Images of Pakistan's future

Abstract

Before we articulate current images of Pakistan’s futures,’ and develop and evaluate five images based on both a literature review and interview+ a brief introduction to the ‘futures approach’ to the study of social reality might provide a useful context. A futures view focuses primarily on temporality. But instead of asking where we have been as in historical studies, we ask, where are we going? What are the possibilities ahead? What strategies can we use to realize our goals? How can a particular image or a range of images of the future better help us understand (in the sense of interpret) and change today? Who are the losers and winners in any particular articulation of social time and social space? The futures perspective is initially similar to traditional political analysis in that it begins with an exploration of economic, international and social events and the choices made by actors that make these events possible. However, the futures view also attempts to place events and choices within a historical dimension; that is, the larger and deeper structures that make these discrete events intelligible, such as core-periphery, urban-rural, gender, caste, and macro patterns of social change. The futures view also takes seriously the larger meaning system or the epistemological ground plan of the real as embedded in language that constitutes events and structures. That is, the poststructural perspective.3 Unfortunately, most efforts to understand the future remain situated in the empiricist-oriented predictive mode. It is often asked, what and when will a particular event occur and how can we profit or increase our power from a specific prediction? Strategic analysts and economists claim to excel at this task. However their analysis does not aid in creating alternative futures or in understanding deep social structures or epistemic discourses. Rather these strategic efforts merely inscribe power in modern Western theories of the state and the individual. These strategic predictive efforts not only recreate the present of modernity but they also