Dismantling old or forging new clientelistic ties? Sudan’s civil service reform after uprising

Abstract

Civil service reform is often a top priority for popular movements that unseat autocracy, and during democratization campaigns more broadly: when a deposed regime had relied upon a clientelistic state to stay in power, in which bureaucrats were rewarded for using their authority to further the interests of the regime and its top elites, new political elites have strong incentives to undertake changes to the state and its personnel upon taking over. Yet despite initially-aligned politician incentives for civil service reform in post-uprising contexts, we highlight how bureaucratic actions can serve as a causal antecedent to new politicians’ subsequent stymieing of reform. Bureaucrats can leverage their embedded knowledge of state processes to forge clientelistic ties with new political elites. This in turn prompts politicians to use their power to block attempts to create more rational-legal agencies. We trace these dynamics through in-depth qualitative and ethnographic data of (failed) efforts to reform Sudan’s civil service after the 2018–19 popular uprising which unseated a 30-year autocracy. Overall, this paper helps explain why so many recent popular uprisings that have come to power have been unable to deliver the large-scale transformative reform upon which they were launched by focusing attention on the elements of the former autocracy that survived the transition.