Born in the ashes of the British imperial rule, the statecraft of the postcolonial state of Pakistan is predicated upon the ideas, norms, values, and practices of the British colonial administration as well as the culture of power preceding it. They form the governing precepts of the state of Pakistan especially in regards to state-society relations in the territories existing at the state’s periphery. The paper attempted to locate the recent community-led protest in the Janikhel area of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province against murder, mayhem, and the management of space by the state in the paradigm of Pakistani statecraft. It applied the theory of Pakistan's strategic culture as a theoretical framework in studying how the state imagines its management of spaces, the people, and the state-society relations in the peripheral territories by taking Janikhel as a case study. The paper concluded that dual imperial legacies of the British and the Mughals as well as the violent making of the postcolonial state embedded an arbitrary and semi-imperial understanding that informed the development of the Pakistani strategic culture from which stems its statecraft. This statecraft possessed an ideating continuity of the British security perceptions toward tribal territories and formed the “frontier mind” of the Pakistani state leading toward a practice of statecraft that is unaccountable and authoritarian, and it is being increasingly becoming exhaustive in its approach and regulation of the everyday state.