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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Rebel Generation: youth, violence and autochthony in Côte d'Ivoire
| Panel |
61. Autochtony, citizenship and exclusion - struggles over resources and belonging
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| Paper ID | 456 |
| Author(s) |
Marshall, Ruth
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | Previous studies underline the centrality of autochthony in structuring political identity in the Ivory Coast from the colonial period on, and point to the fragility of past modes of political regulation and the effects of economic crisis. Nevertheless, these longstanding structural factors do not in and of themselves explain the outbreak of war and the ongoing violence. What needs to be explained is the incredible and sudden echo such discourses appear to have had over a relatively short period of time, in a context marked by intermarriage, ethnic intermixing and longstanding peaceful cohabitation amongst communities. From the end of the nineteen-nineties onwards, radical, xenophobic discourses have led to the violent expulsion by autochthons of ethnic strangers from their lands by the tens of thousands, and in urban settings have given rise to systematic violence by security forces and southern youth against northern migrants and immigrants and the political formations associated with them.
The paper will focus on the principal vector for the popular articulation and dissemination of exclusive discourses and violent practices targeting ethnic and religious others: the southern youth. These youth, organised into "patriotic" associations, militias and para-military groups, have played a central role in the outbreak of the conflict and continue to be one of the principal obstacles to its peaceful resolution. Based on fieldwork carried out among these so-called "patriotic" youth networks, organisations, and militias, the paper discusses the ways in which these notions of autochthony are combined with increasingly ultra-nationalist and xenophobic discourses and how they intersect with other more global forms of identification and imaginaries, in particular religious.
I suggest that these discourses and practices are formed at the intersection of state logics, a mythologized past and globalized, cosmopolitan imaginaries, in which the youth attempt to forge for themselves a new place in their local communities and in the nation-state in a globalized world. While they are increasingly locked out of existing networks of access to wealth, status and power, nevertheless, the frustration of these youth appears to go beyond simple economic motivations. A crisis of values and identity expresses recent changes observed throughout the continent in the moral grounding of imaginaries of power and success, increasingly associated with the informal, the occult, and the criminal. These changes not only provide a fertile terrain for impunity, exclusion and violence, but also give rise to practices of a new culture of liberty, in which being free means dominating others.
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