More From Our Geographers

Read more from our interview with Thomas Bassett on politics in Cote d'Ivoire.

Cote d'Ivoire has stood out amongst its neighbors as a beacon of political stability. Things have fallen apart early on in neighboring Liberia for reasons that are complex [and] that Cote d'Ivoire has avoided. Recent political instability in Cote d'Ivoire I think is linked to the failure of…political parties to represent themselves as national parties, create a national constituency, somehow do what the single party did between 1960 and 1990, that is, create a sense of national identity. But politically, right now, these different leaders have tried to build constituencies by kind of the classic divide and rule strategy and labeling all the parties as regional and religious. And I think that has created tensions.

For example, the north is now considered popularly to be Muslim and to be a bastion of the RDR party, the Republican Rally. And anyone who is familiar with the north knows that it's far more politically diverse, far more ethnically, I mean religiously diverse. But you get this stereotyping and these political campaigns which create these divisions which are difficult to heal. I talked earlier about the role of foreigners in the economy and how important of a role they played in developing the coffee and cocoa sector and over time how land has become increasingly scarce. And tensions have now been created around land scarcity. As educated young men from the cities go back to rural areas to invest in agriculture, they find there is little land available.

In 1998, the government created a land law which declares that all rural land will be titled and registered within a ten year period. This is currently creating a lot of tensions between Ivorians and foreigners and considerable anti-foreigner sentiment. And in some cases, tens of thousands of foreigners have been evicted from parts of the southwest, for example. There has been violence; there's been forced repatriation in a sense. Not by the Ivorian government, but it's people fearing for their lives. So we're at a conjuncture where tensions over land are also becoming mixed with politics over who's Ivorian, who's not Ivorian, and create the conditions for further political instability. So the new leader, or leaders of Cote d'Ivoire have a lot on their platter in terms of national unification and instability.