Ideological Fencing: A Fenced Border, an Unfenced Mind in Pakistan
Contributors
- Muhammad Irfan PhD Scholar, Department of Urdu, National University of Modern Languages, Islamabad, Pakistan.
Abstract
Over the last 50 years, the story has silently replaced the soldier in the twenty-first century. This article defines what people refer to as 'ideological fencing', in which the deliberate construction and protection of a controlled, indigenous ideology is meant to protect a nation's 'cognitive territory' as walls and trenches once did for its physical territory. The article discusses the history of the border in the four phases — physical, legal-cartographic, ideological (cold war) and digital — and suggests that the border has been moved from the ground, to the map and to the mind — with states that protect only the first two protecting a line that no one is going to challenge. Based on Gramsci's concept of hegemony and the organic intellectual, it analyzes how the U.S., China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey practice ideological fencing, and then considers the central case of Pakistan, a ‘state built on an idea', which has physically fenced its most hazardous border while simultaneously establishing an ideological buffer in Afghanistan — that is, a ‘buffer' narrative — in the imitation of the British empire's ‘buffer' policy. The article concludes with a blueprint of five programmes to build an indigenous fence of Pakistan in its own ideology, but not in borrowed narratives, based on Iqbal's reconstructive method.
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Corresponding Author
Muhammad Irfan
PhD Scholar, Department of Urdu, National University of Modern Languages, Islamabad, Pakistan.
Corresponding Author: [email protected]
