Peer-Reviewed Articles
Tareen, Salwa. 2022. Crowdfunding Nayā Pakistan: Development, Nationalism, and the Diamer-Bhasha Dam. The Muslim World, 112: 151-166. https://doi.org/10.1111/muwo.12425
Abstract: On July 4, 2018, then–Chief Justice of Pakistan, Mian Saqib Nisar, announced an unprecedented campaign to crowdfund the Rs. 1.9 trillion ($12.4 billion USD) needed to revive construction of the Diamer–Bhasha and Mohmand dams. Encouraged to contribute as a form of ṣadaqa (voluntary charity), donations from Pakistanis at home and abroad peaked at Rs. 12.9 billion ($80.4 million USD), despite widespread criticisms questioning the fund's motives and feasibility. Drawing on the developmental logic of dams and calls for a Nayā Pakistan (New Pakistan), the dam fund transformed Diamer–Bhasha into a popular symbol of a modern, prosperous, and pious nation.
This paper explores the aspirations and limitations of these claims by tracing the historical, political, and affective discourses that inform the campaign. In order to contextualize the emergence of the dam fund, I argue that the broader developmental and humanitarian significance of the campaign should also be understood in relation to the statist frame of Pakistani Muslim nationalism. Above all, I seek to understand how the dam fund simultaneously presents Pakistanis as vulnerable to extinction, yet capable of their own rescue. I ask: what happens when the nation imagines itself as both the giver and recipient of charity?
Edited Collections
Zegarra Chiappori, Magdalena and Salwa Tareen. 2023. “Introduction”. In “A Sign of Our Times: Caring in an Unsettling World”, edited by Magdalena Zegarra Chiappori and Salwa Tareen, American Ethnologist website, 3 August 2023. [https://americanethnologist.org/online-content/collections/uncaring-world/a-sign-of-our-times-caring-in-an-unsettling-world-introduction-by-magdalena-zegarra-chiappori-and-salwa-tareen/]
Abstract: After years of facing a global pandemic that has exacerbated social, political, environmental, and economic instability, one cannot help but ask: how are we to care in a world that seems to be falling apart? What does care look like in a society pierced by precarity, illness, pervasive racism, environmental destruction, and faltering democracy? Are we still able to care? How do we do it? This collection reflects upon the multiple ways in which people resignify existing practices of care and build new ones in these challenging global times. The fourteen essays contained here seek to extend our understanding of care as a practice related to medicine, health, and illness in order to explore practices and implications of care for and with oneself, others, and the environment. Given the expansive use of care in both lay and academic discourse, most contributors offer insight into the difficulty of meaningfully defining and employing care as an analytical category. Care engenders multiple approaches and practices, which may or may not be in tension with one another. Care also encapsulates various aesthetic and affective experiences.