Necropolitics K

K Lab - UMich 2020

Foucault Research Group: Sydney Pasquinelli, Brandon Bosquett e, Charlie
Brooks, Alli Dixon, Daisy Garcia, Berk Oto, Thomas Reese; + special thanks to Bee
Smale for their help w/ this fi le!
 1NC Shell
The Aff’s reform of the CJS naturalizes the economy of the power to punish –
the plan does not diminish, but rather perfects, the system of punishment
Foucault, M. (1975) Discipline and punish. Vintage Books, New York, NY. Pg 80-82 //bdo
It was not so much, or not only, the privileges of justice, its arbitrariness, its archaic arrogance,
its uncontrolled rights that were criticized; but rather the mixture of its weaknesses and
excesses, its exaggerations and its loopholes, and above all the very principle of this mixture, the
'super-power' of the monarch. The true objective of the reform movement, even in its most
general formulations, is not so much to establish a new right to punish based on more
equitable principles, as to set up a new 'economy' of the power to punish, to assure its better
distribution, so that it should be neither too concentrated at certain privileged points, nor too
divided between opposing authorities; so that it should be distributed in homogeneous
circuits capable of operating everywhere, in a continuous way, down to the finest grain of the
social body. The reform of criminal law must be read as a strategy for the rearrangement of
the power to punish, according to modalities that render it more regular, more effective, more
constant and more detailed in its effects; in short, which increase its effects while diminishing
its Generalized punishment economic cost (that is to say, by dissociating it from the system of
property, of buying and selling, of corruption in obtaining not only office, but the decisions
themselves) and its political cost (by dissociating it from the arbitrariness of monarchical power).
The new judicial theory of penalty corresponds in fact to a new 'political economy' of the
power to punish. This explains why the 'reform' did not have a single origin. It was not the more
enlightened members of the public, nor the philosophes, who regarded themselves as enemies
of despotism and friends of mankind; it was not even the social groups opposed to the
parliamentarism who instigated the reform. Or rather it was not they alone; in this same overall
project of a new distribution of the power to punish, and of a new distribution of its effects,
many different interests came together. Reform is not prepared outside the legal machinery
and against all its representatives it’s prepared, for the most part, from within, by a large
number of magistrates and on the basis of shared objectives and the power conflicts that
divided them. Certainly the reformers did not form a majority of the magistrates; but it was a
body of lawyers who outlined its general principles: a power to judge that would not be
affected by the immediate exercise of the prince's sovereignty; that would be relieved of any
claim to legislate; that would be detached from property relations; and which, having no other
functions but to judge, would exercise that power to the full. In short, the power to judge
should no longer depend on the innumerable, discontinuous, sometimes contradictory
privileges of sovereignty, but on the continuously distributed effects of public power . This
general principle defined an overall strategy that covered many different struggles. Those of
philosophers like Voltaire and of publicists like Brissot or Maratl but also those of magistrates
whose interests were nevertheless very diverse: Le Trosne, a judge at the presidial court of
Orleans, and Lacretelle, the advocate-general at the parlementary Target, who with the
parlements was opposed to Maupeou's reform; but also J. N. Moreau, who supported the royal
power against the parlemenrarresl Servan and Dupaty, both magistrates, but in conflict with
their colleagues, etc. Throughout the eighteenth century, inside and outside the legal
apparatus, in both everyday penal practice and the criticism of institutions, one sees the
emergence of a new strategy for the Punishment exercise of the power to punish. And
'reform', in the strict sense, as it was formulated in the theories of law or as it was outlined in
the various projects, is the political or philosophical resumption of this strategy, with its
primary objectives: to make of the punishment and repression of illegalities a regular function,
coextensive with society; not to punish less, but to punish better; to punish with an attenuated
severity perhaps, but in order to punish with more universality and necessity; to insert the
power to punish more deeply into the social body.

The aff’s investment into the carceral system sustains a necropolitical

imperialism that actively manufactures and sustains death-worlds for
inferiorized and subjugated populations
Lamble 13 (Dr. Sara –Senior Lecturer in Law at University of London at Birkbeck, 8-4-13,
“Queer Necropolitics and the Expanding Carceral State: Interrogating Sexual Investments in
Punishment”,
https://www.academia.edu/4438801/Queer_Necropolitics_and_the_Expanding_Carceral_State
_Interrogating_Sexual_Investments_in_Punishment)
Necropolitics of Imprisonment Each of the above examples involves the direct or indirect mobilisation of discursive, financial or
labour-related resources towards state practices of imprisonment and punishment. Given the ongoing colonial legacies of the
carceral state, the disproportionate number of people of colour in prison and the widespread abuses within carceral institutions,
these queer investments in punishment are, by their very nature, investments in state racism and violence. In this way, such
investments are symptomatic of what Jasbir Puar, drawing from Achilles Mbembe’s work, describes as queer necropolitics.
Necropolitics can be understood as technologies of power that (re)produce social relations of
living and dying, such that some populations are ushered into the worlds of life and vitality, while
others are funnelled into what Mbembe calls death-worlds—worlds of slow living death, and dead
living (Mbembe 2003). Death here includes literal physical death, but also social, political and civil death—
the social relations of death, decay and dying that emerge from prolonged exposure to violence,
neglect, deprivation and suffering . Offering a corrective to Michel Foucault’s work on biopolitics, Mbembe puts forward
the notion of necropolitics and necropower to account for the various ways in which, in our contemporary world, weapons are
deployed in the interest of the maximum destruction of persons and the creation of death-worlds, new and unique forms of social
existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring up on them the status of living dead (2003, p. 40).
In other words, while biopolitical powers work to manage, order and foster life for citizens worthy of protection, such powers work
in tandem with necropolitical powers that produce death for those destined to abandonment,
violence and neglect. Taking up this concept within contemporary queer politics, Puar draws attention to the ways in which
the folding into life of some queers is predicated on the folding out of life of others (Puar 2007, p. 36). On one level, as Braidotti
(2007) notes, ‘Bio-power and necro-politics are two sides of the same coin’; the relationship between the governance of life and
death cannot be separated. Indeed, Foucault notes the inherent tension within the classical theory of sovereignty in the right of
power over life and death. Because the sovereign has no capacity to create life, the ‘right of life and death is always exercised in an
unbalanced way: the balance is always tipped in favour of death’ (Foucault 1976/2003, p. 240). Hence the
‘very essence of
the right of life and death is actually the right to kill; it is at the moment when the sovereign can
kill that he exercises his right over life’ (Foucault 1976/2003, p. 240). Yet the emergence of biopower, argues Foucault,
marks a shift in this balance, from the right to take life or let live, to the power to make live and let die .
Biopower intervenes in the conditions of life at the level of populations to improve, prolong, extend living; it is a technique of
governance aimed at maximising, optimising and fostering life.25 Yet the tension between the exercise of power over life and death
remains. For if biopower seeks to maximise life, what justifies its continued exercise of death? It is here, Foucault argues, that
racism intervenes, as ‘the precondition that makes killing acceptable’ (1976/2003, p. 256). For the
imperative to kill is acceptable only if it results not in a victory over political adversaries, but in
the elimination of the biological threat to and the improvement of the species or race …Once the
State functions in biopower mode, racism
alone can justify the murderous function of the State (Foucault
1976/2003, p. 256). Racism is therefore not an aberration within the exercise of biopower, but a key
premise in determining which populations will be made to live and left to die . Taking this analysis
further, Mbembe asks whether biopolitics can fully account for specific conditions, processes and techniques in which contemporary
forms of life are subjugated by the power of death: Is the notion of biopower sufficient to account for the contemporary ways in
which the political, under the guise of war, of resistance, or of the fight against terror, makes the murder of the enemy its primary
and absolute objective?… What place is given to life, death and the human body (in particular the wounded or
slain body)? How are they inscribed in the order of power?’ (Mbembe 2003, p. 12). Mapping out the ways in which the politics
of death are central to contemporary modes of governance and warfare, Mbembe suggests the creation
of deathwords is not merely a by-product of biopower, but a primary aim of its counterpart, necropower. Indeed, the
administering of life is increasingly contingent upon, and supplemented by, new forms of
sovereign power that are deployed in the administration of mass death and destruction.While
Mbembe’s analysis focuses primarily on situations of military occupation, colonialism and war, the modern prison
arguably constitutes another key instantiation of necropower. For the prison is a site that
produces the conditions of living death ; it is a place where bodies are subject to regimes of slow
death and dying. Not only are deprivation, abuse and neglect regular features of incarceration but the monotonous
regime of caged life—the experience of ‘doing time’—involves the slow wearing away of human vitality
and the reduction of human experience to a bleak existence (Scraton and McQulloch 2009; Taylor 2000). This
is especially true within regimes of solitary confinement, particularly in ‘supermax’ or ‘special housing units’ in the USA where
prisoners are locked up for 23 hours a day, only permitted an hour of exercise in pens the size of dog cages, subjected to windowless
cells and deprived of virtually any human contact—not only for days, but for years—with devastating mental health consequences
(Haney 2003). In these ways, the
prison serves as a site of mass warehousing of bodies in conditions that
often resemble the death-worlds that Mbembe describes. While the modern prison was designed as an
institution which aimed in part to train prisoners as productive workers, obedient citizens and
docile subjects—a strategy that used disciplinary power in the broader service of biopolitical power (Foucault 1978/1995)—
contemporary prisons are little more than mass warehouses for poor, racialised and otherwise
disenfranchised populations (Gilmore 2007). As prison populations continue to grow to unprecedented levels, many
states are abandoning even the pretence of rehabilitation, by dramatically reducing the hours that prisoners
spend out of their cells, slashing funding for educational and other programmes and increasingly leaving prisoners to spend their
days in monotonous isolation. Theseconditions, coupled with overcrowding, lack of adequate medical care and disconnection
from family and friends, mean that prisoners experience high risks of self-harm, psychological abuse,
trauma and suicide, both during imprisonment and post-release (Collins 2008; Taylor 2000; Kupers 2006). A
criminal record also means that employment and housing are difficult to secure postrelease, family and community relationships are
difficult to re-establish, and problems of poverty, mental illness and addiction persist—such that the consequences of imprisonment
extend well beyond the duration of one’s sentence. The added combination of intensive surveillance and
disciplinary probation regimes on the one hand, and limited post-release supports on the other,
also mean that a high portion of prisoners experience repeated cycles of capture and release in
the ‘revolving door’ of imprisonment. The prison thus plays a significant role in altering the
‘distribution of life chances’ or what Gilmore (2007, p. 247) describes as ‘group differentiated
vulnerability to premature death’ . In one sense, the after-effects of imprisonment can be understood as unfortunate but
inevitable ‘challenges’ that prisoners face in recuperating from their sentences. But on another level, these ‘collateral
consequences’ constitute a form of legally sanctioned social abandonment. Because ex-prisoners can be
legally discriminated against with respect to housing, employment, education, jury duty, volunteer service and social assistance
access, a criminal conviction becomes a ‘negative credential’ that functions as a ‘unique mechanism of state-
sponsored stratification’ (Alexander 2010, p. 148). Voting restrictions—including the disenfranchisement of prisoners while
serving sentences in Britain, and the permanent disenfranchisement of felons in some US states—marks
another mode of exclusion from the polis (Manza and Uggen 2006). But perhaps more importantly, the social
stigma and shame of a criminal conviction casts a long shadow on the future prospects of the
(ex)prisoner. Marked as permanently failed, perpetually dangerous, and always suspicious,
prisoners do not simply serve their time and move on; they pay the debt over and over in the form of stigma,
shame and exclusion. A prison sentence thus becomes one of the most powerful ways that
working class, black, migrant, disabled and other over-criminalised populations, are legally
subjected to social, civil, and political death . To argue that the prison is an institution of
necropolitical power and that prisoners are resigned to slow death, is not to deny the resilience
and agency of those who survive prison on a daily basis . It is instead to underscore how the conditions of
captivity govern life in ways that are akin to slow and prolonged death, thus severely restricting the possibilities for resistance and
survival. Ironically, and perhaps most devastatingly, it
is through the act of potentially reclaiming death that
prisoners exercise a desperate form of agency . As Mbembe argues, in the realms of the living dead, death
offers a brutal moment of power. ‘For death is precisely that from and over which I have power. But it is also that space
where freedom and negation operate’ (Mbembe 2003, p. 39). Hence it should be no surprise that the hunger strike—the exercise of
threat of the living to authorise their own death—persists as a last resort of collective power in prison. As the recent prisoner hunger
strikes in California, Italy, England, Palestine, Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere have demonstrated—alongside other less visible
forms of collective organising inside—there is persistent resilience among prisoners to resist and survive the brutal conditions of
their captivity.26 Arguably, what makes the prison an example of necropolitics, and not just an instance of ruthless state brutality, is
that the imposition of death and suffering on some populations is explicitly legitimised and authorised in the name of fostering and
protecting the life of others. In other words, the enhancement and protection of life for some is predicated on the violent
sequestering of others.
There are parallels here to what Nikolas Rose (2000) describes as circuits of
security and circuits of insecurity—contemporary forms of governance that work by moving
some subjects into modes of security and others into abandonment —as well as to what Judith Butler
(2004) describes as the politics of ‘precarious life’ or what Elizabeth Povinelli (2011) refers to ‘economies of abandonment’.
Necropolitics, however, draws more explicit attention to the deathly logic of these modes of
governance, foregrounding the exercise of sovereign power (both within and beyond the state)
to authorise and legitimate the politics of death and killing in the name of vitality and living.
Examining these queer investments in punishment and necropolitics, we can identify several recurring patterns.

Our alternative is to practice passionately principled outrage at the 1AC’s

necropolitical ordering of the carceral system. Our deconstructive criticism is a
prerequisite to more ethical workings of power
Thobani 14 (Sunera; associate professor in the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social
Justice at the University of British Columbia, Queer Necropolitics, pgs. xv-xviii, BB)

The Empire of Terror offers a stark choice to its objects of power: incorporation or
extermination. Its forms of sovereignty intend the taking of no survivors: loyalty or death.
Violence and whiteness constitute the intractable foundation of colonial sovereignty and its
processes of subjection, argued Fanon (1961) in his radical anti- colonial praxis. Drawing on Fanon’s insights, Mbembe (2001) points out
that in the ‘terror formation’ that is the colony, power takes the form of commandment as it

incorporates colonizing subjects into its murderous projects of conquest . Embedded in the depths of such
stubbornly brutal terrain, power in the postcolony assumes the form of necropolitics as ‘it makes the

murder of the enemy its primary and absolute objective’ (Mbembe 2003: 12). In the 21st-century post/colonial
formation that is the ‘war on terror’, the simultaneous constitution of the West and its many rests relies

no less on occupation, invasion and genocide , albeit in changing configurations and with emergent practices enacted by
differentially positioned subjects. For, as Mbembe has astutely noted, ‘modernity was at the origin of multiple concepts of sovereignty’ (2003: 13). In

other words, while

liberal democracy celebrates its citizen-subjects, the mark of extermination that
infuses its racial logic of power gives rise to the ‘Indian’ reserve, the slave plantation, the native
quarter, the Bantustan, the Nazi camp, as well as the slums, prisons and refugee camps
proliferating around the world (Thobani 2012). Western militarized states, their nationals and private
mercenaries now form willing coalitions as readily as they organize death squads; Western
feminists recalibrate their alignments with their states as they set out to rescue Muslim women
or to protect themselves from their narcissistically construed forms of precariousnesses; and
Muslim women and men supplicants to the West speak in the name of feminism and liberal
democracy to indict Islam, along with their families and communities, providing vital alibis for
torture and collective punishment. All the while, Muslim men around the world arc demonized as misogynist homophobes even as
they are incarcerated, deported, raped, tortured and targeted for assassination; Muslim women and queers are raped, killed, bombed and compelled

to surrender unconditionally to Western gender regimes if they are to survive. As for

the Muslims killed in the hundreds of
thousands by bombs, drones and militias, they do not even appear as human in the register of
the war, featuring only as collateral damage - if at all. Islamophobia has thus become the lingua
franca that enables trans/national allegiances to be remade , international accords to be signed,
aid negotiations to be consolidated, intelligence, security and border control agreements to be
implemented, and assassination squads to be deployed across the planet . Such is the moment
that marks the (re)birth of the West as the singular model for futurity after the age of
independence. What avenues, then, for contestation? How to strengthen the forces committed to ending the violence that characterizes the
contemporary geopolitical moment? What possibilities for the politics of radical transformation? For justice? Queer Necropolitics makes a particularly
timely and critically engaged intervention. Mapping out how deployments of sexuality, gender, race and desire inform the self-constituting practices of
unlikely imperialist subjects — queer, feminist, left, and yes, even critical theorists and philosophers - as they simultaneously advance the reach of the

Western empire, the authors of this book highlight how these practices also mark out entire ‘queerly racialized
populations’ for occupation, subjugation or elimination (Puar 2007). Examining the particularities of
the instances where ‘queer vitalities become cannibalistic on the disposing and abandonment of
others’, the authors help to disrupt a critical axis on which pivot the imperial heteronormative,
homonormative and transnormative politics of violence and pleasure (Introduction: p. 2). What comes into view
when homonationalism is named homoracism ? When feminism is defined as imperialist? When human rights arc conceived of as

recolonization? When queer and trans politics are identified as parasitic? The power of whiteness comes into sharp focus,

the everydayness of the institution of white supremacy is exposed in all its stark (in)visibilities . The
authors of Queer Necropolitics provide the conceptual and analytical tools vital to the politics of

resistance against the deathly trajectories of power that mark these times . Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman and
Silvia Posocco point to the ‘worrying tendency to dismiss queer and trans of colour critiques in particular as identitarian, pre-theoretical and inferior’
(Introduction: p. 4). They are absolutely right to draw attention to such dismissal, for the displacing of radical critical race theory - with all its
complexities - in the name of identity politics has become a habitual practice of the Western theoretico-political tradition, including its feminisms, left

activisms and LBGTQ, movements. Refusing to acknowledge the violence of the imperial practices that
incarcerate subjugated populations in their suffocatingly codified identities or to recognize the
forms of violence they themselves enact as they further the universalization of their own
identities in the name of humanism, these intransigent theorists and activists secure their access
to white superiority by such dismissal . Trapped between humanism and its rigidly enforced
politics of identities. Where to turn? It should not be forgotten that the chief architects of this
‘war on terror’ are the settler colonial societies established by Euro-America , namely, US, Canada,
Israel, Australia, along with those seasoned imperialists, the British, the French and the Germans . The massive public
support among their nationals for killing ‘terrorists’ wherever they are to be found, for racial profiling wherever the state deems it necessary and for
ripping off Muslim women’s veils whenever possible extends Islamophobia into homes, schools, workplaces, cinemas, shopping malls, social service

agencies and, yes, in hearts and minds. The

public valorization of the statesmen and stateswomen, the
generals and soldiers, the corporations and journalists who plan, execute and legitimize the new
wars of the 21st century chillingly echo the public celebration of ‘Indian hunters’, pioneering
heroes of an earlier age of US empire and nation-building, as well as of the white lynch mobs
who ‘hunted’ black men and boys in the name of defending the virtue of white women . Indeed, the
continuities in such racial violence cannot but be recognized even by the perpetrators themselves, whether by design or otherwise. US and other allied
soldiers regularly refer to Afghanistan and Iraq as ‘Injun country’ and to the black and brown bodies of Muslims as ‘Injuns’; mercenaries working for the
US state in Somalia define local Somali men as ‘savages’;1 ‘Project Lawrence’ is launched to develop ‘cultural proficiencies’ among elite US forces

working in secret military operations;2 and the codename ‘Geronimo’ is assigned to the mission to kill Bin Laden. As
Western nation-
states fortify their various forms of security - military, national and psychic - neoliberalism
morphs into its audaciously murderous phase , overtly so now; global capitalism acquires a
robust new energy in the privatization of the state’s machinery of death ; new technologies of
surveillance and communication are invented and enthusiastically consumed. The West is
resurgent again and ... all this whiteness. .. ‘(a)ll this whiteness that bums' (Fanon 2008: 86, emphasis added).
It is wise to remember that sovereignty is not abstract . It has a particular name, a face, an address, a

geographical coordinate. Its face is white, it remains housed in white bodies, it is located in
Westernity. Queer Necropolitics does the very important work of teaching its readers how to
recognize the deadly workings of power. We would do well to learn from this book’s
passionately principled outrage at the order of things.
Links
 Generic Topic Link
The affirmatives seemingly ethical action merely reconfigures the state as the
guardian of minority communities and violence allows for the state to masks its
necropolitical projects in the process.
Lamble 13 (Lamble, Sarah Reader in Criminology and Queer Theory Assistant Dean for
Teaching, Learning and Student Experience Director of Studies (Criminology) "Queer
necropolitics and the expanding carceral state: Interrogating sexual investments in
punishment." Law and Critique 24.3 (2013): 229-253.) TR

Arguably, what makes the prison an example of necropolitics, and not just an instance of ruthless state brutality, is
that the imposition of death and suffering on some populations is explicitly legitimised and
authorised in the name of fostering and protecting the life of others. In other words, the
enhancement and protection of life for some is predicated on the violent sequestering of
others. There are parallels here to what Nikolas Rose (2000) describes as circuits of security and circuits of insecurity—
contemporary forms of governance that work by moving some subjects into modes of security and others into abandonment—as
well as to what Judith Butler (2004) describes as the politics of ‘precarious life’ or what Elizabeth Povinelli (2011) refers to
‘economies of abandonment’.
Necropolitics, however, draws more explicit attention to the deathly
logic of these modes of governance, foregrounding the exercise of sovereign power (both
within and beyond the state) to authorise and legitimate the politics of death and killing in the
name of vitality and living. Examining these queer investments in punishment and necropolitics, we can identify several
recurring patterns. First, these trends suggest the emergence and The controversial force-feeding of hunger strikers also marks a
particularly grim form of ‘living death’. See, for example, the brutal account of force-feeding by Samir Najl al Hasan Moqbel who has
been held in Guantanamo Bay for 11 years: Queer Necropolitics and the Expanding Carceral State 123 expansion of a specifically
queer penality. Although punishment is widely endorsed and socially sustained, it appears that LGBT organisations are increasingly
engaging in citizenship claims that are explicitly bound up with punitive norms and values. The
popularity of LGBT
campaigns for the passage and enforcement of hate crime legislation, with the specific aim of
increasing carceral penalties for those convicted, sutures claims of queer safety and freedom to
state practices of caging. Second, these trends reconfigure the neoliberal carceral state as the
guardian of sexual citizenship rather than the perpetrator of violence. As Jin Haritaworn argues the
redefinition of crime, security, and integration as sexual problems lends an intimate touch to
the hard arm of the state. The move of LGBT activism into the penal state enables the police to reinvent
themselves as protector, patron, and sponsor of minorities at the very moment that their
targeting of racialized populations and areas is reaching new levels. (2010, p. 83) In the current era of
neoliberalism, where faith in the welfare state has been all but abandoned, it is striking how much
faith is placed in the carceral state’s capacity to dole out justice, particularly when the state
itself has begun to acknowledge the limits of this capacity (Garland 2001). In this context, queer investments in
punishment become mechanisms through which the state enlists LGBT subjects as responsibilised partners in the ‘co-production of
security’ (Garland 2001, p. 124) and acquires consent and support for one of its most systemically violent and discriminatory
institutions. Whereas law
and order politics once belonged more firmly in a right wing conservative
agenda, policing and punishment in these contexts have been transformed into ‘symbols of
social inclusion and care for sexual diversity’ (Haritaworn 2010). These processes go hand in hand
with the perpetual (re)invention of a dangerous Other, who is easily recognised through older
tropes of criminality: the ‘homophobic Muslim’, the ‘working-class yob’ or the ‘backwards immigrant’ (Haritaworn 2010).
State recognition of the respectable, enlightened and worthy sexual citizen is thus produced through the reproduction of a
dangerous Other who offers a scapegoat for the insecurities and vulnerabilities produced by the contemporary political economic
order. The co-production of these figures works to entrench the dividing line between those who
are marked for life and vitality versus those ushered into abandonment and death . In this way, queer
investments in punishment can be seen to occur at multiple levels, through: (a) discursive investments in the myths
of the neoliberal carceral state (by endorsing rhetoric which equates community safety and
violence prevention with state punishment and securitisation politics); (b) affective investments
in the racialised and classed politics of fear and danger (by invoking discourses of ‘dangerous others’ who
threaten LGBT claims to citizenship and security); (c) labour investments in the techniques of punishment ( by
undertaking the work of the carceral state through partnerships that provide training, develop
criminal justice policy and undertake state-based criminal justice work ) and; (d) financial investments in
the expanding carceral state (by channelling community resources into practices of punishment and by supporting policies that
increase state spending on prisons and policing). S. Lamble 123 These
punitive trends are not restricted to LGBT
organisations, but are occuring more broadly within leftist and ‘progressive’ politics (Aharonson
2010). Feminists who advocate for the criminalisation of sex work and trafficking, for example, are becoming engaged in what
Bernstein (2010) describes as ‘carceral feminism’. Similarly, feminist
anti-violence goals increasingly operate in
tandem with ‘law and order’ politics and are used to justify increased imprisonment, policing
and immigration controls (Critical Resistance and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence 2006; Bumiller 2008; Ritchie
2012). These trends suggest that activist agendas have not simply been co-opted by pro-
criminalisation agendas, but rather that social movements are redefining their politics in ways
that actively infuse traditional recognition claims with punitive and deathly logics.
 Death Penalty Links
Abolishing the death penalty fails to account for mental torture and helps trap
the body into the ‘space of the prison.’
Valentine, K. (2006) Punishing the 'other' : race, ethnicity, and the American justice
system.//bdo

Foucault outlines a number of different models of prisons. In particular he deals with the issue
of work (purpose), isolation, and the ability/willingness/intent to reform the prisoner. Two ideas
stand out; first, those who are sentenced to life imprisonment lose all hope becoming obsessed
with escape and rebellion, investing little concern in the "correction of their morals." Second,
solitary confinement acts as a shock to the prisoner allowing him to delve into his spiritual
self, emerging as a new and purified man. The first point is connected to possibilities for reform
and again, emphasizes the uselessness of life sentences. The second point, describes what, in
an ideal state, solitary confinement should be, or possibly what it was originally intended to
accomplish. The power to punish, the relationship between punishment and the body, as well
as the relationship between punishment and society at large , are the three main concepts
Foucault charts throughout Discipline and Punish . As the power to punish shifts from the
sovereign to society, society becomes more invested in punishment. As the body moves away
from being the site of the infliction of punishment, it instead becomes a trapped and watched
object within the space of the prison.

The removal of the death penalty is a shift from physical to mental torture that
has no impact on the carceral system.
Schwan, A. (2011) How to Read Foucault's Discipline and Punish (How to Read Theory):
9780745329802: Books. How to Read Foucault's Discipline and Punish. Pluto Press, London.
//bdo

The modern ‘punishment-body relation’ seeks to cause less bodily hurt and looks more to
deprive someone of ‘a liberty that is regarded as a right and as property’ involving limits to
free movement and use of the individual’s time. The ‘outside’ of the criminal’s body is
handled less and less as it becomes manipulated more intangibly and peacefully through
confinement. Even when people are executed in the modern-day West , ‘the disappearance of
the spectacle and the elimination of pain’ remains a concern, as death sentences are usually
carried out before small, invitation-only audiences and the prisoner is often either sedated
before being killed or every effort is made for the death to be swift and ‘gentle’ . The change in
punishment’s form from spectacular, public punishment in the mid eighteenth century to
more discreet forms of imprisonment in the early and mid-nineteenth century has several
social and tactical consequences, according to Foucault. With imprisonment, punishment becomes
more ‘private’, isolated and hidden from the public’s gaze. While the performance of
deliberative justice, the judging of guilt, becomes more visible, as trials are usually open to all and
performed in the public record (whereas before they were secret), the execution of that trial’s
punishment becomes more invisible, especially since few of us step inside a penitentiary , which, in
any case, cannot easily be visited without some degree of permission by state officials or guards.
The effect of this privatization of punishment is that the act of punishment becomes more
abstract to us. The move from the ‘visible intensity’ of publicly displayed acts , like Damiens’
death, open to ‘more or less everyday perception’, to punishment’s enactment in spaces hidden
from our view, means that we must increasingly imagine, rather than watch, punishment
happening and so begin to internalize its activity within our mental consciousness. Once
punishment is no longer a commonly witnessed experience of a momentary, physical event in
a public space, but stands as a time-based process that we must intuitively imagine, it begins
to implant its effect within all of our imaginations. Rather than simply being limited to the poor
figure being torn to pieces or broken on the public scaffold , the location of punishment is
transferred so that it now unfolds within our collective minds , rather than on a single anatomy.
The less visible and ‘corporal’ punishment becomes, the easier it is for justice authorities to
shift the responsibility for punishment away from themselves. When someone like Damiens is
executed, justice ‘takes public responsibility for the violence that is bound up with its practice ,’ as
a central executioner does the actual damage of justice on the criminal while everyone watches .
The ‘horror’ of the scaffold binds executioner and criminal together in a repetition of the
punished crime, this time reversed, since the violence is done to, rather than by, the criminal. If the crowd
feels that the punishment is unfair, then they easily know who to blame and attack. Within
the modern reform of punishment, authorities become more reluctant to be seen as the
source that duplicates criminal violence; they become ‘ashamed’ to kill or cause harm.
Authorities now say that they have no ‘desire to punish’ and destroy the criminal; instead
they claim that punishment is used to ‘correct, reclaim, “cure”’ and improve the accused . They
claim to seek the prisoner’s reform, not enact revenge. As punishment becomes ‘gentle’, the
responsibility for recuperating or curing the criminal becomes dispersed among several
bureaucratic agencies. Judges are no longer held as the sole author of the sentence. Instead,
they are protectively surrounded by ‘minor civil servants of moral orthopaedics’ (10), like
psychologists and social workers, who cluster around the judge’s bench to advise on the severity of
punishment. This swarming reduces the burden or culpability any single individual must carry
for punishing someone.
 DNA Reform Links
Deleting DNA profiles fails to account for the surveillant assemblage - the
managerial model predetermines the type of identity that belongs in prisons
then captures those based on institutional surveillance
Brayne 14 - Assistant Professor of Sociology at The University of Texas at Austin, (Sarah,
American Sociological Review, “Surveillance and System Avoidance: Criminal Justice Contact and
Institutional Attachment,” 2014, Vol. 79(3), 368-369)// AD

Beyond the broadening reach of the crimi- nal justice system, there has been a creep of
surveillance more generally. Institutions not typically associated with crime control have
adopted the language and logic of crime con- trol and surveillance (Garland 2001; Harris,
Evans,andBeckett2011;Innes2001;Simon 2007), and formerly discrete institutions have become integrated
into the “surveillant assemblage”—a system aimed at performing surveillance and social control
functions (Hag- gerty and Ericson 2000). Examples of this assemblage include recent regulations requir-
ing U.S. banks to link their clients’ financial holdings to a roster of individuals who owe child
support (Haggerty and Ericson 2000) and fusion centers—surveillance centers that con- solidate data
from public and private agencies, including criminal, hospital, bank, and state motor vehicles
records, and make them avail- able to law enforcement agencies .
The consequences of surveillance are important for scholars and policymakers interested in inequality, institutions, and crim- inal
justice policy. While most research on the topic focuses on the intended functions of surveillance, a burgeoning literature exam- ines
the unanticipated consequences (Merton 1936). Theory and recent ethnographic work (Goffman 2009) suggest the rise in surveil-
lance—and, more importantly, individuals’ perceptions of pervasive surveillance—may be met with a concomitant increase in indi-
viduals’ efforts to evade it. To date, however, there has been no systematic test of whether criminal justice contact is indeed
associated with individuals avoiding certain institutions.

To begin to test for this relationship, I introduce the concept of “system avoidance.” System avoidance denotes the practice of
individuals avoiding institutions that keep formal records (i.e., put them “in the system”) and therefore heighten the risk of
surveillance and apprehension by authorities. I argue that system avoidance is an important concept that should be developed
theoretically and opera- tionalized in a way that can be empirically tested. Using data from the National Longitu- dinal Study of
Adolescent Health (n = 15,170) and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (n = 8,894), I
test the hypothesis that
involvement with the criminal justice system at all levels—from police contact to incarceration—
affects how people interact with medical, financial, labor market, educa- tional, civic, and
religious institutions. Spe- cifically, I posit that the potential of surveillance may lead to lower
levels of involvement in institutions that keep formal records, such as hospitals, banks, schools,
and employment, and I hypothesize that a previ- ously ignored mechanism—system avoid- ance
—may be driving this relationship.
To identify wariness of surveillance as a motivation behind system avoidance, the fol- lowing theoretical framework emphasizes the
distinction between surveilling and non-sur- veilling institutions, arguing that an under- theorized characteristic of institutions is the
degree to which they keep formal records of individuals’ behaviors, transactions, and interactions as a matter of course. Surveilling
institutions keep detailed formal records; these records are critical to carrying out the institution’s functions and, in most instances,
are required to be kept by law. Examples of surveilling institutions include hospitals, banks, formal employment, and schools. Non-
surveilling institutions are characterized by a more casual relationship with individu- als—formal records may be kept, but there is no
legal imperative to do so. Examples of non-surveilling institutions include volunteer associations and religious groups.

To elucidate this distinction, consider how routine interactions with surveilling and non- surveilling institutions differ .
One
profound difference is in requirements for identifica- tion. Interactions with banks, hospitals,
andemployers all require individuals to present state-issued papers to establish identity. For
hospitals, establishing identity is essential for, among other things, insurance billing. For banks
and employers, establishing identity is legally required in fulfillment with labor and financial
regulations and tax compliance. By contrast, religious and volunteer associations do not, as a
rule, require individuals to pre- sent identification to participate . These insti- tutions may keep legal records
of donations and other activities for tax purposes, but individuals can easily abstain from these more intrusive forms of record
keeping with- out jeopardizing their ability to interact with the institution.

Loosening USFG surveillance ushers in corporate tyranny and domination.

Henry Giroux 2014 Global TV Network Chair Professor at McMaster University in the English and
Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University,
“Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State,” Truthout, http://www.truth-
out.org/opinion/item/21656-totalitarian-paranoia-in-the-post-orwellian-surveillance-state
//bdo.

The surveillance state with its immense data mining capabilities represents a historical rupture from
traditional notions of modernity with its emphasis on enlightenment, reason, and the social contract. The older
modernity held up the ideals of justice , equality, freedom, and democracy, however flawed. The investment in
public goods was seen as central to a social contract that implied that all citizens should have
access to those provisions, resources, institutions, and benefits that expanded their sense of
agency and social responsibility. The new modernity and its expanding surveillance net subordinates
human needs, public goods, and justice to the demands of commerce and the accumulation of
capital, at all costs. The contemporary citizen is primarily a consumer and entrepreneur wedded to the belief that the most
desirable features of human behavior are rooted in a "basic tendency towards competitive, acquisitive and uniquely self-interested
behavior which is the central fact of human social life."23 Modernity
is now driven by the imperatives of a
savage neoliberal political and economic system that embrace what Charles Derber and June Sekera call a
"public goods deficit" in which "budgetary priorities" are relentlessly pushed so as to hollow out the welfare state and
drastically reduce social provisions as part of a larger neoliberal counter revolution to lower the taxes of the rich and mega-
corporations while selling off public good to private interests.24 Debates
about the meaning and purpose of the
public and social good have been co-opted by a politics of fear , relegating notions of the civic good, public
sphere, and even the very word "public" to the status of a liability, if not a pathology.25 Fear has lost its social connotations and no
longer references fear of social deprivations such as poverty, homelessness, lack of health care, and other fundamental conditions of
agency.
Fear is now personalized, reduced to an atomized fear that revolves around crime,
safety, apocalypse, and survival. In this instance, as the late Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith once warned,
modernity now privileges "a disgraceful combination of 'private opulence and public squalor.' "26 This is not surprising given the
basic elements of neoliberal policy, which as Jeremy Gilbert indicates, include the: privatization of public assets, contraction and
centralization of democratic institutions, deregulation of labor markets, reductions in progressive taxation, restrictions on labor
organization, labor market deregulation, active encouragement of competitive and entrepreneurial modes of relation across the
public and commercial sectors.

Under the regime of neoliberal capitalism, the expansion of government and corporate surveillance
measures become synonymous with new forms of governance and an intensification of
material and symbolic violence.28 Rather than wage a war on terrorists, the neoliberal security state
wages a war on dissent in the interest of consolidating class power . […] But the NSA and the other 16
intelligence agencies are not the only threat to privacy, freedom and democracy . Corporations
now have their own intelligence agencies and data mining offices and use these agencies and
new surveillance technologies largely to spy on those who question the abuses of corporate
power. The emergence of fusion centers exemplifies how power is now a mix of corporate, local,
federal and global intelligence agencies, all sharing information that can be used by various agencies to stifle dissent
and punish pro-democracy activists. What is clear is that this combination of gathering and sharing information
often results in a lethal mix of anti-democratic practices in which surveillance now extends not
only to potential terrorists but to all law-abiding citizens. Within this sinister web of secrecy, suspicion, state-
sanctioned violence and illegality, the culture of authoritarianism thrives and poses a dangerous threat
to democratic freedoms and rights. It also poses a threat to those outside the United States
who, in the name of national security, are subject to "a grand international campaign with drones and
special operations forces that is generating potential terrorists at every step ." Behind this veil of
concentrated power and secrecy lies not only a threat to privacy rights but the very real threat
of violence on both a domestic and global level.
 Forensic Science Links
Tinkering with judicial control over forensic & genetic data validates a false
sense of utility and reliability within forensic science, which strengthens the
state’s biopolitical and necropolitical control over the imprisoned & society writ
large
Victor Toom, 12 - Bodies of Science and Law: Forensic DNA Profiling, Biological Bodies, and
Biopower, Journal of Law and Society , MARCH 2012, Vol. 39, No. 1, Material Worlds: Intersections
of Law, Science, Technology, and Society (MARCH 2012), pp. 150-166 https://www-jstor-
org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/stable/pdf/41350303.pdf?refreqid=excelsior
%3A4462e4d7d02d95872f15ffaca2741bca
IDENTIFYING THE MECHANISM Most people would intuitively accept the proposition that 'I own my
body'. Such a statement underscores the individual mastery over a particular body and delineates the private from the public. Yet,
if you are under suspicion or convicted for a crime, or diagnosed with a specific disease or
mental condition, the statement may no longer apply; you can be arrested, searched, taken into
custody, hospitalized or forced to take medications. The body that once was yours becomes an
object of incrimination, incarceration, care or treatment . When jurisdiction over a body is transferred from an
individual to agents of power like police and medics, those bodies transform from 'private bodies' into 'public bodies'. An analysis
regarding the transformation of private into public bodies is provided by American social geographer David Delaney.4 He describes a
case where an
inmate is diagnosed with a mental disorder. The patient/ prisoner receives
pharmaceutical treatment, yet withdraws consent for treatment after he experiences
deleterious effects caused by the medication. Bypassing his will, the state legally continues to
administer the drugs to the inmate and hence he becomes the 'unwilling recipient of a sort of
"synthetic sanity".'5 In other words, his body is put under restraint, 'his skin and muscles are
penetrated by the state apparatus of the syringe, his circulatory and nervous systems are
colonized by the authorities aided by pharma- ceutical corporations.'6 In this act of putting his
body under restraint - that is, when a private body is transformed into a public body - several
normative and legal issues arise: individual consent and autonomy are bypassed and his right to
an inviolable body is breached. His body is not 'his' anymore. Or, as Delaney puts it, the inmate's body becomes 'a material
slab, a zone between his self and the outer institutional environment.'7 Before any individual can be made a ward of court, evidence
that he is not able to take care of himself should be provided. In the example provided by Delaney, it can be assumed that the inmate
was tested both mentally and physically (using the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders , DSM), observed and
interviewed, and that all collected data was evaluated. These results are compared with other scientific data, like fMRI scans or
neurochemically tested samples. Individuals can only be made wards of court if the results point to the same mental condition. Hence,
scientific evidence warrants the legal decision of transferring jurisdiction over a body from the individual to an authority - such body
becomes constituted as a body of science and law. The criminal justice system is a domain where private bodies are rendered into
public bodies routinely. Several mechanisms are in place to achieve this, the most straightforward being the arrest or imprisonment of
individuals. Such public bodies can be regarded as 'bodies of law' as legal mechanisms are in place to warrant arrests, and so on.
Bodies of science and law have 4 D. Delaney, 'Making nature/marking humans: law as a site of (cultural) production' (2001) 91
Annals of the Association of Am. Geographers 487-503. 5 id., p. 499. 6 id. 7 id. 152 © 20 1 2 The Author. Journal of Law and Society
C) 20 1 2 Cardiff University Law School This content downloaded from 141.211.4.224 on Wed, 01 Jul 2020 16:20:28 UTC All use
subject to htt been around since as long ago as the nineteenth century, when scientific methods, like dactyloscopy (fingerprinting) and
anthropometry (biometrics) were already being applied to make representations of individuals and their bodies.8

Since the introduction of forensic DNA profiling in criminal justice systems, bodies of science and
law have changed considerably, not least because the latter technology analyses bodily samples.
The example below will introduce forensic DNA profiling and its intimate relationship with
bodies and bodily samples: A break-in was reported by a witness who saw a man smashing in a window. After the police had arrived, a crime scene
examiner collected a piece of glass and secured a bloodstain probably originating with the burglar. The blood trace was submitted to a forensic laboratory where a DNA profile
was obtained and subsequently uploaded to the national DNA database. In the meantime, the police arrested an individual on suspicion of having committed the burglary. He was
asked to provide a biological reference sample, which he refused to do. He was then physically forced by two police officers, who opened his mouth to take a buccal swab. The
sample was processed at the forensic laboratory and it matched the DNA crime scene sample. Such a match is usually expressed as a statistical number (the random match

Agents of power like

probability), stating that the chance that someone in the population at large would have the same DNA profile as less than one in a billion.9

the police, public prosecutor, and judge are, since the introduction of forensic DNA profiling in
criminal justice systems, advanc- ing further into personal spheres, thereby rendering the
personal into public objects.10 The radical shift that has occurred is that crime investigation and
criminal litigation have become intimately connected with body samples and the production of
genetic knowledge about those samples, and hence its originators. It is in this capacity that the
mechanism that enables forensic DNA profiling resembles key aspects of Michel Foucault's
analysis of 'biopower'. First, genetic and subsequent digital representations of bodies are
produced, enabling the comparability of bodily samples originating from a subject and bodily
traces collected at crime scenes. Such representations contain knowledge of the originator's
body that goes beyond 'the science of its functioning'.11 Second, authorities involved in criminal
investigation, who have gained procedural powers to collect biological samples from subjects,
process the samples into DNA profiles, and store samples and profiles in biobanks and databases
for many years. So, the authorities have gained mastery over those bodies and body parts for a
specific amount of time which 'is more than the ability to conquer them'.12 Mastery over bodies
and the ability to produce knowledge about them are central to Foucaulťs analyses regarding
the workings of power and its relationships with bodies. 13 Yet, to appreciate what goes on in forensic DNA profiling, and to be
able to analyse the normative consequences of the routine criminal justice mechanism that renders private bodies into public bodies, it is essential to enquire briefly into political
philosophy and legal theory. Everybody in a democratic state of law is entitled to civil rights. Freedom of speech, religion, association, and opinion are some examples. Such
rights, especially in continental liberal democracies, are laid down in a system of rights usually referred to as the Constitution. Rights of the 'self are, in the context of forensic
DNA profiling, regarded as personal lives and the integrity of individual bodies. In order to protect these realms against the power of the state and its institutions, like the police,
the Office of Public Prosecution, and the judiciary, individuals, their bodies and personal lives are assigned civil rights. More specifically, turning to the Netherlands as a case
study, personal lives and individual bodies are protected by articles 10 and 1 1 of the Dutch Constitution, which states that everyone shall 'have the right to respect for his privacy'
and 'have the right to inviolability of his person'.14 These rights are not absolute rights as they can be curtailed according to 'restrictions laid down by or pursuant to an Act of

personal lives and individual bodies can be violated by authorities involved in

Parliament'.15 In other words,

criminal investigation when conditions described in the Code of Criminal Procedures are met.
With regard to Dutch DNA profiling, the Code of Criminal Procedures delineates when privacy
and the right to an inviolable body do not apply to an individual, and typically include suspects
and convicted offenders (see further below). The bodies and personal lives of these categories of individuals are excluded from Articles 1 0 and 1 1 of the
Dutch Constitution. Their bodies and bodily samples are, echoing Giorgio Agamben's influential work on

contemporary mechanisms of biopower, legally in a 'state of exception'.16 This section has

identified the mechanisms of how agents of power progress into personal spheres when
forensic DNA profiling is applied. The mechanism works on three different levels. First,
authorities involved in criminal investigation gain mastery over individual bodies. Second, this
mastery can only be gained when individuals and their bodies are stripped of entitlements to
civil rights. Third, only when these conditions are met can forensic genetic knowledge about
those bodies be produced. This mechanism renders private bodies into public bodies,
constituted both in science and in law. To delineate these produced public bodies from other conceivable public bodies (like the one described by
Delaney and other biometrie bodies), I will call these bodies 'forensic genetic bodies'. Having established this trend, we will next analyse
details of Dutch forensic genetic practices by tracing the co-evolution of forensic DNA technologies and laws to regulate them.17

Forensic Science is not objective – it functions to confirm presumptions

Karen Kafadar, 14 ---(kafadar, K. ( 2015), Statistical Issues in Assessing Forensic
Evidence. (International Statistical Review, 83: 111– 134 https://onlinelibrary-
wiley-com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/doi/full/10.1111/insr.12069) DG
Probably no other sentence in the report released by the National Academy of Sciences (hereafter, ‘NAS report’; NRC, 2009) has
received as much attention, and as much of a reaction, as this one sentence describing the state of the scientific rigor for the
methods currently in practice in forensic science. Fingerprint evidence, and, to a lesser extent, hair analysis, bite marks, or other
pattern matching analyses, has been advocated as methods that can ‘uniquely identify’ a source. While some of these methods may
be useful in reducing the number of possible subsets of sources or individuals that are consistent with the evidence, the inclusion of
fingerprint evidence in that statement surprised many people. Fingerprint analysis had been assumed for so long
to be capable of identifying a unique individual that its validity and reliability had never been
questioned, so the need for studies of its validity and reliability appeared to be unnecessary.
Only because examiners claimed ‘zero error rate’ in fingerprint analyses (Cole, 2004; Zabell,
2005) and when mistakes surfaced (e.g. Stacey 2004 and Zabell 2005, on the Mayfield case) did
scientists and others question the validity of fingerprint analysis. the NAS report found that the
published studies of the accuracy and reliability of most forensic methods, other than nuclear
DNA analysis, failed to meet the stringent criteria seen in other scientific disciplines, leading to
the earlier conclusion. As noted in Chapter 3 of the NAS report, courts' attempts to apply scientific principles to
the evaluation and consideration (admission or exclusion) of forensic evidence, such as the Daubert
criteria (roughly, admission allowed if methods on which evidence was obtained are ‘testable’, are ‘peer‐reviewed’, have ‘known
error rate[s]’ and are ‘generally accepted in scientific community’), have failed. Committee co‐chair Judge H.T. Edwards
(2009, 2010, 2014) has emphasized that the judicial system is not the proper forum to establish
scientific standards. Rather, the scientific laboratory is well positioned to design, execute and
evaluate the results from well‐conceived scientific studies that will quantify accuracy (bias and
validity) and precision (reliability and consistency) of forensic evidence as well as reveal
shortcomings that can be addressed, which ultimately will strengthen the value of the evidence.
This article describes considerations in the design of such studies, with an aim at identifying and quantifying uncertainty arising from comparing evidence. Because
of the prevalence of forensic evidence that involves patterns (latent fingerprints, firearms and toolmarks, handwriting, tire treads and microscopic hair), the focus
is on the identification of highly distinctive features for comparing pattern evidence. Section 2 reviews some of the more common types of forensic evidence that
involves matching patterns (shapes, lengths, widths, presence or absence of specific features, etc.). Section 3 defines the metrics for assessing and validating
forensic evidence (e.g. sensitivity and specificity), including a statistical calculation concerning numbers of features to assure identification with a high degree of
confidence. Section 4 compares and contrasts the processes used in DNA profile matching and latent print matching. Section 5 describes some examples of forensic
validation analyses. Section 6 provides an example from the medical literature of a well‐designed community clinical trial that was conducted to settle an important
public health concern in 1954 and that has all the ingredients needed for a study to surpass all criticism. Section 7 discusses aspects of this study that could be
implemented in a validation study of forensic procedures. Finally, Section 8 illustrates, via bullet lead evidence, the regrettable consequences of ignoring the
principles of good study design. Section 9 concludes with some final comments encouraging research in these directions 2 Types of Forensic Evidence Crime scene
(CS) investigators may collect multiple types of evidence at a CS, with the primary aim of identifying unambiguously the perpetrator. Thus, the more distinctive the
evidence, the greater the reliability in the identification. (See Section 3 for a formal definition of this concept.) We describe briefly the most common types of
evidence; the NAS report, Chapter 5, has more detail. Analysis of the evidence generally proceeds by comparing it with specimens in a database. With DNA
matching, for example, the alleles at the 13 specified markers in a DNA sample are compared with the 13 alleles of the ∼12 million DNA profiles in the Combined
DNA Indexing System (http://www.fbi.gov.proxy.lib.umich.edu/about-us/lab/biometric-analysis/codis/ndis-statistics, as of March 2014). The matching process is
not so straightforward with other types of evidence, such as when comparing the striations left inside a gun barrel after firing a bullet. The Laboratory at the
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) contains a large repository of different gun types and barrels, so an examiner can compare the striations and toolmark
surfaces between bullets that were found at the CS and bullets that were fired with a gun found in the suspect's possession or from the firearm repository.
Likewise, when comparing latent prints found at a CS with those from a database of ‘latent exemplars’ taken under controlled conditions or two handwriting
samples (known and ‘questioned’) or two samples of hair (one found at a CS and one taken from a suspect), the ‘features’, which are noted to be similar between
the striations or prints or handwriting samples or hair samples, are not defined in advance and hence depend to a large extent on the examiner whose past
experience enables some qualitative assessment of the distinctiveness of the features. This ‘feature identification’ aspect contrasts sharply with the DNA matching
process, where the ‘features’ are alleles at 13 defined markers, which were selected specifically for their ‘distinctiveness’ (‘specificity’) across human populations.
(As with any evidence, specimen evidence and laboratory analysis procedures must be carefully followed, to avoid contaminating the evidence.) Clearly, more
distinctive features ensure fewer false identifications (convicting innocents) and fewer false exclusions (freeing guilty persons). Fingerprint identification has
received the most attention in terms of research and process definition (Section 4). Even in this case, however, ‘No such absolute criteria exist for judging whether
the evidence is sufficient to reach a conclusion as opposed to making an inconclusive or no‐value decision. The best information we have to evaluate the
appropriateness of reaching a conclusion is the collective judgments of the experts’ (Ulery et al ., 2011). While a digital fingerprint acquisition system provides a
numerical ‘quality’ score of an ‘exemplar’ print at the time it is taken (to ensure adequate clarity for later comparison), the ‘quality’ of the latent fingerprint is
usually assessed qualitatively by the examiner. Bond (2008) defines a 5‐point scale primarily in terms of ridge continuity. Tabassi et al ., (2004) define a 5‐point
quality scale in terms of contrast and clarity of features and tuned to a matcher's performance [high (low) quality associated with good (poor) match performance].
Yoon et al ., (2013) define a latent fingerprint image quality score from a user‐defined set of features based on clarity of ridges and features. Tabassi et al . (2004,
Section 2) cite other latent print quality measures that have been proposed and conclude that, for all of them, ‘evaluating their quality measure is a subjective
matter’ (p.6). In addition, Ulery et al . (2012) note ‘substantial variability in the attributes of latent prints, in the capabilities of latent print examiners, in the types of
casework received by agencies, and the procedures used among agencies’. Given the extensive research on fingerprint analysis, one may safely assume that the
situation for other pattern evidence is equally subjective and in need of quantitative validation. One reason for the success of DNA matching is the identification of
13 well‐defined, highly distinctive, objective features, each of which has a finite number of outcomes and assumed to be independent. From them, one can
calculate probabilities of true and false identifications, which enhances enormously its probative value. We next define measures used in quantifying error
probabilities and how they can be used for pattern evidence. 3 Statistical Measures of Performance Most of the articles on the various types of forensic evidence
describe the process of collecting, analyzing and drawing inferences from the evidence. Only a few articles (e.g. Neumann et al. , 2011; Ulery et al. (2012)) present
the results of carefully designed studies toquantify accuracy, precision, sensitivity and specificity in these methods. In this section, we review the definitions
involved in the evaluation of any scientific process. We quantify the number of independent features of sufficiently high sensitivity and specificity needed to
achieve highly accurate predictions. From them, we illustrate a key reason for the success of DNA analysis in the courtroom, namely the objective calculations of
error probabilities. Three important characteristics of any measurement process are validity , consistency and well‐characterized error probabilities . These
concepts have been used extensively in the medical literature (Armitage, 1971, pp. 434ff; Everitt, 1995; Garb, 1996, Chapter 1), and they apply to forensic science
also. Validity (accuracy): Given a sample piece of evidence on which a measurement is made, is the measurement accurate? That is, if the measurement is ‘angle of
bifurcation’ or ‘number of matching features’, does that measurement yield the correct answer? For example, if a bifurcation appears on an image with an angle of
30°, does the measurement technology render a result of ‘30°’, at least on average if several measurements are made? As another example, if a hair diameter is
153μm, will the measurement, or average of several measurements, indicate ‘153’? Consistency (reliability): Given the same sample, how consistent (or variable)
are the results? If the measurement is repeated under different conditions (e.g. different fingers, different examiners, different analysis times, different
measurement systems and different levels of quality in evidence), is the measurement the same? (Almost surely not; see Dror & Charlton, 2006, for a small study
of five examiners.) Under what conditions are the measurements most variable? That is, do measurements vary most with different levels of latent print quality?
Or with different fingers of the same person? Or with different times of day for the same examiner? Or with different automated fingerprint identification systems
(AFIS)? Or with different examiners? If measurements are found to be most consistent when the latent print quality is high and when AFIS system type A is used,
but results vary greatly among examiners when the latent print quality is low or when other AFIS systems are used, then one would be in a good position to
recommend the restriction of this particular type of forensic evidence under only those conditions when consistency can be assured. (Note that this consideration
requires some objective measures of quality. For a measure of quality when imaging biological cells, see Peskin et al. , 2009.) Notice that a measurement can be
highly consistent around the wrong answer (consistent but inaccurate). For example, if an air traffic controller directs a pilot to ‘contact ground control at 121.7’,
the pilot's instrument must be both accurate (i.e. able to tune to 121.7, not 121.6 or 121.8) and precise (i.e. consistently reach 121.7). Well‐determined error
probabilities : If the true condition is known, what is the probability that the measurement technology will return the correct answer? This probability depends on
whether the ‘condition’ is ‘present’ or ‘absent’, so two terms are used to describe error probabilities. For purposes of illustration, suppose that ‘condition is
present’ refers to the ‘same source’ (‘match’) situation; for example, two different prints (latent and exemplar, or two latent) are made on the same person.
Conversely, suppose that ‘condition is absent’ means that the two items (prints, hairs or bullets) are known to have come from different sources. ∙Sensitivity : If,
unbeknownst to the examiner, the two items come from the same source (‘condition is present’), what is the probability that the method of analysis indicates
‘same source’? This probability is called sensitivity : urn:x-wiley:insr:media:insr12069:insr12069-math-0001 The opposite of sensitivity is false‐negative probability
(FNP) : urn:x-wiley:insr:media:insr12069:insr12069-math-0002 ∙Specificity : If, again unbeknownst to the examiner, the items (e.g. latent print and known
‘exemplar’ print) do not come from the same individual (true non‐match, or ‘condition is absent’), what is the probability that the analysis correctly indicates
‘different sources’? urn:x-wiley:insr:media:insr12069:insr12069-math-0003 The opposite of specificity is false‐positive probability (FPP) : urn:x-
wiley:insr:media:insr12069:insr12069-math-0004 The error probabilities FPP and FNP for a method can be estimated only from a designed experiment where the
experiment designer (not the examiner nor the exam administrator) knows whether the presented prints did, or did not, come from the same source. The
uncertainty in these estimates depends on the sample size; see point #6. Positive predictive value (PPV) : In the courtroom, one does not have the ‘true’ answer;
one has only the results of the forensic analysis. The question for the jury to decide is as follows: Given the results of the analysis, what is the probability that the
condition is present or absent ? For fingerprint analysis, one might phrase this question as follows: urn:x-wiley:insr:media:insr12069:insr12069-math-0005 If PPV is
high, and if the test result indicates ‘same source’, then we have some reasonable confidence that the two prints really did come from the same person. But if PPV
is low, then, despite the test result (‘same source’), there may be an unacceptably high chance that in fact the prints did not come from the same person—that is,
we have made a serious ‘type I error’ in claiming a ‘match’ when in fact the prints came from different persons. The opposite of the PPV is the probability of a false‐
positive call (FPC): given that the analysis claimed ‘same source’, what is the probability that in fact the specimens came from different sources? urn:x-
wiley:insr:media:insr12069:insr12069-math-0006 (The preceding quantity is related to the ‘false discovery rate’, a term coined by Benjamini & Hochberg, 1995, in
the context of multiple hypothesis tests; see Appendix.) Negative predictive value (NPV) : Conversely, the test should also correctly identify non‐matches if in fact
the two prints came from different sources. This aspect is called NPV : urn:x-wiley:insr:media:insr12069:insr12069-math-0007 If NPV is high and if the analysis
indicates ‘different sources’, then we have some assurance (given by the probability) that the two prints really did come from different people. But if NPV is low,
then, despite the analysis results (‘different sources’), the probability may be high that in fact the prints really arose from the same person; that is, the analysis has
resulted in a ‘type II error’ in claiming ‘different sources’ when in fact the prints came from the same person (freeing a potentially guilty person). The opposite of
the NPV is the probability of a false‐negative call (FNC): if the analysis claimed ‘different sources’, what is the probability that in fact the specimens really came
from the same person? urn:x-wiley:insr:media:insr12069:insr12069-math-0008 (The preceding quantity is related to the ‘false non‐discovery rate’, in analogy with
Benjamini and Hochberg's ‘false discovery rate’; Genovese and Wasserman, 2004.) The PPV and NPV, and hence the probabilities of FPC and FNC, cannot be
determined in real‐life cases because the ‘true’ answer in such cases is unknown. Sensitivity and specificity can be estimated from realistic scenarios in which an
administrator arranges test scenarios of print pairs that truly came, or did not come, from the same source. Bayes' formula (e.g. Snedecor and Cochran, 1972)
provides the connection between PPV/NPV and sensitivity/specificity (Appendix). PPV and NPV also depend upon the prevalence of the event; that is, are we
looking for one suspect out of one billion, or one suspect out of 10,000? The consequence of this formula is that low prevalence, high sensitivity and high specificity
are needed for high PPV and NPV, that is, for high probabilities of correct decisions, hence the need for sensible restriction of the suspect population, as well as
highly reliable and accurate tests. Moreover, sensitivity and specificity, and hence probabilities of correct decisions given the evidence, may well depend on various
factors , such as examiner, quality of evidence and measurement system. For example, sensitivity and specificity may be lower for examiners with less experience.
How do sensitivity and specificity vary with years of experience, with different levels of quality of the latent print or with different AFIS? Without this information,
we cannot assess the probabilities of correct decisions (PPV and NPV). Uncertainties in estimates : As indicated earlier, a well‐designed study can provide estimates
of sensitivity and specificity, from which estimates of PPV and NPV can be derived. But these estimates will be subject to uncertainty, because they will be based on
a sample, and hence, the information is limited by the sample size. An unappreciated fact is that the upper 95% confidence limit on a proportion based on N tests
that resulted in zero FPC is not zero but is roughly 3/N . So, for example, if an analyst is presented with 50 print pairs, some of which are true matches and some
true non‐matches, and makes the correct calls on all of them (zero errors), the upper bound on the true probability of false calls is roughly 3/50, or 6%; that is,
probabilities of less than 6% are consistent with having observed zero errors out of 50 trials, while probabilities greater than 6% would be inconsistent with having
observed zero errors out of 50 trials. Had one mistake out of 50 occurred, the upper 95% confidence bound would have been roughly 4.7/N , or 9.4%. If two errors
were called, the upper 95% confidence limit would have been roughly 6.2/N , or 12.4%. A common question then arises for statisticians to answer: how many
features are needed to provide a unique signature? For example, are 13 features (used for DNA typing) always sufficient for individualization? The answer depends
on several factors: The sensitivity of each feature; that is, if the profiles really come from the same person, the probability that the features match in both profiles
is high (e.g. above 0.90). The specificity of each feature; that is, if the profiles really come from different persons, the probability that the features do not match in
the profiles is high (e.g. above 0.90). The independence (or lack of strong dependence) among the features. The size of the population on which the signatures are
being evaluated. Under these conditions, 13 features (or even as few as 10) suffice to assure a PPV of over 0.9995. When both the sensitivity and the specificity of
each of k independent features exceed 0.90, Figure 1 shows a plot of the PPV as a function of k = number of features, for various population sizes (e.g. the match
occurs in one out of 10, 20, 50, 100, …, 1,000,000 profiles), when both the sensitivity and the specificity of each of k independent features are 0.90 (Figure 1A). But
when the sensitivity is only 0.60 and the specificity is only 0.50 (Figure 1B), then the number of independent features needed to assure PPV = 0.90 or higher can
easily become very large. image Figure 1 Open in figure viewerPowerPoint Plot of positive predictive value, as a function of number of independent features, when
(A) sensitivity and specificity of each feature is 0.90 and (B) sensitivity of each feature is 0.60 and specificity of each feature is 0.50. Curves correspond to
population size in which a match is believed to occur (1 = 10; 2 = 20; 3 = 50; 4 = 100; 5 = 200; 6 = 1,000; 7 = 10,000; 8 = 100,000; 9 = 1,000,000). 4 DNA Analysis
Versus Latent Print Analysis How do the concepts of sensitivity, specificity, PPV and NPV apply to DNA analysis? First, the National Research Council's report on
DNA Evidence (1996) noted regions of great similarity among individuals but also identified specific regions of great differences . The collection of these regions of
difference leads to genetic uniqueness among individuals (except for identical twins at birth). DNA analysis focuses on 13 specific regions (loci) where individuals
have been found to differ greatly. Specifically, multiple outcomes (alleles) are possible at each of the 13 loci. Suppose that there are 36 possible outcomes at locus
1, 231 at locus 2, 21 at locus …, 120 possible outcomes at locus 12, and 153 possible outcomes at locus 13 (Table 1, taken from Table 1 of Budowle et al. , 2009,
p.62). Then the number of possible unique DNA signatures is 36 × 231 × 21×…×120 × 153, making the number of possibilities huge (about 8 × 1021). [The number
may be larger if one includes low‐frequency (< 1%) alleles.] In addition, the loci appear on different chromosomes, and hence, the outcomes at the loci are
presumably independent ; that is, knowing that locus 1 had allele number 3 provides no information on the allele that is present at any other locus. [It should be
noted that both of these assumptions—number of low‐frequency alleles and independence of occurrence of alleles at two different loci—were based on DNA
databases available at the time of the National Research Council (1996) report. With ∼12 million profiles in the US FBI DNA database (Combined DNA Indexing
System), these assumptions could be investigated; Laurie and Weir, 2003; Weir, 2004, 2007, 2009.] The frequencies of the outcomes (alleles) at the different loci
have been estimated, so that, if an individual's DNA profile matches the suspect's profile at all 13 loci, the probability of a spurious match can be calculated to be
very low indeed. Consequently, both PPV and NPV are extremely high. DNA analysis does not leave the selection of the 13 regions (loci) up to the examiner. The 13
regions are fixed; they have been designed into the DNA analysis process precisely because they are stable (i.e. the alleles at these loci are not likely to change over
time), because each one has extremely high sensitivity and specificity and because, together, they provide a unique signature. One does not need to sequence an
individual's entire DNA, but one also does not have the freedom to choose any 13 loci. The signature has been carefully designed and evaluated to yield high PPV
and NPV. The science behind forensic DNA analysis had been carefully studied before it was used in the courtroom, so, by the time it was proposed as a forensic
tool, scientists had already carefully documented lab procedures (which they continue to improve). Validation and proficiency tests for examiners have been
established, and accredited DNA forensic laboratories are required to follow established standards for the analysis, interpretation and reporting of DNA test
results. (Even with standards in place, laboratory errors can and do occur.) Table 1. Number k of alleles (with frequencies ≥1%) and number of genotypes k (k + 1)/2
The situation is not nearly so well defined with latent fingerprint
at 13 specified loci in the human genome .

analysis: fingerprint ridges are presumed to be unique, based on observation by Galton and Locard (cf. Stigler,
1999).Fingerprint ridge characteristics can change over time (e.g. become less distinct, with greater use, or
absent altogether, with scarring).The a nalysis phase of the A CE‐V method—assessment of print
clarity/quality—is acknowledged to be subjective. At present, no objective measures of print
quality have been proposed, as they have been for other images. For example, the methodology of Peskin et al. , 2009 for
assessing the quality of biological cell images (Figure 2) could be adapted to derive a more objective measure of fingerprint image
quality (Figure 3).The
c omparison phase of the AC E‐V method is highly subjective: the examiner
selects regions for comparing a latent print with prints from a database .the e valuation phase of
the ACE ‐V method likewise is subjective: the examiner identifies features (points or minutiae)
that ‘match’. The non‐compulsory guidelines from the Scientific Working Group on Friction and
SurfaceTechnology recommend 6–12 points of agreement. But the measure of ‘agreement’ is
not made on the basis of measurements (e.g. distance between ridges and density of pores) but
rather is subjective: ‘Source determination is made when the examiner concludes, based on his or her experience, that
sufficient quantity and quality of friction ridge detail is in agreement’ (NAS report, p.138). Moreover, the independence, sensitivity
and specificity of these features are unknown.The v erification phase of the ACE‐V is not conducted as an independent second
review but rather proceeds with ‘another qualified examiner [who] repeats the analysis and comes to same conclusion …[this second
examiner] may be aware of [first] conclusion’ (NAS report, p.138).Unlike the probabilistic model for the frequency of alleles at the 13
loci in DNA analysis, from which one can calculate probabilities of FPC and FNC (from PPV and NPV), no reliable probabilistic or
scientific model for the frequency of minutiae has been validated, and hence, neither probabilistic estimates of errorprobabilities
nor the uncertainties in these estimates can be made.Unlike DNA analysis, which was studied and evaluated in research laboratories
all over the world, no extensive and comprehensive studies of performance of the latent fingerprint process or ACE‐V methodology
(which quantify the effects of multiple sources known to affect variability in performance), nor the probabilities of error from the
individual steps in the process, had been conducted at the time of the National Research Council (2009) report.
 HR Link
The Affirmative sentimental human rights framework necessarily invests in the
anti-queer violence that hold together the fantasy of equality before the law.
By writing the practice of [whatever the aff ends] as an aberrant horror
incompatible with liberal society, the affirmative maintains a necropolitical
investment in the state’s absolute control of “legitimate” violence.
Stanley 11 (Eric, President’s Postdoctoral fellow in the departments of Communication and
Critical Gender Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Near Life, Queer Death Overkill
and Ontological Capture, Pg. 7-8)

Public Pain, Private Loss

Where statistics fail, scars rise to tell other histories. From the phenomenological vault of growing up
different, to the flickers of brutal details, one would not have to dig deep to uncover a corpse . Yet
even with the horrific details, antiqueer violence is written as an outlaw practice , a random event, and
an unexpected tragedy. Dominant culture’s necessity to disappear the enormity of antiqueer
violence seems unsurprising. Yet I suggest that mainstream LGBT discourse also works in de-
politicized collusion with the erasure of a structural recognition . Through this privatization the
enormity of antiqueer violence is vanished .21 Thinking violence as individual acts versus epistemic force works to
support the normative and normalizing structuring of public pain. In other words, privatizing antiqueer violence is one
of the ways in which the national body and its trauma are heterosexualized, or in which the
relegation of antiqueer violence, not unlike violence against women, racist violence, violence against animals (none of
which are mutually exclusive), casts the national stage of violence and its ways of mourning as always
human, masculinist, able- bodied, white, gender- conforming, and heterosexual . For national
violence to have value it must be produced through the tangled exclusion of bodies whose
death is valueless. To this end, as mainstream LGBT groups clamber for dominant power through
attachment of a teleological narrative of progress, they too reproduce the argument that
antiqueer violence is something out of the ordinary .22 The problem of privatizing violence is not, however,
simply one of the re- narration of the incidents. The law, and specifically “rights” discourse , which argues to
be the safeguard of liberal democracy, is one of the other motors that works to privatize this
structural violence. Rights are inscribed, at least in the symbolic, with the power to protect citizens of
the nation-state from the excesses of the government and against the trespass of criminalit y. In
paying attention to the anterior magic of the law, it is not so much, or at least not only, that some are granted rights because they
are human, but that theperformative granting of rights is what constitutes the promise of humanity
under which some bodies are held. This is important in thinking about the murder of Brazell, and
about antiqueer violence at large, because it troubles the very foundations of the notion of
protection and the formative violence of the law itself . According to the juridical logic of liberal
democracy, if these rights are infringed upon, the law offers remedy in the name of justice. This
necessary and assumptive formal equality before the law is the precursor for a system argued to be
based on justice. In other words, for the law to lay claim to something called justice, formalized equality must be a
precondition. The law then is a systematic and systematizing process of substitution where the
singular and the general are shuttled and replaced to inform a matrix of fictive justice. Thus for
the law to uphold the fantasy of justice and disguise its punitive aspirations, antiqueer violence,
like all structural violence, must be narrated as an outlaw practice and unrepresentative of
culture at large. This logic then must understand acts like the murder of Brazell in the singular. Through a mathematics of
mimesis the law reproduces difference as similarity. By funneling the desperate situations and
multiple possibilities into a calculable trespass kneading out the contours and the excess along
the way, equality appears. To acknowledge the inequality of “equality” before the law would
undo the fantastical sutures that bind the U.S. legal system . In the hope of being clear, for the law to
read antiqueer violence as a symptom of larger cultural forces, the punishment of the “guilty
party” would only be a representation of justice. To this end, the law is made possible through the
reproduction of both material and discursive formation of antiqueer, along with many other
forms of violence. I too quickly rehearse this argument in the hope that it might foreclose the singular reliance on the law as
the ground, and rights as the technology, of safety.23
 IR Link
The aff’s neutral descriptions of IR belie a vicious terror state at the core of
global warfare. Their statist ideology guarantees unending war against
difference that manifests itself in structural violence and turns their geopolitics
impacts.
Karatzogianni and Robinson, 13 (Athina Karatzogianni - Senior Lecturer in Media and
Communication at the University of Leicester, UK. Dr. Andrew Robinson is a political theorist and
activist based in the UK and research fellow affiliated to the Centre for the Study of Social and
Global Justice (CSSGJ). July 2013, “Schizorevolutions vs. Microfascisms: A Deleuzo- Nietzschean
Perspective on State, Security, and Active/Reactive Networks,” pp. 8-11,
https://www.academia.edu/8115284/Schizorevolutions_vs._Microfascisms_A_Deleuzo-
Nietzschean_Perspective_on_State_Security_and_Active_Reactive_Networks Date Accessed:
6/27/18)//GraRev

Thesis 2: The threatened state transmutes into the terror state.

The return of state violence from the kernel of state exceptionalism is a growing problem. It is
grounded on a reaction of the terrified state by conceiving the entire situation as it is formerly
conceived specific sites of exception and emergency (c.f. Agamben, 1998, 2005). New forms of social
control directed against minor deviance or uncontrolled flows are expanding into a war against
difference and a systematic denial of the ‘right to have rights ‘ (Robinson, 2007). The project is not
simply an extension of liberal-democratic models ofsocial control, but breaks with such models
in directly criminalizing nonconformity from a prescribed way of life and attempting to extensively
regulate everyday life through repression. This new repressive model, expressing a kind of neo-
totalitarianism, should be taken to include such measures and structures as the rise of gated
communities, CCTV, RFID, ID cards, ASBOs, dispersal zones, paramilitary policing methods, the
‘social cleansing ‘ of groups such as homeless people and street drinkers from public spaces,
increasing restrictions on protests and attacks on ‘extremist ‘ groups, the use of extreme
sentencing against minor deviance, and of course the swathe of “anti-terrorism” laws which
provide a pretext for expanded repression. This increasingly vicious state response leads to
extremely intrusive state measures. The magazine Datacide analyses the wave of repression as ‘the real subsumption of
every singularity in the domain of the State. From now on if your attributes don't quite extend to crime, a judge's word suffices to
ensure that crime will reach out and embrace your attributes ‘ (Hyland n.d.). To
decompose networks, the state seeks
to shadow them ever more closely. The closure of space is an inherent aspect of this project of
control. While open space is a necessary enabling good from the standpoint of active desire, it is
perceived as a threat by the terrified state, because it is space in which demonised Others can
gather and recompose networks outside state control. Hence, for the threatened state, open space is
space for the enemy, space of risk. Given that open space is in contrast necessary for difference
to function (since otherwise it is excluded as unrepresentable or excessive), the attempts to render all space
closed and governable involve a constant war on difference which expands ever more deeply into
everyday life. As Guattari aptly argues, neoliberal capitalism tends to construe difference as unwanted
‘noise ‘ (1996: 137). Society thus becomes a hothouse of constant crackdowns and surveillance,
which at best simulates, and at worst creates, a situation where horizontal connections either cannot emerge or are
constantly persecuted. Theories such as those of Agamben and Kropotkin show the predisposition of the state to pursue
total control. But why is the state pursuing this project now? To understand this, one must recognise the multiple ways in which
capitalism can handle difference. Hence, there are two poles the state can pursue, social-democratic (adding axioms) or totalitarian
(subtracting axioms), which have the same function in relation to capitalism, but are quite different in other regards. State terror
involves the replacement of addition of axioms (inclusion through representation) with
subtraction of axioms (repression of difference). This parallels the distinction between
‘hard ‘ and ‘soft ‘ power in international relations. Crucially, ‘hard ‘ power is deflationary (Mann 2005: 83-
4). While ideological integration can be increased by intensified command, ‘soft ‘ power over anyone who remains outside the
dominant frame is dissipated. Everyday
deviance becomes resistance because of the project of control
which attacks it. It also becomes necessarily more insurrectionary, in direct response to the
cumulative attempts to stamp it out through micro-regulation . What the state gains in coercive power, it
loses in its ability to influence or engage with its other. But the state, operating under intense uncertainty and fear, is giving up
trying to seem legitimate across a field of difference. A recent example of this concerns the treatment of whistleblowers: Bradley
Manning and by extent the publisher Julian Assange in the WikiLeaks case (for a discussion of affect see Karatzogianni, 2012) and
Edward Snowden in relation to the recent revelations about NSA surveillance program PRISM (Poitras and Greenwald ‘s video
Interview with Edward Snowden, 9 June 2013). This is not to say that it dispenses with articulation. It simply restricts it tautologically
to its own ideological space (Negri 2003: 27). Legitimation is replaced by information, technocracy and a
simulation of participation (Negri 2003: 90, 111.). There is a peculiarly  close relationship between the
state logic of command and the field of what is variously termed ‘ideology ‘ (in Althusser), ‘mythology ‘ (in
Barthes) and ‘fantasy ‘ (in Lacan): second-order significations embedded in everyday representations,
through which a simulated lifeworld is created, in which people live in passivity, creating their
real performative connection to their conditions of existence and bringing them into
psychological complicity in their own repression. Such phenomena are crucial to the
construction of demonised Others which provides the discursive basis for projects of state
control. ‘[Conflict is] deflected… through the automatic micro-functioning of ideology through information systems. This is the
normal, ‘everyday ‘ fascism, whose most noticeable feature is how unnoticeable it is ‘ (Negri 1998a:
190). In denial of generalisable rights, the in-group defines social space for itself and itself alone. The result
is a denial of basic dignity and rights to those who fall outside "society", who, in line with their
metaphysical status, are to be cast out, locked away, or put beyond a society defined as being
for "us and us only" (the mythical division between social and anti-social). The neo-totalitarian state resurrects
the tendency to build a state ideology, but this ideology is now disguised as a shared referent of
polyarchic parties and nominally free media . Failing to think in statist terms is no longer any
different from criminal intent. Romantically crossing an airport barrier for a goodbye kiss is taken as a major crime, for
the state, being terrified, responds disproportionately; the romantic is blamed for producing this response (Baker and Robins, 2010).
He should have thought like the state to begin with, and not corrupted its functioning with trivialities such as love. Such
is the
core of the terror-state: constant exertion of energy to ward off constant anxiety, at the cost
of a war on difference.
 Marijuana Links
The Impacts they isolate are not a result of the criminalization of marijuana but
rather the managerial model’s influence on police practices. The affs passage
ensures managerial model will be used to restructure administration,
management, and tactical deployment decisions in order to more insidiously
execute agendas like that used to “fix” the effects of the broken window
hypothesis.
Kohler-Hausmann 14 - Associate Professor of Law and Sociology at Yale Law School (Issa,
Stanford Law Review, “Managerial Justice and Mass Misdemeanors,” February 22, 2014, Vol. 66,
No. 3, 628-633, https://ssrn.com/abstract=2326111)//AD

The managerial model can make sense of the pattern of dispositions in Parts III and IV because,
in this approach, the rules of criminal procedure and criminal law are used as tools for socially
regulating certain populations over time, as opposed to punishing individual instances of
lawbreaking. Not all criminal court actors subjectively ascribe to a set of values that make maintenance of the managerial
model possible, nor do they necessarily describe their choices as seeking managerial ends. The claim developed in Parts
III and IV is that the institutional structure constrains and mediates the subjective orientations
of these actors. Actors in a largely managerial system are not insensitive to evidence of
innocence and guilt. But claims and evidence of innocence or guilt are incorporated into the
operations of misdemeanor justice in a particular manner shaped by the animating logic of the
managerial model.
The actual operations and uses of criminal law and criminal process must be understood in a particular social and historical context.
In New York City the character of misdemeanor justice was radically transformed by seismic changes in policing in the 1990s. With
this conceptual trace of the managerial model in hand, the next Part turns to the story that
produced the age of mass misdemeanors. I highlight aspects of this new policing regime that have received little
attention: the increase in record-keeping from these encounters and the ways in which the policing tactics are dependent upon the
criminal courts to track and sort people. For most of the peak crime years in New York City—about 1985 to 1990—felony arrests
outpaced misdemeanor arrests.In 1994 that changed. Between 1993 and 2010 the number of misdemeanor arrests almost dou-
bled. Misdemeanor arrests started to soar in the mid-1990s because, quite simply, the new political and policing administration
decided to dramatically in- crease misdemeanor arrests. We
can never directly interpret arrest rates as an index
of underlying criminal behavior because reporting and police practices mediate criminal events
and arrests. This is especially true of misdemeanors. The police can find as many instances of
marijuana or drug possession, petit larceny, unlicensed vending, misdemeanor physical
altercations, public alcohol consumption, turnstile jumping, prostitution, and disorderly conduct
as they devote the time and resources to find. Therefore, in most cities, misdemeanor arrest
numbers are largely an artifact of policing practices rather than crime trends. Table 2 shows
that misdemeanor arrests cover a wide range of conduct, yet the largest arrest categories are
for offenses where a surge in underlying behavior is an unlikely (or at least difficult to prove.)
Figure 2 shows the top ten misdemeanor arrests categories over thirty years.

TABLE 2
Misdemeanor Arrests by Offense—2012
Top Arrest Charge
PL 221 Marijuana
PL 165 Other Theft*
 PL 120 Assault
PL 220 Controlled Substances
PL 155 Larceny
PL 140 Trespass/Burglary
PL 265 Weapons
VTL 1192 Driving While Intoxicated PL 145 Mischief
PL 240 Public Order
PL 205 Escape
PL 230 Prostitution
PL 130 Sex Offenses
Other
Total Misdemeanor Arrests
Arrests % of Total 45,574 19.2% 36,925 15.6% 35,068 14.8% 25,224 10.6% 24,679 10.4% 13,337 5.6%
8,477 3.6% 7,712 3.3% 7,444 3.1% 6,357 2.7% 5,715 2.4% 3,462 1.5% 1,063 0.4%
15,820 6.7% 236,857 100.0%
Source: New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services.
* Other theft includes theft of services (e.g., turnstile jumping).
Increasing the number of arrests and tickets for low-level offenses was an explicitly stated goal of the Giuliani administration and his
newly appointed police chief, William Bratton. This new policing regime had three defining fea- tures. One
feature
encompassed using various new organizational and manage- rial tools to gather and analyze
data on crime severity and location, and on po- lice activities. These data were in turn used to
restructure police administration, management, and tactical deployment decisions. These
practices are often grouped under the term CompStat. The second defining feature of the new regime was the
expansion and intensification of certain policing methods—stop-and-frisk encounters, issuance
of summonses, and arrests for misdemeanor crimes. The third feature that defined the new
regime was the massive in- crease in the records collected, maintained, and shared with other
criminal justice agencies.
Failure to challenge managerialism has empirically resulted in white
gentrification of marijuana markets at the expense of black people who bear
the brunt of the war on drugs.
Akbar 18 – Assistant Professor at Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University, ( Amna A.,
New York University Law Review, “Toward a Radical Imagination of Law,” June 2018, Vol. 93, No.
3, 469-470, https://ssrn.com/abstract=3061917)//AD

At the heart of the Vision is the reorganization of the state through the redistribution of power
and resources into Black commu- nities, as self-determined by Black communities. This requires
a reimagination of the criminal legal system and the problems it poses. As part of this larger project, the
movement demands criminal law reforms that do more than delimit the fiscal, social, and governance footprint of incarceration and
policing, but challenge and undermine capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. This
has created some unexpected
tensions and what could be read as contradictory political positions . Consider the campaign in
Colorado to decriminalize mari- juana, viewed by some in the movement as hollow
reform.310 The campaign neither meaningfully reflected Black leadership nor accounted for the
racial injustice wrought by decades of the war on crime . Legalization campaigns, driven by a
desire for profits from newly legalized markets and divorced from racial justice campaigns ,
centralize power in the hands of a few authorized—typically white— growers and dealers. 311
They continue to criminalize unauthorized (cheaper) sales by Black dealers, and do not involve
reparations pro- visions or expungement of drug records .312 Such campaigns do not
meaningfully redress harm in Black communities or shift power into those communities. They
merely strengthen the grip of capitalism.
In every instance in the US the legalization of marijuana directly results in
increased police budgets without resulting in a significant drop in mass
incarceration.
Roberts 6/8/20 (Chris, Forbes, Why Marijuana Legalization Funds The Police,
https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrisroberts/2020/06/08/why-marijuana-legalization-funds-the-
police/#72c7616a2f1e)

Bribing the cops is illegal, but not in politics . Without paying off the cops, California might not
have legalized recreational cannabis.
But now, four years later, with the legal industry struggling and police unable to protect legal merchants
from either the illicit market or organized thieves, there’s serious doubt whether devoting tax
revenue from marijuana sales to police budgets was smart politics. And in light of calls to defund or
cut police spending throughout the country, California’s experience is a warning for legalization efforts in
other states. Should police get a cut before education, healthcare, or disadvantaged communities shut out of the legal market? And does law
enforcement have any business making money off of legalization at all?
Eager to sell regulating and taxing cannabis to uneasy suburban and conservative voters, the authors of Proposition 64, the Adult
Use of Marijuana Act, offered the state’s powerful law-enforcement lobbies a gift.
Twenty percent of the promised $1 billion in annual tax revenue legalization would create was earmarked for “public safety.”
Legalization advocates heard an earful from growers and merchants eager to go legal—why reward the crews that had spent
decades trying to arrest them?—but it was sold as necessary and practical electoral strategy. And from a public-safety standpoint,
the gambit worked—sort of. Though the cop lobbies opposed the measure anyway, they also didn’t run a massive scare campaign.
On Election Day 2016, AUMA won more than 57 percent of the vote.
“It was one of the more difficult-to-swallow parts of the thing,” recalled Hezekiah Allen, a former lobbyist for California cannabis
growers, who had famously opposed legalization in 2010. Allen and his outfit remained neutral.
“But,” he noted, elsewhere in the state, the promise that pot would help cops “sure did get votes.”
Similar tactics have been employed elsewhere . California’s generosity was notable only in its size. Marijuana
legalization has meant money for American police everywhere the social experiment’s been
tried.
Part of legalization’s sales pitch was lower law-enforcement costs. Since cannabis use was no
longer a crime, police would have less to do, and fewer people would go to jail. This has yet to
materialize.
In Nevada, pot taxes help pay the police to “enforce” the measure (along with, one assumes, other laws). In Colorado, cannabis
taxes fund diversion and addiction-recovery programs, which are administered by the police. In Portland, Oregon, most of a special 3
percent city tax on cannabis, part of which was meant to help jump-start minority entrepreneurs, somehow ended up in the police
budget, infuriating local lawmakers who thought the cash would go to minority entrepreneurs.
Even before the coronavirus pandemic flattened consumer spending, legalization was in trouble. In no small part
because taxes are too high, but also because police can’t seem to do anything about it, the illicit market is booming. California’s legal
marijuana industry is “on the brink of collapse,” as officials told the Los Angeles Times in January.
Plans to cut taxes and give merchants some relief were scuttled by the coronavirus pandemic. Weed is
still too expensive. Sales are down, and so is that tax revenue. Yet in the meantime, police are still getting their lick—and legal
California marijuana merchants can’t get the police protection they thought they paid for.
Last week, after the killing of George Floyd at the hands of police, cops decked out in riot gear and armed with tear gas and pepper
spray squared off against demonstrators in almost every major California city. Meanwhile, apparently aware cops were occupied,
bands of organized and armed robbers burglarized cannabis businesses—in some cases, repeatedly. Several merchants reported
police took hours to respond, if they arrived at all, allowing thieves to hold security guards at gunpoint and make off with cannabis
and cash.
That’s cash that now won’t go into anyone’s budget—and in choosing to allocate resources to demonstrations, police may have cost
themselves. Mayors and lawmakers in San Francisco and other cities were cannabis are legal are now looking to trim police budgets.
Voters and wonks in other states pondering legalization also have an object lesson. Why pay for something you might not get—
especially if the whole experiment seems like it could fail?
“It just doesn’t seem fair,” said Debby Goldsberry, whose West Oakland dispensary, Magnolia Wellness, was robbed May 31—one
night after several other Oakland dispensaries were hit. Police did not warn other dispensaries that they were burglary targets, and
did not respond to 911 calls when burglaries were underway, Goldsberry said.
Either Arizona,New Jersey, or maybe New Mexico or New York will be the next state to legalize
cannabis for adults. All need money, badly. And in all states, elected officials and policymakers have suggested cannabis
could provide that money. This is the ATM argument for legalization. But anyone running those campaigns will now have a harder
sell promising cash to cops—at all, and not just up front.
As for California, lawmakers are now in a bind. “I can think of a lot of betters uses of those funds,” said Matt Kumin, a San Francisco-
based lawyer who advocated for Prop. 64’s passage. In the coronavirus pandemic, with millions of Americans going untested for
COVID-19 symptoms and millions more out of work, he’s not the only one.
Redirecting legalization money away from police budgets will require modifying the voter-approved legalization law. This can
probably be done by the state Legislature, but not without a fight.
‘The cops use blackmail, threaten, and practice
low enforcement activity if pols threaten their budgets, ” Kumin added.
Hints of this were underway before the pandemic and the protests . In December, an effort to cut
local weed taxes in Oakland, where Goldsberry and other merchants paid a 10 percent local tax on top of state taxes, in
order to stimulate the industry was opposed—by the local police union .

Decriminalization causes police to target black youth for incarceration.

Anguelov 20 (Nikolay, Associate Professor of Public Policy, University of Massachusetts
Dartmouth, The unintended consequences of marijuana decriminalization,
https://theconversation.com/the-unintended-consequences-of-marijuana-decriminalization-
131270)

America’sdecades-long war on drugs disproportionately harmed minorities . Now, it seems that

decriminalization of marijuana hasn’t leveled the playing field.
Black men are 12 times more likely than white men to spend time incarcerated in the United States. College enrollment for black
men has declined since the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act went into effect.
I am a scholar of public policy. In my book, “From Criminalizing to Decriminalizing Marijuana: The Politics of Social Control,” I aim to
provide a historic overview of marijuana legislation and its impact on minorities.
Unequal easing
Today, some drug laws related to marijuana are easing . Twenty five states have introduced
decriminalization reforms, with 11 states allowing adult recreational use. Such reforms directly impact adults 21 years of
age and older, but they also have indirect effect on younger Americans .
Even though marijuana is still illegal for people under 21 , evidence is emerging that
decriminalization is increasing the number of kids who consume weed illegally.
As I wrote in my book, young people have always been the main buyers of marijuana. Smoking marijuana has become an important
part of growing up for many U.S. teenagers, a fact not acknowledged by any marijuana reform advocacy analysis.
Additionally, crime
data show that even in the most permissive legal environments, minority youth
continue to be disproportionately arrested and convicted on marijuana charges.
Youth using marijuana
From 2000 to 2014, self-reported usage rates in Americans 15 years of age and older doubled. These rates include teens and those
under 21, for whom marijuana use continues to be and most likely will continue to be illegal.
Those who advocate for marijuana reform ignore the fact that looser laws promote more marijuana use, especially by young and
marginalized Americans who buy the drug in illegal markets.
For example, arrest
data show that in Colorado, legalizing recreational use for anyone 21 and over
caused a significant increase in the arrest rates of African Americans and Hispanics under that
legal age limit. At the same time, arrests for underage whites decreased.
In Washington state, arrests on all marijuana charges fell by 90% between 2008 and 2014, but “hazard rates” for African Americans
remained unchanged. This means they were still twice as likely as whites to be arrested on marijuana charges.
In other words, decriminalization has done little to change historical patterns in national marijuana
arrest trends.
What drives reform?
Liberal Americans tend to believe marijuana legalization drives reform.
There are three distinctly different categories of marijuana policy reform – decriminalization of possessing a small amount of
marijuana, legalizing medical marijuana and decriminalizing recreational use.
The reform diffusion trend picked impetus in 2000, when Hawaii and Nevada legalized medical marijuana through their state
legislatures.
This signaled the beginning of the political normalization of marijuana reform. Previously, medical marijuana laws were reformed
largely by ballot initiatives in states with constitutions that have a direct democracy measure.
In my book, I analyzed the political, economic and demographic predictors of each type of policy reform from 2000 to 2014. The
results indicate that rising marijuana usage rates, a ballot initiative allowing voters a say in the matter and the experience of
neighboring states are the main factors driving decriminalization in general.
In all three cases of reform, usage rates were the strongest predictive factor. They had remained largely unchanged until the wave of
decriminalization started two decades ago. As state laws reformed, usage rates started to marginally, yet steadily increase. Since
2000 they have doubled nationally.
The strongest spikes are in states that are known as leaders in not just decriminalization, but which are relatively more permissive in
terms of possession, access and oversight like Washington and Vermont.
States with a relatively large African American population, such as Mississippi, North Carolina and New York, were more likely to
decriminalize small amount possession first, possibly in an attempt to tackle social injustice.
States such as Maryland, Virginia and Rhode Island have legalized medical use without previously decriminalizing small amount
possession.
Decriminalizing recreational use occurred mainly as a function of high marijuana usage rates in states like Massachusetts, Oregon
and Colorado.
The consequences
Reports regarding the arrest rates for youths may indicate unintended consequences of
decriminalization. These consequences include increased police discretion, providing incentives
for youth consumption in illegal markets and exacerbating racial problems in juvenile justice.
 Ontology Links
The political subject is not ontologically fixed, but rather constructed by
historical events that can be uncovered through a re-reading of history.
Clifford 01 (Michael Clifford is a professor in the philosophy department of Mississippi State
University and received his PHD at Vanderbilt University “Political Genealogy After Foucault:
Savage Identities” Date access: 6/27/2020 pg. 150-153) TR
Thus, let us replace our Cartesian doubt with Nietzschean suspicion. Let us ask different questions: Has any subject ever been
understood apart from a discursive milieu that gives him meaning? Has any subject ever been understood apart from a structure of
power relations that determines her place in the world? Has any subject ever been understood apart from a set of practices through
which he fashions a specific mode of being? These questions, which belong together, do not
appeal to the interiority of
a private world, but to a radical exteriority of historical contingencies . When applied to the question, “Is
this really Jeremy Bentham?” they alter it completely; it becomes a question that must be analyzed in terms of
certain privileged discourses (e.g., those of biology, medicine, theology), in terms of certain entrenched
institutional practices, rules, regulations (e.g., those of rank, authority, normalization), and in terms of certain
identifiable, and identifying, ways of conducting oneself . Even more, it is in terms of the correlation of these
factors that we define the reality of Jeremy Bentham. 150 Political Genealogy After Foucault This is the approach that must now be
brought to bear on the question of the political subject. That is, political
subjects are the effects of an interplay of
discursive practices, power relations, and modes of self-formation; political subjects are the
products of a correlation of processes of rarity, of exclusion, of appropriation; political subjects
are fabrications—not entirely unlike the figure that now stares grimly from his mahogany cabinet. The work of Michel Foucault
allows us to understand political identity, not in terms of a metaphysically given entity, but as a
fabrication, a construct. In general terms, Foucault’s work allows us to see political identity as discourse-
specific and historically contingent: it varies according to the interplay of discursive regularities,
regional practices, disciplinary effects, and modes of self-problematization . The political subject emerges
within the space of this interplay. Considered in terms of this interplay, the notion of the political subject as a fundamental and
essential identity animated by spirit or will becomes suspect. Rather, the
political subject is an effect, an arsis,
erected in a matrix of experience that thrusts onto undefined bodies the mask of their own
identity. In this sense, political subjectivity is “an historical event, one which [is] not at all
necessary, not linked to human nature, or any anthropological necessity .”1 The self-identical subject of
traditional political philosophy emerges from genealogical analysis shattered, dispersed, and exposed as a
reticulated convergence of lines of power, of discursive limits, of self-limitations. Genealogy
exposes the nonessentiality of the political subject through a historical analysis of its
constitution. The exposure of political subjectivity is effected by recognizing in it the axial
interplay of discursive practices, power relations, and processes of subjectivation. Yet what is
exposed in this analysis is not the “origin” of the political subject, understood as the
transcendental conditions of its appearance . Rather, what genealogical critique exposes is the
Entstehung of the political subject, its emergence as an event . As Foucault explains, “Emergence designates a place
of confrontation but not as a closed field offering the spectacle of a struggle among equals. Rather, as Nietzsche demonstrates in his
analysis of good and evil, it
is a ‘nonplace,’ a pure distance, which indicates that the adversaries do not
belong to a common space. Consequently, no one is responsible for an emergence; no one can
glory in it, since it always occurs in the interstice. In a sense, only a single drama is ever staged in
this ‘nonplace,’ the endlessly repeated play of dominations.” 2 Here we have, arguably, one final reversal of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau’s history of the origins of the political subject appeals to the notion of origin as Unsprang, which
Foucault describes as “the meta-historical deployment of ideal significations and Genealogy and Other-Politics 151 indefinite
teleologies.”3 Genealogy as the parodic pursuit of Entstehung, by contrast, undermines any notion of
necessary origination. The event of the political subject’s emergence is the effect, rather, of
pure play and raw contingency, of the “play of dominations.” The space of the political
subject’s emergence refers not to the firm ground of historical necessity, but to a “non-place,”
to a space of “pure distance” opened and bordered by the accidental junction and concurrence
of more or less random phenomena. Political subjects emerge in the “interstice,” between
discourses of right and disciplines of subjection, between the polarizing demands of positive
and negative freedom, between citizenry and individuality, between unity and pluralism,
between the antinomic concerns of a governmental integration. This interstice, this space of axial
interplay, is not unlike Jeremy Bentham’s mahogany cabinet at the University of London. In their own way political subjects
are like Benthams—identities pieced together from alien forms, fabrications of anonymous
technologies. In the interstice of the political subject’s emergence we can see discourse at
play, animating and giving meaning to an otherwise meaningless figure. In this interstice we can see
power extending its web, encircling the body and cloaking it in the constricting fabric of its own identity. In this interstice we can see
the subject at work on itself, dutifully fashioning the dress of its stylized display. We see subjection in this interstice,
we see domination and oppression; but we also see freedom, a persistent obstinacy that
holds the promise of new possibilities, of new beginnings. This freedom, this resilience, gives
life to the subject—it extends itself in the form of pure force and desire, seeking limits only for
the sake of transgressing them. “It is through revolt that subjectivity . . . introduces itself into
history and gives it the breath of life.”4 The political subject is at bottom nothing more than the
envelopment of freedom, a circumscription of a persistent resistance. The story of freedom’s relentless
struggle to escape its bonds is the story of history itself. By listening with a suspicious ear to this story, the genealogist not
only exposes the non-essentiality of the emergence of the political subject, but also of those
philosophical discourses which make the political subject the central figure of a juridical
reflection. In particular, the discourses of the liberal tradition are shown to be replete with
metaphysical biases and presuppositions regarding the political subject . We see this most distinctly in the
liberal tradition’s conception of the political subject as a concrete, ontologically distinct unit of individuality. This unit is invested with
rights, freedoms, obligations, animated by the spirit of Sovereignty, protected by inviolable spheres of liberty, bound in a contractual
relation to society, pos 152 Political Genealogy After Foucault sensed of a proprietors power. Foucault’s work undercuts the
authority and essentiality of all such claims and assumptions informing the discursive practice of the liberal
tradition. It is not
just a matter of dismissing these discourses, however. Foucault’s work shows that they are
imbricated in the
anonymous technology of power/knowledge relations that turns individuals into subjects and
puts them in the service of the rationality of governmentality. These discourses provide value
systems and frameworks of conceptualization that individuals can appropriate in the production
of a discourse of truth about themselves, a discourse that serves as the principle of their
subjection as it binds them to the constraints of a self-identification . Thus, more is going on here than a
“positivistic” dismissal of a useless metaphysics. On the contrary: the problem is to show how this metaphysics is
used, effectively, as an instrument of subjection and subjugation.
 Militarized Academy Link
The affirmative rhetoric of the “militarization” of the academy elides the depth
and extent of university ties to the national security apparatus. Focus on
“militarization” trades off with a structural analysis of power along lines of race,
gender, and disability.
Howell 18 (Alison, Department of Political Science, Rutgers University, Forget “militarization”:
race, disability and the “martial politics” of the police and of the university, International
Feminist Journal of Politics)

The “martial politics” of the university

Just as “militarization” has guided inquiry into contemporary police violence, it has also been used to call attention to worrying
connections between the university and the US national security apparatus. One prominent example is the series of Vice News
reports exposing the “100 Most Militarized Universities in America” (Arkin and O’Brien 2015a, 2015b). The authors of the study note
that initially they were reluctant to use the term “militarization,” which was not meant to simply evoke … ROTC [Reserve Officer
Training Corps] drills held on a campus quad. It was also a measure of university labs funded by US intelligence agencies,
administrators with strong ties to those same agencies, and, most importantly, the educational backgrounds of the approximately
1.4 million people who hold Top Secret clearance. (Arkin and O’Brien 2015a)
But “militarization” leads us to underestimate the depth and extent of national security ties to
the university, past and present, and to assume that universities can revert to some non-
militarized past. This limitation is also evident in scholarly literature.
One of the central scholarly texts on the so-called “militarization” of the university is Giroux’s The
University in Chains (2007). Cited hundreds of times, and reported on in popular media, it argues that the post-9/11 period
saw a significant acceleration of the corporatization and militarization of the university (Giroux 2007, 2008). Giroux goes so far as to
say that while corporatization had previously taken root in the university, “it is only in the aftermath of 9/11 that the university has
also become an intense site of militarization” (Giroux 2008, 58). Furthermore, “militarization” of the university begins for Giroux only
after World War II (see also Chomsky et al. 1998).
These popular and scholarly works identify important changes in the nature of military
involvement in universities. For example, the Vice report notes that funding now flows to
intelligence-gathering disciplines (e.g., computer science) rather than solely weapons-oriented ones
(e.g., physics). Yet research guided by the concept of “militarization” falls into the trap of imagining
military encroachment on previously civil institutions : “the idea of the university as a site of critical thinking,
public service and socially responsible research appears to have been usurped” (Giroux 2008, 63).
This is a fantasy. The university was never such a pure site . Many American universities were
built with slave labor or its proceeds (Brown University Committee on Slavery and Justice n.d.), and from the
outset have contributed vitally to colonization and White supremacy. By positing a purely civilian
“before” to a military “after,” “militarization” accounts wrongfully elide this history. In the
American university no such “before” exists.
This is not to say nothing has changed. Seeing the university as a site of “martial politics” allows us to
provide a historical account attuned to the ways in which politics is shaped by the precise forms
warfare takes. Most academic disciplines – the very categories by which we organize knowledge
– were fundamentally shaped by conquest, warfare and military funding . This is not only true for IR, a
discipline born out of colonialism and war (Vitalis 2015), but for any number of other disciplines from physics (Gusterson 1998, 2011)
to business (Cowen 2014) to neuroscience (Howell 2017). Excavating these histories gives us a sense of how
thoroughly we live with “martial politics.”
Several disciplines were said to have been “militarized” after 9/11. Most controversially, medicine, psychiatry, psychology and
anthropology all had major debates about involvement in torture and warfare in their professional associations. In anthropology, for
example, this debate concerned the 2008 establishment of Project Minerva (which provided $50 million in defense funding to social
sciences) and the recruitment of anthropologists in counterinsurgency warfare through the Human Terrain Program (Gusterson
2009). To describe this as the “militarization” of anthropology, however, is to ignore that anthropology is foundationally a colonial
discipline set up to catalog “primitive” subject peoples, with a long history of entanglement with the security state, not least in Cold
War-era counterinsurgency operations in Latin America and Asia (Gusterson 2009).
The concept of “martial politics” allows us to pose new questions about the historical
relationship between formal knowledge production and forms of warfare, rather than just
relations between the university and the military . It allows us to ask how certain forms of
warfare are produced by, and produce, academic disciplines . The nature of this mutual production will differ
depending on the particular military strategy undertaken at any historical moment.
The case of psychology is instructive here. After psychologists were implicated in devising,
administering and overseeing torture at the US naval base at Guantánamo Bay (Howell 2007), concern
was raised about the “militarization” of psychology (Ariggo, Eidelson, and Bennett 2012). Again, this concern
assumes that the discipline was once free from involvement in war or colonialism, and that an
unusual trespass occurred after 9/11. Not so . Since almost its very foundation, psychology has
been tied to forms of military strategy . In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, psychology was a
fledgling discipline and was understood as a humanistic form of knowledge. That changed drastically in World War I. At that time
Robert Yerkes, a eugenics proponent and professor of psychology, was President of the American Psychological Association.
Convinced that psychologists could be of service in the war, and that war could be useful to psychologists, Yerkes approached the US
Army with a proposition: he could help the Army with its personnel problem (of appropriately placing the massive number of new
recruits) in return for funding and access to an unprecedented number of subjects on which to experiment: soldiers. World War I
enabled the first mass scientific experiment in psychology in the form of intelligence testing. The data accumulated provided fodder
for a generation of psychologists, establishing the experiment as the primary methodology of psychology and massively reshaping
the discipline from a philosophical/humanistic one into an (American) science.
This constitutes a symbiotic relationship: psychology
was not “militarized” in World War I . Rather, it
propelled a particular kind of warfare: industrial warfare conducted on frontlines, involving mass
mobilization and requiring new personnel management techniques. Wartime support, in return,
worked to reshape psychology into a science . The academy is not the victim of military breach
but has foundationally been produced and formed, in its specificities, through warfare – and has
formed warfare in return as a technology of security (Howell 2011). Psychology was already well steeped in the
racist and ableist science of eugenics prior to World War I (Mitchell and Snyder 2003; Carey 2009; Thomson 2010), but through
military funding it was able to systematize its eugenicism as a science of “intelligence.”
This martial entanglement did not end with the war and the return of psychology to “domestic” applications. Intelligence data not
only established psychology as a science but went on to practical applications in war-like relations of disability and race both within
the US and other colonial settings. Three examples follow that demonstrate this move.
First, the data from the Army experiment produced results that “proved” that the average American had the intelligence level of a
13-year-old, just above the level of “moron” (an ableist construct). This contributed to a moral panic about the degeneration of the
“stock” of the American nation due to Southern European immigrants, and led to some of the first sweeping US immigration
restrictions. It also bolstered mental hygiene and eugenics movements, promoting the sterilization of disabled, racialized, Indigenous
or “promiscuous” women who were labeled feeble-minded (Carey 2003). This form of martial politics perpetrates violence especially
on women’s bodies, managing their sexuality and reproductive capacities for the purposes of extirpating “dangerous” or degenerate
populations.
Second, since they were constructed by White men who saw “intelligence” in their own image, the Army tests unsurprisingly placed
the “negro” at the bottom of a racist (and sexist) hierarchy of intelligence (Mensh and Mensh 1991; Gould 1999). With their sheen of
objective science, these very same Army tests were administered in South Africa and other colonies, justifying colonial rule and later
Apartheid.
Finally, Carl Brigham, who was part of the Army experiment team, and later a Princeton University professor and member of the
advisory council of the American Eugenics Society, went on to create the high school Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SATs). The SATs
remain the cornerstone of one of the most pernicious and racist aspects of the Army tests’ afterlife: standardized testing. This
regime, to this day, outrageously ranks African American students as having lower intelligence, or aptitude, significantly reducing
access to higher education and thus economic mobility.
All this history, all these contributions of the discipline of psychology to unjust dynamics
surrounding race, disability, poverty and gender, are shuttered by a “militarization” framework
because it assumes that when psychology is used in war (e.g., in torture) that this is an aberration
rather than part of a broad history of violence done to marginalized people, citizens and enemies alike.
In thinking through the “martial politics” of the university, any number of disciplines could be
subjected to this kind of analysis.
Returning to Maneuvers, consider the case of nursing, to which Enloe (2000) directs her attention in assessing the “militarization” of
women’s lives. The chapter in question perceptively begins with Florence Nightingale, who is widely considered to be the “mother”
of nursing, a pioneer in statistical visualization and a major figure in the reform of public health and medical care in both the
Crimean War and Victorian workhouses. Yet Nightingale sits uneasily in a framework that inquires into the “militarization” of
women’s lives because, as Enloe (2000, 204) shows, as a patriotic upper-class White English woman, she herself was active in
propelling “militarization.” Because of its “militarization” framework, Enloe’s account misses the fact that warfare and nursing were
both modernized and professionalized through their mutual encounter. Nightingale’s innovations transformed siege warfare,
helping ensure British victory in the Crimea, and laid the foundations for World War I industrial warfare. After Nightingale returned
from the war she was instrumental in creating nursing as a profession and discipline of study, using techniques developed for
military purposes in “domestic” settings such as workhouses. The story here is not one of military encroachment on nursing; rather,
nursing became a discipline and profession initially through war, and subsequently through war-like relations with the poor.
This symbiosis between war and academic disciplines such as nursing, psychology and – for that matter – IR
should make it unsurprising when war-like relations are propelled through knowledge created in
these disciplines. When we view academic disciplines, or indeed the university as a whole,
through the lens of “martial politics” it becomes clear they are not innocent domains sullied by
military values. Rather, like the can of soup, their form and function are embedded in how they emerge
out of and simultaneously shape warfare.
Even when “militarization” accounts are historical, they lead us to misconstrue the importance
and nature of that history. When there is violence in domestic political life – whether the outright
violence of killer cops or the structural violence of the SATs – it is not that “war” is encroaching
on “peace,” and it is not that “the military” is trespassing on the “civilian.” Rather, “martial politics”
are fundamental to the constitution and continued production of liberal democracies such as
the US. This is not directed equally at all parts of the population but targets those who are
constituted as a threat to the nation’s strength or civil order.
 Police DeMil Links
The affirmatives frame of “demilitarization” posits a binary relationship
between civilian and military that obscures the foundational influence of war
on politics. This naturalizes the liberal order as “peaceful” and calcifies the
carceral power of the police and the university. Voting negative eschews the
affirmative’s “Militarization” framework in favor of an analytic of “Martial
Politics” the centers histories of black, indigenous, and poor folks that illustrate
the permanent and foundational war-like character of the American empire.
Howell 18 (Alison, Department of Political Science, Rutgers University, Forget “militarization”:
race, disability and the “martial politics” of the police and of the university, International
Feminist Journal of Politics)

Arguably the
most influential text on “militarization” in feminist thought is Cynthia Enloe’s classic book,
Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (2000). The book opens with a now-famous
question: how do they militarize a can of soup? Enloe describes a can of soup containing pasta cut into the shape
of Star Wars weapons, illustrating her central argument that “militarization” is a broad social and gendered process:
In the Star Wars soup scenario a lot of people have become militarized – corporate marketers, dieticians, mothers, and children.
They may not run out to enlist in the army as soon as they have finished their lunch, but militarization is progressing nonetheless.
Militarization is never simply about joining a military. It is a far more subtle process. And it sprawls over far more of the gendered
social landscape. (Enloe 2000, 2)
In this account, all sorts of things can become “militarized”: people, values, cultures and
products. Further, “militarization” is a gendered process best understood by examining women’s experiences of it (Enloe 2000,
3). This analysis enabled the study of hitherto-unexamined connections, shedding light on the labor performed by laundresses,
sex workers, military wives, nurses, mothers and other women across the globe. Building on previous work (Enloe 1983; Enloe
[1989] 2014), it highlighted
that investment in the military and military values is not necessary or natural:
they can be disinvested from and resisted. However, the “militarization” concept underestimates
the extent to which we live with war: how marginalized people, those who are racialized,
disabled or poor, are subject to war-like (martial) forms of politics.
Returning to Enloe’s can of soup, in a blog post critiquing the concept of militarism, Cowen makes this intervention: “If, in one of the
most incisive critiques of militarism, Enloe asks ‘how do they militarize a can of soup?’ and questions how the pasta within assumes
the shape of “star wars satellites,” then we are also interested in the central fact of the can” (n.d.). Napoleon commissioned the
design of canning to support the supply of far-flung battlefields; “thus, the can of soup was always already ‘militarized’, and
bypassing the can for the noodles hides perhaps more than it reveals” (Cowen n.d.). Drawing on other scholarship that has
dispensed with the concept of “militarization” (Amoore 2009), Cowen’s (2014) later work on logistics illustrates that
global
supply chains have not been “militarized” or “securitized”: rather the science of logistics
emerged from war. Picking up from such interventions, we can say that the can of soup , as a
material object, was always already “of war” and therefore cannot accurately be said to have been
“militarized.” “Militarization” frameworks cannot adequately account for this imbrication of
“war” and “society” (Kienscherf 2016). This may seem like a counterintuitive statement. Isn’t the concept of
“militarization” precisely about drawing out how social (gendered) relations are permeated by military values and cultures?
However, by holding the categories of the military and of the social (or, war and peace) as
separate until “militarization” happens, the concept implicitly presumes a status prior to
militarization. It underestimates war-like forms of politics because it blithely assumes that war is
“naturally” separate from the “social landscape.”
In this sense, the concept is much like that of securitization (Wæver 1995; Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde 1998), which holds that
security forms the exception to politics. “Politics” (or social relations) is implicitly treated as un-security or un-military until
securitizing or militarizing processes occur, even if they occur pervasively. From this perspective, a reverse process can take place:
desecuritization (Wæver 1995; Aradau 2004) or demilitarization. What “militarization” holds out is the hope that military
encroachment on an otherwise unmilitarized past can be reversed; this drastically underestimates the extent to which warfare and
military strategy are intrinsic to “political” or “social” relations.
As with the can of soup, when we dig, we usually find that those
“civilian” things that are claimed to be in
danger of “militarization” have much deeper roots in warfare, and that the peaceful “domestic”
political order for which we yearn has been fundamentally shaped from the outset by warfare
and colonial violence. The concept of militarization ironically elides the fundamentally warlike history
of liberal politics precisely through its critique of (supposedly exceptional) military
encroachment or trespass on them.
Relatedly, research conducted through the lens of “militarization” has tended to foreground gender analysis, for example, through
the concept of “militarized masculinities,” or emulation of Enloe’s focus on women’s lives. Even if we are attentive to how this may
play out differently for racialized or poor women, the analytical foregrounding of “women’s lives” positions systems of gender as
primary in understanding “militarization.” Gathering considerations of race, disability, poverty and Indigeneity under gender by
pursuing a methodology focused in the first instance on the lives of women (or on masculinities) risks subsuming varied systems of
power, leaving us unable to capture how they might work differently than gender. When
we also center race,
Indigeneity and disability it immediately becomes clear that there is no natural peaceful order,
and that the concept of “militarization” is pallid and half-hearted in its ignorance of the war-like
relations that permeate “peaceful” domestic civil order (James 1996; Davis 2002, 2003).
In IR, the work of |Richter-Montpetit (2007, 2014) is central to understanding race and the production of liberal violence. She argues
that torture is not an aberration from liberal order but forms part of a lineage of anti-Black
violence, from the institution of chattel slavery through contemporary law and criminal justice,
demonstrating that violence against racialized bodies and the law have existed in mutual
relation throughout US history. Thus, “racialized taxonomies and the larger racial formation they gave rise to
were not simply manufactured by law. Rather, law was shaped by, and simultaneously enabled a
wider set of processes and technologies of race-making ” (RichterMontpetit 2014, 52). The concept of
“militarization” cannot take stock of these histories because it assumes a peaceful order that
has been breached by militarism. Only by eschewing forms of analysis that assume a (breached)
separation between military and civilian spheres can we avoid this kind of dangerous oversight.
For this reason I propose an alternate concept: “martial politics.” “Martial” denotes that a thing
is war-like, or that it derives from battle, war, or the military – that it is “of war.” It describes the
process by which war and peace are imbricated. Assessing “martial politics” involves evaluating
the historical roots and present expressions of this imbrication. “Martial politics” dispenses with
the before/after temporality of “militarization” and the assumed separation between military
and civilian, war and peace. It denies any innocent domain of “normal” politics by pointing to
the martial nature of contemporary and historical political formations. “Martial politics” is the
liberal norm, not the exception.

The historical record of policing in America supports our position – the police
have, from their inception, been enforcement tools of slavery, genocide, and
warfare. The affirmative liberal nostalgia for a “demilitarized” police force
reinforces a liberal order built on the subjugation and elimination of Black,
indigenious, queer, and disabled lives.
Howell 18 (Alison, Department of Political Science, Rutgers University, Forget “militarization”:
race, disability and the “martial politics” of the police and of the university, International
Feminist Journal of Politics)

The “martial politics” of police

In June 2014, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released a report entitled, War Comes Home: The Excessive
Militarization of American Policing (ACLU 2014). The report’s launch received initial press attention, focused on accounts of
police forces’ possession of military equipment such as tanks and mine-resistant ambush
protected vehicles (MRAPs). Then, in August 2014, White police officer Darren Wilson killed unarmed African
American teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The shooting was one amongst many across the US, becoming
emblematic of the racism of policing. It sparked ongoing protests and the Black Lives Matter movement ,
which builds on existing civil rights, Black liberation, anti-racist, queer, women’s and prison abolition activism. Suddenly, the
ACLU report seemed prescient. Images of armored vehicles and police wearing camouflage
fatigues circulated widely. Media outlets across the political spectrum framed Ferguson in terms of the “militarization” of
police forces sent to restore social order. I focus here on the ACLU report not only because of its influence on journalistic
reporting, but because it stands as an example of the best kind of analysis that can be conducted via
the (faulty) concept of “militarization,” which it adopts from scholarly work on policing (see Kraska 2007). My aim is to
take seriously what the report offers but also to reveal what it obscures.
The ACLU report provides excellent reporting on the changing tactics, training methods and uses
of technology of contemporary US police forces . Following the before-and-after logic of “militarization,” the report
identifies the origin point of the problem as the 1980s, drawing our attention to the racial inequities of the War on Drugs, and the
increasing post-9/11 use of SWAT teams to conduct search warrants. It exposes federal government programs that have transferred
military equipment to police forces, including bomb suits, drones, facial recognition technology, armored vehicles and personal
protective armor. Finally, it examines the training of police officers into a “warrior mentality.”
Much of this research is valuable, but the report relies throughout on two false assumptions :
first, that if police forces are militaristic, this is an aberration that can be dated to the 1980s , and
thus that there is a latent, more positive form of policing to which we can retreat ; second, and
relatedly, that the raison d’être of American police forces is itself not worthy of questioning. The
critical point is not that “war comes home ” as the title of the report would have it: war has always been at
home in America. The concept of “martial politics” can capture what the “militarization”
framework elides: the historical context out of which the use of MRAPs against Black activism
develops.
To claim an origin point for “militarization” in the 1980s is to ignore the ways that warfare against
Indigenous people and chattel slavery were foundational to the American criminal justice
system (Grenier 2008; Dunbar-Ortiz 2014; Davis 2003). As Black studies scholars and anti-racist activists have illustrated,
American law and practices of policing can be traced from slave patrols and Indian War militias,
through the Jim Crow era, to contemporary mass incarceration (Davis 2002, 2003; Muhammad 2010;
Alexander 2010; Hinton 2016). Disability scholars and activists have drawn out a parallel history of
disability incarceration (Ben-Moshe, Chapman, and Carey 2014; Erevelles 2014). For instance, psychiatric incarceration has
moved from a system of forced institutionalization to one of compulsory chemical incarceration through enforced medicating in
community treatment orders (Fabris 2011). Just as emancipation from slavery gave way to renewed forms of racism perpetrated
through law, so has deinstitutionalization given way to renewed forms of ableism perpetrated through medicine and law. These are
not separate processes: policing systemically criminalizes racialized, Indigenous, disabled and queer people (Mogul, Ritchie, and
Whitlock 2011, 45–68; Amar 2013, 73–78, 209–210; Steele 2016, 331, 340–341).
Understanding this history requires acknowledgement that police are not a natural fact. Organized
police forces are relatively recent inventions, developing especially in the nineteenth century. They emerged as (and remain) a
means of imposing social order. Their precise nature differs in important ways across national contexts and forms of government,
depending on which populations were perceived to be threats to social order. For example, British police were formed to quell Irish
nationalism and Chartist demonstrations in the interests of wealthy Victorians, fearful that London was growing rapidly in size and
impoverishment. The London Metropolitan Police was modelled both on the Bow Street Runners, originators of the concept of
regular uniformed police patrols, and on the London Marine Police Force, initially funded by the West India Merchants and the West
India Planters Committee for the purposes of securing cargo from the colonies. Techniques of policing were also derived from
colonial governance (Brogden 1987). Through the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, British police forces increasingly took on
the role of ensuring public order against the threat of rioting (Harris 2004). In nineteenth-century Canada and Australia, national
“mounted” police forces were established to control Indigenous populations, serving as security forces for settler colonialism
(Nettelbeck and Smandych 2010; Monaghan 2013).
These histories are important for understanding not only the criminalization of Indigeneity (Ross 1998), and the continued regularity
of the murder of Indigenous people in police custody (Razack 2015), but also the ways that war and police have been inextricably
entwined for centuries (Bachman, Bell, and Holmqvist 2014). Policing is not a matter of “domestic” politics that can be shuttered
from IR inquiry: it is precisely a matter of martial politics, of war-like relations within so-called “domestic” and “international” politics
alike.
Likewise, in
the US, describing police as “militarized” ignores that the establishment of police
forces was tied directly to the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and in particular the institution of slave
patrols. While in northern US cities like Boston and New York, as in London, policing developed mainly as a means for the social
control of the poor and immigrants, in the US south, it emerged precisely as a means for ensuring White social and economic order
in relation to (freed) slaves – dynamics that migrated northward alongside those same freed slaves.
In the antebellum South, Blacks outnumbered Whites, and slave-owners lived in fear not only of slave rebellions, but also of the
enticement of slaves to join opposing Spanish forces (Hadden 2001). First germinated in the colonial Caribbean, slave patrols were
created in the early eighteenth century to enforce slave law (a separate code of law governing slaves). Intended to replace the
system of private bounties, slave patrols complemented militias that protected colonists from “external” threats (Indigenous and
Spanish). The idea that policing is different from warfare (and requires different forces) is based on the positioning of threats as
either internal (slaves) or external (“Indians” and Spanish), but both served the same purpose: securing a White supremacist social
and economic order. To this end, slave patrols not only tracked down runaways, but also broke up slave meetings to quash
rebellions. They were officially appointed and indemnified by courts of law, operating not only in rural areas but also in cities
(Hadden 2001). After the Civil War, and the official abandonment of the slavery system, police forces
filled the role previously played by slave patrols (Reichel 1988; Hadden 2001; Davis 2003).
While the American Civil War is traditionally cast as a victory for emancipation, the Jim Crow system of local and state
laws soon arose to enforce racial segregation and ensure inequality in everything from housing
to public transportation, education and voting rights . Vagrancy laws punishing unemployment were selectively
applied, criminalizing freed slaves but not unemployed Whites, resulting in the imprisonment of African Americans who were then
put to hard labor – reproducing White supremacism through criminal law (Davis 2003; Alexander 2010). This state of affairs was
produced not just by the apparatus of the state. For example, scientific thought also supported White supremacy by creating bogus
“proof” of the propensity for criminality in African Americans (Muhammad 2010, 2).
The mid-twentieth century Civil Rights era, like the Civil War before it, is often cast as a triumph of liberal emancipation from Jim
Crow – but just
as slavery gave way to Jim Crow, segregation gave way to new forms of racist civil
order. Much as slave owners feared Black organizing in the antebellum South, so did White urbanites in the Civil Rights era. So-
called “riots” in Birmingham, Newark, Detroit and other cities – uprisings against police brutality and inequality – as well as
organized resistance movements like the Black Panthers became a “problem” of social order like the slave rebellions of a prior
period. The relationship between the military and the police is perhaps clearest in the subjugation
of Black organizing in this period: not only was the National Guard called in to “restore order” in
Watts, Newark and elsewhere (much as it has recently been activated in Ferguson), but the FBI also created its own
counterinsurgency campaign, COINTELPRO, which surveilled, infiltrated and disrupted anti-war and Black power organizations
(Browne 2015). This illustrates the martial nature of political formations aimed at suppressing anti-
racist activism, from slave patrols through COINTELPRO.
The War on Drugs was then-President Richard Nixon’s own innovation for quashing Black resistance in
the name of “law and order.” The ongoing War on Drugs involves strict penalties for drug crimes, which are enforced and
punished disproportionately in Black communities. It produced the mass conviction of African Americans, leading not only to
imprisonment and forced labor, but also to a substantial diminishment of rights including access to employment, education and
voting through the status of so many African Americans as felons (Provine 2007). If the
War on Drugs has failed in its stated
aim of reducing the drug trade, it has succeeded in enforcing a new racial order based on mass
incarceration.
A lineage persists here: police
forces, whether antebellum slave patrols, or enforcers of Jim Crow segregation or the War on
Drugs, have been central to a form of “martial politics” waged for the purposes of maintaining
renewed forms of White social and economic order. Contemporary policing and mass
incarceration can thus best be understood not in terms of “militarization, ” as the ACLU and others
suggest, but as a new expression of the “martial politics” of policing. Through an analysis grounded in “martial
politics” we can grasp the presence of military vehicles and uniforms in Ferguson as a matter of continuity in the US state’s war-like
relations with slaves and their descendants. This does not mean that modern policing is entirely the same as ,
for instance, slave patrols. Racism is highly adaptable (Bonilla-Silva 2006). “Martial politics” denotes a
continuous framework of war-like relations with people of color, and allows for tracing different
systems of racism within it.
It is not that “war” happens elsewhere and is then brought home through “militarization .” This
idea relies on a false distinction between what kinds of politics happen at “home” versus in “war.” It positions “domestic”
violence as an aberration or inward leakiness of war. On the contrary, like the can of soup, policing does
not merely now contain obvious military symbols – it is always already “of war” and war-like in
its very form. Policing cannot be said to have been “militarized,” but rather forms part of a
broader “martial politics” directed against racialized, Indigenous, disabled and queer people
with the aim of reproducing liberal order.
 Police Anti-Immunity Links
The Aff’s desire to punish and incarcerate cops amounts to a queer investment
in punishment that mystifies the carceral system that is the root cause of
policing and also grants that carceral system legitimacy and power by
suggesting that incarceration is the only legitimate response to violence.
Lamble 13 - Assistant Dean for Teaching, Learning and Student Experience and Director of
Studies (Criminology) at the University of London, Birkbeck School of Law (Sarah, Queer
Necropolitics and the Expanding Carceral State: Interrogating Sexual Investments in Punishment,
2013, Law Critique 24, 229–231, ttps://doi-org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/10.1007/s10978-013-9125-
1)//AD
Queer investments in punishment work to authorise, invoke and legitimise a particular criminological vision and promise for the
future. If investment is a practice that cultivates a potentiality in the present in order to secure a possibility for the future, the
promise in this case is one of greater safety, security and vitality for (worthy) sexual citizens. Yet
as the history of criminal
justice policy within western democracies has shown, state investments in punishment have
consistently resulted in failed promises (Garland 1996). State inflictions of punishment rarely
have led to more security or safety overall; and criminal punishment never has properly
fulfilled its claims of prevention or deterrence. Instead, the legacies of endless reform efforts
that characterise the history of the modern prison have led primarily to the ever expanding
growth and dissemination of new forms of carceral control (Foucault 1976/2009; Davis 2003;
Sim 2009; Foucault 1978/1995). Extending these legacies, queer investments in punishment re-
invoke and re-entrench the foundational myths of the modern criminological enterprise.
The language of investment also highlights parallels between social investments in criminal punishment and financial investments in
carceral capitalism (Gilmore 1998). The formal punishment sector (namely the industries and institutions that produce prisons,
policing, asylums, military and surveillance architectures) is a multi-billion dollar global industry, which has expanded dramatically in
recent decades. For example, USA-state spending on ‘corrections’ including prisons, probation and parole, has nearly quadrupled in
the past 20 years (Henrichson and Delany 2012, p. 2). In England and Wales, prison expenditure between 2003–2004 and 2008–2009
increased almost 40 % in real terms, from £2.52 billion to £3.98 billion per year, and incarceration rates continue to grow despite
attempts to cut Ministry of Justice spending (Prison Reform Trust 2012, p. 6). At the same time, these investments in the expansion
of the carceral state should not be reduced to profit-making enterprise alone; as argued below, contemporary
investments in the carceral state mark a key exercise in state sovereignty and a biopolitcal/
necropolitical management strategy for responding to social populations who fail to comply
with the standards of properly self-governing, self-enterprising, punishment (i.e. frameworks
that facilitate, enable and normalise punitive practices), neoliberal subjects. The concept of
investment recognises both the institutional structuresand the role of individuals and groups in
upholding, maintaining and strengthening such institutions. To call attention to both dimensions
is to identify the systemic underpinnings of the carceral state (and its roots in colonialism and
empire),7 without falling prey to the kind of structural determinism that denies individual and
collective agency. That is, while broader social, legal, political and economic structures and
institutions provide the architecture for punitive practices, Organisational strategies that
invest in punitive state institutions are increasingly commonplace within LGBT politics in the
USA and Britain. To give a particularly chilling example: in 2009, US President Barack Obama signed into law the Matthew
Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. The Act—which expanded older hate crime legislation
based on race and ethnicity to include crimes motivated by a victim’s actual or perceived
gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability—was the result of a massive lobbying
effort by LGBT organisations and activists. Despite its title, the Act is not prevention oriented,
but prosecution driven; the Act dramatically extends federal powers to prosecute hate-
motivated incidents by providing additional resources for investigating and prosecuting hate-
motived crimes and enabling harsher sanctions for individuals convicted of such crimes . indeed, at
one point in the process of fighting for the bill, activists found themselves in the unsavory position of supporting legislation, which,
thanks to a Republican amendment, included the death penalty among its available sanctions.

While several LGBT groups issued statements opposing the death penalty, few acknowledged that this amendment
was, in fact, an extension of the punitive values that underpin hate crime legislation. While
routinely framed as ‘progressive’, hate crime laws grow out of, and feed, the same punitive
logics that sustain the death penalty. Indeed, most of the arguments used by groups to oppose
the death penalty (namely its racist application, lack of deterrent effect, and its perpetuation of violence) also apply to hate
crime legislation and to criminal justice systems more broadly. Consider, for example, the statement released by the executive
director of the US National Gay and Lesbian Task Force:

The death penalty is profoundly unjust and inhumane. It is not a deterrent, nor will it reduce the number or severity of
hate crimes. Conversely, capital punishment is state-sponsored brutality that perpetuates violence rather than ending it.
The death penalty is also disproportionately applied to poor people and people of color, and in no manner does it
improve a criminal justice system that is deeply plagued with inequities and discrimination against marginalized groups.
For these reasons, it is critical the death penalty amendment be stripped from...the bill. It is long past time to send a clear
and unequivocal message that hate violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people will no longer be
tolerated—but it must be done in a way that saves lives, not ends them (National Gay and Lesbian Task Force 2009).

While the statement openly acknowledges the racial and class inequities embedded in the US criminal justice system at large ,
its
disavowal of those injustices extends only as far as the death penalty. Yet in a system where
2.3 million people are behind bars (one in every 100 adults), 70 % of those imprisoned are
people of colour (including 1 in 9 black men between the ages of 20 and 34) and systemic class
and racial bias is widespread and well-documented, the violent and discriminatory character
of the system is undeniable (Pew Centre on the States 2008; Alexander 2010; Davis 2003; Rodr ́ıguez 2006). There
also is a troubling irony in a statement that calls for the ‘saving of lives’ via the increased use of
imprisonment. While capital punishment certainly is not equivalent to imprisonment, the
implication that a life-sentence is a more ‘humane’ alternative to death ought to be questioned.
Imprisonment itself instantiates the conditions of social, political and civil death, and also
includes—particular ly when considering the poor health conditions and premature death rates
of prisoner and ex-prisoner popula- tions—biological death . Although the death penalty amendment was
subsequently removed from the final legislation, by advocating for punishment-based hate crime laws, LGBT groups nevertheless
helped to legitimise imprisonment and channel further resources intothe carceral arm of the state despite a lack of evidence that
such measures reduce hate-motivated violence. It
is also signignifiganct that the Shepard-Byrd Hate Crimes
Act was passed as an amendment to the 2010 National Defence Authorization Act, a package
of reforms that provided $680 billion (US) to the US military budget , including $130 billion for
ongoing military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq (Hedges 2009). That the Hate Crimes Act
could be passed in the name of anti- violence work, while simultaneously facilitating the single
largest appropriation of funds to the US Department of Defence in American history, was a
stunning achievement. As Chandan Reddy (2011) so powerfully describes, the passage of the Act signalled an exemplary
instance of ‘freedom with violence’. It was a moment in which the breath-taking contradictions of political freedoms that are
contingent on violence were both laid bare and rendered normal, compatible and commonsensical.

Itis striking that many LGBT activists in the USA see no contradiction between older movement
goals of de-criminalising same-gender sex acts and current goals of expanding criminalisation
through hate crime legislation. Yet this phenomenon is not isolated to the USA; it has become commonplace for
European and international LGBT groups to support a dual-pronged legislative strategy of campaigning for the global
decriminalisation of homosexuality (often in ways that invoke older civilizational projects),13 while simultaneously advocating for
expanded criminaisation via hate crime legislation. Indeed, as selective ‘LGBT rights’ discourses become increasingly globalised,
many gay and lesbian organisations treat the attainment and enforcement of hate crime legislation as a key component of sexual
citizenship rights and a symbol of equality. While
the capacity to hold a duel- pronged political strategy that
calls for the de-criminalisation of some people and the criminalisation of others may not seem
contradictory to those advocating such policies, their congruence only becomes possible when
the violent, discriminatory nature of the carceral state is denied and disavowed. In other words,
pro- criminalisation policies only can be sustained on the myth that the criminal justice system
punishes those who deserve it, and that imprisonment is about safety, justice and protection for
all rather than warehousing, caging and disciplining particular targeted populations. This myth
about the function of the prison system, is of course, widely held and socially reinforced, so it
is perhaps not surprising that LGBT groups have come to embrace this assumption. Given
however that LGBT activists in Europe and North America have historically challenged both
the punitive logic of the carceral state and the construction of ‘deviant’, ‘abnormal’ and
‘criminal’ subjects, this recent shift towards pro-criminalisation strategies raises questions
about how and why these changes are occurring.
 Sentencing Links
Sentencing reform does nothing to fundamentally change the relationship
between the defendant and the judge which is the fundamental issue with the
state’s enforcement of laws. Instead their purpose is to entrench dominant
social order on ‘deviants.’
Noonan, T. (2017) Power, Knowledge, and Relationships within the Federal Sentencing
Guidelines: a Foucauldian Critique. Washington University Jurisprudence Review
10. //bdo.

With the advent of the nineteenth century , the states began to dial back the use of the death
penalty, increase the use of prisons, and allow jury discretion in selecting sentences for
felonies.25 As the law grew more complex, the sentencing decision began to shift to the
province of judges.26 The dichotomy we see today, where juries decide fact and judges decide
law, coalesced under a rehabilitative theory of punishment . Judges became “sentencing
experts,” responsible not just for the application of the law but an adjudication of the person
being sentenced. The rehabilitative theory sought to correct the problem of crime through
sentencing, requiring (or allowing) the judge to weigh and assess a panoply of factors about the convict
and their underlying offense.28 The offender could, through corrective treatment, be retrained and
reintroduced into society – the judge’s job was to determine the appropriate treatment . The
corporal, retributive punishments of the colonial era became theoretical , economic, and
psychological, acting not on the body but on the mind .30 Beyond the general theory of
rehabilitation, to which judges had widely varying degrees of sympathy , there was little guidance or
procedural protection. There was little meaningful appellate review beyond the permissive
proportionality standards of the Eighth Amendment . As such, judges didn’t write sentencing
decisions and no common law surrounding sentencing developed . Due in part to a narrow
doctrinal focus in legal education and the relatively homogeneous demographic makeup in the
legal profession as a whole,35 the purported sentencing experts were being asked to do a job
for which they had little training or experience. This judicial discretion worked in tandem with
the parole system, which had wide latitude asto how sentences were ultimately enacted .
Ultimately, this system resulted in widely varying sentencing outcomes and a perception of
inequality and disingenuousness.3This history is illuminating in two ways. The first is that the
creation of the Guidelines was a reaction to the perceived lawlessness of the prior sentencing
regime. The most prominent reaction was from Judge Marvin Frankel of the Southern District of
New York, who wrote extensively on the lack of guiding law or principles in sentencing . His work
would largely inspire the eventual creation of the Guidelines , albeit not necessarily in the form
he had imagined. It was not a movement towards a particular goal but rather an intentional
departure. If the creation of the Guidelines had a philosophic goal, that goal was the desire for
order. The ultimate reform was significantly less concerned with what form that order would
take. As district court judges in their determination of particular sentences to impose . Such, the
vestigial aspects of the preceding regimes remained intact . The reform simply overla[ys] a literal
grid on top of the extant regime. The other important aspect of the history is the presence
throughout the history of American sentencing of a discourse between sentenced and
sentencer. While this relationship is relatively obvious in the rehabilitative era , it[s] was
paradoxically stronger under determinate sentencing than under the guidelines .
Impacts
 2NC Impact – Colonial Violence
Institutional management normalizes colonial relations and genocidal violence
– deconstructing this epistemology is a prerequisite to resolving structural
violence and flashpoints of war
Batur 07 (Pinar Batur is a PhD at UT-Austin, Prof. of Sociology at Vassar, The Heart of Violence:
Global Racism, War, and Genocide, Handbook of The Sociology of Racial and Ethnic Relations,
eds. Vera and Feagin, p. 441-3, BB)

War and genocide are horrid, and taking them for granted is inhuman. In the 21st century, our
problem is not only seeing them as natural and inevitable, but even worse: not seeing, not
noticing, but ignoring them. Such act and thought, fueled by global racism, reveal that racial
inequality has advanced from the establishment of racial hierarchy and institutionalization of
segregation, to the confinement and exclusion, and elimination, of those considered inferior
through genocide. In this trajectory, global racism manifests genocide. But this is not inevitable . This
article, by examining global racism, explores the new terms of exclusion and the path to permanent war and genocide, to examine
the integrality of genocide to the frame-work of global antiracist confrontation. GLOBAL RACISM IN THE AGE OF “CULTURE WARS”
Racist legitimization of inequality has changed from presupposed biological inferiority to
assumed cultural inadequacy. This defines the new terms of impossibility of coexistence, much less equality. The Jim
Crow racism of biological inferiority is now being replaced with a new and modern racism (Baker
1981; Ansell 1997) with “culture war” as the key to justify difference, hierarchy, and oppression. The
ideology of “culture war” is becoming embedded in institutions , defining the workings of organizations, and
is now defended by individuals who argue that they are not racist, but are not blind to the
inherent differences between African-Americans/Arabs/Chinese , or whomever, and “us.” “Us” as a
concept defines the power of a group to distinguish itself and to assign a superior value to its
institutions, revealing certainty that affinity with “them” will be harmful to its existence (Hunter
1991; Buchanan 2002). How can we conceptualize this shift to examine what has changed over the past century and what has
remained the same in a racist society? Joe Feagin examines this question with a theory of systemic racism to explore societal
complexity of interconnected elements for longevity and adaptability of racism. He sees that systemic racism persists due to a
“white racial frame,” defining and maintaining an “organized set of racialized ideas, stereotypes, emotions, and inclinations to
discriminate” (Feagin 2006: 25). The white racial frame arranges the routine operation of racist
institutions, which enables social and economic repro-duction and amendment of racial
privilege. It is this frame that defines the political and economic bases of cultural and historical legitimization. While the
white racial frame is one of the components of systemic racism, it is attached to other terms of
racial oppression to forge systemic coherency. It has altered over time from slavery to segregation to racial
oppression and now frames “culture war,” or “clash of civilizations,” to legitimate the racist oppression of
domination, exclusion, war, and genocide. The concept of “culture war” emerged to define opposing
ideas in America regarding privacy, censorship, citizenship rights, and secularism, but it has been globalized through
conflicts over immigration, nuclear power, and the “war on terrorism.” Its discourse and action articulate to flood
the racial space of systemic racism. Racism is a process of defining and building communities and societies based on
racial-ized hierarchy of power. The expansion of capitalism cast new formulas of divisions and oppositions, fostering inequality even
while integrating all previous forms of oppressive hierarchical arrangements as long as they bolstered the need to maintain the
structure and form of capitalist arrangements (Batur-VanderLippe 1996). In this context, the white racial frame, defining the terms
of racist systems of oppression, enabled the globalization of racial space through the articulation of capitalism (Du Bois 1942; Winant
1994). The key to understanding this expansion is comprehension of the synergistic relationship between racist systems of
oppression and the capitalist system of exploitation. Taken separately, these two systems would be unable to create such
oppression independently. However, the synergy between them is devastating. In the age of industrial capitalism, this synergy
manifested itself imperialism and colonialism. In the age of advanced capitalism, it is war and genocide. The capitalist system, by
enabling and maintaining the connection between everyday life and the global, buttresses the processes of racial oppression, and
synergy between racial oppression and capitalist exploitation begets violence. Etienne Balibar points out that the connection
between everyday life and the global is established through thought, making global racism a way of thinking, enabling connections
of “words with objects and words with images in order to create concepts” (Balibar 1994: 200). Yet, global racism is not only an
articulation of thought, but also a way of knowing and acting, framed by both everyday and global experiences. Synergy between
capitalism and racism as systems of oppression enables this perpetuation and destruction on the global level. As capitalism
expanded and adapted to the particularities of spatial and temporal variables, global racism became part of its legitimization and
accommodation, first in terms of colonialist arrangements. Incolonized and colonizing lands, global racism has
been perpetuated through racial ideologies and discriminatory practices under capitalism by the
creation and recreation of connections among memory, knowledge, institutions, and
construction of the future in thought and action. What makes racism global are the bridges
connecting the particularities of everyday racist experiences to the universality of racist
concepts and actions, maintained globally by myriad forms of prejudice, discrimination, and
violence (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991; Batur 1999, 2006). Under colonialism, colonizing and colonized societies were
antagonistic opposites. Since colonizing society portrayed the colonized “other,” as the adversary and
challenger of the “the ideal self,” not only identification but also segregation and containment
were essential to racist policies. The terms of exclusion were set by the institutions that fostered
and maintained segregation, but the intensity of exclusion, and redundancy, became more
apparent in the age of advanced capitalism, as an extension of post-colonial discipline. The exclusionary
measures when tested led to war, and genocide. Although, more often than not, genocide was
perpetuated and fostered by the post-colonial institutions, rather than colonizing forces, the
colonial identification of the “inferior other” led to segregation, then exclusion, then war and
genocide. Violence glued them together into seamless continuity. Violence is integral to understanding global
racism. Fanon (1963), in exploring colonial oppression, discusses how divisions created or reinforced by
colonialism guarantee the perpetuation, and escalation, of violence for both the colonizer and
colonized. Racial differentiations, cemented through the colonial relationship, are integral to the
aggregation of violence during and after colonialism : “Manichaeism [division of the universe into
opposites of good and evil] goes to its logical conclusion and dehumanizes ” (Fanon 1963:42). Within
this dehumanizing framework, Fanon argues that the violence resulting from the destruction of
everyday life, sense of self and imagination under colonialism continues to infest the post-
colonial existence by integrating colonized land into the violent destruction of a new “geography
of hunger” and exploitation (Fanon 1963: 96). The “geography of hunger” marks the context and space in which
oppression and exploitation continue. The historical maps drawn by colonialism now demarcate the boundaries of post-colonial
arrangements. The white racial frame restructures this space to fit the imagery of symbolic racism, modifying it to fit the television
screen, or making the evidence of the necessity of the politics of exclusion, and the violence of war and genocide, palatable enough
for the front page of newspapers, spread out next to the morning breakfast cereal. Two examples of this “geography of hunger and
exploitation” are Iraq and New Orleans.
 Turns Case – Social Justice Impacts
The link turns their reform offense – necropolitical underpinning of sentencing
make the aff’s reform seem arbitrary and capricious, which undermines any
judicial strategy for justice.
Noonan, T. (2017) Power, Knowledge, and Relationships within the Federal Sentencing
Guidelines: a Foucauldian Critique. Washington University Jurisprudence Review
10. //bdo.

The desire for sentencing reform was a laudable one . While the body of criminal law is primarily comprised of
trial and pre-trial legal issues, sentencing has a far greater impact on defendants. Designing any broad system
that achieves its social purpose is an immensely difficult task and one that requires, as a necessary predicate, a sense of
purpose. The Sentencing Guidelines, fundamentally, lack a sense of purpose. The purported reasons for the
Guidelines, certainty and fairness, are contradictory and create an inherent tension in their application. In a society where a
tremendous amount of behavior could be subject to criminal sanction and the criminal code is
an increasingly regulatory device, the operative question is not what constitutes criminal
behavior but how we respond to it. When a person is asking why we, as a society, are deciding
to deprive them of their life, liberty, or property, it would behoove us , and them, to have a
reason. A system which serves as its own justification provides little or no incentives for
growth or change, either for the system itself or for the people whom it affects. This is the Guidelines biggest
failure and it is one that is inherent to the concept of structured guidelines . By creating an alternative
discourse which pulls the focus of the dialogue away from the core relationship, the Guidelines push the offender
further away from society, not through banishment or “civil death,” but by contributing to the
creation of an alternative existence, one in which the cycle of poverty and prison now have an
institutional justification. The Guidelines subvert the primacy of the human interaction
underlying the punitive decision. Improving judicial training, strengthening and adding resources for
the sentencing process, and creating a corpus of sentencing law that can then be interpreted
individually are all methods of reform that respect this relationship. It is the person being judged and the
person doing the judging that matter most. One of the messages of Discipline And Punish was that putting people in boxes
in response to crime only increases crime. Putting judges in boxes in the name of “certainty
and fairness” has created a similar irony in judicial outcomes. A system without a rationale can seem
arbitrary and capricious to those outside the system while seeming self-evident to those who
work within it. In criminal sentencing, where the power of the state directly and powerfully impacts the individual, such
divisions only serve to further marginalize the already vulnerable. Ultimately, a system which
does not acknowledge or respond to the individual cannot create a place for the individual.
 Impact – Anti-Queerness
Accepting the binary of criminal/innocent means that the affirmative, despite
their best intentions, invests in the symbolic construction of the criminal that
results in anti-queer violence. These symbolic frames precede and exceed the
legal definition of crime, which means the link overwhelms the affirmative’s
solvency arguments.
Mogul, Ritche, and Whitlock 11. Joey Mogul, partner at the People’s Law Office in
Chicago, Illinois and Director of the Civil Rights Clinic at DePaul University College of Law; Andrea
J. Ritchie, police misconduct attorney and organizer in New York City. She has engaged in
extensive research, writing, speaking, litigation, organizing and advocacy on profiling, policing,
and physical and sexual violence by law enforcement agents against women and lesbian, gay,
bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people in the US and Canada over the past decade. She
currently coordinates Streetwise & Safe (SAS), a leadership development initiative aimed at
building knowledge, community and power among LGBT youth of color with experience of
gender, race, sexuality and poverty-based policing and criminalization in the context of “quality
of life” initiatives and the policing of sex work and trafficking; Kay Whitlock, Montana-based
writer, organizer and consultant working for progressive social change. As an activist, she was
worked for almost 40 years to build bridges between LGBTQ struggles and movements fighting
for racial, gender, economic, and environmental justice. She formerly served in national
leadership positions on LGBTQ issues, including National Representative for LGBT Issues for the
American Friends Service Committee (AFSC, a Quaker organization advocating for peace, social
and economic justice, and human rights); chair of the National NOW Lesbian Rights Committee;
and member and co-chair of the board of directors of the (as it was then known) National Gay
Task Force. Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States, pg. 23

CRIMINALIZING QUEERS

The specter of criminality moves ceaselessly through the lives of LGBT people in the United
States. It is the enduring product of persis tent melding of homosexuality and gender
nonconformity with concepts of danger, degeneracy, disorder, deception, disease, contagion,
sexual predation, depravity, subversion, encroachment, treachery, and violence. It is so deeply
rooted in U.S. society that the term stereotype does not begin to convey its social and political force. The narratives it produces are
so vivid, compelling, and entrenched that they are more properly characterized as archetypes—recurring, culturally ingrained
representations that evoke strong, often subterranean emotional associations or responses. In the realm of criminal archetypes,
anxiety, fear, and dread prevail—potent emotions that can easily overpower reason.

Over time, withinbroader notions of criminality informed by race, class, and gender, a number of
closely related and mutually reinforcing “queer criminal archetypes” have evolved that directly
influence the many manifestations and locations of policing and punishment of people
identified as queer or living outside of “appropriately gendered” heterosexual norms. These
archetypes serve to establish compelling, ultimately controlling, narratives, or predetermined
story lines that shape how a person’s appearance and behavior will be interpreted—regardless
of individual circumstances or realities. Written and rewritten across time, space, and the evolution of queer identi-
ties, these archetypal narratives may be best understood as means to criminalize queerness .
Based on these established criminalizing narratives or scripts, queer people are targeted for
policing and punishment regardless of whether they have actually committed any crime or
done any harm. Queer criminal archetypes rarely operate in isolation, frequently intersecting
and overlapping with other controlling narratives that frame people of color, immigrants, and
poor people as inherently criminal.

This understanding shifts the focus away from the concept of generic antigay prejudice held by
bigoted individuals to systemic patterns of raced, gendered, classed, and sexual policing that,
with a few cosmetic adjustments and innovations, have operated in this country for over five
hundred years, predetermining who is intrinsically “innocent” and who is blameworthy. It is
important to recognize that queer criminalizing scripts have never focused exclusively on the policing and punishment of LGBT
people. As political scientist Cathy J. Cohen points out in her groundbreaking essay Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens,
gender conforming heterosexuals can also be policed and punished for exhibiting behavior or
indulging sexual desires that run contrary to the vast array of punitive rules, norms, practices,
and institutions that “legitimize and privilege heterosexuality.” Cohen uses the phrase
“heteronormativity” to describe this system of framing heterosexuality—constrained within a
nuclear family structure and shaped by raced, classed, and rigidly dichotomous constructions of
gender—as fundamental to society, and as the only “natural” and accepted form of sexual and
gender expression.10

Thus women who may be heterosexual, but not heteronormative, are also subject to sex and
gender policing. The “cult of true [white] womanhood,” one of the foundations of
heteronormativity, has served as an important tool for policing the behavior of even the most
privileged among women. Importantly, it has placed women of color by definition outside the
bounds of heteronormativity and therefore inherently subject to gender policing and
punishment.11 For instance, Black feminists have consistently highlighted the development of a
number of controlling narratives casting Black women as dangerous, gender deviant,
“castrating matriarchs,” or as sexually aggressive, promiscuous, and depraved, to justify their
regulation as both inherently criminal and as “breeders” of criminals.12 Cohen also points to the
use of heteronormativity to exclude single mothers on welfare, predominantly perceived to be almost
exclusively women of color, and sex workers, from those deemed “normal, moral, or worthy of state
support” or legal recognition.13 In brief, every identity, relationship, and household configuration
that does not slot neatly into the heteronormative framework can be defined as unworthy, a
threat to the moral order, and ultimately criminal .

As the Leopold and Loeb story demonstrates, criminalizing

scripts are at once political and cultural
creations, taking hold in the public imagination through symbiotic relationships between law
enforcement and mass media. In his study of crime reporting by American news outlets, Steven M. Chermak confirmed
that more than half the crime stories he examined utilized police and court records as primary sources. This means that the primary
narratives about crime and criminality come directly from law enforcement, in the form of arrest and police reports and from quick
conversations between reporters and police or prosecutors that may contain incomplete, misleading, or false information. Most
criminalized people, by contrast, have little or no regular access to mainstream media and find it difficult—if not impossible—to
disseminate compelling counternarratives that shatter dehumanizing representations. Not surpris- lngly, since sensational stories
boost media profitability by attracting a wider audience, the media favors incidents involving murder, violence, sex, and drugs.14 In
this sense, crime is also a media commodity the more lurid and shocking, the better. Politicians, religious leaders, and advocacy
groups with a self-interested stake in criminalizing discourses also play critical roles in reinforcing and amplifying fear-inducing
images and narratives.

Queer criminal archetypes promulgated through the media spread quickly through channels of pop culture, community
gossip, and schoolyard banter. Their presence is often revealed by the use particular words and phrases
that promote paranoia-inducing images: web, ring, network, recruitment, infiltration,
takeover, underworld, nest, infestation, contagion, gang, and wolf pack. They do not describe
human beings; rather, they promote cold, terrifying abstractions that are the stuff of cultural
nightmare: perverts, predators, deviates, psychopaths, child molesters, bull daggers and bull
dykes, pansies, girlie-men, monsters, he-shes, and freak shows.
The archetypes and their accompanying scripts are remarkably powerful in directing not only the initial gaze, but also subsequent
interpretations and actions, of police, prosecutors, judges, juries, and prison authorities. It is almost impossible to
overestimate the societal clout of these symbolic representations. According to cognitive linguist George
Lakoff, the constant institutional and cultural repetition of an image or idea—that is, a mental structure for organizing and
interpreting information—can literally produce changes in the brain. In a 2008 radio interview, Lakoff succinctly described the
process in layperson’s terms: “The more you repeat the language for a frame or a metaphor, every time that happens, that frame or
metaphor is activated in the brain, the synapses of the brain get stronger, and that becomes part of your brain.”15 Moreover, Lakoff
says, not
only do neuroscience and cognitive science show that most of our reasoning occurs at
an unconscious level, they also demonstrate that emotion is a remarkably powerful part of the
“objective” reasoning process. This research suggests that criminalizing frames for understanding
perceived departures from (white supremacist, colonial, patriar chal, gendered, and
heterosexual) norms, reinforced in infinite ways, consciously and unconsciously over hundreds
of years, can literally change how we are able to think about these issues.
 Impact – Gratuitous Terror
Necropolitics locks in anti-black gratuitous terror.
Agathangelou 13 (Anna, Political Science Professor at York University with a special focus on
postcolonial theory, “Neoliberal Geopolitical Order and Value”, International Feminist Journal of
Politics, Vol. 15, No. 4, p. 463-465, December 17, 2013)
Stephen Dillon provides a theoretical framework to start this analysis, asking: ‘If slavery’s anti-black technologies inhabit and
structure the prison, how do they live in the operations of the market?’ (Dillon 2012: 114). His
article suggests that the
emerging international discourse on ‘gay rights’ and its displacement in Africa and blacks is a
bar on the prison of blackness as well as a technology of slavery . Dillon considers ‘how the
necropolitics of slavery inhabit and drive the biopolitics of neoliberalism’ (2012: 115) even in the
governance of historically marginalized subjects (i.e., gays and lesbians, immigrants, aboriginal peoples). I
contend that the (disciplined) queer is a newer technology in world politics, where a promotion of a specific notion of ‘the queer’
(i.e., among those subjects who possess a capacity and a will to become self-enterprising subjects, indeed their own brand), along
with the protection of that queer, is being used to further a narrative of the superiority of US law as an
international ‘white dog’ (Dayan 2011), white supremacy, neoliberal democracy and imperialism by rupturing black
life. In this view, slavery is the condition of economies of blackness (i.e., it is blackness) as openness to
gratuitous terror. The terror that both makes blacks and is enacted upon blackness in the
afterlife of the historical institution of slavery is a ‘rupturing of the flesh, the evacuation of the
black psyche, the practice of empathic identification and an acknowledgment that blackness is
only made visible through a discourse and narrative afforded a positioning within civil society
(such as queerness)’ (Pak 2012:xiv).Pak’s analytical intervention enables us to recognize the ways that
transatlantic slavery constituted blackness as outside sexual civil society relations and outside
of sovereign sexual protection is in the ‘now’ (The Smiths 1984) – therefore – this is what also makes
possible the segregation of sex from race and the practice of sex as terror . While the slave has
no-value as a being, a body and sexually, it is also a ‘usable and utilized assignation’ (Barrett 1999:
207). The institution of slavery instantiates itself in the subordination, torture and terror of
blackness in the worlding of (i.e., global and local) politics global (and local) politics (see Dillon 2012: 121) in the
‘now’ rather than in some vague and atemporal historical imaginary . Conjuncting the temporal
structures of blackness and queerness is my way of considering them as thinking zones, where
politico-economic and erotic claims about insurgent sensualities as everyday expressions and
performative declarations of what we are and where we live our lives are articulated . By
global ‘insurgent sensualities’ I mean those queerest (i.e., blackness uncontained) sexualities (uncontained)
that do not use their energies in transforming 463 the fact of terror into value and a mode
through which to reproduce a deadly structure (Lorde 1997: 55; Sharpe 2010). In the words of Lorde
(1981: 39): For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings
were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, our feelings
were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men . But women have
survived. As poets. Instead, these poets’ insurgent sensualities or what Sharpe calls ‘monstrous
intimacies’ rupture the ‘pure’ narrative of (white), heterosexual, reproductive sexualities
serving (if sometimes nonchalantly) both a Darwinian mission of ‘natural selection’ and a Christian
directive of marital sexuality as reproductive. In the narrative wherein an imperial global structure of
white supremacy protects ‘the gays’ from ‘the blacks’, insurgent sensualities are robbed of
their content as radical alterities and expressions and deployed as tools of imperium . Moten
describes these tools of crisis as an ‘infinite rehearsal of generative capacity’ within ‘the open field of a generative grammar ... which
reveal[s] the sclerotic constraints ... fostered by an empiricist attitude whose structuring force ... can be traced back to a certain
valorisation of the grasp’ (Moten 2011: 2). A crisis
of ‘gay rights’, like other ‘human rights’ and ‘democracy’
crises before them, holds in Marx’s account an ‘occult ability to add value to itself’ (see Marx 1976:
255). Indeed, these crises or negotiations which are themselves undertaken at the points of
difference (e.g., queers vs. blacks, queers vs. heterosexual Africans, slaves vs. gays and lesbians, queers vs. gays and lesbians,
queers as beings vs. blacks as non-beings), are relays that result in the suturing and coherence of international
structures and worlding projects. As such, far from being disassociated from the global crisis of capitalism, these
pro-‘gay rights’ discourses and the neoliberal straightjacket of sexuality turns into the location
of that global crisis of capitalism. It is a multi-layered violence: of sexuality as disciplined, of
blackness as seemingly sexually repressive and of the two combined as a first-order (selling
sexuality) and second-order (signifier of market merit) market force. Yet, as Barrett points out, this visible multi-layered
global crisis is an ‘attempt to eclipse’ another crisis by suturing terror as value; this ‘duplicitous structure or movement of value can
be imagined as the staging of two separate, but only glancingly separate, appearances – “value as force” and “value as form”’
(Barrett 1999: 30). Within this hierarchy, ‘value as force is underprivileged to the promiscuous value as form’ (Barrett 1999: 32). This
same logic applies in the ‘now’, valorizing queerness along with other kinds of subjects as privileged and a-sexual blackness as the
underprivileged term of novalue, all the while ‘secreting’ and making unthinkable the terror that draws on flesh suturing value 2
while also generating economies of blackness. Engaging the locus of slavery or blackness, the formation and ongoing production 464
I n t e r n a t i o n a l F e m i n i s t J o u r n a l o f P o l i t i c s of a global sexual existence as value highlights the emergence of a social
contract with restructured boundaries and reconfigured sutured value through terror. In order to trace how slavery and
anti-blackness are deployed and leveraged in world politics by dominant states like the US and
corporations all in the name of radicalness (i.e., read capital’s moves to generate more value and infinitely and with no
constraints) and productions of venture power, I draw on Foucault’s critique of the logics of bio-
power as service (Foucault 2004: 16), that is, ways different institutional powers decide who may live
or die, including the ways people can be brought into the market sexually: first, by asserting their right to capacity as working
subjects and second, ‘through the intermediary of health’ (Foucault 2004: 16) as ‘queer value’ (Wesling 2012: 107). While the
marketing of sexuality has previously been analyzed as concerns of human trafficking, prostitution, pornography and other illicit
economies, I suggest that the neoliberal imperium’s deployment of ‘gay rights’ is marketizing sexuality as a human right rather than
positing it as radical erotic connections and relations. I also engage Rose’s idea of biosocialities as ‘collectivities formed around a
biological conception of a shared identity’ (Rose 2007: 134) that make an emergent sexual vitality central to power.
 Impact – Lawfare / Imperialism
Regulatory lawfare activates the necropolitical power of the imperial USFG –
justifies systemic racial and nationalistic violence
Jean Comaroff 2007 Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology,
Oppenheimer Fellow in African Studies also at Harvard, “Law and disorder in the postcolony,”
Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 15. // bdo.

Nor is it just the politics of the present that are being judicialised. As we said earlier, the past,
too, is being fought out in the courts. Britain, for example, is currently being sued for acts of
atrocity in its African empire (Anderson 2005; Elkins 2005): for having killed local leaders,
unlawfully alienated territory from one African people to another, and so on. By these means is
colonialism itself rendered criminal. Hauled before a judge, history is made to submit to the
scales of justice at the behest of those who suffered it. And to be reduced to a cash equivalent,
payable as the official tender of damage, dispossession, loss, trauma. What imperialism is being
indicted for, above all, is its commission of lawfare: the use of its own penal codes, its
administrative procedures, its states of emergency, its charters and mandates and warrants,
to discipline its subjects by means of violence made legible and legal by its own sovereign
word. Also, to commit its own ever-so-civilised forms of kleptocracy. Lawfare – the resort to
legal instruments, to the violence inherent in the law, to commit acts of political coercion, even
erasure (Comaroff 2001) – is equally marked in postcolonies. As a species of political
displacement, it becomes most visible when those who ‘serve’ the state conjure with legalities
to act against its citizens. Most infamous recently is Zimbabwe, where the Mugabe regime has
consistently passed laws to justify the coercive silencing of its critics. Operation Murambatsvina,
‘Drive Out Trash’, which has forced political opponents out of urban areas under the banner of
‘slum clearance’ – has recently taken this practice to unprecedented depths. Murambatsvina,
says the government, is merely an application of the law of the land to raze dangerous ‘illegal
structures’. Lawfare may be limited or it may reduce people to ‘bare life’; in Zimbabwe, it has
mutated into a necropolitics with a rising body count. But it always seeks to launder visceral
power in a wash of legitimacy as it is deployed to strengthen the sinews of state or enlarge
the capillaries of capital. Hence Benjamin’s (1978) thesis that the law originates in violence and
lives by violent means; that the legal and the lethal animate one another. Of course, in 1919
Benjamin could not have envisaged the possibility that lawfare might also be a weapon of the
weak, turning authority back on itself by commissioning courts to make claims for resources,
recognition, voice, integrity, sovereignty. But this still does not lay to rest the key questions:
Why the fetishism of legalities? What are its implications for the play of Law and Dis/order in
the postcolony? And are postcolonies different in this respect from other nation-states? The
answer to the first question looks obvious. The turn to law would seem to arise directly out of
growing anxieties about lawlessness. But this does not explain the displacement of the political
into the legal or the turn to the courts to resolve an ever greater range of wrongs. The fetishism,
in short, runs deeper than purely a concern with crime. It has to do with the very constitution of
the postcolonial polity. Late modernist nationhood, it appears, is undergoing an epochal move
away from the ideal of cultural homogeneity: a nervous, often xenophobic shift toward
heterogeneity (Anderson 1983). The rise of neoliberalism – with its impact on population flows,
on the dispersion of cultural practices, on geographies of production and accumulation – has
heightened this, especially in former colonies, which were erected from the first on difference.
And difference begets more law. Why? Because, with growing heterodoxy, legal instruments
appear to offer a means of commensuration (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000): a repertoire of
standardised terms and practices that permit the negotiation of values, beliefs, ideals and
interests across otherwise intransitive lines of cleavage. Hence the flight into a constitutionalism
that explicitly embraces heterogeneity in highly individualistic, universalistic Bills of Rights, even
where states are paying less and less of the bills. Hence the effort to make human rights into an
ever more global, ever more authoritative discourse. But there is something else at work too. A
well-recognised corollary of the neoliberal turn, recall, has been the outsourcing by states of
many of the conventional operations of governance, including those, like health services,
policing and the conduct of war, integral to the management of life itself. Bureaucracies do
retain some of their old functions, of course. But most 21st century governments have reduced
their administrative reach, entrusting ever more to the market and delegating ever more
responsibility to citizens as individuals, as volunteers, as classes of actor, social or legal. Under
these conditions, especially where the threat of disorder seems immanent, civil law presents
itself as a more or less effective weapon of the weak, the strong and everyone in between.
Which, in turn, exacerbates the resort to lawfare. The court has become a utopic site to which
human agency may turn for a medium in which to pursue its ends . This, once again, is
particularly so in postcolonies, where bureaucracies and bourgeoisies were not elaborate to
begin with; and in which heterogeneity had to be negotiated from the start. Put all this together
and the fetishism of the law seems over-determined. Not only is public life becoming more
legalistic, but so, in regulating their own affairs and in dealing with others, are ‘communities’
within the nation-state: cultural communities, religious communities, corporate communities,
residential communities, communities of interest, even outlaw communities. Everything, it
seems, exists here in the shadow of the law. Which also makes it unsurprising that a ‘culture of legality’ should
saturate not just civil order but also its criminal undersides. Take another example from South Africa, where organised crime
appropriates, re-commissions and counterfeits the means and ends of both the state and the market. The gangs on the Cape Flats in
Cape Town mimic the business world, having become a lumpen stand-in for those excluded from the national economy (Standing
2003). For their tax-paying clients, those gangs take on the positive functions of government, not least security provision. Illicit
corporations of this sort across the postcolonial world often have shadow judicial personnel and convene courts to try offenders
against the persons, property and social order over which they exert sovereignty. They also provide the policing that the state either
has stopped supplying or has outsourced to the private sector. Some have constitutions. A few are even structured as franchises
Charles Tilly (1985) once suggested,
and, significantly, are said to offer ‘alternative citizenship’ to their members.
famously, that modern states operate much like organised crime. These days, organised crime is
operating ever more like states. Self-evidently, the counterfeiting of a culture of legality by the
criminal underworld feeds the dialectic of law and disorder. After all, once government
outsources its policing services and franchises force, and once outlaw organisations shadow the
state by providing protection and dispensing justice, social order itself becomes like a hall of
mirrors. What is more, this dialectic has its own geography. A geography of discontinuous,
overlapping sovereignties. We said a moment ago that communities of all kinds have become
ever more legalistic in regulating their affairs; it is often in the process of so doing, in fact, that
they become communities at all, the act of judicialisation being also an act of objectification.
Herein lies their will to sovereignty, which we take to connote the exercise of autonomous
control over the lives, deaths and conditions of existence of those who fall within its purview –
and the extension over them of the jurisdiction of some kind of law . ‘Lawmaking’, to cite
Benjamin (1978: 295) yet again, ‘is power making.’ But ‘power is the principal of all
lawmaking’. In sum, to transform itself into sovereign authority, power demands an
architecture of legalities.

Lawfare is the central mechanism for neoliberal necro-politics

Comaroof and Camaroof 07 (John Comaroff, Professor of African and African American
Studies and of Anthropology, and Jean Comaroff, Professor of African and African American
Studies and of Anthropology, “Law and disorder in the postcolony,” Social
Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale (2007) Chicago Press, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umichigan/detail.action?docID=408351.
Created from umichigan on 2020-06-30 17:14:09) TR
The history of AIDS drugs notwithstanding, the judicialization of politics has been mobilized effectively by corporate capitalism to
create a deregulated environment conducive to its workings— and, at times, to protect some of its more equivocal operations from
scrutiny. But, as we have already intimated, it has also been deployed at the nether end of the political spectrum: by the “little”
peoples and marginal populations of the world. Some
of those deployments have been intended to stop
harmful intrusions into their lives. Others have sought restitution for damages arising out of
egregious acts of violence against them: witness Nancy ScheperHughes’s (chapter 4) account of the efforts of
ordinary people and activists in the Northeast Brazilian interior to take a stand against death squads by invoking constitutional and
human rights; 82 or the civil proceeding against Pluspetrol in 2002 by the Inter-ethnic Association for Development of the Peruvian
Amazon to demand the cleanup of, and compensation for, an oil spill in the Marañon River; or the class actions filed by 16,000 or so
alumni of Indian boarding schools in Canada against the Anglican, Presbyterian, Roman Catholic, and United Churches, alleging
physical, sexual, and cultural abuse. 83 While most such suits arise out of an originary act of criminal violation, not all of them are
directed primarily at reparation. The effort in 2001 by relatives of those killed by the Israelis at Shatila to indict Ariel Sharon for war
crimes was intended as a volley fired in the struggle against Zionism, itself seen by its opponents as a crime against humanity. Many,
although not all, such cases have failed. The Ogoni, for one, lost a landmark claim brought in the United States under the Alien Tort
Claims Act 84 against Shell for its activities in Nigeria, in particular for its complicity in the execution by the Babangida regime of
those politically opposed to the operations of the oil company. The law often comes down on the side of bandit capital, especially
when the latter dons the mask of respectable business. 85 It is not just the politics of the present that is being judicialized. The past,
too, is increasinglycaught up in the dialectic of law and disorder: hence the mobilization of
legalities to fight anti-imperialist battles anew, which has compelled the British government to answer under oath
for having committed acts of unspeakable atrocity in its African “possessions” (D. Anderson 2005; Elkins 2005), for having killed local
leaders at whim, and for having unlawfully alienated territory from one African people to another. By
these means is
colonialism, tout court, rendered criminal. Hauled before a judge, history is made to break its
silences, to speak in tongues hitherto unheard and untranslated, to submit itself to the scales of
justice at the behest of those who suffered it, of its most abject subjects— and to be reduced to
a cash equivalent, payable as the official tender of damage, dispossession, loss, trauma . In the
process, too, it becomes clear that what imperialism is being indicted for, above all, is its
commission of lawfare: its use of its own rules— of its duly enacted penal codes, its
administrative law, its states of emergency, its charters and mandates and warrants, its norms
of engagement— to impose a sense of order upon its subordinates by means of violence
rendered legible, legal, and legitimate by its own sovereign word. And also to commit its own
ever-socivilized, patronizing, high-minded forms of kleptocracy. Lawfare— the resort to legal
instruments, to the violence inherent in the law, to commit acts of political coercion, even
erasure (J. L. Comaroff 2001)—is equally marked in postcolonies, of course. As a species of political
displacement, it becomes most readily visible when those who act in the name of the state
conjure with legalities to act against some or all of its citizens. Any number of examples present themselves,
but the most infamously contemporary is, again, to be found in Zimbabwe. The Mugabe regime has consistently passed
laws in parliament intended to silence its critics and then has proceeded to take violent action
against them; the media regulations put in place just after the presidential election of 2002 are a case in point. Operation
Murambatsvina (“Drive out Trash”), which has razed informal settlements and markets, forced people out of urban areas, and
caused a great deal of hardship, ill-health, and death under the banner of “slum clearance,” has recently taken this practice to
unprecedented heights— or depths. The most persuasive explanation for the operation, says Allister Sparks, 86 is that it is, first, an
act of vengeance against urban Zimbabweans who voted overwhelmingly for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change in
the national election of March 2005; second,
an attempt to preempt uprisings on the part of a largely out-
of-work population desperately short of food and fuel ; and, third, a strike against the black market that has
arisen in the informal sector to trade in the foreign currency sent back by citizens laboring abroad. Murambatsvina, according to the
Mugabe regime, is merely an application of the law of the land: it is a righteous effort to demolish “illegal structures.” For critics, on
the other hand, it is not that at all. As one Caribbean journalist put it, in a phrase especially apt here, it is “ political
criminality.” 87 Note, in this respect, how the Zimbabwean embassy in Jakarta responded to a censorious piece in an Indonesian
newspaper: (The rapid development of illegal informal small-scale industries, trading centers and outbuildings in all the cities and
towns had destroyed the status of these urban centers and outstretched the capacity of the municipalities to provide adequate
services. The inability of the urban local authorities to levy most of the illegal vendors created an untenable situation that victimized
everybody, including the licenced traders. Many illegal activities such as the hoarding of basic commodities and dealing in gold and
foreign currency were thriving in the illegal informal sector. Over 22,000 people have been arrested for various offenses during the
ongoing exercise. . . . The court also ruled that most of the structures were illegal as the owners did not follow the set approval
channels with the respective local authorities.) 88 The word “illegal” appears five times in this passage. Lawfare
can be
limited or it can reduce people to “bare life” ; in some postcolonies, it has mutated into a deadly
necropolitics with a rising body count (see chapter 9). But it always seeks to launder brute power in
a wash of legitimacy, ethics, propriety. Sometimes it is put to work, as it was in many colonial
contexts, to make new sorts of human subjects; sometimes it is the vehicle by which oligarchs
seize the sinews of state to further their economic ends; sometimes it is a weapon of the weak,
turning authority back on itself by commissioning the sanction of the court to make claims for
resources, recognition, voice, integrity, sovereignty . 89 But ultimately, it is neither the weak nor the meek nor
the marginal who predominate in such things. It is those equipped to play most potently inside the dialectic
of law and disorder. This, to close a circle opened in the preface, returns us to Derrida, Agamben, and Benjamin: to the
notion that the law originates in violence and lives by violent means, the notion, in other words,
that the legal and the lethal animate and inhabit one another . Whatever the truth of the matter, politics
at large, and the politics of coercion in particular, appear ever more to be turning into lawfare. But this still does not
lay to rest the questions that lurk beneath our narrative, although it does gesture toward some answers: Again, why the fetishism of
legalities? What are its implications for the play of law and dis/order in the postcolony? And what, if anything, makes postcolonies
different in this respect from other nation-states? At one level the answer to the first question looks to be self-evident. Theturn
to law, like the popular punitiveness of the present moment (see above), would seem to arise directly out of a
growing anxiety about lawlessness; although, as we have already noted, more law, far from resolving the
problem of disorder, draws attention back to rising criminality, further compounding public
insecurities. But none of this explains the displacement of the political into the legal, the ready turn to civil proceedings to
resolve an ever greater range of private wrongs, and so on. To be sure, the fetishism of the law runs far deeper than
purely a concern with crime. It has to do with the very constitution of the postcolonial polity.
And its history-in-the-making. The modernist nation-state appears to be undergoing an epochal
move away from the ideal of an imagined community founded on the fiction, often violently
sustained, of cultural homogeneity (B. Anderson 1983), toward a nervous, xenophobically tainted sense of
heterogeneity and heterodoxy. The rise of neoliberalism has heightened all this, with its impact on population
movements, on the migration of work and workers, on the dispersion of cultural practices, on
the return of the colonial oppressed to haunt the cosmopoles that once ruled them and wrote
their histories, on the geographical re/distribution of sites of accumulation. These effects are felt
especially in former colonies, which were erected from the first on difference, itself owed to the indifference of empires that paid
scant attention to the organic sociologies of the “countries” they casually called into being. In the event, as is increasingly the case
everywhere, postcolonials are citizens for whom polymorphous, labile identities coexist in uneasy ensembles of political subjectivity.
In many postcolonies, the “vast majority . . . principally think of themselves” as members of “an ethnic, cultural, language, religious,
or some other group” and “attach their personal fate” to it, rather than to the nation, although this does not necessarily imply that
most of them “reject their national identity” per se (Gibson 2004: chap. 2). 90 Indeed, so-called communal
loyalties are
frequently blamed for the kinds of violence, nepotism, and corruption said to saturate these
societies, as if cultures of heterodoxy bear within them the seeds of criminality, difference,
disorder. But an awareness of difference itself also points the way to more law. Why? Because, with
the growing heterodoxy of the twenty-first-century polity, legal instruments appear to offer a
ready means of commensuration (J. Comaroff and J. L. Comaroff 2000): a repertoire of more or less
standardized terms and practices that permit the negotiation of values, beliefs, ideals, and
interests across otherwise-impermeable lines of cleavage. Hence the displacement of so much
politics into jurisprudence. Hence the flight into constitutionalism, which, in its postcolonial
guise, embraces heterogeneity within the language of universal rights— thus dissolving groups of people
with distinctive identities into aggregates of person who may enjoy the same entitlements and enact their difference under the
sovereignty of a shared Bill of Rights. Furthermore, because social, spiritual, and cultural identities tend
increasingly to cross frontiers, resort to the jural as a means of commensuration also transects
nation-states, which is why there is so much talk nowadays of global legal regimes. Meanwhile,
the effort to make human rights into an ever more universal discourse, and to ascribe ever more
authority to it, gives impetus to the remapping of the cartography of jurisdictions. While the growing
salience of heterodoxy has been partly responsible for the fetishism of the law, another consideration is every bit as
critical. It arises from a well-recognized corollary of the neoliberal turn, one spelled out earlier:
the outsourcing by states of many of the conventional operations of governance, including
those, like health services, incarceration, policing, and the conduct of war, integral to the
management of “bare life.” Bureaucracies do retain some of their old functions, of course, most notably the transfer of
public wealth into private hands. But progressively (or, depending on ideological orientation, retrogressively), twenty-firstcentury
governments have attenuated their administrative reach, leaving more and more routine
political action— be it social projects, the quest for redress, or the search for (anything other
than national) security— to citizens as individuals, as communities of one kind or another, as
classes of actor, social or legal. Under these conditions, in which the threat of disorder seems everywhere immanent,
everywhere proportional to the retraction of the state, civil law presents itself as a more or less effective
weapon of the weak, the strong, and everyone in between. This, in turn, exacerbates the
resort to lawfare. The court has become a utopic institutional site to which human agency may
turn for a medium in which to achieve its ends— albeit sometimes in vain, given the
disproportion everywhere between populist expectations of legal remedy and, law-oriented
nongovernmental organizations notwithstanding, access to its means. This is all the more so in
postcolonies, where bureaucratic apparatuses and bourgeoisies were not elaborate to begin with; where the executive was typically
unapproachable; in which heterogeneity was undeniable from the start, often without the requisite instruments; in which state
control over the means of violence was never that firm; in which foreclosed access to power
makes Lilliputian crusades into foreign jurisdictions very appealing. Put all of these things together and
the fetishism of the law seems overdetermined. So, too, do its implications. The distillation of
postcolonial citizens into legal subjects, and postcolonial politics into lawfare, charts the road
from the past to the future, albeit less sharply in some places than in others. Not only are government and public
affairs becoming more legalistic, but so are “communities” within the nation-state— cultural
communities, religious communities, corporate communities, resi dential communities,
communities of interest, outlaw communities— in regulating their own internal affairs and in dealing with others
(see chapter 6). Everything, it seems, including the metaphysics of disorder, exists here in the shadow of the law
(see chapter 5), which also makes it unsurprising that a “culture of legality” should saturate not just civil order but also its criminal
undersides, its camera obscura, and the ambiguous, gray, alegal zones that infuse both, drawing them together into an intricate
weave of practices, relations, and mediations (see chapter 7). In a previous section, we spoke of the ways in which criminality
appropriates, recommissions, and counterfeits the means and ends of polite society, of the state, of the market. Recall Gangland
(Pty) Ltd. on the Cape Flats: organized crime there is not just a mirror image of the business world, a lumpen stand-in for those
excluded from the service economy. For its consumers and customers, it also takes on some of the positive functions of government,
not least the safety and security of its taxed client communities. Illicit corporations of this sort across the postcolonial world—
loosely dubbed “mafias” and “gangs” but frequently much more complex, flexible structures than these terms suggest— often
appoint shadow judicial personnel, duplicate legal rituals and processes, and convene courts to try offenders against the persons,
property, and social order over which they exert sovereignty. Even in prison. Observe, in this regard, Steinberg’s (2004)
extraordinary account of the elaborate mock judiciary and its even more elaborate proceedings, which
extend to capital punishment, among the Numbers gangs in South Africa. Many outlawed “vigilante” groups have
developed quite complicated simulacra of the law as well. Some even have . . . constitutions and, significantly, are said
to offer “alternative citizenship” to their members. 91 It will be self-evident that the counterfeiting of a culture of legality by the
criminal underworld— and by those who occupy the spaces between it and the realm of the licit
— feeds the dialectic of law and disorder. After all, once government begins seriously to outsource its services and to
franchise force, and once extralegal organizations begin to mimic the state and the market by providing protection and dispensing
justice, social
order itself becomes like a hall of mirrors: at once there and not there, at once all
too real and a palimpsest of images, at once visible, opaque, and translucent. What is more,
this doubling, this copresence of law and disorder, has its own geography, a geography of
discontinuous, overlapping sovereignties.
 Impact – Racism
Necropolitics is at the core of modern racism
Mbembe 3 (Achille Mbembe, philosopher, political scientist, and public intellectual, 2003, Necropolitics, [pgs. 16- 18])
Having presented a reading of politics as the work of death, I turn now to sovereignty, expressed predominantly as the right to kill.
For the purpose of my argument, I relate Foucault’s notion of biopower to two other concepts: the state of exception and the state
of siege.16 I examine those trajectories by which the state of exception and the relation of enmity have become the normative basis
of the right to kill. In such instances, power (and not necessarily state power) continuously refers and appeals to
exception, emergency, and a fictionalized notion of the enemy. It also labors to produce that same
exception, emergency, and fictionalized enemy. In other words, the question is: What is the relationship between
politics and death in those systems that can function only in a state of emergency? In Foucault’s formulation of it, biopower
appears to function through dividing people into those who must live and those who must die .
Operating on the basis of a split between the living and the dead, such a power defines itself in relation to a biological field—which it
takes control of and vests itself in. This control presupposes the distribution of human species into groups ,
the subdivision of the population into subgroups, and the establishment of a biological caesura between the ones and the others.
This is what Foucault labels with the (at rst sight familiar) term racism.17 That race (or for that matter racism) figures so
prominently in the calculus of biopower is entirely justifiable. After all, more so than class-thinking (the ideology that
de nes history as an economic struggle of classes), race has been the ever present shadow in Western
political thought and practice, especially when it comes to imagining the inhumanity of, or rule
over, foreign peoples. Referring to both this ever-presence and the phantomlike world of race in general, Arendt locates
their roots in the shattering experience of otherness and suggests that the politics of race is ultimately linked to
the politics of death.18 Indeed, in Foucault’s terms, racism is above all a technology aimed at permitting the exercise of
biopower, “that old sovereign right of death.” 19 In the economy of biopower, the function of racism is to
regulate the distribution of death and to make possible the murderous functions of the state . It
is, he says, “the condition for the acceptability of putting to death .”20 Foucault states clearly that the
sovereign right to kill (droit de glaive) and the mechanisms of biopower are inscribed in the way all
modern states function;21 indeed, they can be seen as constitutive elements of state power in modernity. According to
Foucault, the Nazi state was the most complete example of a state exercising the right to kill. This state, he claims, made the
management, protection, and cultivation of life coextensive with the sovereign right to kill. By biological extrapolation on the theme
of the political enemy, in organizing the war against its adversaries and, at the same time, exposing its own citizens to war, the Nazi
state is seen as having opened the way for a formidable consolidation of the right to kill, which culminated in the project of the “
nal solution.” In doing so, it became the archetype of a power formation that combined the characteristics of the racist state, the
murderous state, and the suicidal state. It has been argued that the complete conflation of war and politics (and racism, homicide,
and suicide), until they are indistinguishable from one another, is unique to the Nazi state. The
perception of the
existence of the Other as an attempt on my life , as a mortal threat or absolute danger whose
biophysical elimination would strengthen my potential to life and security —this, I suggest, is one of
the many imaginaries of sovereignty characteristic of both early and late modernity itself.
Recognition of this perception to a large extent underpins most traditional critiques of modernity, whether they are dealing with
nihilism and its proclamation of the will for power as the essence of the being; with reification understood as the becoming-object of
the human being; or the subordination of everything to impersonal logic and to the reign of calculability and instrumental
rationality.22 Indeed, from an anthropological perspective, what these critiques implicitly contest is a definition of politics as the
warlike relation par excellence. They also challenge the idea that, of necessity, the
calculus of life passes through the
death of the Other; or that sovereignty consists of the will and the capacity to kill in order to live .
Taking a historical perspective, a number of analysts have argued that the material premises of Nazi extermination are to be found in
colonial imperialism on the one hand and, on the other, in the serialization of technical mechanisms for putting people to death—
mechanisms developed between the Industrial Revolution and the First World War. According to Enzo Traverso, the gas chambers
and the ovens were the culmination of a long process of dehumanizing
and industrializing death, one of the
original features of which was to integrate instrumental rationality with the productive and
administrative rationality of the modern Western world (the factory, the bureaucracy, the prison, the army).
Having become mechanized, serialized execution was transformed into a purely technical, impersonal, silent, and rapid procedure.
This development was aided in part by racist stereotypes and the flourishing of a class-based racism
that, in translating the social con icts of the industrial world in racial terms, ended up comparing the working classes and “stateless
people” of the industrial world to the “savages” of the colonial world.

Biopolitical management causes systemic racism and genocide

Rose and Rabinow ’03 (Nikolas Rose and Paul Rabinow, December 10th, Department of
Sociology London School of Economics and Political Science, “Thoughts on Biopower today”
pages 10-11)

Holocaust is undoubtedly one configuration that modern biopower can take. Racisms allows
power to sub-divide a population into subspecies known as races, to fragment it, and to allow a
relationship in which the death of the other, of the inferior race, can be seen as something that
will make life in general healthier and purer : as Foucault put it in 1976 ì racism justifies the death-function
in the economy of biopower by appealing to the principle that the death of others makes one
biologically stronger insofar as ones is a member of a race or a population (2003: 258). It is true that in this lecture he
suggests that it is the emergence of biopower that inscribes [racism] in the mechanisms of the State

Ö as the basic mechanism of power, as it is exercised in modern States. (2003: 254). But the Nazi regime was, in his view,
exceptional paroxysmal development We have, then, in Nazi society something that is really quite extraordinary: this is a society which

has generalized biopower in an absolute sense, but which has also generalized the sovereign
right to kill to kill anyone, meaning not only other people but also its own people a coincidence between a generalized biopower and a
dictatorship that was at once absolute and retransmitted throughout the entire social body (2003: 260). ). Biopower in the form it took

under National Socialism was a complex mix of the politics of life and the politics of death ñ as Robert Proctor points
out, Nazi doctors and health activists waged war on tobacco, sought to curb exposure to asbestos, worried about the over use of medication and X-
rays, stressed the importance of a diet for of petrochemical dies and preservatives, campaigned for whole-grain bread and foods high in vitamins and
fiber, and many were vegetarians (Proctor, 1999). But within
this complex, the path to the death camps was
dependent upon a host of other historical, moral, political and technical conditions. Holocaust is
neither exemplary of thanato-politics, nor the hidden dark truth of biopower.
 Impact – Prisons
Prisons construct a necropolitical zone that invisibilizes bodies in order to
destroy them
Sharman 2014 (Samantha, phd in gender studies, destabilizing the prison industrial complex:
necropolitics, biopolitics and the reproduction of sovereignty, university of Arizona,
http://arizona.openrepository.com/arizona/bitstream/10150/321955/1/azu_etd_mr_2014_020
2_sip1_m.pdf, BB)
Prisons are not death factories—they are not Nazi camps or even necessarily way stations before execution (though in some cases
they may be). I do not mean that every body that enters a prison is executed or physically destroyed. Prisons, I contend, are a
necropolitical tool, a mechanization of social death. I would like us to think about death as a
politics of death, which, as I contend in the case of the PIC, manifest in two ways: the erasure and
destruction of racialized bodies and populations, and the production of the living dead, the
socially dead. The PIC invisibilizes bodies and razes populations. It removes individual people
from their communities4 , from the social world, thus invisibilizing them and erasing them from
the collective imaginary. And because this emerges through a racialized process, it dismantles and attempts to extirpate
whole communities and populations—all the while cloaked in colorblindness and neoliberalism. The process through, and rate at
which, these communities are being razed is reflective of genocide. Regarding genocide, Gregg Barak, Jeanne Flavin, and Paul
Leighton contend in Class, Race, Gender and Crime: Social Realities of Justice in America: [Many Americans] tend to associate
genocide with the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, which creates a distorted standard because it is an extreme case rather than a more
typical one. The
core concept, however, is ‘an attempt to exterminate a racial, ethnic, religious,
cultural, or political group, either directly through murder or indirectly by creating conditions
that lead to the group’s destruction’. Such destruction encompasses ‘not only killing but creation
of conditions that materially or psychologically destroy or diminish people’s dignity, happiness,
and capacity to fulfill basic material needs’” [emphasis added] (90). Just as the presence of Jewish peoples does not
undermine the reality and severity of the Holocaust of Nazi Germany (Barak, 2001, 91), the presence of black communities in the
U.S. does not mean that black communities are not being systemically socially and physically destroyed. Next I would like to
introduce the concept of social death. I bring us into conversation with Achille Mbembe, Lisa Cacho, and F.W.J. Schelling to produce
the following definition of social death: the expulsion of the subject from humanity through the removal of
potentiality. We should understand death not just as physical death, but as life incapable of life.
This is the condition of the subject living under social death: the erasure of the possibility of
potentiality— In other words, life incapable of living, of realizing their potential . The prisoner, not
unlike the slave, experiences four forms of loss: loss of community, loss of home, loss of rights over
one’s body, and loss of political power (Mbembe, 2003, 21). Value and autonomy are removed from
the body of the prisoner. This loss is identical with absolute domination and social death (Mbembe, 2003, 21). Bodies are
made intelligible through visibility and the assignation of value. When these components are removed, what is
left of the body? What is left for the body? If life entails being able to live, having the possibility to fulfill personhood,
those who live social deaths may be physically alive, but their bodies are void of life. As Lisa Marie Cacho argues in Social Death:
Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected, the PIC produces (and is produced by) a larger context of social
death. Bodies do not have to physically be in a prison to be socially killed by the PIC . Members of certain
categories of racialized populations are always and already criminalized. “Gang members” and “illegal aliens”
for example, regardless of behavior or acts, are criminalized for their inclusion in social groups. In other words, they are criminalized
for their identities. Criminalized
subjects, though they may not be exiled in prisons, are socially dead:
they do not have the possibility to fulfill personhood, and their value is removed—making them
unintelligible to the population at large . This is the death to which I refer when I argue that the PIC is a
necropolitical tool of death. This is not to undermine the reality of physical death produced by PIC, however.
Conditions in many prisons do produce physical death—both through violence and neglect.
Furthermore, the violence which both perpetuates, and is perpetuated by, the PIC produces physical death daily—overwhelmingly
for black men. I want us to think bigger, however, and see the PIC as a cultural project which produces socially
dead subjects—bodies of the living dead.
 Impact – Coercion
The carceral system expands beyond the walls of the prison and causes social
policing and coercion external to the criminal justice system.
Foucault ‘75– French historian and philosopher, associated with the structuralist and post-
structuralist movements (Michel., Discipline and Punish, trans. by Alan Sheridan, p.171-
174)//AD

The exercise of discipline presupposes a mechanism that coerces by means of observation; an

apparatus in which the techniques that the means of correct training make it possible to see
induce effects of power, and in which, conversely, the means of coercion make those on whom
they are applied clearly visible. Slowly, in the course of the classical age, we see the construction of those ‘observatories’
of human multiplicity for which the history of the sciences has so little good to say. Side by side with the major
technology of the telescope, the lens and the light beam, which were an integral part of the new
physics and cosmology, there were the minor techniques of multiple and intersecting
observations, of eyes that must see without being seen; using techniques of subjection and
methods of exploitation, an obscure art of light and the visible was secretly preparing a new
knowledge of man.
These ‘observatories* had an almost ideal model: the military camp - the short-lived, artificial city, built and reshaped almost at will;
the seat of a power that must be all the stronger, but also all the more discreet, all the more effective and on the alert in that it is
exercised over armed men. In the perfect camp, all power would be exercised solely through exact observation; each gaze would
form a part of the overall functioning of power. The old, traditional square plan was considerably refined in innumerable new
projects. The geometry of the paths, the number and distribution of the tents, the orientation of their entrances, the disposition of
files and ranks were exactly defined; the network of gazes that supervised one another was laid down: ‘In the parade ground, five
lines are drawn up, the first is sixteen feet from the second; the others are eight feet from one another; and the last is eight feet
from the arms depots. The arms depots are ten feet from the tents of the junior officers, immediately opposite the first tentpole. A
company street is fifty-one feet wide. . . All tents are two feet from one another. The tents of the subalterns are opposite the alleys
of their companies. The rear tentpole is eight feet from the last soldiers’ tent and the gate is opposite the captains’ tent. . . The
captains* tents are erected opposite the streets of their companies. The entrance is opposite the companies themselves.’1 The
camp is the diagram of a power that acts by means of general visibility. For a long time this
model of the camp or at least its underlying principle was found in urban development , in the
construction of working-class housing estates, hospitals , asylums, prisons, schools: the spatial
‘nesting’ of hierarchized surveillance. The principle was one of ‘embedding’ (‘encastrement’).
The camp was to the rather shameful art of surveillance what the dark room was to the great
science of optics.

A whole problematic then develops: that of an architecture that is no longer built simply to be
seen (as with the ostentation of palaces), or to observe the external space (cf. the geometry of
fortresses), but to permit an internal, articulated and detailed control - to render visible those
who are inside it; in more general terms, an architecture that would operate to transform
individuals: to act on those it shelters, to provide a hold on their conduct, to carry the effects of
power right to them, to make it possible to know them, to alter them. Stones can make people
docile and knowable. The old simple schema of confinement and enclosure - thick walls, a heavy
gate that prevents entering or leaving - began to be replaced by the calculation of openings, of
filled and empty spaces, passages and transparencies. In this way the hospital building was gradually organized
as an instrument of medical action: it was to allow a better observation of patients, and therefore a better calibration of their
treatment; the form of the buildings, by the careful separation of the patients, was to prevent contagions; lastly, the ventilation and
the air that circulated around each bed was to prevent the deleterious vapours from stagnating around the patient, breaking down
his humours and spreading the disease by their immediate effects. The hospital - which was to be built in the second half of the
century and for which so many plans were drawn up after the Hotel-Dieu was burnt down for the second time - was no longer simply
the roof under which penury and imminent death took shelter; it was, in its very materiality, a therapeutic operator.

Similarly, the school building was to be a mechanism for training. It was as a pedagogical
machine that Paris-Duverney conceived the ficole Militaire, right down to the minute details
that he had imposed on the architect, Gabriel. Train vigorous bodies, the imperative of health;
obtain competent officers, the imperative of qualification; create obedient soldiers, the
imperative of politics; prevent debauchery and homosexuality, the imperative of morality . A
fourfold reason for establishing sealed compartments between individuals, but also apertures for continuous surveillance. The very
building of the £cole was to be an apparatus for observation; the rooms were The means of correct training distributed along a
corridor like a series of small cells; at regular intervals, an officer’s quarters were situated, so that ‘every ten pupils had an officer on
each side*; the pupils were confined to their cells throughout the night; and Paris had insisted that 'a window be placed on the
corridor wall of each room from chest-level to within one or two feet of the ceiling. Not only is it pleasant to have such windows, but
one would venture to say that it is useful, in several respects, not to mention the disciplinary reasons that may determine this
arrangement* (quoted in Laulan, 117-18). In the diningrooms was ‘a slightly raised platform for the tables of the inspectors of
studies, so that they may see all the tables of the pupils of their divisions during meals*; latrines had been installed with half-doors,
so that the supervisor on duty could see the head and legs of the pupils, and also with side walls sufficiently high ‘that those inside
cannot see one another’.2 This
infinitely scrupulous concern with surveillance is expressed in the
architecture by innumerable petty mechanisms. These mechanisms can only be seen as
unimportant if one forgets the role of this instrumentation, minor but flawless, in the
progressive objectification and the ever more subtle partitioning of individual behaviour. The
disciplinary institutions secreted a machinery of control that functioned like a microscope of
conduct; the fine, analytical divisions that they created formed around men an apparatus of
observation, recording and training. How was one to subdivide the gaze in these observation
machines? How was one to establish a network of communications between them? How was
one so to arrange things that a homogeneous, continuous power would result from their
calculated multiplicity?
Alternative
2NC Alternative
 Alt = Resistance to Power
Only the alt resists the inevitability of disciplinary power – Don’t do the cops’
jobs for them, by limiting your imagination of the alt to what is pre-approved
within the dominant knowledge construction
Clifford 01 (Michael Clifford is a professor in the philosophy department of Mississippi State
University and received his PHD at Vanderbilt University “Political Genealogy After Foucault:
Savage Identities” Date access: 6/27/2020) TR

10-12

Specifically, I consider first what might be called the “discourse of threat” peculiar to traditional
political philosophy. This discourse extends itself beyond the realm of theory to various
institutional structures and installs itself ideologically across the entire political landscape. This
discourse at once isolates us to a private autonomy and permits a governmental integration of
subjects within the body politic. This integration is made possible, in part, through traditional
appeals to “rights”—human rights, natural rights, civil rights, inalienable rights. To appreciate
how this integration is accomplished, we have to examine an aspect of Foucault’s thought the
importance of which has not been commonly recognized or acknowledged in previous
commentaries on Foucault. I am referring to what Foucault calls “Enunciative modalities.” With
regard to modern political subjects, we shall see that one of the most important of these
modalities is the “site” of their emergence. There are two general sites of that emergence, each
corresponding to what I call the practical and ideological registers of modern political identity .
With regard to the ideological register, the conceptual and geographical space of the nation
serves as the site of the emergence and formation of that modern political identity I call the
Savage Noble. With regard to the practical register, I will show how modern political identity is
forged in the “disciplinary” sites of the school, the hospital, military barracks, and the prison,
and how, moreover, the ideological register of savage nobility(i.e., autonomous individuality) is
superimposed on this form of disciplinary subjectivity as a veil and an instrument of subjugation.
Foucault introduces the concept of enunciative modalities in The Archaeology of Knowledge,
where they are part of his larger examination of dis-course. Yet the significance of enunciative
modalities extends beyond that of discourse and, in fact, serves as a linchpin between his work
on power and ethics as well. With regard to power, my main concern is with demon-Political
Genealogy After Foucault starting the emergence of the private, autonomous individual, with
the way that form of political subjectivity is an effect of a set of power relations peculiar to what
Foucault calls “disciplinary” society. Individualism is obviously coextensive with Liberalism and
its contractual view of power. In contrast, disciplinary power operates through subtle coercions
and petty manipulations; it seizes the body and subjects it to a complex series of practices and
procedures in order to produce a form of political subjectivity that is docile, manageable, safe .
Part of the success of disciplinary power is due to its ability to use traditional notions of power
(as something that can be possessed and contracted away) and of autonomous individuality as
an ideological veil to conceal the fact that it is producing an entirely different form of identity,
one for whom traditional notions of power and freedom are rhetorically familiar but
practically alien. As James Bernauer points out, however, the modern notion of individuality is
not merely used by disciplinary power to conceal itself; that notion of individuality is to a very
large extent produced by disciplinary power.31Later, I will show how these two indices of
individuality—ideological and disciplinary—are brought together within the political rationality
of what Foucault calls “Governmentality,” and how they are played out on the enunciative site
of the nation. Nevertheless, the disciplinary individual is not the same as the private,
autonomous individual—the Savage Noble—of the liberal tradition. There are important
conceptual and practical differences between the two that should not be elided. Indeed, to the
extent that much contemporary political theory and philosophy still appeals to traditional
notions of individuality and power, it is important to demonstrate how Foucault’s work
challenges some of the basic assumptions of traditional political philosophy. With regard to
Foucault’s last work on ethics, enunciative modalities can help us to define and delineate those
spaces, or sites, in which individuals fashion their own identity as political subjects. Drawing
upon Foucault’s later work on the history of sexuality, in which he attempts to elaborate the
various processes of “subjectivation,” or self-formation, I select out those aspects of his work
that can help us to understand the self-formation of the political subject. More specifically,
Foucault reads various texts, such as Plato’s Republic and Epictetus’s Discourses, not as
philosophical treatises in the traditional sense, but as “manuals of living” that outline the
practices and regimes through which one may turn oneself into an ethical subject . Using this as
a model of analysis, I trace out such a “technology of self” in the texts of traditional political
philosophy. The focus of my analysis is John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. If we read On Libertyas a
manual of subjectivation rather than as the juridical project to identify a principle designed to
set Introduction11 limits on the exercise of power, we see Mill offering detailed guidelines about
how to “cultivate” our own individuality. One crucial feature of the form of political subjectivity
that Mill elaborates relates to tolerance. In fact, going beyond Mill, it seems to me that the
quality of tolerance can help us to make sense of the different forms of modern (Western)
political identity, and of how they are expected to relate to each other in order to act
“ethically.” I appeal to tolerance to map out the ideological oppositions—left and right, liberal
and conservative, fascist and anarchist—that constitute the political spectrum. Toleration is
considered by Mill and Rawls to be one of the principle virtues of autonomous individuality (and
hence of savage nobility). However, this virtue accrues to a form of abstract political identity
that requires us to be oblivious (e.g, color-blind; the idea that “all men are created equal”) to
the very real differences between us. Yet if we examine the sites wherein we have seen the
formation of that identity we have known as the noble savage—the native American Indian—we
see how both toleration and the lack thereof have served as instruments of power. In fact, the
political spectrum is a kind of prism through which the white light of European male reason is
refracted along an abstract ideological line that leaves little room for recognition of genuine
cultural difference.

Only our deconstructive critique can broaden the scope of analysis sufficiently
to support activism outside the narrow confines of liberal reform projects – the
alt is a prerequisite to solving for necropolitics & the aff impacts
Haritaworn, Kuntsman, and Posocco 14 (Jin Haritaworn is Assistant Professor of Gender,
Race and Environment at York University in Toronto. Adi Kuntsman is Simon Research Fellow at
the University of Manchester. Adi’s research interests include queer politics in Israel-Palestine;
war and violence in digital media; and affect and emotions. Silvia Posocco is Lecturer,
Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck College, University of London. Introduction: Queer
Necropolitics. Pp19-21)

Through the concept-metaphor of queer necropolitics, the contributors to this book broaden
our perception of life, death, violence and survival by attending to different sites, such as the
borderzone, the warzone, the prison and the gentrifying area. These Mbembian ‘topographies
of cruelty’ are by no means an exclusive map of necropolitical spatialities. More work is needed
in order to make sense of the queer vitalities that have proliferated across various sites –
including institutions of punishment alongside institutions of ‘care’, such as schools, psychiatric
units and youth work, as well as the informal spaces and connectivities – the queer ‘scene’, the
queer ‘neighbourhood’, the globalizing LGBT movement – that increasingly follow similar
punitive and pathologizing logics.
While queer necropolitics is not the only tool through which such work is possible, we have
offered it up as an insurgent vocabulary that can help us make sense of the many forms of death
that accompany and condition queer claims to life, visibility and protection. Its attraction lies
precisely in its ability to capture seemingly unrelated phenomena simultaneously, and to bring
back into a shared plane of intelligibility struggles that we are often told are mutually exclusive.
It may help us, for example, to understand figures such as the ‘welfare queen’ (Cohen 1997;
Roberts 1997), the ‘monster-terrorist-fag’ (Puar and Rai 2002), the ‘drunk Indian’ (Razack 2012),
the ‘black rioter’ (Breggin 1995) and the ‘hateful Muslim youth’ (Haritaworn 2013), as related
not only to one another but also to the figure of the ‘queer lover’, whose ascendancy from
degeneracy occurs in shared environments shaped by the same murderous processes. What
would it mean to enter into kinship with these pathologized figures? How might we – from our
various positionalities – explore gender and sexuality beyond these necropolitical moulds?
One way to think crucially and responsibly about queer politics in these times is to refuse the
call to become what we call ‘happy queers’ (or, indeed, nostalgic queers) whose recruitment for
sexual celebration serves to euphemize and accelerate the death of Others – who for some of us
indeed include our own. Instead, we must attend to the forces that prepare queer and indeed
non-queer bodies for premature death (see also Cohen 2011). Yet our motivation must be to go
much further, to foster the survival of those who were ‘meant to perish’ but are not disposable,
to repeat Che Gossett’s moving words (2011: n.p.). What would a politics, queer or otherwise,
that is serious about such a resistant and allied task look like? How can we engage in
unalienated politics, where safer spaces are not won by reproducing cannibalistic, criminalizing
and pathologizing regimes or by inserting ourselves into militarizing and security logics, and
where the violence of the most powerful (such as the racist and neo/colonial state, the market,
the prison and the hospital) is scandalized at least as loudly as the acts of those thus
subjugated?
We see the necropolitical as one in a range of possible tools to explore the possibilities of such a
politics, since it helps us make sense of the symbiotic copresence of life and death, manifested
ever more clearly in the cleavages between rich and poor, citizens and non-citizens (and those
who can be stripped of citizenship at any moment); the culturally, morally, economically
valuable and the pathological; queer subjects invited into life and queerly abjected populations
marked for death. Yet this book is in conversation not just with those interested in testing the
promises and limits of a specifically necropolitical framework, but also with other trajectories of
decolonizing gender and sexuality. More generally, it responds to the new hunger for queerly
theorizing about structural violence and injustice, from tightening borders, mass incarceration,
and the wars without end, to the everyday, banal workings of the market. On an activist level,
this is reflected in the growth of feminist, queer and trans movements that radically refigure
that which counts as a ‘queer and trans issue’, by moving away from narrow liberal and
identitarian notions of protection, tolerance, victimhood and visibility and towards careful
mappings of the bigger picture (Bassichis, Lee and Spade 2011). We are especially encouraged to
witness, through international collaborations such as this, the growth of a radical queer and
trans activism which, stepping into the footsteps of a re-radicalized anti-racist feminism, seeks
to fight oppression in all its intersections and manifestations, including the normalized, the
banal, and the systemic (Decolonize Queer 2011; Gender Just 2011; Incite! – Critical Resistance
2001; Incite! 2006; Khalass We’re Vex 2013; SUSPECT 2010; Sylvia Rivera Law Project et al.
2009). If this has so far largely remained parochial to the North American context, we hope that
projects such as Queer Necropolitics will help us catch up with the moves of capital and
ideology, so that resistant knowledges, too, may begin to cross borders and ‘unmap’ (Razack
2002) the geopolitics of violence, abandonment, and death. We hope that this book will be a
stepping stone for forging a transnational lens that is adequate to this task.
 Alt Solves – ICE
Effective change to the immigration carceral system requires an antagonization
of biopower
Bycura, M. (2011, July) Immigration Legislation's Panoptic Gaze Through A Legal, Theoretical
and Empirical Lens. Arizona State University.

In analyzing the various powers in immigration politics (either among federal branches of
government, between the state and federal government , or between a government actor and a
person subject to the technologies of power they wield ) a theoretical lens helps to clarify the
power relationships. The application of the theories of Michel Foucault provides fascinating
insight into immigration politics in Arizona. This thesis illuminated the power relationships at
play in Arizona from the power relationships among nation states in the broader political
arena of geopolitics and colonialism to the face-to-face power relationship between a police
officer and a stopped/detained/arrested person in a Foucauldian carceral network. At each
level, Foucault’s theories can be seen in Arizona’s immigration politics. Revealing Arizonian
immigration politics and Michel Foucault’s theories of power as analogous , while intriguing, only goes
so far. It might be assumed that the Latino/Hispanic community in Arizona experiences the
carceral network 145 executing a panoptic gaze negatively, but this has not yet been tested. Several
studies have looked at the impact of immigration legislation , but not upon whether or not a
population feels a heightened sense of being watched . Other studies have looked at reactions
toward being watched, or attitudes toward police and perceptions of racial profiling . Yet all fall
short of finding out whether or not a population feels a heightened sense of being watched . This is
important, because it can lead to structural violence of a kind not discussed in immigration
politics. As abovementioned, constantly feeling watched could bring about chronic stress, and the
health risks associated with chronic stress. Therefore, this thesis calls for further research that
would yield an opportunity to analyze these relationships . This thesis discusses the importance
of studying this phenomenon empirically . It situates the study within the genre of surveillance
studies and its theorists. It analyzes similar studies, and identifies the variables the most illuminating for
this analysis. This thesis is written in the hope that a researcher will pick up where this thesis has
left off.
AT: Perm
 Mutual Exclusivity
Inclusion of the affirmative means the alternative is coopted by reformists – we
must refuse to enter the arena of necropolitics
Weizman, 2011. (Eyal, professor of spatial and visual cultures at Goldsmiths University of
London, founder of the collective Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency in Bethleham. The
Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza. Verso Publishers, Print
copy, page 21-24)
Behind the present use of the term 'lesser evil' is a rich history and various intellectual trajectories. What may otherwise seem to be
a perennial problem, endemic to ethics and political practice, a dilemma that recurs in different moments in time in the same shape
and form, might in fact reveal something peculiar about each moment and situation. The various political, theological and
philosophical uses of the lesser evil idiom may suggest that it meant different things to different people in different periods and
situations. Every political tradition and form of political practice developed its own ways of engaging with the lesser evil argument -
and much has subsequently been lost in translation. For example, unlike the tradition of liberal ethics that would invoke him
centuries later, Augustine was never content with lesser evils. Indeed, a significant aspect of the idea of the lesser evil has been lost
in its process of secularization from early Christian theology into the utilitarian foundations of liberal ethics. For the original Christian
toleration of the lesser evil was understood in relation to the telos of redemption that is ultimately in excess of all calculations. For
Augustine, the name for this state beyond calculations was 'the kingdom of heaven'. In contrast to the teachings of the
Christian theologians that they invoked, and locked within a perpetual economy of immanence,
liberal ethics can be interpreted as a drive for the 'optimization' of a system of government. But
what is the sense in optimizing those regimes when they perpetuate intolerable injustice? Even
those of us without much use for a 'kingdom of heaven' and without much patience for the systems of pastoral
government that should guide us to it, can still see in Augustine's argument an important challenge: how
to engage in political practice within the complex existing force-fields of the present in a way
that also aims to break away from them? This challenge is particularly acute for those who
operate within or in relation to situations they deem intolerable and want to fundamentally
change rather than reform. The practices of human rights could be used as effective tools against close
societies and tyrannies, and were indeed often used in struggles that ended up replacing those regimes, they lend themselves
easily for manipulation in the context of liberal democracies. At different times, Marx, Lenin, Kautski,
Luxemburg, Trotsky and Gramsci grappled with the problem of the lesser evil in fighting for gains here and now, while also fighting
for a different and better world on the other. At various points they advocated struggles for immediate gains - for example,
proposing trade unions, whose function was to win a better deal for workers in an exploitative system. None of them, however,
thought that trade unions were all that was possible, and none was satisfied with simply winning a better deal within an existing
system. Unlike the revolutionary and militant communists who protested the drift towards a timid, reformist politics of choosing the
lesser evil and of making compromises with capital,
Marx thought that winning a ten-hour day was a
considerable victory for the English proletariat . Marx's argument shifted the attention from the ten hours of
work to the fourteen hours of non-work time . These he thought provided the opportunity to build
an organizational platform, as well as the consciousness and experience needed to take over the
means of production. To show that it is futile to object to all lesser evil compromises on principle, we could even enlist Lenin
himself. In his attempt to explain the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk that lead to Soviet Russia's exit from World War I in 1918 after making
an agreement with the western powers, Lenin returned to a scene of a road robbery described by Augustine. 'To reject compromises
"on principle", to reject the permissibility of compromises in general, no matter of what kind', said Lenin, 'is childishness ... One must
be able to analyze the situation and the concrete conditions of each compromise, or of each variety of compromise. One must learn
to distinguish between a man who has given up his money and firearms to bandits so as to lessen the evil they can do and to
facilitate their capture and execution, and a man who gives his money and firearms to bandits so as to share in the loot.'34 The
deliberation of a political thought-practice must indeed insist on uncovering the force-field within which each of the dilemmas of the
lesser evil exists, seeking to identify more extended and intricate political connections; looking further into the future, it should insist
on political goals and the means of their achievement. At one end of the spectrum, in which the lesser evil argument occupies the
middle ground, stand those who believe that every possible gain at present is insignificant in light of the essentially compromised
state of the world. Part of the structure of this argument is found the principle of the politique du pire- the politics of making things
worse. This line of thought believes in the redemptive potential of misery- or in its theological-political incarnation as dolorism: pain
as a spiritual experience that allows people to see more clearly. Every form of improvement is necessarily seen as the normalization
of exploitation or the pacification of injustice. Opting for the worst is, therefore, an attempt to undermine the field of alternatives of
a pre-given choice and overcome its terms. But
are the horrific spectacles of greater evils preferable to the
incremental damage of lesser ones? Is the choice only between squabbling with power about
the correct measure of its violence, helping to calibrate it and tend to its wounded, or on the
other hand a call for its amplification in order to 'expose its contradictions' (contradictions seem only to
sustain power's march) to shock a complacent population into rising up? Between refusal and tactical embrace the
difficulty of the dilemma of the lesser evil is equally in practising and in avoiding it. The Greeks thought of the dilemma as one of the
elements of tragedy. Each of the options that a tragic hero faces necessarily leads to different forms of horrific suffering: the
dilemma was presented as a choice between the two horns of an angry bull. But the options
must not only be about which of the horns to choose . Robert Pirsig has suggested several ways to subvert this
complicity of the opposites: one can 'refuse to enter the arena', 'throw sand in the bull's eyes', or 'sing
the bull to sleep' .35 The contemporary forms of power unpacked in this book are no longer so
singular and unified. Rather than a bull, they may appear to take on the shape of a multiplicity, a
diffuse field of forces simultaneously aggressive and benign. It is a form of power that not only
charges forward; it surrounds, immerses and embeds. Political activists must constantly invent
new forms of struggle that are recognisant of this paradigm of power, but which also evade and
subvert its embrace, attempt to rewire its webs in order to escape its calculation . The characters that
inhabit the chapters of this book have stepped right into the thick of this web of forces: their movement through them offer valuable
examples and lessons. Some paths must be avoided at all costs; others illuminate possible courses of action within the intricate
workings of the humanitarian present.
 Tradeoff DA
There is an empirical tradeoff in activist energy between strategies that focus
on the law and strategies that organize outside of the state.
Chartier 13 [Gary, La Sierra University, “Anarchy and Legal Order Law and Politics for a
Stateless Society,” Published by Cambridge University Press, pgs. 321-323]
II. Techniques for Fostering Social Change Need Not Be Aggressive A. Nonaggressive Strategies Can Lead to Social Transformation Embracing the kinds
of just legal rules I seek to defend here would eliminate multiple kinds of aggression and pave the way for the eradication of others. But the

emergence of a healthy society would require changes that, while facilitated by the operation of just legal regimes,
would need to extend beyond the realm of law, and which could reasonably be pursued in nonaggressive ways. Politics
under the rule of the state predictably involves aggression —some action in pursuit of social and
political goals is directly aggressive, and much political activism seems directed at persuading
the state to engage in aggression (Section B), and the state tends to reduce the likelihood that
community action and efforts designed to foster social change through nonaggressive
mechanisms will occur (Section C). A stateless society’s legal and social institutions would create opportunities for the practice
of a stateless politics (Section D), which could foster positive social change nonaggressively in accordance with

alternative strategies I call political anarchism and cultural anarchism (Section E). Some paths to change would focus primarily
on the use of legal strategies, some primarily on approaches to activism taking place outside the courts (Section F). Just legal regimes in a stateless
society would give political activists a panoply of options for fostering a free culture without engaging in aggression (Section G). B. Aggression Is Central
to Statist Politics Political action within the ambit of the state involves, as much as anything, the attempt to influence executives to adopt particular
policy positions and legislators and regulators to adopt particular rules, whether those on whom the rules will be imposed, or those whom the policy
choices will affect, consent or not. Thus, attempts
to foster positive social change under the state’s putatively
benevolent rule often involve the use of the political process to force people to live in what
others regard as more free or fair or responsible ways . Under the state’s dominion, legal rules—civil and criminal—may
frequently infringe on bodies and just possessory claims in ways that would be precluded by legal rules embodying the NAM. The state uses aggressive
force to achieve putatively desirable cultural goals, to promote what it characterizes as morally responsible behavior, and to fund its operations. Even
presuming, for the moment, that the state’s objectives were desirable, the use of aggressive force to achieve those objectives would still be
objectionable. C. The State Undermines the Appeal and Effectiveness of Nonaggressive Political
Strategies The existence and operation of the state tend in a variety of ways to crowd out
fruitful forms of politics that might otherwise flourish.2 The power of the state makes capturing the
state apparatus a sufficiently attractive goal that attempts to work for social change outside the
state are frequently dismissed as idealistic and utopian . Thus, associations not devoted to working through the state
to effect social change may often have difficulty attracting members and resources. The state colonizes various aspects of

social life that might initially not seem to be politically significant . Non-state institutions that
could offer mutual aid, provide dispute resolution services, and foster labor solidarity are
reduced in importance, or eliminated altogether, when the state begins to occupy the spheres
in which they would otherwise operate . The practical effect: these organizations not only cease to
perform the tasks to which, were they functioning vibrantly and effectively, they would be
committed—they also stop serving as loci of community organization and social pressure , and
so as potential sites of political action outside the state apparatus . As a result, the state political
apparatus is too often seen to be essential to politics and to social problem-solving, so that
people find it difficult to envision alternatives . And people reasonably fear the dissolution of the
state because of the absence of alternative institutions . State action is thus all too frequently
self-perpetuating.
 AT: Reformism
Reform is a form of minimum capitulation that allows the system to redeem
itself – staves off criticism and legitimates ongoing structural violence
Bassichis and Spade 14 [Morgan Bassichis is a graduate of Brown University and a former staff
member of Community United Against Violence in San Francisco, and Dean Spade is an associate
prof. at the Seattle University School of Law, Queer Politics and Anti-blackness, Queer
Necropolitics, pgs. 199-202]

Legal equality arguments require those making them both to articulate existing legal
structures as generally fair and neutral but for the exclusion focused on and to portray the
excluded group as a population that deserves inclusion . This work constructs desirable and
undesirable populations, those deserving a chance at life and reproduction and those whose
exile, imprisonment or death is acceptable or even important for the survival of the nation .
Mobilization of images of white gay and lesbian families as ‘hard working’ invokes the anti-black logics of ‘cultures of dependency’,
distinguishing the constituents of gay and lesbian rights politics as not public benefits recipients. Claims that gay and lesbian people
are crime victims assert that constituents of this politics are on the ‘right’ side of the white innocence/ black criminality divide. The
articulation of white gay and lesbian populations as ‘gay Americans’ suggests a patriotic citizenship that suggests membership in
racial national norms that consistently operate at the expense of black life. The central role of formal legal equality in the gay and
lesbian rights framework requires, of course, these investments and belongings because the legal fsystem itself, as so many
movements and theorists have shown, establishes and maintains racialized– gendered property statuses (Chin 2002: 1–63; Gomez
2007; Harris 1996; Ngai 2004; Omi and Winant 1986; Smith 2006). Declarations that the state is racially neutral
and, in the cases of hate crimes laws and anti-discrimination laws, a benevolent protector
against racism, function to expand and instantiate the apparatuses of punishment,
containment, and exploitation structuring black life and death . Uncritically seeking inclusion in
such frameworks – trying to get the ‘equality’ that has purportedly been granted ‘already’ to black people by such laws –
invests gay and lesbian rights politics in the anti-black national narrative that racism has been resolved
by law and that law reform is the way to resolve the complaints of marginalized or excluded
populations. Critical race theorists have helped identify the inadequacy of the discrimination
principle that is central to the failing of ‘formal legal equality’ to deliver material relief from
racism. The discrimination principle conceptualizes racial harm as individual manifestations of
bias in activities like hiring, firing, leasing, selling or serving (Freeman 1996). This approach to
understanding and addressing racism relies on at least two harmful assumptions . The first is that
race consciousness (on the part of both people of colour and white people), not intergenerational structures of
white supremacy, is the problem that the law must eliminate ( leaving ‘colour - blindness’ in its
place, contributing to the dismantling of programmes seeking to address racial disparity such as affirmative action).8 In the
absence of explicit, intentional exclusion, courts rarely find a violation of discrimination law. Most black people who have been
denied a job, apartment, or access to public accommodation cannot produce evidence of intent required, not to mention that most
people for whom such losses might produce the worst consequences cannot afford an attorney (Legal Services Corporation 2007).
The second faulty assumption underlying the discrimination principle is that the law itself can
remedy the most significant conditions of white supremacy . The broad conditions of extreme
racial disparity in access to housing, employment, education, food and healthcare, and severe
disproportionality in criminal punishment, environmental damage and immigration
enforcement, are cast as natural and inevitable by the discrimination principle. When racist harm is
framed as a problem of aberrant individuals who discriminate and when intention must be proved to find a violation of the law, the
background conditions of white supremacy are implicitly declared neutral. In the US, this has been accompanied by a robust
discourse that blames black people for their poverty and criminalization, a logical leap required when colourblindness has been
declared and racism has been defined so narrowly as to exclude it from being blameworthy in the most widespread conditions of
maldistribution. Critical race theorists have supplied the concept of ‘preservation through
transformation’ to describe the neat trick that civil rights law performed in this dynamic
(Harris 2007: 1539–1582; Siegel 1997: 1111–1148). In the face of significant resistance to conditions of subjection, law
reform
tends to provide just enough transformation to stabilize and preserve status quo
conditions. In the case of widespread black rebellion against white supremacy in the US, civil rights law and
colourblind constitutionalism have operated as formal reforms that masked a perpetuation
of the status quo of violence against and exploitation of black people . Explicit exclusionary
policies and practices became officially forbidden, yet the distribution of life chances remained the same or worsened with the
growing racialized concentration of wealth in the US, the dismantling of social welfare, and the explosion of criminalization that has
developed in the same period as the new logic of race neutrality has declared fairness and justice achieved. Lesbian and gay rights
politics’ reproduction of the mythology of anti-discrimination law and the non-stop invocation of ‘equal rights’ frameworks by
lesbian and gay rights politics marks an investment in the legal structures of anti-blackness that have emerged in the wake of Brown.
The emergence of the demand for LGBT inclusive hate crime laws and the accomplishment of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd,
Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act as a highly lauded federal legislative ‘win’ for lesbian and gay rights offers a particularly blatant site of
the anti-blackness central to lesbian and gay rights – literally an investment in the expansion of criminalization as a core claim and
desire of this purported ‘freedom’.9 In the context of the foundational nature of slavery in US political formation, it is perhaps not
surprising to see a political formation of white ‘gay and lesbian Americans’ articulate a demand for freedom that is contingent on the
literal caging of black people The fantasy that formal legal equality is all that is needed to eliminate
homophobia and transphobia is harmful not only because it participates in the antiblack US
progress narrative that civil rights law reforms resolved anti-blackness in the US (thus any remaining
suffering or disparity is solely an issue of ‘personal responsibility’),10 but also because it constructs an agenda that
is harmful to black queer and trans people and other queer and trans people experiencing
violent systems mobilized by anti-blackness. Formal marriage rights will not help poor people,
people whose kids will be stolen by a racially targeted child welfare system regardless of
whether or not they can get married, people who do not have immigration status or health
benefits to share with a spouse if they had one, people who have no property to pass on to their
partners, or people who have no need to be shielded from estate tax . In fact, the current wave of same-
sex marriage advocacy emerges at the same time as another pro-marriage trend, the push by the right wing to reverse feminist wins
that had made marriage easier to get out of and the Bushera development of marriage promotion programmes (continued by
Obama) targeted at women on welfare (Adams and Coltrane 2007: 17–34; Alternatives to Marriage Project 2007; Coltrane and
Adams 2003: 363–372; Feld, Rosier and Manning 2002: 173–183; Pear and Kirkpatrick 2007; Rector and Pardue 2004). The explicitly
anti-black focus of the attacks on welfare and the mobilization of racialized–gendered images to do this go hand in hand with the
pro-marriage gay rights frame that similarly invests in notions of ‘personal responsibility’, and racialized–gendered family forma tion
norm enforcement. The articulation of a desire for legal inclusion in the explicitly anti-black, anti-
poor governance regime of marriage, and the central ization of marriage rights as the most resourced equality claim of gay
and lesbian rights politics, affirms its alliance with anti-blackness.

Their reformism invests too much at the level of the sovereign, obscuring the
normative power of management – only our alternative can account for the
intensification of biopower and its grip over the CJS
Nealon, 2008. (Jeffrey T. Nealon, professor of English at Penn State. Foucault Beyond
Foucault: Power and its Intensifications since 1984. Pages 38-48)
From Discipline to Biopower: In his 1975-76 lectures at the College de France (delivered during brief interval between the
publication of D&P and The History of sexuality, volume I), Foucault
explains that "biopower" constitutes a new
technology of power, but this time it is not disciplinary. This technology of power does not exclude the former, does not
exclude disciplinary technology, but it does dovetail into it, integrate it, modify it to some extent, and all, use it by sort of infiltrating
it, embedding itself in existing disciplinary techniques. This new technique does not simply do away with the disciplinary technique,
because it exists on another level, on a different scale, and because it a different bearing area, and makes use of very different
instruments. Unlike discipline, which is addressed to bodies, the new nondisciplinary power is applied to man-as-body but to the
living man, to man-as-living-being.17 Foucaultian "discipline," whose work on bodies is primarily realized through institutional
training and the exercise, "biopower" is a more intense and saturated form of power that works
throughout populations and takes on its target, "life," quite directly (as opposed to discipline's necessarily
mediated, institutional character). To use a Foucaultian economic figure, the sovereign power of the king was a very
inefficient "wholesale" mode of power's distribution to the socius (early modern spectacles of execution
and torture were expensive and not particularly effective in keeping royal order). Discipline, by contrast, discovered
and deployed a much more economical and effective "retail" power over individual bodies at
particular, transversally linked sites of training (the family, the school, the clinic, the factory, the army).
Biopower, then, goes one step beyond discipline in the intensification of power , working on
individuals "really and directly" ("riellement et directement'; not words that Foucault throws around lightly)." For
Foucault, biopower is the ascendant type of power at work in modern societies- a very efficient
mode of power that infuses each individual at a nearly ubiquitous number of actual and virtual
sites, rather than working primarily on specific bodies at particular sites of training (hospital, school,
army, factory, store). It's a form of power "centered not upon the body," Foucault writes, "but upon
life."19 Another way of putting this might be that biopower forges an enabling link between the seemingly
"universal" categories of population or demography and the "individual" idiosyncrasies of
everyday life. And the proper name for that link is the "norm." In the intensification that morphs
discipline into biopower, then, not only the form of power but the target of power becomes
more murky and more ubiquitous-biopower "is directed not at man-as-body but at man-as-species."20 Take as a
concrete example sexuality, Foucault's primary example of biopower: not everyone has a shared institutional or disciplinary identity
(soldier, mother, or student), but everyone does have something like a "sexuality." In Foucault's words, such a pervasive biopower
has "acted by multiplication of singular sexualities. It did not set boundaries for sexuality; it extended the various forms of sexuality,
pursuing them according to lines of indefinite penetration. It did not exclude sexuality, but included· it in the body as a mode of
specification of individuals" (HS 1:47). This "specification of individuals" -from out of a "massifying" biopolitical investment in
demographics-becomes the innovation biopower provides over panoptic discipline. Biopower sutures the seeming gap between the
"wholesale" and "retail" functioning of disciplinary power through its intensification and redeployment of the disciplinary "norm." In
other words, while biopower emerges on the other side of a certain phase transition or tipping point of discipline, biopower
is
nevertheless born from the intensification of a particular strand of panoptic disciplinary power,
the normative medical or rehabilitative gaze that seeks to "understand" the causes of crime
and criminality. Under a regime of biopower, the political task becomes less training people to
be docile, and more a matter of producing and classifying ever-more kinds of subjectivities . So
far as biopower is concerned, the functioning of power becomes less invested in regulating behavior
through panoptic, institutionally based training exercises, and more invested in directly targeting
life and lifestyles-inside and outside the factory, the army, or the school, those recognizable
sites of disciplinary power. For the mutation from discipline to biopower, the linchpin figure remains an "abnormal"
subject, but-the basis on which that abnormality is diagnosed or discovered changes radically. In short, punitive discourse
comes to pivot on the (biopolitical) delinquent subject rather than the (disciplinary) criminal act: "The
delinquent is to be distinguished from the offender by the fact that it is not so much his act as
his life that is relevant in characterizing him .... The legal punishment bears upon an act; the
punitive technique on a life" (D&P 251-52). Again we see the mutation of dominant forms of power
following out the general formula for power's intensification: abstract, shift targets to ever-more
virtual or mobile ones, expand the domain of power's reach, invent "lighter" and more intense
concepts and procedures. The criminal act remains within a fairly well-defined disciplinary realm, with a more-or-less
binary system of "guilt": in the end, you are or you aren't guilty of a crime. Biopower, then, further multiplies the concepts and
practices of potential guilt by its invention of a species or life form lurking behind the acts of criminality: the delinquent, the
monster, the homosexual, the pervert. These are subjects who may or may not have done anything illegal or transgressive, but their
lives are nonetheless outside the slippery slope of biopolitical normativity. As Foucault insists , biopolitical "delinquency
must be specified in terms not so much of the law as of the norm " (253). In short, the disciplinary
criminal is known through her transgressive deeds, while biopower's delinquent is known
through his abnormal personality. On Foucault's account, this nineteenth-century emergence of subject-centered
biopower becomes the gateway to the present, to the fetishization of subjectivities that characterizes today's even more highly
intensified biopolitical society: ''At this point one enters the 'criminological' labyrinth from which we have certainly not yet emerged"
(D&P 252). As a concrete example of such biopolitical production of subjectivities, and its mutation from the strictly speaking
disciplinary investment in subject production, one could note here that the "homosexual" is the paradigmatic "delinquent" in
Foucault, the subject whose conduct is most obviously saturated and explained by his or her "life": "The nineteenth- century
homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a
morphology'' (HS 1:43). In the intense morphing from discipline to biopower (from power targeting the act to targeting the life), the
emergence of modern homosexuality is paradigmatic insofar as homosexuality in the nineteenth century becomes understood "less
as a habitual sin than as a singular nature" (1:43). In short, homosexuality "was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind
of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul" (r:43; my emphasis), from an occasional and discontinuous set of actions into
the continuous manifestation of a personality defect. And so the dominant modes of power shift, extend, and abstract their targets
and tactics: from force coming to bear on the subject primarily through a series of discontinuous (but linked) institutional training
exercises (birth, school, work, death), to force coming to bear primarily on that subject more ubiquitously through her very life and
lifestyle; from policing the act to policing the norm; from discipline to biopower.
Framework
 Util Turn – Lesser-Evils
Util is a form of Lesser-evils calculation that permits unethical acts in the name
of the greater good. Their political model creates a constant state of exception
which justifies necropolitics (this is a DA to the perm as well)
Weizman, 2011. (Eyal, professor of spatial and visual cultures at Goldsmiths University of
London, founder of the collective Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency in Bethleham. The
Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza. Verso Publishers, Print
copy, page 6-10)

If, as a friend recently suggested, we ought to construct a monument to our present political culture as a
homage to the principle of the 'lesser evil', it should be made in the form of the digits 6-6-5 built of
concrete blocks, and installed like the Hollywood sign on hillsides or other high points overlooking city centres. This number, one
less than the number of the beast -that of the devil and of total evil- might capture the essence
of our humanitarian present obsessed -with the calculations and calibrations that seek to
moderate, ever so slightly, the evils that it has largely caused itself . The principle of the lesser
evil is often presented as a dilemma between two or more bad choices in situations where
available options are, or seem to be, limited. The choice made justifies the pursuit of harmful
actions that would be otherwise deemed unacceptable in the hope of averting even greater
suffering. Sometimes the principle is presented as the optimal result of a general field of
calculations that seeks to compare, measure and evaluate different bad consequences in
relation to necessary acts, and then to minimize those consequences. Both aspects of the principle are
understood as taking place within a dosed system in which those posing the dilemma, the options available for choice, the
factors to be calculated and the very parameters of calculation are unchallenged. Each
calculation is undertaken anew, as if the previous accumulation of events has not taken place,
and the future implications are out of bounds . Those who seek to justify necessary evils as 'lesser' ones, especially
when searching for a rationale to explain recent wars and military expeditions, like to appeal to the work of the fourth-century North
African philosopher-theologian St Augustine. Augustine's rejection of the principle of Manichaeism- a world divided into equally
powerful good and evil - meant that he no longer saw evil as the perfect mirror image of the good; rather, in platonic terms, as a
measure of its absence. Since evil, unlike good, is not perfect and absolute, it is forever measured and calibrated on a differential
scale of more and less, greater and lesser. Augustine taught that it is not permissible to practise lesser evils, because to do so
violates the Pauline principle 'do no evil that good may come'. But- and here lies its appeal -lesser
evils might be
tolerated when they are deemed necessary and unavoidable, or when perpetrating an evil
results in the reduction of the overall amount of evil in the world . One of the examples Augustine gives for
such an economy of lesser and greater evils is a robbery on a crossroads. It is to this crossroads that other theologists, philosophers
and political theorists will return, to this day, when discussing the dilemma. In Augustine's logic of pre-emption, it is better to kill the
would-be assailant before he kills an innocent traveler. A millennium later and the armies of Western Christendom passed through
this ethicotheological needle-eye-sized loophole on their way to the catalogue of pillage and destruction that constituted the
crusades. More recently, Pope Benedict has appealed to the lesser evil principle in a decree permitting the use of condoms in places
inflicted -with high rates of HIV. Similar to the latter logic of contraception, some in the Vatican thought that implicit support of the
government of Silvio Berlusconi, albeit plagued by sin, ridicule and corruption, might after all be considered as the lesser evil in
protecting Christian values. In cases such as these, the
economy of the lesser ev-il is always cited as a
justification for breaching rigid rules and entrenched dogma; indeed, it is often used by those in
power as the primary justification for the very notion of 'exception'. In fact, Augustine's discourse of the
lesser evil developed at a time when the church had started to participate in the political government of its subjects and had
acquired considerable financial and military power. Through the ages, the Christian church increasingly saw its task as keeping
human evil to its minimum level. It pastorally ruled over a vast and complex intrapersonal economy of merits and faults -of sin, vice
and virtue- operating according to specific rules of circulation and transfer, with procedures, analyzes, calculations and tactics that
allow the exercise of a specific interplay between conflicting goods and degrees of evil. In his lectures on the origins of
governmentality, Michel Foucault argued that, on
the basis of this 'economical theology', the modern,
secular form of governmental power has itself taken on the form of an economy. 10 Lesser Evildoers
The theological origins of the lesser evil argument still cast a long shadow on the present. In fact the idiom has
become so deeply ingrained, and is invoked in such a staggeringly diverse set of contexts - from individual situational ethics and
international relations, to attempts to govern the economics of violence in the context of the 'war on terror' and the efforts of
human rights and humanitarian activists to manoeuvre through the paradoxes of aid- that it seems to have altogether
taken the place previously reserved for the term 'good' . Moreover, the very evocation of the 'good' seems to
everywhere invoke the utopian tragedies of modernity, in which evil seemed lurking in a horrible manichaeistic inversion. If no hope
is offered in the future, all that remains is to insure ourselves against the risks that it poses, to moderate and lessen the collateral
effects of necessary acts, and tend to those who have suffered as a result. In relation to the 'war on terror', the terms of the lesser
evil were most clearly and prominently articulated by former human rights scholar and leader of Canada's Liberal Party Michael
lgnatieff. In his book The Lesser Evil, Ignatieff suggested that in 'balancing liberty against security' liberal
states establish
mechanisms to regulate the breach of some human rights and legal norms, and allow their
security services to engage in forms of extrajuridical violence - which he saw as lesser evils - in order to
fend off or minimize potential greater evils, such as terror attacks on civilians of western states. If
governments need to violate rights in a terrorist emergency, this should be done, he thought, only as an exception and according to
a process of adversarial scrutiny. 'Exceptions', Ignatieff states, 'do not destroy the rule but save it, provided that they are temporary,
publicly justified, and deployed as a last resort. '12 The
lesser evil emerges here as a pragmatic compromise, a
'tolerated sin' that functions as the very justification for the notion of exception. State violence
in this model takes part in a necro-economy in which various types of destructive measure are
weighed in a utilitarian fashion, not only in relation to the damage they produce, but to the
harm they purportedly prevent and even in relation to the more brutal measures they may help
restrain. In this logic, the problem of contemporary state violence resembles indeed an all-too-human version of the
mathematical minimum problem of the divine calculations previously mentioned, one tasked with determining the smallest level of
violence necessary to avert the greatest harm. For the architects of contemporary war this balance is trapped between two poles:
keeping violence at a low enough level to limit civilian suffering, and at a level high enough to bring a decisive end to the war and
bring peace. Niore recent works by legal scholars and legal advisers to states and militaries have sought to extend the inherent
elasticity of the system of legal exception proposed by lgnatieff into ways of rewriting the laws of armed conflict themselves.
Lesser evil arguments are now used to defend anything from targeted assassinations and mercy
killings, house demolitions, deportation, torture, to the use of (sometimes) non-lethal chemical
weapons, the use of human shields, and even 'the intentional targeting of some civilians if it
could save more innocent lives than they cost’. In one of its more macabre moments it was suggested that the
atomic bombings of Hiroshima might also be tolerated under the defence of the lesser evil. Faced
with a humanitarian A-bomb, one might wonder what, in fact, might come under the definition of a greater evil. Perhaps it is time
for the differential accounting of the lesser evil to replace the mechanical bureaucy of the 'banality of evil' as the idiom to describe
the most extreme manifestations of violence. Indeed, it is through this use of the lesser evil that societies that see themselves as
democratic can maintain regimes of occupation and neo-colonization. Beyond state agents, those practitioners
of lesser
evils, as this book claims, must also include the members of independent nongovernmental
organizations that make up the ecology of contemporary war and crisis zones . The lesser evil is the
argument of the humanitarian agent that seeks military permission to provide medicines and aid in places where it is in fact the duty
of the occupying military power to do so, thus saving the military limited resources. The
lesser evil is often the
justification of the military officer who attempts to administer life (and death) in an
'enlightened' manner; it is sometimes, too, the brief of the security contractor who introduces
new and more efficient weapons and spatia-technological means of domination, and advertises
them as 'humanitarian technology' . In these cases the logic of the lesser evil opens up a thick political field of
participation bringing together otherwise opposing fields of action, to the extent that it might obscure the fundamental moral
differences between these various groups. But, even
according to the terms of an economy of losses and
gains, the concept of the lesser evil risks becoming counterproductive: less brutal measures are
also those that may be more easily naturalized, accepted and tolerated - and hence more
frequently used, with the result that a greater evil may be reached cumulatively.

Lesser-evil reasoning is the very logic of violence

Weizman, 2011. (Eyal, professor of spatial and visual cultures at Goldsmiths University of
London, founder of the collective Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency in Bethleham. The
Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza. Verso Publishers, Print
copy, page 2-4)

Divine examination, evaluation, calculation and choice operate thus within a complex economy
in which good and bad could be transferred and exchanged. Because in this economy all bad
things necessarily appear at their minimum possible level, the world as lived is always
necessarily the best of all possible worlds. 'If a lesser evil is relatively good,' Leibniz reasoned, 'so a lesser good is
relatively evil ... to show that an architect could have done better is to find faults in his work. ' If this description of the
economy of divine government is already reminiscent of the logic of contemporary wars, with its
own scales of risk and proportionality used to evaluate the desired and undesired consequences
of military acts, it is hardly surprising to find in it an early reflection on the concept of 'collateral damage'. Earlier Christian
theology has indeed already described all bad things that take place as 'the collateral effects of the good'. In this immanent order of
human and divine life, the destructive result of floods are nothing but the collateral effect of necessary rain. In both their theological
and military contexts, as Giorgio Agamben observed, the
collateral effects are structural rather than accidental. It is
through the collateral - flood or blood - that a government -divine or human- can demonstrate, indeed
exercise, its power. Unlike the calculations of a God, seen by the philosophers and the theologians of the eighteenth century
as a perfect mathematician who could undertake instantaneous calculations and immediately arrive at a precise result, mere
humans must of course guess, speculate and hedge their risks as they proceed towards the future as
the blind leading the blind. It is for this reason that they ceaselessly seek to develop and perfect all
sorts of technologies and techniques that might allow them to calculate the effects of violence
and might harness its consequences. It is these techniques and technologies, apparatuses and spatial arrangements,
that are at the heart of this book. Through them, Pangloss's Leibnizian scheme- or is it Leibniz's Panglossian scheme?-of the 'best
of all possible worlds' re-emerges in the progressive tradition of liberalism . Here, in its secularized form,
political rather than metaphysical, a similar structure of the argument sets up the sphere of morality as a set of calculations aimed to
approximate the optimum proportion between common goods and necessary evils? But as the general outlook of liberalism shifted
from Voltaire's and indeed Jeremy Bentham's later focus
on the 'greater good' and the responsibility of
government to increase happiness to the greatest number of people , to the liberal canards of
'just wars', and their increasingly sophisticated technologies for minimizing the number of
'necessary' corpses, the search for 'the best of all possible worlds' started giving ground to the present neo-
Panglossian pessimism of the 'least of all possible evils'. This book engages with the problem of
violence in its moderation and minimization, mostly with state violence that is managed
according to a similar economy of calculations and justified as the least possible means. The
fundamental point of this book is that the moderation of violence is part of the very logic of
violence. Humanitarianism, human rights and international humanitarian law (IHL), when abused by state, supra-
state and military action, have become the crucial means by which the economy of violence is
calculated and managed. A dose reading of a series of case studies will show how, at present, spatial
organizations and physical instruments, technical standards, procedures and systems of
monitoring - the complex humanitarian assemblage that philosopher Adi Ophir called ‘moral technologies' -
have become the means for exercising contemporary violence and for governing the displaced,
the enemy and the unwanted. The condition of collusion of these technologies of humanitarianism, human rights and
humanitarian law with military and political powers is referred to in this book as 'the humanitarian present'. Within
this
present condition, all political oppositions are replaced by the elasticity of degrees, negotiations,
proportions and balances
Aff Answers
 Framework – Util > Dogmatism
Util is key to check empathy bias amongst policymakers and judges
Bloom 14 [Paul Bloom, Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology & Cognitive Science
at Yale University, “Against Empathy, Boston Review, September 13, 2014,
http://bostonreview.net/forum/paul-bloom-against-empathy]

When asked what I am working on, I often say I am writing a book about empathy. People tend
to smile and nod, and then I add, “I’m against it.” This usually gets an uncomfortable laugh. This
reaction surprised me at first, but I’ve come to realize that taking a position against empathy is
like announcing that you hate kittens—a statement so outlandish it can only be a joke. And so
I’ve learned to clarify, to explain that I am not against morality, compassion, kindness, love,
being a good neighbor, doing the right thing, and making the world a better place. My claim is
actually the opposite: if you want to be good and do good, empathy is a poor guide. The word
“empathy” is used in many ways, but here I am adopting its most common meaning, which
corresponds to what eighteenth-century philosophers such as Adam Smith called “sympathy.” It
refers to the process of experiencing the world as others do, or at least as you think they do . To
empathize with someone is to put yourself in her shoes, to feel her pain. Some researchers also
use the term to encompass the more coldblooded process of assessing what other people are
thinking, their motivations, their plans, what they believe. This is sometimes called “cognitive,”
as opposed to “emotional,” empathy. I will follow this convention here, but we should keep in
mind that the two are distinct—they emerge from different brain processes; you can have a lot
of one and a little of the other—and that most of the discussion of the moral implications of
empathy focuses on its emotional side. Some degree of emotional empathy is bred in the bone.
The sight and sound of another’s suffering is unpleasant for babies and, as soon as they are
mobile enough, they try to help, patting and soothing others in distress. This is not uniquely
human: the primatologist Frans de Waal notes that chimps will often put their arms around the
victim of an attack and pat her or groom her. Empathy can occur automatically, even
involuntarily. Smith describes how “persons of delicate fibres” who notice a beggar’s sores and
ulcers “are apt to feel an itching or uneasy sensation in the correspondent part of their own
bodies.” John Updike writes, “My grandmother would have choking fits at the kitchen table, and
my own throat would feel narrow in sympathy.” And empathy can be extended through the
imagination. In a speech before he became president, Barack Obama stressed how important it
is to see the world through the eyes of those who are different from us—the child who’s hungry,
the steelworker who’s been laid off, the family who lost the entire life they built together when
the storm came to town. . . . When you think like this—when you choose to broaden your ambit
of concern and empathize with the plight of others, whether they are close friends or distant
strangers—it becomes harder not to act, harder not to help. Obama is right about this last part;
there is considerable support for what the psychologist C. Daniel Batson calls “the empathy-
altruism hypothesis”: when you empathize with others, you are more likely to help them. In
general, empathy serves to dissolve the boundaries between one person and another; it is a
force against selfishness and indifference. It is easy to see, then, how empathy can be a moral
good, and it has many champions. Obama talks frequently about empathy; witness his recent
claim, after his first meeting with Pope Francis, that “it’s the lack of empathy that makes it very
easy for us to plunge into wars. It’s the lack of empathy that allows us to ignore the homeless on
the streets.” In The Empathetic Civilization (2009) Jeremy Rifkin argues that the only way our
species will survive war, environmental degradation, and economic collapse is through the
enhancement of “global empathy.” This past June, Bill and Melinda Gates concluded their
Stanford commencement address by asking students to nurture and expand their empathetic
powers, essential for a better world. Most people see the benefits of empathy as akin to the
evils of racism: too obvious to require justification. I think this is a mistake. I have argued
elsewhere that certain features of empathy make it a poor guide to social policy. Empathy is
biased; we are more prone to feel empathy for attractive people and for those who look like us
or share our ethnic or national background. And empathy is narrow; it connects us to particular
individuals, real or imagined, but is insensitive to numerical differences and statistical data. As
Mother Teresa put it, “If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” Laboratory
studies find that we really do care more about the one than about the mass, so long as we have
personal information about the one. In light of these features, our public decisions will be fairer
and more moral once we put empathy aside. Our policies are improved when we appreciate
that a hundred deaths are worse than one, even if we know the name of the one, and when we
acknowledge that the life of someone in a faraway country is worth as much as the life a
neighbor, even if our emotions pull us in a different direction . Without empathy, we are better
able to grasp the importance of vaccinating children and responding to climate change. These
acts impose costs on real people in the here and now for the sake of abstract future benefits, so
tackling them may require overriding empathetic responses that favor the comfort and well-
being of individuals today. We can rethink humanitarian aid and the criminal justice system,
choosing to draw on a reasoned, even counter-empathetic, analysis of moral obligation and
likely consequences.

Double Bind – Either A) The alt is dogmatic and is too impractical to solve the
aff impacts; or B) The alt devolves to util which proves you should vote aff
under our framework
Green 2 – Assistant Professor Department of Psychology Harvard University (Joshua, November 2002 "The Terrible, Horrible,
No Good, Very Bad Truth About Morality And What To Do About It", 314) GZ

Some people who talk of balancing rights may think there is an algorithm for deciding which
rights take priority over which. If that’s what we mean by 302 “balancing rights,” then we are
wise to shun this sort of talk. Attempting to solve moral problems using a complex
deontological algorithm is dogmatism at its most esoteric, but dogmatism all the same.
However, it’s likely that when some people talk about “balancing competing rights and
obligations” they are already thinking like consequentialists in spite of their use of
deontological language. Once again, what deontological language does best is express the
thoughts of people struck by strong, emotional moral intuitions: “It doesn’t matter that you can
save five people by pushing him to his death. To do this would be a violation of his rights!”19
That is why angry protesters say things like, “Animals Have Rights , Too!” rather than,
“Animal Testing: The Harms Outweigh the Benefits!” Once again, rights talk captures the
apparent clarity of the issue and absoluteness of the answer . But sometimes rights talk
persists long after the sense of clarity and absoluteness has faded. One thinks, for example, of
the thousands of children whose lives are saved by drugs that were tested on animals and the
“rights” of those children. One finds oneself balancing the “rights” on both sides by asking
how many rabbit lives one is willing to sacrifice in order to save one human life, and so
on, and at the end of the day one’s underlying thought is as thoroughly
consequentialist as can be, despite the deontological gloss. And what’s wrong with
that? Nothing, except for the fact that the deontological gloss adds nothing and furthers the
myth that there really are “rights,” etc. Best to drop it. When deontological talk gets
sophisticated, the thought it represents is either dogmatic in an esoteric sort of way or
covertly consequentialist.
 No Link – Imperialism
The U.S. mischaracterized as an empire—reciprocal economic partnerships and
democratic agreements are the norm.
Ikenberry, 04. Professor of Geopolitics. G. John Ikenberry. “Illusions of Empire: Defining the New
American Order” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2004.

Is the United States an empire? If so, Ferguson's liberal empire is a more persuasive portrait
than is Johnson's military empire. But ultimately, the notion of empire is misleading -- and misses the
distinctive aspects of the global political order that has developed around U.S. power. The United States
has pursued imperial policies, especially toward weak countries in the periphery. But U.S.
relations with Europe, Japan, China, and Russia cannot be described as imperial, even when "neo" or
"liberal" modifies the term. The advanced democracies operate within a "security community" in which the
use or threat of force is unthinkable. Their economies are deeply interwoven. Together, they form a
political order built on bargains, diffuse reciprocity, and an array of intergovernmental institutions and ad
hoc working relationships. This is not empire; it is a U.S.-led democratic political order that has no name
or historical antecedent.To be sure, the neoconservatives in Washington have trumpeted their own
imperial vision: an era of global rule organized around the bold unilateral exercise of military
power, gradual disentanglement from the constraints of multilateralism, and an aggressive
effort to spread freedom and democracy. But this vision is founded on illusions of U.S. power. It
fails to appreciate the role of cooperation and rules in the exercise and preservation of such
power. Its pursuit would strip the United States of its legitimacy as the preeminent global power
and severely compromise the authority that flows from such legitimacy. Ultimately, the
neoconservatives are silent on the full range of global challenges and opportunities that face the
United States. And as Ferguson notes, the American public has no desire to run colonies or manage a
global empire. Thus, there are limits on American imperial pretensions even in a unipolar era. Ultimately,
the empire debate misses the most important international development of recent years: the
long peace among great powers, which some scholars argue marks the end of great-power war.
Capitalism, democracy, and nuclear weapons all help explain this peace. But so too does the
unique way in which the United States has gone about the business of building an international
order. The United States' success stems from the creation and extension of international institutions that
have limited and legitimated U.S. power.

Global pluralism makes empire impossible—the US has influence but not the
control described by the negative.
Zelikow, 03 “Transformation of National Security” Philip Zelikow. Professor of History and Public
Affairs, University of Virginia. National Interest, Summer 2003, pg. 18-10 Lexis).

But these imperial metaphors, of whatever provenance, do not enrich our understanding; they
impoverish it. They use a metaphor of how to rule others when the problem is how to persuade
and lead them. Real imperial power is sovereign power. Sovereigns rule, and a ruler is not just the
most powerful among diverse interest groups. Sovereignty means a direct monopoly control
over the organization and use of armed might. It means direct control over the administration of
justice and the definition thereof. It means control over what is bought and sold, the terms of trade and the
permission to trade, to the limit of the ruler's desires and capacities. In the modern, pluralistic world of
the 21st century, the United States does not have anything like such direct authority over other countries,
nor does it seek it. Even its informal influence in the political economy of neighboring Mexico, for
instance, is far more modest than, say, the influence the British could exert over Argentina a hundred years
ago. The purveyors of imperial metaphors suffer from a lack of imagination, and more, from a
lack of appreciation for the new conditions under which we now live. It is easier in many
respects to communicate images in a cybernetic world, so that a very powerful United States does
exert a range of influences that is quite striking. But this does not negate the proliferating pluralism of
global society, nor does it suggest a will to imperial power in Washington. The proliferation of loose
empire metaphors thus distorts into banal nonsense the only precise meaning of the term imperialism that
we have. The United States is central in world politics today, not omnipotent. Nor is the U.S. Federal
government organized in such a fashion that would allow it to wield durable imperial power
around the world-it has trouble enough fashioning coherent policies within the fifty United
States. Rather than exhibiting a confident will to power, we instinctively tend, as David Brooks
has put it, to "enter every conflict with the might of a muscleman and the mentality of a wimp."
We must speak of American power and of responsible ways to wield it; let us stop talking of American
empire, for there is and there will be no such thing.
 No Link & Perm - Pragmatism
The kritik doesn’t exclude the need for pragmatic politics – prefer the perm
De-Shalit, 2000. Avner, Professor of Political Theory at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and
Associate Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Environment, Ethics, and Society, Mansfield College,
Oxford University. “The Environment: Between Theory and Practice,” p. 36, Questia.

Before continuing, I would like point out a possible challenge to my argument so far. I have
claimed that environmental philosophers should decide how to persuade the public of the need
for environmental policies. It could, however, be argued that many of these philosophers are
convinced that animals have rights, or that there is intrinsic value in nature (I discuss this idea in
depth in the next chapter), and they may feel they have to discuss this, as a mission. They don't
want to give up persuading people about animal rights or intrinsic value, and they don't want to
'sell out' just in order to persuade. It seems (the argument would continue) that I might expect
these philosophers to suppress their ideas and feelings. However, philosophers should be loyal
to their ideas and thoughts as well: they should be authentic; their role is not merely to
persuade for the sake of forming a majority of well-informed citizens. I need of course to
emphasize that this is not what I expect philosophers to do. Indeed, I think that a place does
exist for environmental ethics and meta-ethics and that there is also a time to discuss issues
bearing no relation to policies. However, environmental philosophers cannot escape the need
to engage in real-life public deliberation because what they discuss is not wholly 'academic' . 18
The issues at stake are crucial both to human beings and their welfare, and to ecosystems and
the state of the environment. The ecological crisis is not a question that can be discussed in
tranquillity, and one cannot experiment with thinking about it for too long. There is a strong
and urgent need for some thoughts and theories that are oriented towards institutions and
policies. So, while accepting that environmental ethics and meta-ethics reflect sincere and
authentic concerns, and that these concerns should be voiced, as an important part of this
debate, I would stress that these cannot replace political theory concerning the environment.
Such theory is vital for obvious reasons.
 Perm – Reform Curriculum
Perm – The discursive criticism of the 1NC can be coupled with the education of
the 1AC to encourage a reform of curriculum
Jesse Bazzul (2014) Critical Discourse Analysis and Science Education Texts: Employing Foucauldian
Notions of Discourse and Subjectivity, Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 36:5,
422-437, https://www-tandfonline-com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/doi/full/10.1080/10714413.2014.958381?
scroll=top&needAccess=true

Science education as a field of practice and research is a site where inequities and impending
global catastrophes can be engaged in transformative ways. Critical approaches to science
education are needed to challenge discourses and structures complicit in colonialisms,
oppressions, and the maintenance of exploitive economic regimes (Harding 1998). This article supports critical,
social justice-oriented science education research by providing a theoretical and methodological basis for examining how subjectivities may

be constituted through discourses found in science education texts . Such research explores how discourses orient
teachers and students to the world, others, and themselves, as well as outlines “who” can legitimately participate in practices of science education.
Subjectivity can be thought of here in its most basic sense—the particular perspectives, beliefs, desires, and convictions held by individual subjects. In
Science and Social Inequality Sandra Harding (2006) makes the point that we actually need science knowledge to remain contentious: “Modern western
sciences are too powerful a social force for us to want them uncontroversial. What we can reasonably want, however, are controversies that help us
think in new and fruitful ways about present and possible future relations between knowledge and power” (3). Analyzing
how discourses
work to constitute subjectivities in terms of their social, political, economic, and ethical
commitments should not be seen as only a negative-critical task. On the contrary, engaging the sociopolitical and
cultural fabrics that are the very stakes of science should be seen as a positive, constructive activity. This article supports politicized and theoretically
divergent ways of highlighting the cultural, political, and social contexts of science and science education (Bencze and Carter 2011; Dimick 2012). As Lyn
Carter maintains, science education must engage with other disciplines to (re)consider new politico-ethical directions (Carter 2011). Scholarly

work that asks after subjectivity is grounded in a commitment to trouble the self-evident, which,
when presented as natural, rather than the result of historical, social, and political development,
exercises a kind of violence (Barthes 1972, 1977). The approach to science education discourses outlined
here brings to the surface various discursive formations and effects of power that circulate in
textbooks, which are often thought to be free of bias (Apple 1983). This article begins by setting a theoretical context
for a Foucauldian approach to subjectivity, discourse, and critical discourse analysis (CDA). Next, it
provides a methodological background for examining science education curriculum materials. It
concludes with a brief discussion of a recent textbook study that examines how biology
textbooks can work to constitute subjectivities related to ethics, sex/gender, neocolonialisms,
and neoliberalism. Foucault (1980a) encourages us to move away from simplistic perspectives on
power and science and maintains that, “it is not so much a matter of knowing what external
power imposes itself on science as of what effects of power circulate among scientific
statements, what constitutes, as it were, their internal regime of pow er” (112). For Bruno Latour (1987),
even facts in the physical sciences follow a priori descriptions related to current discourses and
argument structures about nature. As Foucault (1972) explains: “It is always possible one could
speak the truth in a void, one would only be in the true however, if one obeyed the rules of
some ‘discursive’ policy which would have to be reactivated every time one spoke” (224).
Foucault cites the example of Gregor Mendel who spoke “truth,” however could not fit his
theories within the sanctioned biological concepts of heredity at that historical moment in
Europe. As Foucault (1980a) maintains, truth is conjoined to power, meaning any discourse that presents itself as objective also circulates the
effects of power. The effects of power circulating in science texts, because of their pretence of speaking “scientifically” or in an objective manner, may
give an analysis of these texts’ greater importance than an examination of texts in other disciplines. For example, statements concerning sexuality may
be uttered in every corner of the social world, but when they are spoken about objectively they are imbued with a certain authority that more readily
circulates the effects of power. The power that infuses science education discourses should be seen less as something that imposes than something
that governs; as Foucault puts it: “The exercise of power consists in guiding the possibility of conduct and putting in order the possible outcome.
Basically power is less a a confrontation between two adversaries or a linking of one to another than a question of government” (Foucault 1982, 789). It
is somewhat ironic that discourses of science and science education are often overlooked for being apolitical, banal, known for naiveté, or only
influenced by external economic agendas……. what
cannot be overlooked is how discourses of science education
work to produce the very subjectivities that maintain these inequities . The taken-for-granted
nature of schooling allows schools to operate invisibly as effective institutions of control. Louis
Althusser (1998) stresses that individuals are always-already subjects in that they are constituted before they realize their subjectivity. Furthermore,
individuals are interpellated as free subjects so that they freely accept their subjection—an idea later appropriated by Foucault (1982), who insisted
that power can only be exercised over subjects insofar as they believe they are free. Although Althusser's work is important, there are advantages in
moving away from a focus on ideology toward discourse. One reason is that the concept of ideology is often tied to a political agenda that must already
be clear and/or implies that economic/material conditions are always ideology's precursor (Foucault 1980a). Frequently, there is also the implicit
assertion that one can freely speak outside ideology. A focus on discourse allows the researcher to explore how the limits of thought and action are
constructed without automatic reference to particular political agendas or a simplistic notion of false consciousness (Mills 1997).
 Turn – Contingency (NB to perm)
Universal rejection of sovereignty is too wholistic and it links back to their K –
prefer contingency as a framework to reject oppressive formations of power,
but permit exercises of power that produce ethical outcomes
Butler and Spivak, 2010. (Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State? Page 102-105)

BUTLER. I think one perhaps needs to slow¶ down since I'm not sure anybody wants to ¶ be post-
sovereign. The one thing that I had¶ to say about sovereignty is that I think it¶ would be a mistake to take the Schmittian¶ strain
in Agamben as the exclusive lens¶ through which one understands the operation¶ of power. I'm trying to open up an ¶
analytics of power that would include sovereignty ¶ as one of its features but would ¶ also be able
to talk about the kinds of¶ mobilizations and contaimnents of populations¶ that are not
conceptualizable as the¶ acts of a sovereign, and which proceed ¶ through different operations of
state power.¶ But we could talk about many other analytics ¶ as well. Interestingly enough, Arendt¶ says that
the exemplary moment of sovereignty¶ is the act of deportation. This is very important¶ for us to think about now,
given how¶ sovereign power in the US works. Let's ¶ remember as well that Bush is, to a certain ¶
degree, post-sovereign. In the sense that¶ when the argument was presented that ¶ Iraq, whatever its
problems, is a sovereign¶ state and on what basis could the US ¶ invade it, it was very clear that
whatever¶ sovereignty they might have had was illegitimate ¶ by virtue of the fact that Bush did ¶
not regard that particular government as¶ democratically elected or, even if it were, it¶ was not necessarily legitimate
because of its¶ despotic or tyrannical actions. And, of¶ course, that's complicated; the moment this¶ state decides it
can invade that one, it exercises¶ a sovereignty that is extra-territorial. ¶ So, in our new analytics
of power, we are¶ going to have to rethink territoriality and ¶ sovereignty alike. Asserting its
sovereignty¶ in order to override that sovereignty. Then¶ Guantanamo and apparently various detention¶ centers
throughout Europe and¶ Central Asia-the notion of a certain kind¶ of outsourcing of interrogation, imprisonment,¶ torture-which, I
think, have to be¶ understood as an exercise of sovereignty¶ outside of the territorial bounds of the US¶ precisely in order to evade
the restrictions¶ of habeas corpus but, also, to extend the¶ operation of sovereignty so that it becomes¶ synonymous with Empire.
It seems to me¶ that we are seeing new exercises of sovereignty ¶ as well as the illegitimacy of
the¶ sovereign character of other states as having ¶ any kind of final check on US state¶ power. I
don't think that the International ¶ Criminal Court has criminalized sovereignty ¶ but it is true that
it wants to develop a¶ set of international protections that are not ¶ formulated on the basis of
nation-states,¶ which is what the Geneva Treaty did. So,¶ part of its promise is to come up with a¶ postnational understanding
of what human¶ rights might be. That does not keep that¶ particular mechanism from being taken¶ over by certain states, being run
by certain¶ hegemonic interests selectively deciding¶ which kinds of criminal acts it will pursue¶ and which it will not and using all
kinds of¶ national and, I would also say, neoliberal criteria¶ in the selection process. Therefore, the¶ point
is to be neither
pro-sovereign nor to¶ be anti-sovereign but to watch the ways in ¶ which sovereignty is invoked,
extended,¶ deterritorialized, aggregated, abrogated in ¶ the name of sovereignty as well as
against¶ the name of sovereignty. A whole map seems¶ to be emerging that's quite important.

All biopolitics are not the same—democratic contexts are radically different
than their fascism examples.
Dickinson 04 - Associate Professor, History Ph.D., U.C. Berkeley - 2004 (Edward Ross,
“Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse About “Modernity,”
Central European History, vol. 37, no. 1, 1–48)
In the Weimar model, then, the rights of the individual, guaranteed formally by the constitution
and substantively by the welfare system, were the central element of the dominant program for
the management of social problems. Almost no one in this period advocated expanding social
provision out of the goodness of their hearts. This was a strategy of social management, of
social engineering. The mainstream of social reform in Germany believed that guaranteeing
basic social rights— the substantive or positive freedom of all citizens — was the best way to
turn people into power, prosperity, and profit. In that sense, the democratic welfare state was—
and is — democratic not despite of its pursuit of biopower, but because of it. The contrast with
the Nazi state is clear. National Socialism aimed to construct a system of social and population
policy founded on the concept of individual duties, on the ubiquitous and total power of the
state, and on the systematic absorption of every citizen by organizations that could implant that power at every level of their lives — in political and associational life, in the
family, in the workplace, and in leisure activities. In the welfarist vision of Weimar progressives, the task of the state was to create an institutional framework that would give
individuals the wherewithal to integrate themselves successfully into the national society, economy, and polity. The Nazis aimed, instead, to give the state the wherewithal to do
with every citizen what it willed. And where Weimar welfare advocates understood themselves to be constructing a system of knowledge and institutions that would manage
social problems, the Nazis fundamentally sought to abolish just that system by eradicating — by finding a “final solution” to — social problems. Again, as Peukert pointed out,

; the right to health

many advocates of a rights-based welfare structure were open to the idea that “stubborn” cases might be legitimate targets for sterilization

could easily be redefined as primarily a duty to be healthy, for example. But the difference
between a strategy of social management built on the rights of the citizen and a system of racial
policy built on the total power of the state is not merely a semantic one; such differences had
very profound political implications, and established quite different constraints. The rights-
based strategy was actually not very compatible with exclusionary and coercive policies; it relied
too heavily on the cooperation of its targets and of armies of volunteers, it was too embedded
in a democratic institutional structure and civil society, it lacked powerful legal and institutional
instruments of coercion, and its rhetorical structure was too heavily slanted toward inclusion
and tolerance.
 Impact Defense
Biopower is not genocidal when it is deployed by a government which also
respects rights.
Dickinson 04 - Associate Professor, History Ph.D., U.C. Berkeley - 2004 (Edward Ross,
“Biopolitics, Fascism,

Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse About “Modernity,” Central European History,
vol. 37, no. 1, 1–48)

At its simplest, this view of the politics of expertise and professionalization is certainly plausible.
Historically speaking, however, the further conjecture that this “micropolitical” dynamic creates
authoritarian, totalitarian, or homicidal potentials at the level of the state does not seem very
tenable. Historically, it appears that the greatest advocates of political democracy —in Germany
left liberals and Social Democrats —have been also the greatest advocates of every kind of
biopolitical social engineering, from public health and welfare programs through social
insurance to city planning and, yes, even eugenics.102 The state they built has intervened in
social relations to an (until recently) ever-growing degree; professionalization has run ever more
rampant in Western societies; the production of scientistic and technocratic expert knowledge
has proceeded at an ever more frenetic pace. And yet, from the perspective of the first years of
the millennium, the second half of the twentieth century appears to be the great age of
democracy in precisely those societies where these processes have been most in evidence.
What is more, the interventionist state has steadily expanded both the rights and the resources
of virtually every citizen — including those who were stigmatized and persecuted as biologically
defective under National Socialism. Perhaps these processes have created an ever more
restrictive “iron cage” of rationality in European societies. But if so, it seems clear that there is
no necessary correlation between rationalization and authoritarian politics; the opposite seems
in fact to be at least equally true.

Biopower does not make massacres vital—a specific form of violent sovereignty
is also required.
Ojakangas, 05 - PhD in Social Science and Academy research fellow @ the Helsinki Collegium for
Advanced Studies @ University of Helsinki – 2005 (Mika, “The Impossible Dialogue on Biopower:
Foucault and Agamben,” May 2005, Foucault Studies, No. 2, http://www.foucault-
studies.com/no2/ojakangas1.pdf)

Admittedly, in the era of biopolitics, as Foucault writes,  even “massacres  have  become  vital.” 
This is  not the case, however, because violence is hidden   in  the foundation of biopolitics, as
Agamben  believes. Although the twentieth century thanatopolitics is  the “reverse  of 
biopolitics”, it should not be understood, according to Foucault, as “the  effect, the result, or the
logical consequence” of biopolitical rationality. Rather, it should be understood,  as he
suggests, as an outcome of the “demonic combination” of the sovereign power
and biopower, of “the city-citizen game and the shepherd-flock game” or as I would like to put
it, of patria potestas (father’s unconditional power of life and death over
his son) and cura  maternal (mother’s  unconditional  duty  to  take  care  of  her  children).
Although massacres can be carried out in the name of care, they do not follow from the logic of
biopower for which death is the “object of taboo”. They follow from the  logic  of  sovereign 
power,  which  legitimates  killing  by  whatever arguments it chooses, be it God, Nature, or life.  

Biopower does not cause racism or massacres—it is only when it is in the

context of a violent or racist government that it is dangerous.
Ojakangas, 05 - PhD in Social Science and Academy research fellow @ the Helsinki Collegium for
Advanced Studies @ University of Helsinki – 2005 (Mika, “The Impossible Dialogue on Biopower:
Foucault and Agamben,” May 2005, Foucault Studies, No. 2, http://wlt-
studies.com/no2/ojakangas1.pdf)

It is the logic of racism, according to Foucault, that makes killing acceptable in modern
biopolitical societies. This is not to say, however, that biopolitical societies are necessarily
more racist than other societies. It is to say that in the era of biopolitics, only racism,
because it is a determination immanent to life, can “justify the murderous function of
the State”.89 However, racism can only justify killing – killing that does not follow from
the logic of biopower but from the logic of the sovereign power. Racism is, in other words, the only way
the sovereign power, the right to kill, can be maintained in biopolitical societies: “Racism is bound up with workings of a State that is obliged to use race, the
elimination of races and the purification of the race, to exercise its sovereign power.”90 Racism is, in other words, a discourse – “quite compatible”91 with
biopolitics – through which biopower can be most smoothly transformed into the form of sovereign power. Such transformation, however, changes everything. A
biopolitical society that wishes to “exercise the old sovereign right to kill”, even in the name of race, ceases to be a mere biopolitical society, practicing merely
biopolitics. It becomes a “demonic combination” of sovereign power and biopower, exercising sovereign means for biopolitical ends. In its most monstrous form, it
becomes the Third Reich. For this reason, I cannot subscribe to Agamben’s thesis, according to which biopolitics is absolutized in the Third Reich.93 To be sure, the
Third Reich used biopolitical means – it was a state in which “insurance and reassurance were universal”94 – and aimed for biopolitical ends in order to improve

What distinguishes the Third Reich

the living conditions of the German people -- but so did many other nations in the 1930s.

from those other nations is the fact that, alongside its biopolitical apparatus, it erected a
massive machinery of death. It became a society that “unleashed murderous power, or in
other words, the old sovereign right to take life” throughout the “entire social body”, as
Foucault puts it.95 It is not, therefore, biopolitics that was absolutized in the Third Reich
– as a matter of fact, biopolitical measures in the Nazi Germany were, although harsh,
relatively modest in scale compared to some present day welfare states – but rather the
sovereign power: “This power to kill, which ran through the entire social body of Nazi
society, was first manifested when the power to take life, the power of life and death,
was granted not only to the State but to a whole series of individuals, to a considerable
number of people (such as the SA, the SS, and so on). Ultimately, everyone in the Nazi
State had the power of life and death over his or her neighbours, if only because of the
practice of informing, which effectively meant doing away with the people next door, or
having them done away with.96” The only thing that the Third Reich actually absolutizes
is, in other words, the sovereignty of power and therefore, the nakedness of bare life –
at least if sovereignty is defined in the Agambenian manner: “The sovereign is the one
with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one
with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns.”97
 Turn – Biopower Good
Power is fluid—biopower has created new freedoms as well as new oppressions
—context is key.
Dickinson 04 - Associate Professor, History Ph.D., U.C. Berkeley - 2004 (Edward Ross,
“Biopolitics, Fascism,

Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse About “Modernity,” Central European History,
vol. 37, no. 1, 1–48)

Uncoupling “technocracy” from “discourse” is not yet enough, however. We should also be alive
to the ways in which new social practices, institutions, and knowledge generated new choices —
a limited range of them, constrained by all kinds of discursive and social frameworks, but
nonetheless historically new and significant. Modern biopolitics did create, in a real sense, not
only new constraints but also new degrees of freedom— new levers that increased people’s
power to move their own worlds, to shape their own lives. Our understanding of modern
biopolitics will be more realistic and more fruitful if we reconceptualize its development as a
complex process in which the implications of those new choices were negotiated out in the
social and discursive context. Again, in the early twentieth century many more conservative
biopolitical “experts” devoted much of their energy precisely to trying— without any
discernable success— to control those new degrees of freedom. For most social liberals and
Social Democrats, however, those new choices were a potential source of greater social
efficiency and social dynamism. State policy reflected the constant negotiation and tension
between these perspectives. Nor should we stop at a reexamination of knowledge and
technology. It might make sense, too, to reexamine the process of institution-building, the
elaboration of the practices and institutions of biopolitics. No doubt the creation of public and
private social welfare institutions created instruments for the study, manipulation, or control of
individuals and groups. But it also generated opportunities for self-organization and
participation by social groups of all kinds.

Their K oversimplifies—biopower is not a one-way street—it produces

equivalent resistances that check the impact.
Campbell, 98 - professor of international politics at the University of Newcastle - 1998 (David,
“Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity,” pg. 204-205)

The political possibilities enabled by this permanent provocation of power and freedom can be
specified in more detail by thinking in terms of the predominance of the “bio-power” discussed
above. In this sense, because the governmental practices of biopolitics in West ern nations have
been increasingly directed toward modes of being and forms of life — such that sexual conduct
has become an object of concern, individual health has been figured as a domain of discipline,
and the family has been transformed into an instrument of government— the ongoing agonism
between those practices and the freedom they seek to contain means that individuals have
articulated a series of counterdemands drawn from those new fields of concern. For example, as
the state continues to prosecute people according to sexual orientation, human rights activists
have proclaimed the right of gays to enter into formal marriages, adopt children, and receive the
same health and insurance benefits granted to their straight counterparts. These claims are a
consequence of the permanent provoca tion of power and freedom in biopolitics, and stand as
testament to the “strategic reversibility” of power relations: if the terms of governmental
practices can be made into focal points for resistances, then the “history of government as the
‘conduct of conduct’ is interwoven with the history of dissenting ‘counterconducts.”’39 Indeed,
the emergence of the state as the major articulation of “the political” has involved an unceasing
agonism between those in office and those they rule. State intervention in everyday life has long
incited popular collective action, the result of which has been both resistance to the state and
new claims upon the state. In particular, “the core of what we now call ‘citizenship’ consists of
multiple bargains hammered out by rulers and ruled in the course of their struggles over the
means of state action, especially the making of war.” In more recent times, constituencies
associated with women’s, youth, ecological, and peace movements (among others) have also
issued claims on society. These resistances are evidence that the break with the
discursive/nondiscursive dichotomy central to the logic of interpretation undergirding this
analysis is (to put it in conventional terms) not only theoretically licensed; it is empirically
warranted. Indeed, expanding the interpretive imagination so as to enlarge the categories
through which we understand the constitution of “the political” has been a necessary
precondition for making sense of Foreign Policy’s concern for the ethical borders of identity in
America. Accordingly, there are manifest political implications that flow from theorizing identity.
As Judith Butler concluded: “The deconstruction of identity is not the deconstruction of politics;
rather, it establishes as political the very terms through which identity is articulated.”
 Turn – Law Good / Psychoanalysis
Turn – The law functions as a method by which the nation can help shape the
language by which individuals’ desires are formed. Sovereignty and the law are
foundational to the ontological status of all persons who desire to be included
in a larger psychoanalytic order of self-reassurance.
Gillespie 20 (Liam Gillespie, School of Social and Political Sciences, The University of
Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia 5-4-2020, "Laws of Inclusion and Exclusion: Nomos,
Nationalism and the Other," Law and Critique, https://link-springer-
com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/article/10.1007/s10978-020-09264-w) TR
In his later work, Foucault sought to historicise the emergence of neo-liberal individualism and governmentality. In doing so,
Foucault articulated the
emergence and production of the figure of ‘homo æconomicus’: the
mythical, individual subject, the ‘atom of freedom’ in whose name the neo-liberal Sovereign
purports to govern (2010, p. 271). Homo æconomicus, Foucault writes: represents one of the most important mutations, one
of the most important theoretical transformations in Western thought since the Middle Ages. What English empiricism introduces –
let’s say, roughly, with Locke – and doubtless for the first time in Western philosophy, is a
subject who is not so much defined
by his freedom, or by the opposition of soul and body, or by the presence of a source or core concupiscence marked to a
greater or lesser degree by the Fall or sin, but who appears in the form of a subject of individual choices
which are both irreducible and non-transferable. (2010, pp. 271–272) For Foucault, homo æconomicus—
the original subject of liberalism—came to function as an historical predicate and enabling condition of the neo-liberal
Sovereign, sanctioning an ‘art’ of governance ‘determined according to the principle of the
economy’ (2010, pp. 270–272). The ultimate goal of this Sovereign was to provide and maintain a
‘free’ market, which is enshrined in law, and through which supposedly free subjects can
pursue their rationally—that is, ‘freely’—chosen interests (Foucault 2010, pp. 270–272). On Foucault’s
reading, neo-liberalism and neo-liberal governance actively produce the very subjects upon whose
prior existence the Sovereign itself is predicated. Put differently, for Foucault, the Sovereign
retroactively produces the very subjects whom and for whom it supposedly exists to govern. To
borrow a phrase from Slavoj Žižek, neo-liberal ideology ‘posits its own presuppositions’: the existence of a ‘free’, borderless market
within which ‘free’, albeit heavily bordered—that is, private and privatised—human subjects exist. For Foucault, neo-liberalism
and the free-market work in tandem to establish ‘veridiction’ , a term Foucault uses to refer to the ‘truth’
that subjects come to see through their subjection to discourse (2010, p. 224). This ‘truth’ can be understood
as the necessity of the free-market through which homo æconomicus pursues and realises their ‘rational’ interests (which are,
nevertheless, a product of the Sovereign’s inscription in the first instance). In neo-liberal conditions, the
figure of homo
æconomicus becomes concomitant with homo juridicus, insofar as the subject’s need for the
free-market is articulated as a right to the free-market. Through this elision between homo æconomicus and
homo juridicus, the provision of the free-market comes to function normatively and as a litmus
test of (universally) ‘good’ state action (alongside the notion that more economic ‘activity’ is always good for all,
hence the aphorism, ‘a rising tide raises all boats’). While the confluence of homo æconomicus and homo juridicus transmogrifies
the economic into the Sovereign’s final cause, within this telos, the Sovereign’s role is posed in an obfuscatory way. This is because
although neo-liberal
ideology seemingly imposes a limit upon the Sovereign (articulated vis-à-vis law and
the economy), the
category of the limit is always necessarily dual-sided, in that one cannot draw a
boundary to determine a limit (or point of transgression) without also simultaneously but implicitly
legitimising that which falls short of the limit’s stipulation (Brown 2008, p. 36). Brown illustrates this point with
respect to the concept of the border, which not only demarcates ‘the boundaries of an entity (as in the jurisdictional sovereignty)’,
but also ‘[organises] the space both inside and outside the entity’ (2008, p. 36). By way of analogy, fans of competitive sport will
know that rules and boundaries foreshadow their own testing; in sporting parlance, this process is called playing ‘line ball’, where
participants play as aggressively as possible while remaining just below the threshold that would constitute a ‘foul’ (an illegal play).
That is, participants deliberately take lawful play to its absolute limit. While this often results in the adjudication of a foul (which
could come with a penalty), the subsequent (re)enforcement of the rule(s) and boundaries that the foul occasions merely provides
further clarity as to the threshold of acceptable behaviour; in turn, this ‘new’ (re)articulation of the rule(s) can then itself be pushed
and tested to its limit as well. This dual-sided nature of rules and borders is comparable to that of law, because by necessity, law
both prohibits and legitimises simultaneously, because one cannot prohibit something without
implicitly legitimising that which falls short of the threshold of that which one prohibits. With the
dual-sided nature of the limit in view, Brown (reading Foucault) argues that although neo-liberal ideology claims to limit
the role of the Sovereign to that of a ‘caretaker’ who respects the sanctity of the subject and the
economy—and the subject of the economy—that nevertheless, the neo-liberal Sovereign does not recede from
the body of its subjects, but instead, intrudes and encroaches upon them in novel and
paradoxical ways (2015, p. 17). For Brown, this intrusion occurs because neo-liberal ideology constructs the market not only
as something that is sacrosanct that the Sovereign must preserve, but as something that is ubiquitous as well (2015, p. 17). The
market is ubiquitous, for Brown, because neo-liberal ideology seeks to commodify and economise all things
as potential sources of capital (including one’s education, health, fitness, fashion and friends, and as well,
we might add, the nation). For this reason, Brown maintains that neo-liberalism is not a singular ideology,
discourse or mode of governance, but is instead a complex and diffuse set of ‘rationalities’ (2015,
pp. 52–56). These rationalities (or ways of thinking) are the hallmark of late-capitalism, permeating and influencing the
conduct of governments, legal institutions, schools, prisons, homes and selves (Brown 2015, p. 10).
Corporations are left absent from this list only because the corporation itself has come to function as the template and telos upon
which the others are increasingly modelled and formed into their own respective bodies (Brown 2015, p. 10). Thus, although neo-
liberal ideology explicitly claims to limit the Sovereign’s jurisdiction to economic realms, thereby setting its subject ‘free’, it
nevertheless also implicitly legitimises the state’s intrusion into all realms insofar as it economises
them and converts them into sources of capital (Brown 2015, p. 17).Footnote12 There is, however, an aspect of
the Sovereign intrusion that Brown elides, which is that the neo-liberal Sovereign’s attempt to render
everything ‘inside’ the economic fold is also a double intrusion , because the very positing of the free-
market and the existence of individual subjects in and of itself amounts to a claim regarding that which
is assumed to already be there to be intruded upon or retracted from in the first instance. Through
its naturalisation of the market, neo-liberal ideology disavows its first order intrusion (its founding claim to capture things as they
always–already are); in turn, thisdisavowal legitimises the second order of intrusions that stem from the
first (whichever specific acts must be undertaken to ensure that the market and subjects operate
‘freely’). This disavowed intrusion inaugurates a form of mystification that is distinct from that which Marx elucidated (that
between the means of production and the classes), because the Sovereign’s intrusion into everything not only
comes with tacit legitimacy, but also a complex disavowal: a masquerade of retraction from
the ‘private’ life and the privatised body of the subject (supposedly so as to enable their self-governance).
Contemporary subjects internalise neo-liberalism’s disavowed intrusion, so that just like the
ideologies of neo-liberalism, they too seek to ‘entrepreneurialize’ and economise all domains,
whether they are ‘studying, interning, working, planning retirement, or reinventing
[themselves] in a new life’ (Brown 2015, p. 36). Thus, although the Sovereign intrudes upon the
privatised body, subjects of neo-liberalism are nevertheless constructed as the sole caretakers
of their bodies and selves, the so-called ‘masters’ of their own destinies (Brown 2015, p. 36). This
onus of caring for the self as a radically private, hyper-responsibilised individual falls heavily
upon subjects who identify strongly as (defence) nationalists, because the very forces that
interpellate subjects as hyper-individuals also diminish the means by which nationalists attempt
to articulate their own supposedly ‘individual’ identities—the nation . This is because the same forces that
produce subjects as heavily bordered, hyper-individuals also erode the borders of the nation—the collective symbolic resource from
which ‘individual’ national identities are built and maintained—through the transnational forces and rationalities of the globalised
economy. Put differently, neo-liberalism opens up and fractures Pauline Hanson’s ideal ‘One Nation’, and the ‘One Land, One Law,
One People’ that the EDL seeks to ‘defend’. The above analysis of neo-liberalism and its production of ‘individuals’, articulates with
Agamben’s theory of contemporary Sovereignty. For Agamben, one of the hallmarks of contemporary Sovereignty is that it is
founded upon that which it claims to exclude but includes accidentally: namely, the body of its
subjects (1998, p. 9). This is because despite its claim to emancipate subjects by retracting from their
bodies and ‘private’ lives, the Sovereign nevertheless offers historically particular forms of
subjection through ‘the production of a biopolitical body’ (Agamben 1998, p. 6). Indeed for Agamben, this
production is ‘the original activity of sovereign power’ (1998, p. 6). The aporia of contemporary democracy then, is that the
Sovereign prints ‘freedom’ and ‘rights’ on the very bodies it claims to set free (Agamben 1998, p. 9).
For Agamben, this subjection in the guise of emancipation—which is another phrase for ‘disavowed
intrusion’—paradoxically constructs the body as both ‘the place for the organisation of State
power and the subject’s emancipation from that power’ (1998, p. 9). On Agamben’s reading, the
contemporary neo-liberal Sovereign is more than a mere regulator of the rights and freedoms
that govern political life; instead, the Sovereign makes the very decision as to what
constitutes life itself. As I will elaborate, it is this aspect of contemporary Sovereignty—the capacity
to decide what a body is—that is especially relevant in understanding defence nationalism and the importance defence
nationalists ascribe to law. Crucial to Agamben’s argument is the category of ‘bare life’, which constitutes ‘the new biopolitical body
of humanity’ as produced by the Sovereign (1998, p. 9). As Agamben elaborates, the category of bare life can be explained in
relation to the figure of ‘homo sacer’: the figure in Roman law who is nevertheless excluded entirely from Roman law (who is
‘banned’ from law). Through this ‘ban’ as exclusion, Agamben argues that homo sacer is the one that can be killed with impunity
(that is, killed without the commission of homicide), but who, by virtue of this, is also unfit for ritual sacrifice (due to their lack of
worth). For Agamben, the decision as to who is included or excluded from law—and how they are
included or excluded—determines who can be killed, but also who can permissibly be left to
die (as occurs, for example, when the nation’s laws and onus of care are deemed not to apply to the refugee who is ‘offshore’, that
is, outside of the realm of nomos).Footnote13 For Agamben, the Sovereign’s decision as to how to apply (or not
apply) law to the body literally passes over the physical body, determining, as it does, what that
body ‘is’ as bare life: that is, as a body reduced to a biological body (1998, p. 162). Agamben illustrates this
power in relation to a number of examples of technical, medico-legal decision-making regarding the status of life and death,
including decisions such as when a life-support machine can be turned off, or euthanasia administered. What Agamben observes, is
that through various advances in medicine and technology, in conjunction with a number of hallmark legal rulings, death
itself
has come to be redefined, so that ‘somatic death’, rather than ‘brain death’, is its defining
characteristic (1998, p. 162). For Agamben, this ability to redefine life (and death) demonstrates the
power of the Sovereign decision, which is so potent that the comatose body enters a state of
‘radical indistinction’ (1998, p. 164), whose ontological status ‘wavers between life and death
according to the progress of medicine and the changes in legal decisions’ (1998, p. 186). What such examples
illustrate, is that the Sovereign no longer merely decides how to enforce law in a given factual setting, but rather, that through its
decision, the Sovereign creates the factual setting itself (Agamben 1998, p. 170). In the example above, for instance, the Sovereign
first decides the definitions of life and death, and by so doing, comes to alter the ‘factual’ setting regarding which bodies are
considered alive or dead. For Agamben, it
is thus not only the life of the subject that wavers at the whim of
the Sovereign’s decision, but the very ‘factual’ status of reality itself (1998, p. 170). With this supposedly
‘factual’ status established, the particular life-support machines that can be turned off, and those that cannot, then appears to
follow automatically without the need for a further decision, but instead, through a mere technical application of
the law. Similarly, in defence nationalist fantasies, it is the law that decides who belongs to the nation and who does not, who is a
citizen and who is not, and who can be deported and who cannot. Such fantasies position nationalists so that they need not decide
who belongs to the nation and who does not; for them, this information is ‘automatically’ known (by them) by default, so that all
they need do, is to (re)enforce the Sovereign decision by ‘acting’ against others who, as per the ‘factual status of reality’, inherently
do not belong. Law
and the Other To reprise briefly, neo-liberalism has transmogrified subjects’
relationships to law, society, culture, politics and the political (Foucault 2010; Brown 2015; Dardot and Laval
2013; Chandler and Reid 2016). So too, it has transformed subjects’ relationships to one another and the nation. For defence
nationalists, the effects of neo-liberalism have arguably transformed the nation from a vessel of
land and law that contains ‘One People’, to a loose assemblage of radically private, disconnected
(hyper)individuals besieged by non-national others (including refugees and migrants). Within neo-liberal
settings, law plays a role in the way that both collective and individual bodies are formed—be
they corporations, nations, subjects or otherwise. For Foucault (2010), Brown (2015) and Agamben (1998), the
neo-liberal Sovereign founds the ‘individual’ bodies upon which neo-liberalism itself is predicated. The neo-liberal Sovereign
then appropriates those bodies as wholly individuated bodies, the sanctity of which is both
the foundation and telos of Western law (that is, both its starting point and end game). Although the neo-liberal
Sovereign inscribes law upon bodies to establish them as private bodies that exist independently
in the world, it nevertheless claims to ‘retract’ from them as it does so (even enshrining this
supposed retraction, without irony, in law ). The Sovereign therefore inhabits the bodies from which it claims to
retract through the very biopolitical processes that posit the existence of those bodies in the first instance. The formation of
bodies as individuals influences the way subjects conceptualise their own identities (Foucault 2010;
Brown 2015, p. 36); that is, when subjects internalise neo-liberal rationalities they see themselves as
neo-liberalism would see them: as hyper-individual subjects who conceptualise themselves as
such (Brown 2015, p. 36). This is not to say, however, that subjects are merely passive tabula rasa within which power is inscribed
and internalised, unmodified, unadulterated, and without resistance and interpretation. As foreshadowed, it is on this latter point
that psychoanalytic theory can prove illuminating. On a Lacanian reading, the
(bio)political Sovereign that inhabits
the subject is the Other—the symbolic fiction subjects elevate over the entirety of the
symbolic field as the guarantor of its apparent truth and coherence (Lacan 2006, p. 358; Lacan 2006, pp.
364–383; Lacan 2007, pp. 11–26). Although the specific apparatus of the Other differs among subjects—for some, it may be God,
Science, Nature, a cult, a president or indeed, law and/or the nation—the function of the Other is to make sense of
the world (in Agambenian terms, to establish the ‘factual status’ of reality). The original schema for the Other is
‘God’: some higher power that can supposedly guarantee the inexplicable, even if this
knowledge remains beyond the subject’s comprehension (hence the need for ‘faith’ in God/the Other). For
Lacan, the Other provides and guarantees the subject’s coordinates of Being by providing and guaranteeing the stability of the
means by which the subject can conceptualise their own presumed identity. Beyond this, the Other also structures the
subject’s desire (Lacan 2007, pp. 11–26), insofar as the Other provides the language in which desire is
formed and into which desire is translated and articulated (Lacan 2006, p. 222; Lacan 2006, pp. 575–584).
For Lacan, desire therefore ultimately belongs to the Other, because it is the Other, and not the
subject, that possesses language (Lacan 2006, p. 10; Lacan 2006, pp. 676–677; Lacan 2007, p. 13). For Lacan, the
subject’s primordial desire—that which structures all of the subject’s other desires— is the desire to be recognised
by the Other (Lacan 2006, p. 582; Rogers 2014, p. 19). Recognition from other subjects and the Other
quells anxiety because it provides certainty: a guarantee that a subject is who s/he thinks s/he
is, and belongs where s/he thinks s/he belongs. The subject’s primordial desire is to be
recognised by the Other because it is the Other that guarantees the stability of the symbolic
world. Put simply, however the Other recognises me, I (can believe that I) really am. The core contention of this article is that
when defence nationalists invoke fantasies of law to establish the factual status of reality within
the nation—as outlined in detail above—they effectively elevate the nation to the status of the Other , so
that the stability of the nation as a field and meaning, and their place and primacy therein, can
appear guaranteed. One of the reasons the nation can be readily elevated to the Other is because the nation has a
clear, ‘official’ and authoritative language—law—which is capable of recognising subjects as
they desire to be recognised: as individual subjects who belong to the nation (such as through
birth and citizenship). Law is a powerful tool for the delivery of the subject’s primordial desire
because law conceptualises subjects as they see themselves in neo-liberalism: as individual
subjects with individual identities and desires (Rogers 2014, p. 19). On a Lacanian reading, subjects invest
themselves in law not only because law functions as an authoritative discourse of the
Sovereign, but because law functions as the language of the Other; that is, law dispenses the
Other’s recognition with authority (Rogers and Ghumkhor 2015).