Under the Gun: Political Parties and Violence in Pakistan
by Dr Niloufer Siddiqui
Cambridge University Press 2022, pp272

Reviewed by: Dr Zoha Waseem, University of Warwick
20 December 2024
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Why, how, and under what conditions, do political parties—a core component of democratic systems—engage in, or facilitate, violence? Through a party-level analysis—grounded in an in-depth study of how parties are organised and structured in Pakistan, how party workers are recruited and socialised, and how internal cultures of these systems develop—Under the Gun offers a novel way of understanding party behaviour and political violence across democratic and hybrid contexts.

Niloufer Siddiqui argues that party violence is not simply a consequence of weak state capacity. Instead, key economic and political considerations and circumstances are taken into account when parties assess the incentives of engaging in violence by deploying it through party workers, or allying with—what Siddiqui calls—“violence specialists”. Violence specialists are nonstate armed and autonomous actors, either within the party structure or outside the party apparatus, who “may agree to engage in violent acts because they are promised material spoils, such as jobs or contracts; aspire to form connections with state and bureaucratic actors with access to resources; or are promised immunity for their involvement in criminal activity or other acts of violence” (p 5-6). In the context of weak state capacity or partial state control, parties may resort to violence when their constituencies (ethnically or religiously aligned) may tolerate or reward the use of violence.

In deploying violence, therefore, political parties must consider (i) the incentives for using violence in each political environment, (ii) the costs they might incur, particularly from voters who might hold the party accountable for using violence, and (iii) its own capacity for violence. In essence, when designing their violence strategy, parties must take into account their organisational structure and determine whether the party can carry out violence itself or whether it must outsource violence to these “violence specialists”. Therefore, Siddiqui further argues that party organisational structure greatly determines how and to what extent a political party will rely on violence. Organisationally strong parties have extensive local presence, robust party apparatus, and rely on their own party workers to contest elections. Organisationally weak parties, on the other hand, may have little presence on the ground, weak apparatus, and may thus choose to rely on local elites for electoral alliances and associated violence. These factors combined determine whether parties outsource violence to external specialists (ethnic militia, criminal gangs, vigilantes, paramilitaries, etc.), or carry out direct party violence through in-house violence specialists (i.e. party members and workers).

Although party-level analysis is key to Siddiqui’s core argument, it is woven together with discussion on interactions between parties, voters, violence specialists, and state actors. In doing so, Siddiqui not only offers new ways of understanding internal party culture, but also more comprehensive and holistic ways of understanding party behaviour as being influenced by both organisational as well as political and relational factors.

Diverse primary source data, gathered across Pakistan over the course of almost a decade, makes Siddiqui’s analysis empirically rich. Using Pakistan as her key site of study, Siddiqui employs a within-case analysis and examines party behaviour across time and space, focusing notably on the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) and the Awami National Party (ANP) in Karachi; the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PMLN) in Punjab; the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) in rural Sindh and Karachi; as well as the ANP in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP). Through a multi-method approach Siddiqui offers qualitative insights from extensive fieldwork in Pakistan and quantitative analysis of a survey carried out among potential voters in Sindh, Punjab, and KP. While qualitative fieldwork gives the reader an inside glance into party strategy and decision-making through interviews, a conjoint experiment allowed Siddiqui to inform us about the effects of ethnicity, clientelism, and party violence on voter preferences. Furthermore, Siddiqui also relies upon a survey that she conducted in Karachi in the lead up to the 2018 polls, a phone survey of elected politicians in Pakistan, and existing original datasets on politicians, violence, exit poll data, and other datasets in Pakistan.

The book consists of four impressive empirical chapters (Chapters 4-7) that detail how and to what extent violence is instrumentalised by political parties in Pakistan. Chapter 4 focuses on the MQM in Karachi and its reliance upon direct party violence. In this case, the MQM, an organisationally strong political party, benefited from the use of violence, criminality, and extortion, generating both revenue and votes, without losing the support of its constituency. Voter support was maintained through the idea that the Muhajir ethnic identity was under threat and that the party was resorting to violence to protect this group. The cost of using violence remained low until state actors (chiefly the military) drastically altered the party’s organisational structure and reduced both the incentives and capacity for the MQM to engage in violence. In Chapter 5, Siddiqui turns to the PPP, an organisationally weak political party (lacking in local-level organisational capacity) that claims to represent primarily the ethnic Sindhis population, and who outsourced violence to an ethnic militia and criminal gang in Karachi (the People’s Aman Committee). By outsourcing violence to these “violence specialists”, the PPP was able to benefit from violence as well, engaging in criminal activity including extortion as well as turf wars with political competitors such as the MQM, especially in the neighbourhood of Lyari, till a violent state crackdown in 2011 weakened the PAC and cost the PPP political defeat in the 2018 elections.

In Chapter 6, Siddiqui turns to the PML-N to see how this party formed alliances with other violence specialists, i.e. sectarian actors, in Punjab. The PML-N, an organisationally weak political party, lacking in local-level presence (like the PPP in Sindh), patronised influential anti-Shia sectarian militant groups for electoral gains, turning a “blind eye” to the violence carried out by these groups. In Chapter 7, she turns to the ANP in KP and Karachi. While the party has engaged in violence in Karachi, it has refrained from doing so in KP, an interesting dynamic that reminds us that a party must consider its political environment and support bases before assessing the costs and benefits of engaging in violence. Finally, in Chapter 8, Siddiqui briefly considers an out-of-sample case of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI), another organisationally weak political party that, till the time of publication, had been unable to engage in violence. Siddiqui’s book therefore serves as a critical starting point for scholars interested in the political violence observed in Pakistan in the aftermath of the events that led to former PM Imran Khan’s ouster and subsequent arrest.

Siddiqui’s analysis then takes a comparative turn, examining party violence in selected shadow cases of Nigeria, the Philippines, and India. In Nigeria, for example, we learn that parties frequently rely upon violence specialists. The PDP – the most prominent political party – is organisationally weak (like the PPP) and has relied upon the practice of outsourcing its violence to a militia, the Bakassi Boys (comparable to the use of the PAC in Karachi). In the Philippines, although ethnic cleavages are absent, parties liaise with violence specialists ahead of elections and otherwise, because of their weak organisational structures and in the absence of strong supporter bases. In India, Siddiqui compares the Shiv Sena in Mumbai – an organisationally strong, ethnic party – to the MQM in Karachi, showing how ethnic cleavages overlap with existing criminal networks and patron-client relations to enable the party to engage in violence through its own party cadre and workers.

In this impressive academic endeavour, Siddiqui studies the intersections of violence and democracy, making a critical contribution across disciplines, especially political science, but her book should also appeal to criminologists and sociologists. Through its investigation of how political parties organise and structure violence in strategic and relational ways (a dynamic that remains under-explored in studies on political violence within political science), Siddiqui argues for the need to consider the incentives and costs associated with party violence and the role of organisational capacity in enabling party violence, highlighting the varied ways that violence benefits political parties. Above all, her scholarship makes an exciting and timely contribution to our understanding of contemporary Pakistani politics, where parties across the spectrum and across time and space have been directly or indirectly complicit in electoral, criminal, and armed violence, and continue to rely upon a plethora of coercive institutions and actors, both state and non-state, to mete out repression against their critics and political opponents, both for electoral and nonelectoral gains.

© Bloomsbury Pakistan 2024

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