ALSA 2025 meeting

This paper looks at the legal strategies being deployed by the security state in Pakistan in the wake of the War on Terror, to control mobility of populations on the margins of the nation-state. Based on my doctoral research, this paper focuses on the policing of mobility of populations from two frontier regions: Pashtun communities (including activists belonging to the non-violent, anti-war Pashtun Tahfuz Movement (PTM)) from the former Federally Administered Tribal Areas or FATA and the people of Gilgit-Baltistan. The paper aims to show that fear and suspicion related to frontier populations and their cross-border ties has led to the regulation of mobility as a key objective of the security state in Pakistan. It argues that despite the focus on democratic backsliding and judicial review in constitutional law scholarship, it is in fact the use of ordinary criminal law and legal technologies like tenancy registers and terrorism watchlists – often developed during the colonial and early postcolonial period and entrenched during the War on Terror – which are crucial for the management and control of mobility in Pakistan and Asia more broadly. It therefore argues that we theorise emerging forms and entanglements of criminal law and technology as deeply implicated in the shaping of the contemporary postcolonial security state in Asia.