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The conference on Karachi in 2013 was the first event arranged by a newly-created body, The Karachi Conference Foundation, designed to deliberate on all aspects of the city’s life. This book, bringing together the papers presented at the Conference, represents a landmark in scholarship on the mega-city and its issues. It is always a matter of great interest to see how certain societies have developed, starting out as Stone Age sites and flourishing as throbbing urban centres. While not every stage of this process is always documented, the records of remnants collected often help in painting a portrait that provides insights into this transformation. This is what Studies on Karachi does. Lay readers and scholars in a range of different disciplines with an interest in how a sleepy settlement in the late medieval period developed into a mega-city will find this book particularly useful. What emerges from the various chapters is the depiction of a city that, despite its vibrancy, is afflicted with numerous problems, ranging from poor planning to colossal mismanagement. Women, marginalized communities, neglected areas, issues of planning and development, and the history, and the anthropology of Karachi are all particular foci of attention throughout the book.
Argues that within the seemingly chaotic malaise of Karachi's politics, a form of "manageable violence" exists, on which the functioning of the city is based.
A fast-paced, hair-raising journey around Karachi in the company of those who know the city inside out - from an electrifying new voice in narrative non-fiction. Karachi. Pakistan’s largest city is a sprawling metropolis of twenty million people, twice the size of New York City. It is a place of political turbulence in which those who have power wield it with brutal and partisan force. It takes an insider to know where is safe, who to trust, and what makes Karachi tick. In this powerful debut, Samira Shackle explores the city of her mother’s birth in the company of a handful of Karachiites. Among them is Safdar the ambulance driver, who knows the city’s streets and shortcuts intimately and will stop at nothing to help his fellow citizens. There is Parveen, the activist whose outspoken views on injustice repeatedly lead her towards danger. And there is Zille, the hardened journalist whose commitment to getting the best scoops puts him at increasing risk. Their individual experiences unfold and converge, as Shackle tells the bigger story of Karachi over the past decade as it endures a terrifying crime wave: a period in which the Taliban arrive in Pakistan, adding to the daily perils for its residents and pushing their city into the international spotlight. Writing with intimate local knowledge and a global perspective, Shackle paints a vivid portrait of one of the most complex and compelling cities in the world, a city where the borders blur between politicians and gangsters and between lawful and unlawful, as dangerous new forces of violent extremism are pitted against old networks of power.
The varied voices present within this book force the reader to rethink their perspective of Karachi
Being part of a violent community in revolt can be addictive--it can be fun. This book offers a fascinating inside look at present-day political violence in Pakistan through a historical ethnography of the Muhajir Qaumi Movement (MQM), one of the most remarkable and successful religious nationalist movements in postcolonial South Asia. The MQM has mobilized much of the "migrant" (Muhajir) population in Karachi and other urban centers in southern Pakistan and has fomented large-scale ethnic-religious violence. Oskar Verkaaik argues that urban youth see it as an irresistible opportunity for "fun." Drawing on both anthropological fieldwork, including participatory observation among political militants, and historical analyses of state formation, nation-building, and the ethnicization of Islam since 1947, he provides an absorbing and important contribution to theoretical debates about political--religious and nationalist--violence. Migrants and Militants brings together two perspectives on political violence. Recent studies on ethnic cleansing, genocide, terrorism, and religious violence have emphasized processes of identification and purification. Verkaaik combines these insights with a focus on urban youth culture, in which masculinity, physicality, and the performance of violence are key values. He shows that only through fun and absurdity can a nascent movement transgress the dominant discourse to come of its own. Using these observations, he considers violence as a ludic practice, violence as "martyrdom" and sacrifice, and violence as "terrorism" and resistance.
The police force is one of the most distrusted institutions in Pakistan, notorious for its corruption and brutality. In both colonial and postcolonial contexts, directives to confront security threats have empowered law enforcement agents, while the lack of adequate reform has upheld institutional weaknesses. This exploration of policing in Karachi, Pakistan's largest city and financial capital, reveals many colonial continuities. Both civilian and military regimes continue to ensure the suppression of the policed via this institution, itself established to militarily subjugate and exploit in the interests of the ruling class. However, contemporary policing practice is not a simple product of its colonial heritage: it has also evolved to confront new challenges and political realities. Based on extensive fieldwork and almost 150 interviews, this ethnographic study reveals a distinctly "postcolonial condition of policing." Mutually reinforcing phenomena of militarisation and informality have been exacerbated by an insecure state that routinely conflates combatting crime, maintaining public order and ensuring national security. This is evident not only in spectacular displays of violence and malpractice, but also in police officers' routine work. Caught in the middle of the country's armed conflicts, their encounters with both state and society are a story of insecurity and uncertainty.
Karachi is one of the fastest growing cities in the world. It is Pakistan's only port and the major contributor to the country's economy. In addition, it is also a diverse city, with its population politically divided along ethnic lines. These three factors make urban land and that on the city fringe, a highly contested commodity around which federal, provincial, and local landowning agencies; corporate sector interests; formal and informal developers; international capital and military cantonments, compete for control and for extracting maximum value from it. The victims of this battle for turf and profits are the city's social and physical environment and its low and lower middle-income groups. This book deals with the history, evolution, and present day realities around who owns land; its legal and illegal acquisition, land-use conversions and development; the actors involved and their relationship with each other and with the public at large; the often violent conflicts that take place in this process and the measures that can be taken to regulate the land market for the creation of a better urban environment and for providing homes to its less privileged.
"Morning Edition" cohost Inskeep presents a riveting account of a single harrowing day in December 2009 that sheds light on the constant tensions in Karachi, Pakistan--when a bomb blast ripped through a religious procession.
This book explores gender and education in Pakistan by looking at the underlying processes that result in diff erent patterns of educational experiences of and outcomes for females and males. All the chapters are based on research studies that were conducted in different parts of Pakistan and explore diverse aspects of gender in relation to education. The book makes gender issues in education in Pakistan more visible by illustrating how gender is both a very personal and yet, public issue, and calls for more carefully thought out approaches to dealing with gender disadvantage in the education system.
“Drawing inspiration from actor-network theory, science studies, and semiotics, this brilliant book makes us completely rethink the workings of bureaucracy as analyzed by Max Weber and James Scott. Matthew Hull demonstrates convincingly how the materiality of signs truly matters for understanding the projects of ‘the state.’” - Katherine Verdery, author of What was Socialism, and What Comes Next? “We are used to studies of roads and rails as central material infrastructure for the making of modern states. But what of records, the reams and reams of paper that inscribe the state-in-making? This brilliant book inquires into the materiality of information in colonial and postcolonial Pakistan. This is a work of signal importance for our understanding of the everyday graphic artifacts of authority.” - Bill Maurer, author of Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason "This is an excellent and truly exceptional ethnography. Hull presents a theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich reading that will be an invaluable resource to scholars in the field of Anthropology and South Asian studies. The author’s focus on bureaucracy, “corruption," writing systems and urban studies (Islamabad) in a post-colonial context makes for a unique ethnographic engagement with contemporary Pakistan. In addition, Hull’s study is a refreshing voice that breaks the mold of current representation of Pakistan through the security studies paradigm." - Kamran Asdar Ali, Director, South Asia Institute, University of Texas