Delusional States
Feeling Rule and Development in Pakistan's Northern Frontier

Offers a pioneering study of state-making, religion, and development in contemporary Pakistan and its northern frontier.

Nosheen Ali (Author)

9781108497442, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 19 September 2019

325 pages
23.2 x 16.3 x 2.6 cm, 0.55 kg

'Rich in ethnography and theoretically grounded, Delusional States is a significant contribution towards understanding history and political predicaments of Gilgit-Baltistan region.' Muneeb Yousuf, India Quarterly: A Journal of International Affairs

Delusional States is the first in-depth study of state-making and social change in Gilgit-Baltistan, a Shia-majority region of Sunni-dominated Pakistan and a contested border area that forms part of disputed Kashmir. For over seven decades, the territorial conflict over Kashmir has locked India and Pakistan in brutal wars and hate-centred nationalisms. The book illuminates how within this story of hate lie other stories - of love and betrayal, loyalty and suspicion, beauty and terror - that help us grasp how the Kashmir conflict is affectively structured and experienced on the ground. Placing these emotions at the centre of its analysis, the book rethinks the state-citizen relation in deeply felt and intimate terms, offering a multi-layered ethnographic understanding of power and subjection in contemporary Pakistan.

List of maps and figures
Acknowledgements List of abbreviations
Introduction
Part I. Representation and Repression: 1. Unimagined communities in the eco-body of the nation
2. Loyalty, suspicion, sacrifice: feeling and force under militarism
Part II. Education and the Politics of Faith: 3. Challenging school textbooks: the sectarian making of national Islam
4. Sectarian imaginaries and poetic publics
Part III. Saving Nature, Saving People: 5. The nature of development: neoliberal environments and pastoral visions
6. Books vs. bombs? Humanitarian education, empire, and the narrative of terror
Conclusion: the great media game
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Regional government [JPR], Politics & government [JP], Sociology & anthropology [JH], Religion & politics [HRAM2]