Pakistan Archives - Public Seminar

Ecological Nightmare in Lahore, Pakistan

A city holding its breath

October 14, 2025 • by Uswa Shamail

Environmental crises are often narrated in statistics, satellite images, and policy briefings, but what they obscure are the intimate ways in which ecological collapse infiltrates daily life. In South Asia, climate change is not an abstract future—it is a suffocating present that shapes how parents care for their children, how ...

Ecological Nightmare in Lahore, Pakistan

Interviews

Documenting the City of Refugees

An interview with Susan Hartman on her new book about Utica’s transformation by refugees

October 4, 2022 • by Susan Hartman and Marisa Budlong

I wanted to put in perspective what these refugees had gone through, what the countries they left had gone through, what the refugee camp experience was like. So, there is this part where I talk about when they were each on the run: it is very traumatic material and this ...

Feature

The Aspirations and Ambiguities of De-Colonial Politics

Imran Khan’s First Year as Pakistan’s Prime Minister

September 10, 2019 • by SherAli Tareen

Imran Khan’s ascension as Prime Minister of Pakistan in August 2018 preceded and instigated an avalanche of alarming prognoses issued by a range of motley characters. Their convergence made for an interesting union of otherwise incompatible bedfellows. Self-anointed Pakistan experts at neo-conservative U.S. think-tanks, editorials of mainstream Western media, South ...

Feature

Kashmir’s Silent Suffering

New Anguish in the Midst of an Old Struggle

August 28, 2019 • by Bizaa Zeynab Ali

In the meanwhile, Kashmir has been placed on a Genocide Watch and the UN has publicly called out India’s “Draconian Blackout” as a “collective punishment” for the people of Kashmir. with numerous people being killed and more than 4,000 people, mostly young men, being arrested and held without recourse under the Public Safety Act (PSA), a controversial law ...

Feature

Of Silenced Narratives and Political Deceits

Exploding Hyper Nationalism in India and the Case of Kashmir

May 23, 2019 • by Iffat Rashid

In the ongoing drumbeat of democracy or the 'great spectacle' of the Indian elections, Indians; left, right or centre are anxiously awaiting to see whether India voted to 'save its Indian spirit', or whether it will move a step further towards being a Hindu majoritarian state. For Kashmiris, plumbing the ...

Of Silenced Narratives and Political Deceits

Feature

The Moby Dick Problem of War: An Interview with Steve Coll

The NBCC nonfiction award winner on Directorate S: The CIA and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan

May 2, 2019 • by Daniel Goulden

In March, The New School hosted this year’s National Book Critics Circle awards, which honor literature published in the United States in the previous year. The awards are presented in six categories -- autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry -- and are the only U.S. literary awards chosen by ...

The Moby Dick Problem of War: An Interview with Steve Coll

Feature

Pulwama and the Battle of Optics

Political opportunism in the escalating standoff between India and Pakistan

March 19, 2019 • by Udeepta Chakravarty

“No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb. It ends in the total menace which organized mankind poses to organized men...” Adorno’s caution against the possible realization of the barbaric principle of “mutually assured destruction” is not a triviality when ...

Feature

Imran Khan’s Promised Land

Can Imran Khan deliver on his pledge to tackle corruption?

August 19, 2018 • by Maria Khan

Since the 2016 presidential election in the U.S. we have witnessed a severe divide between the Democrats and the Republicans. In Pakistan, however, we have experienced a polarization between two different mind-sets and attitudes. The first can be characterized as stoic and materialistic, and perhaps even skeptical, while the second ...

Uncategorized

The Old Patterns of the New Afghan Democracy

The Ghani-Abdullah Agreement and national and international stability in historical perspective

November 19, 2014 • by Danillo Alarcon

After a long electoral process, on September 27, 2014, Ashraf Ghani was sworn in as the Afghan president. The arrangements to grant him that office, which was earned in a controversial election, were not easy, because it forced a generous conciliation with Abdullah Abdullah, Ghani’s chief rival. Abdullah was granted ...