Under the Gun: Political Parties and Violence in Pakistan (Cambridge University Press)
Political parties are integral to democratic systems. Yet, while often necessary for democratization and state building, they frequently engage in violent behavior that impedes progress toward those ends. Political parties employ violence directly, when their activists and cadres target political opponents. They outsource violent tasks to criminal gangs and ethnic militias who do their violent bidding in exchange for access to state resources and impunity. And they form electoral alliances with local patrons who maintain vote banks through the control of micro-level clientelistic structures and, often, through coercion and intimidation. Under what conditions do democratic actors such as political parties conduct or abet violence? Why do parties refrain from violence in some locales but engage in it in others? What determines the strategy of violence that a party employs—whether it engages in violence directly, outsources to another group, or allies with violent actors—and how do these strategies in turn affect the overall levels of violence in society? That is, when do political parties impede democratization and the process of state building rather than strengthen it?
Under the Gun explores these questions in the context of Pakistan. Its central claim is that party violence and electoral alliances with violence specialists are not simple manifestations of weak state capacity; rather, political and economic conditions structure the incentives that political parties have to maintain violence specialists either within their party apparatus or externally. States are then, at least in part, unable to establish a monopoly of violence because nominally democratic actors—competing parties seeking to be electorally viable—have incentives to further inhibit state capacity of coercive force by maintaining strategic partnerships with non-state violence specialists rather than eliminating them altogether. What is commonly understood to be state failure due to a lack of state capacity is instead the intentional product of particular political incentives, further complicating the process of democratization.
This book develops an argument for why and how political parties employ violence by focusing deliberately on the political party itself, a “meso-level” analysis. It argues that a party’s particular violence strategy depends on the incentives it faces in the subnational political landscape in which it operates, the cost it incurs from its voters for that strategy, and its organizational capacity for violence, highlighting the party apparatus itself.
I test my theory employing a rigorous, multi-method approach, including interviews with about 150 Pakistani politicians, party workers, journalists, civil society members, voters, and law enforcement officials in 22 months of fieldwork; visits to party headquarters, events, and offices; observation of meetings between party representatives and voters in both rural and urban constituencies; and focus groups with both voters and party members. I also draw on three original surveys (one multi-province survey of 1,900 voters, with an embedded conjoint experiment; another survey focused on Pakistan’s largest city of Karachi, among 1,805 residents; and a survey of 251 elected legislators), and quantitative analysis of newly compiled historical election and violence data. Building on these sources and data, this book provides one of the first theoretical and empirical examinations of the complicated dynamics between political parties and democracy.
Pakistan's Political Parties: Surviving between Dictatorship and Democracy (co-edited volume with Mariam Mufti & Sahar Shafqat). Georgetown University Press, 2020.
"This is truly an important contribution to the literature on political parties and electoral considerations in Pakistan. There is nothing like it that currently exists."--Charles H. Kennedy, professor, Department of Political Science and International Relations and Director, Middle East and South Asia Program, Wake Forest University
"This is a long overdue, but essential, contribution to our understanding of Pakistan. With an impressive author list, this will become the go-to book on understanding political parties in Pakistan's hybrid regime."--Katharine Adeney, Director of the University of Nottingham Asia Research Institute
"This wonderful book is absolutely indispensable for understanding Pakistan's democracy, and all of the main actors and interests involved. The various authors manage very effectively to combine deep knowledge of Pakistan's political parties, social groups, and interests, with the comparative breadth to put everything into broader theoretical perspective."--Steven Wilkinson, Henry R. Luce Director, The Whitney & Betty MacMillan Center for International & Area Studies; Nilekani Professor of India & South Asian Studies; and professor of political science & international affairs, Yale University