“The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller”, Steve Jobs once observed. The storyteller, he argued, sets the vision, values and agenda of a generation.
This is not merely a lesson for filmmakers, businesses or political campaigns. It is also a lesson in national security. Every terrorist organisation begins by constructing a story. Weapons produce violence but stories recruit people to terrorism. A terrorist narrative frames a problem as an identity issue, selects a villain, manufactures a hero and presents violence as liberation.
In my book, ‘Narratology for Policymakers’, I argue that storytelling is not a soft skill. It is a strategic tool. Narratives give coherence to scattered experiences. They shape what people believe is possible and give audiences a role in the future they are being asked to create.
A successful narrative normally contains three elements: plot, characters and setting. The plot explains what happened. The characters identify the victim, hero and villain. The setting gives the story a recognisable location. Together, they transform an abstract political proposition into a personal experience.
The Baloch Liberation Army has applied this structure to promote the story of an ‘Azad Balochistan’. Its plot portrays Balochistan as an occupied territory. Pakistan is assigned the role of villain. The terrorist is manufactured into a hero. Balochistan, with its geography, resources and history, provides the setting.
Yet this remains an unrealistic objective. Balochistan is constitutionally, historically and economically integrated with Pakistan. Its people participate in the federation, parliament, civil services, military, business and national institutions. Overwhelming majority of Baloch citizens neither support violence nor fantasise separation.
An unattainable territorial objective also has limited value as an everyday recruitment message. The more adaptable story is that of the ‘Azad Baloch’. It converts a geopolitical project into a personal fantasy. As opposed to a territorial claim, this is a psychological invitation.
In ‘Narratology for Policymakers’, I discuss anchoring and framing as two powerful narrative techniques. An anchor gives the audience a starting point for interpreting later information. A frame selects the part of reality through which the entire issue will be viewed.
The word ‘azad’ becomes the anchor. It carries positive associations with dignity, autonomy and resistance. Once a young person accepts this anchor, every interaction with family, society or the state can be framed as confinement. Terrorism is then presented as freedom. This framing can accommodate different frustrations. For one young person, this may mean freedom from the state. For another, it may suggest freedom from tribal authority, family expectations or social responsibility. Someone struggling with unemployment or a lack of recognition may interpret it as an escape from failure.
This does not mean every young Baloch questioning authority is vulnerable to terrorism. Nor does it mean Baloch aspirations are illegitimate. But a grievance is not automatically an argument for terrorism. It becomes a recruitment opportunity when a terrorist organisation places it inside a romantic narrative.
Ordinary progress demands education, discipline, skills, patience and responsibility. Recognition must be earned. A young person may be expected to support a family and become a productive member of society. This path involves years of effort, with no guarantee of success.
The terrorist story offers an apparent shortcut. Join an organisation and immediately receive an identity. Carry a weapon and acquire authority. Enter a clandestine network and gain belonging. Instead of slowly earning recognition, obtain it through fear.
The terrorist recruiter then changes the moral meaning of these choices. The recruit is told that he is not abandoning his family but sacrificing for a nation. He is not escaping responsibility but becoming a revolutionary. He is not murdering citizens but confronting an occupying force. This is how terrorist propaganda disguises criminal violence as political heroism.
The technique follows a clear narrative arc. The exposition tells the recruit that he belongs to an oppressed people. The conflict identifies state as the adversary. The resolution promises dignity through terrorist violence.
The recruit is placed at the centre of the story. He is no longer an unemployed or directionless young (wo)man. S/He becomes the protagonist of a historical struggle. The BLA reinforces this transformation through videos, social media posts, songs and poetry. These channels apply another principle from my book: human-centred storytelling. Abstract political claims are attached to recognisable individuals. Terrorists are given names, faces and biographies. Their lives are edited into journeys from ordinary existence to supposedly extraordinary purpose.
Poetry is especially effective because it transforms ideology into emotion. It connects the terrorist of the present with the warrior of the past. Repetition turns slogans into familiar truths. The BLA also uses selective framing. Its propaganda highlights the terrorist’s claimed courage while removing the victim from the scene. The passenger killed because of his identity, the labourer pulled from a bus, the teacher deprived of a future and the family destroyed by an attack rarely appear in the story. Their presence would disrupt its manufactured structure of heroes and villains.
Stories can carry truth and falsehood with equal efficiency. Their ethical value depends upon accuracy, transparency, fairness and empathy.
Baloch identity, literature and poetry must not be equated with terrorism. Baloch society possesses rich traditions of courage, hospitality and resistance to injustice. The BLA seeks to appropriate that inheritance and present separatist terrorism as its natural continuation. It is not. Hundreds of thousands of Baloch citizens serve the country as teachers, doctors, civil servants, soldiers, entrepreneurs and political representatives. Many have sacrificed their lives while defending their communities against terrorism. They are as authentically Baloch as anyone carrying a terrorism flag.
The state has a constitutional duty to confront organisations that attack citizens, infrastructure and national institutions. No government can abandon its territory or population because a terrorist group uses persuasive language. Security operations against the BLA are not a rejection of Baloch identity. They are necessary to protect Balochistan and its people.
Security action alone, however, cannot defeat the ‘freedom’ story. An established narrative cannot be displaced by facts alone. It must be deconstructed and replaced with a more persuasive counter-narrative. The answer is the empowered Baloch citizen. He is free because he is educated, economically secure and protected by law. His dignity comes from citizenship, not a weapon.
The government must communicate in local languages and through trusted voices. Teachers, poets, religious scholars, tribal elders, women and young people should be involved. The victims of terrorism must be given faces and names. The sacrifices of Baloch citizens defending peace must be remembered.
The contest is not between the state and the Baloch people. It is between two stories of their future. One offers isolation, terrorism and permanent conflict. The other offers citizenship, development and influence within a federation of more than 250 million people.
The BLA tells young people that a weapon will make them free. The state must demonstrate that education, opportunity, law and belonging will make them powerful. The state will win only if it has a better to story to tell.
The writer is a public policy expert and leads the Country Partner Institute of the World Economic Forum in Pakistan. He tweets/posts @amirjahangir and can be reached at: [email protected]
