scholarly journals Pakistan in 2020

Asian Survey ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 183-193
Author(s):  
Sahar Shafqat

Pakistan began the year with the military establishment having tightened its grip on political institutions, but as the year progressed, opposition parties sought to reassert themselves and challenged both the PTI government and military leaders. Political movements took center stage as religious extremists as well as regionalist movements drew strength from the challenges to the PTI government. Feminists demanded action after a series of sexual assaults, and religious minorities continued to be targeted by violence. The COVID pandemic upended the economy, which was already straining under low growth and high debt and deficit conditions. Foreign relations provided many challenges as the government sought to target India for its mistreatment of Kashmiris, while the Pakistan–China relationship remained strong.

2021 ◽  
pp. 003802292110510
Author(s):  
Hassan Javid

Historically, despite the tremendous influence exerted by Islam on public life, religious parties and organisations have historically failed to do well at the ballot box, receiving an average of only 6% of votes cast in elections since the 1980s. Focusing on the case of the Tehreek-i-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), a new Barelvi political party and social movement that has campaigned on the emotive issue of blasphemy since being formed in 2015, this article argues that the clientelistic, patronage-based nature of democratic politics in Punjab, coupled with factionalism and competition within the religious right, continues to play a role in limiting the electoral prospects of religious parties. Nonetheless, as was seen in the General Elections of 2018 in which the TLP outperformed expectations, there are particular circumstances in which the religious parties are able to make electoral breakthroughs. While the TLP was able to make effective use of populist rhetoric to garner some genuine support for itself, this article argues that the organisations sustained campaign of protests over the issue of blasphemy fed into broader efforts by the military establishment and opposition political parties to destabilise and weaken the government of the PML-N prior to the 2018 elections.


Author(s):  
Marco Bünte

Myanmar has had one of the longest ruling military regimes in the world. Ruling directly or indirectly for more than five decades, Myanmar’s armed forces have been able to permeate the country’s main political institutions, its economy, and its society. Myanmar is a highly revealing case study for examining the trajectory of civil–military relations over the past seven decades. Myanmar ended direct military rule only in 2011 after the military had become the most powerful institution in society, weakened the political party opposition severely, coopted several ethnic armed groups, and built up a business empire that allowed it to remain financially independent. The new tutelary regime—established in 2011 after proclaiming a roadmap to “discipline flourishing democracy” in 2003, promulgating a new constitution in 2008, and holding (heavily scripted) elections in 2010—allowed a degree of power-sharing between elected civilian politicians and the military for a decade. Although policymaking in economic, financial, and social arenas was transferred to the elected government, the military remained in firm control of external and internal security and continued to be completely autonomous in the management of its own affairs. As a veto power, the military was also able to protect its prerogatives from a position of strength. Despite this dominant position in the government, civil–military relations were hostile and led to a coup in February 2021. The military felt increasingly threatened and humiliated as civilians destroyed the guardrails it had put in place to protect its core interests within the tutelary regime. The military also felt increasingly alienated as the party the military had established repeatedly failed to perform in the elections.


Author(s):  
Octavio Amorim Neto ◽  
Igor P. Acácio

Contra the conventional wisdom that term limits are meaningless in dictatorships, Brazil’s military regime developed term-limits for its chief executives and managed a durable political order. This chapter argue that term limits moderated intra-elite conflicts, thus contributing to regime stability. Term limits were key to reconcile two warring factions within the armed forces. The authors see term limits as a credible-commitment mechanism. Three elements are jointly sufficient to explain the adoption of term limits: (1) the armed forces’ decision in 1964 to part ways with the decades-old pattern of episodic, short political interventions and stay in office for the long haul; (2) a legalist tradition that led the new regime to keep a façade of constitutionalism through a myriad of political institutions; and (3) the ideological and political cleavages within the armed forces. We corroborate our arguments using a new dataset of tension events between the military and the government in 1946–85.


2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 409-429
Author(s):  
Bon Sang Koo

This paper revisits the military rule in Korea by paying attention, like Korean specialists, to the disconnection in dictatorship but like comparativists, using the tools in comparative studies of modern authoritarian regimes. This paper argues that the differences in the military leaders’ orientations (personalist vs. party-based type) and survival strategies to deal with potential threat sources (key insiders, political opponents, and economic elites) entailed different regime pathways. Examining (a) how to form a ruling group in terms of unity (competing factions vs. a single dominant faction), (b) how to control the legislative branch (directly controlled organization vs. opposition parties indirectly supported by the government), and (c) how to manage capital owners (tight constraints vs. financial liberalization with occasional punishments), this paper provides an explanation as to why only the second military regime was able to open the door to democratization instead of giving way to authoritarian replacement in Korea.


2020 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 537-569
Author(s):  
Jerome Greenfield

Abstract Much of the nature of French imperialism in Algeria can be explained through an analysis of its financial underpinnings, a subject generally neglected by historians. This article recounts the creation of a colonial fiscal system during the period of the French conquest of Algeria from the 1830s to the 1850s. It argues that money played a decisive role in shaping relations between metropolitan officials and the military leaders who comprised the “men on the spot.” While the French presence in Algeria was to an extent rationalized in terms of imparting “civilization,” the need for money exacerbated the army's tendency to rule through violence. This brutality alienated metropolitan elites, pushing the government to exert greater control over Algerian affairs. Here, money provided crucial leverage, given Algeria's financial dependence on the metropole. In this manner, finance decisively shaped the formation of the French state in Algeria. Souvent négligée par les historiens, l'étude des finances est essentielle pour comprendre l'impérialisme français en Algérie. Cet article traite de l'essor du système fiscal colonial pendant la conquête de l'Algérie. Il souligne le rôle que l'argent a joué dans les relations entre les fonctionnaires métropolitains et les commandants de l'armée en Afrique, « les hommes sur place ». Alors que la présence française en Algérie était en partie justifiée par le projet de « civilisation », les besoins financiers ont exacerbé la disposition de l'armée à gouverner par la violence. Cette brutalité a désenchanté les élites métropolitaines, encourageant le gouvernement à exercer plus de contrôle en Algérie, et pour cela l'argent était indispensable, compte tenu de la dépendance financière de la colonie sur la métropole. Les finances ont donc exercé une influence décisive sur le développement de l'Etat français en Algérie.


1961 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gene M. Lyons

Historically the character of civil-military relations in the United States has been dominated by the concept of civilian control of the military. This has largely been a response to the fear of praetorianism. As recently as 1949, for example, the first Hoover Commission asserted that one of the major reasons for strengthening the “means of exercising civilian control” over the defense establishment was to “safeguard our democratic traditions against militarism.” This same warning was raised in the report of the Rockefeller Committee on defense organization in 1953. While the overriding purpose of the committee's recommendations was to provide “the Nation with maximum security at minimum cost,” the report made it clear that this had to be achieved “without danger to our free institutions, based on the fundamental principle of civilian control of the Military Establishment.” Finally, during the debate on the reorganization proposals of 1958, senators and congressmen used the theme of a “Prussianized” military staff to attempt to slow down the trend towards centralization in the military establishment.Despite this imposing support, the concept of civilian control of the military has little significance for contemporary problems of national security in the United States. In the first place, military leaders are divided among themselves, although their differences cannot be reduced to a crass contrast between dichomatic doctrines. Air Force leaders who are gravely concerned over the need to maintain a decisive nuclear retaliatory force are by now acknowledging the need to develop a limited war capability.


Significance The response underlines the military's continued internal security role but, given that the restive areas are home to large Rohingya populations, also highlights residual political sensitivity about the military's position and the importance of effective government-military relations. Impacts An immediate trigger for civil-military frictions could be a breakdown in peace negotiations with ethnic minority groups. The government will struggle to convince military leaders that wide concessions to armed ethnic groups are needed. Centralisation of power within the NLD will hamper junior civilian leaders gaining experience of working with the military. In time, the military's economic influence will be politically problematic for the NLD.


1975 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 317-327
Author(s):  
Robert P. Shay

When the officials at the British Treasury sat down to sketch out their proposals for the 1937 budget, they knew that they had a problem. During the previous year the Government had been forced to embark upon a costly five year rearmament program by the massive growth of the German military establishment, and the bills for that program were beginning to fall due. £180 million had been spent for defence in 1936, £60 million more than during the previous year, but £100 million less than the military services estimated would be necessary in 1937. The Services' estimate was in the words of Edward Bridges, a Treasury under-secretary, “a good deal higher than anything which I anticipated in my gloomier moments.” He knew, however, that there was little chance that it would be reduced. The question immediately at hand was where the funds could be found to pay for the burgeoning cost of defence not only in the coming year, but in the years to follow.Another Treasury under-secretary, Fredrick Phillips, estimated that they could not realistically expect to raise more than £180 million of the £280 million they required from existing taxation. Although the canons of orthodox finance, to which the Treasury usually adhered, dictated that taxes should be increased to meet the deficit, everyone at the Treasury realized that such a measure would extinguish the growing prosperity which the Government had so laboriously and successfully nurtured since the economic collapse of 1931. Reluctantly they decided to resort to the fiscal device which Neville Chamberlain, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, had once disparaged as “the broad road that leads to destruction”: borrowing.


1977 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 613-629
Author(s):  
Robert R. Archibald

In the eighteenth century the Spanish Crown regarded the setting of maximum prices as a legitimate function. Price fixing was intended to guarantee a just price to producers and consumers. Underlying the entire scheme was a desire by the monarchy to insure the adequacy of the fixed incomes of government employees. Hispanic California provides a case study of price fixing. Fixed prices in California were of two varieties. Prices were limited on those goods coming from San Bias with a view to keeping the cost of living within the limits of military salaries in Alta California. In the late 1770’s, mission agriculture began to produce surpluses. For a number of years the only significant outlet for this excess was the military establishment. Because it removed the burden of providing staples from the Naval Department of San Bias, the Crown willingly turned to the missions as a source of supply. The missions gradually assumed the monopoly of provisioning the military, which had belonged to San Bias. In order to ensure that military salaries would suffice to keep body and soul together and to protect them from price gouging the government determined that price regulation was essential.


2004 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 29-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arturo C. Sotomayor Velázquez

AbstractThis paper analyzes the conditions in which the governments of Argentina and Brazil founded security institutions in the early 1990s, while they were democratizing. It advances the hypothesis that international cooperation in the security field is often linked to the evolution of civil-military relations. Civilian leaders in both countries established institutions and sought international participation deliberately to achieve civilian control and gain leverage over the military establishment, which they sorely distrusted. The need to stabilize civil-military relations at home was therefore the prime motivating force behind the emergence of security institutions in the Southern Cone. Three mechanisms were at work: omnibalancing, policy handling, and managing uncertainty. These mechanisms are derived from three different schools of thought: realism, organizational-bureaucratic models, and theories of domestic political institutions. Besides explaining the sources of nuclear bilateral cooperation, this argument also serves as a critique of two prominent theories in international relations that attempt to explain cooperation and peaceful relations among democracies: neoliberal insti-tutionalism and democratic peace theory.


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