Who Owns the City? Migration, Ownership and Urban Ethnic Parties

• In Event: The Politics of Identity in South Asia: Ethnicity and Caste

Abstract

What explains across-group, intra-urban variation in ethnic political mobilization? Existing theories of ethnic politics emphasize either motivating conditions (such as poor living conditions, violence or other forms of discrimination) or mobilization technologies (such as minimum-winning coalitions or dense co-ethnic networks) to explain why certain ethnic groups become politically mobilized versus others. In this paper, I argue that mobilization technologies are insufficient to account for across-group variation in the successful mobilization of ethnicity. In addition, I argue that motivating conditions are evaluated against how things are expected to be, and these expectations can differ systematically between ethnic groups. In the urban context, I argue that these expectations are borne out of a sense of collective psychological ownership (or lack thereof) over the city, which in turn is shaped by the self-selection process into migration. In comparison to political migrants or natives, economic migrants and their descendants hold lower ownership over, and lower expectations from, city life. Ethnic parties therefore face a tougher challenge in creating a sustainable ethnic constituency from economic migrants. I illustrate this theoretical framework through an in-depth qualitative comparison – based on over 200 original interviews – between the two largest ethnic groups in Pakistan’s megacity Karachi: the Muhajirs and the Pashtuns.

Author

• Mashail Aman Malik, Harvard University