Paper short abstract:

The degraded inner-city of Lyari, in Karachi, has been the terrain of competitive patronage politics since the early 1970s. In recent years, local "bandits" have been taking the lead and successfully traded the status of criminal brokers for that of local political patrons, if not de facto sovereigns.

Paper long abstract:

Since the 1970s, the degraded innercity "slum" of Lyari is the stronghold of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) in Karachi. Over the years, the PPP increasingly relied upon local "bandits" (dacoits) to maintain its hold over the neighbourhood. In turn, these "bandits" used their political protections to secure their illicit activities (drug trafficking, extortion, kidnappings for ransom, land grabbing…). More recently, the second-generation of Lyari's dacoits, starting with Rehman "Dakait", made an attempt to join the political fray on their own terms, by capturing the local state that came out of the devolution plan of 2001. While Rehman was eliminated in a police encounter in 2009, his successor, Uzair Baloch, was more successful in his attempt to trade the status of criminal broker for that of local political patron. Baloch went even further by building upon state institutions and resources to counterfeit state sovereignty. This process was epitomized by the public execution of Uzair's main rival in March 2013, through which the dacoits made a claim to the ultimate attribute of sovereign power: the right to kill with impunity.

Building upon prolonged fieldwork in various localities of Lyari and interviews with local "dons", their lieutenants and relatives, this contribution will retrace the history of Lyari's politico-criminal configurations by locating them in the transformations of mobilisation and patronage networks in the neighbourhood and Karachi at large. It will then explore the dialectics of terror and generosity informing the PAC's political project for Lyari, as well as its negotiation by local residents.