Contribution short abstract:

Based on an ethnographic investigation into Pakistan's cash transfers program, this paper explores various imaginaries of the political that emerge and remain central to the ways in which people constitute, navigate and experience their relationship with the state.

Contribution long abstract:

How do various imaginaries of the political emerge and become dominant or marginal through the ways in which people constitute, navigate and experience their relationship with the state? This paper seeks to address this question by focusing on the politics of cash transfers in Pakistan. The largest social protection initiative in Pakistan's history, the Benazir Income Support Programme was introduced in 2008. It arrogated itself the goals of poverty and women empowerment: around six million households receiving the cash grants are represented by the women recognized as the primary beneficiaries. In order to improve transparency, precision targeting and curbing corruption and various forms of undesired human/political interference, the program has come to rely on digital technologies and databases, the experiments that are claimed to emulate the socalled best practices that have made cash transfers a popular global anti-poverty policy. Successive governments, and their powerful global backers and interlocutors, have claimed that these shifts are meant to affect more desirable forms of "sha'oor" [consciousness] among the poor who should see the money they receive as a matter of depersonalized forms of relating to "the state", such as the "rights" and the "citizenship". However, as I show based on ethnographic research in Pakistan's second largest city, Lahore, various forms of human mediation, socialities and relations remain central to the women beneficiaries' understanding of the money and indeed "the state" itself. Paradoxically, these ever-multiplying mediations performed at the margins of the state remain critical to the program, but also invisible, to the state.