State, Security, and People along Urban Frontiers: Juxtapositions of Identity and Authority in Quetta
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State, Security, and People along Urban Frontiers: Juxtapositions of Identity and Authority in Quetta Faizaan Qayyum 1 # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Quetta is a postcolonial city in Pakistan on the frontiers of global warfare where terrorism—as an extreme or extraordinary condition—is juxtaposed alongside “ordinary” urban social and political dynamics. This combination shapes the nature of and relationships between space, state, and citizens. Unprecedented violence, targeted at the city’s Hazara population, coexists and combines with inefficiencies and informalities in urban governance to create the ultimate juxtacity: one where state institutions engage in power struggles among themselves as security and administration fail, where individually motivated state agents try to work within the constraints of an inefficient political system, where policing involves both public distrust and a constant threat to life, and where life as a Hazara includes both elaborate security arrangements for trips outside Hazara areas and insecurity even inside people’s homes. Identity—religious and ethnic—assumes center-stage in contentious local politics even as activists devise creative and unifying yet disruptive strategies to exert pressure and achieve political goals. The paper studies how these strategies transform and/or reinforce complex juxtapositions of state authority, public space, and grassroots organization. Keywords Violence . Law and order . Policing . Administration . Planning . Grassroots
Situating Quetta: State and Non-State, Government and Governed, Conflict and Peace The tension was palpable as soon as I landed in Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s Balochistan province. Everyone—from uniformed gunmen surrounding the aircraft to militarized airport security officers—was extremely vigilant. Between the airport and my * Faizaan Qayyum [email protected]
1
Department of Urban & Regional Planning, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL, USA
F. Qayyum
accommodation, I passed at least a dozen state-sanctioned barricades, each manned by armed members of one or more security agencies: airport security, police, parapolice, military, and paramilitary personnel, all in a perpetual state of high-alert. As I was to learn over the next several weeks, each of these agencies had its role defined within a complex web of security and surveillance. But on my first day, it appeared as if they were all there to stop and question everybody, frisk those whose answers they found suspicious, and even go so far as to search several vehicles. Unlike other cities in Pakistan, the inspections were both deeper and stricter: in some ways, everyone was a suspect. “Warrants are not required,” a security official I interviewed later told me. “Things can go from greetings to an explosion in a fraction of a second. Should we wait for a warrant when we know hundreds of lives are at stake?” The violence in Quetta is complicated, intricately layered, and historically contingent. It has been influenced heavily by state bu
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