SOUTH ASIA RESEARCH www.sagepublications.com DOI: 10.1177/0262728017725624 Vol. 37(3): 1–19 Copyright © 2017 SAGE Publications Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington DC and Melbourne STATE SOVEREIGNTY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN PAKISTAN: ANALYSING THE REALISM STRANGLEHOLD Ahmed Waqas Waheed National University of Sciences and Technology, Islamabad, Pakistan abstract In Pakistan, the field of international relations (IR) theory remains firmly embedded in the ‘realist’ tradition, to the detriment of a wider range of considerations. This stranglehold, strengthened by the particular evolutionary trajectory of the Pakistani state as well as a complacent academia, seems to have created a vicious circle of knowledge reproduction, reinforced by various bids for power, or proximity to it. This article scrutinises specifically the dominant understandings in Pakistan of state sovereignty and security in a broadly historical perspective, showing how the rise of the military, combined with security paranoia, has prevented academic creativity in this field, including scrutiny of recent concerns over rather close China–Pakistan links. keywords: academia, China–Pakistan relations, international relations, military, Pakistan, security, sovereignty, state, Third World states Introduction After the present author had presented a paper at a local university on the state of international relations (IR) in Pakistan, a senior academic queried: ‘Why do we need any other theory when realism in its various manifestations answers all our questions?’ Precisely that is the problem. Most Pakistani academics find little or no utility in developing or researching other IR theories and continue to fix their gaze on some form of realism as an explanatory framework to analyse the country’s predicaments. This article argues that the limited and restricted scope of IR theories in Pakistan has as much to do with the country’s academia as with the evolution of the Pakistani state and its deep-seated, almost paranoid concerns over sovereignty and security. Pakistan is a state whose military has emerged as a powerful stakeholder in matters concerning IR. This has, sometimes overtly and at other times covertly, captured and channelled