Disaster Capitalism and the Politics of Relief: How Governance Gaps Enable Violent Extremist Influence After Pakistan’s 2022 Floods
Abstract
Disaster capitalism, a term coined by Naomi Klein, refers to the exploitation of a disaster or calamity hit community for profit and other material gains. Klein (2007) talks about the Disaster capitalism in the context of neo-liberal Policies, however, the idea can be extended to other groups who may not exploit for economic profit in the strict sense but for political and other purposes as well. Disaster capitalism therefore provides an appropriate lens to study the recruitment of people in disaster stricken communities by violent extremist organizations with politico-religious agenda. In this paper, we have analyzed how the Violent Extremist Organization’s (VEO) have been able to penetrate into the disaster-stricken communities and what has been the most important factor that has contributed to the success of VEO’s penetration. Key informant interviews and FGD’s were conducted to have an in-depth understanding of community perceptions, major issues faced and what gaps were exploited by the VEO’s. The qualitative data were drawn from 30 key informant interviews and 15 focus group discussions and were analysed through thematic analysis. The locale of the study was Muzaffargarh post 2022 floods. We found that the VEO mainly exploited the governance gaps and this was confirmed by the thematic analysis as well. Therefore the study concludes that there exists a strong relationship between lack of good governance and Influence of VEO’s therefore Violent extremism is more of governance issue rather than societal or religious.
Keywords: disaster capitalism; climate-induced displacement; governance failure; trust in government; violent extremism; Muzaffargarh; Pakistan: Extremist Recruitment.
