| Description |
1 online resource (xxv, 336 pages) : illustrations, maps |
| Contents |
Introduction -- A contested city -- From student brawls to campus wars -- 'The Mohajirs have arrived!' -- The bandits who would be kings -- Jihad comes to town -- A city on the edge -- Geographies of fear |
| Summary |
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 |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 325-331) and index |
| Notes |
Print version record |
| Subject |
Muttahida Quami Movement.
|
| SUBJECT |
Muttahida Quami Movement fast |
| Subject |
Ethnic conflict -- Pakistan -- Karachi
|
|
Political violence -- Pakistan -- Karachi
|
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Ethnicity -- Pakistan -- Pāṭa
|
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Muhajir (Pakistani people) -- Politics and government
|
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HISTORY -- Asia -- India & South Asia.
|
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Ethnic conflict
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Ethnicity
|
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Muhajir (Pakistani people) -- Politics and government
|
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Politics and government
|
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Political violence
|
| SUBJECT |
Karachi (Pakistan) -- Politics and government
|
| Subject |
Pakistan
|
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Pakistan -- Karachi
|
| Form |
Electronic book
|
| ISBN |
9780190237950 |
|
0190237953 |
|
