Aggressive Logic Research Articles

Why Nations Fight: The Causes of the Nigeria–Cameroon Bakassi Peninsula Conflict

ABSTRACTThis article examines the conditions under which state leaders chose to make territorial issues a point of contention using the Nigeria–Cameroon Bakassi Peninsula conflict as an empirical case. Drawing on the theoretical insights of neoclassical realism, the article surveys evidence from the importance of domestic political and economic conditions to the relevance of cultural and historical factors as well as from territorial and geopolitical issues to contend that the Nigeria–Cameroon conflict emerged from three theoretical logics: the territorial logic of aggression, the geostrategic logic of aggression, and the diversionary logic of aggression. The qualitative evidence is synthesized to enhance greater understanding of the domestic and international linkages that connect petroleum with territory and aggressive foreign policy.

Resistance and the City

The mass demonstrations that took place in 2011 in major cities worldwide, dubbed here Contemporary Metropolitan Protest (CMP), varied in terms of the issues tackled and the political efficacy attained, but featured similarities in style, mobilization patterns and the use of traditional and social media. The similarities explain the tendency among commentators and researchers to treat CMP as a coherent category. The variation, on the other hand, raises questions about conceptual and theoretical idioms used so far in the analysis of CMP. The article begins by scrutinizing “resistance”—an idiom introduced to anthropology in the 1980s to theorize peasant response to metropolitan policies—and its recent emergence in the depiction and analysis of CMP. Highlighting the strengths and limitations of the term, I use the rise and fall of CMP in Tel Aviv in 2011 and 2012 as an example of how the implicit logic of aggression and response, so central to earlier employment of the notion of resistance, can be hijacked by defensive regimes that seek to delegitimize and criminalize critique, thus forcing CMP to decline and implode.