Autoritarisme, hybridation et pratiques du pouvoir dans le Grand Khartoum : une étude des services de l’eau et du commerce de rue

This article offers a crossed cases study of the evolutions of street trading and water supply in Khartoum. These two sectors are taken as indicators of the reorganization of the urban management. Our objective is to question how increasing neoliberal reforms, since the 2000’s, and dynamics of authoritarian control are embedded and hybridized in this management. Our approach leans on two qualitative fieldworks among daily workers of the two sectors and inside several district of the Sudanese capital city. The first part briefly outlines the context of the Sudanese authoritarian political regime in order to question its possible urban declinations. Then the integration of mechanisms of control is analysed at two levels. Decentralization and privatization reforms fit with international models of urban management. In on hand, these reforms are the place of a redeployment of the state bureaucracy at intermediary levels, as well as they involve the redistribution of urban planning responsibilities to selected private partners. In the other hand, among the districts, the integration of new norms of management in both of the urban supply sectors underlines the diffusion of logics of old and new logics of control and relationship of authority in daily life.