Things to read

 These are some of the most useful articles I've read about the Pakistan floods:

1) Opinion: Pakistan must get rid of colonial mindset on water by Daanish Mustafa: 

So what does decolonising water mean? What does it mean in the context of the Pakistan floods of 2022? 150 years ago in colonial India of which Pakistan was a part thinking about water was locked into a modernist view of water as a ‘resource’ to the exclusion of its multiple values within local cultures.The modernist view treated water as simply a resource for irrigation water supply and sanitation. The aesthetic cultural spiritual and ecological values that local societies ascribed to water were simply occluded by this view. Under modernity rivers were a giant plumbing system carrying cubic metres of water and were expected to stay within the imposed iron limits of average flows.

2) The British Monarchy Helped Mortgage Our Collective Future by Priya Sadia 

Pakistan is under water, England faces an energy crisis, and the Queen has died. But the frantic analysis of the monarchy remains blind to its role in the existential climate crisis we face: the surrogate sacred object it offered to a society that ceased to find meaning in the earth and fellow beings.

3) The Floods Devastating Pakistan Are More Than a Natural Disaster by Ammar Ali Jan 

Activists in Pakistan are also demanding that creditors in the Global North cancel Pakistan’s debt provide investment and technological transfer for building climate resilient infrastructure and hold their fossil fuel companies responsible for polluting the planet. This is on top of the $100 billion dollars committed to poor countries in the Paris Accords a commitment that has not been honored as yet. These demands should not be confused with a nationalist claim in which South and North become reified categories. Rather as suggested earlier the role of the ruling elites in Pakistan (and arguably across the Global South) in handling economic and climate issues has been dismal.

4) Flooding has devastated Pakistan – and Britain’s imperial legacy has made it worse by Shozab Raza

While landlords can escape to their properties in these cities as several told me they did during the 2010 floods peasants like Bashir have nowhere else to go experiencing what one scholar describes as an “emplaced displacement”. Their tragic predicament is ultimately a consequence of empire and an accomplice elite which together have viewed Pakistan’s peripheral regions as sites for plunder and profit.Calls for climate reparations for Pakistan therefore make sense but not just because of its recent experience with a global north-induced climate crisis. They are also necessary because of this much longer history. Beyond climate reparations what Pakistan really needs are colonial reparations.