ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how population was addressed and whether global norms and discourses were internalised. It examines Pakistani debates on population and development since 1988, focuses on the regimes led by Benazir Bhutto, Nawaz Sharif and Pervez Musharraf. It then demonstrates the process of inter-subjective re-conceptualisation of population in national discourse, and the internalisation of international discourses and norms, particularly those relating to the population-sustainable development-security paradigms. Sensing the urgent need for population control both attempted to implement ambitions control programs, and to induct global norms into national discourse. Population growth was increasingly, then consistently, posited as a threat to national and societal stability and survivability, and therefore security. Elite and public discourse has attached to population a sense of urgency and necessity of societal mobilisation for security. Secular agents particularly objected to the security argument, countering with their own conception of the security problematic, one of a global conspiracy against the Muslim world conducted via the international population agenda.
