War on Terror and Epistemic Violence: Pedagogical Practices and the Construction of Representational Identities

Abstract

The events of 9/11 brought Pakistan under glaring Western scrutiny. The Western academic literature even before 9/11 had been active in constructing Pakistan’s representational identity, but in the aftermath of 9/11 new identities such as failed state, security state etc. continued to proliferate academic literature. Despite the academic turn towards understanding how representational identities are constructed through dominant knowledge structures and academic texts originating in the West, there has been scant research on how non-Western knowledge centres unscrupulously accept Western representational identities as their own. This research will argue that this constructed representation has been reproduced in the non-West by the non-Western intellectuals themselves through their pedagogical practices. The research further argues that the non-West’s dependence on Western intellectual imports are recirculated through pedagogical practices gives rise to epistemic violence. In order to explore the intellectual imperialism of the West and the circulation of its ideas in the non-West through pedagogical practices, this research will examine how the War on Terror, both in concept and practice was circulated by local intellectuals in Pakistani universities. The research will demonstrate how the non-West’s dependency on the Western ideas shapes the pedagogical practices. The research will do so through a critical discourse analysis of the theses published on the War on Terror in the last five years in the top five universities ranked by the Pakistani HEC.