Politicizing Prophethood: Techniques of Far-Right Encroachment on Civil Society in Pakistan

Abstract How do far-right parties normalize their ideas within civil society? Research on far-right parties has focused on their electoral successes and the increasing normalization of their exclusionary ideologies within formal politics. However, far-right parties often function as hybrids, combining electoral strategies with social movement activism. This paper draws attention to the movement characteristics of far-right politics through the case of Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) — an anti-blasphemy political party in Pakistan — a country where elections coexist with military authoritarianism and constrained civil liberties. Based on longitudinal ethnographic research on the party, the paper identifies three techniques through which TLP expands within civil society: Reframing Narratives ; where the party grounds its messages in familiar and legitimate sources but reframes them to foster hate against specific social groups; Network Brokerage ; where the party recruits grassroots activists and co-opts brokers who disseminate its narratives across various organizational and social media networks; and Symbolic Performances ; where the party symbolically appropriates existing cultural objects and practices to engage in both routine and episodic forms of contention. Taken together, these three mechanisms, which I term ‘Techniques of Civil Society Encroachment,’ expand the party’s ideas and norms. By encroachment, I refer to a cultural process in which the boundary between civil and uncivil society is transgressed—such that the uncivil encroaches upon the civil. The unrestricted encroachment of the TLP’s exclusionary, particularist, and repressive norms leads to the displacement of inclusionary, universalist, and solidaric norms from civil society. The paper concludes with a discussion of the contextual factors that facilitate far-right encroachment of civil society in the context of Pakistan’s religious-nationalist and politically hybrid regime.