Saviour complex

The floods in Pakistan are worse than anything we could have ever imagined. And like Covid-19 which exposed a number of inequalities in global wealth, the floods have exposed a series of divisions within Pakistan. There are two such divisions that have stood out during this tragedy. Both are polar opposites, but indirectly related.

The first is the discussion regarding the need for climate reparations from the rich Global North which is responsible for 80 per cent of the total global emissions; Pakistan and other countries in the Global South have been forced to pay the price for it. One group which includes climate justice activists in the North and from Pakistan claims that the onus of the disaster lies on the rich Global North which owes Pakistan not only humanitarian assistance, but also billions in reparations due to its callous regard for the environment.

The other side claims that the Global North is not solely responsible for Pakistan’s climate woes, but Pakistani leaders and politicians, who have been pillaging the country’s natural resources through illegal construction, logging and deforestation, land reclamation from the sea and mega urban expressway and housing developments are also responsible for this natural catastrophe.

The second debate is on the urban feminist perspective of menstruation support and awareness to flood-affected women. Social media has seen an active discourse between women who advocate the distribution of more modern sanitary pads as part of relief goods and those who advocate more traditional methods such as cloth strips. The latter feel that urban women are disconnected from the needs of rural women, doing more harm than good in the process; neither denies that women’s menstrual needs are an urgent human right to be addressed.

So, how are these two extremely polarized cases related? The answer is saviourism. This term emerged in development discourse as the ‘white saviour industrial complex’, coined by Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole in 2012. It articulates the attitudes and intent of post-colonial white development personnel, who feel that they need to ‘save’ the non-white poor from their fate. It is an ethos that robs the agency of non-white countries as being able to manage themselves and requiring a ‘white saviour’ to lift them out of their misery.

This state of mind is reflected in both these cases, not just in terms of how the white Global North sees us, but also in terms of how we see ourselves.

In the first case of climate reparations, an extension of the call for reparations for colonialism, climate justice activists want to ‘save’ Pakistan from environmental injustice. This puts the onus on everyone but Pakistan which should ideally be accountable to its citizens for making poor policy decisions on the environment, climate mitigation and disaster preparedness. Particularly a disaster we have scientifically known about for many years. Both arguments go hand in hand.

But claiming that Pakistan has no responsibility for this disaster is disingenuous towards the plight of its own people. It puts only the external as the saviour. There is little we can do about global emissions alone. But we can do a lot more to protect ourselves from the impact of these emissions.

In the second case, white men and women coming to ‘save’ black and brown women from their misery has been unpacked for decades. Scholar Chandra Mohanty has critiqued the idea of the ‘white gaze’ of white feminists on non-white women, and feminist critic Gayatri Spivak has famously said: “white men are saving brown women from brown men.”

Brown urban women take this one step further in ‘saving’ brown rural women by imposing a set of external rules on them. As far back as the 2005 Kashmir earthquake, Pakistani NGOs under the influence of international donors were constantly espousing that women in the affected areas did not know enough about their menstrual needs, and hence needed to be ‘saved’ by more progressive forces. This belied the fact that women have always been aware of menstruation, but the state has denied them the agency to equitably meet their needs.

Both cases clearly deny agency to the affected populations and take a liberal elite route to saviourism. Neither sees them as being able to articulate their needs. For proponents of climate justice, it is that they ignore the concerns of affected populations around how the state has consistently mismanaged their livelihoods and natural resources, imperial rule notwithstanding.

The menstrual support proponents are ignoring the fact that less-privileged women do not necessarily need expensive and modern menstrual products, but the recognition that their needs are the same as that of every woman, albeit through different methods.

Saviourism is a dangerous mentality anywhere. We need to rid ourselves of the superiority complex that we can save those who are less privileged than us. Maybe they just need us to keep quiet for a change.

The writer is an independentspecialist and researcher ininternational development, social policy and global migration.