Developing countries, with limited monitoring and auditing capabilities, face significant tax evasion issues. This study examines the impact of various text message combinations on promoting tax compliance, particularly in encouraging service providers to submit monthly sales tax returns in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. A randomised controlled trial involved 18,087 service providers and tested three types of SMS reminders. These included a basic reminder for the due date, a reciprocity message emphasising social responsibility, and a loss aversion (LA) message highlighting financial penalties and deactivation. Subsequently, service providers who didn’t file on time received one of three warning messages. These warnings included a basic alert about potential legal action, financial penalties, and deactivation, as well as a message framing continued non-compliance as an active choice (AC). Overall, the interventions did not significantly influence tax filing behaviour beyond basic reminders and warnings. However, compliance improved for early registrants with the LA reminder and AC warning, and these results were robust to multiple hypothesis testing corrections. Compliance worsened for recent registrants in all combinations except the LA reminder and AC warning. These findings suggest that targeted low-cost messages that convey vague threats can improve tax compliance among certain taxpayer groups.

This article examines, for the first time, a significant aspect of Bangladesh’s Liberation War in 1971: the fate of ‘stranded Bengalis’ in West Pakistan during and after the war. The war ended with over 90,000 Pakistani prisoners of war (POWs) captured in East Pakistan-turned-Bangladesh, who were then transferred to Indian custody. The government of Pakistan responded by holding hostage roughly the same number of Bengali military personnel, civil servants, and their dependants in West Pakistan as leverage for the return of its captured POWs. Neither group would return home immediately in what arguably became one of the largest cases of mutual mass internment post-1945. Drawing on a wide range of untapped sources, both official and personal, this article traces the trajectory of this crisis of captivity in which the Bengali officials and officers—hitherto serving the Pakistani state—found themselves as rightless citizens with ‘enemy’ status after December 1971. Their wartime experiences, more than half a century after the war, warrant recognition in widening the understanding of 1971, not only in the history of regional and global politics but also at what was arguably the home front—a thousand miles away from the ‘war zone’ in East Pakistan.

Climate anxiety has a negative impact on the mental health and psychological well-being of the vulnerable population. The goal is to assess many factors that affect mental health and psychological well-being, as well as how climate change affects mental health in Pakistan’s vulnerable population. This study provides evidence-based insights into the long- and medium-term impacts of extreme weather events on mental health. To obtain information on these variables, this research uses a quantitative approach and a cross-sectional survey design with a multivariate regression model for empirical tests on a sample of parents and children with an impact on mental health from climate change anxiety. Results indicate that individuals who experience shock climate change anxiety and its effects on mental health and psychological well-being. Climate change can have detrimental effects on children’s mental health. (1) Children’s Stress Index (CSI): (2) climate change anxiety (CCA), (3) generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) and (4) major depression disorder (MDD), as reported by the children with mental health outcomes. The findings of this study show that climate change has a stressful effect on mental health. The article concludes with a discussion on strategies to address the anticipated mental health issues among children due to climate change.

What is a populist judge, and when do judges embrace populism? Populist judges bypass legal and procedural constraints, seek an unmediated relationship with the public, and claim to represent the public better than political elites. Judicial populism can emerge in response to institutionalized dissonance in the political system. Dissonant institutionalization facilitates contestation between state institutions and can undermine the legitimacy of political institutions. This legitimacy crisis can imbue judges with a belief in their role as representatives of the public interest. In Pakistan, the dissonance caused by unresolved differences between the civil-military bureaucracy and the elected political leadership—differences that were embedded into the constitutional framework, facilitated the rise of judicial populism. I outline the key features of judicial populism and study the dynamics surrounding the rapid expansion of populist jurisprudence between 2005 and 2019 in Pakistan, with a focus on public interest litigation that became the cornerstone of the judiciary’s populist turn. Through case analysis, archival research, and semi-structured interviews, I discuss features of the populist approach to jurisprudence and trace how dissonance within Pakistan’s political system created new opportunities for the judiciary and changed judicial role conceptions within the legal and judicial community.

The genus Ornithodoros is notably diverse within the family Argasidae, comprising approximately 134 species distributed among 4 subgenera, 1 of which is the subgenus Pavlovskyella. In an earlier study, we identified distinct soft ticks as Ornithodoros (Pavlovskyella) sp., which were collected from animal shelters in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. Providing additional collections from that same locality and a comprehensive analysis involving detailed morphological and mitogenome-based comparisons with closely related species, this study formally designates a novel species for these specimens. Adults and late-instar nymphs of the new species display a dorsoventral groove, small cheeks not covering the capitulum, 5 small even humps on tarsus I and a transverse postanal groove intersecting the median postanal groove perpendicularly. It also lacks a tuft of setae on the ventral surface of the hood which separates the novel species from Ornithodoros papillipes. Ventral chaetotaxy of tarsus IV indicates 4–7 setal pairs in nymphs and 5–7 pairs in adults that separate the new species from Ornithodoros tholozani sensu stricto and Ornithodoros crossi, 2 morphologically closely related species that occur in geographical proximity. Phylogenetic analyses of the full-length mitochondrial genome and the 18S and 28S ribosomal RNA genes, combined with pairwise nucleotide comparisons of cox1, cox2, atp8, atp6, cox3, nad3, nad5, nad4, nad4L, nad6, cytb, nad1, nad2, 12S rDNA, 16S rDNA, 18S rDNA and 28S rDNA further support that the new species belongs to the Pavlovskyella subgenus, clustering with O. tholozani, Ornithodoros verrucosus and Ornithodoros tartakovskyi.

Sinf-e-Aahan (2021) and Ehd-e-Wafa (2019) are two scripted television shows produced by Inter Services Public Relations (ISPR), the public relations wing of the Pakistan Armed Forces. Both shows merge the national, military spheres with domestic, civil spheres within its narrative universe, albeit in contrasting ways. This is a departure from military-sponsored scripted television made under the monopolistic state control of television. How do military-sponsored shows maintain the domestic and military spheres in their visual landscape? With attention to visual representation in the serials and using secondary data available on the production team’s choices, I argue that the conventions of domestic serial content force military characters to engage in issues of domesticity, such as marital conflict and reputation scandals. Military and familial logics meld together in instances where the military inserts itself into the domestic sphere within these shows, without embracing the messiness and moral ambiguity of such spaces.

The commemoration of Husain’s martyrdom named “Muharram” implies for the Shi’ite community that it publicly expresses its grief. This emotion is central to its definition, as Muharram is referred to as the “month of mourning” and the Shi’ite as a “community of mourners.” However, Muharram would not be equivalent across Pakistan, as a young Shi’ite fakir, who will serve as our guide, in this comparative study, points out. According to him, the sadness would be greater in Lahore (Punjab) than in Sehwan (Sindh), and for this reason Muharram would be better celebrated there. The comparison of the ritual process in these two cities, drawn from the experiences of this fakir and the ethnographer, will show how the production and expression of sadness are subject to contrasting experiences on the one hand, and divergent aims on the other, depending on the position of the actors in the social context in which they are lived.