Maira Hayat on Pakistan's 2018 Elections

Dr. Maira Hayat (Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology & Woods Institute) has written for Society for Cultural Anthropology about the 2018 general elections in Pakistan. She concludes that "[T]he promise of New Pakistan has exerted a strong pull on Pakistanis from different social locations, with varied institutional, ethnic, and religious affiliations. There is peril in this too; the far-right Tehrik-e-Labaik party’s inroads into electoral politics have caused alarm. What this pull of a New Pakistan consists in, how it will be maintained, who it disappoints, and why it recurs: these questions can be directed at states themselves. Tracing how particular circumstances inform conceptions of and aspirations for states, while staying attuned to where we are looking from and why, then becomes anthropology's task." Click the link below for the full text.