Security Kritik - SDI 2019

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The affirmative maintains a politics of American exceptionalism by constructing
China as a threat to the American led global order – their politics cement China as
an uncivilized Other and create the possibility for all forms of Imperial domination
Turner ’16 – Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh
Oliver Turner, “China, India and the US Rebalance to the Asia Pacific: The Geopolitics of Rising
Identities,” Geopolitics 21, no. 4 (2016): 922-944. Taylor and Francis.
Throughout US history, American expansionism has been less a policy than a mode of being. Nation-states have
consistently exhibited expansionist tendencies, particularly those with the most land and resources. However, brought into existence not
by a people of common race or religion but by disparate groups from all over the world, the US has
arguably to a unique extent always been forced to bind itself according to a set of defining ideals and
values, such as democracy, freedom, and liberty and, crucially, by the knowledge that these values are
universal.22 “Only in a country where it is so unclear what is American do people worry so much about
the threat of things ‘un-American’.” 23 Thus, the U nited S tates was born a ‘ redeemer nation’ , with an
inherent duty to export its identity for the global good. 24 From the base of 13 originally colonies on the eastern
seaboard, Thomas Jefferson’s ‘Empire of Liberty’ was expected to civilise the continent: “Where this progress will stop no-one can say.
Barbarism . . . will in time, I trust, disappear from the Earth”. 25 It could be argued that this remains an especially powerful
and persuasive myth within the United States today because, unlike the imperial powers of Europe in
particular, the US quickly gained its own North American empire and never lost it.
The barbarism Jefferson had first in mind was of course that of Native Americans , and in its conflicts with them
the US worked to secure and inflate both its physical and ontological boundaries. Assessments of national security , indeed, are
heavily imbued with considerations of identity . “Ontological security is security not of the body but of
the self, the subjective sense of who one is, which enables and motivates action and choice”. 26 Ontological difference
primes an identity to the possibility of aggression, 27 and with the American self defined by powerful ideas and values it
has always correspondingly maintained highly value-driven conceptions of security.
The desire to expand and seize resources was certainly a motivating drive, but the US does not invade every country over which it boasts
superiority. Foreign Others are constructed in such ways as to make the application of American power
contingent upon understandings of who to invade and who not. 28 While it could have captured (and still could capture)
some or all of Canada for example, this was precluded by discursive regulations of mainstream debate.29 Discursive mechanisms can
establish ‘truths’ which dictate the boundaries of political possibility by making it all but impossible to
think beyond them.30 Holland argues that discourses achieve such a controlling effect over foreign policy by becoming conceivable,
resonant, and dominant and nullifying oppositional voices.31 Discourses, indeed, can become naturalised statements of fact,32 or common sense,
a form of knowledge which goes unchallenged from the assumption that it reflects reality.33
Native Americans were no credible threat to US survival, but by their existence as Native Americans and
the largely uncontested ideas by which they were defined, they challenged the core tenets of its identity.
Moreover, they were not passive constructions of an Enlightened American self. The two were co-
constitutive, with the ‘uncivilised’ former active in the (re) affirmation of the more ‘civilised’ latter as it
advanced across the continent. Explains Trachtenberg: “In this ‘progress’, this proof of ‘America’, the profoundest role was reserved
not for the abundance of land but for the fatal presence of the Indian. . . ‘Civilization’ required a ‘savagery’ against which to distinguish itself”.
34
US expeditions beyond its western coastal borders were a “logical outcome of the nation’s march to the Pacific”, 35 with understandings of
potential material gain still functions of a unique interpretive lens. For instance, in 1842 Britain forced China to lift restrictions
on foreign trade and Beijing reluctantly signed an ‘unequal treaty’. Two years later, and despite the US
being founded upon the rhetoric of self-determination and anti-imperialism, Washington secured an
identical agreement. Thus while nineteenth-century China represented an economic opportunity for the United States, that ‘opportunity’
existed in the imagination of the American self, for the American self.36 Japan was similarly opened up in 1854, and when the US occupied the
Philippines from around the turn of the twentieth century Americans’ experiences with Native Americans and Mexicans provided the operational
framework for civilisation to be brought to the ‘uncivilised’ Filipinos.37
While peoples and places are Othered according to understandings about the self however, identity cannot be essentialised to the point where it
identifiably ‘exists’, as positivists and some constructivists suggest.38 The fluidity of discourse has thus allowed the US to
redefine itself over time as (combinations of) ‘White’, ‘Enlightened’, ‘anti-communist’, etc. The
significance of Others as ‘non-White’, ‘exotic’ ‘communist’, etc., have correspondingly evolved.39 During
the early Cold War when the US first embedded itself in East Asia, the Others to which it responded challenged the American self in different
ways than before. As already noted however, the ‘ threats’ were equally manufactured.
The alternative is to interrogate the ontological presumptions at the heart of

security – their approach is a violent ontology of security that promotes otherization
and serial policy failure – our questions should come first – reform fails – it only
considers how to deliver violent American values not whether to in the first place
Spacialising the world in this way encapsulates the continuing “struggle between centralizing states and authoritative centers, on the one hand,
and rebellious margins and dissident cultures, on the other” 70. When China is specifically singled out as a beneficiary of
“the open and rules-based system that the U nited S tates helped to build and works to sustain”, 71 the
responsibility falls on Beijing alone to behave or risk disciplinary measures for appearing rebellious or, in
modern parlance, ‘revisionist’. As such, the US is concerned that China abides by international rules, but those
rules are imaginary constructs made significant or not, and judged to have been complied with or not, according to the
mechanics of presupposition and subject positioning. Rather than from statutes of law, in large part they emerge from
ontological differentiation.
US engagement in the Asia Pacific, and by extension its internationalism, also continues to represent less a
political choice than a mode of being. In a majority of statements it is argued that American values and/or
principles, which Clinton asserts are the United States’ ‘most potent asset’ in the Asia Pacific, even above the military,72 should be
exported for the greater good. Such an understanding remains a common sense statement of fact; the question is never
whether the world benefits from ‘universal’ American values, only how best they are delivered . For
political practice to be legitimised and for additional narratives to be rendered unthinkable, discourses dominate by nullifying
opposition .73 Thus when Ash Carter explains that “we must all decide if we are going to. . . cement our
influence and leadership in the fastest-growing region in the world; or if, instead, we’re going to take ourselves out of
the game”, 74 he shuts down debate over American internationalism by removing all credibility from
the only apparent alternative . Together with representations of the Asia Pacific as an opportunity for the United States in twelve of
the fifteen statements, little space is left for dissent .
Thus in several respects the rebalance represents modern day “proof of ‘America’”, by enhancing its presence in a region which has potential and
with a familiarly unquestioned duty to
is maturing (see Table 2) but which requires indispensable US support. Indeed,
internationalism persists an enduring belief in the moral right to American power and hegemony.
Three quarters of statements refer to the beneficial or benevolent role of the US military in the Asia
Pacific. As tellingly, as constitutive of ideas about US power and purpose China’s military is envisioned as destabilising
in part for being morally illegitimate. This lack of legitimacy is once again a construct of discursive
design.
For example, Clinton observes that “the United States and the international community have watched China’s efforts to modernize and expand its
military, and we have sought clarity as to its intentions”. 75 In doing so she undermines China’s already uncertain relationship with the
international community, but with no defined borders, membership, or qualifications for entry, that community is an imaginative geography par
excellence. The American frontier once represented “the outer edge of the wave – the meeting point between
savagery and civilization”. 76 Now the talk is rarely about “civilization” versus “barbarism” or “savagery”, but that global
binary of inside/outside is embodied in such fantasised institutions as the international community of
which the US is its self-appointed figurehead . Civilisation still requires a savagery against which to
distinguish itself77 and the image of a China which lacks the full standards of civilisation continues
to pervade American politics .78 Rising India, by virtue of its ontologically derived status as a “leader” of the American-led
community,79 affirms the right of the US to its preeminent military position.
This is how the present – the rebalance in its current form – becomes logically possible to the point where anything beyond procedural and
strategic details escapes meaningful debate. Despite broadly cooperative relations, China exists as a strategic Other
of the United States, “a discursive construct from which it cannot escape”. 80 Even at a time of
national budget cuts, the alternative of withdrawing or downsizing the United States’ 75,000-plus
troops in myriad regional bases and other facilities81 is conceived as no alternative at all. As Table 2
shows, then, in the broadest sense the ‘proof’ of America is found in the underlying presupposition that “different” China ,
constructed as a real or potential revisionist, rule-breaker, security threat and so on is a challenge which
ca n only be met by an equally imagined United States as a leader and benevolent promotor of security
and prosperity.
China is neither a paragon of diplomacy or helpless victim of US aggression; its construction of new islands in disputed areas of the South China
Sea for example is disruptive and unnecessarily provocative. Yet American performances of differentiation on which the rebalance relies are
more than functions of China’s physical rise. Familiar rituals of the American self, which establish the ‘truth’ that
China represents an ontological antagonist of the United States and its values predate, and are independent of,
China’s contemporary rise. Like Native Americans, Philippine insurgents, the Cold War Soviet Union, and others, modern-day China
by its very existence as China both challenges and reaffirms the American self in the Asia Pacific and its highly value-driven conceptions of
security.
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Link---Chinese Economy/Trade
Their demonization of Chinese economic practices invokes the rhetorical
construction of the Yellow Peril – they create self-fulfilling prophecy and turn China
into an American enemy by depicting it as antithetical to Western ideals
Ooi ’17 – Associate Professor - Political Science, Faculty Director of Butler in Asia Program, Center
for Global Education at Butler University
Su-Mei. Gwen D’Arcangelis. “Framing China: Discourses of othering in US news and political rhetoric”
Global Media and China vol 2, no. 3-4 (2017): pp. 269-283.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2059436418756096
China as cheat: currency squabbles

The merchandise trade deficit that the US maintains with China—which grew to a total of US$365.7 billion in 2015 before falling to US$308.9
billion in 2017—has been a long-standing issue of concern for the United States (United States Census Bureau, 2016, 2017). The trade
deficit is often attributed to unfair trade practices and the artificial undervaluation of China’s currency. The
United States has registered numerous trade disputes with China over the years via the World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlement
mechanism with success. Up to 2010, China has, moreover, kept its national currency undervalued to drive exports. This dimension of US–China
trade relations is of interest here because China has, since 2005, adopted a more flexible exchange rate regime and
gradually revalued the yuan—not least because of political pressure from the United States . Indeed, in May
2015, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) stated that the Chinese yuan was no longer undervalued (The Wall Street Journal, 2015). The Bank
for International Settlements (BIS) estimated that the yuan had, in fact, been most recently overvalued about 32% compared to its trading
partners, and the most expensive among 60 countries (Forbes, 2015).
US political rhetoric has so far been out of step with these changes and has failed to explain the reasons for which
previous motivations to undervalue the yuan no longer hold. In
a charged exchange between candidate Mitt Romney and President
Obama in the 2012 presidential debate, for example, the former accused the latter for failing to call out China as cheat:
“China has been a currency manipulator for years and years and years … and the president has a regular
opportunity to label them as a currency manipulator, but refuses to do so” (Paletta & Davis, 2012a). Romney went on
to build on this image of China to shore up his credentials: “On day one, I will label China a currency manipulator, which will allow me as
president to be able to put in place, if necessary, tariffs where I believe that they are taking unfair advantage of our manufacturers” (Paletta &
Davis, 2012b). At the time, the yuan had already increased by 11% since 2008.
The trope of China as cheat can be read in light of historical constructions of China as the Yellow
Peril , a notion that continues to shape depictions of the Chinese as cunning, sneaky, and immoral in US
political rhetoric today. These stereotypes emerged in the late 1880s to fuel antiChinese sentiment, when U nited S tatesians
responded to the influx of Chinese labor and settlement as a threat to White wages, White social
dominance, and family structure. These depictions helped to justify harsh immigration laws barring
Chinese settlement. In the current context, depictions of China reinvoke this older Orientalist trope to paint
not only a similarly suspicious figure but also a tenuous economic partner with the potential to turn
into the Red Peril that refuses to abide by the rules of the capitalist market .
This was again perceptible when the yuan was devalued by 2.3% to bring it more in line with a market-determined rate in the Fall of 2015 (US
Treasury, Oct 2015). That markets and politicians are sensitized to the slightest downward movement in China’s currency value was underlined
by the agitation with which Congressional representatives reacted to the devaluation of the yuan. The US Treasury, which played a key role in
pressuring China for a market-determined currency, was cautious in its initial response; however, Congressional critics such as Senator Charles
Schumer (NY-D) went on the record saying that this move was indicative of China’s attempt to “double
down” on currency manipulation and that the yuan “should be barred from consideration as a global
reserve currency by the IMF” unless China “stops artificially devaluing” it. Indeed, he is quoted as saying that “China has rigged the
rules” for years in “play[ing] games with its currency” (Bradsher, 2015). Furthermore, Republican Senator Rob Portman said that the devaluation
was yet another “harsh reminder” that China “refuses to play by the rules” (Portman, 2015). Republican Senator Lindsey Graham joined the
chorus by stating that “today’s provocative act by the Chinese government to lower the value of the yuan is just the latest in a long history of
cheating” (Graham, 2015).
The timing of the 2015 devaluation of the yuan did palpably advantage China at a time when exports were slowing, but there remains a
discrepancy between the depiction of China as cheat and the complex economic reality of today. As growth
rates slow and capital outflow takes place, undervaluing the yuan is no longer in China’s best interest. In the longer term,
China is also likely to avoid a policy of undervaluation as it attempts to rebalance the economy toward domesticdriven growth, as a stronger
Chinese yuan increases the purchasing power of its population. Importantly, its (now successful) bid
to have the IMF recognize the
yuan as an official reserve currency on par with the US Dollar, Euro, British Pound, and Japanese Yen constrains significant
devaluations. In this regard, pro-business newspapers such as The Wall Street Journal have gone some way in providing the counterweight to
the image of China as currency manipulator through more objective economic analysis. Yet, conclusions such as “China likely isn’t regressing”
suggests that only tentative conclusions are drawn about China’s ability to conform to fair rules of play (“China’s Currency Policies Win
Cautious Praise Abroad,” 2015). While some journalists have underlined the economic interdependence between the United States and China
(Mallaby, 2005; “Paulson’s China Victory” 2006) and pointed out that China has become a “punching bag” since the 2012 partisan presidential
electoral politics (Paletta & Davis, 2012a), space has also been given to presidential hopefuls to perpetuate the image
of China as cheat by framing the yuan’s recent downward slide as “foreign currency cheating” ( Trump,
2016).
The long-standing Orientalist narrative of China’s cheating behavior, its destabilizing effect on the global
rules of the liberal trade regime and the negative impact on US corporate interests and job security,
remains easy to invoke after being the predominant theme in US public discourse on US–China economic
relations. This narrative helps to bridge the gap between reality and fiction and turns an economic
partner into an enemy . Enemy-making in the economic realm is particularly problematic, moreover,
because polls indicate that the US public tends to pay significant attention to the economic relationship
with China precisely because it most directly affects them. Gallup’s 2014 annual world affairs poll indicated that more
Americans perceive China as an economic threat than a military one, unsurprising since China’s impact on the US job market feels more
immediate to Americans than military developments in Asia (see Figure 1).
Link---Chinese Cyberattacks/IP
The fear of Chinese cyber espionage constructs the Other as a thief waiting to steal
money and technology from the West – their discursive strategy places the US in a
civilizing mission and China as an irresponsible child
China as thief: cyber battles

The construction of China as potential enemy Other takes on an additional hue when we look at the
depictions of China’s cyber activities— China moves from cheat to a more malicious cousin, the thief. The
United States first focused on issues of “cyber warfare” in the mid-2000s to late 2000s, but at the time, the trope associated with China was not
necessarily that of thief. In the mass news media, a militaristic lens framed much of the discussion, depicting China as a rule breaker flouting
international norms and thus posing a security threat. For example, a Los Angeles Times article highlighted that “China in the last year has
developed ways to infiltrate and manipulate computer networks around the world in what U.S. defense officials conclude is a new and potentially
dangerous military capability, according to a Pentagon report” (Barnes, 2008). China is even placed in relation to al-Qaeda:
“Cyber-attacks and cyber-espionage pose a greater potential danger to U.S. national security than Al Qaeda and other militants that have
dominated America’s global focus since Sept. 11, 2001, the nation’s top intelligence officials said Tuesday” (Dilanian, 2013). This
juxtaposition with al-Qaeda only served to heighten the military valence of China’s cyber activities, and a
push to prepare for such a threat. Indeed, in the words of Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL): “The threat, to be sure, is real—and, we cannot
allow ourselves to grow complacent …” (Nelson 2008).
Snowden’s revelations of US spying on China in June of 2013 drastically changed the shape of the discussion however. Snowden demonstrated
that the NSA (1) had two data centers in China from which it had been inserting spy software into vulnerable computers; (2) targeted the Chinese
University of Hong Kong, public officials, businesses, and students; (3) hacked mobile phones; and (4) in 2009, hacked the Pacnet headquarters
in Hong Kong, which runs one of the biggest regional fibre-optic networks. In response to Snowden’s revelations, a spate of articles compared
the United States’ and China’s hacking, displaying a range of attitudes from journalists—some espoused that both countries demonstrate
equivalent transgressive behavior, while others argued that China has crossed the line into more aggressive hacking that goes beyond the United
States’ more benign “preemptive” hacking.
The latter attitude indicates the resilience of tropes of the Yellow and Red Perils, a China whose inherent
ideological and cultural differences with the West makes it a threat. The different lenses through which
journalists and pundits viewed China’s spying in comparison with that of the United States further invoke this Orientalist
demarcation . An article in The Wa shington Po st thus contrasts China’s behavior against that of the U nited
S tates, which merely seeks “to examine huge amounts of communication metadata around the world to
look for trends” and “to preempt some threat against the U.S.” China’s spying is described, however, as
“infiltrating almost every powerful institution in Washington, D.C.,” “breaking into major news organizations,”
“stealing sensitive military technology,” and “stealing so much intellectual property that China’s
hacking has been called the ‘greatest transfer of wealth in history’ ” (Fisher, 2013). Drawing in particular on
incendiary words like “stealing” and “infiltrating,” this article distinguishes China as a sneaky thief.
US journalists and pundits, in charging China with stealing economic resources, have further solidified the
demarcation of China as an inferior and dangerous Other . A well-circulated quote by national security pundit Adam
Segal stated, “The problem is we’re not talking about the same things … We’re trying to make a distinction between cyber economic espionage
and normal political-military espionage. The Chinese don’t make that same distinction” (Bengali & Dilanian, 2015). By portraying China
as unable to grasp the fundamental distinction between economics and national security, Segal suggests
China’s thievery is connected to a more fundamental character flaw—China is unable to grasp
proper civilized norms. Similarly, US official response has been that China’s view of data collection as a sovereign right has rendered
them essentially different from the United States and by implication, the civilized world. That Chinese governmental espionage involves the
collection of economic intelligence that is shared with Chinese companies further departs from civilized norms. Michael Rogers, Director of the
National Security Agency thus explained that “they clearly don’t have the same lines in the sand, if you will, with that regard” (Bennett, 2015).
Historically, US depictions of China as uncivilized have occurred whenever China has gained power or
threatened US interests. The narrative of China as a sort of child following in the United States’ footsteps
on the path to modernity has proven exceedingly popular since World War II and frames the US approach
to China as a potential ally and resource who at the same time may never be civilizable (Kim, 2010;
Vukovich, 2012). In this Orientalist narrative, China’s journey to modernity is always understood as precarious and,
moreover, subject to US vigilance as to whether it meets the appropriate benchmarks. The title of an editorial in The
Washington Post epitomizes current iterations of this sentiment and the ease with which Orientalist imagery can be invoked to portray China’s
path to modernity as needing US guidance when China falls out of line: “The US Needs to Tame the Cyber-Dragon: Stronger Measures are
Need[ed] to Block China’s Economic Espionage [emphasis mine]” (“The U.S. Needs to Tame,” 2013). In reality, US vigilance can be attributed
to the concern since the end of the Cold War, that a “sleeping giant” able to challenge US global hegemony is awakening (Kim, 2010).
Thus, the
cultural work done by portrayals of China as unable to adhere to civilized norms serve to bolster
the image of China as perpetually unprepared to be a responsible member of the international
community . In fact, this narrative of China’s thievery serves to persuade the American public that China is a threat to the international
community. One Wall Street Journal journalist perfectly echoes this sentiment:
A China that leads the world in the theft of intellectual property, computer hacking and resource nationalism will prove extremely destabilizing.
If it continues on this course, Beijing should not be surprised if other countries begin to band together to collectively counter some of the more
harmful implications of China’s rise. A better outcome for all will be for China to embrace its responsibilities to help lead the world … (Metzl,
2011)
This article, although hopeful that China may at some future point become a responsible global actor, even leader, ultimately reifies the notion
that an increase in China’s global power is always suspect.
Link---Chinese Maritime Disputes
Depicting China as a lawless military threat in maritime disputes merely gives a
veneer of legitimacy to US expansionism – they propagate an image of the United
States as the core power broker in any security disputes, extending Imperial
domination to contain the Other
China as lawless bully: maritime disputes

To cheat and thief, we can layer the trope of lawlessness , readily employed in media representations and political rhetoric
over maritime territorial and EEZ disputes involving China and its neighbors in the Western Pacific. China’s territorial claims in the South China
Sea are largely historical in nature and do encroach on the 200 nautical miles EEZ of neighboring countries such as the Philippines and Vietnam.
The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) does not expressly prohibit land reclamation in the sea as long as due notice is
given to other concerned states and due regard to the rights of other states (Art. 60.3, 56.2, and 56.3) is taken into account, while the obligation to
protect and preserve the marine environment is observed (Art. 192). Parties to a dispute are also obligated to refrain from acting in a manner that
would jeopardize or hamper a final agreement resolving the dispute (Art. 74.3 and 83.3). The frantic building of artificial islands to enhance the
legality of China’s claims, unilateral installations, and skirmishes in the disputed areas are thus amenable to interpretation as lawless bullying. An
editorial in the Wall Street Journal titled “Calling Out China’s Lawlessness; The US Points Out that Beijing’s Claims to the South China Sea
Don’t Stand Up,” describes the “sketchy legality of its [Beijing’s] actions” and claims that “China is changing the status quo in the South China
Sea with force and the threat of force” (“Calling Out,” 2014). This characterization in the media is consistent with political rhetoric. US Secretary
of State John Kerry was reported to have said in May 2014 that China’s “introduction of an oil rig and numerous government vessels in waters
disputed with Vietnam was provocative” (Ives & Fuller, 2014). Eliot Engel of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee framed
China’s actions in skirmishes with Vietnam as “needless provocations” (Engel, 2014).
At the same time, media representations and political rhetoric have tended to obscure the fact that China’s
regional neighbors all built airstrips and outposts on the claimed islands long before China ever did .
China also displays inconsistent behavior in that it has reached agreements with Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin and South Korea in the Yellow
Sea to divide fisheries equally and carry out joint enforcement patrols in keeping with international law.3 Indeed, China has in land
disputes signed “fair and balanced” treaties with 13 out of 14 neighbors in keeping with international
legal principles (Kraska, 2015). These instances have not, however, drawn any significant media attention. Instead, the emphasis on
China’s non-compliance with international law in the South China Sea disputes has served to recapitulate China in
Orientalist terms as uncivilized and, moreover, as a fully awakened “sleeping giant” that bullies its neighbors
and is unsuited to replace the US as regional leader.
US political rhetoric and media representation has also obscured the vagueness of international law when applied to the East China Sea dispute as
it would be inconsistent with the image of China as a lawless bully in the South China Sea. The UNCLOS appears to have a straightforward
framework that gives states maritime jurisdiction over resources 200 nautical miles from their coastal baseline, but it says nothing about how
overlapping maritime jurisdictions are to be resolved. In the case of the East China Sea, the area of dispute is only 360 miles across at its widest
point. At the heart of the territorial dispute between China and Japan is the “territorial acquisition” of the Senkaku/Diaoyutai islands, but there is
no convention on how states acquire sovereignty over disputed territories.4 The flexibility of applicable principles in international customary law
have instead allowed both China and Japan to invoke the law to justify their claims to sovereignty (Ramos-Mrosovsky, 2008). China’s refusal to
have the dispute adjudicated by an international body reflects the unpredictability of outcomes and not necessarily China’s lawlessness, especially
when viewed, in light of a similar disinterest on the part of the Japanese.
The essentialization of China as lawless , despite the malleability of international law and dissimilar behavior in other disputes,
has the potential to drive a wedge between China and her neighbors, thus “containing” China’s
growing influence in the region . Indeed, the depiction of China as a lawless bully plays up the
insecurities of its immediate —and in many cases, much weaker— neighbors , whose heavy reliance on
international law to constrain hegemonic behavior is palpable . The breaking of norms has been identified as a crucial
signal that heightens threat perception (Farnham, 2003). In the context of long-standing maritime territorial disputes, playing up an
image of China as a lawless bully also suggests that the United States continues to be a necessary
power broker in the region. The notion that there is an overbearing bully in the neighborhood that could
care less about the rules of the game returns the United States to the role of protector in the post– Cold
War period—its ostensible “manifest destiny.”
Since the late 1990s, titles such as “Spratly Spat Heats up over Chinese ‘Bullying’” (Lamb, 1998) or “Asian Nations Support US Silently”
(Wiseman, 2001) demonstrate how constructing China as a lawless bully serves to reinforce this purpose. Indeed, a recent editorial in The Wall
Street Journal makes this link explicit in the text:
Washington’s hesitant response has allowed controversy to build around freedom-of-navigation missions that should be routine. Beijing’s
strategy in the South China Sea is to bully its neighbors and achieve regional hegemony through coercive means short of war. Turning peaceful
naval patrols into diplomatic hot potatoes is exactly the sort of change Beijing seeks. (“A 12-Mile,” 2015)
Here, China’s behavior is portrayed as incorrigibly belligerent, in distinct contrast to genteel US diplomacy .
One Wall Street Journal article makes this point clear in its title alone: “Chinese Diplomacy Off Course; By Overreaching in the South China Sea,
Beijing has Drawn the US Irrevocably into the Debate” (Wain, 2000). This article embodies the dominant narrative that assumes implicitly the
rightful role of the United States to dole out proper diplomacy and take on any transgressors to maintain world peace. A Wall Street Journal
article describing China’s “increasingly powerful—but highly opaque—military and its more assertive stance [towards the South China Sea]”
emphasize China’s military as an inherent threat to world order but construct the US military according to a different standard, again assuming
the righteousness of US military intervention (Page, 2011).
In this regard, it is important to note that US grand strategy consists of preventing the development of any
regional power capable of obstructing US access to Eurasia—where most of the world’s resources and
economic activity are located. This long-term security goal has informed the Obama administration’s much-touted Pacific Pivot
policy, which many have viewed as a “China containment policy.” A Congressional Report notes that
although U.S. policymakers have not often stated this key national strategic goal explicitly in public, U.S. military (and diplomatic) operations in
recent decades—both wartime operations and day-to-day operations—can be viewed as having been carried out in no small part in support of this
key goal. (O’Rourke, 2014)
China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea cover about 90% of the area that could potentially allow China to deny the United States such
access. As China continues with the modernization of its naval and air capabilities, US apprehension has increased that the disputed land features
in the South China Sea are being used to bolster military and coast guard forces that can monitor and respond to the activities of US allies, deny
the US navy access to these waters, and ultimately check US naval dominance in the region.
It is for this reason that the United States has insisted on freedom of navigation and innocent passage—protected by UNCLOS—through these
contested waters, although tensions with China have ratcheted up considerably as a result. As direct conflict between the United States and China
has become a real possibility, and as the United States has not ratified the UNCLOS, the United States has attempted to base its actions on firm
legal principles, and in turn, to frame China’s behavior in the region as lawlessness. Through US portrayals of China as a lawless
bully, China incurs reputational costs in the global and regional community that have the potential to
exert pressure on China to stand down. The guided-missile destroyer USS Lassen was thus sent in October 2015 on a “freedom of
navigation” patrol within 12 nautical miles of islands artificially built by China in the Spratly chain, which the United States insists is in
compliance with international law.5 The United States revealed this aim in another dispute on whether China has an international legal right to
regulate foreign military actors operating within China’s 200-nautical-mile EEZ. The United States’ view, which China disagrees with, is that
China has a right to restrict military and surveillance activities only within 12 nautical miles of its territorial waters. Tensions reached new
heights when China announced in November 2013 an East China Sea Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) that not only covered her territorial
waters but extended into its EEZ and thus, the contested areas in the East China Sea. US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel responded in a press
statement that “We view this development as a destabilizing attempt to alter the status quo in the region. This unilateral action increases the risk
of misunderstanding and miscalculations,” yet the United States followed shortly by flying two B-52 bombers through the zone (Harlan, 2013).
Certainly, there have been media analyses that characterize China’s behavior as motivated by normal
national self-interest or that point out that US actions to curtail China are “hypocritical” and “hegemonic”
(see, for example, Denyer, 2015; Wu, 2005). However, many more choose to reprise long-standing debates about whether China is a military
threat or not, with titles such as “US Starting to View China as Potential Enemy” (Mann, 1995) and “Weakening Yet Still Aggressive, China
Poses Test for U.S. Presidential Candidates” (Sanger, 2015). None take seriously China’s claims that its actions in the region have been defensive
in nature. Even with a wide range of opinions on the matter, by focusing on the issue of China’s military buildup, these news articles only serve
to heighten this perceived threat by inferring threatening intent from growing military capabilities.
Political rhetoric tends to contain far less ambiguity, however, some even going so far as to suggest that the United States has been unnecessarily
patient toward China. Senator John McCain (2016), Chairman of the Committee of Armed Services, thus commended and encouraged the
continuance of the freedom-of-navigation operation of October 2015, adding that “this decision is long overdue.” In a keynote speech delivered at
the Fourth Annual CSIS South China Sea Conference in 2014, Representative Mike Rogers (R-MI), Chairman of the House Permanent Select
Committee on Intelligence further advised that the United States should stop being “deferential” to China’s “naked aggression” as it continues to
“bully” and “intimidate” its neighbors.6 Indeed, political rhetoric appears to take China’s image as lawless to its
logical conclusion— China as the full-fledged threat to regional stability legitimizes any force that
the United States might be compelled to take in the future to contain such a threa t. Unpacking the great
power rivalry in the maritime disputes thus helps us to understand the cultural work that the trope of lawless bully does to bolster the long-term
security objectives of the United States in the region.
Link---Chinese Nationalism
Rhetoric of Chinese nationalism reifies a binaristic division between the benevolent
self and evil Other – their rhetoric constructs China as antithetical to Western
values and propagates racist Western exceptionalism
Song ’15 – associate professor of political science at the University of Macau, received his Ph.D. in
political science from the University of Siena, Italy
Weiqing Song. “Securitization of the “China Threat” Discourse: A Poststructuralist Account” China
Review, Volume 15, Number 1, Spring 2015, pp. 145-169. Project Muse.
Here, the China threat issue is securitized in a value-laden manner that is qualitatively different from the
scientific mode. Nicholas Kristof, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and longtime commentator on China, does not simply state
that China is threatening because it is not democratic; rather, he pursues the more nuanced argument that
increasing nationalism in China is a major source of potential conflict with other nations . Yet even a careless
reader of the above text may notice that the author adeptly links the alleged threat posed by China with the
historical precedents of Nazi Germany and militarist Japan in the past century. Drawing such analogies
between history and the present constitutes a securitization act.
Using this mode of analogical reasoning, the China threat argument is structurally incorporated into a higher
level of security discourse, situated among the “macro-securitising discourses” of political ideology,55
which involve certain ethical and subjective sets of doctrines, ideals, and worldviews about the
governance of human societies, usually with a blueprint for a specific social order . It is important for
poststructuralist discourse analysts to bear in mind the perspective on social goods communicated in this use of language.56 Kristof attributes the
possibility of a China threat to the Chinese government’s ill-intentioned promotion of “ferocious nationalism.” As one of the West’s veteran
commentators on China, Kristof noticed the country’s vigorous rise much earlier than many others. Twenty years ago, in his early Foreign Affairs
essay “The Rise of China,” he warned that although China is neither a “villain” nor a “renegade country,” it is “an ambitious nation.”57 In this
and other works, he has sought to define the possible China threat arising from Chinese nationalism.
Such arguments involve the politics of identity. The poststructuralist approach to identity formation
emphasizes the dualism that structures human experience, particularly the “interior/exterior
(inside/outside) binary, according to which the inside is deemed to be the self, good, primary, and original
while the outside is the other, dangerous, secondary, and derivative.”58 However, when one tries to build
one’s own identity, the outside is always central to the composition of the inside . Conversely, when one
builds an antagonist identity, the inside is essential to the construction of the outside . An
interior/exterior binary is exactly what authors like Kristof seek to achieve in their securitization
of the China threat issue. Kristof’s argument fundamentally, if not overtly, differentiates China from the
democracies of the West. Linking China with Nazi Germany and militarist Japan in the first half of the 20th century lends weight to his
criticism of the Chinese government and its deliberate instigation of “ferocious nationalism” among the Chinese people. In this way, China is
depicted as different from “normal” Western countries , which are represented as right, good,
proper, and valuable.
Within the broader context of political ideology, the mode of normative analogy requires an appropriate
episteme terrain. In other words, securitizers must use the right language in the right contexts to successfully articulate China’s threat to the
world at large through analogy. Unlike securitizers speaking in the scientific mode, whose audience comprises academics and policy analysts,
normative-analogy securitizers address an attentive, well-informed, and usually well-educated public.
Therefore, successful securitizers in the latter mode are usually those well placed to communicate with the relevant audiences in the correct
venues and in the appropriate language. Kristof, for example, writes for the New York Times, a widely circulated newspaper with well-informed
and well-educated readers in the United States and other Western countries. His essays appear in Foreign Affairs, a scholarly journal published by
an important U.S. think tank that focuses on foreign policy and provides an international forum for new ideas, analysis, and debate regarding
significant world issues. The audience of Foreign Affairs includes government officials, academics, business leaders, and the representatives of
nongovernmental groups such as human rights organizations, all of whom need to communicate with their own audiences using appropriate
linguistic styles and registers. Historical analogies are an effective means of communicating with such audiences, who usually find concrete
examples and precedents from history to be rhetorically persuasive.59
Kristof is not alone. The same securitizing role is played by many opinion leaders with wide influence in their
respective social groups. For example, John Ikenberry, a well-known IR scholar, has expressed concerns about China’s
rise due to its different political system, although he believes that China can eventually be absorbed peacefully into a West-
dominated and institutionalized world.60 Robert Kagan, a Washington Post columnist, shares Kristof’s view that China’s rise
will not be peaceful on the grounds that it is not willing to be “integrated” into the liberal world system .61
Although these opinion leaders offer different policy recommendations, all of them define a real or potential Chinese threat to
both U.S. security and the security of the world at large.
In the analogical mode, the substantial modality of the threat posed by China to the outside world is largely concerned with the political sphere.
Political threats are usually defined in terms of “constituting principles” such as sovereignty and
ideology.62 The referent objects under threat are units that include the nation or the state but may exceed
these designations, as in the cases of the military and strategic spheres. The referent objects may be states
with similar political systems, such as the so-called “democracies” or the “free world.” In their political warnings
against the “China threat,” securitizers such as Kristof discursively construct the Chinese identity by linking it with
bellicose Nazi Germany and militarist Japan, thereby differentiating it from the identity of the
“peace-loving” Western democracies .63
Securitizers working in the normative-analogy mode conduct “conversations ” with their audiences in which they
relate major themes, debates, or motifs that are familiar to the social groups concerned. 64 This approach
is more likely to result in the audience absorbing maximum knowledge, which in turn leads to a more
effective excision of power. Kristof, for example, constructs the possibility of a China threat by focusing on Chinese nationalism in
his “conversations” with educated and well-informed readers in the United States and other Western countries. This is a judicious strategy, as
such audiences are more receptive to nationalism, the promotion of democracy and other forms of ideological reasoning. As Buzan suggests,
existential threats in the political sector may also be ideologically defined.65 Therefore, the arguments of opinion leaders can contribute to the act
of securitizing the alleged impending threat: “Yet what worries me about China isn’t its upgrade of its nuclear arsenal and its military acquisitions
to project power beyond its borders. … No, what troubles me, as one who loves China and is rooting for it to succeed, is the growing nationalism
that the government has cultivated among young people.”66 Unlike the scientific mode, in which securitizers reason deductively, the normative-
analogy mode has an inductive logic, as it reaches its conclusions on the basis of a number of historical and contemporary examples.
Link---Chinese Rise
Demonizing China is a tactic by neoliberal elites to maintain US imperialist
domination at the expense of progressive social transformation, perpetually feeding
the defense industrial complex through a fear of the racialized Other – reject their
attempts to secure the West and sustain an immoral system of US imperialism
Singh ’18 – Toronto based lawyer and political analyst with a focus on the People's Republic of China
Ajit. April 9. “China’s rise threatens U.S. imperialism, not American people,”
https://mronline.org/2018/04/09/chinas-rise-threatens-u-s-imperialism-not-american-people/
This year marks the 40th anniversary of China’s “reform and opening up,” initiated in 1978. At that time, although living standards had
significantly improved following the socialist revolution in 1949—life expectancy nearly doubling in the first 30 years—China still faced
tremendous challenges. Seeking to overcome the country’s severe underdevelopment, the West’s monopoly over technology, and the isolation to
which it had been subjected to during the Cold War by the United States, China implemented reforms in order to promote economic growth and
development. Deng Xiaoping, chief architect of the policy, summed up the Communist Party’s thinking in three simple clauses: “Our country
must develop. If we do not develop then we will be bullied. Development is the only hard truth.”
Four decades later, the success of reform is undeniable: China has lifted 800 million people out poverty—more
than the rest of the world combined during the same period—and generated “the fastest sustained
expansion by a major economy in history,” according to the World Bank. China’s GDP growth has averaged nearly 10 percent a
year over a 40-year period, without crises, with the country becoming a world leader in science, technology and innovation. Rising from extreme
poverty to international power, China now has the world’s second largest economy, and is generally expected to overtake the U.S. in GDP terms
within the next two decades. Measured in terms of purchasing power parity, China’s economy has already surpassed the U.S.
When beginning its reform, China sought to “keep a low profile” and “bide its time, while building up strength”,
as the U.S. led an international offensive, destructively imposing neoliberalism on countries
throughout the global South . Today, we are in the midst of a turning point. Announcing to the world that it is
entering a “new era” at last year’s National Congress of the Communist Party, China is playing a more assertive and leading
role in global affairs. The country’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative—called “the largest single infrastructure program in human
history”—involves over 70 countries and 1,700 development projects connecting Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe. Meanwhile, mired in
economic stagnation and decline, the U.S. is its losing international authority. In particular, during the “America First”-era, the
country’s reputation has plummeted, as the Trump administration unilaterally withdraws from
international institutions and agreements, displays open bigotry towards developing countries, and
eschews diplomacy for insulting arrogance and genocidal threats.
U.S. hostility towards China increases
That China and the U.S. are moving in opposite directions is not a new phenomenon, but this trend has been brought into sharp focus under
Trump. Growing anxious about its diminishing global dominance, the U.S. demonstrates increasing hostility
towards China. In a series of recent policy statements – the National Security Strategy, National Defense Strategy, Nuclear Posture Review,
and State of the Union address – the Trump administration has repeatedly identified the “threat” posed by
“economic and military ascendance” of China, declaring that “[i]nter-state strategic competition, not
terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security.” It is claimed that China, along with
Russia, “want to shape a world antithetical to U.S. values and interests.”
In response to this “danger,” the Trump administration is pursuing a substantial buildup in U.S. military forces,
viewing “more lethal” and “unmatched power [as] the surest means of our defense.” Trump’s 2019 budget
proposes a massive increase in Pentagon spending to $716 billion and he has assembled a war cabinet to make use of it, including extreme hawks
and noted anti-China hardliners such as John Bolton, Mike Pompeo and Peter Navarro. These moves come after top U.S. military officer, General
Joseph Dunford, called China the country’s “greatest threat” and U.S. Pacific Commander Admiral Harry Harris, new ambassador to Australia,
told Congress in February that the U.S. must prepare for war with China. Washington is increasing military pressure on
Beijing: ratcheting up tensions on the Korean peninsula; taking steps to construct a “quadrilateral”
alliance with right-wing governments in India, Japan and Australia, targeting China ; and passing the
Taiwan Travel Act which violates the “One China” policy and encourages the U.S. “to send senior
officials to Taiwan to meet Taiwanese counterparts and vice versa”
On the economic front, the Trump administration seeks to launch a “trade war” with Beijing and form a broad
anti-China alliance, proposing $50 billion in tariffs targeting Chinese imports (and threatening $100 billion more), launching an
investigation into technology transfers to China, and lodging formal complaints at the World Trade Organization on “the state’s pervasive role in
the Chinese economy.” Washington is increasingly regulating and monitoring inbound Chinese investment,
outbound U.S. investment in China, and joint ventures. Viewing technological dominance as a pillar of its international
authority, Washington considers China’s development and technological advance to be an “existential
economic threat.”
As this animosity increases, U.S. rhetoric towards China calls to mind the virulent anti-communism of the Cold
War and racist “yellow peril” phantoms of decades past. Newly appointed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently
warned that China was trying “to infiltrate the United States with spies – with people who are going to
work on behalf of the Chinese government against America … We see it in our schools. We see it in our hospitals and
medicals systems. We see it throughout corporate America. It’s also true in other parts of the world … including Europe and the UK.” Similarly,
FBI director Christopher Wray told Congress in February that “the whole of Chinese society” is a threat to the
U.S. That such belligerent statements can be made towards 1.4 billion people, one-fifth of humanity,
without receiving any challenge from Democrats, Republicans or the corporate -owned media, is an
indication of the consensus around the “China threat” theory in the U.S. establishment, and the danger
this poses.
A new Cold War
Washington’s hostility towards Beijing is rooted in the foundation of modern U.S. foreign policy .
The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and end of the Cold War, ushered in an era during which the U.S. has sought
to establish unipolar global dominance. Explicitly outlined in a 1992 Defense Policy Guidance paper authored under
neoconservative Paul Wolfowitz, the principal objective of U.S. foreign policy in this period has been “to prevent
the re-emergence of a new rival” capable of challenging U.S. aspirations for global hegemony. In the quarter-
century since, the U.S. has aggressively pursued this aim, engaging in endless wars, “regime change” efforts,
and military build-ups around the world, now operating over 900 military bases globally.
Despite these most destructive efforts, the U.S. has been unable to stop China’s momentous rise, which has emerged as the primary obstacle to
U.S. aims for unipolar dominance. Although Washington has sought regime change in Beijing ever since the socialist revolution of 1949, the
U.S. has generally pursued a strategy of “ containment through engagement ” following the
normalisation of bilateral relations in the 1970s. In part, Washington had hoped that China’s economic reform and the fall of
the Soviet Union would lead to political reform in Beijing and the abandonment of Communist Party leadership and socialism with Chinese
characteristics, in favour of Western-oriented neoliberalism. History has confirmed that China has no such intention.
Recognizing its own declining leverage and that China will not become “more like us”, Washington is attempting to launch a new
Cold War against China. The identification of China as the primary target of U.S. foreign policy
originated during the Obama era with the “Asia pivot” seeking to encircle China, shifting 60 percent of U.S. naval
assets to Asia by 2020. As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton argued that the U.S. must reorient the focus of its foreign policy from the Middle
East to the Asia-Pacific to ensure “continued American leadership well into this century.” The developments under Trump, mark an escalation of
this bipartisan strategy.
The unipolar-multipolar struggle
The importance of U.S.-China relations cannot be overstated, with the two countries at the core of a broader unipolar-multipolar struggle over the
shape of the international order. While the U.S. seeks to secure global dominance, China’s rise is central to a multipolarisation
trend, in which multiple centres of power are emerging to shape a negotiated, more democratic world.
China’s political orientation has been fundamentally shaped by its history of subjugation to foreign
powers during its “century of humiliation” and anti-imperialist struggle for national liberation. Under the
leadership of the Communist Party, China has always identified itself as part of the Third World or global South and the collective struggle of
formerly colonized and oppressed nations against the global inequality wrought by imperialism.
Under the banner of “South-South cooperation”, China continues to champion this collective struggle today, promoting
greater say for developing countries in global governance and the construction of a rules-based
international order in place of the unilateral actions of major powers, in particular the U.S. More than mere
rhetoric, China provides crucial investment, infrastructure construction, technology transfers, debt
forgiveness, and diplomatic support to developing countries . Most importantly, unlike the U.S. and West
which engage in destructive foreign interventions, China abides by the principle of non-
interference in the internal affairs of other countries and does not impose conditions on its relations.
China’s respect for the self-determination of other countries has made it an indispensable partner for
nations resisting foreign domination and pursuing independent development, including Cuba, Venezuela,
Bolivia, Zimbabwe, Syria, Iran, and North Korea. It is for this reason that the late Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro declared in
2004 that “China has objectively become the most promising hope and the best example for all Third World countries … an important element of
balance, progress and safeguard of world peace and stability.” Venezuelan foreign minister Jorge Arreaza echoed these sentiments last December,
saying “Thank God humanity can count on China,” as his country faces sanctions, economic sabotage, and threats of regime change from the
U.S.
Contributing to the declining global authority of the U.S, China’s international relations have prompted Washington to
cynically accuse China of fostering dependency in Africa and being an “imperial power” towards
Latin America. In fact, rather than behaving in a predatory manner, China provides sorely needed
funding, on favorable terms, to African borrowers, and as we have seen above China supports Latin
America’s struggle against imperialism. That China is praised by fiercely independent nations of the global South and faces such
charges from the U.S.—the most powerful empire in history—reveals the absurdity of such claims. Anxious about its own decline,
the U.S. seeks to both drive a wedge between China and the South, and also restrict the right of
developing nations to choose their own partners and path. China has demonstrated that its rise is
compatible with the self-determination of other nations—whether capitalist or socialist; what it comes
into contradiction with is U.S. imperialism.
It is important to recognize that U.S. hostility towards China is not simply a product of narrow competition
with the Asian power, it is a resistance to the empowerment of the global South and
democratization of international relations . China is the primary target of U.S. imperialism because
of its strategic importance at the heart of the world multipolarisation trend, which threatens to bring an
end to U.S. international supremacy and 500 years of Western global dominance.
An opportunity for ordinary Americans
For years, the U.S. political establishment has sought to leverage American workers in its struggle against China. Endless
rhetoric about
how China is “stealing U.S. jobs” seeks to stir up xenophobia and racism in order divert attention from
the fact that it was Washington and U.S. corporations that implemented the neoliberal reforms which
hollowed out America’s economy. On a near daily basis, the corporate-owned media further promotes hostility
towards China with hawkish, sensationalized and dishonest reporting. In recent months, Americans have been told
that China, with its “model of totalitarianism for the 21st century”, “has a plan to rule the world”, that its “‘long arm’ of influence stretches ever
further”, its “fingerprints are everywhere” as it “infiltrates” U.S. classrooms, colleges, and more. The message is clear: be afraid.
However, for ordinary Americans, multipolarity and the strengthening of international forces, like China, which
challenge U.S. imperialism are not a threat . Instead, this offers the potential for progressive advances for
the American people in their own struggles . The 20th century provides a historical precedent for this, where the
existence of the Soviet Union and a concrete socialist alternative to capitalism along with the wave of
Third World national liberation struggles, placed pressure on Western capitalist countries , including the U.S.,
to respond to their own people’s demands for progressive social and economic policies, such as the
welfare state, higher taxes on the wealthy, and anti-racist measures.
Similarly, today, as the U.S. and the world face tremendous social, economic and environmental challenges, Chinese socialism is
demonstrating a concrete alternative to the dominant capitalist system: pledging to eradicate poverty by
2020; with wage growth soaring and real income for the bottom half of earners growing 401 percent since
1978 (compared to falling by one percent in the U.S. during that time); declaring healthcare to be a universal human right;
praised for having the “best response to the world’s environmental crisis” and reducing pollution in cities
by an average of 32% in just four years since declaring a “war on pollution”; becoming “a world leader in wind,
solar, nuclear and electric vehicles”; building the world’s longest bullet-train network, spending more on
infrastructure than the U.S. and Europe combined; and announcing that inequality, not economic
underdevelopment, is now the “principal contradiction” to be addressed in Chinese society.
China is able to prioritize social and environmental policies—while sustaining rapid, crisis-free economic growth for four decades—because,
unlike the U.S., the interests of corporations and wealthy do not rise above political authority . China’s wealthy
regularly face severe repercussions for criminal behaviour (instead of bailouts). For example, an annual list of China’s richest citizens is
commonly called the “death list” or “kill pigs list” because those named are often later imprisoned or executed—according to one study 17% of
the time.
While China is not a perfect society and continues to face many challenges, the system of socialism with Chinese characteristics has been able to
respond to a number of pressing issues facing the world today, better than the U.S. capitalist system . This is likely why China leads
the world in optimism, with 87% feeling the country is headed in the right direction, compared to only
43% feeling the same in the U.S.
The new Cold War that Washington seeks to launch against China requires massive increases in military spending,
paid for by ordinary Americans with massive cuts to already inadequate social programs, housing support
and health care. If the American people can reject the Cold War mentality of their ruling class and
arrogant notions of “American exceptionalism”, China’s rise could offer them the opportunity to
learn how to build a society that better meets their needs.
Link---Chinese Threats
Identifying China as a threat is a boundary producing discourse that constructs
foreign danger, propels aggressive responses that make conflict more likely, and
cements ideological and racist foundations of exceptional violence
Turner 12 – Oliver Turner, Research Associate at the Brooks World Poverty Institute at the University
of Manchester, “’Threatening’ China and US Security: The International Politics of Identity,” Review of
International Studies, https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/api/datastream?publicationPid=uk-ac-man-
scw:206471&datastreamId=POST-PEER-REVIEW-PUBLISHERS.PDF
In his analysis of the China Threat Theory Chengxin Pan argues that the ‘threat’ is an imagined construction of American observers.15 Pan does
not deny the importance of the PRC’s capabilities but asserts that they appear threatening from understandings about the United States itself.
‘[T]here is no such thing as ‘‘Chinese reality’’ that can automatically speak for itself’, Pan argues. ‘[T]o fully understand the US ‘‘China threat’’
argument, it is essential to recognize its autobiographical nature’.16 The geographical territory of China, then, is not separate from or external to,
American representations of it. Rather, it is actively constitutive of those representations.17 The analysis which follows demonstrates that
China ‘threats’ to the United States have to some extent always been established and perpetuated
through representation and discourse . Michel Foucault described discourse as ‘the general domain of all statements’,
constituting either a group of individual statements or a regulated practice which accounts for a number of statements.18 American
discourse of China can therefore be manifest as disparate and single statements about that country or as
collectives of related statements such as the China Threat Theory. Ultimately, American representations of China are
discursive constructions of truths or realities about its existence. The article draws in part from the work of David Campbell who suggests that
dangers in the international realm are invariably threats to understandings about the self. ‘The mere
existence of an alternative mode of being’, argues Campbell, ‘the presence of which exemplifies that different identities are
possible . . . is sometimes enough to produce the understanding of a threat.’19 As a result, interpretations of
global danger can be traced to the processes by which states are made foreign from one another through
discourses of separation and difference.20 In this analysis it is demonstrated that particular American discourses have
historically made the US foreign from China. Case study one for example demonstrates that nineteenth century racial
discourses of non-white immigrant Chinese separated China from a U nited S tates largely defined by its
presumed Caucasian foundations. In case study two we see that Cold War ideological discourses of communism
distanced the PRC from the democratic-capitalist US. These types of discourses are shown to have
constituted a ‘specific sort of boundary producing political performance’.21 Across the history of
Sino-US relations then when ‘dangers’ from China have emerged, they have always been perceived
through the lens of American identity . In consequence, they have always existed as dangers to that
identity. In this analysis it is argued that a key purpose of depicting China as a threat has been to protect
components of American identity (primarily racial and ideological) deemed most fundamental to
its being . As such, representations of a threatening China have most commonly been advanced by, and
served the interests of, those who support actions to defend that identity. The case study analyses which follow reveal
that this has included politicians and policymaking circles, such as those within the administration of President Harry
Truman which implemented the Cold War containment of the PRC. It also exposes the complicity of other societal individuals and institutions
including elements of the late nineteenth-century American media which supported restrictions against Chinese immigration to the western
United States. It is demonstrated that, twice before, this discursive process of separating China from the United States
has resulted in a crisis of American identity. Crises of identity occur when the existing order is considered in danger of rupture.
The prevailing authority is seen to be weakened and rhetoric over how to reassert the ‘natural’ identity intensifies.22 Case studies one and two
expose how such crises have previously emerged. These moments were characterised by perceived attacks upon core assumptions about what the
United States was understood to be: fundamentally white in the late nineteenth century and democratic-capitalist in the early Cold War. Case
study three shows that while today’s China ‘threat’ to US security is yet to generate such a crisis, we must learn from those of the
past to help avoid the types of consequences they have previously facilitated . As Director Clapper unwittingly
confirmed then the capabilities and intentions of a ‘rising’ China are only part of the story. International relations are driven by forces both
the processes by which China is made foreign from, and potentially dangerous
material and ideational and
to, the United States are inseparable from the enactment of US China policy . This is because, to
reaffirm, American discourses of China have never been produced objectively or in the absence of
purpose or intent. Their dissemination is a performance of power , however seemingly innocent or benign.23
This is not to claim causal linkages between representation and foreign policy. Rather, it is to reveal the specific historical
conditions within which policies have occurred, through an analysis of the political history of the production of truth.
Link---Deterrence
Deterrence creates an unstable peace that makes structural violence inevitable
Sandy & Perkins 2 Leo R. veteran of the U.S. Navy and an active member of Veterans for Peace,
Inc., co-founder of Peace Studies at Plymouth State College, Ray; Teaches philosophy at Plymouth State
College, The Nature of Peace and Its Implications for Peace Education”, Online journal of peace and
conflict resolution, Issue 4.2, Spring 02, http://www.trinstitute.org/ojpcr/4_2natp.htm
The peace process additionally must acknowledge and contend with its alternative -war-because of the high value status of violence. For example, while war has brought out the worst kind of
behavior in humans, it has also brought out some of the best. Aside from relieving boredom and monotony, war has been shown to spawn self-sacrifice, loyalty, honor, heroism, and courage. It is
well known that suicide rates decline during war. Also, war has helped to bring about significant social changes such as racial and sexual integration, freedom, democracy and a sense of national
violence has been solidly embedded in the national psyche of
pride. Because of its apparent utilitarian value and its ability to enervate,
many countries. As a result, its elimination will be no easy feat. Nevertheless, Reardon (1988) insists that “peace is the absence of
violence in all its forms --physical, social, psychological, and structural (p. 16). But this, as a definition, is unduly negative in that it
fails to provide any affirmative picture of peace or its ingredients (Copi and Cohen, p. 195). Perhaps that picture must come, as O’Kane (1992) suggests, from a close examination of the “nature
of causes, reasons, goals of war in order that we might ... find ways of reaching human goals without resorting to force. That process should help us “uncover” the possible conditions of Peace.”
In its most myopic and limited definition, peace is the mere absence of war. O’Kane (1992) sees this definition as
a “vacuous, passive, simplistic, and unresponsive escape mechanism too often resorted to in the past -without
success.” This definition also commits a serious oversight: it ignores the residual feelings of mistrust and suspicion that the winners and losers of a war harbor toward each other. The
subsequent suppression of mutual hostile feelings is not taken into account by those who define peace so
simply. Their stance is that as long as people are not actively engaged in overt, mutual, violent, physical
and destructive activity, then peace exists. This , of course, is just another way of defining cold war. In other words, this
simplistic definition is too broad because it allows us to attribute the term “peace” to states of affairs that are not truly
peaceful (Copi and Cohen, p. 194). Unfortunately, this definition of peace appears to be the prevailing one in the world. It is the kind of peace maintained by
a “peace through strength” posture that has led to the arms race , stockpiles of nuclear weapons, and the
ultimate threat of mutually assured destruction . This version of peace was defended by the “peacekeeper”--a name that actually adorns some U.S. nuclear
weapons deployed since 1986.1 Also, versions of this name appear on entrances to some military bases. Keeping “peace” in this manner evokes the theme in Peggy Lee’s old song, “Is That All
What this really comes down to is the idea of massive and indiscriminate killing for peace , which
There is?”
represents a morally dubious notion if not a fault of logic . The point here is that a “peace” which depends upon the
threat and intention to kill vast numbers of human beings is hardly a stable or justifiable peace worthy of
the name. Those in charge of waging war know that killing is a questionable activity. Otherwise, they would not use such euphemisms as “collateral damage” and “smart bombs” to
obfuscate it. Some different types of peace One way of clearing up the confusion over terms is to define types of peace and war. Thus, there can be hot war, cold war, cold peace, and hot peace.
In hot war, commonly called war, there is a condition of mutual hostility and active physical engagement
through such forms as artillery, missiles, bombs, small arms fire, mortars, flamethrowers, land and sea
mines, hand-to-hand combat, and the like. The aim is the destruction of the enemy or his surrender by intimidation. The object is to have a winner and loser.
Nationalism reaches its zenith here. In cold war, there is mutual hostility without actual engagement. Intimidation is the sole means of preventing hot war. This condition is characterized by
propaganda, war preparations, and arms races--always at the expense of human needs. During a cold war, nationalism prevails, and the object is to have a stalemate where neither side will initiate
aggression--nuclear or conventional--because of the overwhelming destructive capability of the retaliatory response. In cold peace, there is almost a neutral view of a previous enemy. There is
little mutual hostility but there is also a lack of mutually beneficial interactions aimed at developing trust, interdependence, and collaboration. There may be a longing for an enemy because
nothing has replaced it as an object of national concern. In this situation, isolationism and nationalism occur simultaneously. There is no clear objective because there is no well-defined enemy.
Perhaps the current U.S. military preoccupation with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and the debilitating decade of
sanctions against the Iraqi people are helping to relieve this enemy deficit. The notion that “there are still dangerous people in the
world” is often used to advance the cause of military preparedness and at least some momentum toward a restoration of cold war thinking and behavior. The term “peace dividend” that expressed
Now we are (again) advancing ballistic missile defense--a variation of the
post cold war optimism is hardly verbalized anymore.
Reagan Administration’ s Star Wars debacle, and an inst igator of nuclear proliferation . By contrast, hot
peace involves active collaborative efforts designed to “build bridges” between and among past and
present adversaries. This involves searching for common ground and the development of new non-human
enemies--threats to the health and well-being of humankind and the planet.2 These new enemies could include human rights abuses,
air and water pollution, dwindling energy resources, the destruction of the ozone layer, famine, poverty, and ignorance. Hot peace promotes-and, indeed, is defined by--global interdepedence,
human rights, democratization, an effective United Nations, and a diminution of national sovereignty. The object is the proliferation of cooperative relations and mutually beneficial outcomes.
Hot peace thinking imagines peace and the abolition of war. Another way of thinking about peace is to have it defined in negative and positive terms. Peace as the mere absence of war is what
Woolman (1985) refers to as “negative peace.” This definition is based on Johan Galtung’s ideas of peace. For Galtung, negative peace is defined as a state requiring a set of social structures
that provide security and protection from acts of direct physical violence committed by individuals, groups or nations. The emphasis is ...on control of violence. The main strategy is dissociation,
policies based on the idea of negative peace do not deal with the causes of
whereby conflicting parties are separated...In general,
violence, only its manifestations . Therefore, these policies are thought to be insufficient to assure lasting conditions of
peace. Indeed, by suppressing the release of tensions resulting from social conflict, negative peace efforts may
actually lead to future violence of greater magnitude . (Woolman, 1985, p.8) The recent wars in the former Yugoslavia
are testimony to this. The massive military machine previously provided by the U.S.S.R. put a lid on
ethnic hostilities yet did nothing to resolve them thus allowing them to fester and erupt later .
Doctrinal Paradox- deterrence theory either risks top-level nuclear instability or

escalation of uncontrollable small-scale conflict
Harrington de Santana ‘9, (Anne, Doctoral Candidate in U Chicago Dept. of Poli Sci, Nuclear
Weapons as the Currency of Power: Deconstructing the Fetishism of Force, Nonproliferation Review,
Vol. 16, No. 3, November 2009, pgs. 325-345)
Yet policies of nuclear deterrence did not escape the fundamental paradox of nuclear weapons. Policy debate about how to
achieve a successful nuclear deterrent followed the closed loop of a Mobius strip, the critique of one course of action leading
ineluctably to a conclusion in favor of the other, and vice versa.7 This phenomenon is referred to as the ‘‘stability-instability
paradox.’’8 On the one hand, maintaining a minimum arsenal with only as many weapons as were necessary to absorb a nuclear attack from
the Soviet Union and retaliate with an ‘‘assured destruction’’ capability promoted stability between the superpowers because neither superpower
had an incentive to launch an all- out nuclear attack.9 However, the more invulnerable the retaliatory forces of both the United States and the
Soviet Union became, and the more stable the balance was, the more likely it was that large-scale nuclear threats would be ineffective against
limited forms of aggression. Thus, stability at the level of ‘‘mutual assured destruction’’ created instability at lower levels
of violence. On the other hand, maintaining a wide range of nuclear options, including tactical weapons for use on the battlefield, provided
the possibility of retaliating proportionally to limited aggression. The capacity for a limited response to limited aggression made the threat of
nuclear retaliation more credible. However, flexible options deployable at a variety of levels provided no reliable mechanism for controlling
escalation and could in fact provide an incentive to launch a preventive attack. If the Soviet Union feared that a limited conflict could escalate to
all-out war, then it may have decided that it would be better to destroy as much of the U.S. arsenal as possible in order to limit the U.S. capacity
for retaliation in kind. Thus,
creating stability at lower levels of violence could lead to instability at the level of
all-out war , closing the policy loop by bringing us back to the solution of maintaining a minimum
capacity for retaliation in kind. If there is no escape from the paradox of nuclear deterrence, and therefore no decisive resolution to the
policy debate over the military requirements of deterrence, why is its logic so persuasive? For more than half a century the practice of nuclear
deterrence has been treated as if it were both a natural and inevitable result of the existence of nuclear technologies. Rather than attempt to escape
or resolve the paradox of nuclear weapons, in this article I posit an explanation for its existence and its persistence. I argue that the recurrent
paradox of nuclear weapons is a symptom of their status as fetish objects . More specifically, I argue that the
production of nuclear weapons as fetish objects is the culmination of a pattern of behavior that I refer to as the fetishism of force.10 There are
important similarities between the pattern of behavior Karl Marx sought to identify with respect to commodities*a pattern he called
‘‘fetishism’’*and the pattern of behavior I identify here with respect to military force.11 Marx identified money as the mature expression of
commodity fetishism; I identify nuclear weapons as the mature expression of the fetishism of force. Money is the physical embodiment of a form
of social value, namely, wealth. Likewise, nuclear weapons are the embodiment of power. Just as access to wealth in the form of money
determines an individual’s opportunities and place in a social hierarchy, access to power in the form of nuclear weapons determines a state’s
opportunities and place in the international order. In both cases, the physical form of the fetish object is valuable because it serves as a carrier of
social value. In other words, the power of nuclear weapons is not reducible to their explosive capability. Nuclear weapons are powerful because
we treat them as powerful.
Link---Disease
Securitizing disease creates the individual as a prison which the individual must now
survey and disciple. Fear of a catastrophic outbreak necessitates the capillary
diffusion of carceral and biopolitical violence, turning life into a biological carcass
absent vitality.
Debrix 9 – Francois, Professor and Director of the Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural
Thought (ASPECT) Program @ Virginia Tech, Ph.D., Purdue University and Alexander D., Department
of Political Studies & Public Administration, American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon, PhD in
Political Theory from John Hopkins, ”Nothing to Fear but Fear: Governmentality and the Biopolitical
Production of Terror,” International Political Sociology (2009) 3, 398–413/
A telling example of this self-mobilization and self-anticipation against one’s own conduct can be found in the
way Western states (or, rather, their governmental agencies) along with some transnational organizations (the World Health
Organization, the United Nations) have asked populations to preemptively take care of their health, hygiene, and
everyday routines in the context of the ongoing A⁄H1N1 or ‘‘swine flu’’ pandemic. In this recent case of
popular health scare, as with many other instances of spreading epidemics over the past decade (SARS,
the H5N1 ‘‘bird flu,’’ but also AIDS before), individuals and groups are asked to be the first layers of
securitization by turning their bodies (or those of family members, neighbors, coworkers, etc.) into primordial sites of analysis
and scrutiny from where not only the disease but, just as importantly, the fear about what might happen with the disease
will be monitored. With the ‘‘swine flu,’’ a constant questioning of one’s body movements and symptomatic
features, but also of one’s daily habits, becomes an automatic (and autoimmune) measure against the endemic
fear. Individual and collective bodies become the most vital dispositifs of containment of the pandemic and of
the terror that inevitably will spread. This management or governance of the ‘‘swine flu’’ and its scare (the
disease and its terror are inseparable from the moment a pandemic discourse is launched) is said to require constant self-checking
(Do I have a fever? Is my cough a sign that I have been infected? Did I remember to wash my hands after riding the bus or the subway?). But it
also demands what can be called selfcarceralization measures (we must stay home for several days if we feel sick; we must wear
protective masks if we venture outside and have a runny nose; we must close entire schools for as long as necessary if we suspect that children
in the community have the flu). In the end, it is a full-blown biopolitics of selfterror that sets in whereby people must
allow themselves to be quarantined, must accept being placed in hospital isolation, and must even be willing not to be treated if
pharmaceutical companies fail to produce enough vaccines for everyone.
As the A⁄H1N1 pandemic preemption regime
reveals, individual and collective bodies must always be prepared to immerse themselves into
disciplinary and regulatory procedures, into security mechanisms, and into governmental tactics. In fact,
they must act as dispositifs of fear governance themselves . This means that bodies become the required lines
of forces that connect the possible localized symptoms to the global pandemic and its terror . From this
perspective on how bodies in societies of unease enable regimes of biopolitical terror and are themselves the
product of operations of governmentalized fear, no return to a centralized model of power is necessary to make sense of the
terror embedded in contemporary regimes of government. Rather, as the ‘‘swine flu’’ case shows, it is the horizontality, the
capillarity, and the propagation of carceral effec ts across space and through time that authenticates this
(self) imposition of governmental power and force. But what this system of reproduction of self-
governmentalized scare tactics and biopolitical (in)security calls for , however, is the beginning of a different
understanding of life, or of what life means. Indeed, it is not enough anymore to think of life as docile or
regulated. It may also not be sufficient to think of today’s living bodies as abandoned beings (Agamben
1998) caught in a state of sovereign exception . Rather, the self-rationalizing, self-securitizing, and self-
terrorizing bodies that act, react, and interact in coordination with agents ⁄ agencies of government and
are found at the heart of societies of fear production are more likely to represent what Mick Dillon has called
‘‘emergent life’’ (Dillon 2007).
Link---Disembodied IR
The frame of security studies generates political violence through its unproblematic
account of disembodied subjects who rationally manage international politics for the
protection of ahistorical, biopolitical objects who breathe, suffer, or die depending
on policy decisions.
Wilcox 15 – Professor of Gender Studies at Cambridge (Lauren, Bodies of Violence: Theorizing
Embodied Subjects in International Relations, p. 1-3)
Bodies have long been outside the frame of International Relations (IR)—unrecognizable even as the modes of
violence that use, target, and construct bodies in complex ways have proliferated . Drones make it possible to both watch people
and bomb them, often killing dozens of civilians as well, while the pilots operating these machines remain thousands of miles away, immune from bodily harm. Suicide bombers seek certain
death by turning their bodies into weapons that seem to attack at random. Images of tortured bodies from Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib provoke shock and outrage, and prisoners on hunger
strikes to protest their treatment are force-fed. Meanwhile, the management of violence increasingly entails the scrutiny of persons as bodies through biometric technologies (p.2) and “body
scanners.” In each of these instances, the body becomes the focal point, central to practices of security and International Relations—the body brought into excruciating pain, the body as weapon,
Such bodily focus is quite distinct from prevailing
or the body as that which is not to be targeted and hence is hit only accidentally or collaterally.
international security practices and the disciplinary ways of addressing those practices in IR. Convention has it that states or groups
make war and, in doing so, kill and injure people that other states are charged with protecting . The strategic deployment of force in
the language of rational control and risk management that dominates security studies presents a
disembodied view of subjects as reasoning actors. However, as objects of security studies, the people who
are protected from violence or are killed are understood as only bodies : they are ahistorical, biopolitical
aggregations whose individual members breathe, suffer, and die . In both cases, the politics and sociality of bodies are
erased.¶ One of the deep ironies of security studies is that while war is actually inflicted on bodies, bodily violence and
vulnerability, as the flip side of security, are largely ignored. By contrast, feminist theory is at its most powerful when it denaturalizes
accounts of individual subjectivity so as to analyze the relations of force, violence, and language
that compose our profoundly unnatural bodies. Security studies lacks the reflexivity necessary to see its contribution to the very context it seeks to domesticate. It
has largely ignored work in feminist theory that opens up the forces that have come to compose and constitute the
body: by and large, security studies has an unarticulated, yet implicit, conception of bodies as individual
organisms whose protection from damage constitutes the provision of security . In IR, human bodies are
implicitly theorized as organisms that are exogenously determined—they are relevant to politics only as
they live or die . Such bodies are inert objects: they exist to be manipulated, possess no agency , and
are only driven by the motivations of agents. Attentive to the relations provoked by both discourse and political forces, feminist theory redirects attention to
how both of these compose and produce bodies on terms often alien and unstable. Contemporary feminist theorizing about embodiment
provides a provocative challenge to the stability and viability of several key concepts such as sovereignty, security,
violence, and vulnerability in IR. In this book, I draw on recent work in feminist theory that offers a challenge to the deliberate maintenance and policing of boundaries
and the delineation of human bodies from the broader political context.¶ Challenging this theorization of bodies as natural organisms is a key step in
not only exposing how bodies have been implicitly theorized in (p.3) IR, but in developing a reading of IR that is attentive to the ways in
which bodies are both produced and productive . In conceptualizing the subject of IR as essentially
disembodied, IR theory impoverishes itself . An explicit focus on the subject as embodied makes two
contributions to IR. First, I address the question vexing the humanities and social sciences of how to account for the subject by showing that IR is
wrong in its uncomplicated way of thinking about the subject in relation to its embodiment. In its rationalist
variants, IR theory comprehends bodies only as inert objects animated by the minds of individuals. Constructivist
theory argues that subjects are formed through social relations, but leaves the bodies of subjects outside politics as “brute facts” (Wendt 2001, 110), while many variants of critical theory
In contrast, feminist theory offers a challenge to the
understand the body as a medium of social power, rather than also a force in its own right.
delineation of human bodies from subjects and the broader political context. My central argument is that the bodies that the practices of
violence take as their object are deeply political bodies, constituted in reference to historical political conditions while at the
same time acting upon our world . The second contribution of this work is to argue that because of the way it theorizes subjects in
relation to their embodiment, IR is also lacking in one of its primary purposes: theorizing international political violence . This project argues that
violence is more than a strategic action of rational actors (as in rationalist theories) or a destructive violation of community laws
and norms (as in liberal and constructivist theories). Because IR conventionally theorizes bodies as outside politics and irrelevant to
subjectivity, it cannot see how violence can be understood as a creative force for shaping the limits of how we
understand ourselves as political subjects , as well as forming the boundaries of our bodies and political
communities. Understanding how “war is a generative force like no other” (Barkawi and Brighton 2011, 126) requires us to pay
attention to how bodies are killed and injured, but also formed, re-formed, gendered, and
racialized through the bodily relations of war ; it also requires that we consider how bodies are
enabling and generative of war and practices of political violence more broadly.
Link---Economy
Economic collapse rhetoric shuts down deliberation in favor of an immediate
response—creates a violent state of exception that turns the case
Hanan 1 – Ph.D, Professor of Communication at Temple University (Joshua Stanley, “Managing the
Meltdown Rhetorically: Economic Imaginaries and the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008”,
dissertation The University of Texas at Austin)
By framing the proposed legislation in this particular light, Bush offers us a first example of how the neoliberal state of
exception is manifested rhetorically in the sphere of policy. By describing the crisis as “extraordinary
times” in need of “decisive action,” he is able to side step his administration’s problematic relationship to
Wall Street and the present crisis. Since the economy is not operating normally but is instead in a state of
disarray and chaos, the downturn must be addressed without normal argumentative debate. In his desire to
postpone deliberation by emphasizing the exceptional nature of the crisis , Bush taps into a more general narrative that
emerged during the creation and passage of EESA, namely ethical pragmatism. Like moral critique, ethical pragmatism deploys the
state of exception enthymematically as a way of justifying EESA legislation. Unlike moral critique, however, ethical
pragmatism links the exception to a completely different set of values . By bringing attention to temporary nature of the
present situation, ethical pragmatism argues that deliberation and critique are the enemies . Since the Bush
Administration is “working with Congress to address the root cause behind much of the instability in our
markets,” this narrative contends the worst thing citizens can do right now is challenge the
administration.304 The primary difference between these two rhetorical accounts can thus be located in the way they deploy the state of
exception as an enthymeme to explain EESA and the government’s reaction to the present crisis. Whereas the moral critique implies that a state
of exception has become a permanent practice under Bush, the latter tries to frame the state of exception as temporary action .
Hence, insofar as the narrative of ethical pragmatism attempts to exempt itself from the problem by emphasizing authentic deliberation at a future
point in time, it relies on a different model of the state of exception that is more justifiable. Turning now to our second policy artifact—that of
Secretary Paulson—we see an additional rendering of ethical pragmatism. Delivered on September 23rd 2008 to the Senate Banking Committee,
Paulson’s widely publicized address is particularly useful in illustrating how a temporary understanding of state of exception can be
used as an enthymeme to circumvent moral critique.305By emphasizing the “urgent response” that the
crisis demands, the former Goldman Sach’s CEO centers his argument on how EESA provides “market stability,”
Organizing his narrative around a series of binaries, Paulson’s ethical pragmatism is predicated on the opposition between a
healthy and sick economy. By arguing that “illiquid mortgage-related assets … are choking off the flow of credit which is so vitally
important to our economy,” for example, Paulson renders the financial system a living entity that has been invaded by foreign agents.306
Through a viral process of multiplication, he illustrates how “[t]hese bad loans have created a chain reaction” that now threatens “the very health
of our economy.”307In the same way that a virus can weaken a person’s entire immune system, Paulson wants his audience to see
the economy as having been infected by a rapidly proliferating disease —one that must be eradicated
quickly by experts, and without debate. By explaining the financial crisis through such metaphors, Paulson is able to argue that his
legislation is aimed at excising these "troubled assets from the system.”308The measure is “designed for immediate
implementation and [to] be sufficiently large to have maximum impact and restore market confidence .”309
Thus, by addressing the “underlying problem”—troubled assets that are dragging down the entire economy—he has
devised an expert program to stabilize the financial system . This plan, while putting taxpayers on the line, will cost
American families “far less than the alternative—a continuing series of financial institution failures and frozen credit markets unable to fund
everyday needs and economic expansion.”310 It is at the end of Paulson’s speech, however, that we realize the primary goal of his narrative: the
desire to frame EESA as a temporary state of exception. In spirit of the “bipartisan consensus for an urgent legislative solution,”311 Paulson
argues that there is no time to deliberate and contest the parameters of this bill. Since this “troubled asset purchase program on its
own is the single most effective thing we can do to … stimulate our economy,” we must trust Paulson’s authority as
Treasury Secretary and pass the bill immediately .312 While it is true that “[w]hen we get through this difficult period…
our next task must be to address the problems in our financial system through a reform program that fixes our outdated financial regulatory
structure,” Paulson contends that “we must get through this period first.”313 Through his appeals to urgency and expedient
action, Paulson’s narrative enthymematically invokes a seemingly temporary state of exception . Since the
economy is sick and its pathogen is multiplying rapidly, debate and deliberation about whether EESA is the right form
of interventionism must be postponed to a later point in time. While “[w]e must [eventually] have that critical debate” now is not
the time to question the crisis of neoliberalism .314 As part of Bush’s executive branch we must trust Paulson when he says
he has the “best interest of all Americans” in mind and not risk making the situation even worse. Despite residing in a different sphere of policy
than Bush and Paulson, the third rhetor—Fed Chair Ben Bernanke—demonstrates how the narrative of ethical pragmatism can emerge in
governmental avenues outside the Executive Branch. Delivered to multiple Congressional committees on September 24 and 25, 2008, Bernanke’s
testimony represents perhaps the most explicit attempt to grapple with the contradiction between the Federal government's neoliberal history and
its looming Keynesian intervention.315“Despite the efforts of the Federal Reserve, the …global financial markets remain under extraordinary
stress," declares Bernanke, rationalizing why, in the case of the present downturn, the neoliberal privileging of monetary policy over fiscal policy
will no longer suffice.316 Viewing capitalism through a rhetorical lens similar to that of Paulson, Bernanke describes how "stresses in financial
markets have been high and have recently intensified significantly."317 As "rising mortgage delinquencies" spiral out of control and intersect
other financial venues "the implications for the broader economy could be quite adverse."318 Bernanke thus declares that "[a]ction by the
Congress is urgently required to stabilize the situation."319 If action is not taken immediately to avert the economy’s growing crisis, the situation
may become even bleaker. Like Bush and Paulson, central to Bernanke's attitude toward EESA is the need for immediate action. While he
acknowledges "the shortcomings and weaknesses of our financial markets and regulatory system" now is not the time to debate the policies
underscoring the bill.320 The "development of a comprehensive proposal for reform would require careful and extensive analysis that would be
difficult to compress into a short legislative timeframe now available."321 Bernanke thus believes that it "is essential to deal with the crisis at
hand" and focus later on building a "stronger, more resilient, and better regulated financial system."322 While Bernanke believes the urgency of
the situation is enough of a justification for passing EESA, he does have a response for those who may be critical of the bill’s interventionist
tendencies: “Government assistance should be given with the greatest of reluctance,” adding that in the present case such attempts have already
been exhausted.323Since the Federal Reserve already “attempted to identify private-sector approaches” but none were forthcoming, the
government has no other choice but to bail out the financial sector. By rationalizing EESA as the only possible option, then,
Bernanke's narrative of ethical pragmatism is meant to close off the possibility of dissent . For those that feel
interventionism is a disgrace to free market capitalism, Bernanke has made it clear that "private-sector arrangements" were taken into account. On
the other hand, for who those critique the government for "bailing out Wall Street," Bernanke's appeals imply that debate and deliberation
will come at a later point in time. Thus through his stifling of opposition from all sides, Bernanke’s narrative of ethical
pragmatism invokes the state of exception as the temporary justification for the government’s economic
actions. The Exceptionality of Ethical Pragmatism Bush, Paulson and Bernanke all provide accounts that, while told in slightly different ways,
use the strategy of ethical pragmatism to try to suspend critique and discussion. Whether emphasizing “extraordinary times,”
“urgency,” or “lack of options,” Bush, Paulson, and Bernanke all invoke the state of exception as the
enthymematic justification for their actions. The “exceptional” frame underscoring this series of arguments,
then, offers an additional way to grasp why the dissenting narrative —moral critique—may have had so little
impact on EESA’s legislation. By rendering of EESA as an emergency measure to save the economy, ethical
pragmatism was able to defer debate. Moreover, since ethical pragmatism emerged from the very same sphere in which EESA was
introduced—that of policy—it was able to supersede dissident narratives about the bill at an institutional level. Since the former, not the latter,
narrative defined the parameters of the policy debate; ethical pragmatism had both a material and discursive advantage. Moral critique’s failure
can thus be observed simultaneously in two different rhetorical/institutional contexts. In respect to its own rhetorical argument, moral critique’s
use of the state of exception as an explanation for EESA’s passage negated its own critique by affirming that this technique of power does indeed
exist. At the same time, through the narrative frame of ethical pragmatism, moral critique was deferred from the realm of policy. Since the
“exceptionality” of the situation demanded a suspension of deliberation, it became justified to pass the
bill without proper economic argument. We are thus left to conclude that the state of exception has both a discursive and extra-
discursive reality since the institutional forms and discourses coincide with one another
Link---Objective IR
Their securitized representations of China through a theory of “scientific”
reasoning silences dissent and creates a self-fulfilling prophecy – you should
question the epistemological assumptions of the affirmative instead of accepting
their supposedly objective scholarship
3. Securitizing the China Threat as Scientific Theory

Within the China threat genre there is a broader
range of discursive examples following the scientific mode of
securitization. These are mostly scholarly works enacted by academics. Here is a classic “theory as practice” text:
Can China rise peacefully? My answer is no. If China continues its impressive economic growth over the next few decades, the United States and
China are likely to engage in an intense security competition with considerable potential for war. Most of China’s neighbours—including India,
Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Russia and Vietnam—will join with the United States to contain China’s power.40
At the very beginning of this essay, boldly titled “China’s Unpeaceful Rise,” John Mearsheimer, a world-renowned IR scholar, pessimistically
predicts the consequences of China’s rise. Mearsheimer’s claim that China’s rise will be “unpeaceful” is clearly in
antithesis to the Chinese government’s promise of a “peaceful rise.” In a typical example of the latter, Zheng, a former
Chinese official and policy advisor, assures the outside world that “China does not seek hegemony or predominance in world affairs,” and that
“China’s development depends on world peace— a peace that its development will in turn reinforce.” 41 People are thus faced with
two opposing scenarios for IR in East Asia. Which should one believe?
A poststructuralist reading of the above extract suggests that Mearsheimer articulates the China threat theory through the scientific mode of
representation. First, there is a process of structural incorporation, whereby the subject of China serves the broader interests of academic enquiry.
In short, although this is a serious issue of “hard” security, it is presented as a research topic. The author
does not mention the China threat directly in the essay, and his argument develops in a fairly objective
tone. Indeed, Mearsheimer emphasizes at the outset the need for a “theory of international politics” that explains the behavior of rising great
powers when one tries to “predict” the future of world politics.42 Therefore, the issue of China’s rise and its consequences is
fashioned as an academic subject rather than an internationally current topic of passionate debate.
In the scientific mode, the China threat is securitized via “scientific” reasoning . In this regard, the referent
object is the national security of the United States, the world’s single remaining superpower and its allies.
The subject or audience comprises the intellectual elites and , more important, policy makers of the
United States and its allies. The securitizers are IR academics and policy analysts, represented in the above extract by Mearsheimer. From
the poststructuralist perspective, these agents perform securitization acts by formulating theories, predicting
inevitable outcomes, and advocating policy options. As a result, the distinction between theory and
practice disappears at this point.
To ensure that the issue of the China threat is situated in the relevant epistemic terrain, the proper language must be adopted for
academic debate on the existence and nature of the threat posed by China . Mearsheimer thus claims that his argument
is based on a “theory” of rising great powers and the effects of their rise on international politics. As students of international politics will
immediately recognize, this “theory” is the “offensive” variant of the realist IR tradition, well documented in Mearsheimer’s 2001 book The
Tragedy of Great Power Politics. 43 In this influential study, Mearsheimer presents his argument on the China threat issue with consummate
professionalism. He first enumerates the five “bedrock” assumptions of offensive realism: an anarchic international system; the inherently
offensive military capabilities of great powers; uncertainty about other states’ intentions; survival as the primary goal; and the rationality of state
actors. The combined effects of these assumptions are that great powers tend to be fearful of each other, to rely upon themselves for their
survival, and to try by any means to maximize their own power.44 Mearsheimer concludes that this “scientific” logic is generally applicable as an
explanation of the behavior of great powers that “seek to gain as much power as possible over their rivals.” 45
The issues of power and knowledge are crucial to the scientific mode. Only certain individuals can lay
claim to the “knowledge” that is widely accepted as legitimate . The dominant “knowledge” of global
affairs is both “arbitrary” (in the sense that it is only one of many interpretations) and “non-arbitrary” (in the sense that certain
interpretative practices predominate worldwide).46 For an interpretation of global affairs to become dominant, it
requires power and authority in its field. The epistemological and ontological foundations of
interpretations of IR thus matter less than their authority . Due to his well-established reputation
worldwide as a scholar of IR, Mearsheimer’s acts of securitization have considerable power and
authority . One survey ranks him among the scholars with the greatest influence and most interesting output in the field over the past few
decades.47 According to Google Scholar, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics has been cited as many as 3,371 times (as of April 2014).
With regard to substantial modality, the main social spheres addressed by the scientific mode of securitization are military and strategic. Unlike
China, which defends itself against China threat allegations primarily with reassurances of goodwill, a securitizer, like Mearsheimer, seeks
to argue from a “scientific” basis. He reasons that “to predict the future in Asia, one needs a theory of international politics” that is
“logically sound.” 48 Mearsheimer builds a specific communicative “sign system” in the use of scientific
language to make claims to knowledge.49 He speaks from the perspective of a scientifically trained expert in world politics, thus
privileging technical language over everyday language. The threat posed by a rising China to international security is
reasoned “scientifically” to be inevitable. This raises the question of what practice or activity this use of language is designed to
elicit. By persuading readers of the inevitability of a Chinese threat , for example, Mearsheimer may aim to
prompt the action perceived as necessary to prevent this threat.
According to a survey titled “The Ivory Tower,” published in Foreign Policy, the majority of both academics and practitioners in the United
States consider China’s rise to be the most important U.S. foreign-policy challenge.50 Similarly, both IR scholars and practitioners regularly
pinpoint East Asia as the region of greatest strategic importance to the United States today and over the next 20 years. Although most IR scholars
agree that China’s political influence has not yet exceeded that of the United States, they predict that the chance of war between the two countries
will increase from 13 percent in the next 10 years to 23 percent in the next 30 years.51
In the scientific mode, securitizers reason deductively from scientific theory to the existence of a “China threat.”
This deductive process entails many instances of “intertextuality,”52 moments at which one spoken or written text alludes to, quotes, or otherwise
relates to another. Discussion of the China threat is no longer limited to the world of academia; for instance, the issue has been widely referenced
and examined by U.S. journalists in books that have subsequently become bestsellers.53 It is difficult to trace the ways in which academics and
policy makers influence each other. However, it is clear that renowned IR scholars like Mearsheimer are influential
not only in their own fields but far beyond. Here, knowledge and power mutually reinforce each other.
With the increasing popularity of offensive realism and powertransition theory, people in many different
professions are alluding to or talking at length about the so-called China threat. In scholarly discussion,
policy analysis, and strategic planning, the issue is often taken as a given.
Link---Ontological Security
This ontological commitment to global strategic ordering is the root cause of
conflict, makes violence and serial policy failure inevitable
Burke 7 (Anthony Burke, Int'l Studies @ U of New South Wales, “Ontologies of War,” in Theory &
Event, Vol. 10, Iss. 2)
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.
Link---Order
Disorder and insecurity are inevitable. Attempting to control danger is the impetus
for global destruction
Der Derian 98 – James Der Derian, Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts,
On Security, Ed. Lipschutz, p. 24-25
No other concept in international relations packs the metaphysical punch , nor commands the
disciplinary power of "security." In its name, peoples have alienated their fears, rights and powers to gods,
emperors, and most recently, sovereign states, all to protect themselves from the vicissitudes of nature--as well as
from other gods, emperors, and sovereign states. In its name, w eapons of m ass d estruction have been developed which
have transfigured national interest into a security dilemma based on a suicide pact . And, less often noted
in international relations, in its name billions have been made and millions killed while scientific knowledge has been furthered and
intellectual dissent muted. We have inherited an ontotheology of security, that is, an a priori
argument that proves the existence and necessity of only one form of security because there
currently happens to be a widespread, metaphysical belief in it. Indeed, within the concept of security lurks
the entire history of western metaphysics, which was best described by Derrida "as a series of substitutions of center for
center" in a perpetual search for the "transcendental signified." Continues... 7 In this case, Walt cites IR scholar Robert Keohane on the hazards
of "reflectivism," to warn off anyone who by inclination or error might wander into the foreign camp: "As Robert Keohane has noted, until these
writers `have delineated . . . a research program and shown . . . that it can illuminate important issues in world politics, they will remain on the
margins of the field.' " 8 By the end of the essay, one is left with the suspicion that the rapid changes in world politics have triggered a "security
crisis" in security studies that requires extensive theoretical damage control. What if we leave the desire for mastery to the
insecure and instead imagine a new dialogue of security, not in the pursuit of a utopian end but in recognition of
the world as it is, other than us ? What might such a dialogue sound like? Any attempt at an answer requires a genealogy: to understand
the discursive power of the concept, to remember its forgotten meanings, to assess its economy of use in the present, to reinterpret--and possibly
construct through the reinterpretation--a late modern security comfortable with a plurality of centers, multiple meanings, and fluid identities. The
steps I take here in this direction are tentative and preliminary. I first undertake a brief history of the concept itself. Second, I present the
"originary" form of security that has so dominated our conception of international relations, the Hobbesian episteme of realism. Third, I consider
the impact of two major challenges to the Hobbesian episteme, that of Marx and Nietzsche. And finally, I suggest that Baudrillard provides the
best, if most nullifying, analysis of security in late modernity. In short, I retell the story of realism as an historic encounter of fear and danger with
power and order that produced four realist forms of security: epistemic, social, interpretive, and hyperreal. To preempt a predictable criticism, I
wish to make it clear that I am not in search of an "alternative security." An easy defense is to invoke Heidegger, who
declared that "questioning is the piety of thought." Foucault, however, gives the more powerful reason for a genealogy of security: I am not
looking for an alternative; you can't find the solution of a problem in the solution of another problem raised at another moment by other people.
You see, what I want to do is not the history of solutions, and that's the reason why I don't accept the word alternative. My point is not that
everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. The hope is that in the
interpretation of the most pressing dangers of late modernity we might be able to construct a form of
security based on the appreciation and articulation rather than the normalization or extirpation of difference.
Nietzsche transvalues both Hobbes's and Marx's interpretations of security through a genealogy of modes of being. His method is not to
uncover some deep meaning or value for security, but to destabilize the intolerable fictional identities of the past which have been
created out of fear, and to affirm the creative differences which might yield new values for the future. Originating in the
paradoxical relationship of a contingent life and a certain death, the history of security reads for Nietzsche as an abnegation, a resentment and,
finally, a transcendence of this paradox. In brief, the history is one of individuals seeking an impossible security from the most radical "other" of
life, the
terror of death which, once generalized and nationalized, triggers a futile cycle of collective identities
seeking security from alien others--who are seeking similarly impossible guarantees . It is a story of
differences taking on the otherness of death, and identities calcifying into a fearful sameness .
Link---Orientalism
They discursively otherize China to grease the wheels of American imperialist
domination – reject their Orientalist politics on face
The relationship of the United States and People’s Republic of China (China) is arguably one of the most important in this century .
The
ability of the United States and China to maintain a cooperative relationship will shape, to a large extent,
outcomes on key global issues such as the stability and growth of the global economy, resource scarcity,
climate change, and the nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction . Since President Nixon’s policy of
constructive engagement over four decades ago, the strategic partnership of the two has grown to an extent unimaginable back in 1972. The
alignment of strategic interests between the two has led to policies of undeniable mutual benefit to date—on one hand, China’s access to
world markets has allowed its economy to grow at impressive rates; on the other hand, this growth has
helped to sustain US spending and thus, its maintenance of global hegemony .1 In recent years, however, sharp
disagreements have surfaced on numerous fronts, and the United States has sought to maintain dominance
in the partnership. One of the mechanisms that have facilitated this, we argue, is the construction of China
via long-standing Orientalist tropes that, at once flexible and durable, are easily mobilized and adapted for
strategic political ends . As formulated by foremost scholar Edward Said (2014), depictions of the “Orient” have served
as ideological tools aiding empires since the late 18th century—first the British and French, subsequently, the United
States. The role of knowledge production in the colonial project , which Said termed “Orientalism,” has relied
primarily on producing images of the “Orient” in dualistic terms that serve to affirm Western
cultural superiority —for example, in depicting the “Orient” as backward, the West becomes civilized ; in
casting the former as superstitious, the latter becomes scientific; in describing the former as irrational, the
latter becomes rational; in representing the former as archaic, the latter becomes modern; in fashioning
the former as evil, the latter becomes good; in painting a picture of the former as violent, the latter
becomes peaceful. The affirmation of Western superiority and concomitantly, the cultural and moral
inferiority of the “Orient,” have served to justify Western expansion and global control over lands,
peoples, and resources.
Western construction of the cultural and moral inferiority of China has had a long history and includes an array of portrayals that can be read in
light of specific European and US colonial aims. These include images of China as exotic and immoral in the 1700s, as a cunning and diabolical
“Yellow Peril” in the late 1800s, as a freedom-loving and democracy-loving “China Mystique” during World War II, and as an ideological,
economic, and military “Red Peril” during the Cold War (Kim, 2010; Leong, 2005). Since the end of the Cold War and the definitive
establishment of US global hegemony, China has vacillated in the US imaginary between the latter two positions,
viewed at times as a little brother following imperfectly the path toward modernity, at times imperiling
the world order (Kim, 2010; Vukovich, 2012). This ambiguity continues to occur through the present day and, in light of China’s rise as a
global power since the late 1990s, China is increasingly portrayed, not necessarily an enemy, but always a
potential one . This construction of China as a potential enemy Other reflects the relationship of mutual
interdependence carefully cultivated by many US administrations at the same time that it functions to
justify the paternalistic monitoring and policing of China to ensure that China never overtakes the United
States on the world stage. With this frame in mind, we examine the recapitulation of Orientalist tropes in the post-Cold War context,
focusing, in particular, on representations and language used in US news media and political rhetoric.
Link---Proliferation
Fear of proliferation invokes orientalist tropes that legitimize mass violence –
they’re nuclear apartheid
Biswas 8 – Shampa Biswas, Professor of International Relations at Whitman College, “Nuclear
Apartheid” As Political Position: Race As A Postcolonial Resource?,
http://asrudiancenter.wordpress.com/2008/11/07/nuclear-apartheid-as-political-position-race-as-a-
postcolonial-resource/
Nuclear Apartheid: Race in the Global Order
The nuclear-apartheid argument has been invoked fairly regularly in the public speeches of Indian political leaders and policymakers. As is
pointed out by external-affairs minister Jaswant Singh, the division between nuclear haves and nuclear have-nots within
a discriminatory and flawed nonproliferation regime that sets “differentiated standards of national security” creates a “a sort of
international nuclear apartheid .” (36) To use the word apartheid is clearly to use a racial signifier, and one that carries with it a
certain contemporary political resonance, given the very recent shameful history of the complicity of many First World states with the racist
regime in South Africa. Under very different circumstances no doubt, the nuclear-apartheid argument is in one sense an attempt then to point to
the continuing exclusions and marginalizations faced by people of color in Third World countries in a global order dominated and controlled by
privileged whites in First World countries. Now it is clear that this black/white distinction is problematic. Not only can China, as one of the
nuclear five, clearly not be categorized in the latter category, but it is also problematic, for reasons that will become clearer later, to conflate state
boundaries with racial boundaries, despite the racial implications of all boundary-making exercises. However, the articulation of “whiteness” with
power is deep and compelling for many and draws on a particular postcolonial logic. Let us, for instance, hear the words of a scholar on Indian
security writing just before the Indian tests:
There continues to exist three “White” nuclear weapons states as part of the Western alliance to which in all likelihood a fourth one, Russia, may
be added when its “Partnership for Peace” merges into NATO. It may be recalled that following the Indian atomic test of 1974, President Zulfikar
Ali Bhutto of Pakistan had reportedly said that there was a Christian bomb (US, Britain and France), a Marxist bomb (Soviet Union and China), a
Jewish bomb (Israel’s bombs-in-the-basement) and now a Hindu bomb (India), but no Muslim bomb. Likewise, India could possibly complain
now that there were four White bombs, one Yellow or Beige bomb, but no Brown or Black bombs, an unfair and unacceptable situation. While
China may continue to show some defiance against the policies of the West on occasion, the nuclear distribution indicated the continuing
domination of the traditional White imperialists in an overwhelmingly non-White world. (37)
Similarly, J. Mohan Malik, in reference to the nuclear-apartheid position says that “an unstated reason behind India’s nuclear ambivalence had
been the belief that the possession of nuclear weapons by ‘white’ nations implied their racial and technological superiority that could not go
unchallenged.” (38) It is this sense of racial discrimination in a postcolonial world that is invoked by a BJP spokesman when he says, “We don’t
want to be blackmailed and treated as oriental blackies.” (39)
Let us examine more closely what discrimination the nuclear apartheid position precisely points to. “ Nuclear apartheid,” as deployed by
Indian leaders, quite simply points to not just the existence of an unequal global distribution of nuclear resources, but the
legitimization
and institutionalization of that inequality through the terms of contemporary international treaties such as the
NPT and the CTBT. Let us hear Jaswant Singh on this issue:
If the permanent five’s possession of nuclear weapons increases security, why would India’s possession of nuclear weapons be dangerous? If the
permanent five continue to employ nuclear weapons as an international currency of force and power, why should India voluntarily devalue its
own state power and national security? Why admonish India after the fact for not falling in line behind a new international agenda of
discriminatory nonproliferation pursued largely due to the internal agendas or political debates of the nuclear club? If deterrence works in the
West–as it so obviously appears to, since Western nations insist on continuing to possess nuclear weapons–by what reasoning will it not work in
India? (40)
On the face of it, such an argument is hard to dispute. Clearly, both treaties recognize a clear distinction between those able to possess nuclear
weapons and those that are not. Further, the unequal burdens placed on those two groups to contribute to a “nuclear-free world” makes
one wonder about the criteria that makes any particular group of countries more “worthy” of or more “capable” of or
more “responsible” in possessing weapons that seem dangerous when they proliferate to others . Within a national-
security problematic, the pressures that impinge on France to acquire nuclear weapons to ward off the dangers of an anarchic world are surely not
in any demonstrably clear fashion any greater than those that impinge on India. (41) In the words of the Indian minister for external affairs, “It
cannot be argued that the security of a few countries depends on their having nuclear weapons, and that of the rest depends on their not.” (42) If
security is indeed “high politics,” then the question of the affordability of nuclear weapons by an “underdeveloped” country like India should also
be moot. If being “secure” is always the foremost priority, then a poor India’s expensive nuclear program should make sense–unless the life of
poor people is cheap. Moreover, if deterrence is the product of “state rationality,” then the horrific calculus of “mutual destruction” should
operate as smoothly to prevent nuclear war in the Indian subcontinent (where contiguous territory only magnifies the horror) as it does in the
European theater. (43) The creeping suspicion that the accentuated fear of nuclear disaster in South Asia, expressed
in different versions of “the South Asian Tinderbox” argument, are reflections of more deep-seated prejudices
about the “irrationality” of barbaric peoples in the Third World is hard to avoid . Hence, Pratap Bhanu
Mehta attributes the popularity of the tests for Indians to the “politics of cultural representation”–a general perception of the unstated
assumption in global nuclear discourse that “the subcontinent is full of unstable people with deep
historical resentments, incapable of acting rationally or managing a technologically sophisticated arsenal.” (44)
However, this is not to discount the significance of issues such as the historical relations between India and Pakistan or the
underdevelopment of a command, control, communications, and intelligence system in either country–which add new and important
dimensions to the possibility of a South Asian nuclear conflict–but to problematize the manner in which they “function”
within a particular discourse to create certain kinds of possibilities and foreclose others. For instance, I believe
that the historical relationship between India and Pakistan is certainly pivotal to understanding the nuclear dynamic between these two states, but
it is also important to point out that the dominant historical narrative of the US role in World War II has imparted a certain
“aura of responsibility” to the US decision to use an atomic bomb, so that the United States’ unique position as the only
country ever to have used a nuclear weapon is rendered beyond ethical reproach, while India’s mere
possession of it becomes questionable. Why , after all, does the possession of around one hundred or so
nuclear weapons by India and Pakistan cause the kind of stir that the more than ten thousand nuclear
warheads , many on active alert, in the U nited S tates hardly ever invoke? If such a “sense of (un)safety” is not simply
a product of the proliferation of nuclear weapons but also has to do with “whom” these weapons proliferate to (hence, the much greater focus on
horizontal, rather than vertical, proliferation in these treaties), then what prejudiced criteria make the P-5 unthreatening to, and indeed in some
renditions the guarantors of, safety in a way not deemed possible for other countries? (45) Why, if it is not about a certain kind of racism, do
treaties like the NPT and CTBT that do legitimize both structural inequities and the presuppositions that make those possible, not appear
preposterous to scholars, commentators, and activists who find “progress” in the institutionalization of international norms? Is it not possible to
argue that the strategic objectives of treaties like the NPT and CTBT have less to do with peace and more with
maintaining a monopoly of nuclear violence , a monopoly that is not just fundamental to the
undemocratic nature of the world order but can be used to sustain and maintain the hegemony of a few
states? (46)
In this sense, then, the nuclear-apartheid argument does need to be taken seriously. Not only does it point to the hypocrisy
inherent in the disarmament position taken by powerful countries but it also points to orientalist assumptions
that underlie both such positions and the responses generated by the proliferation of nuclear weapons to Third
World countries. The argument also indicates the existence of an international hierarchy that, even when it is recognized, is accepted
somewhat unproblematically by those within NWSs quick to condemn India and Pakistan without simultaneously condemning the P-5. (47) Even
if one accepts that there is a middle ground between what is seen as the “impossibility” of complete global disarmament and the “horror” of
unrestricted proliferation, and that this middle ground of some kind of “realistic” arms-control arrangement is certainly more attractive than its
absence, the nuclear-apartheid argument does call on us to interrogate how indeed what becomes “realistic”
within this terrain of the “middle ground” is produced through the workings of power in the international
realm. This is one sense in which the nuclear-apartheid argument does make it possible to unsettle some of the
taken-for-granted in accounts of international relations . While its political-strategic use by Indian leaders is largely
directed at a domestic constituency that can find a compelling postcolonial logic in this symbol of discrimination and racial condescension, (48) it
behooves IR scholars to take seriously and pay close attention to the claims made in and through this symbol. Is it precisely the silence on “race”
within IR that both enables its use as a postcolonial resource by Indian political leaders and constrains scholars from interrogating critically
(without dismissing it or accepting it at its face value) the claims of that position?
Link---Psychoanalysis
Security is a psychological construct---scenarios for conflict are products of
paranoia that project our violent impulses onto the other
Mack 91 – John Mack, Doctor of Psychiatry and Professor at Harvard University, “The Enemy
System”, http://www.johnemackinstitute.org/eJournal/article.asp?id=23 [language modified]
The threat of nuclear annihilation has stimulated us to try to understand what it is about (hu)mankind
that has led to such self-destroying behavior . Central to this inquiry is an exploration of the
adversarial relationships between ethnic or national groups. It is out of such enmities that war,
including nuclear war should it occur, has always arisen. Enmity between groups of people stems from the
interaction of psychological, economic, and cultural elements. These include fear and hostility (which are often
closely related), competition over perceived scarce resources,[3] the need for individuals to identify with
a large group or cause,[4] a tendency to disclaim and assign elsewhere responsibility for unwelcome
impulses and intentions, and a peculiar susceptibility to emotional manipulation by leaders who play upon our more
savage inclinations in the name of national security or the national interest. A full understanding of the "enemy system"[3]
requires insights from many specialities, including psychology, anthropology, history, political science, and the humanities. In
their statement on violence[5] twenty social and behavioral scientists, who met in Seville, Spain, to examine the roots of war,
declared that there was no scientific basis for regarding [hu]man[s] as an innately aggressive animal,
inevitably committed to war. The Seville statement implies that we have real choices . It also points to a hopeful paradox of
the nuclear age: threat of nuclear war may have provoked our capacity for fear-driven polarization but
at the same time it has inspired unprecedented efforts towards cooperation and settlement of
differences without violence. The Real and the Created Enemy Attempts to explore the psychological roots of
enmity are frequently met with responses on the following lines: "I can accept psychological
explanations of things, but my enemy is real . The Russians [or Germans, Arabs, Israelis, Americans] are armed,
threaten us, and intend us harm. Furthermore, there are real differences between us and our national
interests, such as competition over oil, land, or other scarce resources, and genuine conflicts of
values between our two nations. It is essential that we be strong and maintain a balance or superiority of
military and political power, lest the other side take advantage of our weakness ". This argument
does not address the distinction between the enemy threat and one's own contribution to that threat -
by distortions of perception, provocative words, and actions. In short, the enemy is real, but we have
not learned to understand how we have created that enemy , or how the threatening image we hold
of the enemy relates to its actual intentions. "We never see our enemy's motives and we never labor to assess
his will, with anything approaching objectivity ".[6] Individuals may have little to do with the choice of national enemies. Most
Americans, for example, know only what has been reported in the mass media about the Soviet Union. We are largely unaware of
the forces that operate within our institutions, affecting the thinking of our leaders and ourselves,
and which determine how the Soviet Union will be represented to us . Ill-will and a desire for revenge are
transmitted from one generation to another, and we are not taught to think critically about how our assigned
enemies are selected for us . In the relations between potential adversarial nations there will have been, inevitably, real grievances
that are grounds for enmity. But the attitude of one people towards another is usually determined by leaders who manipulate the minds of citizens
for domestic political reasons which are generally unknown to the public. As Israeli sociologist Alouph Haveran has said, in times of
conflict between nations historical accuracy is the first victim.[8] The Image of the Enemy and How We Sustain It
Vietnam veteran William Broyles wrote: " War begins in the mind, with the idea of the enemy ."[9] But to sustain
that idea in war and peacetime a nation's leaders must maintain public support for the massive
expenditures that are required. Studies of enmity have revealed susceptibilities , though not necessarily
recognized as such by the governing elites that provide raw material upon which the leaders may draw to sustain the
image of an enemy.[7,10] Freud[11] in his examination of mass psychology identified the proclivity
of individuals to surrender personal responsibility to the leaders of large groups . This surrender takes place
in both totalitarian and democratic societies, and without coercion. Leaders can therefore designate outside enemies and take actions against them
with little opposition. Much further research is needed to understand the psychological mechanisms that impel individuals to
kill or allow killing in their name, often with little questioning of the morality or consequences of such
actions. Philosopher and psychologist Sam Keen asks why it is that in virtually every war "The enemy is seen as less than human? He's
faceless. He's an animal"." Keen tries to answer his question: "The image of the enemy is not only the soldier's most powerful weapon;
it is society's most powerful weapon. It enables people en masse to participate in acts of violence they
would never consider doing as individuals".[12] National leaders become skilled in presenting the adversary in dehumanized images. The mass
media, taking their cues from the leadership, contribute powerfully to the process.
Link---Terrorism
Predictions of catastrophic terrorism are a product of an insular threat industry
that generates propaganda for state violence under the guise of objective academia
Greenwald 12 – Glenn Greenwald, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist, Co-Founder of The Intercept,
JD from New York University School of Law, “The Sham “Terrorism Expert” Industry”, Salon, 8-15,
https://www.salon.com/2012/08/15/the_sham_terrorism_expert_industry/
Shortly prior to the start of the London Olympics, there was an outburst of hysteria over the failure to provide sufficient security against Terrorism, but as
Harvard Professor Stephen Walt noted yesterday in Foreign Policy, this was all driven, as usual, by severe exaggerations of the threat:
"Well, surprise, surprise. Not only was there no terrorist attack, the Games themselves came off rather well." Walt then urges this lesson be learned:
[W]e continue to over-react to the "terrorist threat." Here I recommend you read John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart's The Terrorism
Delusion: America's Overwrought Response to September 11, in the latest issue of International Security. Mueller and Stewart analyze 50 cases
of supposed "Islamic terrorist plots" against the United States, and show how virtually all of the perpetrators were (in
their words) "incompetent, ineffective, unintelligent, idiotic, ignorant, unorganized, misguided, muddled, amateurish, dopey, unrealistic, moronic,
irrational and foolish." They quote former Glenn Carle, former deputy national intelligence officer for transnational threats saying "we must see jihadists for the small,
lethal, disjointed and miserable opponents that they are," noting further that al Qaeda's "capabilities are far inferior to its desires."
In the next paragraph, Walt essentially makes clear why this
lesson will not be learned: namely, because there are too many
American interests vested in the perpetuation of this irrational fear:
Mueller and Stewart estimate that expenditures on domestic homeland security (i.e., not counting the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan) have
increased by more than $1 trillion since 9/11, even though the annual risk of dying in a domestic terrorist
attack is about 1 in 3.5 million. Using conservative assumptions and conventional risk-assessment methodology, they estimate that for these
expenditures to be cost-effective "they would have had to deter, prevent, foil or protect against 333 very large attacks that would otherwise have been successful every
year." Finally, they worry that this
exaggerated sense of danger has now been "internalized" : even when politicians
and "terrorism experts" aren't hyping the danger, the public still sees the threat as large and imminent . As
they conclude:
... Americans seems to have internalized their anxiety about terrorism, and politicians and policymakers have come to believe that they can defy it only at their own
peril. Concern about appearing to be soft on terrorism has replaced concern about seeming to be soft on communism, a phenomenon that lasted far longer than the
dramatic that generated it ... This extraordinarily exaggerated and essentially delusional response may prove to be perpetual."
Which is another way of saying that you should be prepared to keep standing in those pleasant and efficient TSA lines for the rest of your life, and to keep paying for
far-flung foreign interventions designed to "root out" those nasty jihadis.
Many of the benefits from keeping Terrorism fear levels high are obvious. Private
corporations suck up massive amounts of
Homeland Security cash as long as that fear persists, while government officials in the National Security
and Surveillance State can claim unlimited powers, and operate with unlimited secrecy and no
accountability. In sum, the private and public entities that shape government policy and drive political discourse profit far too much in numerous ways to
allow rational considerations of the Terror threat.
*****
But there's a very similar and at least equally important (though far less discussed) constituency deeply vested in the perpetuation of this fear. It's the sham industry
"terrorism experts," who have built their careers on fear-mongering over
Walt refers to, with appropriate scare quotes, as
Islamic Terrorism and can stay relevant only if that threat does .
These "terrorism experts" form an incredibly incestuous, mutually admiring little clique in and around
Washington. They're employed at think tanks, academic institutions, and media outlets. They can and do
have mildly different political ideologies -- some are more Republican, some are more Democratic -- but, as usual for D.C. cliques,
ostensible differences in political views are totally inconsequential when placed next to their common
group identity and career interest : namely, sustaining the myth of the Grave Threat of Islamic Terror
in order to justify their fear-based careers, the relevance of their circle, and their alleged "expertise." Like
all adolescent, insular cliques, they defend one another reflexively whenever a fellow member is attacked,
closing ranks with astonishing speed and loyalty; they take substantive criticisms very personally as attacks on their "friends,"
because a criticism of the genre and any member in good standing of this fiefdom is a threat to their collective interests.
On a more substantive level, any argument (such as Walt's) that puts the Menace of Islamic Terror into its proper rational
perspective -- namely, that it pales in comparison to countless other threats (including Terrorism from non-Muslim individuals and states); that it is wildly
exaggerated considering what is done in its name; and that it is sustained by ugly sentiments of Islamophobic bigotry -- is one that must be harshly
denounced. Such an argument not only threatens their relevance but also their central ideology: that Terror is an objective term that just happens almost always
to mean Islamic Terror, but never American Terror.
Thus, Walt's seemingly uncontroversial article was published for not even 24 hours when it was bitterly attacked for hours on Twitter this morning by Daveed
Gartenstein-Ross, and it's not hard to see why. Looking at Gartenstein-Ross's reaction and what drives it sheds considerable light onto this sham "terrorism expert"
industry.
Gartenstein-Ross' entire lucrative career as a "terrorism expert" desperately depends on the perpetuation of the Islamic Terror threat. He markets himself as an expert
in Islamic Terror by highlighting that he was born Jewish, converted to Islam while in college, and then Saw the Light and converted to Christianity. During his short
stint as a Muslim, he worked at the al-Haramain charity foundation in Oregon -- the same one that was found to have been illegally spied upon by the Bush NSA -- but
became an FBI informant against the group because -- as he claimed in a book,"My Year Inside Radical Islam", which he subsequently wrote to profit off of his
conduct -- he was horrified by "the group hatreds and anti-intellectualism of radical Islam."
He is now listed as an "expert" at the neocon Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (the group's list of "experts" is basically a Who's Who of every unhinged
neocon extremist in the country). Gartenstein-Ross is specifically employed by the Foundation as something called "Director of the Center for the Study of Terrorist
Radicalization." According to his own bio, he also "consults for clients who need to be at the forefront of understanding violent non-state actors and twenty-first
century conflict" including for "major media companies, and strategic consultations for defense contractors" and "also regularly designs and leads training for the U.S.
Department of Defense’s Leader Development and Education for Sustained Peace (LDESP) courses, the U.S. State Department’s Office of Anti-Terrorism Assistance,
and domestic law enforcement."
Unsurprisingly, Gartenstein-Ross -- like so many "terrorism experts" in similar positions -- is eager to depict Islamic Terror as a serious threat: he knows where his
bread his buttered and does not want the personal cash train known as the War on Terror ever to arrive at a final destination. If you were him, would you?
In 2009, he wrote a study entitled "Homegrown Terrorists in the U.S. and U.K." which, needless to say, was only about Muslims: an "examination of 117 'jihadist'
terrorists in the United States and the United Kingdom" which "concludes that religious beliefs" -- namely, Islam --"play a role in radicalization." In 2011, he wrote a
book entitled Bin Laden's Legacy: Why We're Still Losing the War on Terror, which argues that "despite the death of Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda remains a
significant threat." He has hyped the ludicrous alleged Iranian Quds Forces plot against the Saudi Ambassador (explaining that "Holder weighing in on the plot’s
connection to Iran means the administration is deadly serious about it"), and recently touted Nigeria as the "next front in the war on terror."
To be sure, Gartenstein-Ross is more nuanced and sophisticated than the standard neocon "terror expert" cartoon -- his 2011 bin Laden book argues against wasteful
counter-terrorism programs that are out of proportion to the actual threat, and he has, to his credit, publicly opposed some of the more crass Islamophobic attacks --
but if the War on Islamic Terror disappears, so, too, does his lucrative career as a "terrorism expert." In that regard, he's a highly representative figure for this industry.
Walt's clearly expressed and uncontroversial argument about the exaggerated Terror threat prompted hours of angry derision and personal mockery today from
Gartenstein-Ross (who ironically often holds himself out as the Beacon of Civil Discourse). It began this way:
Gartenstein-Ross then demanded that Muslim Terror be taken more seriously than Walt suggests: "terrorists actually put 3 bombs on passenger planes since 2009." He
was then joined by fellow "natsec" clique members for hours of swarming group mockery aimed at Walt (that's how they typically behave). Gartenstein-Ross
continued: Foreign Policy "should rename Walt's blog 'An Ideologue in an Ideological Age.' The idea he transcends ideological blinders is laughable." Professor Walt,
he then said, is "far less rigorous than his reputation suggests" and "the gap between perception & reality is rather astounding." Then: "when an academic starts
blogging it's often easy to tell if that 'authority' is undeserved."
All this public impugning of Walt's reputation, scholarship and character over the crime of pointing out that the threat of Islamic Terror is wildly overstated by people
who have an interest in perpetuating the threat. It's as though Gartenstein-Ross and his friends were eager to jump up, wave their arms, and prove Walt's argument by
identifying themselves as precisely the fear-mongering culprits he was criticizing.
Exactly the same thing happened this week in response to Juan Cole's superb post entitled "Top Ten differences between White Terrorists and Others," pointing out all
the revealing differences in how white perpetrators of violence are talked about versus non-white (especially Muslim) ones. Cole's argument was every bit as
threatening to the vested interests of the "terror expert" industry as Walt's was, as it reveals the ugly truth that the hysteria over the Muslim Threat is motivated far
more by Islamophobic bigotry and subservience to U.S. Government militarism than any rational policy assessments or high-minded scholarship.
This was too much to bear for J.M. Berger, a self-described "specialist on homegrown extremism" and author of "Jihad Joe: Americans Who Go to War in the Name
of Islam," which, in his words, "uncovers the secret history of American jihadists" -- meaning Muslims, of course. "American Muslims have traveled abroad to fight in
wars because of their religious beliefs," says the book's summary. (Symbolizing how relentlessly incestuous this clique is, Gartenstein-Ross randomly took a moment
out of his attack on Walt today to pimp what he called Berger's "valuable book"). Like Gartenstein-Ross, Berger avoids the more overt forms of anti-Muslim rhetoric,
often stressing the need to distinguish between Good Muslims and the Terrorist kind, but he spends his time doing things like shrieking about the Towering Menace of
Anwar al-Awlaki and generally hopping on whatever Muslim-Terrorism-is-a-Grave-Danger train that comes along.
Berger denounced Cole's piece as "80 percent BS, 20 percent fair points" and said it was composed of "lazy generalizations." Specifically, Berger complained that
when a Muslim launches a violent attack, there are "whole stories dedicated to AQ being fringe and Islam being peaceful," but when there's a violent attack by a white
shooter, "no one does stories about how white people are mostly peaceful and non-racist" (apparently, the true victims of unfair media coverage of Terror attacks are
white people, not Muslims). He insisted, needless to say, that white perpetrators of violence are depicted as lone nuts while attacks by Muslims are depicted as part of
a broader Terror threat only because it's so true. It's vital to Berger that Islamic Terror continue to be perceived as a vital, coordinated national security threat or else
J.W. Berger and his "expertise" will cease to matter.
The key role played by this "terrorism expert" industry in sustaining highly damaging hysteria was highlighted in an excellent and still-relevant 2007 Washington Post
Op-Ed by Zbigniew Brzezinski. In it, he described how the War on Terror has created an all-consuming Climate of Fear in the U.S. along with a systematic, multi-
headed policy of discrimination against Muslim Americans based on these severely exaggerated threats, and described one of the key culprits this way:
Such fear-mongering, reinforced by security entrepreneurs, the mass media and the entertainment industry,
generates its own momentum. The terror entrepreneurs, usually described as experts on terrorism, are
necessarily engaged in competition to justify their existence . Hence their task is to convince the public that it
faces new threats. That puts a premium on the presentation of credible scenarios of ever-more-
horrifying acts of violence, sometimes even with blueprints for their implementation .
It's very similar to what Les Gelb, in expressing his regret for supporting the attack on Iraq, described as "the disposition and incentives [in America's Foreign Policy
experts
Community] to support wars to retain political and professional credibility." When I interviewed Gelb in 2010 regarding that quote, he told me that D.C.
know that they can retain relevance in and access to key government circles only if they lend theoretical
support to U.S. militarism rather than oppose it.
(Notably, people in these insular, government-subservient D.C. enclaves try to suppress and delegitimize any
discussion of who funds them and what their careerist and cultural incentives are by denouncing any such
discussion as illegitimate ad hominem; that's all a way of demanding that they be accepted at face value
as "experts" and that the financial and institutional pressures and groupthink precepts shaping their
world and their views never be assessed).
Similarly to Brzezinski's Op-Ed, Ken Silverstein recently wrote an excellent June, 2012 Harpers article examining the fraud known as Matthew Levitt, Ph.D., who
heads the "Counterterrorism and Intelligence Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy," where he tracks “global jihadist movements" (as usual,
"terrorism experts" fixate on Muslims). Levitt has been repeatedly used by the U.S. Government as a "terrorism expert" witness in the prosecution of dozens of
Muslims accused of Terrorism despite a history of discredited claims and extremely dubious grounds for claiming "expertise". Silverstein writes:
That is a description that applies generally to the sham "terrorism expert" industry.
*****
Not all of these "terror experts" are driven primarily by careerist relevance. Some are actually vapid enough to be True Believers, addicted to the excitement and sense
of purpose that Terrorism provides. Fran Townsend -- Bush's former Homeland Security adviser, CNN's "national security expert," and a paid supporter of the Iranian
Terror group MEK -- provided a small but telling example this morning. She was apparently at New York's LaGuardia Airport when a very exciting episode happened
which she "reported" on Twitter as it unfolded. First was this:
Code words! Security breaches! How scary! And exciting! Moments later:
The mystery builds! Then:
Here, things start to palpably deflate. The depressing realization starts to set in that nothing of any significance has happened, that it's all just some routine, banal event
of no consequence. Then: the inevitable, deeply disappointing denouement:
In other words, nothing -- all that breathless excitement over absolutely nothing: a perfect little microcosm of America's Terrorism policies and its "terror expert"
industry over the last decade.
*****
But the
most pernicious attribute of this "terror expert" industry, the aspect that requires much more attention, is its pretense
to non-ideological, academic objectivity. In reality, these "terror experts", almost uniformly, have a
deeply ideological view -- a jingoistic, highly provincial understanding -- of what Terrorism is and is not .
They generally fixate on Muslims to the exclusion of all other forms of Terror. In particular, the idea that the U.S. or its allies now commit Terrorism is taboo,
They are not "experts" as
unthinkable. Their views on what Terrorism is track the U.S. Government's and, by design, justify U.S. government actions.
much as they are ideologues , rank propagandists , and servants of America's establishment power
centers .
The reason the term "terrorism experts" deserves to be put in quotation marks is not as some ad hominem insult (something the mavens of the "terror expert" clique
are incapable of understanding, as they demonstrated with their ludicrously personalized outrage when I applied this critique to one of their industry's most cherished
Patron Saints, Will McCants). Rather, it's because -- as I've written about many times before -- the
very concept of Terrorism is inherently
empty, illegitimate, meaningless. "Terrorism" itself is not an objective term or legitimate object of
study, but was conceived of as a highly politicized instrument and has been used that way ever since.
The best scholarship on this issue, in my view, comes from Remi Brulin, who teaches at NYU and wrote his PhD dissertation at the Sorbonne in Paris on the discourse
of Terrorism. When I interviewed him in 2010, he described the history of the term -- it was pushed by Israel in the 1960s and early 1970s as a means of
The term was then
universalizing its conflicts (this isn't our fight against our enemies over land; it's the Entire World's Fight against The Terrorists!).
picked up by the neocons in the Reagan administration to justify their covert wars in Central America (in a test run for
what they did after 9/11, they continuously exclaimed: we're fighting against The Terrorists in Central America, even as they themselves armed and
funded classic Terror groups in El Salvador and Nicaragua). From the start, the central challenge was how to define the term so as to include the violence used by the
enemies of the U.S. and Israel, while excluding the violence the U.S., Israel and their allies used, both historically and presently. That still has not been figured out,
which is why there is no fixed, accepted definition of the term, and certainly no consistent application.
Brulin details the well-known game-playing with the term: in the 1980s, Iraq was put on the U.S. list of Terror states when the U.S. disliked Saddam for being aligned
with the Soviets; then Iraq was taken off when the U.S. wanted to arm Saddam to fight Iran; then they were put back on again when the U.S. wanted to attack Iraq.
The same thing is happening now with the MEK: now that they're a pro-U.S. and pro-Israel Terror group rather than a Saddam-allied one, they are magically no
longer going to be deemed Terrorists. That is what Terrorism is: a term of propaganda, a means of justifying one's own
state violence -- not some objective field of discipline in which one develops "expertise."
This flaw in the concept of "terrorism expertise" is not a discrete indictment of specific "scholars," but is a
fundamental flaw plaguing the entire field . Even the most decorated and honored "terrorism experts"
are little more than ideological propagandists, because that's what the term necessarily entails . Today, Brulin
wrote the following to me regarding U.S. Reagan-era policy in Central America -- namely, supporting Terror groups (death squads) while denouncing Terrorism --
and the specific "terrorism expert" often held up as the field's most prestigious, Bruce Hoffman:
One obvious question comes to mind: how do “terrorism experts” deal with US policies in Salvador during the 1980s?
A comprehensive analysis of the two major “terrorism studies” journals, “Studies on Conflict and Terrorism” (simply titled “Terrorism” until 1992) and “Terrorism
and Political Violence” shows that overall these journals have dealt with this issue by … being silent about it. More precisely, several authors in fact absolutely accept
that the concept of "state terrorism" is a valid one, and that acts by "death squads" clearly fall under that definition also. They simply never deal with this issue in the
context of the real world policies of the United States and of the Reagan years in particular, a silence all the more surprising than Reagan was the first American
President to develop a "discourse on terrorism".
Reacting to Glenn Greenwald, Andrew Exum wrote: "Greenwald makes it seem as if states are never mentioned as terrorist actors, but there is a lot of literature on the
use of coercive violence by states and state terrorism". This is true of course, but at least when it comes to the conflict of El Salvador studied here, and to US policies
in that country, those who did write about this issue have never been published in the major "terrorism studies journals."
Exum then adds: "Bruce Hoffman published this book in 1999. I'm pretty sure those two guys are terrorism experts without the scare quotes."
In “Inside Terrorism”, to his merit, Hoffman devotes a full chapter to the question of the “definition of terrorism.” What follows in the rest of his book is naturally
dependent on what he decides to include and not include in his definition of "terrorism". Here is, in full, how Hoffman deals with the issue of “death squads”
(emphasis added):
“The use of so-called 'death squads' (often off-duty or plain-clothes security or police officers) in conjunction with blatant intimidation of political opponents, human
rights and aid workers, student groups, labor organizers, journalists and others has been a prominent feature of the right-wing military dictatorships that took power in
Argentina, Chile and Greece during the 1970s and even of elected governments in El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia and Peru since the mid-1980s. But these state-
sanctioned or explicitly ordered acts of internal political violence directed mostly against domestic populations -- that is, rule by violence and intimidation by those
already in power against their own citizenry -- are generally termed 'terror' in order to distinguish that phenomenon from 'terrorism', which is understood to be
violence committed by non-state entities. (Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism, 27).
Sadly, Hoffman does not tell his readers who at the time "termed acts by death squads 'terror'", or who wishes to do so "in order to distinguish this phenomenon from
'terrorism.'"
Not only is this argument rather less than convincing, but most crucially no one in Washington, at the time, ever used this argument, and this for obvious reasons.
Indeed, as Hoffman himself notes, the “death squads”, “even in elected governments like El Salvador”, were “state-sanctioned”, precisely what the Reagan
administration kept denying at the time. Furthermore, Hoffman’s argument makes no sense in the historical context: can one imagine the Reagan administration
defending US aid to El Salvador as part of the “fight against terrorism” while stating that the ties between that State and the “death squad” posed no problem because
they merely fell under the concept of “terror”?
Thus, the role of “terrorism experts” cannot simply be described as blindly accepting of the official “discourse on terrorism”, although this is already a strong critique.
As the case of El Salvador demonstrates, what they have done is to invent arguments aimed at excluding from discussion specific issues, while hiding or being
completely silent about the actual debates that took place on this topic at the very heart of Washington. In so doing, they have allowed a “terrorism discourse” to
developed and become hegemonic despite the many internal inconsistencies that have been at its heart from the very beginning.
Finally, one will note that Hoffman, in Inside Terrorism, makes no mention of the Contras and their support by the Reagan administration. This is a difficult decision
to explain, since aid to the Contras falls under the concept of “state sponsored terrorism”, the validity of which is accepted by all experts. Here, Hoffman uses the
technique used by so many other “terrorism experts” in this case: he simply decides to not write about it, with no explanation given.
The entire field is one huge effort to legitimize U.S. state violence and delegitimize the violence by its
enemies (along those lines: the court-martial of accused Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan began today, and I asked earlier today on Twitter whether this attack
constituted Terrorism given that it targeted a military base and soldiers of a nation at war. My mere asking of this question sparked all sorts of intense outrage from the
predictable "natsec" D.C. mavens: Of course it's Terrorism, as Hasan killed unarmed people including one civilian, exclaimed people who would never, ever dare
apply the Terrorism label to the civilian-devastating U.S. attack on Iraq or the use of American drones and cluster bombs to kill innocent civilians by the dozens; that
is the discourse of Terrorism: violence by Muslims against a U.S. military base during a time of war qualifies, but violence by the U.S. Government against thousands
of innocent Muslim civilians never could).
Brulin is far from alone among scholars in recognizing the true purpose of this sham discipline. Harvard's Lisa Stampnitzky, whom I interviewed several months ago,
is also a leading scholar on the exploitation of Terrorism and the field that calls itself "terrorism experts." In a superb journal article in Qualitative Sociology, she
documents that "'Terrorism' has proved to be a highly problematic object of expertise"; in particular, "Terrorism studies fails to conform to the most common
sociological notions of what a field of intellectual production ought to look like, and has been described by participants and observers alike as a failure." She notes that
the harshest condemnations have come from those who work in this academic discipline: "Terrorism researchers have characterized their field as stagnant, poorly
conceptualized, lacking in rigor, and devoid of adequate theory, data, and methods." That includes Bruce Hoffman himself, who, she notes, wrote:
Fifteen years ago, the study of terrorism was described by perhaps the world’s preeminent authority on modern warfare as a ’huge and ill-defined subject [that] has
probably been responsible for more incompetent and unnecessary books than any other outside the field of sociology. It attracts phonies and amateurs…as a candle
attracts moths’… [T]errorism research arguably has failed miserably.
Stampnitzky adds: "More than 15 years after this assessment, descriptions of the field are rife with similar claims." Indeed, her forthcoming book from Cambridge
University Press is entitled "Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented Terrorism" and, in her words, it "explains how political violence became 'terrorism,' and how
this transformation led to the current 'war on terror'." For that reason, she argues in her dissertation, "those who would address terrorism as a rational object, subject to
scientific analysis and manipulation, produce a discourse which they are unable to control, as attempts at scientific discourse are continually hybridized by the moral
discourse of the public sphere, in which terrorism is conceived as a problem of evil and pathology." Indeed, she explains in her journal article, "One of the most oft-
noted difficulties has been the inability of researchers to establish a suitable definition of the concept of 'terrorism' itself."
In a recently published journal article in International Security, entitled "The Terrorism Delusion," Professors John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart (cited by Walt)
extensively document what a fraud the concept of "Terrorism" has become over the last decade. Specifically, "the exaggerations of the threat presented by terrorism
and then on the distortions of perspective these exaggerations have inspired— distortions that have in turn inspired a determined and expensive quest to ferret out, and
even to create, the nearly nonexistent."
Richard Jackson is a Professor at the The National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies in New Zealand. He has written volumes on the fraud of "terrorism expertise"
and the propagandistic purpose of this field of discipline. He has documented that most self-proclaimed "terrorism experts" simply ignore the primary cause of the
violence they claim to study: "most
terrorism scholars, politicians and the media don’t seem to 'know' that terrorism
is most often caused by military intervention overseas , and not religion, radicalization, insanity,
ideology, poverty or such like" -- even though "the Pentagon has known it for years." In one article entitled "10
Things More Likely to Kill You Than Terrorism," he notes that "The chances of you dying in a terrorist attack are in the range of 1 in 80,000, or about the same
chance of being killed by a meteor," and that bathtubs, vending machines, and lightning all pose a greater risk of death.
In a book critiquing the "terrorism expert" field, Jackson argued that "most
of what is accepted as well-founded 'knowledge' in
terrorism studies is, in fact, highly debatable and unstable." He therefore scorns almost four decades of so-called Terrorism
scholarship as "based on a series of 'virulent myths', 'half-truths' and contested claims" that are plainly
"biased towards Western state priorities." To Jackson, terrorism is "a social fact rather than a brute fact" and "does not exist outside of the
definitions and practices which seek to enclose it, including those of the terrorism studies field." In sum, it means whatever the wielder of the term wants it to mean:
something that cannot be the subject of legitimate "expertise."
*****
There is no term more potent in our political discourse and legal landscape than "Terrorism." It shuts
down every rational thought process and political debate the minute it is uttered. It justifies torture (we have
to get information from the Terrorists); due-process-free-assassinations even of our own citizens (Obama has to kill the Terrorists);
and rampant secrecy (the Government can't disclose what it's doing or have courts rule on its legality because the Terrorists will learn of it), and it
sends people to prison for decades (material supporters of Terrorism).
It is a telling paradox indeed that this central, all-justifying word is simultaneously the most meaningless and therefore the most manipulated. It is, as I have noted
before, a word that simultaneously means nothing yet justifies everything. Indeed, that's the point: it is such a useful concept precisely because it's so malleable,
because it means whatever those with power to shape discourse want it to mean. And no faction has helped this process along as much as the group of self-proclaimed
"terrorism experts" that has attached itself to think tanks, academia, and media outlets. They enable pure political
propaganda to masquerade as objective fact, shining brightly with the veneer of scholarly rigor. The industry
itself is a fraud, as are those who profit from and within it.
A2: Discourse Doesn’t Shape Reality
This is handled on framework –Scholars and practitioners alike of law, natural,
foreign policy, and military affairs note, through empirically verifiable studies, the
relevance of framing
Discourse first – material power is shaped and constructed by discursive
understandings of the world
At this point it
is worth noting that centralising discourse to foreign policy analysis is not to deny the
existence of an external world, reduce reality to the domain of language or dismiss the importance
of material properties . It is to say that the material world exists within, and as a function of,
discourse , since this is our primary means of making sense of it. The meanings we draw from actors are
filtered through lenses coloured by the biases, expectations and experiences identities bring. Contemporary
China is more physically able than before to exert harm. However the China ‘threat’ to US security is traced as clearly
to the fears and sensitivities of American identity as to Beijing’s physical attributes . The US rebalance to
the Asia Pacific, like the world around it, does not exist outside of discourse but is constituted by it.
Rituals of discursive power still operate today, as evidenced by tracing the rebalance not to the beginnings
of a realpolitik saga when the US physically established itself across the region, but through the
constitution of knowledges of foreign Others and the ontological security-seeking practices of the
American self. At the centre of these practices remain the (subjectively defined) values of democracy, freedom and liberty, and their
securitisation for national survival. To demonstrate these assertions, this conceptual framework provides escape from the kinds of problems
highlighted in the introduction which emanate from a traditional faith in the explanatory value of shifts in material power in a seemingly self-
evident world. It presents the opportunity instead to explore the geopolitical claims to power which continue
to frame and regulate the potentialities of policy. As Ó Tuathail explains, the act of geo-graphing defined the
colonial period, but “the struggle between centralizing states and authoritative centers, on the one hand,
and rebellious margins and dissident cultures, on the other hand, is still with us”. 46 The contemporary discursive
logic of these claims to power is now examined through a systemic analysis of US government statements on the rebalance, to address the key
silences of the literature identified at the outset.
Security is a site of contestation—dominant discourses determine response

McDonald ’12 – Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the School of Political Science and
International Studies @ University of Queensland, Australia (Matt, “Security, The Environment, and
Emancipation: Contestation over Environmental Change”, Routledge, p.24)
By way of a conclusion to this discussion of security as a social construction, it is worth reiterating that security
is understood as constructed in the sense that it
is understood by different political communities in different ways in different contexts, and is a site of
inter-subjective negotiation and contestation. And while it is appropriate to focus on how security is given meaning through the articulation
and designation of threat, it is also important to move beyond this concern to point to how referent objects themselves, and the values in need of protection, are given
meaning. Crucially, these
different understandings have different implications for policy and action. The central
determinant of how an issue is dealt with politically is not whether it is included on security agendas, but the way in which a
group's core values, the threats to those values, and the means of preserving or advancing them are
understood regarding that issue. I have also suggested here that, in approaching security as a social construction, we should be concerned not
only with the designation of threat, but also with the meaning of security. Such an approach requires
contesting the logic of security presented by the Copenhagen School and others, in which security is the realm of
emergency, exclusion and 'panic politics'. The remainder of this chapter sets out where we might begin to look for, and make sense of, security
discourses in political practice if not limiting ourselves to the designation and depiction of threat. Looking for security If
the meaning of security is
context-specific, and if this meaning is a crucial determinant of how issues are addressed in practice, it is
clearly important to elaborate on where we might look for security discourses and how we might go about doing this. Here, I
outline a framework for understanding both the nature of significant security 'interventions', and the means through which we might go about analysing these
interventions and locating them in broader frameworks of meaning. It proceeds in two stages. The first outlines the role of language, defined in terms of spoken
representations and texts, as the central (although not only) form of representation in the discursive construction of security. The second outlines the type of
representation that delineates answers to core constituent questions of security (whose
security, from what threats, and also by what
means and by whom should it be advanced?). Here I advance the argument that we should focus on both the invocation and evocation of
security: the former involving the direct articulation of particular visions of 'referent', 'threat', 'means' and 'agent'; and the latter involving the indirect articulation of
such visions through representations of sovereignty and identity. This section also briefly addresses the question of how we might look at these representations
through the application of discourse-analytical methods. Language and the construction of security Lene Hansen has argued: "language is ontologically significant: it
is only through construction in language that 'things' - objects, subjects, states, living beings, and material
-tinctures - are given meaning and endowed with a particular identity'.74 Beyond the role of language in defining security discourses and constituting reality
more broadly, language - in text and especially speech - is central to dynamics of contestation and negotiation about
security. As Pierre Bourdieu has argued, actors are engaged in constant competition through language to position their
own account as most consistent with 'reality' and with a group's core values , in the process attempting to
marginalize alternatives narratives of reality and community .75 And successful actors strategically use language
that has particular symbolic power in given contexts (such as 'security', 'threat' or 'national interest') to render their own
accounts of security convincing and others less so. As noted, international relations theorists such as Mattern, Krebs and Jackson have pointed to the ways
in which successful speakers often attempt to locate narratives in powerful discourses of reality and community in order to maximize resonance and coerce/compel
political opponents to accept the speaker's account of a contested story lest they be seen as unpatriotic, for example.76 The call to 'support our troops' that
accompanied the deployment of military personnel to Iraq in 2003 in states such as the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia may be seen as an example.
Such a call arguably undermined the extent to which opponents could contest the intervention in Iraq without also being seen to target those who would be risking
their lives, thus limiting the space for legitimate opposition.'7 Similar examples are replete in the case studies that follow, not least in the denigration of international
opponents of deforestation in Brazil, and in domestic opposition to the Australian government's position on climate change cooperation. Language, in short,
constitutes the principal means through which meaning is given to security in the contexts I address here. Of course,
language is not the only means through which meaning is given or communicated, and discourses of security are not reducible to linguistic representations of security
and threat. A range of theorists have pointed convincingly to the important role of visual representations as 'security' representations,78 for example, with examples
ranging from depictions of tortured inmates in the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq to Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed that sparked global unrest
in 20 05.79 And at a more fundamental level, discourses are composed of both linguistic and non-linguistic practices. This is especially true of dominant discourses,
which become established in and practised through a wide range of processes, practices and institutions. The post-2001 'war on terror' discourse in the American
context, for example, was composed of, and constituted by, linguistic representations of the terrorist threat by President Bush, but also through security processes at
airports, the Department of Homeland Security's threat advisory images, and of course the establishment of a Department of Homeland Security itself. It was also
articulated and furthered across American society, from the level of political elite to cultural media such as films and television programmes.80 While recognizing that
language (through both speech and text) is therefore only one form through which meanings of security are composed and communicated, my focus here is on the role
of language, for two principal reasons. First, language
is the site of the most direct and important form of engagement
with security, directly delineating answers to core questions such as 'whose security, from what threats, by
what means?' Such representations, as Weldes et al. argue, provide the vehicle for the construction of social
categories that, in turn, serve to underpin the production (through linguistic and non-linguistic practices) of social facts.81 Second,
and related to this, a focus on language allows greater recognition of security as a site of contestation between
actors with competing visions of what security means and how it might be realized . While dominant discourses are
indeed institutionalized in a range of processes and dynamics within (and crucially on behalf of) particular communities, marginal discourses are necessarily less
evident in the official institutions, rituals and fora of a particular community. Indeed, these marginal frameworks of meaning and the actors articulating them are
regularly actively marginalized from these processes. As such, a focus on language provides the best means of identifying multiple security discourses. The following
analysis examines how dominant security discourses come to be accepted and institutionalized, in turn underpinning the most important forms of action on behalf of a
particular community regarding particular instances of environmental change. A final point to note here in suggesting that we can best look for
security discourses (and the competition between discourses) in linguistic practices is that analysing these practices has both
analytical and normative implications, providing a basis for progressive change in three central ways. First, analysing discourses
generally allows us to 'make strange' the most powerful discourses: frameworks of meaning that are
necessarily partial but are represented and accepted as common sense. This is a claim articulated powerfully by Gramsci,
Foucault and Bourdieu, among many others. Second, analysing the linguistic composition of discourses allows us to
recognize possibilities for the most powerful forms of contestation of these discourses, which tend to
orient around practices of immanent critique. While this is elaborated in chapter two, particularly important here is the broad claim that
language enables but also constrains, providing justifications for action that can effectively be contested
and contrasted with the outcomes of that action. Finally, a focus on language also allows us insight into those
actors whose voices are able to be heard, and those who are marginalized or, indeed, silenced. While the latter often
occurs through the nature of the official institutions, rituals and fora of a particular community that are the product of dominant security dis-courses, a focus on
language draws our attention to the vital question of which actors can and do 'speak for' particular
communities, reminding us in the process of those unable to have their voices heard . Types of security representation
As I have suggested, security
is a site of contestation and negotiation , one that takes on particular importance given
the political significance of security, in particular as the central concern for the central actors in world politics: states. It should hardly be
surprising, then, that attempts to define and redefine security -and to lay the groundwork for these visions to resonate - are relatively ubiquitous in contemporary
politics. I suggest here that attempts to delineate answers to core constituent questions of security - 'referent', 'agent', 'threats' and 'means of response' - can be found in
a range of different types of representation beyond the direct designation of security and threat. This section outlines the broader view adopted here of the types of
representation that serve to engage with, and define, security. It asks: to what extent can particular representations be viewed as security representations? To reiterate
an earlier point, the key to answering this question lies in the extent to which particular representations engage with the preservation of a group's core values,
delineating answers to questions such as: who is the referent object and agent of security; who or what threatens this referent object and its core values; and what
means should be employed to advance or preserve the values of this particular community? For approaches to security that take any account of the role of
representation and language in constructing or positioning security, it is not controversial to argue that invocations of 'threat' and 'security' can be viewed as security
representations. The former - as noted - is a particularly prevalent theme in post-aructural and Copenhagen School research on the construction of security. The dual
argument here in justifying this focus is that security is denned primarily in oppositional terms - we
define what needs to be secured by
designating that which threatens it - and that engaging with the question of the designation of threat takes
us to the heart of the politics of security.82 The designation of threat is, for these approaches, therefore the most
important security 'move' in simultaneously telling us who or what needs to be protected, and from whom
or what it needs protecting. It also potentially enables particular types of political response and the actors
undertaking them , chiefly associated with the logic of exceptionalism.83 In my analysis, I accept the importance of these articulations of threat and
danger to the construction of security, even while broadening the terms of analysis to include other (less dramatic or obvious) forms of security representation.
A2: Negative State Action/We’re Nice
The aff’s arms control is rooted in a history of colonialism, racism, and militarism,
causing untold violence – before action, we call for a thoroughgoing and historicized
genealogy of arms control and a recognition of the limits of possibility inherent in
their tactical model of disarmament without demilitarization – their evidence suffers
from an ahistorical bias
Cooper 18 ---- Neil, director of the School of Peace and Conflict Studies (Kent State University’s
College of Arts and Sciences), former head of Peace Studies and International Development (University
of Bradford), former professor of International Relations and Security Studies (University of Bradford),
“Race, Sovereignty, and Free Trade: Arms Trade Regulation and Humanitarian Arms Control in the Age
of Empire,” Journal of Global Security Studies, 3(4),
https://academic.oup.com/jogss/article/3/4/444/5076385
Introduction
The post-Cold War era has witnessed a proliferation of nonproliferation initiatives aimed at regulating
the trade in small arms and light weapons (SALW). These include four separate agreements within the United Nations (UN) framework
on SALW control; six multilateral agreements, forums, and organizations that address SALW outside the UN framework; two regional mechanisms established
specifically to deal with SALW; and thirteen preexisting regional organizations that have developed arms control-related documents or agreements (Greene and Marsh
2012, 170–74). Among the most notable of these initiatives is the 2001 UN Programme of Action to Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons and
the recently ratified UN Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), which lists SALW as one of several categories of defense equipment within its purview. All of these initiatives
have emerged since the 1990s.
It is generally acknowledged that existing literature on SALW control is predominantly policy orientated
(Bourne 2007, 15; Greene and Marsh 2012, 3) and ahistorical (Grip 2015, 1; Enomoto 2017, 5). Even when scholars do locate current
initiatives in the longer history of arms regulation, they generally do so only in passing (Brehm 2008, 363; Bolton
and James 2014, 441; CaseyMaslen et al. 2016, 3–4). There is, of course, a literature examining the history of the arms trade (Cippola 1965; Harkavy 1975; Krause
1992; Stoker and Grant 2003; Grant 2007, 2015, 71–90; Chew 2012), but this body of work principally aims to delineate the drivers of production and trade. Of the
limited literature specifically focused on attempts to control the trade in arms, much of it tends to span many centuries (Krause and MacDonald 1992; Burns 2013, 80–
101; Grip 2015; Enomoto 2017, 3–20). Thus, most scholars examine the period under consideration here—the late nineteenth century and early 1900s—only
relatively briefly. Even work specifically concerned with this era tends to focus more on the post1900s period (Stone 2000; Ball 2012; Krause 2017). Moreover, much
of the material that does exist on regulation in the late nineteenth century appears as elements in publications with a different focus (e.g., anti-slavery, smuggling)
produced by historians, social geographers, sociologists, or economists rather than the arms control community (Miers 1975; Tagliacozzo 2005; Storey 2008; Mathew
2016). One way in which this paper makes an original contribution is by bringing together this fragmented secondary literature to delineate the contours of arms trade
regulation in the late nineteenth century.
The paper also makes an original contribution to the contemporary literature on the relationship between
norms, humanitarian arms control (HAC), and arms control as governmentality . In particular, I argue that the work of
the optimistic school of literature on norms and arms regulation is ahistorical , tends to focus only on
socalled “good” (e.g., humanitarian) norms or discrete initiatives (e.g., the landmines ban), and operates with an inadequate
conceptualization of power . Consequently, it is overly optimistic about the progressive potential of

HAC. In contrast, I draw on extensive archival research on late nineteenth-century arms trade regulation1 to illustrate how
a specific humanitarian initiative aimed at restricting the trade in arms (in this case the 1890 Brussels Act) can be
conceived as the smallest of a set of three nested Russian matryoshka dolls of arms trade governance. Although
principally a multilateral agreement to eliminate the slave trade in Africa, the act also included qualitative restrictions on the import of modern firearms into an area
extending from the middle of the Sahara to present day Namibia and Zimbabwe. As such it has been described as “the first significant multilateral agreement to
restrict the arms trade” (Krause and Macdonald 1992, 712). In part, the arms elements of the act can be understood as an attempt by both campaigners and
policymakers to graft a regulatory arms trade norm onto an established constitutive transnational antislavery norm. Its implementation was more effective than
generally acknowledged.
The second matryoshka doll consists of the broader approach to arms prohibition within which a specific
initiative is located. In this case, the Brussels Act formed only part of far wider efforts to manage the flow of
modern firearms throughout the spaces of European empires. These efforts were driven by the concern to
maintain a qualitative military advantage in what were viewed as cutting-edge military technologies
crucial to the maintenance of imperial authority . Thus, rather than being an era of free trade as often claimed, the period
was characterized by a dual regime of regulation : the application of a liberal export norm for peacetime
arms exports from imperial metropoles combined with extensive attempts to manage arms flows into, within,
and between colonial spaces .
Finally, these broader attempts at prohibition were part of a much larger temporally-bound assemblage of
norms, laws, and logics that constituted the practices of arms control as governmentality —the third
matryoshka doll of arms trade governance. Arms control as governmentality denotes a context where
mechanisms of proscription and permission operate as technologies of social control designed to
manage which populations can legitimately use what kinds of weapons . Overall, I demonstrate how an
understanding of arms regulation in the late nineteenth century undermines the claims of norm optimists that
HAC is inherently transformational and progressive in its promotion of good norms and a benign
logic of human security. Instead, HAC in the late nineteenth century was consistent with colonialism, racism, and
militarism . This is not to discount the notion that there are important differences between contemporary HAC and its late nineteenth-
century variant. Rather , it is to highlight the need for a more thoroughgoing and historicized genealogy of
HAC and a recognition of the “limits of possibility” inherent in the pursuit of tactical humanitarian
“disarmament” without strategic demilitarization.
The affirmative’s reform of how we deliver violence and reliance on the state is
unethical, ignores underlying structural violence and reproduces the same harms it
seeks to eradicate – instead of propping up a flawed system, question the
inevitability of our conditions and the possibility of nonviolence
May 13 ---- Todd, Professor of Philosophy (Clemson), Ph.D. in Philosophy (Penn State), “The Dignity
of Non-Violence,” Histories of Violence, Volume 1: 2013-14, http://historiesofviolence.com/wp-
content/uploads/No-1-On-Violence.pdf
We live amidst violence. It has always been with us. Natural environments are violent places. Human kind has improved the
techniques for the delivery of violence, but has not diminished the violence those techniques were
ostensibly designed to protect against . Of course, most human violence is not physical. It is structural. It
occurs not simply in the beatings, killings, and fear that are the daily fare of so many of our fellows. It is in the needless poverty,
marginalization, and hopelessness that are always there even when the physical violence ebbs. In the decade
or more since 9/11, the privileged few of us who are immune to most of these daily predations of violence
have been inducted into its discourse, but mostly from the side of the righteous well-placed. We are told that
an unspeakable violence has been committed against us, that we have been violated, and that we must oppose that
violence and that violation. With what must we oppose them? With, violence, of course. This is what governments
and those they support do . This is what they know how to do. The state has sometimes been defined as the
institution with the monopoly on violence in a society. When you have a monopoly, you make use of it. In
response to 9/11, we were never offered anything else . There was no consideration of how to respond to the brutality of the
attacks against thousands of innocents other than the issue of when to commence counterattacks that would kill thousands of other innocents.
Perhaps it is time, and even past time, to ask the question of how we might think and act otherwise. Perhaps it
is time we stopped thinking of violence— physical and structural—as natural, inescapable, or at
least beyond our ability to challenge . Instead of thinking about how to harness violence against violence, we
should start thinking about how to confront violence with nonviolence . Instead of comparing tactics of
violence, embracing strategies of nonviolence. There are, of course, histories of nonviolence, just as there are histories of
violence. Their most prominent moments are associated with the figures of Gandhi and Martin Luther King.
However, as the writer Gene Sharp has detailed in his three-volume The Politics of Nonviolent Action, nonviolent resistance has a
long history. It is not a history that is taught in schools, which, after all, are largely state institutions. It is, for the most
part, not a history of political leaders engaged in glorious exploits. Instead it is the expression of people
asserting their dignity against the violence that seeks to warp or derange them. From strikes to marches to
demonstrations to refusals of various types, nonviolence has always asserted the dignity of people . Asked
to knuckle under the brutality directed against them or to return it in kind like a mirror image of their oppressors, those who
have engaged in nonviolent resistance have instead chosen another path . They have not simply reacted against their
conditions and those who have created them; they have expressed their character—or created their character—as something
that lies beyond the dynamic of violence and retribution. It is in this beyond that that dignity of
nonviolence lies . Not content to tread the same paths that always lead to the same impasses —my
retaliation against your retaliation against my retaliation against….—those who engage in nonviolent resistance assume that
there must be something more to being human than this. Nonviolence, true nonviolence, is creative. It seeks to
open up new paths that may lead to new and better destinations. At the very least, it seeks to open
people’s eyes anew, so they can see something they had not seen before. And in doing so, it works not
only on the minds of those to whom it speaks, but also upon the speakers . Those who engaged in the lunch-
counter sit-ins or rode the busses or filled the jail cells during the civil rights movement flamed the conscience of a nation. But
they did more than that. They crafted their own ordinary lives into something extraordinary. They elevated
the struggle for equality and in the same gesture elevated themselves. They crafted themselves into something they would otherwise not
have been, and in doing so brought us along part of the way with them. The Danes who, when the Nazis invaded, spirited
their fellow Jews across the straight to Sweden so that most of the Danish Jewish population survived; achieved a quiet
grandeur that magnified them and continues to inspire us . We all know that we have had enough of violence.
We have had enough of the dying and mutilation that is the legacy of our advanced societies’ military technology. We have had
enough of the anger that, in places like Rwanda, issued out in the form of machetes and hatchets. And, as the
recent Occupation movement has shown, many of us have had enough of the social and economic conditions
that are a more insidious, but not less effective, violence against so many. But we must go beyond “Basta!” We must think
at once about what must be resisted and how , as is often said, we can be the change that is resistance. To do
so is to pass to the other side of violence. It is not to glimpse a non-violence ready-made but instead to
inaugurate it, to create something that was not there before . It is to envision and to improvise another context and other
selves. Michel Foucault once said that his writings were animated by the question of who else we might be. We have been given to
ourselves as beings of violence. In most places and in most times, that is how we have been given to ourselves. To think and act
nonviolently is precisely to ask the question of who else we might be. Not just what we might undergo or what we
might suffer. But what, beyond the selves we have been told to be, we might create of our lives. That is at once our
dignity and our task.
*** IMPACT
Turns Case---War
Structural violence sets the stage for the worst forms of violence – deterrence is the
root cause of conflict and this social exclusion is the largest proximal cause of mass
violence- creates everyday consent for genocide by legitimizing hierarchy =
Scheper-Hughes ‘4 (Prof of Anthropology @ Cal-Berkeley, Introduction: Making Sense of Violence,
in Violence in War and Peace, pg. 19-22)
We are trying to recover here the classic anagogic thinking that enabled Erving Goffman, Jules Henry, C. Wright Mills, and Franco Basaglia among other mid-
twentieth-century radically critical thinkers, to perceive the symbolic and structural relations, i.e., between inmates and patients, between concentration camps,
prisons, mental hospitals, nursing homes, and other “total institutions.” Making that decisive move to
recognize the continuum of violence
allows us to see the capacity and the willingness - if not enthusiasm - of ordinary people, the practical technicians of the social
consensus, to enforce genocidal-like crimes against categories of rubbish people. There is no primary impulse out
of which mass violence and genocide are born, it is ingrained in the common sense of everyday social life. The mad, the
differently abled, the mentally vulnerable have often fallen into this category of the unworthy living, as have
the very old and infirm, the sick-poor, and, of course, the despised racial, religious, sexual, and ethnic groups of the moment. Erik
Erikson referred to “pseudo- speciation” as the human tendency to classify some individuals or social groups as less than fully human - a prerequisite to genocide and
one that is carefully honed during the unremark- able peacetimes that precede the sudden, “seemingly unintelligible” outbreaks of mass violence. Collective
denial and misrecognition are prerequisites for mass violence and genocide. But so are formal bureaucratic structures and
professional roles. The practical technicians of everyday violence in the backlands of Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33), for example, include the clinic
doctors who prescribe powerful tranquilizers to fretful and frightfully hungry babies, the Catholic priests who celebrate the death of “angel-babies,” and the municipal
Everyday violence encompasses the implicit, legitimate,
bureaucrats who dispense free baby coffins but no food to hungry families.
and routinized forms of violence inherent in particular social, economic, and political formations . It is close to what
Bourdieu (1977, 1996) means by “symbolic violence,” the violence that is often “nus-recognized” for something else, usually something good. Everyday violence is
similar to what Taussig (1989) calls “terror as usual.” All these terms are meant to reveal a public secret - the hidden links between violence in war and violence in
peace, and between war crimes and “peace-time crimes.” Bourdieu (1977) finds domination and violence in the least likely places - in courtship and marriage, in the
exchange of gifts, in systems of classification, in style, art, and culinary taste- the various uses of culture. Violence, Bourdieu insists, is everywhere in social practice.
It is misrecognized because its very everydayness and its familiarity render it invisible. Lacan identifies “rneconnaissance” as the prerequisite of the social. The
exploitation of bachelor sons, robbing them of autonomy, independence, and progeny, within the structures of family farming in the European countryside that
Bourdieu escaped is a case in point (Bourdieu, Chapter 42; see also Scheper-Hughes, 2000b; Favret-Saada, 1989). Following Gramsci, Foucault, Sartre, Arendt, and
other modern theorists of power-violence, Bourdieu treats direct aggression and physical violence as a crude, uneconomical mode of domination; it is less efficient
and, according to Arendt (1969), it is certainly less legitimate. While power and symbolic domination are not to be equated with violence - and Arendt argues
persuasively that violence is to be understood as a failure of power - violence, as we are presenting it here, is more than simply the expression of illegitimate physical
force against a person or group of persons. Rather, we need to understand violence as encompassing all forms of “controlling processes” (Nader 1997b) that assault
basic human freedoms and individual or collective survival. Our task is to recognize these gray zones of violence which are, by definition, not obvious. Once again,
the point of bringing into the discourses on genocide everyday, normative experiences of reification, depersonalization, institutional confinement, and acceptable death
is to help answer the question: What makes mass violence and genocide possible? In this volume we are suggesting that massviolence is part of a
continuum, and that it is socially incremental and often experienced by perpetrators, collaborators, bystanders - and
even by victims themselves - as expected, routine, even justified . The preparations for mass killing can be found in social
sentiments and institutions from the family, to schools, churches, hospitals, and the military. They harbor the early “warning signs” (Charney 1991), the
“priming” (as Hinton, ed., 2002 calls it), or the “genocidal continuum” (as we call it) that push social consensus toward
devaluing certain forms of human life and lifeways from the refusal of social support and humane care to
vulnerable “social parasites” (the nursing home elderly, “welfare queens,” undocumented immigrants, drug addicts) to the militarization of everyday
life (super-maximum-security prisons, capital punishment; the technologies of heightened personal security, including the house gun and gated communities; and
reversed feelings of victimization).
2NC---Environment
Securitization makes environmental collapse and extinction inevitable
Burke 16 – Anthony Burke, Audra Mitchell, Balsillie School of International Affairs/Wilfrid Laurier
University, Canada, Simon Dalby, Balsillie School of International Affairs/Wilfrid Laurier University,
Canada, Daniel J. Levine, University of Alabama, USA, Stefanie Fishel, The Department of Gender and
Race Studies, University of Alabama, “Planet Politics: A Manifesto from the End of IR,” Millennium -
Journal of International Studies June vol. 44 no. 3 499-523
8. Global ethics must respond to mass extinction
In late 2014, the Worldwide Fund for Nature reported a startling statistic: according to their global study, 52% of species had gone extinct between 1970 and 2010.60
This is not news: for three decades, conservation biologists have been warning of a ‘sixth mass extinction’, which, by definition, could eliminate more than three
quarters of currently existing life forms in just a few centuries.61 In other words, it could threaten the practical possibility of the survival of earthly life.
Mass extinction is not simply extinction (or death) writ large: it is a qualitatively different phenomena that
demands its own ethical categories. It cannot be grasped by aggregating species extinctions, let alone the
deaths of individual organisms. Not only does it erase diverse, irreplaceable life forms, their unique histories and open-ended possibilities, but it
threatens the ontological conditions of Earthly life .
IR is one of few disciplines that is explicitly devoted to the pursuit of survival , yet it has almost nothing to
say in the face of a possible mass extinction event .62 It utterly lacks the conceptual and ethical frameworks
necessary to foster diverse, meaningful responses to this phenomenon. As mentioned above, Cold-War era concepts such as
‘nuclear winter’ and ‘omnicide’ gesture towards harms massive in their scale and moral horror. However, they are asymptotic: they imagine
nightmares of a severely denuded planet, yet they do not contemplate the comprehensive negation that a
mass extinction event entails. In contemporary IR discourses, where it appears at all, extinction is treated as a problem of
scientific management and biopolitical control aimed at securing existing human lifestyles .63 Once again,
this approach fails to recognise the reality of extinction, which is a matter of being and nonbeing, not one of life
and death processes.
Confronting the enormity of a possible mass extinction event requires a total overhaul of human
perceptions of what is at stake in the disruption of the conditions of Earthly life. The question of what is ‘lost’ in
extinction has, since the inception of the concept of ‘conservation’, been addressed in terms of financial cost and economic liabilities.64 Beyond reducing
life to forms to capital, currencies and financial instruments, the dominant neoliberal political economy of
conservation imposes a homogenising , Western secular worldview on a planetary phenomenon. Yet the
enormity, complexity, and scale of mass extinction is so huge that humans need to draw on every possible resource in order to
find ways of responding. This means that they need to mobilise multiple worldviews and lifeways – including those emerging from indigenous and
marginalised cosmologies.
extinction is a matter of global ethics . It is not simply an issue of
Above all, it is crucial and urgent to realise that
management or security , or even of particular visions of the good life. Instead, it is about staking a claim as to the goodness
of life itself. If it does not fit within the existing parameters of global ethics, then it is these boundaries
that need to change.
9. An Earth-worldly politics
Humans are worldly – that is, we are fundamentally world-forming and embedded in multiple worlds that
traverse the Earth. However, the Earth is not ‘our’ world, as the grand theories of IR, and some accounts of the Anthropocene have it – an object and
possession to be appropriated, circumnavigated, instrumentalised and englobed.65 Rather, it is a complex of worlds that we share, co-
constitute, create, destroy and inhabit with countless other life forms and beings.
The formation of the Anthropocene reflects a particular type of worlding, one in which the Earth is
treated as raw material for the creation of a world tailored to human needs. Heidegger famously framed ‘earth’ and ‘world’
as two countervailing, conflicting forces that constrain and shape one another. We contend that existing political, economic and social
conditions have pushed human worlding so far to one extreme that it has become almost entirely
detached from the conditions of the Earth . Planet Politics calls, instead, for a mode of worlding that is
responsive to, and grounded in, the Earth.
One of these ways of being Earth-worldly is to embrace the condition of being entangled . We can interpret this term in the way that
Heidegger66 did, as the condition of being mired in everyday human concerns, worries, and anxiety, to prolong
existence. But, in contrast, we can and should reframe it as authors like Karen Barad67 and Donna Haraway68 have done. To them and many others,
‘entanglement’ is a radical, indeed fundamental condition of being-with, or, as Jean-Luc Nancy puts it, ‘being singular
plural’.69
This means that no being is truly autonomous or separate, whether at the scale of international politics or of quantum
physics. World itself is singular plural: what humans tend to refer to as ‘the’ world is actually a multiplicity of worlds at
various scales that intersect, overlap, conflict, emerge as they surge across the Earth . World emerges from
the poetics of existence, the collision of energy and matter, the tumult of agencies, the fusion and diffusion of bonds.
Worlds erupt from, and consist in, the intersection of diverse forms of being – material and intangible, organic and
inorganic, ‘living’ and ‘nonliving’. Because of the tumultuousness of the Earth with which they are entangled, ‘worlds’ are not static, rigid or permanent. They are
permeable and fluid. They can be created, modified – and, of course, destroyed. Concepts
of violence, harm and (in)security that focus
only on humans ignore at their peril the destruction and severance of worlds ,70 which undermines the conditions of
plurality that enables life on Earth to thrive.
To respond to the destruction of worlds, we
need a politics that is Earth-worldly, and an Earth-worldliness that is
political. What might this look like? First, humans can acknowledge and embrace worldliness as a
fundamental ontological condition and ethical imperative . Being worldly means understanding that
we are nurtured, threatened, nourished, and harmed, by profound forces – and that our movements,
responses and poetics make a difference to worlds. Humans also need to understand that being-Earth-worldly means
being-vulnerable along with the other co-constituents of the worlds we inhabit and travers e. Instead of
attempting in vain to escape this co-vulnerability, as the global rich attempt to insulate themselves from the worst effects of global
warming suffered by the poor – humans need to acknowledge its inescapability . More than this, they need to reframe it as a
source of positive solidarity, rather than simply the fearful, clinging, negative solidarity71 forged by survival
anxiety.
This means acknowledging that being worldly is not an option or a choice, nor is it an obstacle to human ‘progress’ that can be overcome, whether through major
projects of terraforming or emerging projects of space colonisation. Instead
of confronting worldliness with resentment that
prompts nihilistic violence or apathy72 – or, on the other hand, the instrumentalising optimism of eco-modernism73
– this ethico-politics would embrace the conditions, possibilities, and limitations of being-worldly.
Second, humans can cultivate gratitude for worldliness and the gifts it confers. We can learn from Nigel Clark74 and
other post-Levinasian thinkers, who urge us to acknowledge that humans owe their existence to chains of beings stretching back to the Big Bang (and beyond), and
outwards in every direction, across the boundaries of species and all other categories. And, in turn, humans
can attempt to give back – to inhabit,
protect, nurture, and, yes, kill and consume other beings and worlds – without
expecting them to conform to our demands, or
exacting promises from them. Being Earth-worldly means embracing the collective threat that is the
condition of being. It means engaging in this complex and ultimately finite project with gratitude,
attention, resolution, and, above all, with an amor mundi that embraces the Earth – not only human worlds.
2NC---Extinction
Crisis avoidance makes extinction inevitable by occluding the structural causes of
instability and fueling militarized conflict around the globe---interrogating their
epistemological failures is a pre-requisite to effective policy
Ahmed 11 – Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, International Security Analyst, Executive Director at the
Institute for Policy Research and Development, and DPhil, 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, Taylor and Francis
Instead, both realist and liberal orthodox IR approaches focus on different aspects of interstate behaviour, conflictual and cooperative
respectively, but each lacks the capacity to grasp that the unsustainable trajectory of state and inter-state
behaviour is only explicable in the context of a wider global system concurrently over-exploiting the
biophysical environment in which it is embedded. They are , in other words, unable to address the relationship
of the inter-state system itself to the biophysical environment as a key analytical category for
understanding the acceleration of global crises. They simultaneously therefore cannot recognise the embeddedness of the
economy in society and the concomitant politically-constituted nature of economics.84 Hence, they neglect the profound
irrationality of collective state behaviour, which systematically erodes this relationship, globalising
insecurity on a massive scale – in the very process of seeking security .85 In Cox’s words, because positivist
IR theory ‘does not question the present order [it instead] has the effect of legitimising and reifying it’ .86
Orthodox IR sanitises globally-destructive collective inter-state behaviour as a normal function of
instrumental reason – thus rationalising what are clearly deeply irrational collective human actions that
threaten to permanently erode state power and security by destroying the very conditions of human
existence . Indeed, the prevalence of orthodox IR as a body of disciplinary beliefs, norms and prescriptions organically conjoined with actual
policy-making in the international system highlights the extent to which both realism and liberalism are ideologically implicated in the
acceleration of global systemic crises.87
By the same token, the incapacity to recognise and critically interrogate how prevailing social, political and
economic structures are driving global crisis acceleration has led to the proliferation of symptom-led
solutions focused on the expansion of state/regime military–political power rather than any attempt to
transform root structural causes .88 It is in this context that, as the prospects for meaningful reform through
inter-state cooperation appear increasingly nullified under the pressure of actors with a vested interest in
sustaining prevailing geopolitical and economic structures, states have resorted progressively more to
militarised responses designed to protect the concurrent structure of the international system from
dangerous new threats. In effect, the failure of orthodox approaches to accurately diagnose global
crises , directly accentuates a tendency to ‘securitise’ them – and this, ironically, fuels the proliferation
of violent conflict and militarisation responsible for magnified global insecurity.
‘Securitisation’ refers to a ‘speech act’ – an act of labelling – whereby political authorities identify
particular issues or incidents as an existential threat which, because of their extreme nature, justify
going beyond the normal security measures that are within the rule of law . It thus legitimises resort to special extra-
legal powers. By labelling issues a matter of ‘security’, therefore, states are able to move them outside the
remit of democratic decision-making and into the realm of emergency powers, all in the name of survival
itself. Far from representing a mere aberration from democratic state practice, this discloses a deeper ‘dual’ structure of the state in its
institutionalisation of the capacity to mobilise extraordinary extra-legal military– police measures in purported response to an existential
danger.89
The problem in the context of global ecological, economic and energy crises is that such levels of
emergency mobilisation and militarisation have no positive impact on the very global crises generating
‘new security challenges’, and are thus entirely disproportionate .90 All that remains to examine is on the
‘surface’ of the international system (geopolitical competition, the balance of power, international
regimes, globalisation and so on), phenomena which are dislocated from their structural causes by way
of being unable to recognise the biophysically-embedded and politically-constituted social relations of
which they are comprised. The consequence is that orthodox IR has no means of responding to global
systemic crises other than to reduce them to their symptoms .
Indeed, orthodox IR theory has largely responded to global systemic crises not with new theory, but with the expanded
application of existing theory to ‘new security challenges’ such as ‘low-intensity’ intra-state conflicts ;
inequality and poverty ; environmental degradation ; international criminal activities including
drugs and arms trafficking ; proliferation of weapons of mass destruction ; and international
terrorism .91 Although the majority of such ‘new security challenges’ are non-military in origin – whether their referents are states or
individuals – the inadequacy of systemic theoretical frameworks to diagnose them means they are primarily examined through the lenses of
military-political power.92 In other words, the escalation of global ecological, energy and economic crises is recognised not as evidence that the
current organisation of the global political economy is fundamentally unsustainable , requiring urgent
transformation, but as vindicating the necessity for states to radicalise the exertion of their military–political capacities to maintain existing
power structures, to keep the lid on.93 Global crises are thus viewed as amplifying factors that could mobilise the
popular will in ways that challenge existing political and economic structures, which it is presumed (given
that state power itself is constituted by these structures) deserve protection . This justifies the state’s adoption of extra-
legal measures outside the normal sphere of democratic politics. In the context of global crisis impacts,
this counter-democratic trend-line can result in a growing propensity to problematise potentially
recalcitrant populations – rationalising violence toward them as a control mechanism .
3.2 From theory to policy
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 preeminence 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, genocidalviolence 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 sociopolitical 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.
Conclusions
While recommendations to shift our frame of orientation away from conventional state-centrism toward a
'human security' approach are valid, this cannot be achieved without confronting the deeper theoretical
assumptions underlying conventional approaches to 'non-traditional' security issues .106 By occluding
the structural origin and systemic dynamic of global ecological, energy and economic crises ,
orthodox approaches are incapable of transforming them. Coupled with their excessive state-centrism ,
this means they operate largely at the level of 'surface' impacts of global crises in terms of how they
will affect quite traditional security issues relative to sustaining state integrity, such as international
terrorism , violent conflict and population movements . Global crises end up fuelling the projection
of risk onto social networks, groups and countries that cross the geopolitical fault-lines of these 'surface'
impacts - which happen to intersect largely with Muslim communities . Hence, regions particularly
vulnerable to climate change impacts, containing large repositories of hydrocarbon energy resources, or subject to demographic
transformations in the context of rising population pressures, have become the focus of state security planning in the
context of counter-terrorism operations abroad.
The intensifying problematisation and externalisation of Muslim-majority regions and populations by Western
security agencies - as a discourse - is therefore not only interwoven with growing state perceptions of
global crisis acceleration , but driven ultimately by an epistemological failure to interrogate the
systemic causes of this acceleration in collective state policies (which themselves occur in the context of
particular social, political and economic structures). This expansion of militarisation is thus coeval with
the subliminal normative presumption that the social relations of the perpetrators, in this case Western
states, must be protected and perpetuated at any cost - precisely because the efficacy of the prevailing
geopolitical and economic order is ideologically beyond question.
As much as this analysis highlights a direct link between global systemic crises, social polarisation and state militarisation, it fundamentally
undermines the idea of a symbiotic link between natural resources and conflict per se. Neither 'resource shortages' nor 'resource abundance' (in
ecological, energy, food and monetary terms) necessitate conflict by themselves.
There are two key operative factors that determine whether either condition could lead to conflict. The first is the extent to which either condition
can generate socio-political crises that challenge or undermine the prevailing order. The second is the way in which stakeholder actors choose to
actually respond to the latter crises. To understand these factors accurately requires close attention to the political, economic and ideological
strictures of resource exploitation, consumption and distribution between different social groups and classes. Overlooking the
systematic causes of social crisis leads to a heightened tendency to problematise its symptoms , in the forms
of challenges from particular social groups. This can lead to externalisation of those groups, and the legitimisation
of violence towards them.
Ultimately, this systems approach to global crises strongly suggests that conventional policy 'reform' is
woefully inadequate . Global warming and energy depletion are manifestations of a civilisation which
is in overshoot . The current scale and organisation of human activities is breaching the limits of the
wider environmental and natural resource systems in which industrial civilisation is embedded . This
breach is now increasingly visible in the form of two interlinked crises in global food production and
the global financial system . In short, industrial civilisation in its current form is unsustainable . This
calls for a process of wholesale civilisational transition to adapt to the inevitable arrival of the post-
carbon era through social, political and economic transformation .
Yet conventional theoretical and policy approaches fail to (1) fully engage with the gravity of research in the natural sciences
and (2) translate the social science implications of this research in terms of the embeddedness of human social systems in natural systems. Hence,
lacking capacity for epistemological self-reflection and inhibiting the transformative responses urgently
required, they reify and normalise mass violence against diverse 'Others', newly constructed as
traditional security threats enormously amplified by global crises - a process that guarantees the
intensification and globalisation of insecurity on the road to ecological, energy and economic
catastrophe . Such an outcome, of course, is not inevitable , but extensive new transdisciplinary research
in IR and the wider social sciences - drawing on and integrating human and critical security studies, political ecology, historical sociology and
historical materialism, while engaging directly with developments in the natural sciences - is urgently required to develop
coherent conceptual frameworks which could inform more sober, effective, and joined-up policy-
making on these issues.
2NC---Interventionism
Their discursive construction of the US as the global guarantor of peace and
security drives an imperial fantasy and perpetual interventionism
As seen in Table 2, governmental

discourse of the rebalance consistently (in each of the fifteen statements) constructs the US
as a promoter of peace and security . As with all identified predicates this has the potential to overlap with and implicate others,
in this case on occasion with the ‘truth’ that an American security presence benefits regional prosperity (which alone is advanced in thirteen of
the fifteen statements). Argues Clinton: American treaty alliances in Asia “have underwritten regional peace and security. . . shaping the
environment for the region’s remarkable economic ascent”. 52 It works too in conjunction with the US as competent, with strong leadership
qualities, demonstrated by its possession of “cutting-edge capabilities” 53 or its commitment to not “shy away from. . . defending our interests,
our allies, and our partners throughout the region”. 54 The intention is not to question the validity of these assertions; in
many respects the US has facilitated regional security and prosperity. Rather, it is to show that these ‘truths’ are
not of objective reality. They are products of, and contributors to, discursively manipulated realities which
operate in the service of the United States and its practices in the region, especially within the context of a
rising China.
For instance, Clinton asserts that “by virtue of our unique geography, the United States is both an Atlantic and a Pacific power”. 55 Yet there is
nothing unique about US geography in this regard, since Canada, Mexico, Colombia and others also border both oceans. US geography remains
political geography and inextricable from the exertion of power as its unspectacular physical contours (in this sense at least) are bestowed
exceptional qualities which reinforce established notions of America’s internationalist duties. Essentially unquestioned, Clinton’s fantasised
that US duties, necessitated by its ‘universal’
reality is apparent common sense and unproblematic. So is the ‘fact’
values, legitimately extend to wherever it chooses . Statements on the rebalance purposefully present
the US as a ‘Pacific Power’ (or ‘nation’), but this is not merely descriptive. It is an inherently performative
call to action, turning foreign problems into domestic problems by helping to ensure that the United
States acts in distant Asia as naturally as Vietnam, the Philippines, and, most importantly, China.
This shows that the subject positioning between the US and China (or any other) is not performed only or even primarily at the level of relative
capabilities. Scholars are right to identify the rise of China as a key motivating force behind American regional policy. But the imaginative
geography of rising China means something to the American self which, notably, rising India (the next most
frequently appearing actor in the statements) does not, and vice versa. Each relationship is defined by powerful presuppositions. US officials
(in nine out of fifteen statements) stress that Washington is committed to working with China, and (in four out of fifteen) that China’s rise is
welcomed. As Secretary of Defense Ash Carter states, “I reject the zero-sum thinking that China’s gain is our loss”. 56 Indeed, while punctuated
by sites of tension contemporary US-China relations are broadly productive and cooperative. Yet just as Native Americans were
both a prominent construct of European-American identity and essential to its affirmation, the Chinese
Other does much to necessitate the presence of the fantasised American self in Asia.
Statements on the rebalance do not hide this contemporised geo-graphing of the region and its actors. Indeed, they are continually set
within the context of “differences” between the US and China. “ We have some fundamental differences that cannot be
minimized”, observes National Security Advisor Susan E. Rice.57 Secretary of State John Kerry notes that US China policy is built on
coordinating interests and managing differences, about which Washington is “clear-eyed”. 58 While these differences are rarely spelt out, to the
Ontological
democratic United States China’s communist structures imbue its modern-day rise with ominous connotations.59
difference still primes the US to the possibility of aggression60 but, to return to an earlier point, identities
cannot be essentialised as definitively knowable, as the case of ‘free’ yet authoritarian Cold War Taiwan
demonstrates. What matters is not so much Chinese communism as the understanding that Chinese communism challenges the anti-
communist American self.61
2NC---Reject Aff Evidence
Securitization rhetoric relies on power relations to reinforce its own legitimacy – the
judge as an educator should challenge those assumptions and disrupt the presumed
credibility of the affirmative’s scholarship
In the present research, the three specific modes outlined by Hansen are used to identify the various ways in which the China threat issue is
Language is an essential component of
discursively performed and to determine how this process relates to policy making.
successful securitization, and is thus key to the formation and performance of the China threat
discourse. However, language is deployed in various specific social situations, each associated with a
distinct style, status, and register. A useful way of classifying social situations is domain analysis. In sociolinguistic terms, a domain
is defined by three characteristics: place, role– relationship, and topic.38 A domain is a discourse community comprising a group of people who
subscribe to the conventions that define a particular kind of language use. In practice, this
communicative relationship is
inseparable from , and always overlaps with, power relations wherein individuals’ actions are exercised
upon other individuals.39 Each individual belongs to a different discourse community (or communities)
within society, according to his or her education, status, ideological affiliation, and so on. Therefore, the
success of a securitization act relies on the ability of an authoritative agent to deploy language that is
appropriate to its audience in terms of both style and content.
Therefore, securitization acts relating to the so-called China threat are effective only if the relevant
authoritative agents perform in the correct discourse communities or domains. Authoritative agents
may struggle to convey convincing and compelling interpretations of international issues in their
securitization acts. Three major communities can be identified in human society, along a continuum from general to specific: the general
public, the attentive public, and social elites. Each of these communities uses language and knowledge differently, and thus requires a particular
securitization mode. As shown in Table 1, each of the three modes of securitization—scientific theory, normative analogy, and political myth—
has a different logic and operates differently in terms of structural incorporation, episteme terrain, and substantial modality. It is worth noting that
the three modes are ideal types that are not clear-cut, but overlapping . For example, although the scientific mode is
dominated by the method of scientific theory, it may also be complemented by the methods of historical analogy and political myth. The
following sections are devoted to detailed discussion of the three modes. Three classic texts are chosen to illustrate these modes, each performed
by relevant authoritative agents of power in their respective domains of knowledge.
2NC---Value to Life
Security imposes a calculative logic that destroys value to life
Dillon 96 (Michael, Professor of Politics – University of Lancaster, Politics of Security, p. 26)
Everything, for example, has now become possible. But what human being seems most impelled to do with the
power of its actions is to turn itself into a species; not merely an animal species, nor even a species of currency or consumption (which
amount to the same thing), but a mere species of calculation. For only by reducing itself to an index of
calculation does it seem capable of constructing that oplitical arithmetic by which it can secure the
security globalised Western thought insists upon, and which a world made uncreasingly unpredictable by the very way
human being acts into it now seem to require. Yet, the very rage for calculability which securing security incites is precisely
also what reduces human freedom, inducing either despair or the surrender of what is human to the
dehumanising calculative logic of what seems to be necessary to secure security. I think, then, that Hannah Arendt was right when
she saw late modern humankind caught in a dangerous world-destroying cleft between a belief that everything is possible and a willingness to
surender itself to so-called laws of necessity (calculability itself) which would make everything possible. That it was, in short, characterized by a
combination of reckless omnipotence and reckless despair. But I also think that things have gone one stage further – the
surrender to the necessity of realising everything that is possible- and that this found its paradigmatic expression for example
in the deterrent security policies of the Cold War; where everything up to and including self-immolation not only
became possible but actually necessary in the interests of (inter)national security. The logic persists in the metaphysical
core of modern politics- the axiom of Inter-state security relations, popularized for example, through strategic discourse- even if the details have
changed.
A2: SQ Stable---Pinker
Not predictive – our ev says hierarchies and deterrence structures will manifest in
coming disaster that includes accidental nuke war and proxy conflict
Pinker thinks no nuke war – if they’re right, it’s global defense to the aff
Yang, 2011 (Oct 16, Wesley, Contributing Editor at New York Magazine, “Nasty, Brutish, and Long,”
http://nymag.com/arts/books/reviews/steven-pinker-2011-10/)
In his enormous new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, psycholinguist turned best-selling popular-science writer Steven Pinker calls the drastic decline in
violence in the modern era “the most important thing that has ever happened in human history.” But we’ve remained so fixated on daily reports of murder, repression,
and insurrection, he tells us, that we’ve failed to note the larger trend behind them and forgotten the many millennia in which we condoned or celebrated brutal
practices long since abandoned. “Readers
of this book,” Pinker writes, in one of many catalogues of infamy that punctuate his triumphal survey, “no
longer have to worry about abduction into sexual slavery; divinely commanded genocide; lethal circuses and tournaments; punishment on the cross, rack,
wheel, stake, or strappado for holding unpopular beliefs; decapitation for not bearing a son; disembowelment for having dated a royal; pistol duels to defend their
honor; beachside fisticuffs to impress their girlfriends; or the prospect of a nuclear world war that would put an end to civilization or to
human life itself.”
Pinker’s wrong – ignores Enlightenment violence, forgets ideological co-option,

offers terrible temporal definitions/scholarship, and is empirically wrong
-No war incorrect
-Answers Pinker, Goldstein, Mueller, Fukuyama, and Singer
Gray 15 ---- John, former School Professor of European Thought (London School of Economics and
Political Science), B.A., M.Phil. and D.Phil. (Exeter College, Oxford), former lecturer in political theory
(University of Essex), “Steven Pinker is Wrong about Violence and War,” The Guardian, 3/13,
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/13/john-gray-steven-pinker-wrong-violence-war-
declining?CMP=fb_gu
For an influential group of advanced thinkers, violence is a type of backwardness. In the most modern parts of the world, these thinkers tell us, war
has practically disappeared. The world’s great powers are neither internally divided nor inclined to go to war with one another, and with the spread of democracy, the increase of
wealth and the diffusion of enlightened values these states preside over an era of improvement the like of which has never been known. For those who lived through it, the last century may have
Scientifically assessed, the number of those killed
seemed peculiarly violent, but that, it is argued, is mere subjective experience and not much more than anecdote.
in violent conflicts was steadily dropping. The numbers are still falling, and there is reason to think they will fall further. A shift is under way, not strictly inevitable but
enormously powerful. After millennia of slaughter, humankind is entering the Long Peace. This has proved to be a popular message. The Harvard psychologist and linguist Steven
Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: a history of violence and humanity (2011) has not only been an international bestseller – more than a thousand pages long and containing a
formidable array of graphs and statistics, the book has established something akin to a contemporary orthodoxy. It is now not uncommon to find it stated, as though
it were a matter of fact, that human beings are becoming less violent and more altruistic. Ranging freely from human pre-history to the present day, Pinker presents his case with voluminous
erudition. Part of his argument consists in showing that the past was more violent than we tend to imagine. Tribal peoples that have been praised by anthropologists for their peaceful ways, such
as the Kalahari !Kung and the Arctic Inuit, in fact have rates of death by violence not unlike those of contemporary Detroit; while the risk of violent death in Europe is a fraction of what it was
five centuries ago. Not only have violent deaths declined in number. Barbaric practices such as human sacrifice and execution by torture have been abolished, while cruelty towards women,
children and animals is, Pinker claims, in steady decline. This “civilising process” – a term Pinker borrows from the sociologist Norbert Elias – has come about largely as a result of the
increasing power of the state, which in the most advanced countries has secured a near-monopoly of force. Other causes of the decline in violence include the invention of printing, the
empowerment of women, enhanced powers of reasoning and expanding capacities for empathy in modern populations, and the growing influence of Enlightenment ideals. Pinker was
not the first to promote this new orthodoxy. Co-authoring an article with Pinker in the New York Times (“War Really Is Going Out of Style”), the scholar of international relations Joshua L
Goldstein presented a similar view in Winning the War on War: the Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide (2011). Earlier, the political scientist John E
Mueller (whose work Pinker and Goldstein reference) argued in Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (1989) that the institution of war was disappearing, with the civil
wars of recent times being more like conflicts among criminal gangs. Pronounced in the summer of 1989 when liberal democracy seemed to be triumphant, Francis Fukuyama’s
declaration of “the end of history” – the disappearance of large-scale violent conflict between rival political systems – was a version of the same message. Another proponent of
the Long Peace is the well-known utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer, who has praised The Better Angels of Our Nature as “a supremely important book … a masterly achievement.
Pinker convincingly demonstrates that there has been a dramatic decline in violence, and he is persuasive about the causes of that decline.” In a forthcoming book, The Most Good You Can Do,
Among the causes of the outbreak of altruism,
Singer describes altruism as “an emerging movement” with the potential to fundamentally alter the way humans live.
Pinker and Singer attach particular importance to the ascendancy of Enlightenment thinking. Reviewing Pinker, Singer writes: “During the
Enlightenment, in 17th- and 18th-century Europe and countries under European influence, an important change occurred. People began to look askance at forms of violence that had previously
been taken for granted: slavery, torture, despotism, duelling and extreme forms of punishment … Pinker refers to this as ‘the humanitarian revolution’.” Here too Pinker and Singer belong in a
contemporary orthodoxy. With other beliefs crumbling, many seek to return to what they piously describe as “Enlightenment values”. But these values were not as
unambiguously benign as is nowadays commonly supposed. John Locke denied America’s indigenous peoples any legal
claim to the country’s “wild woods and uncultivated wastes”; Voltaire promoted the “pre-Adamite” theory of human development according to which Jews were
remnants of an earlier and inferior humanoid species; Kant maintained that Africans were innately inclined to the practice of slavery; the utilitarian
Jeremy Bentham developed the project of an ideal penitentiary, the Panopticon, where inmates would be kept in solitary confinement under
constant surveillance. None of these views is discussed by Singer or Pinker. More generally, there is no mention of the powerful
illiberal current in Enlightenment thinking, expressed in the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks, which advocated
and practised methodical violence as a means of improving society. *** Like many others today, Pinker’s response when confronted
with such evidence is to define the dark side of the Enlightenment out of existence. How could a philosophy of reason and toleration be
implicated in mass murder? The cause can only be the sinister influence of counter-Enlightenment ideas. Discussing the “Hemoclysm” – the tide of 20th-century mass murder
in which he includes the Holocaust – Pinker writes: “There was a common denominator of counter-Enlightenment utopianism behind the
ideologies of nazism and communism.” You would never know, from reading Pinker, that Nazi “scientific racism” was
based in theories whose intellectual pedigree goes back to Enlightenment thinkers such as the prominent Victorian psychologist and eugenicist Francis
Galton. Such links between Enlightenment thinking and 20th-century barbarism are, for Pinker, merely aberrations,
distortions of a pristine teaching that is innocent of any crime: the atrocities that have been carried out in its name come from misinterpreting the true gospel, or its corruption by alien
influences. The childish simplicity of this way of thinking is reminiscent of Christians who ask how a religion of
love could possibly be involved in the Inquisition. In each case it is pointless to argue the point, since what is at stake is an
article of faith. There is nothing new in the suggestion that war is disappearing along with the “civilising process”. The notion that the human
capacity for empathy is expanding alongside an increase of rationality owes its wide influence to Auguste Comte, an almost forgotten early-19th-century French Enlightenment thinker. Comte
founded the “religion of humanity”, a secular creed based on the most advanced “science” of the day – phrenology. While Pinker and Singer don’t discuss Comte, his ideas shape their way of
Comte coined the term “altruism”. Like Pinker and Singer, he believed that humankind – or at any rate its most highly developed portions – was
thinking. For one thing,
becoming more selfless and beneficent. But he was also a sharp critic of liberalism who believed the process would end in an “organic” way of life – a “scientific” version of the
medieval social order that, despite his hostility to traditional religion, he much admired. It was Comte’s virulent anti-liberalism that worried John Stuart Mill, another Enlightenment thinker who
was in many other ways Comte’s disciple. Mill went so far as to suggest that the propagation of the species would in future become a duty to humanity rather than a selfish pleasure; but he feared
that a world in which this was the case would be one without liberty or individuality. Mill need not have worried. Human beings continue to be capable of empathy, but there is no reason for
thinking they are becoming any more altruistic or more peaceful.
A2: SQ Stable---Pinker---Stats
Violence is omnipresent – their stats miss slow violence, ignore state-led terror, and
wrongfully buy into conceptions of negative peace
-Declining battlefield fatalities miss increasing non-combatant deaths and proxy wars
declining?CMP=fb_gu
The picture of declining violence presented by this new orthodoxy is not all it seems to be. As some critics, notably John
Arquilla, have pointed out, it’s a mistake to focus too heavily on declining fatalities on the battlefield. If these
deaths have been falling, one reason is the balance of terror: nuclear weapons have so far prevented industrial-style warfare between great
powers. Pinker dismisses the role of nuclear weapons on the grounds that the use of other weapons of mass destruction such as poison gas has not
prevented war in the past; but nuclear bombs are incomparably more destructive. No serious military historian doubts that fear of their use has
been a major factor in preventing conflict between great powers. Moreover deaths of non-combatants have been steadily
rising . Around a million of the 10 million deaths due to the first world war were of non-combatants, whereas around half
of the more than 50 million casualties of the second world war and over 90% of the millions who have perished in the violence
that has wracked the Congo for decades belong in that category. If great powers have avoided direct armed conflict,
they have fought one another in many proxy wars. Neocolonial warfare in s outh- e ast A sia, the Korean war and the
Chinese invasion of Tibet, British co unter- in surgency warfare in Malaya and Kenya, the abortive Franco-British invasion
of Suez, the Angolan civil war, the Soviet invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, the Vietnam war, the
Iran-Iraq war, the first Gulf war, covert intervention in the Balkans and the Caucasus, the invasion of Iraq, the use of airpower
in Libya, military aid to insurgents in Syria, Russian cyber-attacks in the Baltic states and the proxy war between the US and
Russia that is being waged in Ukraine – these are only some of the contexts in which great powers have been
involved in continuous warfare against each other while avoiding direct military conflict. While it is true that war has
changed, it has not become less destructive. Rather than a contest between well-organised states that can at some point negotiate
peace, it is now more often a many-sided conflict in fractured or collapsed states that no one has the power to
end. The protagonists are armed irregulars, some of them killing and being killed for the sake of an idea or faith, others from
fear or a desire for revenge and yet others from the world’s swelling armies of mercenaries, who fight for profit. For all
of them, attacks on civilian populations have become normal . The ferocious conflict in Syria, in which
methodical starvation and the systematic destruction of urban environments are deployed as strategies, is
an example of this type of warfare. It may be true that the modern state’s monopoly of force has led, in some contexts, to declining rates of
violent death. But it is also true that the power of the modern state has been used for purposes of mass killing , and one
should not pass too quickly over victims of state terror. With increasing historical knowledge it has become clear that the
“Holocaust-by-bullets” – the mass shootings of Jews, mostly in the Soviet Union, during the second world war – was perpetrated
on an even larger scale than previously realised. Soviet agricultural collectivisation incurred millions of foreseeable
deaths, mainly as a result of starvation, with deportation to uninhabitable regions, life-threatening conditions in the Gulag
and military-style operations against recalcitrant villages also playing an important role. Peacetime deaths due to
internal repression under the Mao regime have been estimated to be around 70 million . Along with fatalities caused by
state terror were unnumbered millions whose lives were irreparably broken and shortened. How these
casualties fit into the scheme of declining violence is unclear . Pinker goes so far as to
suggest that the 20th-century Hemoclysm might have been a gigantic statistical fluke, and cautions that any history of the last
century that represents it as having been especially violent may be “apt to exaggerate the narrative coherence of this history” (the italics are
Pinker’s). However , there is an equal or greater risk in abandoning a coherent and truthful narrative of the violence
of the last century for the sake of a spurious quantitative precision. Estimating the numbers of those who die from violence involves
complex questions of cause and effect, which cannot always be separated from moral judgments. There are
many kinds of lethal force that do not produce immediate death. Are those who die of hunger or disease during war or its aftermath
counted among the casualties? Do refugees whose lives are cut short appear in the count? Where torture is used in war, will its
victims figure in the calculus if they succumb years later from the physical and mental damage that has been inflicted on them? Do
infants who are born to brief and painful lives as a result of exposure to Agent Orange or d epleted u ranium find a
place in the roll call of the dead? If women who have been raped as part of a military strategy of sexual violence die before their
time, will their passing feature in the statistical tables? While the seeming exactitude of statistics may be compelling,
much of the human cost of war is incalculable . Deaths by violence are not all equal . It is
terrible to die as a conscript in the trenches or a civilian in an aerial bombing campaign, but to perish from overwork, beating
or cold in a labour camp can be a greater evil . It is worse still to be killed as part of a systematic campaign of extermination as happened
to those who were consigned to death camps such as Treblinka. Disregarding these distinctions, the statistics presented by those who
celebrate the arrival of the Long Peace are morally dubious if not meaningless. The radically contingent nature of the
figures is another reason for not taking them too seriously. (For a critique of Pinker’s statistical methods, see Nassim
Nicholas Taleb’s essay on the Long Peace.) If the socialist revolutionary Fanya Kaplan had succeeded in assassinating Lenin in August 1918,
violence would still have raged on in Russia. But the Soviet state might not have survived and could not have been used by Stalin for slaughter on
a huge scale. If a resolute war leader had not unexpectedly come to power in Britain in May 1940, and the country had been defeated
or (worse) made peace with Germany as much of the British elite wanted at the time, Europe would likely have remained under
Nazi rule for generations to come – time in which plans of racial purification and genocide could have been more
fully implemented . Discussing the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 in which nuclear war was narrowly averted, Pinker
dismisses the view that “the de-escalation was purely a stroke of uncanny good luck”. Instead, he explains the fact that nuclear war was
avoided by reference to the superior judgment of Kennedy and Khrushchev, who had “an intuitive grasp of game theory” – an example of
But a disastrous escalation in the crisis may in fact have been prevented
increasing rationality in history, Pinker believes.
only by a Soviet submariner, Vasili Arkhipov, who refused to obey orders from his captain to launch a nuclear torpedo. Had it not been
for the accidental presence of a single courageous human being, a nuclear conflagration could have occurred causing fatalities on a vast scale.
Reject Pinker – crafts false categories of “backward” people while ignoring imperial
and hidden violence
declining?CMP=fb_gu
There is something repellently absurd in the notion that war is a vice of “backward” peoples. Destroying some of the most
refined civilisations that have ever existed, the wars that ravaged south-east Asia in the second world war and the decades that followed
were the work of colonial powers . One of the causes of the genocide in Rwanda was the segregation of the population by
German and Belgian imperialism. Unending war in the Congo has been fuelled by western demand for the
country’s natural resources. If violence has dwindled in advanced societies, one reason may be that they have
exported it. Then again, the idea that violence is declining in the most highly developed countries is questionable .
Judged by accepted standards, the United States is the most advanced society in the world. According to many estimates the US also has the highest rate
of incarceration , some way ahead of China and Russia, for example. Around a quarter of all the world’s prisoners are held in American jails, many for
exceptionally long periods. Black people are disproportionately represented, many prisoners are mentally ill and
growing numbers are aged and infirm. Imprisonment in America involves continuous risk of assault by other prisoners.
There is the threat of long periods spent in solitary confinement, sometimes (as in “supermax” facilities, where something like Bentham’s Panopticon has
been constructed) for indefinite periods – a type of treatment that has been reasonably classified as torture. Cruel and
unusual punishments involving flogging and mutilation may have been abolished in many countries, but , along with
unprecedented levels of mass incarceration, the practice of torture seems to be integral to the functioning of the world’s most advanced
state. It may not be an accident that torture is often deployed in the special operations that have replaced more traditional types
of warfare. The extension of c ounter- t errorism to include assassination by unaccountable mercenaries and remote-controlled killing by
drones is part of this shift. A metamorphosis in the nature is war is under way, which is global in reach . With the state of Iraq in
ruins as a result of US-led regime change, a third of the country is controlled by Isis, which is able to inflict genocidal
attacks on Yazidis and wage a campaign of terror on Christians with near-impunity. In Nigeria, the Islamist militias of Boko Haram practise a type
of warfare featuring mass killing of civilians, razing of towns and villages and sexual enslavement of women and children. In
Europe, targeted killing of journalists, artists and Jews in Paris and Copenhagen embodies a type of warfare that refuses to recognise any distinction between
combatants and civilians. Whether they accept the fact or not, advanced
societies have become terrains of violent conflict .
Rather than war declining, the difference between peace and war has been fatally blurred. Deaths on the battlefield
have fallen and may continue to fall. From one angle this can be seen as an advancing condition of peace. From another point of view that looks at the variety and
intensity with which violence is being employed, the Long Peace can be described as a condition of perpetual conflict .
A2: Threats Real
Threats real isn’t responsive – your ballot should focus on their discourse
independent of the accuracy of representations
The present research takes an additional step in its approach to the West’s China threat discourse by drawing on poststructuralist securitization
theory. The
primary focus of this study, like that of similar existing research, is not to determine whether the so-
called China threat is real, but to examine the articulation and performance of the China threat
discourse in the West. In comparison with previous similar research, however, this study takes a more explicit and sophisticated
poststructuralist approach that distinguishes itself from related approaches with which it is often confused, particularly social constructivism. The
special contribution of this study lies in its identification of several major methods of securitization by which the China threat is fashioned in
Western discourse. It mainly argues that different securitizers perform the China threat acts in their respective
discourse communities. These acts aim to inspire various issues of the China threat thesis through
communication, despite pointing to different referential objects, focusing on different target audiences
and referring to different social spheres. The article proceeds as follows. The next section presents the poststructuralist
securitization framework used to analyze the concept of the “China threat,” followed by one section on each of the three modes of securitization
identified: scientific, normative, and mythical. The article concludes with a discussion of the findings.
A2: Utilitarianism
Utilitarian calculations reduces life to a mere object—it is this thinking which makes
nuclear annihilation an eminent possibility.
Jeff Smith, Clinical Management Communication at USC, 1989
Unthinking the Unthinkable, p. 92
So a number of modern themes here come together. One of those state prerogatives is violence, particularly the right to de-authorize whole other
countries and peoples and so attack them wholesale. The new, pragmatic view of war furthers and supports this sovereign
right. As with machines or representative assemblies, war is now regarded as an institution in which
failures or nonresults are mere nothing, a kind of nonexistence. Nonfunc- tioning machines are not really
machines at all, but scrap metal; the out- voted minority in a legislature is subsumed into its single voice; and by the same logic, the
losers in a war are not people who still hold basic human rights, but mere debris (or booty), their physical
reality ready to be effaced along with their ruined state. The mechanistic view of that state combines
toward the same result as the animistic view.
And thus it becomes possible, for the first time, to conceive of actual devices whose purpose would he the
literal, physical annihilation of those unfortunate nonentities. If machines are really ideas, here I think we have found one
of the key ideas that nuclear weapons really are. Modern, mechanistic, purposive views of war and the state are
essential to the existence of technology as the institution we take it for today: a dynamic, relentless, innovative
system that will eventually produce anything it is possible to produce. Actually, it is important to recognize that technology does not
produce just anything (which is why we are not forced to live with any particular invention). But it does produce virtually
anything demanded by "circumstances." And we have already established what count as circumstances
today.
If nuclear weapons follow from a new concept of enemies as nonper- sons, perhaps they also embody, or literalize, the
mechanistic quality that war itself had taken on from a certain point in history-the quality captured in
our modern phrase war machine. Perhaps, besides being machines themselves, nuclear weapons are also
independent products of the whole modern program that machines represent, along with wars and states: a
program that placed new value on getting the job done, no matter how diabolical that job might have
seemed to an earlier way of thinking.
*** ALTERNATIVE
2NC---Floating PIK
We can advocate the mechanism of the affirmative without their specific
representations of China, attempt to perfect deterrence, and use of Taiwan as a
bargaining chip
That’s best –
A) Discursive education – representations matter for political salience, the
creation of coalitions and effective solvency – Their standard drowns-out our
analysis for big-stick impacts
B) Neg ground – The opted to include their frames in the 1AC – there’s a
strategic cost that we need to test – their vision is severance – kills advocacy
C) Reciprocal – Their perms offer alternate advocacies that balance advantages
It’s also not arbitrary or self-serving because they picked their advantages and
should have defenses of them
It’s predictable – K is literally an impact turn to their 1AC imagery
A2: Fails
Giving up the drive for security and interrogating their epistemological failures is
key
Neocleous 8 – Mark Neocleous, PhD in Philosophy from Middlesex, MSc in Politics and Sociology
from Birkbeck, BSc in Philosophy and Sociology from City, Critique of Security, p. 185-186 [language
modified]
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 remoeves 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 ,"' 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 ."' 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 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 [ignore] blind ourselves to 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 effect achieved through the constant securitising of social and political issues, debilitating 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."'
A2: Not Real World
Their focus on “the real world” brackets out academic dissent and promotes
unproductive scholarship
Sceptical of the importance of post-positivist approaches, Stephen Walt argues that “issues of war and peace
are too important for the field to be diverted into a prolix and self-indulgent discourse that is divorced
from the real world”. 94 Yet rather than divorced from the world, discursive or productive forms of
power are inextricable from it and central to the formulation of what we accept as ‘real’. Productive or
discursive power should not be privileged since a “range of conceptualizations [of power] provides the basis for a better, richer, and fuller
understanding of the workings of world politics”. 95 This is the aim of scholars no matter their epistemological ‘camp’.
Perpetuating a false dichotomy between ‘explainers’ and ‘understanders’ , and the respective, contrasting
can only be detrimental to the field.
contributions they are equipped to offer,
A2: Realism Good
Only the alt activates the critical potential of realism. Reflexive critique must revise
the philosophy of security.
Steele 7 – Brent Steele, Professor of Political Science at the University of Kansas, “’Eavesdropping on
Honored Ghosts’: From Classical to Reflexive Realism”, Journal of International Relations and
Development, 10, p. 284-285
This skeptical view of the eschaton means that rather than being biased, like neorealism , toward the status quo,30
reflexive realism is instead perpetually skeptical of the authority exercised by state elites, and specifically
the ‘big ideas’ that become a part of elite discourse which can lead to dangerous policies.31 Rather than reifying
power, reflexive realism asks us to challenge the manner in which power is projected. Scan the words used in
this reflexive presentation of realism. Far from being the dominant, mainstream, status quo monolith that we were trained to recognize in graduate
school, it is instead ‘inevitably antagonistic toward political power y [a] rebellion against the seduction of
prevailing structures of power, identity, and knowledge’ (Williams 2005a: 179, emphasis added).32 Budding IR scholars
may tend to forget that what motivated especially the post (World War II) realists in their seemingly contrarian positions was their concern for the
republics in which they wrote. Morgenthau was attempting to ‘perform’ a ‘service for his adopted country’ (Lebow 2003: 242). With reflexive
realism, we look back at classical realist writings for evidence of such contemplation about contemporary problems. Morgenthau and Niebuhr not
only buck the common portrayal of ‘hawkish’ realists, they provided some of the most insightful arguments against the Vietnam War. Writing in
1969, Morgenthau stated that his: concern is justified not only historically, in view of the shortcomings of our [American] foreign policies, but
also pragmatically, with a view toward avoiding the mistakes of the past. It is now generally admitted that our Vietnam policy has failed, but, if
we were to let it go at that, we would risk applying the same faulty assumptions and principles that have brought the Vietnam disaster upon us to
other situations with similarly disastrous results (1969: viii). According to Jace Weaver (1995), Niebuhr was a proponent of American
exceptionalism until this war. Despite the fact that Niebuhr recognized how certain religions and patriotism blinded nation-states from their own
limitations, he still viewed the US’ mission as one of necessity during the Cold War. Yet this view would quickly change,33 so that by 1967,
‘The contradiction between our [American] ideal aims of a peace of conciliation and such an imposed peace, which only a defeated enemy would
accept, can be understood only in the light of an ironic self-deception — ironic because we are the victims of our own ideology’ (Niebuhr 1968:
11, emphasis added). And by 1969, Niebuhr would assert that anti-communist ‘fanaticism y ha[d] caused [the United States] to stumble into the
most pointless, costly and bloody war in [its] history’ (Niebuhr, quoted in Reinitz 1980: 120). Like the classical realists they resource,
reflexive realists now provide a particularly salient, effective critique of contemporary foreign policy, but
one that is unique when compared to that made by mainstream realists. The current debate over the Iraq
War between neoconservatives and mainstream realists in the US has appeared in various forums, most notably in the
neoconservative publication Commentary (Rosen 2005). Stephen Walt (2006: 4) stated in a future issue that: Realists were in the vanguard of the
opposition to war with Iraq in 2003y Today, with thousands of Americans and Iraqis killed and wounded, a price tag that will eventually exceed
$1 trillion (!), and no end in sight, which group seems to have the clearest vision of our national interest? For all its limitations, realism remains a
more valuable guide to U.S. foreign policy than the idealistic fantasies offered by its primary intellectual opponents. Walt’s is a
cost/benefit analysis of policy , one echoed in the ISG report noted at the beginning of this article. However, it fails to
comprehensively challenge the philosophy that has driven the Bush administration’s Iraq policy. A
critique of the Iraq War set in the mold of Niebuhr and Morgenthau’s critique of Vietnam would begin by asserting how
hubristic impulses for American hegemonic expansion actually hastened American demise . The inability to
recognize the limits of power in international politics was a strategic miscalculation — demonstrating the cyclical pattern of human history rather
than the linear trajectory assumed by eschatologies. The abnormal (and thus imprudent) behavior, according to reflexive realism, was to invade
Iraq.
A2: Realism Inevitable
Human nature can be changed- it’s not set in advance and pedagogical
transformation in this debate can change economic preference formation
Schor ’10 (Julie, Prof. of Economics @ Boston College, Plenitude: The New Economics of True
Wealth, pgs. 11-12)
And we don't have to. What's odd about the narrowness of the national economic conversation is that it leaves out theoretical
advances in economics and related fields that have begun to change our basic understandings of what motivates
and enriches people. The policy conversation hasn't caught up to what's happening at the forefront of the discipline. One of the hallmarks of
the standard economic model, which hails from the nineteenth century, is that people are considered relatively unchanging. Basic
preferences, likes and dislikes, are assumed to be stable, and don't adjust as a result of the choices people make or the circumstances
in which they find themselves. People alter their behavior in response to changes in prices and incomes, to be sure, and
sometimes rapidly. But there are no feedback loops from today's choices to tomorrow's desires. This accords with an old formulation
of human nature as fixed, and this view still dominates the policy conversation. However, there's a growing body of research that
attests to human adaptability. Newer thinking in behavioral economics, cultural evolution, and social
networking that has developed as a result of interdisciplinary work in psychology, biology, and sociology yields a view of humans
as far more malleable. It's the economic analogue to recent findings in neuroscience that the brain is more
plastic than previously understood, or in biology that human evolution is happening on a time scale more compressed than scientists originally
thought. As economic actors, we can change, too. This has profound implications for our ability to shift from
one way of living to another, and to be better off in the process. It's an important part of why we can both reduce ecological impact and
improve well- being. As we transform our lifestyles, we transform ourselves . Patterns of consuming, earning, or
interacting that may seem unrealistic or even negative before starting down this road become feasible and appealing.
Moreover, when big changes are on the table, the narrow trade-offs of the past can be superseded. If we can question
consumerism, we're no longer forced to make a mandatory choice between well-being and environment. If we can admit that full-time jobs need
not require so many hours, it'll be possible to slow down ecological degradation, address unemployment, and make time for family and
community. If we can think about knowledge differently, we can expand social wealth far more rapidly. Stepping outside the "there is
no alternative to business-as-usual" thinking that has been a straitjacket for years puts creative options into play. And
it opens the doors to double and triple dividends: changes that yield benefits on more than one front. Some of the most important economic
research in recent years shows that a single intervention-a community reclamation of a brownfield or planting on degraded agriculture land-can
solve three problems. It regenerates an ecosystem, provides income for the restorers, and empowers people as civic actors. In dire straits on the
economic and ecological fronts, we have little choice but to find a way forward that addresses both. That’s what plenitude offers.
Circular. Realism is dominant because its tenants are believed. Claiming

“inevitability” annihilates agency.
Bleiker 2k – Roland Bleiker, Senior Lecturer and Coordinator of the Peace and Conflict Studies
Program at the University of Queensland and Professor at Australian National University, Popular
Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics, p. 48-49
The very notion of prediction does, by its own logic, annihilate human agency. To assert that i nternational
r elations is a domain of political dynamics whose future should be predictable through a convincing set of theoretical
propositions is to assume that the course of global politics is to a certain extent predetermined. From such a vantage-
point there is no more room for interference and human agency, no more possibility for politics to overtake
theory. A predictive approach thus runs the risk of ending up in a form of inquiry that imposes a static image upon a far more
complex set of transversal political practices. The point of a theoretical inquiry, however, is not to ignore the constantly changing domain of
international relations. Rather, the main objective must consist of facilitating an understanding [end page 48] of transversal struggles that can grapple with those
moments when people walk through walls precisely when nobody expects them to do so. Prediction is a problematic assessment tool even if a theory is able to
anticipate future events. Important theories, such as realist
interpretations of international politics, may well predict certain events only
because their theoretical premises have become so objectivised that they have started to shape decision makers and
political dynamics. Dissent, in this case, is the process that reshapes these entrenched perceptions and the ensuing
political practices.
New Alt---Decolonial Alliances
The affirmative uses Taiwan as a bargaining chip in the game of US-China great
power competition, making Taiwan’s existence contingent on its strategic value to
the West – their paternalistic approach maintains a militarized American Empire
and continues a guise of American exceptionalism under Trump’s fascism – our
alternative is to affirm international decolonial alliances toward Taiwanese
independence that attack the legitimacy of American Empire
Hsu ’17 – Assistant Professor of American Studies at San Jose State University
Funie Hsu. Brian Hioe was Democracy and Human Rights Service Fellow at the Taiwan Foundation for
Democracy. Wen Liu is Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at University at
Albany, State University of New York. “Collective Statement on Taiwan Independence:Building Global
Solidarity and Rejecting US Military Empire,” American Quarterly 69, no. 3 (September 2017): 465-468.
https://muse.jhu.edu/
Taiwan exists in the between. In historical terms, Taiwan has existed, and continues to exist, in and between
various iterations of colonial occupation : from seventeenth-century Dutch rule and the resulting Han settler colonialism to twentieth-century
Japanese occupation and the current colonial occupation of the lingering Kuomintang (KMT) Nationalist government. Politically, Taiwan resides in
between the competing imperialist discourses of the People’s Republic of China, which has long articulated a goal of
“retaking” or “reunifying” the island it claims as a renegade province, and the United States, a nation that has demonstrated an ambivalent stance toward
Taiwan and expressions of its independence. As such, it has been appropriated as a space on which to bargain the terms of
US–China foreign policy —and negotiate away the island’s right to self-determination —since the 1970s.
Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) culminated in the Shanghai Communiqué, which expressed what would become the United
States’ guiding foreign policy principle of One China, with Taiwan subsumed as part of China. Taiwan
was thus used as a negotiating tool to
solidify a new partnership between the United States and the PRC. The United States expressed its acknowledgment for the idea
“that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China,” and declared, “The United States Government
does not challenge that position.” By 1979 the United States had pulled military personnel out of Taiwan and severed governmental recognition of the Republic of
China. In the space that is in and between occupation, and in between US–China foreign policy , Taiwan
has been constituted by colonial and imperial imaginations of its utility and futurity.
The following collective statement represents an intention to articulate and organize a new possibility
for Taiwan and its independence. It was crafted as a response to the controversial December 2, 2016, phone call between
Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-Wen, and Donald Trump, which presented a new dynamic of [End Page 465] in-betweenness, one
that catapulted the question of Taiwan independence from the margins to center stage. Much of the reaction to the
call revolved around two general sentiments of panic and potential. US foreign policy experts were anxious to preserve the One China status quo, while many in
Taiwan and the Taiwanese diaspora of the United States were cautiously hopeful that it signaled the possibility for renewed American support, especially in regard to
independence. Taiwanindependence , it is often understood, cannot be practically achieved without the
backing of American militarized security . In this statement, a growing contingent of Taiwanese and
Taiwanese American scholars, activists, artists, and people in solidarity argue for a reimagination of the
possibilities of the in-between to move beyond tactics of dollar diplomacy and hopeful anticipation of
American approval, toward more sustainable projects of global solidarity with decolonial justice
movements around the world . We offer this perspective as an alternative to the hegemonic logic
under which Taiwan independence must be practically aligned with American Empire and
bolstered by American militarized peace . Instead, this collective statement attempts to highlight the
entrapment such thinking produces and the violent present moment that so-called US security has
generated, especially under Trump’s increasingly fascist America . Within this context, we intend for this
statement to further transpacific conversations, collaborations, and new configurations for imagining
Taiwan and the possibility of independence during these times.
Funie Hsu
The December 2, 2016, phone call between Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-Wen and American president Donald J. Trump focused new attention on the issue of Taiwan
independence. The call set off two dominant reactions, both problematic. On the one hand, a
troubling Taiwanese national enthusiasm
celebrated the possibility of American solidarity with Taiwan independence under a Trump presidency. On
the other hand, so-called democratic Americans shuddered in fear at the idea that the status of an autonomous
Taiwan might be validated, putting at risk the One China recognition policy that has proved profitable
to the United States since the late 1970s . What is missing , however, is a critical understanding of
the extreme danger of fostering Taiwanese independence through a relationship dependent on the
paternalism of American Empire —made all the more perilous under the increasingly fascist Trump
administration— and the false security of US militarized peace in Asia.
As scholars, activists, and artists in Taiwan and in the diaspora of the United States, and as allies, we are concerned with both Taiwanese independence and [End Page
466] global justice. Therefore, we urge for a critical understanding of the inherent problems in aligning Taiwan
independence with the force of American Empire . American independence and democracy itself have
been built from violent contradictions to liberty, including the genocide of indigenous peoples and the
enslavement of Africans, which continue today in different forms. Indeed, the United States has historically
benefited from the direct suppression of both domestic and international independence movements. Its One
China foreign policy and advocacy for maintaining the status quo in Taiwan is yet another example of this pattern. Trump’s stances have been
unclear, at times expressing a willingness to break from the One China Policy, and at other times
reaffirming it. His inconsistent stance on Taiwan poses fundamental dangers to Taiwanese
sovereignty and, moreover, continues the pattern of America using Taiwan for its geopolitical
interests.
Trump’s America First platform would merely continue a long history of US manipulation of Taiwan
for its own interests in the Asia Pacific . This historical pattern has been most recently demonstrated
through Trump’s comments suggesting that Taiwan may serve as a useful bargaining chip for a
trade deal with China. Thus Taiwanese liberation cannot rely on a dependency model of liberty
contingent on the political whims of the United States , which is especially volatile under Trump’s
authoritarian brand of American governance.
We also call attention to the context of the racist, xenophobic, misogynist, and Islamophobic platform of
Trump and the immediate threat he poses to safety and democracy in the United States and around the
globe. His executive orders to institute a Muslim ban, to construct a wall separating the United States from Mexico, and to continue development of the
Keystone and Dakota oil pipelines are only a few examples of the ways in which the Trump administration has advanced extremist policies that
institutionalize white nationalism, exploit the environment, and threaten the tenets of democracy in
America and abroad. Therefore, we find it troubling to align Taiwan independence movements with the
ongoing project of American Empire currently led by Trump.
Rather than depend wholly on America, we urge for Taiwanese independence movements to not
only distance themselves from the US Empire and Trump but to build their freedom in solidarity
with groups marginalized by American Empire and with other global movements for
decolonization (including indigenous rights movements in Taiwan as linked to broader international indigenous movements). We must establish
strong international alliances with those who are putting their bodies on the line for justice, just as a
previous generation of Taiwanese independence leaders have done . In the United States today, this includes the
NODAPL, Black Lives Matter, and the ongoing queer and trans [End Page 467] liberation movements, to name
just a few. In this manner, we can generate global attention for Taiwan independence by working in solidarity
with other liberation movements instead of pandering to the political-economic desires of the US
Empire.
As scholars and activists concerned with both Taiwan independence and global justice, we call for a Taiwan independence movement that
solidly rejects American military empire and, instead, builds steadfast alliance with marginalized
communities and struggles for justice around the world. Liberation must be collective if it will be at all.
*** FRAMEWORK/PERMUTATIONS
2NC---Framework
Role of the ballot is to endorse the team the best represents the world – Couple of
net-benefits
A) Reps first – failure to analyze their discursive constructions of the opposition
between self and Other guarantee error replications and policy failure
A Genealogy of the Rebalance: Geopolitics, Postcolonialism, and the Politics of Identity

Logan, Swaine, Ross and others examine the US rebalance to the Asia Pacific in an unproblematic world in which the United States is responding
to a selfevidently rising China. Yet these actors
are not self-evident or unproblematic. Their realities (as threatening,
benevolent, cooperative and so on) are subjectively defined, and socially and imaginatively constructed . Like the
world they inhabit they are discursively spacialised or geo-graphed.12 The Asia Pacific for example was
imagined into existence as recently as the 1970s, through the agglomeration of East and South East Asia.13 Peoples and
places, moreover, are Othered from understandings of the self and for the self, with China historically
existing in uncivilised, idealised, and anachronistic forms , among others, from the vantage point of the
necessarily more ‘civilised’, ‘Enlightened’, ‘technological’ U nited S tates.14 This makes the relationship
between self and Other inherently co-constitutive ; “identity is constituted in relation to difference and
[d]ifference is constituted in relation to identity”. 15
The U nited S tates’ contemporary geographical claims to the Asia Pacific, then, like all claims, are geopolitical
because they inscribe Others with meanings which determine how they should be dealt.16 Discourse is
thus not simply descriptive but performative in that it produces the effects that it names ,17
fabricating global territories as sites of interest and material power. “Although often assumed to be innocent. . .
geography [is]. . . a product of histories of struggle between competing authorities over the power to organize, occupy and administer space”. 18
In asking ‘how’ the rebalance is being enabled in its current form, the claim here is not that direct
causal lines can be convincingly drawn between selected discourses and the implementation of policy.
As Doty observes, the explanations of why questions are incomplete because they tend to take for granted the possibility that particular courses of
action can happen, by presupposing the backgrounds of discursive meaning so central to that process. Asking ‘how’ is thus to
examine how certain meanings are produced and attached to social subjects, creating discursive
environments within which practices are made possible and others are precluded .19 The aim here
then is to expose the discursive conditions which make ostensibly problematic or contradictory
policies around the rebalance possible and which, as noted above, more traditional paradigms have difficulty explaining,
through an analysis of the political history of the production of truth and knowledge about the ‘realities’ of China, the United States, India, and so
on. It is to undermine the problematic self-evidences of the existing literature by revealing how rituals of
power arise, take shape, gain importance, and affect contemporary politics. 20 In tracing the genealogy of the
rebalance, then, the expectation is not to locate its physical ‘origin’ in the rise of China, the Cold War or elsewhere. It is to explore the
constitution of its knowledges through a ‘history of the present in terms of its past’, to show how ‘the
present has become logically possible’. 21
B) Ground – 1AC is the focus of the debate and they choose everything in it. Plan
focus justifies severing DA links and case turns --- making offense impossible.
C) Policy efficacy – Their attempt to limit out our argument is part and parcel with
a security strategy that ignores the flawed framing resulting in hopeless policies
now, which means “you link, you lose,” because the aff results in serial policy
failure.
You can’t win offense – we aren’t policy-makers but policy analysts
Andress ‘02 – MPH, JD, Texas Program for Society and Health, Rice University and Doctoral
Candidate, University of Texas School of Public Health. FrameWorks Instistute and the Center for
Communications and Community (Lauri, Strategic Frame Analysis & Policy Making: Where Does SFA
Fit into our Strategic Plan?, FrameWorks Institute, Issue 18)
after a presentation on strategic frame analysis, a group will ask how to apply this information to achieve their
From time-to-time
passing legislation , advancing a policy at the legislative level, convincing a targeted group of the public
primary task of
that a policy position should be supported, or creating a communications campaign to promote a specific policy position. This section is presented in an effort to
ground the art and science of framing a message in the larger strategy and tactics that your organization must undertake to advance its public policy resolutions. The key point we hope to advance
Frame Analysis (SFA) is a key building block in the policy making process and every activity that
is that Strategic
you undertake in pursuit of policy-making . Used effectively, SFA can become the foundation upon which your organization builds its policy advocacy strategy. In
order to not distract us from our primary goal we will use a simplified model of the public policy process. This will allow us to more clearly demonstrate the benefits of SFA. In this case it is not
the steps of the policy process or the model that we want to emphasize but the role of SFA in the process. Accordingly, the use of a standard model of policy making allows us to deconstruct the
process indicating where SFA fits in each step of the policy model. Let's look at the phases of the policy making process as traditionally identified in the policy literature. Problem
identification/gaining agenda status Policy Formulation and adoption Policy Implementation Policy Evaluation/adjustment/termination In order to illuminate the contribution of SFA to
policymaking, we will first discuss policy making in general, presenting a normative view of the process. We will then shift to a definition that more closely matches the objectives of SFA. Next
we will quickly review each policy making phase, culminating with an emphasis on the first phase, where SFA plays such a vital role. We will use examples from public health throughout this
analysis. We do this for the following reason. Health outcomes are determined by a wide variety of factors that range in nature from individual behavior to medical care to socioeconomic factors.
Accordingly, the decision making process involved in naming the health problem , and selecting a policy solution
and intervention provides us with excellent examples to use in exploring how SFA interacts with the public policy process. Thus, it is by focusing on public health issues, we believe, that this
analysis can best realize its' goal of helping you discern why SFA needs to be interlaced into your policy efforts. Policy Making Typically, policy making is described as an assembly line of the
elements required to make policy: first the issue is placed on the agenda and the problem is defined; next the executive branches of government objectively examine alternative solutions based
upon factual data, then select and refine them; then the executive agencies implement the solutions while interest groups often challenge the actions through the judicial branch; and sometimes
the policy is evaluated and revised or scrapped. However, scholars of the policy process such as Deborah Stone say that this model fails to portray the essence of policy making which she
describes as "the struggle over ideas" [2002]. Ideas are a medium of exchange and a mode of influence even more powerful than money, votes and guns. Shared meanings motivate people to
Ideas are at the center of all political conflict . Policymaking, in turn, is a

action and meld individual striving into collective action.
constant struggle over the criteria for classification ; the boundaries of categories, and the definition of ideals that guide the way people behave [Stone, 2002, 11]. Using
Stone's image of policymaking matched against the purpose and objectives of SFA, we can begin to see the importance of framing and how it applies broadly at every level of the policy making
framing is a communications tool that transmits conceptual constructs able to tap into people's deeply held values and
process. We have said that
beliefs. We have also tried to indicate that behind policymaking there is a contest over conflicting conceptions of the policy
based on equally plausible values or ideas. The question at each step of the process then becomes: what frame transmits the policy with
concepts that represent the values and worldviews of the public, policymakers and other key groups that you need to persuade? Accordingly,
framing is the key mechanism that animates the policy process . For example, the second step in policymaking is policy formulation
and adoption. In this step, elected officials, house or senate committees, or the President's cabinet identify, evaluate and select from among alternative policy solutions. A rational, generally
accepted view of decision-making based on reason requires the identification of objectives, the prediction of the consequences of alternative courses of action, and finally the evaluation of the
possible consequences of each alternative. However, adhering to the definition of policymaking as a struggle over values and ideas, we can see that a rational step-by-step method for policy
Humans use models, metaphors and other techniques to impose structure on the
formulation based on objectivity, facts and reason is not accurate.
world and to reduce considerations. We use stories and exclude stories as we seek order. Policy formulation as a part of policy making is, once again, nothing more
than reasoning by analogy, category and metaphor where those involved, based on their values and views, strategically select the
data, facts and information that will be most persuasive in getting others to see a situation as one thing rather than another. A good example of framing in
relation to the description of health problems and the formulation of public health policy is Nurit Guttman's [2000] explanation of the role of values that underlie various health interventions.
health interventions are not always chosen because they are effective but because they
Guttman explains that public
have a stronger link to certain social values over others [2000]. Health education strategies targeting individuals with persuasive techniques raise the issue of
individual autonomy and privacy because they reduce the ability of individuals to freely choose among options [Guttman, 2000]. On the other hand, regulatory strategies restricting the
marketplace or protecting the environment draw on the values of justice and equity and the requirement to provide people an opportunity to live in environments that promote health and
minimize risk [Guttman, 2000]. Thus the regulatory restrictive health intervention is inherently associated with the values of self-actualization and the promotion of the public good [Guttman,
Strategies may include the use
2000]. Various methods or strategies can be employed for the purpose of achieving the goals of a public health communication intervention.
of fear arousal appeals, asking individuals to put social pressure on others, or teaching people skills such as the use of self-monitoring devices…Values clearly play a central
role in the choice and application of such strategies…Questions about the morality of coercion, manipulation, deception, persuasion… typically involve a conflict between the values of
individual freedom and self-determination, on the one hand and such values as social welfare, economic progress, or equal opportunity on the other hand [p. 80]. Milio, [1981] explains another
frame and related underlying values to describe the selection and use of particular public health strategies and policies. The obligation of health policy, if it is to serve the health interests of the
public, does not extend to assuring every individual the attainment of personally defined "health". In a democratic society that seeks at least internal equanimity, if not humanness and social
justice, the responsibility of government is to establish environments that make possible an attainable level of health for the total population. This responsibility includes the assurance of
environmental circumstances that do not impose more risks to health for some segments of the population than for others, for such inequality of risk would doom some groups of people-
policymaking is a process, it is also a
regardless of their choice- to a reduction in opportunities to develop their capacities [Milio, 1981, p.5]. The key point is that, while
human endeavor and as such it is not based on objective and neutral standards. Behind every step in the policy process there is a
contest over equally plausible conceptions of the same abstract goal or value [Stone, 2002]. Remember, those participating in
policymaking are also driven by their belief systems, and ideology. These values and ideologies precede and shape the decisions along every step of the policy process. Steps in Policymaking
Now let's take a look at how framing plays a role in each step of the process. We will begin with step two in the policy making process, leaving the first step for closer examination later. Policy
Formulation and adoption occurs if an issue achieves agenda status. Policy formulation involves analyzing policy goals and solutions , the creation
or identification of alternative recommendations to resolve or address the identified public problem, and the final selection of a policy. The U.S. Surgeon General, the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention and most public health experts support exchanging clean needles for used ones as a way to reduce the spread of H.I.V. infections. New Jersey- a state with more than 9,000
orphans who lost their mothers to AIDS, 26,000 people with AIDS, the nation's third highest rate of intravenous HIV infection and the nation's highest rate of infection among women and
children- not only refuses to pay for needles, it used under cover police to arrest those distributing clean needles to prevent AIDS activists from violating the state ban on distributing syringes
[Clemons and McBeth, 2002.]. Former Governor Christine Todd Whitman (R) was adamantly opposed to needle giveaways, claiming it sent the wrong message to children about drug use.
Former President Bill Clinton (D) who admitted the benefits of a needle exchange program -also failed to support the effort due to pressure from the then Republican majority in Congress.
[Clemons and McBeth, 2002.]. AIDS activist lost this war of ideas that occurred at the policy formulation stage of the process. Possible policy solutions considered were increased sex education
in schools; education about and free distribution of condoms; and the distribution of needles to IV drug users [Clemons and McBeth, 2002.]. Facts, reason and objectivity should have induced the
elected officials to select a policy of needle exchange. However, these policies invoked a series of images and ideas antithetical to the values of powerful groups in the country such as the
religious right [Clemons and McBeth, 2002.]. These same groups then framed the policy solutions in such a manner as to make them "about" the behaviors they recognize - illegal drug use, illicit
The framing of the problem limited the policy
sex, and addiction -as opposed to the prevention of HIV and the death of women and children.
options. Policy Implementation occurs within organizations, typically administrative bureaucracies, directed to carry out adopted polices. Occurring at the national, state and local levels,
implementation begins once a policy has been legalized through a legislative act or a mandate from an official with authority to set policy. Administrators make decisions about how to deploy
The war of ideas and values continues to play out even at this level because administrators
resources, human and financial, to actualize a policy.
must define and put into operation key terms and ideas in the legislative policy. There is often great disparity
between the intentions of a policy and how it is carried out. The outcome will be affected
by how the policy is interpreted , the values, ideologies, and views of the administrators, and the
resources available and selected to implement the policy. Consider the national policy that over hauled the
welfare program during the Clinton administration. The phrase "welfare-to-work" was termed. The President's administration made a great effort to frame the
legislation as a means to transition from welfare into jobs that allowed the recipient to establish a means
of livelihood. Values expressed in this case might have been "doing-no-harm", or self-actualization. But later, in the execution of the legislation, some states
emphasized the transition off of welfare to jobs, while others chose to see the policy simply as a call to
decrease welfare rolls. The values invoked in these kinds of programs might be described as market autonomy, utility, or efficiency. Let us also reflect on the public health
mandate to decrease smoking as enunciated by the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in Healthy People 2010. The goal is to
reduce the number of adults over age 18 who smoke by 12% by the year 2010. The Healthy People 2010 website provides information for individuals on how to stop using tobacco. The federal
agency also invested in public service announcements featuring Bill Cosby on a variety of topics including the tobacco issue admonishing individuals about the dangers of smoking. No mention
is made in the strategies on the website regarding market place regulations or structural remedies such as the tobacco lawsuits, banning smoking in public places, or the marketing of cigarettes.
implementation of public health communication interventions involves
Guttman [2000] says that, consciously or unconsciously, the
the application of values. For instance, the execution of stop smoking programs at the individual level assumes that individuals should be responsible for the solution to health
problems and simply need to have their refusal skills improved. On the other hand, the decision to implement a program at a societal-structural level identifies the locus of solution as external to
The way the health issue is framed as a problem (or not) is likely to reflect certain priorities
the individual. Social problems are time, place and context bound.
determines
or ideologies of the more dominant stakeholders. The mere identification of the problem itself presents a value judgment: the particular view of the ideal state is what
what is considered problematic, thus requiring action. Is the problem conceived as poor motivation on the part of individuals who do not adopt
recommended practices? Perhaps the problem is a result of structural socioeconomic conditions such as limited access of smokers to smoking cessation programs. …The locus problem can be
identified at different levels, as a lifestyle issue versus an issue mainly associated with societal structures and distribution of resources [p.74]. Policy Evaluation The final stage of the policy
process determines what occurred as a result of the selection of a policy and makes corrections in the current policy or program as needed. Essentially, the final stage of the policy process
assesses what has occurred as a result of the implementation of the legislative policy. Just as there is no escape from values into an objective, fact-based mode for selecting one policy in lieu of
another, there is also no neutral, rational, objective way to measure and calculate the benefits or harms resulting from a policy. All the same considerations of values-based framing come into
play in this seemingly "objective" phase as well. To begin to evaluate a policy, several pieces of information must be established: the goals or original objectives of the policy; a means by which
to measure the extent to which goals have been met; and the target of the program or who the program was intended to affect. Assembling this information involves value laden decision-making
including the views, and values of the organizations involved, the analysts, clients or the target population, and the general public who may be paying for the program with their tax dollars. When
assembling the indicators of success for a policy evaluation, priorities and values become important. A particular indicator that may gauge success by one value-laden goal [efficiency] may not
capture the success of the policy for another goal [community solidarity] [Guttman, 2000]. An example provided by Deborah Stone shows us how a value laden evaluative criterion figures in
something as seemingly straight-forward as measuring the efficiency of a library [Stone, 2002]. Scholars agree that an efficiently run library is one that builds up a good collection of books and
that a particular library in California might be more efficient if it replaced some highly paid professionals and spent the money on building the collection of books [Stone, 2002]. It is possible to
imagine several challenges to the evaluative criterion of efficiency. Some citizens may value the resources available in the library in the form of storytelling for children, or jobs for teenagers
[Stone, 2002]. Some might debate what a "good book collection might include [Stone, 2002]. Finally, others might say an efficient library is one that would save the users time by providing the
maximum amount of assistance while the patron is using the services [Stone, 2002]. On the use of efficiency as an evaluative criterion, Stone says it "is always a contestable concept…to go
beyond the vague slogans and apply the concept to a concrete policy choice requires making assumptions about who and what counts as important…The answers built into supposedly technical
analyses of efficiency are nothing more that political claims" [p. 65]. "By offering different assumptions, sides in a conflict can portray their preferred outcomes as being most efficient" [Stone,
2002 p.66]. Ultimately, evaluation of a policy becomes nothing more than a selection among criterion based on values and ideologies. In the example below, one can see clearly how the selection
of the evaluation criterion extricates different values. [In] ... an intervention to prevent adolescent pregnancy that chose the strategy of persuading adolescent girls to use a contraceptive implant, a
likely evaluation criterion would be the relative frequency of pregnancies before and after the intervention in the target population. For stakeholders who define the problem as based on sexual
promiscuity or for those who believe the girls engage in abusive sexual relationships because of low self-esteem however, this criterion would be irrelevant because these adolescent girls may
continue to engage in premarital sex and may have simply adopted enhanced contraceptive practices. Stakeholders who are interested in preventing youth from being infected with sexually
transmitted diseases are not likely to find this criterion satisfactory. The contraceptive implant may protect the adolescents from pregnancy, but they may continue to be exposed to infection
[Guttman, 2000]. Problem identification/gaining agenda status We saved the first step in the policy process for last because it is here, more than at any other stage, that framing becomes critical.
The first step involves getting a problem onto the radar screen of the legislative body that must deal with that issue [Clemons & McBeth, 2001]. Problems gain legislative attention in many ways,
but typically gaining agenda status happens once there has been a value -driven, subjective determination that an issue is now a "public problem". The question then becomes: why do some issues
become public problems reaching agenda status and others do not? The answer to this question has to do with frame construction in the sense that an issue must be constructed so that it is
perceived as qualifying as a social problem (Best, 1995). This is a key objective in getting the attention of the legislative body in charge. This assertion is derived from the notion that issues get
attention when they are labeled as social or public problems (Best, 1995). How an issue becomes a social problem is not based entirely on objective measures of the severity of the condition but
SFA is used to help determine the
rather on a host of factors related to how society perceives or constructs the information presented regarding the issue (Best, 1995). Accordingly,
organizing constructs or values that may be used to frame an issue in order to convert it into a social problem that then
captures the minds and concerns of the public and its elected officials. First, a few ideas on why a social condition is not automatically
a social problem and why it must become one before it can become a priority with the legislature. Joel Best (1995) asserts that until something is labeled a "social problem" it does not rise to a
level of importance sufficient to attract the attention of the public and policymakers. His view is called the subjective, constructionist perspective in that it says a social condition is a product of
something defined or constructed by society through social activities (Best, 1995). For example, when a news conference is held on crack houses or a demonstration on litter, or investigative
when advocacy groups publish a report, they are constructing or framing the issue using
reporters publish stories, or
claims that help build the issue into a social problem. Malcolm Spector and John Kitsuse [1977] use the term "claims making" to define the activities
of individuals or groups making assertions of grievances and claims with respect to some putative conditions that result in social problems. According to all of these definitions, it does
not matter if the objective condition exists or even that it may be severe. It only matters that people make claims
about it in such a way that it invokes the subjective mental construct that will frame the issue in
such a manner that it is believed to be a public problem of magnitude and worthy of attention . In other
words, social problems are the result of claims making activities that frame the issue so that it triggers
organizing principles attached to an individual's deeply held worldviews and values (Best, 1995). Claims making
activities draw attention to social conditions and shape our sense of the nature of the problem (Best, 1995). Through rhetoric,
every social condition can be constructed as many different social problems. A claims makers' success [or framing] depends in part upon whether their claims persuade others that X is a social
problem or that Y offers the solution (Best, 1995). In the area of public health, the construction of a problem explicates embedded values and ideals of those who made the health problem in the
construction further determine whether the problem gets on the agenda as well
first place [Guttman, 2000]. The results of that
as the range of policy solutions that appear natural or appropriate. For instance, using claims that frame the problem at the
organizational level assumes a major cause of the problem is based in organizational arrangements
or practices [Guttman, 2000]. The problem of an overweight America is defined as people's lack of time or facilities at work to exercise or food at work that is high in nutritional value [Guttman,
2002]. Identifying the problem of overweight adults at this marketplace level may involve a frame that links the problem to the industry's quest for profits through the marketing of inexpensive
food products high in calories instead of nutritious products that are more expensive and thus made less accessible [Guttman, 2002]. In this instance, the description of the problem involves a
frame and claims that value the public good over market autonomy. In order to evaluate the relative merits of different frames applied to the social problems we wish to take into the policy
process, we need to ask the following kinds of questions: Would such a frame make this problem a public issue that
gets the attention of the legislature? In the instance above involving the problem of obesity, we would ask: Framed in this way, would the legislature then
consider marketplace restrictions on advertising or regulations on food content? This presentation was meant to leave you with two "take home" lessons. Strategic frame analysis
[SFA] is a critical tool in the larger public policy strategy that your organization must implement in order to
eventually win approval for your policies. The use of SFA animates the public policy process because policy making, like SFA, is driven by subjective value systems,
worldviews, and ideas.
Plan focus makes violence inevitable --- mental deputy politics absolve individual
complicity
Kappeler 95 (Susanne, Associate Professor – Al-Akhawayn University, The Will to Violence: The
Politics of Personal Behavior, p. 10-11)
‘We are the war’ does not mean that the responsibility for a war is shared collectively and diffusely by an entire society—which would be
equivalent to exonerating warlords and politicians and profiteers or, as Ulrich Beck says, upholding the notion of collective irresponsibility1,
where people are no longer held responsible for their actions, and where the conception of universal responsibility becomes the equivalent of
a universal acquittal. 6 On the contrary, the object is precisely to analyze the specific and differential responsibilities of everyone in their
diverse situations. Decisions to unleash a war are indeed taken at particular levels of power by those in a position to make them to command
such collective action. We need to hold them clearly responsible for their decisions and actions without lessening theirs by any collective
‘assumption’ of responsibility. Yet our habit of focusing on the stage where the major dramas of power take
place tends to obscure our sight in relation to our own sphere of competence, our own power and our
own responsibility—leading to the –well-known illusion of our apparent ‘powerlessness’ and its accompanying phenomenon, our so-
called political disillusionment. Single citizens- even more so those of other nations – have come to feel secure in their
obvious non-responsibility for such large-scale political events as, say, the wars in Croatia and Bosnia-
Hercegovina or Somalia – since the decisions for such events are always made elsewhere. Yet our
insight that indeed we are not responsible for the decisions of a Serbian general or a Croatian president
tends to mislead us into thinking that therefore we have no responsibility at all, not even for forming
our own judgment, and thus into underrating the responsibility we do have within our own sphere of action. In particular, it seems
to absolve us from having to try to see any relation between our own actions and those events, or to
recognize the connections between those political decisions and our own personal decisions. It not only
shows that we participate in what Beck calls ‘organized irresponsibility’, upholding the apparent lack of connection between
bureaucratically, institutionally, nationally and also individually organized separate competences. It also proves the phenomenal
and unquestioned alliance of our personal thinking with the thinking of the major powermongers . For we
tend to think that we cannot ‘do’ anything, say, about a war, because we deem ourselves to be in the wrong situation; because we are not
where the major decisions are made. Which is why many of those not yet entirely disillusioned with politics tend to
engage in a form of mental deputy politics , in the style of ‘What would I do if I were the general, the prime
minister, the president, the foreign minister or the minister of defence?’ Since
we seem to regard their mega spheres of
action as the only worthwhile and truly effective ones, and since our political analyses tend to dwell there first of all,
any question of what I would do if I were indeed myself tends to peter out in the comparative
insignificance of having what is perceived as ‘virtually no possibilities’: what I could do seems petty
and futile. For my own action I obviously desire the range of action of a general, a prime minister, or a General
Secretary of the UN — finding expression in ever more prevalent formulations like ‘ I want to stop this
war’, ‘I want military intervention’, ‘I want to stop this backlash’, or ‘I want a moral revolution.’7 ‘We are this
war’, however, even if we do not command the troops or participate in so—called peace talks , namely as
Drakuli~ says, in our non-comprehension’: our willed refusal to feel responsible for our own thinking and
for working out our own understanding, preferring innocently to drift along the ideological current of
prefabricated arguments or less than innocently taking advantage of the advantages these offer . And we
‘are’ the war in our ‘unconscious cruelty towards you’, our tolerance of the ‘fact that you have a yellow form for refugees and I don’t’ — our
readiness, in other words, to build identities, one for ourselves and one for refugees, one of our own and one for the ‘others’. We share in
the responsibility for this war and its violence in the way we let them grow inside us, that is, in the
way we shape ‘our feelings, our relationships, our values’ according to the structures and the values of
war and violence.
Framework---A2: Aff Choice
Arbitrary and unpredictable – they could make debate a “best dressed” contest and
we’d have nothing to say – makes debate a race to the absurd and means the Neg
could never win
Counter-interpretation – teams should debate framework – creates educational
discussion about the form of argument and theory of the activity – and secures Neg
ground
Framework---A2: Education (Plan Focus)
Plan focus is bad –
1. Debate percentage – We discuss reps more than the plan. Focusing exclusively
limits us to the tip of the political iceberg and unintended consequences.
2. Choice – plans are constrained by the resolution, but advantages are
unrestrained. This means they have more responsibility for choosing and should be
held accountable. They get strategic advantages from reading hyperbolic impact
cards, they should have to bear the costs.
3. Predictability – ballot says “did the better debating” – if they can’t defend the
majority of their representations, they haven’t done the better debating --- makes
debate an academic activity like any other where you have to defend your ideas
Cognitive neuroscience has debunked rigid plan-focus—motor memory and
thought-imbued affect are visceral responses that dictate political strategy. The use
of fear is a conservative tactic that nullifies dissent to fulfill the telos of the state and
market.
Livingston ‘12 – Assistant prof of Government @ Cornell, post-doctoral fellow in the department of
Political Science @ Johns Hopkins University, doctoral fellow at the Centre for Ethics at the University
of Toronto (Alexander, Avoiding Deliberative Democracy? Micropolitics, Manipulation, and the Public
Sphere, Philosophy & Rhetoric, Vol. 45, No. 3 (2012), pp. 269-294, Project MUSE)
Deliberative democracy is a fantasy, and a dangerous one at that. A politics of pure deliberation is the dream of hare-brained philosophy professors who, fetishizing
consensus, would reduce all political conflict to moral disagreement, purge passion from politics, and substitute the disinterested and boring experience of jury duty
for the vital and indispensable experience of action, and all this just for the sake of theoretical parsimony. At its best deliberative democracy’s moralization and
rationalization of politics stinks of a bad nostalgia for a classical participatory democracy that never existed.
At its worst, it is a license for an exclusionary politics of elite decision making that silences the voices of the
needy and degenerates into a variant of technocratic management from above. [End Page 269] Or so much of the rhetoric
of its critics goes.1 That this caricature of deliberative democracy is familiar ought to be the occasion for some worry. A general skepticism concerning the claims of
public reason has seeped into much of the landscape of contemporary political theory, making this kind of easy rejection of deliberation both comprehensible and all
too plausible. Yet this kind of rejection is too fast and depends on a straw man account of what deliberative democracy means. The aim of this article is to make the
case that this caricature is wrong and that such skepticism about public reason is unwarranted. Deliberative democracy is a robust theory of the political that, at its
best, lays the groundwork for an egalitarian and even radical democratic politics. To this end, I propose to read the recent work of William E. Connolly as an
expression of political theory’s skeptical critique of public reason. Connolly is exemplary of this wider skepticism in that while he offers a powerful critique of
deliberative democracy, his critical alternative is only plausible when rearticulated as a variant of deliberative democracy itself. Connolly argues that contemporary
findings in neuroscience and cognitive science, mixed with a healthy dose of Gilles Deleuze’s cosmological pluralism,reveal a deep, visceral register of human
thinking that theories of deliberative democracy overlook at their own peril. Deliberative democracy’s rationalism turns a blind eye to this political unconscious and
relegates the theory to an ineffectual “intellectualism,” but, according to Connolly, the
left today needs to make this unconscious lower
register its fighting grounds if it hopes to hold its ground against an insurgent neoconservative
“micropolitics” of media manipulation. This is a suggestive line of argument, but ought it lead to a
rejection of deliberative democracy or instead to a more robust and complex account of communicative
agency in our media-saturated world? Connolly travels the first route, but I argue that his alternative to deliberation that he dubs “micropolitics,”
a politics of the ordinary that politicizes habits, dispositions, feelings, the body, emotions, and thinking as potential sites of domination and resistance below the
register of formal principles and procedures, can only be defended by following the second route. Given the way that Connolly presents the problem of the visceral
register there does not seem to be much role for deliberation in his vision of democratic politics. While he often stresses that “intellectualism is constitutively
insufficient to ethics,” he strains to remind us that saying this is not the same as saying that deliberation has no role to play (2002, 111). Issuing a series of caveats,
Connolly notes that “nothing in the [End Page 270] above carries the implication of eliminating argument, rationality, language, or conscious thought from public
discourse” and that he only means “to flag the insufficiency of argument to ethical life without denying its pertinence” (1999, 36; 2002, 108). The goal of his turn to
micropolitics is not to replace deliberation but rather to “augment intellectualist models of thinking and culture” (2002, 13). Given the role of affective modes of
appraisal in politics, I agree with Connolly that theories of public reason ought to be amended and “augmented” in many ways. Yet, for all his caveats, Connolly’s
vision of micropolitical engagement seems to give short shrift to practices of public deliberation. Indeed, his theory only announces their compatibility but does not
follow through in enacting it. In what follows, I try to close this circle, so to speak, by demonstrating the deliberative potential of Connolly’s agonistic pluralism.2 I
agree that a politics of the visceral reveals the shortcomings of theories of deliberative democracy that prioritize small community meetings and experimental “mini-
publics” as the sine qua non of democratic citizenship today, but Connolly overlooks
the resources provided by an alternative
account of deliberative democracy; namely, a critical and sociologically complex theory of deliberative
democracy that aims at revising our self-understandings and provoking self-transformation. Intellectualism and the
Visceral Register The first step in exploring the potential of William Connolly’s reluctant theory of deliberative democracy is to come to terms with the reasons why
he thinks extant accounts of communicative politics are insufficient. Intellectualism, Connolly argues, is the grand failing of deliberative democracy. In accusing
deliberative democracy of intellectualism, he is not issuing a by-now familiar criticism of deliberative rationalism. To say that deliberative democracy is guilty of
deliberative
intellectualism is not to say that it is blind to questions of power, or identity, or difference—or at least it’s not only to say this—but rather that
models of democracy are working with a faulty conception of thinking. They have been captured by what
Gilles Deleuze calls “the image of thought”—the idea that thinking is an autonomous , linguistically mediated process of
mind that is oriented toward coherence and truth (1994, 129–67). Deliberative thinking takes place at one relatively transparent register
where our reasons for action can be compared, reasoned about, and revised through the force of the better argument. This image of thought is intellectualist because
it fails to see how thought is a layered process of neural, perceptual, and embodied activity not reducible
to conceptual ratiocination alone. “Attempts to give priority to the highest and conceptually most sophisticated brain
nodules in thinking and judgment,” Connolly argues, “may encourage those invested in these theories to underestimate the
importance of body image, unconscious motor memory, and thought-imbued affect” (2002, 10). Against the
intellectualist image of thought, Connolly argues that thinking is distributed across multiple registers that make possible
“visceral modes of appraisal” (1999, 27). It is these deep, intensive, and reactive visceral modes of thinking and judgment
that the deliberative image of thinking overlooks. Disgust, for example, is a visceral response that makes your
stomach turn. It seems to well up inside you without your willing it. The values and beliefs of others can
sometimes stimulate this kind of feeling, say, if they present you with a defense of cloning , or euthanasia, or gay
marriage, as the case may be. You can’t always put your finger on what it is that strikes you as so disgusting and morally contaminating
about such proposals, but sometimes you just feel that they are plain wrong. We’re unable to provide
defensible reasons for our responses. Sometimes things just rub us the wrong way. Connolly’s point is that visceral and embodied
responses like disgust, shame, and hatred come to play a role in political decision making —as they evidently do
in political deliberations about matters such as cloning, euthanasia, and gay marriage—and that a
deliberative approach is poorly equipped to deal with them. Deliberative democrats either require that these sorts of affective
feelings are purged from the public sphere as unfortunate distortions of real communication, or they suggest that they can be subject to deliberation and argument just
as any other sort of belief, interest, or prejudice can be. Connolly thinks that both
of these approaches are bound to fail. Visceral reactions are
not conceptually sophisticated thoughts and as such are not amenable to deliberation, argumentation, or verbal persuasion. The exchange of validity
claims alone is not enough to stop your stomach from churning when you think about the right to die.
Deliberative democrats need to learn “how much more there is to thinking than argument” and to begin
experimenting with alternative forms of political engagement (1999, 149). Because political judgment is
so often carried out at the level of this visceral or virtual register, deliberation cannot provide a privileged
or efficacious form of participation, justification, or transformation. To corroborate these claims about the multiple registers of
thinking, Connolly turns to recent findings in neuroscience that suggest a more intimate relationship between reason , the
emotions, and the body than [End Page 272] the intellectualist account assumes. Like some other political theorists, Connolly
hopes that a closer engagement with neurology and cognitive science will provide grounds for a more adequate
account of subjectivity, reason, and ethics.3 The kind of thinking that intellectualists privilege—sophisticated,
conceptual, reflective, deliberative, and linguistically mediatedthought— pertains to the activity of the largest part of the brain, the cerebral cortex. It is
through the rich and complex layers of neural activity in the cortex that we can perform intricate activities like planning, speaking, reasoning, and arguing. What
recent findings in neuroscience suggest , however, is that cortical activity is not autonomous and is in fact in
some ways subservient to the parts of the brain that control emotions, memory, and affect.4 In particular, the
cortex responds to information from the limbic system , the small curved part of the brain below the cortex that controls emotion and
fine motor movement. Made up of the basal ganglia, the hippo-campus, and the amygdala, the limbic system enables the fast, intensive,
and reactive action of affects. The jolt of fear that makes one’s hair stand on end or the disgust that
we feel in the pit of our stomachs is the work of the part of the limbic system called the amygdala. The sort of reactions governed by this system
are an evolutionary necessity for a species that needs to appraise and respond to dangerous situations quickly and effectively without much cognitive expenditure. The
decision to jump out of the way of a speeding car needs to happen in a split second. It is not the sort of situation that allows you to
deliberate about the relative merits of your different options before acting . But this is not to say that the limbic system is
entirely thoughtless. It is not concerned with sophisticated, conceptual, and deliberative thinking, but its actions certainly are symbolically
mediated or “ thought imbued ” in some sense (the expression is Connolly’s). These intense affective responses are not entirely
biologically determined but instead take a fair deal of cultural learning . The limbic system in a sense learns or records cultural standards of what is
dangerous and what is disgusting and then habituates them as automated response.5 Between the cortex and limbic system there is a “feedback loop” of mutual
influence through which these fast, affective, “proto-thoughts” of the limbic system shape the slow, reflective thinking of the cortex (2002). The existence of these
intensive, instinctive elements moving below the register of reflective judgment means that human
reason is not pure and autonomous but
rather is shaped in a complex way at the neural level by the influence of the emotions and affects .6 David
Hume, it would seem, [End Page 273] was right to say that reason is in fact the slave of the passions . And what this means for politics is that
the emotions and affects that shape and guide thinking are themselves deeply influenced by values
and opinions that we may or may not actually want to endorse. Racist, sexist, homophobic, and
other ideological sentiments may lodge themselves deeply into this “body-brain-culture network”
(2002). Where this is the case, valid and sound argumentation is at a loss to dislodge them and the force of the better
argument may be powerless to persuade us to respect, tolerate, or trust each other in the ways that democratic
cooperation require. Connolly explains: Culturally preorganized charges shape perception and judgment in ways
that exceed the picture of the world supported by the models of calculative reason, intersubjective culture,
and deliberative democracy. They show us how linguistically complex brain regions respond not only to
events in the world but also , proprioceptively, to cultural habits, skills, memory traces, and affects mixed
into our muscles, skin, gut, and cruder brain regions . (2002, 36) This all culminates in a critique of
deliberative models of democracy: the inability of practical reason to influence these potentially
dangerous or hateful “culturally preorganized charges” points to its undoing. Visceral Politics Before analyzing the merits
of Connolly’s critique of deliberative democracy I want to first situate his charge of intellectualism within its political context. At its heart, Connolly’s objection to the
deliberative turn in democratic theory boil down to his belief that too much focus on the terms of justification and legitimation ignores the everyday sensibilities
expressed and reproduced in the actions of citizens. These sensibilities are not identical to doctrinal beliefs or articulate reasons; or, as he prefers to put it in his most
recent book, spirituality is not identical with doctrinal creed (2008). Rather, the
sensibility that determines how it is that we hold our
beliefs or “creed” is unreflectively informs this visceral register of judgment and thinking . Where these sensibilities have
been cultivated to promote respect, responsiveness, and generosity a pluralistic liberalism can thrive. The political problem, however, is that in contemporary America
this noble ethos is largely absent. Instead Connolly argues that this visceral register has become a vehicle for a “stingy”
sensibility animated by resentment, fear, and a desire for revenge (1999, 7). The deep roots of existential resentment in
an increasingly disempowered American working class today provide the spiritual common ground for the an emerging
coalition of competing neoconservative and neoliberal elites who share a punitive and vengeful ethic
while disagreeing on matters of doctrine. The resulting theological-corporate-media apparatus Connolly calls “the evangelical-capitalist resonance
machine” wreaks havoc on American democracy today as it proceeds to undermine the terms of liberal pluralism and roll back the hard-won
achievements of the liberal democratic struggles of the last hundred years (2008, 39–68). Democratic theory’s idea of deliberation seems poorly equipped to confront
this threat. Connolly’s contention is that the failing of the left in America today is due in no small part to its resistance to accepting the role of the visceral register in
politics. Instead, it is still caught up in a potentially antiquated search for some better argument that would bring reason and truth together to serve the ends of justice.
The American right, however, has been a much better student of the visceral elements of thinking and has crafted
an array of strategies that seek to manipulate it to punitive ends. Among working-class Americans who have suffered
unemployment with the collapse of the industrial economy, cultural alienation from a powerfully secular and liberal cultural elite, and social fragmentation from the
Neoliberals and
increasing speed, ethnic pluralism, and diversity of a globalizing world, there exists a reserve of resentment to be tapped.
neoconservatives on the American right have overcome their traditional antagonism to draw on this resentment
and channel it into a shared spirituality of revenge that vilifies foreigners , immigrants, nonwhites , women,
queers, liberals, and secularists .7 Crucial to the success of this resonance machine has been its most
powerful echo chamber: the media . Savvy exploitation of new media technologies enable conditions of
mass persuasion through which the sentiments of resentment are validated, entering “the thought-imbued
feelings of viewers before being subjected to critical scrutiny ” (2008, 55), and channeled to political ends.
Twenty-four-hour news shows, aggressive and partisan pundits, and the constant fluctuation of terror alerts all
combine to excite, code, and steer visceral fear and anxiety. The result is the proliferation of “ugly
dispositions” that the powerful media machinery of the right “can foment and amplify, installing
them in habitual patterns of perception,identity, interest, and judgments of entitlement” (2008, 53).
Micropolitics as the manipulation of embodied, intensive affects along the visceral register of thinking is
a familiar tactic in the repertoire of [End Page 275] commercial capitalism and the state. Marketers and advertisers
have long drawn on findings inpsychology, neurobiology, and related fields to manufacture the desires their
commodities satisfy . Branding is only the most recent affective technique of assuring consumer loyalty
in a long history of unconscious and unwilled consumption. Marketers now talk about “low-involvement advertising” that bypasses
the higher-level cognitive functions of viewers to appeal to nonconscious mental processing. Similarly, the
manipulation of intensive reactions
and affect has been crucial in sustaining consent for America’s open-ended “war on terror.” The color-coded
terror alert system in place to warn Americans of the likelihood of terrorist attacks functions as a perceptual marker by which public
fear and anxiety are calibrated . The aggressive rhetorical tactics, facial gestures, and vocal timbre of
conservative media pundits like Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh as well as the explosive graphics, and fast cutting
techniques of twenty-four-hour news channels all have the effect of expressing the spinelessness of the
“liberals” they browbeat.8 And the list goes on. Techniques of affective persuasion that function through “sub-
discursive modes of communication” are ubiquitous and powerful in the modern world (2008, 66). The
challenge of confronting them today, Connolly wagers, means learning to play their game . The left is done arguing. It’s time
to learn how “fight fire with fire” (2006, 74). What Kind of Politics Are Micropolitics? A more fundamental source of Connolly’s skepticism about deliberative
democracy than the findings of neurological science is Gilles Deleuze’s cosmological pluralism. In Connolly’s texts, these scientific and metaphysical sources
dovetail elegantly, but one is always left with the impression that the scientific arguments are deployed only to the extent that they readily accord with these more
basic philosophical commitments to a deep and radical pluralism in the world.9 Deleuze’s concepts of multiplicity, rhizomes, micropolitics, deterritorialization, and
war machines infuse Connolly’s writing and offer an alternative discourse to the allegedly problematic language of public reason. In fact, Deleuze himself, in his
magisterial collaboration with Félix Guattari, could be said to prefigure a certain denigration of deliberative politics.10 It would of course be anachronistic to describe
Deleuze and Guattari as critics of deliberative democracy, or even worse, as denizens of the American culture wars. But that said, there are passing remarks
concerning deliberation in their texts that seem to connect with [End Page 276] Connolly’s claims. More important than decision making and
deliberation are the molecular and unconscious forces that open us up to new ways of thinking and
experiencing the world. When Deleuze and Guattari do mention political deliberation it is invariably to dismissit as an example of what they call
arboreal, state thinking: Politics operates by macrodecisions and binary choices, binary interests; but the realm of the decidable remains very slim. Political
decision making necessarily descends into a world of microdeterminations, attractions, and desires, which it
must sound out or evaluate in a different fashion. Beneath linear conceptions and segmentary decisions, an evaluation of flows and their
quanta. (1987, 221) A politics that addresses these microdeterminations , what Deleuze and Guattari call micropolitics, is more
basic than deliberation because it concerns the boundaries of “the realm of the decidable.” The appeal of
reason can only function within existing narrow and rigid boundaries. Strategic appeals to affect , however,
can help close or expand this realm and open up new issues to deliberation and participation. In this sense,
Deleuze and Guattari consider micropolitics as essentially underlying deliberation. Creative becoming, not
practical reason, is at the heart of their vision of politics. How does a democratic micropolitics, then, attempt
to reshuffle the rigid segments of a stingy American public culture? Connolly argues that the only way we can
achieve a “public ethos of pluralism” is by cultivating the “civic virtues” of agonistic respect and critical
responsiveness (2005, 65). If the work of politics aspires to more than a further round in a vicious circle of existential revenge, citizens must first
nurture an ethics of “micropolitical receptivity” to the interdependence of their conflicting identities
claims in a complex, ever faster late-modern world (1999, 149). To this end, Connolly draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking to
devise tactics and techniques of “nudging” or exerting “modest influence” on the visceral register of the self and of public culture more widely (2002, 77; 1999, 29).
In some passages, Connolly describes this as the search for “more expansive modes of persuasion,” while in others he appeals to the
force of a sort of “mystical experience” (1999, 8; 2002, 120). Yet this dependence on Deleuze and Guattari’s “micropolitics” draws Connolly away from his own best
insights and leads him to marginalize the democratic core of a leftist response to an insurgent neoconservative micropolitics. [End Page 277] Deleuze and Guattari’s
philosophy provides a powerful tool for theorizing the symbolic meanings and dispositions carried at visceral register of experience. While they do not frame their
project in terms of embodied registers or the differential processing structures of brain, they provide an analogous conception of experience, drawing on Henri
Bergson’s concept of “the virtual” (Bergson 1990; Deleuze 1988). Emotions,
memory traces, infrasensible experiences, habitual
gestures, and the unconscious exist “virtually,” such that we cannot always articulate them at the level of
language, yet they play a role in shaping our higher-register experiences of the world. The virtual represents a
lower register of experience than the conscious and reflective register of ideas, doctrines, and interests . To
the extent that A Thousand Plateaus can be regarded as a text of political philosophy, it can be said to be a treatise concerned with political potential of this virtual
register as both a site of subjectification and resistance. Micropolitics is Deleuze and Guatarri’s name for this politics of the virtual. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze
and Guattari introduce the concept of micropolitics in their analysis of political regimes. Against
the received image of the state as a
centralized, stable, and sovereign territorial entity , Deleuze and Guattari argue that the state is better described as a
macropolitical assemblage that depends on more ubiquitous, fluid, and supple micropolitical
assemblages. The molar organization of the state depends on a micro- or molecular organization of forces such as affects,
moods, memories, and habits that sustain and propagate the state’s ends. “In short,” they write, “everything is political, but
every politics is simultaneously a macropolitics and a micropolitics ” (1987, 213). Despite appearances to the contrary, even
the most monolithic and centralized assemblages of power, such as the state, are in fact fluid and lively micro-assemblages
resonating together in an only relatively stable manner. Taking the stark example of the fascist state, Deleuze and Guattari make the
case that it too is in fact only a decentered plurality that depends on the micropolitics that sustain it: The concept of the totalitarian State applies only at the
macropolitical level, to a rigid segmentarity and a particular mode of totalization and centralization. But fascism is inseparable from a
proliferation of molecular focuses in interaction, which skip from point to point, before beginning to
resonate together in the National Socialist State . Rural fascism and city or neighborhood fascism, youth fascism and war veteran’s fascism,
fascism on [End Page 278] the Left and fascism on the Right, fascism of the couple, family, school, and office: every fascism is defined by a
micro-black hole that stands on its own and communicates with the others, before resonating in a great,
generalized central black hole.
Framework---A2: Education---Policy
They can’t access their impact – their short-term extinction scenarios all occur
before you can export your portable skills. Rhetorical analysis is immediate and
matters in college classes and individual activism.
Framework---A2: Education---Topic
Not a shred of a link – the entire K is about whether or not arms sales are good and
how we frame reducing them. Just because it’s a focus on reps doesn’t mean it
ignores core topic specific education arguments.
Reps education outweighs – it shapes how we relate to and engage policy. These
discussions also teach us how to best frame our approaches to garner public support
and craft effective policy
Framework---A2: Fairness/Arbitrary
No impact to fairness – their arbitrary framework is more dangerous than alts---
they close off questioning the means of policy, assumptions, reason-giving or
rhetoric --- alternatives can be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, which solves all
their offense.
Education outweighs fairness – we have to evaluate debate norms
Lundberg 10 (Christian O, Master of the House of Theory, Professor of Communications @
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “Tradition of Debate in North Carolina” in Navigating
Opportunity: Policy Debate in the 21st Century By Allan D. Louden, p306-313)
Debate shares this commitment to reinvention with democracy: one of the great virtues of democracy, noted in Greek antiquity and reiterated by modern-day theorists
from John Dewey to Jacques Derrida, is that democracy
is amenable to critique, reformulation, and improvement. Dewey
captures this notion in the idea of “creative intelligence,” which holds that the very contingent conditions that invite
democratic life together in the first place also allow for the creative and deliberative reformulation of democracy in
response to its challenges (Dewey and Moore 2007). Derrida (2001) has argued similarly that democracy’s best feature is that it is both
revisable and perfectible. The implication of democracy’s revisability and perfectibility extends both backward into an account of democracy’s founding
conditions and forward to its ideal future: to a “democracy yet to come” (Derrida 2001). Perfectibility and revisability imply that the democracy we have now is
neither perfect, complete, nor guaranteed in advance. At the same time, perfectibility
and revisability imply that whatever
democracy’s failings, the founding condition of democracy also invites the possibility that democracy will
exceed its current iterations and be made anew, into something that is better . As democratic technology and technique,
debate builds a structural commitment to perfectibility and revisability into democratic discourse, by suggesting that current
conditions of democratic life be open to critical analysis and that our common democratic life might be lived differently. Because
debate practice highlights both the revisability and perfectibility of democratic life, on balance, the best answer to the drawbacks of debate’s current cultural
debate pedagogy
articulations is, to put it bluntly, more debate. Specifically, by the very practice of holding critical questions up for public contest,
inculcates an ethos that sees democracy as not already here, but as something in the making, so much so that a commitment to
debate embodies both the strongest critique of and best hope for perfecting democratic politics—debate practices, by their nature, relentlessly rearticulate democracy.
More pointedly for Greene and Hicks’s critique, the best way out of a broader sense of democratic insularity lies in turning debate toward the presuppositions of
American exceptionalism, a move present in the most simple act of debate: that is, in
pointing out that there is something flawed in the
status quo or in our conventional approaches to fixing it. Debate practice contains within itself the conditions for exceeding the current
articulation of democracy and simultaneously cultivates capacities that provide concrete political hope that we might realize a
democracy that is different from the one we have now. The alternative, to give up on debate, leaves not only the insularity of debate’s articulation to democracy intact,
but more important, leaves the whole edifice of American exceptionalism, which is rooted deeply at many sites beyond debate, fundamentally untroubled. The final
critique of debate pedagogy that I address is that debate practice promotes a naive conception of the speaking citizen that is inappropriate to our current democratic
context. This critique of debate, while useful in highlighting the changing conditions of governance that implicate all of us, fails on two accounts. First, even though
the citizen speaking in public may not hold the same sway it once did (if it ever did), speech does make a difference in a number of democratic processes: political
speech influences how people vote and to whom they contribute money, and it makes a significant difference at a number of sites in the administrative apparatuses of
modern government (for instance in public notice and comment practices). More important, even if the romantic vision of the individual citizen’s speech changing the
course of democratic life is a bit overblown in our context, political speech makes an important difference in noninstitutional practices of political socialization:
political speech not only influences who we will vote for but also sets the bar for what we will put up with, profoundly influences our views regarding the legitimacy
of public policies, and determines the range of opinions to which we are exposed. Thus, even if debate practices do not directly access the levers of power, they might
play a significant role in the production and reformulation of our political culture. The second major problem with the critique that identifies a naivety in articulating
debate and democracy is that it presumes that the primary pedagogical outcome of debate is speech capacities. But the democratic capacities built by debate are not
limited to speech—as indicated earlier, debate builds capacity for critical thinking, analysis of public claims, informed decision making, and better public judgment. If
the picture of modern political life that underwrites this critique of debate is a pessimistic view of increasingly labyrinthine and bureaucratic administrative politics,
rapid scientific and technological change outpacing the capacities of the citizenry to comprehend them, and ever-expanding insular special-interest- and money-driven
politics, it is a puzzling solution, at best, to argue that these conditions warrant giving up on debate. If democracy is open to rearticulation, it is open to rearticulation
precisely because as the challenges of modern political life proliferate, the citizenry’s capacities can change, which is one of the primary reasons that theorists of
democracy such as Dewey in The Public and Its Problems place such a high premium on education (Dewey 1988, 63, 154). Debate provides an indispensible form of
education in the modern articulation of democracy because it builds precisely the skills that allow the citizenry to research and be informed about policy decisions that
impact them, to sort through and evaluate the evidence for and relative merits of arguments for and against a policy in an increasingly information-rich environment,
and to prioritize their time and political energies toward policies that matter the most to them. The
merits of debate as a tool for building
democratic capacity-building take on a special significance in the context of information literacy . John Larkin
(2005, 140) argues that one of the primary failings of modern colleges and universities is that they have not changed curriculum to match with the challenges of a new
information environment. This is a problem for the course of academic study in our current context, but perhaps more important, argues Larkin, for the future of a
citizenry that will need to make evaluative choices against an increasingly complex and multimediated information environment (ibid.). Larkin’s study tested the
benefits of debate participation on information-literacy skills and concluded that in-class debate participants reported significantly higher self-efficacy ratings of their
ability to navigate academic search databases and to effectively search and use other Web resources: To analyze the self-report ratings of the instructional and control
group students, we first conducted a multivariate analysis of variance on all of the ratings, looking jointly at the effect of instruction/no instruction and debate topic . . .
that it did not matter which topic students had been assigned . . . students in the Instructional [debate] group were significantly more confident in their ability to access
information and less likely to feel that they needed help to do so. . . . These findings clearly indicate greater self-efficacy for online searching among students who
participated in [debate]. . . . These results constitute strong support for the effectiveness of the project on students’ self-efficacy for online searching in the academic
databases. There was an unintended effect, however: After doing . . . the project, instructional group students also felt more confident than the other students in their
ability to get good information from Yahoo and Google. It may be that the library research experience increased self-efficacy for any searching, not just in academic
databases. (Larkin 2005, 144) Larkin’s study substantiates Thomas Worthen and Gaylen Pack’s (1992, 3) claim that debate in the college classroom plays a critical
role in fostering the kind of problem-solving skills demanded by the increasingly rich media and information environment of modernity. Though their essay was
written in 1992 on the cusp of the eventual explosion of the Internet as a medium, Worthen and Pack’s framing of the issue was prescient: the
primary
question facing today’s student has changed from how to best research a topic to the crucial question of
learning how to best evaluate which arguments to cite and rely upon from an easily accessible and
veritable cornucopia of materials
Framework---A2: Politics Good
Zero link – the entire K questions how to frame political questions. The alt, also,
does not foreclose political action.
They cede the political and absolve contribution—all their impacts are inevitable
Trennel 6 Paul, Ph.D of the University of Wales, Department of International Politics, “The (Im)possibility of
Environmental Security”
Thirdly, it can be claimed that the

security mindset channels the obligation to address environmental issues in an
unwelcome direction. Due to terms laid out by the social contract “security is essentially something done by states…
there is no obligation or moral duty on citizens to provide security …In this sense security is essentially
empty…it is not a sign of positive political initiative” (Dalby, 1992a: 97-8). Therefore, casting an issue in
security terms puts the onus of action onto governments , creating a docile citizenry who await
instructions from their leaders as to the next step rather than taking it on their own backs to do something about
pressing concerns. This is unwelcome because governments have limited incentives to act on
environmental issues, as their collectively poor track record to date reveals. Paul Brown notes that “at present in all the large
democracies the short-term politics of winning the next election and the need to increase the annual
profits of industry rule over the long term interests of the human race” (1996: 10; see also Booth 1991: 348). There
is no clearer evidence for this than the grounds on which George W. Bush explained his decision to opt out
of the Kyoto Protocol: “I told the world I thought that Kyoto was a lousy deal for America…It meant that we had to cut emissions
below 1990 levels, which would have meant I would have presided over massive layoffs and economic destruction” (BBC: 2006). The short-
term focus of government elites and the long-term nature of the environmental threat means that any
policy which puts the burden of responsibility on the shoulders of governments should be viewed with
scepticism as this may have the effect of breeding inaction on environmental issues . Moreover,
governmental legislation may not be the most appropriate route to solving the problem at hand. If environmental vulnerabilities are
to be effectively addressed “[t]he routine behaviour of practically everyone must be altered” (Deudney, 1990: 465).
In the case of the environmental sector it is not large scale and intentional assaults but the cumulative effect of small and seemingly innocent acts
such as driving a car or taking a flight that do the damage. Exactly how a legislative response could serve to alter “non-criminal apolitical acts by
individuals” (Prins, 1993: 176- 177) which lie beyond established categories of the political is unclear. Andrew Dobson has covered this ground
in claiming that the solution to environmental hazards lies not in piecemeal legislation but in the fostering of
a culture of ‘ecological citizenship’ . His call is made on the grounds that legislating on the environment, forcing
people to adapt, does not reach the necessary depth to produce long-lasting change, but merely plugs the problem temporarily .
He cites Italian ‘car-free city’ days as evidence of this, noting that whilst selected cities may be free of
automobiles on a single predetermined day, numbers return to previous levels immediately thereafter (2003:
3). This indicates that the deeper message underlying the policy is not being successfully conveyed . Enduring environmental
solutions are likely to emerge only when citizens choose to change their ways because they understand that
there exists a pressing need to do so. Such a realisation is unlikely to be prompted by the top-down, state oriented
focus supplied by a security framework.
A2: Perm Do Alt
Perm severs 1AC’s representations – voter for neg ground and advocacy skills.
Competition should be based on the whole 1AC – different standards create a
moving target of what they’ll defend, justify not defending sexist or racist language
and link to all our framework education offense
A2: Perm Do Alt---Judge Choice
JC begs the question of what there is left to affirm – K is a total take out of the
MECHANISM of your advantages and the representations themselves
It also begs a question of framework – causes terrible argument construction
because you can just see what sticks. That should be rejected because it relies on a
flawed conception of the judge and obscures responsibility.
Turner ‘09, BA Dartmouth, Grad Student UGA, http://www.georgiadebate.org/2009/11/the-illogic-of-
judgechoice
The terminology used here reveals the problem with the theory of “judge-choice.” The focus is on the “necessary” connection between the plan
and a justification for the plan. We should not start with a model of policy-formation and advocacy that presumes we are likely to identify
necessary connections between action and result. Though the constraints of time mean that components of an affirmative will not be challenged if
we’ve learned anything from the process of debate it is that there are no necessary connections only possibilities /probabilities.
If we can say that any relationship in a debate is necessary it is that a plan requires a justification in order for the judge to vote
affirmative* (I’m not addressing a form of affirmation disconnected from rationality—but that’s not at issue for the discussing the limitations of
judge-choice). The extreme plan-focus of “judge-choice” breaks down if we acknowledge that the judge endorses something like a 1AC, not
simply the plan text (The theory of “judge-choice” is not significantly different from plan-focus. Judge-choice seems for the most part a way to
move the locus of deciding what portions of the affirmative to endorse from the affirmative team to the judge.) Most of the evidence on the
importance of framing and representation claims the importance of kritik derives from our ability to demonstrate that
what appears natural and necessary should be treated as contingent. Representational kritiks ask the question why given “such
terminology is not necessarily an outcome” of a plan the affirmative decided to make the connection between the two. What are the
conditions of the possibility for the appearance of the 1AC? Why did the stories that the 1AC initially told
make sense to us so as to appear “necessary?” If we take Harrigan’s formulation of “judge-choice” at its word it is not intended
to prevent the introduction of representational kritiks. Instead of being a reason to vote negative, in this theory they would be used to exclude
certain reasons presented from the reasons for affirmation. The
world encouraged by this theory is one of increasingly
poorly articulated advantages supplemented by more obscure add-ons . Extra-T presents an analogous situation—
introducing any number of reasons to support the plan allows the negative to kritik those advantages but at most to take them out and then have to
win any number of other positions to win the debate. Sure, this
isn’t “zero-cost” but it’s pretty close. This would fit with
a general move away from probability/possibility at the level of link and internal link towards probability
and magnitude at the level of impact. In a sense, judge-choice will make the already unfortunate aspects of
the combination of plan-focus and quality evidence about the relevance of language/rhetoric/representation even worse .
Extreme plan-focus makes any problematic terms in the resolution/implementation literature immediate fodder for any
number of negative arguments (see: biofuels, nuclear weapons, CAFO, Sub-Saharan Africa, persons living in poverty, and many many others)
that become quite difficult to defeat or increasingly awkward and annoying to avoid in spite of the fact that the 1AC is most
constrained when it comes to wording plans. The area where the 1AC exercised less constrained choices *
(“choice” here sits uncomfortably with many critical theories that we might draw on for the arguments, but it is required by the terminology of
“judge choice” obviously and if we problematize the notion of “choice” that makes for a different way of breaking down the theory) –
advantage construction/justification receives the least critical scrutiny. So, for example, an aff about animal liberation on the
subsidies topic that articulated a set of advantages based on breaking down anthropocentrism and highlighted their use of the term “CAFO” as a
strategic choice for reasons of implementation and access to exiting discursive framings/structures would be highly likely in our current
understanding to lose to a PIC out of CAFO as sanitizing language (because there’s “no offense” grrrr…) but an aff that represents the issue of
factory-farming purely in terms human-self interest or through connection to disease security can just read an add-on about how factory-farming
makes animals suffer and the question of anthropocentrism is settled. On the issue of the judge’s “interaction” with the debate the theory of
“judge-choice” as presented presumes a problematic and contestable understanding of the position and role of a judge. First, the theory
presumes a purely consequentialist form of evaluation as given by treating “ outcomes” as entirely
separate from reason-giving. For example, this sentence, “Good ideas are good if they have beneficial outcomes, regardless of how
they are justified.” This is a theory of decision-making that presumes that one of the most contentious issues in
ethical and political theory has already been resolved . Quality evidence suggests that reason-giving substantially
effects outcomes. This issue is likely resolved in this theory by pointing out that even if reason-giving cannot be strictly separated from
consquence there is still the ability of the judge to “choose” not to use those reasons that would have negative effects. However, this brings us to
another important issue in the understanding of judging. The judge Harrigan refers to “chooses” which reasons to use in their decision. This
understanding of the judge-subject is itself the subject of many representational kritiks. The theory of “judge-
choice” constructs the judge as an agent who believes that justification /rhetoric/representation can be separated
strongly from action – that type of judgment may itself be responsible for many of the negative effects
of particularly problematic representational systems . “Judge-choice” presumes that rhetoric is a set of
discrete objects over which a detached subject can exercise choice . Negatives could characterize the role of rhetoric as
constitutive – thus an affirmative hails us/interpellates us as subjects of a particular type. Alternatively, the subject-position of judge and decision
could be an effect of discourse rather than an agent. There are a variety of other possibilities—all of which we should resolve through substantive
argument rather than by theoretical fiat. Adding complexity to our understanding of possible judges also helps clarify the claim that only “judge-
choice” presumes an “interactive” judge. Interactivity here is constrained to easily detachable reasons that a judge can choose between easily.
Affective, constitutive, or ideological effects of speech clearly do not “interact” with this type of judge. Interaction also occurs in this
vision only at the moment of decision. It is odd to say that this is the only way to preserve a “dynamic”
judge given the static understanding of language and subject that it accompanies . Consider Harrigan’s explanation
of the effects this has on our theory of judging: that you should hold speakers to every reason they cite as justification and use it to assess their
policy—is one of the most reactionary and anti-critical stances one could take. It prioritizes who speaks over what is spoken about. It ignores
content for form. It punishes instead of compromises. And, fundamentally, it is a tactic used by conservative political forces to crush
progressivism. Do the critique folk really want to be in this company? I agree that reliance on some language of punishment/severance could be a
good argument against the phrasing/theory of language and judgement. That way of explaining what is going on in these debates isn’t our only
option (more on this below). However, this groups all criticisms of this style together and presumes they are
“progressive” or that content and form can be strictly separated. Ironically, if obnoxiously, we could at this point write a
representational kritik of Harrigan’s post regarding the language of “progress.” What seems like one word might indicate a whole
system of thought about the end goal of pure consequentialism and a “use” oriented theory of the
relationship between language and the subject . At the very least, we should acknowledge that for much of the critical theory
we’re drawing on for this type of position would say that what is spoken about constitutes the “who” that is speaking or
judging. Rather than associating the construction of the 1AC with the debaters (the “who speaks”) as a type of personal corruption most of these
positions rely on evidence about the role of criticism/negation as productive. They do not have to be about punishing
individuals but instead about engaging in criticism of processes that all to often occur without much thought because they
appear “necessary.” Severance is probably problematic and I agree that importation of counteprlan theory into debating alternatives has typically
obscured issues instead of clarified them. The use of terms like severance seems more a symptom of judge-adaptation or inertia/debate-laziness
than an intrinsic characteristic of criticism. If we take this claim from Harrigan, “Thus, the judge, at the end of the debate, should be able to
choose (for themselves) why to vote Aff or Neg. Logically, one can choose the best arguments from the set of available reasons presented in the
debate,” I think it potentially works if we permit plan-inclusive or aff-inclusive alternatives. People fear the number of different arguments that
can be raised about individual words. I think that we ought to treat these issues on a case-by-case basis (and with less
commitment to offense-defense) in
terms of how important a particular set of representations appear for an aff. Frankly,
affirmatives should also be thinking about these issues . Also ignored in this fear is that there are significant circumstances
where the negative cannot separate the plan from the problematic reasons presented by an affirmative. Negatives have often been dishonest about
the degree to which something purely a contingent connection between justification and policy. Particularly in adopting a language that implies a
strict separation between the plan (action) and advantage (justification/frame) the negative may be using a model of discourse/representation etc.
that is in tension with the overall theoretical vocabulary. However, much of the responsibility for this phenomenon lies in the hands of
affirmatives desperate to protect the special status of the plan. We have typically debated all of these as questions of absolute priority (the K
equivalent of offense-defense). Rather, most of the evidence read for these claims (including Doty) indicates that these are issues worth engaging,
not issues that are logically prior to consequnce—but something that should shape how/whether we ought to evaluate consequences (particularly
in the manner described by many affs). I think that the analogy to the town-hall is loaded and misleading (we would change a lot more about
debate than the question of representational kritiks and plan focus if we were actually concerned with modeling a town-hall format). However,
even if we take it as a guiding analogy for evaluating debate the theory of “judge-choice” fails to account for the potentially productive
components of the analogy. First, I would hope that in listening to the various proposals made in public
deliberation that attendees would investigate not only the policies being presented or believe that
advocacy for a policy could easily be detached from the rhetoric that often surrounds it. If one fails to pay
attention to the connections between ideology and advocacy then we will have serious problems in
deliberation. In a town-hall style exchange we’d likely witness AIK style advocacies—I agree with the general course of action, but in order
not to have the course of action create X set of issues we ought to frame our actions differently.
A2: Perm Do Both
Begs a question of framework – if we win that representations are a central
question, they shouldn’t get a permutation because we have offered a competing
rhetorical framing strategy
They only win if they sever – that’s a voting issue, it makes the affirmative a moving
target that pivots based off 1NC strategy. That teaches bad advocacy skills and
moots all the offense we have after showing our hand.
Perm links to 1NC links
The perm fails – any inclusion of securitized depiction makes alternative futures
appear impossible – only the alternative’s radical divestment from the affirmative’s
ontological assumptions can open up new possibilities of understanding US-China
relations
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2059436418756096 ***Modified for language
Conclusion
Peter Hays Gries once suggested that the
way Americans view China is most likely motivated by “cold calculations
of their own self-interest … intertwined with deep-seated ‘gut feelings’ about China” (Hays Gries, 2006, p. 209).
And while we “frequently infer Chinese intentions from Chinese capabilities,” admitting to these features in US policy is something that we are
China has , since the end of the Cold War, occupied a space in the US imaginary as
often unwilling to do (Gries, 2006).
the potential enemy Other , and the areas of contention highlighted above have become ample context for the reification of negative
images of China as an imminent source of threat. These images have been drawn from older tropes of the Yellow and Red Perils and also newer
incarnations of the “sleeping” or “awakened” giant. As previous work has shown, such tropes have the ability to do the cultural work that shapes
negative
and justifies US policies (Buzan & Wæver, 2003; de Buitrago, 2012; Steuter & Wills, 2010; Turner, 2014). In the present moment,
images of China have enabled the justification of an increasingly hardline approach to China . The
latest National Security Strategy articulated by the Trump administration has unequivocally named China a challenger to “American power,
influence and interests” who has attempted to “erode American security and prosperity” (Landler & Sanger, 2017; U.S. White House Office,
2017), and the United States’ hardline tack toward China has been further reflected in the areas of contention in the US–China Comprehensive
Dialogue.
We have aimed to interrupt post–Cold War representations of China as a potential enemy Other that
encourage a reductive attitude toward a “rising China.” We have been particularly concerned with how
this may disable [prevent] the US public from fairly evaluating China’s actions as a rising power, as well as the US
government’s policies toward China. Indeed, if China is essentially a lawless bully, a thief, and a cheat incapable of
learning international norms of acceptable behavior, what options besides the exercise of hard
power does the United States have to meet its long-term security objectives? A treatise on the aims and modes of
US national security is beyond the scope of this article, but we hope to at least foreground the way othering frames the “truths” about China, so that the wider public
may view US China policy with a more critical filter. The ability of the US public to do so could become increasingly important—diversionary wars have been used
as a tactic to shore up public support for unpopular leaders threatened by domestic discontent, after all (Sobek, 2007). Although
China’s longtime
position has been to maintain a strong partnership with the US based on mutual interest, benefit, and
respect, it is imperative that the US public understands when US policy encourages China to retreat from
that position, and the potential that holds for conflict.
Military DA – Military leaders just don’t get it and are incapable of solving the aff –
their inclusion in the permutation collapses efficacy of plan and alt – rejection and
reconceptualization key
Lawson 12 ---- Sean, Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of
Utah, syndicated commentator on cyber policy and national defense, "Putting the 'War' in Cyberwar:
Metaphor, Analogy, and Cybersecurity Discourse in the United States," First Monday, Volume 17,
Number 7, 7/2, http://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3848/3270
There are limits to metaphor and analogy’s power to explain and bring about change. It is important to note that the U.S. defense
community’s use of the war metaphor and deterrence analogy is as much a symptom as it is a cause . The
use of Cold War, industrial–era metaphors is an indicator that the U.S. military still struggles to adapt its
thought and culture to the realities of the Information Age. Since the 1980s, U.S. military discourse has been dominated by talk of
networks, decentralization, and the Information Age (Cebrowski and Garstka, 1998). The thinking of some of the most
influential U.S. military theorists has even been described as “postmodern ” (Osinga, 2007). And yet the
knee–jerk reaction to prospective cyber threats has been to apply industrial–era thinking. This indicates
that the shift to an information–age fighting force has yet to be fully realized and raises deeper questions
about whether such a shift is possible at the level of military thought and culture.
A2: Perm Rethink Security
Intrinsic --- it adds the positive element of rethinking security. The alt is only
negative --- a rejection of the Aff’s framing --- critical praxis is the process of
endorsing our criticism --- not a component to be added --- voting issue --- destroys
all offense
Doesn’t solve – links and DAs from perm do both prove the incompatibility of the
1AC with breaking down the deterrence logic of cybersecurity.
AFFIRMATIVE
*** LINK
2AC---Link---General
No link – intersubjectivity means there’s no monolithic understanding of security
and speech acts are never singular – that means dialogue solves our bad reps
Roe 12 ---- Paul, Associate Professor of International Relations and European Studies (Central
European University), “Is Securitization a ‘Negative’ Concept? Revisiting the Normative Debate over
Normal versus Extraordinary Politics,” Security Dialogue, 43.3, SAGE
Is securitization always about silence and speed? For the Copenhagen School, securitization represents a
panic politics: we must do something now, as our very survival is at stake. In such a scenario, it is hardly surprising that Aradau and Huysmans both see the possibilities for debate
and deliberation as being minimal: normal procedures must be circumvented, otherwise it might all be too late. The speed of decisionmaking and the accompanying silence on the part of those
outside the relevant elite are made all the more salient by the so-called internalist (Stritzel, 2007) or philosophical (Balzacq, 2011) view of securitization, whereby the security speech act
possesses its own performative power. The internalist reading is characteristic of Wæver’s (1995) earlier work on securitization and accords with the notion of performativity. Performativity
corresponds to John L. Austin’s illocutionary act. Here, uttering security is more than just describing something: it is performing an action that creates new realities (Balzacq, 2005: 177, 2011:
20; Stritzel, 2007: 361). The security speech act thus has the power to enable emergency measures and to (re)order sociopolitical relations (friend/enemy, us/them). In other words, security is a
self-referential practice. The internalist reading of securitization closely resembles the Schmittian conception of the political inasmuch as both are decisionist: the securitizing actor, like Schmitt’s
sovereign, defines what is exceptional. The silence that arguably marks the internalist reading therefore reflects the lack of oversight to which the securitizing actor is subject, while, with regard
This is
to speed, there is a distinct sense of automaticity in the moment when a political issue is rapidly transformed into a matter of security by virtue of its very utterance as such.
problematized , however, by the so-called externalist (Stritzel, 2007) or sociological (Balzacq, 2011) view, which emphasizes instead the intersubjectivity of the
securitization process. With the externalist reading, the authority to speak and the power of the speech act itself are subject to the
context in which security is uttered. Most importantly, the framing of something as a security issue is not the sole preserve of the securitizing actor but
must also be accepted by a relevant audience . As Buzan et al. (1998: 25) make clear, presenting something as an existential threat is merely a
‘securitizing move’, as ‘the issue is [successfully] securitized only if and when the audience accepts it as such’. Accordingly, with its emphasis on the
intersubjective establishment of threat, the externalist rendering of securitization makes problematic Wæver’s earlier
assertion of security as a self-referential practice. And this conceptual tension is reflected in the specific
debate over the nature of the speech act itself. For both Thierry Balzacq and Holger Stritzel, Wæver/the Copenhagen School thus present securitization as
both an illocutionary act and a perlocutionary act – that is, they discuss what is done in saying security, as well as what is done by saying security. Perlocutionary acts are external to the
performative aspect of the speech act and thereby correspond not to the utterance itself but to its effects: did the securitizing actor manage to convince the relevant audience. Balzacq (2005: 177–
8) sums up the situation thus: either we argue that securitization is a self-referential practice, in which case we forsake perlocution with the related acquiescence of the audience … or we hold fast
to the creed that using the conception of security also produces a perlocutionary effect, in which case we abandon self-referentiality. He goes on: I suspect instead that the CS [Copenhagen
School] leans towards the first option…. [A]lthough the CS appeals to an audience, its framework ignores the audience, which suggests that the CS opts for an illocutionary view of security
Copenhagen School has
yielding a ‘magical efficiency’ rather than a fully-fledged model encompassing perlocution as well (Balzacq, 2005: 177–8).9 It is indeed the case that the
underconceptualized the role of the audience.10 This is something of which Wæver (2003) himself is well aware .
But, it is debatable whether the Copenhagen School favours an internalist reading of the securitization concept. Although Wæver is keen to stress the importance of the ‘moment’ of the speech
act, and thus retain its illocutionary force, he nevertheless also leans towards the importance of the relationship between securitizing actor and audience. Wæver warns of viewing securitization as
a ‘unilateral performance’ – that undertaken only by the sovereign – and thus its equivalence to a ‘Schmittian anti-democratic decisionism’. Rather: We [members of the Copenhagen School]
preserve the event-ness of the speech act and the performative moment, but locate it in-between the actors…. This might look like perlocution because it includes something after the speaker’s
first action, but if the speech act is viewed as a larger whole including audience, it is more appropriate to see securitization as what is done in the (collective) act, rather than dissolving the move
The important point here is how the security speech act
into one component of a larger complex social explanation of processes (Wæver, 2007: 4).
moves away from a Schmittian to an Arendtian conception of politics, ‘because the theory places power
in-between humans … and insists on securityness being a quality not of threats but of their handling, that is, the theory places power not with “things” external to a community
but internal to it’ (Wæver, 2011: 468). For Wæver, securitization thus takes place in a context where there is space for
open politics: actors and audiences together agree as to what constitutes security and what does not. This is not
to say that agreement is necessarily reached on an equal basis, as actors often possess, and indeed employ, the resources to cajole and bully audiences into acquiescing to their depiction of events.
it is to say that some kind of agreement is nevertheless required . Indeed, the potential for
But,
securitization to avoid its Schmittian connotations in this way is also recognized by Williams. For Williams, the
importance of the audience relates to a ‘discursive ethics’ that goes against the decisionist account of
securitization. The security speech act entails the possibility of dialogue and thereby also the
potential for the transformation of security (Williams, 2003: 522–3). And although Williams (2003: 524)
seems somewhat sceptical as to the extent to which securitizations are subject to such ‘discursive legitimation’ – also noting how security issues often ‘operate in the realm
of secrecy, of “national security”, of decision’ – he nonetheless makes clear the potential for securitizations to be ‘pulled
back’ into the public realm, ‘particularly when the social consensus underlying the capacity for decision is
challenged, either by questioning the policies, or by disputing the threat, or both’.
No link – particularity – even if some IR claims are wrong, narrow claims are
accurate.
Price 98 (Richard Price is a former prof in the Department of Anthropology at Yale University. Later, he moved to Johns Hopkins
University to found the Department of Anthropology, where he served three terms as chair. A decade of freelance teaching (University of
Minnesota, Stanford University, Princeton University, University of Florida, Universidade Federal da Bahia), ensued. This article is co-authored
with Christian Reus-Smit – Monash University – European Journal of International Relations Copyright © 1998 via SAGE Publications –
http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/~courses/PoliticalScience/661B1/documents/PriceReusSmithCriticalInternatlTheoryConstructivism.pdf)
One of the central departures of critical international theory from positivism is the view that we cannot escape the interpretive moment. As George (1994: 24) argues,
‘the world is always an interpreted “thing”, and it is always interpreted in conditions of disagreement and conflict, to one degree or another’. For this reason, ‘there
can be no common body of observational or tested data that we can turn to for a neutral, objective knowledge of the world. There can be no ultimate knowledge, for
example, that actually corresponds to reality per se.’ This proposition has been endorsed wholeheartedly by constructivists, who are at pains to
deny the possibility of making ‘Big-T’ Truth claims about the world and studiously avoid attributing such status to their findings. This having been
said, after undertaking sustained empirical analyses of aspects of world politics constructivists do make ‘small-t’ truth claims about the subjects they
have investigated. That is, they claim to have arrived at logical and empirically plausible interpretations of actions, events or
processes, and they appeal to the weight of evidence to sustain such claims. While admitting that their claims are always contingent and
partial interpretations of a complex world, Price (1995, 1997) claims that his genealogy provides the best account to date
to make sense of anomalies surrounding the use of chemical weapons, and Reus-Smit (1997) claims that a culturalist perspective offers the best
explanation of institutional differences between historical societies of states. Do such claims contradict the interpretive ethos of critical international
theory? For two reasons, we argue that they do not . First, the interpretive ethos of critical international theory is driven, in large measure, by a normative
rejection of totalizing discourses, of general theoretical frameworks that privilege certain perspectives over others. One searches constructivist scholarship in vain,
though, for such discourses. With the possible exception of Wendt’s problematic flirtation with general systemic theory and professed commitment to ‘science’,
research is at its best when and because it is question driven, with self-consciously contingent claims made
constructivist
specifically in relation to particular phenomena, at a particular time, based on particular ev idence,

and always open to alternative interpretations. Second, the rejection of totalizing discourses based on ‘big-T’ Truth claims does not
foreclose the possibility, or even the inevitability, of making ‘small-t’ truth claims. In fact, we would argue that as
soon as one observes and interacts in the world such claims are unavoidable, either as a person engaged in everyday life or as a scholar. As Nietzsche pointed out long
ago, we cannot help putting forth truth claims about the world . The individual who does not cannot act, and the
genuinely unhypocritical relativist who cannot struggles for something to say and write. In short, if constructivists are not advancing totalizing discourses, and if
making ‘small-t’ truth claims is inevitable if one is to talk about how the world works, then it is no more likely that constructivism per se violates the interpretive ethos
of critical international theory than does critical theory itself.
1AR---Link---General---Ext---Reps Irrelevant
Reps don’t determine policy
Richardson 8 Alexia, “Traces of terror : photography and memory of political violence in Argentina and Peru” –as part of
the critique of visual determinism, this card internally quotes David D. Perlmutter, Ph.D.. He is Dean of the College of Media &
Communication at Texas Tech University. Before coming to Texas Tech, he was the director of the School of Journalism and
Mass Communication at the University of Iowa. As a documentary photographer, he is the author or editor of seven books on
political communication and persuasion. Also, he has written several dozen research articles for academic journals as well as
more than 200 essays for U.S. and international newspapers and magazines such as Campaigns & Elections, Christian Science
Monitor, Editor & Publisher, Los Angeles Times, MSNBC.com., Philadelphia Inquirer, and USA Today. This was the her
Dissertation to gain her PhD in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures University of Durham. While pursuing her PhD at
Durham University, Alexia Richardson gained much traction on the international conference scene – presenting a paper titled 'Ni
un paso atrás: Resistance and Emotion in Images of Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo' at the ‘Public Displays of Affection’
conference at the University of Rochester, New York. Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses
Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/1898/
Perlmutter (1998) questions the logic of 'visual

Despite the ubiquitous nature of photographic images, their pervasive influence may be hard to pin down. In a sceptical analysis, David
determinism', which argues for the role of images in policy decisions - the so-called 'CNN effect' which draws elected
officials to the television set as they evaluate their ever-changing position in the public eye. According to Perlmutter, icons are selected and confirmed by a small section of society he calls 'discourse elites' - politicians, academics, and
workers in the media. Because such privileged professionals work daily with images, control them, study them in broadsheet newspapers and believe in their effects, they tend to assume that the general public does likewise, often
overestimating the familiarity of even the most famous images to the untrained or uninterested viewer. Choosing specific examples including Adams' image of General Loan in Tet and other'icons of outrage', he argues
that the measurable effect of visual images is small and they do not usually overturn policy , although, by contrast, some examples
of decisions influenced by images are given in Taylor (1998: 136). So, while many blamed photographs like those made by Adams for influencing public
opinion in the United States against the war in Vietnam , Perlmutter argues for the reverse: that because
public opinion was already turning against the war, it seized on the image of Loan as a confirmation of its new values.
Perlmutter's warning against an exaggerated or naive trust in the power of the image is important, and he is correct
in stating that an objective measurement of the influence of images on policy decisions is hard to find.
Nevertheless, his analysis does not preclude a more general awareness of certain regularly circulated photographs in society, and influence may also have more general effects than government policy decisions. Accordingly, Hariman
and Lucaites (2001: 19) believe that, 'visual practices have long been important yet undervalued constituents of democratic culture precisely because they are media for emotional representation that lead to performative identification
rather than rational deliberation'. I would concur that the value accorded to written documents and the official archive of materials is often denied the photographic image which, nevertheless, is so regularly witnessed that its pull on
the emotions should not be dismissed. 5
2AC---Link---A2: China
Their K doesn’t apply – context matters – that both denies the link because our
argument has nuance that avoids sweeping claims and proves the alt reverses the
error by falsely claiming China can never contribute to violence
Callahan 5 – William A. Callahan, Professor of Politics at the University of Manchester, “How to
Understand China: The Dangers and Opportunities of Being a Rising Power”, Review of International
Studies, 31
Although ‘China threat theory’ is ascribed to the Cold War thinking of foreigners who suffer from an enemy deprivation syndrome, the use of
containment as a response to threats in Chinese texts suggests that Chinese strategists are also seeking to fill the symbolic gap left by the collapse
of the Soviet Union, which was the key threat to the PRC after 1960. Refutations of ‘China threat theory’ do not seek to deconstruct the discourse
of ‘threat’ as part of critical security studies. Rather they are expressions of a geopolitical identity politics because they refute ‘Chinese’ threats as a way of facilitating
the production of an America threat, a Japan threat, an India threat, and so on. Uniting to fight these foreign threats affirms China’s national identity. Unfortunately,
by refuting China threat in this bellicose way – that is by generating a new series of threats – the China threat theory texts end
up confirming the
threat that they seek to deny: Japan, India and Southeast Asia are increasingly threatened by China’s protests of peace.43 Moreover, the estrangement
produced and circulated in China threat theory is not just among nation-states. The recent shift in the focus of the discourse from security issues to more economic and
cultural issues suggests that China is estranged from the ‘international standards’ of the ‘international community’. After a long process of difficult negotiations,
China entered the WTO in December 2001. Joining the WTO was not just an economic or a political event; it was an issue of Chinese identity.44 As Breslin, Shih and
Zha describe in their articles in this Forum, this process was painful for China as WTO membership subjects the PRC to binding rules that are not the product of
Chinese diplomacy or culture. Thus although China enters international organisations like the WTO based on shared values and rules, China also needs to distinguish
itself from the undifferentiated mass of the globalised world. Since 2002, a large proportion of the China threat theory articles have been published in economics,
trade, investment, and general business journals – rather than in international politics, area studies and ideological journals as in the 1990s. Hence China threat theory
is one way to differentiate China from these international standards, which critics see as neo-colonial.45 Another way is for China to assert ownership over
international standards to affirm its national identity through participation in globalisation.46 Lastly, some China threat theory articles go beyond criticising the
ignorance and bad intentions of the offending texts to conclude that those who promote China threat must be crazy: ‘There is a consensus within mainland academic
circles that there is hardly any reasonable logic to explain the views and practices of the United States toward China in the past few years. It can only be summed up in
a word: ‘‘Madness’’ ’.47 Indians likewise are said to suffer from a ‘China threat theory syndrome’.48 This brings us back to Foucault’s logic of ‘rationality’ being
constructed through the exclusion of a range of activities that are labelled as ‘madness’. The rationality of the rise of China depends upon distinguishing it from the
madness of those who question it. Like Joseph Nye’s concern that warnings of a China threat could become a self-fulfilling
prophesy, China threat theory texts vigorously reproduce the dangers of the very threat they seek to
deny. Rather than adding to the debate, they end up policing what Chinese and foreigners can rationally
say. Conclusion The argument of this essay is not that China is a threat. Rather, it has examined the productive linkages that knit together the
image of China as a peacefully rising power and the discourse of China as a threat to the economic and military stability
of East Asia. It would be easy to join the chorus of those who denounce ‘China threat theory’ as the misguided
product of the Blue Team, as do many in China and the West. But that would be a mistake , because depending on
circumstances anything – from rising powers to civilian aircraft – can be interpreted as a threat . The purpose is not
to argue that interpretations are false in relation to some reality (such as that China is fundamentally
peaceful rather than war-like), but that it is necessary to unpack the political and historical context of each
perception of threat. Indeed, ‘China threat’ has never described a unified American understanding of the PRC: it has always been one position among many
in debates among academics, public intellectuals and policymakers. Rather than inflate extremist positions (in both the West and
China) into irrefutable truth, it is more interesting to examine the debates that produced the threat/opportunity dynamic.
2AC---Link---A2: Deterrence
Deterrence prevents global nuclear war – 70 years of research studies, empirical
examples, expert consensus, counter-factual studies and comparison to rival thesis
Tertrais 11 ---- Bruno, Senior Research Fellow at the Fondation pour la Recherche Stratgique,
Master's degree in Public Law and a Doctorate in Political Science (Institut d'études politiques de Paris),
member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies and editorial board of the Washington
Quarterly, “In Defense of Deterrence,” IFRI Securities Studies Center, Proliferation Papers, Fall,
www.ifri.org/downloads/pp39tertrais.pdf
Nuclear Weapons Have Been Effective War-Prevention Tools It is by definition impossible to prove
that deterrence has worked, and correlation is not causality. But History gives us solid arguments in support
of the positive role played by nuclear weapons, especially since our "database" now covers nearly 70 years . No major power
conflict has taken place in nearly 70 years - The role of nuclear deterrence to explain this historical anomaly has been
highlighted by leading historians and authors such as John Lewis Gaddis, Kenneth Waltz, and Michael Quinlan.3 No
comparable period of time has ever existed in the history of States. There were two dozen conflicts among major powers in the
equivalent amount of time following the Treaties of Westphalia (1648), and several after the Vienna Congress (1815).4 There has never
been a direct military conflict between two nuclear States5 - Beyond this mere observation, two recent
quantitative studies have shown that the possession of nuclear weapons by two countries significantly
reduced - all things equal - the likelihood of war between them.6 Events in Asia since 1949 provide an interesting test case.
China and India fought a war in 1962, but have refrained from resorting to arms against each other ever since. There were
three India-Pakistan wars (1962, 1965 and 1971) before both countries became nuclear; but since the late 1980s (when the two
countries acquired a minimum nuclear capability), none of the two has launched any significant air or land operations against the
other. No nuclear-armed country has ever been invaded - This proposition too can be tested by the evolution of
regional crises. Israel had been invaded in 1948, on the day of its independence. But in 1973, Arab States deliberately
limited their operations to disputed territories (the Sinai and the Golan Heights).7 It is thus incorrect to take the example of
the Yom Kippur war as a "proof of the failure of nuclear deterrence . Likewise, India refrained from
penetrating Pakistani territory at the occasion of the crises of 1990, 1999, 2002 and 2008, whereas it had done so in 1965
and 1971. Another example is sometimes mistakenly counted as a failure of nuclear deterrence: the
Falklands War (1982). But this was a British Dependent Territory for which nothing indicated that it was covered by nuclear
deterrence. Furthermore, it would be erroneous to take these two events as evidence that extended deterrence
does not make sense, as some authors have done ("if nuclear weapons cannot protect part of the national territory, how could they protect a foreign
country?"8). Extended deterrence is meant to cover interests that are much more important to the protector than
nonessential territories; for instance, during the Cold war Germany was much more "vital" to the United States than, say, Puerto Rico. No country covered
by a nuclear guarantee has ever been the target of a major State attack - Here again evidence is hard lo give, but can be
found a contraho. The U nited S tates refrained from invading Cuba in 1962, for instance, but did not hesitate in invading
Grenada, Panama or Iraq. The Soviet Union invaded Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, but not a single US ally. China has
refrained from invading Taiwan, which benefits from a US defense commitment. North Korea invaded
its southern neighbor in 1950 after Washington had excluded it from its "defensive perimeter", but has refrained from doing so since Seoul has been
covered with a nuclear guarantee. Neither South Vietnam nor Kuwait were under the US nuclear umbrella. Russia
could afford to invade Georgia because its country was not a NATO member. A partial exception is the shelling of
Yeongpyeong island (2011); but the limited character of the attack and its location (in a maritime area not recognized by
Pyongyang as being part of South Korean territory) make it hard to count it as a major failure of extended deterrence. Alternative
Explanations Are Not Satisfying Some have suggested alternative explanations which all rest, to some extent, on the idea that international
society has undergone major transformations since 1945: the development of international institutions, the progress of democracy, the rise of
global trade, etc., to which is often added the memories of the Second World War. Thus for authors such as John Mueller, nuclear weapons played a marginal -
The Soviet Union, it is also argued, was a status quo power in Europe which
non-necessary - role in the preservation of peace.9
would not have taken the risk of a major war on the continent. But such explanations are not satisfying . The rise of
international trade from 1870 onwards did not prevent the First World War: Norman Angell's "Great Illusion" was a
fallacy. The construction of a new global order based on the League of Nations did not prevent the Second.10 Kenneth Waltz reminds
us that "in a conventional world even forceful and tragic lessons have proved to be exceedingly difficult for states to
learn".11 In the same vein, Elbridge Colby holds that such cultural argumentation "markedly overestimates the durability of
historically contingent value systems while seriously downplaying the enduring centrality of
competition, fear, uncertainty and power".12 Major powers have continued to use military force in deadly conflicts, especially in the
two decades after 1945: "war fatigue" is a limited and rather recent phenomenon. As for democratization, it is obviously a
red herring : during the Cold war, the risk of major war was between pro-Western (not all of them democratic until at
least the late 1970s) and totalitarian regimes. No one knows how a "non-nuclear cold war" would have unfolded in Europe. However, without
nuclear weapons, Washington might have hesitated to guarantee the security in Europe ("no nukes, no troops"), and
might have returned to isolationism; and without US protection, the temptation for Moscow to grab territory in
Western Europe would have been stronger.'3 And as Michael Quinlan puts it, in order to claim that nuclear deterrence was key in the
preservation of peace, one does not need to postulate a Soviet desire for expansionist aggression: it is enough to
argue that "had armed conflict not been so manifestly intolerable the ebb and flow of friction might have managed
with less caution, and a slide sooner or laler into major war, on Ihe pattern of 1914 or 1939, might have been less
unlikely "." Alternative explanations might not even suffice to explain the absence of conflict among
European countries: the integration process which began in 1957 and culminated with the creation of the European Union in 1991 might have
been much more difficult without the US umbrella.15 Neither are they satisfying regarding regional
powers. It is hard to believe that the political, economic and cultural factors mentioned above are enough to
explain the absence of a major conventional war involving Israel, India or Pakistan since these countries have become nuclear powers.16
Deterrence has limited the scope and intensity of conflict among the major States. If crises in Europe, as
well as wars in Asia and the Middle East, did not turn into global conflicts, it is probably due largely to nuclear
weapons . The fear of nuclear war and the precautions taken by decisionmakers during the Cold war to reduce the risks
of direct conflict have been made clear by a collective study that contradicts Mueller's thesis .17
2AC---Link---A2: Deterrence---Instability/Stability Paradox
No escalation of low-level conflicts – nuclear taboo, war games and empirics
The risk of nuclear escalation - The

risk of escalation has to exist if deterrence is to be operative . But if one sets
aside the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) for the Soviet Union and perhaps, to some extent, the Yom Kippur War (1973) for Israel, there
does not seem to be any example when nuclear weapons have been really "close" to being employed:
neither in Korea (1950), nor at Dien-Bien-Phu (1954), nor in the Formosa Straits (1954-1955 and 1957-1958); neither during the second Berlin
crisis (1961), nor during the battle of Khe Sanh (1968), the Ussuri River crisis (1969), the US/North Korea tensions (1969), the "madman"
nuclear alert (1969)68 or the South Asia war (1971). Likewise for the Able Archer incident (1983), the Gulf War (1991), or the South Asian
crises of 1990 1999 and 2002. 69 To envision the possible use of nuclear weapons, discuss it with one's advisers, seriously consider it
if the crisis was to worsen, possibly make it known publicly (and/or put forces on a higher state of alert), have it planned by military staffs is
one thing. To have "the finger on the button" and be on the verge of ordering a nuclear strike is quite another . We will
never know if nuclear weapons would have been used if one of these crises had further escalated. But they showed that with very
few exceptions, the highest political authorities - of various types of regimes and personality - have been
extraordinarily prudent regarding their use.70 Most exercises and wargames showed that possessors of
nuclear weapons were extraordinarily reluctant to engage in massive nuclear strikes.71 George Quester, one of the
most subtle American analysts of deterrence theory, considers, for instance - after a rigorous analysis of the early days of the
Cold war - that ethical motivations were paramount to explain the absence of any US nuclear use when it
was in a situation of monopoly.72 Hence the idea of a "nuclear taboo " proposed by Nina Tannenwald for the United States or
that of a "tradition of non-use" suggested by T. V. Paul for nuclear-armed countries in general.73 It is not an exaggeration to claim that the
nuclear terror message conveyed by popular culture (novels, movies, cartoons, documentaries, photographs...) played a role in the consolidation
of this taboo.74
Violence decreasing now, which disproves deterrence causes low-level wars – Aff
also outweighs in a consequential framework
The Costs of Deterrence Remain Acceptable Of course, the benefits of nuclear deterrence have to be measured in relation to its
actual or potential costs. Some authors have claimed that crises and low-intensity conflicts have multiplied due
to the existence of nuclear deterrence . What has been called the "stability-instability paradox" by Glenn Snyder is a
reality. But the number of international conflicts had slowly been declining since 1945 .* And - leaving
Korea and Vietnam aside if one was to claim that such wars were by-products of nuclear deterence - was
not that a relatively small price to pay for the prevention of major power conflict?
2AC---Link---A2: Disease
Disease framing promotes beneficial preparation, not a securitized response
Saksena ’11 Mita – Former Lecturer, Jai Hind College, Bombay University. Also former Research Assistant University of
Madras, Project on Implementation of Regulatory and Distributive Policies in Tamil Nadu Joint Project between University of
Oslo and University of Madras. Dissertation was overseen and approved by Professor Paul A. Kowert, Associate Professor,
Department of Politics and International Relations Florida International University. This Thesis is written by Mita Saksena – the
author now holds a Ph.D. in International Health & Human Rights from Florida International University “Framing Infectious
Diseases and U.S. Public Opinion” A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy in International Relations – http://search.proquest.com/docview/952533573
Two hypotheses were tested in this chapter. First, frames represented prominently in the media will tend to mobilize public
support for policies associated with those frames . This study indicates that the biomedical frame was the predominant
frame in media reports in the sampled period 2004–2007 (Tables 5.4–5.9 and Figure 5.1-5.3). The study also highlights a strong
correlation between the biomedical frame and the American public’s worry about the disease and their concern about the likelihood that the
disease would strike the United States . The surveys were conducted mainly between December 2005 and in 2006 and the beginning of 2007. Figure 5.1 clearly indicates that between 2005 and the
second quarter of 2007, the volume of stories that discussed the impact of avian flu on the United States and the globe
as a whole increased. In the second quarter of 2007 all articles dealt with the impact of the disease on the United States. In February 2005, a news story reported that at the national meeting of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science, scientists stated that they believed it highly likely that a virus that has swept through chickens and other poultry in Asia would genetically change into a flu that can be transmitted among
people.38 At the same time, Cambodia and Indonesia reported their first human cases of avian flu, which turned out to be fatal.39 By November 2005, the WHO's official count of human cases of H5N1 reached 122, with 62 deaths in
This
Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, and Cambodia.40 This was followed by news reports of the spread of avian flu to countries such as China, the Russian Federation, Turkey, Italy, and many other countries around the globe.
was also a time when the United States President and Congress launched several initiatives. The Pandemic and All Hazards
Preparedness Act was adopted by Congress in December 2006. With this law, Congress mandated for the first time in United States history that the federal government prepare a National Health
Security Strategy to guide improvement of the country’s public health emergency preparedness and response capabilities. The second hypothesis tested was that when the biomedical and economic
frames dominate media coverage, which is the most common scenario, people will be more worried about the disease. They will be likely to
support potentially inconvenient policies intended to address the dangers of the disease. The survey reports show high support for vaccine production and research and
willingness on the part of the American public to undertake precautionary measures to deal with the disease . The public did not see
the human rights and security frames as relevant . The security frame was more prominent in media stories about bird flu than it was for SARS. It did not, however,
show any significant correlation with worries about bird flu . The human rights frame was not very prominent in news stories about bird flu. Part of the reason for
this is that the bird flu did not infect humans in the United States, and there were no major issues arising over access to antiviral drugs and vaccines or about
quarantine and isolation .

2AC---Link---A2: Disembodied IR
Focusing only on bodies without accounting for immediate concerns of politics fails
Kirby 15 – Paul Kirby, Lecturer in International Security in the School of Global Studies at the
University of Sussex, “Bodies, What Matter?” The Disorder of Things, 7-15,
http://thedisorderofthings.com/2015/07/15/bodies-what-matter/
By contrast, it becomes easy to see violences as about embodiment when they happen to bodies, and more, when they happen to bodies in ways somehow unusual or
surprising relative to a conventional form of violence. When focusing on the exceptional, or on violence that we find politically objectionable, the bullet on the
battlefield does not appear as an example of embodied violence. If bodies are seen as primarily the materiel for violence, the substance that violence is done to, then
there is less of a sense of bodies themselves constituting or limiting meaning. Nor do we see the mechanics of a power that layers meaning onto bodies. To
give
an account of power’s materialising is to insist on a proper account of the body’s historicity. Like Foucault (him
again). But such histories (genealogies) are specific and dense, even as they claim that nothing was quite the same
hence. The danger in centring the body is then of falling between the requisite conceptualisation
(what is mattering in general?; what is a body as such?) and specific histories of power (how did the modern
state come to govern a population of bodies?).
The intertwining of concepts and histories means that there are various (we might even say rival) understandings of political bodies, and mattering bodies. In The
Body in Pain Elaine Scarry writes of torture as:
the translation of all the objectified elements of pain into the insignia of power, the conversion of the enlarged map of human suffering into an emblem of the regime’s
strength… [A]t least for the duration of this obscene and pathetic drama, it is not the pain but the regime that is incontestably real, not the pain but the regime that is
total, not the pain but the regime that is able to eclipse all else, not the pain but the regime that is able to dissolve the world.
Whilst materialising is something that happens upon, or in, the physical form (hence phrases like ‘inscribed on the body’),
the mattering of bodies is not a brute physical process. The conferring of meaning on bodies and their
experiences – the conversion of pain into truth – is something done in speech (which we might say is hardened into
something called ‘discourse’). Is saying so to to reinstate a bad dualism, a good dualism, or not a dualism at all?
Should we read Scarry as inattentive to the body as more than a bundle of nerve endings, or see the
foundation on which different political histories might be erected? Even as the tortured body occupies the zenith of materialised
violence, Scarry insists on a certain ontology of the body whilst putting the emphasis on institutional
power . Pain in the body has certain characteristics that cannot find intersubjective expression. So the meaning (and perhaps therefore the materialisation) of
bodies as tortured, and tortured for a reason, comes through the political speech of the torturer and his regime.
In Bodies of Violence, the conceptual key to understanding how bodies are produced (and hence political) is
performativity. Which is to say that categories do not name pre-existing realities, but are enunciations that claim
to be reflecting facts that they are actually creating . So bodies (or the political language around violent bodies) cannot be taken for
granted. But what is the opposite of performativity? Who is it that claims that ‘prisoner’ reflects a pre-
existing truth rather than coming into being through the institution and discourse of imprisonment (an example
Wilcox draws on)? Clearly, there is too much woven into the idea of performativity to unpack the possibilities here. The point is that there are multiple
ways in which performativity could be seen to work in practice, and an enlarging sphere of debates about mattering to sift
through. Moving beyond the rare figures of international politics, how do we sense the body of the factory
worker, of the financial trader, or the seafarer, of the defence intellectual? Liminality makes for
symptomatic readings, but also the paradoxical re-inscribing of “the body” as of only occasional import,
rather than as central to the global everyday .
The materiality of the body is the substratum of a subjectivity that is always – necessarily – in excess of the body. The bare life of the body needs to be taken literally
– there is nothing to be said about the body without translation in and through some other regime of
meaning . So attention is due to the history of those regimes of meaning . Or else we require an account
of mattering that confers more agency to flesh than Bodies of Violence does. If the body is resistant or
has agency at a more fundamental level, theory must explicate that mechanism in addition to showing
how different embodiments are used by hegemonic politics. This is to a great extent a question of ontologies of the body, and a
generalised theory of embodiment. But it is also crucial for the political readings we hope to produce. If, as Wilcox suggests,
suicide bombing deterritorialises the state in its exemplary force (the leakiness of flesh challenging the hegemony of the body politic), and if the state form itself
requires a certain stabilised form of the body, international theory must reckon with the body anew. As Kevin says, Bodies of Violence is a broad proof of concept,
and it does much to convince. A vista of possibilities has been opened (not all of which, as Ali Howell notes, need be indebted to feminist theory above all). Theory is
disembodied (decapitated here, mutilated there), but matter is going nowhere. All these bodies, and still the theories keep piling up.
2AC---Link---A2: Economy
Economic competition is a safety valve for war – alt causes recourse to nuclear
conflict
Gartzkey 10 – Erik, UC San Diego Political Science Department (“Interdependence Really is
Complex,” 2/15/10, http://dss.ucsd.edu/~egartzke/papers/complexinterdep_02242010.pdf)
Strategists in
the early nuclear era faced a fundamental challenge. How was competition possible when each disagreement
potentially involved the end of civilization ? Brodie (1946, 1959), Kahn (1960), Schelling (1966) and others realized that the
situation was analogous to a game of chicken. Nuclear nations could not precipitate a cataclysmic exchange over every disagreement. Instead,
conflict in the nuclear era involved manipulating the risk of mutually dreaded outcomes (Powell 1990). Competition among the superpowers
became commonplace as the cost of a contest subsided from global holocaust to some finite probability of the same. Indeed, the fact that it is
common knowledge in a chicken game that contests will be contained in their intensity may help to explain why the U.S. and Soviet blocs were
willing to engage in a large number of relatively minor disputes.
Interdependence creates similar dynamics, though by extending the range of possible contests. Economic ties provide both the
motive and opportunity for interdependent states to substitute relatively minor non-militarized contests
for violent confrontations. As in clashes between the Soviet Union and the United States, the lower intensity and risk of escalation
should mean that interdependent dyads actually increase conflict behavior, though at lower levels of dispute intensity. This insight contrasts with
the classical liberal argument, which sees interdependence as deterring conflict and discouraging acts that run the risk of endangering trade or
other pro table relationships.
Interdependence encourages additional low-level conflict. Militarized disputes are replaced with non-militarized
disputes, but interdependent dyads are also free to pursue a greater variety of latent conflicts, given the lower cost of non-militarized disputes.
Imagine a state that has a relatively modest grievance. The state can make demands in negotiation. Sometimes demands will be believed and
issues resolved diplomatically, but the state often has no way of proving its valuation for issues, short of fighting. Given the high cost of warfare,
the state may not be willing or able to act on any given dispute, but may instead let issues accumulate into a bundle of grievances. Once there are
sufficient differences, or once grievances grow to sufficient intensity, this can provoke a war.
If instead economic linkages allow a state to signal the need for a more generous settlement, a contest
can be averted . The presence of economic linkages, by allowing signaling, substitute a larger number of
relatively minor economic conflicts for less frequent, but more intense militarized contests. Introducing a
mechanism that is cheaper than war and more effective than talk encourages interdependent states to
pursue issues for which fighting is prohibitively expensive. Interdependence thus creates a “middle
way" between talk and war, reduces militarized conflict but increasing nonmilitarized conflict over a greater variety of
minor issues. The need to combine the mechanisms of signaling and coercion in one conflict process in order to substitute for militarized violence
also imply that interdependent dyads should be more peaceful than asymmetrically dependent dyads.
2AC---Link---A2: Nonviolence
Nonviolence isn’t a moral obligation
Ryan 2 (Howard – central figure and early member of the Livermore Action Group, which was one of
the first organizations to systemically document and research civil disobedience. The group covered
hundreds of nonviolent actions around the world as part of their newspaper Direct Action. Howard
specifically played a role in the L.A.G.’s sub-section called “the Overthrow Cluster” – which afforded
him unique insight into the strategies of social movements. Epistemological data for this article includes
observation of movements against nuclear power, against nuclear weapons and focused protests against
the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant near San Luis Obispo, as well as at the University of California's
Lawrence Livermore Labs where nuclear weapons are designed – “Critique of Nonviolent Politics,”
http://www.uow.edu.au/~/bmartin/pubs/peace/02Ryan.pdf)
Challenging Pacifist Morality ¶ The secular moral view faces ready challenge: If human life has value, should it not
be ¶ defended when necessary? If a Hitler threatens genocide of a people, is not armed self-¶ defense a
moral response? Pacifists can be creative and vigorous in defending against ¶ such challenges. For example, they will point to cases of
nonviolent resistance to the ¶ Nazis. But life experience itself often creates tension for the pacifist moralist, and many ¶ will contradict their
espoused principles in practice. Gandhi declared, "I am an ¶ uncompromising opponent of violent methods even to serve the noblest of
causes."12 Yet, ¶ he recruited
Indians to fight for the British during World War I, and supported violence ¶ on
other occasions as well (see part II). Likewise, King's nonviolent principles didn't ¶ prevent him from demanding
federal troops or (in Chicago) police protection for civil ¶ rights demonstrations (see chapter 7). During World War II,
thousands of American ¶ pacifists threw their support behind the war against Hitler, many abandoning their ¶ pacifist beliefs.13 ¶ ¶ The spread of
armed liberation movements in third world countries poses a particular ¶ challenge to radical pacifists today. The causes have just aims--
democracy, equality, ¶ basic freedoms--while facing the cruelest repression. Are their methods immoral? Some ¶ pacifists condemn the violence
outright. ¶ ¶ It is absurd to talk of revolution without nonviolence because all violence is ¶ reactionary, causing the exact conditions it intends to
destroy. ¶ Ira Sandperl14 ¶ ¶ The stance of others is more subtle. While not endorsing armed struggle, they do make a ¶ distinction between the
violence of the oppressor and of the oppressed. ¶ ¶ Clearly we have to distinguish between the violence of the current regime in ¶ South Africa--
which is criminal--and that of those struggling against it--¶ which, by contrast, is tragic…. ¶ ¶ While we do not support the violent means used by
some movements, we do ¶ support their objective in seeking liberation from oppression. ¶ ¶ The greatest single contribution we can make to
liberation movements is not ¶ by becoming entangled in the debate over whether or not such movements ¶ should use violence, but by actively
working to bring an end to colonialism, ¶ imperialism, racism, and sexism. ¶ Ed Hedemann15 ¶ ¶ To their credit, many pacifists actively support
liberation movements by working against ¶ U.S. military intervention. And, as Ed Hedemann of the War Resisters League points out, ¶ American
activists need not become entangled in the debate over the violence of such ¶ movements. But bypassing the debate does not resolve the questions
about nonviolent ¶ theory posed by liberation movements. Nor could the debate be easily avoided if one ¶ currently lived in El Salvador and were
active politically. Advocating nonviolent ¶ principles could place one at odds with the popular armed movement; it is questionable ¶ ¶ Critique of
Nonviolent Politics 11¶ how fully one could support the movement's liberation objective while opposing its ¶ means. ¶ ¶ ¶ Pacifism and Situational
Morality ¶ The notion that violence is inherently evil is problematic because it assumes that a violent ¶ act
may be judged apart from its circumstances, intentions, or consequences . By the ¶ moral logic of many
pacifists, it would be an evil act to kill one person to prevent that ¶ person from killing ten or a
thousand persons: ¶ ¶ An ultimate moral principle is not to be trifled with. For the pacifist, violence ¶ to human personality, even in
political struggle, is ruled out because it is ¶ ethically unrighteous--period. ¶ ¶ Mulford Q. Sibley16 ¶ ¶ Sibley's terms such as "ultimate" and "ruled
out…period" underscore the absolutist ¶ character of his ethics. (King's "fixed and immutable" formulation is similarly absolutist.) ¶ Modern
society widely and rightfully rejects absolutist morality , favoring instead a ¶ situational morality that
judges acts in light of circumstances. Our courts of law practice ¶ this daily. An individual who commits an assault may appeal for
leniency by arguing that ¶ the assault was provoked, or by pointing out that s/he has no history of violence. The law ¶ considers killing in self-
defense to be "justifiable homicide." Even where the use of ¶ violence is beyond dispute, a court takes into account the facts and circumstances ¶
A progressive morality must be situational , must assess political
surrounding the violent act in rendering its judgment. ¶ ¶
actions based on the ¶ needs, circumstances, and choices available to a given movement, rather than invoking ¶ absolutist
standards. Hedemann embraces situationality when he distinguishes between ¶ the violence of oppressor regimes and the violence of those
opposing such regimes. At ¶ the same time, Hedemann objects to the armed movements and calls their methods ¶ "tragic," ¶ while apparently
having little knowledge of the movements in question--in South Africa, ¶ in Central America--and offering no strategic alternatives. ¶ ¶
2AC---Link---A2: Ontological Security
Construction of ontological security good – it represents an aspiration of what the
world ought be
Rose 12 ---- Mitch, PhD in Geography (Cambridge), M.A. International Relations (Syracuse), B.A.
Middle East History (Wisconsin), Lecturer in the Department of Geography (University of Hull),
“Dwelling as Marking and Claiming,” Environment and Planning: Society and Space, Vol. 30, Via
academia
Conclusions It is only once we understand techne as an operation that gathers and is gathered in and through the fourfold that we can understand dwelling as
something that marks and claims. Dwelling is something that comes to us without coming from us (see Joronen, 2010). To
borrow a phrase from Merleau-Ponty (1968), we cannot claim to be the origin of our dwelling any more than we can claim to be the origin of our heart or its beating.
(7) The world is that which we have been bequeathed.
The question of building, therefore, is a question of how Dasein
appropriates that which it receives. How do mortals creatively enrol (through techne) and thus participate in the world in
which it is gathered? The answer I have attempted to sketch out here is that Dasein builds in order to make a claim —
a claim that marks out something that is ‘its own’ in the midst of the unrelenting movement of the
fourfold. In this sense, mortals build tools, symbols, and landscapes to mark a site where the fourfold can be
disclosed as not simply a world but our world —a place that names our being vis-à-vis the restless unfolding that the fourfold announces. Such
buildings are only ever claims. The violent creative works that mortals build immediately succumb to the fourfold’s unfolding (an unfolding that
marks both their origin and finitude). This is why Heidegger describes dwelling as a process of coming to be at home in
not being at home (1971a; 2000). Although we discussed this idea above in terms of the disclosive dynamics of techne, we can now see it in more
fundamental terms. Techne as building (ie, the disclosive act of dwelling) necessarily estranges because it builds a home where it can never properly belong. Indeed,
building is the act of marking and claiming that which is never properly ours. Things, symbols,
landscapes, and other buildings are not expressions of internal worlds (culturally or historically bequeathed) but are
contextual aspirations . They mark out (build) ‘a claim’ to ‘a world’. Building is how we, as mortals in the midst of
change, transformation, and death, endeavour to hold onto a world by claiming it as our own ; it is how we work to
build a place for ourselves even as such sites elude our mortal hands. This, for Heidegger, is the
destiny to which we have been delivered. And to reassure ourselves with the height of our buildings, the speed of our motorways, or the sheer
abundance of our material possessions is to delude ourselves from reckoning with this most basic situation; that is, the situation of not being at home, of not having a
place in the world that can resolutely be called our own.
2AC---Link---A2: Prolif
Nuclear weapons are bad. Less is good, even if unequal.
Ford 11 Chris Ford, Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. He previously served as U.S. Special
Representative for Nuclear Nonproliferation, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, and General Counsel to the U.S.
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, 1/10/11, Havea and Have-Nots: "Unfairness in nuclear Weapons possession,"
www.newparadigmsforum.com/NPFtestsite/?p=658
First, however, let’s provide some context. As I noted above, it is fascinating that in the long history of military technological have/have not
dynamics, the international politics of nuclear weaponry has acquired such a strong flavor of moral critique. To my knowledge, after all, one did
not see Xiongnu politics emphasizing how darned unfair it was of those nasty Chinese Emperors to monopolize the presumed secrets of China’s
bingjia strategic literature. Nor does the unfairness of Byzantine efforts to control the recipe for Greek Fire seem to have become a prevalent
trope of Frankish or Persian diplomacy. “Have nots” have surely always coveted powerful tools possessed by the
“haves,” or at least wished that the “haves” did not possess them . It seems pretty unusual, however, for non-
possessors to articulate such understandable envy and resentment in the moral language of “unfairness,” and
to assume that this presumed injustice should motivate the “haves” to change their behavior . This argument
seems to be a curiously modern phenomenon. One might respond that the very specialness of nuclear weapons makes such a position appropriate.
After all, while a local monopoly on iron swords may have given the Vikings some advantage in skirmishes with Native Americans in what the
Norsemen called Vinland, such technological asymmetry was not strategically decisive. (Indeed, the Vikings seem ultimately to have been
pushed out of the New World entirely.) If iron had threatened to offer the Vikings an insuperable advantage, would the Skraelings have been
justified in developing a moral language of “have/have not” resentment that demanded either the sharing of iron weaponry or Viking
disarmament in the name of achieving a global “iron zero”? I’m skeptical, but for the sake of argument let’s say “maybe.” The argument
that nuclear weapons are “special,” however, is a two-edged sword. Perhaps they are indeed so peculiarly potent and
militarily advantageous that their asymmetric possession is sufficiently “unfair” to compel sharing or disarmament. Such an argument,
however, sits only awkwardly – to say the least – with the simultaneous claim by many advocates of the “have/have not” critique that
nuclear weapons have no real utility in the modern world and can therefore safely be abandoned by their possessors. After all, it is hard to
paint nuclear weapons as being strategically decisive and useless at the same time . (If they are indeed
useless, the conclusion of “unfairness” hardly sounds very compelling. If they aren’t useless , however, it
may be appropriately hard to abolish them.) More importantly, any argument about the destructively
“special” character of nuclear weaponry cuts against the “unfairness critique ” in that it is this very
specialness that seems to rob the “have/have not” issue of its moral relevance . Unlike iron swords, the bingjia literature,
Greek Fire, or essentially all other past military technologies the introduction of which produced global control/acquisition dynamics, nuclear
weapons have introduced existential questions about the future of human civilization which utterly
swamp the conventional playground morality of unfair “have/have not” competition. No prior
technology held the potential to destroy humanity, making nuclear weapons – with the possible exception of
certain techniques of biological weaponry – a sui generis case to which the conventional “unfairness” critique
simply does not very persuasively apply. III. Implications Let me be clear about this. The moral critique of nuclear
weapons possession may yet speak to the issue of whether anyone should have them . (This is not the place for a
discussion of the feasibility of the remedies proposed by the disarmament community, but let us at least acknowledge the existence of a real
moral issue.) But this matter has nothing to do with “unfairness ” per se – and to the extent that it purports to,
one should give it little credence. If indeed nuclear weapons do menace the survival of humanity, it is
essentially irrelevant whether their possession is “unfairly” distributed – and it is certainly no solution to make
the global balance of weaponry more “fair” by allowing more countries to have them . (Disarmament advocates
hope to address the fairness problem by eliminating nuclear weapons, of course, but this is just icing. Disarmament is almost never articulated as
being driven primarily by fairness; the critical part of that argument is instead consequentialist, stressing the dangers that any nuclear weapons are
said to present.) As a moral critique, in other words, the fair/unfair dichotomy fails to speak intelligibly to the world’s
nuclear dilemma. It isn’t really about “fairness” at all. Given the entanglement of nuclear weapons issues with quasi-
existential questions potentially affecting the survival of millions or perhaps even billions of people, moreover, it stands
to reason that an “unfair” outcome that nonetheless staves off such horrors is a perfectly good
solution . On this scale, one might say, non-catastrophe entirely trumps accusations of “unfairness .”
Questions of stability are far more important than issues of asymmetric distribution . This, of course, has
powerful implications for nonproliferation policy, because pointing out the hollowness of the “unfairness” argument as
applied to nuclear weapons suggests the moral sustainability of nonproliferation even if complete nuclear
disarmament cannot be achieved and the world continues to be characterized by inequalities in weapons
possession. We forget this at our collective peril. Don’t get me wrong. “Unfairness” arguments will presumably continue to
have a political impact upon the diplomacy of nuclear nonproliferation, either as a consequence of genuine resentment or as a cynical
rationalization for the destabilizing pursuit of dangerous capabilities. (Indeed, one might even go so far as to suspect that the emergence of the
“unfairness” critique in modern diplomatic discourse is in some sense partly the result of how morally compelling nonproliferation is, in this
context, irrespective of the “fairness” of “have/have not” outcomes. Precisely because the moral case for nonproliferation-
driven inequality is so obvious and so compelling if such imbalance serves the interests of strategic
stability, perhaps it was necessary to develop a new rationale of “fairness” to help make proliferation aspirations seem more legitimate.
Skraelings, one imagines, did not need an elaborate philosophy of “fairness” in order to justify trying to steal
iron weapons; the desirability of such tools was simply obvious, and any effort to obtain them unsurprising and not in itself condemnable.) But
even in this democratic and egalitarian age, merely to incant the mantra of “unfairness” – or to inveigh against the existence of “haves” when
there also exist “have nots” – is not the same thing as having a compelling moral argument. Indeed, I would submit that we lose our
moral bearings if we allow “unfairness” arguments to distract us from what is really important
here: substantive outcomes in the global security environment. “Unfairness,” in other words, is an overrated critique,
and “fairness” is an overrated destination . At least where nuclear weapons are concerned, there are more
important considerations in play. Let us not forget this.
2AC---Link---A2: Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis doesn’t explain reality
Bunge 10 – Bunge, McGill University philosopher, 2010 (Mario, “Should Psychoanalysis Be in the
Science Museum?”, 10-5, http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20827806.200-should-psychoanalysis-
be-in-the-science-museum.html)
We should congratulate the Science Museum for setting up an exhibition on psychoanalysis. Exposure to pseudoscience greatly helps understand genuine science, just
as learning about tyranny helps in understanding democracy. Over the past 30 years, psychoanalysis has quietly been displaced in academia by scientific psychology.
But it persists in popular culture as well as being a lucrative profession. It is the psychology of those who have not bothered to learn psychology, and the
psychotherapy of choice for those who believe in the power of immaterial mind over body. Psychoanalysis is a bogus science because its
practitioners do not do scientific research. When the field turned 100, a group of psychoanalysts admitted
this gap and endeavoured to fill it. They claimed to have performed the first experiment showing that patients benefited from their treatment.
Regrettably, they did not include a control group and did not entertain the possibility of placebo effects.
Hence, their claim remains untested (The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol 81, p 513). More recently, a meta-analysis
published in American Psychologist (vol 65, p 98) purported to support the claim that a form of psychoanalysis
called psychodynamic therapy is effective. However, once again, the original studies did not involve control groups.
In 110 years, psychoanalysts have not set up a single lab. They do not participate in scientific congresses,
do not submit their papers to scientific journals and are foreign to the scientific community - a marginality
typical of pseudoscience. This does not mean their hypotheses have never been put to the test . True, they
are so vague that they are hard to test and some of them are, by Freud's own admission, irrefutable. Still,
most of the testable ones have been soundly refuted. For example, most dreams have no sexual content. The
Oedipus complex is a myth; boys do not hate their fathers because they would like to have sex with their mothers. The list goes on. As for
therapeutic efficacy, little is known because psychoanalysts do not perform double-blind clinical trials or follow-up studies. Psychoanalysis is a
pseudoscience. Its concepts are woolly and untestable yet are regarded as unassailable axioms. As a result
of such dogmatism, psychoanalysis has remained basically stagnant for more than a century , in contrast with
scientific psychology, which is thriving.
2AC---Link---A2: Terrorism
Diverse empirical sources support our claim---critical theory is awful scholarship
Schmid 9 – Chair in International Relations; the Director of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and
Political Violence at St. Andrews University(Alex, Perspectives on Terrorism, v.3, issue 4, Book Review
of “Critical Terrorism Studies. A new research agenda. by Richard Jackson”,
http://www.terrorismanalysts.com/pt/index.php?option=com_rokzine&view=article&id=96
The editors accuse, in their introduction “the orthodox field” of orthodox terrorism studies of functioning “ideologically in the service of existing power structures”, with their academic research.
Furthermore, they claim that orthodox scholars are frequently being used “to legitimise coercive intervention in the global South….” (p.6). The present volume is edited by three authors
associated with the Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Contemporary Political Violence (CSRV) in the Department of International Politics in Aberystwyth (Wales, UK). They also
happen to be editors of a new Routledge journal “Critical Studies on Terrorism’ . The “critical” refers principally but not exclusively to the “Frankfurt-via-Welsh School Critical Theory
Perspective”. The twelve contributors are not all equally “critical” in aHabermasian sense. The programmatic introduction of the editors is followed by two solid chapters from Magnus Ranstorp
(former Director of CSTPV, St. Andrews, and currently Director of the Centre for Asymmetric Threat Studies at the Swedish National Defence College) and Andrew Silke (formerly with the UK
Home Office and now Field Leader for Criminology at the University of East London). They both rightfully criticize some of the past sins and present shortcomings of the field of Terrorism
Studies. One of them approvingly quotes Marc Sageman who observed that “disagreements among experts are the driving force of the scientific enterprise”. Such disagreements, however, exist
the claim by some critical theorists that the field of traditional
among “orthodox” scholars like Sageman and Hoffman or Pape and Abrams. In that sense,
Terrorism Studies is ossified without them, is simply is not true . One of the problems with many of the adherents of the “critical”
school is that the focus is almost exclusively on the strawman they set up to shoot - ”orthodox” terrorism discourse rather than on the
practitioners of terrorism. Richard Jackson claims that “…most of what is accepted as well-founded ‘knowledge’ in terrorism studies is, in fact,
highly debatable and unstable” (p.74), dismissing thereby almost four decades of scholarship as “based on a series of ‘virulent myths’, ‘half-
truths’ and contested claims…biased towards Western state priorities” (p.80). For him “terrorism is…a social fact rather than a brute fact” and “…does not exist outside of the definitions and
practices which seek to enclose it, including those of the terrorism studies field” (pp.75-76). He objects to prevailing “problem-solving theories of terrorism” in favour of an approach that
questions “ the status quo and the dominant acts within it” (p.77). Another contributor, J.A. Sluka, argues, without offering any proof, that “terrorism is fundamentally a product of social
Behind many of the critical theorists who blame mainstream terrorism research for taking ‘the
inequality and state politics” (p. 139).
there is an agenda for changing the status quo and overthrowing existing power structures. There is, in itself, nothing wrong with
world as it finds it’
wanting a new and better world order. However, it is not going to be achieved by using an alternative discourse on terrorism and
counter-terrorism. Toros and Gunning, contributors of another chapter, state that “the sine qua non of Critical Theory is emancipation” (p. 99) and M. McDonald als puts “emancipation as central
to the study of terrorism” (p.121). However, there is not a single word on the non-emancipated position of women under Islam in general or among the Taliban and their friends from al-Qaeda in
particular.One of thestrength (some argue weakness) of Western thinking is its ability for self-criticism – something largely absent in the
Muslim world. In that sense, this volume falls within a Western tradition. However, self-criticism should not come at the cost of not criticising adversaries by using the same yardstick. In this
sense, this volume is strangely silent about the worldview of those terrorists who have no self-doubts and attack the Red Cross, the United Nations, NGOs and their fellow Muslims with equal
lack of scruples. A number of authors in the volume appear to equate terrorism uncritically with political violence in general while in fact it is more usefully thought of as one of some twenty
sub-categories of political violence - one characterized by deliberate attacks on civilians and non-combatants in order to intimidate, coerce or otherwise manipulate various audiences and parties
to a conflict. Part of the volume advocates reinventing the wheel. J. Gunning, for instance, recommends to employ Social Movement Theory for the study of terrorism. However, that theory has
Many “critical” statements in the volume are
been employed already explicitly or implicitly by a number of more orthodox scholars, e.g. Donatella della Porta.
unsupported by convincing evidence , e.g. when C. Sylvester and S. Parashar state “The September 11 attacks and the ongoing war on terror reinforce gender
hierarchy and power in international relations” (p.190). Jackson claims that the key question for critical terrorism theory is “who is terrorism research for and how does terrorism knowledge
support particular interests?” (p.224)It does not seem to occur to him that he could have studied this question by looking
at the practitioners of terrorism and study al-Qaeda’s ideological writings and its training and recruiting manuals . If CTS is a call for
“making a commitment to emancipatory praxis central to the research enterprise” (R. Jackson et al, p. 228), CTS academics should be the first on the barricades against jihadists who treat women
not as equals and who would, if they get their way, eradicate freedom of thought and religion for all mankind. It is sad that some leading proponents of C ritical
T errorism S tudies appear to be in fact uncritical and blind on one eye.
2AC---Link---A2: Threat Construction
Aff’s scenario planning and permutation’s consideration of revamped deterrence
posture ensures leaders can respond to nuclear crises – alt ensures escalatory
accidents
Delpech 12 ---- Thérèse, former director of strategic studies for France’s Atomic Energy Commission,
Ph.D. in philosophy (l’École Normale Supérieure), “Nuclear Deterrence in the 21st Century,”
http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2012/RAND_MG1103.pdf
One of its most important tasks is to keep humanity within the boundaries of acceptable historical
experiences.3 Sixty-seven years after 1945, most would consider a nuclear attack to be beyond those boundaries. The
variety of nuclear actors, the proliferation of cruise and ballistic missiles, thermonuclear weapons, and radical
ideologies have transformed the nuclear scene to a considerable extent since the end of World War II. Whether thinking
on nuclear weapons has followed a similarly impressive path, particularly since the dissolution of the USSR, is
questionable . There are numerous analyses and studies, but they do not match the quality and pertinence of those of the Cold War vintage.
While nuclear deterrence attracted an abundance of intellectual attention during the Cold War, since the 1950s there has been a decline in
thinking on this subject even as the risk of nuclear use has been rising. The absolute necessity of preventing extreme violence
among states (as opposed to nonstate actors) has
receded in our minds, even though it is prominent in our speeches. Humanity
does not learn much from events that do not happen. In a way, the very success of the deterrence enterprise during the Cold
War undermined its principal gain: Since no nuclear exchange took place, the notion of nuclear weapons as a threat
to our survival lost a good deal of force and a sense of urgency. Ideas have consequences. So does a lack of them .
During the Cold War, a mixture of deterrence, containment, conventional capabilities, and arms control seemed successful in preventing a nuclear
exchange with the Soviets. Luck may have played a part as well.4 Today’s
nuclear dangers seem to pale in comparison
with those of the Cold War. They pale even when compared with those of the 1990s, when Russia was weak, with a considerable and
poorly guarded nuclear stockpile and nuclear scientists and military officials reduced to poverty. At the time, a substantial effort was launched to
secure Russia’s weapons, nuclear materials, and scientists. New problems are arising now: nuclear terrorism; radical Islamists
challenging the Islamabad government; the ability of nonstate actors to bring India and Pakistan to the brink of war;
asymmetric nuclear threats coming from Iran and North Korea;5 Pakistan’s, Iran’s, and North Korea’s nuclear and
missile proliferation nexus; and China increasingly asserting its military achievements —including its nuclear,
ballistic missile, cyber, and space achievements.6 While many in the West tend to see nuclear weapons as instruments of
the past, other actors view them as weapons of the future . There are obvious gaps in Western thinking
and some disregard for those gaps. However unpleasant, it is imperative to address these . To start with,
consider the following reasons why another look at nuclear deterrence is important in the 21st century . The first is
obvious: In an era of extraordinary uncertainty, turmoil, and upheavals, it is good to keep a clear mind about
the most dangerous strategic situations contemporary leaders may face. There is little doubt that a nuclear crisis—or,
worse, a nuclear attack—whether effected by a nation-state or a nonstate actor, would be a critical situation. It should be
considered unlikely, but as long as it appears even remotely possible , the difficult choices that would be
required from governments ought to be understood for what they are, particularly in democratic societies. Such choices are
“deeply baffling even to the ablest minds,” as Bernard and Fawn Brodie wrote in From Crossbow to H-Bomb. 7 The “unthinkable”8 may
have become less unlikely in practice since reckless actors are entering the nuclear arena, but it is becoming
increasingly unlikely in Western minds at a time when even the political capacity of tolerating military casualties is questionable. Foreign
policy, notably Western foreign policy, continues to be made under the shadow of a nuclear strategy that is almost
forgotten or that is becoming empty. The consequence is that our ability to face a nuclear attack effectively may
be slipping through our fingers . If this is true, what the strategic planning community can contribute toward
preventing this loss (or preparing to deal with it, if necessary) is to revitalize nuclear thinking . This does not call for any
specific doctrine but for a top-quality intellectual debate on the concepts , old and new ; on the crises,
old and new ; and on the actors, whether they played a part on the nuclear scene in the past or are only just now entering it,
sometimes with masks on their faces
2AC---Link---A2: War
Taiwan conflict real and probable – prefer our evidence because of its dismissal of
improbable threats like nuc terror while prioritizing other risks
The absence of a chapter on nuclear terrorism, listed as the first threat in the 2010 U.S. Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), might
seem surprising to an American audience . There are two reasons for this omission: First, a number of excellent American
analyses on the subject have been published in recent years, and little can be added to them. Second, the author tends to agree with Brian
Jenkins, who wrote in 2008 that “it is hard to separate truth from myth” in this domain, and that “a world of
fantasies, nightmares, hoaxes, scams and stings” are not backed by evidence or historical records .4 This
is not to say that complacency is warranted, but that the anticipation of nuclear terrorism should not have such a high
degree of priority and should not drive American defense or nuclear policy. This is also true for Europe, where a British intelligence report
leaked to the press in 2007 predicted a large-scale nuclear attack by al Qaeda operatives “on par with Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”5 Sometimes
we succeed in terrorizing ourselves. Other nuclear realities look more troubling to this author: China’s
unabated nuclear and ballistic missile modernization , its lack of transparency on issues of command
and control, and the fact that a confrontation over Taiwan or over the South China Sea would pose the most
serious danger of nuclear war since 1962 ; Russia’s nuclear doctrine (overt and covert6 )coupled with military exercises
rehearsing the use of nuclear weapons against separatist forces (the 2010 Vostok maneuvers) and Moscow’s suspected continuous violation of the
Biological Weapons Convention (BWC);7 Pakistan’s perceived recklessness and its apparent inability to deal with the potentially mortal threat of
extremism; progress in the nuclear and ballistic missile programs of both Iran and North Korea, two non-status-quo nations; the number of
countries that will potentially be operating nuclear reactors by 2030;8 and, last but not least, the lack of sustained thinking on the
new conditions under which nuclear weapons might operate in the 21st century .
It’s THE path to nuclear war

In addition, the
evolving relationship between the U nited S tates and China is more likely to be vexed than
cooperative, not only on exchange rates and trade, but on security issues—notably on Taiwan and the South China Sea, the
issue capable of starting a nuclear conflict among major actors in this century. Although the aims of
China’s ballistic missile and nuclear modernization are not known, the fact that China is the only nuclear
weapon state building up its arsenal is now frequently underlined. How exactly will this arsenal evolve? How will the
relationship between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) evolve? This question depends heavily on the
political evolution in Beijing. How will China’s nuclear capabilities be coupled with its conventional means? Will
China follow in practice the prudent nuclear policy that it proclaims? These are difficult and decisive
questions for regional and international security, with implications for India and Pakistan and also
globally. Recent years show a clear deterioration of China’s relationship with the West, and even Moscow
recognizes behind closed doors that its relationship with Beijing is “complex.”11
*** IMPACTS
2AC---Impact---General
Debate and representational determinism solve their impact -- ongoing discourse
clarifies the representation and our images aren’t read unidirectionally
Rundle 10 ---- Michelle, BA in Political Science and International Studies (University of Southern
Indiana), MPA in Public Administration (University of Southern Indiana), former Research Associate at
the Office of Planning, Research, & Assessment at Southern Indiana, “Meltdowns, Cover-Ups and
Mutants: Pop Culture’s Perversion of Nuclear Energy,” Indiana Journal of Political Science, Volume 13,
http://www.indianapsa.org/2010/article5.pdf
Throughout the course of our article, we have tried to remain objective and present an unbiased finding. As such, we
have presented arguments from both sides . Although pro and anti-nuclear scientists draw the same data,
they interpret the information differently , leading to controversy. Still, much of what was read in opposition to
nuclear energy was not based in fact or scientific reasoning; rather, they were sensationalized statements to scare. The cause for nuclear energy’s
anti-popularity spiral may be due to rumor mongering. As shown in this article, many of the arguments against nuclear energy
are unfounded. Only through open dialogue, cross-discipline communication, and education can
citizens obtain the tools and perspective to make well informed decisions regarding nuclear
energy policies. No longer is it acceptable to be swayed by Hollywood and the media sensationalist ideas of nuclear energy. We have an
obligation to ourselves and to future generations to approach these issues with a spirit of scientific
inquiry and with willingness to cross-disciplines in order to finally allow the most significant scientific
discovery in the modern era its chance to flourish peacefully and to better living conditions for human
beings in every region.
2AC---Impact---A2: Endless War
No endless war
Marty 71 (William R. – Associate Professor of Political Science at Memphis State University –
“Nonviolence, Violence, and Reason,” The Journal of Politics, Vol. 33, No. 1, Feb., 1971,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2128530)
The defenders of nonviolence level a second charge against ¶ violence- that violence leads to more violence in
an unending chain ¶ of hatred, revenge, and destruction . This argument is often couched ¶ in terms of
international politics where wars, presumably, lead to ¶ the humiliation of one side, which leads in turn to a desire for re- ¶
venge and to further wars. This argument is plausible because the ¶ chain of events described coincides closely with much of the history
¶ of warfare. Nevertheless, the sequence is not invariable . The ¶ First World War led, fairly directly, to the Second
World War, but ¶ the sequence after the Second World War is not as clear. The ¶ United States and Britain,
victorious powers in the war, are now on ¶ friendly terms with both the West German and Japanese govern- ¶ ments,
the vanquished powers. There are a number of reasons for ¶ this-the type of peace imposed, the international balance of forces, ¶ and
others-but the fact remains that two nations, conquered by ¶ violence, now have friendly relations with the nations that con- ¶ quered them,
Violence , in international relations, does not always breed an un- ¶
despite the total nature of the war that was fought. ¶
ending chain of hatred, desire for revenge, and further violence. ¶ Neither does the refusal to use force , or to threaten
its use, guaran- ¶ tee peace and friendship , as British Prime Minister Neville Cham- ¶ berlain found out after
Munich.
2AC---Impact---A2: Environment
Environment resilient and no impact
Raudsepp-Hearne 10 (Ciarra, PhD in the Department of Geography, Elena M. Bennett is an
assistant professor in the Department of Natural Resource Sciences and McGill School of Environment,
Graham K. MacDonald is a doctoral student in the Department of Natural Resource Sciences, and Laura
Pfeifer is a master’s student in the Department of Natural Resource Sciences and the McGill School of
Environment, all at McGill University, in Montreal, Quebec. Garry D. Peterson is a researcher at the
Stockholm Resilience Centre and the Department of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology, at
Stockholm University. Maria Tengö is currently a researcher at the Department ofSystems Ecology and
the Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University. Tim Holland currentlyworks for SNV
Netherlands Development Organisation in Hanoi, Vietnam. Karina Benessaiah is currently a doctoral
student in the Department of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University.
September 2010; “Untangling the Environmentalist’s Paradox: Why Is Human Well-being Increasing as
Ecosystem Services Degrade?”; http://www.aibs.org/bioscience-press-releases/resources/Raudsepp-
Hearne.pdf)
Although many people expect ecosystem degradation to have a negative impact on human well-being,
this measure¶ appears to be increasing even as provision of ecosystem¶ services declines. From George Perkins
Marsh’s Man and¶ Nature in 1864 to today (Daily 1997), scientists have described¶ how the deterioration of the many services provided¶ by
nature, such as food, climate regulation, and recreational¶ areas, is endangering human well-being. However, the Millennium¶
Ecosystem Assessment (MA), a comprehensive study of¶ the world’s resources, found that declines in the majority of¶
ecosystem services assessed have been accompanied by steady¶ gains in human well-being at the global
scale (MA 2005). We¶ argue that to understand this apparent paradox, we need to¶ better understand the ways in which ecosystem services are¶
important for human well-being, and also whether human¶ well-being can continue to rise in the future despite projected¶ continued declines in
ecosystem services. In this article, we¶ summarize the roots of the paradox and assess evidence¶ relating to alternative explanations of the
conflicting trends¶ in ecosystem services and human well-being.¶ The environmentalist’s expectation could be articulated ¶
as: “Ecological degradation and simplification will be followed by a decline in the provision of ecosystem
services, leading to a decline in human well-being.” Supporters¶ of this hypothesis cite evidence of unsustainable¶ rates of
resource consumption, which in the past have had¶ severe impacts on human well-being, even causing the collapse¶ of civilizations (e.g.,
Diamond 2005). Analyses of the¶ global ecological footprint have suggested that since 1980,¶ humanity’s footprint has exceeded the amount of
resources¶ that can be sustainably produced by Earth (Wackernagel¶ et al. 2002). Although the risk of local and regional
societies¶ collapsing as a result of ecological degradation is much¶ reduced by globalization and trade, the
environmentalist’s¶ expectation remains: Depletion of ecosystem services translates¶ into fewer benefits for humans, and therefore
lower¶ net human well-being than would be possible under better¶ ecological management.¶ By focusing on ecosystem services—the benefits
that¶ humans obtain from ecosystems—the MA set out specifically¶ to identify and assess the links between ecosystems and¶ human well-being
(MA 2005). The MA assessed ecosystem ¶ services in four categories: (1) provisioning services, such ¶ as
food, water, and forest products; (2) regulating services, which modulate changes in climate and regulate
floods,¶ disease, waste, and water quality; (3) cultural services, which ¶ comprise recreational, aesthetic,
and spiritual benefits; and¶ (4) supporting services, such as soil formation, photosynthesis, ¶ and nutrient
cycling (MA 2003). Approximately 60%¶ (15 of 24) of the ecosystem services assessed by the MA were¶ found to be in decline. Most of the
declining services were¶ regulating and supporting services, whereas the majority of¶ expanding ecosystem services were provisioning services,¶
such as crops, livestock, and fish aquaculture (table 1). At the¶ same time, consumption of more than 80% of the assessed¶ services was found to
be increasing, across all categories. In¶ other words, the use of most ecosystem services is increasing ¶ at the same time
that Earth’s capacity to provide these¶ services is decreasing.¶ The MA conceptual framework encapsulated the
environmentalist’s¶ expectation, suggesting tight feedbacks between¶ ecosystem services and human well-being. However, the¶
assessment found that aggregate human well-being grew¶ steadily over the past 50 years, in part because
of the rapid¶ conversion of ecosystems to meet human demand for food, ¶ fiber, and fuel (figure 1; MA 2005). The
MA defined human¶ well-being with five components: basic materials, health,¶ security, good social relations, and freedom of choice and¶
actions, where freedom of choice and actions is expected to¶ emerge from the other components of well-being. Although¶ the MA investigated
each of the five components of well-being¶ at some scales and in relation¶ to some ecosystem services,¶ the assessment of global¶ trends in human
well-being¶ relied on the human development¶ index (HDI) because of¶ a lack of other data. The HDI¶ is an aggregate measure of¶ life
expectancy, literacy, educational¶ attainment, and per¶ capita GDP (gross domestic¶ product) that does not capture¶ all five components of¶ well-
being (Anand and Sen¶ 1992).¶
2AC---Impact---A2: Ethics
Consequences first – unintended consequences must be observed because they cause
violence and focus on intentions obscures material conditions
Issac 2 (Jeffery, Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, Dissent, Vol. 49 No. 2, Spring)
Politics, in large part, involves contests over the distribution and use of power. To accomplish anything in the political world one must attend to
the means that are necessary to bring it about. And to develop such means is to develop, and to exercise, power. To say this is not to say that
power is beyond morality. It is to say that power is not reducible to morality. As writers such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold
Niebuhr, Hannah Arendt have taught, an unyielding concern with moral goodness undercuts political responsibility.
The concern may be morally laudable, reflecting a kind of personal integrity, but it suffers from three fatal flaws: (1) It fails to see that the
purity of one’s intentions does not ensure the achievement of what one intends. Abjuring violence or refusing to
make common cause with morally comprised parties may seem like the right thing, but if such tactics entail impotence, then it is
hard to view them as serving any moral good beyond the clean conscience of their supporters; (2) it fails
to see that in a world of real violence and injustice, moral purity is not simply a form of powerlessness, it is often a
form of complicity in injustice. This is why, from the standpoint of politics-as opposed to religion-pacifism is always a potentially
immoral stand. In categorically repudiating violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain violent injustices with any effect; and (3 ) it fails
to see that politics is as much about unintended consequences as it is about intentions; it is the effects of
action, rather than the motives of action, that is most significant. Just as the alignment with “good” may engender impotence,
it is often the pursuit of “good” that generates evil. This is the lesson of communism in the twentieth
century: it is not enough that one’s goals be sincere or idealistic; it is equally important, always, to ask
about the effects of pursuing these goals and to judge these effects in pragmatic and historically contextualized
ways. Moral absolutism inhibits THIS judgment. It alienates those who are not true believers. It promotes arrogance. And it
undermines political effectiveness.
2AC---Impact---A2: Extinction Inevitable
No inevitable extinction
Johnson 3 David Johnson has a DPhil. in English and Related Literature (York University), an MA
(Distinction) in Continental Philosophy (Warwick University) and a BA (Hons) in Literature and
Philosophy (Middlesex Polytechnic). Time & Society copyright © 2003 available via SAGE database
I shall assume that time cannot be separated from space, and that time is essentially a view of what happens to space. If we
see time as encompassing all of space, it is difficult to see time as rushing headlong towards an end, since we must
imagine time as having to move through the tangled matter of space to get to any end: a tortuous procedure.
Time does not cut through space instantly like a magic knife towards an end, so why should we view all
time from its end? Moreover, time is ‘everything that happens’, involving the irreducible durations of pleasure or pain, slavery or
sovereignty. Again, with such a rich view of time, it is hard to see how time can be authentically described as slipping
easily towards its extinction. Since time is made up of everything that occurs, the philosophical act of
analysing time from the point of view of the annihilation of all occurrence is narrow to the most extreme
degree. How can this backward glance, this posthumous look at time from the illusory vantage point of nothingness, not be an emaciated view,
a ‘little’ view? How can such a narrow, such a restricted view of time not be a slave perspective in the Nietzschean sense?
2AC---Impact---A2: Interventionism
No interventions – Fear of humanitarian interventions is overstated and a relic of 90s
policy – public opposition and Congressional checks
Malone 17 ---- Clare, Senior Political Writer featured in 538/The New Yorker/The American Prospect,
B.A. in English and Government (Georgetown University), “America’s Fickle Relationship with
Humanitarian Intervention,” 4/10, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/americas-fickle-relationship-with-
humanitarian-intervention/
The purpose of President Trump’s airstrikes on a Syrian government airfield was, according to Trump, to secure the national
security interests of the U.S. “and deter the spread and use of deadly chemical weapons.”
But there were apparently other, more humanitarian considerations for the president. He opened his televised remarks on Thursday with
a statement about the lives that had been lost in the sarin gas attack and the cruel nature of their deaths: “It was a slow and brutal death for so many, even beautiful
babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack. No child of God should ever suffer such horror.” Trump
was clearly moved to action by the
but through the years, American public opinion has been mixed on the subject of
horror of the attack on civilians,
humanitarian grounds for foreign intervention.
The early polling about Trump’s decision to strike suggests there’s broad support for it, but Syrian intervention on humanitarian grounds
hasn’t been popular in the past. In the fall of 2013, when President Obama sought congressional approval for
military action against Bashar al-Assad’s government after it used chemical weapons on civilians only 36 percent of
Americans favored the U.S. taking military action to reduce Syria’s chemical weapons use. Fifty-one percent of those surveyed
opposed military action on these grounds. ( Obama’s effort failed .)
But the contours of the Syrian crisis changed when the I slamic S tate began to operate in the country. Americans’ calculus appears to
have shifted as well. A poll from last year showed that Americans generally supported limited intervention in Syria against extremist groups — 72 percent were in
favor of airstrikes against them, and 57 percent were in favor of special operations forces working in the country.
That difference — more support for acting against the Islamic State, an international terror threat, than against the Assad government’s
home-turf war crimes — speaks to Americans’ fraught relationship with humanitarian intervention .
Looking at the last 20 years or so of American debates over humanitarian intervention in conflict zones around the world, one sees ebbs and flows in support,
reflecting the varying degrees of success of American missions abroad. (I looked at public opinion surrounding the conflicts in Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo and
Darfur.)
Americans started the last decade of the 20th century bullish on American intervention in humanitarian crises. President George
H.W. Bush announced he was sending troops into Somalia’s civil war and famine in December 1992, and a Gallup/Newsweek poll that month showed that a majority
But less than a year later, in October 1993, 18 Americans soldiers died in the
of Americans (66 percent) approved of this move.
Battle of Mogadishu while Bill Clinton was president. That seemed to have serious influence on American opinion of
humanitarian intervention.
In June of 1994, in the midst of the three-month killing spree in Rwanda that would result in the deaths of 800,000 people, CBS News asked
poll respondents if “in order to stop the killing in Rwanda” they favored or opposed sending in ground troops. Sixty-one percent
opposed the effort. When the same poll asked if the “ U nited S tates has a responsibility to do something to stop the killing in Rwanda,”
51 percent of respondents said the country did not have that moral obligation .
This 1990s turn against intervention — likely with the deaths in Mogadishu still fresh in Americans’ minds — continued with the
Bosnian war. In early 1994, as NATO bombing began and Clinton declared the U.S. willing to aid in the effort, Americans still
seemed uneasy with the idea of a moral mandate. A Time/CNN poll in February of that year asked if respondents thought
“the U nited S tates has a moral obligation to protect the citizens of Sarajevo and Bosnia.” Fifty percent said no .
After the NATO action the course of events shifted bloodily and the war took on new dimensions in the global consciousness. In October 1995, the first news reports
of the July massacre in the town of Srebrenica began to surface; over 7,000 Muslim men were killed over the course of a couple of days.Perhaps with the Bosnian
massacres on their mind, Americans were more amenable to intervening when the war in Kosovo reared its head and NATO began a bombing campaign in March of
1999. A February 1999 Gallup poll asked if the U.S. had “a moral obligation to help keep the peace in Kosovo, or not,” and 52 percent of respondents said it did. On
the same survey, respondents were asked whether they would “favor or oppose the U.S. and its allies committing a small number of ground troops in order to help
establish peace in that region.” Sixty-six percent of respondents favored ground troops, a stunning turnaround from only four years prior, when the Rwandan and
Bosnian questions were on the table.1
The dawn of thenew century and the George W. Bush administration of course changed American foreign policy — the attacks on
Sept. 11, 2001, and subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan left an American public overwhelmed by overseas
conflict . Perhaps because of this, the killings in the Darfur region of Sudan resonated less urgently with the public.
All this despite the U.S. Congress formally declaring the killings in the Darfur region of Sudan to
be “genocide” and Bush also calling the Darfur killings “genocide” in 2005. But asked to rank a list of foreign policy
priorities in a July 2006 NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, only 7 percent of respondents said “dealing with the genocide in Darfur” should rank as
the U.S.’s No. 1 foreign policy priority. Stabilizing Iraq, fighting the war on terrorism, and “dealing with China as a growing superpower” were the primary concerns
of the public.
Trump’s Syria intervention comes at a moment when the U.S. is questioning its role abroad . The president ran on a
policy of “ America first ,” an idea that resonated with many in the public who had soured on the effects of outsourcing
and decades-long conflicts in the Middle East. Trump himself seemed at times to sneer at the idea that the U.S. bore a moral obligation unique unto
itself; “you think our country is so innocent?” he said, responding to a question about Vladimir Putin’s penchant for eliminating political opponents. Some have
speculated that his foreign policy will be more isolationist, but the events of this week cast that into somewhat more doubt.
The U.S. has not always held itself to the standard of the superpower with a collective mindset of “to whom much has been
given and much is expected.” In May of 1940, People’s Research Survey asked “would it be wiser for us to join the war if
the allies seem to be losing or to stay out in the hope that we can live in peace with the new German empire if Hitler wins?”
Sixty-two percent of Americans answered that they’d prefer to stay out and take their chances with Mr.
Hitler.
2AC---Impact---A2: Otherization/Scapegoating
Particularity beats their overly essentialist notions of security – our form doesn’t
produce bad policy or scapegoating
-Liberal democracy provides checks vs bad policy
-Security spurs cooperation solving scapegoating (i.e. the emancipatory community)
In a 2004 article, Claudia Aradau (2004) set out the terms for a normatively defined debate over securitization/desecuritization as negative/positive conceptions. In the
article, Aradau
defines securitization as negative inasmuch as it s mode of extraordinary politics necessarily both institutionalizes
fast-track decisionmaking (‘process’) and produces categories of enemy others (‘outcome’). Additionally, while desecuritization (i.e.
maintaining issues in, or returning issues to, the realm of ‘normal’ politics)1 thereby offers the possibility of a more positive conception, Aradau argues that its
transformatory potential is severely circumscribed, as the normal political mode is itself invariably subject to the same institutional sovereign authority and
domination as securitization. For Aradau, the
solution to this predicament was therefore to escape security and
reconceptualize politics according to a different logic, one ‘based on universal address and recognition .
Such a logic disrupts the exclusionary logic of security and, at the same time, furnishes a principle upon which a new relationality with the other can be conceived’
(Aradau, 2004: 401; see also Aradau, 2008). Aradau’s
critique of security/securitization, particularly her claim that the concept
indeed corresponds to Carl Schmitt’s notion of the political (decisionist/exclusionary), reflects an increasing concern
with the notion of ‘positive’ security/securitization. While Aradau argues that securitization inevitably produces categories of ‘haves’ and ‘have-
nots’ – those that belong to the political community and those that do not; as she succinctly puts it, ‘we cannot all be equal sharers of security’ (Aradau, 2008: 73) –
other writers (e.g. McSweeney, 1999; Booth, 2005, 2007; McDonald, 2008) offer different formulations that are critical of an
essentialization of security that reflects the Schmittian mode of politics. For Ken Booth (2007: 138), for instance,
an exclusionary sense of ‘us’ and ‘them’ is brought into question by what he calls an ‘emancipatory
community’: An emancipatory community recognizes that people have multiple identities, that a person’s identity cannot be satisfactorily
defined by any single attribution … and that people must be allowed to live simultaneously in a variety of communities
expressing their multifaceted lives.2 On the one hand, the present article resides firmly within the context of this general debate inasmuch as it is concerned with
particular understandings of ‘negative’ (and thus also ‘positive’) in attempts to define the meaning of security. On the other hand, however, it also has a more specific
focus, in that its
argument is set squarely against the Copenhagen School’s notion of securitization . There are a
couple of reasons for the adoption of such an approach. First,
a focus on securitization illuminates some assumptions in a
particular way. For example, Rita’s Floyd’s (2010) most recent work on the positiveness/negativeness of environmental security is
predicated on an understanding of, and certain revisions to, the securitization concept with regard to ‘outcome’. Second, a
focus on securitization also brings with it other assumptions that are largely absent from the more general
debate, assumptions related to ‘process’ and to the proposition that (successful) securitizations are bad for democracy. In other words, the
normative critique of securitization has also generated more particular thinking over what is considered positive and negative. Accordingly, my intention is to make
evident the terms of the debate that have served to inform securitization as a negative concept. In my attempt to do so, I
make two main arguments.
The first, which relates to to process, is that the
extent to which securitization necessitates a lack of openness and
deliberation has been overexaggerated : in the context of liberal democracies, legislation is invariably
marked by a greater semblance of oversight than that assumed by Aradau and others.
The second main argument, which relates to outcome, is that although securitization might indeed function
in accordance with what Ole Wæver (1995) has called the ‘logic of war’, its mode of extraordinary politics belies an
engagement with different constructions that also serve to reveal more non-divisive referents and
cooperative practices . In the first part of the article, I set out the terms of the debate according to the concerns with process and outcome, before moving
on in the second part to make clear the aforementioned arguments.
2AC---Impact---A2: Root Cause
No root causes
Swanson 5 Jacinda Swanson is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Western. Michigan
University – Theory, Culture & Society August 2005 vol. 22 no. 4 87-118 – DOI:
10.1177/0263276405054992 –The online version of this article can be found –
http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/22/4/87
It is thus misleading to suggest that social relations are ever solely economic, political or cultural, or that
the causes of and remedies for unjust social arrangements are singular (see also Butler, 1997c: 273, 276; Young, 1997:
154–6; Sayer, 1999). Although Fraser insists on the thorough imbrication of culture and economics, her emphasis on the two categories of redistribution and
recognition and on root causes undermines the more complex understanding she articulates elsewhere.6 Moreover, despite her
commitment to perspectival dualism – and thus her rejection of substantive dualism and economism – in several instances Fraser describes the economy and
capitalism in economically reductionist and determinist terms (2003: 53, 58, 214–18). For
instance, although she correctly insists that
capitalism and culture interact, she often appears to conceptualize capitalism and other economic
activities as in themselves fundamentally economic practices that function independently of political and
cultural processes, and, related, appears to conceive economic behavior/phenomena as devoid of values. To cite just a few examples, Fraser provides the
following conceptualizations: ‘In this marketized zone, interaction is not directly regulated by patterns of cultural value. It is governed, rather by the functional
interlacing of strategic imperatives, as individuals act to maximize self-interest’ (2003: 58); ‘system integration, in which interaction is coordinated by the functional
interlacing of the unintended consequences of a myriad of individual strategies’; and ‘a quasi-objective, anonymous, impersonal market order that follows a logic of
its own. This market order is culturally embedded, to be sure. But it is not directly governed by cultural schemas of evaluation’ (2003: 214). As
the concept
of overdetermination shows, ‘economic’ practices themselves depend on specific (cultural)
knowledges, values and discourses, as well as specific (political) rules and regulations (and vice versa). Values are therefore not confined to the cultural status
order.7 In addition to discourses and knowledges, values, for example, constitute ideas and behavior related to business enterprise success and purposes, rational
considerations and calculations, individual self-interest, appropriate and desirable objects of economic production and exchange, etc. (Amariglio and Ruccio, 1994;
Watkins, 1998). The theoretical perspective I am advocating here thus urges both the multiplication of analytical categories and concrete empirical investigations of
the numerous conditions of existence (located throughout society) of any unjust practice (see also Smith, 2001: 121). It consequently suggests that overcoming
any given form of oppression most likely will require transforming a wide range of cultural, economic
and political practices.
2AC---Impact---A2: Serial Policy Failure
No serial policy failure – liberal demo provides sufficient checks, sometimes
extraordinary politics are good, and their evidence assumes Cold War politics
Securitized issues indeed have the potential to disrupt the processes of open and accountable government: through its very nature, fast-tracking
serves to limit the proper functioning of normal politics. But, extraordinary politics (in the form of the expedition of legislation) does
not mean an abandonment of legislative mechanisms : while the legislative process is surely accelerated, a
degree of scrutiny and oversight nevertheless remains . As a result, in the context of liberal democracies,
securitization rarely resembles Schmittian decisionism. Rather, the commitment to maintaining openness and deliberation in
the relationship between the executive and the legislature equates the concept far more with Wæver’s own preferred Arendtian politics. Indeed
(Paris School contentions aside),25 as Olav Knudsen makes clear, the speed and silence of securitization is largely
characteristic of the military sector, particularly during the Cold War period. However, things ‘just aren’t so any
more. In the post-Cold War period, agenda-setting has been much easier to influence than the
securitization approach assumes’ (Knudsen, 2001: 359). Besides which, in certain circumstances there are also
dangers involved in not expediting legislation. In highlighting how securitization can give the necessary prominence to some
problems, for example, Booth (2007: 168) warns against the general recourse to desecuritization (politicization):
Desecuritisation can disempower. Having issues settled by ‘ordinary’ politics is a nice idea: who would
not prefer it to the threat of political violence? But ‘ ordinary’ politics might not help in extraordinary
circumstances ; indeed, treating extraordinary issues as ordinary politics is a problem, not a solution.
2AC---Impact---A2: Structural Violence
We control impact uniqueness – global trend toward less violence now
Pinker ‘11 (Steven, Harvard College Professor of Psychology – Harvard University, “Violence Vanquished”, Wall Street Journal, 9-24,
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904106704576583203589408180.html? mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTTopStories)
On the day this article appears, you will read about a shocking act of violence. Somewhere in the world there will be a terrorist
bombing, a senseless murder, a bloody insurrection. It's impossible to learn about these catastrophes without thinking, "What is the world coming
to?" With all its wars, murder and genocide, history might suggest that the taste for blood is human nature.
Not so, argues Harvard Prof. Steven Pinker. He talks to WSJ's Gary Rosen about the decline in violence in recent decades and his new book,
"The Better Angels of Our Nature." But a better question may be, "How bad was the world in the past?" Believe it or not, the world of the past
was much worse. Violence has been in decline for thousands of years, and today we may be living in
the most peaceable era in the existence of our species. The decline, to be sure, has not been smooth. It has not brought violence
down to zero, and it is not guaranteed to continue. But it
is a persistent historical development, visible on scales from
millennia to years, from the waging of wars to the spanking of children. This claim, I know, invites skepticism, incredulity, and
sometimes anger. We tend to estimate the probability of an event from the ease with which we can recall examples, and scenes of carnage are
more likely to be beamed into our homes and burned into our memories than footage of people dying of old age. There will always be enough
violent deaths to fill the evening news, so people's impressions of violence will be disconnected from its actual likelihood. Bartolomeo
Manfredi/Getty Images 'Cain Murdering Abel,' Bartolomeo Manfredi, c. 1610 Evidence of our bloody history is not hard to find. Consider the
genocides in the Old Testament and the crucifixions in the New, the gory mutilations in Shakespeare's tragedies and Grimm's fairy tales, the
British monarchs who beheaded their relatives and the American founders who dueled with their rivals. Today the decline in these brutal
practices can
be quantified. A look at the numbers shows that over the course of our history, humankind has been blessed with six
major declines of violence. The first was a process of pacification: the transition from the anarchy of the hunting, gathering and horticultural societies in which our species spent most of its evolutionary history
to the first agricultural civilizations, with cities and governments, starting about 5,000 years ago. For centuries, social theorists like Hobbes and Rousseau speculated from their armchairs about what life was like in a "state of nature."
Nowadays we can do better. Forensic archeology—a kind of "CSI: Paleolithic"—can estimate rates of violence from the proportion of skeletons in ancient sites with bashed-in skulls, decapitations or arrowheads embedded in bones.
And ethnographers can tally the causes of death in tribal peoples that have recently lived outside of state control. Enlarge Image These investigations show that, on average, about 15% of people in prestate eras died violently,
compared to about 3% of the citizens of the earliest states. Tribal violence commonly subsides when a state or empire imposes control over a territory, leading to the various "paxes" (Romana, Islamica, Brittanica and so on) that are
familiar to readers of history. It's not that the first kings had a benevolent interest in the welfare of their citizens. Just as a farmer tries to prevent his livestock from killing one another, so a ruler will try to keep his subjects from cycles
of raiding and feuding. From his point of view, such squabbling is a dead loss—forgone opportunities to extract taxes, tributes, soldiers and slaves. The second decline of violence was a civilizing process that is best documented in
Europe. Historical records show that between the late Middle Ages and the 20th century, European countries saw a 10- to 50-fold decline in their rates of homicide. The numbers are consistent with narrative histories of the brutality of
life in the Middle Ages, when highwaymen made travel a risk to life and limb and dinners were commonly enlivened by dagger attacks. So many people had their noses cut off that medieval medical textbooks speculated about
techniques for growing them back. Historians attribute this decline to the consolidation of a patchwork of feudal territories into large kingdoms with centralized authority and an infrastructure of commerce. Criminal justice was
nationalized, and zero-sum plunder gave way to positive-sum trade. People increasingly controlled their impulses and sought to cooperate with their neighbors. The third transition, sometimes called the Humanitarian Revolution, took
off with the Enlightenment. Governments and churches had long maintained order by punishing nonconformists with mutilation, torture and gruesome forms of execution, such as burning, breaking, disembowelment, impalement and
sawing in half. The 18th century saw the widespread abolition of judicial torture, including the famous prohibition of "cruel and unusual punishment" in the eighth amendment of the U.S. Constitution. At the same time, many nations
began to whittle down their list of capital crimes from the hundreds (including poaching, sodomy, witchcraft and counterfeiting) to just murder and treason. And a growing wave of countries abolished blood sports, dueling,
witchhunts, religious persecution, absolute despotism and slavery. Enlarge Image The fourth major transition is the respite from major interstate war that we have seen since the end of World War II. Historians sometimes refer to it as
the Long Peace. Today we take it for granted that Italy and Austria will not come to blows, nor will Britain and Russia. But centuries ago, the great powers were almost always at war, and until quite recently, Western European
countries tended to initiate two or three new wars every year. The cliché that the 20th century was "the most violent in history" ignores the second half of the century (and may not even be true of the first half, if one calculates violent
deaths as a proportion of the world's population). Though it's tempting to attribute the Long Peace to nuclear deterrence, non-nuclear developed states have stopped fighting each other as well. Political scientists point instead to the
growth of democracy, trade and international organizations—all of which, the statistical evidence shows, reduce the likelihood of conflict. They also credit the rising valuation of human life over national grandeur—a hard-won lesson
of two world wars. The fifth trend, which I call the New Peace, involves war in the world as a whole, including developing nations. Since 1946, several organizations have tracked the number of armed conflicts and their human toll
world-wide. The bad news is that for several decades, the decline of interstate wars was accompanied by a bulge of civil wars, as newly independent countries were led by inept governments, challenged by insurgencies and armed by
the cold war superpowers. The less bad news is that civil wars tend to kill far fewer people than wars between states. And the best news is that, since the peak of the cold war in the 1970s and '80s, organized conflicts of all kinds—
The rate of documented

civil wars, genocides, repression by autocratic governments, terrorist attacks—have declined throughout the world, and their death tolls have declined even more precipitously.
direct deaths
from political violence (war, terrorism, genocide and warlord militias) in the past decade is an
unprecedented few hundredths of a percentage point. Even if we multiplied that rate to account for unrecorded deaths and the
victims of war-caused disease and famine, it would not exceed 1%. The most immediate cause of this New Peace was the demise of communism,
which ended the proxy wars in the developing world stoked by the superpowers and also discredited genocidal ideologies that had justified the
sacrifice of vast numbers of eggs to make a utopian omelet. Another contributor was the expansion of international peacekeeping forces, which
really do keep the peace—not always, but far more often than when adversaries are left to fight to the bitter end. Finally, the postwar era
has seen a cascade of "rights revolutions" —a growing revulsion against aggression on smaller scales. In the developed world, the
civil rights movement obliterated lynchings and lethal pogroms, and the women's-rights movement has helped to shrink the incidence of rape and
the beating and killing of wives and girlfriends. In recent decades, the movement for children's rights has significantly reduced rates of spanking,
bullying, paddling in schools, and physical and sexual abuse. And the campaign for gay rights has forced governments in the developed world to
repeal laws criminalizing homosexuality and has had some success in reducing hate crimes against gay people. * * * * Why has violence declined
so dramatically for so long? Is it because violence has literally been bred out of us, leaving us more peaceful by nature? This seems unlikely.
Evolution has a speed limit measured in generations, and many of these declines have unfolded over decades or even years. Toddlers continue to
kick, bite and hit; little boys continue to play-fight; people of all ages continue to snipe and bicker, and most of them continue to harbor violent
fantasies and to enjoy violent entertainment. It's more likely that human nature has always comprised inclinations toward violence and
inclinations that counteract them—such as self-control, empathy, fairness and reason—what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our
nature." Violence has declined because historical circumstances have increasingly favored our better angels.
The most obvious of these pacifying forces has been the state, with its monopoly on the legitimate use of force. A disinterested
judiciary and police can defuse the temptation of exploitative attack, inhibit the impulse for revenge and circumvent the self-
serving biases that make all parties to a dispute believe that they are on the side of the angels. We see evidence of the pacifying effects of government in the way that rates of killing declined
following the expansion and consolidation of states in tribal societies and in medieval Europe. And we can watch the movie in reverse when violence erupts in zones of anarchy, such as the Wild West, failed states and neighborhoods controlled by mafias and street gangs, who can't call 911
or file a lawsuit to resolve their disputes but have to administer their own rough justice. Another pacifying force has been commerce, a game in which everybody can win. As technological progress allows the exchange of goods and ideas over longer distances and among larger groups of
trading partners, other people become more valuable alive than dead. They switch from being targets of demonization and dehumanization to potential partners in reciprocal altruism. For example, though the relationship today between America and China is far from warm, we are unlikely to
declare war on them or vice versa. Morality aside, they make too much of our stuff, and we owe them too much money. A third peacemaker has been cosmopolitanism—the expansion of people's parochial little worlds through literacy, mobility, education, science, history, journalism and
mass media. These forms of virtual reality can prompt people to take the perspective of people unlike themselves and to expand their circle of sympathy to embrace them. These technologies have also powered an expansion of rationality and objectivity in human affairs. People are now less
likely to privilege their own interests over those of others. They reflect more on the way they live and consider how they could be better off. Violence is often reframed as a problem to be solved rather than as a contest to be won. We devote ever more of our brainpower to guiding our better
angels. It is probably no coincidence that the Humanitarian Revolution came on the heels of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, that the Long Peace and rights revolutions coincided with the electronic global village. Whatever its causes, the implications of the historical decline of
violence are profound. So much depends on whether we see our era as a nightmare of crime, terrorism, genocide and war or as a period that, in the light of the historical and statistical facts, is blessed by unprecedented levels of peaceful coexistence. Bearers of good news are often advised to
keep their mouths shut, lest they lull people into complacency. But this prescription may be backward. The discovery that fewer people are victims of violence can thwart cynicism among compassion-fatigued news readers who might otherwise think that the dangerous parts of the world are
irredeemable hell holes. And a better understanding of what drove the numbers down can steer us toward doing things that make people better off rather than congratulating ourselves on how moral we are. As one becomes aware of the historical decline of violence, the world begins to look
different. The past seems less innocent, the present less sinister. One starts to appreciate the small gifts of coexistence that would have seemed utopian to our ancestors: the interracial family playing in the park, the comedian who lands a zinger on the commander in chief, the countries that
quietly back away from a crisis instead of escalating to war. For all the tribulations in our lives, for all the troubles that remain in the world, the decline of violence is an accomplishment that we can savor—and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it
possible.
2AC---Impact---A2: Threat Construction
Lit bias toward threat deflation --- we’re the opposite of paranoid
Schweller 4 – Randall L. Schweller, Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at The
Ohio State University, “Unanswered Threats A Neoclassical RealistTheory of Underbalancing,”
International Security 29.2 (2004) 159-201, Muse
Despite the historical frequency of underbalancing, little has been written on the subject . Indeed, Geoffrey Blainey's
memorable observation that for "every thousand pages published on the causes of wars there is less than one page directly on the causes of peace" could have been made with equal veracity about
shelves are filled with books on the causes and dangers of
overreactions to threats as opposed to underreactions to them.92 Library
exaggerating threats, ranging from studies of domestic politics to bureaucratic politics, to political psychology, to organization theory. By comparison, there
have been few studies at any level of analysis or from any theoretical perspective that directly explain why states have
with some, if not equal, regularity underestimated dangers to their survival. There may be some cognitive or
normative bias at work here. Consider, for instance, that there is a commonly used word, paranoia, for the unwarranted fear
that people are, in some way, "out to get you" or are planning to do oneharm. I suspect that just as many people are afflicted with the
opposite psychosis: the delusion that everyone loves you when, in fact, they do not even like you. Yet, we do not have a
familiar word for this phenomenon. Indeed, I am unaware of any word that describes this pathology (hubris and overconfidence come close, but they plainly define
something other than what I have described). That noted, international relations theory does have a frequently used phrase for the pathology of
states' underestimation of threats to their survival, the so-called Munich analogy. The term is used, however, in a disparaging way by
theorists to ridicule those who employ it. The central claim is that the naïveté associated with Munich and the outbreak of World War II has become an overused and inappropriate analogy
because few leaders are as evil and unappeasable as Adolf Hitler. Thus, the analogy either mistakenly causes leaders [End Page 198] to adopt hawkish and overly competitive policies or is
A more compelling explanation for the paucity of studies on
deliberately used by leaders to justify such policies and mislead the public.
underreactions to threats, however, is the tendency of theories to reflect contemporary issues as well as the
desire of theorists and journals to provide society with policy- relevant theories that may help resolve or
manage urgent security problems. Thus, born in the atomic age with its new balance of terror and an ongoing Cold War, the field of security
studies has naturally produced theories of and prescriptions for national security that have had little to say
about—and are, in fact, heavily biased against warnings of—the dangers of underreacting to or
underestimating threats. After all, the nuclear revolution was not about overkill but, as Thomas Schelling pointed out, speed of kill and mutual kill.93 Given the
apocalyptic consequences of miscalculation, accidents, or inadvertent nuclear war, small wonder that theorists were more
concerned about overreacting to threats than underresponding to them . At a time when all of humankind could be wiped out in less than
twenty-five minutes, theorists may be excused for stressing the benefits of caution under conditions of uncertainty and erring on the side of inferring from ambiguous actions overly benign
assessments of the opponent's intentions. The overwhelming fear was that a crisis "might unleash forces of an essentially military nature that overwhelm the political process and bring on a war
thatnobody wants. Many important conclusions about the risk of nuclear war, and thus about the political meaning of nuclear forces, rest on this fundamental idea."94 Now that the Cold War is
over, we can begin to redress these biases in the literature. In that spirit, I have offered a domestic politics model to explain why threatened states often fail to adjust in a prudent and coherent way
to dangerous changes in their strategic environment. The model fits nicely with recent realist studies on imperial under- and overstretch. Specifically, it is consistent with Fareed Zakaria's
analysis of U.S. foreign policy from 1865 to 1889, when, he claims, the United States had the national power and opportunity to expand but failed to do so because it lacked sufficient state power
(i.e., the state was weak relative to society).95 Zakaria claims that the United States did [End Page 199] not take advantage of opportunities in its environment to expand because it lacked the
institutional state strength to harness resources from society that were needed to do so. I am making a similar argument with respect to balancing rather than expansion: incoherent, fragmented
states are unwilling and unable to balance against potentially dangerous threats because elites view the domestic risks as too high, and they are unable to mobilize the required resources from a
elite fragmentation and disagreement within a competitive political
divided society. The arguments presented here also suggest that
process, which Jack Snyder cites as an explanation for overexpansionist policies, are more likely to produce underbalancing than overbalancing behavior
among threatened incoherent states.96 This is because a balancing strategy carries certain political costs and risks with few, if any,
compensating short-term political gains, and because the strategic environment is always somewhat
uncertain. Consequently, logrolling among fragmented elites within threatened states is more likely to generate overly cautious responses to threats than overreactions to them. This
dynamic captures the underreaction of democratic states to the rise of Nazi Germany during the interwar period.97 In addition to elite fragmentation, I have suggested some basic domestic-level
variables that regularly intervene to thwart balance of power predictions.
2AC---Impact---A2: Value to Life
There’s always value to life
Coontz 1 Phyllis D. Coontz, PhD Graduate School of Public and International Affairs University of
Pittsburgh, et al, Journal of Community Health Nursing, 2001, 18(4), 235-246 – J-Stor
In the 1950s, psychiatrist and theorist Viktor Frankl (1963) described an existential theory of purpose and meaning
in life. Frankl, a long-time prisoner in a concentration camp, related several instances of transcendent
states that he experienced in the midst of that terrible suffering using his own experiences and observations. He believed
that these experiences allowed him and others to maintain their sense of dignity and self-worth. Frankl (1969)
claimed that transcendence occurs by giving to others, being open to others and the environment, and coming to accept the
reality that some situations are un- changeable. He hypothesized that life always has meaning for the individual; a
person can always decide how to face adversity. Therefore, self-transcendence provides meaning and
enables the discovery of meaning for a person (Frankl, 1963). Expanding Frankl's work, Reed (1991b) linked self-transcendence
with mental health. Through a developmental process individuals gain an increasing understanding of who they are and
are able to move out beyond themselves despite the fact that they are experiencing physical and mental pain.
This expansion beyond the self occurs through in- trospection, concern about others and their well-being, and integration of the past
and future to strengthen one's present life (Reed, 1991b).
*** ALTERNATIVE
2AC---Alt---General
Alt violently fails and their framework’s bankrupt – Their K’s premise is wrong
Hynek 13 et al; Dr. Nik Hynek is Associate Professor of International Relations and Theory of Politics at the Metropolitan
University Prague and Charles University. He holds PhD degree in International Politics and Security Studies from the
Department of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford - “No emancipatory alternative, no critical security studies”- Critical
Studies on Security - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2013. Modifed for potentially objectionable language. Obtained via Taylor & Francis
Fresh Journals Collection
We offer a provocation – that we should stop appending ‘Critical’ to ‘Security Studies’. Critical
security as an academically and politically
contested terrain is no longer productive of emancipatory alternatives. In making this claim, we seek to
reflect upon the underlying dynamics which drove the boom in critical security studies in the 1990s and the
early 2000s and its pale afterlife in the recent years. To support the argument empirically, the attention is paid to the role of emancipatory
agency at the heart of critical security understandings. As we argue, the current state of ‘critical’ security theorising is no longer
informed by the emancipatory impulse of the 1990s and the critical claims have been much damaged by the
retreat of liberal internationalism and rise of non-emancipatory and post-emancipatory approaches. The critics that
remain in the field thus articulate much lower horizons with regard to policy alternatives and
conceptualise no clear agency of emancipatory possibilities . Ironically, ‘critical’ security theorists today are
more likely to argue against transformative aspirations – rather than in favour of them. Critical security studies
(CSS) has grown so large and diverse as an academic field that it has generated many books and student texts to map the diversity of its analysis (see, e.g. Krause and
Williams 1997; Fierke 2007; Hansen 2006; Collins 2007; Krause and Williams 1997; Peoples and Vaughan-Williams 2010; Chandler and Hynek 2010). 1 In fact, the
success of CSS is one of the reasons we suggest that it makes perfect sense to drop the ‘critical’ appendage. As a glance at the
books and textbook guides makes clear, CSS has now expanded to include the entire body of what we could call ‘non-traditional’ security
studies, with ‘traditional’ security studies set-up as a straw man (strawperson) of unreflective, uncritical, depoliticised or
timeless thinking of security. Bearing in mind that as Columba Peoples and Nicholas Vaughan-Williams note (2010, 2), this straw man
( strawperson ) never existed; that security was always an ‘essentially contested concept’ and that even allegedly ‘timeless’
concepts such as ‘national interests’ were always shifting, contingent and ambiguous we seek to go beyond the analytical narratives and
descriptive mapping which constitute the stock acceptance of an academic world in which security theorising or focuses beyond inter-state
military conflict become part of the living cannon of ‘CSS’ (see, e.g. CASE 2006; Williams 2003; Krause and Williams 1996, 1997; Wyn Jones 1999; Waever
2004; Richmond 2010a; Newman 2010; Bourne 2012; Jarvis 2009; Jackson 2012; Merlingen 2010; Pugh, Cooper, and Turner 2011). We concur entirely
with the starting point of a recent article by Christopher Browning and Matt McDonald (2012) in which they argued that CSS had ‘generally
fallen short of providing us with a sophisticated, convincing account of either the politics or the ethics of
security’. For Browning and McDonald: ‘At stake in the failure to provide such an account is the fundamental question of whether we need a “critical security
studies” at all’. Where we depart from these authors is in the analysis of weaknesses of CSS and the conclusions drawn. For us, the problematic is not if the jury is still
out on whether CSS can provide a coherent ‘alternative’ position. We do not seek to judge the usefulness of CSS, as if diverse positions can or should be homogenised
in some way; rather, we seek to draw out why it makes little sense to maintain the ‘critical’ prefix to a study area which is so diverse and contested.
Case crushes the alt

Linklater 90 (Andrew, Senior Lecturer in Politics – Monash University, Beyond Realism and
Marxism: Critical Theory and International Relations, p. 32)
These theoretical disagreements with Marxism generate major differences at the practical level. It is necessary to conclude that a post-Marxist critical theory of
international relations must concede that technical and practical orientations to foreign policy are inescapable at least at
this juncture. Such an approach must appreciate the need for classical realist methods of protecting the state under conditions of insecurity and distrust, and
recognise the importance of the rationalist defence of order and legitimacy in the context of anarchy. It is important to take account of the rationalist claim that order is
unlikely to survive if the major powers cannot reconcile their different national security interests. In a similar vein, a
critical approach to
international relations is obliged to conclude that the project of emancipation will not make significant
progress if international order is in decline. One of its principal tasks would then be to understand how the community of states can be
expanded so that it approximates a condition which maximises the importance of freedom and universality. In this case, a critical theory of international relations
which recognises the strengths of realism and Marxism must aim for a political practice which deals concurrently with the problem of power, the need for order and
the possibility of emancipation through the extension of human community.
1AR---Alt---General---Ext---Fails
Alt fails and boosts violence within its own framework – try or die premise inverted
Condit 15 Celeste Condit is a Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Communication
at the University of Georgia. The author also serves as a faculty member for the University of Georgia’s
Franklin College Institute for Women's Studies. “Multi-Layered Trajectories for Academic Contributions
to Social Change”, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 101:1, 258-270 – obtained via Taylor & Francis
Combined Library (SSH & ST)
One can sum up the most widely circulating theories of social change among “critical social theorists” of the twentieth century in
the following, admittedly simplified, statement : There is an (evil) Totality (fill in the blank with one or more : patriarchy , whites,
the West , the U.S ., neo-liberalism , global capitalism) that must be overturned by a Radical Revolution. We don’t
know the shape of what will come after the Revolution, but The Evil is a construction of the Totality, so anything that comes after
will be better. All you need is … (fill in the blank: Love , Courage , Violence , etc.). For an example, read Slavoj Žižek’s attack on the
evil Totality (“capitalism,”5 pp. 41/ 49), which requires the “excess” of violence named as “courage”6 (pp. 75, 78, 79), via “a leap”7 (p. 81), to eliminate “democracy” for a yet-to-be-imagined
“new collectivity” (p. 85).8 The resilience of this social theory identifies it as a rhetorical attractor; a predispositional symbolic set that readily transmits emotive potency. To appropriate Kenneth
Burke’s terms, the bio-symbolics of human political relationships readily create a “grammar” and “rhetoric” in the form of a unified enemy that can be imagined as defeated in a singular battle,
after which, things in “our” tribe may be harmonious. To identify this fantasy theme in this way is to suggest that it may not merely be the product of “Western” or “capitalist” imaginations, but
rather that it arises from an intersection of the structural characteristics of language systems and the nature of human biologies (which readily adopt both tribal social cooperation and inter-tribal
this fantasy theme is avoidable, even if it is powerfully

competition). Because neither biology nor symbolics are deterministic systems,
attractive. Because both biology and symbolics are material, however, specific kinds of work are necessary in order to avoid the lure of that
predisposition. This point is crucial, because it invalidates the twentieth century (idealist) approaches to social change,
which envisioned a single (violent) leap away from the social as sufficient to create and maintain better worlds. Thus,
when Žižek and others urge us to “Act” with violence to destroy the current Reality, without a vision of an alternative, on the grounds that the links between actions and consequences are never
we have dozens of revolutions as models, and the
certain, we can call his appeal both a failure of imagination and a failure of reality. As for reality,
historical record indicates quite clearly that they generally lead not to harmonious cooperation (what I call “AnarchoNiceness” to
gently mock the romanticism of Hardt and Negri) but instead to the production of totalitarian states and/or violent factional strife. A materialist constructivist
epistemology accounts for this by predicting that it is not possible for symbol-using animals to exist in a symbolic void. All symbolic movement has a trajectory, and if you have not
imagined a potentially realizable alt ernative for that trajectory to take, then what people will leap into is biological
predisposition s— the first iteration of which is the rule of the strongest primate. Indeed, this is what experience with revolutions has shown to
be the most probable outcome of a revolution that is merely against an Evil. The failure of imagination in such rhetorics thereby reveals itself to be critical, so it is
worth pondering sources of that failure. The rhetoric of “the kill” in social theory in the past half century has repeatedly reduced to the leap into a void because the symbolized alternative that the
context of the twentieth century otherwise predispositionally offers is to the binary opposite of capitalism, i.e., communism. That rhetorical option, however, has been foreclosed by the historical
discrediting of the readily imagined forms of communism (e.g., Žižek9). The hard work to invent better alternatives is not as dramatically
enticing as the story of the kill: such labor is piecemeal, intellectually difficult, requires multi-disciplinary understandings, and perhaps requires
more creativity than the typical academic theorist can muster. In the absence of a viable alternative, the appeals to Radical Revolution
seem to have been sustained by the emotional zing of the kill , in many cases amped up by the appeal of autonomy and manliness (Žižek uses
the former term and deploys the ethos of the latter). But if one does not provide a viable vision that offers a reasonable chance of leaving most people better off than they are now, then
Fox News has a better offering (you’ll be free and you’ll get rich!). A revolution posited as a void cannot succeed as a horizon of history, other than as constant
local scale violent actions, perhaps connected by shifting networks we call “terrorists.” This analysis of the geo-political situation, of the onto-epistemological character of language, and of the
the focal project for progressive Left Academics should now include the
limitations of the dominant horizon of social change indicates that
hard labor to produce alternative visions that appear materially feasible. The most widely circulating
alternative to violent Revolution, AnarchoNiceness, fails to reach that standard. AnarchoNiceness provides an appealing vision (everyone is good to everyone, and everyone is treated
fairly). But it is not a materially viable vision (alas!), because it does not take into account the developmental bio-symbolic character of human beings. The AnarchoNice-ist vision
assumes either (1) that humans are naturally nice and only corrupted by the evil Totality or (2) that if we ensured that only discourses of nice-
ness circulated then everyone would be nice . #1 is obviously false. If humans were naturally nice, we would not have developed the evil Totality. We
would still be living in the innocent mutual care postulated as the golden past. #2 was tried by the Soviets and the Chinese. Both of these nation states rigorously circulated collectivist discourses
and, following Plato’s doctrines, thoroughly effaced art that did not convey the collectivist vision. The very circulators of this discourse, however, behaved in not nice ways. They murdered and
Discourses of niceness did not
imprisoned others, and they appropriated material wealth (Soviet dachaus, cars, caviars) or sexual wealth (Mao) to themselves.
succeed even at guiding the behaviors of those who rigorously circulated them. And the broader populace found those discourses
largely unconvincing in motivating them to work very hard on assembly lines or in massive agricultural fields for the good of others (among other communicative-economic
limitations). As most social theorists would recognize, the failure of Soviet and Chinese propaganda and their “collectivist” systems cannot be assigned to personal failures that could be
overcome by putting better people in power. Mandatory limitations on public discourse require oppressive power in action. Those who are unreflective about this material problem may continue
to trumpet their identity as would-be communists, with the idealist wish that these material requirements could be overcome by hope (or more circulation of niceness discourse!). Those
who are more cynical have adopted another option, an often un-admitted anarchism. The anarchistic option is
just another version of the idealism of the void. Anarchistic theories posit no source for effective measures to guide
human proclivities and behaviors toward care or justice. A Transilient onto-epistemology asserts that care and justice are not default conditions, but products of labor. At the symbolic
level, the very notions of “care” and “justice” must be constantly created, revivified and adapted to circumstances, and negotiated among those with different experiences and hence different
identities. Biological inputs must be actively shaped to fit the symbolic inventions. A statement does not rewrite biology like a magic wand. As biological creatures, some humans are intensely
predisposed toward status drives (that enhance reproductive success) and toward short-term pleasures (that are pleasurable!). It takes work to constrain and direct predispositions, whether those
were evolved or trained by previous symbolic regimes. Thus, even an already-perfect society would have to develop and maintain structures that helped children acquire the bio-symbolic
capacities to channel their/our biological proclivities. And if the society is not to be absolutely static, then it must have mechanisms for constantly retraining both biological and symbolic
constitutions of adults as well.
Alt fails and boosts violence

Ling ‘2 (L.H.M., Senior Lecturer @ the Hague, "Postcolonial IR")
Without concrete action for change, postmodernism's 'dissident voices' have remained bracketed, disconnected, not really real. In
maintaining 'a critical distance' or 'position offshore' from which to 'see the possibility of change' (Shapiro, 1992: 49), the postmodern critic
brushed off too conveniently the immediate cries of those who know they are burning in hells of exploitation, racism, sexism,
starvation, civil war, and the like but who have few means or strategies to deal with them. What hope do they have of overthrowing the shackles
of sovereignty without a program of action? After all, asked Mark Neufeld, 'What is political without partisanship?' (Neufeld, 1994: 31). In not answering these questions,
postmodernists recycled, despite their avowals to the contrary, the same sovereign outcome as (neo)realism, that is, discourse divorced from prac-
tice, analysis from policy, deconstruction from reconstruction, particulars from universals, and critical theory from problem-solving. Dissident i nternational r elations could not
accommodate an interactive, articulating, self-generative Other. Its exclusive focus on the Western Self ensured, instead, (neo)realism's sovereignty by relegating the Other to a familiar
is, as a mute, passive reflection of the West or Utopian projection of the West's dissatisfaction with itself. Critique became romanticized
subordinate identity, that
into a totalizing affair - especially for those who must bear the brunt of its repercussions , bell hooks asked, appropriately:
'[s]hould we not be suspicious of postmodern critiques of the "subject" when they surface at a historical moment when many subjugated people feel themselves coming to voice for the first time?'
(hooks, 1990: 28). Without this recognition, postmodernists ended up marginalizing, silencing, and exiling precisely those who are 'the greatest victims of the West's essentialist conceits (the
excolonials and neocolonials, Blacks, women, and so forth)' (Krishna, 1993: 405). Worse yet, added Roger Spegele, dissidence as offshore observation has 'freed us from the recognition that we
have a moral obligation to do anything about it' (Spegele, 1992: 174).
*** FRAMEWORK/PEMRUTATIONS
2AC---FW---A2: Epistemology First
Epistemology first causes violence – claims get stuck – never get around to solving
Lake 11 (David A., Jerri-Ann and Gary E. Jacobs Professor of Social Sciences and Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the
University of California – San Diego, “Why ‘‘isms’’ Are Evil: Theory, Epistemology, and Academic Sects as Impediments to Understanding and
Progress,” International Studies Quarterly (2011) 55, 465–480)
These five pathologies combine to divert professional debate from the substance of world politics to first principles. Having created academic
sects based on incommensurate assumptions and supported by selective evidence, we do not seek to assess which approach helps us understand
world politics best (or helps us understand which range of phenomena best). We focus instead on the inherent superiority of this or that set of
assumptions. Rather
than seeking to understand the world— our highest obligation as scholars — we debate
assumptions seemingly without end . What are the fundamental units of world politics? Are individuals, groups or social
collectivities, or organizations ‘‘rational’’? Do actors seek power, welfare, justice, or something else? Which matters more, system or unit,
structure or agency? Without comparable propositions derived from these competing research traditions and assessed against the same patterns of
behavior, there
is no possible answer to such existential questions. This makes for a continuing and lively debate of
adds little to our understanding of world politics and nothing at all to practical
course, but it
policymakers. Rather than seeking to understand the complex and often frightening world around us, we
spend far too much of our intellectual time and energy debating assumptions as if they mattered in
absolute terms. It is here that research traditions tip over from being useful organizing devices to theologies.
Assumptions stop being treated as more or less useful simplifications of a complex reality and become beliefs that are accepted or not as truths.
We have left the realm of scholarly inquiry and entered the world of academic religions. By whatever definition,
we have stopped doing ‘‘science.’’
2AC---FW---A2: Ontology First
Ontology doesn’t designate a prior question
-Proves perm solves best and that ontological truths can be marked and created
academia ***evidence is modified for ableist language
conceptualising dwelling as something that precedes building—as

Regardless of why this ambiguity lingers, my point here is to illustrate how
ignores] the fact that dwelling is both a ground and an event . It is a

something that is the ground of building, potentially blinds us to [
ground in the sense that it names how mortals are always already ‘held out to’ an historically bequeathed world and an event in the sense that the world only
comes to be a world as it gathers and as it is gathered . Although the details of these relations will be elaborated, the point I want to get across at this
stage is that building, far from being a secondary or postphenomenal effect or expression of dwelling, is
just as much a ground for dwelling as dwelling is a ground for building . Building is the way that
mortals (and the other elements of the world) remain, tarry, and exist. And although building is no doubt
always already an expression of dwelling, to dwell means to build as much as to build means to dwell.
Dwelling, in other words, constitutes what Harrison (2007), pace Strohmayer (1998), terms an ‘event of space’: a spacing whereby the elements
of the dwelling are allowed to stand out as what they are. It is only by building that the elements of dwelling can
appear and be apportioned as ‘a world’. Dwelling, as I argue in this paper, is a way of marking and claiming; it is the event by which
a world is built and named as one’s own. Although the point being made here may seem obvious to anyone who has grappled with the concept of dwelling, the
implications of this emphasis on the importance of building can best be seen when we engage with the question of cultural
landscape. In much of the work that establishes itself as being distinctly phenomenological in its approach to landscape, or in the work that understands itself to be applying a ‘dwelling
perspective’, we find an emphasis on the textures of relatedness prefiguring any subject–object determination . For
example, in Wylie’s walks up Glastonbury Tor (2002) or along the British South West Coast Path (2005) we fi nd voice, vision, and feet dissolving from the confi nes of a preestablished subject,
a disintegration of perspective towards an elemental horizon where sense is characterised by luminosity, tone, and shading rather than position and/or measurement. The aim of Wylie’s walks is
to reveal a presubjective affective ecology from which a seeing subject and a distant landscape secondarily arise. Thus, the emphasis is not on the event of walking itself, the taking place of
distance that engenders a thinking, choosing, and orienting subject, and Wylie’s narrative works hard to keep this gathering deferred. To be fair, Wylie takes his point of departure from Merleau-
Cloke and Jones (2001; 2004) as well as
Ponty (and Deleuze) rather than Heidegger and does not portray his work as attempting to capture anything about dwelling. But the work of
that of Ingold (2000), who do use the term more explicitly, similarlytend to emphasise the situation of being-in (the situation of skillful
practical absorption) over the event of separation and apportioning. At first glance this characterisation
seems misguided . It is Ingold, after all, who develops the idea of the ‘taskscape’—a landscape characterised by putting
the relations inherent in the dwelling to task. My problem with the taskscape, however, is that it presents the landscape
as primarily an expression of a pre-established situation—that is, it is the tasking and tooling of an immanent world, “human technical practices” embedded
“in the current of sociality” (Ingold, 2000, page 195). In this sense the landscape is an artefact of wayfinding ; it expresses the sensing and feeling
that occurs along the unique paths that particular worlds present. While my aim is not to suggest that the dwelling is not about
wayfinding , I also believe it is more than this .(1) The element that is neglected in this rendering of the dwelling is the one that
mortals (as opposed to animals) bring: that is, perspective. While Ingold wants to draw a distinction between the landscape that is ‘sensed’ over the landscape that is ‘seen’ (for
reasons I understand and am sympathetic to), dwelling creates a position precisely in-between these two modalities for being. The building of a landscape is not
only the unfolding of an immanent topology; it is also its spacing before mortal eyes. Landscape is not
simply imminent to our situation, it is also something that is marked out—that is, apportioned and set apart. As Heidegger
suggests, “to say that mortals are is to say that in dwelling they persist through spaces by virtue of their stay among things and locations (1971a, page 157, original emphasis). Thus, mortals are as
To dwell is not only to build the world
far as they exist in and among a set of distinctive positions— that is, in and among other beings who are properly spaced.
we are always already within but also to build it in a manner that makes it visible to ourselves and other
beings from a distance. Dwelling, as building, is (in short) to mark and claim . While it is the world that delivers mortals to a particular
situation, it is mortals who mark and claim it as their own. The aim of this paper is to elaborate this conception of dwelling as marking and claiming. As already suggested, I argue here that
dwelling needs to be conceived as a modality of practice that marks and claims a world through the
building of material objects and/or environments. In saying that dwelling is marking I mean to suggest that dwelling ‘marks out’ a specific
region of relations through the production of objects that catalyse those relations. In saying that dwelling is claiming I draw
attention to the ontological fragility of such creations. The argument is built incrementally over three substantive sections, each of which elaborates a
particular aspect of the marking and claiming dynamic I am attempting to discern.
2AC---Perm---Do Both
Perm do both – it solves, and alt fails – dwelling and action are the same coin and
only action prevents death – they also never spill up
academia
The aim of this paper is to put forth a conception of dwelling as a practice of marking and claiming. By this I
mean that dwelling does not designate a passive condition but a mode of human practice. By suggesting that
dwelling is marking I am highlighting the intimate relationship between dwelling and building. While in “Building dwelling thinking” (in Poetry,
Language, Thought 1971, Harper and Row, New York) Heidegger encourages the reader to look beyond building in order
to see how it is grounded in dwelling, his emphasis on techne in other work illustrates that he sees building
and dwelling as two sides of the same coin. Not only must we dwell in order to build, but
we must build in order to dwell . To dwell means to build and building is how we constitute our
dwelling . At the same time, I argue that dwelling is only ever a claim. While Heidegger always understands human action
as limited by our temporal situation (beings that are thrown and that face death ), his later work elaborates this
context through the conception of the fourfold. The fourfold emphasises how marking (as building) is always undermined and
overwhelmed by the spatial/temporal unfolding of the world itself. Thus, while mortals must build in order to dwell, all such
buildings are claims—that is, assertions, allegations, and wagers announced in the face of a relentlessly moving world. The argument is
developed by examining three Heideggerian concepts—the Augenblick, techne, and the fourfold—each of which contributes to this particular
notion of dwelling.

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