Book Launch – Seeking Supremacy: The Pursuit of Judicial Power in Pakistan
In this talk, Kureshi will launch his recently-published book that maps out the evolution of the relationship between the judiciary and military in Pakistan, explaining why Pakistan’s high courts shifted from loyal deference to the military to open competition, and confrontation, with military and civilian institutions. In the book Kureshi demonstrates that a shift in the audiences shaping judicial preferences explains the emergence of the judiciary as an assertive power center. As the judiciary gradually embraced less deferential institutional preferences, a shift in judicial preferences took place and the judiciary sought to play a more expansive and authoritative political role. Using this audience-based approach, Kureshi roots the judiciary in its political, social and institutional context, and develops a generalizable framework that can explain variation and change in judicial-military relations around the world.

The discussant for the book launch will be: Professor Anuj Bhuwania, Professor in Law at OP Jindal Global University in India and the Smuts Research Visitng Fellow in Commonwealth Studies at the University of Cambridge.
The chair for the book launch will be Dr. Ankita Pandey, Departmental Lecturer in South Asian Studies with the Oxford School of Global Studies in the University of Oxford.

Yasser Kureshi is a Departmental Lecturer in South Asian Studies with the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies at the University of Oxford. His research concerns the military and the judiciary and their impact on constitutional configurations and democratic outcomes in authoritarian and post-authoritarian states. His other research interests include democratic backsliding in South Asia, coup legitimation strategies, federalism, and the making of legal cultures. His work has appeared in the Journal of Comparative Politics, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, and Democratization.