Populist Identification in Public Discourse: Pakistanis Constructing Pakistaniat
By Ihsan Yilmaz and
Fizza Batool
Palgrave Macmillan
239pp.

The late German political theorist Carl Schmitt is infamous for his political writings. He has received vehement disapproval from the right and left of the political spectrum, yet his friend-or-enemy binary explicates the quintessential moral foundation of the post-Machiavellian modern ethos of politics.

Populism also divides people into binaries — either you are a plebeian or you are elite — or, in simpler terms, either you are a part of ‘us’ or ‘them’. The Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev has rightly pointed out that, with the ongoing democratisation, politics has entered its populist moment.

Whether defined as a style of politics, a discourse or an ideology of selective exclusion, populism’s ethical and moral imaginary fundamentally adheres to the Schmittian binary. However, like all constructions, the binary of enemy or friend is also not always stable, and the identities of individuals and groups identifying with each of the categories are contingent upon the context: the history of state formation, national imaginaries, ethnic diversity and, more important to postcolonial countries such as Pakistan, the role of religion in the public sphere.

How to understand this fluidity is the question that Ihsan Yilmaz and Fizza Batool’s latest co-authored treatise, Populist Identification in Public Discourse: Pakistanis Constructing Pakistaniat, has tried to answer. They investigate the demand of populism in Pakistan.

The book, comprising six chapters, helps understand the conflicting yet prevalent and fluid forms of identities that create ‘Pakistaniat’. Theoretically, it attempts to connect the assorted process of people’s identification (both in terms of plebs and demos) with ideals of Ummah, nationhood and democracy, to understand the consolidation of populist political idioms and styles in a postcolonial setting.

Taking political theorists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s discursive tradition in........

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