Nation, Territory, and Globalization in Pakistan: Traversing the Margins

This book provides a unique multilocal and multivocal analysis of the interlinkages between space, travel and history in the formation of the Pakistani nation-state. By focusing on the Karakoram Highway, which since opening in 1978 has had an extraordinary life channelling global, national, and local movements, the author critically analyses how the national imagination was remapped. Constructed by the Pakistani state constructed as a major development project that furthered the national interest and solidified state control over the remote and disputed region of northern Pakistan, mapped as part of greater Kashmir, the highway acted as a symbol for an imagined national identity. The author shows how the highway offered Pakistan a pre-Partition history and a fixed territory, by providing a historical link to the Silk Route and a contemporary geographical linkage to Central Asia. Examining how the diverse travelers along the Karakoram Highway landscape the nation-state in particular locales, he shows that global flows of development, trade, labour, and tourism have remapped the Pakistani nation-state and reshaping the local. This book provides a fresh perspective on the troubled nation-state of Pakistan, fore-fronting everyday lives in the making of the nation. Recent attention on the region is dominated by issues of militancy and Islamic extremism and ignores the historical and cultural contexts. This unique book concentrates on the everyday experiences of ordinary Pakistanis and offers an important contribution to the growing interest in Pakistan, providing an accessible study of the life of a highway in the making of Pakistan.