Gender, Global Terror, and Everyday Violence in Urban Pakistan

Abstract

We investigate the cross scalar linkages between every day violence and global war on terror in the context of urban Pakistan. We draw upon intensive research undertaken in the twin cities of Rawalpindi/Islamabad and Karachi to highlight how marginalized Pashtun and Bengali Rohingya communities experience state and everyday violence in the context of the global war on terror. Focusing on the gendered aspects of infrastructural and spectacular violence, we argue that every day violence too, is deeply politicised and inflected by national and global level geopolitics. Following Hannah Arendt, we conceptualize violence as a manifestation of a loss of power. Accordingly, drawing upon ethnographic evidence we demonstrate how even domestic violence takes on a public and a political valence. We argue that performances of masculinities and femininities are, in fact, imbricated with geographies of exclusion, marginalization and state policies. The routinization of violence in everyday spaces draws attention to the DNA like relationality of the local with the geopolitical at the global and national scales.