Federal Governance and Strategic Coherence in Pakistan's Foreign Policy (2018–2025)

Abstract

The foreign policy of Pakistan during the period of 2018-2025 was developed in the context of acute political turmoil, three successive government changes, the worsening of civil-military relations, and overlapping economic crises that combined to challenge the ability of this country to portray coherent and consistent strategic intent to the international community. This paper has discussed the connection between the federal governance arrangements and the strategic consistency of foreign policy in Pakistan over this time, using a case study methodology. The sources of data were purposely chosen policy papers, government white papers, communications of the National Security Committee, parliamentary proceedings, speeches of the ministers, and the published professional analyses. The analysis of documents and thematic analysis using the six-step framework described by Braun and Clarke (2006) were used to create five main themes, including institutional coherence, policy continuity, geostrategic alignment, democratic governance and oversight, and strategic communication. The discussion has shown that the sustained instability in governance, through parliamentary votes of no-confidence, judicial interference and change in civil-military balance, created a great degree of inconsistency in the foreign policy posture that Pakistan is adopting, especially in the way it balances relations with the United States, China, Saudi Arabia and its regional neighbours. Pakistan proved capable of strategic coherence episodically under circumstances of a concentrated institutional authority, but not of a sustained and institutionally entrenched strategic coherence over the entire duration of the study, having been green-listed by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) in 2022 and hosting the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in 2024. Conclusions about reforming governance and capacity building in diplomacy are presented.