Contested Notions of Pakistan

Scrutiny: A Journal of Pakistan Studies, 1978

How and where Pakistan Studies originated?

History Compass, 2004

This piece highlights some of the main areas of scholarly research and media reportage on Pakistan, which is not only one of the largest Muslim states but also operates as an important bridgehead between South and South-western Asia. Some of the recent and notable multi-disciplinary studies, by both foreign and Pakistani publishing houses, are also appended in the list.

In this paper, we will explore the case of Social Sciences in Pakistan which may be characterized by quasi-isolation, outdated knowledge, and as cognitively and institutionally static. In the passage of over half a century, how is it possible that Pakistani social scientists have merely published less than 200 articles in Science Citation Index (SCI) journals. What does this activity in the name of knowledge production reveal about subtle, often ignored issues of international division of intellectual labour, especially in third world? What does it tell us about how relationships between first world and third world should be viewed and assessed when former is perceived as knowledge producer and the later as the dependent player in the age of knowledge economy? Our thesis is twofold – first, that Pakistani Social Sciences has nourished in no significant manner the concert of international division of labour in scientific research, and second, that the international division of scientific labour has failed to interact with Pakistan either through extracting little of interest from Pakistani Social Scientists or from Pakistani social experience. Pakistan thus stands outside the dynamics of cognitive labour differentiation. Such an initially structurally imposed academic dependency on the North of the South and subsequent isolation from its knowledge production process may help us understand the nature of the division of scientific labour in other Third world countries. In fact, if the same pattern is predominantly adopted by other Third world countries in a national science system, it may well prove fatal to their integration on a global level.