ords do political work. The repeated deployment of charged epithets like kafir (infidel), ghaddar (traitor) and the generic tag of security threat function far less as neutral description than as instruments of social boundary-making.

When used in profusion by political actors, media institutions or organs of the state, these signifiers perform a cluster of interlinked operations: they de-legitimate particular persons and collectivities; authorise extraordinary measures against them; foreclose deliberative contestation; and signal an intellectual and institutional impoverishment at the core of political order. Rather than reflecting substantive engagement with dissent, their excessive circulation points to a political culture in which naming replaces reasoning and coercive consensus substitutes for democratic persuasion.

Situating this phenomenon within contemporary political theory particularly securitisation theory, govern-mentality and the concept of the state of exception helps illuminate how such linguistic practices are neither accidental nor merely rhetorical, but constitutive of modes of governance. Pakistan offers a particularly revealing case study, where besides political opponents, rights activists and lawyers have been framed through these exclusionary registers.

Securitisation theory, most prominently associated with the Copenhagen School, begins with the insight that security is not an objective condition discovered through empirical assessment but a performative act accomplished through speech. By naming an issue, an idea, or an individual as an existential threat, political elites shift that object from the realm of ordinary politics into the domain of emergency, thereby legitimising exceptional instruments and extraordinary responses.

Once an issue is successfully securitised, normal standards of proportionality, legality and public justification are weakened, if not suspended altogether. In this sense, labels such as “traitor” or “security threat” do not describe a reality so much as produce one: they transform dissent into danger and disagreement into disloyalty. The power of such signifiers lies precisely in their capacity to foreclose debate by framing critique as a threat to collective survival.

Michel Foucault’s reflections on govern-mentality and bio-politics deepen this analysis by locating these rhetorical practices within broader technologies of rule. Governmentality refers to the rationalities and techniques through which modern power seeks to administer populations by defining norms, managing risks and classifying deviance. From this perspective, the invocation of kafir or ghaddar operates as a classificatory device that renders certain lives morally and politically unintelligible.

The bio-political dimension of this process becomes visible when such classifications justify surveillance, detention and disciplinary interventions in the name of protecting the life of the polity. Individuals thus labelled are expelled from the field of legitimate political subjects and repositioned as objects to be managed, neutralised or corrected. What appears as moral condemnation or patriotic outrage is, in fact, deeply embedded in the administrative logic of controlling people.

This dynamic is further clarified by Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the state of exception, which describes how modern states suspend ordinary legal protections by invoking extraordinary circumstances, most often under the banner of security. The repeated rhetorical manufacture of enemies makes the declaration of exception not only easier but routine. When terms such as kafir, ghaddar or security threat are deployed habitually, exceptional governance ceases to appear exceptional; it becomes normalised. The boundary between law and violence blurs, and dissenting citizens find themselves inhabiting a legal grey zone in which rights exist formally but are effectively withheld. The state of exception, in this sense, is sustained less by overt coups or formal emergencies than by the everyday circulation of delegitimising language.

Beyond these institutional and juridical effects, the profusion of such signifiers also points to a deeper crisis of public reason. Political language that relies on epithets rather than arguments reflects what may be described as intellectual decadence: the erosion of shared vocabularies of critique, citizenship and disagreement. In such contexts, stigmatisation replaces persuasion and symbolic purification substitutes for substantive engagement with social complexity. This decadence is not merely stylistic; it is structural. It tends to co-exist with top-down governance arrangements that privilege command over conversation and loyalty over legitimacy. Where diversity (social, cultural, ethnic or ideological) exists without corresponding democratic accommodation, the temptation to govern through exclusionary naming becomes particularly strong.

The transition from signifier to sanction occurs through a set of mutually reinforcing mechanisms. First, delegitimation frames the target as lying outside the moral community either as an apostate undeserving of protection or as a traitor willfully endangering the politythereby lowering the threshold for punitive action. Second, legal and administrative legitimation follows. Once an issue is framed in security terms, ordinary criminal law is supplemented or bypassed by special regimes such as anti-terrorism or cybercrime legislation, which permit harsher penalties and procedural shortcuts. Third, social de-legitimacy is produced, creating a climate in which harassment and economic marginalization - even physical violence - become socially intelligible, if not tacitly sanctioned. These mechanisms operate in concert: the claim of “security threat” performs the legal conversion, kafir inoculates the public against empathy, and ghaddar mobilises nationalist affect to justify exclusion.

Pakistan’s contemporary political landscape vividly illustrates these dynamics. The country’s institutional architecture marked by strong unelected centres of power, a dominant security establishment and constrained deliberative spaces, has long incentivised securitised modes of governance. In recent years, dissenting lawyers and activists have increasingly encountered the full force of this apparatus.

The harassment of human rights lawyers, particularly through charges linked to critical expression on social media, exemplifies how dissent is converted into a quasi-criminal spectacle. Judicial interventions, including stays and hearings by superior courts, have highlighted both the intensity of state pressure and the fragility of legal safeguards once securitizing narratives take hold.

A similar pattern is evident in the treatment of ethno-regional activism in Balochistan and the former FATA regions.

Then there is the persistent potency of sectarian language, particularly the practice of takfir, which declares individuals or groups outside the fold of Islam. While often discussed as a social or theological problem, takfir also functions as a political technology of exclusion, marginalising heterodox voices and minority communities. Periodic debates about criminalising takfir reveal an acute awareness of its destabilising effects, yet they also underscore how readily religious signifiers are mobilised to police moral and political boundaries. When religious delegitimation converges with security framing, dissenters encounter a double bind: they are rendered morally suspect and politically dangerous at the same time.

These empirical patterns are best understood as products of institutional incentives inherent in top-down governance. Where power is centralised and accountability mechanisms are weak, rhetorical shortcuts become efficient tools of rule. Epithets signal loyalty, identify enemies and facilitate rapid mobilisation across media and bureaucratic networks. Over time, a vicious cycle emerges in which exclusionary language degrades the public sphere, intellectual vocabularies narrow, grievances are forced into securitised frames and pluralism is further eroded. Intellectual decadence, in this sense, refers not simply to poor rhetoric but also to the loss of a shared discursive infrastructure that allows a diverse society to negotiate difference without recourse to coercion or humiliation.

If pluralism is to be preserved and securitisation prevented from consuming ordinary politics, the implications are clear. Contested social and political questions must be de-securitised and returned to the realm of democratic disagreement through judicial vigilance and parliamentary leadership. Vocabularies of shared belonging must be strengthened through education, civil society and responsible media practices that resist the economies of outrage. Finally, robust rule-of-law remedies and independent oversight are essential to counter arbitrary detention and judicial harassment, ensuring that security prerogatives do not permanently eclipse civil liberties.

The triad of signifiers - kafir, ghaddar and security threat - represents more than rhetorical excess. Their persistent invocation is both a symptom and a driver of exclusionary politics, revealing a polity in which dissent is increasingly unintelligible except as danger. Pakistan’s recent experience demonstrates how naming becomes sanctioning and how language itself can be weaponised to sustain exceptional governance. Reversing this trajectory requires not only institutional reform but also a renewed commitment to deliberative politics and the rehabilitation of civic language capable of accommodating difference without criminalising it.

The writer is a professor in the Faculty of Liberal Arts at the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore.