Syed Sami Raza

University of Peshawar

“Legal Sovereignty on the Border: Aliens, Identity, and Violence on the Northwestern Frontier of Pakistan”

In the summer of 2011 two incidents of cold-blooded violence took place at the hands of law enforcement agencies in Pakistan. One incident involved the killing of a group of foreigners/aliens traveling across the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, and the other involved the killing of a citizen in an area under curfew in the metropolitan city of Karachi. On one hand, the Supreme Court of Pakistan took a Suo Moto action in the case of the latter incident, while remaining silent on the former. On the other, the Pakistani government, instead of reviewing the powers of law enforcement agencies, increased these powers by passing new security laws in the following years. In this article, I focus on these two incidents of violence to question how/why aliens are treated differently from citizens in the Pakistan’s criminal justice system. I trace the legal genealogy of that differential treatment and highlight the different stages of its growth. I also throw light on the way lethal force was used on the victims to show the drawbacks in the operational side of law enforcement. Finally, I engage critical theory to understand the nature of this violence, which now resides in the structure of the criminal justice system.

Syed Sami Raza is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science, University of Peshawar. He earned his PhD from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Hawaii, USA. His research focuses on issues relating to war, political theory, comparative politics, and law and critique. He can be reached at samiraza@upesh.edu.pk.