ABSTRACT
The premise of this collection of articles, Beyond Crisis, is that we should re-examine our ideas of ‘crisis’ in order to reinvigorate the study of Pakistan as a critical field of scholarly inquiry. This is certainly not because crises are unimportant to Pakistan: the country has had many, a number of which are the focus of the articles in this volume. But in the current climate of alarm about developments in the ‘Islamic world’, the theme of crisis threatens to overwhelm, and in the process trivialise, the study of Pakistan. Held up against unexamined normative models, tropes of Pakistan as a ‘failed state’, a ‘failed nationalism’, or a ‘failed sovereignty’, in the end obscure, as Naveeda Khan argues persuasively in the Introduction, more than they reveal.
