Sovereign Attachments: Masculinity, Muslimness, and Affective Politics in Pakistan

A sserting sovereignty across its territories remains the primary purpose of the modern State. There exist two kinds of sovereignties: legal sovereignty and de facto sovereignty. While legal sovereignty encompasses the formal ideologies of rule and legality, de facto sovereignty includes the actual ability to kill, punish, and discipline a specific fragment of society or a section of it. Non-State actors can also perform the latter deeds. In the context of de facto sovereignty, the post-colonial State of Pakistan offers a distinctive understanding of the enmeshment of ‘multiple sovereignties’––ranging from militant and tribal groups to America’s drone strikes within its territories. Both the Pakistani State and non-State actors, such as the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), indulge in violence as an expression of claiming their sovereignty and control over the life and death of the people in Pakistan. Besides this, the claimants to sovereignty fight through other means, although not necessarily in a violent manner with a sole purpose of cultivating sovereign attachments. The TTP, an amalgam of several Pakistan-based militant groups, was formed in 2007 and ever since has not only resorted to violence but also used old and new media and information and communication technology to project the Pakistani State and military as un-Islamic. Shenila Khoja-Moolji’s Sovereign Attachments studies print and online contents including videos, songs, magazine articles, and essays of both the Pakistani State and the TTP. The book argues that through these cultural productions both are trying to capture the attention of the same sets of religiously inclined people to prove their Islamic credentials. The TTP’s invoking of Khilafat in their magazines is done with a specific purpose— that of arousing past Muslim glory and reproducing such political order, for which they conceive themselves as ‘chosen’ by God, and also with the aim of fostering ambivalence towards the State of Pakistan (p.14). For the TTP, sovereignty belongs exclusively to Allah and this belief sharply opposes the State’s sovereignty. In the public relations production of the Pakistani Army, Khoja-Moolji argues that mourning mothers of slain soldiers are cast in a manner so as to generate reattachment to the State. A blend of Islam and masculinity that Khoja-Moolji terms Islamo-masculinity occurs as a dominant conception through which the Pakistani State and the TTP Strategic Analysis, 2023 Vol. 47, No. 2, 180–182, https://doi.org/10.1080/09700161.2023.2190616