Ijlal Naqvi is Associate Professor of Sociology at Singapore Management University. He is a political sociologist studying state capacity in the Global South, with a particular interest in energy infrastructures and urban citizenship.
His book uses the electrical power infrastructure in Pakistan as a lens on questions of uneven state capacity in the Global South. He conceives of governance as an emergent compromise produced out of the nested fields of the state’s electricity generation and distribution network, thus connecting national policy issues of chronic undersupply and crippling debt to the everyday challenges of the infrastructural state. The book draws on extensive fieldwork at the offices of the Islamabad electrical utility and experience with policy reform.
Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia
Development Seminar