Insecure Guardians: Enforcement, Encounters, and Everyday Policing in Post-Colonial Karachi: by Zoha Waseem, New York, Oxford University Press, 2022, 328 pp., $55 (hardcover), ISBN: 9780197663615.

We find that the National Highway and Motorway Police of Pakistan ("NHMP") operates on the metropolitan police model as opposed to the Irish constabulary, paramilitaristic model that the Karachi police is based on. Both work through an operating manual that can be broadly conceived of as "procedural informality" - what Waseem calls the "core outcome" of Pakistan's brand of post-colonial policing. Zoha Waseem's work on what she dubs the "post-colonial condition of policing" in the megapolis of Karachi offers vibrant insights into the institutionally battered souls that populate the rank and file of Karachi's police force, as well as the powerful, oft paradoxical slices of the upper air that schematise politics, industry, and policing in a permanent quest for hegemony. [Extracted from the article]