PAKISTAN’S 2024 election results marked the end of a political cycle that began in the early 2000s. Less often noted is that this cycle expired at roughly the same moment as the global order which framed it. Signs of political and cultural realignment are now fully emergent, and their trajectory passes through events of the past 25 years — the ‘war on terror’ and its effects on Muslim societies, the financial crisis alongside growth in Asian economies, and increased migration to Western countries.

The Pakistani domestic cycle is best characterised as an unsuccessful attempt to achieve a political settlement, under the garb of federalised (and electoral) constitutional rule. Its participants were the traditional parties PML-N and PPP, and their core constituents, sections of liberal civil society and private news media, and some segments of the judiciary. Its opposition came from entities excluded from or antagonised by that brief lived system of patronage: the PTI, the upwardly mobile urban classes, and the military establishment and its aligned factions among the media. The latter coalition won out over the last 10 years. In winning, it stumbled upon its own internal contradictions, which are now playing out as the present crisis.

This cycle, however, was always nested inside something larger. Its vocabulary of rights, its civil society, and much of its international support came from a global dispensation; NGO work here was intellectually and financially sustained by Western aid largesse in the context of the war on terror. Once the external scaffolding........

© Dawn