Borderland, Resistance, and Neo-Pashtun Consciousness: The Case of Pashtun Tahafuz (Protection) Movement in Pakistan

Abstract This article examines the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM) as a transformative political movement that has emerged from Pakistan’s historically marginalized borderland region. Immediately following the aftermath of Naqibullah Mehsud’s extrajudicial killing on January 13, 2018, the PTM exceeded its initial demand for justice to articulate a broader critique of state violence, militarization, and structural inequalities faced by Pashtuns in Pakistan. Drawing on postcolonial theory, this article attempts to situate PTM within the genealogy of colonial indirect rule and Pakistan’s continuation of exceptional governance in its frontier region through mechanisms such as the Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR), and to examine how such practices produced a space of exclusion in which Pashtuns were simultaneously securitized and silenced. The article’s main argument is that PTM represents a rupture in this historical pattern by generating a “neo-Pashtun consciousness” forged in urban centers through student politics; digital networks; and the lived realities of profiling, displacement, and everyday state surveillance. Through ethnographic accounts, the analysis highlights how PTM disrupted hegemonic binaries of citizen/terrorist and periphery/center by examining the internal contestations and ideological resistance the movement faced within the Pashtun community, which were shaped by state propaganda, class interests, and suspicion of authenticity. Mainly focused on both support and opposition to PTM within the Pashtun population, this article also argues that PTM sheds light on the dialectics of political agency in Pakistan, where hegemony and resistance continually redefine the boundaries of citizenship, justice, and collective memory.