The issue of political governance in Africa: The challenges of the Ivorian crisis

This thesis focuses on the Ivorian crisis in what it holds in terms of etiological dimensional complexity but also of epistemological and heuristic interest because of the analytical ideas it opens and allows. It roots the crisis in the "rockbottom" of developmentalist theories and the diffusionism of state models resistant to endogenous data. Houphouëtism, a pragmatist conception of power, structures most of the Ivorian postcolonial trajectory marked by the dual cycle of stability and crisogenic implosion. A structural crisis of the Ivorian nation-state with a manifold etiologic complex (economic, social, land use, migration, politics, biopolitics). The failure of an agricultural export model fed the threefold crisis: socio-economic, political and military. The phenomenology generating war goes back, in fact, to structural and remote causes. Manipulating indigenism (autochthonous) and ethnic differences for political ends, Ivorian political entrepreneurs seem to have opted for power at the expense of the nation. Ivoreanity, as an ideology of exclusion, is in reality a biopolitical tool at the service of retaining power as well as political dominance. It symbolizes the dehouphouëtization as well as the break up of social consensus. Neither is ethnicity, in our opinion, a mummy, nor is Ivoreanity here an etiological hard drive. Deeper and more structural, the causes of the Ivorian crisis are rooted as much in the genealogy as in the trajectory of the nation-state whose construction is still unfinished. Reversing the Marxist paradigm, here we give primacy to the political over the economic in an Ivorian reality marked by a double weakness of private sector and civil society, giving the state sphere and its immense manna a neo-patrimonial importance. Rebellion and the use of weapons as a means to compete in the conquest of power and partition emphasize the collapse of the nation-state, aggravated by post-election crisis of 2010/2011. The salience of political issues does not prevent resorting to interparadigmity and the beneficial connection of science to political science insights, and Beyond, an exploration of this epistemic field that is Côte d'Ivoire "in" and "with" the World.