Epistemological Positioning of Human Geography towards Understanding Borderlands Geographies of Pakistan

Abstract

This research emphasizes the interdisciplinary approach of Human Geography and Peace and Conflict Studies (PCS) scholarship for developing the conceptual understanding of peace of borderland geographies of Pakistan. A contextual understanding has been developed by elaborating the epistemological positioning of Human Geography for exploring the research questions pertaining to defining, conceptualizing and problematizing peace. The Human Geography discipline has provided theoretical, methodological and conceptual support to this research through the poststructuralist mode of inquiry to understand the nature of knowledge, ways of production and dissemination, and the binary and representational aspects manifested in the knowledge generation leading to the identity formation of borderlands of Pakistan. On the same token, critical geopolitics has helped in exploring representations, processes and rhetoric. This study has adopted discourse analysis for understanding where power resides in the narratives of borderlands of Pakistan i.e. depicting them as peaceful or violent, prominent and hegemonic knowledge areas and ways of legitimizing knowledge for interdisciplinarity. For the said purpose, secondary data from the relevant peer-reviewed academic journals of the sub-fields of Geography and Political Science and IR as approved by HEC, Pakistan through the HEC Journal Recognition System (HJRS) stretching over time of twenty years (2000-21) has been analysed. The research concludes that the discursive attempts by the interdisciplinary scholars remained tilted towards developing conflict-oriented dimensions of PCS discipline and thereby endorsed violent representations of these borderlands. Also, despite regulation of the knowledge produced, the issue of subjectivities in knowledge construction persisted.