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Blog, Features, Sensing (In)Security: New Materialism and The Politics of Security

Zoha Waseem: Creeping Digital Authoritarianism and (In)Security in Pakistan

Image 1: Deployment of Safe City infrastructure in Karachi, 2025. Photos by author

Over the past decade, Pakistan has been steadily expanding its digital security, policing, and surveillance architecture, which is sensorially and materially altering how security is experienced and enacted. The expansion has occurred through an assemblage of securitising narratives, non-transparent deployment of internationally procured smart policing technology used for urban surveillance, and state lawfare targeting digital behaviour through Pakistan’s primary cybercrime law, the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (PECA).

This online and offline blend indicates what I refer to as creeping digital authoritarianism in Pakistan. I approach digital authoritarianism as a transdisciplinary concept (explored in detail by Polyakova and Meserole 2019, Roberts and Oosterom 2024), as a strategy of governance that allows regimes, both democratic and authoritarian, to digitally and technologically control, manipulate, censor, surveil, and repress regime opponents and critics, domestic and abroad, for the consolidation of power. As a strategy, digital authoritarianism facilitates and enables the hyper-introduction of mass surveillance technologies, a pattern observed globally, especially in the aftermath of 9/11.

In this text, I attempt to explore the impact of such creeping digital authoritarianism in Pakistan. I specifically focus on the recent developments of smart policing technology (known locally as ‘Safe City’ projects) and the simultaneous weaponisation of legal frameworks designed for policing and punishing online political activity (PECA). These technologies, although seemingly disconnected, have a collective chilling effect on citizen behaviour, which is leading to patterns of self-censorship and self-discipline. I approach the notion of “chilling effect” through Stevens et al. (2023) definition, as an explanation of how the fear, or possibility, of “being watched affects an individual’s conduct, impacting behaviours such as what they saw, what websites they visit, what materials they post, what comments they make, who they interact with, and if, or how, they engage in political opposition.” Although this effect is more evident in PECA-related cases, there is an observable impact on how people experience the world around them, notably in efforts to assemble, mobilise, and resist in the presence of surveillance technology deployed and used in ad hoc ways, with limited public engagement or transparency.

In a rapidly proliferating global era of digital authoritarianism, this human-technology relationship between digital policing (including the arbitrary use of technology alongside legal tools and frameworks) and political participation has wide-ranging consequences, not limited to the undermining of political freedoms. Everyday, routine behaviours—such as posting on digital messaging and social media platforms—are being gradually affected.

Infrastructures of Control

In 2016, the government of Pakistan passed its first and primary cyber and electronic crimes legislation, PECA. Over the past few years, this law has witnessed several amendments, and hundreds of journalists, activists, and critics have faced charges under PECA, under the allegation of “spreading false narratives against state institutions” or “anti-state activities”. Between January and July 2025, an additional 99 cases were reportedly filed under PECA for “anti-state activities”, according to a report drafted by the Ministry of Interior. Some of these 2025 cases were directed at journalists and private citizens accused of making defamatory statements against the Chief Minister of Punjab, Maryam Nawaz, the daughter of a former prime minister and the niece of current prime minister.

In early 2025, Pakistan hastily amended PECA, criminalising the dissemination of “fake and false information”, yet what constitutes “fake and false information” remains undefined. As such, this has significantly increased state control over online and digital activity and created avenues for potential abuse of discretion by law enforcement agents seeking to protect “national interest”. Then, in September 2025, PECA empowered Pakistani telecommunication providers to censor online content deemed to be against “the interest of the glory of Islam” (or blasphemous content) or against the “integrity, security or defence of Pakistan”. It further authorised a federal policing body, the National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency (NCCIA), to investigate and arrest those accused of posting or publishing content or opinions reportedly against the interest of the state and key state institutions, chiefly the military and the judiciary.

Last year, Amnesty International published an extensive report detailing the “notable abuses” that internationally procured and sourced technologies are enabling in Pakistan, including mass surveillance and unlawful internet censorship. Part of this surveillance involves the monitoring of digital and social media platforms, weaponised through PECA.

The “Digital Dehshatgard”

Pakistan’s ascent towards digital authoritarianism has been carefully shaped by securitising narratives, with surveillance infrastructure and institutions gaining public legitimacy through the state-constructed risk of the so-called “digital dehshatgard (terrorist)”. The state’s introduction of the “digital terrorist” came in 2024, a label assigned to political opponents and activists reliant upon digital and social media platforms to generate critique against the armed forces and other state institutions. This narrative-construction helped set the stage for coordinated repression of opponents, and efforts towards “developing a strong national narrative” that would accompany media strategies, target disinformation, propaganda, and misinformation, while “positively influencing the younger generation” (The Express Tribune 2025).

Meanwhile, the procurement and development of digital surveillance infrastructure have been intricately connected to national growth and prosperity. Such technology is deemed vital for Pakistan’s “Digital Pakistan” vision, a strategy that seeks to create a digital ecosystem with information and communication technologies deployed across sectors. The introduction of surveillance technology across sectors is inevitable in today’s tech-dependent world, but risks fuelling digital authoritarianism. Pakistan’s attempts to control the internet, digital platforms, and information and communications systems, have escalated in the aftermath of a political fall-out between former prime minister Imran Khan’s political party (the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf) and the military, since 2023. These attempts gained traction in May 2025, following armed conflict with India, which saw widespread disinformation, including the use of AI-generated deepfakes, on both sides of the border.

Over time, securitised narrative-construction has carefully sought to legitimise the state’s encroachment into the digital realm, compromising the rights of social media users and undermining the security of activists, both online and offline.

The Legal Grind

In addition to the periodic censorship of social media platforms (including X and YouTube), banning the use of VPNs, or temporary shutdowns that throttle the internet, the state controls and monitors digital and online behaviour through PECA, which criminalizes free speech and uses broad language to equate online criticism with “cyber terrorism”. The law is frequently applied alongside the Anti-Terrorism Act, Pakistan’s primary counterterrorism legislation. This ensures that those who are charged under PECA and the ATA collectively can be tried in anti-terrorism courts, special courts that are created to avoid following due process and fair trial procedures. Such frameworks authorise state institutions such as the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority and the NCCIA, to survey and investigate online speech, censor content, and punish critical thought.

These institutions are further bolstered by their surveillance capacity, consisting of local social media cells that monitor online accounts and digital behaviours. This surveillance enables law enforcement agents to “build cases”, for which agencies may rely upon “crowd-sourced surveillance” (social media users who may be rewarded for registering police complaints against other users for posting “offensive” material online) or in-house complainants.

A recent infamous conviction of two lawyers, Imaan Mazari and Hadi Ali Chatha in January 2026, reveals the practice of relying upon in-house complainants. In this case, two human rights lawyers, Imaan and Hadi, were charged under PECA for tweets condemning the practice of enforced disappearances in Pakistan. The case was filed by an officer of the NCCIA itself. This has a direct bearing on how targets of this law experience insecurity because of such digital surveillance and the legal grind that follows.

As journalist Farieha Aziz (2025) writes, empowered by PECA, these agencies use technology for surveillance, monitoring, and subsequently punishing, subjecting their targets to “bail hearings, repeated court appearances, the stigma of being labelled ‘’anti-state’, and the constant threat of a lingering case—often without trial”. Through lengthy ordeals within and outside of the courtroom, state critics experience the violence of unregulated and unchecked technological and digital surveillance material.

The high-profile case and subsequent conviction of Imaan and Hadi—who have been sentenced for a total of 17 years in prison for their posts on X—shows how technology and law can work in tandem to realise digital authoritarianism in the absence of adequate safeguards and regulatory mechanisms. In other words, material technologies can be harnessed to filter and flag content that can later be criminalised under a state’s legal architecture. This combination of the material and the legal, if designed to prioritize regime interests over individual rights and liberties, paves the way for repression through hybrid online and offline monitoring.

“Leave Your Phone Outside”

The combination of PECA and various internet governance strategies has resulted in what activists on the ground call “process as punishment” (Aziz 2025). In the words of one activist who spoke to me in confidence, PECA (and accompanying laws) are usually applied by state agencies after a suspect (usually, an opponent or a critic) has been illegally detained by unknown agents of the state with their whereabouts not disclosed, typically based on social media content. The “disappearance” follows the formal registration of a police complaint, which may be dictated to the police “on the phone” by other agents of the state or by unknown complainants that may be patronised by state institutions. The registration of the complaint allows the suspect to be formally charged and for the investigation to begin. The whereabouts of the suspect are then disclosed, after the complaint has been registered. During this time, the suspect’s devices may be taken from them and unlocked through coercion. No warrants are obtained for such a search.

Reports of digital surveillance processes have become common over the past few years, resulting in journalists and activists critical of the state to self-censor and self-discipline. The most obvious example of this is the increasingly widespread use of the “disappearing messages” function on WhatsApp, a practice notably adopted by journalists, activists, and lawyers, to limit the information and communication that can be used by authorities as evidence to incriminate “suspects” under PECA, should their devices be searched, as they frequently are once an individual is taken into custody.

Even beyond users likely to be criminalized under PECA, civilians have told me in private conversations that they are less likely to forward messages received through WhatsApp since the law was introduced. Lawyer Rida Hosain (2025) has similarly explained that “Even clicking ‘repost’ on content that the state finds objectionable can subject an individual to criminal persecution.”

Beyond these platforms and messaging apps, insecurity is also felt by critics in their routine usage of electronic devices, such as their phones. It is common knowledge that after reports of state surveillance through the Lawful Intercept Management System (Amnesty International 2025), state critics and opponents are increasingly wary of their digital messaging platforms coming under state scrutiny. Not only are dissidents applying the “disappearing messages” function to their messaging platforms, but extra efforts are also made to physically distance themselves from such gadgets during meetings and conversations considered to be of “sensitive” nature.

During my fieldwork in Pakistan, respondents told me that it was common practice in some official spaces for civilians to leave their phones outside of meeting rooms or be requested to do so. In at least one interview with a politician, the gentleman himself tucked his phones deep inside his sofa cushions to potentially avoid our conversation being audio-recorded through his devices, demonstrating the chilling effect of creeping digital authoritarianism.

Other respondents have similarly revealed switching their WhatsApp over to international numbers, when they are able to, as correspondence from local numbers may be easy to track by the state through the telecommunications authority.

Eyes on the Road

While PECA serves to criminalise dissent online and through information and communication technologies, the Peaceful Assembly and Public Order (PAPO) Act has criminalised protest and peaceful assembly in the capital city of Islamabad. Upon being hastily passed in September 2024, PAPO has been used to charge political opponents and supporters of the PTI (Imran Khan’s party). Enabling such legal repression of urban resistance and the right to protest are expansive and expensive technological projects, known as “Safe City” projects.

Safe City projects are essentially digital surveillance and security infrastructure that seek to enhance policing and law enforcement in Pakistan through technological advancements, and the collection of vast quantities of data (Hong 2022). Pakistani authorities refer to implementation of “safe city” infrastructure as necessary for “effectively combating terrorism,” in response to an “emergent situation”. In other words, technological advancements are justified as a response to a range of “internal threats”, from domestic terrorism to civil unrest and political protest, depending upon how governments choose to label anti-state agitation. In this way, technology and politics are co-produced in the field of security governance.

Even though the procurement and deployment of such technology imply urgency, risk, and threat to the nation, governments overseeing these projects have been largely secretive and guarded about details and documentation about this infrastructure. However, it is generally understood that the procurement of such smart policing technology has included material equipped with artificial intelligence, webcams, bodycams, facial recognition technology, voice recognition technology, and more.

By framing the procurement of such technology as relevant for countering terrorism and “emergent situations”, securitising narratives are used to justify lucrative and expensive architecture, avoiding debates around the global supply chains and partnerships that enable this process and aid digital authoritarianism. This way, any debate on harms that may be associated with or produced by this new surveillance technology, is avoided, as technological advancement, including the incorporation of AI in policing and surveillance, becomes integral to national stability and progress.

What is also avoided is a critical consideration of how smart policing technology may be deployed through colonial frames, tropes, and logics, that are ingrained into postcolonial policing and pacification programmes. As is already known, population control and monitoring were crucial for imperial interests and the protection of the colonial regime in British India (before independence in 1947). The Safe City infrastructure in Pakistan is similarly seen as critical for population control.

In an interview with this author, an official overseeing one such project boasted that Safe City officers were “custodians of people’s data”, an alarming admission for a country still lacks data protection laws and allows internationally-procured technology to collect vast amounts of data on civilians, hoping to use this data as “inputs for safe city solutions” (Hong 2022).

While there exists a draft of a Personal Data Protection Bill since 2023, it has yet to be passed, which means there are no legal safeguards in place to determine how personal data collected through safe city technology will be stored, for how long, under what conditions, and to whom it will be accessible. Similarly, little protection is available to “suspects” in terms of how their data is extracted by law enforcement authorities, should they be charged under the PECA law.

Thus, digital control practices and the lack of legal safeguards have a chilling effect, with observable behavioural changes, especially in the work of journalists, lawyers, activists, and dissidents.

For example, public order policing, protests, and collective mobilization have been controlled and punished using both PECA as well as surveillance footage collected through Safe City cameras. During protests led by opponents critical of the military establishment’s removal of the former prime minister Imran Khan in May 2023, for instance, Safe City surveillance cameras were used by the police to identify protestors and political leaders.

As interviewees informed me after these protests, the military – a key player in Pakistan’s politics and law enforcement–had direct access to such surveillance data, raising concerns about the political weaponisation of such expansive technology. As per the police’s own admission, most of the arrests that were carried out in the aftermath of these protests were of individuals identified through CCTV cameras of the Safe City Authority in Punjab, aided by geotagging.

These arrests—which have included high profile political figures (including women and the former prime minister, Khan)—have deterred large-scale political demonstrations over the past two years, showing the impact of technologically enabled surveillance practices on political opposition, a chilling effect.

Separately, however, the use of technology for repression is also condemned by certain law enforcement officials. In the aftermath of the arrests of PTI workers and activists, when the police were asked by their military counterparts to “pick up” civilians identified through geo-tagging and Safe City cameras, in private conversations some police officials expressed feeling “uneasy” by the demands being placed on them.

It is thus worth considering what pressures such techno-authoritarianism places upon state agents themselves, who may not always be united in their perceptions or their discretion.

Buy First, Justify Later?

Pakistan is becoming a prominent consumer in the global marketplace of surveillance and censorship technology, but details of how this technology is procured, delivered, and deployed emerge only gradually, if at all. The logic is simple: “if it is available and can be bought, it should be bought.” Such technological advancement is presented as essential for Pakistan’s growth, security, and associated with the nation’s progress, thus it has seemingly acquired substantial public legitimacy.

While the state’s use of digital surveillance technology for policing protests and public assemblies has created a deterrence in street mobilisation in Pakistan, the extent to which it impacts civilians sensorially is hard to quantify as this technology is still being developed and deployed. The onset of digital authoritarianism in the country, however, is undeniable. It is grounded in human and non-human assemblages of policing institutions, legal frameworks, tools and technologies, and security-centric narratives, all of which are having a chilling effect on citizen’s behaviour.

In the absence of adequate legal safeguards or independent oversight mechanisms, technological advancements risk digital infrastructural harm, not limited to the undermining of personal freedoms.

Zoha Waseem is an Associate Professor in Criminology at the University of Warwick. She is interested in policing, law enforcement, digitalization, and urban (in)security with a focus on South Asia.

References

Ahmed, Z., Yilmaz, I., Akbarzadeh, S., and Bashirov, D. 2025. Contestations of Internet Governance and Digital Authoritarianism in Pakistan. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 38, 499-526.

Amnesty International. 2025. Shadows of Control: Censorship and Mass Surveillance in Pakistan. Available at: https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/asa33/0206/2025/en/.

Aziz, F. 2026. Imaan-Hadi Conviction Marks the Death of Fair Trial in Pakistan. Dissent Today. Available at: https://dissenttoday.net/opinion/how-imaan-hadi-conviction-marks-the-death-of-fair-trial-in-pakistan.

Express Tribune, 2025. PM Leads high-level meeting to strengthen national narrative against terrorism. The Express Tribune. Available at: https://tribune.com.pk/story/2536922/pm-leads-high-level-meeting-to-strengthen-national-narrative-against-terrorism.

Hong, C. 2022. “Safe Cities” in Pakistan: Knowledge Infrastructures, Urban Planning, and the Security State. Antipode, 54(5), 1476-1496.

Hosain, R. 2026. Imaan-Hadi Arrest and a State at War with Dissent. Dawn. Available at: https://www.dawn.com/news/1968787/imaan-hadi-arrest-and-a-state-at-war-with-dissent.

Polyakova, A. and Meserole, C. 2019. Exporting digital authoritarianism: The Russian and Chinese Models. Policy Brief, Democracy and Disorder Series, 1-22. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/FP_20190827_digital_authoritarianism_polyakova_meserole.pdf.

Roberts, T. and Oosterom, M. 2024. Digital Authoritarianism: A Systematic Literature Review. Information Technology for Development, 4, 860-884.

Stevens, A., Fussey, P., Murray, D., Hove, K., and Saki, O. 2023. ‘I Started Seeing Shadows Everywhere’: The Diverse Chilling Effects of Surveillance in Zimbabwe. Big Data and Society. DOI: 10.1177/20539517231158631.

Cite as: Wasseem, Z. 2026. “Creeping Digital Authoritarianism and (In)Security in Pakistan” Focaalblog April 14. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/04/14/zoha-waseem-creeping-digital-authoritarianism-and-insecurity-in-pakistan/

Blog, Features, The Social Life of Inflation

Quirin Rieder: Drinking tea with the IMF: sticking to prices and protesting inflation in Aliabad, Northern Pakistan

Image 1: A Taxi driver during a tea break in Aliabad, 2023, photo by the author

Aziz put down the newspaper and sighed. “This is bad, the situation is bad”. Sitting in his small tea shop, he had just finished his routine practice of reading out loud some articles from the local Urdu newspaper K2, that publishes on issues in Gilgit-Baltistan (one of the Pakistani parts of Kashmir). Normally this is much appreciated not only by some of the town’s senior residents with bad eyesight, but also by the German anthropologist who sometimes struggled to decipher the miniature Urdu letters. Aziz had just read about the new hike in petrol and gas prices that was announced by the national government and would only increase the inflation in Pakistan, which had been soaring at that point, with an annual food inflation rate of over 50 per cent. Daado (an older regular customer; all names changed) and I were sitting around the small table in Aziz’s shop, while his 25-year-old son Farhan stood behind the counter and silently listened to our conversation while he prepared more chai or checked his phone. Aziz and Farhan’s chai shop stood next to the KKH, the Karakoram Highway, that links Pakistan’s capital Islamabad to China’s Xinyang province, passing through Aliabad in Hunza, where I conducted ethnographic fieldwork between November 2022 and August 2023. During that time, I visited their shop nearly daily and became good friends with Aziz, Farhan and regular customers, keeping up with local news and gossip.

On that day at the end of February 2023, Aziz was not happy and folded away the newspaper. The headline stated that the IMF had imposed tight conditions on completing its current review phase that would release an urgently needed tranche of $1.1 billion to Pakistan. The country had been undergoing a constitutional crisis since former Prime Minister Imran Khan had lost a vote of confidence in March 2022, and massive floods submerged large parts of territory in the following summer, with the global energy and food crisis already hitting hard. Drained of foreign exchange reserves that were needed to import foodstuffs and energy resources, the national government had to radically devalue its currency and increase electricity and fuel prices (key IMF conditions), triggering an unprecedented inflation. The currency exchange rate went up from a relatively stable rate of US $1 = 170Rs (Pakistani Rupees) in the years 2019–2021, to 230Rs in 2022 and even reached 280Rs in January and February 2023. Daado shook his head and wearily sipped his tea. Aziz threw a last glimpse at the international news section reporting on the war in Ukraine, when he also shook his head and repeated: “These are hard times, it’s a very bad situation (haalat kharab hai)”. He then told me that he and his family had planned to visit Karachi, Pakistan’s biggest city, to meet friends and relatives, and get some routine medical check-ups in the renowned health facilities there, but the one-way bus ticket alone was 14.000Rs (for a ride of 20-26 hours). Overall, it would have cost them around 4 lakh (400.000Rs) for the whole trip, so they cancelled.

This text looks at practices of negotiating and un-doing inflation in everyday life. While rising prices routinely bring economic hardship for ordinary people, they also open up possibilities to contest the capitalist dynamics that trigger inflation in the first place. I explore this question through two examples: negotiations over the price of tea, and protests against cutting essential wheat flour subsidies. In Aliabad, inflation was far from being a supernatural economic force, and was instead understood as something that was done to the town’s residents by international, national and regional actors. As such, it could also be undone, at least to some extent.

The value of a cup of tea

Later that day, regular customers were scarce, and Aziz had left to prepare his family’s small plot of land for the upcoming seasonal opening of the water channels that Hunza is famous for. Only Farhan and I remained in the tea shop. I asked him whether these days fewer customers were coming because of the inflation. He shook his head: “No, I don’t think so. Not really actually.” I asked him why he kept the price for a cup of tea at 50Rs, given that in other places nearby, prices had gone up to 60Rs and sometimes even 70Rs. “Yes, I know”, he said wearily, then adding defensively “but why should I make my customers worry (parishaan)? For me, it’s okay like that. 50Rs, bas.” A little taken aback, I asked again: “But you also have higher costs, don’t you?” Farhan’s voice grew louder for a second: “Sure, for everything! Milk, tea powder, cooking gas… but 50Rs for a cup of tea is okay. “During the rest of my fieldwork and many months after, Aziz and Farhan stuck to this price, even though both frequently complained of the ingredients’ rising prices. Their refusal to increase the price of tea was an active act of affirming socio-cultural values like sociality, community, and accessibility of chai to customers over merely economic considerations in times of crisis. Whereas many other tea shops in Aliabad were quick to adapt their prices to the inflation rate, Farhan and his father kept it at 50Rs. Notably, these other tea shops were drawing on a different group of (also regular) local customers, mainly neighboring bazaar shop owners, who themself had also increased the prices for their goods and services. Every time I asked Farhan and his father about their reasons for not doing the same, they told me that they don’t want their customers to worry. That way, they emphasized the importance of chai as an essential good that should be provided to their regular customers that were largely older and not very affluent customers (and often neighbors and friends too) who might otherwise not be able to afford it.

Amidst the rapid inflation and unable to postpone the family’s medical trips indefinitely, their rejection of the impulse to raise prices was all the more remarkable. In situations of economic instability, people make price hikes relatable by, for example, complaining or blaming politicians for it (Amri 2023), and frequently – depending on a place’s economic history and imagined future – fall into narratives of despair (Muir 2016). However, such interpretations might overlook how local engagements with inflation are never only passive representations of broader economic developments, but also make for opportunities to actively mediate and navigate the meanings and consequences of inflation. Looking at inflation and price hikes this way means acknowledging that actors can reframe capitalist dynamics, even if they do not make their choices under self-selected circumstances (Narotzky and Besnier 2014; Thompson 1971).

This becomes especially visible when approaching inflation as shifts in the way people value certain things and activities. They thereby engage in “boundary struggles” (Fraser 2022) over, conceptually speaking, the relationships between exchange value and use value – in this instance, of chai. Farhan’s insistence on not changing prices means putting the use value over the exchange value of chai. Use value incorporates here not only tea as something you drink when thirsty, but also its cultural values like facilitating social life, and being affordable to customers. The reasoning behind not wanting to bother their customers is in line with these values of chai in facilitating community and participation in social life. Further, the refusal to increase prices also ensured the continuous coming of customers, and therefore was not entirely contrary to economic considerations.

Given that Aziz and Farhan didn’t make a fortune by their insistence on the 50Rs, their prioritization of social ideals while struggling with rising production costs shows that the relationship between use values and exchange value is never clear-cut nor predetermined. And especially processes like inflation open up avenues for redefining their (albeit fuzzy) boundaries. Adhering to ideas of socio-cultural provision while also ensuring clientele to come, ultimately meant that refusing to play along with the dynamics of global inflation came down to a cup of tea.

Un-doing inflation?

The newspaper that Aziz was reading on that morning in February 2023 also described how the crucial monthly bags of subsidized wheat flour would soon cost 36Rs per kg and might even rise to 58Rs per kg, and not 20Rs anymore. This was not even the first hike. The sub headline read that the rise was condemned by the “Awami Action Committee” that organizes public protests on various issues in the region. For the last few months, the value of the Pakistani Rupee had been decreasing significantly, leading to higher prices for imported oil and gas, among other things. And, it seemed, the regional and national government had decided to translate that price rise into higher prices for flour. When Aziz finished reading, Daado, the older customer next to me, exclaimed: “Listen, this flour subsidy, this is not a gift (tohfa) by the government! It’s our right (qanon), it’s the law of the UN, United Nations!” He said this twice, and with much emphasis.

Image 2: Charter of Demands and English Translation by Pamir Times 2024

Over the course of 2023, nation-wide protests against rising costs of living broke out, which the Pakistani sociologist Umair Javed (2023) described as “a product of total frustration at the state for violating its basic obligations towards citizens”. But in Aliabad, many like Daado saw not just a moral obligation on the side of state authorities to care for its people (Thompson 1971), but also a legal one, given the constitutional limbo and the lack of full citizenship rights (such as voting in national elections) of the region due to its relation to the Kashmir conflict (Ali 2019). So, in Gilgit-Baltistan, the rising inequalities, as well as the fact that the government appeared to directly relay inflation and IMF’s austerity measurements into cutting the flour subsidies of the already marginalized region, provided the context for protests against this move. A series of decentralized, often women-led protests and road blocks emerged in summer 2023. And when local state officials made only excuses and empty promises, an enormous, region-wide protest march to the main town Gilgit was organized by the Awami Action Committee that Aziz had read about.

In January and February 2024, huge sit-ins in Gilgit demanded a full reinstatement of the flour subsidy, but also presented a more fundamental 15 Point Charter of Demands. These included constitutional recognition of Gilgit-Baltistan as a full province of Pakistan, protection of communal land rights, a withdrawal of new direct taxes, enhanced transport, medical and energy infrastructure, and improved educational opportunities, especially for women. After weeks of protests (and also briefly before the country’s national elections in February 2024, in which residents of Gilgit-Baltistan tellingly couldn’t even participate), the flour subsidy was reinstated at full rate. The inflation and its impact on the flour rates had mobilized large parts of the population in Gilgit-Baltistan and united them in a broader political struggle. Resisting and even reversing inflation, and through it also forms of political marginalization, suddenly appeared to be possible.

Conclusion

Ethnography allows studying inflation by paying attention to how it is done and undone by various actors with different degrees of power. One avenue for this is looking at how the relationship between exchange and use value is actively re-negotiated. Shop-owners like Farhan and Aziz, for example, did not reproduce inflation in a straight-forward way, and instead prioritized communal values over exchange value. However, given the structural dependency on the cash economy and imports, the question remains how many trips or medical check-ups they can postpone before their refusal to raise the tea price will falter. Equally, the political organizers and the protestors in Gilgit-Baltistan did not agree with inflation leading to subsidy cuts and further deteriorating their economic resources and symbolic recognition in a situation of political marginalization. Their protest actually enabled the lowering of prices, by means of the reinstatement of the flour subsidy.

In their own ways, these two examples represent different facets of how people politicize and seek to un-do inflation. Highly aware of IMF conditions and their peculiar political situation, Aliabad’s residents concerned themselves deeply with inflation and came up with various forms of engaging with it. For my interlocutors, drinking tea and sharing bread with the IMF, then, did not mean falling into despair or normalizing inflation as something given. Instead, they embarked on different ways of politicizing, refusing, and resisting the effects of inflation as an unavoidable part of our economic system.

This text is part of the feature The Social Life of Inflation edited by Sian Lazar, Evan van Roeckel, and Ståle Wig. 

Quirin Rieder is a PhD candidate at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University Vienna. His doctoral research analyzes how access to electricity shapes social organization in Northern Pakistan.

References

Ali, Nosheen. 2019. Delusional States: Feeling Rule and Development in Pakistan’s Northern Frontier. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Amri, Myriam. 2023. ‘Inflation as Talk, Economy as Feel: Notes Towards an Anthropology of Inflation’. Anthropology of the Middle East 18 (2): 27–45.

Fraser, Nancy. 2022. Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet – and What We Can Do about It. London: Verso.

Javed, Umair. 2023. ‘Burning Bills’. Dawn, 4 September 2023. https://www.dawn.com/news/1773941/burning-bills.

Muir, Sarah. 2016. ‘On Historical Exhaustion: Argentine Critique in an Era of “Total Corruption”’. Comparative Studies in Society and History 58 (1): 129–58.

Narotzky, Susana, and Niko Besnier. 2014. ‘Crisis, Value, and Hope: Rethinking the Economy: An Introduction’. Current Anthropology 55 (S9): S4–16.

Thompson, E.P. 1971. ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’. Past & Present, no. 50, 76–136.

Cite as: Rieder, Quirin 2024. “Drinking tea with the IMF: sticking to prices and protesting inflation in Aliabad, Northern Pakistan” Focaalblog 10 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/12/10/quirin-rieder-drinking-tea-with-the-imf-sticking-to-prices-and-protesting-inflation-in-aliabad-northern-pakistan/