Analysis
Commentary, briefings, and forecasts on the trends shaping Pakistan's strategic environment. Filter by focus area or format.
As the world's largest economies rediscover tariffs and industrial policy, the open-trade assumptions behind Pakistan's export model are quietly eroding. The window is narrowing.
A fragmenting global order theoretically hands middle powers more leverage. Whether Pakistan can convert that theory into advantage is a question of capacity, not opportunity.
Pakistani equities have been among the world's best performers on the back of stabilisation. The question for the second half of the year is whether earnings and growth can validate the re-rating.
Talk of de-dollarisation and BRICS expansion offers indebted economies a tempting narrative of escape. For Pakistan, the appeal is real — and the math is unforgiving.
Climate stress and a fraying treaty are turning the Indus from a settled arrangement into a live strategic risk. It is the one India–Pakistan issue where the status quo could genuinely break.
Saudisation, Emiratisation, and a more selective Gulf labour market threaten the remittances that keep Pakistan's external accounts afloat. The lifeline is quietly being reshaped.
Gulf capital is no longer arriving as no-strings deposits. The pivot to equity stakes in ports, minerals, and agriculture is the most consequential shift in Pakistan's external financing model.
Pakistan helped put 'loss and damage' on the global agenda. Turning that diplomatic win into actual money — and spending it well — is the harder, less told story.
Access to AI compute is becoming a marker of national power, sorting the world into chip-rich and chip-poor. Where that leaves countries like Pakistan is a question of more than technology.
A consumer-led solar boom is reshaping Pakistan's power economics from the bottom up — and quietly destabilising the finances of a grid that was never designed for it.
A region once defined by rigid rivalries is recombining — Saudi–Iran détente, Gulf diversification, and shifting US engagement. Each shift changes the space a partner like Pakistan has to operate.
The relationship has settled into a low-communication, low-trust equilibrium. The danger is not renewed intent for conflict — it is the thinning of the channels that prevent miscalculation.
Technology decoupling between Washington and Beijing is no longer a great-power spectator sport. For deeply China-aligned economies like Pakistan, it is becoming a forced choice — read from Islamabad.
Cross-border militancy is the sharpest deterioration in Pakistan's risk profile. Islamabad's options for pressuring Kabul are narrower than its rhetoric implies.
The headline numbers are cooperative. The reform agenda underneath them is where the program will succeed or fail — and where Islamabad's record is thinnest.
Beijing and Islamabad have rebranded the corridor around industry, agriculture, and technology. The rebrand is real; the financing model behind it is the part worth watching.
Reserves are stabilising, the security picture is not. Our framing of the five dynamics — fiscal, political, security, regional, and energy — that will shape Pakistan's year.
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