Youths, cadets and vieux pères. War and social reproduction in Ivory Coast

Abstract

Grounding on a critical review of researches connecting youth, violence and war in sub-Saharan Africa, an analysis is proposed where generational processes of political subjectivation and armed mobilization are contextualized within local frames of social reproduction. To that aim, a methodological distinction is developed, where the relational-hierarchical category of the “cadets” (derived from Marxist French anthropology) is opposed to “youth”, the latter being understood (both by social actors and analysts) as an empiric group, i.e. as an autonomous political subject – whose representation is a constituent part of the contemporary global imagery. This cadets/youth opposition is put to work in order to study the Cote d’Ivoire's conflict. It is shown how mobilization took different shapes on the two opposite fronts, producing cadets as combatants on the one side, youngsters as nationalist militants and militias on the other; it is shown, moreover, how this difference was a consequence of the different kinds of crisis in social reproduction which affected two opposite parts of Ivorian society.