The Baloch National Struggle in Pakistan discusses the relevance of the principle of the right of self-determination in the context of rising trends towards ethnic nationalism in Afro-Asian countries. The book deals with the emerging conflict of the Baloch with Pakistan and Iran. It also discusses the geopolitical and geostrategic repercussions of any re-demarcations of the boundaries of Pakistan and Iran on the region and long-term policies of world powers. The book gives an insight into the political psychology and cultural traits of the Baloch struggle for safeguarding their historic personality, political sovereignty, and their national and cultural survival in Iran and Pakistan.

The book is about history of the Baloch conflict with Iran and Pakistan. The work describes and analyzes, from the very beginning, the protracted and bloody struggle of the Baloch against Iran and Pakistan. It is an attempt to answer some of the pertinent questions regarding the background and contextual factors of this long-drawn conflict. The book analyzes the strength and weaknesses of opposing parties in the conflict, and it discusses the role of regional and international interest groups. It is also an overview of the problems facing the Baloch national struggle in both countries and prospects for the success of the Baloch resistance in near future.

Balochistan is Pakistan's largest province rich with natural gas, gold and copper. Located on the borders of Iran and Afghanistan, land of the Balochs, where the first Baloch confederacy was founded in 1666, has had a bitter history of exploitation and suppression by a strictly centralized federal government heavily influenced by the country's military. While the central government and the province confronted each other four times since the forceful annexation of the Baloch land into Pakistan in 1948, the ongoing movement entails more systematic and radical dimensions. Malik Siraj Akbar, editor of the The Baloch Hal, the first online English newspaper of Balochistan, takes a look at the last one decade how the dimensions of the Baloch movement changed. A Hubert Humphrey Fellow at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, Malik reveals the "enforced disappearance" of hundreds of Baloch political workers and their brutal murder by the Pakistani security services under a "kill and dump" policy during detention in a phenomenon similar to Argentina's Dirty War. The book analyzes growing state-sponsored radicalization in secular Balochistan. Malik is the most widely quoted journalist on Balochistan. He insists that the killing of former governor Nawab Akbar Bugti, 79, by Pervez Musharraf's regime proved as the 9/11 of Pakistan's relations with the resourceful province. The Balochistan question merits attention of the international community not only for a stable Pakistan but also to provide the world alternative options for a secular buffer state between Iran and Afghanistan if Pakistan falls in the hands of Islamists.

Balochistan is Pakistan’s largest province rich with natural gas, gold and copper. Located on the borders of Iran and Afghanistan, land of the Balochs, where the first Baloch confederacy was founded in 1666, has had a bitter history of exploitation and suppression by a strictly centralized federal government heavily influenced by the country’s military. While the central government and the province confronted each other four times since the forceful annexation of the Baloch land into Pakistan in 1948, the ongoing movement entails more systematic and radical dimensions. Malik Siraj Akbar, editor of the The Baloch Hal, the first online English newspaper of Balochistan, takes a look at the last one decade how the dimensions of the Baloch movement changed. A Hubert Humphrey Fellow at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, Malik reveals the “enforced disappearance” of hundreds of Baloch political workers and their brutal murder by the Pakistani security services under a “kill and dump” policy during detention in a phenomenon similar to Argentina’s Dirty War. The book analyzes growing state-sponsored radicalization in secular Balochistan. Malik is the most widely quoted journalist on Balochistan. He insists that the killing of former governor Nawab Akbar Bugti, 79, by Pervez Musharraf’s regime proved as the 9/11 of Pakistan’s relations with the resourceful province. The Balochistan question merits attention of the international community not only for a stable Pakistan but also to provide the world alternative options for a secular buffer state between Iran and Afghanistan if Pakistan falls in the hands of Islamists.

Miroslav Hroch’s Social Preconditions of National Revival has profoundly influenced the study of nationalism since it first appeared in English translation, particularly because of its famous three-phase model for describing and analyzing national movements in Eastern Europe. Contributors to this book explore Hroch’s continued relevance to the field of nationalism studies with four case studies and two theoretical/historiographic essays. Two case studies apply Hroch’s thinking to Eastern Europe in light of subsequent historiography, finding that Hroch’s ideas remain useful for understanding national movements in Belarus and among the Kuban Cossacks. Two further studies apply Hroch’s schema to the Mexican independence movement and contemporary Pakistan – times and places that Hroch specifically excluded from his own considerations. The first theoretical contribution seeks to apply Begriffsgeschichte to Hroch’s work; the second suggests that Hroch’s phases form a useful typology of nationalism, thus facilitating communication between different branches of nationalism studies. Hroch ends the volume with his own commentary on the various contributions. This book was published as a special issue of Nationalities Papers.

Ethnic and religious identity-markers compete with class and gender as principles shaping the organization and classification of everyday life. But how are an individual's identity-based conflicts transformed and redefined? Identity is a specific form of social capital, hence contexts where multiple identities obtain necessarily come with a hierarchy, with differences, and hence with a certain degree of hostility. The contributors to this book examine the rapid transformation of identity hierarchies affecting Iran, Pakistan and Turkey, a symptom of political fractures, social-economic transformation, and new regimes of subjectification. They focus on the state's role in organizing access to resources, with its institutions often being the main target of demands, rather than competing social groups. Such con- texts enable entrepreneurs of collective action to exploit identity differences, which in turn help them to expand the scale of their mobilization and to align local and national conflicts. The authors also examine how identity-based violence may be autonomous in certain contexts, and serve to prime collective action and transform the relations between communities.