Convergence, negotiation, and accommodation : spatial politics and controlled inclusion of women in Pakistan

Abstract

Women make up almost half of the world's population but are grossly under-represented in social and political decision-making institutions in democracies of all kinds. International norms, international commitments, and constitutional guarantees have facilitated the inclusion of more women and other marginalized groups in social and political spheres. Still, these have not always translated into real influence on politics and power. This dissertation explores this paradox termed "controlled inclusion." In this paradox, the formal procedures of political inclusion are used to accommodate claims of equality within hegemonic structures of authority. Controlled inclusion does not work through exclusion but through multi-level constraints: psychological restrictions through gendered socialization, ideological legitimation through selective cultural and religious interpretations, institutional gatekeeping through party nominations, and spatial barriers that limit physical mobility within social and political spheres. Derived from and integrated theoretical synthesis combining the concepts and proposition of Gender Role Theory, Intersectionality, Rational Choice Theory of Democracy and Subaltern Counterpublics, this dissertation investigates how these interlocked mechanisms create what feminist institutionalists have termed an "overdetermined" system of exclusion: one in which multiple independent explanatory factors are operating at once to keep groups of people excluded even as the barriers they face are dismantled one by one. The research was conducted within a constructivist interpretivist paradigm and a multiple-case comparative design. Two contrasting urban contexts, Islamabad (the Federal Capital of Pakistan) and Muzaffarabad (capital of Azad Jammu & Kashmir), were selected as the study settings. 70 in-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted from September 2024 to February 2025. Women and men politicians were among the participants, along with officials from civil society, politicians from various political parties, academics, and religious scholars. Braun and Clarke's reflexive thematic analysis was used to analyze the data. Results show that there are three interrelated dynamics. This occurs as a compounded form of marginalization, created synergistically at the psychological, ideological, institutional, and spatial levels, and which is difficult to break down by single-axis approaches. Women in Pakistan hold about 20 percent of the seats in the National Assembly with reserved seats. Religious minorities account for about three percent. So, both groups together account for less than 1 percent of the leadership in National Assembly committees and have negligible influence on substantive policy. Second, the women and subaltern political actors navigate and resist in multidimensional ways. They are acquiring credentials, managing their respectability, building women's-only spaces, establishing alliances across political parties, and using mentorship networks. However, these strategies are both shaped by and constrained by the structural conditions that they aim to challenge. Third, modern patriarchal structures have evolved adaptive mechanisms to accommodate both symbolic concessions (quota seats, gender policy machinery, international commitments, etc.) and to ensure that the underlying structural inequalities of power continue to function in terms of the distribution of services by "patronage", "gatekeepers," and the practice of reserving seats for directly elected seats in line with predetermined arrangements. Importantly, the pattern found in Pakistan is not unique to a particular culture. This dissertation supports the claim that the gap between descriptive and substantive representation is a transnational structural pattern rather than an anomaly in certain democratic contexts, such as Nordic social democracies, post-genocide Rwanda, India, Latin America, and the United States. This dissertation aimed to add to the body of knowledge in two ways. First, it has the potential to advance the notion of controlled inclusion as an analytic tool for studying how the regime of patriarchy adapts to pressures on formal equality, and to bridge feminist geography and political science by showing that spatial constraints are a fundamental mechanism of political exclusion. In practice, it provides conceptual and concrete policy suggestions to political parties, civil society groups, and transnational feminist movements to take women beyond symbolic nods at the issue and towards "real change" in governance.