Since its emergence as one of the two successor states after the end of the British Indian Empire in 1947, Pakistan has been riven with political conflict. The sources thereof, in considerable part—as the political scientist Maya Tudor has demonstrated in her masterly study, The Promise of Power (2013)—can be traced to the structure, ideology, and organization of the Muslim League, the principal political organization that was responsible for the genesis of the country. The party, although deft in pressing its case for a Muslim homeland, had given scant attention to any blueprint for governance after attaining its chief aim: the creation of a separate state based on religious identity.

The problems that came to the fore shortly after the creation of Pakistan have been analyzed with care in the works of the political scientist Khalid bin Sayeed, most notably in his book Pakistan: The Formative Phase (1968). The issues that the nascent state had to deal with included sectarian and ethnic differences, questions of regional identity, and the maintenance of political order. The post-independence Pakistani political leadership was mostly not up to these challenges, and in 1958 the country saw its first of many military coups. Since then, the military establishment has emerged as an entity that is primus inter pares in Pakistan’s politics, a subject ably dealt with in Aqil Shah’s The Army and Democracy: Military Politics in Pakistan (2014).

Despite this insightful body of scholarship on the evolution of Pakistan’s politics, no book has provided an overarching account of the sources and persistence of a range of political conflicts in Pakistan. Mohammad Waseem, a widely published scholar on the contemporary politics of Pakistan, has taken on this substantial task in his new book Political Conflict in Pakistan.

Waseem’s work is worthy of admiration at multiple levels. At the outset, unlike a great deal of scholarship on Pakistan, which is mostly descriptive, Waseem locates his analysis in a corpus of literature drawn from the fields of sociology and comparative politics. To that end, he turns his attention to the institutional design of the Pakistani state and how it promoted conflict along various dimensions. Specifically, he demonstrates that two competing forces emerged in the wake of partition: (1) the state’s bureaucracy, the military, and the upper echelons of the judiciary and (2) the landed elite in the country working in concert with elements of a professional elite. These two forces have colluded, on occasion, to protect certain professional and class interests and at other times have clashed, resulting in considerable societal tension and conflict.

Unlike other works on Pakistani politics that adopted a mostly chronological approach, Waseem’s book relies on a thematic focus. Not surprisingly, he starts his analysis with a detailed discussion of partition’s impact on Pakistan. This episode, one of the most cruel and callous turns in the history of the twentieth century, witnessed the transfer of more than 10 million individuals across newly and poorly demarcated national borders. It also resulted in the deaths of at least a million individuals.

In this section, Waseem carefully evaluates a very substantial oeuvre of literature on the subject before turning to the actual mechanics of partition and its disastrous consequences for at least three major religious communities: Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs. In discussing the process of partition, Waseem highlights that the partition boundaries drawn by Sir Cyril Radcliffe, the British barrister, left a bitter legacy in Pakistan. These resentments stemmed, in considerable part, from a belief that Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last British viceroy, had browbeaten Radcliffe to favor India when drawing those boundaries.

Despite this assumption, one that continues to animate a significant segment of Pakistani elite opinion, a far simpler explanation can be found in the noted poet W. H. Auden’s evocative poem Partition. As Auden brilliantly highlights in the poem, Radcliffe—who had never set foot in the subcontinent—was mostly clueless about the task with which he had been entrusted. That said, the assumption of possible British bias and perfidy, Waseem argues, contributed to a long-standing grudge in Pakistan against India.

Waseem also devotes a considerable section of the book to a discussion of the “master narrative” of Pakistan and how it has contributed to endemic conflict. The key elements of this dominant cultural theme focus on certain fundamental and shared assumptions: a deep-seated, conspiratorial view of India; the importance of Islam as the foundation of the Pakistani state; the fraught question of Pakistan’s language policies; and the country’s irredentist claim to the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir. All four concerns have contributed to conflict at various levels since the inception of the Pakistani state. Having spelled out these central tropes, Waseem proceeds to provide ample evidence of how they have played out at various junctures in Pakistan’s politics over decades. In doing so, he demonstrates an extraordinarily granular grasp of the complexities of Pakistan’s politics and discusses key turning points while weaving in theoretical insights.

In his discussion of the troubled fate of democracy, Waseem again demonstrates his supple grasp of the extant literature on the subject. To that end, he reviews and evaluates much of the pertinent literature. He then offers his own analysis of the sources and prospects of Pakistan’s fragile democracy. This is where, despite the other obvious strengths of his book, his analysis falters. Without adequately tracing its antecedents or outlining its key features, he argues that “the establishment” has determined the scope and dimensions of democracy in Pakistan. Consequently, this argument takes on a slightly polemical tone and has limited explanatory value on this particular front.

There is one other criticism that can be leveled against this otherwise impressive work. Waseem, no doubt, returns to the leitmotif of conflict throughout the chapters of this massive volume. However, the chapters, although often quite insightful, have a stand-alone quality to them. Even while eschewing a conventional, chronological account of political conflict in Pakistan, the discussion could have been better interwoven with key intellectual threads connecting the disparate component parts.

That said, there is little or no question that this book is the product of a lifetime of painstaking scholarship and of an intimate familiarity with the particulars of Pakistan’s complex politics. Those interested in obtaining a better understanding of the troubled state of the country’s politics will benefit greatly from a careful perusal of Waseem’s sweeping and highly informed analysis.