Foucault K - SCuFI - Paper

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Foucault K ......................................................................................................................................................................1
1NCShell (1/3) ............................................................................................................................................................3
1NCShell (3/3) ............................................................................................................................................................4
1NCShell (3/3) ............................................................................................................................................................5
LinkWar ......................................................................................................................................................................6
LinkHegemony ...........................................................................................................................................................7
LinkRealism ................................................................................................................................................................8
LinkCirculation ............................................................................................................................................................9
LinkCirculation ..........................................................................................................................................................10
LinkTransportation Infrastructure..............................................................................................................................11
LinkPublic Transportation .........................................................................................................................................12
LinkTraffic Safety ......................................................................................................................................................13
LinkHighways ...........................................................................................................................................................14
LinkTerrain ...............................................................................................................................................................15
LinkArctic Territory....................................................................................................................................................16
LinkArctic Territory....................................................................................................................................................17
LinkArctic War ..........................................................................................................................................................18
LinkTerrorism ...........................................................................................................................................................19
LinkTerrorism ...........................................................................................................................................................20
LinkEnvironmental Managerialism............................................................................................................................21
LinkEnvironmental Crises .........................................................................................................................................24
LinkEnvironmental Globalism/THE STATE ..............................................................................................................25
LinkTransportation Investment .................................................................................................................................26
LinkGas Tax .............................................................................................................................................................27
LinkEconomy ............................................................................................................................................................28
ImpactCapitalism ......................................................................................................................................................29
ImpactSecurity ..........................................................................................................................................................30
ImpactGovernmentality.............................................................................................................................................31
ImpactNormalization .................................................................................................................................................32
ImpactNormalization .................................................................................................................................................33
ImpactFreedom ........................................................................................................................................................34
Eco ImpactEnvironmental Destruction .....................................................................................................................35
AltMicropolitics..........................................................................................................................................................36
AltResistance ...........................................................................................................................................................39
AltCare of the Self ....................................................................................................................................................40
AltRefuse Distinctions...............................................................................................................................................41
AltRefuse Distinctions...............................................................................................................................................42
AltTerritory ................................................................................................................................................................43
AltEnvironment .........................................................................................................................................................44
AltEnvironment .........................................................................................................................................................45
AltPublic Ecology ......................................................................................................................................................46
AT: Perm ......................................................................................................................................................................47
AT: Perm ......................................................................................................................................................................48
AT: PermEnvironment specific .................................................................................................................................49
AT: Action/Reform Good ..............................................................................................................................................50
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AT: Action/Reform Good ..............................................................................................................................................51

AT: Realism/Security Inevitable ...................................................................................................................................52
AT: Threats Real ..........................................................................................................................................................53
AT: Managerialism Good .............................................................................................................................................54
AT: Managerialism Good .............................................................................................................................................55
AT: Environmental Securitization Activism .............................................................................................................56
AT: PragmatismEnvironment specific .......................................................................................................................57
FWDiscourse ............................................................................................................................................................58
FWDiscourse ............................................................................................................................................................59
FWDiscourseEnvironment specific .......................................................................................................................60
FWTerritory ..............................................................................................................................................................61
FWTerritoryArctic spec. ........................................................................................................................................62
FWSpatialityTerrorism spec. .................................................................................................................................63
AT: Policymaking Good................................................................................................................................................64
AFFPredictions Good ...............................................................................................................................................65
AFFGeneric Perm.....................................................................................................................................................66
AFFReform Good .....................................................................................................................................................67
AFFAlt Doesnt Solve ...............................................................................................................................................68
AFFAlt Doesnt Solve ...............................................................................................................................................69
AFFAlt Doesnt SolveFoucault specific .................................................................................................................70
AFFCede the Political DA .........................................................................................................................................71
AFFViolence UQ.......................................................................................................................................................72
AFFNo Impact ..........................................................................................................................................................73
AFFAT: Structural Violence ......................................................................................................................................74
AFFAT: Root Cause .................................................................................................................................................75
AFFAT: Discourse FW..............................................................................................................................................76
AFFAT: Epistemology FW ........................................................................................................................................77
AFFAT: Epistemology...............................................................................................................................................78
AFFAT: Ontology FW ...............................................................................................................................................79
AFFAT: Value to Life ................................................................................................................................................80
AFFBiopower Good ..................................................................................................................................................81
AFFThreats Are Real................................................................................................................................................83
AFFApocalyptic Discourse Good..............................................................................................................................84
AFFEnvironment Alt Co-option............................................................................................................................85
AFFEnvironment Managerialism Good.....................................................................................................................86
AFFClimate Science Good .......................................................................................................................................87
AFFClimate Science Good .......................................................................................................................................88
AFFScience Good ....................................................................................................................................................89
AFFEco-Pragmatism Good ......................................................................................................................................90
This file combines a couple different arguments related to Michel Foucault:
- The mobility link included in the 1NC applies to most affs on the topic with a little spin, particularly mass transit
and high speed rail.
- The generic section includes links to non-topic-specific things. This is where the broadest impacts, alts, and
framework arguments are.
- The territory links include several 1NC-quality cards about the icebreakers and STRAHNET affs.
- The environment arguments are most descriptive of the mass transit and gas tax affs.
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Mobility is a disciplinary technique designed to normalize and re-code bodies to maximize
their integration in productive economies. The aff makes bodies docile within discursive
regimes of biopolitics.
Reid 8 Julian Reid, Life Struggles: War, Discipline, and Biopolitics in the Thought of Michel Foucault, Foucault on
Politics, Security and War, ed. Michael Dillon and Andrew W. Neal, Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2008, p. 68-70
The chapter of Discipline and Punish titled Docile Bodies carefully records the emergence of these techniques with attention to their specifically military remit. It was through the
technique of enclosure that men came to be assembled under one roof in the form of the barracks. This technique of enclosure
allowed for new forms of control

and security: the prevention of theft and violence; the dissipation of fears of local populations at the incursions of marauding bands
of troops; the prevention of conflict with civil authorities; the stopping of mass desertion, and the management of expenditure (1991b:
p. 142). Through the technique of partitioning, militarised groups of men were individualised. Knowing where and how to
locate individuals, to control communication between individuals, to supervise the conduct not only of the mass body
but the life of bodies individually, comprised an essential technique in the development of modern military
organisation. The innovation of new systems of rank represented a further technique by which bodies were not only individualised but cast within a network of relations of
exchange, allowing for their better distribution and circulation. The organisation of serial spaces providing fixed positions for individuals but
permitting their circulation and interchange allowed for new forms of tactical arrangements in the composition of
military forces. Foucault demonstrates with ample reference to the work of the French military tactician, Comte de Guibert, how the modern military science of tactics
encapsulated this newfound understanding of the potentialities of techniques of ranking and partitioning in the production of recombinant forms of order. Blinded by the immensity,
dazed by the multitude ... the innumerable combinations that result from the multiplicity of objects Guibert mused at the end of the eighteenth century (1991b: p. 148). The
advent
of these new disciplinary techniques in the military sciences was, as Discipline and Punish shows, much concerned with the reordering of relations between bodies and space. Yet they were also as interested in the disciplining of relations
between time and bodily activity, or what Foucault called the temporal elaboration of the act (p. 151). He documents how modern military organisation was
predicated upon the creation of meticulously detailed programmes according to which the correct use of the body would be specified in order to allow for a correct use of time (p.
152). For example, between the mid-seventeenth and mid-eighteenth century, ordinances developed to refine the movements across space and time of marching soldiers. While in the
seventeenth century marching was only vaguely regulated to assure conformity, by the eighteenth century ordinances specified distinctions between four different sorts of marching
step; the short step, the ordinary step, the double step and the marching step, each differentiated according to duration, extension and comportment (p. 151). As
disciplinary
power was concerned with the correct use of time so it was also concerned with what Foucault called the
instrumental coding of the body through the creation of a body-machine complex (p. 153). Foucault considered that traditional
forms of subjection involved only the extraction of the product of labour, the exploitation of bodies for their surpluses. Disciplinary
power, on the other hand, is about more than that. Its aim is to assure and regulate the correct procedure by which the body
carries out its labour as an end in itself. In this vein, Foucault focused again on innovations occurring in the domain of military organisation centrally on the
specifications made in the same late eighteenth-century military ordinances as to how to fire a weapon, which were meticulous in their detailing of how body and weapon interact (p.
153). All of these
new innovations, reflecting what Foucault identified as a new positive economy of time through which modern societies
changes that were occurring in the domain of
war. The mid-eighteenth century successes of Prussia enabled by the military systems of Frederick II were the harbinger of most of these developments (p. 154). Through the
development of these techniques with which to organise for and conduct war emerged a new object for the
organisation of power relations. That new object was as Foucault described, the natural body, the bearer of forces and the
seat of duration; it is the body susceptible to specified operations, which have their order, their stages, their internal
conditions, their constituent elements (p. 155).
attempted to intensify their use of time with increased speeds and increased efficiencies, resulted he argued from
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The dark side of power over life is the ability to put entire populations to death in the name
of the greater good
Foucault 78 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, 1978, p.
136-137
Since the classical age the West has undergone a very profound transformation of these mechanisms of power. " Deduction"
has tended to be no
longer the major form of power but merely one element among others, working to incite, reinforce, control, monitor,
optimize, and organize the forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them,
rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them. There has been a parallel shift in the right of death, or at least a
tendency to align itself with the exigencies of a life-administering power and to define itself accordingly. This death that was based on the right of the sovereign is
now manifested as simply the reverse of the right of the social body to ensure, maintain, or develop its life. Yet wars were never as bloody as they
have been since the nineteenth century, and all things being equal, never before did regimes visit such holocausts on their
own populations. But this formidable power of death -and this is perhaps what accounts for part of its force and the cynicism with which it has so
greatly expanded its limits -now presents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that
endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations. Wars are no longer waged in the
name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire
populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have
become vital. It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to
wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed. And through a turn that closes the circle, as the technology of wars has
caused them to tend increasingly toward all-out destruction, the decision that initiates them and the one that
terminates them are in fact increasingly informed by the naked question of survival. The atomic situation is now at the end
point of this process: the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an
individual's continued existence. The principle underlying the tactics of battle that one has to be capable of killing in order to go on living-has become
the principle that defines the strategy of states. But the existence in question is no longer the juridical existence of sovereignty; at
stake is the biological existence of a population. If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a
recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the
large-scale phenomena of population.
The alternative is to vote negative.

This performatively destabilizes the discourses the 1AC subscribes to and opens up new
avenues of discussion which move past status quo limits of knowledge.
Julia H. Chryssostalis, lecturer at the Westminster school of law, The Critical Instance After The Critique of the
Subject, Law and Critique 16, 2005, pg. 16-21
So far, we have looked at some of the ways in which the question of the question is being re-situated in a philosophical terrain that has been radically _re-marked by the critical
discourses associated with the deconstruction of subjectivity in French contemporary thought. However, the critical instance involves not only questioning but also judgment as one of
its basic tropes. How? To begin with, judgment is found intimately implicated in the semantic economy of the critical: critique, criticism, criterion, critic; they all derive from krisis, the
Greek word for judgment; yet, in addition, and more importantly, the very operation of the critical instance seems dominated by judgmental figures, grammars and logics.78 After all, is
not the figure of the Tribunal of Reason at the centre of Kants critical project?79 And is not the
role of critique therein precisely _that of defining the

conditions under which the use of reason is legitimate in order to determine what can be known [connatre], what must be
done, and what may be hoped?80 Moreover, from the Enlightenment onwards, is not the critical practised _in the search for formal
structures with universal value81 that would firmly ground our knowledge, action, and aspirations, and provide the
criteria for the evaluation of all claims to authority?82 And does not the critical instance, in this respect, necessarily turn
around a _quaestio juris, the juridical question, [which asks] with what right one possesses this concept and uses it?83 Finally,
does not the critical moment itself whether found operating in terms of fault-finding (epi-krisis),84 of drawing distinctions (dia-krisis),85 or of drawing comparisons (syn-krisis)
seem always to rely on the basic _logic of judgement: namely, the operation through which the particular is
subsumed (and thus also thought and known) under the rule of an already constituted category?86
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What is interesting to note about these judgemental grammars and logics organising the operation of the critical instance,87 is that the subjective forms they deploy involve two wellknown _types of the figure of the judge. On the one hand, there is the _judge as a sovereign figure whose
capacity to pass judgements on our received

wisdom, draw distinctions in the field of our knowledge, and set the limits of what can be known, means the capacity
to invest the world with a meaning drawn from a more profound knowledge. On the other hand, there is the _judge as a normalising, technocratic figure,
a mere functionary of the criteria, which regulate and organise the conceptual gestures of our thought and knowledge. These two _types can be easily seen as antithetical. On the one hand, the figure of the critic in
all its dignity, autonomy and sovereignty; on the other, the figure of the critic in, what Adorno calls, the _thing like form of the object.88 However, what should not be missed is how much both rely on the
philosophemes that organise the _classical configuration of the subject: rationality, mastery, self-presence, identity, consciousness, intentionality, autonomy, the radical difference between subject and object. For
does not critical judgement involve in this instance an operation of thinking, where an already given subject takes the initiative of applying an already established category to, say, an object, a text, an event? Is not
this _initiative marked not only by the distance between the _judge and the _judged, but also by the instrumentality of a masterful, rational and rationalising subject? Moreover, is not the submission of the
functionary compensated by the mastery s/he has over the material under his/her authority? And does not the very form of subsumption, with its reliance on already established categories, involve a technique, which
if the critical instance is ruled by

judgemental grammars and logics, which in turn rely on _classical configurations of subjectivity, what happens to the
critical when reinscribed and re-situated in a philosophical terrain which has been _re-marked by the critique or
deconstruction of subjectivity, a philosophical terrain without transcendental guarantees? Following what was said earlier in connection with the question of the
question, the critical is also being re-thought and re-worked. Three gestures mark this re-thinking: first, an abandonment of judgemental grammars and
logics; second, a re-casting of the critical in terms of the question of the limit; and third, the emergence of an ethic of
encounter (with the limit). Let us briefly consider what is involved in the last two gestures. One of the clearest statements of what is at stake in the re-casting of the critical in terms
assimilates and neutralises the singularity of the particular and forecloses the possibility of thinking something new?89 To return to our initial question,
of the question of the limit, the limit as a question, is to be found in Foucaults two essays, _What Is Critique? 90 and _What is Enlightenment?91 Without going into the detail of the
argument developed there, I want to focus at a point in the Enlightenment essay, which I think is crucial. This is a point where, to begin with, Foucault affirms that _[c]riticism
indeed consists of analyzing and reflecting upon limits, thus seemingly locating himself within the basic parameters of the Kantian formulation of the
critical. Then, though, he continues: But if the Kantian question was that of knowing [savoir] what limits knowledge [connaissance] must renounce exceeding, it seems to me
that the critical question today must be turned back into a positive one: In what is given to us as universal, necessary,
obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent, and the product of arbitrary constraints? The
point in brief is to transform the critique conducted in the form of necessary limitation into a practical critique that
takes the form of a possible crossing over [franchissment].92 In other words, Foucaults re-working of the critical involves a
notion of the limit not as necessary limitation, as in the Kantian critical project, but as a point of _a possible crossing
over. For posing the question of the limits of our knowledge, or _showing the limits of the constitution of objectivity,93 involves also a
dimension of opening up, of transformation and becoming. As such the type of _work done at the limits of ourselves must, according to Foucault, _on
the one hand, open up a realm of historical inquiry, and on the other, put itself to the test of reality, of contemporary reality,
both to grasp the points where change is possible and desirable, and to determine the precise form this change
should take.94 In other words, the critical instance rethought in terms of the limit as question does not merely involve a negative moment of transgression. For at the
point of this work on the limits (of ourselves), the ethico-political promise/possibility of transformation opens up
which is also why, at this point, the critical instance, for Foucault, becomes intimately linked with virtue.95 Let us now turn to
the last gesture involved in the re-thinking of the critical: namely, the displacement of judgemental logics and the emergence of an ethics of encounter that is to say, an encounter with
the question of the limit. Let us move with caution, though. To begin with,
it is important to understand that one does not drive to the limits for a
thrill experience, or because limits are dangerous and sexy, or because it brings us into tintillating proximity with evil. One asks about the limits
of knowing because one has already run up against a crisis within the epistemological field in which one lives. The
categories by which social life is ordered produce a certain incoherence or entire realm of unspeakability. And it is
from this condition, the tear in the fabric of our epistemological field, that the practice of critique emerges, with the
awareness that no discourse is adequate here or that our reigning discourses have produced an impasse.96 Which is to say
that the critical instance, as the exposure of the _limits of the constitution of objectivity, also involves the experience of the dislocation of our sedimented positivities, in other words, the
experience of crisis. Such a
recognition is important here because it reinscribes crisis, which is actually another meaning of the Greek word krisis, into
is thus re-connected with the notion of negativity negativity in the ontological sense. This negativity, as Stavrakakis notes,
has both a disruptive dimension that _refers to the horizon of impossibility and unrepresentability, which punctuates the life of
linguistic creatures,97 and at the same time a productive one: _[b]y inscribing a lack in our dislocated positivities, it
fuels the desire for new social and political constructions.98 As such, this negativity is _neither an object nor its
negation: it is the condition of possibility/ impossibility of objects,99 of objectivity more generally, indeed of all
transformative action.100 And it is precisely here that an ethics of the encounter with the limit is located in that such an encounter is a moment, which ought to be
acknowledged rather than covered over by quickly _patching the cracks of our universe. It is a moment which should not be foreclosed or assimilated: For at stake in this
encounter with the limit, _is a matter of showing how the space of the possible is larger than the one we are assigned
that something else is possible, but not that everything is possible.101 And it is precisely here, at the moment when the site of the pre-thetic
the critical, which
and the pre-judicative is glimpsed, that the thrust and the promise of a _re-marked critical instance is to be found.
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LinkWar
Threats of nuclear war are used to justify militarization
Grondin 2004 ((Re)Writing the National Security State: How and Why Realists (Re)Built the(ir) Cold War David
Grondin Occasional Paper Paper presented at the annual International Studies Association Convention, March 1720, 2004, Montreal)
Much of the Cold War state apparatus and military infrastructure remained in place to meet the challenges and
threats of the post-Cold War era. If the attack on Pearl Harbor was the driving force of the postwar national security state apparatus (Stuart, 2003:
303), the 9/11 events have been used as a motive for resurrecting the national security discourse as a justification
against a new infamy, global terrorism.19 Although in this study I am calling into question the political practices that legitimized the very idea of a
national security state during the Cold War era, I find even more problematic the reproduction of a similar logic in the post-9/11 era
a rather different historical and socio-political context. As Simon Dalby highlights, Coupling fears of Soviet ambitions, of a
repeat of Pearl Harbor, and of nuclear war, these institutions formed the heart of a semipermanent military
mobilization to support the policies of containment militarism. If this context is no longer applicable, the case that the national security
state is not an appropriate mode for social organization in the future is in many ways compelling. If security is premised on violence, as securitydilemma and national-security literatures suggest (albeit often reluctantly), perhaps the necessity of rethinking global
politics requires abandoning the term and the conceptual strictures that go with it (Dalby, 1997: 21).
Invocations of a dangerous other threatening the stability of the West place discursive
control in the hands of a national security complex fixated on continual war
The Cold War national security culture represented in realist discourses was constitutive of the American national
security state. There was certainly a conflation of theory and policy in the Cold War military-intellectual complex, which were observers of, and active
participants in, defining the meaning of the Cold War. They contributed to portray the enemy that both reflected and fueled
predominant ideological strains within the American body politic. As scholarly partners in the national security state, they were
instrumental in defining and disseminating a Cold War culture (Rubin, 2001: 15). This national security culture was a complex space
where various representations and representatives of the national security state compete to draw the boundaries and
dominate the murkier margins of international relations (Der Derian, 1992: 41). The same Cold War security culture has
been maintained by political practice (on the part of realist analysts and political leaders) through realist discourses in
the post-9/11 era and once again reproduces the idea of a national security state. This (implicit) state identification is neither
accidental nor inconsequential. From a poststructuralist vantage point, the identification process of the state and the nation is always a
negative process for it is achieved by exclusion, violence, and marginalization. Thus, a deconstruction of practices that constitute
and consolidate state identity is necessary: the writing of the state must be revealed through the analysis of the discourses that constitute it. The state and
the discourses that (re)constitute it thus frame its very identity and impose a fictitious national unity on society; it is
from this fictive and arbitrary creation of the modernist dichotomous discourses of inside/outside that the discourses
(re)constructing the state emerge. It is in the creation of a Self and an Other in which the state uses it monopolistic
power of legitimate violence a power socially constructed, following Max Webers work on the ethic of responsibility
to construct a threatening Other differentiated from the unified Self, the national society (the nation).16 It is through this
very practice of normative statecraft,17 which produces threatening Others, that the international sphere comes into being. David Campbell adds that it is by
constantly articulating danger through foreign policy that the states very conditions of existence are generated18.
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LinkHegemony
US hegemony establishes a global liberal order engaged in constant warthe world is
translated into a universal domestic realm in which continual American intervention is
necessitated
Louiza Odysseos, Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Sussex, Liberalisms War,
Liberalisms Order: Rethinking the Global Liberal Order as a Global Civil War paper prepared for Liberal
Internationalism, 17 March 2008, San Francisco
This echoes official voices of the new normalcy or the new normal, pronounced by Vice President Cheney the day
before the USA PATRIOT Act passed into law in October 2001: Many of the steps we have now been forced to take will become permanent in
American life. They represent an understanding of the world as it is, and dangers we must guard against perhaps for decades to come. I think of it as the new normalcy (Cheney
2001).9 The
new normalcy, encompassing as it does the biopolitical operations of the state of exception, and which
involves the defence of logistical societies (Reid 2006), points to a disruption of the relationship posited by Schmitt
between the rule and the exception, allowing Agamben to speak of its becoming the dominant paradigm of
government in contemporary politics (Agamben 2005: 2). When the state of exception becomes the (political) rule, we discern it more clearly as a space devoid of
law, in which the law is replaced by civil war and revolutionary violence, that is human action that has shed [deposto] every relation to law (ibid.: 59). 10 Since the state of exception
has today reached its maximum worldwide deployment, we
are faced with the advent of a global civil war in which the normative aspect
of the law can thus be obliterated and contradicted with impunity by a governmental violence that while ignoring
international law externally and producing a permanent state of exception internally nevertheless still claims to be
applying the law (ibid.: 87) The emphasis placed on the fictitious (or willed) state of exception and on the analogy to Nazism, alongside the exposition of Benjamins call to
bring about a real state of exception with which to fight Fascism (1999: 248), might suggest that we are faced with a post-modern totalitarianism, which
normalises the state of exception and leads us to a global civil war. Yet this term refers, for Agamben, not so much to actual fighting or a specific
instance of conflict but, importantly, to a form of world ordering, pursued by (or which is) the global liberal order. The global liberal order, then, maybe be
preliminarily formally indicated as a war-order. As he explains in an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: By the rapid reduction of global politics to
the antitheses of state/terrorism, what once seemed a paradoxical and peripheral term has today become real and effective. By strategically linking the two
paradigms of the state of emergency and the civil war, the new American world order defines itself as a situation in
which the state of emergency [exception] can no longer be distinguished from the norm, and in which even
differentiating between war and peace - and between external and civil war - is impossible (Agamben 2003; brackets added).
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Realist discourse keeps the US operating on Cold War logic, securitizes against the other
and prevents any alternative forms of thought from achieving legitimacy.
As American historian of U.S. foreign relations Michael Hogan observes in his study on the rise of the national security state during the Truman administration,
the
national security ideology framed the Cold War discourse in a system of symbolic representation that defined
Americas national identity by reference to the un-American other, usually the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, or some other totalitarian
power The very notion of state security as it is used in this literature is concerned with the relationship between state
and society where the state provides insurance against the impact of external contingencies (Mabee, 2003: 143). However,
as Bryan Mabee rightfully notes, this research area overlaps with the idea of the national security state, as conceptualized in the literature on the history of US
security policy, with particular reference to the early Cold War years, and the founding of the National Security Act in 1947 (Mabee, 2003: 148, note 15). In
addition, a feminist literature on
national security studies has emphasized how states, and not only the American state, act
as security states. For example, for Iris Marion Young, security states designate Hobbes Leviathan; they are authoritarian governments
acting as protector states asking total obedience from their society. The state grounds its patriarchal role of the
masculine protector in fear of threat and in the apparent desire for protection such fear generates (Young, 2003: 2). In light
of these different literatures, when using the concept of national security state, it is necessary to specify the context and the meaning with which it is associated.
Such a binary system made it difficult for any domestic dissent from U.S. policy to emerge it would have amounted
to an act of disloyalty (Hogan, 1998: 18).15 While Hogan distinguishes advocates from critics of the American national security state, his view takes for
granted that there is a given and fixed American political culture that differs from the new national security ideology. It posits an American way, produced by its
cultural, political, and historical experience. Although he stresses that differences between the two sides of the discourse are superficial, pertaining solely to the
means, rather than the ends of the national security state, Hogan sees the national security state as a finished and legitimate state:
an American state suited to the Cold War context of permanent war, while stopping short of a garrison state: Although
government would grow larger, taxes would go up, and budget deficits would become a matter of routine, none of these and other transformations would add up
to the crushing regime symbolized in the metaphor of the garrison state. The outcome instead would be an American national security state that was shaped as
much by the countrys democratic political culture as it was by the perceived military imperatives of the Cold War (Hogan, 1998: 22). I disagree with this
essentialist view of the state identity of the United States. The United States does not need to be a national security state. If it was
and is still constructed as such by many realist discourses, it is because these discourses serve some political
purpose. Moreover, in keeping with my poststructuralist inclinations, I maintain that identity need not be, and indeed never is, fixed. In a scheme in which to
say is to do, that is, from a perspective that accepts the performativity of language, culture becomes a relational site where identity politics happens rather than
being a substantive phenomenon. In this sense, culture is not simply a social context framing foreign policy decision-making. Culture is a signifying part of the
conditions of possibility for social being, [] the way in which culturalist arguments themselves secure the identity of subjects in whose name they speak
(Campbell, 1998: 221).
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LinkCirculation
Mobility infrastructure paradoxically imposes freedom of movement on the populace to
support security apparatuses
Didier Bigo, Professor of International Relations at Sciences-Po, Paris, Security: A Field Left Fallow, trans. J.E.
Dillon, Foucault on Politics, Security and War, ed. Michael Dillon and Andrew W. Neal, Palgrave Macmillan: New
York, 2008, p. 107-108
As we have seen, a major argument for Foucault is that a dispositif of security cannot exist without a regime of liberties, and in
particular without freedom of circulation. Security pre-supposes that one analyses mobilities, networks and margins instead
of the frontier and the isolation that goes with demarcation. Security is thus a dispositif of circulation within a life
environment and not a dispositif of disciplining bodies. A security dispositif does not isolate, it is built as a network. It does not
close off the social area but interweaves its aspects. It does not operate so as to watch and maintain surveillance, it lets things happen (as a
form of laissez-faire). Specialists on European institutions have to question themselves about this dimension where freedom of circulation produces a normality, a
security which destabilises disciplinary closures and sovereign logics, and thus creates unease about the lack of certainty (Apap, 2001; Gangster et al., 1997;
Huysmans, 2004a; Kelstrup and Williams, 2000). They are often unaware of the Foucaultian approach and its idea of centrifugal dynamic, and see the
phenomenon through the lenses of a spillover, but much research concerning the frontiers of Europe can profit from Foucaults lectures. What is often not
accepted is the effect this line of thought has on freedom. The
proposition overturns the conventional schema of the balance

between two different principles: security and freedom (Bigo et al., 2006a). Security is not the opposite of liberty. It is not an equivalent
principle. It is not even the delineation of the limits of liberty or a form of necessity. It is the result of liberties. Security works in a given area
and favours the double movement of extending the area and freeing circulation. In fact, within the interplay of opposing forces,
security is extended by displacing frontiers, pushing back controls on others, externalising discipline so as to maintain securitisation only in the name of the liberty
of the majority (Bigo and Guild, 2005; Valluy, 2005).
Production of greater and more efficient population movement justified through the
backdrop of images of terror is a strategy of population management
Diken and Laustsen 3 Blent Diken, lecturer in Sociology at Lancaster University, and Carsten Bagge Laustsen,
Ph.D. student at the University of Copenhagen, Zones of indistinction : security, terror and bare life, Territories,
Islands, camps and other states of utopia, 2003, p. 42-51, http://www.languageandcapitalism.info/wpcontent/uploads/2006/08/wot.pdf
Modern sovereignty does not only work according to the disciplinary logic of exclusion. Disciplinary confinement, and thus
exclusion and normalization constitute only one of the three spatial principles embodied in the camp. The camp is also a space of control
organized according to a science of flows, manifesting a biopolitical paradigm la Foucault. Control does not demand the
delimitation of movement but rather abstraction and speed. Significantly, the Nazi regime used the human instinct for
survival to make the Jews carry out their own destruction. The Nazi sought to destroy the Jews step by step, making
them opt for the least evil option each time, which paved the way for the greatest evil. In the camp, there was no
space for rest, reflection and comfort: work, finding something to eat and survival were parts of a daily battle, which
meant that the prisoners were in permanent movement. What interrupted their controlled flow was terror. In contrast to
discipline and control, which operate, respectively, in terms of enclosure and flow, terror functions against the background of fear related to
uncertainty, insecurity and unsafety. The prisoner could be hit, at any time, by the guards anger, the greatest terror
being the showers. Terror immobilizes through fear. It is thus disciplinary without the spatial confinement of
discipline and the functional regularity of flows. Let us now investigate these three paradigms discipline, control, and terror focusing on how
the attempts at escaping from one form of power sediment other, more advanced forms of power.
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Foucault
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LinkCirculation
Mobile subjectivity requires discipline and regulation from the state in the form of
increasingly effective transportation infrastructure to ensure that speed does not exceed
mechanisms of social control
Jeremy Packer, Assistant Professor of Communications at Penn State-University Park, Foucault, Cultural Studies,
and Governmentality, 2003, p. 139-140
Paul Virilios thesis in Speed and Politics (1986) is that the power of the State is primarily that of the police: the management of the public ways. He follows this
with a combative assertion on thinking about knowledge. Virilio states in his study, the related logic of knowing-power, or power-knowledge, is eliminated to the
benefit of moving-powerin other words the study of tendencies, of flows (p. 47). An examination of this statement will make it apparent that although Virilio
does provide impetus to think about the importance of mobility and its control, his dismissal of the relationship between power and knowledge not only weakens
his claims but forces his hand regarding notions of power and freedom. Foucault, according to Virilio, is the thinker of confinement and disciplinarity.
Power/knowledge according to Foucault describes the co-constitutive capacities of knowledge and power to produce apparatusses of control, regulation, and
production. The important insight that power/knowledge provides is that discourses such as science, medicine, or psychology, through
their monopoly on truth claims, exert the power to determine the relative face of reality. For instance, Foucault in Madness and
Civilization (1965) explains how, through the creation of the descriptive category of madness, a whole series of material effects were carried out upon those
deemed mad by medicine and psychology Knowledge
then is not simply descriptive, but productive. It produces, among other things,
normative categories, prescriptions for proper conduct, and relations of power: for instance the relationship of doctor-patient or
highway patrolman-driver. Virilio, by dismissing the power/knowledge thesis, demonstrates that his understanding of power is in line with traditional Marxism in
which power is wielded by the State and is exerted upon an unsuspecting proletariat, with negative effects.3 His discussion of freedom begins to reveal his notion
of the negative effects that the power of speed has, namely the loss of freedom. Freedom for Virilio is something innate to individuals rather than the product and
necessity of certain forms of government. Furthermore, speed is a correlate of freedom within conceptions of mobility: more speed is said to equal greater
freedom. In Foucault and Political Reason (1996), Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose critique this understanding of freedom and its relation to a
top-down conception of power. The following quote sums this up: Freedom is neither an ideological fiction of modern societies nor an existential feature of
existence within them; it must be
understood also and necessarily as a formula of rule. Foucaults concern here might be characterized as an
has become, in our socalled free societies, a resource for, and not merely a hindrance to, government. (p. 8) If we are to take Foucaults notion seriously we need not
simply look for instances in which something, in this instance speed, leads to a loss of freedom, but instead reveal the types of freedom produced
by speed, the types of regulations placed on speed and its purposes, and the necessity of freedom as a constitutive
element of the very notion of speed. Speed after all is always relative; it is measured against what is considered the
normative rate. Freedom and mobility, one of its material corollaries, must be understood then in their specificity and in their
necessity to current forms of governing, State and otherwise. This demands a recognition that as the potential for mobility is
increased, the subject of governing must change in accordance. A more free or at least more mobile citizen
becomes necessary to partake actively in a differently striated space. Thus the goal of governing is not to simply guard against
too much freedom, but to produce the type of freedom that accords with the expansive demands of culture and economy .
attempt to link the analysis of the constitution of freedom with that of the exercise of rule; that is, with the extent to which freedom
Governing at a distance across striated space takes the place of direct control. A proper deployment of power requires enabling and activating men and things
(Foucault 1991, p. 93) in a manner that allows them to and in fact demands that they move outside of confined and continuously surveyed arenas. It also means
striating space in such a fashion that rule can still be exercised. Depending upon what perspective drives ones analysis, one could view the directly surveyed
subject as far less dangerous to the State than the mobile subject, and thus more free, in that once it is surveyed, its perceived ability to do harm to the state is
minimal and thus not taken as seriously. Mobile
subjects, on the other hand, must be highly disciplined, because they are not under
continual surveillance, are not always within the immediate scope of state interaction, and are depended upon to
execute the goals of State and non-State institutions when the State per se is not present to do so. Thus, to be mobile
is to be free to govern oneself, across a vast territory, but it is always in accordance with governing in so far as it coincides with convenient ends (p.
93).
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Foucault
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LinkTransportation Infrastructure
Transportation infrastructure is designed to maximize the extraction of labor from the
populace and identify and quarantine social deviants and unproductive workers
Elden 8 Stuart Elden, Strategies for Waging Peace: Foucault as Collaborateur, Foucault on Politics, Security and
War, ed. Michael Dillon and Andrew W. Neal, Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2008, p. 28-30
In sum, over a million francs was projected for this work, worth about 773,000 euros today, 13 enough to support a fairly large team for a few years. 14 Various outputs came from this
work, culminating in the book Les quipements du pouvoir which was originally published as a special issue of the journal Recherches in 1973, and then reissued in 1976. 15
Recherches was the house journal of CERFI, and although all the projects clearly influenced the work, this is very much based on Fourquets research project. 16 The
equipments of power analysed in this book are the three items in the subtitle: towns, territories and collective equipments quipements
collectifs. By these Fourquet and Murard mean something akin to public amenities or the infrastructure of society. These are tools or utensils that are utilised
collectively roads, transportation and communication networks, and the more static apparatus of towns. Circulation necessarily plays a
crucial role, with the flux and flow of people, goods and capital as money (Fourquet and Murard, 1976: p. 35). For Fourquet and Murard,
these elements of infrastructure are means of production, or perhaps more accurately the means by which production can
be achieved (Fourquet and Murard, 1976: p. 32). The town is in their terms a collective equipment, and the network [rseau] of
towns distribute capital across the whole of the national territory (Fourquet and Murard, 1976: p. 35). Foucault himself takes place in two dialogues
in the book, after the outlining of various ideas by Fourquet and Murard. 17 In the English translation of the dialogues the order is reversed, and the accompanying material left aside.
This makes for a peculiarly decontextualised discussion. Fourquet and Murard note that the three key terms that they are interested in thinking through are power, territory and
production, particularly in their interrelation (Fourquet and Murard, 1976: p. 7). The stress on power and territory within a broadly Marxist analysis allows for a displacement rather than
a revision or critique (Fourquet and Murard, 1976: p. 8). This context is supplemented by an interest in Deleuze and Guattaris work Anti-Oedipus, and earlier texts which the authors
received while working on this, and an interest in Foucaults work on madness and the clinic (Fourquet and Murard, 1976: p. 10). The original title of the work, Gnalogie des
quipements collectives (Fourquet and Murard, 1976: p. 9) perhaps betrays this Foucaultian influence a Foucault then engaging with Nietzsches ideas in detail. Indeed in the
extended introduction, Fourquet and Murard acknowledge Deleuze and Foucaults readings of Nietzsche, as well as the pioneering work of Bataille and Klossowski (Fourquet and
Murard, 1976: p. 17). All sorts of Foucaultian themes are found in this work the use of the panopticon, relations of power and knowledge, surveillance, control of population and
normalisation of individuals and so on. The dating of the material to the early 1970s shows that this relation was not solely a one-way influence. Murard and Fourquet utilise Foucaults
research on madness, medicine and other issues, but the bulk of the material predates Discipline and Punish, although there is some editing between the 1973 journal article and the
1976 book. Some of Foucaults ideas about the division of space in schools and the control of childrens bodies and medical plans for towns are discussed in this work (see Fourquet
and Murard, 1976: pp. 1978, 210). A range of other contemporary thinkers are utilised, including those of a more obviously Marxist perspective such as Lefebvre (Fourquet and
Murard, 1976: pp. 556) and Castells. The ideas of normalisation are explicitly related to Canguilhem, just as Foucault does in his Les Anormaux lectures (Fourquet and Murard, 1976:
p. 155, see 7). But the other key role is played by Fernand Braudel, who is mentioned in a number of places (Fourquet and Murard, 1976: pp. 7, 10). The book is organised on the
following plan: La ville-ordinateur the town-machine La ville-mtaphore the town-metaphor Les territoires territories Formation des quipements collectives formation of
collective equipments or facilities Le discours du plan the discourse of the plan conomie politique sans famille political economy without the family. In the second dialogue
Foucault takes the example of a road, and suggests that it plays three strategic functions: to produce production, to
produce demand, and to normalise. While the first two are unsurprising from a Marxist perspective, the third is perhaps most interesting. Production
requires transport, the movement of goods and labour, and the levies or tithes of state power and tax collector. The
bandit is an antithetical person in these relations. Demand requires the market, merchandise, buyers and sellers, it creates a whole
system of coded places of business, regulates prices and goods sold. The inspector, controller or customs agent face-to-face with the smuggler
of contraband, the peddler (Foucault, 1996: p. 106; Fourquet and Murard, 1976: pp. 21516). Both production and demand are the subject of the
procedure of normalisation, in the adjusting and regulation of these two domains. Foucault talks about the amnagement du territoire, the control and planning of the
land or territory of the state that the road allows. The role of engineers is important both as a product of normalising power their education and authentic knowledge and as its
privileged agent. In
opposition to them are those who do not fit the allowed circuits the vagabond or the sedentary: in both
cases, abnormal (Foucault, 1996: p. 216; Fourquet and Murard, 1976: p. 107). Foucault stresses that this is merely one example of the kind of collective equipment that
Fourquet and Murard are analysing. He suggests that the chronology of the industrial and the disciplinary state we should note that it is of the state, not society, that he is speaking
do not match up, although they are correlatives. Education produces producers, it produces those who demand and at the same time, it normalises, classes, divides, imposes rules and
indicates the limit of the pathological (Foucault, 1996: p. 107; Fourquet and Murard, 1976: pp. 21718). Deleuze
responds to this, suggesting that the three

aspects are rather investment, treating someone as a producer in potential or actuality; control, treating someone as a
consumer; the public service aspect, the citizen as a user. Utilising concepts that he and Guattari would develop in their collaborative work, Deleuze
suggests that the highway today is channelled nomadism, a partitioning into a grid, while public service implies a general
nomadism (Foucault, 1996: p. 107; Fourquet and Murard, 1976: pp. 21718). Foucaults point in response is that the state is tasked with the
balancing of production of production (i.e. supply) with the production of demand. The states role in other areas, such as the normalisation
undertaken by the police, hospitals, treatment of the insane, is ambiguous: on the one hand the states role expands, but on the other private corporations are part of a process of destatisation. Foucaults telling point is that the difference between socialist and capitalist utopias is that the latter worked. But now,
instead of private ventures of this

kind, there are housing projects that the state must control, that depend on the State apparatus. The deck has been reshuffled
(Foucault, 1996: p. 108; Fourquet and Murard, 1976: pp. 21820). Murard and Fourquet give their own examples, of hospitals that act as means of production in terms of producing the
healthy workforce required by capital.
11
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Foucault
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LinkPublic Transportation
Efficient public transportation fulfills the biopolitical necessity of increasing population
movement and labor extraction while regulating movement and social interactions
The first technique of docility dealt with by Foucault is the art of distributions, mentioned earlier in the discussion of the naval hospital. It entails the distribution
of individuals in space provided through the enclosure of populations, the partitioning of individuals within that space,
the creation of specialized spaces in which only singular activities took place, and the rank of arrangements through
which individuals move. This last point is particularly important in that individuals are never given a fixed location, but rather their
purposefulness is dependent upon the relative location that they occupy at any given moment. This allows for
mobility, yet only in a very predetermined fashion. For instance, there are very particular places in which one can operate motor vehicles: primarily the road
system, with some ever-decreasing number of off-road areas. The roads themselves only connect certain places, and the quickest routes
generally only connect places of political and economic importance. Furthermore, only certain types of vehicles and modes of transportation are
allowable in these spaces. The second technique is the control of activity, which primarily depends upon the allocation of time and the efficient connection of actor and tools, through
the use of time-tables, the standardization of time allowed for actions, the partitioning of actions, and exhaustive use of time. The control of activities on the road can in a simple way be
understood as the rules of the road: one-way streets, stop signs, turn signal use, speed limits, and so forth. In
the name of efficiency an entire traffic

engineering apparatus has been set up to minimize time spent on roads in order to command the most efficient use
of resources. As drivers we merely serve as transporters of our own resources: time, money, and labor. This creates
the third technique of docility, capitalization of time. It entails the repetitive but gradual acceleration of proficiency. Thus
the Highway Commission is constantly under pressure to produce more proficient drivers through the use of traffic engineering. Whether automobiles or other forms of public
transportation are involved, the often divergent goals of personal mobility and population mobilization frequently derail any plans to satisfy both desires with one system as Bruno Latour
(1996) notes. The last technique described by Foucault is the
composition of forces. It entails the response to a new demand for social

efficiency, which is to construct a machine whose effect will be maximized by the concerted articulation of the
elementary parts of which it is composed (Foucault, 1979, p. 164). Thus the techniques listed above are said to elevate the effectiveness of simple actions into a
comprehensive activity~ In this instance it is paramount that the mobility produced must service other sectors of the social order, most notably
the economy and government. Put simply, these techniques of docility must enable individuals to get to work, transport
goods, go on vacation, get to shopping malls, and go to school in an efficient manner. Furthermore, the road system needs
to operate to keep particular, often less docile, populations off the streets, away from middle-class suburbs, and
without access to quick group mobilization.6
12
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Foucault
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LinkTraffic Safety
Purging transportation of its attendant dangers is a tool to solidify social control through
the ordering of mobility
In his Governmentality lecture, Michel Foucault (1991) pinpoints Guillaume de La Perriers statement in Mirror Politique, one of the first anti-Machiavellian
treatises on government, government is the right disposition of things, arranged so as to lead to a convenient end (Foucault, 1991, p. 93), as the demarcator of
the shift from sovereignty to governmentality. According to de La Perrier, and Foucault by extension, ruling was no longer consumed by the task of simply
retaining sovereignty. Rather, it became the responsibility of rulers to employ tactics that would benefit the population as well
as the State. In place of the goal simply to maintain territory and loyalty, men and territory were seen as a means to an ends, assuming
they were properly disposed. According to Foucault, the metaphor often used to illustrate this point, in the governing manuals of the eighteenth century, was the
governance of a ship (p. 93). This metaphor speaks to a concern with not only the men on the ship and the potential gain produced by successful shipping, but,
importantly, the avoidance of catastrophes that could befall such an enterprise. It is the choice of this metaphor that I want to elucidate in this essay. It bears
further elaboration because it points out the importance of mobility in the formation of thought concerning governing. In an increasingly mobile world,
governing mobility consumes greater and greater amounts of mental and physical resources. A vast literature explains the
structural organization, political and economic advantages, and general importance of transportation and communication systems that crisscross the globe. But
personal mobility is
achieved through the brute materiality of cars, trucks, buses, trains, motorcycles, and airplanes. This form of mobility
plays a vital role in how individuals organize, rationalize, and inhabit their world. It is at this intersection of
governance and governed (increasingly self-governed) in the realm of the microphysics of power, that the following analysis
of the politics of mobility is located. Quite literally, individuals are the vehicles of power (Foucault 1980, p. 98). Personal mobility must therefore be seen as an act of power. An examination of the net like-organisation (p. 98) that binds individual aims and governmental
more specifically, the disposition of these resources takes place not only on a global or national scale. In contemporary America,
primarily
aims can illuminate the important ways that our individual mobile conduct is implicated in, guided by, and resistant to seemingly detached political, economic, and
cultural trends. The relative importance ascribed to Foucaults work is often based on his analysis of large-scale processes such as power, discourse, or, more
recently, government. The critical orientation that such generalities provide for current and friture intellectual enterprises is certainly important. However, it needs
to remain clear that the specificity of Foucaults research was often the microphysics of power and close discursive investigation of key texts that oriented thought
at critical moments. Furthermore, thinking about mobility, like thinking about incarceration or madness, demands detours into discursive territory that is not
necessarily obvious at first. In the case of this essay the
notion of safety has oriented my road map for investigating how personal mobility is
linked to governing. As the ship metaphor makes explicit, an important part of governing in general and mobility specifically is
the avoidance of catastrophe. It is this avoidancebeing safethat comes to construct thought and ultimately selfreflection about mobility. As Foucault explains, in order for something to be governed, or imagined as governable, it needs to be problematized (1990b).
This is to say that an activity to be governed needs to be thought of in terms of a problem to be overcome. In this regard,
mobility, like communication (Mattelart, 1996, p. xvi), has historically been seen as an economic, cultural, and political good, but it has been
problematized according to the dangers that it posed. The idea of safety serves then as the solution and provides a
normative orientation for mobility. Once this orientation solidifies, as I will argue it has, it disperses into a vast array of
normative contexts, thereby legitimating forms of governance and self-governance that have little relation to any specific
problematization.
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Foucault
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LinkHighways
Highway expansion fortifies class divisions within populations by stratifying social
privileges through the criteria of automobility
Campbell 5 ,David The Biopolitics of Security: Oil, Empire, and the Sports Utility Vehicle American Quarterly, Vol. 57, No. 3, Legal Borderlands: Law
and the Construction of American Borders (Sep., 2005), pp. 943- JSTOR BSH
Although constructed as a means to achieve the unification of social life, the
web of traffic routes that permeate urban space have in practice

furthered the fragmentation of the urban and its peri-urban and suburban spaces, creat-ing in the process new
borderlands (which in turn require new capsules of security).The distanciation of life elements (home from work, family from
friends, haves from have nots) that are part of this urban fissure in turn promotes further reliance on automobility as people seek to
overcome, traverse, or bypass these divisions. Importantly, this partitioning of the urban world has been codified in and encouraged by
planning legislation. Embodying a functionalist view of the city as an organized machine, American urban plan-ners
from the 1 920s on relied on a system of zoning controls that separated uses and imposed homogenous criteria on specified areas.
Hostile to mixed usage or hybrid formations, these uniform zoning codes (known as Euclidean zoning after a 1 926 Supreme Court decision in favor of the
village of Euclid) have produced urban sprawl and the elongation of travel routes.95 In the absence of public transport systems, these
urban forms have further increased reliance on the car. For residents of the border zones known as "edge cities," there is little choice but to
rely on private transport for mobility. Contemporary urban life is both sustained by oil in the form of the car and requires increasing oil
consumption through the use of the car urban life promotes. Citizens are thus coerced into a limited flexibility, creating a situation that is "a wonderful
testament
14
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Foucault
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LinkTerrain
Identifying zones of land as sites for sovereign struggle and competition converts land into
militaristic terrainthis supports and extends the violence essential to modern statecraft
Stuart Elden, Durham University, Land, terrain, territory, Progress in Human Geography 34 (6), 2010, p. 799-817
The conflict over land indicated by Anderson is significant. Property is important as an indicator, but conflict over land is twofold: both over its possession and conducted on its terrain.
Land is both the site and stake of struggle. In this it differs from conflict over other resources. Strategic-military reasons thus become significant. As well as
seeking to maximize the possession of land as a scarce resource, feudal lords and nascent states were also concerned with security, management and administration. Defensible
borders, homogeneity and the promotion of territorial cohesion offer a range of examples examples that straddle the
strategic issues and link closely to the development of a range of techniques of state practice. France, for example, following the
Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659, began a process of mapping and surveying its land, employing technical specialists both to map and to reinforce its so-called natural frontiers. A
related term to that of land is therefore terrain. This is land that has a strategic, political, military sense. The English territory, the
French territoire and related terms in other languages derive from quite a specific sense of the Latin territorium. Territorium is an extremely rare term in classical Latin that becomes
common in the Middle Ages. The standard definition is the land belonging to a town or another entity such as a religious order. It is used, for instance, by Cicero (1858: volume IV, 522)
for the agricultural lands of a colony, and in phrases such as that describing the birthplace of the Venerable Bede in his Ecclesiastical history. Bede (Colgrave and Mynors, 1969: v, 24)
is described as being born in territorio eiusdem monasterii, in lands belonging to the monastery. This monastery was Jarrow in northeast England. In Alfred the Greats Anglo-Saxon
translation, Bede was born on sundorlonde of the monastery, outlying lands, lands sundered from the estate itself, but under its possession, and thus it has been claimed that this is
the basis for the name of the town Sunderland, although it is not clear that it was this sundorlonde (Brown, 1855: 277, 280; Colgrave, 1969: xix). As a number of writers have discussed,
the etymology of territorium is disputed, with the meaning of the place around a town supplemented by that of a place from which people are warned or frightened (see, for example,
Connolly, 1995; Neocleous, 2003; Hindess, 2006). The Latin terrere is to frighten, deriving from the Greek trein meaning to flee from fear, to be afraid, and the Sanskrit, trasati, meaning
he trembles, is afraid. This means that the term territory has an association with fear and violence, an association that is more compelling in history than etymology. As argued
elsewhere, creating
a bounded space is already a violent act of exclusion and inclusion; maintaining it as such requires
constant vigilance and the mobilization of threat; and challenging it necessarily entails a transgression (Elden, 2009: xxx).
Terrain is of course a term used by physical geographers and geologists. Yet all too often the term terrain is used in a very vague sense. Evans (1998: 119), for instance, notes that to
some of us, terrain analysis means, especially, quantitative analysis of terrain, thus seeing a greater need to qualify the mode, rather than object, of analysis. Terrain is seen as land
form, rather than process (Lane et al., 1998; see also Lawrence et al., 1993; Wilson and Gallant, 2000). It is also a term used by military strategists. Yet there is a relation as well as a
separation, with knowledge of battlefield terrain essential to military success. There are a number of important studies of different military campaigns and the question of terrain, but little
conceptual precision (see, for example, Parry, 1984; Winters, 1998; Rose and Nathanail, 2000; Doyle and Bennett, 2002a).10 For Doyle and Bennett (2002b: 1), terrain encompasses
both the physical aspects of earths surface, as well as the human interaction with them. At times terrain seems to be landscape devoid of life, as it is when targeting of cities is
discussed without reference to those living within it, or it is reduced from a concrete materiality to a level of virtuality. Max Webers analysis of the historical development of the state,
and Michael Manns study of the changing dynamics of power (Mann, 1986; 1993), where they do discuss territory, could be seen to be operating in a way that sees territory as terrain,
a political-strategic relation. In his interview with the geographers of the H erodote journal, Foucault deflects their inquiry about his use of spatial categories, suggesting that they are
not primarily geographical, but instead shot through with power. As he declares, territory is no doubt a geographical notion, but its first of all a juridico-political one: the area controlled
by a certain kind of power (Foucault, 2007: 176). As his interviewers respond, certain spatial metaphors are equally geographical and strategic, which is only natural since geography
grew up in the shadow of the military (p. 177). They make the explicit linkage between the region of geographers and the commanded region, fromregere; the conquered territory of a
province, from vincere; and the field as battlefield. Foucault then notes how the
politico-strategic term is an indication of how the military and

administration actually come to inscribe themselves both on a material soil and within forms of discourse (p. 177). Lefebvre
offers further concrete and compelling discussion of this relation (see also Lefebvre, 1974: 133; 1991: 122; 2009; Brenner and Elden, 2009): Sovereignty implies space,
and what is more it implies a space against which violence, whether latent or overt, is directed a space established and constituted by
violence . . . Every state is born of violence, and state power endures only by virtue of violence directed towards a
space . . . At the same time, too, violence enthroned a specific rationality, that of accumulation, that of the bureaucracy and the army a unitary,
logistical, operational and quantifying rationality which would make economic growth possible and draw strength from that growth for its own expansion to a point where it would take
possession of the entire planet. A founding violence, and continuous creation by violence (by fire and blood, in Bismarcks phrase) such are the
hallmarks of the state. (Lefebvre, 1974: 32233; 1991: 280) What is central in Lefebvres reading is the relation between accumulation, violence and the unitary, logistical, operational
and quantifying rationality. For Lefebvre this highlights the limitations of a political-economic reading of territory as land: Neither Marx and Engels nor Hegel clearly perceived the
violence at the core of the accumulation process . . . and thus its role in the production of a politico-economic space. This space was of course the birthplace and cradle of the modern
state (Lefebvre, 1974: 322; 1991: 279; see also pp. 413/358).
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LinkArctic Territory
The primary issue underlying Arctic concerns is a question of territory and borders. What
is at stake is a method of delineating an inside and outside to feed a desire for security
Klaus Dodds, Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, Flag planting and finger pointing:
The Law of the Sea, the Arctic and the political geographies of the outer continental shelf, Political Geography, Vol.
29, Issue 2, February 2010, p. 63-73, Elsevier
The ongoing claims to OCS and maritime resources, alongside with debates about the trans-continental accessibility
of the Arctic, has attracted considerable popular and formal geopolitical speculation. According to some commentators, the Arctic
is on the threshold of a political and environmental state-change (e.g. Berkman & Young, 2009). Sea ice thinning in particular is held to be
primarily responsible for stimulating renewed interest in the Arctic as a resource rich space awaiting further
development and exploitation. Moreover, as a consequence of these potential shifts, it is claimed that we are witnessing the
prospect of further schisms emerging over maritime claims to the Arctic Ocean. As Berkman and Young (2009: 339) warn, The
Arctic could slide into a new era featuring jurisdictional conflicts, increasingly severe clashes over the extraction of natural resources, and the emergence of a
new great game among the global powers. Claims
to OCS are only one element, therefore, in a wider discursive reconfiguration

of the Arctic. Repeated warnings concerning the thinning of Arctic sea ice have contributed to increasingly strategic
debate concerning the region's accessibility not only in the form of shipping lanes (e.g. the Northwest Passage and Northern Sea
Route) but also as an energy/resource frontier. What is at stake here, I believe, is a competing sense of territorial legibility,
most notably over the maritime Arctic. The ongoing attempt of the coastal states to map and survey their continental shelves is
one powerful manifestation of that desire, in the words of the US led Extended Continental Shelf Project, for certainty and
recognition. Informing, and indeed enhancing, that desire for those aforementioned qualities is a whole series of
bordering practices ranging from demarcating the outer continental shelf to speculating about new fears of illegal
trans-shipment and illicit flows through an ice-free Arctic. What, however, is clear is that those Arctic coastal states seeking certainty and
recognition will have to do so in a world much changed form the Cold War era when extra-territorial actors and indigenous communities were either marginal or
marginalised, respectively (cf. Osherenko & Young, 1989).
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LinkArctic Territory
Exploring and opening the Arctic is intimately linked with the governmental practice of
bordering and identifying domestic spaces which must be protected from foreign threats, as
well as a colonial mythology of economic expansion
The inscription of Arctic territory including remote areas of the seabed by coastal states and international bodies such as the CLCS makes it
both more legible and accessible although in this case accessibility is unusual in the sense that it is likely to only apply to scientists and their
logistical sponsors including civilian and military agencies such as the US Coast Guard. Access to these territories will, because of their
remoteness, inevitably be conditioned by variable sea ice/weather. The CLCS requested that the Russian authorities conduct further
oceanographic research in the central Arctic Ocean following their 2001 submission to this UN body. What has changed in the intervening period, however, was
this attempt to calculate subterranean territory was further heightened by a growing awareness of an Arctic being
changed by ice melting and debates over accessibility involving a range of parties including coastal and non-coastal
states. The establishment of calculable territory depends on underwater interventions and the travails of mini-submarines and survey vessels are
helping to create the conditions for further sovereign interventions. The map and the survey are one element of this
intervention but so are other kinds of activities and practices. In a speech to an audience in the Canadian Arctic, the Canadian
Prime Minister noted that: But you can't defend Arctic sovereignty with words aloneIt takes a Canadian presence on
the ground, in the air and on the sea and a Government that is internationally recognized for delivering on its
commitments. And I am here today to make it absolutely clear there is no question about Canada's Arctic borderAll along the border, our jurisdiction
extends outward 200 miles into the surrounding sea, just as it does along our Atlantic and Pacific coastlinesSome in the opposition dismiss our focus on
northern sovereignty as expensive and unnecessarySome have actually come to the North and suggested our plans here are a waste of money. To that I say,
government's first obligation is to defend the territorial integrity of its bordersThis is Nunavut Our Land just as Yukon and the
Northwest Territories and the entire Arctic Archipelago are Our Land (Harper, 2006). Notwithstanding the Prime Minister's extraordinary appropriation of the
Inuit term Nunavut, it does give an indication of the apparent stakes. Making
territory legible, especially in the absence of the protective

covering of ice, raises the spectre of intrusion and transgression even in areas where citizens will never see let alone
walk over. And as one commentator has recently noted, the legibility of the Arctic carries with not just contemporary anxieties but
longer colonial trajectories, the Northwest Passage has long been regarded not as a distinct place, but as a
threshold to a desired place elsewhere, be it the commercial riches of China, natural resources in the High Arctic, or
the paradise imagined to exist at the ice-free North Pole (Craciun, 2009: 14). The spectre of an ice-free North Pole is
unquestionably one of the most powerful incentives to make those subterranean territories legible. It also helps to
explain and legitimate a special kind of icy geopolitics (Dodds, 2008). Mobilising terms such as borders, our land and
presence, Prime Minister Harper helped to conjure up the exceptional the Arctic as an exceptional space, which
demands extraordinary measures to make sure that Canadians care as much as the Arctic as they might about the
Bay of Fundy. In Canada's case, new investment in icebreakers, military bases, scientific mapping and enhanced
homeland security measures were initiated ( [Heubert, 2009] and [Byers, 2009]). As we shall see, however, those attempts to intervene and to
enhance legibility are rarely straightforward in a remote environment strongly shaped by ocean currents, sea ice formation and extreme weather. The Arctic,
notwithstanding the desires and demands of coastal states and their political representatives, is a lively space .
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LinkArctic War
Framing the Arctic as an anarchic site for security competition reinforces a militaryindustrial trajectory which builds and preys upon political anxiety to justify violence
This episode formed the backdrop to this paper, which was originally a wide-ranging lecture on the Polar Regions presented to the 2009 Nordic Geographers
Meeting, held in Finland. My concern here is to use this moment in 2007 as an exemplar of Arctic territorialities, which is then informed by recent discussions on
calculable territory, sovereignty and territorial legibility (for example, Agnew, 2005; [Blomley, 1994] and [Blomley, 2003]; [Clark et al., 2008] and [Crampton,
2006]; [Elden, 2007] and [Elden, 2009]; Hannah, 2009). This flagging incident seemed to me to present an opportunity to reflect on how Arctic territories are
being made legible and re-legible for the purpose of intervention and/or management. Legibility, as such, allows for all sorts of textual and visual interventions
(see Fig. 1). As a widely cited Foreign Affairs journal article noted in the aftermath of the 2007 Russian flagging, The situation is especially dangerous because
there are currently no overarching political and legal structures that can provide for the orderly development of the region or mediate political disagreements over
Arctic resources or sea-lanes (Borgerson, 2008: 71). Accordingly, a nightmarish neo-realist vision of international politics with the
central Arctic Ocean as an anarchic space, at the apparent mercy of the competing geopolitical imperatives of
coastal states and other interested parties, is brought to the fore (see also Baev, 2007). As a consequence of such a scenario,
the management of the Arctic emerges as a latter day Sisyphean challenge ( [Heininen, 2005] and [Heininen and Nicol, 2007];
Dodds, 2008; [Dalby, 2009] and [Rothwell, 2009]). Given the enduring legacies of Arctic militarization alongside the tangled
contours of the militaryindustrialacademic complex (Barnes, 2008), this framing of the Arctic, as a poorly regulated
space invested with considerable resource potential, is not inconsequential (for other analyses, [Chaturvedi, 1996], [Chaturvedi,
2000] and [Lackenbauer and Farish, 2007]). Growing evidence of material changes such as sea ice thinning (and with
consequences for seaborne accessibility via the Northwest Passage and Northern Sea Route) and new resource
assessments by state agencies such as the US Geological Survey (Bird et al., 2008) have added gist to the neo-realist mill. Maps of
biophysical changes, polar sea-lanes, actual and possible maritime claims and resource potential have also enriched a
particular sense of the Arctic as a site of intensifying geopolitical competition, and what Didier Bigo has termed, the
circulation of security unease (Bigo, 2002). As the Canadian scholar, Michael Byers informed his readers, An ice-free Northwest Passage could also
serve as an entry point for drugs, guns and illegal immigrants. In Canada and elsewhere including the United States, there is evidence of a kind of
domopolitics, which as Walters (2004: 241) has noted involves, [a] rationalization of series of security measures in the name of a
particular conception of home against a backdrop of anxiety about heightened mobility.
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LinkTerrorism
Claiming terrorist threats marks a homeland to be defended against the outside. This
simultaneously constructs foreign lands as dangerous and unpredictable, justifying
interventions through the War on Terror.
Mark Duffield, Professor at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Lancaster, Carry on Killing: Global Governance,
Humanitarianism and Terror, Danish Institute for International Studies, 2004, http://www.diis.dk/graphics/Publications/WP2004/duffield_carry_on_killing.pdf
For Georgio Agamben (1998),3 rather
than emerging from a social contract, sovereignty is argued to reside in the power to
decide the exception. That is, to fix in language the boundary between who or what is included or excluded as valid life:
sovereign power is that which constitutes the other. In populating the space of the exception, sovereignty calls forth a particular form of subjectivity to bear the
consequences of exclusion. Agamben has given this subjectivity a generic name calling it bare or natural life. That is, an abandoned life that effectively exists
beyond the rights, conventions and moral restraints of secular and religious law. Deciding the exception constitutes a juridico-political
space where anything becomes possible; it is even permitted to kill without committing homicide (Ibid: 83 as orig.).4
Such life, however, is more than an abandoned subjectivity destined to bear sovereigntys ordering; it is constitutive of
political order itself. Bare life is an exclusion that is also an inclusion (Ibid: 18). While sovereignty decides the exception, it
simultaneously elects to protect society from the threat that it has itself identified. The war on terrorism is an example of this recurrent
sovereign design. During the 1990s, the leading homeland states, as it were, remapped the zone of exception in terms of a
global borderland of failed states, shadow networks, rogue states, and so on. Today, this new cartography of risk
encapsulates the terrorist threat (National Security Strategy 2002). At the same time, through emergency powers, the derogation of
international law and pre-emptive attack, homeland states seek to protect society and its values from the menace
their intelligence systems have identified. The global borderlands have once again become zones where anything
becomes possible; an open-range where you can kill without committing murder.
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LinkTerrorism
Enunciations of shadowy unidentifiable terrorist threats require necessary
reterritorialization of these threats in specific foreign nations to be invaded and controlled
Stuart Elden, International Boundaries Research Unit, Department of Geography, Durham University, Terror and
Territory, Antipode, Vol. 39, Issue 5, p. 821-845, November 2007, http://instituty.fsv.cuni.cz/~kozak/elden-terrorterritory.pdf
It did not take long after the events of September 11, 2001 for the US to work out who was going to pay. According to Antony
Seldon, British Prime Minister Tony Blairs biographer, when told that force could not be used purely for retribution, Bush said I dont care what the international
lawyers say, were going to kick some ass (Seldon 2005:490). Other commentators joined the chorus. Right-wing harridan Ann Coulter (2001) was particularly
animated: We know who the homicidal maniacs are. They are the ones cheering and dancing right now. We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and
convert them to Christianity. We werent punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed
civilians. Thats war. And this is war. Bush too agreed that this action had to be more than pounding sand (Seldon 2005:490). This was a reference to the
Tomahawk Cruise Missile attacks of Clinton, particularly those launched at Sudan and Afghanistan on 21 August 1998 in the wake of the US embassy bombings
in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar as-Salaam, Tanzania. Despite the destruction of a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, and camps in Afghanistan this was not nearly
effective enough for Bush, who declared that when I take action, Im not going to fire a two million dollar missile at a ten dollar empty tent and hit a camel in the
butt. Its going to be decisive (cited in Roy 2001:140). As the novelist Arundhati Roy suggests: President Bush should know that there are no targets in
Afghanistan that will give his missiles their moneys worth. Perhaps, if only to balance his books, he should develop some cheaper missiles to use on cheaper
targets and cheaper lives in the poor countries of the world (2001:140). A number of moves were thus made. On 12 September Bush
said that the deliberate and deadly attacks which were carried out yesterday against our country were more than
acts of terror. They were acts of war (2001b). The sovereignty of the US was profoundly challenged, and a
sovereign response , a decision, was needed . It was therefore important that this branding of the acts, and the
response, was as a war: either the war on terrorism or the war on terror (see Ross 2004:137138). This was not
the only option, but one that marked the political events that followed, and has regularly characterised US projections of
its power (see Badiou 2004:2627). Indeed, in the fumbling speech on the day of the attacks, Bush declared that he had directed the full resources of our
intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and to bring them to justice, suggesting a rather different response. But the very next
words demonstrated how this was likely to proceed: we
will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts
and those who harbor them (2001a). As Bushs speechwriter David Frum suggested, with those words, Bush upgraded the war on
terror from metaphor to fact (2003:142). What this enabled was the move to target states . As Cheney expressed it, in
some ways the states were easier targets than the shadowy terrorists (reported in Woodward 2003:48). A putatively
deterritorialised threatthe network of networks of al-Qaeda (Burke 2004), or global Islamism (Roy 2004)3 was
reterritorialised in the sands of Afghanistan and, later, Iraq. For Benjamin Barber, among others, this was tortured logic: Like the drunk looking
on the wrong side of the street for the keys he dropped on the other side because the light is better over here the United States prefers the states it can locate
and vanquish to the terrorists it cannot even find (Barber 2004:126, see 124125). It was then a short step to position al-Qaeda in
Afghanistan, although There was an immediate struggle in the Bush administration as to whether this indeed should be the first target, or whether this
provided the opportunity for outstanding scores to be settled with Iraq (see Clarke 2004; Woodward 2003, 2004). In the short term, Afghanistan as target was to
win out, with an immediate demand that the Taliban shut down the terrorist training camps. Not working with this demand left the Taliban vulnerable as
harbourers. For Gregory, this entailed two peculiar cartographic performances. The first was a performance of sovereignty
through which the ruptured space of Afghanistan could be simulated as a coherent state . . . The second was a
performance of territory through which the fluid networks of al-Qaeda could be fixed in a bounded space. As Gregory
continues, this required the reterritorialisation of the supposedly non-territorial network. Similarly it required a rigid
territorialisation of the US as a national spaceclosing its airspace, sealing its borders, and contracting itself to the
homeland (Gregory 2004a:4950).
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LinkEnvironmental Managerialism
Identifying an environment separate from nature reduces it to an object to be managed and
manipulated for the good of human populations as interpreted through technicist discourse
Luke 95 On Environmentality: Geo-Power and Eco-Knowledge in the Discourses of Contemporary
Environmentalism Cultural Critique, No. 31, The Politics of Systems and Environments, Part II p.57-81
(Autumn,1995), Phttp://www.jstor.org/stable/1354445 Accessed: 13/07/2012 12:05 BSH
The separation of organisms from their environments is the primary epistemological divide cutting through reality in the
rhetorics of ecology. This discursive turn goes back to Haeckel's initial 1866 identification of ecology as the science that investigates all of the relations of
an organism to its organic and inorganic environments. Nonetheless, there are differences among ecologists over what these
"environments" might be. Because the expanse of the organic and inorganic environment is so broad, it often is defined in terms delimiting what it is by
looking at what it is not. In other words, it is the organism, or biotic community, or local ecosystem that ecologists place at the center
of their systems of study, while the environment is reduced to everything outside of the subject of analysis .
With these maneuvers ,
environments are often transformed rhetorically into silences, backgrounds, or settings . In

this manner, they also are studied and understood not directly as such, but more indirectly in terms of the objective relations and
effects they register upon the subjects of study they surround. Even so, this inversion of one thing, like an organism or society,
into everything, or the environment, might disclose the nature of the environment only in relation to this one thing. After all,
environmental analysis must reduce "everything" to measures of "anything" available for measurement (like
temperature levels, gas concentrations, molecular dispersions, resource variations, or growth rates) to track variations in
"something" (like an organism's, a biome's, or a river's responses to these factors). But is it "the environment" that is being understood here, or is its identity
being evaded in reducing it to a subset of practicable measurements? Does this vision of "environment" really capture the actual quality
or true quantity of all human beings' interrelations with all of the terrains, waters, climates, soils, architectures,
technologies, societies, economies, cultures, or states surrounding them? In its most expansive applications, then, the
environment becomes a strong but sloppy force: it is anything out there, everything around us, something affecting us, nothing within us,
but also a thing upon which we act. Despite its formal definitions, however, the environment is not, in fact, everything. Many environmental discourses
look instead at particular sites or at peculiar forces. The discursive variations and conceptual confrontations of the "environment" really
begin to explode when different voices accentuate this or that set of things in forming their environmental analysis. On
the one side, they may privilege forces in the ecosphere, or, on the other side, they might stress concerns from the technosphere. But in either case, each
rhetoric which operates as an agency protecting "the environment" struggles to site "the environmental" as a
somewhere affected by or coming from everything. Perhaps the early origins of "the environment" as a conceptits historical emergence and
original applications-might prove more helpful. In its original sense, which is borrowed by English from Old French, an environment is an action
resulting from, or the state of being produced by a verb: "to environ." And environing as a verb is, in fact, a type of strategic action. To environ
is to encircle, encompass, envelop, or enclose. It is the physical activity of surrounding, circumscribing, or ringing around
something. Its uses even suggest stationing guards around, thronging with hostile intent, or standing watch over some person or place. To environ a site or a
subject is to beset, beleaguer, or besiege that place or person. An
environment, as either the means of such activity or the product of these actions, now
might be read in a more suggestive manner. It is the encirclement, circumscription, or beleaguerment of places and persons in a strategic
disciplinary policing of space. An environmental act, in turn, is already a disciplining move, aimed at constructing some expanse
of space-a locale, a biome, a planet as biospherical space, or, on the other hand, some city, any region, the global economy in technospherical
territory-in a discursive envelope. Within these enclosures, environmental expertise can arm environmentalists who
stand watch over these surroundings, guarding the rings that include or exclude forces, agents, and ideas. If one thinks
about it, this original use of "the environment" is an accurate account of what is , in fact, happening in many environmental
practices today. Environmentalized places become sites of supervision, where environmentalists see from above and from without
through the enveloping designs of administratively delimited systems. Encircled by enclosures of alarm , environments can be disassembled,
recombined, and subjected to the disciplinary designs of expert management.
Enveloped in these interpretive frames,
environments can be redirected to fulfill the ends of other economic scripts, managerial directives, and administrative writs. Environing,
then,
engenders "environmentality," which embeds instrumental rationalities in the policing of ecological spaces.
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Teaching students in educational contexts like debate that nature is something external to
be used by humanity produces subjects concerned more with efficiency and instrumentality
than ecological health
Luke, 2001 (Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 33, No. 2, 2001 Education, Environment and Sustainability:
what are the issues, where to intervene, what must be done? TIMOTHY W. LUKE Department of Political Science,
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, USA, also he blew up the death star)
One vital site for generating, accumulating and then circulating such discursive knowledge about nature is the educational system of schools, colleges and
universities. As the primary institutions for credentialing individual learners and legitimating collective teachings, schools and universities do much to construct
our understanding of the natural world. Over
the past generation, graduate programmes in environmental science on many

American university campuses have become a major source of collective representations of `the environment as well
as the home base for those scienti c disciplines used to study nature s meanings. At the same time, their research ndings and
graduates lter into the lower levels of education in the teaching of environmental awareness. As a result, school leavers at all levels routinely
now have a very speci c set of knowledge (as it has been scienti cally validated) and a quite focused notion of power (as it is institutionally
constructed) to understand `the environmental crisis as citizens or consumers armed with sound scientific and technical
teachings. This study, however, questions how such specialised discourses about nature, or `the environment , are constructed in many school programmes
by professional technical experts. This articulation of environmental knowledge often sets nature apart in special distant
locales and isolates nature s wild places from modern economies and societies. This move articulates a complex
epistemic code for environmentalists that externalises, authorises and centres, on one level, the forces of nature by
operationally internalising, mystifying and decentring complex economic and social forces, on another level, in the
practices of environmental education and management.2 How Epistemics Affects Applied Practices The first efforts to articulate
such epistemic schemata in environmental education began in the United States with the Second Industrial Revolution as the
conservation movement and progressively-minded managers founded schools of forestry, management, agriculture, mining and engineering on many college
and university campuses. Their
ecological vision put nature outside society, and humans then went out into nature to master
and transform its resources into `goods and `services 3 for society. Industrialising society saw nature s
environments as external, other and centred, because the progress of all in society over nature was allegedly the
internal, manifest and decentred goal of all. These two spheres for human thought and action thus were divorced,
and this split has created major conceptual and operational problems for environmental education and policy ever
since. In the ecological upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, some schools of the environment and colleges of natural resources went beyond this
conservationist project by beginning to train specialised experts in environmental science. This ill-de ned discipline, ranging in scope from ecotoxiology to
national park administration, was Education, Environment and Sustainability 189 needed to de ne, develop and deploy new varieties of knowledge for society
about nature in many practical dimensions of everyday work and play.4 The
entire planet, then, can be reduced by such environmental

science at research universities to a complex system of interrelated systems, whose constituent ecological processes
are essentially humanised. In turn, two different spatial systems nature and society are left in such environmental
education for humanity to operate efficiently or inefficiently as vast terrestrial infrastructures. Yet, one is zoned as `green
space where wild nature survives and the other becomes `brown space where societys industrialisation, pollution and contamination occur. The rational
imperatives for inserting natural and artificial bodies into the machinery of global production pushes environmental
education to assume that the green spaces are what environmental professionals work must be about and the brown
zones are largely ignored except as the realm from which global threats to pristine green places originate.
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Environmental discourse enfolds populaces into apparatuses of biopolitical control
Luke 95 On Environmentality: Geo-Power and Eco-Knowledge in the Discourses of Contemporary Environmentalism Cultural Critique, No. 31, The Politics of Systems and
Environments, Part II p.57-81 (Autumn,1995), Phttp://www.jstor.org/stable/1354445 Accessed: 13/07/2012 12:05 BSH
These reflections on "the environment" reframe its meanings in terms of the practices of power, allowing us to turn to Michel Foucault for additional insight. The bio-power formation
described by Foucault was not historically closely focused upon the role of Nature in the equations of biopolitics (Foucault, History of Sexuality I 138-42). For Foucault, the
whole
point of the controlled tactics of inserting human bodies into the machineries of industrial and agricultural production as part and
parcel of strategically adjusting the growth of human populations to the development of industrial capitalism was to bring "life
and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations," making the disciplines of knowledge and discourses of power into many
agencies as part of the "transformation of human life" (143). Once this threshold of biopower was crossed, human
economics, politics, and technologies continually placed all human beings' existence into question. Foucault notes that these
industrial transformations implicitly raised ecological issues as they disrupted and redistributed the understandings provided by the classical episteme of defining human interactions
with Nature. Living
became "environmentalized," as humans related to their history and biological life in new ways from
within growing artificial cities and mechanical modes of production, which positioned this new form of human being "at the same time outside
history, in its biological environment, and inside human historicity, penetrated by the latter's techniques of knowledge and power" (143). Here we can begin to locate the
emergence of "the environment" as a nexus for knowledge formation and as a cluster of power tactics. As human beings began to consciously wager
their life as a species on the outcomes of these biopolitical strategies and technological systems, it became clear that they also were wagering the lives of other (or all) species as well.
While Foucault regards this shift as one of many lacunae in his analysis, it is clear there is much more going on here than he realizes. Once
human power/knowledge
formations become the foundation of industrial society's economic development, they also become the basis for the
physical survival of all terrestrial life forms. Here, ecological analysis emerges as a productive power formation that
reinvests human bodies-their means of health, modes of subsistence, and styles of habitation integrating the whole space of existence with bio-historical
significance by framing them within their various bio-physical environments filled with various animal and plant
bodies.
Resource managerialism submits nature to the power of bureaucratic control and economic
manipulation, converting natural objects into usable goods
Luke 95 On Environmentality: Geo-Power and Eco-Knowledge in the Discourses of Contemporary Environmentalism Cultural Critique, No. 31, The Politics of Systems and
Environments, Part II p.57-81 (Autumn,1995), Phttp://www.jstor.org/stable/1354445 Accessed: 13/07/2012 12:05 BSH
The script of environmentality embedded in new notions like "the environment" is
rarely made articulate in scientific and technical

discourses. Yet, there are politics in these scripts. The advocates of deep ecology and social ecology dimly perceive this in their
frustrations with "reform environmentalism," which weaves its log-ics of geo-power in and out of the resource
managerialism that has defined the mainstream of contemporary environmental protection thinking and traditional
natural resource conservationism (Luke, "Green Consumerism"). Resource managerialism can be read as the eco-knowledge of modern governmentality. While voices in favor of
conservation can be found in Europe early in the nineteenth century, the real establishment of this stance comes in the United States with the Second Industrial Revolution from the 1880s through the 1920s and the
closing of the Western Frontier in the 1890s (Noble). Whether one looks at John Muir's preservationist programs or Gifford Pinchot's conservationist codes, an awareness of modern industry's power to deplete
natural resources, and hence the need for systems of conservation, is well established by the early 1900s (Nash, Wilderness). President Theodore Roosevelt, for example, organized the Governor's Conference in
1907 to address this concern, inviting the participants to recognize that the natural endowments upon which "the welfare of this nation rests are becoming depleted, and in not a few cases, are already exhausted"
the fundamental premises of resource managerialism have not changed significantly. In fact, this
code of eco-knowledge has only become more formalized in bureaucratic applications and legal interpretations. Paralleling the managerial logic of the
Second Industrial Revolution, which empowered technical experts on the shop floor and professional managers in the main office, resource managerialism imposes
corporate administrative frameworks upon Nature in order to supply the economy and provision society through
centralized state guidance. These frameworks assume that the national economy, like the interacting capitalist firm and household, must avoid
both overproduction (excessive resource use coupled with inadequate demand) and underproduction (inefficient resource use in the face of excessive demand)
on the supply side as well as overconsumption (excessive resource exploitation with excessive demand) and underconsumption (inefficient resource exploitation coupled
with inadequate demand) on the demand side. To even construct the managerial problem in this fashion, Nature must be reduced-through the encirclement
of space and matter by national as well as global economies-to a cybernetic system of biophysical systems that can
be dismantled, redesigned, and assembled anew to produce "resources" efficiently and in adequate amounts when
and where needed in the modern market-place. In turn, Nature's energies, materials, and sites are redefined by the eco-knowledges of
resource managerialism as the source of "goods" for sizable numbers of some people, even though greater material and immaterial
"bads" also might be inflicted upon even larger numbers of other people who do not reside in or benefit from the
advanced national economies that basically monopo-lize the use of world resources at a comparative handful of highly developed regional and municipal sites. Many of
(Jarrett 51). Over the past nine decades ,
these eco-knowledge assumptions and geo-power commitments can be seen at work in the discourses of the Worldwatch Institute as it develops its own unique vision of
environmentality for a global resource managerialism.
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LinkEnvironmental Crises
Environmental crisis frames policy solutions in terms of expert discourses and leads to
individual passivity
Frederick Buell, professor of English at Cornell, From Apocalypse to Way of Life, 2003, p. 184-185
Elaborating crisis is thus not only hard to do but can also perhaps never really be done. Worse, even an actual occurrence of crisis, not just an elaboration of its
imminence, is no guarantee that people will fall in line with the analyses and prescriptions of environmentalists. Environmental
crisis, as Ulrich Beck

has argued, is uniquely susceptible to social construction, and while an actual crisis, like Samuel Johnson's hanging,
can indeed concentrate the mind wonderfully, it can concentrate it on the wrong target. Revenge against an outgroup can easily
substitute for remedy to ecological crisis-especially given the political machinery devoted to obscuring problems and displacing blame described in Chapter 1 .
Looked at critically then, crisis discourse thus suffers from a number of liabilities. First, it seems to have become a
political liability almost as much as an asset. It calls up a fierce and effective opposition with its predictions; worse, its
more specific predictions are all too vulnerable to refutation by events. It also exposes environmentalists to being called grim
doomsters and antilife Puritan extremists. Further, concern with crisis has all too often tempted people to try to find a "total
solution" to the problems involved a phrase that, as an astute, analyst of the limitations of crisis discourse, John Barry,
puts it, is all too reminiscent of the Third Reich's infamous "final solution." A total crisis of society environmental crisis at its gravest threatens to translate
despair into inhumanist authoritarianism; more often, however, it helps keep merely dysfunctional authority in place. It
thus leads, Barry suggests, to the

belief that only elite-and expert-led solutions are possible. At the same time it depoliticizes people, inducing them to
accept their impotence as individuals; this is something that has made many people today feel, ironically and/or
passively, that since it makes no difference at all what any individual does on his or her own, one might as well go
along with it. Yet another pitfall for the full and sustained elaboration of environmental crisis is, though least discussed, perhaps the most deeply ironic. A
problem with deep cultural and psychological as well as social effects, it is embodied in a startlingly simple
proposition: the worse one feels environmental crisis is, the more one is tempted to turn one's back on the
environment. This means, preeminently, turning one's back on "nature" on traditions of nature feeling, traditions of
knowledge about nature (ones that range from organic farming techniques to the different departments of ecological science), and traditions of
nature-based activism. If nature is thoroughly wrecked these days, people need to delink from nature and live in postnature a conclusion that, as the
next chapter shows, many in U.S. society drew at the end of the millennium. Explorations of how deeply "nature" has been
wounded and how intensely vulnerable to and dependent on human actions it is can thus lead, ironically, to further
indifference to nature-based environmental issues, not greater concern with them.
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LinkEnvironmental Globalism/THE STATE

Displacing environmental activism in global terms co-opts movements and ensures policies
are crafted to serve the interests of multinational corporations
Vandana Shiva, 98(a philosopher, environmental activist, author and eco feminist, The Geopolitics Reader,
Volume 1 pg. 231-232)
The global in the dominant discourse is the political space in which a particular dominant local seeks global control,
and frees itself of local, national and international restraints. The global does not represent the universal human
interest; it represents a particular local and parochial interest which has been globalized through the scope of its
reach. The seven most powerful countries, the G-7, dictate global affairs, but the interests that guide them remain narrow, local and parochial. The World Bank
is not really a Bank that serves the interests of all the worlds communities. It is a Bank where decisions are based on the voting power weighted by the economic
and political power of donors, and in this decision-making it is the communities who pay the real price and the real donors (such as the tribal of Narmada Valley
whose lives are being destroyed by a Bank financed mega-dam)but have no say. The global of today reflects modern version of the global reach of a handful of
British merchant adventurers who, as the East India Company, later the British Empire, raided and looted large areas of the world. Over the past 500
years of colonialism, whenever this global reach has been threatened by resistance, the language of opposition has
been co-opted, redefined and used to legitimize future control. The independence movement against colonialism had
revealed the poverty and deprivation caused by the economic drain from the colonies to the centers of economic
power. The post-war world order which saw the emergence of independent political states in the South, also saw the emergence of the Bretton Woods
institutions such as the World Bank and IMF which took over the language of underdevelopment and poverty, removed these independent political states history,
and made them the reason for a new bondage based on development financing and debt burdens. The
environment movement revealed the

environmental and social costs generated by maldevelopment, conceived of and financed by such institutions as the
World Bank. Now, however, the language of the environment is itself being taken over and made the reason for
strengthening such global institutions and increasing their global reach. In addition to the legitimacy derived from coopting the
language of dissent is the legitimization that derives from a false notion that the globalized local is some form of hierarchy that reflects
geographical and democratic spread, and to which lower order hierarchies should somehow be subservient.
Operationalizing undemocratic development projects was based on a similar false notion of national interest, and every local interest felt morally compelled to
make sacrifices for what seemed the larger interest. It was this moral compulsion that led each community to make way for the construction of mega-dams in
post-independence India. Only during the 1980s, when the different local interests met nationwide, did they realize that what was projected as the national
interest was, in fact, the electoral interests of a handful of politicians financed by a handful of contractors, such as J.P. and Associates who benefit
from the construction of all dams, such as Tehri and the Narmada Valley projects. Against the narrow and selfish
interest that had been elevated to the status of national interest, the collective effort of communities engaged in
resistance against large dams began to emerge as the real though subjugated national interest. In a similar way the World
Banks Tropical Forest Action Plan (TFAP) was projected as responding to a global concern about the destruction of tropical forests. When rainforest movements
formed a worldwide coalition under the World Rainforest Movement, however, it became clear that TFAP reflected the narrow commercial interests of the World
Bank and multinational forestry interests such as Shell, Jaako Poyry and others, and that the global community best equipped to save tropical
forests were forest dwellers themselves and farming communities dependent on forests.
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LinkTransportation Investment
Investments in transportation infrastructure feed the interests of major corporations in the
form of building contracts, which leaves uncontested the systems of exchange and social
relations that produce environmental degredation
Timothy W. Luke, 5 (areas of research include environmental politics and cultural studies, as well as comparative
politics, international political economy, and modern critical social and political theory at Virginia Tech University,
THE DEATH OF ENVIRONMENTALISM OR THE ADVENT OF PUBLIC ECOLOGY? Organization & Environment,
Vol. 18 No. 4, December 2005 489-490)
established environmental movements rarely question the most basic

assumptions about what does and does not get counted as environmental, because these groups inherently define
environmental problems so narrowly that almost all proposed solutions turn out to be technical (pp. 8-9). Yet, even as they pillory
environmentalism for embracing technified tactics and/or accepting statist regulation, Shellenberger and Nordhaus take a major misstep. That is, they claim the only real escape from global warming, for
example, as a severe ecological surprise (King, 1995) is to follow now the organizational lead blazed by the successes of
right-wing political activists since the 1970s. This recommendation, in turn, entails riding a new third wave of
environmentalism that will be framed around investment in new public-private partnerships like those America
made in the railroads, the highways, the electronic industry, and the Internet (Shellenberger & Nordhaus, 2004, p. 28). Even though one can sympathize with their
disappointments over the conventional ecomanagerialism favored by the National Environmental Protection Acts since the 1970s, any clearheaded environmentalist must question
solutions for global warming based on the putative models of Americas railroads, interstate highway system, or
electronics industry, using so-called public-private investments. On one level, these big technological systems are the
embedded infrastructures that spew greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, so they hardly provide ideal models for
curbing global climate change. On another level, Shellenberger and Nordhaus do not have a clear sense of how deeply private interests burrow into larger public
projects in the economy and environment (Fischer, 1990) to pursue special agendas that derail the common good to seize
personal benefits. Admittedly, the railroads, the interstates, and electronic life both on and off the Net did change America. Nonetheless, it is unclear that such changes were positive, because these ambiguous
transformations often served other narrower interests, like those of railroad tycoons, General Motors, Microsoft, or
General Electric. This miscomprehension can be connected to the stark distortions built into the ecosubpolitical
realms of contemporary capital and its collective infrastructures (Luke, 2005, pp. 202-206). It is in this realm that private interests
and/or technical accreditation are pitted against truly collective public concerns.
Here, Shellenberger and Nordhaus (2004) perhaps start out on the right track. They observe that
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LinkGas Tax
Market-centered approaches to environmental crises replicates irresponsible practices of
consumption which reproduce disaster. Eco-progress cant come from systems premised
on greed and selfishness.
Vol. 18 No. 4, December 2005 489-490)
The challenge today is not how to get back on the offensive (Shellenberger& Nordhaus, 2004, pp. 29-31) by only doing private conservative activists one better. Rather, it
is how to develop a truly public ecology with new organizations, institutions, and ideas whose material articulation
can balance the insights of scientific experts, the concerns of private property holders, the worries about social
inequity, and the need for ecological sustainability to support human and nonhuman life in the 21st century. A public
ecology merely accepts the truth of John Laws (1991) observations about contemporary life: All human ecologies on
Earth are a hybridized sociotechnical order. Dismissing technical realities, and then turning to private investments, as
Shellenberger and Nordhaus ask, will not change this increasingly artificial world, which, as Law suggests, pulls together systems
of humans and machines, animals and plants, economies and ecologies as our environment. Even global warming reaffirms
this rough reality, namely, what appears to be 490 ORGANIZATION & ENVIRONMENT / December 2005 social is partly technical. What we usually call technical is partly social. In
Markets alone, especially with new antistatist coping and

consenting style of collaborative environmental governance, either will fail completely or flail around ineffectively in
churning new green investment schemes. As Light and Shippen (2003, p. 234) claim, the specific importance of environmental
public goods makes it imperative to lay deeper materialist foundations for protecting the community goods,
collective needs, and public services required for stable, healthy, industrial and natural metabolisms to sustain all
human and nonhuman life. Only a more public conception of ecology can harness together a new mixed ecological regime (of state, market, and civil society) to rethink
practice nothing is purely technical. Neither is anything purely social (Law, 1991, p. 10).
and restructure todays destructive urban industrial ecologies (Luke, 2003).
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LinkEconomy
Economic growth is an extension of the rich exploiting the political environment in order to
get ahead in society. This leads towards inequality and class distinctions.
Timothy W. Luke, 2001 (areas of research include environmental politics and cultural studies, as well as
comparative politics, international political economy, and modern critical social and political theory at Virginia Tech
University, Globalization, Popular Resistance and Postmodernity, Democracy & Nature, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2001, pg.
317-318)
Everything that exists now around the world could be otherwise. This realization is what fuels the increasingly restive
resistance against what global modernity has become from Seattle to London to Washington. Much of what persists
at this moment, whether one looks at advanced economic structures or modern political practices, expresses
enduring inequalities in wealth, power, and knowledge that benefit a few to the detriment of the many. These
oligarchical concentrations of authority and income, in turn, are undercutting the democratic promise of a more
universal popular empowerment and enrichment, which if it was realized would create more prosperity, greater
harmony, and better governance. Those benefits, however, are not being realized. And, most efforts to advance toward them are being thwarted by
entrenched elites intent upon preserving their position and privilege in latest expressions of modernity as the postmodern turn.1 Nonetheless, other
more democratic, equitable, and popular expressions of modernity are possible; and, this possibility is what many
new local, regional, and national resistances against globalized inequality and disempowerment hope to attain. The
modes of organization realized during the Industrial Revolution entailed a complex social contract between labor and capital, the rulers and the ruled, the lay
people and technical experts. In exchange for passive acceptance of expert decisions, enlightened rule, and enduring
growth at its finest levels of

performance, this social contractas a rhetorical constructmostly consigned active agency to capital, the rulers,
and experts, leaving labor, the ruled, and lay people to enjoy a good standard of living, a state concerned with their
welfare, and better living through science. Of course, it rarely worked to everyones satisfaction, many were left out, and some suffered continual
persecution. Nevertheless, this mode of organization in the economy, society, and government, whether one labels it
industrial democracy, Fordism, social democracy, advanced capitalism, liberal democratic society , etc., satisfied some
publics with many continuous emendations until the 1980s.
Capitalism incorporates their new and fancy technology within its demand for increasing
efficiency and flexible accumulation
Timothy Luke, Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Reconstructing
Nature: How the New Informatics are Rewrighting the Environment and Society as Bitspace, Capitalism Nature
Society 12 (3), September 2001
This ceaseless search for performance and profit is the essence of todays postmodern condition. And, as Lyotard claims, such
capitalist restructuring continues to take place without leading to the realization of any of these dreams of
emancipation.18 With waning trust in narratives of truth, enlightenment or progress, Lyotard argues the supporters of science and technology working
behind big business fall under the sway of another language game, in which the goal is no longer truth, but
performativity that is, the best possible input/output equation.19 On another level, which Jameson struggles to outline, these mediations of
performativity begin generating a new social system beyond classical capitalism. 20 This system is inchoate, but it basically
boils down to whatever is proliferating throughout the world space of multinational capital.21 More specifically, as David Harvey
argues, this new multinational corporate regime began dismantling the old Fordist regime of industrial production,
capital accumulation, and state intervention patched together on a national basis during the 1930s through the 1970s by welfare states. In its place, new
arrangements for flexible accumulation, productive specialization, and public deregulation have surfaced since the 1970s along with the ideologies of neoliber-alism. Working within
these many loosely coupled transnational alliances, Harvey observes, flexible
accumulation typically exploits a wide range of seemingly

contingent geographical circumstances, and reconstitutes them as structured internal elements of its own
encompassing logic....the result has been the production of fragmentation, insecurity, and ephemeral uneven
development within a highly unified global space economy of capital flows.22
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ImpactCapitalism
Biopolitics produces a neoliberal economic model that emphasizes corporate rights over
those of the people, collapsing democracy and exacerbating social inequality
323-324)
Neoliberalism also brings a second contradiction tied to its deeply rooted fixation on the market. This endangers
democracy inasmuch as neoliberal doctrines of market expansion, free choice, and bureaucratic deregulation are
counterposed to what were once democratically enacted policiesaffirmed by the people at the ballot boxto
constrain markets (wage guarantee laws, workers rights legislation, social welfare provisions) and endorse regulation (occupational safety codes, food
inspection procedures, environmental protection legislation). The information revolution comes after the end of imperialism, and its
performativity agendas bring the domination of the global economy by a few hundred TNCs based to an
overwhelming extent in the same ex-imperialist countries. The professional managers who control them have the means to benefit the
world or to exploit it to their own benefit.24 The opening of American society to global market competition or foreign business
investment appears to be a race, not to the top of the worlds economic hierarchies, but instead to the bottom. For
neoliberal advocates, the US should no longer benchmark itself against the welfare states of Western Europe, because they too will change. Instead, America is
urged to emulate Chile, Hong Kong, Mexico, Singapore, or Brazil. While the successful fifth of Reichs symbolic analysts may benefit from such policies, the
unsuccessful four-fifths of nonsymbolic toilers suffer even more downward mobility. The magic of the marketplace should bring clean
outcomes, but it now often works many dirty tricks against most people in contemporary society. Globalization could
be resisted, and many in America do vote to follow anti-globalization paths in the republics public policies. Instead, they
find experts accelerating the agendas of globalization, and many see this outcome as selling America out to a nebulous New World Order by turning the US into
NAFTAland.25
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ImpactSecurity
Biopolitics engages in war on behalf of a population whose very identity is contingent upon
the other who must be eradicated
Mark Duffield, Professor at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Lancaster,
Carry on Killing: Global Governance, Humanitarianism and Terror, Danish Institute for International Studies, 2004,
http://www.diis.dk/graphics/Publications/WP2004/duffield_carry_on_killing.pdf
Bio-politics, however, contains an intrinsic and fateful duality. As well as fostering and promoting life it also has the power to disallow it to the point of death
(Ibid: 138 orig. emph.). In making this bio-political distinction, racism plays a formative role (Foucault 2003; Stoler 1995). This not only includes its nineteenth and
early twentieth century biological forms, it also involves its contemporary cultural, value and civilisational re-inscriptions (Duffield 1984). Race and its modern
codings underpin the division between valid and invalid life and legitimates the measures deemed necessary to secure the former against the later. In this sense,
biopolitics is intrinsically connected with the security of populations, including global ones. This duality moreover underlies the
paradox of bio-politics: as states have assumed responsibility for maintaining and developing life, wars have become
increasingly more encompassing, devastating and genocidal for the populations concerned. The awesome power to unleash
limitless death presents itself as a cynical counterpart, of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavours to administer, optimize, and multiply
it, subjecting it to all precise controls and comprehensive regulations. Wars
are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must

be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilised for the purpose of wholesale
slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital (Ibid: 136). As the managers of species-life, since the end of the nineteenth century states
have been able to wage total wars that have pitched entire populations against each other in cataclysmic struggles to the death. What
is at stake in
modern war is the existence of society itself. Genocide consequently emerges as a strategy because power is
situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population (Ibid:
137). Although the ending of the Cold War raised hopes of a peace dividend, the diagrammatic form of biopower was to be re-inscribed in the new wars of the
1990s and confirmed with the declaration of war on terrorism. This re-inscription has taken in its stride the shift in the locus of threat from the Soviet Union, one of
the worlds largest and most centralized war economies, to its very opposite, that is, the new security cartography of failed states, shadow economies and
terrorist networks. However, as the Guardian columnist quoted above has grasped, despite
this radical re-ordering the bio-political principle

of state power has remained the same: in order to carry on living one has to carry on killing (Ibid). As well as departing from a
realist conception of power, the idea of global governance as a design of bio-power also breaks with the conventional view of what global governance is. That is,
as an essentially benign undertaking involving state and non-state actors in a collective pursuit of global security, an
open and inclusive economic system, effective legal and political institutions, global welfare and development, and a
shared commitment to conflict resolution (Biscop 2004). From this perspective, security threats are usually seen as emerging
independently of global governance and, indeed, despite its best intentions. It becomes an ethico-political response to preexisting or externally motivated threats. Global governance as a design of bio-power, however, rather than responding
out of the blue to external threats, directly fabricates its own security environment. In distinguishing between valid
and invalid global life, it creates its own other with all its specific deviancies, singular threats and instances of maldevelopment to which
it then responds and tries to change. Consequently, it also shapes the terrain over which the bio-political logic of
living through killing must operate. It is in relation to this constitutive function of global governance that the place of sovereignty within it can now be
examined.
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ImpactGovernmentality
Governmentality adopts any and all means necessary to ensure the health and safety of the
populationthis justifies authoritarian control and violent transgression of order for the
sake of its preservation
Louiza Odysseos, Liberalisms War, Liberalisms Order: Rethinking the Global Liberal Order as a Global Civil
War paper prepared for Liberal Internationalism, 17 March 2008, San Francisco
The sovereigns task, Foucault argued, was to remain sovereign, that is, in power; there was, in other words, a circularity to
sovereignty, in that its end was internal to itself (Foucault 2001: 211). Governmentality, on the contrary, is characterised by a
finality, directed towards the things it manages (ibid.) If the global liberal order is an order for which the political concern
is population, then its end is to manage that population in pursuit of the perfection and intensification of the
processes it directs (ibid.). Yet, one could argue, some remnant of circularity remains: to preserve the emphasis on life and population management is
also an end of a governmental economy of power. It is this, possibly, that allows Foucault to note that, whereas sovereign power has historically
created systems of exclusion by differentiating between those who submit to its power (perhaps, in a contractarian fashion),
and those who violate it (such as criminals), governmental power differentiates between those who behave in accordance
with the welfare of the population and those who conduct themselves in relation to the management of the populationas if they
were not part of the populationas if they put themselves out of it (Foucault 2007a: 43-44). Governmental violence, to use Agambens
term, might indeed be necessary to ensure that a distinction is drawn between those who resist the regulation of the
population, who try to elude the apparatus by which the population exists, is preserved, subsists, and subsists at an optimal level and the population; as
Foucault argues, this opposition is very important (ibid.: 44). What range of means or tactics might be necessary for this? Any tactic,
including the permanent suspension of the law, which allows this order to identify, criminalise, control, indeed, to police
those who stand outside the population and oppose the governmentalisation of the state. The tactic and operations of
governmental power as police activity is pertinent to the workings of the global liberal order as global civil war , as
discussed below, because it is exercised internally, i.e. within the population and reinforces the order and its governmental
violence (cf. Agamben 2000: 103-7).
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ImpactNormalization
Biopolitical regulation undertaken in the name of human productivity exposes the entire
population to death and totalitarian control
Reid 8 Julian Reid, Life Struggles: War, Discipline, and Biopolitics in the Thought of Michel Foucault, Foucault on
Politics, Security and War, ed. Michael Dillon and Andrew W. Neal, Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2008, p. 89-90
It is in turn in response to this reconceptualisation of war, a war in defence of the state rather than against the state, that we see the emergence of the discourse
of population and the development of the range of biopolitical techniques that guarantee the existence and proliferation of what George Ensor described
classically in 1818 as populousness (Ensor, 1967: p. 12). If state security is, according to Foucault, the object of war by the end of the eighteenth
century, it
is also more importantly the strategic object of war to secure the life of populations themselves. The species
life of populations becomes the battlefield on which these new forms of biopolitical war are to be waged. A war
conducted through the development of security mechanisms that act to establish an equilibrium, maintain an
average, establish a sort of homeostasis, and compensate for variations within this general population ... so as to
optimise a state of life (Foucault, 2003b: p. 246). The commitment to state security is always by necessity a commitment to
the security of society which is also always a commitment to the security of a particular form of life. The development
of the range of normalising techniques, the constitution of populations around various discourses of the normal is in turn,
Foucault insists, a kind of continual race war. What in fact is racism? he asks. It is primarily a way of introducing a break into the
domain of life that is under powers control, the break between what must live and what must die. The appearance
within the biological continuum of the human race of races, the distinction among races, the hierarchy of races, the fact that certain
races are described as good and that others, in contrast, are described as inferior: all this is a way of fragmenting the
field of the biological that power controls. It is a way of separating out the groups that exist within a population.
(Foucault, 2003b: pp. 2545) The constitution of species life itself as the referent object of the security practices of state power allows for the
specification of any and every form of life that can be held to install degenerative effects within the field of population as the
enemy upon which war must be waged. Not necessarily a war of the military type, but a war of quiet extermination, carried out with
the continual deployment of regulatory and normalising techniques. A war that rages at the heart of modern societies.
A war of the biological type (Foucault, 2003b: p. 255). At the same time, then, that we see wars of the military type addressed as a moral scandal and the major
political problematic of modernity, so we
see the legitimisation of new forms of warmaking as the right to kill becomes aligned in
proximity to the new necessity to make live (Foucault, 2003b: p. 256). In turn we see the emergence of new practices of
colonisation justified on racial grounds. Subsequently we witness the emergence of fascist states and societies in
which the power over life and death, adjudicated on explicitly racial criteria, is disseminated widely, to the point where
everyone has the power of life and death over his or her neighbours, if only because of the practice of informing,
which effectively means doing away with the people next door, or having them done away with. (Foucault, 2003b: p. 259)
Likewise the emergence of socialisms based on the pursuit of the elimination of class enemies within capitalist society emit, for Foucault, an essential form of
racism (Foucault, 2003b: pp. 2612). These strategies of states, as well as counter-state, counter-hegemonic struggles, are all fundamentally tied up with this
problem of the relations between war, life and security. Once politics is construed as the continuation of war, once
war becomes conceived as a

condition of possibility for life, for the pursuit of its security and the increase of its being, however that conception may be grounded, the
conditions are created whereby life itself becomes the object for variable forms of destruction, annihilation and quiet
exterminations.
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ImpactNormalization
Attempting to normalize subjectivity leads to repression, assimilation, and eradication
Connolly 2 William Connolly, Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University,
Identity/Difference, revised edition, 2002, pp. 88-90
To say that late-modern societies are, among many other things, normalizing societies is not simply to say that they bestow
institutional privilege on a restrictive set of identities and apply intensive institutional pressures to secure those
identities as norms against which a variety of modes of otherness are defined and excluded. It is also to say that
those who endorse these norms tout them as natural or intrinsically true standards. They claim that the self, the
group, the nation, and/or the world would endorse these standards once they acquired the experience of their
intrinsic truth. To translate such a naturalization of norms into the critical language of normalization is not to gesture toward an order in which no norms exist.
For the ethic I endorse, as we have already seen, accepts the importance of disciplines applied to the self and the group. Such disciplines, though, encourage
the self and the culture to come to terms more affirmatively with contingent, relational elements in established cultural identities and to cultivate a more generous
ethics of engagement between contending constituencies. A normalizing society treats the small set of identities it endorses as if they
were intrinsically true; this puts it under tremendous pressure to treat everything that differs from those intrinsic truths
to be fundamental threats, deviations, or failures in need of correction, reform, punishment, silencing, or liquidation.
To challenge such a perspective is to presume that every social identity is a constructed, relational formation that engenders human differences, resistances,
remainders, and surpluses through the very politics of its consolidation. It is, therefore, to resist the drive to translate all of those remainders into modes of
otherness in the futile pursuit of final redemption or completion. Contemporary
social life requires identity (at various levels) to be, but

the dogmatization and universalization of dominant identities translates some of the very intrasubjective and
intersubjective differences through which they are organized and regulated into modes of otherness to be
assimilated, punished, or liquidated. Such a critical perspective does not deny the necessity of limitations and exclusions. Those who resist the
pressures of a normalizing society, indeed, must explore what can be done to restrict dogmatic constituencies who strive to repress the very differences upon
which they depend for their organization. This poses difficult and dicey issues. But even as those issues are being addressed, it is necessary to find political
means by which to expose the dependence of dogmatic identities upon the differences they vilify. For a dogmatic identity translates the
differences upon which it depends into modes of otherness to be opposed and condemned, doing so to a degree far
surpassing the requirements of living together when the presumptions of intrinsic identity are reciprocally resisted by
the parties involved. Such a politicization of dogmatic identities forms an essential prelude to the effort to devise creative ways through which a wider
variety of identities can negotiate less violent terms of coexistence. Everyone does not become the same in a normalizing society. The
opposite is more likely to occur. Nor is a normalizing society automatically mobilized against "the individual." It might, for instance, embody a
general conception of the normal individual against which every difference is appraised. A normalizing society resists
the proliferation of affirmative individualities and positive associational styles. It does so not by making everyone the
same, but by translating the cultural diversity that exists and struggles to exist into perversified diversities. It identifies
multiple deviations from the norms it endorses and then translates them into an impressive variety of intrinsic
perversities. There is thus plenty of variety in a normalizing society. The numerous groups and individuals who deviate are shuffled
into multifarious categories of abnormality, perversity, incapacity, irrationality, sickness, irresponsibility, personal
defect, and so on. These abnormalities vary across domains (e.g., medical practice and sexual customs), severity (e.g., eccentricity, a
sick sense of humor, madness), and perceived degree of threat to the identity of an entire civilization (e.g., welfare freeloaders, sexual
deviants, atheists, nihilists). A normalizing society, then, proliferates abnormalities, treating the broad array of types that
threaten its claim to correspond to the natural or divine order of things to be in themselves in need of help, love, selfcorrection, improvement, or punishment. Its consummate irony is that it fosters the world of antagonism, violence,
and fragmentation to which it purports to be the corrective.
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Foucault
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ImpactFreedom
Biopolitics deprives the subject of freedom by enfolding them within a proliferating web of
technicism and expertism
322-323)
Moreover, these professionaltechnical experts derive power, prestige, and privilege in the collective quest for
greater performative results from their possession of specialized knowledge, based on education, competitive merit, and experience
on the jobin a word, on their human capital.19 As Lasch argues, they also constitute an essentially postmodern class that incarnates
neoliberalism in everything they do. Living without metanarratives, they are symbolic analysts, technical experts, and
managerial specialists. They also are deterritorialized souls, who live in a world of abstract concepts and symbols ,
ranging from stock market quotations to the visual images produced by Hollywood and Madison Avenue, and who specialize in the interpretation and deployment
of symbolic information.20 As postmodern times become those focused on the work of nations, as Reich asserts, the silent
majorities of routine producers and inperson servers are now becoming very restive over losing both their
metanarrative meanings and most social control over their future to such abstract mobile minorities of systemsthinking symbolic analysts.21 Increasingly, the expert exponents of more global neoliberalism completely miss how much their
project contradicts and confounds democracy in the US. Liberal management by the state or firm may appear to
guarantee individual values, but these precepts might only be the values of neoliberal experts who believe they are
empowered to keep the people equal by impelling them to pursue individuality in an open society, to secure various
abstract enactments of individual rights, and to assist the needier elements of society. Such agendas of enlightened
managerialism from above and without frequently will conflict with those of more selfreliant people struggling to rule themselves as fully-functioning democrats in
fulfillment of goals chosen by/for/of the people, and not by liberal statists.22 Many local and regional movements ask a troubling question: who actually sets the
rules of governance, and for whom? Such
elitist statism arguably is contemporary neoliberalisms first contradiction. A

proliferating panoply of experts, once meant to assist the life of individuals in states, has come to constrain real
democratic choice, reducing communal self-governance to the individual ratification of expert decisions taken
elsewhere. State and corporate managerialists transmogrify popular democracy into an elitist technocracy legitimated
by formal bureaucratic practices intent upon protecting only their moralizing abstractions, like equal rights and full entitlements.
While real people in many actual communities might choose through open and free democratic means to not accept affirmative action, to not endorse abortion
rights, to not pay for anti-poverty program entitlements, or to not impose restrictive gun control laws for many locally important reasons, liberal statists
continue to intervene contra-democratically in their lives to force such statist policies down their throats as the right
freedoms that they must accept. As Beck observes, governments now try to reduce riskto themselves and their constituentsby reprocessing the
dangers of democratic governance into the more predictable certainties of expert rulings.23 Politics becomes sub-politics, insulating real
political choices from the democratic hurly-burly of popular elections or partisan wrangling, while empowering small
networks of experts to make decisions on the basis of their professionaltechnical disciplinary codes in polyarchies of
professionalized interest articulation/aggregation where more networks of other experts make/enforce and interpret
the rules. Hence, the main political conflict zones today are no longer necessarily those between labor and capital, left and right, persons of color and
WASPs, or women and men, but rather they are cut along new contours of control between those who know and those who do not, those who can and do
participate in elitist managerial decisiontaking and those who cannot, or those who intervene in the personal spheres of others and those who cannot.
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Eco ImpactEnvironmental Destruction

The environment always exceeds human meddlingmore intervention only worsens the
cycle of crisis, guaranteeing ecological extinction
Commoner also presents these two worlds as being àt war . As humans in the technosphere disrupt the ecosphere, the ecosphere
responds with equally or more disruptive secondary effects in the technosphere. In some sense, the environment is `nature for
Commoner, but it is also `society , or, perhaps more accurately, a new composite of `nature-as-transformed-by-society . Commoner stresses this interpretation
in The Closing Circle when he claims `the environment is, so to speak, the house created on the earth by living things, for living things (Commoner, 1971, p. 32).
This representation of the environment as life s house, however, does little more than reduce it to a biophysical housing of all living things or, again, the setting
that surrounds organisms.Pesticides often are used to typify how environmental destruction happens in this conceptual
register. A chemical agent is applied by humans in the technosphere on something in the biosphere, like weeds or
animal pests. While this application was intended to eradicate only those plants or animals that destroyed crops,
carried disease and infested dwellings, its impact was much broader. Soon pesticides jumped the dualist chasm and
spread through everything in the ecosphere both human technosphere and non-human biosphere returning from
òut there in natural environments back into plant, animal and human bodies situated ìn here , affecting those arti
cial environments with unintended, unanticipated and unwanted negative effects. This recognition begins with Carson (1962). Many
environmental educators accept this ontological momentum in ordinary Education 195 language use and allow the reductionist and dualist vision of the
environment to in ltrate their visions of human concern for the Earth s ecologies. Up to a point, this view works, but the limited advantage it provides culminate
in resource, risk and recreationist managerialism. When
the world is divisible into environment and society, nature and community,
ecology and economics, environmental education s charge is to enlighten everyone about how to mitigate the
damage caused by the latter on the former. Hence, various environmental protection agencies, built ìn here by
society to safeguard what is òut there in nature, can mobilise agents and activities to reduce resource use, mitigate
risks, and contain recreational degradation in the environment. These approaches `work , but their workability is
short-term and limited. They overlook how resources are misused, risks are avoidable and recreations are mutable.
Environmental destruction is a result of human managerial control that contributes to the

diminishment of planetary resources. Managerialism is the root cause of environmental
crises.
Paul Trenell, graduate student in international politics at the University of Wales, "The (Im)possibility of
'Environmental Security," dissertation submitted September 2006, accessed 11/30/09
http://cadair.aber.ac.uk/dspace/bitstream/2160/410/2/trenellpaulipm0060.pdf
Before tracing the response to the emergence of environmental hazards it is necessary to say a word about the
causes of environmental degradation. By this I refer not to the scientific explanations of the process, but the deeply rooted societal and
philosophical developments that have allowed the process to continue. As Simon Dalby has detailed, environmental threats are the result of the
kind of society that the current global political economy produces. Industrial activity, agricultural monocultures, and
rampant individual consumption of disposable items (all of which are efforts to enhance some forms of human welfare through domination
and control of facets of nature) produce other forms of insecurity (1992a: 113). A large hand in the development of contemporary
environmental problems must be attributed to the enlightenment faith in human ability to know and conquer all. In the
quest for superiority and security, an erroneous division between humanity and nature emerged whereby the natural
world came to be seen as something to be tamed and conquered rather than something to be respected (Adorno &
Horkheimer, 1973). Over time, this false dichotomy has become accepted as given, and as a result humankind has lost sight of its own dependence on nature. It
is this separation which allows the continued abuse of planetary resources with such disregard for the long-term
implications. What is at stake in how we respond to environmental insecurity is the healing of this rift and, in turn, the preservation of human life into the
future. Any suggested solutions to environmental vulnerability must account for these concerns and provide a sound
basis for redressing the imbalance in the humanity-nature relationship.
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AltMicropolitics
Exposing contradictions within fields of discourse halts their reproduction and lets counterhegemonic modes of thinking emerge to contest normalizing practices. This is both
theoretical criticism and the basis for practical revolution.
Jutta Weldes, et al., lecturer in international relations at University of Bristol, Mark Laffey, independent scholar,
Hugh, Gusterson, professor of anthropology at MIT, Raymond Duvall, professor of political science at University of
Minnesota, George Marcus, professor of anthropology at Rice, Cultures of Insecurity: States, Communities, and the
Production of Danger, 1999, pg. 16-17
The fact that cultures are composed of multiple discourses or codes of intelligibility, and that the world therefore can be
and is represented in different, and often competing, ways, has significant implications. In particular, it means that any
representation can potentially be contested and so must actively be reproduced. Meanings are not given, static, or
final; rather, they are always in process and always provisional. The production of insecurities thus requires considerable social workof
production, of reproduction, and, possibly, of transformation. Dominant discourses must constantly reproduce themselves to answer
challenges to their constructions of the world and their identification of those insecurities worthy of a response.
Defining security and insecurity requires considerable ideological labor. Contesting discourses, in turn, attempt to
rearticulate insecurities in ways that challenge the dominant representations (see, for example, Ballinger, this volume). In addition,
discourses are themselves not perfectly coherent but always entail internal contradictions and lacunae. These
contradictions make possible both resistance to a dominant discourse and the transformation of discourses. It is in this
sense, then, that culture can be viewed as a field on which processes of discursive contestation are set. It should be noted that, in analyzing such constructive
processes, we are not examining mere rhetoric. It is in any case misleading to associate the notions of culture, of discourse, or of codes of intelligibiliry with the
merely linguistic. As Laclau and Mouffe have argued (1987: 8284), discourses are composed of linguistic and nonlinguistic (that is to say, material) practices,
both of which are indispensable to the production of worlds and of insecurity.17 After all, discursive articulations, including the construction of
insecurities, are
always materialized in concrete practices and rituals and operate through specific state [and other]
apparatuses (Hall, 1988: 46). Discourses and their codes of intelligibility have concrete, and significant, material effects.
They allocate social capacities and resources and make practices possible. We use the terms construction and production loosely to
maintain the distinction between linguistic and nonlinguistic practices. Linguistically, discourses are the vehicle for the construction of categories (of difference, of
identity, of threat, etc.). Through both linguistic and nonlinguistic practices, they are the vehicle for the production of social facts (such as insecurities).
Reframing politics as a mere constellation of power relations reveals its constitutive

violence and allows for alternatives to juridical government to be explored
Andrew W. Neal, Cutting Off the Kings Head: Foucaults Society Must Be Defended and the Problem of
Sovereignty, Alternatives 29 (2004), p. 373-398
The critique of Foucault on sovereignty ultimately turns on Foucault's hypothesis that "politics is the continuation of war by other means."
Indeed, this hypothesis has been given great prominence; even the inside jacket of the new U.S. English-language edition exclaims: "Inverting Clausewitz's
famous formulation "War is the continuation of politics by other means," Foucault explores the notion that "politics is war by other means" in its relation to race,
class struggle, and, of course, power." This prominence can also be attributed to the fact that the first two chapters of the lecture series, in which he posits this
hypothesis, were available in English long before the translation of the entire lecture series.^^ Accordingly, then, Foucault provocatively
suggests
that we need an alternative to the "juridical model of sovereignty." (He would not make his claim about the need to "cut off the Ring's head" until the
following year, but the link is clear.) As Foucault writes: In order to make a concrete analysis of power relations, we must abandon
the juridical model of sovereignty. . . . [R]ather than looking for the single point from which all forms of power derive,
either by way of consequence or development, we must begin to let them operate in their multiplicity, their differences, their
specificity, and their reversibility; we must therefore study them as relations of force that intersect, refer to one
another, converge, or, on the contrary, come into conflict and strive to negate one another. . . . If we have to avoid reducing
the analysis of power to the schema proposed by the juridical constitution of sovereignty, and if we have to think of
power in terms of relations of force, do we therefore have to interpret it in terms of the general form of war? Can war
serve as an analyzer of power relations?16 We can see that the initial hypothesis that Foucault sets out to explore is indeed whether politics can
be alternatively understood as a tangled web of conquests, struggles, and wars; and this does indeed appear to be an inversion of Clausewitz's famous
aphorism.
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AltMicropolitics
Small points of resistance are key to analyze the mechanisms of power and escape from the
systems of juridical politics.
94-97 BSH
Continuing this line of discussion, we can advance a certain number of propositions: -Power
something that one holds on to or allows to slip away; power
is not something that is acquired, seized, or shared,

is exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of nonegalitarian and
mobile relations. -Relations of power are not in a position of exteriority with respect to other types of relationships (economic processes, knowledge relationships,
sexual relations), but are immanent in the latter; they are the immediate effects of the divisions, inequalities, and disequilibriums which
occur in the latter, and conversely they are the internal conditions of these differentiations; relations of power are not in
superstructural positions, with merely a role of prohibition or accompaniment; they have a directly productive role, wherever they come into play. -Power
comes from below; that is, there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power
relations, and serving as a general matrix -no such duality extending from the top down and reacting on more and more limited groups to the very depths of the social body. One
must suppose rather that the manifold relationships of force that take shape and come into play in the machinery of production, in
families, limited groups, and institutions, are the basis for wide-ranging effects of cleavage that run through the social body as a whole.
These then form a general line of force that traverses the local oppositions and links them together; to be sure, they also bring about redistributions, realignments, homogenizations,
serial arrangements, and convergences of the force relations. Major
dominations are the hegemonic effects that are sustained by all these confrontations.
-Power relations are both intentional and nonsubjective. If in fact they are intelligible, this is not because they are the effect of another instance that "explains" them,
but rather because they are imbued, through and through, with calculation: there is no power that is exercised without a series of
aims and objectives. But this does not mean that it results from the choice or decision of an individual subject; let us not look for the headquarters that presides over its
rationality; neither the caste which governs, nor the groups which control the state apparatus, nor those who make the most important economic decisions direct the entire network of
power that functions in a society (and makes it function); the
rationality of power is characterized by tactics that are often quite explicit at

the restricted level where they are inscribed (the local cynicism of power), tactics which, becoming connected to one another, attracting and
propagating one another, but finding their base of support and their condition elsewhere, end by forming comprehensive systems: the logic is perfectly clear, the
aims decipherable, and yet it is often the case that no one is there to have invented them, and few who can be said to have formulated them: an implicit characteristic of the great
anonymous, almost unspoken strategies which coordinate the loquacious tactics whose "inventors" or decisionmakers are often without hypocrisy. -Where
there is power,
there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power. Should it be
said that one is always "inside" power, there is no "escaping" it, there is no absolute outside where it is concerned, because one is subject
to the law in any case? Or that, history being the ruse of reason, power is the ruse of history, always emerging the winner? This would be to misunderstand the strictly relational
character of power relationships. Their existence depends on a multiplicity of points of resistance: these play the role of adversary, target, support, or handle in power relations. These
points of resistance are present everywhere in the power network . Hence there is no single locus of great
Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary . Instead there is a plurality of resistances,
each of them a special case: resistances that are possible, necessary, improbable; others that are spontaneous, savage, solitary, concerted, rampant, or violent; still others that are
quick to compromise, interested, or sacrificial; by definition, they can only exist in the strategic field of power relations. But this does not mean that they are only a reaction or rebound,
Resistances do not derive from a few

heterogeneous principles; but neither are they a lure or a promise that is of necessity betrayed. They are the odd term in relations of power; they
forming with respect to the basic domination an underside that is in the end always passive, doomed to perpetual defeat.
are inscribed in the latter as an irreducible opposite. Hence they too are distributed in irregular fashion: the points, knots, or focuses of resistance are spread over time and space at
varying densities, at times mobilizing groups or individuals in a definitive way, inflaming certain points of the body, certain moments in life, certain types of behavior. Are there no great
radical ruptures, massive binary divisions, then? Occasionally, yes. But more
often one is dealing with mobile and transitory points of

resistance, producing cleavages in a society that shift about, fracturing unities and effecting regroupings, furrowing across
individuals themselves, cutting them up and remolding them, marking off irreducible regions in them, in their bodies and minds. Just as the network of power relations ends by forming a
dense web that passes through apparatuses and institutions, without being exactly localized in them, so too the swarm of points of resistance traverses social stratifications and
individual unities. And it
is doubtless the strategic codification of these points of resistance that makes a revolution possible,
is in this sphere of force relations that we must
try to analyze the mechanisms of power. In this way we will escape from the system of Law-and-Sovereign which has
captivated political thought for such a long time. And if it is true that Machiavelli was among the few-and this no doubt was the scandal of his "cynicism"-who
conceived the power of the Prince in terms of force relationships, perhaps we need to go one step further, do without the persona of the Prince, and
decipher power mechanisms on the basis of a strategy that is immanent in force relationships.
somewhat similar to the way in which the state relies on the institutional integration of power relationships. It
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AltMicropolitics
The alt seizes the debate as a site for resisting power by destabilizing dominant discourses
and opening political spaces outside of state bureaucracythis enables change both within
and beyond the state
David Campbell, professor of international politics at the university of Newcastle, Writing Security, 1998, pg. 204205
Even more important, his understanding of power emphasizes the ontology of freedom presupposed by the existence of disciplinary and normalizing practices.
Put simply, there cannot be relations of power unless subjects are in the first instance free: the need to institute negative and
constraining power practices
comes about only because without them freedom would abound. Were there no possibility of
freedom, subjects would not act in ways that required containment so as to effect order.37 Freedom, though, is not the
absence of power. On the contrary, because it is only through power that subjects exercise their agency, freedom and
power cannot be separated. As Foucault maintains: At the very heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it,
are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom. Rather than speaking of an essential freedom, it
would be better to speak of an agonism of a relationship which is at the same time reciprocal incitation and
struggle; less of a face-to--face confrontation which paralyzes both sides than a permanent provocation.38 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 Western 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 provocation of power and freedom in biopolitics, and stand as
testament to the strategic reversibility of power relations: if the terms of govern mental 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.40
In more recent times, constituencies associated with womens, youth, ecological, and peace movements (among others)
have also issued claims on society.41 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 Policys 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 .42
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AltResistance
Questioning the legitimacy of the 1AC discourse is an act of resistance which questions the
very coordinates of power that have previously been assumed. Demonstrating the
possibility that things might be different is a radical political act.
Dan W. Butin, Assistant Professor of Education at Gettysburg College, June 2001, Educational Studies, Vol. 32,
No. 2
Foucault believed that resistance could make a positive and concrete difference in people's lives. It may , of course, make
the situation worse. But to not have the opportunity to attempt to change is the most dangerous of all positions. It is
against this that Foucault railed. His "hyper- and pessimistic activism" was thus both an enactment of his belief in how relations of power can be struggled
against, and an experiment in gauging the potential for transformation. In this light I would therefore like to offer three methodological correctives for the "Foucauldian fallacies" I
outlined previously. First, it must be acknowledged that individuals are neither simply passive nor radically autonomous agents. Foucault
forcefully argued that resistance is an inherent aspect of relations of power and thus predicated on the ability to act. Without
such a theoretical acknowledgment, Foucault's insights concerning power and domination collapse within a totalizing
and static perspective. In a sense, this is a simple acknowledgment based on over one hundred years of pragmatist research grounded in William James, John Dewey, and
George Herbert Mead. And in fact, some have argued for a more sympathetic relationship between Foucault and pragmatism (Maslan 1988). Second, and predicated on the first point,
"subjugated
knowledges" should be heard. "Subjugated knowledges" are, for Foucault, "a whole set of knowledges that
have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated" and include the voices "of the
psychiatric patient, of the ill person, of the nurse" (Foucault 1980, 82). For all of the theoretical sophistication of the four articles analyzed previously, none
cites the individuals affected by the practices described. Gang members, British academics who "spontaneously" consent, and administrators caught within disciplinary practices are left
unheard. Their voices
are assumed and spoken for. I am not suggesting that their voices are the final truth. Neither does Foucault. Rather, they must simply
be acknowledged. Michael Apple makes a similar point when he urges analyses of how subjects make meaning of the technologies of differentiation: "we should not assume
that teachers or students are totally unaware of what is happening. How do they understand these things? How do they possibly find the holes in these discourses and mechanisms in
creative ways so as to allow for spaces of resistance?" (Apple 1998, 424). Qualitative and ethnographic research, or the citation of it, is not a strong point of poststructuralist
researchers. It might behoove a closer look at Foucault's constant and consistent political engagement (Felski 1998). Third, educational researchers
must be willing to
experiment with new truths. One must always bear in mind and grapple with the fact that new "regimes of truth" may replace old
authoritarian principles; yet it should be realized that some forms of domination are more dangerous than others. To
capitulate to a radical relativism denies any potential to resist and thus precludes any means by which to modify or
reverse relations of power. Moreover, the questioning of the criteria of the experimental truth must be seen for what it is:
a tactical struggle to maintain a particular truth-claim. This is not to say such a truth-claim is invalid or unhelpful or nonliberating. Rather, it is simply to
realize that the truth-claims of the status quo attempt to ward off resistance in the same manner that new experimental
truths attempt to overturn them: by struggling to delegitimize their grounding to truth.
Resistance is always possiblethe alt reveals the insecurity of modern power by

questioning its pretensions to certainty and truth
Hasana Sharp, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at McGill University, Spring 2002, Intertexts, Vol. 6, No. 1
Fraser's invocation of empirical validity could be misleading in that Foucault does not advocate imagining power in sovereign terms in any historical period, but, at the same time, claims
that the
move away from organizations of rule according to a model of state sovereignty nonetheless constitutes a
transformation in techniques of government. I would like to contend that, even in an absolutist regime, power operates
productively and is connected to everyday life and subjectivity, albeit in quite different forms. Understandings of
sociality according to sovereignty never adequately grasp the complexity of the social forces at play. What is interesting and
troubling about disciplinary and normalizing societies is that the pervasive quality of power makes it all the more necessary for it to conceal
itself through naturalizing discourses: "power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself. Its
success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms" (HS1 86). Panopticism tends to be read as the most somber note in Discipline and
Punish, but the book ends with an invocation of battle and struggle, a reminder that the norms produced by discipline are contested and always subject to the vicissitudes of war.
Foucault writes, "And what
ultimately resides over all these mechanisms is not the unitary functioning of an apparatus or an institution, but the
necessity of combat and the rules of strategy ... we must hear the distant roar of battle" (308). While the "panopticon," itself a
dream of power, appears unitary to its subjects, its mode of appearing represents only the necessary myth of power's functioning. Power must appear
necessary where it is contingent. The logic of sovereignty is coextensive with the logic of necessity, of the seamless functioning of power. Such a logic betrays itself
as a symptom of power's insecurity. Beneath such desperate measures, we must apprehend what power seeks to
conceal: the power of the multitude, the antagonistic forces of the people, the omnipresence of struggle. (5)
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AltCare of the Self

Resisting power entails evaluating ones actions and beliefs with regard to their regulatory
functions, endeavoring to be creative in life.
Hubert L. Dreyfus, professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley, Being and Power Revisited, Foucault and Heidegger:
Critical Encounters, 2003, p. 49-50
Like Heidegger abandoning talking of being, as Foucault works out his final ideas on how to resist bio-power, he becomes more interested in saving the self from
becoming a subject and less interested in power per se. Thus, in a typical retrospective reinterpretation, he begins his essay "The Subject and Power" by saying:
"I would like to say, first of all, what has been the goal of my work during the last twenty years. It has not been to analyze the phenomena of power, nor to
elaborate the foundations of such an analysis. My objective, instead, has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings
are made subjects.1151 The moral seems to be that, when
one is looking for marginal practices that could support resistance to a

dominant epoch of the understanding of being or a dominant regime of power; rather than thinking of resistance as
the preparation of a new total epoch or regime that is dawning, as both Heidegger and Foucault once did, one should think of the
marginal as what resists any unified style of being or power. One will seek to preserve not new forms of being or
power, but local things and individual selves. Thus in the last works of Heidegger and Foucault the discussions of epochal
understandings of being and regimes of power appropriately disappear. Foucault, then, bases resistance on the self.
He finds in antiquity a practice in terms of which to question the direction our current practices are taking, and to
resist this trend. He explains: [In antiquity] it was a matter of knowing how to govern one's own life in order to give it the
most beautiful form possible (in the eyes of others, of oneself, and of the future generations for whom one could serve as an example).59 He
proposes "opposing to categories of the 'law' and of 'prohibition' those of the 'art of living,' 'techniques of self,' and
'stylization of existence."'60 Foucault grounds resistance in these "practices of creativity.1161 In the end, he thus embraces a kind
of Nietzschean constant overcoming for its own sake. He offers "a critical philosophy that seeks the conditions and the indefinite
possibilities of ... transforming ourselves.1162 This is the sense in which, although the structure of Foucault's thought is thoroughly Heideggerian,
Nietzsche won out in the end.
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AltRefuse Distinctions
We should refuse the distinctions that sovereign power creates, as it leads to a relationship
of violence.
Jenny Edkins, Professor of International Politics at the University of Wales Aberystwyth, and Vronique Pin-Fat,
Lecturer in International Relations in the Centre for International Politics at the University of Manchester, 2005,
Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 34, No. 1, p. 11-14
Against Connollys reading, we suggest that Agambens contribution provides an insight into ways in which sovereign power can be challenged and indeed its
logic or grammar refused. As we have pointed out, the possibility of resistance is in general not one which relies on an escape or
emancipation from power relations. Indeed, we have argued that such an escape leads us into the camps, which are
marked by such an absence of power relations. What we will call a challenge to or contestation of sovereign power, on the
contrary, entails a displacement of sovereign power and a return to properly political power relations: a life of power. A
challenge to sovereign powers creation of zones of indistinction (the concentration camp being the paradigmatic example) cannot consist of a call for a
reinstatement of classical politics, a reinstatement of the distinction between zoe and bios. Firstly, this is not a possibility because the
very distinction
itself, and the lines that it draws, is the fundamental activity of sovereign power.51 Secondly, the classical distinction requires that
bare life can only be included through an exclusion in the form of an exception. There cannot be a return to a politics that maintains the
distinction between zoe- and bios, or, in Agambens words: There is no return from the camps to classical politics. In
the camps, city and house became indistinguishable, and the possibility of differentiating between our biological body
and our political body between what is incommunicable and mute and what is communicable and sayable was
taken from us forever.52 Either way, whether through an emancipatory ideal or through a reinstatement of classical politics, we would all remain homines
sacri or bare life. However, challenge may be possible not through emancipation or nostalgic return, but, as we will argue, through either of two other strategies:
first, through a refusal to draw lines and second, through the assumption of bare life. We have argued that Agambens work demonstrates that
sovereign power is no longer a form of power relation in Foucauldian terms but a relationship of violence (as his
discussion of the camp shows). Since this is the case, however paradoxical it may seem, challenges to sovereign power take place
when there is a demand for a return to properly political power relations, and take the form of such a demand.
Agambens injunction is that we must find a completely new politics that is, a politics no longer founded on the exception of bare life.53 If the zone of
indistinction has extended beyond the camp to embrace much of the rest of the world, then what we have is an extension of bare life, and its lack of relationalities
of power: in other words, an impossibility of politics. The absence of a power relation is not desirable because there is then no
possibility of resistance. We have nothing but a form of servitude or slavery. So, rephrasing it in Foucauldian terms,
Agambens argument is that we have moved from a relation of power to a relationship of violence. Let us remind ourselves
how Foucault describes such a relationship and its contrast with a power relation: A relationship of violence acts upon a body or upon
things; it forces, it bends, it breaks, it destroys, or it closes off all possibilities. Its opposite pole can only be passivity,
and if it comes up against any resistance it has no other option but to try to break it down. A power relationship, on the
other hand, can only be articulated on the basis of two elements that are indispensable if it is really to be a power relationship:
that the other (the one over whom power is exercised) is recognised and maintained to the very end as a subject who acts; and
that, faced with a relationship of power, a whole field of responses, reactions, results, and possible inventions may
open up.54 In this context it then makes sense when Agamben argues that the question we should be addressing is not Is there any escape from power
relations? but, on the contrary, Is today a life of power available? Such a life of power would be a life of potentialities and possibilities, a life in the field of power
relations, resistance, and freedom: in other words, a political life. It
is important to make it clear that what we are talking about is not a

challenge to a particular sovereign order, but to sovereignty, or sovereign power, in general, as a form of order that
entails specific forms of life. We do not see sovereignty as an ontological condition of the possibility of order as such, as Sergei Prozorov argues.55
In our view it is not inconceivable that there might be forms of social and political organisation which would not entail
a life under the sway of sovereign power and would still represent a form of order, though a very different one. They
may well seem wholly unintelligible, entirely meaningless, outright inconceivable or even quaintly paradoxical when viewed from the framework of sovereign
power.56 We are indeed issuing a call to dispense with the very principle of order57 when it concerns an order founded on the sovereign ban. We do not deny
that the sovereign exception is constitutive of such an order;58 we do deny that sovereign power constitutes the only possible form of political life, and indeed
that it constitutes a political life at all. Since
sovereign power relies on two things first, the drawing of lines between forms of
life, and, second, the production thereby of a generalised bare life there are two ways the demand for a return to
politics can be articulated: the refusal of sovereign distinctions and the assumption of bare life. We elaborate what we mean
by this in the remainder of this article.
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Foucault
___ of ___
AltRefuse Distinctions
The only way to contest sovereign power is to completely eliminate lines of distinction
drawn between people. We cannot simply change where the lines are drawn.
Jenny Edkins, Professor of International Politics at the University of Wales Aberystwyth, and Vronique Pin-Fat,
Lecturer in International Relations in the Centre for International Politics at the University of Manchester, 2005,
Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 34, No. 1, p. 11-14
One potential form of challenge to sovereign power consists of a refusal to draw any lines between zoe and bios,
inside and outside.59 As we have shown, sovereign power does not involve a power relation in Foucauldian terms. It is
more appropriately considered to have become a form of governance or technique of administration through
relationships of violence that reduce political subjects to mere bare or naked life. In asking for a refusal to draw lines as a possibility
of challenge, then, we are not asking for the elimination of power relations and consequently, we are not asking for the
erasure of the possibility of a mode of political being that is empowered and empowering, is free and that speaks:
quite the opposite. Following Agamben, we are suggesting that it is only through a refusal to draw any lines at all between
forms of life (and indeed, nothing less will do) that sovereign power as a form of violence can be contested and a
properly political power relation (a life of power as potenza) reinstated. We could call this challenging the logic of sovereign power
through refusal. Our argument is that we can evade sovereign power and reinstate a form of power relation by contesting sovereign powers assumption of the
right to draw lines, that is, by contesting the sovereign ban. Any other challenge always inevitably remains within this relationship of violence. To move outside it
(and return to a power relation) we need not only to contest its right to draw lines in particular places, but also to resist the call to draw any lines of the sort
sovereign power demands. The grammar of sovereign power cannot be resisted by challenging or fighting over where the
lines are drawn. Whilst, of course, this is a strategy that can be deployed, it is not a challenge to sovereign power per se as it still
tacitly or even explicitly accepts that lines must be drawn somewhere (and preferably more inclusively). Although such
strategies contest the violence of sovereign powers drawing of a particular line, they risk replicating such violence in
demanding the line be drawn differently. This is because such forms of challenge fail to refuse sovereign powers
line-drawing ethos, an ethos which, as Agamben points out, renders us all now homines sacri or bare life.
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Foucault
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AltTerritory
Questioning spatial assumptions of the 1AC generates an epistemic confusion which
provides the impetus for a discovery of new values and relations to others
Dalby 5 Simon Dalby, Carleton University, Ottowa, Political Space: Autonomy, Liberalism, and Empire,
Alternatives 30 (2005), 415-441, ebsco

Starting from the assumptions of stability and the fixity of political spaces in a world where they are so novel suggests
great conceptual confusion, or at least considerable ethnocentrism and "presentism," in the so-called social sciences. It
forces reflection on the social role of such discourses as statements of political aspiration quite as much as analysis
of how things actually are. Legitimation practices premised on an unreflective cartography of at least relatively autonomous
spaces offer an extension of the geopolitics of liberalism, of local autonomy as the mode of administration of a political economy that exceeds
those spaces repeatedly. Then again, might we social scientists not simply understand ourselves as Wilsonian liberals dedicated to the triumph of modern
affluence administered within autonomous territorial, albeit it not obviously "national" spaces? Ironically the events of the last few years, and in particular the
actions of the Bush administration since September 11, 2001, make all this much easier to see. In a world of supposedly sovereign states with
formal political equality, the conditions of the global covenant, at least the US state under the Bush administration has no problem
arrogating to itself the right to intervene when and where it sees fit to preempt any threats to its preeminence. The
nonintervention clauses of the UN Charter are notably fraying, but still the return of the Bush administration to the United Nations, in the months after its invasion
in March 2003, to ask for help in pacifying Iraq suggests that even the prerogatives of empire do not allow that state to evade its political obligations to claim
legitimacy on the basis of more than brute force. In this sense, there remains a global "political space," albeit one that seems to have an impossible Newtonian
cartography. The converse of this argument is that political struggles that oppose the cavalier use of military force to ensure the
flows of resources from the periphery to fuel, literally in this case, the economies of the metropole, are also implicated in a politics
that transcends claims to sovereignty. Precisely the invocation of the rights to nonintervention on the part of activists in many places rely on a
nonterritorial strategies of publicity, internet "sites," and coordinated protests in many places, to invoke the "rights" to territorial nonintervention. This is not to
disparage the undoubted uses of territorial strategies in defence of many things; but it is to make clear that this is what is going on. It is also to insist on the
utility of raising explicitly the questions of who precisely writes cosmopolitan texts with many of the assumptions of
the "right" of mobility, travel, and transit anywhere on the planet.^^ In addition, the argument that the current occupation of Iraq is about a
war for the US way of life, and gas-guzzling SUVs in particular, makes it clear that this violence is a form of "shadow globalization" cast over the peripheries of
the world economy.^^ Progressive
politics cannot now be about the extension of these fossil-fueled urban liberties. It can be
about solidarities, which do not have an implicit spatiality to them, although these sometimes also use spatial metaphors to express
"horizontal" linkages. Above all else, this engagement with the political-space debate reinforces the argument that the
cartographies of modern administrative spaces are no longer an adequate basis on which to build either social sciences or
some form of progressive politics. To think differently is to try to think about politics as connection, as link, as network. As
Walker has repeatedly pointed out, this is immensely difficult to do given the constraints of the spatial languages that we have inherited from modern thinkers.^^
Obligations across boundaries and the possibilities of politics not constrained to geographical invocations of a we that
does politics are the questions for the moment. These questions are not well served by unreflective languages of political "space" or
geographical "scale" with assumptions of autonomy as their ontological starting point. Politics is a lot more complicated. The inclusion of so much of the world
directly into the circuits of the global economy has made the necessity of thinking much more carefully about the spatial metaphors of politics unavoidable.
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___ of ___
AltEnvironment
Reconsidering our relationship to the environment allows us to change the way we view
nature
By reconsidering how educators and schools discursively construct `the environment , one can see, as Foucault suggests, the
way in which individuals or groups represent words to themselves, utilise their forms and meanings, compose real
discourse, reveal and conceal in it what they are thinking or saying, perhaps unknown to themselves, more or less
than they wish, but in any case leave a mass of verbal traces of those thoughts, which must be deciphered and
restored as far as possible to their representative vivacity.(Foucault, 1994, p. 353) There are many different alternatives to what prevails,
and changing ways of thought can revolutionise the practices of policy. In environmental education, the professional technical
articulations of teaching largely focus on resource/risk/recreation managerialism to establish and enforce `the right
disposition of things between humans and their environment through administering resource use, risk, de nition,
and recreation loads. When approached through these categories, the planet Earth does become, if only in terms of
environmental policy s operational assumptions, an immense planetary infrastructure. As the human races ècological lifesupport system, it has `with only occasional localised failures provided `services upon which human society depends consistently and without charge (Cairns,
1995). As
the foundational infrastructure of brown spaces in society, the Earth generates ècosystem services , or
those derivative products and functions of natural systems that human societies perceive as valuable (Westmen, 1978).
Human life will continue only if such survival-sustaining services continue, so this complex system of systems is what
must survive. These outputs include: the generation of soils, the regeneration of plant nutrients, capture of solar energy, conversion of solar energy into
biomass, accumulation/puri cation/ distribution of water, control of pests, provision of a genetic library, maintenance of breathable air, control of micro and
macro climates, pollination of plants, diversi cation of animal species, development of buffering mechanisms in catastrophes and aesthetic enrichment (Cairns,
1995). Because it is the terrestrial infrastructure of transnational enterprise, the planet s ecology requires very skilled and informed leadership to guide its
sustainable use. In turn, environmental experts will monitor, massage and manage those systems that produce these robust services. Just as the sustained use
of any technology `requires that it be maintained, updated and changed periodically , so too does the `sustainable use of the planet require that we not destroy
our ecological capital, such as old-growth forests, streams and rivers (with their associated biota), and other natural amenities (Cairns, 1995, p. 6). Systemic
survival of nature s green zones, then, becomes the central concern of these environmental education initiatives,
while the artificial ecologies of society s brown zones often are ignored.
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AltEnvironment
Rejecting the values of managerialism allows for the creation of a new society that refuses
to be rooted in expert control and capitalism.
324-325)
It is the unanticipated costs incurred by society at large in serving such performative corporate goals that populists resist as antithetical to the larger agendas of
living well. By opposing these destructive tendencies with new alternative values, democratic populists push to renew
non-hierarchical social relations, technical simplicity, small-scale economies, political decentralization, reasonable
science, and cultural vitality within the free spaces of present-day national society. Unlike most expert programs for greater
corporate managerialism, many democratic populists and critical social theorists favor mobilizing the immediate producers
and consumers to reconsider how crucial decisions about their relations to Nature can change rather than
surrendering this prerogative to state and corporate technocrats. This contestation of expert managerialism puts
ecology at the center of a new critical sensibility to revitalize political debates over the key issues of who decides,
who pays, and who benefits in the complex economic and technological l relations of people with Nature.26 A sense
of Nature, as ecologically constituted free sites for self-created being, promises to reorder the relations of the
individual l to the collective, of personality to society, and of these dual social relations to Nature. 27 This ecological
sensibility, then, also must reinvest individuals with the decision-making power to construct their material relations to the environment in smaller-scale, nonhierarchical, ecologically sound technical relations between independent producers in local and regional commonwealths. They know states and businesses will
not act responsibly in every instance. Therefore, democratic populism must reaffirm the responsibility of all individuals for preserving their ecological inheritance
and passing it on to future generations. To
confirm the virtues of self and social discipline in living within the renewable cycles of
natural reproduction, this ecological sensibility should point to the most promising paths out of the global
consumerism of transnational capitalism. 28 Rather than encouraging passivity, dependence and purposelessness, which corporate technocracy
fosters and perpetuates, the theory and praxis of democratic populism should presume greater social activity, personal autonomy, and reasonable balance to
preserve Nature. With these goals, the labor of competent, conscious communities could be guided to reconstitute ecologically their social, economic and political
mediations with each other by interacting reasonably with Nature.29 Furthermore, the successful establishment of new social relations
organized along these ecological lines will alter radically the social constructions of Nature in relation to society,
making it again into a subject not an object, an agency not an instrumentality, and a more than equal partner not a
dominated subaltern force. Rather than viewing environmental disasters as isolated incidents of untidy waste disposal or inefficient management of
natural processes, making Nature an equal partner with people would recast such events as tragedies of unreasoning abuse. The living and inorganic
constituents of Nature could be entitled to rights and privileges as worthy of defense as any human rights and social
privileges.30 Guarantees of ecological security should ramify, in turn, into greater freedom, dignity and reasonability
for the human beings whose own autonomy suffers in Natures abusive indenturement to corporate enterprises
instrumental rationality.31
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Foucault
___ of ___
AltPublic Ecology
A public ecology attuned to the social realities of today is most capable of responding to
the problems of commodification and nature. This entails critical redeployment of scientific
and social discourses through a prior framework which refuses any reductive or selfinterested approaches to the environment.
Vol. 18 No. 4, December 2005 492-493)
Oddly, Shellenberger and Nordhauss (2004) endorsement of a new Apollo Project could make moves toward a public ecology because it could aim at
undercutting todays allegedly special interest environmentalism by using big, new investments for national energy independence centered on building a
coalition of environmental, labor, business, and community allied who share a common vision for a future and a
common set of values (p. 26). Even though this would be a laudable goal, Shellenberger and Nordhaus ironically get caught here in almost laughable
performative contradictions inasmuch as they try to legitimize their new strategy by noting the Apollo vision was endorsed by 17 of the countrys leading labor
unions and environmental groups ranging from the NRDC [Natural Resources Defense Council] to the Rainforest Action Network, as if this lineup actually is a
sincere attempt to undermine the assumptions of special interest environmentalism (p. 26). This strategic miscalculation fails their own test of intellectual
viability, namely, that the strength of any given political proposal turns more on its visions for the future and the values its carries within it than on its technical
policy specifications (p. 27). Lining up new coalitions of different special interests from old environmental and labor groups neither expresses a new vision for the
future nor a fresh set of values. It is Shellenberger and Nordhauss blindness to
proclaim that environmentalism is dead. In truth, they

should instead see the advent of a public ecology amid todays ecological crises as a vital space to gather new
progressive movements for equity from the economy and ecology of the Earth. Public ecology is one opportunity to
overcome such blindness by cutting new spatial optics to detect the disruptive snarls in the worldwide webs of natural
and social exchanges (see Dodds, 2000). Public ecology, then, knits together what once were quite discrete natural and social elements into a
compound prefiguration of planet wide community, which Lefebvre (2003) labeled as the urban in 1970. What once seemed only like a horizon, an illuminating
virtuality (p. 17) a generation ago is now fully recognizable in todays deruralizing and over urbanized ways of life.
Although the urban is perhaps somewhat abstract, its fields of force still remain the main public focus of human
ecological actionin cities and country sides alike. Consequently, the material impulse of capitalist globalism to remake the
world in commodified forms through markets must be countered by dense webs of social movements and systemic
materialities embedded in public ecology to reimagine the urban revolutions inequitable and inefficient reconstitution
of the worlds environments and their inhabitants. By pushing beyond exhausted conceptual divisions in naturalized environmental sciences
into the more social sciencefocused environmental studies, public ecology also could fuse insights from life science, physical
science, social science, applied humanities, and public policy into a cohesive conceptual complex that anticipates
and avoids ecological surprises (King, 1995). Today, the Earth is a res publica, and it must be cared for with caution, through collective deliberation,
and quite openly (Luke, 1999). Public ecology could preserve but also look far beyond conventional regimes for environmental problem detection/monitoring/
regulation such as those in the United Statess federal bureaucracy. Public ecology must show how private ecologies have turned the
worlds built and un -built environments into a formation that exploits those mental divides as it degrades the overall
civic life of society. Although privileged millions still benefit from the international misery of billions, Shellenberger and Nordhauss anti global warming
politics cannot help us find a post environmental world by simply endorsing other more preferred networks for privativistic special interest politics. Indeed, their
frantic faith in just doing what right-wing activists have done for decades, only now with a different progressive spin and broader coalition, could only resurrect the
non-environmentalism all suffered through during the Gilded Age prior to rise of the first conservation movements in the United States.
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AT: Perm
The 1AC cannot be severed from its entrenchment in an outdated model of power relations
which mistakenly centralizes power in the federal government. Only the alt engages new
modes of disciplinary power present throughout society.
Hubert L. Dreyfus, professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley, Being and Power Revisited, Foucault and Heidegger:
Critical Encounters, 2003, p. 44-45
This seeming problem is cleared up, I think, if we remember Heidegger's account of onto-theology. Like the understanding of being, power always, in fact,
"comes from everywhere," in that it is embodied in the style of everyday practices. But what
these background practices have made possible

up until recently is monarchical and state juridical power, i.e., power administered from above. As Foucault Puts it: At bottom,
despite the differences in epochs and objectives, the representation of power has remained under the spell of monarchy. In
political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king. Hence the importance that the theory of
power gives to the problem of right and violence, law and illegality, freedom and will, and especially the state and
sovereignty. (88-89) But now, Foucault tells us, things have changed. just as for Heidegger technicity, by treating everything as resources, levels
being to pure ordering and so gets rid of onto-theology-the idea that some entity is the ground of everything-so bio-power reveals the irrelevance of
questions of the legitimacy of the state as the source of power. Foucault says: To conceive of power [in these terms] is to
conceive of it in terms of a historical form that is characteristic of our societies: the juridical monarchy. Characteristic
yet transitory. For while many of its forms have persisted to the present, it has gradually been penetrated by quite new
mechanisms of power that are probably irreducible to the representation of law. (89) That is, Just as for Heidegger total mobilization
cannot be understood by positing subjects and objects, so normalization bypasses the state and works directly through new sorts of
invisible, precise, continuous practices of control Foucault calls micro-practices. The everyday person-to-person power
relations whose coordination produces the style of any regime of power are, indeed, everywhere. But in earlier regimes
of power there were no micro-Practices. Only disciplinary power works meticulously by ordering every detail. So, while
for Foucault all forms of power are bottom-up and the understanding of power as emanating from the sovereign or the state misses this important fact,
nonetheless bio-power
is bottom-up in a new and dangerously totalizing way, so that understanding power on the model
of the power of the king or the state (the equivalent of ontotheology) now covers up an important change in how our practices
are working.
Effective policy is impossible without prior investigation of the discursive underpinnings of

the 1ACmere combination fails to displace securitys central role in governmentality
David Campbell, professor of international politics at the university of Newcastle, Writing Security, 1998, pg. 202
Furthermore, Foucault argues that from the eighteenth century onward, security becomes the central dynamic in governmental rationality, so that (as discussed in chapter 6) we live today, not in a narrowly defined and overtly repressive disciplinary society, but in a society of security, in
which practices of national security and practices of social security structure intensive and extensive power relations, and constitute
the ethical boundaries and territorial borders of inside/outside, normal/pathological, civilized/barbaric, and so on23 The
theory of police and the shift from a sovereigns war to a populations war thus not only changed the nature of man and war, it
constituted the identity of man in the idea of the population, and articulated the dangers that might pose a threat to
security. The major implication of this argument is that the state is understood as having no essence, no ontological status that exists prior to and is served by
either police or war. Instead, the state is the mobile effect of a multiple regime of governmentality, of which the practices
of police, war, and foreign policy/Foreign Policy are all a part.34 Rethinking security and government in these terms is
one of the preconditions necessary to suggest some of the political implications of this study. Specifically, it has been the
purpose of this book to argue that we can interpret the cold war as an important moment in the production and reproduction of American identity in ways
consonant with the logic of a society of security To
this end, the analysis of the texts of Foreign Policy in chapter 1, the consideration of
the examination of the interpretation of danger surrounding the war on drugs in chapter 7,
demonstrated that even when these issues are represented in terms of national security and territorial boundaries, and even when these issues are
written in the depoliticizing mode of policy discourse, they all constitute the ensemble of the population in terms of
social security and ethical borders. Likewise, Foucaults argument underpins the fact that these developments are not peculiar to the postWorld
Eisenhowers security policies in chapter 6, and
War II period.
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AT: Perm
1AC securitization overwhelms alt solvency because the nature of security politics
footnotes all other concerns as secondary to the survival and health of the homeland
Jeff Huysmans, Lecturer in politics at the department of government at Open University, Alternatives Defining
Social Constructivism in Security Studies: The Normative Dilemma of Writing Security Feb 2002 p. 45-47
For understanding the meaning of security, the discursive formation is crucial because it defines the specificity of security practices. The rules of
the security formation link different themes, theories, and practices together as security themes, security theories, security practices. The formation is not a security utterance itself, but
it makes it possible for these themes, theories, and practices to appear. Here
the full implications of this understanding of language becomes

visible. The formation is not a transparent instrument that is manipulated to represent security questions that already exist out there somewhere. It works on another register: the
constitutive or generic register where security questions are brought into existence. Wawer has briefly defined some major aspects of the dominant Western security formation. He
defines the rules, or logic, constituting the meaning of security through the logic of war, which he reads through the lens of national security. National security is the name of an ongoing
debate, a tradition, an established set of practices and, as such, the concept has a rather formalized referent.17 Looked at through this lens, a
security problem is
something that challenges the survival of the political order. As a result, it alters the premises for all other questions.
They are subjugated to the security question because if the political unit does not succeed in successfully dealing with the security
problem it will cease to exist as a self-determined political unit. The other questions will have become irrelevant at that stage
since the unit does not exist anymore as a political unit. Security concentrates everything at this one point where the political units confront a test of will in which the ability to
fend off a challenge is the criterion for forcing the others to acknowledge its sovereignty and identity as a state.18 This
logic of security can be replayed metaphorically and extended to other sectors. If this happens, the other sectors are structured according to a security logic.19 The normative dilemma
receives its full weight from the combination of the performative logic and a generic understanding of language. Security
language becomes normative by

definition. Here it differs from the normative dimensions of security policies that classical realists sometimes discussed. For example, Arnold Wolferss classic analysis of national
security argues that security is a value among other social values such as wealth.29 This implies that a security policy implicitly or explicitly defines how
important security is compared with other values. (To put the question crudely: How much do we spend on nuclear weapons that we cannot then spend on
health care?) The policy also has to decide the level of security that is aspired to; for example: will it be minimum security or maximum security? But this normative awareness does
not capture the fundamental normativity of security enunciations that social constructivists face. Social-constructivist authors face not only the two questions formulated by Wolfers, they
also have to answer a question that in a sense precedes Wolferss remarks. They have to decide whether they want to write security in a particular area. In other words, security
enunciations not only implicitly or explicitly assume the level of priority they give to security and the level of security they aspire to; they first determine if one should approach an issue
from a security perspective at all. Normative questions are thus inescapably present in the very heart of security analysis.
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AT: PermEnvironment specific

The perm is like the national park systemit sets aside a particular instance of
environmental protection so that systemic abuses of nature go uninvestigated
To serve this end, schools are invited to prepare their students to master the ìns-and-outs of resource managerialism,
risk assessment and/or recreationist management in the environment. In fact, resources, risks and recreationists become `the three Rs
of higher environmental education. This gives students and faculty some very specific new foci for their studies and grants a
specialised managerial power to experts in either the government or big business to control. Because acting on the
behalf of nature has shifted from the avocational register of belle-letteristic naturalist writings into the professional
technical knowledge codes of environmental science, larger public discourses about ecological degradation, resource
waste or environmental remediation also have changed significantly. On the one hand, many see this shift as progressive: scienti c
personnel with positivistic technical knowledge allegedly now can identify ecological problems objectively as well as design ef cient solutions for the most
pressing ones. On the other hand, this change is regarded by others with suspicion: a spirit of `shallowness occludes the enchantments of nature in the dark
shadows of anthropocentrism, capitalism and statism, leaving
`the environment to be treated as little more than terrestrial

infrastructure for global capital (see Nash, 1989; Devall & Sessions, 1985; Fox, 1990). Parts of it must be maintained in pristine
condition as parks, but other larger pieces must be turned over either to mines, agriculture and ranches or sacrificed
to dumps, sewers and wasteland.
Environmental costs cannot just be regulated and postponed, they must be solved utterly
and completely
Timothy W. Luke, Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Deep
Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered, Organization & Environment, Vol. 15 No. 2, June 2002, p. 178-186, Sage
Reform environmentalism and radical ecology both focus on the unintended social costs of economic growth,
complexity, scale, and productivity (Luke, 1997). Yet reform environmentalists treat them as minor problems that can
be dealt with by the public and not-for-profit sector with essentially minor technocratic modifications by government
regulation or market-driven incentives for the private sector (Devall, 1979, pp. 129-155). Many radical ecologists, on
the other hand, see the modern states approach to these unintended costs as forgotten costs that business,
society, and government have always known about but purposely suppressed (Best, 1998). Such costs never can be
eradicated entirely because an industrial economy presumes their recurring charges as externalities. Regulating
them only postpones the final reckoningby hiding some costs elsewhere. A foundational change in thinking is needed
to attack the most basic problemsuntrammeled economic growth, instrumental rationality, and the reification of
natureimplicit in capitalist industrialism (Luke, 1999; Salleh, 1993). Hence, deep ecologists turn to repressed,
ignored, or forgotten visions of ecological living, which persist beneath, behind, or beyond the existing structures of
industrial society.
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AT: Action/Reform Good

Theory is action. Our critique of power is the first step in its reversal and in the initiation of
new struggles for more equitable and free social circumstances. Reform merely increases
asymmetrical distributions of power.
Deleuze and Foucault 72 Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, Intellectuals and Power, Language, CounterMemory, Practice: selected essays and interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, recorded March 4,
1972, http://libcom.org/library/intellectuals-power-a-conversation-between-michel-foucault-and-gilles-deleuze
DELEUZE: Precisely. A theory is exactly like a box of tools. It has nothing to do with the signifier. It must be useful. It must function. And not for itself. If no one uses it, beginning with
the theoretician himself (who then ceases to be a theoretician), then the theory is worthless or the moment is inappropriate. We don't revise a theory, but construct new ones; we have
no choice but to make others. It is strange that it was Proust, an author thought to be a pure intellectual, who said it so clearly: treat my book as a pair of glasses directed to the outside;
if they don't suit you, find another pair; I leave it to you to find your own instrument, which is necessarily an investment for combat. A theory does not totalise; it is an instrument for
theory is by nature opposed to

power. As soon as a theory is enmeshed in a particular point, we realise that it will never possess the slightest
practical importance unless it can erupt in a totally different area. This is why the notion of reform is so stupid and
hypocritical. Either reforms are designed by people who claim to be representative, who make a profession of speaking for others, and
they lead to a division of power, to a distribution of this new power which is consequently increased by a double repression;
or they arise from the complaints and demands of those concerned. This latter instance is no longer a reform but revolutionary action that questions
multiplication and it also multiplies itself. It is in the nature of power to totalise and it is your position, and one I fully agree with, that
(expressing the full force of its partiality) the totality of power and the hierarchy that maintains it. This is surely evident in prisons: the smallest and most insignificant of the prisoners'
demands can puncture Pleven's pseudoreform (5). If
the protests of children were heard in kindergarten, if their questions were attended to, it would
be enough to explode the entire educational system. There is no denying that our social system is totally without tolerance; this accounts for its extreme
fragility in all its aspects and also its need for a global form of repression. In my opinion, you were the first-in your books and in the practical sphere-to teach us something absolutely
fundamental: the indignity of speaking for others. We ridiculed representation and said it was finished, but we failed to draw the consequences of this "theoretical" conversion-to
appreciate the theoretical fact that only those directly concerned can speak in a practical way on their own behalf. DELEUZE: Yes, and the reverse is equally true. Not only are
prisoners treated like children, but children are treated like prisoners. Children are submitted to an infantilisation which is alien to them. On this basis, it is undeniable that schools
resemble prisons and that factories are its closest approximation. Look at the entrance to a Renault plant, or anywhere else for that matter: three tickets to get into the washroom during
the day. You found an eighteenth-century text by Jeremy Bentham proposing prison reforms; in the name of this exalted reform, he establishes
a circular system
where the renovated prison serves as a model and where the individual passes imperceptibly from school to the
factory, from the factory to prison and vice versa. This is the essence of the reforming impulse, of reformed
representation. On the contrary, when people begin to speak and act on their own behalf, they do not oppose their
representation (even as its reversal) to another; they do not oppose a new representativity to the false representativity of
power. For example, I remember your saying that there is no popular justice against justice; the reckoning takes place at another level. FOUCAULT: I think that it is not simply the
idea of better and more equitable forms of justice that underlies the people's hatred of the judicial system, of judges, courts, and prisons, but-aside from this and before anything elsethe singular perception that power is always exercised at the expense of the people. The anti-judicial struggle is a struggle against power and I don't think that it is a struggle against
injustice, against the injustice of the judicial system, or a struggle for improving the efficiency of its institutions. It is particularly striking that in outbreaks of rioting and revolt or in
seditious movements the judicial system has been as compelling a target as the financial structure, the army, and other forms of power. My hypothesis -but it is merely an hypothesis- is
that popular courts, such as those found in the Revolution, were a means for the lower middle class, who were allied with the masses, to salvage and recapture the initiative in the
struggle against the judicial system. To achieve this, they proposed a court system based on the possibility of equitable justice, where a judge might render a just verdict. The
identifiable form of the court of law belongs to the bourgeois ideology of justice. DELEUZE: On
the basis of our actual situation, power emphatically

develops a total or global vision. That is, all the current forms of repression (the racist repression of immigrant workers, repression in the factories,
in the educational system, and the general repression of youth) are easily totalised from the point of view of power. We should not only seek the unity of
these forms in the reaction to May '68, but more appropriately, in the concerted preparation and organisation of the near future, French capitalism now relies on a "margin" of
unemployment and has abandoned the liberal and paternal mask that promised full employment. In this perspective, we begin to see the unity of the forms of repression: restrictions on
immigration, once it is acknowledged that the most difficult and thankless jobs go to immigrant workers-repression in the factories, because the French must reacquire the "taste" for
increasingly harder work; the struggle against youth and the repression of the educational system, because police repression is more active when there is less need for young people in
the work force. A wide range of professionals (teachers, psychiatrists, educators of all kinds, etc.) will be called upon to exercise functions that have traditionally belonged to the police.
This is something you predicted long ago, and it was thought impossible at the time: the reinforcement of all the structures of confinement. Against
this global policy of

power, we initiate localised counter-responses, skirmishes, active and occasionally preventive defences. We have no
need to totalise that which is invariably totalised on the side of power; if we were to move in this direction, it would
mean restoring the representative forms of centralism and a hierarchical structure. We must set up lateral affiliations
and an entire system of networks and popular bases; and this is especially difficult. In any case, we no longer define reality as a
continuation of politics in the traditional sense of competition and the distribution of power, through the so-called representative agencies of the Communist
Party or the General Workers Union(6). Reality is what actually happens in factories, in schools, in barracks, in prisons, in police
stations. And this action carries a type of information which is altogether different from that found in newspapers (this explains the kind of information carried by the Agence de
Press Liberation (7).' FOUCAULT: Isn't this difficulty of finding adequate forms of struggle a result of the fact that we continue to
ignore the problem of power? After all, we had to wait until the nineteenth century before we began to understand the nature of exploitation, and to this day, we have
yet to fully comprehend the nature of power. It may be that Marx and Freud cannot satisfy our desire for understanding this enigmatic thing which we call power, which is at once visible
and invisible, present and hidden, ubiquitous.
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AT: Action/Reform Good

Theories of government and the traditional analyses of their mechanisms certainly don't exhaust the field where power is exercised and where it functions. The question of power remains a total enigma. Who exercises power? And in what sphere? We now know with reasonable certainty who exploits others, who receives the profits, which people are involved, and
we know how these funds are reinvested. But as for power . . . We know that it is not in the hands of those who govern. But, of course, the idea of the "ruling class" has never received
an adequate formulation, and neither have other terms, such as "to dominate ... .. to rule ... .. to govern," etc. These notions are far too fluid and require analysis. We should also
investigate the limits imposed on the exercise of power-the relays through which it operates and the extent of its influence on the often insignificant aspects of the hierarchy and the
forms of control, surveillance, prohibition, and constraint. Everywhere
that power exists, it is being exercised. No one, strictly speaking,

has an official right to power; and yet it is always excited in a particular direction, with some people on one side and
some on the other. It is often difficult to say who holds power in a precise sense, but it is easy to see who lacks
power. If the reading of your books (from Nietzsche to what I anticipate in Capitalism and Schisophrenia (8) has been essential for me, it is because they seem to go very far in
exploring this problem: under the ancient theme of meaning, of the signifier and the signified, etc., you have developed the question of power, of the inequality of powers and their
struggles. Each struggle develops around a particular source of power (any of the countless, tiny sources- a small-time boss, the manager of "H.L.M.,"' a prison warden, a judge, a
union representative, the editor-in-chief of a newspaper). And if pointing out these sources-denouncing and speaking out-is to be a part of the struggle, it is not because they were
previously unknown. Rather, it is because to speak on this subject, to force the institutionalised networks of information to listen, to produce names, to point the finger of accusation, to
find targets, is the first step in the reversal of power and the initiation of new struggles against existing forms of power. If the discourse of inmates or prison doctors constitutes a form of
struggle, it is because they confiscate, at least temporarily, the power to speak on prison conditions-at present, the exclusive property of prison administrators and their cronies in reform
groups. The discourse of struggle is not opposed to the unconscious, but to the secretive. It may not seem like much; but what if it turned out to be more than we expected? A whole
series of misunderstandings relates to things that are "bidden," "repressed," and "unsaid"; and they permit the cheap "psychoanalysis" of the proper objects of struggle. It is perhaps
more difficult to unearth a secret than the unconscious. The two themes frequently encountered in the recent past, that "writing gives rise to repressed elements" and that "writing is
necessarily a subversive activity," seem to betray a number of operations that deserve to be severely denounced. DELEUZE: With respect to the problem you posed: it is clear who
exploits, who profits, and who governs, but power nevertheless remains something more diffuse. I would venture the following hypothesis: the thrust of Marxism was to define the
problem essentially in terms of interests (power is held by a ruling class defined by its interests). The question immediately arises :
how is it that people whose

interests are not being served can strictly support the existing power structure by demanding a piece of the action?
Perhaps, this is because in terms of investments, whether economic or unconscious, interest is not the final answer; there are investments of desire that function in a more profound
and diffuse manner than our interests dictate. But of course, we never desire against our interests, because interest always follows and finds itself where desire has placed it. We
cannot shut out the scream of Reich: the
masses were not deceived; at a particular time, they actually wanted a fascist regime!
There are investments of desire that mould and distribute power, that make it the property of the policeman as much
as of the prime minister; in this context, there is no qualitative difference between the power wielded by the
policeman and the prime minister. The nature of these investments of desire in a social group explains why political
parties or unions, which might have or should have revolutionary investments in the name of class interests, are so often reform
oriented or absolutely reactionary on the level of desire.
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AT: Realism/Security Inevitable

International relations is constituted through exchanges of power, of which we are all
agentsinvestigating power as such best interrogates its particular deployments and
allows us to resist violence
Mark Duffield, Professor at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Lancaster,
Carry on Killing: Global Governance, Humanitarianism and Terror, Danish Institute for International Studies, 2004,
http://www.diis.dk/graphics/Publications/WP2004/duffield_carry_on_killing.pdf
Global governance is a design of bio-power. These two terms design and bio-power need some elaboration. Understanding power as a design
sets it apart from a realist or conventional, state-centric approach to power. For realism, power is something almost
tangible. It is an exclusive quality or resource that can be captured, amassed or deployed by the powerful; usually elites of some kind
political, economic, military, criminal, and so on. In this context, power is frequently presented as somehow bad, or at least, having negative connotations; it is
what the powerful use against the powerless. Power as a design, however, is more egalitarian, diffuse and inclusive. We are all agents of power,
including actors and non-state organisations that realism would regard as merely the external auxiliaries, servants or
sub-contractors of the powerful. Power is the ability to change the behaviour and attitudes of others and, in the
process, of ourselves as well (Dean 1999). As such, even lifes bit-players have the ability to stage independent, innovative and often surprising
effects. Power relations are everywhere in the classroom, the doctors surgery, the family, the NGO project, and so on. Such relations are productive and shape
the comportment of their authoring agents as well as those subject to them.1 Without
relations of power, society and the world would grind

to a halt. From this inclusive and pervasive perspective, power itself is ambivalent and can be either good or bad. Deciding between them, and checking the
latter in favour of the former, is a matter for a practical ethics and politics. It would be a mistake to regard the realist conception of power (as an
exclusive quality amassed by the powerful) as wrong or misconceived. For many actors and non-state agencies this viewpoint is a convenient construction. It
enabled, for example, concentration camp functionaries to frame their defence in terms of just following orders of an
external power. It also enables humanitarian agencies, in the interests of neutrality, to either remain silent in relation to power
so conceived, or else, through recourse to international law, codes of conduct or technical standards, to erect
legalistic barriers and professional boundaries to distance themselves from an external power (Leader 1999). An exclusive
and amassed view of power also shapes what humanitarian agencies understand by politics. That is, those various strategies and techniques relating to the
augmentation or deployment of external power (Weiss 1999).
Realism is not necessaryit is a political construct used to confirm national identity

Given that political language is not a neutral medium that gives expression to ideas formed independently of structures
of signification that sustain political action and thought, American realist discourses belonging to the neorealist or
neoclassical realist traditions cannot be taken as mere descriptions of reality. We are trapped in the production of discourses in
which national leaders and security speech acts emanating from realist discourses develop and reinforce a notion of
national identity as synonymous with national security. U.S. national security conduct should thus be understood through the prism of the
theoretical discourses of American political leaders and realist scholars that co-constitute it. Realist discourses depict American political
leaders acting in defense of national security, and political leaders act in the name of national security. In the end,
what distinguishes realist discourses is that they depict the United States as having behaved like a national security
state since World War II, while legitimating the idea that the United States should continue to do so. Political scientists and
historians are engaged in making (poesis), not merely recording or reporting (Medhurst, 2000: 17). Precisely in this sense, rhetoric is not the
description of national security conduct; it constitutes it.
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AT: Threats Real

Threats dont exist, theyre defined by state leaders
Adopting a more critical stance, David Campbell points out that [d]anger is not an objective condition. It (sic) is not a
thing which exists independently of those to whom it may become a threat. [] Nothing is a risk in itself; [...] it all
depends on how one analyses the danger, considers the event (Campbell, 1998: 1-2). In the same vein, national
security discourse does not evaluate objective threats; rather, it is itself a product of historical processes and
structures in the state and society that produces it. Whoever has the power to define security is then the one who has
the authority to write legitimate security discourses and conduct the policies that legitimize them. The realist analysts
and state leaders who invoke national security and act in its name are the same individuals who hold the power to
securitize threats by inserting them in a discourse that frames national identity and freezes it.9
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AT: Managerialism Good

Resource managerialism fails to prevent ecological damages; empirically causes harm to
the environment
The fundamental premise of resource managerialism in environmental education has not changed significantly over
the past nine decades. At best, it only has become more formalised in its bureaucratic applications and legal
interpretations. Keying off of the managerial logic of the Second Industrial Revolution, which empowered technical experts, or engineers and scientists, on
the shop oor and professional managers, or corporate executives and finnancial officers, in the main office, resource managerialism imposes
corporate frameworks upon nature in order to supply the economy and provision society through centralised expert
guidance (Noble, 1977). These frameworks assume that the national economy, like the interacting capitalist firm and
household, must avoid both overproduction (excessive resource use coupled with inadequate demand) and
underproduction (inefficient resource use coming with excessive demand) on the supply-side as well as overconsumption (excessive resource exploitation coming with excessive demand) and under-consumption (inefficient
resource exploitation coupled with inadequate demand) on the demand side. To imagine the managerial problem in
this manner, nature is reduced through the encirclement of space and matter by national as well as global
economies to an elaborate system that can be dismantled, redesigned and assembled anew on demand to produce
`resources efficiently and when and where needed in the modern marketplace. As a cybernetic system of biophysical systems,
nature s energies, materials and sites are rede ned by the eco-knowledge of resource managerialism as manageable resources. With them, environmental
education teaches that human beings can realise great material `goods for sizeable numbers of some people, even though greater material and immaterial
`bads also might be inflicted upon even larger numbers of other people, who do not reside in or bene t from the advanced national economies that essentially
monopolise the use of world resources at a comparative handful of highly developed regional and municipal sites. As Beck suggests, risk managerialism is now
an integral part of the self-critical production and reproduction of globally thinking, but locally acting, capitalism.7 Environmental
educators train
students to conceptually contain, actuarially assess and cautiously calculate various dimensions of ecological risk in
their eco-toxicology, environmental assessment, or eco-remediation courses. Risk management presumes its
calculations are based on a (spatially, temporally and socially circumscribed) accident definition or that its analyses truly do
èstimate 192 T. W. Luke and legitimate the potential for catastrophe of modern large-scale technologies and industries
.8 Superfund site after supertanker spill after superstack bubble, however, suggest that this degree of managerial knowledge is precisely
what the risk management sciences at schools of environmental studies fail to produce, ànd so they are
falsifications, and can be criticised and reformed in accordance with their own claims to rationality (Beck, 1996).
Nonetheless, this trend toward developing fully self-conscious risk managerialism grounded in economistic trade-offs is taking over many
curricula for higher environmental education, because such risk assessment methods can produce models of most
social and political factors that bureaucratic experience believes to be true to effective resource management.
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AT: Managerialism Good

Resource managerialism gives only the cheapest and most minimal concessions to
environmental progressivism by isolating irrelevant safe spaces to justify wider
destruction
Environmental education also prepares students for more tertiary uses of nature as recreational resources. As the USDA
says about its managed public lands, the natural environment is à land of many uses , and mass tourism, commercial recreation, or park administration all
require special knowledge and powers to be conducted successfully. Instead of appraising nature s resources as industrial production resource reserves,
recreationist managerialism frames them as resource preserves for recurring consumption as positional goods, scenic assets, or leisure sites. The
idea
behind national parks or protected areas is to park a number of unique sites or undeveloped domains outside of the
continuous turnover of industrial exploitation for primary products or agricultural produce, and then the recreational
pursuits of getting to, using and appreciating such ecological assets can be mass produced there through highly
organised sets of practices. These goals for the green zones of nature are crucial. The pressures of living in the brown zones of
society are such that many of cial studies suggest tourism will be the world s largest industry by 2000. Hence,
environmental education must pitch managerial knowledge at those sectors of the tourism industry that depend upon
valuable natural resources whether they are `park and recreation concessionaires, adventure and tour guide
companies, private campgrounds and hunting/ shing preserves, destination resorts, ecotourism establishments,
and tourism development boards and advertising companies (Department of Natural Resource, Recreation and Tourism, Colorado State
University, Fort Collins, 1996, p. 1) to prepare students for these private sector pursuits. As these guideposts for contemporary environmental education indicate,
its discursive practices frequently have a shallow/instrumental/managerialist understanding of `the environment . Yet, from these curricula and their professional
degree granting capabilities, the
discourse of resource managerialism/risk assessment/recreationist administration become,

as Foucault argues, èmbodied in technical processes, in institutions, in patterns for general behavior, in forms of
transmission and diffusion, and in pedagogical forms which, at once, impose and maintain them (Foucault, 1977).
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AT: Environmental Securitization Activism

Environmental securitization doesnt spur activismit distracts political subjects and
reframes the problem solely in terms of state action
Barnett, Fellow in the School of Social and Environmental Enquiry at University of Melbourne, 2001 (Jon, and a
New Zealand Sci and Tech Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Canterbury and serves on the editorial boards of
several scholarly journals, May 4, The Meaning of Environmental Security: Ecological Politics and Policy in the New
Security Era, pg. 88 p4 pg. 89 p1)
Another failing of the threat discourse is that it focuses attention on issues 'only when crises are imminent, by which
time it is often too late for effective interventions and corrective measures' (Dabelko and Simmons 1997: 142). This is another
example of what Prins calls the environmental Catch-22: by the time environmental problems are unambiguously overt it
is too late to rectify them; on the other hand, unless the problems at immediately pressing there is insufficient
motivation to result in action by mainstream political institutions (Prins 1990). Thus the particular state- and military-centred interpretation
of environmental security by the US policy community ignores a telling implication of environmental problems for politics: that long-term and
fundamental reforms are required to address the underlying structural causes of environmental degradation.This
presentation of environmental problems as threats rests on a recurrent conflation of threat with risk. Environmental
security in this sense represents the state's particular highly politicised assessment of risk rather than any scientific
account of the actual risks. There is little correlation between the two; most often the way states respond to environmental problems is conditioned by political factors more than informed risk assessments. Certainly the US government's
assessment of risks is fat less a matter of credible scientific assessment and far more a Matter of the', politics of identity and
Otherness. The challenge, according to Hay, is to continue to provide informed risk assessments, and 'to expose the distortions imposed by the state's own
consequence-risk calculus' (Hay 1994: 226). This chapter has sought to expose such distortions in US policy.
Even if securitization spurs activism, it collapses quickly
Broda-Bahm 99 (Kenneth T, Assistant Professor in the Mass Communication and Communication Studies
Department at Towson University, Finding Protection in Definitions: The Quest for Environmental Security
Argumentation & Advocacy, 10511431, Spring99, Vol. 35, Issue 4)
Another motive for speaking of environmental degradation as a threat to national security is rhetorical: to make people respond to environmental threats with a
sense of urgency. But before harnessing the old horse of national security to pull the heavy new environmental wagon, one must examine its temperament... If
the emotional appeals of national security can somehow be connected to environmental issues, then it is also
possible that other, less benign associations may be transferred. Yet the national security mentality engenders an enviable sense of
urgency, and a corresponding willingness to accept great personal sacrifice. Unfortunately, these emotions may be difficult to sustain. Crises
call for resolution, and the patience of a mobilized populace is rarely long. A cycle of arousal and somnolence is
unlikely to establish permanent patterns of environmentally sound behavior, and `crash' solutions are often bad ones.
(pp. 24-25)
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AT: PragmatismEnvironment specific

Even if the state should do things, the discursive constructs deployed in this debate round
spill over to unnecessary and countereffective environmental policy
Environmental education is one place that shows how power and knowledge work in unison out in the open as the expertise sets needed by ruling, owing,
knowing, or controlling elites. At the same time, the power agendas required to define, implement or reproduce such knowledge and their truth systems quickly
get adopted through environmental educators programmes of study and research.9 Such discursive frames and conceptual definitions for a
common theoretical concern, like `the environment , ènvironmental studies , or ènvironmental sciences , have not
entirely failed to safeguard nature. Nonetheless, they also cannot fully succeed by simply zoning nature off into the
green spaces of `the environment , while most environmental education systematically ignores the economics,
politics and technics of social ecologies in the brown zones that threaten nature from without. Whether one looks at
K-12 classrooms or colleges of natural resources, the dualistic misconstruction of nature and society as green and
brown zones, separate and apart, is a major intellectual distortion in most environmental education.
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FWDiscourse
Power comes from everywhere and permeates all relationsinstitutions and social groups
are all constellated through convergences and conflicts of power. Locating analysis at this
level reveals linkages between power and knowledge and produces the best strategies for
change.
92-93
the word power is

apt to lead to a number of misunderstandings-misunderstandings with respect to its nature, its form, and its unity. By power, I do not mean
"Power" as a group of institutions and mechanisms that ensure the subservience of the citizens of a given state. By power, I do
not mean, either, a mode of subjugation which, in contrast to violence, has the form of the rule. Finally, I do not have in mind a general
system of domination exerted by one group over another, a system whose effects, through successive derivations, pervade the entire social
Hence the objective is to analyze a certain form of knowledge regarding sex, not in terms of repression or law, but in terms of power. But
body. The analysis, made in terms of power, must not assume that the sovereignty of the state, the form of the law, or the over-all unity of a domination are given
at the outset; rather, these are only the terminal forms power takes. It seems to me that power must be understood in the first
instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute
their own organization; as the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them; as the
support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or a system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions
which isolate them from one another; and lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the
state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies. Power's
condition of possibility, or in any case the viewpoint which

it possible to use its mechanisms as a grid
of intelligibility of the social order, must not be sought in the primary existence of a central point, in a unique source of
sovereignty from which secondary and descendent forms would emanate; it is the moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their
inequality, constantly engender states of power, but the latter are always local and unstable. The omnipresence of power: not because it
has the privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced from one moment to the next, at every point,
or rather in every relation from one point to another. Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because
permits one to understand its exercise, even in its more "peripheral" effects, and which also makes
it comes from everywhere . And "Power," insofar as it is permanent, repetitious, inert, and self-reproducing, is simply the over-all effect
that emerges from all these mobilities, the concatenation that rests on each of them and seeks in turn to arrest their movement. One needs to be
nominalistic, no doubt: power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name
that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society. Should we turn the expression around, then,
and say that politics is war pursued by other means? If we still wish to maintain a separation between war and politics,
perhaps we should postulate rather that this multiplicity of force relations can be coded-in part but never totally-either in the form of
"war," or in the form of "politics"; this would imply two different strategies (but the one always liable to switch into the other) for integrating these
unbalanced, heterogeneous, unstable, and tense force relations.
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FWDiscourse
Governmentality is dispersed through policy discussions that accept dominant terms of
debate without critically interrogating them. Discursive analysis demonstrates the
contingent and arbitrary nature of the 1AC assumptions.
Larner and Walter 4 Wendy Larner, School of Geographical Sciences, Unviersity of Bristol, and William Walters,
Department of Political Science, Carleton University, Globalization as Governmentality, Alternatives 29 (2004), 495514
Jessop is right to observe that the idea of a zero-sum opposition between globalization and the state is not helpful. He argues that "states help to constitute the
economy as an object of regulation and the extent to which even economic globalization continues to depend on politics. "^^ But it is not states that do this. To
frame it in this way is to imply they would never destroy themselves. Rather, attention
should be paid to the discourses and techniques

through which disparate and qualitatively different assemblages are made into commensurable entities such as the
"economy." Most immediately then, the technical is political.^'^ Policy debates within international organizations and the
redeployment of techniques and measurements are part of the means by which global objects and subjects are being
constituted. So, too, are the flows of knowledge embodied in the activities of management consultants and others.58
These claims underline the point that globalization is governmental. Globalization assumes particular "macrosubjects" (industries, states,
regions, firms, networks) with particular attributes and capacities. These entities are exhorted to enter into the pursuit for
international competitiveness through notions such as export orientation, self-management, good governance, and
policy dialogue. They are encouraged to work on themselves to recreate themselves in very specific forms with
particular capacities. Significantly, and in strong contrast to earlier formulations, embeddedness in the global order is not imposed
from above but is to be sought voluntarily. Both people and places are encouraged to apply financial disciplines, demonstrate entrepreneurial
capacities, and seek out new opportunities. Moreover, the response to global uncertainty is not to withdraw but rather to engage more deeply, to adapt, and
become more compatible with the new global terrain. In this regard, we can see how globalization is both a description and a normative account. Governmentality
encourages us to ask questions such as: Through
what techniques are such global entities known? How are the relationships
between them understood? Once attention is paid to such questions, it becomes possible to better distinguish
between concepts like civilization, modernization, and globalization. How does each of these formulations imagine
places and populations? How do they divide and rule? And what of other series? Religions, nation-states, networks? Finally, we
could think about how the governmentalities of globalization are articulated with other forms of rule (for example,
authoritarianism) .59
Critique is a prior questionthe real world is mere discursive constructonly discursive

criticism allows us to alter and correct rigid lenses of analysis
Given my poststructuralist inclinations, I do not subscribe to the positivistic social scientific enterprise which aspires
to test hypotheses against the real world. I therefore reject epistemological empiricism. Since epistemology is
closely intertwined with methodology, especially with positivism, I eschew naturalism as a methodology. I study discourses
and discursive practices that take shape in texts. This does not mean that there is no material world as such, only
that it must be understood as mediated by language, which in the end means that it is always interpreted once
framed by discourse (through the spoken word or in written form).2 A discourse, then, is not a way of learning about something out there in the real
world; it is rather a way of producing that something as real, as identifiable, classifiable, knowable, and therefore,
meaningful. Discourse creates the conditions of knowing (Klein quoted in George, 1994: 30). We consider real what we
consider significant: a discourse is always an interpretation, a narrative of multiple realities inscribed in a specific social or symbolic order.
Discursive representation is therefore not neutral; individuals in power are those who are authorized to produce reality, and
therefore, knowledge. In this context, power is knowledge and the ability to produce that which is considered true. A realist
discourse will produce the sociolinguistic conditions that will allow it to correspond, in theory as in practice, to
reality. Evidently, this reality will be nothing but the realist discourse that one has constituted oneself. This is why,
from a poststructuralist perspective, discourse may be considered as ontology3.
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FWDiscourseEnvironment specific
Be skeptical of their truth claimsthey are determined by a statist discourse of the
environment which evaluates truth and creates meaning through techniques of control
Luke 95 On Environmentality: Geo-Power and Eco-Knowledge in the Discourses of Contemporary
Environmentalism Cultural Critique, No. 31, The Politics of Systems and Environments, Part II p.57-81
(Autumn,1995), JSTOR Accessed: 13/07/2012 12:05 BSH
Foucault invites social theorists not to reduce all ensembles of modernizing development to the "statalization" of society wherein "the state" becomes an
expansive set of managerial functions, dis-charging its effects in the development of productive forces, the reproduction of relations of production,
or the organization of ideological superstructures. Instead he argues in favor of investigating the "governmentalization" of the economy and society whereby
individuals and groups are enmeshed within the tactics and strategies of a complex form of power whose institutions, procedures, analyses, and techniques
loosely manage mass popula-tions and their surroundings in a highly politicized symbolic and material economy (103). Because governmental
techniques are the central focus of political struggle and contestation, the interactions of populations with their natural
surroundings in highly politi-cized economies compel states constantly to redefine what is within their competence
throughout the modernizing process. To survive after the 1960s in a world marked by decolonization, global industrialization, and nuclear military
confrontation, it is not enough for states merely to maintain legal jurisdiction over their allegedly sovereign territories . As
ecological limits to growth are either dis-covered or defined, states are forced to guarantee their populations' fecundity and
productivity in the total setting of the glo-bal political economy by becoming "environmental protection agencies."
Governmental discourses methodically mobilize particular assumptions, codes, and procedures in enforcing specific under-standings about the economy and
society. As a result, they
generate "truths" or "knowledges" that also constitute forms of power with significant reserves of
legitimacy and effectiveness. Inasmuch as they classify, organize, and vet larger understandings of reality, such discourses can authorize or
invalidate the possibilities for con-structing particular institutions, practices, or concepts in society at large . They simultaneously
frame the emergence of collective subjectivities (nations as dynamic populations) and collections of subjects (individuals) as units in such nations. Individual
subjects as well as collective subjects can be reevaluated as "the element in which are articulated the effects of a certain
type of power and the reference of a certain type of knowledge, the machinery by which the power relations give rise
to a possible corpus of knowledge, and knowledge extends and reinforces the effects of this power" (Foucault, Discipline
and Punish 29). Therefore, an environmentalizing regime must advance ecoknowledges to activate its com-mand over geopower as well as to re-operationalize many of its notions of governmentality as environmentality. Like governmen-tality, the disciplinary
articulations of environmentality must cen-ter upon establishing and enforcing "the right disposition of things."
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FWTerritory
Territory is a prior question to the plan because it shapes how we encounter and interact
with the politicalwe cannot work within the state without understanding its spatial
dimensions
Stuart Elden, Durham University, Land, terrain, territory, Progress in Human Geography 34 (6), 2010, p. 799-817
It would be unusual or reductive to see the political-economic, political-strategic, political-legal or political-technical in strict isolation. Political-economic accounts often indicate a strategic relation; strategic work
recognizes the importance of law and the dependence on measure and calculation. Yet it is only in seeing these elements together, and in privileging the legal and the technical, that an understanding of the
To concentrate on the political-economic risks reducing territory to land; to emphasize the

political-strategic blurs it with a sense of terrain. Recognizing both, and seeing the development made possible by
emergent political techniques allows us to understand territory as a distinctive mode of social/spatial organization,
one which is historically and geographically limited and dependent, rather than a biological drive or social need. Indeed,
recognizing and interrogating this does not just allow us to see that the modern division and ordering of the world is peculiar and clearly not the only possible way, but it also allows
us to begin to escape what Agnew described as the territorial trap. As Agnew (1995: 379) himself notes, social science has often been too
geographical and insufficiently historical. It is through a historical conceptual examination that moving beyond the
territorial trap rather than simply avoiding it might be possible (Brenner and Elden, 2009; for a related inquiry, see Murphy, 1996). The overall suggestion here is
thus that territory is not best understood through territoriality, but through an examination of the relation of the state to the
emergence of a category of space. Edward Casey (2002: xvii) describes his book The fate of place as an inquiry which traces out the idea of place vis-a`-vis space. What
understanding of space was necessary for the idea of territory to be possible? If territory is seen as a bounded
space or as Giddenss bounded power container, the questions that remain are what is this space and how are these
boundaries possible? As Paul Alliès (1980: 32) suggests: to define territory, we are told, one delimits borders [fronti ` eres]. Or to think the border, must we not
already have an idea of homogeneous territory? To put this more forcefully, boundaries only become possible in their modern
sense through a notion of space, rather than the other way round. Focusing on the determination of space that
makes boundaries possible, and in particular the role of calculation, opens up the idea of seeing boundaries not as a
primary distinction that separates territory from other ways of understanding political control of land, but as a secondorder problem founded upon a particular sense of calculation and concomitant grasp of space. How does that concept of space become
complexities of territory can be attained.
a political-legal category and what kinds of techniques are at work? Two qualifications to this analysis are necessary. The first is that this is an approach derived from, and directed toward, western political thought.
The problematic term west is of course open to question, but it is intended here to be read in relation to a chronology of thought that can be traced from Ancient Greece, to Roman appropriations and late medieval
Latin rediscoveries, providing the conceptual frame within which the emergence of the modern state and its territory occurred.15 Other traditions would have very different histories, geographies and conceptual
lineages. The specificity of the analysis begun here militates against generalization and pretensions to universalism. Nonetheless, it is hoped that this historical conceptual approach would be useful in other such
analyses, even if it would need to be supplemented, developed and critiqued. The second qualification is that while this work seeks to utilize an expanded understanding of territory that goes beyond narrowly
economic or strategic accounts, but which is also attentive to the specificity of the notion, its approach is necessarily partial. As Valerie November (2002: 17) notes, the notion of territory is at the same time juridical,
political, economic, social and cultural, and even affective. Here, the social, cultural, and affective elements have been underplayed in order to emphasize the political in a broad sense. This is not to suggest that
those other elements are unimportant, but rather that they have been discussed elsewhere in some detail. The literature on the nation, on attachment to homeland, and identity politics, for instance, can profitably be
read from a territorial perspective (see Winichakul, 1994; Paasi, 1996; Yiftachel, 2006). Folding the insights of those analyses into the outline offered here would be a necessary step for any account which aimed to
be comprehensive. Three interlinked propositions thus provide an agenda for future work; a project which seeks to grasp the history of the state of territory: (1) Territory must be approached as a topic in itself; rather
than through territoriality. Indeed, it may well be the case that the notion of territoriality with regard to humans can only be appropriately understood through a notion of territory. In other words, while particular
strategies or practices produce territory, there is a need to understand territory to grasp what territoriality, as a condition of territory, is concerned with. (2) Territory can be understood as a bounded space only if
boundaries and space are taken as terms worthy of investigation in their own right as a preliminary step. These terms require conceptual and historical work themselves, rather than being sufficient for an
Territory can be understood as a

political technology: it comprises techniques for measuring land and controlling terrain. Measure and control the
technical and the legal need to be thought alongside land and terrain. Understanding territory as a political
technology is not to define territory once and for all; rather it is to indicate the issues at stake in grasping how it was understood in different
historical and geographical contexts. Territory is a historical question: produced, mutable and fluid. It is geographical,
not simply because it is one of the ways of ordering the world, but also because it is profoundly uneven in its
development. It is a word, a concept and a practice, where the relation between these can only be grasped
genealogically. It is a political question, but in a broad sense: economic, strategic, legal and technical. Territory must be approached
politically in its historical, geographical and conceptual specificity.
explanation. (3) Land and terrain as political-economic and political-strategic relations are necessary but insufficient to grasp territory.
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FWTerritoryArctic spec.
Arctic politics are bound within constructions of self and othersecurity discourse is
deployed to produce and reinforce identifications of the ever-expanding homeland against
foreign dangers.
Mathieu Landriault, School of Political Studies, University of Ottowa, Securitizing the north in Canada:
Observations on Continuity and Transformation: A Reply to Nicol and Heininens Networking the North, Southern
Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 4, 1 (June 2011), google scholar
There is no doubt than the international agenda has been modified near the end of and after the Cold War. I am not questioning this factual point presented by
Nicol and Heininen, but rather the authors argument that it is clear that this international North, stemming from an environmental and scientific understanding
of regionalism, resulted in a new way of structuring policies within the North.5 On the contrary, I would argue that, by taking discursive practices seriously and by
attributing to them a performative nature in which discourses can frame and represent in a specific way, we come to see the stability, constancy, and
permanency of Canadian foreign policy (CFP) in the Arctic instead of postulating that a rupture in CFP occurred at the end of the Cold War. By doing so,
foreign policy can exist as a site for the construction of significations and differences between the inside of the state
(a Self) and an external world (Others). In turn, the Self will be defined in contrast with the external world and thus
establish the differences that are considered meaningful.6 This process of differentiation can be positive or negative,
but it stands on the projection of identity which, in the case of foreign policy, will favour one component (the Self, Canada)
over the Other(s). This discursive practice shapes the elaboration and implementation of the policies by bringing forth
a system of acceptable norms, conventions, and signs. This context will contribute afterwards to the stability and
permanency of the established practices and discourses. Foreign policy discourses actively construct how the
foreign world beyond the border might look to insiders, especially after the Cold war given that it sparked an
interest for initiating new reactions to novel issues and that these initiatives had to be explained to multiple
audiences.7 To better illustrate my point, I shall comment on The Northern Dimension of Canadas Foreign Policy
document, and how the threats affecting Northern populations are conceptualized within it, as this represents a key
component of the document itself. This exercise of defining the threats is centred on external phenomenon,
particularly globalisation, climate change and transboundary pollution issues.8 The performative function of the
foreign policy discourse is evident here as the threats to the integrity and the security of the communities all come from
the exterior (the Others). This situation has the advantage of concealing the fact that many past, present and future threats
are direct consequences of the activities emanating from the Southern populations in Canada and that Canada has been
idle on many issues (climate change being the most notable example of this inactivity). A passage of this document is particularly important in order to
grasp the identity-building nature of foreign policy: A clearly defined Northern Dimension of Canadas Foreign Policy will establish a framework to promote the
extension of Canadian interests and values (P.2). The Canadian government policy toward the North is thus taking the very common
path of the diffusion and exportation of Canadian values to construct communities to its image. A relevant example of this type
of practice in the circumpolar world would be the investment coming from the Canadian government for governance and democratic reform projects in Northern
Russia. These initiatives helped Canada and Russias Nordic communities connect, but if a new way of structuring policies in the North can be identified, I think
we must pay attention to the transfer of responsibilities from governmental agencies to organizations of the third sector, the oft-cited concept of civil society.
However, we must understand though that this new neo-liberal way of conducting business results in an overstretch for these
organizations because these new tasks of providing services and implementing the practical implications of policies
on a daily basis come with a price, which is a reduction in the advocacy capability of these organizations9. Furthermore,
as many critical voices in Canadian foreign policy had outlined (see Sandra Whitworth or Mark Neufeld), the democratisation of CFP has not created a structural
change in the formulation and application of CFP. As a former Foreign Affairs minister reminded us, governments still control international processes even
though NGOs can influence and stimulate cooperation. On another note, the inclusion of Canadian NGOs in international forum in the 1990s have been made by
the Canadian government with the underlying assumption that these NGOs would largely support official Canadian positions and interests.10 On a related front,
the divide is clearly delineated and the differentiation is established, positive or negative depending on your normative standpoint (it is not the purpose of this
article to postulate one) with this key fragment of the Northern dimension of Canadas Foreign Policy, since foreign policy has the goal first and foremost to
enhance the security and prosperity of Canadians (P.10). This necessity appears in the majority of official foreign policy documents linked to Canadian foreign
policy. We do not want to judge the intentions or the instrumentality of such a discursive practice but rather underline the existence of its basic function performed
by foreign policy, which is to reify the insideoutside demarcation point.
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FWSpatialityTerrorism spec.
Space is crucial to understanding the war on terrorism. Governmental manipulation of
spatial imaginaries which paint Al-Qaeda as spaceless enables comparably global violence
Stuart Elden, International Boundaries Research Unit, Department of Geography, Durham University, Terror and
Territory, Antipode, Vol. 39, Issue 5, p. 821-845, November 2007, http://instituty.fsv.cuni.cz/~kozak/elden-terrorterritory.pdf
The events of September 11, 2001 in New York City, Washington DC, and the field in Pennsylvania are a political, spatial and temporal marker. The lazy
shorthand of September 11 or, worse, 9/11, masks the spatial context of the events in favour of a temporal indication (see Gregory 2004a:19), one that is
reduced to a number in calendar time, and seeks a privileging of the date for American grief, occluding other events on that day in this and other years.1 As
some have been quick to remind us, more than twice as many children died of diarrhoea on this same day than died in the more publicised events (United
Nations Development Report figures from http://www.undp.org; see Pilger 2002:1). President George W Bush himself has now put a figure to part of the
consequences, suggesting that at least 30,000 people have died in Iraq since the invasion (2005), while others have put the figures much higher. And yet, such
mere enumerations risk losing sightand losing siteof the problem in their numerical accounts; accountancy in place of grief. Unlike
the 7 December 1941

attack on Pearl Harbor, which is conveniently signed by a place alone, the lack of a single geographical site has
turned the new Pearl Harbor into a simple date. Yet the implications of these events have been widespread in space and
time, spreading across spatial scales from the local to the national and the regional to the global (see Smith 2001, 2002). As
Gregory suggests, contra Booth and Dunne (2002:1), these were not out-of-geography, but rather their origins have surged
inwards and their consequences rippled outwards in complex, overlapping ways (2004a:19). In a number of ways then Bushs
war on terror has demonstrated the importance of Lefebvres suggestion that space is the ultimate locus and
medium of struggle, and is therefore a crucial political issue. For Lefebvre, space is not just the place of conflict, but an
object of struggle itself. It is for this reason that he claims that there is a politics of space because space is political ([1972] 2000:59;
see Elden 2004). Considering the interrelation of the spatial dimension of politics and the political dimensions of space
provides an important frame for understanding the war on terror. Yet while geographers have concentrated on the spatial aspects
generally, there has arguably been less emphasis on the explicitly territorial aspects (Cairo 2004). Al-Qaeda has often been portrayed as a deterritorialised
network, and while the challenges to international law have been widely discussed, few have looked at the implications for the legal basis of the relationship
between sovereignty and territory.
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AT: Policymaking Good

Institutions are constituted through discourseour theoretical critique is simultaneously
radical practice which creates space within policymaking for intellectual responsibility
Deleuze and Foucault 72 Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, Intellectuals and Power, Language, Counter-
Memory, Practice: selected essays and interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, recorded March 4,
1972, http://libcom.org/library/intellectuals-power-a-conversation-between-michel-foucault-and-gilles-deleuze
GILLES DELEUZE: Possibly we're in the process of experiencing a new relationship between theory and practice. At one time,
practice was considered an application of theory, a consequence; at other times, it had an opposite sense and it was thought to inspire theory, to be
indispensable for the creation of future theoretical forms. In any event, their relationship was understood in terms of a process of
totalisation. For us, however, the question is seen in a different light. The relationships between theory and practice are
far more partial and fragmentary. On one side, a theory is always local and related to a limited field, and it is applied in another
sphere, more or less distant from it. The relationship which holds in the application of a theory is never one of resemblance. Moreover, from the moment a
theory moves into its proper domain, it begins to encounter obstacles, walls, and blockages which require its relay by
another type of discourse (it is through this other discourse that it eventually passes to a different domain). Practice is a set of relays from
one theoretical point to another, and theory is a relay from one practice to another. No theory can develop without eventually
encountering a wall, and practice is necessary for piercing this wall. For example, your work began in the theoretical analysis of the context of
confinement, specifically with respect to the psychiatric asylum within a capitalist society in the nineteenth century. Then you became aware of the necessity for
confined individuals to speak for themselves, to create a relay (it's possible, on the contrary, that your function was already that of a relay in relation to them); and
this group is found in prisons -- these individuals are imprisoned. It was on this basis that you organised the information group for prisons (G.I.P.)(1), the object
being to create conditions that permit the prisoners themselves to speak. It would be absolutely false to say, as the Maoist implied, that in
moving to this practice you were applying your theories. This was not an application; nor was it a project for initiating reforms or an enquiry in
the traditional sense. The emphasis was altogether different: a system of relays within a larger sphere, within a multiplicity
of parts that are both theoretical and practical. A theorising intellectual, for us, is no longer a subject, a representing or representative
consciousness. Those who act and struggle are no longer represented, either by a group or a union that appropriates the right to stand as their conscience.
Who speaks and acts? It is always a multiplicity, even within the person who speaks and acts. All of us are "groupuscules."(2)
Representation no longer exists; there's only action-theoretical action and practical action which serve as relays and form networks. FOUCAULT: It
seems to me that the political involvement of the intellectual was traditionally the product of two different aspects of his
activity: his position as an intellectual in bourgeois society, in the system of capitalist production and within the ideology it produces or imposes
(his exploitation, poverty, rejection, persecution, the accusations of subversive activity, immorality, etc); and his proper discourse to the extent that
it revealed a particular truth, that it disclosed political relationships where they were unsuspected. These two forms of politicisation did not
exclude each other, but, being of a different order, neither did they coincide. Some were classed as "outcasts" and others as "socialists."
During moments of violent reaction on the part of the authorities, these two positions were readily fused: after 1848, after the Commune, after 1940. The
intellectual was rejected and persecuted at the precise moment when the facts became incontrovertible, when it was
forbidden to say that the emperor had no clothes. The intellectual spoke the truth to those who had yet to see it, in the name of those who were
forbidden to speak the truth: he was conscience, consciousness, and eloquence. In the most recent upheaval (3) the intellectual discovered that the masses no
longer need him to gain knowledge: they know perfectly well, without illusion; they know far better than he and they are certainly capable of expressing
themselves. But there exists a system of power which blocks, prohibits, and invalidates this discourse and this knowledge,
a power not only found in the manifest authority of censorship, but one that profoundly and subtly penetrates an entire societal network. Intellectuals are
themselves agents of this system of power-the idea of their responsibility for "consciousness" and discourse forms part of the system. The
intellectual's
role is no longer to place himself "somewhat ahead and to the side" in order to express the stifled truth of the
collectivity; rather, it is to struggle against the forms of power that transform him into its object and instrument in the sphere of "knowledge," "truth,"
"consciousness," and "discourse. "(4) In this sense theory does not express, translate, or serve to apply practice: it is practice. But it is local and
regional, as you said, and not totalising. This is a struggle against power, a struggle aimed at revealing and
undermining powe r where it is most invisible and insidious . It is not to "awaken consciousness"
that we struggle (the masses have
been aware for some time that consciousness is a form of knowledge; and consciousness as the basis of subjectivity is a prerogative of the bourgeoisie),
to sap power , to take power; it is an activity conducted

safe distance. A "theory" is the regional system of this struggle.
but
alongside those who struggle for power, and not their illumination from a
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AFFPredictions Good
Predictions good, accepting uncertainty doesnt mean you shouldnt try and predict the
future .
Kurasawa 4 Fuyuki Kurasawa, Associate Professor of Sociology at York University, Cautionary Tales,
Constellations Volume 11, No. 4, 2004,

http://www.yorku.ca/kurasawa/Kurasawa%20Articles/Constellations%20Article.pdf
When engaging in the labor of preventive foresight, the first obstacle that one is likely to encounter from some
intellectual circles is a deep-seated skepticism about the very value of the exercise. A radically postmodern line of
thinking, for instance, would lead us to believe that it is pointless, perhaps even harmful, to strive for farsightedness in
light of the aforementioned crisis of conventional paradigms of historical analysis. If, contra teleological models, history has no intrinsic meaning, direction, or
endpoint to be discovered through human reason, and if, contra scientistic futurism, prospective trends cannot be predicted without error, then the abyss of
chronological inscrutability supposedly opens up at our feet. The future appears to be unknowable, an outcome of chance. Therefore,
rather than
embarking upon grandiose speculation about what may occur, we should adopt a pragmatism that abandons itself to
the twists and turns of history; let us be content to formulate ad hoc responses to emergencies as they arise. While this
argument has the merit of underscoring the fallibilistic nature of all predictive schemes, it conflates the necessary recognition of the contingency of history with
unwarranted assertions about the latters total opacity and indeterminacy.
Acknowledging the fact that the future cannot be known with

absolute certainty does not imply abandoning the task of trying to understand what is brewing on the horizon and to
prepare for crises already coming into their own. In fact, the incorporation of the principle of fallibility into the work of prevention means that we
must be ever more vigilant for warning signs of disaster and for responses that provoke unintended or unexpected consequences (a point to which I will return in
the final section of this paper). In addition, from a normative point of view, the acceptance of historical contingency and of the self-limiting character of
farsightedness places the duty of preventing catastrophe squarely on the shoulders of present generations. The
future no longer appears to be a

metaphysical creature of destiny or of the cunning of reason, nor can it be sloughed off to pure randomness. It
becomes, instead, a result of human action shaped by decisions in the present including, of course, trying to
anticipate and prepare for possible and avoidable sources of harm to our successors.
Predictions good, without them, leaders resort to their personal beliefs.

Michael Fitzsimmons, defense analyst, The Problem of Uncertainty in Strategic Planning, Survival 48.4, Winter
2006/2007
It should follow, then, that in planning under conditions of risk, variability in strategic calculation should be carefully tailored
to available analytic and decision processes. Why is this important? What harm can an imbalance between complexity and cognitive or analytic
capacity in strategic planning bring? Stated simply, where analysis is silent or inadequate, the personal beliefs of decision-makers
fill the void. As political scientist Richard Betts found in a study of strategic surprise, in an environment that lacks clarity, abounds with
conflicting data, and allows no time for rigorous assessment of sources and validity, ambiguity allows intuition or
wishfulness to drive interpretation ... The greater the ambiguity, the greater the impact of preconceptions.16 The decisionmaking environment that Betts describes here is one of political-military crisis, not long-term strategic planning. But a strategist who sees
uncertainty as the central fact of his environment brings upon himself some of the pathologies of crisis decisionmaking. He invites ambiguity, takes conflicting data for granted and substitutes a priori scepticism about the validity
of prediction for time pressure as a rationale for discounting the importance of analytic rigour. It is important not to exaggerate
the extent to which data and rigorous assessment can illuminate strategic choices. Ambiguity is a fact of life, and scepticism of analysis is
necessary. Accordingly, the intuition and judgement of decision-makers will always be vital to strategy, and
attempting to subordinate those factors to some formulaic, deterministic decision-making model would be both
undesirable and unrealistic. All the same, there is danger in the opposite extreme as well. Without careful analysis of what is relatively likely and what is
relatively unlikely, what will be the possible bases for strategic choices? A decision-maker with no faith in prediction is left with little more
than a set of worst-case scenarios and his existing beliefs about the world to confront the choices before him. Those
beliefs may be more or less well founded, but if they are not made explicit and subject to analysis and debate regarding their application to particular strategic
contexts, they
remain only beliefs and premises, rather than rational judgements. Even at their best, such decisions are
likely to be poorly understood by the organisations charged with their implementation. At their worst, such decisions
may be poorly understood by the decision-makers themselves.
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AFFGeneric Perm
Operating through political spheres is the only way to produce change
Lawrence Grossburg, University of Illinois, We Gotta Get Outta This Place, 1992, p. 391-393
The Left needs institutions which can operate within the systems of governance, understanding that such institutions
are the mediating structures by which power is actively realized. It is often by directing opposition against specific institutions that power
can be challenged. The Left has assumed from some time now that, since it has so little access to the apparatuses of
agency, its only alternative is to seek a public voice in the media through tactical protests. The Left does in fact need more
visibility, but it also needs greater access to the entire range of apparatuses of decision making and power. Otherwise,
the Left has nothing but its own self-righteousness. It is not individuals who have produced starvation and the other social disgraces of our
world, although it is individuals who must take responsibility for eliminating them. But to do so, they must act within organizations, and
within the system of organizations which in fact have the capacity (as well as the moral responsibility) to fight them.
Without such organizations, the only models of political commitment are self-interest and charity. Charity suggests that we act on behalf of others who cannot act
on their own behalf. But we are all precariously caught in the circuits of global capitalism, and everyones position is increasingly precarious and uncertain. It will
not take much to change the position of any individual in the United States, as the experience of many of the homeless, the elderly and the fallen middle class
demonstrates. Nor are there any guarantees about the future of any single nation. We
can imagine ourselves involved in a politics where

acting for another is always acting for oneself as well, a politics in which everyone struggles with the resources they
have to make their lives (and the world) better, since the two are so intimately tied together! For example, we need to
think of affirmation action as in everyones best interests, because of the possibilities it opens. We need to think with what
Axelos has described as a planetary thought which would be a coherent thoughtbut not a rationalizing and rationalist inflection; it would be a fragmentary
thought of the open totalityfor what we can grasp are fragments unveiled on the horizon of the totality. Such a politics will not begin by distinguishing between
the local and the global (and certainly not by valorizing one over the other) for the ways in which the former are incorporated into the latter preclude the luxury of
such choices.
Resistance is always a local struggle, even when (as in parts of the ecology movement) it is imagined to
connect into its global structures of articulation: Think globally, act locally. Opposition is predicated precisely on locating the points of
articulation between them, the points at which the global becomes local, and the local opens up onto the global. Since the meaning of these terms has to be
understood in the context of any particular struggle, one is always acting both globally and locally: Think globally, act appropriately!
Fight locally because

that is the scene of action, but aim for the global because that is the scene of agency. Local struggles directly target national and
international axioms, at the precise point of their insertion into the field of immanence. This requires the imagination and construction of forms of unity,
commonality and social agency which do not deny differences. Without such commonality, politics is too easily reduced to a question of individual rights (i.e., in
the terms of classical utility theory); difference ends up trumping politics, bringing it to an end. The struggle against the disciplined mobilization of everyday life
can only be built on affective commonalities, a shared responsible yearning: a yearning out towards something more and something better than this and this
place now. The Left, after all, is defined by its common commitment to principles of justice, equality and democracy
(although these might conflict) in economic, political and cultural life. It
is based on the hope, perhaps even the illusion, that such things
are possible. The construction of an affective commonality attempts to mobilize people in a common struggle, despite
the fact that they have no common identity or character, recognizing that they are the only force capable of providing
a new historical and oppositional agency. It strives to organize minorities into a new majority.
Perm solves, working through the state can be done.

Michel Foucault, 1980, Philosophy, Politics, and Culture, pg. 154
FOUCAULT We must escape from the dilemma of being either for or against. After all, it is possible to face up to a government and
remain standing. To work with a government implies neither subjection nor total acceptance. One may work with it and yet
be restive. I even believe that the two things go together.
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AFFReform Good
Slow but steady revolutions allows us to bring about change.
Bradley 9 Robert Bradley, PhD in Political Economy, M.A. in Economics, Capitalism at Work: Business,
Government and Energy, pg. 103
There are good revolutions and bad ones. There must be continual improvement, or incrementalism, between sea
changes. Often, if not quite always, revolution comes by steps, not bounds. Business thinker Jim Collins enriched the SchumpeterDrucker-Hamel view by noting how good-to-great companies were disciplined change makers whose entrepreneurship was less about revolutionary moments
than revolutionary process. In his words: Good-to-great
transformations never happened in one fell swoop. There was no single

defining action, no grand program, no one killer innovation, no solitary lucky break, no wrenching revolution. Good to
great comes about by a cumulative processstep by step, action by action, decision by decision, turn by turn of the
flywheelthat adds up to sustained and spectacular results. Success was an organic evolutionary process . . . a pattern of buildup
leading to breakthrough. The doom loop, noted Collins from his case studies, was big programs, radical change efforts, dramatic
revolutions, chronic restructuring always looking for a miracle moment or new savior. Collins saw greatness in disciplined
thought and action; failure, in fads and . . . management hoopla. There was no silver bullet, no magic, that could substitute for
sustained, well- directed effort.
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Alt fails, only operating through political spheres actually changes anything.
Anna M. Agathangelou, Dir. Global Change Inst. And Womens Studies Prof @ Oberlin, and L.H.M. Ling, Inst.
For Social Studies @ Hague, Fall 1997, Studies in Political Economy, v. 54, p 7-8
Yet, ironically if not tragically, dissident IR also paralyzes itself into non-action. While it challenges the status quo, dissident
IR fails to transform it. Indeed, dissident IR claims that a coherent paradigm or research program even an alternative one
reproduces the stifling parochialism and hidden power-mongering of sovereign scholarship. Any agenda of global politics
informed by critical social theory perspectives, writes Jim George must forgo the simple, albeit self-gratifying, options inherent in ready-made alternative
Realisms and confront the dangers, closures, paradoxes, and complicities associated with them. Even
references to a real world, dissidents

argue, repudiate the very meaning of dissidence given their sovereign presumption of a universalizable, testable
Reality. What dissident scholarship opts for, instead, is a sense of disciplinary crisis that resonates with the effects of marginal and dissident movements in all
sorts of other localities. Despite its emancipatory intentions, this approach effectively leaves the prevailing prison of sovereignty intact. It doubly incarcerates
when dissident IR highlights the layers of power that oppress without offering a heuristic, not to mention a program, for emancipatory action. Merely
politicizing the supposedly non-political neither guides emancipatory action nor guards it against demagoguery. At
best, dissident IR sanctions a detached criticality rooted (ironically) in Western modernity. Michael Shapiro, for instance, advises
the dissident theorist to take a critical distance or position offshore from which to see the possibility of change. But what becomes of those
who know they are burning in the hells of exploitation, racism, sexism, starvation, civil war, and the like
while the esoteric dissident observes critically from offshore ? What hope do they have of overthrowing these shackles of
sovereignty? In not answering these questions, dissident IR ends up reproducing despite avowals to the contrary, the
sovereign outcome of discourse divorced from practice, analysis from policy, deconstruction from reconstruction,
particulars from universals, and critical theory from problem-solving.
Alt cant gain political momentum because no one understands it.
OCallaghan 2 Terry O'Callaghan, lecturer in the school of International Relations at the University of South
Australia, International Relations and the third debate, ed: Jarvis, 2002, p. 80
There are also a host of technological and logistical questions that plague George's scheme and make problematic his recommendations. For example, through
what medium are those on the fringes of the international system going to speak to the world? Although it may be true that the third world has now been
integrated into the global polity via the advent of technological innovations in communications, allowing for remote access to information sources and the Internet,
it also remains true that the
majority of those on the fringes continue to be disenfranchised from such mediums, whether as
a result of a lack of economic resources, the prevalence of illiteracy, or social, cultural and political circumstances
that systemically exclude, women (among others) from economic resources and certain political and social freedoms.
Need we remind George that social, political, and individual autonomy is at a minimum in these parts of the world,
and an intellectual approach as controversial as postmodernism is not likely to achieve the sorts of goals that George
optimistically foreshadows. Indeed, on practical questions such as these, matters otherwise central to the success of postmodern visions, George
prefers to be vague, suggesting instead that the intricacies of such details will somehow work themselves out in a
manner satisfactory to all. Such a position reveals George's latent idealism and underscores how George's schema is an intellectual one: a theory of
international politics written for other theorists of international politics. George's audience is thus a very limited and elite audience and
begs the question of whether a senior, middle-class scholar in the intellectual heartland of Australia can do anything
of real substance to aid the truly marginalized and oppressed. How is it possible to put oneself in the shoes of the
"other," to advocate on his or her behalf, when such is done from a position of affluence, unrelated to and far
removed from the experiences of those whom George otherwise champions? Ideals are all good and well, but it is hard to
imagine that the computer keyboard is mightier than the sword, and hard to see how a small, elite, affluent
assortment of intellectuals is going to generate the type of political momentum necessary to allow those on the
fringes to speak and be heard! 1 .
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Alt fails, no one cares about the oppressed
Australia, International Relations and the third debate, ed: Jarvis, 2002, p. 80-81
Moreover, why should we assume that states and individuals want to listen and will listen to what the marginalized and
the oppressed have to say? There is precious little evidence to suggest that "listening" is something the advanced
capitalist countries do very well at all. Indeed, one of the allegations so forcefully alleged by Muslim fundamentalists as justification for the terrorist attacks of
September I I is precisely that the West, and America in particular, are deaf to the disenfranchised and impoverished in the world. Certainly, there are agencies and
individuals who are sensitive to the needs of the "marginalized" and who champion institutional forums where
indigenous voices can be heard. But on even the most optimistic reckoning, such forums and institutions represent
the exception, not the rule, and remain in the minority if not dwarfed by those institutions that represent Western, first
world interests. To be sure, this is a realist power-political image of the current configuration of the global polity, but one
apparently, and ironically, endorsed by George if only because it speaks to the realities of the marginalized, the
imposed silences, and the multitude of oppressions on which George founds his call for a postmodern ethic. Recognizing
such realities, however, does not explain George's penchant for ignoring them entirely, especially in terms of the structural rigidities they pose for meaningful reform. Indeed,
George's desire to move to a new "space beyond International Relations" smacks of wishful idealism, ignoring the
current configuration of global political relations and power distribution; of the incessant ideological power of
hyperindividualism, consumerism, advertising, Hollywood images, and fashion icons; and of the innate power
bestowed on the (institutional) barons of global finance, trade, and transnational production. George seems to have little
appreciation of the structural impediments such institutions pose for radical change of the type he so fiercely advocates. Revolutionary change of the kind desired by
George ignores that fact that many individuals are not disposed to concerns beyond their family, friends, and daily work
lives. And institutional, structural transformation requires organized effort, mass popular support, and dogged singlemindedness if societal norms are to be challenged, institutional reform enacted, consumer tastes altered, and political
sensibilities reformed. Convincing Nike that there is something intrinsically wrong with paying Indonesian workers a few dollars a week to manufacture shoes for the global
market requires considerably more effort than postmodern platitudes and/or moral indignation. The cycle of wealth creation and distribution that sees Michael Jordan receive multimillion
dollar contracts to inspire demand for Nike products, while the foot soldiers in the factory eke out a meager existence producing these same products is not easily, or realistically,
challenged by pronouncements of moving beyond International Relations to a new, nicer, gentler nirvana.
Alt fails, apathy doesnt translate to action, no real plan for enacting the alternative means
nothing gets done.
Australia, International Relations and the third debate, ed: Jarvis, 2002, p. 81-82
More generally, of course, what George fails to consider is the problem of apathy and of how we get people to care about the plight
of others. What do we with the CEOs of multinational corporations, stockbrokers, accountants, factory workers, and the unemployed, who, by and large, fail to consider the
homeless and destitute in their own countries, let alone in places they have never isited and are never likely to visit? Moral indignation rarely translates into
action, and apathy about the plight of others is a structural impediment as strong any idea, theory, or writing. What
George's treatise thus fails to consider is how we overcome this, and how we get others to listen. He needs to explain how the social, political,
psychological, and moral structures that define the parameters of existence for the many millions of ordinary citizens
in the first world, and that deflects attention from the marginalized and the oppressed can be broken down. Unfortunately,
there is little to indicate that George has thought much about this, suggesting that his commitment to postmodern theory is not likely to make much difference. In fact, in the
academy the postmodern light is already beginning to dim in certain quarters, having registered scarcely a glimmer in
the broader polity, where, if change was to ensue, it needed to burn brightly. Even among those versed in the nomenclature of scholarly
debate, theorists of international politics remain skeptical of the value of postmodern discourse, by and large rejecting it. This does not portend well for postmodern visionaries and the
future of postmodern discourse. But can George really be surprised by this? After all, his
discourse indicts the "backward discipline" for complicity in

crimes against humanity, calling for a repudiation of realism and with it a repudiation of the lifelong beliefs and
writings of eminent theorists like Kenneth Waltz, Robert Gilpin, and Stephen Krasner who have otherwise defined the parameters of the
discipline, its projects, and research agendas. Can George really expect discipline-wide capitulation to an intellectual diaspora that would see theorists
repudiate their beliefs and works in order to take up the creed of postmodernism, as vague, open-ended, and indeterminate as it is? Without a clear and credible plan
of how to get from "incarceration and closure" to intellectual freedom, creativity, and openness, George's postmodern
musings have understandably attracted few disciples.
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Alt doesnt escape sovereigntymicro-level resistance only compounds the problem by
dispersing it and risks conservative co-option
Andrew W. Neal, Cutting Off the Kings Head: Foucaults Society Must Be Defended and the Problem of
Sovereignty, Alternatives 29 (2004), p. 373-398
As I have already signalled, I wish to unsettle this common interpretation of Foucault on sovereignty. Certainly, the methods and approaches that Foucault posits
will be familiar to readers from diverse intellectual fields as being extremely sharp, productive, potent, and original. However, these moves do not
"solve," "escape," or even "destroy" the problem of sovereignty. Foucault does not succeed in "cutting off the King's
head," at least not in this way. Moves into resistant forms of subjectivity, historicism, or war do not help us to leave behind
the problem of sovereignty; in fact, they only compound it. It is true that the genealogical method of historicizing the ahistorical forms of
political theory and pluralizing "universal" forms of history is devastating to those models. But although Foucault may indeed succeed in cutting
off the head of modern juridical state sovereignty in this way, he does not succeed in cutting of the head of sovereignty
altogether. Foucault does not simply give us a methodological toolbox, but an armory of discursive weapons. If we go down the road of "politics
as the continuation of war by other means," wedded to a relentless historicism to reveal war and confrontation as an underlying
"reality," Foucault risks becoming a cipher for just about any political position. The critical weapons themselves are
politically ambiguous; they could just as much be used by states, the far Right or left-leaning political theorists.
Undermining modern state sovereignty through these means does not rid us of the problem of sovereignty; it makes
it even more pressing. We are faced with the problem of how to justify alternative forms of political authority with neither the recourse to "ancient" rights,
to Hobbesian state reason, nor to the "blackmail" of the Enlightenment. If we "cut off the King's head," perhaps another, possibly even
nastier, bead will sprout elsewhere. In his determined regicidal project, Foucault risks becoming the Lady Macbeth of
political thought.
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AFFCede the Political DA

Focus on postmodern discussions cedes control of political spheres to right-wing fascists.
Richard Rorty, professor emeritus of comparative literature and philosophy at Stanford University, Achieving Our
Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, 1998, pp. 89-94
Many writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that the old industrialized democracies are heading into a
Weimar-like period, one in which populist movements are likely to overturn constitutional governments. Edward Luttwak,
for example, has suggested that fascism may be the American future. The point of his book The Endangered American Dream is that
members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to
prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar
workers-themselves desperately afraid of being downsized-are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else. At that
point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking
around for a strongman to vote for-someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats,
tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like
that of Sinclair Lewis novel It Cant Happen Here may then be played out. For once such a strongman takes office, nobody can predict
what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic. One
thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by
homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words "nigger" and "kike" will once again be heard in
the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly
educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet. But such a renewal of sadism will not alter the
effects of selfishness. For after my imagined strongman takes charge, he will quickly make his peace with the international superrich, just as Hitler made his with
the German industrialists. He will invoke the glorious memory of the Gulf War to provoke military adventures which will generate short-term prosperity. He will be
a disaster for the country and the world. People
will wonder why there was so little resistance to his evitable rise. Where, they
will ask, was the American Left? Why was it only rightists like Buchanan who spoke to the workers about the consequences of globalization? Why
could not the Left channel the mounting rage of the newly dispossessed? It is often said that we Americans, at the end of the twentieth
century, no longer have a Left. Since nobody denies the existence of what I have called the cultural Left, this
amounts to an admission that that Left is unable to engage in national politics. It is not the sort of Left which can be asked to deal
with the consequences of globalization. To get the country to deal with those consequences, the present cultural Left would
have to transform itself by opening relations with the residue of the old reformist Left, and in particular with the labor unions. It
would have to talk much more about money, even at the cost of talking less about stigma. I have two suggestions about how to effect this transition. The first
is that the Left should put a moratorium on theory. It should try to kick its philosophy habit. The second is that the Left
should try to mobilize what remains of our pride in being Americans. It should ask the public to consider how the country of Lincoln and
Whitman might be achieved. In support of my first suggestion, let me cite a passage from Dewey's Reconstruction in Philosophy in which he expresses his
exasperation with the sort of sterile debate now going on under the rubric of "individualism versus communitarianism." Dewey thought that all discussions which
took this dichotomy seriously suffer from a common defect. They are all committed to the logic of general notions under which specific situations are to be
brought. What we want is light upon this or that group of individuals, this or that concrete human being, this or that special institution or social arrangement. For
such a logic of inquiry, the traditionally accepted logic substitutes discussion of the meaning of concepts and their dialectical relationships with one another.
Dewey was right to be exasperated by sociopolitical theory conducted at this level of abstraction. He was wrong when he went on to say that ascending to this
level is typically a rightist maneuver, one which supplies "the apparatus for intellectual justifications of the established order. "9 For such ascents are now more
common on the Left than on the Right. The contemporary academic Left seems to think that the higher your level of abstraction,
the more subversive of the established order you can be. The more sweeping and novel your conceptual apparatus,
the more radical your critique. When one of today's academic leftists says that some topic has been "inadequately theorized," you can be pretty
certain that he or she is going to drag in either philosophy of language, or Lacanian psychoanalysis, or some neo-Marxist version of economic determinism.
Theorists of the Left think that dissolving political agents into plays of differential subjectivity, or political initiatives into pursuits of Lacan's impossible object of
desire, helps to subvert the established order. Such subversion, they say, is accomplished by "problematizing familiar concepts." Recent attempts to subvert
social institutions by problematizing concepts have produced a few very good books. They have also produced many thousands of books which represent
scholastic philosophizing at its worst. The authors of these purportedly "subversive" books honestly believe that they are serving human liberty. But it is almost
impossible to clamber back down from their books to a level of abstraction on which one might discuss the merits of a law, a treaty, a candidate, or a political
strategy. Even though what these authors "theorize" is often something very concrete and near at hand-a current TV show, a media celebrity, a recent scandalthey offer the most abstract and barren explanations imaginable. These futile attempts to philosophize one's way into political relevance are a symptom of what
happens when a Left retreats from activism and adopts a spectatorial approach to the problems of its country. Disengagement
from practice produces theoretical hallucinations. These result in an intellectual environment which is, as Mark Edmundson says in his book
Nightmare on Main Street, Gothic. The cultural Left is haunted by ubiquitous specters, the most frightening of which is called
"power." This is the name of what Edmundson calls Foucault's "haunting agency, which is everywhere and nowhere, as evanescent and insistent as a
resourceful spook."10
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Global violence at its lowest point in history now, impacts of the kritik are exaggerated
Pinker 11 Steven Pinker, experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist, and popular science author, and
Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard, Violence Vanquished, Wall Street
Journal, 9/24/2011,
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904106704576583203589408180.html?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTTopSto
ries
Believe it or not, the world of the past was much worse. Violence has been in decline for thousands of years, and today we
may be living in the most peaceable era in the existence of our species. The decline, to be sure, has not been smooth. It has not brought violence down to
zero, and it is not guaranteed to continue. But it is a persistent historical development, visible on scales from millennia to years, from the waging of wars to the spanking of children. This claim, I know, invites
We tend to estimate the probability of an event from the ease with which we can recall
examples, and scenes of carnage are more likely to be beamed into our homes and burned into our memories than
footage of people dying of old age. There will always be enough violent deaths to fill the evening news, so people's impressions of violence will be disconnected from its actual likelihood.
Evidence of our bloody history is not hard to find. Consider the genocides in the Old Testament and the crucifixions in the New, the gory mutilations in Shakespeare's
tragedies and Grimm's fairy tales, the British monarchs who beheaded their relatives and the American founders who dueled with their rivals. Today the decline in these brutal practices can be quantified. A look
at the numbers shows that over the course of our history, humankind has been blessed with six major declines of
violence. The first was a process of pacification: the transition from the anarchy of the hunting, gathering and
horticultural societies in which our species spent most of its evolutionary history to the first agricultural civilizations, with cities and governments, starting about 5,000 years
ago. For centuries, social theorists like Hobbes and Rousseau speculated from their armchairs about what life was like in a "state of nature." Nowadays we can do better. Forensic archeologya kind of "CSI:
skepticism, incredulity, and sometimes anger.
Paleolithic"can estimate rates of violence from the proportion of skeletons in ancient sites with bashed-in skulls, decapitations or arrowheads embedded in bones. And ethnographers can tally the causes of death
in tribal peoples that have recently lived outside of state control. These investigations show that, on average, about 15% of people in prestate eras died violently, compared to about 3% of the citizens of the earliest
states. Tribal violence commonly subsides when a state or empire imposes control over a territory, leading to the various "paxes" (Romana, Islamica, Brittanica and so on) that are familiar to readers of history. It's not
that the first kings had a benevolent interest in the welfare of their citizens. Just as a farmer tries to prevent his livestock from killing one another, so a ruler will try to keep his subjects from cycles of raiding and
feuding. From his point of view, such squabbling is a dead lossforgone opportunities to extract taxes, tributes, soldiers and slaves. The second decline of violence was a civilizing process that is best documented in
Europe. Historical records show that between the late Middle Ages and the 20th century, European countries saw a 10- to 50-fold decline in their rates of homicide. The numbers are consistent with narrative histories
of the brutality of life in the Middle Ages, when highwaymen made travel a risk to life and limb and dinners were commonly enlivened by dagger attacks. So many people had their noses cut off that medieval medical
textbooks speculated about techniques for growing them back. Historians attribute this decline to the consolidation of a patchwork of feudal territories into large kingdoms with centralized authority and an
infrastructure of commerce. Criminal justice was nationalized, and zero-sum plunder gave way to positive-sum trade. People increasingly controlled their impulses and sought to cooperate with their neighbors. The
third transition, sometimes called the Humanitarian Revolution, took off with the Enlightenment. Governments and churches had long maintained order by punishing nonconformists with mutilation, torture and
gruesome forms of execution, such as burning, breaking, disembowelment, impalement and sawing in half. The 18th century saw the widespread abolition of judicial torture, including the famous prohibition of "cruel
and unusual punishment" in the eighth amendment of the U.S. Constitution. At the same time, many nations began to whittle down their list of capital crimes from the hundreds (including poaching, sodomy, witchcraft
The fourth major

transition is the respite from major interstate war that we have seen since the end of World War II. Historians
sometimes refer to it as the Long Peace. Today we take it for granted that Italy and Austria will not come to blows, nor will Britain and Russia. But centuries ago, the
great powers were almost always at war, and until quite recently, Western European countries tended to initiate two
or three new wars every year. The clich that the 20th century was "the most violent in history" ignores the second half of the century (and may not even be true of the first half, if one
and counterfeiting) to just murder and treason. And a growing wave of countries abolished blood sports, dueling, witchhunts, religious persecution, absolute despotism and slavery.
calculates violent deaths as a proportion of the world's population). Though it's tempting to attribute the Long Peace to nuclear deterrence, non-nuclear developed states have stopped fighting each other as well.
Political scientists point instead to the growth of democracy, trade and international organizationsall of which, the statistical evidence shows, reduce the likelihood of conflict. They also credit the rising valuation of
The fifth trend, which I call the New Peace, involves war in the world as a
whole, including developing nations. Since 1946, several organizations have tracked the number of armed conflicts
and their human toll world-wide. The bad news is that for several decades, the decline of interstate wars was accompanied by a bulge of civil wars, as newly independent countries were led
by inept governments, challenged by insurgencies and armed by the cold war superpowers. The less bad news is that civil wars tend to kill far fewer people than wars
between states. And the best news is that, since the peak of the cold war in the 1970s and '80s, organized conflicts
of all kindscivil wars, genocides, repression by autocratic governments, terrorist attackshave declined throughout
the world, and their death tolls have declined even more precipitously. The rate of documented direct deaths from political violence (war, terrorism, genocide
human life over national grandeura hard-won lesson of two world wars.
and warlord militias) in the past decade is an unprecedented few hundredths of a percentage point. Even if we multiplied that rate to account for unrecorded deaths and the victims of war-caused disease and famine,
it would not exceed 1%. The most immediate cause of this New Peace was the demise of communism, which ended the proxy wars in the developing world stoked by the superpowers and also discredited genocidal
ideologies that had justified the sacrifice of vast numbers of eggs to make a utopian omelet. Another contributor was the expansion of international peacekeeping forces, which really do keep the peacenot always,
the postwar era has seen a cascade of "rights revolutions"a growing

revulsion against aggression on smaller scales. In the developed world, the civil rights movement obliterated
lynchings and lethal pogroms, and the women's-rights movement has helped to shrink the incidence of rape and the
beating and killing of wives and girlfriends. In recent decades, the movement for children's rights has significantly reduced rates of spanking, bullying, paddling in schools, and
but far more often than when adversaries are left to fight to the bitter end. Finally,
physical and sexual abuse. And the campaign for gay rights has forced governments in the developed world to repeal laws criminalizing homosexuality and has had some success in reducing hate crimes against gay
people.
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Democracy checks the impact to the kritik
Rosemary OKane, professor of comparative political theory at the University of Keele, Modernity, the Holocaust
and politics, Economy and Society 26:1, 1997, pp. 58-59
Modern bureaucracy is not 'intrinsically capable of genocidal action' (Bauman 1989: 106). Centralized state coercion has no
natural move to terror. In the explanation of modern genocides it is chosen policies which play the greatest part, whether in effecting bureaucratic
secrecy, organizing forced labour, implementing a system of terror, harnessing science and technology or introducing extermination policies, as means and as
ends. As Nazi Germany and Stalin's USSR have shown, furthermore, those chosen policies of genocidal government turned away from and not towards
modernity. The choosing of policies, however, is not independent of circumstances. An analysis of the history of each case plays an important part in explaining
where and how genocidal governments come to power and analysis of political institutions and structures also helps towards an understanding of the factors
which act as obstacles to modern genocide. But it is not just political factors which stand in the way of another Holocaust in modern society. Modern
societies have not only pluralist democratic political systems but also economic pluralism where workers are free to
change jobs and bargain wages and where independent firms, each with their own independent bureaucracies, exist
in competition with state-controlled enterprises. In modern societies this economic pluralism both promotes and is served
by the open scientific method. By ignoring competition and the capacity for people to move between organizations
whether economic, political, scientific or social, Bauman overlooks crucial but also very 'ordinary and common'
attributes of truly modern societies. It is these very ordinary and common attributes of modernity which stand in the
way of modern genocides.
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AFFAT: Structural Violence

Structural violence doesnt cause war, wars cause structural violence.
Joshua S. Goldstein, professor of International Relations at American University, War and Gender: How Gender
shapes the War System and Vice Versa, 2001, pp. 411-412
First, peace activists face a dilemma in thinking about causes of war and working for peace. Many peace scholars and activists support the approach, if you want peace, work for
justice. Then, if one believes that sexism contributes to war one can work for gender justice specifically (perhaps among others) in order to pursue peace. This
approach brings
rests on the assumption that injustices cause war. The evidence in this
book suggests that causality runs at least as strongly the other way. War is not a product of capitalism, imperialism,
gender, innate aggression, or any other single cause, although all of these influence wars outbreaks and outcomes.
Rather, war has in part fueled and sustained these and other injustices.9 So,if you want peace, work for peace. Indeed, if you want justice
strategic allies to the peace movement (women, labor, minorities), but
(gender and others), work for peace. Causality does not run just upward through the levels of analysis, from types of individuals, societies, and governments up to war. It runs
downward too. Enloe suggests that changes in attitudes towards war and the military may be the most important way to reverse womens oppression. The dilemma is that peace
work focused on justice brings to the peace movement energy, allies, and moral grounding, yet, in light of this books
evidence, the emphasis on injustice as the main cause of war seems to be empirically inadequate.
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Theres no root cause for war. Monocausal explanations ignore the human thinking process
Vivienne Jabri, lecturer in international relations at the University of Kent, "Introduction: Conflict Analysis
Reconsidered, Discourses on Violence: Conflict Analysis Reconsidered, 1996, p. 3
The study of war has produced a number of often conflicting answers to Quincy Wrights question, Why is war thought? Why is war fought?1 The history of
human political violence has shown that we cannot produce monocausal explanations of war. Studies which
concentrate on assumed innate human characteristics fail to account for the societal factors which are implicated in
what is essentially an interactive and dynamic process. Similarly, investigations which link attributes of the international
system, such as balances of power, not only produce contradictory findings, but seem to negate human decisionmaking and psychological processes in the onset of war in specific conditions. Studies of violent conflict aspire to uncover, through
empirical investigation, patterns of behaviour which lead to war. As indicated by Holsti, studies of war may be divided into those which
emphasise structural or ecological variables, such as the distribution of power capabilities within the system, and
those which emphasise decision-making, values, and perceptions of policy-makers in attempts to isolate common
features leading up to the decision for war.2
No root cause of war, root cause claims offer no solutions to preventing war.
Kalevi Jaakko Holsti, professor of political science at the University of British Columbia, "On The Study Of War,"
Peace And War: Armed Conflicts And International Order, 1648-1989, 1991, p. 3
Investigators of conflict, crises, and war reached a consensus years ago that monocausal explanations are
theoretically and empirically deficient. Kenneth Waltz (1957) classic typology of war explanations convincingly demonstrated various problems
arising from diagnoses that locate war causation exclusively at the individual, state attribute, or systemic levels. He also illustrated how prescriptions
based on faulty diagnoses offer no solution to the problem. Even Rousseaus powerful exploration of the consequences of
anarchy, updated by Waltz (1979), remains full of insights, but it only specifies why wars recur (there is nothing to prevent them) and
offers few clues that help to predict when, where, and over what issues. Blainey (1973), in another telling attack on monocausal
theories, continues where Waltz left off. He offers, on the basis of rich historical illustrations, both logical and anecdotal rebuttals of facile explanations of war that
dot academic and philosophical thought on the subject. But rebuttals of the obvious are not sufficient. We presently have myriads of theories of
war, emphasizing all sorts of factors that can help explain its etiology. As Carroll and Fink (1975) note, there are if anything
too many theories, and even too many typologies of theories. Quoting Timascheff approvingly, they point out that
anything might lead to war, but nothing will certainly lead to war.
Competing ideologies have different ideas of root cause claims, no one true root cause of
violence.
Dr. John Monahan, psychologist and professor of law at University of Virginia-Charlottesville, "The Causes of
Violence," FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, 1 January 1994
I have been asked to summarize everything that we really know about the biological, sociological, and psychological causes of violencein 20 minutes or less.
Unfortunately, I think I can do it. But, I warn you in advance what
I cannot do-what no one can honestly doand that is to offer a neat,

simple story that explains why so many Americans are afraid to walk home alone at night. Only people on the extremes of the
political spectrum have that luxury and that conceit. The political right believes that the root cause of violent crime is bad genes or bad morals. Not so, says the
left. The root cause of violent crime is bad housing or dead-end jobs. And, I tell you that while
doing something about the causes of violence

surely requires a political ideology, the only way we can determine what those causes are in the first place is to check
our ideologies at the door and to try to keep our minds open as wide, and for as long, as we can bear. I realize that this is
not easily done. But, if you give it a try, which I urge you to do, I think that you will find that violence does not have one root cause. Rather, violence has
many tangled roots. Some grow toward the left and some grow toward the right. We have to find the largest ones,
whichever way they grow, and only then can we debate how to cut them off.
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AFFAT: Discourse FW
Discourse is overrated; focusing on it prevents discussion on other aspects of political
decisions.
Gearoid O Tuathail, Department of Geography at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, The patterned
mess of history and the writing of critical geopolitics: a reply to Dalby, Political Geography Vol 15 No 6/7, 1996,
CIAO
While theoretical debates at academic conferences are important to academics, the discourse and concerns of foreign-policy decision- makers are quite
different, so different that they constitute a distinctive problem- solving, theory-averse, policy-making subculture. There is a danger that academics
assume that the discourses they engage are more significant in the practice of foreign policy and the exercise of
power than they really are. This is not, however, to minimize the obvious importance of academia as a general
institutional structure among many that sustain certain epistemic communities in particular states. In general, I do not
disagree with Dalbys fourth point about politics and discourse except to note that his statement-Precisely because reality could be represented in
particular ways political decisions could be taken, troops and material moved and war fought-evades the important
question of agency that I noted in my review essay. The assumption that it is representations that make action possible is
inadequate by itself. Political, military and economic structures, institutions, discursive networks and leadership are
all crucial in explaining social action and should be theorized together with representational practices. Both here and
earlier, Dalbys reasoning inclines towards a form of idealism. In response to Dalbys fifth point (with its three subpoints), it is worth noting, first, that his book is
about the CPD, not the Reagan administration. He analyzes certain CPD discourses, root the geographical reasoning practices of the Reagan administration nor
its public-policy reasoning on national security. Dalbys book is narrowly textual; the general contextuality of the Reagan administration is not dealt with. Second,
let me simply note that I find that the distinction between critical theorists and post- structuralists is a little too rigidly and heroically drawn by Dalby and others.
Third, Dalbys interpretation of the reconceptualization of national security in Moscow as heavily influenced by dissident peace researchers in Europe is highly
idealist, an interpretation that ignores the structural and ideological crises facing the Soviet elite at that time. Gorbachevs reforms and his new security
discourse were also strongly selfinterested, an ultimately futile attempt to save the Communist Party and a discredited regime of power from disintegration.
The issues raised by Simon Dalby in his comment are important ones for all those interested in the practice of critical geopolitics. While I agree with Dalby that
questions of discourse are extremely important ones for political geographers to engage, there is a danger of fetishizing this concern with
discourse so that we neglect the institutional and the sociological, the materialist and the cultural, the political and
the geographical contexts within which particular discursive strategies become significant. Critical geopolitics, in
other words, should not be a prisoner of the sweeping ahistorical cant that sometimes accompanies
poststructuralism nor convenient reading strategies like the identity politics narrative; it needs to always be open to
the patterned mess that is human history.
Discourse framing widens gaps between people based on languages spoken, prevents
social change.
McNally 97 David McNally, professor of political science at York University, In Defense of History: Marxism and the
Postmodern Agenda, 1997, p. 26-27
We are witnessing today a new idealism, infecting large sections of the intellectual left, which has turned language not merely into an independent realm, but into an all pervasive realm,
a sphere so omnipresent, so dominant, as virtually to extinguish human agency. Everything is discourse, you see; and discourse is everything. Because human begins are linguistic
creatures, because the world in which we act is a world we know and describe through language, it allegedly follows that there is nothing outside language. Our
language, or
discourse, or text the jargon varies but not the message defines and limits what we know, what we can
imagine, what we can do. There is a political theory here too. Oppression is said to be rooted ultimately in the way in
which we and others are defined linguistically, the way in which we are positioned by words in relation to other words,
or by codes which are said to be structured like a language. Our very being, our identities and subjectivities, are constituted through language. As
one trendy literary theorist puts it in David Lodges novel Nice Work, it is not merely that you are what you speak; no, according to the new idealism, you are what speaks you.
Language is thus the final prison-house. Our confinement there is beyond resistance; it is impossible to escape
from that which makes us what we are. This new idealism corresponds to a profound collapse of political horizons. It is the pseudoradicalism of a period of retreat
for the left, a verbal radicalism of the word without deed, or, rather, of the word as deed. In response to actual structures and practices of oppression and exploitation, it offers the
rhetorical gesture, the ironic turn of phrase. It comes as little surprise, then, when one of the chief philosophers of the new idealism, Jacques Derrida, tells us that he would hesitate to
use such terms as liberation 1 Imprisoned within language, we may play with words; but we can never hope to liberate ourselves from immutable structures of oppression rooted in
language, itself. The
new idealism and the politics it entails are not simply harmless curiosities; they are an abdication of
political responsibility, especially at a time of ferocious capitalist restructuring, of widening gaps between rich and
poor, of ruling class offensives against social programs. They are also an obstacle to the rebuilding of mass
movements of protest and resistance.
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Epistemological kritiks require a large lack of information, doesnt preclude doing things
like the plan.
Tyler Cowen, Department of Economics at George Mason University, "The Epistemic Problem Does Not Refute
Consequentialism," 2 November 2004, http://www.gmu.edu/jbc/Tyler/Epistemic2.pdf, p. 14-15)
The epistemic critique relies heavily on a complete lack of information about initial circumstances. This is not a plausible
general assumption, although it may sometimes be true. The critique may give the impression of relying more heavily on a more
plausible assumption, namely a high variance for the probability distribution of our estimates concerning the future.
But simply increasing the level of variance or uncertainty does not add much force to the epistemic argument. To see
this more clearly, consider another case of a high upfront benefit. Assume that the United States has been hit with a bioterror attack
and one million children have contracted smallpox. We also have two new experimental remedies, both of which offer
some chance of curing smallpox and restoring the children to perfect health. If we know for sure which remedy works,
obviously we should apply that remedy. But imagine now that we are uncertain as to which remedy works. The
uncertainty is so extreme that each remedy may cure somewhere between three hundred thousand and six hundred thousand children. Nonetheless we have
a slight idea that one remedy is better than the other. That is, one remedy is slightly more likely to cure more children, with no other apparent
offsetting negative effects or considerations. Despite the greater uncertainty, we still have the intuition that we should try to save as many children as possible.
We should apply the remedy that is more likely to cure more children. We do not say: We are now so uncertain
about what will happen. We should pursue some goal other than trying to cure as many children as possible. Nor would
we cite greater uncertainty about longer-run events as an argument against curing the children. We have a definite good in the present (more cured children),
balanced against a radical remixing of the future on both sides of the equation. The
definite upfront good still stands firm. Alternatively, let

us assume that our broader future suddenly became less predictable (perhaps genetic engineering is invented, which creates new and
difficult-to-forecast possibilities). That still would not diminish the force of our reason for saving more children. The variance of forecast becomes larger on both
sides of the equation whether we save the children or not and the value of the upfront lives remains. A higher variance of forecast might increase the required
size of the upfront benefit (to overcome the Principle of Roughness), but it would not refute the relevance of consequences more generally. We could
increase the uncertainty more, but consequentialism still will not appear counterintuitive. The remedies, rather than curing
somewhere in the range of three to six hundred thousand children, might cure in the broader range of zero to all one million of the children. By all classical
statistical standards, this new cure scenario involves more uncertainty than the previous case, such as by having a higher variance of possible outcomes. Yet this
higher uncertainty lends little support for the view that curing the children becomes less important. We still have an imperative to apply the remedy that appears
best, and is expected the cure the greater number of children. This example may appear excessively simple, but it points our attention to the non-generality of the
epistemic critique.
The critique appears strongest only when we have absolutely no idea about the future; this is a special
rather than a general case. Simply boosting the degree of background generic uncertainty should not stop us from
pursuing large upfront benefits of obvious importance.
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Our knowledge doesnt have to be perfectthe aff still matters
Rudra Sil, assistant professor of Political Science at University of Pennsylvania. Against Epistemological
Absolutism: Toward a Pragmatic Center, in Beyond Boundries ed Sil and Eileen M. Doherty 2000 p160-161
An even stronger case is made by Paul Feyerabend who attacks the very idea that a paradigm might provide some conceptual coherence to a body of theoretical
literature; rather, the problem of incommensurable meanings in each and every theory, in each and every case, makes it impossible to generate shared
paradigms. Thus, Feyerabends relativistic epistemology provides no criteria whatsoever for the acceptance or refutation of
theories, leaving social scientists with a growing body of inconsistent and incommensurable theories.~~ Feyerabends
position is implicitly accepted by many interpretive theorists as well as postmodernists. For relativists, it is not simply the methodological immaturity of the social
sciences that produces debates over the relative merits of theories; the very nature of social inquiry makes it impossible to achieve a uniform set of methods or
criteria for the evaluation of theory.56 Posrmodernists even make a virtue out of this criterionless social science where anything goes. Some
of the less
skeptical posrmodernists proceed to emphasize intuition and empathy as substitutes for positivist method, but the
most extreme relativists can do no more than deconstruct texts to reveal hidden biases and challenge hidden
assumptions. In both cases, there is no basis for determining when an insightful narrative or an act of deconstruction
yields anything of significance to anyone other than author. Is there a position between Feyera bends relativism, on the one hand, and
Popperian conventionalism or Lakatoss sophisticated falsificationism on the other? To most social scientists in their everyday work, the latter seems unfeasible
and the former unthinkable. Instead, some have responded to the challenge of absolute relativism by calling for the use of
compelling arguments and empirical findings not to test or falsify theories but to modestly engage in the rational
persuasion of a given audience; thus, they posit a bounded notion of rationality, stripped of its absolute
universalism and consistent with socially constructed intersubjective realities.57 Others suggest that theories may initially be
incommensurable, but that they can be translated so as to enable at least a tentative comparison and evaluation on the basis of the same kind of empirical
tests.s8 In these approaches, the result will not be definitive and theories will never become laws, but instead of crirerionless narratives, scholars can at
least make an effort to persuade audiences by appealing to their own common-sense version of reason by relating
theories to compelling empirical observations. In the end, there may be no alternative to relying on the judgment of
other human beings, and this judgment is difficult to form in the absence of empirical findings. However, instead of
clinging to the elusive idea of a uniform standard for the empirical validation of theories, it is possible to simply
present a set of observational statementswhether we call it data or narrativefor the modest purpose of
rendering an explanation or interpretation more plausible than the audience would allow at the outset. In practice, this is
precisely what the most committed positivists and interprerivists have been doing anyway; the presentation of logically consistent hypotheses supported by
data and the ordering of facts in a thick narrative are both ultimately designed to convince scholars that a particular proposition should be taken more seriously
than others. Social
analysis is not about final truths or objective realities, but nor does it have to be a meaningless world
of incommensurable theories where anything goes. Instead, it can be an ongoing collective endeavor to develop,
evaluate, and refine general inferencesbe they in the form of models, partial explanations, descriptive inferences,
or interpretationsin order to render them more sensible or plausible to a particular audience. In the absence of a
consensus on the possibility and desirability of a full-blown explanatory science of international and social life, it is
important to keep as many doors open as possible. This does not require us to accept each and every claim without some sort of validation,
but perhaps the community of scholars can be more tolerant about the kinds of empirical referents and logical
propositions that are employed in validating propositions by scholars embracing all but the most extreme
epistemological positions.
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Ontological questions arent a reason to exclude certain arguments
Wendt 2 Alexander Wendt, professor of international security at political science at Ohio State, with James Fearon,
Handbook of International Relations, ed Carlsnaes, 2002, p. 53
It is important to understand these ontological issues, since failure to do so can lead to analytical tools or frameworks becoming tacit ontologies (Ruggie, 1983:
285), foreclosing potentially interesting lines of argument without justification. However, we do not believe this framing of the rationalist
constructivist debate is the most useful, for three reasons. First, the issues are by definition philosophical, and as
such not likely to be settled soon, if ever, and almost certainly not by IR scholars. Second, although some rationalists
and constructivists may in fact have strong ontological commitments, others may not, since there is no inherent need
to commit to an ontology to work in these traditions. Just as quantum physicists can do their work without any idea how to interpret its
ontological implications, social scientists too can proceed pragmatically, remaining agnostic about what society is 'really' made of. Finally, it seems
doubtful that as a discipline we know so much about international life that we should rule out certain arguments a
priori on purely philosophical grounds. Thus, while recognizing the role that ontological issues play in structuring the
rationalist-constructivist debate, in this chapter we will largely avoid them, adopting a stance of ontological pluralism
instead.
Reality and human experiences come before questions of ontology

Davidson 89 Arnold Davidson, co-editor of Critical Inquiry, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Member of the
Committees on General Studies in the Humanities and on the Conceptual Foundations of Science at the University of
Chicago, Critical Inquiry, Winter, 1989
I understand Levinas work to suggest another path to the recovery of the human, one that leads through or toward other human beings: The dimension of
the divine opens forth from the human face.Hence metaphysics is enacted where the social relation is enactedin
our relations with men.The Other is not the incarnation of God, but precisely by his face, in which he is
disincarnate, is the manifestation of the height in which God is revealed. It is our relations with menthat give to theological concepts the sole signification
they admit of. Levinas places ethics before ontology by beginning with our experience of the human face: and, in a clear
reference to Heideggers idolatry of the village life of peasants, he associates himself with Socrates, who preferred the city where he
encountered men to the country with its trees. In his discussions of skepticism and the problem of others, Cavell also aligns himself with this path of thought, with
the recovery of the finite human self through the acknowledgment of others: As long as God exists, I am not alone. And couldnt the other suffer the fate of
God?I wish to understand how the other now bears the weight of God, shows me that I am not alone in the universe. This requires understanding the
philosophical problem of the other as the trace or scar of the departure of God. [CR, p. 470] The
suppression of the other, the human, in

Horror is always disconnected
toward the human: every object of horror bears the imprint of the human will. So Levinas can see in Heideggers silence about the
Heideggers thought accounts, I believe, for the absence, in his writing after the war, of the experience of horror.
gas chambers and death camps a kind of consent to the horror. And Cavell can characterize Nazis as those who have lost the capacity for being horrified by
what they do. Where was Heideggers horror? How could he have failed to know what he had consented to? Hannah Arendt associates Heidegger with Paul
Valerys aphorism, Les evenements ne sont que lecume des choses (Events are but the foam of things). I think one understands the
source of her intuition. The mass extermination of human beings, however, does not produce foam, but dust and
ashes; and it is here that questioning must stop.
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Value to life inevitable existence key to maximize it
David Pizer 2001Argument that life has inherent value, July 8, http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/dsp.cgi?msg=16930
Argument that life has inherent value 1. The concept of value comes from what living beings will pay for something. How much one being is willing to give in
order to get something he wants is a way to think of the value of that thing. What a being is willing to pay for something depends on how much he desires that
thing. So indirectly, desire is what actually sets the value of something. 2. In
order to desire something, the thing doing the desiring must

be alive - it must be a living being. So value, the end of desire, is dependent on life. Only living things (living beings)
can give value to something else. 3. In order for any first thing to give something to a second thing, the first thing must first have it to give. So if only
living things can give value, then living things must have value. 4. Desire can only come from, (and so must be in), living beings. So
when living things desire something, that desire must be inherent in the living things. If desire in living things is what gives value to other
things, and that desire is inherent in the living thing, then living things, or life, has inherent value in it. Or to say it another
way: If an object gives something value, that object must have value in it as a quality to give. Example: For me to love my dog, I must first have love in me. For
me to value my dog, I must first have value in me. 5. Put another way, if a living being has some quality, that quality is a part of what
makes that being what it is. 6.If life gives value to life, than one of the parts of life is value. Put another way, value cannot
exist without life, so value is life and life is value. 7. If value is only relative, then saying life being valuable relative to life is the same as saying
life has worth relative to life. Anything that is relative to itself is an unconditional part of itself and therefore has
"inherentness". 8.THEREFORE, anyway you look at it, life is value and value is life - and life has inherent value.
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AFFBiopower Good
Democratic biopower is designed to protect the rights of its citizens.
Dickinson 4 - 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, 148)
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, many advocates of a

rights-based welfare structure were open to the idea that stubborn cases might be legitimate targets for sterilization; the right to health 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.
Biopolitical ends have created constraints on totalitarian power.

In short, the continuities between early twentieth-century biopolitical discourse and the practices of the welfare state in
our own time are unmistakable. Both are instances of the disciplinary society and of biopolitical, regulatory, social-engineering modernity, and they
share that genealogy with more authoritarian states, including the National Socialist state, but also fascist Italy, for example. And it is certainly fruitful to view
them from this very broad perspective. But that analysis can easily become superficial and misleading, because it obfuscates the profoundly different strategic
and local dynamics of power in the two kinds of regimes. Clearly the
democratic welfare state is not only formally but also substantively

quite different from totalitarianism. Above all, again, it has nowhere developed the fateful, radicalizing dynamic that
characterized National Socialism (or for that matter Stalinism), the psychotic logic that leads from economistic
population management to mass murder. Again, there is always the potential for such a discursive regime to generate coercive policies. In those
cases in which the regime of rights does not successfully produce health, such a system can and historically does create compulsory programs to enforce
it. But again, there are political and policy potentials and constraints in such a structuring of biopolitics that are very different from those of National Socialist
Germany. Democratic biopolitical regimes require, enable, and incite a degree of self-direction and participation that is functionally incompatible with authoritarian
or totalitarian structures. And this pursuit of biopolitical ends through a regime of democratic citizenship does appear,
historically, to have imposed increasingly narrow limits on coercive policies, and to have generated a logic or
imperative of increasing liberalization. Despite limitations imposed by political context and the slow pace of discursive change, I think this is the
unmistakable message of the really very impressive waves of legislative and welfare reforms in the 1920s or the 1970s in Germany.90 Of course it is not yet
clear whether this is an irreversible dynamic of such systems. Nevertheless, such regimes are characterized by sufficient degrees of
autonomy (and of the potential for its expansion) for sufficient numbers of people that I think it becomes useful to
conceive of them as productive of a strategic configuration of power relations that might fruitfully be analyzed as a
condition of liberty, just as much as they are productive of constraint, oppression, or manipulation. At the very least,
totalitarianism cannot be the sole orientation point for our understanding of biopolitics, the only end point of the logic
of social engineering.
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AFFBiopower Good
Modern Biopower does not stifle ideas, but opens up a forum for many different ideas to be
expressed
This notion is not at all at odds with the core of Foucauldian (and Peukertian) theory. Democratic welfare states are regimes of
power/knowledge no less than early twentieth-century totalitarian states; these systems are not opposites, in the sense that they are
two alternative ways of organizing the same thing. But they are two very different ways of organizing it. The concept power should not be read
as a universal stifling night of oppression, manipulation, and entrapment, in which all political and social orders are
grey, are essentially or effectively the same. Power is a set of social relations, in which individuals and groups have
varying degrees of autonomy and effective subjectivity. And discourse is, as Foucault argued, tactically polyvalent. Discursive elements
(like the various elements of biopolitics) can be combined in different ways to form parts of quite different strategies (like totalitarianism or the democratic welfare
state); they cannot be assigned to one place in a structure, but rather circulate. The
varying possible constellations of power in modern

societies create multiple modernities, modern societies with quite radically differing potentials.91
Democratic biopower has greatly increased the rights and resources of citizens under
interventionist regimes.
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.
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AFFThreats Are Real

Threats exist, we should pay attention to them.
Olav Knudsen, Professor of Political Science at Sodertorn, "Post-Copenhagen Security Studies," Security Dialogue
32:3, 2001
Moreover, I have a problem with the underlying implication that it is unimportant whether states 'really' face dangers from other states or groups. In the
Copenhagen school,
threats are seen as coming mainly from the actors' own fears, or from what happens when the fears
of individuals turn into paranoid political action. In my view, this emphasis on the subjective is a misleading conception of
threat, in that it discounts an independent existence for whatever is perceived as a threat. Granted, political life is often
marked by misperceptions, mistakes, pure imaginations, ghosts, or mirages, but such phenomena do not occur simultaneously to large numbers of politicians,
and hardly most of the time. During the Cold War, threats - in the sense of plausible possibilities of danger - referred to 'real'
phenomena, and they refer to 'real' phenomena now. The objects referred to are often not the same, but that is a different matter. Threats
have to be dealt with both n terms of perceptions and in terms of the phenomena which are perceived to be threatening. The point of Waevers concept
of security is not the potential existence of danger somewhere but the use of the word itself by political elites. In his 1997
PhD dissertation, he writes, One can View security as that which is in language theory called a speech act: it is not interesting as a sign referring to something
more real - it is the utterance itself that is the act.24 The deliberate disregard of objective factors is even more explicitly stated in Buzan & WaeVers joint article
of the same year. As a consequence, the phenomenon of threat is reduced to a matter of pure domestic politics.
It seems to me that the security

dilemma, as a central notion in security studies, then loses its foundation. Yet I see that Waever himself has no compunction about
referring to the security dilemma in a recent article." This discounting of the objective aspect of threats shifts security studies to
insignificant concerns. What has long made 'threats' and threat perceptions important phenomena in the study of IR
is the implication that urgent action may be required. Urgency, of course, is where Waever first began his argument in favor of an alternative
security conception, because a convincing sense of urgency has been the chief culprit behind the abuse of 'security' and the consequent politics of panic', as
Waever aptly calls it. Now, here - in the case of urgency - another baby is thrown out with the Waeverian bathwater. When real situations of urgency
arise, those situations are challenges to democracy; they are actually at the core of the problematic arising with the
process of making security policy in parliamentary democracy. But in Waevers world, threats are merely more or less
persuasive, and the claim of urgency is just another argument. I hold that instead of 'abolishing' threatening phenomena
out there by reconceptualizing them, as Waever does, we should continue paying attention to them, because situations with a
credible claim to urgency will keep coming back and then we need to know more about how they work in the interrelations of groups and states (such as civil
wars, for instance), not least to find adequate democratic procedures for dealing with them.
Territorial securitization is inevitableactors will always defend themselves against the

outside
Barry Buzan, Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and
honorary professor at the University of Copenhagen, Security, the State, the New World Order, and Beyond, On
Security, ed. Ronnie D. Lipschutz, 1998, CIAO
One assumption underlying this chapter is that differences in internal construction have a substantial impact on how states
define threats and vulnerabilities, and therefore on the whole construction of the security problematique. Given their fundamental character, all states (or
at least all of those that are embedded in an international system--and it is only these that will be discussed here) will share bottom line security
concerns about the maintenance of their territorial base and their political autonomy. If the threat is of external armed
attack aimed at seizing territory or resources, or overthrowing the government, then, within the limits of resources,
conceptions of security will tend to be similar in all states, and the effect of internal differences will be pushed into the
background. Beyond that bottom line, however, internal differences can have radical effects on the construction of security, affecting both the breadth of the
security agenda (what kinds of actions--military, political, economic, societal, environmental--are perceived as threats), and the definition of priorities for security
policy.
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Apocalyptic rhetoric incites us to stop apocalyptic threats, creates social activism.
Blain 91 Michael Blain, professor of Sociology, RHETORICAL PRACTICE IN AN ANTI-NUCLEAR WEAPONS
CAMPAIGN, Peace & Change
Peace activism can be understood as a sociopolitical performance. It enacts a pattern of discourse that can be
rhetorically analyzed in terms of its strategy of incitement. As peace activists mobilized their forces in the 1980s, they built up a discourse -- a repertoire
of possible political statements for use against nuclear weapons policies. Such statements as nuclear annihilation, radiation pollution, and
strategic madness have been the primary incitements to peace activism. Activists use language pragmatically. As political
actors addressing a public audience, they know they must speak a language familiar to that audience. Nineteenth-century activists were educated, middle-class women, clergymen,
educators, and businessmen with a reform Christian conscience. Twentieth-century activists have included political leftists and cultural dissidents as well as traditional pacifists and
religious liberals.(n1) Middle-class professionals have played prominent roles in the peace movement. For example, medical activists like Helen Caldicott and Robert Lifton have
elaborated a discourse on the madness of "nuclearism"(n2) In fact, some analysts interpret the
peace movement as a power struggle of middle-class

radicals and countercultural rebels against the power elite.(n3) This article presents the results of a rhetorical analysis of activists' discursive practices in a
victorious campaign to defeat a U.S. government plan to construct the first new nuclear weapons plant in twenty years in the state of Idaho, the Special Isotope Separator (SIS). It
shows how activists in the Snake River Alliance (SRA), a Boise, Idaho, antinuclear organization, mobilized hundreds of "Idahoans" to act as "concerned citizens" and "Life Guards," to
lobby, testify, demonstrate, and finally, to kill this plan. The article introduces a perspective on how discourse functions in political movements. An effective movement discourse must
accomplish two things: (1)
knowledge, or the constitution of the subjects and objects of struggle, and (2) ethics, or the moral
incitement of people to political action. I will show how this perspective can illuminate how anti-SIS activists
developed an effective discourse to kill this crucial nuclear weapons program. A critical evaluation of this campaign
can contribute to peace in at least three ways: it can celebrate the artful practices these activists engaged in to
achieve their political objectives; it can add a case study of a victorious campaign to the emerging literature on the
tactics of nonviolent action; and finally, it can contribute to the current debate about the future of the peace
movement in a post-cold war world. The anti-SIS campaign involved an alliance of environmental and peace groups, which suggests one possible political strategy
for future peace actions. POLITICAL MOVEMENTS AS VICTIMAGE RITUALS Political activists must engage in discourse to fight and win power
struggles with their adversaries. In political battles, such as the anti-SIS campaign, words are weapons with tactical
functions. Michel Foucault clearly articulates this perspective: Indeed, it is in discourse that power and knowledge are joined together. And for this reason, we must conceive
discourse as a series of discontinuous segments whose tactical function is neither uniform nor stable ... as a multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into play in various
strategies. It is this distribution that we must reconstruct ... according to who is speaking, his position of power, the institutional context in which he happens to be situated ... with the
shifts and reutilizations of identical formulas for contrary objectives.(n4) A power strategy refers to all means, including discursive practices, put into play by an actor in a particular
power relationship to influence the actions of others. The
language of political movements, including peace activism, is militaristic;

activists talk strategy, tactics, and objectives. And it is important to see that discourse is itself a part of any power
strategy. Kenneth Burke's concepts of victimage rhetoric and rituals can be used to illuminate this process .(n5) Political
activists use victimage rhetoric to mobilize people to fight and defeat their adversaries. Victimage rhetoric is melodramatic in form. It functions to incite those who identify with it to
engage in political acts of ritual scapegoating. Activists
mobilize people to engage in activism by getting them to identify with an actual

or impending violation of some communal "ideal"--a problem, concern, or danger. Activists mount "education" campaigns to get the public
to identify with the imminent danger. A critical knowledge of the nature of this danger is constructed, taking the form of villainous powers inflicting or threatening to inflict some terrible
wrong on the world. This
rhetorical practice is tactical in the sense that it is designed to generate intense anger and moral
outrage at what has, is, or could be happening to the values of those who identify with it. These people can then be
mobilized in a campaign to fight the villain. This effect is intensified by emphasizing the negative features of the
actions of the agents and agencies responsible for the violation. Once implanted, this knowledge exerts an ethical incitement to
activism. Activists, this model suggests, must develop a discourse that does two things: vilify and activate. These two functions correspond to two mom ents in a melodramatic
victimage ritual. These two moments of identification are (1) acts of violation or vilification and (2) acts of redemptive or heroic action. Movement leaders must construct images of both
villains and activists fighting villains. They
must convince us that acts of violation have occurred or will happen, and then they must
goad us into doing something about it. This analysis suggests that a movement discourse is a rhetorical system
composed of two elements working in tandem. One of the main features of motive in victimage ritual is the aim to destroy the destroyer. In the anti- SIS
campaign, as we shall see, the objective was to kill a Department of Energy (DOE) program to build a nuclear weapons plant. One means of accomplishing that objective was to vilify its
proponents. The second element in a movement discourse is redemptive or ethical. Once leaders succeed in convincing their followers that there is a real threat, they must then incite
those convinced to act. To accomplish these objectives, peace activists have assembled a discourse charged with peril and power--a knowledge of the scene they confront and an ethic
of political activism. They have constituted a "knowledge" of the dangers posed by the nuclear arms race and nuclear war that is infused with a redemptive ethic of political activism.
Activists use this knowledge and ethic to goad people into campaigns to achieve antinuclear objectives. For example, activists have invoked the term power in two distinct ethical
senses. There is the "bad" power of the agents of the nuclear arms race (politicians such as Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher; agencies such as the U.S. government, NATO, or
the Department of Energy). And there is the "good" power that activists produce by their concerted political actions, including a subjective effect called "empowerment." Activists
empower themselves by "taking personal responsibility for the fate of the earth," sacrificing time, energy, and money
to the cause. By engaging in political activism, peace activists say they transcend psychological despair and obtain a
sense of personal power.(n6)
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Kritiks of environmentalism are co-opted by the right
Paul Wapner, associate professor and director of the Global Environmental Policy Program at American University.
Leftist Criticism of "Nature" Environmental Protection in a Postmodern Age, Dissent Winter 2003
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/menutest/archives/2003/wi03/wapner.htm
The postmodern argument also poses challenges for anyone concerned with environmental protection. Environmentalism is fundamentally about conserving and
preserving nature. Whether one worries about climate change, loss of biological diversity, dwindling resources, or overall degradation of the earth's air, water,
soil, and species, the nonhuman world is the backdrop of concern. What happens when critics call this backdrop into question? What happens when they claim
that one understanding of "nature" is at odds with another and that there is no definitive way to judge which one is better? How can a movement dedicated to
protecting nature operate if the very identity of its concern is in doubt? These may seem like academic questions, but they go to the heart of environmentalism
and have begun to worry even the most committed environmentalists. After scholars such as William Cronon, Timothy Luke, and J. Baird Callicott
introduced "eco-criticism" to the scholarly and popular publics, various environmental activists and thinkers have
struggled to articulate a response. Their inability to do so in a decisive and persuasive manner has further damaged the environmentalist position.
Even more troubling, now that the critique is out of the bag, it is being co-opted by people on the right. Antienvironmentalists such as Charles Rubin and Alston Chase, for example, now claim that, if there is no such thing as
"real" nature, we need not treat the nonhuman world with unqualified respect. If we think it is in our interest, we can freely choose to
pave the rainforest, wipe out the last panda bear, or pump high levels of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. What is critical to notice in both cases
is that criticisms of "nature," whether they come from the left or are co-opted by the right, are playing an increasing
role in structuring the confrontation between anti- and pro-environmentalists. And they are re-setting the fault lines
within the environmental movement itself.
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We have a moral responsibility to protect nature, post-modern kritks of nature spend time
discussing while the environment is destroyed.
Paul Wapner, associate professor and director of the Global Environmental Policy Program at American University.
Leftist Criticism of "Nature" Environmental Protection in a Postmodern Age, Dissent Winter 2003
The third response to eco-criticism would require critics to acknowledge the ways in which they themselves silence
nature and then to respect the sheer otherness of the nonhuman world. Postmodernism prides itself on criticizing the urge toward
mastery that characterizes modernity. But isn't mastery exactly what postmodernism is exerting as it captures the nonhuman world within its own conceptual
domain? Doesn't postmodern cultural criticism deepen the modernist urge toward mastery by eliminating the ontological weight of the nonhuman world? What
else could it mean to assert that there is no such thing as nature? I have already suggested the postmodernist response: yes, recognizing the social construction
of "nature" does deny the self-expression of the nonhuman world, but how would we know what such self-expression means? Indeed, nature doesn't speak;
rather, some person always speaks on nature's behalf, and whatever that person says is, as we all know, a social construction. All attempts to listen to nature
are social constructions-except one. Even the most radical postmodernist must acknowledge the distinction between physical existence and non-existence. As I
have said, postmodernists accept that there is a physical substratum to the phenomenal world even if they argue about
the different meanings we ascribe to it. This acknowledgment of physical existence is crucial. We can't ascribe meaning to that which doesn't
appear. What doesn't exist can manifest no character. Put differently, yes, the postmodernist should rightly worry about
interpreting nature's expressions. And all of us should be wary of those who claim to speak on nature's behalf
(including environmentalists who do that). But we need not doubt the simple idea that a prerequisite of expression is
existence. This in turn suggests that preserving the nonhuman world-in all its diverse embodiments-must be seen by ecocritics as a fundamental good. Eco-critics must be supporters, in some fashion, of environmental preservation.
Postmodernists reject the idea of a universal good. They rightly acknowledge the difficulty of identifying a common value given the multiple contexts of our valueproducing activity. In fact, if there is one thing they vehemently scorn, it is the idea that there can be a value that stands above the individual contexts of human
experience. Such a value would present itself as a metanarrative and, as Jean-Franois Lyotard has explained, postmodernism is characterized fundamentally
by its "incredulity toward meta-narratives." Nonetheless, I can't
see how postmodern critics can do otherwise than accept the value
of preserving the nonhuman world. The nonhuman is the extreme "other"; it stands in contradistinction to humans as
a species. In understanding the constructed quality of human experience and the dangers of reification,
postmodernism inherently advances an ethic of respecting the "other." At the very least, respect must involve ensuring that the "other"
actually continues to exist. In our day and age, this requires us to take responsibility for protecting the actuality of the nonhuman.
Instead, however, we are running roughshod over the earth's diversity of plants, animals, and ecosystems. Postmodern
critics should find this particularly disturbing. If they don't, they deny their own intellectual insights and compromise their fundamental moral commitment. Now,
what does this mean for politics and policy, and the future of the environmental movement? Society is constantly being asked to address questions of
environmental quality for which there are no easy answers. As we wrestle with challenges of global climate change, ozone depletion, loss of biological diversity,
and so forth, we need to consider the economic, political, cultural, and aesthetic values at stake. These considerations have traditionally
marked the politics of environmental protection. A sensitivity to eco-criticism requires that we go further and include
an ethic of otherness in our deliberations. That is, we need to be moved by our concern to make room for the "other"
and hence fold a commitment to the nonhuman world into our policy discussions. I don't mean that this argument should drive all
our actions or that respect for the "other" should always carry the day. But it must be a central part of our reflections and calculations. For example, as we
estimate the number of people that a certain area can sustain, consider what to do about climate change, debate restrictions on ocean fishing, or otherwise
assess the effects of a particular course of action, we must think about the lives of other creatures on the earth-and also the continued existence of the nonliving
physical world. We
must do so not because we wish to maintain what is "natural" but because we wish to act in a morally
respectable manner. I have been using postmodern cultural criticism against itself. Yes, the postmodernists are right: we can do what we want with the
nonhuman world. There is nothing essential about the realm of rocks, trees, fish, and climate that calls for a certain type of action. But postmodernists are also
right that the only ethical way to act in a world that is socially constructed is to respect the voices of the others-of those with whom we share the planet but with
whom we may not share a common language or outlook. There is, in other words, a limit or guiding principle to our actions. As political theorist Leslie Thiele puts
it, "One can't argue for the diversity of views of "nature" without taking a stand for the diversity of nature."
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Climate science is necessary, without it we comply with fossil fuel industries.
Lever-Tracy 8 Constance Lever-Tracy, Global Warming and Sociology, Current Sociology 56 (3), 2008, pp. 445466, http://ireswb.cc.ku.edu/~crgc/NSFWorkshop/Readings/Lever-Tracy%20Current%20Sociology%202008.pdf
There is a mystery in this lack of interest in developments that could conceivably open the door to chaos and barbarism later this century, or whose prevention might require a
transformation in the core processes of industrial society. A contingent reason for the silence may lie in the status structure of the discipline. Writers on the subject often come from the
field of environmental sociology, originating in rural sociology. Given the classical focus on urbanization, rural sociology has tended to be marginalized from prestigious journals or
degree courses. There are, however, more essential reasons for the silence. Arguably, it derives from the interaction of two factors. The first is our recently acquired suspicion of
teleology and our mirroring of an indifference we find in contemporary society towards the future. The second factor is our continuing foundational suspicion of naturalistic explanations
for social facts, which has often led us to question or ignore the authority of natural scientists, even in their own field of study. Together, these two have often blinded us to the predicted,
fateful convergence of social and natural time, in a new teleological countdown to possible disaster, coming towards us from the future.
While the rate of change of

natural processes is shrinking towards the time scales of human society, social scientists have been theorizing a
further shrinking in cultural horizons, with an emphasis on immediate gratification, and a decline in long-term direction
or plans, so that even threats just decades away would now scarcely register. In his history of the 20th century, Eric Hobsbawm complained
how men and women, at the centurys end, live in a permanent present where a discounting of the past parallels inattention to the future. The editors of What the Future Holds: Insights
from Social Science, note in their introduction the sharp decline, since 1980, of academic discussions on future scenarios (Cooper and Layard, 2002: 4). For those of us brought up on
C. Wright Mills, historical grand narratives have seemed to be at the very foundation of our discipline, yet no sociologist contributed to this volume. To grasp this, we can contrast the
classic sociological paradigms of modern society with ours. Marx and Weber were motivated to understand both the origins and the distinctive nature of modern, capitalist, industrial,
urban society, and its future shape and likely trajectory. Marx expected contradictions in the society to work themselves out dialectically, through polarizing class conflict leading either
to barbarism or an era of freedom and plenty, while Weber, more pessimistically, foresaw a linear trajectory, with the uninterrupted advance of the calculating, depersonalized cosmos
of the modern economic order . . . bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all individuals. . . . Perhaps it will so
determine them until the last ton of fossilised coal is burnt (Weber, 1930: 181). Neither, however, expected any major interruption to strike suddenly from outside society. Sociologists
have more recently sought to describe and understand a new social reality, resulting from the dissolution of these expectations, and have come to reject any long-term future orientation
as teleology. We have no expectation now of socialist transformation, while both the progressive polarization of a collectively organized working class and an increasingly concentrated
capital has been reversed. The iron cage and the onward march of rationality and bureaucracy have also been countered. In their place we see a rise in entrepreneurial small
businesses and religious fundamentalisms and in mantras of competition, individualism and flexibility. This foreshortening of time horizons has often been made central to sociological
theorizing in the late 20th century. Giddens saw the dissolution of evolutionism and the disappearance of teleology as two of the most conspicuous features of his new stage of
reflexive, radicalized modernity (Giddens, 1990: 52). Lash and Urry (1987) described and theorized a transition, taking place from the 1970s, from organized to disorganized
capitalism. As deregulation and globalization ratcheted up competition, the capacity of corporations, unions and governments to coordinate the national economy and society was
undermined. Short-term, flexible responsiveness replaced long-term planning. The French regulation school spoke of a transition from a Fordist to a flexible, post-Fordist regime of
accumulation. In Britain, Harvey wrote in 1989 of the new wave of spacetime compression, in which a crisis of profitability was overcome by accelerating the turnover time of capital
and technology. The half-life of a Fordist product, of five to seven years, was cut by half or more, and the postmodern aesthetic celebrated difference, spectacle, ephemerality and
fashion (Harvey, 1989: 156). The temporary contract in everything is the hallmark of postmodern living (Harvey, 1989: 291). The dominance of stock options and share turnover has
increasingly subjected investment decisions everywhere to a very short-term profit motive. 9 Japanese capitalism, distinctively and, for a time, successfully based on corporate planning,
made possible by reinvested profits, managerial power and lifetime employment, entered a long period of stagnation after 1991, undermining its relevance as an alternative model. The
collapse of communism similarly removed another such alternative. Baumann (1988) extended the idea of postmodernity from culture to society. He described postmodern art as the
paradigm of postmodern culture and of a postmodern world view that rejected historical thinking, and cited Deleuze and Guattaris metaphor of the rhizome: that peculiar rootstock
which . . . seems to possess no sense of privileged direction, expanding instead sideways, upwards and backwards with the same frequency (Baumann, 1988: 791). However, he
warned against a postmodern sociology that would itself take on these attributes, advocating instead a sociology of postmodernity.
This could study postmodernity

as a fully fledged comprehensive and viable type of social system, a historical stage in which consumer freedom
had been substituted for work as the hub around which the life world rotates. . . . Having won the struggle for control
over production . . . capitalism can now afford the free reign of the pleasure principle (Baumann, 1988: 808). It should not, we can add,
pre-empt an awareness that a later stage might replace this rhizome-like postmodern social system by a countdown to a natural catastrophe. Where do such changes lead us? Is there
life after information/ consumer/post whatever society? Too often, one suspects, Baumanns warning has not been heeded, and sociology has taken on some of the colouration of its
subject matter. Without admitting it, many sociologists have acted as if Lyotards postmodern evaporation of the historical grand narratives or Fukuyamas end of history were in fact
upon us, as suitable guides to our own practice. Sociologists
have thus described at length how contemporary society has turned its
eyes away from the future, its people focusing on immediate consumption and ephemeral fashions, its politicians on
the next election and its industrial leaders on the next annual report. To take global warming seriously involves
asking the kinds of questions about future directions that most sociologists believe they have now put behind them.
Preoccupied with analysing these social facts, sociologists are unwilling to be disturbed by the voices of natural
scientists, reporting from inaccessible upper atmospheres, ancient ice cores or deep oceans, where no social facts
exist. Unable themselves to judge the validity of the evidence, and increasingly uncomfortable with predictions and
teleologies, they prefer to avoid the subject. For the classics (Marx, Weber, Durkheim), as for most sociologists since, nature, for practical purposes, was an
unproblematic, stable background constant, increasingly understood and controlled by science and technology. The role of sociology was to study social processes, trends and
contradictions independently from the natural sciences. Such an insulation of society from nature has, indeed, become a major subject of debate between realists and social
constructivists within environmental sociology, since Catton and Dunlap first counterposed their New Ecological Paradigm to what they called the Human Exemptionalist Paradigm in
the late 1970s (Dunlap, 2002; Yearley, 2002). Since then, environmental sociologists have worked out an accommodation, enabling them to take seriously the findings of natural
scientists. See, for example, Mol and Spaagarens (2000: 27) claim that What is conceived of as social . . . cannot be explained without reference to the natural. Mainstream
sociologists, on the other hand, have remained much closer to the social constructivist paradigm of nature. At best a middle road could be claimed for the idea that science and society
are partially independent levels, but this led to the same conclusion as constructivism: that knowledge of science is rarely relevant for sociologists (Lidskog, 2001). Such a partial
independence of the levels is, however, dramatically called into question by the time convergence that has become manifest in the last decades. Social processes that impact on nature
in unintended ways, such as emissions caused by economic growth and the destruction of carbon sink forests, have been speeding up exponentially since the industrial revolution. The
result has been an unexpected and unprecedented speeding up also of changes in natural processes .
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Natural change is usually very slow. It used to be believed, for example, that it would take 10,000 years to melt an ice
sheet, 10 but we can no longer assume that, for practical purposes, changes in natural processes are not relevant to
social analysis. Global climate changes are now likely to impact within our own lives or those of our children. The
urgency for remedial action is now measured in decades, not able to be postponed to some indefinite future. But
even decades have now receded out of sight. The fact that macro theorists of late 20th century society, from Daniel
Bell to Ulrich Beck, continue to see nature as either irrelevant or as socially controlled or even constructed,
contributes to sociologys marginal contribution to the discussions about global warming. In this case, where the concepts and the
evidence have been entirely the product of natural scientists, and beyond the expertise of social scientists to evaluate, the latter have found themselves on uncomfortable ground and
have tended to shy away. Daniel Bell, in his influential Post Industrial Society, proposed a three-part schema, comprising pre-industrial (or traditional), industrial and post-industrial
stages. The third would be based on information technology, rather than on the use of energy and raw materials, and on the displacement of the secondary, manufacturing sector by
what we now call services. In his schema, the game against nature was relegated to the pre-industrial stage (with no hint that it might return), and the game against fabricated
nature of the industrial stage was now also about to be displaced by the post-industrial game between persons (Bell, 1974: 117). Others later added theories of information society
and of dematerialized production (Stehr, 2001: 77) to the concept of a post-industrial society often ignoring the fact that energy-intensive material production has been globalized
rather than displaced, and continues to grow absolutely despite large increases in efficiency. Giddens has been dismissive of the relevance of direct studies of natural facts, remarking
that Although ecology seems to be wholly about nature, nature in the end has very little to do with it (Giddens, 1994: 189). Perhaps for this reason, he has written little about global
warming: it is not mentioned in his book on Reflexive Modernization (Beck et al., 1994) or in his introduction to the more recent A Progressive Manifesto (Giddens, 2003). In Beyond Left
and Right (Giddens, 1994), he did include global warming in his list of the high consequence, manufactured risks of reflexive modernity, but devoted to it only a few lines (Giddens,
1994: 34, 203). He understood such manufactured risks as essentially a product of human intervention (Giddens, 1994: 34, 203, 2067) rather than (as this article argues) resulting
from an, only partly understood, interaction of social and natural systems each with their own dynamic, and therefore requiring both social and natural expertise. He argued global
warming was not undisputed, and rather than referring to the collective conclusions of most climatologists since 1988, or the IPCC report of 1990 (expressing the views of 700
specialist scientists) or that of the Rio Earth Summit of 1992, he preferred to cite Deepak Lal, the neoliberal economist, from his 1990 Wincott Memorial Lecture for the Institute of
Economic Affairs. According to Lal, wrote Giddens, the evidence about global warming is ambiguous and scientists disagree about its interpretation. Depending on which scientist is
consulted, we could frizzle or we could freeze or there may be no change (Giddens, 1994: 203); 11 easier then to ignore them all. Ulrich Becks concept of Risk Society is the only
grand social theory with a major explicit focus on the interface of society and nature, but on closer examination it too proves inappropriate to the question of climate change. In fact,
Beck does not discuss the application of his concept to the greenhouse effect, but concentrates instead on such issues as toxicity, nuclear hazards or genetic engineering, and this is
not surprising given how inappropriate his analysis is for the former purpose. 12 Beck claims that risks are products of todays new stage of high industrialism and its advanced
science/technology (he rarely distinguishes the two), which often seem to be his primary enemy. But global warming does not fit, being a long-term cumulative effect, finally manifest,
of the whole history of modern society. The worst impact on climate comes not from advanced technology but from the burning of fossil fuels by basic industrial production. The source
of danger is no longer ignorance but knowledge, Beck (1992: 183) argues. One could counter that it is our ignorance of the risks that allowed them to accumulate. His solution to risk is
often to attack the dominance of science/technology and to seek its subjection to common experience and democratic control (e.g. Beck, 1992: 223, 1995: 46). Beck usually hedges
his bets, but in one exceptionally constructionist moment, admitted he was mainly interested in cultural perceptions and definitions of risk, not in their reality. Indeed, he suggested that
they ceased to count as risks once they had became manifest (Beck, 2000: 213). Whatever his intention, this would conveniently absolve sociologists from having an opinion on the
validity and implications of scientists factual findings. Unfortunately, this would leave sociology as an agnostic on the sidelines, continually withdrawing its concern about crucial issues
dividing society, just as they become salient. But global warming has been revealed by scientific studies of ice cores, ocean depths and stratospheres, beyond the range of daily
experience. In fact, we do desperately need more and better knowledge of this kind, and to protect the professional autonomy of natural scientists, under threat from capitalist interests
and religious fundamentalists, well equipped to lobby democratic institutions. 13 The anti-science arguments of such neoliberals as Deepak Lal (motivated by a dogmatic opposition to
any kind of government intervention) have not only been taken up by the paid sceptics of the fossil fuel lobby, but have also thus evoked an echo in the prejudices of sociologists, who
should be more careful of the company they keep. In contrast, it seems to me that a respectful division of labour is essential now that natural and social change are operating in tandem,
on the same time scales. Since
we are not ourselves competent to evaluate the debate between climatologists and sceptics,
we have no option but to accept the professional authority and integrity of the accredited experts, on questions of
natural processes, as a basis for our own analyses of social causes, consequences and choices. The alternative is
irrelevance or worse an effective complicity with the vested interests of fossil fuel corporations.
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Science is helps empower people, increases conditions of living all over the world.
Stephen Eric Bronner, Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University, 2004, Reclaiming the Enlightenment:
Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement, p. 21-23
Something will always be missing: freedom will never become fully manifest in reality. The relation between them is asymptotic. Therefore, most philosophes
understood progress as a regulative ideal, or as a postulate,13 rather than as an absolute or the expression of some divine plane or the foundation for a
system.4 Even in scientific terms, progress retained a critical dimension insofar as it implied the need to question established certainties. In this vein, it is
misleading simply to equate scientific reason with the domination of man and nature.15 All the great figures of the scientific revolution Bacon,
Boyle, Newtonwere concerned with liberating humanity from what seemed the power of seemingly intractable forces.
Swamps were everywhere; roads were few; forests remained to be cleared; illness was rampant; food was scarce; most people would never leave their village.
What it implied not to understand the existence of bacteria or the nature of electricity, just to use very simple examples, is today simply inconceivable.
Enlightenment figures like Benjamin Franklin, the complete philosophe,6 became famous for a reason: they not only freed people from
some of their fears but through inventions like the stove and the lightning rod they also raised new possibilities for making
peoples lives more livable. Critical theorists and postmodernists miss the point when they view Enlightenment
intellectuals in general and scientists in particular as simple apostles of reification. They actually constituted its most consistent enemy. The philosophes may not have grasped the commodity form, but they empowered people by challenging
superstitions and dogmas that left them mute and helpless against the whims of nature and the injunctions of
tradition. Enlightenment thinkers were justified in understanding knowledge as inherently improving humanity. Infused with a sense of furthering the public
good, liberating the individual from the clutches of the invisible and inexplicable, the Enlightenment idea of progress required what the young Marx later termed
the ruthless critique of everything existing. This regulative notion of progress was never inimical to subjectivity. Quite the
contrary: progress became meaningful only with reference to real living individuals.
Critiquing science is dumbthere are no rational alternativescriticism misses sciences

self-reflexive and progressive nature
Stephen Eric Bronner, Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University, 2004, Reclaiming the Enlightenment:
Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement, p. 162-63
Reclaiming the Enlightenment calls for clarifying the aims of an educated sensibility in a disenchanted world. But this requires science. The assault upon its
instrumental character or its method by self-styled radicals trained only in the humanities or social sciences is a self-defeating enterprise. Criticizing
bourgeois science is meaningful only with criteria for verification or falsification that are rigorous, demonstrable,
and open to public scrutiny. Without such criteria, the critical enterprise turns into a caricature of itself: creationism becomes as scientific as evolution,
astrology as instructive as astronomy, prayer as legitimate a way of dealing with disease as medicine, and the promise of Krishna to help the righteous a way of
justifying the explosion of a nuclear device by India.10 Striking is how the emphasis on local knowledgea stance in which all science is seen as ethno-science
with standards rooted in a particular culture1 withdraws objectivity, turns the abdication of judgment into a principle of judgment, and recalls what was once a
right-wing preoccupation with Jewish physics, Italian mathematics, and the like. Forgotten is that those who do physics or biology or
mathematics all do it the same way or, better, allow for open scrutiny of their own way of doing it. The validity of
science does not rest on its ability to secure an absolute philosophical grounding, but rather on its universality and
its salience in dealing with practical problems. There is a difference between the immanent method of science and
the external context in which it was forged. The sociology of science is a completely legitimate endeavor. It only makes sense to consider, for
example, how an emerging capitalist production process with imperialistic aspirations provided the external context in which modern science arose. But it is
illegitimate to reduce science to that context or judge its immanent workings from the standpoint of what externally inspired its development.12 Too much
time has already been wasted on deconstructing the scientific method for what Foucault termed its dogmatic
approach and its supposedly hermetic character. That is the case not simply because the scientific revolution was
directed against a scholastic view of nature that constrained the possibilities of inquiry or because the Enlightenment
spirit influenced many nontraditional notions of science like homeopathy. It is primarily because, in political terms, the issue is not the
method of science but the type of scientific research that demands funding and, ultimately, the ends to which science is put. Again defined by what they
oppose, ironically, those principally concerned with the scientific method reflect the establishmentarian tendency to isolate science from politics. Whatever the
connection between this method and metaphysics, or the status of its original commitment to benefit humanity, there is no reason to believe that science in the
age of globalization has lost its ability to question previous claims or established authority: neither from the standpoint of science nor ethics is it legitimate to
maintain that the enlightenment has lost any trace of its own self-consciousness. 13
89
SCFI 2012
Foucault
___ of ___
AFFEco-Pragmatism Good
Eco pragmatism allows us to avoid getting bogged down in different viewpoints, allows for
avenues of change to happen
Reitan 98 Eric Reitan (Seattle University Writer for the Electronic Green Journal) Pragmatism, Environmental World
Views, and Sustainability. December 1998
With the urgency of the current environmental crisis, we cannot afford to get bogged down in theoretic disputes that mask a
common mission and get in the way of making the practical changes that are so pressing. Pragmatic Mediation of Deep Ecology
and Christian Stewardship The example I have chosen to discuss is the theoretic debate between two environmental philosophies that have emerged in the last
few decades: the philosophy of stewardship that has evolved in Christian communities, and the philosophy of deep ecology. I choose these two not on the basis
of any special status they have, but rather because they are the two environmental perspectives with which I have the most personal acquaintance, and because
the nature of the debate between them usefully illustrates the value of using pragmatic principles to guide theoretic environmental discourse. Before
applying pragmatic principles to this example, some preliminary comments may be helpful. First, it is important to
keep in mind that complex worldviews or philosophical systems may impact more than one domain of human life, and
that they may have radically opposing pragmatic implications in one or more of those domains while implying
substantially the same behaviors in the domain of the human-nature relationship. In such a case, we can say that while the
worldviews do not have the same pragmatic meaning overall, they have the same environmental meaning. As such, it is important not to let the real differences in
other areas mask the genuine agreement in the environmental domain. Second, it is worth noting that there is almost certainly more than one human social
arrangement that harmonizes sustainable with the natural environment. Put another way, there is more than one set of human practices that works in terms of
promoting a healthy human-natural system. And it follows from this observation that more than one worldview can be
pragmatically true: while two worldviews may imply environmental behaviors that are different, and hence have a
different pragmatic meaning, insofar as they both promote sustainable behaviors they are both true from a pragmatic
standpoint. Pragmatic truth is not monistic, but pluralistic. Given the urgent pragmatic goals of environmental philosophy, sustained
theoretic debates about meaning differences of this sort appear to be unwarranted, and should be put aside in favor
of the task of finding practical ways of integrating and accommodating those alternative social arrangements which
serve the common goal of sustainable human-natural systems.
90

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AT: Action/Reform Good ..............................................................................................................................................51

allowed for new forms of control

The alternative is to vote negative.

role of critique therein precisely _that of defining the

capacity to pass judgements on our received

if the critical instance is ruled by

proposition overturns the conventional schema of the balance

responds to this, suggesting that the three

instead of private ventures of this

the name of efficiency an entire traffic

composition of forces. It entails the response to a new demand for social

web of traffic routes that permeate urban space have in practice

politico-strategic term is an indication of how the military and

to OCS are only one element, therefore, in a wider discursive reconfiguration

territory legible, especially in the absence of the protective

environments are often transformed rhetorically into silences, backgrounds, or settings . In

Enveloped in these interpretive frames,

the past generation, graduate programmes in environmental science on many

entire planet, then, can be reduced by such environmental

rarely made articulate in scientific and technical

crisis, as Ulrich Beck

thus leads, Barry suggests, to the

LinkEnvironmental Globalism/THE STATE

environment movement revealed the

established environmental movements rarely question the most basic

Markets alone, especially with new antistatist coping and

and restructure todays destructive urban industrial ecologies (Luke, 2003).

growth at its finest levels of

accumulation typically exploits a wide range of seemingly

are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must

this radical re-ordering the bio-political principle

war becomes conceived as a

social life requires identity (at various levels) to be, but

elitist statism arguably is contemporary neoliberalisms first contradiction. A

Eco ImpactEnvironmental Destruction

Environmental destruction is a result of human managerial control that contributes to the

Reframing politics as a mere constellation of power relations reveals its constitutive

is not something that is acquired, seized, or shared,

rationality of power is characterized by tactics that are often quite explicit at

Resistances do not derive from a few

often one is dealing with mobile and transitory points of

been increasingly directed

Resistance is always possiblethe alt reveals the insecurity of modern power by

AltCare of the Self

one is looking for marginal practices that could support resistance to a

is important to make it clear that what we are talking about is not a

Alternatives 30 (2005), 415-441, ebsco

proclaim that environmentalism is dead. In truth, they

these background practices have made possible

Effective policy is impossible without prior investigation of the discursive underpinnings of

the full implications of this understanding of language becomes

language becomes normative by

AT: PermEnvironment specific

`the environment to be treated as little more than terrestrial

AT: Action/Reform Good

theory is by nature opposed to

the basis of our actual situation, power emphatically

this global policy of

AT: Action/Reform Good

that power exists, it is being exercised. No one, strictly speaking,

how is it that people whose

AT: Realism/Security Inevitable

relations of power, society and the world would grind