Karachi : Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for City

By Laurent Gayer

About the book

With a population exceeding twenty million, Karachi is one of theworld’s largest ‘megacities’. It is also one of the most violent.Since the mid-1980s, Karachi has endured endemic political confl ictand criminal violence, which revolve around control of the city andits resources (votes, land and bhatta-‘protection’ money). – esestruggles for the city have become ethnicised. In the process, Karachi,often referred to as a ‘Pakistan in miniature’, has become increasinglyfragmented, socially as well as territorially.Despite this chronic state of urban political warfare, Karachi remainsthe cornerstone of the economy of Pakistan. In contrast to the ‘chaotic’and ‘anarchic’ city portrayed in journalistic accounts, there is indeedorder of a kind in the city’s permanent civil war.Far from being entropic, Karachi’s polity is predicated upon relativelystable patterns of domination, rituals of interaction and forms ofarbitration, which have made violence manageable for its population-even if this does not exclude a pervasive state of fear, which resultsfrom the continuous transformation of violence in the course ofits updating. Whether such ‘ordered disorder’ is viable in the longterm remains to be seen, but for now Karachi works despite-andsometimes through-violence.