Education plays a role in promoting or limiting conflict, and researchers who have established this posit that language may be a contributing factor. However, this has not been widely explored. Drawing upon literature in horizontal-or between-group-inequalities, conflict and education, and language regimes, I make the case that language of instruction (LoI) and sociopolitical conflict interact in a complex manner. Through a comparative case study of policy discourse analysis and narrative analysis of interviews with parents and teachers in two communities in Cote d'Ivoire, I seek to answer the question, in multi-lingual Cote d'Ivoire, how do LoI policies and practices interact with socio-political conflict as the nation continues the transition from conflict state to a post-conflict state? I use across-event discourse analysis and narrative analysis techniques to generate evidence that the ways in which LoI policies have evolved over time and the ways that these policies are perceived reflect larger social power structures in a conflicted society thus reinforcing or breaking down existing inter-group inequalities that are known to lead to conflict. In the Ivorian post-conflict setting, my findings focus on the potential of LoI policies and practices to reinstate pre-conflict horizontal inequalities, attempt to remedy pre-conflict horizontal inequalities, or lead to the development of new horizontal inequalities which all have an impact on the complete transition to an Ivorian post-conflict state. By focusing on the perspectives of parents and educators and contrasting those perspectives to the official language regime developed via education policies, I find tensions surrounding notions of belonging and questions about whose languages deserve a place in education. I explore these tensions and the perceived horizontal inequality related to access to local language of instruction practices that extends beyond urban-rural divides.
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