This dissertation explains the post-2008 rise of blasphemy vigilantism in Pakistan by distinguishing between a relatively stable legal-discursive condition and a changing political opportunity structure. Judicial ambivalence—the tendency of courts to condemn mob justice while reaffirming the legitimacy and moral seriousness of blasphemy law—did not suddenly emerge after 2008. What changed was the political context in which this ambivalence operated. The return to competitive elections, the growing value of public religious credibility, and the expansion of media and digital communication created new incentives for elites to activate blasphemy frames. Judicial ambivalence matters because it provides a usable legal-moral vocabulary: elites can condemn violence as unlawful while still mobilizing the sacred-injury frame that blasphemy law itself validates. In this way, the dissertation explains not simply why blasphemy law exists, but why accusations become more politically usable and more likely to produce vigilantism under post-2008 conditions. Methodologically, the dissertation employs qualitative content analysis of documentary sources. It draws on two linked empirical corpora: a census-style incident universe of just over fifty documented blasphemy-vigilantism episodes from 2008 to mid-2025, and a court-centered corpus of sixteen judgments, judicial inquiries, and joint-investigation records. These materials are triangulated with human-rights reports and verified media coverage to examine both broader clustering patterns and episode-level escalation mechanisms. The findings show that blasphemy vigilantism in Pakistan is geographically and socially patterned rather than random. It clusters most heavily in Punjab and in urban or semi-urban settings, is frequently associated with religious-party brokerage, party-linked processions, Sunni majoritarian sectarian ecologies, and police passivity or collusion, and disproportionately affects Christians and Ahmadis, although Muslims are also targeted. The analysis further shows that elite statements—especially local incitement, mosque announcements, and organized brokerage—are strongly associated with both the occurrence and severity of vigilantism. Judicial discourse matters less as a direct trigger than as a conditioning environment: by condemning “mob justice” while reaffirming blasphemy law, courts help sustain a discursive field in which sacred injury remains legally and morally legible. The dissertation contributes to political science, law-and-society scholarship, and the study of religion in global politics by showing how sacred guardianship becomes a competitive political strategy under democratic contestation.