To many, Karachi represents the paradigmatic image of urban dystopia. Journalists, pointing to the street battles, bombings, and homicides since the 1970s call it “the world's most dangerous city” and “a metropolis under siege.”Footnote ⁷ Many residents echo this view. For them, street violence is no longer an aberration but an everyday condition. This narrative of urban dystopia raises some important questions: How can we understand urban processes beyond the transnationally circulating images that frame them? And how can researchers go beyond dominant narratives without denying their resonance with local realities?

Laurent Gayer's Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City provides some helpful answers to these questions, while also offering a novel approach to the study of urban violence. Drawing from over ten years of research that includes extensive interviews with activists, researchers, and politicians in Karachi, Gayer provides a comprehensive account of Karachi's post-1950s transformation from a quiet, moderately-sized city to its current incarnation as a tense, contested, and economically vibrant megalopolis. Migration, ethnic identity formation, the militarization of student politics, drug smuggling, gun running, informal housing, and the destructive effects of being in the epicenter of geopolitical conflicts all find their way into this far-reaching book. Along the way, Gayer offers a nuanced account of the city's politics and the logic of its everyday street violence that blends the political scientist's focus on institutional structure with the anthropologist's eye for local meaning. He shows that Karachi's violence is a product of specific and contingent political arrangements; rather than random conflagrations, this violence is an “ordered disorder.”

Contemporary Karachi is a product of three significant historical processes: the influx of hundreds of thousands of migrants (muhajirs) during and following the partition in 1947; the political mobilization of muhajirs in the 1970s and 80s, culminating in the political ascendency of the Muttahida Quami Movement; and Zia Ul-Haq's policy of “Islamicization” and strategy of making Pakistan (and in particular, Karachi) central to the CIA support for the mujahideen in their fight against the Soviet Union. However, one of the central points of Gayer's book is that explanations for contemporary conflicts cannot hinge on these large-scale processes alone. Avoiding the trap of reducing individual experiences to broader historical processes, Gayer emphasizes people's complex motivations and personal accounts of events. For instance, it is clear that the in-flow of arms due to the Afghan war transformed Karachi's student politics. This is a point made by many. However, Gayer examines a more interesting question—why did activists start using those weapons and what did being armed mean? Former student activists in the 1970s and 80s emphasize how “intra-group dynamics,” heterogeneous “social identities” (p. 64), as well as mundane intimacies and anxieties militarized student politics. Vivid testimony from student activists depicts fraught activist-students for whom guns bolstered an embattled masculinity. “We never decided to become militants, it just happened” (p. 65), said one man. Guns “simply ‘ended up’ in his hands” (p. 69), said another; “we realised that we could conquer all Karachi” (p. 62). These testimonies of accidental militants tell a story of urban violence that avoids simple explanations of cause and effect. The source of urban violence, Gayer argues, is not located in the ideology of its participants, but in the “structure of political opportunities” as well as the “transformation in technologies of warfare” and “interconnections [with a] changing local, national and international environment” (p. 76).

Gayer's compelling account challenges the language of organicity through which the tensions of megacities are often framed. From Lagos to Rio de Janeiro, violence, sprawl and conflicts over infrastructure are framed as endemic or metastasizing processes. Gayer recognizes the limitations of this language and attempts to offer an alternative. Rather than a “descent into chaos,” Gayer writes, upticks in violence represent a “re-configuration of [Karachi's] ordered disorder” (p. 230) and instances of “violent entrepreneurs … competing for control [of the city]” (p. 214), often in coordination with representatives of the state. Likewise, rather than a product of natural forces, violence is entangled with the activists’ strategies and the practices of rule; violence does not simply “erupt,” Gayer argues, but is managed.

Others have attempted to add nuance to the flattening and dehumanizing image of Karachi as urban dystopia. For instance, in Kartography, the novelist Kamila Shamsie shows what it means to live and love amidst the city's everyday violence.Footnote ⁸ Gayer's project, however, is quite different. Violence is not the backdrop to this book, but its object. Karachi shows what it means to participate in the struggles over the city, what motivates people to take up arms, and how official decisions undergird processes commonly seen as state breakdowns. Indeed, Karachi's conflicts, rather than a sign of the city unraveling—an index of the “coming anarchy,” as Robert Kaplan put it—instead may represent the tensions of urban space itself.Footnote ⁹