Salam Franklin, 1954

The earliest trace of what would become the Franklin Book Program in relation to Pakistan appears in a 1954 Urdu booklet entitled The Franklin Book Program, published without an attributed author.Footnote ⁹ The booklet captures the tentative character of Franklin’s first presence in the region. Preceding the program’s formal institutionalization, this document belongs to an exploratory phase in which books were imagined as vehicles of cultural connection even as the practical conditions of circulation remained unclear. The program is introduced simply as an institution whose “aim and objective is to arrange for the translation and publication of books in other countries and in their languages,” established under New York law and “not [for] commercial profit.”Footnote ¹⁰ In this sense, the booklet evokes the unstable information orders of empire that, as historian C. A. Bayly shows concerning colonial knowledge, were such that “their knowledge was patchy, incomplete and liable to atrophy,” existing on different, “imperfectly linked” levels.Footnote ¹¹ Rather than outlining a fully formed initiative, the booklet instead conveys a climate of experimentation and expectation. Administration is said to “rest with a Board of Directors,” including publishers and “individuals who represent the general public.” The program is further described as a “non-governmental and independent institution” that “works in cooperation with universities, research institutions, government departments, and other educational organizations,” signaling aspirations to broad legitimacy.Footnote ¹² Decisions about which kinds of books were needed “in a given country” were to be made “based on advice from local consultants,” and success is defined as the extent to which the “genuine needs of different countries are fulfilled,” as assessed by “local advisers.”Footnote ¹³

Franklin’s early involvement in Pakistan thus rested on interpersonal networks and working assumptions about language and demand. Urdu, for the FBP in Pakistan, appears to have been a language of possibility, with little indication of how particular readerships or linguistic constituencies would be addressed or how circulation would be sustained.Footnote ¹⁴ In this early moment in the FBP’s history, translation occupied a central yet unresolved place. The booklet notes that “the selection of books, their translation, printing, and distribution are all carried out locally” and, in some cases, books were “adapted and presented […] in a manner suited to local conditions,” but offers no detail about translators or genre priorities.Footnote ¹⁵ The booklet’s emphasis on local adaptation underscores that translation was not merely the transfer of content but a process shaped by locally specific negotiations over meaning and authority. Certain patterns in the subject matter, however, slowly became apparent. Early proposals, such as the Urdu translation of The United Nations and How It Works (1955) (Figure 1), suggest an effort to familiarize local readers with global institutions and position Pakistan within emerging postwar frameworks of international governance.

Figure 1.

Cover of The United Nations and How It Works, Library of Congress, Urdu Franklin Books Collection.

Even before Franklin became embedded in Pakistan’s publishing infrastructure, questions around who counted as a legitimate reading public were already bound up with contests over language and authority in ways that “foreground[ed] and amplif[ied] the background hiss of a problematic political culture” while “relegating the more familiar narratives of successful nation-state creation […] to the background.”Footnote ¹⁶ Given that the FBP archives offer scant evidence of broad readership or concrete impact in these early years, they instead document the tentative aspirations and uncertainties that framed such cultural projects before becoming fully operational. Recognizing these early uncertainties is crucial to understanding subsequent controversies, which did not emerge as sudden ruptures. By preserving the provisional character of the introductory booklet, the analysis avoids retroactively imposing coherence or settled intention. While for Datus C. Smith Jr., translations promised access and ways to expand cultural horizons by making knowledge and ideas accessible across linguistic boundaries, that promise was structured by asymmetries of power and competing claims to agency on the ground in Pakistan. Within this context, the production and reception of American-sponsored books hinged on local dynamics, often complicating or even subverting the aspirations of cultural diplomacy. At the center of these activities was Hamid Ali Khan (1901–1995), the Lahore director of Franklin Pakistan, who served as the key intermediary between New York, local publishers, and Urdu-reading publics.Footnote ¹⁷ Under his direction, the Franklin Book Program in Pakistan did not operate as a straightforward vehicle of American influence.

In this article, I focus specifically on the period surrounding the 1965 Indo-Pakistani War, when suspicion of foreign involvement intensified and Franklin became acutely vulnerable to public scrutiny.Footnote ¹⁸ During the war, the program’s Urdu titles and public profile drew criticism directed at both its leadership and its ties to the United States. These developments turned the program and its publications into lightning rods for wider anxieties within Pakistan’s evolving public sphere, shaped by the broader dynamics of Cold War cultural diplomacy in which US initiatives privileged an implicit model of linguistic centralization, while Soviet programs advanced a vision of linguistic plurality and horizontal exchange across languages.Footnote ¹⁹ By situating Franklin within these disputed moments, the limits of Cold War cultural diplomacy come into view and Pakistani editors and translators emerge as central figures in shaping what book circulation came to signify.

Archival Approach and Limits

As previously mentioned, this article draws on the institutional records of the Franklin Book Program at the Harry Ransom Center and the Library of Congress, especially correspondence between the New York headquarters and the Lahore office. I trace how the routines of administration intersected with moments of disruption, such as the 1965 war and subsequent criticism of US-backed institutions, to produce an uneven archival record. I treat letters and published books not as direct statements of intent but as fragmentary traces of decision-making shaped by constraint and recalibration. I draw primarily on the subject matter and titles of Urdu–language books, along with their covers, using these as institutional artifacts to trace patterns and priorities in the program’s publishing choices. A fuller analysis of the textual and paratextual features lies beyond the scope of this article, leaving space for future work to examine these materials in greater depth. Accordingly, I draw on selected Urdu titles, cited in my own English renderings, not for exhaustive textual analysis but to illustrate how particular choices of subject and presentation make editorial priorities visible. For instance, War and Peace in the Law of Islam, published in 1959 (Figure 2), shows that works engaging with Islamic legal thought were among those approved for publication under the Franklin imprint in Pakistan, indicating the range of topics considered suitable for translation at the time.

Figure 2.

Cover of War and Peace in The Law of Islam, Library of Congress, Urdu Franklin Books Collection.

Where possible, I read these publications alongside related English-language Franklin materials, such as editorial correspondence, to indicate how concepts were presented across different linguistic contexts. Furthermore, rather than treating these differences as deliberate ideological interventions, I take them chiefly as signs of pragmatic adaptation within the constraints of local political and religious sensitivities. Examining these publishing choices within the compressed political context of 1965 further shows how seemingly routine decisions, such as which books were translated into Urdu and how they were presented, were shaped by heightened concern over public perception and the risk of accusations of propaganda. Taken together, the archive reveals both the routines of daily organizational life and moments of controversy, yet it offers only scattered glimpses of public reception or the communities that engaged with Franklin’s books. These patterned silences and fragmentary voices, in turn, underscore how archival gaps shape the very narratives that can be reconstructed.

Franklin Pakistan before 1965

In the decade after its first contacts with Pakistan, the Franklin Book Program developed a more stable institutional presence as its Lahore office brought regular communication with New York and clearer procedures for translation and production. This channeled earlier ambiguities into routine administrative practice. A circular from New York in 1957 captures this shift, urging Lahore staff to “put all of your energy into operations and let the New Yorkers worry about fund-raising,” even as it stresses that Franklin’s offices were “becoming more and more indigenous institutions, instead of just American as was necessarily the case at the start.”Footnote ²⁰ During these years, Franklin’s work in West Pakistan centered on Urdu-language books for educational settings and general readers. Editorial correspondence shows sustained attention to matters such as format and accessibility, as well as ongoing concerns about production costs and circulation. Letters from late 1957, for instance, question whether ordering “thirty copies of each title” for a Nawa-i-Waqt scheme would be “enough for a really adequate trial,” and urge Lahore to avoid stock shortages if a book “start[s] selling so well that the bookseller’s supplies are exhausted before he can replenish them.”Footnote ²¹ Decisions about which titles to translate rested on judgments about usability and demand rather than on a unified cultural program, and so Pakistani editors and translators became increasingly central to this process. They assessed manuscripts and mediated between Franklin’s publishing ambitions and the realities of Urdu readership.

Contemporary assessments singled out figures such as Imtiaz Ali Taj, whose children’s translations were described as “readable and at places very good,” and Shafiqur Rahman, chosen as translator of William Saroyan’s Human Comedy because he was “basically a writer of light humor” who produced “a good literary translation.”Footnote ²² Professional translators such as Shahid Ahmed Dehlvi were praised as “among the best in Pakistan,” with their work judged as “very good, directed to adults,” while Maulana Salahuddin Ahmed’s rendering of David Coyle’s The United States Political System and How It Works was commended by the Chief Justice of West Pakistan as a “lucid and clear exposition” that “fully brings home to the reader in Urdu all that the writer in English has got to say and convey.”Footnote ²³ Such interventions shaped how books were framed and presented, even with final approval remaining with New York, situating these translations within particular “domains of power” that authorized what could circulate.Footnote ²⁴ From Lahore, Hamid Ali Khan wrote in November 1957 of being “evermore anxious to keep busy good translators […] but unfortunately our publishers are constantly letting me down,” pointing to “a widespread lack of interest in book-publishing in Pakistan” and the “many other difficulties with the publishers besides a general inertia,” remarks underscoring the routine challenges shaping translation and publication.Footnote ²⁵

As Franklin’s Urdu output gradually expanded, its visibility within Pakistan’s cultural landscape grew. Books bearing the Franklin imprint entered public and private libraries and appeared in commercial bookshops, making the program increasingly legible in public life. This prominence did not immediately provoke open controversy, but correspondence suggests an awareness that publishing in Urdu carried symbolic and political weight. The stakes attached to Urdu meant that questions of audience and reception surfaced intermittently, even when they were not yet articulated as risks, since “to be Pakistani was not simply to be a legal resident of the country; it also required a sense of belonging and affiliation mediated through history, culture, and literature.”Footnote ²⁶ Over time, New York pressed Lahore for news on getting Franklin titles onto the “Approved List for school libraries,” only to learn that a provincial committee had been stalled for nearly a year because vacancies remained unfilled, an apparently bureaucratic delay that nonetheless determined how, and whether, Urdu Franklin titles such as Democracy Begins in the Home (Figure 3) entered state-sanctioned reading circuits.Footnote ²⁷

Figure 3.

Democracy Begins in The Home, Library of Congress, Urdu Franklin Books Collection.

Franklin’s approach to religion also followed a pattern of pragmatic caution. The program did not articulate a clear position on Islam. Nonetheless, assumptions about religious context surfaced in the selection of subject matter and recommended titles, shaping how Franklin’s publications were positioned within contemporaneous debates. As the Historian Seema Alavi shows, mid-20th-century Muslims found themselves “at the intersection of the British imperial networks and its cultural web […] and the Islamic intellectual imperium,” an encounter enabled by “growing networks of transportation, communication, and print culture” that reconfigured Muslim textual publics and reading communities.Footnote ²⁸ In December 1957, New York warned Lahore of “an extremely vigorous attack on a book in the 1 October issue of the periodical Al-Islam entitled ‘These Western Interpreters of Islam,’” and suggested quietly placing a copy with a sympathetic religious scholar whose opinion would be “impossible to predict” but potentially decisive for publication.Footnote ²⁹ Similarly, Philip Hitti’s Islam and the West was ultimately abandoned by the Lahore office after local advisers warned that certain chapters could provoke controversy, despite acknowledging the book’s “scientific” quality.Footnote ³⁰ In this context, titles such as The Flame of Islam (Figure 4) proved to be broadly acceptable choices. Franklin’s presence in Pakistan accordingly depended on balancing institutional ambition with restraint and local mediation in translation and publishing decisions. By the early 1960s, Franklin was sufficiently visible within Urdu publishing that subsequent moments of national crisis would render its foreign sponsorship newly legible and vulnerable.

Figure 4.

The Flame of Islam, Library of Congress, Urdu Franklin Books Collection.

On the awam

The Lahore office’s 1964–65 report highlighted seventy-three Urdu titles, including multiple reprints and school–library series, describing them as “standard and attractive books” for students and “people in general,” with growing orders cited as evidence that “Franklin books have become more popular.”Footnote ³¹ However, Franklin’s sustained investment in Urdu, beyond a mere medium of translation, carried significant political and symbolic weight. While its publications avoided political commentary, Urdu was a language through which the post-colonial state “cultivate[d] a sense of Pakistani national identity and its constitutive elements,” even as “individuals and communities […] contested the power of the state and its nation-making project.”Footnote ³² Franklin’s internal correspondence and editorial materials, as previously mentioned, indicated that Urdu publications were intended for a broad public. In mid-1965, Lahore staff described Urdu translations as “useful scientific and educational books” admired not only by “well-known educators” but also “the general public,” pointing to an orientation towards what might be understood as the awam.Footnote ³³ The staff also noted that sets of Franklin titles gifted to schools across West Pakistan had prompted “letters of warm appreciation” from headmasters.Footnote ³⁴ While Franklin also sponsored translations into Bangla, the broad reading public here was imagined almost exclusively in Urdu, revealing how notions of the “general reader” could themselves reinscribe linguistic hierarchy.Footnote ³⁵ As writer Anam Zakaria has shown, Pakistani textbooks teach children to “otherize” East Pakistan, treating it “as a part that was never truly Pakistan,” while the language movement in Bangla is mentioned “almost as an afterthought,” shorn of its decade-long struggle and the everyday exclusions that made Bengalis feel that their “language is not worthy.”Footnote ³⁶ In essence, this loosely sketched public resembles earlier North Indian Muslim print worlds, where imagined readerships were opaque, less a clearly defined category of actual readers, and more an aspirational horizon of the state’s narrative.Footnote ³⁷ Urdu texts were edited to emphasize clarity and didactic value, reflecting assumptions about how knowledge should be communicated to non-specialist readers. Franklin’s practice tended towards a domesticating method, suggesting a preference for “a fluent translation [that] is immediately recognizable and intelligible, ‘familiarised,’ domesticated, not ‘disconcerting[ly]’ foreign.”Footnote ³⁸ These assumptions were not framed as a formal theory of public engagement, yet they structured how American-authored material was rendered into Urdu and positioned within Pakistani institutions. In doing so, Franklin’s Urdu translations confronted not only linguistic but also conceptual limits in addressing an imagined awam. Introductory national texts such as the First Book of Pakistan (Figure 5) illustrate how the program’s sponsored books framed citizenship and national history for school-age readers, while adapting visual and textual cues to local expectations. Internal discussion of a projected “Handbook of Book Publishing,” for instance, revolved around questions of typeface, layout, and “selection of suitable type” for local readers, while New York circulated memoranda on “Translation and Adaptation” to all offices in late 1965, indicating that technical decisions about fluency and readability were being systematized.Footnote ³⁹

Figure 5.

Title page of The First Book of Pakistan, Library of Congress, Urdu Franklin Books Collection.

By 1965, the West Pakistan Education Department also formally “appreciate[d] the service that [the] Franklin Book Program [was] rendering” in enriching school and college libraries, and the National Book Center regularly displayed Franklin titles at its exhibitions.Footnote ⁴⁰ However, these same endorsements continued to amplify the program’s public profile. Therefore, understanding Franklin’s relationship to Urdu and its loosely imagined awam before 1965 is crucial to interpreting the reactions that followed the Indo-Pakistani War. The critiques that emerged after the conflict did not arise solely from shifts in foreign policy or public sentiment; they were shaped by the conditions under which Franklin had already made itself legible through Urdu-language publishing. When political circumstances changed, assumptions embedded in these earlier practices were brought into sharper relief and became available as grounds for contestation.

1965 and the limits of cultural diplomacy

Franklin’s day-to-day publishing operations did not undergo dramatic reorganization in 1965; what changed was less the content of its work than the increasingly fraught context in which that work was received and understood. As radio coverage in Pakistan showed, the 1965 Kashmir conflict with India “was a moment when nationalist energies were mobilized,” revealing “the fault lines running through South Asian nationalisms” and the persistence of audiences who cut across national borders.Footnote ⁴¹ US military and economic assistance, long framed as development and security aid, was increasingly recast in public debate as compromising Pakistan’s sovereignty and favoring India, particularly after Washington suspended military aid during the conflict.Footnote ⁴² Correspondence from 1965 and its aftermath registers a marked increase in caution. In April of that year, Harold N. Munger, a member of Franklin, sent a letter informing Hamid Ali Khan of an upcoming press conference in New York intended to address questions about the use of American books in developing countries, assuring Khan that “this conference is to be concerned with books only, and some of us, including Datus, will be present to shield you in the unlikely event any political questions are asked.”Footnote ⁴³ The language of a protective “shield” is telling, as it casts Franklin’s cultural work in defensive terms and exposes the limits of cultural diplomacy at a moment when even ostensibly apolitical initiatives were drawn into geopolitical tension. By September, as the war intensified, this guarded posture became more explicit.Footnote ⁴⁴ Datus C. Smith Jr. wrote to Hamid Ali Khan on 7 September that “the hearts of all your American friends are with you during the trials through which Lahore is passing,” promising to continue routine operations while acknowledging “manifestations of anti-American feeling” in Pakistan.Footnote ⁴⁵ Previously, New York’s queries about school-library “extension” grants, book selection procedures, and even photojournalistic coverage of Franklin in magazines such as Life were explicitly framed in terms of how much visibility the program could safely sustain. Although Franklin was not yet singled out, its dependence on American funding and affiliations meant it could be readily folded into broader critiques of US influence in Pakistan.

In Indonesia, too, 1965 was marked by rising anti–American sentiment and the abortive 30 September Movement, which provided the pretext for General Suharto’s gradual displacement of Sukarno and the army–led campaign against the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI).Footnote ⁴⁶ Staff in Jakarta warned their Lahore counterparts that “increased anti-American atmosphere had already forced them to add more non-American titles “to balance our American selection,” and expressed the hope that Pakistan would not face “such an unpleasant situation,” a comparative insight that Lahore could not easily ignore.Footnote ⁴⁷ As Mahdi Ganjavi notes, Franklin’s programs elsewhere continued to operate “in spite of the rise of anti-US sentiments […] especially in Egypt,” sustained by local government backing even as anti-American political currents intensified across countries, including Pakistan and Indonesia.Footnote ⁴⁸

The archive suggests that Franklin responded through adjustment. Lahore quietly dropped some stalled projects, such as an Urdu edition of Spiller’s Cycle of American Literature, which was handed over to the US Information Service when Franklin judged it could not proceed without difficulty. The Lahore office also revised the language around other projects, even as it continued to report substantial lists of new Urdu titles to New York.Footnote ⁴⁹ Memos on “Translation and Adaptation” circulating in late September 1965 urged managing directors to compile “basic directives” for translators, emphasizing unobtrusive adaptation and caution in handling potentially controversial material.Footnote ⁵⁰ Such measures did not amount to a repudiation of earlier commitments but instead show an attempt to preserve a functioning program while managing exposure to an attentive public. Moreover, Franklin’s highly visible Urdu list, circulating in schools, libraries, and bookshops and now endorsed by state education authorities, could be reread as evidence of American intrusion into a charged linguistic field. As Historian Ali Usman Qasmi has shown, Urdu was a privileged marker of Muslim identity and Pakistani nationhood that could not easily accommodate the new state’s linguistic diversity, such that “the overriding triumvirate of Islam, Muslim, and Urdu, with its epistemic and political violence, has aspired to achieve a homogenized Pakistani identity” that was “always fraught, a false aspiration and an impossible becoming.”Footnote ⁵¹ As noted earlier, that linguistic field was already marked by resentment in East Pakistan over the marginalization of Bengali and growing perceptions of West Pakistani dominance. These internal tensions were further compounded by shifting external allegiances, becoming more volatile as anti-American sentiment intensified after 1965. As such, Urdu’s political centrality made Franklin’s operations increasingly precarious, as the program continued to present its titles as neutral educational tools even as such claims of neutrality grew harder to sustain.

Uncle Smith under speculation

In 1965, support for Urdu did not reflect a settled consensus but rather the instability of its status, as competing groups mobilized around Urdu precisely because its meaning as a “national language” remained unresolved. As the historian and political theorist Badruddin Umar observed of the Bengali Language Movement of 1952 in East Pakistan, it was “a movement of all the people speaking different languages against a small reactionary-ruling clique” demanding “equal status to all the spoken languages of Pakistan—Bengali, Punjabi, Sindhi, Pushtu, Baluch etc.”Footnote ⁵² In this setting, public performances in favor of Urdu could be read in multiple ways, as affirmations of the national project, attempts to secure recognition within Urdu-centered hierarchies, or efforts to stake claims in ongoing struggles over representation and patronage. By the mid-1960s, The Pakistan Times functioned as a government-aligned daily rather than the independent paper of its early years, and consequently operated within this ambivalent field.Footnote ⁵³ That a pro-Urdu procession could be attacked in its columns, therefore, signaled not hostility to Urdu itself but anxiety over who was mobilizing in its name, under what terms, and with whose backing. Contemporary Urdu newspapers, including widely circulated dailies such as Jang, framed the 1965 war in overtly national terms, demonstrating how Urdu increasingly functioned as a primary medium of political mobilization.Footnote ⁵⁴ The late Urdu literary scholar C. M. Naim observed how wartime Urdu poetry recast the conflict in moral and civilizational terms, invoking prophetic and redemptive imagery to situate Pakistan’s struggle within a broader narrative of renewal. Drawing on poems such as Ahmad Nadim Qasmi’s “6 September,” the war is figured as a moment in which “a nation [became] aware of its identity,” with the speaker declaring, “I am dawn. I am light. I am a reality,” transforming military conflict into a claim about collective existence.Footnote ⁵⁵ Against this backdrop, the presence of an American-funded publisher at the head of a language procession was easily cast as suspect.

On 23 April 1965, Hamid Ali Khan joined a procession “organized by a group of people of diverse intentions all professing to be the well-wishers of the Urdu language,” calling for its use “in all walks of life.”Footnote ⁵⁶ In another context, such participation might have signaled alignment with nationalist aims. In 1965, however, Khan’s presence was rendered newly legible through the lens of foreign affiliation, raising questions about whether such support was externally motivated. The next day, a columnist at The Pakistan Times, H.S., accused Hamid Ali Khan of using both the procession and his role as “manager of the local branch of Franklin” to “carry on American propaganda.”Footnote ⁵⁷ The episode marked a shift, and archival correspondence from Lahore records the incident with unease. Hamid Ali Khan described H.S.’s column as a “nasty article,” which further read, “The person [Hamid Ali Khan] walking in the procession with bowed head and measured steps was no well-wisher of Urdu but a servant of a foreign firm.”Footnote ⁵⁸ The charge, therefore, was not that Khan opposed Urdu, but that his support for it was compromised, interpreted as instrumental rather than genuine, and thus an extension of foreign influence. Hamid Ali Khan proceeded to enclose both the offending piece and subsequent reactions, noting that the newspaper’s own management had apologized and the Secretary of Information and Broadcasting publicly defended Franklin at a meeting.Footnote ⁵⁹ Franklin’s internal response was cautious and deliberately measured. Abdul Wahid, the editor in charge of the FBP in Lahore, attempted to set the record straight: “Franklin at New York or Lahore is neither a publisher nor a bookseller. It only assists in the Urdu publishing industry of Pakistan by making available to Pakistani publishers, free of cost, Urdu translations of standard English books published in America.”Footnote ⁶⁰ He further emphasized that no American had any say in the selection of books and the “authors of the selected American books are not necessarily American.”Footnote ⁶¹

This incident prompted renewed attention to how the program appeared in public. Subsequent memoranda on publicity and book selection framed school-library donations, exhibitions, and even jacket design as activities that made “people in general” aware of Franklin’s work, a benefit that now also entailed risk in an atmosphere of heightened linguistic and political sensibility.Footnote ⁶² The program thereby became neither a straightforward instrument of American persuasion nor a neutral provider of educational material, not least because its commitment to Urdu brought it into proximity with debates that exceeded its institutional remit. The program’s cautious routine offered limited protection once those debates spilled into the street. The speculation surrounding Hamid Ali Khan during the procession crystallized these tensions, casting him as a figure through whom the entanglement of foreign sponsorship and shifting claims to linguistic and cultural authority became newly visible. For years, Franklin’s practices—including its reliance on local staff, emphasis on accessibility, and focus on Urdu—had enabled the program to operate with minimal controversy; the attack on Hamid Ali Khan reveals, however, how quickly such routines could be unsettled. Crucially, the deployment of Urdu itself did not carry a singular or fixed meaning, instead embodying what historian Tariq Rahman characterizes as a language question structured by “hegemonic and counter-hegemonic movements” and ongoing mediation between groups, with Urdu functioning both as a symbol of Pakistani nationalism and a site of contestation vis-à-vis regional languages within ethnonational struggles.Footnote ⁶³ Therefore, in addition to describing intentions, which are rarely carried out precisely as planned, and studying effects, which are notoriously difficult to measure, it is more revealing to attend to what was actually done and by whom. As agents continually reinterpret and reshape messages, the medium and its practitioners emerge as central to how cultural diplomacy worked in practice, especially when existing activities were recast under new conditions of suspicion and mobilization.