The geopolitical architecture of impunity: Violence against journalists in Pakistan’s Pashtun periphery

Abstract

In the year 2024, 11 journalists were killed in Pakistan, bringing the total number of reporters killed since 2000 to 153. Among them, 46 are ethnic Pashtuns. Working in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, they lost their lives in reporting on the US-led “war on terror.”

Drawing from interviews with these journalists (N = 19) and using Puar’s (2017) concept of “economy of injury,” this study explores how Pashtun journalists describe violence against them. The injury is not just physical harm but rather the gradual, long-term debilitation of capacity—fear of job loss, exclusion of plurality, self-censorship, and repression of dissent. The authors argue that this media-related violence is not a consequence of the conflict but an agentive part of the state’s geopolitics. This perspective enables them to focus on the threats to public safety and free expression that the militarized status quo poses to the cross-border population. The study calls for a change in the way these journalists view resistance to violence against them during the time when the Pakistani military assumes responsibility for the “war on terror” after the pullout of the US troops in 2021.