NON-FICTION : Change and upheaval in the tribal areas |
Political and Social Change in Pakistan’s Tribal Areas: Understanding Pashtun Youth
By Naveed Ahmad Shinwari
Routledge
ISBN: 978-1032956091
246pp.
For decades, the rugged region bordering Afghanistan, until recently known as Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata), was framed almost as a geopolitical flashpoint. Journalists, policymakers and scholars portrayed it through the prism of conflict, echoing descriptions like “the most dangerous place on earth”, which narrowly overshadowed the everyday experience, social complexity and aspirations of the over five million Pakhtuns living there.
Naveed Ahmad Shinwari’s book, Political and Social Change in Pakistan’s Tribal Areas: Understanding Pashtun Youth, offers a substantive corrective to this prevailing imagery.
Moving beyond conventional depictions of conflict, Shinwari illuminates the lived realities of a society undergoing major structural changes. His central argument underscores that the true story of the former Fata, now called “merged districts” of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa following the 2018 constitutional integration, is not defined solely by residual violence, but by the rise of a politically conscious youth determined to reshape inherited structures of power.
Drawing on over two decades of development engagement and extensive field research, Shinwari offers a level of empirical depth that has long been missing from scholarship on the region. The book, which expands on his doctoral dissertation at the University of Sussex, fills a critical analytical gap.
Where policy debates often reduced the region to a laboratory of counterterrorism, Shinwari’s work depicts it as a dynamic social landscape, marked by contested authority, intricate kinship structures, evolving identities, and increasing political mobilisation.
A very timely scholarly book moves beyond conventional depictions of conflict in Pakistan’s ‘merged districts’ to illuminate the lived........