Kashaf Imran
In contemporary international politics, strategic culture is a relatively new concept to holistically understand how states interact and what is the why behind their foreign policy decisions.
As a concept strategci culture helps explore how decision-makers interpret threats, opportunities, and strategic options. This is becasue according to scholars like Colin Gray and Jack Snyder, strategic culture offers a conceptual underpinning with a cognitive framework for guidance in strategic thinking. It underscores how issues are framed, perceived, and justified.
This framing effect determines what is considered a threat, an opportunity, or a legitimate strategic objective. By shaping narratives and perceptions, strategic culture can make certain policy options seem more reasonable or inevitable.
For a state like Pakistan, strategic culture as a concept is pertinently used to analyse the complexity and proximity. Since its inception and particularly in contemporary times, Pakistan has been dealing with a host of issues with multiple strands, including internal faultlines, external threats, geopolitical proximity due to regionalism, and the neighbour paradox.
In this backdrop, Pakistan has ensured its survival amidst wars, disintegration, and neighbours’ attempts to exploit the faultlines. In this aspect, traditional international relations paradigms have a limited ontological scope to dissect why behind this resilient stature of Pakistan. Therefore, the concept of strategic culture fills in the gap.
Year 2025 and onwards to 2026, Pakistan’s rise on the global stage with regards to diplomacy, defence, and security has been witnessed after a years-long period of regional isolation, descending global image, and historical alienation with its eastern neighbour (India), and western neighbour (Afghanistan). All these historical challenges and rise to the global stage has direct link to Pakistan’s strategic culture, having three pressing dimensions.
The first dimension of Pakistan’s strategic culture is centricity to India. Since the subcontinent partition in 1947, India and Pakistan have been described as arch-rivals, and India has been the centre-stage in the national security and foreign policy of Pakistan. According to Aizaz Chaudhry, for both India and Pakistan, leadership factor, Kashmir issue, great power competition, and terrorism are dominant factors defining an antagonistic bilateralism between the two nations, hence impacting the strategic culture to be defined by animosity and historical grievances.
India, being central to Pakistan’s strategic culture, reflects how policy factors are directed towards state sovereignty and protection. Therefore, following this, the second major dimension of Pakistan’s strategic culture is the primacy of national security, making Pakistan for decades a security state. The key factors involving this dimension are the symbolism of Muslim sovereignty and the historical genesis of existential threats to Pakistan.
Therefore, this dimension of strategic culture was a primary reason for Pakistan to acquire nuclear weapons as an act of sustaining the state and maintaining deterrence. The last dimension of Pakistan’s strategic culture is ideology ingrained in Muslim identity and two nation theory. This aspect of strategic have been a driving factor reinforcing the resolve of Pakistan to resist threats and refusal to be a secondary player in the strategic architecture of South Asia as well as on the global stage.
These dominating dimensions of Pakistan’s strategic culture are a driving force behind its rise on the global stage, reflecting psychological resilience in statecraft. According to Edward O. WIslon war is humanity’s hereditary curse. Hence, war not only had devasting conseuqences physcially rather psychologically.
Pakistan, due to its animosity with India, geographical proximity, and internal faultlines, has been the target of both kinetic and non-kinetic attacks. Opponents aim at demoralising the enemy by weakening its ideology. India is the embodiment of it. Since its inception, India has been creating factions in Pakistan’s society and distorting its global perceptions through propaganda. Be it the 1971 tragedy or Pakistan’s role in the War on Terror, India’s ambitions have been materialised with success, earning Pakistan titles like hard country, incubator of terrorism, etc. In the layman’s psychological aspect, framing like these are powerful to break morale and induce hopelessness.
This is because, according to Martin Seligman, helplessness leads one from despair to death. But resilience to counter these framing marks a success; on this, Seligman further maintains that survival in adversity is possible only if hope is maintained. Applied on state lens, the case of Pakistan is pertient example of it.
For more than 70 years since its inceptions the crisis, both internal and external, could be enough to break the state; however, Pakistan’s statecraft reflects survival instead of victimisation with hope as a driving factor. Pakistan kept on cultivating the capacity to keep hope alive that bore fruitful outcomes witnessed in the year 2025 onwards, firstly, duringthe May 2025 confrontation when Pakistan managed to stand against a bigger nation and earn diplomatic success.
Secondly, on diplomatic grounds, in which Pakistan’s strength is witnessed due to cooperation with the Islamic world, with Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Kazakhstan. Lastly, despite years of estrangement with the USA and now the USA-India renewal of the pact, Pakistan’s ability to maintain alliance with the USA and to contribute towards Palestine cause by signing the Board of Peace. These prevailing developments on defence and diplomatic grounds reflect Pakistan’s rise due to its strategic culture and resilient statecraft.
The author is a geopolitical analyst from Pakistan with expertise in South Asian studies, emerging security trends, counterterrorism with interdisciplinary approach at intersection of psychology, security studies and political science.
