Muhammad Jahanzaib’s book published by Palgrave MacMillan (Springer Nature) “The Interplay of Geo-Politics and Geo-Economics in Pakistan’s Foreign Policy (Post-2008): Imperatives, Constraints and Potentials through a Neoliberal Lens” critically examines Pakistan’s evolving foreign policy through the dual prism of geo-politics and geo-economics.
Book Review
Pakistan’s foreign policy has always been studied in the context of security; the Kashmir issue, balancing between Washington and Beijing, and the perception of threat emanated from India and Afghanistan. In his book “The Interplay of Geo-Politics and Geo-Economics in Pakistan’s Foreign Policy (Post-2008): Imperatives, Constraints and Potentials through a Neoliberal Lens” by Palgrave MacMillan (Springer Nature); Muhammad Jahanzaib aims to supplant that grammar or at least to add to it, as they have come to shape Islamabad’s approach to the world as a result of economic considerations. It prioritizes trade corridors, investment facilitation, remittances, connectivity initiatives that iinterplays with the geo-political ones. The project is based on a qualitative case-study approach and neoliberal theory, and traces Pakistan’s prioritization of foreign policy from a security-based approach to diplomacy and a more economic one.
The book is divided into seven chapters. The first is an expanded introduction which puts the study into a broader context, presents the research puzzle and goals, and briefly describes the theoretical and methodological design. The chapter two of the book examines change against a geopolitically dominated baseline: the Cold War, the Soviet-Afghan war, the post-9/11 War on Terror, which chronicles Pakistani foreign policy from independence (1947) to 2008. Chapter three is a discussion on the concept of geo-economic reorientation as a conceptual category and discusses the logic behind Pakistan’s prioritization towards economic diplomacy. The empirical backbone of the study is the focus of the chapters four and five, as the fourth chapter charts the interplay of geopolitical and geo-economic ideas in Pakistan’s relations with the major powers, neighbouring countries and the Muslim world since 2008, and the fifth one is a focus on the instruments of the intended pivot and its impacts, including the Special Investment Facilitation Council (SIFC) and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), in the post-2008 years. The sixth chapter is organized around a trio of national imperatives, constraints and potentials, and the last chapter seven presents the conclusion and a set of policy recommendations.
Book’s key argument is that Pakistan’s foreign policy has not completely shifted from ‘geo-politics’ to ‘geo-economics’ and but has rather moved to an era in which the two imperatives are no longer mutually exclusive but, rather, coexist and sometimes clash with each other, with Pakistan’s trade and connectivity goals often colliding with border conflicts, great-power competition and domestic unrest. For example, the initiatives like CPEC under the Belt and Road, National Security Policy of 2022, and the institutional policy like the SIFC, reflect the unequal transition. A defensible and, on the evidence marshalled, well-supported argument, albeit one that won’t surprise specialists in the field: the idea that geo-economics and geopolitics are not mutually exclusive but interact and intersect has been commonplace of the broader geo-economics literature since the 1990s when Edward Luttwak published his landmark work. The book does not make such a general statement, but it does make these rather detailed applications to the Pakistani context.
It expands on the work of two strands of the neoliberal internationalism of Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, namely those of the complex interdependence and liberal institutionalism, and a broader framework that holds the key to understanding the functioning of economic cooperation and multilateral diplomacy and institutional engagement used throughout this study to explain the functioning of Pakistan since 2008. This is a reasonable option for a study that focuses on trade and institutional cooperation but the lens that this provides is not so effective to explain why some of the initiatives that it documents have failed to move forward or even come to fruition, such as the Quadrilateral Traffic in Transit Agreement, the TAPI pipeline, and parts of the CPEC itself, have failed to realize Pakistan’s economic diplomacy ambition. More detailed engagement with realist or dependency-theory interpretations of the same evidence, explaining why realist or dependency-theory interpretation was not used, but neoliberalism was, would have reinforced the fact that these constraints are not mentioned at all as ‘constraints’ in chapter six of the book. There is no separate chapter on the limitations of the study and chapter one’s rejection of realism, neo-realism and constructivism is very succinct although the complex interdependence (neo-liberalism) applied fills the void partially in context.
The empirical aspects of the book, on the other hand, are some of its most outstanding ones. The book then brings together a wealth of primary and secondary sources, detailing Pakistan’s bilateral relations with the United States, China, Russia, India, Afghanistan and Iran, then with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the Gulf Cooperation Council states, the Central Asian republics and African Muslim-majority countries, in detail, in chapters four and five. The inclusion of economic indicators like volume of trade, bilateral investment, State Bank of Pakistan statistics and remittance flows lends substance to the analysis missing from the existing literature on Pakistan’s foreign policy. The most matured facet in the book is the one that deals with the relationship between China and Pakistan, in which the geo-strategic origins of the partnership in the Cold Wars period, development of CPEC related infrastructure investment, energy cooperation and the new Digital Silk Road are well captured and rewarded; CPEC is the case in point that keeps appearing throughout the book as the focus of the book is on the geo-economic turn.
The chapters on Pakistan and the Muslim world are also of value from the scholarly perspective. The analysis of Saudi Arabia – on labour migration and remittances, energy supply, defence cooperation and the stresses induced by the Saudi-Iran rivalry – provides a nuanced picture of the intersection of religious, economic and strategic factors in bilateral relations, as well as the analysis of Turkey, the Gulf states and the Central Asian republics which avoids the security-focused binaries that are often prevalent in this literature. The author has brought the documentary evidence alive with a series of primary interviews with ambassadors, economists, bankers, military officers, bureaucrats, religious scholars and academics, which, without such sources, a purely desk-based study would fail to have. There is one point on this to which readers must take note; the authors have used official government documents like the National Security Policy, the Prime Minister’s Office and the ministries as primary sources; and the authors’ institutional status as a head of a Pakistan-based think tank with access to various strata of the government establishment makes for a close approximation to the viewpoint of the establishment. That doesn’t mean that it is a disqualifying factor, but the positive sentiment for CPEC and SIFC is not matched by a similar discussion about the debt sustainability issues, which, in the overall policy discourse, are poorly discussed and only mentioned in passing, since one of the more controversy-ridden aspects of Pakistan’s China engagement is debt sustainability.
But some of the empirical material is a little shabby for the year 2026. The trade data for Pakistan’s interactions with Saudi Arabia and Turkey presented in this study is from 2021 while the other aspects of the study refer to export data from the State Bank of Pakistan up until early 2025, resulting in a balanced study but one that feels somewhat dated in the light of the charts. Users who look up current numbers from the book should verify the information provided in the graphics with more up-to-date trade statistics.
While these concerns are valid, the emergence of a triadic dynamic between national requirements (economic development, regional connectivity and security), constraints (political instability, fiscal vulnerability and dependence on debt), and potentials (geostrategic location, youthful labour force and new trade partnerships) provides a helpful analytical framework for policy makers and researchers. The idea of diversified economic partnership as well as the need to strengthen ties with regional institutions like the SCO and ECO and leverage on diaspora networks as tools of economic diplomacy comes across as a pragmatic understanding of Pakistan’s structural position, though these are sometimes formulated not as a result of the country’s own evidence of failed or underperforming initiatives but rather as a re-statement of Pakistan’s official policy stance.
The book, in short, is a highly informative and empirically sound study, with the greatest strength being the amount of bilateral analysis it manages to fit into a single analytical framework, with a comprehensive bibliography and primary interview sources that future scholars on the theme will not be able to afford to ignore. Its limitations a shallow interaction with competing theoretical approaches although complex interdependence fills the void. It is a first-of-its-kind orientation book for those newcomers to Pakistan’s post-2008 diplomacy; for experts and policy makers, it will be a helpful compendium of facts to be read in conjunction with, not in lieu of, more theoretically charged works on the same subject.
* Sheikh Eilaf Tariq is a Research Intern at Diamanium Thinkers, working on Strategic Studies, Security and Geopolitics with a focus on South Asia and the Middle East. His research interests centre on conflict transformation and international relations.