Electoral violence is emerging as the most exciting recent frontier in the agenda of violence and conflict studies in political science. Examining the relationship between parties and violence is therefore an urgent task for this research agenda. Niloufer Siddiqui, in her stimulating new book on the relationship between violence and political parties in contemporary Pakistan, seeks to explain varieties of violent (and nonviolent) strategies implemented by these political organizations. Siddiqui examines such variation through the structural context of political competition and the institutional and organizational characteristics of the parties themselves, which shape their capacities and incentives to deploy violence to achieve their ends. The book provides a valuable contribution to understanding party-implicated violence by elucidating what parties are able to do and what they seek to do in using violence to further their interests.

A book on party-implicated violence in Pakistan is overdue for two reasons. It is vital for understanding the country on its own terms as a complex landscape of intense political competition and everyday violence that characterizes many if not most developing countries, rather than popular stereotypes of a failed state overrun by radical Islamist violence or an autocracy under military control, in which elections are just window dressing. Studying parties is an essential enterprise precisely because Pakistani elections are deeply consequential and their outcomes not predetermined. Pakistan is also the ideal exemplar case for understanding the many different forms of party-implicated violence because of its extreme diversity of political geographies and forms of competition; this diversity yields significant but explicable variation in the relationship between parties and political violence that might be missed in country cases in which only one type—say, vote-suppressive violence by incumbents—is evident. Siddiqui’s book deftly engages with this empirically and theoretically important national case in comparative perspective, providing us with an explanatory framework that not only accounts for strategies of violence among parties in Pakistan but also establishes a template to link these different strategies to analogous cases from Nigeria to the Philippines.

Why do parties pursue different strategies, with some perpetrating violence directly, whereas others outsource violence to violent groups, form alliances with elite actors with independent coercive capacities, or even refrain from violence completely? At the heart of Siddiqui’s argument is a powerful explanatory typology, in which different values on two key dimensions of analysis yield four types of party-implicated violent (or nonviolent) strategies. The first dimension is the political geography within which party competition occurs. Siddiqui recognizes that Pakistan, like many other developing countries, is a country with weak capacity, which perforce means that the state does not maintain an unrivaled monopoly over the legitimate use of force over all its territory. Critically, however, she distinguishes between two very different manifestations of this weakness: conditions of “shared sovereignty”—where governance functions are formally or informally carried out by social elites—and “multiple, competing sovereigns,” in which no actor can fully establish a coercive monopoly, and thus multiple actors clash with one another over resources and power. In the Pakistani context, the former refers to parts of (rural) Punjab, Sindh, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP)—certainly the majority of constituencies in the country—whereas the latter refers to the complex, multiethnic metropolis of Karachi, certainly the epicenter of political violence in the country. The second dimension is a party’s organizational capacity: whether any particular party has “local-level presence and the ability to mobilize voters through their own party cadres” or “lack[s] that institutional presence and which must rely on external actors for voter mobilization” (38). This yields four types of partisan strategies with respect to violence: direct (competing sovereigns, organizationally strong), outsourcing (competing sovereigns, organizationally weak), alliance (shared sovereignty, weak), and nonviolence (shared sovereignty, strong). Other factors—the particular incentives for engaging in violence and the audience costs that might dissuade it, the inelasticity of the vote and the extent to which vote bases are effectively captured and whether associated violence actors are elite or street-level—augment rather than crosscut this central logic driving strategic choice.

The bulk of the book is dedicated to elaborating and evidencing this framework through a rigorous but wide-ranging multimethod examination of four exemplar cases of parties and their different strategies for violence: the Muhajir-dominated Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM) and the Sindhi-dominated Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) in Karachi, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) in Punjab, and the Awami National Party (ANP) in KP. In so doing, Siddiqui relies on significant fieldwork involving hundreds of interviews, documentary evidence in English and Urdu, and surveys of politicians and voters. Aficionados of causal inference will be gratified to find a sophisticated conjoint experiment that explores the key mechanism of audience cost. Siddiqui’s analytical approach is greater than the sum of its parts; the book deftly deploys different kinds of data and methods to address different dimensions of the argument and the specificity of cases. Siddiqui also shows a deep knowledge of Pakistani politics. I was particularly impressed by her facility in engaging with respondents and capturing the dynamics in radically different political contexts—from the violent ethnic machine politics of Karachi to the elite patronage networks of rural Punjab.

As with any piece of self-aware scholarship, the clarity of the book’s framework allows us to see both what can be explained and what cannot. As Siddiqui herself notes, Pakistan is a case in which history is quickly moving, providing us with new cases and dynamics to be explained. Her research mostly focused on the period between the buildup to the 2013 elections and the aftermath of the 2018 elections, which saw a peak of insurgent violence associated with the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan and the crucible of conflict in Karachi, as well as the remarkable emergence of Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI), which formed a coalition government that ruled between 2018 and 2022. The PTI is briefly treated as a “out-of-sample” case in a broader comparative chapter. In the year since the publication of the book, the PTI was forced from power, and PTI activists have engaged in sustained contentious violence on the streets of Lahore, Islamabad, and Rawalpindi. This culminated in two waves of intense riots following Imran Khan’s arrest in May 2023 in which military installations were attacked, dozens of civilians were killed, and thousands were arrested. These three cities are sites where the state holds a monopoly on violence, and the PTI is famously an organizationally weak, personalistic party: it is a vehicle for Imran Khan’s ambitions. This episode suggests an emerging type of party-implicated violence: decentralized, contentious in nature, targeted against the state, and driven as much by ideological conviction as by strategic calculus. The PTI-implicated violence in May 2023 has resonances with the January 2020 riots at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, and related incidents in Berlin and Brasilia.

This in turn raises some hard questions for the direction of the research agenda, which Siddiqui’s excellent book might help us understand. Is the study of electoral violence primarily about elections? If so, party-implicated violence then seems a dark but inevitable consequence of the heightened stakes of political competition. Or is it primarily about violence, in which case the independent strategies of violent entrepreneurs sometimes ally with, work for, or even take the form of parties in pursuit of their independent objectives.