Islands of Dispossession: Worlding and Counter-Worlding Urban Futures in Karachi

Two islands off Karachi’s coast, historically owned and communally spatialised by the indigenous Mallah (fisher folk) community, have become contested sites of urban restructuring. Having thwarted two previous dispossession attempts, the Mallah now face an intensified threat with the establishment of the Pakistan Island Development Authority (PIDA), an autonomous legal body, to aggressively push forward an ambitious, $50b island city project. This article draws on fieldwork and secondary sources to critically examine the struggle between the Mallah, as subaltern actors engaging in everyday resistance, and the state, functioning as a worlding broker in concert with private capital. It explores how normativising knowledge geographies are produced by reinscribing indigenous spatialities and recoding their cosmological registers, ultimately instantiating the islands as terra nullius—uninhabited and available for (re)worlding as sites of speculative accumulation. Importantly, this article centres the Mallah’s spatial and cultural politics of defiance and subversion, conceptualised here as counter-worlding practices, which seek to expose both localised and transnational contingencies within the worlding assemblage.