State of minorities in Quaid’s Pakistan National December 25, 2020 The modern nation-states are not home to culturally homogenised people but of varied groups that may be differentiated mostly on the grounds of religion, race, and language. Despite sharing common citizenship, the status and relationship between majority and minority groups are not given and fixed but flexible and constructed. The identity of the majority-minority group is rooted in the binary construction of ‘self’ and ‘other’ where the former is always placed at a privileged/dominant position from its opposite. According to the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, ‘self’ and ‘other’ are different, however, mutually constituting each other. The ‘self’ is constantly defined in relation to the ‘other’. The ‘other’ who is represented as a direct opposite of the ‘self’, consequently, is excluded from the identity of the latter. From the critical theory perspective of international politics, the reification/materialisation of boundaries between ‘self’ and ‘other’ is essential for identity construction and the establishment of power relations. By implication, majority-minority group identities are constituted in a way where ‘majority self’, which is dominant/privileged, excludes ‘minority other’, which is marginalised/underprivileged, to exercise power relations that need to be critically evaluated in a specific context.