Poverty and Support for Militant Politics: Evidence from Pakistan

Combating militant violence, particularly within South Asia and the Middle East, stands at the top of the international security agenda. Much of the policy literature focuses on poverty as a root cause of support for violent political groups. There is little evidence to support this contention, however, particularly in the case of Islamist militant organizations in Pakistan. Pakistan’s urban poor are more exposed to the negative externalities of militant violence and as such they may be the least supportive of violent organizations. To explore these hypotheses, we conducted a 6000-person, nationally representative survey of Pakistanis that measures affect towards four important militant organizations, applying a novel measurement strategy to mitigate the item non-response and social desirability biases that plague previous studies due to the sensitive nature of militancy. Contrary to conventional expectations, poor Pakistanis dislike militant groups more than middle-class citizens. This dislike is strongest among poor urban residents, particularly those living in districts that have experienced violence, consistent with our expectation that exposure to the externalities of terroris