Strategic Agency or Structural Constraint: Civil-Military Relations in Pakistan's Foreign Policy (2010-2020)

Abstract

This research is a systematic review of the key factors shaping Pakistan's foreign policy during the critical decade from 2010 to 2020. It academically explores the traditional agency-structure argument in International Relations theory by questioning the degree to which Pakistan's external relations were characterised by sovereign strategic autonomy or by adaptation to domestic institutional constraints rooted in the system. The paper does not merely apply the traditional civil-military debate. Rather, it reveals a praetorian paradox in states with dominant security institutions. In such states, the military is a dual-faced reality: the primary agent as well as the primary domestic constraint, creating a unique, self-limiting form of agency. The study is a qualitative, within-case analysis that relies on a constructivist epistemology. It aims to employ the synthesis of the literature and the open-source official statements of the Indian, Pakistani and the US sources. The foreign policy of Pakistan can best be described as being characterised by constricted agency, a state in which tactical actions are made within the context of parameters of strong structural restraint. The findings reveal a dialectical process wherein strategic agency is continuously moderated and reconstructed by the structural forces that lie deep-rooted within it. This entails the institutional imbalance of the dominant Civil-Military Relations (CMR), chronic domestic political instability, acute economic vulnerabilities, its religiously constructed realities, and the dynamics of an intensely competitive regional and global geopolitical landscape. This has profound consequences for democratic consolidation, long-term strategic coherence, regional stability, and narratives of pure autonomy or of deterministic constraint.

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