Adeem Suhail
Biographic Data
| ID | 629941 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Adeem Suhail |
| GIVEN NAMES | Adeem |
| FAMILY NAME | Suhail |
| SIGNATURE | SUHAIL A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Emory University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7040-7602 |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 6 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 11 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
The brokerage of order in Karachi
This article reframes Lyari’s gangs in Karachi as brokers of political order rather than merely criminal entities. Drawing on five years of ethnographic and archival research, it argues that the figure of the ‘gangster’ functioned as a political intermediary, stabilizing contradictions between military regimes, capital accumulation, and working-class urban life. Through portraits of three interlocutors—a tragic and unlikely ‘gangster’, a gang und…
Research Ethics and the Chimera of Postcolonial Policing: Reflections after Zoha Waseem’s Insecure Guardians (2023)
Sacropolitics
Two decades into the twenty-first century, a panoply of formerly separate movements, interests, organizations, and individuals have converged around shared anxieties about the future of life on earth. This article focuses on the implicit logic on which this "cult(ure) of extinction" is based. We refer to this logic as sacropolitics-the politics of mass public sacrifice. We suggest that sacropolitics describes a practical reimagining of the politi…
On Urban Re‐arrangements: A Suite in Five Movements
This movement introduces the ethos of the collective project: its conceptual and practical preoccupations. It focuses on our concern with urban processes on the cusp of change, in the midst of being re‐arranged, and thus homes in on the various polyrhythms of intersections, how things come together and diverge, how possibilities open and close in urban contexts of continuously shifting horizons
Movement 5. Sensing the Affective Lives of Arrangements
This final movement explores whether thinking with re‐arrangements can help us account for that which is hidden, unseen or nested in the recesses and folds of urban practices. And if so, how we might then talk about and account for elusive parts of an arrangement that both exert an influence and are influenced. This essay uses sensibilities as an entry point into the intangible interactions between subjects and (re)arrangements
Movement 3. Navigating Urban Arrangements
The third movement explores how (re)arrangements are made and re‐worked as people navigate fractured, ever‐shifting landscapes of urban opportunity, conflict and uncertainty. Drawing on fieldwork in Paris, Mogadishu and Abidjan, we point to the fragile, collective and anticipatory knowledges accumulated during navigations, and to how these knowledges become contained within and (re)constitute embodied archives
Movement 2. Formalizing Arrangements: Re‐signification and the Making of Governable Spaces
The second movement considers (re)arrangements as projects of formalization that seek to impose and even fix a form to spaces historically constructed as marginal. This impositional arrangement operates as a governmental desire to fix a form by re‐signifying both subjects and spaces
Movement 4. Breath Sigh Tempest: On the Temporal Dimensions of Re‐arrangements
The fourth movement explores the temporal relationship between arrangements and re‐arrangements, addressing the question of how an obdurate and ‘sticky’ temporal order may give way to palpable re‐arrangement of the ways in which subjects experience time. Eschewing a concern with linear homogenous time, it addresses the processes of re‐arrangement by understanding the dynamics of grave events, hauntings of the past, subtly changing rhythms of ever…
State Formation
Anthropological debates about state formation take two broad forms. One considers state formation as a set of organizational processes that culminate in a coercive institution called the state. The other approach considers state formation as a cultural process that creates the illusion that such an institution exists. It is by means of this illusion, or mask, that the intolerability of political subjection is made to appear as an inevitable and u…
Our City, Your Crisis: The Baloch of Karachi and the Partition of British India
This essay approaches the Partition of British India through the perspective of the Baloch inhabitants of Karachi, who locate the city at the centre of diverse political geographies and cultural lineages. We specifically look at the testimony of the residents of Karachi's historic neighbourhoods of Qiyamahsari and Lyari. Their narratives demonstrate how Partition spelled the end of certain forms of socio-political life in the city, while reaffirm…
Saadia Toor: The State of Islam: culture and cold war politics in Pakistan
Movement 3. Navigating Urban Arrangements
The third movement explores how (re)arrangements are made and re‐worked as people navigate fractured, ever‐shifting landscapes of urban opportunity, conflict and uncertainty. Drawing on fieldwork in Paris, Mogadishu and Abidjan, we point to the fragile, collective and anticipatory knowledges accumulated during navigations, and to how these knowledges become contained within and (re)constitute embodied archives
Our City, Your Crisis: The Baloch of Karachi and the Partition of British India
This essay approaches the Partition of British India through the perspective of the Baloch inhabitants of Karachi, who locate the city at the centre of diverse political geographies and cultural lineages. We specifically look at the testimony of the residents of Karachi's historic neighbourhoods of Qiyamahsari and Lyari. Their narratives demonstrate how Partition spelled the end of certain forms of socio-political life in the city, while reaffirm…
On Urban Re‐arrangements: A Suite in Five Movements
This movement introduces the ethos of the collective project: its conceptual and practical preoccupations. It focuses on our concern with urban processes on the cusp of change, in the midst of being re‐arranged, and thus homes in on the various polyrhythms of intersections, how things come together and diverge, how possibilities open and close in urban contexts of continuously shifting horizons
Movement 2. Formalizing Arrangements: Re‐signification and the Making of Governable Spaces
The second movement considers (re)arrangements as projects of formalization that seek to impose and even fix a form to spaces historically constructed as marginal. This impositional arrangement operates as a governmental desire to fix a form by re‐signifying both subjects and spaces
Saadia Toor: The State of Islam: culture and cold war politics in Pakistan
Our City, Your Crisis: The Baloch of Karachi and the Partition of British India
This essay approaches the Partition of British India through the perspective of the Baloch inhabitants of Karachi, who locate the city at the centre of diverse political geographies and cultural lineages. We specifically look at the testimony of the residents of Karachi's historic neighbourhoods of Qiyamahsari and Lyari. Their narratives demonstrate how Partition spelled the end of certain forms of socio-political life in the city, while reaffirm…
State Formation
Anthropological debates about state formation take two broad forms. One considers state formation as a set of organizational processes that culminate in a coercive institution called the state. The other approach considers state formation as a cultural process that creates the illusion that such an institution exists. It is by means of this illusion, or mask, that the intolerability of political subjection is made to appear as an inevitable and u…
On Urban Re‐arrangements: A Suite in Five Movements
This movement introduces the ethos of the collective project: its conceptual and practical preoccupations. It focuses on our concern with urban processes on the cusp of change, in the midst of being re‐arranged, and thus homes in on the various polyrhythms of intersections, how things come together and diverge, how possibilities open and close in urban contexts of continuously shifting horizons
Movement 5. Sensing the Affective Lives of Arrangements
This final movement explores whether thinking with re‐arrangements can help us account for that which is hidden, unseen or nested in the recesses and folds of urban practices. And if so, how we might then talk about and account for elusive parts of an arrangement that both exert an influence and are influenced. This essay uses sensibilities as an entry point into the intangible interactions between subjects and (re)arrangements
Movement 3. Navigating Urban Arrangements
The third movement explores how (re)arrangements are made and re‐worked as people navigate fractured, ever‐shifting landscapes of urban opportunity, conflict and uncertainty. Drawing on fieldwork in Paris, Mogadishu and Abidjan, we point to the fragile, collective and anticipatory knowledges accumulated during navigations, and to how these knowledges become contained within and (re)constitute embodied archives
Movement 2. Formalizing Arrangements: Re‐signification and the Making of Governable Spaces
The second movement considers (re)arrangements as projects of formalization that seek to impose and even fix a form to spaces historically constructed as marginal. This impositional arrangement operates as a governmental desire to fix a form by re‐signifying both subjects and spaces
Movement 4. Breath Sigh Tempest: On the Temporal Dimensions of Re‐arrangements
The fourth movement explores the temporal relationship between arrangements and re‐arrangements, addressing the question of how an obdurate and ‘sticky’ temporal order may give way to palpable re‐arrangement of the ways in which subjects experience time. Eschewing a concern with linear homogenous time, it addresses the processes of re‐arrangement by understanding the dynamics of grave events, hauntings of the past, subtly changing rhythms of ever…
Sacropolitics
Two decades into the twenty-first century, a panoply of formerly separate movements, interests, organizations, and individuals have converged around shared anxieties about the future of life on earth. This article focuses on the implicit logic on which this "cult(ure) of extinction" is based. We refer to this logic as sacropolitics-the politics of mass public sacrifice. We suggest that sacropolitics describes a practical reimagining of the politi…
Research Ethics and the Chimera of Postcolonial Policing: Reflections after Zoha Waseem’s Insecure Guardians (2023)
The brokerage of order in Karachi
This article reframes Lyari’s gangs in Karachi as brokers of political order rather than merely criminal entities. Drawing on five years of ethnographic and archival research, it argues that the figure of the ‘gangster’ functioned as a political intermediary, stabilizing contradictions between military regimes, capital accumulation, and working-class urban life. Through portraits of three interlocutors—a tragic and unlikely ‘gangster’, a gang und…
Sociology (8 works) · Political science (7 works) · Aesthetics (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Art (5 works) · Epistemology (5 works) · Movement (music (5 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Philosophy (4 works)