From Black Lives Matter to the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement: Racial capitalism across the centre and periphery

With the United States-led invasion of Afghanistan following the 11 September 2001 attacks, the north-western tribal region of Pakistan--a historically marginalized land bordering Afghanistan --became one of extreme strategic importance to the US. Consequently, US imperialism, along with its underlying structural dynamics, formally entered the tribal areas, bringing with it the governing logics and structural dynamics of US power and proving to be uniquely transformative and destructive for the region’s indigenous people. This mode of power external to Pakistan—racialized disposability—ultimately became enmeshed with the country’s own governing logics. It brought Pashtun ethnicity within the folds of racialization under the trope of terrorism, enabling it to seep into Pakistani society as well. It profoundly transformed the social fabric and local political economy of the region, allowing the flourishing of a rentier economy based on aid, military contracts, extortion, and bribery. It opened the tribal lands to large, state-owned projects that destroyed traditional livelihoods. Moreover, the project raised the region’s value to global capitalistic extraction through a ramping up of public discourse on valuable minerals, as well as the adoption of institutional arrangements for mineral extraction and foreign trade. The political work of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM) has brought to light this common mode of racialized disposability--a shared governing logic of racialization, surveillance, coercion, and violence --executed by the carceral state in the US and the militarized state in Pakistan. Moreover, the two movements do not just centrally highlight racialized disposability. They also stress the material profits embedded within the criminalization of racial minorities in the US and the militarization of the tribal lands in Pakistan. Studying their discourse comparatively points to the central argument of this thesis: the two movements are resisting the same source and mode of power, while also pointing to the operation of racial capitalism across transnational settings and its interlinkages with US imperialism.