The Machiavellian State and Its Progeny: Security, Religion, and the Production of Political Violence in Pakistan

Waqar Ahmad, Ph.D Student in University of Peshawar
Muhammad Riaz, University of Peshawar

This paper challenges the conventional explanation that political violence in Pakistan and the Global South stems primarily from religious fundamentalism. Instead, it argues that such violence is largely a product of the state’s own Machiavellian logic—a rationality-based pursuit of security inherited from the Westphalian model of statehood. Religion, far from being the original cause, enters the frame as an instrument mobilized by state power in its drive to maintain monopoly over organized violence. Drawing on critical security studies and Pakistan’s political history, this paper examines a central paradox: the state that claims a monopoly on legitimate violence has systematically created and armed non-state actors who became its fiercest competitors. From the utilization of Islamist militias in the Kashmir jihad to the cultivation of sectarian organizations as counters to internal threats, Pakistan's security apparatus has repeatedly instrumentalized religious networks as force multipliers. This strategy, rooted in rational calculus of interest and expedited by Cold War geopolitics, treats religion as a tool of governance rather than a driver of conflict. The paper argues that the intensification of religious violence in Pakistan correlates not with periods of heightened piety, but with moments of perceived state vulnerability and traces how the state’s attempt to instrumentalize religion for security ends has empowered autonomous actors—militant groups and sectarian armies—who now challenge the state’s own authority. The state’s drive to occupy all symbolic space has, in practice, fragmented it, allowing competitors to proliferate within the very ecosystem the state created. Reframing political violence through this lens offers an alternative to the Orientalist gaze that essentializes Islam as inherently violent. It reveals that violence plaguing the Global South is not a relic of tradition, but a distinctly modern phenomenon born of the state’s rational power pursuit and its willingness to sacrifice the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate force.

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 Presented in Session 172. Religion, State Formation and Political Authority