From extortion to civil service
Type de matériel :
24
This article analyses the profiles and the trajectories of actors who integrated into the financial authorities after the Peace Agreements that put an end to the war in Côte d’Ivoire (2002-2011). It explores the vivid debate about continuities and ruptures that characterize the State in the aftermath of war. In this perspective, this article demonstrates that people who integrated into the State apparatus after the war were actually former student unionists who first began their careers during the violent students’ struggles in the 1990s before joining the rebellion of the Forces Nouvelles in the 2000s. All these actors gained significant social capital during these periods, which paved the way for their integration into the State administration. Yet, all do not have the same capacity to convert this social capital into symbolic capital in order to durably legitimize their political mobilization at the local and national levels. This process of reconversion indeed depends on the volume of accumulated social capital during the rebellion, which itself depends on their belonging to specific student generations before the conflict. In this context, students’ unions’ involvement undoubtedly appears to be a new way to access the politicoadministrative field during the post-conflict period, but only the best endowed managed to enter politics and experience social mobility. Such a finding illustrates that pre-war social hierarchies, which already existed within student unions then during the rebellion, are reproduced after the conflict. This article thus highlights the importance of analyzing actors’ trajectories from a long-term perspective to understand to what extent the integration of former rebels into the administration impacts and transforms State public services, not only in terms of its composition and agent’s profiles but also in terms of social hierarchies.
Réseaux sociaux