Geo-racial governance or legal exception? Deconstructing post-merger legal developments in Pashtun Land

The 2018 merger of FATA, a colonial remnant in northwest Pakistan, with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa was celebrated as a step toward ending the region’s legal and political marginalization. This article critically examines whether post-merger legal reforms have substantively altered the state’s mode of governance in Pakistan’s Pashtun borderlands. Drawing on Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis, theoretically informed by Foucault’s concept of governmentality and Agamben’s theorization of the state of exception, we examine two post-merger legal developments: the Actions (in Aid of Civil Power) Regulation 2019 and the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Mines and Minerals Bill (2025). Our analysis shows how these legal texts institutionalize a state of exception that racializes Pashtun bodies as potentially criminal and dispossesses them of land through extractive policies. In light of successive waves of Ulasi Pasoon (people’s uprisings) (2024–2025), this article argues that the state extends its internal colonial project in Pashtun Land through the operationalization of necro-legal technologies, to create bare life conditions and transform the region into a resource colony.