An empirical take on the debates on peacebuilding’s failure: the case study of the Ivorian Dialogue Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2011–2014)

ABSTRACT Why does peacebuilding keep on failing? A large body of academic literature tackles that question, through the lenses of liberal peace and its ‘local turn’, and with categories, such as ‘the local’ and ‘the international’. This article offers to question the terms of the debates on peacebuilding failure in lights of an empirical research conducted in Côte d’Ivoire on the Dialogue Truth and Reconciliation Commission, set up by the victor of the 2010–2011 electoral crisis after at least a decade of a ‘fragmented civil war’ in the country. The empirical method makes it possible to grasp exactly how power relations, first between very heterogeneous domestic actors, then between them and external actors, shape the announced reconciliation process. Despite the role they are given in the literature, the internationals’ hold on the process empirically appears ambiguous and tenuous in Côte d’Ivoire.