Gold mining, conflict, and post-war governmentality in Côte d’Ivoire

Over the last twenty years, there has been a new gold rush in West African countries along a new resource frontier. The article’s key question is how mining governance reform and discourses around the 2014 Mining Code in Côte d’Ivoire create socio-environmental conflicts over the local development model, property rights and identity politics. The article draws upon direct observation, semi-structured interviews, focus groups with gold panners, mine managers and local village populations, as well as a household survey.

Building on the resource frontier literature, this article explains how gold mining sites in Côte d’Ivoire are spaces at the intersection between patronage economies, state territorialisation, capital accumulation and informality. The governance of gold mining can be viewed as a shock which destabilises local political, social and cultural practices and thereby leads to a reconfiguration of the local social order along this resource frontier.

The analysis around three dimensions, the development model, property rights and identity politics, reveal a number of important characteristics with respect to the evolution of the local social order in Côte d’Ivoire. More broadly, these conflicts are a microcosm of post-war governmentality in Côte d’Ivoire: conflicts around the new norms and values in defining the social order and direction of the Ivorian state.