Un-Disciplining Sociology: Movements As Sites of Thought

Paper in progress prepared for Colonialism, Anticolonialism and Dissident Sociology
Traditions at American University of Beirut.
Please don’t circulate without permission!
Un-Disciplining Sociology: Movements as

Sites of Thought
Mahvish Ahmad
Abstract
Recent attempts to decolonise Sociology – and the academy as such – has focused on
revealing the discipline’s Eurocentrism and its entanglements with empire or on expanding
its canon to include the writings of dissident, anti-colonial thinkers from the Global South.
While these developments are welcome, they do not go far enough. What counts as social
thought worthy of inclusion in research and teaching remains tethered to texts written by
identifiable individuals, usually available in English. This reproduces a narrow idea of
thinking as an individuated and mostly peaceful act, available in writing. Yet, much thinking
in the Global South – especially under colonial, imperial, and sovereign violence – has had to
be collective, underground, and on-the-run in languages other than English, and often in
forms other than text. Attempts to decolonise Sociology must centre more forcefully the
many ways people make sense of, critique and imagine alternatives to their social worlds. It
must attend not just to the content of what is read and taught, but its form; it must dismantle
the ways that Sociology disciplines what counts as thought.
In this paper, I consider the challenges and opportunities of such a centring, by turning to
two other sites of thought in Pakistan’s southern province of Balochistan: a banned pamphlet
from the 1970s called Jabal and study circles among students currently on the run from
military violence. This raises methodological questions about retrieval and ethics. It also
reveals counter-infrastructures of knowledge production engaged but not dependent on
northern ideas/institutions; networks fostering and circulating other conceptual lenses that
diagnose existing conditions, helping people reimagine relations of power and propel
political action. I ask: Can a decolonised Sociology integrate such collective, underground,
on-the-run, and often anonymised spheres of debate and thought? Should it?
For the past twenty years, lives in Pakistan and Afghanistan have been subject to a violent,
imperial war machine which – with regional militaries and militancies – has killed at least
200,000 people and decimated the everyday lives of those who live there (Tahir 2017; Alimia
2012; Ahmad 2018). This follows a long history of imperial and sovereign aggression,
including three Anglo-Afghan Wars, the Soviet War in Afghanistan, and several counter-
insurgency operations launched by postcolonial militaries in both countries, with imperial
funds. In the midst of this destruction, communities and movements have continued to
persist, thinking and organising against imperial and sovereign violence. In southern
Pakistan’s Balochistan province – a site of amplified state destruction from the colonial era
until today that I engage with intellectually and politically – anti-colonial collectives
performed war ballads against the British during military expeditions against “tribal
fanatics”; Marxists wrote underground pamphlets against US-funded counterinsurgency
operations; and today, student organisations hold political meetings documenting and
analysing harassment and abductions against the current state’s erasure of atrocities targeting
their communities (Marri 2014; Hussain 2019; Badalkhan 2013; Naseer n.d.). The same is
true in other parts of this region (Caron 2019; Ali 2012). Yet, current conversations on
decolonising Sociology – or knowledge production as such – is completely disengaged, if not
wholly unaware, of the political and intellectual labour of these collectives. Why?
A generous answer to this question is that the decolonial project in its current iteration is
relatively young in Sociology, and that it merely needs an academic to bring Afghanistan and
Pakistan into a broader conversation. With recent attempts to decolonise Sociology focused
on revealing the discipline’s Eurocentrism and its imperial entanglements, or on expanding
its canon to include the writings of dissident, anti-colonial thinkers from the Global South,
this could mean unpacking how the imperial episteme has determined knowledge production
of Pakistan and Afghanistan (Gregory 2004; Manchanda 2020; Hopkins 2020; Bajwa 2016;
Jalal 1995; Cohn 1996). Alternatively, it could mean locating and, if necessary, introducing
and translating the texts of anti-colonial thinkers from the region, like Muhammad Iqbal,
Eqbal Ahmed, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan or Meena Keshwar Kamal (Azad 2014; Schaar
2015; Banerjee 2000; Gandhi 2004; RAWA 2012).
In this paper, however, I suggest that the circumvention of organising, thinking
communities and movements is indicative of a critical limitation which continues to structure
the academy–even decolonial Sociologists. The labour of contextualising existing social
theory (Steinmetz 2016) and reading thinkers from the Global South (Patel 2009; Alatas &
Sinha 2017) is extremely important. However, it stops short of challenging the tacit
assumption that social thought is primarily individually authored, existing in similar forms,
everywhere, and that its context and content is therefore easily available, transferrable, and
digestible. As a result, what counts as social thought worthy of inclusion in research and
teaching remains tethered to analyses written by identifiable personalities, usually available
in (or easily translatable into) English. This inadvertently reproduces a narrow idea of
thinking as an individuated and mostly peaceful act, available in the form of text. Yet, little
attention has been paid to how people think in the midst of imperial and sovereign
destruction, and the forms that this thinking must take in order to survive empires and states
intent on doing away with ideas and collectives that threaten its rule. In fact, a close look at
practices of thinking and organising under conditions of historic and contemporary
destruction in e.g. Pakistan and Afghanistan reveals that much of it has had to be collective,
underground, on-the-run and anonymous, in languages other than English and sometimes in
forms other than text. In this paper, I argue that we must centre more forcefully the many
ways people make sense of, critique and imagine alternatives to their social worlds. In other
words, we must attend not just to the content of what is read and thought, but its form; we
must necessarily dismantle the ways that Sociology disciplines what counts as thought.
To unpack the consequences of centring this other, more slippery form of thought, I go in
Section I to Balochistan, particularly to places where indigenous, Baloch communities live
and work.1 I shortly consider why thinking with sites of violence in Balochistan are fruitful in
bringing to light critical limitations in current, decolonial debates in the academy, before
turning to two kinds of collective thought that I came across here: a banned magazine called
Jabal published during a 1970s counterinsurgency campaign (Section I.A.) and study circles
run by students on the run from military violence today (Section I.B.). Through each
example, I consider the methodological and ethical challenges of integrating movement
thought and chart the alternative knowledge circuits and conceptual insights that they reveal.
I end in Section II by reflecting back on decolonial debates in the academy, and ask: What
would it mean to centre movement thought in debates on decolonising knowledge
production? Can decolonial debates reconnect with ongoing political struggles to understand
and potentially open itself up to these other knowledge circuits? Can it integrate concepts
from extra-academic knowledge communities? Should it?
I Movements in Balochistan as Sites of Thought
Thinking with movement materials and practices in Balochistan has been fruitful for me to
interrogate the limits of current, decolonise conversations for three reasons.
First, attention to Baloch movement thought in Balochistan is a reminder of the different
forms that thinking must take when it happens under conditions of overt, corporeal violence.
Critical thought in Balochistan cannot take the forms that critical thought in e.g. the UK
takes, because critical thinkers face the constant threat of being abducted and killed. Take
Saba Dashtiyaari, a Baloch literary figure and educator, who built a library for young Baloch
students in Karachi’s Malir District. For his work, he was assassinated in 2011, after he
started speaking directly against ongoing military violence. Take, as an alternative, Dr Shah
Mohammad Marri, a prolific writer who lives in Balochistan’s capital of Quetta on the border
to Afghanistan. Dr Marri has told me that he takes the same route to and from work and
ensures that he embeds all his critique in vague and elusive language. Take, as an alternative
to that, students who read political philosophy from the region and around the world in study
circles. Once able to operate overground, they have been forced to hold their study circles
and meetings in secret. The Internet has certainly made new sites open for the publication of
critical thought, but a Cyber Crime Bill passed in 2016 by the government means that
accounts and websites are constantly shut down and editors and writers of Baloch magazines
harassed and sometimes killed.
The forced fragmentation and scattering of critical thought and thinkers in Balochistan
has given many young Pakistanis in other parts of the country I have met the wrong
perception that critical knowledge production does not take place there. It has also ensured
that critical thought from places like Balochistan – because it is not easily available in
English, because it is scattered and fragmented – finds it harder to travel out of Balochistan,
to be mobilised as critical resources of social thought elsewhere. Of all the debates that I have
1
Balochistan may mean “Land of the Baloch” but other ethnicities and linguistic communities live here too,
with Pashtuns concentrated in its northern regions and Hazaras in its capital of Quetta, on the border to
Afghanistan. The Baloch are also split into Balochi and Brahui linguistic communities, and include several other
divisions that do not fit neatly into ideas of separate ethnicities.
come across within the northern academy, it is radical Black studies that have paid the most
careful attention to the different forms that thinking must take when people live under
conditions of annihilatory violence. This is because they have refused to accept that the
horror of slavery, genocide and racial violence in the Americas meant that people did not
think. Their attention to the intellectual lives of slaves and fugitive maroons and Black
women living under racial and patriarchal violence (Roberts 2015; Hartmann 2019; Spillers
1987) has been an indispensable theoretical resource for me as I think through the fragmented
and scattered archives of social thought from Balochistan.
Secondly, the Baloch are a minoritised community in Pakistan, whose nationalist
movements argue that the postcolonial state maintains a relationship of settler-coloniality
with Baloch indigenous subjects, often with imperial support from global powers like the US
and China. Attention to the thought of Baloch movements - i.e. thought that has come out of
a postcolonial minority – challenges a slippage within current, decolonial debates to
essentialise brown and black identities as relatively homogenous, and to equate all anti-
colonial critique as equally counter-hegemonic. The current, militarised Pakistani state also
fronts an anti-colonial critique; so do powerful, Sunni majoritarian Islamist movements, some
of which have stood behind violent attacks on religious minorities including Shias and
Ahmadis. Anti-colonial critique also enjoys much fanfare among postcolonial elites,
including the middle and upper classes of the Punjabi elite which dominates the ranks of the
Pakistani military and of which my family is a part. Across the border, the Modi regime also
uses the discourse of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism, often against minority Muslims
who they brand as a community that descend from Muslim invaders on Hindu land. The anti-
imperialism of the Pakistani military regime has often been used to justify violence against
Baloch and other ethnic minorities, and political dissidents. The military has argued that
anyone who criticises them are foreign-funded and are undermining the sovereignty of a
postcolonial state that is already battling to maintain some semblance of autonomy in the
international sphere.
The decolonise debate in the northern academy can end up assuming that the terrain of
political battle looks identical everywhere; as a result, those invested in resurrecting anti- and
de-colonial thought can end up cooperating with e.g. the Erdogan government while it is
harassing and arresting dissidents and Kurdish minorities (one scholar intent on resurrecting
Ottoman thought famously sent a solidarity email to Erdogan’s daughter during protests in
Gezi Park), or celebrating the decolonial thought of Syed Abul A’la Maududi, the founder of
the Sunni majoritarian Jamaat-e-Islami (another scholar I know of is working on a paper
investigating Maududi’s decolonial thought and his critiques of liberal politics). By
deliberately centring the thought of a movement emergent from a postcolonial minority I am
insisting that we parse out different lineages of anti-colonial critique. Baloch nationalist
leaders famously asked for greater political and economic autonomy but were militarily
annexed in 1948. They are not the only community that felt that they lost out during an
otherwise victorious moment of historical decolonisation; Kashmiris include another
community that felt not the departure of colonialism in 1947, but its reinscription. The anti-
colonial critique of postcolonial minorities becomes especially challenging when we consider
that many have actively pursued close relations with western powers against their
postcolonial governments, in the name of an anti-colonialism oriented towards other,

occupying forces. Some Baloch leaders regularly approach the UK and US governments to
ask for help to separate from Pakistan; Kurdish groups have gotten aerial support from US
forces against ISIS; this is all while maintaining a tradition of anti-imperial critique. Centring
movement thought among the minority Baloch of Pakistani Balochistan has been fruitful
because it has constantly reminded me of the differential, sometimes contradictory, political
functions that anti-colonial critique plays in the postcolonial world.
Finally, I have found that centring movement thought from Balochistan has forced me to
remain accountable to the movements themselves. It would not have been possible for me to
even be aware of movement thought without forging relationships with the people within it
that are doing the thinking. I have been engaged on and off with missing persons movements
and student groups in Balochistan since at least 2010 when I wrote my first articles on
enforced disappearances in the province. I have since developed links to older comrades and
organisers from the Balochistan movement. As Yael Navaro (2012: xii) reminds us: “only
certain spaces and themes make themselves available and accessible for study by certain
people.” My engagements has certainly allowed me to gain a deeper insight into the
intellectual activities of movements in Balochistan.
However, these engagements also tie me into certain relationships of reciprocity. Like
any other person, I have a limited amount of time. When you are tied into both the academy
and into relationships with ongoing movements, you find yourself having to choose how to
practice your intellectual and political commitments. Will you spend your time writing an
essay on the anti-colonial thought of movements for a conference or will you edit an op-ed
written by a missing persons organiser on a student you knew who was abducted two months
after you finished your fieldwork? This was a real question that I faced while writing this
paper, and in this case I ended up doing both, but often I do not have the time to do both. I
found it interesting that sometimes (emphasis on sometimes, this is not the case for everyone)
scholars most deeply involved in the decolonial debate in the academy are, at the same time,
not involved with political movements, sometimes not even student movements for
decolonising the academy. I saw this for example in South Africa, where one academic centre
held several grants on decolonising theory and the academy but took the side of the university
administration and private security firms that it hired to squash student protests and arrest
organisers demanding decolonisation and fee reductions. I also saw it at Cambridge, where
those nowhere during protests to decolonise the university ended up with jobs doing research
on decolonising the academy. Thinking about decolonise debates with the perspective of a
movement that I have relations with brings into sharp relief how the demands of the
neoliberal academy – rather than the demands of political movements against colonialism and
coloniality in all its current forms – survives within academic conversations on
decolonisation.
So far, I have used the term “movement thought” quite loosely; in the rest of this paper, I
want to zero in on the two concrete examples of such thinking that I speak of earlier: Jabal
and the study circles. My choice of these two cases is somewhat arbitrary; I could also have
picked press releases of the Voice for Baloch Missing Persons, the songs of mothers of
Baloch men killed by the military, or the poetry and essays written by the sisters of the
disappeared. Yet, I also think that they are a fruitful place from which to start: Jabal is
collectively and anonymously written, but it is nevertheless a text, albeit a marginal one that
few would consider including in new collections of anti-colonial critique. The study circle is
also collective and underground, but not textual, and so it presents other challenges and
opportunities. Both of these examples also help me unpack further the three limitations that I
lay out above. First, both Jabal and the study circles emerged in moments of heightened
violence: Jabal emerged during a counterinsurgency campaign in the 1970s and the study
circles take place during current militarised violence in Balochistan. Second, both emerge
from minoritised postcolonial, indigenous community. Jabal emerged from northeastern
Marris, a tribal Baloch formation that both the British and Pakistani regimes have identified
as especially incendiary and rebellious. The study circles take place among a new middle
class of Baloch students, who have emerged as active critics of the continued racialisation
and minoritisation of Baloch communities and therefore also subject to extreme levels of
enforced disappearances. Finally, both have emerged out of organised movement work.
Behind Jabal is the Balochistan Popular Liberation Front, an armed guerrilla group. Behind
the study circles, a series of student unions, especially the Baloch Student Organisation-
Azaad, a separatist group formed in 2002.
In the two, following sections, I begin by unpacking the methodological, ethical
challenges of integrating these instances of movement thought. Then I think through how
these particular instances of movement thought expand our idea of the spaces and forms of
social thought from the Global South.
I.A. On Jabal, by the Balochistan Popular Liberation Front

I first heard about Jabal in 2016, while carrying out research in Pakistan on shifting
modes of state violence in Balochistan. I was looking specifically at a counterinsurgency
operation in 1973, launched by the sitting prime minister, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, after he
dismissed Balochistan’s first democratically elected government. Balochistan’s provincial
government was led by the main opposition party, the National Awami Party (NAP). NAP
was known for being a party of socialists and multi-nationalists: People who criticised Bhutto
and the central government’s policies of centralising power; marginalising minority
languages like Balochi; the government’s continued imperial and anti-Communist alliances
with countries like Shah-era Iran and the United States; and the continued capital exploitation
of places like Balochistan. Bhutto accused NAP’s members from Balochistan of planning an
armed campaign for independence, just two years after another part of the country – East
Pakistan – had successfully seceded and formed Bangladesh. In response, NAP’s members,
allies and sympathisers launched widespread protests, including an armed campaign. Its
purpose was to force Bhutto to release NAP leaders from Hyderabad Jail in neighbouring
Sindh, and to force the prime minister to stop crackdowns, arrests, torture, and conspiracy
trials.
Jabbal was launched, in the midst of this conflict, by the Balochistan Popular Liberation
Front (BPLF), a Marxist-Leninist armed insurgency with members from a multiplicity of
Pakistan’s minority ethnicities and urban leftists, though with a concentration of minority
Baloch. As protestors launched attacks and faced crackdowns, arrests, torture, conspiracy
trials, and army operations, I heard that a group of BPLF members got together and started
publishing Jabal. As soon as I heard about Jabal, I wanted to get my hands on it for my
research. That process took me almost two years. When I asked around for copies, most
people told me that they were long gone, its authors, printers and distributors had burnt them
because its contents were still considered incendiary. A sympathiser of the BPLF who finally
gave me some copies initially denied that he had any left and did not hand them over until I
made multiple visits and won over his trust. I finally received copies from him in January
2018, and another set from another sympathiser in March 2018. What I found was a rich set
of analyses, critiques and alternatives, written anonymously by various literate authors in the
BPLF, for the purposes of circumventing the state’s version of past, present, and future. In
the at least 14 issues published over three years, in Urdu and English, Jabbal printed
alternative histories; news and information; analyses and critiques of the regime and its
policies; and strategic and tactical analyses of the opposition. Published entries included
original writings and translated or re-published texts from other national liberation and
revolutionary movements around the world. Jabbal’s purpose was two-fold. Firstly, to
“overcome” the “lies and distortions spewed out daily by the Bhutto regime.” Secondly, to
“lay the basis for the UNITY of all oppressed nationalities, democratic and progressive forces
in Pakistan” and around the world.
The violent context within which Jabal was published, and the difficulties I faced in
getting copies of this pamphlet, index an important set of methodological challenges that I
would like to begin this section with: the challenges of retrieval and ethics.
I have often been struck by the ease with which academics and organisers in and around
the decolonise movement have talked about integrating thought from the Global South. It is
certainly true that there is an incredibly rich corpus of thinkers who are not part of the canons
of social theory taught in Sociology departments and the effort to translate and integrate them
remains an important priority. However, the thinkers that are available - through their
singularly authored texts - are often thinkers that have enjoyed some elite position and even
power. That is one of the reasons so many of them end up being men with literate, elite
backgrounds, often from majoritarian groups within current postcolonial states.2 Yet, in and
around such established thinkers were entire communities and movements that debated what
decolonisation and anti-colonialism meant in practice. Attention to movements that were
actively excluded from power - for example from minoritised ethnic communities seen as
aberrations from a majoritarian national identity (think Kurds in Turkey, Kashmiris in India,
Rohingya in Myanmar, and of course the Baloch and other ethnic minorities in Pakistan) -
can bring to light a far more expansive set of social thought from the Global South. However,
given that this other form of thought was not individuated and solely authored, written
2
Take, for example, two key thinkers from Pakistan that people often refer to when thinking of anti-colonial
thought from this part of the world: the Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz who was an editor of Lotus during his time
in Beirut and Muhammad Iqbal, a pan-Islamic philosopher-poet and a key thinker of turn-of-the-century
reformist movements. Their writings are widely and easily available, in part because the Pakistani state has
canonised both of them, even Faiz who was actually quite critical of the anti-democratic military which controls
so much of Pakistani politics today. This is not to say that their writings are not important and should not be
integrated into anti-colonial canons, but it is to say that their integration does not go far enough since it
reproduces an idea of thought as something that is individual, often male and elite, thinkers engaged in.
instead underground, on the run, and anonymously, it is important to pay attention to

questions of retrieval, since the thought of these movements are not readily available. This is
made worse by the fact that they are still marginalised within postcolonial states. Even their
textual archives - like Jabal - are often scattered, fragmented, and destroyed in the aftermath
of violence and marginalisation.
As I mention above, scholars of slavery, genocide and annihilation have recently begun
looking at the challenges of writing about the lives - political, economic, social, intellectual -
of places and peoples targeted in mass violence. In a research group that I am a part of,
Archives of the Disappeared, we are discussing the challenges of studying and documenting
communities, social movements, literatures, cultures, and thought destroyed through acts of
political repression and mass violence. We are coming to realise that much research is based
on an assumption that evidence, sources, archives, empirics are easily available. In a
forthcoming essay, Yael Navaro (Forthcoming) - a member of the research initiative - brings
attention to how “professional imaginaries about ‘research methodologies’ assume the
availability, presence, and accessibility of ‘evidence’ and propose routes towards its
conceptualisation and interpretation…” Within the field of anthropology, she argues that this
“availability, presence, and accessibility” cannot be assumed if your field site exists in the
aftermath of mass violence: In the aftermath of destruction, anthropologists face a
methodological challenge of a field often absent of evidence, data, or material. I’d like to
argue that our debates on decolonising Sociology also assumes that thought is easily available
for us to then integrate it into various, new textbooks of social thought. Yet, what is and is not
available for us to integrate is often a product of power, of who had the abilities and
resources to write and who did not, and of who is allowed to form and maintain archival
collections and who is not. The archives of even some of the most famous anti-colonial and
democratic movements and thinkers in Pakistan are not readily available, and with the current
Pakistani government increasing surveillance of academics on university campuses, they are
becoming more and more difficult to access. This is even more true in places like India,
under the current Modi regime. Recovering the material legacies produced by marginalised,
rural movements - which often have embedded in them trenchant critiques of power - are,
needless to say, even more difficult.
Given that these movements still face threats and given that such textual archives remain
difficult to find, this raises the question of ethics. When I was handed copies of Jabal, I was
explicitly told by those who gave them to me that they did not want to be associated with it,
and that I should anonymise them in my writing. I have since done that. When I tried to
interview former Baloch members of the BPLF still living in Balochistan, many refused to
speak to me and when they did, I was asked several times to shut off my recorder, to
remember things as background information, and was only trusted because I had developed
long-standing relationships. Yet, this whole experience raised important questions regarding
the kind of knowledge from underground movements (even historical ones like the BPLF)
that I make available, and what I leave out. If I am calling for drawing on movement
knowledge, and doing so requires developing relationships with movements, then what kind
of obligations does that put on me as a scholar? What happens when I run into insights,
internal debates, and historical details that can be detrimental to the collectives that are
sharing them with me? How do I decide what to communicate and what not to communicate?
Indigenous scholars working in communities they are from have spoken about the
necessity of refusing research. They have criticised, quite rightly, the “major colonial task of
social science research” to “pose as a voicebox, ventriloquist, interpreter of subaltern voice.”
(Tuck & Wang 2014, 225). It is necessary, as Audra Simpson (2007) has argued, to know
when to stop asking questions, to know when to shut of a recorder, and to refuse to bring
certain things known internally out into the open (“I knew that there were limits to what I
could ask—and what I could say.” Simpson 2007, 73). I am not Baloch nor am I member of
any of the movements that I have built relationships with, unlike Audra Simpson, so there are
certain debates I was never privy too. Nevertheless, there is other information that I did come
across, other insights and debates that I witnessed. Bringing the decolonising knowledge
conversation into contact with movement thought requires us to reconnect with movements
themselves. Reconnecting with movements means coming face to face with the limitations of
academic production, including its limited use and potential harms.
If retrieval and ethics raise such major questions, why even bother to try and think with a
movement text like Jabal? I think that integrating marginal and difficult-to-access texts like
Jabal bring to light an important dimension of social thought from the Global South, of anti-
colonial, decolonial, dissident thought from around the world. First, it brings to light other
circuits of knowledge, spheres of discussion, debate, and theorising, that while open to ideas
from the academy were neither beholden nor dependent on them. Secondly, embedded within
these other spheres of debate are concepts developed collectively and mobilised across
different geographies and times for the explicit purpose of making sense of violent worlds
and providing alternatives to them.
A materialist history of Jabal - which pays attention to the conditions of its curation,
printing, distribution, and readership - as well as the other underground media that it engaged
with (like pirate radio channels and other banned publications) brings to light an entire
counter-infrastructure of discourse, an entirely alternate circuit of knowledge production and
circulation. Jabal was curated by an anonymous collective of writers who were members or
sympathisers of the BPLF. Though I do not know who they were, it is very likely that they
were members of the BPLF who could read and write easily.3 After its articles were written
or translated, it was printed by hand on a cyclostyle machine and stapled together, and its
copies surreptitiously circulated hand-to-hand by underground cells maintained by
sympathisers in Pakistani cities outside of Balochistan, like Karachi and Lahore. There are
indications that copies of it reached some university campuses and that students who were
found in possession of it were arrested. One of the two sympathisers of the BPLF who gave
me copies of Jabal said that they were given just one copy. They were to make further copies
using their own access to a cyclostyle machine and distribute it among people they trusted.
After having done so and after having read it themselves, they were to destroy their copy.
3
I have strong suspicions that one of the writers was Biyyathil Mohyuddin Kutty, a Malayalam Communist who
settled in Pakistan after Independence and Partition in 1947 because he fell in love with Lahore. B.M. Kutty
ended up becoming an important supporter of NAP and the BPLF, shadow writing press releases and
autobiographies.
Needless to say, the sympathisers who gave me copies of Jabal had failed to destroy it and
hid it instead, imagining themselves as the private archivists of Pakistan’s material,
democratic inheritance.
Jabal was also part of a far broader network of underground organising and thinking -
indeed of hidden and underground discourse - that has been a mainstay of Pakistani politics
since Independence in 1947. Jabal was just one node in a vast alternate and hidden
infrastructure that allowed activists and organisers, politicians and thinkers, sympathies and
members of the BPLF and NAP to remain in conversation even as they faced the censorship
of the postcolonial regime. This infrastructure included other sites of thought and circulation,
including pirate radio channels that ran out of Beirut, Kabul and Karachi. It included the
mountain, where BPLF members had set up camp, and which the pamphlet was named after
(Jabal means mountain in Balochi). It also included other underground magazines and
pamphlets - like jed-o-jehd (struggle) and al fatah - that were similarly banned, printed and
surreptitiously circulated throughout Pakistan in this period.
There is much talk of the political economy of the academy nowadays, with particular
attention to how knowledge production still depends on funding and institutions available to
universities in the Global North. The point I am about to make is perhaps obvious, but I think
it is worth stressing: Jabal did not depend on any funding or institutions in the Global North.
The analyses, critiques and alternatives that it offered were produced by a committed cadre of
organisers who wrote and thought, copied and distributed Jabal irrespective of the support
they received from any external source. Unlike knowledge circuits in universities, Jabal was
not closed to ideas from other parts of the world, including Europe and North America. When
I began to dig into the counter-infrastructure that Jabal was both a part of, and a part of
building, I realised the rich, scattered theoretical debates about state, empire, citizenship,
nationalism, and more. In fact, Jabal is one of several, 20th century print forms — which
included periodicals, newspapers, cultural and literary journals, magazines, manifestoes,
newsletters, and political pamphlets — that functioned as sites of Left, anti-imperial and anti-
colonial critical production. These print forms could exist despite the lack of external support
because they were cheap, easy and quick to produce. They are a version of what Eric Bulson
(2016) calls the “little postcolonial magazine”: an “anti colonial device” with freed its writers
from passing “through a Western metropolis for validation” and allowed them to circumvent
“extroverted literary production.” Paulin J. Hountondji has rightly pointed out “intellectual
workers in the global periphery are pushed toward a particular cultural and intellectual
stance” and calls this stance “extraversion.” (Connell 2018, 401). Yet, Jabal is an example of
a rich archive of intellectual production that depended neither on the resources of the state
nor those of the Global North. Now, as a written text Jabal was not turned towards the
Baloch communities which it claimed to represent — the levels of functional illiteracy are
too high, and many did not speak Urdu or English — but it was turned towards other, ethnic
minority and dissident communities within Pakistan and among dissidents in the Global
South and around the world. By centring a text like Jabal, we can be reminded of the rich,
scattered and fragmented archives of intellectual production that while sometimes engaging
the northern metropole (that was partially its purposes, since it was translated into English as
well) was not dependent on it to exist.
Embedded within Jabal is also several, political concepts that can be further unpacked,
but I’d like to bring attention to just one of them: the idea of an underground
internationalism. Central to Jabal was a belief that the freedom of the Baloch minority in
Pakistan was dependent on the freedom of other repressed communities inside and outside
the country. In order to achieve this freedom, Jabal’s authors argued that the BPLF and other
sympathetic movements should aim to create links among themselves as well as with ongoing
armed struggles against colonial and postcolonial repression around the world. These links,
however, should circumvent postcolonial states and be forged directly between struggles,
since so many postcolonial states had been taken over by “national bourgeois elites” who
despite their pretenses of creating a more anti-colonial world order, continued to repress
internal minorities. For the writers of Jabal, these sort of extra-state linkages needed to be
built deliberately. The BPLF attempted to do so, for example when its fighters went to train
with George Habash and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. It could also
depend on a pre-existing trans-geographic and -oceanic Baloch communities that stretched
from Baghdad to Karachi.
As a pamphlet that was written by a movement, embedded in a minoritised, postcolonial
community, Jabal also saw an internal battle for a more democratic and pluralist,
multinationalist dispensation (one that gave all minorities within the new postcolonial state
an equal stake in power) as inextricably linked with a more democratic and pluralist,
internationalist dispensation around the world. Of late, scholars like Adom Getachew (2019)
have brought attention to crucial attempts by postcolonial leaders to bring about a more
egalitarian world order, economically and politically, through the forging of direct links of
solidarity between newly independent postcolonial states apparent for example in the non-
alignment movement. Jabal’s idea of underground internationalism adds to this kind of
research, by bringing attention to how the archives of minoritised and repressed communities,
who lost out during decolonisation and found themselves marginalised by majoritarian states,
represent an alternative and more critical genealogy of anti-colonial thought, one that is
acutely aware of the dangers of majoritarianism that was embedded in the nation-building
projects of postcolonial elites yet one that remained committed to building radical
alternatives locally and globally. Jabal’s vision of anti-colonialism is qualitatively different
from a vision propagated by several, postcolonial elites, who often saw internal dissent as a
marker of imperial intervention rather than democratic ferment.
What would a centring of texts like Jabal concretely mean for the decolonial project
within Sociology? First, it draws attention to the necessity of archival initiatives. We cannot
retrieve social thought embedded in texts like Jabal if we cannot retrieve Jabal itself, our
access to Jabal is dependent on its conservation.4 Second, it draws attention to ethical and
political questions; as a text emergent from a minority still under attack, articulating critiques
still considered incendiary, it requires that we ask what is prudent to bring into the open and
what needs to remain hidden. Thirdly, it forces us to reconstitute how we present anti-
4
A realisation of how dependent my retrieval of social thought in Pakistan is on archival projects has pushed me
to collaborate with e.g. the South Asia Resource and Research Centre, an archive in Islamabad. Its founder,
Ahmed Salim, is an important private archivist who is working hard to maintain the material legacies of
Pakistan’s socialist and democratic movements. Without efforts like his, any attempts to build collections of
critical thought from this part of the Global South are doomed.
colonial thought in research and teaching; at the moment, our presentation of it is too tightly
wound up with the identities of individual thinkers (from Pakistan, for example, someone like
Faiz Ahmed Faiz or Eqbal Ahmed). Finally, it pushes us to recognise the at times
contradictory forms that anti-colonialism and internationalism can take. In the period that
Jabal was bring printed, Bhutto - the prime minister that its writers were criticising - was also
criticising US empire and working towards greater Afro-Asian solidarity. Yet, the anti-
colonialism of the BPLF in Jabal and that of Bhutto was qualitatively different, and that
difference is one that is important to parse out.
I.A. On Study Circles, by the Baloch Student Organisation-Azaad

When I first visited university campuses in Balochistan’s capital of Quetta in 2010,
Baloch students were holding public study circles articulating trenchant critiques of the
militarisation of the province and the slow spread of abductions, torture, and kill-and-dumps
in their province. This violence in Balochistan was a direct outgrowth of the state’s
collaboration with George W. Bush after the launch of the American War in Afghanistan in
2001. Bush asked the sitting military ruler, Pervez Musharraf, to abduct and deliver through
extraordinary rendition suspect militants involved in the 9/11 and other attacks; over time, the
Pakistani military expanded this practice to target not just opponents of the US, but critics of
the Pakistani government. As a result of this expansion, these study circles started going
underground, as members of Pakistan’s Frontier Corps stepped up abductions of students
from university campuses. When one of the key groups behind more critical study circles, the
separatist Baloch Student Organisation-Azaad (BSO-Azaad), was banned by the Government
of Pakistan in 2013, its members went completely underground. Today, several leading
members of the BSO-Azaad have been abducted and killed, and its leadership names are no
longer publicly known. The violence against the BSO-Azaad as well as other separatist,
critical Baloch students has increased after a $62 billion Chinese investment in the Belts and
Roads project, confirmed in 2014, which runs through Balochistan.
The violent context within which these study circles operate today make the
methodological and ethical challenges of thinking with them even more difficult than the
ones we face when trying to centre Jabal.
While study circles were possible to attend in 2010, it has become completely impossible
today. When I was carrying out my fieldwork on contemporary state violence in 2016, BSO-
Azaad members met me surreptitiously even for individual interviews. Going with them to
study circles was out of the question, not because (I was told) that I could not be trusted but
because the levels of surveillance was simply too high and the danger of having underground
study circles found out simply too extreme. The study circle as a difficult-to-access but
extremely important site of knowledge production and circulation is an important reminder
that a lot of collective, social thought both today and over the last many centuries has had to
happen outside or beyond the gaze of power, and therefore outside or beyond the realm of
legibility and transparency. The study circle is available to the community that the BSO-
Azaad is trying to mobilise - Baloch students that it trusts politically, students that are
committed to the emancipation and liberation of Baloch thorugh a separation of this province
from the postcolonial Pakistani state - but it is completely unavailable to anyone who does
not fit into this category. It is therefore a reminder that there have and always will be other
networks and other modes of knowing are not always available to us, nor should they be,
since their persistence is dependent on their ability to remain opaque and illegible to power,
including the legibility that is accorded by academic writing.
Again, it is scholars in black studies who I have found most insightful in bringing
attention to the importance of remaining opaque, hidden and underground in order to
continue organising and thinking in the context of white supremacy and ongoing racial
violence. Edouard Glissant (1990) speaks about it in his essay, For Opacity, where he argues
for the right to remain opaque, and for the right to not give an account of oneself. He draws
on existing critiques of knowledge production as a colonial and imperial practice, the purpose
of which is to render the world transparent in order to understand and control it. If that is so,
he argues, then those who are often the objects of knowledge should have the “right to
opacity,” to not be grasped by the gaze strictures of knowledge-makers. Similarly, in The
Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013)
speak about the theory and practice of the black radical tradition as necessarily taking place
away from the gaze of government and academy. Though Balochistan is a very different
context – incommensurable to the black American experience – the insights of scholars of
black fugitivity remind us that communities and movements have been able to organise and
think while under attack precisely because they are evasive, opaque, underground and hidden.
This, however, also means that huge parts of anti-colonial thought remains methodologically
unavailable to us, because it was meant to be inaccessible in order to ensure the survival of
those who developed it and circulated it.
Needless to say, this raises an even bigger, ethical challenge. On the one hand, groups like
the BSO-Azaad are very interested in much of what they discuss to travel out of Balochistan,
for others to be aware of what is happening there and the violence that they are subjected to
on an everyday basis. Many of the conversions that I have had with members like
information secretary Shabbir Baloch, who was abducted in 2016, were about how they can
make other people more aware of the atrocities that the Baloch are facing. On the other hand,
there are certain insights that cannot and should not travel out of the closed communities in
which they take place. Again, we are reminded of the insights of indigenous scholars, and
their theorisations of refusal in research, and the importance to ask: “Who benefits from this
and why?” (Simpson 2007, 78). Even as I write this, I wonder how I can navigate carefully
the limits between what I can make transparent and what needs to remain hidden.
These, even larger, methodological and ethical challenges again raises the question: If
there are all these problems, why look towards hidden and underground study circles? For
this paper, I’d like to argue two points. First, unlike Jabal, the study circle is not a textual site
of knowledge production, and therefore challenges our ideas of thought as only written in
several, important ways, specifically by bringing attention to how social thought is also
embedded in the embodied practice of sitting together and talking, of meeting and forming
friendships. This forces us to perhaps be humbler in our claims about pluralising the canon. It
forces us to realise that decolonisation can at best be a process and not a destination, and
there is much social thought that will continue to elude us as we reconstitute textual
collections of social thought.
Secondly, the study circle was generative of specific concepts. In the case of the BSO-
Azaad’s study circle, one of the most important concepts (which I kept on hearing over and
over again from students who took part in it) was the idea of cultivating a shaoor, nazriyat,
and zameer - a mind, consciousness, and ideology - that could counter the sovereign violence
of the state. As I unpack below, this critical consciousness included the willingness to exit
normative relations of obligation, including towards the family, to dedicate oneself to the
larger battle for the emancipation of Balochistan. In other words, this concept speaks of
critical thought as an internal, psychological disposition rather than just an external critique.
When brought into our debates on decolonising the academy, it forces us to ask: Is changing
the composition of our curriculum and faculty enough, or is decolonisation a far deeper,
internal exercise, which includes cultivating a willingness to exit the academy?
Let me begin with the first point: The study circles draw us again towards recognising
how social thought still happens underground, outside and beyond the gaze of power, in
forms that are far harder to translate. Like Jabal, the study circle brings attention to counter-
infrastructures of knowledge production. Today, it is not possible to write or discuss openly
all critiques of the military on the campuses of for example Balochistan University or the
Bolan Medical College, once sites of fervent student organising; attention to study circles of
the BSO-Azaad are a reminder that collective social thought happens despite the crackdowns
on university campuses, much like Jabal reminded us that writing happened despite the
censorship of newspapers in Pakistan in the 1970s. However, unlike Jabal, the study circle
also draws attention to the relationship between thinking and embodied practice. For several
students who took part in the study circle, what they read and talked about was just a small
part of their political education, of the knowledge that they were given and that they helped
spread. The very act of meeting for a study circle at a time when they are banned - of
escaping from under the nose of parents who do not want their children involved in separatist
activities, of sitting side by side in mixed-gender conversations when coming from a
community where men and women sit apart, of developing political friendships and
relationships of care across the divides of class, gender, and family, of questioning and
debating - was just as important if not more than the content of what participating students
talked about. Ideas were not just an object that they found in texts, that they discussed
verbally, but were embedded in the formation and practice of new political relationships,
specifically the relationships between sangat, a Balochi for friend or comrade.
Take, for instance, Ruzhun. Ruzhun started participating in study circles in Karachi after
she saw protests by Baloch women in front of the Karachi Press Club while heading back
from school one day. She was invited to take part and ended up eventually becoming a
prominent organiser in Karachi. When I asked her about the circles, this is what she said:
The basic… point is… knowledge. How do you get knowledge? You get them
from circles. Our main focus is the circles. Why the circles? So that new members
come and get shaoor [consciousness]. They should become confident when they
talk…
In a circle, in the beginning, a person gives a lecture, and after that… there’s a
discussion. There is questioning, there are arguments, someone accepts it,
someone denies it. Someone accepts it and gives evidence, tells us why they’ve
accepted an argument, when someone denies it, they also give us a reason, tell us
why they’ve denied the argument. So that’s how a mahaul [environment] is born,
an environment of argument… I mean, you get himmat [strength, will] to ask
questions…
… We are a student organisation. Until you have knowledge, until we have

knowledge, we can’t move forward. Student means knowledge, and then struggle,
a struggle for your peace, a struggle for your motherland, a struggle for your
freedom before victory.
In the quote above, Ruzhun speaks about how the study circles becomes a key site of
knowledge exchange, of the making of thinking, organising members for the BSO-Azaad.
What is interesting is that she - and others that I spoke to about the circles - did not speak so
much about what they read, but instead spoke a lot more about how they felt, the friendships
they formed, the habits they cultivated, the way they sat and discussed rather than the content
of what they discussed. In another paper for this conference, Sara Salem (2020) identifies
within affect an alternative to sociology’s centring of empirical data and speaks of the more
elusive terrain of feelings as a kind of theorising, a site where our understandings of the
world are formed and reformed. The felt experience of being in a study circle, of developing
friendships and confidence, of learning how to argue, was for Ruzhun identical to
knowledge-making, to theory-making. The study circle was a small manifestation of a larger
world that the BSO-Azaad wanted to create. In creating new relations, the members of the
study circle were also experimenting with new and transgressive forms of sociality between
different members of the BSO-Azaad.
For Ruzhun, one of the new kinds of relationships she formed was with Reza Jahangir,
the former information secretary of the BSO-Azaad. Her friendship with Reza ended up
completely changing her view of the world and her understandings of what was happening
around her. Her friendship with Reza became, in other words, a lens through which she re-
diagnosed the world she lived in, and reconstituted herself as a political subject dedicated ot
the emancipation of Balochistan:
I met a boy in 2012. His name was Reza, Reza Jahangir. I was a clown type, and
he was a bit of a devil. We developed a very strong friendship… On texts,
Facebook, chit chat…
In 2013 or 2014, August, college was off, and I received a message, that Reza had
been killed. For me, this was a moment of death, a moment where I was ready to
kill someone. Because they had killed the sweetest person. A person who said:
“Ruzhun, study. Ruzhun, there is so much strength in your pen, you don’t even
know it. Ruzhun, we can do anything, we are students, we are young.” He

would explain all this to me…
I really got to know him in the first year. I met his family, his wife, his children.
There was a lot of attachment. But when I found out that Reza had been martyred,
I cried a lot that day. I did not hate the state of Pakistan as much as after Reza had
been martyred. Because I knew he was not a militant. I knew he was not a
terrorist. I knew his fiqh, his nazariyya [ideology]. I knew what he would talk
about in his lectures. I knew the truth about him…
This happened in the month of August. So I went to Urdu Bazaar and bought a lot
of books. About the history of the Kurd. Vietnam. Chairman Mao. And on Baloch
history. I kept on reading. That is when shaoor [consciousness] emerged in me…
My beginning, the beginning of Ruzhun, happened after Reza.
For Ruzhun, the study circle, where she met Reza, produced a deep-seated and viscerally
felt knowledge about the ongoing violence of the state and its effects on everyday life
through the personal loss of her friend, a friend she would not have made were it not for the
site of the study circle. By looking closely at the study circle as another kind of knowledge,
another kind of theory-making, we not only see this site outside of the university, but also
how central the felt experience of taking part in a study circle, of forming relationships of
care and friendship, are in developing a felt knowledge of violence and life.
Central to the study circle, and the experience of taking part in it, was the development of
a shaoor, nazriyat, and zameer - a mind, consciousness, and ideology - that could counter the
sovereign violence of the state. How does centring these three terms, so prevalent among
students who took part in the study circles, contribute to our debates on decolonising
Sociology? What do they contribute when we think through the corpus of theoretical critiques
of colonialism that we, inside Sociology, are trying to centre through decolonial efforts? I am
still working through answers to these questions, but would like to suggest that they bring
attention to the importance of internalising political critiques of power, of allowing it
reconfigure the internal dispositions of those who take part in political movements to counter
power, including colonial and colonised power. Ruzhun, at another point, spoke about how
she understood the importance of giving up normative desires for marriage and a family so
that she could fully dedicate herself to the struggle. It was not enough, she told me, to merely
read the analysis and speak about the struggle for emancipation, it was also necessary to
make changes in ones personal life and in ones personal disposition.
If we were to take these concepts seriously as a theoretical contribution to our critical
debates on decolonial knowledge rather than merely an object of our theorising, what are they
telling us? What would centring these study circles, and concepts like shaoor, nazriyat, and
zameer, bring to our current efforts for decolonising knowledge and Sociology? First, the
study circle reminds us of other sites of knowledge-making and circulation. The fact that
students primarily spoke about the experience of taking part in a study circle, rather than
what was actually said in it, also indicates that there are other ways of knowing - more felt
ways of knowing - that are just as important if we are to understand how people come to
know the violence of colonialism and the violence of power. They remind us also, quite
importantly, of how theory is communicated not just through the content of what is said, but
the context within which it is spoken. If forces us to consider how the mere inclusion of
decolonial texts or the mere hiring of a more pluralised faculty – though very important – is
not enough; the surrounding institution, the classroom, the ways in which we relate to each
other and the relations formed between students and students and teachers, are just as much
part of the decolonial project as the content of what we teach. So, when centres get grants on
decolonisation but fail to support their students when they protest, or when faculty are hired
but are disinvested from existing political struggles and relations of care with their students,
then they are not invested in the decolonial project.
Secondly, concepts like shaoor, nazriyat, and zameer tell us something about the
internalised, affective, and psychological terrain on which political critique must operate. I’d
like to suggest that they bring attention to decolonisation as more than reconstituting our
curriculum and pluralising our faculty; they speak of decolonisation, anti-colonialism, and
critical consciousness as necessarily an internal disposition which should make us willing to
turn our backs on the neoliberal academy and other normative obligations if that is eventually
what is required of us.
II Undisciplining Sociology?
Can a decolonised Sociology integrate such collective, underground, on-the-run, and
often anonymised spheres of debate and political thought? There are a series of
methodological and ethical challenges that such a move must address, which I have tried to
discuss above at some length, but in this conclusion I’d like to focus on the disciplinary limits
that Sociology – even in its decolonial variations – seems to maintain.
First, we have not sufficiently discussed the relationship between decolonising Sociology
and ongoing movements against colonial and imperial violence. This is despite the fact that
critiques of colonialism initially came out of the heat of struggle, eventually becoming an
academic though still politicised enterprise, especially in the humanities. In an important
intervention into this debate, Julian Go (2016) calls for a deeper conversation between
postcolonial theory and Sociology, which has for too long been separated within the academy.
In the book, Go reviews the waves of critiques of colonialism, identifying postcolonial theory
as a second wave that followed the first wave of anticolonial theory with writers like Frantz
Fanon and Amilcar Cabral. What I’d like to bring attention to via this article on movement
thought is that the first wave of anti-colonial theory was far more embedded in ongoing
political struggles, whereas the second wave (postcolonial theory in the humanities) was
often quite critical, turning its back on existing political movements. One of reasons for this
was a frustration with what postcolonial theorists saw as teleological ideas of progress they
felt remained embedded in Marxist movements active in many postcolonial states. As David
Scott argues, “Postcolonial theorists have made a considerable name for themselves by
criticizing their predecessors, the anticolonial nationalists, for their essentialism—that is, for
holding conceptions of nation, race, identity, history, and so on that assume … a stable
ground of explication and justification.”5 I’d like to suggest that though their critiques were
important, the decision by postcolonial theorists to distance themselves from anti-colonial
movements in the Global South also marked a break with the first, anti-colonial wave
thinkers’ embeddedness in actually-existing political struggle, in living and breathing
political movements. By bringing attention to movement thought, I am saying that we need to
reconnect with the political movements that postcolonial theorists broke from.
Secondly, when I read about decolonising Sociology, I am vexed by what looks like an
attachment to Sociology as a discipline, including its methods and underlying assumptions of
the shape that social theory takes, and the specific requirements that it must live up to. This
came across to me when I asked a prominent Sociologist, who has been pressing for the
decolonisation of the discipline, whether they would consider alternative forms of social
thought as theory that could be integrated. This Sociologist said that their primary interest
was not in expanding the forms of knowledge admitted into the academy, but in ensuring that
marginalised Sociologists, like WEB Du Bois, was recentred in accounts of the Sociological
canon. As I have said earlier, this is an important project. But it does not escape my notice
that many of the thinkers being recentred in re-canonisations at some point passed through
the northern academy, as individuals who were students or academics, and as writers whose
texts are easily translated. Ahsan Kamal, in a paper prepared for this conference, brings
attention to how the decolonial theory still requires that theory first pass through the
metropole to be accepted as theory worthy of inclusion. He follows this up with arguing for
“southernizing theory,” for centring theory and concepts produced in the Global South for the
Global South, outside or beyond the knowledge circuits of the northern academy. I think his
critique is difficult to read but also very important, because it brings attention to the huge
amount of intellectual labour that remains excluded from the academy even at the very
moments when we are debating a pluralisation of social theory.
As I end this paper, therefore, I’d like to pose the following questions: What would it
mean to continue to keep an eye on what is excluded, even as we move forward in
reconstituting canons within Sociology? What would it mean to see decolonisation as a
process rather than a destination which is complete once our introductory textbooks to
Sociology consists of thinkers of different colours and genders from around the world? And,
to what extent does a challenge to existing and hegemonic ideas of what constitutes social
theory require more than just including thinkers from the Global South—to what extent does
it require us to undiscipline Sociology?
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Un-Disciplining Sociology: Movements As Sites of Thought

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Paper in progress prepared for Colonialism, Anticolonialism and Dissident Sociology

Traditions at American University of Beirut.

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