| dc.description.abstract | This thesis explores the international politics of Pakistan’s conditional sovereignty through a comparative analysis of Pakistan-US relations during the Cold War (1979-88) and the War on Terror (2001-08). The thesis seeks to understand whether the end of the Cold War restructured, reshaped and reconfigured US attitudes towards Pakistan when caught up in a new geo-political conflict, namely the War on Terror. The thesis is constructed around three main arguments focusing on Pakistan’s sovereignty, US foreign assistance to Pakistan and Pakistan’s state failure. Firstly, the thesis demonstrates that US conditions on Pakistan’s sovereignty fluctuate according to whether or not the US is strategically interested in Pakistan. In both cases, different sets of conditions are applied to Pakistan’s sovereignty. The thesis also details Pakistan’s response to these conditions on its sovereignty. Secondly, the thesis argues that given the importance of the normative value of state failure in the post-9/11 US policy and its absence in the War on Terror as a condition on Pakistan’s sovereignty, it is expected that Pakistan’s state failure status will come to dominate the conditions on Pakistan’s sovereignty when the US is not strategically interested. Thirdly, the conditions on Pakistan’s sovereignty are a means to secure Pakistan’s compliance to US demands, by either withholding foreign assistance or disbursing it. In that case then, given the centrality of human rights and state failure in post-9/11 international relations, the thesis demonstrates that US statebuilding efforts remain pivoted on US political interests rather than human rights and development. The qualitative research includes elite interviews, unclassified documents and builds on existing literature, while the quantitative portion involves statistical data. | en_US |
