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Destruction as Rule: Containment, Censuring and Confusion in Pakistani Balochistan 10.17863/CAM.38970 Ahmad, Mahvish Desai, Manali Navaro, Yael This dissertation explores the contour and content of state-ordered destruction in the construction of state, territory, and subjects. To do so, it carries out a historical and ethnographic study of state violence, from the colonial era until today, in Pakistan’s southern province of Balochistan. Through this study, the dissertation argues: Where the construction of state, territory, and subjects requires a rendering of society as legible in order to create it and make it manipulable for the purposes of rule, the destruction of politics, places and peoples requires a rendering of networks opposing the state as obscure in order to dismantle them and make them docile for the same purpose. These networks, or “counter-societies,” are collective identities that transgress and resist the state’s version of society proper, e.g. through the collective identities of the anti-colonial rebel, the revolutionary communist, or the separatist ethnonationalist. In turn, society proper is constituted by state-sanctioned identities considered necessary for rule, like the “tribal” colonial subject or the loyal and growth-minded Pakistani citizen. Through a close reading of three cases of state violence in the colonial, early post-colonial, and contemporary era–a 1918 colonial-era military expedition, a 1973-’77 counterinsurgency campaign, and post-9/11 displacements, disappearances, killings, and army raids–the dissertation argues that the state sought to contain the “infection” of “fanaticism” in the colonial era, censure alternative ideas of Pakistan as socialist and multi-national in the early post-colonial era, and confuse attempts to articulate a counter-hegemonic front against the violence of the state in the contemporary era. University of Cambridge 2019-07-15 Thesis Doctoral Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) en Research for this thesis has been sponsored by: - Cambridge Political Economy Society Trust - Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge - The Cambridge Commonwealth, European & International Trust https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/291810 https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/65d39a65-2d53-4fac-adcf-65320573bd4f/download a6bc3a6f6563ca5e434484a41e6e3814 https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/5c4da25b-355e-4301-9afa-f2572723ea91/download 87eda9de84448d1f82354d60eee3eb5f https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Balochistan Pakistan South Asia violence state sovereignty citizenship political subjectivity hegemony counter-hegemony colonial violence British India indirect rule colonialism post-colonial violence counter-insurgency Cold War communism National Awami Party Baloch Popular Liberation Front Pararis Jabbal confusion opacity destruction censorship containment illegibility legibility