One In Côte d’Ivoire, meanwhile, the instability and civil war that have devastated the country’s once prosperous economy since 1999, displacing some 750,000 people and causing 3 million to require humanitarian assistance, have some of their deepest roots in conflicts over the definition of who is a ‘real’ citizen of the country. Central to the peace negotiations has been a regular­ization of nationality status. During the 1930s, the French colonial authorities both modified borders and encouraged the movement of several hundred thousand agricultural workers from what are now Burkina Faso and Mali south to fertile land in what was to become Côte d’Ivoire. While Côte d’Ivoire enjoyed a post-independence economic boom, the status of this group was relatively uncontroversial; but from the mid-1990s, as economic conditions deteriorated with a de­cline in global commodity prices, the status of the ‘non-indigenous’ population – estimated in the 1998 census to form 26 per cent of the total – became increasingly contested. Once northerner Alassane Ouattara tried to run for president, southern politicians increasingly mobilized rhetoric and law to insinuate that anyone with a possible northern support base was in essence a foreigner. Ouattara himself was said to have a parent from Burkina Faso, and the law was changed to require both parents of a presidential candidate to be Ivorian by origin. Meanwhile, those ordinary people alleged to be migrants faced ever-increasing difficulties in obtaining the necessary identity cards and certificates of nationality to claim their other citizenship rights, including voting, registration of children in school, running businesses and owning land. A Christmas Eve military coup in 1999 was followed by deeply flawed elections in late 2000. Southern leaders deployed both administrative measures and violence to exclude from voting or standing for office those of migrant origin as well as ­northerners and Muslims deemed suspect by association. This exclusion brought a rebellion, a period of active civil war and the de facto partition of the country into two zones, a partition that continues today. 10