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2009 34: 249Alternatives: Global, Local, PoliticalCathy Elliott

DevelopmentThe Day Democracy Died: The Depoliticizing Effects of Democratic

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The Day Democracy Died:The Depoliticizing Effects ofDemocratic Development

Cathy Elliott*

The current fashion for good governance and promoting de-mocracy as an integral element of development is ironically havingdepoliticizing effects because of its articulation with a techno-cratic and Westernized vision of what a good society might be like.Proceeding empirically and using texts relating to the assassina-tion of Benazir Bhutto, this article demonstrates how discoursesof democracy and development are mobilized in the contempo-rary international space, enabling the discursive taking of sides:

for democratic development and against Islamic extremism,in ways that elide other possible modes of seeing. Democraticdevelopment constitutes, and is constituted by, a Western (andBritish) identity in ways that are seductive, but also disciplinary:In particular, they turn out to produce and reproduce a partic-ular set of gender relations as well as exhorting British Muslimsto fit in with this identity. This exclusionary logic also trans-poses struggle over these power relations into an undemocraticinternational space. One key consequence of its mobilization is

precisely the closing down of space for political resistancethrough democratic means, which I argue is not only ironicallyhighly undemocratic, but also dangerous. KEYWORDS: democra-tic development, democracy promotion, depoliticization, tech-nocracy, Pakistan, Bhutto

Writing on 18 September 2001 about the recent iconic terrorist at-tacks, Martin Amisa laureate of violence, extremisms, and mascu-linitiessuggested that: Weirdly the world suddenly seems bipolar.

All over again the West confronts an irrationalist, agonistic, theocratic/ideocratic system.1 The British media coverage of Benazir Bhuttosassassination in Pakistan in December 2007, and the broader public

Alternatives 34 (2009), 249274

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*School of Public Policy, University College London. E-mail: [email protected]

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discourse surrounding it, provide a neat encapsulation of this bi-polar2 paradigm in the way that they present and constitute the Westand its supposed Other, here represented by a stylized Pakistan.

Both Bhutto and the democracy she came to symbolize are conspicu-ous by their absence in much of the coveragenot merely dead, butalso murderedand Islam is associated with threats to all that theyrepresent. Readers and viewers are regularly asked to condemn Is-lamic extremism and to come down on the side of democracy, whiledemocracy itself is portrayed as a Western concept, fragile and alienin a Pakistani, Islamic context.

The UK Sunnewspaper3 rarely devotes space to foreign policy,and its extensive coverage of the assassination, including that days

headlineThe Day Democracy Died4is representative of the waythis event captured the public imagination. It is furthermore sympto-matic, and constitutive, of a broader discursive formation, in whichtaking sideswith democracy and, by implication, against Islamic ex-tremism, is popularized and politically mobilized within an interna-tional, textual space.

In this article, I am particularly concerned to show how the siteof contemporary international relations, especially between theUnited Kingdom and Pakistan, is constituted by a complex textual-

ization that depends on variations on this bipolar paradigm. I will usediscourse analysis to examine texts surrounding a moment of up-heavalthe assassinationquestioning how, in a world where there isincreasing consensus over the value of democracy, the realm of thepolitical is increasingly devalued and sidelined, because of discursivepractices that construct political issues in a technocratic way. Follow-ing a brief section on methods, I will begin by using the empirical ex-ample of the controversy over how Bhutto actually died to argue thatthe play of power, the contestation, and resistance, the competing

claims to truth, which underpin our discursive and representativepractices, are the very stuff of politics: crafting identities, distributingresources and creating the accepted truths, the norms, values, andrules that enable (and complicate) our lives together. Having madethis case, I will look at how discourse operated in practice at the timeof this event. What will emerge from these close readings is a series ofbinary oppositions that tend toward an organized system of differ-ences5: a discursive formation I will call democratic development. Pak-istan is generally portrayed as male-dominated, threatening, Islamic,

extremist, anti-democratic, backward, and barbarous. At the sametime, the West is constructed as gender-equal (within certain largelyinvisible limits), measured, secular, moderate, democratic, modern,and civilized. Bhutto, with her fragile, gendered body, emerges as afeminized, non-threatening, pro-Western representative of Islamand Pakistan, who is nevertheless characterized by her absence.

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I will go on to argue that this way of looking at the world, in whichdemocratic development is systematically opposed to Islamic extremism,functions as a kind of fighting talk that enables and requires the dis-

cursive taking of sides. I will go on to propose in subsequent sections,however, that by constructing ways of understanding the world thatare binary, this discourse disguises and elides the more complex op-erations of power which always already colonize and inhabit it. Thedemocratic development discourse constitutes, and is constituted by,a Western (and British) identity in ways that are seductive, but alsodisciplinary: in particular, they turn out to produce and reproduce aparticular set of gender relations as well as exhorting British Muslimsto fit in with this British identity. Furthermore, by enabling the co-

option of democracy by one side, contemporary discourse ironicallyrobs us of one of the tools for peaceful, political resolution of differ-ences: democracy itself. I will finally show how the discursive forma-tion ofdemocratic developmentis empirically shaping the internationalspace in which the relationship between the West (especially, for mypurposes, the United Kingdom) and Pakistan is constructed, giving ex-amples of the ways in which it blocks a number of important politicaldebates around issues such as corruption, gender roles, and what itmight mean to be a developed country.

Why Wont Politics Fix Pakistan?

The Financial Timessuggested, at the time of the Pakistani elections inFebruary 2008, that politics will not fix Pakistan.6 This turns out tobe a rather widespread view, which is inextricably linked to concep-tualizations of development. Robert Templer, director of Inter-national Crisis Groups Asia program, for example, stated at a recent

seminar that: What Pakistan needs is governments that are less po-litical and more technocratic [because] it is a country that needs de-velopment.7 The Timescomplain that neither of Pakistans leadingpoliticians seems able to subordinate personal ambition to a credi-ble programme for Pakistans development and expresses a hope fora neutral, technocratic figure8 to emerge. Relatedly, British-Muslimauthor Ziauddin Sardar attacks Bhutto for not completing a singledevelopment project, not even a motorway, thus underlining an as-sumption that development is a technical matter, and that one devel-

opment project is as good as (if not always as difficult as) another.9Thus the technocratic discourse of development plays a part in clos-ing down the processes of contestation and the balancing of priori-ties, which a really democratic system might enable. Meanwhile, thenew government under President Asif Ali Zardari proposes develop-ment as a strategy to manage conflict in the tribal areas, without giv-

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ing any sense of what this might mean,10 perhaps because there is al-ready a consensus on what a good, developed life might look like.Slavoj Zizek puts it like this: It is easy to make fun of Fukuyamas no-

tion of the End of History, but the dominant ethos today isFukuya-maian: liberal-democratic capitalism is accepted as the finally foundformula of the best possible society.11

It is worth bearing this explicitly depoliticized construction ofdevelopment in mind when examining a talking points memo en-titled Election and assassination of Benazir Bhutto [sic] obtainedfrom the UK Department for International Development (DFID). Thememo says surprisingly little about the assassination, but is instead im-plicitly a justification of continuing the UK aid program despite recent

events. It tells a story about Pakistan: 50 percent of the population isilliterate, 1 in 10 children die before their fifth birthday and 24 per-cent of people are living below the poverty line.12 Given the enor-mity of this situation, we may well feel that the important job at handis the difficult, technical matter of how to solve these problems. Poli-ticsand particularly the chaotic, scarcely comprehensible strugglefor power depicted in media coverage of Pakistani politics, includingthe articles cited abovemay seem a distraction and a luxury given aworld of scarce resources and the dire situation in which our fellow

human beings find themselves.So far, so uncontroversial, perhaps. Would we really dare to argue

against DFIDs technical expertise in spending funds that lifted 8million people out of poverty or enrolled three million more chil-dren into primary school?13Yet at this stage it is worth reflecting thatDFIDs practice in Pakistan and elsewhere is in fact unavoidably po-litical, not least in its engagement with the local (until recently, mili-tary) government. Their negotiations will include various politicalissues often subsumed under development including poverty, edu-

cation, health, social protection, womens rights, and even defensespending, none of them uncontroversial. And yet the really puzzlingthing is this: Democracy is a highly salient feature of recent construc-tions of development, as the Zizek quote above underlines. The DFIDmemo not only stresses support to elections, but also justifies its directbudget support for the Pakistani government in terms of account-ability.14 This echoes a broad international commitment to goodgovernance as an intrinsic element of development15voiced both byrespected academic figures such as Nobel prize-winning economist

Amartya Sen16 and by powerful agencies such as the World Bank,17the UNDP,18 and DFID.19Yet if democracy is something that we valueas an intrinsic part of development, surely all these other issues wouldbe considered as rightfully within the political sphere, a matter for de-bate, struggle, contestation, and notas appears to be the current




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assumptiontechnocratic, managerial resolution through the correctapplication of statistics and expertise by neutral figures? How hasthis odd state of affairs come about?

A way into resolving this puzzle has been put in place by the post-development literature, which shows how the discursive formation ofdevelopment profoundly structures global politics.20 This body ofwork allows us to understand development less as a set of technicalachievements, the desirability of which we can all agree on, but ratheras a political project, whose very politicization is elided and disguisedthrough the technical manner of its enunciation. One of the ways thisoperates is the pervasiveness of thinking about some parts of the worldin terms of their lack, relative to others.21As Arturo Escobar shows, the

huge, billion-dollar industry that promotes development around theworld exists precisely because this value judgement is accepted verywidely: For example, former Pakistani military dictator, General Per-vez Musharraf has remarked, We are for democracy, human rights,anything that you have and maybe we dont have.22

The advantage of building on Escobars achievement is that it al-lows us to move our focus away from a set of real technical problemsand toward the politics of representation and textuality that enable usto think, and rethink, those problems. As Michael Shapiro points out:

any reality is mediated by a mode of representation and . . . repre-sentations are not descriptions of a world of facticity, but are ways ofmaking facticity.23 The story DFID tells about Pakistan,24 then,meshes intertextually with development more broadly. It not onlyquotes a body of statistics, it also echoes the huge number of suchfacts and figures we encounter regularly through political speeches,advertisements, and the media.25 This is how discourse works:through the never-ending and interlocking sets of texts that form thefabric of our lives, mutually reinforcing one another, in this case, in a

picture of a developing world characterized by poverty, misery, igno-rance, and death. Pakistan is thus placed firmly within the imaginaryof developing countries, constituted as poor, wanting, in need,Other, obscuring alternative modes of seeing. It becomes the legiti-mate subject of (technocratic) intervention,26 that is, in need ofbeing fixed.

Yet, what alternative narratives about Pakistan might be imagin-able? What are the statistics on street crime, or binge drinking? Howare older people treated? Once we realize how our narratives pro-

foundly constitute the political, including our policy documents, otherinterpretations become thinkable: Pakistan may have some thingsthat we, perhaps, do not. Henceforth, then, when I refer to develop-ment, I will be using the term as a shorthand for the discursive for-mation of development: a whole set of representational practices

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that together constitute the teleological project of promoting similarityto the West, by which I mean an idealized, textualized version of cer-tain attributes of some societies in the geographical West. What these

attributes might be will be traced more fully in subsequent sections;however, it is worth remembering that good governance and thesupposed universality of (liberal) democratic values is an importantelement.27 This cooptation of democracy into the broader develop-ment project is a stultifying move, which radically undermines therole of politics.

Method

In the remainder of this article, I will examine the contemporary dis-cursive formation constituting the UK relationship with Pakistan inthe context of development, showing in detail how this depoliticiza-tion of democracy and development is occurring at the micro levelsof discursive practice, using the Bhutto assassination as a self-containedexample of discourse at work. The period of my study is from October2007 (Bhuttos return to Pakistan) to the February 2008 elections. Iprimarily analyze texts from the British print and electronic media.

One section examines reporting on the cause of Bhuttos death

from across a broad cross-section of British newspapers representingthe range of positions on the narrow mainstream spectrum from leftto right, as well as broadsheets to tabloids. Subsequent sections pro-vide close readings of four newspaper articles and a BBC news broad-cast, all from the week of the assassination. Although these two sectionsalso make some background use of a broader variety of newspapers, allfour articles considered in depth are drawn from the Sun. This is notonly because its tabloid style might be expected to provide a counter-balance to the BBCs more serious tone, but also because it is the

mostly widely read newspaper in the United Kingdom, with on averageover 8 million readers each day.28 Its self-proclaimed political influencemay be overstated, but its enduring popularity and uncanny ability toback political winners demonstrate that it captures the discursive moodof nation. (My assumption throughout is that the media do not formpublic opinion, nor merely reflect it, but rather that there is a dynamicrelationship between the two in which discourse is both produced andreproduced.) Subsequent sections then go on to demonstrate how de-mocratic development is politically mobilized, and here I use a wider

variety of texts, looking not only at the media, but also at politicalspeeches, examples of discourse in action and Benazir Bhuttos ownposthumously published book. This is an interpretive piece of work, inwhich I make no recourse to scientific discourse nor any claim that myselection of texts is representative in a statistical sense.




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It is finally worth stressing that I have concentrated overwhelm-ingly on British sources. As I have indicated, the UK is inextricablycaught up in development and democracy-promotion, and I am con-

cerned to examine the role of the United Kingdom in the postcolo-nial relationship and the construction of British identities and powerrelations. The discursive strategies of the heterogeneous populationof Pakistan are touched on only occasionally and always through themedium of English. A separate discourse analysis of this event from aPakistani perspective would be of great relevance, and would no doubtreveal not only imbrication in a broader international discourse, butalso examples of locally produced resistances and political contestationin the face of power. However, I do not undertake that analysis here.

Was Benazir Bhutto Killed by a Bang on the Head?

If politics are an unnecessary distraction from technocratic problem-solving, then surely studying the politics of representation is even moresuperfluous. Corbridge, in a critique of such approaches, suggeststhat the view that poverty is mainly definitional is thumpingly con-venient for the rich and powerful.29 To put this another way, he en-

gages in two of the preferred strategies of those who have theirdoubts about the constitutive nature of discourse: He is both makingan accusation of political quietism against certain postdevelopmenttheorists and also apparently drawing a bottom line beyond whichmaterial conditions trump the politics of representation. The subjectof my study constitutes in various ways a hard case for those of us whoconversely believe that discursive explanations go all the way down,dealing as it does with both death and furniture, which are theemblems of two very common . . . objections to relativism.30 Fur-

niture here stands for the physical objects, whose obstinate solidity,out there in the world, cannotbe denied31: in this case, the bullets,the sunroof, the blast, any of which may have killed Bhutto. Deathrefers not to her death alone, but also the deaths and associated mis-eries of those who are, definitionally or otherwise, suffering from alack of development: the reality that should notbe denied.32 DerekEdwards and associates have already rehearsed the arguments againstdrawing these kinds of bottom lines.33 For my purposes, and drawingon their work, I argue that the unavoidability of death and furni-

ture in this case actually serves to demonstrate the very usefulness ofdiscursive analysis.

Following the assassination, then, a remarkable controversy sprangup. The Pakistani government, amidst allegations of complicity, statedthat Bhutto was killed by the bomb blast; a claim vehemently denied by

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her supporters in the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), including eye-witnesses, who insisted that she had been shot.34 There was anger anddisbelief not only in the PPP, but also in the British tabloid press, at

the notion that Bhutto was killed by a bang on the head, as theDailyMailput it, describing this as the astonishing official verdict.35 TheMirror likewise describes the suggestion that Ms Bhutto died frombanging her head as bizarre.36 The Sunpithily puts it like this: Theauthorities excuse that she banged her head is as plausible as a re-jected plotline for The Bill[television drama],37 despite having ear-lier published x-ray pictures allegedly of her fractured skull.38

Why did some politicians and commentators appear to careabout the exact manner of her death? The Observer, among others,

proposed that any suggestion that she died because her head was ex-posed to the blast would allow the authorities to insist that she had ex-posed herself to danger, and absolve themselves of charges that theyfailed to protect the leader of the opposition.39 This seems a veryodd argument, however, as surely they would not have been less cul-pable on this account if she had been shot. It seems to me that theanger in the Bhutto camp may rather have been related to the impliedindignity of a death by bang on the head, not to mention connota-tions of clumsiness, and implications of cowardice relating to duck-

ing.40 This is not to suggest that such insinuations are deliberate,simply to note that a bullet might seem the more noble death.41Whythen was the British media so adamant that the authorities version was untrue? Perhaps in the absence of an unmediated, objectivetruth, they were taking sides with the Bhutto camp, and against an un-democratic military dictatorship.

The curious coda to this affair is that Scotland Yard detectives, in- vestigating by invitation, concluded that it was the explosion thatkilled Bhutto.42 There might be at least three bases for disputing their

findings, however, if that is the story one wants to tell. First of all,forensic evidence is an interpretive matter itself, and this week, as Iwrite, another in a long line of convictions has been overturned in theUK on the basis of changing interpretations of scientific evidence.43

Second, no postmortem was carried out, and British officers wereworking with evidence provided to them by the Pakistani authorities.44

Third, a number of eyewitnesses claim to have seen bullets actually hit-ting Bhutto or to have seen obvious bullet wounds on her body afterdeath.45 This might appear something of a predicament for anyone

wanting to appeal to scientific fact or common-sense evidence ofones own eyes. Who is to say whether the forensic evidence was ade-quate, or tampered with, or correctly interpreted? Who is to say thatthe eyewitnesses are liars, or mistaken, or driven mad with grief? Even




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in this clear-cut case of death and furniture, how do we decide whoseversion of the truth to accept, and with what consequences?

The hoots of derision were not reprised in the British press,46 and

even Bhuttos widower used the old rhetorical trick of changing thesubject.47 In this, surely, both press and politicians are tacitly ac-knowledging that truth is a practical matter.48 British journalistsmay want to take the PPPs side, but not at the price of underminingScotland Yard and their technologies of truth; the PPP, meanwhile,turn to focus their discursive resources on the Musharraf regime.

Bearing this in mind, consider Escobars definition of a discur-sive practice: It sets the rules of the game: who can speak, from whatpoints of view, with what authority and according to what criteria of

expertise.49 The Scotland Yard investigation shows that, howevercontestedly, the British detectives had the power to give a definitiveaccount of the truth. Yet what do their authority and criteria of ex-pertise rest on, in a country where not long ago the British were thecolonizers, and furthermore where Britain has by no means been po-litically neutral in recent years, but rather has supported the militaryregime? Their access to particular technologies and perceived superiorscientific ways of knowing surely accounts for their power/credibility,and that in turn, crucially, derives from the privileged status of the

United Kingdom as developed.The limits of what counts as truth are elastic, contestable, and al-

ways open to debate and resistance;50 even death does not alwaysmean the same thing. However, this does not imply that anythinggoes.51 It is important to note that in any given instance, one cannotchoose to believe simply any story (Bhutto did not die peacefully ofold age, nor was she kidnapped by aliens). Acceptable accounts oftruth depend both upon what sorts of narratives are presentedbythe kinds of people who have authority (eyewitnesses, British detec-

tives)as the facts, and what kinds of stories tend to be believedunder these kinds of circumstances in our society. Discourse is thus asocial institution and we cannot, as individuals, readily think beyondit. This view of truth is influenced by Foucault, who insists on the in-tersection of truth with power.52 Power, then, does not reside withinindividuals (or in putative extra-discursive material resources such asclass or wealth) who then use discourse to entrench it. Rather, individuals are always already inserted into an inescapable web of dis-course. Discourse enables and enforces particular institutionalized

scripts such as class and developmentand relatedly the possession(through socially constructed rules of inheritance and desert) of cer-tain types of rocks or printed pieces of paper (wealth)53as a differ-ential positioning in the field of power/truth. Whatever the merits of

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Corbridges specific argument,54 then, the stakes of the politics of thedefinitional are high and inescapable: Discourse both crafts identi-ties and distributes resources accordingly.

Let us now turn to tracing in the media the discursive formationthat emerges in texts relating to the assassination.

The Other Without: Constructions of Pakistan

A recurring theme is the notion that Pakistan is the most dangerousplace on earth.55 Pakistani novelist, Mohsin Hamid, writing in theGuardian, however, remarks that this characterization is unfair.56

Admittedly with the benefit of hindsight, it does seem curious: Fearsthat Pakistan would erupt into a civil war, or that the Taliban wouldseize control of nukes,57 seem to be overstated, if not paranoid.58

After the elections of 18 February had taken place, various knowl-edgeable commentators told a different story about Pakistan, notingthat the polls had been relatively peaceful, returned mostly moderateparties and did not even seem to be much rigged.59 The promised de-scent into chaos and the demise of democracy itself had perhaps beenexaggerated.60

What was the function of this characterization of Pakistan? Toanswer this, I want first to draw attention to the ways binary opposi-tions are mobilized. First the Sunasserts that the death of Benazirhighlights how different the East and the West really are, illustrat-ing the point with, Here we say it with flowers, in Pakistan they sayit with fires, as well as remarking the absence of women in scenesof rioting on television screens.61 This is reminiscent of an article bythe same journalist about the first assassination attempt: In thiscountry, if you dont like a public figure you make fun of them.

. . . In Pakistan there are more explosive measures.62 The BBC,63meanwhile, broadcast a collage of images of Pakistan including atleast four burning vehicles; crowds of (often bearded) men wearinglocal dress, shouting, crying, and hitting burning vehicles with sticks;men dragging a body into an ambulance; British troops looking calmwith their sophisticated machinery in Afghanistan; rockets identifiedas nuclear warheads supposedly being launched; and Nawaz Sharif,the leader of the other main Pakistani political party, the PakistanMuslim League (N), barely audible over a chaotic crowd, and possibly

crying. Counterposed is an old photograph of Bhutto at Oxford Uni-versity in Western clothes and a fashionable haircut, and footage ofher in salwar kameezand characteristically light headscarves, wearingmakeup and speaking an educated English. We also see US PresidentGeorge W. Bush and UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown (and, briefly,Musharraf) giving their reactions calmly in quiet surroundings.




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Overall, we have a dangerous, emotional, barely controlled, in-flammatory and often violent masculinity associated with Islam, Pak-istan, and the East. Western (and pro-Western) leaders meanwhile,

are presented as secular, measured, and rational; Western rituals aspredictable, peaceful, democratic, and even joyous (sending flowers,making fun); Western state-sanctioned violence in Afghanistan is dis-ciplined and controlled in comparison to the contiguous (fictional)presentation of Pakistani nuclear warheads. Bhutto emerges from thisas a kind of metaphorical mediator: Clearly pro-Western, and a sym-bol of democracy,64 she is unthreatening in her femininity and thesentimentalization of her role as a mother;65yet she is also unmistak-ably Pakistani and a Muslim. She presents herself in ways that con-

form to Western norms of glamour66 as well as Pakistani norms ofmodesty. It should be noted this third way can be read as reinforcingthe very binary poles that it would seem to disrupt, by restricting ourfield of imagination to these alternatives. It is important to remember,however, that Bhutto is, above all, presented as a lack. The longed-forrecognition of oneself in the Other,67 her ability to represent the rec-onciliation of Western and Eastern values is precisely and explicitlynot only what has been lost, but what has been murdered, necessitat-ing a brutal metaphoric return to Pakistans subordinate positioning.

Pakistan, then, is not just geographically without the boundaries of the West. It is lacking in security and stretchers; the capitalist practicesassociated with glamour (and car ownership) are highly precarious;women are nowhere to be seen (implicitly, without rights) and evenmothers can be targeted; it is without rule-of-law, democracy, peace,prosperity, civilization: In short, it is unlike the West. This makes itboth dangerous and in need; it is therefore constituted as a subject forintervention.68

The Other Within: Defending the West

Meanwhile a similar set of binary oppositions is at play in the preoccu-pation that Pakistans politics will be played out on British streets.69

Again in the Sun,70we read that our boys (the British military) in Af-ghanistan symbolically launched a devastating blitz on a sick knees-up [to] celebrate Benazir Bhuttos murder. The subsequentdescription is much more violent than anything we read about rioting

in Pakistan: The weaponry includes mortars, heavy machine guns,and a rocket . . . designed to stop Soviet tanks. The ragtag rev-ellers stood no chance against British heroes. Whatever the (undis-closed?) military justification for this apparently (representationally)disproportionate show of force, the article itself displays no queasiness when a (commanding) British soldier grinned at the denouement

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and implicitly defends it by saying, It must have had quite a detrimen-tal effect on their morale. Celebrating Bhuttos murder clearly putsthe fanatics on the wrong side, and lest we be in any doubt they are

also named in this 200-word article as Taliban (four times), evil,terrorists (twice), and bloodthirsty (twice). In the absence of anycontextual explanation, we are left to imagine what, other than theknees-up celebration, they may have done to deserve the characteri-zation. This vignette is an intervention into the politics of representa-tion, which underlines the symbolic, textual importance of theassassination. With its intertextual narrative of heroes and villains, goodtriumphing over evil, it reads like propaganda for a conflict in whichmorale is an important resource. The evil terrorists are of course

feared and attacked not because of their activities in Afghanistan, butbecause of the threat they pose to the United Kingdom.

Terrorism and other sorts of violence are by no means illegiti-mate sources of anxiety; however, the politics of representingre-producing, but also producingfear is complex and deserving ofsome attention. In the British press, fear of terrorism frequently dove-tails with pernicious Islamophobia. The Sun finds no shortage ofbearded clerics and other Muslims in Pakistan who can be calledupon to denounce democracy, threaten to blow themselves up, or ad-

vocate violent jihad against the West,71 and this arguably stokesthe fear of Muslims generally, particularly when one such intervieweeis found to have been booted out of Britain,72with all the impliedthreat to Muslims in the United Kingdom that this contains. This nar-rative intersects with a huge array of stories about fanaticism, Islam,and terror too numerous to cite.73

However, the discursive struggle with Islam also takes place overthe always-contested terrain of womens bodies. The Sun describestwo faces of womanhood now struggling for the soul of Pakistan.74

One (Shebana) is described as the modern face of Pakistan andengages in various capitalistic (developed) practices, such as workingin an office, eating at Pizza Hut, and watching Angelina Jolie films.She is pretty, wears a figure-hugging sweater, and has male andfemale friends. She is also pictured. The other woman is one of thestick-waving girls in burkas who formerly attended the Red Mosquein Islamabad; dreams of being a martyr for Islam; faces a life behindclosed doors looking after her husband; and eats simple meals(note the denial of consumerist practices). She declined to be photo-

graphed. What is particularly significant about this is that both of thesestylized representations of women are somewhat transgressive by localstandards.75Although there is a small, liberal middle class and a greatdiversity of attitudes, Pakistan is on the whole a conservative country




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where pre-scripted gender norms do not generally include wearingfigure-hugging clothes nor waving sticks and engaging in violence.The article is addressed to a UK audience, and its discursive force

in a context in which Sunjournalists castigate British Muslim womenwho choose to dress like a dalek76serves to shore up Western gen-der norms and construct the UK status quo (under the proxy of She-bana, the idealized picture of modernity) as enviable. Let us note,though, that the UK context is arguably hardly one of perfect genderequality (although this is by no means a claim to equivalence betweentwo very different contexts). The article itself enacts this inequality,perpetrating the dual degradation of implying to (female) readersthat women are mainly of note in terms of what they look like, how

they dress, and whether they are available to men, and also giving(male) readers (yet more) access to womens bodies.

Thus, in representations of the assassination and its aftermath, thepress construct a set of oppositions between radicalism and moderation;extremism and secularism; the East and the West. Furthermorede-spite the ever-present specter of Pakistans nuclear arsenalsuperiortechnology and capitalist consumption tend to be enjoyed by thosewho are moderate and Western. All these texts can be interpreted asdisciplining British Islam; they also contribute to constructions of what

the West is and should be like, asserting a (more or less coherent) setof values and attributes with which British people, particularly Mus-lims, are repeatedly asked to fit in, mainly by virtue of not being as-sociated with fanaticism of the various sorts presented here.77

Are You with Us or Against Us?Fighting Talk in a Bipolar World

As we have now seen, in contemporary discourse Pakistan is con-structed as undeveloped, undemocratic, and extremist, whereas theWest (particularly the United Kingdom) is portrayed as developed,democratic, modern, and secular. Not all of these elements map ex-actly onto the historically constituted dichotomy between developedand developing countries, but they are influenced by this lens (as therepresentations of technology and consumerism particularly under-line), and they also serve to reproduce and reconstruct it. As such,they are articulated, in the punning senseboth of meaning-making

and of linkinginfluentially suggested by Laclau and Mouffe.78 Thiscomplex articulated formation temporarily and contingently fixes themeaning of development, as well as apparently divid[ing] the politi-cal space into two antagonistic fields.79 Not forgetting the importance

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of good government and democracy in constructions of develop-ment, I will use the phrase democratic development80 as a short-hand for this articulated formation.

Tellingly, Bhutto was herself an advocate of democratic develop-ment.81 She explicitly states: Democracy needs support. The bestsupport for democracy can come from other democracies.82 In acontiguous passage, she argues that programs to help fellow humanbeings should be viewed not as charity but rather as an invest-ment.83Whereas this invocation of the development discourse con-stitutes Pakistan as already a subject for intervention,84 the emergingformation of democratic developmentwith its ever-present shadowyOthers of terrorism, extremism, Pakistan as the most dangerous

place on earthimplies for that symbol of democracy, BenzairBhutto, the discursive resource to demand various sorts of support, tobe the privileged instrument of Western developmental intervention.Meanwhile Gordon Brown calls Bhutto a symbol of . . . modern Is-lamic democracy, going on to invoke her gender and arguing thatwe must . . . recognise that a society that allows womens voices to beheard is more likely to be a society of tolerance and compassion where violence has no place.85 This articulates hegemonic and es-sentialist gender norms, parasitic on womens roles in nurturing and

care, instrumentally with newer concerns: Our resolve that terroristswill not win.86 David Miliband also mobilizes the notion of democ-racy to garner support in their struggle against terrorism: Democracyis the only viable way to contain the growth of extremism, militancyand fanaticism.87 It is important to note here that none of thesepoliticians are articulating subjects88with the power to fix meaningonce and for all. They are rather tacticians, drawing on a discursiveformation that is historically constituted and exceeds them. They useit productivelyeven as it positions them as subjectsto build al-

liances, identify common enemies and develop a kind of fightingtalk. As Mottier argues, the use of binary oppositions enhances dis-cursive capacity for mobilisation.89 This culminates after the assassi-nation when Bilawal Zardari Bhutto, Benazirs eldest son, asks othersto take sides with him, avowing that: Democracy is the best revenge.90

The articulation is (for the moment) remarkably effective andstable: It unites as diverse subjects as politicians in a Labour govern-ment, the Sunnewspaper, various very different feminists, and advo-cates for womens rights91 and British moderate Muslims.92 It is also

telling that (some forms of) resistance are expressed using the termsof the articulation: Bill Leckie, also in the Sun(though rather a lonevoice), firmly disputes the link between promoting democracy andfighting terrorism, yet still comes down in favor of doing both (justnot in Pakistan). He also frames his opposition with an intertextual




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echo of an old argument against aid/development: Democracy [likecharity] should begin at home.93Where Bhutto is occasionally criti-cized after the assassination, it is also generally through this lens of

democracy.94 This appropriation of the articulated categories of de-mocratic development, even in arguments that oppose the consensus,suggests that we are dealing with something approaching a hegemonicformation.

Laclau and Mouffes early work actively advocates the consciousforging and hegemonization of articulated chains of equivalents be-tween the different struggles against oppression.95 They are also seem-ingly unapologetic about the potentially bipolar nature of this struggle.Despite their insistence on the inevitability of diversity and plural-

ity in any discursive system,96 they give the impression that there areonly two possible directions in which an articulation will emerge: itwill go to the Left or the Right.97 Laclaus more recent work, how-ever, makes it clear that these chains of equivalencesby now con-ceptualized as chains of demands linked precisely through theemergence of an empty signifier, analogous to the function of de-mocratic development here98are by no means automatically pro-gressive.99 Nevertheless, perhaps the key danger of democraticdevelopment is that it is powerfully seductive for those of us who

think of ourselves as progressive, or on the left (and many, no doubt,who do not), precisely because we would wish to support emancipa-tory projects of democratization, development, womens rights, and soon, as well as wishing to oppose extremism and terrorism. Indeed, inLaclaus terms, the seductiveness of this identification enables theconstruction and reproduction over time of a British people fromthese seemingly disparate elements. However, I view this very binarylogic to be dangerous, as perhaps recalled to us in George W. Bushsfamous fighting talk formulation: Are you with us or against us? or

alternatively Amiss vision of a bipolar global paradigm (with all theconnotations of psychosis that this includes).

For an example of why this is dangerous, I look at remarks madeby journalist and academic, Anatol Lieven. He reported that in inter-views with Pakistani political activists, including those from moderateparties such as Bhuttos PPP, every single one said that their chiefreason for wanting a democratic government in Pakistan was to tellthe US to go to hell; he furthermore remarked that in light of the con-tradiction of seeing a democratic government being forced to do what

the majority of its supporters oppose (enable US military interventionin South Waziristan), the Pakistani Taliban is seen by an increasingnumber of Pakistani Pashtuns as a legitimate force of rebellion.100 Inother words, by enabling a marginalization of dissenting voices fromthe political resolution of differences in a democratic institutional

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framework, democratic development means that resistance to the over-all hegemonic project can only be mobilized outside the discursiveboundaries of democracy. We are left with a discursive construction of

democracy that is hollowed out of its political content, but this doesnot eliminate the role of politics, of power, it merely sidelines dissentand polarizes conflict. Note that this functions in part by transposingstruggles into a (notoriously undemocratic) international space.

It may be objected here that it is Islamic extremists themselves,in their violent opposition to democracy, who have closed down thespace for the political resolution of differences. I am not disputing thatacts and discourses of terrorism have played their part in the construc-tion of democratic development. Nevertheless, and as many diplomats

know very well, not all extremists are the same, and some may turnout to be fairly pragmatic if brought into dialogue.101 The construc-tion of democratic development as the opposite of extremism invitestwo consequences. First, it renders invisible the possibility of articu-lating (non-state-sponsored) violence simply with criminality. Second,the bipolar construction provides an obvious means of opposing de-mocratic development, which some may have good reason to do: thatis, to be against us. If we ask in whose interests the discursive for-mation of democratic development is operating, it is possible to iden-

tify the subject position of those who advocate a violent interpretationof Islam as not only complicit, but also strengthened by it.

Power and Interconnectedness in a Multipolar World

Laclau and Mouffes observation that subject positions become artic-ulated through discourse, and not the other way around, opens upspace to advocate a wholesale transformation: the crafting of new iden-

tities within a new common sense.102 However, this is unlikely everto emerge by dividing the political space unproblematically in two, asboth these authors demonstrate in subsequent work.103 On the con-trary, it is likely to be shot through with power and subordination atthe micro level, and here it is useful to take seriously Foucaults con-ceptualization of power as all-pervasive and relational, as the multi-plicity of force relations immanent in their sphere [and] the supportthese force relations find in one another thus forming a chain or sys-tem, or on the contrary the disjunctions and contradictions which iso-

late them from one another.104This understanding of how power operatesrelationally, dynami-

cally, establishing multiple connections, and enacting multiple exclu-sionsenables us to look again at the way democratic development isoperating. For example, Gordon Browns previously noted aspirationfor a violence-free society is doubtless to be welcomed, but in this




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instance it is discursively achieved at the price not only of reproducingan essentialized and passive construction of women, but also of advo-cating womens rights because that would make society better for . . .

men (admittedly among others). Meanwhile, self-styled radical femi-nist, Julie Burchill, is able to articulate her admiration of a womanleader and support for freedom and democracy with opposition tothe Islamo-Nazis, an inflammatory formulation in the context ofIslamophobia in the United Kingdom, which is arguably threateningless to al-Qaeda, than to a vulnerable British Muslim community.105

Any discursive formation that depends on a single set of binaryoppositions (left/right, democratic development/Islamic extremism)will tend to elide these discursive micro-tactics of power, but they can-

not be wished away, no matter that we may wish to take sides. Mouffeslater work directly acknowledges that politics is always an ongoingconfrontation, but even here she does not quite come to grips withthe role of power at the micro level.106 In proposing that the aimof democratic politics is to transform an antagonism into an ago-nism,107 she is advocating plurality and contestation, but fails to ac-knowledge the impossibility of this, given the differential positionssubjects always already inhabit in discourse. Also somewhat unsatis-factory is her recent advocacy of a move from a unipolar world, in

which Western hegemony (attempts to) dominate(s) other parts ofthe world, to a more multipolar mode of global life, in which separatehegemonic orders are struggled for in different geographical loca-tions.108 This ignores the ways in which colonizers and colonized areimbricated in one another though webs of meaning, as demonstratedby the wealth of postcolonial theory, which shows the insidious ways inwhich imperial narratives (such as development) still produce dividedsubjects and reproduce colonial stereotypes.109 This is precisely what isat stake when the discourse of democratic development disciplines

British Muslim populations at the same time it seeks to render Pak-istan intelligible. It is as unrealistic to expect a postcolonial world thatis so deeply interconnected in its discursive practices to separate outinto multiple, separate hegemonic poles as it is to engage in an undif-ferentiated, unipolar struggle with fanaticism, in whose creation itssubjects are always already complicit, through the United Kingdomstroubled (post)colonial, developmental relationship with Pakistan,with its antidemocratic military and its training camps for militants.

Democratic Development Without Politics

Burnell perceptively argues that, because they are inextricably linkedwith the processes of political self-determination, the instrumentsand approaches employed in promoting democracy are necessarily

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constitutive of the political relationships that the external actors havewith countries and with different political constituencies within thosecountries.110 Democracy promotion is also constitutive of the UKs

development offer, for democratic development is not only an intrin-sic part of constructions of UK identity, it is also a mainstay of DFIDsapproach, including their preference for budget support, which relieson and supposedly promotes the accountability of partner govern-ments.111 David Miliband recently went further than this, suggestingthat our [aid] investment should be linked to outcomes, includingthe improvement of democratic governance.112As we have seen, the ways in which democratic development makes subject positions, al-liances, articulations, and resources available played an important

role in Bhuttos political identity, and, I suggest, are inextricably linkedwith possibilities for Pakistani democracy, as well as the relationship(or more precisely, the multiplicity of relationships) forged in the in-ternational discursive space, which arguably has no really democraticinstitutions, but which becomes the site of various struggles for power.

The instruments and approaches of democracy promotion arenecessarily discursive. After all, even at the most basic levelBhuttoherself asserted that calling something an election and actually hav-ing an election are obviously very different things113it is not en-

tirely clear where the distinction lies. A successful election is surelyconstituted in a discursively constructed set of rules including repre-sentational means of registering a choice, and the outcome is pro-claimed, accepted, and/or disputed discursively. Vote-rigging, too, isa matter of definition: Is it legitimate to reserve seats for women; to vote on behalf of someone else; to influence the vote of another?These are always political decisions, decided upon discursively and ina context of power.

However, the problem with the depoliticized version of democ-

racy in contemporary constructions is that democracy becomes amerely technical matter. For example, voting systems are put in placeon the basis of Western norms and elections ratified by internationalobservers. The European Unions power to declare the legitimacy ofthe Pakistani election114 is curiously reminiscent of the Scotland Yarddetectives power to pronounce on the cause of Bhuttos death. Mean-while, the Foreign Secretarys proposed links between UK aid and out-comes related to democratic governance extend the scope of potentialsurveillance, as well as lodging the power to decide what democracy is,

what form it should take, in an international, not domestic, space.Relatedly, political corruption is defined according to Western

norms, and meeting anticorruption standards tends to be a conditionof international aid.115 However, various authors argue that the mean-ing of corruption (including, but not restricted to, the meaning of




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vote-rigging) is itself constituted discursively, particularly through theprocesses of contestation through which common purposes, normsand rules are created116 and that it is therefore a political, not a tech-

nical matter.117 Thus, the technocratic monitoring techniques of West-ern development agencies may actually close down the discursivespace in which the often difficult public debate about the meaning ofcorruption, and its complex social causes and solutions might takeplace, thereby eliding the possibility for an anticorruption strategythat has internal legitimacy within the Pakistani political culture.118

Finally, and contrary to what might be assumed, my view is that de-mocratic development puts the struggle for womens rights in particu-lar jeopardy. For example, what are we to make of Taliban militant

Baitullah Mehsuds denial of involvement in the assassination: Wedont strike women?119 This construction of women as outside thereaches of violent struggle is arrestingly close to Gordon Browns viewof womens pacifying role in society. What Mehsud seems to be insti-tuting here is a discursive struggle to re-appropriate the notion ofwomens rights within a conservative Islamic framework; it is also thesort of thing that many Pakistanis, regardless of their views on the le-gitimacy of terrorism, might accept given that countrys rather conser-vative framework of gender norms. This shows how the formulation of

womens rights in constructions of democratic development cruciallygo both too far and yet not far enough. It represents a rather uneasy Western compromise, in which feminist struggles have over time in-deed significantly improved womens discursive and social positioning.However, despite this evidence of the dynamism and contestability ofcultural/discursive systems such as gender, women are without doubtstill subordinately positioned in the West and not least, I would argue,in the objectification and sexualization of our bodies, which the Sunepitomizes. Yet it is precisely this objectification, along with sexual free-

doms, which are not the same thing, that are for now politically un-palatable in Pakistan. Other potential gains for women, such as rightsto education, reproductive health, vote, become prime minister, even arelaxation of the dress code, might be easier to win,120 but I wouldargue that one obstacle to them is the very construction of democraticdevelopment, with its secularism, its gender norms and its consumeristdecadence, all of which make it easier to oppose to Islam. As the vastmajority of Pakistanis are devout Muslims, there is little doubt whichside most will take. It is also important to note that democratic devel-

opment also serves to reproduce and reinforce Western gender normsand roles, and therefore also creates discursive obstacles for Britishfeminists. The relationship between the West (including the UnitedKingdom) and Pakistan is therefore not only produced in part by strug-gles over gender roles, it also, again, becomes the site of those struggles.

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Presumably Pakistani feminists are struggling for a set of identities within a transformed Pakistani gender system to be developed overtime, and historically constituted in ways that make sense in terms of

Pakistans Islamic heritage. To do this, they will require political spaceand discursive resources, which will always and inevitably include theavailable scripts from Western feminism, but may also draw on other,more situated resources. In fact, Bhutto shows just one (contestable) way in which this might be done, with her Quranic justifications of womens rights.121 This conversation will be long and difficult; it willentail a respect for difference and for contestation; it will require poli-tics. One serious obstacle is that, in the depoliticized context of demo-cratic development, as well as in the transposition of this struggle to an

undemocratic international space where both Pakistan and womenare relatively disadvantaged categories, this political space is difficult tofind and easy to oppose in Pakistan and the United Kingdom.

Conclusion:Putting Representation into Democracy

At the beginning of this article, I discussed the puzzling emergence

of a conceptualization of development that privileges democracy yetstill manages to be depoliticizing, showing how this operates througha rather stable (though always contingent) set of scripts that informan understanding of what a developed country looks like in waysthat elide other possible ways of seeing. By tracing the emergence ofdemocratic development as a hegemonic formation, I showed thatdiscourse is constitutive of our political lives, including our identitiesand resources, and is a function of ways of knowing and the power todefine what counts as truth.

I hope that this argument, taken all in all, has demonstrated thatthe difficult questions to do with developmentWho can access ma-terial resources? Under what circumstances? Who has what rights?Who gets to make decisions about the lives of others?revolve aroundrelationships of power, which is always a function of discourse, andthe subject positions that it creates. Any real changes will involve longand difficult negotiations and transformations in prevailing discur-sive formations, in which the outcome is not necessarily fixed in ad-vance and does not necessarily lead to similarity with liberal-democratic

capitalism. This will always take place in the context of the available dis-cursive practices and scripts, the contemporary power relations, whichsuffuse the political.

It is impossible to put a stop to the micro-tactics of power, whichoperate throughout the postcolonial relationships in which we are all




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intertwined: Even to aspire to this aim is undesirable insofar as it wouldentail an apolitical, technologized world of pure administration. Thereare no quick fixes to the (entirely real) miseries created by subjects

differential positioning in a field of power, but the depoliticization ofdevelopment and democracy is surely a step in the wrong direction.The purpose of detailed empirical work that demonstrates the waydiscourse works is a means of understanding the flows of power inwhich we are inevitably caught, an intervention at the level of the sig-nifier, which might help us to unpack and nuance the ways we are ap-propriated by discourse in our relations with the Other, imagine waysin which things might be different, and even develop the tools to ar-ticulate them anew. Perhaps understanding and harnessing the

power of representation is a first step toward repoliticizing our hard- won democracy, wherever we may be positioned, whatever we mighttake democracy to mean. After all, is politics not what democracy is for?

Notes

Research for this article has been supported by a +3 award from the UK Eco-nomic and Social Research Council, whose financial assistance is gratefullyacknowledged. Thanks to David Hudson and Sherrill Stroschein at UCL fortheir very helpful comments on earlier drafts.

1. Martin Amis,The Second Plane: September 11, 20012007 (London:Jonathan Cape, 2008) pp. 89.

2. Ibid., p. 53.3. All newspaper references accessed through Lexis Nexis database in

August 2008 unless otherwise specified.4. Simon Hughes, The Day Democracy Died, The Sun, 28 December

2007.5. Ernesto Laclau and Chantel Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy:

Toward a Radical Democratic Politics(London: Verso, 2001) p. 135.

6. Gideon Rachman, Why Politics Will Not Fix Pakistan, FinancialTimes6, 19 February 2008, p. 6.7. Robert Templer, remarks made at a seminar entitled Pakistan: De-

mocratic Transition on the Rocks (LSE: 18 June 2008). My thanks to Mr.Templer for permission to quote him.

8. The Times, Pakistani Poker, The Times, 20 February 2008.9. Ziauddin Sardar, Outside Powers Have Turned Pakistan Into a Pow-

der Keg, The Guardian, 20 October 2007.10. Simon Tisdall, World Briefing: Pakistans Brief Honeymoon, The

Guardian, 23 April 2008); David Miliband, Dilemmas of Democracy: Work inProgress in Afghanistan, Pakistan, speech at Center for Strategic and Inter-

national Studies, Washington, DC, 21 May 2008.11. Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes(London: Verso, 2008) p. 42112. DFID, Election and Assassination of Benazir Bhutto, internal

memo obtained through Freedom of Information Act, 3 January 2008, p. 4.13. Ibid., pp. 45.

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14. Ibid., p. 3.15. Ilan Kapoor, The Postcolonial Politics of Development(Abingdon: Rout-

ledge, 2008) pp. 2933.16. Amartya Sen Democracy as a Universal ValueJournal of Democracy

10, no. 3 (1999).17. World Bank, Good Governance and Development(Washington DC: World

Bank, 1992).18. UNDP, Human Development Report 2002: Deepening Democracy in a Frag-

mented World(New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).19. DFID How We Fight Poverty: Whats the Point of Voting? DFID web-

site (accessed at http://www.dfid.gov.uk/howwefightpoverty/government.aspon 6 August 2008).

20. Arturo Escobar,Encountering Development: The Making and Unmakingof the Third World(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); WolfgangSachs, The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power(London: ZedBooks, 1992); Majid Rahnema and Victoria Bawtree, The Post-DevelopmentReader(London: Zed Books, 1997).

21. See Kapoor,The Postcolonial Politics of Development, note 15, Chapter 4,for a useful exploration of the Lacanian/Zizekian implications of the politicsof lack for studies of development.

22. Bronwen Maddox, Musharrafs Big Charm Offensive is Charmingand Sometimes Offensive, The Times, 29 January 2008.

23. Michael J. Shapiro, Textualising Global Politics, in James Der Der-ian and Michael J. Shapiro. eds., International/Intertextual Relations: PostmodernReadings of World Politics(Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 1989) pp. 1314.

24. DFID, Election and Assassination of Benazir Bhutto, note 12.25. Escobar,Encountering Development, note 20, p. 213.26. Ibid.27. For a useful survey of contemporary constructions of democracy as a

universal value, and a problematization of this from a historical perspective,see Christopher Hobson, Beyond the End of History, Millennium37, no. 3(2009): 631657.

28. Newspaper Marketing Agency, Facts and Figures, NMA website (ac-cessed at http://www.nmauk.co.uk/nma/do/live/factsAndFigures?newspaperID=17, 5 August 2008)

29. Stuart Corbridge, Beneath the Pavement Only Soil: The Poverty of

Post-Development,Journal of Development Studies34, no. 6 (1998): 141.30. Derek Edwards, Malcolm Ashmore, and Jonathan Potter Death andFurniture: The Rhetoric, Politics and Theology of Bottom Line ArgumentsAgainst Relativism, History of the Human Sciences8, no. 2 (1995): 32, 26.

31. Ibid., p. 26.32. Ibid.33. Ibid.34. Ian Cobain, Fury At Claims on Bhutto Killing, The Observer, 30 De-

cember 2007.35. Fiona Barton, Bhutto Killed By a Bang on the Head,The Daily Mail,

29 December 2007.

36. Daily Mirror, Pakistan Must Vote,Daily Mirror, 29 December 2007.37. Jon Gaunt, Met Team Should Bhutt Out, The Sun, 4 January 2008.38. The Sun, 29 December 2007 (print edition), pp. 45.39. Cobain, Fury At Claims on Bhutto Killing, note 34.




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40. This word is used ubiquitously, but see for example David Wooding,Yard in Bhutto Probe, The Sun, 3 January 2008; Christina Lamb, The Mak-ing of a Martyr The Sun, 30 December 2007.

41. Andrew Buncombe, The Bhutto File, The Independent, 8 January

2008; Matthew dAncona, Pakistans Politics Will be Played Out on BritishStreets, The Sunday Telegraph, 30 December 2007.

42. Declan Walsh, Bhutto Killed By Blast, Not a Bullet, Scotland YardConcludes, The Guardian, 9 February 2008.

43. Andrew Alderson, Police Closed Minds to Barry George Being In-nocent, The Sunday Telegraph, 3 August 2008.

44. Buncombe, The Bhutto File, note 41.45. Ibid.46. Walsh, Bhutto Killed By Blast, Not a Bullet, Scotland Yard Con-

cludes, note 42.47. Isambard Wilkinson, Bhutto Party Rejects Yards Claim That Bomb

Blast Caused Death, The Telegraph, 9 February 2008.48. Edwards, Ashmore, and Potter, Death and Furniture, note 30, p. 36.49. Escobar,Encountering Development, note 20, p. 41.50. Michel Foucault, The Body of the Condemned, in Paul Rabinow,

ed., The Foucault Reader(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991) p. 174.51. Edwards, Ashmore, and Potter, Death and Furniture, note 30, p. 41.52. Foucault, Truth and Power, in Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader,

note 50, p. 73.53. Marieke de Goeke, Virtue, Fortune, and Faith: A Genealogy of Finance

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).

54. With Rist, see Corbridge Beneath the Pavement Only Soil, note 29.55. Daily Telegraph, The Will to Rule, The Daily Telegraph, 31 December2007; Simon Reeve, Robbed of Hope, The Mirror, 28 December 2007; BenazirBhutto, Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West(London: Simon and Schus-ter, 2008) p. 210; Marc Almond, Will Her Nations Hopes Die With Her?The Daily Mail, 28 December 2007.

56. Mohsin Hamid, The Pakistan Election Has Given Me Hope ThatOne Day My Country Can Again Become My Home, The Guardian, 22 Feb-ruary 2008.

57. James Murray, Battle to Seize Control of Nukes, Sunday Express, 30December 2007; Pascoe-Watson, Murder is Setback to Wests War on Terror,

The Sun, 28 December 2007; see also Bhutto, Reconciliation, note 55, p. 79.58. Jemima Khan, The Politics of Paranoia, The Independent(18 Febru-ary 2008); Pankaj Mishra, The Churchill Wannabes Destroy Any Hope ofViolence-Free Life in Pakistan, The Guardian, 8 January 2008.

59. Irfan Husain, Pakistans Judgement Day, openDemocracy.net (ac-cessed at http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/conflicts/india_pakistan/after_pakistans_election on 6 August, 2008); William Dalyrymple, PakistanReborn? The New Statesman(21 February 2008); Hamid, The Pakistan Elec-tion Has Given Me Hope That One Day My Country Can Again Become MyHome, note 56.

60. Subsequent media coverage of Pakistan in the intervening period

has continued to paint a dismal picture of Pakistan. It might be argued thatsome of the current problems facing the democratic Pakistani governmentare the consequence of the depoliticized nature of the democracy that insti-tuted it.

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61. Anila Baig,My Heart Bleeds for My Familys Country, The Sun, 1January 2008.

62. Anila Baig, Pakistan Beset By Violence, The Sun, 20 October 2007.63. BBC, BBC News Bulletin, BBC 1, 1800 on 27 December 2007; vir-

tually identical footage and commentary was used in the broadcasts at 1300and 2225, and almost constantly throughout the day on News 24).

64. Bhutto, Reconciliation, note 55, p. 191; Saira Khan, To Me, She Wasan Icon, The Mirror, 29 December 2007; David Blair The Target, The DailyTelegraph, 28 December 2007.

65. Graeme Wilson and Oliver Harvey, Mother and Martyr,The Sun, 28December 2007.

66. Wilby, Why the Media Love Bhutto; Baig, She Was Pakistan Peo-ples Princess [sic]; Rees-Mogg, William, Now Asia, Too, Has Its Very OwnMarilyn Monroe, all from The Mail on Sunday, 30 December 2007.

67. For more on the Lacanian implications of the politics of lack in de-velopment, see Kapoor, The Postcolonial Politics of Development, note 15, Chap-ter 4.

68. See Escobar,Encountering Development, note 20, p. 42.69. dAncona, Pakistans Politics Will be Played Out on British Streets,

note 41.70. Jerome Starkey, Our Boys in Blitz on Talibans Knees-Up,The Sun,

31 December 2007.71. Oliver Harvey, Bhuttos Son is the Target Now, The Sun, 2 January

2008; Oliver Harvey Its Right Election is Going Ahead, The Sun, 3 January2008; Oliver Harvey, Women Fighting for the Soul of Pakistan, The Sun, 1

January 2008; Oliver Harvey, We Want an Islamic World and Will Use Forceto Get it, The Sun, 31 December 2007; Oliver Harvey, Bhuttos MaskedButcher, The Sun, 29 December 2007.

72. Harvey, Bhuttos Masked Butcher, note 71.73. To tell a statistical story, a search just on the terms Islam and ter-

ror in the UK national newspapers for the five-month period of my study,yielded 1,448 results. (For comparison, a search for the same period on creditcrunch [a key contemporary economic story] and Darling [the UK Chan-cellor of the Exchequer] yields just 373.)

74. Harvey, Women Fighting for the Soul of Pakistan, note 71.75. Based on my anecdotal experience of working in Pakistan and meet-

ing a wide range of women from different social backgrounds.76. A reference to the hijab in John Gaunt, Fawning Over MinoritiesShould be Exterminated, The Sun, 11 January 2008.

77. Note particularly Graeme Wilson, You Should Be Proud to Be Eng-lish, The Sun, 28 December 2007, in the same edition as extensive coverageof the Bhutto assassination and with its accompanying picture of Amir Khan,the British Muslim boxer, draped in a union flag. Other examples include:Patrick OFlynn, How Can This Muslim Leader Say Britain is Like Nazi Ger-many? The Express, 13 November 2007; On Wing and a Prayer,Daily Star, 4December 2007; Jason Groves, Europeans Believe Islam is Dangerous, The

Express, 27 January 2008.

78. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, note 5.79. Ibid., p. 130.80. This is the phrase used by the FCO and British Council for their in-

terventions in democracy promotion in Pakistan.81. Bhutto, Reconciliation, note 55, pp. 123124, 151, 254.




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82. Ibid., p. 307.83. Ibid., p. 306.84. Escobar,Encountering Development, note 20, p. 4285. Gordon Brown, Democracy Must be Benazirs Lasting Memorial,

article circulated in Pakistan and provided to me by the FCO, 27 December2007.

86. Ibid.87. David Miliband, Dilemmas of Democracy: Work in Progress in

Afghanistan, Pakistan (speech given on 21 May 2008 at Center for Strategicand International Studies, Washington). Miliband has lately explicitly advo-cated a move away from talking in exactly this binary way, see Julian Borger,David Miliband expands on criticism of war on terror phrase TheGuardian, 15 January 2009.

88. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, note 5, p. 134.89. Vronique Mottier, Sex and Discourse: The Politics of the Hite Re-

ports, in Terrell Carver and Matti Hyvrinen, eds., Interpreting the Political:New Methodologies(London: Routledge, 1997) p. 47.

90. Declan Walsh, My Mother Said Democracy is Best Revenge, TheGuardian, 31 December 2007.

91. Joan Smith, Bhutto Was Silenced for Being Visible and Modern,In-dependent on Sunday, 30 December 2007; Julie Burchill, I Wasnt Shocked ByBhuttos Death, The Sun, 2 January 2008.

92. Saira Khan, To Me, She Was an Icon, The Mirror, 29 December2007; Tom Carlin and Shekhar Bhatia, Petals and Tears At Grave, The Peo-

ple, 30 December 2007.

93. Bill Leckie, Bhutto Claim Is Wrong, The Sun, 1 January 2008.94. Simon Jenkins, The West Has Not Just Repressed Democracy, TheGuardian, 9 January 2008; William Dalrymple, Pakistans Flawed and FeudalPrincess, The Observer, 30 December 2007; Robert Kellaway, Tainted Legacy,The News of the World, 30 December 2007; Yasmin Alibhai-Brown,Born toRuleand Not Just in Pakistan, The Independent, 31 December 2007; Isam-bard Wilkinson, Pakistan Falling Apart, Warns Bhutto Heir, The Daily Tele-graph, 9 January 2008.

95. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, note 5, p. 176.96. Ibid., pp. 191, 184.97. Ibid., pp. 159177.

98. Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason(London: Verso, 2005), Chapter 4.99. Ibid., pp. 238, 246.100. Anatol Lieven, remarks made a seminar entitled Pakistan: Demo-

cratic Transition on the Rocks, London School of Economics, 18 June 2008.My thanks to Professor Lieven for permission to quote him.

101. Henry McDonald We Can Persuade the Taliban to Be Peaceful,The Guardian, 16 February 2008.

102. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, note 4, pp. 183184.103. Laclau, On Populist Reason, note 98, Chapter 5; Chantal Mouffe

Democracy in a Multipolar World, Millennium, 37, no. 3 (2009): 549561.104. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (Harmondsworth:

Penguin, 1979), pp. 9293, my emphasis.105. Burchill, I Wasnt Shocked By Bhuttos Death, note 91.106. Chantal Mouffe, Deliberative Democracy Or Agonistic Pluralism?

Social Research66, no. 3 (1999): 755; Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox(London: Verso, 1999) pp. 13, 102103.

Cathy Elliott 273



27/27

107. Mouffe, Deliberative Democracy Or Agonistic Pluralism? note106, p. 755.

108. Chantal Mouffe, Cosmopolitan Democracy or Multipolar WorldOrder? Soundings 28, no. 13 (2004); Mouffe Democracy in a Multipolar

World, note 103.109. Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1995); Escobar, En-

countering Development, note 20; Kapoor, The Postcolonial Politics of Development,note 15, pp. 69. It is also instructive here to consider the notion of hybrid-ity explored by Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture(Oxford: Routledge,1995), which suggests that discursive identities in a postcolonial world are al-ways already intertwined.

110. Peter Burnell, From Evaluating Democracy Assistance to Apprais-ing Democracy Promotion, Political Studies, 56, no. 2 (2007): 421.

111. DFID, Election and Assassination of Benazir Bhutto, note 12, p. 3.112. Miliband, Dilemmas of Democracy: Work in Progress in Afghanis-

tan, Pakistan, note 87.113. Bhutto, Reconciliation, note 55, p. 231.114. European Union, Preliminary Statement: Pakistan Holds Compet-

itive Elections, Despite Significant Problems With the Election Frameworkand Environment (accessed at http://www.eueompakistan.org/ on 15 August2008).

115. Mlada Bukanovsky, The Hollowness of Anti-Corruption Discourse,Review of International Political Economy13, no. 2 (2006): 190; DFID, Electionand Assassination of Benazir Bhutto, note 12, p. 3.

116. Mark E. Warren, What Does Corruption Mean in a Democracy?

American Journal of Political Science48, no. 2 (2004): 328.117. Bukovansky, The Hollowness of Anti-Corruption Discourse, note115, p. 184.

118. Kapoor, The Postcolonial Politics of Development, note 15, p. 32.119. Lamb, The Making of a Martyr, note 40.120. See DFID, Gender Equality Project: Project Completion Report,

2006 (available under the Freedom of Information Act): 35.


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