In January 2010, a gigantic mass of rocks came down the slope above Attabad, a village in the high mountain area of Gilgit-Baltistan, northern Pakistan. The landslide filled the narrow valley of the Hunza River, blocked the flow of water and buried the Karakoram Highway (KKH) that connects the area with Pakistan and China. The landslide took away half of the village and claimed 19 lives. The events unfolding in consequence of the landslide affected many more people, namely the whole population of Gojal, the sub-district upstream from Attabad village, around 20, 000 people. As the Karakoram Highway, the road that links Pakistan and China, is the only road leading into Gojal, the area was cut-off from Pakistan. Further, a rapidly growing lake developed behind the barrier created by the landslide, inundating several villages.

For the purpose of relief and compensation, people who had lost their homes became listed as Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). Over the years, this list became much more than an apparently simple bureaucratic means for the allocation of compensations: it was transformed into an instrument of empowerment and the basis of a jealously guarded new status. The list of IDPs will be taken as the point of departure to discuss disaster governmentality and state-society relations.

About the Speaker:

Martin Sökefeld is professor of social anthropology at Ludwig-Maximilian University Munich. He has been engaged in fieldwork in Northern Pakistan for more than 25 years, focusing on ethnicity, sectarianism, the politics of Gilgit-Baltistan in the context of the Kashmir dispute, and more recently on “natural” disasters. He has also worked on transnational Alevi politics of identity between Germany and Turkey and on the political mobilization of an Azad Kashmiri diaspora in the UK.