The brokerage of order in Karachi

Abstract

This article reframes Lyari’s gangs in Karachi as brokers of political order rather than merely criminal entities. Drawing on five years of ethnographic and archival research, it argues that the figure of the ‘gangster’ functioned as a political intermediary, stabilizing contradictions between military regimes, capital accumulation, and working-class urban life. Through portraits of three interlocutors—a tragic and unlikely ‘gangster’, a gang underboss who mediated between state projects and the denizens of his neighbourhood, and a socialist activist targeted for elimination by the gangs on behalf of the state—the article demonstrates how state, civil society, and scholarly discourses have unwittingly colluded to produce ‘Lyari-as-gangland’ without attending to what the gangs actually did in Lyari apart from the violence that overdetermines their era of dominance. It argues that coding brokerage as criminological masks the gang’s everyday functions in projects of public health, housing, and bureaucratic mediation. Furthermore, the rise of gangs to this role is historically situated in the conjuncture of the role of Pakistan’s military dictatorship in the global war on terror, where violent non-state actors were instrumentalized to produce a highly unequal order in the city.