Securitising the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderland: impacts on the Ahmadzai Wazirs

Abstract

Taking ‘Ahmadzai Wazirs’ of erstwhile FATA, Pakistan as a case study, this research attempts to explore the impacts of the securitization discourse and border fencing on the socio-cultural lives of the tribesmen who have lived for centuries in the Pakistan and Afghanistan borderland area. This is done by focusing on the perceptions which Ahmadzai Wazir tribes have on the state’s securitization and border fencing narrative, and the resultant impacts on them. In the wake of the policy maker’s decision to fence the border, this paper investigates the perception of the border community about the ongoing border fencing project and the ways in which the border landers defy the territorial notion of state sovereignty. We thus try to engage this comparatively newer theoretical framework, the borderland theory to investigate perceptions of the local people as a distinct cross-border community in order to investigate the notion of security from the perspective of the people on the borderland. The theory allows us to see borderland as a distinct entity as opposed to the hitherto dominant state-centred approach of looking at the border region as state peripheries. A mixed research method was employed to get primary and secondary data and draw analysis.