I am Malala is predominantly set in Malala’s hometown, Mingora, the largest town in the Swat Valley, Pakistan. Swat is the region in which Malala is raised and educated and where she begins to advocate for female education. Malala’s attachment to Swat is clear throughout the book; the mountains, meadows and lakes, which tourists call ‘the Switzerland of the East’ and home to Pakistan’s first ski resort, is Malala’s comfort zone. The Swat’s population mostly comprises of ethnic Gujjar and Pashtuns, an ancestral tribe which predates Islam and to which Malala’s family belongs, and whose population is primarily located in Afghanistan and north-west and west Iran. Several relics from the Buddhist reign in the third century BC across 300 sites have been discovered by archaeologists but many of these were destroyed by the Taliban.

After Malala is shot, she and her family moved to Birmingham, England, in order for Malala to receive further treatment, and where the story concludes. The built up environment of Birmingham, with its similar looking houses and absence of mountains, sharply contrasts Swat and Malala experiences this deeply.

A number of events in Pakistani history are referenced in the book and inform the reader of Pakistan’s social and political evolution. When the British Empire abandoned its Asian territories, following the peaceful resistance of Indian leader Mahatma Ghandi, the area the British had controlled was separated into the present-day countries of India and Pakistan. With this separation in 1947, Pakistan became home to a larger percentage of Muslims while India became home to a larger number of Hindus. The economic growth and relative prosperity of Pakistan in the 1950s and 60s was short-lived when, in the 1980s, Pakistan came under the control of the violent dictator, General Zia, who radicalised the population. Zia made an alliance with the United States, promising them aid in its conflicts with the Soviet Union and, as a result, received large quantities of foreign aid and military training. It was during Zia’s reign that Osama Bin Laden traveled to Pakistan to help in their fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. By 2001, at the commencement of the American-led ‘War on Terror’, Pakistan’s new leader was General Pervez Musharraf. He also made a promise to aid the United States, this time in its struggle to fight terrorists such as Osama Bin Laden.

Despite its alliance with the US, Pakistan grew increasingly more radical during the early 2000s when, according to Malala’s narration, a large percentage of its citizens started to believe the US was a grave threat to the world and that the Jews were responsible for most of the world’s economic exploitation. It was during this time that the Taliban rose to prominence, using military tactics to attack aspects of Pakistani society it judged to be perversions of Islam, such as suicide bombers who blew up American buildings and female schools. It is widely held that it was the Taliban who were responsible for the assassination of two times Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, the first female prime minister to head a democratic government in a Muslim majority nation, and a promoter of women’s rights.