Tribal Elders and Social Inequity in Pakistan’s Northwestern Borderlands 1947–2018

Pakistani tribal elders policed and governed their communities in the Pakhtun northwest until they were dismissed in 2018. This paper does not engage with theorization of Pakhtunwali, the Pakhtun tribal code, as the underpinning of hierarchical tribal organization. Instead it looks at the role of elders as community leaders and as jurists, and the expectations of the government of Pakistan and Pakhtun communities had of them. The state paid tribal elders to secure the territories which belonged to their tribes and appointed these elders to tribal courts or jirgas to adjudicate criminal prosecutions. Community members nominated elders to civil courts to adjudicate land disputes. The judgments in these legal proceedings shaped tribal belonging and status.

The principle that the cultural code of Pakhtunwali prevailed in the region provided the rationale for the involvement of elders with no military, administrative or legal training in border management and adjudication of disputes. Yet no provisions, principles and ideals of Pakhunwali are described, or otherwise documented, in the extensive records of jirga proceedings from 1947 till 2018. Hence this paper does not work from the premise that an objectively locatable system of cultural norms encased and informed the work of the jurists, the approach favored by anthropologists and sociologists. Instead I seek to identify governmental and social expectations for elders and treat the patterns of outcomes of suits as a dynamic, historical, political and social activity which constituted social inequity. This paper offers a fundamental rethinking of the underpinnings of tribal hierarchy and culture in Pakistan’s northwest. Concurring with other scholarly assessments which implicate elders in presiding over the breakdown of the tribal order, this paper highlights the ways in which elders fulfilled government expectations for regional security but gradually betrayed social expectations of justice.