Karachi: Organized Crime in a Key Megacity

Abstract

IntroductionMegacities are developing across many regions of the world - in particular in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. These cities are growing rapidly as migrants from rural areas or those escaping conflicts gravitate to urban areas. Migrants often settle in informal urban settlements that frequently lack infrastructure and services. In the absence of state presence, or in areas where the state's presence is substantially weakened, criminals and other non-state actors become the providers of services needed by citizens. Many security specialists write that the rise of criminal groups in megacities presents a critical challenge to global stability. They suggest that poor governance by states and the rise of disgruntled populations in these megacities may result in alternative structures of governance where gangs and warlords assert control over urban territory.1Research in Karachi, a city in which criminal organizations, terrorists and crime-terror groups are all powerful actors, suggests a different reality. Crime and violence are deployed strategically by criminals in Karachi for economic and political gain. Yet they are just one group competing for power in an environment in which every political player is armed and has a stake in the city.Despite the presence of much intra-personal and politically motivated violence, including high rates of homicide, there is an order in Karachi that is established from the bottom up rather than the top down. This order is not entirely separate from the state but-as this analysis will show-these diverse criminalized non-state actors manipulate the state and are in turn manipulated by the state.The reason that many fail to see the order that exists in this chaos is that they use Western concepts of nation-building or state formation to analyze the new urban reality of the developing world. Thus they miss the distinctive relationships that exist between state and non-state actors in the megacities of the developing world, of which Karachi is a prime example.This paper analyzes how criminalized non-state groups are connected to the wider political and economic contexts in which they operate. The relationships between organized crime and the state are different in Karachi from those that exist in Sicily, Italy. Yet the Sicilian context provides the overarching framework for our understanding of crime-state relationships. In Sicily, family relationships determine the structures of criminal groups and votes are delivered to politicians in return for contracts and tolerance of their activities. Criminal groups are loyal to the state and have grown along with the economic development of the Italian state since World War II.2In contrast, in Karachi, non-state actors do not benefit as directly from a parasitic relationship to the state. This is true, in part, because the state has less to give. Moreover, there is less of an exchange relationship between the non-state actors and political structures than in Italy. Rather, much more complex relationships exist between the state and the non-state actors in this difficult environment in which crime and terror groups have assumed many functions that are vital for the survival of citizens, such as the provision of housing and water.Karachi: Order and Disorder in this MegacityKarachi, a city with a population of approximately twenty million, contributes at least a quarter of Pakistan's GDP and serves as its primary port. Through its port flow many illicit commodities including drugs,3 ensuring the centrality of illegal commerce to the economic life of the city, and by extension, the country.Karachi's political structure is distinctive in having criminal groups, terror groups (Al-Qaeda, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT)), and crime-terror groups (D-company) as major actors in the political and economic environment of this great port city. Even its primary political party, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement or MQM (party representing migrants) as it is popularly known, is credited for introducing systematic violence and crime to the city's politics. …