Acid throwing attacks are most common in South Asia. iulian circo/Flickr. Some rights reserved.Like many places in the world, South Asia has seen a rise in violence and injustice against people who are minorities in terms of religion, ethnicity and gender, as well as political activists, academics and journalists. Provoked by state and non-state actors, these instances erode the space of dissent, free thought and human rights, pointing to a wider culture of rising intolerance and hate.
Yet these incidents appear and disappear daily in our media-saturated imaginations. Watching them play out in each national context, often in quick succession, leaves little time to absorb and make sense of them. Looking beyond the immediacy of mainstream and social media, how can we think about the relationships between incidents of hate and intolerance, understand overarching patterns and structures, or start to question their terrifying frequency? Spurred by an ambition to understand this landscape of intolerance, we turned to mapping it.
Tracking intolerance
About a year ago we launched a site called "Intolerance Tracker", in collaboration with Timescape, a map-based storytelling platform, to document cases of violence and hate across South Asia — in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka. Aggregating ongoing and recent incidents across national borders seemed to be one way of trying to draw connections between different types of hate crimes, local conditions, types of perpetrators and so on.
