ABSTRACT
Once lauded as a rare success story in a region plagued by corruption, coups d’état, military rule, and civil war, Ivory Coast in recent years has succumbed to the maladies that have plagued its West African neighbors since independence came to all of these countries nearly a half-century ago. The death of long-serving President Félix Houphouët-Boigny in December 1993 ushered in a period of instability that his less charismatic successors have proven unable to surmount. Simmering religious and ethnic disputes, combined with rigged elections, petty political squabbling, and grave economic dislocation, provoked a civil war in 2002 that left the country divided into a Muslim north and mainly Christian south. Forces from France, Ivory Coast’s former colonial ruler, later bolstered by UN forces, helped establish a fragile cease-fire, but a peace deal between rebel forces and the government in 2003 was not fully implemented.
