Pakistani conflictual world-making in international politics: The Afghan–Soviet War, Cold War counter-insurgency, and the struggles for decolonisation

Abstract This article theorises Pakistan’s role in the Afghan–Soviet War (1979–1989) as a form of ‘conflictual world-making’ – a process through which postcolonial states and societies simultaneously contest and reproduce global orders. Moving beyond Eurocentric narratives of superpower rivalry, it demonstrates how Pakistan’s state and societal actors actively reshaped the Cold War from the margins. Drawing on state archives and movement periodicals, the analysis reveals a dialectical struggle: while the military establishment enforced a U.S.-led imperial order, borderland movements pursued alternative, anti-imperial world-making projects. The article develops the concept of ‘imperial-anti-imperial relationism’ to capture this entanglement. By centring these South-South encounters and transboundary mobilisations, it recasts the Afghan war not as a mere proxy conflict between the superpowers, but as a decisive crucible where late Cold War geopolitics collided with the unfinished project of decolonisation. The argument compels a rethinking of world order struggles, insisting that the Global South’s generative margins are essential to understanding the end of the Cold War and the violent birth of our contemporary world disorder.