A Radical Journal

of Geography

From Partisan Universal to Concrete

Universal? The Pashtun Tahaffuz
Movement in Pakistan

Ayyaz Mallick
Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada;
ayyazm@yorku.ca

Abstract: This paper explores the question of universal-particular through the anti-
war Pashtun Tahaffuz (Protection) Movement in Pakistan. With its demands couched in
the language of pain, rights to life and “dignity”, the PTM mobilises popular Pashtun
sentiments as a “partisan universal”: a political formulation which achieves the common
good even as it attends to particular interests. However, within the re-formulated urban
question in post-9/11 Pakistan, PTM also attempts to make common cause with other
ethnic-spatial communities through shared—but situated and differentiated—experi-
ences of dispossession. Thus, the PTM’s “dialectic of experience” is a partisan universal
in search of a “concrete universal”: a non-totalising but encompassing and open univer-
sality, a universal politics which works through the particularity of specific groups’ expe-
riences. It is in this terrain of political practice, and its attendant theoretical articulations,
that we will find the—contingent and processual—resolution of the transition from par-
ticularity to universality.

Keywords: universal, particular, partisan universal, the urban question, Pakistan

The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a
question of theory but is a practical question. Man [sic] must prove the truth—i.e. the
reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the
reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholas-
tic question. (Karl Marx’s second “Thesis on Feuerbach”, 1845)

Introduction
Questions over universality-particularity, generality-specificity, and global-local
have been fundamental to fields as diverse as political philosophy, cultural studies,
human geography, and historiography. From the relation of identity politics and
populism in Anglo-American nationalism(s) to contestations over Staatsvolk versus
Marktvolk in Europe, debates over the universal and particular have gained intense
political resonance in the current conjuncture (cf. Tooze 2017). In the concep-
tual-intellectual terrain, polarised debates—over, for example, “Marxism” and
“postcolonialism”/“post-structuralism”, class versus difference, History 1 versus
History 2—have come to stand as metonyms for epistemological and

Antipode Vol. 0 No. 0 2020 ISSN 0066-4812, pp. 1–20 doi: 10.1111/anti.12661
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methodological discussions over universality, particularity, situatedness, and gen-

erality (Hart 2018). As such, the concepts’ relationship to political practice, and
meditation on their conceptual underpinnings, has gained an unprecedented
valence today.
It is in the spirit of clarifying the practical, political stakes of intellectual medita-
tions on the universal-particular that this paper investigates the Pashtun Tahaffuz
(Protection) Movement (PTM) in Pakistan.1 As a civil rights and anti-war move-
ment born out of the post-9/11 conjuncture, the PTM has been struggling with
issues of universality and particularity. It draws upon a host of historical tropes,
while re-articulating these through specific practices and claims over space, place,
and the “right to life”. In articulating older histories of uneven development to
ongoing dispossession, the PTM operates as a “partisan universal” among Pashtun
populations of Pakistan. However, considering the changing terrain of the
national and urban question, it has also attempted to make common cause with
other affected ethnic-spatial communities. Thus, the PTM directs attention to the
mutual—but differentiated—constitution of spatio-temporal conjunctures, forms
of oppression, and attendant attempts at broader political practice. In this regard,
debates within the PTM, the broader Left in Pakistan, and other ethnic-spatial
communities, give indication of the integral mediation of practice in the production
of universality. In the vein of Frantz Fanon, the PTM and its “dialectic of experi-
ence” is a partisan universal in search of a “concrete universal” (Sekyi-Otu
1996:118, 121): a non-totalising but encompassing and open universality, a uni-
versal politics which works through—and emerges from within—the particularity
of specific groups’ experiences/locations.
In emphasising the production of universality through particularity, I aim to cut
through polarised debates over class/difference, Marxism/postcolonialism, and
universal/particular. I propose to go back to older understandings of the “univer-
sal” and “particular” in the Hegelian dialectic to explore their mediation/co-con-
stitution. Where the Hegelian dialectic is philosophically idealist (and thus, can be
teleological), Marx’s methodological explorations in the Grundrisse serve to socia-
lise the dialectic through the mediation of intellectual-political practice. Here,
identity and generality are produced not as ontologically separate from but
through difference and specificity, by the mediation of practice in determinate
contexts. Such a socialisation of the dialectic is then read through the socio-spa-
tial and national-popular precepts of Antonio Gramsci and Frantz Fanon. Thus,
the focus on situated forms of socio-spatial practice serves to elaborate the practi-
cal mediation of the dialectic of universal-particular. The Gramscian-Fanonist con-
cepts of “partisan universal” and “concrete universal” will serve as conceptual
tools for understanding attempts at the active production of universality through
particularity.
The argument of the paper will proceed in three sections. First, I shed light on
the PTM’s emergence and its forging of a “partisan universality” through prac-
tices and claims over/in space, place, and dignity. The second section explores
debates within the PTM and broader Left and its mediations with regards to the
ruling bloc and other marginalised ethnic-spatial communities. The last section
will reflect on prospects of the PTM forging—or becoming catalyst for—a

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From Partisan Universal to Concrete Universal? 3

“concrete universal”. In this moment, the potential for an active universality is

revealed through determinate and situated forms of socio-political practice. This is
the “long labour ... involved in the formation of political will ... [which] necessi-
tates deep engagement with language and meaning” while also “requir[ing]
attention to the spatial and temporal rhythms of organisation, the contradictory
and sedimented conceptions of the world” which concretely structure the terrain
of political practice and transformation (Doucette 2020:327, emphasis added).
Here, the new urban question in Pakistan will be briefly elaborated as potential
terrain for a concrete universality, the moment when a richer—but always contin-
gent and processual—universality is revealed: “a universal which embraces within
itself the wealth of the particular” (Hegel, quoted by Anderson 1995:34).
The political stakes of this conceptual clarification are extremely pertinent.
Today, when the claims of Enlightenment universalism are often appropriated for
reactionary ends, the temptation remains strong for retreat into irreducible partic-
ularity and pessimism towards prospects of universal, human emancipation. In
speaking with Aim e Cesaire (2010:152), the task for an engaged political and
intellectual practice is that of refusing the false choices between either “burying
myself in a ‘narrow particularism’ [‘walled segregation in the particular’]” or “to
lose myself in an ‘emaciated universalism’”. On the contrary, we aim for universal-
ity not as a point of departure, but as a point of arrival, “enriched by every partic-
ular: the deepening and coexistence of all particulars” (ibid.). Questions of
universal-particular and their mediation are therefore not simply matters of con-
ceptual clarification. In the PTM, Pakistan and beyond, these questions are posed
as matters of life, death, and the affirmation of dignity in the face of brutal neo-
imperial violence. The PTM’s struggle thus serves a segue to clarify the conceptual
valences of particularity and universality today.

Partisan Universal: The Emergence of the PTM

The Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement emerged in the background of four decades of
continuous US-sponsored war—first in the 1980s Afghan jihad and more recently
the War on Terror—in the Pashtun areas of Pakistan. Here, the north-western Fed-
erally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) have borne the brunt of violence, along
with adjoining Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan provinces.2 Due to bomb
attacks from religious fundamentalists, military operations by the Pakistani state,
and US drone attacks, more than 65,000 people have been killed, a large propor-
tion from Pashtun areas. The exact number of “militant” and civilian casualties is
hard to discern due to the opacity of military operations, inaccessibility of inde-
pendent media, and underdevelopment of the area.
The marginalisation of FATA dates back to the late 19th century. The colonial
division of Pashtun lands into urban “settled” districts and rural “tribal” regions,
along with changes to systems of dispute mediation and land tenure, increased
the incidence of violence in these areas (Banerjee 2017:40–41). In response to
these changes and repeated wars with Afghan rulers, the colonial construction of
Pashtuns—especially of “tribal” areas—pivoted around tropes of religious fanati-
cism, “noble savages”, and “treacherous” allies (Banerjee 2017:50–51). This in

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turn justified imposition of the FCR regime which mandated indirect rule through
a “Political Agent” and collective punishment of tribes for individual offences.
Post-Independence, the Pakistani state continued the FCR while drawing upon
similar colonial tropes.3 During the 1980s, the “semi-autonomous” status of FATA
was instrumentalised for establishing training camps for the US-Saudi sponsored
jihad against the Soviets. Post-jihad, the militants forged a symbiotic relationship
with the Pakistani military establishment, forming the Taliban government in
Afghanistan, and expanding their holy war to Indian-occupied Kashmir.
Post-9/11, the Pakistani security establishment ostensibly realigned its policies
with the War on Terror and obtained generous financial reward for facilitating the
US assault on Afghanistan. With Taliban and Al-Qaeda militants fleeing across the
border into FATA, the Pakistani establishment attacked some militants and patron-
ised others, to keep up pressure on India and maintain a “strategic foothold” in
Afghanistan. The influx of foreign fighters and militarisation had a devastating
effect on the social structure of Pashtun areas. Established elites, especially those
against religious militancy, came under attack while lumpen elements gained
ascendancy through the surfeit of arms, drugs, money, and millenarian ideology
(Shakirullah et al. 2020). When several fundamentalist groups turned against the
Pakistani state and carried out attacks in mainland Pakistan, repeated rounds of
military operations were carried out (along with US drone attacks). FATA, already
underdeveloped, bore the brunt of this triangle of neo-imperial, post-colonial,
and fundamentalist militarism.
While Pakistani military operations in FATA began in 2005, a “decisive” military
operation beginning in 2014 claimed killing up to 4000 militants. Over a million
residents were displaced, about 150,000 were maimed, with refugees relocated
to hastily set-up camps in deplorable conditions (Khan 2018). Amidst this milieu,
a new generation of war-weary Pashtuns, especially those displaced from tribal
areas, grew up in parts of mainland Pakistan. Here, they faced common stereotyp-
ing as “religious fanatics” and “azaad qabaail” (independent tribes). In cities such
as Karachi, the large Pashtun working class and refugee segments also faced the
brunt of police violence. The displacement to “settled” areas gave young Pash-
tuns a chance to compare their own conditions as (post-)colonial subjects to
those with “full” citizenship in mainland Pakistan (Kakar 2020). Due to its deliber-
ate underdevelopment and position as an imperial warzone, broadband Internet
access was only extended to FATA in 2005, and intermittently banned for long
periods for “security” reasons (Tribal News Network 2017). But in “mainstream”
areas of Pakistan, Internet and social media accessibility acted as catalyst for devel-
oping a collective consciousness through discovery of common experiences of
war and stereotyping.
Refugees returning home after military operations often found them destroyed
and ransacked, and their areas covered with deadly, unmarked landmines. To add
insult to injury, select Taliban groups—those still relevant to strategic/regional cal-
culus of the military establishment—were still being patronised in the form of
“peace committees”, while mainstream media reported triumphantly on the mili-
tary having eliminated militancy (Wazir 2018). These conditions—decades of war,
displacement, and discriminatory treatment—laid the groundwork for connecting

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From Partisan Universal to Concrete Universal? 5

with other war-weary segments of Pashtun society, such as workers of nationalist

parties, intellectuals, and poets. Post–9/11, for example, Pashto poetry around
anti-war and pro-peace themes underwent a veritable flowering (Khalil 2012).
In January 2018, a group of 22 young men of the Mehsud Tahaffuz (Protection)
Movement (MTM)4 decided to undertake a “long march” from DI Khan (a town
adjoining FATA, with large refugee concentration) to the federal capital Islam-
abad. These were from middle and lower middle class backgrounds, some univer-
sity students, most unemployed, and all with harrowing tales of personal tragedy
(Kakar 2018a). One, Ali Wazir, had lost 13 family members to Taliban and military
operations; another, 25-year-old Manzoor Pashteen had been part of his tribe’s
(temporary) banishment as “punishment” for an army Major’s death by landmi-
nes (Shahjahan 2020). Just before the march, news arrived of Naqeebullah Meh-
sud, an aspiring social-media model, having been shot dead in Karachi in a
“counter-terrorism” operation.5 When a Pashtun political worker reached the
morgue and began Facebook broadcasting images of Naqeebullah’s brutalised
corpse, a viral storm erupted. As the young men of the MTM marched through
Pashtun areas, their caravan swelled to thousands. They were joined by workers
of Pashtun political parties, and by Left and feminist organisers.
Just outside Islamabad and then at their sit-in at the Press Club, tribal “repre-
sentatives” associated with the state arrived. Slogans against the military went up,
and when “representatives” tried to pacify protestors, they were forced down.
MTM organisers, grassroots political workers, and human rights activists ascended
the stage (Shahjahan 2020). The long march and then the Islamabad sit-in
became a focal point for Pashtun grievances: Facebook live videos, Twitter hash-
tags, and existing networks of loss and community among working-class Pashtuns
in cities became key mobilising nodes. What had begun as a long march against
land mines in FATA soon turned into a general Pashtun conflagration against
unaccountable military policies, humiliation on paramilitary check-points, and
police violence/stereotyping in “mainstream” Pakistan. Soon, as the caravan
moved from one Pashtun town to another, it became clear that this was not a
one-off. Thousands of ordinary people greeted Manzoor Pashteen (by now the
informal leader of the movement) and his comrades everywhere. They came on
stage, told stories of their loved ones disappeared by agencies, killed by Taliban,
and of homes and livelihoods destroyed by this War of Terror.
With this generalisation of grievance, its public articulation, and the morphing
of MTM into the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM), salient features of the
mobilisation emerged. Three types of persons came forward as PTM organisa-
tional workers (Kakar 2020). The first two were grassroots workers of established
Pashtun nationalist parties (PkMAP and ANP) whose leaderships, through a mix of
cooption and fear, had eschewed vocally taking up issues of militarism in Pashtun
areas. Thus, while party leaderships (especially ANP) stayed aloof of the move-
ment, their lower cadres formed the PTM’s organisational backbone. In addition,
the key articulatory node, especially through their Internet-savvy, was provided by
young, middle class and educated Pashtuns. These young men had been dis-
placed to “settled” areas of Pakistan due to military operations and militancy.
Here, the displaced came into increasing contact with Pashtun students, workers,

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and intellectuals from non-tribal areas. Due to their linguistic-cultural association,

the non-tribal Pashtuns themselves had become targets of state surveillance and
discrimination. Traditionally, tribal and geographical divisions have been key barri-
ers to the formation of a unified Pashtun consciousness. However, proximity of
Pashtuns from different tribes and geographies in urban spaces, and the wide-
spread availability of new media technologies, accelerated “discovery” of their
common experiences. Here, in the crucible of everyday discrimination and com-
mon experiences of war/displacement in the post-9/11 conjuncture, a new Pash-
tun collective consciousness of marginalisation at the hands of the Pakistani state
developed, mediated crucially through Internet and social media.
While the fresh faces in Pashtun mobilisation and relatively uncensored digital
spaces gave an impetus to forging new identities, a crucial factor was their sub-
version of established/imposed conventions of Pashtun identity and political dis-
course in Pakistan. The movement’s non-violent symbolism, youthful character,
and winning back of “dignity” through new media, was succinctly summed up
by a core committee member of PTM: “With 3G, not G3”, referring to use of 3G
internet (and social media) as opposed to the G3 battle rifle (Khan 2019). The
symbolic subversion can be most clearly discerned in the mobilising slogans. For
example, there is “Da Sanga Azadi Da” (What kind of freedom is this?) which
became an anthem of the movement. In questioning “freedom” this slogan did
not simply express (a more conventional) postcolonial disappointment with bour-
geoisie nationalism. In PTM’s case, this also overturned the trope of “ghayoor”
(fearless) and “azaad qabail” (independent tribesmen) through which the “excep-
tional” legal-territorial status of tribal areas had been justified. Thus, while tribal
areas’ “independence” had been instrumentalised by local and imperial elites for
nefarious “strategic” aims, the PTM overturned this trope on its head by bracket-
ing their “azaadi” (independence) as a fetishised form of dependency and (re-)-
colonisation.
Another slogan was “Nar Pashtun, Batur Pashtun: Manzoor Pashtun, Manzoor
Pashtun” (Who is the manly and brave Pashtun? Manzoor Pashtoon). The “Nar
Pashtun” slogan played on the historical construction of “Pashtun masculinity” as
prone to violence and unthinking bravado. However, in venerating Manzoor, a
student of veterinary medicine who emphasised non-violent articulation of grie-
vances, the PTM was “redefining the ‘manly’ Pashtun ... in Manzoor, the intrepid
man who stood for the oppressed with strong conviction, and who dared to
speak spenay khabarey, truth to power” (Nasr 2018). Manzoor’s quiet determina-
tion also evoked dormant memories of the anti-colonial Khudai Khidmatgar move-
ment (Servants of God, KK). The Khidmatgars were led by legendary Pashtun
leader Abdul Ghaffar Khan also known as Bacha Khan and nicknamed the “Fron-
tier Gandhi” for his emphasis on fighting the British through non-violent, but
highly disciplined, organisation. Like the KKs, Manzoor too wore a red cap
(though of a different design) which has become extremely popular among Pash-
tuns, and his soft-spoken demeanour, emphasis on non-violence, and speeches/
acts bearing witness to violence, have turned him into a Bacha Khan-like charis-
matic figure. Thus, the subversive “Nar Pashtun” slogan and synchronic

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From Partisan Universal to Concrete Universal? 7

articulation of subterranean memories with ongoing dispossession made Manzoor

Pashteen an embodiment of the new Pashtun awakening.
The most subversive slogan was “ye jo dehshat-gardi hai, is ke peechay wardi
hai” (“Behind this terrorism, stands the uniform, i.e. military”). While this slogan
has been deployed by resistance movements in Pakistan for several decades, with
the PTM it became a crucial node for concentrating Pashtuns’ grievances against
the state. Since Independence, the military has enjoyed a preeminent position,
ruling Pakistan directly for almost half its existence, being the main beneficiary of
US largesse, and amassing a business empire worth over $100 billion (Jalal 1990;
Shakil 2019). The military’s influence in civil and political society through a mix of
coercion, corruption, and praetorian nationalism has made it synonymous with
patriotism and any calls for accountability as tantamount to treason. Conversely,
the “dehshatgardi” slogan punctured, in one pithy and witty line, the prestige of
the security establishment, not as “saviours” against “terrorism” but as prime pur-
veyors and patrons of the same. Although this slogan later became a focus of
anti-PTM state propaganda, the reason for its repeated emergence in rallies, in
videos from FATA, and even in a popular song was simple: it was the direct, most
succinct expression of millions of Pashtuns’ lived experience of the depravation of
war and the Pakistani ruling bloc’s machinations over last several decades.
These slogans and public rallies were part of the PTM’s two-pronged Ben-
jaminian techniques: firstly, in their synchronic articulation of historical fragments,
memory, and consciousness (as discussed above); and secondly, in their practices
and slogans publicly baring the pain of victims as a way of exposing/shattering
the “aura” of the ruling bloc. As mentioned earlier, the emphasis on non-violence
and the figure of Manzoor Pashteen evoked comparisons to the struggle of KKs
and Bacha Khan. In baring their pain, PTM re-articulates historical experiences of
oppression, vivifying fragments of subterranean memory in the present.6 Thus,
where the ruling bloc attempts a forcible amnesia with regards to subalternised
groups, invoking the symbolism of past resistance and “perceiving similarities with
the past is a mechanism giving temporal breadth to the struggle” (Shah 2018).
The state-imposed homogeneity of space-time is shattered by the act of bearing
witness to past and present trauma, appropriating-inverting stabilised symbols of
the past, and in the vivified figure of Manzoor Pashteen.
In addition to Manzoor’s spenay khabaray speeches, the PTM’s rallies are domi-
nated by victims of military operations, photos of the “disappeared” adorning the
stage, and relatives of war victims narrating their stories of loss and uncertainty.
Here, the PTM’s conscious centring of women’s experiences not only publicises
the usually stoic and private sufferings of the sexually harassed, the war-trauma-
tised, and the relatives of the disappeared. In a highly patriarchal context, women
taking centre-stage also subverts gendered norms regarding leadership, hierarchy,
and the enactment (or, as it may, concealment) of grief and shame. The exhibi-
tion of wounds is thus not merely catharsis. Where the phenomenon of “missing
persons” is the apogee of the ruling bloc’s tendency to inscribe space-time with
an empty homogeneity, the slogans equating “wardi” (uniform) with “dehshat-
gardi” (terrorism) and the baring of victims’ names and pains, are classically Ben-
jaminian techniques of “shock” and awe “which strip objects and experience of

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their aura” (Eagleton 2002:59). As Ali Wazir declared in a rally in Lahore, capital
of the historically dominant Punjab province: “We want to show, to the people of
Lahore, the wounds of those hidden behind the mountains of FATA” (Eleazar and
Khan 2018, emphasis added).
As such, the slogans and testimonies of Manzoor and other war victims disturb
the aura of the ruling clique inscribed in the physical and cognitive spaces of
“core” Pakistan. By inverting received wisdoms, puncturing ossified traditions of
prestige, and publicly baring their wounds, the PTM expose the universality of
the state as an imposed particularity. In fact, one of their main demands—a Truth
and Reconciliation Commission—to account for victims and costs of war is part of
this same strategy of exposure and disturbance of sedimented common sense. It
is thus through a mixture of mobilisation via digital and non-digital spaces, articu-
lating past fragments of oppression to ongoing dispossession, the charismatic fig-
ure of Manzoor Pashteen, and Benjaminian techniques of shock and awe, that
the PTM has lifted the war-curtain of fog and fear in Pashtun areas.
In popularising and publicly exposing (among Pashtuns) the securitised and
imperial logics of the Pakistani ruling bloc the PTM has come to form, tentatively
but surely, a partisan universal: “that political formation which achieves the com-
mon good even as it attends to particular interests” (Sekyi-Otu 1996:118). It is
also through baring of pain and techniques of shock in now “visible” space of
core Pakistani cities, that PTM attempts to popularise its discourse among other
communities. This is potentially the (dialectical) moment of mediation, the act of
will through which the partisan universal attempts to generalise, where the prac-
tice of struggle attempts to transcend its immediacy and sublate itself into a con-
crete universal. It is this struggle over mediation, the always-contingent attempt
to forge a concrete universal, that we turn to next.

Mediation: Struggles and Debates

The baring of pain, techniques of shock, and forging of a partisan universal
among war-weary Pashtuns had the potential to expose wider logics of state for-
mation in Pakistan. In questioning the logic of perpetual war and peripheral
underdevelopment, the PTM touched a raw nerve of the Pakistani state. It
attacked the militarised core of the ruling bloc, and in doing so, laid bare how
large swathes of territory and populations were rendered invisible for instrumen-
talisation in regional and imperial power games. The militarised core of the Pak-
istani state has been a primary regional client of US imperialism (and its sub-
partners, such as Gulf dictatorships) through the Cold War and post-9/11 era
(Ahmad 1983:132). In fact, the primacy of the militarised core, and attendant
securitised logics of civil and political society, have provided coherence to a post-
colonial ruling bloc with no integral hegemonic project of their own. Conse-
quently, PTM’s partisan universal and attempts at generalisation have the
potential to undo the very “articulating principle” which binds the ruling bloc,
and thus lay the basis for a new social contract in Pakistan (Kakar 2018b; Mouffe
1979).

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From Partisan Universal to Concrete Universal? 9

The PTM’s emergence, its attempts at universalisation, and the responses of

various groups (including the Pakistani state) must therefore be placed in this
high-stakes context. As mentioned previously, the PTM’s emergence is integrally
linked to the failure of established Pashtun nationalist parties to give shape to the
post-9/11 terrain in Pakistan. The incorporation of Pashtun elites into the ruling
bloc has been ongoing from the 1970s, with the emergence of a Pashtun bour-
geoisie in key sectors, capitalist transition of some big landowners, and Pashtuns’
relatively high representation in the military (Ahmed 1998a). Post-9/11, the
absorption was accelerated due to limited power devolution to provinces. Taliban
upsurge in Pakistan also targeted established Pashtun elites. As such, leaderships
of established parties were unable/unwilling to openly articulate challenges to
imperial war in Pashtun areas. This created space for new articulations of Pashtun
socio-political consciousness.
Crucially, and in contradistinction to previous articulations of Pashtun national-
ism, the PTM was based less on grandiose visions of Pashtun glory, and more on
the everyday, lived experiences of militarisation and discrimination (as reflected in
the slogans discussed above) (Kakar 2020). The PTM’s focus on commonly lived
experiences of marginalisation in the post-9/11 conjuncture therefore led to its
wide resonance among Pashtuns often divided along tribal and geographical
lines. The focus on lived experience fed into a fresh articulation of Pashtun con-
sciousness centred on countering the logics of imperial warfare and legal regimes
of exceptionalism and underdevelopment within a Constitutional framework.
The strained dialectic of the PTM with established Pashtun parties has also been
on show in debates on electoral participation and on institutionalising the move-
ment’s organisation. Due to a large proportion of PTM’s grassroots organisers
belonging to the same parties, struggles over the movement’s local institutional
structures can often become turf wars between established political workers and
the newly emergent generation of the displaced and/or politcised. PTM being
prime expression—and attempt at representation—of the crisis of Pashtun nation-
alism, is thus traversed by these incipient faultlines and debates. However, for
now, the charisma of Manzoor Pashteen, the momentum of the mass movement,
and a supple dialectic between electoral politics and independent mobilisation,
has meant that PTM maintains popular appeal within a reformulated Pashtun
political terrain.
However, it is in PTM’s challenge to the ruling bloc that the integrally practical
aspect of the production of universality came to the fore. On one hand, this is seen
in the response of militarised ruling bloc to the PTM. While there have been
(weak) attempts at cooption through material and electoral incentives, the over-
whelming response of the state has been a blitz of propaganda and coercion.
PTM organisers have been arrested under a host of colonial-era laws relating to
sedition and “disturbance of public order”. In FATA, still devoid of access to inde-
pendent media, various Taliban groups became active under the guise of “peace
committees”, and attacked spontaneous rallies of PTM supporters (Shah 2020).
Social media videos emerged of young Pashtuns undergoing corporal punishment
at military checkposts and coerced to pronounce Manzoor Pashteen “beyghairat”
(dishonourable) and “anti-Pakistan”. Several key articulators on social media,

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10 Antipode

including students, have been “picked up” and kept in Pakistan’s most notorious
jails. In universities and colleges, any discussion of the movement is quickly shut-
down. In a protest in Balochistan, a main organiser Arman Luni, an auto-didact
college lecturer from a working-class background, was beaten to death by security
officials with rifle butts.
In mainstream media, there has been a complete blackout. This is part of a
wider crisis of the ruling bloc, with the military establishment attempting to direct
a passive revolutionary program of concentrated coercion (Mallick 2017). News-
paper editors, due to self-censorship or under direct threats, have refused to pub-
lish columns discussing the PTM. On Pakistan’s booming electronic media, a daily
facßade of debate on scandals of the political elite ensues, while avoiding any men-
tion of PTM and the substantive issues it is raising about the war. In a recent
“public service” advertisement, the Punjab government used photos of PTM rallies
for denoting religious sectarianism; ironically, identifying the worst victims of mili-
tarism with its perpetrators, and furthering the hegemonic imaginary of “fanatic”
Pashtuns. The Pashteen cap, having become a worldwide phenomenon among
Pashtun diaspora, is frequently forced off shop shelves by intelligence officers
before PTM rallies.
The military has repeatedly insinuated that the PTM is part of a “fifth-genera-
tion”, “non-kinetic” war against Pakistan. This is supposedly aimed at turning Pak-
istan into “another Syria”, the playground of world powers and civil war. The
irony of course is that it is Pakistan’s ruling classes who have been primary benefi-
ciaries and guarantors of imperial interests in the region.7 In 1971, after refusing
demands for federal autonomy, Pakistan lost more than half its population after a
brutal war resulting in the secession of Bangladesh. Since then, any stirrings
around regional autonomy are quelled with brute force. Thus, anti-PTM propa-
ganda is part of a longer history, whereby a highly centralised and militarised rul-
ing bloc has perceived movements articulated around ethnicity as conspiracies
against Pakistan’s “Islamic” unity/identity. In fact, patronage of fundamentalist
groups was also initially a strategy for undercutting ethnic movements demand-
ing federal autonomy (Shahjahan 2020). Today, with the social-spatial basis of
national/ethnic question shifting and recurring crises of hegemony, Pakistan’s rul-
ing bloc continues to construct movements like the PTM as “foreign conspiracies”
and attacks on the nation’s unity.
In a similar but distinct vein, parts of the “orthodox” Left in Pakistan also
refused to lend support to the PTM. Segments among the Left, especially those of
an earlier generation subscribing to a mechanical “Marxism” in the garb of ortho-
doxy, decried the movement variously as “ethnic chauvinists” or as “covert” Tal-
iban sympathisers. These tendencies are part of a longer history of fluctuating
relations between the Left (especially, of the dominant Punjab province) and
ethno-national movements in peripheries. Discounting honourable exceptions,
the Left in Pakistan has generally oscillated between binary tendencies. On one
hand, there has often been an uncritical embrace of ethnic nationalism, and tail-
ing/subsumption into projects hegemonised by landed and/or petty bourgeoisie
interests. On the other hand, there has been a strategy of aloofness, whereby
uneven development and ethnic/(sub-)national oppression is rhetorically

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From Partisan Universal to Concrete Universal? 11

recognised, but in practice a narrow conception of “class” struggle eschews any

productive engagement with ethnicity-based organising.
When the PTM arrived in Karachi in May 2018, significant segments of Sindhi
nationalists—often from Left backgrounds themselves—refused to take part in
organisational efforts, and some even opposed the movement. In Sindh’s case,
this was overdetermined by longer histories of up-country migration, indigenous
displacement, and exclusions from state and civil society, which have been regis-
tered through highly toxic ethnic conflicts, especially in Karachi (Ahmed 1998b).
Reigning stereotypes of Pashtuns as “Taliban sympathisers”, prone to masculinist
violence, and as “invading” the indigenous “Sufi”/“peaceful” fabric of Sindhi soci-
ety, played into the reluctance to engage with the PTM. The Left of course is not
immune to racism or stereotyping; and the weight of complex histories and
mechanical thought can make for the strangest of bedfellows, in this case, two
groups which are usually implacably opposed to each other: “orthodox” (i.e.
mechanical) Marxists and ethnic nationalists.
At an ideological level, the degeneration of Marxist thought in Pakistan, itself
linked to worldwide rhythms of the communist movement, has also been regis-
tered in a failure to comprehend the fundamental precepts of dialectical praxis.
Political defeat and intellectual involution here have gone hand in hand. Post-
Soviet Union, “consolation” has been achieved through staunch and repeated
reaffirmation of ideals (Anderson 2000), even while (re-)examination of shifting
terrains and (crucially) of epistemological bases of political projects has been
eschewed. “Class” is here conceptualised as the unmediated product of an auto-
gestating “economy”, an abstract universal divorced of all its social determinants,
its historical, structural, and geographical joints. Such an unmediated affirmation
of “class” itself carries the danger of becoming an “ideological” category, whose
“exclusionist interpretive use can face us with an evacuating result” (Bannerji
2011:38).
In his methodological notes in the Grundrisse, however, Marx points out that
general categories should always be seen in their historical specificity where “ele-
ments which are not general and common, must be separated ... so that in their
unity ... their essential difference is not forgotten” (1973:27, emphasis added). For
Marx, general concepts and categories therefore “differentiate in the very moment
that they reveal hidden connections” (Hall 2003:118). “The regime of capital”, as
Stuart Hall (1996:437) reminds us, “can function through differentiation and dif-
ference, rather than through similarity and identity”. In Pakistan’s case, such a
concrete delineation of the conjuncture and class as a “unity-within-distinctions”,
would consider its integral linkages to differentiated spatio-temporal relations
(such as gender and ethnicity). But with the fundamental dialectical precept of
“distinctions-within-a-unity” ignored, with the mutually constitutive but differenti-
ated grounds of exploitation forgotten, the narrow particularism of some seg-
ments of ethnic nationalism merged with the abstract universalism of the
orthodox Left (around “class”) and the Pakistani state (around “national unity”).
Class, unity, and universality here are seen not as points of arrival, as moments of
practical mediation, but as transcendental givens; not as “a rich totality of many

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12 Antipode

determinations and relations” (Marx 1973:42), but as an abstract universal: “the

night”, Hegel (2018:10) once caustically remarked, “in which all cows are black”.
It is of course, a testament to what C.L.R. James (2015) termed “the always
unsuspected power of the mass movement” that the PTM brought so many dor-
mant questions to the fore, both with regards to the militarised-imperial logic of
the Pakistani state, and debates around universality and difference in the Left. In
fact, it is in PTM’s graduation to “core” Pakistan areas and its attempts at univer-
salising its struggle in the socio-spatial terrain, that the most intense struggles
came to the fore. PTM rallies themselves are a battle of nerves, open struggles
over the domination of space and time between the state and the people. Before
the Lahore rally in April 2018, organisers from the Left Front (who were handling
logistics) were constantly coerced: one was mailed a bullet, the press printing
banners and flyers was ransacked, and several organisers were arrested the night
before. Next morning, in an unconscious parody, state authorities flooded the
venue with stinking sewage water. The rally went ahead when hundreds of Pash-
tun and non-Pashtun volunteers worked at breakneck speed to clear the grounds.
Manzoor mocked state authorities for trying to drown the purity of the PTM’s
pain with the filth of their nefarious designs (and sewage).
In May, military intelligence swarmed all over Karachi as the PTM arrived. Sev-
eral organisers’ mobile phones were blocked and they were forced underground.
Rumours were spread that the rally will be targeted by a suicide bomber. PTM
supporters/sympathisers from various parts of Balochistan and Sindh were
stopped from entering Karachi. Manzoor himself was stopped from boarding the
flight to Karachi. When Manzoor and the young Pashtuns accompanying him
decided to drive the 1200 km to Karachi they were stopped 23 times at check-
points. At the rally, thousands of people waited for him for seven and a half
hours, chanting slogans, singing Da Sanga Azadi Da, and listening to stories of
the maimed and the disappeared. When he eventually arrived to address a
charged crowd of thousands, Manzoor declared that he would have travelled for
40 years, if that is how long it took to reach Karachi. This was a battle between
the ruling bloc’s imposition of homogenous time and space versus ordinary, war-
weary peoples’ celebration-appropriation of it. And it is the people that were
winning.
As mentioned above, it is also around the time of the Karachi rally that ques-
tions of socio-spatial alliances and universalisation came to the forefront. The “un-
suspected power of the mass movement”, the constitutive differentiation and
non-linearity of space-time, broke through in the mutual constitution and acceler-
ation of struggles in different peripheral areas of Pakistan against the logic of per-
manent war. Left-wing lawyer Jalila Haider’s hunger strike to bring attention to
the plight of Shia Hazara community was warmly welcomed by Manzoor in his
popular Facebook live videos and actively supported by PTM cadres in Quetta. In
Islamabad in late May, university students from Sindh began a hunger strike
against activists’ “disappearance” by security agencies. When Manzoor visited the
strike camp, one Sindhi student told him: “we are doing this inspired by you; it is
time to raise our joint voices”. Popular mobilisations of left and nationalist workers
all over Sindh followed against the scourge of “missing persons”. A seemingly

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From Partisan Universal to Concrete Universal? 13

unassailable wall of fear-induced silence was crumbling against the spenay kha-
barey courage and accounts of common pain brought forth by PTM.
This was the PTM’s moment of socio-spatial mediation beyond the (Pashtun)
partisan universal. It was/is the moment of practical struggle against an imposed
(and abstract) universality “from above”, i.e. of the militarised ruling bloc; and a
practical struggle for a concrete universal, i.e. for an insurgent universality “from
below”. It is this tentative articulation of—and attempts towards—the concrete
universal that we explore in the last section.

The New Urban Question: Towards a Concrete

Universal?
By May 2018, the PTM had explicitly begun addressing the social and spatial
aspects of its attempts at universalisation, and relatedly, its relation to the emerg-
ing urban question in Pakistan. This can be clearly glimpsed in its graduation to
“core” urban spaces in Pakistan, especially its primate city Karachi. To emphasise,
the “urban” here is not merely, or even primarily, a (technocratically defined)
physical space or passive “container” of social relations. But in Lefebvrian sense,
the “urban” itself is a process: both expression and mediation of the homogenis-
ing-differentiating dialectic of state and capital; of the historically bound rule of
the commodity fetishised as universal time and serialised space; and a site of
encounter which encodes non-contemporaneous rhythms of space and time
(Lefebvre 2003). Thus, while the “urban” is the mediation of multi-level forces, it
is also “the medium of action and creation” by subjects, both the site for con-
struction of hegemony, and the potential Achilles heel of capital and state (Kipfer
2002:139). Crucially, while fragmentations and commodification of urban space
produce “minimal” (i.e. particularised) difference, the urban is also the potential
site for mutual recognition of particularity and its transformation to “maximal”
difference: forms of plurality and individuality based on unalienated social rela-
tions (Kipfer 2002:144–145).
In Pakistan’s case, the historical production of Karachi as a resume of multi-level
contradictions has positioned it as the very embodiment of the changing con-
tours of the urban (and national) question. It is a city of migrants with historic
connections to both Sindh and Balochistan, and linked through (post-)colonial
economic geography to both the American imperium (as conduit for its war
machine) and up-country areas of Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Today, Kara-
chi is a city of upwards of 15 million people and has the highest number of Pash-
tuns anywhere in the world. Beginning from 1950s, large-scale industrialisation
absorbed migrants from all parts of Pakistan as part an emerging working class.
Working-class migrants, including large segments of Pashtuns, were at the fore-
front of radical upsurges in the 1960s and 1970s (Ali 2005). With the onset of
imperial warfare on the Afghanistan–Pakistan borderland from 1980s onwards,
waves of Pashtun migration into Karachi have continued. However, the experi-
ence of different migrant communities in post-Independence decades with
regards to housing and urban planning was substantially differentiated (Gazdar
and Mallah 2013:3103). This led to complex occupational and spatial

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14 Antipode

stratifications whereby patterns of ethnicity and class were often co-constituted.

But repression of the labour movement and an intense civic crisis in the 1980s
saw these socio-spatial stratifications feeding into violent, “ethnicised” articulation
of the urban question. As mentioned earlier, these conflicts themselves were
overdetermined by issues around indigeneity and displacement of the “indige-
nous” Sindhi and Balochi-speaking people of Sindh (Ahmed 1998b). Several years
of highly toxic conflict and military operations followed, engulfing Pashtuns, Sind-
his, and Urdu-speaking migrants, violently producing “ethnicity” through minimal
difference and particularised space (Verkaaik 2016). This internecine urban warfare
led to an ethnically enclavised structure of feeling, whereby the potential cos-
mopolitanism of Karachi and its popular classes gave way to serialisation along
lines of ethnicity and locality.
With the onset of neoliberalism and financial deregulation, regimes of accumu-
lation shifted all over Pakistan. Today, material and discursive articulations of the
“urban” in Karachi are formed at the intersection of post-colonial state-/nation-
formation, the “resurgence of imperial power ... [and] the coalescing of these
dynamics with new global neoliberal futures” (Anwar 2014:22). Agricultural
depeasantisation and war in various parts of the country led to massive rural-ur-
ban migrations, more than doubling Karachi’s population in the decade of the
2000s. With liberalisation of financial markets, and in absence of any sustainable
project of accumulation, Pakistan’s upper and middle classes resorted to real
estate investment/speculation as a primary means of accumulation. A veritable
gravy train of a political economy consisting of private developers, local muscle-
men, civil bureaucrats, and military businesses emerged leading to massive (and
coerced) transfers of peri-urban land into urban real estate. Post-9/11, investment
in real estate quadrupled: today Pakistan’s real estate market stands at an esti-
mated value of $400–$700 billion and, over just the past five years, urban plot
prices have grown over 150% annually (average income has grown only 20%)
(Rashid 2019). The massive rural-to-urban migration, and limited absorptive
capacity in the economy, has led to a proliferation of informal modes of living.
Today, more than more than half of Karachi’s population live in informal settle-
ments; the top one-third of residents occupy close to three quarters of residential
land, while the bottom two-thirds live on less than a quarter (Hasan 2015:224).
It is this context of up-country migration of different ethnicities and real estate
accumulation that has laid the basis for new articulations of the national and
urban question in Pakistan today. For the question of underdevelopment and the
periphery is no longer a question of those “other” spaces, removed from the
physical and cognitive proximity of the core. Today, the “periphery” of Pakistan
are exploding into the “core” itself. Where in the 1980s and 1990s this led to
internecine ethnic warfare in Karachi, today the confluence of underdevelopment
and migration is expressed in the classed and ethnicised land-grabs which pull
the “rural” and agrarian into an ever-expanding fabric of the (neoliberal) urban
(Anwar 2018). On one hand, this has led to fear of the ethnicised underclass,
articulated in familiar post-9/11 tropes of religious fundamentalism and extrem-
ism. For instance, Mustafa Kamal, highly acclaimed mayor of Karachi from 2005
to 2010, referred to Pashtun migrants in the Sohrab Goth area as: “These

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From Partisan Universal to Concrete Universal? 15

Pashtuns means like fundamentalist—religiously fundamentalist ... They are com-

ing in ... It’s [Sohrab Goth] a very strategic location, you see? They can control
the whole highway” (quoted by Inskeep 2008). On the other hand, it is also in
this expanding-differentiating fabric of the urban that the new frontier of accumu-
lation and corruption is found. For example, just recently in November 2018, a
9000-acre scam of the value of $2bn was unearthed in the eastern Malir District
of Karachi involving military-linked private developers (Soch 2018). It is no coinci-
dence that this is the same District Malir where notorious SSP Rao Anwar, the
same police officer who killed Naqeebullah Mehsud in cold blood, operated for
many years with the patronage of powerful groups in state and civil society.
It is precisely at this joint—where the violence of a militarised ruling bloc and
its “counter-terror” operations meets its narrow accumulation machine—that new
articulations of ethnicity and urbanity can be found in Pakistan today. This has
manifested not just in “encounter” killings and socio-spatial “fixation” of urban
underclasses, but also affects middle class students from ethnic minority back-
grounds who face everyday discrimination and marginalisation on campuses and
outside. In wake of the Pakistani state’s so-called National Action Plan against ter-
rorism, more than 65,000 Afghans—stereotyped as conduits for militant violence
—were forced to leave Pakistan in 2015 alone. Human Rights Watch (2017:1) ter-
med this “the world’s largest unlawful mass forced return of refugees in recent
times”. It is also this concatenation of everyday humiliation and militarised dispos-
session which undergirds the PTM’s partisan universality among Pashtuns and its
articulation of this reshaped and respatialised ethnic and national question in Pak-
istan today.
That the PTM is consciously attempting to shape a new, insurgent universality
from within this reformulated national and urban question is without doubt. Thus,
in its public flyer for the Karachi rally in May 2018, PTM not only recognised the
historical “ownership” of indigenous Sindhis and Baloch of the land, but also the
concrete grounds for unity between the differentiated subaltern classes of the city.
The pamphlet pointed out that where waves of migration should have made Kar-
achi “a unique bouquet of diverse fragrances”, the city became a site of ethnic
turf battles due to the narrowness of political and economic elites, turning Karachi
into a collection of “unrelated islands haunted by fear and foreboding”. The mass
rally was held on 13 May, a day after the anniversary of one Karachi’s bloodiest
days of ethnic bloodshed,8 as symbolic negation and “amelioration of our
mother’s [Karachi’s] pain”.9 Linking processes of land-grabbing and “counter-ter-
rorism” operations, shared experiences of state violence and dispossession were
highlighted as the basis of concrete unity between differentiated popular classes
and ethnicities. “PTM is the sadqa [penance] of this pain”, the pamphlet
declared.
Such shared pain was also reflected in the PTM’s mobilisation in core cities. Rel-
atives of missing persons from Sindhi and Baloch communities were prominent in
the crowd and treated with the melancholic respect which is a hallmark of PTM
gatherings. As always, the PTM rallies were festivals of shock, the unearthing and
baring of the pain of militarism, but this time befitting the cosmopolitanism of
Karachi’s urban fabric. The pamphlet itself succinctly summarised the bases of

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16 Antipode

concrete unity in the lines of Faiz Ahmed Faiz:10 Bara hai dard ka rishta / Tum-
haray naam pe aaein ge gham-gusaar chaley (Deep runs the bond of pain / In your
name will all mourners come together). As such, the questions being raised by
the PTM were no longer just questions of “far away” and “other spaces”; these
were integral questions for reimagining the social and scalar coordinates of every-
day urban life in Pakistan. Thus, while the “urban” under capitalism produces seri-
alisation and separation, it is also “a place where differences know one another
and, through their mutual recognition” may become mediatory moments towards
a hegemonic transformation (Lefebvre 2003:96). And it is through this differenti-
ated—but mutually constitutive and recognised—experience of space-time that
PTM was attempting to forge a concrete universal.
Importantly, while PTM appealed to the diversity of the urban fabric, this was
no resort to a liberal cosmopolitanism functioning as an (abstract) universal which
is simply a given/transcendental truth. Repeatedly, Manzoor has emphasised the
aspect of struggle involved in building unity, in coming up with concrete points
of socio-spatial articulation, and—crucially—the importance of immediacy and
partisan universal in the (dialectical/practical) task of forging an insurgent univer-
sality. Thus, at the Sindhi students’ hunger camp, when asked about the unity of
oppressed ethnicities in Paksitan, Manzoor’s reply was Fanonian in its prescience:
You must trust your own people [qaum], you must go and awaken them, we cannot
win this war without peoples’ power ... You must work very hard. We can join and
unite, yes. But if there is no ground work, then in unity there will only be disappoint-
ment. If all the peoples are equal, then the alliance will have its own momentum ...
We will come again to this camp. You must go to your villages and towns [in Sindh],
do seminars there, raise awareness, gather the people. We are with you.

Here in one simple conversation is the laying down of the socio-spatial bases of
immediacy and partisan universal as necessary moments to forging a concrete
universality. The demand for dignity and equality here is “not some abstract uni-
versal” but one emerging from “real or actual movement ... [which] has its practi-
cal origins in history and geography; it does not precede them” (Doucette
2020:323, emphasis added). As with Fanon, Manzoor recognises the need for the
native intellectual to retreat to the spatial-social grounds of popular bases within
their communities, “to fall back towards the countryside”, to “learn their lessons
in the hard school of the people”, to join the people “in that fluctuating move-
ment which they are just giving shape to”, and then—and only then—culminate
back in the urban core, the (potential) terrain of concrete unity (Fanon
2001:100–101, 182). This then is the mutual socio-spatial imbrication of partisan
universal(s), the dialectical sublation of immediacy into an insurgent universality.
Of course, through their own experience, PTM also realise that this practice of
transition is no one-way street. The “universal” itself is constitutive of the “particu-
lar”, and thus claims over the “universal” themselves are relational, political
claims, often hiding exclusion and/or particular interests. As such, there is always
a struggle for universality, the generalisation of particularity as universality through
the mediation of ethico-political and socio-spatial hegemony. In this, the greatest
challenge is to subvert/thwart the imposed universality of the ruling bloc by

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From Partisan Universal to Concrete Universal? 17

exposing its particularity, even while keeping the horizon of an alternate universal-
ism intact. In December 2018, when state authorities prevented him from attend-
ing a protest camp for Baloch missing persons, and in recognition of the practical
struggle for universality, Manzoor declared that “the state is afraid of people com-
ing together, of different people [ethnicities] joining together in love. They [the
state] think they are safe when people are divided ... they are mistaken that they
can stop our shared pain and relationship by banning my presence in the camp for
Baloch missing persons. With these ugly tactics, our relationship is gaining vitality,
they will become jewels under this pressure. The state is on its way to defeat. We
are on our way to victory”. Therefore, there is both a recognition of the horizon
of an alternative universality, and a sober recognition of the difficulty of forging
such. State and capital impose their own universality by (the often coercive) serial-
isation of peoples. Thus, while the ruling bloc attempts to constrain the subaltern
in a walled particularism, the forging of an alternative universality cannot but take
this moment of particularity, this ground of immediacy, as its point of departure.
It is this ground of immediacy, not as destiny but as history, and in mutual consti-
tution with other moments of immediacy, that is the departure point for the prac-
tical struggle of “a universal which embraces within itself the wealth of the
particular” (Hegel, quoted by Anderson 1995:34).
The oeuvre of the PTM, its representation of the crisis of the ruling bloc, and its
articulation of the shifting socio-spatial coordinates of the national and urban
question in Pakistan, is thus instructive for delineating the place of the particular
and universal in intellectual-political practice. Here, the ground of immediacy, the
particularity of existence, belies an immediately transparent universality. In fact,
situated and differentiated—but shared—experiences of multi-scalar projects of
dispossession at the hands of the praetorian Pakistani ruling bloc may potentially
serve as the ground for a concrete/dialectical unity. Where partisan universality is
forged through centring the experiences of historically formed ethnic-spatial com-
munities, these can become potential moments of transition to “a second har-
mony”: “a concrete universal ... the product of that critical ‘national
consciousness’ which ‘rationalises’ or ‘elicits reason’ from ‘popular action’” (Sekyi-
Otu 1996:121, emphasis added). In such a dialectical vision, identity does not
cancel difference, but articulates-sublates it in a higher form; the relationship
between the particular and universal here is discovered to be one of practical
mediation, as opposed to one of incommensurability. To speak with Fanon, there
is no inherent opposition between the particularity of “the national” and the
search for a common/universal humanity, because the “building of a nation is of
necessity accompanied by the discovery and encouragement of universalising val-
ues ... it is at the heart of national consciousness that international consciousness
lives and grows” (Fanon 2001:199).
The forging of a concrete universal is therefore always contingent, processual,
and a matter of practical struggle. What is immediately given is “not concretely
universal”, but a necessary moment of “the struggle for objectivity”, the formation
of “the universal subjective” (Gramsci 1971:445, emphasis added). Reason, truth,
and universality are not transcendent; there are no guaranteed articulations of the
Truth to which living people, in all their multi-variate experiences, must measure

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18 Antipode

up to: “What the idealists call ‘spirit’ is not a point of departure but a point of arri-
val, it is the ensemble of the superstructures moving towards concrete and objec-
tively universal unification and it is not a unitary presupposition” (ibid., emphasis
added). Concrete universality then is forged in the dialectical crucible of experi-
ence: a non-totalising but encompassing and open universality, a universal politics
which emerges from within the particularity of specific groups’ experiences, his-
toricities, and spatialities. It is thus by necessity “not a unitary pre-supposition”.
The project of truth and universality cannot be abandoned either to the exclu-
sionary legacy of the Enlightenment, or to the walled particularisms which are its
dialectical Other. Nor are truth and universality beholden to the self-movement of
the Idea, but they are immanent to the modes of practice, that is, to politics itself.
Eliciting universality is the task of an engaged and determinate theoretical-political
struggle. The question of objective truth, to echo the master himself, is never a
purely scholastic question: truth must always be proven in practice. The point, as
always, remains to change it.

Acknowledgements
Key arguments of this paper were presented at the Annual Meeting of American Associa-
tion of Geographers (AAG) in Washington, DC in April 2019. In addition to the Antipode
editors (Dave Featherstone and Andy Kent) and anonymous reviewers, I am grateful to Ste-
fan Kipfer, Hurmat Ali Shah, Rafiullah Kakar, and Shahab Saqib for their feedback and
encouragement in the preparation of this version.

Endnotes
1
I will draw upon accounts of PTM organisers and Pashtun intellectuals, in addition to my
own experiences/observations as member of a left political party whose members have
been integrally involved in the movement.
2
Pashtuns are Pakistan’s second largest ethnic group (about 40 million, 18% of the popu-
lation). The three areas with Pashtun concentrations were divided as such under colonial-
ism. FATA was kept as a “buffer zone” between British India and Afghanistan, and a brutal
legal regime imposed the Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR). FATA has recently been
merged into KP province, but we will refer to it as a separate entity as it is this “buffer
zone” status that laid grounds for PTM’s emergence.
3
Sir Syed, founding father of Muslim nationalism in India: “Pathan tribes of the Frontier
are a destabilising influence for the Empire ... They do not challenge British rule because it
is illegitimate—they do it solely because they know not how else to live” (Qadir 2018).
4
Mehsud tribe is mostly based in the Waziristan agencies of FATA. They were particularly
targeted during military operations as several prominent Taliban commanders were also
Mehsuds. The MTM was formed in May 2014.
5
Between 2011 and 2018, Senior Superintendent Police of Malir District (Karachi) Rao
Anwar killed 444 people in “encounters”. According to the police’s own records, “not a
single policeman was even injured, let alone killed, during the 745 encounters” (Zaman
and Ali 2019).
6
Two incidents involving KKs figure prominently in Pashtun nationalist discourse: the mas-
sacre of up to 400 people in Qissa Khwani Bazar by colonial authorities in 1930, and of
more than 600 people in Babraa by postcolonial authorities in 1948.
7
Pakistani generals’ well paid services to foreign powers are well documented. See, for
example, their role in the Arab Spring Thermidor in Bahrain (Mashal 2011).
8
Almost 50 people were killed on 12 May 2007 when anti-dictatorship protests were
instrumentalised by ethnic militants to go on a rampage.

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From Partisan Universal to Concrete Universal? 19

9
For its cosmopolitan character and absorptive capacity, Karachi is vernacularly known as
the “mother of the poor” (ghareebon ki maa): surely, a node of popular common sense to
be concretely realised and universalised.
10
One of Urdu’s greatest poets, recipient of the 1962 Lenin Peace Prize.

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