With an official population approaching fifteen million, Karachi is one of the largest cities in the world. It is also the most violent. Since the mid-1980s, it has endured endemic political conflict and criminal violence, which revolve around control of the city and its resources (votes, land and bhatta-"protection" money). These struggles for the city have become ethnicized. Karachi, often referred to as a "Pakistan in miniature," has become increasingly fragmented, socially as well as territorially.
Despite this chronic state of urban political warfare, Karachi is the cornerstone of the economy of Pakistan. Gayer's book is an attempt to elucidate this conundrum. Against journalistic accounts describing Karachi as chaotic and ungovernable, he argues that there is indeed order of a kind in the city's permanent civil war. Far from being entropic, Karachi's polity is predicated upon organisational, interpretative and pragmatic routines that have made violence "manageable" for its populations. Whether such "ordered disorder" is viable in the long term remains to be seen, but for now Karachi works despite-and sometimes through-violence.
With an official population approaching fifteen million, Karachi is one of the largest cities in the world. It is also the most violent. Since the mid-1980s, it has endured endemic political conflict and criminal violence, which revolve around control of the city and its resources (votes, land and bhatta-"protection" money). These struggles for the city have become ethnicized. Karachi, often referred to as a "Pakistan in miniature," has become increasingly fragmented, socially as well as territorially.
Despite this chronic state of urban political warfare, Karachi is the cornerstone of the economy of Pakistan. Gayer's book is an attempt to elucidate this conundrum. Against journalistic accounts describing Karachi as chaotic and ungovernable, he argues that there is indeed order of a kind in the city's permanent civil war. Far from being entropic, Karachi's polity is predicated upon organisational, interpretative and pragmatic routines that have made violence "manageable" for its populations. Whether such "ordered disorder" is viable in the long term remains to be seen, but for now Karachi works despite-and sometimes through-violence.
Laurent Gayer is a research fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), currently posted at the Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH) in Delhi. He is also Research Associate at the Centre d'Etudes de l'Inde et de l'Asie du Sud in Paris. He has coedited, with Christophe Jaffrelot, Armed Militias of South Asia: Fundamentalists, Maoists, and Separatists, and Muslims in Indian Cities: Trajectories of Marginalization, both of which are available from OUP.
"Laurent Gayer's Karachi is the best book yet published on the
interplay of politics, ethnicity, religion, and criminality in one
of the world s largest cities." --Anatol Lieven, New York Review of
Books
"This is an extraordinarily well-researched and deeply informed
book about the transformation of Karachi, once known as the City of
Lights into a byword for endemic violence and urban break down.
Gayer's knowledge of the city, many central events, people and
places that have been pivotal in this transformation is very
impressive indeed."--Thomas Blom Hansen, Stanford University,
author of Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial
Bombay
"Gayer meticulously shows how a complicated palimpsest of actors is
both at the root of recurrent problems, and the reason why
continuous violence, simultaneously creative and destructive, yet
also increasingly opaque and complicated, fails to erupt into a
full-blown conflagration. This prosaic insight forms the common
ground that allows political scientists to communicate with
anthropologists, and activist practitioners with poets and
militants. The result is a sophisticated, timely intervention
destined to calmly steer the reader through Karachi's current
crisis of violent transition."--Nichola Khan, Senior Lecturer in
the School of Applied Social Science, University of Brighton and
author of Mohajir Militancy in Pakistan
"Laurent Gayer's Karachi is the best book yet published on the
interplay of politics, ethnicity, religion, and criminality in one
of the world's largest cities." -- Anatol Lieven, New York Review
of Books"[This] is a thoroughly researched book. The author has
clearly spent many months in the city and drawn on a variety of
sources. The book is sprinkled with quotes from various Urdu texts
and conversations he had with Karachi's residents, making this book
an enjoyable and useful read." -- Deccan Herald"A vivid book. ...
Mr Gayer explodes that myth of Karachi as a secular city." -- Mira
Sethi, Wall Street Journal"There is no doubt in my mind that
Gayer's Karachi is destined to become the primary point of
reference for further work ... a superb book." -- Dawn
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