Written by Mustafa Arif
April 16, 2026
Introduction
The term “revolution” is of deep symbolic significance. It evokes images of citizens storming the Bastille, Bolsheviks in Petrograd, and anti-colonial movements in the Global South. But in political science, not every disruption constitutes revolution. Pakistan’s recent history has led many to question whether the nation is actually undergoing fundamental change or is simply going through another bout of instability triggered by elites. In this article, the recent crises in Pakistan are reinterpreted through comparative and theoretical perspectives to address a simple question: Is Pakistan undergoing revolutionary change, or do these disturbances signal the reorganization of elites within a limited authoritarian order?
Theoretical Foundations: What Makes a Revolution?
To assess whether Pakistan’s political instability is revolutionary, one must first ask: what defines a revolution? Karl Marx viewed revolutions as epochal breaks stemming from contradictions between economic base and political superstructure; in The Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx and Engels foresaw revolution as the engine of historical progress, whereby class struggle culminates in a new socio-economic order. However, Marx’s deterministic model often fails to account for state capacity, international context, or ideological coherence.
Theda Skocpol, in States and Social Revolutions (1979), offered a more structuralist model. For her, revolutions occur when state institutions, especially coercive and administrative apparatuses, collapse or become paralysed. Revolutions are not just ideological contests but structural breakdowns; Skocpol argued that successful revolutions in France (1789), Russia (1917), and China (1949) combined state failure with peasant mobilization and elite defection.
James C. Davies added a psychological dimension; his J-curve theory (1962) posited that revolutions erupt when rising expectations are suddenly dashed, creating a cognitive dissonance between perceived entitlements and lived reality. Meanwhile, elite theorists such as Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca contended that history is defined not by revolutionary breaks but by the circulation of elites. According to Pareto, revolutions merely substitute one ruling class for another without altering structural hierarchies.
Taken together, these theories offer competing lenses through which Pakistan’s post-2022 upheavals can be assessed, either as incipient revolutionary moments or as episodes of elite reconfiguration within a resilient authoritarian order.
Hybrid Regimes & Military Dominance – The Structural Core:
Pakistan’s political history is marked by recurrent civilian displacement and institutional interruption, with no elected civilian government having completed a full term without either being dismissed, judicially removed, or by military intervention. One of the core reasons for the dismissal is conflict with military high command, often leading to direct martial law or installation of more compliant civilian alternatives – resultantly, Pakistan has spent approximately thirty-three of its seventy-eight years under direct military rule, and the remainder can be characterized as various forms of indirect or hybrid control. Such a pattern – in the words of Ayesha Jalal – can be described as a system in which democratic institutions exist within carefully managed limits, rather than a failed democracy.
The 2018 general election, which in itself was competitive but were widely criticised for pre-poll engineering, and Imran Khan’s ascent as the 22nd Prime Minister of Pakistan was widely termed as a “selected” government rather than an elected one. It was a government in which civilian authority existed alongside, and subordinate to, entrenched military influence, hence consolidating the hybrid regime. During this period, opposition leaders were incarcerated or systematically marginalised through legal proceedings, while freedoms of the press and speech deteriorated sharply, allowing the military to further entrench itself within the political system, reinforcing the perception that its authority could not be meaningfully challenged. Although these measures consolidated executive control in the short term—due to military backing and the absence of effective opposition—they ultimately exposed the fragility of civilian autonomy within Pakistan’s hybrid political framework.
The stability of Khan’s government was ultimately was contingent on continued military support, but by late 2021, fissures emerged between Khan and the then Chief of Army Staff (COAS), General Qamar Javed Bajwa, ultimately leading to Khan’s removal through a Parliamentary Vote of No Confidence in April 2022.
The legal and political process surrounding Khan’s ouster further underscored the mechanics of elite circulation. The doctrine of Parliamentary Supremacy states that the courts cannot question the Parliamentary proceedings (Article 69 of the Constitution), but the Supreme Court of Pakistan intervened to restore Parliamentary Proceedings after the Deputy Speaker dismissed the no-confidence motion on constitutional grounds. Additionally, the vote succeeded amid widespread horse-trading and defections by PTI legislators, and the PML-N and the PPP returned to power with establishment backing, reinforcing Pareto’s insight that political change often entails elite substitution rather than systemic transformation.
This trajectory was further consolidated in the 8th Feb 2024 general election, where PTI-backed independents won the election by a margin on Form-45 results, however, overnight these results were changed and those with lead of thousands of votes were declared losers in the final Form-47 results. Additionally, PTI was later denied its reserved seats in Parliament, with both measures effectively receiving judicial endorsement from the Supreme Court, ultimately ensuring that power remained with establishment-aligned coalitions, despite clear evidence of widespread popular discontent.
Pakistan increasingly resembles a Competitive Authoritarianism – a system in which elections occur but are systematically skewed in favour of incumbents. However, military dominance does not suppress revolutionary potential. It actively fragments civilian authority, weakens legislative mediation, and ensures that political crises are resolved through elite realignment rather than popular transformation.
May 9, 2023: Revolutionary Moment or Authoritarian Stress Test?
Following his removal in April 2022, Imran Khan’s political appeal expanded rather than diminished, with people viewing his ousting as evidence of entrenched elite manipulation. This led to an unprecedented level of popular political consciousness, with Khan’s rhetoric reframing Pakistan’s political crisis as a struggle between an unaccountable establishment and an excluded majority. For a brief moment, the conditions outlined by James C. Davies’ J-curve theory—rising expectations followed by sudden political reversal—appeared to converge.
The events of 9th May, 2023 – from a symbolic standpoint – appeared to be revolutionary, with the military’s moral and institutional sanctity publicly contested for the first time by its former civilian constituency. Triggered by Khan’s arrest, represented the most serious challenge to Pakistan’s civil-military equilibrium in decades, where protestors attacked the Corps Commander House in Lahore, amongst other places. However, for a revolution to be successful the coercive institutions must fracture or become paralysed – ironically, in Pakistan the opposite occurred.
The state responded quickly with mass arrests, enforced disappearances, media blackouts, and the revival of military trials under the Pakistan Army Act, effectively reasserting the integrity of the coercive apparatus, foreclosing the possibility of elite defection or institutional paralysis. Additionally, these measures fractured mass mobilisation itself. Organizational leadership was decimated, fear replaced momentum, and protest energy dissipated. What initially resembled a revolutionary opening was thus converted into an episode of authoritarian consolidation. Ayesha Siddiqa’s view is apt in this regard that Pakistan’s military operates not merely as a security institution but as a political–economic complex capable of neutralising threats through coercion and patronage. In Pareto’s terms, May 9 did not mark a rupture in the ruling order, but a moment of elite reassertion: the system absorbed dissent, disciplined challengers, and recalibrated control without altering underlying power relations.
Constitutional Engineering and the Collapse of Judicial Faith
Post–9 May, the regime shifted its focus to legal reforms through which the extraordinary was normalized and insulated from challenge, with constitutionalism repurposed to stabilise elite control. The 26th Constitutional Amendment enabled executive influence over judicial appointments and established a separate constitutional bench within the Supreme Court to hear constitutional matters; notably, this very bench later heard the vires of the Amendment itself. While the issue remained sub judice, the 27th Amendment was introduced, in response to mounting criticism of its predecessor, further consolidating control over the judiciary; a separate Constitutional Court was created with regime-favored appointments, while provisions were introduced allowing the inter-provincial transfer of High Court judges, with refusal resulting in forced retirement, illustrating a systematic effort to legitimise power, curtail judicial independence, and remove dissenting voices from the system.
This sequence reflects Carl Schmitt’s observation that sovereignty lies not in suspending legality, but in reshaping it to determine when and how exceptions apply. For Pakistan, constitutional legality was not dismantled but recalibrated to accommodate permanent emergency governance. Consequently,there has been a profound erosion of public faith in the judiciary, once viewed as a potential counterweight—particularly in the aftermath of the Lawyers’ Movement (2007–09)—the courts are now widely perceived as facilitators of elite consensus rather than defenders of constitutionalism. The concept of delegative democracy captures this reality aptly: institutions endure, but their capacity to check power is hollowed out, as a result, the judiciary no longer functions as a conceivable avenue for transformative change. Revolution through law appears implausible in a system where constitutional redesign consistently narrows, rather than expands, democratic possibility.
Fiscal Centralization, Provincial Fragmentation, and the Limits of Revolutionary Convergence
Pakistan’s post-2022 political crisis has also unfolded through the quieter terrain of fiscal and territorial management. The National Finance Commission (NFC) Award, constitutionally designed to secure provincial fiscal autonomy, has been used as an instrument of political discipline, with the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) government – controlled by Khan’s party (PTI) – repeatedly alleging delayed or withheld federal transfers, claiming outstanding dues of approximately Rs. 4 trillion, which has stalled development spending, weakened public service delivery, and eroded provincial governing capacity, reinforcing dependence on the center.
This pattern reflects what scholars of hybrid regimes describe as fiscal centralization as a mechanism of indirect control, whereby elected subnational governments are constrained through calibrated resource deprivation. The centre disciplines provinces through control over intergovernmental transfers, narrowing their political and administrative autonomy; in KP, this has limited institutional governance while pressuring PTI’s electoral base through deteriorating socioeconomic conditions. KP’s response has largely taken the form of protest politics, the leadership has mobilized protests and symbolic resistance to demand fiscal dues, however this mobilisation remains geographically contained and politically manageable, since mobilisation without organizational convergence or elite defection rarely produces systemic rupture.
If any region in Pakistan resembles a site of revolutionary potential, it is Balochistan. The province has faced decades of economic marginalization, enforced disappearances, and cultural repression. The Baloch insurgency, now in its fifth phase, has sustained itself through guerrilla tactics and diaspora activism, with leaders like Dr. Mahrang Baloch and Karima Baloch framing their struggle not in electoral terms but in existential ones.
This movement aligns more closely with Skocpol’s model, and can be viewed as a peripheral region with weak state penetration, mobilized elites, and sustained resistance. Yet, it lacks the national resonance of earlier revolutions. Pakistan’s media blackout and the international community’s indifference have marginalised the Baloch cause. Without horizontal elite coordination or a central state crisis, Balochistan remains a revolutionary periphery, not a national rupture.
External Shocks, Strategic Rents, and Regime Stabilization
As Napoleon Bonaparte stated whenever a King sees that his people will revolt against him, he starts fighting with another country. Pakistan’s military has historically used conflict with India to consolidate internal authority; after the 2025 border skirmishes, the military rebranded itself as the guardian of national security. Nationalist rhetoric surged, and criticism of the military was framed as a crime. Charles Tilly argued that “war makes states“; in Pakistan, war re-legitimizes military supremacy. This episode fits the pattern of elite retrenchment, just as Kargil and Pulwama elevated the military’s domestic status, the 2025 clashes neutralized dissent and depoliticized the public.
The year 2025 was also marked as a year in which Pakistan’s foreign relations have flourished, and Pakistan can be said to have “re-emerged” on the global stage. Relations with the United States (US) have entered a phase of recalibration with transactional cooperation around security, IMF facilitation, mineral-sector investment has resumed, and US President, Donald Trump has been seen applauding the Pakistani government and the COAS on multiple occasions. China continues to provide long-term strategic insulation through CPEC, defence cooperation, and diplomatic cover. At the same time, Pakistan’s Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement with Saudi Arabia signals a significant expansion of its external security portfolio enhancing Pakistan’s leverage as the Muslim world’s only nuclear power while embedding it more deeply within Gulf security architectures. Together, these relationships reflect Levitsky and Way’s framework of competitive authoritarianism, through which diversified external alignments can reduce a regime’s vulnerability to external leverage, enabling it to broaden international support without necessarily liberalizing domestically.
Announcements regarding offshore oil, gas, and critical mineral discoveries—regardless of commercial maturity—have reshaped elite expectations and strengthened Pakistan’s bargaining position abroad. Political economy scholarship cautions that resource anticipation in weakly institutionalised states tends to entrench centralised rent control rather than redistribute power, a dynamic already visible in Pakistan’s extractive governance. Additionally, following the inflationary crisis of 2023, Pakistan has entered a phase of tentative macroeconomic stabilization, despite debt burdens, and structural constraints Pakistan experienced modest growth recovery and easing inflation. What this really reflects is what Guillermo O’Donnell saw in unevenly institutionalised democracies — a kind of ‘low-intensity citizenship,’ where the state’s reach is patchy at best. Crisis gets managed, order gets preserved for some, but the system holds its shape without ever really changing — no meaningful transformation, no genuine inclusion.
Taken together, external conflict, strategic partnerships, resource optimism, and economic stabilization have not weakened Pakistan’s political order. Pakistan’s trajectory is therefore best understood not as revolutionary rupture, but as the controlled circulation of elites within a resilient hybrid regime.
Conclusion
Pakistan’s current moment does not neatly fit the classical model of revolution; there is no unified mass movement, no ideological rupture, and no decisive collapse of state authority, however to conclude that meaningful change is unlikely would be equally misleading. Drawing from clio-dynamics—the study of historical patterns of political and social change—periods of apparent stagnation often precede significant transformation when structural pressures accumulate and remain unaddressed.
Several such pressures are now visible in Pakistan. Declining real wages, sustained over multiple years, have eroded living standards and intensified economic insecurity. Inequality between rich and poor has widened, with recent data suggesting that nearly 37 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, a level historically associated with political volatility rather than stability. Compounding this is the overproduction of educated youth, as Pakistan faces one of the highest youth unemployment rates in the region—an experience mirrored in countries such as Sri Lanka and Nepal prior to episodes of major political upheaval. At the state level, exploding public debt has constrained governance capacity, with a substantial portion of federal revenues diverted toward debt servicing rather than development or social welfare. This fiscal squeeze intersects with growing repression and institutional distrust, particularly following the February 8 elections and the successive constitutional amendments, which have deepened perceptions of elite insulation rather than democratic responsiveness.
Taken together, these conditions do not guarantee revolution—but history suggests they rarely persist without consequence. If left uncorrected, such structural imbalances tend to produce systemic change, whether through elite reconfiguration, institutional recalibration, or more disruptive political realignment. Pakistan, therefore, may not be on the brink of revolution—but it is undeniably approaching a moment where change, in one form or another, becomes increasingly difficult to defer.