Why Pakistan’s middle class backs terror while poor suffer from it

For years, the dominant explanation for terrorism in Pakistan has rested on a simple idea: that poverty breeds radicalism. It is a narrative among global policy experts that has shaped the direction of billions of dollars in international aid and development programmes.Now, with Pahalgam and India’s Operation Sindoor reigniting the debate over cross-border militancy, a 2012 Princeton-led study has acquired fresh relevance, revealing that the true drivers of extremism may lie closer to comfort than crisis.The groundbreaking study, co-authored by four leading academics and published in the American Journal of Political Science in 2012 under the title ‘Poverty and Support for Militant Politics: Evidence from Pakistan’, shows that the primary wellspring of support for militant groups in Pakistan is not the country’s poorest citizens. It is, in fact, the urban middle class.The study was conducted by researchers Graeme Blair, C Christine Fair, Neil Malhotra and Jacob N Shapiro.“The poor are far more exposed to the externalities terrorism causes,” said Shapiro, professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, in a recent interview with The Economic Times. “It is the urban middle class that provides the ideological base, the managerial skills, and the long-term infrastructure that sustains militant groups.”The findings are based on a 6,000-person survey conducted across Pakistan’s four main provinces — Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The sample included both urban and rural respondents and followed a stratified design to reflect Pakistan’s demographic landscape.What made the survey distinctive, however, was not just its scale but its method too. Recognising that openly expressing support or disapproval of militant groups can be dangerous — or socially unacceptable — researchers employed what’s known as an “endorsement experiment”.One group — the control group — was simply asked whether they supported these policies. The treatment group, however, was told that one of four known militant organisations endorsed the policy in question.History of violence: Pakistan’s most disturbing truthOne of the study’s most revealing findings was that exposure to violence — not poverty — had the strongest correlation with attitudes towards terrorism. Areas with high levels of terror activity, particularly urban markets and city centres, were home to the most sceptical respondents.Poor people living in these violent districts showed three times the hostility towards terrorists as those in more peaceful areas. Poor urban respondents in violence-prone areas were significantly less sympathetic to terrorists than either the rural poor or urban middle class. This contrast highlighted the sharper effect of direct exposure to violence on shaping public opinion.Between 1988 and 2010, researchers documented over 27,000 incidents of political violence across Pakistan. In the year before the survey, 787 militant attacks led to 4,525 casualties. Most of these incidents occurred in urban spaces — bazaars, public transport hubs, and dense residential areas — where the poor were both most exposed and most vulnerable. These included cities like Peshawar, Karachi, and Quetta — not remote conflict zones, but major urban centres central to Pakistan’s economy.The urban middle class, in contrast, often lives in gated communities or suburbs. This allows them to be relatively insulated from such attacks. medium nocaptionhttp://mv.cuckootool.com/3sw658_7hzteqpqoj/1kaUMStsKtC3r9?2qxpm=9nqs-pWGtuBZ1EehEpcBid this study is relevant todayOne of the misconceptions the study confronts is the idea that extremism is born of desperation. In reality, many middle-class supporters of militancy are driven by ideology, grievance, or political identity — not poverty.In the ET interview, Shapiro noted that sympathy often centres on narratives of foreign aggression, Western hypocrisy, or religious duty. “It’s not a lack of education. In some cases, education allows people to become more effective ideologues,” he said, pushing back against the assumption that education automatically reduces radicalism.For example, Kashmiri-focused groups were seen as “freedom fighters” by some respondents, especially among urban middle-class men. Sectarian groups also found indirect support within communities that shared their worldview, despite their often-violent attacks on fellow Pakistanis.The study’s insights are relevant today as digital platforms have amplified the reach of extremist ideologies, allowing militant groups to target middle-class audiences via encrypted messaging apps, online videos, and social media networks.Shapiro warned, “The informational revolution has made it easier for terrorist groups to reach educated middle-class audiences.” Radicalisation now happens in drawing rooms, WhatsApp groups, and classrooms — not just in madrasas or refugee camps.This study also found that neither personal poverty nor perceptions of neighbourhood wealth — what researchers call ‘egocentric’ and ‘sociotropic income’ views — predicted support for militancy. Several earlier investigations, it acknowledged, had attempted to explore the poverty-extremism link — with mixed results:A 2003 study by Alan Krueger and Jitka Malečková found that many terrorists had more education and higher income than the average citizen.Tessler and Robbins (2007), analysing Pew survey data, concluded that economic hardship alone did not explain support for terrorism in Muslim-majority countries.Mousseau (2011), drawing from survey data in 14 Muslim countries, suggested that support for Islamist terrorism could be higher among the urban poor — but his analysis did not isolate Pakistan or disaggregate by group type.The 2012 Pakistan study also went deeper than earlier ones. It didn’t just look at whether a person was rich or poor. It also looked at how wealthy their neighbourhood was, and whether they lived in an area where there had been terrorist attacks. What this means for IndiaWith India-Pakistan tensions escalating — most recently with Operation Sindoor — the question of who supports terrorism, and why, remains politically urgent. If extremist sentiment is more common among shielded urban middle classes than among those on the frontlines of conflict, then many current strategies are misguided.Aid programmes that focus exclusively on poverty alleviation miss the ideological drivers of militancy. Counter-terrorism efforts that focus only on madrassas or refugee camps ignore the digital and cultural ecosystems that enable extremism to flourish among Pakistan’s professionals, students, and city-dwelling elites.The implications, according to the study, are clear. To counter radicalisation effectively, governments and donors must:Monitor and disrupt ideological support networks within urban middle-class communities Expand counter-radicalisation messaging into digital platforms and higher education spacesRethink development strategies that assume poverty is the primary driver of militancyAs Shapiro says, “Terrorism is not just about bombs. It’s also about belief systems. And the people most invested in those systems are not the poor.”Terrorist groups ‘corporate structure’Shapiro and his co-authors describe how militant groups operate with a layered structure — from recruiters and funders to foot soldiers — much like organisations with both strategic leadership and operational wings.While some of the operational personnel may indeed come from poorer backgrounds, those managing recruitment, financing, ideology, and communications are more likely to have university degrees, digital literacy, and socio-economic privilege. In essence, the middle class fuels the sustainability of militant operations — even if they do not directly engage in violence.This, the study claims, mirrors global patterns. For instance, the 9/11 attackers, the architects of ISIS propaganda, and the strategists behind Lashkar-e-Taiba all came from educated, economically stable backgrounds. How the study was conductedAs mentioned earlier, the researchers recognised that openly expressing support or disapproval of militant groups can be dangerous or socially unacceptable. They employed what’s known as an “endorsement experiment”. Participants were randomly divided into two groups. Both groups were asked about their views on four relatively uncontroversial public policies: Reforming the colonial-era Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR)Redefining the disputed Durand Line between Pakistan and AfghanistanMandating science and math instruction in madrassasSupporting the polio vaccination campaignIn the group called Control, respondents were asked whether they supported certain public policies (like polio vaccination or madrassa reform) with no mention of militant groups. In the group call Treatment, these respondents were shown the same policies, but with one difference — they were told the policy was endorsed by a specific militant group, such as the Afghan Taliban or al-Qaeda.The idea was simple: if someone supports a policy less (or more) when a militant group is said to back it, that change reflects how they feel about the group — without having to ask them outright. This indirect method reduced non-response and fear bias, allowing researchers to reliably estimate support for militant organisations.These militant groups were:Al-Qaeda, a global jihadist network known for its anti-Western ideologyThe Afghan Taliban, often viewed more sympathetically within PakistanKashmiri tanzeems, or terror groups focused on the Kashmir conflictSectarian tanzeems, groups targeting religious minorities such as Shias and AhmadisWhere direct questions about terror groups had produced non-response rates as high as 50%, the endorsement approach was revelatory as it brought that figure down to less than 8% in some cases. Also, women and men were surveyed by same-gender enumerators to meet cultural norms, with a robust response rate of nearly 72%. The enumerators were trained, and safety protocols were in place to mitigate the risk of retaliation or disclosure.Moreover, support levels also varied depending on which group endorsed the policy. Respondents were least favourable to policies endorsed by al-Qaeda and more tolerant of those backed by the Afghan Taliban or Kashmir-focused groups.