CEDEJ Khartoum was pleased to organize the conference “Metropolization and Liminal Spaces in Greater Khartoum” on Sunday 30th October, 2016 at the University of Khartoum.

This conference heralded the end of a two-year research programme entitled “Metro 2 Sudan” and conducted by a Sudanese/international team of researchers and students from the CEDEJ Khartoum and from the University of Khartoum.

This research programme has received support from the AUF (Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie) as well as several other partners (Paris 8 University/LAVUE, the French ministry of Foreign Affairs/Campus France and the Sudanese ministry of Higher Education).

“Metro 2 Sudan” aimed at analyzing the interplay of actors and power relationships built around these areas that have a rural/urban interface in the Greater Khartoum. These spaces exist at various scales and in various inter-crossed parameters: functionally and economically, it refers to residential, industrial, agricultural, livestock or of “wasteland” areas; socio-spatially and in terms of housing, it refers to luxury compounds, former IDP camps, rural villages which were recently encompassed in the capital; administratively and legally, it refers to urban neighborhoods, rural or urban administrative units; socio-culturally and anthropologically, reconfigurations are varied, in regards to ethnic, tribal, religious and statutory affiliations.

[9:30-10 am] – INTRODUCTION

Alice FRANCK – Programme Coordinator (CEDEJ Khartoum/University Paris 1): METRO2 objectives, participants, partnerships, fieldworks

Barbara CASCIARRI – Co-coordinator (University Paris 8 – LAVUE): ethnographical and anthropological approaches of in-betweenness

[10-12 pm] – PANEL 1: IN-BETWEENNESS: THE WATERSHED OF 2011 AND THE CREATION OF TWO SUDANS. SOUTHERN-SUDANESES BEFORE AND AFTER SEPARATION

The first panel focuses on the situation of Southerners (living in Northern Sudan, notably in Greater Khartoum) after the separation of South Sudan. Though, more generally, we can question whether this major political event constitutes a globally meaningful and all-explanatory watershed, nonetheless it is a matter of fact that this category of people has more visibly been targeted by the post-2011 dynamics of change and marginalization. The panel papers share a twofold focus: first, the one on 2011 as a temporal dividing-line bringing to new configuration of Southerners who willingly or not passed from a status to another; second, the variety of in-between spaces in which they are caught as far as citizenship, territorial and land access, social relations and cultural perceptions are concerned.

 President: Mohamed BABIKER / Chairperson: Idris SALIM EL-HASSAN

• Azza AHMED ABDEL AZIZ – The In-betweenness of Southerners in Khartoum: Recasting Different Registers of Status through Narrative and Experience

• Mohamed AG BAKHIT – The ‘community’ citizenship status for Southern Sudanese in Khartoum. The case of Al-Baraka

• Katarzyna GRABSKA – Negotiating citizenship and belonging in displacement: Nuer in Khartoum

• Alice FRANCK – The second urban marginalization: Southerners in popular neighbourhoods of Greater Khartoum from a land property analysis

[12-1:30 pm] – **LUNCH BREAK**

[1:30-4 pm] – PANEL 2 – IN-BETWEENNESS: PLURAL EXPRESSIONS OF MATERIAL AND SYMBOLIC LIMINALITY. GEOGRAPHICAL, SOCIO-POLITICAL AND LEGAL IN-BETWEEN SPACES

 The second panel focuses on the multiplicity of contemporary contexts in which Sudanese people are living situations where the fluidity of borders makes experience a status of in-betweenness at different levels and with various effects. The panel papers are not strictly focusing on the 2011 events as a breaking point, they rather underline the variety of situations where the notion of in-betweenness may be a useful analytical tool for understanding ongoing social realities:  the relation between shifting urban and rural spaces, the transitional political arena, the identity processes influenced by marriage strategies, the legal pluralism and ambiguous land issues entangled with communities’ reconfigurations and rights.

 President: Munzul ASSAL / Chairperson: Abdelghaffar MOHAMED AHMED

• Barbara CASCIARRI & Alice FRANCK – Reconfigurations of the pastoral and agricultural in-betweenness in Khartoum State. Insights on the ‘urbanization of neoliberalism’

• Clément DESHAYES – New socio-political actors: the stakes of categorisation and political reproduction
  

• Peter MILLER – Whom to marry? An ethnographic study of marriage practices and strategies amongst upper-middle class city-dwellers

• Hind M YUSUF – The Impact of urbanization on education processes: Youth’s life strategies in Al-Fatah
  

• Mohamed A BABIKER – Between Law and Practices. Rendering vulnerable displaced and stateless on issues of land and identity

 [4–4:30 pm] – **COFFEE BREAK**

[4:30–5:30 pm] – CONCLUSIONS

Stella GAYTANO – Identity

ROUNDTABLE AND DEBATE: SYNTHESIS AND PERSPECTIVES (moderator: Jean-Nicolas BACH, Coordinator of CEDEJ Khartoum)

 

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