ABSTRACT
Pakistan concentrates the attention of policy-makers and scholars for numerous reasons. This chapter focuses upon public support for groups who are the vanguard of such violence: sectarian militant groups. It concentrates specifically upon Islamist militant violence generally and sectarian violence in particular within Pakistan itself. The chapter applies a new and large dataset collected by Fair et al. (2013) which is drawn from a recent and large national survey of Pakistanis. It provides a brief background to the problem of sectarian militants in Pakistan and the vast array of violence they produce. Deobandis, like most Muslims in South Asia, follow the Hanafi School of fiqh, or jurisprudence. This cluster of Deobandi militant organizations includes the sectarian (and communal) organization Ahl-e-Sunnat wal Jamaat (ASWJ), which is the name under which older Deobandi sectarian groups such as Sipah-e-Sahaba-e-Pakistan (SSP) and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) now operate.
