Pakistan: A State-Society Analysis

AI

State-society relations in Pakistan follow a pattern that has outlasted every government since 1947: formal institutions exist on paper, while real power flows through armies, landlords and kinship networks. A constitution guarantees fundamental rights, yet it has been abrogated, rewritten twice and amended whenever a ruler found it inconvenient. Elections are held, yet a narrow circle of families and the military establishment decide most of what matters. Understanding why requires looking past headlines to the structures underneath.

One of the most systematic attempts to map those structures was an EU-funded state-society analysis completed in January 2009 by Marco Mezzera and Safiya Aftab for the Conflict Research Unit of the Netherlands Institute of International Relations (Clingendael). Drawing on fieldwork in Islamabad, Peshawar, Lahore and Quetta, it traced how foundational factors, formal rules and informal “rules of the game” combine to produce chronic fragility. Constitutional landmarks have shifted since, but the grammar of power the researchers described remains recognisable. What follows presents that framework and brings the story to the present.

The colonial inheritance

Pakistan did not inherit a neutral administrative machine from British India; it inherited one designed for control. The Indian Civil Service it took over in 1947 was organised around central authority and order, not the delivery of schools, clinics or justice. That orientation survived independence largely intact, felt most keenly in the frontier districts, interior Sindh, southern Punjab and Balochistan.

Two other colonial legacies proved just as consequential. The first was the frontier itself. During the nineteenth-century Great Game with Russia, the British treated the Pashtun tribal belt as a buffer zone, governing it indirectly through tribal maliks and the Frontier Crimes Regulation, a legal code first imposed in 1848 that permitted collective punishment of whole tribes and gave appointed Political Agents judicial powers no court could review. Pakistan kept the arrangement essentially unchanged for seventy years: the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) sat outside ordinary law, taxation and politics until their merger into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in May 2018.

The second legacy was the army’s recruitment base. Colonial doctrine designated certain groups as “martial races” and recruited them disproportionately. The 2009 study cited estimates that some 75 percent of Pakistani army personnel came from three districts of northern Punjab; Sindhi and Baloch representation barely registered. A military so narrowly recruited, layered onto a bureaucracy built for control, gave the state a lopsided skeleton from the outset.

Civil-military imbalance

Civil-military relations in Pakistan are the axis around which everything else turns. The country has seen three coups, in 1958, 1977 and 1999, and by the time of the Clingendael fieldwork the military had governed directly, or through dominated civilian administrations, for 37 of the state’s first 61 years. The confrontation with India over Kashmir, underway within months of independence, gave the army a permanent claim on resources and a permanent guardianship role.

The study paid particular attention to the military’s economic empire. Drawing on Ayesha Siddiqa’s Military Inc., it described welfare foundations, public-sector firms and cooperatives spanning banking, insurance, cement, fertiliser, transport and real estate, run outside the defence budget and beyond parliamentary scrutiny; Siddiqa put the value at around 15 billion euros. Defence absorbed nearly 20 percent of the 2008-09 federal budget, against less than half of one percent for health.

Formally, much has changed. No coup has occurred since 1999, and 2013 brought the first transfer of power between two elected civilian governments, yet no prime minister has ever completed a full five-year term. Analysts commonly describe the arrangement consolidated after the 2018 election as a “hybrid regime”: civilians hold office while the military retains decisive influence over security policy, foreign relations, the economy and, critics argue, the fate of governments. Imran Khan’s removal in a no-confidence vote in April 2022, his imprisonment and the contested 2024 elections kept that debate alive. The International Crisis Group’s ongoing Pakistan coverage documents how that pattern of circumscribed civilian rule has adapted rather than disappeared.

Feudalism, biradari and social hierarchy

Pakistani politics is often explained through personalities; the state-society framework explains it through land and kinship. At partition, agriculture dominated the economy, and skewed landownership made rural landlords the dominant elite. Repeated land reforms barely dented their position. These “feudal” families converted control over land, tenants and customary loyalties into reliable voting blocs, and from there into national power. A report cited in the 2009 study found that 82 percent of district nazims came from established political families, and that 76 percent of women legislators on reserved seats were related to male parliamentarians.

The connective tissue is the biradari, the clan network that structures social and political affinity across Punjab in particular. Votes are mobilised through biradari ties; jobs, contracts and access to services flow back down the same channels. In Balochistan and parts of the northwest, tribal structures under hereditary sardars and maliks play the equivalent role. Where South Asian caste is often assumed to be a Hindu institution, the Pakistan caste system operates through these overlapping hierarchies of ethnicity, occupation, tribe and sect. The study was blunt about the results: lower castes face persecution, landless labourers and religious minorities suffer systematic discrimination, and lower-caste women occupy the most disadvantaged position of all; bonded labourers were estimated at 17 million.

“Behind the façade of the state and its laws and procedures, it is socio-economic structures and networks, cultural norms and expectations, and the exercise of personal power that shape governance.”

This is why the researchers described politics in Pakistan as patrimonial rather than programmatic. Parties function as family fiefdoms. Votes are exchanged for expected patronage, not won by manifesto. Officials face two forms of accountability, one written into law and one owed to patrons and kin, and the informal version usually wins because society regards it as more legitimate. Dynastic parties still dominate; the sharpest challenge since 2009 came from a populist party built around a single celebrity leader, not from any anti-feudal movement.

Provinces and the federation

Pakistan’s federation has always been lopsided. Punjab held 56 percent of the population at the 1998 census and dominates the army, bureaucracy and economy. Balochistan covers about 43 percent of the land with roughly 5 percent of the people, supplies a large share of the country’s natural gas, and has fought the centre in five major military operations. The 2009 study documented the grievance: revenue was distributed almost purely by population, Balochistan’s gas was priced at less than half the Sindh rate, and the federal government collected 93 percent of all revenue while provinces carried 28 percent of expenditure.

The next decade brought the most serious rebalancing yet. The seventh National Finance Commission award of 2009 added poverty, revenue generation and population density to the distribution formula, to Balochistan’s benefit. The Eighteenth Amendment, passed with rare cross-party consensus in April 2010, then abolished the concurrent legislative list, devolved health, education and social sectors to the provinces, renamed the Northwest Frontier Province as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and stripped the president of the power under Article 58(2)(b) to dismiss elected assemblies.

Practice has been messier. Provincial bureaucracies inherited functions faster than they built capacity, a problem already visible in the 2001 devolution round, when Sindh managed to spend only 37 percent of its education budget in a year. Federal governments periodically float revisiting the provincial share, and many analysts ask whether devolution is being quietly unwound. Balochistan’s insurgency has meanwhile intensified, now entangled with attacks on Chinese-financed infrastructure. The structural pattern stands: a centre that extracts and redistributes on its own terms, and peripheries that read the bargain as exploitation.

Religion and the state

Pakistan was founded as a homeland for South Asian Muslims, but Muhammad Ali Jinnah envisioned a modern Muslim democracy rather than a theocracy. The drift began soon after his death in 1948. The Objectives Resolution of 1949 committed the future constitution to Islamic principles, partly to counter Bengali nationalism. From the mid-1970s rulers used Islam ever more instrumentally: General Zia ul-Haq’s Islamisation drive after 1977 introduced the Hudood Ordinance, Islamised schooling and broadcasting, and cemented an alliance between the military establishment and the religious right that outlived him.

The consequences compounded. State support for jihad in Afghanistan and Kashmir created armed militant cadres, sectarian violence divided communities, and religious parties gained bargaining power as coalition partners of military rulers, a bargain that peaked when the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal alliance won 20 percent of assembly seats in 2002. By 2007-08 the state faced a full insurgency by the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, a movement that turned the jihadist infrastructure against its former patron. Army operations after 2014 pushed the TTP across the Afghan border, but the group revived after the Taliban retook Kabul in 2021, and attacks on Pakistani forces have climbed sharply since. The legitimacy vacuum the study identified, in which an unresponsive elite leaves the field open to actors who can mobilise the masses through religion, remains one of its most durable insights.

Media and civil society

The study caught Pakistani media mid-transformation. Television went from two or three state-run channels in 2000 to more than 50 private ones by 2008, and the print press was among South Asia’s most outspoken. The limits were equally clear: the armed forces’ political and economic role and the conflicts in Balochistan and the tribal areas were effectively off-limits, Musharraf shut down news channels under his 2007 emergency, and a would-be founder of a Baloch-language satellite channel was abducted and tortured for 22 months. Media in Pakistan have lived inside that contradiction ever since: pluralistic and noisy, but policed at the red lines. The sector’s growth and regulatory battles are treated fully in a separate analysis of media in Pakistan.

Later years shifted the battleground more than the balance. The Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act of 2016 extended state control into digital space. Journalists covering the military or intelligence services face harassment, abduction and worse; Reporters Without Borders’ country reporting consistently ranks Pakistan among the more dangerous places to practise journalism. Civil society shows the pattern the study observed in 2008: capable urban organisations and moments of real mobilisation, such as the lawyers’ movement, but few channels for sustained policy influence. Freedom House’s assessments have kept Pakistan in the “partly free” band for years, with declining civil liberties scores.

External patrons and dependency

No account of state-society relations in Pakistan is complete without the external dimension. From the Cold War through the Afghan jihad to the post-2001 War on Terror, outside powers have repeatedly funded and legitimised whichever regime held power in Islamabad, usually a military one. The 2009 study noted that around three-quarters of the roughly 12 billion dollars in US assistance between 2002 and 2008 was security-related. Aid on those terms, the researchers argued, distorts accountability: a state financed by patrons has less need to bargain with its own citizens through taxation and representation.

The pattern continues with new patrons. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, launched in 2015, made Beijing the indispensable partner and the protection of Chinese projects a new army mission. Gulf states provide deposits at moments of crisis. The International Monetary Fund has been a near-permanent presence: more than twenty arrangements since 1958, from the 7.6 billion dollar programme of the 2008 crisis to a seven billion dollar facility approved in 2024. The fiscal weakness underneath is domestic. The study put the tax-to-GDP ratio at 10.5 percent, among the world’s lowest for a middle-income country, with less than one percent of Pakistanis paying income tax; the ratio remains near those levels today, as World Bank data for Pakistan shows. An elite that will not tax itself keeps returning to external rescue, and each rescue postpones the domestic bargain.

Structural drivers of instability: what the state-society analysis shows

The value of a state-society analysis lies in separating symptoms from drivers. The 2009 study identified structural trends that read, in retrospect, like a forecast: religious militancy breaking out of its frontier heartlands; a youth bulge, with 60 percent of the population under 25, destined either for the economy or for extremist recruitment; growth reversing and pushing the state back to the IMF; US drone strikes discrediting the government in its citizens’ eyes; and militarisation of the economy and bureaucracy deepening.

“The resulting regulations and institutions are regarded as mere facades to protect and justify the real deals happening behind them.”

Underlying all of these was the finding captured in that sentence: institutions in Pakistan are respected in form and bypassed in substance. The population has grown from the 165 million the study recorded to more than 240 million at the 2023 census. Parliamentary turnout, averaging 45.3 percent since independence, reflects citizens’ low expectations of formal politics. When the formal system delivers little, people turn to informal adjudication and patronage even where these favour local elites, hollowing the formal system further. That feedback loop, not any single crisis, is Pakistan’s core fragility; the 2022 floods and recurring balance-of-payments emergencies are stress tests the same structure keeps failing.

What state-society analysis means for peacebuilding practice

The Pakistani case carries lessons for practitioners well beyond South Asia. First, formal institutional reform on its own changes little. Pakistan adopted decentralisation three times, each under a military ruler, and each round partly served to legitimise central rule and bypass provincial rivals; reforms created by processes seen as illegitimate tend to be seen as illegitimate themselves. Programming that counts laws passed without asking who actually holds power will keep mistaking facades for foundations. The same logic applies to public security and justice provision, where informal systems such as the jirga thrive precisely where formal courts fail ordinary people.

Second, work with the grain of society’s own change agents. The study placed its guarded hope in the urban middle class, the lawyers’ movement and an emerging awareness of rights; comparative work on local peacebuilding in Nepal points the same way, grounding interventions in local networks rather than imported templates. Third, external actors must reckon with their own role. Security-first engagement that funds the most powerful actor in the system can entrench the very imbalance driving instability, which is why a human security lens, starting from what citizens need rather than what states demand, is a useful corrective. Finally, stabilisation without justice does not hold: where cleared areas of the northwest got no reconciliation or accountability mechanisms, militants simply reoccupied the space, a finding echoed in work on transitional justice and security reform.

Pakistan is not a failed state. It is a state organised around a particular distribution of power, one that serves its elites tolerably well and most of its citizens poorly. Seen that way, its recurring crises stop looking like bad luck and start looking like outputs of a system. That shift from events to structures is what state-society analysis offers, and why a framework applied in 2009 still explains the country’s politics today. Further country studies appear in the journal’s analysis section.

Frequently asked questions

What does “state-society relations” mean in the Pakistani context?

State-society relations describe how state institutions and citizens interact: whether people access services and justice through formal rules or personal networks, and whether the state answers to society or stands apart from it. In Pakistan, informal institutions such as patronage, kinship networks and military influence routinely override the formal framework of constitution, courts and elections.

Why does the military hold so much power in Pakistan?

The imbalance has historical, security and economic roots. The colonial army recruited narrowly from northern Punjab and the northwest, the Kashmir conflict gave the military a permanent claim on resources from 1947, and three coups (1958, 1977 and 1999) normalised army rule. A vast military business empire in banking, real estate, transport and manufacturing gives the institution lasting interests in political influence.

What are civil-military relations in Pakistan like today?

No coup has occurred since 1999, and elected governments have held office continuously since 2008. Even so, civil-military relations in Pakistan remain unbalanced: the army holds decisive influence over foreign policy, security and increasingly the economy. No prime minister has completed a full five-year term, and the ousters of Nawaz Sharif in 2017 and Imran Khan in 2022 were widely read as reflecting establishment preferences.

Does Pakistan have a caste system?

Yes, although it differs from the Hindu caste model. The Pakistan caste system works through overlapping hierarchies of ethnicity, tribe, occupation and sect, expressed through biradari networks in Punjab and tribal structures elsewhere. Research has documented severe discrimination against lower castes, landless labourers and religious minorities, with lower-caste women facing the harshest exclusion and bonded labour estimated in the millions.

What was the Frontier Crimes Regulation?

The Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR) was a colonial legal code, imposed from 1848, that governed the Pashtun tribal areas. It allowed collective punishment of whole tribes and gave appointed Political Agents combined executive and judicial powers with no appeal to higher courts. Pakistan retained the FCR after independence and abolished it only when the tribal areas merged into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2018.

What changed with the 18th Amendment in 2010?

The Eighteenth Amendment was the largest devolution of power in Pakistan’s history. It abolished the concurrent legislative list, transferring health, education and social sectors to the provinces; renamed the Northwest Frontier Province as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa; and removed the president’s power to dismiss elected assemblies. Implementation has been uneven, and debates continue over whether it is being eroded in practice.

What happened to the FATA?

The Federally Administered Tribal Areas were merged into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province through the Twenty-Fifth Constitutional Amendment in May 2018. The merger ended the Frontier Crimes Regulation and extended court jurisdiction and the ordinary franchise to roughly five million residents. Promised integration funding has lagged, and security has deteriorated again since the Afghan Taliban’s return to power in 2021.

Why is Balochistan a persistent source of conflict?

Balochistan combines the classic ingredients of centre-periphery conflict: vast territory with a small population, gas and mineral wealth extracted on terms set by the federal government, chronic underfunding under population-based revenue formulas, and a history of five major military operations against Baloch movements. Grievances over resources, disappearances and political exclusion sustain an insurgency that now also targets Chinese-financed projects.

What is a “hybrid regime” and does the term apply to Pakistan?

A hybrid regime combines the outward forms of electoral democracy with authoritarian control exercised behind them. Many analysts apply the term to Pakistan’s post-2018 arrangement, in which elected civilians hold office while the military establishment shapes security policy, foreign relations and key economic decisions. The label is contested, but it captures the gap between formal and actual power.

How free is the media in Pakistan?

Media in Pakistan are pluralistic but constrained. Liberalisation after 2000 produced dozens of private television channels and a lively press, yet the military’s political and economic role, the intelligence agencies and the Balochistan conflict remain effectively off-limits. Journalists face harassment, abduction and prosecution, digital speech is policed under the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act, and international press freedom indices rank Pakistan poorly.

What role does religion play in Pakistani state identity?

Pakistan was founded as a homeland for Muslims, and the 1949 Objectives Resolution committed the state to Islamic principles. Successive rulers, most decisively General Zia ul-Haq after 1977, used Islamisation to build legitimacy and ally with religious parties. That strategy strengthened the religious right, fed sectarian violence and helped create the militant infrastructure that later turned against the state itself.

Why is Pakistan’s tax base so narrow?

Research in the late 2000s put Pakistan’s tax-to-GDP ratio at 10.5 percent, among the world’s lowest for a middle-income country, with under one percent of citizens paying income tax; the ratio remains near those levels today. Wide exemptions, evasion by wealthy groups and heavy reliance on regressive indirect taxes drive recurring debt crises and IMF programmes.

How dependent is Pakistan on external patrons?

Heavily, though the patrons rotate. US Cold War and War on Terror funding flowed mainly to the military; China became the dominant investor through the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor after 2015; Gulf states provide emergency deposits; and Pakistan has entered more than twenty IMF arrangements since 1958. External financing on this scale weakens the accountability link between state and citizens.

What can peacebuilding practitioners learn from state-society analysis?

Three things stand out from the Pakistani case. Formal reforms fail when the informal power structures beneath them are ignored, so analysis must map real networks of authority. Change agents such as urban middle classes, lawyers’ movements and independent media deserve long-term support. And external engagement that funds the strongest actor in the system can deepen the very imbalance driving instability.

Is Pakistan a failed state?

No. Pakistan maintains a functioning army, bureaucracy, judiciary and electoral system, and it is a nuclear power with a large, diversified economy. State-society analysis suggests a more precise diagnosis: a state organised to serve a narrow elite alliance of military, landed and industrial interests, which performs poorly for most citizens. Its recurring crises are products of that structure rather than signs of collapse.