Last month, a team of six staff from the Civic Initiative (a business group of the University of Massachusetts Amherst Donahue Institute) were in Islamabad. They held a three-day follow-up conference for alumni from recent cohorts of the Study of the U.S. Institutes Comparative Public Policymaking program that has been held annually by the Civic Initiative since 2010. The SUSI program is funded by the US Department of State Education and Cultural Affairs Office.
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2016-17 AIPS Book Prize Winner
Submitted Friday, February 9th, 2018
AIPS is pleased to announce the 2016-17 Book Award prize winner: Prof. Dr. Sadia Saeed, author of Politics of Desecularization: Law and the Minority Question in Pakistan!
The committee chose the book because of its relevance to Pakistan Studies, as well as because of its theoretical sophistication and depth of argument. The author tackles such tough questions such as why government officials in Muslim majority countries adopt policies that are explicitly religious and how such policies are then encoded explicitly in laws. Using Pakistan as her case study, she charts the changes in Pakistani law related to the minority Ahmadiyya community, which then allows her to create a conceptual framework for understanding the competitive dynamics of secularism versus religionism. Her framework allows her to conclude that desecularization is essentially a modern phenomenon that can only be understood through the lens of nation-state formation and political majoritarianism.
More information on all AIPS Book Award winners can be found at: http://www.pakistanstudies-aips.org/content/book-prize-awardees
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