Discourse K Shells

Statistics Discourse K

1NC Link Statistics

Their statistical account of food security reduces humans
and their suffering to numbers and abstract concepts
this reduces life to bare life.
Stefanovic 2K Ingrid Leman Stefanovic. Safeguarding Our Common Future: Rethinking
Sustainable Development. State University of New York.

the
predominance of the calculative mode of thought affects the
foundation of interpersonal relations. The topic deserves more attention here,
particularly as it impacts upon the discussion of sustainability. Too often, we tend to forget
that human beings are neither mere objects nor resources to
be defined in positivist terms of a sectoral inventory of need s.
Calculating Others In the previous chapter, I showed, in a preliminary way, how

In this respect,

we might benefit from the reflections of Thomist philosopher Jacques

'As individuals, each

of us are parts of a wider wholeof a family, a community, "a single dot in
the immense network of forces and influences, cosmic, ethnic, historic, whose laws we obey."2 In so
far as we are persons, however, every human being is a unique
whole, "a principle of creative unity, of independence and of freedom."3 The mystery of personality is
Maritain, who distinguished between individuals and persons.

the essence of the living subject and is confined by no material boundaries. It finds some expression in the
poetic imaginationin emotional, artistic, intuitive, and profound intellectual sensibilities. In our highly
rational, calculative era,

we must learn to guard against the tendency to

devalue Maritain's [the]notion of personhood in favor of

individuality, by transforming unique human beings into
statistics or into mere units of a collectivity . Margaret Catley-Carlson,
president of the Canadian International Development Agency, echoes this sentiment when she describes
the difficulties in discovering just and affordable means of enforcing environmental controls, precisely on
the level of the human person. She writes: Consider a taxi driver in Calcutta, whose dilapidated old
heap belches black smoke. If you fine him for polluting the air, or demand he get his car tuned,
where will he find the money? He's just barely making enough each day to feed himself and his family.
And if you impound his vehicle, how would he and his children eat?4 Catley-Carlson asks us to
multiply this dilemma by 5 million cars, in order to begin to comprehend the huge challenges facing
Calcutta in battling air pollution. At the same time, a genuine understanding of the problem requires a
fuller awareness of the human implications than such an easy calculation may suggest. The solution to a
serious pollution problem in this case would involve intervening in an entire way of life that, presently, has
its just returns on the level of the human person. This realization does not mean, of course, that we must
consequently abstain from environmental intervention. It compels us to do so fully aware, however, of the
human dimension and fully prepared to cope with the personal, as well as social, costs of such
intervention.

Calculative thinking grounds many of our ways of

being with one another. For example, to recite abstract

statistics about the state of world hunger similarly risks
distanc[es]ing us from the full meaning of human suffering.
Recall that the Brundt- land Report tells us that, in 198 5, despite the objective abundance of food
production, "more than 730 million people did not eat enough to lead fully productive working
lives."5 Others tell us that ten thousand people starve to death daily and 460 million are
permanently hungry.6 These [Large]

figures are significant, but as numerical abstractions, they also, insidiously, allow us to disassociate

ourselves from the full breadth of meaning underlying the

numbers. Other, less calculative perspectives may inform us in a way that is closer to heart. One
shudders to read that "hunger is a child with shrivelled limbs and a swollen belly. It is the grief of parents
or a person gone blind for lack of vitamin A."7 Even bringing the numbers down to the level of the
everyday has its merits. Philosopher Louis Pojman asks us to consider the following analogy:
Imagine ten children eating at a table. The three healthiest eat the best food and throw much of it away
or give it to their pets. Two other children get just enough to get by on. The other five do not get
enough food. Three of them who are weak manage to stave off hunger pangs by eating bread and rice,
but the other two are unable to do even that and die of hunger-related diseases, such as

while we may
remain disengaged from the misery of world poverty through
our recitalor ignoranceof statistical compilations that reach into
the millions, at the personal level of each child, a fundamental
injustice prevails in such easy, calculative abstractions. Freefloating numerical concepts, while informative at some level,
also risk collapsing the essence of hunger into the comfortable domain of what Heidegger called
"das Man"the impersonal, neutral, and ultimately, inauthentic
distantiality (Abstandigkeit) of "the. they."9 In such a domain of "publicness," Heidegger explains
peneumonia and dysentery.8 The example implicidy reminds us that ,

that "overnight, everything that is primordial gets glossed over as something that has long
been well known. Everything gained by a struggle becomes just something to be manipulated.
Every secret loses its force" in an overall "levelling down" of authentic possibilities.10 By
transforming the concrete, lived reality of a child's hunger into the "averageness" of an empty
statistic, it is a simple task to take the next step and disengage[s] oneself from any responsibility or
feeling of authentic care. Positivist [These] interpretations of human relations subtly infect our
policy discussions of sustainable development at various levels. Consider another example that
relates to the current debate about "future generations" in the field of environmental ethics. The World
Commission on Environment and Development explains that their own message of hope is "based on the
premise that every human beingthose here and those who are to comehas the right to life, and to a
decent life."11 But to what extent can we speak consistently of the "rights" of unborn generations? How
rational is it to speak of the existence of rights for nonexistent rightholders? Some philosophers maintain
that it is meaningless to do so. While one may feel that it is unethical to ask future generations to pay for
our mistakes (for example, in the disposal of nuclear waste) others question whether it is proper to deprive
the poor of our own generation for the sake of nonexistent future generations. In this respect, some
ethicists go so far as to suggest that since we do not know who or what they will be, or even wherein their
convictions will lie, it is meaningless to specify obligations to nonexistent peopleto nonentities.12 A
related argument suggests that there is no single future generation to whom we can be said to owe
anything or whom we harm by our present-day actions.13 If we say that future people would be "better
off" if we pursued more sustainable environmental policies today, we assume that a particular group of
people would be affected by these policies. Yet different policies lead to different outcomes that
themselves lead to alternative contingent eventsand these events, in turn, may result in the birth of
different people. We are asked to imagine how many events might have prevented our own parents or
grandparents from meeting. Had events happened in some alternate sequence, we ourselves would not
exist.14 Similarly, a single, specific "future generation" not only does not exist now, but we have no
obligations to our descendants, since the composition of any one generation itself may be affected by our
own actions or even by circumstances beyond our control. In fact, a future generation that does not yet
exist, can possess no rights. It follows that I cannot have a duty to a nonexistent entity. I find these kinds of
logistical acrobatics to be ethically misdirected. To maintain that I owe nothing to future generations
because I cannot touch, feel, or empirically experience them or describe them exactlyis intuitively
offensive. To suggest that rights of future generations are nonexistent because those same generations are
nonexistent follows the narrow rules of ^logic but not of rationality in a broader sense: the implication
seems to be that if future people have no rights, neither do they really matter. This conclusion
goes against the grain of what it means to exist as a member of humanity and of a broader
social world. Such philosophical machinations deny the significance of human compassion and of care
beyond the confines of one's own self-grounded concerns. This kind of denial can only happen when
human beings are interpreted in a reductionist model, as discreet "things" that either do exist
now in the present or else remain but a futural fiction of one's imagination. Later, I will say more
about the need of a holistic vision of human being, one that incorporates notions of conscience and care in
a nonpositivist, phenomenological vision. At this point, however, I wish only to flag some of the dangers
that arise in our philosophical reflections on the meaning of right and wrong, when human beingsand

their rights and dutiesare defined by way of a positivist reduction to empirically accessible realities
only.15 We turn, finally, to one last example of the hazards of interpreting human beings as mere material
entities. [For example]The Brundtland Report points out how "women farmers, though they play a
critical role in food production, are often ignored by programmes meant to improve production."16

women's contributions to informal sector

activities have been left out of abstract stereotype models of the
developing world, because these contributions have been
difficult, if not impossible, to measure and record.17 None of
Others have similarly noted how

this is unusual, in an epoch that seeks to present a neatly

defined, conclusive picture of the human ideal . Ecofeminists argue
against androcentric models of humanity, because these very models present an image of the
perfect human being as male, rational, and in control. Characteristics such as compassion,
care, and emotional sensitivity are typically interpreted on this model as being inferior and,
often, feminine qualities.18 Not only do ecofeminists question such an androgenic, reified conception
of the human being, but some go even further to criticize essentializing tendencies of some ecofeminists
themselves. Critics suggest that those who purport to speak of a woman's way of knowing as if there is a
single woman's voice (usually with an implicit classist and racist bias) are themselves falling into the trap
of objectifying Woman as if she can be defined as a neatly circumscribed, hypostatized entity.19 The
single-minded notion of a simple, unified feminine experience, separate from the masculine experience,
has been questioned persuasively.20 While ecofeminists are in general agreement that there is a
significant relation between the exploitation of women and the exploitation of nature, one realizes in
surveying the eco- feminist literature that its strength lies precisely in the lack of a solidifed consensus on
the meaning of Being Woman.21 The attempt to delimit the feminine experience within neatly
circumscribed limits is just another expression of the current tendency to compartmentalize the human
experience within rigid, ahistorical definitionsdefinitions that ultimately deny to that experience its
richness and onto- logical breadth of significance. It has been said that inasmuch as something exists, it
exists to a certain degree and in that sense is subject to measurement.22 Certainly that claim applies to
empirical entities like tables and chairs. It cannot, however, apply in the same way to human beings,
whose social, cultural, and historical experiences transcend the boundaries of material entities in their
essence. Significantly, Canada's submission to the Fifth Session of the United Nations Commission on
Sustainable Development in 1997 addresses the theme of "Strengthening Our Social Fabric" by collapsing
that issue into two categories of discussion on "human capital" and "social capital."23 As an update of
Canadian progress in this field, the document testifies to the fact that we still tend to reduce
human affairs to quantitative, economic terms. Of course, social networks and civic
institutions can be viewed from the economic perspective. The full depth of human experience,
however, consists of understanding, imagination, intuition, sensibility, and complex nuances of
meaning that are revealed in the temporal unfolding of each human life.

To collapse the

richness of that experience within a simplistic, calculative

framework is, at best, naive. At worst, it threatens genuine
progress toward a

sustainable and a

more humane society.

1NC Impact Bare Life

This inscription within bare life is at the heart of violence
and domination, allowing every human life to be devalued
and eliminated in the name of sovereign management.
Agamben 98 Giorgio Agamben, professor of philosophy at the University of Verona, Homo Sacer, 1998, pg. 139-140.
3.3 It is not our intention here to take a position on the difficult ethical problem of
euthanasia, which still today, in certain countries, occupies a substantial position in
medical debates and provokes disagreement. Nor are we concerned with the
radicality with which Binding declares himself in favor of the general admissibility of
euthanasia. More interesting for our inquiry is the fact that the sovereignty of

the living man over his [their] own life has its immediate
counterpart in the determination of a threshold beyond which
life ceases to have any juridical value and can, therefore, be
killed without the commission of a homicide . The new juridical
category of "life devoid of value" (or "life unworthy of being
lived) corresponds exactly evenifinanapparentlydifferentdirection to the
bare life of homo sacer[.] andcaneasilybeextendedbeyondthelimitsimaginedby
Binding.It is as if every valorization and every politicization of
life (which,afterall,is implicit in the sovereignty of the individual
over his [their] own existence) necessarily implies a new
decision concerning the threshold beyond which life ceases to
be politically relevant, becomes only "sacred life," and can as
such be eliminated without punishment . Every society sets
this limit; every societyeventhemostmoderndecides who its "sacred
men" willbe.Itisevenpossiblethatthis limit, on which the politicization
and the exception of natural life in the juridical order of the
state depends, has done nothing but extend itself in the
history of the West and has now in the new biopolitical horizon
of states with national sovereignty moved inside every human
life and every citizen. Bare life is no longer confined to a
particular place or a definite category. It now dwells in the
biological body of every living being.

1NC Alternative Discourse Analysis

Discourse analysis is a precondition to the success of
movements against dehumanization and extermination
understanding current historical arrangements is the only
solvency.
Shefner 2K7

Jon Shefner. Rethinking Civil Society in the Age of NAFTA: The Case of Mexico. The
ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 2007; 610; 182.

Instead, I want to emphasize that if we are looking at organized

efforts to resist, change, or even overturn hierarchies, we must

examine the social bases of those hierarchies. The social basis
of the neoliberal project is class. Because neoliberalism is a
class project, that project has to be assessed in class terms:
how people act from their class positions to impose or resist
class pressures . Which particular hierarchy penetrates a specific society
at a specific time is a case of historical contingency, to be examined within
various cases. Indeed, hierarchical systems intersect in ways that

make it difficult to assess the impacts of one over another. But

to examine how domination works, we have to identify the
social base of individual systems, then assess impacts on
disadvantaged groups and their efforts and strategies of
responding to the form of domination in their own terms . Said in
a different way, the new social movement researchers were correct: earlier
discourses of class analysis indeed failed to capture the
actions, motivations, and goals of many different forms of
collective action. We have to acknowledge a whole series of
oppressive social structures to understand the emergence of
multiple types of movements. These movements are defined in
large part by identities, whether these are imposed by social
structure or embraced by movement participants. These
identities are also a result of communities emerging from
social hierarchy and oppression. If we are to understand the
roots and emergence of different contentious communities , we
have to [FIRST] recognize a whole series of oppressionsrace,
gender, ethnicity, and so onthat characterize current and
historical social arrangements. Understanding the multitude of
oppressions and contention, however, may be obscured when we expect too
much from the civil society concept. Second , recognizing the strata of

civil society may help us understand the dynamics and

outcome of strategic efforts at unified struggle. The way civil

society works together on shared strategies [that] may build
bridges or create fissures, depending on relations among
members, ability to recognize hierarchy between groups, and
the subsequent possibility of differential outcomes from
shared strategy. [And] Third , recognizing the strata of civil
society suggests that we carefully examine coalition
strategies. Organizing temporary coalitions around shared
goals can make enormous sense when groups are mobilizing to
create an opposition and launch an alternative. Yet recognizing
the strata of civil society forces us to understand that the
successful accomplishment of a coalesced strategy will still
yield differential impacts on the members of civil society.

Developing/Third World K

1NC Link Third World

Viewing Third World countries as impoverished or
suffering from malnourishment simply reinforces the
power of the First World over the Third this causes bare
life as people become numbers and statistics.
Escobar 95

Arturo Escobar. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third
World. 1995. Princeton University Press.
THE DISPERSION OF POWER 103 Because of its explosive political and social implications, the subject [of
hunger] until very recently has been one of the taboos of our civilization. . . . Hunger has unquestionably
been the most potent source of social misfortunes, but our civilization has kept its eyes averted, afraid to
face the sad reality. War has always been loudly discussed. Hymns and poems have been written to
celebrate its glorious virtues as an agent of selection. . . . Thus, while war became a leitmotiv of Western
thought, hunger remained only a vulgar sensation, the repercussions of which were not supposed to
emerge from the realm of the subconscious. The conscious mind, with ostentatious disdain, denied its
existence. ([1952] 1977, 51) This obscurity of hunger changed dramatically after World War II, when
hunger entered irremediably the politics of scientific knowledge. Famines in the 1960s and 1970s (Biafra,
Bangladesh, the Sahel)brought massive hunger to public awareness. Yet the more intractable aspects of
persistent malnutrition and hunger entered the scientific world a decade earlier. From the 1950s to
today, an army of scientists nutritionists, health experts, demographers, agriculturalists, planners, and so
on has been busy studying every single aspect of hunger. This hunger of (scientific) language has
resulted in manifold strategies that have succeeded each other throughout the development era; from
food fortification and supplementation, nutrition education, and food aid in the 1950s and 1960s to land
reform, the green revolution, integrated rural development, and comprehensive national food and
nutrition planning since the late 1960s, the languages of hunger have grown increasingly inclusive and
detailed. Whether the nutrition problem was thought to be due to insufficient protein intake, lack of
calories, lack of nutrition education, inadequate food intake combined with poor sanitation and health,
low incomes, or inefficient agricultural practices or to a combination of many of these factors a battery of
experts was always on call to design strategies and programs on behalf of the hungry and malnourished
people of the Third World. To be blunt, one could say that

the body of the

malnourished the starving African portrayed on so many covers of Western

magazines, or the lethargic South American child to be adopted for $16 a month portrayed in
the advertisements of the same magazines is the most striking symbol of the
power of the First World over the Third. A whole economy of
discourse and unequal power relations is encoded in that
body. We may say, following Teresa de Lauretis (1987), that there is a violence of
representation at play here. This violence, moreover, is extreme;
scientific representations of hunger and overpopulation (they
often go together) are most dehumanizing and objectifying. After all, what
we are talking about when we refer to hunger or population is
people, human life itself; but it all becomes, for Western science and media,
helpless and formless (dark) masses, items to be counted 104
CHAPTER 4 and measured by demographers and nutritionists, or systems with
feedback mechanisms in the model of the body espoused by physiologists and biochemists. The

language of hunger and the hunger of language join forces not

only to maintain

a certain

social order but to exert

a kind of

symbolic

violence that sanitizes the discussion of the hungry and the

malnourished. It is thus that we come to consume hunger in

the West ; in the process our sensitivity to suffering and pain
becomes numbed by the distancing effect that the language of
academics and experts achieved . To restore vividness and political efficacy to the
language becomes almost an impossible task (Scheper- Hughes 1992). The situation is
even more paradoxical when one considers that the strategies implemented
to deal with the problems of hunger
them,

and food supply, far from solving

have led to their aggravation . Susan George (1986) best captured the

cynicism of these strategies with the title More Food, More Hunger.

Countries that

were self-sufficient in food crops at the end of World War II

many of them even exported food to industrialized nations

became net food

importers throughout the development era . Hunger similarly

grew as the capacity of countries to produce the food
necessary to feed themselves contracted under the pressure
to produce cash crops, accept cheap food from the West, and
conform to agricultural markets dominated by the multinational merchants of
grain. Although agricultural output per capita grew in most
countries, this increase was not translated into increased food
availability for most people. Inhabitants of Third World cities in particular
became increasingly dependent on food their countries did not produce. How can one
account for this cynicism of power? This brings us again to the question of how discourse
works, how it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth (Foucault 1979, 194). The
discourse of development is not merely an ideology that has little to do with the real
world; nor is it an apparatus produced by those in power in order to hide another, more
basic truth, namely, the crude reality of the dollar sign.

Th[is] e development

discourse has crystallized in practices that contribute to

regulating the everyday goings and comings of people in the
Third World . How is its power exercised in the daily social and economic life of countries and
communities? How does it produce its effect on the way people think and act, on how life is felt and
lived? So far I have said little about what developers actually do in their day-today work. I still have to
show how the discourse of development gets dispersed in or through a field of practices; how it relates to
concrete interventions that organize the production of types of knowledge and forms of power, relating
one to the other. It is necessary to scrutinize the specific practices through which international lending
agencies and Third World governments carry out their task, bringing together bureaucrats and experts of
all THE DISPERSION OF POWER 105 kinds with their ThirdWorld beneficiaries peasants, poor women,
urban marginals, and the like. This will be the task of this chapter; it examines in detail the deployment
of development. The chapter investigates the concrete forms that the mechanisms of professionalization
and institutionalization take in the domain of malnutrition and hunger. In particular, the chapter reviews
the strategy of comprehensive national Food and Nutrition Policy and Planning (FNPP), created by the
World Bank and a handful of universities and institutions in the developed countries in the early 1970s
and implemented in a number of Third World countries throughout the 1970s and 1980s. FNPP grew out
of the realization that the complex problems of malnutrition and hunger could not be dealt with through
isolated programs but that a comprehensive, multisectoral strategy of planning at the national level was
needed. Based on this realization, a body of theory was produced in the above institutions, and national
food and nutrition plans were designed and implemented which included ambitious programs that
covered all areas related to food, such as food production and consumption, health care, nutrition
education, food technology, and so on. After examining the production of FNPP theory, we will look
closely at the implementation of such a strategy in Colombia during the period 1975 -1990. In order to

analyze the practices of development, we have to analyze what development institutions actually do.

Institutional practices are crucial not so much because they account for most of
what is earmarked as development, but mostly because they contribute to
producing and formalizing social relations, divisions of labor,
and cultural forms. Thus illustrating how development functions, the aim of this chapter, is
not a simple task. It requires that we investigate the production of discourses about the problem in
question; that we show the articulation of these discourses with socioeconomic and technological
conditions that they, in turn, help produce; and, finally and more importantly, that we examine the actual
work practices of institutions involved with these problems. Discourse, political economy, and
institutional ethnography should be woven in order to provide an adequate understanding of how
development works. The daily practices of institutions are not just rational or neutral ways of doing. In
fact, much of an institution's effectiveness in producing power relations is the result of practices that are
often invisible, precisely because they are seen as rational. It is then necessary to develop tools of
analysis to unveil and understand those practices. I do this in the first part of this chapter, by explaining
the notion of institutional ethnography. The second part reconstructs the birth, life, and death of FNPP,
focusing on the view of hunger that this strategy produced and the practices that actualized it. In the
third part, I summarize the political economy of the agrarian crisis in Latin America in the period 1950
-1990 and examine the response that the Colom106 CHAPTER 4 bian government and the international
development establishment gave to this crisis. I focus especially on the so-called Integrated Rural
Development strategy, produced by the World Bank in the early 1970s and implemented in Colombia
from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, with the cooperation of the World Bank and other international
agencies. Finally, in the fourth section I propose an interpretation of FNPP as a paradigmatic case in the
deployment of development. The underlying premise of this investigation is that as long as institutions
and professionals are successfully reproducing themselves materially, culturally, and ideologically, certain
relations of domination will prevail; and to the extent that this is the case, development will continue to
be greatly conceptualized by those in power. By focusing on the practices that structure the daily work
of institutions, on one hand, I hope to illustrate how power works, namely, how it is effected by
institutional and documentary processes. The emphasis on discourse, on the other hand, is intended to
show how a certain subjectivity is privileged and at the same time marginalizes the subjectivity of those
who are supposed to be the recipients of progress. It will become clear that this marginalization produced
by a given regime of representation is an integral component of institutionalized power relations.

1NC Link Developing Countries

The affirmative specifies developing countries and
ignores the problems and fails to compare itself to
developed countries.
Altieri 2K4

Altieri, Charles. The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects. Ithaca, N.Y.,
London: Cornell UP, 2004. Print.

the meanings associated with urban development and

colonial development concurred with many others to
transform[ed] the word 'development', step by step, into one with
contours that are about as precise as those of an amoeba. It is
now a mere algorithm whose significance depends on the
context in which it is employed. It may allude to a housing project, to the
logical sequence of a thought, to the awakening of a child's mind, to a chess game or
to the budding of a teenager's breasts. But even though it lacks, on its own, any
precise denotation, it is firmly seated in popular and intellectual
perception. And it always appears as an evocation of a net of
significances in which the person who uses it is irremediably
trapped. Development cannot delink itself from the words with
Throughout the century,

which it was formed - growth, evolution, maturation. Just the same, those who
now use the word cannot free themselves from a web of
meanings that impart a specific blindness to their language,
thought and action. No matter the context in which it is used. or the precise
connotation that the person using it wants to give it, the
expression becomes qualified and coloured by meanings perhaps
unwanted. The word always implies a favourable change, a step
from the simple to the complex, from the inferior to the superior, from worse to
better. The word indicates that one is doing well because one is
advancing in the sense of a necessary, ineluctable, universal
law

and toward a desirable goal. The word retains to this day the meaning given to it a century ago by

the creator of ecology, Haeckel: 'Development is, from this moment on, the magic word with which we will
solve all the mysteries that surround us or. at least. that which will guide us toward their solution.'

But

for two-thirds of the people on earth, this positive meaning of

the word 'development'

- profoundly rooted after two centuries of its social construction

is a reminder of what they are not. It is a reminder of an

undesirable, undignified condition. To escape from it, they
need to be enslaved to others' experiences and dreams.

1NC Impact Human Rights Destruction

The affirmative causes human rights destruction.
Lutz 2K [Date estimated]. Ellen L. Lutz. Recognizing Indigenous Peoples Human Rights.

Voices.
Issue 5.1. Ellen L. Lutz is the executive director of Cultural Survival.
http://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/voices/australia/recognizing-indigenous-peoples-human-rights

The worlds indigenous peoples have a serious human rights

problem: The nations of the world refuse to recognize that indigenous
peoples have human rights. All countries are ready to recognize that
individual indigenous persons have rights. Those rights are the same
as the rights of all human beings, and are now well secured by
international human rights law and by the laws of many
countries. The problems arise when indigenous peoples claim rights as
peoples. As indigenous advocates frequently point out, the
whole debate is over the letter s. What are the rights that
indigenous peoples seek ? First, they want to be recognized for who

they are: distinct groups with their own unique cultures.

Indigenous peoples want to enjoy and pass on to their children
their histories, languages, traditions, modes of internal
governance, spiritual practices, and all else that makes them
who they are. They want to be able to pray on their ancestral lands without finding that those lands have been dug up to
construct a gold mine, fenced off to create a safari park, or watered with sewage effluent pumped from a nearby city.

1NC Alternative Converted

The alternative is calling them converted.
Westoll 2K8

Westoll, Andrew. The Riverbones: Stumbling after Eden in the Jungles of Suriname.
Toronto: Emblem, 2008. Print.

a new phrase, a term free from judgment,

discrimination and moralism. The truer word, the more honest
descriptor for countries like this, I think, is converting. The people
So, I suggest

of Suriname

are converting, slowly and steadily, to the ways of a

converted world.

2NR Link Ext Development

Development discourses ignore the sacrifices inevitable
in becoming developed, and veils the results of said
development.
Westoll 2K8

Westoll, Andrew. The Riverbones: Stumbling after Eden in the Jungles of Suriname.
Toronto: Emblem, 2008. Print.

developing ignores the cultural and social

sacrifices that are inevitable on the way to becoming a
developed country domestic control over mineral rights come
to mind, as does the survival of indigenous and tribal ways of life. It
The happy term

also veils the usual results of said development a financially

poor tropical country with an economic infrastructure that
resembles the temperate rich countries of the world, thereby
enabling the latter to take advantage of the former in terms of
open markets, free trade and resource exploitation. The term
developing is also faulty because it implies the developed
world has already arrived at some kind of pinnacle of progress,
that we have doubtless followed the right path to get there, and that we have achieved
everything that self-respecting nations should strive for. There is an
insinuation of moral, cultural and spiritual achievement in the term that rivals the old phrase Third World
for its underlying arrogance.

2NR Impact Ext Imperialism

Discourse centered on development prioritizes affluent
Western culture and renders other nations inferior.
Zein-Elabden 2K1

(Department of Economics, Franklin & Marshall College (Summer 2001.

Contours of a non-modernist discourse: the contested space of history and development Review of
Radical Political Economies. Volume 33, Issue 3. ScienceDirect).

Situating the postcolonial in relation to modernity has been

perhaps the most difficult enterprise. This difficulty can be seen in the loss for words
among many authors to articulate a vocabulary outside the
parameters set by modern European discourse. Bhabha, for example, uses
the expressions otherwise than modernity and contra-modernity (1994: 6). My use of the term nonmodernist here is no exception.

The difficulty of speaking outside the

language of modernity originates in that modern Europe

include European settlements worldwide)

(to

has largely succeeded, through

material/discursive processes, in establishing a strong claim

on history and, therefrom, all facets of human experience:
Reason/rationality, meaning, development, and of course
modernity, appropriating all of these as uniquely European.5
Postcolonial thinkers themselves fall into this habit by ceding
to modern Europe the majority of what could possibly be
generically human and open to different cultural
interpretations. 6 The imperial success of modern Europe ,
inseparable from its rise as an industrial power, laid the
ground for its claim on history. This claim represents the
discursive process that accompanied, and was perhaps
necessary for, the rationalization and ideological purchase of
modernitys project of universal dominion. Thus, from a postcolonial
perspective, the problem of modernist discourse lies not only in that it is
centered around a linear, determinist interpretation of history, the (gendered) triumph of reason, and

in claiming history itself for the European

experience, and succeeding in defining the terms of reality and categories of discourse to the
point where none could exist outside of its theoretical
framework. In this framework, modernity became a condition
inherently superior to age and tradition, with tradition being not the past of modern Europe,
but also the present of non-European societies and cultures
exceeding faith in an objective knowledge, but

. I wish to rely here on the work of Dipesh C hakrabarty (1997), one of the Subalt ern Studies writers, to illustrate the problem of the European claim on history. 7 C hakrabarty is

part icularly concerned with the problem of the nat ion state, but his argument applies wit h equal precision to other cat egories of modernist discourse. He takes on the practice of historicism (interpret ing history as a process that unfolds according to certain, immutable, and knowable a priori laws). So far such laws have been supplied by Western philosophy (for example, Hegel and Marx among a long line of less significant figures). C hakrabarty argues that historiography essentially entails a uniform application of European theories of history to all societ ies. Accordingly, history is perceived as something which has already happened elsewhere [ in Europe], and which is to be reproduced, mechanically or otherwise, with a local content (Ibid: 283). He goes on to show that this reproduct ion has, in fact, been faithfully carried out by third world historians
and social scient ist s who are firmly caught up in the theoret ical framework of Europe as history. Economics and history are the knowledge forms that correspond to the two major instit utions that the rise (and later universalization) of the bourgeois order has given to the worldthe capitalist mode of production and the nat ion state. A crit ical historian has no choice but to negot iate this knowledge. She or he therefore needs to understand the state on its own terms, that is, in terms of its self- just ificatory narratives of citizenship and modernit y. Since these themes will always take us back to the universalist propositions of modern (European) polit ical philosophyeven the pract ical science of econom ics that now seems natural to our construct ions of world systems is (theoret ically) rooted in the ideas of ethics in eighteenth-century Europea
third-world historian is condemned to knowing Europe as the original home of the modern, . Thus follows the everyday subalternity of non-Western histories (Ibid: 2856). The capt ivity of postcolonial historians in the concept ual framework of Europe- as-history is reflected in what Chakrabarty calls the paradox of third- world social science. The paradox is that West ern theories, written in ignorance of the majority of humankindthat is, those living in non-Western cultures (265), seem to illum inate many aspects of those societ ies for third world social scient ists and eminent ly help in understanding their social problems. C hakrabarty finds the answer to his paradox to be that the reality illuminated by Western theories is present only in the minds of those social scient ist s who, hav ing been thoroughly trained in Western tradit ion through the

modern European claim on

history (interpreted as a teleological universalization of a particular rationality) finds its
expression in contemporary economic analysis through the
notion of development: namely, the form of large scale, material accumulation associated
primarily with Western societies. In the 20th century postwar period , a tremendous
process of colonialism, share the European interpret ations of history. Much more, they have accepted the negat ive characterizat ion of their own cultures as permanent ly inadequate and undeveloped. In the classical Marxian interpretation, for instance, the Brit ish colonization of Indiaalthough condemnedwas tolerated as the necessary evil of modernizat ion and the transit ion to socialism.

8 The

investment in economic analysis as well as industrial projects

was undertaken, and the notion of development has since been
instituted in the binarism of developed/un(der/less)developed.9
The idea of development is, of course, deeply rooted in
Western philosophical thought (
see, for instance, Bury and Zein), but the imperative of its extension to other world regions draws part icularly on the not ion of universal history that emerged in eighteent h century Europe, and served to support the Enlightenment vision of progress by establishing universal laws according to which history unfolds. In Idea of a Universal History from a C osmopolitan Point of View, Kant proposed a history in which nature brings about

the development of all mankind ( Teggart 1949) . Similarly, Turgot in Discourses on Universal History envisioned the human race as one whole moving towards greater perfect ion (Bury 1932). C ontemporary economic analy sis carried on this tradition. The classical Marx ian theory in this regard has just been ment ioned, and postmodern Marx ian economists (e.g., Amariglio and Ruccio 1994) have already ident ified its historicism . Neoclassical economics, on the other hand, lacking a formalized theory of history, focused on individual rat ionality as the catalyst for dev elopment, set against the backdrop of a general stages- of-growth notion borrowed from classical economics. For example, in his influent ialif now defunctStages of Economic Growth, Rostow (1960) deployed the notion of universal history to suggest that all societ ies followed the path of
industrial Europe. Institut ional economics did not rely on a teleological apprehension of historical change, but saw a path dependent co-evolut ion of technology and inst itutions. Nevertheless, it s paradigmatic emphasis on the dynam ic role of technological innov ation lends it self to a bias towards industrializat ion as progress, and presents a constant tension with the role of culture in inst itut ional econom ic analysis. 10 2. Why a non-modernist discourse? The term non-modernist (rather than postmodernist) denotes an engagement with modernity from the subaltern position of its former colonies and marginalized others.11 What is most crucial from this posit ion is that the modernity from which the postmodern departure might take place survives and current ly exercises its premises, approaches, and material consequences for non-Western peoples and
cult ures. For postcolonial societies, the postmodern age has not meant a transcendence of European hegemony, to the same extent that it has not meant the end of economic exploitation and other capit alist processes in the industrialized world. Instead, many of these have ex panded and accelerated through globalizat ion and other triumphs. A non-modernist discourse questions totalizing narrat ives, teleological understandings of history, and essent ialist interpretat ions of subjectivity, and doubts objectified and universalized reason, truth, knowledge, and reality. Having said that, it should not be inferred that postmodernist critique logically extends to ex press the predicament s of cultures that represent the ot her of European modernit y. Yes, the foundational element s of modernity that have been exposed by postmodernist lit erature
underlay the project of colonialism and, through it, they unfolded brutally before the eyes of the colonized. However, their consequences and meanings to those in the colonies are not necessarily the same as to those liv ing on the imperial side of modernity. Indeed, a desire to subsume the postcolonial critique of econom ic and polit ical dom inat ion wit hin the postmodern umbrella would amount to turning the Other into the Same, which, of course, postmodernism refuses to do (During 1987). The problem of postcoloniality, rather than a loss of faith in the modern self, is the relentless sovereignty of European modernity, liv ed in the contemporary relat ionship between the formerly colonial and the now post colonial. The physical end of the colonial era did not fundamentally alter this relationship.

Colonialism was, almost smoothly, succeeded by the project of

development through which former colonies were to oversee
the reproduction of modern Europe on their own terrain
Elabdin 1998). 12

(Zein-

The project of development, from the standpoint of

to-be-developed societies, represents a negative ontology,

namely, a process that defines being by negation. The
development discourse of the past half century theoretically
negated the actual experiences of those societies on the
premise that their present realities and world conceptions
were a mere prelude to a more significant existence in the
form of an industrial, materially affluent society.

2NR Alternative Ext Discourse Analysis

Discourse analysis is a precondition to the success of
movements against dehumanization and extermination
understanding current historical arrangements is the only
solvency.
Shefner 2K7

Jon Shefner. Rethinking Civil Society in the Age of NAFTA: The Case of Mexico. The
ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 2007; 610; 182.

Instead, I want to emphasize that if we are looking at organized

efforts to resist, change, or even overturn hierarchies, we must

examine the social bases of those hierarchies. The social basis
of the neoliberal project is class. Because neoliberalism is a
class project, that project has to be assessed in class terms:
how people act from their class positions to impose or resist
class pressures . Which particular hierarchy penetrates a specific society
at a specific time is a case of historical contingency, to be examined within
various cases. Indeed, hierarchical systems intersect in ways that

make it difficult to assess the impacts of one over another. But

to examine how domination works, we have to identify the
social base of individual systems, then assess impacts on
disadvantaged groups and their efforts and strategies of
responding to the form of domination in their own terms . Said in
a different way, the new social movement researchers were correct: earlier
discourses of class analysis indeed failed to capture the
actions, motivations, and goals of many different forms of
collective action. We have to acknowledge a whole series of
oppressive social structures to understand the emergence of
multiple types of movements. These movements are defined in
large part by identities, whether these are imposed by social
structure or embraced by movement participants. These
identities are also a result of communities emerging from
social hierarchy and oppression. If we are to understand the
roots and emergence of different contentious communities , we
have to [FIRST] recognize a whole series of oppressionsrace,
gender, ethnicity, and so onthat characterize current and
historical social arrangements. Understanding the multitude of
oppressions and contention, however, may be obscured when we expect too
much from the civil society concept. Second , recognizing the strata of

civil society may help us understand the dynamics and

outcome of strategic efforts at unified struggle. The way civil

society works together on shared strategies [that] may build
bridges or create fissures, depending on relations among
members, ability to recognize hierarchy between groups, and
the subsequent possibility of differential outcomes from
shared strategy. [And] Third , recognizing the strata of civil
society suggests that we carefully examine coalition
strategies. Organizing temporary coalitions around shared
goals can make enormous sense when groups are mobilizing to
create an opposition and launch an alternative. Yet recognizing
the strata of civil society forces us to understand that the
successful accomplishment of a coalesced strategy will still
yield differential impacts on the members of civil society.

Links

1NC Links Bare Life

Their statistical account of food security reduces humans
and their suffering to numbers and abstract concepts
this reduces life to bare life.
Stefanovic 2K Ingrid Leman Stefanovic. Safeguarding Our Common Future: Rethinking
Sustainable Development. State University of New York.

the
predominance of the calculative mode of thought affects the
foundation of interpersonal relations. The topic deserves more attention here,
particularly as it impacts upon the discussion of sustainability. Too often, we tend to forget
that human beings are neither mere objects nor resources to
be defined in positivist terms of a sectoral inventory of need s.
Calculating Others In the previous chapter, I showed, in a preliminary way, how

In this respect,

we might benefit from the reflections of Thomist philosopher Jacques

' As individuals, each

of us are parts of a wider wholeof a family, a community, "a single dot in
the immense network of forces and influences, cosmic, ethnic, historic, whose laws we obey."2 In so
far as we are persons, however, every human being is a unique
whole, "a principle of creative unity, of independence and of freedom."3 The mystery of personality is
Maritain, who distinguished between individuals and persons.

the essence of the living subject and is confined by no material boundaries. It finds some expression in the
poetic imaginationin emotional, artistic, intuitive, and profound intellectual sensibilities. In our highly
rational, calculative era,

we must learn to guard against the tendency to

devalue Maritain's [the]notion of personhood in favor of

individuality, by transforming unique human beings into
statistics or into mere units of a collectivity . Margaret Catley-Carlson,
president of the Canadian International Development Agency, echoes this sentiment when she describes
the difficulties in discovering just and affordable means of enforcing environmental controls, precisely on
the level of the human person. She writes: Consider a taxi driver in Calcutta, whose dilapidated old
heap belches black smoke. If you fine him for polluting the air, or demand he get his car tuned,
where will he find the money? He's just barely making enough each day to feed himself and his family.
And if you impound his vehicle, how would he and his children eat?4 Catley-Carlson asks us to
multiply this dilemma by 5 million cars, in order to begin to comprehend the huge challenges facing
Calcutta in battling air pollution. At the same time, a genuine understanding of the problem requires a
fuller awareness of the human implications than such an easy calculation may suggest. The solution to a
serious pollution problem in this case would involve intervening in an entire way of life that, presently, has
its just returns on the level of the human person. This realization does not mean, of course, that we must
consequently abstain from environmental intervention. It compels us to do so fully aware, however, of the
human dimension and fully prepared to cope with the personal, as well as social, costs of such
intervention.

Calculative thinking grounds many of our ways of

being with one another. For example, to recite abstract

statistics about the state of world hunger similarly risks
distanc[es]ing us from the full meaning of human suffering.
Recall that the Brundt- land Report tells us that, in 198 5, despite the objective abundance of food
production, "more than 730 million people did not eat enough to lead fully productive working

lives."5 Others tell us that ten thousand people starve to death daily and 460 million are
permanently hungry.6 These [Large]

figures are significant, but as numerical abstractions, they also, insidiously, allow us to disassociate
ourselves from the full breadth of meaning underlying the
numbers. Other, less calculative perspectives may inform us in a way that is closer to heart. One
shudders to read that "hunger is a child with shrivelled limbs and a swollen belly. It is the grief of parents
or a person gone blind for lack of vitamin A."7 Even bringing the numbers down to the level of the
everyday has its merits. Philosopher Louis Pojman asks us to consider the following analogy:
Imagine ten children eating at a table. The three healthiest eat the best food and throw much of it away
or give it to their pets. Two other children get just enough to get by on. The other five do not get
enough food. Three of them who are weak manage to stave off hunger pangs by eating bread and rice,
but the other two are unable to do even that and die of hunger-related diseases, such as

while we may
remain disengaged from the misery of world poverty through
our recitalor ignoranceof statistical compilations that reach into
the millions, at the personal level of each child, a fundamental
injustice prevails in such easy, calculative abstractions. Freefloating numerical concepts, while informative at some level,
also risk collapsing the essence of hunger into the comfortable domain of what Heidegger called
"das Man"the impersonal, neutral, and ultimately, inauthentic
distantiality (Abstandigkeit) of "the. they."9 In such a domain of "publicness," Heidegger explains
peneumonia and dysentery.8 The example implicidy reminds us that ,

that "overnight, everything that is primordial gets glossed over as something that has long
been well known. Everything gained by a struggle becomes just something to be manipulated.
Every secret loses its force" in an overall "levelling down" of authentic possibilities.10 By
transforming the concrete, lived reality of a child's hunger into the "averageness" of an empty
statistic, it is a simple task to take the next step and disengage[s] oneself from any responsibility or
feeling of authentic care. Positivist [These] interpretations of human relations subtly infect our
policy discussions of sustainable development at various levels. Consider another example that
relates to the current debate about "future generations" in the field of environmental ethics. The World
Commission on Environment and Development explains that their own message of hope is "based on the
premise that every human beingthose here and those who are to comehas the right to life, and to a
decent life."11 But to what extent can we speak consistently of the "rights" of unborn generations? How
rational is it to speak of the existence of rights for nonexistent rightholders? Some philosophers maintain
that it is meaningless to do so. While one may feel that it is unethical to ask future generations to pay for
our mistakes (for example, in the disposal of nuclear waste) others question whether it is proper to deprive
the poor of our own generation for the sake of nonexistent future generations. In this respect, some
ethicists go so far as to suggest that since we do not know who or what they will be, or even wherein their
convictions will lie, it is meaningless to specify obligations to nonexistent peopleto nonentities.12 A
related argument suggests that there is no single future generation to whom we can be said to owe
anything or whom we harm by our present-day actions.13 If we say that future people would be "better
off" if we pursued more sustainable environmental policies today, we assume that a particular group of
people would be affected by these policies. Yet different policies lead to different outcomes that
themselves lead to alternative contingent eventsand these events, in turn, may result in the birth of
different people. We are asked to imagine how many events might have prevented our own parents or
grandparents from meeting. Had events happened in some alternate sequence, we ourselves would not
exist.14 Similarly, a single, specific "future generation" not only does not exist now, but we have no
obligations to our descendants, since the composition of any one generation itself may be affected by our
own actions or even by circumstances beyond our control. In fact, a future generation that does not yet
exist, can possess no rights. It follows that I cannot have a duty to a nonexistent entity. I find these kinds of
logistical acrobatics to be ethically misdirected. To maintain that I owe nothing to future generations
because I cannot touch, feel, or empirically experience them or describe them exactlyis intuitively
offensive. To suggest that rights of future generations are nonexistent because those same generations are
nonexistent follows the narrow rules of ^logic but not of rationality in a broader sense: the implication
seems to be that if future people have no rights, neither do they really matter. This conclusion
goes against the grain of what it means to exist as a member of humanity and of a broader
social world. Such philosophical machinations deny the significance of human compassion and of care
beyond the confines of one's own self-grounded concerns. This kind of denial can only happen when
human beings are interpreted in a reductionist model, as discreet "things" that either do exist

now in the present or else remain but a futural fiction of one's imagination. Later, I will say more
about the need of a holistic vision of human being, one that incorporates notions of conscience and care in
a nonpositivist, phenomenological vision. At this point, however, I wish only to flag some of the dangers
that arise in our philosophical reflections on the meaning of right and wrong, when human beingsand
their rights and dutiesare defined by way of a positivist reduction to empirically accessible realities
only.15 We turn, finally, to one last example of the hazards of interpreting human beings as mere material
entities. [For example]The Brundtland Report points out how "women farmers, though they play a
critical role in food production, are often ignored by programmes meant to improve production."16

women's contributions to informal sector

activities have been left out of abstract stereotype models of the
developing world, because these contributions have been
difficult, if not impossible, to measure and record.17 None of
Others have similarly noted how

this is unusual, in an epoch that seeks to present a neatly

defined, conclusive picture of the human ideal . Ecofeminists argue
against androcentric models of humanity, because these very models present an image of the
perfect human being as male, rational, and in control. Characteristics such as compassion,
care, and emotional sensitivity are typically interpreted on this model as being inferior and,
often, feminine qualities.18 Not only do ecofeminists question such an androgenic, reified conception
of the human being, but some go even further to criticize essentializing tendencies of some ecofeminists
themselves. Critics suggest that those who purport to speak of a woman's way of knowing as if there is a
single woman's voice (usually with an implicit classist and racist bias) are themselves falling into the trap
of objectifying Woman as if she can be defined as a neatly circumscribed, hypostatized entity.19 The
single-minded notion of a simple, unified feminine experience, separate from the masculine experience,
has been questioned persuasively.20 While ecofeminists are in general agreement that there is a
significant relation between the exploitation of women and the exploitation of nature, one realizes in
surveying the eco- feminist literature that its strength lies precisely in the lack of a solidifed consensus on
the meaning of Being Woman.21 The attempt to delimit the feminine experience within neatly
circumscribed limits is just another expression of the current tendency to compartmentalize the human
experience within rigid, ahistorical definitionsdefinitions that ultimately deny to that experience its
richness and onto- logical breadth of significance. It has been said that inasmuch as something exists, it
exists to a certain degree and in that sense is subject to measurement.22 Certainly that claim applies to
empirical entities like tables and chairs. It cannot, however, apply in the same way to human beings,
whose social, cultural, and historical experiences transcend the boundaries of material entities in their
essence. Significantly, Canada's submission to the Fifth Session of the United Nations Commission on
Sustainable Development in 1997 addresses the theme of "Strengthening Our Social Fabric" by collapsing
that issue into two categories of discussion on "human capital" and "social capital."23 As an update of
Canadian progress in this field, the document testifies to the fact that we still tend to reduce
human affairs to quantitative, economic terms. Of course, social networks and civic
institutions can be viewed from the economic perspective. The full depth of human experience,
however, consists of understanding, imagination, intuition, sensibility, and complex nuances of
meaning that are revealed in the temporal unfolding of each human life.

To collapse the

richness of that experience within a simplistic, calculative

framework is, at best, naive. At worst, it threatens genuine
progress toward a

sustainable and a

more humane society.

1NC Links Third World

Viewing Third World countries as impoverished or
suffering from malnourishment simply reinforces the
power of the First World over the Third this causes bare
life as people become numbers and statistics.
Escobar 95

Arturo Escobar. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third
World. 1995. Princeton University Press.
THE DISPERSION OF POWER 103 Because of its explosive political and social implications, the subject [of
hunger] until very recently has been one of the taboos of our civilization. . . . Hunger has unquestionably
been the most potent source of social misfortunes, but our civilization has kept its eyes averted, afraid to
face the sad reality. War has always been loudly discussed. Hymns and poems have been written to
celebrate its glorious virtues as an agent of selection. . . . Thus, while war became a leitmotiv of Western
thought, hunger remained only a vulgar sensation, the repercussions of which were not supposed to
emerge from the realm of the subconscious. The conscious mind, with ostentatious disdain, denied its
existence. ([1952] 1977, 51) This obscurity of hunger changed dramatically after World War II, when
hunger entered irremediably the politics of scientific knowledge. Famines in the 1960s and 1970s (Biafra,
Bangladesh, the Sahel)brought massive hunger to public awareness. Yet the more intractable aspects of
persistent malnutrition and hunger entered the scientific world a decade earlier. From the 1950s to
today, an army of scientists nutritionists, health experts, demographers, agriculturalists, planners, and so
on has been busy studying every single aspect of hunger. This hunger of (scientific) language has
resulted in manifold strategies that have succeeded each other throughout the development era; from
food fortification and supplementation, nutrition education, and food aid in the 1950s and 1960s to land
reform, the green revolution, integrated rural development, and comprehensive national food and
nutrition planning since the late 1960s, the languages of hunger have grown increasingly inclusive and
detailed. Whether the nutrition problem was thought to be due to insufficient protein intake, lack of
calories, lack of nutrition education, inadequate food intake combined with poor sanitation and health,
low incomes, or inefficient agricultural practices or to a combination of many of these factors a battery of
experts was always on call to design strategies and programs on behalf of the hungry and malnourished
people of the Third World. To be blunt, one could say that

the body of the

malnourished the starving African portrayed on so many covers of Western

magazines, or the lethargic South American child to be adopted for $16 a month portrayed in
the advertisements of the same magazines is the most striking symbol of the
power of the First World over the Third. A whole economy of
discourse and unequal power relations is encoded in that
body. We may say, following Teresa de Lauretis (1987), that there is a violence of
representation at play here. This violence, moreover, is extreme;
scientific representations of hunger and overpopulation (they
often go together) are most dehumanizing and objectifying. After all, what
we are talking about when we refer to hunger or population is
people, human life itself; but it all becomes, for Western science and media,
helpless and formless (dark) masses, items to be counted 104
CHAPTER 4 and measured by demographers and nutritionists, or systems with
feedback mechanisms in the model of the body espoused by physiologists and biochemists. The

language of hunger and the hunger of language join forces not

only to maintain

a certain

social order but to exert

a kind of

symbolic

violence that sanitizes the discussion of the hungry and the

malnourished. It is thus that we come to consume hunger in

the West ; in the process our sensitivity to suffering and pain
becomes numbed by the distancing effect that the language of
academics and experts achieved . To restore vividness and political efficacy to the
language becomes almost an impossible task (Scheper- Hughes 1992). The situation is
even more paradoxical when one considers that the strategies implemented
to deal with the problems of hunger
them,

and food supply, far from solving

have led to their aggravation . Susan George (1986) best captured the

cynicism of these strategies with the title More Food, More Hunger.

Countries that

were self-sufficient in food crops at the end of World War II

many of them even exported food to industrialized nations

became net food

importers throughout the development era . Hunger similarly

grew as the capacity of countries to produce the food
necessary to feed themselves contracted under the pressure
to produce cash crops, accept cheap food from the West, and
conform to agricultural markets dominated by the multinational merchants of
grain. Although agricultural output per capita grew in most
countries, this increase was not translated into increased food
availability for most people. Inhabitants of Third World cities in particular
became increasingly dependent on food their countries did not produce. How can one
account for this cynicism of power? This brings us again to the question of how discourse
works, how it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth (Foucault 1979, 194). The
discourse of development is not merely an ideology that has little to do with the real
world; nor is it an apparatus produced by those in power in order to hide another, more
basic truth, namely, the crude reality of the dollar sign.

Th[is] e development

discourse has crystallized in practices that contribute to

regulating the everyday goings and comings of people in the
Third World . How is its power exercised in the daily social and economic life of countries and
communities? How does it produce its effect on the way people think and act, on how life is felt and
lived? So far I have said little about what developers actually do in their day-today work. I still have to
show how the discourse of development gets dispersed in or through a field of practices; how it relates to
concrete interventions that organize the production of types of knowledge and forms of power, relating
one to the other. It is necessary to scrutinize the specific practices through which international lending
agencies and Third World governments carry out their task, bringing together bureaucrats and experts of
all THE DISPERSION OF POWER 105 kinds with their ThirdWorld beneficiaries peasants, poor women,
urban marginals, and the like. This will be the task of this chapter; it examines in detail the deployment
of development. The chapter investigates the concrete forms that the mechanisms of professionalization
and institutionalization take in the domain of malnutrition and hunger. In particular, the chapter reviews
the strategy of comprehensive national Food and Nutrition Policy and Planning (FNPP), created by the
World Bank and a handful of universities and institutions in the developed countries in the early 1970s
and implemented in a number of Third World countries throughout the 1970s and 1980s. FNPP grew out
of the realization that the complex problems of malnutrition and hunger could not be dealt with through
isolated programs but that a comprehensive, multisectoral strategy of planning at the national level was
needed. Based on this realization, a body of theory was produced in the above institutions, and national
food and nutrition plans were designed and implemented which included ambitious programs that
covered all areas related to food, such as food production and consumption, health care, nutrition
education, food technology, and so on. After examining the production of FNPP theory, we will look
closely at the implementation of such a strategy in Colombia during the period 1975 -1990. In order to

analyze the practices of development, we have to analyze what development institutions actually do.

Institutional practices are crucial not so much because they account for most of
what is earmarked as development, but mostly because they contribute to
producing and formalizing social relations, divisions of labor,
and cultural forms. Thus illustrating how development functions, the aim of this chapter, is
not a simple task. It requires that we investigate the production of discourses about the problem in
question; that we show the articulation of these discourses with socioeconomic and technological
conditions that they, in turn, help produce; and, finally and more importantly, that we examine the actual
work practices of institutions involved with these problems. Discourse, political economy, and
institutional ethnography should be woven in order to provide an adequate understanding of how
development works. The daily practices of institutions are not just rational or neutral ways of doing. In
fact, much of an institution's effectiveness in producing power relations is the result of practices that are
often invisible, precisely because they are seen as rational. It is then necessary to develop tools of
analysis to unveil and understand those practices. I do this in the first part of this chapter, by explaining
the notion of institutional ethnography. The second part reconstructs the birth, life, and death of FNPP,
focusing on the view of hunger that this strategy produced and the practices that actualized it. In the
third part, I summarize the political economy of the agrarian crisis in Latin America in the period 1950
-1990 and examine the response that the Colom106 CHAPTER 4 bian government and the international
development establishment gave to this crisis. I focus especially on the so-called Integrated Rural
Development strategy, produced by the World Bank in the early 1970s and implemented in Colombia
from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, with the cooperation of the World Bank and other international
agencies. Finally, in the fourth section I propose an interpretation of FNPP as a paradigmatic case in the
deployment of development. The underlying premise of this investigation is that as long as institutions
and professionals are successfully reproducing themselves materially, culturally, and ideologically, certain
relations of domination will prevail; and to the extent that this is the case, development will continue to
be greatly conceptualized by those in power. By focusing on the practices that structure the daily work
of institutions, on one hand, I hope to illustrate how power works, namely, how it is effected by
institutional and documentary processes. The emphasis on discourse, on the other hand, is intended to
show how a certain subjectivity is privileged and at the same time marginalizes the subjectivity of those
who are supposed to be the recipients of progress. It will become clear that this marginalization produced
by a given regime of representation is an integral component of institutionalized power relations.

1NC Links Developing Countries

The affirmative specifies developing countries and
ignores the problems and fails to compare itself to
developed countries.
Altieri 2K4

Altieri, Charles. The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects. Ithaca, N.Y.,
London: Cornell UP, 2004. Print.

the meanings associated with urban development and

colonial development concurred with many others to
transform[ed] the word 'development', step by step, into one with
contours that are about as precise as those of an amoeba. It is
now a mere algorithm whose significance depends on the
context in which it is employed. It may allude to a housing project, to the
logical sequence of a thought, to the awakening of a child's mind, to a chess game or
to the budding of a teenager's breasts. But even though it lacks, on its own, any
precise denotation, it is firmly seated in popular and intellectual
perception. And it always appears as an evocation of a net of
significances in which the person who uses it is irremediably
trapped. Development cannot delink itself from the words with
Throughout the century,

which it was formed - growth, evolution, maturation. Just the same, those who
now use the word cannot free themselves from a web of
meanings that impart a specific blindness to their language,
thought and action. No matter the context in which it is used. or the precise
connotation that the person using it wants to give it, the
expression becomes qualified and coloured by meanings perhaps
unwanted. The word always implies a favourable change, a step
from the simple to the complex, from the inferior to the superior, from worse to
better. The word indicates that one is doing well because one is
advancing in the sense of a necessary, ineluctable, universal
law

and toward a desirable goal. The word retains to this day the meaning given to it a century ago by

the creator of ecology, Haeckel: 'Development is, from this moment on, the magic word with which we will
solve all the mysteries that surround us or. at least. that which will guide us toward their solution.'

But

for two-thirds of the people on earth, this positive meaning of

the word 'development'

- profoundly rooted after two centuries of its social construction

is a reminder of what they are not. It is a reminder of an

undesirable, undignified condition. To escape from it, they
need to be enslaved to others' experiences and dreams.

Development discourses ignore the sacrifices inevitable in

becoming developed, and veils the results of said
development.
Westoll 2K8

Westoll, Andrew. The Riverbones: Stumbling after Eden in the Jungles of Suriname.
Toronto: Emblem, 2008. Print.

developing ignores the cultural and social

sacrifices that are inevitable on the way to becoming a
developed country domestic control over mineral rights come
to mind, as does the survival of indigenous and tribal ways of life. It
The happy term

also veils the usual results of said development a financially

poor tropical country with an economic infrastructure that
resembles the temperate rich countries of the world, thereby
enabling the latter to take advantage of the former in terms of
open markets, free trade and resource exploitation. The term
developing is also faulty because it implies the developed
world has already arrived at some kind of pinnacle of progress,
that we have doubtless followed the right path to get there, and that we have achieved
everything that self-respecting nations should strive for. There is an
insinuation of moral, cultural and spiritual achievement in the term that rivals the old phrase Third World
for its underlying arrogance.

Impacts

1NC Impacts Elimination

This inscription within bare life is at the heart of violence
and domination, allowing every human life to be devalued
and eliminated in the name of sovereign management.
Agamben 98 Giorgio Agamben, professor of philosophy at the University of Verona, Homo Sacer, 1998, pg. 139-140.
3.3 It is not our intention here to take a position on the difficult ethical problem of euthanasia, which still
today, in certain countries, occupies a substantial position in medical debates and provokes disagreement.
Nor are we concerned with the radicality with which Binding declares himself in favor of the general

the sovereignty of
the living man over his [their] own life has its immediate
counterpart in the determination of a threshold beyond which
life ceases to have any juridical value and can, therefore, be
admissibility of euthanasia. More interesting for our inquiry is the fact that

killed without the commission of a homicide . The new juridical

category of "life devoid of value" (or "life unworthy of being
lived) corresponds exactly evenifinanapparentlydifferentdirection to the
bare life of homo sacer[.] andcaneasilybeextendedbeyondthelimitsimaginedby
Binding.It is as if every valorization and every politicization of
life (which,afterall,is implicit in the sovereignty of the individual
over his [their] own existence) necessarily implies a new
decision concerning the threshold beyond which life ceases to
be politically relevant, becomes only "sacred life," and can as
such be eliminated without punishment . Every society sets
this limit; every societyeventhemostmoderndecides who its "sacred
men" willbe.Itisevenpossiblethatthis limit, on which the politicization
and the exception of natural life in the juridical order of the
state depends, has done nothing but extend itself in the
history of the West and has now in the new biopolitical horizon
of states with national sovereignty moved inside every human
life and every citizen. Bare life is no longer confined to a
particular place or a definite category. It now dwells in the
biological body of every living being.

Discourse centered on development prioritizes affluent

Western culture and renders other nations inferior.
Zein-Elabden 2K1

(Department of Economics, Franklin & Marshall College (Summer 2001.

Contours of a non-modernist discourse: the contested space of history and development Review of
Radical Political Economies. Volume 33, Issue 3. ScienceDirect).

Situating the postcolonial in relation to modernity has been

perhaps the most difficult enterprise. This difficulty can be seen in the loss for words
among many authors to articulate a vocabulary outside the
parameters set by modern European discourse. Bhabha, for example, uses

the expressions otherwise than modernity and contra-modernity (1994: 6). My use of the term nonmodernist here is no exception.

The difficulty of speaking outside the

language of modernity originates in that modern Europe

include European settlements worldwide)

(to

has largely succeeded, through

material/discursive processes, in establishing a strong claim

on history and, therefrom, all facets of human experience:
Reason/rationality, meaning, development, and of course
modernity, appropriating all of these as uniquely European.5
Postcolonial thinkers themselves fall into this habit by ceding
to modern Europe the majority of what could possibly be
generically human and open to different cultural
interpretations. 6 The imperial success of modern Europe ,
inseparable from its rise as an industrial power, laid the
ground for its claim on history. This claim represents the
discursive process that accompanied, and was perhaps
necessary for, the rationalization and ideological purchase of
modernitys project of universal dominion. Thus, from a postcolonial
perspective, the problem of modernist discourse lies not only in that it is
centered around a linear, determinist interpretation of history, the (gendered) triumph of reason, and

in claiming history itself for the European

discourse to the
point where none could exist outside of its theoretical
framework. In this framework, modernity became a condition
inherently superior to age and tradition, with tradition being not the past of modern Europe,
but also the present of non-European societies and cultures
exceeding faith in an objective knowledge, but

experience, and succeeding in defining the terms of reality and categories of

. I wish to rely here on the work of Dipesh C hakrabarty (1997), one of the Subalt ern Studies writers, to illustrate the problem of the European claim on history. 7 C hakrabarty is

part icularly concerned with the problem of the nat ion state, but his argument applies wit h equal precision to other cat egories of modernist discourse. He takes on the practice of historicism (interpret ing history as a process that unfolds according to certain, immutable, and knowable a priori laws). So far such laws have been supplied by Western philosophy (for example, Hegel and Marx among a long line of less significant figures). C hakrabarty argues that historiography essentially entails a uniform application of European theories of history to all societ ies. Accordingly, history is perceived as something which has already happened elsewhere [ in Europe], and which is to be reproduced, mechanically or otherwise, with a local content (Ibid: 283). He goes on to show that this reproduct ion has, in fact, been faithfully carried out by third world historians
and social scient ist s who are firmly caught up in the theoret ical framework of Europe as history. Economics and history are the knowledge forms that correspond to the two major instit utions that the rise (and later universalization) of the bourgeois order has given to the worldthe capitalist mode of production and the nat ion state. A crit ical historian has no choice but to negot iate this knowledge. She or he therefore needs to understand the state on its own terms, that is, in terms of its self- just ificatory narratives of citizenship and modernit y. Since these themes will always take us back to the universalist propositions of modern (European) polit ical philosophyeven the pract ical science of econom ics that now seems natural to our construct ions of world systems is (theoret ically) rooted in the ideas of ethics in eighteenth-century Europea
third-world historian is condemned to knowing Europe as the original home of the modern, . Thus follows the everyday subalternity of non-Western histories (Ibid: 2856). The capt ivity of postcolonial historians in the concept ual framework of Europe- as-history is reflected in what Chakrabarty calls the paradox of third- world social science. The paradox is that West ern theories, written in ignorance of the majority of humankindthat is, those living in non-Western cultures (265), seem to illum inate many aspects of those societ ies for third world social scient ists and eminent ly help in understanding their social problems. C hakrabarty finds the answer to his paradox to be that the reality illuminated by Western theories is present only in the minds of those social scient ist s who, hav ing been thoroughly trained in Western tradit ion through the

modern European claim on

history (interpreted as a teleological universalization of a particular rationality) finds its
expression in contemporary economic analysis through the
notion of development: namely, the form of large scale, material accumulation associated
primarily with Western societies. In the 20th century postwar period , a tremendous
investment in economic analysis as well as industrial projects
was undertaken, and the notion of development has since been
instituted in the binarism of developed/un(der/less)developed.9
The idea of development is, of course, deeply rooted in
Western philosophical thought (
process of colonialism, share the European interpret ations of history. Much more, they have accepted the negat ive characterizat ion of their own cultures as permanent ly inadequate and undeveloped. In the classical Marxian interpretation, for instance, the Brit ish colonization of Indiaalthough condemnedwas tolerated as the necessary evil of modernizat ion and the transit ion to socialism.

8 The

see, for instance, Bury and Zein), but the imperative of its extension to other world regions draws part icularly on the not ion of universal history that emerged in eighteent h century Europe, and served to support the Enlightenment vision of progress by establishing universal laws according to which history unfolds. In Idea of a Universal History from a C osmopolitan Point of View, Kant proposed a history in which nature brings about

the development of all mankind ( Teggart 1949) . Similarly, Turgot in Discourses on Universal History envisioned the human race as one whole moving towards greater perfect ion (Bury 1932). C ontemporary economic analy sis carried on this tradition. The classical Marx ian theory in this regard has just been ment ioned, and postmodern Marx ian economists (e.g., Amariglio and Ruccio 1994) have already ident ified its historicism . Neoclassical economics, on the other hand, lacking a formalized theory of history, focused on individual rat ionality as the catalyst for dev elopment, set against the backdrop of a general stages- of-growth notion borrowed from classical economics. For example, in his influent ialif now defunctStages of Economic Growth, Rostow (1960) deployed the notion of universal history to suggest that all societ ies followed the path of
industrial Europe. Institut ional economics did not rely on a teleological apprehension of historical change, but saw a path dependent co-evolut ion of technology and inst itutions. Nevertheless, it s paradigmatic emphasis on the dynam ic role of technological innov ation lends it self to a bias towards industrializat ion as progress, and presents a constant tension with the role of culture in inst itut ional econom ic analysis. 10 2. Why a non-modernist discourse? The term non-modernist (rather than postmodernist) denotes an engagement with modernity from the subaltern position of its former colonies and marginalized others.11 What is most crucial from this posit ion is that the modernity from which the postmodern departure might take place survives and current ly exercises its premises, approaches, and material consequences for non-Western peoples and
cult ures. For postcolonial societies, the postmodern age has not meant a transcendence of European hegemony, to the same extent that it has not meant the end of economic exploitation and other capit alist processes in the industrialized world. Instead, many of these have ex panded and accelerated through globalizat ion and other triumphs. A non-modernist discourse questions totalizing narrat ives, teleological understandings of history, and essent ialist interpretat ions of subjectivity, and doubts objectified and universalized reason, truth, knowledge, and reality. Having said that, it should not be inferred that postmodernist critique logically extends to ex press the predicament s of cultures that represent the ot her of European modernit y. Yes, the foundational element s of modernity that have been exposed by postmodernist lit erature
underlay the project of colonialism and, through it, they unfolded brutally before the eyes of the colonized. However, their consequences and meanings to those in the colonies are not necessarily the same as to those liv ing on the imperial side of modernity. Indeed, a desire to subsume the postcolonial critique of econom ic and polit ical dom inat ion wit hin the postmodern umbrella would amount to turning the Other into the Same, which, of course, postmodernism refuses to do (During 1987). The problem of postcoloniality, rather than a loss of faith in the modern self, is the relentless sovereignty of European modernity, liv ed in the contemporary relat ionship between the formerly colonial and the now post colonial. The physical end of the colonial era did not fundamentally alter this relationship.

Colonialism was, almost smoothly, succeeded by the project of

development through which former colonies were to oversee
the reproduction of modern Europe on their own terrain
Elabdin 1998). 12

(Zein-

The project of development, from the standpoint of

to-be-developed societies, represents a negative ontology,

namely, a process that defines being by negation. The
development discourse of the past half century theoretically
negated the actual experiences of those societies on the
premise that their present realities and world conceptions
were a mere prelude to a more significant existence in the
form of an industrial, materially affluent society.

The affirmative causes human rights destruction.

Lutz 2K [Date estimated]. Ellen L. Lutz. Recognizing Indigenous Peoples Human Rights.

Voices.
Issue 5.1. Ellen L. Lutz is the executive director of Cultural Survival.
http://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/voices/australia/recognizing-indigenous-peoples-human-rights

The worlds indigenous peoples have a serious human rights

problem: The nations of the world refuse to recognize that indigenous
peoples have human rights. All countries are ready to recognize that
individual indigenous persons have rights. Those rights are the same
as the rights of all human beings, and are now well secured by
international human rights law and by the laws of many
countries. The problems arise when indigenous peoples claim rights as
peoples. As indigenous advocates frequently point out, the
whole debate is over the letter s. What are the rights that
indigenous peoples seek ? First, they want to be recognized for who
they are: distinct groups with their own unique cultures.
Indigenous peoples want to enjoy and pass on to their children
their histories, languages, traditions, modes of internal
governance, spiritual practices, and all else that makes them
who they are. They want to be able to pray on their ancestral lands without finding that those lands have been dug up to
construct a gold mine, fenced off to create a safari park, or watered with sewage effluent pumped from a nearby city.

Alternatives

1NC Alternative Discourse Analysis

Discourse analysis is a precondition to the success of
movements against dehumanization and extermination
understanding current historical arrangements is the only
solvency.
Shefner 2K7

Jon Shefner. Rethinking Civil Society in the Age of NAFTA: The Case of Mexico. The
ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 2007; 610; 182.

Instead, I want to emphasize that if we are looking at organized

efforts to resist, change, or even overturn hierarchies, we must

examine the social bases of those hierarchies. The social basis
of the neoliberal project is class. Because neoliberalism is a
class project, that project has to be assessed in class terms:
how people act from their class positions to impose or resist
class pressures . Which particular hierarchy penetrates a specific society
at a specific time is a case of historical contingency, to be examined within
various cases. Indeed, hierarchical systems intersect in ways that

make it difficult to assess the impacts of one over another. But

to examine how domination works, we have to identify the
social base of individual systems, then assess impacts on
disadvantaged groups and their efforts and strategies of
responding to the form of domination in their own terms . Said in
a different way, the new social movement researchers were correct: earlier
discourses of class analysis indeed failed to capture the
actions, motivations, and goals of many different forms of
collective action. We have to acknowledge a whole series of
oppressive social structures to understand the emergence of
multiple types of movements. These movements are defined in
large part by identities, whether these are imposed by social
structure or embraced by movement participants. These
identities are also a result of communities emerging from
social hierarchy and oppression. If we are to understand the
roots and emergence of different contentious communities , we
have to [FIRST] recognize a whole series of oppressionsrace,
gender, ethnicity, and so onthat characterize current and
historical social arrangements. Understanding the multitude of
oppressions and contention, however, may be obscured when we expect too
much from the civil society concept. Second , recognizing the strata of

civil society may help us understand the dynamics and

outcome of strategic efforts at unified struggle. The way civil

society works together on shared strategies [that] may build
bridges or create fissures, depending on relations among
members, ability to recognize hierarchy between groups, and
the subsequent possibility of differential outcomes from
shared strategy. [And] Third , recognizing the strata of civil
society suggests that we carefully examine coalition
strategies. Organizing temporary coalitions around shared
goals can make enormous sense when groups are mobilizing to
create an opposition and launch an alternative. Yet recognizing
the strata of civil society forces us to understand that the
successful accomplishment of a coalesced strategy will still
yield differential impacts on the members of civil society.

1NC Alternative Converted

The alternative is calling them converted.
Westoll 2K8

Westoll, Andrew. The Riverbones: Stumbling after Eden in the Jungles of Suriname.
Toronto: Emblem, 2008. Print.

a new phrase, a term free from judgment,

discrimination and moralism. The truer word, the more honest
descriptor for countries like this, I think, is converting. The people
So, I suggest

of Suriname

are converting, slowly and steadily, to the ways of a

converted world.

Framework

1NR Role OTB Discourse Shapes Reality

Our discourse socially constructs our reality, hence
evaluate K impacts prior to the impacts of the affirmative,
since the affirmative cannot exist separate from the
discourse it utilizes.
Chia 2K

Robert Chia. University of Essex Discourse Analysis as Organizational Analysis.

Organization, Vol. 7, No. 3, 200, http://geocities.ws/visisto/Biblioteca/Chia_Discourse.pdf

The question of discourse , and the manner in which it shapes

our epistemology and understanding of organization, are
central to an expanded realm of organizational analysis. It is one
which recognizes that the modern world we live in and the social
artefacts we rely upon to successfully negotiate our way
through life, are always already institutionalized effects of
primary organizational impulses. Social objects and
phenomena such as the organization, the economy, the market or even stakeholders or the
weather, do not have a straightforward and unproblematic
existence independent of our discursively-shaped
understandings. Instead, they have to be forcibly carved out of the
undifferentiated flux of raw experience and conceptually fixed
and labelled so that they can become the common currency for communicational exchanges.
Modern social reality, with its all-too-familiar features, has to be continually
constructed and sustained through such aggregative
discursive acts of reality-construction. The idea that reality, as we know it, is
socially constructed, has become an accepted truth. What is less commonly understood is how this reality
gets constructed in the first place and what sustains it. For the philosopher William James, our social reality
is always already an abstraction. Our lifeworld is an undifferentiated flux of fleeting sense-impressions and
it is out of this brute aboriginal flux of lived experience that attention carves out and conception
names: . . . in the sky constellations, on earth beach, sea, cliff, bushes, grass. Out of time we cut
days and nights, summers and winters. We say what each part of the sensible continuum is, and all

It is through this
process of differentiating, fixing, naming, labelling, classifying
and relatingall intrinsic processes of discursive organizationthat social reality is
systematically constructed.
these abstract whats are concepts. (James, 1948: 50, emphasis original)

2NR Framework Answers

Resolved means to become aware of our own being.
Pezze 2K6

(Barbara, 2006 PhD Philosophy at Honk Kong U, Heidegger on Gelassenheit, Minerva,

vol .10, http://www.ul.ie/~philos/vol10/Heidegger.html)
Let us pause for a moment to consider a possible misunderstanding. It could appear, from what we have
been saying, that Gelassenheit floats in the realm of unreality and so in nothingness, and, lacking all
power of action, is a will-less letting in of everything and, basically, the denial of the will to live! (1966a, p.

recalls the power

of action, but which is not a will. It is a resolve [Entschlossenheit]
(ibid., p. 81), but not as an act of will that makes a decision and
finds a solution to a problem or a situation. This resolve , as
Heidegger himself suggests, must be thought as the one that is spoken of
in Being and Time, that is, it is a letting oneself be called
80). But this is not the case, for in the Gelassenheit we find something that

forth

(1996, p. 283)

to ones ownmost possibility of being..

Resoluteness as Entschlossenheit is translated in Being and Time

being a self

is authentic

(1996, p. 274). It is quite difficult to think a resolve that is not a matter of will that

moves to an action; we tend, in fact, to consider resoluteness as a strong determination to attain

something. As we read in Heideggers Introduction To Metaphysics (2000),

the essence of the

resolve , as he intends it, is not an intention to act; it is not a

gathering of energy to be released into action. Resolve is the
beginning, the inceptual beginning of any action moved . Here acting
is not be taken as an action undertaken by Dasein in being resolute. Rather, acting refers to the existential
and fundamental mode of being of Dasein, which is to be care, and which is the primordial being of

Resoluteness, in its essence, is the remaining open of

Dasein for being. In the context of the Conversation, this resolve should thus be understood as
Dasein.

the opening of man particularly undertaken by him for openness [als das eigens bernommene
Sichffnen des Daseins fr das Offene] (Heidegger 1966a, p. 81). It is a resolve to remain open to be-ing,
and therefore to what is ownmost to mans nature, which is disclosed in relation to be-ing. This resolve is
what Heidegger, in the Conversation, indicates as releasement to that-which-regions, the resolve to
release oneself to that-which-regions, to remain open towards the openness itself. Now, there is another
element that pertains to Gelassenheit: there is, in fact, not only a resolve, but also a steadfastness
[Ausdauer] (Heidegger 1966a, p.81) proper to Gelassenheit. Thinking, becoming more and more aware of
its nature, and experiencing more clarity about it, remains firm and resolute. Thinking stands within and
rests in this composed steadfastness (ibid., p. 81]). The steadfastness proper to Gelassenheit would
be behavior which did not become a swaggering comportment, but which collected itself into and
remained always the composure of releasement [Verhaltenheit der Gelassenheit]. (Heidegger 1966a, p.
81) Releasement rests in this composed steadfastness and, by resting within it, it relates to that-whichregions and is let-in by that-which-regions in the regioning of that-which-regions, in its swaying. The
holding sway of Gegnet allows releasement to be in its ownmost being, as releasement to that-whichregions. To all of this Heidegger gives the name of in-dwelling [Instndigkeit] (1966a, p. 81). Indwelling refers to what in Being and Time is named existence, which in its essence is so described by
Heidegger in the Introduction to what is metaphysics?: what is meant by existence in the context of a
thinking that is prompted by, and directed toward, the truth of Being, could be most felicitously designated
by the word in-standing [Instndigkeit]. We must think at the same time, however, of standing in the
openness of Being, of sustaining this standing-in (care), and of enduring in what is most extreme (being

Resolve,
steadfastness, in-dwelling belong all together to authentic
releasement, that is as such, when it is in relation to thatwhich-regions. Heidegger summarizes this authentic relation as follows: (Scientist) [] authentic
toward death); for together they constitute the full essence of existence (1998a, p. 284)

releasement consists in this: that man in his very nature belongs to that-which-regions, i.e., he is released
to it. (Scholar): Not occasionally, butprior to everything. (Scientist): The prior, of which we really can not
think (Teacher): because the nature of thinking begins there. (Scientist): Thus mans nature is released
to that-which-regions in what is prior to thought. (Scholar): []and, indeed, through that-which-regions
itself (1966a, p. 82-83) During the conversation, the experience of that-which-regions occurs, but while
the nature of that-which-regions has neared, Heidegger says, that-which-regions itself seems to be
further away than ever before (1966a, p. 85). It is the openness itself that here opens before us; but in its
opening, the openness hides itself, and thus seems to be further away from us. Perhaps Gelassenheit,
says the teacher, as the resolve to let oneself be involved with the truth of be-ing, would be as we have
been experiencing during the conversation a coming near to and so at the same time remaining distant
from that-which-regions (ibid., p. 86). But what would be the nearness and distance in which Gegnet
conceals and unconceals itself?

Focus on policy formation fails only questioning

ontology can reclaim the political.
Seckinelgin 2K11 lecturer in international social policy at the Department of Social Policy,
London School of Economics and Political Science (Hakan, The Environment and International Politics,
Routledge Research in Environmental Politics, http://guessoumiss.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/theenvironment-and-international-politics.pdf)

Can International
Relations understand and address the ecological call? In doing so
the book has gone through three stages. From the initial
empirical case of ocean management in the South Pacific it
moves to the possibility of understanding ecological problems, or producing
knowledge, in general, in IR and then locates this possibility of
knowing in the larger philosophical framework. By doing so, it
responds to the original question in the negative: IR cannot
This book has sought to respond to the question posed in the introduction:

understand and address the ecological call .

the philosophical level. I argued that

The reason for this is given at

in order to respond to the question, the

philosophical rethinking of the humannature relationship is

required in order to consider an ecological ethics as the
ground of the political and the methodology of understanding .
In this study, thinking means to locate oneself within the question, rather than to exercise an abstract
control of the issue as the objective enquirer in questioning. Therefore, the thinking process does not
prioritise one of the parties; rather it takes everyone as part of a multiplicity that is being faced. To be able
to think about an issue within its complexity, one has to unfold the complexity without being inhibited by
the habitual, exclusionist categories. Within this process, the second dimension of questioning, then, tries
to reflect on, and eventually bring together, what is near that has been lost in the naturalness of the

The biological life of ocean species, their

habitats and their life dynamics are now important
components of thinking about international ecological
problems presented in the oceans. However, at the same time,
this is an unfolding of what is being disregarded in what is
seen as common or natural at present. It also follows that by
including these components of ocean life in the consideration
of the political , the process that has disregarded them so far
can no longer be presented as natural or common. Therefore,
this process deconstructs the apparent naturalness of the
common (Heidegger 1968: 129).

stand taken by International Relations in the face of ecological challenge

through building a dynamic thinking about the present in its complexity. At the same time, this
process of bringing ecological concerns into the analysis creates a philosophical outlook in which
ethical and epistemological concerns are grounded through this
ecological understanding. In conclusion, two questions might be asked. The first is: How
can this analysis inform the studying of IR/environment? The second is: How can this analysis help to
address the actual problem of environment articulated? The first question goes beyond the immediate
question about the particular environmental problem. It allows the study to articulate the problem on an

At the level of methodology the

empirical question becomes a question of understanding and
conceptualisation within IR. This also has important implications
for the social sciences, which are constructed as discrete areas of study and understanding.
It is at this level that I have discussed the problem presented by the discipline. The empirical
onto- logical level, as a question of methodology.

study is employed to show that responding to the initial

question of the ecological call, answered in the empirical,
framed in the disciplinary understanding , would remain silent
to the call. The response adopts the question to the limits

of understanding

within IR whereby ecological problems are persistently

reduced to the question of management of regimes. Therefore,
rather than framing a response to an environmental problem
as a policy formulation and concluding the study within the
ontological limits of IR, in considering the problem as an
ethical issue, the ethical position implied and deployed
through IR is questioned. Ecological ethics is a challenge to the study of International
Relations, which, in its different schools, considers a world a priori that may be understood, and thus as a
given area to be studied.2 In their differences, none the less, most of the schools consider the world that
may be understood, according to the overarching international/sovereignty-based framework, in which a

In its different variants either as

a problem-solving theory or as critical theory , IR also
remains within the boundaries of anthropocentric ontology .4 This
fundamental ethical posi- tion is implicitly applied.3

pervasive ethical position then becomes a guarantee for the method used in understanding international
relations. By arguing that the question of environment is foremost an ethical question and not a
managerial one, the grounding ethical assumption of International Relations is questioned. The morality of
the abstracted sovereign individual in relating to the other is scrutinised. The location of first abstracted,
and then radically individuated, human being is questioned.5 In this manner, also, the possibility of a fixed
delimitation of a disciplinary locus, dominant in the social sciences, based on discrete categori- sations of
targeted subjectivities may be contested. In rethinking an ethical relation between nature and human
being in terms of belonging, a new space is opened up. This rethinking contests the ideas of fixed the
international and the agents of action within it. By introducing a larger relationality, ecological ethics
shows that the world which can be studied in IR, as the domain of knowledge in interna- tional politics, is

in unsettling the grounds of justification of the

conceptual plane that can be studied, ecological ethics not
only addresses the environmental issue but targets a problem
within IR as a discipline. Furthermore, it creates a general marker for questioning social
deceptive. Therefore,

method based on abstract models of human being or the individual person.