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This study uses Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to evaluate improvements in transportation infrastructure and related urbanization over the last 40 years in Pakistan. In addition, we suggest a definition to measure peri-urban population using the agglomeration index methodology developed by Uchida and Nelson (2008). In doing so, we incorporate a series of GIS data including: travel time rasters, population density rasters and other nationally collected biophysical and infrastructure variables (i.e. roads, railroads, waterbodies) in order to construct measurements of urban agglomeration within Pakistan. We use road and population data from corresponding census years (and government growth rates for more recent population estimates) to model reductions in remoteness to urban areas over time.
Already one of the most urbanized nations in South Asia, Pakistan is projected to have a majority of its population living in cities within three decades. This demographic shift will alter Pakistan’s politics and threaten its stability, but the political and security implications of Pakistan’s urbanization remain underanalyzed. This report examines urbanization as a potential driver of long-term insecurity and instability, with particular attention to the cities of Karachi, Lahore, and Quetta. Drawing on demographic trends, election results, and survey data, the authors conclude that urbanization may fuel anti-American sentiment and help recruitment by transnational Islamist groups (but not necessarily Islamist political parties) in the short term. Urbanization is also likely to increase popular demand for political reform in Pakistan. In the near future, a Pakistani government more directly accountable to its electorate might be less willing to cooperate with the United States in unpopular security policies. In the long run, however, a Pakistani government more responsive to its citizens could be a better security partner for the United States. By spurring Pakistani policymakers to focus on provision of good governance and public services rather than on scapegoating external actors, political reform may eventually help reduce anti-American attitudes.
This open access book draws the big picture of how population change interplays with politics across the world from 1990 to 2040. Leading social scientists from a wide range of disciplines discuss, for the first time, all major political and policy aspects of population change as they play out differently in each major world region: North and South America; Sub-Saharan Africa and the MENA region; Western and East Central Europe; Russia, Belarus and Ukraine; East Asia; Southeast Asia; subcontinental India, Pakistan and Bangladesh; Australia and New Zealand. These macro-regional analyses are completed by cross-cutting global analyses of migration, religion and poverty, and age profiles and intra-state conflicts. From all angles, this book shows how strongly contextualized the political management and the political consequences of population change are. While long-term population ageing and short-term migration fluctuations present structural conditions, political actors play a key role in (mis-)managing, manipulating, and (under-)planning population change, which in turn determines how citizens in different groups react.
Pakistan’s presence in the outside world is dominated by images of religious extremism and violence. These images—and the narratives that interpret them—inform events in the international realm, but they also twist back around to shape local class politics. In The New Pakistani Middle Class, Ammara Maqsood focuses on life in contemporary Lahore, where she unravels these narratives to show how central they are for understanding competition and the quest for identity among middle-class groups. Lahore’s traditional middle class has asserted its position in the socioeconomic hierarchy by wielding significant social capital and dominating the politics and economics of urban life. For this traditional middle class, a Muslim identity is about being modern, global, and on the same footing as the West. Recently, however, a more visibly religious, upwardly mobile social group has struggled to distinguish itself against this backdrop of conventional middle-class modernity, by embracing Islamic culture and values. The religious sensibilities of this new middle-class group are often portrayed as Saudi-inspired and Wahhabi. Through a focus on religious study gatherings and also on consumption in middle-class circles—ranging from the choice of religious music and home décor to debit cards and the cut of a woman’s burkha—The New Pakistani Middle Class untangles current trends in piety that both aspire toward, and contest, prevailing ideas of modernity. Maqsood probes how the politics of modernity meets the practices of piety in the struggle among different middle-class groups for social recognition and legitimacy.