This dissertation seeks to understand the ways in which Pakistani government’s attempts to initiate large-scale infrastructure development projects in Balochistan Province have transformed its social and political landscape. Ethnographically, the study focuses on Gwadar, a small coastal town in Pakistan’s western Balochistan Province to show how colonial and postcolonial projects of progress and development suppress or subsume other kinds of lived geographies and imaginations of place. Keeping in mind the centrality of everyday experiences in generating social forms, this dissertation describes how development, transnationalism, and ethnic identity are (re)configured. It is based on ethnographic encounters that foreground the lived experiences and imaginations of fishermen from Med kinship and occupational group who occupy a subaltern position within the local status hierarchy in Gwadar. On the one hand, the promise of becoming modern citizens of the future mega city incites new desires and longings among those fishermen that facilitate their incorporation into emergent regimes of labor and entrepreneurship. On the other hand, Pakistani security forces have tightened their control over the local population by establishing a cordon sanitaire around Gwadar Port and the town. These mechanisms of control have disrupted local fishermen`s experiences of place and intimate sociality and introduced elements of exclusion, fear, and paranoia. By interrupting the fishermen`s expectations of their rightful place in the city, it compels them to think of alternate ways to confront the state’s development agenda, including peaceful protest and armed struggle. The dissertation concludes, tentatively, that the imposition of political violence by state authorities that accompanies the structural violence of mega infrastructure projects tends to create a mirror effect whereby the victims of development adopt a language of violence and a different idiom of identity. / text

No / The management and incorporation of ethnic identities in Pakistan has historically been far more problematic in Balochistan than other provinces and regions. With the killing in 2006 of Akbar Bugti, a leading political figure who was the head of the Bugti tribe and served as federal minister, chief minister and Governor of Balochistan, the province became politically polarised and has descended into a new cycle of bombings, abductions and murders. The rebellion has resulted in a major security operation pitting the security forces against the Baloch people, attacks against Punjabi settlers and sectarian violence against Hazara Shias that collectively threaten to derail major development projects and increase instability in Pakistan as a whole at a critical juncture. This article examines the insurgency in Balochistan and evaluates various perspectives that have been used to explain the present crisis: external intervention, resistance to social change, resource driven conflict theory, transnationalism and diaspora, and failure to manage difference. After examining the evidence it concludes by arguing that the primary cause for the insurgency in Pakistan is due to poor management of difference.