Identifier

1119

Document Type

Discussion Paper

Date of Paper

Fall 10-13-2025

Abstract

State formation through secession often requires two critical steps: building mass support for independence, and engaging in violent conflict against a state resisting territorial loss. Combining satellite data with archival sources, we statistically document how exposure to the 1970 Bhola cyclone in East Pakistan which killed 350,000 people led to a rise in separatist sentiments expressed in voting booths, and later induced citizens to take up arms against the government and engage in guerrilla warfare. We identify the cyclone as a focal point that helped galvanize dispersed separatist sentiments into an organized political movement and war, in part by revealing the Pakistan government’s indifference to Bengalis’ suffering. This important historical case identifies the specific causal channels by which a climate shock produces armed conflict (Hsiang et al., 2013).

Acknowledgements

We thank seminar participants at UC Berkeley, Yale School of Management, Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS), IBA-Karachi, LUMS Pakistan, University of Notre Dame, Harvard/MIT/Brown South Asia seminar, BYU, London School of Economics, Ashutosh Varshney, Feyaad Allie, Clare Balboni, Martha Chen, Rinchan Mirza, Saumitra Jha, David Engerman, Lars Lefgren, Asif Dowla for their comments and feedback. Georgii Marinichev and Aleksandra Vasileva provided excellent research assistance. We thank the Satelitte Services Group in NOAA’s National Center for Environmental Information, and Ali Bakhtawar for facilitating access to NOAA’s ITOS-1 satellite images. We are grateful to Muhammad Asiful Basar for sharing archive materials. Contact: smehmood@nes.ru and ahmed.mobarak@yale.edu

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