In the aftermath of the December 2014 Tehrik-e-Taliban attack on the Army Public School (APS) in Peshawar, which killed 132 children and 9 teachers and staff, both the Taliban and the Pakistani state put forth their own claims and justifications of violence. To Shenila Khoja-Moolji, this tragic incident is emblematic of how the preexisting conceptualization of sovereignty—as the hegemonic, unified monopolization of violence by the state—inadequately explains the specifically postcolonial context of Pakistan. Using this observation as a point of departure, Khoja-Moolji’s Sovereign Attachments: Masculinity, Muslimness, and Affective Politics in Pakistan thus interrogates the “entanglements and shared repertoire” (3) of the Taliban and the Pakistani state; examines various gendered performances and figurations in Pakistan; and posits a new theory of sovereignty, centered on its cultural, discursive, and affective dimensions.

Sovereignty, to Khoja-Moolji, is more than an absolute politico-legal concept. Rather, she argues that it is a created and cultivated relationship, or an attachment, between the sovereign and an allied public. In other words, sovereignty is a discursive and affective (gendered) performance in which competing sovereigns engage. Applying this definition to her case study, Khoja-Moolji notes that when staking their claims to sovereignty, the Pakistani state and the Taliban extrapolate from the same cultural scripts of gender, sexuality, normative Islam, the family, and imaginations of past and future to foster attachments to their particular visions of the political, whether the Pakistani nation-state or the entire Muslim ummah, and to stipulate who belongs and who does not.

Relatedly, another novel concept that Khoja-Moolji develops is “Islamo-masculinity,” or the intertwined normative scripts of masculinity and Muslimness, by which authoritative sovereign power is primarily performed by both the Taliban and the Pakistani state. Other gendered figurations—the paternal father, the innocent child, the mourning mother, the brave soldier, the resolute believer, the perverse terrorist, and the dutiful daughter—figure in upholding Islamo-masculinity. However, in line with her theorization that sovereignty is fractured and competed for, Khoja-Moolji also examines challenges to normative gendered figurations, such as the undutiful daughter and the melancholic mother. It is from these figurations that the book takes its organizational structure, with each chapter deconstructing how the state and the Taliban shape each particular gendered, discursive, and affective attachment.

The first half of Sovereign Attachments revolves around different figurations of Islamo-masculinity: the head of state, the soldier, and the mujahid. The first chapter examines constructions of normative Islamo-masculinity through the memoirs of Pakistani heads of state—Pervez Musharraf, Benazir Bhutto, and Imran Khan—establishing what the sovereign claims as the political, as well as a basis to compare the Taliban’s Islamo-masculinity. The next chapter considers how the figure of the military soldier (jawan) is a proxy for the sovereign. This chapter shows how the sovereign, although presented as a singular entity, is actually diffuse and multinodal, and reinforced through the stylized attachments other figurations like that of the solider. Then, by comparing the figuration of the jawan with its deviant other, the figure of the talib or Taliban militant, Khoja-Moolji argues that the two discourses are mutually reinforcing through both distance and difference. The final section expands on the figuration of the talib and deconstructs the mujahid, demonstrating how the Taliban generates a counter-public to the Pakistani state.

The second half of the book looks at women’s contributions to the Islamo-masculinist claims of the state and the Taliban, in the form of figurations undergirded by affective and cultural labor. On the one hand, the mujahida, muhajira, and the army woman all advance the goals of their respective political spaces through adherence to normative gender roles and sanctioned methods of participation ascribed to women. On the other, beti and behans (daughters and sisters) function as familial subjects for the entire nation, as subjects of rescue and protection. In these sections, Khoja-Moolji explores statist reactions to and framing of women who deviate from these ascriptive, normative roles. Lastly, Khoja-Moolji considers “ambivalent” attachments to the sovereign, where the public contests the hegemony of the state. In this final section, using the case studies of the protests around the arrest of Aafia Siddiqui in the United States and around the APS attack, Khoja-Moolji shows how protest and challenges to the state can either reinforce the masculinist construction of sovereignty, as in the former, or “rework sovereign attachments” (182) through refusal to engage in scripts of sacrifice, as in the latter.

One of the book’s greatest strengths is its extensive and diverse primary source material, ranging from autobiographies of civilian political leaders to magazine articles, music videos, and activist posters and media images. The sources that Khoja-Moolji relies on are cultural texts, or “objects whose circulation engenders and produces relations of sovereignty” (2). They include materials from Inter Services Public Relations, the media wing of the army, the Taliban, and mainstream media post-9/11, and they focus on key events in the national space, such as the Taliban attack on APS, military operations against the Taliban, the arrest and later release of the 19-year-old Naureen Laghari, and the incarceration of Aafia Siddiqui. In particular, the Urdu- and English-language Taliban materials offer a rich and complex reservoir, and visual materials in the form of posters, photographs, and videos inform yet another layer of analysis of political ideologies, media scripts, and symbolic representations.

By moving the discussion of sovereignty from the realm of law to public culture and imbuing it with gender analysis, Khoja-Moolji has made a key intervention not only in studies of gender, masculinities, and power, but also in their wider home disciplines of history, politics, and sociology. While it has a confined scope, Sovereign Attachments dialogues with a wide body of theoretical literature from various disciplines; through its interdisciplinary methodology, it teases out the nuances in the contemporary practice of sovereignty rather than offering a broad overview. Scholars in numerous other fields—postcolonialism, gender, media, and so forth—can benefit from Khoja-Moolji’s game-changing re-theorization of sovereignty and deep investigation.