Pakistan's Wars: An Alternative History - with Professor Tariq Rahman

The Department of Modern Languages and Literatures of South Asia cordially invites you to a talk entitled Pakistan’s Wars: An Alternative History by Professor Tariq Rahman on Wednesday, 28.06. The event will take place in the CATS lecture room 010.00.01 (Voßstraße 2, Building 4130) from 18:00 to 19:30 pm. Your presence and participation will be greatly appreciated. Please find below more relevant details about the event.

Abstract: This lecture is based on the author´s latest book Pakistan´s Wars: An Alternative History (Routledge, 2022), which studies the wars Pakistan has fought over the years with India as well as with other non-state actors. Focusing on the first Kashmir war (1947–1948), the wars of 1965 and 1971, the 1999 Kargil war, and low-level and covert military actions, the author analyzes the decisions that led to them. The author claims that most of these decisions were taken by cliques even when the highest office-holders of the state were involved in them. More significantly, they carried inordinate risks and may have jeopardized the security of the state itself. His analysis provides insights into the possibility of avoiding risky behavior patterns of the past for South Asia as a whole.

Professor Tariq Rahman is a Distinguished National Professor of Pakistan since 2004. An emeritus professor at the National Institute of Pakistan Studies, Islamabad, Dr. Rahman is presently the Dean of the School of Education at the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore. He has published 10 books, over 100 articles, and has received several prestigious awards from around the world. Professor Rahman was the first Pakistani to be presented the Humboldt Research Award, one of Germany’s highest awards for academic research. The President of Pakistan conferred upon him the Pride of Performance in 2004 and the Sitara-i-Imtiaz in 2013. He is a Salzburg Seminar fellow (2017); a member of the Common Room at Wolfson College, University of Oxford; a visiting fellow of Pakistan Institute of Development Economics and also a Fellow of the Pakistan Academy of Sciences. He is the author of several important books, including Language and Politics in Pakistan (1996); From Hindi to Urdu: A Social and Political History; Names (2015); Interpretations of Jihad in South Asia (2018).