Abstract

Pakistan seems to offer a particularly fertile ground for conspiracy theories. The presence and undefined role of Blackwater, a private security firm working as a subcontractor to the US Army, has lent new fervour to these discussions. Certainly mainstream North Atlantic media portrays Pakistanis as particularly prone to believing conspiracy theories. Such a representation carries within it many suggestions: of blind nationalism and ignorance of history, of misinformed locals unable to deal with a complicated reality, and of shifting blame from Pakistanis to those outside this imagined community. But what precisely is the relationship between conspiracy theories and a sedimented history? Conspiracy theories may be too linear and hyper-logical to allow for historical contingency and the messy reality of political struggles but is it possible to conceive of them as a kind of social imaginary that places Pakistan within a transnational context in an age where a surfeit of information is matched only by its inaccessibility for vast numbers of people, and at a time when it has become legitimate to talk of empire again? The paper takes a detailed look at local about f Blackwater to think through some of these questions.

The discussant will be Sharath Srinivasan.

For more information about the speaker, please visit: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/sspp/politicaleconomy/people/iqitdar.html or http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo11017672.htm