The discourses on the civil society and the State in the context of European and post-colonial narratives: Re-conceptualizing the civil society in Pakistan

Understanding the social contract as the justification of the State. The discourses on the State: a comparative perspective from early modern, modern and post modern era. Theory building on the State: the modernization, core-periphery (dependency), neo-dependancy and the world systems schools. The case of the civil society: evolution of the term since early times/historical and philosophical background. Theoretical approaches to civil society: normative and perspective features towards understanding the concept. The liberal and the non-liberal narratives to the discourses on the civil society. The Post-colonial studies approach towards understanding the civil society. Post-colonial theoretical framework: retracing the concept of civil society. The historiography of the politics of the governed in Pakistan: constructing the political narrative of the marginal fragments.Understanding the social contract as the justification of the State. The discourses on the State: a comparative perspective from early modern, modern and post modern era. Theory building on the State: the modernization, core-periphery (dependency), neo-dependancy and the world systems schools. The case of the civil society: evolution of the term since early times/historical and philosophical background. Theoretical approaches to civil society: normative and perspective features towards understanding the concept. The liberal and the non-liberal narratives to the discourses on the civil society. The Post-colonial studies approach towards understanding the civil society. Post-colonial theoretical framework: retracing the concept of civil society. The historiography of the politics of the governed in Pakistan: constructing the political narrative of the marginal fragments.LUISS PhD Thesi

Counterfactual Explanation and Instance-Generation using Cycle-Consistent Generative Adversarial Networks

The image-based diagnosis is now a vital aspect of modern automation assisted diagnosis. To enable models to produce pixel-level diagnosis, pixel-level ground-truth labels are essentially required. However, since it is often not straight forward to obtain the labels in many application domains such as in medical image, classification-based approaches have become the de facto standard to perform the diagnosis. Though they can identify class-salient regions, they may not be useful for diagnosis where capturing all of the evidences is important requirement. Alternatively, a counterfactual explanation (CX) aims at providing explanations using a casual reasoning process of form "If X has not happend, Y would not heppend". Existing CX approaches, however, use classifier to explain features that can change its predictions. Thus, they can only explain class-salient features, rather than entire object of interest. This hence motivates us to propose a novel CX strategy that is not reliant on image classification. This work is inspired from the recent developments in generative adversarial networks (GANs) based image-to-image domain translation, and leverages to translate an abnormal image to counterpart normal image (i.e. counterfactual instance CI) to find discrepancy maps between the two. Since it is generally not possible to obtain abnormal and normal image pairs, we leverage Cycle-Consistency principle (a.k.a CycleGAN) to perform the translation in unsupervised way. We formulate CX in terms of a discrepancy map that, when added from the abnormal image, will make it indistinguishable from the CI. We evaluate our method on three datasets including a synthetic, tuberculosis and BraTS dataset. All these experiments confirm the supremacy of propose method in generating accurate CX and CI

Fighting terrorism: can Pakistan overcome its negative image?

The debate on whether Pakistan can be considered a trustworthy actor in the international arena has surfaced again. Recent events have shown that Pakistan is capable of prudence and moderation when dealing with non-aligned South Asian powers, which is a welcome, (if relative), improvement in its international image. The fact that Pakistan remains under continuous global scrutiny regarding terrorist-related activities is well known; however, a true commitment to the fight against terrorism by the current government can go a long way in reshaping Pakistan’s credibility. To what extent can Pakistan’s counter-terrorist initiatives be trusted is thus far unknown. The task is immense, and it remains to be seen whether Pakistan can transform itself from a country that exports terrorism to a country that promotes peace and harmony both regionally and internationally. This article focuses on this bold new Pakistani ambition, which is led by the country’s new government under the leadership of Prime Minister Imran Khan. We have witnessed bans on organisations and networks known to financially support terrorist activities locally, regionally and internationally, and Islamabad has also put forward claims to curb terrorism and militancy. Will we finally witness the rise of Pakistan as a credible and responsible global actor

Kashmir and the abrogation of Article 370: Can peace be possible, or stalemate continue to hamper India and Pakistan relations in future?

[...] India’s abrogation of Article 370 and 35A in Kashmir is also a manifest to that end. On 5 August India belligerently took over the disputed and autonomous region of Kashmir, stripping off its autonomy by merging it with the Union Territory. The legal fraternity in India called it extra constitutional, fraudulent and illegal, barring the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly rather making it entirely dysfunctional and abrogating it all together. [...