Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates the deep reach of violence in the life of one man who became a political mercenary during conflicts involving Pakistan’s ethno-nationalist MQM party. It follows the certainty of early participation, to a crisis precipitated by targeted killings, to a stubborn foreclosure of feeling after violence, and queries implications for the ethnographic research encounter.

Paper long abstract:

In a single case study, this paper investigates the deep reach of violence in the life of one man, 'Arshad', who became a mercenary during the Karachi conflicts of the nineties involving Pakistan's ethno-nationalist Mohajir party, the MQM. It addresses the relative lack of attention to individual or affective aspects in the prevailing historical-political accounts. Individual subjectivity is proposed not in (causal) terms of a 'psychology', but an analytic space for tracing a movement through the 'macro' (politics, economy) to the 'micro' (locality, biography) to understand how a contradictory militarized field involving diverse actors produces violence.

Second, drawing on ethnographic interviews since 1994, the paper traces moments in Arshad's transformation from the high hopes and certainty of early participation in a militia group (1994), to a crisis of selfhood precipitated by targeted killings (2006), to the achievement of a more 'certain', stubborn foreclosure of feeling in the years following violence (2011). More precisely, this comprises a kind of spectrality (Agamben 2009), a deadening of the senses and the self, in the sense of something not yet reconstituted that prohibits feeling alive, whilst it is also generative in securing survival. Third, this persistent tension is refracted in the wider political controversies surrounding violence in Karachi in summer 2011, perceived as homologous with 'MQM' killings two decades previously in which Arshad participated.

Last, the paper forces difficult questions about Karachi politics —as well as about the feelings of antipathy, terror, and compassion that connect ethnographers to people they encounter in their research.