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 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 building efforts, tribal and ethnic rivalries, and transnational warfare.Footnote 1 It is also deeply implicated in multiple ethnonational insurgencies across the province (Siddiqi 2012). The US invasion of Afghanistan and concurrent domestic operations by the Pakistani military have also given rise to religiously inspired violence, often connected with the Taliban (Gazdar et al. 2010). This has hit the province and Quetta disproportionately and has particularly targeted the city’s Shi’i Hazara population ruthlesslyFootnote 2 (Isa 2016; HRW 2014).

Sectarian tension and violence have existed in many parts of Pakistan since before the American invasion of Afghanistan. However, such violence has witnessed an “exponential rise” since the invasion and various Pakistani military operations started (Grare 2013). Attacks became deadlier and more brazen—and in Quetta, the city’s small Hazara Shi’i community became the biggest target. 2012 and 2013, the deadliest years on record for the community, saw massive bombings inside Hazara residential areas and multiple targeted gun and bomb attacks. Together, more than 850 Hazaras were killed in the 2 years (HRW 2014).

With somewhere between 300,000 and 700,000 people, the Hazaras are a phenotypically distinct ethnic and sectarian minority in the city of 2.27 million (PBS 2017). While exact numbers are difficult to ascertain because of Pakistan’s porous Western borders (Isa 2016), their population has increased steadily as more Hazara refugees from Afghanistan have joined their ethnic counterparts in Pakistan (HRW 2014). In a city where tribe and ethnicity often intersect, and one which is largely segregated along a mix of these identities, the Hazaras live in two highly segregated settlements on opposite edges of the city. The first, called Marriabad, was developed by the initial Hazara migrants from Afghanistan in the late nineteenth century (Owtadolajam 2006); it is now among the better-developed areas of the city. Marriabad is surrounded by mountains on two sides, the military cantonment on the third, and the fourth opens to the city. The second settlement is called Hazara Town and developed when the first settlement ran out of space. Located along the city’s Western edge, it is now walled on all sides. Hazara Town is populated predominantly by more recent Hazara migrants from Afghanistan and is outside legally defined “urban” areas of the city.

Yet, despite the unrelenting violence, the community engages in a multitude of individual and collective strategies to make political, social, and economic claims; organize protests; and construct life as a persecuted community within Quetta. They do so within a postcolonial state that continues to enforce legal, administrative, and bureaucratic frameworks and laws from the British colonial era (Siddique 2013). Different institutions—a powerful military, well-entrenched bureaucracy, political class, and civilian police institutions—compete and clash within the state for political, financial, and administrative influence. There are situations—especially relating to, but not limited to security—where many different agencies carry out essentially the same tasks, each following their own protocols and through their own hierarchies. This simultaneity and juxtaposition of multiple authorities leads to further conflict and competition within state agencies, which manifest at all levels including federal, provincial, and the local. This environment of postcoloniality, marked by institutional strengths and weaknesses, violence, community organization, and competing claims over authority, resources, and influence, combine to create complex interactions between the state, space, and people. Claims are made, rejected, and remade, and physical, spatial, and social realities of life as a Hazara citizen in Quetta are created, destroyed, and recreated through these juxtapositions.

Through fieldwork in the city between May and July of 2017, I studied these contests and claims between and among the civil administration, security institutions, and the Hazara population of Quetta. I was particularly interested in how these claims impact everyday life for the city’s violently targeted Hazara minority. As a college student in Lahore several years ago, I had often allied with Hazara student activists from Quetta to protest ongoing violence. These connections helped me identify and reach out to several Hazara social and political actors. From this position of trust, I was able to access other community activists from a variety of political affiliations.

I also used my acquaintances as a former researcher at a prominent national policy think-tank and my credentials as an urban planning graduate student at a prestigious American university to reach out to key administration and security officials. Bureaucratic networks in both administration and policing are very centralized in Pakistan,Footnote 3 and many officials are interested in opportunities for graduate studies in planning or policy studies. These connections and my affiliation with a program of professional interest enabled me to build trust and access those networks. I embedded myself in public and bureaucratic offices; interviewed bureaucratic, political, military, paramilitary, police, and community representatives; and observed community organizing, political claim-making, and political and bureaucratic decision-making processes. Through these various community, political, and bureaucratic offices, I had access to and reviewed available data and correspondence within and between numerous state office-bearers, community organizations, and local politicians. Because of the unique security challenges that state and community representatives face in Quetta, I have anonymized all data, removed names, and use direct quotes only very sparingly.

This article is therefore a critical narrative of how various state institutions and members of a minority group act in an extreme situation of terrorism. I have divided it in three sections: in the first, I study state institutions including the different offices responsible for law enforcement and security, bureaucratic administration, and planning. I explain how the juxtaposition of competing claims over resources and political and administrative influence creates an atmosphere of weak governance despite strong state institutions. In this context, security and surveillance become administrative priorities, and local Hazaras organize around their own vulnerability to demand healthcare, education, and other basic municipal services.

The second section explores how these contests translate to lived experiences of Quetta’s Hazaras through fear, security, and grassroots activism. The immediate impacts of security measures include physical walls, barriers, and check posts, which have led to the establishment of what I call “Hazara-cities” within the city. While this has created a physical separation between “secure” and “insecure” places, unabated violence even inside walled Hazara settlements means that many residents live in a perpetual state of “secure insecurity”; here, death carries its own experiences for the living and becomes a source of solidarity. With a steady focus on insecurity and loss, local political organizations build competing narratives around religion and ethnicity to garner popular support.

The concurrent existence of juxtaposed differences among state institutions and Hazara citizens produces a unique lived reality for residents of Quetta. Legally defined jurisdictions are sidelined in favor of fluid, new jurisdictions that rely on strategic calculations by individual officers; at the same time, Hazara organizers make political claims both in spite of and because of the violent context within which they live. I conclude this paper with a discussion on how these juxtapositions coexist in Quetta, which produces, transforms, and restricts life in the city at the same time.

The Paradox of Postcolonial Urbanity

Perhaps the foremost divides in many postcolonial states, particularly those in the global South, emanate from the continuation of colonial practices even after independence or freedom from direct colonial rule. The emergence of modern states is not always accompanied by concurrent processes of decolonization (Fanon 2004). Continuing colonial practices interact with the realities of a politicized public in complex ways, leading to intellectual, socioeconomic, and often violent conflict. With rapid urbanization, cities in the global South become sites of claims, counterclaims, and contestations that produce, transform, and reproduce life for citizens (Shappard 2014; Parnell 2014).

Fanon’s characterization of settlers, natives, and a “native elite” does well to give a broad overview of power dynamics in postcolonial states. Siddique’s study of Pakistan’s legal and administrative framework concludes that the system continues to be “alien” (Siddique 2013) and firmly rooted in colonial practices. Combining Fanon’s descriptions of colonial violence with Siddique’s conclusions of continuing colonial attitudes in Pakistan, one might predict some violence between or against identity groups; a native elite may, for example, conspire to retain power by violently suppressing other native groups, who may respond violently to permanently dismantle the status quo. However, such a prediction would still fall short of explaining the nature of other forms of violence not targeted by or against the native elite who run the postcolonial state.

Such subnational groups that can engage in or are targeted by violence were studied by Mamdani who examined communal violence and ethnic cleansing in Rwanda (Mamdani 2001). He postulated that where colonial rule was established based on a “settler” and native racial dichotomy, internal control was solidified through the politicization of subnational identities including those of religion and ethnicity. These identities are functionally distinct from cultural and market-based identities. Power imbalances were deliberately perpetuated through colonial classification methods that preferred some identities over others. This process, called “ethnicization,” was also followed in British India (including modern-day Pakistan) and contributes to contemporary postcolonial violence (Wieland 2006).

Different researchers have opted for different approaches to studying violence in urban areas of the global South and colonized cities. Some (Yiftachel and Roded 2011; Yiftachel 2011; Varshney 2002; Beall 2009; Falzon 2004) have studied colonial ethnicization projects, including their implications for violence by or against politicized identity groups, as important factors. Others (Davis 2012; Davis 2006; Caldeira 2000; Rotker 2002; Bayat 2012) place their focus at the intersection of neoliberalism, inequalities, and urban violence. Both perspectives have important implications for understanding state and community strategies as well as the production of life in cities.

Research on colonial ethnicization projects and resultant conflicts recognizes the historical role of the state in creating and perpetuating political identities, including groups that assume power and others that are excluded. Such ethnicization of subnational identities and power imbalances between the different groups generates contestations, struggles, and often conflict (Beall 2009). The hostility can often lead to violence, which Beall et al. (2013) characterize as sovereign, civil, or civic violence. At its source, the violence may be facilitated or hindered by formal and informal institutions: using his study of different cities in postcolonial India, focused on peace and violence among Muslims and Hindus, Varshney found that formal institutions such as trade unions, business associations, political parties, and professional organizations can effectively contain outbreaks of violence. Even informal institutions and everyday interactions, like collective participation in festivals and celebrations, may play a similar role (Varshney 2002). On the other hand, the state may actively produce conditions of “ghetto citizenship” (Yiftachel 2011) for some of its residents. Local disputes over land or inequitable access contribute to the outcomes of violent conflict. Using the example of Arabs in Israel, Yiftachel also introduces the notion of “depth” of colonialism, suggesting that the state may generate radicalization “from above” which, through direct and indirect processes, can lead to further radicalization “from below” (Yiftachel and Roded 2011). The outcome of such contestation is often the creation or perpetuation of current and historical segregation (Falzon 2004).

On the other hand, some scholars have studied these conflicts through the pervasive influence of neoliberal governance in much of the developing world. A weakened state facilitates capitalist accumulation by the powerful at the expense of the poorest. In this process, that Harvey (2007) calls “accumulation by dispossession”, the poor get poorer and are priced out of formal markets. Inequalities grow, poverty becomes commonplace, and cities become spaces of crime and violence (Davis 2006; Harvey 2007). Walled and gated compounds appear (Falzon 2004) as the elite “enclose” themselves so as to secure sanitized spaces from real and imaginary threats (Caldeira 2000; Rotker 2002). At the same time, the urban poor occupy public and empty spaces, appropriating them for private use including informal squatting or commercial activities (Bayat 1997, 2012). These practices of exclusion and occupation often happen simultaneously, independently yet dependent on one another.

Read together, these approaches to urban contestation in postcolonial cities provide valuable insights for this study. As I will illustrate in subsequent sections, Quetta is clearly demarcated by ethnicity, tribal affiliation, and other markers of differentiated political identity. The Hazaras have been viciously targeted for both their ethnic and sectarian identities (Gazdar et al. 2010), and hundreds have been killed in the past decade alone. In this paper, I focus on how the Hazaras and the state have organized within this context of violence. Community and state strategies revolve around their respective understandings of such violence and needed responses, which can range from strengthening formal and informal institutions (Varshney 2002) to militarizing policing (Waseem 2019) and tightening the state’s ethnocratic governance model (Yiftachel and Roded 2011; Yiftachel 2011). However, postcolonial and other Southern states’ weaknesses and incapacity to respond is also well-documented (Davis 2012; Bayat 1997; Collier 2007).

Citizens in the meantime may resort to legal and extralegal channels to air their grievances, using informal channels within and outside the state (Roy 2009; Bayat 2012). Miraftab distinguishes between “invented” and “invited” spaces of citizenship. In the latter case, the state hopes to contain grassroots activism by allowing citizens to claim and define certain spaces. Where this is not allowed, activists “invent” spaces, as Miraftab has shown in Cape Town (2005). In doing so, they “re-describe” (Simone and Pieterse 2017) life and citizenship (Holston 1999; Isin and Nielsen 2008). In this, they may engage in disruptive, imaginative, and intentionally political acts and form counter hegemonic “insurgencies” to define new claims, rights, and privileges—including new forms of citizenship (Miraftab 2009).

On their own, however, these perspectives have critical gaps. The reality, for cities like Quetta, is that such struggles are present yet ineffective. Outcomes are similarly manifested but differently structured; violence is criminal but ethnicized, and ethnicized but not communal. Community responses include a mix of formal and informal strategies; the state remains both unitary and fragmented, strong and weak, responsive and non-responsive, and both implicated in and disconnected from the creation of violence. In Quetta, different arms of the state (including the civilian bureaucracy, the military and paramilitary, and the police) must navigate institutional imbalances and contradictions, which create new realities for the state’s overall role in the city. While the broader institutional context is similar to other Pakistani cities like Karachi (Waseem 2019; Gazdar and Mallah 2013), Quetta differs in its particularities: the influence of the military on civilian administration is much greater, policing responds to a different kind of violence even within Beall et al.’s categorizations of civil and civic violence (2013), and the spatial segregation of the Hazaras is much more pronounced. Similarly, the Hazaras must constantly balance their quest for safety and security with the economic and social necessities of travel and commuting. In effect, these institutional and experiential juxtapositions are key to shaping the lives of the persecuted Hazara minority in Quetta.

What we need, then, is not generalization and broad discussion of violence and community responses, but studies grounded in the empirics of individual cities in their unique contexts (Robinson 2016; Simone and Pieterse 2017; Roy 2014). Within each location, we need to untie these relationships between and among institutions and practices, both real and imagined, and complicate the picture by approaching it from different perspectives. I do that in this paper by splitting both the “state” and Hazara “society” into their constitutive parts. I go a step further; by borrowing methodologically from Deleuze et al. (1999), I explore not only focal points like the postcolonial state, ethnicization, and violence, but also the nuances within that state, contestations within identities, and the grassroots defiance and responses to an extremely violent situation. I show how the state is created and recreated by competing internal claims over power, authority, and influence, as well as community pressure for security, service delivery, and new development. The resulting situation is both temporary and contentious, and the prevailing violence forces a juxtaposition of insecurity with security and death with life, which shapes both everyday life and activism in Hazara communities. In this context, I also show how these juxtapositions shape activism, including claims and counterclaims over Hazara identity and competing narratives about everything from the lived experience and reality of violence to community responses and strategies. I use identity here as a category of social and political practice (Brubaker and Cooper 2000); one used by local organizers and politicians to construct solidarities and gather financial, logistical, and political support.

The State of Paradox

In this section, I explore the state’s role in Quetta by deconstructing it to separately explore military, policing, and civilian planning and bureaucratic administrations. I start first with the prevailing institutional imbalances that force each of them to function within a unique set of contradictions shaped by the military’s direct and indirect involvement in politics.Footnote 4 I then build on these interactions by exploring institutions separately, further focusing on issues of law and order, policing, and security. These contests within and between military and policing institutions shape the space within which the political and bureaucratic leadership must perform. When juxtaposed with local and personal political considerations, it generates complex new interactions between Hazaras, their political representatives, and the local bureaucratic administration.

Strong Military, Weak Governance: National Institutional Imbalances

“Who do you think runs the place? We all know who runs the place,” responded a prominent politician when I asked them about the relative distribution of power among different institutions of the state. The overall security situation in the region, including global warfare and the local context of violence, has left all branches of governance weak. This is particularly true for civilian institutions and is immediately observable in Quetta and its suburbs. At the same time, the heavily militarized and internationalized nature of this violence has allowed the military to gain significant influence at the cost of political, bureaucratic, and other civilian arms of the state.

This power dynamic manifests uniquely in Quetta and acts on top of decades of direct military rule, with lasting implications for both central and local policymaking. Here, the military’s control goes beyond “defense, security, and foreign policy” (Shafqat 2019): it influences most civil decisions, including those about policing, planning, infrastructure development, and even outcomes of local electoral politics. This can be indirect, through a process that several respondents in the civilian bureaucracy described as “informal conveyance of opinion”, or more direct through “tea parties” at the regional military headquarters where the political and bureaucratic leadership is “invited.” In informal discussions, respondents in military, police, and civilian institutions described how these tea parties are effectively “demand notices”, where the civilian leadership receives “development priorities in exchange for tea and cookies”.

In this context, individual bureaucrats, who go through a highly competitive, merit-based selection process for appointment, rely heavily on “individual appeal and influence” to survive and exercise powers allocated to them by law. According to a senior officer in the local bureaucracy, it is “all about personality” in environments like Quetta’s. Bureaucrats sometimes try to push back against military influence but rarely receive support from political leadership in provincial and national legislative bodies. In turn, political leaders at all levels face their own paradox with respect to their own survival. Some of the biggest national political leaders are notorious for corruption, financial malpractice, and maladministration. Several national, provincial, and local leaders have been convicted and disqualified, even as speculations of military influence in judicial outcomes remain rife. As a result, several politicians described their “complete withdrawal” from most decision-making, especially where security institutions express interest.

This balance of power firmly juxtaposes a strong military with a weak governance structure—within Quetta, the military exercises virtually unlimited power where it so chooses, while the civilian bureaucracy and political representatives carefully identify domains where they can exercise influence at the same time. This reinforces the status quo as no civilian institution is in a position to contest the distribution of power: the regional military commander is the most powerful individual in all of Balochistan; civil bureaucrats rely on individual dynamism to achieve administrative outcomes; and politicians operate within boundaries set by the military. Elected local politicians, who represent small constituencies in Quetta, are left out of the policymaking process altogether as decisions are centralized and made to reflect national security or provincial political priorities.

While some of this is a manifestation of incapacity, as described by Davis (2012), Collier (2007), or Harvey (2007), it does not represent a state that is necessarily weak and unable to enforce order. Rather, the state in Quetta demonstrates imbalances within institutions, where some are rendered ineffective while others wield incredible influence and enforcement ability. The history of local and national politics accounts for some of these imbalances, while the unique set of security vulnerabilities (particularly faced by the Hazaras) defines the rest. Together, these imbalances create a contested equilibrium of power and influence between the military and civilian arms of the state. As subsequent sections will show, this impacts law and order and policing, but also local administration, planning, and development that are otherwise functions of the civilian bureaucracy.

Law and Order and Security Institutions

The military’s influence on life in Quetta is most apparent in how the city’s law and order apparatus functions. Civilian law enforcement is predominantly a domain of the local police, but the military now exercises direct influence through the introduction of the paramilitary Frontier Corps (FC) in urban policing matters. The city’s policing involves several different institutions: the local police, under its own chief, operates through area police officers called Station House Officers (SHOs); the local district administration commands a parapolice force (called the “Levies”); and the FC is present in city limits to assist and supplement local police. Formally, the police department liaisons with local community leaders, neighborhood representatives, religious leaders, and others through the SHOs. The Levies supplement police deployment and escort bureaucrats and other public office bearers for security. The concurrent exercise of policing powers by multiple forces creates a highly contested terrain of authority and legitimacy, while also shaping how the civilian police department functions at the same time.

The police force is “designed to serve everyday needs of enforcement in times of peace”, as a former city police chief explained, but the violence they now face involves terrorist groups armed with assault rifles, IEDs, rocket launchers, and suicide bombers. Much of the violence targets a specific civilian community, but unlike Beall et al.’s definition of “civil” violence (2013), it does not involve community groups acting violently against other community groups. Unlike “civic” violence, it is not “reactive,” and it is unclear whether violent actors have specific grievances against the Hazaras apart from their sectarian identity. At the same time, it is couched in broader civic conflict and the state’s military action against terrorist and insurgent organizations. As publicly visible, uniformed personnel, police officers also become easily identifiable targets of such violence and hundreds of officials—from sergeants to serving and former police chiefs—have lost their lives in such attacks. The nature and severity of violence, combined with the police department’s own lack of training, has facilitated the military’s push into urban policing, and the FC is now a formally notified paramilitary police force in the city.

This requisition of the FC has direct consequences for urban policing. Police officers described their powerlessness, and in our discussions insisted that they can “handle the situation if given the autonomy”. The FC’s powers are restricted by law; they can act only as directed by and in assistance of the police. They are not permitted to arrest or detain suspects, investigate a crime, or lead criminal prosecution. But their presence introduces direct military influence on urban policing and introduces a heavily militarized force amidst an urban, civilian population. All officers of the force are career military officers assigned to the FC on deputation. The force uses its military affiliation to operate autonomously; senior FC officers admitted that they “arrest and investigate suspects” in FC’s own camp and also “make development recommendations to the civilian leadership”. Police officers spoke at length about the FC “rejecting security plans prepared by the (police) department and requiring compliance with their plans instead”. Additionally, all respondents acknowledged the paramilitary’s capacity to conduct operations independent of, and often unbeknownst to, the police.

Paramilitary commanders also use their positions as de facto leaders of a policing force to engage with and talk to local political leaders, thereby taking over the functions of area SHOs. Politicians acknowledged meeting FC “wing commanders” often, even clandestinely on occasion. This allows the military to directly influence local political conversations—behind the garb of security, the military can effectively act as gatekeepers between communities and the state. The FC’s critical role in maintaining law and order also provides the force, and indirectly the military, with a direct connection to the local administration. Meetings of the bureaucrat in charge of district administration with the FC wing commander are frequent, and the two offices work closely in formulating administrative policies that are in line with the city’s updated security landscape.

At the same time, the violence and the co-presence of a militarized force in urban areas has facilitated a militarization of the civilian police force itself. This may be in part because they “strive to perform at par with their paramilitary counterpart” as their peers in Karachi (Waseem 2019), but officers also described “operational necessities” in our discussions. In recent years, the police have also led large, risky operations against sectarian militants in the city with and without cooperation from other agencies, and many officers involved in such operations have been injured or killed in revenge attacks (Ahmed 2018). The vulnerability of individual police officials has grown so much that traffic sergeants on key intersections now “require additional security by the FC or Levies” to be able to do their job, and police officials narrated tales of vulnerability, loss, and sacrifice in our discussions. However, even these stories of sacrifice have not helped build trust and reliability among vulnerable Hazaras. In fact, many Hazara representatives now question the police’s institutional failure to protect their own senior officers even as they acknowledge the lives lost to violence. This recurring question was phrased by an activist as such: “how can a force protect us when it cannot even protect its own officers?”

Officials of the FC and the military use this situation to further promote the paramilitary’s role in policing, while the civilian police department also continues to engage in more militarized methods of policing. Police officers have lost friends, colleagues, and family members, and they retaliate when they can; respondents acknowledged that operations are carried out with verbal “shoot-to-kill” orders, suspects are eliminated instead of being taken into custody, and the cycle of violent, militarized policing by both civilian and paramilitary bodies is reproduced. After all, they are “just following the FC’s tactics,” said an officer. “Why is it a problem when we do it?”

This echoes Waseem’s findings from Karachi (2019) but has also created new institutional and political dynamics. Hazaras cannot trust the police, but then they also narrate stories of the FC’s high-handedness and militarized methods in policing. At the same time, some Hazara leaders acknowledged how they strategized around this institutional struggle during their protests. “We had set up our protest camp, and the paramilitary would send food to our protest camps,” one narrated. “They used our protest to make politicians even more powerless – and all we wanted was to live, so we had no choice but to continue protesting until the political government’s dismissal.” This captures the delicate balance in policing, law enforcement, and political activism. Law enforcement, and its failures, has created a situation where popular activism has further weakened democratic political forces. As I show in the next section, this has contributed to the military’s power while creating new problems for local administration and planning.

Planning for the Hazara

Amidst surrounding crises of urban security and institutional infighting, the main platform for interaction between the civilian bureaucracy, political representatives, and local communities is that of provision of services and planning for development. Within these functions, “development” assumes distinct meanings for different, and even the same, people. Politicians, for example, emphasize visible, large infrastructural projects that help raise their political profile and increase chances of success in future electoral campaigns. On the other hand, a bureaucrat in local administration described his role as a “functional alternative to political malpractices” and described his focus on improving the rule of law (including enforcement of building codes) and efficient implementation of existing projects. The local tier of political representatives, who contest mainly for municipal bodies, complain of feeling powerless and would like more control over local projects like street infrastructure, water supply, and sanitation. The Hazaras, long at the receiving end of unprecedented violence, want security of life. However, they also want healthcare, psychological and psychiatric services, basic infrastructure, education, and sources of entertainment. Perhaps most critically within the city’s institutional context, the military wants security, surveillance, and, in the words of an officer stationed in Quetta, “creation of economic opportunities that can discourage people from joining insurgencies against the state”.

These claims, made and contested within the state’s resource constraints, also highlight Quetta’s unique position among other Pakistani cities. While decisions typically reflect local distribution of power among relevant players, these players both challenge and reinforce this distribution at the same time. Security considerations seem to dominate all decision-making including that of development projects and service provision; both Hazara Town and Marriabad are physically walled-in on all sides, and access is strictly controlled by paramilitary personnel posted at all entry points. This militarized separation has allowed locals to concentrate their demands within these walled areas—and the prevailing insecurity has meant that the state is more amenable to listening if Hazara activists threaten to protest outside.

In effect, these urban divides have generated a new platform of political protest for the Hazaras. The state prefers to wall them in for security, and it is precisely by threatening to go out in large numbers and presenting a vulnerable target that Hazaras can now exert pressure on the state. As subsequent sections will illustrate, any collective movement of Hazaras through Quetta is met with large-scale arrangements and coordination among security institutions. By exploiting their own vulnerability, and through a mix of public oversight, grassroots organizing, financial support, and constant protests, the Hazaras have managed to keep their public schools staffed, the local public hospital running, and their streets clean. They also run dozens of private schools, clinics, vocational and language training centers, computer laboratories, libraries, and cultural centers independently of the state.

Outside Hazara areas, however, the story is different and dominated by military and political interests. Officials in the Planning and Development Department described their single biggest project: the Quetta Safe City Project, a 5-year project that promises security cameras, control rooms, coordination centers, and fiber optic connectivity for this massive surveillance infrastructure in the city. Other projects have included large new infrastructure like flyovers to ease traffic congestion, new school buildings, and new roads. The civil bureaucracy has lobbied for anti-encroachment and cleanliness drives and projects to rebuild sewers and green spaces—ostensibly at the behest of elected municipal bodies that do not have the resources to carry them out on their own. Bureaucrats, and even specialists at Balochistan’s Planning and Development Department, describe “no technical oversight” over selection of these projects and eventual disbursement of funds. Instead, they describe the process as “informal” but “formalized through rubberstamp approvals”.

The entire state administration, planning, and law and order machinery is therefore occupied by security concerns. These priorities have allowed the military to gain power and influence over all other institutions, and it has used both formal and informal channels to enforce compliance. However, this has also generated new policing strategies, and for the city’s Hazara population, new lived realities. The next section explores how Hazaras experience this context in Quetta.

Hazara-Cities: Fear, Security, and Activism

The interaction between authority, influence, and institutional politics in the state of paradox is a key determinant of lived experiences for the Hazaras in Quetta. They engage with these contradictions and contestations with their own claims and conflicts, forming and breaking coalitions as required to effectively make political claims on the state. The situation has forced them into walled Hazara enclaves where security and insecurity coexist and residents live the experience and fear of death in their everyday lives. They engage in coordinated and uncoordinated organization at both small and large scales and use that engagement to forward uniquely contextualized yet conflicting and contradictory narratives about the Hazara identity.

In this section, I explore the two Hazara settlements in Quetta as separate Hazara-cities, which exist as segregated localities almost independent of the rest of the city. I study what I call the atmosphere of “secure insecurity” that Hazaras must live every day, especially in trying to access areas outside of their settlements. Repeated security failures and acts of violence have taken hundreds of Hazara lives, inside and outside Hazara areas, and left most families with their own stories of death, loss, and mourning. I then study this interaction of life and death, and how death forms a way of life for the living. As such, Hazara political representatives must navigate the common problems of insecurity and institutional power imbalances on top of local Hazara activism as they seek support from the people. This leads to contesting claims of what it means to be Hazara. Different parties adopt different narratives about the Hazara identity, and local claims and contestations often gain prominence as the Hazaras collectively find ways to survive in Quetta.

Hazara-Cities Within the City

They call themselves the Quetta Hazara, but Quetta does not represent the city that Hazaras live in. Decades of violent attacks in various parts of Quetta have created new spatial dynamics for the community; they are segregated from other groups and concentrated in two areas of the city, both of which are physically walled and have paramilitary personnel guarding all access points. The Hazaras are now reluctant, even unable, to travel outside of these two settlements for fear of violence.

There are other examples of urban segregation in the world, often along ethnic lines as with Arabs in Israel (Yiftachel 2011), upper class ethno-religious enclaves in India (Falzon 2004), or walled communities in South America (Caldeira 2000). In Belfast, the city’s commercial core was protected through a “ring of steel” (Coaffee 2020). I have witnessed segregation in many Pakistani cities by ethnicity, religion, or class, and, in recent years, a range of law enforcement and security strategies to respond to terrorism. But the case of the Hazaras in Quetta particularly stands out for both its intensity and visibility. Like many others, the city itself is largely segregated by ethnic or (often sub-ethnic) tribal affiliations, but there are common public areas including institutions of higher education, markets, and places like intercity bus terminals. Hazara settlements, on the other hand, exist effectively like cities within the city.

The ongoing violence has forced Hazara students to abandon schools, colleges, and universities outside of these Hazara-cities. Almost all of Quetta’s Hazara-owned businesses have moved into these areas, and the Hazara-cities of Quetta now have their own convenience stores, bakeries, shoe stores, jewelers, cloth merchants, restaurants, travel agents, auto-mechanics, and even schools, clinics, and a drug rehabilitation center. A cab driver, who was a non-Hazara resident of Quetta, described himself as an “outsider” when I asked if he would be able to take me to either of the Hazara settlements. When I gained access and reached inside a Hazara settlement, my first respondent apologized for the extensive security cordons and remarked, “my non-Hazara friends often tell me we have everything inside and the only reason for interacting with the city outside is to go to the airport, Sad as it is, they’re right”.

Consolidation of these Hazara-cities is necessarily an inward-looking development, but they are still oriented outwards. Hazara-cities exist relationally with the city outside; most businesses that were once located in Quetta’s main markets are now situated at the edge of these Hazara-cities, right next to the heavily guarded pickets at the entrance. They still rely on old clientele from the better days, some of whom are happy to be return customers despite the additional scrutiny they go through at the entrance points. They must, therefore, move inwards to survive while looking outwards to sustain this survival.

This new relational co-existence also defines the paradox of life as a Hazara in Quetta. While the Hazara communities have traditionally lived close to one another, and the city has been an amalgam of different segregated settlements, they have never been walled out from the rest of the city, its public spaces, and its residents. Hazaras are now strictly segregated from non-Hazaras, and this binary is firmly enforced through the built environment. All Hazara respondents of this study saw the wall as a “necessary evil”. At the same time, most also acknowledge the socioeconomic, political, and psychological impact of this rigid separation and the resultant reproduction of segregation. Many, especially young respondents who were just starting families, are worried about their kids’ future as an “other” in Quetta—the same Quetta where they could “idly stroll down bazaars with (their) friends”, Hazara and non-Hazara, use public parks to play, and attend school or college in previous years. Many of the same spaces are now “no-go areas”, an informal designation used by Hazaras that signifies elevated risks they face therein. Respondents had general recognition of the constant fear that both Hazaras have leaving Hazara-cities and outsiders have coming into these Hazara-cities. As for Hazaras who wish to travel between the two Hazara-cities, they must do so using an informally designated “safe route” that the police and paramilitary claim to have “better security arrangements for”. The Hazara Organization for Peace and Equality (HOPE) maintains an updated, geotagged list of violent incidents as well as informal spatial designations (HOPE 2019) (see Map 1).

Map 1
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Hazara-cities, no-go areas, and the “safe route”: Life as a Hazara in Quetta. Source: (HOPE, 2019)

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This fear, apprehension, and yet also longing for the outside world and, ultimately, reliance of Hazara-cities on the city outside, interact with Quetta’s complex policing systems to produce peculiar interactions of Hazaras with the city. The simple act of buying vegetables from the wholesale market, for example, turns into an elaborate performance. Roads, streets, and the market itself become a stage for police officers, paramilitary, and Hazara vegetable buyers to play their parts with variable intensity. Internal police and paramilitary correspondence details how vegetable buying is done in one large convoy on a fixed day of the week; the entire exercise involves extensive coordination within and among all actors on this stage. Gun-mounted police vehicles escort the convoy, the entire route is sealed off to other forms of traffic and manned by armed policemen and paramilitary personnel, and the wholesale vegetable market is secured after a thorough sweep. The convoy proceeds, sirens blaring and with dozens of escorting policemen on high alert, as if it were responding to a critical emergency. Such securitization of mobility illustrates how interacting with Quetta is an occasional exception for many Hazaras, where security is juxtaposed alongside insecurity to create what I call secure insecurity with even greater intensity every week.

Secure Insecurity

Visitors to Quetta would be excused for thinking of Hazaras as the most protected community in the city. Gated, walled Hazara-cities, physical pickets manned by paramilitary soldiers, and police and paramilitary escorts for vegetable buyers, after all, project an environment of high vigilance and security for a specific group within the population. Such “hardening” (Coaffee 2020) has been successful in curbing the incidence of violent attacks in Quetta. Internal data shared with me by the police show that between 2012 and 2017, the total casualties from bombings and targeted gun attacks fell from 187 in 2012 to 52 in 2016. 2017 was the calmest year until the summer when I conducted my fieldwork, with four deaths from bombings and eight from targeted gun attacks until May 31st (see Table 1). All state security and law enforcement bodies see these numbers as an indication of success for their strategy and an improvement in security for the Hazaras.

Table 1 Incidents of violence in Quetta, 1-1-12 to 5-31-17
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However, there is another side to this success. According to the same data, 57 of the 93 deaths from targeted gun attacks in 2012 were sectarian—in other words, 57 Hazara Shi’is were targeted and killed in gun attacks in 2012 alone. 2013 saw multiple bombings inside Hazara settlements that claimed hundreds of lives in each of the two areas. Throughout the period for which I received data, most casualties were suffered by the Hazara community or by law enforcement agencies (LEAs) including the police and FC. This signifies that even with a reduced total incidence of violence and “hardened” access to Hazara-cities, the group remains a prime target in Quetta.

Security agencies have responded with even more target hardening. Yet even with segregation and reinforced security measures, attackers have managed to break through, leading to painful stories of death and destruction for Hazaras. The first of the 2013 attacks was an incident of twin-bombings in Marriabad, in which a suicide bomber blew himself up inside a snooker club in the main public square of the Hazara-city. Dozens of people died. As people, law enforcement agencies, and emergency responders gathered, another attacker drove up in an ambulance which exploded. Despite visibly higher vigilance, the second attack happened several weeks later in the second settlement of Hazara Town. A water-tanker, rigged with high-powered explosives, evaded paramilitary pickets and blew up in the Hazara-city. “The police and FC let him through,” a rescue worker, who responded to the second attack, recalled. “The blast was so intense, we couldn’t even find everybody’s remains.”

Hazara-cities, then, exist within unique environments of secure insecurity. Proponents of the wall appreciate its necessity even as they install surveillance cameras and recording devices in their houses and on street corners. Religious processions are “secured” by hundreds of paramilitary and police personnel working in coordination with local volunteers and leaders. All of this happens where even uniformed policemen and ambulance drivers are all untrustworthy and suspected of planning the next big attack against the community. This juxtaposition of security with insecurity creates new dynamics: of cooperation and coordination among various state agencies, of the coexistence of trust and mistrust, and of the unique interactions of Hazara vegetable buyers with security agencies that I described earlier. Additionally, it creates the circumstances of closely juxtaposed life and death for Hazaras, which I describe in the next section.

The Lived Experience of Death

In this atmosphere of secure insecurity, life goes on—and so does sudden, violent death. This is perhaps the most extreme of all juxtapositions: for the Hazaras of Quetta, life exists overtly alongside death. Instead of a dichotomous state distinct from life, death is part of the everyday, and actively shapes Hazara lived experiences of the city through the built environment, public spaces, naming conventions for popular places, and oral narratives.

Death is the single most visible and aural aspect of both of Quetta’s Hazara-cities. Banners, photographs, and paintings commemorating the martyred appear as soon as the Hazara-city starts. These banners are installed by locals and community organizations and are tied to gates, shutters, electricity poles, and even trees. In the Hazara settlement of Marriabad, this continues along the main road—called “Qabristan Road,” or “Graveyard Road”, through the area’s main public square and intersection—called “Shuhada Chowk,” or “Martyrs’ Intersection.” The same road leads all the way to the area’s graveyard.

As if to highlight the juxtaposition of death and life, sorrow and celebration, and melancholy and success, the graveyard sums up the lived experience of Hazaras in Quetta. The place is a revealing experience in itself: it carries intense emotions; long, harrowing tales of sorrow; and a community effort at place-making that left me astonished. People spend their evenings in the graveyard, praying for their loved ones lost to violence, narrating and re-narrating to one another their tales of woe, and burning incense and showering graves with petals. Some stories have become part of the common narrative; of that woman, for example, who lost her son in the first blast in 2013 and died standing by his grave the next day.

The graveyard is now the most prominent public space in the Hazara-city. It has been built to include a walking path that traverses the graves, and the space has extensive tree cover. Almost every tree in the graveyard is a signpost for commemorative banners: photographs of people who lost their lives; poetry to reminisce and celebrate their life and honor their martyrdom; and date, time, and other details of the incident that took their lives from them. Some posters make demands—“Protect the lives of the Hazara!”—and others honor the dozens of Hazaras who died while working as policemen. The entire built space of the graveyard is managed by an informal association of retired Hazaras who work diligently to water plants and trees, remove weeds and unwanted plants from the area, maintain the walking path, and plant flowers to beautify the space.

A place of death therefore becomes a place of solidarity, storytelling, political activism, even celebration—a place of life. It is a public display of sorrow but also expresses a commitment to building solidarities against the violence that engulfs the community. These narratives reinforce grassroots organizations in the Hazara-city, while also highlighting internal political claims and counter claims over the Hazara identity. I explore some of these contentions in the proceeding section.

Construction and Counter-Construction of the Hazara Identity

Existing amidst weak governance, with most of the city inaccessible to them, Hazaras in Quetta devise innovative ways to organize and make political claims from within their constrained environment. As an ethnic and sectarian minority spread across international borders, there are multiple identities to which the Hazaras can trace affiliation: some of the most prominent are ethnic (Hazara), religious (Muslim), sectarian (overwhelmingly Shi’i Muslim), and national (Pakistani or Afghan). Within these markers, there are further divisions (e.g., based on gender, age group, or educational background) but political discussions largely omit them amidst the city’s ethno-religious violence.

Most grassroots organizing that I have described earlier relies heavily on these different, and often competing, claims over the Hazara identity. Claims are constructed by reprioritizing the different markers—for religious activists, for example, Shi’i solidarity is paramount, while the ethnic Hazara marker is a priority for other groups. The goal, nevertheless, is to construct solidarities and maintain a network for financial, logistical, political, and social support. While both main claims (ethnic and sectarian) encourage high levels of community involvement and activism through a mutual emphasis on solidarities, they highlight different motivations for the same. Other markers of identity, like nationality (Pakistani or Afghan), are often couched within the broader debates around ethnicity and religious sect.

Regardless of their views on which identity marker to prioritize, Hazara activists exhibit high levels of political ownership of their areas, people, and resources. Most community organizations are managed through boards comprising of local donors, area residents, and community elders. However, most people on these boards are associated with one of the two main political parties that participate in the debate around how to use the Hazara identity to organize. These two parties (the Hazara Democratic Party (HDP) and Majlis Wahdatul Muslimeen (MWM)) therefore manage or indirectly influence separate, often competing, groups of small grassroots organizations with very different visions for the society. HDP prefers a non-religious outlook, focusing on the ethnic identity and organizing around culture, music, and modern education. It refuses to differentiate between Pakistani Hazaras and Afghan Hazaras and strongly advocates for stronger networks between Hazaras and other groups in Quetta. MWM, on the other hand, prioritizes religious and, within religion, sectarian affiliations. Instead of music and culture, which the party actively discourages, MWM works to organize religious processions, renovation and upgrading of mosques, and national solidarity among Shi’i Muslims across the country. Its notion of peaceful coexistence is rooted in sectarian and religious peace.

These contrasting perspectives create equally diverging narratives to explain the violence in Quetta and steps taken to curb it. Both MWM and HDP acknowledge unique vulnerabilities of the combined Hazara identity but promote different steps as possible solutions. Religious groups and the MWM see the violence as a sectarian construct and come out strongly in support of the “target-hardening” approach by law enforcement agencies. They have also contributed to the formation of the “Hazara-city” within Quetta; by accepting segregation and an inaccessible city as necessary outcomes, they have instead focused on bringing the city to Hazaras inside their areas. On the other hand, the HDP strongly opposes the wall and its enforced segregation, and the inability to travel to other areas of Quetta. Party leaders identify ethnic prejudice as a source of instability and violence and suggest that such divisions can only be dealt with through greater interaction with other groups. An analytical distinction is important here; unlike colonial violence by the state in Israel (Yiftachel 2011) and communal violence in India (Varshney 2002), the violence against Hazaras is perpetrated by terrorist groups that do not necessarily command large-scale support among the government or non-Hazara groups in Quetta. In that sense, this violence targets a certain group but is non-communal. Both main political parties acknowledge as much, insisting that they “have no problems talking to people from other communities.”

With these differences in the foreground, political campaigns in Hazara areas are intense and highly charged. Leaders with self-proclaimed “secular” ideologies accuse religious groups of receiving funding from Iran, while they get criticized for ignoring the Pakistani identity in supporting Afghan Hazaras. Both parties blame each other for fomenting unrest and prejudice, one on an ethnic basis and the other on sectarian grounds. Yet, despite the visibly charged political atmosphere, these contesting narratives are intricately linked to one another as the two parties recognize one another and often work in tandem on key issues of public service, infrastructure provision, and protest. They prioritize different themes in activism, but it is rare to find two different groups or community organizations doing the same thing for the same people. Despite their claims of being either religious or secular, they organize a community deeply affiliated with both religion and ethnicity.

As a result, both parties come together in critical moments. After multiple attacks in January 2013, the Hazaras refused to bury their dead and used their bodies to protest in the streets of Quetta for days. Despite fundamental and prominent differences on the causes of violence and what the state could do to support them, activists from both parties participated in a protest all Hazara respondents recalled enthusiastically. This was not just the suspension of differences under extremely difficult circumstances; it was the generation of new solidarities among Hazaras themselves and between Hazaras and other groups, made possible by the contradictory statements issued by Hazara leaders who addressed the protestors. One party declared that the state had failed the Shi’is. The other insisted that the attack was not symptomatic of deeper Sunni-Shi’i schisms, but a general failure of the state to enforce its writ and take cognizance of the Hazaras’ collective vulnerability. Together, they agreed that the state had failed—and many non-Hazaras from around the country participated in this “act of citizenship” (Isin and Nielsen 2008) and witnessed the contest over the Hazara identity play out between the HDP and MWM. After 3 days of massive protests, the provincial government was suspended and promises of greater security were made.

Much of the physical manifestation of Hazara-cities, including the walls and tight security check posts, appeared as a result of the attacks and protests of 2013. When they happened, the protests represented the spillover of Hazara politics into the streets of Quetta. They also illustrated the coexistence of life and death, where the dead helped the living make a political claim. At the same time, they highlighted the everyday juxtaposition of security and insecurity: in the months that followed, Hazara-cities became a stronger reality as walls were built, security check posts set up, and Hazaras moved their everyday life from Quetta to these Hazara-cities. The contest to establish a dominant political Hazara narrative has since continued, as has local activism and organization amidst the state’s own focus on security.

The Interaction of Juxtapositions in Quetta

The case study of Quetta, and in particular the city’s Hazara population, reveals a rich array of juxtaposed differences—spatial, political, institutional, social, cultural—that shape both the structures of urban governance and lived urban experience. The city and its divides show how seemingly contradictory or even conflicting forces can exist both in opposition and in productive relation to one another. The complexity of interactions generated by these juxtapositions is well illustrated by the example of the state as it operates in Quetta. It is not a unitary monolith with all agents following the same agenda. Rather, as I show, the state has its own internal contests over power, influence, and resources, expressed through and shaping the practices of different agencies and institutions. In this process, legally defined jurisdictions are often ignored if not deliberately violated. As multiple state actors compete to assert their respective legal jurisdictions, a new kind of jurisdictional mode is generated: fluid, strategic, and based on the clout of individual officers. In cities challenged by chronic violence and other security issues, this can lead to security institutions accumulating greater say in administrative affairs.

This context is also particularly generative for forms of local organizing among the Hazaras. On the one hand, local activism has continued in spite of the violence. On the other hand, social and political organizations and groups have found new ways to make their claims because of this violence and its implications. The constant loss of lives faced by Hazara families has confronted them with the constant simultaneity of security and insecurity, and life and death. In certain urban spaces such as graveyards, this has also generated new kinds of solidarities and socialities in their sharing of stories of loss. At the same time, even as they deploy competing narratives of Hazara political identity and activism, local political parties recognize one another and have found solidarity during key moments of common protest, as evidenced in 2013. In a city where the state has chosen to wall them in for the sake of “security,” Hazaras have constructed their own Hazara-cities, and with this, their own versions of what it means to live and survive in relation to the rest of Quetta.

Another arena of productive difference arises through the dynamic interaction between formal authority and local forms of political organizing. Here, one observes, on the one hand, Hazara protesters using their collective presence outside Hazara-cities as a pressure tactic on the state, and on the other, powerful institutions like the military taking advantage of Hazara protests to pressurize civilian political and bureaucratic leaders. This generates another kind of juxtaposition—that of the co-presence of invented and invited spaces (Miraftab and Wills 2005)—as protesters use the walls to invent spaces of political protest beyond them.

How these invited and invented spaces have interacted, however, merits more study. It is apparent, and accepted by both Hazara and military respondents, that the military supported the Hazara protest of 2013 and used it to pressurize the political and bureaucratic executives. That protest led to the dismissal of the political government in the province—and resulted in the paramilitary and military institutions assuming even greater powers to secure Hazara lives and make the city safer. As such, a local act of insurgent citizenship led to strengthening of the status quo, taking authority away from political institutions and delivering them to unelected ones. Existing theorization of walled compounds by Caldeira (2000) applies in some ways to Quetta’s Hazara settlements, and the violence they face is surely “spectacular” (Davis 2006). Similarly, the political struggle for a dominant Hazara identity, and the surrounding networks of solidarities and resistance, resemble Bayat’s theorization of everyday resistance (2012). However, while these outcomes are prima facie similar to those described above, the contexts are structurally very different from Quetta. Walled Hazara-cities in Quetta are not elitist projects aimed at creating sanitized spaces for a particular economic class, but state-led exercises in target-hardening that include people of all economic backgrounds. State-sanctioned security measures, including the spectacle of buying vegetables, are detested by the very shoppers they protect, who described them as inconvenient, and by many Hazara leaders who criticize them for “normalizing Quetta’s militarized environment”. Perhaps most critically, local Hazara activists of both ethnic and religious dispositions reminisce longingly about better days when anybody could walk anywhere and with anyone in the city, with no ethnicized risks of violence.

Amidst the continuous evolution of violent conflict and displacement in many parts of the world—be this produced through religious or ideologically driven conflict, or the violence of capital in crisis—various juxtapositions of difference will continue to create new and even more complex urbanities that current theoretical models may fail to capture. As these interactions and contradictions create more juxtacities, it is imperative that they be studied in their own specificities, and from many perspectives, including the unique geographical, historical, social, political, and economic context of each.