Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"The high point of the Côte d’Ivoire boom came in the mid-1970s. A price explosion for cocoa and coffee sent state revenues soaring. Gripped by financial euphoria and gambling that commodity prices would remain high, the government embarked on a string of ambitious development projects such as roads, ports and hydro-electric dams, borrowing heavily to do so. . . . The boom soon turned to bust." [The Fate of Africa, p. 285-9] "The once prosperous Côte d’Ivoire was dragged into a ruinous civil war in 2011 after Laurent Gbagbo, a southern politician who had ruled for ten years, refused to accept his defeat in an election and summoned the army and youth militias in Abidjan to keep him in office. . . . Abidjan, once famous for its Parisian-style boulevards, became a battlefield." [The Fate of Africa, p. 701] "Ivory Coast (officially Côte d’Ivoire) has had a turbulent history. Following independence from France in 1960, it translated the next three decades of autocratic but stable rule into economic progress; however, by the late 1990s the political succession had become badly entangled in the north-south, Muslim-Christian schism that degenerated into two rounds of civil war between 2002 and 2011." [Geography: Realms, Regions, and Concepts, 17th Edition, p. 307]