COMPARED to recent years books published this year related to the regional politics of Pakistan were scant. Perhaps we are in an interlude, a time for scholars to do research, to write or to finish the last touches to books that are just around the corner. Some interesting titles already visible on publishers' websites suggest so. And perhaps this break has its benefits. Pakistan was in global geopolitical focus in recent years and books with the usual 'war on terror' related catch words were popular in the market. But new insights became rare, and especially the larger political views of Pakistan as a fragile state in the midst of the storm, repetitive. A recent focus on Karachi brought interesting insights but that wasn't really reciprocated for other cities or regions. So what avenue to pursue?
Four books took on the risky task of trying to explain one of the colossal topics of South Asian 20th-century history once more. Much has been written on these topics and still many aspects remain inconclusive.
Dilip Hiro brought forth The Longest August: The Unflinching Rivalry between India and Pakistan, looking at the neighbours' relations through the last century from a geopolitical analyst's standpoint; T.V. Paul with *The Warrior State: Pakistan in the Contemporary World provides a classical account of a political scientist based on written sources, looking at Pakistan through the prism of its militarised state; and Christopher Snedden in his second book on Kashmir, Understanding Kashmir and Kashmiris tries to make sense of where the Kashmir dispute stands today and how it got there, focusing equally and without bias on both sides of the border; finally Christophe Jaffrelot, with a more sociological view in The Pakistan Paradox: Instability and Resilience, sets out to "explain Pakistan" looking at what keeps the country running despite all the odds based on long insight into local developments.
While a lot is written on Pakistan's relations with its eastern and western neighbours - the one perhaps often too focused solely on assumed inherent antipathies, the other on the war - very little solid research was available so far on its relationship with the neighbour in the north, China, and the south-west, Iran. Andrew Small provides an excellent example of how a country can be understood by investigating how it treats and is treated by its friend and neighbour, in this case China, in The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia's New Geopolitics. More focused on Western interests in the two states but on an even less explored relationship is Alex Vatanka's Iran and Pakistan: Security, Diplomacy and American Influence.
It is high time that scholarship on Pakistan and its relations with its neighbours and the world moves from the all too common general accounts that reduce the country to a militarised Sunni state apparatus that antagonises India and the West and is entangled in secretive networks of global and local conflicts. Insights with new sources - oral or written - and in which Pakistani people surface as the heterogeneous crowd of human beings they are show up then and again in the books noted above.
The topics which the publication caravan has currently moved on to in its need for attention - the [self-styled] Islamic State and international forced migration - also have enough of a 'Pakistani' element to them. But none of it can be explained with simple geopolitical theories. Too much field data is still missing, too few accounts of people who are part of these challenges exist or are accessible. Let's hope that the decreased number of publications that saw the light of day in 2015 is because some writers actually were busy during this year gathering some of these insights on the country and the region.
