Laurent Gayer's magnificently evocative account of politics and urban violence in Karachi comes after a spate of recent reinterpretations of Pakistan as a society and polity. Rather than following the time-honoured tradition of emphasising failures of one form or another - and of predicting the country's imminent collapse - authors such as Anatol Lieven, Naveeda Khan, Ayesha Jalal and Ian Talbot have stressed that despite its serious and many problems, Pakistan still ‘works’. Even if survival constitutes a ‘paradox’, as Christophe Jaffrelot put it most recently, there is some kind of method in the madness. Gayer, when surveying the more specific paradox of Karachi – Pakistan's most populous and economically important city – speaks of ‘ordered disorder’. Tens of thousands of its inhabitants may have been killed over the last five years, and the city is divided into ethnic no-go areas with their own paramilitary overlords, yet it still attracts millions of new residents in search of a better life, contributes the lion's share of income tax returns to the Pakistani economy and offers a glitzy consumer culture and arts scene to its most affluent residents. The all-important point is that organised political violence – although too fluid and unpredictable to be called a ‘system’ – still follows a pattern that actors can discern, adapt to and even manipulate to their advantage. Karachi is not a city in a state of disintegration, nor a city at war – and it is unlikely that this will change in the immediate or medium-term future.

This at least, is Gayer's stated argument, elegantly supported by a wide range of social theories. The kind of conclusion that flows naturally from his account, and the way it is written and ‘packaged’ is a lot darker, however. There is a lot of despair and very little hope in the pieces of Urdu literature that Gayer often cites and interprets to set the context for the several hundred interviews that provide the empirical bedrock of the book. An alarmingly high proportion of his informants meet a violent death not long after been recorded by the author. This strangely aestheticised sense of danger makes this book so interesting and readable, an atmosphere heightened by the constant presence of Urdu – be it in direct quotations or in wildly proliferating translations of key (and occasionally not-so-key) terminology. Where else in a scholarly account of Pakistani politics do we meet not only known hitmen and gangster bosses face to face, but even a Taliban militant who gets scared when having to use a lift, or a would-be suicide bomber interviewed by Gayer in a lower middle-class restaurant? In fact, the most powerful proof for Gayer's attestation of Karachi's ‘order in disorder’, is perhaps the very fact that he was able to do such extensive and often daring field work across the city in the first place.

There is too little empirical evidence here to give real traction to the idea that Karachi is somehow still functioning. Perhaps laudably, Gayer resists the temptation to offer clichéd ethnographies of fashion shows, shopping malls or TV soaps – the usual hallmarks of a Pakistan ‘still working’ deployed by other writers. But what about the practical ways in which, say, a successful bank or business actually operate? How can an elite still make millions despite persistent power cuts, kidnappings and bombings? A paradox can only really work as a heuristic device if both of its sides are properly developed, not – as is the case here – when one side is only lightly sketched, while the other is painted in the most vivid of colours. Ultimately, it remains an open question whether the ‘order’ that Gayer detects in Karachi's disorder is primarily of analytical value, or a genuine resource of political hope.

Gayer's account is roughly chronological, bookended by more thematic and theory-guided discussions. Even in the good old days of the 1950s and 1960s, he points out, Karachi was never quite the well-ordered middle-class paradise so often evoked in nostalgic memories. Rapid urbanisation, the presence of millions of unsettled refugees from India and volatile ethnic politics made this impossible. Its descent into the ‘ordered disorder’ of today, however, started in the late 1970s and 1980s, and largely by coincidence. The influx of Kalashnikovs, heroin and Pashtun refugees in the wake of general Zia's war in Afghanistan had an unhappy impact on Karachi University student politics, which had long been a battleground between the Islamist right and an ethnic nationalist left. Epitomised by the emergence in 1984 of the Muhajir Qaumi Movement (MQM) — until today Karachi's most powerful political and paramilitary presence —armed student politics spilled over into violent neighbourhood politics, complete with fortified living spaces, private torture cellars and professional target killers. By the early 1990s, the MQM had become something of a parallel state with almost full control over the city. Its preeminence was only temporarily broken, when the PPP government of Benazir Bhutto sent in the army to destroy the organisation. This not only led to a sustained epidemic of political violence but also changed the rules of the game. The MQM eventually recovered. But instead of acting as a parallel state, it captured and controlled large parts of the ‘official’ state. The height of its power — and some of the most peaceful years for Karachi's citizens — coincided with General Musharraf's military dictatorship which actively patronised the movement. When military rule disintegrated from 2007 onwards, Karachi entered an enduring period of disorder again — but this time the number of ‘entrepreneurs of political violence’ had multiplied. Baloch Gangsters from Lyari set up the People's Aman Committee (PAC) loosely aligned to the PPP, and religious movements of various stripes took over from Pashtun nationalists as de-facto sovereigns over some of Karachi's neighbourhoods. The MQM remains the strongest of these entrepreneurs of violence but it is no longer able to control the whole city or to act unchallenged.

Gayer is not only an exceptionally intrepid fieldworker, he also uses a wide array of social theorists to make sense of what he observes, from Walter Benjamin to Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and Norbert Elias, not to mention political anthropologies of Latin America and Africa. At times, this leads him into multiple directions simultaneously, and makes it more difficult to maintain an overall line of argument. But many of his insights are of great importance for our understanding of Pakistan, and of political societies in the global South more generally. Entrepreneurs of political violence do not operate outside or against an ‘official’ state that is in the process of failing, but rather draw a great deal of their strength from interacting with certain parts of that ‘official’ state. The connection between land grabbing, violence and politics, meanwhile, demonstrates that the once clearly separate domains of the economic, the legal and the political are beginning to merge together in a game of localised ‘sovereignties’, resembling a quasi-pre-Hobbesian political order — a highly sophisticated and persuasive way of understanding urban politics, first developed by Thomas Blom Hansen in his work about Bombay.

But something remains unanswered here. Having myself worked with a theoretical framework very similar to Gayer's for much of my past research, this book makes me wonder whether we need to return to a more structurally integrated theory of causality, some new form of Marxist political economy perhaps. Is there a ‘Karachi mode of production’? A way in which ‘ordered disorder’ can still ensure adequate control over labour, education and training, healthcare, housing, contract enforcement, urban infrastructure? Can we have a somewhat ‘functioning’ capitalism without a state as normally conceived? To answer these questions we need to think beyond urban violence and pay more attention to the urban economics and geography of Karachi as a mega-city of over twenty million people. Gayer strangely neglects such more conventional motifs of urban politics. As a result he is not entirely able to answer his own central question. This does not detract from the fact that as an account of urban violence in Karachi this remains a terrific piece of research, amongst the very best the field has to offer.