Chai, Change, Chatter: Migration and State at Quetta Tea Cafes

The study explores the production of state spaces in the wake of developmental politics by tracing the experience of state in the stories of internal migration resulting in Quetta Tea Cafes (QCs) - generic name of an informal tea-selling franchise in Islamabad. The purpose of this study is to problematize the structural (e.g., Marxist) and functional (e.g., Weberian) understanding of state in Pakistan, i.e., a state is a set of institutions with designated functions, mainly to further the interests of a particular class/group. The structural and functional theories of state in Pakistan have historically culminated in security state and developmental state perspectives. However, recent studies show that state is not a static/top-down entity and is produced and reproduced as a processual space in the anthropological domain through a repetitive and collective performance of social and bureaucratic acts which cannot be restricted to macroeconomy, revenue collection, security, or territoriality. An ethnography of the public sphere that has taken shape at the select QCs from eight zones of Islamabad can reveal insights into the Pashtoon migrants’ experience of state who fled from Balochistan, apparently because of violence, poverty, and climate change and established QCs as a nuanced model of migrant commerce in urban Pakistan. The conditions in the migrants’ home districts and the opportunities in Islamabad are constitutive of the developmental politics, which is a mix of securitized periphery, ethnopolitical migration trail, and urban business landscape. This politics takes place through an active engagement between state and its subjects operationalizing the logic of economic growth, blurring the security-development distinction, since state is performed in both these realms at the same time with varying spaces across the country’s geography.