The literature on peacebuilding has increasingly emphasized the importance of the local level – a trend that has been called the local turn. For some researchers, more attention paid to the local level can improve international peacebuilding interventions. More ambitiously, for other scholars the local turn is an agenda to promote an emancipatory and legitimate peace. However, the local turn agenda has also been criticized for its theoretical and conceptual vagueness, for its romanticization of the ‘local’ and for the exaggerate expectations that it places in it. This paper problematizes the local turn by looking at the case of Côte d’Ivoire, a country where peace is based on military victory, not on an elite pact. It argues that the local turn reposes on some assumptions that appear particularly problematic in a political environment characterized by the lack of elite-level reconciliation. It shows how the discourse and practices of the local turn, first promoted in Côte d’Ivoire by the international community under the label of ‘social cohesion’, have been appropriated by the incumbent Ivorian government in order to depoliticize the peacebuilding process and de-emphasize the importance of national-level processes of transitional justice and democratization. However, many Ivorians, especially those who have supported the losing side during the Ivorian crisis, reject the idea that community reconciliation is the key to peace and emphasize the important of addressing national-level issues in order to achieve a legitimate peace.