In Cote d’Ivoire, it looks like it’s military power, not people power or diplomatic pressure, that’s beginning to make a difference after a 4-month stalemate following November’s presidential elections.

According to the BBC GlobalNews podcast yesterday:

Alasan Outarra is looking increasingly confident. He already knows he has the combined support of the international community behind him. But that’s turned out to be much less useful than a loyal and efficient fighting force. Having such an army has at least put him on the verge of making his presidency a reality and forcing Laurent Gbagbo to step down.

In Kenya and Zimbabwe, a disputed election led to the defeated incumbent negotiating his way back into government. So is it any wonder that Gbagbo hasn’t been listening to diplomatic pressure asking him to leave. What use then are concepts like “diplomacy” and “international community” when it’s actually force that’s a lot harder to ignore?

This entry was posted on April 2nd, 2011 at 10:32 am by Amanda Atwood and is filed under Governance, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.