We develop a p-adic version of the so-called
Grothendieck-Teichmüller theory (which studies ${\rm Gal}( \mathbf{\bar Q}/\mathbf{Q})$
by means of its
action on profinite braid groups or mapping class groups). For
every place v of $\overline {\mathbf {Q}}$ , we give some
geometrico-combinatorial descriptions of the local Galois
group ${\rm Gal}(\overline {\mathbf {Q}}\sb v/\mathbf {Q}\sb v)$ inside ${\text{Gal}}( {{\mathbf{\bar Q}}/{\mathbf{Q}}})$ . We also show that ${\rm Gal}(\overline {\mathbf {Q}}\sb p/\mathbf {Q}\sb {p})$ is the automorphism group of an
appropriate $\pi\sb 1$ -functor in p-adic geometry.