Contenu du sommaire : Soudan. Jusqu'au bout du régime al-Inqaz

Analysis of the social anchoring of the National Congress Party (NCP) in working-class neighborhoods in Greater Khartoum reveals the multiple registers of party affiliation and the organizational modes taken by the Islamist movement in Sudan. I explore the forms of self-presentation shaped by affiliation with the NCP, as well as the social logics generated by the party's presence at the neighborhood level. The promotion of activists through ideals of morality is conditioned by party discipline and emotional labor within local party structures, which shape as much as they repress the individual dispositions.

Based on field research conducted in 2015, this article analyzes the implementation of a participatory development policy in the Sudanese province of North Kordofan. I propose to interpret it as a particular modulation of the authoritarian Al-Ingaz regime. On the one hand, local authorities rely on a discourse surrounding the region's specificity and the idea of breaking with the immediate past in order to gain support. On the other hand, they resort to practices characteristic of the regime and its use of the economy of the gift, and, beyond that, of authoritarianism in postcolonial Sudan.

The International University of Africa is an Islamic university in Khartoum that is specifically aimed at educating foreign students. Although officially transnational and independent, the university, sponsored by Omar al-Bashir from 1991, has been largely instrumentalized by the Al-Ingaz regime. The study of this institution provides a concrete example of the realization of the “civilizational project” of the Sudanese Islamist government. Through this example, the article examines the resilience of an institution in the service of al-Bashir's government following the fall of his regime.

The deposing of the former Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir in April 2019 sparked enthusiastic reactions in the media and academic communities, particularly concerning the renewed prospect of bringing al-Bashir before the International Criminal Court (ICC). However, the legitimacy of the ICC to prosecute the former Sudanese president cannot be taken for granted. The justifications put forward stem from a questionable legal technique that reveals the court's difficulties in departing from the American prosecution agenda. Far from indicating the merging of the Sudanese and ICC prosecution agendas, the criminal proceedings brought against al-Bashir in the Sudanese courts represent the government's last bastion against the ICC's intrusion into the penal sovereignty of the Sudanese state.

Our article reviews the practices of power and negotiations prevalent under the Al-Ingaz regime over the last decade (2010–2019) based on a study of the mining sector in Sudan, which became, over the course of a few years, a cornerstone of the Sudanese national economy and one of the main sources of enrichment for the regime. Based on broad field research in the capital and several regions, our analysis examines the model of the Sudanese state and the relations of domination of the center over the peripheries. It highlights the fluidity of authoritarian domination and the diversity of these power relations, while also demonstrating how the central state, using its security apparatus, monopolized rent-seeking to the detriment of local interests in the mining areas. This allows us to understand how the security forces conceptualized their relations with the population in terms of center–periphery, but also public–private. This conceptualization fed their way of governing and lies at the heart of the current revolutionary moment insofar as it preconfigured the fundamental tension between civil and military rule.

This article aims to contribute to the general debate on social housing policies in cities in the Global South by expanding on the case of Greater Khartoum. It analyzes the three decades in power of Omar al-Bashir (from 1989 to 2019), corresponding to a movement in terms of housing policy for the working classes, which can be linked to the regime's broader choices on another scale. Based on long-term fieldwork, this article discusses the way in which programs for the eradication of informal housing, the allocation of plots of land, and social housing were connected in time and space in the Sudanese capital. In response, it examines the regime's violence in the city and the difficulty of formulating resistance from the peripheries.

This interview, conducted by Barbara Casciarri, a researcher in Sudan for thirty years, with Abdalbasit Saeed, a Sudanese anthropologist, focuses on key moments of the uprising that began in December 2018 and that led to the fall of the regime in April 2019. It analyzes the convergences and divergences with the revolutions of 1964 and 1985, as well as the class composition of the movement and the new political actors, such as Resistance Committees. Despite the support expressed for this revolutionary process, it points out some of its ideological contradictions or blind spots, such as the marginalization of peripheral urban groups and nomads.

In this interview about the Sudanese Revolution conducted by Raphaëlle Chevrillon-Guibert, Roland Marchal, a sociologist specialist of politics in Sudan, looks back on the thirty years in power of the Al-Ingaz regime and beyond. His analysis is based on his favorite themes: political economy and the regional and conflictual dimensions of this experience of government. He also discusses the ideological dimension of the regime and its evolution through the trajectories of its leaders — a useful interpretive framework that sheds light on current issues.

In 2013–2014, the influx of Central African refugees in Cameroon led to the implementation of many emergency aid projects targeting displaced populations. At the local level, these humanitarian interventions helped reshape public spaces and the production of social services. In a context of disintegration of public action and centralized and uneven management of the country's resources, these transformations enable us to rethink the dynamics of Cameroon's governance and sociopolitical situation.

Drawing on ethnographic data collected in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), this article examines the effects of state formalism, conceptualized as part of the everyday dynamics of “real governance” in urban centers. By unravelling the profoundly ambivalent characteristics of statehood, as both an intangible and concrete political artefact, the text shows the various ways by which formal practices can recreate and objectivize the state–society distinction (distantiation), via long-term processes of collective obedience (discipline) toward the idea of the state as a dominant force both within Congolese society and across our contemporary international order.