Dispositifs of (Dis)Order: Gangs, governmentality and the policing of Lyari, Pakistan Adeem Suhail

Abstract: At a moment when the violence of policing has found its locus in the bureaucratic institutions of ‘the police’, anthropology offers a more expansive idea of policing as a social function, articulated through multiple social forms, and crucial to hierarchical orders. This article draws on the idea of the dispositif to offer a processual model for understanding how non-state violence abets the maintenance of social order. Exploring the limits of biopolitics and drawing on ethnographic evidence, it uses the case of gang activity in Lyari, Pakistan, to show how gangsters maintained, rather than disrupt, the dominant social order in the city. Furthermore, it shows that those who challenged the inherently violent and exploitative order implemented by the gangs and the city's political elite were prime targets of public violence wielded by law and outlaw working together as a dispositif.

Introduction

The policeman who collected him from the recycling depot did not offer any explanations which made Babu Maheshwari apprehensive. Things became clearer when a few blocks away they arrived at the drainage nala. Babu saw the boy floating face-down in the murky waters amidst the thick sludge of excreta, plastics, chemicals, and once-desired objects that form Karachi’s daily discharge. This mundanely repugnant ecology had claimed and begun consuming the boy. Babu, a veteran municipal waste worker hailing from the ex-untouchable Dalit communities of coastal Sind, was brung, once more, to be the instrument that reclaimed the body, as a once-desired object, now discarded by city into its rivers of shit. To reclaim the boy, as a body, to be probed and named in death by police, who stood at the edge of the nala, beneath the oppressive sun and the revolting sludge.

Babu extracted the body with a long wooden pole, wading knee deep into the nala. He then, without getting or expecting assistance, dragged the body onto the crumbling embankment. Accelerated decomposition had not yet erased the traces of several purple bruises blotted over the arms and face. The features were not quite recognizable anymore, but together with the jeans and familiar football jersey hinted at a young Afro- Baloch man. To Babu, a man, but to the policemen a procedural problem. The rotund officer in charge waddled up closer by a few feet, discernibly queasy. From a ‘safe’ distance, he directed Babu to search the pockets. Nothing. Convinced by the extent of his investigations the officer declared that the body belonged to another as-yet-unidentified gengvar.

At the time, Gengvar was a curious category in popular circulation all over the city. It was the figuration of the infamous Lyari Gang War. Once in circulation, gengvar suspended young Baloch men, and especially Afro-Baloch men (because Black boys are men to power the world over) from Lyari between victim and perpetrator of violence. The Gang War congealed onto their bodies, like the purple bruises on a dead youth. Process, and event, subject, and object collapsed, one into the other. These collapses were ubiquitous to Lyari during the putatively exceptional temporality of the Gang War. A ‘war’ that was really a war on presenting as Black, identifying as Baloch, being from Lyari. Fear: spatialized, racialized, embodied, then packaged and distributed en masse.

The 21st century dawned on this working-class neighborhood in the red hues of blood. Once the repository of Karachi’s old city charm, progressive political values, and harmonious diversity, Lyari transformed into a notorious gangland. Over five years of ethnographic learning and unlearning, it became clear to me that the ‘fear' identified with Lyari far exceeds the manifest sense of insecurity in people's everyday lives. This 2 article interrogates this highly constructed discursive stability where contrary discourses and paradoxical practices cohere, muddling a robust assessment of the social functions and effects of the gangs in Lyari.1

Fear was deployed in narratives about Lyari to several different and often competing ends. It catered to widely differing publics, served widely differing interests. Fear was commandment and commencement. Each "statement" equating Lyari with exceptional violence and paralyzing fear operated in surplus of material precarity faced by Lyarians. Though the horrors of gang violence are undeniable, their staging as an exceptionality and subsequent fetishization by diverse forces united only in their grotesque fascination with Lyari was indeed strange.

So strong was this fetish, that in its sway, one could forget that the rest of the city of Karachi was not faring any better than Lyari in combatting spectacular acts of violence. The fetish animated a powerful fascination with public violence and transformed gangsters that were, not too long ago, petty criminals into all-powerful monsters with the capacity to challenge the very foundations of the Pakistani state and its social order.2

In 2014, when the military crackdown against the gangs commenced, this same discourse legitimized the weekly tallies of young men from Lyari killed extra-judicially, disappeared without a trace, or apprehended with dubious access to legal representation. Pakistan's draconian security apparatus, its ‘progressive', left- liberal scholarly community, the politicians hailing from the city's historic elite, crime-beat journalists out for scoop, and many civil society figures and organizations who, on most issues saw themselves as fiercely adversarial to one another; completely concurred on the spatialization and ethnicization of fear and violence in Lyari. How do we explain the coherence of antagonistic formations—progressive, right-wing, parliamentarian, or suspected agents of the military establishment—in discursively producing Lyari as a subject of fear and violence?

This article addresses that question. It explains how the gangs were one amongst many social formations involved in policing and maintaining the boundary between Lyari and the city. This policing function, as we will see, is one of the most critical subroutines in the reproduction of power.3 It reproduces the social boundary between government and the governed, state and society, order and disorder, and thus between Lyari and the city of Karachi. These social locations that stand in for social ‘order' acquire concreteness and appear orderly precisely by defining places like Lyari, and social formations like the gangs, as the opposite of order.

However, the establishment of order through boundary-making is a contradictory process. It inherently involves the orchestration and application of hyper-visible, spectacular forms of violence at multiple

1 c.f. Tsing, Anna L. "From the Margins" Cultural Anthropology 9(3):279. 2 I discuss the racial dimensions of this fetish, which is strong, important, and deserving of full analysis in detail elsewhere (see Suhail 2016; 2018). That scholars of South Asia rarely engage with the literature on race or explore the significant homologies between race, ethnicity, and caste is quickly changing (see, for example, Pandey 2014). However, ‘race' remains an undertheorized variable in research on South Asia. This is astounding when studying categories like the gang, the genesis, and of which occurs in 1920s Chicago and which later becomes a fetish object for the ‘science' of criminology, both under the circumstances completely governed in the absolute by racial politics in the United States. That the ‘gangs' of Lyari consist of the doubly marked Afro-Baloch youth of Lyari, constituting a racialized minority and affiliated with an ethnic group long associated in Pakistan with suspicions of anti-state, communist and separatist proclivities makes it all the more salient. Remarkably, despite becoming a destination for scholars of Pakistan, no study of Lyari has remotely mentioned the ethno-racial dimensions of social organization there. 3 Mitchell, T. (1991). "The limits of the state: beyond statist approaches and their critics." The American Political Science Review: 77-96 3 scales.4 The orchestration of spectacular violence allows ‘order' to be identified, defined, established, and maintained through the continual staging of chaotic, ostensibly senseless acts of brutality.5 Often, the curators of these theaters of violence outsource the policing function to groups better situated to perform the dirty work. All over the world, we find illicit groups, shadowy figures, and shady organizations recruited for such functions, in each case blurring boundaries between state, society, and criminality.6

In this paper, I argue that the gangs of Lyari were precisely that: an agent of order, a mechanism of social control. They were a part of what I identify as a ‘dispositif.' They wielded spectacular violence to reproduce, rather than challenge, the extant relations of domination through constructing and policing the social boundaries between Lyari and Karachi, and effectively articulating processes of political subjection therein.

Furthermore, the gangs were only the most recent iteration in a series of social formations that performed the policing function in Lyari by reproducing it as a wild frontier consistently in need of ordering. Moreover, the gang sustained its position within the dispositif by convincing one and all that they were the only formation capable of effectively reproducing power relations and strived to distinguish themselves from other formations that could potentially perform the same function.

I will show how the gang is an order-maintaining force through ethnographic evidence. Firstly, through the case of Akram, a gangster from Lyari, I will show how the orchestration of spectacular violence was not the gang's sole or even primary or predominant mode of policing and ordering Lyari. On the contrary, much of the gang's everyday activity in Lyari comprised of mundane services rendered to the residents of Lyari in the absence of effective or willing state institutions.

Secondly, I will show that gang violence regularly targeted figures they identified as ‘disorderly' and ‘dangerous' elements. However, their assessment of who was ‘dangerous' was the same as that of the political elite of the city. They targeted groups and figures that had an interest in upending the highly unequal and inherently violent ‘order' being established in the city. The trials of the young social activist Robin showcase how the gangs and the ‘state'—ostensibly on different sides of the law—counted the same kinds of social actors as a threat, as the object of policing, as a target marked for their violence.

Violence and Order

The brutal gangs in Lyari did nothing to disrupt power relations between the city's political elite and the masses that inhabited Lyari, who were the subjects of their domination. They served to preserve and extend those relations. They established a condition where their sporadic spectacles of arbitrary violence propped up a highly unequal, prejudicial, and violent order. The gang policed Lyari, eliminating social actors interested in upending this order. The open competition between rival gangs to be the conduits of this policing function—the so-called Lyari gang war— only echoed internal competition within the ruling elite on whose behalf they maintained this order. Thus, what appeared as a violent disorder of the gangs was order itself. The problem was that the processes that maintained this order were inherently destructive, exploitative, and violent even though they went by seemingly benign names such as urbanization and development or passed as 'law and order.'

4 Aretxaga, B. (2000). "Playing terrorist: Ghastly plots and the ghostly state." Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 1(1): 43-58. 5 Taylor, D. (1997). Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's" Dirty War." Duke University Press. 6 See McCoy, A. W. (2003). "The politics of heroin: Cia complicity in the global drug trade, Afghanistan, Southeast Asia, Central America." And also, Wilson, E. (2009). Deconstructing the shadows. Government of the Shadows: Parapolitics and criminal sovereignty, 13-55. 4

Anthropologists have identified the pivotal role played by violent non-state operators in such processes across a variety of contexts. For instance, Anton Blok's classic study of peasant communities in the mid- 20th century Sicily highlights how the Sicilian Mafiosi articulated relations of domination between the "national" landed gentry and "local" peasant community.7 To establish and maintain their role as mediators, the Mafiosi wielded the threat of spectacular violence, enabling the extraction of votes and labor from the peasantry while claiming to be their sole avenue of social mobility and resource access.8 Their violence inhibited resistance formations amongst the peasants and channeled restive elements away into the mainland industrial centers as émigré labor.9 Their entrenchment in Sicily, criminal as it was, had the full support of the Italian political elite.

Blok's framework builds on the idea of social banditry;10 which links the figure of the bandit to other people by various ties" and therefore, under analysis, must "reference… other groups, classes, or networks with which [it] form[s] specific configurations of interdependent individuals”.11 The Sicilian mafia was a specific social articulation of multi-scalar social relations that transcend both their categorization as criminals and the time-space of Sicily itself. This framing is echoed repeatedly throughout anthropological investigations of violent non-state formations and their relation to order.12 It resonates powerfully with the situation in Lyari, allowing us to move beyond the spectacle of violence to consider how power articulates across social and geographic fields.13

There can be no doubt that the gangs in Lyari, in the time they controlled the neighborhood, had perpetrated acts of unspeakable cruelty. However, while in these past decades, Lyari was made synonymous with violent gangland, the rest of Karachi was not faring any better. Citizens Police Liaison Committee (CPLC) stats for 2011 saw the category of ‘political and terrorist' violence claims 1724 victims—a 30% increase from the year before, continuing on a trend that reached its peak in 2013—the bloodiest year in Karachi's history with more than 2700 documented violent deaths. The Lyari gangs were not insignificant contributors to the incidents recorded, yet they were not the sole or even primary vector of violence either.

Nevertheless, the generalized threat of spectacular and arbitrary violence produced a sense of inescapability from the pervasiveness of fear, masking the relations and processes driving and underpinning their genesis.14 Indeed, there is a widespread fascination with the violent condition of the urban contemporary, that lodges violence into a black box, making it appear inherently senseless, disorderly, pathological and emanating from "anti-social" elements so that experts and enforcers may offer differential diagnoses of such imponderable, pathological violence. The task of the "social sciences is not [just] to surf the wave of current events, but to bring to light the durable mechanisms that produce them."15 Nevertheless, it would

7 Blok, A. (1975). The Mafia of a Sicilian village, 1860-1960: a study of violent peasant entrepreneurs. HarperCollins Publishers. 8 Blok, A. (1969). "Peasants, patrons, and brokers in western Sicily." Anthropological Quarterly: 155-170. 9 Blok, A. (2001). "The enigma of senseless violence." 10 Hobsbawm, E. J. (1963). Primitive rebels, studies in archaic forms of social movement in the 19th and 20th centuries. New York: Praeger. 11 Blok, A. (1972). "The peasant and the brigand: social banditry reconsidered." Comparative Studies in Society and History 14(4): pp.497-8. 12 Hoffman, D. (2011). The war machines: young men and violence in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Duke University Press; Jaffe, R. (2013). The hybrid state: Crime and citizenship in urban Jamaica. American Ethnologist, 40(4), 734- 748. 13 Feldman, A. (1991). Formations of Violence: The narrative of the body and political terror in Northern Ireland. University of Chicago Press 14 Nagengast, C. (1994). "Violence, Terror, and the Crisis of the State." Annual review of anthropology: 109-136; Nordstrom, C. and A. C. Robben (1995). Fieldwork under fire: Contemporary studies of violence and survival, University of California Press 15 Wacquant, L. (2008). Urban outcasts: A comparative sociology of advanced marginality, Polity. p.282. 5 not be unfair to say that images of violence were being circulated as much in police statistics, as it was in the tweets and columns of journalists and the tweets and academic journals of social scientists. To be sure, the social sciences have always grappled with crime and criminality, playing a pivotal role in the genesis and stabilization of the gang as a category.

The production of gang violence as an analytical category in the social sciences is traceable to the interwar metropolises of northern United States receiving poor migrants from war-torn Europe as well as the Great Migration of Black Americans escaping Jim Crow South.16 Pioneering research into the confluence of urban violence, street gangs, inequality, and social exclusion, while instructive, was based on ideas about ‘social organization' and ‘culture of poverty' that have since been subject to intense scrutiny, challenge, and revision.17 Nevertheless, a vestigial pull of these powerful frameworks persists in the social sciences.18 Extending Liberalisms conceits, ‘non-state' violence remains ‘illegitimate' and "disorderly" despite evidently blurry boundaries between state, law, and their putative others.19

Contrapuntal epistemologies have emerged from the scholars of the Global South and critical race studies within the US. These studies offer robust frameworks sensitive to changing empirical realities. Scholars from the African and South Asian postcolony over the past few decades have contributed to this literature.20 New research on gangs as a social formation focuses on the possibilities and foreclosures attending violent youth formations, rather than fetishizing the violence accompanying them.21

Unfortunately, most studies in Pakistan continue to draw on dated representations of the city as a tableau of dark minds, darker deeds, and pathological disorders.22 Many fall back on the easily accessible narratives of fear and conjure up stock figures—the gangster, the terrorist, the dissident—rendered inherently pathological by defunct frameworks. Dazzled by the spectacle of violence, they inadvertently mime statist perspectives, legitimizing any measures, however drastic, taken in the name of the ‘restoration of order.' The task here is not to merely oppose or concur with statist frameworks; it is to understand the precarity produced by a confluence of the narratives and practices of the state, and those characterized as outlaws.23

16 Wirth, L. (1925). A bibliography of the urban community. Park, R. E., et al. (1925). "The City (The University of Chicago Studies in Urban Sociology)." The City (The University of Chicago Studies in Urban Sociology). And especially, Thrasher, F. M. (1963). The gang: A study of 1,313 gangs in Chicago, University of Chicago Press. 17 Harrison, F. V. (1988). "Introduction: An African diaspora perspective for urban anthropology." Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development 17(2/3): 111-141. Ralph, L. (2014). Renegade Dreams: Living through injury in gangland Chicago. University of Chicago Press. Wilson, W. J. (2011). When work disappears: The world of the new urban poor. Vintage. Hagedorn, J. (2008). A world of gangs: armed young men and gangsta culture (Vol. 14). U of Minnesota Press. 18 pace Hannerz, U. (1980). Exploring the city: inquiries toward an urban anthropology, Columbia University Press. 19 Coughlin, B. C. and S. A. Venkatesh (2003). "The urban street gang after 1970." Annual Review of Sociology 29(1): 41-64. 20 Kolsky, E. (2010). Colonial Justice in British India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 21 Levenson, D. T. (2013). Adios Niño: The gangs of Guatemala City and the politics of death, Duke University Press. Fontes, A. W. (2016). "Extorted Life: Protection Rackets in Guatemala City." Public Culture 28(3 80): 593-616. Wolseth, J. (2011). Jesus and the gang: Youth violence and Christianity in urban Honduras, University of Arizona Press. Zilberg, E. (2007). "Gangster in guerilla's face: A transnational mirror of production between the USA and El Salvador." Anthropological Theory 7(1): 37-57. Ramirez, M. C. (2011). Between the guerrillas and the state: the cocalero movement, citizenship, and identity in the Colombian Amazon, Duke University Press. Rodgers, D. (2006). "Living in the shadow of death: gangs, violence, and social order in urban Nicaragua, 1996–2002." Journal of Latin American Studies 38(2): 267-292. Rodgers, D. (2006). "The State as a Gang Conceptualizing the Governmentality of Violence in Contemporary Nicaragua." Critique of Anthropology 26(3): 315-330. 22 Verkaaik, O. (2004). Migrants and militants: fun and urban violence in Pakistan, Princeton University Press. Khan, N. (2010). Mohajir militancy in Pakistan: violence and transformation in the Karachi conflict, Routledge. 23 Benjamin, W. (1978). Reflections: Essays, aphorisms, autobiographical writings (p. 277). New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 6

Gang violence partook of the epistemic violence aggregating in the Archive of knowledge about gangs, about Lyari, about the relations between the domain of the informal and outlaw, with the formal and legal itself. I identify this coalescence of disparate, often contradictory, elements at critical moments within a political process as the dispositif.

Reclaiming the Dispositif

The latter half of the twentieth century saw accelerated economic and political shifts across the world. A manifestation of these shifts was the concentration of human life into urban spaces where new relations were forged, and old ones recast in diverse ways.24 A different idiom of making claims on material resources emerged that was sensitive to the novelty of technologies, techniques, and conditions.25 These tactics precipitated a rearrangement in relations of power. In turn, these rearrangements have made it difficult to insist on the difference between state and society, law and outlaw, order and disorder, and all binarisms of that ilk.

Anthropologists interested in the relationship between power and social organization, over these past few decades, have uncovered these blurred boundaries in innovative ways and a variety of contexts.26 Scholars draw on Foucault and theorists such as Giorgio Agamben, who extends his insights, in order to do so. Indeed, Foucault's later work demonstrates with much clarity, how the orchestration of systemic violence is necessary to the reproduction of power.27 Scholars interested in issues of sovereignty, power, and violence have extended this insight, building especially on the lectures Foucault delivered at the College de France in the late 1970s.28

The lectures outline Foucault's idea of "modern governmentality," and consolidate legal, economic, medical, and institutional discourses, amongst others, into a matrix of powers that craft the modern subject. The lectures assemble this matrix, tracing a genealogy of the exercise of power in diverse domains of life. An essential aspect of governmentality is that it decenters the state as a locus of power by focusing on the diverse and mundane social locations in the exercise of governmentality. Government appears as the regulation of life that achieves functional coherence at distinct moments across time; power has no decisive locus, telos, or causal linearity. Multiple modalities of subjection are enumerated.

Governmentality is a negative determination on the conditions under which populations are exposed to precarity. Some scholars treat governmentality as a cohesive political project and thus tie systemic or structural violence into projects of governance. Nevertheless, despite undermining the conceptual category of the state, Foucault rarely tackles the question of violence explicitly—especially spectacular, hyper- visible, physical violence—without referring to the conceptual location of the state. Such a framework may work for certain fields-sites and certain kinds of questions.29 Nevertheless, as Akhil Gupta argues, many contexts betray less a systemization of power and more a proliferation of arbitrary outcomes for its

24 Davis, M. (2006). "Planet of slums." New Perspectives Quarterly 23(2): 6-11. 25 do Rio Caldeira, T. P. (2000). City of walls: crime, segregation, and citizenship in São Paulo, University of California Press. 26 Gupta, A. (1995). "Blurred boundaries: the discourse of corruption, the culture of politics, and the imagined state." American Ethnologist 22(2): 375-402. 27 Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison, Random House LLC. 28 Foucault, M. (2009). Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977--1978, Macmillan. Foucault, M. (2010). "The Birth of Biopolitics": Lectures at The College de France, 1978—1979, Macmillan. Foucault, M. (2003). " Society Must Be Defended": Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976, Macmillan 29 Copjec, J. (1994) "Read My Desire: Lacan against the historicists," MIT University Press. 7 subjects.30 In any case, the relationship between governmentality and spectacular violence eludes these frameworks.31

The idea that large-scale projects of rule engender population-level exposure to harm, i.e., governmentality, often recapitulates the premise that these projects propagate from the conceptual location of 'the state.' It further presumes that the state is, by and large, successful in realizing these projects. Thus, in the very move where the state blurs into society, Foucault smuggles the state back in as a reified location to explain away spectacular (state) violence.32

Even operations of governmentality presumably encompassed by "the state," are often subject to the direction of non-state organizations such as banks, IFIs, NGOs, lobbyists, trade unions, media pundits, quirky billionaires, armies and their independently minded generals, and so on. These diverse operations unfold on multiple scales, sometimes cohering, often not. Thus, even projects Foucault identifies with the 'state' rarely emanate from the normative location of the state.33

The set of operations that precipitate in large-scale hyper-visible acts of violence are a limit-case of Foucauldian analysis. Orchestrators of violence may include mercenaries, private companies, intelligence agencies, vigilantes, mobs, errant police officers, gangs, cartels, and other, often shadowy formations. In most instances, these formations perform the functions of governmentality. In their liminality relative to the state, they maintain the project of rule by regulating and policing the social while offering plausible deniability to the political classes. They discipline, they punish, often to maintain an order predicated on the threat of hypervisible violence. Foucault's efficacy in such contexts remains subject to caveat and challenge.34

Such violence constitutes a limit case for biopolitics that seeks to extend political subjection over the living and recognizes death as a limit to power. However, as Mbembe rebuts, those who claim to be the state forget the biopolitical imperative of "let live" everywhere and often.35 Life inconveniently transgresses theory; the levers of biopolitics and governmentality regularly kill. Homo Sacri litter the age of governmentality.36 The frequency and regularity of spectacular violence indicate the conceit of power, which resides in making routine violence seem rare and evental.

In contexts of hypervisible violence, therefore, governmentality relies on the overdetermination of the conceptual location identified as the state— one that does not obtain in ‘most of the world.'37 Shadowy

30 Gupta, A. (2012). Red tape: bureaucracy, structural violence, and poverty in India. Durham, Duke University Press. 31 See Rose, N. (2000). "Government and control." British journal of criminology 40(2): 321-339. Merry, S. E. (2001). "Spatial governmentality and the new urban social order: Controlling gender violence through law." American Anthropologist 103(1): 16-29. Oksala, J. (2012). Foucault, politics, and violence, Northwestern University Press. 32 Foucault, M. (2003). " Society Must Be Defended": Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976, Macmillan. pp.254=263. 33 Foucault's break from the universal is not as radical as it may appear. See Nugent and Suhail, “State Formation” in the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Anthropology. 34 The idea of ‘state racism' works for a quick accounting of large-scale violent political projects. The gross unevenness of conflict and affliction, and inter-state scale of analysis concretize the idea of the state, and that spectacular violence appears to emanate from the state-domain. Spectacular violence in these regards appears as the vengeance of the law, a culture of cruelty extendable to ‘society,' a spectacle of death and violence necessary to statecraft. For instance, see Garnett, N. S. (2010). Ordering the city: land use, policing, and the restoration of urban America. New Haven, Yale University Press; Taylor, K.-Y. (2016). From #blacklivesmatter to black liberation, Haymarket Books; Anderson, C. (2016). White rage: The unspoken truth of our racial divide. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, amongst many others. 35 Mbembe, J.-A. (2003). "Necropolitics." Public Culture 15(1): 11-40. 36 Agamben, G. (1998). "Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life." 37 Chatterjee, P. (2004). The politics of the governed: reflections on popular politics in most of the world. New York, Columbia University Press. 8 figures and para-political agencies openly organize social life, promulgating the processes of governmentality.38 They produce regularities, predictabilities, and a sense of order where only the inherent unreason and schizophrenia of capital reigns.39 In these contexts, if ever at all, ‘the state' is not the guarantor of ‘order.'

21st-century Lyari was one such place. The stabilization and maintenance of order here depended on composite multi-scalar formations working together for a time. The artifice of the state mobilized discourses of fear to produce boundaries that lent it concreteness.40 Law-outlaw, order-chaos, civil society-surplus humanity were exactly such kinds of putatively antagonistic social binaries mobilized to mask the operations of power.41 Reproducing order necessitated policing and conserving these boundaries so that disorder appears as order and people in different social locations continue to feed the process and ensure that the intolerable continued to be tolerated.42 At every scale, spectacular violence frequently facilitates this policing function through non-state actors as mechanisms that reproduce power.43

* * *

What is a dispositif? And why dispositifs? Foucault describes a dispositif as a "heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions—in short, the said as much as the unsaid."44 Left there, the concept is so broad that it might at once mean everything and nothing.45

Quite to the contrary, I argue that there is power and depth to the dispositif in Foucault that Foucault cannot acknowledge, as it signals towards the limits of his entire framework. Rather than elaborating on a philosophical procedure, I posit the following: The dispositif is the objectified trace of the transcendental signifier, that Foucault inserts within his frame in order to render internal consistency to his theory of power. Thus, the dispositif is a conceptual instrument that resolves problems that appear at the limits of Foucauldian frameworks. Hence, while the historicist bent in Foucault's thought cannot accommodate an external mediator, it stabilizes itself through the dispositif as a black box that can be everything and nothing.

Agamben supports this reading by plotting the dispositif as "a mechanism of capture, an aggregation of forms practical, material and discursive that abet the process of subjection by performing a total strategic

38 Aretxaga, B. (2003). "Maddening states." Annual review of anthropology: 393-410. 39 Nugent, D. (2010). "States, secrecy, subversives: APRA and political fantasy in mid‐20th‐century Peru." American Ethnologist 37(4): 681-702. 40 Abrams, P. (1988). "Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State (1977)." Journal of historical sociology1(1):58- 89. 41 Marx, K. and F. Engels (1970). "The German Ideology, ed. CJ, Arthur." New York: International. 42 Taussig, M. T. (1997). The magic of the state. New York, Routledge. 43 Gramsci calls this hegemony. See Crehan, K. A., F. (2002). Gramsci, culture, and anthropology. Berkeley, University of California Press. 44 p. 194. Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977, Pantheon. 45 See Deleuze, G. (1992). What is a dispositif? Michel Foucault: Philosopher, 159-168. Deleuze asks the same question in his interrogation of Foucault's dispositifs with a conclusion that, for this article, does not deviate enough from Agamben's analysis to require a full treatment in the body of the essay, especially given its peculiarly esoteric idiom. Similar to our conclusions, Deleuze figures the dispositif as a "multilinear ensemble" of "off-balance" vectors subject to ‘drift.' The process of subjectification is one such vector that produces subjects through the dispositif. "The production of subjectivities escapes from the powers and forms of knowledge of one dispositif in order to be reinserted in another, in forms that are yet to come into being" (p.162). Each dispositif is a multiplicity through which "processes still in formation" are articulated. Finally, in each dispositif, "it is necessary to distinguish what we are, what we are no longer, and what we are in the process of becoming." Again, this deviates little from our understanding of the dispositif in Foucault and Agamben. 9 function."46 No one element within this ensemble is the locus of assembly for the dispositif. It can only be relationally and functionally identified and continuously substitutes elements within itself to continue to perform a specific social function.

The dispositif, as a transmutable and flexible articulation of the process of subjection, works but does not always work well. Whether it is the disorder of power or capital, the large-scale process it articulates always tends to reproduce its subject. Dispositifs subjectify and desubjectify at the same time, produce elements of their negation, then organizing the conquest of the negative as a frontier. The dispositif is thus an instrument of capture that is never in identity with the constellation of social elements it mobilizes towards a particular order.47 It stabilizes processes intrinsically self-referential and disruptive—processes such as wars on crime/terror, or even urban planning, state-formation, and nation-building.

The coup of the concept in Foucault's work is that it gives the appearance of order to processes inherently ambiguous and incoherent. The relations between elements internal to the dispositif may lie in latent antagonism with each other (such as law and outlaw). They may either be nullified or mobilized towards the functional directive of the dispositif. Tensions between internal elements need not be elided as dispositifs work through tensions, contradictions, and antagonisms.

Furthermore, in time, we may find that elements constitutive of the dispositif have changed. Groups, practices, discourses may have dropped out of the dispositif without altering its total function. Thus, unlike the rigidity evoked by the term "apparatus" as a structured arrangement, the dispositif on aggregate, need not achieve structural coherence across time.

Finally, we may define the dispositif's conceptual boundaries to give it analytical sharpness. The dispositif, despite its fluidity, is not just anything and everything, despite Foucault's clumsy attempt at a definition. For our purposes, the total strategic function that the dispositif performs at any given time is inextricable from the history of the population under subjection, from the history of the social elements that constitute the dispositif, and their mutual relationship. It has a total direction, which in our case, is the reproduction of order in Lyari. This functional directionality distinguishes the dispositif from the kin-concept of the assemblage.48

While Foucault hints at the temporal limits of the strategic function of the dispositif, these issues of temporality are often erased when these frames are applied to anthropological problems.49 However, the considerations of time, i.e., how elements of the dispositif cohere in the process of reproduction only for a finite amount of time is central to the way we read the dispositif. The dispositif effects political subjection and desubjectivation through the same ensembles at different times.50 This temporal malleability of the dispositif is briefly referenced in Tania Li's Will to Improve (2007), wherein it is likened to a "heterogeneous assemblage" that "combines forms of practical knowledge with modes of perception," and discursive

46 Agamben, G. (2009). " What is an apparatus?" and other essays, Stanford University Press. 47 I persist with the term dispositif because the English language ‘apparatus' implies much more coherence to the dispositif as an ensemble than it ever achieves. 48 The assemblage appears to mimic the schizophrenia and disorder of capital at all scales, while the dispositif tends towards reproducing the relations of production in the context of these schizophrenic forces. See McFarlane, C. (2009). "Translocal assemblages: space, power, and social movements." Geoforum 40(4): 561-567. Simone, A. (2004). For the city yet to come: Changing African life in four cities, Duke University Press. Collier, S. J., and A. Ong (2005). "Global assemblages, anthropological problems." Global assemblages: Technology, politics, and ethics as anthropological problems: 3-21. 49 see Dean, M. (1996). Foucault, government, and the enfolding of authority. Foucault and political reason: Liberalism, neoliberalism, and rationalities of government, 209-229. Hallward, P. (2006). Out of this world. Deleuze and the philosophy of creation. London & New York: Verso. 50 p 43. Agamben, G. (2009). " What is an apparatus?" and other essays, Stanford University Press. 10 instruments as well as social practices and capacities.51 Here, we apply the dispositif to the problem of non- state violence as a temporally sensitive and processual mode of organizing political subjection.

In summary, the concept dispositif refers to the relations and sets of relations between an ensemble of heterogeneous elements that come together for a limited time and performs a strategic function in the process of reproduction of order. It allows for the permutations of relations between elements to shift, but only per conditional probabilities determined by the history of relations between the elements.

I argue that in early 21st-century Lyari, the policing of social boundaries was being performed by its "criminal" gangs. The discourse of fear consolidated their role within the larger dispositif as a technology of social control. This discourse masked the crucial relationship between gangs of Lyari and the political elite of Karachi. The gang as a part of the dispositif reproduced social order by wielding hyper-visible violence, and the perpetuation of fear. It performed the task of policing different arenas and scales of social life, by periodically adding to the discourse of fear through tableaus of violence. The gangs, for a time, were a significant but never sole agents of the order in the dispositif policing Lyari.

How does the gang become a central component of the dispositif in Lyari? What is the relationship between this "gang" and the history of criminal gangs operating in Lyari? For that, we need to understand the social relations that underpin the social order in Lyari.52 Enforcing an order that is inherently disordering and intolerably destructive, requires everyday life to appear chaotic, disorderly, and violent. And then to ‘order' it. It also eliminates forces, figures, and formations that have an interest in upending this inherently unequal and schizophrenic ‘order.' The face of order in Karachi required defacing Lyari as a gangland.

Akram, Gangster Rule in Lyari

Akram bhai wears many hats. He is a "violent entrepreneur," a gangster, a party worker for a major political party, and a community leader in the small corner of Lyari, where he was born and raised. He begins his story where his family did: in Rajasthan, India, only to be forced to migrate to Karachi at the time of the partition of British India in 1947. Penniless, with no hope of support, they founded a refugee settlement atop old cremation grounds in a remote corner of Lyari.

Akram lays out the struggles of his forefathers in great detail. His narrative appears well-rehearsed, unfolding through oft-told stories. It was violence—a blood vendetta his grandfather became embroiled in— and decidedly not nationalist zeal to belong to the state of Islam, that drove his grandfather to Pakistan. Nevertheless, the myth of his ancestor's violence followed his people when they arrived in Karachi and tried to settle in Lyari. "Tribalistic" Afro-Baloch "ruffians," as his telling of this story goes, harassed and marauded their little encampment in the forgotten margins of Lyari. His grandfather's people were desolate and helpless, and it was only the martial disposition of Akram's forebear that saw them fight off their adversaries and establish themselves in this "dark" corner of the city where the writ of the Pakistani state never quite reached fully. Murder chased them from India, murder established them in Lyari. Akram's fate as a man of violence was written into his blood as history.

The first few times I met Akram, he recounted these stories to me near verbatim. The preamble would follow allusions his dark exploits. He had been the target of police raids since thirteen. When the police raided the neighborhood, his gang and he would hide in the neighborhood mosques and amidst the graveyards. He boasted of possessing an armory of sophisticated weapons stashed away at strategic locations through the neighborhood and buried in the graveyard across the highway. He is a vocal

51 p.6 Li, T. M. (2007). The will to improve: Governmentality, development, and the practice of politics. Duke University Press. 52 Gayer, L. (2014). Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City, Oxford University Press. 11 cheerleader of his libidinal prowess, yet he is vague and elusive regarding details of his violent exploits. He says he is a ‘doer, not a talker.' Once you get to know his loquaciously usually affable self, though, you begin to wonder.

In the light of day, Akram is a man well regarded in his neighborhood. When he rolls about on his bike, people do not scurry away in fear. They flock up to him, inquiring on favors he had promised them. Belying the reputation, he tries to cultivate for himself. There is no sign of that persistent fear and trepidation that the infamous Lyari gangster is supposed to inspire. Reflecting on the role he plays in the community, Akram fronts both as a strongman capable of ill deeds and a servant of "his people." The gangster was not a figure of antisociality but an integral component of the social order in Lyari.

Akram and his ‘gang' were primary conduits of access to essential civic services for the residents of the neighborhood. In delivering these services, the gang complemented the state. Akram's primary quotidian preoccupation was to arrange, produce, and procure different kinds of documentation for the residents of the neighborhood. Such documents included birth certificates, death certificates, marriage licenses, ration cards, ID cards, documentation relating to leasing agreements, and affidavits of myriad kinds. Akram was the gateway that bypassed the dysfunctional and contradictory world of governmental bureaucracies.

Akram's gang mostly hung out at a community center nestled at the ground floor of a multistoried residential building indistinguishable from others that surrounded it. These were the unimaginative productions of the ‘builder mafia' that acquires narrow patches of land at rock bottom prices in his neighborhood and erects small unit apartment buildings in its place, making millions in the bargain — the profits funded other such acquisitions in other parts of the city, constructing the trickle-up economic ladder. However, the community center opened onto a small park, lush with green grass and flowering trees. Akram was a principal broker in the ‘acquisitions' phase of the builder mafia's operation. In turn, he would also be allowed to negotiate discounts on rent for some residents of the neighborhood; and was able to preserve the small park for the community's enjoyment. Akram was a key broker of access to stable, affordable housing in the neighborhood.

When I had first stumbled into this part of Lyari, Akram was introduced to me as a ‘community leader' and a ‘party worker' for a major political party in Karachi. We usually met at the community center. Our mutual liaison was a WHO employed health-worker working on a vaccination campaign in Lyari. According to our friend, Akram and his posse had been immeasurably helpful in implementing the polio eradication campaign. Many times, I found Akram himself substituting as a polio vaccinator. Akram was involved in multiple aspects of many public health campaigns in the neighborhood. In these campaigns, he would work with government healthcare employees, state security personnel, and residents. Akram was a part of the local healthcare infrastructure.

Usually, such ventures brought together a medley of police officers, gangsters, doctors, teachers, residents, local politicians, and folk representing influential international NGOs. Often these characters would be found devouring plates of deliciously spicy biryani. Outlaws and lawmen, health-givers and killers, people ostensibly on opposite sides of violent ‘ethnic' or ‘sectarian' strife could be found engrossed in joking, flirtations, maybe even relations of friendships and respect in Lyari. Grumbling and complaints also erupted, but only because large-scale projects are never smooth on the ground. These snapshots of everyday life echo across my field-notes and interview recordings, ridiculing normative frameworks that reduce the problem of Lyari to criminality, or ethnic strife. The productive relations that maintain order despite the chaos of capital and political subjection pays no heed to discursive games of cops and robbers.

Akram's posse and its involvement in such large-scale order-making processes make it typical, rather than exceptional, amongst the gangs of Lyari. During the gang ascendancy, there was no grand contradiction between law and outlaw, state, society, and those marked as ‘anti-social' elements. Nor was there a grand 12 conspiracy of clandestine ‘state-sponsored' extralegal violent actors. It was all rather mundane, carried out in the open, and permeating the fields of healthcare, housing, sports, and even access to government-issued documents. The gangs were each performing multiple different functions in the many processes essential to everyday life in the city. That they performed these functions was what set Lyari apart.

All these biryani-philiacs, state, privately employed and outlaw, had an interest in maintaining the idea of Lyari as a violent gangland. This story was neither the first and nor the only one Akram tells about the gang war or himself. My interviews with the local paramilitary Rangers and the police also yielded a version of the same normalizing discourse, just from the perspective of ‘law enforcement.' Law enforcement and gangsters co-constructed the same discursive social boundaries, positioning themselves on either side of this boundary; and then stubbornly collaborating in policing it. These collaborations stabilized daily life in Lyari and perpetuated the political subjection of her famously free-spirited and politically progressive residents.

Lyari is considered an economically and politically marginal enclave in the heart of the city, which happens to be the most productive boundary that this ensemble of putative adversaries’ police as a dispositif. Contrary to its characterization as the ‘margin,' millions of dollars' flow in and out of Lyari's historic wholesale markets, through the bank accounts of the myriad NGOs and entrepreneurs who have made Lyari their pet project and cash cow. Additionally, millions of dollars flow through development funds earmarked for ‘backward' Lyari by the federal and provincial governments. It is an unimaginative science that forgets the relational nature of capital, which is only realized in a continuous process of circulation and exchange. That capital does not stick around in Lyari does not make it an insignificant channel of capital flow through the city. In fact, the channels of capital, ideas, desires and inevitably peoples, flow through Lyari into the world, surprising those who buy the marginality narrative that Lyari has been for centuries plugged into the Indian Ocean world of exchange through ties of trade and kinship that transcend place-specific markers of class, ethnic-racial grouping, and gender. Everything changes when one crosses the seas, and the gangster of Lyari may (and does, as I have shown elsewhere) become a policeman in Bahrain, quelling the Arab Spring in that country, on the side of the law, in the name of order.

Often, in states of inebriation, Akram would say that Karachi is a city of riches, subject to plunder by the city's political and economic elite, for whom Lyari is a frontier to be tamed. Lyari's adjacency to the docks, its proximity to the financial district in the city center, and the revenues in protection-money from its historic markets ensure that Lyari is central to processes of political contestation in the city. Akram asserts that there is money to be made, but he is not greedy. He knows his limits, knows that he is a pawn, and, in the scheme of things, he is okay with that.

A Brief History of Dispositifs in Lyari

Lyari is the historic home of Karachi's working-classes. When Karachi was a small fortified trading outpost in the 18th century, Lyari was settled in the shadows of the town's ramparts, outside the walls by laborers and fisherfolk and sailors that contributed to the city's growth. People came to it from Western Balochistan (Iran), from across the Makran coast, from the sea-king communities of the Mohana Sindhis, from Kutch, Maharashtra, and Gujarat, all stripes of Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Jain, and Dalit.53 For centuries, Lyari remained a warehouse of cheap migrant labor that fed industry and trade in Karachi. Nevertheless, brokers and jobbers who plied kin and tribal relations mediated access to this labor pool, ensuring the availability of the labor would see to the city's growth and prosperity.

53 Hasan, A., Younus, M., & Zaidi, S. A. (2002). Understanding Karachi: planning and reform for the future. City Press; Khuhro, H., & Mooraj, A. (2010). Karachi: megacity of our times. Oxford University Press. 13

The partition of British India changed everything. Karachi saw a 300% increase in population as refugees from India poured into the nascent nation-state of Pakistan's new capital city. The refugees, Muhajirs, brought with them cultural capital and skills-sets that the new political-economy found both desirable and in abundance, especially relative to the humble denizens in Lyari.54 The Muhajir worker displaced the old blue-collar working class from Lyari.

Not only did the people of Lyari find themselves on the lowest rung of an entirely new social ladder, they often found themselves contrapose to the two main aims of the economic and political forces in the young country. Firstly, the elite aimed at promulgating a growing capitalist economy by setting up a robust industrial sector that drew on the ample availability of labor that mostly centered around Karachi. The people of Lyari constituting a significant pool of the city's blue-collar workers may be deemed "growth- retardant" in their level of organization and cohesion as workers. Secondly, the elite aimed at establishing the sovereignty of Pakistan's ruling classes over territories forced into the union in one way or another. The resistance of the Baloch peoples of Kalat to annexation also rendered the role of Lyari's vast Baloch population into question.55

Demographic and sociological shifts nullified jobbers and community elders who had mediated between the city's mostly Hindu elite and working peoples of Lyari through personal patronage networks as the new Gujarati Muslim mercantile families replaced the city's Hindu capitalists.56 In the ensuing decades, a further influx of migrant labor from the north further decentered Lyari's working classes. Many found themselves the target of retrenchments. The fall of the old brokers fueled the emergence of a class of leftists and Baloch nationalists who sought to resist the ruthlessness of Lyari's workers by the economic and political elite. They would in time take up the role of trade unionists and community organizers and emerge as the new political mediators and regulators in Lyari.57

Lyari was the birthplace of Baloch nationalism in the 1930-40s, activities that intensified as Pakistan occupied Kalat and Makran, i.e., most of contemporary Balochistan, in the 1950s.58 Lyari's people, having ties of kinship, trade, and sympathy with the Baloch in Balochistan, became guilty by association and first targets of government sanction. Progressive and populist student institutions (e.g., NSF, DSF, BSO), as well as left-leaning political parties (i.e., NAP, PPP), found a ready support base amongst the embattled residents of Lyari.59

In sum, material circumstances had bestowed Lyari with a history of organizing around symbols and issues that threatened the dominant order. They had to be eliminated or at least policed, controlled how. Ayub Khan's military dictatorship throughout the 1960s, for instance, found that punitive measures against the people of Lyari, its underdevelopment, the lack of investment in its infrastructure, the withholding of land leases, and its people's ouster from government jobs only fueled its people's recalcitrance to power. Savvy to the machinations of the elite, these mechanisms of control had to articulate the process of governance,

54 Gazdar, H. and H. B. Mallah (2013). "Informality and political violence in Karachi." Urban Studies 50(15): 3099- 3115. This and a treasure-trove of excellent sociological reports from the research collective where these two authors have collaborated. 55 See also Suhail, A. and A. Lutfi (2016). "Our City, Your Crisis: The Baloch of Karachi and the Partition of British India." South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies: 1-17. 56 Shaheed, Z. (1977). "The organization and leadership of industrial labor in Pakistan (Karachi)." Unpublished Ph. D. dissertation, Department of Politics, University of Leeds. 57 Alavi, H. (1972). "The state in post-colonial societies, Pakistan and Bangladesh." New Left Review (74): 59. 58 Bizenjo, G. (2009). "In Search of Solutions: The Autobiography of Mir Ghaus Bakhsh Bizenjo." Edited by BM Kutty. Karachi: Pakistan Labor Trust and University of Karachi's (KU) Pakistan Study Centre. 59 Baloch, R. (2014). Lyari Ki Adhuri Kahani. And its follow-up Baloch, R. (2017). Lyari Ki Ankahi Kahani. 14 while appearing to be organically linked to the constellation of social formations internal to Lyari. A dispositif needed assembly.

At this time, a class of community leaders, political activists, trade unionists and labor organizers broadly affiliated with the communist and socialist left and Baloch nationalism. We marked above the circumstances under which this class of leftists came to be a force in Lyari. This class achieved its prominent place in the dispositif by playing a crucial role in precipitating the ouster of a decade of the military dictatorship. Populist and leftist activists, lawyers, literati, and labor leaders led the movement for the restoration of democracy. Lyari was invariably the hub of their organizing activities.

After the humiliation of the Pakistani military and the birth of Bangladesh in 1971, Pakistan thus saw to power its first democratically elected parliamentary government. The "leftists" in Lyari were broadly aligned with this new parliamentary order, i.e., they articulated the power of elite parliamentarians in Lyari. Kamran Asdar Ali's account of the Karachi labor riots of 1972 describes this well.60The account captures a tenuous moment when regardless of worker militancy and organization, the labor leaders were less interested in organized political action for worker rights and more so in establishing themselves as a mediatory class between the state and the ‘street.' It was their bid to retain their position within the dispositif as articulators of governance over the workers. The story of the strikes is a violent dance of claims-making as the parliamentary government shed all pretenses of allegiance to the working masses and established labor unions as policing mechanisms that ensured ‘order' amongst the working classes. This dispositif, however, decidedly articulated parliamentarian rule as opposed to the praetorian rule of the Pakistani military junta and thus made a crucial and partisan distinction between the two large formations within the ruling elite of the country.

At this same transitional conjuncture, another significant relationship was emerging: one between the city's economic elite and a cast of unsavory characters from Lyari. These characters were involved in petty criminal enterprises and would act as violent enforcers, and strongmen on behalf of the city's tiny mercantile and industrial elite class. As mentioned before, this economic elite constituted the backbone of young Pakistan's meager economy. They kept close ties with the country's military-bureaucratic rulers while retaining some relations of patronage within the working peoples of Karachi, whom they employed in their ever-growing industrial empires.

Many of them also maintained a sizable philanthropic footprint in working-class neighborhoods such as Lyari. They founded schools, hospitals, universities, and mosques in Lyari. However, they also cultivated an ongoing relationship with the unsavory elements which could be used to strong-arm workers, influence elections, provide security, enable access to illicit goods and services, amongst other petty uses. This underclass would, over the next three decades, bloom into the behemoth that would be the Lyari gangs.

Gangs, labor leaders, and trade unionists of the time were part of policing mechanisms that kept the power accrued by the working classes in the 1960s in check. They produced a balance between labor and capital, and between political dissidence amongst the working classes and elite interests, be they parliamentarian or praetorian. This dispositif ensured a dynamic stasis in the 1970s and established a lasting footprint in Lyari's working-class communities.

This stasis relied on a mediatory role played by leftist worker representatives and Baloch nationalists whose putatively adversarial and militant stance against the ‘state' and the economic elite in the city, masked the

60 Ali, K. A. (2005). "The strength of the street meets the strength of the state: The 1972 labor struggle in Karachi." International journal of middle east studies 37(01): 83-107.

15 functional coherence of the dispositif that worked to consolidate two large-scale processes of government. Firstly, it implemented the rule of the parliamentary order through appeals to democratic control over means of production. Secondly, it abetted the extraction of labor-power by regulating militant tendencies amongst workers through the dialectic of compromise and conflict. Another ancillary mechanism of pacification, at this time, was the exportation of blue-collar labor from Karachi to the emerging oil economies of the middle east.

To understand the historical relationship between the political and economic elite and their proxies in Lyari is to realize how seemingly antagonistic social formations—industrialists who were the backbone of Pakistan's formal economy and violent entrepreneurs who dabbled in smuggling, bootlegging and strong- arming—were productive of a specific form of order necessary for ordering Karachi. This ordering, for the most part, abetted the reproduction of the status quo every time the larger antagonism between labor and capital, or between the people and the dominant classes, appeared to get out of hand, especially in the diverse and volatile zones such as Lyari. The gangster and the mercantile families came together to regulate the boundaries that distinguished the social and material domains of dominators and the dominated. However, the primary political cleavage in Lyari was not that of ethnicity, but class and the role of the ‘gangs' in the policing dispositif was minimal as compared to community leaders and labor organizers.

Drastic events in the ensuing decades would change this dynamic. Firstly, the 1972 parliamentary government also saw an overtly Baloch-oriented, and socialist government claim power in Balochistan. A mass exodus of Baloch progressive, leftist, and nationalist intelligentsia and leadership took place, leaving Karachi for Quetta. The dismissal of this provincial government led to a movement for Baloch rights, both non-violent and violent, that remained centered in Balochistan. Never again would Lyari be the heart of Baloch movements again. Secondly, in 1977, General Zia ul-Haq overthrew the populist and nominally leftist government of Prime Minister Bhutto, hanged him, and began a decade of tyrannical rule that would change Pakistan forever.

The Zia dictatorship saw to the Islamization of Pakistan as Pakistan got embroiled in abetting America's violent interventionism in Afghanistan. Attendant to this project was the dismantling of the socialist and communist left in Pakistan A systematic program of murder, disappearance, military operations, repression of free speech, oppressive legislation, biased constitutional amendments, and a plethora of other instruments were wielded by the Zia government to completely cripple whatever semblance of leftism, or even a nominal recourse to democratic principles that were on the ascendant during the 1970s in Pakistan.

In Karachi, the systematic culling of progressive groups gave way to the language of ethnocentrism and sectarian politics, and the introduction of neoliberal economic regimes. Furthermore, the war in Afghanistan precipitated in the flooding of Karachi's streets with a cheap and inexhaustible supply of arms and weapons. Thus, across the 1980s, as the old labor and community leaders disappeared, criminal outfits, and gangs came to the fore. These gangs already had a history of collaboration with the economic elite in the city that saw no qualms in working with the military regime in ensuring the onset of neoliberalist policies in the city.

Indeed, the rise of similar formations in this period has been widely documented in other parts of the world.61 Mark that the relationship between the political and economic elite and outlaw elements was not new and 'gangs' had been used as instruments of social control all over the world; but it appeared as such in every instance when they emerged as a primary instrument of policing and social control because while effective, they bore no legitimacy at scales other than where their power of coercion was maximal. Moreover, as instruments of social control, the gangs were in a relation of co-dependence with the economic and political elite to varying degrees. Rather than destabilizing 'a peaceful order of governance,' the gangs

61 Hansen, T. B. (1999). The saffron wave: Democracy and Hindu nationalism in modern India. Princeton University Press. 16 established an element of putative 'chaos' that allowed for the speculative and extractive dimensions of capital and the impetus of power to entrench itself. The gangsters and the government conspired a new settlement. A new dispositif was recapitulated.

This brief genealogy of changing relations from which the gangs emerged showcases their induction into the dispositif that polices Lyari. I place gang violence in Lyari in a perspective where putatively adversarial forces coalesce to reproduce Lyari as a violent gangland. The gangs are embedded in social relations and discourses that resist easy classification because they are infrastructural to the establishment of order in Lyari preferable to the political elite of the city. We identified some of those relations to find the gang a "morbid symptom" of the dominant order as it manifested in Lyari, a vital member of the governing dispositif.

The ascension of the gangs of Lyari as a mature class of power brokers capable of participating in a dispositif coincides with Pakistan's third spell of military dictatorship beginning in the late 1990s. There is a moment early in the Musharraf military regime when economic and political classes in the city were still adjusting to the re-imposition of the military's diktat as order. Technologies of social policing ushered in by the war on terror within Pakistan were decisive in achieving a political settlement between the city's elite and the military junta. The army's takeover of crucial institutions, the increasing physical presence of security agencies in the broader arena of life accompanied the proliferation of fear through various and unpredictable acts of hyper-visible violence. Karachi re-emerged as a theater for a militant politics conveniently painted in hues of criminal, ethnic, political, sectarian, Islamist or separatist violence wherever necessary.

In Lyari, the gangs, like other groups, vied for a place in the new, violent order. Where Pakistan was curated as a fractured and disordered zone in need of a strong ordering force, Lyari's history of working-class activism, secular politics, history of agitation, political affiliation with the in-exile PPP, and years of suffering resource-deprivation did not lend itself to the kinds of dispositifs, such as the emergence of the Islamist right, deployed elsewhere in the country. For Lyari, what worked was the idea of a criminal gangland hailing in and legitimizing the forces that could (eventually) offer the securitization of life in the city.

If we broaden the social function of policing and conceive it as being enacted through an ensemble of institutions, attitudes, locations, persons and knowledges i.e. a dispositif, the gang emerged in this context as an critical component of the dispositif, formally in an antagonistic relationship with the security regimes but embedded in the reproduction of the new political settlement. In its role, the gang was able to root out, or co-opt, the remnants of the old left, the socialists, the Baloch nationalists, union organizers, rights activists, and community leaders.

The policing function transcended the State-Society dialectic, serving as an essential subroutine in the process of reproduction of rule. The alibi for this function is the need to debug the pathology of social criminality and to not only render impossible the elimination of the exceptional pathology of the gang war. For this, it needs to invent or accumulate a history for the pathology and generate a genealogy for the afflicted social body extended back in time to a point when it was ‘healthy.' Knowledge disseminates in publications like Jaanbaaz but was produced in other arenas that claimed that there was always a gang in Lyari. History became theater as the contemporary gang was erroneously cast as an intensification of the colonial bandit.

A history of criminality in Lyari, when written as the history of Lyari, supports of statist violence. This history stretches from the colonial bandit to the colorful gangsters, strongmen, and smugglers from the 1960s, and finally to infamous contemporary gang-lords. That prior generations of gangsters were kin related to the present-day gangsters does not mean they served the same social function across the decades. 17

Their role in the dispositif policing Lyari both stemmed from historical relations but was also wholly unprecedented and of its time.

We met Akram, a ‘gangster' who cavorts with the formal agents of order and abets the maintenance of that order in his part of Lyari. During the gang ascendancy, it was not the gang that was the target of the dispositif. The gang performed the function of social policing in Lyari, often by deploying murderous violence to uphold an unequal order. However, if this infamously violent gang was regulating order, then who was the agent of disorder? Young Robin Sharif was an agent of disorder, and he took a bullet in the head to prove it.

Robin, An Agent of Disorder

Robin's political activism with opposition to the gangs of Lyari. He was a proud student of Lyari's venerated communist and Baloch nationalist political leader, Lala Lal Bakhsh Rind. The Lala had been a beacon for progressive youth in Lyari all his life, famously coming out to protest Zia-ul-Haq's dictatorship after a stroke had confined his mobility. For decades he hosted a Marxist study circle at his modest home in Chakiwara that was known as the Leningrad Circle. Robin was amongst the last cohorts of the Circle. A precocious young man, he carried his political education in left activism to college as a student activist.

The years of his political maturation in the mid-1990s was a time of transitions. For decades, community leaders affiliated with the National Awami Party and the Pakistan People's Party, and later the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy, had been the locus of political activity and avenues of access to resources in Lyari. By the end of the 1980s, the army had eradicated the most politically progressive elements within this class. The structural re-adjustment of economic life and new political settlements devalued and deskilled labor. The days when trade-unionists and left activists could elicit significant concessions from the ruling classes were gone.

Nevertheless, the memory of their exploits continued to inspire the youth in Lyari. This youth came from Lyari's famous "street schools." The schools were established on the principle of "each according to their ability to each according to their need." In the context of drastic disinvestment in public education, young men would give away their evenings and knowledge freely to those less fortunate than them in the neighborhood. Robin was a kindred spirit and spent his time in the street schools, but also felt an even higher calling was his.

Robin hailed from the Christian minority community settled in the Musa Lane neighborhood of Lyari. In a context of increasing politicization of Islam, which included a de jure censure on the sale of alcohol from/by Muslims, alcohol vendors and bootleggers sprang up in ‘Christian' neighborhoods all over Karachi. However, many members of the Christian minority community in Musa Lane resented the ready association between their community and neighborhoods and the peddling of social vice, especially when all of their customers were affluent Muslims. The city's elite frequented Musa Lane, where old smuggling networks made foreign brands available.

In Musa Lane, the distribution of alcohol through a legitimate vendor or theka was managed by the gangs.62 Clients looking to make a purchase formed a hoard of cars along the main street nightly, as teenagers from the neighborhood became runners for the clientele for meager tips. Robin saw this as the slow but sure encroachment over the neighborhood by the gangs and their dark economy of illicit substances. Before that, the gangs had mostly kept their operations separate from the domains of everyday life in Lyari. Nevertheless, he recalls, even then, this appeared to him and his comrades a harbinger of the carnage of

62 As a matter of law, buying or selling alcohol is legally prohibited to/for Muslims, but non-Muslim minorities can obtain sales licenses. As a practice, it is widespread and lucrative. 18 days to come. Robin, along with a few like-minded comrades from the neighborhood, took up the cause and vowed to have the theka shut down.

Initially, they tried to reason with the illicit operators about the harmful effects their enterprise was having on the neighborhood in particular and the ‘community' in general. They began organizing the residents and conveyed their censure for the theka. They asked the operators, who were neighbors and kin, after all, to move their theka elsewhere. In answer, the ‘gangsters' of the time sent armed men to rough up Robin and his social crusaders. These armed men were not the infamously murderous ‘gangsters' or target killers but policemen who had a financial stake in the theka.

Robin surmises in retrospect that if the matter had been between the gang and themselves: it could have been resolved amicably. Many of the so-called gangsters had grown up with them, had been their childhood friends. On some level, the ‘gangsters' as much as himself, saw the community under threat of predatory forces emanating from the city in the form of corrupt government officials, prejudicial policing, and joblessness. However, the fact was that it was not a matter of ‘the gang' and the crusaders. A whole apparatus of social relations had a stake in the matter. The gang was just one part of a larger dispositif that had emerged in Lyari at the time.

The larger dispositif betrayed itself when, ultimately, it was neither the gang nor police that ended the crusade. The idealistic young men of Musa Lane had the moral support of elders like Lala Lal Bakhsh. Their agitation became bolder after the police encounter. They began making a commotion at peak ‘business' hours to drive wary customers away from the theka. These young Christian men recruited local imams to decry the theka from their pulpits. Ultimately, though, too many people of import had a stake in the liquor depot. It was discretely communicated to Robin's father, that the consequences for continued disruption of business might get dire. The warning, this time, had come neither from the gangsters nor the police. It came from influential community leaders in Musa Lane.

Robin and his comrades tried to persist, but the pressures from within his household began taking its toll. The police could be resisted as an external force, the gangs as a criminal one, but when leading members of the ‘community' itself have a stake in the illicit enterprise. How does one fight that? How does one identify the object of the struggle? In time, the whole family was forced to leave Lyari altogether. They were not driven out by the gangsters, nor by the police. An ensemble of social relations beyond the abstraction of state-society that maintained order in Lyari ejected them. The theka is still there to date.

In September 2002, at the offices of the Urdu-language publication Jafakash, eight members of the newspaper staff were held down and killed execution-style. Each of the victims was shot point-blank in the head. Jafakash was a progressive publication that focused on issues of labor and human rights issues that did not get covered in the mainstream media. It was affiliated with The Center for Peace and Justice, a platform that provided legal and political support to workers' rights and minority issues and had a broad and inclusive mandate despite being co-funded by the Protestant and Catholic Churches of Pakistan. Of the eight victims, one survived. That was Robin.

Years later, Robin does not speak much about that day. He writes some for the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, but his life of activism is behind him, and his family, for his safety, polices his involvement diligently. His partial disability and the concave hemisphere on his head are constant reminders of his loss. After his miraculous recovery, Robin was left partially disabled and in perpetual fear that someone might return to complete the job half-done. Robin works as a schoolteacher today, but a disquiet haunts him. He yearns to return to a life in accord with the ideals he still espouses and tries to instill in his students.

Another survivor of the Jafakash massacre was its only Muslim employee, its chief editor Lala Azad Baloch, another stalwart of the Leningrad Circle, who had given Robin his job as the librarian and columnist 19 for the publication. Azad, in his eighties now, is a sweet old man confined mainly to his bedroom, with a Mona Lisa painting at his bedside, a small library of Marxist literature and Urdu poetry, and a memories of life spent as a Balochi poet, a socialist political activist, a journalist, and a partisan of the Baloch people's struggle. He considers those who were killed that day as his students and comrades in the ‘fight against tyranny.' He repudiates the idea that his comrades at Jafakash were killed by ‘Islamists' for being Christian. The precision of the execution, the use of a gun silencer, the professionalism of their infiltration into the offices left little doubt that the establishment ordered the hit.

A few days before the massacre, a member of the security establishment had allegedly visited the Jafakash offices with ‘advice' for them to desist highlighting labor rights, coercive land annexations by the land mafia, and growing religious extremism and its support by the military government. These were the early days of the Musharraf dictatorship, and the young activist journalists were slow to realize the threat. The murders may have been retribution for their recalcitrance.

It is telling that Robin and his comrades had proven themselves to be a significant threat to the forces of order. By his mid-twenties, Robin was ejected from his childhood neighborhood, shot in the head, and harassed into silence. Robin, and people like Robin, possess a rare breed of courage activated by their material circumstances. Lyari produces many Robins, each one struggling to upend a crushing order that would see communities such as his represented as chaotic frontiers, waiting to be tamed by the very forces that destabilize them. It is ‘disorderly' elements like Robin that dispositifs serve to cull for order to prevail.

Conclusion: Power, Policing, Dispositifs

One scorching hot day during a polio vaccination campaign, I was stuck hunting for shade with Akram, who regularly moonlighted as a polio vaccinator for the World Health Organization funded vaccination campaign. The polio-eradication campaign objectives were that all children in the neighborhood be vaccinated every month. Instead of mechanisms of informed consent, it was only the charisma of Akram and a few other local personalities that kept the program running without too much protest from the campaign-fatigued residents. It would be nearly impossible for the vaccination campaign to be effective was it not for Akram's help.

Accompanying us was a rotund policeman who was grumpily broadcasting his melting. Some men from the neighborhood approached us. There had been a string of thefts in the area attempted by ethnically Kachhi heroin addicts from the adjoining neighborhood. The men wanted the ‘authorities' to do something about it. It suddenly dawned on me that they were appealing to Akram rather than the policeman.

The policeman confirmed this as he wiped his ample visage of accumulating sweat beads and raising an eyebrow in Akram's direction admitting, to my surprise, that handling the matter was up to on Akram (Jo karna hai inhi ne karna hai). When the plaintiffs protested further, he grew exasperated and said: "You see them next, take a gun, and two shots to the abdomen. Case closed. Do not worry about the rest; you kill the bastards and then call me. These Kachhi sister-fuckers need to be taught a real lesson."

Akram had had enough. In an impatient gesture, he emphatically dismissed the assembly. The men move on, the policeman shut up, and I was left furiously scribbling in my field notebook, dumbfounded at the blasé way in which the policeman had invited death onto these so-called Kachchi thieves with no heed paid to the lurking anthropologist or more consequential folk in the vicinity. Most disturbing was Akram's calm, and I wondered whether a "drastic" decision on the lives of the Kachhi miscreants had already been made. I shivered under the hot sun.

* * * 20

Many in Lyari initially saw the gangs as a curative to the fickle patronage of the political elite. If the ruling classes worked with the gangs to effect rule in Lyari, diverse groups in Lyari, even if they can no longer admit so, welcomed their mediation. The idea, as one community leader puts it, was to arrest the decades of ‘resource deprivation' imposed on Lyari by the political elite. They wanted to work out an alternate system monitored by "their own." They wanted to break the racist stereotype that made them living repositories of ‘old city' culture of bonhomie or, in other words, as passive witnesses to their own marginalization. The gangs seemed to offer the possibility of such an alternative.

In the past, dominant social formations brokered the reproduction of social boundaries but also won concessions and allowances that served, at least some, in the community. These were hard-won concessions for services rendered by the formations serving in the dispositif of the time, delivered in the form of votes, labor, and support for the ruling classes. They, in turn, got jobs, roads, electricity, post offices, sewerage, city water, healthcare, and such basic amenities. There was no reason to assume that the gangs would not deliver when put in a similar role.

Lyari had learned, through history, a healthy mistrust of those that spoke in the name of the state. They had learned on factory floors and in the streets. Lyari boasts of being the historic home of the city's working classes, of secular, leftist politics, of opposing military dictators, and of Baloch nationalism. Distrust of the ‘state' was bred in labor riots and strikes, in police encounters and ethno-racial profiling, in rampant corruption, and lack of political accountability. Distrust of power was Lyari's inheritance.

This distrust would be turned on its head by the gang. If Lyari's workers were unwelcome in the Muhajir and Pashtun dominated industrial labor scene, then the gang would channel labor into a burgeoning informal economy that transcended the licit/illicit divide. In the age of war on terror, the gang would build itself as Baloch, local, secular, outlaw, pro-development. It would seek to rebuild Lyari. The gang was able to dissociate itself from the state, which allowed it to articulate governmentality in Lyari. The gangs were involved in education, public health, poverty relief, the informal as well as the formal economy, dispute resolution, access to jobs, investments in sports, infrastructural development. They were working with NGOs and INGOs, supporting cottage industries in Lyari, and were instrumental in the running of Lyari Resource Centre (LRC).63

Alternatively, the gang was an ideal mechanism for making Lyari unlearn its distrust of power in the long run while policing it in short. Gangs could use coercive means to implement the diktats of power. The gang, as socially pathological criminals and agents of a violent disorder offered plausible deniability. Ultimately, the coercive arm of the economic and political elite, i.e., the army, could swoop in to eliminate their erstwhile partners, to establish the write of the legitimate and sovereign ‘state.' Robin's case illustrates how hollow this discourse was. Rather than getting mired in the temporal nature of the alliances and antagonisms through which power unfolds, we use the concept of the dispositif to represent how seemingly antagonistic forces come together to reproduce order.

The violent contests of the infamous gang war in Lyari were a prelude to the blood-soaked peacock strut of the military as it used the anti-crime military operations to establish itself in the city's streets permanently. The praetorian elite began eradicating their former partners in Lyari but did not stop there. They turned their attention on the city's parliamentarian elite next. It targeted, prosecuted, exiled, and disappeared the grassroots structure of the three main political parties in the city. The war on Lyari gangs in the south and the ‘war against the Taliban' in the north-west of Karachi was a classic pincer move that reproduced the city as a violent frontier, necessitating an acute need for military interventions.

63 Viqar, S. (2014). "Constructing Lyari: place, governance, and identity in a Karachi neighborhood." South Asian History and Culture 5(3): 365-383 21

Where once the gangs policed and culled elements like Robin, i.e. ‘problematic groups ad figures such as rights activists, Baloch nationalists, prominent members of rival parties and journalists, now the army was eradicating the gangs in the name of these very forces. The focus of policing became the distinction between law and outlaw. The gangland, so impenetrable and immutable for years, was dismantled overnight. A different agent of order, the paramilitary Ranger, recast as a specialist in urban policing, supplanted the gangs. The dispositif was recapitulated.