Sumrin Kalia - Imagining Madina: Repertoires of Populism in Pakistan
In Pakistan's 2018 elections, two rival populist movements campaigned on the same slogan: a promise to make the country ‘the State of Madina’. Imran Khan's Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) emerged as a personalist populist movement directed against the political elite. Khadim Rizvi's Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) took a contentious approach against both elite and minorities. How could the same political ideology, under similar structural conditions, produce such different constructions of “us” and “them”?
Populism appears in various forms ranging from left to right, agrarian to nationalist, radical to dictatorial. In this talk, I use the case of Pakistan to explain why populism takes such radically different forms.
I argue that populist divisions of us and them is not determined by ideology, performances, or discourses alone. They are shaped by the engagement orientations in civil society that legitimate certain social and political boundaries and provide repertoires for populist mobilization. Explaining who populists exclude and how, thus necessitates looking at what forms and meanings of civic action are rendered legible and legitimate through activism in the civil society. It also necessitates paying attention to how other spheres such as the market, and the state infiltrate the civil society and change the ways civil society organizations orient participants and broader publics.
About the Speaker:
Sumrin Kalia is a political sociologist and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Free University of Berlin. Her research examines linkages between political parties, markets, and civil society organizations. Methodologically, she combines qualitative data with comparative case studies to understand how organizations in the civil society influence and are influenced by cultural, political, and economic institutions. Her work has appeared in journals such as Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, Religion, State and Society etc. She is also co-edited two books and is currently working on her book: Imagining Madina: Repertoires of Populism in Pakistan.