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Podcast: Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast
Episode: Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, "The Politics of Common Sense: State, Society and Culture in Pakistan" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
Description: Aasim Sajjad Akhtar’s The Politics of Common Sense: State, Society and Culture in Pakistan(Cambridge University Press, 2018) is an incisive study of continuity as well as change in Pakistan that has moved the country towards religious conservatism and increased authoritarianism. Akhtar, a political scientist and self-confessed left-wing activist, documents the development of political power in Pakistan that with the military dictatorship in the 1980s of General Zia ul-Haq ended an era of more liberal and left-wing politics and put the country on a path of right-wing religious ultra-conservatism from which it has yet to deviate. In tracking that de...