History, structure and conjuncture: Imperialism and the polity in Pakistan

Ayyaz Mallick, Muhammad Tayyab Safdar and Bilal Ayaz Butt
Additional contact information
Ayyaz Mallick: University of Liverpool, UK
Muhammad Tayyab Safdar: University of Virginia, USA
Bilal Ayaz Butt: Independent Researcher, Pakistan

Environment and Planning A, 2025, vol. 57, issue 4, 402-428

Abstract: This paper develops Antonio Gramsci’s distinction between organic and conjunctural terrains to delineate the relationship between imperialism and the polity in Pakistan. A political-economic analysis of the mechanisms and magnitude of unequal exchange and economic drain over the last three and a half decades is carried out through domestic and international data sources. This imperial-economic mooring is then brought into conversation with Pakistan’s contemporary history. It is through this intersection of structure and history that the specific structuring of the political terrain in Pakistan may be elucidated. A Gramscian understanding of passive revolution, conjunctures and their articulation of organic processes helps understand how imperialism conditions punctual shifts in the polity. Such a Gramscian framework also helps move beyond some of the polarised debates in critical social theory when it comes to understanding imperialism and its internality to peripheral social formations.

Keywords: Antonio Gramsci; imperialism; dependency; Pakistan; conjunctural analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0308518X251326388 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envira:v:57:y:2025:i:4:p:402-428

DOI: 10.1177/0308518X251326388

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Planning A
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().