Alina L. Filimonova

The article examines foreign policy settings that Islamist parties of Pakistan developed during the last three decades of the XXth century. The rise of Islamist forces around the world and the enhancement of their role within the global community, that began at that time, are still going on, in some form or other. In order to better understand this process one will find it beneficial to study the case of Pakistan – the state where Islamists fairly early began to express interest in global politics, having to face rather practical problems in this respect. Pakistani Islamists’ perception of foreign policy was formed at the crosscurrents of two factors under the influence of subjective circumstances, stemming from the specifics of Pakistan as a state. The first factor is the niche occupied by Islamists in Pakistan’s inner politics; the second one is the role ascribed to religion in the development of inter-state connections between Islamabad and the rest of the world. Having determined the contents of these factors as well as their combined influence on the foreign policy perception by Pakistani Islamists, we come to the conclusion that, due to the interdependence between Pakistani authorities and Islamist organisations, the latter focused their attention on the discourses that were in line with official state policy.

The article is dedicated to the foreign policy approaches and principles that were characteristic of Islamist organisations of Pakistan at the end of the XXth century (this, second part of the article, covers the 1988–1999 period). It has been ascertained that the partnership between Islamist forces and the Pakistani leaders, established by both sides in domestic politics, led to a specific perception of foreign policy by Pakistani Islamists, who were pursuing the most compelling topics while at the same time staying in line with the general course set by the Pakistani government. The most significant among these topics are apparently setting Pakistan against India and calling for Pan-Islamic solidarity, of which Pakistan was deemed to be a stronghold. The aforementioned views often intertwined, which is obvious from Pakistani Islamists’ attitude towards the Afghan conflict, their support for Muslim separatism in Kashmir and their contacts with Indian counterparts. The main principle that Pakistani Islamists have been following while developing their approaches towards global politics is formulating foreign policy priorities according to inner policy needs.

The paper discusses issues in the contemporary historiography of the West Punjab region, which now forms the Punjab province of Pakistan. The ethnic specificity of this area has been fully recognized by researchers; however, it is interpreted indifferent ways. To this end, the basic criterion has been the algorithm of “fixing” West Punjab within the general South Asian context. A detailed study of works on Punjabi ethnocultural identity allows us to distinguish two main research approaches: 1) consideration of West Punjab’s peculiarities in view of its ages-old cultural legacy; 2) analysis of its historical path and contemporary place based on the political realities of mid-ХХ–ХХI cc. While the first line of thinking is based on the assumption that West Punjabi culture has been inseparable from that of South Asia, the second one suggests that West Punjab should be considered exclusively as a Muslim-majority area, whose incorporation into Pakistan has been a natural outcome.