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'Salman Rafi has written a book that should make all of us pause and contemplate the complex realities of political conflict in the contemporary world. In meticulously documenting the evolution of the political struggle of the Baloch ethnic-nation for rights and recognition within the state of Pakistan, Rafi forces us to think critically about the problematic of political violence in the so-called age of terror, and alerts us to the dangers of using an ahistorical lens to study conflicts between states and ethnic communities that reside within state borders. Rafi demonstrates that the growing visibility of often violent separatist elements within the wider Baloch nationalist movement raises questions about how successive Pakistani rulers have dealt with long-standing demands emanating from peripheral regions over questions of identity and power-sharing within a multi-national state. Rather than embodying a fundamentally anti-democratic and violent ethos, the Baloch movement is, in Rafi's close reading, to be seen as a case of a people being forced into an untenable position by a state that continues to view democratic assertion by historically underrepresented ethnic groups as an invitation to suppress them. Needless to say, such an approach by the state is entirely self-defeating, but, worryingly, more and more the norm in an age where any and all forms of dissent are conveniently reduced to "terrorism".' - Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, National Institute of Pakistan Studies, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan

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