Welfare as "contact zone" of Christians and the State: Experiences and negotiations of state and citizenship in Pakistan in the context of Islamic state and global security policies

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Martin Sökefeld
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: from 2014 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 248785111

This anthropological research project studies public welfare in Pakistan as contact zone (Linke 2006) between state and subject. The project focuses on the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) which was implemented in 2008 and which is the first program of public welfare in Pakistan that includes religious minorities. Anthropological fieldwork will concentrate on public welfare as daily practice and experience and on the appropriation of the state by members of the Christian minority. Because the BISP mostly aims at women and their empowerment gender will be particularly taken into account. How does the new proximity between the state and Christians affect their mutual relationship? How are concepts of state and citizenship transformed through this form of welfare?The project departs from the constellation of tension which affects the largely poor Christian minority in Pakistan: structural discrimination and violence on one hand, public care and political inclusion on the other. Further, there is the ambivalent interpellation of the subjects of welfare in the context of the BISP: In the framework of the global war against terror the Pakistani poor are declared a global threat and public welfare merges with global agendas of security, prevention of terrorism, empowerment of women and the struggle against corruption.The conceptualization of the state as practice and experience brings processes of governance and the agency of the beneficiaries / subjects of public welfare into focus. Fieldwork will look at everyday experiences and cultural practices of appropriation of citizenship and the state in their diverse forms: as representations, as interpellations of the subjects and as smart technologies which are employed in by the program. As a contact zone, public welfare emerges as a space of political power and its subversion, as site of subjectification and as a field in which political concepts, emotions and relationships are negotiated. The concept of contact zone sensitizes particularly for the sensual dimension of the state and the field of politics.The research project addresses current questions about the transformation of state and citizenship in the context of public welfare in Pakistan as well as in the context of global social and security policies and pursues the problem of the emergence of political emotions. Further, the situation of the Christian minority in Pakistan and its relation with the state will be studied for the first time and the under researched fields of welfare in the contexts of global policies of security and Islam as well as welfare and gender in South Asia will be explored.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Pakistan
• Participating Person: Professor Dr. Azam Chaudhary