Literature Review of Pakistan’s AML and CFT Framework in Global and Regional Governance: A Doctrinal Analysis Perspective

Abstract

The study of anti-money laundering (AML) and counter-terrorist financing (CFT) phenomenon has grown significantly in the past decade, but this is a field that is divided into doctrinal analyses of money laundering and criminalisation, policy reports on FATF compliance, financial sector analysis of risk-based supervision, and country-specific narratives of reform. This article combines doctrinal legal analysis in addition to qualitative narrative review and thematic coding to map the intellectual structure of AML and CFT regulation from 2014 to 2024. It questions the development of the research body, the thematic clusters that dominate the discipline and the relation between these clusters and a changing regulatory landscape characterized by FATF mutual evaluations, EU harmonisation, beneficial ownership (BO) transparency, virtual assets, grey-listing and the reception of transnational standards in the national sphere. The review draws on existing literature and primary sources at three interconnected levels: conceptual/definitional discussions about money laundering, terrorist financing and transnational organised crime; the regime architecture of the United Nations conventions, Security Council resolutions, FATF standards and EU law; and the disparate implementation of AML and CFT norms at the domestic level in Pakistan. The central argument is that AML and CFT law has moved through a process of doctrinal hardening, such as treaty obligations and Security Council duties generated baseline legal commitments, FATF translated those commitments into operational soft-law standards and peer-review metrics, and domestic systems such as Pakistan’s transformed those standards into statutory and regulatory forms under conditions of external pressure. The article contributes a refined framework for analysing AML and CFT governance as a multi-level process of norm diffusion, compliance pressure and legal transplantation, and it identifies the literature gaps that a Pakistan-focused doctrinal review can fill.