Waging Peace: The Narrative War for Côte d’Ivoire 2002 - 2017

The international interventions in Côte d'Ivoire were at the centre of a narrative war, both violently contested and declared an exemplar of peacekeeping best practice. The critical intervention literature has tended to focus on acknowledged failures and not asked as many questions of the interventions labelled as successes. Analysis of competing strategic narratives of intervention enables a deeper questioning of the narratives of the intervenors, as well as the narratives of the intervened. This thesis explores the ways in which political actors used strategic narratives to define events, create and contest historical records, and establish the competing hegemonic and counterhegemonic epistemes of the international interventions in Côte d'Ivoire from 2002 to 2017. Through analysing the hegemonic and counterhegemonic strategic narratives of intervention and the narrative strategies used to propagate them, I demonstrate the ways in which polemical strategic narratives became accepted as political fact in the Ivoirian interventions, and the ways in which these narratives shaped the beliefs, opinions, ideologies, policies, decisions, and outcomes of the interventions. I find that the narrative war for Côte d'Ivoire was waged asymmetrically, with hegemonic and counterhegemonic narrators grounding their narratives in incommensurate discourses. I foreground the dialectical contradictions inherent in these complex discourses and link these contradictions to the strategic challenges faced by narrators fighting the narrative war for Côte d'Ivoire. This thesis further develops the strategic narrative analysis theoretical framework by incorporating insights from narrative strategy analysis. I demonstrate the utility of strategic narrative analysis for better understanding the complexity and contestation which accompanies all international interventions and the broader general terrain of narrative warfare.