Description: The Defiant Border explores why the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands have remained largely independent of state controls from the colonial period into the twenty-first century. This book looks at local Pashtun tribes' modes for evading first British colonial, then Pakistani, governance; the ongoing border dispute between Pakistan and Afghanistan; and continuing interest in the region from Indian, US, British, and Soviet actors. It reveals active attempts by first British, then Pakistani, agents to integrate the tribal region, ranging from development initiatives to violent suppression. The Defiant Border also considers the area's influence on relations between Pakistan, Afghanistan, and India, as well as its role in the United States' increasingly global Cold War policies. Ultimately, the book considers how a region so peripheral to major centers of power has had such an impact on political choices throughout the eras of empire, decolonization, and superpower competition, up to the so-called 'war on terror'.
Brief description: Elisabeth Leake is a Lecturer in International History at the University of Leeds. She previously held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has published articles in The Historical Journal, Modern Asian Studies, and The International History Review. She is coeditor, alongside Leslie James, of Decolonization and the Cold War: Negotiating Independence (2015), and has coedited a special issue of Contemporary South Asia on South Asia's 'wider worlds'.
Review Quotes: 'Elisabeth Leake explains why a small and peripheral part of the world, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of the frontier region between Pakistan and Afghanistan, should have had for much of the twentieth century an influence out of all proportion to their size on the politics both of surrounding states and of the great powers. This book is essential reading for those interested in the geopolitics of South Asia in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.' Francis Robinson, Royal Holloway, University of London