In the wake of the devastating Argentine economic crisis of 2001, Buenos Aires has undergone one of the largest real estate booms in the city’s history—a boom that is fundamentally reconfiguring the urban landscape. In the midst of a whirlwind of urban development, several middle-class neighborhood activist groups have emerged to contest the effects of the boom on the identity of their neighborhoods and city. One of these activist groups, Palermo Despierta, has begun a campaign in the Palermo district to prevent the construction of residential mega-towers - an icon of urban development since the crisis. This middle-class activism largely contradicts scholarship that pigeonholes middle-class urban dwellers as agents of “globalization-oriented urban development.” I argue that underlying the resistance is a desire to defend an historically imagined, national narrative of middle-class European identity inscribed in the urban space of Buenos Aires. In a nation and city recovering from crisis, porteños (Buenos Aires residents) are more willing than ever to contest the globalizing of their city in order to re-emplace national narratives that remain at the heart of their urban identity. This nascent activism is deeply paradoxical, however, as the narratives that animate Palermo Despierta operate on the basis of racial and class distinctions. Contrary to the claims of scholars like Saskia Sassen and Arjun Appadurai, I argue that Buenos Aires demonstrates that the process of deterritorialization has been accompanied by processes of middle-class reterritorialization in post-crisis Buenos Aires. I also offer a revision of the view that neoliberalism is a totalizing form of global hegemony. Post-crisis Buenos Aires illustrates that the global hegemony of neoliberalism is itself contested, resisted, and reworked by the national hegemony of middle-classness and Europeanness.  [Article]

The turn of the nineteenth century was a tumultuous time in British-Nigerian colonial history. While Britain was initially content to remain on the coast and rely on middlemen for economic sustenance, technological improvements coupled with desires for higher profit margins spurred a merchant push into the interior. The level and nature of colonial violence and Nigerian resistance to this attempted conquest varied across regions. What accounted for this variation? This thesis explores the causes of the colonial violence through a “group dynamic” framework, focusing broadly on the Nigerian people and three groups of British interests in the colonial situation that include merchants, missionaries, and Whitehall. Three case studies are examined: the Ekumeku movement, the fall of Benin, and the Ebrohemie War. The research yields a number of conclusions: the typical three-group division of British interests can be redefined to include officers at Whitehall, agents stationed in Nigeria, merchants, and missionaries. Further, Nigerian interests may also be additionally categorized into middlemen and rival ethnic groups. In light of these redefinitions, violent colonial episodes were driven by subtle interactions among these particular interests that included misperceptions, cooperation, divisions, and coalescence. Ironically, the influence of individuals among these groups is also illuminated within the framework, particularly that of Ralph Moor. Finally, the group dynamic framework allows for positing theories explaining the intensity and likelihood of Nigerian resistance; the importance of converging and diverging goals among different British interests is highlighted here.  [Article]