For roughly a decade, Côte d’Ivoire has been bitterly divided by a civil war between its dry Muslim north and its fertile Christian south. Many commentators have attempted to ascribe cultural or social origins to this war, casting it as an example of wider conflict between the Christian and Muslim worlds, while others see it as yet another example of the failings of weak, divided and tribalistic African states. I go beyond these narrow categories to explain the civil war as the natural outcome of a series of rational economic and political choices.