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ID: 136221

Climatic disasters and radical politics in southern Pakistan: the non-linear connection / Siddiqi, Ayesha

Siddiqi, Ayesha	Article
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This paper is a local level examination of the political spaces and opportunities that arise for radical political agents in the aftermath of a climatic disaster. It explores the theoretical argument that disasters break the social contract between the state and disaster-affected communities by opening political space for change. The empirical work is based on a large-scale flooding disaster that affected southern Pakistan in 2010 and 2011 and caused international concern around increased Islamist mobilisation through their disaster relief programmes. The case study investigates the extent to which the climatic disaster opened political space for the radical Islamist group, the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, to mobilise. Based on fieldwork conducted in three districts of Sindh in southern Pakistan, this paper demonstrates that climatic disasters are able to impact radical politics. This connection is not linear or causal but rather very complex. It further explains why this type of inquiry is relevant in order to understand climate change and security

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ID: 159869

Disaster citizenship: an emerging framework for understanding the depth of digital citizenship in Pakistan / Siddiqi, Ayesha

Siddiqi, Ayesha	Journal Article
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In recent years, the Pakistani state has made significant advances in formalising and universalising citizenship through the digitisation of citizenship numbers. The National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) is at the forefront of this initiative, which has now covered 96% of Pakistan’s 180 million citizens. The state successfully used this digitisation of citizenship to reach out to its citizens in the aftermath of a large-scale flooding disaster in 2010 and 2011. The universal cash transfer programme instituted for disaster-affected households used citizenship numbers to identify and then provide ATM cards to those domiciled in the worst-affected regions. This paper draws upon my fieldwork done in 2012–2013 in Lower Sindh and argues that while still in its infancy, a new form of ‘disaster citizenship’ is visible in southern Pakistan, which is driven partially by this digitisation of citizenship in the country. It explores the post-disaster political space where state actors and citizens came to interact with each other, and argues that these informal and unplanned interactions overlapped with formal policy to result in a new and emerging form of ‘disaster citizenship’ in the region.

Key Words

Pakistan ; Disaster Citizenship ; Emerging Framework ; Digital Citizenship

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