Notes

More topic specific links are coming

Security K
1nc
 1nc K
Security is based on a desire to control and manage – its epistemological precepts
attempt to render everything knowable and hence predictable – means that random
variation in IR ensures aggression and enemy creation – makes extinction inevitable
Burke 07 – Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations in the University of New South
Wales (Anthony, Theory & Event, Volume 10, Issue 2, 2007, “Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and
Reason,” Project MUSE)

This essay develops a theory about the causes of war -- and thus aims to generate lines of action and critique for peace -- that
cuts beneath analyses based either on a given sequence of events, threats, insecurities and political manipulation, or the play of
institutional, economic or political interests (the 'military-industrial complex'). Such factors are important to be sure, and should
not be discounted, but they flow over a deeper bedrock of modern reason that has not only come to form a powerful structure
of common sense but the apparently solid ground of the real itself. In this light, the two 'existential' and 'rationalist' discourses
of war-making and justification mobilised in the Lebanon war are more than merely arguments, rhetorics or even discourses.
Certainly they mobilise forms of knowledge and power together; providing political leaderships, media, citizens, bureaucracies
and military forces with organising systems of belief, action, analysis and rationale. But they run deeper than that. They are
truth-systems of the most powerful and fundamental kind that we have in modernity: ontologies, statements about truth and
being which claim a rarefied privilege to state what is and how it must be maintained as it is.¶ I am thinking of ontology in
both its senses: ontology as both a statement about the nature and ideality of being (in this case political being, that of the
nation-state), and as a statement of epistemological truth and certainty, of methods and processes of arriving at certainty (in
this case, the development and application of strategic knowledge for the use of armed force, and the creation and
maintenance of geopolitical order, security and national survival). These derive from the classical idea of ontology as a
speculative or positivistic inquiry into the fundamental nature of truth, of being, or of some phenomenon; the desire for a solid
metaphysical account of things inaugurated by Aristotle, an account of 'being qua being and its essential attributes'.17 In
contrast, drawing on Foucauldian theorising about truth and power, I see ontology as a particularly powerful claim to truth
itself: a claim to the status of an underlying systemic foundation for truth, identity, existence and action; one that is not
essential or timeless, but is thoroughly historical and contingent, that is deployed and mobilised in a fraught and conflictual
socio-political context of some kind. In short, ontology is the 'politics of truth'18 in its most sweeping and powerful form.¶ I see
such a drive for ontological certainty and completion as particularly problematic for a number of reasons. Firstly, when it takes
the form of the existential and rationalist ontologies of war, it amounts to a hard and exclusivist claim: a drive for ideational
hegemony and closure that limits debate and questioning , that confines it within the boundaries of a particular, closed
system of logic, one that is grounded in the truth of being , in the truth of truth as such. The second is its intimate relation with
violence: the dual ontologies represent a simultaneously social and conceptual structure that generates violence. Here we are
witness to an epistemology of violence (strategy) joined to an ontology of violence (the national security state). When we
consider their relation to war, the two ontologies are especially dangerous because each alone (and doubly in combination)
tends both to quicken the resort to war and to lead to its escalation either in scale and duration , or in unintended effects. In
such a context violence is not so much a tool that can be picked up and used on occasion , at limited cost and with limited
impact -- it permeates being.¶ This essay describes firstly the ontology of the national security state (by way of the political
philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, Carl Schmitt and G. W. F. Hegel) and secondly the rationalist ontology of strategy (by way of the
geopolitical thought of Henry Kissinger), showing how they crystallise into a mutually reinforcing system of support and
justification, especially in the thought of Clausewitz. This creates both a profound ethical and pragmatic problem. The ethical
problem arises because of their militaristic force -- they embody and reinforce a norm of war -- and because they enact what
Martin Heidegger calls an 'enframing' image of technology and being in which humans are merely utilitarian instruments for
use, control and destruction, and force -- in the words of one famous Cold War strategist -- can be thought of as a 'power to
hurt'.19 The pragmatic problem arises because force so often produces neither the linear system of effects imagined in
strategic theory nor anything we could meaningfully call security, but rather turns in upon itself in a nihilistic spiral of pain and
destruction. In the era of a 'war on terror' dominantly conceived in Schmittian and Clausewitzian terms,20 the arguments of
Hannah Arendt (that violence collapses ends into means) and Emmanuel Levinas (that 'every war employs arms that turn
against those that wield them') take on added significance. Neither, however, explored what occurs when war and being are
made to coincide, other than Levinas' intriguing comment that in war persons 'play roles in which they no longer recognises
themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance'. 21¶ What I am trying to describe in this
essay is a complex relation between, and interweaving of, epistemology and ontology. But it is not my view that these are
distinct modes of knowledge or levels of truth, because in the social field named by security, statecraft and violence they are
made to blur together, continually referring back on each other, like charges darting between electrodes. Rather they are
related systems of knowledge with particular systemic roles and intensities of claim about truth, political being and political
necessity. Positivistic or scientific claims to epistemological truth supply an air of predictability and reliability to policy and
political action, which in turn support larger ontological claims to national being and purpose, drawing them into a common
horizon of certainty that is one of the central features of past-Cartesian modernity. Here it may be useful to see ontology as a
more totalising and metaphysical set of claims about truth, and epistemology as more pragmatic and instrumental; but while a
distinction between epistemology (knowledge as technique) and ontology (knowledge as being) has analytical value, it tends to
break down in action.¶ The epistemology of violence I describe here (strategic science and foreign policy doctrine) claims
positivistic clarity about techniques of military and geopolitical action which use force and coercion to achieve a desired end, an
end that is supplied by the ontological claim to national existence, security, or order. However in practice, technique quickly
passes into ontology. This it does in two ways. First, instrumental violence is married to an ontology of insecure national
existence which itself admits no questioning . The nation and its identity are known and essential, prior to any conflict, and the
resort to violence becomes an equally essential predicate of its perpetuation. In this way knowledge-as-strategy claims, in a
positivistic fashion, to achieve a calculability of effects (power) for an ultimate purpose (securing being) that it must always
assume. Second, strategy as a technique not merely becomes an instrument of state power but ontologises itself in a
technological image of 'man' as a maker and user of things, including other humans, which have no essence or integrity
outside their value as objects. In Heidegger's terms, technology becomes being; epistemology immediately becomes
technique, immediately being. This combination could be seen in the aftermath of the 2006 Lebanon war, whose obvious
strategic failure for Israelis generated fierce attacks on the army and political leadership and forced the resignation of the IDF
chief of staff. Yet in its wake neither ontology was rethought. Consider how a reserve soldier, while on brigade-sized
manoeuvres in the Golan Heights in early 2007, was quoted as saying: 'we are ready for the next war'. Uri Avnery quoted Israeli
commentators explaining the rationale for such a war as being to 'eradicate the shame and restore to the army the "deterrent
power" that was lost on the battlefields of that unfortunate war'. In 'Israeli public discourse', he remarked, 'the next war is seen
as a natural phenomenon, like tomorrow's sunrise.' 22¶ The danger obviously raised here is that these dual ontologies of war
link being, means, events and decisions into a single, unbroken chain whose very process of construction cannot be examined.
As is clear in the work of Carl Schmitt, being implies action, the action that is war. This chain is also obviously at work in the U.S.
neoconservative doctrine that argues, as Bush did in his 2002 West Point speech, that 'the only path to safety is the path of
action', which begs the question of whether strategic practice and theory can be detached from strong ontologies of the
insecure nation-state.23 This is the direction taken by much realist analysis critical of Israel and the Bush administration's 'war
on terror'.24 Reframing such concerns in Foucauldian terms, we could argue that obsessive ontological commitments have led
to especially disturbing 'problematizations' of truth.25 However such rationalist critiques rely on a one-sided interpretation of
Clausewitz that seeks to disentangle strategic from existential reason, and to open up choice in that way. However without
interrogating more deeply how they form a conceptual harmony in Clausewitz's thought -- and thus in our dominant
understandings of politics and war -- tragically violent 'choices' will continue to be made.¶ The essay concludes by pondering a
normative problem that arises out of its analysis: if the divisive ontology of the national security state and the violent and
instrumental vision of 'enframing' have, as Heidegger suggests, come to define being and drive 'out every other possibility of
revealing being', how can they be escaped?26 How can other choices and alternatives be found and enacted? How is there any
scope for agency and resistance in the face of them? Their social and discursive power -- one that aims to take up the entire
space of the political -- needs to be respected and understood. However, we are far from powerless in the face of them. The
need is to critique dominant images of political being and dominant ways of securing that being at the same time, and to act
and choose such that we bring into the world a more sustainable, peaceful and non-violent global rule of the political.¶ Friend
and Enemy: Violent Ontologies of the Nation-State¶ In his Politics Among Nations Hans Morgenthau stated that 'the national
interest of a peace-loving nation can only be defined in terms of national security, which is the irreducible minimum that
diplomacy must defend with adequate power and without compromise'. While Morgenthau defined security relatively narrowly
-- as the 'integrity of the national territory and its institutions' -- in a context where security was in practice defined expansively,
as synonymous with a state's broadest geopolitical and economic 'interests', what was revealing about his formulation was not
merely the ontological centrality it had, but the sense of urgency and priority he accorded to it: it must be defended 'without
compromise'.27 Morgenthau was a thoughtful and complex thinker, and understood well the complexities and dangers of using
armed force. However his formulation reflected an influential view about the significance of the political good termed 'security'.
When this is combined with the way in which security was conceived in modern political thought as an existential condition -- a
sine qua non of life and sovereign political existence -- and then married to war and instrumental action, it provides a basic
underpinning for either the limitless resort to strategic violence without effective constraint, or the perseverance of limited
war (with its inherent tendencies to escalation) as a permanent feature of politics. While he was no militarist, Morgenthau did
say elsewhere (in, of all places, a far-reaching critique of nuclear strategy) that the 'quantitative and qualitative competition for
conventional weapons is a rational instrument of international politics'.28¶ The conceptual template for such an image of
national security state can be found in the work of Thomas Hobbes, with his influential conception of the political community as
a tight unity of sovereign and people in which their bodies meld with his own to form a 'Leviathan', and which must be
defended from enemies within and without. His image of effective security and sovereignty was one that was intolerant of
internal difference and dissent, legitimating a strong state with coercive and exceptional powers to preserve order and
sameness. This was a vision not merely of political order but of existential identity, set off against a range of existential others
who were sources of threat, backwardness, instability or incongruity.29 It also, in a way set out with frightening clarity by the
theorist Carl Schmitt and the philosopher Georg Hegel, exchanged internal unity, identity and harmony for permanent
alienation from other such communities (states). Hegel presaged Schmitt's thought with his argument that individuality and the
state are single moments of 'mind in its freedom' which 'has an infinitely negative relation to itself, and hence its essential
character from its own point of view is its singleness':¶ Individuality is awareness of one's existence as a unit in sharp distinction
from others. It manifests itself here in the state as a relation to other states, each of which is autonomous vis-a-vis the
others...this negative relation of the state to itself is embodied in the world as the relation of one state to another and as if the
negative were something external.30 ¶ Schmitt is important both for understanding the way in which such alienation is seen as
a definitive way of imagining and limiting political communities, and for understanding how such a rigid delineation is linked to
the inevitability and perpetuation of war. Schmitt argued that the existence of a state 'presupposes the political', which must be
understood through 'the specific political distinction...between friend and enemy'. The enemy is 'the other, the stranger; and it
sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in an extreme
case conflicts with him are possible'.31 The figure of the enemy is constitutive of the state as 'the specific entity of a people'.32
Without it society is not political and a people cannot be said to exist:¶ Only the actual participants can correctly recognise,
understand and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme case of conflict...to judge whether the adversary intends to
negate his opponent's way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one's own form of
existence.33¶ Schmitt links this stark ontology to war when he states that the political is only authentic 'when a fighting
collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity. The enemy is solely the public enemy, because everything that has a
relationship to such a collectivity of men, particularly to the whole nation, becomes public by virtue of such a relationship...in its
entirety the state as an organised political entity decides for itself the friend-enemy distinction'.34 War, in short, is an
existential condition:¶ the entire life of a human being is a struggle and every human being is symbolically a combatant. The
friend, enemy and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical
killing. War follows from enmity. War is the existential negation of the enemy.35¶ Schmitt claims that his theory is not biased
towards war as a choice ('It is by no means as though the political signifies nothing but devastating war and every political deed
a military action...it neither favours war nor militarism, neither imperialism nor pacifism') but it is hard to accept his caveat at
face value.36¶ When such a theory takes the form of a social discourse (which it does in a general form) such an ontology can
only support, as a kind of originary ground, the basic Clausewitzian assumption that war can be a rational way of resolving
political conflicts -- because the import of Schmitt's argument is that such 'political' conflicts are ultimately expressed through
the possibility of war. As he says: 'to the enemy concept belongs the ever-present possibility of combat'.37 Where Schmitt
meets Clausewitz, as I explain further below, the existential and rationalistic ontologies of war join into a closed circle of mutual
support and justification.¶ This closed circle of existential and strategic reason generates a number of dangers. Firstly, the
emergence of conflict can generate military action almost automatically simply because the world is conceived in terms of the
distinction between friend and enemy ; because the very existence of the other constitutes an unacceptable threat , rather
than a chain of actions, judgements and decisions. (As the Israelis insisted of Hezbollah, they 'deny our right to exist'.) This
effaces agency, causality and responsibility from policy and political discourse: our actions can be conceived as independent
of the conflict or quarantined from critical enquiry , as necessities that achieve an instrumental purpose but do not contribute
to a new and unpredictable causal chain. Similarly the Clausewitzian idea of force -- which, by transporting a Newtonian
category from the natural into the social sciences, assumes the very effect it seeks -- further encourages the resort to military
violence. We ignore the complex history of a conflict, and thus the alternative paths to its resolution that such historical
analysis might provide, by portraying conflict as fundamental and existential in nature; as possibly containable or
exploitable, but always irresolvable. Dominant portrayals of the war on terror, and the Israeli-Arab conflict, are arguably
examples of such ontologies in action.¶ Secondly, the militaristic force of such an ontology is visible, in Schmitt, in the absolute
sense of vulnerability whereby a people can judge whether their 'adversary intends to negate his opponent's way of life'.38
Evoking the kind of thinking that would become controversial in the Bush doctrine, Hegel similarly argues that:¶ ...a state may
regard its infinity and honour as at stake in each of its concerns, however minute, and it is all the more inclined to susceptibility
to injury the more its strong individuality is impelled as a result of long domestic peace to seek and create a sphere of activity
abroad. ....the state is in essence mind and therefore cannot be prepared to stop at just taking notice of an injury after it has
actually occurred. On the contrary, there arises in addition as a cause of strife the idea of such an injury...39¶ Identity, even
more than physical security or autonomy, is put at stake in such thinking and can be defended and redeemed through warfare
(or, when taken to a further extreme of an absolute demonisation and dehumanisation of the other, by mass killing, 'ethnic
cleansing' or genocide). However anathema to a classical realist like Morgenthau, for whom prudence was a core political
virtue, these have been influential ways of defining national security and defence during the twentieth century and persists into
the twenty-first. They infused Cold War strategy in the United States (with the key policy document NSC68 stating that 'the
Soviet-led assault on free institutions is worldwide now, and ... a defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere')40
and frames dominant Western responses to the threat posed by Al Qaeda and like groups (as Tony Blair admitted in 2006, 'We
could have chosen security as the battleground. But we didn't. We chose values.')41 It has also become influential, in a
particularly tragic and destructive way, in Israel, where memories of the Holocaust and (all too common) statements by Muslim
and Arab leaders rejecting Israel's existence are mobilised by conservatives to justify military adventurism and a rejectionist
policy towards the Palestinians.¶ On the reverse side of such ontologies of national insecurity we find pride and hubris, the
belief that martial preparedness and action are vital or healthy for the existence of a people. Clausewitz's thought is thoroughly
imbued with this conviction. For example, his definition of war as an act of policy does not refer merely to the policy of
cabinets, but expresses the objectives and will of peoples:¶ When whole communities go to war -- whole peoples, and
especially civilized peoples -- the reason always lies in some political situation and the occasion is always due to some political
object. War, therefore, is an act of policy.42¶ Such a perspective prefigures Schmitt's definition of the 'political' (an earlier
translation reads 'war, therefore, is a political act'), and thus creates an inherent tension between its tendency to fuel the
escalation of conflict and Clausewitz's declared aim, in defining war as policy, to prevent war becoming 'a complete,
untrammelled, absolute manifestation of violence'.43 Likewise his argument that war is a 'trinity' of people (the source of
'primordial violence, hatred and enmity'), the military (who manage the 'play of chance and probability') and government
(which achieve war's 'subordination as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason alone') merges the existential
and rationalistic conceptions of war into a theoretical unity.44¶ The idea that national identities could be built and redeemed
through war derived from the 'romantic counter-revolution' in philosophy which opposed the cosmopolitanism of Kant with an
emphasis on the absolute state -- as expressed by Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Bismarkian Realpolitik and politicians like
Wilhelm Von Humbolt. Humbolt, a Prussian minister of Education, wrote that war 'is one of the most wholesome
manifestations that plays a role in the education of the human race', and urged the formation of a national army 'to inspire the
citizen with the spirit of true war'. He stated that war 'alone gives the total structure the strength and the diversity without
which facility would be weakness and unity would be void'.45 In the Phenomenology of Mind Hegel made similar arguments
that to for individuals to find their essence 'Government has from time to time to shake them to the very centre by war'.46¶
The historian Azar Gat points to the similarity of Clausewitz's arguments that 'a people and a nation can hope for a strong
position in the world only if national character and familiarity with war fortify each other by continual interaction' to Hegel's
vision of the ethical good of war in his Philosophy of Right.47 Likewise Michael Shapiro sees Clausewitz and Hegel as alike in
seeing war 'as an ontological investment in both individual and national completion...Clausewitz figures war as passionate
ontological commitment rather than cool political reason...war is a major aspect of being.'48¶ Hegel's text argues that war is 'a
work of freedom' in which 'the individual's substantive duty' merges with the 'independence and sovereignty of the state'.49
Through war, he argues,¶ the ethical health of peoples is preserved in their indifference to the stabilization of finite institutions;
just as the blowing of the winds preserves the sea from the foulness which would be the result of a prolonged calm, so the
corruption in nations would be the product of a prolonged, let alone 'perpetual' peace.50 ¶ Hegel indeed argues that 'sacrifice
on behalf of the individuality of the state is a substantial tie between the state and all its members and so is a universal duty...if
the state as such, if its autonomy, is in jeopardy, all its citizens are duty bound to answer the summons to its defence'.51
Furthermore, this is not simply a duty, but a form of self-realisation in which the individual dissolves into the higher unity of the
state:¶ The intrinsic worth of courage as a disposition of mind is to be found in the genuine, absolute, final end, the sovereignty
of the state. The work of courage is to actualise this end, and the means to this end is the sacrifice of personal actuality. This
form of experience thus contains the harshness of extreme contradictions: a self-sacrifice which yet is the real existence of
one's freedom; the maximum self-subsistence of individuality, yet only a cog playing its part in the mechanism of an external
organisation; absolute obedience, renunciation of personal opinions and reasonings, in fact complete absence of mind, coupled
with the most intense and comprehensive presence of mind and decision in the moment of acting; the most hostile and so
most personal action against individuals, coupled with an attitude of complete indifference or even liking towards them as
individuals.52¶ A more frank statement of the potentially lethal consequences of patriotism -- and its simultaneously physical
and conceptual annihilation of the individual human being -- is rarely to be found, one that is repeated today in countless
national discourses and the strategic world-view in general. (In contrast, one of Kant's fundamental objections to war was that
it involved using men 'as mere machines or instruments'.53) Yet however bizarre and contradictory Hegel's argument, it
constitutes a powerful social ontology: an apparently irrefutable discourse of being. It actualises the convergence of war and
the social contract in the form of the national security state.¶ Strategic Reason and Scientific Truth¶ By itself, such an account
of the nationalist ontology of war and security provides only a general insight into the perseverance of military violence as a
core element of politics. It does not explain why so many policymakers think military violence works. As I argued earlier, such
an ontology is married to a more rationalistic form of strategic thought that claims to link violent means to political ends
predictably and controllably, and which, by doing so, combines military action and national purposes into a common -- and
thoroughly modern -- horizon of certainty. Given Hegel's desire to decisively distil and control the dynamic potentials of
modernity in thought, it is helpful to focus on the modernity of this ontology -- one that is modern in its adherence to modern
scientific models of truth, reality and technological progress, and in its insistence on imposing images of scientific truth from the
physical sciences (such as mathematics and physics) onto human behaviour, politics and society. For example, the military
theorist and historian Martin van Creveld has argued that one of the reasons Clausewitz was so influential was that his 'ideas
seemed to have chimed in with the rationalistic, scientific, and technological outlook associated with the industrial
revolution'.54 Set into this epistemological matrix, modern politics and government engages in a sweeping project of mastery
and control in which all of the world's resources -- mineral, animal, physical, human -- are made part of a machinic process of
which war and violence are viewed as normal features.¶ These are the deeper claims and implications of Clausewitzian
strategic reason. One of the most revealing contemporary examples comes from the writings (and actions) of Henry Kissinger, a
Harvard professor and later U.S. National Security Adviser and Secretary of State. He wrote during the Vietnam war that after
1945 U.S. foreign policy was based 'on the assumption that technology plus managerial skills gave us the ability to reshape the
international system and to bring about domestic transformations in emerging countries'. This 'scientific revolution' had 'for all
practical purposes, removed technical limits from the exercise of power in foreign policy'.55¶ Kissinger's conviction was based
not merely in his pride in the vast military and bureaucratic apparatus of the United States, but in a particular epistemology
(theory of knowledge). Kissinger asserted that the West is 'deeply committed to the notion that the real world is external to the
observer, that knowledge consists of recording and classifying data -- the more accurately the better'. This, he claimed, has
since the Renaissance set the West apart from an 'undeveloped' world that contains 'cultures that have escaped the early
impact of Newtonian thinking' and remain wedded to the 'essentially pre-Newtonian view that the real world is almost entirely
internal to the observer'.56¶ At the same time, Kissinger's hubris and hunger for control was beset by a corrosive anxiety: that,
in an era of nuclear weapons proliferation and constant military modernisation, of geopolitical stalemate in Vietnam, and the
emergence and militancy of new post-colonial states, order and mastery were harder to define and impose. He worried over
the way 'military bipolarity' between the superpowers had 'encouraged political multipolarity', which 'does not guarantee
stability. Rigidity is diminished, but so is manageability...equilibrium is difficult to achieve among states widely divergent in
values, goals, expectations and previous experience' (emphasis added). He mourned that 'the greatest need of the
contemporary international system is an agreed concept of order'.57 Here were the driving obsessions of the modern rational
statesman based around a hunger for stasis and certainty that would entrench U.S. hegemony:¶ For the two decades after
1945, our international activities were based on the assumption that technology plus managerial skills gave us the ability to
reshape the international system and to bring about domestic transformations in "emerging countries". This direct
"operational" concept of international order has proved too simple. Political multipolarity makes it impossible to impose an
American design. Our deepest challenge will be to evoke the creativity of a pluralistic world, to base order on political
multipolarity even though overwhelming military strength will remain with the two superpowers.58 ¶ Kissinger's statement
revealed that such cravings for order and certainty continually confront chaos, resistance and uncertainty: clay that won't be
worked, flesh that will not yield, enemies that refuse to surrender. This is one of the most powerful lessons of the Indochina
wars, which were to continue in a phenomenally destructive fashion for six years after Kissinger wrote these words. Yet as his
sinister, Orwellian exhortation to 'evoke the creativity of a pluralistic world' demonstrated, Kissinger's hubris was undiminished.
This is a vicious, historic irony: a desire to control nature, technology, society and human beings that is continually
frustrated, but never abandoned or rethought. By 1968 U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the rationalist
policymaker par excellence, had already decided that U.S. power and technology could not prevail in Vietnam; Nixon and
Kissinger's refusal to accept this conclusion, to abandon their Cartesian illusions, was to condemn hundreds of thousands more
to die in Indochina and the people of Cambodia to two more decades of horror and misery.59 In 2003 there would be a
powerful sense of déja vu as another Republican Administration crowned more than decade of failed and destructive policy on
Iraq with a deeply controversial and divisive war to remove Saddam Hussein from power.¶ In this struggle with the lessons of
Vietnam, revolutionary resistance, and rapid geopolitical transformation, we are witness to an enduring political and cultural
theme: of a craving for order, control and certainty in the face of continual uncertainty . Closely related to this anxiety was the
way that Kissinger's thinking -- and that of McNamara and earlier imperialists like the British Governor of Egypt Cromer -- was
embedded in instrumental images of technology and the machine: the machine as both a tool of power and an image of social
and political order. In his essay 'The Government of Subject Races' Cromer envisaged effective imperial rule -- over numerous
societies and billions of human beings -- as best achieved by a central authority working 'to ensure the harmonious working of
the different parts of the machine'.60 Kissinger analogously invoked the virtues of 'equilibrium', 'manageability' and 'stability'
yet, writing some six decades later, was anxious that technological progress no longer brought untroubled control: the
Westernising 'spread of technology and its associated rationality...does not inevitably produce a similar concept of reality'.61¶
We sense the rational policymaker's frustrated desire: the world is supposed to work like a machine, ordered by a form of
power and governmental reason which deploys machines and whose desires and processes are meant to run along ordered,
rational lines like a machine. Kissinger's desire was little different from that of Cromer who, wrote Edward Said:¶ ...envisions a
seat of power in the West and radiating out from it towards the East a great embracing machine, sustaining the central
authority yet commanded by it. What the machine's branches feed into it from the East -- human material, material wealth,
knowledge, what have you -- is processed by the machine, then converted into more power...the immediate translation of mere
Oriental matter into useful substance.62¶ This desire for order in the shadow of chaos and uncertainty -- the constant war with
an intractable and volatile matter -- has deep roots in modern thought , and was a major impetus to the development of
technological reason and its supporting theories of knowledge. As Kissinger's claims about the West's Newtonian desire for the
'accurate' gathering and classification of 'data' suggest, modern strategy, foreign policy and Realpolitik have been thrust deep
into the apparently stable soil of natural science, in the hope of finding immovable and unchallengeable roots there. While this
process has origins in ancient Judaic and Greek thought, it crystallised in philosophical terms most powerfully during and after
the Renaissance. The key figures in this process were Francis Bacon, Galileo, Isaac Newton, and René Descartes, who all
combined a hunger for political and ontological certainty, a positivist epistemology and a naïve faith in the goodness of
invention. Bacon sought to create certainty and order, and with it a new human power over the world, through a new empirical
methodology based on a harmonious combination of experiment, the senses and the understanding. With this method, he
argued, we can 'derive hope from a purer alliance of the faculties (the experimental and rational) than has yet been
attempted'.63 In a similar move, Descartes sought to conjure certainty from uncertainty through the application of a new
method that moved progressively out from a few basic certainties (the existence of God, the certitude of individual
consciousness and a divinely granted faculty of judgement) in a search for pure fixed truths. Mathematics formed the ideal
image of this method, with its strict logical reasoning, its quantifiable results and its uncanny insights into the hidden structure
of the cosmos.64 Earlier, Galileo had argued that scientists should privilege 'objective', quantifiable qualities over 'merely
perceptible' ones; that 'only by means of an exclusively quantitative analysis could science attain certain knowledge of the
world'.65¶ Such doctrines of mathematically verifiable truth were to have powerful echoes in the 20th Century, in the
ascendancy of systems analysis, game theory, cybernetics and computing in defense policy and strategic decisions, and in the
awesome scientific breakthroughs of nuclear physics, which unlocked the innermost secrets of matter and energy and applied
the most advanced applications of mathematics and computing to create the atomic bomb. Yet this new scientific power was
marked by a terrible irony: as even Morgenthau understood, the control over matter afforded by the science could never be
translated into the control of the weapons themselves, into political utility and rational strategy.66¶ Bacon thought of the new
scientific method not merely as way of achieving a purer access to truth and epistemological certainty, but as liberating a new
power that would enable the creation of a new kind of Man. He opened the Novum Organum with the statement that
'knowledge and human power are synonymous', and later wrote of his 'determination...to lay a firmer foundation, and extend
to a greater distance the boundaries of human power and dignity'.67 In a revealing and highly negative comparison between
'men's lives in the most polished countries of Europe and in any wild and barbarous region of the new Indies' -- one that echoes
in advance Kissinger's distinction between post-and pre-Newtonian cultures -- Bacon set out what was at stake in the
advancement of empirical science: anyone making this comparison, he remarked, 'will think it so great, that man may be said to
be a god unto man'.68¶ We may be forgiven for blinking, but in Bacon's thought 'man' was indeed in the process of stealing a
new fire from the heavens and seizing God's power over the world for itself. Not only would the new empirical science lead to
'an improvement of mankind's estate, and an increase in their power over nature', but would reverse the primordial humiliation
of the Fall of Adam:¶ For man, by the fall, lost at once his state of innocence, and his empire over creation, both of which can
be partially recovered even in this life, the first by religion and faith, the second by the arts and sciences. For creation did not
become entirely and utterly rebellious by the curse, but in consequence of the Divine decree, 'in the sweat of thy brow thou
shalt eat bread'; she is now compelled by our labours (not assuredly by our disputes or magical ceremonies) at length to afford
mankind in some degree his bread...69¶ There is a breathtaking, world-creating hubris in this statement -- one that, in many
ways, came to characterise western modernity itself, and which is easily recognisable in a generation of modern technocrats
like Kissinger. The Fall of Adam was the Judeo-Christian West's primal creation myth, one that marked humankind as flawed
and humbled before God, condemned to hardship and ambivalence. Bacon forecast here a return to Eden, but one of man's
own making. This truly was the death of God, of putting man into God's place, and no pious appeals to the continuity or
guidance of faith could disguise the awesome epistemological violence which now subordinated creation to man. Bacon indeed
argued that inventions are 'new creations and imitations of divine works'. As such, there is nothing but good in science: 'the
introduction of great inventions is the most distinguished of human actions...inventions are a blessing and a benefit without
injuring or afflicting any'.70¶ And what would be mankind's 'bread', the rewards of its new 'empire over creation'? If the new
method and invention brought modern medicine, social welfare, sanitation, communications, education and comfort, it also
enabled the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust and two world wars; napalm, the B52, the hydrogen bomb, the Kalashnikov
rifle and military strategy. Indeed some of the 20th Century's most far-reaching inventions -- radar, television, rocketry,
computing, communications, jet aircraft, the Internet -- would be the product of drives for national security and militarisation.
Even the inventions Bacon thought so marvellous and transformative -- printing, gunpowder and the compass -- brought in
their wake upheaval and tragedy: printing, dogma and bureaucracy; gunpowder, the rifle and the artillery battery; navigation,
slavery and the genocide of indigenous peoples. In short, the legacy of the new empirical science would be ambivalence as
much as certainty; degradation as much as enlightenment; the destruction of nature as much as its utilisation.¶ Doubts and
Fears: Technology as Ontology¶ If Bacon could not reasonably be expected to foresee many of these developments, the idea
that scientific and technological progress could be destructive did occur to him. However it was an anxiety he summarily
dismissed:¶ ...let none be alarmed at the objection of the arts and sciences becoming depraved to malevolent or luxurious
purposes and the like, for the same can be said of every worldly good; talent, courage, strength, beauty, riches, light itself...Only
let mankind regain their rights over nature, assigned to them by the gift of God, and obtain that power, whose exercise will be
governed by right reason and true religion.71¶ By the mid-Twentieth Century, after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
such fears could no longer be so easily wished away, as the physicist and scientific director of the Manhattan Project, J. Robert
Oppenheimer recognised. He said in a 1947 lecture:¶ We felt a particularly intimate responsibility for suggesting, for supporting
and in the end in large measure achieving the realization of atomic weapons...In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity,
no humor, no over-statement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin, and this is a knowledge they cannot lose.72¶
Adam had fallen once more, but into a world which refused to acknowledge its renewed intimacy with contingency and evil.
Man's empire over creation -- his discovery of the innermost secrets of matter and energy, of the fires that fuelled the stars --
had not 'enhanced human power and dignity' as Bacon claimed, but instead brought destruction and horror. Scientific powers
that had been consciously applied in the defence of life and in the hope of its betterment now threatened its total and
absolute destruction. This would not prevent a legion of scientists, soldiers and national security policymakers later attempting
to apply Bacon's faith in invention and Descartes' faith in mathematics to make of the Bomb a rational weapon.¶ Oppenheimer
-- who resolutely opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb -- understood what the strategists could not: that the
weapons resisted control, resisted utility, that 'with the release of atomic energy quite revolutionary changes had occurred in
the techniques of warfare'.73 Yet Bacon's legacy, one deeply imprinted on the strategists, was his view that truth and utility are
'perfectly identical'.74 In 1947 Oppenheimer had clung to the hope that 'knowledge is good...it seems hard to live any other
way than thinking it was better to know something than not to know it; and the more you know, the better'; by 1960 he felt
that 'terror attaches to new knowledge. It has an unmooring quality; it finds men unprepared to deal with it.'75¶ Martin
Heidegger questioned this mapping of natural science onto the social world in his essays on technology -- which, as 'machine',
has been so crucial to modern strategic and geopolitical thought as an image of perfect function and order and a powerful tool
of intervention. He commented that, given that modern technology 'employs exact physical science...the deceptive illusion
arises that modern technology is applied physical science'.76 Yet as the essays and speeches of Oppenheimer attest, technology
and its relation to science, society and war cannot be reduced to a noiseless series of translations of science for politics,
knowledge for force, or force for good.¶ Instead, Oppenheimer saw a process frustrated by roadblocks and ruptured by irony;
in his view there was no smooth, unproblematic translation of scientific truth into social truth, and technology was not its
vehicle. Rather his comments raise profound and painful ethical questions that resonate with terror and uncertainty. Yet this
has not prevented technology becoming a potent object of desire, not merely as an instrument of power but as a promise and
conduit of certainty itself. In the minds of too many rational soldiers, strategists and policymakers, technology brings with it the
truth of its enabling science and spreads it over the world. It turns epistemological certainty into political certainty; it turns
control over 'facts' into control over the earth.¶ Heidegger's insights into this phenomena I find especially telling and disturbing
-- because they underline the ontological force of the instrumental view of politics. In The Question Concerning Technology,
Heidegger's striking argument was that in the modernising West technology is not merely a tool, a 'means to an end'. Rather
technology has become a governing image of the modern universe, one that has come to order, limit and define human
existence as a 'calculable coherence of forces' and a 'standing reserve' of energy . Heidegger wrote: 'the threat to man does
not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology. The actual threat has already
affected man in his essence.'77¶ This process Heidegger calls 'Enframing' and through it the scientific mind demands that
'nature reports itself in some way or other that is identifiable through calculation and remains orderable as a system of
information'. Man is not a being who makes and uses machines as means, choosing and limiting their impact on the world for
his ends; rather man has imagined the world as a machine and humanity everywhere becomes trapped within its logic. Man,
he writes, 'comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall...where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve .
Meanwhile Man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth.'78 Technological man
not only becomes the name for a project of lordship and mastery over the earth, but incorporates humanity within this project
as a calculable resource. In strategy, warfare and geopolitics human bodies, actions and aspirations are caught, transformed
and perverted by such calculating, enframing reason: human lives are reduced to tools, obstacles, useful or obstinate
matter.¶ This tells us much about the enduring power of crude instrumental versions of strategic thought, which relate not
merely to the actual use of force but to broader geopolitical strategies that see, as limited war theorists like Robert Osgood did,
force as an 'instrument of policy short of war'. It was from within this strategic ontology that figures like the Nobel prize-
winning economist Thomas Schelling theorised the strategic role of threats and coercive diplomacy, and spoke of strategy as
'the power to hurt'.79 In the 2006 Lebanon war we can see such thinking in the remark of a U.S. analyst, a former Ambassador
to Israel and Syria, who speculated that by targeting civilians and infrastructure Israel aimed 'to create enough pain on the
ground so there would be a local political reaction to Hezbollah's adventurism'.80 Similarly a retired Israeli army colonel told
the Washington Post that 'Israel is attempting to create a rift between the Lebanese population and Hezbollah supporters by
exacting a heavy price from the elite in Beirut. The message is: If you want your air conditioning to work and if you want to be
able to fly to Paris for shopping, you must pull your head out of the sand and take action toward shutting down Hezbollah-
land.'81¶ Conclusion: Violent Ontologies or Peaceful Choices?¶ I was motivated to begin the larger project from which this
essay derives by a number of concerns. I felt that the available critical, interpretive or performative languages of war -- realist
and liberal international relations theories, just war theories, and various Clausewitzian derivations of strategy -- failed us,
because they either perform or refuse to place under suspicion the underlying political ontologies that I have sought to
unmask and question here. Many realists have quite nuanced and critical attitudes to the use of force, but ultimately affirm
strategic thought and remain embedded within the existential framework of the nation-state. Both liberal internationalist and
just war doctrines seek mainly to improve the accountability of decision-making in security affairs and to limit some of the
worst moral enormities of war, but (apart from the more radical versions of cosmopolitanism) they fail to question the
ontological claims of political community or strategic theory.82¶ In the case of a theorist like Jean Bethke Elshtain, just war
doctrine is in fact allied to a softer, liberalised form of the Hegelian-Schmittian ontology. She dismisses Kant's Perpetual Peace
as 'a fantasy of at-oneness...a world in which differences have all been rubbed off' and in which 'politics, which is the way
human beings have devised for dealing with their differences, gets eliminated.'83 She remains a committed liberal democrat
and espouses a moral community that stretches beyond the nation-state, which strongly contrasts with Schmitt's hostility to
liberalism and his claustrophobic distinction between friend and enemy. However her image of politics -- which at its limits, she
implies, requires the resort to war as the only existentially satisfying way of resolving deep-seated conflicts -- reflects much of
Schmitt's idea of the political and Hegel's ontology of a fundamentally alienated world of nation-states, in which war is a
performance of being. She categorically states that any effort to dismantle security dilemmas 'also requires the dismantling of
human beings as we know them'.84 Whilst this would not be true of all just war advocates, I suspect that even as they are so
concerned with the ought, moral theories of violence grant too much unquestioned power to the is. The problem here lies with
the confidence in being -- of 'human beings as we know them' -- which ultimately fails to escape a Schmittian architecture and
thus eternally exacerbates (indeed reifies) antagonisms. Yet we know from the work of Deleuze and especially William Connolly
that exchanging an ontology of being for one of becoming , where the boundaries and nature of the self contain new
possibilities through agonistic relation to others, provides a less destructive and violent way of acknowledging and dealing with
conflict and difference.85¶ My argument here, whilst normatively sympathetic to Kant's moral demand for the eventual
abolition of war, militates against excessive optimism.86 Even as I am arguing that war is not an enduring historical or
anthropological feature, or a neutral and rational instrument of policy -- that it is rather the product of hegemonic forms of
knowledge about political action and community -- my analysis does suggest some sobering conclusions about its power as an
idea and formation. Neither the progressive flow of history nor the pacific tendencies of an international society of republican
states will save us. The violent ontologies I have described here in fact dominate the conceptual and policy frameworks of
modern republican states and have come, against everything Kant hoped for, to stand in for progress, modernity and reason.
Indeed what Heidegger argues, I think with some credibility, is that the enframing world view has come to stand in for being
itself. Enframing, argues Heidegger, 'does not simply endanger man in his relationship to himself and to everything that is...it
drives out every other possibility of revealing...the rule of Enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied
to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth.'87¶ What I take from
Heidegger's argument -- one that I have sought to extend by analysing the militaristic power of modern ontologies of political
existence and security -- is a view that the challenge is posed not merely by a few varieties of weapon, government, technology
or policy, but by an overarching system of thinking and understanding that lays claim to our entire space of truth and
existence. Many of the most destructive features of contemporary modernity -- militarism, repression, coercive diplomacy,
covert intervention, geopolitics, economic exploitation and ecological destruction -- derive not merely from particular choices
by policymakers based on their particular interests, but from calculative, 'empirical' discourses of scientific and political truth
rooted in powerful enlightenment images of being. Confined within such an epistemological and cultural universe,
policymakers' choices become necessities, their actions become inevitabilities, and humans suffer and die . Viewed in this
light, 'rationality' is the name we give the chain of reasoning which builds one structure of truth on another until a course of
action, however violent or dangerous, becomes preordained through that reasoning's very operation and existence. It creates
both discursive constraints -- available choices may simply not be seen as credible or legitimate -- and material constraints that
derive from the mutually reinforcing cascade of discourses and events which then preordain militarism and violence as
necessary policy responses, however ineffective, dysfunctional or chaotic. ¶ The force of my own and Heidegger's analysis does,
admittedly, tend towards a deterministic fatalism. On my part this is quite deliberate; it is important to allow this possible
conclusion to weigh on us. Large sections of modern societies -- especially parts of the media, political leaderships and national
security institutions -- are utterly trapped within the Clausewitzian paradigm, within the instrumental utilitarianism of
'enframing' and the stark ontology of the friend and enemy. They are certainly tremendously aggressive and energetic in
continually stating and reinstating its force.¶ But is there a way out? Is there no possibility of agency and choice? Is this not the
key normative problem I raised at the outset, of how the modern ontologies of war efface agency, causality and responsibility
from decision making; the responsibility that comes with having choices and making decisions, with exercising power? (In this I
am much closer to Connolly than Foucault, in Connolly's insistence that, even in the face of the anonymous power of discourse
to produce and limit subjects, selves remain capable of agency and thus incur responsibilities.88) There seems no point in
following Heidegger in seeking a more 'primal truth' of being -- that is to reinstate ontology and obscure its worldly
manifestations and consequences from critique. However we can, while refusing Heidegger's unworldly89 nostalgia, appreciate
that he was searching for a way out of the modern system of calculation; that he was searching for a 'questioning', 'free
relationship' to technology that would not be immediately recaptured by the strategic, calculating vision of enframing . Yet
his path out is somewhat chimerical -- his faith in 'art' and the older Greek attitudes of 'responsibility and indebtedness' offer us
valuable clues to the kind of sensibility needed, but little more.¶ When we consider the problem of policy, the force of this
analysis suggests that choice and agency can be all too often limited; they can remain confined (sometimes quite wilfully) within
the overarching strategic and security paradigms. Or, more hopefully, policy choices could aim to bring into being a more
enduringly inclusive, cosmopolitan and peaceful logic of the political. But this cannot be done without seizing alternatives from
outside the space of enframing and utilitarian strategic thought , by being aware of its presence and weight and activating a
very different concept of existence, security and action.90¶ This would seem to hinge upon 'questioning' as such -- on the
questions we put to the real and our efforts to create and act into it. Do security and strategic policies seek to exploit and direct
humans as material, as energy, or do they seek to protect and enlarge human dignity and autonomy? Do they seek to impose
by force an unjust status quo (as in Palestine), or to remove one injustice only to replace it with others (the U.S. in Iraq or
Afghanistan), or do so at an unacceptable human, economic, and environmental price? Do we see our actions within an
instrumental, amoral framework (of 'interests') and a linear chain of causes and effects (the idea of force), or do we see them as
folding into a complex interplay of languages, norms, events and consequences which are less predictable and controllable?91
And most fundamentally: Are we seeking to coerce or persuade? Are less violent and more sustainable choices available? Will
our actions perpetuate or help to end the global rule of insecurity and violence? Will our thought?

Our response is to interrogate the epistemological failures of the 1ac – debate is an

academic forum and your job is to inculcate valuable understanding – having a
coherent intellectual position is more important than specific political battles
Jones 99 – Professor International Politics @ Aberystwyth University (1999, Richard Wyn, Security,
Strategy, and Critical Theory, p. 155-163)

The central political task of the intellectuals is to aid in the construction of a counterhegemony and thus
undermine the prevailing patterns of discourse and interaction that make up the currently dominant
hegemony. This task is accomplished through educational activity, because, as Gramsci argues, “every relationship of
‘hegemony’ is necessarily a pedagogic relationship” (Gramsci 1971: 350). Discussing the relationship of the “philosophy of praxis” to political practice, Gramsci claims:
It [the theory] does not tend to leave the “simple” in their primitive philosophy of common sense, but rather to lead them to a higher conception of life. If it affirms the need for contact between intellectuals and “simple” it is not in
order to restrict scientific activity and preserve unity at the low level of the masses, but precisely in order to construct an intellectual-moral bloc which can make politically possible the intellectual progress of the mass and not only
of small intellectual groups. (Gramsci 1971: 332-333). According to Gramsci, this attempt to construct an alternative “intellectual-moral bloc” should take place under the auspices of the Communist Party – a body he described as
the “modern prince.” Just as Niccolo Machiavelli hoped to see a prince unite Italy, rid the country of foreign barbarians, and create a virtu-ous state, Gramsci believed that the modern price could lead the working class on its
journey toward its revolutionary destiny of an emancipated society (Gramsci 1971: 125-205). Gramsci’s relative optimism about the possibility of progressive theorists playing a constructive role in emancipatory political practice
was predicated on his belief in the existence of a universal class (a class whose emancipation would inevitably presage the emancipation of humanity itself) with revolutionary potential. It was a gradual loss of faith in this axiom
that led Horkheimer and Adorno to their extremely pessimistic prognosis about the possibilities of progressive social change. But does a loss of faith in the revolutionary vocation of the proletariat necessarily lead to the kind of
quietism ultimately embraced by the first generation of the Frankfurt School? The conflict that erupted in the 1960s between them and their more radical students suggests not. Indeed, contemporary critical theorists claim that
the deprivileging of the role of the proletariat in the struggle for emancipation is actually a positive move. Class remains a very important axis of domination in society, but it is not the only such axis (Fraser 1995). Nor is it valid to
reduce all other forms of domination – for example, in the case of gender – to class relations, as orthodox Marxists tend to do. To recognize these points is not only a first step toward the development of an analysis of forms of
exploitation and exclusion within society that is more attuned to social reality; it is also a realization that there are other forms of emancipatory politics than those associated with class conflict.1 This in turn suggests new
possibilities and problems for emancipatory theory. Furthermore, the abandonment of faith in revolutionary parties is also a positive development. The history of the European left during the twentieth century provides myriad
examples of the ways in which the fetishization of party organizations has led to bureaucratic immobility and the confusion of means with ends (see, for example, Salvadori 1990). The failure of the Bolshevik experiment illustrates
how disciplined, vanguard parties are an ideal vehicle for totalitarian domination (Serge 1984). Faith in the “infallible party” has obviously been the source of strength and comfort to many in this period and, as the experience of
the southern Wales coalfield demonstrates, has inspired brave and progressive behavior (see, for example, the account of support for the Spanish Republic in Francis 1984). But such parties have so often been the enemies of

History furnishes examples of progressive

emancipation that they should be treated with the utmost caution. Parties are necessary, but their fetishization is potentially disastrous.

developments that have been positively influenced by organic intellectuals operating outside the
bounds of a particular party structure (G. Williams 1984). Some of these developments have occurred in the
particularly intractable realm of security . These examples may be considered as “resources of hope” for
critical security studies (R. Williams 1989). They illustrate that ideas are important or, more correctly, that change is the product of
the dialectical interaction of ideas and material reality . One clear security-related example of the role of critical thinking and critical thinkers in
aiding and abetting progressive social change is the experience of the peace movement of the 1980s . At that time the ideas of dissident defense

intellectuals (the “alternative defense” school) encouraged and drew strength from peace activism . Together they had an
effect not only on short-term policy but on the dominant discourses of strategy and security, a far more
important result in the long run. The synergy between critical security intellectuals and critical social movements and the potential influence of both working in tandem
can be witnessed particularly clearly in the fate of common security . As Thomas Risse-Kappen points out, the term “common security” originated in the contribution of
peace researchers to the German security debate of the 1970s (Risse-Kappen 1994: 186ff.); it was subsequently popularized by the Palme Commission report (Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues 1982).

Initially, mainstream defense intellectuals dismissed the concept as hopelessly idealistic ; it certainly had no place in their
allegedly hardheaded and realist view of the world. However, notions of common security were taken up by a number of different

intellectuals communities, including the liberal arms control community in the United States, Western European peace researchers, security specialists in the center-left political parties of Western
Europe, and Soviet “institutchiks” – members of the influential policy institutes in the Soviet Union such as the United States of America and Canada Institute (Landau 1996: 52-54; Risse-Kappen 1994: 196-200; Kaldor 1995; Spencer

1995). These communities were subsequently able to take advantage of public pressure exerted through social movements in
order to gain broader acceptance for common security. In Germany, for example, “in response to social movement pressure, German social organizations such as
churches and trade unions quickly supported the ideas promoted by peace researchers and the SPD” (Risse-Kappen 1994: 207). Similar pressures even had an effect on the

Reagan administration. As Risse-Kappen notes: When the Reagan administration brought hard-liners into power, the US arms control community was removed from policy influence. It was
the American peace movement and what became known as the “freeze campaign” that revived the
arms control process together with pressure from the European allies. (Risse-Kappen 1994: 205; also Cortright 1993: 90-110). Although it would be difficult to sustain a claim that the combination of critical
movements and intellectuals persuaded the Reagan government to adopt the rhetoric and substance of common security in its entirety, it is clear that it did at least have a substantial impact

on ameliorating U.S. behavior. The most dramatic and certainly the most unexpected impact of alternative defense ideas was felt in the
Soviet Union. Through various East-West links, which included arms control institutions, Pugwash conferences, interparty contacts, and even direct personal links, a coterie of Soviet
policy analysts and advisers were drawn toward common security and such attendant notions as “nonoffensive defense” (these links are detailed in
Evangelista 1995; Kaldor 1995; Checkel 1993; Risse-Kappen 1994; Landau 1996 and Spencer 1995 concentrate on the role of the Pugwash conferences). This group, including Palme Commission member Georgii

Arbatov, Pugwash attendee Andrei Kokoshin , and Sergei Karaganov, a senior adviser who was in regular contact with the Western peace researchers Anders Boserup and Lutz Unterseher (Risse-Kappen 1994: 203), then

influenced Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev’s subsequent championing of common security may be attributed to several factors. It is clear, for example, that new Soviet
leadership had a strong interest in alleviating tensions in East-West relations in order to facilitate much-
needed domestic reforms (“the interaction of ideas and material reality”). But what is significant is that the Soviets’ commitment to common
security led to significant changes in force sizes and postures. These in turn aided in the winding down of
the Cold War, the end of Soviet domination over Eastern Europe, and even the collapse of Russian
control over much of the territory of the former Soviet Union . At the present time, in marked contrast to the situation in the early 1980s, common security is
part of the common sense of security discourse. As MccGwire points out, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) (a common defense pact) is using the rhetoric of common security in order to justify its expansion into

This points to an interesting and potentially important aspect of the impact of ideas on
Eastern Europe (MccGwire 1997).

politics. As concepts such as common security, and collective security before it (Claude 1984: 223-260), are adopted by governments and military
services, they inevitably become somewhat debased. The hope is that enough of the residual meaning
can survive to shift the parameters of the debate in a potentially progressive direction. Moreover, the adoption of the
concept of common security by official circles provides critics with a useful tool for (immanently) critiquing aspects of security policy (as MccGwire 1997 demonsrates in relation to NATO expansion). The example of common
 critical intellectuals can be politically engaged and play a role – a significant one at that – in
security is highly instructive. First, it indicates that

making the world a better and safer place . Second, it points to potential future addressees for critical
international theory in general, and critical security studies in particular . Third, it also underlines the role of
ideas in the evolution in society. CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES AND THE THEORY-PRACTICE NEXUS Although most proponents of critical security studies reject aspects of Gramsci’s theory of
organic intellectuals, in particular his exclusive concentration on class and his emphasis on the guiding role of the party, the desire for engagement and relevance must remain at the heart of their project. The example of the peace
movement suggests that critical theorists can still play the role of organic intellectuals and that this organic relationship need not confine itself to a single class; it can involve alignment with different coalitions of social movements

Said captures this broader orientation when

that campaign on an issue or a series of issues pertinent to the struggle for emancipation (Shaw 1994b; R. Walker 1994). Edward

he suggests that critical intellectuals “are always tied to and ought to remain an organic part of an
ongoing experience in society: of the poor, the disadvantaged, the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless” (Said 1994: 84). In the specific case of critical security studies, this
means placing the experience of those men and women and communities for whom the present world
order is a cause of insecurity rather than security at the center of the agenda and making suffering
humanity rather than raison d’etat the prism through which problems are viewed . Here the project stands full-square within the
critical theory tradition. If “all theory is for someone and for some purpose,” then critical security studies is for “the

voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless,” and its purpose is their emancipation . The theoretical
implications of this orientation have already been discussed in the previous chapters. They involve a fundamental reconceptualization of security
with a shift in referent object and a broadening of the range of issues considered as a legitimate part of the discourse. They also
involve a reconceptualization of strategy within this expanded notion of security. But the question remains at the conceptual level of how these

alternative types of theorizing – even if they are self-consciously aligned to the practices of critical or new social movements, such as peace activism, the struggle for human rights, and the
survival of minority cultures – can become “a force for the direction of action .” Again, Gramsci’s work is insightful. In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci advances a
sophisticated analysis of how dominant discourses play a vital role in upholding particular political and economic orders, or, in Gramsci’s terminology, “historic blocs” (Gramsci 1971: 323-377). Gramsci adopted Machiavelli’s view of
power as a centaur, ahlf man, half beast: a mixture of consent and coercion. Consent is produced and reproduced by a ruling hegemony that holds sway through civil society and takes on the status of common sense; it becomes
subconsciously accepted and even regarded as beyond question. Obviously, for Gramsci, there is nothing immutable about the values that permeate society; they can and do change. In the social realm, ideas and institutions that
were once seen as natural and beyond question (i.e., commonsensical) in the West, such as feudalism and slavery, are now seen as anachronistic, unjust, and unacceptable. In Marx’s well-worn phrase, “All that is solid melts into
the air.” Gramsci’s intention is to harness this potential for change and ensure that it moves in the direction of emancipation. To do this he suggests a strategy of a “war of position” (Gramsci 1971: 229-239). Gramsci argues that in

states with developed civil societies, such as those in Western liberal democracies, any successful attempt at progressive social change requires a slow, incremental, even
molecular, struggle to break down the prevailing hegemony and construct an alternative
counterhegemony to take its place. Organic intellectuals have a crucial role to play in this process by helping to
undermine the “natural,” “commonsense,” internalized nature of the status quo. This in turn helps create political space within
which alternative conceptions of politics can be developed and new historic blocs created. I contend that Gramsci’s strategy of a war of position suggests an
appropriate model for proponents of critical security studies to adopt in relating their theorizing to political practice. THE TASKS OF CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES If the project of critical security

studies is conceived in terms of war of position, then the main task of those intellectuals who align
themselves with the enterprise is to attempt to undermine the prevailing hegemonic security discourse.
This may be accomplished by utilizing specialist information and expertise to engage in an immanent critique of the
prevailing security regimes, that is, comparing the justifications of those regimes with actual outcomes.
When this is attempted in the security field, the prevailing structures and regimes are found to fail
grievously on their own terms. Such an approach also involves challenging the pronouncements of those
intellectuals, traditional or organic, whose views serve to legitimate, and hence reproduce, the prevailing world
order. This challenge entails teasing out the often subconscious and certainly unexamined assumptions that
underlie their arguments while drawing attention to the normative viewpoints that are smuggled into
mainstream thinking about security behind its positivist façade. In this sense, proponents of critical security
studies approximate to Foucault’s notion of “specific intellectuals” who use their expert knowledge to
challenge the prevailing “regime of truth” (Foucault 1980: 132). However, critical theorists might wish to reformulate this sentiment along more familiar Quaker lines of “speaking
truth to power” (this sentiment is also central to Said 1994) or even along the eisteddfod lines of speaking “truth against the world.” Of course, traditional strategists can, and indeed do, sometimes claim a similar role. Colin S. Gray,
for example, states that “strategists must be prepared to ‘speak truth to power’” (Gray 1982a: 193). But the difference between Gray and proponents of critical security studies is that, whereas the former seeks to influence

critical
policymakers in particular directions without questioning the basis of their power, the latter aim at a thoroughgoing critique of all that traditional security studies has taken for granted. Furthermore,

theorists base their critique on the presupposition, elegantly stated by Adorno, that “the need to lend
suffering a voice is the precondition of all truth” (cited in Jameson 1990: 66). The aim of critical security studies in attempting to undermine the prevailing orthodoxy is
ultimately educational. As Gramsci notes, “every relationship of ‘hegemony’ is necessarily a pedagogic relationship” (Gramsci 1971: 350; see also the discussion of critical pedagogy in Neufeld 1995: 116-121). Thus, by

criticizing the hegemonic discourse and advancing alternative conceptions of security based on different understandings of
human potentialities, the approach is simultaneously playing apart in eroding the legitimacy of the ruling historic
bloc and contributing to the development of a counterhegemonic position . There are a number of avenues of avenues open to critical
security specialists in pursuing this educational strategy. As teachers, they can try to foster and encourage skepticism toward accepted

wisdom and open minds to other possibilities. They can also take advantage of the seemingly
unquenchable thirst of the media for instant pundistry to forward alternative views onto a broader
stage. Nancy Fraser argues: “As teachers, we try to foster an emergent pedagogical counterculture …. As
critical public intellectuals we try to inject our perspectives into whatever cultural or political public
spheres we have access to” (Fraser 1989: 11). Perhaps significantly, support for this type of emancipatory strategy can even be found in the work of the ultrapessimistic Adorno, who
argues: In the history of civilization there have been not a few instances when delusions were healed
not by focused propaganda, but, in the final analysis, because scholars, with their unobtrusive yet insistent work
habits, studied what lay at the root of the delusion. (cited in Kellner 1992: vii) Such “unobtrusive yet insistent work” does not in itself create the social change to which
Adorno alludes. The conceptual and the practical dangers of collapsing practice into theory must be guarded

against. Rather, through their educational activities, proponent of critical security studies should aim to
provide support for those social movements that promote emancipatory social change . By providing a
critique of the prevailing order and legitimating alternative views, critical theorists can perform a
valuable role in supporting the struggles of social movements. That said, the role of theorists is not to direct and instruct those movements with which
they are aligned; instead, the relationship is reciprocal. The experience of the European, North American, and Antipodean peace movements of the 1980s shows how

influential social movements can become when their efforts are harnessed to the intellectual and
educational activity of critical thinkers. For example, in his account of New Zealand’s antinuclear stance in the 1980s, Michael C. Pugh cites the
importance of the visits of critical intellectuals such as Helen Caldicott and Richard Falk in changing the country’s
political climate and encouraging the growth of the antinuclear movement (Pugh 1989: 108; see also COrtright 1993: 5-13). In the 1980s
peace movements and critical intellectuals interested in issues of security and strategy drew strength and succor from each other’s efforts. If such critical social movements do not exist, then this creates obvious difficulties for the
critical theorist. But even under these circumstances, the theorist need not abandon all hope of an eventual orientation toward practice. Once again, the peace movement of the 1980s provides evidence of the possibilities. At that
time, the movement benefited from the intellectual work undertaken in the lean years of the peace movement in the late 1970s. Some of the theories and concepts developed then, such as common security and nonoffensive
defense, were eventually taken up even in the Kremlin and played a significant role in defusing the second Cold War. Those ideas developed in the 1970s can be seen in Adornian terms of the a “message in a bottle,” but in this
case, contra Adorno’s expectations, they were picked up and used to support a program of emancipatory political practice. Obviously, one would be naïve to understate the difficulties facing those attempting to develop alternative
critical approaches within academia. Some of these problems have been alluded to already and involve the structural constraints of academic life itself. Said argues that many problems are caused by what he describes as the

Academics are now so constrained by the requirements of job security and

growing “professionalisation” of academic life (Said 1994: 49-62).

marketability that they are extremely risk-averse. It pays – in all senses – to stick with the crowd and avoid the
exposed limb by following the prevalent disciplinary preoccupations , publish in certain prescribed journals, and so on. The result is
the navel gazing so prevalent in the study of international relations and the seeming inability of security
specialists to deal with the changes brought about by the end of the Cold War (Kristensen 1997 highlights
the search of U.S. nuclear planners for “new targets for old weapons ”). And, of course, the pressures for conformism
are heightened in the field of security studies when governments have a very real interest in
marginalizing dissent. Nevertheless, opportunities for critical thinking do exist, and this thinking can connect
with the practices of social movements and become a “force for the direction of action. ” The experience of the 1980s, when,
in the depths of the second Cold War, critical thinkers risked demonization and in some countries far worse in order to challenge received wisdom, thus arguably playing a crucial role in the very survival of the human race, should
act as both an inspiration and a challenge to critical security studies.
Impacts
 Burke
security can only reproduce the same forms of violence across the globe
Burke 17 (Anthony Burke is an Associate Prof and Reader in International and Political Studies @ UNSW
Australia, “Security Cosmopolitanism and Global Governance”, Global Insecurity)//KW

These examples of the transnationalisation, globalisation, and even 'planetisation' of insecurity

raise a number of profound intellectual, ethical, and policy concerns. Firstly, there is a problem
of the relative concern and attention paid to particular forms of insecurity by political elites
(complacency about gender violence and nuclear war, on the one hand, and hyper-vigilance in
relation to Daesh, refugees or Ebola, on the other). Without denying that these examples are
significant challenges, this politicisation of particular kinds of insecurity based on political
ideology and global privilege misrecognises the relative threat and se verity of various
structures and systems of insecurity. It also contributes to bad policy responses and ineffective
systems of global governance. Secondly, there is a problem of how adequately scholars and
policymakers under- stand the complex roots and sources of such forms of insecurity. Too
often, insecurities are seen as discrete events and symptoms, and policy is targeted at their
most visible and immediate manifestations. We seem less able (or more to the point, less
willing) to identify and analyse the under- lying systems of which such insecurities are the
product, and less able and willing again to address and transform those systems in the interests
of global security. Thirdly, is a problem that is the major focus of this book: how to effectively,
justly, and fairly respond to systemic, globalised forms of insecurity with improved approaches
to national policy and regional and global governance. Given several deeply worrying trends in
global security- a deterioration in the strategic relationships and trust between major powers;
the persistence of conflict in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Sudan, Nigeria, and
Somalia with its disproportionate impact on civilians; unprecedented numbers of forced
migrants and refugees; annual terrorism casualties reaching the tens of thousands; and the dire
predictions of climate and earth system scientists - it is right to express concern that our
national and global approaches to global insecurity are in grave crisis. It is no longer acceptable
to either view the current situation as some- how routine, or see it through the lens of a
selective and self-interested alarmism. It makes no sense to privilege the security of our own
state, our allies, or states themselves, when so many other communities and forms of life are
also suffering grave insecurity. Given the distributed and systemic and interrelated nature of
contemporary insecurities, it makes no sense to privilege any one 'referent' of security; rather,
reflecting the enmeshed coexistence of states, human communities, and ecologies in ways that
extend to the entire biosphere, we have to find ways to collectively and cooperatively secure
the entire mesh of planetary existence and life (Burke 2016: 148 ). At the same time, it is also
important to distinguish between the global as a question of scale and the global as a question
of scope (or reach). As Jon Western explains, insecurities that are global in scale (such as
climate change, nuclear war, economic crisis, and gender and racial inequality) 'affect a larger
set of actors ... with effects that are more widely dispersed and challenging'. They also 'tend to
be more connected in diverse and convoluted ways with an array of emergent properties that
make them more difficult to diagnose and to develop governance struc- tures to control or
mitigate'. Alternatively, he suggests, 'issues that are global in reach may also have high degrees
of complexity, but they tend to have more localised causes and effects and require a different
set of governance structures to address them' (Western 2016: 100). The globalisation of
insecurity is not just a transformation of scale and scope. The twentieth century saw the
creation of integrated and chaotic global processes that have transformed nature itself and
made the world confront the enormity of humankind's strange new powers. Imperialism and
settler colonialism brought about the destruction of indigenous societies on five continents and
the global slave trade. In the Holocaust and other genocides, we have witnessed tl1e attempt to
exterminate entire races, cultures, and political communities. The nuclear age and the global
ecological crisis have together ushered in what earth system scientists and social theorists have
called the 'Anthropocene': a new geologic epoch in which humans - through processes of
imperialism, warfare, and industrialised capitalism - have become a geophysical force that is
reshaping tl1e planet and erasing the boundaries between humanity and nature (Burke et al.
2016; Harrington 2016; Youatt 2014; Dalby 2015). In short, the problem is not merely one of
scale and management - although that is certainly challenging enough - but also one of moral
enormity and ethical response. An awareness of moral enormity implies an awareness of the
enormous impact on earth and each other that our forms of collective political and industrial
power have had and will continue to have; it demands the development of ethical and political
principles that can honour our systemic enmeshment with and impact on tl1e planet, and that
can appreciate our historical and cultural differences along with our common humanity and
dependence on the earth. And, given the tremendous future duration of the changes to the
biosphere that nuclear isotopes and climate change are creating (from hundreds to millions of
years), this ethical awareness must honour our obligation to future generations of human
beings, plants, and animals. Such a situation requires an ethics that can grapple with the
dilemma that the philosopher Hannah Arendt identified: '[E]very act that is once made its
appearance stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of
the past ... the unprece- dented, once it has appeared, may become a precedent for the future'
(Arendt 2005: 98-99). The challenge this poses to our current concepts and architecture of
collective security and global governance cannot be underestimated.
 Never Ending War

The impact is a never ending war for security, as the culmination of militarism
necessitates violence across the globe
Ritchie 11 (Nick Ritchie is a Research Fellow at the Department of Peace Studies @ University of
Bradford, , Rethinking security: a critical analysis of the Strategic Defence and Security
Review”International Affairs Volume 87, Issue 2)

Third, thelegitimating narrative of acting as a ‘force for good’ that emerged in the 1998 SDR to justify an
expensive, expeditionary, war-fighting military doctrine in the name of ‘enlightened self-interest’ must
be scrutinized. But the relationship between the rhetoric and the reality is highly questionable. From a critical perspective it can be argued
that successive governments have framed interventionist policy choices as positive, progressive and
‘good’ to generate support for ‘risk transfer’ military operations of choice that are presented as essential to
the security of UK citizens but in fact reproduce a state-centric construction of a particular ‘national role’.
This reflects Hirshberg’s contention that ‘the maintenance of a positive national self-image is crucial to continued public acquiescence and
support for government, and thus to the smooth, on-going functioning of the state’. 86 The notion that Afghanistan is a ‘noble cause’ for
the British state reflects
a state-centric concern with ideas of status and prestige and the legitimating moral
gloss of the ‘force for good’ rhetoric. 87 Furthermore, the rhetoric of ‘enlightened self-interest’ implies that
the exercise of UK military force as a ‘force for good’ will lessen security risks to the British state and
citizenry by resolving current security threats and pre-empting future risks. But , returning again to Iraq and
Afghanistan, we must ask whether sacrificing solders’ lives, killing over 100,000 Iraqi civilians including a
disproportionate number of women and children, destroying the immediate human security of several
million others through injury, displacement, persecution and trauma, and sparking long-term trends of
rising crime rates, property destruction, economic disruption, and deterioration of health-care resources
and food production and distribution capabilities, all while providing profits for largely western
corporations through arms deals, service contracts and private military contractors, constitutes being a
‘force for good’ when the outcomes of these major military interventions have proven at best
indeterminate. 88 The legitimacy of this question is reinforced by Curtis’s analysis of the deadly impact of British foreign policy since the
1950s. Curtis argues that ‘the history of British foreign policy is partly one of complicity in some of the world’s worst horrors … contrary to the
extraordinary rhetoric of New Labour leaders and other elites, policies are continuing on this traditional course, systematically making the
world more abusive of human rights as well as more unequal and less secure’. 89 Add to this the statistic that the UK was involved in more wars
between 1946 and 2003 (21 in total) than any other state, and the ‘force for good’ rationale begins to unravel. 90 Furthermore, the
militarized ‘force for good’ narrative encompasses the active defence of the ‘rules-based system’ as a
global good. But it is clear that the current ‘rules-based system’ of western-dominated multilateral
institutions and processes of global governance does not work for billions of people or for planetary
ecological systems. The Human Development Reports produced by the United Nations Development Programme routinely highlight
the global political and economic structures and systems that keep hundreds of millions of people poor,
starving, jobless, diseased and repressed. 91 A stable ‘rules-based system’ is no doubt in the interests of UK citizens and the
interests of global human society. With stability comes predictability, which can minimize uncertainty, risk and insecurity. But there is a
growing consensus that long-term stability, particularly the reduction of violent conflict, will require far
greater political, economic and environmental equity on a global scale, as advocated in the Department for
International Development’s 2009 white paper on Eliminating world poverty. 92 An interventionist, military-oriented, state-
centric, global risk management doctrine and the risks it can generate are unlikely to stabilize and
transform the rules-based system into a more equitable form . A growing literature now argues that prevailing
western approaches to understanding, managing and ameliorating global insecurity and its violent
symptoms are inadequate and unsustainable. They are proving, and will continue to prove, increasingly
incapable of providing security for both the world’s poor and immiserated, concentrated in the Global
South, and the world’s elite of around one billion, mainly located in the North Atlantic community,
Australasia and parts of East Asia, which will remain unable to insulate itself from violent responses to
pervasive insecurity. 93 This is not to suggest that the UK should not exercise elements of national power to alleviate others’ suffering
as a consequence of natural or man-made disasters. Indeed, the Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty’s 2001 ‘responsibility to
protect’ doctrine sets out clearly the principle of conditional sovereignty and the grounds for legitimate intervention when a state cannot or will
not protect its citizens from pervasive and severe harm. 94 More broadly, if we accept that in an increasingly complex, interdependent world
the human security of UK citizens enmeshed in global networks of risk and opportunity is intertwined with the human security of others,
particularly in conflict-prone regions often characterized by poverty, weak governance and underdevelopment, then actions to improve others’
long-term human security does constitute a form of ‘enlightened self-interest’. But we must question the assumption that war-fighting
interventionist missions of choice do, in fact, serve the long-term human security interests of UK citizens as opposed to the interests of the
state based on prevailing conceptions of national role. Utility of force Connected to this critique is a reappraisal of the utility of force within the
conception of national security as global risk management, on two counts. First, security risks are increasingly likely to arise from a complex
mixture of interdependent factors. Environmental, economic, military and political sources of insecurity could include the effects of climate
change, mass poverty and economic injustice, global pandemic disease, mass migration and refugee flows, poor governance, weak and failing
states, international terrorism and asymmetric warfare, the spread of WMD and advanced conventional military technologies, ethnic and
sectarian nationalism, and competition over access to key resources such as oil and water. Future conflicts are therefore likely to be complex
and diverse. They are unlikely to be susceptible to purely military solutions, and the use of military force in regional crises will be messy,
indeterminate and of limited value and effectiveness. 95 It is not obvious that the armed forces have a significant war-fighting role to play in
mitigating these risks, as opposed to supporting police, intelligence and security forces in countering terrorist plots—and possibly launching a
limited, precision strike against WMD capabilities in the event of the extreme scenario of robust intelligence that a WMD attack is imminent. In
fact, the 2009 National Security Strategy limited the role of the armed forces to ‘defence against direct threats to the UK and its overseas
territories’ (which one could qualify as ‘direct violent, or military, threats’) together with a contributory role in ‘tackling threats to our security
overseas by helping to address conflict, instability and crises across the globe’. 96 This broad but essentially supportive remit for the military
was reinforced in the 2010 National Security Strategy’s catalogue of priority risks. The three-tiered list enumerated 15 risks, which can be
reduced to five: terrorism, civil emergencies, international crime, trade disputes and an attack by another state. 97 The role of military force is
limited in all of these except the last, which remains by far the least likely. As Jenkins argues, almost none of the above is a threat. They are
crimes, catastrophes, or, in the case of being ‘drawn in’ to a foreign conflict, a matter of political choice … as for the threat of conventional
attack on the British Isles by another state, we can only ask who? The threat is so negligible as to be insignificant. It is like insuring one’s house
for billions of pounds against an asteroid attack. 98 Bob Ainsworth, then Defence Secretary, seemed to grasp this in 2009, arguing that ‘our
initial conclusions on the character of warfare should be first that international intervention will be more difficult not less. We will have to
consider carefully how to apply military force in pursuit of national security. And second, and related to this, that the timely application of soft
power and methods of conflict prevention will be a high priority.’ 99 Yet the government also insists on maintaining an interventionist,
expeditionary military doctrine and corresponding capabilities based on a seemingly unquestioned national security role as a ‘force for good’ in
global risk management operations. Second, risk management through military intervention in a complex
international security environment characterized by asymmetric cultures, actors and distributions of
power and knowledge, and interconnections on many levels, can generate significant negative feedback,
or ‘blowback’, from unintended outcomes that create more risk. This challenges notions of effective risk management
and control through linear change via the exercise of military power. 100 In fact, as Williams argues, the decision to act to mitigate
a risk itself becomes risky: in the attempt to maintain control, negative feedback from the effects of a
decision ‘inevitably leads to a loss of control’. 101 The danger is that military-based risk management
becomes a cyclical process with no end in sight. 102 Rogers, for example, presciently envisaged a post-9/11 ‘never-
ending war’ of military-led risk mitigation generating new and potentially more dangerous risks deemed
susceptible to further military solutions, and so on. 103 This risk is not limited to distant theatres of
conflict, but also applies to the very ‘way of life’ the current militarized risk management doctrine is
meant to protect, through the erosion of civil liberties and the securitization of daily life. There is a powerful
argument that the exercise of UK military force for optional expeditionary war-fighting operations will be an increasingly
dangerous, expensive and ethically dubious doctrine that could generate more, and potentially more
lethal, risks than it resolves or contains. Since absolute security cannot be achieved , the value of any potential,
discretionary increment in UK security through the exercise of military force must take into account its political, economic and human cost. As
Wolfers argues, ‘at a certain point, by something like the economic law of diminishing returns, the gain in security no longer compensates for
the added costs of attaining it’, and the exercise of military force becomes ineffective or, worse, wholly
counterproductive. 104 After following George W. Bush on a risky adventure into Iraq, the UK must question the effectiveness of a
militarized ‘risk transfer’ strategy as the foundation for managing globalized security risks in relation to the long-term human security needs of
British citizens.
 Genocide/Environment
Securitization of environmental and social crises risks genocide and mass violence.
Ahmed 11 (Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is a Associate Tutor at the Department of IR @ University of
Sussex “The international relations of crisis and the crisis of international relations: from the
securitisation of scarcity to the militarisation of society,” Global Change, Peace & Security, Volume 23,
Issue 3)

Consequently, for the most part, the policy implications of orthodox IR approaches involve a
redundant conceptualisation of global systemic crises purely as potential ‘threat-multipliers’ of
traditional security issues such as ‘political instability around the world, the collapse of
governments and the creation of terrorist safe havens’. Climate change will serve to amplify the
threat of international terrorism, particularly in regions with large populations and scarce
resources.94 The US Army, for instance, depicts climate change as a ‘stress-multiplier’ that will
‘exacerbate tensions’ and ‘complicate American foreign policy’; while the EU perceives it as a
‘threat-multiplier which exacerbates existing trends, tensions and instability’.95 In practice, this
generates an excessive preoccupation not with the causes of global crisis acceleration and how
to ameliorate them through structural transformation, but with their purportedly inevitable
impacts, and how to prepare for them by controlling problematic populations. Paradoxically,
this ‘securitisation’ of global crises does not render us safer. Instead, by necessitating more
violence, while inhibiting preventive action, it guarantees greater insecurity. Thus, a recent US
Department of Defense report explores the future of international conflict up to 2050. It warns
of ‘resource competition induced by growing populations and expanding economies’,
particularly due to a projected ‘youth bulge’ in the South, which ‘will consume ever increasing
amounts of food, water and energy’. This will prompt a ‘return to traditional security threats
posed by emerging near-peers as we compete globally for depleting natural resources and
overseas markets’. Finally, climate change will ‘compound’ these stressors by generating
humanitarian crises, population migrations and other complex emergencies.96 A similar study
by the US Joint Forces Command draws attention to the danger of global energy depletion
through to 2030. Warning of ‘the dangerous vulnerabilities the growing energy crisis presents’,
the report concludes that ‘The implications for future conflict are ominous.’97 Once again, the
subject turns to demographics: ‘In total, the world will add approximately 60 million people
each year and reach a total of 8 billion by the 2030s’, 95 per cent accruing to developing
countries, while populations in developed countries slow or decline. ‘Regions such as the
Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa, where the youth bulge will reach over 50% of the
population, will possess fewer inhibitions about engaging in conflict.’98 The assumption is that
regions which happen to be both energy-rich and Muslim-majority will also be sites of violent
conflict due to their rapidly growing populations. A British Ministry of Defence report concurs
with this assessment, highlighting an inevitable ‘youth bulge’ by 2035, with some 87 per cent of
all people under the age of 25 inhabiting developing countries. In particular, the Middle East
population will increase by 132 per cent and sub-Saharan Africa by 81 per cent. Growing
resentment due to ‘endemic unemployment’ will be channelled through ‘political militancy,
including radical political Islam whose concept of Umma, the global Islamic community, and
resistance to capitalism may lie uneasily in an international system based on nation-states and
global market forces’. More strangely, predicting an intensifying global divide between a super-
rich elite, the middle classes and an urban under-class, the report warns: ‘The world's middle
classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational
processes in their own class interest.’99 3.3 Exclusionary logics of global crisis securitisation?
Thus, the securitisation of global crisis leads not only to the problematisation of particular
religious and ethnic groups in foreign regions of geopolitical interest, but potentially extends
this problematisation to any social group which might challenge prevailing global political
economic structures across racial, national and class lines. The previous examples illustrate how
securitisation paradoxically generates insecurity by reifying a process of militarisation against
social groups that are constructed as external to the prevailing geopolitical and economic order.
In other words, the internal reductionism, fragmentation and compartmentalisation that
plagues orthodox theory and policy reproduces precisely these characteristics by externalising
global crises from one another, externalising states from one another, externalising the inter-
state system from its biophysical environment, and externalising new social groups as
dangerous ‘outsiders’. Hence, a simple discursive analysis of state militarisation and the
construction of new ‘outsider’ identities is insufficient to understand the causal dynamics
driving the process of ‘Otherisation’. As Doug Stokes points out, the Western state
preoccupation with the ongoing military struggle against international terrorism reveals an
underlying ‘discursive complex’, where representations about terrorism and non-Western
populations are premised on ‘the construction of stark boundaries’ that ‘operate to exclude and
include’. Yet these exclusionary discourses are ‘intimately bound up with political and economic
processes’, such as strategic interests in proliferating military bases in the Middle East,
economic interests in control of oil, and the wider political goal of ‘maintaining American
hegemony’ by dominating a resource-rich region critical for global capitalism.100 But even this
does not go far enough, for arguably the construction of certain hegemonic discourses is
mutually constituted by these geopolitical, strategic and economic interests – exclusionary
discourses are politically constituted. New conceptual developments in genocide studies throw
further light on this in terms of the concrete socio-political dynamics of securitisation processes.
It is now widely recognised, for instance, that the distinguishing criterion of genocide is not the
pre-existence of primordial groups, one of which destroys the other on the basis of a pre-
eminence in bureaucratic military–political power. Rather, genocide is the intentional attempt
to destroy a particular social group that has been socially constructed as different.101 As
Hinton observes, genocides precisely constitute a process of ‘othering’ in which an imagined
community becomes reshaped so that previously ‘included’ groups become ‘ideologically
recast’ and dehumanised as threatening and dangerous outsiders, be it along ethnic, religious,
political or economic lines – eventually legitimising their annihilation.102 In other words,
genocidal violence is inherently rooted in a prior and ongoing ideological process, whereby
exclusionary group categories are innovated, constructed and ‘Otherised’ in accordance with a
specific socio-political programme. The very process of identifying and classifying particular
groups as outside the boundaries of an imagined community of ‘inclusion’, justifying
exculpatory violence toward them, is itself a political act without which genocide would be
impossible.103 This recalls Lemkin's recognition that the intention to destroy a group is
integrally connected with a wider socio-political project – or colonial project – designed to
perpetuate the political, economic, cultural and ideological relations of the perpetrators in the
place of that of the victims, by interrupting or eradicating their means of social reproduction.
Only by interrogating the dynamic and origins of this programme to uncover the social relations
from which that programme derives can the emergence of genocidal intent become
explicable.104 Building on this insight, Semelin demonstrates that the process of exclusionary
social group construction invariably derives from political processes emerging from deep-
seated socio-political crises that undermine the prevailing framework of civil order and social
norms; and which can, for one social group, be seemingly resolved by projecting anxieties onto
a new ‘outsider’ group deemed to be somehow responsible for crisis conditions. It is in this
context that various forms of mass violence, which may or may not eventually culminate in
actual genocide, can become legitimised as contributing to the resolution of crises .105 This
does not imply that the securitisation of global crises by Western defence agencies is genocidal.
Rather, the same essential dynamics of social polarisation and exclusionary group identity formation
evident in genocides are highly relevant in understanding the radicalisation processes behind mass
violence. This highlights the fundamental connection between social crisis , the breakdown of
prevailing norms, the formation of new exclusionary group identities, and the projection of
blame for crisis onto a newly constructed ‘outsider’ group vindicating various forms of violence.
 Enframing
Enframing of national security is a pre-requisite to macropolitical violence
Burke 7 (Anthony Burke is an Associate Prof and Reader in International and Political Studies @ UNSW
Australia, “Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and Reason,” Theory and Event)

My argument here, whilst normatively sympathetic to Kant's moral demand for the eventual
abolition of war, militates against excessive optimism.86 Even as I am arguing that war is not an
enduring historical or anthropological feature, or a neutral and rational instrument of policy --
that it is rather the product of hegemonic forms of knowledge about political action and
community -- my analysis does suggest some sobering conclusions about its power as an idea
and formation. Neither the progressive flow of history nor the pacific tendencies of an
international society of republican states will save us. The violent ontologies I have described
here in fact dominate the conceptual and policy frameworks of modern republican states and
have come, against everything Kant hoped for, to stand in for progress, modernity and reason.
Indeed what Heidegger argues, I think with some credibility, is that the enframing world view
has come to stand in for being itself. Enframing, argues Heidegger, 'does not simply endanger
man in his relationship to himself and to everything that is...it drives out every other possibility
of revealing...the rule of Enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to
him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal
truth.'87 What I take from Heidegger's argument -- one that I have sought to extend by
analysing the militaristic power of modern ontologies of political existence and security -- is a
view that the challenge is posed not merely by a few varieties of weapon, government,
technology or policy, but by an overarching system of thinking and understanding that lays
claim to our entire space of truth and existence. Many of the most destructive features of
contemporary modernity -- militarism, repression, coercive diplomacy, covert intervention,
geopolitics, economic exploitation and ecological destruction -- derive not merely from
particular choices by policymakers based on their particular interests, but from calculative,
'empirical' discourses of scientific and political truth rooted in powerful enlightenment images
of being. Confined within such an epistemological and cultural universe, policymakers' choices
become necessities, their actions become inevitabilities, and humans suffer and die. Viewed in
this light, 'rationality' is the name we give the chain of reasoning which builds one structure of
truth on another until a course of action, however violent or dangerous, becomes preordained
through that reasoning's very operation and existence. It creates both discursive constraints --
available choices may simply not be seen as credible or legitimate -- and material constraints
that derive from the mutually reinforcing cascade of discourses and events which then
preordain militarism and violence as necessary policy responses, however ineffective,
dysfunctional or chaotic. The force of my own and Heidegger's analysis does, admittedly, tend
towards a deterministic fatalism. On my part this is quite deliberate; it is important to allow this
possible conclusion to weigh on us. Large sections of modern societies -- especially parts of the
media, political leaderships and national security institutions -- are utterly trapped within the
Clausewitzian paradigm, within the instrumental utilitarianism of 'enframing' and the stark
ontology of the friend and enemy. They are certainly tremendously aggressive and energetic in
continually stating and reinstating its force. But is there a way out? Is there no possibility of
agency and choice? Is this not the key normative problem I raised at the outset, of how the
modern ontologies of war efface agency, causality and responsibility from decision making; the
responsibility that comes with having choices and making decisions, with exercising power? (In
this I am much closer to Connolly than Foucault, in Connolly's insistence that, even in the face
of the anonymous power of discourse to produce and limit subjects, selves remain capable of
agency and thus incur responsibilities.88) There seems no point in following Heidegger in
seeking a more 'primal truth' of being -- that is to reinstate ontology and obscure its worldly
manifestations and consequences from critique. However we can, while refusing Heidegger's
unworldly89 nostalgia, appreciate that he was searching for a way out of the modern system of
calculation; that he was searching for a 'questioning', 'free relationship' to technology that
would not be immediately recaptured by the strategic, calculating vision of enframing. Yet his
path out is somewhat chimerical -- his faith in 'art' and the older Greek attitudes of
'responsibility and indebtedness' offer us valuable clues to the kind of sensibility needed, but
little more. When we consider the problem of policy, the force of this analysis suggests that
choice and agency can be all too often limited; they can remain confined (sometimes quite
wilfully) within the overarching strategic and security paradigms. Or, more hopefully, policy
choices could aim to bring into being a more enduringly inclusive, cosmopolitan and peaceful
logic of the political. But this cannot be done without seizing alternatives from outside the
space of enframing and utilitarian strategic thought, by being aware of its presence and weight
and activating a very different concept of existence, security and action.90 This would seem to
hinge upon 'questioning' as such -- on the questions we put to the real and our efforts to create
and act into it. Do security and strategic policies seek to exploit and direct humans as material,
as energy, or do they seek to protect and enlarge human dignity and autonomy? Do they seek
to impose by force an unjust status quo (as in Palestine), or to remove one injustice only to
replace it with others (the U.S. in Iraq or Afghanistan), or do so at an unacceptable human,
economic, and environmental price? Do we see our actions within an instrumental, amoral
framework (of 'interests') and a linear chain of causes and effects (the idea of force), or do we
see them as folding into a complex interplay of languages, norms, events and consequences
which are less predictable and controllable?91 And most fundamentally: Are we seeking to
coerce or persuade? Are less violent and more sustainable choices available? Will our actions
perpetuate or help to end the global rule of insecurity and violence? Will our thought?
Alternatives
 Brincat

The alternative is a project of emancipation that creates new political worlds by

exploring the possibility outside normative views of Security and IR
Brincat and Linklater 2012 (Shannon Brincat is a Research Fellow at Griffith University, Andrew
Linklater is a Professor of IR @ Aberystwyth University, “Critical Theory in International Relations and
Security Studies: Interviews and Reflections”)
Earlier you implied that the idea of emancipation came with much political and historical baggage: how do you explain it to those not familiar
with the term? At the beginning, I played with different definitions — not a way to engage audiences. I believe I made a leap forward in
explaining the term when I came across the title of a book written by the Chartist William Lovett (1876), which contains the words `Bread,
Knowledge and Freedom'. For many I talk to, using these three words as the basis for discussing emancipation has
made it seem more understandable, more concrete, and both more local as well as universal . Right across
the world, folk tales and histories recognize iconic struggles against oppression: struggles for material necessities
(‘bread'), struggles for truth in the face of dogmatic authority (‘knowledge'), and struggles to escape from political and
economic tyranny (‘freedom'). You claim that security as emancipation is about opening up space in people's lives, about removing
constraints on free choice so that life can naturally unfold. Can you explain what you mean by this state in which people will be able to decide
freely about their lives? I do not accept the idea of life 'naturally' unfolding. What humans do (and should do) is highly 'unnatural'. If life were
simply natural, it would involve remaining trapped in our animal 'natures'. The development of our minds has enabled us to
create new social and political worlds. This is what I mean by equating emancipation with the creation
of the possibilities to explore what it might mean to be human. Such exploration is a highly 'unnatural'
exploration of the freedom which our biological make-up allows. ‘Removing constraints’ is not
synonymous with 'no constraints'. I assume there will always be constraints; I cannot imagine life otherwise, and would not want it
so. I do not want a society where I am free to carry a gun, or where companies are free to exploit workers. Emancipation is about
constructing a world of humane constraints that promise reasoned freedom (consistent with everybody else's).
This is the tradition that conceives freedom in terms of the ability of individuals to live their lives within a
structure of rules (including laws). But what I am concerned with in the first instance in removing those brutal, demeaning,
and determining constraints on peoples' lives such as poverty, racism, patriarchy, war and so on. The starting
point for thinking about security/emancipation must be insecurity. Insecurity is synonymous with living a
determined life. Such a life is one of daily necessity not choice. Does the idea of 'security as emancipation' assume that true emancipation
claims are ultimately compatible and harmonious? Emancipation is a journey, and I cannot imagine what might ultimately be possible.
But as humans are not born wiser than their parents, I expect there will always be work to do. In the event of a stage in human
history being reached in which universal emancipation could be announced — with bread, knowledge and freedom
everywhere, with the setting free of the dove of world peace, and with the raising of the flag of humanity above the parliament of humankind
— then critical theorists would need to turn their theoretical commitment and political orientation
inwards, to discover what oppressions might exist in this new stage in the journey. Critique is a way of
life. As the journey proceeds, I believe there is much potential for the compatibility of values across cultures, and
harmony between groups. For that to happen, humanity needs to free itself from what Allott (1998: 323) termed the 'deformed ideas
of what it is' — ideas such as 'human nature', 'the human condition' and so on. We are still very much engaged in the Enlightenment's struggle
against regressive ideas. On this journey, if you are faced with a particular situation in which two emancipation claims are contradictory, what
do you do? This
is a question of practical politics, and politics is an art not a science. In specific situations one has to learn
as much as possible about what is going on, examine the words and behaviour of those involved, and
make a decision as to which party seems the more likely to advance the emancipatory package of 'bread,
knowledge and freedom'. The political arena is messy, and wrong choices can be expected. In the heat of the kitchen, the recipe books of
political theory are guaranteed not to work out as well as they promise in the seminar room. This is as true for theories about emancipation as
it is for other principles.
 Bilgin
Our alternative is to reject the affirmative in favor of a critical approach to security.
This is crucial to open space for emancipatory perspectives—our critique is mutually
exclusive with the affirmative.
Bilgin 5 (Pinar Bilgin is an Associate Professor of International Relations @ Bilkent University, “Regional
Security in the Middle East: A Critical Perspective: Conclusion, p. 205-207)

Emphasising the mutually interactive relationship between intellectuals and social movements
should not be taken to suggest that the only way for intellectuals to make a change is to get
directly involved in political action. They can also intervene by providing a critique of the
existing situation, calling attention to what future outcomes may result if necessary action is
not taken at present, and by pointing to potential for change immanent in regional politics.
Students of security could help create the political space for alternative agents of security to
take action by presenting appropriate critiques. It should be emphasised however that such
thinking should be anchored in the potential immanent in world politics. The hope is that non-
state actors (who may or may not be aware of their potential to make a change) may constitute
themselves as agents of security when presented with an alternative reading of their situation.
Thinking about the future becomes even more crucial once theory is [end page 205]
conceptualised as constitutive of the ‘reality’ it seeks to respond to. In other words, our ideas
about the future—our conjectures and prognoses—have a self-constitutive potential. What the
students of Cold War Security Studies consider as a more ‘realistic’ picture of the future
becomes ‘real’ through practice, albeit under circumstances inherited from the past. Thinking
about what a ‘desired’ future would look like is significant for the very same reason; that is, in
order to be able to turn it into a ‘reality’ through adopting emancipatory practices. For, having a
vision of a ‘desired’ future empowers people(s) in the present. Presenting pictures of what a
‘desired’ future might look like, and pointing to the security community approach as the start of
a path that could take us from an insecure past to a more secure future is not to suggest that
the creation of a security community is the most likely outcome. On the contrary, the dynamics
pointed to throughout the book indicate that there exists a potential for descent into chaos if
no action is taken to prevent militarisation and fragmentation of societies, and the
marginalisation of peoples as well as economies in an increasingly globalising world. However,
these dynamics exist as ‘threats to the future’ to use Beck’s terminology; and only by thinking
and writing about them that can one mobilise preventive action to be taken in the present.
Viewed as such, critical approaches present not an ‘optimistic’, but a more ‘realistic’ picture of
the future. Considering how the ‘realism’ of Cold War Security Studies failed not only when
judged by its own standards, by failing to provide an adequate explanation of the world ‘out
there’, but also when judged by the standards of critical approaches, as it was argued, it could
be concluded that there is a need for more ‘realistic’ approaches to regional security in theory
and practice. The foregoing suggests three broad conclusions. First, Cold War Security Studies
did not present the ‘realistic’ picture it purported to provide. On the contrary, the pro-status
quo leanings of the Cold War security discourse failed to allow for (let alone foresee) changes
such as the end of the Cold War, dissolution of some states and integration of some others.
Second, notwithstanding the important inroads critical approaches to security made in the
post-Cold War era, much traditionalist thinking remains and maintains its grip over the security
practices of many actors. Third, critical approaches offer a fuller or more adequate picture of
security in different parts of the world (including the Middle East). Cold War Security Studies is
limited not only because of its narrow (military-focused), pro-status quo and state-centric (if
not statist) approach to security in theory and practice, but also because of its objectivist
conception of theory and the theory/practice relationship that obscured the mutually
constitutive relationship between them. Students of critical approaches have sought to
challenge Cold War Security Studies, its claim to knowledge and its hold over security practices
by pointing to the mutually constitutive relationship between theory and practice and revealing
[end page 206] how the Cold War security discourse has been complicit in constituting
(in)security in different parts of the world. The ways in which the Cold War security discourse
helped constitute the ‘Middle East’ by way of representing it as a region, and contributed to
regional insecurity in the Middle East by shaping security practices, is exemplary of the
argument that ‘theories do not leave the world untouched’. The implication of these
conclusions for practice is that becoming aware of the ‘politics behind the geographical
specification of politics’ and exploring the relationship between (inventing) regions and
(conceptions and practices of) security helps reveal the role human agency has played in the
past and could play in the future. An alternative approach to security, that of critical
approaches to security, could inform alternative (emancipatory) practices thereby helping
constitute a new region in the form of a security community. It should be noted, however, that
to argue that ‘everything is socially constructed’ or that ‘all approaches have normative
concerns embedded in them’ is a significant first step that does not by itself help one adopt
emancipatory practices. As long as people rely on traditional practices shaped by the Cold War
security discourse - which remains prevalent in the post-Cold War era - they help constitute a
‘reality’ in line with the tenets of ‘realist’ Cold War Security Studies. This is why seeking to
address evolving crises through traditional practices whilst leaving a critical security perspective
to be adopted for the long-term will not work. For, traditionalist thinking and practices, by
helping shape the ‘reality’ ‘out there’, foreclose the political space necessary for emancipatory
practices to be adopted by multiple actors at numerous levels. Hence the need for the adoption
of a critical perspective that emphasises the roles human agency has played in the past and
could play in the future in shaping what human beings choose to call ‘reality’. Generating such
an awareness of the potentialities of human agency could enable one to begin thinking
differently about regional security in different parts of the world whilst remaining sensitive to
regional actors’ multiple and contending conceptions of security, what they view as referent(s)
and how they think security should be sought in different parts of the world. After decades of
statist, military-focused and zero-sum thinking and practices that privileged the security of
some whilst marginalising the security of others, the time has come for all those interested in
security in the Middle East to decide whether they want to be agents of a world view that
produces more of the same, thereby contributing towards a ‘threat to the future’, or of
alternative futures that try to address the multiple dimensions of regional insecurity. The choice
is not one between presenting a more ‘optimistic’ or ‘pessimistic’ vision of the future, but
between stumbling into the future expecting more of the same, or stepping into a future
equipped with a perspective that not only has a conception of a ‘desired’ future but is also
cognisant of ‘threats to the future’.
 Criticism
Vote negative for an ontological criticism of the affirmative – this act of criticism is
crucial to rupturing the affirmatives hegemonic enframing and allowing a space for
politics outside of security
Burke, 2k2 (Anthony Burke is an Associate Prof and Reader in International and Political Studies @
UNSW Australia, University of Queensland , Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 27.1)

It is perhaps easy to become despondent, but as countless struggles for freedom, justice, and social transformation have proved, a sense of
seriousness can be tempered with the knowledge that many tools are already available--and where they are not, the effort to
create a productive new critical sensibility is well advanced. There is also a crucial political opening within the liberal
problematic itself, in the sense that it assumes that power is most effective when it is absorbed as truth,
consented to and desired--which creates an important space for refusal . As Colin Gordon argues, Foucault thought
that the very possibility of governing was conditional on it being credible to the governed as well as the governing. (60) This throws
weight onto the question of how security works as a technology of subjectivity. It is to take up Foucault's
challenge, framed as a reversal of the liberal progressive movement of being we have seen in Hegel, not to discover who or
what we are so much as to refuse what we are. (61 ) Just as security rules subjectivity as both a totalizing
and individualizing blackmail and promise , it is at these levels that we can intervene . We can critique
the machinic frameworks of possibility represented by law, policy, economic regulation, and diplomacy,
while challenging the way these institutions deploy language to draw individual subjects into their
consensual web. This suggests, at least provisionally, a dual strategy. The first asserts the space for agency, both in challenging available
possibilities for being and their larger socioeconomic implications. Roland Bleiker formulates an idea of agency that shifts
away from the lone (male) hero overthrowing the social order in a decisive act of rebellion to one that
understands both the thickness of social power and its "fissures," "fragmentation," and "thinness." We must,
he says, "observe how an individual may be able to escape the discursive order and influence its shifting
boundaries.... By doing so, discursive terrains of dissent all of a sudden appear where forces of domination
previously seemed invincible." (62) Pushing beyond security requires tactics that can work at many
levels--that empower individuals to recognize the larger social, cultural, and economic implications of
the everyday forms of desire, subjection, and discipline they encounter , to challenge and rewrite them,
and that in turn contribute to collective efforts to transform the larger structures of being , exchange, and
power that sustain (and have been sustained by) these forms. As Derrida suggests, this is to open up aporetic
possibilities that transgress and call into question the boundaries of the self, society, and the
international that security seeks to imagine and police . The second seeks new ethical principles based on a critique of the
rigid and repressive forms of identity that security has heretofore offered. Thus writers such as Rosalyn Diprose, William Conolly, and Moira
Gatens have sought to imagine a new ethical relationship that thinks difference not on the basis of the same but
on the basis of a dialogue with the other that might allow space for the unknown and unfamiliar , for a
"debate and engagement with the other's law and the other's ethics" --an encounter that involves a
transformation of the self rather than the other . (63) Thus while the sweep and power of security must be acknowledged, it
must also be refused: at the simultaneous levels of individual identity, social order, and macroeconomic possibility, it would entail another kind
of work on "ourselves"--a
political refusal of the One, the imagination of an other that never returns to the
same. It would be to ask if there is a world after security, and what its shimmering possibilities might be.
 Rethink Security

Vote negative to rethink security.

Burke et al. 14 (Anthony Burke is an Associate Prof and Reader in International and Political Studies
@ UNSW Australia, Katrina Lee-Koo, and Matt McDonald, Ethics and Global Security p. 19-21)

A final point is necessary on the relationship between security and ethics as we conceive it, by
way of introduction to this book. To develop a cosmopolitan ethics of security is not simply a
case of applying "cosmopolitanism" to a particular issue area in global politics (security), but
rather, rethinking ho w we understand and practice security. What limits existing accounts of
the relationship between ethics and security is the tendency to ignore or downplay the
particular politic of security: its centrality to the political legitimacy of the key actors in global
politics; its capacity to define the core values of communities, and the manner in which they
might be protected or advanced; its capacity to mobilise particular political responses or the
actors undertaking them. -Fins is particularly applicable to discourses of "human security'', for
example, and to some extent, critical engagement with security grounded in concerns with
emancipation (Booth 2007). It is for these reasons that security is often seen to belong to the
realm of "high politics": the most important objective of states, wherein the naming and
relationship of "security" and "threat" designates political priority and can trigger extraordinary
(and frequently illiberal and antidemocratic) responses, such as the violation of human rights or
international law. This political function of security makes an analysis of the ethics of security
more urgent, in part because of what is at stake in debates about security (definitions of
community and values, and responsibilities to the self and others, for example). But this politics
of security also complicates the simple application of cosmopolitan thought. In our view, what
is needed is sustained engagement with the "politics of security" that argues for moral
progress, while taking seriously the dangers of securitization and the apparent constraints
placed upon the articulation of radical security alternatives. When taking account of the politics
of security here, we particularly focus on the 'function of representations or discourses of
security in defining group identity, enabling particular policy or legitimating particular actors as
security providers' (Browning and McDonald 2013). Engagement with the politics of security in
this way has tended to come from theorists ofs ecurity in the post-structural tradition. For such
thinkers, representations of security define political community or integrate individuals into an
abstract notion of political community or national values (Burke 2008a; Campbell 1998a;
Weldes 1999). Security, in this sense, can become a form of governmentality that shapes and
moulds individuals for political ends. David Campbell's (1992, 1998a) analysis of the function of
Cold War discourses of the communist threat in the United States is perhaps the most obvious
case here. For Campbell, national security discourses served to define American identity in a
narrow and highly, politicised way. In the process of constructing external threats to which the
state ( in this instance) positions itself as the actor capable of providing security, those with
power can exclude dissenting voices and political alternatives, and shut down needed debates
about policy. For the so-called Copenhagen (or "securitization") School, security can be
understood as a social construction, brought into being through "speech acts" that define
particular dynamics, actors or things as existential threats. In the process, these issues are
elevated above the realm of "normal- politics and into the high politics arena of security, where
they are dealt with through urgency and secrecy. While its proponents do not deny the
possibility that such developments may be progressive, ultimately their preference is for
desecuritization: the removal of issues from the security agenda. This is most frequently based
on the claim that security has an illiberal logic, limiting the possibility for dialogue and locating
responsibility for providing security to those with power. But such a sedimented view of the
logic of security can also apply to its meaning. For Ole Wxver (1995), at the heart of the concept
of security 'we still find something to do with defence and the state' ( see also Berki 1986;
Neocleous 2008). These alternative conceptions of security will be examined in more detail in
the Chapter 1. They suggest something distinct about the study of security that makes it
qualitatively different from other issue areas or "promises" of government. In this, we would
agree, and reaffirm the need to take seriously the politics of security. But if these critics have
most explicitly engaged with the politics of security and its dangers, their proposed response to
the dangers of securitization—resisting or escaping security and its logics is problematic (Dillon
and Reid 2009; Dillon 1996; W;,ever 1995). For these scholars, security is something that should
be resisted, escaped or challenged. We think such critics go too far. They are right to identify
the dangers of an unthinking embrace of security as a site of progress, and right too in drawing
attention to the ways in which the promise of security for some can all too easily be defined on
the basis of the continued suffering and marginalization of others, both within a particular
political community and beyond. Yet, in acknowledging the pathologies of a dominant security
discourse, and in failing to articulate a progressive alternative, they mistake this discourse for
the timeless essence of what security means and does, paradoxically reinforcing its centrality in
international relations. In rejecting the possibility that a range of actors can and do enact
progressive notions of security, they deprive marginal actors and communities of a site of
contestation and change. This pessimism has been contested in a range of " positive. " critical
accounts of security (Booth 2007; Burke 2013a; Floyd 2011; Nunes 2012; Hoogensen-Gjory
2012; McDonald 2014; Roe 2012). What is needed, then, is an approach that is at once attuned
to the dangers of embracing security—given its history of contributing to exclusionary practices
and the status quo—while refusing to give up on defining a cosmopolitan conception of security
oriented towards an integrated global society, and the rights and needs of the least powerful
and most vulnerable. In a related way, we are concerned to see global security as a major
priority that can be addressed as a part of the normal (not exceptional) practice of government
and civil society action that are democratically and internationally accountable. In part, this is
because exceptionalist practices have tended to reinforce nationalism and alienation, privilege
the security of the few and undermine it for the many, and gravely damage global cooperation
and consciousness. When international organisations become involved in global security
governance, it is imperative that their practices and objectives either reflect the global interests
and international norms painstakingly developed over decades, or seek to improve them in the
cause of a just global security order that supports human dignity and flourishing.
2NC
 2nc-Overview
The Affirmative even in its attempt to challenge U.S. Arms Sales Abroad is still complicit in a larger praxis
of security in which the affirmatives technocratic approach to arms attempts to manage rationally the
chaos of violence in Afghanistan – this hypocritical project not only leaves in power the united states/
and intra-western arms transfers that naturalize current colonial power operations but becomes the
energy for future violence abroad.

Instead you should prefer the alternatives project of criticsm that challenges the unspoken assumptions
internal to the affirmative politics – without the alternative’s questioning those practices go
unquestioned with allows violence – instead you should flip the script and focus on the representations
and assumptions that make their politics possible.

Playing within the terms of Militarism in context of arms control only recreates the
same failures through serial policy failure – instead you should centers the alts
epistemological disruption as a pre-requisite to the affirmatives policy making good
offense
Dalby 2012 (Simon Dalby is a professor of G eography @ Ottawa, Reconceptualising Arms Control: Controlling the Means of Violence
:Critical Geopolitics and the Control of Arms in the 21st Century)//KW

Much obviously needs to be done in terms of the arms trade and the possibilities of tackling proliferation in terms of the
consequences for human rights specifically and human security more generally.48 In borrowing the slogan from the World Social Forum for this
concluding section of this essay, the argument returns to the possibility of alternatives, not just where they are usually investigated in the
contemporary scholarly engagements with activist movements and those getting arrested in protests against various ‘global’ projects, but also
in the logics of critical geopolitics challenging the terms of political discourse where it is frequently most seductive, in the specification of
contexts which, once so specified, then apparently require certain modes of conduct.49 As Spiegel and Le Billon suggest, the
invocation
of simple geopolitical verities, in their case a brutal regime (Mugabe’s Zimbabwe), and an evil arms supplier
state (China), and heroic narratives of resistance to the arms trade by South African dock workers refusing
to allow ‘the ship of shame’ to come into port to unload weapons and ammunition, run into much more
complex geographies when resistance is mobilized to political violenc e.50 The international trade of
weapons and the various financial organizations , shipping companies and other agents involved in this case alone make the
reality of global interconnection much more complicated. Political campaigns calling for boycotts and international sanctions became caught up
in confusion and counter claims, all of which suggest to Spiegel and Le Billon that larger questions about complicity in violence and support of
regimes that use violence on their own populations need investigation. Which suggests once again the importance of larger political
movements against war, and the arms trade in general rather than particular campaigns against particular ships or shipments. It is clear from
this case that when focussed only on Chinese actions resistance was quickly drawn into geopolitical arguments and mutual recriminations,
charges of hypocrisy and malfeasance that did not help prevent the continued violence in Zimbabwe. But what is clear in all this is the global
interconnections of politics, violence and a global public concerned, albeit sporadically, about political violence are part of the current policy
picture. It is also clear that such civil society initiatives are a fixture in the politics that President Obama discussed in Prague even though there
is no reason to assume that the protestors will support American initiatives on weapons or disarmament. The growing interconnections and the
potential for economic and political cooperation now suggest the possibilities of grappling with weapons issues and the technologies of
destruction in matters that are much more nuanced than simple invocations of virtue and perfidy residing in particular states. With clear rules
for assistance, trading, and aid in a crisis the possibilities of confrontation are reduced and the need for complicated technological weapons
reduced. Double standards and self-serving attempts to use diplomacy as a means of strategic competition by other means will no doubt persist
for a long time to come. If arms control is to be about more than this, then the geopolitical contexts within which these debates take place
need much more attention. None of this suggests that pure ‘enlightenment’ where all the political leaders suddenly come to their senses and
decide to come to common agreement over global problems is going to happen imminently.51 But it does suggest that the changing context of
globalization presents opportunities to deal with numerous matters in a more productive atmosphere where pressing problems of mutual
interest can be addressed. To
do so requires, in the short run, tackling the legacy of the War on Terror, with its
remilitarization of international politics. Continued American actions in Asia, while ostensibly consistent with the nuclear free
world eventually policy of the Obama administration, nonetheless continue the military policies of his predecessor. While Colin Gray may be
correct in arguing that America is the leading state on the planet for the foreseeable future, and can act as hegemon in some ways, his warnings
about overreach are more especially germane to questions of how arms control and international cooperation play out in coming years. 52 The
rise of Asian powers makes it especially clear that there are limits to American capabilities, and that arms control will have to recognize the
geopolitical circumstances of globalization and imminent problems of climate change, urbanization, energy shortages, and numerous related
issues. As some recent commentators have suggested the shifting
patterns of geopolitical change are beginning to
produce alternative visions of arms control and disarmament, ones that are not about American
technological dominance and surveillance, as in the Cold War model, but ones of larger cooperative
international arrangements and regimes that do not rely on maintaining the existing geopolitical order
as it has come to be known.53 The simple point that most of the existing nuclear-armed states have been reluctant to give up their
nuclear weapons, while insisting that other states not acquire them and conveniently ignoring those that have done so outside international
regimes, is not forgotten by many emerging states. It’s worth remembering that some of the peace activists in New Zealand in the 1980s, while
advocating nuclear free zones, explicitly saw the spread of weapons from metropolitan states as the threat that needed to be contained .
Geography matters greatly in how threats are understood . The initiative by Turkey and Brazil in May 2010 to defuse the
standoff on the Iranian nuclear issues may only be the beginning of diplomatic initiatives from the growing group of second tier states, those
Parag Khanna calls the second world.54 in light of President Obama’s speech in Prague where he insisted that people must demand an end to
nuclear weapons, there is a rich irony in how quickly this particular initiative was dismissed in Washington and demands for negotiations
between Tehran, Washington and European states were reiterated. American
control of the agenda was apparently much
more important than an innovative solution, and one that would have legitimized other states as actors
on the arms control agenda worldwide. None of this is surprising if the authoritarian pedagogue model
based on the American credo, to once again invoke Andrew' Bacevich’s formulation, remains as the
dominant script of American policy. Nonetheless the assumption that arms control can remain a matter of
control of arms by the major powers of the Cold War era is now' clearly in doubt. Numerous proposals for the
reform of the United Nations Security' Council imply a refusal to allow the nuclear powers to dictate the terms of world order in perpetuity.
The geographical loci of policy initiative may indeed shift in unpredictable w'ays. Paying attention to the
geopolitical world orders that rising powers are seeking to shape, rather than operating within a simple
geography of the existing metropolitan states policing a world of peripheral dangers, would be a most
useful start in thinking about innovation in policy making, not to mention scholarly analysis.Facing
challengers may be much less important in the coming decades than facing challenges, whether it’s from
ecological disruption, diseases, or simply economic instability . But continuing to pose policy options in
terms of competitive state actions is itself the major obstacle to progress on numerous pressing human
security issues and arms control in particular.55 For the structural realists this is the only game in town;
for the rest of us this game is precisely the problem that needs to be tackled, and while multilateral arms control is
but one of the many methods whereby the logic of that game might continue to be effectively constrained, it has a role to play in dissipating
the dangerous political prejudices that Peter Kropotkin warned about a long time ago.(50-2)

Securitization perpetuates and justifies militarism in the name of “public safety”

Stavrianakis 19 Anna Stavrianakis (Anna Stavrianakis is a Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Sussex. Her main
research interests are NGOs and global civil society; the arms trade and military globalisation; and critical approaches to the study of
international security) Introduction: Special issue on Militarism and security: Dialogue, possibilities and limits Security Dialogue2018, Vol. 49(1-
2) 3–18 TD

Security has become a central preoccupation of the field of international relations and the practice of global politics. In the process, it has become the subject of
rich, interdisciplinary, conceptual, normative and policy-oriented study among researchers and practitioners globally – and variously valorized as a critically
contested concept and castigated as a policy lapdog. Security (its practice, performance and promise) seems to be everywhere and nowhere, as well as always and

as security seeps into spaces previously unfamiliar to international relations, we lose sight of its limits
never. Yet,

in relation to other critical concepts and practices that also lie at the heart of the discipline . In
particular, militarism – broadly understood as the preparation for war, its normalization and legitimation – has never received the widespread and
sustained focus it warrants in either traditional variants of security studies or the various critical turns of recent decades. The prevalent emphasis on

security has taken precedence over the study of the ways in which war and militarism continue to
permeate societies the world over, in different forms and to different degrees. In our view, something is lost in the critical scholarly endeavour in this
changing purview. But the issue is not necessarily to stake a claim for one concept over another. Rather, it is to ask how we are to understand the relationship

problems
between security and militarism, both as analytical tools and as objects of analysis. Such questions are important because as the

recognized as security problems shift and transmute, so too do the familiar lines of distinction that inform our notions of what
security is or does, where it resides, and how to achieve it. The question of security has been reframed in both international relations and

global policy to address political, economic and social processes, practices and materialities that
blur, for instance, boundaries between the domestic and the foreign, the civilian and the military, the public and the private, and war and
peace. It has made us think more carefully about the operation of power in its variety of forms, and about the scale of analysis from the local to the
international, transnational or global. Yet in the move towards the study of security and the transformation in how we do this, we

overlook and at times cast a blind eye to other key areas and interrelationships, such as the political economy of military
institutions and their socioeconomic practices conducted in the name of development, or the connection between practices of

militarization, securitization and mundane security practices in the name of counterinsurgency and public safety. Militarism
has its own contested conceptual history (see Berghahn, 1981 for a classic chronology, and Stavrianakis and Selby, 2013 for a contemporary typology). While
militarism has often been regarded as a polemic rather than analytic concept, such dismissal belies the variety and scope of scholarly interventions seeking to
understand it. And for all the normative debate about the study of security, there remains, in our view, a broad distinction between the oppositional force of the
concept of militarism and the critical study of security. Hence, while critical security studies in its various guises1 has opened up our thinking to attend to security

War and militarism as objects of analysis

critically, it has nonetheless fixed less sustained attention on the question of militarism.

have been largely subsumed under the rubric of security both in policy and in efforts to
understand even that which has been traditionally clearly presented as ‘war’ or ‘military force’. Latterly, this oversight has been remedied by burgeoning
fields such as critical military studies and critical war studies, which have reinvigorated our understanding of many of the practices, processes and materialities that
also animate the preoccupation with security briefly discussed above. The reemergence of attention to militarism and war in critical inquiry (often associated with
European scholarship) thus invites us to refocus on war, militarism and their relationship to security.
 2nc- Perm answers
The Permutation doesn’t make sense if win a link argument – any link argument
means that the affirmative has invested in violent meta narratives that produce
violence this is enough to warrant a negative ballot and short circuit the permutation

AND, the perm is severance severs out of the representations of the affirmative which
makes it impossible to be negative because the affirmative can always shift out of our
offense

1AC framing precludes change – forgetting the 1AC is necessary

Bleiker 1 (Roland, Senior Lecturer and Co-Director – Rotary Centre of International Studies in Peace and Conflict Resolution, The Zen of
International Relations, Ed. Chan, Mandeville, and Blieker, p. 38-39)

The power to tell stories is the power to define common sense. Prevalent IR stories have been
told for so long that they no longer appear as stories. They are accepted as fact for their
metaphorical dimensions have vanished from our collective memories. We have become
accustomed to our distorting IR metaphors until we come to lie, as Nietzsche would say “herd-
like in a style obligatory for all. As a result dominant ir stories have successfully transformed
one specific interpretation of world political realities, the realist one, into reality per se. Realist
perceptions of the international have gradually become accepted as common sense, to the
point that any critique against them has to be evaluated in terms of an already existing and
objectified world view. There are powerful mechanisms of control precisely in this ability to
determine meaning and rationality. 'Defining common sense', Steve Smith argues, 'is the
ultimate act of political power.’8 It separates the possible from the impossible and directs the
theory and practice of international relations on a particular path. The prime objective of this
essay is to challenge prevalent IR stories. The most effective way of doing so, the chapter
argues, is not to critique but to forget them, to tell new stories that are not constrained by the
boundaries of established and objectified IR narratives. Such an approach diverges from many
critical engagements with world politics. Most challenges against dominant IR stories have been
advanced in the form of critiques. While critiquing orthodox IR stories remains an important
task, it is not sufficient. Exploring the origins of problems, in this case discourse of power
politics and their positivist framing of the political practice, cannot overcome all the existing
theoretical and practical dilemmas. By articulating critique in relation to arguments advanced
by orthodox IR theory, the impact of critical voices remains confined within the larger discursive
boundaries that have been established through the initial framing of debates. A successful
challenge to orthodox IR stories must do more than merely critique their narrow and
problematic nature. To be effective, critique must be supplemented with a process of forgetting
the object of critique, of theorizing world politics beyond the agendas, issues and terminologies
that are prest by orthodox debates. Indeed the most powerful potential of critical scholarship
may well lie in the attempt to tell different stories about IR, for once theres stories have
become validated , they may well open up spaces for a more inclusive and less violence prone
practice of real world politics.

Only refusing the very grammar of security can escape cooption

Neocleous 8 (Mark Neocleous is a Professor of the Critique of Political Economy @ Brunel University
London, 2008, “Critique of Security,” pp 185-6)

The only way out of such a dilemma, to escape the fetish, is perhaps to eschew the logic of
security altogether – to reject it as so ideologically loaded in favour of the state that any real
political thought other than the authoritarian and reactionary should be pressed to give it up.
That is clearly something that can not be achieved within the limits of bourgeois thought and
thus could never even begin to be imagined by the security intellectual. It is also something
that the constant iteration of the refrain ‘this is an insecure world’ and reiteration of one fear,
anxiety and insecurity after another will also make it hard to do. But it is something that the
critique of security suggests we may have to consider if we want a political way out of the
impasse of security. This impasse exists because security has now become so all-encompassing
that it marginalises all else, most notably the constructive conflicts, debates and discussions
that animate political life. The constant prioritising of a mythical security as a political end – as
the political end – constitutes a rejection of politics in any meaningful sense of the term. That
is, as a mode of action in which differences can be articulated, in which the conflicts and
struggles that arise from such differences can be fought for and negotiated, in which people
might come to believe that another world is possible – that they might transform the world
and in turn be transformed. Security politics simply removes this; worse, it removes it while
purportedly addressing it. In so doing it suppresses all issues of power and turns political
questions into debates about the most efficient way to achieve ‘security’, despite the fact that
we are never quite told – never could be told – what might count as having achieved it. Security
politics is, in this sense, an anti-politics,141 dominating political discourse in much the same
manner as the security state tries to dominate human beings, reinforcing security fetishism and
the monopolistic character of security on the political imagination. We therefore need to get
beyond security politics, not add yet more ‘sectors’ to it in a way that simply expands the
scope of the state and legitimises state intervention in yet more and more areas of our lives.
Simon Dalby reports a personal communication with Michael Williams, co-editor of the
important text Critical Security Studies, in which the latter asks: if you take away security, what
do you put in the hole that’s left behind? But I’m inclined to agree with Dalby: maybe there is
no hole.142 The mistake has been to think that there is a hole and that this hole needs to be
filled with a new vision or revision of security in which it is re-mapped or civilised or gendered
or humanised or expanded or whatever. All of these ultimately remain within the statist
political imaginary, and consequently end up reaffirming the state as the terrain of modern
politics, the grounds of security. The real task is not to fill the supposed hole with yet another
vision of security, but to fight for an alternative political language which takes us beyond the
narrow horizon of bourgeois security and which therefore does not constantly throw us into
the arms [control] of the state. That’s the point of critical politics: to develop a new political
language more adequate to the kind of society we want. Thus while much of what I have said
here has been of a negative order, part of the tradition of critical theory is that the negative
may be as significant as the positive in setting thought on new paths. For if security really is the
supreme concept of bourgeois society and the fundamental thematic of liberalism, then to
keep harping on about insecurity and to keep demanding ‘more security’ (while meekly hoping
that this increased security doesn’t damage our liberty) is to blind ourselves to [conceal] the
possibility of building real alternatives to the authoritarian tendencies in contemporary
politics. To situate ourselves against security politics would allow us to circumvent the
debilitating [damaging] effect achieved through the constant securitising of social and political
issues, debilitating [damaging] in the sense that ‘security’ helps consolidate the power of the
existing forms of social domination and justifies the short-circuiting of even the most
democratic forms. It would also allow us to forge another kind of politics centred on a different
conception of the good. We need a new way of thinking and talking about social being and
politics that moves us beyond security. This would perhaps be emancipatory in the true sense
of the word. What this might mean, precisely, must be open to debate. But it certainly requires
recognising that security is an illusion that has forgotten it is an illusion; it requires recognising
that security is not the same as solidarity; it requires accepting that insecurity is part of the
human condition, and thus giving up the search for the certainty of security and instead
learning to tolerate the uncertainties, ambiguities and ‘insecurities’ that come with being
human; it requires accepting that ‘securitizing’ an issue does not mean dealing with it
politically, but bracketing it out and handing it to the state; it requires us to be brave enough to
return the gift.143

The Permutation creates cognitive dissonance which naturalizes security and takes out
the alterantive
Inan 04 ( Dr. A (Annette) Freyberg Inan is an Associate Professor @ Univ of Amsterdam, What Moves
Man: The Realist Theory of International Relations and Its Judgment of Human Nature 2004)

Cognitive approaches concede that real-life decision makers cannot comply with the
expectation of full rationality. Instead, political decision makers adopt a number of strategies to
deal with the limitations imposed on them by their cognitive capabilities. It is important to
remember that such strategies are, to a certain extent, necessary and unavoidable. They
facilitate information processing and enable actors to make decisions. However, they may also
lead to misperception and error. A number of processes are particularly relevant. The study of
problem solving has proven the need to pay attention to actors’ definitions of the problem.51
Studies of the limitations of memory have drawn attention to the problem of information
overload in both problem solving and decision making. Most important, the development of the
concepts of ‘cognitive dissonance’ versus ‘cognitive consistency’ by Leon Festinger and Fritz
Heider in the 1950s and 1960s has served to emphasize the need for stability in beliefs and
perceptions, while at the same time alerting us to the costs of such stabilit y: “misperception
and biased interpretation, with individuals using denial, bolstering, or other mechanisms to
maintain their beliefs.”52 According to Robert Art and Robert Jervis, “[P]eople simplify their
processing of complex information by permitting their established frameworks of beliefs to
guide them. They can then assimilate incoming information to what they already believe.”53
Thus there exists “a tendency for people to assimilate incoming information into their pre-
existing images.” 54 This tendency is explained by psychological theor y as part of a strategy to
avoid cognitive dissonance. There is little to stop this tendency, because “information is usually
ambiguous enough so that people can see it as consistent with the views that they already
hold.”55 Voss and Dorsey observe that “individuals build mental representations of the world
and . . . such representations provide coherence and stability to their interpretations of the
complexities of the environment.”56 So-called image theory studies the role played in the
decision-making process by such interpretive “blueprints,” which have been variously called
“images,” “schemata,” “scripts,” or “mental models.”57 The concept of “image,” which is most
commonly used in foreign policy analysis, captures the notion of a schema, which is more
popular in cognitive psychology. In the 1950s, Kenneth Boulding defined the term image as “the
total cognitive, affective, and evaluative structure of the behavioral unit, or its internal view of
itself and its universe.”58 He argued that “the images which are important in international
systems are those which a nation has of itself and of those other bodies in the system which
constitute its international environment.”59 Images can introduce misperception and error into
the decision-making process, especially if they function as stereotypes. Stereot ypes can be
defined as “images that are assumed to have attributes that characterize all elements of a
particular group.”60 The role of stereotypical images, such as the “enemy image,” has been
explored by authors such as Ole Holsti, Richard Cottam, or David Finlay and his colleagues. 61
Such studies find that stereot yping generally leads to “over-generalization, that is, erroneously
attributing characteristics to a particular countr y that may not have one or more of the given
characteristics. The countries are thus not sufficiently differentiated.”62 According to Holsti,
“[T]he relationship of national images to international conf lict is clear: decision-makers act
upon their definition of the situation and their images of states—others as well as their own.
These images are in turn dependent upon the decision-maker’s belief system, and these may or
may not be accurate representations of ‘reality.’”63 The impact of stereot ypical national
images in policy making was particularly obvious during the Cold War, when Boulding referred
to them as “the last great stronghold of unsophistication” in international politics, observing
that “nations are divided into ‘good’ and ‘bad’—the enemy is all bad, one’s own nation is of
spotless virtue.”64 The bipolar system was commonly characterized as a “closed” one, in which
“perceptions of low hostilit y are self-liquidating and perceptions of high hostilit y are self-
fulfilling.”65 This is because both sides continue to interpret new information in ways that help
preserve the enemy image, even if such information is meant to constitute a conciliatory
gesture. Closed systems suffer from the dangerous problem of distorted “mirror images.” Urie
Bronfenbrenner explains: Herein lies the terrible danger of the distorted mirror image, for it is
characteristic of such images that they are self-confirming; that is, each part y, often against its
own wishes, is increasingly driven to behave in a manner which fulfills the expectations of the
other. . . . [The mirror image] impels each nation to act in a manner which confirms and
enhances the fear of the other to the point that even deliberate efforts to reverse the process
are reinterpreted as evidence of confirmation.66 (128-130)

Policy Makers don’t want to engage with an anti-arms movement and when they do
its Eurocentric the Perm can’t solve.
Stavrianakis 19 Anna Stavrianakis (Anna Stavrianakis is a Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Sussex. Her main
research interests are NGOs and global civil society; the arms trade and military globalisation; and critical approaches to the study of
international security) Introduction: Special issue on Militarism and security: Dialogue, possibilities and limits Security Dialogue2018, Vol. 49(1-
2) 3–18 TD
While critical security studies over the past 20 years or so has paid attention to human insecurity and knock-on security effects, less attention has been paid to the
wars and militarism that in many cases generated them or that arise from them. For example, the 1994 United
Nations Development
Programme (UNDP) Human Development Report , which first articulated the concept of human security, was clear that
militarism is a key cause of insecurity (UNDP, 1994). Yet of human security proponents and critical security theorists, only feminists have paid
sustained attention to militarism. Why might this be so? One reason is that directly addressing particular wars and forms of militarism is intensely political and
requires analysis of the role of the state and of organized 6 Security Dialogue 49(1-2) violence as a social force, ongoing asymmetries in North–South relations, and
the effects of a capitalist global political economy. A policy-oriented agenda such as human security has found it hard to make a critique of militarism bite:
policymakers did not want to engage with the women of Greenham Common in the 1980s, and do not want to engage with anti-arms
fair protestors today. Another response is that the relative lack of attention to militarism compared to
security reflects a chronic Eurocentrism in security studies, and in international relations more generally .
For instance, today, while the displacement and refugee crisis is far worse felt within Syria and Yemen, and in

neighboring countries such as Turkey and Jordan (themselves involved in war through, for example, funnelling weapons and financing),
and despite the indubitable evidence of widespread violence and harm in these warscapes, much of the
emerging security literature, albeit selfidentified as critical, nonetheless focuses on the problem as understood in
Europe, or when these wars and their effects become a political problem for Europe. Even here in this
contemporary example, the well-worn patterns that postcolonial critiques of critical security studies have highlighted (Barkawi and Laffey, 2006; Duffield, 2010) are
reproduced. Eurocentrism also blinds us to the different ways in which security and militarism, as well as
their interrelationships, manifest in distinct places, scales, temporalities and imaginaries. This blind spot,
generally speaking, includes how the state as both abstraction and institution – the garrison state, postcolonial state,
failed state, fragile state, Western liberal state, authoritarian state – interacts with society and employs violence and force , and to
what ends (Jabri, 2012).
 2nc-framework
Role the judge should place special emphasis on grading the knowledge claims since it is the baseline for
the debate. When a student turns in an F paper a teacher doesn’t have to write a new paper. pointing
out major aff academic deficiencies should be enough to vote negative. The way we understand the
world is influenced by particular discourses of knowledge.

We have a UQ argument about the academy that means you should prioritize our FW
arguments.
Cooper and Mutimer 2012 (Neil Cooper is a professor of International Relation @Bradford
University , David Mutimer is a professor Political science @ York University , Reconceptualising Arms
Control: Controlling the Means of Violence : Arms control for the 21st Century: Controlling the Means of
Violence) //KW

The period between 1960 and 1961 saw the emergence of some of the key texts upon which Cold War arms control practice and theory was
built. This included the Daedalus special issue on arms control of 1960, Schelling and Halperin’s Strategy and Arms Control, and Hedley Bull’s
The Control of the Arms Race both of which appeared in 1961.1 The same year also witnessed the publication of Donald Brennan’s edited book,
Arms Control, Disarmament and National Security, based on the articles in the earlier special issue of Daedalus.2 The influence of the Daedalus
publication in particular is reflected in the journal’s production of further special issues on arms control in 1975 and 1991 each of which
reviewed progress on the agenda of the 1960 publication and assessed the new arms control challenges emerging on its fifteenth and thirtieth
anniversary respectively.3 Given the fiftieth anniversary of the Daedalus special issue has only just passed and that the same landmark has now
been reached for the other publications, it
is an apposite time to once again review the arms control agenda of the
1960s, to consider new practices that have emerged since then and to ask whether either are fit for
purpose in a post-Cold War, post-9/11 era, apparently replete with new arms control challenges . Over and
above the question of timeliness however, the production of this special issue was animated by our concern that the academic community has
largely been reduced, on the one hand, to recording the new practices or challenges of arms control (although often using language other than
has engaged in an extensive
that of arms control), rather than shaping the former or anticipating the latter. On the other hand, it
reconceptualization of security and its associated practices that h as, nevertheless, managed to pay scant attention to
questions of arms and their control. Instead, it has tended to be the policy or NGO community that has driven new
agendas in arms control rather than the academy . Moreover, given the predominantly problem-solving
orientation of academic arms control, there has not even been much that can be described as an
attempt to critically reflect on the relationship between current practice and traditional arms control
theory, on the security framings underlying current policies or on the functions served by the current
global architecture of arms control . In part, this may reflect one of the downsides of the widening and deepening of security
studies that has occurred since the 1980s, which has arguably resulted in relatively less attention being paid by more critical analysts to some of
those areas normally associated with the thinner and shallower notion of security held in traditional security or strategic studies. (1)

Representations are a prior question – political rhetoric frames our understanding of

political reality
Hinds & Windt Jr 91 – (1991, Lynn Boyd, is Associate Professor of Broadcasting at West Virginia
University. and Theodore Otto, Professor of Political Rhetoric at the University of Pittsburgh. “The Cold
War As Rhetoric: The Beginnings, 1945–1950,” 1991, 6-10) // CB

The primary materials for this examination are the central rhetorical texts that formulated the American cold war consensus in the United States. Our concern is
with what Professor Richard Cottam of the University of Pittsburgh has called the "generic moment," a time when perception and rhetoric come together to
produce policy, and in the case of the cold war, to produce a universal doctrine. Our theme is taken from Walter Lippmann. In Public Opinion,he wrote: For the most
part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick
out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out
in the form stereotyped for us by our culture. 14 If one were to add "political leaders" to "culture," one would have the orientation to what
follows in this book. Definitions require language both to conceive of reality and to express it, and the kind of

language people use then shapes the ways in which they see the world. Choosing one set of words to
define reality rather than another not only orients people, it also creates a grammar that structures
reality and then expands into a rhetoric that justifies that reality. Our thesis is that political rhetoric
creates political reality , and in the case of the American cold war, the universal rhetoric created in the aftermath
of World War II created a universal reality. Words and arguments chosen to justify policies took on lives of their own which

eventually meant -- especially in the late 1940s and in the 1950s -- that perceptions, opinions, attitudes, policies, and even
the way people lived, had to be adjusted more or less (and usually more) to be consistent with this
universal rhetoric. No more eloquent example of rhetoric taking on its own life can be found than in the history of George F. Kennan's famous article,
"The Sources of Soviet Conduct." Originally written as a private memorandum for James V. Forrestal and based on his private "long telegram," Kennan's article,
when published in Foreign Affairs, became the living doctrine of containment. Kennan recorded in his Memoirs that he watched with great anguish as his term
containment "was picked up and elevated, by common agreement of the press, to the status of a 'doctrine', which was then identified with the foreign policy of the
administration." 15 He went on to note that he felt "like one who has inadvertently loosened a large boulder from the top of a cliff and now helplessly witnesses its
path of destruction in the valley below, shuddering and wincing at each successive glimpse of disaster." 16 Such was the vitality of Kennan's language and rhetoric.
And so too were the vitality and life of Churchill's "Iron Curtain," Truman's Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and a variety of other rhetorical acts that when taken
together comprise the American version of the cold war reality. METHODS OF ANALYSIS Political rhetoric creates the arena of political
reality from which political thought and action proceed. Such a statement has become commonplace. 17 Political
language and arguments -- in sum, political rhetoric -- create political consciousness , define political
settings , create national identity , stimulate people to act , and give sense and purpose to these
actions. 18 Political reality is a persuasive description of "things as they are," and once situations are so described,
certain responses are eliminated and others seem right. Decisions are discussed and debated within the rhetorical description, ever
with an eye toward action. Every society has a need to make sense of things, of its identity as a people or a nation

and of the world it inhabits. Government leaders need to provide rationales for their decisions in order to govern. Leaders must convince the public
"that the government's decisions are legitimate and good and that its foreign policy is correct." 19 Politics is about power, and political

power functions within the context of a perceived political reality. Citizens, likewise, need to make sense of things.
Without a sense of political reality, the "way things are," the individual is helpless to understand the
myriad of facts and opinions that one is bombarded with daily, especially the things that are far-off and
cannot be experienced directly. This need to make sense of the political world evokes a constant
outpouring of rhetoric, not only by political leaders but by opinion leaders from all strata of society. In speeches, newspaper editorials, magazine
articles, and the like people make rhetorical efforts to argue and describe the "way things are," in short, to

understand political reality . Such efforts become intensive and extensive when an old order of political reality changes, as when World War II ended,
and a new order is needed to make sense out of the confusion that accompanies the fall of the old. For political rhetoric to function in this fashion, three essential
conditions must exist: (1) a "raw" event and/or events or its corollary, confusion about events; (2) a rhetoric that clarifies and assigns meanings to these events; (3)
publicity for the rhetoric as others share it at the time. All three of these came together to produce the cold war. Buta study of political rhetoric
as political reality is more than that. If we "define and then see," such a concept applies both to
decisionmakers as well as the general public. The language people use becomes a part of what they see
because people cannot have definitions without language. In many respects, we are prepared to see what our language has
prepared us to see. We account for the rhetoric used in relation to any event in great part through the preconceptions on which it is based. To a substantial

degree the rhetoric that accompanies any event comes from an a priori rhetoric , based on values that
have come to be regarded as basic beliefs, on a preexisting language that is always present exerting its
influence in shaping our consciousness, on previous interpretations of past events that may or may not
be similar to current events. In such ways are we both liberated and imprisoned by language . Government
officials and others do not construct a language or a rhetoric out of thin air; they inherit it from the past and modify or adapt it to meet current or future concerns.
Robert Funk observed, "Language does not merely stand at our beck and call; it is there before we are, it situates
us, it restricts our horizon, it refuses us its total complicity ." 20 Even as the language politicians use can be dynamic and changing, it
also is dependent on rhetorical traditions created previously. The rhetoric of the cold war grew in large part out of preexisting

rhetorics as diverse as Churchill's long-standing antibolshevism and the war language of World War II, to name only a few. This analysis demonstrates that the
events that contributed to the cold war after 1945 had a rhetorical climate that preceded them as well as a rhetorical interpretation that accompanied them. The
latter grew out of the former, took a particular direction, and molded the meaning of events to the extent that they created an all-pervasive political reality that not
only "explained" events but became landmark events in and of themselves, ordering and interpreting future events as they occurred. Two important points need to
be made. First, in the world of practical politics a political rhetoric is often constructed quickly and on an ad hoc basis. George Elsey, a member of President
Truman's staff, stated the case for politicians succinctly: "You don't sit down and take time to think through and debate ad nauseam all the points [about an
issue]. . . . You don't have time. Later somebody can sit around for days and weeks and figure out how things might have been done differently. This is all very well
and very interesting but quite irrelevant." 21 One must add that it is only irrelevant for those who believe that whatever action is taken and whatever rhetoric
constructed to justify that action constituted the most prudent action and rhetoric. For the critic reexamination is always required because language has
consequences, often creating the first conception of a political reality of an event and then creating a lasting meaning of that event. Second, the creation of a
rhetorical reality is a process, rarely a single event. In the rhetoric of the cold war the reality grew over a period of years before it took hold and became elevated to
the level of sacred doctrine, an ideological doctrine whose fundamental principles few dared to challenge and to which almost all had to pay rhetorical respects
even when they disagreed about how those principles applied to particular situations. The failures of the architects of the American cold war -- Truman, Acheson,
and Kennan -- to restrict the political reality they had created provide compelling illustrations of the power of their own rhetoric. Before getting to the ways in which
this rhetorical process worked to define the nature and scope of the cold war, we need to identify the elements that were crucial to its development. Names,
Metaphors, and Definitions Thus
far we have argued that language is an essential part of reality, not merely a tool
to interpret events. Language itself is a creative act, not an added-on interpretation that comes from an
act. It is the confluence of act and language that is the first step in creating reality , a "raw" event and the political
meaning persuasively expressed that is attached to that event. Language and events cannot be easily separated once they become public currency. Again, we turn
to Funk who noted: Language and understanding arise together, are reciprocal. The common [event or actuality] to which they
refer both precedes and follows. It makes them possible, and yet the common reality does not become audible without language and understanding. Language

and understanding both arise out of and invoke shared reality.  22 This process of uniting the two, we call
a language-event, a unity of political language and actual events that creates political reality both in
perception and in expression. For this analysis of the cold war reality, there are three important ways in which language created that reality:
through naming, through metaphor, and through formal definitions. Kenneth Burke remarked that all language is "magical" or

creative because "the mere act of naming an object or situation decrees that it is to be singled out as
such-and-such rather than as something-other ." 23 In this understanding of language we are not merely saying something when we use
language, we are doing something. When we name an object, it becomes real for us because naming "does not

mean inventing a convenient designation, but giving reality to the object, calling it into [meaningful]
existence." 24 This conception of language has its roots in antiquity, and although it was once discarded by the modern scientific world as a mythical
understanding of reality, its significance has been rediscovered by Burke and the postmodernists. The scientific conception of language came to be associated with
its noetic function, that is, a word was thought of as a symbol that only conveys meaning, a tool separate from the thing it described. Louis Halle used this concept
of language in describing the changes that American leaders had to make in foreign policy in the postwar period. He argued that the confusions of that period and
Soviet expansionism required a new language to express the new "realities" of tensions in the world: What was required in the first instance, for the replacement of
the projected foreign policy by a policy applicable to the developing circumstances, was a conscious recognition of the realities to which it would have to be
applicable. The American Government and the American people . . . would then have to accept the need to re-establish a balance of power by filling the remaining
power vacuums and thereby limiting the further expansion of the Russian empire. Such a conceptual change as this, while it might take place more rapidly in the
subconscious mind, could hardly be explicitly formulated and adopted as such until after an interval of intellectual confusion and inner conflict, during which some
persons would continue to adhere with a sort of blind desperation to the outdated concepts and their attendant language, while others would recognize the
increasingly manifest realities without being able to find a coherent intellectual pattern or forms of words into which to fit them. 25Clearly, Halle viewed language
as a tool of expression, not as a creative rhetorical process. For Halle, the new cold war "reality" existed waiting only to be "recognized." Once recognized, the task
for U.S. leaders became an independent search for appropriate concepts and language to express that reality. In the older mythic realm, however, language and the
comprehension of reality were more deeply fused. This latter conception of language guides our understanding about rhetoric's role in the political construction of
reality.
 2nc-alternative overview
Our K is an ethics DA to your aff—we need to rethink militarism to understand the
root cause of violence and security,—its try or die with the alt
Stavrianakis 19 Anna Stavrianakis (Anna Stavrianakis is a Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Sussex. Her main
research interests are NGOs and global civil society; the arms trade and military globalisation; and critical approaches to the study of
international security) Introduction: Special issue on Militarism and security: Dialogue, possibilities and limits Security Dialogue2018, Vol. 49(1-
2) 3–18 TD
The contributions in this issue also do not shy away from prying open the concept/practice of militarism
in their reflections on its relation to security. Mabee and Vucetic take as their point of departure the
character of militarism as a contested concept and offer a typology for better understanding the
different meanings with which it is imbued. They characterize securitization as an exceptionalist form of
militarism that needs to be understood in comparison to other ideal types. Eastwood, meanwhile,
argues for rethinking militarism as ideology in order to open space for a critique of violence. Such a
move would help break the deadlock critical security studies has faced in assessing ‘the ethical
ramifications of various understandings of security for the pursuit of violence’ (Eastwood, this issue:
44). Abrahamsen invites us to rethink static and universal conceptions of militarism: while the merging
of security and development has facilitated the return of militarism, its form cannot adequately be
captured by old conceptual accounts; rather, the operation of global militarism in contemporary Africa
is dependent on the logic of security and securitization. And Rodriguez moves between conventional
and new approaches to the concept of militarism to chart the blurring of war, internal armed conflict
and urban security in Colombia. Arguing that the turn to security is a façade for militarism, he
demonstrates the ways in which civil authorities have used the discourse of security to facilitate
militarized responses to a vast array of problems, despite the Colombian military being formally
subordinate to civilian control. Taken as a whole, the contributions demonstrate the value of
reinvigorating the concept of militarism; that the turn to security loses analytical and political purchase
when it ignores militarism; and that the study of militarism cannot disregard the transformations that
have come with the turn to security (in both theory and practice). So it is not a case of choosing one
concept over the other, but of thinking them in relation to each other. The contributions underscore
that we need to understand the ways in which security practices, ideologies and discourses shape and
are shaped by militarism. How one does that depends on theoretical and political orientation – and also
methodology, to which we turn next. Paying attention to how people, institutions, practices,
processes, and so on are militarized or rendered the subjects of security or securitized, and to what
effect, is an important methodological move. Our contributors demonstrate a range of methodological
approaches. Mabee and Vucetic work in a historical-sociological tradition of ideal types in order to build
a bridge between critical security studies and historical-sociological accounts of militarism. This allows
them to construct the category of ‘exceptionalist militarism’ that is co-constituted by three other ideal
types: nation-state militarism, civil society militarism and neoliberal militarism . Eastwood combines
Althusserian and psychoanalytic ideology critique in order to foreground the task of anti-militarist
critique. In this, he challenges the criticism of ideological approaches to the study of militarism,
arguing that a reformulated concept of ideology can facilitate a stronger ethico-political critique of
violence.
Militarism is NOT inevitable-critical scholarship can change institutions and norms
--The K is a prerequisite to policy making-critical security scholarship can solve the aff
and the links
-two uses

*we solve your critical aff

*perm card for the critical aff

Stavrianakis 19 Anna Stavrianakis (Anna Stavrianakis is a Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Sussex. Her main
research interests are NGOs and global civil society; the arms trade and military globalisation; and critical approaches to the study of
international security) Introduction: Special issue on Militarism and security: Dialogue, possibilities and limits Security Dialogue2018, Vol. 49(1-
2) 3–18 TD

Academic trends, however, are not only influenced by and influential on the playing out of politics on the global arena; they are also subject to the ‘marketplace of
academic hiring, journal publishing, and grant opportunities’ (Stern, 2017). Hence, the political economy of staking out the field of critical
security
studies, critical war studies or critical military studies also has to do with branding and creating a niche
for a community of scholarship. While the development of subfields offers a venue for fostering
collective knowledge production with common points of reference, thus facilitating spaces in which
exciting exchanges of ideas and innovations can flourish, the politics of defining a field also give rise to
the limiting effects of the politics of identity. Conversations an become insular and self-referential. Opportunities to learn from other
parallel or previous scholarly discussions are missed. To take a familiar example: as many have pointed out, the politics of mapping and cataloguing are perhaps
exaggerated within critical security studies (c.a.s.e collective, 2006, 2007; Security Dialogue, 2007), with its seemingly never-ending preoccupation with
geographically defined schools and the identification of turns that masquerade as exciting new dance steps. On the sidelines of these productions, the voices of
feminist and postcolonial scholars become hoarse from suggesting that perhaps the reflexive turn, the corporeal turn or the everyday turn in critical security
studies, for instance, might have something to learn from decades of feminist theorizing and from
choreographies developed by scholars in other disciplines . We therefore also note the role politics, institutional
framings and branding play in delimiting the kinds of possible conversations between critical security
and critical military projects, and aim to hold these to the light of productive scrutiny through our
consideration of the concepts/practices of security and militarism. We start with some insights from feminism and
postcolonial research in order to underscore the slipperiness of analysis of security and militarism. Feminists have long been noting and

interrogating the continuum of violence (Kelly, 2012) and the (in)adequacy of the categories that distinguish
between different forms of violence, thus problematizing the lines of distinction between war and
peace, the public and the private, domestic and political violence, and so on. Feminist insight has shown us that for people living
in war zones, war is relational and systemic, a continuum in which ‘it is not quite so easy to set aside
“ordinary” aggression, force or violence as “not war” (Cockburn, 2010: 146). And postcolonial analysis problematizes the conventional
distinction between war and other forms of violence, such as (internal) armed conflict, inviting us to critically rethink how we conceive of a host of forms of
organized violence (Barkawi, 2016). War zones might not be located only in the theatre of traditional combat, but instead can be found in the seemingly safe place
of our homes, our streets, our borders, and inscribed on our bodies. Sylvester (2013), for example, advocates a reinvigorated study of war through attention to its
embodied and emotional experiences as a social institution. Recent work on
queer approaches to international relations troubles
boundary-drawing even further, exploring the ways in which ‘power, desire, pleasure and agency come
together in militarization’, meaning that ‘power relations are productive and enjoyable, not merely
oppressive’ (Crane-Seeber, 2016: 43–44). Furthermore, the concepts and practices of militarism and security are not only deeply
gendered but also racialized , and reflect colonial imaginaries (see e.g. Chisholm, 2014; Porter, 2009; Ware, 2012). Simply put, through
careful empirical and theoretical research, feminist and postcolonial literature situated within critical
security studies, critical military studies and critical war studies has questioned the premises of both
traditional security studies and war studies , and cautioned us not to draw too tight a boundary around the concepts of security and
militarism and their possible objects of inquiry. As burgeoning fields, critical military studies and critical war studies have more explicitly focused on military power
as their object of inquiry than critical security studies, while being explicit that ‘our
very conceptions of military power, militarism
and militarization are themselves open to critique and reimagining’ (Basham et al., 2015: 1). A shift from a focus
on the military as institution to military power allows us to notice the workings of militarism (however
construed) and martial practices as they are infused in and co-constitutive of society. In strategic thought,

this generates attention to the malleability of norms around what constitutes civil and military across
space and time (Angstrom, 2013: 224). ‘War and society’ approaches (e.g. Shaw, 1988) allow us to see how military
power shapes and is shaped by wider social relations, without mistaking an analytical distinction
between military and civilian for substantive separation. Howell pushes this further, exhorting us not to assume ‘any
fundamental separation between military and civilian life’ 2017: 133), raising the question of whether military power is even a
discrete object of analysis. Meanwhile, work on the spatialities of militarism (e.g. Henry and Natanel, 2016; Rech et al., 2015), the rise of ‘everyday militarism’
approaches (e.g. Bernazzoli and Flint, 2010), and attention to practices, material, emotions and embodiment have wrested militarism away from the confines of
narrow understandings of military power. However, militarism’s ‘stickiness’ (Ahmed, 2004: 89–92) to violence, to the state and to the institution of the military
clearly poses some challenges for attempts to disengage it from its traditional moorings. Witness how easy it is to be talking about militarism and yet quickly slip
into a discussion of war and the military (traditionally understood). Nonetheless, critical scholarship has opened up space for querying
militarism in its myriad forms. In preparing this special issue, we have been reminded of the vast amount of creative and
robust scholarship that engages in the questions of security and militarism. These concepts/practices – while surely
overlapping, limited and limiting, as well as overwrought with ideological, historical and institutional baggage – nonetheless still are put to excellent

use in attempts to reflect, analyse, understand and even change the world and redress harm. This brings us
back to our political project in putting these two concepts in dialogue. One of the things we take from these contributions is that there is a pressing

need to reinvigorate a focus on militarism and its co-constitution with security – and, as evidenced here, there
are extant and emerging scholarly resources with which to do so.
Block extensions
AT
AT:
 at: inevitability
Disregard claims of inevitability – only by rejecting the securitization of the affirmative
can we open up space for new alternatives – realism is structurally flawed
Roberts 08 – research paper submitted at the University of East Anglia, School of Political, Social and
International Studies, cites political scientists such as Fukuyama (July 10, 2008, Adrian Bua Roberts,
“Contesting Neo-Realism and Liberal Idealism; Where do Hopes for a ‘Perpetual Peace’ Lie?”
http://www.e-ir.info/2008/07/10/contesting-neo-realism-and-liberal-idealism-where-do-hopes-for-a-
%E2%80%98perpetual-peace%E2%80%99-lie/) // NG

War has been an omnipresent aspect of the international order since the beginning of recorded history.
Consequently, ‘realism’ sees conflict and war as the defining aspects of international relations . On the other hand

‘idealists’ posit that human reason/different forms of societal organization can curb or even eliminate
belligerency. This essay shall critically analyse the realist position drawing on ‘critical theory’ to show that it is limited to analysing
the world system without committing to change it. Realism’s “a-historic” nature and descriptive
limitation presupposes that patterns discovered are immutable truths and by eliminating the internal
nature of states from consideration, realism fails to provide adequate account for the changing nature
of war. Following analysis on the effects of economic interdependence and democratic regimes upon war, the essay shall argue that though democracy and
economic interdependence amongst equal trading partners hamper belligerency, the effects of capitalist globalization corrupt such gains and perpetuate conflict.
The aim is to show that war is not necessarily inevitable, but in order to significantly reduce or eliminate war the world must reach a post-capitalist stage.

THE ROOTS OF WAR

The lack of organization, technology and communication would make war unfeasible until a relatively
recent time, so it is safe to assume that mankind’s pre-history was a non-military one. Pre-historic breeding and
feeding groups may have been prone to group ferocity but this does not amount to “organized armed
struggle between groups in which each side seeks to displace or to dispel, to dominate or punish, or
simply to be rid of the other by inflicting ‘defeat’ ”[1]. War requires a political purpose of some sort. Though it has not yet been
established whether war is inevitable amongst sovereign[2]states, the notion of sovereignty lies at the root of “war”. War’s

purpose is the removal, limitation or exercise of another state’s ‘sovereignty’, without ‘Sovereignty’ war
would not be necessary.
Clausewitz saw war beginning when the “weak defender” realised organised resistance was the only way of giving the “strong offender” a taste of his own
medicine[3] Conflict is seen as the main reason why men organized themselves into societies . This view that the state
and war came into existence in a symbiosis is expressed in Montesquieu’s dictum –

“once in a political society, men lose their feeling of weakness whereupon their former equality disappears and the state of war begins”[4].

This is a convincing account of war’s origins. The

“state” enables war to occur, it is necessary for war (also true of the “war on
terror”[5]) if war is to be different from chaos . Moreover, as Michael Howard notes war has had a huge influence upon the

evolution of states. For example, Medieval Europe before the development of guns was “parcelled out between thousands of Lords, each with his own
power base”[6]. However, “the development of guns was the final argument of Kings against overmighty subjects (lords) whose castles could now be reduced to
rubble”[7]. Heavy cannon enabled Kings to establish their authority and centralise power over greater territory. Conflict, through developments in weapons
technology, began the process of consolidating “nation states”.

War has had a massive influence upon the world we know, however this should not lead us to see the
state and war as partners in a relationship which is necessarily equal to each. The dependence of the state upon
war/conflict is not logically necessary. Even if both arose together and even if the state depended upon war to

establish itself, the relationship is not necessarily perpetual . Nevertheless, ‘realism’ would dispute this claim.
REALISM

Following the demise of Liberal idealism, scholars such as George Kennan, Walter Lippman and Hans Morgenthau, whose main goal was influencing US foreign
policy to tackle the new exigencies posed by the ‘cold war’, restored the ancient tradition of power politics to orthodoxy. At birth, “political realism” was more
interested in practice than abstract theory, aiming to produce an interpretive guide enabling us “to look over the shoulder of a statesman … and anticipate his very
thoughts”[8]. Realism was presented as the universal language of power, the international system as its stage and states as its actors.

Morgenthau would attempt to extrapolate a science of international politics from this ‘practical guide’, using the concepts of power, rationality and the balance of
power as its analytical tools. He theorized international politics as a struggle for power in a hierarchic international system, constituted by power balances with the
ability to create both “equilibrium” (negative peace) and conflict through power struggles. Power was not understood as an instrument to attain other ends, but as
an end in itself, due to the “limitless character of the lust for power (which) reveals a general quality of the human mind”[9]. The basic elements of “power” and
“conflict” are essential to understand realism’s development.

Neo-realism emerged from a critique of “political realism” positing that “human nature” is insufficient to
explain behavior. Human nature is treated as a historical constant and therefore fails to explain
variations in war over time and space. Furthermore, if human nature varies -as some argue- it is the
sources of that variation and not human nature that account for war. Morton Kaplan and Stanley Hoffman (amongst others)
began to account for conflict in terms of the competitive and anarchic nature of world politics as a whole. Kenneth Waltz expanded upon this to produce “structural
realism”. Where Morgenthau saw international politics as a hierarchy consisting of power balances, Waltz maintained international politics is inherently anarchic
and deemed the ‘structure’ of any system to transcend the characteristics of its units. State behavior is explained in structural terms, by the system it operates
within. To illustrate this point Waltz used the “oligopolistic market” analogy -

“within an oligopolistic market, the ability of firms to arrive at some convergence regarding prices… cannot be adequately understood either by examining
negotiations among the firms or by studying their internal decision making process. Rather it is the structure of the market itself, in which a few key actors
collectively hold the dominant market share… the tendency for competition is dampened through mutual adjustments over time”[10]

In the same way, state behaviour cannot be explained by internal characteristics, but is determined by the structure of the international system which (like other
‘structures’) varies across three dimensions:

“by their ordering principles, the specification of functions of formally differentiated parts and the relative capabilities of the units”[11].

States are “ordered” by the principle of anarchy and “function” as rational power maximisers. The only
remaining difference amongst states is their “relative capabilities” (power) International Relations becomes
limited to analyzing the relative power between states. Changing power configurations can affect alignment and levels of conflict.
Nevertheless, in an anarchic world order, competing sovereign states with different levels of power create conflict and

war, which is seen as inevitable amongst sovereign states.

REALISM’S EPISTEMOLOGY

A great part of the difference between those who see war as a necessary and inevitable part of international relations and those who contend that
war can be avoided or even eliminated is based upon the distinction between synchronic and diachronic

understandings of history. Though they are not mutually exclusive, the synchronic dimension (space rather than time) tends to
see the world as a series of interrelated parts with a tendency for equilibrium whereas the diachronic
dimension (time rather than space) sees history as a process, naturally leading to enquiry into
circumstances/events which bring about system transformation [12].

Realism’s synchronic understanding of history views the international system as essentially unchanging,
enabling the deduction of knowledge through the analysis of behaviour throughout history, much like
the analysis of physical phenomena in the natural sciences. This positivist epistemology leads to the
deduction of ‘universal truths’ such as the anarchic nature of the international order and state’s
behaviour as power-maximisers. History is reduced to a “mine of data”, Robert Cox points out this has negative
effects on neorealist historicism;
“There can be no dispute about Kenneth Waltz’s adherence to the positivist approach … the elegance he achieves in the clarity of his theoretical statement comes
at the price of an unconvincing mode of historical understanding” Robert Cox[13]

Neorealism’s positivist approach eliminates subjectivity from consideration. Therefore, the event observed
– war/conflict – is removed from any possible causal relation with the subjective actors – states. Only
the structure and the effect are left to analyse, eliminating the possibility for a subjective cause of ‘war’.
Analysis is restricted to the structure within which war occurs . The only internal characteristic being a disposition to act as
power-maximisers, necessitated by the “anarchic” structure of the international system, an external factor. Realism is not interested in

analysing why states use war beyond the universal claim that states invariably act as “power
maximisers”. Fukuyama criticises realism on this point; “realism introduces assumptions about the nature of human
societies that make up the system, erroneously attributing them to the system rather than the units
which make it up”[14]. By ignoring the effect a state’s internal nature has upon its relationships within
the international system, realism amputates from itself a key area of analysis.

Clear gaps in realist theory become apparent . For example realism would analyse “Imperialist War” (Lenin 1916) in the same terms as the
religious crusades of the middle ages – power balance within an anarchic international system. Neorealists treat “anarchy” as a

historical/structural constant, unaffected by different forms of organization, and therefore cannot

adequately account for variations in war and peace. Kenneth Waltz concedes on this point noting that “although neorealist theory
does not explain why particular wars are fought, it does explain war’s dismal reoccurrence through the millennia”[15 ]. Variables such as the power

polarity of the system provide a limited account for variations in war and peace and, inkeeping with
realist tradition, these remain accountable to the international system itself, not the nature of the units
which constitute it.
In order to account for research that has clearly favored dyadic over systemic explanations for the outbreak of war (Bueno de Mesquita and Lalman, 1988, 1992)[16]
it has been argued that “structural realism requires a supporting theory of state”[17]. However ,
to consider the internal nature of states
would surely be a complete reversal from structural realism’s inherent principle – that structure
transcends the characteristics of its units. Such a theory is more likely to fundamentally reshape
neorealism rather than complement it.

Realism is essentially a-historical, its

positivist epistemology degenerates history into “a mine of data illustrating the
permutations and combinations that are possible within an essentially unchanging human story”[18] .
Moreover, by limiting itself to analysing the structure and the effect, realism eliminates from analysis the

impact subjective actors (states) have upon war and ignores the fact that changes in societal
organization affect war.

An understanding of history as a process enables analysis on the effects different conditions and
different forms of state have upon war. This lends itself to a rejection of positivism and adoption of
“critical theory”[19] where the role of philosophy is to change the world, not merely to interpret it-
“The real social function of philosophy lies in its criticism of what is prevalent … the chief aim of such criticism is to prevent mankind from losing itself in those ideas
and activities which the existing organization of society instills into its members” Max Horkheimer[20]

Realism may not be “losing itself” in presently hegemonic ideas, a synchronic understanding of history
enables its core argument to survive throughout historical periods . However by extrapolating trans-historic conclusions, it
loses itself in the “bigger picture”, failing to consider how different circumstances (beyond power balances) affect
war and ignoring the possibility to prescribe changes for its elimination. Realism does not see the ideas
prevalent in the existing organization of society as self-evident natural laws or “higher truths”, it sees a
pattern which has survived changes in societal organization and produces its own “higher truths” from
it, ignoring the fact that changes in societal organization affect war.

This condemns realism to the conclusion that war is an inevitable and immutable part of international
relations, burdening discourse with pessimism and perpetuating complacency. Scholars should aim to
prescribe changes to the existing order with a view to improving it. The internal nature of states, the nature of relations
amongst them and different international “ordering principles” account for variations in war and peace. Analysis
of these differences – far
from producing utopian prescriptions – could provide humanity with very real possibilities for
eliminating, significantly reducing, or at least preventing the tragedy that is war .

Accusations of futile utopianism will surely be made against such a claim . However, I would suggest that it is the
realist who engages in a largely futile endeavour. For if realism believes its own conclusions – the necessarily
power maximising behaviour of states, the anarchical international order and the inevitability of conflict – it eliminates the possibility for any

positive contributions transcending these factors, limiting analysis of the international system to mere
descriptiveness. Ultimately, realism suffocates International Relations like Creationist dogma suffocates
Evolutionary Science.

Conflicts appear inevitable because we allow security to constitute our world.

Burke 2007(Anthony Burke is an Associate Prof and Reader in International and Political Studies @
UNSW Australia, “Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and Reason,” Theory and Event)

This chapter is thus an exercise in thinking, which challenges the continuing power of political
ontologies (forms of truth and being) that connect security, sovereignty, belonging, othemess
and violence in ways that for many appear like enduring political facts, inevitable and
irrefutable. Conflict, violence and alienation then arise not merely from individual or collective
acts whose conditions might be understood and policed; they condition politics as such,
forming a permanent ground, a dark substrata underpinning the very possibility of the present.
Conflict and alienation seem inevitable because of the way in which the modem political
imagination has conceived and thought security, sovereignty and ethics. Israel/ Palestine is
chosen here as a particularly urgent and complex example of this problem, but it is a problem
with much wider significance. While I hold out the hope that security can be re-visioned away
from a permanent dependence on insecurity, exclusion and violence, and I believe it retains
normative promise, this analysis takes a deliberate step backward to examine the very real
barriers faced by such a project. Security cannot properly be rethought without a deeper
understanding of, and challenge to, the political forms and structures it claims to enable and
protect. If Ken Booth argues that the state should be a means rather than an end of security,
my objective here is to place the continuing power and depth of its status as an end of security,
and a fundamental source for political identity, under critical interrogation.' If the state is to
become a means of security (one among many) it will have to be fundamentally transformed.
The chapter pursues this inquiry in two stages. The first outlines the historic strength and
effective redundancy of such an exciusivist vision of security in Israel, wherein Israel not only
confronts military and political antagonists with an 'iron wall' of armed force but maps this onto
a profound clash of existential narratives, a problem with resonances in the West's
confrontation with radical Islamism in the war on terror. The second, taking up the remainder
of the chapter, then explores a series of potential resources in continental philosophy and
political theory that might help us to think our way out of a security grounded in violence and
alienation. Through a critical engagement with this thought, I aim to construct a political ethics
based not in relations between insecure and separated identities mapped solely onto nation-
states, but in relations of responsibility and interconnection that can negotiate and recognise
both distinct and intertwined histories, identities and needs; an ethics that might underpin a
vision of interdependent (national and non-national) existence proper to an integrated world
traversed by endless flows of people, commerce, ideas, violence and future potential.
 at: short term impacts o/w
Timeframe should be irrelevant in your decision calculus – the aff needs to prove the
method that produced their truth claims isn’t epistemologically suspect as a prior
question to solvency

Short-termism link turns effective policy making – causes serial policy failure and
crowds out true strategic thinking
Bilgin 04 – Pinar Bilgin 4 IR @ Bilikent AND Adam David MORTON Senior Lecturer and Fellow of the
Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice IR @ Nottingham“From ‘Rogue’ to ‘Failed’ States? The
Fallacy of Short-termism” Politics 24 (3) p. Wiley Interscience

Calls for alternative approaches to the phenomenon of state failure are often met with the criticism that such
alternatives could only work in the long term whereas  'something' needs to be done here and now . Whilst
recognising the need for immediate action, it is the role of the political scientist to point to the fallacy of 'short-

termism' in the conduct of current policy. Short-termism is defined by Ken Booth (1999, p. 4) as 'approaching security issues within the time frame of the
next election, not the next generation'. Viewed as such, short-termism is the enemy of true strategic thinking. The latter

requires policymakers to rethink their long-term goals and take small steps towards achieving them . It
also requires heeding against taking steps that might eventually become self-defeating .  The

United States has presently fought three wars against two of its Cold War allies in the post-Cold War era, namely, the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein
and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Both were supported in an attempt to preserve the delicate balance between the

United States and the Soviet Union. The Cold War policy of supporting client regimes has eventually backfired in that US

policymakers now have to face the instability they have caused. Hence the need for a comprehensive
understanding of state failure and the role Western states have played in failing them through varied forms of
intervention. Although some commentators may judge that the road to the existing situation is paved with good intentions, a truly strategic
approach to the problem of international terrorism requires a more sensitive consideration of the medium-to-long-term
implications of state building in different parts of the world whilst also addressing the root causes of the problem of state 'failure'.  Developing this line of
argument further, reflection on different socially relevant meanings of 'state failure' in relation to different time increments shaping policymaking might convey
alternative considerations. In line with John Ruggie (1998, pp. 167–170), divergent issues might then come to the fore when viewed through the different lenses of
particular time increments. Firstly, viewed through the lenses of an incremental time frame, more immediate concerns to policymakers
usually become apparent when linked to precocious assumptions about terrorist networks, banditry and the breakdown of social order within failed states. Hence
relevant players and events are readily identified (al-Qa'eda), their attributes assessed (axis of evil, 'strong'/'weak' states) and judgements made about their long-

term significance (war on terrorism). The key analytical problem for policymaking in this narrow and blinkered domain is the one of choice
given the constraints of time and energy devoted to a particular decision. These factors lead policymakers to bring conceptual baggage

to bear on an issue that simplifies but also distorts information.  Taking a second temporal form, that of a conjunctural time frame, policy responses
are subject to more fundamental epistemological concerns. Factors assumed to be constant within an incremental time frame are more variable and it is more
difficult to produce an intended effect on ongoing processes than it is on actors and discrete events. For instance, how long should the 'war on terror' be waged
for? Areas of policy in this realm can therefore begin to become more concerned with the underlying forces that shape current trajectories.  Shifting

attention to a third temporal form draws attention to still different dimensions. Within an epochal time frame an agenda still
in the making appears that requires a shift in decision-making, away from a conventional problem-solving mode 'wherein doing nothing is favoured on burden-of-
proof grounds', towards a risk-averting mode, characterised by prudent contingency measures. To conclude, in relation to 'failed states', the latter time
frame entails reflecting on the very structural conditions shaping the problems of 'failure' raised throughout the present discussion, which will demand lasting and
delicate attention from practitioners across the academy and policymaking communities alike. 
 AT: Owen
17 Years later – Owen Still concluces Neg – We don’t prelucde problem solving – our
argument questions the specific assumptions that cause violence
Owen 2 (David Owen is a professor of Political Theory @ University of Southhampton, "Re-orienting
International Relations: On Pragmatism, Pluralism and Practical Reasoning," Millennium - Journal of
International Studies)

How, though, does this focus on government act to re-orient the discipline of IR? The salient point for our immediate concerns is that IR
theory as a form of practical philosophy can be situated in three roles here , each of which may require different
kinds of theoretical practice. The first role is that of seeking to bring a public into being by enabling us to
perceive significant effects, to bring them over the threshold of visibility. This may be directed at effects
that that are potential candidates for government —e.g., as Shacknove points out, persons whose government fails to protect
their basic needs and who are accessible to the international community ought to qualify for refugeehood—or at effects that are products of
existing forms of government—for example, the fact that, because the current refugee regime lacks any criteria on burden-sharing, the
majority of refugees are situated in the world’s poorest and weakest states and that this can have destabilising effect on these states.32 At the
same time, this rendering visible may involve contesting the background picture that informs our current
perception of consequences—e.g., contesting the assumptions of territoriality it involves—or elucidating previously unnoticed
consequences within the terms of that background picture by way of better accounts of the practices in question— for example, the
elucidation of the gendered effects of the fact that refugeehood is constructed on an exilic bias . The
second role is that of serving an existing public by offering accounts of the consequences of the practices
in question that support the shared moral judgement that constitutes this public and offering
practicable ways of addressing these consequences —for example, focusing on the human rights aspect of refugeehood and
the role that human rights legislation can play in supporting refugees. The third role, finally, is that of seeking to dissolve an
existing public by showing that the shared moral judgement that constitutes it as a public is mistaken in
that the effects with which it is concerned are either illusory or not sufficiently significant. In each of these
ways, IR can serve the purpose of increasing the intelligence of our reflections on practices of government
and it is worth stressing, at least as it seems to me, that some of the hostilities in contemporary IR theory mark a
failure to register the different roles that different kinds of IR theory can play in this process. Thus, for
example, the point of genealogical investigations is, as Foucault notes, primarily that of attempting to
constitute a community of judgement, a public in Dewey’s terms, and hence it is primarily concerned with
transforming our perception through world-disclosure such that previously invisible consequences
become visible.33
Links
 Failed States Link

The affirmative description of (X Country) as a failed state requires a securitized view

of governance that can only reproduce colonial violence
Dolek 08 (Caglar is a grad student @ Middle East Technical University in Political Science and Public
Administration ,Journal of Turkish Weekly ,The Myth of 'Failed State' in Africa: A Question ,April 29,
2008)

As discussed above, almost all the perceptions tend to make a descriptive account of 'state failure' giving
no reference to the historical and social conditions through which these polities have happened to 'fail'.
That is, as Bilgin and Morton argues: "...no reference is made to the process through which these states
have become 'weak' while others have gained 'strength'. In other words, the question 'who's failed 'the
failed state'?' is never asked." [8] The main reason of the absence of such a question is because of the
very ontological constitution of failed state or mythical representation of the 'failure' itself. That is, to
refer to the Barthesian notion of 'myth', the state failure is presented as natural, universal and
ahistorical phenomenon that suddenly emerged with the end of Cold War. To develop this critique, it is
essential to have a deeper look at the notion of myth. Roland Barthes, an influential French philosopher
thanks to his invaluable contributions to the emergence of post-modern thought, argues that
bourgeoisie ideology constantly creates a process in which what is historical is presented as if it were
universal and ahistorical. He, therefore, claims that bourgeoisie ideology decontextualizes the object
from its historical and social conditions. [9] These ideological products, for Barthes, are the mere 'myths'
which appear as if they were produced outside the given context. 'The myth', then, takes a purely
cultural and historical object and transforms it into a universal value. [10] In his philosophy, however,
the myths are not simply illusions in our minds. That is to say, the myths are not only ideological
products of bourgeoisie culture, but also they are concrete things. Here, the most fundamental premise
of Barthes arises: While the myth avoids the social and historical conditions of the construction of the
subject, there is awareness among the people about these historical conditions. At this point, for him,
bourgeoisie ideology creates the mythology that prevents us from seeing those historical conditions.
That is to say, although we are generally aware of the historical background of the mythical aspect of
that ideological product, we tend to think that it is natural. [11] This is the exact ideological function of
the myth. Barthes further developed his theory in order to demystify the myth. To this aim, he relied on
the Saussurian analysis of the linguistic signs, but further developed such an analysis, and constructed
the theory of the semiology. Therefore, semiology is the model for the demystification of the ideological
products of the bourgeoisie society. It is beyond this study to analyze this rather complex theory of
semiology in which Barthes used schematic figures to deconstruct the myth. Yet, the most important
thing that concerns us here is the aim of semiology: to demystify the myth with reference to the
historical and social conditions in which it was constructed. With reference to the discussion here, it is of
paramount significance to realize the mythical representation of the very notion of 'failed state'. Within
the framework of Barthesian arguments, the scholarly analysis as well as policy justifications mostly rely
on a 'state failure' decontextualized from the wider social, historical and international contexts. Then,
the 'failure' itself becomes as a fault of those underdeveloped polities either due to intrinsic cultural
features, or due to corrupted political elites. etc. Among the others, the thesis on 'New Barbarism',
briefly touched upon above, provides most explicit manifestation of the mythical representation of
postcolonial African 'subject'. Moreover, within the context of African 'failed states, there is no
reference to the colonial experiences of subordination through which a neo-colonial dependent state
structure has been inherited. Nor is any critical attention paid towards the 'perpetuation' of the
conditions of underdevelopment in the continent especially with the introduction of neoliberal policies
to those already weak African states. It has become an undeniable fact that the introduction of
neoliberal structural adjustment programs, legitimized in the name of resolving development impasse in
Africa, has become main obstacle before the development objectives of the African countries.
Therefore, the 'African crisis' of 1970s and 1980s have been transformed into 'African tragedy' meaning
that the problems in the continent have already exceed the point of being temporal crisis. Therefore,
behind all these mythical representation of 'failed state' lies the particular social ontology which isolates
the object from its social and historical conditions through which it has come into being. This is the
atomistic social ontology which treats the failed states as atomistic agents constituted equally within
international relations. That is to say, the juridical or political equality of the nation states lies at the
basis of this social ontology as it produces the illusion of a state being abstracted from the international
sphere, or from the structures of domination within global capitalism. This very ontological position, as
Jones has put it, results in the problem of "blaming the victim" according to which ". the wealth or
poverty, success or failure of the person or state is their fault and their responsibility, it is to be
explained by their choices, attitude, commitment and so on." [12] Jones discusses the issue with
reference to an inherent characteristic of capitalist social relations: separation of the politics and
economics which is fruitfully analyzed in the writings of Wood. With regard to the discussion here, such
a separation means the existence of the 'surface appearances' of a complex phenomenon. [13] In that
sense, to use Barthes' words, we tend to see the state failure as normal because of the mythology of the
failed state. It indicates both an illusion (surface appearances) and reality. Yet, we tend to disregard the
social context of the state failure, and think that the state failure fundamentally results from internal
conditions of a country. Furthermore, the unacceptable violations of human rights committed by these
failed states strengthen this vision. All in all, an external intervention becomes inevitable and necessary
because of the 'responsibility to protect'. In Place of a Conclusion. The discussion here has been on the
mythical constitution of failed states with reference to atomistic social ontology. A particular reference
has been tried to be made to the African continent. However, rather than making a descriptive analysis
of the cases within the continent, the central aim has been mainly to demystify the myth of failed state.
Decontextualized from the social and historical conditions, and thus blamed for their own fault, the
'failed states' have been discursively produced to function as the legitimate basis of Western
intervention into the internal affairs of the developing countries. Revealing this very mythical
representation of failed states is a vital job in order to provide more substantial and enduring solutions
for the 'failures' of those states.
 China Threat
The Affirmatives reading of Arms sale as producing Conflict with China requires a
eurocentric view of China as a threat that justifies violence
Pan 2004 (Chengxin Pan is a professor of international relations @ Deakin university, The "China Threat"
in American Self-Imagination: The Discursive Construction of Other as Power Politics, Alternatives:
Global, Local, Political, Vol. 29, No. 3 (June-July 2004), pp. 305-331)//KW

The ''China Threat" Discourse and the New U.S. Containment Policy The discursive construction of the
U.S. self and the "Chinese threat" argument are not innocent, descriptive accounts of some
"independent" reality. Rather, they are always a clarion call for the practice of power politics. At the
apex of this power-politics agenda is the politico-strategic question of "what is to be done" to make the
United States secure from the (perceived) threats it faces. At a general level, as Benjamin Schwarz
proposes, this requires an unhindered path to U.S. global hegemony that means not only that the United
States must dominate wealthy and technologically sophisticated states in Europe and East Asia -
America's "allies" - but also that it must deal with such nuisances as Saddam Hussein, Slobodan
Milosevic and Kim Jong II, so that potential great powers need not acquire the means to deal with those
problems themselves. And those powers that eschew Amer- ican supervision - such as China - must be
both engaged and contained. The upshot of "American leadership" is that the United States must spend
nearly as much on national security as the rest of the world combined.67 This "neocontainment" policy
has been echoed in the "China threat" literature. In a short yet decisive article titled "Why We Must
Contain China," Washington Post columnist Charles Krautham- mer insists that "containing China" and
"undermining its ruthless dictatorship" constitute two essential components of "any rational policy
toward a rising, threatening China." Not only is a policy other than containment considered irrational,
but even a delay to implement it would be undesirable, as he urges that "containment of such a bully
must begin early in its career." To this end, Kraut- hammer offers such "practical" options as
strengthening regional alliances (with Vietnam, India, and Russia, as well as Japan) to box in China;
standing by Chinese dissidents; denying Beijing the right to host the Olympics; and keeping China from
joining the World Trade Organization on the terms it desires.68 Containing China is of course not the
only option arising from the "China threat" literature. More often than not, there is a sub- tle, business-
style "crisis management" policy. For example, Bern- stein and Munro shy away from the word
containment, preferring to call their China policy management.69 Yet, what remains unchanged in the
management formula is a continued promotion of control- ling China. For instance, a perusal of
Bernstein and Munro's texts reveals that what they mean by management is no different than
Krauthammer's explicit containment stance.70 By framing U.S.- China relations as an issue of "crisis
management," they leave little doubt of who is the "manager" and who is to be "managed." In a more
straightforward manner, Betts and Christensen state that coercion and war must be part and parcel of
the China manage- ment policy: In addressing the China challenge, the United States needs to think hard
about three related questions: first, how to avoid crises and war through prudent, coercive diplomacy;
second, how to manage crises and fight a war if the avoidance effort fails; third, how to end crises and
terminate war at costs acceptable to the United States and its allies.71 This is not to imply that the kind
of perspectives outlined above will automatically be translated into actual China policy, but one does
not have to be exceedingly perceptive to note that the "China threat" perspective does exert enormous
influence on U.S. policy making on China. To illustrate this point, I want now to examine some specific
implications of U.S. representations of the "China threat" for U.S.-China relations in relation to the 1995-
1996 Taiwan Strait missile crisis and the "spy plane" incident of 2001. Theory as Practice 1: The Taiwan
Strait Missile Crisis In the eyes of many U.S. China watchers, China's approach to the Taiwan question is
a microcosm of its grand strategy to dominate Asia. The argument is that nowhere is the threatening
ambition more palpable than in China's saber-rattling missile tests near Tai- wan's coast in 1995-1996, in
addition to its long-standing refusal to renounce the use of force as a last resort to settle the dispute.72
While the 1995-1996 missile crisis has been a favorite "starting point" for many pundits and
practitioners to paint a frightening pic- ture of China and to justify U.S. firm response to it, what is often
conveniently overlooked is the question of how the "China threat" discourse itself had played a
constitutive role in the lead-up to that crisis. Limits of space forbid exploring this complex issue here.
Sim- ply put, the Taiwan question was created largely as a result of wide- spread U.S. perceptions of
China as a "Red Menace" in the wake of the "loss of China" and the outbreak of the Korean War. To
thwart what it saw as an orchestrated Communist offensive in Asia, the United States deployed the U.S.
Seventh Fleet to the Taiwan Strait as part of its Cold War containment strategy, thereby effectively pre-
venting the reunification of Taiwan with mainland China. While the United States abandoned its
containment and isolation policy toward China in the 1970s and the two countries established full
diplomatic relations in 1979, the conventional image of the "Red Menace" lingered on in the United
States. To manage such a "threat," the U.S. Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act shortly after the
normalization of U.S.-China relations, renewing U.S. com- mitment to Taiwan's defense even though
diplomatic ties with the island had been severed.73 This confrontational policy serves not only to shore
up Taiwan's defense capabilities but also to induce its independent ambition and further complicate
cross-strait relations. As former U.S. defense official Chas Freeman remarked, "U.S. arms sales to Taiwan
no longer work to boost Taipei's confidence that it can work out its dif- ferences with Beijing. Instead,
they bolster the view that Taiwan can go its own way."74 For instance, amid growing sympathy from the
Republican-dominated Congress and the elite media as well as the expanded ties with the United States,
Taiwan responded coolly to Beijing's call for dialogue in January 1995. In June 1995, Taiwan's flexible
diplomacy, designed to burnish its independent image, cul- minated in its president Lee Teng-hui's high-
profile visit to the United States. This in turn reinforced Beijing's suspicion that the real U.S. intention
was to frustrate its reunification goal, leaving it apparently no other choice but to prepare militarily for
what it saw as a worst-case scenario. All this constituted the major context in which the 1995-1996
Taiwan Strait missile exercises took place. For most Chinese, the carrying out of these military exercises,
well within their own territory, had little to do with attacking Tai- wan, much less with challenging U.S.
security interests in the west- ern Pacific. Rather, it was about China's long-cherished dream of national
unity, with its "sabre rattling" tactics serving merely as a warning to the United States, as well as to
Taiwan. However, inter- preting such exercises as China's muscle-flexing with direct security implications
for the region, with "an almost 19th-century display of gunboat diplomacy,"75 the United States
dispatched two nuclear- powered aircraft carriers to the region of Taiwan. While not denying the
potential security repercussions of China's missile tests for the region, I suggest that the flashpoint of
Taiwan says as much about the danger of this U.S. approach to China as about the threat of Beijing's
display of force itself. "Had Bill Clinton projected a constancy of purpose and vision in China policy ... in
1993-1994," David M. Lampton argues, "he might not have been challenged in the Taiwan Strait in 1995-
1996 with missile exercises."76 Indeed, it was primarily in the context of this U.S. intervention that
Zhongguo keyi shuo bu (China can say no), one of the most anti-U.S. books ever produced in China,
emerged and quickly became a best-seller in the Chinese reading world.77 Mean- while, some Chinese
strategic thinkers were so alarmed by the U.S. show of strength that they told Helmut Sonnenfeldt, one
of Henry Kissinger's close associates, that they were rereading the early works of George F. Kennan
because "containment had been the basis of American policy toward the Soviet Union; now that the
United States was turning containment against China, they wanted to learn how it had started and
evolved."78
 China Coop

The affrimative’s shift away from proxy containment through Taiwanese Arms sales is
just the inversion of modern militarism and ultimately reifies the sames term of
security logics through a perverse inclusion in violent global norms
Nordin ’14 (Astrid Nordin is a lecturer in the Department of Politics, Philosophy, and Religion @
Lancaster University, “Radical Exoticism: Baudrillard and Others’ Wars”, IJBS Volume 11, Number 2 (May
2014))//KW
As described above, there are aspects of Baudrillard’s writing where all alternatives to American achieved utopia appear to be erased for
Baudrillard (Beck 2009: 110). In the final parts of America, for example,
simulation is portrayed as a means of sustaining and
extending American dominance at home and abroad, which is now ‘uncontested and uncontestable’, a
universal model ‘even reaching as far as China’ (Baudrillard 1989 [1986]: 116). And indeed, this universal model has literally
reached the very territorial border of China in the form of the war on terror that was rolled out all the way to the Sino-Afghan
border and beyond. In Baudrillard’s view, the 9/11 attacks represented “the clash of triumphant globalization at war
with itself” and unfolded a “fourth world war”: The first put an end to European supremacy and to the
era of colonialism; the second put an end to Nazism; and the third to Communism. Each one brought us
progressively closer to the single world order of today , which is now nearing its end, everywhere opposed, everywhere
grappling with hostile forces (Baudrillard, 2003b). In this new fractal state of war and hostility, the Chinese state has
joined forces with the American leadership to reinstate the hegemony of the global (of which they have surely
dreamt, just like the rest of us). To the American unilateral war on terror in Afghanistan and George W. Bush’s call “you are either with us or
against us”, the Chinese government responded with a (perhaps reluctant) “we are with you!” This wish to be part of the global American self
has not meant, however, the full contribution to the war effort that some American representatives may have hoped. China has, since
around the time of 9/11 shifted from being extremely reluctant to condone or participate in any form of
“peacekeeping” missions, including under United Nations (UN) flag, to being the UN Security Council
member that contributes most to UN peacekeeping missions. Much of this participation has taken the
form of non-combatant personal. Nonetheless, China has been an actively involved party in ‘Operation
Enduring Freedom’. It has provided police training for Afghanistan’s security forces, as well as mine-clearance. Though it was opposed to
the US invasion of Iraq without UN mandate, China has emerged as one of the biggest beneficiaries of the
occupation, as it is one of the biggest winners of oil contracts in Iraq . In both Afghanistan and Iraq, China has been
accused of ‘free-riding’ on American efforts, but China has nonetheless been clearly positioned as part of the participating and benefiting ‘we’.
The Chinese state has benefited from participation in the war on terro r in more ways than one. The war has
increased Chinese influence in Central Asia . It has legitimized China’s harsh clamp-downs in Xinjiang, where the
state claims its violence is justified by the presence of separatist ‘terrorists’ in the Muslim Uyghur
community. Not least, China’s participation in the war on terror has been used to demonstrate to the world that China is now a
‘responsible great power’, as measured by the standard of ‘international society’ (see Yeophantong
2013 for a discussion of this ‘responsibility’ rhetoric). Again, this rhetoric of ‘responsibility’ has been
deployed by both American and Chinese leaders to tie China more tightly to the purported American-led
‘we’. More recently, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has stressed the importance of continued Sino-US co-
operation over Afghanistan post-2014 troop withdrawal . Wang has publicly stressed the common goals of China and the
US with regards to Afghanistan: ‘We both hope Afghanistan will continue to maintain stability … We both hope to see the reconstruction of
Afghanistan and we both don’t want to see the resurgence of terrorism’ (cited in Chen Weihua, 2013). China and the USA have jointly engaged
in what is termed advisory and capacity-building for Afghans, for example in training Afghan diplomats, and their co-operation continues
around shared goals in the region. Much could be said here about China’s participation in the American-led globalization project and war on
terror. My point here is simply to note that whatever we read America as doing through its war on terror, China is a supporting and benefiting
actor in this process. It is clearly positioned as part of this global idea of self. At the same time, however, China is also portrayed, from within
and without, as a challenger, an alternative, or an ‘other’ to that global, American or Western order. We therefore turn next to the Chinese
scholarly and governmental rhetoric that claims to offer such an alternative or challenge to the Western way of war that Baudrillard criticized
and that we can see China joining in the war on terror. (ii).
Contemporary PRC rhetoric on pre-modern Chinese thought
on war In contemporary China, the official rhetoric on war focuses on pre-emption and the claim that
China will never be a ‘hegemonic’ or warmongering power – unlike the US. In this rhetoric, the Chinese war is
by nature a non-war. Official documents emerging in the last decade repeatedly stress that China is by nature peaceful, which is why nobody
needs to worry about its rise. In the 2005 government whitepaper China’s Peaceful Development Road, for example, we are told that: [i]t is an
inevitable choice based on China’s historical and cultural tradition that China persists unswervingly in taking the road of peaceful development.
The Chinese nation has always been a peace-loving one. Chinese culture is a pacific culture. The spirit of the Chinese people has always featured
their longing for peace and pursuit of harmony (State Council of the PRC 2005b). The whitepaper (and numerous other official and unofficial
publications) posit an essentialised Chinese culture of peacefulness as prior to any Chinese relations with the world. This rhetoric of an
inherently non-bellicose Chinese way has also echoed in Chinese academic debates, where Chinese pre-modern philosophy has come back in
fashion as a (selectively sampled) source of inspiration. The claims and logics that have come out of these debates are varied. One significant
grouping of Chinese academics directly follow the government line and claim that ‘choosing “peaceful rise” is on the one hand China’s voluntary
action, on the other hand it is an inevitable choice’ (Liu Jianfei 2006: 38). That peacefulness and harmony is something that ‘Chinese people’
have always valued is an implication, and often explicitly stated ‘fact’ in these literatures. Zhan Yunling, for example, claims that ‘from ancient
times until today, China has possessed traditional thought and a culture of seeking harmony’ (Zhang Yunling 2008: 4). This claim to natural
harmony is mutually supportive of the claim that ‘the Chinese nation’ has always been a peaceful nation, to authors such as Liu Jianfei (2006),
or Yu Xiaofeng and Wang Jiangli (2006). A related set of commentators further stress the significance of militarily non-violent means to China
getting its (naturally peaceful) way in international relations. For example, Ding Sheng draws on the Sunzi quote mentioned above: ‘to
subjugate the enemy’s army without doing battle is the highest of excellence’ (Ding Sheng 2008: 197). This line of argument typically sees what
some would call ‘soft power tools’ as a way of getting others to become more like yourself without any need for outright ‘war’ or other forms of
physical violence. In a discussion of the official government rhetoric of ‘harmonious world’ under former president Hu Jintao, Shi Zhongwen
accordingly stresses that the doctrine opposes going to extremes, and therefore contradicts what Shi calls ‘the philosophy of struggle’ (Shi
Zhongwen 2008: 40, where ‘struggle’ implies Marxist ideology). Qin Zhiyong similarly argues that China needs to steer away from collisions and
embrace the aim of ‘merging different cultures’ (Qin Zhiyong 2008: 73). At the same time, few Chinese academics question the direction of the
‘merging of cultures’ discussed above – clearly it is other cultures that should merge into China’s peaceful one. In a common line of thought
that draws on the historical concept of Tianxia, or ‘All-under-heaven’, it is argued that the Chinese leadership can thus bring about a
harmonious world through ‘voluntary submission [by others] rather than force’ simply through its superior morality and exemplary behaviour
(Yan Xuetong 2008: 159). On this logic, the leadership will never need to use violence, because everybody will see its magnanimity and will
want to emulate its behaviour (Zhao Tingyang 2006: 34. See Callahan 2008: 755 for a discussion). Much of these debates have come to pivot
around this concept of Tianxia,
an imaginary of the world that builds on a holistic notion of space, without
radical self-other distinction or bordered difference. To some thinkers, this imagination is based on a
notion of globalisation (for example Yu Xiaofeng and Wang Jiangli 2006: 59) or networked space (Ni
Shixiong and Qian Xuming 2008: 124) where everything is always already connected to everything else in a borderless world. In these accounts,
Tianxia thinking is ‘completely different from Western civilisation, since Chinese civilisation insists on its own subjectivity, and possesses
inclusivity’ (Zhou Jianming and Jiao Shixin 2008: 28). Despite this apparent binary, it is claimed that Tianxiaism involves an identification with all
of humankind, where there is no differentiation or distinction between people (Li Baojun and Li Zhiyong 2008: 82). A thinker whose deployment
of the Tianxia concept has been particularly influential is Zhao Tingyang, who proposes the concept as a Chinese and better way of imagining
world order (Zhao Tingyang 2005; 2006), where ‘better’ means better than the ‘Western’ inter-state system to which Tianxia is portrayed as the
good opposite. In opposition to this ‘Western system’, he argues that Tianxia can offer ‘a view from nowhere’ or a view ‘from the world’, where
‘[w]orld-ness cannot be reduced to internationality, for it is of the wholeness or totality rather than the between-ness’ (Zhao Tingyang 2006:
39). However, as a consequence of a prioritisation of order over the preservation of alterity, ‘ any
inconsistency or contradiction in
the system will be a disaster’ (Zhao Tingyang 2006: 33). As a corollary of this prioritisation, Zhao comes to insist on the homogeneity
of his all-inclusive space, which aims at the uniformity of society (Zhao Tingyang 2006: 33, emphasis in original) where ‘all political levels …
should be essentially homogenous or homological so as to create a harmonious system’ (2006: 33). The aim of the Tianxia system is thus to
achieve one single homogeneous and uniform space. Clearly, for
such homogeneity to be born from a heterogeneous
world, someone must change. Zhao argues that: one of the principles of Chinese political philosophy is
said ‘to turn the enemy into a friend’, and it would lose its meaning if it were not to remove conflicts
and pacify social problems – in a word, to ‘transform’ (化) the bad into the good (Zhao Tingyang 2006: 34). Moreover, this conversion
to a single ‘good’ homogeneity should happen through ‘volontariness’ rather than through expansive colonialism: ‘an empire of All-under-
Heaven could only be an exemplar passively in situ, rather than positively become missionary’ (Zhao Tingyang 2006: 36, emphasis in original).
However, when we are given clues as to how this idea of the ‘good’ to which everyone should conform would be determined, Zhao’s idea of
self-other relations seems to rely on the possibility of some Archimedean point from which to judge this good, and/or the complete
eradication of any otherness, so that the one space that exists is completely the space of self (Zhao Tingyang 2006: 33). Thus, Zhao
confesses that ‘[t]he unspoken theory is that most people do not really know what is best for them, but that the elite do, so the elite ought
genuinely to decide for the people’ (2006: 32). As explained by William A. Callahan: By thinking through the world with a view from
everywhere, Zhao argues that we can have a ‘complete and perfect’ understanding of problems and solutions that is ‘all-inclusive’. With this all-
inclusive notion of Tianxia, there is literally ‘no outside’.… Since all places and all problems are domestic, Zhao says that ‘this model guarantees
the a priori completeness of the world’ (Callahan 2007: 7). This
‘complete and perfect’ understanding is hence attainable
only to an elite, who will achieve homogeneity (convert others into self) through example. Eventually,
then, there will be no other, the ‘many’ will have been transformed into ‘the one’ (Zhao Tingyang 2005:
13, see also 2006). It is through this transformation and submission to the ruling elite that the
prevention of war is imagined. If Baudrillard had engaged with these contemporary Chinese redeployments of pre-modern thought
on war (which, to my knowledge, he never did), I think he would have recognised many of the themes that interested him in Western
approaches to the first Gulf war. Most strikingly, this is a way of talking about war that writes out war from its story. Like deterrence, it is an
imagination of war that approaches it via prevention and pre-emption . What is more, we recognise an obsession with
the self-image of the self to itself – in this case, a Chinese, undemocratic self rather than a Western, democratic one. In this Chinese war, like in
the Persian Gulf of which Baudrillard wrote, there is no space for an Other that is Other. In the Tianxia imaginary, Others can only be imagined
as something that will eventually assimilate into The System and become part of the Self, as the Self strives for all-inclusive perfection. There is
no meeting with an Other in any form. Encounter only happens once the Other becomes like the Self, is assimilated into the One, and hence
there is no encounter at all (for an analysis that reads Baudrillard and Tianxia to this effect in a Chinese non-war context, see Nordin 2012). As
was the case with the first Gulf War, the war that we are waiting for here in the Chinese case is thus a non-war. If
by war we mean
some form of (symbolic) exchange or some clash of forms, agons, or forces (as we tend to do even in the
current ‘cutting edge research’ in ‘critical war studies’, see Nordin and Öberg 2013) – we cannot expect
it to take place. In China, we see not only a participation in the Western system of (non)war through the
war on terror, but also another system that precisely denies space for imagining an other as Other,
which in turn makes the idea of exchange impossible. In this sense, the Ancient Chinese approach to war
through the Tianxia concept – at least as it is reflected by current Chinese thinkers like Zhao Tingyang
and Yan Xuetong – is not a Clausewitzean war continuing politics by other means, but precisely a
continuation of the absence of politics by other means . It arguably shares this aspect with both the first and the second
Gulf Wars. This, however, is certainly not to say that there are not those who fear a Chinese war or that we have no reason to fear it. In various
guises, the war that is imagined through a Clausewitzean ontology of agonistic and reciprocal exchange returns and is reified also in China. It is
not uncommon for authors discussing the Chinese traditions of thinking war that I describe above to begin their discussion by explicitly drawing
on Clausewitz and take his war as their point of departure (for example Liu Tiewa 2014). For several Chinese writers, it is clear that this building
of a ‘harmonious world’ is directed against others whose influence should be ‘smashed’ (Fang Xiaojiao 2008: 68). From this line of thinkers, the
call to build a harmonious world has also been used to argue for increased Chinese military capacity, including its naval power (Deng Li 2009).
Although Chinese policy documents stress that violence or threat of violence should be avoided, they similarly appear to leave room for means
that would traditionally be understood as both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ in Joseph Nye’s dichotomisation (See for example State Council of the PRC
2005a). Indeed, many of Chinas neighbours have voiced concern with growing Chinese military capacity over the last few years, and a Chinese
non-war is no less frightening to its neighbours than a war – be it labelled ‘just’ or ‘unjust’, ‘real’ or ‘virtual’. This Chinese war – past, present
and future – is acted out in various different modes. Violent war is reified through the spectacle of computer games, art, online memes,
cartoons and not least dramas on film and television (Diamant 2011, 433).
The Chinese state claims success in all of its wars,
and simultaneously claims that it has never behaved aggressively beyond its borders (which is also, of
course, a convenient way of glossing over all the violence perpetrated by the Chinese state within those
borders, the violence with which they are upheld and with which they were established in the first place, and the clear
contradiction between the state’s fixation on territorial integrity and its borderless and holisticTianxia rhetoric). Popular cultural renditions of
war paint a more varied picture, but all contribute to a reification of war.
 Arms Sales – Technocracy Link
The Affrimative is a technocratic project that uses western rationality to manage non-
western countries who then get patholigized post affirmative which all trades off with
more revolutionary challenges to the systems
Krause 2012 (Keith Krause is Professor at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland,
Reconceptualising Arms Control: Controlling the Means of Violence - specifically Leashing the Dogs of War: Arms Control from Sovereignty to
Governmentality)//KW

So what remains is a set of formal arms control agreements, mostly bilateral, but also a few that were
multilateral, designed to manage the potentially most dangerous and destabilizing aspects of inter-state
conflict dynamics. They channeled the confrontation between the superpowers into a technical and
problem-solving logic that would facilitate decision making about what kinds of weapons to produce and
deploy, and under what circumstances to use them. In addition, after some of the conceptual confusions
of early nuclear strategy (such as Massive Retaliation), arms control became part of the logic by which
decisions over appropriate (rational) strategies could be designed. In the 1960s and 1970s, in context of
the East-West conflict and nuclear proliferation, maintaining the conditions of stable deterrence and
reducing the risk of war was perhaps a politically and normatively laudable goal. But arms control was
thus also linked to deterrence theory and practice, and to the entire functioning of the so-called
military-industrial complex, and not something distinct and in opposition to it. This vision would not
necessarily be accepted by those – such as researchers at the Stockholm International Peace Research
Institute (SIPRI) and other think-tanks – who saw themselves as growing out of the peace and anti-
nuclear weapons movements, but I think the policy acceptability of SIPRI’s work (for example) came
precisely from its progressive acceptance of the underlying rules of the game.19 What were these rules
of the game? There are four elements of the Cold War practice of arms control that warrant a deeper
exploration in order to illustrate the normalizing and sovereign logic of arms control. The first element
was the attempt by proponents of arms control to distinguish it from advocacy of disarmament in any
form. Disarmament was associated with the failed attempts to negotiate reductions in armaments
during the interwar period. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was associated with the peace and anti-nuclear
movements, and was seen as the preserve of impractical idealist efforts – at best politically naïve; at
worst politically suspect. As Jeffrey Larsen notes, ‘in the early 1960s international security specialists
began using the term arms control in place of the term disarmament, which they believed lacked
precision and smacked of utopianism. The seminal books on arms control published in that era all
referred to this semantic problem’.20 So arms control was presented by its practitioners as directed
towards controlling or regulating the numbers, types, deployment or use of certain types or quantities
of arms, and disarmament was defined as involving the reduction or the elimination of particular
weapons and weapons systems, and/or foreswearing of acquisition of new weapons.21 Although
occasionally agreements were signed that did eliminate weapons systems or particular classes of
weapons, most notably the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty that eliminated an entire class
of nuclear weapons, when seen as part of the broader spectrum of nuclear capabilities, such restrictions
were tilted more towards the control side of the equation.22 Overall, arms control reinforced, not
undermined, sovereign state power. The second, related, element was the technocratic or problem-
solving orientation of arms control practices. Its political acceptability came from its claim to operate
within the same policy frame as other forms of military-strategic thinking, including of course
deterrence theory and strategy, alliance-building, and the entire military-industrial logic that shaped
Western (and arguably Eastern) security policy. More importantly, however, it provided legitimacy to a
counter-intuitive set of policy prescriptions (such as leaving your own civilian population vulnerable to
nuclear attack, or revealing the equivalent of state secrets as part of confidence-building measures). And
finally, the technocratic approach also was, in its strongest version, opposed to the irrational and
uncontrollable prescriptions of what, as early as President Eisenhower, was called the military-industrial
complex. High level proponents of arms control (Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, for example,
as well perhaps as Secretary of State Henry Kissinger), regarded the defence establishment as unable to
set limits on its threat assessment and concomitant arms acquisitions. They wished to subject security
policy to rational managerial techniques, including such ideas as diminishing marginal returns to
investments in new weapons, cost-benefit analysis for weapons systems, and trade offs between
competing goals (the guns-versus-butter debate).23 As Henry Kissinger is once purported to have said,
‘What in the name of God is strategic superiority? What is the significance of it, politically, militarily,
operationally, at these levels of numbers? What do you do with it?’ thus expressing his frustration with
the inability of the nuclear defense establishment to provide a rationale for its weapons acquisition
plans.24 Even more hawkish arms controllers subscribed to the rational calculus, with, for example, Paul
Nitze arguing, with respect to ballistic missile defense (Star Wars), that it had to be cost effective on the
margin in order to make strategic sense.25 Arms control was thus more rational – and promised to
achieve the same national security goals (including war-fighting dominance) at lower cost. But the actual
achievements of arms control negotiations, treaties and agreements are difficult to assess, even if we
use some counter-factual analysis. As noted above, arms control failed to stem the technological arms
race, failed to reduce spending on weapons, and perhaps played only a marginal role in preventing a
violent superpower confrontation. In all of its forms, arms control was not a transformative paradigm –
but a techno-managerial project. The transformation of inter-state relations via either nuclear
disarmament or nuclear holocaust was to be avoided at all costs, and the management of the
superpower arms race was a sort of via media between these two Manichean visions. Parenthetically,
some prominent advocates, such as Robert McNamara, or President Barack Obama, who have argued
prominently for the complete abolition of nuclear weapons, claim implicitly or explicitly that there is a
seamless conceptual thread that goes from arms control to nuclear disarmament, and that all that
distinguishes one from the other is the relative time horizon or degree of pragmatism of the
advocates.26 But this is both conceptually and practically unlikely – if arms control is a set of techno-
managerial practices fully integrated into the Cold War logic of national security strategy, then it is
unable to make the leap to disarmament – which involves an entirely different idea about the place of
violence in social and political life. Recent debates around the ratification of the New START treaty in
late 2010 illustrated how it hardly represented a step towards deeper nuclear reductions. The third core
element of the arms control paradigm was that the Weberian state’s monopoly over the use of lethal
force could not only be used to impose order domestically and to create social peace but that it could
also be projected outwards to create a form of international order that reduced the risk of violence. Just
as the domestic form of the Weberian monopoly renders the population vulnerable to the predatory
state (so much so that scholars such as Rudolph Rummel could argue that democide – state-sanctioned
killing of citizens – was a greater risk than war);27 the international form also involved rendering entire
populations totally vulnerable to nuclear holocaust. In the name of national security the very survival of
the entire population could be put at risk, through policies such as Mutual Assured Destruction or
treaties such as the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty. It is difficult to find a better example of techno-
managerial logic, instrumental rationality and the assertion of sovereign power at work. Although
perhaps an extreme example, this faith in the ability of states to exercise restraint over the use of force,
also underlay the entire edifice of nuclear deterrence policy and strategy. The final element was that the
arms control paradigm, like the much older balance of power system, was not a mechanism for
maintaining order that eliminated war or the use of force from the international system. It assumed that
the main risk to be prevented was that of large-scale inter-state war between great powers or the
superpowers, and that a trade-off between this risk, and the risk of (or fact of) small and large wars,
especially in the postcolonial world, was an acceptable one. The use of violence was either to be part of
the logic of so-called limited (nuclear) war or to be confined to the periphery, to such places as
Indochina, Angola, and Afghanistan (although this was hardly peripheral to the Soviet Union). This was
analogous to the operation of the 19th century balance of power system, which sanctioned the
partitions of Poland, the Crimean War, and so forth in the name of maintaining systemic stability.
Similarly, the logic of limited nuclear war, as presented by scholars such as Henry Kissinger, rested upon
the assumption that the use of force could be carefully calibrated and controlled.28 The neo-colonialist
and political implications of pushing the problem of war to the periphery are of course clear, and one
could argue that the arms control paradigm sketched above, especially the treaties that stabilized the
nuclear confrontation between East and West (SALT I and II), made certain kinds of proxy wars more
possible or acceptable by creating escalatory fire-breaks that facilitated the relatively risk-free provision
of military assistance to client states and movements. These fire breaks were easier to create in the
global South, where American and Russian troops managed to avoid confronting each other directly, but
less easy to create in Europe. The history of attempts to achieve mutual and balanced force reductions
(the 1975 name for what in the late 1980s became the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE Treaty), and
of debates over the necessity for intermediate range and tactical nuclear weapons in Europe, and the
problem of extended deterrence (or the nuclear umbrella) all point towards a set of tensions or
contradictions within the logic of arms control. (23-6)
 Singular Campaign
The affirmative’s opposition to specific moments of military aid not only empirically
naturalizes militarism writ large but plays into the very terms of the military industrial
complex.
Cooper 2012
(Neil
Cooper is a professor of International Relation @Bradford, Reconceptualising Arms Control:
Controlling the Means of Violence specifically Humanitarian Arms Control and Processes of
Securitization: Moving Weapons Along the Security Continuum)//KW

Fourth, the success of campaigns on landmines and cluster munitions demonstrates how ‘moments of
intervention’ undertaken on behalf of the voiceless by supposedly weak securitizing actors such as NGOs
can, nevertheless, produce quite effective securitizations - in this case, the hyper-securitization of
particular weapons technologies. Both campaigns also highlighted the ways in which actors can utilize
media images and, through survivor activism that extended to the conference room, provide a context
for the body to speak security. Moreover, the success of these campaigns highlights the ways in which
the language of threat, survival, and security can be deployed to achieve positive security outcomes. At
the same time however, the success of the humanitarian arms control agenda around landmines and
cluster munitions in particular was only achieved because NGOs adopted exactly the same discourse
around humanitarianism, human security and weapons precision that has been deployed to legitimize
post-Cold War liberal peace interventionism and in the marketing of new weapons developments. On
one reading, this might point to the potential for actors to deploy dominant forms of security speech in
order to achieve progressive ends. On a more pessimistic reading however, it also highlights the
profound limits involved in such approaches. To the extent that the extra-securitization of pariah
technologies such as landmines has facilitated the relative desecuritization of major conventional
weapons transfers it has also made the current framework of control look like an example of ethical
advance at the same time as creating space for the deproblematization of arms transfers in general.
Ultimately then, the moments of intervention represented by the campaigns on landmines and cluster
munitions were successful because they did not threaten, and in many ways were quite consistent with,
the dominant security paradigm and security narratives of the post-Cold War era. Equally, whilst the
regularized routines and working practices of the security professionals of the export licensing process
are certainly important in understanding the treatment of defence transfers, this body of professionals
were themselves, brought into being as a result of historical changes in the fundamental assumptions
about security and economy. Moreover, their veiy working practices and modes of behaviour are
currently being altered as a result of similar fundamental shifts in the paradigms of security and
economy which, in turn, are a function of particular combinations of power and interest. Although these
shifts certainly predated the post-Cold War era, they have become particularly concretized in this era.
One consequence of all this is that a loud ethical discourse around the restriction of landmines, cluster
munitions, and small arms has gone hand in hand with recent rises in both global military expenditure
and arms transfers. For example, overall, world defence expenditure in 2008 was estimated to be $1,464
billion (of which NATO countries accounted for 60 per cent and OECD countries 72 per cent)
representing a 45 per cent increase in real terms since 1999,93 whilst global arms sales were 22 per cent
higher in real terms for the period 2005-2009 than for the preceding period 2000-2004.94 Moreover,
largely because of the dominance of American and European defence spending, the defence trade is
increasingly concentrated in the hands of the United States and to a lesser extent, European companies.
For example, in 2006 American and European companies accounted for an estimated 92.7 per cent of
the arms sales of the world’s 100 largest defence companies.95 Most arms trade NGOs have largely
neglected issues such as the rises in defence expenditure in major weapons states such as the United
States, intra-northern trade in arms, and the dominant role played by Western companies in the arms
trade, in favour of an agenda that conceives the South - and in particular pariah actors in sub-Saharan
Africa - as the primary object of conventional arms trade regulation.96 With regard to transfers of small
arms and major conventional weapons it might be argued that this, at least, also requires impressive
self-abnegation from arms trade profits on the part of powerful states in the international system. In
practice however, international initiatives such as the EU Code or the Wassennaar Arrangement,
national export regulations of the major weapons states and the local initiatives of client states mostly
combine to produce a cartography of prohibition that corresponds more closely with the disciplinary
geographies advocated by the powerful rather than any global map of militarism and injustice. One
illustration of this is the way in which a recent review of British defence export legislation downgraded
long-range missiles and the ‘heroic’ Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV - the Maxim gun of modern imperial
wars) from a categoiy A classification (goods such as cluster munitions whose supply is prohibited) to the
less restrictive categoiy B,97 whilst in 2010, the Afghan government proscribed the import, use, and sale
of Ammonium Nitrate Fertilizer because it is one of the elements used in the making of IEDs.98 More
generally, as one recent econometric analysis of major weapons transfers from the Britain, France,
Germany, and the United States concluded, despite much rhetoric about the need for a more ethical
approach to arms sales from governments in all these countries: Neither human rights abuses nor
autocratic polity would appear to reduce the likelihood of countries receiving Western arms, or reduce
the relative share of a particular exporter’s weapons they receive. In fact, human rights abusing
countries are actually more likely to receive weapons from the US, while autocratic regimes emerge as
more likely recipients of weaponry from France and the UK.99 Of course, arms trade NGOs have often
been the first to highlight such hypocrisies and the work of most organizations include, to a greater or
lesser extent, elements of critique or advocacy that might be considered transformational. However,
one of the principle features of arms trade activism in the post-Cold War era is the extent to which many
NGOs have downgraded radical critique in exchange for insider influence and government funding.100
Instead, activism has largely been aimed at promoting tactical reform within an overarching economic
and security' paradigm that justifies intervention, regulation, and transformation of the South whilst
(with the exception of token action on landmines, etc.) leaving the vast accumulation of Western
armaments largely unproblematized. The logic of this analysis then, is that there needs to be a far
greater problematization of military expenditure by the major powers, of the so-called ‘legitimate’ trade
in defence goods, including intra-Northern trade, and a problematization of the predominance of
Western defence companies in global arms markets. In short, campaigners needs to return to a strategic
contestation of global militarism rather than searching for tactical campaign victories dependent on
accommodation with the language and economic and security paradigms of contemporary military
humanism.
 Digital Humanitarianism Trade Off
Ending of Military sales naturalizes more insidious interventions through a form of
digital humanitarianism that manifest through remote technologies and
subcontracting local players – the impact is imperial backlash and serial policy failure
through a circular repetition of securitization.
Duffield 2016 (Mark Duffield is Professor Emeritus @ The University of Bristol , The Resilience of the Ruins: Towards a Critique of
Digital Humanitarianism, Resilience: International Politics and Discourses, Taylor & Francis, p. 2-6)//KW
At the end of the cold war, there was an historic upsurge in the liberal interventionism within the global South. In terms of the number of agencies involved, personnel deployed and money spent, this interventionism was reflected

in a rapid increase of all kinds of UN and NGO humanitarianism, development and peace activism throughout the 1990s (Duffield, 2001). Looking back over the last decade, however, it is striking how this intrusive
interventionism has failed to achieve its defining aim . That is, with military force if necessary, to democratise and liberalise failed and non-integrating societies in the
interest of international security (Mazzarr, 2014). Such liberal interventionism now lies buried in the ruins of Iraq, Libya and Syria. The existential shock of this strategic defeat,

needlessly amplified by the war on terror, has seen an increasing recourse to arm’s length remote
management and risk-avoidance when it comes to international terrestrial deployments in the global
South. There has been a widespread retreat or physical circumscription of an international ground
presence in challenging or politically difficult environments. This defensive relocation not only involves the military, perhaps even more so, it affects diplomats
(Worth, 2012), international aid agencies (Healy & Tiller, 2014; Lemay-Hébert, 2011), journalists (Sundaram, 2014) and academic researchers as well (Adams, 2007). Unqualified ideas of ‘retreat’ or

‘withdrawal’, however, can be misleading. Although international actors may be limiting or circumscribing their
ground presence, aid operations and academic research, for example, have not stopped or disappeared, indeed they continue apace (Collinson & Duffield,

2013). There is a difference, however. The mode of engagement has changed. While exceptions exist,

effects on the ground are now orchestrated at a distance through a mixture of remote technologies and
subcontracting local players. While this shift is widely celebrated as the fruit of technological advancement, the current risk and anxiety-related
distancing of international actors are closely intertwined with the negativity of policy failure, political
push-back and humanitarian access denial (Duffield, 2013).1 {1. For space reasons, this paper is unable to elaborate the epistemological distancing inherent in cybernetics (Hayles,
1999), which precedes and reinforces more recent existential and risk-related aspects of remoteness.} The growing physical remoteness from what one could call the West’s clash with history has been compensated by the rise of

remote management techniques (Howe, Stites, & Chudacoff, 2015; Verjee, 2005). Such capabilities are currently driving all
data-based smart technology and

manner of international security, research, media and aid interventions. The emergence of what has been called ‘digitial
humanitarianism’ (Conneally, 2011) is but one example of a terrestrial retreat which is being
repositioned as a triumph of technoscience and its ability to achieve governmental effects from the enveloping electronic
atmosphere (Linvingston, 2015).2 {In brief, the electronic atmosphere emerges first with the laying of submarine telegraph cables during the nineteenth century and subsequent discovery of short-wave-radio, it advances with

It is a remoteness that, simultaneously, is a form of

earth orbiting satellites and consolidates with the Internet and Web 2.0 revolution (Sloterdijk, 2013/2015).}

recapture and drawing near. The strategic plane has pivoted from the ground friction of the horizontal to
the relative freedom of the vertical and volumetric dimensions (Elden, 2013; Weizman, 2002). At a time of global
rebalancing, remoteness involves a combination of epistemological, existential and physical distancing while,

simultaneously, calling forth new technological means of digital recoupment and re-embodiment .
Remoteness is inseparable from the increasing sophistication of the global North’s atmospheric ability to
digitally rediscover, remap, and importantly, govern anew a now distant South . This strategic turn to the electronic atmosphere,
however, is obscured by the inability of technoscience to conceive its own conditions of possibility. The political setback and failure of liberal interventionism

is obscured by an affirmatory rhetoric that celebrates the restorative powers of smart technologies and
fast machine thinking (Meier, 2015). Within this normalising narrative, new technologies are simply
replacing older and less efficient terrestrial assemblages (Hanchard, 2012). The transformation of a
negative into an affirmatory positive has allowed a failed liberal interventionism to live on as a
delusional and revengeful digital afterlife . Against the backdrop of falling battle deaths, as a strategic platform, the electronic atmosphere has allowed the
reconfiguration of the whole planet, irrespective of the claims of territorial sovereignty, as a seamless
digital manhunt reserve (Chamayou, 2015). In addressing these concerns, the paper explores what Hannah Arendt would recognize as the world alienation intrinsic to technoscience (Arendt,
 That this alienation now appears as a stupefying political psychosis, however, would possibly
1998/1958).

surprise and alarm her.

 Generic Links
The Aff is a hypocrticial project that pathologizes non-western countries for wanting
arms while allowing the west to stay in power
Stavrianakis 2019(Anna Stavrianakis is a lecturer in IR @ University of sussex, Controlling weapons
circulation in a postcolonial militarised world, Review of International Studies (2019), 45: 1, 57–76
doi:10.1017/S0260210518000190)//KW

Introduction At a time when the misuse of weapons is increasingly visible in human rights violations,
breaches of international humanitarian law (IHL), terrorism, war and armed violence around the world,
the 2013 Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) provides, for many, a glimmer of hope. The ATT represents the
apogee of over two decades of diplomacy, advocacy, and campaigning by a North–South coalition of
small and medium-sized states and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). The treaty has been widely
celebrated as a step forward in humanitarian arms control and a victory for human security, given its
goal of reducing human suffering, and the inclusion of IHL and human rights standards in its provisions.
Scholar and practitioner proponents hope that the treaty will ‘diminish the human cost of the poorly
regulated arms trade’, 1 with the effect of ‘humanizing international security’. 2 Since its entry into force
in December 2014 though, the signs have not been encouraging. Controversy over exports by the UK, an
ATT State Party, to Saudi Arabia and its coalition partners for use in the war in Yemen, as well as the
challenges of engaging states not party to the treaty there and in cases such as the war in Syria, are just
the most politically prominent cases (in Western debates, at least) of the human cost of war and of the
challenges facing the ATT. This article inquires into the significance of the ATT for controlling weapons
circulation. Most of the emerging academic literature on the treaty situates it as part of the post-Cold
War trend of humanitarian arms control, prioritising human security over state security, or at least
making them complementary. Such accounts draw on and extend disarmament efforts to ban specific
weapons technologies (landmines, cluster munitions, and nuclear weapons) and control efforts to
regulate others (small arms and light weapons (SALW)). Critics, meanwhile, argue that the ATT
represents an accommodation with global or liberal militarism. In this article I take the tensions between
arms transfer control and militarism as my starting point, arguing that the negotiating process and
eventual text of the ATT demonstrate the competing modes of militarism in play in the contemporary,
postcolonial world. These different modes of militarism are expressed in terms of sovereignty, political
economy, or human security, and are all underpinned by ongoing imperial relations: racial, gendered,
and classed relations of asymmetry and hierarchy that persist despite formal sovereign equality in the
UN system in which arms trade regulation is negotiated. This means seeing human security as a form of
militarism rather than the antithesis of it: circumscribed by liberal conceptions of human rights and IHL,
but with little to say about intra-Western arms transfers, global military spending, or the entrenchment
of military interests in societies and economies around the world, and with little political force to
counter allegations of hypocrisy due to controversial transfers or double standards. Such an argument
challenges the idea that the human security agenda has been a victory over militarism, and complicates
our understanding of the nature of the accommodation with it, demonstrating the transformation as
well as entrenchment of contemporary militarism. The argument also reframes the challenge facing
weapons control, placing the necessity for feminist, postcolonial antimilitarist critique front and centre.
The argument unfolds in three steps. First, I outline the debate between proponents of humanitarian
arms control and human security, and critics who focus on militarism. Second, I trace the transformation
of human security over time in relation to weapons issues, arguing that the scholarship on the arms
trade and on human security needs to both foreground feminist critiques of militarism and postcolonial
critiques of international politics, to counter the dominant trends of optimism and presentism, and
benevolent and linear accounts of history. Third, I outline three competing modes of militarism
expressed in terms of sovereignty, political economy and human security, and illustrate their
contestation through three controversies and one silence that structured the ATT negotiations and
eventual text. The controversies relate to the definition of the illicit trade; the treatment of human
rights and IHL; and diversion and the treatment of ammunition. The silence is around domestic
procurement and civilian possession, both of which are excluded from the international regulatory
agenda. The research is based on close reading of primary sources from states, organisations, research
institutes, and NGOs involved in the campaign,3 combined with participant observation work with pro-
control NGOs4 and at ATT negotiation, implementation and training events.

The Affirmative’s project of Arms control is easily coopted to justify interventions and
other security practices
Stavrianakis 2019(Anna Stavrianakis is a lecturer in IR @ University of sussex, Controlling weapons
circulation in a postcolonial militarised world, Review of International Studies (2019), 45: 1, 57–76
doi:10.1017/S0260210518000190)//KW

Activists and scholars have attempted to elevate human rights and humanitarian concerns for the broad
swath of the world’s population above the political economy and security interests of states and arms-
producing companies. Weapons-specific initiatives such as the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty and 2008
Convention on Cluster Munitions had shown the impact that a humanitarian framing can have in
relation to particular technologies. The negotiation of the 2001 Programme of Action to Prevent,
Combat and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects showed the
challenge of applying human security principles to weapons with legitimate military and security uses –
a challenge that was to resurface during the ATT negotiations. Regulating the conventional arms trade as
a whole cannot take a purely disarmament or humanitarian frame, given its deeply entrenched
legitimacy. This makes the ATT a human security initiative rather than a primarily humanitarian arms
control or disarmament one8 – while it has the reduction of human suffering as a named purpose, this
sits alongside ‘international and regional peace, security and stability’ in Article 1 of the text. As Mary
Martin and Taylor Owen put it, ‘The idea of arms control is appealing to proponents of human security
because it sets out to control tools of violence, as well as seeking to curb the dominance of the state in
determining the forms of insecurity to which policy solutions must be found.’ 9 Jody Williams, founding
coordinator of the ICBL, calls on governments and civil society to work together, including on initiatives
like the ATT, ‘to advance human security as a viable alternative to militarism and violence and war’. 10
Sympathetic criticism of the ATT has been aired from within the academic and scholarpractitioner
community. Matthew Bolton and Katelyn E. James argue that the treaty represents a ‘melding’ of a
‘“maximalist” human security – civil society approach with concerns of developing countries and the
“minimalist” strategic and commercial interests of the major arms exporters’. 11 Christine Chinkin and
Mary Kaldor argue that ‘the humanitarian achievements’ of post-Cold War weapons control ‘need to be
complemented by disarmament’. That is, as well as ‘bringing states’ human rights obligations into the
heart of weapons control’, human security requires ‘the reduction of existing weapon stocks and
prohibition of the development, production and stockpiling of further weapons’. 12 Such a call echoes
the demand of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), one of the civil
society organisations active on the ATT, for disarmament as a longstanding, yet marginalised feminist
concern.13 Others have been less sympathetically critical. For Neil Cooper, initiatives like the ATT ‘do
not represent a novel post-Cold War development that symbolizes progress on an emancipatory human
security agenda’. 14 Post-Cold War arms trade regulation has been based on a ‘discourse around
humanitarianism, human security and weapons precision’ that has served to legitimise high-tech military
technologies.15 Cooper and others emphasise the deep historical roots of the way humanitarian
impulses intersect with economic and security ones, including in late nineteenth-century efforts to
regulate the supply and circulation of weapons in the imperial peripheries that are remarkably resonant
with contemporary efforts.16 Historically minded scholars remind us that surplus and obsolete weapons
have long circulated in the peripheries of empire, and new weapons tested there; and political
authorities were licensing weapons exports as early as the sixteenth century – in part to avoid
blowback.17 Arms trade regulation, then, has a ‘historically contingent’ character, marked by the
ongoing importance of ‘power, interest, economy, security’. 18 Militarism emerges as a core concern
out of such critiques and provides the jumping-off point for this analysis. In particular, there are long
traditions of historical sociological and feminist scholarship on militarism,19 defined here as ‘the social
and international relations of the preparation for, and conduct of, organized political violence’. 20 In
relation to arms control, I have argued elsewhere that the ATT has been mobilised by liberal democratic
states primarily to legitimise their arms transfer practices.21 And Cooper concludes that ‘campaigners
need to return to a strategic contestation of global militarism rather than searching for tactical campaign
victories dependent on accommodation with the language and economic and security paradigms of
contemporary military humanism’. 22 This is part of a political economy critique of the way ‘the
regulation of pariah weapons might alternatively be described as “arms control from below within the
logic of militarism from above”’, 23 in line with a wider critique of human security as having been
‘institutionalised and co-opted to work in the interests of global capitalism, militarism and neoliberal
governance’. 24 Neil Cooper and David Mutimer, surveying the history of and prospects for controlling
the means of violence, argue that ‘the longer term, indirect effect should be to reduce militarism and
promote cultures of peace’ or ‘at the very least, avoid further embedding cultures of militarism’. 25
How, then, should we think about the impact of the human security agenda on militarism, and vice
versa; and what are the ramifications for weapons control?
 Human Security
The affirmative’s utilization of Human Security as a framework for understanding arms
controls requires a masculine view of the arms trade and warfare that can only
reproduce violence
Stavrianakis 2019(Anna Stavrianakis is a lecturer in IR @ University of sussex, Controlling weapons
circulation in a postcolonial militarised world, Review of International Studies (2019), 45: 1, 57–76
doi:10.1017/S0260210518000190)//KW

For all these developments, the human security agenda’s take on war, conflict, and armed violence has
not been without its critics. It has been described as the ‘new orthodoxy’ that is ‘unable to provide the
basis for a substantive change of the system of international security’, despite finding ‘the old language
of interstate war and conflict … lacking’. 35 Similarly, its emphasis on ‘progressive’ initiatives such as
‘eliminat[ing] certain types of weapons’ stands accused of failing to adequately examine ‘the
pathologies inherent in the structure of the international system’ that generate such challenges.36 And
when the ‘human’ in human security is naturalised as masculine, the inclusion of novel threats and new
actors leaves the parameters of security untouched, meaning that ‘state-based, militarised security
remains unchallenged’. 37 Feminist scholars have critiqued the gendered concepts and practices of war,
peace, militarisation, peacekeeping and soldiering, going well beyond the human security framework in
the process.38 Feminist critiques that challenge the parameters of human security can usefully be
combined with postcolonial accounts of IR that emphasise the ways in which the discipline ‘can both
deny empire while simultaneously normalizing an imperial perspective on the world’. 39 Some of the
main themes of the human security agenda are illustrative of the need for an imperial perspective in
how we understand the challenges facing weapons control. By this I mean interpreting them with the
aid of scholarship that challenges methodological nationalism and Eurocentrism in its analysis, mobilises
feminist critiques of militarism, and puts the legacy of empire and colonialism, and the racial, gendered,
and classed politics of imperial control, front and centre in its assessment of contemporary
challenges.40 Deploying such resources gives us a chance to rethink some of the key assumptions
around human security and the prospects for regulating weapons circulation. Three core themes of the
human security agenda are ripe for an imperial critique. First, the claim that the character of conflict has
changed, from inter-state war towards internal conflict, has become axiomatic in much of IR, including
the human security literature.41 The greatest threats to human security are deemed to stem from
internal conflict and criminal violence, or the state itself, rather than from an external adversary as per
the traditional security agenda. As such, ‘international security traditionally defined – territorial integrity
– does not necessarily correlate with human security’. 42 Second, the changing character of conflict
requires a shift in the referent object of security, according to the human security agenda: away from
the state and inter-state war, and towards the individual and the broader range of threats they face. 43
And third, the human security agenda nonetheless emphasises the importance of the state’s monopoly
on legitimate violence and role in security provision.44 Yet the circumstances have been transformed
with the end of the Cold War. Kaldor attributes a ‘profound restructuring of political authority’ to the
new wars, and sees human security as an opportunity for ‘reconstructing political authority in the
context of the processes we call globalisation’. 45 Hence the need for security sector reform (SSR),
demobilisation, disarmament, and reintegration (DDR) and other reforms of coercive practices and
apparatuses. Each of these three themes is premised on the significance of the rupture that occurred
with the end of the Cold War. But understanding the Cold War as predominantly an East–West
ideological and geopolitical confrontation marginalises longer historical patterns of North–South power
relations and conflict, and of hot war in the South. And the increased focus on internal conflict, while
fruitful in terms of changing the scale of analysis, risks disconnecting the micropolitics of violence from
broader systems and structures of war preparation, ignoring one of the key lessons of feminist
scholarship, which is that the scales or so-called levels of analysis are interdependent. As Laura Sjoberg
and Sandra Via put it, ‘absolutely distinguishing between the personal, national and international level
of war and militarism lacks conceptual and empirical rigor at best’: feminist attention allows us to
understand both the impact of war and militarism on people (especially, but not only, women) as well as
the gendered construction of war and militarism.46 A longer historical view that is not hamstrung by a
state-centric ontology allows us to see that arms transfer practices have long been part of the
simultaneously transnational and asymmetrical constitution of force. Historical scholarship on the arms
trade emphasises the importance of decolonisation as the shift from empire to a system of formally
sovereign states in which North– South power asymmetries continue to resonate. One of the key
transformations in weapons transfer practices that came with decolonisation was a shift on the part of
the Soviet Union and China from support for national liberation movements, to the defence of
sovereignty as a means of resisting US-led domination, in either anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist
modes.47 The supply of weapons and military training was a common feature of both Soviet and US
relations with the Third World: despite their differences, North–South politico-military relations had
much in common between the two blocs.48 Ostensibly new or transformed challenges of the post-Cold
War era, such as Somali piracy, new wars in Africa, or insurgency and counterinsurgency in Afghanistan,
are thus better understood in postcolonial terms, with militarised transnational continuities as well as
changes associated with the end of superpower rivalry.49 Amina Mama and Margo Okazawa-Rey
emphasise the continuities between colonial and contemporary militarism that not only led them to
prefer the terminology of postcolonial conflicts over that of new wars, but also emphasise the
fundamentally gendered characteristics of the physical and structural violence at stake.50 And as
Cooper argues, arms control regimes have long featured both ‘proscription and permission’ operating in
tandem, challenging the optimism of accounts premised on the end of the Cold War as the changed
permissive factor that allows humanitarian concerns to be the core objective of weapons control. This
emphasis on history and power generates scepticism about the optimism and presentism of most
accounts of the emergence of the ATT, and the linear, benevolent account of history found therein.52 A
longer historical perspective allows us to see how state security (whether national or imperial) and
(what is today called) human security have long been two sides of the same coin. There are thus
continuities of imperial forms of practice despite the turn to formal sovereignty. A focus on the
systematic or organised and North–South character of much armed violence is not to return to Cold War
politics or the ‘sterile polemic’ of past debates about weapons issues mentioned earlier. Rather, it is to
emphasise that historical weapons supply routes and power relations continue to resonate; that massive
and uneven levels of global military spending and proxy wars continue to matter; and that clients
continue to use weapons in ways that are often unanticipated by patrons. Ostensibly civil or internal
wars are enmeshed in wider regional and international projects.53 There are internationalised sources
of much of what counts as domestic, civil or intra-state, including colonial legacies and internationalised
weapons supply chains. In many accounts, human security has been mobilised as an attempt to ‘cope
with [the] pathological results’ of how security has been defined in postcolonial states in the South.54
Yet this encourages internalist analysis that sees the problems of armed violence as having their sources
primarily within the global South. In conceding the terms of debate to ‘traditional’ security studies, and
seeking to shift inwards from the state to the individuals living within it, rather than critiquing the
conception of the international system, the human security agenda continues to ‘occlude and distort
imperial relations’ in the way that more traditional ‘Westphalian terms of reference’ do.55 In the human
security agenda’s account of the shift from wars between states to wars within them, war falls off the
agenda as it is deemed analytically outdated and politically regressive. Yet neo-realist, Cold War
accounts of national security were never adequate, and in trying to overcome them, many human
security accounts take them at face value and get the critique wrong. With its emphasis on the enduring
power of war preparation, the concept of militarism suggests that much contemporary violence remains
coordinated or facilitated (by state, paramilitary, militia, or other organised actors), and systematic
within society, despite the shift towards discussion of armed violence and intentional homicide, which is
suggestive of disorganised violence. So how are we to mobilise the concept of militarism in light of the
imperial turn, in ways that help us think more productively about weapons control? First is to defend the
use of the concept at all. According to Mary Kaldor, the concept of militarism has outlived its usefulness
as it is ‘drawn from the Cold War and before’: the changes with the end of the Cold War necessitate new
terms.56 To capture the ways that organised violence blurs state/non-state and national/foreign
boundaries, whether in the form of paramilitary groups, organised crime or terrorist cells, or in the form
of peacekeeping troops, Kaldor coins the terms ‘Netforce’ and ‘Protectionforce’ respectively.57 Kaldor
restricts the concept of militarism to ‘the new American militarism’ and the ‘neo-modern militarism’
(‘the evolution of classical military forces in large transition states’ practising inter-state war or
counterinsurgency) of states such as Russia, China, and India.58 But in differentiating some types of
organised violence as not-militarism, we lose the opportunity to compare them, to see the overlaps,
similarities, and differences in modes of organised violence. Feminists have long been able to capture
this with the concept of militarism, showing us that ‘it is not quite so easy to set aside “ordinary”
aggression, force or violence as “not war”’59 – especially when we pay attention to the experience of
violence in the global South.60 Second, and relatedly, the specificities of combinations of actors, degrees
of state support, and so on, are subject to empirical and historical specificity, and a common rubric of
militarism helps us understand similarities and differences between them. Working in a historical
sociological tradition, Bryan Mabee and Srdjan Vucetic draw up a typology of forms of contemporary
militarism.61 They contrast Michael Mann’s concept of civil society militarism – ‘the use of organized
military violence in pursuit of social goals that is “state-supported, but not state-led”’62 – to ‘nation-
state militarism’ in both its authoritarian and liberal forms; to ‘neoliberal militarism’ structured around
socioeconomic liberalisation; and to ‘exceptionalist militarism’ seen in practices associated with the War
on Terror. Feminists tend not to operate in such formal typological ways, but have long been articulating
the idea of war and militarism as a spectrum or a system, in which the forms, intensities, and
characteristics may vary, but the gendered basis of violence is central.63 And a focus on militarism can
be usefully mobilised to consider the connections and feedback loops between Northern and Southern
practices, giving a more internationalised account that is better attuned to the operation of power in
contexts of armed violence. Indeed, Rita Abrahamsen refers to ‘global militarism in Africa’ because
‘while militarism is always specific (and often national), it is also simultaneously global’, and the
‘analytical challenge is to capture at one and the same time the global and the local, and their
intersection in particular locations’. 64 Third, while I want to defend the concept, and think about types
of militarism in relation to each other, it is crucial to acknowledge that contemporary militarism and
human security have shaped each other in the last twenty years. Human security, with its emphasis on
human rights and IHL, has become a mediating element in the relation between war and society. Post-
Cold War processes of democratisation have ‘often coincided with new forms of militarism’ that tend to
be analysed under the rubric of policy-oriented concepts such as security sector reform.65 As
Abrahamsen argues, ‘The securitization of underdevelopment … is the condition of possibility for a
global militarism justified in the name of human security and development.’ 66 We must take heed of
Abrahamsen’s warning that ‘Paradoxically, transformations that initially entailed a critique of
militarization and militarism have ended up according a new importance to security actors and laying
the groundwork for new expressions of militarization and militarism.’ 67 Human security has – against
its self-image as a progressive social force – facilitated a resurgent as well as transformed militarism.
 Cooper
The aff’s political campaign against arms sales becomes the affective grease for the
wheels of militarism
Cooper 2018 (Neil Cooper is a professor of International Relation @Bradford, Race, Sovereignty, and
Free Trade: Arms Trade Regulation and Humanitarian Arms Control in the Age of Empire, Journal of
Global Security Studies, Volume 3, Issue 4, October 2018, Pages 444–462,
https://doi.org/10.1093/jogss/ogy013)//KW

The pessimistic school encompasses a number of different positions. First, some suggest that arms
trade policy may be characterized as a form of organized hypocrisy under which declaratory
commitments to prohibitory norms and/or the socially constructed reputational concerns of states are
frequently trumped by material interests (Perkins and Neumayer 2010; Efrat 2012, 289–91; Erickson
2013, 2015; Hansen and Marsh 2015; Hansen 2016). In this perspective, state policy reflects the
outcomes of clashes between relatively weak regulative arms trade norms and material interests. An
alternative pessimistic approach takes more seriously the constructivist claim that norms are not just
regulative but can also be constitutive of identity and interests. It therefore shares some similarity with
optimists such as Garcia but reaches different conclusions. In particular, this set of scholars suggests that
what may look like a clash between humanitarian principle and base self-interest actually reflects the
influence of competing foundational and constitutive norms such as sovereignty, self-defense, and free
trade (Legro 1997, 33; Capie 2008; Grilot 2011, 540; Avant 2013, 741). This has resonance with a
broader literature discussing the tensions between market liberal norms and cosmopolitan liberal norms
(Orbie and Khorana 2015). Regulation, therefore, reflects the outcome of clashes (or indeed overlaps)
between so-called “good” (e.g., humanitarian) norms and “bad” (e.g., free trade, sovereignty, military
necessity) norms, or, more precisely, emerges as the outcome of particular norm hierarchies or systems
of norms (Wunderlich 2013, 23). I will argue that an analysis of policy in the late nineteenth century not
only provides support for this perspective but also illustrates the historically contingent nature of
permissive and proscriptive arms trade norms—in this case, norms grafted onto foundational
constitutive norms of anti-slavery, free trade, sovereignty, colonialism, and the standard of civilization.
The third strand of pessimistic literature has drawn on thicker understandings of critical or postcolonial
theory to critique contemporary practices of arms control. Where the optimists focus on and celebrate
the success of discrete campaigning initiatives—the first Matryoshka doll of arms trade governance—
critical pessimists also aim to contextualize such initiatives within the broader fields and logics
associated with the inter-related governance of arms, security, economy, and people. In this context,
action on landmines or cluster munitions has been depicted as part of a “devil’s bargain” (Krause 2011,
23) in which the protection of some people from some weapons is achieved at the expense of
legitimizing other arms, forms of violence, and ways of war—in particular, liberal militarism (Stavrianakis
2016). Even more fundamentally, some critical pessimists, drawing on Foucault (2003, 2007), have
argued that initiatives on landmines or small arms can only be properly understood as part of what has
been labeled as “arms control as governmentality” (Krause 2011; also see Mutimer 2011). It is not my
intention here to provide a full exploration of the concept of governmentality or its application to
colonialism (on the latter see Scott 1995; Larner and Walters 2002) but rather to use it to highlight
particular themes relevant both to the study of arms trade regulation in the late nineteenth century and
current debates about norms, HAC, and arms trade regulation. The first theme is reflected in the
Sending and Neuman (2006; also see Neuman and Sending 2007) who emphasize a reading of
governmentality as concerned with the changing practices and rationality (or mentality) of governing
and how these reflect and produce particular relations of power. For them, adding in a governmentality
perspective to the examination of both “good” and “bad” norms provides for a more complete analysis
by situating them in the broader relations of power, rationalities, and practices that produce certain
forms of behavior as appropriate and certain actors and identities as superior (Neuman and Sending
2007). For example, rather than viewing the landmines campaign as illustrative of a civil society realm
empowered at the expense of recalcitrant states, they suggest it is better understood as indicative of a
governmental rationality in which political power operates through NGOs and one in which they are not
so much opponents of power as agents or even products of power (Sending and Neumann 2006; also
see Lipschutz 2005, 247). A second theme concerns the way in which governmentality is understood
when applied to the field of international relations. In some perspectives, governmentality requires a
concern with elaborating the techniques aimed at regulating the behavior of states and governments,
particularly in a context of unequal power relations between North and South (Joseph 2009). For
example, Mathur (2016) has critiqued the “colonialist governmentality” of arms control, evident in the
practices of technology denial, forcible disarmament, and counter-proliferation employed by the West
and laundered through a new standard of civilization mantra. Alternatively, Krause has placed more
emphasis on Foucault’s distinction between sovereign and governmental power. The former is
concerned with securing a given territory through the exercise of direct power, whilst the latter is
exercised through the wide-ranging regulation of economy and society and particularly associated with
liberal techniques of government (Krause 2011, 21). Here, the distinction between the two does not
imply a rejection or displacement of sovereignty (Joseph 2009, 415) but its recasting within the concern
for population (Sending and Neumann 2006, 657). Equally, there always remains the possibility that
governmental power can give way to the exercise of more direct forms of sovereign and disciplinary
power (Joseph 2009, 426). Thirdly, when applied to the field of arms control, this implies a distinction
between a sovereign conception of arms control and arms control as governmentality. The former is
focused not only on securing the states’ monopoly of force but also on reducing the risk of war between
states, and its practices are shaped by formal adherence to notions of sovereign equality (Krause 2011).
The latter is focused on managing populations, represents a technology of social control, and is
concerned with “who could legitimately use what kinds of violence against which people or groups ...
under what circumstances” (ibid., 31). Both types of arms control can be identified in the practices of
earlier eras, but sovereign approaches to arms control were more characteristic of the Cold War era. In
the post-Cold War era, arms control as governmentality is characterized by initiatives such as the ban on
landmines and postconflict disarmament demobilization programs (ibid.). At one level, therefore, this
paper functions as a work of history that aims to delineate the norms, logics, and practices that
constituted a particular period of the operation of arms control as governmentality. As already
discussed, however, the analysis of the governmentality of arms trade regulation in the late nineteenth
century also provides a basis for critiquing the ahistorical and uncritical assumptions of the norm
optimist literature on armstrade regulation.

The Affirmative has missed the boat – Arms control is the production of empire not its
dissolution
Cooper 2018 (Neil Cooper is a professor of International Relation @Bradford, Race, Sovereignty, and
Free Trade: Arms Trade Regulation and Humanitarian Arms Control in the Age of Empire, Journal of
Global Security Studies, Volume 3, Issue 4, October 2018, Pages 444–462,
https://doi.org/10.1093/jogss/ogy013)//KW

Even more instructively, the first Hague Conference was convened in the very same year as the 1899
agreement between Britain and Egypt establishing a joint condominium over the Sudan. This had been
preceded by the battle of Omdurman in which five hours of fighting had left 11,000 Mahdists dead in
comparison to just 40 on the British side (Headrick 1981, 118). Back in Britain, The Morning Post
(September 29, 1898) highlighted the role played by “the powerful weapons of civilization— the
shrapnel shell, the magazine rifle and the Maxim gun.” Winston Churchill (1902, 300) recorded “the
most signal triumph ever gained by the arms of science over barbarians.” Unsurprisingly perhaps, the
advantage provided by the “weapons of civilisation” was duly recognized in the Sudan Agreement.
Article 12 noted that “special attention shall be paid to the enforcement of the Brussels Act of the 2nd
July, 1890, in respect to the import, sale and manufacture of firearms and their munitions” (ibid., 373).
As this example illustrated, qualitative arms control functioned to underpin the capacity to deploy
violence in the service of empire, not constrain it. The Brussels Act therefore represented an early
version of the “devil’s bargain” highlighted by Krause (see above, pX), in which a prohibitory HAC norm
is promoted at the cost of legitimizing the logics and practices of liberal militarism both at home and
abroad. However, focusing only on the operation of prohibitory regulatory norms obscures the way
arms trade regulation also constituted a specific colonial form of arms control as governmentality,
whereby mechanisms of prohibition and prescription were both put to the service of governing which
peoples could legitimately use what kinds of arms. Of course, efforts to manage arms flows to
potentially unruly colonial subjects by constantly seeking to balance permission and proscription were
neither completely effective nor ever effectively complete. First, efforts at restraint were perennially
subject to strategies of evasion undertaken by local actors operating with their own normative and
cartographic understandings (Tagliacozzo 2005; Mathew 2016). Second, arms trade regulation was a
contested terrain over which advocates of permission and advocates of restraint often clashed. For
example, pressures for restraint were offset by pressures to use the provision of arms to secure access
to markets and the loyalty or security of allies in a context of intra-European competition to maintain
and expand formal and informal empires (Grant 2007; Chew 2012). Policy on the ground, therefore,
often appeared contradictory. Nevertheless, proponents of permission and proscription generally
agreed on the broad goals of policy—to maintain imperial influence and imperial order. As will be
illustrated below, they agreed even more on the broader logics in which arguments for permission and
proscription were to be located—those governing sovereignty, free trade, development, and the
standard of civilization. For example, the Brussels Act certainly failed to prevent a substantial arms trade
into Abyssinia and Somalia where, by 1908, British officials considered the act had “completely broken
down”29 largely as a result 29 Memorandum on the Arms Traffic with the Natives of Africa, of French
support for a profitable arms trade through French-controlled Djibouti. In this case, colonial norms of
sovereignty provided the regulatory space for proliferation. The legal legitimacy of this transit trade was
enshrined by Article Ten of the Brussels Act, which, somewhat ironically, had been vigorously promoted
by the British. This affirmed the right of inland territories “under the sovereignty or protectorate” of
another signatory power to acquire arms via the territory of a coastal power, and Italy had previously
announced Abyssinia’s adhesion to the agreement. Compounding the irony, at one point in the
negotiations the French had suggested the conference had “no power to impose a right of transit on any
Sovereign state.”30 Enforcement of both the arms and slave trade regulations of Brussels was also
hampered by French refusal to permit searches of sea vessels flying the French flag. Arms smuggling
dhow owners operating in both the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf quickly realized the French flag
represented “a license to traffic” (Mathew 2016, 35), as it made each dhow an “island of colonial
sovereignty” (ibid., 34) and therefore immune to search. This is not to imply sovereignty norms offered
an unfettered license to trade. The arms provisions of the Brussels Act were ultimately predicated on
the fact that European powers exercised “rights of sovereignty” (Article Nine) in their colonial
possessions. Thus, the act and its implementation was suffused with norms of sovereignty that both
underpinned restrictions on the arms trade and provided the regulatory spaces permitting their
circumvention. Similarly, both the advocates for free trade in arms in the spaces of empire and the
advocates of restriction crafted their arguments by reference to the shared ideational frames of free
trade, development, and the standard of civilization—each heavily imbricated in the other. In Africa, for
example, free trade advocates argued the offer of arms was essential for recruiting African laborers and
that arms proliferation would speed the depopulation of local wildlife, thus hastening the day when
natives switched from hunting and alcohol to legitimate trade (Storey 2008, 196). Conversely,
proponents of restriction such as Alexander Mackay (1890, 42) of the Church Missionary Society
deplored the fact that “in the name of Christianity, free trade and civilization we see firewater and
firearms pouring in every port [in Africa].” However, for Mackay, the solution lay not only in “forbidding
the import of arms and ammunition” but in promoting legitimate trade amongst Africans, “developing
the resources of the country, and . . . promoting internal peace” so “the natives will . . . busy themselves
with growing whatever they can get a fair price for instead of fighting” (Letter to The Times, May 8,
1889). In this sense, the Brussels Act represented the archetype of regulation in the spaces of empire,
combining restrictions on the arms and liquor trades with calls for the development of “agricultural
labour and . . . the industrial arts” amongst native populations (Article Two). At the same time, the
precise ways in which these twin processes of grafting and counter-grafting played out varied from
region to region and over time. For example, in Singapore, policy from the 1820s onwards oscillated
between permission and proscription, as free trade and merchant pressure on the one hand and
concerns about the destabilizing impact of the firearms trade on the other hand were weighed in
different ways at different times (Tagliacozzo 2005, 270; Chew 2012, 174–79). At Muscat, commercial
treaties between the sultan and various powers (particularly the French) enshrining free trade severely
hampered Britain’s ability to curtail the trade in the Persian Gulf. This was only finally resolved by the
aforementioned 1913 agreement between Britain and France. Thus, free trade norms were constantly
exposed to serial processes of grafting and counter-grafting. Nevertheless, as the nineteenth century
merged into the early twentieth century, arms trade regulation in the spaces of empire was increasingly
seen as consonant with a dominant imaginary of liberal market norms (Mathew 2016). This is not to
downplay the pressures for imperial powers to supply arms to local allies, or the way broader colonial
conceptions of economic and geostrategic interest militated against cooperation to limit the arms traffic
as at Djibouti and Muscat.31 However, such factors ultimately illustrate the way in which particular
assemblages of norms, formal and informal practices, responses to evasions, and norm-derived
conceptions of interest constituted colonial practices of arms control as governmentality. Understood in
this way, oscillations in policy in the same region or between different spheres of colonial interest
reflected the attempt (always imperfect) to manage arms flows according to where people were placed
in the racially inflected triple hierarchies of civilization, loyalty, and utility to imperial power—hierarchies
that could be either mutually reinforcing or mutually opposed depending on circumstance. Pressures to
arm or disarm locals also illustrated how judgements about what constituted interest were predicated
on a particular moral economy in which European norms of racial superiority and imperialism framed
the standards of appropriate behavior of the era (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998, 892) and the fluid but
always subordinate identities of the other. The centrality of European racial and imperial norms in arms
governance was illustrated in the late 1870s when the Cape Colony in Southern Africa introduced a
licensing system aimed at disarming supposedly disloyal native tribes (Storey 2004, 707). In response,
one tribe, the Basuto, proclaimed their loyalty to the Queen and asked whether “we are to be disarmed
because we are black.”32 In British India, Acts in 1858, 1860, 1878, and 1909 constantly refined and
revised who had the right to own, import, export, and produce what kinds of arms, where they could be
transferred to, and under what conditions. Each act was also regularly amended via a series of
notifications that led one official reviewing rules on exports to Aden to lament “it is impossible to say . . .
with absolute certainty what are now the precise powers of the Government of India under the [1878]
Arms Act.”33 This illustrates how such regulations were not just about the effective management of
arms flows but also an intrinsic part of the process by which imperial gradations of race, culture, and
threat were actually produced. Indeed, in this context, the performative of adherence to, and
refinement of, regulatory processes was as important as actually achieving a concrete impact on arms
flows. In Somalia, imperial policy combined permission with prohibition. In 1894, Italy concluded an
agreement under which the Somali Sultan of the Mjertin adhered to the terms of the Brussels Act
(Hertslett 1967, 1119). Further measures, aimed at preventing arms reaching Sayyid Muhamed Abdullah
Hassan, the so-called Mad Mullah of Somalia, included the 1902 Aden Sea Traffic in Arms Regulation;34
the 1905 Ilig Agreement between Italy and a then-weakened Sayyid prohibiting his import of firearms
(Hertslett 1967, 1120–23; Katagiri 2010, 38); and the British Somaliland Firearms Regulation of 1905
regulating the import of arms into their Somaliland Protectorate.35 At the same time, however, after
1909 the British combined arms restrictions with a policy of supplying arms to the “friendly tribes,” a
policy that backfired when they turned their newly acquired arms on each other.36 Worse was to follow
in 1914 when, in direct contravention of his orders, Richard Corfield, the commander of the Camel
Corps, launched an attack that led to the virtual annihilation of his troops and Corfield’s own death.
Although a military disaster, back in England, Lord Emmot, Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies,
observed to the House of Lords that Corfield: “… was what is called in common parlance “white all
through,” precisely the sort of man one would desire to go tiger shooting with”.37 British policy on
Somalia therefore illustrates the inadequacy of humanitarian, free trade, or strategic frameworks alone
for understanding regulation of the arms trade in Africa (and indeed elsewhere). In this case, imperial
motivations were laid bare—both proscription and permission were put to the service of making the
spaces of empire safe for traders, administrators, loyal natives, and even visiting tiger hunters.

Security empires work through a dual project of regulation and and free trade of
military arms
Cooper 2018 (Neil Cooper is a professor of International Relation @Bradford, Race, Sovereignty, and
Free Trade: Arms Trade Regulation and Humanitarian Arms Control in the Age of Empire, Journal of
Global Security Studies, Volume 3, Issue 4, October 2018, Pages 444–462,
https://doi.org/10.1093/jogss/ogy013)//KW
However, the Brussels Act represented just one element in a larger network of regulation aimed at
restricting the supply of arms to colonial subjects in all the spaces of empire. This constituted the second
Matryoshka doll of arms trade governance. Thus, rather than being an era of free trade in arms, the
period was actually characterized by a dual regime of regulation: the operation of a peacetime liberal
export norm for transfers from imperial metropoles combined with widespread efforts to manage arms
flows into, within, and between the spaces of empire (using post-export blockades, import controls,
internal regulations, and restrictions on transfers between colonial spaces). This contrasts with the
contemporary emphasis on producer export controls as a primary (if not exclusive) vehicle for managing
the global trade in conventional arms. When located in this broader network of prohibitory regulation,
the humanitarian underpinnings of the Brussels Act are revealed to be far less significant than the
concerns about the maintenance of colonial order and qualitative military advantage for imperial
powers. Of course, the operation of a free trade in arms philosophy combined with competition for
colonies, markets, and influence amongst imperial powers is generally deemed to have trumped
substantive efforts at limiting arms flows. However, practices of proscription and permission were both
part of the attempt to delineate who could legitimately use which gradations of weapons according to
where they were located in the triple hierarchies of civilization, loyalty, and utility to empire. This is not
to deny that local actors constantly engaged in strategies of evasion or that imperial policies were
perennially reversed or amended. Indeed, both permissive and proscriptive arms trade norms were the
site of recurring contestation that played out in the form of competing appeals to transnational
constitutive norms such as sovereignty, free trade, colonialism, and the standard of civilization.
Nevertheless, the oscillations in policy this produced are better understood less as a failure of
prohibition and more as constituting the fluid cartography of regulation that was (and is) a defining
feature of arms control as governmentality. Moreover, the process of serially reinventing the border
between legitimate and illegitimate ownership of, and trade in, the means of violence represented an
important political project in its own right, irrespective of the actual material impact on arms flows.
Indeed, the understanding of arms trade governance as a Sisyphean endeavor was (and remains) central
to the legitimizing politics of arms control as governmentality; sanctifying the performative of regulatory
and institutional refinement, an á la carte approach to normative frameworks (e.g. humanitarianism,
free trade, military necessity) and their application to specific arms trade policy questions. Nevertheless,
by the early 1900s colonial powers had developed fairly extensive mechanisms of regulation that, in
general, were probably as effective as the mechanisms of contemporary arms trade regulation heralded
by optimists as signaling a shift to a novel form of global arms governance. What insights, then, can we
draw into contemporary debates in the literature on post-Cold War arms trade regulation? First, the
simplistic claim that contemporary HAC initiatives, including those on small arms, are “novel” just does
not stand up to historical analysis. This bears repeating time and time again given the frequency with
which the former claim is recycled. What is more useful, therefore, is to reflect on the ways in which
contemporary HAC is or is not novel compared to antecedents such as the Brussels Act and to use this
reflection as the basis for evaluating current debates in the literature on HAC. There are some notable
differences. The Brussels Act was concerned with restricting what were then considered new, modern,
and technologically cutting-edge firearms, whereas contemporary small arms are generally viewed as a
mature technology. Even more notably, the overt racism that characterized the discursive landscape of
nineteenth-century HAC has largely disappeared. Similarly, a feature of contemporary transnational
initiatives on small arms, landmines, and the ATT has been the way these initiatives have been actively
promoted by key states and civil society organizations from the Global South (Efrat 2012, 66; Bromley,
Cooper, and Holtom 2012, 1039). The global architecture of small arms regulation also includes regional
agreements, such as the ECOWAS moratorium on SALW, that are composed solely of states from the
Global South. This is certainly indicative of changes in power relations between North and South.
Nevertheless, northern NGOs remain the primary gatekeepers determining what issues (e.g., landmines
as opposed to thermobaric weapons) become the focus of civil society campaigns (Carpenter 2014).
Northern actors have also been the largest funders of HAC campaigns on small arms, landmines, and
cluster munitions, whilst northern NGOs have been the largest recipients of this funding (Stavrianakis
2011, 208; O’Dwyer 2014). Moreover, whilst HAC campaigns are certainly framed as expressions of
cosmopolitan solidarism, they have also drawn on largely uninterrogated standard of civilization norms
and are not immune to the recycling of orientalist assumptions about the legitimacy and motivations of
different suppliers, recipients, and users of the instruments of violence (Stavrianakis 2011; Mathur
2014). Furthermore, there have been notable moves to liberalize arms exports, particularly with respect
to intra-Western transfers (Cooper 2011, 147–49). This indicates the need to abandon the uncritical
assumption of the optimists that the merging of arms control and humanitarianism must, by definition,
be both positive and transformative. As demonstrated here, the merging of the two is not necessarily
incompatible with colonialism, racism, and imperial violence. Moreover, both Brussels and the broader
operation of arms control as governmentality illustrate how HAC initiatives may not represent a victory
for “good norms” over “bad norms” but the way in which such initiatives are situated within the
regulatory logics produced by both. Indeed, victories for HAC may neither challenge nor reconstitute
hegemonic practices of security and economy. Instead, they may be achieved because apparently
disparate and divergent normative frameworks constitute historically contingent norm hierarchies that
produce the conditions of possibility for the emergence of particular modes of arms trade governance
and their associated logics of permission and restraint. Certainly, arms trade regulation in the age of
empire, including its humanitarian variants, never challenged the logic of liberal militarism and in many
respects was harnessed to it. The Brussels Act, in particular, represented an early example of the “devil’s
bargain” in which humanitarian restraint was achieved at the expense of legitimizing the arms, forms of
violence, and ways of war practiced by hegemonic powers. There are similarities here with many
contemporary HAC campaigns, which have been equally focused on controlling violence in the
peripheries. Such campaigns have also been characterized by the way in which key groups such as the
ICRC have sought to distance themselves from disarmament activists and antimilitarism to make HAC
agendas more palatable to policymakers (Carpenter 2014, 105 and 117). This indicates the need for
caution in assuming that successive limited humanitarian initiatives can change the dominant logics of
militarism whilst also extracting a critique of militarism from those same initiatives. Of course, the
recent success of the humanitarian campaign to ban nuclear weapons might suggest a shift in HAC
towards a more effective merging of humanitarianism and antimilitarism. Even here, however, it is
notable that campaigners have attempted to retain the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate
weapons, and the distinction between disarmament as an overarching goal and strategy and
disarmament as a weapons-specific tactic (Fihn 2017; UNIDIR 2017, 10). Moreover, it is notable that
nuclear weapon states have neither signed the ban treaty nor abandoned expensive nuclear
modernization programs (Korb 2017). Thus, both Brussels and contemporary HAC initiatives illustrate
the “limits of possibility” inherent in pursuing the empty promise of tactical humanitarian
“disarmament” without strategic demilitarization. It is worth noting in this context that in historical
terms, the Brussels Act and the broader range of initiatives to manage arms flows in the spaces of
Empire were essentially transitory—they did not produce a lasting change in arms trade norms or in the
international system. In part at least, this was because prohibitory arms trade norms emerged as
elements in the normative superstructure of the era rather than as constitutive norms in their own right.
At the same time, it was also the case that from the 1930s onwards, changes in the substance of
transnational constitutive norms pertaining to sovereignty, security, economy, and colonialism created
the permissive conditions for a new set of regulatory arms trade norms to emerge through new
processes of grafting and counter-grafting. There were, of course, elements of earlier approaches in the
use of arms supplies to “the friendlies” in the wars of decolonization and anticommunism. More
generally, however, arms trade regulation in the Cold War was characterized more by a sovereign
approach to arms control that emphasized the creation and expansion of peacetime national export
licensing systems and the use of regulation to achieve security between states. Arms trade norms were
ultimately at the mercy of these far larger shifts in foundational constitutive norms. All this should
prompt due modesty on the part of the optimists heralding the normative transformations supposedly
wrought by HAC initiatives such as those on small arms. This article also highlights the need for a more
thoroughgoing genealogical approach to the histories of both HAC and arms trade regulation
(governmental and sovereign). This is more obviously the domain of the critical school of thinking on
arms trade regulation. In the case of the optimists, both the evident flaws of humanitarian arms trade
regulation in the late nineteenth century and its essentially transient nature demonstrate why they need
to think more historically about the relationship between humanitarianism and arms regulation. Indeed,
despite the differences between nineteenth- and twenty-first-century HAC, they have yet to
convincingly demonstrate why things might turn out differently this time around.
 Nuclear War
The threat of nuclear war is constructed to justify military development and conflict
escalation-turns the case
Aradau & Van Munster 11 (Claudia is a Professor of International Politics in the Department of War
Studies @ , King’s College London, Rens is asenior researcher and coordinator @Danish Institute for
International Studies, “Politics of Catastrophe: Genealogies of the Unknown”)

Crisis and disaster, then, can be said to formulate different discourses about securing the future
which evolve around particular referent objects of security, and which gain validity through
different styles of reasoning about the unknown future. For many observers, what characterizes
both crises and disasters – in contradistinction to risk management – is their so- called ‘“un-
ness”: unexpected, unscheduled, unprecedented, and almost unmanageable’ (Rosenthal et al.
1989: 5). The concepts of crisis and disaster mobilize and apply forms of knowledge that
oscillate between the probable and the possible. Despite their differences, both concepts share
a common history and were developed in response to the same question: how to secure society
against extreme events and emergencies, in particular nuclear war? The concept of crisis was
fundamental to governing the catastrophic future of nuclear war. Couched in the vocabulary of
risk, uncertainty and chance, nuclear strategists for instance considered their task as one of
dealing with future contingencies.9 To this end, they often deployed the notion of insurance in
a context that was different from probabilistic calculation. In this view, ‘planning is a prudential
exercise, like taking out insurance against an accident. You hope you don’t need it, but you’ve
taken reasonable precautions just in case’ (Kahn 1984: 55). Obviously, important differences
exist between insurance and nuclear strategy. Insurance generally deals with recurring
accidents of a non- catastrophic nature, which means that losses and damage are tolerable as
long as they can be compensated for on a routine basis. Nuclear war, clearly, does not allow
that luxury. Rather than risk compensation, nuclear strategists focused predominantly on war
planning and civil defence as means of decreasing the probability of nuclear war. Using the
analogy of insurance, however, rendered planning as an insurantial technology through which
the incalculability of a nuclear attack was made actionable. Concerned with the question of the
threshold, the notion of crisis refers not just to the actual moment of decision but includes the
broader prior strategic choices and actions that move or prevent a situation from moving in the
direction of the decisive moment of victory or defeat (Koselleck 1982: 625).10 As is illustrated
most evidently by the Cuban Missile Crisis, a crisis was understood as a protracted period of
interdependent conflict that had not yet reached the critical point of war. The task of security
analysts and experts was to strategically plan, based on the rational and conscious estimation of
possible advantages and disadvantages, a given course of action whose consequences could
nevertheless be never known in full (Allison 1971).11 The continuum crisis- disaster-
catastrophe draws attention not just to the modes of knowledge mobilized to secure the future
beyond computations of risk, but also to the knowledge of events, pre- evental processes and
postevental effects. Crises, disasters, catastrophes can be understood as dispositifs of
governance, deployed in response to particular problematizations of the future. Technologies
and forms of knowledge developed to prevent a nuclear war – such as deterrence, mutually
assured destruction, second strike capabilities and civil defence – only make sense when these
are looked at through the concept of crisis as a distinct style of reasoning about catastrophic
futures. Deterrence, in particular, functioned as a practice of crisis management through which
the likelihood of a full- blown nuclear war could be reduced, if not completely prevented. At the
same time, the idea of a threshold enabled the development of knowledge about how to
approach the extreme point of no return without actually passing it. Crises were to be managed
and prevented from developing; they also provided an opportunity to gain political or military
advantage over the adversary through competitive risk- taking (Schelling 1960). Crisis
management was about the ‘controlled loss of control’ where the risk of war is deliberately
made more likely through policy actions and choices. Schelling referred to this strategy of
manipulating risk as ‘the deliberate creation of a recognizable risk of war, a risk that one does
not completely control. It is a tactic of letting the situation get somewhat out of hand, just
because its being out of hand may be intolerable to the other party and force his
accommodation’ (quoted in Freedman 2003: 208). Kahn’s description of a complex escalation
ladder that, infamously, involved over forty different steps also conveyed the basic idea that a
limited war could and should get out of hand by degrees (Kahn 1960). Crisis, then, is not so
much a decisive turning point as the process leading up to that critical and extreme situation; it
is not triggered by a decision but the outcome of multiple causes that work together over time
to produce an existential threat. A security crisis embraces ‘those situations that threaten basic
values through perceptions of a heightened risk of military violence’ (Stern 2003: 188). Here,
the concept of crisis thus denotes a different temporal relation than securitization which,
dealing with the extreme moment of decision only, tells us little about the strategies deployed
to avert, manage or even exploit the future possibility of nuclear war. As Michael C. Williams
has argued in a different context, to focus too narrowly on the search for singular and distinct
acts of securitization might well lead one to misperceive processes through which a situation is
being gradually intensified, and thus rendered susceptible to securitization, while remaining
short of the actual securitizing decision. (Emphasis in original.) (M. C. Williams 2003: 521) The
decisionism at the heart of theories of securitization misses the particular relationship that
crisis establishes with the unknown future of nuclear war. For some, similar forms of knowledge
are thought to define both crisis and disaster management. Defining disaster as the negative
outcome of crisis, the failure to prevent a crisis from passing the threshold, these authors do
not consider disaster as constituting a separate field of knowledge and practices (Rosenthal
1998, Boin 2005). Nevertheless, the focus on non- military disasters taking place during peace
time, even if only selected for their presumed resemblance to air raids, introduces a significant
shift. Moving away from a view of external agents as a cause, disaster focuses on the
vulnerability of social structures only. Even as the etymological roots of ‘disaster’ (ill- starred,
des + astro) point towards outside circumstances such as the positioning of the stars, fate,
God’s will or the laws of nature as the cause for harm, in the modern world they have been
governmentalized as vulnerabilities as part of and built into social structures: [D]isasters are
inherently social phenomena. It is not the hurricane wind or storm surge that makes the
disaster; these are the sources of damage. The disaster is the impact on individual coping
patterns and the inputs and outputs of social systems … Vulnerability … is to be found in social
structure and disruption is the outcome of vulnerability. There is some consensus, by inference,
that the magnitude of a disaster should be measured not in lives or property lost, but by the
extent of the failure of the normative or cultural system. (Perry 2007: 12, 13) The focus is not
on the cause of harm but on its impact. Although the phenomena of terrorism, hurricanes and
floods may have different causes, disaster constitutes them as structurally similar in as far as
they all represent ‘the interdependent cascade of failure triggered by an extreme event that is
exacerbated by inadequate planning and ill- informed individual or organizational actions’
(Comfort 2005: 338). Disaster research also borrowed from the geography of natural hazards
the idea that preparedness needs to span the entire hazard cycle and not just that of response.
Disaster research has emphasized the need to analyse disasters for the purposes of stimulating
preparedness, resilience and recovery as valid objectives in and by themselves (Comfort 2005).
Whereas crisis refers to a regime that works through gradual escalation and competitive risk-
taking, the epistemic regime of disaster inscribes a range of policies, laws and practices that are
to strengthen readiness and preparedness in all kinds of sectors. Although response and
recovery are important elements of disaster management, these are subordinate to the
objective of creating disaster- resistant communities through fostering preparedness and
readiness in individuals, families and households, organizations and communities. Under the
telling title Are You Ready?, the US Department of Homeland Security (2004) has published a
guide that helps US citizens and families to be prepared against all types of hazards and
disasters. Disaster management does not rely primarily upon maintaining a competitive
advantage against an adversary but on reducing vulnerability in one’s own society, organization
or subjectivity to be able to withstand disastrous events. The acting- out of catastrophe serves
the objective of mitigating and absorbing the catastrophic event by improving preparedness
and readiness. Through preparedness exercises, vulnerabilities in the milieu can be mapped,
and hypothetical scenarios and imagined futures can be made physically present in specific
ways that allow the future to be rehearsed: ‘In staging, an “in- between” opens up between the
present and the future in which the consequences of the event can be experimented with. The
scenario is therefore best conceptualised as a theatrical device that enables an “as if” future to
be made present’ (Anderson 2010a: 233). Unlike in a crisis, scenarios do not primarily serve the
function of imagining alternative futures, but to make the future present as a bodily experience
through staging, playing and performance (Davis 2007, Collier 2008, Anderson 2010b). The
knowledge generated by disaster studies strongly depends on experiential knowledge
generated through exercises and the bodily embracement of an unknown future. Stephen
Collier (2008) refers to this as ‘acting out’ the future; the unknown future is not just imagined
but also actualized through a governing of the senses which are regimented to experience
reality in a certain way.12 In Anderson’s apposite formulation, ‘[t]he space of the exercise
becomes an occasion for experiencing how a future event might feel’ (Anderson 2010b: 10).
Acting out the catastrophic event serves the objective to mitigate and absorb the catastrophic
event by improving preparedness and readiness. The distinctions we have drawn between crisis
and disaster management should not be taken to mean that similar forms of knowledge,
discourses, practices and technologies cannot be seen at work in both regimes. The two are not
the same regime, but neither do they constitute wholly separate tracks: they circulate in a
constant back- and- forth movement of practices and schemas of knowledge. Discourses and
technologies developed in one regime were put to a different strategic use in the other. For
example, governing the future through crisis also required the collection of knowledge about
systemic vulnerabilities. Yet, this knowledge was strategized in a different way in as far as it was
inserted within a rationality of crisis escalation and competitive risk- taking, which also required
some sort of appreciation of complex systems, their functioning and proneness to disruption:
the more resilient social structures were, the higher the chance that a possible attack could be
countered, and the more likely that a possible aggressor would be deterred (Wohlstetter 1958).
Thus, within the regime of crisis, national space was reinterpreted as an interconnected field of
potential targets and vulnerabilities forcing a process of de- urbanization and the diffusion of
critical industries throughout the nation (Galison 2001). Similarly, strategists ‘discovered’ civil
defence and preparedness as useful practices for promoting deterrence and prevention.13
Moreover, during the Cold War, the focus of research on natural disasters resonated with the
interests of security experts given their focus on impact and organization and public responses.
Questions of how the public would react to a nuclear attack could be answered by researching
the ‘laboratories’ of natural disasters (Tierney 2007: 504). Claude Gilbert depicts these
analogies in relation to disaster studies as a separate field of knowledge: The scientific
approach to disaster is therefore a reflection of the nature of the market in which disaster
research became an institutional demand. Bombs fitted easily with the notion of an external
agent, while people harmed by floods, hurricanes, or earthquakes bore an extraordinary
resemblance to victims of air raids. (Emphasis in original.) (Gilbert 1998: 13) Yet, the
rationalities underpinning the utilization of these technologies can nonetheless be
distinguished. For those concerned with the management of crisis, the rationality behind civil
defence, preparedness and vulnerability reduction was first and foremost to cancel out the
enemy’s advantage of a first strike. It was a way of preventing or minimizing the risk of a
military attack. Therefore, when crisis management is discussed in organizational studies today,
the focus is that of maintaining a competitive advantage. More recently, however, the regimes
of crisis and disaster have become increasingly merged in securing catastrophic futures. This is
driven both by institutional changes such as the inclusion of FEMA under Homeland Security in
the US, which are themselves enabled by modes of knowledge that consider a continuum of
future incidents that are attributable to an external agent and those that are not immediately
so. For example, the European Union programme for critical infrastructure protection takes an
‘all hazards’ approach rather than a ‘terrorism’ one (European Commission 2004). Expert
knowledge, from academic expertise in disaster management to insurance professionals, has
redefined terrorism as intentional disaster. Sociologists such as David Alexander or Jean- Pierre
Dupuy have placed 9/11 in the continuity of historical disasters or catastrophes such as the
Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 (Alexander 2002, Dupuy 2002b). A series of analogies are thereby
established: Both disasters affected great commercial cities with extensive networks of
influence abroad. Both dealt a body blow to trade and postage, though not a fatal one. On a
smaller scale, some of the physical parallels are remarkable … Both events represent a symbolic
victory of chaos over order. (Alexander 2002: 5–6) Moreover, the knowledge developed in
sociology and geography about disasters has also informed this merging. Drabek, for instance,
has prepared literature summaries for instruction on FEMA courses focused on the social
dimensions of disasters (Drabek and Evans, 2005: 3). Even if the interpenetration of these
practices has gained more attention after 9/11, the knowledge of crisis and disaster
management shows that the concern with unknown, catastrophic futures predates 9/11 and
the end of the Cold War. At the same time, the field has paid scant attention to the problem of
the event and the continuum crisis- disaster- catastrophe. We suggest that the concept of
catastrophe can capture both elements: unknowability and eventfulness. If the unknowns that
plague security experts today can no longer be satisfactorily captured through the regimes of
crisis and disaster management alone, one can speak of a strategic reintegration, recalibration
and enveloping of these practices into a new epistemic regime that appears at the very limit of
these forms of management. This style of reasoning is best captured by the concept of
catastrophe, which to some extent surpasses the concepts of both crisis and disaster. Although
‘disaster’ and ‘catastrophe’ are often used interchangeably – this is, to an extent, the result of a
double etymology to render similar events: disaster derives from Latin, while catastrophe is of
Greek origin – a qualitative distinction separates these concepts: Hurricane Katrina has
reinforced the view of some researchers that the scale of any collective crisis has to be taken
into account in any analysis. To them, just as ‘disasters’ are qualitatively different from
everyday community emergencies, so are ‘catastrophes’ a qualitative jump over ‘disasters’.
(Quarantelli 2006, emphasis added) The FEMA training on risk and disaster management also
differentiates catastrophes from disasters, which are considered less destructive (US
Department of Homeland Security 2008). The Lisbon Earthquake in 1755, Hurricane Mitch in
1998 and the famine in India in 1965–1967 are given as historical examples of catastrophe.
Natural and human- caused events are seen to cause catastrophic effects affecting the well-
being of whole nations, while disaster management emergency tools are seen as inadequate to
tackle catastrophe. Whereas crisis implies a diagnostic and prognostic intent, representing the
point of no return and the possibility to transform and manage the crisis successfully,
catastrophes appear beyond our ability to resolve them. Barack Obama recently cautioned in
relation to the economic crisis that ‘A failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a
catastrophe’ (Krauthammer 2010). Unlike crises, catastrophes must be prevented at all costs,
both preeventally and in the course of the event itself to minimize its disruptions. Catastrophes
can be diagnosed and prognosticated but not solved. Behind the issues of scale that are
increasingly seen to differentiate emergencies, crises, disasters and catastrophes, the question
of the unknown thus needs to be posed anew: how to manage events that are difficult, if not
impossible, to predict and that could have potentially catastrophic consequences? What
epistemic regime emerges when security professionals can no longer solely rely on the
controlled manipulation of risk or be sure if such events can be absorbed or mitigated?
 Transformation Link
The 1ac’s refusal of military sales to (X authoritarian regimes) misdiagnoses the
system of global warfare –global warfare no longer operationalizes itself through
sovereign aid, but instead exists through a fractalization of semiotic survival that only
becomes coherent through the affirmative’s transformation of warfare!
Illas 15 (Edgar is a professor of Spanish @ indiana University , Survival; or, the War Logic of Global
Capitalism , mar 16 2015 , http://arcade.stanford.edu/content/survival-or-war-logic-global-
capitalism)//KW

In global war, in contrast, we no longer find a clear difference between the spaces of the friend and the
spaces of the enemy. For Galli, global war involves no telos and no division between internal and
external spaces. Global war is the inherent obverse of globalization , in which “every local point
become[s] an immediate function of a single global Totality (the principle of ‘glocality’).” Globalization is
“at every point, an immediate short-circuit between local and global,” which generates a “contradiction
without system” and makes violence a boundless mode of being. The difference between this situation
and total war is that the latter was based on total mobilization and “the immediate militarization of
society,” whereas global war entails “the global socialization of violence.” The transformation of
violence into a social relation has destabilized a central paradigm for political and theoretical practices.
Whereas under the cultural logic of late capitalism the recognition of all types of differences and the
unearthing of heterodox, queer, marginal and subaltern subjectivities were the main driving forces of
critical efforts, in the new conjuncture recognition is no longer the last horizon of cultural and social
politics. Under the war logic of globalization, another regime has become dominant: the regime of
survival. Two determinations conflated in the task of cultural recognition. First, the cultural logic of
capital established a market of identities that made possible the recognition of multiple subject
positions that had been previously invisible or nonexistent. Second, the destruction of total war in the
twentieth century made imperative that an ethical task of recognition worked against the
disappearances, forgetting, and repression it caused everywhere . Recognition encompassed, on the one
hand, ethical work against the effects of total war and, on the other, an opening to the possibilities
offered by the new postmodern marketplace. I will now focus on three important aspects of the regime
of survival. These aspects are the new antagonistic relation between life and death ; the post-katechontic
nature of survival; and the overcoming of the modern paradigms of convivance and biopolitics. The
contemporary regime of survival contends with a new reality of life and death. While in the last decades
of the twentieth century cultural recognition attempted to give visibility to what total war had erased ,
an effort that could generate positive effects, like reparation or affirmation, or more aporetic ones, like
the impossibility of bridging the gap between visibility and invisibility amidst the infinite dimensions of
justice, survival copes instead with the fact that, within global war, life and death are two absolute
conditions, with no possible bridge or dialogue between them. Death produced by total war resulted in
cultural exclusion and social destruction and, as psychoanalysis and trauma studies have analyzed, death
marked the beginning of endless chains of haunting specters and mourning acts. Death under global
war, in contrast, is as constituent as life. It is as destructive as it is constructive. It is not hidden but fully
exposed. It has no function in the structuring of social life other than being productive elimination.
Survival is therefore the task of escaping death and establishing no connection to i t. But we should not
understand the new conjuncture as a return to a pre-political stage where homo homini lupus est.
Global war is not the situation previous to sovereign power and in which, in Hobbes’s famous phrase,
there is “continual fear and danger of violent death, and [where] the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty,
brutish, and short.” In fact, we may define it as the exact opposite, that is, as the post-political condition
that results from the crumbling of the state’s monopoly on violence. The absence of an indisputable
sovereign power that can limit the spaces of life and death produces a sense of permanent threat and
an apocalyptic structure of feelin g. Global war entails the end of Carl Schmitt’s katechon, that is, the
demise of “the power that prevents the long-overdue apocalyptic end of times from already happening
now.” In this conjuncture, survival is an unregulated struggle to live on, with no form of governmentality
that directs it and no katechontic principle that controls it. One often encounters the idea that the so-
called “survival of the fittest” encapsulates the governmentality of our times. The premise is that we
inhabit a sort of capitalist jungle in which only the strong survive and where, as Guns’n’Roses used to
sing, “ya learn to live like an animal in the jungle where we play.” Yet the problem with this ideologeme
is not so much that it justifies the colossal inequalities produced by economic competition, but rather
that it applies the rational template of the law of the stronger on a global reality in which the
rationalities of modernity have imploded. The logic of survival does not refer to the post-evental
circumstance of those who come out alive from a war or those who win in an economic battle. Rather, it
defines an ongoing and productive condition determined by the presence of immediate catastrophe. In
this context, political practices are no longer oriented toward the modern question of convivance and
living together, but, as French anthropologist Marc Abélès writes, they result from what he calls “the
interiorization of the survival problem.” For Abélès, the reflections and practices that go from the
construction of Hobbes’s Leviathan to the implementation of the Keynesian welfare state, aimed at
finding the best possible political form for the organization of the living together of human beings.
Within globalization, in contrast, “the political field finds itself overrun by a gnawing interrogation
concerning the uncertainty and threats that the future possesses.”But Abélès explains the transition
from modern convivance to postmodern survival in terms of biopolitics, and he defines “survival” as the
“biopolitical dimension” of neoliberal governmentality. As is known, for Foucault the imperative of the
biopolitical state is “to ‘make’ live and ‘let’ die,” that is, to regulate life and pursue the disciplining and
subsequent purification of the social body for the extraction of surplus labor. It is true that, in Foucault,
biopolitics do not lead to a positive organization of convivance but rather to a system of terror of which
the Nazi state is “the paroxysmal development.” However, the genocidal logic of the biopolitical state
was not oriented toward the administration of future uncertainty. Systematic massacring did not pursue
the control of future threats, but continued to organize convivance by means of a radical extirpation of
the perverted and inoperative elements of the population. For this reason, if the contemporary regime
of survival is not about organizing communal living-together, then it cannot be biopolitical. Biopower is
not the primary catalyzer of the new world order. But let’s now focus on the productive energies of the
regime of survival. The interiorization of survival by individuals , which is a way of inserting the work of
the state into one’s subjectivity, compels everyone to play a protective but also entrepreneurial role in
the social field. Thus, survival takes multiple forms of intervention. It may consist in the direct attack on
other positions that are not necessarily dominant or oppressive, but that are perceived as threats in a
given moment. It may be the effort to protect an inherited body of knowledge against external
contamination or internal dissent. It can operate as preemptive manhunt that neutralizes future
conflicts. It can develop guerrilla tactics, with hide-and-seek movements and specific targets. It can
consist of mafia politics based on friendship and alliances of common interests . It can take the shape of
a covert operation in the sphere of infowar and cyberwar . It can be violent or non-violent, physical or
symbolic, melodramatic or unspectacular, real or virtual, or a combination of both, or a synthesis of all
of the above. This brief list of forms is indicative of one central aspect: the neutral ideology of the work
of survival. Survival is neither progressive nor reactionary; it is indeterminate and generic. It is a
standard principle imposed on all political and critical interventions, and yet it does not make
interventions indifferent to the world. On the contrary, the work of survival transforms all social
practices into interventionist practices. Each individual and collective action becomes effectively militant
and activist. In the first stage of globalization, during the euphoric years of postmodernism, Reagan,
Thatcher, and Fukuyama’s “end of history,” an opposition traversed the space for cultural and
theoretical practice: the opposition between identity politics and subaltern critique. The recognition of
different subjective positions and new identities constituted the dominant horizon of critical and
political interventions. In a relation of inclusion/exclusion vis-à-vis this process of recognition,
subalternism questioned the hegemonic articulations required to play the game of identity politics.
Subalternism aimed to give justice to the residues that could not be incorporated into this game.
Multiculturalism and subalternism were the terms of a suprastructural discussion built on two historical
changes: the end of total war and the transformation of the nation state into the corporate state. These
transformations involved the replacement of national cultures by multicultural diversity, and offered the
possibility of imagining an end to war alongside utopian and alternative spaces beyond the state. In our
second, post-9/11 stage of globalization, in which the euphoria of postmodernity has been replaced by
the permanent state of emergency of global war, the opening process of cultural recognition has turned
into the activist intervention for the common survival. This shift should not be interpreted as a clear-cut
break, but as a shift of valences or as an Althusserian tendential law. But a crucial difference lies
between recognition and survival. While recognition involved a variety of actions oriented toward
making the invisible visible, speaking truth to power, bearing witness to the ashes of total destruction
and writing the unnameable names of the subaltern, the interventions of survival pursue their own
effacement in a realm of full visibility and control. Instead of bearing witness to the erased traces, the
challenge now is to erase the traces that one leaves when moving through the “modulations” of the
society of control. Contemporary interventions do not create evental changes; on the contrary, they
produce changes without events, consequences without programs, itineraries without trails. The
question is no longer whether the subaltern can speak, because everybody can speak. In fact, everybody
must speak in order to survive. One must speak all the time in order to locate oneself in the field of war.
One must speak so that she is not automatically seen as a threat and a target. Thus, the paradox is that
one must intervene in the field of war and yet one must also pass unnotice d. To put it in other terms, to
survive is to accomplish a mission and at the same time remain peacefully static. To survive is to avoid
being caught on camera in a permanently televised world. To survive is to delete the undeletable
cookies of the computer; to avoid being shot when one crosses the str eet; to be somewhere else when a
terrorist attack occurs; to withdraw the money before the investment fails; to be safe when a natural
disaster wipes everything out. Contemporary Dasein is not being-there, but being-somewhere-else
when something takes place. A further aspect of this paradoxical condition is that the reality of global
war in which interventions take place is ultimately eventless. Even if the media constantly focus on the
horrifying components of the war (from Bin Laden to ISIS, from Palestine to Ciudad Juárez, from
Afghanistan to Guantánamo), the perpetual war of globalization is characterized by the eerie calm of
everyday life. Anxiety and fear are prevalent structures of feeling, but traumatic events are surprisingly
absent in global war. Or, more precisely, violence is experienced through the mediation of the media
and so, as Judith Butler observes, today violence seems to affect others even when it affects oneself:
“Television coverage of war positions citizens as visual consumers of violent conflict that happens
elsewhere … enforcing a sense of infinite distance from zones of war even for those who live in the
midst of violence.” The mediatization of war also reveals and conceals the fact that war is the normal
state of things, that it is less an existential or phenomenological experience than a spectral structure
that organizes social life. One short story by Catalan writer Quim Monzó, “Durant la guerra” [“During the
War”] is a perfect portrait of the practice of everyday life under global war. In it, a group of citizens
become aware that a war has begun despite the fact that no government has officially declared it and no
military action has taken place. The irrefutable sign that indicates the beginning of the war is that
everybody acts as if nothing happened, and they keep a “calma (aparentment apparent)” [“(ostensibly
ostensible) calm.”] It seems that the conflict resulted from the “enfrontament entre dues faccions (no
declaradament antagòniques) de l’exèrcit” [‘a confrontation between two factions (that weren’t openly
antagonistic) within the army’]. But none of the factions are interested in publicizing the fight: the
winning side wants a discreet victory, and the victims do not want to have to admit defeat.
Symptomatically, radio and TV stations do no inform about the conflict. They continue to program
classical music, an Elvis Presley movie, a soap opera in which one of the leading characters reveals that
he is gay, and the reports of a workers demonstration and of the seven victims of a rugby match in
which fans of the two teams began to fight. This situation of tension and misinformation lasts for years
and years, until one day one of the citizens announces that the war finished that afternoon “tan
inopinadament com havia començat” [“as unexpectedly as it had begun”]. Some citizens celebrate the
event, but others become even more worried. They know that wars are hard, but that post-wars are
even harder, and the peace treaty that had just been signed “en marcava inapel·lablement l’inici” [“was
an ineluctable indicator that the post-war period had started”]. In short, global war is the dark obverse
of globalization, but global peace, or the state of ostensibly ostensible calm, is the even darker side of
global war.
Aff Answers
2ac
 2ac-Framework

Our framework is : the impacts of the aff impacts be should weighed against the K—
the affirmative act of scenario planning is a form of critical pedagogy which solves the
blind spots of the K and enhances creativity and self-reflexivity while
deconstructing cognitive biases and flawed assumptions—
Barma et al. 15| NAAZNEEN H. BARMA Naval Postgraduate School BRENT DURBIN Smith College ERIC
LORBER Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher AND RACHEL E. WHITLARK Belfer Center, Harvard Kennedy School of
Government “International Studies Perspectives Advance Access published November 6, 2015 -
“Imagine a World in Which”: Using Scenarios in Political Science1”
(http://www.naazneenbarma.com/uploads/2/9/6/9/29695681/using_scenarios_in_political_science_isp
_2015.pdf) ABaez

Prominent
Over the past decade, the “cult of irrelevance” in political science scholarship has been lamented by a growing chorus (Putnam 2003; Nye 2009; Walt 2009).

scholars of international affairs have diagnosed the roots of the gap between academia and
policymaking, made the case for why political science research is valuable for policymaking, and offered a number of ideas for enhancing the
policy relevance of scholarship in international relations and comparative politics (Walt 2005,2011; Mead 2010; Van Evera 2010; Jentleson and Ratner 2011; Gallucci 2012; Avey and Desch

focus on
2014). Building on these insights, several initiatives have been formed in the attempt to “bridge the gap.”2 Many of the specific efforts put in place by these projects

providing scholars with the skills, platforms, and networks to better communicate the findings and
implications of their research to the policymaking community, a necessary and worthwhile objective for a field in which theoretical debates, methodological training,
and publishing norms tend more and more toward the abstract and esoteric. Yet enhancing communication between scholars and policymakers is only one component of bridging the gap

between international affairs theory and practice. Another crucial component of this bridge is the generation of substantive
research programs that are actually policy relevant—a challenge to which less concerted attention has been paid. The dual challenges of bridging
the gap are especially acute for graduate students, a particular irony since many enter the discipline with the explicit hope of informing policy. In a field that has an

admirable devotion to pedagogical self-reflection, strikingly little attention is paid to techniques

for generating policy-relevant ideas for dissertation and other research topics. Although numerous articles and conference workshops are devoted to the importance of experiential and
problem-based learning, especially through techniques of simulation that emulate policymaking processes (Loggins 2009; Butcher 2012; Glasgow 2012; Rothman 2012; DiCicco 2014), little

has been written about the use of such techniques for generating and developing innovative research
ideas. This article outlines an experiential and problem-based approach to developing a political science research program using scenario analysis. It focuses especially on illuminating the
research generation and pedagogical benefits of this technique by describing the use of scenarios in the annual New Era Foreign Policy Conference (NEFPC), which brings together doctoral
students of international and comparative affairs who share a demonstrated interest in policy-relevant scholarship.3 In the introductory section, the article outlines the practice of scenario

analysis and considers the utility of the technique in political science. We argue that scenario analysis should be viewed as a tool to
stimulate problem-based learning for doctoral students and discuss the broader scholarly
benefits of using scenarios to help generate research ideas. The second section details the manner in which NEFPC deploys scenario
analysis. The third section reflects upon some of the concrete scholarly benefits that have been realized from the scenario format. The fourth section offers insights on the pedagogical
potential associated with using scenarios in the classroom across levels of study. A brief conclusion reflects on the importance of developing specific techniques to aid those who wish to

Scenario analysis is perceived

generate political science scholarship of relevance to the policy world. What Are Scenarios and Why Use Them in Political Science?

most commonly as a technique for examining the robustness of strategy. It can immerse decision
makers in future states that go beyond conventional extrapolations of current trends, preparing them
to take advantage of unexpected opportunities and to protect themselves from adverse exogenous
shocks. The global petroleum company Shell, a pioneer of the technique, characterizes scenario analysis as the art of considering “what if” questions about possible future worlds.
Scenario analysis is thus typically seen as serving the purposes of corporate planning or as a policy tool to be used in
combination with simulations of decision making. Yet scenario analysis is not inherently limited to
these uses. This section provides a brief overview of the practice of scenario analysis and the motivations underpinning its uses. It then makes a case for the utility of the technique
 We characterize scenario analysis
for political science scholarship and describes how the scenarios deployed at NEFPC were created. The Art of Scenario Analysis

as the art of juxtaposing current trends in unexpected combinations in order to articulate surprising
and yet plausible futures, often referred to as “alternative worlds.” Scenarios are thus explicitly not
forecasts or projections based on linear extrapolations of contemporary patterns, and they are not
hypothesis-based expert predictions. Nor should they be equated with simulations, which are best characterized as functional representations of real
institutions or decision-making processes (Asal 2005). Instead, they are depictions of possible future states of the world, offered
together with a narrative of the driving causal forces and potential exogenous shocks that could lead to those futures. Good scenarios thus rely on explicit causal propositions that,
independent of one another, are plausible—yet, when combined, suggest surprising and sometimes controversial future worlds. For example, few predicted the dramatic fall in oil prices
toward the end of 2014. Yet independent driving forces, such as the shale gas revolution in the United States, China’s slowing economic growth, and declining conflict in major Middle Eastern
oil producers such as Libya, were all recognized secular trends that—combined with OPEC’s decision not to take concerted action as prices began to decline—came together in an unexpected
way. While scenario analysis played a role in war gaming and strategic planning during the Cold War, the real antecedents of the contemporary practice are found in corporate futures studies
of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Raskin et al. 2005). Scenario analysis was essentially initiated at Royal Dutch Shell in 1965, with the realization that the usual forecasting techniques and
models were not capturing the rapidly changing environment in which the company operated (Wack 1985; Schwartz 1991). In particular, it had become evident that straight-line extrapolations
of past global trends were inadequate for anticipating the evolving business environment. Shell-style scenario planning “helped break the habit, ingrained in most corporate planning, of
assuming that the future will look much like the present” (Wilkinson and Kupers 2013, 4). Using scenario thinking, Shell anticipated the possibility of two Arab-induced oil shocks in the 1970s
and hence was able to position itself for major disruptions in the global petroleum sector. Building on its corporate roots, scenario analysis has become a standard policymaking tool. For
example, the Project on Forward Engagement advocates linking systematic foresight, which it defines as the disciplined analysis of alternative futures, to planning and feedback loops to better
equip the United States to meet contemporary governance challenges (Fuerth 2011). Another prominent application of scenario thinking is found in the National Intelligence Council’s series of
Global Trends reports, issued every four years to aid policymakers in anticipating and planning for future challenges. These reports present a handful of “alternative worlds” approximately
twenty years into the future, carefully constructed on the basis of emerging global trends, risks, and opportunities, and intended to stimulate thinking about geopolitical change and its
effects.4 As with corporate scenario analysis, the technique can be used in foreign policymaking for long-range general planning purposes as well as for anticipating and coping with more
narrow and immediate challenges. An example of the latter is the German Marshall Fund’s EuroFutures project, which uses four scenarios to map the potential consequences of the Euro-area

Several features make scenario analysis particularly useful for policymaking .5

financial crisis (German Marshall Fund 2013).

Long-term global trends across a number of different realms—social, technological, environmental,

economic, and political—combine in often-unexpected ways to produce unforeseen challenges. Yet the
ability of decision makers to imagine, let alone prepare for, discontinuities in the policy realm is
constrained by their existing mental models and maps. This limitation is exacerbated by well-known
cognitive bias tendencies such as groupthink and confirmation bias (Jervis 1976; Janis 1982; Tetlock 2005). The
power of scenarios lies in their ability to help individuals break out of conventional modes of thinking
and analysis by introducing unusual combinations of trends and deliberate discontinuities in
narratives about the future. Imagining alternative future worlds through a structured analytical
process enables policymakers to envision and thereby adapt to something altogether different from
the known present. Designing Scenarios for Political Science Inquiry The characteristics of scenario analysis that commend its use to policymakers also make it well suited to
helping political scientists generate and develop policy-relevant research programs. Scenarios are essentially textured, plausible, and relevant

stories that help us imagine how the future political-economic world could be different from the past
in a manner that highlights policy challenges and opportunities. For example, terrorist organizations are a known threat that have
captured the attention of the policy community, yet our responses to them tend to be linear and reactive. Scenarios that explore how seemingly unrelated vectors of change—the rise of a new
peer competitor in the East that diverts strategic attention, volatile commodity prices that empower and disempower various state and nonstate actors in surprising ways, and the destabilizing
effects of climate change or infectious disease pandemics—can be useful for illuminating the nature and limits of the terrorist threat in ways that may be missed by a narrower focus on

scenario analysis helps

recognized states and groups. By illuminating the potential strategic significance of specific and yet poorly understood opportunities and threats,

to identify crucial gaps in our collective understanding of global politicaleconomic trends and
dynamics. The notion of “exogeneity”—so prevalent in social science scholarship—applies to models of reality, not to reality itself. Very simply, scenario analysis can
throw into sharp relief often-overlooked yet pressing questions in international affairs that demand
focused investigation. Scenarios thus offer, in principle, an innovative tool for developing a political science research agenda. In practice, achieving this objective requires
careful tailoring of the approach. The specific scenario analysis technique we outline below was designed and refined to

provide a structured experiential process for generating problem-based research questions with contemporary
international policy relevance.6 The first step in the process of creating the scenario set described here was to identify important causal forces in contemporary global affairs. Consensus was
not the goal; on the contrary, some of these causal statements represented competing theories about global change (e.g., a resurgence of the nation-state vs. border-evading globalizing
forces). A major principle underpinning the transformation of these causal drivers into possible future worlds was to “simplify, then exaggerate” them, before fleshing out the emerging story
with more details.7 Thus, the contours of the future world were drawn first in the scenario, with details about the possible pathways to that point filled in second. It is entirely possible, indeed
probable, that some of the causal claims that turned into parts of scenarios were exaggerated so much as to be implausible, and that an unavoidable degree of bias or our own form of

groupthink went into construction of the scenarios. One of the great strengths of scenario analysis, however, is that the
scenario discussions themselves, as described below, lay bare these especially implausible claims
and systematic biases .8 An explicit methodological approach underlies the written scenarios themselves as well as the analytical process around them—that of
 The use of scenarios is
case-centered, structured, focused comparison, intended especially to shed light on new causal mechanisms (George and Bennett 2005).

similar to counterfactual analysis in that it modifies certain variables in a given situation in order to
analyze the resulting effects (Fearon 1991). Whereas counterfactuals are traditionally retrospective in nature and explore events that did not actually occur in the
context of known history, our scenarios are deliberately forward-looking and are designed to explore potential
futures that could unfold. As such, counterfactual analysis is especially well suited to identifying how individual events might expand or shift the “funnel of choices”
available to political actors and thus lead to different historical outcomes (Nye 2005, 68–69), while forward-looking scenario analysis can better

illuminate surprising intersections and sociopolitical dynamics without the perceptual

constraints imposed by fine-grained historical knowledge. We see scenarios as a complementary
resource for exploring these dynamics in international affairs, rather than as a replacement for
counterfactual analysis, historical case studies, or other methodological tools. In the scenario process developed for NEFPC,
three distinct scenarios are employed, acting as cases for analytical comparison. Each scenario, as detailed below, includes a set of explicit “driving forces” which represent hypotheses about

The scenario analysis process itself employs templates (discussed

causal mechanisms worth investigating in evolving international affairs.

further below) to serve as a graphical representation of a structured, focused investigation and thereby as

the research tool for conducting case-centered comparative analysis (George and Bennett 2005). In essence, these
templates articulate key observable implications within the alternative worlds of the scenarios and
serve as a framework for capturing the data that emerge (King, Keohane, and Verba 1994). Finally, this structured,
focused comparison serves as the basis for the cross-case session emerging from the scenario analysis
that leads directly to the articulation of new research agendas. The scenario process described here
has thus been carefully designed to offer some guidance to policy-oriented graduate students who are
otherwise left to the relatively unstructured norms by which political science dissertation ideas are typically developed. The initial articulation of a
dissertation project is generally an idiosyncratic and personal undertaking (Useem 1997; Rothman 2008), whereby students might choose topics based on their coursework, their own previous
policy exposure, or the topics studied by their advisors. Research agendas are thus typically developed by looking for “puzzles” in existing research programs (Kuhn 1996). Doctoral students
also, understandably, often choose topics that are particularly amenable to garnering research funding. Conventional grant programs typically base their funding priorities on extrapolations
from what has been important in the recent past—leading to, for example, the prevalence of Japan and Soviet studies in the mid-1980s or terrorism studies in the 2000s—in the absence of

The scenario approach to generating research ideas is

any alternative method for identifying questions of likely future significance.

grounded in the belief that these traditional approaches can be complemented by identifying
questions likely to be of great empirical importance in the real world, even if these do not appear as puzzles in existing research
programs or as clear extrapolations from past events. The scenarios analyzed at NEFPC envision alternative worlds that could develop in the medium (five to seven year) term and

are designed to tease out issues scholars and policymakers may encounter in the relatively near
future so that they can begin thinking critically about them now . This timeframe offers a period distant enough from the
present as to avoid falling into current events analysis, but not so far into the future as to seem like science fiction. In imagining the worlds in which these scenarios might come to pass,

participants learn strategies for avoiding failures of creativity and for overturning the assumptions
that prevent scholars and analysts from anticipating and understanding the pivotal junctures that
arise in international affairs.
 2ac-state inevitable
The Security state won’t just disspear – we should prioritize functional checks like the
affirmative
Chandler 2007 (David Chandler is a Professor IR @ Westminister, Deconstructing Sovereignty:
Constructing Global Civil Society,” in Politics Without Sovereignty: A Critique of Contemporary
International Relations, pg 164-5)

Global civil society theorists focus their ire on what they understand to be the narrow, exclusionary bias of the
sovereign state. In turn, they view a wide constellation of transnational actors, from the global mega-NGOs to local farming
cooperatives, as representing a radical alternative that opens up the space for new kinds of political organization
and activity. In fact, what the celebration of ‘bottom-up’ politics and the critique of the state really

express is a deep disenchantment with mass society and the demands of formal accountability that go along
with representative democracy.72 A consequence of rejecting the political sphere is that it leaves political
struggles isolated from any shared framework of meaning or from any formal processes of democratic
accountability. The quest for individual autonomy and the claim for the recognition of separate ‘political spaces’ and the

‘incommunicability’ of political causes, each demonstrate the limits of these radical claims for the normative
project of global civil society [END PAGE 164] ‘from below’. Far from reflecting the emergence of new global
political forces, the global civil society, by virtue of its social isolation, is marked by political weakness. As
such, the only strategy left to it is a retreat into elite lobbying and individualized ethical postures . It is important to stress

that I am not claiming that the key problem with radical global civil society approaches is their rejection of formal

engagement per se in existing political institutions and established parties. The point I am making here is that the
rejection of state-based politics, which forces the individual to engage with and account for the views of
other members of society, reflects a deeper problem – an unwillingness to engage in political
contestation per se. Proponents of global civil society ‘from below’ therefore seek to legitimize their views as
the prior moral claims of others. This has the effect of transforming global civic actors into the advocates of
those unable to make moral claims themselves . Alternatively, they put themselves in harm’s way and would lead by inarticulate example.
What they avoid doing is pursuing their own interests or seeking to build political solidarity around shared interests.
What can actually be achieved through their chosen methods is limited. Radical lobbying and calls for recognition may in
some cases precipitate a generational turnover in the establishment. However, the rejection of social engagement is more likely

to lead to a further shrinking of the political sphere, reducing it to a small circle of increasingly
unaccountable elites. If the only alternative to the political ‘game’ is to threaten to ‘take our ball home’
– the anti-politics of rejectionism – the powers
 2ac -Alternative Fails

What is the alternative institution/social order that should be put into place? Is that
feasible? What would have to be done to create that change and what would be the
consequences of those actions? Absent these questions shifts in knowledge
production are useless – governments’ obey institutional logics that exist
independently of individuals and constrain decisionmaking – that’s true regardless of
this debate Debate is politicizing – engaging political details is necessary to actualize
change
Lederman 2014(Schmuel Ledrman teaches @ the Open University of Israel, “Agonism and
Deliberation in Arendt,” Constellations, Vol. 21, Issue 3)

It is fairly obvious why Villa does not “recognize” this utopia. His “agonist” interpretation of Arendt
excludes attributing special importance to citizens’ participation in government. Indeed, to his mind
believing that Arendt offers us a possible recovery of action in fact involves a failure to take seriously
Arendt's analysis of the modern world and the almost non-existent (according to Villa) prospects for
action within it.92 This seems to be also the case for Sandra and Lewis Hinchman, who argue that
Arendt's political ideal finally became the philosopher as a public figure, and not the citizen who speaks
to his fellow citizens.93 For Arendt, however, participation in government, with its obvious
“deliberative” elements (exchanging opinions, agreeing and acting with others), is essential to the
experience of freedom itself. As I explained above, politics in its Arendtian sense grows out of the desire
of individuals to appear in the public sphere, to claim their place in the common world. The space of
appearance into which we enter when we take part in the public realm provides us with an opportunity
for actualizing ourselves, our unique identity, which receives concreteness and intensiveness when it is
disclosed to others. It also provides us with an actualization of the world itself: “For without a space of
appearance and without trusting in action and speech as a mode of being together, neither the reality
of one's self, of one's own identity, nor the reality of the surrounding world can be established beyond
doubt […] this actualization resides and comes to pass in those activities that exist only in sheer
actuality.”94 The same actualization of the self and the world, I would like to stress, is achieved by
common speech, namely the exchange of opinions in light of the necessity to agree on joint decisions
and actions. As was already pointed out, opinions reflect the place from which people see the world,
their standpoint.95 When one exchanges one's opinions with fellow citizens, one makes explicit the way
the world is seen from his or her particular standpoint in it,96 while discovering how the world is seen
through the eyes of those others. This ability to see the world through the eyes of others is for Arendt
the political insight par excellence.97 Through the exchange of opinions we achieve a more complete
understanding of the world, and what Curtis called “our sense of the real”98 becomes stronger and
deeper, thereby reducing our alienation from the world. Seen from this perspective, to discuss things
with others and to cooperate with them is essentially not at all different from appearing and trying to
excel before them. These are aspects of the same activity, whose meaning is the overcoming of
alienation, and the restoration—at least partially—of the sense of being “at home in the world.” In this
sense, Arendt continues the fundamental realization common to both Heidegger and Jaspers, despite
the differences between their philosophical projects: “‘man is, in Dasein, possible existence’ […] [he]
achieves reality only to the extent that he acts out of his own freedom rooted in spontaneity.”99
Politics, Arendt suggests, is a central human sphere in which these human possibilities can be realized.
The individuals acting and speaking in politics ultimately achieve neither interest, nor virtue nor some
common good, but a new existential meaning. This does not mean that those individuals intentionally
aim for this meaning when they act in the public sphere. Meanings for Arendt are the kinds of things
that cannot be aimed at: instead we discover them while performing activities that are aimed at certain
concrete goals. This is why when Entreves, for example, warns us against seeing Arendt's politics as an
existential need, since such a need is concentrated on the self and not on the world,100 he misses, in my
opinion, Arendt's intention. In all her descriptions of political action, the acting individuals seek to
achieve specific goals, being concerned with whatever is taking place in their public sphere. But while
acting for the world they discover that “acting is fun.”101 Arendt explains what she means by that when
she relates to the student movement of the 1960s: “This generation discovered what the eighteen
century called ‘public happiness’, which means that when man takes part in public life he opens up for
himself a dimension of human experience that otherwise remains closed to him and that in some way
constitute a part of complete ‘happiness.’”102 This dimension of human experience that opens up in
action and speech is the existential meaning citizens can experience only in the public realm, that is, only
when they participate in government.
 2ac-Reps don’t come first
Rep’s first framings put the cart before the horse – instead we should engage material
structures of power through the affirmative
Tuathai 1996 (Gearoid tuathail is a professor of Geography @ Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Political
Geography, 15(6-7))

While theoretical debates at academic conferences are important to academics, the discourse and
concerns of foreign-policy decision- makers are quite different, so different that they constitute a
distinctive problem- solving, theory-averse, policy-making subculture. There is a danger that academics assume that
the discourses they engage are more significant in the practice of foreign policy and the exercise of
power than they really are. This is not, however, to minimize the obvious importance of academia as a general institutional structure among many
that sustain certain epistemic communities in particular states. In general, I do not disagree with Dalby’s fourth point about politics and discourse except to

note that his statement-‘Precisely because reality could be represented in particular ways political decisions could be

taken, troops and material moved and war fought’- evades the important question of agency that I noted in my review essay. The

assumption that it is representations that make action possible is inadequate by itself. Political, military
and economic structures, institutions, discursive networks and leadership are all crucial in explaining
social action and should be theorized together with representational practices . Both here and earlier, Dalby’s
reasoning inclines towards a form of idealism. In response to Dalby’s fifth point (with its three subpoints), it is worth noting, first, that his book is about the CPD,
not the Reagan administration. He analyzes certain CPD discourses, root the geographical reasoning practices of the Reagan administration nor its public-policy
reasoning on national security. Dalby’s book is narrowly textual; the general contextuality of the Reagan administration is not dealt with. Second, let me simply
note that I find that the distinction between critical theorists and post- structuralists is a little too rigidly and heroically drawn by Dalby and others. Third, Dalby’s
interpretation of the reconceptualization of national security in Moscow as heavily influenced by dissident peace researchers in Europe is highly idealist, an
interpretation that ignores the structural and ideological crises facing the Soviet elite at that time. Gorbachev’s reforms and his new security discourse were also
strongly self- interested, an ultimately futile attempt to save the Communist Party and a discredited regime of power from disintegration. The issues raised by
Simon Dalby in his comment are important ones for all those interested in the practice of critical geopolitics. While I agree with Dalby that questions of discourse
are extremely important ones for political geographers to engage, there
is a danger of fetishizing this concern with discourse so
that we neglect the institutional and the sociological, the materialist and the cultural, the political and
the geographical contexts within which particular discursive strategies become significant. Critical geopolitics,
in other words, should not be a prisoner of the sweeping ahistorical cant that sometimes accompanies ‘poststructuralism nor convenient reading strategies like the
identity politics narrative; it needs to always be open to the patterned mess that is human history.
 2ac-Util Good
Util is Ethical, it Evaluates each step to reach a maximum end
Darwish 09 Bahaa Darwish (In 1980, Darwish was graduated in Alexandria University where he studied philosophy in the College of Arts. In 1987, he got his
MA in philosophy. In 1993, he got a PhD scholarship to Germany and returned in 1995 to Egypt where he was awarded the PhD title and was appointed as a lecturer
in Minia University MU (South of Cairo).) DOI 10.5840/tej200910119 Teaching Ethics; Fall2009, Vol. 10 Issue 1, p87-109, 23p TD

Utilitarianism is an ethical theory. Thus, merely achieving the maximal outcome is not a sufficient condition to
attain its end. Actions achieving the maximal outcome should be virtuous . This is how, as I think, both Bentham and Mill
intend it. Bentham says: “Goodwill is that of which the dictates, taken in a general view, are surest of coinciding with those of the principle of utility. For the dictates
of utility are neither more nor less than the dictates of the most extensive and enlightened (that is welladvised) benevolence.”34 Mill says: “( the
utilitarian)
standard is not the agent’s own greatest happiness, but the greatest amount of happiness altogether;
and character is always the happier for its nobleness, there can be no doubt that it makes other people
happier, and that the world in general is immensely a gainer by it. Utilitarianism, therefore, could only attain its end by the
general cultivation of nobleness of character.”35 The action that achieves the maximal outcome should ,
then, be a virtuous action that by intending to achieve the maximal outcome it intends mainly to achieve the good of those in interest. Add to this,

virtuous actions do not achieve the maximal outcome through , or at the expense of, the unhappiness of others. But
it seems that very few examples can, in this sense, be characterized as virtuous, because very few actions achieve people’s interests without having negative
outcomes on others. Here we can divide negative actions, or harms, into two categories: those that are characterized by everyone (whatever their moral standard
is) as crimes or apparently extreme harms that neither a benevolent nor a noble person could perform, such as murder, theft, or/ and torture, and those that are
harms but can be tolerated for the sake of the majority and for their being compensable. To illustrate, let’s take two examples—both will result in harm to others—
to show that consistently with utilitarianism the first action ought not to be accepted, while the other can. The first example is borrowed from Beauchamp and
Childress’s book Principles of Biomedical Ethics. According to them, if victory on one’s side can be gained by torturing the other side’s captured children who were
told by their soldiers fathers not to reveal their location, the former should, according to utilitarianism, torture the children and it is a moral action. Doubtlessly,
torture is an immoral action and no
action can be characterized as moral if it achieves the maximal utilitarian
outcome through such an apparent harm . As the maximal outcome intended by utilitarianism should be
reached through a virtuous action performed by a benevolent or/and noble agent, and a noble agent does not
achieve the greatest amount of happiness through an apparent harm like torture , such actions should
consistently with utilitarianism be excluded from the actions intended to achieve happiness, or the
maximal utilitarian outcome.

Util, it’s the only ethical framework

Marseille 19 Elliot Marseille Published: 3 April 2019 (Elliot Marseille, DrPH, MPP is principal of the firm, Health Strategies International in Oakland,
California that specializes in the economic evaluation of global health programs. Trained in health policy analysis, Dr. Marseille has over 30 years of senior public
health management and research experience with a focus on the empirical and modeled assessment of the cost, and cost-effectiveness of services, programs, and
policies related to HIV/AIDS.) Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine201914:5 https://doi.org/10.1186/s13010-019-0074-7 TD

Efficiency as quantified and promoted by cost-effectiveness analysis sometimes conflicts with equity and other ethical values, such as the “rule of rescue” or rights-
based ethical values. We describe the utilitarian foundations of cost-effectiveness analysis and compare it with alternative ethical principles. We find that while

utilitarianism is usually superior to the alternatives. This is primarily because efficiency – the
fallible,

maximization of health benefits under a budget constraint – is itself an important ethical value . Other ethical frames may be irrelevant,
incompatible with each other, or have unacceptable implications. When alternatives to efficiency are considered for precedence, we propose that it is critical to
quantify the trade-offs, in particular, the lost health benefits associated with divergence from strict efficiency criteria. Using an example from HIV prevention in a
high-prevalence African country, we show that favoring a rights-based decision could result in 92–118 added HIV infections per $100,000 of spending, compared to
one based on cost-effectiveness. Economic efficiency is a leading criterion for resource allocation decisions for global (or public) health [1, 2]. Yet assessments of
efficiency in the form of cost-effectiveness (CEA) or cost-benefit analysis (CBA) are regarded with a mixture of enthusiasm and suspicion: enthusiasm, because, all
else equal, program managers and policy makers seek to maximize the benefit from limited dollars; and suspicion, because all else is rarely equal, when other
considerations are included such as fairness and reduction in disparities. Indeed, CEAs are perceived by some as ethically suspect because they rest on a conceptual
foundation that violates everyday moral intuitions [3]. By representing human life in dollar terms and choosing among life-saving interventions based on
mathematically-derived return-on-investment metrics, they undermine the expression of communitarian values, and often appear to conflict with a range of ethical
principles including equity, urgent need, and human rights as enshrined in international law [4, 5]. In this article, we describe the ethical framework implied by CEA,
utilitarianism, as applied to global health. Second, after describing some of the moral objections to utilitarianism, we show that the criticisms leveled against CEA on

: Efficiency in promoting human life and health is itself a valid ethical

ethical grounds are often misleading

standard, and that alternative formal ethical approaches, as well as everyday ethical intuitions,
present their own problems when applied to real world situations. In particular, we discuss the moral equivalence
between identified and statistical lives implied by utilitarianism. Using the example of the female condom to prevent HIV transmission in developing countries, we
also show that using non-efficiency based principles to guide resource allocation, even central principles such as human rights, when applied too narrowly, can

inadvertently lead to undermining those very principles. Third, we argue that while no infallible theory of the ethics of resource allocation is yet available, the
utilitarian framework underlying CEA and CBA generally provides trustworthy guidance; is
usually superior to the alternatives, and should therefore constitute the default perspective.
Finally, we propose that when utilitarianism generates results that stakeholders deem ethically unacceptable, the grounds for that dissatisfaction should be made
numerically explicit. A good faith effort should be made to describe and quantify the trade-offs associated with decisions that diverge from efficiency criteria. Ethical
framework implied by cost-effectiveness analysis The ethical foundation of CEA and CBA, utilitarianism, was originally developed by the nineteenth century British
philosophers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mills [6, 7] and was recently revisited and advanced by Peter Singer in “Practical Ethics” and other writings, and by
Joshua Greene in “Moral Tribes” [8, 9]. Utilitarianism is a species of Consequentialism, which is the ethical doctrine that one should judge actions by the outcomes
that can reasonably be expected to follow, and not by the actors’ intention or by fidelity to an abstract moral principle. Thus, the overarching maxim of

Utilitarianism is, “Act in such a way as to generate the maximum quantum of well-being,
happiness, or utility”, or in Bentham’s famous dictum, “the greatest good for the greatest number” [6]. In the context of global health, this implies:
1. Resources should be allocated consistent with maximizing overall benefit, such as deaths
averted or quality-adjusted life-years gained. Such allocation decisions are consistent with the findings of cost-effectiveness
analyses. 2. All lives have the same value. While anodyne at first sight, this concept helps fuel

utilitarianism’s reputation for replacing common humanity with hyper-rational calculation. It

means, for example, that there is no basis for distinguishing between identified lives (e.g., a sick person
treated at a hospital) versus statistical lives (e.g., unknown individuals who avoid disease). We argue that in general, this principle is in fact consistent
with our humanity and is at the heart of the unique contribution of the global health perspective. 3. No special claim accrues to alleviating inequality. The exception
is when privileging vulnerable populations, or those with less access to care, is an efficient means to achieving #1, above. This seeming indifference to the plight of
the poor may be part of the reason for the “.. . widespread suspicion that CEA does favor the healthy and well-to-do” [10]. We will argue that there is less to object
to here than meets the eye: in most populations, efficiency and inequality alleviation are concordant. This is because poor people are usually sicker and start with
fewer health resources than wealthier neighbors. Few would dispute the notion that #1 is an important part of rational resource allocation. Our difference with
some critics of CEA is that we believe other ethical values should onely rarely substantially modify guidance based on efficiency alone. As expounded below, those

powerful, often irresistible

other ethical values are not necessarily of a higher order than efficiency, and have their own problems. Regarding #2,

emotions, especially empathy, impel decision makers to privilege identified lives. Nevertheless,
we are aware of no rational basis for elevating this sense of empathy to a principle that should
guide policy. Public health as distinct from clinical medicine is, at its core, concerned with populations, not identified
individuals. Statistical lives are in fact identified lives for the friends and family members of
those persons. The impulse to favor identified individuals is thus a failure of imagination. For public
health professionals to treat identified lives as having a primary claim because they are less visible to those professionals, lacks ethical foundation. Regarding #3, as

the area of potential conflict between equity and utilitarianism is smaller than one
a practical matter,

might expect. This is because the incremental benefit of investing additional global health dollars for the poor and others with limited access to health
care is generally greater than the incremental benefits generated by the same dollars spent on the more affluent and those with better access to health care [2].
Thus, in most cases, efficiency and equity goals are aligned. For example, malaria and neglected tropical diseases account for 15% of the total burden of disease in
sub-Saharan Africa [11] and malaria deaths are closely associated with poverty [12]. A 2013 systematic review and meta-analysis found a roughly two-fold higher
risk of parasitemia in children of lower compared with children of higher socio-economic status [13]. Malaria treatment and prevention is one of the areas where
investment in global health have seen the greatest returns in the past 20 years. These interventions are included in the “enhanced investment scenario” for low-
income countries needed to achieve global health convergence by 2035 [12].
 2ac-China is not a threat
Reject their Impact Calculus they securitize China and make the Impact a Self fulfilling
prophecy
Song 15 Song, W. ( Ph.D. in Political Science, University of Siena, Italy (2008) M.A. in European Politics, University of Leuven, Belgium (2004) (2015).
Securitization of the "china threat" discourse: A poststructuralist account *.  China Review,  15(1), 145-169. Retrieved from https://libproxy.library.unt.edu/login?
url=https://libproxy.library.unt.edu:2165/docview/1678026312?accountid=7113 TD

The so-called China threat has been widely and consistently enacted in the West as comprehensively
endangering the West and the whole world. This article problematizes this issue using a poststructuralist securitization approach.
Some people may claim that there is clear evidence of the real "China threat," such as the ever-increasing Chinese military might, persistent nationalist
indoctrination, global hunt for energy, and a market economy. However, a poststructuralist may argue that representation of any political event will always be

China has strong

susceptible to competing interpretations.84 These same events can be represented in a significantly different ways. For example,

reason to increase its national power, for national self-defense and unification and to pursue
social and economic development. The inevitable and mutual constitutive nexus of knowledge
and power is evident in the various securitization processes. Knowledge of various types is
embedded in power relations and the struggle to impose authoritative interpretations of
international events, such as the "China threat." This article identifies the three modes of securitization activity. In all of
these modes, securitizing agents communicate the China threat issue referentially (that is,
using the linguistic act of identifying something) to their audiences/subjects in the context of shared knowledge in a particular
domain. It can be structurally incorporated into the field of theoretical research, addressed to

elites and focused on the security and strategic sectors. It can also be structurally incorporated
into ideological debates and conflicts, addressed to an attentive or well-informed public and
focused on the political sector. Alternatively, it can be assigned to a broad context of culture and civilization, addressed to the general public
and encompassing a comprehensive range of sectors. In these processes, the actors are performing acts with communicative

force. Although the intended meanings are not directly signaled, they can be inferred from the
contexts of the different modes. The so-called China threat can be predicted as inevitable,
based on deductive reasoning from scientific theory. Rhetorical power comes from a specialized
domain of scholarly expertise. Following an inductive logic, the same conclusion can be drawn
from past experiences and current observations. It can also be inferred from psychological
traits and prejudices. In the latter case, the issue of the China threat is securitized by eliciting an
intuitive emotional response from the audience that bypasses ordinary justification. In other words,
the subject's perception of the China threat results from immediate a priori knowledge or
experiential belief. The agents thereby heighten their audiences' sense of the seriousness and
urgency of the issue. A securitization act succeeds only when it achieves the intended effect. A
poststructuralist securitization analysis of the China threat issue in this article reveals the specific ways in which power and knowledge constitute each other

All types of performative communication, regardless of their domains, attempt

through different modes.

to build identities- in this case, that of a "threatening" China-through means such as linking and differentiating. The real aim of
this process of securitization is not to identify the cause of the "China threat," but rather to
elicit a reaction from an audience. The China threat thesis may become a self-fulfilling
prophecy. If so, this may have very real policy implications and political consequences.
Reject their Impact Calculus, Their threats of China are based in the Colonial Desire of
certainty
Pan ’12 - Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Deakin University (Chengxin, Knowledge, Desire and Power in Global Politics, //TD
Yet objective certainty, however desirable or precisely because it is desirable, is an illusory effect of desire. The
desire for certainty may be satisfied only within desire and through the certainty of desire. When certainty is not
within reach, the modern knowing subject, unable or unwilling to give up its quest, turns to the illusive certainty
and comfort of what John Dewey called ‘emotional substitute’: ‘in the absence of actual certainty… men cultivated all sorts of things that would give them the
feeling of certainty’. 74 Trust is one such feeling, which is not based on objective certainty, but cultivated through a process of ‘emotional inoculation’.75 Fears and
fantasies are two other forms of emotional substitute, especially useful for making sense of strangers. By
fantasizing about an uncertain other’s
assimilability and eventual trans-formation into the self, one can gain a sense of certainty . Alternatively, one may arrive at a
sense of predictability by reducing that other to an already known prototype of menace. Either way, these emotional substitutes provide the much-desired antidote
of certainty to the Cartesian Anxiety: either the other can be converted, or it must pose a threat. In this way, the initial uncer-tainty of the other translates into the
certainty of an emotive either/or. 16 Knowledge, desire and power in global politics
As emotional substitutes for certainty, fears and fantasies have figured prominently in what Robert Young calls ‘colonial
desire’, which regulates colonialists’ encounters with and their knowledge of various unfamiliar Others. These
emotions together make up an ‘ambivalent double gesture of repulsion and attraction’ towards the colonised .76 On
the one hand, colonial desire finds people of other races and colours ‘disgusting’ and ‘repulsive’, hence an object of

fear and paranoia. At the same time, colonial desire projects onto those (same) people some degree of ‘beauty, attractiveness or desirability’,77 thus
making them an exotic source of fantasy and wonder. According to Homi Bhabha, underlying such ambivalent structures of feeling is precisely the modern desire for
certainty, identity and ‘a pure origin’.78 Thanks to this ever-present modern desire, the aforementioned ambivalent colonial stereotype is
able to acquire ‘its currency’ and ‘ensure[s] its repeat-ability in changing historical and discursive conjunctures’. In this sense, Orientalism
is best seen as ‘the site of dreams, images, fantasies, myths, obsessions and requirements’.79 What this latent form of Orientalist knowl-edge

reveals is not something concrete or objective about the Orient, but something about the Orientalists themselves,
their recurring, latent desire of fears and fantasies about the Orient. Indeed, only when imbued with such unconscious but persistent
desire can Orientalism get ‘passed on silently, without comment, from one text to another’.80

Western knowledge of China’s rise is precisely such a text that has been caught up in the silent emotive current. For example, the ‘China threat’
paradigm bears the stamp of fears, whereas the ‘China opportunity’ paradigm can be best seen as manifestations of modern fantasies.
These emotions about China’s rise are certainly not identical to the Orientalist colonial desire in the nineteenth century. For instance, the overtly sexual/racial
connotation that once was a hallmark of old-style colonial desire is no longer prevalent in contemporary writings on China. What used to be some of the main
obses-sions in European colonial fears and fantasies, such as miscegenation and racial hybridity, have now been repackaged as issues of multiculturalism, norm
diffusion, socialisation, and so forth. Still, a similar structure of colo-nial desire lives on; even the racial facet has not disappeared completely in contemporary China
watching. 81 Thus, to better understand the twin China paradigms, we need to put them in the context of (neo)colonial desire, and ask how they have more to do
with the West’s latent quest for certainty and identity than with the manifest search for empirical truth about ‘Chinese reality’. If all social knowledge is yoked to

, much of the worldliness of the ‘threat’ and ‘opportunity’ discourses of

some intertextuality and worldli-ness

China is then made up of the (renewed) fears and fantasies accompanying the Western modern
desire and self-imagination.

Arms sales to Taiwan are justified through securitizing China as a threat

Pan ’12 - Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Deakin University (Chengxin, Knowledge, Desire and Power in Global Politics, //TD
 We solve your security K

First, the threat paradigm helps define (or at least renew) the purpose of containment as a policy. Bernard Schaffer tells us that policy has
three dimensions of meaning: purposes; the review of information and the determi-nation of appropriate action; and the securing and commitment of resources in
its implementation.12We are familiar with the second and third dimensions of policy, but no policy can exist without the first, namely, a certain purpose (or
purposes). In fact, functioning like a fulcrum, the
articulation of a relevant purpose is often the very first—sometimes also the most
difficult—step in a policy-making process. For instance, as far as US strategic planners are concerned, the main challenge lies not in
implementing a policy of military build-up, but in justifying or identifying a legitimate public purpose for that
policy. Likewise, for weapons manufacturers, promoting arms sales is not an overly complicated task; but in order to
translate it into official policy, they require a rationale, or more specifically, a legitimate target against which their
arms should be deployed. In both cases, identifying a purpose or target is crucial to policy-making. Thanks to a China
threat ‘out there’, a new purpose can be injected into US foreign policy. It provides a rationale for a policy that
would otherwise struggle to justify its contemporary relevance . This constitutive effect on US China policy can be likened to the way in
which the discourse of terrorism justified and legitimized the US-led ‘War on Terror’. For a start, the terrorist threat immediately gave George W. Bush a hitherto
elusive sense of certainty about his mission and policy direction. As reported in the New York Times, not until the ‘September 11’ tragedy did the President begin to
feel ‘sure about what he should be doing’. While the rise of terrorism has enabled the US to preoccupy itself with the ‘War on Terror’ for more than a decade, at
least for a particular section of the US foreign policy establishment, a
more lasting purpose for US foreign and security policy requires
the China threat. Second, the threat paradigm contributes to policy-making by spelling out some specific policy
options. From the beginning, the representation of China as a danger is not merely an intellectual question about ‘what is China?’; it is
always concerned with the practical question of ‘what to do about it?’ For example, in their book The Coming Conflict with China,
Bernstein and Munro devote a whole chapter to the issue of how to manage China’s rise. Among their policy recommendations are maintaining a

strong US military presence in Asia, strengthening Japan, continuing arms sales to Taiwan, and restricting China’s nuclear weapons
arsenal. 14 Similarly, in the last pages of The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, Mearsheimer believes that an appro-priate China policy is not what he calls the
‘misguided’ engagement strategy, 88 Knowledge, desire and power in global politics but containment to ‘slow the rise of China’.15 Charles Krauthammer, a
prominent neoconservative proponent of the China threat argument, not only advocated explicitly for containing China in his 1996 Time magazine article, but also
detailed how this can best be done. Taking ‘a rising and threatening China’ as a pregiven fact, he insisted that ‘any rational policy’ towards the country should be
predicated on various containment strategies such as strengthening regional alliances (with Japan, Vietnam, India, and Russia) to box in China, standing by Chinese
dissidents, denying Beijing the right to host the Olympics, and keeping China from joining the WTO on its own terms. Speaking with a sense of urgency, he urged
that this containment policy ‘begin early in its career’.
 2ac realism good
Realism also pursues non-security goals that improve welfare
Mearsheimer 01 (John Joseph is an American political scientist. He is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service
Professor at the University of Chicago. 2001. “Chapter One: Introduction”. The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. New York: W.W.
Norton & Company.)

Survival is the number one goal of great powers, according to my theory. In practice, however, states
pursue non-security goals as well. For example, great powers invariably seek greater economic
prosperity to enhance the welfare of their citizenry. They sometimes seek to promote a particular
ideology abroad, as happened during the Cold War when the the United States tried to spread
democracy around the world and the Soviet Union tried to sell communism. National unification is
another goal that sometimes motivates states, as it did with Prussia and Italy in the nineteenth century
and Germany after the Cold War. Great powers also occasionally try to foster human rights around the
globe. States might pursue any of these, as well as a number of other non-security goals. Offensive
realism certainly recognizes that great powers might pursue these non-security goals, but it has little to
say about them, save for one important point: states can pursue them as long as the requisite behavior
does not conflict with balance-of-power logic, which is often the case.34 Indeed, the pursuit of these
non-security goals sometimes complements the hunt for relative power. For example, Nazi Germany
expanded into eastern Europe for both ideological and realist reasons, and the superpowers competed
with each other during the Cold War for similar reasons. Furthermore, greater economic prosperity
invariably means greater wealth, which has significant implications for security, because wealth is the
foundation of military power. Wealthy states can afford powerful military forces, which enhance a
state's prospects for survival. As the political economist Jacob Viner noted more than fifty years ago,
"there is a longrun harmony" between wealth and power.35 National unification is another goal that
usually complements the pursuit of power. For example, the unified German state that emerged in 1871
was more powerful than the Prussian state it replaced.

Cooperation is essential to realism

Mearsheimer 01 (John Joseph is an American political scientist. He is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service
Professor at the University of Chicago. 2001. “Chapter One: Introduction”. The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. New York: W.W.
Norton & Company.)

One might conclude from the preceding discussion that my theory does not allow for any cooperation
among the great powers. But this conclusion would be wrong. States can cooperate, although
cooperation is sometimes difficult to achieve and always difficult to sustain. Two factors inhibit
cooperation: considerations about relative gains and concern about ~heating.~3 Ultimately, great
powers live in a fundamentally competitive world where they view each other as real, or at least
potential, enemies, and they therefore look to gain power at each other's expense. Any two states
contemplating cooperation must consider how profits or gains will be distributed between them. They
can think about the division in terms of either absolute or relative gains (recall the distinction made
earlier between pursuing either absolute power or relative power; the concept here is the same). With
absolute gains, each side is concerned with maximizing its own profits and cares little about how much
the other side gains or loses in the deal. Each side cares about the other only to the extent that the
other side's behavior affects its own prospects for achieving maximum profits. With relative gains, on
the other hand, each side considers not only its own individual gain, but also how well it fares compared
to the other side. Because great powers care deeply about the balance of power, their thinking focuses
on relative gains when they consider cooperating with other states. For sure, each state tries to
maximize its absolute gains; still, it is more important for a state to make sure that it does no worse, and
perhaps better, than the other state in any agreement. Cooperation is more difficult to achieve,
however, when states are attuned to relative gains rather than absolute gains.54 This is because states
concerned about absolute gains have to make sure that if the pie is expanding, they are getting at least
some portion of the increase, whereas states that worry about relative gains must pay careful attention
to how the pie is divided, which complicates cooperative efforts. Concerns about cheating also hinder
cooperation. Great powers are often reluctant to enter into cooperative agreements for fear that the
other side will cheat on the agreement and gain a significant advantage. This concern is especially acute
in the military realm, causing a "special peril of defection," because the nature of military weaponry
allows for rapid shifts in the balance of power.55 Such a development could create a window of
opportunity for the state that cheats to inflict a decisive defeat on its victim. These barriers to
cooperation notwithstanding, great powers do cooperate in a realist world. Balance-of-power logic often
causes great powers to form alliances and cooperate against common enemies. The United Kingdom,
France, and Russia, for example, were allies against Germany before and during World War I. States
sometimes cooperate to gang up on a third state, as Germany and the Soviet Union did against Poland in
1939.56 More recently, Serbia and Croatia agreed to conquer and divide Bosnia between them,
although the United States and its European allies prevented them from executing their agreement.57
Rivals as well as allies cooperate. After all, deals can be struck that roughly reflect the distribution of
power and satisfy concerns about cheating. The various arms control agreements signed by the
superpowers during the Cold War illustrate this point. The bottom line, however, is that cooperation
takes place in a world that is competitive at its core-one where states have powerful incentives to take
advantage of other states. This point is graphically highlighted by the state of European politics in the
forty years before World War I. The great powers cooperated frequently during this period, but that did
not stop them from going to war on August 1, 1914.58 The United States and the Soviet Union also
cooperated considerably during World War 11, but that cooperation did not prevent the outbreak of the
Cold War shortly after Germany and Japan were defeated. Perhaps most amazingly, there was
significant economic and military cooperation between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during the
two years before the Wehrmacht attacked the Red Army.59 No amount of cooperation can eliminate
the dominating logic of security competition. Genuine peace, or a world in which states do not compete
for power, is not likely as long as the state system remains anarchic.
 2ac realism inevitable
Realism and fear among great powers inevitable
Mearsheimer 01 (John Joseph is an American political scientist. He is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service
Professor at the University of Chicago. 2001. “Chapter One: Introduction”. The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. New York: W.W.
Norton & Company.)

Many in the West seem to believe that "perpetual peace" among the great powers is finally at hand . The
end of the Cold War, so the argument goes, marked a sea change in how great powers interact with one
another. We have entered a world in which there is little chance that the major powers will engage each
other in security competition, much less war, which has become an obsolescent enterprise. In the words of one famous author, the
end of the Cold War has brought us to the "the end of history."1 This perspective suggests that great powers no longer
view each other as potential military rivals , but instead as members of a family of nations, members of what is sometimes called
the "international community." The prospects for cooperation are abundant in this promising new world, a world
which is likely to bring increased prosperity and peace to all the great powers . Even a few adherents of
realism, a school of thought that has historically held pessimistic views about the prospects for peace
among the great powers, appear to have bought into the reigning optimism , as reflected in an article from the mid-
1990s titled "Realists as Optimists."2 Alas, the claim that security competition and war between the great powers have been purged from the
international system is wrong. Indeed, there is much evidence that the promise of everlasting peace among the
great powers was stillborn. Consider, for example, that even though the Soviet threat has disappeared, the
United States still maintains about one hundred thousand troops in Europe and roughly the same
number in Northeast Asia. It does so because it recognizes that dangerous rivalries would probably emerge
among the major powers in these regions if U.S. troops were withdrawn. Moreover, almost every European
state, including the United Kingdom and France, still harbors deep-seated, albeit muted, fears that a
Germany unchecked by American power might behave aggressively ; fear of Japan in Northeast Asia is probably even
more profound, and it is certainly more frequently expressed. Finally, the possibility of a clash between China and the
United States over Taiwan is hardly remote . This is not to say that such a war is likely, but the possibility
reminds us that the threat of great-power war has not disappeared . The sad fact is that international politics
has always been a ruthless and dangerous business, and it is likely to remain that way . Although the
intensity of their competition waxes and wanes, great powers fear each other and always compete with
each other for power. The overriding goal of each state is to maximize its share of world power , which
means gaining power at the expense of other states. But great powers do not merely strive to be the strongest of all the great powers, although
that is a welcome outcome. Their ultimate aim is to be the hegemon—that is, the only great power in the
system. There are no status quo powers in the international system, save for the occasional hegemon that wants to maintain its dominating
position over potential rivals. Great powers are rarely content with the current distribution of power ; on the
contrary, they face a constant incentive to change it in their favor . They almost always have revisionist
intentions, and they will use force to alter the balance of power if they think it can be done at a reasonable price.3 At times, the costs and
risks of trying to shift the balance of power are too great, forcing great powers to wait for more favorable circumstances. But the desire for
more power does not go away, unless a state achieves the ultimate goal of hegemony. Since
no state is likely to achieve global
hegemony, however, the world is condemned to perpetual great-power competition . This unrelenting pursuit of
power means that great powers are inclined to look for opportunities to alter the distribution of world power
in their favor. They will seize these opportunities if they have the necessary capability . Simply put, great
powers are primed for offense. But not only does a great power seek to gain power at the expense of other states, it also tries to
thwart rivals bent on gaining power at its expense. Thus, a great power will defend the balance of power when looming
change favors another state, and it will try to undermine the balance when the direction of change is in
its own favor. Why do great powers behave this way? My answer is that the structure of the international
system forces states which seek only to be secure nonetheless to act aggressively toward each other .
Three features of the international system combine to cause states to fear one another: 1) the absence of a central authority
that sits above states and can protect them from each other , 2) the fact that states always have some
offensive military capability, and 3) the fact that states can never be certain about other states'
intentions. Given this fear—which can never be wholly eliminated—states recognize that the more powerful they are
relative to their rivals, the better their chances of survival . Indeed, the best guarantee of survival is to be a
hegemon, because no other state can seriously threaten such a mighty power. This situation, which no one consciously
designed or intended, is genuinely tragic . Great powers that have no reason to fight each other —that are
merely concerned with their own survival— nevertheless have little choice but to pursue power and to seek to
dominate the other states in the system . This dilemma is captured in brutally frank comments that Prussian statesman Otto von
Bismarck made during the early 1860s, when it appeared that Poland, which was not an independent state at the time, might regain its
sovereignty. "Restoring the Kingdom of Poland in any shape or form is tantamount to creating an ally for any enemy that chooses to attack us,"
he believed, and therefore he advocated that Prussia should "smash those Poles till, losing all hope, they lie down
and die; I have every sympathy for their situation, but if we wish to survive we have no choice but to
wipe them out."4 Although it is depressing to realize that great powers might think and act this way, it behooves us to see the
world as it is, not as we would like it to be . For example, one of the key foreign policy issues facing the United States is the
question of how China will behave if its rapid economic growth continues and effectively turns China into a giant Hong Kong. Many
Americans believe that if China is democratic and enmeshed in the global capitalist system, it will not act
aggressively; instead it will be content with the status quo in Northeast Asia . According to this logic, the United
States should engage China in order to promote the latter's integration into the world economy, a policy that also seeks to encourage China's
transition to democracy. If engagement succeeds, the United States can work with a wealthy and democratic China to promote peace around
the globe. Unfortunately, a policy of engagement is doomed to fail. If China becomes an economic
powerhouse it will almost certainly translate its economic might into military might and make a run at
dominating Northeast Asia. Whether China is democratic and deeply enmeshed in the global economy or
autocratic and autarkic will have little effect on its behavior , because democracies care about security as
much as non-democracies do, and hegemony is the best way for any state to guarantee its own survival . Of
course, neither its neighbors nor the United States would stand idly by while China gained increasing increments of power. Instead, they would
seek to contain China, probably by trying to form a balancing coalition. The
result would be an intense security competition
between China and its rivals, with the ever-present danger of great-power war hanging over them. In
short, China and the United States are destined to be adversaries as China's power grows.
1ar
 1ar – Framework
Our Pedagogical benefits outweigh – Scenario Analysis generates the tools we need to
produce relevant research, ideas, and combat cognitive biases – Our Epistemology is
just and we have a better internal link to Critical Thinking and Educational outcomes
Barma et al. 15| NAAZNEEN H. BARMA Naval Postgraduate School BRENT DURBIN Smith College ERIC
LORBER Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher AND RACHEL E. WHITLARK Belfer Center, Harvard Kennedy School of
Government “International Studies Perspectives Advance Access published November 6, 2015 -
“Imagine a World in Which”: Using Scenarios in Political Science1”
(http://www.naazneenbarma.com/uploads/2/9/6/9/29695681/using_scenarios_in_political_science_isp
_2015.pdf) ABaez

The scenario analysis workshop experience helps participants become better scholars by acquiring a tool to
generate fresh, policy-relevant research ideas and produce research on that basis. NEFPC also offers participants the
opportunity to cement professional skills and connect to a network of like-minded peers. It thus offers a number of important assets for scholars who hope to work at the nexus of

the scenario-based approach develops students’ ability to

international relations scholarship and policy relevance. In the first instance,

identify interesting questions by encouraging them to think creatively about what the world may look
like in a few years and asking what we would need and want to know about that world. In turn, the NEFPC
experience teaches them how to narrow down significant insights into researchable questions. For example, if the scenario world we discuss is one

populated by a growing number of autocratic regimes that learn from each other, participants might
ask how—and under what conditions—autocratic regimes have learned historically as a way to shed
light on an issue that might become relevant in the near future. This question is interesting to the policy community, researchable from
a practical perspective, speaks to an important debate in the international relations literature, and could easily serve as the basis for a journal article or a dissertation. Conversations like those

Few doctoral students begin

facilitated at NEFPC are important given that it is not self-evident what makes for an acceptable and feasible research question in political science.

their studies with inherent knowledge concerning the requisite breadth and depth of scholarly
projects. Rather, students learn through exposure to the norms and conventions of the discipline.
Exploring substantive topics and ways to analyze them in this experiential setting allows junior
scholars to learn from one another, with the guidance of a handful of more seasoned academics, and
to develop new analytical and research skills. NEFPC thus openly introduces another layer of disciplinary socialization through a process we view as
complementary to the core training received by students in their coursework and home departments. Consequently, we do not compare the success of this

program to other types of training but rather view it as yet another way to help young scholars
produce rigorous, policy-relevant scholarship. Second, the scenario-based approach helps facilitate the
production of scholarship by assembling conference panel proposals that explore some of the
research questions developed during the workshop and by inspiring graduate students to develop tangible
research ideas they can turn into publications. Over the past ten years, NEFPC alumni have successfully proposed and presented about twenty ISA
panels, with a total of more than seventy papers. Many of these papers have been well-received,18 and graduate students and junior faculty have published articles with both academic and
policy relevance based on the ideas developed at the workshop (Barma, Ratner, and Weber 2007, 2013; Barma and Whitlark 2013; Bleek and Lorber 2014; Feaver and Lorber 2014). By guiding
participants through a process for generating researchable ideas and turning those ideas into conference papers, pieces of dissertations, and possible publications, NEFPC helps prepare these
young scholars for their careers as professional political scientists. Third, some of the ideas developed at NEFPC and refined through the academic publication process have been transmitted to
policymakers. A core theme that emerged at the first workshop, for example, was the increasing power and interconnectivity of the emerging economies in the non-Western world. Building on
that insight, three NEFPC founders wrote two policy-oriented pieces on what they dubbed the “World Without the West” in The National Interest (Barma, Ratner, and Weber 2007, 2013),
which attracted attention in policy circles 18For example, Seva Gunitsky, a 2009 NEFPC alumnus, received Honorable Mention for the Carl Beck Award at the 2010 ISA annual meeting for his
paper on power transitions and normative change. The award is presented to the best paper authored by a graduate student at the annual meeting. 12 “Imagine a World in Which”: Using
Scenarios in Political Science (National Intelligence Council 2008).19 They also worked with other colleagues to produce an empirical investigation of the concept that appeared in a peer-
reviewed scholarly journal (Barma et al. 2009). Another participant developed a workshop-inspired project on the difficulty of unwinding economic sanctions and the challenges this poses for
the successful use of coercive diplomacy. He co-authored an article on the subject (Feaver and Lorber 2014) and then presented his work to former NEFPC participants working in government
during the Obama Administration’s Fall 2014 push toward an interim agreement on Iran’s nuclear program. A number of workshop alumni have held senior positions in the national security
decision-making apparatus, serving for example on the National Security Council as Deputy National Security Advisors and as staff on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Others hold
senior positions at major foreign policy think tanks. Through the NEFPC network, participants are able to disseminate their ideas directly to these policymakers. Fourth, NEFPC builds a network
of political scientists interested in policy-relevant issues. Many of the graduate students and young faculty who participate in the workshop have interests in similar topics. Bringing together
these junior scholars early in their careers provides them with the opportunity to know, learn from, and work with others who will be their colleagues throughout their careers, including
important connections with more senior scholars. The network has already produced collaboration in many areas, as indicated by several of the research projects and publications mentioned
above. In addition, as part of this network, participants engage with like-minded scholars who believe in the role that academics have to play in informing foreign policy decision making.
Although in some political science departments today discussing this goal openly is taboo—especially for a doctoral candidate or untenured scholar—NEFPC and Bridging the Gap support,
encourage, and embrace it. This network expands overseas as well. A related Bridging the Gap project employing scenarios, the New Era International workshop, took place in December 2013
at the Singapore Management University. Over two days, seventeen scholars and policy analysts from across Asia used a focused set of scenarios to explore the provision of public goods in
Southeast Asia, with a particular emphasis on the respective roles played by the United States, China, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN. The three scenarios for this
workshop posited different power trajectories for each of these actors. Through our discussion and comparison across these possible futures, we considered how the regional provision of two
types of public goods—infectious disease prevention and energy governance—could develop, and who might be positioned to positively influence this evolution. While the research outputs

given the significant

from this workshop are still developing, participants expressed great enthusiasm for the scenario process and the insights it provided. Fifth,

amount of interest among major grant organizations for projects that pursue policy-relevant research,
NEFPC helps to position participants with an increased chance of receiving external support, an important

criterion and metric for success in academia . Over the past few years, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Stanton Foundation, the Carnegie
Corporation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Minerva Research Initiative, among others, have given millions of dollars to projects that utilize political science methods to explore policy-
relevant topics—and numerous workshop alumni have competed successfully for these funding sources. 19The National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends 2025 report included a scenario

entitled “A World without the West” (National Intelligence Council 2008). NAAZNEEN H. BARMA ET AL. 13 Teaching with Scenarios The observed benefits of scenario analysis
for scholarly research are echoed in many ways by its use in teaching.20 The method is extremely flexible because instructors can
tailor both the content of the scenarios and the analytical process to accomplish learning objectives
across many different types of curricula. And while the scenario process described above was designed specifically for international relations and foreign
policy analysis within the discipline of political science, the model is certainly applicable elsewhere, including in other fields of

social science. Here, we consider the possible uses of scenarios for teaching at the doctoral, master’s, and undergraduate levels. Doctoral We have already highlighted some of the
pedagogical benefits of scenario analysis for doctoral students. Not only can this approach help students identify new and interesting research topics, it can also provide an

opportunity to consider how the conceptual and theoretical frameworks of their discipline interact
with real-world problems and policies. For students early in their doctoral programs, scenarios that cover a broad range of issues—such as those presented
above—might be most helpful for identifying new research agendas and even dissertation topics. Indeed, several NEFPC participants have noted the value of the workshop for “road testing”
the theories covered in their international relations and comparative politics field seminars. A one- or two-week scenario exercise would be a valuable addition to many such courses, both as a
way to apply and contrast elements of the existing literature and as an opportunity to identify interesting topics requiring further exploration. For later stage candidates, the process could be
helpful for finding a new project beyond one’s dissertation. In courses with a narrower focus, scenarios could be written to provide analytical leverage on the politics of a specific region, topic,
or set of actors. Consider, for example, the debate over nuclear proliferation in international relations. Scholars such as Kenneth Waltz have argued that proliferation can make conflict less
likely by increasing the number of states with strong deterrent capabilities (Sagan and Waltz 2003). Others disagree. Scott Sagan, for example, has noted that the conditions for stable
deterrence—including symmetrical nuclear forces and second-strike capabilities, and the ability to avoid accidental war—are difficult if not impossible to achieve in most contexts (Sagan and

Waltz 2003). Scenarios can be employed to understand better the nuances and implications of this debate.
Students might, for example, examine these arguments through a set of scenario futures that describe different outcomes in the Pakistan–India relationship, including nuclear conflict,

Through the process of “deepening” the scenarios, students would be challenged

conventional conflict, and no conflict.

to identify different causal pathways that might lead to each outcome, as well as which factors seem
most and least influential. Such an approach would provide an opportunity to consider different
methods for studying the topic, such as the identification of necessary and sufficient conditions for
obtaining a certain result. This effort would also require students to apply their empirical knowledge of nuclear force structures and regional dynamics to a more general
theoretical debate. A similar approach could be used to explore varied futures relating to development trajectories, regional integration dynamics, the politics of energy and natural resources,
or almost any other topic of interest to scholars of international relations, comparative politics, or other social science subfields. 20Note the distinction between our use of the term scenario
and that employed in many ethics courses, in which students are asked how they would respond to a narrowly defined hypothetical situation or dilemma (cf. Weber 1992; Wielhouwer 2004).

14 “Imagine a World in Which”: Using Scenarios in Political Science In addition, exposure to a variety of pedagogical techniques in a Ph.D. program
can help students when they become teachers themselves . On the job market, students will be asked to
demonstrate that they are prepared to bring innovative and effective techniques into their own
classrooms. Scenario analysis is thus a useful addition to a student’s teaching toolbox. Master Scenario analysis is an
especially useful tool for instructors in public policy, public administration, and other professionally focused master’s programs. These programs place a heavy

emphasis on connecting theory to practice, and have long employed case studies, role-playing
exercises, and other hands-on techniques for training their students. Scenarios provide another way
for professional students to develop their analytical and practical skills through problem-based
learning. In addition to the intellectual benefits described in the sections above, the scenario process can give master’s students a chance to
serve as facilitators, rapporteurs, and discussion leaders, depending on the instructor’s objectives for
the course. Scenario exercises can also couple well with various communication assignments—such as
policy memoranda, briefing books, and formal presentations— that are well suited to the professional goals of master’s-level students.
Given the increasing use of scenarios throughout the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, such training will also be appealing to a wide range of employers. Undergraduate Using scenarios in
undergraduate courses presents a unique set of challenges and rewards. Most undergraduate students are neither looking to start major research projects nor seeking to develop a specific set
of skills for professional policy work. Moreover, undergraduates often do not have the requisite breadth of conceptual and historical knowledge to develop a full understanding of complex

scenarios and their implications. The goals and methods of an undergraduate scenario exercise will likely be different from those at the graduate level. Even so, scenarios can be
a very valuable tool in the college-level classroom. For example, scenario analysis can be used to ask “what
comes next?” at the conclusion of survey courses in international relations and US foreign policy. In such classes, students are often particularly
susceptible to believing that the world will continue to evolve along current trend lines— e.g., that nonstate
actors will be increasingly important in international affairs, or that the US–China relationship will define global politics in the twenty-first century. Well-crafted scenarios

propose alternative dynamics that force students to question their assumptions, ideally by bringing
related course content into their analyses. Importantly, a basic scenario exercise does not require the detailed logistics or infrastructure (formal templates,
guided breakout sessions, etc.) employed at the workshop described above. Rather, an instructor can try out the approach by following three basic steps: first, write up a set of one to three

scenarios describing different possible futures; second, give students time to consider and discuss
one-page

these in small groups, either during or outside of class; and, third, facilitate a discussion of interesting
questions and observations that the scenarios raise, including cross-fertilization across different
scenarios. With experience, the technique can then be adapted to be more complex and to meet additional
learning objectives. Finally, a growing body of research finds that students learn best in a diverse and active learning
environment (Brown and King 2000; Burch 2000; Asal 2005; Glasgow 2012). The scenario approach adds another lens through
which to analyze complicated political dynamics in a fun, interactive, and experiential way. Scenarios also
accord well with the “flipped classroom,” in which students learn facts and concepts outside the classroom—such as through recorded lectures or NAAZNEEN H. BARMA ET AL. 15 podcasts—

the “Power to the People” scenario described above could be used to

and then apply these critically during class. For example,

address readings or other preparation on social movements, democratization, specific regional

dynamics, or a host of related topics. In this way, scenario analysis may be most fruitful in the
undergraduate classroom when it is used to explore and test material that has already been covered,
rather than to introduce new material. Conclusion Crucial dimensions of bridging the gap between international affairs scholarship and policymaking include
the production of substantive, policy-relevant research programs and the equipping of a new generation of political science students with the skills to connect theory to practice. This article

scenario analysis is a valuable experiential and problem-based technique for the political
has made the case that

science discipline, bringing both scholarly and pedagogical benefits. Because scenarios can aid political scientists in imagining plausible
alternative worlds in the future, applying this technique to contemporary international affairs offers a structured, comparative process for generating research agendas on otherwise

overlooked and crucial issues. In addition, because this analytical exercise encourages identifying these issues now—well
before decision makers are likely to confront them—it enables political scientists to begin pursuing
the necessary research to provide policymakers with empirically robust and useful answers to
important policy questions that will become significant down the road. One aim in deploying the process we have described here
is to accelerate innovation in policy-relevant political science scholarship by shifting mental maps and thereby illuminating new and essential areas of inquiry. Scenario analysis

can be an invaluable aid to scholars in asking questions that are not being asked in policy circles,
building middle-range theory to propose answers to those questions, and then communicating the
answers to decision makers in ways they can use. Intended to complement traditional methods of political science training, the New Era Foreign
Policy Conference aims to equip an emerging cohort of graduate students and junior scholars with the tools to incorporate the kind of thinking that scenarios provoke as a central ingredient of
their scholarship. This undertaking is hence a two-sided statement about bridging the gap. It embraces the value of immersion in contemporary international affairs to the political science

in the belief that policy relevant research contributes to the overall diversity of the field without
discipline,

diluting its epistemological commitments. It also takes seriously the goal of policy relevance as one
important metric of the quality of scholarship, in the belief that political scientists are well placed to
inform and enliven public debate. For, in the end, we at Bridging the Gap feel that it is the collective responsibility of our discipline to engage with and contribute
to the public sphere. Scenarios and the workshop model described here provide one avenue to that end.
 1ar-at: reps 1st

There no prior question – empirics should be a sufficient analytic

Owen 2002(David Owen is a professor of Political Theory @ University of Southhampton, "Re-
orienting International Relations: On Pragmatism, Pluralism and Practical Reasoning," Millennium -
Journal of International Studies)

Commenting on the ‘philosophical turn’ in IR, Wæver remarks that ‘[a] frenzy for words like
“epistemology” and “ontology” often signals this philosophical turn’, although he goes on to comment
that these terms are often used loosely.4 However, loosely deployed or not, it is clear that debates
concerning ontology and epistemology play a central role in the contemporary IR theory wars. In one
respect, this is unsurprising since it is a characteristic feature of the social sciences that periods of
disciplinary disorientation involve recourse to reflection on the philosophical commitments of different
theoretical approaches, and there is no doubt that such reflection can play a valuable role in making
explicit the commitments that characterise (and help individuate) diverse theoretical positions. Yet, such
a philosophical turn is not without its dangers and I will briefly mention three before turning to consider a
confusion that has, I will suggest, helped to promote the IR theory wars by motivating this philosophical
turn. The first danger with the philosophical turn is that it has an inbuilt tendency to prioritise issues of
ontology and epistemology over explanatory and/or interpretive power as if the latter two were merely a
simple function of the former. But while the explanatory and/or interpretive power of a theoretical account
is not wholly independent of its ontological and/or epistemological commitments (otherwise criticism of
these features would not be a criticism that had any value), it is by no means clear that it is, in contrast,
wholly dependent on these philosophical commitments. Thus, for example, one need not be sympathetic
to rational choice theory to recognise that it can provide powerful accounts of certain kinds of problems,
such as the tragedy of the commons in which dilemmas of collective action are foregrounded. It may, of
course, be the case that the advocates of rational choice theory cannot give a good account of why this
type of theory is powerful in accounting for this class of problems (i.e., how it is that the relevant actors
come to exhibit features in these circumstances that approximate the assumptions of rational choice
theory) and, if this is the case, it is a philosophical weakness—but this does not undermine the point that,
for a certain class of problems, rational choice theory may provide the best account available to us. In other
words, while the critical judgement of theoretical accounts in terms of their ontological and/or
epistemological sophistication is one kind of critical judgement, it is not the only or even necessarily the
most important kind. The second danger run by the philosophical turn is that because prioritisation of
ontology and epistemology promotes theory-construction from philosophical first principles, it cultivates a
theory-driven rather than problem-driven approach to IR. Paraphrasing Ian Shapiro, the point can be put like
this: since it is the case that there is always a plurality of possible true descriptions of a given action, event
or phenomenon, the challenge is to decide which is the most apt in terms of getting a perspicuous grip on
the action, event or phenomenon in question given the purposes of the inquiry; yet, from this standpoint,
‘theory-driven work is part of a reductionist program’ in that it ‘dictates always opting for the description
that calls for the explanation that flows from the preferred model or theory’.5 The justification offered for
this strategy rests on the mistaken belief that it is necessary for social science because general
explanations are required to characterise the classes of phenomena studied in similar terms. However, as
Shapiro points out, this is to misunderstand the enterprise of science since ‘whether there are general
explanations for classes of phenomena is a question for social-scientific inquiry, not to be prejudged before
conducting that inquiry’.6 Moreover, this strategy easily slips into the promotion of the pursuit of
generality over that of empirical validity. The third danger is that the preceding two combine to encourage
the formation of a particular image of disciplinary debate in IR—what might be called (only slightly
tongue in cheek) ‘the Highlander view’—namely, an image of warring theoretical approaches with each,
despite occasional temporary tactical alliances, dedicated to the strategic achievement of sovereignty over
the disciplinary field. It encourages this view because the turn to, and prioritisation of, ontology and
epistemology stimulates the idea that there can only be one theoretical approach which gets things right ,
namely, the theoretical approach that gets its ontology and epistemology right. This image feeds back into
IR exacerbating the first and second dangers, and so a potentially vicious circle arises.
 1ar- realism inevitable
Great powers will always securitize against each other
Mearsheimer 01 (John Joseph is an American political scientist. He is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service
Professor at the University of Chicago. 2001. “Chapter Two: Anarchy and the Struggle for Power”. The Tragedy of Great Power
Politics. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.)

State Behavior Great powers fear each other. They regard each other with suspicion, and they worry
that war might be in the offing. They anticipate danger. There is little room for trust among states. For
sure, the level of fear varies across time and space, but it cannot be reduced to a trivial level. From the
perspective of any one great power, all other great powers are potential enemies. This point is
illustrated by the reaction of the United Kingdom and France to German reunification at the end of the
Cold War. Despite the fact that these three states had been close allies for almost forty-five years, both
the United Kingdom and France immediately began worrying about the potential dangers of a united
Germany.10 The basis of this fear is that in a world where great powers have the capability to attack
each other and might have the motive to do so, any state bent on survival must be at least suspicious of
other states and reluctant to trust them. Add to this the "911" problem—the absence of a central
authority to which a threatened state can turn for help—and states have even greater incentive to fear
each other. Moreover, there is no mechanism, other than the possible self-interest of third parties, for
punishing an aggressor. Because it is sometimes difficult to deter potential aggressors, states have
ample reason not to trust other states and to be prepared for war with them. The possible
consequences of falling victim to aggression further amplify the importance of fear as a motivating force
in world politics. Great powers do not compete with each other as if international politics were merely
an economic marketplace. Political competition among states is a much more dangerous business than
mere economic intercourse; the former can lead to war, and war often means mass killing on the
battlefield as well as mass murder of civilians. In extreme cases, war can even lead to the destruction of
states. The horrible consequences of war sometimes cause states to view each other not just as
competitors, but as potentially deadly enemies. Political antagonism, in short, tends to be intense,
because the stakes are great. States in the international system also aim to guarantee their own survival.
Because other states are potential threats, and because there is no higher authority to come to their
rescue when they dial 911, states cannot depend on others for their own security. Each state tends to
see itself as vulnerable and alone, and therefore it aims to provide for its own survival. In international
politics, God helps those who help themselves. This emphasis on self-help does not preclude states from
forming alliances.11 But alliances are only temporary marriages of convenience: today's alliance partner
might be tomorrow's enemy, and today's enemy might be tomorrow's alliance partner. For example, the
United States fought with China and the Soviet Union against Germany and Japan in World War II, but
soon thereafter flip-flopped enemies and partners and allied with West Germany and Japan against
China and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. States operating in a self-help world almost always act
according to their own self-interest and do not subordinate their interests to the interests of other
states, or to the interests of the so-called international community. The reason is simple: it pays to be
selfish in a self-help world. This is true in the short term as well as in the long term, because if a state
loses in the short run, it might not be around for the long haul. Apprehensive about the ultimate
intentions of other states, and aware that they operate in a self-help system, states quickly understand
that the best way to ensure their survival is to be the most powerful state in the system. The stronger a
state is relative to its potential rivals, the less likely it is that any of those rivals will attack it and threaten
its survival. Weaker states will be reluctant to pick fights with more powerful states because the weaker
states are likely to suffer military defeat. Indeed, the bigger the gap in power between any two states,
the less likely it is that the weaker will attack the stronger. Neither Canada nor Mexico, for example,
would countenance attacking the United States, which is far more powerful than its neighbors. The ideal
situation is to be the hegemon in the system. As Immanuel Kant said, "It is the desire of every state, or
of its ruler, to arrive at a condition of perpetual peace by conquering the whole world, if that were
possible."12 Survival would then be almost guaranteed.13 Consequently, states pay close attention to
how power is distributed among them, and they make a special effort to maximize their share of world
power. Specifically, they look for opportunities to alter the balance of power by acquiring additional
increments of power at the expense of potential rivals. States employ a variety of means—economic,
diplomatic, and military—to shift the balance of power in their favor, even if doing so makes other
states suspicious or even hostile. Because one state's gain in power is another state's loss, great powers
tend to have a zero-sum mentality when dealing with each other. The trick, of course, is to be the
winner in this competition and to dominate the other states in the system. Thus, the claim that states
maximize relative power is tantamount to arguing that states are disposed to think offensively toward
other states, even though their ultimate motive is simply to survive. In short, great powers have
aggressive intentions.14 Even when a great power achieves a distinct military advantage over its rivals, it
continues looking for chances to gain more power. The pursuit of power stops only when hegemony is
achieved. The idea that a great power might feel secure without dominating the system, provided it has
an "appropriate amount" of power, is not persuasive, for two reasons.15 First, it is difficult to assess
how much relative power one state must have over its rivals before it is secure. Is twice as much power
an appropriate threshold? Or is three times as much power the magic number? The root of the problem
is that power calculations alone do not determine which side wins a war. Clever strategies, for example,
sometimes allow less powerful states to defeat more powerful foes. Second, determining how much
power is enough becomes even more complicated when great powers contemplate how power will be
distributed among them ten or twenty years down the road. The capabilities of individual states vary
over time, sometimes markedly, and it is often difficult to predict the direction and scope of change in
the balance of power. Remember, few in the West anticipated the collapse of the Soviet Union before it
happened. In fact, during the first half of the Cold War, many in the West feared that the Soviet
economy would eventually generate greater wealth than the American economy, which would cause a
marked power shift against the United States and its allies. What the future holds for China and Russia
and what the balance of power will look like in 2020 is difficult to foresee. Given the difficulty of
determining how much power is enough for today and tomorrow, great powers recognize that the best
way to ensure their security is to achieve hegemony now, thus eliminating any possibility of a challenge
by another great power. Only a misguided state would pass up an opportunity to be the hegemon in the
system because it thought it already had sufficient power to survive.16 But even if a great power does
not have the wherewithal to achieve hegemony (and that is usually the case), it will still act offensively
to amass as much power as it can, because states are almost always better off with more rather than
less power. In short, states do not become status quo powers until they completely dominate the
system. All states are influenced by this logic, which means that not only do they look for opportunities
to take advantage of one another, they also work to ensure that other states do not take advantage of
them. After all, rival states are driven by the same logic, and most states are likely to recognize their own
motives at play in the actions of other states. In short, states ultimately pay attention to defense as well
as offense. They think about conquest themselves, and they work to check aggressor states from gaining
power at their expense. This inexorably leads to a world of constant security competition, where states
are willing to lie, cheat, and use brute force if it helps them gain advantage over their rivals. Peace, if
one defines that concept as a state of tranquility or mutual concord, is not likely to break out in this
world. The "security dilemma," which is one of the most well-known concepts in the international
relations literature, reflects the basic logic of offensive realism. The essence of the dilemma is that the
measures a state takes to increase its own security usually decrease the security of other states. Thus, it
is difficult for a state to increase its own chances of survival without threatening the survival of other
states. John Herz first introduced the security dilemma in a 1950 article in the journal World Politics.11
After discussing the anarchic nature of international politics, he writes, "Striving to attain security
from . . . attack, [states] are driven to acquire more and more power in order to escape the impact of the
power of others. This, in turn, renders the others more insecure and compels them to prepare for the
worst. Since none can ever feel entirely secure in such a world of competing units, power competition
ensues, and the vicious circle of security and power accumulation is on."18 The implication of Herz's
analysis is clear: the best way for a state to survive in anarchy is to take advantage of other states and
gain power at their expense. The best defense is a good offense. Since this message is widely
understood, ceaseless security competition ensues. Unfortunately, little can be done to ameliorate the
security dilemma as long as states operate in anarchy.
 1ar- realism good

Realism results in collaborative efforts toward world peace

Mearsheimer 01 (John Joseph is an American political scientist. He is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service
Professor at the University of Chicago. 2001. “Chapter One: Introduction”. The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. New York: W.W.
Norton & Company.)

The claim is sometimes made that great powers can transcend realist logic by working together to build
an international order that fosters peace and justice. World peace, it would appear, can only enhance a
state's prosperity and security. America's political leaders paid considerable lip service to this line of
argument over the course of the twentieth century. President Clinton, for example, told an audience at
the United Nations in September 1993 that "at the birth of this organization 48 years ago . . . a
generation of gifted leaders from many nations stepped forward to organize the world's efforts on
behalf of security and prosperity. . . . Now history has granted to us a moment of even greater
opportunity. . . . Let us resolve that we will dream larger. . . . Let us ensure that the world we pass to our
children is healthier, safer and more abundant than the one we inhabit today."44 This rhetoric
notwithstanding, great powers do not work together to promote world order for its own sake. Instead,
each seeks to maximize its own share of world power, which is likely to clash with the goal of creating
and sustaining stable international orders.45 This is not to say that great powers never aim to prevent
wars and keep the peace. On the contrary, they work hard to deter wars in which they would be the
likely victim. In such cases, however, state behavior is driven largely by narrow calculations about
relative power, not by a commitment to build a world order independent of a state's own interests. The
United States, for example, devoted enormous resources to deterring the Soviet Union from starting a
war in Europe during the Cold War, not because of some deep-seated commitment to promoting peace
around the world, but because American leaders feared that a Soviet victory would lead to a dangerous
shift in the balance of power.46 The particular international order that obtains at any time is mainly a
by-product of the self-interested behavior of the system's great powers. The configuration of the
system, in other words, is the unintended consequence of great-power security competition, not the
result of states acting together to organize peace. The establishment of the Cold War order in Europe
illustrates this point. Neither the Soviet Union nor the United States intended to establish it, nor did they
work together to create it. In fact, each superpower worked hard in the early years of the Cold War to
gain power at the expense of the other, while preventing the other from doing likewise.47 The system
that emerged in Europe in the aftermath of World War I1 was the unplanned consequence of intense
security competition between the superpowers.

IR Realism causes powers to act more defensively in fear of other powers

Mearsheimer 01 (John Joseph is an American political scientist. He is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service
Professor at the University of Chicago. 2001. “Chapter Two: Anarchy and the Struggle for Power”. The Tragedy of Great Power
Politics. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.)

Calculated Aggression There is obviously little room for status quo powers in a world where states are
inclined to look for opportunities to gain more power . Nevertheless, great powers cannot always act on
their offensive intentions, because behavior is influenced not only by what states want, but also by their
capacity to realize these desires. Every state might want to be king of the hill, but not every state has the
wherewithal to compete for that lofty position, much less achieve it. Much depends on how military
might is distributed among the great powers. A great power that has a marked power advantage over its
rivals is likely to behave more aggressively, because it has the capability as well as the incentive to do so.
By contrast, great powers facing powerful opponents will be less inclined to consider offensive action
and more concerned with defending the existing balance of power from threats by their more powerful
opponents. Let there be an opportunity for those weaker states to revise the balance in their own favor,
however, and they will take advantage of it. Stalin put the point well at the end of World War II:
"Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise."22 States might
also have the capability to gain advantage over a rival power but nevertheless decide that the perceived
costs of offense are too high and do not justify the expected benefits. In short, great powers are not
mindless aggressors so bent on gaining power that they charge headlong into losing wars or pursue
Pyrrhic victories. On the contrary, before great powers take offensive actions, they think carefully about
the balance of power and about how other states will react to their moves. They weigh the costs and
risks of offense against the likely benefits. If the benefits do not outweigh the risks, they sit tight and
wait for a more propitious moment. Nor do states start arms races that are unlikely to improve their
overall position. As discussed at greater length in Chapter 3, states sometimes limit defense spending
either because spending more would bring no strategic advantage or because spending more would
weaken the economy and undermine the state's power in the long run.23 To paraphrase Clint Eastwood,
a state has to know its limitations to survive in the international system. Nevertheless, great powers
miscalculate from time to time because they invariably make important decisions on the basis of
imperfect information. States hardly ever have complete information about any situation they confront.
There are two dimensions to this problem. Potential adversaries have incentives to misrepresent their
own strength or weakness, and to conceal their true aims.24 For example, a weaker state trying to deter
a stronger state is likely to exaggerate its own power to discourage the potential aggressor from
attacking. On the other hand, a state bent on aggression is likely to emphasize its peaceful goals while
exaggerating its military weakness, so that the potential victim does not build up its own arms and thus
leaves itself vulnerable to attack. Probably no national leader was better at practicing this kind of
deception than Adolf Hitler. But even if disinformation was not a problem, great powers are often
unsure about how their own military forces, as well as the adversary's, will perform on the battlefield.
For example, it is sometimes difficult to determine in advance how new weapons and untested combat
units will perform in the face of enemy fire. Peacetime maneuvers and war games are helpful but
imperfect indicators of what is likely to happen in actual combat. Fighting wars is a complicated business
in which it is often difficult to predict outcomes. Remember that although the United States and its allies
scored a stunning and remarkably easy victory against Iraq in early 1991, most experts at the time
believed that Iraq's military would be a formidable foe arid put up stubborn resistance before finally
succumbing to American military might.25 Great powers are also sometimes unsure about the resolve of
opposing states as well as allies. For example, Germany believed that if it went to war against France
and Russia in the summer of 1914, the United Kingdom would probably stay out of the fight. Saddam
Hussein expected the United States to stand aside when he invaded Kuwait in August 1990. Both
aggressors guessed wrong, but each had good reason to think that its initial judgment was correct. In
the 1930s, Adolf Hitler believed that his great-power rivals would be easy to exploit and isolate because
each had little interest in fighting Germany and instead was determined to get someone else to assume
that burden. He guessed right. In short, great powers constantly find themselves confronting situations
in which they have to make important decisions with incomplete information. Not surprisingly, they
sometimes make faulty judgments and end up doing themselves serious harm. Some defensive realists
go so far as to suggest that the constraints of the international system are so powerful that offense
rarely succeeds, and that aggressive great powers invariably end up being punished.26 As noted, they
emphasize that 1) threatened states balance against aggressors and ultimately crush them, and 2) there
is an offense-defense balance that is usually heavily tilted toward the defense, thus making conquest
especially difficult. Great powers, therefore, should be content with the existing balance of power and
not try to change it by force. After all, it makes little sense for a state to initiate a war that it is likely to
lose; that would be self-defeating behavior. It is better to concentrate instead on preserving the balance
of power.27 Moreover, because aggressors seldom succeed, states should understand that security is
abundant, and thus there is no good strategic reason for wanting more power in the first place. In a
world where conquest seldom pays, states should have relatively benign intentions toward each other.
If they do not, these defensive realists argue, the reason is probably poisonous domestic politics, not
smart calculations about how to guarantee one's security in an anarchic world. There is no question that
systemic factors constrain aggression, especially balancing by threatened states. But defensive realists
exaggerate those restraining forces.28 Indeed, the historical record provides little support for their claim
that offense rarely succeeds. One study estimates that there were 63 wars between 1815 and 1980, and
the initiator won 39 times, which translates into about a 60 percent success rate. 29 Turning to specific
cases, Otto von Bismarck unified Germany by winning military victories against Denmark in 1864, Austria
in 1866, and France in 1870, and the United States as we know it today was created in good part by
conquest in the nineteenth century. Conquest certainly paid big dividends in these cases. Nazi Germany
won wars against Poland in 1939 and France in 1940, but lost to the Soviet Union between 1941 and
1945. Conquest ultimately did not pay for the Third Reich, but if Hitler had restrained himself after the
fall of France and had not invaded the Soviet Union, conquest probably would have paid handsomely for
the Nazis. In short, the historical record shows that offense sometimes succeeds and sometimes does
not. The trick for a sophisticated power maximizer is to figure out when to raise and when to fold.30