Post-election Crisis Research Articles

ECOWAS and Military Group (ECOMIG): Force to Reckon With in Peace Enforcement and Stabilization Operations in West Africa: A Case of the Gambian 2016–2017 Political Crisis

Efforts at minimizing the barrage of security problems in West African states still remains a serious challenge facing the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS); and despite the forthright initiatives of the Organization in regional integration and maintenance of peace and security, incidents of violent conflicts appear persisting in various West African states. The bane of the study however, examines the effectiveness of the ECOWAS using its military group (ECOMIG) that was briefly put up in January, 2017 in maintaining peace and stable security in political crisis in the Gambia, a West African state. The theoretical framework employed for the study is elite theory. The study thoroughly examines roles of the ECOWAS and its military group (ECOMIG) in restoring peace and security in the Gambia during and after the post-election crisis that rocked the state. A documentary research design is used for the study. Findings in the study indicate that: the ECOWAS and ECOMIG played significant roles in resolving the political crisis and reducing the spate of violent conflicts that could have engulfed the Gambia during the recent political crisis and West Africa at large; and for the ECOWAS to be truly effective in peace and security maintenance through its military tool (ECOMIG), efforts must be geared towards making member states comply with the Organization’s directives; that it has to be fully ready to solve problems and; that it has a built-in ability to become an efficient player in peace and security maintenance in West Africa but faces unbending challenges which can only be decimated with extensive external support. The study concludes that the major challenge of the ECOWAS in maintaining regional integration with peace and security in West African region, is to prove that West Africans are capable of resolving their own inadequacies.

The Paradox of the Fight Against Child Labor in Cote D’Ivoire: the Phenomenon of “Microbes”

Despite the Ivorian government's efforts to combat trafficking, exploitation and child labor, another kind of child labor is expanding in Ivorian capital. These are groups of young and very young delinquent children who have been terrorists in the popular quarts of Abidjan since the day after the post-election crisis of April 2011. With knives and sometimes guns, they attack anyone. Protected by former rebels according to some sources or by the strongmen of the road stations, they engage as much in the traffic of drugs as in the racket of the drivers of collective taxis (Gbaka). The reaction of the authorities is slow to bear fruit and the inhabitants of the neighborhoods are organizing to do justice themselves. Keywords : Paradox, fight, child labor, Cote d’Ivoire, microbes. DOI : 10.7176/JLPG/88-15 Publication date : August 31 st 2019

Les forces armées de Côte d’Ivoire : portrait d’un dispositif fragile

Les mutineries de 2017 ont ravivé les craintes d’un retour des armes sur la scène politique ivoirienne, alors que la Réforme du secteur de la sécurité (RSS) et l’opération de Désarmement, démobilisation et réintégration (DDR) avaient été conduites, au sortir de la crise postélectorale de 2010-2011, pour fluidifier le retour des militaires en caserne et le retour d’ex-combattants à la vie civile. Hier comme aujourd’hui, la question des forces armées reste centrale, quoique méconnue. Entretien avec le général Bruno Clément-Bollée, qui fut, entre autres fonctions, commandant de l’opération française Licorne en 2007-2008, directeur de la coopération de sécurité et de défense au ministère français des Affaires étrangères (2010-2013) et conseiller du directeur ivoirien de l’autorité pour le DDR (2013-2016)

Peut-on apprendre la paix à l’école ? Une évaluation du cours « Éducation aux droits de l’homme et à la citoyenneté » (EDHC) en Côte d’Ivoire post-conflit

Can we learn peace at school? An evaluation of the “Human rights and Citizenship Education” (EDHC) course in post-conflict Ivory Coast – After the post-electoral crisis, the government of Ivory Coast introduced a course entitled “Human rights and citizenship education” (EDHC) to the lower secondary school curriculum to facilitate a societal transition to a culture of peace. This article, which examines the perceptions of course participants and their teachers, is based on a large-scale survey (n = 984), 25 focus groups and course observations carried out in Abidjan. An analysis of the course’s strengths and weaknesses from the point of view of the key players in the education system enables the authors to evaluate its effectiveness. They find that, despite the enthusiasm around this course, its lack of depth is preventing a change of mentality. In addition, the message of peace that the course strives to convey is compromised by school violence.

Impact Des Conflits Armes Sur La Sante Maternelle En Cote d’Ivoire: Cas Des Conflits Armes De 2002 Et De 2010

The "new conflict" that emerged in the 90s, mainly in developing countries, is a major obstacle to improving health. Quantitative studies of the impact of armed conflict on maternal health indicators are still fragmentary and scarce. The purpose of this study is to analyze the impact of the 2002 and the 2010 conflicts on maternal health in Côte d'Ivoire. In this study, we choose a particular type of health care service with assisted delivery in a health center. We use the parametric difference using the difference method to estimate our parameter of interest. Also, we use the propensity score technique and the standard error bootstrap technique to regulate some double difference hypotheses. In making our estimates, we use survey data including the MICS 2000 and 2006 and EDSCI 2012. Our results show that, globally, the crisis of 2002 had a negative effect on the use of assisted delivery in the CNO zone (Center North and West) (-0,708). The same is true for the post-election crisis (-0,514). On the other hand, in South and Abidjan zone, the 2002 crisis had no significant effect, while that of the 2010 crisis had a positive effect (+0,628). The conflicts of 2002 and 2010 therefore constituted a major impediment to access to maternal health care services for households living in CNO zone.

The Odds of Justice: Is Statistics Down for the Count?

Statistics took a beating in last year's post-election existential crisis. Part of the problem was, of course, that probability is just that. Too many fail to understand that a 71.4% probability do...

Information, Opinion, or Rumor? The Role of Twitter During the Post-Electoral Crisis in Côte d’Ivoire

On the African continent, the use of Internet and social media has been growing at an incredible speed in the past decade. Social media have thus been used in an array of instances such as election periods, natural disasters, and political crises. However, previous research on social media has barely taken a look at the use of social media during war. By investigating on the use of Twitter during the post electoral crisis in Côte d’Ivoire in 2010/2011, this study wants to emphasize the potential of social media for the development of democracy in the context of crisis, war, and limited media freedom. Through a content analysis of Twitter and qualitative expert interviews with Ivoirian bloggers, this study found that Twitter was mainly used for political debate and crowdsourcing information. The crisis turning over to a civil war, the network was used in particular by a small group of active citizens and bloggers, operating as technically versed opinion leaders, to provide humanitarian help for the population caught in the crisis. Results further showed that mobile devices played a crucial role for the use of Twitter within the country and indicated that the post electoral crisis considerably contributed to the discovery of Twitter in Côte d’Ivoire. A central finding is that Twitter, on the one hand, was used for diffusing false information and expressing verbal violence and, on the other hand, it served to verify information and throwback rumors.

ECOWAS's Leadership in the 2016 Gambian Post-Electoral Crisis – Challenging the UNSC's Primacy in Providing for Peace?

ECOWAS's Leadership in the 2016 Gambian Post-Electoral Crisis – Challenging the UNSC's Primacy in Providing for Peace?

The 2017 General Election in Kenya: Re-evaluating r2p’s First Test Case 10 Years On

As Kenyans went to the polls on 8 August, protests over the results brought back memories of the disputed election 10 years prior. While the level of violence and contestation did not reach the same magnitude as a decade ago, recent events have illuminated the tentative nature of the peace that was established in the aftermath of the 2007–08 post-election crisis. While there is no doubt that the Kenya National Dialogue and Reconciliation (kndr) process was essential in averting further bloodshed in Kenya – what is often overlooked are the significant costs associated with the 2008 agreements. By prioritising stability over democracy, enabling impunity over accountability, and addressing the symptoms of violence as opposed to more proximate causes, the kndr process left many of the issues that facilitated the 2007 unrest unresolved. Consequently, the underlying causes of instability in Kenya remain.

Economic and Health Impacts of the 2011 Post-Electoral Crisis in CCte DDIvoire: Evidence from Microdata

Past studies have shown that income shocks can trigger women to embark on commercial sex. This paper studies some microeconomic effects of the Cote d’Ivoire’s political instability in 2011 after the presidential election. We use a unique dataset, collected right before and after the crisis, on individuals sampled in health centers, which, coupled with biomarkers on HIV, allows to evaluate the consequences of the conflict. We first use subjective measures of exposure to document the entity of the crisis. We then analyze the consequence of the crisis on income and consumption during and right after the crisis. We show that individuals engage in transactional sex to make up for income loss. In particular, women who are young, unmarried and without a stable source of income increased their number of sexual partners by 26% and received 44% higher amounts of transfers right after the crisis. In the same line, we also find that the incidence of HIV grew to around 1.2% for women and 0.8% for men in conflict-intensive regions.

Historicity of extraversion in Côte d’Ivoire and the ‘post-conflict’

ABSTRACTSince independence Côte d’Ivoire has been an important feature of the debate on dependency in development theory, as Côte d’Ivoire was either a ‘mirage’ for the dependency school, or a ‘miracle’ according to mainstream development theorists. Against economicism and an instrumental view of these dynamics, Jean-François Bayart proposed a renewed understanding of dependency, without denying its existence. This article discusses the relevance and heuristic capacities of the concept of extraversion to understand how elites in Côte d’Ivoire mobilised resources derived from their relationship with the external environment since the end of the post-electoral crisis in 2011. These practices – material and symbolic – are important to understand Alassane Ouattara’s first term (2011–2015) and put international peace building and state building policies in perspective. At its core, it raises many key issues for Côte d’Ivoire: the post-colonial quest for autonomy and the issue of dependency, the complex relationship between state formation and globalisation, and the specific context of the francophone space. The strength of extraversion is to highlight the agency of the African subject – in this case its elites – but we should not forget both the historicity of the specific insertion of Africa in the world, as well as the dynamics of change, against univocal causal interpretation.

Video, algorithms and security: How digital video platforms produce post-sovereign security articulations

Digital videos increasingly sustain new and older imagined communities (and enmities), and make battlefields, unfolding terror plots and emergencies public. Yet digital videos mediate security articulations following logics that are radically different from those of journalistically edited media, with consequences for how we should think of security articulation in new visual media. This article analyses how, in digital video, the combination of visible facts and the remediation logics of algorithmically governed video platforms – such as YouTube and Facebook – allow for new types of security articulations. It argues that digital video can be understood as a semiotic composite where the material semiotics of media technologies, calculated publics and spectators combines with the political semiotics of audio-visual media to condition how video articulations work as political agency. A powerful video-mediated security articulation, the #neda videos from the 2009 Iranian post-election crisis, illustrates how security articulation in digital video is not tied to the authority of a speaker and does not contain the promise of an immediate, illocutionary security effect. Drawing on securitization theory and Butler’s critique of speech act theory, this article understands such video articulations as post-sovereign security articulations.

The Politics of Youth Employment and Policy Processes in Ethiopia

Policy processes are inherently shaped by political contexts. One way of identifying the impact of politics on policy processes is by examining how policy narratives and framings evolve through time. This article examines youth employment-focused policies in Ethiopia between 2004 and 2015. It argues that policy narratives and framings driving youth employment policy are directly derived from the developmental orientation of the incumbent Ethiopian regime. The 2005 post-election political crisis also played a major role in streamlining youth-focused policy processes.

From the Failure to Consolidate Democracy to the Recurrence of Violent Political Conflicts: The Case of Madagascar Under the Third Republic (1992-2009)

Following the democratization process in 1992, Madagascar under the 3rd Republic (1992-2009) was viewed by many observers as a “democratic country.” However, it was also marked by two major violent political conflicts: the post-electoral crisis of 2001-2002 which escalated to a minor civil war, and the political crisis of March 2009 which led to the resignation of the democratically elected president Marc Ravalomanana and the end of the 3rd Republic itself. This short-lived democratic experience demonstrates the importance of democratic consolidation for new democracies in Africa and anywhere else in the world, and the connection between the failure to consolidate democracy (or regime type in general) and the recurrence of violent political conflicts, including civil wars. The purpose of this study is to explore this connection. In doing so, it builds on the literature on conflict analysis, democratic consolidation and democratic civil peace, and makes the argument that the failure of the Malagasy political leaders to consolidate democracy under the 3rd Republic had a tremendous impact on the recurrence and escalation of violent political conflicts in this country.

Shadow peacebuilders and diplomatic counterinsurgencies: informal networks, knowledge production and the art of policy-shaping

ABSTRACTThis article explores the role of informal networks in producing strategic knowledge and influencing policy responses to the 2011 post-election crisis in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The analytical focus is on networks of shadow peacebuilders, defined as actors who are often not visible to the public and who promote a mix of altruistic and personal interests of their broader network by generating strategic narratives and influencing peacebuilding policy. As this article shows, shadow peacebuilders engage in diplomatic counterinsurgencies waged by means of diplomacy, politics, public relations and legal means. Strategic narratives are instrumental in legitimizing diplomatic counterinsurgency, inducing internal cohesion within the network and delegitimizing alternative narratives and policy solutions. Yet the production of strategic knowledge by shadow peacebuilders has its limitations. When the gap between strategic narrative and actions becomes too big, the network risks fragmentation and defeat by other networks that promote alternative strategic narratives and paths of action in the battle over control of peacebuilding policy.

Economic and Health Impacts of the 2011 Post-Electoral Crisis in CCte DDIvoire: Evidence from Microdata

Past studies have shown that income shocks can trigger women to embark on commercial sex. This paper studies some microeconomic effects of the Cote d?Ivoire?s political instability in 2011 after the presidential election. We use a unique dataset, collected right before and after the crisis, on individuals sampled in health centers, which, coupled with biomarkers on HIV, allows to evaluate the consequences of the conflict. We first use subjective measures of exposure to document the entity of the crisis. We then analyze the consequence of the crisis on income and consumption during and right after the crisis. We show that individuals engage in transactional sex to make up for income loss. In particular, women who are young, unmarried and without a stable source of income increased their number of sexual partners by 26% and received 44% higher amounts of transfers right after the crisis. In the same line, we also find that the incidence of HIV grew to around 1.2% for women and 0.8% for men in conflict-intensive regions.

Conflits Fonciers Intercommunautaires Et Fracture Sociale Dans Les Régions Du Guémon Et Du Cavally À L’ouest De La Côte d’Ivoire

The armed conflict that ravaged Côte d'Ivoire after the post-election crisis in november 2010 was sparked by several factors (land disputes, armed uprising of september 2002, tribal militias conquest of state power). In the regions of Guémon and Cavally that formed the epicenter of the war, intercommunal land disputes were instrumental in the outbreak of the war. These tensions between peasants have long caused confusion in the far west forest and contributed in part to the social division between indigenous and migrant communities. This qualitative study based on the phenomenological approach and firstly analyses the dynamics of these communal land disputes before the post-election crisis of 2010. Then, it situates the impact of these conflicts in the social division between communities.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back? Côte d'Ivoire's 2015 Presidential Polls

The 2015 presidential election in Côte d'Ivoire was seen as an important test for the country given the 2010 post-election crisis. Although the 2015 polls were peaceful, they were affected by problems not new to Côte d'Ivoire: lack of competition due to non-participation of major political actors, low voter turnout, mistrust in electoral institutions. The unpreparedness of the Commission Electorale Indépendante (CEI) was also problematic, especially with respect to the revision of the voter list. Due to the boycott of partisans of former president Laurent Gbagbo and because of the support of the Rassemblement des Houphouëtistes pour la Démocratie et la Paix (RHDP), President Alassane Ouattara's re-election was essentially a given from the start. With the ruling coalition firmly in control, Côte d'Ivoire appears stable. However, the country's democratic deficit might lead to renewed violence once the RHDP has to pick Ouattara's successor.

Contesting land rights in a post-conflict environment: Tenure reform and dispute resolution in the centre-West region of Côte d'Ivoire.

Large-scale land tenure reforms in post-conflict environments present significant challenges to and unique opportunities for peace processes. Fundamental to reconciliation, economic rehabilitation, and rural livelihood security, land and land tenure are essential components of post-conflict development. The importance of land to large-scale returns and sustainable peace is especially relevant in Côte d’Ivoire, where multiple waves of displacement linked to the 2002 civil war and 2010 post-election crisis exacerbated socio-economic and political relations between self-identified indigenous and migrant groups. Despite notable improvements in physical security, protracted land disputes throughout the cacao-producing region of the centre-West present a key obstacle to sustainable returns and long-term peace. Given a lack of institutional and financial capital, the current Government of Côte d’Ivoire has fallen back on a pre-war suite of tenure reforms designed to formalize customary land rights through mandatory certification and registration. Differing from previous critiques of the theoretical framework guiding the 1998 Rural Land Law, this paper uses field data to provide an overview of the main causes of land-related disputes, local mechanisms of dispute resolution, and current status of the 1998 Rural Land Law as it is being applied throughout the centre-West region of the country. Specifically, I argue that the prevalence of land-related disputes and unnecessarily complex nature of statutory reformsdissociated from the socio-political and economic foundation of the ‘tutorat’ system areundermining the tenure security of rural households.

The coordination roles of relief organisations in humanitarian logistics

ABSTRACTThe number of organisations involved in relief work in general and humanitarian logistics specifically is large and increasing, creating new complexity. In this paper we analyse different types of coordination and roles in two case studies of the humanitarian cluster system based on its initial development and the Kenyan Post-election crisis. The different and unclear roles of the organisations create significant problems before and after cluster activation and deactivation. Individual organisations take on many roles in the cluster system and beyond it in terms of coordination. The clarity of the roles affects the need for and ease of coordination. We suggest a simple basic categorisation of roles as a starting point for developing this concept in the field of humanitarian logistics and connect this to coordination.