
Archiving Pakistan’s Diverse and Rich History
CAP’s Team Contribution Merriam-Webster dictionary defines archives as both a noun and a verb, “a place that holds public records and historical material, a repository or collection of information,” and the act to file or collect such materials.[1] However, an archive...

Public Archivist Par-Excellence; Ahmad Salim
My friend Ahmad Salim the poet, the novelist, the author, the historian, the chronicler and more importantly a dedicated political archivist is a unique civilizational person. I came to know him as the editor of monthly Jafakash, Karachi back in 1985 when I met him...

Girls’ Education During Pandemic
Zainab Zafar Pakistan already sits in a standstill with eradicating its illiteracy rates, with the ongoing pandemic the socioeconomic barriers towards curbing the problem have only widened. Girls in particular were at the short end of the stick. With 22.8 million...

Citizens’ tracking of Right to Education
The 18 the Constitutional Amendment made Right to Education a justiciable fundamental right with the following pledge; ‘The State shall provide free and compulsory education to all children of the age of five to sixteen years in such manner as may be determined by...

Time to Transform Education
CW-Report Making sure all girls are finishing secondary education by 2030 could boost the gross domestic product (GDP) of developing countries by 10% on average over the next decade, says a report by Plan International. It says ‘every single dollar ($1) spent on...

The State of Democracy: Why We Stand Where We Stand?
Let me begin by making a few things plain about ethos, values, spirit and the foundational ideas that define modern day democracy. In everything it represents and stands for, the man, the people, the community and society have the right to rule themselves—to be...

State of Democracy in Pakistan
The students of Pakistan’s political history have always confronted a disturbing question as to why a country that owes its independence to political and legal parleys and about which it was believed without an iota of doubt that it would emerge as a strong...

Pakistan: Signposts to a Populist Authoritarianism
“Democracy is in our blood. Indeed, it is in our marrow of bones” Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah Pakistan is a product of democracy, whose freedom struggle was led by a politician heading a popular political party, rooted in the Muslim masses, whose...

The Quality of Pakistani Democracy
September 15 is celebrated every year as the International Day of Democracy to review the state of democracy in the world and uphold the principles and values of democracy. It is therefore apt to review the quality and state of democracy in Pakistan on this day....

The State of our Democracy
Democracy is an evasive idea, an ideal that all polities are trying to achieve but somehow fall short of. Countries in transition to a democratic rule, presumably from authoritarianism, use the term democratization to describe their journey. It would be interesting to...