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Pakistan is one of the most climate change and natural disaster-affected countries in the globe, where the lives and livelihoods of people are repeatedly affected due to these natural disasters. Over the past few decades, the country has been impacted by numerous devastating floods, droughts, and storms. As a result, households face enormous complications, particularly those dwelling in disaster-prone areas. Therefore, this study intends to explore the status of household vulnerability and resilience practices of hazard-prone communities in Pakistan from existing literature. This study has identified the 17 most relevant documents. It argues that household vulnerability is increasing consistently with the increasing rate of disaster intensity. Frequent flooding, landslide, erosion, and crop loss are the leading causes of household vulnerability. This study reveals five types of household vulnerability components which look into several livelihood vulnerability indicators of Pakistani households. Moreover, the study unfolds that the main causes of disaster vulnerability are widespread crop loss, a lack of water, loss of soil fertility, and low socioeconomic situations. The major vulnerability components of dwellers are exposure (increasing summer duration, the rapid increase of population house build-up in the riparian areas, and increasing occurrence of hailstorms), sensitivity, low access to education facilities, human loss, diseases infestation, food insecurity, and social conflict), and less adaptive capacity (social networks, migration, poor emergency services, multiple income sources, and less access to the health facility). To address the household vulnerability, this study has also identified four key aspects of resilience, like social resilience, economic resilience, institutional resilience, and physical resilience. The findings will effectively help to understand the dynamics of household vulnerability and resilience and its measurement and management strategy from developed indicators.

Social media has become an indispensable part of modern politics. Its rise in the political arena has coincided with the decline in trust toward mainstream media. Today, more than half of the population gets their political news and information through social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Social media offers a great marketing opportunity to politicians as they allow them to bypass traditional media and communicate directly with voters, engage citizens during campaign and noncampaign periods, and create a brand image. As social media's influence in politics grows, so has the research devoted to political marketing on social media. It is against this backdrop that this chapter is written, which provides readers with an overview of the academic domain and the current state of literature. The chapter highlights the various research areas that have been explored in the literature and the implications of social media for political marketing strategy, along with the domain's current limitations and possible avenues of further research.

Zakat is an effective Islamic social financial tool that could be used to eliminate global poverty. The pandemic has turned back the world's poverty clock and as such, more work is required to bring equitable and shared prosperity to the world. International organizations that serve humanity could be used as intermediaries of zakat to reach out to those categories of legal recipients of zakat who are most deserved of such assistance, but who are unidentified and unreachable by the zakat organizations. This is with the ultimate objective of enhancing the effectivity of zakat as a social finance tool. However, using international organizations as zakat intermediaries is not a straightforward issue and limited literature are available on the matter to understand the contemporary practice and challenges in this regard. As such, using a qualitative research approach, this chapter sheds light on the issues revolving around the internationalization of zakat by looking at the existing practice of it by identifying the challenges in doing so. This chapter proposes a way to resolve the existing issues in internationalization of zakat by leveraging on blockchain technology where a proposition is made to introduce a crypto zakat platform. This chapter also reveals that in contemporary times, there are three ways in which international organizations have been involved as zakat intermediaries: by creating a zakat fund for specific purpose; by receiving zakat money to be distributed to transform the societies in countries other than where the zakat was collected; and by creating partnership with zakat organizations to use zakat money in the respective country in which zakat was collected. It is anticipated that soon the stakeholders of zakat would join hands with international organizations to effectively manage zakat to alleviate poverty in the world exacerbated by the ongoing pandemic.

Pakistan had never been a place of serious and nuanced debate and contestation of politics of postcolonial critique, that is, the continuity of economic, political, and cultural dependency of newly independent countries (NICs) on ex-colonizers as pointed out by neocolonialism, dependency theory, and postcolonial theory, respectively. Instead, Pakistan is presented by extant liberal academic literature as a “failed nation” and a state dominated by the military and plagued by religious extremism. As opposed to this, through the literary and activists writings of Aziz-ul-Haq, this chapter will try to illustrate how cultural contestation of the nation-building project postindependence from British rule was a lot more complex and interesting in Pakistan. This was so because the nation-building project of Pakistan was, on the one hand, an amalgamation of Indo-Persian, Arab, Indian, and Western colonial and civilizational influences and, on the other hand, entailed suppression of resilient local and national cultures of its constituent nationalities developed over centuries. This was later expressed in ethno-nationalist politics. However, when it came to the politics of the marginalized in the late 1960s, there were important political, theoretical, and literary insights which caused a change in the direction of political practice in Pakistan, which paralleled the politics expressed by writers like Fanon and early Subaltern Studies influenced by the Naxal Movement in India. The contestation and confusion arising from this dialectic also entered Pakistan's literary and cultural sphere. This chapter not only tries to give a different postcolonial critique of the failure of nation-building project in Pakistan but, though at a preliminary level, is an attempt to separate the original postcolonial theory in its radical tradition from contemporary postmodern/poststructuralist postcolonial theory marked with pessimism and resignation.

The fact that the ME has been an area of conflicts throughout its history is an indication of its utmost relevance to the strategy formulations of major powers. The ME can be called “the land bridge of civilization” because it links Africa with Eurasia, and it has been the trade route of peoples from Asia, Africa, and Europe. Ancient empires, as well as contemporary major powers, have competed for power and influence in the region to enhance their relative economic and military positions. The discovery of oil in the region escalated the struggle among major powers, created societal dislocations, and increased internal and external conflicts. The ME has been the major artery of contact for over 3000 years (Weatherby, 2001, pp. 1–4). One hundred years ago, scholar-adventurer John L. Stoddard recognized this fact when he described a small portion of the region, Palestine. According to Stoddard, “Palestine has an area only a little larger than the state of Massachusetts, while Russia occupies one seventh of the habitable globe: yet in the scales of intellectuals and moral value the little province of Judea outweighs beyond comparison the empire of Czar” (Weatherby, 2001, pp. 1–4).

This chapter is intended to elaborate on the existing academic literature addressing the migration of constitutional ideas. Through an examination of ongoing efforts to enshrine “defamation of religion” as a violation of international human rights, the author confirms that the phenomenon of migration is not restricted to positive constitutional norms, but rather also encompasses negative ideas that ultimately may serve to undermine international and domestic constitutionalism. More specifically, the case study demonstrates that the movement of anti-constitutional ideas is not restricted to the domain of “international security” law, and further, that the vertical axis linking international and domestic law is in fact a two-way channel that permits the transmission of domestic anti-constitutional ideas up to the international level.

In reaching the findings presented herein, the chapter also adds to the universalism–relativism debate by demonstrating that allowances for “plurality consciousness” on the international level may in certain instances undermine fundamental norms previously negotiated and accepted as authoritative by the international community. From this perspective, the movement in favor of prohibiting “defamation of religion” is not merely a case study that helps to expand our understanding of how anti-constitutional ideas migrate, but also indicative of a reenergized campaign to challenge the status, content, and stability of universal human rights norms.