Syed Sami Raza is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Peshawar, Pakistan. His research focuses on topics of geopolitics, critical IR, and critical legal theory. He is the author of The Security State in Pakistan: Legal Foundations (Routledge 2018).Michael J. Shapiro is Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawai‘I at Manoa, Honolulu, USA. Among his recent publications are Punctuations: How the Arts Think the Political (Duke UP, 2019) and The Cinematic Political: Film Composition as Political Theory (Routledge, 2020).

• Introduction: Politics on Border – Critical Reflections on the Pakistan–Afghanistan BorderlandSyed Sami Raza and Michael J. Shapiro1. Geopolitics on the Pakistan–Afghanistan Borderland: An Overview of Different Historical Phases Rasul Bakhsh Rais2. Of Pious Missions and Challenging the Elders: A Genealogy of Radical Egalitarianism in the Pashtun BorderscapeJan-Peter Hartung3. Legal Sovereignty on the Border: Aliens, Identity and Violence on the Northwestern Frontier of Pakistan Syed Sami Raza4. Security is a ‘Mental Game’: The Psychology of Bordering Checkposts in PakistanMaximilian Lohnert5. Performing the Afghanistan–Pakistan Border Through Refugee ID Cards Sanaa Alimia6. Tribal Women, Property and Border: An Auto-Ethnographic Critique of the Riwaj (Tradition) on the Pakistan–Afghanistan Borderland Noreen Naseer7. Pashto Border Literature as Geopolitical KnowledgeJames Caron8. Writing Stars in the Sky or Decentring the Glocal Discourse of the ‘War(S) on Terror’ through Narratives of Those Displaced Andrea Fleschenberg and Tariq Saeed Yousufzai9. The Moving Border of the China-Pakistan Economic CorridorAlvin Cheng-Hin Lim