Laurent Gayer – författare

With an official population approaching fifteen million, Karachi is one of the largest cities in the world. It is also the most violent. Since the mid-1980s, it has endured endemic political conflict and criminal violence, which revolve around control of the city and its resources (votes, land and bhatta-"protection" money). These struggles for the city have become ethnicized. Karachi, often referred to as a "Pakistan in miniature," has become increasingly fragmented, socially as well as territorially.Despite this chronic state of urban political warfare, Karachi is the cornerstone of the economy of Pakistan. Gayer''s book is an attempt to elucidate this conundrum. Against journalistic accounts describing Karachi as chaotic and ungovernable, he argues that there is indeed order of a kind in the city''s permanent civil war. Far from being entropic, Karachi''s polity is predicated upon organisational, interpretative and pragmatic routines that have made violence "manageable" for its populations. Whether such "ordered disorder" is viable in the long term remains to be seen, but for now Karachi works despite-and sometimes through-violence.

A magisterial comparative study, Proud to Punish recenters our understanding of modern punishment through a sweeping analysis of the global phenomenon of "rough justice": the use of force to settle accounts and enforce legal and moral norms outside the formal framework of the law. While taking many forms, including vigilantism, lynch mobs, people's courts, and death squads, all seekers of rough justice thrive on the deliberate blurring of lines between law enforcers and troublemakers. Digital networks have provided a profitable arena for vigilantes, who use social media to build a following and publicize their work, as they debase the bodies of the accused for purposes of edification and entertainment. It is this unabashed pride to punish, and the new punitive celebrations that actualize, publicize, and commercialize it, that this book brings into focus. Recounted in lively prose, Proud to Punish is both a global map of rough justice today and an insight into the deeper nature of punishment as a social and political phenomenon.

A magisterial comparative study, Proud to Punish recenters our understanding of modern punishment through a sweeping analysis of the global phenomenon of "rough justice": the use of force to settle accounts and enforce legal and moral norms outside the formal framework of the law. While taking many forms, including vigilantism, lynch mobs, people's courts, and death squads, all seekers of rough justice thrive on the deliberate blurring of lines between law enforcers and troublemakers. Digital networks have provided a profitable arena for vigilantes, who use social media to build a following and publicize their work, as they debase the bodies of the accused for purposes of edification and entertainment. It is this unabashed pride to punish, and the new punitive celebrations that actualize, publicize, and commercialize it, that this book brings into focus. Recounted in lively prose, Proud to Punish is both a global map of rough justice today and an insight into the deeper nature of punishment as a social and political phenomenon.

A magisterial comparative study, Proud to Punish recenters our understanding of modern punishment through a sweeping analysis of the global phenomenon of "rough justice": the use of force to settle accounts and enforce legal and moral norms outside the formal framework of the law. While taking many forms, including vigilantism, lynch mobs, people's courts, and death squads, all seekers of rough justice thrive on the deliberate blurring of lines between law enforcers and troublemakers. Digital networks have provided a profitable arena for vigilantes, who use social media to build a following and publicize their work, as they debase the bodies of the accused for purposes of edification and entertainment. It is this unabashed pride to punish, and the new punitive celebrations that actualize, publicize, and commercialize it, that this book brings into focus. Recounted in lively prose, Proud to Punish is both a global map of rough justice today and an insight into the deeper nature of punishment as a social and political phenomenon.

Across the world, religious and cultural identities are being weaponised for political gains. South Asia is no exception, with frequent conflicts between faith communities strengthening politico-religious organisations, and severely straining social cohesion. Yet this region also has a history of religious intermingling, exemplified by shared sacred sites such as saints' tombs, temples, churches, and natural elements serving as places of worship.Such 'sites in common' offer rich insights into the dynamics of religious interaction. This book investigates them through two key questions. First, it examines what shared places of worship can reveal about plural societies in the midst of persistent religious and ethnic nationalism. Are they exceptional? Do they reflect or transcend socio-religious fault lines? The authors approach coexistence as a tensile equilibrium, in which conflict is no stranger to sharing: South Asia's shared sacred sites are seen as social laboratories, where communities experiment with pluralism and its challenges. Second, the contributors consider the politics of belonging, questioning the boundaries between groups and religions. They examine the logics at work in people's visits to places outside their own religious affiliation, challenging theoretical frameworks of religious demarcation and showing the importance of other markers, such as caste, class, language and gender.

Across the world, religious and cultural identities are being weaponised for political gains. South Asia is no exception, with frequent conflicts between faith communities strengthening politico-religious organisations, and severely straining social cohesion. Yet this region also has a history of religious intermingling, exemplified by shared sacred sites such as saints tombs, temples, churches, and natural elements serving as places of worship.Such sites in common offer rich insights into the dynamics of religious interaction. This book investigates them through two key questions. First, it examines what shared places of worship can reveal about plural societies in the midst of persistent religious and ethnic nationalism. Are they exceptional? Do they reflect or transcend socio-religious fault lines? The authors approach coexistence as a tensile equilibrium, in which conflict is no stranger to sharing: South Asias shared sacred sites are seen as social laboratories, where communities experiment with pluralism and its challenges. Second, the contributors consider the politics of belonging, questioning the boundaries between groups and religions. They examine the logics at work in peoples visits to places outside their own religious affiliation, challenging theoretical frameworks of religious demarcation and showing the importance of other markers, such as caste, class, language and gender.

There seems to be no end to the growing number of victims of civil war, terrorism, guerrilla warfare and military repression on the Indian subcontinent, despite the absence of interstate wars over the past ten years. These conflicts often involve armed paramilitary militias or insurgents of one sort or other, and it is their ideology, sociology and strategies that the contributors to this book investigate. Whether based on ideological motives - such as the Maoists and Naxalites in Nepal and India - or invested with a fundamentalist religious mission - the Hindu nationalist Bajrang Dal in India, the Sunni SSP in Pakistan, or Islamist militias in Bangladesh-all these movements use violence to exercise social control, challenge the authority of the state and impose their own particular worldview.Although they seek also to undermine the state, depriving it of the monopoly on legitimate violence that it supposedly holds, governments are equally adept at exploiting them to make them serve their own ends. For the authorities, these movements can be useful tools for their pursuit of both moral and social order.However delegating power to such groups for short term political gains can be an extremely risky enterprise, as demonstrated by Indira Gadhi's patronage of the Sikh militant group that later assassinated her. "Armed Militas of South Asia" is the first comprehensive book of its sort and will be required reading for all those interested in the politics of the subcontinent and Myanmar.

On 11 September 2012, over 250 workers of Ali Enterprises, which produced jeans for the German discount retailer KiK, perished in a fire in their Karachi factory. Was this an accident or an arson attack? Straight away, the tragedy gave rise to contradictory interpretations. While some blamed the exploitative logics of fast fashion, others suspected foul play by the political parties preying on the city and its business class.Taking as a starting point the controversy caused by this disaster, Gunpoint Capitalism plunges us into the murky waters of globalisation. Exploring the back alleys of Pakistan's industrial capital city, it shows how the manufacturing economy makes order out of disorder, and profit out of conflict--to the detriment of workers. In Karachi, as elsewhere, petty criminals and ex-servicemen prove to be formidable enforcers of economic order. A comparison with Europe, the United States and Latin America confirms the central place of such henchmen in the dynamics of capitalism. These shock troops of anti-unionism are now participating in the dismantling of the social state.This probing, sometimes shocking, book sheds new light on the power structures, organised violence and daily labour struggles underpinning the production of our consumer goods.