PAKISTAN’S 2024 election results marked the end of a political cycle that began in the early 2000s. Less often noted is that this cycle expired at roughly the same moment as the global order which framed it. Signs of political and cultural realignment are now fully emergent, and their trajectory passes through events of the past 25 years — the ‘war on terror’ and its effects on Muslim societies, the financial crisis alongside growth in Asian economies, and increased migration to Western countries.
The Pakistani domestic cycle is best characterised as an unsuccessful attempt to achieve a political settlement, under the garb of federalised (and electoral) constitutional rule. Its participants were the traditional parties PML-N and PPP, and their core constituents, sections of liberal civil society and private news media, and some segments of the judiciary. Its opposition came from entities excluded from or antagonised by that brief lived system of patronage: the PTI, the upwardly mobile urban classes, and the military establishment and its aligned factions among the media. The latter coalition won out over the last 10 years. In winning, it stumbled upon its own internal contradictions, which are now playing out as the present crisis.
This cycle, however, was always nested inside something larger. Its vocabulary of rights, its civil society, and much of its international support came from a global dispensation; NGO work here was intellectually and financially sustained by Western aid largesse in the context of the war on terror. Once the external scaffolding weakened, the undoing at home proved swift.
That scaffolding is what we commonly dub the neoliberal world order. Characterised by deregulation in markets, and trade and financial liberalisation, these prescriptions were macroeconomic orthodoxy for nearly four decades. They represented the response of the capitalist class to the stagflation crisis of the 1970s in Western economies, dismantling the political power of labour by making offshoring easier, and restoring the power of capital through financialisation. The recipe would remain incomplete without access to new labour, product, and capital markets, which is why it came packaged as IMF-run ‘structural adjustment’ for countries in the Global South.
The Pakistani domestic cycle is best characterised as an unsuccessful attempt to achieve a political settlement.
What did these four decades of liberalisation deliver? Growth for some countries (East Asia, parts of Latin America), stagnation and deindustrialisation for most others, astronomical returns for owners of finance capital, and heightened inequality nearly everywhere. Since 2008, populations in the West have rightly soured on this misfiring orthodoxy, and that resentment has gradually made its way into how decision-makers think about their economies. Free markets are no longer considered orthodoxy (at least in rhetoric).
The unravelling of the old order extends beyond economics. Liberal democracy was presented as a core value, supposedly maintained by the US globally. Its use as a cynical foreign policy stick had already made many in the world wary. Elsewhere, the appeal of some authoritarian systems is growing. Sociologist Cihan Tugal points to Turkiye under Erdogan and the AKP, which has used state welfare, economic intervention, and centralised politics to contain opposition over two decades. Key political and establishment figures in countries like Pakistan now routinely view limits on democracy as necessary for economic progress.
Does this reordering then offer Pakistan an opening? Statist nationalists see the country’s expanded role in regional geopolitical affairs as both a vindication of its military-led governing structure and a route to its destined status as a regional power. On the face of it, both shifts work in the country’s favour. As a state with strong military capabilities, both nuclear and conventional, Pakistan can extract material concessions from regional powers looking for a security patron after the US winds down its position. And for a country long locked into IMF programmes, escaping some elements of neoliberal economic orthodoxy is a necessity.
The real question is: can it? Here the answer goes back to how the global is refracted into the local via the domestic arrangements that actually exist on the ground. Can the rentier/ patronage economy be turned productive? Can those with outsized claims on the exchequer be reined in? The task rests with a state overwhelmed by a military-bureaucratic establishment that has turned its primary logic into one of extraction via authoritarian decree rather than service delivery. More importantly, this is a state of viceregal origin, incapable of the mass mobilisation and disciplining that engendered effective capacity in Korea or China. It is held together instead by the distribution of rents, internally to its cadres and kin, and externally to a narrow sliver of the population.
The traditional parties that might have steered this moment have proven completely unable to do so. Their mode of politics rested on narrow patronage relations with socially dominant segments in Punjab and Sindh, and in exchange for temporary respite they outsourced Fata, Balochistan, judicial independence, electoral competition, and even large parts of governance to the militarised logic of establishment control. Most of all, they have ignored the emergent reality of the upwardly mobile, digitally resourceful urban middle classes and inflation-weary masses, leaving the field wide open for multiple types of resentment.
However, resentment on its own is insufficient to lead society anywhere. The arduous task for those still committed to broad-based material uplift lies in reworking the state into something attentive to the collective good and capable of mobilising society for it. This is not a reworking that will be handed to progressives with any ease. In fact, in the absence of viable progressive movements to project some notion of universal justice, the militarisation of the region and the turn to narrow, sectional resentment is a recipe for further marginalisation of the already vulnerable.
The writer teaches politics and sociology at Lums.
X: @umairjav
Published in Dawn, November 9th, 2026
