Urban Violence in Pakistan: Ecological Dynamics of Putative Interethnic Animosities in Karachi

• In Event: Marxist Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Marxist Sociology Section Roundtable 2

Abstract

The proposed study aims at exploring the root cause(s) of urban violence in Pakistan, specifically in its largest city of Karachi that is the country’s commercial heart, sitting on the shores of the Indian Ocean. Since the 1980s, Karachi has endured insurgent violence that has been widely attributed to interethnic animosities, and a reprise of medieval warrior instincts. Such attributions, however, are facile, which fail to account for subterranean causal drives underlying urban strife in Pakistan. Karachi, which was founded by a fisher woman named Kolachi and houses one-fourth of Pakistan’s urban population, has been home to a multitude of communities for centuries, which lived side by side in peace. Why is it that their descendants began to nurse mutual loathing at a particular historical juncture? Although estimates vary, violence in Karachi has claimed 20,000 lives in 1985-2015. Additionally, 2,000 police officers have been target-killed in 1991-2014. The paper tests major theoretical commitments of environmental sociology (and political ecology) to explain the phenomenon of urban violence: ethnic nationalism as imagined communities; resource maldistribution masked as interethnic violence; dependency theory; uneven and combined development; disarticulated development; and most importantly metabolic rift (MR) theory. MR analysis edges over its peers in one key regard: It engages with town and country, as well as labor and nature, and labor and capital to explain ethnic animosities in the split labor market. Also, it accounts for the surplus rural labor that migrates to urban industrial centers in search of off-farm jobs. Of late, MR theory has evolved in far more productive directions to explain such climatological events as carbon rift and biospheric rift. Although it has seldom been deployed to explain “social rift” (e.g., urban violence), it is equipped with all the tools to tread in these uncharted waters as this project attempts to demonstrate.

Author

• Tarique Niazi, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire