Nosheen Ali

This project investigates the nature of state power and social struggle in the disputed border territory of Pakistan’s Northern Areas. Using ethnographic and textual analysis, it examines how this strategic region is constructed and contained through state practices of political, religious, and environmental regulation. Second, it illuminates local efforts to rework these practices in order to realize a more substantive vision of citizenship. This project engages with studies on state-formation within political sociology and cultural anthropology, and also complicates the myopic security perspective through which Northern Pakistan has largely been understood.