How do we begin to understand a city? A city so drastically important to the country it belongs to, but one that has remained relegated to ...
How do we begin to understand a city? A city so drastically important to the country it belongs to, but one that has remained relegated to the depths of ethnic violence and executive control. A city that was the heart of Pakistan but is today known for the regularity with which violence asserts itself in every corner.
Laurent Gayer painstakingly documents Karachi, a city once known for its clubs and its thriving culture, but where regular people now spend many hours navigating the ramifications of years of violence. Everything from the architecture to the ways in which “normalcy” is assumed is dependent on the interactions that people in the city have had with violence.
Karachi is a city of migrants. It is undergirded by a complex political system that makes it an interesting case not only for the study of armed conflict but also for the causal mechanisms that play a larger role in igniting those in the first place. The complexity of having an ethnic conflict, a housing crisis driven by the party in power, a central government that is more interested in Karachi as an economically critical place, and a student organisation that suddenly gets access to arms, is woven into a...
