Status of Interdisciplinary Studies

The book under review is the outcome of a Herculean task of reviewing the status of both pure and interdisciplinary disciplines of the social sciences in Pakistan. The review has been done on the basis of quantitative growth, qualitative development and identification of the factors that limited or fostered the disciplines. Without following any chronology of the development disciplines the editors have collected the articles on different disciplines randomly. For instance International relations which is relatively new and interdisciplinary subject has been discussed ahead of Economics, Anthropology or Sociology. Three major challenges that the teaching and research in the field of International Relations in Pakistan face are, one, lack of theoretical orientation of the courses, second, its weak multidisciplinary character. The third challenge is the lack of nexus between the policy makers and the Pakistani academia (p.25). Inayatullah emphasizes that, “The discipline of Political Science in Pakistan compared to its counterparts in the West and India remains underdeveloped both quantitatively and qualitatively…