When a state confronts political dissent, the response often reveals more about its character than its constitutional promises. Pakistan’s treatment of the Baloch movement offers a particularly revealing example of how contemporary states manage political opposition. Should one judge a state by the democratic values it proclaims, or by the practices through which it governs? The latter offers a far more reliable measure.
From Disappearances to Criminalisation
Authoritarian states have never tolerated political opposition. Whether in Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union or Pinochet’s Chile, the objective remained consistent: neutralise those who challenged the state’s authority. What has changed over time is not the objective but the repertoire of techniques through which it is pursued. Earlier regimes often relied on spectacular violence, including public executions, torture, and mass imprisonment, to instil fear. As international human rights norms developed after the Second World War and overt brutality became increasingly costly, many states adapted. By the latter half of the twentieth century, enforced disappearances emerged as one of the defining technologies of repression. The state could eliminate its critics while denying responsibility, leaving families suspended between hope and uncertainty.
Today, repression has evolved once again. This does not mean that disappearances have ceased. They continue across many authoritarian contexts, often targeting those whose invisibility carries few political consequences. Rather, the hierarchy of repression has changed. Faced with prominent dissidents whose disappearance would invite domestic scrutiny and international condemnation, states increasingly turn to the law itself. Anti-terror legislation, national security statutes, and emergency provisions serve as instruments by which political opposition is criminalised rather than simply eliminated. Violence has not disappeared; it has acquired legal form.
This transformation is precisely what Michel Foucault anticipated when he argued that modern power operates less through spectacular displays of violence than through institutions that classify, discipline, and normalise. Courts, prisons, legal procedures, and bureaucracies do not simply punish; they produce political identities. The accused becomes a criminal. The dissenter becomes a terrorist. Giorgio Agamben extended this insight by arguing that the “state of exception” no longer remains an extraordinary response to crisis. Exceptional powers become embedded within ordinary law until the emergency itself becomes routine. Contemporary counter-terror legislation exemplifies this shift. Its significance lies not only in expanding state power but in allowing repression to appear lawful.
The Baloch Movement and the Juridification of Dissent
Pakistan’s treatment of the Baloch movement reflects this transformation with striking clarity. For decades, the Baloch question has been marked by enforced disappearances. Students, journalists, political workers, and ordinary civilians have vanished into a system that operates largely beyond judicial scrutiny. Human rights organisations have repeatedly documented these abuses. Balochistan, despite being Pakistan’s largest and most resource-rich province, continues to experience profound political exclusion, economic marginalisation, and militarised governance.
Following the assassination of Baloch nationalist leader Akbar Bugti in 2006, disappearances and extrajudicial killings intensified. Yet, another pattern gradually became visible. Alongside covert repression, the Pakistani state increasingly relied on anti-terror legislation to prosecute activists, journalists, and civil society organisations. United Nations experts have repeatedly expressed concern that Pakistan conflates peaceful political advocacy with terrorism, undermining freedoms of expression, association, and assembly. Amnesty International has likewise criticised the routine use of anti-terror laws against individuals engaged in legitimate political dissent. The objective is not merely to silence opposition but to redefine it.
Few cases demonstrate this shift more clearly than that of Dr. Mahrang Baloch. A physician-turned-activist and one of the founders of the Baloch Yakjehti Committee (BYC), she has emerged as the most prominent face of one of South Asia’s largest peaceful, women-led movements. Her political journey began after her father, himself a political activist, was forcibly disappeared and later found dead. Like countless Baloch women searching for missing relatives, she transformed private grief into collective resistance.
Her work has earned international recognition, including inclusion in the BBC’s 100 Women list and a nomination for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize. Yet that very visibility helps explain the state’s response. Lesser-known activists continue to disappear with little public attention. Mahrang Baloch, by contrast, has been criminally prosecuted. Her imprisonment reflects the strategic logic of contemporary authoritarianism. A disappearance attracts questions while prosecution produces a legal record. A secret detention centre exposes the state while the courtroom allows it to claim fidelity to the rule of law. The state no longer appears to suppress political opposition. It appears to prosecute criminality.
This distinction is politically significant because criminalisation accomplishes what disappearance alone cannot. It transforms the meaning of dissent itself. Once an activist is legally designated a terrorist or extremist, every demand they articulate becomes suspect. Every supporter risks guilt by association. Every act of solidarity is recast as complicity. Foucault’s insight becomes tangible here: law does not simply regulate political life; it produces categories through which political life is understood. The issue is no longer whether the state imprisons its critics, but whether those critics can still be recognised as political actors once the law has redefined them as security threats.
Pakistan is hardly unique in this regard. Across the world, governments increasingly invoke the language of national security to prosecute journalists, environmental defenders, student leaders, and human rights activists. The legal frameworks differ from one country to another, but the underlying logic remains strikingly similar. Rather than presenting dissent as a legitimate feature of democratic politics, states increasingly portray it as an existential threat requiring exceptional legal measures. The courtroom has become an important theatre in which authoritarian power seeks democratic legitimacy.
The question, then, is how political movements survive this transformation. One possible answer comes from the Zapatista movement in southern Mexico. By rejecting centralised leadership and organising collectively, the movement made itself difficult to decapitate through arrests or assassinations. Its experience can teach an important lesson: movements should learn from one another across borders because repression itself evolves across borders. As states increasingly target visible leaders through legal and institutional means, decentralised forms of organisation may offer a way to preserve resistance without making it dependent on any single individual.
The Challenge for Democratic Societies
The significance of Mahrang Baloch’s imprisonment extends far beyond Pakistan or the Baloch struggle. It points to a broader transformation in the relationship between law and power. Contemporary authoritarianism has not abandoned violence; it has learned to institutionalise it. The courtroom increasingly replaces the secret prison and legality itself becomes the language through which coercion is justified. The danger, then, is not only that dissidents are imprisoned. It is that repression begins to resemble justice. When the law ceases to restrain power and instead legitimises it, authoritarianism no longer needs to operate in the shadows. It governs in plain sight, speaking the reassuring language of legality while hollowing out its substance. The challenge for democratic societies is therefore not only to defend dissent but also to recognise when legality itself becomes the most effective instrument of repression. By the time repression speaks the language of justice, it has already become far more difficult to resist.
