Antonio Gramsci’s Southern Question concerned the political relations through which Italy’s southern peasantry remained subordinated within an unequal national order. His argument for an alliance between northern workers and southern peasants emerged from an analysis of these relations and the political conditions necessary to transform them. In Pakistan, disagreements within the Left over political alliances increasingly concern the relationship between anti-imperialism, national sovereignty, geopolitical alignments and struggles against class domination and authoritarian power. The newly established programme The Southern Question, bringing together anthropologist Adeem Suhail, LUMS scholar Ameem Lutfi and Haqooq-e-Khalq Party general secretary Ammar Ali Jan, has become a site of these disagreements, featuring pointed criticism of intellectuals characterized as left-liberal. This confrontation extends beyond disagreements over political strategy to questions concerning the legitimacy of competing political traditions, the place of popular struggles within internationalist politics, and whether opposition to imperial domination can be separated from opposition to the coercive institutions and social hierarchies through which states exercise power.
In the programme’s discussions, contributors express a preference for engaging sections of the Right on global politics rather than so-called left-liberal intellectuals concerned with ethnicity, borders and social antagonisms. They accuse much of the Left of lacking a theory of change and substituting academic criticism for political organization. The language of political “defeat” is itself ideological, reducing the history of the Left to winners and losers while obscuring state repression, class antagonisms and the conditions under which movements organize. The issue is not engagement across ideological lines, but how agreement over geopolitical sovereignty becomes a measure of political seriousness while competing positions become objects of suspicion. In the manner of Carl Schmitt’s friend–enemy distinction, the programme constructs imaginary enemies out of so-called left-liberal intellectuals, many of whom emerge from the very intellectual and social milieu its contributors inhabit. The construction of this suspect outsider serves to delegitimize political disagreement, discredit competing intellectual traditions and consolidate a growing Maoist orthodoxy within sections of Pakistan’s Left. Meanwhile, the contributors and the political formations they represent evade equivalent scrutiny of their own organizational practices, political alliances and claims to success.
The Southern Question’s invocation of foreign interference reproduces the conspiratorial logic of the outside-agitator trope, historically deployed by American segregationists to discredit the civil-rights movement. This reasoning has long served the political Right by attributing popular resistance to hidden external forces rather than the social relations and structures of domination against which people organize. Its significance lies in how allegations of foreign manipulation become substitutes for explaining political dissent, transforming struggles against dispossession, repression and authoritarian power into threats to national sovereignty. The convergence with right-wing politics does not require an identical political programme. It emerges through a shared suspicion of dissent, the privileging of state authority over popular political agency, and the treatment of opposition as evidence of foreign subversion. In reproducing this conspiratorial framework, the programme risks legitimizing precisely the forms of repression that authoritarian states routinely justify in the name of national security.
The issue is not engagement across ideological lines, but how agreement over geopolitical sovereignty becomes a measure of political seriousness while competing positions become objects of suspicion.
The programme caricatures an ill-defined category of Western-trained, left-liberal intellectuals as scholars who would respond to imperial bombardment by reading Michel Foucault or Giorgio Agamben rather than confronting the material conditions of war. This dismissal is particularly consequential in Pakistan, where the institutional space for critical thought remains limited. Across Pakistan’s universities, teaching and research in the core disciplines of the social sciences and humanities too often remain confined to positivist, realist, descriptive and conventional disciplinary frameworks, limiting critical inquiry into political economy, social relations, historical transformations and the structures of power that shape contemporary society. The problem is not an excess of scholars engaging with critical theory, but the difficulty of moving beyond established intellectual and methodological conventions. Dismissing contemporary theoretical approaches as the preoccupations of so-called left-liberal intellectuals further restricts the possibilities of critical inquiry.
In The Stakes of Internationalism, Marxist scholar Keya Ganguly locates internationalism in struggles over the global division of labour and socialist transformation, recognizing the importance of sovereignty without conflating it with nationalism. She also rejects the nativist dismissal of European intellectual traditions as a measure of political authenticity. The urgency of war becomes a means of determining which intellectual traditions possess legitimacy, while the preferred Maoist vocabulary in these discussions remains exempt from the same scrutiny. More consequentially, identifying with a state against imperialist aggression cannot establish the internationalist character of that identification when the social relations and coercive institutions governing its population remain unexamined. Such reasoning produces a solidarity without stakes, in which opposition to external domination need not entail solidarity with workers, feminists and political dissidents confronting authoritarian power within the states being defended.
In the programme’s discussion of the imperial academy, scholarly attention to increasingly specific minority struggles is criticized in favour of a politics capable of organizing the masses. Elsewhere, displacement and violent resettlement are treated as complications of development whose political significance is subordinated to an assessment of development within the world system. The distinction assumes that struggles against racialized exclusion, dispossession and patriarchal authority are narrower than mass politics, rather than examining how these relations constitute society. Political antagonisms do not begin only when they acquire a recognized party, a universal slogan or a sufficiently large constituency. Treating particular forms of domination as distractions from collective struggle risks reproducing the exclusions through which the national community is organized.
The programme’s treatment of sovereignty and religion further reveals its convergence with conservative nationalism. In his examination of Pakistan’s national master narrative, historian Ali Usman Qasmi demonstrates how the construction of a unified Muslim national history depends upon subordinating competing histories, political traditions and forms of belonging. A comparable logic emerges in The Southern Question, where geopolitical framing and the distinction between mass politics and minority concerns provide intellectual legitimacy to an increasingly exclusionary conception of political belonging. The accusation that the Left approaches religion with contempt further constructs an opposition between an authentic religious public and an alienated intellectual class. By conflating criticism of religious authority with hostility toward ordinary believers, this argument obscures the struggles through which women, religious minorities and dissenting Muslims contest the institutions regulating religious and political life. The programme’s intellectual interventions lend authority to a political framework that increasingly treats social antagonisms as obstacles to national unity and dissenting traditions as expressions of political estrangement. The result is a conception of popular politics in which claims to national authenticity determine whose struggles acquire legitimacy, while the institutions and relations sustaining existing hierarchies remain comparatively unexamined.
The political direction of The Southern Question becomes clearest in its choice of adversaries. Its sustained hostility toward so-called left-liberal intellectuals contrasts with its comparatively limited confrontation with authoritarian religious and far-right formations organizing against workers, women, minorities and political dissidents. This asymmetry matters because the language of sovereignty, national authenticity and foreign interference can render criticism politically suspect even when it emerges from struggles against dispossession and state violence. The convergence with the Right does not require a shared political programme, but develops through the reproduction of distinctions between legitimate politics and suspect dissent, authentic national subjects and alienated outsiders, mass movements and supposedly marginal struggles. The programme’s intellectual framing helps sustain these distinctions, providing a language through which the exclusion of competing political traditions acquires the appearance of strategic necessity. Under conditions of expanding authoritarian rule, such reasoning helps legitimize the suppression of movements challenging state power, dispossession and entrenched social hierarchies through appeals to sovereignty and national survival. The danger is not simply that sections of the Left abandon particular commitments, but that they reproduce the authoritarian logic through which their own repression becomes possible.