Sovereignty, Sacrifice, and Survival in Pakistan’s Necropolitical Order

Sovereignty, Sacrifice, and Survival in Pakistan’s Necropolitical Order: Death’s Dominion examines how sovereignty, sacrifice, and survival are experienced by individuals living under Pakistan’s militant and counter-militant regimes. Drawing on unstructured, in-depth interviews with sectarian militants and interrupted martyrdom operatives, it transforms first-person testimony into a critical analysis of necropolitics: the power to determine who may live, who must remain vulnerable, and who may be exposed to death. The book shows how selective protection, institutional failure, militant violence, and exceptional security practices can produce “death-worlds” governed through insecurity, abandonment, and differential exposure to violence.

Combining phenomenological inquiry with post-structural theory, the study reveals how state and non-state actors participate in overlapping moral and political economies of death, in which martyrdom, refusal, betrayal, and survival acquire political and sacred meanings. It advances the Pakistan-specific NEC Framework—National, Ethnosectarian, and Counterterror Necropolitics—to explain how competing forms of sovereignty intersect in shaping the national order. In dialogue with Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Achille Mbembe, and Judith Butler, the book also develops counter-necropolitics as a life-affirming project grounded in justice, accountability, rehabilitation, recognition, reparation, and counter-narratives.

Munir Ahmad Zia Rao is Deputy Inspector General of Police, Punjab, Pakistan. He has a PhD in Terrorism Studies from the University of the Punjab.