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From Partisan Universal to Concrete Universal? The Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement in Pakistan
Author(s) -
Mallick Ayyaz
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
antipode
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.177
H-Index - 98
eISSN - 1467-8330
pISSN - 0066-4812
DOI - 10.1111/anti.12661
Subject(s) - universality (dynamical systems) , dignity , politics , situated , dialectic , political science , political economy , universal law , sociology , terrain , epistemology , law , geography , computer science , philosophy , physics , artificial intelligence , cartography , quantum mechanics
This paper explores the question of universal‐particular through the anti‐war Pashtun Tahaffuz (Protection) Movement in Pakistan. With its demands couched in the language of pain, rights to life and “dignity”, the PTM mobilises popular Pashtun sentiments as a “partisan universal”: a political formulation which achieves the common good even as it attends to particular interests. However, within the re‐formulated urban question in post‐9/11 Pakistan, PTM also attempts to make common cause with other ethnic‐spatial communities through shared—but situated and differentiated—experiences of dispossession. Thus, the PTM’s “dialectic of experience” is a partisan universal in search of a “concrete universal”: a non‐totalising but encompassing and open universality, a universal politics which works through the particularity of specific groups’ experiences. It is in this terrain of political practice, and its attendant theoretical articulations, that we will find the—contingent and processual—resolution of the transition from particularity to universality.