The Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion in Urban Burkina Faso

The Ivorian civil war carried significant political and economic consequences for the whole West African subregion for most of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Burkina Faso has historically provided a significant proportion of the labour force for Côte d’Ivoire’s plantation economy and Burkinabe labour migrants and their descendants in Côte d’Ivoire were at the heart of the political crisis that lead to armed conflict, causing more than 500.000 Burkinabe migrants to leave Côte d’Ivoire because of persecution (McGovern 2011). For second-generation immigrants to Côte d’Ivoire, the political rhetoric of “sending the strangers home” rang as false as it