Quand la manifestation tourne à l'émeute : les affrontements violents entre forces de l'ordre et manifestants en Côte d'Ivoire

Demonstrations in Côte d’Ivoire have been extremely violent. During the past 15 years, more than 400 people have been killed during demonstrations. Despite the importance of the problem, only a few scientific studies address this issue and the current approaches of the existing ones deal with the legal responsibility of police officers or the psychology of political authorities’, neglecting a crucial level of analysis: the interacting group process out of which violence emerge. We consider violence as a situated transaction between police officers and protesters. Therefore, the present thesis aims to understand the process and logic underlying the use of violence during demonstrations.  Symbolic interactionism is the guiding framework of this qualitative inquiry. The materials of analysis consist of interviews and various documents. 33 respondents among which 20 police officers and 13 protesters selected through a purpose sample, by the snowball technic. The police officers are all from the main riot control agencies: the CRS and the BAE. They totalized 12 years of experience in these paramilitary corps, and most of them took part to the latest violent demonstration of 16 December. The 13 protesters recruited through the same way are mob leaders, locally called ‘’street generals’’. They have been protesting since the 2000s’ and took part in one at least of the four major violent demonstrations of the country. The inquiry was conducted from January to April 2013. Other documents have been consulted: inquiry reports of the American NGO Human Rights Watch, training manuals of police officers and other minor sources.  The analysis conducted following the procedures of the grounded theory, produced important insights on protest violence.  First, the analysis revealed the rigidity of a peacekeeping system with a ‘’king police’’ resolutely devoted to the defense of the institutions at the expense of civil liberties. In fact, the decision to ban a particular protest, the appreciation of police intervention opportunity as well as the definition of the assignment of this intervention, are all taken by civil authorities. Police officers have a subaltern function limited to the dispersion of ban protests and the backing of the permitted ones. Therefore the main style of policing is a legalist one corresponding to the so called escalating of force (McPhail, Schweingruber, & Carthy, 1998). But despite this structural constraint, police officers chose their style on the ground in respect to their perception of crowd attitude. Depending on this attitude, their style could be paternalist, characterized by an under enforcement of the law with quiet demonstrators or be repressive or deviant, based on a strong enforcement, toward people labeled hostiles. Second, the results suggest that violence is a situated transaction between police officers and the crowd. The spiraling interactive process of violence climbs three escalatory levels. It shift from a bilateral nonlethal violence in which police use gas when protesters respond by throwing missiles, to a unilateral lethal violence due to the use of firearms by the police, and end by a bilateral lethal violence where both police and civils use firearms. Finally, groups use violence when they interpret the attitude of their counterpart to be a republican indignity. In fact, demonstrations rest on some structural rules from which interacting groups interpret their actions each other. These rules, rooted on the republican form of the state, mean pacifism (for crowd) and employing the least violence possible (for police officers). Violence broke out and escalates when one group interpret the action of his adversary not to fit these rules. The consequences of this appreciation are the taking away of the deference due to his status and the right to use violence against him, when materially capable and if violence is conforming to one’s own identity. The actions interpreted as unworthy by police officers are portrayed under the figure of hostile crowd. Conversely, protesters frame excessive use of force, and house violations as a ‘’republican indignity’’.

Keyphrases: Styles de policing, Manifestations violentes, Republican indignity, Protest policing, Riots, Youth and urban violence, Mob psychology, Africa