This paper reports findings from a qualitative study of how older, educated Pashtun men in Pakistan negotiate masculine authority across jirga/hujra settings and formal governance. Drawing on 20 life-history interviews and 12 episodes of participant observation (local jirgas, hujra gatherings, party offices, and tehsil council sessions), we analyze how Pashtunwali, an indigenous moral and political code among the Pashtun community in Pakistan and Afghanistan that regulates justice, leadership, and social conduct, especially the notion of ghairat (honor), nang (dignity), and badal (reciprocity/justice), is recalibrated through education, bureaucratic routines, and exposure to global discourses. Using hybrid masculinities as theoritical lense, our findings identify three recurrent repertoires of “hybrid political masculinity”: (1) Custodial-Modernist, which pairs guardianship of Pashtunwali with meritocratic talk (observed in retired civil servants and head teachers); (2) Procedural Patriarch, which embraces rule-of-law and due process but preserves male gatekeeping in decision forums; and (3) Developmental Patron, which reframes patronage as “service delivery” (roads, welfare, documents) while retaining vertical authority. Survey-style prompts embedded in interviews indicate selective egalitarianism with 68% endorsing women’s voting and education as “community strength,” yet only 14% supported women’s speaking roles in jirgas; 76% named formal education as a legitimate basis for leadership, but 61% prioritized jirga consensus over statutory law when the two clashed. This study advances, (a) the notion of credentialized ghairat (honor), education as moral capital that revalidates authority without dismantling gendered exclusions; (b) procedural patriarchy, adoption of bureaucratic/procedural talk that modernizes the form of male dominance while preserving its effects; and (c) a repertoire model of hybrid political masculinities that explains situational switching between Pashtunwali and state rationalities. By showing how educated Pashtun men mobilize merit, progress, and democracy to reframe (rather than replace) custodial power, the study contributes a decolonial, context-specific account of political masculinities in everyday governance, clarifying how honor, education, and institutional proximity co-produce authority and delimit women’s and youth’s political voice.
