With a population exceeding twenty million, Karachi is one of the world’s largest megacities. It is also one of the most violent.

Since the mid-1980s, Karachi has endured endemic political conflict and criminal violence, which revolve around control of the city and its resources (votes, land, bhatta, protection, money). These struggles for the city have become ethnicised. In the process, Karachi, often referred to as a “Pakistan in miniature”, has become increasingly fragmented, socially as well as territorially.

Despite this chronic state of urban political warfare, Karachi remains the cornerstone of the economy of Pakistan. In contrast to the chaotic and anarchic city portrayed in journalistic accounts, there is indeed order of a kind in the city’s permanent civil war.