Post-election crisis in Cote d'Ivoire: The gbonhi war

Abstract

The presidential election of 2010 was supposed to rescue Côte d'Ivoire from crisis. Three and a half years after the signing of the Ouagadougou Agreement, the country seemed ready to turn its back on the years of violence. The turn-out alone (over 80 per cent in the first round) indicated how tired Ivoirians were of the crisis years and how much they wanted their vote finally to bring peace to the country. And yet the opposite happened. Laurent Gbagbo's refusal to accept defeat at the hands of Alassane Dramane Ouattara (ADO) plunged the country into a new political crisis which, within a few months, assumed the form of a genuine civil war. As part of understanding the conflict, this briefing identifies the dynamics of insurrectionary and counter-insurrectionary mobilization from below. It proposes that the extreme radicalization of political violence is not just the result of a simple electoral dispute. Rather, it reveals twinned processes of upheaval in political modes of action: on the one hand, a militarization of the political battles around issues of citizenship,1 which confers the role of ‘kingmaker’ on those who carry arms; on the other, a ‘militianization’ of state and society, which makes control of the street the principal determinant of access to power. This gbonhi policy2 has been pushed to the limit in the urban guerilla warfare conducted in Abidjan by the armed forces of Gbagbo and Ouattara, and poses major questions for the future stabilization of the country.