Report: Zolaikha Anwar, Shama Naqvi and Naila Bilqees

The post-insurgency landscape of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the Pakistan–Afghanistan frontier has evolved into a complex discursive field where governance, identity, and militarisation converge. The reports and reflections by Abdul Rahim (Frontier Times, 12 March 2022), Farzana Ali (Daily Mashriq, 27 May 2021), Khalid Mehmood (The Frontier Post, 8 August 2020), Nadia Khan (Tribal News Network, 16 November 2021), Imran Ullah (Dawn Peshawar Bureau, 4 February 2023), Shireen Afridi (Express Tribune, 19 September 2020), Salman Wazir (Daily Aaj, 22 July 2021), Bushra Ghafoor (Khyber News, 30 October 2022), Asadullah Jan (The News International, 18 April 2024), and Gulalai Wazir (HumSub Blog, 7 June 2023) collectively illuminate a transformation far deeper than mere counterinsurgency. Their writings — each distinct in linguistic register and ideological orientation — exhibit the emergence of what Foucault would identify as governmentality through militarised discourse, a condition where authority functions not through overt coercion alone but through cognitive domestication and discursive normalisation of power.

Through Foucauldian conversation analysis, Abdul Rahim’s narrative constructs the Pakistan Army not as an occupying structure but as a producer of civic rationality. His diction reorients the semantics of “rehabilitation” into a lexeme of control and legitimacy, embedding obedience within administrative syntax. The very linguistic architecture of his prose signifies what cognitive linguists term “semantic reframing” — the process through which authority transforms perception by naturalising hierarchy. Farzana Ali’s reportage operates at another register: her syntax reveals gendered securitisation, where linguistic patterns link feminine agency to collective safety. The repeated association of “education” “security” and “counter-radicalisation” exemplifies psycholinguistic conditioning — embedding the idea that emancipation must proceed under surveillance. Both writers, thus, construct a cognitive grammar in which military presence is intertwined with moral order.

Khalid Mehmood’s editorial in The Frontier Post translates economic reform into a discourse of national hygiene. His language recodes “smuggling” and “markets” into metaphors of contagion and cure, implying the army’s intervention as therapeutic. This medicalised metaphorisation is a key mechanism of institutional dominance, as per Foucault’s power-knowledge dialectic — reframing governance as clinical purification. Nadia Khan’s textual style, by contrast, is performative; her linguistic choices — verbs of celebration, participles of movement, nouns of belonging — reveal how securitised culture is aestheticised. Her discourse establishes the army as the choreographer of modernity, converting cultural production into a pedagogical spectacle. In cognitive terms, such lexical configurations engineer associative schemas that equate patriotism with participation and dissent with regression.

Imran Ullah’s analytical piece for Dawn exemplifies the bureaucratisation of language. His syntactical precision mirrors the procedural logic of militarised governance. The frequency of institutional nouns — “committees,” “permits”, “frameworks” — creates a textual rhythm that cognitively legitimises routine surveillance. His discourse mirrors Foucault’s notion of disciplinary inscription, where language itself becomes a medium of obedience. Similarly, Shireen Afridi’s text in Express Tribune deploys moral binaries — “orthodox” versus “modern”, “youth” versus “elders” — that psycholinguistically induce generational realignment. Her article embodies a discursive cleansing in which the youth are cognitively engineered as the bearers of national renewal, aligning social progress with military mediation. This linguistic strategy is central to cognitive framing theory, where metaphoric oppositions shape ideological perception more effectively than factual assertions.

In Daily Aaj, Salman Wazir’s vocabulary of “eradication,” “reconstruction” and “redemption” embodies a quasi-religious lexicon, transforming anti-smuggling campaigns into moral crusades. This rhetorical theology fuses nationalism with sanctity, a discursive move that strengthens the psychological legitimacy of militarised development. His language functions as ritualised reaffirmation, binding the reader’s cognitive empathy with state securitisation. Bushra Ghafoor’s Khyber News reporting advances this moral vocabulary into theological restructuring. Her linguistic substitution of “cleric” with “approved imam” and “madrassa” with “education centre,” signifies a semantic domestication of faith. It is through such terminological engineering that discourse transforms belief systems into administrative categories, creating a Foucauldian continuum between religion, discipline and governance.

Asadullah Jan’s work in The News International manifests linguistic nationalism through phonetic uniformity. His preference for cohesive sound structures and recurring alliteration between “language,” “loyalty” and “legitimacy” exhibits cognitive reinforcement. This stylistic recurrence engrains a subconscious equivalence between linguistic conformity and patriotism. The psycholinguistic effect is a form of national hypnosis — a cognitive conditioning that naturalises linguistic homogenisation as virtue. Gulalai Wazir’s HumSub essay, meanwhile, operates through empathetic subversion. Her lexicon of inclusion — “voice,” “agency” “representation” — extends Foucauldian discourse into feminist reconstruction. Her linguistic framing portrays the military not as patriarchal domination but as an enabling structure, subtly reassigning the source of empowerment from society to securitised authority. The cognitive schema here is one of delegated emancipation: freedom within supervision.

Collectively, these ten discourses reveal the Pakistan Army’s communicative dominance across the cognitive spectrum of post-merger FATA. Each journalist, through unique linguistic manoeuvres, participates in the production of a new epistemic order. Psycholinguistic analysis exposes how their word choices, syntactic architectures, and semantic patterns normalise militarised governance as developmental rationality. Foucauldian conversation analysis identifies a deeper structure—the conversion of power into knowledge, and knowledge into consent. What emerges is an intellectual cartography where governance is not only administered through institutions but also inscribed into cognition through discourse.

In this reconstructed communicative order, the borderlands no longer exist merely as territories but as psychological laboratories of the nation-state. The Pakistan Army, in the language of these writers, becomes both the grammarian and the geographer of identity, scripting loyalty through linguistics and enforcing modernity through metaphor. This convergence of discursive, cognitive, and institutional power substantiates the broader thesis of Militarised Constructivist Institutionalism: that in zones of fragility, governance operates through language before it governs through law.