ABSTRACT
This chapter shows French military involvement in the Ivorian conflict was crucial in determining and experimenting with new modes of international intervention and thus in how the conflict evolved. It analyses the role that France played in the Ivorian crisis, but it is not a straightforward analysis of French policy and decision making. The difficult but necessary analytical articulation is made between the particularity of Ivorian case and the universal claims and aims of the international intervention context. The chapter argues Ivorian conflict was not 'a world of either criminal accumulation or principal legitimate defence' because 'Ivorian elites and intercalaries have many incentives to maintain a situation of neither war nor peace, in which instances of relatively low-level violence are a built-in part of the social and political equation, necessitating the state of emergency that acts as cover for various forms of profiteering'. In other words, from Gbagbo's resistance to international intervention emerged new forms of governance in Cote d'Ivoire.
