• Skip to content
  • Skip to footer
  • Accessibility options
University of Brighton
  • About us
  • Business and
    employers
  • Alumni and
    supporters
  • For
    students
  • For
    staff
  • Accessibility
    options
Open menu
Home
Home
  • Close
  • Study here
    • Courses and subjects
    • Find a course
    • A-Z course list
    • Explore our subjects
    • Academic departments
    • Visiting the university
    • Explore: get to know us
    • Upcoming events
    • Virtual tours
    • Chat to our students and staff
    • Open days
    • Applicant days
    • Order a prospectus
    • Ask a question
    • Studying here
    • Accommodation and locations
    • Applying
    • Undergraduate
    • Postgraduate
    • Transferring from another university
    • The Student Contract
    • Clearing
    • International students
    • Fees and finance
    • Advice and help
    • Advice for students
    • Advice for parents and carers
    • Advice for schools and teachers
    • Managing your application
    • Undergraduate
    • Postgraduate
    • Apprenticeships
  • Research
    • Research and knowledge exchange
    • Research and knowledge exchange organisation
    • The Global Challenges
    • Centres of Research Excellence (COREs)
    • Research Excellence Groups (REGs)
    • Our research database
    • Information for business
    • Community University Partnership Programme (CUPP)
    • Postgraduate research degrees
    • PhD research disciplines and programmes
    • PhD funding opportunities and studentships
    • How to apply for your PhD
    • Research environment
    • Investing in research careers
    • Strategic plan
    • Research concordat
    • News, events, publications and films
    • Featured research and knowledge exchange projects
    • Research and knowledge exchange news
    • Inaugural lectures
    • Research and knowledge exchange publications and films
    • Academic staff search
  • About us
  • Business and employers
  • Alumni, supporters and giving
  • Current students
  • Staff
  • Accessibility
Search our site
Baboshka-banner
Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics
  • What we do
  • Join us for study, work or visit
  • Who we are
  • What we do
    • What we do
    • Research and enterprise projects
  • Research and enterprise projects
    • Research and enterprise projects
    • Protest camps and climate activism
    • Cityscapes of Violence in Karachi
    • Migrant Journeymen from Afghanistan: Taxis, Life and Making Tracks in Britain
    • Mental Disorder: Anthropological Insights
    • On Kandahar Street: Afghan migration to Singapore and the British Straits Settlements in the mid to late nineteenth century
    • Outer space as environment
    • Peasant Resistance, Food Sovereignty, and Human Rights
    • Homer in the laboratory
    • cli-MATES
    • Growing Heritage: The politics of heritage vegetables
    • Evaluation cultures in the political risk industry
    • FutureCoast Youth
    • IKETIS The mediation of climate change induced migration
    • Indebted-entanglements
    • The Isimila stone age project
    • Babochka
    • Ecological crisis, sustainability and the psychosocial subject
    • YOUR world research - Insecurity and uncertainty
    • The People's Pier
    • Emergent Authorities
    • Formulating implicity: contemporary feminist activism and critique in a neoliberal context
    • Here today: moving images of climate change
    • Mediating climate change
    • Power in outer space
    • Problems of participation
    • Landscapes of authority, affect and public memory
    • Race, Place and the Seaside: Postcards from the Edge
    • social-ecological resilience of a waterside community in changing water conditions
    • The happiness project
  • Cityscapes of Violence in Karachi

Cityscapes of Violence in Karachi

Edited volume and writing experiment that brings together academics, journalists and activists in Karachi in order to challenge the city’s endemic violence.

Project timeframe

Published in 2017 

Project aims

Cityscapes” examines some of the controversies that understanding, writing about and publishing on violence in Karachi entails. It brings into conversation some prominent academics—including anthropologists and political scientists—journalists, writers and activists. This diverse coalition provokes shifts away from recursive academic and media scripts of the city toward a different “counter-public” of cultural and political commentary, as the contributors critically unpack the constitutive relation of violence to personal experience and also seek to create new understandings that are tentatively shared.

The approach to counterpublicking is organised around three overlapping schema. These are: social science and ethnography; epochal or historical transformation; and oral history and personal memoir. Drilling down into Karachi’s city neighbourhoods, the chapters examine the ways that violence is textured locally and citywide and investigate violence in the context of protest drinking, social and religious movements, class and cosmopolitanism, gang wars, the fractured lives of militants, press censorship and the effects on journalists, uncertain continuua between state political and individual madness, and ways the painful shattering of some worlds produces dreams of others.

While the individual chapters each provide fresh insights, the collective ethics of rewriting, rethinking or cajoling Karachi’s landscape into other forms is more dynamic and unclear, and one being worked out in public. Chapters are by Nadeem F. Paracha, Laurent Gayer, Zia Ur Rehman, Nida Kirmani, Nichola Khan, Oskar Verkaaik, Arif Hasan, Razeshta Sethna, Asif Farrukhi, Kausar S. Khan, Farzana Shaikh, and Kamran Asdar Ali. Collectively, they comprise a singular and important contribution for all those spirited to understand what went wrong with Karachi.

Location country

Karachi, Pakistan

Project findings and impact 

Book launch at Karachi Literature Festival (KLF) 2018.

Speaker at first KLF-London in 2017, Royal Festival Hall. Reviews in Karachi media. 


Editorial reviews:

“This wonderful volume offers a vivid palimpsest of perspectives that brilliantly unpack how urban violence structures people’s lives and relations in both contested and contradictory ways. It will undoubtedly become ‘the’ reference point for understanding Karachi, as well as a model for exploring other violent cityscapes around the world.” —Dennis Rodgers, Professor of International Development Studies, University of Amsterdam

“A mesmerising read, presenting original, provocative prose about a city that defines Pakistan in more ways than one…Khan has done a phenomenal job of weaving together the themes in these brilliant essays.’ —Professor Hassan Abbas, Chair of the Department of Regional and Analytical Studies, National Defense University, Washington, D.C.

“This unusual book does full justice to a dynamic, diverse and troubled metropolis. Each chapter brims with insight, knowledge and affection for Karachi, and sensitive portraits of its residents. Khan’s volume strikingly depicts how violence, spectral and real, frames Karachi life, from ethnic fissures and poetry to masculine labour and alcohol.’ — Thomas Blom Hansen, Professor of Anthropology, Stanford University.

“Karachi, currently numbering over 23m people, is projected to be the world’s largest city by 2030. Khan has marshalled leading authorities to examine from different disciplinary perspectives why violence is integral to the city’s workings...’ — Francis Robinson, Professor of the History of South Asia, Royal Holloway University of London.

Media reviews in Dawn, Herald, The Friday Times.Yusuf, Ahmed. 2017. “Karachi Conversations”. Dawn, 13 August 

“a conversation between the gods of scholarly writing on Karachi.”
Academic reviews- Urban Geography 2017 “It covers a huge gap in the body of knowledge on peculiarities of Asian cities” (2017 online, Sana Iqbal) 

Research team

Dr Khan, Nichola

Output

Khan, Nichola. 2017, ed. Cityscapes of Violence in Karachi: Publics and Counter-publics. London: Hurst & Co; Karachi: Oxford University Press.

Back to top
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • TikTok
  • YouTube
  • LinkedIn icon

Contact us

University of Brighton
Mithras House
Lewes Road
Brighton
BN2 4AT

Main switchboard 01273 600900

Course enquiries

Sign up for updates

University contacts

Report a problem with this page

Quick links Quick links

  • Courses
  • Open days
  • Order a prospectus
  • Academic departments
  • Academic staff
  • Professional services departments
  • Jobs
  • Privacy and cookie policy
  • Accessibility statement
  • Libraries
  • Term dates
  • Maps
  • Graduation
  • Site information
  • Online shop
  • COVID-19

Information for Information for

  • Current students
  • International students
  • Media/press
  • Careers advisers/teachers
  • Parents/carers
  • Business/employers
  • Alumni/supporters
  • Suppliers
  • Local residents