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Elections held in Pakistan in February witnessed an upsurge of support for the incarcerated former prime minister Imran Khan, despite a brutal wave of military-led suppression. This essay looks at the contours of this upsurge, focusing on its roots in middle-class anger and a crisis of legitimacy for traditional political forces., On February 8, Pakistanis went to the polls to elect representatives to the country's national assembly and its four provincial assemblies. Preelection predictions in mainstream media converged on a comfortable [...]

The article examines the victory of Imran Khan in the presidential elections in Pakistan held on July 25, 2018. A brief profile of Khan is provided who is an anti-corruption crusader, philanthropist, and former cricket player. Topics include Pakistan's political system, the corruption scandal involving former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, and procedural democracy.

How do popular protests about the basics of everyday life, specifically about energy, come about in settings where political authority is fragmented and conflict and repression common? How do state and political actors respond to protests which disrupt social and economic life, and undermine public authority? To what extent do such mass protests, often justified as inherently moral struggles over the basics of everyday life, empower the powerless or hold the powerful to account in such political settings? And how do external actors shape these events? These are the questions addressed in this paper, part of a research project under the UK Aid-funded Action for Empowerment and Accountability (A4EA) programme at the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex. It is a preliminary effort to make sense of a specific category of popular protests, mass protests about the affordability or availability of fuel or energy, seen as among the contentious 'politics of provisions', or elite-mass struggles over policies governing the necessities of everyday life. The paper aims to: (a) contribute to theoretical debates about the kinds of social and political action that strengthen accountability and empower the marginalised in fragile and conflict-affected settings; (b) make an empirical contribution to the contentious politics literature with new evidence about the nature of energy-related protests (or 'fuel riots') in developing countries, to strengthen the political economy analysis of energy subsidy reforms and austerity programmes, shedding new light specifically on the tendencies of non-democratic regimes to maintain high fuel subsidies; and (c) generate knowledge about how the behaviour and practices of external actors shape how energy protests play out in these fragile political settings, in order to inform policy and practice. The paper draws on: (a) an events catalogue built on a review of international media that was; (b) triangulated and refined further through a research workshop and discussions with participants, direct observers, and other scholars. These research activities were designed to investigate the phenomenon of energy-related protests (definitions and forms of which are discussed) in settings marked by fragile or fragmented political authority or where conflict is common or recurrent, what is known in development thinking as fragile, conflict, and violence-affected (FCVAS) settings. The focus is on the period 2007-17, a time of unusual turbulence in global commodity and financial markets, and of correspondingly intense national and transnational struggles over austerity regimes, financial shocks, and commodity price spikes in countries around the globe. The paper draws on the events catalogue and workshop contributions to develop preliminary analysis of how grievances about energy connected to other material and political grievances in the society. It sets out initial findings about the social and political alliances that emerged between the informal sector workers, youth, and urban working class groups that were on the frontline of most protests, and other actors such as business, political parties, trades unions, civil society organisations and broader social movements. It explores the repertoires, or the styles and forms taken by the protests, reflecting on how those were transformed over the episodes of contention, and specifically in counter-response to the state response. The paper presents the synthesis of these inquiries, which it situates within the limited relevant literature on energy protests and the political economy of development in fragile settings. It concludes with a discussion of knowledge gaps and potential research agendas on the contentious politics of energy provisioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]