Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for City

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.