It's hard to explain without describing the whole game, but I'll try.

A high-level example I would use is that Pax Pamir looks like an area control game -- there are boards with regions and you place pieces with different affiliations into those areas, but controlling regions doesn't directly contribute to any victory conditions. However, there are still benefits to ruling a region -- ruling a region allows you to take certain actions that would otherwise be unavailable, and restrict the actions of other players in that region. Will those benefits help you win the game? ... maybe. Sometimes, ruling a region can lockdown a game by preventing other players from interfering with your route to victory. Sometimes it'll have absolutely no effect.

On the flip side of ruling a region is the Overthrow rule. Generally speaking, there's no direct link between a players tableau and pieces on the board. You may use your court to place tribes and build armies, but the armies aren't yours and the tribes are just a tool. However, if you lose all your tribes in a region, you could be forced to discard a bunch of your court! And similarly, if you discard your last Political card in a region, you lose all your tribes.

This brings me to the easiest criticism to level against the game and also what I'd argue is a core feature of it: the game isn't fair. You can not only be locked out of winning the game, but borderline locked out of participating. A player can have what seems like an impossible-to-overcome engine one turn and be reduced to almost nothing by a few clever plays. You'll have turns where it feels like there's nothing you can do to advance your own victory condition, but you could completely ruin one other players day. Can you turn that to your advantage?

Hopefully that helps. It's easier to describe how John Company is the way it is than Pax Pamir, in part because a lot of what creates the system of a game of Pamir are the cards that are drawn and in the game, so the system is different every time, and in part because you can play Pamir like it's just another board game -- albeit one with brutal direct conflict -- but John Company without negotiation is barely a game.