Autarky in Violence: Twilight Institutions for Dispute Resolution

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Abstract

Karachi witnessed a third bout of organized violence from 2007–13. Contrary to press reporting, the violent event data for the city defies a ubiquitous spread of violence. Rather, violence dotted the landscape of some neighborhoods, with varying frequencies, leaving others out. The following research design aims to investigate this disparity in the spread of violence from the lens of political informality, instead of ethnicity or poverty. In this regard, non-state dispute resolution through political party offices is understood as a proxy for political informality in Karachi. Consequently, neighborhoods with higher incidence of violence are expected to demonstrate higher density of political party offices, and higher utilization of non-state dispute resolution. The objective is to make a dint at the meta-narratives of ethnicity and poverty to explain Karachi’s sporadic civil war through the micro-dynamics of the city’s violent informal governance.

1. Introduction

At 21 million+, Karachi accounts for over 10% of Pakistan’s total population and [more than] 42% of the country’s total death rate since 1980s (Gazdar & Mallah, 2013). It is the capital city of Pakistan’s Sindh province and has experienced three major waves of ‘ethnic’ violence from 1984–6, 1990–3, and 2007–13—the last two culminating in military and paramilitary operations aimed at eradicating armed militias from the city. Violence in the city has historically brought its different ethnic communities at loggerheads. Moreover, poor neighborhoods have seen a higher frequency of violence than their more affluent counterparts. Therefore, conflict dynamics in Karachi have been predominantly explored from the lenses of ethnicity or poverty (Gayer, 2014; Yusuf, 2012; Waseem, 1996; Haq, 1995; Wright, 1991; Engineer, 1987) despite their obvious limitations.

The explanatory potential of ‘poverty as a driver of violence’ is weak in Karachi’s context, given that as violence grew, it spread to several middle class neighborhoods as well (Gazdar & Mallah, 2013). On the other hand, a major deficiency of the ‘ethnicity’ argument lies in its inability to explain what Kalyvas (2003) calls the micro-dynamics of violence. For instance, the most recent spell of violence (2007–13) coincided with Karachi’s major political parties—PPP, ANP, MQM—forming a coalition government in Sindh. While ethnic elites in these parties periodically blamed each other for failure to curtail violence, they rarely mobilized racial sentiments against the ‘rival’ ethnic group from an official, party-level standpoint. Secondly, some of Karachi’s neighborhoods witnessed recurrent episodes of violence while others remained largely unaffected despite having mixed-ethnicity households. In other words, if violence was indeed ethnicity-driven, its concentration in a select cohort of mixed neighborhoods leaving out others with similar demographics makes little sense, unless more drivers of violence apart from ethnicity were present.

Another problem with the ethnicity/poverty argument relates to our opaque knowledge of violent offenders. Anyone remotely familiar with conflict dynamics in Karachi would know that violent incidents ranging from riots to targeted killings were almost always blamed on ‘unidentified persons’. When perpetrators remain unknown, many explanans are conjectured at best. Arguments are made for certain observable patterns implicating ethnicity, such as the killing of political workers from Party A followed by the killing of political workers from Party B, with each party representing two distinct ethnic communities. However, the overlapping of ethnic and political identities renders it difficult to decide whether a particular violent incident reflected inter-party, inter-ethnic, any other tension, or simply criminality. The ethnicity and poverty arguments hold factual substance especially if one were to consider the riots of 1984–6. Nonetheless, inculpating them as the main drivers of violence in Karachi in recent times seems far-fetched—especially under a demonstrated absence of clearly articulated ethnic interests by all parties involved, as well as a relatively broader prevalence of violence.

In this paper, I argue to locate the drivers of Karachi’s violence in the governance landscape of affected neighborhoods. In this regard, anecdotal evidence as well as some research accounts implicate criminality and non-state dispute resolution in fomenting violence. According to this perspective, the coercive resolution of disputes involving non-state armed actors (political parties and their proxies) lay at the root of most violent incidents. These disputes included (but were not limited to) criminality, especially bhatta collection . Therefore, whether violence was a result of non-state dispute resolution is a question worth addressing.

I borrow from literature on political informality and twilight institutions to formulate the argument on non-state dispute resolution in Karachi. In general, non-state dispute resolution prevailed in many formal, middle class neighborhoods of the city much the same way as in the poor, informal settlements. Therefore, the corresponding research design identifies two cohorts of most-similar, mixed-ethnicity formal and informal neighborhoods demonstrating comparable prevalence and/or scarcity of violence. All else being constant, differing violence levels in both neighborhood cohorts will be explained by analyzing variation in one indicator: prevalence of non-state dispute resolution.

2. Literature Review

2.1 Political Informality and Twilight Institutions

‘Formal institutions represent the baseline from which we evaluate the desirability of various outcomes’ (Tsai, 2007), yet informal institutions remain a vital clue to understanding political phenomena in non-Western societies (Radnitz, 2011). Informal institutions draw their persisting influence from their ability to sustain even when formal institutions may decline and change (Radnitz, 2011). In some societies, informal institutions can positively intervene to compensate for a fledgling state apparatus. Elsewhere they can kindle a dangerous void by ‘being impervious to the state’s reach and denying it coercive monopoly’ (Gazdar & Mallah, 2013). In this sense, it is debated whether formal rules and procedures, or informal codes of conduct, should be the theoretical baseline to study political processes (Radnitz, 2011).

Focusing on formal institutions may yield near-accurate results for advanced democracies where the reach and extractive capacity of the state has prevailed over patrimonial and kinship allegiances as well as private contract enforcement and traditional dispute resolution institutions. However, the inconsistent trajectory of democratization across cases means that many countries demonstrate a palimpsest of political institutionalization where informal institutions exist alongside formal institutions. Putnam (1994) even attributes regional variation in institutional development to the strength of informal institutions, like social capital. Although it is debatable whether social capital constitutes an independent institution or whether it is a proxy for other informal institutions (Radnitz, 2011; Voigt, 2013); nevertheless, the increased theoretical focus on informal institutions demonstrates the need to open new frontiers in the conceptualization of state and governance. Therefore, explaining or extrapolating political developments by taking formal institutions as the only baseline is flawed, especially in contexts where informal institutions tend to play a key role in affecting political outcomes. As the case of Karachi demonstrates, ‘informal politics is not a residual category of formal politics’ (Radnitz, 2011); rather, it is a system in its own right. In this sense, Lund (2000) problematizes the binary state-society divide to show a more fluid state-society dispensation, propelling new questions on the exercise of public authority in contexts where it is challenging to accurately pinpoint institutions along the formal-informal axis.

Diverging from the dominant rational-legal perspective on state formation and governance, Lund (2000) focuses on a heuristic development of the state enacted in everyday processual interactions between individuals. Lund (2000) contests the idea that public authority is only possessed by government institutions. Basing his arguments on some post-colonial African countries largely derided as ‘failed states’, he talks of contexts ‘where institutional competition is intense, and a range of ostensibly apolitical situations become actively politicized’ (Lund 2000), as organizations lacking the legal recognition of state but exercising legitimate public authority come to hold structural power and indulge in contentious claim-making. To precisely capture their murky character, Lund (2000) defines these organizations as ‘twilight institutions’. Lund (2000) also contests the idea of state failure in the presence of these ‘de facto public authorities’ that ensure service provision, particularly dispute resolution, the methods of which are questionable and may not be half as equitable, peaceful, or efficient as compared to the state’s. Like Gayer (2014) notes in his book on conflict dynamics in Karachi, the societal order in such contexts could be predicated on disorder, but the point is, it works, even if for a few. As a result, disputants may submit their claims or concerns to those ‘twilight institutions’ which they reckon as most capable of producing a satisfactory outcome (Lund 2000). Previous literature indicates the prevalence of a similar situation in Karachi. In this sense, an empirical investigation on political informality in the city can employ many proxies. Informal service provision is the most common. However, I use non-state dispute resolution owing to its potential to get violent since there are less formal restraints on all parties to resolve disputes peacefully.

3. The Context: Non-state Dispute Resolution in Karachi

Non-state dispute resolution is hardly an anachronism in Pakistan. In the more conservative rural and tribal regions of the country, dispute resolution is entrusted to the traditional jirgas and panchayats. These institutions have often made international headlines due to their controversial decisions. As a result, non-state dispute resolution has become more and more synonymous with rural and tribal culture with its prevalence in urban areas, especially in big cities like Karachi, going under the radar. Truth be told, non-state dispute resolution as well as informal service provision in general, was dispensed by all three major political parties of Karachi until 2013–14. They recruited an assortment of party workers, petty criminals, and mafia gangs for these tasks. The ‘wards’, ‘PAC’, ‘KRC’, ‘units’, and ‘sectors’—different political party offices—deeply resonate with Karachiites and are even deemed more efficient in virtually all governance areas than the teetering local government.

The ‘units’ and ‘sectors’ of the MQM were particularly popular. The MQM violently refused others to increase their footprint in the city, especially gatekeeping the predominantly Muhajir neighborhoods (Khan, 2016). Its growth into a de facto arbiter ‘successfully’ resolving both big and petty disputes at the neighborhood level was made possible through its utilization of coercion, eviction, and even murder of recalcitrant individuals, including its critics (Gayer, 2014). Other parties had also come to imitate the MQM’s template, often flexing their muscle to ‘help’ people, especially those distressed of the MQM’s excesses. However, this equation went both ways. The MQM also settled disputes for many individuals, particularly when other parties were involved. In this process, people would sometimes lose land, be kidnapped for ransom, or worse, killed. This fighting had two dimensions. On the one hand, party offices ensured distressed individuals (actual and potential voters) of their ability to protect by taking up their battles as seriously as their own. On the other hand, coercive action was a way for parties to send signals of strength to their adversaries. Gradually, political party offices effectively replaced the law enforcement apparatus of the state as they became the main sites of dispute resolution and grievance redressal in many neighborhoods (Baig, 2008). They dispensed their state-like expertise in coercive negotiation and action for an extensive array of issues ranging from civil and criminal disputes to employment and neighborhood uplift. As Baig (2008) in his work on the MQM notes, the MQM’s organizational structure was far more sophisticated than that of police. It explains why neighborhood issues, as well as other mishaps, were reported by both Muhajirs and non-Muhajirs to the local MQM leader, instead of the police. Muhajirs could take almost all of their concerns to the local party offices as well as the party headquarters where senior members of the MQM were available to them. Thus, the MQM became much more powerful than the government’s law enforcement apparatus.

Evidently, dispute resolution undertaken by party offices was far from peaceful as ‘justice’ administered by multiple de facto authorities struggling to prevail over each other, ‘claiming for themselves the right to punish, discipline [and tax], but also to protect, turned the city into a zone of contested sovereignties (Gayer, 2014).’ Thus, I expect violence to correlate with non-state dispute resolution in Karachi. Therefore, the higher the prevalence of non-state dispute resolution in a neighborhood, the higher the incidence of violence there. The null hypothesis excludes a relationship between the variables of interest. To reiterate, I focus on mixed-ethnicity neighborhoods. Ethnically homogeneous localities are out of focus here as I do not expect members of the same ethnicity, probably represented by the same party, to use violence against each other. The possibility definitely exists; moreover, if not against each other, their propensity to use violence on politically unaffiliated members of the neighborhood cannot be dismissed. However, this issue is beyond the scope of my research design.

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Autarky in Violence: Twilight Institutions for Dispute Resolution

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