Paper short abstract:

The paper aims to explore the urban condition of youth street groups (or gangs) in Mekelle (Ethiopia). Their street moral economy - manipulated by other social actors - becomes a new risk of marginalization, as I will show through evidences collected during an ethnographic fieldwork.

Paper long abstract:

In Mekelle, the capital city of Tigray (Northern Ethiopia), youth gangs - or "street youth organizations" (Brotherton and Barrios 2004) - navigate a horizon of meanings based on urban and local vision of power (hayalnet) and prestige. These gangs are involved in a declared process of "conversion", which manipulates forms of solidarity and moral street economy. The ruling party translates a both collectivistic and neoliberal vision of development into a "marketization of poverty" (Schwittay 2011), to provide generic opportunities for poors (not materially substantial), awareness and entrepreneurial skills that should make them emerge from a state of poverty, leading the message that only by becoming entrepreneurs, one can change his life and the society as a whole. The development device for the "conversion" of young urban 'troublemakers' is the youth economic cooperativism. Street groups are "re-organized" through a complicated 'burocratizing path' and a para-governmental employment formalization, fielded to expand consensus and control on the "street", ambiguous space of possible (or supposed) dangerous alliances among marginalized young people and political opponents (Di Nunzio 2014b). Street groups, now "converted" in youth economic cooperatives, suffer a split between what is materially at stake for their lives and the rhetoric of good governance, which does not coincide with the attainment of a desirable social mobility and that 're-marginalizes' them. 'Reorganized young people' are placed into the arena of small entrepreneurs, provided that they accept new and close bonds of dependency on local policy makers and abandon all forms of street moral economy.