Projecting Agency

Pakistan's Geoeconomic Discourse in an Era of Great Power Competition

Abstract

As great power competition intensifies, many Global South states claim to pursue "geoeconomic" strategies that prioritise economic partnerships over traditional security alignments. Pakistan is no exception to this rhetorical shift. Since 2021, Pakistani officials have explicitly endorsed a pivot from "geopolitics to geoeconomics" and articulated a posture of strategic non-alignment between the United States and China. But does this discourse reflect genuine agency, or does it mask persistent structural constraints? Through process tracing across three interconnected timelines – US–Pakistan relations from 2010 to 2025, CPEC development from 2013 onwards, and the emergence of geoeconomics rhetoric from 2021 – this paper analyses the relationship between strategic narratives and material policy outcomes. Using a publicly filed May 2025 Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) document as a critical test case, the paper demonstrates a fundamental gap between public non-alignment rhetoric and less visible, transactional diplomatic positioning. The empirical evidence shows that Pakistan's dual dependencies, operating through US-backed IMF conditionalities and Chinese infrastructure lock-in mechanisms, compound rather than offset one another, substantially restricting material policy transformation. This paper argues that geoeconomic discourse functions not as evidence of structural autonomy, but as a form of limited discursive agency deployed to manage domestic and international legitimacy costs. Ultimately, the paper proposes empirical indicators for distinguishing genuine agency from rhetorical positioning, offering a potentially replicable analytical framework for understanding how middle powers strategically deploy narratives to navigate narrow negotiating spaces within, rather than beyond, great power asymmetry.