Chapter 6 presents a case study on Côte d’Ivoire to illustrate how political leaders exploit the differences in ethnicity and religion to their own advantage during conflict. The chapter begins by explaining the incentives of elites following a power-vacuum that emerged in the 1990s. In particular, new president Henri Konan Bedié lacked the resources to coopt identity groups and instead used land tenure policies to gain favor with his support base. This choice had the effect of framing increasing political tensions in ethnic terms. I then document how, as those incentives changed, the actors, targets, rhetoric, and reporting of the conflict shifted from ethnic to religious. I show that by exploiting the religious identity in an otherwise ethno-national conflict over resources and discrimination, Ivoirian leaders in the 2000s were able to generate otherwise unattainable external support and moral legitimacy. The chapter concludes by describing a cross-border study on the boundary with Burkina Faso. It suggests that, despite the Ivoirian conflict having underlying causes unrelated to religion, the period of conflict led to more intense religious attachments in Côte d’Ivoire.