Over the end credits of Chris Morris’ 2010 film Four Lions the innocent brother of one of the four homegrown jihadists finds himself the victim of a surrogate extradition. Placed in a shipping container within a hanger in RAF Mildenhall, he is told he has left Britain and for all intents and purposes the container in which they sit is now Egypt, and beyond the steel walls wait some torturous Egyptian interrogators. All it took to achieve this crude conjuring trick of sovereignty, rendering invisible the boundaries between rural Suffolk and an Egyptian torture cell, was a chameleonic shipping container, the ubiquitous unit that has been called the “hidden plumbing of globalisation”.
Pakistani journalists Bina Shah and Farooq A Khan recently reported on the adoption of the portmanteau “Containeristan” in response to the ascent of the shipping container to the status of political icon during the course of anti-government protests. Since at least 2007 the Pakistani government has taken to appropriating thousands of shipping containers and placing them at key junctions of metropolitan highways as ready-made blockades to impede the flow of demonstrators. Although containers featured at the seismic Lawyers’ Movement marches in 2009, it was 2014’s concurrent anti-government protests led by Imran Khan’s PTI party and cleric Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri that saw the disgruntled declaration of the figurative community “Containeristan” by PTI’s president Javed Hashmi.
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