Dispossession and the militarised developer state: financialisation and class power on the agrarian–urban frontier of Islamabad, Pakistan

Abstract

Pakistan’s capital Islamabad is one of the country’s fastest growing cities, the labouring poor comprising the majority of its residents. Many migrants from rural hinterlands and war-ravaged regions reside in informal squatter settlements on the city’s rapidly expanding agrarian–urban frontier. In recent years, violent demolitions of these settlements, known as katchi abadis, have increased in accordance with the growing demand for land as a financial asset in the form of gated housing schemes. Islamabad is a microcosm of contemporary processes of urbanisation across both Global North and South. Dispossession of both rural and urban working-class communities to make way for for-profit real estate development is an increasingly common practice in many countries, reflecting systemic transformation in the logic of global capitalism towards ‘financialisation’. Our case study engages the theoretical literature on financialisation and real estate along with recent empirical work on dialectical processes of development and dispossession in the Global South. In Islamabad, a ‘militarised developer state’ featuring civil and military bureaucracies, private contractors and city development authorities props up the dominant land-use paradigm, which deeply exacerbates urban land inequality and fuels both construction and destruction of katchi abadis which house a large segment of the city’s working-class population.