1
Draft: 20 August 2004
Neoliberalism and the New Territorial Politics:
The Case of Cote d’Ivoire
Catherine Boone
Associate Professor, Department of Government
BUR 536, A1800
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX 78712
cboone @mail.la.utexas.edu
Abstract
This paper considers implications of the neoliberal shift
for forms of national integration that were achieved in sub-
Saharan Africa during the developmentalist era. National
integration strategies pursued during the developmentalist era
created and helped to manage regional competition within not-
completely-integrated national units. This was the old
territorial politics. The argument here is that the neoliberal
shift makes old strategies of national integration difficult to
sustain. What has emerged is a new territorial politics, which
revolves around attempts to consolidate power within sub-units of
the state and reorder relations among them, to enforce political
control within communities, and to reorder rural property rights.
The paper argues that the new territorial politics is structured
by four institutional legacies of the developmentalist era:
indirect rule, discriminatory allocation of local citizenship
rights, spatially fragmented markets for land and labor, the
build-up of regional caciques or strongmen. The neoliberal turn
reveals spatial and territorial aspects of state-formation
strategies that were not so obvious, or did not seem so
politically salient, in the earlier period. Côte d’Ivoire
provides a case in point.
A paper prepared for presentation at the annual meetings of the
American Political Science Assocation, Chicago, IL, 2-5 September 2004.
This is a draft; please do not quote without permission of the author.
Comments are welcome. An earlier version was presented as “Open Economy
State-Building,” at the conference on “The Political Economy of Africa
Revisted,” Institute for Global Studies, Johns Hopkins University, 21
April 2002.
Page 1 of 38 
Convention