Questão 741269

Text 1

Book Review 1 –

Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City

by Laurent Gayer

With an official population approaching fifteen million, Karachi is one of the largest cities in the world. It is also the most violent. Since the mid-1980s, it has endured endemic political conflict and criminal violence, which revolve around control of the city and its resources (votes, land and bhatta — “protection” money). These struggles for the city have become ethnicized. Karachi, often referred to as a “Pakistan in miniature”, has become increasingly fragmented, socially as well as territorially.

Despite this chronic state of urban political warfare, Karachi is the cornerstone of the economy of Pakistan. Gayer’s book is an attempt to elucidate this conundrum. Against journalistic accounts describing Karachi as chaotic and ungovernable, he argues that there is indeed order of a kind in the city’s permanent civil war. Far from being entropic, Karachi’s polity is predicated upon organisational, interpretative and pragmatic routines that have made violence “manageable” for its populations. Whether such “ordered disorder” is viable in the long term remains to be seen, but for now Karachi works despite — and sometimes through — violence.

Source: <www.amazon.com>.. Retrieved on: March 2, 2014.

Text 2

Book Review 2 –

The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia’s New Geopolitics

by Andrew Small

1 ____ The Beijing-Islamabad axis plays a central role in

Asia’s geopolitics, from India’s rise to the prospects for a

post-American Afghanistan, from the threat of nuclear

4 terrorism to the continent’s new map of mines, ports and

pipelines. China is Pakistan’s great economic hope and its most

trusted military partner; Pakistan is the battleground for

7 China’s encounters with Islamic militancy and the heart of its

efforts to counter-balance the emerging US-India partnership.

For decades, each country has been the other’s only

10 ‘all-weather’ friend. Yet the relationship is still little

understood. The wildest claims about it are widely believed,

while many of its most dramatic developments are hidden from

13 the public eye. This book sets out the recent history of

Sino-Pakistani ties and their ramifications for the West, for

India, for Afghanistan, and for Asia as a whole. It tells the

16 stories behind some of its most sensitive aspects, including

Beijing’s support for Pakistan’s nuclear program, China’s

dealings with the Taliban, and the Chinese military’s planning

19 for crises in Pakistan. It describes a relationship increasingly

shaped by Pakistan’s internal strife, and the dilemmas China

faces between the need for regional stability and the imperative

22 for strategic competition with India and the USA.

Source: <www.amazon.com>. Retrieved on: March 2, 2014.

Based on the information conveyed by the two book reviews, judge the items right (C) or wrong (E).

The first review implies that the book author’s point of view is explicit in the narrative, whereas the second indicates the book presents an impartial account of the state of affairs.