Description
This article examines how Pakistani editorial cartoons from 2001–2003 responded to and reinterpreted dominant Western securitising narratives in the aftermath of 9/11. Drawing on metaphor analysis of 809 cartoons from three major newspapers, it argues that Pakistan’s visual discourse on the War on Terror reveals a complex and ambivalent understanding of national security is shaped by postcolonial anxieties, anti-imperial sentiment, and hybrid political identities. Using securitisation theory and postcolonial IR, especially the work of L.H.M. Ling and Achille Mbembe, the paper develops the concept of "speaking back"; a visual, metaphorical mode through which postcolonial states resist, parody, and subvert dominant Western security logics. Further, rather than reproducing a direct securitising chain, Pakistani cartoons reflect crisis as normal politics, with metaphors that blur distinctions between victim and aggressor, and between security and insecurity. In doing so, the article used uses Pakistani images to challenge Eurocentric assumptions in critical security studies and visual IR. It contributes to ongoing debates about the portability of securitisation theory to non-Western contexts and offers a framework for understanding how visual culture in postcolonial settings constitutes a field of everyday security politics.
