Product Description
With a population exceeding twenty million Karachi is one of the
world's largest 'megacities'. It is also one of the most violent.
Since the mid-1980s Karachi has endured endemic political confl ict
and criminal violence which revolve around control of the city and
its resources (votes land and bhatta-'protection' money). - ese
struggles for the city have become ethnicised. In the process 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 remains
the cornerstone of the economy of Pakistan. In contrast to the 'chaotic'and 'anarchic' city portrayed in journalistic accounts there is indeed
order of a kind in the city's permanent civil war.
Far from being entropic Karachi's polity is predicated upon relatively
stable patterns of domination rituals of interaction and forms of
arbitration which have made violence manageable for its population
-even if this does not exclude a pervasive state of fear which results
from the continuous transformation of violence in the course of
its updating. Whether such 'ordered disorder' is viable in the long
term remains to be seen but for now Karachi works despite-and
sometimes through-violence.