Voting for Disorder

The post-conflict election in Côte d’Ivoire in November 2010 was meant to conclude the country’s transition from war-to-peace, to mark the beginning of a new era of peace and promote democratisation. Instead, the election triggered a military stand-off between the two major presidential candidates and plunged the country back into civil war. This book analyses the factors which allowed for the post-conflict election in Côte d’Ivoire in 2010 to ruin the country’s peace process. The analysis is based on the conceptual framework of Höglund et al., which brings together most of the major findings about post-conflict elections that have emerged in academic literature so far. The author argues that a whole range of conflict-generating factors, including the continuity of the major political actors, unfavourable institutional circumstances and the particularly high stakes of the election, were present.