Strategie di soggettivazione e percorsi di inclusione. Il caso dei "giovani patrioti " avoriani

The crisis Ivory Coast went through in the last decade has been enquired by many observers in its connection with the rise of youth as a pivotal actor in the ivorian public-political space. Processes of political subjectivation (Banegas), urge of “regenerating the nation” (Arnaut), violent dissent and renegotiation of intergenerational relations (Chauveau), redefinitions of citizenship through autochthony as a mean of access to modernity (Marshall-Fratani, Cutolo), have been addressed in this perspective. On such a background the paper, based on field research, will focus the concrete, personal practices of moral, political and religious subjectivation undertaken by ultranationalist militants, connecting political biographies and the ethnography of daily life in Abidjan. In particular, I will dwell on the practices and on the strategies through which one of the “popular parliaments” (called “agoras” in Ivory Coast) of Abidjan, whose role has been crucial for the mobilisation of ultranationalist youth during the crisis, was created and managed by a group of “jeunes patriotes”, showing how it constituted a way of access to paths leading to social mobility through the mediation of the cadres of the Front Populaire Ivoirien (the party of president L. Gbagbo). It will then appear how political subjectivation coincides here with a process leading to subjection through forms of conduct, self-discipline and subordination going beyond the public-political domain and affecting the militant’s politics of the self.