Karachi. Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City
Karachi, violences, conflits, conflits ethniques, fragmentation sociale, fragmentation territoriale, guerre civile, Pakistan
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 ethnicised. 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.
Laurent Gayer
http://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/karachi/
HURST
2014-05
256
EN
Ouvrage
Rethinking urban democracy in South Asia. South Asia multidisciplinary academic journal (No. 5)
South Asia, Asie du Sud, démocratie, mouvement social, participation, politique de la ville, ségrégation urbaine, Kolkata, Calcutta, Mumbai, Bombay, Karachi, Ahmedabad, Tawa Lama-Rewal Stéphanie, Zérah Marie-Hélène
<div><b>Extract from the Editorial by Tawa Lama-Rewal and Zérah:</b></div>
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This special issue considers together (i) the role of democracy (or lack of it) in the city (Ramaswamy, Heuzé, Ahmad); (ii) the redeployment of urban politics along with economic restructuring (Rajagopal); and (iii) the role of the city in democracy (Gazdar & Mallah)—which suggests that the three dimensions of urban democracy are not mutually exclusive but on the contrary overlap and reinforce each other. The five papers in this issue focus on four South Asian cities—Karachi, Kolkata, Mumbai and Ahmedabad—while the book review adds elements about Delhi. These papers contribute to afore mentioned debates and bring original perspectives on urban democracy, on three major points.</div>
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<b>Contents:</b></div>
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Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal and Marie-Hélène Zérah - Urban democracy: A South Asian perspective</div>
V. Ramaswamy - 'It does not die' - urban protest in Kolkata, 1987-2007: An interview with Ranabir Samaddar</div>
Djallal G. Heuzé - <i>Tej</i> city. Protests in Mumbai, 1988-2008</div>
Tania Ahmad - Bystander tactics: Life on turf in Karachi</div>
Haris Gazdar and Hussain Bux Mallah - The making of a 'colony' in Karachi and the politics of regularisation</div>
Arvind Rajagopal - Urban segregation and the special political zone in Ahmedabad: An emerging paradigm for religio-political violence</div>
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NC
Association pour la Recherche sur l'Asie du Sud
Distributor
Revues.org
2011
Revue
http://samaj.revues.org/index3176.html