Policing “Crises”: Postcolonial Lawfare and the Criminalization of Dissent in Pakistan

This chapter considers the convergences between colonial “lawfare”, (post)colonial counterinsurgency, and domestic policing to explore how such convergences facilitate the criminalization and punishment of dissent and activism within contemporary undemocratic or authoritarian contexts. Using colonial-era legislations found in Pakistan, I explore how such frameworks are deployed as part of a postcolonial state’s overarching counterinsurgency warfare against citizens. I employ postcolonial perspectives to show how such colonial institutions legitimise and weaponise the state’s militarised lawfare against its people and frame socio-political activism and critical resistance as conspiracies amounting to national security threats, revealing continuities between colonial and postcolonial policing of resistance. Such securitized narrative-framing, coupled with the deployment of colonial-era techniques of control, further ensures an ongoing conflation of “police power” and “war power”.