Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City

Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City

by Laurent Gayer
Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City

Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City

by Laurent Gayer

Hardcover

$37.50 
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Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780199354443
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Publication date: 07/01/2014
Pages: 256
Product dimensions: 5.60(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

1 'The Mother of the Poor

2 The City Where All Wars Meet

3 From Student Brawls to Campus Wars

4 'The Mohajirs Have Arrived!

5 The Bandit Who Would Be King

6 Jihad Comes to Town

7 Ordered Disorder, Disordered Order

8 Geographies of Fear

9 Poetry for Troubled Times

Conclusion
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