Shell....................................................................................

5
Security K 1NC Generic............................................................................6
Link General Security.............................................................................11
Link Security Rhetoric............................................................................ 12
Link Security Ideology............................................................................15
Link Environment................................................................................... 16
Link Environment -- AT: Environmental Security Good...........................24
Link Global Warming.............................................................................. 30
Link -- Water Wars.................................................................................... 39
LinkResource Wars................................................................................41
Link Energy Security.............................................................................. 46
Link -- OCS................................................................................................ 48
Link -- Arctic Link...................................................................................... 52
Link -- Energy Security.............................................................................54
Link -- Disease.......................................................................................... 55
Link -- Disease.......................................................................................... 58
LinkFood Security.................................................................................. 68
Link Hegemony...................................................................................... 70
Link -- Hegemony [Rule].........................................................................102
Link -- Hegemony [Rule].........................................................................104
Link -- Hegemony [Burke].......................................................................106
Link -- Hegemony [Burke].......................................................................107
Link Global Governance.......................................................................109
LinkGlobal Coop..................................................................................111
Link Soft Power.................................................................................... 113
Link Multilateralism.............................................................................123
Link --Accidents...................................................................................... 124
Link -- Democracy................................................................................... 126
Link -- Economy...................................................................................... 129
Link -- Economy Poverty......................................................................132
Link -- Economy Economic Analysis Fails.............................................135
Link -- Economy AT Econ =/= Realism.................................................137
Link -- Competitiveness..........................................................................138
LinkHuman Rights............................................................................... 144
Link --I-Law............................................................................................. 147
Link -- Failed States................................................................................149
Link -- Prolif............................................................................................. 155
Link -- Prolif AT Perm............................................................................164
Link -- Prolif Spread Link....................................................................167
Link -- Prolif NPT Link........................................................................... 169
Link -- Prolif AT Cant Deter Third World...............................................170
Link -- Prolif AT Crazy Third World........................................................172
Link -- Terrorism...................................................................................... 173
Link -- Terrorism Alt Solves..................................................................190
Link --Terrorism AT Perm/Flawed Epistemology....................................191
Link -- Terrorism Biological Terrorism Link............................................192
Link -- Terrorism Nuclear Terrorism Link...............................................193
Link -- Terrorism Cyberterrorism Link...................................................195
Link -- Terrorism AT Elshtain.................................................................196

Link Islamic/Middle East Threat.........................................................199

Link-- Afghanistan..................................................................................201
Link -- Afghanistan Counterterrorism...................................................204
Link -- Afghanistan Counterterrrorism Reps Key................................205
Link -- Afghanistan Stability.................................................................207
Link - China............................................................................................. 208
Link -- China - Method Debate...............................................................221
Link -- China - Threats False....................................................................225
Link -- China - AT: Perm...........................................................................227
Link -- China - AT: Realism......................................................................228
Link -- Indo-Pak War................................................................................230
Link -- Latin America...............................................................................232
Link North Korea.................................................................................. 233
Link -- Korea War.................................................................................... 240
Link -- Korea War Alt Solves/AT Perm...................................................246
Link -- Korean Prolif.................................................................................247
Link -- Japan Relations............................................................................249
Link -- Japan Alliance.............................................................................. 250
Link -- Israel/Iran Strikes........................................................................251
Link -- Iran................................................................................................ 253
Link -- Iran Prolif..................................................................................... 257
Link -- Middle East..................................................................................277
Link -- Middle East Representations First..............................................285
Link -- Middle East Impact Calc............................................................287
Link -- Middle East FW card..................................................................288
Link -- Middle East AT Said Indicts........................................................291
Link -- Middle East Alternative.............................................................292
Link -- Middle East Iraq........................................................................293
Link -- Russia.......................................................................................... 295
Link -- Turkey.......................................................................................... 298
Link --- Ikenberry Liberal Hegemony.......................................................299
Link -- Catastrophe.................................................................................301
Link -- Survival........................................................................................ 303
Link- Realism............................................................................................. 307
Link -- Schmitt....................................................................................... 308

Impacts............................................................................313
General................................................................................................... 314
Threat Construction................................................................................ 318
Turns Case.............................................................................................. 319
Turns Environment.................................................................................. 326
Endless Violence..................................................................................... 327
SFFP (Turns Case)................................................................................... 332
Genocide................................................................................................ 335
Bare Life................................................................................................. 340
Biopower Bad......................................................................................... 342
Value to Life............................................................................................ 343
Environmental Destruction.....................................................................350

A2: Hegemony Good Impact Turns....................................352

2NC Hegemony No !............................................................................ 353

2NC Hegemony AT War Decreasing (Pinker)........................................360

2NC Hegemony AT Statistics................................................................361
2NC Hegemony AT Deterrence.............................................................362
2NC Hegemony AT Kagan....................................................................363
2NC Hegemony AT Ferguson................................................................364
2NC Hegemony AT Thayer (Card)........................................................365
2NC Hegemony AT Thayer (Analytic)...................................................366
2NC Hegemony Credibility...................................................................367
2NC Hegemony- Power Vacuum.............................................................369
Alternative..............................................................................370
General................................................................................................... 371
Discourse Impact.................................................................................... 372
Reps First................................................................................................ 373
Ethical Obligation to Vote Neg................................................................376
Rejection................................................................................................. 379
Embrace Insecurity................................................................................. 385
A2: Policymaking Good...........................................................................395
A2: Intellectualism Bad...........................................................................401
A2: Cede the Political.............................................................................. 404
A2: Perm................................................................................................. 407
A2- Perm: Must Disengage First..............................................................416
A2: Perm- Realism Coopts......................................................................418
Alternative Solves Warming Better.........................................................420

Answers to (A2) Common Affirmative Arguments................................423

A2:
A2:
A2:
A2:
A2:
A2:
A2:
A2:
A2:
A2:
A2:
A2:
A2:
A2:
A2:
A2:
A2:
A2:
A2:
A2:
A2:
A2:
A2:
A2:
A2:
A2:

Our Harms Are Objective..................................................................424

Realism Reflexive...........................................................................425
Realism Evolutionary.....................................................................426
Realism General............................................................................. 429
Realism Inevitable............................................................................439
Realism Inevitable [Empiricism].......................................................446
Realism Inevitable [K Solves Realism]..............................................447
Realism Good................................................................................... 451
Realism Inevitable............................................................................452
Murray/Guzini................................................................................... 453
Guzinni............................................................................................. 458
OTuathail......................................................................................... 462
Jarvis................................................................................................ 465
Kurasawa.......................................................................................... 467
Gunning............................................................................................ 469
Jones................................................................................................ 470
Lockman (Middle East Studies Reflexive).........................................471
Heydemann Role of the Ballot.......................................................472
Zarnett (Reverse Essentialism)........................................................473
Mueller (Democracy Discourse Doesnt Cause War).........................475
Rychlak (Should Represent Islamic Terrorism)..................................476
Valbjorn (Shouldnt Focus on Representations)................................478
Kaufman (Discourse Doesnt Cause Violence)..................................479
Pinker (Violence Declining Because of the West)..............................480
Pinker............................................................................................... 482
Schmitt/Emnity................................................................................. 484

A2: Human Nature is Self-Interested/Violence Inevitable.......................489

A2: Security Inevitable...........................................................................501
A2: War Inevitable.................................................................................. 503
A2: Threats Real..................................................................................... 505
A2: Action Key........................................................................................ 513
A2: Case Outweighs...............................................................................515
A2: We Have a Specific Impact...............................................................520
A2: Scenario Planning Good...................................................................522
A2: Transitions........................................................................................ 523
A2: Benign Hegemon..............................................................................525
A2: Good forms of security.....................................................................527
A2: We just respond to existing threats..................................................531
A2: Security K2 Freedom........................................................................532
A2 Critical Security Bad.......................................................................533
A2: Liberal Democracy Solves War.........................................................536
A2: Threat Con Solves War.....................................................................537
A2: We Solve.......................................................................................... 540
A2: Nuke War Outweighs........................................................................542
A2: Predictions Good.............................................................................. 545
AT: Democracy Prevents Genocide.........................................................547

Useful Overview Evidence..................................................556

2NC/1NREpistemology........................................................................557
Aff Ev. Suspect........................................................................................ 561

1NC Shell

Security K 1NC Generic

The 1AC calls into existence a world replete with dangerous flaws in need of
correction at all costs. The image of catastrophe is not a neutral depiction of the
way things are, but a rallying cry to a violent project of eliminating otherness.
Campbell, Professor of international politics at the University of Newcastle,
1998 [David, Writing Security, p. 47-48]
To talk of the endangered nature of the modern world and the enemies and threats that abound in it is thus
not to offer a simple ethnographic description of our condition; it is to invoke a discourse of danger through
which the incipient ambiguity of our world can be grounded in accordance with the insistences of identity.
Danger (death, in its ultimate form) might therefore be thought of as the new god for the modern world of
states, not because it is peculiar to our time, but because it replicates the logic of Christendom's evangelism
of fear. Indeed, in a world in which state identity is secured through dis courses of danger, some low tactics
are employed to serve these high ideals. These tactics are not inherent to the logic of identity, which only
requires the definition of difference. But securing an ordered self and an ordered worldparticularly when
the field upon which this process operates is as extensive as a stateinvolves defining elements that stand
in the way of order as forms of "otherness." 50 Such obstructions to order "become dirt, matter out of place,
irrationality, abnormality, waste, sickness, perversity, incapacity, disorder, madness, unfreedom. They
become material in need of rationalization, normalization, moralization, correction, punishment, discipline,
disposal, realization, etc."51 In this way, the state project of security replicates the church project of
salvation. The state grounds its legitimacy by offering the promise of security to its citizens who, it says,
would otherwise face manifold dangers. The church justifies its role by guaranteeing salvation to its
followers who, it says, would otherwise be destined to an unredeemed death. Both the state and the church
require considerable effort to maintain order within and around themselves, and thereby engage in an
evangelism of fear to ward off internal and external threats, succumbing in the process to the temptation to
treat difference as otherness. In contrast to the statist discourse of international relations, this understanding
proffers an entirely different orientation to the question of foreign policy. In addition to the historical
discussion above, which suggested that it was possible to argue that the state was not prior to the interstate
system, this interpretation means that instead of regarding foreign policy as the external view and
rationalist orientation of a preestablished state, the identity of which is secure before it enters into relations
with others, we can consider foreign policy as an integral part of the discourses of danger that serve to
discipline the state. The state, and the identity of "man" located in the state, can therefore be regarded as the
effects of discourses of danger that more often than not employ strategies of otherness. Foreign policy thus
needs to be understood as giving rise to a boundary rather than acting as a bridge. (47-48)

Security rhetoric furthers the perpetual threat of destruction and justifies unending,
state-sanctioned violence.
Coviello 2000 (Peter Coviello, assistant professor of English at Bowdoin College, Apocalypse From Now
On, 2000)
Perhaps. But to claim that American culture is at present decisively postnuclear is not to say that the
world we inhabit is in any way post-apocalyptic. Apocalypse, as I began by saying, changed it did
not go away. And here I want to hazard my second assertion: if, in the nuclear age of yesteryear,
apocalypse signified an event threatening everyone and everything with (in Jacques Derridas
suitably menacing phrase) remainderless and a-symbolic destruction, then in the postnuclear
world apocalypse is an affair whose parameters are definitively local. In shape and in substance,
apocalypse is defined now by the affliction it brings somewhere else, always to an other people
whose very presence might then be written as a kind of dangerous contagion, threatening the safety
and prosperity of a cherished general population. This fact seems to me to stand behind Susan
Sontags incisive observation, from 1989, that, Apocalypse is now a long running serial: not
Apocalypse Now but Apocalypse from Now On. The decisive point here in the perpetuation of

the threat of apocalypse (the point Sontag goes on, at length, to miss) is that the apocalypse is ever
present because, as an element in a vast economy of power, it is ever useful. That is, though the
perpetual threat of destruction through the constant reproduction of the figure of the apocalypse
the agencies of power ensure their authority to act on and through the bodies of a particular
population. No one turns this point more persuasively than Michel Foucault, who in the final chapter
of his first volume of The History of Sexuality addressess himself to the problem of a power that is
less repressive than productive, less life-threatening than, in his words, life-administering. Power,
he contends, exerts a positive influence on life [and] endeavors to administer, optimize, and
multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations. In his brief comments
on what he calls the atomic situation, however, Foucault insists as well that the productiveness of
modern power must not be mistaken for a uniform repudiation of violent or even lethal means. For
as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, agencies of modern power presume to act
on the behalf of the existence of everyone. Whatsoever might be construed as a threat to life and
survival in this way serves to authorize any expression of force, no matter how invasive, or, indeed,
potentially annihilating. If genocide is indeed the dream of modern power, Foucault writes, this
is not because of a recent return to the ancient right to kill it is because power is situated and
exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population.
For a state that would arm itself not with the power to kill its population, but with a more
comprehensive power over the patters and functioning of its collective life, the threat of an
apocalyptic demise, nuclear or otherwise, seems a civic initiative that can scarcely be done without.

C THE IMPACT:THE LOGIC OF SECURITY MAKES ANNIHILATION

INEVITABLE
The inability to accept the inherent disorder of existence and the arena of
international relations in particular results in a violent struggle to overcome
uncertainty in the name of an unattainable securitythis futile quest has brought
into existence the technology to eradicate life on earth and the political context that
makes such an apocalypse both possible and necessary.
Campbell and Dillon, professor of international politics at the University of Newcastle and professor of politics at Lancaster University, 1993 [David
and Michael, The Political Subject of Violence, p. 163-165]
This interpretation of violence as constitutive of identity might, paradoxically, offer the only hope of some amelioration of the worst
excesses of violence exhibited by the formation of (political) identity. The orthodox rendering of such violence as premodern abdicates its responsibility to a predetermined historical fatalism. For if these ethnic and nationalist

conflicts are understood as no more than settled history rearing its ugly head, then there is nothing that can
be done in the present to resolve the tension except to repress them again. In this view, the historical drama
has to be enacted according to its script, with human agency in suspension while nature violently plays
itself out. The only alternative is for nature to be overcome as the result of an idealistic transformation at the hands
of reason. Either way, this fatalistic interpretation of the relationship between violence and the political is rooted in a hypostatised
conception of man/nature as determinative of the social/political: the latter is made possible only once the former runs its course, or if
it is overturned. It might have once been the case that the prospect of a transformation of nature by reason seemed
both likely and hopefulindeed, many of the most venerable of the debates in the political theory of international relations
revolved around this very point. But, having reached what Foucault has called societys threshold of modernity, we now face a
prospect that radically re-figures the parameters of politics: the real prospect of extinction. As Foucault argues,
we have reached this threshold because
the life of the species is wagered on its own political strategies. For millennia, man remained what he was for
Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity of a political existence: modern man is an animal whose
politics place his existence as a living being in question.

How the prospect of extinction might materialise itself is an open question. That increasingly it can be
materialised, militarily, ecologically and politically, is not. The double bind of this prospect is that modernitys
alternative of transformation through reason is not only untenable, it is deeply complicit in the form of
(inter)national life that has been responsible for bringing about the real prospect of extinction in the first
place. The capacity of violence to eradicate being was engendered by reasons success; not merely, or perhaps
even most importantly, by furnishing the technological means, but more insidiously in setting the parameters
of the political (Ia politique, to use the useful terms of debate in which Simon Critchley engages) while fuelling the violent
practices of politics (la politique). The reliance on reason as that which could contain violence and reduce the real
prospect of extinction may prove nothing less than a fatal misapprehension. In support of this proposition,
consider the interpretive bases of the Holocaust. For all that politics in the last fifty years has sought to exceptionalise the
Nazis genocide as an aberrant moment induced by evil personalities, there is no escaping the recognition that modern political
life lies heavily implicated in the instigation and conduct of this horror. In so far as modernity can be
characterised as the promotion of rationality and efficiency to the exclusion of alternative criteria for action,
the Holocaust is one outcome of the civilising process . With its plan rationally to order Europe through the elimination
of an internal other, its bureaucratised administration of death, and its employment of the technology of a modern state, the
Holocaust was not an irrational outflow of the not-yet-fully-eradicated residence of pre-modern barbarity. It was a
legitimate resident in the house of modernity; indeed, one who would not be at home in any other house. The
paradoxical nature of modernity is suggested by the emergence of a Holocaust from within its bosom. And there can be no better
indication in contradistinction to those modernists who would like to brand so-called postmodernists with the responsibility for all
and future Holocausts that a reliance on established traditions of reason for ethical succour and the progressive amelioration of the
global human condition may be seriously misplaced. The comfort we have derived from the etiological myth of

modern politics has occluded the way in which the civilising process of which that myth speaks has
disengaged ethics from politics. As Bauman concludes:

the civilizing process is, among other things, a process of

divesting the use and deployment of violence from moral calculus, and of emancipating
the desiderata of rationality from interference of ethical norms and moral inhibitions.
We need to take stock of the evidence that

D -- Our alternative is to reject the affirmative in favor of a critical approach to

security. This is crucial to open space for emancipatory perspectivesour critique is
mutually exclusive with the affirmative.

Bilgin 5Pinar Bilgin, Associate Professor of International Relations at Bilkent University (Turkey)
[Conclusion, Regional Security in the Middle East: A Critical Perspective, Published by Routledge,
ISBN 0415325498, p. 205-207]

Emphasising the mutually interactive relationship between intellectuals and social

movements should not be taken to suggest that the only way for intellectuals to make a
change is to get directly involved in political action. They can also intervene by providing a
critique of the existing situation, calling attention to what future outcomes may result if
necessary action is not taken at present, and by pointing to potential for change immanent
in regional politics. Students of security could help create the political space for alternative
agents of security to take action by presenting appropriate critiques . It should be emphasised
however that such thinking should be anchored in the potential immanent in world politics. The hope is that
non-state actors (who may or may not be aware of their potential to make a change) may constitute
themselves as agents of security when presented with an alternative reading of their situation.
Thinking about the future becomes even more crucial once theory is [end page 205]
conceptualised as constitutive of the reality it seeks to respond to . In other words, our ideas
about the futureour conjectures and prognoseshave a self-constitutive potential . What
the students of Cold War Security Studies consider as a more realistic picture of the future becomes real
through practice, albeit under circumstances inherited from the past. Thinking about what a desired future
would look like is significant for the very same reason; that is, in order to be able to turn it into a reality
through adopting emancipatory practices. For, having a vision of a desired future empowers
people(s) in the present.
Presenting pictures of what a desired future might look like, and pointing to the security community
approach as the start of a path that could take us from an insecure past to a more secure future is not to
suggest that the creation of a security community is the most likely outcome. On the contrary, the dynamics
pointed to throughout the book indicate that there exists a potential for descent into chaos if no action is
taken to prevent militarisation and fragmentation of societies, and the marginalisation of peoples as well as
economies in an increasingly globalising world. However, these dynamics exist as threats to the future to
use Becks terminology; and only by thinking and writing about them that can one mobilise preventive
action to be taken in the present. Viewed as such, critical approaches present not an optimistic,
but a more realistic picture of the future. Considering how the realism of Cold War Security
Studies failed not only when judged by its own standards, by failing to provide an adequate
explanation of the world out there, but also when judged by the standards of critical
approaches, as it was argued, it could be concluded that there is a need for more realistic approaches to
regional security in theory and practice.
The foregoing suggests three broad conclusions. First, Cold War Security Studies did not present the
realistic picture it purported to provide. On the contrary, the pro-status quo leanings of the Cold War
security discourse failed to allow for (let alone foresee) changes such as the end of the Cold War,
dissolution of some states and integration of some others. Second, notwithstanding the important inroads
critical approaches to security made in the post-Cold War era, much traditionalist thinking remains and
maintains its grip over the security practices of many actors. Third, critical approaches offer a fuller
or more adequate picture of security in different parts of the world (including the Middle East).
Cold War Security Studies is limited not only because of its narrow (military-focused), prostatus quo and state-centric (if not statist) approach to security in theory and practice, but

also because of its objectivist conception of theory and the theory/practice relationship that
obscured the mutually constitutive relationship between them. Students of critical approaches
have sought to challenge Cold War Security Studies, its claim to knowledge and its hold over security
practices by pointing to the mutually constitutive relationship between theory and practice and revealing
[end page 206] how the Cold War security discourse has been complicit in constituting (in)security in
different parts of the world. The ways in which the Cold War security discourse helped constitute the
Middle East by way of representing it as a region, and contributed to regional insecurity in the Middle
East by shaping security practices, is exemplary of the argument that theories do not leave the world
untouched.
The implication of these conclusions for practice is that becoming aware of the politics behind the
geographical specification of politics and exploring the relationship between (inventing)
regions and (conceptions and practices of) security helps reveal the role human agency has
played in the past and could play in the future. An alternative approach to security , that of
critical approaches to security, could inform alternative (emancipatory) practices thereby helping
constitute a new region in the form of a security community. It should be noted, however, that to

argue that everything is socially constructed or that all approaches have normative
concerns embedded in them is a significant first step that does not by itself help one adopt
emancipatory practices. As long as people rely on traditional practices shaped by the Cold War security
discourse - which remains prevalent in the post-Cold War era - they help constitute a reality in line with
the tenets of realist Cold War Security Studies. This is why seeking to address evolving crises through
traditional practices whilst leaving a critical security perspective to be adopted for the long-term will not
work. For, traditionalist thinking and practices, by helping shape the reality out there,

foreclose the political space necessary for emancipatory practices to be adopted by multiple
actors at numerous levels. Hence the need for the adoption of a critical perspective that
emphasises the roles human agency has played in the past and could play in the future in
shaping what human beings choose to call reality. Generating such an awareness of the
potentialities of human agency could enable one to begin thinking differently about regional
security in different parts of the world whilst remaining sensitive to regional actors
multiple and contending conceptions of security, what they view as referent(s) and how they
think security should be sought in different parts of the world.
After decades of statist, military-focused and zero-sum thinking and practices that
privileged the security of some whilst marginalising the security of others, the time has
come for all those interested in security in the Middle East to decide whether they want to be
agents of a world view that produces more of the same, thereby contributing towards a
threat to the future, or of alternative futures that try to address the multiple dimensions of
regional insecurity. The choice is not one between presenting a more optimistic or
pessimistic vision of the future, but between stumbling into the future expecting more of
the same, or stepping into a future equipped with a perspective that not only has a
conception of a desired future but is also cognisant of threats to the future .

Link General Security

The AFFs imagination of war and catastrophe is part and
parcel of a cultural politics of fear and anxiety which
writes trauma into every aspect of life. The 1AC security
frame ensures a mania surrounding the coming trauma,
ensuring the perpetuation of a constant state of warfare
and closing off all epistemologies which do not obsess
about looming threats to life.
Neocleous 2012
/Mark, Professor of the Critique of Political Economy, Politics and History @ Brunel University, London,
Dont Be Scared, Be Prepared: Trauma-Anxiety-Resilience, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 2012
37: 188 originally published online 13 June 2012, DOI: 10.1177/0304375412449789, SAGEOnline/
The idea of trauma is now deeply engrained in our political, cultural, and intellectual
universe. What in the seventeenth century was a surgeons term to describe a physical wound,
transformed in the nineteenth century to include psychic ailments comparable to shock, morphed into
shell shock and nervous trauma by the end of World War I (WWI) and from there eventually

became a psychiatric category now used to describe experience of war, genocide, and
catastrophe. The history of the category could be described as moving from the idea of physical damage
to the mental health system and on to the social management of major disasters.1 This is most
obviously true in the discourse surrounding war and conflict at some point in the future, note
the editors of one collection of essays on the trauma of war, historians looking back at the wars of the
1980s, 1990s, and early twentieth century will notice trauma projects appearing alongside food, health,
and shelter interventions.2 Yet the historians will also see a highly traumatized society in general, as

trauma has become the discourse through which not only catastrophic events are
articulated, but through which virtually all sufferings are expressed: That was really
traumatic! is now thought to be an appropriate response to any event that would once
have been described as rather unpleasant or quite difficult. It is this everydayness, or
naturalness, of trauma talk that I want to engage here. When categories and concepts take on an
increasing appearance of being the natural categories through which we are encouraged to think, critical
theory needs to be on the alert. Such is the case with trauma. My main purpose is to explore what all
this trauma talk might be doing, ideologically and politically. Such a task places us on the
terrain of the relationship between security and anxiety. A glance at any security text, from the
most mundane government pronouncement to the most sophisticated literature within academic security
studies, reveals that through the politics of security runs a political imagination of fear and
anxiety. I want to first explore this relation before connecting it with the question of trauma. In so doing I
suggest that the management of trauma and anxiety has become a way of mediating the

demands of an endless security war: a war of security, awar for security, awar through
security; a war whose permanence and universality has been established to match the
permanence and universality of our supposed desire for security . The article therefore has
nothing to say about governing traumatic events. Rather, it seeks to understand the emergence of a
hypertrophied concept of trauma and the proliferation of discourses of anxiety as
ideological mechanisms deployed for the security crisis of endless war; deployed , I will argue,
as a training in resilience. As such, I want to suggest that the language of trauma and anxiety,
and the training in resilience that is associated with these terms, weds us to a deeply conservative
mode of thinking, with the superficial humanitarianism supposedly captured in the
discourse of trauma in fact functioning as a means of cutting off political alternatives.

Link Security Rhetoric

Security rhetoric presumes a conception of peace that leads to inevitable violence
and undermines human security
Sandy & Perkins 1 (Leo R.,

co-founder of Peace Studies at Plymouth State College and Ray,

teacher of philosophy at Plymouth State College, The Nature of Peace and Its Implications for Peace Education
Online Journal of Peace and Conflict Resolutions, 4.2)

Also, versions of this name appear on entrances to some military bases. Keeping "peace" in this
manner evokes the theme in Peggy Lee's old song, "Is That All There is?" What this really comes
down to is the idea of massive and indiscriminate killing for peace, which represents a morally
dubious notion if not a fault of logic. The point here is that a "peace" that depends upon the
threat and intention to kill vast numbers of human beings is hardly a stable or justifiable
peace worthy of the name. Those in charge of waging war know that killing is a questionable
activity. Otherwise, they would not use such euphemisms as "collateral damage" and "smart bombs"
to obfuscate it.

Security rhetoric props up the legitimization of the state to a point where

elimination of all that is foreign to maintain the safety of the inside is justified
Steans 98 (Senior Lecturer in International Relations Theory , Department of Political Science and International Studies,
University of Birmingham, Gender and International Relations: An Introduction, 108-109)

Critical approaches to International Relations criticize the state centrism of realism, not only
because it is inherently reductionist, but also because it presents a view of the state as a concrete entity with
interests and agency. Not only does the state act, but the state acts in the national interest. Those who adopt critical approaches 15
view the state in dynamic rather than static terms, as a process rather than a thing. The state does not exist in any concrete sense; rather it is
made. The

state is made by the processes and practices involved in constructing boundaries and
identities, differentiating between the inside and the outside. Andrew Linklater has recently argued that
critical approaches to the study of International Relations centre around understanding the processes of inclusion and exclusion, which have
in a sense always been the central concerns of the discipline.16 However, as Linklater contends, critical theorists understand that these processes have also worked to include and exclude people on the basis of race, class and gender.7 In

the making of the state

the construction of the hostile other which is threatening and dangerous is central to the
making of identities and the securing of boundaries. Indeed, David Campbell argues that the legitimation of
state power demands the construction of danger outside. The state requires this discourse of
danger to secure its identity and for the legitimation of state power. The consequence of this is
that threats to security in realist and neo-realist thinking are all seen to be in the external realm and citizenship becomes synonymous with
loyalty to the nation-state and the elimination of all that is foreign.8 Jean Elshtain has argued that the problems of war and
the difficulties of achieving security in the so-called anarchy of the international realm, should not be seen as problems which are not rooted
in the compulsions of interstate relations as such.9 Rather, they arise from the ordering of modern, technological society in which political
elites have sought to control the masses by the implementation of the mechanism of the perfect army.20 Elshtain argues that to see war as a
continuation of politics by other means, is to see a continuation of the military model as a means of preventing civil disorder.2 In critiquing
dominant conceptions of security in International Relations, feminists have, to some extent, echoed the arguments of non-feminist critical
thinkers, but have been concerned to show what is lost from our understanding of security when gender is omitted. As was noted in chapter 4,
feminist political theorists have demonstrated that in much Western political thought the conception of politics and the public realm is a
barracks community, a realm defined in opposition to the disorderly forces which threaten its existence.22 This

same conception
of politics is constructed out of masculine hostility towards the female Other. One sees in the
development of this political discourse a deeply gendered subtext in which the citizen role is in
all cases identified with the male.23 Hartsock believes that this sets a hostile and combative dualism at the heart of the
community men construct and by which they come to understand their lives.

Framing the foreign as unstable portrays them inferior and perpetuates our
relationship with the Other in terms of domination and subordination
Tickner 92 (J. Ann, Professor of International Relations at University of South California, Gender in
International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security, 8-9)

Extending Scott s challenge to the field of international relations, we can immediately detect a
similar set of hierarchical binary oppositions. But in spite of the seemingly obvious association of
international politics with the masculine characteristics described above, the field of international
relations is one of the last of the social sciences to be touched by gender analysis and feminist
perspectives. 1 The reason for this, I believe, is not that the field is gender neutral, meaning that the
introduction of gender is irrelevant to its subject matter as many scholars believe, but that it is so
thoroughly masculinized that the workings of these hierarchical gender relations are hidden.
Framed in its own set of binary distinctions, the discipline of international relations assumes
similarly hierarchical relationships when it posits an anarchic world outside to be defended
against through the accumulation and rational use of power. In political discourse, this becomes
translated into stereotypical notions about those who inhabit the outside. Like women, foreigners
are frequently portrayed as the other: nonwhites and tropical countries are often depicted
as irrational, emotional, and unstable, characteristics that are also attributed to women. The
construction of this discourse and the way in which we are taught to think about international
politics closely parallel the way in which we are socialized into understanding gender differences.
To ignore these hierarchical constructions and their relevance to power is therefore to risk
perpetuating these relationships of domination and subordination . But before beginning to
describe what the field of international relations might look like if gender were included as a central
category of analysis, I shall give a brief historical overview of the field as it has traditionally been
constructed.

By replicating the predominant image of a global space

teeming with dangers against which a national home must
be secured, the discourse of the 1AC contributes to the
emergence of destructive security-state that becomes
indistinguishable from the forms of violence it seeks to
prevent.
Agamben, Professor of Philosophy at the Collge International de Philosophie in Paris, 2002 [Giorgio, Theory & Event 5:4,
ProjectMuse]

Security as the basic principle of state politics dates back to the birth of the modern
state. Hobbes already mentions it as the opposite of the fear which compels human
beings to unite and form a society together. But not until the 18th century does the
paradigm of security reach its fullest development. In an unpublished lecture at the
Collge de France in 1978, Michel Foucault showed how in the political and economic
practice of the Physiocrats security opposes discipline and the law as instruments of
governance.
Neither Turgot and Quesnay nor the Physiocratic officials were primarily concerned
with the prevention of famine or the regulation of production, but rather wanted to
allow for their development in order to guide and "secure" their consequences. While
disciplinary power isolates and closes off territories, measures of security lead to an
opening and globalisation; while the law wants to prevent and prescribe, security
wants to intervene in ongoing processes to direct them. In a word, discipline wants to
produce order, while security wants to guide disorder. Since measures of security can
only function within a context of freedom of traffic, trade, and individual initiative,
Foucault can show that the development of security coincides with the development
of liberal ideology.
Today we are facing extreme and most dangerous developments of this paradigm of
security. In the course of a gradual neutralisation of politics and the progressive
surrender of traditional tasks of the state, security imposes itself as the basic

principle of state activity. What used to be one among several decisive measures of
public administration until the first half of the twentieth century, now becomes the
sole criterion of political legitimation. Security reasoning entails an essential risk. A
state which has security as its only task and source of legitimacy is a fragile
organism; it can always be provoked by terrorism to turn itself terroristic.
We should not forget that the first major organisation of terror after the war, the
Organisation de l'Arme Secrte (OAS) was established by a French General who
thought of himself as patriotic and who was convinced that terrorism was the only
answer to the guerilla phenomenon in Algeria and Indochina. When politics, the way
it was understood by theorists of the "Polizeiwissenschaft" in the eighteenth century,
reduces itself to police, the difference between state and terrorism threatens to
disappear. In the end it may lead to security and terrorism forming a single deadly
system in which they mutually justify and legitimate each others' actions.
The risk is not merely the development of a clandestine complicity of opponents but
that the hunt for security leads to a worldwide civil war which destroys all civil
coexistence. In the new situation -- created by the end of the classical form of war
between sovereign states -- security finds its end in globalisation: it implies the idea
of a new planetary order which is, in fact, the worst of all disorders. But there is yet
another danger. Because they require constant reference to a state of exception,
measures of security work towards a growing depoliticization of society. In the long
run, they are irreconcilable with democracy.
Nothing is therefore more important than a revision of the concept of security as the
basic principle of state politics. European and American politicians finally have to
consider the catastrophic consequences of uncritical use of this figure of thought. It is
not that democracies should cease to defend themselves, but the defense of
democracy demands today a change of political paradigms and not a world civil war
which is just the institutionalization of terror. Maybe the time has come to work
towards the prevention of disorder and catastrophe, and not merely towards their
control. Today, there are plans for all kinds of emergencies (ecological, medical,
military), but there is no politics to prevent them. On the contrary, we can say that
politics secretly works towards the production of emergencies. It is the task of
democratic politics to prevent the development of conditions which lead to hatred,
terror, and destruction -- and not to reduce itself to attempts to control them once
they occur.

Security discourse results in ethical segregation of non-western others

Campbell 5 (David. Professor of cultural and political geography at Durham University Oil, Empire,
and the Sports Utility Vehicle: The Biopolitics of Security American Quarterly 57.3, 943-972 )
Over time, of course, ambiguity is disciplined, contingency is fixed, and dominant meanings are
established. In the history of U.S. foreign policyregardless of the radically different contexts
in which it has operatedthe formalized practices and ritualized acts of security discourse
have worked to produce a conception of the United States in which freedom, liberty, law,
democracy, individualism, faith, order, prosperity, and civilization are claimed to exist because of
the constant struggle with and often violent suppression of opponents said to embody tyranny,
oppression, anarchy, totalitarianism, collectivism, atheism, and barbarism.
This record demonstrates that the boundary-producing political performance of foreign policy does
more than inscribe a geopolitical marker on a map. This construction of social space also involves
an axiological dimension in which the delineation of an inside from an outside gives rise to a
moral hierarchy that renders the domestic superior and the foreign inferior. Foreign policy
thus incorporates an ethical power of segregation in its performance of identity/difference.
While this produces a geography of "foreign" (even "evil") others in conventional terms, it also

requires a disciplining of "domestic" elements on the inside that challenge this state identity. This is
achieved through exclusionary practices in which resistant elements to a secure identity on the
"inside" are linked through a discourse of "danger" with threats identified and located on the
"outside." Though global in scope, these effects are national in their legitimation.12

Link Security Ideology

Security ideology paints the outside world as threatening and dangerous. Americas
identity becomes a suspicion of any threats from others within and outside our
borders and forces the elimination of all thats foreign
Tickner 95 (J. Ann, Professor of Policy at Holy Cross University, IR Theory Today)
When national security is defined negatively, as protection against outside military threats, the sense
of threat is reinforced by the doctrine of state sovereignty, which strengthens the boundary between a
secure community and a dangerous external environment. For this reason, many critics of realism

claim that, if security is to start with the individual, its ties to state sovereignty must be severed.
While E. H. Carr argued for he retention of the nation-state to satisfy people's need for identity,
those who are critical of state-centric analysis point to the dangers of a political identity
constructed out of exclusionary practices. In the present international system, security is tied to a
nationalist political identity which depends on the construction of those outsides as 'other' and
therefore dangerous. (Walker 1990) David Campbell suggests that security the
boundaries of this statist identity demands the construction of 'danger' on the outside: Thus,
threats to security in conventional thinking are all in the external realm. Campbell claims that
the state requires this discourse of danger to secure its identity and legitimation which depend
on the promise of security for its citizens. Citizenship becomes synonymous with loyalty and the
elimination of all that is foreign. Underscoring this distinction between citizens and people
reinforced by these boundary distinctions, Walker argues that not until people, rather than any
citizens, are the primary subjects of security can a truly comprehensive security be achieved.

Link Environment
Environmental apocalypticism causes ecoauthoritarianism and mass violence against those deemed
environmental threats also causes political apathy which
turns case
Buell 3 Frederickcultural critic on the environmental crisis and a Professor of English at Queens College and the author of
five books, From Apocalypse To Way of Life, pages 185-186

crisis discourse thus suffers from a number of

liabilities. First, it seems to have become a political liability almost
as much as an asset. It calls up a fierce and effective opposition
with its predictions; worse, its more specific predictions are all too
vulnerable to refutation by events. It also exposes
environmentalists to being called grim doomsters and antilife
Puritan extremists. Further, concern with crisis has all too often
tempted people to try to find a total solution to the problems
involved a phrase that, as an astute analyst of the limitations of
crisis discourse, John Barry, puts it, is all too reminiscent of the
Third Reichs infamous final solution .55 A total crisis of
societyenvironmental crisis at its gravestthreatens to translate
despair into inhumanist authoritarianism ; more often, however, it helps
Looked at critically, then,

It thus leads, Barry suggests, to the belief

that only elite- and expert-led solutions are possible.56 At the same
time it depoliticizes people, inducing them to accept their impotence as individuals;
this is something that has made many people today feel, ironically and/or passively, that since it
makes no difference at all what any individual does on his or her
own, one might as well go along with it. Yet another pitfall for the full and sustained elaboration of
keep merely dysfunctional authority in place.

environmental crisis is, though least discussed, perhaps the most deeply ironic. A problem with deep
cultural and psychological as well as social effects, it is embodied in a startlingly simple proposition:

the worse one feels environmental crisis is, the more one is
tempted to turn ones back on the environment. This means,
preeminently, turning ones back on nature on traditions of nature

feeling, traditions of knowledge about nature (ones that range from organic farming techniques to
the different departments of ecological science),

and traditions of nature-based

activism. If nature is thoroughly wrecked these days, people need

to delink from nature and live in postnaturea conclusion that, as the next
chapter shows, many in U.S. society drew at the end of the millenium. Explorations of how
deeply nature has been wounded and how intensely vulnerable to and dependent
on human actions it is can thus lead, ironically, to further indifference to
nature-based environmental issues, not greater concern with
them. But what quickly becomes evident to any reflective consideration of the difficulties of crisis
discourse is that all of these liabilities are in fact bound tightly up with

one specific notion of environmental crisiswith 1960s- and 1970s-style

environmental apocalypticism. Excessive concern about them does not recognize that crisis
discourse as a whole has significantly changed since the 1970s. They remain inducements to look
away from serious reflection on environmental crisis only if one does not explore how environmental
crisis has turned of late from apocalypse to dwelling place.

The apocalyptic mode had a

number of prominent features: it was preoccupied with running out and running into
walls; with scarcity and with the imminent rupture of limits; with actions that
promised and temporally predicted imminent total meltdown; and
with (often, though not always) the need for immediate total solution .
Thus doomsterism was its reigning mode; ecoauthoritarianism was a grave temptation; and as crisis was
elaborated to show more and more severe deformations of nature, temptation
increased to refute it, or give up, or even cut off ties to clearly
terminal nature.

Catastrophic depictions of the environment embody the logic of security they

produce one-shot governmental solutions that utterly fail to resolve the underlying
harm
Roe, 12 (Paul Roe, Associate Professor in the Department of International Relations and European
Studies at Central European University, Budapest, Is securitization a negative concept? Revisiting the
normative debate over normal versus extraordinary politics, Security Dialogue vol. 43 no. 3, June 2012)
For the Copenhagen School, and particularly for Wver, desecuritization (politicization) might
be more effective than securitizing problems (Wver, 1995: 57; emphasis added). This is not
just a matter of the context within which problems are dealt with, but also has to do with the
long-term thinking that normal politics arguably brings with it. Although Wver is by no means
categorical in the claim that securitization is invariably worse than politicization, his thinking
nevertheless suggests that securitizing problems may not always result in better outcomes.5 For
example, Wver (1995: 65) restates Barry Buzans assertion that some environmental issues
might be tackled more effectively by the process-type remedies of economics, than by the statist
solutions of security logic. Similarly, Daniel Deudney (1990: 4657) has warned of the logic of
security being appropriated to create a sense of urgency in relation to the need to address
ecological problems: how some environmentalists endeavour to find a moral equivalence to
war. In particular, Deudney draws attention to how national securitys propensity for short-term
strategizing the desire that affairs are quickly returned to normal is not likely to make much
of a contribution to establishing patterns of environmentally sound behaviour. Because
conventional national security organizations have short-term horizons, the tendency not to
operate on the basis of long-term thinking represents a poor model for environmental problem
solving. Stefan Elbe has also raised questions over the efficacy of securitizing certain public
health concerns.6 In Elbes treatment of (the more specific) normative debate over the linking of
HIV/AIDS and security, he notes how framing the issue of HIV/AIDS as security pushes
responses to the disease away from civil society toward the much less transparent workings of
military and intelligence organizations, which also possess the power to override human rights
and civil liberties (Elbe, 2006: 128).7

Environmental issues become securitizing when extreme measures are taken to

conserve it- when the environment becomes an apriori issues to any others
Buzan et al, 1998 (Barry Bzzan, Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at the London
School of Economics and honorary professor at the University of Copenhagen and Jilin University, Ole
Waever, a professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science, University of
Copenhagen Jaap de Wilde, Professor of International Relations and World Politics at the University of
Groningen., 1998 Security: A New Framework for Analysis p.38)
Nor do system-level referent objects always lose out. Thus far they have done so in the military
and political sectors, where the security of humankind has generally had less appeal than that of
the state. But the story is different in other sectors. The environment is becoming an interesting
case, because groups are using a securitizing logic that exactly follows the format prescribed in
the previous section: the environment has to survive: therefore, this issue should take priority
over all others, because if the environment is degraded to the point of no return all other issues

will lose their meaning. If the normal system (politics according to the rules as they exist) is not
able to handle the situation, we (Greenpeace and especially the more extremist Eco terrorists)
will have to take extraordinary measures to save the environment. Sustainability might be the
environmentalists equivalent of the states sovereignty and the nations identity: it is the
essential constitutive principle that has to be protected. If the is idea catches on the environment
itself may be on the way to becoming a referent object- an object by reference to which security
action can be taken in a socially significant way. We discuss this more fully in Chapter 4. Once
this door is opened, one can see other plausible candidates for security referent objects at the
system level. Humankind as a whole achieved some status as a referent object in relation to
nuclear weapons and could do so again- perhaps more successfully- in relation to environmental
disasters, such as new ice ages or collisions between the earth and one or more of the many large
rocks that occupy near-earth space. The level of human civilization could also become the
referent object in relations to environmental threats.

Environment link
The extension of security logic to the environment reinforces current environmental
trends, and results in the destruction of human civilization and endangers our mere
existence
Dalby 2002 (Simon, professor of geography and political economy at Carleton University,
Environmental Security, 2002, pg. 144-6)
This observation makes the question of what is to be secured especially important. The
possibility that the ecological costs of globalizing omnivorous consumption might drastically
destabilize the biosphere is the rationale for many invocations to think about environmental
security, as well as the related appeals for global environmental management that so worry
"global ecology" thinkers like Wolfgang Sachs.2 While Peter Taylor calls such a program an
eco-fascist world order, the World Order Models Project has discussed these matters in terms of
eco-imperialism and made the argument that such practices are effectively already in action.3
Tim Luke's warning that environmentalists often, if sometimes inadvertently, support such
projects in their zeal to monitor and encourage managerial responses to political crises extends
these observations to once again emphasize the importance of the discursive politics of forms of
ecocritique.4 From this it is clear that a program of environmental management will have to
understand human ecology better than conventional international relations does if world politics
in the global city is going to seriously tackle environmental sustainability. Accelerating attempts
to manage planet Earth using technocratic, centralized modes of control, whether dressed up in
the language of environmental security or not, may simply exacerbate existing trends. The
frequent failures of resource management techniques premised on assumptions about stable
ecosystems are even more troubling in the case of claims about the necessity of managing the
whole planet. Given the inadequacy of many existing techniques, if these practices are to be
extended to the scale of the globe, the results are potentially disastrous. In the face of extreme
disruption, no comfort can be taken from biospheric thinking or the Gaia hypothesis. As James
Lovelock has pointed out, the question for humanity is not just the continued existence of
conditions fit for life on the planet. In the face of quite drastic structural change in the biosphere
in the past, the climatic conditions have remained within the limits that have assured the overall
survival of life-but not necessarily the conditions suitable for contemporary human civilization.
The political dilemma and the irony here is that the political alternative to global managerial
efforts, that of political decentralization and local control, which is often posited by green theory,
frequently remains in thrall to the same limited political imaginary of the domestic analogy and
avoids dealing with the hard questions of coordination by wishing them away in a series of
geographical sleights of hand coupled to the rearticulation of the discourses of political
idealism.5 Given that the ecological analyses of biospheric processes and the human ecology
discussions of biospheric people suggest both the global scope of processes of disruption and the
intrinsic instabilities of ecology, the importance of politics and the inadequacies of international
relations to grapple with its complexities is only emphasized in the face of these calls for either
global management or radical decentralization.6 The widespread failure of the omnivores to
acknowledge the consequences of their actions is a crucial part of these concerns, and this
responsibility is often obscured by the construction of security in terms of technological and
modernist managerial assertions of control within a geopolitical imaginary of states and
territorial entities, urbane civilization and primitive wilderness. But as the focus on human
ecology demonstrates, nature is not just there anymore; it is also unavoidably here, in part a
consequence of human activities, which, although often out of sight to urban residents, cannot
remain out of mind in considering matters of world politics and the radical endangerment of
human "being" as a result of the practices of securing modern modes of existence.

Environment link
Construction of environmental threats produces securitizing measures but no real
change- no solvency
Buzan et al, 1998 (Barry Buzan, Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at the London
School of Economics and honorary professor at the University of Copenhagen and Jilin University, Ole
Waever, a professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science, University of
Copenhagen Jaap de Wilde, Professor of International Relations and World Politics at the University of
Groningen., 1998 Security: A New Framework for Analysis p.73-74 )
It should be emphasized that the political agenda does not only address the more sensational,
emotion manifestations of environmental issues but has also become a part of ordinary politics.
Political parties, departments, and many firms must formulate environmental polities as a part of
their ordinary activities, regardless of whether they believe in them. This situation constitutes
politicization rather than securitization. As long as environmental concerns fall outside
established economic and political practices and routines, their advocates tend to- and probably
must- overemphasize the overwhelming importance of those values and issues. Many
securitizing moves can be found in the reports that bridge both agenda, ranging from the Club of
Rome reports to the work of the Brudtland Commission. These reports present Silent Springtype lessons (de Wilde 1994: Carson 1962): It is not the actual disasters but their predictions that
lead to securitization. Concepts such as resource scarcity and sustainability have successfully
mobilized public concern. when picked up by governments and firms, however, these concerns
are often merely politicized: they constituted a subagenda within the larger political context. The
environmental sector displays more clearly than any other the propensity for dramatic
securitizing moves but with comparatively little successful securitization effects (i.e. those that
lead to extraordinary measures). this finding points to the unsettled standing of the
environmental discourse as such within public debate.

The blending of environmental and national impacts supports a securitized logic of

geopolitics, upholding the US as the only true global savior
Gearid Tuathail, Professor of Government and International Affairs and Director of the Masters of
Public and International Affairs program Virginia Tech, Sept 1996. AT THE END OF
GEOPOLITICS?. http://www.nvc.vt.edu/toalg/Website/Publish/papers/End.htm
Even within the much remarked upon emergence of "environmental security" and the sacred visions
of green governmentalists like Al Gore, geography is post-territorial in-flowmations of ozone gases,
acid rain, industrial pollution, topsoil erosion, smog emissions, rainforest depletions and toxic spills.
Yet, the discourse of unveiled and primordial geographical regions persists also. In the place of
Mackinder's natural seats of power, Gore presents the "great genetic treasure map" of the globe,
twelve areas around the globe that "hold the greatest concentration of germplasm important to
modern agriculture and world food production." Robert Kaplan's unsentimental journey to the "ends
of the earth" where cartographic geographies are unravelling and fading has him disclosing a "real
world" of themeless violence and chaos, a world where "[w]e are not in control." The specter of a
second Cold War -- "a protracted struggle between ourselves and the demons of crime, population
pressure, environmental degradation, disease and cultural conflict" -- haunt his thoughts. This
equivocal environmentalization of strategic discourse (and visa versa) -- and the environmental
strategic think tanks like the World Watch Institute which promote it -- deserve problematization as
clusters of postmodern geopolitics, in this case congealments of geographical knowledge and green
governmentality designed to re-charge the American polity with a circumscribed global
environmental mission to save planet earth from destruction.

The affirmative harms expand the concept of security from

traditional issues like war to include the environment, this
framing of the environment spills over massively expanding
government power and justifying militarism

Waever 95 (Ole, Senior Researcher at the Center for Peace & Conflict
Research, On Security, p. 63-64) KSM
Central to the arguments for the conceptual innovation of
environmental or ecological security41 is its mobilization potential. As
Buzan points out, the concept of national security "has an enormous power
as an instrument of social and political mobilization" and, therefore, "the
obvious reason for putting environmental issues into the security agenda is
the possible magnitude of the threats posed, and the need to mobilize
urgent and unprecedented responses to them. The security label is a useful
way both of signalling danger and setting priority, and for this reason alone it
is likely to persist in the environmental debates."42 Several analysts have,
however, warned against securitization of the environmental issue
for some of these very reasons, and some of the arguments I present
here fit into the principled issue of securitization/desecuritization as
discussed earlier in this chapter. A first argument against the environment as
a security issue, mentioned, for example, by Buzan, is that environmental
threats are generally unintentional.43 This, by itself, does not make
the threats any less serious, although it does take them out of the
realm of will. As I pointed out earlier, the field of security is constituted
around relationships between wills: It has been, conven tionally,
about the efforts of one will to (allegedly) override the sovereignty
of another, forcing or tempting the latter not to assert its will in
defense of its sovereignty. The contest of concern, in other words, is
among strategic actors imbued with intentionality, and this has been the
logic around which the whole issue of security has been framed. In light of
my earlier discussion, in which I stressed that "security" is not a reflection of
our everyday sense of the word but, rather, a specific field with traditions,
the jump to environmental security becomes much larger than
might appear at first to be the case. I do not present this as an
argument against the concept but, rather, as a way of illuminating or even
explaining the debate over it. Second in his critique of the notion of

environmental security, Richard Moss points out that the concept of

"security" tends to imply that defense from the problem is to
be provided by the state: The most serious consequence of
thinking of global change and other environmental problems as
threats to security is that the sorts of centralized gov ernmental
responses by powerful and autonomous state organizations
that are appropriate for security threats are inappropriate for
addressing most environmental problems. When one is
reacting to the threat of organized external violence,
military and intelligence institutions are empowered to take
the measures required to repel the threat. By this same logic,
when responding to environmental threats, response by
centralized regulatory agencies would seem to be logical.
Unfortunately, in most cases this sort of response is not the
most efficient or effective way of addressing environmental
problems, particularly those that have a global character. 44
Moss goes on to warn that "the instinct for centralized state responses

to security threats is highly inappropriate for responding

effectively to global environmental problems."45 It might, he points
out, even lead to militarization of environmental problems .46 A third
warning, not unrelated to the previous two, is the tendency for the
concept of security to produce thinking in terms of us-them,
which could then be captured by the logic of nationalism. Dan
Deudney writes that "the 'nation' is not an empty vessel or blank slate
waiting to be filled or scripted, but is instead profoundly linked to
war and 'us vs. them' thinking ( . . . ) Of course, taking the war and 'us
vs. them' thinking out of nationalism is a noble goal. But this may be like
taking sex out of 'rock and roll,' a project whose feasibility declines when one
remembers that 'rock and roll' was originally coined as a euphemism for
sex."47 The tendency toward "us vs. them" thinking, and the general
tradition of viewing threats as coming from outside a state's own
borders, are, in this instance, also likely to direct attention away
from one's own contributions to environmental problems." Finally,
there is the more political warning that the concept of security is basically
defensive in nature, a status quo concept defending that which is,
even though it does not necessarily deserve to be protected. In a
paradoxical way, this politically conservative bias has also led to warnings by
some that the concept of environmental security could become a dangerous
tool of the "totalitarian left," which might attempt to relaunch itself on the basis
of environmental collectivism." Certainly, there is some risk that the
logic of ecology, with its religious potentials and references to holistic
categories, survival and the linked significance of everything, might easily
lend itself to totalitarian projects, where also the science of ecology has
focused largely on how to constrain, limit, and control activities in
the name of the environment.50

Linking ecology to security misrepresents the nature and

significance of environmentalismenvironmental problems are
diffuse and long-term while wars are concentrated and violent
Dalby 2 (Simon, professor of geography and political economy at
Carleton University in Ottawa, Environmental Security, p. 16-17)
Discussions of the relationships between environment and security didn't start in 1989,
although at least in the United States it is fair to say that the topic emerged in its contemporary form
then." Against the backdrop of the long summer drought of 1988, alarmist reports of huge tropical
forest destruction, especially in Brazil, renewed concern about global climatic change and
stratospheric ozone depletion, the relaxation of the cold war, and the drastic rethinking of
Soviet security policy, policy discussions in Washington were ripe for some new topics and
thinking. Just as Francis Fukuyama was declaring the end of history and the triumph of liberalism,
the environment, too, became part of the foreign policy discussion and the focus for
discussions of endangerment.65 In 1989 Norman Meyers published an article linking environment
and security in Foreign Policy, and ,`Jessica Tuchman Mathews published one in Foreign Affairs
that suggested that resources and population issues mattered as foreign policy priorities and should
be incorporated in a reformulated understanding of security. Mike Renner's Worldwatch paper of
that same year also linked environment and security.66In Britain Neville Brown published a paper
on climate change and conflict in Survival, the journal of the influential Lute of Strategic Studies;
Peter Gleick reversed the process of introducing environment into security considerations by writing

about national security in the journal Climatic Change. Arthur Westing, the leading researcher on
questions of the environmental disruptions caused by warfare, contributed a discussion of a
comprehensive formulation of security. Josh Karliner suggested that the environmental difficulties
in Central America amounted to a different form of warfare there.67 National sovereignty and the
transboundary responsibilities for the global environment were also the topic for articles.68 Special
issues of the journals Millennium and the Fletcher Forum on International Affairs followed in 1990.
A little later Gwyn Prins introduced the discussion to wider British audiences in a book and television documentary with the memorably apt title of Top Guns and Toxic Whales.69 Daniel
Deudney was quick to pen a paper arguing that all this was not necessarily a good idea. In what has
probably become the most cited paper in this whole discussion, he argued that linking security
to ecology required a number of serious mismatches of means and ends as well as a
misconstrual of the nature and significance of environmentalism:70 He argued that
environmental problems are often diffuse and long-term while wars are concentrated and
violent. Polarizing discourses to mobilize populations against identifiedan tagonists is not
similar to the kinds of social changes needed to deal with environmental difficulties. With rapid
increases in international trade supplying raw materials from a diversity of sources, most re source conflicts were unlikely to lead to warfare. Before the debate had developed very far, one
of the arguments Deudney made, that military institutions' frequently dreadful record on
environmental matters in the past did not bode well for their handling matters of ecology in
the future, was powerfully reinforced by pictures of blazing oil wells in Kuwait in the latter
stages of the Gulf War in 1991.
The blending of environmental and national impacts supports a securitized logic of geopolitics,
upholding the US as the only true global savior
Gearid Tuathail, Professor of Government and International Affairs and Director of the Masters of Public and International
Affairs program Virginia Tech, Sept 1996. AT THE END OF GEOPOLITICS?.
http://www.nvc.vt.edu/toalg/Website/Publish/papers/End.htm

Even within the much remarked upon emergence of "environmental security" and the sacred visions
of green governmentalists like Al Gore, geography is post-territorial in-flowmations of ozone gases,
acid rain, industrial pollution, topsoil erosion, smog emissions, rainforest depletions and toxic spills.
Yet, the discourse of unveiled and primordial geographical regions persists also. In the place of
Mackinder's natural seats of power, Gore presents the "great genetic treasure map" of the globe,
twelve areas around the globe that "hold the greatest concentration of germplasm important to
modern agriculture and world food production." Robert Kaplan's unsentimental journey to the "ends
of the earth" where cartographic geographies are unravelling and fading has him disclosing a "real
world" of themeless violence and chaos, a world where "[w]e are not in control." The specter of a
second Cold War -- "a protracted struggle between ourselves and the demons of crime, population
pressure, environmental degradation, disease and cultural conflict" -- haunt his thoughts. This
equivocal environmentalization of strategic discourse (and visa versa) -- and the environmental
strategic think tanks like the World Watch Institute which promote it -- deserve problematization as
clusters of postmodern geopolitics, in this case congealments of geographical knowledge and green
governmentality designed to re-charge the American polity with a circumscribed global
environmental mission to save planet earth from destruction.
The institutionalization of environmental fears expands securitization into the social realm,
constructing whole populations as threats to be eliminated while ignoring degradations true cause
Barry Buzan et al, prof Intl Studes, University of Westminster, 1998. Security: A New Framework for Analysis. (Ole
Waever, senior research fellow, COPRI, and Jaap de Wilde, lecturer IR, University of Twente )
At first sight, there seems to be more room for natural hazards of the first type of threat: Nature
threatens civilization, and this is securitized. Many societies are structurally exposed to recurring
extreme natural events, such as earthquakes, volcanoes, cyclones, floods, droughts, and epidemics.
They are vulnerable these events, and much of heir history is about this continuous struggle with
nature. The risks involved are often explicitly securitized and institutionalized. In the Netherlands,

for example, protection against the sea and flooding rivers is a high-ranking national interest; the
same goes for protection against earthquakes in Japan.
As soon as some form of securitization or politization occurs, howeverthat is, when some
measure of human responsibilities replaces the role of fate of Godeven this group of conflicts
tends to develop a social character (the second type of threat). Following the river floods in the low
countries in 1995, the debate in the Netherlands was about political responsibility for he dikes: Who
was to blame, and what should be done? I Japan, following the Kobe earthquake in early 1995,
designers of seismological early warning systems and of construction techniques, as well as
governmental civil emergency plans, were under fire. Where the means to handle threats are
thought to exist, the security logic works less against nature than against the failure of the human
systems seen as responsible. Moreover, with links suspected between human activities and
natural catastrophes, the distinction between natural and manmade hazards is becoming blurred.
Therefore, except for cases in which people undergo natural hazards without any question, the logic
that environment security is about threats without enemies (Prins 1993) is often misleading.

Link Environment -- AT: Environmental

Security Good
The aff is about environmental conflict, not environmental
security they privilege resource scarcity and national
security. Only our alternative recognizes the role of
consumption.
Detraz and Betsill 9Nicole Detraz Poli Sci @ Memphis and Michele Betsill Poli Sci @ Colorado
St. [Climate Change and Environmental Security: For Whom the Discourse Shifts International Studies
Perspectives 10 p. 307-308]

From the environmental security perspective, policies should be targeted at both human
behavior and natural processes, as each of these contribute to environmental insecurity for
humans. Human behaviors that contribute to environmental insecurity include things such as
high consumption patterns (Barnett 2001; Princen, Maniates, and Conca 2002) and high
population levels9 (Pirages 1997; Worku 2007). Natural processes discussed in this discourse include
natural disasters or biophysical alterations such as changes in precipitation levels, the growth or decline of
species populations, or changes in levels of pathogenic microorganisms (Pirages and DeGeest 2004). It is
important to note that many of these natural processes can also be worsened by human behaviors such as
consumption and population growth. However, despite the potential contributions that humans make to
processes that lead to environmental insecurity, there is a different degree of intentionality in the
environmental security discourse when compared with the environmental conflict discourse. In the

environmental conflict discourse, humans have a high degree of intentionality. This means
that segments of society knowingly come into violent contact with each other because of the
presence or absence of a resource. From an environmental security perspective, humans are rarely
seen as intentionally contributing to the insecurity of others. Rather, they act in ways that are consistent
with the practices of their societies. Scholars working within the environmental security

discourse are likely to advocate policies that deal with not only the short-term instances of
environmental insecurity but also the longer-term strategies for combating processes of
environmental change. These policies must prioritize human security over national security,
meaning that the security of humans must be the main concern of security policy . This is in
contrast to policies advocated within the environmental conflict discourse, which tend to
have direct links to the security of states themselves either over or in conjunction with the
security of individuals. Environmental security policies will often involve direct action of states but will
also have a role for other actors. According to this storyline, states have a responsibility to protect the
security of their populations, but in some cases this will mean allocating authority to achieve this objective
to other actorseither above or below the state.10 The environmental security discourse focuses on a wide
variety of threats to humans due to environmental change. Policy making will be directed at vulnerable
populations where vulnerability is seen to stem from both human behaviors and natural processes. This may
require a portfolio of governance mechanisms at different scales, ranging from the local to the global, and
involving both state and nonstate actors. It may include policies aimed at minimizing human activities that
lead to environmental degradation as well as enhancing the ability of human populations to adapt to
environmental change. In sum, the environmental security and environmental conflict discourses represent
two distinct ways of conceptualizing the relationship between security and the environment. We contend
that the environmental conflict discourse is more than simply a part of the broader environmental security
discourse. As discussed above, each has its own storylines or narratives about these issues. Those who use
an environmental security discourse introduce a broad range of threats and vulnerabilities into their analysis
of environmental change, focus on the negative effects to human populations, and envision a broad array of
policy solutions. In contrast, the environmental conflict discourse uses a narrower set of
storylines to describe the link between security and the environment (emphasizing conflict),

privileges the security of the state over human populations, and proposes a more limited set
of policy solutions aimed at avoiding conflict over resources rather than eliminating the
sources of resource scarcity in the first place.

Climate conflict framing focuses on narrow adaptation

and militaristic preparation versus poor-states.
Detraz and Betsill 9Nicole Detraz Poli Sci @ Memphis and Michele Betsill Poli Sci @ Colorado
St. [Climate Change and Environmental Security: For Whom the Discourse Shifts International Studies
Perspectives 10 p. 313-314]
A security dialog is an understandable choice for those who wish to raise the profile of climate change on
the global agenda. As mentioned earlier, the inclusion of environmental concerns into security debates was
designed to raise the environment into the area of high politics. Many scholars and policy makers view
climate change as an issue worth all of the attention that is typically bestowed on traditional security issues.
In fact, many are convinced of the security implications of climate changealthough how security is
defined varies. At the same time, there are others who question whether framing climate change as a
security issue is beneficial. In a field that is marked by complexity, adding security to the debate may only
serve to confuse matters. As discussed throughout this paper, discourses have implications for the way a
problem like climate change is defined and the range of policy options that are considered. Ultimately, we
believe that a discursive shift to the environmental conflict perspective, even if limited to the Security
Council, would be counterproductive in the development of a global response to climate change. Our
primary concern is that a shift to the environmental conflict discourse would result in a
narrowing of policy options focused on a particular form of adaptation avoiding

conflictand that other issues of human security as well as adaptation and mitigation
strategies for addressing those issues could fall off the agenda . One of the problems of
relying on the environmental conflict discourse to understand the security implications of climate change is
that the climate issue is different than most other issues discussed in the literature that links
conflict and the environment. Climate change is a more abstract phenomenon than many other
environmental issues and will be experienced in different ways. While there is some variation in the
time horizon expected for climate change, the pace will be relatively slow but the impacts will spread to a
variety of environmental arenas, including water availability, food availability, and so on. (IPCC 2007).
This means that climate change is more likely to act as a threat multiplier than as a primary source of
insecurity. This presents different issues than those often tackled by the existing environmental conflict
cases, which tend to be focused on only one resource at a time.17 According to Purvis and Busby
(2004:68), the connection between climate change and the outbreak of violence will unlikely be as strong
as when natural resources can be exploited for quick financial reward. None of this is to suggest that
environmental conflict is unlikely to occur as a result of climate change. On the contrary, there is a
possibility that groups in society will conflict over resources if climate change results in resource
scarcity.18 Our point is that this is only one concern in the climate change debate and quite probably not
the most pressing concern. Another issue with the environmental conflict discourse is the

tendency to locate the authority for solutions and action in the military apparatus of
states. Allenby (2000:13) claims that the national security community in most countries is
conservative, insular , heavily focused on military threats and challenges,
secretive , and powerful; it also tends to focus on short-term, obvious problems.
Culturally, such security communities are among the least likely to embrace environmental considerations,
and, when they do so, only in a mission-oriented context. Scholars have long questioned whether armed
forces are capable of meeting the challenges posed by environmental change (Barnett 2003). Liotta and
Shearer (2007:133) argue against the idea that climate change in particular should be met with a militarized
response: The problems are too broadly distributed and the consequences are too deeply
penetrating for such an approach to be successful. These positions point out the tendency of

militarized solutions to be narrowly defined and potentially top-down . If climate

change requires a behavioral shift to achieve lasting solutions, then narrowly defined militarized solutions
are unlikely to be sufficient responses. These problems are in addition to the fact that militaries around the
world are responsible for major environmental damage, both through wartime and peacetime activities
(Paterson 2001; Liotta and Shearer 2007). It may be counterproductive to depend on the military apparatus
of states as a potential solution to environmental problems when they are simultaneously contributing to
those same problems. Lastly, a shift to the environmental conflict discourse may lead to the
continuation of the status quomeaning that those who are currently advantaged in society
will suffer much less from the impacts of climate change as well as the strategies for
mitigating climate change and vice versa. Nordas and Gleditsch (2007:635) claim that the security
scenarios may well be constructed with the benign intention of arousing the world to greater attention to a
global issue. But they could also lead to greater emphasis on a national security response to whatever
degree of climate change is seen as unavoidable. This would not be helpful to the primary victims of
climate change. This is true both in terms of states and segments of society. IPCC reports have claimed that
the negative impacts of climate change are expected to fall disproportionately on poor countries in Africa,
Asia, and Latin America (Biermann and Dingwerth 2004; Park 2005). Additionally, there are different
levels of vulnerability to climate change. Those impacted most are likely to be those who depend on natural
resources and ecosystem services for their livelihoods (Barnett and Adger 2007). This includes agriculturalbased economies in particular. If climate change is understood as a security issue tied to potential for
conflict, then these poor states are likely to be seen as a military threat first and foremost. This may result in
military strategies, like ecological intervention, rather than more humanitarian strategies to help those
suffering from environmental insecurity. A related concern is the potential for disadvantaged populations
within states to be targeted differently for climate change solutions. Paterson (1996) suggests that as
countries are hit by the negative impacts of climate change, existing ethnic, religious, or other divides may
play a role in decision-making processes, and governments may favor dominant groups in decisions.

Nondominant groups could be classified as the aggressor in an environmental conflict

situation and therefore become targets of environmental conflict solutions implemented by
the state.

Climate security discourse authorizes technocratic topdown politics.

Methmann and Rothe 12Chris Methmann, Research Associate Poli Sci Inst. @ Hamburg and
Delf Rothe IR PhD Candidate @ Hamburg [Politics for the day after tomorrow: The logic of apocalypse in
global climate politics Security Dialogue 43 p. 334-337]

Security: The war of all against nothing The third case study involves the UN Security Council
debate on climate change in 2007. This represents an extreme case, since here securitization is most likely
to result in exceptional measures. At first sight, the discourse here follows the script of securitization in the
Copenhagen Schools sense, articulating climate change as a source of conflict among states. However, our
analysis, as illustrated in Figure 2, reveals a much more fine-grained picture. To be precise, it actually
presents two different versions of securitization, drawing on two different antagonisms. On the one hand,
there is an antagonism constructed between first-order threatsthat is, the direct impacts of a changing
climateand all vulnerable regions, countries or communities. The security framing here is one of
human security, as climate change threatens the livelihoods, food supplies, water security ,
etc. of the vulnerable. On the other hand, these hot spots or zones of crisis can become a source of danger
themselves. The human insecurity in vulnerable regions, then, is articulated with what could be called a
neo-Malthusian climate-conflict discourse (Trombetta, 2008; Detraz and Betsill, 2009). This states, on the
one hand, that vulnerable regions suffering from the impacts of climate change will be conflict-prone, as
they lack the knowledge, capacity and resources to deal with it (Heller in UN Security Council, 2007b:
19). Environmental degradation and the resulting scarcity of resources are understood as an additional and
novel driver for conflicts (see Appendix). Taken together, these ideas constitute a security discourse
in which the vulnerable are becoming dangerous (Oels, 2012)that is, a threat for national

security in the Western world or even for international securit y. The vulnerable thus
become the dangerous enemies in the sense of the logic of security. And this clearly implies
the adoption of a preemptive logic and the exceptional measures of interstate
conflict and military intervention . Yet, even in the security field, preemptive or other
security measures, which can be found for example in disaster management (see Figure 2), only play a
minor role. The reason for this is that the two articulations of climate change and security are heavily
permeated by a different storyline, one that follows the logic of apocalypse (the fantasmatic dimension
presented in Figure 2). Also in this case most articulations stress the universality of the threat,
resulting in an antagonistic frontier between humanity and dangerous climate change that is characteristic
for the apocalypse (see above). And this explains why an exceptional rhetoric in the case of climate change
is not linked with the adoption of exceptional measures. While the climate/humanity antagonism is still
most dominantly couched in metaphors of war (see Appendix), the unification of humanity implies that this
particular war is fought against an entirely spectral enemy: this is not a struggle against anyone (Weisleder
in UN Security Council, 2007b: 32). And this war of all against nothing is the crucial point for the

logic of apocalypse that connects security and risk in this particular case and thus excludes
exceptional measuresbecause our conflict is not being fought with guns and missiles but with
weapons from everyday lifechimney stacks and exhaust pipes (Pita in UN Security Council, 2007b: 8).

The antagonism created by a logic of apocalypse does not just replace or transform the
other security articulations: it also links them in crucial ways . As Figure 2 shows, the most
prominent demand articulated in the discourse is prevention. And as second-order threats like
uncontrollable migratory flows (see Figure 2) mainly evolve under conditions of an apocalyptic climate
change, mitigation becomes the best measure of conflict prevention. Again, there is a dichotomization
between a linear development (e.g. normal migratory patterns) and a state of chaos. Therefore, also the
climate-security discourse heavily promotes the political machinery of the UN Framework Convention and
its Kyoto Protocol (Churkin in UN Security Council, 2007b: 17)just as appropriate incentives, public
private partnerships, low-carbon emitting technologies and innovative solutions (Kryzhanivskyi in UN
Security Council, 2007b: 4). At the same time, also adaptation becomes a form of conflict prevention, as it
lessens the direct impacts of climate change on the vulnerable. The discourse thus articulates a riskmanagement approach similar to that in the field of adaptation, which revolves around the concepts of
vulnerability, resilience and community (see, for example, Hill in UN Security Council, 2007b: 6;
(Koenders in UN Security Council, 2007a: 22). The hegemonic discourse here takes up the calls for
supporting the vulnerable with adaptation and constructs a responsibility on the part of the West (see
Appendix and Figure 2). This responsibility is transformed into a pastoral relation, taking the
form of government at a distance through empowerment, stakeholder participation and self
responsibilization of local communities. Also in the field of global security governance we can see
the impacts of the banality of the apocalypse (De Goede and Randalls, 2009: 872).
Even though climate change is commonly seen as one of the major threats to international
peace and security, this does not result in the adoption of exceptional measures not in
preemptive geo-engineering, not in a global climate response force, not in military pre-warning systems,
etc. Rather, the (political) machine of mitigation governance and the preparedness of the
vulnerable become the cornerstones of a broadened security agenda . Conclusion The starting
point of this article was the paradoxical simultaneity of the logic of risk and the logic of security in global
discourses of climate change. Drawing on Laclau and Mouffes theory of hegemony, we have argued that
risk and security have been articulated in a way that may be termed the logic of apocalypse: creating a
universal threat for the entire planet, radically undermining the possibility of a future as such, mobilizing
religious apocalyptic imageries and emphasizing an antiepistemology. Our empirical analysis in three cases
those of mitigation, adaptation and the security sectorreveals that this logic is deeply ingrained in
global discourses of climate change. Yet, apocalypse is the hegemonic way of articulating climate change
as a security problem. And, following our theoretical argument, this logic of apocalypse results coherently
in practices of risk management: mitigation as precautionary risk management, adaptation as investing in
preparedness, and security not as preemption but as a combination of the former two. In the face of the
apocalypse, politicians seem to be too small and human to resolve the dawning crisishence,

responsibility is handed over to the arcane and obscure practices and rationalities of risk

management. To conclude, we suggest that our study be read as outlining a contribution to critical
security studies that might be termed the security paradox. It may indeed be a recurrent pattern that
securitization, as the Copenhagen School holds, results in exceptional measures. However, there are
definitely some cases in which securitization is so overwhelming that it prompts a counterintuitive result:

the greater and more apocalyptic the perceived threat, the greater the resulting distrust in
political actors and exceptional measures, and thus the smaller and technocratic the
political measures ; here, securitization is so exaggerated that it prompts the opposite: routine
and micropractices of risk management. By contrast, for those working in the Foucauldian tradition, this
piece could draw attention to the fact that even the most mundane practices of risk management are
politically supported and discursively sustained by images of an overwhelming apocalyptic threat. In other
words, our work supports the emerging insight that risk and security are two sides of the same coinrather
than two very different animals.

Link Global Warming

Even if warming is true, framing it as apocalypse is strategically even more dangerous.
Crist 7 Ass. Prof. Sci & Tech in Society @ VT (Eileen, Telos 141, Winter, Beyond the Climate Crisis)
While the dangers of climate change are real, I argue that there are even greater dangers in representing it as
the most urgent problem we face. Framing climate change in such a manner deserves to be challenged for two
reasons: it encourages the restriction of proposed solutions to the technical realm, by powerfully insinuating that the
needed approaches are those that directly address the problem; and it detracts attention from the planets ecological
predicament as a whole, by virtue of claiming the limelight for the one issue that trumps all others. Identifying
climate change as the biggest threat to civilization, and ushering it into center stage as the highest priority problem, has bolstered the
proliferation of technical proposals that address the specific challenge. The race is on for figuring out what technologies, or portfolio
thereof, will solve the problem. Whether the call is for reviving nuclear power, boosting the installation of wind turbines,
using a variety of renewable energy sources, increasing the efficiency of fossil-fuel use, developing carbon-sequestering
technologies, or placing mirrors in space to deflect the suns rays, the narrow character of such proposals is evident:
confront the problem of greenhouse gas emissions by technologically phasing them out, superseding them,
capturing them, or mitigating their heating effects. In his The Revenge of Gaia, for example, Lovelock briefly mentions the need to
face climate change by changing our whole style of living.16 But the thrust of this work, what readers and policy-makers come
away with, is his repeated and strident call for investing in nuclear energy as, in his words, the one lifeline we can use
immediately.17 In the policy realm, the first step toward the technological fix for global warming is often identified with
implementing the Kyoto protocol. Biologist Tim Flannery agitates for the treaty, comparing the need for its successful endorsement to
that of the Montreal protocol that phased out the ozone-depleting CFCs. The Montreal protocol, he submits, marks a signal
moment in human societal development, representing the first ever victory by humanity over a global pollution problem.18 He hopes
for a similar victory for the global climate-change problem. Yet the deepening realization of the threat of climate change, virtually in
the wake of stratospheric ozone depletion, also suggests that dealing with global problems treaty-by-treaty is no solution to the
planets predicament. Just as the risks of unanticipated ozone depletion have been followed by the dangers of a long underappreciated
climate crisis, so it would be nave not to anticipate another (perhaps even entirely unforeseeable) catastrophe arising after the (hopedfor) resolution of the above two. Furthermore, if greenhouse gases were restricted successfully by means of technological shifts and
innovations, the root cause of the ecological crisis as a whole would remain unaddressed. The destructive patterns of
production, trade, extraction, land-use, waste proliferation, and consumption, coupled with population growth,
would go unchallenged, continuing to run down the integrity, beauty, and biological richness of the Earth. Industrial-consumer
civilization has entrenched a form of life that admits virtually no limits to its expansiveness within, and perceived entitlement to, the
entire planet.19 But questioning this civilization is by and large sidestepped in climate-change discourse, with its single-minded quest
for a global-warming techno-fix.20 Instead of confronting the forms of social organization that are causing the climate crisisamong
numerous other catastrophesclimate-change literature often focuses on how global warming is endangering the culprit, and agonizes
over what technological means can save it from impending tipping points.21 The dominant frame of climate change funnels cognitive
and pragmatic work toward specifically addressing global warming, while muting a host of equally monumental issues. Climate
change looms so huge on the environmental and political agenda today that it has contributed to downplaying other
facets of the ecological crisis: mass extinction of species, the devastation of the oceans by industrial fishing, continued

old-growth deforestation, topsoil losses and desertification, endocrine disruption, incessant development,
and so on, are made to appear secondary and more forgiving by comparison with dangerous anthropogenic
interference with the climate system. In what follows, I will focus specifically on how climate-change discourse encourages
the continued marginalization of the biodiversity crisisa crisis that has been soberly described as a holocaust,22 and which despite
decades of scientific and environmentalist pleas remains a virtual non-topic in society, the mass media, and humanistic and other
academic literatures. Several works on climate change (though by no means all) extensively examine the consequences of global
warming for biodiversity, 23 but rarely is it mentioned that biodepletion predates dangerous greenhouse-gas buildup by decades,
centuries, or longer, and will not be stopped by a technological resolution of global warming. Climate change is poised to exacerbate
species and ecosystem lossesindeed, is doing so already. But while technologically preempting the worst of climate
change may temporarily avert some of those losses, such a resolution of the climate quandary will not put an end to
will barely addressthe ongoing destruction of life on Earth.

Their framing of climate change causes a distraction for more pressing

environmental movements that solve extinction
Crist 7 Ass. Prof. Sci & Tech in Society @ VT (Eileen, Telos 141, Winter, Beyond the Climate Crisis)
The diminishment of life's richness began with the exodus of hunters and gatherers from Africa
thousands of years ago, and deepened with the [end page 36] invention of agriculture and cities, the
development of warfare, and the advent of the European voyages.24 But biodepletion accelerated

enormously after the emergence of industrial civilization, and particularly since the mid-

twentieth century, with billions of people not only doubling every few decades, but
incliningby force, choice, or delusiontoward a consumer culture founded on
overproduction and global trade. Overproduction and global trade, in turn, require the
ceaseless conversion of living beings and natural systems into dead objects, "resources,"
and humanized landscapes and seascapes.25 The significance of human-driven extinction
can never be overstated, because it means not only the death of species but the end of their
evolutionary destinies as wellof the life-forms they would or might have eventually originated.
Present-day extinction is not about species blinking out sporadically; it is a global and escalating
spasm of en masse losses that, the geological record reveals, is an infrequent event in Earth's natural
history. Notwithstanding circulating shallow sophistry that proclaims extinction to be "natural" or
"normal," anthropogenic extinction is neither natural (for countless species are disappearing from
targeted onslaught or pressures far exceeding their capacity to adapt) nor normal (for this level of
losses occurs rarely as a consequence of a catastrophic event). Yet, as tragic as extinction is, species
are also being devastated without being annihilated: losses of distinct populations and plunges in
population numbers are a blow to the vigor, ecological contributions and connectedness, and
evolutionary potential of species. Today, drops of 70, 80, 90 percent, or more, of wild plants and
animals, on land and in oceans, are common. Such declines mean that species hang on as relics, with
shortened lifespans or committed to extinction, no longer able to play significant ecological and
evolutionary roles. The nosedive of wild-animal and plant abundance foregrounds yet [end
page 37] another facet of biodepletion: the simplification of ecosystems. From a landscape
perspective, the decline of numbers and geographic races of wild organisms signifies constrictions
of their former ranges. As populations blink out from diverse places, their place-bound

contributions are lost; the losses cascade through the communities of organisms to which
the extinguished populations belonged, leaving behind degraded ecosystems. While the
simplification of ecosystems is often dramatically visible, it can also unfold as an
incremental, barely noticeable process. And it is not that ecosystems, here and there, are
occasionally suffering simplification by losing constituent locals. The biosphere is
experiencing gross decline or elimination of areas that are, in certain cases, centers of
diversificationmost notably, tropical forests, wetlands, mangrove forests, and coral reefs
everywhere. The whittling down of ecological complexity has been a global trend proceeding from
the conversion of ecosystems for intensive human uses, the aforementioned population depletions,
and the invasion of nonnative species. Nonnative species are the generalists hitching rides in the
bustle of globalizationfrom the climate-change-favored fungus that is killing frogs, to millions of
domestic cats preying on birds, to innumerable more.26 Human-facilitated invasions, coupled with
the disappearance of natives, lead to places losing the constellation of life-forms that once uniquely
constituted them. The inevitable outcome of extinction, plummeting populations, lost and simplified
ecosystems, and a bio-homogenized world is not only the global demolition of wild nature, but also
the halting of speciation of much complex life. The conditions for the birth of new species within a
wide band of life, especially of large-bodied species that reproduce slowly, are being suspended.27
[end page 38] All these interconnected dimensions constitute what conservation biologists call
the biodiversity crisisa term that to the postmodernist rings of rhetoric, while to the broad
public (insofar as it has heard anything about it) involves a largely illiterate and vague
understanding of "extinction."28 Academic frivolity and public ignorance aside, the biodiversity

crisis heralds a biospheric impoverishment that will be the condition and experience of all
future human generations: it requires 5 to 10 million years for biodiversity to recover after
a mass extinction of the current scope. In light of this fact, I submit that unless global
warming unleashes appalling penaltiesin which case, the climate crisis and biodepletion
will merge into one devastating event for virtually all life 29the implications of
humanity's impact on biodiversity are so far-reaching that they may, in reality, dwarf the
repercussions of climate change. And yet, the current framing of climate change as the
urgent issue encourages regarding the unwinding of biodiversity as a less critical matter
than the forthcoming repercussions of global warming. Attention to the long-standing ruination
of biodiversity underway is subverted in two ways in climate-change discourse: either it gets elided

through a focus on anthropocentric anxieties about how climate change will specifically affect
people and nations; or biodepletion is presented as a corollary of climate change in writings that
closely consider how global warming will cause biodiversity losses. Climate change is

undoubtedly speeding up the unraveling of life's interconnectedness and variety. But if

global warming has such potential to afflict the natural world, it is because the latter's
"immunity" has been severely compromised. It is on an already profoundly wounded
natural world that global warming is delivering its blow. Focusing on the added blow of
climate change is important, but this focus should not come at the expense of erasing from
view the prior, ongoing, and climate-change-independent wounding of life on Earth .
Depictions of climate conflict cause pre-emptive military build-up starting great power conflict
before the migration even occurs
Michael Brzoska 8, Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg
[The securitization of climate change and the power of conceptions of security, Paper prepared for the International Studies
Association Convention 2008, 3/26-29]
It will affect the living conditions of many people. In many cases the change in living conditions will be for the worse. This
may, in turn, lead to violent conflict. The deterioration of the human environment and the resulting violent conflict may induce
large numbers of people to migrate, thus also creating conflicts in areas less negatively affected by climate change. Beyond local

and regional effects, climate change increases the global risk of violent conflict by adding another element
of contention to the competition among major powers. These dangers associated with climate change are by
now quite well rehearsed. But how high is the probability that they will occur? How likely is it that climate change will lead to
more interstate wars, intrastate wars or terrorism? How much do we know about the links between climate change and violence? Are
these dangers real in the sense of having a high likelihood of occurring or are they largely fictitious, edgeof-range possibilities that are used to draw attention to climate change, a level of attention that would not
be attainable by stressing the more likely, but less spectacular economic and social consequences of the
problem? The latter would be understandable but potentially counterproductive. In the literature on securitization it is implied that
when a problem is securitized it is difficult to limit this to an increase in attention and resources devoted to
mitigating the problem (Brock 1997, Waever 1995). Securitization regularly leads to all-round exceptionalism
in dealing with the issue as well as to a shift in institutional localization towards security experts (Bigot
2006), such as the military and police. Methods and instruments associated with these security organizations
such as more use of arms, force and violence will gain in importance in the discourse on what to do . A
good example of securitization was the period leading to the Cold War (Guzzini 2004 ). Originally a political
conflict over the organization of societies, in the late 1940s, the East-West confrontation became an existential
conflict that was overwhelmingly addressed with military means, including the potential annihilation of
humankind. Efforts to alleviate the political conflict were, throughout most of the Cold War, secondary to improving military
capabilities. Climate change could meet a similar fate. An essentially political problem concerning the
distribution of the costs of prevention and adaptation and the losses and gains in income arising from
change in the human environment might be perceived as intractable, thus necessitating the build-up of
military and police forces to prevent it from becoming a major security problem. The portrayal of climate
change as a security problem could, in particular, cause the richer countries in the global North, which are less
affected by it, to strengthen measures aimed at protecting them from the spillover of violent conflict from the
poorer countries in the global South that will be most affected by climate change . It could also be used by
major powers as a justification for improving their military preparedness against the other major powers,
thus leading to arms races.

The impact is extinction

Heinberg 4 [Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow at the Post-Carbon Institute, 2004, Book Excerpt: Powerdown: Options and
Actions for a Port-Carbon World, News Gateway, September 26th, Available Online at http://www.energybulletin.net/node/2291,
Accessed 12-04-2008]

Last One Standing The path of competition for remaining resources. If the leadership of the US

continues with current policies, the next decades will be filled with war, economic crises,
and environmental catastrophe. Resource depletion and population pressure are about to
catch up with us, and no one is prepared. The political elites, especially in the US, are
incapable of dealing with the situation. Their preferred solution is simply to commandeer
other nations resources, using military force. The worst-case scenario would be the general

destruction of human civilization and most of the ecological life-support system of the
planet. That is, of course, a breathtakingly alarming prospect. As such, we might prefer not to
contemplate it except for the fact that considerable evidence attests to its likelihood . The
notion that resource scarcity often leads to increased competition is certainly well founded.
This is general true among non-human animals, among which competition for diminishing
resources typically leads to aggressive behaviour. Iraq is actually the nexus of several
different kinds of conflict between consuming nations (e.g., France and the US); between western
industrial nations and terrorist groups; and most obviously between a powerful consuming
nation and a weaker, troublesome, producing nation. Politicians may find it easier to persuade
their constituents to fight a common enemy than to conserve and share . War is always

grim, but as resources become more scarce and valuable, as societies become more
centralized and therefore more vulnerable, and as weaponry becomes more sophisticated
and widely dispersed, warfare could become even more destructive that the case during the
past century. By far the greatest concern for the future of warfare must be the proliferation
of nuclear weapons. The US is conducting research into new types of nuclear weapons
bunker busters, small earth-penetrators, etc. Recent US administrations have enunciated a
policy of nuclear first-strike. Chemical and biological weapons are of secondary concern,
although new genetic engineering techniques may enable the creation of highly infectious
and antibiotic-resistant supergerms cable of singling out specific ethnic groups.
Additionally, the US has announced its intention to maintain clear military superiority to any
potential rival (full-spectrum dominance), and is actively developing space-based weapons
and supersonic drone aircraft capable of destroying targets anywhere on the planet at a
moments notice. It is also developing an entirely new class of gamma-ray weapons that
blur the critical distinction between conventional and nuclear weapons .

Attempting to halt global warming produces securitization- countries compete

against each other to reduce, or avoid reducing their emissions
Buzan et al, 1998 (Barry Buzan, Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at the London
School of Economics and honorary professor at the University of Copenhagen and Jilin University, Ole
Waever, a professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science, University of
Copenhagen Jaap de Wilde, Professor of International Relations and World Politics at the University of
Groningen., 1998 Security: A New Framework for Analysis p.86)
The third sequence of questions is decisive, because it is here that a political constellation of
mutual security concerns is formed. Who feels threatened? Who must those parties cooperate
with if action is to be effective? Effects and causes are significant conditions in disposing who
will become involved with whom and how, but they do not fully determine our outcomes.
Securitization always involves political choice: thus, actors might choose to ignore major causes
for political or pragmatic reasons and therefore may form a security constellation that is different
from what one would expect based on ones knowledge of effects and causes. Occasionally ,
pragmatism may prescribe global action, but even then it is necessary to subdivide global issues
according to the context of their causes and effects. Dealing with the causes of, for instance,
global warming require a global contest. The fossil CO2 emissions that contribute to the
greenhouse effect occur worldwide are therefore a global problem, even though important
regional differences should be realized. Meeting the causes of global warming points to the
urgency of a global regime, which was recognized at UNCED where the climate treaty that
became effective in March 1994 was signed. It is telling, however tat at the follow-up
conference in Berlin (28 March-7 April 1995), saving the intentions declared at UNCED was the
optimum goal. Further decision making and regime formation were postponed to the third
Climate Summit, to be held in Tokyo in 1997. This postponement is in part a result of the fact
that those who have to pay the price for prevention are different from those who pay the price of
failure.

This technological enframing makes warming strategically

even more dangerous.
Crist 7 Ass. Prof. Sci & Tech in Society @ VT (Eileen, Telos 141, Winter, Beyond the Climate Crisis)
While the dangers of climate change are real, I argue that there are even greater dangers in representing it as
the most urgent problem we face. Framing climate change in such a manner deserves to be challenged for two
reasons: it encourages the restriction of proposed solutions to the technical realm, by powerfully insinuating that the
needed approaches are those that directly address the problem; and it detracts attention from the planets ecological
predicament as a whole, by virtue of claiming the limelight for the one issue that trumps all others. Identifying
climate change as the biggest threat to civilization, and ushering it into center stage as the highest priority problem, has bolstered the
proliferation of technical proposals that address the specific challenge. The race is on for figuring out what technologies, or portfolio
thereof, will solve the problem. Whether the call is for reviving nuclear power, boosting the installation of wind turbines,
using a variety of renewable energy sources, increasing the efficiency of fossil-fuel use, developing carbon-sequestering
technologies, or placing mirrors in space to deflect the suns rays, the narrow character of such proposals is evident:
confront the problem of greenhouse gas emissions by technologically phasing them out, superseding them,
capturing them, or mitigating their heating effects. In his The Revenge of Gaia, for example, Lovelock briefly mentions the need to
face climate change by changing our whole style of living.16 But the thrust of this work, what readers and policy-makers come
away with, is his repeated and strident call for investing in nuclear energy as, in his words, the one lifeline we can use
immediately.17 In the policy realm, the first step toward the technological fix for global warming is often identified with
implementing the Kyoto protocol. Biologist Tim Flannery agitates for the treaty, comparing the need for its successful endorsement to
that of the Montreal protocol that phased out the ozone-depleting CFCs. The Montreal protocol, he submits, marks a signal
moment in human societal development, representing the first ever victory by humanity over a global pollution problem.18 He hopes
for a similar victory for the global climate-change problem. Yet the deepening realization of the threat of climate change, virtually in
the wake of stratospheric ozone depletion, also suggests that dealing with global problems treaty-by-treaty is no solution to the
planets predicament. Just as the risks of unanticipated ozone depletion have been followed by the dangers of a long underappreciated
climate crisis, so it would be nave not to anticipate another (perhaps even entirely unforeseeable) catastrophe arising after the (hopedfor) resolution of the above two. Furthermore, if greenhouse gases were restricted successfully by means of technological shifts and
innovations, the root cause of the ecological crisis as a whole would remain unaddressed. The destructive patterns of
production, trade, extraction, land-use, waste proliferation, and consumption, coupled with population growth,
would go unchallenged, continuing to run down the integrity, beauty, and biological richness of the Earth. Industrial-consumer
civilization has entrenched a form of life that admits virtually no limits to its expansiveness within, and perceived entitlement to, the
entire planet.19 But questioning this civilization is by and large sidestepped in climate-change discourse, with its single-minded quest
for a global-warming techno-fix.20 Instead of confronting the forms of social organization that are causing the climate crisisamong
numerous other catastrophesclimate-change literature often focuses on how global warming is endangering the culprit, and agonizes
over what technological means can save it from impending tipping points.21 The dominant frame of climate change funnels cognitive
and pragmatic work toward specifically addressing global warming, while muting a host of equally monumental issues. Climate
change looms so huge on the environmental and political agenda today that it has contributed to downplaying other
facets of the ecological crisis: mass extinction of species, the devastation of the oceans by industrial fishing, continued

old-growth deforestation, topsoil losses and desertification, endocrine disruption, incessant development,
and so on, are made to appear secondary and more forgiving by comparison with dangerous anthropogenic
interference with the climate system. In what follows, I will focus specifically on how climate-change discourse encourages
the continued marginalization of the biodiversity crisisa crisis that has been soberly described as a holocaust,22 and which despite
decades of scientific and environmentalist pleas remains a virtual non-topic in society, the mass media, and humanistic and other
academic literatures. Several works on climate change (though by no means all) extensively examine the consequences of global
warming for biodiversity, 23 but rarely is it mentioned that biodepletion predates dangerous greenhouse-gas buildup by decades,
centuries, or longer, and will not be stopped by a technological resolution of global warming. Climate change is poised to exacerbate
species and ecosystem lossesindeed, is doing so already. But while technologically preempting the worst of climate
change may temporarily avert some of those losses, such a resolution of the climate quandary will not put an end to
will barely addressthe ongoing destruction of life on Earth.

Warming Anxiety Link

Dodds 12 Joseph, MPhil, Psychoanalytic Studies, Sheffield University, UK, MA, Psychoanalytic
Studies, Sheffield University, UK BSc, Psychology and Neuroscience, Manchester University, UK,
Chartered Psychologist (CPsychol) of the British Psychological Society (BPS), and a member of several
other professional organizations such as the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society, Psychoanalysis

and Ecology at the Edge of Chaos p 27 *gender mod

Why psychoanalysis? On the face of it, it seems frankly irrelevant. Surely it is the basic
sciences of geology, ecology, biology, and climatology that we need, combined with various
hi-tech engineering? Yes and no. The science informing us of the risks and possible technical solutions

has run far ahead of our psychological state. We are not yet at the point emotionally of
being able to clearly grasp the threat, and act accordingly. We need to ask why this issue,
despite its current prominence, fails to ignite people's motivation for the major changes science tells
us is necessary. This concerns not only the 'public' but the academy and the psychoanalytic
community. In spite of the fact that Harold Searles was already writing in 1960 that psychoanalysts need to acknowledge the psychological importance of the non-human environment, until very
recently his colleagues have almost entirely ignored him.

In this section we explore some of the theories with which we may be able to construct a psychoanalysis of
ecology. Fuller elaboration will involve incorporating approaches from the sciences of complexity and
ecology, and Deleuze and Guattari's 'geophilosophy' or 'ecosophy', which itself emerged in critical dialogue
with psychoanalysis and complexity theory. However, we first need to explore the ecological potential
within psychoanalysis itself, as without the latter's methods and theories for unmasking hidden motivations
and phantasies, this investigation will not be able to proceed.

Lertzman (2008), one of the first psychoanalytically informed social scientists to engage with the ecological crisis, describes a common surreal
aspect of our everyday responses to 'eco-anxiety', the experience of flipping through a
newspaper and being suddenly confronted with:
the stop-dead-in-your-tracks, bone-chilling kind of ecological travesties taking place around our planet today ... declining honey
bees, melting glaciers, plastics in the sea, or the rate of coal plants being built in China each second. But how
many of us actually do stop dead in our tracks? Have we become numb? ... if so, how can we
become more awake and engaged to what is happening?
Environmental campaigners have become increasingly frustrated and pessimistic. Even as
their messages spread further and further, and as scientists unite around their core
concerns, there is an alarming gap between increasingly firm evidence and public response.
Renee

The fact that oil companies donate millions to climate 'sceptic' groups doesn't help (Vidal 2010). Nor does the fact that eight European companies which are together responsible for 5-10 per cent of the emissions covered in the EU emissions trading system (Bayet,
BASF, BP, GDF Suez, ArcelorMittal, Lafarge, E.ON, and Solvay) gave $306,100 to senatorial candidates in the 2010 United States midterm elections who either outright deny climate change ($107,200) or pledge they will block all climate change legislation
($240,200), with the most flagrant deniers getting the most funds (Goldenberg 2010; Climate Action Network 2010). These are the same companies that campaign against EU targets of 30 per cent reductions in emissions using current inaction in the United
States as a justification, while claiming their official policy is that climate change is a major threat and they are committed to doing all they can to help in the common cause of dealing with the danger (for the full report see Climate Action Network 2010).

as well. In February 2010 a BBC-commissioned poll by Populus (BBC

2010a, 2010b) of 1,001 adults found that 25 per cent didn't think global warming was happening, a rise of 8
per cent since a similar poll in November 2009. Belief that climate change was real fell from 83 per cent to
75 per cent, while only 26 per cent believed climate change was established as largely man-made compared
with 41 per cent in November. A third of those agreeing climate change was real felt consequences had
been exaggerated (up from a fifth) while the number of those who felt risks had been understated fell from
38 per cent to 25 per cent (see Figure 3). According to Populus director M. Simmonds, 'it is very unusual ...
to see such a dramatic shift in opinion in such a short period ... The British public are sceptical about man's
contribution to climate change and becoming more so' (BBC 2010a).
. According to the chief scientific advisor at the Department for the
Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Professor Robert Watson: 'Action is urgently needed ... We need the
public to understand that climate change is serious so they will change their habits and help us move
towards a low-carbon economy.' Why this shift? Whilst the poll took place with the background of heavy
snow and blizzards in the UK, always a convenient backdrop to climate sceptic jokes,
(2010a) article
(UEA).
Recent opinion polls show climate scepticism is on the rise in the UK

Most remarkable here is the discrepancy between public and expert opinion

the BBC

focused on a high-profile story concerning stolen emails alleging scientific malpractice at the University of East Anglia
way the overall science, and yet this is not how the public perceived it.

While this was a very serious accusation, no mainstream scientific body seriously imagines it changes in any real

Subsequently, the UK Parliament's Commons Science and Technology Committee completed its
investigation into the case (BBC 2010c). The MPs' committee concluded there was no evidence that UEA's
Professor Phil Jones had manipulated data, or tried 'to subvert the peer review process' and that 'his
reputation, and that of his climate research unit, remained intact' (BBC
2010c). The report noted that 'it is not standard practice in climate science to publish the raw data and the
computer code in academic papers' and that 'much of the data that critics claimed Prof Jones has hidden,
was in fact already publicly available' (BBC 2010c) but called strongly for a greater culture of transparency
in science. The report concluded that it 'found no reason in this unfortunate episode to challenge the
scientific consensus that global warming is happening and is induced by human activity' (BBC 2010c).
. In such a lengthy report of over 3 000
pages, produced from the combined efforts of the world scientific community on a topic with as many
variables as climate change, it is unsurprising some estimates need revising. Undoubtably there will be
more revisions in the future, some major.
. No doubt many sceptics will use the Parliamentary committee's report as further
evidence of an institutional cover-up.
This story was followed closely by another in January 2010 when the IPCC admitted a mistake concerning the timetable of Himalayan glacial melting

It is important to emphasize that for the world's scientists the overall picture has not been affected, but public perception is completely different, with

triumphant claims of proof 'it is all made up'

people are ready for such events

- the psychosocial equivalent of a
sandpile in a state of self-organized criticality (Palombo 1999; Bak 1994), when a single grain can cause a
major avalanche cascading through the whole system. Understanding such subtle shifts, and the often
unconscious motivations behind them, is where psychoanalysis perhaps more than any
other discipline has a lot to offer. As Lertzman (2008) writes:
What if the core issue is more about how humans respond to anxiety? ... [Environmental
problems ... conjure up anxieties that ... we are done for, and nothing can really be done ... To help me
understand more, I turn to Freud ... because I have found few others who speak as eloquently, and sensitively about what humans do when faced with anxiety or anxietyThe important psychological point is that

, indeed eager for it

provoking news.

Freud, civilization, nature and the dialectic of the Enlightenment

Is Freud really relevant to understanding our current crisis? While he was very much engaged in
relating psychology to social issues, from war to racism, group psychology and the discontents of
civilization (Freud 1913a, 1915, 1921, 1927, 1930), he was writing during a period when the possibility
that human activities could bring the Earth's ecosystems to the brink of collapse would have been hard to
contemplate. Romanticism may have complained about 'unweaving rainbows' and industry's 'dark satanic
mills', but by Freud's day this could be seen as Luddite anti-progress talk, especially for those working
within the Weltangschung of science and the Enlightenment to which Freud (1933) pinned his
psychoanalytic flag. However, much of our current bewildering situation can be understood as
rooted in part in a world view that was at its zenith during Freud's day and, as Lertzman
(2008) suggests, in our responses to anxiety. In addition, Freud did offer us some crucial

reflections on our relationship with nature:

The principle task of civilization, its actual raison d'etre, is to defend us against nature. We all know that
in many ways civilization does this fairly well already, and clearly as time goes on it will do it much
better. But no one is under the illusion that nature has already been vanquished; and few dare hope that she will ever be entirely subdued to man.
(Freud 1927: 51)
Here we can see an interesting ambivalence in Freud's rhetorical style, which perhaps unwittingly captures
two crucial aspects of our civilization's relationship to 'Nature' and thus begins to open up a
psychoanalytic approach to ecology. First, he depicts a series of binary oppositions typical for
his era, and not so different in our own: human versus nature, man versus woman and (more
implicitly) order versus chaos. Here we find the classic tropes of the Enlightenment, modernity,
patriarchy, industrialism and capitalism, which Jungian ecopsychologist Mary-Jane Rust (2008)
calls the myths we live by. The myths she is referring to in particular are the 'myth of progress'
and the 'myth of the Fall'. She argues that in order to create a sustainable future, or indeed any
future, we need to find other stories, other myths, through which to live our lives, to rethink
how we have fallen and what it means to progress. Freud's work suggests that Western culture views
civilization as a defence against nature, and against wildness, inner and outer, but as Rust (2008: 5)
writes, at 'this critical point in human history we most urgently need a myth to live by which
is about living with nature, rather than fighting it.' Thus, according to Rust,
we find ourselves ... between stories (Berry 1999), in a transitional space ... of great turbulence, with little
to hold onto save the ground of our own experience. Our therapeutic task ... is to understand how
these myths still shape our internal worlds, our language, and our defences ... [S]omewhere in
the midst of 'sustainability' ... lies an inspiring vision of transformation ... We need to dig deep, to re-read
our own myths as well as find inspiration from the stories of others.
(ibid.)

The myth of progress enters the climate change debate in calls for geo-engineering and
Utopian techno-fixes such as putting thousands of mirrors in space, and in the dismissal of
even gentle questioning of current economic models of unlimited growth. We will later look at Harold Searles' (1972)
approach to our fascination with technology and its role in the current crisis . Returning to Freud, however, there is, as
always, another side, an implicit awareness that the feeling of mastery civilization gives us is in
many ways a dangerous illusion. Behind our need for mastery lies our fear and trembling in
the face of the awesome power of mother nature.

There are the elements which seem to mock at all human control: the earth, which quakes
and is torn apart and buries all human life and its works; water, which deluges and drowns everything in turmoil; storms, which blow everything before
them ... With these forces nature rises up against us, majestic, cruel and inexorable; she brings
to our mind once more our weakness and helplessness, which we thought to escape through the work
of civilization.
(Freud 1927: 15-16)
Here is the other side of Freud's writing on the relation between 'Nature' and 'Civilization', with humanity
portrayed as a weak and helpless infant in awe and fear of a mighty and terrible mother. The lure and
horror of matriarchy lie behind the defensive constructs of patriarchal civilization , just as
Klein's paranoid-schizoid fears of fragmentation, engulfment, and annihilation lie behind later castration
threats (Hinshelwood 1991).
With each new earthquake or flood, nature erupts into culture -similar to Kristeva's (1982) description of
the eruption of the 'semiotic' into the 'symbolic' - and we are thrown back into a state of terror. The 'illusion'
in the title of Freud's 1927 essay The Future of an Illusion was meant to refer to how religion arose to

deal with these anxieties. However, the structural function of the myth of progress, while
undoubtably more successful in terms of practical benefits, can also be included here . In these
words of Freud we have already a deep understanding, albeit largely implicit, of our own current
crisis: a relationship to nature based on a master-slave system of absolute binaries, and an
attempt to maintain an illusory autonomy and control in the face of chaos.
There is often a tension in Freud, between the celebration of Enlightenment values found in works such as
The Future of an Illusion (1927) and the more Romantic Freud who won the Goethe prize and constantly
emphasized the elements Enlightenment rationality leaves out such as jokes, dreams, slips and
psychological symptoms. Thus, as well as being a perfect example of the Enlightenment with its call to
make the unconscious conscious and give the 'rational' ego greater power over the wilds of the id,
psychoanalysis also provides a serious challenge to this way of thinking. There will always
be something beyond our control. We are not, and never can be, masters in our own house,
and the core of who we are is irrational, and often frightening . Marcuse (1998) touched on a
similar tension when declaring Freud's (1930) Civilization and Its Discontents both the most radical
critique of Western culture and its most trenchant defence. Psychoanalysis, as always, is exquisitely
ambivalent.
Ultimately, for Freud, both the natural world and our inner nature are untamable and the most we can hope for are temporary, fragile, anxious compromises between competing
forces (Winter & Koger 2004). The chaos of nature we defend against is also the chaos of our inner
nature, the wildness in the depths of our psyche. Civilization does not only domesticate
livestock but also humanity itself (Freud & Einstein 1933: 214). However, attempts to eliminate
the risk have in many ways dangerously backfired, comparable to the ways that the

historical programmes aiming to eliminate forest fires in the United States have led to far
bigger and more uncontrollable fires taking the place of previously smaller and more
manageable ones (Diamond 2006: 43-47).
The control promised by the Enlightenment, the power of the intellect to overcome chaos
(environmental and emotional), is therefore at least partly a defensive and at times
dangerous illusion. In our age of anxiety, with the destruction of civilization threatened by
nuclear holocaust, ecosystemic collapse, bioweapons and dirty bombs, Freud's warning is
more relevant than ever:
Humans* have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their
help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man ... hence
comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety.
(Freud 1930: 135)
Freud's binaries 'masculine/Enlightenment/control/autonomy' versus 'feminine/nature/chaos/dependency'
also lead us to consider what Gregory Bateson (2000: 95) called the 'bipolar characteristic' of Western
thought, which even tries 'to impose a binary pattern upon phenomena which are not dual in
nature: youth versus age, labor versus capital, mind versus matter - and, in general, lack[s] the
organizational devices for handling triangular systems/ In such a culture, as with the child

struggling to come to terms with the Oedipal situation, 'any "third" party is always regarded ... as a threat'
(ibid.).
Deleuze and Guattari describe such dualistic forms of thinking using the ecological metaphor of the tree with its fork-branch patterns (although they would not use the term metaphor): 'Arborescent systems are
hierarchical systems with centers of signifiance and subjectification ... an element only receives information from a higher unit, and only receives a subjective affection along preestablished paths' (Deleuze & Guattari

Freud's 'arborescent' system of binaries can also show us the way out, capturing
the psychological bind we are now in. As Deleuze and Guattari (2003a: 277) write: 'The only way to get outside the
dualisms is ... to pass between, the intermezzo.' Deconstructing these dualisms allows us to
think about how our destructive urge to dominate and control is connected to our fear of
acknowledging dependency on this largest of 'holding environments', the ultimate
'environment mother' (Winnicott
2003a: 16). However,

Link -- Water Wars

Water wars rhetoric sanitizes and legitimizes violence and obscures its underlying causes.

Trottier 2004

, (Julie, post-doctoral fellow at McGill University, Water Wars: the Rise of a

hegemonic Concept World Water Assessment Programme)

A main achievement of state power in modern times has been the persuasion of the population concerning
the legitimacy of the use of violence. In the western world, the idea according to which the state has a monopoly over the
legitimate use of violence has become hegemonic. This legitimacy or lack of it confers the status of either murder or
execution to what would otherwise be, technically, the same act. State violence is referred to as war or police
operation whereas violence from another source is referred to as terrorism or banditism. The labeling of identical acts as
war acts or terrorist acts is often enough to categorize them as legitimate or not, since the cognitive map of
each citizen has been structured according to this hegemonic concept. Any group carrying out violent acts strives to
label them as acts of war in order to secure that legitimacy. In the case of a body that is not a state, this has generally implied, over the
last century, claiming to be a liberation movement that will eventually create a state. The objective of creating a state became
necessary to acquire this legitimacy, even for groups such as the Kurds, whose form of political organization was not the territorial
state (Badie, 1992). The water war discourse started growing in a fertile soil where a very specific definition of

water development had become hegemonic and where the only legitimate violent conflicts were believed to
be wars between opposing states. Of course other hegemonic concepts contributed to this fertile ground: the idea
according to which the state is the only institution spelling out the rules of social control and determining
who will exercise this social control, for example. Investigating this assumption, Joel Migdal demonstrated how it rarely
reflects reality, especially in the developing world. He developed his state-in-society model in order to account for the interaction
between the state and the multiple other institutions that spell out the rules and exercise social control (Migdal, 1988, 2001). How

western hegemonic concepts concerning the states role in society have obscured the understanding of
water conflicts in the non-western world has been explored elsewhere (Trottier, 2003). The eventual growth of the
idea of water wars as a hegemonic concept must be analyzed within the context of other pre-existing and well-entrenched
hegemonic concepts that distorted and rationalized unequal distributions of resources and specific distributions of power in various
societies. These acted as building blocks supporting the growth of new concepts, they limited the range of
options that appeared possible and they provided fences limiting the issue definitions : states wanted water
development at all cost, therefore states might wage war in order to secure it. Such an issue definition precluded any

consideration of the fact that water development could have a different meaning for various social groups,
that states may not be the only social actors that benefit from water development, that other social groups
may actually benefit from it more than the state itself while the state may loose from it, or that states rarely choose to go to
war over one issue alone.

Water wars are an ideological fiction hegemonic concept manipulated to serve the interests of
powerful social actors and dominant interest groups regard claims with suspicion theyre
mindlessly repeating the soundbytes theyve been programmed to proliferate

Trottier 2004

, Water Wars: the Rise of a hegemonic Concept World Water Assessment

Programme,

The concept of hegemony was developed by Gramsci in order to explain how a state managed to assert its
power over a population living in a given territory. State power, said Gramsci, does not consist only of coercion. The
means of repression at the disposal of a state are only the most visible element of its power. The other fundamental element of
state power, and probably the most important one, is persuasion. A social group can become dominant and
gather state power in its hands only if it succeeds in developing its hegemony within the civil society by
persuading the subordinate groups to accept the values and ideas that it has adopted and by building a network of
alliances based on these values (Simon, 1991, p. 18). The hegemony of the dominant group is therefore very much
ideological in nature. The dominant group generates common sense, the uncritical and partly unconscious
way in which people perceive the world. This common sense is maintained by the relations existing within the civil society,
as churches, political parties, trade unions, mass media, and other institutions propagate it. Gramsci therefore distinguishes the state
apparatuses, which have a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence and coercion, from the civil society
institutions, which build and maintain the hegemonic common sense that allows the population to accept the
states power as legitimate. Gramsci defined civil society as the set of all institutions that do not belong either to the state or to
the realm of economic production. The media, churches, and trade unions all belonged to this civil society within which hegemonic
concepts took root and flourished. He included schools within civil society, on the basis that the educative relation is essentially a
voluntary one even though the state usually subsidizes schools and sets the curriculum (Gramsci, 1957). Other authors have defined
civil society differently, and bodies such as the EU commonly consider private companies to be part of civil society. Private
enterprises clearly play an important role in propagating hegemonic concepts that structure the modern common sense concerning

water and water wars, and institutions such as the media are often private enterprises. Their role will therefore be included in this
article along with that of the other members of civil society. Ideologically hegemonic conceptions provide stabilizing

distortions and rationalizations of complex realities, inconsistent desires, and arbitrary distributions of
valued resources. They are presumptions that exclude outcomes, options, or questions from public consideration; thus they
advantage those elites well positioned to profit from prevailing cleavage patterns and issue definitions. That hegemonic beliefs do not
shift fluidly with changing realities and marginal interest is what makes them important. That they require some correspondence to
objective realities and interests is what limits their life and the conditions under which they can be established and maintained.
(Lustick, 1993, p. 121) Gramsci paid much attention to what he termed a war of position. Such a struggle is subtle and
nonviolent. It is conducted in the press, in educational and religious institutions, and in the political arena
(Gramsci, 1957). The outcome of a war of position is either the persistence of ideologically hegemonic concepts,
the destruction of formerly ideologically hegemonic concepts, or the emergence of new ones. Such wars of
position certainly do not imply any kind of conspiracy. Various social groups promote certain values and certain definitions they wish
to become hegemonic. This will in turn affect the resilience of other hegemonic concepts in an unpredictable manner. Many social
groups and many institutions act as vehicles for the propagation of hegemonic concepts without benefiting from them at all. The
example of the female vote in Europe illustrates this very well. The idea of females voting seemed, at best, preposterous
a hundred years ago. In England, a number of suffragettes were sent to Holloway Prison because of their activism. Their war

of position proved successful and no one in the European political landscape now challenges the legitimacy
of the right to vote for women. This successful war of position later affected many other hegemonic concepts concerning
gender, such as the legitimacy of womens presence in the work force. Whether or not a social group is successful at imposing or
toppling a hegemonic concept largely hinges on the echo it will find for this idea among other institutions and social groups. This
article will examine the rise of the hegemonic concept concerning water wars. It will investigate the mechanisms whereby such an
idea emerged and was propagated. It will also briefly examine the war of position that is now being waged against the concept of
water wars. 2. THE EMERGENCE OF THE CONCEPT OF WATER WARS Hegemonic concepts are not created in a vacuum.
They emerge within a context where other hegemonic concepts have already taken hold and where other wars of
position are being waged. Before examining empirically the emergence of the concept of water wars, other hegemonic concepts
concerning water and concerning war will need to be reviewed. These, and the accompanying wars of position, are the soil in which
the concept of water wars is taking root and is growing. 2.1. Water Development The idea according to which water
should be brought where it is needed has a long history in western society and has led to the emergence of a
hegemonic concept of water development. The water literature is rife with introductory declarations concerning the great
quantity of freshwater available on the planet and the crucial necessity of redistributing this wealth more adequately. Globally,
freshwater is abundant. Each year an average of more than 7,000 cubic meters per capita enters rivers and aquifers. Unfortunately it
does not all arrive in the right place at the right time write Turner and Durbourg (1999) in a vein that is very representative of a
dominant assumption. Such a statement implies that there is a right place and a right time for water. It implies a
clear hierarchy of values concerning water users. Some are deemed to be more deserving than others. Indeed, water will

be used wherever it flows, but fish and algae living in northern Canada rate as less important than human
beings in need of drinking water, food, and sanitation. Such an anthropocentric vision of water is widely shared by most
social actors. It is also coherent with the conservationist trend in environmentalism. Two types of environmentalism can be
distinguished: that of conservationists and that of preservationists. Conservationists want to protect nature as a resource for human use
whereas preservationists seek to protect nature itself from human use (Milton, 1996). It is fair to say that the idea of water as a basic
human right is well entrenched as a hegemonic concept around the planet. The right of thirst has long been enshrined in Muslim law
and is not questioned in any international forum (Faruqui et al., 2001). It satisfies the essential criteria to qualify as a hegemonic
concept: anyone evoking the possibility of a distribution system that would not ensure a minimum supply of
freshwater and food to every human being would apologize for mentioning such a thought. Were that person to advocate
such an idea, they would be regarded as monstrous. At best, the person would be laughed at. The organizations that struggle
against the construction of big dams always put forward their adherence to the principle of water as a human right. They demonstrate
how such projects, while claiming to bring water where it is needed, would actually compromise this right for the social group they
defend (see for example: Roy, 1999). This first ideologically hegemonic concept of water and food as basic human rights has provided
the rationalization for what has become another hegemonic concept: water development. As humans have a basic right to food and
water, water development would bring clean water to them for their domestic needs, provide sanitation, and allow the development of
irrigation to provide food. Lusticks reference to hegemonic concepts rationalizing complex realities and excluding options or
questions from public consideration is very relevant here. Transferring populations from water-scarce areas to water-rich areas could
have satisfied the human right to water and food. It could have been satisfied by populations deciding to prioritize their use of water
and resorting to virtual water. 1 But water development came to signify exactly the opposite: water would be

brought to the people for domestic consumption and for irrigation even if these people elected to settle in
the middle of the desert. Which groups, which elites in Lusticks terms, benefited from such an issue definition?
Construction companies appear as obvious candidates, as they grew out of this version of water
development. They clearly participated in maintaining this belief and in propagating it. But many other
groups participated in the making of water development, as it is understood today.

LinkResource Wars
Securitization of environmental and social crises risks
genocide and mass violence.
Ahmed 11Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is an international security analyst. He is Executive Director at
the Institute for Policy Research and Development, and Associate Tutor at the Department of IR, University
of Sussex, where he obtained his DPhil. [The international relations of crisis and the crisis of international
relations: from the securitisation of scarcity to the militarisation of society, Global Change, Peace &
Security, Volume 23, Issue 3, 2011, Taylor and Francis Online]
3.2 From theory to policy
Consequently, for the most part, the policy implications of orthodox IR approaches involve a

redundant conceptualisation of global systemic crises purely as potential threatmultipliers of traditional security issues such as political instability around the world, the collapse
of governments and the creation of terrorist safe havens. Climate change will serve to amplify the threat of
international terrorism, particularly in regions with large populations and scarce resources.94 The US
Army, for instance, depicts climate change as a stress-multiplier that will exacerbate
tensions and complicate American foreign policy; while the EU perceives it as a threatmultiplier which exacerbates existing trends, tensions and instability.95
In practice, this generates an excessive preoccupation not with the causes of global crisis

acceleration and how to ameliorate them through structural transformation, but with their
purportedly inevitable impacts, and how to prepare for them by controlling
problematic populations . Paradoxically, this securitisation of global crises does not
render us safer. Instead, by necessitating more violence, while inhibiting preventive action, it
guarantees greater insecurity. Thus, a recent US Department of Defense report explores the future of
international conflict up to 2050. It warns of resource competition induced by growing populations and
expanding economies, particularly due to a projected youth bulge in the South, which will consume ever
increasing amounts of food, water and energy. This will prompt a return to traditional security

threats posed by emerging near-peers as we compete globally for depleting natural

resources and overseas markets. Finally, climate change will compound these stressors by
generating humanitarian crises, population migrations and other complex emergencies. 96
A similar study by the US Joint Forces Command draws attention to the danger of global energy depletion
through to 2030. Warning of the dangerous vulnerabilities the growing energy crisis presents, the report
concludes that The implications for future conflict are ominous.97 Once again, the subject turns to
demographics: In total, the world will add approximately 60 million people each year and reach a total of 8
billion by the 2030s, 95 per cent accruing to developing countries, while populations in developed
countries slow or decline. Regions such as the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa, where the youth bulge
will reach over 50% of the population, will possess fewer inhibitions about engaging in conflict.98 The
assumption is that regions which happen to be both energy-rich and Muslim-majority will also be sites of
violent conflict due to their rapidly growing populations.
A British Ministry of Defence report concurs with this assessment, highlighting an inevitable youth bulge
by 2035, with some 87 per cent of all people under the age of 25 inhabiting developing countries. In
particular, the Middle East population will increase by 132 per cent and sub-Saharan Africa by 81 per cent.
Growing resentment due to endemic unemployment will be channelled through political militancy,
including radical political Islam whose concept of Umma, the global Islamic community, and resistance to
capitalism may lie uneasily in an international system based on nation-states and global market forces.
More strangely, predicting an intensifying global divide between a super-rich elite, the middle classes and
an urban under-class, the report warns: The world's middle classes might unite, using access to knowledge,
resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest.99
3.3 Exclusionary logics of global crisis securitisation?

Thus, the securitisation of global crisis leads not only to the problematisation of particular

religious and ethnic groups in foreign regions of geopolitical interest, but potentially
extends this problematisation to any social group which might challenge
prevailing global political economic structures across racial, national and class lines. The
previous examples illustrate how securitisation paradoxically generates insecurity by reifying a
process of militarisation against social groups that are constructed as external to the
prevailing geopolitical and economic order. In other words, the internal reductionism,
fragmentation and compartmentalisation that plagues orthodox theory and policy
reproduces precisely these characteristics by externalising global crises from one
another, externalising states from one another, externalising the inter-state system from its
biophysical environment, and externalising new social groups as dangerous
outsiders . Hence, a simple discursive analysis of state militarisation and the construction of new
outsider identities is insufficient to understand the causal dynamics driving the process of Otherisation.
As Doug Stokes points out, the Western state preoccupation with the ongoing military struggle against
international terrorism reveals an underlying discursive complex, where representations about terrorism
and non-Western populations are premised on the construction of stark boundaries that operate to exclude
and include. Yet these exclusionary discourses are intimately bound up with political and
economic processes, such as strategic interests in proliferating military bases in the Middle
East, economic interests in control of oil, and the wider political goal of maintaining
American hegemony by dominating a resource-rich region critical for global capitalism. 100
But even this does not go far enough, for arguably the construction of certain hegemonic discourses is
mutually constituted by these geopolitical, strategic and economic interests exclusionary discourses are
politically constituted. New conceptual developments in genocide studies throw further light on

this in terms of the concrete socio-political dynamics of securitisation processes. It is now

widely recognised, for instance, that the distinguishing criterion of genocide is not the pre-existence of
primordial groups, one of which destroys the other on the basis of a pre-eminence in bureaucratic military
political power. Rather, genocide is the intentional attempt to destroy a particular social group
that has been socially constructed as different. 101 As Hinton observes, genocides precisely

constitute a process of othering in which an imagined community becomes reshaped so

that previously included groups become ideologically recast and dehumanised as
threatening and dangerous outsiders, be it along ethnic, religious, political or economic lines
eventually legitimising their annihilation .102
In other words, genocidal violence is inherently rooted in a prior and ongoing ideological
process, whereby exclusionary group categories are innovated, constructed and Otherised
in accordance with a specific socio-political programme. The very process of identifying and
classifying particular groups as outside the boundaries of an imagined community of
inclusion, justifying exculpatory violence toward them, is itself a political act without
which genocide would be impossible.103 This recalls Lemkin's recognition that the intention to
destroy a group is integrally connected with a wider socio-political project or colonial project
designed to perpetuate the political, economic, cultural and ideological relations of the
perpetrators in the place of that of the victims, by interrupting or eradicating their means of
social reproduction. Only by interrogating the dynamic and origins of this programme to
uncover the social relations from which that programme derives can the emergence of
genocidal intent become explicable.104
Building on this insight, Semelin demonstrates that the process of exclusionary social group
construction invariably derives from political processes emerging from deep-seated sociopolitical crises that undermine the prevailing framework of civil order and social norms;
and which can, for one social group, be seemingly resolved by projecting anxieties onto a new
outsider group deemed to be somehow responsible for crisis conditions. It is in this context

that various forms of mass violence, which may or may not eventually culminate in actual genocide,
can become legitimised as contributing to the resolution of crises .105
This does not imply that the securitisation of global crises by Western defence agencies is genocidal.
Rather, the same essential dynamics of social polarisation and exclusionary group identity

formation evident in genocides are highly relevant in understanding the radicalisation

processes behind mass violence. This highlights the fundamental connection between social
crisis, the breakdown of prevailing norms, the formation of new exclusionary group identities,
and the projection of blame for crisis onto a newly constructed outsider group vindicating
various forms of violence.

And this framing is a prerequisite to resource wars

relations of power configured by resource ownership
cause conditions of scarcity to escalateonly the alt can
solve.
Ahmed 11Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is an international security analyst. He is Executive Director at
the Institute for Policy Research and Development, and Associate Tutor at the Department of IR, University
of Sussex, where he obtained his DPhil. [The international relations of crisis and the crisis of international
relations: from the securitisation of scarcity to the militarisation of society, Global Change, Peace &
Security, Volume 23, Issue 3, 2011, Taylor and Francis Online]
As Rosenberg shows in his analysis of the dynamics of distinctive geopolitical orders from Rome to Spain
and Teschke in his exploration of the changing polities of continental Europe from the eighth to the
eighteenth centuries these orders have always been inseparably conjoined with their constitutive relations
of production as structured in the context of prevailing socialproperty relations, illustrating the mutuallyembedded nature of economic and extra-economic power.76 In contrast, orthodox IR axiomatically
fragments the economic and extra-economic (and the latter further into military, political, cultural,
etc.) into separate, autonomous spheres with no grasp of the scope of their interconnection.77
It also dislocates both the state, and human existence as such, from their fundamental

material conditions of existence, in the form of their relationship to the biophysical

environment, as mediated through relations of production , and the way these are
governed and contested through socialproperty relations.78 By externalising the biophysical
environment and thus human metabolism with nature from state praxis, orthodox IR
simply lacks the conceptual categories necessary to recognise the extent to which sociopolitical organisational forms are mutually constituted by human embeddedness in the
natural world.79 While further fragmenting the international into a multiplicity of disconnected state
units whose behaviour can only be analysed through the limited lenses of anarchy or hierarchy, orthodox
IR is incapable of situating these units in the holistic context of the global political economy,
the role of transnational capitalist classes, and the structural pressures thereby exerted on
human and state behaviour.80
Indeed, the mediating structure of the global political economy along with the beliefs and
behaviour of agents within it (through which this structure is constructed) play a critical role in
the transformation of ecological or resource-related events into concrete politically-defined
conditions of scarcity that lead to crisis or conflict. A powerful example is provided by Davis in
his study of the impact of the El NioSouthern Oscillation (ENSO) the vast oscillation in air mass and
Pacific Ocean temperature. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, ENSO created large-scale droughts
in many countries peripheral to the European empires, including those in Asia (India, China, Java, the
Philippines and Korea), and in Brazil, southern Africa, Algeria and Morocco. Davis shows that British free
market imperial policy converted these droughts into foreseeable but preventable deadly famines,
multiplying death tolls to gross proportions without any historical precedent.81

In 187476, northern harvests were more than sufficient to provide reserves for the 1878 autumn crops
deficit. But most of the grain from north-western Indian subsistence farming was controlled by a captive
export sector designed to stabilise British grain prices, which from 1876 to 1877 had increased due to poor
harvests. This generated a British demand that absorbed almost the entirety of north-western India's wheat
surplus. Meanwhile, profits from these grain exports were monopolised by wealthy property holders,
moneylenders and grain merchants, as opposed to poor Indian farmers. India's newly-constructed modern
railway system shipped grain from drought areas to central depots for hoarding, leading to exorbitant
price hikes that were co-ordinated in a thousand towns at once. Food prices rocketed out of the reach of
outcaste labourers, displaced weavers, sharecroppers and poor peasants. Consequently, the poor began to
starve to death even in well-watered districts reputed to be immune to food shortages. Thus, between
1877 and 1878, grain merchants exported a record 6.4 million hundredweight of wheat to Europe while
between 5.5 and 12 million Indians starved to death. This catastrophe occurred not outside the modern
world system, but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political
structures.82
As Dalby thus argues, humans live in a complex interaction with environments that adapt and

change in much more complex ways than is facilitated by linear thinking within the
territorial boxes of contemporary administrative arrangements . This suggests that global
markets and economic connections are essential to understanding the complex politics of
local environments and struggles over access to specific resources in particular places
because the geography of the domination of nature is precisely the continuing history of
colonisation and imperialism.83 Hence, environmental and energy crises are generated in
the context of historically-specific socio-political systems and whether or not they lead to
conflict depends on existing relations of power at local, national and
transnational scales, and on how those relations are configured by structures of resource
ownership, mediated by ideas and values, and supported by military power .

And symptom focus makes all aff impacts inevitableself

reflexivity is a prerequisite to solvency.
Ahmed 11Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is an international security analyst. He is Executive Director at
the Institute for Policy Research and Development, and Associate Tutor at the Department of IR, University
of Sussex, where he obtained his DPhil. [The international relations of crisis and the crisis of international
relations: from the securitisation of scarcity to the militarisation of society, Global Change, Peace &
Security, Volume 23, Issue 3, 2011, Taylor and Francis Online]
2.4 The socio-historical evacuation of the political ecology of power
Global ecological, economic and energy crises thus expose a core contradiction at the heart

of modernity that the material progress delivered by scientific reason in the service of
unlimited economic growth is destroying the very social and environmental conditions of
modernity's very existence. This stark contradiction between official government recognition
of the potentially devastating security implications of resource scarcity and the continued
abject failure of government action to mitigate these security implications represents a
fundamental lacuna that has been largely overlooked in IR theory and policy
analysis. It reveals an analytical framework that has focused almost exclusively on
potential symptoms of scarcity. But a truly complete picture of the international relations
of resource scarcity would include not only a map of projected impacts, but would also seek
to grasp their causes by confronting how the present structure of the international system
itself has contributed to the acceleration of scarcity, while inhibiting effective national and
international responses.

It could be suggested that the present risk-oriented preoccupation with symptoms is itself

symptomatic of IR's insufficient self-reflection on its own role in this

problem. Despite the normative emphasis on ensuring national and international security, the
literature's overwhelming preoccupation with gauging the multiplicity of ways in which
ecological, energy and economic crises might challenge security in coming decades
provides very little opening in either theory or policy to develop more effective
strategies to mitigate or prevent these heightened security challenges. On the contrary, for the
most part, these approaches tend to highlight the necessity to maximise national politicalmilitary
and international regimes' powers so that states might be able to respond more robustly in the
event that new threats like resource wars and state failure do emerge. But the futility of this
trajectory is obvious a preoccupation with security ends up becoming an unwitting
accomplice in the intensification of insecurity.

Link Energy Security

Energy security militarizes energy justifies intervention
and causes serial policy failure
Ciuta 10 -- Lecturer in International Relations and Director of the Centre of European Politics, School
of Slavonic and East European Studies @ University College London, UK (Felix, 2010, "Conceptual Notes
on Energy Security: Total or Banal Security?" Security Dialogue 41(123), Sage)
Even casual observers will be familiar with the argument that energy

is a security issue because it is either a

cause or an instrument of war or conflict. Two different strands converge in this logic of energy
security. The first strand focuses on energy as an instrument: energy is what states fight their current wars with .
We can find here arguments regarding the use of the energy weapon by supplier states (Belkin, 2007: 4; Lugar, 2006: 3; Winstone,
Bolton & Gore, 2007: 1; Yergin, 2006a: 75); direct substitutions in which energy

is viewed as the equivalent

of nuclear weapons (Morse & Richard, 2002: 2); and rhetorical associations that establish policy
associations, as exemplified by the panel Guns and Gas during the Transatlantic Conference of the Bucharest NATO Summit.
The second strand comes from the literature on resource wars, defined as hot conflicts triggered by a struggle to grab valuable
resources (Victor, 2007: 1). Energy is seen as a primary cause of greatpower conflicts over scarce energy resources (Hamon & Dupuy,
2008; Klare, 2001, 2008). Alternatively, energy is seen as a secondary cause of conflict; here, research has focused on the dynamics
through which resource scarcity in general and energy scarcity in particular generate socio-economic, political and environmental
conditions such as population movements, internal strife, secessionism and desertification, which cause or accelerate both interstate
and intrastate conflict (Homer-Dixon, 1991, 1994, 2008; Solana, 2008; see also Dalby, 2004). As is immediately apparent, this logic
draws on a classic formulation that states that a nation is secure to the extent to which it is not in danger of having to sacrifice core
values, if it wishes to avoid war, and is able . . . to maintain them by victory in such a war (Lippmann, 1943: 51). The

underlying principle of this security logic is survival : not only surviving war, but also a generalized quasiDarwinian logic of survival that produces wars over energy that are fought with
energy weapons . At work in this framing of the energy domain is therefore a definition of
security as the absence of threat to acquired values (Wolfers, 1952: 485), more recently reformulated as survival in the
face of existential threats (Buzan, Wver & de Wilde, 1998: 27). The defining parameters of this traditional security logic
are therefore: (1) an understanding of security focused on the use of force, war and conflict (Walt, 1991: 212; Freedman, 1998: 48);
and (2) a focus on states as the subjects and objects of energy security. In the war logic, energy security is derivative of

patterns of international politics often captured under the label geopolitics (Aalto & Westphal, 2007: 3) that lend
their supposedly perennial attributes to the domain of energy (Barnes, Jaffe & Morse, 2004; Jaffe & Manning, 1998). The
struggle for energy is thus subsumed under the normal competition for power, survival,
land, valuable materials or markets (Leverett & Nol, 2007). A key effect of this logic is to arrest
issues usually not associated with war, and thus erase their distinctive characteristics. Even the
significance of energy qua energy is abolished by the implacable grammar of conflict: energy becomes a resource like any
other, which matters insofar as it affects the distribution of capabilities in the international system . As a
result, a series of transpositions affect most of the issues ranked high on the energy security agenda. For example, in the European
context, the problem is not necessarily energy (or, more precisely, gas, to avoid the typical reduction performed by
such accounts). The

problem lies in the geopolitical interests of Russia and other supplier states,
whose strength becomes inherently threatening (Burrows & Treverton, 2007; Horsley, 2006).
Energy security policies become entirely euphemistic, as illustrated for example by statements that equate
avoiding energy isolation with beating Russia (Baran, 2007). Such geopolitical understanding of
international politics also habituates a distinct vocabulary. Public documents, media reports and academic
analyses of energy security are suffused with references to weapons, battles, attack, fear,
ransom, blackmail, dominance, superpowers, victims and losers . It is therefore unsurprising
that this logic is coterminous with the widely circulating narrative of the new Cold
War . This lexicon of conflict encourages modulations, reductions and transpositions in the meanings
of both energy and security. This is evident at the most fundamental level, structuring encyclopaedic

entries (Kohl, 2004) and key policy documents (White House, 2007), where

energy security becomes oil security

becomes oil geopolitics (oil modulates security into geopolitics). Once
security is understood in the grammar of conflict, the complexity of energy is abolished and
reduced to the possession of oilfields or gas pipelines. The effect of this modulation is to
habituate the war logic of security, and also to create a hierarchy between the three constitutive
dimensions of energy security (growth, sustenance and the environment). This hierarchy reflects and at the same time embeds
the dominant effect of the war logic, which is the militarization of energy (Russell & Moran,
(security modulates energy into oil), which

2008), an argument reminiscent of the debates surrounding the securitization of the environment (Deudney, 1990). It is of course
debatable whether this is a new phenomenon. Talk of oil wars has been the subject of prestigious conferences and conspiracy theories
alike, and makes the headlines of newspapers around the world. A significant literature has long focused on the relationship between
US foreign policy, oil and war (Stokes, 2007; in contrast, see Nye, 1982). The pertinence of this argument cannot be evaluated in this
short space, but it is worth noting that it too reduces energy to oil, and in/security to war. The key point is that this logic changes

not only the vocabulary of energy security but also its political rationality . As Victor
(2008: 9) puts it, this signals the arrival of military planning to the problem of natural resources and
inspires a logic of hardening, securing and protecting in the entire domain of energy. There
is, it must be underlined, some resistance to the pull of the logic of war, as attested for example by NATOs insistence that its focus on
energy security will not trigger a classical military response (De Hoop Scheffer, 2008: 2). Yet, the same NATO official claims that
the global competition for energy and natural resources will re-define the relationship between

security and economics, which hints not only at the potential militarization of energy security
policy but also at the hierarchies this will inevitably create . New geographies of insecurity will
thus emerge if the relationship between the environment, sustenance and growth is structured
by the militarized pursuit of energy (Campbell, 2005: 952; Christophe Paillard in Luft & Paillard, 2007).

Link -- OCS
Your acquisition of offshore resources for security causes
serial policy failure and environmental destruction that
results in extinction
Martens 11 (Emily, MA in Geography and Regional Studies University of Miami, The Discourses of
Energy and Environmental Security in the Debate Over Offshore Oil Drilling Policy in Florida, Open
Access Theses, 5-10, http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1253&context=oa_theses)
Amid growing concerns over access to reliable and cheap energy resources, on March 31, 2010 the Obama Administration announced the opening of additional exploratory
and drilling sites for oil within the United States Outer Continental Shelf. The announcement of an Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Strategy for 2012-2017 came only
three weeks before the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, an event that marked an unprecedented economic and environmental disaster, spilling an estimated 5 million
barrels (172 million gallons) of oil into the Gulf of Mexico over the course of 86 days. This oil disaster renewed concerns over the environmental impacts of offshore

offshore oil drilling, however, has been a concern of environmental

activists and domestic energy policy makers for decades . Since the oil crises of 1970s the political
rhetoric regarding access to energy resources has focused on the creation of domestic
supplies that can reduce heavy dependence on imports from volatile or hostile foreign producers. Yet, the rhetoric of energy security
emanating from policy making circles has been, since its beginning, internally constrained by a
rhetoric of environmental protection, because of an oil spill in January 29, 1969 resulting from a blowout on a Union Oil Co. drilling
platform six miles off the coast of Santa Barbara, California. Thus the opening of new spaces for the purpose of oil
exploration and drilling under the rubric of domestic energy security , ranging from removing protected
drilling many of which remain unknown;

place status from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to new offshore spaces along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, including the historically oil-rig free waters

has since been debated heavily in the public forum. 2 The impetus to
open additional offshore spaces to oil drilling and selling more leases in offshore
territory has been sustained by a dominant discourse of energy security that has called to
expand the domestic oil supply in order to establish national energy independence and ensure access
to cheap and safe energy supplies. More recently, this discourse has been lent urgency by geopolitical
rearrangements that rendered US oil imports as an indirect means of funding terrorism and states hostile to the interests of
the US. This discourse of energy security, however, is opposed to, and by an alternative expression of energy security
emanating from the environmental movement an environmental discourse of energy security that shares the
goal of reducing the dependence of the US on foreign oil not by expanding domestic oil production but by
reducing the dependence of the US on oil itself and therefore the development of alternative fuels. The fusion of
energy security and environmental protection concerns has since the energy and environmental crises of the 1970s forged
a policy aimed at creating environmentally safe extraction and production processes. The emphasis on cheap energy
resources, however, has come into contradiction with requirements of costly regulation
and oversight practices that are thought to better ensure environmental security. The
attempt to reconcile offshore drilling with concerns about environmental protection during
the Nixon and Carter years was torn asunder by the hostility to regulation during the Reagan and Clinton years. As a result, a heated debate
surrounding the state of Florida,

developed between proponents of offshore oil drilling who argue that (unregulated) offshore oil drilling and expanded domestic oil production in general ensures
energy security by making the United States energy independent and opponents of offshore oil drilling who do not 3 contest the goal of energy independence but who argue
that this should not be at the expense of the protection of marine ecosystems and coastal economies from the destructive effects of offshore drilling, regulated or not. The
debate, in other words, developed into a debate between a dominant discourse of energy security and a counter discourse of environmental security at the core of it were
questions of regulation as well as competing commercial interests. Though there are various actors and interests within each of these discourses, the primary tension
between proponents and opponents of offshore oil drilling tends to reproduce the tensions embodied in the larger discourses of energy security and environmental security
at different geographical scales. One of the main arguments of this thesis is that the credence given to either one of these two security discourses at any given time is the
result of broader socio-political forces and the changing ideologies within which they operate. Underlying both seemingly opposed discourses, however, is a common logic
that informs the path they take and the language they use to establish legitimacy the logic of the commodity an abstract representation of space that supports this
logic. This space, as Lefebvre (2007: 53) points out, includes the world of commodities, its logic and its worldwide strategies, as well as the power of money and that
of the political state. As will be shown in the following chapters, each of these competing discourses has organized its arguments around the logics of capitalism to gain
public support and federal and local state protections. This is not an arbitrary association but rather the result of specific political developments in the US that have shaped
environmental concerns, and the environment, according to free market principles. 4 Prior to the injection of neoliberal policies of deregulation and privatization into the
environment and discourses on the environment under the Reagan Administration, the Nixon and Carter Administrations were caught between an environmental movement,
which attempted to create a new perspective from which human activity could be viewed in light of its often negative impacts on the environment especially offshore oil
drilling as a result of the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill and the volatility of the international oil market which threatened oil imports. The Nixon and Carter strategies
attempted to balance the two agendas through the expansion of domestic oil production in tandem with regulations and oversight that would monitor the offshore oil
industrys compliance with environmental standards. This was thought and presented as a temporary measure. Ultimately the aim was to create alternative fuels in the not
too distant future to replace oil, in light of evidence and concern that both the production and consumption of oil were proving to be detrimental to the environment which

Neoliberal restructuring under the Reagan Administration, however, promoted a marketdiscourse of energy security above, or more precisely against the discourse of

humans depended on for their own survival.

based

environmental security , advocating reduction of state oversights and reliance on market signals
Environmental security, in the form of government oversight, became a
threat to the accumulation of wealth a source of insecurity . Instead, environmental security could
instead as the more efficient means to regulate offshore drilling.

be entrusted to the multiple interests operating in the free market. The argument rested on the neoliberal mantra that the government was not as efficient as private owners

As a result, offshore oil drilling 5 activity has since enjoyed lax

oversight, while day-to-day oil pollution continues to disrupt various

and the market in managing and protecting the environment.

regulatory

ecological and economic activities that share ocean space . The fact that the
question of environmental protection and regulation concerns productive activity in ocean space lends it additional complexity deriving both from the nature of ocean space
itself, and how it has been historically perceived and constructed, and from the peculiar political system in the US that divides sovereignty between the federal government
an the individual states. This shared sovereignty over ocean space has shaped the interaction of policy-makers at the state and Federal level in their attempt to promote
policy reconciling economic imperatives and environmental concerns that differed across scale. This scalar tension finds its origin in the Submerged Lands Act that
President Eisenhower signed in 1945, which gave coastal states sovereign rights over coastal territory extending three miles from the shore. In the case of Florida and
Texas, where a rather extensive continental shelf exists on their gulf coasts, they were granted 10.3 miles of territory into the Gulf of Mexico, which was to acknowledge
historical use claims. Complementary ocean laws between the state and federal government appear to acknowledge the uncontainable nature of the ocean environment
which can carry pollutants horizontally across space, which exacerbates not only the tension between states and the federal government but also the varying interests of
different coastal states with different economies and ecologies. Where the government of Florida, a state heavily dependent on revenues from tourism, has found it
commercially necessary to keep the ocean territory free of oil pollutants, at least for now, the Federal government has implemented a moratorium that extends what can
only be seen as a buffer surrounding the state of Florida in order to reduce the risk of oil pollutants washing ashore. In Texas 6 and Louisiana, on the other hand, whose
economies are dependent on revenues from and employment in offshore oil drilling (despite some tourism, and fishing and shrimping interests in the latter), the coastal
territory has developed into a site of extensive drilling and production, with an extensive network of pipelines strewn over the ocean floor. Floridas coast, in contrast, is a

marine
sanctuaries that would be threatened by pollution from offshore oil activities and potential oil spills. But ocean space does not
protected area at both the state and Federal levels, with policy-makers at both levels acknowledging sensitive environments, such as the Everglades and a few

recognize political borders, and the shores of Florida are as susceptible to that ever present threat of a large oil spill as the spill from the explosion of the Deepwater
Horizon oil rig might come to prove I found Florida to be a significant case for studying the interaction between the discourses of energy and environmental security and
their perceived utility for ocean space because it allows for significant insight into the interaction between proponents and opponents of offshore oil drilling as well as how
the logic of commodity comes to be expressed as a vital component in creating policies that protect commercially viable interests harnessed within the security discourses.
Though a similar study could be done on California, I find the unique positioning of Florida in relation to the other Gulf States extremely intriguing, particularly due to
Florida being the only state situated along the Gulf of Mexico to ban offshore oil drilling. Furthermore, the Gulf of Mexico is considered to be partially landlocked, which
means that there is only one side that connects to the open ocean, where the rest is encapsulated by land. This means that pollution from offshore oil drilling would have to
maneuver its way through the gulf, 7 possibly traveling around the Florida Peninsula on the Loop Current, before it would reach the open ocean. This situation is very
unlike that of California, as there is no offshore oil production nearby to threaten its coasts. Though it would be an interesting point of departure to compare Floridas
offshore oil drilling policy and the reasons behind it with those of the other Gulf States of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas, my primary concern in this thesis is
to understand the interaction between the discourses of energy and environmental security which compete to define the utility of ocean space and its relationship to society.
The case study of Florida is significant, as it allows an analysis of how the security debate in crosses between the federal and state levels, and is not simply reiterated but is
also localized, made pertinent to specifically local concerns. Secondly, the case of Florida allows a look into a state that has managed to successfully commodify a clean
environment and create policy that protects that commodity from the threat posed by offshore oil drilling; and this in the Gulf of Mexico where offshore oil drilling is
widespread. The ban on offshore drilling in Florida and the uncertainty about potential, largely unexplored, offshore oil reserves lend the debate over offshore oil drilling in
Florida more significance. With advancements in exploration and drilling technology it has been argued that larger oil deposits may lie in or around what were once
commercially unproductive oil wells off the Florida coast. As a result, there has been a push at both the Federal and state levels to lift the ban on offshore oil drilling off
Floridas coasts. The push to open offshore oil drilling around Florida has been met with objections from both environmentalist groups and industries dependent on
maintaining a clean marine 8 environment, such as tourism and fishing. As a state dependent on beach tourism, with roughly $37 billion generated in revenue annually, the
cost of offshore drilling in Florida depends more heavily on the creation of unsightly oil rigs and the potential for spills that can spoil beaches and thereby the local
economy. Florida remains the only gulf state that does not allow drilling in either its coastal waters, or in the Federal waters within 100 miles from its coast, though some
drilling did take place along Floridas coast before it was banned in 1990. Operating on the notion that offshore oil drilling within and near state waters will threaten the
pristine marine environment and damage the local, tourism-dependent industries, environmental activism within the state, in conjunction with the local tourism industry,
has played a key role in keeping oil rigs out of Floridian waters since 1990. Prior to the BP oil spill in April 2010, however, a debate was underway within the Florida state
legislature to allow offshore exploration and production within state waters. Though state waters which extend some three miles into the Atlantic Ocean and ten miles into
the Gulf of Mexico ultimately remained closed to offshore oil drilling, President Obama announced a plan in March 2010 to open the Federal waters along Floridas
northeast coast, as well as an area in the eastern Gulf of Mexico to offshore oil leasing. The policy generated a backlash by drilling opponents, even though the drilling
would take place more than 100 miles from the Florida coasts. The sense of victory this created for offshore oil proponents did not last long, as the Obama administration
reversed its decision to allow oil drilling off the Florida coast in the eastern Gulf of Mexico and along the Atlantic coast until 2017 as a result of the BP oil spill. The
environmental devastation caused by the BP oil spill, along with the economic turmoil 9 suffered by the tourism and fishing industries along the Gulf coast, managed to
table the discussion on offshore oil drilling along the Florida coast until a full investigation could be conducted as to the cause of the spill and the effects it had on the
environment. The intention of this thesis is to analyze the Florida offshore oil debate within the contexts of the energy security and environmental security discourses, in
order to gain insight into the values and beliefs that lead to the implementation of policies regarding offshore oil drilling within the United States, and more particularly the
state of Florida. Using a discursive analysis, I look at how arguments for and against offshore oil drilling are framed, justified and how they are incorporated into the policymaking process. Furthermore, I aim to understand why and when certain arguments come to dominate the discussion by looking at current events and socio-economic

ocean space is
constructed as a result of perceptions about its utility to society . Social constructions of
the oceans position in relation to the social sphere, as well as its perceived utility, serve as a prominent point of departure
for the security discourses analyzed later on. The dominant energy security discourse seeks to maintain the
ocean as a source of resources and wealth accumulation external and resistant to socialization, while simultaneously
promoting a sense of national security through attempts to reduce dependence on oil imports by
structures which inform how a discourse comes to be articulated to gain credence and policy support. I begin by looking at how

increasing domestic production. On the other hand, offshore oil drilling opponents, who have adopted an environmental security discourse, have a negative reaction to
expanded offshore oil drilling as it signifies a threat to the long-term environmental sustainability and commercial interests that depend on an ocean free of dangerous

The opposition attempts to 10 reconstruct the ocean as a pristine environment, an

essential element in the Earths ecosystem as well as coastal tourism and fishing industries, while simultaneously
promoting a counter-hegemonic energy security by advocating for
alternative fuels. The discussion regarding the construction of the ocean in Chapter 2 uses a historical optic through which one can view the evolution of
ocean space in its relationship with human society. More importantly it looks at how perceptions and representations
pollutants.

of ocean space inform how policy is made

and how States, as the sources of legitimate territorial

jurisdiction, manage to acquire and secure ocean territory in order to utilize it for exclusive resource exploitation. Chapter 3 and 4 look at the historical evolution of energy

security and environmental security in relation to offshore oil drilling first at the level of the federal state (chapter 3) and then at the level of the state of Florida (chapter 4),
with the aim of deconstructing the discourses in the historical contexts from which they emanate. The 1970s mark a key turning point for, if not the initial emergence in the

concerns
about oil dependence and environmental protection in the speeches of United States Presidents as a representation of
hegemonic policy discourse. This is important beyond the discursive level, at
United States of concerns about environmental sustainability as well as concerns about the foreign oil supplies. The analysis focuses on the articulation of

the level of policy making , because US presidents have the power to directly appoint key
decisionmakers, such as the Secretary of the Interior the department which then appoints the head of the Minerals Management Service which is in charge
of leasing, overseeing and collecting revenues from the oil industry the Secretary of Energy, and the Director of the Environmental Protection Agency. These
appointed officials are in charge of the 11 agencies that implement policy and oversee
compliance with regulations in the area of offshore oil drilling. Therefore, the sentiments towards
offshore oil drilling that are held by the president tend to reflect those held by these appointed leaders and dictate regulations and
how strictly they will be enforced. The discourses of US presidents on energy and environmental security are what
Wolford (2010: 8) calls strategic essentialisms , intentional simplifications of an otherwise complex subject for the purposes of democratic
engagement. Engagement in what? Thus, the primary question behind the discursive analysis I exercise in chapters 3 and 4 is: in the discourse on energy and
environmental security, what is it that needs to be made secure, why does it need to be secured, and what are the potential threats to its security? Chapter 2 - The
Construction and Securitization of Ocean Space To look upon the ocean is to place it within a particular social context according to a perceived utility. For the Florida
beachgoer, the ocean is a pristine environment, where the horizon seems to extend infinitely as it meets the sky. For the oil entrepreneur, it holds great mineral wealth,
which, at some point in time, must be exploited to fuel the economy and expand the industry. For the ecologist the ocean contains essential biophysical processes that are
not only necessary for marine life, but part of the larger, global ecosystem that sustains all life forms on the planet. For the fisherman, the ocean is a space where both
income and sustenance may be obtained. The ocean has been used for transportation, commercial and military activities for several thousand years, but only recently has

divergent interests find themselves

competing over ocean space in order to define its utility as well as the international and State legislation
required to secure these interests against potential threats . In the case of offshore oil drilling, ocean space
is the physical arena upon which the security discourses , such as energy and environmental, create
knowledge, portraying counter-realities of the ocean and its value for society. Though the security discourses discussed in
depth in chapters 3 and 4 attach new images and values to ocean space through the perpetuation of their associated knowledges, the ocean has, throughout
history, been the subject of social representations and value constructions that persist within
these discourses. In particular, marine or ocean space, most notably in terms of its relationship to terrestrial space, has often
held the position as the spatial other in respect to human processes . As
Steinberg (2001) points out, the ocean has held many positions in its relationship with society, namely as a space for transportation, resource extraction, and, more
recently, an intricate part of the biophysical processes that sustain
much credence been given to its location within the global ecosystem. Today, these

human life . Regardless of the attempts of the latter imagination to integrate ocean spaces into a complex argument about the long-term sustainability of
life on earth, the more traditional notion that the ocean is merely a distance and not a place
where social rules do not apply, persists in contemporary discourses, managing to
distance ocean spaces from social controls and oversight (Steinberg 2001: 49; Zalik 2009). During the centuries before
widespread seafaring, the ocean was a resource provider, furnishing littoral communities with food and the occasional luxury items (i.e. pearls). With God, Glory and

the Imperial quest to map and mine the world sent many explorers across the oceans, but with little
interest given to the content of the oceans themselves . This has resulted, especially under the auspices of
capitalism and neoliberalism, which emphasize material and financial accumulation in tandem with deregulation and privatization, in policies that often
ignore or belittle social and environmental consequences to the very social processes
transpiring within ocean space. Due to the anthropocentric nature of exploration and
resource extraction, the oceans have tended to play merely a service role, as they are viewed simply
as the matter lying between the more easily inhabitable terrestrial formations . Social
constructions or representations of the ocean, attempt to provide a static image of this
space in order to define the parameters of its usefulness to society . In the processes of
resource extraction, multi-use preservation, and environmental sustainability, the often competing representations of ocean space have seen little
Gold in mind,

compromise, with regulatory policies constantly being implemented, lifted, or ignored in view of competing interests, and their associated ocean-space imaginations. This
chapter seeks to highlight the evolution of social constructions and securitization of the ocean, namely in the United States, by deconstructing and analyzing a few of the
dominant perspectives regarding ocean space throughout history. I hope to show that despite an increase in scientific inquiry aimed at increasing an understanding of ocean
spaces and reconfiguring the spatial imagination, the ocean as a resource provider and the other to terrestrial spaces remains a prominent vision that serves to inform
human actions within that space. As a result of the oceans seemingly fixed construction as the other, limited authority is placed on any knowledge that conceptualizes
ocean space as a vital element within the Earths ecosystem, and the subsequent need for protections and regulations to ensure its sustainability. In fact, where protections of
ocean space exist it is most frequently in light of efforts to maintain the ocean as a multiple use space for commercial enterprises, and not as a result of an incorporation of a
new knowledge that seeks to protect ocean space for the purpose of environmental sustainability or ecosystem protection. In the case of energy and environmental security,
the conceptualization of the ocean provides the frame of reference from which each discourse imagines the oceans relationship and utility to society. For instance,

under the discourse of energy security the ocean is constructed as the frontier for oil
resources, that would be produced and used domestically in order to secure the
American oil supply from the volatile foreign oil market and oil-funded terrorism . In the

case of environmental security, the ocean is perceived as [1] a vital element in the larger
ecosystem on which humans rely upon for long-term survival ; and [2] is the site where the
commodification of the pristine, unspoiled by dirty offshore drilling activities and rigs, is able to generate thousands of jobs and billions in annual income for coastal
tourism.

Link -- Arctic Link

Your construction of the Arctic justifies increased military
presence turns conflict and causes environmental
degradation
Dittmer et al 11 -- Professors in the Departments of Geography at University College London, University of Oulu, University
College London, and Royal Holloway, respectively (Jason Dittmer, Sami Moisi, Alan Ingrama, Klaus Dodds, Political Geography,
2011, Have you heard the one about the disappearing ice? Recasting Arctic geopolitics,
http://www.uta.fi/jkk/jmc/studies/courses/reading1%20+%20arctic%20+%20moisio.pdf)
The idea of the Arctic as an open e or opening e and uncertain space also calls forth future-

oriented imaginative techniques, notably scenario analysis and the booming trade in Arctic futures (Anderson, 2010).
The rhetorical orientation of such exercises inevitably reproduces and gives free rein to
divergent conceptualizations of the future. Thus, on the one hand are dystopian imaginations of
the Arctic as a locus of social, political, economic, cultural and ecological
disaster. While during the 1990s Arctic space was infused with political idealism and hope as the end of the Cold War seemed to
open the possibility of a less explicitly territorialized governance regime (the Arctic Council), current interventions in
Arctic space raise the spectres of conict, environmental degradation and the resource
curse (Emmerson, 2010). The notion of the Arctic as an open, melting space is thus
represented as posing a multi-faceted security risk. Scott Borgerson (2008) published a
notably neo-realist intervention in Foreign Affairs which considered this kind of scenario in
more detail; he argued that the decrease in sea ice cover is directly correlated to evidence of a
new scramble for resources in the region, involving the ve Arctic Ocean coastal states and their national security
interests. According to Borgerson (2008: 65), the Arctic region could erupt in an armed
mad dash for its resources . More generally, melting ice is correlated with enhanced
accessibility and hence opportunities for new actors ranging from commercial shipping to illegal migrants and
terrorist groups to migrate within and beyond the Arctic. At the most extreme, neorealists have contended that
Arctic installations such as pipelines or terminals might be potential targets for terrorist
organizations hell-bent on undermining North American energy security (Byers, 2009). At the same time, the Arctic is
also framed as a space of promise: the locus of a potential oil bonanza, new strategic trade routes and huge shing
grounds (Powell, 2008a). No wonder then that the Arctic possibilities have resulted in a number of scenarios
on the relationship between Arctic resources and Arctic geopolitical order. Lawson Brigham, a
well known Arctic expert, has imagined an Arctic race, a scenario in which high demand and
unstable governance set the stage for a no holds barred rush for Arctic wealth and
resources (described in Bennett, 2010, n.p.). This vision, which is opposite to Arctic saga, can be regarded as a
liberal warning message. Accordingly, without new governance structures based on new international agreements, high demand
in the Arctic region could lead to political chaos which could also jeopardize Arctic
ecosystems and cultures. The emphasis on the economic potential of the Arctic maritime areas further highlights the
dominance of future over present in contemporary geopolitical discourses. The image of disaster (as epitomised
by the Exxon Valdez sinking in 1989) thus forms a counterpoint to the image of a treasure chest (the
Russian agplanting in 2007).We suggest that these assertions of Arctic disaster are used to
justify a strengthened military presence in Arctic waters in the name of
national security along with a range of futuristic possibilities (Jensen & Rottem, 2009). Here neorealism feeds off the idea of the Arctic as opening, shifting and potentially chaotic spa ce. It thus
has an affective as well as descriptive quality e invoking a mood change and associated calls to arms (Dodds, 2010). This theme of
fearing the future has emerged periodically within Canadian political discourse, with Stephen
Harpers famous use

it or lose it dictum traceable through previous governments, which have emphasized the threat of
disaster argumentation

incursion by the Soviets or the United States (Dodds, in press; Head, 1963; Huebert, 2003). The

(Berkman & Young, 2009) also

underwrites liberal calls for a new multilateral Arctic legal

agreement which would set out rules, for example, on how to exploit Arctic resources. In these representations,
multilateralism denotes peace, prosperity, stability and environmental rescue whilst
national control and interest denote increasing tension, environmental degradation and
conict. Arctic openness is central to the performance of Arctic geopolitics, enabling
sabre-rattling by the ve Arctic Ocean coastal states. The regions coding as a feminine space to be tamed by
masculine exploits provides an arena for national magnication. The remoteness and
difculty of maintaining permanent occupation of the far north also makes it a space where
overlapping territorial claims and competing understandings of access to transit passages
can (at the moment) co-exist with relatively little chance of actual combat (Baev, 2007). As we shall see, this
is particularly true of the US/Canadian arguments over the legal status of the NorthWest Passage. In this way the discursive
formation of Arctic geopolitics is also bound up with neo-realist ideas about the inherent
tendencies of states towards conict over resources, sovereignty and so on e ideas that
have been subject to extensive critical deconstruction in IR and political geography, but
which are being rapidly reassembled in relation to the Arctic. The Arctic is thus a space in
which the foundational myths of orthodox international relations are
being reasserted . It might be said that it is not just the Arctic climate that is changing, with knock on effects for state
politics and international relations, but rather that the region is being reconstituted within a discursive formation that renders it
amenable to neo-realist understandings and practices inconceivable for other, more inhabited regions. Accepting the

premises of Arctic geopolitics risks both obscuring the liveliness of Arctic geography
(Vannini, Baldacchino, Guay, Royle, & Steinberg, 2009) and enabling the sovereign fantasy that coastal states and
their civilian and military representatives have previously enjoyed security via effective
territorial control and may establish it once again.

Link -- Energy Security

Energy security functions as a metaphor for all realist thought- it organizes the world as infinite
violence being naturally deployed for finite resources
Daojiong Zha Graduate School of International Relations, International University of Japan, Alternatives 1-1-01 p. HighBeam
In addition to considerations about "balance of power," the South China Sea is closely related to
considerations of so-called energy security. This notion "energy security," as an important component of
"economic security," argues for using diplomatic/military means to secure access to energy-resource
deposits and transportation of energy, in particular, oil and gas. The significance of the South China Sea embodies oil-andgas security concerns for two basic reasons. One, the South China Sea waters are a gateway for oil and natural gas transportation from
the Persian Gulf and Indonesian islands to Japan, the United States, and increasingly China. Two, the South China Sea itself is an area
with potential deposits of oil and natural gas in the seabed. For these two reasons, China, according to the realist logic, should
rationally compete with the United States and other powers to influence the use, if not control, of the South China Sea waters. Hence,
the concern about "energy security." [19] The significance of transportation was discussed in the preceding section. Suffice it to say
here that what makes the South China Sea a security concern is the fear of having one power (China, in particular) influence/control
access through the waterways than actual hazards for transportation. Regarding the potential deposits of oil and gas in the South China
Sea seabed, Mark J. Valencia's summary of the politics of science is revealing. According to Valencia, China and the Philippines have
in recent years made the most optimistic predictions about the oil and gas potential in the South China Sea. International oil
companies, which conduct their own geological surveys of the area, are generally pessimistic, partly as a negotiation tactic; these
negotiations are often geared to ex tract concessions from governments, and the governments, in turn, that wish to materialize their
claims to territorial sovereignty by entering into joint exploration projects. [20] More and more scholars, after studying the history of
exploration and comparing the "scientific" data presented, are coming to view the "oil rich Spratlys" as more a fiction than science.
[21] For the governments that claim sovereignty over the South China Sea waters, however, it is important to keep the fiction alive. In
East Asia and other parts of the world, through the granting of hydrocarbon concessions in disputed ocean areas to international oil
corporations, a claimant state makes a declaration of its determination to exercise jurisdiction. In addition, by way of such
"commercial" acts, such states make use of an international energy operator to assist in resisting diplomatic pressures from other
claimant states. Clearly, the diplomatic/political posturing behind such joint exploration projects in part explains the huge gaps in
"scientific findings" about oil and gas deposits in the South China Sea. Of the six claimant states, China and the Philippines are in re
cent years most active in pursuing/reiterating their respective claims, and, naturally, predictions made by scientists associated with
these two states are optimistic: they are politically significant. The predictions help to aid governments in justifying investing
military/diplomatic resources to keep their claims alive, and, by extension, their claims to future access to whatever lies in the
deepwater areas. The notion of "energy security" is at the same time a powerful cognitive tool for realist
researchers to argue for guarding against military actions to solidify one government's claims (those of China,
in particular) to ownership of the energy resources. Such reasoning departs from knowledge about the growth of the Chinese
economy and its increasing dependence on "offshore" sources of oil and gas. That dependence, then, can be used as justification for
modernizing the Chinese armed forces (the navy, in particular), which in turn are meant first to safeguard and then to defend Chinese
claims to ownership of energy in the deep seabed. [22] Like wise, arms races by states in the region are either justified or

understood through the prism of energy security. What the realist arguments about "energy security" in the
area downplay in interpreting history and predicting the future is that the disintegration of the Soviet Union
has opened up vast areas of oil deposits in the former Soviet republics for exploration. Expressed concerns
about threats from China to global energy, mean while, are also but remotely related to realities . The
Chinese government's oil-and-gas development strategy for the next twenty years is to focus on its interior
regions and the area immediately off the Pearl River Delta. [23] More importantly, "geology-based assessments of the
oil and gas resources of the world" have changed from the 1980s through the 1990s largely due to "an evolving understanding of
world recoverable oil and gas resources rather than to procedural or philosophical changes." [24] That "philosophical" continuity
refers to, more than anything else, an ideology to achieve as much "energy independence" as possible, lest oil, gas, and other forms of
energy fall into "enemy hands." That same philosophy explains the Chinese government's choice of continuing to
rely on domestic coal as the dominant fuel, in spite of coal's environmental costs. [25] In short, the promotion

of the South China Sea as a priority area where the world's "energy security" is under threat seems to be
based less on facts than on preparing for the future unknown--the same logic used in arguments for military
preparedness. It serves to legitimate military strategies for maintaining/upgrading the arsenals of
destruction in the region.

Link -- Disease
The call to securitize against disease creates the
individual as a prison which the individual must now
survey and disciple. The AFF vision and fear of a
catastrophic disease outbreak necessitates the capillary
diffusion of carceral and biopolitical violence, turning life
into a biological carcass absent vitality.
Debrix and Barder 2009
/Francois, Professor and Director of the Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought
(ASPECT) Program @ Virginia Tech, Ph.D., Purdue University and Alexander D., Department of Political
Studies & Public Administration, American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon, PhD in Political Theory
from John Hopkins, Nothing to Fear but Fear: Governmentality and the Biopolitical Production of Terror,
International Political Sociology (2009) 3, 398413/
A telling example of this self-mobilization and self-anticipation against ones own conduct can
be found in the way Western states (or, rather, their governmental agencies) along with some
transnational organizations (the World Health Organization, the United Nations) have asked

populations to preemptively take care of their health, hygiene, and everyday routines in the
context of the ongoing AH1N1 or swine flu pandemic. In this recent case of popular health
scare, as with many other instances of spreading epidemics over the past decade (SARS, the
H5N1 bird flu, but also AIDS before), individuals and groups are asked to be the first
layers of securitization by turning their bodies (or those of family members, neighbors, coworkers,
etc.) into primordial sites of analysis and scrutiny from where not only the disease but, just as importantly,
the fear about what might happen with the disease will be monitored. With the swine flu, a
constant questioning of ones body movements and symptomatic features, but also of ones
daily habits, becomes an automatic (and autoimmune) measure against the endemic fear.
Individual and collective bodies become the most vital dispositifs of containment of the
pandemic and of the terror that inevitably will spread. This management or governance of
the swine flu and its scare (the disease and its terror are inseparable from the moment a pandemic
discourse is launched) is said to require constant self-checking (Do I have a fever? Is my cough a
sign that I have been infected? Did I remember to wash my hands after riding the bus or the subway?). But
it also demands what can be called selfcarceralization measures (we must stay home for several days
if we feel sick; we must wear protective masks if we venture outside and have a runny nose; we must
close entire schools for as long as necessary if we suspect that children in the community have the flu). In
the end, it is a full-blown biopolitics of selfterror that sets in whereby people must allow
themselves to be quarantined, must accept being placed in hospital isolation, and must even be
willing not to be treated if pharmaceutical companies fail to produce enough vaccines for everyone. As

the AH1N1 pandemic preemption regime reveals, individual and collective bodies must
always be prepared to immerse themselves into disciplinary and regulatory procedures,
into security mechanisms, and into governmental tactics. In fact, they must act as dispositifs
of fear governance themselves. This means that bodies become the required lines of forces that
connect the possible localized symptoms to the global pandemic and its terror . From this
perspective on how bodies in societies of unease enable regimes of biopolitical terror and are
themselves the product of operations of governmentalized fear, no return to a centralized model
of power is necessary to make sense of the terror embedded in contemporary regimes of government.
Rather, as the swine flu case shows, it is the horizontality, the capillarity, and the

propagation of carceral effects across space and through time that authenticates this (self)
imposition of governmental power and force. But what this system of reproduction of selfgovernmentalized scare tactics and biopolitical (in)security calls for , however, is the

beginning of a different understanding of life, or of what life means. Indeed, it is not enough
anymore to think of life as docile or regulated. It may also not be sufficient to think of
todays living bodies as abandoned beings (Agamben 1998) caught in a state of sovereign
exception. Rather, the self-rationalizing, self-securitizing, and self-terrorizing bodies that act,
react, and interact in coordination with agents agencies of government and are found at
the heart of societies of fear production are more likely to represent what Mick Dillon has
called emergent life (Dillon 2007).

Link -- Disease
Disease descriptions are shaped by political interests and in turn shape reality turns the aff

MacPhail 2009

(Theresa, medical anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley

The Politics of Bird Flu: The Battle over Viral Samples and Chinas Role in Global Public Health, Journal of language and politics,
8:3, 2009)
In fact, the health development strategies of international organizations are judged as significant in

reinforcing the role of the state in relation to the production of primary products for the world market,
thereby perpetuating international relations of dominance and dependency. Soheir Morsy, Political Economy in
Medical Anthropology In July of 2007, former Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona appeared before a congressional
committee and testified that during his term in office he had been pressured by the Bush administration to suppress or
downplay any public health information that contradicted the administrations beliefs and/or policies .
Gardiner Harris of the New York Times noted that Dr. Carmona was only one of a growing list of present and former administration
officials to charge that politics often trumped science within what had previously been largely nonpartisan
government health and scientific agencies (Harris 2007). Dr. Carmona testified that he had repeatedly faced political
interference on such varied topics as stem cell research and sex education. Two days later, an editorial in the Times bemoaned the
resultant diminution of public health both its reputation as non-biased and the general understanding of important public health
issues in the eyes of the same public it was meant to serve (2007). In the wake of Dr. Carmonas testimony, it would appear that
these are grave times for public health. And yet, public health concerns and international measures to thwart disease pandemics have
never been more at the forefront of governmental policy, media focus and the public imagination. Dr. Carmonas testimony on the
fuzzy boundaries between science and state, health and policy, is in line with a recent spate of sensational stories on the dangers of
drug-resistant tuberculosis and the recurrent threat of a bird flu outbreak all of which belie any distinct separation of politics and
medical science and highlight the ever-increasing commingling of the realms of public health and political diplomacy. Until

recently, the worlds of public health and politics have generally been popularly conceptualized as separate
fields. Public health, undergirded by medicine, is primarily defined as the science and practice of protecting and improving the
health of a community (public health 2007), regardless of political borders on geographical maps. Disease prevention and care
is typically regarded as neutral ground, a conceptual space where governments can work together for the
direct (or indirect) benefit of all. Politics, on the other hand, is usually referred to in the largely Aristotelian sense of the word,
or politika, as the art or science of government or governing, especially the governing of a political entity, such as a nation, and the
administration and control of its internal and external affairs (politics 2007). If we take to be relevant Clausewitzs formulation that
war is merely the continuation of policy (or such politics) by other means, might we then argue that the recent wars on disease

specifically the one being waged on the ever-present global threat of bird flu are merely a
continuation of politics by different means? In an article written for the U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC), two health
professionals suggest that the flow of influence works optimally when an unbiased science first informs public health, with public
health then influencing governmental policy decisions. The other potential direction of influence, wherein politics directly

informs public health, eventually constraining or directing scientific research, has the potential to create a
situation in which ideology clouds scientific and public health judgment, decisions go awry and politics
become dangerous (Koplan and McPheeters 2004: 2041). The authors go on to argue that: Scientists and public health
professionals often offer opinions on policy and political issues, and politicians offer theirs on public health policies, sometimes with
the support of evidence. This interaction is appropriate and healthy, and valuable insights can be acquired by these cross-discussions.
Nevertheless the interaction provides an opportunity for inappropriate and self-serving commentary, for public
grandstanding, and for promoting public anxiety for partisan political purposes. (ibid.) The authors, however,
never suggest that pure science, devoid of any political consideration, is a viable alternative to an ideologically-driven disease
prevention policy. What becomes important in the constant interplay of science, politics and ideology, is both an awareness of
potential ideological pitfalls and a balance between official public health policy and the science that underlies it. The science/ public
health/politics interaction is largely taken for granted as the foundation of any appropriate, real-world policy decisions (Tesh 1988:
132). Yet the political nature of most health policies has, until recently, been overshadowed in popular discourse
by the ostensibly altruistic nature of health medicine. Yet as Michael Taussig reminds us of the doctor/patient
relationship: The issue of control and manipulation is concealed by the aura of benevolence (Taussig 1980: 4). Might the overt
goodwill of organizations such as the WHO, the CDC, and the Chinese CDC belie such an emphasis on politics? Certainly there is
argumentation to support a claim that public health and medicine are inherently tied to politics. Examining the hidden arguments
underlying public health policies, Sylvia Noble Tesh argues: disease prevention began to acquire political meaning. No
longer merely ways to control diseases, prevention policies became standard-bearers for the contending political arguments about the
form the new society would take (1988: 11). Science is a reason of state in Ashis Nandys Science, Hegemony and Violence (1988:
1). Echoing current battles over viral samples, Nandy suggests that in the last century science was used as a political plank
within the United States in the ideological battle against ungodly communism (1988: 3). Scientific performance is
linked to political dividends (1988: 9), with science becoming a substitute for politics in many societies (1988:
10). What remains novel and of interest in all of this conflation of state and medicine is the new politics of scale of
the war on global disease, specifically its focus on reemerging disease like avian influenza. As doctor and

medical anthropologist Paul Farmer notes: the WHO

manifestly attempts to use fear of contagion to goad

wealthy nations into investing in disease surveillance and control out of self-interest an age-old public health
ploy acknowledged as such in the Institute of Medicine report on emerging infections (Farmer 2001: 5657). What Farmers
observation underlines is that public health has transformed itself into a savvy, political entity. Institutions like the WHO are
increasingly needed to negotiate between nations they function as the new diplomats of health. Modern politics, then, have
arguably turned into health politics. In 2000, the UN Security Council passed a resolution on infectious diseases. The
resolution came in response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic and was the first of its kind issued (Fidler 2001: 80). What started as a

reaction to a specific disease, AIDS, has since developed into an overall concern with any disease or illness
which is seen as having the potential to lay waste to global health, national security, or economic and
political stability. In other words, disease and public health have gone global. But, as law and international disease scholar
David Fidler points out, the meeting of realpolitik and pathogens that he terms microbialpolitik is anything but new (Fidler 2001:
81). Microbialpolitiks is as old as international commerce, wars, and diplomacy. Indeed, it was only the brief halfcentury respite provided by antibiotics, modern medicine and the hope of a disease-free future that made the coupling of politics and
public health seem out-of-date. But now we have (re)entered a world in which modern public health structures have weakened, thus
making a return to microbialpolitiks inevitable. As Fidler argues: The reglobalization of public health is well
underway, and the international politics of infectious disease control have returned (Fidler 2001: 81). Only three
years later, Fidler would write that the predicted return of public health was triumphant, having emerged prominently on the agendas
of many policy areas in international relations, including national security, international trade, economic development, globalization,
human rights, and global governance (Fidler 2004: 2). As Nicholas King suggests, the resurgence of such

microbialpolitiking owes much to the discourse of risk so prevalent in todays world. The current focus on
risk, as it specifically pertains to disease and its relationship to national security concerns, has been
constructed by the interaction of a variety of different social actors : scientists, the media, and health and
security experts (King 2004:62). King argues: The emerging diseases campaign employed a strategic and
historically resonant scale politics, making it attractive to journalists , biomedical researchers, activists,
politicians, and public health and national security experts . Campaigners identification of causes and consequences at
particular scales were a means of marketing risk to specific audiences and thereby securing alliances; their recommendations for
intervention at particular scales were a means of ensuring that those alliances ultimately benefited specific interests. (2004: 64) King
traces this development to the early 1990s, specifically to Stephen Morses 1989 conference on Emerging Viruses. Like the UN
Security Council resolution on emerging infections, the conference was in the wake of HIV/AIDS. In Kings retelling, it was Morses
descriptions of the causal links between isolated, local events and global effects that changed the politics of public health (2004: 66).
The epidemiological community followed in Morses footsteps, with such luminaries as Morse and Joshua Lederberg calling for a
global surveillance network to deal with emerging or reemerging diseases such as bird flu or SARS. However, although both the
problem and the effort were global by default, any interventions would involve passing through American laboratories,
biotechnology firms, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and the information science experts (King 2004: 69). Following the conference,
disease became a hot topic for the media. Such high-profile authors as Laurie Garrett (The Coming Plague) and

Richard Preston (The Hot Zone) stoked the emerging virus fires, creating what amounted to a viral
panic or viral paranoia (King 2004: 73). Stories of viruses gone haywire, such as Prestons account of Ebola, helped reify the
notion that localized events were of international importance. Such causal chains having been formed in the popular imagination, the
timing was ripe for the emergence of bioterrorism concerns. In the aftermath of 9/11, the former cold war had been transformed, using
scalar politics, into a hot war with international viruses (King 2004: 76). Of course, all of this can be tied into the
Foucaultian concept that knowledge is by its very nature political. In The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault outlines the
ways in which medicine is connected to the power of the state. For Foucault, medicine itself becomes a task for the
nation (Foucault 1994: 19). He argues that the practice of medicine is itself political and that the struggle against
disease must begin with a war against bad government (Foucault 1994: 33). In an article on the politics of emerging
diseases, Elisabeth Prescott has echoed Foucaults equation of disease with bad government. She suggests that a nations capacity
to combat both old and newly emergent diseases is a marker not of just biological, but of political, health .
She argues that the ability to respond [is] a reflection of the capacity of a governing system (2007: 1). Whats more, ruptures in
health can lead to break-downs in effective government or in the ability of governments to inspire confidence. Prescott suggests:
Failures in governance in the face of infectious disease outbreaks can result in challenges to social cohesion, economic performance
and political legitimacy (ibid.). In other words, an outbreak of bird flu in China would equate to an example of Foucaults bad
government. In the end, there can be no doubt that the realms of medicine and (political) power are perpetually intertwined. Foucault
writes: There is, therefore, a spontaneous and deeply rooted convergence between the requirement of political ideology and those of
medical technology (Foucault 1994: 38). In other words, we should not be overly surprised by Richard Carmonas testimony or by
debates over bird flu samples. Politics and health have always arguably gone hand-in-hand

Framing disease as a threat is an act of securitization it justifies biopolitical regulation.

Dr. Stefan

Elbe 4

"AIDS, Security, and Biopolitics".

, Ph.D. in International Relations and Senior Lecturer in International Relations at LSE, 2004,

The securitization of AIDS is also biopolitical, secondly, because of the manner in which international actors
are trying to monitor and govern the health of populations. The detailed statistical monitoring of
populations that formed such an integral component of eighteenth-century European biopolitics is today being
replicated on a global level by international agencies eager to identify and forecast the population dynamics
likely to be induced around the world by HIV/AIDS. The task of compiling these statistics has been assigned to the
World Health Organization and the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS). The latter prides itself on its
efforts to provide strategic information about HIV/AIDS globally, as well as [t]racking, monitoring and
evaluation of the epidemic and of responses to it.25 Indeed, it claims to be the worlds leading resource for
epidemiological data on HIV/AIDS.26 To this end, UNAIDS also provides in a manner that recalls Englands nineteenth-century
Blue Books annual updates on the global state of the AIDS pandemic, and endeavors to keep up-to-date information on HIV
prevalence amongst adult populations for every country. 27 Crucially, UNAIDS does not restrict itself to providing data for collective
populations; its surveillance techniques penetrate further and also generate new sub-populations by singling
out specific risk groups that need to be targeted another historical hallmark of biopolitics.28 The organization thus
differentiates between adult and child populations and between urban and rural populations, and pays particularly close attention to
sex workers and drug users. Where possible, UNAIDS even gathers data on sexual behavior, such as the median age of first sexual
intercourse and the rate of condom use, as well as a variety of other knowledge indicators. UNAIDS, in short, produces the

vital knowledge about the biological characteristics of the worlds populations and sub-populations
needed to rein in the pandemic.
Framing the state as the actor to prevent disease is securitizing it makes the health of the
population the government's responsibility.
Dr. Stefan

Elbe 4

, Ph.D. in International Relations and Senior Lecturer in International Relations at LSE, 2004,

"AIDS, Security, and Biopolitics".

Today such biopolitical impulses

can also be found resonating beyond the borders of Europe through

practices such as the securitization of HIV/AIDS . The latter, after all, marks nothing other than a powerful
international intervention targeted directly at the level of population. With the arrival of HIV/AIDS on the
international security agenda, security is no longer confined to defending sovereignty, territorial integrity and
international law; but, as the unprecedented Security Council meeting demonstrates, population dynamics including levels of
disease have now become strategically significant as well. International political actors securitizing HIV/AIDS
are effectively calling upon governments around the world to make the health and longevity of their
populations a matter of highest governmental priority echoing Foucaults earlier observation that in a biopolitical age
[t]he population now appears more as the aim of government than the power of the ruler.

Disease descriptions are shaped by political interests and

in turn shape reality turns the aff
MacPhail 2009 (Theresa, medical anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley The Politics of Bird Flu:
The Battle over Viral Samples and Chinas Role in Global Public Health, Journal of language and politics, 8:3, 2009)
In fact, the health development strategies of international organizations are judged as significant

in
reinforcing the role of the state in relation to the production of primary products for the world market,
thereby perpetuating international relations of dominance and dependency. Soheir Morsy, Political Economy in
Medical Anthropology In July of 2007, former Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona appeared before a congressional
committee and testified that during his term in office he had been pressured by the Bush administration to suppress or
downplay any public health information that contradicted the administrations beliefs and/or policies .
Gardiner Harris of the New York Times noted that Dr. Carmona was only one of a growing list of present and former administration
officials to charge that politics often trumped science within what had previously been largely nonpartisan
government health and scientific agencies (Harris 2007). Dr. Carmona testified that he had repeatedly faced political
interference on such varied topics as stem cell research and sex education. Two days later, an editorial in the Times bemoaned the
resultant diminution of public health both its reputation as non-biased and the general understanding of important public health
issues in the eyes of the same public it was meant to serve (2007). In the wake of Dr. Carmonas testimony, it would appear that
these are grave times for public health. And yet, public health concerns and international measures to thwart disease pandemics have
never been more at the forefront of governmental policy, media focus and the public imagination. Dr. Carmonas testimony on the
fuzzy boundaries between science and state, health and policy, is in line with a recent spate of sensational stories on the dangers of
drug-resistant tuberculosis and the recurrent threat of a bird flu outbreak all of which belie any distinct separation of politics and
medical science and highlight the ever-increasing commingling of the realms of public health and political diplomacy. Until

recently, the worlds of public health and politics have generally been popularly conceptualized as separate
fields. Public health, undergirded by medicine, is primarily defined as the science and practice of protecting and improving the

health of a community (public health 2007), regardless of political borders on geographical maps. Disease

prevention and care

is typically regarded as neutral ground, a conceptual space where governments can work together for the
direct (or indirect) benefit of all. Politics, on the other hand, is usually referred to in the largely Aristotelian sense of the word,
or politika, as the art or science of government or governing, especially the governing of a political entity, such as a nation, and the
administration and control of its internal and external affairs (politics 2007). If we take to be relevant Clausewitzs formulation that
war is merely the continuation of policy (or such politics) by other means, might we then argue that the recent wars on disease

specifically the one being waged on the ever-present global threat of bird flu are merely a
continuation of politics by different means? In an article written for the U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC), two health
professionals suggest that the flow of influence works optimally when an unbiased science first informs public health, with public
health then influencing governmental policy decisions. The other potential direction of influence, wherein politics directly

informs public health, eventually constraining or directing scientific research, has the potential to create a
situation in which ideology clouds scientific and public health judgment, decisions go awry and politics
become dangerous (Koplan and McPheeters 2004: 2041). The authors go on to argue that: Scientists and public health
professionals often offer opinions on policy and political issues, and politicians offer theirs on public health policies, sometimes with
the support of evidence. This interaction is appropriate and healthy, and valuable insights can be acquired by these cross-discussions.
Nevertheless the interaction provides an opportunity for inappropriate and self-serving commentary, for public
grandstanding, and for promoting public anxiety for partisan political purposes. (ibid.) The authors, however,
never suggest that pure science, devoid of any political consideration, is a viable alternative to an ideologically-driven disease
prevention policy. What becomes important in the constant interplay of science, politics and ideology, is both an awareness of
potential ideological pitfalls and a balance between official public health policy and the science that underlies it. The science/ public
health/politics interaction is largely taken for granted as the foundation of any appropriate, real-world policy decisions (Tesh 1988:
132). Yet the political nature of most health policies has, until recently, been overshadowed in popular discourse
by the ostensibly altruistic nature of health medicine. Yet as Michael Taussig reminds us of the doctor/patient
relationship: The issue of control and manipulation is concealed by the aura of benevolence (Taussig 1980: 4). Might the overt
goodwill of organizations such as the WHO, the CDC, and the Chinese CDC belie such an emphasis on politics? Certainly there is
argumentation to support a claim that public health and medicine are inherently tied to politics. Examining the hidden arguments
underlying public health policies, Sylvia Noble Tesh argues: disease prevention began to acquire political meaning. No
longer merely ways to control diseases, prevention policies became standard-bearers for the contending political arguments about the
form the new society would take (1988: 11). Science is a reason of state in Ashis Nandys Science, Hegemony and Violence (1988:
1). Echoing current battles over viral samples, Nandy suggests that in the last century science was used as a political plank
within the United States in the ideological battle against ungodly communism (1988: 3). Scientific performance is
linked to political dividends (1988: 9), with science becoming a substitute for politics in many societies (1988:
10). What remains novel and of interest in all of this conflation of state and medicine is the new politics of scale of
the war on global disease, specifically its focus on reemerging disease like avian influenza. As doctor and
medical anthropologist Paul Farmer notes: the WHO manifestly attempts to use fear of contagion to goad
wealthy nations into investing in disease surveillance and control out of self-interest an age-old public health
ploy acknowledged as such in the Institute of Medicine report on emerging infections (Farmer 2001: 5657). What Farmers
observation underlines is that public health has transformed itself into a savvy, political entity. Institutions like the WHO are
increasingly needed to negotiate between nations they function as the new diplomats of health. Modern politics, then, have
arguably turned into health politics. In 2000, the UN Security Council passed a resolution on infectious diseases. The
resolution came in response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic and was the first of its kind issued (Fidler 2001: 80). What started as a

reaction to a specific disease, AIDS, has since developed into an overall concern with any disease or illness
which is seen as having the potential to lay waste to global health, national security, or economic and
political stability. In other words, disease and public health have gone global. But, as law and international disease scholar
David Fidler points out, the meeting of realpolitik and pathogens that he terms microbialpolitik is anything but new (Fidler 2001:
81). Microbialpolitiks is as old as international commerce, wars, and diplomacy. Indeed, it was only the brief halfcentury respite provided by antibiotics, modern medicine and the hope of a disease-free future that made the coupling of politics and
public health seem out-of-date. But now we have (re)entered a world in which modern public health structures have weakened, thus
making a return to microbialpolitiks inevitable. As Fidler argues: The reglobalization of public health is well
underway, and the international politics of infectious disease control have returned (Fidler 2001: 81). Only three
years later, Fidler would write that the predicted return of public health was triumphant, having emerged prominently on the agendas
of many policy areas in international relations, including national security, international trade, economic development, globalization,
human rights, and global governance (Fidler 2004: 2). As Nicholas King suggests, the resurgence of such

microbialpolitiking owes much to the discourse of risk so prevalent in todays world. The current focus on
risk, as it specifically pertains to disease and its relationship to national security concerns, has been
constructed by the interaction of a variety of different social actors : scientists, the media, and health and
security experts (King 2004:62). King argues: The emerging diseases campaign employed a strategic and
historically resonant scale politics, making it attractive to journalists , biomedical researchers, activists,
politicians, and public health and national security experts . Campaigners identification of causes and consequences at
particular scales were a means of marketing risk to specific audiences and thereby securing alliances; their recommendations for

intervention at particular scales were a means of ensuring that those alliances ultimately benefited specific interests. (2004: 64) King
traces this development to the early 1990s, specifically to Stephen Morses 1989 conference on Emerging Viruses. Like the UN
Security Council resolution on emerging infections, the conference was in the wake of HIV/AIDS. In Kings retelling, it was Morses
descriptions of the causal links between isolated, local events and global effects that changed the politics of public health (2004: 66).
The epidemiological community followed in Morses footsteps, with such luminaries as Morse and Joshua Lederberg calling for a
global surveillance network to deal with emerging or reemerging diseases such as bird flu or SARS. However, although both the
problem and the effort were global by default, any interventions would involve passing through American laboratories,
biotechnology firms, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and the information science experts (King 2004: 69). Following the conference,
disease became a hot topic for the media. Such high-profile authors as Laurie Garrett (The Coming Plague) and

Richard Preston (The Hot Zone) stoked the emerging virus fires, creating what amounted to a viral
panic or viral paranoia (King 2004: 73). Stories of viruses gone haywire, such as Prestons account of Ebola, helped reify the
notion that localized events were of international importance. Such causal chains having been formed in the popular imagination, the
timing was ripe for the emergence of bioterrorism concerns. In the aftermath of 9/11, the former cold war had been transformed, using
scalar politics, into a hot war with international viruses (King 2004: 76). Of course, all of this can be tied into the
Foucaultian concept that knowledge is by its very nature political. In The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault outlines the
ways in which medicine is connected to the power of the state. For Foucault, medicine itself becomes a task for the
nation (Foucault 1994: 19). He argues that the practice of medicine is itself political and that the struggle against
disease must begin with a war against bad government (Foucault 1994: 33). In an article on the politics of emerging
diseases, Elisabeth Prescott has echoed Foucaults equation of disease with bad government. She suggests that a nations capacity
to combat both old and newly emergent diseases is a marker not of just biological, but of political, health .
She argues that the ability to respond [is] a reflection of the capacity of a governing system (2007: 1). Whats more, ruptures in
health can lead to break-downs in effective government or in the ability of governments to inspire confidence. Prescott suggests:
Failures in governance in the face of infectious disease outbreaks can result in challenges to social cohesion, economic performance
and political legitimacy (ibid.). In other words, an outbreak of bird flu in China would equate to an example of Foucaults bad
government. In the end, there can be no doubt that the realms of medicine and (political) power are perpetually intertwined. Foucault
writes: There is, therefore, a spontaneous and deeply rooted convergence between the requirement of political ideology and those of
medical technology (Foucault 1994: 38). In other words, we should not be overly surprised by Richard Carmonas testimony or by
debates over bird flu samples. Politics and health have always arguably gone hand-in-hand

The metaphor of disease allows us to cover up the framework of securitization

under the guise of policymaking
Campbell 98 (David, Professor of International Politics at U of Newcastle, Writing Security: US
Foreign Policy and the Polities of Identity. Pg 81-82)
However one might begin to fathom the many issues located within those challenges, our current
situation leaves us with one certainty because we cannot escape the logic of differentiation, we are
often tempted by the logic of defilement. To say as much is not to argue that we are imprisoned
within a particular and permanent system of representations. To be sure, danger is often
represented as disease, dirt, or pollution. As one medical text argues: Disease is shock and
danger for existence32 Or as Karl Jaspers maintains: Disease is a general concept of non-value
which includes all possible negative values33 But such concerns have less to do with the
intrinsic qualities of those conditions that the modernist requirements of order and stability:
Dirt offends against order. Eliminating it is not a negative moment, but a positive effort to
organize the environment. One might suggest that it is the extent to which we want to organize
the environment- the extent to which we want to purify our domain that determines how likely
it is that we represent danger in terms of dirt or disease. Tightly defined order and strictly
enforced stability, undergirded by notions of purity, are not a priori conditions of existence;
some order and some stability might be required for existence as we know it (i.e., in some form
of extensive political community), but it is the degree of tightness, the measure of straightness,
and the extent of desire for purity that constitute danger as dirt or disease. But the temptation
of the logic of defilement as a means of orienting ourselves to danger has more often than not been
overpowering, largely because it is founded on a particular conceptualization of the body in
its use since at lease the eighteenth century, this conceptualization demands purity as a
condition of health and thus make the temptation to defilement a natural characteristic.
This has endowed us with a mode of representation in which health and cleanliness serve the
logic of stability, and disorder is rendered as disease and dirt. In the eighteenth century, when
state forms were becoming the most prevalent articulations of extensive political community,

these modes of representation began to take a new turn that intensified the capacity of
representations of disease to act as discourses of danger of the social.

Medical security metaphors legitimate practices of violence

while simultaneously promoting a liberal subjectivity on the
basis of this violence
Dalby 2(Simon, professor of geography and political economy at
Carleton University in Ottawa, Environmental Security, p. 153-154)
Security studies might draw intellectual support from cultural studies and postcolonial critiques. It
might, as Prins argues, recognize itself in terms of a branch of interpretive humanities. In doing so
the task of academic practitioners, or insecurity specialists, to adopt Davis Bobrow's term but not his
conclusion,29 becomes one of engagement in a conversation about the fate of humanity on an
endangered planetrather than a task of scientists to "objectively" examine a given series of structural
relationships. As such, if it also takes the geographical arguments into account, security studies
might understand itself as many geographical selves, as security studies plural, with Asian, European, and American variants in addition to a variety of postcolonial and, crucially perhaps,
postdevelopment understandings." Security is not then read as a universal condition, as the
American behavioral scientists might like us to do, but understood as a highly contested
signifier that invokes numerous specifications of danger and legiti mates practices of violence
while simultaneously frequently promoting a modern liberal subjectivity on the bases of this
violence.
It also invokes the modern political impulse to control and the medical tropes of
endangerment and disease, abnormality, and threat that are, as Bobrow unreflectively notes,
pervasive in contemporary security culture. Foucault's discussions of security, power, policing,
and government have suggested that the political impulse to secure in the lives of populations
within states is linked to the formulations of all sorts of dangers as well as the questions of
social welfare. Thus the metaphors of various wars against everything from polio to drugs are
part of the larger popular geopolitical repertoires for engaging state agencies. " `[T]he end of
the Cold War' represents not a decisive break with the logic of security, but a realignment that
throws into relief problems and sites of contestation that earlier had been less accessible, that is,
intelligible.

Using medical metaphors reproduces cold war discourse and obscures attempts to
reform consumption
Dalby, professor of geography and political economy at Carleton
University in Ottawa, 2002
(Simon, Environmental Security, p. 154-156)
What threatens is a complex matter of cultural politics. Scripts of nationhood are frequently woven around heroic
deeds in wartime. Battles and wars of independence are crucial military events when rendered so by the narratives of
nation; founding myths produce shared identities. As noted in previous chapters, similar military meta phors saturate
many social phenomena concerned with protection and individual subjects. Medical language is replete with

bacterial invasions, therapeutic interventions, and the battle with disease. Im mune systems are
the patient's first line of defense prior to the use of pharmaceutical weapons. Victims of disease
struggle valiantly. The battleground is the body analogized to the body politic of the state.
Heroic struggles inscribe both national histories and discussions in hospital wards .32 This
medical intertext also haunts Davis Bobrow's formulation of the tasks of security practitioners in
terms of medical metaphors. And yet the formulations of these threats and the invocations of
such themes as the "New World Order" once again work within a spatial imaginary where the
knowledgeable clinician both specifies the condition of the patient and acts within a
disciplinary spatial apparatus that designates the spaces for treatment, the assignment to the
asylum, or the terms of quarantine. As Francois Debrix argues, borrowing from Foucault's analysis in The
Birth of the Clinic, "peacekeeping" in the medical language of such organizations as Medecins sans
Frontieres is also caught in the normalizing practices of the clinical gaze where the failed state, the
site of genocide, or a humanitarian emergency is specified in contrast to the abstraction of the
normal state.33 Such tropes require the intervention of the medical specialist to diagnose, conduct surgery, organize
a quarantine, or specify safe havens. What preventive care or a holistic medical metaphor might convey as Alternative
mode of knowing the South remains a useful counter/- argument to the assumptions of clinical medicine even if the
answers are far from easy. If at least some of the "new" threats to the geopolitical order of
modernity are fairly directly related to the ex pansion of the impacts of modernity , and Laurie
Garrett's extensive compilation of the circumstances of the emergence of new species- hopping

diseases due to the disruptions of tropical ecosystems extends the medical language
appropriately here, then the matter of causes rather than cures is especially pressing .34 This is
particularly true given the ecological shadows of "normal" states, where the assump tions of
indigenous causes requiring intervention to provide a cure fail to incorporate the crossboundary responsibilities implicit in the causes of the disruptions in the first place. None of this
is intended to disparage the work of such organizations as Medecins sans Frontieres in contemporary crises; but

thinking politics without presupposing narratives of normalization, spatial security,

intervention, and imperial control is one important task for critical thinking "after the cold
war." It is if we are to think in terms that do not reproduce the identities, practices, and
politics that cold war security discourses secured . Neither can one innocently argue that such
organizations, the mendicant orders of the twentieth century, to borrow Hardt and Negri's formulation, are outside the
contemporary practices of power however much they may advertise their practices in antigeopolitical tropes.35

Detaching these things from the traditional ethnocentrism of international relations is a

necessary part of the construction of an international and interdisciplinary security studies; it
would certainly seem to be necessary if a cosmopolitan understanding of the dynamics of
conflict and the possibilities for thwarting identity politicsbased warfare is to be the basis of a
new political order.36 If this broader critical agenda is accepted, can it be used as a way of rescuing politics and
security studies from the geopolitical stipulations of communities living in boxes with violence ultimately arbitrating
disagreements? Hopefully it can. Can such thinking also shift the referent objects of security from the state to the human
individual, as both the human security agenda and the critical security literature advocate, without presupposing the identity
of these individuals as neoliberal citizen consumers embedded in a mesh of claims to universal rights? Can all this be
accomplished in recognizing that the social processes currently in motion are interconnected, and in that sense global, but not
in a sense that requires management of the poor by the rich and powerful? To do so, such studies will need a much' more
complicated, geographically diverse world of interconnections as the ontological premise for contemplation and analysis.

Violence and insecurity then can be addressed more directly without the intel lectual detours
through assumptions of interstate violence, territorial states, national security, or even
"civilizations" obscuring the social processes in question. International relations and strategic

studies it is probably not, but security studies it might still be, albeit in a rather different guise
from that bequeathed from the hegemonic practices of the past.

LinkFood Security
Food security pays lip service to the hungry while serving
as a justification for the violent expansion of global
governance
Alcock 9 (Rupert, graduated with a distinction in the MSc in Development and Security from the Department of Politics, University of Bristol in 2009, MSc dissertation
prize joint winner 2009, Speaking Food: A Discourse Analytic Study of Food Security 2009, pdf available online, p. 10-14 MT)

the concept of food security has been the primary lens through which the ongoing
prevalence and inherent complexity of global hunger has been viewed. The adoption of the term at the FAOsanctioned World Food Conference in 1974 has led to a burgeoning literature on the subject, most of which takes food security as an
unproblematic starting point from which to address the persistence of so-called food
insecurity (see Gilmore & Huddleston, 1983; Maxwell, 1990; 1991; Devereux & Maxwell, 2001). A common activity pursued by academics specialising in food security
is to debate the appropriate definition of the term; a study undertaken by the Institute of Development Studies cites over 200 competing definitions (Smith et al., 1992). This
pervasive predilection for empirical clarity is symptomatic of traditional positivist epistemologies and constrains a more farsighted understanding of the power functions of food security itself, a conceptual construct now accorded considerable institutional depth.2 Bradley Klein contends that to
understand the political force of organizing principles like food security, a shift of analytical
focus is required: Instead of presuming their existence and meaning, we ought to historicize
and relativize them as sets of practices with distinct genealogical trajectories (1994: 10). The
forthcoming analysis traces the emergence and evolution of food security discourse in
official publications and interrogates the intertextual relations which pertain between these
publications and other key sites of discursive change and/or continuity . Absent from much (if not all) of the
academic literature on food security is any reflection on the governmental content of the concept of security itself. The notion of food security is
received and regurgitated in numerous studies which seek to establish a better, more
comprehensive food security paradigm. Simon Maxwell has produced more work of this type than anyone else in the field and his studies are
Since the 1970s,

commonly referenced as foundational to food security studies (Shaw, 2005; see Maxwell, 1990; 1991; 1992; 1996; Devereux & Maxwell, 2001). Maxwell has traced the evolution
in thinking on food security since the 1970s and distinguishes three paradigm shifts in its meaning: from the global/national to the household/individual, from a food first
perspective to a livelihood perspective and from objective indicators to subjective perception (Maxell, 1996; Devereux & Maxwell, 2001). There is something of value in the kind
of analysis Maxwell employs and these three paradigm shifts provide a partial framework with which to compare the results of my own analysis of food security discourse. I
suggest, however, that the conclusions Maxwell arrives at are severely restricted by his unwillingness to reflect on food security as a governmental mechanism of global liberal
governance. As a development expert he employs an epistemology infused with concepts borrowed from the modern development discourse; as such, his conclusions reflect a

the macro-politics of food security as a specific

rationality of government. In his article Food Security: A Post-Modern Perspective (1996) Maxwell provides a meta-narrative which explains the
concern with the micro-politics of food security and a failure to reflect on

discursive shifts he distinguishes. He argues that the emerging emphasis on flexibility, diversity and the perceptions of the people concerned (1996: 160) in food security
discourse is consistent with currents of thought in other spheres which he vaguely labels post-modern. In line with one of the most popular words in the lexicon of postmodernism, Maxwell claims to have deconstructed the term food security; in so doing, a new construction has been proposed, a distinctively post-modern view of food
security (1996: 161-162). This, according to Maxwell, should help to sharpen programmatic policy and bring theory and knowledge closer to what he calls real food insecurity
(1996: 156). My own research in the forthcoming analysis contains within it an explicit critique of Maxwells thesis, based on three main observations. First, Maxwells

reconstruction of food security and re-articulation of its normative criteria reproduce

precisely the kind of technical, managerial set of solutions which characterise the positivistic
need for definitional certainty that he initially seeks to avoid. Maxwell himself acknowledges the risk of falling into the trap of the meta-narrative and that the

ice is admittedly very thin (1996: 162-163), but finally prefers to ignore these misgivings when faced with the frightening (and more accurately post-modern) alternative.
Second, I suggest that the third shift which Maxwell distinguishes, from objective indicators to subjective perceptions, is a fabrication which stems more from his own normative
beliefs than evidence from official literature. To support this part of his argument Maxwell quotes earlier publications of his own work in which his definition incorporates the

while lip-service is occasionally paid to the

lives and faces of hungry people, food security analysis is constituted by increasingly
extensive, technological and professedly objective methods of identifying and stratifying
the food insecure. This comprises another distinctly positivistic endeavour. Finally, Maxwells emphasis on shifts in thinking suggests the replacement of old
subjective dimension of food security (cf. Maxwell, 1988). As my own analysis reveals,

with new the global/national concern with food supply and production, for example, is replaced by a new and more enlightened concern for the household/individual level of
food demand and entitlements. Discursive change, however, defies such linear boundary drawing; the trace of the old is always already present in the form of the new. I suggest

food security is an increasingly complex agenda, increasingly amorphous

results in a technocratic discourse which
presents policy as if it were directly dictated by matters of fact (thematic patterns) and deflects
consideration of values choices and the social, moral and political responsibility for such choices (Lemke,
that Maxwells shifts should rather be conceived as additions; the implication for

definitions and the establishment of new divisions of labour between experts in diverse fields. This

1995: 58, emphasis in original). The dynamics of technocratic discourse are examined further in the forthcoming analysis. These observations inform the explicit critique of

I adopt a broad perspective from

which to interrogate food security as a discursive technology of global liberal governance .
contemporary understandings of food security which runs conterminously with the findings of my analysis.

Food security is not conceived as an isolated paradigm, but as a component of overlapping

discourses of human security and sustainable development which emerged concurrently in
the 1970s. The securitisation process can be regarded in some cases as an extreme form of politicisation, while in others it can lead to a depoliticisation of the issue at hand
and a replacement of the political with technological or scientific remedies. I show how the militaristic component of traditional
security discourse is reproduced in the wider agenda of food security, through the notions of
risk, threat and permanent emergency that constitute its governmental rationale.

Link Hegemony
Written out of the 1AC empirical analysis hegemony is the
failure of the War in Vietnam and the subsequent
construction of neoliberal laboratories across the global
south beginning with Chile. The AFF imagines U.S.
hegemony existing in the vacuum of international
anarchy; the history told by the 1AC is a Eurocentric
history which obfuscates the U.S.s role in propping up
brutal dictatorships to reassert its hegemonic control.
Hegemony is intimately bound the brutal spread of
neoliberalism.
Barder 2013
/Alexander D., Department of Political Studies & Public Administration, American University of Beirut,
Beirut, Lebanon, PhD in Political Theory from John Hopkins, American Hegemony Comes Home: The
Chilean Laboratory and the Neoliberalization of the United States Alternatives: Global, Local, Political
2013 38: 103 originally published online 22 April 2013, DOI: 10.1177/0304375413486331/
Examining historical patterns of international hierarchy reveals a rich and multidirectional diffusion of
norms, practices, and knowledges between dominant and subordinate polities.2 Imperial historians have
for some time now have documented this transnational norm diffusion by looking more closely at how
colonial spaces were in fact laboratories of sociopolitical experimentation .3 Nonetheless, this
multidirectional norm diffusion and appreciation of the active reverberations from imperial or
subordinate spaces remains largely unexplored by international theorists , for two main
reasons. First, the fact that canonical international theory remains largely predicated upon an
assumption of international anarchy which is construed as a timeless feature of international
politics.4 This assumption implies a representation of the state ahistorically .5 Furthermore, it
construes the global South as a largely passive and peripheral actor in world history. Second,
because of a continuing Eurocentrism that conceptualizes the West as a privileged

historical actor by taking for granted that Western norms travel outbound rather than
being the product of interactions with non-Western polities.6 Socialization, when it is
theorized in international theory, is typically conceived as the socialization of the non-West into an already
constituted European society of states.7 What these two perspectives imply is a lack of appreciation

within international theory of how historical patterns of hierarchical international relations

have resulted in a set of what some have called a colonial archive that has left significant
imprints upon the historical trajectory of Western state-formation .8 Taking the above into
consideration, this article explores the conjunction between changes in American hegemony over the
course of the 1970s and the subsequent neoliberalization of the United States in the early 1980s. While the
story of the emergence of neoliberalism has been told through many different angles, I argue that this
Reagan-Thatcher neoliberal counterrevolution represents the normalization of a set of
economic theories that were initially experimented within Chile during the mid- to late 1970s
and later adapted within the United States and the United Kingdom.9 Beginning in the late 1960s
with the American defeat in the Vietnam War, and later, the collapse of the Bretton Woods
Agreement, the spike in oil prices and especially the economic crises of stagflation throughout
the industrialized North, American political and economic supremacy was radically
challenged. However, as Giovanni Arrighi has shown, this neoliberal counterrevolution was not
simply a response to a particular economic crisis condition; it was more importantly a political

reassertion of American global hegemony by the means of economic structural adjustment.

Moreover, this project of restoring American supremacy abroad was fundamentally entwined with a

domestic reassertion of governmental authority. As Greg Grandin succinctly puts it, the restoration of

Americans global military power and the restoration of laissez-faire capitalism were
increasingly understood to be indistinguishable goals.10 What connects the international
dimension of crisis management and hegemonic reassertion with domestic neoliberalization
is precisely the manner in which the operationalization of neoliberal reform was
experimented with and innovated in various informal American laboratories . The Chilean
laboratory in particular permitted, under authoritarian conditions, the radical
transformation of the economy according to principles and theories laid out by the Chicago
School of economics. This experience would then become perceived as the tried-and-true
developmental model not only across the global South, but also, with varying degrees, across
the North. This article proceeds as follows. In the first section, I depart from G. John Ikenberrys
recent discussion on postSecond World War American liberal hegemony. While Ikenberry
importantly draws our attention to the hierarchical components of this apre`s guerre international order and
its processes of norm diffusion, he crucially misses the profound crisis of American hegemony of
the 1970s. In the second section, I turn to both Robert Brenner and Giovanni Arrighi to show, first, the
importance of both intercapitalist competition (Brenner) and the collapse of American international
political legitimacy in the wake of the Vietnam War (Arrighi) to account for the erosion of American
control over the global South. Finally, in the third section, I turn to the specific case of Chile and show how
it becomes an important laboratory setting for the experimentation and development of neoliberalism.
This sociopolitical/economic innovation proved to imbricate both a project of reasserting

American hegemony abroad and governmental authority at home.

Hegemony is not based on a liberal order, rather, it is

founded on the imperial financial policies of deregulation
and SAPs which took the global south from sovereign
colonialism to neoliberal colonialism. A benign hegemonic
order is a ruse which covers up the brutal legacy of neoimperialism instated to save U.S. hegemony after our loss
in Vietnam. U.S. hegemony is not only a form of violent
imperialism; it is an unsustainable system which
necessitates escalating crises which will collapse
hegemony and neoliberalism.
Barder 2013
/Alexander D., Department of Political Studies & Public Administration, American University of Beirut,
Beirut, Lebanon, PhD in Political Theory from John Hopkins, American Hegemony Comes Home: The
Chilean Laboratory and the Neoliberalization of the United States Alternatives: Global, Local, Political
2013 38: 103 originally published online 22 April 2013, DOI: 10.1177/0304375413486331/
Brenners argument is that the economic crisis of the 1970s reflected a decline in the

manufacturing rate of profit across the advanced capitalist economies as a result of overcapacity and over-production.35 American firms were placed in a position in which they could not
increase prices in order to keep up with increasing domestic labor costs. Moreover, their profitability was
being undermined because of the higher productivity of their competitors in Germany and Japan. Brenner
acknowledges that this international situation provoked an American domestic political crisis that the
Johnson administration initially attempted to address through fiscal and monetary austerity. However, this
policy did not halt declining economic growth. As Brenner explains, the Nixon administration realized that
the political costs of sustaining a serious anti-inflationary policy proved unacceptable . . . . Well before
the defeat of the Republicans in the congressional elections of November 1970, and as high interest rates
threatened to choke off the recovery, the government turned once again to fiscal stimulus and the Fed
accompanied a policy of easy credit. As Nixon was to put it several months later, We are all Keynesians
now.36 The devaluation of the dollar was, as Brenner shows, a way of shifting the burden of declining

profits more evenly across the industrialized world (i.e., negating the inherent benefits for German and
Japanese exporters). However, this proved not to be the panacea that state administrators sought in order to
reestablish American domestic manufacturing profitability. On the contrary, as Brenner writes, By the
end of the 1970s, the manufacturing sector on an international scale was at an impasse, as was the
Keynesian programme of demand management that had been implemented to revitalize the world
economy.37 Systemwide manufacturing profitability could not be rescued on the basis of fiscal and
monetary policies: the continuation of such policies only furthered a run on the dollar provoking a threat to
the dollars position as an international reserve currency.38 The result was what Brenner calls the

shift to Reaganism/ Thatcherism which reversed fiscal and monetary stimulus in order
to dampen the growth of wages, as well as by directly redistributing income to capital
through reduced taxes on corporations and diminished spending on social services .39 The
emergent neoliberalization of economic activity, through the deregulation and liberalization
of finance and other business sectors, aimed . . . at bringing about a revitalization of, and
thereby a shift into, domestic and international financial sectors . . . by means of
suppressing inflation . . . .40 Brenner sees the transformation of the world and domestic (US)
economy as fundamentally tied to the crisis of systemic-wide manufacturing profitability.

Neoliberalization was thus meant to address this economic crisis at the very center of
American economic hegemony. Giovanni Arrighi contests Brenners explanation of the worldwide
economic crisis of profitability as the main factor in explaining the subsequent long stagnation of the
1970s and the emergence of the neoliberal alternative. To be sure, Brenners work is helpful in showing that
intracapitalist competition provoked an important crisis that had substantial reverberations for embedded
liberalism within the industrialized North. In contrast to Ikenberrys narrative, Brenner sees the

economic tribulations of the 1970s as reflecting internal contradictions in the very financial
and economic capitalist architecture that otherwise appears unproblematized within the
wider literature on American liberal hegemony . Brenner does not, as Arrighi argues, convincingly
explain the set of international geopolitical and domestic conditions that influenced policy choices leading
to the Reagan/Thatcher monetarist counter revolution.41 What Brenner misses is that the crisis of

profitability located in the first world industrialized North was fundamentally refracted by
a crisis of American liberal hegemony beginning in the late 1960s: The crisis of
profitability that marked the transition from the long boom to the long downturn, as well as
the great stagflation of the 1970 s, were themselves deeply affected by the parallel crisis of
American hegemony which ensued from the Vietnam War and the eventual American defeat. As
for the Reagan-Thatcher counterrevolution, it was not just, or even primarily, a response to
the unsolved crisis of profitability but alsoand especiallya response to the deepening
crisis of hegemony.42 Brenner, Arrighi argues, misses the broader political context underlying this
crisis in American liberal hegemony precisely because his analysis is primarily focused on intercapitalist
competitive pressures (i.e., between the United States, Germany, and Japan) and not on how the United
States was concerned with maintaining its hegemonic position throughout the global
South.43 By contrast, Arrighi shows that the changes in US balance of payments (and the
corresponding fluctuations in US currency prices that would lead to enormous fluctuations in
international and domestic fiscal and monetary policies) were fundamentally part an ongoing
geopolitical project during the 1960s: the US government sought to contain, through the
use of force, the joint challenge of nationalism and communism in the Third World .44 And,
as Arrighi shows, the changes in politicoeconomic policies beginning with Reagan and Thatcher
came from the unresolved crises of US hegemony in the Third World rather than in the crisis
of profitability as such.45 The Vietnam War was the main event of this larger US project to dominate the
global periphery either through direct military means or the use of proxies. However, the catastrophic
engagement in Vietnam proved to have not only enormous economic implications the
increase in defense expenditures resulted in growing budget deficits at the same time that the Johnson
Administration was busy funding the Great Society initiativebut also resulted in a fundamental
crisis of legitimacy. Internationally, the joint military and legitimacy crises of the US world power
were the expression of the failure of the US military-industrial complex to cope with the problems posed

by world-wide decolonization.46 Whereas Ikenberry takes for granted that American liberal

hegemony provides a basis for weaker and secondary states to make decisions to willingly
join and comply with the rules and institutions of this order, the reality was far more
complex and conflictual. Newly decolonized states were subject to intense American
pressure to satisfy its growing economic and political needs throughout the Cold War .47 Reindustrialization in many northern states, along with ever-increasing military demands to keep up
with the arms race with the Soviet Union by the United States, was predicated upon the
consistent ability to extract primary materials from the global South . What emerged over the
course of the 1950s and 1960s was a set of highly effective and efficient organizational links between
Third World primary inputs and First World purchasing power and resulted in powerful vested
interest[s] . . . in preserving maximum present and future flexibility in the use of Third World resources for
the benefit of First world states.48 There was a tension between the demands of continuous
capital accumulation by the industrialized North (in the global South) and the progressive demand
for the exercise of full sovereignty by newly decolonized states . When it became clear
that the liberal hegemon could not directly subjugate Vietnam into complying, as Ikenberry
would argue, with its demands, the US government temporarily lost most, if not all of its
credibility as the policeman of the free world.49 The loss of American credibility suffered as a result of
its defeat in Vietnam resulted in what Arrighi characterizes as a power vacuum that was accentuated
throughout the 1970s. Events such as the rise of [Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries]
OPEC, the oils crises, the Yom Kippur war and the fall of the Shah in 1979, all happened
concurrently with the escalation of inter-capitalist competition, as Brenner has shown, and
resulted in a profound economic crisis throughout the North.50 This political economic crisis
perpetuated the impression among political leaders and public opinion across the world that the
United States was incapable of addressing this systemic crisis. All told the conjunction between
an international political crisis derived from the Vietnam War and the crisis in profitability produced
(though aided by extremely lax US monetary policy) the inflationary uptick in the early 1970s and the
collapse of the system of fixed exchange rates. In short, Arrighi writes, the interaction between

the crisis of profitability and the crisis of hegemony, in combination with the US
inflationary strategy of crisis management, resulted in a ten-year increase in world
monetary disorder, escalating inflation and steady deterioration in the capacity of the US dollar to
function as the worlds means of payment.51 This finally paved the way for the dramatic shifts in
the set of international and domestic policies designed to reassert American hegemony. The
monetarist counterrevolution embodied in tight monetary and fiscal policies was designed to
reassert faith in the US dollar as the international reserve currency. But what the increase in real
interest rates accomplished in a spectacular fashion was the direct reassertion of US control
over Third World countries that heavily borrowed US dollars in the open market at a time when
there was a massive supply of petrodollars being recycled through Western banks. Such countries faced
ruinous repayment rates that necessitated international organizations such as the IM F and
World Bank provide them with structural adjustment programs . Significantly, such structural
adjustment programs gave primacy to Western corporate interests through deregulation
and the ability to repatriate US dollar assets back home. Direct changes in US monetary policy
resulted in a series of debt crises, that as David Harvey argues, were in fact orchestrated,
managed and controlled both to rationalize the system and to redistribute assets during the
1980s and 1990s.52 These debt crises were part of a way of reasserting American
hegemony throughout the global South in such a way that was inconceivable merely
through military means. The American-led liberal order, and its reassertion of hegemony in
the 1980s, was in fact predicated upon the very need to discipline and coerce weaker
states, particularly in Latin America and the Middle Eastas Ikenberry writesthrough
political and economic means. The debt crises of the 1980s were part of this capacity to discipline.
However, these crises, characterized as well by the explosive development of financial
securitization and the proliferation of asset bubbles, represents what Arrighi calls a signal

crisis of the dominant regime of accumulation of the American postsecond world war
order.53 A signal crisis signifies a deeper underlying systemic crisis when leading
capitalist entities begin switching their economic activities away from production and trade
to financial intermediation and speculation.54 This initial move from investment in
material production to the fictitious world of financial speculation and engineering initially
forestalls and enhances the capacity for wealth generation for a certain class . Nonetheless, it
cannot embody a lasting resolution of the underlying contradictions. On the contrary, as
Arrighi writes, it has always been the preamble to a deepening of the crisis and to the
eventual supersession of the still dominant regime of accumulation by a new one.5 5 What
Arrighi calls the terminal crisis is then the end of the long century that encompasses the
rise, full expansion, and demise of that regimewhat is potentially occurring today.56 The
signal crisis of American political and economic hegemony provoked a set of policies to
enhance capital accumulations beneficial to American business and state to the detriment
of the global South. What Ikenberry sees as American behavior being crudely imperial in
certain contexts was in fact the way of maintaining and reinvigorating international forms of
capital accumulation for the benefit of American hegemony and its allies . As I will show in the
last section of this chapter, this manifestly neo-imperial economic order was not only meant to be
applicable throughout the global South; the Reagan-Thatcher counter revolution was also an internal
revolution that adapted some of the experiences and practices developed in the global

periphery to reinforce American hegemony at home and abroad.

Their pursuit of hegemony is based on a fantasy of control that relies upon the
existence of threatening monsters to maintain the illusion of personal strength and
discipline. This grand strategy prompts resistance and creates a permanent state of
conflict, turning constructed enemies into real enemies and flipping the case.
Ira Chernus, Professor of Religious Studies and Co-director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at
the University of Colorado-Boulder, 2006 (Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and
Sin, Published by Paradigm Publishers, ISBN 1594512752, p. 53-54)
The end of the cold war spawned a tempting fantasy of imperial omnipotence on a global scale.
The neocons want to turn that fantasy into reality. But reality will not conform to the fantasy; it
wont stand still or keep any semblance of permanent order. So the neocons efforts inevitably
backfire. Political scientist Benjamin Barber explains that a nation with unprecedented power
has unprecedented vulnerability: for it must repeatedly extend the compass of its power to
preserve what it already has, and so is almost by definition always overextended. Gary Dorrien
sees insecurity coming at the neoconservatives in another way, too: For the empire, every
conflict is a local concern that threatens its control. However secure it maybe, it never feels
secure enough. The [neocon] unipolarists had an advanced case of this anxiety. . . . Just below
the surface of the customary claim to toughness lurked persistent anxiety. This anxiety was
inherent in the problem of empire and, in the case of the neocons, heightened by ideological
ardor.39 If the U.S. must control every event everywhere, as neocons assume, every act of
resistance looks like a threat to the very existence of the nation. There is no good way to
distinguish between nations or forces that genuinely oppose U.S. interests and those that dont.
Indeed, change of any kind, in any nation, becomes a potential threat. Everyone begins to look
like a threatening monster that might have to be destroyed. Its no surprise that a nation
imagined as an implacable enemy often turns into a real enemy. When the U.S. intervenes to
prevent change, it is likely to provoke resistance. Faced with an aggressive U.S. stance, any
nation might get tough in return. Of course, the U.S. can say that it is selflessly trying to serve
the world. But why would other nations believe that? It is more likely that others will resist,
making hegemony harder to achieve. To the neocons, though, resistance only proves that the
enemy really is a threat that must be destroyed. So the likelihood of conflict grows, making
everyone less secure. Moreover, the neocons want to do it all in the public spotlight. In the past,
any nation that set out to conquer others usually kept its plans largely secret. Indeed, the cold
war neocons regularly blasted the Soviets for harboring a secret plan for world conquest. Now

here they are calling on the U.S. to blare out its own domineering intentions for all the world to
[end page 53] hear. That hardly seems well calculated to achieve the goal of hegemony. But it is
calculated to foster the assertive, even swaggering, mood on the home front that the neocons
long for. Journalist Ron Suskind has noted that neocons always offer a statement of enveloping
peril and no hypothesis for any real solution. They have no hope of finding a real solution
because they have no reason to look for one. Their story allows for success only as a fantasy. In
reality, they expect to find nothing but an endless battle against an enemy that can never be
defeated. At least two prominent neocons have said it quite bluntly. Kenneth Adelman: We
should not try to convince people that things are getting better. Michael Ledeen: The struggle
against evil is going to go on forever.40 This vision of endless conflict is not a conclusion
drawn from observing reality. It is both the premise and the goal of the neocons fantasy.
Ultimately, it seems, endless resistance is what they really want. Their call for a unipolar world
ensures a permanent state of conflict, so that the U.S. can go on forever proving its military
supremacy and promoting the manly virtues of militarism. They have to admit that the U.S.,
with its vastly incomparable power, already has unprecedented security against any foreign
army. So they must sound the alarm about a shadowy new kind of enemy, one that can attack in
novel, unexpected ways. They must make distant changes appear as huge imminent threats to
America, make the implausible seem plausible, and thus find new monsters to destroy. The
neocons story does not allow for a final triumph of order because it is not really about creating a
politically calm, orderly world. It is about creating a society full of virtuous people who are
willing and able to fight off the threatening forces of social chaos. Having superior power is less
important than proving superior power. That always requires an enemy.
Just as neocons need
monsters abroad, they need a frightened society at home. Only insecurity can justify their shrill
call for a stronger nation (and a higher military budget). The more dire their warnings of
insecurity, the more they can demand greater military strength and moral resolve. Every foreign
enemy is, above all, another occasion to prod the American people to overcome their anxiety,
identify evil, fight resolutely against it, and stand strong in defense of their highest values.
Hegemony will do no good unless there is challenge to be met, weakness to be conquered, evil
to be overcome. The American people must actively seek hegemony and make sacrifices for it,
to show that they are striving to overcome their own weakness. So the quest for strength still
demands a public confession of weakness, just as the neocons had demanded two decades earlier
when they warned of a Soviet nuclear attack through a window of vulnerability. The quest for
strength through the structures of national security still demands a public declaration of national
insecurity. Otherwise, there is nothing to overcome. The more frightened the public, the more
likely it is to believe and enact the neocon story.

Attempts to shore up U.S. hegemony are symptomatic of a dangerous obsession with

controlthis death drive terminates in apocalyptic violence.
Robert Jay Lifton, Visiting Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, previously Distinguished
Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at the Graduate School and Director of The Center on Violence and
Human Survival at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York, 2003
(Superpower Syndrome: Americas Apocalyptic Confrontation With The World, Published by Thunders
Mouth Press / Nation Books, ISBN 1560255129, p. 1-4)
The apocalyptic imagination has spawned a new kind of violence at the beginning of the twentyfirst century. We can, in fact, speak of a worldwide epidemic of violence aimed at massive
destruction in the service of various visions of purification and renewal. In particular, we are
experiencing what could be called an apocalyptic face-off between Islamist* forces, overtly
visionary in their willingness to kill and die for their religion, and American forces claiming to
be restrained and reasonable but no less visionary in their projection of a cleansing war-making
and military power. Both sides are [end page 1] energized by versions of intense idealism; both
see themselves as embarked on a mission of combating evil in order to redeem and renew the
world; and both are ready to release untold levels of violence to achieve that purpose. The war
on Iraqa country with longstanding aspirations toward weapons of mass destruction but with
no evident stockpiles of them and no apparent connection to the assaults of September 11was
a manifestation of that American visionary projection. The religious fanaticism of Osama bin

Laden and other Islamist zealots has, by now, a certain familiarity to us as to others elsewhere,
for their violent demands for spiritual purification are aimed as much at fellow Islamics as at
American infidels. Their fierce attacks on the defilement that they believe they see
everywhere in contemporary life resemble those of past movements and sects from all parts of
the world; such sects, with end-of-the-world prophecies and devout violence in the service of
bringing those prophecies about, flourished in Europe from the eleventh through the sixteenth
century. Similar sects like the fanatical Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo, which released sarin gas
into the Tokyo subways in 1995, have existedeven proliferatedin our own time. The
American apocalyptic entity is less familiar to us. Even if its urges to power and domination
seem historically recognizable, it nonetheless represents a new constellation of forces bound up
with what Ive come to think of [end page 2] as superpower syndrome. By that term I mean a
national mindsetput forward strongly by a tight-knit leadership groupthat takes on a sense
of omnipotence, of unique standing in the world that grants it the right to hold sway over all
other nations. The American superpower status derives from our emergence from World War II
as uniquely powerful in every respect, still more so as the only superpower left standing at the
end of the Cold War in the early 1990s. More than merely dominate, the American superpower
now seeks to control history. Such cosmic ambition is accompanied by an equally vast sense of
entitlement, of special dispensation to pursue its aims. That entitlement stems partly from
historic claims to special democratic virtue, but has much to do with an embrace of technological
power translated into military terms. That is, a superpowerthe worlds only superpoweris
entitled to dominate and control precisely because it is a superpower. The murderous events of
9/11 hardened that sense of entitlement as nothing else could have. Superpower syndrome did
not require 9/11, but the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon rendered us an aggrieved
superpower, a giant violated and made vulnerable, which no superpower can permit. Indeed, at
the core of superpower syndrome lies a powerful fear of vulnerability. A superpowers
victimization brings on both a sense of humiliation and an angry determination to restore, or
even [end page 3] extend, the boundaries of a superpower-dominated world. Integral to
superpower syndrome are its menacing nuclear stockpiles and their world-destroying capacity.
Throughout the decades of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union both lived with
a godlike nuclear capacity to obliterate the cosmos, along with a fear of being annihilated by the
enemy power. Now America alone possesses that world-destroying capacity, and post-Soviet
Russia no longer looms as a nuclear or superpower adversary. We have yet to grasp the full
impact of this exclusive capacity to blow up anyone or everything, but its reverberations are
never absent in any part of the world. The confrontation between Islamist and American
versions of planetary excess has unfortunately tended to define a world in which the vast
majority of people embrace neither. But apocalyptic excess needs no majority to dominate a
landscape. All the more so when, in their mutual zealotry, Islamist and American leaders seem
to act in concert. That is, each, in its excess, nurtures the apocalypticism of the other, resulting
in a malignant synergy. * In keeping with general usage, Islamist refers to groups that are
essentially theocratic and fundamentalist, and at times apocalyptic. Islamic is a more general
ethnic as well as religious term for Muslims. The terms can of course overlap, and Islamic
state can mean one run on Islamist principles.

The aff is fueled by American Exceptionalismtheir defense of U.S. hegemony is

inextricably bound up in notions of manifest destiny.
David Grondin, Lecturer in the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa, 2006 (The
(Power) Politics of Space: What IR Theories have to say about American Astro-Political Discourses on
Space Weaponisation, Paper Presented At The Annual Meeting Of The International Studies Association,
March
25th,
Available
Online
via
All
Academic
at
http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/0/9/8/6/7/p98679_index.html,
Accessed
10-26-2008, p. 8-11)
The reterritorialization of the national security state in a global security scheme produces news
frontiers on the global map: cartographically speaking, the US "territorial" boundaries are that of
the globe and national security goes hand in hand with global security American security
interests would be read as concomitant with global security interests. This idea goes along with a

geopolitical vision centered on globalization. Recently, this idea was put forth by a former
Pentagon's strategist and professor of the US Naval War College, Thomas Barnett, who wishes
to propose the new strategic thinking for the US in the War on Terror5. He wanted to link
security concerns with globalization in a rejuvenated US global strategy that both aims to
achieve neoliberal globalization and global stability. In remapping of the world in two zones, a
Functioning Core and a Non-Integrated Gap6 with globalization (see the map7), he wished to
redefine the frontiers of globalization by using a cartography where security and economy would
be in a symbiotic relation. The US would act as the global systems administrator, as if it were the
systems administrator of computer networks. He sees disconnectedness as the source of danger
and disconnectedness expresses a country that has not accepted the security rules set of
globalization, rules set by the countries that benefit from globalization we should say. And what
should be the objective? To shrink the Gap! For Barnett, the "dangerous" countries are to be
found in the Gap. He sees the US as a global Leviathan state that could act, through its armed
forces, in the Gap in order to "export security" (security has become a commercial product); in
the Core, the US state would act as a policing and peacekeeping force. [end page 8; page 9
omitted -- graphic only] Barnett goes even further as he associates the fate of globalization as a
political and economic project and as historical development to the destiny of the US: America
serves as the ideological wellspring for globalization. These United States still stands as its first
concrete experiences. We are the only country in the world purposely built around the ideals that
animate globalization's advance: freedom of choice, freedom of movement, freedom of
expression. We are connectivity personified. Globalization is this country's gift to history the
most perfectly flawed projection of the American Dream onto the global landscape. [...] In short,
we the people needs to become we the planet (Barnett 2004: 50; original emphasis). Since 1945,
the US state has had but one global strategy, a neoliberal geopolitics of global dominance
(Sparke 2005; Robert, Secor, and Sparke 2003).8 As Barnett and other strategic documents like
the NSS and the NMS show, the Global War on Terror has been fuelled by an extremely vibrant
and patriotic nationalist base that truly believes that America is imbued with a providential
mission and sense of moral crusade. Despite an apparent discrepancy between current US
militaristic projects that draw from a neoconservative realist geopolitical discourse and other
strategic projects that fall within the scope of a global neoliberal geoeconomical discourse, I
argue that these discourses stem from the same ideological foundation, the 'liberal imagination'
in American political life. According to Daniel Nexon and Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, it is a
powerful identity and ideological narrative in the American discourse on foreign policy which
makes them overtly moralistic. It is often used to conflate the US and the world in the protection
of liberal democracy and liberty. As they put it, "Indeed, no matter what the specific policy
recommended, the notion that the United States has a 'manifest destiny' as the embodiment of
freedom and liberty is a constant theme in American political discourse" (Nexon and Jackson
2003: 146). It is however known that the suffusion of liberal values and ascription of a divine
mission for the world bring about contradictions when confronted with some of the foreign
policy actions of the United States. But this is of no concern for US nationalism is committed to
an "ideological construction of the nation that insists on the global relevance of the American
project" and consequently claims "its righteous entitlement to lead the world". This remapping of
US nationalism is thus to be understood through a dialectical relationship of [end page 10]
exceptionalism/universalism, of a "city upon a hill" and a crusader state. It is in this framing of
US globalist nationalism that its neoliberal hegemonic global strategy tries to have it both ways,
to remake the world in America's image, while assuming that its national interests are global
interests, thereby conflating its national security with global security, as if the great aspirations
of the US and of mankind were one and the same (McCartney 2004: 400). In this light, the USled Global War on Terror really becomes a nation-building project that has evolved into a Global
Leviathan, but without its mandatory "social contract" with the peoples of the world (Barnett
2004: 369-370).

The impact is extinctionexceptionalism engages in an active forgetting of the

horrors of past atrocities, paving the way for ever-increasing violence.
William V. Spanos, Distinguished Professor of English at Binghamton University, State

University of New York, 2008 (American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization: The
Specter of Vietnam, Published by SUNY Press, ISBN 0791472892, p. ix-x) In this book I
contend that the consequence of America's intervention and conduct of the war in Vietnam was
the self-destruction of the ontological, cultural, and political foundations on which America had
perennially justified its benign" self-image and global practice from the time of the Puritan
"errand in the wilderness." In the aftermath of the defeat of the American Goliath by a small
insurgent army, the "specter" of Vietnamby which I mean, among other things, the violence,
bordering on genocide, America perpetrated against an "Other" that refused to accommodate
itself to its mission in the wilderness of Vietnamcame to haunt America as a contradiction that
menaced the legitimacy of its perennial self-representation as the exceptionalist and "redeemer
nation." In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the dominant culture in America (including the
government, the media, Hollywood, and even educational institutions) mounted a massive
campaign to "forget Vietnam." This relentless recuperative momentum to lay the ghost of that
particular war culminated in the metamorphosis of an earlier general will to "heal the wound
inflicted on the American national psyche, into the "Vietnam syndrome"; that is, it transformed a
healthy debate over the idea of America into a national neurosis. This monumentalist initiative
was aided by a series of historical events between 1989 and 1991 that deflected the American
people's attention away from the divisive memory of the Vietnam War and were represented by
the dominant culture as manifestations of the global triumph of "America": Tiananmen Square,
the implosion of the Soviet Union, and the first Gulf War. This "forgetting" of the actual history
of the Vietnam War, represented in this book by Graham Greene's The Quiet American, Philip
Caputo's A Rumor of War, and Tim OBrien's Going After Cacciato (and many other novels,
memoirs, and films to which I refer parenthetically), contributed to the rise of neoconservatism
and the religious right to power in the United States. And it provided the context for the renewal
of America's exceptionalist errand in the global wilderness, now understood, as the conservative
think tank the Project for the New American [end page ix] Century put it long before the
invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, as the preserving and perpetuation of the Pax Americana.
Whatever vestigial memory of the Vietnam War remained after this turn seemed to be decisively
interred with Al Qaeda's attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11,
2001. Completely immune to dissent, the confident American government, under President
George W. Bush and his neoconservative intellectual deputiesand with the virtually total
support of the America mediaresumed its errand in the global wilderness that had been
interrupted by the specter of Vietnam. Armed with a resurgence of self-righteous indignation and
exceptionalist pride, the American government, indifferent to the reservations of the "Old
World," unilaterally invaded Afghanistan and, then, after falsifying intelligence reports about
Saddam Hussein's nuclear capability, Iraq, with the intention, so reminiscent of its (failed)
attempts in Vietnam, of imposing American-style democracy on these alien cultures. The early
representation by the media of the immediately successful "shock and awe" acts of arrogant
violence in the name of civilization" was euphoric. They were, it was said, compelling evidence
not only of the recuperation of American consensus, but also of the rejuvenation of America's
national identity. But as immediate "victory" turned into an occupation of a world unwilling to
be occupied, and the American peace into an insurgency that now verges on becoming a civil
war, the specter of Vietnam, like the Hydra in the story of Hercules, began to reassert itself: the
unidentifiability or invisibility of the enemy, their refusal to be answerable to the American
narrative, quagmire, military victories that accomplished nothing, search and destroy missions,
body counts, the alienation of allies, moral irresolution, and so on. It is the memory of this
"Vietnamthis specter that refuses to be accommodated to the imperial exceptionalist
discourse of post-Vietnam Americathat my book is intended to bring back to presence. By
retrieving a number of representative works that bore acute witness, even against themselves, to
the singularity of a war America waged against a people seeking liberation from colonial rule
and by reconstellating them into the post-9/11 occasion, such a project can contribute a new
dimension not only to that shameful decade of American history, but also, and more important,
to our understanding of the deeply backgrounded origins of America's war on terror" in the
aftermath of the Al Qaeda attacks. Indeed, it is my ultimate purpose in this book to provide
directives for resisting an American momentum that threatens to destabilize the entire planet, if
not to annihilate the human species itself, and also for rethinking the very idea of America.

By defining security around the predominance of US influence, every conflict of

interests becomes justification for militarization, escalating to war.
Campbell 98 (David, Professor International Politics at University of New Castle, "Writing Security; United States Foreign
Policy the Politics of Identity," 31-33)

Most important just as the source of danger has never been fixed, neither has the identity that it was said to
threaten. The contours of this identity have been the subject of constant (re)writing; no rewriting

in the sense of changing the meaning, but rewriting in the sense of inscribing something so that
which is contingent and subject to flux is rendered more permanent. While one might have
expected few if any references to national values or purposes in confidential prepared for the inner
sanctum of national security policy (after all, don't they know who they are or what they represent?) the texts of
foreign policy are replete with statements about the fulfillment of the republic, the fundamental purpose of the
nation, God given rights, moral codes, the principles of European civilization, the fear of cultural and spiritual
loss, and the responsibilities and duties thrust upon the gleaming example of America. In this

sense, the texts that guided national security policy did more than simply offer strategic analysis of
the "reality" they confronted: they actively concerned themselves with the scripting of a
particular American identity. Stamped "Top Secret" and read by only the select and power few, the texts effaced the boundary
between inside and outside with their quasi-Puritan figurations.
In employing this mode of representation, the foreign policy texts of the postwar period recalled the seventeenth-century literary genre of the
jeremiad, or political sermon, in which Puritan preachers combined searing critiques with appeals for spiritual renewal. Later to establish the
interpretive framework for national identity, these exhortations drew on a European tradition of preaching the omnipresence of sin so as to
instill the desire for order but they added a distinctly affirmative moment:
The American Puritan jeremiad was the ritual of a culture on an errand - which is to say, a culture based on a faith in process. Substituting
teleology for hierarchy, it discarded the Old War ideal of stasis for a New World vision of the future. Its function was to create a climate of
anxiety that helped release the restless "progressivist" energies required for the success of the venture. The European jeremiad thrived on
anxiety, of course.

Like all "Traditionalist" forms of ritual, it used fear and trembling to teach
acceptance of fixed social norms. But the American jeremiad went much further. It made anxiety its end as well as its means.
Crisis was the social norm it sought to inculcate. The very concept of errand after all, implied a state of unfulfillment. The future, though
divinely assured, was never quite there, and New England's Jeremiahs set out to provide the sense of insecurity that would ensure the outcome.
Whereas the Puritan jeremiads were preached b y religious figures in public, the national security planners entreated in private the urgency of
the manifold dangers confronting the republic. But the refrains of their political sermons have occupied a prominent place in postwar political
discourse. On two separate occasions (first in 1950, and t hen in 196), private citizens with close ties to the foreign policy bureaucracy
established a "Committee on the Present Danger" to alert a public they perceived as lacking resolve and will to necessity of confronting the

More recently, with Pentagon planners concerned

about the "guerillas, assassins, terrorists, and subversives" said to be "nibbling away" at the
United States, proclamations that the fundamental values of the country are under threat have been
no less insistent. As Oliver North announced to the U.S. Congress: "It is very important for the
American people to know that this is a dangerous world; that we live at risk and that this
nation is at risk in a dangerous world." And in a State Department report, the 1990s were foreshadowed
political and military threat of communism and the Society Union.

as an era in which divergent political critiques nonetheless would seek equally to overcome the "corruption"
and "profligacy" induced by the "loss" of "American purpose" in Vietnam the "moral renewal." To this end, the
rendering of Operation Desert Shield-turn-Storm as an overwhelming exhibition of America's rediscovered
mission stands as testament. The cold war, then , was both a struggle that exceeded the military

threat of the Soviet Union and a struggle into which any number of potential candidates,
regardless of their strategic capacity, were slotted as a threat. In this sense, the collapse, overcoming,
or surrender of one of the protagonists at this historical junction does not mean "it" is over. The cold war's
meaning will undoubtedly change, but if we recall that the phrase cold war was coined by a fourteenth

century Spanish writer to represent the persistent rivalry between Christians and Arabs, we come to
recognize that the sort of struggle the phrase demotes is a struggle over identity: a struggle that is
no context-specific and thus not rooted in the existence of a particular kind of Soviet Union. Besides, the
United States-led war against Iraq should caution us to the fact that the Western (and particularly American)
interpretive dispositions that predominated in the post-World War II international environment - with their

zero-sum analyses of international action, the sense of endangerment ascribed to all the
activities of the other, the fear of internal challenge and subversion, the tendency to militarize all
response, and the willingness to draw the lines of superiority/inferiority between us and them were not specific to one state or ideology. As a consequence, we need to rethink the convention
understanding of foreign policy, and the historicity of the cold war in particular.

Hegemony is a paranoid fantasy---the strategy

omnipotence sees threats to empire everywhere, which
necessitates constant violence---you have an obligation to
place the structural violence that hegemony invisibilizes
at the core of your decision calculus
McClintock 9chaired prof of English and Womens and Gender Studies at UWMadison. MPhil
from Cambridge; PhD from Columbia (Anne, Paranoid Empire: Specters from Guantnamo and Abu
Ghraib, Small Axe Mar2009, Issue 28, p50-74)

the United States has come to be dominated by two grand and dangerous
hallucinations: the promise of benign US globalization and the permanent threat of the
war on terror. I have come to feel that we cannot understand the extravagance of the violence to which
the US government has committed itself after 9/11two countries invaded, thousands of innocent
people imprisoned, killed, and torturedunless we grasp a defining feature of our moment,
that is, a deep and disturbing doubleness with respect to power. Taking shape, as it now
does, around fantasies of global omnipotence (Operation Infinite Justice, the War to End All Evil) coinciding with
nightmares of impending attack, the United States has entered the domain of paranoia: dream
world and catastrophe. For it is only in paranoia that one finds simultaneously and in such condensed form both
deliriums of absolute power and forebodings of perpetual threat. Hence the spectral and
nightmarish quality of the war on terror, a limitless war against a limitless threat, a war vaunted by
the US administration to encompass all of space and persisting without end. But the war on terror is not a real
war, for terror is not an identifiable enemy nor a strategic, real-world target. The war on terror is what William Gibson calls elsewhere a consensual
hallucination, 4 and the US government can fling its military might against ghostly apparitions and
hallucinate a victory over all evil only at the cost of catastrophic self-delusion and the
infliction of great calamities elsewhere.
I have come to feel that we urgently need to make visible (the better politically to challenge) those established but
concealed circuits of imperial violence that now animate the war on terror. We need, as urgently, to illuminate the
continuities that connect those circuits of imperial violence abroad with the vast, internal
shadowlands of prisons and supermaxesthe modern slave-ships on the middle passage to nowherethat have come to
characterize the United States as a super-carceral state. 5
Can we, the uneasy heirs of empire, now speak only of national things? If a long-established but
By now it is fair to say that

primarily covert US imperialism has, since 9/11, manifested itself more aggressively as an overt empire,

does the terrain and object of intellectual inquiry, as well as the claims of political
responsibility, not also extend beyond that useful fiction of the exceptional nation to
embrace the shadowlands of empire? If so, how can we theorize the phantasmagoric, imperial
violence that has come so dreadfully to constitute our kinship with the ordinary , but which
also at the same moment renders extraordinary the ordinary bodies of ordinary people, an
imperial violence which in collusion with a complicit corporate media would render itself
invisible, casting states of emergency into fitful shadow and fleshly bodies into specters? For
imperialism is not something that happens elsewhere, an offshore fact to be deplored but as easily
ignored. Rather, the force of empire comes to reconfigure, from within, the nature and
violence of the nation-state itself, giving rise to perplexing questions: Who under an empire
are we, the people? And who are the ghosted, ordinary people beyond the nation-state
who, in turn, constitute us?
We now inhabit a crisis of violence and the visible. How do we insist on seeing the violence
that the imperial state attempts to render invisible, while also seeing the ordinary people afflicted by that violence? For to allow the
spectral, disfigured people (especially those under torture) obliged to inhabit the haunted no-places and
penumbra of empire to be made visible as ordinary people is to forfeit the long-held US claim of
moral and cultural exceptionalism, the traditional self-identity of the U nited States as the
uniquely superior, universal standard-bearer of moral authority, a tenacious, national

mythology of originary innocence now in tatters. The deeper question, however, is not only how to see but also how to theorize and oppose the
violence without becoming beguiled by the seductions of spectacle alone. 6

we must also find a way to speak with ghosts, for specters disturb the
authority of vision and the hauntings of popular memory disrupt the great forgettings of
official history.
Perhaps in the labyrinths of torture

Paranoia
Even the paranoid have enemies.
Donald Rumsfeld

Can we fully understand the proliferating circuits of imperial violencethe very eclipsing of which gives to our
without understanding the pervasive presence of the paranoia that has
come, quite violently, to manifest itself across the political and cultural spectrum as a
defining feature of our time? By paranoia, I mean not simply Hofstadters famous identification of the US states tendency toward conspiracy theories. 7 Rather, I
conceive of paranoia as an inherent contradiction with respect to power: a double-sided phantasm that oscillates
precariously between deliriums of grandeur and nightmares of perpetual threat, a deep and
dangerous doubleness with respect to power that is held in unstable tension, but which, if
suddenly destabilized (as after 9/11), can produce pyrotechnic displays of violence. The pertinence of understanding
Why paranoia?

moment its uncanny, phantasmagoric cast

paranoia, I argue, lies in its peculiarly intimate and peculiarly dangerous relation to violence. 8

Let me be clear: I do not see paranoia as a primary, structural cause of US imperialism nor as its
structuring identity. Nor do I see the US war on terror as animated by some collective, psychic agency,
submerged mind, or Hegelian cunning of reason, nor by what Susan Faludi calls a national terror
dream. 9 Nor am I interested in evoking paranoia as a kind of psychological diagnosis of the imperial
nation-state. Nations do not have psyches or an unconscious; only people do. Rather, a social entity
such as an organization, state, or empire can be spoken of as paranoid if the dominant powers governing
that entity cohere as a collective community around contradictory cultural narratives, self-mythologies,
practices, and identities that oscillate between delusions of inherent superiority and omnipotence, and
phantasms of threat and engulfment. The term paranoia is analytically useful here, then, not as a
description of a collective national psyche, nor as a description of a universal pathology, but rather as an
analytically strategic concept, a way of seeing and being attentive to contradictions within power, a way of
making visible (the better politically to oppose) the contradictory flashpoints of violence that the state tries
to conceal.
Paranoia is in this sense what I call a hinge phenomenon, articulated between the ordinary person and
society, between psychodynamics and socio-political history. Paranoia is in that sense dialectical rather
than binary, for its violence erupts from the force of its multiple, cascading contradictions: the intimate
memories of wounds, defeats, and humiliations condensing with cultural fantasies of aggrandizement and
revenge, in such a way as to be productive at times of unspeakable violence. For how else can we
understand such debauches of cruelty?
A critical question still remains: does not something terrible have to happen to ordinary people (military
police, soldiers, interrogators) to instill in them, as ordinary people, in the most intimate, fleshly ways, a
paranoid cast that enables them to act compliantly with, and in obedience to, the paranoid visions of a
paranoid state? Perhaps we need to take a long, hard look at the simultaneously humiliating and
aggrandizing rituals of militarized institutions, whereby individuals are first broken down,

then reintegrated (incorporated) into the larger corps as a unified, obedient fighting body,
the methods by which schools, the military, training camps not to mention the paranoid
image-worlds of the corporate mediainstill paranoia in ordinary people and fatally
conjure up collective but unstable fantasies of omnipotence . 10 In what follows, I want to trace
the flashpoints of imperial paranoia into the labyrinths of torture in order to illuminate three crises that
animate our moment: the crisis of violence and the visible, the crisis of imperial legitimacy, and what I call
the enemy deficit. I explore these flashpoints of imperial paranoia as they emerge in the torture at
Guantnamo and Abu Ghraib. I argue that Guantnamo is the territorializing of paranoia and that torture
itself is paranoia incarnate, in order to make visible, in keeping with Hazel Carbys brilliant work, those
contradictory sites where imperial racism, sexuality, and gender catastrophically collide. 11
The Enemy Deficit: Making the Barbarians Visible Because night is here but the barbarians have not
come. Some people arrived from the frontiers, And they said that there are no longer any barbarians. And
now what shall become of us without any barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.
C. P. Cavafy, Waiting for the Barbarians

The barbarians have declared war.

President George W. Bush
C. P. Cavafy wrote Waiting for the Barbarians in 1927, but the poem haunts the aftermath of 9/11 with
the force of an uncanny and prescient dj vu. To what dilemma are the barbarians a kind of solution?

Every modern empire faces an abiding crisis of legitimacy in that it flings its power over
territories and peoples who have not consented to that power. Cavafys insight is that an
imperial state claims legitimacy only by evoking the threat of the barbarians. It is only the
threat of the barbarians that constitutes the silhouette of the empires borders in the first
place. On the other hand, the hallucination of the barbarians disturbs the empire with
perpetual nightmares of impending attack. The enemy is the abject of empire: the rejected
from which we cannot part. And without the barbarians the legitimacy of empire vanishes
like a disappearing phantom. Those people were a kind of solution.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, the grand antagonism of the United States
and the USSR evaporated like a quickly fading nightmare. The cold war rhetoric of totalitarianism,
Finlandization, present danger, fifth columnist, and infiltration vanished. Where were the
enemies now to justify the continuing escalation of the military colossus? And now what
shall become of us without any barbarians? By rights, the thawing of the cold war should
have prompted an immediate downsizing of the military; any plausible external threat had
simply ceased to exist. Prior to 9/11, General Peter Schoomaker, head of the US Army,
bemoaned the enemy deficit: Its no use having an army that did nothing but train, he said. Theres
got to be a certain appetite for what the hell we exist for. Dick Cheney likewise complained: The
threats have become so remote. So remote that they are difficult to ascertain. Colin Powell
agreed: Though we can still plausibly identify specific threatsNorth Korea, Iran, Iraq, something like
thatthe real threat is the unknown, the uncertain. Before becoming president, George W. Bush
likewise fretted over the postcold war dearth of a visible enemy: We do not know who the
enemy is, but we know they are out there. It is now well established that the invasion of Iraq had
been a long-standing goal of the US administration, but there was no clear rationale with which to sell such
an invasion. In 1997 a group of neocons at the Project for the New American Century produced a
remarkable report in which they stated that to make such an invasion palatable would require a
catastrophic and catalyzing eventlike a new Pearl Harbor. 12

The 9/11 attacks came as a dazzling solution, both to the enemy deficit and the problem of
legitimacy, offering the Bush administration what they would claim as a political casus belli
and the military unimaginable license to expand its reach. General Peter Schoomaker would publicly admit that the attacks were an
immense boon: There is a huge silver lining in this cloud. . . . War is a tremendous focus. . . . Now we have this focusing opportunity, and we have the fact that (terrorists) have actually attacked our homeland,
which gives it some oomph. In his book Against All Enemies, Richard Clarke recalls thinking during the attack, Now we can perhaps attack Osama Bin Laden. After the invasion of Afghanistan, Secretary of

Krauthammer, for one, called

for a declaration of total war. We no longer have to search for a name for the post-Cold
War era, he declared. It will henceforth be known as the age of terrorism. 13
State Colin Powell noted, America will have a continuing interest and presence in Central Asia of a kind we could not have dreamed of before. Charles

Their paranoid projections guarantee unending wars

Hollander 3

professor of Latin American history and women's studies at California State University (Nancy, "A
Psychoanalytic Perspective on the Politics of Terror:In the Aftermath of 9/11"
www.estadosgerais.org/mundial_rj/download/FLeitor_NHollander_ingl.pdf)

9-11 has symbolically constituted a relief in the sense of a decrease in the persecutory anxiety
provoked by living in a culture undergoing a deterioration from within. The implosion reflects the economic and
social trends I described briefly above and has been manifest in many related symptoms, including the erosion of family and
community, the corruption of government in league with the wealthy and powerful, the abandonment of working people by
profit-driven corporations going international, urban plight, a drug-addicted youth, a violence addicted media reflecting and
motivating an escalating real-world violence, the corrosion of civic participation by a decadent democracy, a spiritually
bereft culture held prisoner to the almighty consumer ethic, racial discrimination, misogyny, gaybashing, growing numbers of families joining
the homeless, and environmental devastation. Was this not lived as a kind of societal suicide--an ongoing
assault, an aggressive attackagainst life and emotional well-being waged from within against the societal self?
In this sense, then,

9/11 permitted a respite from the sense of internal decay by inadvertently stimulating a renewed
vitality via a reconfiguration of political and psychological forces: tensions within this countrybetween the haves-mores
and have-lesses, as well as between the defenders and critics of the status quo, yielded to a wave of nationalism in which a united
people--Americans all--stood as one against external aggression. At the same time, the generosity, solidarity and selfsacrifice expressed by Americans
In this sense,

toward one another reaffirmed our sense of ourselves as capable of achieving the positive depressive position sentiments of love and empathy. Fractured social relations were

The enemy- -the threat to our integrity as a nation and, in D. W. Winnicotts terms, to our sense of
going on being--was no longer the web of complex internal forces so difficult to understand and change,
but a simple and identifiable enemy from outside of us, clearly marked by their difference, their foreignness and their
uncanny and unfathomable uncivilized pre-modern character. The societal relief came with the projection of aggressive impulses
onto an easily dehumanized external enemy, where they could be justifiably attacked and destroyed. This
countrys response to 9/11, then, in part demonstrates how persecutory anxiety is more easily dealt with in individuals
and in groups when it is experienced as being provoked from the outside rather than from internal sources.
As Hanna Segal9 has argued (IJP, 1987), groups often tend to be narcissistic, self-idealizing, and paranoid in relation to other groups
and to shield themselves from knowledge about the reality of their own aggression, which of necessity is
projected into an enemy-- real or imagined--so that it can be demeaned, held in contempt and then attacked. In this regard, 9/11
permitted a new discourse to arise about what is fundamentally wrong in the world: indeed, the antiterrorism rhetoric and policies of the U.S. government functioned for a period to overshadow the antiglobalization movement that has identified the fundamental global conflict to be between on the one
hand the U.S. and other governments in the First World, transnational corporations, and powerful international financial institutions, and on the other,
workers struggles, human rights organizations and environmental movements throughout the world. The new discourse presents the
fundamental conflict in the world as one between civilization and fundamentalist terrorism . But this
civilization is a wolf in sheeps clothing, and those who claim to represent it reveal the kind of
splitting Segal describes: a hyperbolic idealization of themselves and their culture and a projection of all that
is bad, including the consequences of the terrorist underbelly of decades long U.S. foreign policy in
the Middle East and Asia, onto the denigrated other, who must be annihilated. The U.S.
government, tainted for years by its ties to powerful transnational corporate interests, has recreated itself as the nationalistic
defender of the American people. In the process, patriotism has kidnapped citizens grief and mourning and militarism has high jacked
peoples fears and anxieties, converting them into a passive consensus for an increasingly authoritarian
governments domestic and foreign policies. The defensive significance of this new discourse has to do with another theme related to death anxiety as
well: the threat of species annihilation that people have lived with since the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Segal argues that the leaders of the U.S. as well as other countries with nuclear capabilities, have disavowed their own aggressive
motivations as they developed10 weapons of mass destruction. The distortion of language throughout the Cold
War, such as deterrence, flexible response, Mutual Assured Destruction, rational nuclear war, Strategic
Defense Initiative has served to deny the aggressive nature of the arms race (p. 8) and to disguise from ourselves and
symbolically repaired.

others

the horror of a nuclear war and our own part in making it possible or more likely (pp. 8-9).

Although the policy makers destructiveness can be hidden from their respective populations and justified for national security reasons, Segal believes that

such denial

only increases reliance on projective mechanisms and stimulates paranoia.

The portrayal of the U.S. as a benign hegemon justifies its violence in the name of
peace. The U.S. forces its image of an ideal world onto the world order.
Noorani, 2005. Yaseen Noorani is a Lecturer in Arabic Literature, Islamic and Middle East Studies,
University of Edinburgh. The Rhetoric of Security, The New Centennial Review 5.1, 2005.
The Bush administration perpetually affirms that the war against terrorism declared in response
to the attacks of September 2001 is "different from any other war in our history" and will
continue "for the foreseeable future." This affirmation, and indeed the very declaration of such a
war, belongs to a rhetoric of security that predates the Bush administration and which this
administration has intensified but not fundamentally altered. Rhetorically speaking, terrorism is
the ideal enemy of the United States, more so than any alien civilization and perhaps even more
so than the tyrannies of communism and fascism, terrorism's defeated sisters. This is because
terrorism is depicted in U.S. rhetoric not as an immoral tactic employed in political struggle, but
as an immoral condition that extinguishes the possibility of peaceful political deliberation. This
condition is the state of war, in absolute moral opposition to the peaceful condition of civil
society. As a state of war, terrorism portends the dissolution of the civil relations obtaining
within and among nations, particularly liberal nations, and thus portends the dissolution of
civilization itself. Terrorism is therefore outside the world order, in the sense that it cannot be

managed within this order since it is the very absence of civil order. For there to be a world order
at all, terrorism must be eradicated. In prosecuting a world war against the state of war, the
United States puts itself outside the world order as well. The Bush administration affirms, like
the Clinton administration before it, that because the identity of the United States lies in the
values that engender peace (freedom and democracy), the national interests of the United States
always coincide with the interests of the world order. The United States is the animus of the
world order and the power that sustains it. For this reason, any threat to the existence of the
United States is a threat to world peace itself, and anything that the United States does to secure
its existence is justified as necessary for the preservation of world peace. In this way, the
existence of the United States stands at the center of world peace and liberal values, yet remains
outside the purview of these values, since when under threat it is subject only to the extra-moral
necessity of self-preservation. I will argue that the symmetrical externality of the United States
and terrorism to the world order lies at the foundation of the rhetoric of security by which the
U.S. government justifies its hegemonic actions and policies. This rhetoric depicts a world in
which helpless, vulnerable citizens can achieve agency only through the U.S. government, while
terrorist individuals and organizations command magnitudes of destructive power previously
held only by states. The moral-psychological discourse of agency and fear, freedom and
enslavement invoked by this rhetoric is rooted in both classical liberalism and postwar U.S.
foreign policy. The war of "freedom" against "fear" is a psychic struggle with no specific
military enemies or objectives. It arises from the portrayal of the United States as an autarkic,
ideally impermeable collective agent that reshapes the external world in its own image. The war
of freedom against fear thereby justifies measures said to increase the defenses and internal
security of the United States as well as measures said to spread freedom and democracy over the
world. Now that the destructive capacity of warlike individuals can threaten the world order, the
power of the United States must be deployed in equal measure to neutralize this threat
throughout the world. The world as a whole now comes within the purview of U.S. disciplinary
action. Any manifestation of the state of war, terrorist activity, anywhere in the world, is now a
threat to the existence of the United States and to world peace.There is no clash of
civilizations, but the Middle East, as the current site of the state of war, is the primary danger to
the world and must be contained,controlled, and reshaped. The symmetrical externality of the
United States and terrorism to the world order, then, allows its rhetoric to envision a historic
opportunity for mankindthe final elimination of the state of war from human existence, and
fear from the political psyche. Thiswill be achieved, however, only by incorporating the world
order into the United States for the foreseeable future.

Hegemony link
The U.S. military strategy of creating a perfect safe world through its power is
impossible. It futile attempts just create more violence in the name of liberty and
peace.
Der Derian 2003 [James Der Derian, Associate Professor of Political Science at University of
Massachusetts Amherst, Decoding The National Security Strategy of the United States of America,
boundary, 2 30.3, 19-27]
Regardless of authorial (or good) intentions, the NSS reads more like latevery late
nineteenth-century poetry than a strategic doctrine for the twenty-first century. The rhetoric of
the White House favors and clearly intends to mobilize the moral clarity, nostalgic
sentimentality, and uncontested dominance reminiscent of the last great empires against the
ambiguities, complexities, and messiness of the current world disorder. However, the gulf
between the nation's stated cause ("to help make the world not just safer but better" [1]) and
defensive needs (to fight "a war against terrorists of global reach" [5]) is so vast that one detects
what Nietzsche referred to as the "breath of empty space," that void between the world as it is
and as we would wish it to be, which produces all kinds of metaphysical concoctions. In short
shrift (thirty pages), the White House articulation of U.S. global objectives to the Congress
elevates strategic discourse from a traditional, temporal calculation of means and ends, to the
theological realm of monotheistic faith and monolithic truth. Relying more on aspiration than
analysis, revelation than reason, the NSS is not grand but grandiose strategy. In pursuit of an
impossible state of national security against terrorist evil, soldiers will need to be sacrificed, civil
liberties curtailed, civilians collaterally damaged, regimes destroyed. But a nation's imperial
overreach should exceed its fiduciary grasp: what's a full-spectrum dominance of the battle space
for? Were this not an official White House doctrine, the contradictions of the NSS could be
interpreted only as poetic irony. How else to comprehend the opening paragraph, which begins
with "The United States possesses unprecedentedand unequaledstrength and influence in
the world" and ends with "The great strength of this nation must be used to promote a balance of
power that favors freedom" (1)? Perhaps the cabalistic Straussians that make up the defense
intellectual brain trust of the Bush administration (among them, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle,
and William Kristol) have come up with a nuanced, indeed, anti-Machiavellian reading of
Machiavelli that escapes the uninitiated. But so fixed is the NSS on the creation of a world in
America's image that concepts such as balance of power and imminent threat, once rooted in
historical, juridical, as well as reciprocal traditions, [End Page 20] become free-floating
signifiers. Few Europeans, "old" or "new," would recognize the balance of power principle
deployed by the NSS to justify preemptive, unilateral, military action against not actual but
"emerging" imminent threats (15). Defined by the eighteenth-century jurist Emerich de Vattel as
a state of affairs in which no one preponderant power can lay down the law to others, the
classical sense of balance of power is effectively inverted in principle by the NSS document and
in practice by the go-it-alone statecraft of the United States. Balance of power is global
suzerainty, and war is peace.

Hegemony link
The U.S. attempts to create a safe world do not always lead to the ideal world we
hope for
Der Derian 2003 [James Der Derian, Associate Professor of Political Science at University of
Massachusetts Amherst, Decoding The National Security Strategy of the United States of America,
boundary, 2 30.3, 19-27]
What significance should we make of the fact that the shortest section of the NSS (barely a page
and a half) is on the "nonnegotiable demands of human dignity" and rights, including "free
speech; freedom of worship; equal justice; respect for women; religious and ethnic tolerance;
and respect for private property" (3). Are these rights so self-evident and inalienable that they do
not warrant further clarification or justification? It would seem so: "History has not been kind to
those nations which ignored or flouted the rights and aspirations of their people" (3). And yet
this universalist avowal of rights requires a selective if not outright denial of history. Where was
the U.S. support of freedom, justice, and religious and ethnic tolerance when it supported
Saddam Hussein in his earlier war against Iran? When it provided intelligence, arms, and the
precursors for chemical weapons of mass destruction? When it abandoned the Shiites in the
south and the Kurds in the north of Iraq after the first Gulf War? Most significant is that these
rights are considered "nonnegotiable," making war, if not the first, certainly more of a viable
option when these [End Page 21] rights are violated. In this regard, President Bush's NSS is a
continuation rather than a repudiation of President Clinton's National Security Strategy of the
United States 19941995: Engagement and Enlargement. To be sure, Clinton's National Security
Strategy places greater emphasis on "preventive diplomacy" and multilateral intervention than
Bush's preference for preemptive war and unilateralist predispositions. But the virtuous
imperatives are in full evidence in the Clinton strategy: "All of America's strategic interests
from promoting prosperity at home to checking global threats abroad before they threaten our
territoryare served by enlarging the community of democratic and free market nations. Thus,
working with new democratic states to help preserve them as democracies committed to free
markets and respect for human rights, is a key part of our national security strategy." 1 It is
hardly surprising, then, that many liberals, both within the government and the university,
supported the war against Iraq, and hardly unfair to question the extent to which Clinton and
other moral interventionists prepared the high ground for this war. As a microcosm, consider one
of the most visible splits in the ranks at top American universities, when such "moral" liberals as
Joseph Nye, Michael Ignatieff, and Samantha Power came out in support of the war, whereas
such "amoral" realists as Stanley Hoffmann, Steve Walt, and John Mearsheimer publicly
opposed it. Nietzsche, who always detected the smell of the swamp in all talk of virtue, finds in
The Twilight of the Idols a "bestowing virtue" in the realist's "courage in the face of reality":
"My recreation, my preference, my cure from all Platonism has always been Thucydides.
Thucydides, and perhaps the Principe of Machiavelli, are related to me closely by their
unconditional will not to deceive themselves and to see reason in realitynot in reason,' still
less in morality.' . . ."

Our national security strategy leaves us stuck in an endless war in which the world
must either follow the U.S. or die
Der Derian 2003 [James Der Derian, Associate Professor of Political Science at University of
Massachusetts Amherst, Decoding The National Security Strategy of the United States of America,
boundary, 2 30.3, 19-27]
The NSS might aim for peace, but it amounts to a blueprint for a permanent war. Gone is any
trace of the humility that presidential candidate Bush invoked in his foreign policy addresses. In
its place, hubris of an epic size obviates any historical or self-consciousness about the costs of
empire. What ends not predestined by America's righteousness are to be preempted by the
sanctity of holy war. The NSS leaves the world with two options: peace on U.S. terms, or the
perpetual peace of the grave. The evangelical seeps through the prose of global realpolitik and
mitigates its harshest pronouncements with the solace of a better life to come. We all shall be

as played by the band as the Titanic sank"Nearer My God to Thee" (coincidently, written by
Sarah Flower Adams, sister of the nineteenth-century poet Elizabeth Barrett, who secretly
married . . .) .

Hegemony link
The U.S.s hope for peace and strive to stay a hegemon usually ends violently with
more problems
Der Derian 03 [James Der Derian, Associate Professor of Political Science at University of
Massachusetts Amherst, Decoding The National Security Strategy of the United States of America,
boundary, 2 30.3, 19-27]
Ultimately, however, real-world transformations exceed the grasp of the NSS. The war in Iraq
put on full display just how effective the military could be in attaining its planned goals. But
what falls outside the engineering and imaginary of the plan, what Edmund Burke called the
"empire of circumstance," is in the driver's seat and beyond the cybernetic machinations of the
NSS, as we see in the "peace" that followed. Many scholars saw the end of the Cold War as an
occasion to debate the merits of a unipolar future as well as to wax nostalgic over the stability of
a bipolar past. These debates continued to be state-centric as well as materialist in their
interpretation of how power works. By such criteria, there was little doubt that the United States
would emerge as the dominant military, economic, and, indeed, civilizational power. Even in
Paul Wolfowitz's worst-case nightmares, it was difficult to identify a potential "peer competitor"
on the horizon. [End Page 26] But then came 9/11, and blueprints for a steady-state hegemony
were shredded. Asymmetrical power and fundamentalist resentment, force-multiplied by the
mass media, prompted a permanent state of emergency. After the first responders came a
semiotic fix with a kick, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America. But
from the tragedy of 9/11 to the farce of war in Iraq, after the multilateral hopes for a "safer and
better world" were subverted by the unilateral nihilism of preventive war, the syntax of order and
the code of the simulacrum began to break down. We caught a glimpse of a heteropolar matrix,
in which actors radically different in identity and interests (states versus super-empowered
individuals), using technologies in revolutionary ways (civilian airliners to create kamikaze
weapons of mass destruction, the Internet to mobilize the largest antiwar demonstrations ever),
were suddenly comparable in their capability to produce improbable global effects. It might be
small solace, but out of this deeply nihilistic moment might yet come a real balance of power
and truth, in which the Straussian reach of The National Security Strategy is foreshortened by a
Nietzschean grasp of reality.

The U.S. tries to maintain its power through preemptive actions. The U.S. is a
paradox of both vulnerability and invincibility.
Kaplan 04 (Amy Kaplan, Prof. of English @ Univ. of Pennslyvania, 3 [American Quarterly 56.1,
Violent Belongings and the Question of Empire Today,2004, p. muse]
This coming-out narrative, associated primarily with neoconservatives, aggressively celebrates
the United States as finally revealing its true essenceits manifest destinyon a global stage.
We won the Cold War, so the story goes, and as the only superpower, we will maintain global
supremacy primarily by military means, by preemptive strikes against any potential rivals, and
by a perpetual war against terror, defined primarily as the Muslim world. We need to remain
vigilant against those rogue states and terrorists who resist not our power but the universal
human values that we embody. This narrative is about time as well as space. It imagines an
empire in perpetuity, one that beats back the question haunting all empires in J. M. Coetzee's
Waiting for the Barbarians: "One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire:
how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era." 9 In this hypermasculine narrative
there's a paradoxical sense of invincibility and unparalleled power and at the same time utter and
incomprehensible vulnerabilitya lethal combination, which reminds us that the word
vulnerable once also referred to the capacity to harm.

Hegemony is a paranoid fantasythe most powerful

nation sees threats everywhere, legitimizing constant
war.
McClintock 9chaired prof of English and Womens and Gender Studies at UWMadison. MPhil
from Cambridge; PhD from Columbia (Anne, Paranoid Empire: Specters from Guantnamo and Abu
Ghraib, Small Axe Mar2009, Issue 28, p50-74)
By now it is fair to say that the United States has come to be dominated by two grand and

dangerous hallucinations: the promise of benign US globalization and the permanent threat
of the war on terror. I have come to feel that we cannot understand the extravagance of the
violence to which the US government has committed itself after 9/11two countries invaded,
thousands of innocent people imprisoned, killed, and torturedunless we grasp a defining
feature of our moment, that is, a deep and disturbing doubleness with respect to power.
Taking shape, as it now does, around fantasies of global omnipotence (Operation Infinite
Justice, the War to End All Evil) coinciding with nightmares of impending attack, the U nited
S tates has entered the domain of paranoia: dream world and catastrophe. For it is only in
paranoia that one finds simultaneously and in such condensed form both deliriums of absolute
power and forebodings of perpetual threat. Hence the spectral and nightmarish quality of
the war on terror, a limitless war against a limitless threat, a war vaunted by the US
administration to encompass all of space and persisting without end. But the war on terror is
not a real war, for terror is not an identifiable enemy nor a strategic, real-world target. The war on
terror is what William Gibson calls elsewhere a consensual hallucination, 4 and the US
government can fling its military might against ghostly apparitions and hallucinate a victory
over all evil only at the cost of catastrophic self-delusion and the infliction of great
calamities elsewhere.
I have come to feel that we urgently need to make visible (the better politically to challenge) those
established but concealed circuits of imperial violence that now animate the war on terror. We
need, as urgently, to illuminate the continuities that connect those circuits of imperial violence
abroad with the vast, internal shadowlands of prisons and supermaxesthe modern slaveships on the middle passage to nowherethat have come to characterize the United States as a
super-carceral state. 5
Can we, the uneasy heirs of empire, now speak only of national things? If a long-established but
primarily covert US imperialism has, since 9/11, manifested itself more aggressively as an overt empire,

does the terrain and object of intellectual inquiry, as well as the claims of political
responsibility, not also extend beyond that useful fiction of the exceptional nation to
embrace the shadowlands of empire? If so, how can we theorize the phantasmagoric, imperial
violence that has come so dreadfully to constitute our kinship with the ordinary , but which
also at the same moment renders extraordinary the ordinary bodies of ordinary people, an
imperial violence which in collusion with a complicit corporate media would render itself
invisible, casting states of emergency into fitful shadow and fleshly bodies into specters? For
imperialism is not something that happens elsewhere, an offshore fact to be deplored but as easily
ignored. Rather, the force of empire comes to reconfigure, from within , the nature and
violence of the nation-state itself, giving rise to perplexing questions: Who under an empire
are we, the people? And who are the ghosted, ordinary people beyond the nation-state
who, in turn, constitute us?
We now inhabit a crisis of violence and the visible. How do we insist on seeing the violence
that the imperial state attempts to render invisible, while also seeing the ordinary people afflicted
by that violence? For to allow the spectral, disfigured people (especially those under torture) obliged
to inhabit the haunted no-places and penumbra of empire to be made visible as ordinary
people is to forfeit the long-held US claim of moral and cultural exceptionalism, the

traditional self-identity of the United States as the uniquely superior, universal standardbearer of moral authority, a tenacious, national mythology of originary innocence now in
tatters. The deeper question, however, is not only how to see but also how to theorize and oppose the
violence without becoming beguiled by the seductions of spectacle alone. 6
Perhaps in the labyrinths of torture we must also find a way to speak with ghosts, for specters

disturb the authority of vision and the hauntings of popular memory disrupt the great
forgettings of official history.
Paranoia
Even the paranoid have enemies.
Donald Rumsfeld
Why paranoia? Can we fully understand the proliferating circuits of imperial violence the very
eclipsing of which gives to our moment its uncanny, phantasmagoric castwithout understanding the

pervasive presence of the paranoia that has come, quite violently, to manifest itself across
the political and cultural spectrum as a defining feature of our time? By paranoia, I mean not
simply Hofstadters famous identification of the US states tendency toward conspiracy theories. 7 Rather,
I conceive of paranoia as an inherent contradiction with respect to power: a double-sided
phantasm that oscillates precariously between deliriums of grandeur and nightmares of

perpetual threat, a deep and dangerous doubleness with respect to power that is held in
unstable tension, but which, if suddenly destabilized (as after 9/11), can produce
pyrotechnic displays of violence . The pertinence of understanding paranoia, I argue, lies
in its peculiarly intimate and peculiarly dangerous relation to violence. 8
Let me be clear: I do not see paranoia as a primary, structural cause of US imperialism nor as its structuring
identity. Nor do I see the US war on terror as animated by some collective, psychic agency, submerged
mind, or Hegelian cunning of reason, nor by what Susan Faludi calls a national terror dream. 9 Nor am
I interested in evoking paranoia as a kind of psychological diagnosis of the imperial nation-state. Nations
do not have psyches or an unconscious; only people do. Rather, a social entity such as an organization,
state, or empire can be spoken of as paranoid if the dominant powers governing that entity cohere as a
collective community around contradictory cultural narratives, self-mythologies, practices, and identities
that oscillate between delusions of inherent superiority and omnipotence, and phantasms of threat and
engulfment. The term paranoia is analytically useful here, then, not as a description of a collective national
psyche, nor as a description of a universal pathology, but rather as an analytically strategic concept, a way
of seeing and being attentive to contradictions within power, a way of making visible (the better politically
to oppose) the contradictory flashpoints of violence that the state tries to conceal.
Paranoia is in this sense what I call a hinge phenomenon, articulated between the ordinary person and
society, between psychodynamics and socio-political history. Paranoia is in that sense dialectical rather than
binary, for its violence erupts from the force of its multiple, cascading contradictions: the intimate
memories of wounds, defeats, and humiliations condensing with cultural fantasies of aggrandizement and
revenge, in such a way as to be productive at times of unspeakable violence. For how else can we
understand such debauches of cruelty?
A critical question still remains: does not something terrible have to happen to ordinary people (military
police, soldiers, interrogators) to instill in them, as ordinary people, in the most intimate, fleshly ways, a
paranoid cast that enables them to act compliantly with, and in obedience to, the paranoid visions of a
paranoid state? Perhaps we need to take a long, hard look at the simultaneously humiliating and
aggrandizing rituals of militarized institutions, whereby individuals are first broken down,

then reintegrated (incorporated) into the larger corps as a unified, obedient fighting body,
the methods by which schools, the military, training camps not to mention the paranoid
image-worlds of the corporate mediainstill paranoia in ordinary people and fatally
conjure up collective but unstable fantasies of omnipotence . 10 In what follows, I
want to trace the flashpoints of imperial paranoia into the labyrinths of torture in order to illuminate three
crises that animate our moment: the crisis of violence and the visible, the crisis of imperial legitimacy, and
what I call the enemy deficit. I explore these flashpoints of imperial paranoia as they emerge in the
torture at Guantnamo and Abu Ghraib. I argue that Guantnamo is the territorializing of paranoia and that

torture itself is paranoia incarnate, in order to make visible, in keeping with Hazel Carbys brilliant work,
those contradictory sites where imperial racism, sexuality, and gender catastrophically collide. 11
The Enemy Deficit: Making the Barbarians Visible Because night is here but the barbarians have not
come. Some people arrived from the frontiers, And they said that there are no longer any barbarians. And
now what shall become of us without any barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.
C. P. Cavafy, Waiting for the Barbarians
The barbarians have declared war.
President George W. Bush
C. P. Cavafy wrote Waiting for the Barbarians in 1927, but the poem haunts the aftermath of 9/11 with
the force of an uncanny and prescient dj vu. To what dilemma are the barbarians a kind of solution?

Every modern empire faces an abiding crisis of legitimacy in that it flings its power over
territories and peoples who have not consented to that power. Cavafys insight is that an
imperial state claims legitimacy only by evoking the threat of the barbarians .
It is only the threat of the barbarians that constitutes the silhouette of the empires borders
in the first place. On the other hand, the hallucination of the barbarians disturbs the empire
with perpetual nightmares of impending attack. The enemy is the abject of empire: the
rejected from which we cannot part. And without the barbarians the legitimacy of empire
vanishes like a disappearing phantom. Those people were a kind of solution.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, the grand antagonism of the United States
and the USSR evaporated like a quickly fading nightmare. The cold war rhetoric of totalitarianism,
Finlandization, present danger, fifth columnist, and infiltration vanished. Where were the
enemies now to justify the continuing escalation of the military colossus? And now what
shall become of us without any barbarians? By rights, the thawing of the cold war should
have prompted an immediate downsizing of the military; any plausible external threat had
simply ceased to exist. Prior to 9/11, General Peter Schoomaker, head of the US Army,
bemoaned the enemy deficit: Its no use having an army that did nothing but train, he said. Theres
got to be a certain appetite for what the hell we exist for. Dick Cheney likewise complained: The
threats have become so remote. So remote that they are difficult to ascertain. Colin Powell
agreed: Though we can still plausibly identify specific threatsNorth Korea, Iran, Iraq, something like
thatthe real threat is the unknown, the uncertain. Before becoming president, George W. Bush
likewise fretted over the postcold war dearth of a visible enemy: We do not know who the
enemy is, but we know they are out there. It is now well established that the invasion of Iraq had
been a long-standing goal of the US administration, but there was no clear rationale with which to sell such
an invasion. In 1997 a group of neocons at the Project for the New American Century produced a
remarkable report in which they stated that to make such an invasion palatable would require a
catastrophic and catalyzing eventlike a new Pearl Harbor. 12

The discourse of American leadership is rooted in the

construction and demonization of dangerous others. Their
advantage produces the threat that it names.
Campbell et al. 7David Campbell, Geography @ Durham [Performing Security: The Imaginative
Geographies of current US strategy Political Geography 26 (4) doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2006.12.002 (Other
Authors: Luiza Bialasiewicz, Stuart Elden, Stephen Graham, Alex Jeffrey and Alison J. Williams)]
It is important to highlight the way performativity's idea of reiteration calls attention to changes in
historically established imaginative geographies. While US foreign policy has been traditionally written in
the context of identity/difference expressed in self/other relationships (Campbell, 1992), we detect in

recent strategic performances a different articulation of America's relationship to the world .

Signified by the notion of integration we identify elements in the formation of a new imaginative
geography which enable the US to draw countries into its spheres of influence and

control . We show how integration (and its coeval strategies of exclusion) has been
enunciated over the last 15 years through popular-academic books, think-tank documents, policy
programmes and security strategies, as well as popular geopolitical sources. This concept of
integration, we argue, is enacted through a number of practices of representation and coercion
that encourage countries to adopt a raft of US attitudes and ways of operating or else suffer
the consequences. As such, we are witnessing the performance of a security problematic that requires
critical perspectives to move beyond a simple ideal/material dichotomy in social analysis in order to
account for more complex understandings of opposition, including the emergence of new, mobile
geographies of exclusion.
Non-state scribes
To understand the power of the imaginative geographies guiding current US strategy it is important to look
back at the recitation, reiteration and resignification of previous strategic formulations. During the Clinton
years, a number of figures who had been involved in various guises in previous Republican administrations
wrote widely on the geopolitical opportunities and threats of a post-Cold War era. From specifications of

the threat posed by international terrorism, failed states and rogue regimes, to the
dangers posed by cultural/civilisational conflicts. The individuals and institutions we choose to
examine in this section are those whose geographical imaginations have been central in laying the
ground for some of the securitizing strategies of the current Bush administration and,
specifically, whose work has been key in specifying the importance of integrating a
chaotic world where conflict is inevitable .
The writers whose work we highlight here occupy a liminal position within policy circles. While
not paid members of the administration, they have either occupied such positions in the past or were
aspiring to them in the future. They do not, therefore, directly speak for the state (a position that

grants them a veneer of objectivity), and they navigate in the interstices between
academic and policy-oriented research: a location that, in turn, absolves them from the
rigors of a scholarly discipline, including disciplinary critique. By the term non-state scribes
we wish to indicate those who occupy a liminal zone between academic and non-academic work, working
in a range of governmental and private research centres, think-tanks and study groups. What we would
like to highlight are some of the ways in which their influence problematises simple, secure understandings
of the state and the constitution of state-interest. While these individuals appear as impartial
commentators-cum-advisers-cum-analysts, their access to policy circles is open, if not privileged. To the
extent that their geographical imaginations are invoked by state power, they are also today's
consummate intellectuals of statecraft: those who designate a world and fill it with
certain dramas, subjects, histories and dilemmas ( Tuathail & Agnew, 1992: 192).
Certainly the most prominent self-styled community of experts intersecting with the Bush
administration is the Project for a New American Century (for critical analysis see Sparke, 2005).
The PNAC, founded in the spring of 1997, defines itself as a non-profit, educational organization whose
goal is to promote American global leadership (see PNAC, 2006). Putatively lying outside formal policy
networks, the Project from its inception has aimed to provide the intellectual basis for continued US
military dominance and especially the willingness to use its military might.
As sole hegemon, PNAC argued, the US could not avoid the responsibilities of global
leadership. But it should not simply react to threats as they present themselves: it should, rather,
actively shape the global scenario before such threats emerge: the history of the 20th century
should have taught us that it is important to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats
before they become dire (PNAC, 2000: i).

The resonance of these views with those of the Bush administration should come as no
surprise: among the Project's founders were individuals who had held posts in previous Republican
administrations and went on to serve in Bush's cabinet: Vice-President Dick Cheney, former Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy and now World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz, along with
the former ambassador to Iraq (and soon to be US Ambassador to the UN) Zalmay Khalilzad, in addition
to well known neoconservatives shaping policy debates in the US today, including Francis Fukuyama,

Norman Podhoretz, and William Kristol (see Fukuyama, 2006 and Williams, 2005). Unsurprisingly, the
most explicit formulation of what would become goals of the Bush administration can be found in the
PNAC's manifesto Rebuilding America's Defenses, which appeared in the election year of 2000. Here and
in subsequent documents, the PNAC envisages the US military's role to be fourfold: Defend the American
Homeland; fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars; perform the
constabulary duties associated with shaping the security environment in critical regions; and transform
U.S. forces to exploit the revolution in military affairs (PNAC, 2000: iv, 5; cf. The White House, 2002b:
30).
It is telling just how spatialised some of these specifications become when worked through in detail.
Already in 2000, PNAC argued that the major military mission is no longer to deter Soviet
expansionism, but to secure and expand zones of democratic peace; deter rise of new greatpower competitor; defend key regions; exploit transformation of war (PNAC, 2000: 2). They
suggested that rather than the Cold War's potential global war across many theatres, the concern now is
for several potential theatre wars spread across the globe fought against separate and distinct adversaries
pursuing separate and distinct goals (2000: 2, 3). To counter such threats, the US needs to station its
troops broadly, and their presence in critical regions around the world is the visible
expression of the extent of America's status as a superpower and as the guarantor of liberty,
peace and stability (2000: 14). They claimed that while US security interests have expanded, and that
its forces provide the first line of defense in what may be described as the American security perimeter,
at the same time the worldwide archipelago of U.S. military installations has contracted (2000: 14, 15).
Because the security perimeter has expanded slowly but inexorably since the end of the Cold War, US
forces the cavalry on the new American frontier must be positioned to reflect the
shifting strategic landscape (2000: 14, 15). Equally, their use of the term homeland drew strongly on
its use in the Clinton administration and prefigured the creation of the Office for Homeland Security
under G.W. Bush, with the concept strengthened by both the PATRIOT acts and the establishment of U.S.
Northern Command.Again, it is essential that we conceptualize these strategies as both

containing and making imaginative geographies; specifying the ways the world is and, in
so doing, actively (re)making that same world. This goes beyond merely the military action or
aid programmes that governments follow, but indicates a wider concern with the production of
ways of seeing the world, which percolate through media, popular imaginations as well as
political strategy. These performative imaginative geographies are at the heart of this paper and will reoccur throughout it. Our concern lies specifically with the ways in which the US portrays and
over the past decade has portrayed certain parts of the world as requiring involvement, as threats, as
zones of instability, as rogue states, states of concern, as global hotspots, as well as the

associated suggestion that by bringing these within the integrated zones of democratic
peace, US security both economically and militarily can be preserved . Of course, the
translation of such imaginations into actual practice (and certainly results) is never as simple as some might
like to suggest. Nonetheless, what we wish to highlight here is how these strategies, in

essence, produce the effect they name . This, again, is nothing new: the United
States has long constituted its identity at least in part through discourses of danger that
materialize others as a threat (see Campbell, 1992). Equally, much has been written about the new set
of threats and enemies that emerged to fill the post-Soviet void from radical Islam through the war on
drugs to rogue states (for a critical analyses see, among others, Benjamin and Simon, 2003 and Stokes,
2005; on the genealogies of the idea of rogue states see Blum, 2002 and Litwak, 2000).

Their hegemonic approach to peace will produce error

replicationthe very discourse used to describe their
advantages causes violence. We must open the
framework of what constitutes peace to critical
interrogation
Richmond 7 [Oliver P. Richmond, School of International Relations, University of St. Andrews,
Scotland, Alternatives 32 (2007), 247274]

It is generally assumed by most theorists, most policymakers, and practitioners, that peace has an
ontological stability enabling it to be understood, defined, and thus created. Indeed, the
implication of the void of debate about peace indicates that it is generally thought that peace as
a concept is so ontologically solid that no debate is required. There is clearly a resistance to
examining the concept of peace as a subjective ontology, as well as a subjective political and
ideological framework. Indeed, this might be said to be indicative of orientalism, in
impeding a discussion of a positive peace or of alternative concepts and contexts of peace.18 Indeed,
Saids humanism indicates the dangers of assuming that peace is universal, a Platonic ideal form, or
extremely limited. An emerging critical conceptualization of peace rests upon a genealogy that

illustrates its contested discourses and multiple concepts. This allows for an understanding
of the many actors, contexts, and dynamics of peace, and enables a reprioritization of what,
for whom, and why, peace is valued. Peace from this perspective is a rich, varied, and fluid
tapestry, which can be contextualized, rather than a sterile, extremely limited, and probably
unobtainable product of a secular or nonsecular imagination. It represents a discursive
framework in which the many problems that are replicated by the linear and rational
project of a universal peace (effectively camouflaged by a lack of attention within IR) can be
properly interrogated in order to prevent the discursive replication of violence .19 This
allows for an understanding of how the multiple and competing versions of peace may even
give rise to conflict, and also how this might be overcome . One area of consensus from within this
more radical literature appears to be that peace is discussed, interpreted, and referred to in a way that
nearly always disguises the fact that it is essentially contested. This is often an act of
hegemony thinly disguised as benevolence, assertiveness, or wisdom. Indeed, many assertions
about peace depend upon actors who know peace then creating it for those that do not, either
through their acts or through the implicit peace discourses that are employed to describe
conflict and war in opposition to peace. Where there should be research agendas there are
often silences. Even contemporary approaches in conflict analysis and peace studies rarely stop to
imagine the kind of peace they may actually create. IR has reproduced a science of peace
based upon political, social, economic, cultural, and legal governance frameworks , by which
conflict in the world is judged. This has led to the liberal peace framework, which masks a
hegemonic collusion over the discourses of, and creation of, peace .20 A critical interrogation
of peace indicates it should be qualified as a specific type among many .

The affs discourse of integration and leadership rehashes

the geographies of exclusion and containment in nicer
sounding terms. Construct of dangerous other versus
stable and peaceful United States confirms the material
and moral hierarchies of the dominant U.S. identity.
Campbell et al. 7David Campbell, Geography @ Durham [Performing Security: The Imaginative
Geographies of current US strategy Political Geography 26 (4) doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2006.12.002 (Other
Authors: Luiza Bialasiewicz, Stuart Elden, Stephen Graham, Alex Jeffrey and Alison J. Williams)]

The concept of integration, invoked in different ways and in different measures by both Kagan and
Barnett, is similarly at the heart of the current administration's foreign and domestic policies. The
former Director of Policy at the US State Department, Richard Haass, articulated the central tenets
of the concept when he wondered:
Is there a successor idea to containment? I think there is. It is the idea of integration. The goal
of US foreign policy should be to persuade the other major powers to sign on to certain key
ideas as to how the world should operate: opposition to terrorism and weapons of mass
destruction, support for free trade, democracy, markets. Integration is about locking them into
these policies and then building institutions that lock them in even more (Haass in Lemann, 1 April 2002,
emphasis added).
That the US is no longer prepared to tolerate regimes that do not mirror its own democratic
values and practices, and that it will seek to persuade such major powers to change their policies and
behaviours to fit the American modus operandi, is not without historical precedent (Ambrosius, 2006). Nor

does the differently imagined geography of integration replace completely previous

Manichean conceptions of the world so familiar to Cold War politics. Rather, the
proliferation of new terms of antipathy such as axis of evil, rogue states, and terror cities
demonstrate how integration goes hand in hand with and is mutually constitutive of new
forms of division. Barnett's divide between the globalised world and the non-integrating gap is reflected
and complemented by Kagan's divide in ways of dealing with this state of affairs. Much of this imagined
geography pivots on the idea of the homeland. Indeed, in the imaginations of the security analysts we
highlight here, there is a direct relationship and tension between securing the homeland's borders and
challenging the sanctity of borders elsewhere (see Kaplan, 2003: 87).
Appreciating this dynamic requires us to trace some of the recent articulations of US strategy. Since
September 11th 2001 the US government and military have issued a number of documents outlining their
security strategy. Each recites, reiterates and resignifies both earlier strategic statements as
well each other, creating a sense of boundedness and fixity which naturalizes a specific view of
the world. Initially there was The National Strategy for Homeland Security (Office of Homeland Security,
2002), and then the much broader scope National Security Strategy (The White House, 2002b; see Der
Derian, 2003). These were followed by the National Strategy for Combating Terrorism and particular
plans for Military Strategy, Defense Strategy and the Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support
(Department of Defense, 2005a, Department of Defense, 2005b, Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2004 and The White
House, 2002a). These are seen as an interlocking whole, where the National Military Strategy (NMS)
supports the aims of the National Security Strategy (NSS) and implements the National Defense Strategy
(NDS) (Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2004: 1); and the Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support builds
upon the concept of an active, layered defense outlined in the National Defense Strategy (Department of
Defense, 2005b: iii; see also diagram on 6). The updated National Security Strategy (The White House,
2006) presents a further re-elaboration and re-stating of these principles.
As with the understandings we highlighted previously, it should be noted that key elements of these
strategies pre-date September 11. Significant in this continuity is the link between the Bush administration's
strategic view and the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance (DPG). Written for the administration of George
H. W. Bush by Paul Wolfowitz and I. Lewis Scooter Libby, the DPG was the first neoconservative
security manifesto for the post-Cold War; a blue print for a one-superpower world in which the US had to
be prepared to combat new regional threats and prevent the rise of a hegemonic competitor (Tyler, 8 March
1992; see Mann, 2004: 198ff, 212).
Initial versions of the DPG were deemed too controversial and were rewritten with input from then Defense
Secretary Cheney and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Colin Powell (Tyler, 24 May 1992).
Nonetheless, Cheney's version still declared that, we must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential
competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role (Cheney, 1993: 2).
What we find in this is the kernel of the policies implemented in the administration of George W. Bush,
reworked through the Clinton period by such organizations as PNAC (discussed above). The assemblage of
individuals and organizations both inside and outside the formal state structures running from the DPG,
through PNAC to the plethora of Bush administration security texts cited above (all of which draw upon
well-established US security dispositions in the post-World War II era) demonstrates the performative

infrastructure through which certain ontological effects are established, and through which certain
performances are made possible and can be understood.
As we argue throughout this paper, the distinctive thing about recent National Security Strategies is their
deployment of integration as the principal foreign policy and security strategy. It is telling that Bush's claim
of either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists (Bush, 2001) relies not on a straightforward
binary, as is sometimes suggested, but a process of incorporation. It is not simply us versus them, but with
us, a mode of operating alongside, or, in the words of one of Bush's most enthusiastic supporters, shoulder
to shoulder (Blair, 2001; see White & Wintour, 2001). This works more widely through a combination of
threats and promises, as in this statement about the Palestinians: If Palestinians embrace democracy and
the rule of law, confront corruption, and firmly reject terror, they can count on American support for the
creation of a Palestinian state (The White House, 2002b: 9). Likewise, it can be found in some of remarks
of the British Prime Minister Blair (2004) about the significance of democracy in Afghanistan, Africa and
Iraq. Equally Bush's notorious axis of evil speech did not simply name North Korea, Iran and Iraq as its
members, but suggested that states like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to
threaten the peace of the world (Bush, 2002a, emphasis added). A comparison of the like, alongside the
with the terrorists is actually a more complicated approach to the choosing of sides and the drawing of
lines than is generally credited. Simple binary oppositions are less useful to an understanding here than the
process of incorporation and the policy of integration.
These examples indicate the policy of integration or exclusion being adopted by the US and followed by
certain allies. It warns those failing to adopt US values (principally liberal representative democracy and
market capitalism), that they will be excluded from an American-centric world. The place of US allies in
these representations is not unimportant. Indeed, the strength of the US discourse relies also on its
reflection and reiteration by other key allies, especially in Europe. Above and beyond the dismissive
pronouncements of Rumsfeld about Europe's Old and New a conception that was inchoately
articulated as early as the 1992 DPG the dissent of (even some) Europeans is a problem for the US in its
world-making endeavours (see Bialasiewicz & Minca, 2005). It is not surprising, then, that following his
re-election, George W. Bush and Condoleeza Rice embarked almost immediately on a bridge-building
tour across Europe, noting not trans-Atlantic differences but the great alliance of freedom that unites the
United States and Europe (Bush, 2005).
For although the United States may construct itself as the undisputed leader in the new global

scenario, its right and the right of its moral-political mission of spreading freedom
and justice relies on its amplification and support by allies. The construction of the United
States' world role relies also on the selective placement and representation of other
international actors who are hailed into specific subject positions (see Weldes, Laffey,
Gusterson, & Duvall, 1999). Of course, different actors are granted different roles and different degrees of
agency in the global script: the place of key European allies is different from that bestowed upon the
peripheral and semi-peripheral states that make part of the coalition of the willing. Both, however, are
vital in sustaining the representation of the US as the leader of a shared world of values and ideals. Indeed,
the lone superpower has little influence in the absence of support.
Another important dimension of integration as the key strategic concept is its dissolution of the
inside/outside spatialization of security policy. The concluding lines of the Strategy for Homeland Defense
and Civil Support are particularly telling. It contends that the Department of Defense can no longer think
in terms of the home game and the away game. There is only one game (Department of Defense,
2005b: 40). In part this is directed at the previous failure to anticipate an attack from within: indeed, the
Strategy remarks that the September 11th 2001 attacks originated in US airspace and highlighted
weaknesses in domestic radar coverage and interagency air defense coordination (2005b: 22). In other
words, the US needs to ensure the security of its homeland from within as much as without, to treat home
as away. In part, however, such rhetoric also reflects a continuity with and reiteration of

broader understandings with a much longer history, promoted by a range of US

intellectuals of statecraft since the end of the Cold War: understandings that specified
increasingly hard territorialisations of security and identity both at home and abroad to
counter the geopolitical vertigo (see Tuathail, 1996) of the post-bipolar era.
It is important to note here, moreover, that the 2002 National Security Strategy's affirmation that today, the
distinction between domestic and foreign affairs is diminishing (The White House, 2002b: 30) also
involves the US treating away as a home, or at least, as a concern. From this we can see how the pursuit of

integration enables the territorial integrity of other sovereign states to be violated in its name, as specific
places are targeted to either ensure or overcome their exclusion (see Elden, 2005). As an example,
consider this statement, which recalls the late 1970s enunciation of an arc of crisis stretching

from the Horn of Africa through the Middle East to Afghanistan: There exists an arc of
instability stretching from the Western Hemisphere, through Africa and the Middle East
and extending to Asia. There are areas in this arc that serve as breeding grounds for threats
to our interests. Within these areas rogue states provide sanctuary to terrorists, protecting them from
surveillance and attack (Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2004: 5).
In his foreword to the 2002 National Security Strategy, Bush declared that We will defend the peace by
fighting terrorists and tyrants. We will preserve the peace by building good relations among the great
powers. We will extend the peace by encouraging free and open societies on every continent (Bush,
2002b: i). This notion of extension is crucial in understanding the explicitly spatial overtones of this
strategy of integration: more than merely about values, democracy and capitalism, it is about a performative
geopolitics. Put crudely, it is about specifying the geographies of world politics; it is about specifying the
ways the world (now) is a presumably descriptive geopolitical exercise but that, as all such exercises,
also implicitly contains the prescription for putting the world right.
Imaginative geographies and popular geopolitics
As we have tried to argue, such elaborations of security rely upon the affirmation of certain understandings
of the world within the context of which the strategies and understandings advanced by them are rendered
believable. What is more, we have tried to highlight how such performances invoke earlier articulations,
even as their reiteration changes them. More broadly, we stressed how such articulations provide the
conditions of possibility for current and future action. Integration thus marks a new

performative articulation in US security strategy, but it reworks rather than replaces earlier
formulations. One of the ways in which this operates is that the ideal of integration, as we have seen,
necessarily invokes the idea of exclusion . The imagined divide between the US homeland
and the threatening frontier lands within the circle of Barnett's Non-Integrating Gap thus recalls
earlier iterations of barbarism even if their identity and spatiality are produced by more than a
simple self/other binary. In the final section of this essay, we will make some brief remarks regarding the
disjuncture between the theory and the practice of the enactment of such imaginations. First, however, we
would like to highlight some other ways in which these deployments of categories of inclusion and
incorporation, on the one hand, and exclusion and targeting, on the other, are also performed in the popular
geopolitical work done by a wide range of textual, visual, filmic and electronic media supportive of the
war on terror at home and abroad. These cultural practices resonate with the idea of fundamentally
terrorist territories, whilst, at the same time rendering the homeland zone of the continental US as a
homogenous and virtuous domestic community. Such wide-ranging and diffuse practices that are
nonetheless imbricated with each other are further indications that we are dealing with performativity rather
than construction in the production of imaginative geographies.

The logic of Hegemonic preservation festishizes the US global role, necessitating a

kill-to-save mentality
Noorani, 2005. Yaseen Noorani is a Lecturer in Arabic Literature, Islamic and Middle East Studies,
University of Edinburgh. The Rhetoric of Security, The New Centennial Review 5.1, 2005.
The U.S. government's rhetoric of global security draws its power from simultaneously instantiating Schmitt's vision of the political as
non-normative national self-preservation and the liberal vision of the political as normative civil relations. The consequence is not that
this rhetoric disavows political antagonism within the nation, as Schmitt would have it (though there is an element of this), but that it
disavows political antagonism on the global level. I argued above that the positing of a non-normative situation of national selfpreservation, the same as that of a person being murdered, is insupportable due to the inescapable presence of a moral ideal in defining
the nation's self and deciding what threatens it. This applies to all justifications of action grounded in national security. The U.S.
rhetoric of security, however, lifts the paradox to a global level, and illustrates it more forcefully, by designating

the global order's moral ideal, its "way of life" that is under threat, as civil relations, freedom and peace, but
then making the fulcrum of this way of life an independent entity upon whose survival the world's way of
life dependsthe United States. Just as an aggressor puts himself outside of normativity by initiating violence, so is the victim
not bound by any norms in defending his life. As the location of the self of the world order that must be preserved,
the United States remains unobligated by the norms of this order as long as it is threatened by terrorism. So
long as it struggles for the life of the world order, therefore, the United States remains external to this order,

just as terrorism remains external to the world order so long as it threatens a universal state of war .

Without
the United States everyone is dead. Why should this be? The reason is that the United States fully embodies the values underlying
world peace"freedom, democracy, and free enterprise" (National Security 2002, i)and is the key to their realization in the global
domain. These values are [End Page 30] universal, desired by all and the standard for all. "[T]he United States must defend liberty and
justice because these principles are right and true for all people everywhere" (National Security 2002, 3). The fact that the United
States "possesses unprecedentedand unequaledstrength and influence in the world" (1) cannot therefore be fortuitous. It cannot
but derive from the very founding of the United States in universal principles of peace and its absolute instantiation of these principles.
This results in "unparalleled responsibilities, obligations, and opportunity" (1). In other words, the United States as a nation

stands, by virtue of its internal constitution, at the forefront of world history in advancing human freedom.
It is the subject of history. Its own principle of organization is the ultimate desire of humanity, and the development of this
principle is always at its highest stage in and through the United States. For this reason, the values of the United States and its interests
always coincide, and these in turn coincide with the interests of world peace and progress. The requirements of American security
reflect "the union of our values and our national interests," and their effect is to "make the world not just safer but better" (1). The
United States therefore is uniquely charged by history to maintain and advance world peace and universal freedom. America is a
nation with a mission, and that mission comes from our most basic beliefs. We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire.
Our aim is a democratic peacea peace founded upon the dignity and rights of every man and woman. America acts in this cause with
friends and allies at our side, yet we understand our special calling: This great republic will lead the cause of freedom. (Bush 2004a)
America can lead the cause of freedom because it is the cause of freedom. "American values and American interests lead in the same
direction: We stand for human liberty" (Bush 2003b). For this reason, it has no "ambitions," no private national interests or aspirations
that would run contrary to the interests of the world as a whole. It undertakes actions, like the invasion of Iraq, that further no motive
but the cause of humanity as a whole. "We have no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and restore control of [End Page 31]
that country to its own people" (Bush 2003a). In this way, the United States is distinct from all other nations, even though all of
humanity espouses the same values. Only the United States can be depended upon for ensuring the endurance of
these values because they are the sole basis of its existence. "Others might flag in the face of the inevitable ebb and
flow of the campaign against terrorism. But the American people will not" (NSCT 2003, 29). Any threat to the existence of
the United States is therefore a threat to the existence of the world order, which is to say, the values that make this
order possible. It is not merely that the United States, as the most powerful nation of the free world, is the most capable of defending
it. It is rather that the United States is the supreme agency advancing the underlying principle of the free order. The United States is
the world order's fulcrum, and therefore the key to its existence and perpetuation. Without the United States, freedom,

peace, civil relations among nations, and the possibility of civil society are all under threat of extinction.
This is why the most abominable terrorists and tyrants single out the United States for their schemes and
attacks. They know that the United States is the guardian of liberal values. In the rhetoric of security, therefore, the
survival of the United States, its sheer existence, becomes the content of liberal values. In other words, what does it mean to espouse
liberal values in the context of the present state of world affairs? It means to desire fervently and promote energetically the survival of
the United States of America. When the world order struggles to preserve its "self," the self that it seeks to
preserve, the primary location of its being, is the United States. Conferring this status upon the United States allows
the rhetoric of security to insist upon a threat to the existence of the world order as a whole while confining the non-normative status
that arises from this threat to the United States alone. The United Statesas the self under threatremains external to the normative
relations by which the rest of the world continues to be bound. The United States is both a specific national existence

struggling for its life and normativity itself, which makes it coextensive with the world order as a whole.
For this reason, any challenge to U.S. world dominance would be a challenge to world peace and is thus
impermissible. We read in The National Security Strategy that the United States [End Page 32] will "promote a balance of power
that favors freedom" (National Security 2002, 1). And later, we find out what is meant by such a balance of power.

Hegemony elevates security to a transcendental idealit creates a moral framework

for violence that requires the elimination of all that is different or unpredictable.
Der Derian 2003 [James Der Derian, Associate Professor of Political Science at University of
Massachusetts Amherst, Decoding The National Security Strategy of the United States of America,
boundary, 2 30.3, 19-27]
From President Bush's opening lines of The National Security Strategy of the United States of
America (NSS), the gap between rhetoric and reality takes on Browningesque proportions: "Our
Nation's cause has always been larger than our Nation's defense. We fight, as we always fight,
for a just peacea peace that favors liberty. We will defend the peace against the threats from
terrorists and tyrants. We will preserve the peace by building good relations among the great
powers. And we will extend the peace by encouraging free and open societies on every
continent'" (1). Regardless of authorial (or good) intentions, the NSS reads more like latevery
latenineteenth-century poetry than a strategic doctrine for the twenty-first century. The
rhetoric of the White House favors and clearly intends to mobilize the moral clarity, nostalgic
sentimentality, and uncontested dominance reminiscent of the last great empires against the
ambiguities, complexities, and messiness of the current world disorder. However, the gulf

between the nation's stated cause ("to help make the world not just safer but better" [1]) and
defensive needs (to fight "a war against terrorists of global reach" [5]) is so vast that one detects
what Nietzsche referred to as the "breath of empty space," that void between the world as it is
and as we would wish it to be, which produces all kinds of metaphysical concoctions. In short
shrift (thirty pages), the White House articulation of U.S. global objectives to the Congress
elevates strategic discourse from a traditional, temporal calculation of means and ends, to the
theological realm of monotheistic faith and monolithic truth. Relying more on aspiration than
analysis, revelation than reason, the NSS is not grand but grandiose strategy. In pursuit of an
impossible state of national security against terrorist evil, soldiers will need to be sacrificed, civil
liberties curtailed, civilians collaterally damaged, regimes destroyed. But a nation's imperial
overreach should exceed its fiduciary grasp: what's a full-spectrum dominance of the battle space
for? Were this not an official White House doctrine, the contradictions of the NSS could be
interpreted only as poetic irony. How else to comprehend the opening paragraph, which begins
with "The United States possesses unprecedentedand unequaledstrength and influence in
the world" and ends with "The great strength of this nation must be used to promote a balance of
power that favors freedom" (1)? Perhaps the cabalistic Straussians that make up the defense
intellectual brain trust of the Bush administration (among them, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle,
and William Kristol) have come up with a nuanced, indeed, anti-Machiavellian reading of
Machiavelli that escapes the uninitiated. But so fixed is the NSS on the creation of a world in
America's image that concepts such as balance of power and imminent threat, once rooted in
historical, juridical, as well as reciprocal traditions, become free-floating signifiers. Few
Europeans, "old" or "new," would recognize the balance of power principle deployed by the NSS
to justify preemptive, unilateral, military action against not actual but "emerging" imminent
threats (15). Defined by the eighteenth-century jurist Emerich de Vattel as a state of affairs in
which no one preponderant power can lay down the law to others, the classical sense of balance
of power is effectively inverted in principle by the NSS document and in practice by the go-italone statecraft of the United States. Balance of power is global suzerainty, and war is peace.

The Affs Hegemonic discourse of Global Instability versus a stable US validate

the Hierarchy of Dominant US Identity, returning to the geographies of exclusion.
Daavid Campbell et. al. 7, Prof. of Geography @ Durham, 7 [Political Geography 26, Performing
security: The imaginative geographies of current US strategy, 414415]
The concept of integration, invoked in different ways and in different measures by both Kagan and Barnett, is similarly at the heart of
the current administrations foreign and domestic policies. The former Director of Policy at the US State Department, Richard Haass,
articulated the central tenets of the concept when he wondered:
Is there a successor idea to containment? I think there is. It is the idea of integration. The goal of US foreign policy should be to
persuade the other major powers to sign on to certain key ideas as to how the world should operate: opposition to terrorism and
weapons of mass destruction, support for free trade, democracy, markets. Integration is about locking them into these policies and
then building institutions that lock them in even more (Haass in Lemann, 1 April 2002, emphasis added).

That the US is no longer prepared to tolerate regimes that do not mirror its own democratic values and
practices, and that it will seek to persuade such major powers to change their policies and behaviours to fit
the American modus operandi, is not without historical precedent (Ambrosius, 2006). Nor does the
differently imagined geography of integration replace completely previous Manichean conceptions of the
world so familiar to Cold War politics. Rather, the proliferation of new terms of antipathy such as axis of
evil, rogue states, and terror cities demonstrate how integration goes hand in hand with e and is
mutually constitutive of e new forms of division. Barnetts divide between the globalised world and the
non-integrat- ing gap is reflected and complemented by Kagans divide in ways of dealing with this state of
affairs. Much of this imagined geography pivots on the idea of the homeland. Indeed, in the imaginations
of the security analysts we highlight here, there is a direct relationship and tension between securing the
homelands borders and challenging the sanctity of borders elsewhere (see Kaplan, 2003: 87).
Appreciating this dynamic requires us to trace some of the recent articulations of US strategy . Since
September 11th 2001 the US government and military have issued a number of documents outlining their
security strategy. Each recites, reiterates and resignifies both earlier strategic statements as well each other,
creating a sense of boundedness and fixity which naturalizes a specific view of the world. Initially there was
The National Strategy for Homeland Security (Office of Homeland Security, 2002), and then the much broader scope National
Security Strategy (The White House, 2002b; see Der Derian, 2003). These were followed by the National Strategy for Combating

Terrorism and particular plans for Military Strategy, Defense Strategy and the Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support
(Department of Defense, 2005a, 2005b; Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2004; The White House, 2002a). These are seen as an interlocking
whole, where the National Military Strategy (NMS) supports the aims of the National Security Strat- egy (NSS) and implements the
National Defense Strategy (NDS) (Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2004: 1); and the Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support
builds upon the concept of an active, layered defense outlined in the National Defense Strategy (Department of Defense, 2005b: iii;
see also diagram on 6). The updated National Security Strategy (The White House, 2006) presents a further re-elaboration and restating of these principles.
As with the understandings we highlighted previously, it should be noted that key elements of these strategies pre-date
September 11. Significant in this continuity is the link between the Bush administrations strategic view and the 1992 Defense
Planning Guidance (DPG). Writ- ten for the administration of George H. W. Bush by Paul Wolfowitz and I. Lewis Scooter Libby,
the DPG was the first neoconservative security manifesto for the post-Cold War; a blue print for a one-superpower world in which the
US had to be prepared to combat new regional threats and prevent the rise of a hegemonic competitor ( Tyler, 8 March 1992; see
Mann, 2004: 198ff, 212).
Initial versions of the DPG were deemed too controversial and were rewritten with input from then Defense Secretary Cheney and
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Colin Powell (Tyler, 24 May 1992). Nonetheless, Cheneys version still declared that, we must
maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role ( Cheney, 1993:
2).What we find in this is the kernel of the policies implemented in the administration of George W. Bush, reworked through the
Clinton period by such organizations as PNAC (dis- cussed above). The assemblage of individuals and organizations e both inside and
outside the formal state structures e running from the DPG, through PNAC to the plethora of Bush administration security

texts cited above (all of which draw upon well-established US security dispositions in the post-World War
II era) demonstrates the performative infrastructure through which certain ontological effects are
established, and through which certain performances are made possible and can be understood.

Pursuit of hegemony is a fantasy of control that relies

upon construction of threatening Otherness --- this
prompts resistance and create a permanent state of
conflict
Chernus 6 (Ira, Professor of Religious Studies and Co-director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program University of
Colorado-Boulder, Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin, p. 53-54)
The end of the cold war spawned a tempting fantasy of imperial omnipotence on a global scale. The neocons want to
turn that fantasy into reality. But reality will not conform to the fantasy; it wont stand still or keep any semblance of permanent order.
So the neocons efforts inevitably backfire. Political scientist Benjamin Barber explains that a nation with unprecedented
power has unprecedented vulnerability: for it must repeatedly extend the compass of its power to preserve what it already
has, and so is almost by definition always overextended. Gary Dorrien sees insecurity coming at the neoconservatives in another way,
too: For the empire, every conflict is a local concern that threatens its control. However secure it maybe, it never feels
secure enough. The [neocon] unipolarists had an advanced case of this anxiety. . . . Just below the surface of the customary
claim to toughness lurked persistent anxiety. This anxiety was inherent in the problem of empire and, in the case of the neocons,
heightened by ideological ardor.39 If the U.S. must control every event everywhere, as neocons assume, every act of
resistance looks like a threat to the very existence of the nation. There is no good way to distinguish between nations
or forces that genuinely oppose U.S. interests and those that dont. Indeed, change of any kind, in any nation, becomes a potential
threat. Everyone begins to look like a threatening monster that might have to be destroyed. Its no surprise that a
nation imagined as an implacable enemy often turns into a real enemy. When the U.S. intervenes to prevent change, it is
likely to provoke resistance. Faced with an aggressive U.S. stance, any nation might get tough in return. Of course, the U.S. can
say that it is selflessly trying to serve the world. But why would other nations believe that? It is more likely that others will
resist, making hegemony harder to achieve. To the neocons, though, resistance only proves that the enemy really
is a threat that must be destroyed. So the likelihood of conflict grows, making everyone less secure.
Moreover, the neocons want to do it all in the public spotlight. In the past, any nation that set out to conquer others usually kept its
plans largely secret. Indeed, the cold war neocons regularly blasted the Soviets for harboring a secret plan for world conquest. Now
here they are calling on the U.S. to blare out its own domineering intentions for all the world to [end page 53] hear. That hardly seems
well calculated to achieve the goal of hegemony. But it is calculated to foster the assertive, even swaggering, mood on the home front
that the neocons long for. Journalist Ron Suskind has noted that neocons always offer a statement of enveloping peril and no
hypothesis for any real solution. They have no hope of finding a real solution because they have no reason to look for one. Their
story allows for success only as a fantasy. In reality, they expect to find nothing but an endless battle against an enemy that can never
be defeated. At least two prominent neocons have said it quite bluntly. Kenneth Adelman: We should not try to convince people that
things are getting better. Michael Ledeen: The struggle against evil is going to go on forever.40 This vision of endless conflict is
not a conclusion drawn from observing reality. It is both the premise and the goal of the neocons fantasy. Ultimately, it seems, endless
resistance is what they really want. Their call for a unipolar world ensures a permanent state of conflict, so that the
U.S. can go on forever proving its military supremacy and promoting the manly virtues of militarism. They have
to admit that the U.S., with its vastly incomparable power, already has unprecedented security against any foreign army. So they must
sound the alarm about a shadowy new kind of enemy, one that can attack in novel, unexpected ways. They must make distant changes
appear as huge imminent threats to America, make the implausible seem plausible, and thus find new monsters to destroy. The

neocons story does not allow for a final triumph of order because it is not really about creating a politically calm, orderly world. It is
about creating a society full of virtuous people who are willing and able to fight off the threatening forces of social chaos. Having
superior power is less important than proving superior power. That always requires an enemy. Just as neocons need monsters abroad,
they need a frightened society at home. Only insecurity can justify their shrill call for a stronger nation (and a higher military budget).
The more dire their warnings of insecurity, the more they can demand greater military strength and moral resolve. Every foreign
enemy is, above all, another occasion to prod the American people to overcome their anxiety, identify evil, fight resolutely against it,
and stand strong in defense of their highest values. Hegemony will do no good unless there is challenge to be met, weakness to be
conquered, evil to be overcome. The American people must actively seek hegemony and make sacrifices for it, to show that they are
striving to overcome their own weakness. So the quest for strength still demands a public confession of weakness, just as the neocons
had demanded two decades earlier when they warned of a Soviet nuclear attack through a window of vulnerability. The quest for
strength through the structures of national security still demands a public declaration of national insecurity. Otherwise, there is nothing
to overcome. The more frightened the public, the more likely it is to believe and enact the neocon story.

Conflict de-escalation is backwards assumptions of

violence become a self-fulfilling prophecy and guarantee
environmental collapse
Clark 4 (Mary E., French Cumbie Professor of Conflict Resolution at George Mason University,
Rhetoric, Patriarchy & War: Explaining the Dangers of "Leadership" in Mass Culture, Women and
Language. Urbana: Fall,. Vol. 27, Iss. 2, ProQuest)
Today's Western patriarchal world view now dominates globalwide dialogue among the "leaders" of Earth's nearly two hundred
nation-states. Its Machiavellian/Realpolitik assumptions about the necessity of' military power to preserve

order within and between groups of humans trumps--and stifles--other potential viewpoints. Founded on the
belief that "evil" is innate, it dictates that human conflict must be "controlled": global "law" backed by coercive
force. This view, when cross-culturally imposed, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy , thus "legitimating"
an escalating use of force. Western leaders (male and female) use a rhetoric couched in a
"hegemonic masculinity" to justify their ready use of military force to coerce "those who are against
us" into compliance. This translates globally as "national leaders must never lose face!" Changing this dominant paradigm requires dismantling the hierarchic hegemony of
masculine militarism and its related economic institutions, through global cross-cultural dialogues, thus replacing a hegemonic world view and institutions with new, more adaptive
visions, woven out of the most useful remnants of multiple past cultural stories. The paper concludes with a few examples where people around the worm are doing just this--using
their own small voices to insert their local "sacred social story" into the global dialogue. This global process--free from a hegemonic militaristic rhetoric--has the potential to
initiate a planetary dialogue where "boundaries" are no longer borders to be defended, but sites of social ferment and creative adaptation. When the call came for papers on War,
Language, and Gender, referring us to Carol Cohn's seminal paper "Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals," (1) I at first felt that little more could be added
on the subject. But events in Washington in the ensuing weeks stimulated me to a broader "take" on this topic. Defense intellectuals, after all, are embedded in a whole culture, and
the interaction is two-way. Not only does their strategic framework with its euphemistic language about war and killing have the outcome of forcing society to think in their terms;
their framework and language developed in response to our deeply embedded, Western cultural image of a Machiavellian / neo-Darwinian universe. In other words,

militarism and the

necessity for organized physical force (2) emerge out of culturewide

assumptions about human nature. Throughout historical times these assumptions have repeatedly
proved to be self-fulfilling prophecies. The pervasive perception of enemy-competitors has
generated violent conflicts that flared up and died back, only to flare up again through our failure
to achieve deep resolution and, especially, to alter our basic beliefs about human nature and our consequent social institutions. Today our
species, politically, comprises some 180190 "nations" of varying cultural homogeneity and moral legitimacy, not to mention size and physical power. Regardless of their
indigenous, internal cultural preferences, their cross-national interactions are institutionalized to fit a framework long established by former Western colonial powers among
themselves. In other words, the global "reality" constructed by Western patriarchies-a Realpolitik, ultimately grounded in military power-has come to define day-to-day crossnational politics. During the era of the Cold War, this resulted in small, powerless nations seeking alliances with one or other superpower, which offered not only development aid
but military protection, and, for locally unpopular, but "cooperating" leaders, small arms to maintain order at home. The "end" of the Cold War brought little change in this
pervasive global militarism (though it did strengthen the role of economic hegemony by the remaining superpower (3)). The enormous technological

"improvements"-i.e. efficiency

in killing power-in weaponry of all types over the past few decades has now resulted
in a dangerously over-armed planet that simultaneously faces a desperate shortage of
resources available for providing the world's people with water, energy, health care, education, and the infrastructure for
distributing them. While our environmental and social overheads continue to mount, our species
seems immobilized, trapped in an institutionalized militarism-an evolutionary cul-de-sac! We need new
insights-as Cohn said, a new language, a new set of metaphors, a new mental framework-for thinking, dialoguing and visioning new
patterns of intersocietal interaction.

Link -- Hegemony [Rule]

Framing hegemony as necessary greases the wheels of future intervention
James B

Rule

, PhD Harvard, MA Oxford, BA Brandeis, The

Dissent Vol. 57 No 1, Winter

Military State of America and the Democratic Left ,

2010

The invasion of Iraq

was a defining moment for the United States. This was the kind of war that many Americans
believed formed no part of this country's repertoire - an aggressive war of choice. Its aim was not to stop
some wider conflict or to prevent ethnic cleansing or mass killings; indeed, its predictable effect was to
promote these things. The purpose was to extirpate a regime that the United States had built up but that had morphed into an obstacle to this
country - and to replace it with one that would represent a more compliant instrument of American purpose. In short, the war was a
demonstration of American ability and willingness to remove and replace regimes anywhere in the world.
Even in the wake of the Iraq fiasco, no one in high places has declared repetitions of such exploits "off the
table" - to use the expression favored by this country's foreign policy elites. For those of us who opposed the war, there is obvious relief at the
conclusion - we hope - of a conflict that has consistently brought out the worst in this country. But at the same time, those on the democratic
Left look to the future with unease. Even under a reputedly liberal president, we have reason to worry about
new versions of Iraq - in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran or venues yet undisclosed . To its credit, Dissent has not joined the
rush to avert attention from the endgames of the Iraq conflict. The Spring 2009 edition features a section of articles under the rubric "Leaving Iraq." The
essays focus on the moral and political quandaries of America's departure from a country that it did a great deal to break, but where its ability to repair
things is rapidly diminishing. But, a look at the proposals put forward there makes it clear that the

thinking that gave us the American

invasion of Iraq in the first place has not gone away. George Packer, for example, inveighs against those seeking a
quick exit for American forces. The balance of power among Iraq's domestic forces could easily be upset , he
holds, and valuable progress undone, without a longlingering presence of Americans as enforcers. Obviously playing to the sensitivities of Dissent
readers, he concludes that "much as we might wish [the war] had never happened at all, America will have obligations as well as interests in Iraq for a
long time to come." The

sense of all this, from Packer's standpoint, becomes clear when you recall his efforts to
discredit Americans' resistance to the war in the months before it began. The antiwar movement, he wrote in
the New York Times Magazine in December, 2002, "has a serious liability . . . it's controlled by the furthest reaches of the
American Left." He goes on, in this same article, to envisage a quite different role for those on the Left, like himself, who took what he considered
a more enlightened view: The "liberal hawks could make the case for war to suspicious Europeans and to wavering fellow Americans," he wrote; "they
might even be able to explain the connection between the war in Iraq and the war on terrorism ..." Brendan O'Leary, another contributor to Dissent's
Spring 2009 "Leaving Iraq" section, also stresses responsibility. He, too, means by this continued readiness to apply U.S. coercion to manage
Iraqi domestic politics. To judge from his words, he has no difficulty in principle with the notion of remaking Iraq by outside military force: "Reasonable
historians should judge ... that removing the genocidal Baathists was overdue," he avers. "The younger Bush made up for his father's mistake, though he
did so for the wrong reasons." Still, O'Leary allows that the invasion hasn't quite unfolded as he might have wished: "... grotesque mismanagement of
regime-replacement ... unnecessary and arrogant occupation ... incompetence of American direct rule... numerous errors of policy and imagination ... in
the horrors and brutalities that have followed." The America occupiers have sometimes proved "blindly repressive," he allows - but sometimes,
apparently, not repressive enough. Still, leaving before America sets things straight would be irresponsible. If the United States just keeps trying, it may
yet get it all right. This country must now manage the political forces set in motion by its invasion according to O'Leary's exacting formula: defend the
federalist constitution, keep resurgent Sunni and Shiite forces from each other's throats, and preserve the autonomy of the Kurds. Just the same, he notes,
"After the United States exits, an Arab civil war may re-ignite, as well as Kurdish-Arab conflict." To some of us, an invasion that leaves such possibilities
simmering after six years of American-sponsored death and destruction itself seems more than a little irresponsible. Some of the aims invoked by Packer
and O'Leary are beyond reproach. Certainly the United States bears profound responsibilities to protect Iraqis at risk from their collaboration with or
employment by American forces - and for that matter, to help repair damage to the country's infrastructure resulting from the invasion. And certainly this
country should do everything possible to prevent regional, communal, and ethnic groupings from exploiting a U.S. pullout to oppress others. But making
good on any of these estimable goals, as the authors seem to realize, will be a very big order - especially given America's record thus far. Yet the

deeper, mostly unstated assumptions underlying these authors' proposals ought to strike a chill throughout
the democratic Left. Their problems with the Iraq invasion - and implicitly, future American military exploits of the same kind have to do with execution, not the larger vision of American power that inspired the enterprise . Their words
strike an eerie resonance with those of Thomas L. Friedman, before the invasion occurred: he favored George W.
Bush's "audacious" war plan as "a job worth doing," but only "if we can do it right ." America's violent remaking of Iraq would
have been entirely acceptable, it seems, if only Friedman's sensibilities could have guided it. More important: the continuing mission of the
United States as maker and breaker of regimes around the world remained unquestioned. When any country
gets seriously in the way of American power, the global responsibilities of this country are apt to require
action like that taken in Iraq. We hear this kind of thinking in its most outof-the-closet form from
neoconservatives - who gave us the Iraq invasion in the first place. But its roots in American history lie at least as far back
as notions of Manifest Destiny. Its key inspiration is a particularly aggressive form of American exceptionalism.
Some higher power - fate, Divine Providence, or special "moral clarity" - has created opportunities, indeed obligations, for
America to set things straight on a global scale. Versions of this idea are pervasive among thinkers - American
foreign policy elites, and those who would guide them - who would disclaim identification with the neocons . Often conveying the
doctrine are code words referring to special "responsibilities" of the United States to guarantee world "stability." Or, as Madeleine Albright, then U.S.

ambassador to the United Nations, stated, "If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see
further into the future. . ." To her credit, Albright's effusions in this direction stopped short of support for invading Iraq - something that cannot be said for
the so-called liberal hawks. Accepting

this view of America as the ultimate and rightful arbiter of global affairs - as
superpower, to use less upbeat terms - triggers the weightiest implications and consequences.
Nearly all of them, I hold, run in collision course to the best aims and directions of the democratic Left. Yet
even for thinkers who identify themselves as being on the Left, acceptance of a hyper-militarized America,
and its concomitant role of global enforcer, often passes without question. For those of us who challenge
this view, the invasion of Iraq was wrong for fundamental political and - indeed - moral reasons. Not because it
was mismanaged. Not because too few troops were dispatched; not because the Iraqi Army was disbanded; not because the occupation was
master hegemon or world

incompetent, corrupt, and often criminally negligent. It was wrong because wars of this kind are always wrong - aggressive, opportunistic wars of choice,
aimed at revamping entire countries to fit the dictates of the invaders. These wars

are wrong because of the destruction and

distortions that they spread both abroad and at home. Among nations, they countervail against one of the subtle
but hopeful tendencies in the world today - the movement away from sole reliance on brute state power to
resolve international conflict and toward supranational authorities, multilateral decision -making, and
establishment of powers above the level of states. At home, the effects are even more insidious. For in order
to make itself the kind of country capable of "projecting power" anywhere in the world, as America has
done so unsuccessfully in Iraq, it has had to impose vast demands and distortions upon its own domestic
life.

Link -- Hegemony [Rule]

The Logic of US Exceptionalism militarizes society and greases the wheels of intervention. Their
obsession with the specifics of military distribution instead of the framing that allowed fiascos like
Iraq to happen makes error replication and future intervention inevitable.
And, their discourse distorts their description of the world and means the affs harms only exist in
their imperialist imagination. This militarization of society makes war fighting the end point of
existence which leads to no value to life because we are cooped up in our homes with duct tape, water
bottles and Fox news too afraid to leave.
Pursuit of hegemony is a fantasy of control that relies upon construction of threatening Otherness --this prompts resistance and create a permanent state of conflict
Chernus 6 (Ira, Professor of Religious Studies and Co-director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program University of
Colorado-Boulder, Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin, p. 53-54)
The end of the cold war spawned a tempting fantasy of imperial omnipotence on a global scale. The neocons want to
turn that fantasy into reality. But reality will not conform to the fantasy; it wont stand still or keep any semblance of permanent order.
So the neocons efforts inevitably backfire. Political scientist Benjamin Barber explains that a nation with unprecedented
power has unprecedented vulnerability: for it must repeatedly extend the compass of its power to preserve what it already
has, and so is almost by definition always overextended. Gary Dorrien sees insecurity coming at the neoconservatives in another way,
too: For the empire, every conflict is a local concern that threatens its control. However secure it maybe, it never feels
secure enough. The [neocon] unipolarists had an advanced case of this anxiety. . . . Just below the surface of the customary
claim to toughness lurked persistent anxiety. This anxiety was inherent in the problem of empire and, in the case of the neocons,
heightened by ideological ardor.39 If the U.S. must control every event everywhere, as neocons assume, every act of
resistance looks like a threat to the very existence of the nation. There is no good way to distinguish between nations
or forces that genuinely oppose U.S. interests and those that dont. Indeed, change of any kind, in any nation, becomes a potential
threat. Everyone begins to look like a threatening monster that might have to be destroyed. Its no surprise that a
nation imagined as an implacable enemy often turns into a real enemy. When the U.S. intervenes to prevent change, it is
likely to provoke resistance. Faced with an aggressive U.S. stance, any nation might get tough in return. Of course, the U.S. can
say that it is selflessly trying to serve the world. But why would other nations believe that? It is more likely that others will
resist, making hegemony harder to achieve. To the neocons, though, resistance only proves that the enemy really
is a threat that must be destroyed. So the likelihood of conflict grows, making everyone less secure.
Moreover, the neocons want to do it all in the public spotlight. In the past, any nation that set out to conquer others usually kept its
plans largely secret. Indeed, the cold war neocons regularly blasted the Soviets for harboring a secret plan for world conquest. Now
here they are calling on the U.S. to blare out its own domineering intentions for all the world to [end page 53] hear. That hardly seems
well calculated to achieve the goal of hegemony. But it is calculated to foster the assertive, even swaggering, mood on the home front
that the neocons long for. Journalist Ron Suskind has noted that neocons always offer a statement of enveloping peril and no
hypothesis for any real solution. They have no hope of finding a real solution because they have no reason to look for one. Their
story allows for success only as a fantasy. In reality, they expect to find nothing but an endless battle against an enemy that can never
be defeated. At least two prominent neocons have said it quite bluntly. Kenneth Adelman: We should not try to convince people that
things are getting better. Michael Ledeen: The struggle against evil is going to go on forever.40 This vision of endless conflict is
not a conclusion drawn from observing reality. It is both the premise and the goal of the neocons fantasy. Ultimately, it seems, endless
resistance is what they really want. Their call for a unipolar world ensures a permanent state of conflict, so that the
U.S. can go on forever proving its military supremacy and promoting the manly virtues of militarism. They have
to admit that the U.S., with its vastly incomparable power, already has unprecedented security against any foreign army. So they must
sound the alarm about a shadowy new kind of enemy, one that can attack in novel, unexpected ways. They must make distant changes
appear as huge imminent threats to America, make the implausible seem plausible, and thus find new monsters to destroy. The
neocons story does not allow for a final triumph of order because it is not really about creating a politically calm, orderly world. It is
about creating a society full of virtuous people who are willing and able to fight off the threatening forces of social chaos. Having
superior power is less important than proving superior power. That always requires an enemy. Just as neocons need monsters abroad,
they need a frightened society at home. Only insecurity can justify their shrill call for a stronger nation (and a higher military budget).
The more dire their warnings of insecurity, the more they can demand greater military strength and moral resolve. Every foreign
enemy is, above all, another occasion to prod the American people to overcome their anxiety, identify evil, fight resolutely against it,
and stand strong in defense of their highest values. Hegemony will do no good unless there is challenge to be met, weakness to be
conquered, evil to be overcome. The American people must actively seek hegemony and make sacrifices for it, to show that they are
striving to overcome their own weakness. So the quest for strength still demands a public confession of weakness, just as the neocons
had demanded two decades earlier when they warned of a Soviet nuclear attack through a window of vulnerability. The quest for
strength through the structures of national security still demands a public declaration of national insecurity. Otherwise, there is nothing
to overcome. The more frightened the public, the more likely it is to believe and enact the neocon story.

Culminates in planetary annihilation

Dallymayr 4 (Fred, Professor of Philosophy and Political Science University of Notre Dame, The Underside of Modernity:
Adorno, Heidegger, and Dussel, Constellations, 11(1))
What Dussel here calls asymmetry is otherwise often called hegemony or else the onset of a new global imperialism
(involving the rule of the West over the Rest). In such a situation, nothing can be more important and salutary than
the cultivation of global critical awareness, of critical counter-discourses willing and able to call into question the presumptions of
global imperial rule. The dangers of such totalizing domination are becoming more evident every day. With the
growing technological sophistication of weaponry we are relentlessly instructed about the underside of

modernity, about the fateful collusion of power and knowledge in the unfolding of modern enlightenment
(as analyzed by Adorno and Horkheimer). Coupled with the globalizing momentum, military sophistication greatly
enhances the prospect of global warfare indeed of global total warfare (as envisaged by Heidegger in the 1930s).
Such warfare, moreover, is profiled against the backdrop of hegemonic asymmetry (as seen by Dussel): the vastly
unequal possession of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. In this situation, the goal of global
warfare is bound to be the total subjugation of less developed or subaltern societies a subjugation
accomplished through longdistance military offensives capable of inflicting maximum casualties on
enemies while minimizing the attackers costs.25 Given the intoxicating effects of global rule, must one not also anticipate
corresponding levels of total depravity and corruption among the rulers? In fact, must one not fear the upsurge of a new breed of
global master criminals (planetarische Hauptverbrecher) whose actions are likely to match those of their twentieth-century
predecessors, and perhaps even surpass them (behind a new shield of immunity)? Armed with unparalleled nuclear devices
and unheard-of strategic doctrines, global masters today cannot only control and subjugate populations, but in
fact destroy and incinerate them (from high above). In the words of Arundhati Roy, addressed to the worlds imperial
rulers:To slow a beast, you break its limbs. To slow a nation, you break its people; you rob them of volition. You
demonstrate your absolute command over their destiny. You make it clear that ultimately it falls to you to decide who lives, who dies,
who prospers, who doesnt. To exhibit your capability you show off all that you can do, and how easily you can do it how easily you
could press a button and annihilate the earth.26

Link -- Hegemony [Burke]

US Leadership ensures destruction we only believe it is stabilizing because we refuse to question it
Anthony Burke, Senior Lecturer @ School of Politics & IR @ Univ. of New South Wales, 7 [Beyond
Security, Ethics and Violence, p. 231-2]
Yet the first act in America's 'forward strategy of freedom' was to invade and attempt to subjugate Iraq,
suggesting that, if 'peace' is its object, its means is war: the engine of history is violence, on an enormous
and tragic scale, and violence is ultimately its only meaning. This we can glimpse in 'Toward a Pacific Union', a deeply
disingenuous chapter of Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man. This text divides the earth between a 'posthistorical' world of affluent developed democracies where 'the old rules of power-politics have decreasing relevance', and a
world still 'stuck in history' and 'riven with a variety of religious, national and ideological conflicts'. The two worlds will
maintain 'parallel but separate existences' and interact only along axes of threat, disturbance and crucial strategic interest:
oil, immigration, terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Because 'the relationship between
democracies and nondemocracies will still be characterised by mutual distrust and fear', writes Fukuyama, the 'posthistorical half must still make use of realist methods when dealing with the part still in history ... force will still be the

naturalises war and

coercion as the dominant mode of dealing with billions of people defined only
ultima ratio in their relations'. For all the book's Kantian pretensions, Fukuyama

through their lack of 'development' and 'freedom'. Furthermore, in his advocacy of the 'traditional moralism of American
foreign policy' and his dismissal of the United Nations in favour of a NATO-style 'league of truly free states ... capable of
much more forceful action to protect its collective security against threats arising from the non-democratic part of the
world' we can see an early premonition of the historicist unilateralism of the Bush administration. 72 In this light, we

can see the invasion of Iraq as continuing a long process of 'world-historical' violence that
stretches back to Columbus' discovery of the Americas, and the subsequent politics of genocide, warfare
and dispossession through which the modem United States was created and then expanded
- initially with the colonisation of the Philippines and coercive trade relationships with China and Japan, and eventually
to the self-declared role Luce had argued so forcefully for: guarantor of global economic and strategic
order after 1945. This role involved the hideous destruction of Vietnam and Cambodia,
'interventions' in Chile, El Salvador, Panama, Nicaragua and Afghanistan (or an ever more
destructive 'strategic' involvement in the Persian Gulf that saw the United States first building up Iraq as a formidable
regional military power, and then punishing its people with a 14-year sanctions regime that caused the deaths of at least
200,000 people), all of which we are meant to accept as proof of America's benign intentions ,

of America putting its 'power at the service of principle'. They are merely history working itself out, the
'design of nature' writing its bliss on the world.73 The bliss 'freedom' offers us, however, is the bliss of
the graveyard, stretching endlessly into a world marked not by historical perfection or
democratic peace, but by the eternal recurrence of tragedy, as ends endlessly
disappear in the means of permanent war and permanent terror. This is how we must

understand both the prolonged trauma visited on the people of Iraq since 1990, and the inflammatory impact the US
invasion will have on the new phenomenon of global antiWestern terrorism. American exceptionalism has deluded US
policymakers into believing that they are the only actors who write history, who know where it is heading, and how it will
play out, and that in its service it is they (and no-one else) who assume an unlimited freedom to act. As a senior adviser to
Bush told a journalist in 2002: 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality . . We're history's
actors."

Link -- Hegemony [Burke]

Heg may have deterred a few foes, but the question is whether its worth it -- Burke says hegemony's
dominant means of peace is through war. Only our argument is based in empirics -- historical
violence stemming from US leadership archives genocide and dispossession in Vietnam, Cambodia,
Iraq, and Afghanistan.
The 1NC Burke ev criticizes their claims to national existence and a state that admits no questioning
their commitment to national security creates problematizations of the truth that drive out peaceful
global rule of the political.
Pursuit of hegemony is a fantasy of control that relies upon construction of threatening Otherness --this prompts resistance and create a permanent state of conflict
Chernus 6 (Ira, Professor of Religious Studies and Co-director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program University of
Colorado-Boulder, Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin, p. 53-54)
The end of the cold war spawned a tempting fantasy of imperial omnipotence on a global scale. The neocons want to
turn that fantasy into reality. But reality will not conform to the fantasy; it wont stand still or keep any semblance of permanent order.
So the neocons efforts inevitably backfire. Political scientist Benjamin Barber explains that a nation with unprecedented
power has unprecedented vulnerability: for it must repeatedly extend the compass of its power to preserve what it already
has, and so is almost by definition always overextended. Gary Dorrien sees insecurity coming at the neoconservatives in another way,
too: For the empire, every conflict is a local concern that threatens its control. However secure it maybe, it never feels
secure enough. The [neocon] unipolarists had an advanced case of this anxiety. . . . Just below the surface of the customary
claim to toughness lurked persistent anxiety. This anxiety was inherent in the problem of empire and, in the case of the neocons,
heightened by ideological ardor.39 If the U.S. must control every event everywhere, as neocons assume, every act of
resistance looks like a threat to the very existence of the nation. There is no good way to distinguish between nations
or forces that genuinely oppose U.S. interests and those that dont. Indeed, change of any kind, in any nation, becomes a potential
threat. Everyone begins to look like a threatening monster that might have to be destroyed. Its no surprise that a
nation imagined as an implacable enemy often turns into a real enemy. When the U.S. intervenes to prevent change, it is
likely to provoke resistance. Faced with an aggressive U.S. stance, any nation might get tough in return. Of course, the U.S. can
say that it is selflessly trying to serve the world. But why would other nations believe that? It is more likely that others will
resist, making hegemony harder to achieve. To the neocons, though, resistance only proves that the enemy really
is a threat that must be destroyed. So the likelihood of conflict grows, making everyone less secure.
Moreover, the neocons want to do it all in the public spotlight. In the past, any nation that set out to conquer others usually kept its
plans largely secret. Indeed, the cold war neocons regularly blasted the Soviets for harboring a secret plan for world conquest. Now
here they are calling on the U.S. to blare out its own domineering intentions for all the world to [end page 53] hear. That hardly seems
well calculated to achieve the goal of hegemony. But it is calculated to foster the assertive, even swaggering, mood on the home front
that the neocons long for. Journalist Ron Suskind has noted that neocons always offer a statement of enveloping peril and no
hypothesis for any real solution. They have no hope of finding a real solution because they have no reason to look for one. Their
story allows for success only as a fantasy. In reality, they expect to find nothing but an endless battle against an enemy that can never
be defeated. At least two prominent neocons have said it quite bluntly. Kenneth Adelman: We should not try to convince people that
things are getting better. Michael Ledeen: The struggle against evil is going to go on forever.40 This vision of endless conflict is
not a conclusion drawn from observing reality. It is both the premise and the goal of the neocons fantasy. Ultimately, it seems, endless
resistance is what they really want. Their call for a unipolar world ensures a permanent state of conflict, so that the
U.S. can go on forever proving its military supremacy and promoting the manly virtues of militarism. They have
to admit that the U.S., with its vastly incomparable power, already has unprecedented security against any foreign army. So they must
sound the alarm about a shadowy new kind of enemy, one that can attack in novel, unexpected ways. They must make distant changes
appear as huge imminent threats to America, make the implausible seem plausible, and thus find new monsters to destroy. The
neocons story does not allow for a final triumph of order because it is not really about creating a politically calm, orderly world. It is
about creating a society full of virtuous people who are willing and able to fight off the threatening forces of social chaos. Having
superior power is less important than proving superior power. That always requires an enemy. Just as neocons need monsters abroad,
they need a frightened society at home. Only insecurity can justify their shrill call for a stronger nation (and a higher military budget).
The more dire their warnings of insecurity, the more they can demand greater military strength and moral resolve. Every foreign
enemy is, above all, another occasion to prod the American people to overcome their anxiety, identify evil, fight resolutely against it,
and stand strong in defense of their highest values. Hegemony will do no good unless there is challenge to be met, weakness to be
conquered, evil to be overcome. The American people must actively seek hegemony and make sacrifices for it, to show that they are
striving to overcome their own weakness. So the quest for strength still demands a public confession of weakness, just as the neocons
had demanded two decades earlier when they warned of a Soviet nuclear attack through a window of vulnerability. The quest for
strength through the structures of national security still demands a public declaration of national insecurity. Otherwise, there is nothing
to overcome. The more frightened the public, the more likely it is to believe and enact the neocon story.

Culminates in planetary annihilation

Dallymayr 4 (Fred, Professor of Philosophy and Political Science University of Notre Dame, The Underside of Modernity:
Adorno, Heidegger, and Dussel, Constellations, 11(1))
What Dussel here calls asymmetry is otherwise often called hegemony or else the onset of a new global imperialism
(involving the rule of the West over the Rest). In such a situation, nothing can be more important and salutary than
the cultivation of global critical awareness, of critical counter-discourses willing and able to call into question the presumptions of
global imperial rule. The dangers of such totalizing domination are becoming more evident every day. With the
growing technological sophistication of weaponry we are relentlessly instructed about the underside of

modernity, about the fateful collusion of power and knowledge in the unfolding of modern enlightenment
(as analyzed by Adorno and Horkheimer). Coupled with the globalizing momentum, military sophistication greatly
enhances the prospect of global warfare indeed of global total warfare (as envisaged by Heidegger in the 1930s).
Such warfare, moreover, is profiled against the backdrop of hegemonic asymmetry (as seen by Dussel): the vastly
unequal possession of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. In this situation, the goal of global
warfare is bound to be the total subjugation of less developed or subaltern societies a subjugation
accomplished through longdistance military offensives capable of inflicting maximum casualties on
enemies while minimizing the attackers costs.25 Given the intoxicating effects of global rule, must one not also anticipate
corresponding levels of total depravity and corruption among the rulers? In fact, must one not fear the upsurge of a new breed of
global master criminals (planetarische Hauptverbrecher) whose actions are likely to match those of their twentieth-century
predecessors, and perhaps even surpass them (behind a new shield of immunity)? Armed with unparalleled nuclear devices
and unheard-of strategic doctrines, global masters today cannot only control and subjugate populations, but in
fact destroy and incinerate them (from high above). In the words of Arundhati Roy, addressed to the worlds imperial
rulers:To slow a beast, you break its limbs. To slow a nation, you break its people; you rob them of volition. You
demonstrate your absolute command over their destiny. You make it clear that ultimately it falls to you to decide who lives, who dies,
who prospers, who doesnt. To exhibit your capability you show off all that you can do, and how easily you can do it how easily you
could press a button and annihilate the earth.26

Link Global Governance

The affirmatives call to maintain or reinstate a stable and secure global order only
masquerades as international benevolence. The ritual of peddling solutions to new
global problems only perpetuates a condition of continual crises by which security
apparatuses are able to justify themselves
Dillon and Reid, Professor of Politics at the University of Lancaster and lecturer in international relations at Kings College in London, 2000 [Michael
and Julian, Alternatives vol. 25, issue 1, spring, EbscoHost]

governmentality, according to Foucault's initial account, poses the question of order

not in terms of the origin of the law and the location of sovereignty, as do traditional accounts of power, but in terms
instead of the management of population. The management of population is further refined in terms of specific
problematics to which population management may be reduced. These typically include but are not necessarily exhausted by the
following topoi of governmental power: economy, health, welfare, poverty, security, sexuality, demographics,
resources, skills, culture, and so on. Now, where there is an operation of power there is knowledge, and where there is
As a precursor to global governance,

knowledge there is an operation of power. Here discursive formations emerge and, as Foucault noted,
in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and redistributed by a certain number of
procedures whose role is to ward off its powers and dangers, to gain mastery over its chance events, to evade its ponderous,
formidable materiality.[ 34]
More specifically, where there is a policy problematic there is expertise, and where there is expertise there, too, a policy
problematic will emerge. Such problematics are detailed and elaborated in terms of discrete forms of knowledge as well as
interlocking policy domains. Policy domains reify the problematization of life in certain ways by turning these

epistemically and politically contestable orderings of life into "problems" that require the continuous
attention of policy science and the continuous resolutions of policymakers. Policy "actors" develop and
compete on the basis of the expertise that grows up around such problems or clusters of problems and their
client populations.
Here, too, we may also discover what might be called "epistemic entrepreneurs." Albeit the market for discourse is
prescribed and policed in ways that Foucault indicated, bidding to formulate novel problematizations they seek to
"sell" these, or otherwise have them officially adopted. In principle, there is no limit to the ways in which the management
of population may be problematized. All aspects of human conduct, any encounter with life, is problematizable. Any problematization
is capable of becoming a policy problem. Governmentality thereby creates a market for policy, for science and for
policy science, in which problematizations go looking for policy sponsors while policy sponsors fiercely compete on behalf of
their favored problematizations.

Reproblematization of problems is constrained by the institutional and ideological investments surrounding

accepted "problems," and by the sheer difficulty of challenging the inescapable ontological and
epistemological assumptions that go into their very formation. There is nothing so fiercely contested as an
epistemological or ontological assumption. And there is nothing so fiercely ridiculed as the suggestion that the real
problem with problematizations exists precisely at the level of such assumptions. Such "paralysis of
analysis" is precisely what policymakers seek to avoid since they are compelled constantly to respond to
circumstances over which they ordinarily have in fact both more and less control than they proclaim. What they do not have
is precisely the control that they want. Yet serial policy failurethe fate and the fuel of all policy--compels them into a
continuous search for the new analysis that will extract them from the aporias in which they constantly find themselves enmeshed.
[ 35]

Serial policy failure is no simple shortcoming that science and policy--and policy science--will ultimately
overcome. Serial policy failure is rooted in the ontological and epistemological assumptions that fashion
the ways in which global governance encounters and problematizes life as a process of emergence through
fitness landscapes that constantly adaptive and changing ensembles have continuously to negotiate. As a
particular kind of intervention into life, global governance promotes the very changes and unintended outcomes
that it then serially reproblematizes in terms of policy failure. Thus, global liberal governance is not a linear
problem-solving process committed to the resolution of objective policy problems simply by bringing better

it deliberately installs socially

specific and radically inequitable distributions of wealth, opportunity, and mortal danger both locally and
globally through the very detailed ways in which life is variously (policy) problematized by it.
information and knowledge to bear upon them. A nonlinear economy of power/knowledge,

LinkGlobal Coop
Belief in global cooperations ability to solve obscures the
causes of overexploitation and creates a utopian belief in
technologys ability to solve.
Ahmed 11Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is an international security analyst. He is Executive Director at
the Institute for Policy Research and Development, and Associate Tutor at the Department of IR, University
of Sussex, where he obtained his DPhil. [The international relations of crisis and the crisis of international
relations: from the securitisation of scarcity to the militarisation of society, Global Change, Peace &
Security, Volume 23, Issue 3, 2011, Taylor and Francis Online]
2.3 Neoliberalism: mutual over-exploitation as normative
On the other hand, we have strategies of international cooperation to establish new global governance
regimes by which states can develop treaties and agreements to encourage mitigating action. It is now clear
that the massive proliferation of international legal treaties designed to regulate activities impacting
detrimentally on the environment and thus limit environmental degradation simply cannot be explained
under the realist theoretical framework. While this seemingly vindicates neoliberal theoretical
approaches which underscore the scope for rational state strategies of mutual cooperation,62 the latter

are still at a loss to explain the extent to which ethical norms and values, national cultures
and environmental and scientific advocacy underpin wide-ranging environmental regimes
which cannot be reduced purely to state interests.63
Much of the liberal literature also explores the regressive dynamic of the energy industry and its
international dimensions, though failing to escape realist assumptions about anarchy. Kaldor and her coauthors, for instance, note that conflicts can erupt in regions containing abundant resources when
neopatrimonial states collapse due to competition between different ethnic and tribal factions motivated by
the desire to control revenues.64 Similarly, Collier argues that the most impoverished populations inhabit
the most resource-wealthy countries which, however, lack robust governance, encouraging rampant internal
resource predation and therefore civil wars.65 Lack of robust governance thus facilitates not only internal
anarchy over resource control, but also the illicit and corrupt activities of foreign companies, particularly in
the energy sector, in exploiting these countries.66 This sort of analysis then leads to a staple set of

normative prescriptions concerned largely with ways of inculcating good governance, such
as transparency measures to avoid excessive secrecy under which oil companies indulge in
corruption; more robust international regulation; corporate social responsibility; and
cosmopolitan principles such as democratisation, political equality and freedom of civil
society.67
Yet such well-meaning recommendations often do not lead to sufficiently strong policy
action by governments to rein in energy sector corruption. 68 Furthermore, it is painfully
clear from the examples of Kyoto, Copenhagen and Cancun that international
cooperative state strategies continue to be ineffective, with states unable to agree on the
scale of the crises concerned, let alone on the policies required to address them. Indeed, while
some modest successes were apparent in the Cancun Accord, its proposed voluntary
emissions regime would still likely guarantee according to even mid-range climate models a
global average temperature rise of 4C or more, which would in turn culminate in many of
the IPCC's more catastrophic scenarios.69
This calls into question the efficacy of longstanding recommendations such as Klare's that
the international community develop unprecedented international mechanisms to
coordinate the peaceful distribution of natural resources in the era of scarcity and environmental
degradation.70 While at face value such regulatory governance mechanisms would appear
essential to avoid violent conflict over depleting resources, they are posited in a sociopolitical and theoretical vacuum. Why is it that such potentially effective international

mechanisms continue to be ignored? What are the socio-political obstacles to their implementation?
Ultimately, the problem is that they overlook the structural and systemic
causes of resource depletion and environmental degradation.
Although neoliberalism shares neorealism's assumptions about the centrality of the state as a unitary
rational actor in the international system, it differs fundamentally in the notion that gains for one state do
not automatically imply losses for another; therefore states are able to form cooperative, interdependent
relationships conducive to mutual power gains, which do not necessarily generate tensions or conflict.71

While neoliberalism therefore encourages international negotiations and global governance

mechanisms for the resolution of global crises, it implicitly accepts the contemporary social,
political and economic organisation of the international system as an unquestionable
given , itself not subject to debate or reform.72
The focus is on developing the most optimal ways of maximising exploitation of the
biophysical environment. The role of global political economic structures (such as centralised
private resource-ownership and deregulated markets) in both generating global systemic crises
and inhibiting effective means for their amelioration is neglected. As such, neoliberalism is
axiomatically unable to view the biophysical environment in anything other than a
rationalist, instrumentalist fashion, legitimising the over-exploitation of natural resources
without limits, and inadvertently subordinating the global commons to the competitive
pressures of private sector profit-maximisation and market-driven solutions, rather
than institutional reform .73 Mutual maximisation of power gains translates into
the legitimisation of the unlimited exploitation of the biophysical environment without
recognition of the human costs of doing so, which are technocratically projected
merely as fixable aberrations from an optimal system of cooperative progress.74
Consequently, neoliberalism is powerless to interrogate how global political economic
structures consistently undermine the establishment of effective environmental regimes .

Link Soft Power

The AFFs focus on security and international order is
merely a new discursive shift to cover up the antagonistic
demonization of the other which lies at the heart of their
politics. Their pedagogy and politics of soft power is not a
benign new order attempting to bring peace to the world,
the AFF is embedded in the old school discursive economy
of militarization which justifies unending war.
Chouliaraki 2009
/Lilie, Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics, The Soft Power of
War, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, pg. 6-7/
Graham and Lukes paper Militarising the Body Politic: New Mediations as Weapons of Mass Instruction
opens up the section The Iraq war in political discourse. The paper makes the interesting point that neo-

feudal corporatism goes hand in hand with the hectic militarisation of contemporary bodies
politic the world over. Militarisation, however, primarily reveals itself as a political, economic
and cultural force in many societies, and therefore it requires the power of language soft
power. This is because militarisation requires the generation of new, negative evaluations of
other, antagonistic bodies politic in order both to safeguard its own legitimacy and to redefine the contours of political communities. Such evaluations of the antagonistic other are
inculcated by new and multiple mediations of meaning, which, by virtue of their global
reach, continuity and intensity act as pervasive forms of public pedagogy. The section on
political discourse continues with Faircloughs contribution Doctrine of International Community. Tony
Blairs contribution to an emergent hegemonic discourse of global security. The paper builds upon Graham
and Lukes point that contemporary bodies politic depend upon the power of discourse to
rationalise military interventions and re-define international community . What is currently
evidenced in the case of Iraq, Fairclough argues, is that old practices and doctrines have been

perceived as outdated, and new discourses have emerged as imaginaries of alternative world
orders. A struggle for hegemony has opened up, and one way of interpreting what we are
now seeing in the case of Iraq is that a would-be hegemonic discourse is being materialised
and enacted. Looking at Blairs contribution to this process over the period 19992003, Fairclough
critically engages with the emergence, diffusion, and bid for international hegemony of new
discourses (and narratives) of international affairs, global security, and international
community. Teun van Dijks paper, War Rhetoric of a Little Ally: Political Implicatures and Aznars
Legitimatisation of the war in Iraq, examines the speeches by Jos Mara Aznar held in Spanish parliament
in 2003 justifying his decision to enter the coalition in the war against Iraq. Within a framework of
multidisciplinary critical discourse analysis, van Dijk pays special attention to political implicatures,
defined as inferences based on general and particular political knowledge as well as on the context models
of Aznars speeches. He argues that such analysis reveals significant sociopolitical aspects of Aznars
discourse and gives insight into the broad bank of discursive resources through which the

project of war is narrated and legitimised.

Their Rhetoric of Soft Power is a Reality of the Worst Forms of Violent Foreign
Policy Their Truth is Racism.
Amy Kaplan, Prof. of English @ Univ. of Pennslyvania, 3 [American Quarterly 56.1, Violent
Belongings and the Question of Empire Today, p. muse]
Another dominant narrative about empire today, told by liberal interventionists, is that of the
"reluctant imperialist." 10 In this version, the United States never sought an empire and may
even be constitutionally unsuited to rule one, but it had the burden thrust upon it by the fall of
earlier empires and the failures of modern states, which abuse the human rights of their own
people and spawn terrorism. The United States is the only power in the world with the capacity
and the moral authority to act as military policeman and economic manager to bring order to the
world. Benevolence and self-interest merge in this narrative; backed by unparalleled force, the
United States can save the people of the world from their own anarchy, their descent into an
[End Page 4] uncivilized state. As Robert Kaplan writesnot reluctantly at allin "Supremacy
by Stealth: Ten Rules for Managing the World": "The purpose of power is not power itself; it is a
fundamentally liberal purpose of sustaining the key characteristics of an orderly world. Those
characteristics include basic political stability, the idea of liberty, pragmatically conceived;
respect for property; economic freedom; and representative government, culturally understood.
At this moment in time it is American power, and American power only, that can serve as an
organizing principle for the worldwide expansion of liberal civil society." 11 This narrative does
imagine limits to empire, yet primarily in the selfish refusal of U.S. citizens to sacrifice and
shoulder the burden for others, as though sacrifices have not already been imposed on them by
the state. The temporal dimension of this narrative entails the aborted effort of other nations and
peoples to enter modernity, and its view of the future projects the end of empire only when the
world is remade in our image. This is also a narrative about race. The images of an unruly
world, of anarchy and chaos, of failed modernity, recycle stereotypes of racial inferiority from
earlier colonial discourses about races who are incapable of governing themselves, Kipling's
"lesser breeds without the law," or Roosevelt's "loosening ties of civilized society," in his
corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. In his much-noted article in the New York Times Magazine
entitled "The American Empire," Michael Ignatieff appended the subtitle "The Burden" but
insisted that "America's empire is not like empires of times past, built on colonies, conquest and
the white man's burden." 12 Denial and exceptionalism are apparently alive and well. In
American studies we need to go beyond simply exposing the racism of empire and examine the
dynamics by which Arabs and the religion of Islam are becoming racialized through the
interplay of templates of U.S. racial codes and colonial Orientalism. These narratives of the
origins of the current empirethat is, the neoconservative and the liberal interventionisthave
much in common. They take American exceptionalism to new heights: its paradoxical claim to
uniqueness and universality at the same time. They share a teleological narrative of inevitability,
that America is the apotheosis of history, the embodiment of universal values of human rights,
liberalism, and democracy, the "indispensable nation," in Madeleine Albright's words. In this
logic, the United States claims the authority to "make sovereign judgments on what is right and
what is wrong" for everyone [End Page 5] else and "to exempt itself with an absolutely clear
conscience from all the rules that it proclaims and applies to others." 13 Absolutely protective of
its own sovereignty, it upholds a doctrine of limited sovereignty for others and thus deems the
entire world a potential site of intervention. Universalism thus can be made manifest only
through the threat and use of violence. If in these narratives imperial power is deemed the
solution to a broken world, then they preempt any counternarratives that claim U.S. imperial
actions, past and present, may have something to do with the world's problems. According to this
logic, resistance to empire can never be opposition to the imposition of foreign rule; rather,
resistance means irrational opposition to modernity and universal human values. Although these
narratives of empire seem ahistorical at best, they are buttressed not only by nostalgia for the
British Empire but also by an effort to rewrite the history of U.S. imperialism by appropriating a
progressive historiography that has exposed empire as a dynamic engine of American history. As
part of the "coming-out" narrative, the message is: "Hey what's the big deal. We've always been
interventionist and imperialist since the Barbary Coast and Jefferson's 'empire for liberty.' Let's
just be ourselves." A shocking example can be found in the reevaluation of the brutal U.S. war

against the Philippines in its struggle for independence a century ago. This is a chapter of history
long ignored or at best seen as a shameful aberration, one that American studies scholars here
and in the Philippines have worked hard to expose, which gained special resonance during the
U.S. war in Vietnam. Yet proponents of empire from different political perspectives are now
pointing to the Philippine-American War as a model for the twenty-first century. As Max Boot
concludes in Savage Wars of Peace, "The Philippine War stands as a monument to the U.S.
armed forces' ability to fight and win a major counterinsurgency campaignone that was bigger
and uglier than any that America is likely to confront in the future." 14 Historians of the United
States have much work to do here, not only in disinterring the buried history of imperialism but
also in debating its meaning and its lessons for the present, and in showing how U.S.
interventions have worked from the perspective of comparative imperialisms, in relation to other
historical changes and movements across the globe. The struggle over history also entails a
struggle over language and culture. It is not enough to expose the lies when Bush hijacks words
[End Page 6] such as freedom, democracy, and liberty. It's imperative that we draw on our
knowledge of the powerful alternative meanings of these key words from both national and
transnational sources. Today's reluctant imperialists are making arguments about "soft power,"
the global circulation of American culture to promote its universal values. As Ignatieff writes,
"America fills the hearts and minds of an entire planet with its dreams and desires." 15 The work
of scholars in popular culture is more important than ever to show that the Americanization of
global culture is not a one-way street, but a process of transnational exchange, conflict, and
transformation, which creates new cultural forms that express dreams and desires not dictated by
empire. In this fantasy of global desire for all things American, those whose dreams are
different are often labeled terrorists who must hate our way of life and thus hate humanity itself.
As one of the authors of the Patriot Act wrote, "when you adopt a way of terror you've excused
yourself from the community of human beings." 16 Although I would not minimize the
violence caused by specific terrorist acts, I do want to point out the violence of these definitions
of who belongs to humanity. Often in our juridical system under the Patriot Act, the accusation
of terrorism alone, without due process and proof, is enough to exclude persons from the
category of humanity. As scholars of American studies, we should bring to the present crisis our
knowledge from juridical, literary, and visual representations about the way such exclusions
from personhood and humanity have been made throughout history, from the treatment of
Indians and slaves to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

Soft Power is not a neutral phenomenon aimed towards universal good rather, soft
powers very attractiveness is the product of hegemonic and imperialist values with
which the U.S. dominates the international system. Soft Powers softness is the link
it attempts to deny the third worlds true interest by duping impoverished states to
participate in the U.S. led international system.
Bilgin, 2008. Bilgin, Assistant Professor, Department of International Relations, Bilkent University and
Elis, phd candidate, Department of International Relations, Ankara University, 2008,
Hard Power, Soft Power: Toward a More Realistic Power Analysis, Insight Turkey Vol. 10 / No. 2 / 2008
pp. 5-20
Nye is not the best candidate for presenting such a critique, for he fails to inquire into his
own core concept of attraction. This is rather unfortunate, because by doing so he replicates the
essentialism of realist power analysis. Just as realist IR fails to look into the production of
military power, Nye accepts as pre-given the stockpile of soft power, i.e. U.S. attraction, and
focuses his account on the ways in which that stockpile could best be utilized. Admittedly, Nye
assigns two ontological statuses to attraction, as Mattern points out: one as an essential
condition and one as a result of social interaction.42 Still, throughout his analysis, Nye relies on
the former and fails to push the latter to its full conclusion. Even as he identifies the sources of
soft power as the attractiveness of a countrys culture, political ideas and policies,43 Nye does
not reflect upon how was it that U.S. cul ture, political ideas and policies came to be considered
attractive by the rest of the world.44 Nyes silence on the production of soft power is somewhat
Perhaps

surprising, as his agony over the decline of U.S. soft power during George W. Bush
administration45 suggests his cognizance of its variability.46 Still, nowhere in his writings does
Nye seek to inquire into the historical processes through which the attractive ness of U.S.
culture has been produced. Indeed, as Bially Mattern also points out, while Nye favors universal
values over the parochial, he says nothing about why universal values are the right ones or
how one acquires such values.47 Perhaps more importantly, Nye remains silent on the historical
process through which particular values have come to be considered as universal and right and
others have been rendered parochial and less right. An analysis of the attractiveness of U.S.
culture and values that is historically and sociologically attentive to their produc tion would
inquire into soft power in terms of U.S. hegemony and domination.48 Failing that, stating a
preference for soft power while relying on essentialist notions of culture and identity
communicates a benign picture of U.S. hegemony and does not allow the capturing of not-sosoft aspects of soft power (see below).49 On one level, there are no surprises here. Nye is not
interested in inquiring into how the opponents of the U.S. are relegated to silence through
various expressions of soft power. As the sub-title of his book (Soft Power: the Means to
Success in World Politics) indicates, his is an unabashedly unreflexive take on the best ways to
further U.S. success.50 In offering a particular conception of soft power, Nye not only
introduces a new concept; he also calls on the United States to make more efficient use of its
existing stockpile of soft power. That the kind of soft power he calls for the United States to
utilize is not-so-soft insofar as its effects on the rest of the world are concerned does not seem
to worry him.

Soft power is colonialism masked in rhetoric and values the affirmative effaces the
violence of the political context of soft-powers emergence, guaranteeing it is nothing
more than an imperialist tool
Bilgin, 2008. Bilgin, Assistant Professor, Department of International Relations, Bilkent University and
Elis, phd candidate, Department of International Relations, Ankara University, 2008, Hard Power, Soft
Power: Toward a More Realistic Power Analysis, Insight Turkey Vol. 10 / No. 2 / 2008 pp. 5-20
Lukes understands the third face of power as those instances when A may exercise power over B by
getting him to do what he does not want to do, but he also exercises power over him by influencing,
shaping, or determining his very wants.52 Post-colonial peoples post-WWII rush towards sovereign
statehood may be viewed as an example of the third face of power whereby the international so ciety
shaped their wants while their actual circumstances called for other forms of political community. That is to
say, in Lukes framework, B does what A wants in apparent readiness contrary to its own interests. Put
differently, by exercising soft power, A prevents B from recognizing its own real interests. While Nyes
attention to As ability to shape Bs wants seem to render his analy sis three-dimensional, his lack of
curiosity into not-so-soft expressions of U.S. power renders his (soft) power analysis two-and-a-half
dimensional. This is mostly because Nye assumes that Bs real interests are also served when it follows
As lead. It is true that soft power does not involve physical coercion, but as Lukes reminded us, it is the
supreme and most insidious exercise of power to prevent people, to whatever degree, from having
grievances by shaping their perceptions, cognitions and preferences in such a way that they accept their role
in the existing order of things, either because they can see or imagine no alternative to it, or because they
see it as natural and unchangeable, or because they value it as divinely ordained and beneficial.53 Going
back to the example of North/South relations, power is involved not only when the South does not express
its grievance because of the absence of opportunities to do so, but also when it seemingly has no grievances
as a consequence of the prevalent system of ideas that depoliticizes its status within the international
economic order.54 In a similar fashion, Nye is not interested in inquiring into the sources of U.S.
attraction, for he considers the U.S.s ability to shape the wants of others as befitting the latters real
interests. Accordingly, he misses a fundamental part of soft power, what Bohas describes as the early
shaping of taste, collective imaginary and ideals which con stitutes a way of dominating other countries.
This includes the reinforcing effect of the social process in favor of American power through goods and
values.55 As such, Nyes analysis remains limited in regard to the third face of soft power, where the
existing state of things is internalized by the actors, and the U.S.s expression of power seems benign and in
accordance with the real interests of others. With the aim of rendering power analysis more realistic, we

should open up to new research agendas as required by the multiple faces of power. Power is far too
complex in its sources, effects and production to be reduced to one dimension.59 Indeed, power is diffused
and enmeshed in the social world in which people live in such a way that there are no relations exempt
from power.60 Since power shapes the formation of actors consciousness, no interest formation can be
objective; defining what an actors real interests are is not free of power relations. That is to say, not only
the mobilization of bias and agenda-setting but also the produc tion and effects of all norms and values that
shape human consciousness should be critically scrutinized. This, in turn, calls for not three- but fourdimensional power analysis Lukes plus Foucault as dubbed by Guzzini.62 Contra Lukes, whose
three-dimensional power analysis rests on assumptions regarding (1) the possibility of uncovering power
relations, and (2) Bs objective (real) interests that A denies through various expressions of hard and soft
power, Foucault maintains that power and knowledge directly imply one another [in that] there is no
power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not
presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.63 The academic field of International
Relations constitutes a supreme example of the workings of the fourth face of power. Over the years,
students of IR have studied international relations as an effect of power. It is only recently that they have
begun to study power as an effect of international relations (as world politics) 64 and International
Relations (as an academic field).65 However, as Booth reminds us, such silences, as with IRs narrow
conception of power, are not natural, they are political. Things do not just happen in politics, they are
made to happen, whether it is globalization or inequality. Grammar serves power.66 One of the sites
where the productive effects of grammar in the service of power is most vis ible is the Third World. This
has been one of the central themes of postcolonial studies where [f]rom Fanon to Jan Mahomed to
Bhabha, the connecting theme is that Western representations construct meaning and reality in the Third
World. Concepts such as progress, civilized and modern powerfully shape the non-European
world.67 The ways in which grammar serves power becomes detectable through more realistic power
analysis. More realistic power analysis requires looking at instances of:68 A getting B to do what it wants
in the event of a visible conflict;a. A getting B to do what it wants in the absence of a visible articulation of
b. grievances during a visible conflict; A getting B to do what it wants by shaping Bs wants and needs so
that a visa. bile conflict does not occur; A getting B to do what it wants by constituting the field of
knowledge d. through which B realizes its subjectivity.69 It is in this last sense that IR has been complicit
in the ways in which grammar has served power. If power rolls out of the mouths of men, as well as the
barrels of guns,70 it is high time for more realistic power analyses that reflect upon their own moment(s)
and site(s) of production and expression.

Soft power is a realist tool used to justify transforming an

unstable world to mirror our interests
Eschen 5 [Penny Von Eschen, Associate Prof of History at UMich, 2005, Enduring Public Diplomacy,
American Quarterly 57.2 pg. 335-343. Muse]
Yet while public diplomacy has historically operated as a mystifying smoke screen , for all its
absurdities and contradictions, we cannot wish the term away. As Kennedy and Lucas demonstrate,

public diplomacy is emerging as "a crucial theater of strategic operations for the renewal of
American hegemony within a transformed global order," arguably as prominent as it was during
the cold war. If the resonances between the cold war and present-day public diplomacy are readily
apparent, the differences are also striking. During the cold war, the governments official disseminators of
overseas propaganda, the United States Information Agency and the Voice of America, were for export
only; it was illegal to distribute and broadcast their programs and bulletins within the United States. Yet
today, Kennedy and Lucas argue, global media and technology have made public diplomacy an open
communication forum. Any consideration of public diplomacy must take into account the greater difficulty
of the U.S. government to separate the domestic public from overseas audiences for American propaganda.
Moreover, if the state and civil society lines of cold war public diplomacy were often deliberately blurry,
through technologies of the Internet and expanded corporate power, public diplomacy has taken on

unprecedented shape-shifting characteristics. Halliburton, CNN, and Microsoft all circulate

as "America" with more authority than state agencies. While the "fake news" of the Bush
administration recently revealed by the New York Times has plenty of cold war precedents, such "public

diplomacy," as the authors contend, is rendered at once "more global by communications technology but
also more local by interventions in selected conflicts." For Kennedy and Lucas, these current efforts in
public diplomacy, even more unaccountable and amorphous than their cold war predecessors, not only

trace the contours of the new imperium, but they shape the conditions of knowledge
production and the terrain on which American studies circulates . [End Page 337] The urgency
of the authors questions about "the conditions of knowledge-formation and critical thinkingin the
expanding networks of international and transnational political cultures" was impressed upon me when I
recently spoke to a group of deans and directors of international study abroad programs. Most had worked
in the field for nearly two decades. Many worked at underfunded institutions. As they contended with the
retrenchment and possible collapse of their programs, two possible paths of salvation were presented to
them. The first was partnership with countries entering the "competition" for the George W. Bush
administrations Millennium Challenge Corporation. The program, administered by the State Department,
was established in 2003 ostensibly as a poverty reduction program through funding growth and
development initiatives. Its funding priorities, as its critics have noted, are closely tied to U.S. security
interests and do not favor the programs that would promote sustainability. Particularly jarring was the
language of assessment used in the competitive application process. If "transparency" seems an ironic
request from the secretive Bush administration, the standard of former adherence to World Bank and IMF
dictates as a criterion of eligibility seemed an especially harsh case of tough love. The second possibility
for funding dangled before the audience appeared even more sinister. The real money, a fund-raising expert
told the gathering, is in the Gulf states. Dont believe a thing you hear in the media, the educators were
instructed, about how negatively people in the Middle East perceive Americans. Rest assured, the speaker
continued, the moneyed elite from the Gulf states keenly desire degrees from American universities, and
they can afford your tuition. At a moment when journalists and scholars are denied visas and
entry into the country, making it impossible for many Middle Eastern scholars to attend the
American Studies Association meeting (as occurred in 2004 to name just one example), knowledge
production is indeed proceeding apace, as Kennedy and Lucas suggest, "by the new
configurations of U.S. imperialism." Hence, one critical task for American studies scholars is to

engage with the legacies of the institutional relationships between public diplomacy and
American studies as a field, and the contemporary reshaping of these relationships in
conditions not of our choosing. Kennedy and Lucass sobering portrait of the challenges faced by
practitioners of American studies make all the more urgent their invocation of John Carlos Rowes call for
the international field of American studies to devote its attention to the critical study of the circulation of
America. Invoking Rowe, Kennedy and Lucas propose collaborations with related disciplines in a critical
American studies. Such collaborations are crucial in the foregrounding and tracking of processes of U.S.
empire, and offer an important alternative to [End Page 338] attempts to "internationalize" American
studies that manifest themselves as a "distorted mirror of neoliberal enlargement." Following Kennedy and
Lucass call for collaboration with other fields, I want to return to the story of Duke Ellington in Iraq as a
means of decentering the "American" in critical American studies. I first want to emphasize the difficulty of
constructing even the most rudimentary context for the story of Ellington in Iraq. Despite the fine work of
such scholars as Douglas Little and Melani McAlister on the United States and the Middle East, along with
excellent work by Iraqi specialists, it is an understatement to say that the story of Iraq has been very much
on the periphery for Americanists interested in the global dimensions of U.S. power.6 Yet, when the Duke
Ellington orchestra visited Iraq, the United States was already deeply implicated in the unfolding events in
Iraq and the region. Not only had the Ellington band stumbled into the 1963 Iraqi crisis, but the experience
reprised that of Dave Brubeck and his quartet, who had been in Iraq on the eve of the coup in 1958 that had
brought Abd al-Karim Qassim to power. With surprising frequency, the State Department sent jazz
musicians to tense situations in countries and regions that have been neglected by historians yet were
constantly in the news as the U.S. went to war with Iraq in 2003. To mention only the examples from the
Middle Eastern and adjoining states, in addition to Brubecks and Ellingtons Iraqi performances, Dizzy
Gillespie toured Afghanistan and Pakistan in 1956; Dave Brubeck toured Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran in
1958; and Duke Ellington visited those same countries in 1963. The tumultuous history of U.S.Iraqi
relations simply vanishes in the still-dominant bipolar emphasis on U.S.Soviet conflict. It drops out, as
well, within the more neglected frame of anticolonialism. As Rashid Khalidi has pointed out, "there had
never been a state, empire, or nation of Iraq before British statesmen created it in the wake of World War
I."7 Yet if Iraq, along with other Gulf states, lacks the same history of colonization and decolonization

shared by Asia and Africa, it remains a central terrain for contemporary struggles over who controls the
resources of the formerly colonized world. If we, as Americanists, examine public diplomacy in this
context of the consolidation of U.S. hegemony in its quest for control over resources, the work
of specialists on Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and Latin America as well, where U.S. imperialism had
long beleaguered formally independent states, will be crucial for such an endeavor. An account of U.S.
public diplomacy and empire in Iraq can be constructed only through engaging fields outside the sphere of
American studies. Political scientist Mahmood Mamdani locates the roots of the current global crisis in
[End Page 339] U.S. cold war policies. Focusing on the proxy wars of the later cold war that led to CIA
support of Osama Bin Laden and drew Iraq and Saddam Hussein into the U.S. orbit as allies against the
Iranians, Mamdani also reminds us of disrupted democratic projects and of the arming and destabilization
of Africa and the Middle East by the superpowers, reaching back to the 1953 CIA-backed coup ousting
Mussadeq in Iran and the tyrannical rule of Idi Amin in Uganda. For Mamdani, the roots of contemporary
terrorism must be located in politics, not the "culture" of Islam. Along with the work of Tariq Ali and
Rashid Khalidi, Mamdanis account of the post1945 world takes us through those places where U.S.
policy has supported and armed military dictatorships, as in Pakistan and Iraq, or intervened clandestinely,
from Iraq and throughout the Middle East to Afghanistan and the Congo. For these scholars, these events
belong at the center of twentieth-century history, rather than on the periphery, with interventions and coups
portrayed as unfortunate anomalies. These scholars provide a critical history for what otherwise is posed as
an "Islamic threat," placing the current prominence of Pakistan in the context of its longtime support from
the United States as a countervailing force against India.8 Stretching across multiple regions, but just as
crucial for reading U.S. military practices in Iraq, Yoko Fukumura and Martha Matsuokas "Redefining
Security: Okinawa Womens Resistance to U.S. Militarism" reveals the human and environmental
destruction wrought by U.S. military bases in Asia through the living archive of activists who are
demanding redress of the toxic contamination and violence against women endemic to base communities.9
Attention to the development of exploitative and violent sex industries allows us to place such recent
horrors as the abuse, torture, and debasement at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in a history of military
practices.10 Taken together, these works are exemplary, inviting us to revisit the imposition of U.S. power
in East and South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, regions where the instrumental role of U.S. power in
the creation of undemocratic military regimes has often been overlooked. That none of these works has
been produced by scholars who were trained in American studies is perhaps not accidental, but rather
symptomatic of a field still shaped by insularity despite increasing and trenchant critiques of this insularity
by such American studies scholars as Amy Kaplan and John Carlos Rowe.11 In recommending that
American studies scholars collaborate with those in other fields and areas of study and by articulating
warnings about how easily attempts to "internationalize" can hurtle down the slippery slope of

neoliberal expansion, Kennedy and Lucas join such scholars in furthering the project of
viewing U.S. hegemony from the outside in. They [End Page 340] expose the insularity that
has been an abiding feature of U.S. politics and public discourse.

We must be especially critical of couching hegemony in

liberal terms. The hidden transcript of american security
elites creates imperialist and devstating outcomes.
Pieterse 7Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Sociology @ Illinois (Urbana) [Political and Economic
Brinkmanship, Review of International Political Economy 14: 3 p 467-468]

The neoconservative case for American power, as set forth in the Project for a New American
Century, is a straightforward geopolitical argument alongside a Wilsonian argument for
benevolent global hegemony to spread democracy. The former is relatively easy to deal with; since it
does not claim legitimacy it is plain geopolitics. The latter dominates in policy speeches and is a
harder nut to crack because it resonates with a wider constituency that shares the liberal
case for hegemony. Many liberals (not only Americans) also endorse strong American power. According
to Michael Ignatieff, it is the lesser evil (2004). According to Paul Berman, in response to terrorism war is

just (2003). It resonates with a long standing idea that spreading democracy is an American
mission (Smith, 1994).
At a recent meeting of the American Political Science Association, Joseph Nye said the United States
cannot win by hard power alone, but must pay more heed to soft power and global communications.

I asked him why should the United States win and he replied, the United States must win
because it is the worlds largest democracy and this is a dangerous world. This is a
quintessential liberal position and a tenet that runs the gamut of political positions. This may be a
dangerous and chaotic world, but the question is does American hegemony and preventive
war make it less or more dangerous?
While much recent criticism targets the neoconservatives, criticism should rather focus on
the liberal position because it claims a legitimacy that the neoconservative view lacks , is
shared by many more than the neoconservative view, is used by neoconservatives to garner
support for forward policies, and underpins bipartisan and public support for the defense industries.
Promoting democracy is controversial because exporting democracy and democracy from the barrel of a
gun are difficult propositions and inconsistent with policies of cooperating with authoritarian governments.
Indeed, the liberal view should be examined not in terms of its declared intentions but in
terms of its implementation. In the first part of this paper I discuss the views and methods of
American security professionals and argue that these stand in contrast to the declared liberal
aims of American policy. This is not merely a matter of unintentional messiness of action on
the ground but is often intentional and, I argue, part of a posture of political brinkmanship,
which goes back at least to the Kennedy administration. The Vietnam War, too, was part of

Kennedys global liberalism. Entering hegemony through the service entrance reveals the
tension between ends and means and exposes fundamental flaws in the liberal position .
The term brinkmanship was first used in relation to American policy during the Cuban missile crisis.
Brinkmanship refers to the policy or practice, especially in international politics and foreign policy, of
pushing a dangerous situation to the brink of disaster (to the limits of safety) in order to achieve the most
advantageous outcome by forcing the opposition to make concessions (Wikipedia). Brinkmanship was part
of the American stance during the cold war and has since become part of the habitus of superpower.
During the Reagan administration American foreign policy shifted from containment to rollback, pushing
back Soviet influence. Support for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan and the contras in Nicaragua and the
Irancontra affair were part of this (Mamdani, 2004). Rollback means occupying offensive positions, war of
maneuver and involves risk taking and brinkmanship. The unilateral policy which the United States
increasingly adopted after the end of the cold war (Skidmore, 2005) may be considered a form of
brinkmanship. Prolonging the unipolar moment as advocated by Charles Krauthammer (2002/2003) and
the grandiose defense policy guidance formulated by Paul Wolfowitz in 1992 to build American military
preparedness beyond rival challenges represent brinkmanship elevated to strategic posture. The reigning
theme of the 1990s, humanitarian intervention or the use of military force for humanitarian ends, merges
military force and Wilsonian ideals as an idea that Paul Wolfowitz and Kofi Annan can agree on (Rieff,
2005). The neoconservative approach and the Project for a New American Century is part of this series. It is
a project for turning American cold war victory into lasting supremacy and the willingness to take bold
risks to achieve this.

There is ample discussion of the outcomes of American policies, but this treatment focuses
on the intentions driving policies. Brinkmanship is a strong interpretation because it assumes
deliberate, calculated risk taking on the part of policy elites . It can be described as political
maximalism (Sestanovich, 2005). It may be difficult to demonstrate because the intentions of
policymakers are often classified. At times they are implied in policy statements and conceded
retroactively, in memoirs and biographies, though usually only in relation to policies that have proven
successful. As a source I use the views of security professionals, which are less guarded than those of
policymakers.
The cumulative effect of American economic policies are that exports become imports, the trade deficit
deepens, the economic base shrinks, income inequality widens and external deficits rise to unsustainable
levels. Could we view current American economic policies too as brinkmanship? Political brinkmanship,
though difficult to validate, is reasonable in outline and familiar as a theme. Economic brinkmanship,

which I explore in the second part, is a more difficult and unusual hypothesis. I argue that laissezfaire and
neoliberal policies represent willed risk taking by policy elites. As a source I use the arguments of
economists who argue that current trends and US debt are actually positive signs (e.g. Levey and Brown,
2005). These hypotheses may enable us to see larger patterns in American policies and raise new questions,
in particular on the relationship between intentional and unintended, unanticipated risk. The risks

accepted by policymakers and their adherents are often different from the public record
and the unanticipated consequences that follow are different again. This means that three
scenarios are in play: the public one, which is usually couched in terms of liberal hegemony
and promoting democracy; the classified script held by policy and security insiders; and the
script of actual processes as they unfold and the political and operational responses they
elicit.

Liberal intention to use hegemony for awesome produces

neoconservative results
Pieterse 7Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Sociology @ Illinois (Urbana) [Political and Economic
Brinkmanship, Review of International Political Economy 14: 3 p 474]

American military posture and action on the ground, then, do not merely fail to implement
a well intentioned project because the real world is messy and chaotic, but are in
fundamental respects designed to achieve the reverse of the liberal
mission . Real time hegemonic operations are schizophrenic double acts :
establishing order while following a politics of tension. The security institutions are
layered in formal and informal cultures and overt and covert operations (Baer, 2003). Liberal
hegemony is about bringing stability while security insiders may be concerned with
producing instability as part of a strategy of tension.

Soft power and integration are just the flip side of the
brutality of imperial containment and security.
Kennedy and Lucas 5Liam Kennedy, American Studies @ University College (Dublin) and
Scott Lucas, American Studies @ Birmingham [Public Diplomacy and U.S. Foreign Policy, American
Quarterly 57.2 MUSE]
Members of the Bush Administration are fond of drawing analogies between the America of the early cold
war and the America of the present, especially to emphasize the material preponderance of the United
States at both historical moments and to underline the special responsibility that the nation bore and
continues to bear in the execution of its power.65 Yet, even as the U.S. government promotes the
assumption that "public diplomacy helped win the cold war, and it has the potential to win the war on
terror," it has established a framework for the waging of the contemporary battle that is very different from
that promoted fifty years ago.66 In both instances, a "war of ideas" is evoked to frame a bipolar

clash of civilizations and promote a national ideal of liberal democracy, yet the combination
of value and security in each instance is shaped by different geostrategic frameworks of
"national security." During the cold war the (publicly stated) regulatory paradigm was that
of "containment," which functioned to segment publics and information; in the war on terror
the leading paradigm is "integration," which seeks to draw publics into an American
designed "zone of peace." The National Strategy for Combating Terrorism states that "ridding the world
of terrorism is essential to a broader purpose. We strive to build an international order where more countries
and peoples are integrated into a world consistent with the interests and values we share with our
partners."67 Both paradigms, however, conceal strategic tensions. For many inside and outside U.S.
administrations in the 1950s, containment pointed toward coexistence with the Soviet bloc and its captive

peoples, precluding the extension of freedom through "liberation." For many inside and outside the current
administration, "integration" does not provide a solution for long-term war with rogue states and tyrants, a
war that has to be waged by and for a U.S. "preponderance of power."
It is our contention that political warfare tries to bridge, if not resolve, these tensions. In 1950, NSC 68
concluded with the mandate not only to "strengthen the orientation toward the United States of the nonSoviet nations" but also "to encourage and promote the gradual retraction of undue Russian power and
influence from the present perimeter areas around traditional Russian boundaries and the emergence of the
satellite countries as entities independent of the USSR."68 A half-century later Richard Haass, Director of
Policy Planning in the State Department (and far from an acolyte of the "neoconservative" movement),
easily moved from describing the goal of postcold [End Page 324]war U.S. foreign policy as

"a process of integration in which the United States works with others to promote ends that
benefit everyone" to acknowledging it is "an imperial foreign policy . . . a foreign policy that
attempts to organize the world along certain principles affecting relations between states and conditions
within them."69
The National Security Act of 2002 states: "The U.S. will use this moment of opportunity to extend the
benefits of freedom across the globe. . . . We will actively work to bring the hope of democracy,
development, free markets, and free trade to every corner of the world."70 As in the cold war, "freedom" is
a prized trope of U.S. international affairs, but is now framed by a different set of ideological and policy
aims. The cold war conflation of "national interest" and the "free world" was a rhetorical reflection of a
realpolitik, state-centered approach to international affairs, often defined by struggles over territory and
sovereignty. The goal of the war on terror is "not to defend the free world but, rather, freedom itself."71
This is to say that freedom is now more fully abstracted and deterritorialized, just as the

empire is unbound in a perpetual war. "Freedom" is certainly the key trope of the war on
terror, the integer of idea and value, as Henry Hyde has clearly articulated: "In addition to genuine
altruism, our promotion of freedom can have another purpose, namely as an element in the U.S.'s
geopolitical strategy."72 In this sense, freedom is an abstracted signifier of American
imperialism; it is not a promise of negative liberty and social respect (the "empire of liberty"
reflected in the Constitution), but rather a harbinger of the "empire for liberty," which

combines the reinstantiation of the national security state with the pursuit of "virtuous
war."73 This combination makes a "regulatory fiction" of the American mythology of
freedom, transforming it into a master rationale for the neoliberal empire's symbolic
dramas of emergency and extension.74 Actions against the "enemies of freedom" (as defined by
President Bush) extend "national security" around the globe, producing spectacular military and
media campaigns in the process. In the promotion of "freedom" to foreign audiences, public
diplomacy is inextricably connected with the development and implementation of U.S.
foreign policy, charged with the awkward task of reconciling interests and ideals. This reconciliation
is always deferred, forever incomplete, yet it cannot be disavowed since it is the horizon of
the imperial imaginary projected by the extension of the national security state .

Link Multilateralism
Benign imperialismfaith in moderate multilateralism
prevents questioning imperial domination.
Shaikh 7Nermeen Shaikh, @ Asia Source [Development 50, Interrogating Charity and the
Benevolence of Empire, palgrave-journals]
And where, again, does this power for benevolent goodwill reside? In the post-war period, and especially
after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, it is the United States that sees itself
increasingly as the vanguard of human emancipation, John Winthrop's 'city upon a hill'. This is also
its rightful place, having emerged from a unique tradition (political, social, cultural and religious), which
has brought it to its current position of freedom and leadership. And so it is the US, sometimes in the
guise of multilateralism, most recently not as much, that exercises the most power globally. The
liberal, democratic-capitalist political system is triumphant . How, then, does one interrogate
American intervention in the world according to its own standards? How does one hold the US accountable
precisely for the goodwill it professes? Can the US hold itself accountable in any meaningful
sense?
Collateral damage One clue as to the possibility of such an auto-critique lies in a phrase that has become
part of the popular political imaginary: collateral damage. This term, inaugurated during the Cold War,
is perhaps the euphemism par excellence: it contains within it the cleansing, indeed the
impossibility, of culpability; it must be assumed that the US is always acting with good intentions,
and if events unfold in such a way as to suggest otherwise, then each instance is simply a
betrayal of the original intent, which is itself beyond reproach or at the very least, absolved of
the worst offences. In certain readings, the various forms of oppression and exclusion that make
up the collateral damage of imperial power might also be interpreted as constitutive of the
order in which they occur. In the economic realm, Joseph Stiglitz, for instance, argues that the West
has used its disproportionate share of economic power to maintain its position, most notably when it comes
to determining the terms of trade as well as the limits of free trade (an essential ingredient of the present
liberal-capitalist dispensation) (Stiglitz, 2002). This often, and perhaps unsurprisingly, results in a distinct
advantage for richer countries. In other readings, intentions may be harder to determine, but given that the
term collateral damage includes within it the possibility of its own exoneration, what can be said about the
likelihood of justice in such a system? If every inequality, every abuse, every infraction is seen as

an aberration, as a demonstration of the fact that the order has not yet reached its full
potential, are we to hope that this same order will eventually be equal to its own avowed
aspirations? The response to the latter question is of course widely affirmative. The problem is
that it is predicated on the claims of the dispensers of benevolent intervention themselves.
But it is necessary to interrogate these very claims to bring out the more egregious and
systematic forms of collateral damage and thereby question the very possibility of justice
within this order. On the one hand, as Stiglitz also points out, there is some hope: whereas previously
only the radical left was critical of the World Bank and IMF, now these critiques are far more widespread.
On the other hand, the possibility of a global, socialist revolution is scarcely found anywhere. Attempting to
speak from the perspective of the recipients of goodwill immediately, then, begs the question: is radical
structural change necessary before the possibility of justice in the realm of collateral damage can be born?

Link --Accidents
accident is a political strategy to obscure responsibility for nuclear violence
Hanna M. Segal, MB ChB FRC Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst British Pyscho-Analytic Society, 88 [Psychoanalysis
and the Nuclear Threat: Clinical and Theoretical Studies, p. 47]

The growth of technology is also used for a typically schizoid dehumanization and mechanization. There is
a kind of pervasive depersonalization and derealization. Pushing a button to annihilate parts of the world we have never
seen is a mechanized, split-off activity. Bracken (1984) contends that war is likely to happen as a result of our
machines getting Out of control. Everything is so automated that oversensitive machines could start an unstoppable nuclear
exchange. The MIT computer expert Joseph Weizen-baum (1976) comes to a similar conclusion: modern big computers are so
complicated that no expert can see through and control them. Yet the whole nuclear early warning system is based on these machines.
Since one effect of nuclear explosion is a disturbance in communication systems, it might not be within the power of governments to
stop a war even if they wished to. But the fact that we can even think that "machines will start the war, not us"
shows the extent of denial of our responsibility. We seem to live with a peculiar combination of helplessness
and terror and omnipotence-helplessness and omnipotence in a vicious circle; heightening one another . This
helplessness, which lies at the root of our apathy, is inevitable. We are faced with a horrifyingly threatening danger. But partly
it is induced by us and becomes a self--fulfilling prophesy. Confronted with the terror of the powers of

destructiveness we divest ourselves of our responsibilities by denial, projection, and fragmentation. The
responsibility is fragmented and projected further and further away-into governments, army, scientists, and,
finally, into machines beyond human control. We not only project into our so--called enemies, we also divest
ourselves of our responsibilities by projecting them onto governments. They, in turn, can not bear such responsibility, and they
project onto us, the people, public opinion, and so on, as well as fragmenting their responsibility as previously described. When we
project onto governments, we become truly helpless. We are in their hands.
Descriptions of nuclear accidents outweighs and turns the aff it dehumanizes people by describing
the process as purely mechanical removing the human element. Eliminating the role of agency in the
process and claiming machines are going to start the war not us ignores the discursive framing that
put that system in place, makes their impact inevitable thats Segal 88.
Accident fears are missile hysteria
Seng 2 [Tan See, Prof of Security Studies @ IDSS Singapore, July 2002, "What Fear Hath Wrought: Missile Hysteria and The
Writing of America, IDSS Commentary No. 28, http://www.sipri.org/contents/library/0210.pdf]
Few, to be sure, would doubt the sincerity of Secretary Rumsfeld when he averred last June: "I don't think vulnerability is a (viable)
policy."84 Clearly, Washington's preoccupation with missile defence has much to do with the Bush Administration's concern over
what it perceives as the strategic vulnerability of America to potential ballistic missile attack. Nonetheless, as important as debates
over whether or not the "missile threat" actually exists are to the study and practice of international relations, what is equally if not
more fundamental is the question of how discourses of danger figure in the incessant writing of "America" -

a particular and quite problematic identity that owes its materiality to textual inscriptions of difference and
Otherness. Missile hysteria in US national security discourse cannot be simplistically reduced to the level
of an ideological explanation - certainly not according to the classic formulation of Mannheim's. 85 Rather, what this paper has
demonstrated is the centrality of difference and deferral in discourse to the identity of America - a discourse of
danger, fear, and vulnerability posed by potential missile attacks against the US from "rogue states" and
accidental or unauthorized missile launches from a particular "China" or "Russia." The argument maintained here
has been that a particular representation of America does not exist apart from the very differences that
allegedly threaten that representation, just as the particular America of recent lore did not exist apart from Cold War-related
discourses of danger. If missile defence is (as Bauman, cited earlier, has put it) the "foolproof recipe" for exorcising the ghosts or
demons of missile hysteria, then Bush's national security advisors are the exorcists and shamans as well as the
constructors of national insecurity via missile hysteria. 86 However, the argument has not been that the Administration,
the Rumsfeld Commission, and other missile defence enthusiasts fabricated, ex nihilo, a ballistic missile threat against the US by
means of a singular, deliberate "act," which is what some constructivists in international relations, conspiracy theorists, and partisan
Democrats - an interesting if not motley collectivity - would have us believe. Nor has it been that language and discourse is
"everything" as linguistic idealists would have us imagine. Rather, through reiterative and coordinated practices by

which discourse produces the effects that it names, a certain normative representation of America
"emerges" - wrought, as it were, by fear and written into being by missile hysteria.

Link -- Democracy
Democratization is imperialism 2.0 exposing the flip side of this oppressive regime is necessary
Alison J.

Ayers

, Department of Political Science - Simon Fraser University, Imperial Liberties: Democratisation and

Governance in the New Imperial Order POLITICAL STUDIES:

2009

VOL 57, 127

Thus, far from non- or indeed anti-imperial, the current global mission to democratise the world is
internal to contemporary imperialism. For those who do constantly think within the horizons of the putatively non-imperial
present, the internationalisation of (neo)liberal democracy is presumed to be incompatible with imperialism, but this habitual and
normative acceptance is highly problematic (Marks, 2000; Tully, 2008). Mainstream accounts of democratisation

presuppose what requires explanation, taking for granted the non-imperial character of this global project,
the hegemony of a specific and impoverished model of (neo)liberal democracy, highly problematic, dehistoricised notions of state, society and self and the categorical separation of the domestic and the
international. The article seeks to address such lacunae through a critique of the project of democratisation. It provides detailed
empirical evidence from Africa. As such Africa is central while also curiously marginal to the general thesis. The article seeks to
demonstrate that far from an alternative to imperialism, the democratisation project involves the
imposition of aWestern (neo)liberal procedural form of democracy on imperialised peoples . As such,
democracy promotion is concerned, in part, with manufacturing mentalities and consent around the
dominant (neo)liberal notion of democracy, foreclosing attempts to understand or constitute democracy in
any other terms. It should be noted, however, that this project is executed somewhat inconsistently. Western powers have
been selective in their approach to liberal-democratic reform when countervailing strategic, economic or
ideological interests have prevailed. Thus Western governments have eschewed aid restrictions despite
gross and persistent violations of human rights or good governance in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Algeria,
Egypt, Colombia, Uzbekistan, Pakistan and Niger (Callinicos, 2003; Crawford, 2001; Olsen, 1998). As demonstrated by
the situation in Uganda (detailed below) as well as Niger, in cases of violations of liberal democratic principles, official Western
agencies have routinely prioritised liberalisation over democratic principles. Likewise, in other instances, Western
intervention has terminated autonomous democratic processes, for example in Chile, Guatemala and Nicaragua (Slater, 2002).
Selective adherence notwithstanding, the orthodox (neo)liberal model of democracy claims universality. As Bhikhu Parekh notes in his
account of the cultural particularity of liberal democracy, such claims have aroused deep fears in the fragile and nervous societies of
the rest of the world (Parekh, 1992, p. 160). In seeking to constitute African (and other) social relations in its own particular image,

the democratisation project reproduces internal tensions and antinomies within liberal thought. As such, a
profound non-correspondence exists, in Mahmood Mamdanis (1992) terms, between received (neo)liberal democratic
theory and living African realities. Resistance is therefore widespread, with Western (neo)liberal democratic notions being reassessed in many places on the continent nowadays, often more censoriously than may be heard above the clamor of Euro-American
triumphalism (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1997, p. 141). As Michel Foucault argued in The Subject and Power,

between a relationship of power and a strategy of struggle there is a reciprocal appeal, a perpetual linking
and a perpetual reversal. The ensuing instability enables analysis either from inside the history of struggle or from the
standpoint of the power relationships as well as interaction or reference between the two (Foucault, 1994, p. 347). Each
approach is necessary but not possible within the scope of the present article. The article seeks to provide
analysis of the articulation of informal imperialism, inter alia through democracy and governance
interventions, as a necessary and prefigurative mapping exercise (Peterson, 2003) to understanding social
transformation, as well as the social conditions of possibility of alternative forms of relation and engagement.5 The mapping of
this project is essential in illuminating relations of power. The current imperial order is inimical to
democracy but to disrupt and redirect the particular orderings at work we must first be able to see them
clearly (Peterson, 2003, p. 173, emphasis in original). As such, analysis of how post-colonial imperialism is articulated is a
necessary precondition of thinking in an informed manner about resistance and transformation.

Democracy is discursive justification for imperialism it has empirically been use to invade and fix
other countries like Afghanistan, Iraq and Vietnam. It also creates structural inequality because we
automatically take the side of democracies further alienating non-democratic regimes. This means
everyone is either With or Against us, that probably makes conflict more likely. The claim that
authoritarian regimes are conflict prone is laughable because the people at the top of the chain know
that wars would only risk destabilizing their position.
The myth of democratic peace is used to justify military interventionturns their advantage

Mueller, pol sci and IR prof, 9

pol sci prof and IR,

Ohio State. Widely-recognized expert on terrorism threats in foreign policy. AB from U Chicago, MA in pol sci from UCLA and PhD
in pol sci from UCLA (John, Faulty Correlation, Foolish Consistency, Fatal Consequence: Democracy, Peace, and Theory in the
Middle East, 15 June 2007, http://psweb.sbs.ohio-state.edu/faculty/jmueller/KENT2.PDF, p.. 7-10)
Philosophers and divines not only encased democracy in a vaporously idealistic or ideological mystique, they
have done the same for the democracy-peace correlation. After all, if correlation is taken to be cause, it
follows that peace will envelop the earth right after democracy does. Accordingly for those who value peace, the
promotion of democracy, by force or otherwise, becomes a central mission. This notion has been brewing for some
time. Woodrow Wilson's famous desire to "make the world safe for democracy" was in large part an antiwar motivation. He and many
others in Britain, France, and the United States had become convinced that, as Britain's Lloyd George put it, "Freedom is the only
warranty of Peace" (Rappard 1940, 42-44). With the growth in the systematic examination of the supposed peace-democracy
connection by the end of the century, such certain pronouncements became commonplace. Notes Bruce Russett, sentiments like those
have "issued from the White House ever since the last year of the Reagan administration" (2005, 395). Foolish consistency, fatal
consequence: the role of little statesmen It was left to George W. Bush to put mystique into practice. As he stressed to reporter Bob
Woodward during the runup to his war with Iraq, "I say that freedom is not America's gift to the world. Freedom is God's gift to
everybody in the world. I believe that. As a matter of fact, I was the person that wrote that line, or said it. I didn't write it, I just said it
in a speech. And it became part of the jargon. And I believe that. And I believe we have a duty to free people. I would hope we
wouldn't have to do it militarily, but we have a duty" (2004, 88-89). And in an address shortly before the war, he confidently
proclaimed, "The world has a clear interest in the spread of democratic values, because stable and free nations do not breed the
ideologies of murder. They encourage the peaceful pursuit of a better life" (quoted, Frum and Perle 2003, 158). In this, Bush was only
trying to be consistent (foolishly so, perhaps, but nonetheless), a quality that endears him to so many of his followers. If democracy
is so wonderful, and if in addition it inevitably brings both peace and creates favorable policy preferences, then forcefully

jamming it down the throats of the decreasing number of nondemocratic countries in the world must be all
to the good. He had already done something like that, with a fair amount of success, in Afghanistan; his father had crisply slapped
Panama into shape; Reagan had straightened out Grenada; and Bill Clinton had invaded Haiti and bombed the hell out of Bosnia and
Serbia with the same lofty goal at least partly in mind. Further, the Australians had recently done it in East Timor and the British in
Sierra Leone (Mueller 2004, ch. 7). Critics have argued that democracy can't be spread at the point of a gun, but these cases, as well as
the experience with the defeated enemies after World War II, suggests that it sometimes can be, something that supporters of the
administration were quick to point out (Kaplan and Kristol 2003, 98-99. Frum and Perle 2003, 163). Even Russett, a prominent
democratic-peace analyst, eventually, if rather reluctantly, concedes the possibility (2005, 398-400; see also Peceny and Pickering
2006). However, Bush and some of his supporters--particularly those in the neo-Conservative camp --foolishly, if consistently,
extrapolated to develop an even more extravagant mystique. Not only would the invasion crisply bring viable
democracy to Iraq, but success there would have a domino effect: democracy would eventually spread from its Baghdad
bastion to envelop the Middle East. This would not only bring (it needs hardly to be said) blissful peace in its wake (because, as we
know, democracies never fight each other), but the new democracies would also adopt all sorts of other policies as well including, in
particular, love of, or at least much diminished hostility toward, the United States and Israel (because, as we know, the democratic
process itself has a way of making people think nice thoughts). Vice President Dick Cheney attests, reports Woodward, to Bush's
"abiding faith that if people were given freedom and democracy, that would begin a transformation process in Iraq that in years ahead
would change the Middle East" (Woodward 2004, 428). Moreover, since force can establish democracy and since democracies rather
automatically embrace peaceful and generally nice thoughts, after Iraq was forced to enter the democratic (and hence peaceful and
nice-thinking) camp, military force would be deftly applied as necessary to speed up the domino-toppling process wherever necessary
in the area. Such extravagant, even romantic, visions fill war-advocating neo-Conservative fulminations. In their book, The War Over
Iraq, Lawrence Kaplan and William Kristol apply due reverence to the sanctified correlation--"democracies rarely, if ever, wage war
against one another"--and then extrapolate fancifully to conclude that "The more democratic the world becomes, the more likely it is
to be congenial to America" (2003, 104-5). And war architect Paul Wolfowitz also seems to have believed that the war would become
an essential stage on the march toward freedom and democracy (Woodward 2004, 428). In a 2004 article proposing what he calls
"democratic realism," Charles Krauthammer urges taking "the risky but imperative course of trying to reorder the Arab world," with a
"targeted, focused" effort that would (however) be "limited" to "that Islamic crescent stretching from North Africa to Afghanistan"
(2004 23, 17). And in a speech in late 2006, he continued to champion what he calls "the only plausible answer," an ambitious
undertaking that involves "changing the culture of that area, no matter how slow and how difficult the process. It starts in Iraq and
Lebanon, and must be allowed to proceed." Any other policy, he has divined, "would ultimately bring ruin not only on the U.S. but on
the very idea of freedom." And Kaplan and Kristol stress that "The mission begins in Baghdad, but does not end there....War in Iraq
represents but the first installment...Duly armed, the United States can act to secure its safety and to advance the cause of liberty--in
Baghdad and beyond" (2003, 124-25). With that, laments Russett, democracy and democratic peace theory became "Bushwhacked"
(2005). Democratic processes of pressure and policy promotion were deftly used by a dedicated group to wage costly war to establish
both peace and congenial policy in the otherwise intractable Middle East. It could be argued, then, that the little statesmen of the Bush
administration had the courage of the mystical convictions of the democracy and democratic peace philosophers and divines.
However, although Bush's simple faith in democracy may perhaps have its endearing side, how deeply that passion is (or was) really
shared by his neo-Conservative allies could be questioned. That is, did they really believe that the United States which, as
Francis Fukuyama notes, "cannot eliminate poverty or raise test scores in Washington, DC," could "bring democracy
to a part of the world that has stubbornly resisted it and is virulently anti-American to boot" (2004, 60)? nonIsraeli Middle East is, like Krauthammer's comparable vision, so fantastic as to border on the deranged.) Indeed, after one looks
beneath the boilerplate about democracy and the democratic peace, what seems to be principally motivating at
least some of these people is a strong desire for the United States to use military methods to make the Middle

East finally and once and for all safe for Israel (Drew 2003, 22; Fukuyama 2004; Roy 2003). All of them are devoted
supporters of Israel, and they seem to display far less interest in advocating the application of military force to deal with unsavory
dictatorial regimes in other parts of the world that do not seem to threaten Israel--such as Burma, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Haiti, or Cuba.
As John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt point out in their discussion of what they call "The Israel Lobby" (2006), such policy
advocacy is entirely appropriate and fully democratic: "There is nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies
attempting to sway US policy" (although they also note that Jewish Americans generally actually were less likely to support the war
than was the rest of the population). Democracy, as noted earlier, is centrally characterized by the contestings of
isolated, self-serving, and often tiny special interest groups and their political and bureaucratic allies . What
happened with Iraq policy was democracy in full flower. It does not follow, of course, that policies so
generated are necessarily wise, and Mearsheimer and Walt consider that the results of much of the Lobby's efforts--certainly in
this case--have been detrimental to American (and even Israeli) national interest, although their contentions that the Lobby was
"critical" or "a key factor" in the decision to go to war or that that decision would "have been far less likely" without the Lobby's
efforts would need more careful analysis. It is also their view that the Lobby has too much influence over U.S foreign policy--a
conclusion, as it happens, that is shared by 68 percent of over 1000 international relations scholars who responded to a 2006 survey.15
However that may be, it could certainly be maintained that, as an Israeli scholar puts it, the United States by its action eliminated what
Israel considered at the time to be a most "threatening neighbor" (Baram 2007). Following this line of thinking, then, the Israel
Lobby and its allies skillfully and legitimately used democracy to Bushwhack the democracy and democratic peace
mystiques as part of its effort to nudge, urge, or impel the United States into a war that, as it happens, has proven to be
its greatest foreign debacle in its history after Vietnam. It should be noted, however, that, although Bush and Cheney and at
least some of the neocons may actually have believed their pre-war fantasies about the blessings that imposed
democracy would in turn impose on the Middle East, the arguments they proffered for going to war stressed
national security issues, not democracy ones--the notion that Saddam's Iraq was a threat to the United States because of its
development, or potential development, of weapons of mass destruction and of its connections to terrorist groups out to get the United
States (Roy 2003). The democracy argument rose in significance, notes Russett, only after those security arguments
for going to war proved to be empty (2005, 396). As Fukuyama has crisply put it, a prewar request to spend "several hundred
billion dollars and several thousand American lives in order to bring democracy to...Iraq" would "have been laughed out of court"
(2005). Moreover, when given a list of foreign policy goals, the American public has rather consistently ranked the promotion of
democracy lower--often much lower--than such goals as combating international terrorism, protecting American jobs, preventing the
spread of nuclear weapons, strengthening the United Nations, and protecting American businesses abroad (see Figure 1).

Link -- Economy
Attempting to save the global economy from disaster is a
liberal order-building method of security
Mark Neocleous, Professor of Critique of Political Economy, Brunel University, 08 (Critique of Security,
McGill-Queens University, pp. 94-97, Published 2008)
But 'social security' was clearly an inadequate term for this, associated as it now was with 'soft' domestic policy issues such as old-age
insurance. 'Collective security' would not do, associated as it was with the dull internationalism of Wilson on the one hand and still
very much connected to the institutions of social security on the other." Only one term would do: national security. This

not to imply that 'national security' was simply adopted and adapted from 'social security'. Rather, what we
are dealing with here is another ideological circuit, this time between 'national security' and 'social security' ,
in which the policies 'insuring' the security of the population are a means of securing the

body politic , and vice versa;" a circuit in which, to paraphrase David Peace in the epigraph to this chapter, one can
have one's teeth kicked out in the name of national security and put back in through social security. Social security and national
security were woven together: the social and the national were the warp and the weft of the security fabric. The warp and the
welt, that is, of a broader vision of economic security. Robert Pollard has suggested that 'the concept of "economic

security'- the idea that American interests would be best sewed by an open and integrated economic system,
as opposed to a large peacetime military establishment - was firmly established during the wartime period'.
71 In fact, the concept of 'economic security' became a concept of international politics in this period, but the concept itself had a
longer history as the underlying idea behind social security in the 1930s, as we have seen. Economic security, in this sense,

provides the important link between social and national security, becoming liberalism's

strategic weapon of choice and the main policy instrument from 1945. As one State Department memo
of February 1944 put it, 'the development of sound international economic relations is closely related to the problem of security. But it
would also continue to be used to think about the political administration of internal order. Hence Roosevelt's comment that 'we must
plan for, and help to bring about, an expanded economy which will result in more security [and so that the conditions of 1932 and the
beginning of 1933 won't come back again'.' On security grounds, inside and outside were constantly folding into one
another, the domestic and the foreign never quite On the fabrication of economic order properly distinguishable. The
reason why lay in the kind of economic order to be secured: both domestically and internationally, 'economic security' is coda for
capitalist order.
Giving a lecture at Harvard University on 5 June 1947, Secretary of State George C.
Marshall recalled the disruption to the European economy during the war and Europe's continuing inability to feed itself, and
suggested that if the US did not help there would be serious economic, social and political deterioration which would in turn have a
knock-on effect on US capital. The outcome was a joint plan submitted to the US from European states at the end
of August, after much wrangling with the Soviet Union, requesting $28 billion over a four-year period (the
figure was reduced when finally agreed by Congress). The European Recovery Program (ERE known as the Marshall Plan) which
emerged has gone down as an economic panacea, 'saving' Europe from economic disaster. But as the first of
many such 'Plans', all the way down to the recent 'reconstruction' of Iraq, it does not take much to read the
original Marshall Plan through the lens of security and liberal order-building.
Alan Milward has suggested that

the conventional reading of the Marshall Plan and US aid tends to accept the picture of post-war

Europe on the verge of collapse and with serious social and economic discontent, such that it needed
to be rescued by US aid. In fact, excluding Germany, no country was actually on the verge of collapse.
There were no bank crashes, very few bankruptcies and the evidence of a slow down in industrial
production is unconvincing. There is also little evidence of grave distress or a general deterioration in the standard of living. By
late-1946 production had roughly equalled pre-war levels in all countries except Germany. And yet Marshall Aid came about. Milward
argues that the Marshall Plan was designed not to increase the rate of recovery in European countries or to

prevent European economies from deteriorating, but to sustain ambitious, new, expansionary economic and
social policies in Western European countries which were in fact already in full-bloom conditions. In other
words, the Marshall Plan was predominantly designed for political objectives - hence conceived and rushed through by the
Department of State itself."
Milward's figures are compelling, and complicate the conventional picture of the Marshall Plan as
simply a form of economic aid. But to distinguish reasons that are 'economic' reasons from reasons that are
'political' misses the extent to which, in terms of security, the economic and the political are entwined. This is
why the Marshall Plan is so inextricably linked to the Truman Doctrine's offer of military aid and intervention beyond us borders, a
new global commitment at the heart of which was the possibility of intervention in the affairs of other countries. As Joyce and Gabriel
Kolko have argued the important dimension of the Truman Doctrine is revealed in the various drafts of Truman's speech before it was

finally delivered on 12 March, and the private memos of the period. Members of the cabinet and other top officials understood very
clearly that the united States was now defining a strategy and budget appropriate to its new global commitments, and that a far greater
involvement in other countries was now pending especially on the economic level. Hence the plethora of references to 'a

world-wide trend away from the system of free enterprise's which the state Department's speech-writers
thought a 'grave threat' to American interests. Truman's actual speech to Congress is therefore more interesting for
what it implied than what it stated explicitly. And what it implied was the politics behind the Marshall Plan: economic security
as a means of maintaining political order against the threat of communism. The point then, is not just that
the Marshall Plan was 'political' how could any attempt to reshape global capital be anything but political ? It
is fairly clear that the Marshall Plan was multidimensional, and to distinguish reasons that are 'economic' reasons from reasons that are
'political' misses the extent to which the economic, political and military are entwined The point is that it was very much a project
driven by the ideology of security. The referent object of 'security here is 'economic order'. The government and
the emerging national security bureaucracy saw the communist threat as economic rather than military. As
Latham notes, at first glance the idea of military security within a broad context of economic containment merely appears to be one
more dimension of strength within the liberal order. But in another respect the project of economic security might itself be viewed as
the very force that made military security appear to be necessary. In this sense, the priority given to economic security

was the driving force behind the us commitment to underwrite milita ry security
for Western Europe." The protection and expansion of capital came to be seen as the path to security, and
vice versa. This created the grounds for a re-ordering of global capital involving a constellation of class and corporate forces as well
as state power, undertaken in the guise of national security. NSC-68, the most significant national security document to emerge in this
period, stated that the 'overall policy at the present time may be described as one designed to foster a world environment in which the
American system can survive and flourish'." In this sense we can also read the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) of 1947, the Brussels Pact of March 1948 and the nascent movement towards 'European
Union' as part and parcel of the security project being mapped out." The key institutions of 'international order' in this period invoked
a particular vision of order with a view to reshaping global capital as a means of bringing 'security' political, social and economic from the communist threat.

Framing the economy in terms of security discourse leads states to implement protectionist or
unreliable policies, destroying the economic strength they attempt to preserve
Ronnie

Lipschutz

, Director Politics PhD Program, UC Santa Cruz,

1998

. On Security p.

11-12

The ways in which the framing of threats is influenced by a changing global economy is seen nowhere
more clearly than in recent debates over competitiveness and "economic security." What does it mean to be
competitive? Is a national industrial policy consistent with global economic liberalization? How is the security component of this issue
socially constructed? Beverly Crawford (Chapter 6: "Hawks, Doves, but no Owls: The New Security Dilemma Under International
Economic Interdependence") shows how strategic economic interdependence--a consequence of the growing liberalization
of the global economic system, the increasing availability of advanced technologies through commercial markets, and the everincreasing velocity of the product cycle--undermines the ability of states to control those technologies that, it is often
argued, are critical to economic strength and military might. Not only can others acquire these technologies,
they might also seek to restrict access to them. Both contingencies could be threatening. (Note, however, that by
and large the only such restrictions that have been imposed in recent years have all come at the behest of the United States, which is
most fearful of its supposed vulnerability in this respect.) What, then, is the solution to this "new security dilemma," as
Crawford has stylized it? According to Crawford, state decisionmakers can respond in three ways. First, they can try
to restore state autonomy through self-reliance although, in doing so, they are likely to undermine state
strength via reduced competitiveness. Second, they can try to restrict technology transfer to potential
enemies, or the trading partners of potential enemies, although this begins to include pretty much everybody. It also

threatens to limit the market shares of those corporations that produce the most innovative technologies.
Finally, they can enter into co-production projects or encourage strategic alliances among firms. The former
approach may slow down technological development; the latter places control in the hands of actors who are
driven by market, and not military, forces. They are, therefore, potentially unreliable. All else being equal, in all
three cases, the state appears to be a net loser where its security is concerned. But this does not prevent the state
from trying to gain.

US economic liberalism is part of the security insecurity paradox it undercuts other countries
sense of security, causing a self-fulfilling prophecy
Ronnie D.
16)

Lipschutz 95

, Assistant Professor of Politics @ UCSC, 1995. On

Security (p. 15-

Consider, then, the

consequences of the intersection of security policy and economics during and after the
Cold War. In order to establish a secure global system, the United States advocated, and put into place, a
global system of economic liberalism. It then underwrote, with dollars and other aid, the growth of this
system.43 One consequence, of this project was the globalizations of a particular mode of production and accumulation, which relied
on the re-creation, throughout the world, of the domestic political and economic environment and preferences of the United States.

That such a project cannot be accomplished under conditions of really-existing capitalism is not important:
the idea was that economic and political liberalism would reproduce the American self around the world.44
This would make the world safe and secure for the Untited States inasmuch as it would all be the self, so to
speak. The joker in this particular deck was that efforts to reproduce some version of American society abroad, in order to
make the world more secure for Americans, came to threaten the cultures and societies of the countries
being transformed, making their citizens less secure. The process thereby transformed them into the very
enemies we feared so greatly. In Iran, for example, the Shahs efforts to create a Westernized society engendered so much
domestic resistance that not only did it bring down his empire but so, for a time, seemed to pose a mortal threat to the American
Empire based on Persian Gulf oil. Islamic fundamentalism, now characterized by some as the enemy that will replace Communism,
seems to be U.S. policymakers worst nightmares made real,45 although without the United States to interfere in the Middle East and
elsewhere, the Islamic movements might never have acquired the domestic power they now have in those countries and regions that
seem so essential to American security. The ways in which the framing of threats is influenced by a changing global economy is
seen nowhere more clearly than in recent debates over competitiveness and economic security. What does it mean to be
competitive? Is a national industrial policy consistent with global economic liberalization? How is the security compenent of this issue
socially constructed? Beverly Crawford (Chapter 6: Hawks, Doves, but no Owls: The New Security Dilemma Under International
Economic Interdependence) shows how strategic economic interdependence a consequence of the growing liberalization of the
global economic sytem, the increasing availability of advanced technologies through commercial markets, and the ever-increasing
velocity of the product cycle undermines the ability.

Link -- Economy Poverty

Poverty securitization rhetoric encourages imperialism, enforces an us vs. them dichotomy
mindset & turns poverty because it focuses on dangerous poverty and ignores the most needy.

Smith 2007

(Katie is an author for E-International Relations a web site for international relations

studies. She attended Brown University and got a BA in International Relations. Assess the strengths and weaknesses of securitising
poverty December 22nd 2007. http://www.e-ir.info/?p=178, MT)
The idea of poverty as a security issue has been fairly commonplace since the end of the Cold War. In 1993,
the United Nations sought to redefine security with individuals as the referent object; a framework in which poverty is one of the
principal security threats as it significantly reduces quality and quantity of life. At the same time, poverty was gaining importance in
the security agendas of states. This is based on the idea that poverty is a threat to the rich as well as the poor and
that an unequal world is an unstable one; a view that has become very powerful in the years since September, 2001. This
essay will address the implications of this second type of securitisation world poverty as a threat to the west. I will use the
Copenhagen School approach to show how poverty is being securitised by western leaders in the context of the War on Terror. I will
then go on to demonstrate that, although the issue of poverty is likely to receive more attention as a result, the
securitisation of poverty may also cause many problems. Firstly, aid may be redirected from the nonthreatening poor (often those most in need) to those perceived to be dangerous. Secondly, the involvement of the
securitising states in the creation of poverty can be hidden as the rich are presented as potential victims. Finally, securitisation

necessarily presents the interests of the securitiser as more important than those who will be affected by its
actions and therefore encourages an imperialistic approach. Although the securitisation of poverty is directing some
much needed attention to the problem, a humanitarian approach is a much more appropriate when considering the needs of the poor.
The securitisation of poverty The theory of securitisation is the method by which the Copenhagen School approaches security
studies; it is the process by which an issue comes to be perceived as a security threat by a group. An issue is securitised by the

speech act; the point at which the relevant authorities are persuaded that the issue is a security threat and
warrants emergency action (Buzan, Waever and de Wilde, 1998: 24-5). Thus the Copenhagen School deals with subjective
security the perception of threat. Abrahamsen makes an addition to this idea to include partial securitisations. She suggests that,
instead of security threats being only existential threats, security issues can be seen to move on a continuum from normalcy to
worrisome/troublesome to risk and to existential threatand conversely, from threat to risk and back to normalcy. (2005: 5) This is a
scale which can include poverty as a security issue. While poverty has not been allocated a place near the existential
threat end of the spectrum by any Western government, recent rhetoric of world leaders (the speech act) has created a partial
securitisation of poverty. Poverty is increasingly mentioned by world leaders in the context of the War on Terror, as a
constituent part of this dominant security framework. (Buzan, 2006) In February 2002, US Secretary of State Colin
Powell stated, I fully believe that the root cause of terrorism does come from situations where there is poverty, where there is
ignorance, where people see no hope in their lives. (in Berrebi, 2003: 5) Similarly, Tony Blair claimed in November, 2001, The

dragons teeth [with regards to terrorism and terrorists] are planted in the fertile soil of . . . poverty and
deprivation. (in Berrebi, 2003: 6). Furthermore, the World Trade Centre bombings have shown that No-one in this world can feel
comfortable, or safe, while so many are suffering and deprived (Kofi Annan, BBC, 22/03/02) and that It is no longer necessary to
prove a direct link between a troubled faraway country and the order of our own societies. (Jack Straw, in Abrahamsen, 2005: 65)
The policy response to these ideas has been mixed. Between September 2001 and July 2002, US aid to countries bordering
Afghanistan rose dramatically, including a 278% increase for Pakistan. (Looney, 2002) President Bush also promised a 50% increase
in all US aid. (BBC, 22/03/02) However, in reality poverty relief has not topped many agendas; the EU, OEDC, Denmark, Australia,
Japan and others have rewritten the rules of aid to allow counter-terrorism measures to become an acceptable target of development
assistance, therefore militarizing much humanitarian aid. (Christian Aid, 2004) With or without an increase in aid for poverty under
the security agenda, I will argue below that this securitisation is not a positive move from a humanitarian perspective. The NonThreatening Poor Although poverty and terrorism are presented as clearly linked in the quotes above, this is
not generally accepted by terrorism experts. Berrebi is one of many who argue that there is, little reason to believe that
materialistic or educational improvements would help reduce terrorism. If anything, the correlation I find is that those with higher
education and higher living standards are more likely to participate in terrorist activity. (2003: 2) Pipes argues that, suicide

bombers who hurl themselves against foreign enemies offer their lives not to protest financial deprivation
but to change the world. (2002) Terrorism is therefore best understood as a response to political conditions and long-standing
feelings (either perceived or real) of indignity and frustration that have little to do with economics. (Krueger and Maleckova, 2002: 1)
A vast body of literature, some carried out by government bodies themselves, points to the perpetrators of terrorism as predominantly
educated young men who perceive injustice and who feel that they have no option other than terrorism to address the problem.
Importantly, it is widely recognised that terrorism is a product of middle income people in middle income countries. (Berrebi, 2003: 3)
Poverty may still be an important factor however, because other peoples poverty may be a motivation for terrorism. One Hamas
leader identified the poverty-stricken outskirts of Algiers or the refugee camps in Gaza as the principal motivations for Islamic and,
more specifically, Palestinian terrorism. (in Pipes, 2002) What this suggests is that it is the combination of political grievance and
poverty which may become dangerous by inspiring terrorism, not poverty per se. So which types of poverty are dangerous to those
afraid of terrorism? Firstly, the poverty linked to clear political injustice. This is the poverty found alongside prosperity where
educated, mostly middle class people engage in terrorism on behalf of politically and economically marginalised communities. And
secondly, the poverty that angers young men the most likely group to participate in terrorist activities. This is the poverty linked to

masculine humiliation. While both these types of poverty clearly need to be addressed, looking at poverty from a security
point of view can overlook much poverty that is not seen to be threatening. For example, very poor countries
tend to be less susceptible to terrorism; people must focus on survival and have little time for politics. (Lazarsfeld and Zeisal
in Gurr, 1970: 34) Under a security agenda, the poverty of these people would not need to be addressed. The UK
Department for International Development notes that a disproportionately large amount of the worlds bilateral aid already goes to the
middle income countries where terrorism is most likely. (2005: 15) Further, in 2003, the UK gave a disproportionate amount

of its allocated aid for poor communities in middle income countries to Iraq, showing a further
politicisation of aid. (Christian Aid, 2004: 2) Similarly, the poverty of women will not be seen as important through the security
lens since it is men that are the primary terrorist threat. In contrast both very poor countries and women are particular
targets of non-securitised development aid. (UN, 1997) Thus a securitisation of poverty could easily overlook the nondangerous poor on behalf of the dangerous The finite pool of resources allocated to poverty reduction is unlikely to ever be able to
address all forms of poverty. More money is, and may further be allocated to those NGOs and governments that stress the security
aspect of their development work than those who work for purely humanitarian concerns. (Christian Aid, 2004: 2-3) Duffield argues
that escaping the logic of this security regime is already very difficult, emphasising the increasingly overt and accepted politicisation
of aid. (2001: 16) Aid, in other words, is being co-opted to serve in the global War on Terror . (Christian Aid, 2004:
1) What may be at stake is the allocation of resources away from the most needy on the behalf of those perceived to be most
dangerous. Externalising poverty Some theorists suggest that securitised issues always carry with them a logic of us
against them. A threat to our existence is something that we must be protected from , those threatening us are
external others whose aims are incompatible with ours. This is clear in the rhetoric surrounding terrorism and,

increasingly, in the securitisation of poverty. This can have serious implications for the attitude that is taken
towards these issues; in a study of the securitisation of the African continent, Abrahamsen identifies an important process of
shifting attitudes from a cooperative humanitarian approach to an us against them approach which
accompanies securitisations; otherness is becoming something to fear and policies are increasingly driven by this. (2005: 60,
65 The us against them logic that is so central to ideas of security involves a necessary privileging of our interests over theirs.
This is accepted logic in relation to perceived existential threats but becomes more problematic when attached to partial securitisations
and non-traditional threats. That our security is considered to be important when dealing with poverty is already clear; the UKs
foreign office minister for Africa argued that there are sound practical reasons why we cannot afford to ignore the state of Africa. The
most immediate of these is terrorism. (in Abrahamsen, 2005: 67) What are not clear are the extents that western governments are
prepared to go to ensure this security. Recent ideas of global policing and voluntary imperialism that have emerged from the British
government suggest that, in theory at least, the UK is prepared to take extensive measures. (Cooper, 2002) The combination of
privileging our interests over the interests of impoverished others and a potential voluntary imperialism is perhaps the central
problem of securitising poverty. If western society is to be the referent object in addressing poverty, the needs and wishes of those on
the receiving end are necessarily subordinate to the requirements of the west. The further the west is prepared to intervene

in poor countries to protect its own security with little consideration for the people on the receiving end, the
further the choice, democracy and diversity of those people will be eroded. While poverty and related problems
need to be addressed, it is important, for the sake of the people receiving aid, that problems are addressed on their terms and not on the
terms of others. Conclusion The securitisation of poverty is a trend that the western world has seen in the years since the World Trade
Centre bombings. That poverty is a threat to us is increasingly emphasised in political rhetoric particularly in relation to terrorism, of
which it is seen to be a cause. More detailed examinations of the subject see a subjective understanding of inequality as the root cause
of terrorism and so, while poverty may be a part of this, necessarily some types of poverty (those linked to conflict and political
discrimination on the national or global scale) are more likely to be a threat than others. The securitisation of poverty can
lead to various problems. Firstly, aid may be redirected from the non-threatening poor (often those most in need)
to those perceived to be a threat. Secondly, the involvement of the securitising states in the creation of poverty can

be hidden as the threat is increasingly presented in external terms. Finally, securitisation necessarily
presents the interests of the securitiser as more important than those who will be affected by its actions .
Recent ideas of voluntary imperialism, if carried through, could potentially be very damaging to those under their control.The
securitisation of poverty is a trend that we can see in the political rhetoric of today but it is as yet only a partial securitisation. What we
can see is possibly the beginnings of a new, securitised approach to poverty or possibly just a passing phase. The UK Department for
International Development remains careful to distance itself from UK security issues as do many other organisations giving bilateral
aid. However, securitisation can be seen as a sliding scale; the problems addressed in this essay are emerging issues that may or may
not become very problematic. Some, such as the distribution of aid, are already more pronounced than others. In light of these
potential problems and despite the increased attention that poverty can get as a result of being presented as a security threat,
humanitarian approaches to the issue are preferable.

That outweighs

Gilligan 96 [James, Professor of Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School, Director of the Center
for the Study of Violence, and a member of the Academic Advisory Council of the National
Campaign Against Youth Violence, Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and its Causes, p. 191-196]

The deadliest form of violence is poverty. You cannot work for one day with the violent people
who fill our prisons and mental hospitals for the criminally insane without being forcible and

constantly reminded of the extreme poverty and discrimination that characterizes their lives.
Hearing about their lives, and about their families and friends, you are forced to recognize the truth
in Gandhis observation that the deadliest form of violence is poverty. Not a day goes by without
realizing that trying to understand them and their violent behavior in purely individual terms is
impossible and wrong-headed. Any theory of violence, especially a psychological theory, that
evolves from the experience of men in maximum security prisons and hospitals for the criminally
insane must begin with the recognition that these institutions are only microcosms. They are not
where the major violence in our society takes place, and the perpetrators who fill them are far from
being the main causes of most violent deaths. Any approach to a theory of violence needs to
begin with a look at the structural violence in this country. Focusing merely on those relatively
few men who commit what we define as murder could distract us from examining and learning from
those structural causes of violent death that are for more significant from a numerical or public
health, or human, standpoint. By structural violence I mean the increased rates of death, and
disability suffered by those who occupy the bottom rungs of society, as contrasted with the relatively
low death rates experienced by those who are above them. Those excess deaths (or at least a
demonstrably large proportion of them) are a function of class structure; and that structure itself is a
product of societys collective human choices, concerning how to distribute the collective wealth of
the society. These are not acts of God. I am contrasting structural with behavioral violence, by
which I mean the non-natural deaths and injuries that are caused by specific behavioral actions of
individuals against individuals, such as the deaths we attribute to homicide, suicide, soldiers in
warfare, capital punishment, and so on. Structural violence differs from behavior violence in at least
three major respects. *The lethal effects of structural violence operate continuously, rather
than sporadically, whereas murders, suicides, executions, wars, and other forms of behavior
violence occur one at a time. *Structural violence operates more or less independently of
individual acts; independent of individuals and groups (politicians, political parties, voters) whose
decisions may nevertheless have lethal consequences for others. *Structural violence is normally
invisible, because it may appear to have had other (natural or violent) causes. [CONTINUED] The
finding that structural violence causes far more deaths than behavioral violence does is not limited
to this country. Kohler and Alcock attempted to arrive at the number of excess deaths caused by
socioeconomic inequities on a worldwide basis. Sweden was their model of the nation that had
come closest to eliminating structural violence. It had the least inequity in income and living
standards, and the lowest discrepancies in death rates and life expectancy; and the highest overall
life expectancy of the world. When they compared the life expectancies of those living in the other
socioeconomic systems against Sweden, they found that 18 million deaths a year could be attributed
to the structural violence to which the citizens of all the other nations were being subjected.

During the past decade, the discrepancies between the rich and poor nations have increased
dramatically and alarmingly. The 14 to 19 million deaths a year caused by structural
violence compare with about 100,000 deaths per year from armed conflict. Comparing this
frequency of deaths from structural violence to the frequency of those caused by major
military and political violence, such as World War II (an estimated 49 million military and
civilian deaths, including those by genocide or about eight million per year, 1939-1945), the
Indonesian massacre of 1965-66 (perhaps 575,000 deaths), the Vietnam war (possibly two million,
1954-1973), and even a hypothetical nuclear exchange between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. (232
million), it was clear that even war cannot begin to compare with structural violence , which
continues year after year. In other words, every fifteen years, on the average, as many people die
because of relative poverty as would be killed by the Nazi genocide of the Jews over a six-year
period. This is, in effect, the equivalent of an ongoing, unending, in fact accelerating,

thermonuclear war, or genocide, perpetrated on the weak and poor every year of every
decade, throughout the world. Structural violence is also the main cause of behavioral
violence on a socially and epidemiologically significant scale (from homicide and suicide to
war and genocide). The question as to which of the two forms of violence structural or behavioral
is more important, dangerous, or lethal is moot, for they are inextricably related to eachother, as
cause to effect.

Link -- Economy Economic Analysis Fails

Economic analysis is neither objective nor inevitable positivist economic lenses recreate violence

Tooze 5
Professor of
International Relations
Roger, Visiting

at City University The Missing : Security,

Critical International Political Economy, and Community Book: Critical Security Studies and World Politics; Edited by Ken Booth
(pg. 153-155)
Turning to the problem of the conceptualization of economics, we find even greater resistance to an integrated political

economy than in traditional political analysis and hence great resistance to an integrated theory and practice
of security. This is because a specific notion of economics has become hegemonic, especially since the
1970s. Among critical theorists, J Richard Ashley has done most to identify the problematics of knowledge
and the consequences of economism for real political agency.81 For Ashley the move from classical
political realism to IR's neorealism was the formal manifestation of a powerful and relentless economism,
expressed under and through the same conditions that in orthodox IPE gave rise to the concern with
economic security. In Ashley's words: The "given" order, including the separation of political and economic spheres, was no
longer self-evident. In matters of resource vulnerability and petroleum embargoes, monetary crises and worldwide recession,
economic processes and relations no longer seemed independent of political interventions. . . . Suddenly, the ever-so-commonsensical
realist depiction of international politics in terms of an autonomous power-political logic lost its magic.82 The resulting

theorization was the statism of neorealism, embedded within which is a logic of economy and technical
rationality. Ashley's work helps us to understand the deep relationship between politics and economics laid down within and
prefigured by a statist, orthodox IPE framed by neorealism. This is an important critical uncovering of hidden theoretical assumptions.
Yet as important as Ashley's insights are, perhaps they do not go far enough. My sense is that the fundamental basis of this

economism is already laid down, not in the theories of IR and IPE but in the construction of a hegemony of
legitimate knowledge driven by the emergence of economics as a sphere of human activity and the market
as its institutionalized form within the overall development of capitalism. The emergence of a realm of
human economic activity that required and requires a special knowledge of economics in order for it to be
made sense of within society is the province of capitalism.83 The rise and consolidation of capitalism is
one, moreover, with which the fields of IR and security studies had and have a very ambivalent and
troublesome relationship, particularly given the primacy of politics that is embedded in both fields. To
assert the primacy of politics, as we saw in the discussion of politics and economics in the last section,
presupposes not only the ontological separation of the interstate political system and "a highly integrated,
incompletely regulated, rapidly growing . . . world economy"84 but also the prior separation of politics and
economics as distinct spheres of activity. This separation is a necessary and integral part of the process of
the construction of self-regulating markets in the dynamics of capitalist growth.85 As Karl Polanyi has pointed
out, A self-regulating market demands nothing less than the institutional separation of society into an economic and political sphere.
Such a dichotomy is, in effect, merely the restatement, from the point of view of society as a whole, of the existence of a selfregulating market. It might be argued that the separateness of the two spheres obtains in every type of society at all times. Such an
inference would be based on a fallacy.86 Polanyi then shows how the existence of a separate economic system is a

specific and historically distinct creation of nineteenth-century English capitalism and indeed is a political
creation, "the outcome of a conscious and often violent intervention on the part of governments which
imposed the market organization on society for noneconomic ends."81 The construction of the market and
its corollary, the separation of economics from politics, is thus political. If the construction of an economics
separate from politics and society is itself a political act and remains a political act in that economic
structures and processes serve particular interests, it is highly problematic when, as Polanyi calls it, the
economic sphere comes to be in turn constructed and justified as neutral, as nonpolitical, and as natural,
above politics. The historical processes by and through which the construction of such a depoliticized political economy has
occurred are complex. They directly to the professionalization of knowledge,88 to the political triumph of a specific and partial view
of human rationality at the beginning of the twentieth century,89 and to the ability of those with wealth to wield the power to
reproduce and enhance those structures that guaranteed and enhanced that wealth. Suffice to say that the thirty-year hegemony

of neoliberalism in the world political economy has constructed the economic sphere in such a way as to
claim that a neoliberal economic way of organizing society within its scale of values is natural, inevitable,
neutral, and rational, with no indication of the inherently and structurally political nature of economics
itself. In other words, the claim that economics is nonpolitical is a political claim.

Focus on national economic security through a positivist lens fails cant account for non-state
actors and puts issues of major concern to all in purely economic terms

Tooze 5
Professor of
International Relations
Roger, Visiting

at City University The Missing : Security,

Critical International Political Economy, and Community Book: Critical Security Studies and World Politics; Edited by Ken Booth
(pg. 150-151)

To restate the basis of the argument: it is not that national economic security, however defined, does not
matter; it clearly does, but it is that a sole focus on national economic security, theorized only through
positivist methodology and where the economic is defined in the way it is by orthodox IPE, is too narrow,
claims too much, and is increasingly partial and inappropriate. An exemplar of this weakness is the otherwise excellent
analysis of economic security and the problem of cooperation in post-Cold War Europe by Jonathan Sperling and Emile Kirchner.68
This is an important article, both for security studies and IPE, as it argues for a redefinition of security in that "the European security
system has two mutually constitutive elements, the political-military and the economic."69 This achieves (in my view) the necessary
elevation of economic matters above the secondary level afforded by most analyses of security and makes the between security and
political economy equally important; this is all too often ignored by mainstream IPE outside the specific focus on economic security.
The article offers a powerful argument showing the mutually constitutive structures and processes that together may bring about
comprehensive security in Europe. Yet despite discussing societal security in a spatial political economy that is more integrated than
within many states, and despite the extensive discussion of European institutions, this argument still relies on a statist ontology.
This limits its epistemological and political constructivism to the activities of states and state-based

institutions. Here, in effect, politics is defined as what is done by governments, agents of states, or those
involved in formal political structures and roles. But are agents of European states the only institutions
relevant to comprehensive security? Do the large corporations and banks (e.g., Shell, Volkswagen, Credit
Suisse) or mass social movements (e.g. antiglobalization, antinuclear, environmentalist) have no relevant
power in Europe? Does the European economy exist in isolation of the world market economy? One would
think so from this analysis. In holding this position, Sperling and Kirchner maintain a particular
conceptualization of both politics and economics but inadvertently contradict their own assertions through
the assumed definitions and predefined relationships that they (and all orthodox IPE) import into their
political economy from the discipline of economics. Quite simply, the approach of Sperling and Kirchner
shares with orthodox IPE the characteristic of importing into political economy a particular theorization of
economics that has major consequences for our ability to understand political economy. Economics is
analyzed as a purely rational activity to which a technical solution is possible, that is, economics is
accepted as defined by and for economists. The analysis of the guns-versus-butter issue by Sperling and Kirchner, for
example, employs a resolutely rationalistic and economistic argument, which seems to specify the problem in order to make it
amenable to rational analysis. I would argue that the move to buttersocial welfareis the product of much more complex forces
than they identify.70 Moreover, note the argument that "until transition (to stability) is completed and consolidated, issues of political
economy must be treated as elements of the new security order rather than as simple issues of welfare maximization ."1 Does the

achievement of stability really mean that issues of political economy are magically depoliticized and/or
stripped of their power content, to make them amenable to technical rational economic resolution? Can, for
example, the support for agriculture, which directly affects the price of food, be defined as a simple issue of
welfare maximization when it is clearly and necessarily a concern of the democratic polity? It can, but only
if one understands how simple issues of welfare maximization are treated in economics and if we accept the
argument of Sperling and Kirchner.

Link -- Economy AT Econ =/= Realism

The affirmatives notion of economic security based on the states is paired with and supports
traditional conceptions of IR

Tooze 5
Professor of
International Relations
Roger, Visiting

at City University The Missing : Security,

Critical International Political Economy, and Community Book: Critical Security Studies and World Politics; Edited by Ken Booth
(pg. 148-149)
Economic Security The consideration of the economic in the theory and practice of security, and security in the

theory and practice of political economy, has taken place on the basis of prevailing discourses in
economics, political science, political economy, and international political economy. As we have seen,
these discourses not only embody deep commitments to specific (orthodox) methodology, epistemology,
and ontology; they also construct both economics and politics, and the relationship between them, in very
particular ways. This seems to have led to the possibility of a twin track for investigations into security by political economy and
into economics by security. One track starts with politics (the traditional concerns of security) but with economic added on as a new
domain of threat to states. The other track starts with a (repoliticized) economics, leading to a whole literature on economic security,
vulnerability, and systemic risk (with particular reference to the global financial system). But the way that the economic is

then related to the political (and vice versa) seems to depend upon prior ideological commitments as to the
nature of the relationship between economics and politics, normally expressed in paradigmatic terms of perspectives or
contesting approaches. For instance, a liberal interpretation of economic security is conditioned by the prior
assumption of the between economic prosperity and war based on the assumed beneficial rationality of
markets. In this sense, economic security as a concept and as an issue has been clearly constructed as an
extension of statist, positivist IPE, which brings together the twin tracks by grafting the agenda of
economics onto the classic concerns of state security via neorealism. Of course, the tradition of mercantilist
thinking, or economic nationalism, as Robert Gilpin prefers to describe it, clearly locks economic security into physical
securitybut on, and only on, a state basis. In this tradition, power and wealth, and hence national security,
are inseparable and complementary, particularly in what are regarded as strategic industries, that is, those
industries whose healthy development is considered necessary for the maintenance of national military-political security.58
Notwithstanding the mercantilist imperative for both states and theorists, the post-1945 international economic structure

emerged as a U.S. hegemony that was articulated and developed on the public basis of a liberal trade and
investment order with a constituting, rationalizing, and legitimating ideology of liberal political economy .
Hence, for twenty years after IR and economics were theoretically ed in mainstream academic practice, it was only to the extent that a
strong, broad-based modem economy was regarded as necessary to maintain security. However, the early intimations of the failure of
U.S. policy to keep apart the Bretton Woods institutional twin-track system set up after World War IIseparating international politics
(as politics) and international economics (as technical management)manifested themselves in the problems of the dollar and U.S.
payments in the late 1960s. The unwillingness of the United States to tolerate a massive outflow of dollars forced a reconnection at the
policy level of politics and economics, and this led to an upswing of interest in the international politics of economic conflict. The
possibility of trade wars was mooted.59 But the real spur to the study of what became labeled "economic security" came with action
by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in 1973 and the resultant oil-supply threats and related price shocks for
the international economic system.60 The changing structure of the international political economy at that time, with the move to
floating exchange rates and the rediscovery by the West (and the South) of economic vulnerability, brought forth a large number of
studies on the issue and problems of economic security.61 The studies of economic security stemming from the crises

of the 1970s defined their focus principally in terms of the interests of the state. Equally significant, their
definition of economics prioritized issues of trade and trade relations and tended to ignore other potentially
significant elements. This meant that deep structures of international political economy finance,
production, and knowledge62and the changing international division of labor (and its implications) were
not seen as part of this conception of economic security. In effect, IPE and IR (including that branch
conceiving itself as security studies) meekly adopted the agenda of U.S. policy economists. After all, from
the perspective of this approach, what matters when all states have adopted the goal of long-term economic
growth are threats to the economic security of the state, and the territorial economy of the state, in terms of
the ability of the state to deliver on its claimed economic goals. Such is particularly the case when this
ability is made vulnerable by an apparent change in trade relationships or is made more sensitive to the
problems of deepening economic interdependence.

Link -- Competitiveness
Competitiveness discourse mobilizes populations for economic warfare. Its produced by threat
construction for big biznis rather than economic realityVote neg to reject competitiveness
discourse

Dr.

Gillian

Bristow,

Senior Lecturer in Economic Geography @ Cardiff University,

(Journal of

Economic Geography 5.3: 285-304, Everyones a winner)

This begs the question as to why a discourse with ostensibly confused, narrow and ill-defined content has
become so salient in regional economic development policy and practice as to constitute the only valid currency
of argument (Schoenberger, 1998, 12). Whilst alternative discourses based around co-operation can be
conceived (e.g. see Hines, 2000; Bunzl, 2001), they have as yet failed to make a significant impact on the
dominant view that a particular, quantifiable form of output-related regional competitiveness is inevitable, inexorable and
ultimately beneficial. The answer appears to lie within the policy process, which refers to all aspects involved in the
provision of policy direction for the work of the public sector. This therefore includes the ideas which inform policy

conception, the talk and work which goes into providing the formulation of policy directions, and all the
talk, work and collaboration which goes into translating these into practice (Yeatman, 1998; p. 9). A major
debate exists in the policy studies literature about the scope and limitations of reason, analysis and
intelligence in policy-makinga debate which has been re-ignited with the recent emphasis upon evidence-based policymaking (see Davies et al., 2000). Keynes is often cited as the main proponent of the importance of ideas in policy making, since he
argued that policy-making should be informed by knowledge, truth, reason and facts (Keynes, 1971, vol. xxi, 289). However,
Majone (1989) has significantly challenged the assumption that policy makers engage in a purely objective,
rational, technical assessment of policy alternatives. He has argued that in practice, policy makers use theory,

knowledge and evidence selectively to justify policy choices which are heavily based on value judgements .
It is thus persuasion (through rhetoric, argument, advocacy and their institutionalisation) that is the key to the policy
process, not the logical correctness or accuracy of theory or data. In other words, it is interests rather than ideas
that shape policy making in practice. Ultimately, the language of competitiveness is the language of the business
community. Thus, critical to understanding the power of the discourse is firstly, understanding the appeal and
significance of the discourse to business interests and, secondly, exploring their role in influencing the ideas
of regional and national policy elites. Part of the allure of the discourse of competitiveness for the business
community is its seeming comprehensibility. Business leaders feel that they already understand the basics of what
competitiveness means and thus it offers them the gain of apparent sophistication without the pain of grasping
something complex and new. Furthermore, competitive images are exciting and their accoutrements of
battles, wars and races have an intuitive appeal to businesses familiar with the cycle of growth, survival and sometimes
collapse (Krugman, 1996b). The climate of globalisation and the turn towards neo-liberal, capitalist forms of regulation has
empowered business interests and created a demand for new concepts and models of development which offer guidance on how
economies can innovate and prosper in the face of increasing competition for investment and resources. Global policy elites of
governmental and corporate institutions, who share the same neo-liberal consensus, have played a critical role in
promoting both the discourse of national and regional competitiveness, and of competitiveness policies which they
think are good for them (such as supportive institutions and funding for research and development agendas). In the EU, for example,
the European Round Table of Industrialists played a prominent role in ensuring that the Commission's 1993 White Paper placed the
pursuit of international competitiveness (and thus the support of business), on an equal footing with job creation and social cohesion
objectives (Lovering, 1998; Balanya et al., 2000). This discourse rapidly spread and competitiveness policies were transferred through
global policy networks as large quasi-governmental organisations such as the OECD and World Bank pushed the national and,
subsequently, the regional competitiveness agenda upon national governments (Peet, 2003). Part of the appeal of the regional
competitiveness discourse for policy-makers is that like the discourse of globalisation, it presents a relatively structured

set of ideas, often in the form of implicit and sedimented assumptions, upon which they can draw in
formulating strategy and, indeed, in legitimating strategy pursued for quite distinct ends (Hay and Rosamond,
2002). Thus, the discourse clearly dovetails with discussions about the appropriate level at which economic governance should be
exercised and fits in well with a growing trend towards the decentralised, bottom-up approaches to economic development policy
and a focus on the indigenous potential of regions. For example, in the UK:the Government believes that a successful regional and
sub-regional economic policy must be based on building the indigenous strengths in each locality, region and county. The best
mechanisms for achieving this are likely to be based in the regions themselves (HM Treasury, 2001a, vi). The devolution of powers
and responsibilities to regional institutions, whether democratic or more narrowly administrative, is given added tour de force when
accompanied by the arguments contained within the regional competitiveness discourse. There is clear political capital to be gained
from highlighting endogenous capacities to shape economic processes, not least because it helps generate the sense of regional identity
that motivates economic actors and institutions towards a common regional purpose (Rosamond, 2002). Furthermore, the regional
competitiveness discourse points to a clear set of agendas for policy action over which regional institutions have some potential for
leverageagendas such as the development of university-business relationships and strong innovation networks. This provides

policy-makers with the ability to point to the existence of seemingly secure paths to prosperity, as reinforced
by the successes of exemplar regions. In this way, the discourse of regional competitiveness helps to provide a way of
constituting regions as legitimate agents of economic governance. The language of regional
competitiveness also fits in very neatly with the ideological shift to the Third Way popularised most notably by
the New Labour government in the UK. This promotes the reconstruction of the state rather than its shrinkage (as
under neo-liberal market imperatives) or expansion (as under traditional socialist systems of mass state intervention). Significantly,
this philosophy sees state economic competencies as being restricted to the ability to intervene in line with perceived microeconomic
or supply-side imperatives rather than active macroeconomic, demand-side interventionan agenda that is thus clearly in tune with
the discourse around competitiveness. The attractiveness of the competitiveness discourse may also be partly a product

of the power of pseudo-scientific, mathematised nature of the economics discipline and the business
strategy literature from which it emanates. This creates an innate impartiality and technicality for the
market outcomes (such as competitiveness) it describes (Schoenberger, 1998). Public policy in developed countries
experiencing the marketisation of the state, is increasingly driven by managerialism which emphasises the improved
performance and efficiency of the state. This managerialism is founded upon economistic and rationalistic assumptions
which include an emphasis upon measuring performance in the context of a planning system driven by objectives and
targets (Sanderson, 2001). The result is an increasing requirement for people, places and organisations to be
accountable and for their performance and success to be measured and assessed. In this emerging evaluative state,
performance tends to be scrutinised through a variety of means, with particular emphasis placed upon output indicators. This
provides not only a means of lending legitimacy to the institutional environment , but also some sense of
exactitude and certainty, particularly for central governments who are thus able to retain some top-down,
mechanical sense that things are somehow under their control (Boyle, 2001). The evolutionary, survival of the
fittest basis of the regional competitiveness discourse clearly resonates with this evaluative culture. The
discourse of competitiveness strongly appeals to the stratum of policy makers and analysts who can use it to
justify what they are doing and/or to find out how well they are doing it relative to their rivals. This helps explain the
interest in trying to measure regional competitiveness and the development of composite indices and league tables. It also helps
explain why particular elements of the discourse have assumed particular significanceoutput indicators of firm performance are
much easier to compare and rank on a single axis than are indicators relating to institutional behaviour, for example. This in turn
points to a central paradox in measures of regional competitiveness. The key ingredients of firm competitiveness and
regional prosperity are increasingly perceived as lying with assets such as knowledge and information which are, by
definition, intangible or at least difficult to measure with any degree of accuracy. The obsession with performance
measurement and the tendency to reduce complex variables to one, easily digestible number brings a kind of blindness with
it as to what is really important (Boyle, 2001, 60)in this case, how to improve regional prosperity. Thus while a composite
index number of regional competitiveness will attract widespread attention in the media and amongst policy-makers and development
agencies, the difficulty presented by such a measure is in knowing what exactly needs to be targeted for appropriate remedial action.
All of this suggests that regional competitiveness is more than simply the linguistic expression of powerful exogenous
interests. It has also become rhetoric. In other words, regional competitiveness is deployed in a strategic and persuasive
way, often in conjunction with other discourses (notably globalisation) to legitimate specific policy initiatives and
courses of action. The rhetoric of regional competitiveness serves a useful political purpose in that it is easier
to justify change or the adoption of a particular course of policy action by reference to some external threat that
makes change seem inevitable. It is much easier for example, for politicians to argue for the removal of supply-side
rigidities and flexible hire-and-fire workplace rules by suggesting that there is no alternative and that jobs would be lost
anyway if productivity improvement was not achieved. Thus, the language of external competitiveness...provides a rosy

glow of shared endeavour and shared enemies which can unite captains of industry and representatives of
the shop floor in the same big tent (Turner, 2001, 40). In this sense it is a discourse which provides some
shared sense of meaning and a means of legitimising neo-liberalism rather than a material focus on the
actual improvement of economic welfare. 5. Conclusions The discourse of regional competitiveness has become
ubiquitous in the deliberations and statements of policy actors and regional analysts. However, this paper has argued that
it is a rather confused, chaotic discourse which seems to conflate serious theoretical work on regional
economies, with national and international policy discourses on globalisation and the knowledge economy.
There are, however, some dominant axioms which collectively define the discourse, notably that regional competitiveness is a firmbased, output-related conception, strongly shaped by the regional business environment. However, regional competitiveness tends to
be defined in different ways, sometimes microeconomic, sometimes macroeconomic, such that it is not entirely clear when a situation
of competitiveness has been achieved. It is argued here that the discourse is based on relatively thinly developed and narrow
conceptions of how regions compete, prosper and grow in economic terms. The discourse chooses to ignore broader, non-

output related modalities of regional competition which may tend to have rather more negative than
positive connotations. Moreover, it over-emphasises the importance of the region to firm competitiveness and indeed the
importance of firm competitiveness to regional prosperity. In this sense proponents of regional competitiveness are guilty of
what the eminent philosopher Alfred North Whitehead termed the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness. In other words,

they have assumed that what applies to firms can simply be read across to those other entities called
regions, and that this is a concrete reality rather than simply a belief or opinion.
Framing the US as America Inc. causes bad policy and hurts the economy A Nobel Prize Winner in
Economics Agrees

Krugman 1-23 professor of

economics and international
affairs
received the Nobel
Prize for Economics in 2008
Paul

-11 (

at Princeton University,

, The Competition Myth,

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/24/opinion/24krugman.html?_r=3&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1295895740-k8wCd1lX2ZIyowhgF19//A)
But lets not kid ourselves: talking about competitiveness as a goal is fundamentally misleading. At best, its a

misdiagnosis of our problems. At worst, it could lead to policies based on the false idea that whats good for
corporations is good for America. About that misdiagnosis: What sense does it make to view our current woes as stemming
from lack of competitiveness? Its true that wed have more jobs if we exported more and imported less. But the
same is true of Europe and Japan, which also have depressed economies. And we cant all export more while
importing less, unless we can find another planet to sell to. Yes, we could demand that China shrink its trade surplus
but if confronting China is what Mr. Obama is proposing, he should say that plainly. Furthermore, while America is running a trade
deficit, this deficit is smaller than it was before the Great Recession began. It would help if we could make it smaller still. But
ultimately, were in a mess because we had a financial crisis, not because American companies have lost their
ability to compete with foreign rivals. But isnt it at least somewhat useful to think of our nation as if it were America Inc.,
competing in the global marketplace? No. Consider: A corporate leader who increases profits by slashing his work
force is thought to be successful. Well, thats more or less what has happened in America recently:
employment is way down, but profits are hitting new records. Who, exactly, considers this economic success? Still, you might say
that talk of competitiveness helps Mr. Obama quiet claims that hes anti-business . Thats fine, as long as he

realizes that the interests of nominally American corporations and the interests of the nation, which were
never the same, are now less aligned than ever before. Take the case of General Electric, whose chief executive, Jeffrey
Immelt, has just been appointed to head that renamed advisory board. I have nothing against either G.E. or Mr. Immelt. But with fewer
than half its workers based in the United States and less than half its revenues coming from U.S. operations, G.E.s fortunes have very
little to do with U.S. prosperity. By the way, some have praised Mr. Immelts appointment on the grounds that at least he represents a
company that actually makes things, rather than being yet another financial wheeler-dealer. Sorry to burst this bubble, but these days
G.E. derives more revenue from its financial operations than it does from manufacturing indeed, GE Capital, which received a
government guarantee for its debt, was a major beneficiary of the Wall Street bailout. So what does the administrations
embrace of the rhetoric of competitiveness mean for economic policy? The favorable interpretation, as I said, is that
its just packaging for an economic strategy centered on public investment, investment thats actually about creating jobs now while
promoting longer-term growth. The unfavorable interpretation is that Mr. Obama and his advisers really believe that the
economy is ailing because theyve been too tough on business, and that what America needs now is corporate tax cuts
and across-the-board deregulation. My guess is that were mainly talking about packaging here. And if the president does
propose a serious increase in spending on infrastructure and education, Ill be pleased. But even if he proposes good policies,

the fact that Mr. Obama feels the need to wrap these policies in bad metaphors is a sad commentary on the
state of our discourse. The financial crisis of 2008 was a teachable moment, an object lesson in what can go wrong if you trust a
market economy to regulate itself. Nor should we forget that highly regulated economies, like Germany, did a much better job than we
did at sustaining employment after the crisis hit. For whatever reason, however, the teachable moment came and
went with nothing learned. Mr. Obama himself may do all right: his approval rating is up, the economy is showing signs of life,
and his chances of re-election look pretty good. But the ideology that brought economic disaster in 2008 is back on
top and seems likely to stay there until it brings disaster again.

Competitiveness is a hegemonic discourse- its power comes from belief, not truth or accuracy.
Dr. Gillian Bristow, Senior Lecturer in Economic Geography @ Cardiff University, 5 (Journal of Economic Geography 5.3: 285304, Everyones a winner)
Since the 1990s, in response to the work of authors such as Michael Porter (1990), the concept of regional competitiveness
has become a hegemonic discourse (Schoenberger, 1998) within public policy circles in developed countries. Indeed,
regional competitiveness has been enthusiastically adopted as a policy goal by the European Commission and by national
governments across Europe and North America (ACOA, 1996; De Vol, 1999; Commission of the European Communities, 2000). It
has risen to particular prominence in the UK where the national government has explicitly tasked Regional Development Agencies

(RDAs) with the responsibility for making their regions more competitive and akin to benchmark competitive places such as Silicon
Valley (DETR, 1999; House of Commons, 2000; HM Treasury, 2001a). The competitiveness hegemony is such that

according to certain analysts, the critical issue for regional economic development practitioners to grasp is
that the creation of competitive advantage is the most important activity they can pursue (Barclays, 2002, 10).
Current policy documents extolling the language of competitiveness tend to present it as an entirely
unproblematic term and, moreover, as an unambiguously beneficial attribute of an economy. Competitiveness is
portrayed as the means by which regional economies are externally validated in an era of globalisation, such that
there can be no principled objection to policies and strategies deemed to be competitiveness enhancing,
whatever their indirect consequences. For example, the European Commission (2004, viii) states that strengthening regional
competitiveness throughout the Union and helping people fulfil their capabilities will boost the growth potential of the EU economy as
a whole to the common benefit of all. Similarly, theUKgovernment sees its regional policy objective as being one of widening the
circle of winners in all regions and communities (DTI, 2001, 4), a sentiment clearly absorbed by the devolved administration in Wales
which has entitled its National Economic Development Strategy, A Winning Wales (Welsh Assembly Government, 2002). The
emergence of regional competitiveness as a discrete and important policy goal has spawned the development
of indicators by which policy-makers and practitioners can measure, analyse and compare relative competitive
performance, or find out who is winning. Various attempts have been made to measure and model competitiveness for European
regions (e.g. IFO, 1990; Pompili, 1994; Pinelli et al., 1998; Gardiner, 2003). Furthermore, the European Commission has placed the
analysis of regional competitiveness at the heart of its ongoing assessment of regional economic performance (Commission, 1999;
2000). In the UK, the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) has published sets of regional competitiveness indicators since 1995
(e.g. DTI, 2003, 2004). More recently, efforts have also been made to develop composite indices of regional competitiveness,
following similar trends in the evolution of national competitiveness indicators (e.g. World Economic Forum, 2003; see Lall, 2001).
These combine relevant indicators into one overarching measure, the results of which can be reported in the form of a league table
(Huggins, 2000; 2003). This preoccupation with competitiveness and the predilection for its measurement is
premised on certain pervasive beliefs, most notably that globalisation has created a world of intense
competition between regions (Raco, 2002).However, there is some confusion as to what the concept actually
means and how it can be effectively operationalised. Indeed, in a manner cognate with debates surrounding clusters (see
Martin and Sunley, 2003), policy acceptance of the existence and importance of regional competitiveness and its
measurement appears to have run ahead of a number of fundamental theoretical and empirical questions.
The purpose of this paper is to problematise the dominant policy discourse around regional competitiveness with
reference to theory, to explore how and why a discourse with ostensibly thin and ill-defined content has
assumed such significance in policy circles, and to consider the potential policy consequences. It is argued that the answer

lies within the political economy of economic policy and the rhetorical power and usefulness of the
prevailing competitiveness discourse. The paper begins by examining the polysemous yet overlapping meanings of regional
competitiveness in academic debates. (285-6)

Competitiveness makes environmental and economic

collapse and resource wars inevitable
Bristow 10 (School of City & Regional Planning, Cardiff University) (Gillian, Resilient regions:
re-placeing regional competitiveness, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 2010, 3, 153
167)
In recent years, regional development strategies have been subjugated to the hegemonic discourse of competitiveness, such that the
ultimate objective for all regional development policy-makers and practitioners has become the creation of economic advantage
through superior productivity performance, or the attraction of new rms and labour (Bristow, 2005). A major consequence is the
developing ubiquitication of regional development strategies (Bristow, 2005; Maskell and Malmberg, 1999). This reects the status
of competitiveness as a key discursive construct (Jessop, 2008) that has acquired hugely signicant rhetorical power for certain
interests intent on reinforcing capitalist relations (Bristow, 2005; Fougner, 2006). Indeed, the competitiveness hegemony

is such that many policies previously considered only indirectly relevant to unfettered economic
growth tend to be hijacked in support of competitiveness agendas (for example Raco, 2008; also
Dannestam, 2008). This paper will argue, however, that a particularly narrow discourse of
competitiveness has been constructed that has a number of negative connotations for the
resilience of regions. Resilience is dened as the regions ability to experience positive economic success that
is socially inclusive, works within environmental limits and which can ride global economic
punches (Ashby et al., 2009). As such, resilience clearly resonates with literatures on sustainability, localisation and
diversication, and the developing understanding of regions as intrinsically diverse entities with evolutionary and context-specic
development trajectories (Hayter, 2004). In contrast, the dominant discourse of competitiveness is placeless

and increasingly associated with globalised, growth-rst and environmentally malign

agendas (Hudson, 2005).

However, this paper will argue that the relationships between competitiveness and resilience are more
complex than might at rst appear. Using insights from the Cultural Political Economy (CPE) approach, which focuses on
understanding the construction, development and spread of hegemonic policy discourses, the paper will argue that the dominant
discourse of competitiveness used in regional development policy is narrowly constructed and is thus insensitive to contingencies of
place and the more nuanced role of competition within economies. This leads to problems of resilience that can be partly overcome
with the development of a more contextualised approach to competitiveness. The paper is now structured as follows. It begins by
examining the developing understanding of resilience in the theorising and policy discourse around regional development. It then
describes the CPE approach and utilises its framework to explain both how a narrow conception of competitiveness has come to
dominate regional development policy and how resilience inter-plays in subtle and complex ways with competitiveness and its
emerging critique. The paper then proceeds to illustrate what resilience means for regional development rstly, with reference to the
Transition Towns concept, and then by developing a typology of regional strategies to show the different characteristics of policy
approaches based on competitiveness and resilience. Regional resilience Resilience is rapidly emerging as an idea whose time has
come in policy discourses around localities and regions, where it is developing widespread appeal owing to the peculiarly powerful
combination of transformative pressures from below, and various catalytic, crisis-induced imperatives for change from above. It
features strongly in policy discourses around environmental management and sustainable development (see Hudson, 2008a), but has
also more recently emerged in relation to emergency and disaster planning with, for example Regional Resilience Teams established
in the English regions to support and co-ordinate civil protection activities around various emergency situations such as the threat of a
swine u pandemic. The discourse of resilience is also taking hold in discussions around desirable local and regional development
activities and strategies. The recent global credit crunch and the accompanying in-crease in livelihood insecurity has highlighted the
advantages of those local and regional economies that have greater resilience by virtue of being less dependent upon globally
footloose activities, hav-ing greater economic diversity, and/or having a de-termination to prioritise and effect more signicant
structural change (Ashby et al, 2009; Larkin and Cooper, 2009). Indeed, resilience features particular strongly in the
grey literature spawned by thinktanks, consul-tancies and environmental interest groups around

the consequences of
the global recession, catastrophic climate change and the arrival of the era of peak oil for
localities and regions with all its implications for the longevity of carbon-fuelled economies ,
cheap, long-distance transport and global trade. This popularly labelled triple crunch (New Economics
Foundation, 2008) has power-fully illuminated the potentially disastrous material consequences of
the voracious growth imperative at the heart of neoliberalism and competitiveness, both in
the form of resource constraints (especially food security) and in the inability of the current
system to manage global nancial and ecological sustainability. In so doing, it appears to be galvinising
previously disparate, fractured debates about the merits of the current system, and challenging public and political opinion to develop
a new, global concern with frugality, egalitarianism and localism (see, for example Jackson, 2009; New Economics Foundation, 2008).

LinkHuman Rights
Depictions of human rights catastrophe legitimize realism

Dunne & Wheeler 4 [Tim Dunne, University of Exeter, UK, Nicholas J. Wheeler, University of
Wales, Aberystwyth, UK, We the Peoples: Contending Discourses of Security in Human Rights Theory
and Practice, International Relations, Vol. 18, No. 1, 9-23,
http://cadair.aber.ac.uk/dspace/bitstream/2160/1972/1/We%2520the%2520Peoples.pdf]

Where do human rights fit into this realist picture of security? Realist proponents of
national security do not deny the existence of human rights norms such as those embodied in the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But crucially, realism argues that they are norms which
are not binding on states when they collide with other interests (such as trade or national
security). Hans J. Morgenthau, the godfather of realism, argued that the principle of the
defense of human rights cannot be consistently applied in foreign policy because it can and
must come in conflict with other interests that may be more important than the defense of
human rights in a particular circumstance.9 Realists also point to the centrality of states in implementing
human rights standards and the weak or nonexistent enforcement machinery. As a leading representative of
the US delegation at San Francisco made clear, We the peoples means that the peoples of the world were
speaking through their governments.10 Amnesty Internationals annual report is a constant reminder that
realist thinking on human rights is part of the fabric of contemporary international society .
A recent report summarized its findings against the backdrop of the war on terror as follows:
Governments have spent billions to strengthen national security and the war on terror.

Yet for millions of people, the real sources of insecurity are corruption, repression,
discrimination, extreme poverty and preventable diseases .11 This is nothing new. Driven by
expediency and self-interest, governments have long trampled on their citizens rights in order
to maintain the power and privilege of an elite few. In the language of International Relations
theory, what Amnesty is describing is the problem of statism, by which is meant the idea that the state
should be the sole source of loyalty and values for its citizens.12 Amnesty claims that the majority of

states routinely fail to deliver even basic rights to their citizens. Governments or agencies
acting on their behalf routinely imprison without trial, torture and/or kill individuals who
challenge the regime. The Westphalian practice of statism infects international bodies such as the United
Nations. Amnesty International points to the realpolitik in the General Assembly and the UN Commission
on Human Rights that it charges as being almost irrelevant to the protection of victims in Burundi,
Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.13 It is not unusual to find that no state has tabled a
condemnatory resolution at the UN General Assembly even after it has been presented with evidence of
gross human rights violations. Consistent with the charge of statism is the argument that the UN
is merely an arena for raison dtat, a kind of global Westphalian system where the language for

the conduct of international relations has changed but the interests remain the same.
Human rights in this context have represented, in the words of Norman Lewis, nothing more
than an empty abstraction whose function was the legitimation and perpetuation of the
given system of power relations, domestically and internationally .14

The aff securitizes human rightshowever government methods for solving it fail
turning the case

Kardas 5 [Saban Kardas, Ph.D. Student University of Utah Department of Political Science, working
paper no. 31, Human Rights Policy and International Relations: Realist Foundations Reconsidered,
December 6, 2005, http://www.du.edu/korbel/hrhw/working/2005/31-kardas-2005.pdf]
The concern for and promotion of human rights has increasingly assumed an international
dimension in the post-War period.2 The Westphalian principles are not the only values advanced by
the UN Charter. To be sure, the Charter also mentions human rights among the purposes of the

organization, along with the maintenance of international peace and security , and a growing
body of human rights regime has accumulated since the enactment of the Charter. This trend is best
reflected emerged a body of legal in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the two UN
Covenants and other universal and regional Human Rights Conventions and mechanisms. As a result of the
development of such a normative international order, and increasing pace of interdependence and
globalization eroding the traditional distinctions between domestic and international affairs, coupled with
the activities of powerful NGOs, the issues of human rights have found their way into
international politics. Consequently, there norms and mechanisms as well as political
instruments, ranging from human rights diplomacy to humanitarian intervention and international war
crimes tribunals, which regulate the governments treatment of their citizens .3 Though very

fragile, they provide a ground to put the domestic conduct of the governments under the
scrutiny by individuals, domestic and international non-governmental organizations, other
states and international organizations. Despite the tension to be discussed below, human rights
especially the violation of them- has become a legitimate concern to the international
society, a process which has been provided with added impetus in the post-Cold War era.4 The
end of the Cold War and the emerging international system were characterized by the
increasing possibilities for international cooperation, especially at a time where destabilizing
effects of the end of the Cold War have increased the need for international protection and
promotion of human rights. Growing activities on the part of secessionist and nationalist
movements created a growing need for the protection of human and particularly minority
rights. Against this setting, the emerging multi-centric international system and a global
wave of democratization have enabled human rights groups to mobilize liberal states and
international organizations to incorporate the promotion of human rights into their agenda .
This process was also reinforced and complemented by the expanding ideas in the post-Cold War era that
the traditional norms of sovereignty and non-intervention cannot be interpreted in their absolute sense and
therefore the international community may override these norms under certain conditions. The widely
cited Vienna Declaration (1993) adapted by the UN World Conference on Human Rights, thus, stated

that the protection and promotion of human rights is the primary responsibility of
governments and a legitimate concern of the international community . Nonetheless, the reality
remains there. Although respect for human rights is a stated concern of the international
community and an international system for protection of human rights has been set up, its
implementation and enforcement is far from being effective . Despite the attempts towards
international standard setting, the violations of basic human rights are still the case on many
parts of the globe. Similar to the weakness of other international regimes in general, this emerging
body of international human rights regime still lacks effective and consistent enforcement
mechanisms. In response to this picture, there is a growing belief that inclusion of human rights concerns
into foreign policy making of individual states will contribute to the betterment of the status of human
rights globally, especially to more effective implementation of the existing human rights regimes. Since
progress toward fulfillment of human rights is to a large extent conditional upon the compliance of the
states to the internationally agreed norms, in the absence of domestic dynamics for change, the external
pressure put on the governments by the international community remains a suitable avenue available to
advance human rights.

And this turns the case- security can never be achieved when ones rights are being
threatened

Dunne and Wheeler 4 [Tim Dunne, University of Exeter, UK, Nicholas J. Wheeler, University of
Wales, Aberystwyth, UK, We the Peoples: Contending Discourses of Security in Human Rights Theory
and Practice, International Relations, Vol. 18, No. 1, 9-23,
http://cadair.aber.ac.uk/dspace/bitstream/2160/1972/1/We%2520the%2520Peoples.pdf]

A critical security approach to human rights opens with a fundamental belief in the
indivisibility of security and human rights. How does this indivisibility play out in

practice? The human security discourse would maintain, for example, that there can be no
security for the individual if their right to life is being threatened by their government .
Similarly, security is absent when an individual is denied the rights to subsistence , such as food,
clothing and housing. If security is defined as protection from harm, then it is clear that the
infringement of fundamental rights signifies the presence of insecurity .25 Just as its prescriptive
orientation emphasizes indivisibility, the human security discourse recognizes the multidimensionality of
the sources of harm. There are military and non-military producers of harm, national and transnational,
private and public. Harm can be the outcome of intentional acts (employers using child labour) as well as
unreflective acts (children in the West buying a football that has been manufactured by slave labour in
India). Rights may be secured by one agent while simultaneously being threatened by another. For
example, the citizens of a social democratic society may have all their human rights protected by the state,
but that does not necessarily mean their community has security. It could, for example, have borders that
are contiguous with a predatory state committed to an expansionist foreign policy. Another threat could be
transnational and unintentional, such as that posed by high levels of radioactivity caused by an accident in a
nuclear power station (for example, the disaster at Chernobyl). We would argue that the

interdependence between security and human rights is at its strongest when the focus is
upon what Henry Shue, and later R.J. Vincent, referred to as basic rights.26 Security from violence
and subsistence were defined by Shue as the key basic rights. On the surface, this might seem to rely on a
narrow definition of rights but we define subsistence as covering a range of economic and social rights
(such as work, property, social security) while security from violence includes many civil and political
rights (protection from torture, racial hatred, slavery and asylum).

Link --I-Law
The affirmative orders International Relations around a myth that exists to make authoritarianism
warm and fuzzy instead we need to reorient ourselves towards a counter-politics resisting this state
of emergency.
Mark

Neocleous

, Professor of the Critique of Political Economy at Brunel University,

08

(Critique of Security, McGill-Queens University, pp. 72-75, Published 2008)

But there is a wider argument to be made, one with political implications. The idea

that the permanent emergency involves

a suspension of the law encourages the idea that resistance must involve a 'return to legality' , a return to the
'normal' mode of governing through the rule of law. This involves a serious misjudgement in which it is
simply assumed that legal procedures - both international and domestic are designed to protect human
rights from state violence. 'Law' are comes to appear largely unproblematic and the rule of law 'an unqualified human good'."
What this amounts to is what I have elsewhere called a form of legal fetishism, in which Law becomes a
mystical answer to the problems posed by power. In the process, the problems inherent in Law are ignored. Law is treated
as an 'indepen- dent' or 'autonomous' reality, explained according to its own dynamics, a Subject in itself whose very existence
requires that individuals and institutions 'objectify' themselves before it. This produces the illusion that Law has a life

of
its own, abstracting the rule of law from its origins in class domination, ignoring the ways in which the rule
of law is deployed as a political strategy, and obscuring the ideological mystification of these processes in
the liberal trumpeting of the rule of law. To demand the return to the 'rule of law' is to seriously misread the history of the
relation between the rule of law and emergency powers and, consequently, to get sucked into a less-than-radical politics in dealing
with state violence. Part of what I am suggesting is that emergency measures are part of the everyday exercise of powers, working
alongside rather than against the rule of law as part of a unified political strategy in the fabrication of social order. The question

to
ask, then, is less 'how can we bring law to bear on violence?' and much more 'what is it that the law permits
emergency measures to accomplish?"' This question - the question that Schmitt, with his fetish for the decision cannot
understand/' which is also why contemporary Left Schmittianism is such a dead loss - disposes of any supposed
juxtaposition between legality and emergency and allows us to recognise instead the extent to which the
concept of emergency is deeply inscribed within the law and the legal condition of the modem state, and a
central part of liberalism's authoritarian moment: the iron fist in the velvet glove of liberal
constitutionalism. Far from suspending law or bracketing off the juridical, emergency powers lie firmly within the legal domain.
How could they not, since they are so obviously central to state power and the political technology of government - part of the
deployment of law, rather than its abandonment? Once this is recognised, the supposed problematic of violence disappears completely,
for it can then be seen that emergency powers are deployed for the exercise of a violence necessary for the permanent refashioning of
order - the violence of law, not violence contra law. Liberalism struggles with this, and thus presents it as an exceptional moment;
fascism recognises it for what it is, and aestheticises the moment. As David Dyzenhaus points out, while the stripping of

liberties in the name of emergency the denial of rights on the grounds of necessity and the suspension of
freedoms through the exercise of prerogative might appear quite minor compared to what happens in fascist
regimes, the fact that the stripping, denial and suspension does happen under the guise of emergency and in
full view of the courts brings the legal order of liberal democracies far closer to the legal order of fascism
than liberals would care to admit. But in a wonderful ideological loop, the rule of law is also its own ideological obfuscation of that
fact
The political implications of this are enormous. For if emergency powers are part and parcel of the exercise of law and
violence (that is, law as violence), and if historically they have been aimed at the oppressed - in advanced capitalist states

against the proletariat and its various struggles, in reactionary regimes against genuine politicisation of the
people, in colonial systems against popular mobilisation - then they need to be fought not by demanding a
return to the 'normal' rule of law, but in what Benjamin calls a real state of emergency, on the grounds that only
this will improve our position in the struggle against the fascism of our time. And this is a task which requires violence, not the rule of
law. As Benjamin saw, the law's claim to a monopoly of violence is explained not by the intention of preserving some mythical 'legal
end' such as security or normality but, rather, for 'the intention of preserving the law itself'. But violence not in the hands of the law
threatens it by its mere existence outside the law. A violence exercised not by the state, but used for very different political ends. For 'if
the existence of violence outside the law, as pure immediate violence, is assured, [then] this furnishes proof that revolutionary violence
... is possible'."'
That this possibility of and necessity for revolutionary violence is so often omitted when emergency powers are
discussed is indicative of the extent to which much of the Left has given up any talk of political violence for the far more comfortable
world of the rule of law, regardless of how little the latter has achieved in just the last few years. But if the history of emergency
powers tells us anything it is that the least effective response to state violence is to simply insist on the rule of law. Rather than

aiming to counter state violence with a demand for legality, then, what is needed is a counter-politics:
against the permanent emergency by all means, but also against the 'normality' of everyday class power and
the bourgeois world of the rule of law. And since the logic of emergency is so deeply embedded in the rhetorical
structure of liberalism's concept of security this means being against the politics of security. For the very posing

of political questions through the trope of emergency is always already on the side of security. To grasp why, we need to now refocus
our attention more specifically on security as a political technology.

Link -- Failed States

Failed states are an entirely constructed threat with no basis in reality. Their discourse shapes policy
goals and justifies global military intervention. It should be rejected.
Logan and Preble 10 Justin is associate director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. He holds a masters degree in
international relations from the University of Chicago and a bachelors degree in international relations from American University and
Christopher is director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. He holds a PhD in history from Temple University and a BA in
history from George Washington University. Washingtons Newest Bogeyman Debunking the Fear of Failed States Strategic Studies
Quarterly, Summer 2010
Given the growing acceptance of arguments about failed states and the fact that these ideas have begun to affect
US foreign policy, it is striking how ill-defined the terms of debate have been. How can we measure state failure?
What are the historical correlations between the attributes of failed states and the supposed security threats they pose? Below we show
that by the established definitions of state failure and a reasonable interpretation of the word threat, failed states almost always miss
the mark. Impressionism as Social Science A survey of the formal studies of state failure reveals a methodological
wasteland. Analysts have created a number of listings of failed states, which have, in fairness, overlapped considerably; all are
populated by poor countries, many of which have been wracked by interstate or civil violence.48 However, instead of adhering to
basic social-scientific standards of inquiry, in which questions or puzzles are observed and then theories are described and tested using
clearly defined independent and dependent variables, analysts began by drawing up a categoryfailed stateand then attempted to
create data sets from which theoretical inferences could be induced. To take one prominent case, the authors of the State
Failure Task Force Report contracted by the Central Intelligence Agencys Directorate of Intelligence chose to adjust

their definition of failed state after their initial criteria did not produce an adequate data set for the
quantitative tests the researchers wanted to perform. After dramatically expanding the definition, the task
force produced almost six times more countries that could be coded failed as compared with their
original criteria and then proceeded with their statistical analysis. They justified this highly questionable
decision on the judgment that events that fall beneath [the] total-collapse threshold often pose challenges
to US foreign policy as well.49 Subsequently, the task force changed its name to the Political Instability Task Force and
appeared to back away from the term failed state.50 Beyond methodological shortcomings, the lists of failed states reveal only that
there are many countries plagued by severe problems. The top 10 states in the 2009 Fund for Peace/Foreign Policy magazine Failed
States Index include two countries the United States occupies (Iraq and Afghanistan), one country without any central government to
speak of (Somalia), four poor African states (Zimbabwe, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Central African
Republic), two resource-rich but [ 26 ] Washingtons Newest Bogeyman unstable African countries (Sudan and Guinea) and a
nuclear-armed Muslim country, population 176 million (Pakistan). The sheer diversity of the countries on the lists makes

clear that few policy conclusions could be drawn about a country based on its designation as a failed state.
In fact, what has happened is that analysts have seized on an important single data pointAfghanistan in the 1990s and
2000sand used it to justify a focus on failed states more broadly. Because Afghanistan met anyones definition
of failed state and because it clearly contained a threat, analysts concluded en masse that failed states were
threatening. When confronted with the reality that the countries regularly included on lists of failed states include such strategic
non-entities as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, and East Timor, advocates of focusing on state failure routinely point
back at the single case that can be justified directly on US national security grounds: Afghanistan.51 Even in Afghanistan,
however, remedying the condition of state failure would not have eliminated the threat , and eliminating the

threatby killing or capturing Osama bin Laden and his confederateswould not have remedied the
failure. The fact that expansive claims about the significance of state failure have been used to market
studies of the subject, when viewed in light of the diverse and mostly nonthreatening states deemed
failed, leaves the impression of a bait and switch. For instance, the 2007 update of the Failed States Index promises on
the magazines cover to explain why the worlds weakest countries pose the greatest danger. The opening lines of the article declare
that failed states arent just a danger to themselves. They can threaten the progress and stability of countries half a world away.
Strikingly, then, the article does little to back up or even argue these claims. It instead shrugs that failing states are a diverse lot and
that there are few easy answers to their troubles. By 2009, the index was conceding that greater risk of failure is not
always synonymous with greater consequences of failure, and that the state failure-terrorism link is less clear than
many have come to assume.52 Given these concessions undermining the idea that state failure is
threatening, one wonders why scholars continue to study failed states at all. As seen above, the countries on lists of
failed states are so diverse that it is difficult to draw any conclusions about a states designation as failed. But the purpose, one would
think, of creating a new category of states would be to unify countries that share attributes that can inform either how we think about
these states or how we craft policies toward these states. Instead, the scholarship on state failure has arbitrarily grouped

together countries that have so little in common that neither academic research nor policy work should be
influenced by this concept. Despite repeated claims to the contrary, learning that a task force has deemed a particular state
failed is not particularly useful. Start with the Conclusions and Work Backward Existing scholarship on state failure seems to
indicate that the conclusion led to the analysis, rather than vice versa. Scholars who argue that failed state is a

meaningful category and/or indicative of threat provide a rationale for American interventionism around the
globe. Given the arbitrary creation of the category failed state and the extravagant claims about its

significance, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that research on failed states constitutes, as one analyst
put it, an eminently political discourse, counseling intervention, trusteeship, and the abandonment of the
state form for wide swaths of the globe.53 The policy proposals offered by state failure theorists certainly meet this
description. In 2003 retired diplomats James Hooper and Paul Williams argued for what they called earned sovereigntythe idea
being that target states would need to climb back into the good graces of the intervening power to regain their sovereignty. In some
cases, this would mean that domestic governments would perform whatever functions were allowed by the intervener, but other duties
would be retained by the outside actor. The element of shared sovereignty is quite flexible . . . as well as the time frame of shared
sovereignty. . . . In some instances, it may be indefinite and subject to the fulfillment of certain conditions as opposed to specified
timelines.54 The premise seems to be that countries will be returned to the control of their indigenous populations when the
intervener decides it is appropriate. James Fearon and David Laitin, both political science professors at Stanford University, promote a
new doctrine that may be described as neotrusteeship, or more provocatively, postmodern imperialism.55 As they see it, this policy
should not carry the stigma of nineteenth- or twentieth-century imperialism. [W]e are not advocating or endorsing imperialism with
the connotation of exploitation and permanent rule by foreigners. [ 28 ] Washingtons Newest Bogeyman On the contrary, Fearon
and Laitin explain, Postmodern imperialism may have exploitative aspects, but these are to be condemned.56 While perhaps not
intentionally exploitative, postmodern imperialism certainly does appear to entail protracted and quasi-permanent rule by foreigners.
Fearon and Laitin admit that in postmodern imperialism, the search for an exit strategy is delusional, if this means a plan under which
full control of domestic security is to be handed back to local authorities by a certain date in the near future.57 To the contrary: for
some cases complete exit by the interveners may never be possible; rather, the endgame is to make the national level of government
irrelevant for people in comparison to the local and supranational levels.58 Thus, in Fearon and Laitins model, nation building may
not be an appropriate term; their ideas would more accurately be described as nation ending, replacing national governments with a
supranational governing order. Stephen D. Krasner, director of the State Departments policy planning staff under George W. Bush and
a leading advocate of focusing the department increasingly on state building, believes that the rules of conventional sovereignty . . .
no longer work, and their inadequacies have had deleterious consequences for the strong as well as the weak.59 Krasner concludes
that to resolve this dilemma, Alternative institutional arrangements supported by external actors, such as de facto trusteeships and
shared sovereignty, should be added to the list of policy options.60 He is explicit about the implications of those policies and admits
that in a trusteeship, international actors would remain in control indefinitely. The intervening power would maintain the prerogative
of revoking the targets sovereignty and should make no assumptions of withdrawal in the short or medium term.61 Krasners candor
about the implications of his policy views, however, was not equaled by a willingness to label them accurately. For policy purposes,
it would be best to refer to shared sovereignty as partnerships. This would more easily let policymakers engage in organized
hypocrisy, that is, saying one thing and doing another. . . . Shared sovereignty or partnerships would make no claim to being an
explicit alternative to conventional sovereignty. It would allow actors to obfuscate the fact that their behavior would be inconsistent
with their principles.62 Development experts with an interest in state failure agree that seizing political control of weak states is the
answer. Paul Collier, for example, writes that outside powers should take on the responsibility of providing [ 29 ] public goods in
failed states, including security guarantees to indigenous governments that pass Western democracy tests, and the removal of
guarantees coupled with the encouragement of coups against governments that fail such tests.63 In part, these sweeping admonitions
to simply seize politico-military control of the countries in question result from the failure to determine which of the failedness
indicators should be addressed first or whether there is any order at all. While some studies have proposed hierarchies of objectives,
starting with security and ending with development,64 it is clear that for many analysts, the causal arrows zigzag across the diagram.
Each metric is tangled up with others, forcing those arguing for intervention to advocate simultaneous execution of a number of
extraordinarily ambitious tasks. David Kilcullen lists cueing and synchronization of development, governance, and security efforts,
building them in a simultaneous, coordinated way that supports the political strategy as only one of eight best practices for
counterinsurgents.65 In Afghanistan, the flow chart of the December 2009 strategy seeking to repair that state looked more like a
parody:66 Discussing this dilemma of interlocking objectives in the context of Afghanistan, Rory Stewart remarks that:

Policymakers perceive Afghanistan through the categories of counter-terrorism, counter-insurgency, statebuilding and economic development. These categories are so closely linked that you can put them in almost
any sequence or combination. You need to defeat the Taliban in order to build a state and you need to build
a state in order to defeat the Taliban. There cannot be security without development, or development
without security. If you have the Taliban you have terrorists, if you dont have development you have
terrorists, and as Obama informed the New Yorker, If you have ungoverned spaces, they become havens
for terrorists.67 Not only do all bad things go together in these analyses, but it also becomes difficult if not
impossible to discern which objective should be the primary focus of state-building efforts. Similarly, on the
issue of state building and democracy, Francis Fukuyama informs readers that before you can have a democracy, you must have a
state, but to have a legitimate and therefore durable state you must have democracy. Acknowledging the circularity of this argument,
Fukuyama offered only the rather unsatisfying concession that the two ends are intertwined, but the precise sequencing
of how and when to build the distinct but interlocking institutions needs very careful thought .68 This is a

platitude and should be cold comfort to policymakers who are being urged forward by the same experts to
perform these ambitious tasks. The High Costs of Targeting State Failure We have argued that the failed state category
is a vacuous construct and that the countries frequently referred to as failed states are not inherently
threatening. For those whom we have not convinced, however, we now examine the historical record and attempt to examine the
costs of a national security policy that placed a high priority on attempting to fix failed states . It is of course
impossible to determine the precise cost of any mission beforehand. Historically, however, such operations have been extremely
costly and difficult. In a study for the RAND Corporation, James Dobbins and his coauthors attempt to draft a rule-of-thumb
measure for the costs of nation building in a hypothetical scenario involving a country of five million people and $500 per capita
GDP.69 For less ambitious peacekeeping missions, they calculate the need for 1.6 foreign troops and 0.2 foreign police per 1,000
population, and $1.5 billion per year. In the more ambitious [ 31 ] Justin Logan and Christopher Preble peace enforcement

scenarios, they figure 13 foreign troops and 1.6 foreign police per 1,000 population, and $15.6 billion per year.70 Curiously, though,
Dobbins et al. approach this problem by deriving average figures from eight historical nation building (peace enforcement)
missions, five of which they had coded in a previous study to indicate whether or not they had been successful. One of these (Japan)
they coded as very successful, two (Somalia and Haiti) were not successful, one (Bosnia) was a mixed result, and one (Kosovo)
was a modest success.71 The authors then simply averaged the costs of these missions and deemed the resulting figures to be a rule
of thumb.72 It is unclear why future missions should be based on historical experience when the historical examples used to derive the
figures produced successes, failures, and results in between. Our methodological criticism notwithstanding, even taking Dobbins et al.
on their own terms reveals how remarkably costly it is to attempt to fix failed states. Using the model laid out in Dobbins et al., we
calculated the cost of nation building in three countries: Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan. A peace enforcement mission in Yemen would
cost roughly $78 billion the first year, whereas a peacekeeping mission would cost roughly $12 billion the first year. Similar missions
in Somalia, with a smaller population and a smaller per capita GDP, would only cost around $30 billion and $3 billion, respectively.73
In the case of a larger country, like Pakistan, the costs would be significantly higher. A peace enforcement operation in Pakistan would
cost approximately $582 billion the first year, while a peacekeeping operation would cost around $81 billion. In all these examples,
the peace enforcement numbers contain very high military costs. According to Dobbins model, a peace enforcement operation in
Pakistan would require more than two million international soldiers, costing about $200,000 each.74 Analysts Frederick Kagan and
Michael OHanlon suggest that even for the minimal task of trying to tip the balance of an intra-Pakistani conflict, the international
community would need to contribute between 100,000 and 200,000 troops (only 50,000100,000 of whom would be US, they
suggest), and this represents the best of all the worst-case scenarios.75 As quickly becomes clear, intervening in any of the
frequently mentioned failed states implies significant costs. As Kilcullen observes in the context of counterinsurgency, a corps of state
builders should be available to stay in the country indefinitely. He proposes that key personnel (commanders, ambassadors, political
staffs, [ 32 ] Washingtons Newest Bogeyman aid mission chiefs, key advisers, and intelligence officers) in a counterinsurgency
campaign should be there for the duration.76 But it is unlikely that Western governments possess large pools of workers willing and
well-equipped to deploy to Bangladesh, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or Haiti for the duration. Western civil services
and even most, if not all, Western militariesare not comprised of a separate class of citizens who live their lives in far-flung locales,
away from family and country, indefinitely. It is for this reason that, in addition to the structural changes highlighted above, a number
of policy reports have called for radical overhauls of the national security establishment in the United States so that it can be better
tailored to repair failed states.77 Failed Thinking, Not Failed States From new military doctrines and budget priorities, to statebuilding offices in the State Department, to the myriad proposals for transforming the entire US national security establishment, a

long-term strategy of fixing failed states would entail dramatic change and high costs . More appropriate
and far less costlythan such dramatic changes would be a fundamental rethinking of the role of nation
building and the relevance of state failure to national security planning. However, this does not appear likely.
Thrust forward by the claims of threat, but unequipped with the expensive tools necessary for the task,
policymakers look likely to persist in the failed approach to the subject that they have applied in recent
years. If we intend to seriously embark on a plan to build nations, we must be prepared to bear heavy costs in time, money, and lives
or we must be prepared to fail. Moreover, no matter how evenhanded the United States may attempt to be, if US
personnel are on the ground in dangerous parts of the world, Americans could be forced to choose sides in
other countries internal conflicts, and the nation could become entangled militarily when its vital interests
are not at stake.78 For instance, if our nation builders are killed in the line of duty, will there be a US military
response? It seems likely that Congress and the American people would demand military retaliation, and at
that point, the United States could find itself facing a choice of either a spiraling military escalation (as in
Vietnam) or a humiliating retreat (as in Somalia). Both of those prospects are troubling but may emerge if policymakers pursue
a strategy of fixing failed states without broad public support. The essence of strategy is effectively balancing
ends, ways, and means. Squandering scarce resources on threats that exist primarily in the minds of
policymakers is one indication that, as Richard Betts has pointed out, US policymakers have lost the ability to
think clearly about defense policy.79 The entire concept of state failure is flawed. The countries that appear
on the various lists of failed states reveal that state failure almost never produces meaningful threats to US
national security. Further, attempting to remedy state failurethat is, embarking on an ambitious project of
nation or state buildingwould be extremely costly and of dubious utility. Given these connected realities,
policymakers would be wise to cast off the entire concept of state failure and to evaluate potential threats to
US national security with a much more critical eye.

Failed state discourse frames the Global South as the

source of violence. This colonizes our understanding of
international society with demonized stereotypes that
justify oppression.
Cooper 5Neil Cooper, Peace Studies @ Bradford [Picking out the Pieces of the Liberal Peaces:
Representations of Conflict Economies and the Implications for Policy Security Dialogue 36 (4) p. 471]
The political economies of contemporary conflicts have also been the object of analyses influenced by
critical theory and post-structuralism. Mark Duffield, in particular, has identified shadow trade in the

developed world as a form of really existing development taking place outside the formal structures of the
global economy, from which large parts remain excluded. Much of this literature has also
emphasized the need to distinguish between different kinds of economies that exist in the same
environment, for instance the combat economy of the warlords, the shadow economy of the mafiosi
and the coping economy of ordinary citizens (Pugh, Cooper & Goodhand, 2004). A key feature in

this work, however, has been a concern with the way in which weak and failed states have
been incorporated into a discourse that has re-inscribed underdevelopment as the source of
multiple instabilities for the developed world what Luke & Tuathail (1997) term the virus of
disorder. Duffields work, in particular, has identified the processes by which the securitization of
underdevelopment has underpinned the new liberal peace aid paradigm, centred around
the restoration of order through the application of neoliberalism and the formal accoutrements
of democracy and civil (but not economic) rights (Duffield, 2001). Indeed, for Duffield,
development has become a form of biopolitics concerned with addressing the putative
threats posed to effective states by transborder migratory flows, shadow economies, illicit networks
and the global insurgent networks of ineffective states (Duffield, 2005). And, in contrast to the Cold War,
the geopolitics of effective states is concerned less with arming Third World allies and more with
transforming the populations inside ineffective states. In this view, development represents a security
mechanism that attempts through poverty reduction, conditional debt cancellation and selective

funding to insulate [developed] mass society from the permanent crisis on its borders
(Duffield, 2005: 157).
While Duffields analysis arguably understates the continuities between the Cold War and the post-Cold
War era, these insights are nevertheless of particular relevance when examining both shifts in discourse and
policy on development and security in general and the political economy of conflict in particular, and it is
to these that we will now turn.
Towards a Synthesis of Difference or a Difference in Synthesis?
In the aftermath of 9/11, weak and failed states have become the object of a heightened discourse

of threat that represents them as actual or potential nodal points in global terrorist
networks. In this conception, the absence of state authority and the persistence of disorder creates local
societies relatively immune to technologies of surveillance, making them ideal breeding grounds for
terrorist recruitment, training, money-laundering and armstrafficking, as well as organized crime more
generally. As Collier et al. (2003: 41) note, civil war generates territories outside the control of
governments that have become epicentres of crime and disease and that export global evils such
as drugs, AIDS and terrorism.

This has produced an element of synthesis between new-right critiques of the current aid
paradigm and at least some critics from the liberal left. In particular, the idea that the neoliberal
project has been taken too far and has had the counterproductive effect of eroding state capacity and
legitimacy a traditional refrain of the left has now been taken up by realists. Thus, Fukuyamas State
Building signs up to earlier analyses that have emphasized the way in which neopatrimonial regimes used
external conditionality as an excuse for cutting back on modern state sectors while expanding the scope of
the neopatrimonial state (Fukuyama, 2004: 22). Fukuyama has also become a belated convert to the idea
that, under the Washington Consensus, the state-building agenda was given insufficient emphasis
(Fukuyama, 2004: 7). Thus, the new-right analysis is one that emphasizes strong states and local
empowerment. Even (especially) the Bush administration concluded in its National Security Strategy of
2002 that America is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing states (White House,
2002: 1).
However, this apparent consensus between the new-right analysis and the liberal critique raises a number of
concerns. First, the new-right analysis is situated as a response to the apparently new global dangers
unleashed by 9/11. As Fukuyama (2004: 126) notes, the failed state problem . . . was seen
previously as largely a humanitarian or human rights issue, whereas now it has been
constructed as a problem of Western security . This dichotomy between the situation preceding and
that after 9/11 is most certainly an exaggeration. Underdevelopment has always been securitized, just in
different ways; and even its post-Cold War manifestation was firmly in place well before 9/11. Indeed, this
historical amnesia can be understood as an intrinsic element of a securitizing discourse that justifies

regulatory interventions as a response to a specific global emergency rather than as part of longer-term
trends.
Nevertheless, it is also the case that the securitization of underdevelopment highlighted by
Duffield has become acutely heightened post-9/11, and it is in this context that current
debates about the need to eradicate debt, increase aid and reform trading structures are taking
place. Thus, the cosmopolitan emphasis on responding to the plight of other global citizens
has been merged with the security imperatives of the war on terror to create something of a

monolithic discourse across left and right that justifies intervention, regulation and
monitoring as about securing both the poor and the developed world.
Consequently, what structures the debate about addressing abuse or underdevelopment in this perspective is
not the abuse or underdevelopment per se but its links with multiple threats posed to the developed world.
A continuum is thus created for external intervention, entailing not merely the overthrow of Saddam
Hussein in Iraq but also structuring debate about Somalia or the need to address shadow trade. Moreover,
this discourse is by no means unique to new-right perspectives. Thus, the recent Barcelona Report on a
Human Security Doctrine for Europe deploys much the same kind of language, despite being situated in an
explicitly cosmopolitanist analysis that emphasizes the importance of human security. For the authors,
regional conflicts and failed states are the source of new global threats including terrorism, weapons of
mass destruction and organised crime and consequently no citizens of the world are any longer safely
ensconced behind their national border (Study Group on Europes Security Capabilities, 2004: 67).
Interventionary strategies, whether designed to address weapons of mass destruction, AIDS or

the shadow trade emanating from civil conflict, are thus explicitly framed as prophylactic
strategies designed to protect the West from terror, disease, refugees, crime and disorder . In
the words of an IISS (2002: 2) report on Somalia, the concern is with inoculating failed or failing states
against occupation by al-Qaeda.
This is not to suggest there is now complete synthesis between new-right analyses and liberal critiques. As
already noted, analyses such as the Barcelona Report are located in a cosmopolitanist perspective that still
emphasizes the importance of providing human security to the citizens of weak states and stresses the need
for a bottom-up approach that empowers locals. In contrast, for Fukuyama (2004: 115), state-building and
local ownership somehow manage to encompass approval for the idea that, on key areas such as central
banking, ten bright technocrats can be air-dropped into a developing country and bring about massive
changes for the better in public policy. The emphasis is also on state capacity for enforcement, the ability
to send someone with a uniform and a gun to force people to comply with the states laws (Fukuyama,
2004: 8) and to maintain the integrity of borders too easily traversed by networked crime and terror.
However, the promise inherent in this monolithic discourse is of a potential synthesis between
solidarism and security one in which welfare, representation and security (for both rich and poor) can
really be combined. The risk, though, is that security will delimit solidarism in terms of both the
breadth of its reach and the depth of its implementation. For example, following US allegations
of support for terrorism, the operations of a Saudi charity operating in Somalia were suspended, throwing
over 2,600 orphans onto the streets (ICG, 2005a: 15). Similarly, while the USA has increased aid, much of
the direction of this aid has been determined by the priorities of the war on terror, while bilateral trade
arrangements have been used to reward key allies in the war on terror, such as Pakistan (Tujan, Gaughran &
Mollett, 2004). A further notable feature of the post-9/11 environment is that while the war on terror
framing has colonized the representation of a wide variety of topics, including discussion of
conflict trade and shadow war economies, insights from this literature have not always travelled in
the reverse direction. Thus, even the most basis lessons from the literature on the economic challenges of
peacebuilding were ignored in Iraq. What was notable here was the failure of imagination to conceive preinvasion Iraq as an entity that exhibited many features of a war economy for example, high levels of
corruption, weak infrastructure, a shadow trade in oil and other forms of sanctions-busting, and a
militarized society. Similarly, concern at the way porous borders and informal economies may have been
exploited by terror networks in the Sahel has led the USA to develop a Pan-Sahel Initiative focused on
reinforcing borders and enhancing surveillance. In other words, cutting off networks that have become the
economic lifeblood of Saharan peoples (ICG, 2005b: i) has been prioritized rather than dealing with the
underlying dynamics driving such networks.
Conclusion

In some respects, then, there has been a degree of convergence in at least the mainstream discourse and
language deployed to discuss weak states and their various features, including shadow economies. The
current emphasis is on reversing the excesses of neoliberal reforms that are deemed to have undermined the
state in the 1980s and 1990s. The consensus is on the need for strong states and local empowerment (see
the contribution by Rolf Schwarz in this edition of Security Dialogue). However, while the discourse and
terminology are the same, the meaning applied to them is often very different. How these commonalities
and differences will play themselves out in the development of policy remains to be seen. What is
nonetheless clear is that much of the discussion of civil war economies has become infected by

the virus that is the language of the war on terror. A key concern that this gives rise to is
that such framings will structure all or much policy on inconflict and post-conflict societies
as being about providing hermetic protection for the West, rather than really addressing the
lessons about the local economic dynamics driving shadow economies. The risk is that post-9/11
post-conflict reconstruction may fuse the liberal peace aid paradigm (a continued emphasis on
the rigours of neoliberalism, albeit mitigated by a nod towards poverty reduction) with elements of more
traditional Cold War interventions that emphasized formal state strength: powerful
militaries and intelligence services (albeit mitigated by a nod to civil society). The ways in which
this synthesis between the security imperatives of the developed world, cosmopolitanist concerns with the
poor and the current reworking of the neoliberal model play themselves out will only really become clear
with the test of time. However, what seems to be emerging is a variable-geometry approach to weak states.
Some, like Iraq and Afghanistan, may become the object of heightened discourses of threat,

producing highly militarized intervention strategies that prioritize order and security issues
while failing to address other factors such as the nature of shadow economies and their
relationship to occupation and regulation. Indeed, at their extreme, as in Iraq, rather than
witnessing the modification of discredited neoliberal models, such objects of intervention
may experience even more virulent versions (Klein, 2005). Others, such as Sudan, may find
themselves subject to a post-9/11 variant of the new barbarism thesis, in which the anarchy and extremes of
violence they are deemed to exhibit are simultaneously presented not only as a rationale for intervention
but also as a reason for severely delimiting intervention in the absence of acute imperatives for action
provided by the logic of the war on terror. In between, there may be a broad swathe of states, from Sierra
Leone to Angola to Liberia, where specific intervention policies may be less strongly influenced by the
logic of war on terror and the more general securitization of underdevelopment, but where broader policies
that influence such interventions are mediated via the dictates of both solidarism and the security and
economic interests of the developed world. Thus, it is perhaps more appropriate to refer not to the
imposition of the liberal peace on post-conflict societies but to the imposition of a variety of liberal peaces
(Richmond, 2005), albeit ones still imposed within the broad constraints of neoliberalism and within the
context of profoundly unequal global trading structures that contribute to underdevelopment.

Link -- Prolif
Prolif is an epistemological excuse for violence their discourse wrecks alternative approaches
Matthew

Woods, PhD in IR
, 7

International Relations

@ Brown - Researcher @ Thomas Watson Institute of

[Journal of Language and Politics 6.1Unnatural Acts: Nuclear Language, proliferation, and order, p.

116-7]

It is important to identify, expose and understand the successful creation of 'proliferation' as the inevitable,
uncontrollable and dangerous spread of nuclear arms because it changed the world in innumerable ways . On
one hand, it is the chief motivation for a wide array of cooperative endeavors among states and the central rationale for the
most successful arms control agreement in modern history, the NPT. It inspired sacrifices that led to faith in our regard for others
and stimulated confidence in international law. On the other hand, it is the reason for an unparalleled collection of
international denial and regulatory institutions and it is the omnipresent and ineliminable threat at the heart
of our chronic, unremitting suspicion of others. It is a cause of global inequality and double-standards
among states and the progenitor of the name and identity 'rogue state' (states that reject the whaling ban are not
'rogue states'). It is a central element in world-wide toleration for human misery, such as starvation in North
Korea, and in public toleration for the clear deception and dissembling of government elites, such as in the US.
It is a vehicle in some media for racial stereotypes. The existence of 'proliferation' is a primary rationale among
nuclear states for preserving and improving their nuclear arsenals. And faith in the existence of 'Proliferation:
most recently, brought about invasion, war and continuing death in the Middle East. Every individual that
fears it, organization that studies it and state that strives to prevent it embraces 'proliferation' as a real and
known thing and, in part, orients their identity and behavior according to it. The successful creation of
'proliferation' represents the creation of our common sense, our everyday life and our natural attitude toward
the nuclear world 'out there.' It is uncontestable and to suggest otherwise that nuclear states might be to blame for any spread of
nuclear arms, or that it has actually been rare and so far benign or that it may even be beneficial (see a critical review of this literature
in Woods 2002) - is to invite derision and ostracism. The reality of 'proliferation' is so massive and solidified that the essential role of
(cell) proliferation in maintaining life and health is virtually forgotten, overwhelmed, its positive meaning restricted to the doctor's
office and biology lab. In short, the creation of 'proliferation' is a textbook example of what some term hegemony,

the creation by a dominant group of a world that realizes its ideological preferences while marginalizing
other possibilities and co-opting subordinates.
Prolif control has become a battle of good and evil creating a black check for violence

Der Derian 03 Political Science

Professor
(

, University of Massachusetts, boundary 2 30.3 (2003) 19-27, Decoding The National Security

Strategy of the United States of America, project muse)

From the perspective of the NSS, even before the shock of 9/11, the

end of the Cold War augured not global peace

but a new world disorder. "New deadly challenges have emerged from rogue states and terrorists" (13); and
while they might not possess the might of the Soviet Union, they have the asymmetrical advantages garnered by
weapons of mass destruction and the will to use them. Positing that traditional deterrence no longer works,
the NSS presents axiomatically the right to preemptively strike against these new enemies : "The greater the
threat, the greater is the risk of inactionand the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to
defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy's attack" (15). This is not a grand
strategy; this is a blank check, to take whatever actions, whenever deemed necessary, against whoever fits
the terrorist profile. Facing "an age where the enemies of civilization openly and actively seek the world's most destructive
technologies," the NSS sanctions a counterstrategy based on superior intelligence, ethics, and technological capability (15): "The
reasons for our actions will be clear, the force measured, and the cause just" (16). In short, war will be virtuous. First
auditioned in the Balkans, and dress-rehearsed in Afghanistan, virtuous war took center stage in the invasion of Iraq. Virtuous war
projects a technological and ethical superiority in which computer simulation, media dissimulation, global surveillance, and networked
warfare combine to deter, discipline, and, if need be, destroy the enemy. Ethically intentioned and virtually applied, drawing on the
doctrines of just war when possible and holy war when necessary, virtuous war is more than a felicitous oxymoron. After

September 11, as the United States chose coercion over diplomacy in its foreign policy, and deployed a
rhetoric of total victory over absolute evil, virtuous war became the ultimate means by which the United States

intended to resecure its borders, assert its suzerainty, and secure the holy trinity of international order: global capitalism (VI. Ignite a
New Era of Global Economic Growth through Free Markets and Free Trade [17]); Western models of democracy (VII. Expand the
Circle of Development by Opening Societies and Building the Infrastructure of Democracy [21]); a hegemonic "balance of power"
(VIII. Develop Agendas for Cooperative Action with the Other Main Centers of Global Power [25]); and preventive interventions.

The affs prolif discourse is racist and legitimates US

militarism.
Gusterson 99Hugh Gusterson is a professor of anthropology and sociology at George Mason
University. [Nuclear Weapons and the Other in the Western Imagination, Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 14,
No. 1 (Feb., 1999), pp. 111-143, accessed through JSTOR]
Nuclear Orientalism
According to the literature on risk in anthropology, shared fears often reveal as much about the
identities and solidarities of the fearful as about the actual dangers that are feared (Douglas
and Wildavsky 1982; Lindenbaum 1974). The immoderate reactions in the West to the nuclear

tests conducted by India and Pakistan, and to Iraq's nuclear weapons program earlier, are
examples of an entrenched discourse on nuclear proliferation that has played an important
role in structuring the Third World, and our relation to it , in the Western
imagination. This discourse, dividing the world into nations that can be trusted with nuclear
weapons and those that cannot, dates back, at least, to the N on- P roliferation T reaty of 1970.
The Non-Proliferation Treaty embodied a bargain between the five countries that had nuclear weapons in
1970 and those countries that did not. According to the bargain, the five official nuclear states (the
United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, and China)3 promised to assist other
signatories to the treaty in acquiring nuclear energy technology as long as they did not use that
technology to produce nuclear weapons, submitting to international inspections when
necessary to prove their compliance. Further, in Article 6 of the treaty, the five nuclear powers
agreed to "pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear
arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament" (Blacker and Duffy 1976:395). One hundred
eighty-seven countries have signed the treaty, but Israel, India, and Pakistan have refused, saying it
enshrines a system of global "nuclear apartheid." Although the Non-Proliferation Treaty divided the
countries of the world into nuclear and nonnuclear by means of a purely temporal metric4- designating

only those who had tested nuclear weapons by 1970 as nuclear powers-the treaty has
become the legal anchor for a global nuclear regime that is increasingly legitimated in
Western public discourse in racialized terms. In view of recent developments in global politicsthe collapse of the Soviet threat and the recent war against Iraq, a nuclear-threshold nation in the Third
World-the importance of this discourse in organizing Western geopolitical understandings is

only growing. It has become an increasingly important way of legitimating U.S.

military programs in the post-Cold War world since the early 1990s, when U.S. military
leaders introduced the term rogue states into the American lexicon of fear, identifying a new
source of danger just as the Soviet threat was declining (Klare 1995).
Thus in Western discourse nuclear weapons are represented so that "theirs" are a problem
whereas "ours" are not. During the Cold War the Western discourse on the dangers of "nuclear
proliferation" defined the term in such a way as to sever the two senses of the word proliferation. This
usage split off the "vertical" proliferation of the superpower arsenals (the development of new
and improved weapons designs and the numerical expansion of the stockpiles) from the "horizontal"
proliferation of nuclear weapons to other countries, presenting only the latter as the
"proliferation problem." Following the end of the Cold War, the American and Russian arsenals are
being cut to a few thousand weapons on each side.5 However, the United States and Russia have
turned back appeals from various nonaligned nations, especially India, for the nuclear
powers to open discussions on a global convention abolishing nuclear weapons. Article 6 of the

Non-Proliferation Treaty notwithstanding, the Clinton administration has declared that nuclear weapons
will play a role in the defense of the United States for the indefinite future. Meanwhile, in a controversial
move, the Clinton administration has broken with the policy of previous administrations in basically
formalizing a policy of using nuclear weapons against nonnuclear states to deter chemical and biological
weapons (Panofsky 1998; Sloyan 1998).

The dominant discourse that stabilizes this system of nuclear apartheid in Western ideology
is a specialized variant within a broader system of colonial and postcolonial discourse that
takes as its essentialist premise a profound Otherness separating Third World from Western
countries.6 This inscription of Third World (especially Asian and Middle Eastern) nations as
ineradicably different from our own has, in a different context, been labeled "Orientalism" by
Edward Said (1978). Said argues that orientalist discourse constructs the world in terms of a
series of binary oppositions that produce the Orient as the mirror image of the West: where
"we" are rational and disciplined, "they" are impulsive and emotional; where "we" are
modem and flexible, "they" are slaves to ancient passions and routines; where "we" are
honest and compassionate, "they" are treacherous and uncultivated. While the blatantly racist
orientalism of the high colonial period has softened, more subtle orientalist ideologies endure in
contemporary politics. They can be found, as Akhil Gupta (1998) has argued, in discourses of economic
development that represent Third World nations as child nations lagging behind Western nations in a
uniform cycle of development or, as Lutz and Collins (1993) suggest, in the imagery of popular magazines,
such as National Geographic. I want to suggest here that another variant of contemporary
orientalist ideology is also to be found in U.S. national security discourse .

The affirmatives proliferation discourse is part of broader

orientalist rhetoric to construct a hierarchy of nations.
Gusterson 99Hugh Gusterson is a professor of anthropology and sociology at George Mason
University. [Nuclear Weapons and the Other in the Western Imagination, Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 14,
No. 1 (Feb., 1999), pp. 111-143, accessed through JSTOR]
The Orientalist Underworld: A Tour of Images

These falsely obvious arguments about the political unreliability of Third World nuclear
powers are, I have been arguing, part of a broader orientalist rhetoric that seeks to
bury disturbing similarities between "us" and "them" in a discourse that systematically
produces the Third World as Other. In the process of producing the Third World, we also
produce ourselves, for the Orient, one of the West's "deepest and most recurring images of the
other," is essential in defining the West "as its contrasting image, idea, personality,
experience" (Said 1978:1-2).
The particular images and metaphors that recur in the discourse on proliferation represent
Third World nations as criminals, women, and children. But these recurrent images and
metaphors, all of which pertain in some way to disorder , can also be read as telling hints
about the facets of our own psychology and culture which we find especially troubling in
regard to our custodianship over nuclear weapons. The metaphors and images are part of
the ideological armor the West wears in the nuclear age, but they are also clues that
suggest buried, denied, and troubling parts of ourselves that have mysteriously surfaced in
our distorted representations of the Other. As Akhil Gupta has argued in his analysis of a different
orientalist discourse, the discourse on development, "within development discourse ... lies its shadowy
double ... a virtual presence, inappropriate objects that serve to open up the 'developed world' itself as an
inappropriate object" (1998:4).

In the era of so-called rogue states, one recurrent theme in this system of representations is
that of the thief, liar, and criminal: the very attempt to come into possession of nuclear
weapons is often cast in terms of racketeering and crime. After the Indian and Pakistani nuclear

tests, one newspaper headline read, "G-8 Nations Move to Punish Nuclear Outlaws" (Reid 1998: 1),
thereby characterizing the two countries as criminals even though neither had signed-and hence violatedeither the Non-Proliferation Treaty or the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. When British customs officers
intercepted a shipment of krytrons destined for Iraq's nuclear weapons program, one newspaper account
said that Saddam Hussein was "caught red-handed trying to steal atomic detonators" (Perlmutter 1990,
emphasis added)-a curious choice of words given that Iraq had paid good money to buy the krytrons from
the company EG&G. (In fact, if any nation can be accused of theft here, surely it is the United States,
which took $650 million from Pakistan for a shipment of F-16s, cancelled the shipment when the Bush
administration determined that Pakistan was seeking to acquire nuclear weapons, but never refunded the
money.) According to an article in the New York Times, "it required more than three decades, a global
network of theft and espionage, and uncounted millions for Pakistan, one of the world's poorest countries,
to explode that bomb" (Weiner 1998:6). Meanwhile the same paper's editorial page lamented that "for years
Pakistan has lied to the U.S. about not having a nuclear weapons program" and insisted that the United
States "punish Pakistan's perfidy on the Bomb" (New York Times 1987a:A34, 1987b:A34). And
Representative Stephen Solarz (Democrat, New York) warns that the bomb will give Pakistan "the nuclear
equivalent of a Saturday Night Special" (Smith 1988:38). The image of the Saturday night special
assimilates Pakistan symbolically to the disorderly underworld of ghetto hoodlums who rob comer stores
and fight gang wars. U.S. nuclear weapons are, presumably, more like the "legitimate"
weapons carried by the police to maintain order and keep the peace .18
Reacting angrily to this system of representations, the scientist in charge of Pakistan's nuclear weapons
program, Abdul Qadeer Khan, said, "Anything which we do is claimed by the West as stolen and we are
never given credit except for the things like heroin.... You think that we people who also got education are
stupid, ignorant. Things which you could do fifty years ago, don't you think that we cannot do them now"
(NNI-News 1998).

Third World nations acquiring nuclear weapons are also described in terms of passions
escaping control. In Western discourse the passionate, or instinctual, has long been
identified with women and animals and implicitly contrasted with male human rationality
(Haraway 1990; Merchant 1980; Rosaldo 1974). Thus certain recurrent figures of speech in the
Western discourse on proliferation cast proliferant nations in the Third World in imagery
that carries a subtle feminine or subhuman connotation . Whereas the United
States is spoken of as having "vital interests" and "legitimate security needs," Third World
nations have "passions," "longings," and "yearnings" for nuclear weapons which must be
controlled and contained by the strong male and adult hand of America. Pakistan has "an
evident ardor for the Bomb," says a New York Times editorial (1987a:A34). Peter Rosenfeld, writing in the
Washington Post, worries that the United States cannot forever "stifle [Pakistan's] nuclear longings"
(1987:A27). Representative Ed Markey (Democrat, Massachusetts), agreeing, warns in a letter to the
Washington Post that America's weakness in its relationship with Pakistan means that the Pakistanis "can
feed nuclear passions at home and still receive massive military aid from America" (1987:A22). The image
is of the unfaithful wife sponging off her cuckolded husband.
But throwing the woman out may cause even more disorder: the Washington Post editorial page,
having described Pakistan's nuclear weapons program-in an allusion to the ultimate symbol of Muslim
femininity-as concealed "behind a veil of secrecy," goes on to warn that there are "advantages to ... having
Pakistan stay in a close and constraining security relationship with the United States rather than be cast out
by an aid cutoff into a loneliness in which its passion could only grow" (1987:A22). Thus, even though

American intelligence had by 1986 concluded that the Pakistani uranium-enrichment plant
at Kahuta "had gone all the way" (Smith 1988: 104), and even though the president can no
longer, as he is required by law, "certify Pakistan's nuclear purity " (Molander 1986), the
disobedient, emotive femininity of Pakistan is likely to be less disruptive if it is kept within
the bounds of its uneasy relationship with the United States.
Third World nations are also often portrayed as children, and the United States, as a parental
figure. The message is succinctly conveyed by one newspaper headline: "India, Pakistan Told to Put
Weapons Away" (Marshall 1998a). Ben Sanders praises the Non-Proliferation Treaty as a means to "protect
the atomically innocent" (1990:25). But what about when innocence is lost? Steve Chapman, speaking of

India and Pakistan, argues that "it's fine to counsel teenagers against having sex. But once they have
produced a baby, another approach is in order" (1998:21). New York Times editorials speak of U.S.
"scoldings" of Pakistan and "U.S. demands for good Pakistani behavior from now on" (1987a:A34). Some

commentators fear that the U.S. parental style is too permissive and will encourage
misbehavior by Pakistan's naughty siblings: "those who advocated an aid cutoff said the time had
come for the United States to set an example for other would-be nuclear nations" (Smith 1988: 106).
Warning that American parental credibility is on the line, the New York Times says that "all
manner of reason and arguments have been tried with Pakistani leaders. It's time for stronger steps"
(1987a:A34).

These metaphorical representations of threshold nuclear nations as criminals ,

women , and children assimilate the relationship between the West and the Third
World to other hierarchies of dominance within Western culture. They use the
symbolic force of domestic hierarchies-police over criminals, men over women, and adults
over children-to buttress and construct the global hierarchy of nations , telling us
that, like women, children, and criminals, Third World nations have their proper place. The
sense in the West that Third World nations have their proper place at the bottom of a global
order in which nuclear weapons are the status symbols of the powerful alone-that nuclear
proliferation is transgressing important symbolic hierarchies-is nicely conveyed by the
condescending reactions in the Western media to India's and Pakistan's nuclear tests of
1998. Here many commentators sounded like secretaries of exclusive members- only clubs blackballing
applications from the nouveau riche. "With scant regard for the admonitions of other members of the
[nuclear] group, India has abruptly and loudly elbowed itself from the bottom into the top tier of this
privileged elite," said one commentator (Smith 1998:A 12). Putting the upstarts back in their place, U.S.
Secretary of State Madeline Albright said that it was "clear that what the Indians and Pakistanis did was
unacceptable and that they are not now members of the nuclear club" (Marshall 1998b:A12). The same
sentiment was expressed in stronger terms on the op-ed page of the New York Times by former National
Security Adviser Robert McFarlane, whose characterization of India draws on classic orientalist imagery to
make its point that the Indians are not "our" kind of people: "We must make clear to the Indian government
that it is today what it was two weeks ago, an arrogant, overreaching cabal that, by its devotion to the caste
system, the political and economic disenfranchisement of its people and its religious intolerance, is
unworthy of membership in any club" (1998:13). Mary McGrory, an alleged liberal, writing for the
Washington Post op-ed page, expressed the same reaction against people rising above their proper station in
life. In a comment extraordinary for its simple erasure of the great literary and cultural achievements made
by persons of the Indian subcontinent over many centuries, she said, "People who cannot read, write or feed
their children are forgetting these lamentable circumstances in the ghastly glory of being able to burn the
planet or their enemies to a crisp" (1998b:C1).

The proliferation metaphor is epistemologically bankrupttheir framing obscures

the root cause of the spread of weapons, turning the case.
David Mutimer, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at York University (Canada),
2000 ("The Proliferation Image," The Weapons State: Proliferation and the Framing of Security,
Published by Lynne Rienner (Boulder, CO), ISBN 1555877877, p. 58-63)
To this point I have discussed the various images through which weapons technology has been
framed in general terms. The central argument of this book is that these technologies have been
reframed in terms of proliferation, and that this has had particular practical and political
consequences. To make this argument and to explore those consequences, it is necessary to fill in
the proliferation frame in much more detail. This image joins together a number of discursive
links to create a particular discursive construction of an international security problem. The
central element of the image, the one that draws the others together into a single image, is
proliferation itself. Before its appropriation by those concerned with the development of nuclear
weapons following World War II, proliferation was commonly used (when it was commonly
used) to talk of the reproduction of animals and plants. Animalseven human animals

proliferated by having children, usually a lot of children. Rabbits were particularly proliferous.
This meaning is clearly reflected in the Oxford English Dictionary's definition [end page 58] of
proliferous: Producing offspring; procreative; prolific. Initially, analysts and policymakers
adopted the language of proliferation for the problem of an increase in the number of states with
access to nuclear technology after controlled fission was developed in 1945. This act of
discursive imagination yielded nuclear proliferation as a policy problem in the Cold War.
Nuclear technology would reproduce, spawning an ever-growing family of nuclear nations.
This image of nuclear proliferation underpinned the various solutions that were devised: the
NPT and its attendant supplier groups, the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and the Zangger
Committee. We can see what sort of thing is made of nuclear proliferation by its being
imagined as proliferation if we look more closely at the earlier use of proliferationthe
familiar referent in terms of which this new and unfamiliar nuclear technology came to be
understood. Animals produce offspring; they are procreative, that is, they are proliferous. To say
that an animal proliferates is to say that it has young. Often, particularly when used for humans
rather than for other animals, proliferation carries the connotation of excessive reproduction
humans proliferate when they have noticeably more than the accepted number of children rather
than just when they have children. This implication is suggested in the Oxford English
Dictionary's use of prolific in the definition I quoted earlier. Thus proliferation has two
important entailments as the metaphor chosen to imagine the development of nuclear weapons.
First, proliferation is a natural process that requires external intervention not to proceed but
rather only for prevention (e.g., various forms of birth control). Second, the result of unchecked
proliferation tends to be excessive growth in the originating organism. Both of these entailments
are captured nicely in a use of the term proliferation in a discussion of metaphor by literary
theorist Paul de Man: Worse still, abstractions [tropes] are capable of infinite proliferation.
They are like weeds, or like cancer; once you have begun using a single one, they will crop up
everywhere. 15 De Man's reference to cancer is rather ironic. Cell biologists have also adopted
the language of proliferation to talk about the way in which cells in organisms multiply . 16 In
particular, the language of proliferation is central to the study of cancers. The connection
between cell proliferation and cancer throws the entailments of proliferation into stark relief. By
itself, cell proliferation is a harmless, natural processindeed, it is essential to life as we know
it. This proliferation is managed by a series of biological control mechanisms that regulate the
growth of cells so they faithfully reproduce what is coded into their genetic material. Once these
mechanisms fail and the cells reproduce without control, cancers, often deadly to the organism
as a whole, result. As Andrew Murray and Tim Hunt write in introducing the study of cell
proliferation, Without knowing the checks and balances that normally ensure orderly cell
division, we cannot devise [end page 59] effective strategies to combat the uncontrolled cell
divisions of the cancers that will kill one in six of us. 17 Proliferation, as appropriated within
the study of cancer, refers to an autonomous process of growth and spread, internally driven but
externally controlled. Danger arises when the controls fail and the natural proliferation of cells
produces excessive reproduction. When the language of proliferation was used in thinking about
the development of nuclear technology after the discovery of controlled fission in the U. S.
Manhattan Project, a process similar to that which produces cancer was imagined as a result . 18
The U. S. nuclear program was the original technology that would multiply and spread. Such
spread, when imagined as proliferation, is a natural process and is inevitable without active
outside intervention. Once the development of nuclear technology is imagined as proliferation,
this entailment of a natural process of spread leads to the expectation of inevitable growth in the
number of nuclear powers. This, of course, is precisely what was expected. Because such a
condition was considered dangerous and undesirable, attempts were made to establish external
controls over the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Again, this follows from imagining the
problem in terms of proliferation. Some form of external control is necessary to prevent the
prolific growth of nuclear weapons outside the United States. Attempts to place such external,
international controls on nuclear proliferation resulted in the NPT of 1970, which remains the
principal mechanism of proliferation control. What are the implications of this imagewith its
understandings of autonomous, natural growth and external controlfor the policy response to
the development of nuclear technology? The first implication is that something imagined in
terms of proliferation is seen to grow or multiply from a single source. Although animal

reproduction involves two individuals, the father is quickly forgotten, and it is the mother who is
proliferous. The budding of cells, which gives rise to the proliferation of some plants and, of
course, cancers, begins with a single, or source, cell and spreads from therein the case of a
cancer, both to produce a single tumor and to create a number of separate tumors throughout the
host body. Similarly, the problem of weapons proliferation is one of a source or sources
proliferating, that is, reproducing by supplying the necessary technology to a new site of
technological application. This form of imagining highlights the transmission process from
source to recipient. Hence, the dominant response to nuclear proliferation has been the creation
of supplier groupsthe Zangger Committee and the NSGthat seek to control the spread of
nuclear technology. In other words, to paraphrase Murray and Hunt, they attempt to provide the
checks and balances that normally ensure orderly transfer and prevent the spread of nuclear
technology resulting in the cancer of a prolific number of nuclear weapons. [end page 60]
The second implication of the proliferation metaphor for the problem of nuclear weapons spread
is an extreme technological determinism. Animal reproduction is an internally driven
phenomenon, and so the metaphor of proliferation applied to the development of nuclear
technology highlights the autonomy in the growth of that technology and its problematic
weapons variant. It is worth recalling Frank Barnaby's words: A country with a nuclear power
program will inevitably acquire the technical knowledge and expertise, and will accumulate the
fissile material necessary to produce nuclear weapons. 19 In fact, the text from which this
quotation is drawn presents an interesting example of the autonomy of the proliferation
metaphor. The book is entitled How Nuclear Weapons Spread: Nuclear Weapon Proliferation in
the 1990s. Notice that the weapons themselves spread; they are not spread by some form of
external agentsay, a human being or a political institution. Under most circumstances such a
title would be unnoticed, for the implications are so deeply ingrained in our conceptual system
that they are not recognized as metaphorical. This image, by highlighting the technological and
autonomous aspects of a process of spread, downplays or even hides important aspects of the
relationship of nuclear weapons to international security. To begin with, the image hides the fact
that nuclear weapons do not spread but are spreadand, in fact, are spread largely by the
Western states. Second, the image downplaysto the point of hidingany of the political,
social, economic, and structural factors that tend to drive states and other actors both to supply
and to acquire nuclear weapons. Finally, the image downplays the politics of security and threat,
naturalizing the security dilemma to the point that it is considered an automatic dynamic. The
image of proliferation thus privileges a technical, apolitical policy by casting the problem as a
technical one. The NPT controls and safeguards the movement of the technology of nuclear
energy. The supporting supplier groups jointly impose controls on the supplythat is, the
outward flowof this same technology. The goal in both cases is to stem or at least slow the
outward movement of material and its attendant techniques. These entailments suggest that to
reimagine another problem of weapons technology in terms of proliferation is to construct that
problem as technologically autonomous and to privilege solutions that attempt to control this
natural growth by means of interventions aimed at the constituent technologies. This is precisely
the strategy institutionalized within the chemical weapons convention. The general obligations
of the states party to the CWCset out in its first articleare to refrain from developing,
producing, or holding any CW; to refrain from using CW or making military preparations for
their use; and to refrain from assisting anyone else from doing anything prohibited by the
convention. 20 These obligations are usefully compared with those assumed by states in the first
two articles [end page 61] of the NPT. 21 In both cases the obligations of states party are to
refrain from producing or procuring the weapon in question and to forego transferring the
weapon to others. The differenceand it is an important differenceis that in the case of the
NPT, five nuclear weapon states do not have to renounce their nuclear weapons capability.
Otherwise, the obligations are identical. More to the point than the initial obligations, however,
are the practices each treaty institutionalizes to prevent the spread of weapons. In both cases
direct international supervision and control are placed on precursor technologies to ensure that
they do not spread to weapons. The NPT obliges all NNWSs party to place their nuclear
industries under IAEA safeguards, and the NWSs party to the NPT have also placed their
nonmilitary nuclear facilities under international safeguard. 22 These safeguards are an
internationally monitored material accountancy, designed to ensure that all fissile material used

to produce nuclear energy is accounted for throughout the nuclear fuel cycleand thus has not
been diverted to produce nuclear weapons. Similarly, the CWC establishes an extensive
machinery to verify that chemicals from the chemical industries of the states party are not used
to produce CW. The mechanics of the CW system vary from those of the nuclear safeguards, but
the essentials do not. In both cases potential industrial sources of technological spread are
declared to the international agency, which can then monitor those industries to ensure that the
declarations are accurate and that the material of concern is properly accounted for. The CWC is
therefore a proliferation control instrument, in the same way the 1989 and 1990 bilateral
agreements between the Soviet Union and the United States over chemical weapons were arms
control agreements. The centrality to the CWC regime of the practices monitoring chemical
industries to ensure they are not used to spread chemical weapons marks it as an instrument to
control proliferation, not one designed to achieve disarmament, for instance. Only in the context
of a reimagining of the problem of chemical weapons from one of arms control or
disarmament to one of proliferation did the CWC become possible. As chemical weapons
came to be imagined as a proliferation problem in the late 1980s, the CWC as a
nonproliferation agreement for chemical technology (but without the overtly discriminatory
features of the nuclear NPT) became realizable. The end of the Cold War not only produced a
limited arms control agreement between the superpowers concerning chemical weapons but,
more important, created the conditions for realizing what reimagining in terms of the
proliferation image made possible. A proliferation image produces a particular kind of
object. It imagines a technology that reproduces naturally and autonomously, moving outward
from an identifiable origin by relentlessly multiplying. The image [end page 62] imagines this
technology as essentially benign but with the possibility of excessreproduction is natural,
expected, and even desirable, but prolific reproduction is dangerous. To permit the benign spread
of technology while preventing the dangerous conclusion to that spread, external controls are
required. Because the object of proliferation is imagined in this fashion, the forms of control
that can be applied are constrained. Put another way, the particular imagination of the object of
proliferation enables a specific series of control practices. The reverse is also true: creating
given practices will construct the object of those practices in particular ways. The result is a
neatly closed circle it is simple to reifywe face this particular problem with these practices;
these practices are employed, so we are facing this problem. Read in either direction, the
contingent becomes seen as the natural. What has happened since the late 1980s, particularly
following the war in the Gulf, has been the reimagining of all forms of military technology in
terms of the proliferation image and the embedding of that image in a series of control
practices. Alternatively, a series of control practices has been established around the range of
military technologies, which has constituted the object of those practices as a proliferation
problem.

Their framing of proliferation stabilizes a system of Nuclear Apartheid that relies on

an Orientalist construction of Us vs. Them.
Hugh Gusterson, Professor of Anthropology and Science/Technology/Society at MIT, 1999 (Nuclear
Weapons and the Other in the Western Imagination, Cultural Anthropology, Volume 14, Issue 1, Available
Online via Social Sciences Full Text)
Thus in Western discourse nuclear weapons are represented so that "theirs" are a problem
whereas "ours" are not. During the Cold War the Western discourse on the dangers of "nuclear
proliferation" defined the term in such a way as to sever the two senses of the word proliferation.
This usage split off the "vertical" proliferation of the superpower arsenals (the development of
new and improved weapons designs and the numerical expansion of the stockpiles) from the
"horizontal" proliferation of nuclear weapons to other countries, presenting only the latter as the
"proliferation problem." Following the end of the Cold War, the American and Russian arsenals
are being cut to a few thousand weapons on each side.(FN5) However, the United States and
Russia have turned back appeals from various nonaligned nations, especially India, for the
nuclear powers to open discussions on a global convention abolishing nuclear weapons. Article 6
of the Non-Proliferation Treaty notwithstanding, the Clinton administration has declared that

nuclear weapons will play a role in the defense of the United States for the indefinite future.
Meanwhile, in a controversial move, the Clinton administration has broken with the policy of
previous administrations in basically formalizing a policy of using nuclear weapons against
nonnuclear states to deter chemical and biological weapons (Panofsky 1998; Sloyan 1998). The
dominant discourse that stabilizes this system of nuclear apartheid in Western ideology is a
specialized variant within a broader system of colonial and postcolonial discourse that takes as
its essentialist premise a profound Otherness separating Third World from Western countries.
(FN6) This inscription of Third World (especially Asian and Middle Eastern) nations as
ineradicably different from our own has, in a different context, been labeled "Orientalism" by
Edward Said (1978). Said argues that orientalist discourse constructs the world in terms of a
series of binary oppositions that produce the Orient as the mirror image of the West: where "we"
are rational and disciplined, "they" are impulsive and emotional; where "we" are modern and
flexible, "they" are slaves to ancient passions and routines; where "we" are honest and
compassionate, "they" are treacherous and uncultivated. While the blatantly racist orientalism of
the high colonial period has softened, more subtle orientalist ideologies endure in contemporary
politics. They can be found, as Akhil Gupta (1998) has argued, in discourses of economic
development that represent Third World nations as child nations lagging behind Western nations
in a uniform cycle of development or, as Lutz and Collins (1993) suggest, in the imagery of
popular magazines, such as National Geographic. I want to suggest here that another variant of
contemporary orientalist ideology is also to be found in U.S. national security discourse.

This renders their analysis of proliferation epistemologically bankrupt.

Hugh Gusterson, Professor of Anthropology and Science/Technology/Society at MIT, 1999 (Nuclear
Weapons and the Other in the Western Imagination, Cultural Anthropology, Volume 14, Issue 1, Available
Online via Social Sciences Full Text)
These falsely obvious arguments about the political unreliability of Third World nuclear powers
are, I have been arguing, part of a broader orientalist rhetoric that seeks to bury disturbing
similarities between "us" and "them" in a discourse that systematically produces the Third World
as Other. In the process of producing the Third World, we also produce ourselves, for the Orient,
one of the West's "deepest and most recurring images of the other," is essential in defining the
West "as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience" (Said 1978:1-2). The particular
images and metaphors that recur in the discourse on proliferation represent Third World nations
as criminals, women, and children. But these recurrent images and metaphors, all of which
pertain in some way to disorder, can also be read as telling hints about the facets of our own
psychology and culture which we find especially troubling in regard to our custodianship over
nuclear weapons. The metaphors and images are part of the ideological armor the West wears in
the nuclear age, but they are also clues that suggest buried, denied, and troubling parts of
ourselves that have mysteriously surfaced in our distorted representations of the Other . As Akhil
Gupta has argued in his analysis of a different orientalist discourse, the discourse on
development, "within development discourse ... lies its shadowy double ... a virtual presence,
inappropriate objects that serve to open up the 'developed world' itself as an inappropriate
object" (1998:4).

Link -- Prolif AT Perm

Public debate shapes the governmental discourse on proliferation. The perm continues the cooption
of anti-nuclear critiques resulting in endless militarism.
Hugh

Gusterson 4

, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies at

MIT, 2004, People of the Bomb: Portraits of Americas Nuclear Complex, pg. 220-226

Weapons systems, treaties, and strategies come to seem right (or wrong) in the context of the stories we tell
ourselves about them. Social scientists and historians call these stories discourses. Sometimes new discourses (like
our discourse on civil rights) originate from below and eventually gain enough credibility that they are co-opted
by the government. Other discourses (like the discourse on deterrence during the cold war) originate within the
government, and within the tight circle of think tanks that speak to the government, and are then propagated
outward through society by waves of speech making and media dissemination. From time to time there are
sharp historical breaks as new stories and propositions become accepted with startling suddenness . Senior
officials in the Bush administration are now trying to create this kind of radical shift in our discourse about nuclear weapons. The
cold war saw the rise of an official discourse on nuclear weapons that is now looking more than a little tattered. Its
chief assumptions were as follows: that the genie having escaped the bottle in a dangerous world, nuclear weapons could not
be abolished, and anyone who thought otherwise was nave, or worse; that even though the two superpowers were
inevitable rivals racing to improve their arsenals, they were rational enough to manage their competition in ways that
would not cause a nuclear war; that the arms race could be channeled and disciplined , though not prevented, by
arms control treaties; and that certain avenues of competition were destabilizing and should therefore be foreclosed by mutual
agreement. These included a race to build defensive antimissile systems and to put nuclear, antisatellite, or antiballistic weapons in
space. After the cold war, this way of looking at the world began to seem increasingly outmoded. The Clinton administration
attempted to strike up some new discursive themes, but its efforts were undercut by its own half-heartedness. For example, the
administration made vague remarks about moving toward a world without nuclear weapons, but it failed to
negotiate any new arms reductions and it proclaimed through its Nuclear Posture Review that the United States would rely on
nuclear weapons for its security for the indefinite future. Similarly. Clinton administration officials said that they supported the AntiBallistic Missile (ABM) Treaty only to sponsor research and development programs that pointed in the direction of its erosion or
demise. And President Clinton spoke of a new global order founded on strong international treaties and institutions only to wage war
in Kosovo without UN approval and to walk away from an international convention on land mines. The administration of George W.
Bush, on the other hand, has attempted to use the debate about ballistic missile defense to transform the official
discourse on nuclear weapons and arms control. It has sought to dramatically redefine the U.S.-Russian relationship, q,
and the significance of arms control. If some of the statements made by administration officials had been uttered by President
Clinton, they would have met with Republican derision. The Bush administration has also appropriated some of the
antinuclear movement's rhetoric, only to use it in support of a further round of militarization. The new
discourse, like its predecessor, starts with the assumption that the world is a very dangerous place, although the

source of danger is no longer Soviet-style militant communism but rather the proliferation of weapons of
mass destruction to rogue states." As Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz recently testified to Congress: "The shortrange missile threat to our friends, allies, and deployed forces arrived a decade ago; the intermediate missile threat is now here; and
the long-range threat to American cities is just over the horizona matter of years, not decades, awayand our people and territory
are defenseless.' Within the old discourse, missile threats from abroad were used to justify nuclear deterrence. No longer.
Remarkably, it is now becoming axiomatic that leaders of "rogue states," unlike the old Soviet leaders, cannot be

deterred by nuclear weapons. This axiom is being used to justify not only the development of missile
defenses but also a new earth-penetrating "mininuke" that would supposedly hold the leaders of "rogue
states" personally at risk in their underground bunkers. Although there is no evidence to support it, and the argument
only seems plausible within the context of racist assumptions about Third World leaders' lack of rationality, the proposition that
nuclear deterrence does not work on "rogue states" is now treated as self-evident by government officials .
Just as an earlier generation of government officials would have said nuclear weapons keep the peace, as if merely articulating the
obvious, so our current officials simply state as fact the claim that leaders of countries like Iraq, Iran, and North Korea cannot be
deterred by nuclear weapons. Thus, Richard Perle said of Saddam Hussein, "I really don't want to count on the rational judgment of a
man who used poison gas against his own people." And Wolfowitz asked rhetorically, "If Saddam Hussein had the ability to strike a
Western capital with a nuclear weapon, would he really be deterred by the prospect of a U.S. nuclear strike that would kill millions of
Iraqis?"' Those who thought the answer to Wolfowitz question would he, "Yes, of course he would he deterred," would find
themselves in disagreement with the editors of the New York Times, whose reaction has typified the extraordinary credulousness with
which the media have received such claims. A May 2 New York Times editorial, repeating the new common sense, said, "By their
nature, rogue nations, sometimes ruled by irrational dictators, cannot be assumed to respond to the Cold War deterrence of 'mutually
assured destruction. The next day, Times columnist William Safire drove the point home, asking, "Why should we make it possible
for some tinpot dictator, unconcerned about retaliation, to hold an American city hostage?" What we see happening hereaided
and abetted by a striking lack of skepticism in the mediais the creation of a new axiom for what Jonathan Schell has

called the second nuclear age." The flip side of the emphasis on new threats from rogue states is an
insistence that the old threat, Russia, is no longer an enemy. For example, Wolfowitz, told the Senate that "we are
engaged in discussions with Russia on a new security framework that reflects the fact that the Cold War is over and that the U.S. and
Russia are not enemies."' And George Bush, taking aim at the ABM treaty, said that "Russia is not an enemy of the United States and
yet we still go to a treaty that assumes Russia is the enemy, a treaty that says the whole concept of peace is based on us blowing each
other up. I don't think that makes sense any more." The truth is, of course, that Russia may no longer be the enemy it once was, but it
is not exactly a friend either. Friends do not keep thousands of nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert targeted against one another. Nor
do they expel one another's diplomats forty at a time. The new discourse overstates the transformation of U.S.-Russian relations so as
to delegitimate the ABM Treaty the two countries signed in 1972 as a relic of the past, opening the way for construction of George W.
Bush's cherished missile defense system. Bush administration officials have even suggested that treaties in general have become
useless fetishes, revered out of habit, and that the fast-moving world of today requires a more flexible approach than treaties allow.
Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser, has said, for example, There's a good reason not to get into 15-year negotiations,
which is what it has taken to create arms-control treaties."' She also made the following remarkable statement in a July 12, 2001, press
conference: was one of the high priestesses of arms controla true believer. Like so many others, I eagerly anticipated those
breathtaking moments of summitry where the centerpiece was always the signing of the latest arms control treaty; the toast; the
handshake; and with Brezhnev, the hear hug. For those precious few moments the world found comfort in seeing the superpowers
affirm their peaceful intent. And the scientists would sec the clock back a few minutes further away from midnight. Deep down we
knew that arms control was a poor substitute for a real agenda based on common aspirations.... But along the way to the next summit
something hap gelled. History happened. 1989. Sri, while many of us were debating the implications of !WRVS !multiple independent
reentry vehicles' on SS18s and Peacekeepers like so many angels dancing on a warhead, the forces of history were making the old
paradigm obsolete.... We cannot cling to the old order-like medieval scholars clinging to a Ptolemaic system even after the Copernican
revolution. We must recognize that the strategic world we grew up in has been turned upside down. This

futuristic rhetoric is one of the most striking features of the new nuclear discourse, and it signifies a bold
theft of the disarmament movement's rhetorical fire by the ideologues of the Pentagon . Cold war nuclear
discourse was full of appeals for "caution," "realism," and stability, making a virtue of its distrust for radical measures, where the
new nuclear discourse is all about futuristic weapons and hold measures. One might have expected to hear of the need for visionary
thinking, the hopeful possibilities if only we could break with the assumptions of yesterday, from partisans of disarmament. Instead,
we hear it from Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, and Paul Wolfowitzveteran cold warriors all who use it as a
battering ram against the ABM Treaty. The ARM Treaty is a relic of the pan," said George W. Bush recently, the days of the Cold War
have ended, and so must the Cold War mentality as far as Im concerned." WoIfowitz used similar language, that 30-year-old treaty
designed to preserve the balance of terror during the Cold War must not be allowed to prevent us from taking steps to protect our
people, our forces, and our allies. Virginia's John Warner, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee,
concurred: "The ARM Treaty has outlived its justification and foundations." Likewise, his colleague, North Carolina's Jesse Helms,
said, ''Russia must come to grips with the bet that the Cold War is over. It is time to iCT;11, the ABM Treaty." The new rhetoric is
more indebted to the logic of advertising than that of strategic thinking. Ache [[ hers use rhetoric glibly to create perceptions rather
than co argue for truths, and they have learned that one of the easiest ways to discredit rival products, whatever their manifest virtues,
is to make them seem old and outdated compared to one's own. While it is arguably the thinking of Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz
that is old and outdated, these tremors of the new nuclear discourse have learned that by simply likening the ARM Treaty to Mom and
Dad's Oldsmobile they do not need to get their hands dirty with arguments about the precise relationship between the ABM and
strategic stability. Perhaps the most extraordinary achievement of chew purveyors of the new nuclear discourse is to have appropriated
antinuclear critiques of nuclear deterrence in the service of a new generation of weaponry. Officials who only a decade ago would
have derided the naivet of disarmament advocates who criticized nuclear deterrence now sound like their cesnvhile opponents.
Wollowitz, for example, striking a sentimental note, began his recent testimony to the Senate Armed Service Committee by saying
that, in Israel during the Gulf War, "We saw children walking to school carrying gas masks in gaily decorated boxesno doubt to try
to distract them from the possibility of facing mass destruction. They were awfully young to have to think about the unthinkable."
Jesse Helms, a staunch defender of deterrence throughout the cold war, told the Senate two months earlier that it was time to "dispense
with the illogical and immoral concept of mutually assured destruction," and Rice, recycling an argument often made by the
antinuclear movement in the 1990s, stated in her July 12 press conference that we need to recognize that just as peace is not the
absence of war, stability is not a balance of terror." The new nuclear discourse holds out the hope that the United States and Russia can
be friends and that, although rising military powers in the Third World may not be rational we can be safe from their weapons of Mass
destruction, and indeed from the entire depressing logic of mutually assured destruction, if only we can let go of the ABM Treaty and
build a new generation of defensive weapons that are almost within our technical grasp. Such weapons, being purely defensive,
threaten no one; in the words of Donald Rumsfeld, "They bother no one, except a country ... that thinks they want [to] have ballistic
missiles to impose their will on their neighbors." Once people begin to realize that this is not something that is a matter of gaining
advantage over anyone but is a matter of reducing vulnerability for everybody, then I think they begin to look at it differently,
Wolfowitz told a press conference in Paris on May 9, 2001 All discourses, especially government discourses, have something to hide,
and this one is no exception. Although the Bush administration speaks of missile defense as a purely defensive technology designed to
protect the United States from "rogue states' and not to change the balance of power with established nuclear powers, I have it on good
authority from sources in the Clinton White House that, in their conversations out of public view, Pentagon planners arc very
interested in ways in which missile defense might be able to neutralize the twenty single-warhead missiles in China capable of hitting
the United States, thus effectively disarming China. Although Rush administration officials like to tell the public that missile defense
is not "a matter of gaining advantage over anyone,' they tell the Senate something different. Thus Wolfowitz recently testified that "the
countries pursuing these [ballistic missile] capabilities are doing so because ... they believe that if they can hold the American people
at risk, they can ... deter us from defending our interests around the world.... They may secure, in their estimation, the capability to
prevent us from forming international coalitions to challenge their act' of aggression and force us into a truly isolationist posture. And
they would not even have to use the weapons in their possession to affect our behavior and achieve their ends.'" In other words,
ballistic missile defense is a new means to the old dream of the cold warriors: achieving nuclear superiority. Insofar as it is about
doing away with deterrence, it is only about abolishing the ability of other countries to deter the United States. As British antinuclear
activist Helen Johns put it: Ballistic missile defense is the armed wing of globalization. It is a euphemism for plans to ensure U.S.

military and economic domination of the planet." The

new nuclear discourse puts the disarmament movement in an

awkward position. Its traditional rhetoric about the possibility of reconciliation with Russia and the
existential darkness of deterrence has been hijacked by today's superannuated cold warriors as a way of
justifying the abrogation of old arms control treaties the construction of new weapons, and the
militarization of space. Thus the movement is left either defending nuclear deterrence or arguing for
nuclear abolitiona goal that strikes much of the public as no less idealistic than the Pentagons Buck
Rogers scheme for missile defense. But unless the disarmament movement learns to tell a compelling new
story soon, very soon, the tall stories being told by the Bush administration will become the stories for our
age.

Link -- Prolif Spread Link

The affirmatives biological metaphor of proliferation frames proliferation as the outward spread of
weapons externally controlling is the ultimate embrace of the metaphor adherence constructs
proliferation as a technological and autonomous problem, diverting attention from human agency
and social facts
David

Mutimer 1994

(Reimagining Security: The Metaphors of Proliferation, August 1994,)

[E.Berggren]

The proliferation metaphor as applied to nuclear weapons. The first entailment is the image of a spread outward
from a point, or source. Cell division begins with a single, or source cell, and spreads outward from there
in the case of a cancer, both to produce a single tumour and to create a number of separate tumours
throughout the host body. Similarly, the 'problem' of proliferation is one of a source or sources 'proliferating', that is reproducing itself
by supplying the necessary technology to a new site of technological application. This image highlights the transmission process from
source to recipient, and entails policy designed to cut off the supply, restricting the technology to its source. Hence, the dominant
response to nuclear proliferation is the creation of supplier groups, the Zangger Committee and the NSG, which

seeks to 'control' the spread of nuclear technology. In other words, they attempt to provide "the checks and
balances that normally ensure orderly" transfer, and prevent the spread of nuclear technology resulting in
the "cancer" of weapons' proliferation. The image is repeated even in the more extreme proposals for policy. For example,
former Prime Minster Trudeau proposed a scheme to the United Nations Special Session on Disarmament for preventing weapons'
spread. This scheme included two measures currently under consideration at the Conference on Disarmament, a Comprehensive Test
Ban Treaty, and a Cutoff of Fissile Material Production. Trudeau's plan was known as the 'suffocation proposal'firmly in keeping
with the biological referent of proliferation. To stop, rather than control, reproduction by organisms, you need to

'suffocate' the progenitors. The second entailment of the 'proliferation' metaphor for the problem of nuclear
weapons spread is an extreme technological bias. Biological proliferation is an internally driven
phenomenon, and so the image of 'Proliferation' applied to the development of nuclear technology
highlights the autonomous spread of that technology, and its problematic weapons variant . As Frank Barnaby
writes in a recent work, "A country with a nuclear power programme will inevitably acquire the technical knowledge and expertise,
and will accumulate the fissile material necessary to produce nuclear weapons."50 In fact, the text from which this is drawn presents
an interesting example of the autonomy of the 'proliferation' metaphor. The book is entitled How Nuclear Weapons Spread: Nuclearweapon proliferation in the 1990s. Notice that the weapons themselves spread, they are not spread by an external agent of some form
say a human being or human institution. Under most circumstances such a title would be unnoticed, for as Lakoff

and Johnson argue, the metaphors are so deeply engrained in our conceptual system that they are not
recognised as being metaphorical. This image, by highlighting the technological and autonomous aspects of
a process of spread, downplays or even hides important aspects of the relationship of nuclear weapons to
international security. To begin with, the image hides the fact that nuclear weapons do not spread, but are
spreadand in fact are spread largely by the western states. Secondly, the image downplays, to the point of hiding, any of the
political, social, economic and structural factors which tend to driv states and other actors both to supply and to acquire nuclear
weapons. Finally, the image downplays the politics of security and threat, naturalising the 'security dilemma' to the point that it is
considered as an automatic dynamic. The image of PROLIFERATION thus privileges a technical, apolitical policy,

by casting the problem as a technical, apolitical one. The Non-Proliferation Treaty controls and safeguards
the movement of the technology of nuclear energy. The supporting supplier groups jointly impose controls
on the supplythat is the outward flowof this same technology. The goal, in both cases, is to stem or, at
least slow, the outward movement of material and its attendant techniques. Such a policy is almost doomed
to fail, however, for it downplays and hides the very concerns which motivate the agents of the process. Iraq
was driven to acquire nuclear weapons, even in the face of NPT commitments, and so employed technology which is considered so
outdated that it is no longer tightly controlled. This simply does not fit with the NPT-NSG-Zangger Committee approach. In addition,
in order to gain the necessary material, the Iraqis needed access to external technology. Such technology was acquired by human
agents acting for the Iraqi state and was acquired from other agents, who had their own motivationa interests to provide the necessary
technology. The technology does not 'spread' through some autonomous process akin to that causing a zygote to become a person, but
rather they are spread, and so the agents involved are able to sidestep the technologically focussed control efforts . The second step

of this process, reimagining international security in the terms of PROLIFERATION following the end of
the Cold War, adopts the policy entailments along with the underlying biological imagery. By using the
PROLIFERATION image now to address biological and chemical weapons, missile technology and even
conventional weapons, the international community is replicating the problematic policy solutions which
highlight technology and hide politics and agency. Thus the NPT and its supplier groups are joined by the Chemical
Weapons Convention and the Australia Group, a supplier group which also oversees export controls on both chemical and biological
weapons' technology. Missile technology is controlled by the Missile Technology Control Regime . Even conventional arms,

the ones we might expect to be most closely related to understandings of politics, are conceived in terms of

'excessive and destabilising accumulations'. Once more, it is the weapons themselves, rather than the
political agents acquiring and using them, which are the lexical focus of discussions of conventional arms .
What is ignored by this policy approach is any suggestion that there are political interests or motivations at work, which may cause
human institutions to act in ways which promote insecurity (which, in other words, destabilize). A good part of the reason for

this lack of understanding is that the image of the problem is one which downplays, and even hides, the
involvement of the politics of human agency in both the acts of supply and acquisition.

Link -- Prolif NPT Link

Affs management of nuclear tech re-creates nuclar apartheid and imperial aggression ensuring
prolif and escalating wars
Mike

Whitney

, Feelance Writter @ Washington State,

[February 9, Time to Scrap the NPT,

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Feb06/Whitney09. hostile nations, it should be abandoned altogether.

The purpose of the NPT (Nonproliferation Treaty) is to reduce or eliminate the development of nuclear weapons. If it is to have any
meaning at all it must be directed at nations that not only have weapons, but that demonstrate a flagrant disregard for the international
laws condemning their use. The IAEA should focus its attention on those states that have a clear record of territorial aggression,
military intervention, or who consistently violate United Nations resolutions. In its present form the IAEA and the NPT are
utterly meaningless. Rather than leading the world towards nuclear disarmament, the agency and the treaty have simply
ignored the misbehavior of the more powerful nations and humiliated the non-nuclear states with spurious accusations and
threatening rhetoric. The NPT was never intended to be a bludgeon for battering the weaker nations; nor was it set up as a de-facto
apartheid system whereby the superpower and its allies can lord above the non-nuclear states coercing them to act according to

their diktats. It was designed to curb the development of the worlds most lethal weapons, eventually
consigning them to the ash heap. The political maneuvering surrounding Irans alleged nuclear weapons programs
demonstrates the irrelevance and hypocrisy of the current system. As yet, there is no concrete evidence that Iran is in non-compliance
with the terms of the treaty. That hasnt deterred the Bush administration from intimidating its allies and

adversaries alike to assist them in dragging Iran before the Security Council. The Bush administration is
asking the Security Council to enforce additional protocols which will preclude Iran from enriching
uranium for use in electric power plants, a right that is clearly articulateed in the NPT. Article 4 section 2
states: All the Parties to the Treaty undertake to facilitate, and have the right to participate in, the fullest
possible exchange of equipment, materials and scientific and technological information for the peaceful
uses of nuclear energy. Irans determination to enrich uranium is protected under international law and should not be abridged
to accommodate the regional ambitions of the United States. By giving up its legal rights Iran would be undermining the fundamental
principle that underscores all such agreements and tacitly accepting that the Bush administration alone has the final say-so on issues of
global concern. Why should Iran accept a standard for itself that is different than that for every other signatory

of the NPT? No nation should willingly accept being branded as a pariah without evidence of wrongdoing.
The fact that the United States is occupying the country next door and has yet to provide a coherent justification for the invasion is a
poignant reminder of the irrelevance of both the United Nations and the IAEA. The two organizations have remained

resolutely silent in the face of the massive incidents of human rights abuses, war crimes, and crimes against
humanity. While Iran is roundly condemned by heads-of-state and the corporate media, the greatest crime of our generation
continues into its third year without a word of reproach from the world body. The international community simply looks
away in fear. This alone should illustrate the ineffectiveness of the institutions that are designed to keep the peace. If the ruling
body at the IAEA is to have any relevance, it must direct its attention to the real threats of nuclear
proliferation posed by those nations that consider nuclear weapons a privilege that should be limited to a
certain group of elite states. If the IAEA cannot perform its duties in a neutral manner that respects the
rights of all nations equally, it should disband and abolish the NPT without delay. If the IAEA is uncertain
about the real threats to regional peace, they should take note of the many recent polls that invariably list
the same belligerent nations as the leading offenders. It is these countries that should be scrutinized most
carefully. It is not the purview of the IAEA to keep the weaker nations out of the nuclear club. That simply
enables the stronger states to bully their enemies with threats of using their WMD. In fact, its plain to see
that the current disparity in military power has created a perilous imbalance between nations that is rapidly
spreading war throughout the world. One only has to look at Haiti, Afghanistan, Iraq or Kosovo to see the
glaring failures of the unipolar model; where the military prowess of one country is so great it is
emboldened to resolve its differences through conflagration. The NPT was not created to facilitate the imperial
ambitions of the superpower, but to protect the innocent from the increasing likelihood of nuclear holocaust. If the NPT cannot
decrease the threat of nuclear war from conspicuously hostile nations, it should be abandoned altogether.

Link -- Prolif AT Cant Deter Third World

Claims that Third World nations do not follow conventional deterrence doctrine is fundamentally
wrong and based on an ethno-centric view of international affairs

Gusterson Associate Professor of

Anthropology
1999
Hugh

and Science and Technology Studies at MIT, 2/

, Nuclear

Weapons and the Other in the Western Imagination, JSTOR [BB]

During the Cold War Americans were told that nuclear deterrence

prevented the smoldering enmity between the

superpowers from bursting into the full flame of war, saving millions of lives by making conventional war
too dan- gerous. When the practice of deterrence was challenged by the antinuclear movement of the 1980s, Pentagon officials and
defense intellectuals warned us that nuclear disarmament would just make the world safe for conventional war.9 Surely, then, we
should want countries such as Pakistan, India, Iraq, and Israel also to enjoy the stabilizing benefits of
nuclear weapons. This is, in fact, precisely the argument made by the father of the Pakistani bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan. He said at
a press conference in 1998, alluding to the fact that Pakistan had a nuclear capability for many years before its actual nuclear tests,
"The nuclear weapon is a peace guarantor. It gave peace to Europe, it gave peace to us .... I believe my work has saved this country for
the last twenty years from many wars" (NNI-News 1998). Western security specialists and media pundits have argued ,
on the other hand, that deterrence as practiced by the superpowers during the Cold War may not work in Third World

settings because Third World adversaries tend to share common borders and because they lack the
resources to develop secure second-strike capabilities. On closer examination these arguments, plausible enough at first,
turn out to be deeply problematic, especially in their silences about the risks of deterrence as practiced by the superpowers. I shall take
them in turn. First, there is the argument that deterrence may not work for countries, such as India and Pakistan, that share a common
border and can therefore attack one another very quickly.'0 As one commentator put it, In the heating conflict between India and
Pakistan, one of the many dangers to be reckoned with is there would be no time for caution. While it would have taken more

than a half-hour for a Soviet-based nuclear missile to reach the United States-time at least for America to
double-check its computer screen or use the hotline-the striking distance between India and Pakistan is no
more than five minutes. That is not enough time to confirm a threat or even think twice before giving the
order to return fire, and perhaps mistakenly incinerate an entire nation. [Lev 1998:A19] This formulation
focuses only on the difference in missile flight times while ignoring other countervailing differences in
missile configurations that would make deterrence in South Asia look more stable than deterrence as
practiced by the superpowers. Such a view overlooks the fact that the missiles deployed by the two superpowers were, by the
end of the Cold War, MIRVed and extraordinarily accurate. MIRVed missiles-those equipped with Multiple Independently Targetable
Reentry Vehicles-carry several warheads, each capable of striking a different target. The MX, for example, was designed to
carry ten warheads, each capable of landing within 100 feet of a separate target. The unprecedented accuracy of the MX, together
with the fact that one MX missile could-in theory at least-destroy ten Soviet missiles, made it, as some arms controllers worried at the
time, a destabilizing weapon that, together with its Russian counterparts, put each superpower in a "use-it-or-lose-it"
situation whereby it would have to launch its missiles immediately if it believed itself under attack . Thus,

once one adds accuracy and MIRVing to the strategic equation, the putative contrast between stable
deterrence in the West and unstable deterrence in South Asia looks upside down, even if one were to grant the
difference in flight times between the Cold War superpowers and between the main adversaries in South Asia. But there is no reason to
grant the alleged difference in flight times. Lev says that it would have taken "more than half an hour" for American and Russian
missiles to reach their targets during the Cold War (1998:A19). While this was more or less true for intercontinental ballistic missiles
(ICBMs), it was not true for the submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) the superpowers moved in against each other's coasts;
these were about ten minutes of flight time from their targets. Nor was it true of the American Jupiter missiles stationed in Turkey,
right up against the Soviet border, in the early 1960s. Nor was it true of the Pershing IIs deployed in Germany in the 1980s. When the
antinuclear movement claimed that it was destabilizing to move the Pershings to within less than ten minutes of flight time of
Moscow, the U.S. government insisted that anything that strengthened NATO's attack capability strengthened

nuclear deterrence. Here again one sees a double standard in the arguments made to legitimate "our"
nuclear weapons. Finally, even if we were to accept that the superpowers would have half-an- hour's warning against five minutes
for countries in South Asia, to think that this matters is to be incited to a discourse based on the absurd premise that there is any
meaningful difference between half an hour and five minutes for a country that believes itself under nuclear attack (see Foucault
1980a: ch. 1). While half an hour does leave more time to verify warnings of an attack, would any sane na- tional leadership feel any
safer irrevocably launching nuclear weapons against an adversary in half an hour rather than five minutes? In either case, the time
frame for decision making is too compressed. In other words, the argument about missile flight times, quite apart from the fact that it
misrepresents the realities of deterrence between the superpowers, is a red herring. What really matters is not the
geographical proximity of the adversarial nations but, rather, their confidence that each could survive an
attack by the other with some sort of retaliatory capability. Many analysts have argued that newly nuclear nations with
small arsenals would lack a secure second-strike capability. Their nuclear weapons would therefore invite rather than

deter a preemptive or preventive attack, especially in a crisis. Thus the New York Times editorialized that "unlike the
superpowers, India and Pakistan will have small, poorly protected nuclear stocks. No nation in that situation can be sure that its
weapons could survive a nuclear attack" (1998:14). Similarly, British defense analyst Jonathan Power has written that "superpower
theorists have long argued that stability is not possible unless there is an assured second-strike capability. .. . Neither India and [sic]
Pakistan have the capability, as the superpowers did, to develop and build such a second-strike capability" (1997:29). This
argument has been rebutted by Kenneth Waltz (1982, 1995a, 1995b), a leading political scientist seen as a maverick for his
views on nuclear proliferation. Waltz, refusing the binary distinction at the heart of the dominant discourse, suggests that horizontal

nuclear proliferation could bring about what he calls "nuclear peace" in troubled regions of the globe just
as, in his view, it stabilized the superpower relationship. Waltz argues that, although the numbers of weapons
are different, the general mathematical principle of deterrence-the appalling asymmetry of risk and rewardremains the same and may even, perversely, work more effectively in new nuclear nations. Waltz points out that
it would take very few surviving nuclear weapons to inflict "unacceptable damage" on a Third World
adversary: "Do we expect to lose one city or two, two cities or ten? When these are the pertinent questions,
we stop thinking about running risks and start thinking about how to avoid them" (1995a:8). Waltz argues that,
while a first strike would be fraught with terrifying uncertainties in any circumstances, the discussion of building secure
retaliatory capabilities in the West has tended, ethnocentrically, to focus on the strategies the superpowers
employed to do so: building vast arsenals at huge expense on land, at sea, and in the air. But Third World
countries have cheaper, more low-tech options at their disposal too: "Nuclear warheads can be fairly small and light, and they are easy
to hide and to move. People worry about terrorists stealing nuclear warheads be- cause various states have so many of them.
Everybody seems to believe that terrorists are capable of hiding bombs. Why should states be unable to do what terrorist gangs are
thought to be capable of?" (Waltz 1995a:19). Waltz (1982, 1995a) also points out that Third World states could easily and cheaply
confuse adversaries by deploying dummy nuclear weapons, and he reminds readers that the current nuclear powers (with the exception
of the United States) all passed through and survived phases in their own nuclear infancy when their nuclear arsenals were similarly
small and vulnerable. The discourse on proliferation assumes that the superpowers' massive interlocking arsenals of highly accurate
MIRVed missiles deployed on hair-trigger alert and designed with first-strike capability backed by global satellite capability was stable
and that the small, crude arsenals of new nuclear nations would be unstable, but one could quite plausibly argue the reverse. Indeed, as
mentioned above, by the 1980s a number of analysts in the West were concerned that the MIRVing of missiles and the accuracy of
new guidance systems were generating increasing pressure to strike first in a crisis. Although the strategic logic might be a little
different, they saw temptations to preempt at the high end of the nuclear social system as well as at the low end (Aldridge 1983; Gray
and Payne 1980; Scheer 1982). There were also concerns (explored in more detail below) that the complex computerized earlywarning systems with which each superpower protected its weapons were generating false alarms that might lead to accidental war
(Blair 1993; Sagan 1993). Thus one could argue-as former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (1986) and a number of others
have-that deterrence between the United States and Russia would be safer and more stable if each side

replaced their current massive strategic arsenals with a small force of about one hundred nuclear weaponsabout the size India's nu- clear stockpile is believed to be, as it happens.

Link -- Prolif AT Crazy Third World

The assumption that Third World military officers cannot control their impulses entrenches an
orientalist mindset that endorses negative racial stereotypes

Gusterson, Associate Professor

of Anthropology
1999
Hugh

and Science and Technology Studies at MIT, 2/

Nuclear Weapons and the Other in the Western Imagination, JSTOR [BB]

After dictators and religious fanatics, the Western imagination is most afraid of Third World military
officers. The academics Brito and Intriligator, for example, tell us that Third World governments might acquire nuclear
weapons "mainly for deterrence purposes but might not be able to control such weapons once they were
available .... Unilateral initiatives by junior officers could lead to these weapons going off" (Brito and
Intriligator 1982:140). One finds the same presumption in the writings of Nigel Calder, who also worries about Third World military
officers: "An American or Russian general in Europe is not going to let off the first nuclear weapon on his own

initiative, even in the heat of battle, but will the same discipline apply to ... a Pakistani general who has a
private nuclear theory about how to liberate Kashmir?" (1979:77). Oliver North notwithstanding, it is taken as so obvious
it does not need explaining that Third World junior officers, unlike our own, are prone to take dangerous unilateral initiatives. Calder's
passage only makes sense if one accepts the contrast it states as unquestionably natural. It is the kind of ideological statement that the
French theorist Roland Barthes characterized as "falsely obvious" (1972:11). As Edward Said says, once a group has been
orientalized, "virtually anything can be written or said about it, without challenge or demurral " (1978:287).
This presumption that the Third World body politic cannot control its military loins is, I believe, a coded or

metaphorical way of discussing a more general lack of control over impulses , a pervasive lack of discipline,
assumed to afflict people of color.

Link -- Terrorism
The AFFs construction of an impending terror attack
writes the future as a site of incomprehensible trauma. To
plan for catastrophe is to graft fear and anxiety onto the
bodies of all liberal political subjects. The AFF makes
unending war the only possible future and replaces
politics with an anxiety riddled fear of the future.
Neocleous 2012
/Mark, Professor of the Critique of Political Economy, Politics and History @ Brunel University, London,
Dont Be Scared, Be Prepared: Trauma-Anxiety-Resilience, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 2012
37: 188 originally published online 13 June 2012, DOI: 10.1177/0304375412449789, SAGEOnline/
In a discussion in 2003, Jacques Derrida asked a pertinent question: imagine that the Americans and,
through them, the entire world, had been told: what has just happened, the spectacular destruction of
two towers . . . is an awful thing, a terrible crime, a pain without measure, but its all over, it wont
happen again, there will never again be anything as awful as or more awful than that. Mourning would be
possible, selves could be remade, pages would be turned, and a line could be drawn under the trauma. But
as Derrida suggests, the traumatism which followed, like all traumatism, is produced by the

future, by the to come, by the threat of the worst to come, rather than by an aggression that
is over and done with.27 Derridas suggestion runs counter to the common trope of trauma and
memory, an approach which encourages us to think of trauma in terms of a remaking of the self in the
light of the past, as unclaimed experience, as the redemptive authority of history, as forgetfulness
and forgiveness, as struggles over representations of the past, as healing.28 This is especially the
case following 9/11, an event which is presented to us as the collective trauma of our timethese are now
the days after, as one character puts it in Don DeLillos post-9/11 novel Falling Man. But Derridas
suggestion helps us read trauma in terms of the danger of the terror to come, or which might

be to come. The trauma is the trauma of a future which is unknowable but imaginable, and
imaginable as traumatic. The wound of trauma is less the wound of the past and much
more, to paraphrase Derrida, a wound which remains open in our terror of the danger that we
imagine lies ahead. The terror lies not in what has happened in the past but in the danger
and the anxiety of what we imagine threatens to happen, and which we are encouraged to
imagine as being worse than anything that has ever taken place . In this light, the issue is not the
remaking of the self in the light of past trauma but the making of the self in preparation for the
trauma to come. And that making of the self is how political subjectivity now comes to be
shaped: endlessly, just like the war itself. What we need to consider, then, is not acts that are
somehow genuinely traumatic per se and how they are governed. Rather, what we need to consider is how
and why so many acts are produced as trauma and what that production does to contemporary political
subjectivity. For the imagination of danger and terror is the contemporary psychopolitical
condition of trauma politics. If the catastrophe must be imagined and the worst-case
scenario considered so that contingency plans, emergency measures, and, more than anything, the

security arrangements be put in place, then trauma is mobilized to integrate us into the
security measures of endless war. Trauma has become a means of organizing the subject of
security/insecurity within a social field defined as war . This is not liberation from past
violence but preparation for violence in the future. If society must be defended, as we are
now all fond of saying with Foucauldian irony (albeit with rather different levels of irony, depending on
our politics), then it must be defended more than anything from its future traumas. This is
where trauma connects to the growth of resilience as a political concept.29 If resilience has come to

the fore in the context of an anxious political psyche engaged in a war on terror and
within the wider neoliberal authoritarianism confronting us, we might add that it has done so for

a social order and international system understanding itself as traumatized and preparing for
more trauma to come. Resilience training represents a general preparation for events defined in
advance as traumatic. As Pat OMalley puts it, resilience does not seek only to render individuals able to
bounce back after trauma, an essentially reactive model. Rather, it aims to create subjects capable of
adapting to, and exploiting to their advantage, situations of radical uncertainty.30 The biological and
psychological frailty implied in the concept of trauma has to be somehow compensated for in advance by
the strength and endurance implied in the concept of resilience. To be a viable political subject, now,
means planning ones resilience to withstand the trauma to come . It is for this reason that the
psy-disciplines have been central to the growth of resilience. The American Psychological Association
launched a major Road to Resilience campaign in 2002 to link those types of traumatic events (i.e.,
September 11, 2001) with the hardships that define all of our lives, anytime that people are struggling
with an event in their communities. It became clear that these events helped to open a window to self
discovery for many, said Jan Peterson, assistant executive director of public relations in APAs Practice
Directorate. People were interested in learning more about themselvesand in particular, how to become
more resilient. The APA launched a multi-media approach, with a free tool kit including 10 ways to
build resilience, a documentary video Aftermath: The Road to Resilience with three overarching
messages (resilience can be learned; resilience is a journey, not an event or single turning point;
there is no prescribed timeline for the road to resilience), special phases of the campaign including
Resilience for Kids and Teens, and resilience workshops for journalists.31 The main theme to emerge is
how individuals, communities and organizations might bounce back from any attacks, setbacks or
challenges.32 A leading article called Providing Direction on The Road to Resilience by Russ Newman,
Executive Director at the APA, published in Behavioral Health Management in July 2003 to publicize the
campaign, has been made available on websites run by and for business management.33 Elsewhere one
finds that resilience workshops are conducted in centers specializing in trauma.34 By pairing trauma

with resilience, the subjects personal anxieties become bound up with the political dangers
facing the nation; the trauma is individual and collective, and so the resilience training is
the training in and of liberal subjects such that capitalist order might be properly secured.
The fabrication of liberal subjectivity and its martial defense are to be achieved in one and
the same moment. In this way, the traumaresilience couplet is now central to the politics of
security: the measures proposed in the unsuccessful National Resilience Development Act in 2003 found
their way into the ubiquitous powers of the Department of Homeland Security, and the UKs more
recent National Security Strategy (2008) is structured around the same problematicthe concept of
resilience runs through the text, encompassing the armed forces, the police, the British people,
the private sector, human and social resilience, community resilience, and on it go es.35

This planned defense and its prior imagining of the community and its subjects as anxious
and traumatized closes down alternate possibilities. Trauma and, relatedly, PTSD are
themselves symptomatic of the way contemporary order is constituted as a certain kind of
war, the mobilization of emotion within this war, and the kind of responses we are allowed
to have to it. We can be traumatized, we can prepare to be traumatized, we can be trained to be
resilient against the trauma to come, and we can obtain some therapy to help us cope in advance. But we
must not be challenged to respond politically. Resilience thereby designates an aptitude
for little other than keeping things exactly as they are. We can expect to be traumatized
collectively but not mobilized politically. Trauma talk is now part of the jargon of authenticity.
Seemingly irresistible, it has become pure ideology, a language providing power with its
refuge; seemingly responsive to real human need, it functions as a form of political
administration. Politics has been replaced by the administration of anxious and
traumatized subjects in their acceptance of the permanent security war.

Their impact claims are self-fulfillingconstant repetition of terrorism scenarios

creates a vicious cycle of fear and violence.
Robert Jay Lifton, Visiting Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, previously Distinguished

Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at the Graduate School and Director of The Center on Violence and
Human Survival at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York, 2003
(Superpower Syndrome: Americas Apocalyptic Confrontation With The World, Published by Thunders
Mouth Press / Nation Books, ISBN 1560255129, p. 115-116)
The amorphousness of the war on terrorism carries with it a paranoid edge, the suspicion that
terrorists and their supporters are everywhere and must be preemptively attacked lest they
emerge and attack us. Since such a war is limitless and infiniteextending from the farthest
reaches of Indonesia or Afghanistan to Hamburg, Germany, or New York City, and from
immediate combat to battles that continue into the unending futureit inevitably becomes
associated with a degree of megalomania as well. As the planet's greatest military power replaces
the complex world with its own imagined stripped-down us-versus-them version of it, our
distorted national self becomes the world. Despite the Bush administration's constant invocation
of the theme of "security," the war on terrorism has created the very oppositea sense of fear
and insecurity among Americans, which is then mobilized in support of further aggressive plans
in the extension of the larger "war." What [end page 115] results is a vicious circle that
engenders what we seek to destroy: our excessive response to Islamist attacks creating ever more
terrorists and, sooner or later, more terrorist attacks, which will in turn lead to an escalation of
the war on terrorism, and so on. The projected "victory" becomes a form of aggressive longing,
of sustained illusion, of an unending "Fourth World War" and a mythic cleansing of terrorists, of
evil, of our own fear. The American military apocalyptic can then be said to partner with and act
in concert with the Islamist apocalyptic.

Their terrorism impact rests on a simplified construction of depoliticized good and

evilthis is epistemologically bankrupt.
Anastassia Tsoukala, Research Fellow at the University of Paris V-Sorbonne and Associate Professor at
the University of Paris XI, 2008 (Boundary-creating Processes and the Social Construction of Threat,
Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Volume 33, Issue 2, April-June, Available Online via Academic
Search Elite, p. 147-148)
The moral inferiority of terrorists is brought forth through the frequent use of a Manichean
image of the world, where the good lies with the threatened Western countries and the evil with
the aggressors, as is shown by the latter's lack of respect for human life and the indiscriminate
character of their targets. To further underpin the dangerousness of the threat, the terrorist act is
deprived of any political objective and is turned into a goal in itself, as if terrorists were solely
aiming to inflict pain and suffering. This alleged affective insensibility facilitates the
depoliticization of the conflict as it turns it into more classic patterns of criminal behavior. While
implying that the retaliation will not be a conventional war,45 the depoliticization and
subsequent criminalization of the conflict create, by definition, a huge moral gap between the
aggressors and the aggressed and confirm the already established moral superiority of the
aggressed. The cultural inferiority theme prolongs the Manichean image underlying the moral
inferiority theme by reinforcing the creation of an outer space, in rupture with the rest of the
world, that terrorists can be relegated to. The uncivilized nature of this outer space is usually
illustrated by the use of two opposed terms: barbaric, and civilized. Terrorism is seen as a
challenge to the Western perception of civilizationthat is, the belief in an uninterrupted
civilizing process that gradually improves the human condition. The establishment of this view
relies on a hierarchical classification of civilizations following two principles: The civilized
world is synonymous with the Western world, and all non-Western countries are culturally
inferior insofar as they do not share the same democratic ideals. As these democratic ideals
include some major moral principles, mainly related to the human-rights issue, this alleged
cultural superiority can easily imply a moral one, thus discrediting completely the political and
philosophical system the terrorists rely on. This outcasting from the overall society further rests
upon the alienation of the aggressors from the Muslim in-group. Following the assumption that
terrorism has nothing to do with the true message of Islam, Muslims are totally depoliticized to
be solely defined in cultural terms. Islam is presented as a peaceful and tolerant religion,
distorted by its illegitimate appropriators (i.e., people pursuing other, nonspecified objectives). A
clear line is thus drawn between the Muslim community and the few extremists, who are unable

or [end page 147] unwilling to share the dominant values of both the British society and their
own community.
Their representations of terrorism lend ideological support to mass violence

John Collins, Assistant Professor of Global Studies at St. Lawrence

University, and Ross Glover, Visiting Professor of Sociology at St.
Lawrence University, 2002 (Collateral Language, p. 6-7)
The Real Effects of Language As any university student knows, theories about the social construction and social effects of language
have become a common feature of academic scholarship. Conservative critics often argue that those who use these
theories of language (e.g., deconstruction) are just talking about language, as opposed to talking about the
real world. The essays in this book, by contrast, begin from the premise that language matters in the most concrete,

immediate way possible: its use, by political and military leaders, leads directly to violence in the form of
war, mass murder (including genocide), the physical destruction of human communities, and the devastation of
the natural environment. Indeed, if the world ever witnesses a nuclear holocaust, it will probably be because
leaders in more than one country have succeeded in convincing their people, through the use of political
language, that the use of nuclear weapons and, if necessary, the destruction of the earth itself, is justifiable.
From our perspective, then, every act of political violencefrom the horrors perpetrated against Native
Americans to the murder of political dissidents in the Soviet Union to the destruction of the World Trade
Center, and now the bombing of Afghanistanis intimately linked with the use of language. Partly what
we are talking about here, of course, are the processes of manufacturing consent and shaping peoples perception of the world around them; people are more likely to support acts of violence committed in their
name if the recipients of the violence have been defined as terrorists, or if the violence is presented as a
defense of freedom. Media analysts such as Noam Chomsky have written eloquently about the corrosive effects that this kind of process has on the political culture of supposedly democratic societies. At the risk of
stating the obvious, however, the most fundamental effects of violence are those that are visited upon the
objects of violence; the language that shapes public opinion is the same language that burns villages , besieges
entire populations, kills and maims human bodies, and leaves the ground scarred with bomb craters and littered with land mines. As
George Orwell so famously illustrated in his work, acts of violence can easily be made more palatable through
the use of euphemisms such as pacification or, to use an example discussed in this book, targets. It is important to
point out, however, that the need for such language derives from the simple fact that the violence itself is
abhorrent. Were it not for the abstract language of vital interests and surgical strikes and the flattering
language of civilization and just wars, we would be less likely to avert our mental gaze from the
physical effects of violence.
Attempts to secure the world from terrorism replicate their harms

Mitchell, 05

(Andrew , Stanford U. Humanities Post-Doctoral Fellow, "Heidegger and

Terrorism," Research in Phenomenology, Volume 35, Number 1, 2005 , pp. 181-218)

Government and politics are simply further means of directing ways of life according to plan; and no one,
neither terrorist nor politician, should be able to alter these carefully constructed ways of life . Ways of life are
themselves effects of the plan, and the predominant way of life today is that of an all-consuming Americanism.
National differences fall to the wayside. The homeland, when not completely outmoded, can only appear as commodified
quaintness. All governments participate in the eradication of national differences. Insofar as Americanism represents the attempt to
annihilate the "homeland," then under the aegis of the abandonment of being, all governments and forms of

leadership become Americanism. The loss of national differences is accordant with the advent of terrorism,
since terrorism knows no national bounds but, rather, threatens difference and boundaries as such. Terrorism is
everywhere, where "everywhere" no longer refers to a collection of distinct places and locations but instead to a "here" that is the same
as there, as every "there." The threat of terrorism is not international, but antinational or, to strain a Heideggerian formulation,
unnational. Homeland security, insofar as it destroys the very thing that it claims to protect, is nothing

opposed to terrorism, but rather the consummation of its threat. Our leaders, in their attempt to secure the
world against terrorism, only serve to further drive the world towards its homogenized state. The elimination of
difference in the standing-reserve along with the elimination of national differences serve to identify the threat of terrorism with the
quest for security. The absence of this threat would be the absence of being, and its consummation would be the absence of being as
well. Security is only needed where there is a threat. If a threat is not perceived, if one believes oneself

invulnerable, then there is no need for security. Security is for those who know they can be injured, for
those who can be damaged. Does America know that it can be damaged? If security requires a recognition of one's own

vulnerability, then security can only be found in the acknowledgment of one's threatened condition, and this means that it can only be
found in a recognition of being as threat. To be secure, there must be the threat. For this reason, all of the planned

securities that attempt to abolish the threat can never achieve the security they seek. Security requires that
we preserve the threat, and this means that we must act in the office of preservers. As preservers, what we are
charged to preserve is not so much the present being as the concealment that inhabits it. Preserving a thing means to not challenge it
forth into technological availability, to let it maintain an essential concealment. That we participate in this essencing of being does not
make of it a subjective matter, for there is no isolated subject in preservation, but an opening of being. Heidegger will name this the
clearing of the truth (Wahrhet) of being, and it is this clearing that Dasein preserves (bewahrt). When a thing truthfully is, when it is
what it is in truth, then it is preserved. In preserving beings, Dasein participates in the truth (preservation) of being. The truth of

being is being as threat, and this threat only threatens when Dasein preserves it in terror. Dasein is not
innocent in the terrorization of being. On the contrary, Dasein is complicit in it. Dasein refuses to abolish
terrorism. For this reason, a Heideggerian thinking of terrorism must remain skeptical of all the various
measures taken to oppose terrorism, to root it out or to circumvent it. These are so many attempts to do
away with what threatens, measures that are themselves in the highest degree willful. This will can only impose
itself upon being, can only draw out more and more of its wrath, and this inward wrath of being maintains itself in a never-ending
supply. The will can only devastate the earth. Rather than approaching the world in terms of resources to be secured, true security can
only be found in the preservation of the threat of being. It is precisely when we are busy with security measures and

the frantic organization of resources that we directly assault the things we would preserve. The threat of
being goes unheeded when things are restlessly shuttled back and forth, harried, monitored, and surveilled.
The threat of being is only preserved when things are allowed to rest. In the notes to the "Evening Conversation,"
security is thought in just such terms: Security (what one understands by this) arises not from securing and the measures taken for this;
security resides in rest [in der Ruhe] and is itself made superfluous by this. (MA 77: 244)23 The rest in question is a rest from the
economic cycling and circulating of the standing reserve. The technological unworld, the situation of total war, is precisely the era of
restlessness ("The term 'totality' says nothing more; it names only the spread of the hitherto known into the 'restless"' [GA 69: 181]).
Security is superfluous here, which is only to say that it is unnecessary or useless. It is not found in utility, but in the preserved state of
the useless. Utility and function are precisely the dangers of a civil that has turned antagonistic towards nature. In rest, they no longer
determine the being of the thing. In resting, things are free of security measures, but not for all that rendered insecure. Instead, they are
preserved. There is no security; this is what we have to preserve. Heideggerian thinking is a thinking that thinks away from simple
presence and absence. It thinks what Heidegger calls "the between" (das Zwischen). This between is a world of nonpresence and
nonabsence. Annihilation is impossible for this world and so is security. The terror experienced today is a clue to the withdrawal of
being. The world is denatured, drained of reality. Everything is threatened and the danger only ever increases. Dasein flees to a
metaphysics of presence to escape the threatened world, hoping there to find security. But security cannot do away with the threat,
rather it must guard it. Dasein guards the truth of being in the experience of terror. What is perhaps repugnant to consider in all this is
that being calls for terrorism and for terrorists. With the enframing of being and the circulation of standing-reserve, what is
has already been destroyed. Terrorism is merely the ugly confirmation of this point. As we have seen, being does not linger behind the
scenes but is found in the staging itself. If being is to terrorize-if, in other words, this is an age of terrorism-then
being must call for terrorists. They are simply more "slaves of the history of beyng " (GA 69: 209) and, in
Heidegger's eyes, no different from the politicians of the day in service to the cause of Americanism . But
someone might object, the terrorists are murderers and the politicians are not. Granting this objection despite its obvious naivety, we
can nonetheless see that both politicians and terrorists are called for by the standing-reserve, the one to ensure its

nonabsence, that the plan will reach everyone everywhere, and the other to ensure its nonpresence, that all
beings will now be put into circulation by the threat of destruction. In this regard, "human resources" are no
different from "livestock," and with this, an evil worse than death has already taken place. Human
resources do not die, they perish.
That means only we access an external impact Collins says the only scenario for nuclear holocaust
will be if we convince the public, through hyperbolic language and an ambiguous alterity like
terrorists, can we mold the country's support in favor of an actual nuclear attack
The affirmative's depiction of an imminent terrorist threat transforms the real people who commit
terrorist acts into " the terr-ists ," a group of shadowy monsters who are always just around the
corner plotting their next attack. This framing of the terrorist threat sidesteps the question of why
they hate us and normalizes a state of permanent national insecurity.

Chernus 6, Ira, Professor of Religious Studies and Co-Director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of
Colorado-Boulder, 2006 ( Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin , Published by Paradigm
Publishers, ISBN 1594512752, p. 3-4)

Monsters are not real-unless you believe in them . Monsters exist only in fictional
stories. But if you really believe in the stories, you will believe in the
monsters. Then the monsters will have very real effects. That's how monsters

become real. That's what we are doing in our war on terrorism. On September 11,
2001, some very real people hijacked four airplanes and did very terrible, wholly
unjustifiable things. Then America turned those people, and many other people
perhaps (or perhaps not) associated with them, into monsters. We call them
"the terrorists." The real people are certainly dangerous to us. They are far more dangerous, though, as monsters.
Every day, America goes abroad searching for those monsters and trying to destroy them. Every day, that effort
puts our freedom, our civil liberties, our national spirit, and our national security at risk.
Every day, it creates new ways to harm our country and our people. Muslims are
attacked, imprisoned, and tortured, giving anti-U.S. forces a powerful recruiting tool.
Prolonged war in Iraq provides a rich training ground for the recruits. Threats of
preemptive attack against Iran, Syria, and other nations destabilize the
global political scene, creating new enemies. Increased spending for weapons,
especially nuclear weapons, encourages other nations to spend more too, spurring
nuclear proliferation. Every day, the United States sells weapons to nations that are now
allies but might someday turn those weapons against us. Bush administration policies alienate world
opinion, making it more likely that allies will turn into enemies. Meanwhile, restrictions on civil liberties
create constitutional dilemmas and growing political splits at home. The government
spies on, and sometimes imprisons, innocent people. As the costs of national security rise dramatically
(military spending in fiscal 2007 will exceed half a trillion dollars) the ballooning budget deficit plays havoc with the
nation's financial future. Huge sums must be borrowed from foreign nations, giving those nations (including most notably,
China) unpredictable leverage over the U.S. economy. And billions are wasted in homeland security efforts that tum out to
be more or less useless. As long as people want to attack us, they will find a way, no

matter how much we spend to stop them. We won't be safe until they no
longer want to attack us. So far, nearly everything the United States has
done in response to 9/11 has given them more reason to want to attack us. If
we want to reverse our course--if we want to make ourselves more secure--the most
important thing is to understand why they want to attack us. Or, as the question is so
often put, Why do they hate us? But thats a question you ask only about human beings, who have reasons and
motives for their hatred. You dont ask that question about monsters. You simply search them
out and destroy them. Americans faced a choice on that dreadful September 11 and still face the same
choice today: Treat the attackers as human beings, or treat them as monsters? To treat them
as human beings means finding out why they hate us. Its easy enough. On the night of
September 11, 2001, it took me about five minutes of Googling to find several interviews
with Osama bin Laden, where he repeated the same grievances over and over again. U.S.
troops were stationed throughout Muslim lands including Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of
Islam. U.S. bombing and sanctions were killing people in Iraq every day. The United
States supported Israels occupation of Palestine. By March, 2004, the United States had
moved the brunt of its Middle East military force from Saudi Arabia to Iraq. Otherwise,
little had changed. When three trains were bombed in Madrid, the group claiming responsibility (the Abu Hafs alMasri Brigades) said bluntly: Stop targeting us, release our prisoners, and leave our land, and we will stop attacking
you.i[2] No grievances could ever begin to justify the horrors of 9 /11 and Madrid. But were

the policies that angered the attackers so important that we should continue them, even
if it risks more attacks on our soil? Who can say? The question got, and still gets, virtually no
public discussion. By common consent, the whole subject of their motives has been
sealed by a Great Taboo. Instead, most Americans have settled for two simplistic slogans
coined in the White House: "They hate our freedoms." "They're flat evil." The attackers,
past and future, are transformed from human beings into monsters, driven by irrational
evil or a bloodthirsty desire to take away our freedoms. That means we have done
nothing to provoke them. No U.S. policy changes could reduce their desire to attack
uS,again. So there is nothing to talk about. We just hunker down, spend more billions on
security, and wait for the next attack. When the next attack comes, more than four out of
every five Americans believe, itwill "strengthen the nation's resolve to be even tougher in

going after terrorists."4 So there is every reason to expect that we'll strike out at the
monsters again, remain under the Great Taboo, and be just as insecure, waiting for yet
another round of attack and counterattack.
Secondthis turns the case the affirmatives framing of the terrorist threat entrenches a cycle of
insecurity that makes attacks more likely.

Chernus 6, Ira, Professor of Religious Studies and Co-Director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of
Colorado-Boulder, 2006 ( Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin ,
Published by Paradigm Publishers, ISBN 1594512752, p. 3-4)
The structure is simple enough. A

battle is raging between absolute good and absolute evil. Evil

threatens to unleash chaos and anarchy upon the world. The good must summon up the
strength, both moral and military, to stand firm against the threat and thus protect the
social order. That strength is the sign, and often the very definition, of moral goodness.
When this utterly familiar plot is transferred from the realm of fairy tales to the realm of
national security policy, it runs up against a chilling paradox. The stories are supposed to
provide a sense of security. Yet they can never achieve that aim. Tales of a battle between
good and evil must depict the world as a threatening or even terrifying place, full of
monsters. That alone would be enough to make people feel insecure. But there is more.
The stories always imply (and often say quite openly) that the monsters can never be destroyed.
The best to hope for is to build a stout defense against them, one strong enough to keep
them from destroying us. The monsters may be contained. But their threat will
never go away. The stories about social values that Bush and the neoconservatives created before 9/11 show this
paradox all too clearly. In those stories, the monstersliberals, sinners, secular humanistsplay a crucial
role; they cant be eliminated from the plot; they can never go away. So the battle
against them must go on forever. That is just what has been happening in the
United States since on September 11, 2001, the administration started turning its stories
about domestic values into war stories about foreign monsters to destroy. Instead of
fighting the real war that was thrust upon us on that incomprehensible morning four
years ago, as Mark Danner writes, we stubbornly insisted on fighting a war of the
imagination, an ideological struggle that we defined not by frankly
appraising the real enemy before us but by focusing on the mirror of our
own obsessions.ii[7] By substituting imagination for reality in its foreign policy, the Bush
administration has entrenched the nation deeper and deeper in the cycle of insecurity. It
was, and still is, trying to find security in stories that say we can never be truly secure.
They give us no reason even to try to be secure and every reason to go on staying
insecure. As long as such stories prevail, they distort perceptions of reality, creating
policies that are profoundly unrealistic. So its more likely that the U nited States will
suffer another grievous attack.

Aff terror claims are neither objective or truedominant

experts rely on politicized research, policymakers exclude
critique for political motives and limit the sources of
knowledge experts use
Raphael 9 [Sam, IR, Kingston University, Critical terrorism studies, ed. Richard Jackson, 50-51]
ellipses in original
The close relationship between the academic field of terrorism studies and the US slate means that it is
critically important to analyse the research output from key experts within the community. This is
particularly the case because of the aura of objectivity surrounding the terrorism knowledge
generated by academic experts. Running throughout the core literature is a positivist

assumption, explicitly slated or otherwise, that the research conducted is apolitical and objective
(see for example, Hoffman. 1992: 27; Wilkinson. 2003). There is little to no reflexivity on behalf of
the scholars, who see themselves as wholly dissociated from the politics surrounding the
subject of terrorism. This relocation of academic knowledge about terrorism is reinforced
by those in positions of power in the US who tend to distinguish the experts from other kinds
of overtly political actors. For example, academics are introduced to Congressional hearings in a
manner which privileges their nonpartisan input: Good morning. The Special Oversight Panel on Terrorism
meets in open session to receive testimony and discuss the present and future course of terrorism in the
Middle EastIt has been the Terrorism Panels practice, in the interests of objectivity and gathering all the
facts, to pair classified briefings and open briefingsThis way we garner the best that the classified world
of intelligence has to offer and the best from independent scholars working in universities, think tanks, and
other institutions... (Saxton, 2000, emphasis added) The representation of terrorism expertise as
independent and as providing objectivity and facts has significance for its contribution to the
policymaking process in the US. This is particularly the case given that, as we will see, core experts
lend to insulate the broad direction of US policy from critique. Indeed, as Alexander George noted,
it is precisely because they are trained to clothe their work in the trappings of objectivity,
independence and scholarship that expert research is particularly effective in securing
influence and respect for the claims made by US policymakers (George, 1991b: 77). Given this,
it becomes vital to subject the content of terrorism studies to close scrutiny. Based upon a wider, systematic
study of the research output of key figures within the field (Raphael, forthcoming), and building upon
previous critiques of terrorism expertise (see Chomsky and Herman, 1979; Herman, 1982; Herman and
OSullivan, 1989; Chomsky, 1991; George, 1991b; Jackson, 2007g), this chapter aims to provide a critical
analysis of some of the major claims made by these experts and to reveal the ideological functions served
by much of the research. Rather than doing so across the board, this chapter focuses on research on the
subject of terrorism from the global South which is seen to challenge US interests. Examining this aspect of
research is important, given that the threat from this form of terrorism has led the US and its
allies to intervene throughout the South on behalf of their national security, with profound
consequences for the human security of people in the region. Specifically, this chapter examines two
major problematic features which characterise much of the fields research. First, in the context of anti-US
terrorism in the South, many important claims made by key terrorism experts simply replicate

official US government analyses. This replication is facilitated primarily through a

sustained and uncritical reliance on selective US government sources, combined with the
frequent use of unsubstantiated assertion. This is significant, not least because official
analyses have often been revealed as presenting a politically-motivated account of the
subject. Second, and partially as a result of this mirroring of government claims, the field tends to
insulate from critique those counterterrorism policies justified as a response to the
terrorist threat. In particular, the experts overwhelmingly silence the way terrorism is itself often
used as a central strategy within US-led counterterrorist interventions in the South. That is.
counterterrorism campaigns executed or supported by Washington often deploy terrorism as a
mode of controlling violence (Crelinsten, 2002: 83; Stohl, 2006: 18-19). These two features of the
literature are hugely significant. Overall, the core figures in terrorism studies have, wittingly or
otherwise, produced a body of work plagued by substantive problems which together shatter the illusion
of objectivity. Moreover, the research output can be seen to serve a very particular
ideological function for US foreign policy. Across the past thirty years, it has largely served the
interests of US state power, primarily through legitimising an extensive set of coercive
interventions in the global South undertaken under the rubric of various war(s) on terror. After
setting out the method by which key experts within the field have been identified, this chapter will outline
the two main problematic features which characterise much of the research output by these scholars. It will
then discuss the function that this research serves for the US slate.

Terror discourse constructs dominant knowledge projects

that shape policythis excludes alternate forms of
knowledgeterror discourse has broader political
currency which must be interrogated
Jackson 8 [Richard Jackson, IR, Aberystwyth University PhD, University of Canterbury, The Ghosts
of State Terror, 2008, http://users.aber.ac.uk/mys/csrv/ghost%20of%20state%20terror-richard%205.pdf]
Employing a discourse analytic approach, this paper examines the silence on state terrorism within the
mainstream terrorism studies literature. An analysis of more than a hundred academic texts on terrorism,
many by established terrorism experts, reveals that state terrorism is noticeable mainly for its absence. In
some cases, state terrorism is simply defined out of the analysis by the employment of an actor-based
definition: terrorism, it is argued, is a kind of violence performed solely by non-state actors. In
other cases, the possibility of state terrorism is acknowledged but is then given a cursory treatment or
simply ignored as a serious subject of research. Following this textual analysis, the main findingthe
silence on state terrorism within terrorism studiesis subjected to both a first and second order critique. A
first order or immanent critique uses a discourses internal contradictions, mistakes and misconceptions to
criticise it on its own terms and expose the events and perspectives that the discourse fails to
acknowledge or address. In this case, the absence of state terrorism is criticized for its illogical

actor-based definition of terrorism, its politically biased research focus and its failure to
acknowledge the empirical evidence of the extent and nature of state terrorism, particularly that
practiced by Western liberal states and their allies. A second order critique entails reflecting on
the broader political and ethical consequencesthe ideological effectsof the representations
enabled by the discourse, and the ways in which the discourse functions as a political
technology. It is argued that the absence of state terrorism from academic discourse functions to
promote particular kinds of state hegemonic projects, construct a legitimizing public
discourse for foreign and domestic policy, and deflect attention from the terroristic
practices by Western states and their allies. Importantly, the exposure and destabilisation of this
dominant terrorism knowledge opens up critical space for the articulation of alternative and
potentially emancipatory forms of knowledge and practice. Introduction Terrorism studies, once a
fairly minor sub-field of security studies, has now expanded to become a stand-alone field with its own
dedicated journals, research centres, leading scholars and experts, research funding opportunities,
conferences, seminars, and study programmes. It is in fact, one of the fastest expanding areas of research in
the English-speaking academic world, with literally thousands of new books and articles published over the
past few years,1 significant investment in terrorism-related research projects, and increasing numbers of
postgraduate dissertations and undergraduate students.2 A perennial criticism of this voluminous output
however, has been the neglect of state terrorism as a subject for systematic and sustained research, a
problem noted during the Cold War but which seems to have become even more acute since September,
2001.3 To many observers this neglect is somewhat puzzling given that the genealogy of the term
terrorism has its earliest roots in the deployment of violence by states to terrify and intimidate civilian
populations, states have employed terrorism far more extensively than non-state actors over the past two
centuries, state terrorism is far more lethal and destructive than non-state terrorism and the employment of
terror against civilians by states continues unabated in a great many countries today. The purpose of this
paper is to explore this puzzle through the prism of discourse analysis, a form of critical theorising aimed in
part at understanding and describing the relationship between knowledge, power, and politics. Taking as its
starting point that knowledge and its production is never a purely neutral exercise but always

works for someone and for something, this paper seeks to excavate the ideological effects of
the discourse on state terrorism (or, more accurately, the silence within the discourse) in the terrorism
studies field. It argues that the way in which state terrorism is constructed as a (non)subject
both distorts the field as an area of scholarly research, and more importantly, reifies dominant
structures of power and enables particular kinds of elite and state hegemonic projects. The
argument proceeds in three sections. In the first section, I briefly outline the methodological approach
employed in the analysis. This is followed by a discussion of the main findings of the discourse analysisa

description of the ways in which the subject of state terrorism is (and is not) discursively constructed and
deployed within the broader terrorism studies literature. The third section subjects these findings to a first
and second order critique as a means of exploring the effects of the discourse on knowledge, power and
politics. Specifically, I deconstruct and dismiss the most common arguments for not including state
terrorism as a valid object of study within the field of study, as well as illuminate and describe the political
and ideological effects of its non-inclusion. Finally, in the conclusion to the paper, I argue that there are
important analytical and normative reasons for taking state terrorism seriously and incorporating its
systematic analysis into existing research programmes. Analysing the Discourse of State Terrorism As
stated above, the analytical approach employed in this study falls broadly under the mantle of discourse
analysis.4 A form of critical theorising, discourse analysis aims primarily to illustrate and describe the
relationship between textual and social and political processes. In particular, it is concerned with the
politics of representationthe manifest political or ideological consequences of adopting one
mode of representation over another. In this case, I am concerned with the ways in which
state terrorism is representedor not represented, which is itself a kind of representation
as a subject within the field of terrorism studies. Although discourse theorising is employed within a range
of different epistemological paradigmspoststructuralist, postmodernist, feminist, and social constructivist
it is predicated on a shared set of theoretical commitments. Broadly speaking, these include:5 an
understanding of language as constitutive or productive of meaning; an understanding of discourse as
structures of signification which construct social realities, particularly in terms of defining
subjects and establishing their relational positions within a system of signification ;6 an
understanding of discourse as being productive of subjects authorised to speak and act, legitimate
forms of knowledge and political practices and importantly, common sense within particular social
groups and historical settings; an understanding of discourse as necessarily exclusionary and
silencing of other modes of representation; and an understanding of discourse as historically and
culturally contingent, inter-textual, open-ended, requiring continuous articulation and re-articulation and
therefore, open to destabilisation and counter-hegemonic struggle. On this epistemological foundation and
adopting an interpretive logic rather than a causal logic, the discourse analytic technique employed in this
paper proceeded in two main stages. The first stage entailed an examination of a large number of texts from
within the terrorism studies field.7 As such, the primary units of analysis or data for this research were
more than 100 mainstream academic books, articles in the main terrorism studies and international relations
journals, conference papers presented at ISA and APSA, and reports and websites from think-tanks and
research institutions. Each text was examined initially to see if it contained the terms state terrorism or
state terror. Texts that did contain these terms were then examined to see how they were constructed as a
discursive formation and subject of knowledge, how they were deployed within broader narratives, and
how state terrorism was positioned as a subject in relation to non-state terrorism. Employing a grounded
theory approach, the analysis was considered complete when the addition of new texts did not yield any
new insights or categories. The second stage of the research involved subjecting the findings of the textual
analysis to both a first and second order critique. A first order or immanent critique uses a discourses
internal contradictions, mistakes, misconceptions, and omissions to criticise it on its own terms and expose
the events and perspectives that the discourse fails to acknowledge or address. The point of this form of
internal critique is not necessarily to establish the correct or real truth of the subject beyond doubt, but
rather to destabilise dominant interpretations and demonstrate the inherently contested and
political nature of the discourse. A second order critique entails reflecting on the broader
political and ethical consequencesthe ideological effectsof the representations and more
importantly in this case, the silences, enabled by the discourse. Specifically, it involves an
exploration of the ways in which the discourse functions as a symbolic technology 8 that
can be wielded by particular elites and institutions, to: structure the primary subject positions,
accepted knowledge, commonsense and legitimate policy responses to the actors and events being
described; exclude and de-legitimise alternative knowledge and practice; naturalise a particular
political and social order; and construct and sustain a hegemonic regime of truth. A range of
specific discourse analytic techniques are useful in second order critique: genealogical analysis, predicate
analysis, narrative analysis, and deconstructive analysis.9 It is crucial to recognise that discourses are
significant not just for what they say but also for what they do not say; the silences in a discourse can be

as important, or even more important at times, than what is openly stated. This is because silence
can function ideologically in any number of ways. For example, silence can be a deliberate means of
distraction or misdirection from uncomfortable subjects or contrasting viewpoints, the suppression or delegitimisation of alternative forms of knowledge or values, the tacit endorsement of particular kinds of
practices, setting the boundaries of legitimate knowledge, or as a kind of disciplining process directed
against certain actorsamong others. In other words, the silences within a text often function as an
exercise in power; revealing and interrogating those silences therefore, is an important part of
first and second order critique. Lastly, it is important to note that when we examine a discourse as a
broad form of knowledge and practice, it is never completely uniform, coherent, or consistent; it
always has porous borders and often contains multiple exceptions, inconsistencies, and contradictions by
different speakers and texts. Many of the terrorism scholars discussed in this paper for example, upon
a close reading of their individual texts, often express more nuanced arguments than are
necessarily presented here. The important point is not that each text or scholar can be
characterised in the same uniform way, or even that these scholars agree on a broad set of
knowledge claims. It is rather, that taken together as a broader discourse and a body of work

that has political and cultural currency, the narratives and forms of the discourse function
to construct and maintain a specific understanding of, and approach to, terrorism and state
terrorism and that this knowledge has certain political and social effects .

Discourse of terrorism in IR constructs the world in

absolute dichotomies between legitimate state violence
and illegitimate political violence. The problem-solving
policy approach of this type of knowledge reproduces the
issues that drive the violence responsible for the aff
impacts.
Gunning 7Joroen Gunning, Deputy Director of the Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and
Contemporary Political Violence @ Aberystywh (Wales) [Government and Opposition, Blackwell
Publishing, Vol.42, No. 3, p. 369-375]
Each of these critiques goes some way to explain the shortcomings in terrorism research, although the
argument that funding is not available for projects critical of the status quo is perhaps overstated.30 It will
always be difficult to obtain reliable data on clandestine violence, so that scholars will inevitably be
tempted to draw heavily on secondary sources or build elaborate theories on very little , and
often dubious, information.31 Equally, given prevailing power structures, the embeddednes of

researchers within them, and the shock that terroristic tactics typically seek to induce, it
will arguably always be tempting to demonize the terrorist other . However, what most of the
critiques overlook is the crucial fact that, beyond these inherent difficulties, many of the observed
shortcomings can be traced back to the dominance in terrorism research of what Robert Cox
famously called a problem-solving approach: one that takes the world as it finds it, with the
prevailing social and power relationships and the institutions into which they are organised, as the given
framework for action.32 This is not to say that terrorism research has been devoid of critical voices,
if critical is defined, with Cox, as not tak[ing] institutions and social and power relations for granted but
call[ing] them into question by concerning itself with their origins and how and whether they might be in
the process of changing,33 and, significantly, exploring the extent to which the status quo contributes to
the problem of terrorism. Crelinsten, who takes an explicitly critical approach,34 is a long-standing
member of the editorial board of the journal Terrorism and Political Violence, as are Weinberg and
Crenshaw, who are critical in the (loose) sense of problematizing existing dichotomies, historicizing
political violence and moving beyond a state-centric security approach.35 Silke, Horgan, Schmid and
Jongman can also be considered critical in that they are explicitly self-reflexive about assumptions,
methodologies and the shortcomings of terrorism research.36 However, if we consider the typical

characteristics of a problemsolving or traditional approach,37 we find that many of these both dominate
terrorism research (including many of the contributions of Silkes one-timers)38 and can be directly
linked to the shortcomings witnessed in this research. In its most uncritical manifestation and it must be
emphasised that few scholars are wholly uncritical in a Coxian sense a problem-solving approach does
not question its framework of reference, its categories, its origins or the power relations that enable the
production of these categories.39 It is statecentric, takes security to mean the security of the
state rather than that of human beings, on the assumption that the former implies the latter, and

sees security in narrow military or law-and-order terms, as opposed to the wider conception
of human security, as for instance developed by critical security studies.40 It is ahistorical and
ignores social and historical contexts; if it did not, it would have to account for the historical
trajectory of the state, which would undermine the states claim to being uniquely
legitimate. The problem-solving approach is positivist and objectivist, and seeks to explain
the terrorist other from within state-centric paradigms rather than to understand the
other inter-subjectively using interpretative or ethnographic methods. It divides the world
sharply into dichotomies (for instance, between the legitimate and good state, and the
illegitimate and evil terrorists). It posits assumptions based on these dichotomies, often without
adequately exploring whether these assumptions are borne out in practice. It sees interests as fixed, and it
regards those opposed to the status quo as the problem, without considering whether the status quo is part
of the problem and transformation of both sides is necessary for its solution. Not only can many of these
characteristics be found in more or less diluted form in terrorism research41 a legacy of the fields
origins as a sub-field within traditional security and strategic studies but these problem-solving

characteristics can also be shown to contribute directly to its observed shortcomings. The
reported lack of primary data, the dearth of interviews with terrorists and the fields typical
unwillingness to engage subjectively with [the terrorists] motives,42 is in part fuelled by the
fields over-identification with the state, and by the adoption of dichotomies that depict terrorism as an
unredeemable atrocity like no other, that can only be approached with a heavy dose of moral indignation,
although other factors, such as security concerns, play a role too.43 Talking with terrorists thus becomes
taboo, unless it is done in the context of interrogation.44 Such a framework also makes it difficult to
enquire whether the state has used terroristic methods. If the state is the primary referent, securing its
security the main focus and its hegemonic ideology the accepted framework of analysis, terrorism,
particularly if defined in sharp dichotomies between legitimate and illegitimate, can only be logically
perpetrated by insurgents against the state, not by state actors themselves. State actors are engaged in

counterterrorism, which is logically depicted as legitimate, or at least, justifiable given the

terrorist threat and the fields focus on shortterm problem-solving . Where traditional
terrorism studies do focus on state terrorism, it is in the context of the other: the authoritarian or
totalitarian state that is the nemesis if not the actual enemy of the liberal democratic state.45 The observed
disregard for historical context and wider sociopolitical dynamics46 can similarly be traced to the
ahistorical propensity of problem-solving approaches and their state-centric understanding of security.
The typical focus is thus on violent acts against the state, and the immediate terrorist campaign, not on
how these acts relate to a wider constituency and its perception of human security, history and the state, or
what role the evolution of the state has played in creating the conditions for oppositional violence.47 The
lack of critical and theoretical reflection48 can be linked to the problem-solving tendency

to be short-termist and practical, and to deal in fixed categories and dichotomies that
privilege the state and its dominant ideological values. From such a standpoint, scholars would not
readily explore how terrorism discourse is produced and how it is used to marginalize alternative
conceptions, discredit oppositional groups, and legitimize counter-terrorism policies that transgress
international law.49 Nor would they be particularly likely to consider how the development of the modern
state or the international system might have contributed to the evolution of terrorism, or how theories of
the state and the international system can help illuminate the terrorism phenomenon. Drawing on cognate
theories more broadly is similarly discouraged since terrorism is framed as an exceptional threat, unique
and in urgent need of a practical solution.50 The state-centricity, inflexibility and dichotomous

nature of such a framework also makes it easier to recycle unproven assumptions, such as
the notion that religious terrorism is not concerned with constituencies and knows no

tactical constraints against killing infidels, 51 without having to test these assumptions
empirically across different samples. It thus becomes possible to argue, for instance, that negotiating
with terrorists encourages further terrorism without need for empirical proof a point already observed
by Martha Crenshaw in 198352 or to insist that terrorists inherently lack legitimacy without reflection
on whether the state lacks legitimacy in the experience of those who support the terrorists.53 The
combined result of these tendencies is often a less than critical support (whether tacit or explicit) for

coercive counterterrorism policy without adequate analysis of how this policy contributes to
the reproduction of the very terrorist threat it seeks to eradicate
Attempts to combat terrorism are a vain extension of US exceptionalism, embedding militaristic
notions of security in the pursuit of violent eradication
Noorani, 2005. Yaseen Noorani is a Lecturer in Arabic Literature, Islamic and Middle East Studies,
University of Edinburgh. The Rhetoric of Security, The New Centennial Review 5.1, 2005.
The Bush administration perpetually affirms that the war against terrorism declared in response
to the attacks of September 2001 is "different from any other war in our history" and will
continue "for the foreseeable future."1 This affirmation, and indeed the very declaration of such a
war, belongs to a rhetoric of security that predates the Bush administration and which this
administration has intensified but not fundamentally altered. Rhetorically speaking, terrorism is
the ideal enemy of the United States, more so than any alien civilization and perhaps even more
so than the tyrannies of communism and fascism, terrorism's defeated sisters. This is because
terrorism is depicted in U.S. rhetoric not as an immoral tactic employed in political struggle, but
as an immoral condition that extinguishes the possibility of peaceful political deliberation. This
condition is the state of war, in absolute moral opposition to the peaceful condition of civil
society. As a state of war, terrorism portends the dissolution of the civil relations obtaining
within and among nations, particularly liberal nations, and thus portends the dissolution of
civilization itself. [End Page 13] Terrorism is therefore outside the world order, in the sense that
it cannot be managed within this order since it is the very absence of civil order. For there to be a
world order at all, terrorism must be eradicated. In prosecuting a world war against the state of
war, the United States puts itself outside the world order as well. The Bush administration
affirms, like the Clinton administration before it, that because the identity of the United States
lies in the values that engender peace (freedom and democracy), the national interests of the
United States always coincide with the interests of the world order. The United States is the
animus of the world order and the power that sustains it. For this reason, any threat to the
existence of the United States is a threat to world peace itself, and anything that the United
States does to secure its existence is justified as necessary for the preservation of world peace. In
this way, the existence of the United States stands at the center of world peace and liberal values,
yet remains outside the purview of these values, since when under threat it is subject only to the
extra-moral necessity of self-preservation. I will argue that the symmetrical externality of the
United States and terrorism to the world order lies at the foundation of the rhetoric of security by
which the U.S. government justifies its hegemonic actions and policies. This rhetoric depicts a
world in which helpless, vulnerable citizens can achieve agency only through the U.S.
government, while terrorist individuals and organizations command magnitudes of destructive
power previously held only by states. The moral-psychological discourse of agency and fear,
freedom and enslavement invoked by this rhetoric is rooted in both classical liberalism and
postwar U.S. foreign policy. The war of "freedom" against "fear" is a psychic struggle with no
specific military enemies or objectives. It arises from the portrayal of the United States as an
autarkic, ideally impermeable collective agent that reshapes the external world in its own image.
The war of freedom against fear thereby justifies measures said to increase the defenses and
internal security of the United States as well as measures said to spread freedom and democracy
over the world. Now that the destructive capacity of warlike individuals can threaten the world
order, the power of the United States must be deployed in equal measure to neutralize this threat
throughout the world. The world as a [End Page 14] whole now comes within the purview of U.S.
disciplinary action. Any manifestation of the state of war, terrorist activity, anywhere in the
world, is now a threat to the existence of the United States and to world peace. There is no "clash
of civilizations," but the Middle East, as the current site of the state of war, is the primary danger

to the world and must be contained, controlled, and reshaped. The symmetrical externality of the
United States and terrorism to the world order, then, allows its rhetoric to envision a historic
opportunity for mankindthe final elimination of the state of war from human existence, and
fear from the political psyche. This will be achieved, however, only by incorporating the world
order into the United States for the foreseeable future.
Their claims to knowledge about terrorism are not neutral or objective, but rather motivated in
terms of the normative agenda of terrorism studies as a discipline.
Burke, 2008. Burke, University of New South Wales, 2008[Anthony, The end of terrorism studies,
Critical Studies on Terrorism, Volume 1, Issue 1 April 2008 , pages 37 49]
no knowledge is neutral, however scientific
its appearance. We now know, in contrast to the positivistic and instrumental assumptions of
natural science, that knowledge is not a mirror of the real nor a tool that lies reliably in the hands
of man. It was not what Francis Bacon foretold modern science to be: a vehicle for the
restoration of man's 'empire over creation' (Bacon 1620/1952). Instead, we all too often find
knowledge serving power as it conceals its political function within claims to objectivity and
expertise. We find that it harbours secrets: its discourse of expertise and epistemological
mastery, of policy rationality, sitting visibly above a silent bedrock of assumptions about the
nature of culture, the political, the necessary and the good. These it reinforces, without making
them audibleKnowledge, argued Foucault, is utterly intertwined with the exercise and
production of power, but it is not a pre-existing knowledge that serves a pre-existing power,
whose forms we understand and accept. Rather, through a series of complex and conflictual
operations, it produces and limits the possibility for each, creates a working system of relations
between them, and sets a machinery into operation. Knowledge classifies, imagines, orders and
constructs. Foucault conceived this theory as one that could be applied across the human and
social sciences. My interest, on the occasion of the inauguration of a journal entitled Critical
Studies on Terrorism, is in a particular, global social field which terrorism and counter-terrorism
as practices traverse, affect and transform. This social field intersects with a relatively new social
science known as 'terrorism studies', one drawing its methodologies and assumptions from other
social sciences (sociology, political science, security studies) and that claims an authoritative
understanding of a relatively stable object. Of particular salience is the fact that terrorism studies
is not dominated institutionally by universities so much as by think tanks, policy institutes,
intelligence agencies, militaries, media organizations, and the ideological activity of political
parties and ministers. The traditions of critical scholarship possible in the university here yield to
a more immediate and pragmatic concern with effectiveness. Even as it asserts ontological
certainty, the knowledge of terrorists and terrorism produced in such institutions is thoroughly
engaged. What then, can this tell us about 'terrorism'? About (critical) 'terrorism studies'? What is
the nature of this intellectual field and its object, terror? Critical terrorism studies has insinuated
itself into an intellectual, institutional and political space shaped by 'terrorism' and 'counterterrorism'. There it exists, uneasily and problematically, pulled back and forth between the
disparate (and often antithetical) tasks of study, critique and policy. There it must consider its
purposes, forms and functions; the kind of 'power' it wants its 'knowledge' to become. This, to
me, means that - like terrorism itself - terrorism studies cannot ignore its normative impact.
However, cautiously and reflexively, it must set out and pursue a normative agenda.
Ever since the early works of Michel Foucault, we have known that

Rhetoric of terrorism constructs imaginary threats which prevent effective, peaceful

solutions
Chernus 1 (Ira, PROFESSOR OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO AT
BOULDER,
FIGHTING TERROR IN THE NATIONAL INSECURITY STATE,
http://spot.colorado.edu/~chernus/WaronTerrorismEssays/FightingTerror.htm, AD: 7/10/09) jl
On September 11, 2001, most Americans wanted to hear the story of World War II. Pearl Harbor
had come again, and the fight was on. In this corner: the waving flags, the crowds singing
"America the Beautiful," the heroic young people vowing to go when ordered. In that corner: the
sneer of bin Ladin on every newsstand, the gas masks and antidote kits, the universal lament: "I no

longer feel safe in my own homeland." Only Muslims were surprised when George W. Bush
declared a new crusade to rid the world of the evildoers.
Nine days later, in his major address to Congress and the nation, Bush narrated the official story
of the war on terrorism. Although he spoke of "a new kind of war," it looked a lot like World
War II: Al Qaedas "goal is remaking the world and imposing its radical beliefs on people
everywhere. They follow in the path of fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism Freedom itself is
under attack. This is civilization's fight." The evil was easy to explain: "Americans are asking
Why do they hate us? They hate our freedoms." Bush offered no evidence to back up this
explanation for the attacks. But it hardly mattered, since few Americans were looking for
evidence. It seemed self-evident that, now as in the past, civilization and freedom are beset by
enemies.
If anyone cares to know why they hate us, evidence is easy enough to find. Osama bin Laden, for
one, has been telling the U.S. for years why he hates us. He hates U.S. policies that dominate and
oppress Muslims. Above all, he hates U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, Islams holiest land.
Secondarily, he hates U.S. bombing and sanctions in Iraq, and (recently, at least) U.S. support
for Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. But all this has no place in the official story.
In the peace movements alternative story, bin Ladens words matter. There is no excuse for the
murder of thousands, that story goes. The murderers must be condemned. Still, their complaints
have some validity. Unless we listen to those complaints, more deaths are likely. If we simply
strike back, without reconsidering the policies that caused the problem, we only insure that
more innocents, including many Americans, will die.

The discourse of terrorism and threats makes it impossible to differentiate between

real threats and made up threats
Der Derian 95 (James, Director of the Global Security Program and Research Professor of International Studies at the Watson
Institute for International Studies at Brown University, Arms, Hostages, and the Importance of Shredding in Earnest: Reading the
National Security Culture (II), Facts, Factoids, and the Factotum of Terrorism, Duke University Press, JSTOR, AD: 7/10/09) AN

Just as Nietzsche alleged the precession of meaning to facts, North-the factotum of terror and
counter-terror-preceded the factoids of terrorism. To be sure, there are some commonly accepted
"facts" about international terrorism. A selection of Rand corporation documents on international
terrorism reveals the following: over the last ten years terrorists have seized over fifty embassies
and consulates, held the oil ministers of eleven states hostage; kidnapped hundreds of
diplomats, businessmen and journalists; made several hundred million dollars in ransom money; assassinated Lord
Mountbatten and President Sadat and the former premier of Italy, attempted to assassinate the president of France, the Pope, and Alexander

Terrorist incidents and their

severity have increased over the last ten years, but most terrorist actions involve few or no
casualties: they are symbolic acts of violence. Com-pared to the ruthlessness and
destructiveness of states, or even to natural disasters, terrorism is a mere nuisance. Yet it is
cause for crises of state, media spasms on a seismic scale, and the hyper-production of institutes,
conferences, and books on terrorism. Why is this? International terrorism does represent a crisis,
but not in terms of body-counts or a revolutionary threat to the states-system. On a political
level, the simulacrum of terrorism, that is, the production of a hyperreal threat of violence,
anticipates a crisis of legitimation.9W hat this means is that international terrorism is not a
symptom or a cause or an effect of this systemic crisis: it has become a spectacular, microcosmic simulation. International terrorism simulates a legitimating crisis of the international
order; conversely, counter-terrorism is a counter-simulation, an attempt to engender a new
disciplinary order which can save the dominant legitimacy principle of international relations.10O n a representational level, the
Haig (a near miss with a rocket launcher when he was supreme allied commander of NATO).

spectacle of terrorism displace-and distracts us from-the signs of a pervading international disorder. As a result, much of what is read and
written of terrorism displays a superficiality of reasoning and a corruption of language which effects truths about terrorism without any sense of
how these truths are produced by, and help to sustain official discourses of international relations. This was repeatedly evidenced by the
proceedings and documents of the Iran-contra hearings, in which our reason of state was exposed as ideological expediency and redressed as
principled policy. If the reader of terrorism is to break out of the dominant cultural economy, in which each of us acts as a factotum of factoids,
that is, a transmitter of official truths, then some critical interpretive skills must be deployed. Along with an empirical study of the salient
sources of disorder around us, we need a genealogy of our knowledge of international terrorism and legitimacy, of how consumers in this
cultural economy arrive at some shared assumptions about the exchange-value of both. One goal, then, of a cultural reading is to reach a better
under-standing of whether these assumptions or constructions of terrorism and legitimation serve to preserve principles and practices beneficial
to the international order, or whether they forestall the knowledge necessary to deal effectively with an increasing fragmentation, a diffusion of
power, and a sustained challenge to the sovereign state's once-natural monopoly of force: in short, the neo-medievalism alluded to earlier.

Your terror discourse enables mass state violence

Jackson 9 (Senior Researcher @ Centre for the Study of Radicalization and Contemporary Political
Violence, Richard, Reader in the Department of International Politics @ Aberystwyth University, Critical
Terrorism Studies: A New Research Agenda, ed. Jackson, Smyth, and Gunning, p.77-80)
In contrast to first order critique, second order critique involves the adoption of a critical standpoint outside of the discourse. That is,
based on an understanding of discourse as socially productive or constitutive and fully cognisant of the knowledge-

power nexus, a second order critique attempts to expose the political func tions and
ideological consequences of the particular narratives, practices, and forms of representation
enunciated within the dominant terrorism studies discourse. In the first place, it can be argued that terrorism
studies fulfills an obvious ideological function because, as Jeroen Gunning (2007a) has convincingly shown,
the dominant knowledge' of the field is an ideal type of "problem-solving theory' . According to
Robert Cox, problem-solving theory takes the world as it finds it, with the prevailing social and
power relationships and the institutions into which they are organised, as the given
framework for action, and then works to "make these relationships and institutions work smoothly by dealing effectively
with particular sources of trouble' (Cox. 1981: 128 129). In this instance, problem-solving theories of terrorism do
not question the extent to which the status quo and the dominant actors within it , the
hierarchies and operation of power and the inequalities and injustices thus generated could
be implicated in the very 'problem' of terrorism itself or the many other forms of violence which it is
inextricably bound up with. The problem-solving character of the field is illustrated most prosaically by
the ubiquitous efforts of virtually every terrorism studies scholar to provide research that is
'policy relevant' and which will assist the state in its efforts to defeat terrorism, and by the
widespread tendency to uncritically accept the state's categorisations, definitions,
dichotomies, and demonisations (see Toms and Gunning, this volume). Andrew Silke's study concluded that a great
deal of the field's output is driven by policy concerns and is limited to address ing
government agendas (Silke. 2004d: 58). This characteristic is not at all surprising given that
terrorism studies' origins lie in counter-insurgency studies, security studies, and neo-realist
approaches to international relations at the height of the cold war (Burnett and Whyte. 2005: 11-13). In
fact, the first major review of the field concluded that much of its early output appeared to be 'counterinsurgency masquerading as
political science* (Schinid and Jongman, 1988: 182). More recently, the events of 11 September 2001 galvanised

a
whole new generation of scholars who were understandably eager to offer their skills in the
cause of preventing further such attacks and "solving the terrorism 'problem. They therefore had little
reason to question the dominant orientation of the field towards assisting state security or
the underlying assumptions this necessarily entails. The desire to assist governments in their efforts to control
the destructive effects of non-state terrorism is not necessarily problematic in and of itself; nor does it imply any bad faith on the part
of individual scholars (Morgan and Boyle. 2008). In fact, the prevention of violence against civilians is a

highly laudable aspiration. However, when virtually the entire academic field collectively
adopts state priorities and aims, and when it tailors its research towards assisting state
agencies in fighting terrorism (as defined by state institutions), it means that terrorism
studies functions ideologically as an intellectual arm of the state and is aligned with its
broader hegemonic project. The field's problem-solving, state-oriented and therefore
ideological character is also illustrated by the way in which the field's 'knowledge' functions
to delegitimise any kind of non-state violence while simultaneously reifying and legit imising
the state's employment of violence; and the way it constructs terrorism as a social problem to be
solved by the state but never as a problem of state violence itself. From this viewpoint, the silence
regarding state terrorism within the discourse (Jackson. 2008b). and in particular the argument of many terrorism studies
scholars that state actions should not be defined as 'terrorism', actually functions to furnish states with an
authoritative academic justification for using what may actually be terroristic forms of violence
against their opponents and citizens. In effect, it provides them with greater leeway when applying terror-based forms of
violence against civilians, a leeway exploited by a great many states who intimidate groups and individuals with the application of
massive and disproportionate state violence. In other words, by occluding and obscuring the very possibility of

state terrorism, and as a field with academic and political authority, the discourse of terrorism studies can be
considered part of the conditions that actually make state terrorism possible. Furthermore, the
discourse is deeply ideological in the way in which its core assumptions, narratives, and
knowledge-producing practices function to legitimise existing power structures and
particular hegemonic political practices in society . For instance, the primary' focus on the
'problem' of non-state terrorism functions to distract from and deny the long history of
Western involvement in terrorism (sec Blakeley. forthcoming), thereby constructing Western foreign
policy as essentially benign - rather than aimed primarily at reifying existing structures of
power and domination in the international system, for example. That is, by deflecting criticism
of particular Western policies, the discourse works to maintain the potentially dangerous myth
the accepted common sense among Western scholars and Western publics - of Western exceptionalism. This sense of
exceptionalism in turn permits Western states and their allies to pursue a range of discrete and often
illiberal political projects and partisan interests aimed at maintaining dominance in a
hegemonic liberal international order. Specifically, by reinforcing the dominant 'knowledge
that non-state terrorism is a much greater security threat than state terrorism and by obscuring
the ways in which counterterrorism itself can morph into state terrorism (see Jackson, forthcoming), the discourse functions
to legitimise the current global war on terror and its associated policies of military
intervention and regime change, extraordinary rendition, military expansion to new regions,
military assistance programmes (often to repressive regimes), the imposition of sanctions, the
isolation of oppositional political movements, and the like (see, among many others, Stokes and Raphael, forthcoming; F.I Fadl.
2002; Mahajan. 2002, 2003; C'allinicos. 2003). More directly, the discourse provides legitimacy to broader
counter-insurgency or counterterrorism programmes in strategic regions where the actual
underlying aims clearly reside in the maintenance of a particular political-economic order
such as is occurring in Colombia at the present time (see Stokes, 2006). At the domestic level, the dominant
terrorism discourse can and has been used by political elites to justify and promote a whole
range of political projects, such as: expanding and strengthening the institutions of national security
and the military-industrial complex; the construction of extensive surveillance and social
control systems; the normalisation of security procedures across all areas of social life ;
expanding the powers and jurisdiction of state security agencies and the executive branch, in large part
by normalising a state of exception; controlling wider social and political dissent, restricting
human rights, and setting the parameters for acceptable public debate; and altering (he legal system among others (see. among manyothers. Mueller. 2006; Lustick. 2006; Cole, 2007. 2003; Jackson. 2007c; Scratou. 2002). Lastly,
we must note that powerful economic interests particularly those linked to the security sector, such as private
security firms, defence industries, and pharmaceutical companies, among others all benefit materially and politically
from the primary narratives of the terrorism studies discourse. For example, the accepted
"knowledge' that non-state terrorism poses a catastrophic threat to Western society has in
part resulted in contracts worth many millions of dollars to private security companies for site
security at airports and government buildings, while pharmaceutical companies have been contracted to
provide millions of vaccines and decontamination material in case of bioterrorism (see Mueller,
2006). In other words, there are a clear set of identifiable political-economic and elite interests
that are served by the discourse. In sum, it seems clear that the discourse functions to encourage
the reification and extension of state hegemony both internationally and domestically, and
directly serves a range of political and economic interests . Perhaps more importantly, the
discourse reinforces the widely accepted belief in the instrumental rationality of violence as
an effective tool of politics (Burke. 2008), particularly as it relates to counterterrorism. As such, it can be argued that the
discourse and knowledge practices of terrorism studies function as a kind of disciplinary
and hegemonic truth regime designed to reify existing structures of power and domi nance.
Despite the intentions of individual terrorism scholars therefore, who may believe that they
are engaged in objective academic analysis of a clearly defined phenomenon, the broader
discourse which they reproduce and legitimise actually serves distinctly political purposes
and has clear ideological consequences for society.

Link -- Terrorism Alt Solves

Root cause outweighs proximity cause counterterrorism has been tried and fails
statistics prove that means on the alt can solve
Brubaker, Stasson, and Parker 8, Pamela K., professor for religion at California Lutheran University, Glen, Lewis B.
Smedes professor and prolific scholar, Janet, theological advisory to WCC decade to overcome violence, A Critique of Jean Bethke
Elshtain's Just War Against Terror and an Advocacy of a Constructive Alternative, http://www.religionconflictpeace.org/node/40

Let us face reality. Our situation is more dire than many realize. Relying on
justification of war against Muslims has done nothing to ameliorate the causes that
motivate that recruiting. The consensus of sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies warns that
the war on Iraq has greatly increased anger among Muslims, has dramatically increased
recruits to terrorism, and is training fighters in skills useful for future acts of terrorism in
other countries. Add the torture of Muslims and the occupation of Palestine, and that warning becomes yet stronger.
The official report of the United States Department of State on international terrorism shows the
astounding increase in terrorist incidents since the Iraq War and the torture of
prisoners: * 208 terrorist attacks caused 625 deaths in 2003 * 3,168 attacks caused 1,907
deaths in 2004 * 11,111 attacks caused 14,602 deaths in 2005 . * 14,500 attacks caused
20,745 deaths in 2006. * Approximately 14,500 attacks caused 22,605 deaths in 2007.
[39] Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, a Republican from Texas and Bushs appointee, has said, an unacknowledged
and unpleasant reality is that a more militant approach toward terrorism would, in virtually all cases, require us to act
violently and alone. Retributive violence, no matter how massive, almost inevitably begets

more violence against us in response .[40] Maryann Cusimono Love writes: Terrorists seek to
overcome their minority status by provoking an overreaction by democratic states. This
is typically how democratic states lose ground to terrorist organizations .[41] Examples include
the Bush administrations misdirected overreaction to an al Qaeda attack by making war on Iraq and Israel s overreaction
to Palestinian and Lebanese provocations by attacking both Gaza and Lebanon in 2006, killing over 1,000 people and
causing extensive devastation. Israel s action was a response to the capture of one Israeli soldier in Gaza and two in
Lebanon . Muslims in the Middle East see the hand of the United States in Israel s attacks, and certainly in the
devastation in Iraq . Healing requires something more than war. It requires remedying causes

of terrorism. Healing

requires major corrective action, but being anti-Bush, or hoping a new president will solve
things, or even withdrawing from Iraq will not get us the corrective action we need. The question is whether President
Obama will make the necessary corrections. Writing on terrorism with only just war theory as a

guide, as Elshtain does,[42] and without just peacemaking theory, is like peering out one
eye while keeping the other eye slammed shut . Not one sentence in Elshtains book on
terrorism deals with causes of terrorist recruitment that she says we can do something
about, unless we consider making more wars against Muslims a viable solution to
terrorist recruitment. Not one sentence affirms preventive actions that work and that the
United States should be taking now. As a nation we need both eyes wide open. We need a
paradigm to guide us in public debate about both questions , not just one question . As
Gandhi quipped, An eye for an eye ends up leaving the whole world blind.

Link --Terrorism AT Perm/Flawed Epistemology

Studies framing terrorism as a threat of national security are epistemologically flawed they skip the
basic understanding of terrorism and deck any attempts at coherent inquiry

Jarvis, 9

Lecturer, Politics and International Relations @ Swansea University (Lee, The Spaces and Faces of

Critical Terrorism Studies, Security Dialogue vol. 40, no. 1, February)

Although there may exist strategic, even normative, grounds for

conceptu- alizing terrorism as a coherent

object of knowledge, this essentialist ortho- doxy is unfortunate for two reasons. First, by attributing terrorism
an objective existence, mainstream terrorism studies offers very limited space for reflecting on the historical
and social processes through which this identity, behaviour or threat has been constituted. With the
interpretive, symbolic and discursive contexts of its creation to say nothing of the power relations traversing these
contexts presumed largely irrelevant for under- standing this phenomenon, terrorism remains consistently
and artificially detached from the processes of its construction. In this sense, we could do far worse than remember
Foucaults (1981: 67) famous cautionary note when encountering claims to speak the truth about terrorism: We must not imagine that
the world turns towards us a legible face which we would have only to decipher. Foucaults meta-theoretical caution will not, of
course, convince everyone that further critical reflection in this field is needed. By turning to the very specific, and narrow, essence
attributed to terrorism within the mainstream debates, however, it may be possible to garner further support for such a programme. As
the above discussion suggests, existing studies remain overwhelmingly structured by a conception of their object
as an unconventional form of illegitimate violence. With relatively few exceptions, the majority of scholars working
here are content to tie their understanding of terrorism both to activities of particular non-state actors and to
the targeting of par- ticular victims: non-combatants or (more emotively) innocent civilians. With reflections on the
nature and causes of terrorism already framed around this double condemnation, then, discussions relating to the

legitimacy of terrorism, or, indeed, the possibility of state terrorism, become systematically excluded from
this field of enquiry before they emerge. As outlined below, it is an attempt to contest these exclusionary
practices that largely motivates the first, broadening, face of critical terrorism studies. Given the above
preference for a specific and narrow essentialist frame- work, it is perhaps unsurprising that terrorism
studies has oriented towards policy-relevant research. In seeking not only to define and explain, but also to
prevent or resolve, its object of knowledge, this structuring of the discipline necessarily mobilizes a very
limited conception of academic responsibility. In Coxs (1996: 88) famous terminology, as noted by Gunning (2007),
terrorism studies has overwhelmingly functioned as a problem-solving pursuit that: takes the world as it
finds it, with the prevailing social and power relationships and the institutions into which they are
organized, as the given framework for action. The general aim of problem solving is to make these
relationships and institutions work smoothly by dealing effectively with particular sources of trouble. As
Coxs remarks suggest, the problem-solving approach to the study of terrorism is normatively problematic in
reducing academic responsibility to a technical exercise of risk governance or management . At best, such a
reduc- tion militates against any notion of critical enquiry aimed at contesting or destabilizing the status
quo: of saying the unsayable in Booths (2008: 68) terminology. At worst, it simply reifies a tired and unstable
inside/outside dichotomy that legitimizes the states continued monopoly on violence. Either way, the
continued structuring of the mainstream literature around the above debates fails to offer any meaningful
participatory role for engaged, active scholarship. In sum, although characterized by considerable diversity, the
terrorism studies literature suffers from key analytical and normative limitations. Analytically, the preference for
a narrow essentialist framework not only neglects the processes of terrorisms construction, it also reduces
the space available for discussing the (il)legitimacy of particular violences. Norma- tively, the preference
for producing policy-relevant, problem-solving research works to detach academic responsibility from any
notion of critical enquiry. These limitations, I argue, open considerable space for the emergence of a critical terrorism studies
agenda.

Link -- Terrorism Biological Terrorism Link

Bioterror discourse is grounded in a sense of vulnerability that turns the advantage alt is key to
solve
Kittelsen, 9 Researcher for the Security programme @ the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo (Sonja,
Conceptualizing Biorisk: Dread Risk and the Threat of Bioterrorism in Europe, Security Dialogue vol. 40, no. 1, February)
The dread that the prospect of bioterrorism elicits thus not only compounds the distinction between actual

and
imagined threat, but also challenges the conventional spatio-temporal relationship between threat and
security, in that it reinforces a sense of imminence and pervasiveness of possible attack. Its imperceptible
nature means that insecurity can exist independent of an actual attack occurring, the mere threat of infection
and contagion carrying the capacity to evoke a heightened sense of fear long before and well after an attack has
been identified as ever having taken place. In the absence of fact about a threat that deliberately evades detection,
the demand on governments to act proactively has become all the more salient, and providing for security
has taken a precautionary turn. Strategies aimed at mitigating the threat of bioterrorism have thus involved
attempts at delineating security through spatio-temporal techniques that involve intervening in the present
in order to avoid the potential for serious and irreversible damage in the future . They constitute an attempt
at rearticulating the boundary between secure and insecure space through the active act of anticipation.
Inherent in such an anticipatory logic, however, is an in-built vulnerability, in that this logic is necessarily
informed by the subjective insecurities that the threat of bioterrorism elicits . It simultaneously functions
within and constitutes a product of the dread that the threat of bioterrorism evokes, and accordingly does not
so much serve to reduce the threat of bioterrorism as it serves to mitigate the effects of what is considered an
inevitable occurrence. It there- by runs the risk of perpetuating insecurity to the extent that it facilitates
threat through its enactment. Engaging with the threat of bioterrorism, then, neces- sarily requires recognizing
how the same logic that informs the dread that bioterrorism elicits also serves to inform the security
practices pursued to confront it. Just as the molecular body is no longer conceptualized as a unified whole, so too is Europe
less a self-contained entity than a site of circulation and exchange . Mitigating the threat of bioterrorism, then,
necessitates explor- ing the ways in which security practices and perceptions of threat interact with each
other and with the more tangible aspects of the threat of bioterror- ism to make Europe not only vulnerable
to biological insecurity, but also a producer and perpetuator of it. This article argues that it is by conceptualizing
bioterrorism through the notion of dread risk that this self-perpetuation of vulnerability and threat can be exposed and the necessary
inroads provided by which to engage more critically with the threat of bioterrorism, its produc- tion and perpetuation, as well as with
the constitution of security itself.

Link -- Terrorism Nuclear Terrorism Link

Threat of nuclear terrorism authorizes a blank check of militarism
Joseph Masco, Prof. of Anthro @ U-Chicago, 6 [The Nuclear Borderlands, p. 328-332]
The post-Cold War period ended after September 11, 2001, with the formal conversion of the United States to a
counterterrorism state. Americans who once thought the end of the Cold War had fundamentally transformed their relationship to
the bomb were, after the terrorist strikes on September 11, once again witness to an escalating discourse of nuclear terror: the
airwaves were filled with stories of vulnerability, of unsecured ports through which a terrorist nuclear device could be smuggled, of
unprotected nuclear power plants open to suicide attacks by airplane, of radiological dirty bombs, which might contaminate major
U.S. cities, rendering them uninhabitable. A newly formed Department of Homeland Security (DHS) soon launched the first civil
defense campaign in more than a generation, seemingly designed more to maintain nuclear fear than reduce it. The Ready.Gov
campaign officially advised citizens to stockpile potassium iodide pills to deal with potential radioactive poisoning, while doing their
best to avoid contact with an exploding nuclear device (see Figure 8.1). Meanwhile, a new Homeland Security Advisory System kept
Americans at a state of "elevated" to "high" risk of terrorist attack, institutionalizing a new kind of official terror, buttressed by
frequent speculations from the DHS and FBI about possibly imminent catastrophic attacks. By the fall of 2004, when asked in

their first debate to identify the single greatest threat to the national security of the United States, both
presidential candidates agreed it was the atomic bomb: Senator Kerry put it in the context of "nuclear proliferation,"
while President Bush stated the greatest danger to the United States was nuclear weapons "in the hands of a
terrorist enemy."1 In the new century, nuclear insecurity once again formally linked the foreign and the
domestic under the sign of apocalyptic nuclear risk, creating a political space in which anything seemed
possible. National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice, for example, made a case for war with Iraq simply by stating that "we don't
want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."2 In doing so, she mobilized the threat of an imaginary Iraqi nuclear
arsenal to enable the most radical foreign policy decision in modern American history: a "preventative"
war, which involved invading another country to eliminate a nuclear threat before it actually existed.3 In a few short years, nuclear
fear writ large was politically mobilized into an enormously productive force in the United States, enabling a
reconfiguration of U.S. military affairs (embracing covert action on a global scale), a massive bureaucratic reorganization of
federal institutions (the Department of Homeland Security), a reconfiguration of civil liberties and domestic policing laws (the
U.S.A. Patriot Act), and an entirely new concept of war (preemption. All of these projects were pursued in the
name of a "war" on "terror," which was energized by an explicit nuclear discourse after the September 11
attacks on Washington, D.C., and New York. The post-Cold War period (1991-2001), thus', concluded with the official transformation
of the United States from a countercommunist to a counterterrorist state, a conversion that would not have been possible in its speed,
scale, or lack of debate without a discourse of nuclear terror. Given the scale of this transformation, it is difficult now to remember a
time, only a few years ago, when it was difficult to focus American public attention on the bomb. Looking back on when I started
researching this book in the mid-1990s, public reactions to nuclear weapons from the early post-Cold War moment now appear quite
strange. Outside of New Mexico, a description of this book project, for example, often produced puzzled looks from U.S. citizens, and
statements that suggested for many Americans the bomb had already become a thing of the past, of historical interest but not an
ongoing political concern. A common response was surprise that Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) was "still" involved in
nuclear weapons work, and/or "shock" that the United States remained committed to the bomb after the demise of the Soviet Union.
This immediate psychological effort to declare the bomb history in the wake of the Cold War is as remarkable as the feverish nuclear
discourses following the decidedly non-nuclear September 11 attacks, and is part of the same structural logic: these psychosocial
strategies reveal the American cultural tradition of approaching the bombeither as a banal object, not worthy of
attention, or as a hysterical threat, requiring a total mobilization of the imagination. This banal/apocalyptic dual
structure works to deny the U.S. commitment to the bomb by either cloaking it in a normative everyday space or by
displacing attention onto solely external nuclear threats .In both instances, the internal politics and effects of the U.S.
nuclear arsenal are erased, even as the core relevance of U.S. nuclear weapons to everyday American life is powerfully revealed by a
bomb that is either all too absent or all too present.

Construction of super-terrorism or nuclear terror is designed to create fear

Jackson 4

(Richard, Lecturer in International Security at the Centre for International Politics at the

University of Manchester The Politics of Threat and Danger: Writing the War on Terrorism* Paper Presented at the British
International Studies Association (BISA) 29th Annual Conference, University of Warwick, 20-22 December, 2004,
http://cadair.aber.ac.uk/dspace/bitstream/2160/1947/1/BISA-2004-Paper.pdf)

The initial construction of the terrorist threat involved fixing the attacks of September 11, 2001 as the start
of a whole new age of terrorthe dawning of a new era of terrorist violence which contained
unprecedented dangers. Vice President Dick Cheney constructs a powerful image of the new age: Today, we are not just
looking at a new era in national security policy, we are actually living through it. The exact nature of the new dangers revealed
themselves on September 11, 2001, with the murder of 3,000 innocent, unsuspecting men, women and children right here at home.19
John Ashcroft called it a new reign of terror.20 What Cheney and Ashcroft are doing is attaching significance and meaning to the
attacks that goes far beyond their physical and psychological impacts: these were not just acts of dissident violence; they were a
dawning, a rupture in time. They were events of metaphysical proportions. This rhetorical association between the dawn of

the new age and the threats posed by terrorists is deliberate and specifically designed to script a discourse
of danger. Moreover, it is only possible by severing all s between this act of terrorism and the countless
others preceding itby decontextualising it from previous attacks. In a sense, 9/11 was discursively
constructed without a pre-history and now stands alone as a defining act of cruelty and evil (infamy). Related
to their significance as the harbinger of a new age of terror, the discourse goes on to reconstruct them as the start of an
era of super-terrorism or catastrophic terrorism where terrorists use weapons of mass destruction to try
and kill not just thousands of innocent people, but millions. As Cheney contends, the threat of terrorism is supremely
catastrophic: 7 The attack on our country forced us to come to grips with the possibility that the next time terrorists strike, they may
well [] direct chemical agents or diseases at our population, or attempt to detonate a nuclear weapon in one of our cities. [N]o
rational person can doubt that terrorists would use such weapons of mass murder the moment they are able to do so. [W]e are dealing
with terrorists [] who are willing to sacrifice their own lives in order to kill millions of others.21 This language is clearly and
unambiguously designed to generate maximum fear. The visions presented are apocalyptic, reflecting the most terrifying of
Hollywood movies: the detonation of a nuclear bomb in a city, or the release of a deadly chemical or biological agent
resulting in millions dead (it is reflective of The Sum of All Fears, 12 Monkeys, or Outbreak). It is important to note how the
discourse employs the vision of a city devastated by a nuclear attack, without openly acknowledging that the source of that vision is
the only atomic attack on a city in history (Hiroshima)committed by America itself. The language constructs a terrifying
fear while consigning the source of the fear to historical amnesia. As if this is not enough to induce paralysing terror,
Cheney then makes it seem a perfectly reasonable fear to have; any rational person should fear a terrorist-induced nuclear holocaust.

Link -- Terrorism Cyberterrorism Link

Worries about cyber-terror are rooted in its opposition to geographies of exclusion
Bialasiewicz et al 7, - Luiza Bialasiewicz a, David Campbell b, Stuart Elden b, Stephen Graham b, Alex Jeffrey c, Alison J.
Williams a Department of Geography, Royal Holloway University of London, United Kingdom b International Boundaries Research
Unit, Geography Department, Durham University, Durham, DH1 3LE, United Kingdom c School of Geography, Politics and
Sociology, University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, United Kingdom, Performing security: The imaginative geographies of current US
strategy Political Geography 26 (2007) 405e422, via sciencedirect.com)
Abroad, one contradiction between the moral cartography of terror and the spatiality of globalization can be

found in the attention US national security discourse pays to the deepening connectivity between domestic
US space and burgeoning circuits of computer communication, electronic transaction, and organized criminal
activity. Significant here is the US militarys discussion of the risk of cyber-terrorism; their efforts to clamp
down on transitional financial dealings of alleged terrorist sympathizers; or their analyses of the biological
pathogens which routinely flow around the worlds airline and shipping systems (The White House, 2002a).
These bring into being a world in which everything and everywhere is perceived as a border from which a
potentially threatening Other can leap (Hage, 2003: 86). Such a world of porosity, flow and rhizomatic, fibrous
connectivities is deeply at odds with the imaginative geographies of exclusion and their moral cartography.

Link -- Terrorism AT Elshtain

Elshtains rhetoric is poisoned by her religious ideology she willfully ignores the consequence of
interventionism

Brubaker, Stasson, and Parker 8, Pamela K., professor for religion at California Lutheran University, Glen, Lewis B.
Smedes professor and prolific scholar, Janet, theological advisory to WCC decade to overcome violence, A Critique of Jean Bethke
Elshtain's Just War Against Terror and an Advocacy of a Constructive Alternative, http://www.religionconflictpeace.org/node/40

An Out-of-Date Jesus In our judgment, Elshtains rhetoric in defense of the war on

terror as a just war has become an ideological tool of national self-interest
and lacks mindfulness of the likelihood that the actual violence to ensue will
exceed the bounds of moral justification , as Cahill cautions. Part of the reason for this, we
contend, is her thin description of Jesus. Elshtain cites Jesus statement that my kingdom is not of
this world (Jn. 18:36) and his charge to render unto Caesar that which is Caesars (Matt. 22:21)[28] as biblical
support for her position that rejects a nonviolent response to the 9/11 attacks. She
suggests in many ways, Jesus preached an ethic for the end time. Thus Christians struggle with
how they are to live in the here and now.[29] She draws on H. Richard Niebuhrs Christ and Culture to make this
argument.[30] H. Richard Niebuhrs description of Jesus becomes thinner throughout Christ and Culture, but later in his
life he returned to a Christocentric ethic. In his article for The Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, Glen Stassen
suggests, To learn from Niebuhrs history and teach a transformative faith not

accommodated to ideologies of injustice, ethics needs to recover a thicker Jesus."[31]

Elshtain does not engage any of the rich New Testament scholarship that has emerged since Niebuhr wrote in the 1950s.
More recent study shows Jesus identifying with the prophetic tradition, and offers strong grounds for a very different
interpretation of these statements. Larry Rasmussen points out that much New Testament scholarship presents a Jesus
deeply immersed in struggles between various contending factions and forces and thus involved in power politics and
choices. It also presents a Jesus thoroughly Jewish, intent on fashioning a community reflective of the nature of the God in
whom he trusted. Jesus piety was social; all aspects of life, including political and economic ones, were related to God in a
community that sought to give faith concrete social form.[32] This scholarship undermines Elshtains

interpretation of Jesus statement that his kingdom is not of this world and her
conclusion that the ethic he preached is only for the end time. Elshtain does use Jesus
teaching of love of neighbor as a basis for just war , particularly to protect the innocent from harm, yet
she does not refer to the parable of the Good Samaritan, which Jesus told in response to the question, Who is my
neighbor? (Luke 10:29). The parable shows that the one who acted as neighbor is the despised otherthe enemy
whom Jesus also commands us to love. Elshtain claims that we have particular moral responsibilities to those nearest
and dearest to usparents to children, friends to other friends, but also citizens to fellow citizens. Vague talk about our
responsibility for the entire human race is meaningless.[33] Such a claim, in our judgment, comes close to making Jesus
teaching meaningless. Elshtain argues, We are obliged to stop those who use civilians against other civilians by turning a
great symbol of human freedom of movementthe commercial airplaneinto a deadly bomb. We will put our combatants
in harms way to punish those who put our noncombatants in harms way and who have no compunction about mass
murder.[34] However, we already saw that she accepts the notion of civilians coming in harms way as a reality of war.

She writes movingly of her grandchildren asking what would happen if Grandmas plane
were hijacked. But she never acknowledges the many children in the world who draw
pictures of their family and friends dying from bombs dropped from the sky . In a 1992 article
about the Gulf War, she wrote, Just war as politics embraces a standpoint: the standpoint of the
child and the childs needs; it requires that one evaluate periods of peace as well as
times of war with reference to minimal requirements of both justice and mercy.[35]
We ask, whose child? Hers? Ours? Theirs? If we claim all, we may well be accused of
being utopian. But we will reply all children. Christian realist and Niebuhrian scholar Ronald Stone
sees a place for eschatological vision grounded in the biblical prophetic tradition, the tradition that includes Jesus.
Policies may be eschatologically inspired [Isa. 5253, Mt. 25] while ethically informed. Law, council, disarmament, and
the disestablishment of war are both prophetic and relevant policy goals. He believes that just peacemaking theory can
supplement Christian or prophetic realism well.[36] Lisa Cahill also thinks that just peacemaking theorys practical
approach to avoiding war and Richard Falks quest for humane global governance can be brought together as efforts to
change the framework of discourse about globalization, justice, world order, and governance.[37] Both Cahill and Stone
warn, though, that such practices will put us into conflict with the government of the United States and other interests.
Our challenge is to develop a theory and practice of just peacemakingtempered by realismmotivated by a thick
prophetic vision of justice and love. Just peacemaking theory is a response to the call of U.S. Catholic bishops, the
Presbyterian General Assembly, the United Methodist Church, and the United Church of Christ for a positive theological
ethic of peacemaking practices, not only an ethic that debates whether war or wars are justifiable. It has developed ten
practices of just peacemaking that on the one hand are theologically and biblically grounded, and on the other hand have

demonstrated their realistic effectiveness in preventing numerous wars. These practices are: 1) support nonviolent direct
action; 2) take independent initiatives to reduce threat; 3) use cooperative conflict resolution; 4) acknowledge
responsibility for conflict and injustice and seek repentance and forgiveness; 5) advance democracy, human rights, and
religious liberty; 6) foster just and sustainable economic development; 7) work with emerging cooperative forces in the
international system; 8) strengthen the United Nations and international efforts for cooperation and human rights; 9)
reduce offensive weapons and weapons trade; and 10) encourage grassroots peacemaking groups and voluntary
associations. The book setting forth the new paradigm has in a short time reached its third edition: Just Peacemaking: The
New Paradigm for the Ethics of Peace and War, and Muslim and Jewish scholars have decided to develop their parallel
just peacemaking ethics.[38] Our argument is that U.S. policy needs a constructive alternative to Elshtains advocacy of
making waran alternative that deals with causes of terrorism. We base our alternative on just peacemaking practices 510, and we draw upon ecumenical wisdom from the World Council of Churches to undergird our call for an alternative
approach to counterterrorism. Real Security through International Cooperation

Link Islamic/Middle East Threat

Representations of an Islamic threat are rooted in U.S. arrogance and ignorance
their authors assumptions about the nature of the Orient are arbitrary and
imperialist.
Edward Said, Professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University, 2003 (A window on the
world, The Guardian, August 2nd, Available Online at http://books.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4724580110738,00.html)
My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and
rewritten, so that "our" east, "our" orient becomes "ours" to possess and direct. And I have a very
high regard for the powers and gifts of the peoples of that region to struggle on for their vision of
what they are and want to be. There has been so massive and calculatedly aggressive an attack
on contemporary Arab and Muslim societies for their backwardness, lack of democracy, and
abrogation of women's rights that we simply forget that such notions as modernity,
enlightenment, and democracy are by no means simple and agreed-upon concepts that one either
does or does not find like Easter eggs in the living-room. The breathtaking insouciance of jejune
publicists who speak in the name of foreign policy and who have no knowledge at all of the
language real people actually speak, has fabricated an arid landscape ready for American power
to construct there an ersatz model of free market "democracy". But there is a difference between
knowledge of other peoples and other times that is the result of understanding, compassion,
careful study and analysis for their own sakes, and on the other hand knowledge that is part of an
overall campaign of self-affirmation. It is surely one of the intellectual catastrophes of history
that an imperialist war confected by a small group of unelected US officials was waged against a
devastated third world dictatorship on thoroughly ideological grounds having to do with world
dominance, security control and scarce resources, but disguised for its true intent, hastened and
reasoned for by orientalists who betrayed their calling as scholars. The major influences on
George W Bush's Pentagon and National Security Council were men such as Bernard Lewis and
Fouad Ajami, experts on the Arab and Islamic world who helped the American hawks to think
about such preposterous phenomena as the Arab mind and the centuries-old Islamic decline
which only American power could reverse. Today bookstores in the US are filled with shabby
screeds bearing screaming headlines about Islam and terror, the Arab threat and the Muslim
menace, all of them written by political polemicists pretending to knowledge imparted by
experts who have supposedly penetrated to the heart of these strange oriental peoples. CNN and
Fox, plus myriad evangelical and rightwing radio hosts, innumerable tabloids and even middlebrow journals, have recycled the same unverifiable fictions and vast generalisations so as to stir
up "America" against the foreign devil.

The impact is imperial warfareIraq proves.

Edward Said, Professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University, 2003 (A window on the
world, The Guardian, August 2nd, Available Online at http://books.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4724580110738,00.html)
Without a well-organised sense that the people over there were not like "us" and didn't
appreciate "our" values - the very core of traditional orientalist dogma - there would have been
no war. The American advisers to the Pentagon and the White House use the same clichs, the
same demeaning stereotypes, the same justifications for power and violence (after all, runs the
chorus, power is the only language they understand) as the scholars enlisted by the Dutch
conquerors of Malaysia and Indonesia, the British armies of India, Mesopotamia, Egypt, West
Africa, the French armies of Indochina and North Africa. These people have now been joined in
Iraq by a whole army of private contractors and eager entrepreneurs to whom shall be confided
everything from the writing of textbooks and the constitution to the refashioning of Iraqi
political life and its oil industry. Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is
not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten,
civilise, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still,

there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic
empires.

Link-- Afghanistan
The affirmative represents Afghanistan as an uncivilized state that must be brought into the
neoliberal order and crowds out alternative epistemologies. These representations are the root caues
of their harms.

Crowe 7

(L. A. Crowe, Researcher, York Centre for International and Security Studies, York University, 2007,

The Fuzzy Dream: Discourse, Historical myths, and Militarized (in)Security - Interrogating dangerous myths of Afghanistan and
the West http://archive.sgir.eu/uploads/Crowe-loricrowe.pdf)
These elements of oppositional binaries is closely related to the second element: contemporary discourse has developed from

and further perpetuates a particular ideology that emmanates from a neo-liberal capitalist and imperial
agenda that is founded upon neo-colonialist attitudes and assumptions. The US campaign to fight
terrorism, initiated after September 11th explains Nahla Abdo has crystallized all the ideological underpinnings of
colonial and imperial policies towards the constructed other.82 This emerges in the heroism myth mentioned
above; for example, Debrix explains how narratives around humanitarianism serve an ideological purpose in that it contributes to the
reinforcement of neoliberal policies in pathological regions of the international landscape.83 It also emerges in the militarization
myth, insofar as neoliberal globalisation relies on the institutionalization of neo-colonialism and the commodification and
(re)colonization of labor via militarized strategies of imperial politics. That is, as Agathangelou and Ling point out, Neoliberal
economics enables globalized militarization.84 Embedded in this normalization of neo-colonial frames are the
elements of linearity and thus assumed rationality of reasoning in the West. As Canada stepped up its role in direct
combat operations (which included an increase of combat troops, fighter jets, and tanks with long-range firing capacities85), Stephen
Harper appealed to troop morale on the ground in Afghanistan, stating: Canada and the international community are determined to
take a failed state and create a "democratic, prosperous and modern country."86 (my italics ) Proposed solutions to the
conflict(s) in Afghanistan have been framed and justified not only as saving backwards Afghanistan but
also as generously bringing it into the modern, capitalist, neoliberal age. Moreover, this element represents an

continuity of colonial power, presenting the one correct truth or resolution, emmanating from the objective
gaze of the problem-solving Western world. Representations of Afghanistan present Western voices as
the authority and the potential progress such authority can bring to the East as naturally desirable. This
rationality also presumes an inherent value of Western methodology (including statistical analysis, quantification of
data, etc) and devalues alternative epistemologies including those of the Afghan people. This is problematic for
several reasons: 1) It forecloses and discourages thinking outside the box and instead relies upon the masters tools
which include violent military force, the installation of a democratic regime, peacekeeping, and reconstruction and foreign aid
alternative strategies are deemed radical, unworkable, and anti-American; 2 ) it prioritizes numbers and statitistics

over lived experiences. By relying on tallies of deaths, percetages of voters, and numbers of insurgents for
example, the experiences of those living in the region are obfuscated and devalued, and; 3)it reproduces a
colonial hierarchy of knowledge production. Old colonial narratives of have re-surfaced with renewed
vigor in the case of Afghanistan is contingent on and mutually reinforced by opposing narratives of a
civilized and developed West. For example: Consider the language which is being usedCalling the perpetrators
evildoers, irrational, calling them the forces of darkness, uncivilized, intent on destroying civilization, intent on
destroying democracy. They hate freedom, we are told. Every person of colour, and I would want to say also every Aboriginal
person, will recognize that language. The language of us versus them, of civilization versus the forces of darkness, this language is
rooted in the colonial legacy.87 This colonizer/colonized dichotomy is key to the civilisational justification the US administration
pursues (We wage war to save civilization itself88) which, as Agathangelou and Ling explain, is motivated by a constructed
medieval evil that threatens American freedom and democracy, the apotheosis of modern civilization, and therefore must be
disciplined/civilized. In his Speech to Congress on September 21, 2001, Bush portrays the irrational Other as Evil and
retributive seeking to destroy the developed, secure prosperous and civilized free world: These terrorists
kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of lifeAl Qaeda is to terror what the mafia is to crime. But
its goal is not making money; its goal is remaking the world, and imposing its radical beliefs on people everywhere .89 This

production of othering and re-institutionalization of colonial discourse has been enabled by and facilitated
culture clash explanations.90 The danger of such theories, warns Razack, lies not only in their
decontextualization and dehistoricization, but also on its reliance on the Enlightenment narrative and
notions of European moral superiority that justify the use of force. This is evident in the unproblematic way
in which outside forces have assumed a right of interference in the region spanning from the 18th century when
imperial powers demarcated the Durrand Line (which created a border between British India and Afghanistan with the goal of making
Afghanistan an effective buffer statefor British Imperial interests91) to the American intervention that began in the Cold War,
followed by the Soviets in the 1980s and the Americans, Canadians and British today. In fact, The Wests practical

engagement in Afghanistan reveals how it has served to reporoduce this neo-colonial myth as well as the
complexities and paradoxes which simultaneously de-stabilize that myth. During the cold war, the Soviet and the

Americans used Afghanistan as the battleground for power, choosing to sponsor and condemn various
regimes as they saw fit; this history of foreign engagement contributed to state fragmentation,
underdevelopment, and the self-sustaining war-economy that persist today. An example of this is the use of rentier
incomes during the early 1900s that were used as a means of control and coercion.

The discourse used in historical representations of Afghanistan bolsters Americas need of

securitization and peacebuilding.
Crowe, 2007. L.A. Crowe, 2007, New York University. The Fuzzy Dream: Discourse, Historical myths,
and Militarized (in)Security- Interrogating dangerous myths of Afghanistan and the West
http://archive.sgir.eu/uploads/Crowe-loricrowe.pdf
The historical production of particular myths of Afghanistan have relied on representations of
the country in the West that are largely simplistic, ahistorical, and politically motivated.
Afghanistan is a sort of fuzzy dream for most in the West: embodied in a series of fabricated
images of war and poverty, de-contextualized photos without names or places, numbers and
graphs claiming statistical quantification, and disjointed yet often repeated phrases and
metaphors. A particular mythic representation of Afghanistan is being (and has been)
proliferated in the international community, through media, history books, foreign policy
documents, political commentators, academia, and virtually any other body of communication.
The vigor with which particular discourses have materialized since 9/11 are representative of
their link to the Wests militarized War on Terror and more generally of the embedded
relationship between political policies and militarized discourses which legitimate the Wests
military engagement and development policies. That is, Afghanistan serves as an unfortunate
example of the very real power of discourse and myth-making which affect the form that
international engagement takes; this in turn reproduces those myths in a cycle of destructive
imperial engagement.
In trying to understand the current political situation in Afghanistan, and in attempting to
formulate international policy in the region, it is vital that we are aware of the dominant
narratives or myths that are being produced, who it is that is producing them and for what
purpose, and what is at stake in failing to interrogate them. Any policy that does not take the role
of deliberately constructed narratives and the mediums throough which they are disseminated
into account will not only continue to replicate them, perhaps unknowingly, but any
securitizing, peacebuilding and development efforts built on these terms can never result
in long-term success. The emancipatory possibilities of such a critical project of discourse
deconstruction lie in: 1) understanding the raced/classed/gendered power hierarchies that are
their foundation; 2) uncovering the nationalized militarization and the hypermasculinized and
hyperfeminized normativities that are are embedded within these myths, and; 3) the recognition
of the detrimental effect of the Wests myths and configuring the reconceptualisation of policy
alternatives through its contestation.
By looking critically at what has become the common language of foreign engagement in
Afghanistan, the foundation of historical narratives or myths that perpetuate a certain image of
Afghanistan, and which in turn results in very particular attitudes that imbue foreign policy,
begin to be revealed. I will utilize two broad (and inextricably linked) categorizations which
most accurately encapsulate the dominant strains of discourse to help clarify how this
relationship is constructed and by thus identifying them as such attempt to de-bunk the myths
they create. These myths which have become normalized and banal in foreign policy, media,
and some academic discourse I define as the heroism discourse/myth and the militarization
discourse/myth.

The United States has defined its own identity in relation to Afghanistan by demonizing it on the
basis of perceived danger. The need to securitize comes from an ill-conceived perception of the other .

Crowe, 2007. L.A. Crowe, 2007, New York University. The Fuzzy Dream: Discourse, Historical myths,
and Militarized (in)Security- Interrogating dangerous myths of Afghanistan and the West
http://archive.sgir.eu/uploads/Crowe-loricrowe.pdf
Looking specifically at the relationship between the US and Afghanistan, the US has defined its
own identity (as good, modern, normal, etc.) in relation to its difference from the Afghan
Other, cultivating its demonization on the basis of perceived danger and moral valuations
(superior/inferior) that are spatially constructed. Claims that the West is constructing a peaceful,
democratic, and liberal nation (values claimed to be at the core of our civilization, freedom,
democracy and ways of life) are motivated by the need to transform their barbarism,
inhumanity, low morality and style of life.77 Eisenstein explains that Others are constructed or
fabricated in order to deal with the fear of not-knowing: Creating the savage, or slave, or
woman, or Arab allows made-up certainty rather than honest complex variability and
unknowability.78 Unfortunately, this is not a novel phenomenon unique to the contemporary
situation in Afghanistan: articulations of security that rely on definitions of otherness as threats
to security, argues Campbell, replicates the logic of Christendoms evengelism of fear.
Obstructions to security/order/God become defined as irrational, abnormal, mad, etc. in need of
rationalization, normalizations, punishment, moralization, etc.: The state project of security
replicates the church project of salvation.79 As is commonly known, under Christendom it was
such discourses of danger that were instrumental in establishing its own authority and
disciplining its followers. Similarly, by relying on discourses of danger to define who we are,
who we are not, and who they are that we must fear, the state constructs enemies whos
elimination/domination is necessary to preserve the states own identity (and security): All
powers are geared against a single alien. And all the rationalizations are raging against the
advent of Evil.80 Thus, the war on terror, or Afghanistan, or Iraq, becomes, in the words of
Baudrillard, an endless war of prevention to excorcise evil; an ablation of a non-existant
enemy masquarading as the leitmotiv for universal safety.81 These elements of oppositional
binaries is closely related to the second element: contemporary discourse has developed from
and further perpetuates a particular ideology that emmanates from a neo-liberal capitalist and
imperial agenda that is founded upon neo-colonialist attitudes and assumptions. The US
campaign to fight terrorism, initiated after September 11th explains Nahla Abdo has
crystallized all the ideological underpinnings of colonial and imperial policies towards the
constructed other. This emerges in the heroism myth mentioned above; for example, Debrix
explains how narratives around humanitarianism serve an ideological purpose in that it
contributes to the reinforcement of neoliberal policies in pathological regions of the
international landscape.83 It also emerges in the militarization myth, insofar as neoliberal
globalisation relies on the institutionalization of neo-colonialism and the commodification and
(re)colonization of labor via militarized strategies of imperial politics. That is, as Agathangelou and
Ling point out, Neoliberal economics enables globalized militarization.84 Embedded in this normalization of neocolonial frames are the elements of linearity and thus assumed rationality of reasoning in the West. As Canada stepped
up its role in direct combat operations (which included an increase of combat troops, fighter jets, and tanks with longrange firing capacities85), Stephen Harper appealed to troop morale on the ground in Afghanistan, stating: Canada and
the international community are determined to take a failed state and create a "democratic, prosperous and modern
country."86 (my italics) Proposed solutions to the conflict(s) in Afghanistan have been framed and justified not only as
saving backwards Afghanistan but also as generously bringing it into the modern, capitalist, neoliberal age. Moreover,
this element represents an continuity of colonial power, presenting the one correct truth or resolution, emmanating from
the objective gaze of the problem-solving Western world. Representations of Afghanistan present

Western voices as the authority and the potential progress such authority can bring to the East
as naturally desirable. This rationality also presumes an inherent value of Western methodology
(including statistical analysis, quantification of data, etc) and devalues alternative epistemologies
including those of the Afghan people. This is problematic for several reasons: 1) It forecloses
and discourages thinking outside the box and instead relies upon the masters tools which
include violent military force, the installation of a democratic regime, peacekeeping, and
reconstruction and foreign aid alternative strategies are deemed radical, unworkable, and
anti-American

Link -- Afghanistan Counterterrorism

Counterterrorism causes a self fulfilling prophecy that ends in the promotion of terrorism because it
limits itself to flawed epistemological approaches that ignore culture, the unconscious and other
drives.

Zulaika 2009

(Joesba, Professor, at the Center for Basque Studies. Ph.D., Anthropology, from

Princeton University, has written widely on the issue of Terrorism and culture. Terrorism: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy 2009, p. 1-3,
MT)
Counterterrorism has become self-fulfilling and it is now pivotal in promoting terrorism . This book is an attempt
to prove it. There is now near consensus, on both the Left and the Right, that the war in Iraq has been a catastrophe and that the War
on Terror has made the United States far less secure than before. Yet we barely understand the thinking that, with the generalized
approval of the public, led us to this situation. Why the sense of missed opportunities and failure of George W. Bushs presidency? A
response requires understanding the role of counterterrorism in designing public policy. In order to think and
write terrorism without thereby further constituting it, the preliminary task at hand is conceptual: What are the impasses and blind
spots in counterterrorist thinking that led us to the self-fulfilling nature of the War on Terror? The first part of the book is devoted to
the ways in which discourse creates and perpetuates the very thing it abominates. It repeats the call in my book Terror and Taboo
(coauthored with William Douglass) for an exorcism against such cultureTerrorism discourse must be disenchanted if it is to lose
its efficacy for all concerned,1 terrorists and counterterrorists alike. I fully agree with Richard Jacksons conclusion that resisting the
discourse is not an act of disloyalty; it is an act of political self-determination; and it is absolutely necessary if we are to avoid another
stupefying period of fear and violence like the cold war.2 There is little doubt by now that terrorism discourse creates its own reality.
My arguments here go beyond discourse analysis. Terrorism is premised on the will of insurgents, rebels, fighters,
terrorists. Terrorism studies are about tactics, financial networks, organizational structures, ideologies, psychological typesthe
observable expressions of the terrorist agenda. But first we must reckon with the terrorist as an individual subject .
We are baffled by his or her seeming madness, the horrific freedom of his amor fati, the willing acceptance of
death and killing as ones mission, the embrace of a truth that can only be expressed in the form of terroristic massacre. And it is a

madness that is all the more disconcerting because we know it is strategically willed and aimed directly at
us for reasons that we cannot clearly see nor accept. These issues cannot be properly addressed without the
awareness that the terrorist subject is deeply engaged in the politics of the unconscious , including the Freudian
death drive expressed in willfully embracing suicide. Counterterrorisms ignorance of the languages, cultures, and
histories of the people it purports to monitor is proverbial. The crisis of knowledge begins with the quality
of the intelligence when the analysts are not able to look into their own ideological investments. What is one to
make of the fact that scores of people in the intelligence community had known for months that two of the people who were going to
take part in 9/11 were living in the United States, yet nothing was done about it? According to the findings of the 9/11 Commission
(officially, the National Commission on Terrorists Attacks upon the United States), evidence gathered by the panel showed that the
attacks could probably have been prevented.3 Why such blindness? What needs to be established is that the system had sufficient
evidence to know about the upcoming plot yet it preferred not to know that it knew. These are problems that derive directly from a
faulty epistemologybeginning with the placement of the entire phenomenon in a context of taboo and the willful ignorance of the
political subjectivities of the terrorists. They have to do with what counts as a standard of evidence, what is valuable information, what
type of experience should be respected, what sort of associative logic links together various kinds of events, and other various contexts
and mind-sets. One only has to compare Paul Bremers and David Petraeuss policies in Iraq to become aware
of the disastrous self-generating logic of counterterrorism. The counterterrorist Bremer acted as if anything touched by
Saddam Hussein was contaminated with evil and drove tens of thousands of former soldiers and officers into the insurgency; the
military man Petraeus studied the culture and ended up negotiating with and partially dissolving the enemy. The counterterrorist

is typically like the proverbial dumb policeman who, by ignoring the actors subjectivity in its complex
interaction of cultural background, social motivation, and unconscious desire, is unable to read the evidence
in front of his eyes while taking seriously evidence deliberately planted by the criminal to fool him. What
is required is to make the sweeping change from the policemans to the detectives mind frame. We went to war against Hussein
because we did not figure out that he was bluffing. What kind of writing can do justice to the terrorists suicidal madness? Since at
least the Old Testament, writers have dealt with murder; far from utterly alien human beings, murderers have been depicted by writers
as all-too-human members of ordinary communities; at times heroicized, at other times their actions are deplored as tragic, they are
always the objects of intense curiosity and study. Before he wrote his nonfiction novel In Cold Blood, Truman Capote spent
hundreds of hours with the multiple murderers Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. They became for him anything but tabooed people. In
fact, he projected himself into Perrys life and concluded that he was too much like himself. The final result is that Capote knew his
murderers thoroughly and intimately they could not lie to him, nor would he underestimate their human potential. Counterterrorism
thinking precludes in principle the subjective knowledge of a Truman Capote or a detective or an ethnographer. Hence, I argue in this
book, the categorical blunders and the systemic blindness.

Link -- Afghanistan Counterterrrorism Reps

Key
Reps key in the context of counterterrorism

De Graaf 10

(Beatrice, researcher for the Centre for Terrorism and Counterterrorism. Bob, professor

for Terrorism and Counterterrorism studies, Bringing politics back in: the introduction of the 'performative power' of
counterterrorism, Critical Studies on Terrorism, Volume 3, Issue 2, informaworld)
In sum, it is almost impossible to measure arithmetically the outcome of counterterrorism efforts . However, this
does not mean that we cannot and should not try to assess the effect of governmental policies. The issues outlined above suggest that

it is not necessarily the policy measures and their intended results as such, but much more the way in which
they are presented and perceived that determine the overall effect of the policy in question. The key
question is therefore really: What do counterterrorism policy-makers want? They set the agenda with
respect to the phenomenon of terrorism, define it in a certain way and link it to corresponding measures .
Subsequently, they execute these measures, behind closed doors, and with the tacit permission of the public
- or, conversely, they feel forced to 'market' their measures first, in order to generate a substantial level of public and political support.
The way in which they perform, or in other words carry out the process of countering terrorism, can have
more impact than the actual arrests being made (or not being made). This is what we call the performativity
of counterterrorism, or its 'performative power'. The authors would like to introduce the concept 'performativity'1 in this
discussion, expressing the extent to which a national government, by means of its official counterterrorism policy and corresponding
discourse (in statements, enactments, measures and ministerial remarks), is successful in 'selling' its representation of events, its set of
solutions to the terrorist problem, as well as being able to set the tone for the overall discourse regarding terrorism and
counterterrorism - thereby mobilising (different) audiences for its purposes.2 There is of course a difference between threat assessment
and threat perception, and there are other players in the field apart from official state actors. Here, however, our focus is on the
government's attempts to persuade public opinion of the legitimacy and accuracy of its threat assessment. In terms of developing

counterterrorism policies, this is particularly relevant because counterterrorism officials - and we as

academics and advisers - can exert influence particularly on this field (see also the introduction and conclusion in
Forest 2009). Counterterrorism measures (in statements, enactments, activities, expressions made by cabinet
members) set the tone for the political and public debate. Government statements and memoranda are
not mere texts: they create reality. This is certainly the case when the presentation and definition of new
policy dovetails with existing threat perceptions in the population (on communism, immigration or new religions, for
instance); when they tune in to historical experiences (such as previous conflicts, attacks or major disasters); if they
depict the alleged terrorist threat as foreign, radically 'different' and alien or fundamentally hostile; or if
they succeed in promoting terrorism as a central issue in a political game or campaign (by portraying the
opposition as being 'soft on terrorism' or by presenting themselves as the nation's saviour from all evil).3 When these implicitly
or explicitly formulated representations of 'threats', 'enemies' and 'security' are accepted by the majority of
the population, political and social conflicts could be heightened. Consensus subsequently gives way to
polarisation, acceptance of the limitation of civil liberties and stigmatisation of radical ideas . Counterterrorism
measures therefore clarify which radical ideas are still tolerated, what level of sympathy with revolutionary terrorists is still permitted
and which infringements on civil liberties are accepted for the sake of national security.

Reps influence Counterror

Chowdhury and Krebs 10

(Arjun, PhD candidate in the

Political Science Department at the University of Minnesota, Ronald, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the
University of Minnesota, Talking about terror: Counterterrorist campaigns and the logic of representation, European Journal of
International Relations, March, Vol 16, Issue 1, 132-133)
An ideal representational strategy? Counterterrorist policy cannot be separated from representational, or rhetorical,

politics because legitimation is normally an imperative, not a mere nicety. Meaning cannot be imposed
unilaterally or through the exercise of material power alone. The effort to forge shared meaning implicates
some audience in the process, and those who do not legitimate their claims will be rejected or ignored .
Legitimation consequently cannot be invoked only when outcomes seem puzzling: it is politics as usual. Furthermore,
representational politics is inseparable from policy choice. That which cannot be legitimated cannot be pursued, and not everything
can be legitimated: rhetoric is not infinitely elastic, and speakers may not say just anything they would like in
the public arena. Finally, how policies are legitimated at t 0 limits what can be said at t 1 We presume that
speakers . are subject to some consistency constraint that limits, but by no means eliminates, overt rhetorical contradictions in the face
of attentive publics capable of imposing substantial audience costs

Heres more evidence, vote neg if they dont have a 2AC card specific to countererror

Chowdhury and Krebs 10

(Arjun, PhD candidate in the

Political Science Department at the University of Minnesota, Ronald, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the
University of Minnesota, Talking about terror: Counterterrorist campaigns and the logic of representation, European Journal of
International Relations, March, Vol 16, Issue 1, 141)

Critics might suggest that actual policy matters more to the success or failure of counterterrorism than does
rhetorical strategy. We cannot rebut this counterargument here: we have, in this article, presumed that rhetorical strategy has
substantial ramifications so we might devote analytical attention to its sources, and we have suggested only in passing what
consequences flow from rhetorical choices. But we also disagree with the posing of this as an alternative. It

presumes, wrongly in our view, that policy can be clearly separated from the politics of legitimation. But
these two cannot be neatly divorced, since a sustainable counterterrorist policy must be capable of public
legitimation. It presumes that instruments should be placed in competition with each other carrots or sticks; rhetoric or policy?
but it is more useful, we believe, to explore when and how multiple instruments interact (Byman and Waxman, 2000). From our
perspective, it is more productive to inquire into the relationship between rhetoric and policy. Do particular

representational strategies limit or facilitate particular counterterrorist policies? Conversely, do particular

counterterrorist policies render particular representational strategies unsustainable? In short, this opens up a range
of research questions that would otherwise be occluded.

Link -- Afghanistan Stability

The affirmative continues the discourse of saving Afghanistan, reinforcing the paternalism and
neo-colonialism behind US actions

Crowe 7

(L. A. Crowe, Researcher, York Centre for International and Security Studies, York University, 2007,

The Fuzzy Dream: Discourse, Historical myths, and Militarized (in)Security - Interrogating dangerous myths of Afghanistan and
the West http://archive.sgir.eu/uploads/Crowe-loricrowe.pdf)
The heroism narrative can be called by several names: the saviour syndrome, mediatically generated or hybrid technomedical humanitarianism58, foreign aid, humanitarian intervention, etc. This narrative constructs foreign engagement in

a region as spectacle and as prized commodities to be admired and sold to the public; it constructs the
West as saviours and the Other , in this case Afghanistan, as the victim in need of saving, accomplished through
images and tales of passion and fervour that often pathologize the other and valorize the Western interveener. When the US, with the
support of the UN, bombed Afghanistan in 2001in response to the events of September 11th, the mission was entitled Operation
Enduring Freedom. Today, as reconstruction and peace-building efforts are underway in Afghanistan in

tandem with military operations, political conversations and media productions are saturated with calls to
win the hearts and minds of the people of Afghanistan and of the necessary and benevolent role the West
must play in instilling freedom, justice and democracy in the war-torn and poverty stricken region. Debrix, offers
an analysis of what he calls the global humanitarian spectacle to demonstrate how medical and humanitarian NGOs simulate
heroism, sentiment, and compassion; medical catastrophes and civil conflicts, he explains, have indeed become prized

commodities for globalizing neoliberal policies of Western states and international organizations to sell to
myth readers: They give Western states and the UN the opportunity to put their liberal humanistic
policies into practice, while, for Western media, humanitarianism simply sells.59 There are several repercusions of this myth,
explains Debrix. First, this has resulted in real humanitarian and moral issues being overlooked; Second, images
are being purged of their content. Myth has thus becoming the very real enemy of true humanitarianism; that
is, weve become so inundates with superhero mythologization of real world events that the embedded
paternalism and unrealistic goals go unnoticed.60 Additionally, this narrative reinforces a victimology of the
Other and in fact capitalises on it, while simultaneously hiding the paternalistic and neo-colonialist
ideologies in humanitarian garb. The role of the media and consciously generated and disseminated images is particularly
pronounced here, as passion and spectacle are valued in the commodification of images over content and history. Jean Baudrillard
states There is no possible distinction, at the level of images and information, between the spectacular and the symbolic, no possible
distinction between the crime and the crackdown.61

Link - China
China threat discourse reduces the world to calculative
strategy. Behaviors, histories, and possibilities that dont
fit into the affirmatives worldview of stability and
certainty are labeled threatening.
Chengxin PAN IR @ Australian Natl 4

The China Threat in American Self-Imagination: The Discursive

Construction of Other as Power Politics Alternatives 29 p. 314-315
In this sense, the discursive construction of China as a threatening other cannot be detached from
(neo)realism, a positivist. ahistorical framework of analysis within which global life is reduced to endless
interstate rivalry for power and survival. As many critical IR scholars have noted, (neo) realism is not a
transcendent description of global reality but is predicated on the modernist Western identity, which, in the
quest for scientific certainty, has come to define itself essentially as the sovereign territorial nation-state .
This realist self-identity of Western states leads to the constitution of anarchy as the sphere of insecurity,
disorder, and war. In an anarchical system, as (neo) realists argue, "the gain of one side is often considered to be the loss of the
other,"''5 and "All other states are potential threats."'^ In order to survive in such a system, states inevitably pursue power or
capability. In doing so, these realist claims represent what R. B. J. Walker calls "a specific historical articulation
of relations of universality/particularity and self/Other."^^ The (neo) realist paradigm has dominated the U.S. IR
discipline in general and the U.S. China studies field in particular. As Kurt Campbell notes, after the end of the Cold War , a whole

new crop of China experts "are much more likely to have a background in strategic studies or international
relations than China itself. ""^^ As a result, for those experts to know China is nothing more or less than to
undertake a geopolitical analysis of it, often by asking only a few questions such as how China will
"behave" in a strategic sense and how it may affect the regional or global balance of power, with a particular emphasis
on China's military power or capabilities. As Thomas J. Christensen notes, "Although many have focused on intentions as
well as capabilities, the most prevalent component of the [China threat] debate is the assessment of China's overall future military
power compared with that of the United States and other East Asian regional powers."''^ Consequently, almost by default, China
emerges as an absolute other and a threat thanks to this (neo) realist prism. The (neo) realist emphasis on survival and

security in international relations dovetails perfectly with the U.S. self-imagination , because for the United
States to define itself as the indispensable nation in a world of anarchy is often to demand absolute security. As James
Chace and Caleb Carr note, "for over two centuries the aspiration toward an eventual condition of absolute security has been viewed
as central to an effective American foreign policy."50 And this self-identification in turn leads to the definition of not
only "tangible" foreign powers but global contingency and uncertainty per se as threats. For example, former
U.S. President George H. W. Bush repeatedly said that "the enemy [of America] is unpredictability. The enemy is instability. "5'
Similarly, arguing for the continuation of U.S. Cold War alliances, a high-ranking Pentagon official asked, "if we pull out, who knows
what nervousness will result? "^2Thus understood, by its very uncertain character, China would now
automatically constitute a threat to the United States. For example, Bernstein and Munro believe that "China's political
unpredictability, the always-present possibility that it will fall into a state of domestic disunion and factional fighting," constitutes a
source of danger.s^ In like manner, Richard Betts and Thomas Christensen write: If the PLA [People's Liberation Army] remains
second-rate, should the world breathe a sigh of relief? Not entirely. . . . Drawing China into the web of global interdependence may do
more to encourage peace than war, but it cannot guarantee that the pursuit of heartfelt political interests will be blocked by a fear of
economic consequences. . . . U.S. efforts to create a stable balance across the Taiwan Strait might deter the use of force under certain
circumstances, but certainly not all.54 The upshot, therefore, is that since China displays no absolute certainty for peace,
it must be, by definition, an uncertainty, and hence, a threat. In the same way, a multitude of other unpredictable factors
(such as ethnic rivalry, local insurgencies, overpopulation, drug trafficking, environmental degradation, rogue states, the spread of
weapons of mass destruction, and international terrorism) have also been labeled as "threats" to U.S. security. Yet, it seems that in the
post-Cold War environment, China represents a kind of uncertainty par excellence. "Whatever the prospects for a more peaceful, more
democratic, and more just world order, nothing seems more uncertain today than the future of post-Deng China,"55 argues Samuel
Kim. And such an archetypical uncertainty is crucial to the enterprise of U.S. self-construction, because it

seems that only an uncertainty with potentially global consequences such as China could justify U.S.
indispensability or its continued world dominance. In this sense, Bruce Cumings aptly suggested in 1996 that China (as a threat)
was basically "a metaphor for an enormously expensive Pentagon that has lost its bearings and that requires
a formidable 'renegade state' to define its mission (Islam is rather vague, and Iran lacks necessary weights)."56
Chinese threat construction essentializes a violent Chinese "other" - causes war and kills value to life

Pan 2004 Prof IR @ Australian Natl. Univ. (Chengxin, "The 'China Threat' in American Self-Imagination: The
Discursive Construction of Other as Power Politics," Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, vol. 29, no. 3 (2004))

Having examined how the "China

construction, I want to turn

threat" literature is enabled by and serves the purpose of a particular U.S. selfnow to the issue of how this literature represents a discursive

construction of other, instead of an "objective" account of Chinese reality. This, I argue,

has less to do with its portrayal of China as a threat per se than with its essentialization
and totalization of China as an externally knowable object, independent of
historically contingent contexts or dynamic international interactions. In this sense, the
discursive construction of China as a threatening other cannot be detached from (neo)realism,
a positivist, ahistorical framework of analysis within which global life is reduced to endless
interstate rivalry for power and survival. As many critical IR scholars have noted, (neo)realism is not
a transcendent description of global reality but is predicated on the modernist Western
identity, which, in the quest for scientific certainty, has come to define itself essentially as the
sovereign territorial nation-state. This realist self-identity of Western states leads to the
constitution of anarchy as the sphere of insecurity, disorder, and war. In an anarchical
system, as (neo)realists argue, "the gain of one side is often considered to be the loss of the
other," (45) and "All other states are potential threats." (46) In order to survive in such a
system, states inevitably pursue power or capability. In doing so, these realist claims represent what R.
B. J. Walker calls "a specific historical articulation of relations of universality/particularity and self/Other." (47) The
(neo)realist paradigm has dominated the U.S. IR discipline in general and the U.S. China
studies field in particular. As Kurt Campbell notes, after the end of the Cold War, a whole new crop of China experts
"are much more likely to have a background in strategic studies or international relations than China itself." (48) As a
result, for those experts to know China is nothing more or less than to undertake a

geopolitical analysis of it, often by asking only a few questions such as how China will
"behave" in a strategic sense and how it may affect the regional or global balance of
power, with a particular emphasis on China's military power or capabilities. As Thomas J. Christensen notes, "Although
many have focused on intentions as well as capabilities, the most prevalent component of the [China threat] debate is the
assessment of China's overall future military power compared with that of the United States and other East Asian regional
powers." (49) Consequently, almost by default, China emerges as an absolute other and a threat

thanks to this (neo)realist prism. The (neo)realist emphasis on survival and security

in
international relations dovetails perfectly with the U.S. self-imagination, because for the United States to define itself as
the indispensable nation in a world of anarchy is often to demand absolute security. As James Chace and Caleb Carr note,
"for over two centuries the aspiration toward an eventual condition of absolute security has been viewed as central to an
effective American foreign policy." (50) And this self-identification in turn leads to the definition of not only

"tangible" foreign powers but global contingency and uncertainty

per se

as threats.

For

example, former U.S. President George H. W. Bush repeatedly said that "the enemy [of America] is unpredictability . The

enemy is instability."

(51) Similarly, arguing for the continuation of U.S. Cold War alliances, a high-ranking

Pentagon official asked, "if we pull out, who knows what nervousness will result?" (52)

Thus understood, by its very

uncertain character, China would now automatically constitute a threat to the United States.
For example, Bernstein and Munro believe that "China's political unpredictability, the always-present possibility that it
will fall into a state of domestic disunion and factional fighting," constitutes a source of danger. (53) In like manner,
Richard Betts and Thomas Christensen write: If the PLA [People's Liberation Army] remains second-rate, should the
world breathe a sigh of relief? Not entirely.... Drawing China into the web of global interdependence

may do more to encourage peace than war, but it cannot guarantee that the pursuit
of heartfelt political interests will be blocked by a fear of economic consequences.... U.S.
efforts to create a stable balance across the Taiwan Strait might deter the use of force
under certain circumstances, but certainly not all. The upshot, therefore, is that since China
displays no absolute certainty for peace, it must be , by definition, an uncertainty, and hence, a
threat. In the same way, a multitude of other unpredictable factors (such as ethnic rivalry, local
insurgencies, overpopulation, drug trafficking, environmental degradation, rogue states, the spread of weapons of mass
destruction, and international terrorism) have also been labeled as "threats" to U.S. security. Yet, it

China represents a kind of uncertainty par excellence.

"Whatever the prospects for a more peaceful , more democratic, and more just world order, nothing
seems more uncertain today than the future of post-Deng China,"
seems that in the post-Cold War environment,

The affirmatives discourse of a China threat influences

policy formulation at every stage. The only way to
achieve a coherent China foreign policy is to interrogate
the role of discourse in policy making. The K is prior to
solvency
Turner 13Oliver Turner is a Research Associate at the Brooks World Poverty Institute at the
University of Manchester. He is the author of American Images of China: Identity, Power, Policy
(Routledge, forthcoming) [Threatening China and US security: the international politics of identity,
Review of International Studies, FirstView Articles, pp 1-22, Cambridge University Press 2013]

The modern day China threat to the United States is not an unproblematic, neutrally
verifiable phenomenon. It is an imagined construction of American design and the product
of societal representations which, to a significant extent, have established the truth that a
rising China endangers US security. This is an increasingly acknowledged, but still relatively underdeveloped, concept within the literature.121 The purpose of this article has been to expose how threats
from China towards the United States have always been contingent upon subjective
interpretation. The three case studies chosen represent those moments across the lifetime of Sino-US
relations at which China has been perceived as most threatening to American security. The threats
emerged in highly contrasting eras. The nature of each was very different and they emerged from
varying sources (broadly speaking, from immigration in the nineteenth century and from great power
rivalry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries). Yet in this way they most effectively demonstrate how
China threats have repeatedly existed as socially constructed phenomenon .
Collectively they reveal the consistent centrality of understandings about the U nited States in

perceptions of external danger. They demonstrate that, regardless of China's ability to

assert material force or of the manner in which it has been seen to impose itself upon the
United States, the reality of danger can be manufactured and made real. China
threats have always been threats to American identity so that the individual sources of
danger whether a nuclear capability or an influx of (relatively few) foreign immigrants have
never been the sole determining factors. As James Der Derian notes, danger can be ascribed
to otherness wherever it may be found.122 During the mid-to-late nineteenth century and throughout
the early Cold War, perceptions of China threats provoked crises of American identity. The
twenty-first-century China threat is yet to be understood in this way but it remains inexplicable
in simple material terms. As ever, the physical realities of China are important but they are
interpreted in such a way to make them threatening , regardless of
Beijing's intentions.
Most importantly, this article has shown how processes of representation have been complicit
at every stage of the formulation, enactment, and justification of US China
policy . Their primary purpose has been to dislocate China's identity from that of the
United States and introduce opportunities for action. Further, those policies themselves have
reaffirmed the discourses of separation and difference which make China foreign from the
United States, protecting American identity from the imagined threat. Ultimately, this analysis
has sought to expose the inadequacy of approaches to the study of US China policy which privilege and
centralise material forces to the extent that ideas are subordinated or even excluded.
Joseph Nye argues that the China Threat Theory has the potential to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Based upon a crude hypothetical assumption that there exists a 50 per cent chance of China becoming
aggressive and a 50 per cent chance of it not, Nye explains, to treat China as an enemy now effectively
discounts 50 per cent of the future.123 In such way he emphasises the ideational constitution of material

forces and the power of discourse to create selected truths about the world so that certain courses of action
are enabled while others are precluded. Assessments such as those of Director of National Intelligence
James Clapper in March 2011 should therefore not only be considered misguided, but also

potentially dangerous . For while they appear to represent authoritative statements of

fact they actually rely upon subjective assumptions about China and the
material capabilities he describes.
In late 2010 President Obama informed Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao that the American people [want] to
continue to build a growing friendship and strong relationship between the peoples of China and the United
States.124 The hope, of course, is that a peaceful and cooperative future can be secured. Following the

announcement that the Asia Pacific is to constitute the primary focus of Washington's early
twenty-first-century foreign policy strategy, American interpretations of China must be
acknowledged as a central force within an increasingly pertinent relationship. The basis of
their relations will always be fundamentally constituted by ideas and history informs us that
particular American discourses of China have repeatedly served to construct vivid and
sometimes regrettable realities about that country and its people. Crucially, it tells us that
they have always been inextricable from the potentialities of US China policy. As Sino-US
relations become increasingly consequential the intention must be for American
representations of the PRC and indeed Chinese representations of the United States to become
the focus of more concerted scholarly attention. Only in this way can the contours of those
relations be more satisfactorily understood, so that the types of historical episodes explored
in this analysis might somehow be avoided in the future.
US studies of china are all formed not around objective evaluations of reality but tailored toward
what the US response should beconsequences cannot be separated from questions of epistemology
Breslin 2009
Shaun, Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick, Understanding Chinas regional rise:
interpretations, identities and implications International Affairs 85: 4 (2009)817835
Chinas rise or Americas decline? Another key problem is the near-impossibility of disentangling the study of
Chinas regional relations from conceptions of US (in)security. US-based scholars have devoted considerable
time and attention in recent years to the study of Chinese power in East Asia. The subdiscipline has been enriched by, among other
works, monographs by Sutter and Kang, edited collections by Shambaugh and by Keller and Rawski, and a range of articles in
International Security.55 There are also strong Asia dimensions to broader considerations of the implications of Chinas rise
Lamptons consideration of different dimensions of Chinese power, Shirks understanding of the fragility of the Chinese regime,
Goldsteins understanding of Chinas grand strategy, Gills focus on security diplomacy and Johnstons forensic investigation of how
China is being socialized into international norms through participation in global and regional regimes.56 It is not surprising that

Asia figures so highly in these considerations of the implications of Chinas rise. It is in its own
neighbourhood that China is most active, and has made the most progress in establishing itself as a major
(if still not quite yet the primary) power. It is also the region in which the power of the US is perhaps most under threat. As a
result, there are some who are concerned that negative perceptions of the US and/or US neglect of the region and/or US foreign policy
initiatives in the Middle East have resulted in declining support for Washington. Moreover, the association of the US with the policies
promoted in the region by the IMF in the wake of the Asian financial crisis are also seen as undermining support for US values and
culture (culture defined in political economy terms if not in the continued appeal of individual leading brands). So, in many respects,
interest in the rise of Chinas soft power should be seen alongside the concomitant concern about the loss of US soft power in
particular, and challenges to US hegemony in general. All of these studies are of course about China, but they are also

in many respects for the US. They are designed at least in part to influence the way in which US policymakers think about and act towards China, by assessing first the nature of this thing called China; then the
nature of the challenge that it poses to the US; and finally the efficacy of different responses in defending
US national interests. To suggest that much of the literature on Chinese power is intended to influence a policy
audience in Washington is not particularly heretical: most of these works are explicit in their intention and
have chapters devoted to explaining what the authors arguments mean for the US and how the government
should respond. Keller and Rawski perhaps speak for them all when they say that our investigation is structured to inform a US
policy on Asia capable of responding to dynamic change in the light of an apparent US disengagement from Asiaan unfortunate
coincidence of the decline of the US with Chinas new regional initiatives.57 This policy advocacy dimension to

analyses of Chinese power needs to be kept in mind when trying to evaluate the consequences of
Chinas changed regional policynot so much when reading the studies referred to above, but at least
when considering some of the warnings of an impending tip in the balance of power. When the intention is to

convince an audience, it is important to get the message across. So

when it comes to talking about Chinese soft power,

the broader the definition of what it actually is, the greater the amount of power that China seems to have
(and the more urgent the threat to the US). For example, despite his earlier comments about the attraction of the Chinese
model, at the heart of Kurlantzicks definition of the sources of Chinese soft power is the rather hard strategic use of economic
relations as a means of achieving power politics objectives.58 Windybank also focuses on economic relations, including politically
inspired trade and aid, and concludes that the challenge to the US is real and urgent: through a combination of trade, aid and skilful
diplomacy, Beijing is laying the foundations for a new regional order with China as the natural leader and the United States as the
outsider.59 Perhaps the tone is best summed up by the title of Moshers 2001 bookHegemon: Chinas plan to
dominate Asia and the world.60

Their detached and orderly description of China reduces a complex and nuanced
society to a specimen that can be clinically observed and analyzedthis approach to
knowing China renders critical reflection impossible and legitimizes violence.
Chengxin Pan, Department of Political Science and International Relations at the Australian National
University, 2004 (The "China Threat" in American Self-Imagination: The Discursive Construction of
Other as Power Politics, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Volume 29, Issue 3, June/July, Available
Online via Academic Search Premier, p. 305-306)
While U.S. China scholars argue fiercely over "what China precisely is," their debates have been
underpinned by some common ground, especially in terms of a positivist epistemology. Firstly,
they believe that China is ultimately a knowable object, whose reality can be, and ought to be,
empirically revealed by scientific means. For example, after expressing his dissatisfaction with
often conflicting Western perceptions of China, David M. Lampton, former president of the
National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, suggests that "it is time to step back and look at
where China is today, where it might be going, and what consequences that direction will hold
for the rest of the world."2 Like many other China scholars, Lampton views his object of study
as essentially "something we can stand back from and observe with clinical detachment."3
Secondly, associated with the first assumption, it is commonly believed that China scholars
merely serve as "disinterested observers" [end page 305] and that their studies of China are
neutral, passive descriptions of reality. And thirdly, in pondering whether China poses a threat or
offers an opportunity to the United States, they rarely raise the question of "what the United
States is." That is, the meaning of the United States is believed to be certain and beyond doubt. I
do not dismiss altogether the conventional ways of debating China. It is not the purpose of this
article to venture my own "observation" of "where China is today," nor to join the "containment"
versus "engagement" debate per se. Rather, I want to contribute to a novel dimension of the
China debate by questioning the seemingly unproblematic assumptions shared by most China
scholars in the mainstream IR community in the United States. To perform this task, I will focus
attention on a particularly significant component of the China debate; namely, the "China threat"
literature. More specifically, I want to argue that U.S. conceptions of China as a threatening
other are always intrinsically linked to how U.S. policymakers/mainstream China specialists see
themselves (as representatives of the indispensable, security-conscious nation, for example). As
such, they are not value-free, objective descriptions of an independent, preexisting Chinese
reality out there, but are better understood as a kind of normative, meaning-giving practice that
often legitimates power politics in U.S.-China relations and helps transform the "China threat"
into social reality. In other words, it is self-fulfilling in practice, and is always part of the "China
threat" problem it purports merely to describe. In doing so, I seek to bring to the fore two
interconnected themes of self/other constructions and of theory as practice inherent in the "China
threat" literaturethemes that have been overridden and rendered largely invisible by those
common positivist assumptions.

Their representations of China are grounded in a myth of American Exceptionalism

that is epistemologically indefensible. Fears of the China Threat are products of
U.S. anxiety that are manifested in violencethis turns the case.
Chengxin Pan, Department of Political Science and International Relations at the Australian National
University, 2004 (The "China Threat" in American Self-Imagination: The Discursive Construction of
Other as Power Politics, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Volume 29, Issue 3, June/July, Available

Online via Academic Search Premier, p. 310-314)

American Self-imagination and the Construction of Otherness In 1630, John Winthrop, governor
of the British-settled Massachusetts Bay Colony, described the Puritan mission as a moral
beacon [end page 310] for the world: "For wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a
Hill, the eies [eyes] of all people are uppon us."26 Couched in a highly metaphoric manner, the
"city on the hill" message greatly galvanized the imagination of early European settlers in North
America who had desperately needed some kind of certainty and assurance in the face of many
initial difficulties and disappointments in the "New World." Surely there have been numerous
U.S. constructions of "what we are," but this sense of "manifest destiny," discursively repeated
and reconstructed time and again by leading U.S. politicians, social commentators, the popular
press, and numerous school textbooks, has since become a pivotal part of U.S. selfconsciousness. In 1992, Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote:
America is a remarkable nation. We are, as Abraham Lincoln told Congress in December 1862, a
nation that "cannot escape history" because we are "the last best hope of earth." The president
said that his administration and Congress held the "power and . . . responsibility" to ensure that
the hope America promised would be fulfilled. Today . . . America is still the last best hope of
earth, and we still hold the power and bear the responsibility for its remaining so.2'' This
sentiment was echoed by Madeleine K. Albright, the former secretary of state, who once called
the United States "the indispensable nation" and maintained that "we stand tall and hence see
further than other nations."28 More recently, speaking of the U.S. role in the current war on
terrorism. Vice President Dick Cheney said: "Only we can rally the world in a task of this
complexity against an enemy so elusive and so resourceful. The United States and only the
United States can see this effort through to victory."29 It is worth adding that Cheney, along with
several other senior officials in the present Bush administration, is a founding member of the
Project for the New American Century, a project designed to ensure U.S. security and global
dominance in the twenty-first century. Needless to say, the United States is not unique in
ethnocentric thinking. For centuries, China had assumed it was the center of the world. But what
distinguishes U.S. from Chinese ethnocentric self-identities is that while the latter was based
largely on the Confucian legacy, the former is sanctioned by more powerful regimes of truth,
such as Christianity and modern science. For the early English Puritans, America was part of a
divine plan and the settlers were the Chosen People blessed by covenant with God. With the
advent of the scientific age, U.S. exceptionalism began taking on a secular, scientific dimension.
Charles Darwin once argued that "the [end page 311] wonderful progress of the United States, as
well as the character of the people, are the results of natural selection."3' The United States has
since been construed as the manifestation of the law of nature, with its ideas and institutions
described not as historically particular but as truly universal. For example, in his second
inaugural address in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson declared that U.S. principles were "not
the principles of a province or of a single continent. We have known and boasted all along that
they were the principles of a liberated mankind. " In short, "The US is Utopia achieved." It
represents the "End of History."* What does this U.S. self-knowledge have to do with the way
in which it comes to know others in general and China in particular? To put it simply, this selfknowledge is always a powerful analytical framework within which other societies are to be
known. By envisioning a linear process of historical development with itself at its apex, the
United States places other nations on a common evolutionary slope and sees them as inevitably
traveling toward the end of history that is the United States. For example, as a vast, ancient
nation on the other side of the Pacific, China is frequently taken as a mirror image of the U.S.
self. As Michael Hunt points out, we imagine ourselves locked in a special relationship with the
Chinese, whose apparent moderation and pragmatism mirror our own most prized attributes and
validate our own longings for a world made over in our own image. If China with its old and
radically different culture can be won, where can we not prevail? Yet, in a world of diversity,
contingency, and unpredictability, which is irreducible to universal sameness or absolute
certainty, this kind of U.S. knowledge of others often proves frustratingly elusive. In this
context, rather than questioning the validity of their own universalist assumptions, the people of
the United States believe that those who are different should be held responsible for the lack of
universal sameness. Indeed, because "we" are universal, those who refuse or who are unable to
become like "us" are no longer just "others," but are by definition the negation of universality, or

the other. In this way, the other is always built into this universalized "American" self. Just as
"Primitive . . . is a category, not an object, of Western thought," so the threat of the other is not
some kind of "external reality" discovered by U.S. strategic analysts, but a ready-made category
of thought within this particular way of U.S. self-imagination. Consequently, there is always a
need for the United States to find a specific other to fill into the totalized category of otherness.
[end page 312] In the early days of American history, it was Europe, or the "Old World," that
was invoked as its primary other, threatening to corrupt the "New World." Shortly after World
War II, in the eyes of U.S. strategists, the Soviet Union emerged as a major deviance from, hence
an archenemy of, their universal path toward progress via the free market and liberal democracy.
And after the demise of the Soviet Union, the vacancy of other was to be filled by China, the
"best candidate" the United States could find in the post-Cold War, unipolar world. Not until the
September 11 attacks in New York and Washington had China's candidature been suspended, to
be replaced by international terrorism in general and Saddam's Iraq in particular's At first
glance, as the "China threat" literature has told us, China seems to fall perfectly into the "threat"
category, particularly given its growing power. However, China's power as such does not speak
for itself in terms of an emerging threat. By any reasonable measure, China remains a largely
poor country edged with only a sliver of affluence along its coastal areas. Nor is China's sheer
size a self-evident confirmation of the "China threat" thesis, as other countries like India, Brazil,
and Australia are almost as big as China. Instead, China as a "threat" has much to do with the
particular mode of U.S. self-imagination. As Steve Chan notes: China is an object of attention
not only because of its huge size, ancient legacy, or current or projected relative national power. .
. . The importance of China has to do with perceptions, especially those regarding the potential
that Beijing will become an example, source, or model that contradicts Western liberalism as the
reigning paradigm. In an era of supposed universalizing cosmopolitanism, China demonstrates
the potency and persistence of nationalism, and embodies an alternative to Western and
especially U.S. conceptions of democracy and capitalism. China is a reminder that history is not
close to an end. Certainly, I do not deny China's potential for strategic misbehavior in the global
context, nor do I claim the "essential peacefulness" of Chinese culture." Having said that, my
main point here is that there is no such thing as "Chinese reality" that can automatically speak
for itself, for example, as a "threat." Rather, the "China threat" is essentially a specifically social
meaning given to China by its U.S. observers, a meaning that cannot be disconnected from the
dominant U.S. self-construction. Thus, to fully understand the U.S. "China threat" argument, it is
essential to recognize its autobiographical nature. [end page 313] Indeed, the construction of
other is not only a product of U.S. self-imagination, but often a necessary foil to it. For example,
by taking this particular representation of China as Chinese reality per se, those scholars are able
to assert their self-identity as "mature," "rational" realists capable of knowing the "hard facts" of
international politics, in distinction from those "idealists" whose views are said to be grounded
more in "an article of faith" than in "historical experience."41 On the other hand, given that
history is apparently not "progressively" linear, the invocation of a certain other not only helps
explain away such historical uncertainties or "anomalies" and maintain the credibility of the
allegedly universal path trodden by the United States, but also serves to highlight U.S.
"indispensability." As Samuel Huntington puts it, "If being an American means being committed
to the principles of liberty, democracy, individualism, and private property, and if there is no evil
empire out there threatening those principles, what indeed does it mean to be an American, and
what becomes of American national interests?" In this way, it seems that the constructions of the
particular U.S. self and its other are always intertwined and mutually reinforcing. Some may
suggest that there is nothing particularly wrong with this since psychologists generally agree that
"individuals and groups define their identity by differentiating themselves from and placing
themselves in opposition to others."^3 This is perhaps true. As the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de
Saussure tells us, meaning itself depends on difference and differentiation. Yet, to understand the
U.S. dichotomized constructions of self/other in this light is to normalize them and render them
unproblematic, because it is also apparent that not all identity-defining practices necessarily
perceive others in terms of either universal sameness or absolute otherness and that difference
need not equate to threat.
Chinese threats are grounded in US primacys demand of securitization versus a vague otherthis

logic creates a self fulfilling cycle of endless intervention

Pan, 2004. Chengxin Pan, Department of Political Science and International Relations at Australian
National University. Alternatives 29, 2004. Pages 310-313.
In 1630, John Winthrop, governor of the British-settled Massachusetts Bay Colony, described
the Puritan mission as a moral beacon for the world: "For wee must Consider that wee shall be
as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies [eyes] of all people are uppon us." Couched in a highly
metaphoric manner, the "city on the hill" message greatly galvanized the imagination of early
European settlers in North America who had desperately needed some kind of certainty and
assurance in the face of many initial difficulties and disappointments in the "New World." Surely
there have been numerous U.S. constructions of "what we are," but this sense of "manifest
destiny," discursively repeated and reconstructe{d time and again by leading U.S. politicians,
social commentators, the popular press, and numerous school textbooks, has since become a
pivotal part of U.S. self-consciousness. In 1992, Colin Powell, then chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote:
America is a remarkable nation. We are, as Abraham Lincoln told Congress in December 1862, a
nation that "cannot escape history" because we are "the last best hope of earth." The president
said that his administration and Congress held the "power and . . . responsibility" to ensure that
the hope America promised would be fulfilled. Today . . . America is still the last best hope of
earth, and we still hold the power and bear the responsibility for its remaining so.
This sentiment was echoed by Madeleine K. Albright, the former secretary of state, who once
called the United States "the indispensable nation" and maintained that "we stand tall and hence
see further than other nations." More recently, speaking of the U.S. role in the current war on
terrorism. Vice President Dick Cheney said: "Only we can rally the world in a task of this
complexity against an enemy so elusive and so resourceful. The United States and only the
United States can see this effort through to victory." It is worth adding that Cheney, along with
several other senior officials in the present Bush administration, is a founding member of the
Project for the New American Century, a project designed to ensure U.S. security and global
dominance in the twenty-first century.
Needless to say, the United States is not unique in ethnocentric thinking. For centuries, China
had assumed it was the center of the world. But what distinguishes U.S. from Chinese
ethnocentric self-identities is that while the latter was based largely on the Confucian legacy, the
former is sanctioned by more powerful regimes of truth, such as Christianity and modern
science. For the early English Puritans, America was part of a divine plan and the settlers were
the Chosen People blessed by covenant with God. With the advent of the scientific age, U.S.
exceptionalism began taking on a secular, scientific dimension. Charles Darwin once argued that
"the wonderful progress of the United States, as well as the character of the people, are the
results of natural selection."
The United States has since been construed as the manifestation of the law of nature, with its
ideas and institutions described not as historically particular but as truly universal. For example,
in his second inaugural address in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson declared that U.S. principles
were "not the principles of a province or of a single continent. We have known and boasted all
along that they were the principles of a liberated mankind." In short, "The US is Utopia
achieved." It represents the "End of History."
What does this U.S. self-knowledge have to do with the way in which it comes to know
others in general and China in particular? To put it simply, this self-knowledge is always a
powerful analytical framework within which other societies are to be known. By envisioning a
linear process of historical development with itself at its apex, the United States places other
nations on a common evolutionary slope and sees them as inevitably traveling toward the end of
history that is the United States. For example, as a vast, ancient nation on the other side of the
Pacific, China is frequently taken as a mirror image of the U.S. self. As Michael Hunt points out,
we imagine ourselves locked in a special relationship with the Chinese, whose apparent
moderation and pragmatism mirror our own most prized attributes and validate our own longings
for a world made over in our own image. If China with its old and radically different culture can
be won, where can we not prevail?

Yet, in a world of diversity, contingency, and unpredictability, which is irreducible to

universal sameness or absolute certainty, this kind of U.S. knowledge of others often proves
frustratingly elusive. In this context, rather than questioning the validity of their own universalist
assumptions, the people of the United States believe that those who are different should be held
responsible for the lack of universal sameness. Indeed, because "we" are universal, those who
refuse or who are unable to become like "us" are no longer just "others," but are by definition the
negation of universality, or the other. In this way, the other is always built into this universalized
"American" self. Just as "Primitive ... is a category, not an object, of Western thought," so the
threat of the other is not some kind of "external reality" discovered by U.S. strategic analysts,
but a ready-made category of thought within this particular way of U.S. self-imagination.
Consequently, there is always a need for the United States to find a specific other to fill into the
totalized category of otherness. In the early days of American history, it was Europe, or the "Old
World," that was invoked as its primary other, threatening to corrupt the "New World." Shortly
after World War II, in the eyes of U.S. strategists, the Soviet Union emerged as a major deviance
from, hence an archenemy of, their universal path toward progress via the free market and liberal
democracy. And after the demise of the Soviet Union, the vacancy of other was to be filled by
China, the "best candidate" the United States could find in the post-Cold War, unipolar world.
Not until the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington had China's candidature been
suspended, to be replaced by international terrorism in general and Saddam's Iraq in particular.
At first glance, as the "China threat" literature has told us, China seems to fall perfectly into the
"threat" category, particularly given its growing power. However, China's power as such does
not speak for itself in terms of an emerging threat. By any reasonable measure, China remains a
largely poor country edged with only a sliver of affluence along its coastal areas. Nor is China's
sheer size a self-evident confirmation of the "China threat" thesis, as other countries like India,
Brazil, and Australia are almost as big as China. Instead, China as a "threat" has much to do with
the particular mode of U.S. self-imagination. As Steve Chan notes:
China is an object of attention not only because of its huge size, ancient legacy, or current or
projected relative national power. . . . The importance of China has to do with perceptions,
especially those regarding the potential that Beijing will become an example, source, or model
that contradicts Western liberalism as the reigning paradigm. In an era of supposed
universalizing cosmopolitanism, China demonstrates the potency and persistence of nationalism,
and embodies an alternative to Western and especially U.S. conceptions of democracy and
capitalism. China is a reminder that history is not close to an end.
Certainly, I do not deny China's potential for strategic misbehavior in the global context, nor do I
claim the "essential peacefulness" of Chinese culture." Having said that, my main point here is that
there is no such thing as "Chinese reality" that can automatically speak for itself, for example, as a
"threat." Rather, the "China threat" is essentially a specifically social meaning given to China by its
U.S. observers, a meaning that cannot be disconnected from the dominant U.S. self-construction.
Thus, to fully understand the U.S. "China threat" argument, it is essential to recognize its
autobiographical nature.

Chinese threat construction assumes a knowable and essentially violent Chinese

Otherthis Western lens makes militarization and conflict inevitable.
Pan, 2004. Pan, IR at Australian National University, 04[Chengxin, "The 'China Threat' in American SelfImagination: The Discursive Construction of Other as Power Politics," Alternatives: Global, Local,
Political, vol. 29, no. 3 (2004)]
Having examined how the "China threat" literature is enabled by and serves the purpose of a
particular U.S. self-construction, I want to turn now to the issue of how this literature represents
a discursive construction of other, instead of an "objective" account of Chinese reality. This, I
argue, has less to do with its portrayal of China as a threat per se than with its essentialization
and totalization of China as an externally knowable object, independent of historically
contingent contexts or dynamic international interactions. In this sense, the discursive construction of
China as a threatening other cannot be detached from (neo)realism, a positivist, ahistorical framework of analysis within
which global life is reduced to endless interstate rivalry for power and survival. As many critical IR scholars have noted ,

(neo)realism is not a transcendent description of global reality but is predicated on the modernist

Western identity, which, in the quest for scientific certainty, has come to define itself essentially
as the sovereign territorial nation-state. This realist self-identity of Western states leads to the
constitution of anarchy as the sphere of insecurity, disorder, and war. In an anarchical system, as
(neo)realists argue, "the gain of one side is often considered to be the loss of the other," (45) and
"All other states are potential threats." (46) In order to survive in such a system, states inevitably
pursue power or capability. In doing so, these realist claims represent what R. B. J. Walker calls "a specific
historical articulation of relations of universality/particularity and self/Other." (47) The (neo)realist paradigm has
dominated the U.S. IR discipline in general and the U.S. China studies field in particular. As Kurt
Campbell notes, after the end of the Cold War, a whole new crop of China experts "are much more likely to have a
background in strategic studies or international relations than China itself." (48) As a result , for those experts to

know China is nothing more or less than to undertake a geopolitical analysis of it, often by
asking only a few questions such as how China will "behave" in a strategic sense and how it may
affect the regional or global balance of power, with a particular emphasis on China's military power or
capabilities. As Thomas J. Christensen notes, "Although many have focused on intentions as well as capabilities, the
most prevalent component of the [China threat] debate is the assessment of China's overall future military power
compared with that of the United States and other East Asian regional powers." (49) Consequently, almost by default,

China emerges as an absolute other and a threat thanks to this (neo)realist prism. The
(neo)realist emphasis on survival and security in international relations dovetails perfectly with the U.S. selfimagination, because for the United States to define itself as the indispensable nation in a world of anarchy is often to
demand absolute security. As James Chace and Caleb Carr note, "for over two centuries the aspiration toward an
eventual condition of absolute security has been viewed as central to an effective American foreign policy." (50) And this
self-identification in turn leads to the definition of not only "tangible" foreign powers but global
contingency and uncertainty per se as threats. For example, former U.S. President George H. W. Bush
repeatedly said that "the enemy [of America] is unpredictability . The enemy is instability." (51) Similarly, arguing
for the continuation of U.S. Cold War alliances, a high-ranking Pentagon official asked, "if we pull out, who knows what
nervousness will result?" (52) Thus understood, by its very uncertain character, China would now
automatically constitute a threat to the United States. For example, Bernstein and Munro believe that
"China's political unpredictability, the always-present possibility that it will fall into a state of domestic disunion and
factional fighting," constitutes a source of danger. (53) In like manner, Richard Betts and Thomas Christensen write: If
the PLA [People's Liberation Army] remains second-rate, should the world breathe a sigh of relief? Not entirely....

Drawing China into the web of global interdependence may do more to encourage peace than
war, but it cannot guarantee that the pursuit of heartfelt political interests will be blocked by a
fear of economic consequences.... U.S. efforts to create a stable balance across the Taiwan Strait
might deter the use of force under certain circumstances, but certainly not all. The upshot,
therefore, is that since China displays no absolute certainty for peace, it must be, by definition,
an uncertainty, and hence, a threat. In the same way, a multitude of other unpredictable factors
(such as ethnic rivalry, local insurgencies, overpopulation, drug trafficking, environmental degradation, rogue states, the
spread of weapons of mass destruction, and international terrorism) have also been labeled as "threats" to

U.S. security. Yet, it seems that in the post-Cold War environment, China represents a kind of
uncertainty par excellence. "Whatever the prospects for a more peaceful, more democratic, and
more just world order, nothing seems more uncertain today than the future of post-Deng China,"

Their so-called China Experts use flawed methodologiestheir conclusions should

be rejected.
Chengxin Pan, Department of Political Science and International Relations at the Australian National
University, 2004 (The "China Threat" in American Self-Imagination: The Discursive Construction of
Other as Power Politics, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Volume 29, Issue 3, June/July, Available
Online via Academic Search Premier, p. 315)
The (neo) realist paradigm has dominated the U.S. IR discipline in general and the U.S. China
studies field in particular. As Kurt Campbell notes, after the end of the Cold War, a whole new
crop of China experts "are much more likely to have a background in strategic studies or
international relations than China itself." As a result, for those experts to know China is nothing
more or less than to undertake a geopolitical analysis of it, often by asking only a few questions
such as how China will "behave" in a strategic sense and how it may affect the regional or global
balance of power, with a particular emphasis on China's military power or capabilities. As
Thomas J. Christensen notes, "Although many have focused on intentions as well as capabilities,
the most prevalent component of the [China threat] debate is the assessment of China's overall
future military power compared with that of the United States and other East Asian regional

powers." Consequently, almost by default, China emerges as an absolute other and a threat
thanks to this (neo) realist prism.

Congressional debates about China prove our argument hostile representations of

a China Threat manifest themselves in ineffective policies and undermine
relations.
Stanley Lubman, Lecturer of Law and Visiting Scholar for the Center for the Study of Law and Society
at the University of California-Berkeley, 2004 (The Dragon As Demon: Images Of China On Capitol
Hill, Center for the Study of Law and Society Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, JSP/Center for
the Study of Law and Society Faculty Working Papers, Paper 18, March 4, Available Online at
http://repositories.cdlib.org/ csls/fwp/18/, p. 22-24)
Any faint hope that narrow and dogmatically negative views of China might be tempered is no
more than a whistle in the dark, but the debates that have been quoted here suggest that there is a
good deal of darkness in Congress that needs to be illuminated. Unfortunately, the groups in
Congress that have been identified here as anti-Chinese gather strength from their numbers taken
together, and are more likely than not to continue to join forces, especially on the economic
issues that grew prominent in 2003. On these latter issues, moreover, Congressional emotions
are understandably fueled by [end page 22] knowledge of the pain of constituents who lose jobs
because their employers move manufacturing activities to China or close in the face of
competition from China. This article has explored only the surface manifestations of deeper
issues that lie beneath the Congressional debates because it has been concerned only with what
has been said publicly, for the record. It undoubtedly slights many other members whose spoken
words have been few, but who are more temperate in their judgments than some of their more
vocal colleagues. More important, relationships with interest groups lie behind the onedimensional images of China in Congress that have been illustrated here. Labor unions, human
rights advocates and anti-abortion groups have been among Chinas strongest critics, and there
are others less obvious, such as Taiwan-funded lobbyists. The impact of the lobbyists is
reinforced, however, by what one veteran of thirty years of China-watching in the US
government has noted as the lack of professional training or experience in dealing with China
on the part of congressional staff members critical of administration policy.40 But when
members of Congress reflect uncritically what lobbyists and poorly-informed staff tell them,
ignoring the complexities of modern China, they are led into drastic oversimplification of their
debate and thought on China policy. It is impossible to differentiate among the reasons
underlying the demonizing of China by some in Congress, but some ignorance, willful or not,
underlies the words of the demonizers. More than ignorance is involved, of course, and inquiry
into the dynamics of Congressional participation in making China policy obviously must go
behind the Congressional debate that forms the public record. Whatever other factors are at
work, however, the rhetoric that dominates discussions of China by some members of Congress
promises to continue to deform not only their personal perspectives, but the contribution that
Congress makes to formulation of this countrys China policy. At the very least, administration
policymakers are diverted from other tasksMuch time is spent dealing with often
exaggerated congressional assertions about negative features of the Chinese governments
behaviorThe congressional critics are open to a wide range of Americans some with
partisan or other interests who are prepared to highly in often graphic terms real or alleged
policies and behaviors of the Chinese government in opposition to US interests.41 It is difficult
not to agree with the conclusion of one recent study, that the cumulative effect of
Congressional criticism of the China policies under both the first President Bush and President
Clinton reinforced a stasis in US-China relations and slowed forward movement.42 Of the
PNTR debate itself, it has recently been said that the rancorous partisanship in both House
and Senate during the PNTR process, and the numerous other challenges highlighted by the
protagonists [end page 23] nonproliferation, human rights, trade deficits, and other issues
sharpened the disagreements and laid the ground for future battles the potential remained for
even more controversy and contention over China policy.43 Indeed, the passage of time and
the growing power of economic issues since the PNTR debate underlines the trenchancy of this

prediction, as the concluding section of this article suggests.

their very understanding of China is locked in a mentality

of paranoid threat construction in which containment and
engagement become indistinguishable
Seng 2Head of Research for Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, Singapore. PhD (Tan See, What
Fear Hath Wrought: Missile Hysteria and The Writing of America, July 2002,
http://www.rsis.edu.sg/publications/WorkingPapers/WP28.PDF, AMiles)
In Kyles discourse we encounter, first, the partisan criticism levelled against the previous administration for its evidently erroneous belief that China could be
reformed by the civilizing influence of the West. That this statement proceeds immediately from there to demonstrate why this theory hasnt proven out is not to
imply that the senator from Arizona therefore thinks that the entirety of the Clinton Administrations purported logic is thereby flawed. Indeed, his discourse enacts
precisely the same exclusionary practice, present in the logic that he has just criticized, so as to position China as a lesser subject, so to speak, relative to the US. Again,

This exclusionary matrix by which subjects are formed thus requires the
simultaneous production of a domain of abject beings, those who are not yet subjects, but
who form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject. 75 I would suggest that Butlers
Butlers thoughts are helpful here:

abject beingswho are not yet subjects may possibly be construed as what I have termed lesser
subjects. Hence, in much the same way that colonial or Orientalist discourses produced
subaltern subjects in order to be known, domesticated, disciplined, conquered, governed, and of
course civilized, 76 the figuration of China in Kyles discourse, evoking a genre of Otherness
most moderns prefer to think has disappeared with the passing of colonialism, is that of an uncivilized
barbaric nation and people. The previous Democratic administration, according to Kyle, erred in
believing that the Chinese can be reformed and civilized, but no such hope and it is, after all, a liberal
hope need be entertained by conservatives who know better than to even attempt to civilize the natives.
This representation allows for the simultaneous production of the properly constituted subject, America,
where human rights, the rule of law, democracy, and a track record of good neighbourliness are fully
embraced along with capitalism. Here we may note that although this inventory of criteria has long been
associated with how Americans perceive themselves and, to be sure, how the world perceives America,
positively as well as negatively their own national history, however, is littered with as many spectacular
failures as there have been successes in these very areas. Further, what is interesting to note, in terms of the
redeployment or, to paraphrase Foucault, a re-incitement of Orientalist tropes in security discourse, is
the shift from the sorts of axiomatic and practical axes that structure interrelated discourses on communism
during and prior to the Cold War, to the axes that configure contemporary readings of communism or, more
precisely, the latest variant of socialism with Chinese characteristics. As Campbell has pointed out, one
of the dimensions upon which pivoted the construction of Soviet communism as the Wests Other was that
of the organizing of economic relations: notably, in its most simplistic terms, central planning and
collectivisation on the part of the communist bloc; and, laissez faire cum mixed economy and private
ownership on the part of the Free World. 77 In the case of Senator Kyles narrative which, in a key
respect, reiterates and references norms and tropisms already present in security discourses on China during
the Clinton presidency that particular axis has become irrelevant in the wake of Chinas embrace of
western capitalism and growing integration with the global economy. 78 For a replacement, contemporary
security discourse has mobilized other representational resources that, as we have seen, function
within the senators discourse to domesticate and constitute China as a threat. And although
China is described therein as being led by a communist regime, the choice of this particular adjective,
deliberately circulated to invoke past articulations of fear, no longer refers to the same thing, however.
Hence, much as China has embraced western capitalism, much as communism in its economic sense is
no longer adhered to throughout all of China, the discursive construction of Otherness, to the extent that the
figuration of communism is still being employed, now proceeds along the democratic/authoritarian axis, as
well as along other axes (elaborated upon earlier) around which rogue states are constituted. From this
fragment of discourse reliant as it is on other discourses developmental, humanitarian, juridical, ethical,
economic, political, ideological, cultural, and of course security in order to be effective emerges a
China that can be perceived in no other way other than as a threat to the US. Kyle
concludes with a stirring endorsement of what may be for others symptomatic of American hubris and
ethnocentricity: We should hold China up to the same standards of proper behavior we have

defined for other nations, and we should work for political change in Beijing, unapologetically
standing up for freedom and democracy 79 words today that resonate ambivalently as Washington
wages its new war on terrorism in the name of freedom and democracy while, at the same time, having to
infringe upon the civil liberties of some Americans of particular ethno-religious backgrounds in the name of
that war. Finally, it is not entirely clear why Chinese military modernization and buildup of
forces opposite Taiwan, much less Beijings threatening rhetoric as if Chinese leaders,
unlike their US counterparts, do not ever employ rhetoric for purposes of domestic
consumption should automatically lead Americans to the conclusion that China
potentially poses a growing threat to [the USs] national security. To its credit, the Bush
Administration has, for the most part, avoided any forthright labelling of China as a threat, much
less a clear and present danger. But the conditions of discursive possibility for such labelling are

clear and present, so much so that policy options of containment, confrontation, and
engagement, in an important sense, do not constitute fundamentally distinct ways of
conceptualising China, but rather overlapping approaches to managing an already
presumed Other, both dangerous and threatening. As National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice
has argued, China is not a status quo power [because it] resents the role of the United States
in the Asia-Pacific region 80 an ideological reduction that not only constitutes China as
incorrigibly revisionist, but refuses the possibility that China may in fact accept (or, as a retired
Chinese diplomat recently put it, tolerate 81 ) the international status quo owing to the benefits
Beijing has accrued and desires to continuing accruing, thanks largely to Americas apparent
stabilizing influence in the region. 82 Moreover, as one analyst has averred, Beijing has a history of
testing US presidents early to see what theyre made of. 83 As in the above illustrations concerning rogue
states, exclusionary practices along various axiomatic and practical axes construct a particular
China that, in turn, legitimates the view of the Chinese and their missiles as threats. All the
while, the contemporaneous production and reproduction of a particular American identity
proceeds apace by way of the reiteration and reference of boundary producing performances
that form the constitutive outside of danger, threat, and vulnerability.

Link -- China - Method Debate

[ ] Negative representations result in an essentialist and racist policy towards China, turns case
Lubman 4 Lecturer in Law and Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Law and Society (Stanley, "The Dragon As
Demon: Images Of China On Capitol Hill," Working Papers, March)

In Congress, alliances of partisans of single issues insist vocally on highly negative views of China. Critics of
Chinas human rights practices, including a repressive criminal process and suppression of dissent, have joined with members who
speak for the religious right in decrying Chinas birth-control policies and hostility to religions not licensed by the state. Supporters of
Tibetan independence and an autonomous Taiwan add further heat to debate, as do others in whose geostrategic perspective China has
already become a threat to American security. Underlying the views of some, echoing the labor unions, is a commitment to
protectionism. One respected Senator suggested during the debates that latent racism may lurk even deeper. These

views cloud debate because they often caricature a complex society and foster unconstructive moralizing
rather than analysis of the problems that they address. By demonizing China they obstruct the formulation
and maintenance of a coherent American policy toward China and weaken Congress contribution to
making US policy.
[ ] That's a decision rule - you should reject racism in every instance because it confines our
knowledge and replicates cruelty and injustice - c/a Batur
[ ] Their discourse causes containment - presupposing conflict incentivizes war plans which replicate
the security dilemma
Weber 8 PhD Candidate at Johann Wolfgang-Goeth University (Christian, Securitizing China and Russia?, Western relations
with rising powers in the East, Journal of Historical Sociology, Vol. 16(3), http://www.soz.unifrankfurt.de/hellmann/projekt/Securitizing%20China%20and%20Russia_September_2008.pdf)

One clear example for the reproduction of the West through practices of securitization is
the conceptualization of Chinas rise as a long term security threat . Since the mid-1990s, Western
scholars and politicians try to evaluate the power potential and the aims of the Chinese
leadership in order to assess in a more informed fashion whether Western states should be either
concerned or dispassionate about Chinas impressive economic growth rates and its increases in military
spending.19 One striking feature of this literature is its normative Western outlook. Scholars, particularly in the U.S.,
presume that the current liberal international order and the Western supremacy within
this order must be preserved. A revision of the existing rules on Chinas terms is hardly ever
considered as an acceptable option and is associated with warlike escalations of previous power transitions. Thus,
the literature on Chinas rise starts from the presupposition that Western predominance
should be upheld and depicts a more powerful China as a challenger that should be either fully socialized into the liberal
system through a policy of engagement or restrained from subverting it through a containment
strategy.20 Proponents of containment who regard a future antagonism between China and the West as almost inevitable made
themselves heard with explicit securitizing moves when conflicts between U.S. and Chinese foreign policy came up. For example, a
few months after the Taiwan Strait crisis in 1995-96 the journal Foreign Affairs appeared with a special section on The China
threat.21 In the lead article, Richard Bernstein and Ross Munro, two American journalists, made some deterministic predictions
suggesting that China is bound to be no strategic friend of the United States, but a long-term adversary (p.22). In East Asia, they
contended, military conflict between China and the U.S. over Taiwan or over territorial claims in the South China Sea was always
possible and becoming more and more likely as Chinas military strength continued to grow. Bernstein and Munro did not see this
conflict confined only to China and the U.S. but instead presented it as a veritable global security problem: Moreover, the ChineseAmerican rivalry of the future could fit into a broader new global arrangement that will increasingly challenge Western, and especially
American, global supremacy. Chinas close military cooperation with the former Soviet Union, particularly its purchase of advanced
weapons in the almost unrestricted Russian arms bazaar, its technological and political help to the Islamic countries of central Asia and
North Africa, and its looming dominance in East Asia put it at the center of an informal network of states, many of which have goals
and philosophies inimical to those of the United States, and many of which share Chinas sense of grievance at the long global
domination of the West.22 This quote reads like a textbook version of a securitization move in which China is stylized as the leader of
an informal but nevertheless dangerous coalition of autocratic and Islamic enemies that prepare for a struggle against Western
dominance. It is hardly surprising that they cite Samuel Huntingtons thesis on the clash of civilizations in the subsequent paragraph.
Their vision shares quite a similarity with Huntingtons idea of a Confucian- Islamic Connection that has emerged to challenge
Western interests, values and power.23 Interestingly, they would see less need for concern if China would become a democracy.
Then, its military strength would be less threatening than if it remained a dictatorship. They dont believe that to happen, however,
since that would be contrary to Chinese culture.24 Bernstein and Munros essay was not the last one to portray China as the coming
danger to for the West. In the context of renewed tensions over Taiwan in 2000, the Washington Times
journalist Bill Gertz made very similar claims in his book on the The China threat. Gertz

argued that China was the

most serious long-term national security challenge to the United States. It threatened Taiwan with a

massive missile buildup, supported terrorist groups that threatened the U.S. and enhanced military cooperation with Russia. These
claims and allegations of anti-American intentions are only garnished with quotes from Chinese senior generals and illustrated with
incidents where China and the U.S. have come into diplomatic conflict. The Clinton administration is accused of having sold out
American interests in ignoring the most serious security threat of the United States by naively trying to engage China via economic
cooperation. As trade would not ensure friendly relations, he argues, instead China must be contained through a recommitment to East
Asian military involvement and a U.S. military buildup.25 Although the western security agenda after 9/11 had clearly shifted towards
Islamic terrorism, in the second edition of his book Gertz sticks to his warning that the danger from the nuclear-armed communist
dictatorship in China is growing. From an IR theory perspective there seem to be two separate arguments about the alleged dangers
of Chinas rise. The first is the liberal argument that there is a qualitative difference in the foreign policy behaviour of democratic and
autocratic regimes with the latter being more risk-acceptant and dangerous because their leaders are not as dependent on the consent of
their respective population as the former.26 The second argument is a realist one about power transitions. According to this
perspective, a look at the historical record allows draw- ing the lesson that the hegemony of a state does not last forever because over
time the distribution of power will change to its detriment. New rising powers, also frequently called revisionist powers, will not be
prepared to satisfy themselves with the existing set of rules that constituted the old hegemonic order and will instead seek to change
the rules to their own favour.27 Since there is no reliable mechanism in international society to manage this transition peacefully and
because the dominant actors will not give up their power position voluntarily, serious conflict over world hegemony and a radical
revision of the old rules seem inevitable. 28 Against this backdrop it should come as no surprise that realist scholars like John
Mearsheimer and Robert Kagan join the public dispute with the message that a more powerful China is a long term threat that must be
contained by the United States and its allies.29 In the public debate about Chinas rise the liberal and the realist arguments are
combined to a distinctive narrative that can be summarized as follows.30 China poses a long term threat to the security of the U.S. and
the liberal Western order as a whole. As soon as the leading great power in the world is seriously challenged by the rise of great
powers that are equipped with the sufficient demographic and economic potential, the fight over world hegemony cannot be prevented
forever. Democracies and totalitarian regimes cannot coexist peacefully indefinitely. This is a lesson that can be drawn from 19th
and 20th century history. Sooner or later they will fight each other until one or the other side prevails. Therefore, it would be
detrimental to U.S. long term interests to engage China in a policy of appeasement e.g. through trade partnership as the Clinton
administration had practiced it. Instead it must assume a firm posture and contain China through a

politics of strength e.g. with a military build-up in East Asia and the forging of alliances of
democracies. It is up to the U.S. as the leader of the Western world to take the initiative and
demonstrate military strength. This narrative had a considerable impact in China
itself where it was received under the label of Chinese threat theory. Chinese scholars and
officials reviewed U.S. and European articles that named China as a security threat and took it as an illustration of the onesidedness
with which China was treated by foreigners. In this way, complaining about the Western Chinese threat

theory at the same time fostered Chinese foreign policy identity: the country would not
turn to imperial expansion as Western great powers had done in the past but would instead go its own way of peaceful rise or
peaceful development. 31 This short reconstruction of the China threat narrative shall serve only as a starting point illustrate how a
securitization of China could look like. Of course it is only one specific part of an overall discourse about how to understand and react
to Chinas growing importance in world politics that is taking place in the academy as well as in policy circles and in the wider public.
But at least one preliminary observation still seems worth noting. China is not only seen as a threat in the United States as one might
expect.32 For example, the Gaullist former French prime minister Edouard Balladur recently called for a union of the West that
could stop the alleged relative decline of the Atlantic community vis--vis Chinas economic growth.33 Opinion polls indicate that
large parts of the population not only in the United States but also Europe see the growing power of China as an economic and even
as a military threat.34 Of course this does not mean that they would support a policy of containment. People who are worried about
Chinas growth may favor diplomatic negotiations as the more adequate measure. But nevertheless the description of

the problem has an impact on the range of options that are taken into
consideration. When the German Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in its recent Asia Strategy conceptualizes Asia as a
strategic challenge and opportunity for Germany and Europe, it pushes the range of alternatives in a certain direction.35 If even
those who prefer a politization of Sino-Western relations through multila- teral negotiations and economic
cooperation build their arguments upon a description of Chinas rise as a strategic
challenge the plausibility to treat it like a security issue increases.
[ ] Containment causes war
Eland 5/11/05 Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace and Liberty at the Independent Institute (Ian Eland,
"Coexisting with a Rising China," Independent Institute)
Instead of emulating the policies of pre-World War I Britain toward Germany, the United States should take a page from
another chapter in British history. In the late 1800s, although not without tension, the British peacefully allowed the fledging United
States to rise as a great power, knowing both countries were protected by the expanse of the Atlantic Ocean that separated them.
Taking advantage of that same kind separation by a major ocean, the United States could also safely allow China to
obtain respect as a great power, with a sphere of influence to match. If China went beyond obtaining a reasonable sphere of
influence into an Imperial Japanese-style expansion, the United States could very well need to mount a challenge. However, at present,
little evidence exists of Chinese intent for such expansion, which would run counter to recent Chinese history. Therefore,
a U.S. policy of coexistence, rather than neo-containment, might avoid a future catastrophic war or even a

nuclear conflagration.

[ ] Chinese threat literature is an exercise in the construction of US identitynot true statements

about China.

Pan 2004 Prof IR @ Australian Natl. Univ. (Chengxin, "The 'China Threat' in American
Self-Imagination: The Discursive Construction of Other as Power Politics," Alternatives:
Global, Local, Political, vol. 29, no. 3 (2004))
Instead, China as a "threat" has much to do with the particular mode of U.S. self-imagination . As Steve Chan
notes: China is an object of attention not only because of its huge size, ancient legacy, or current or projected relative national
power. . . . The importance of China has to do with perceptions, especially those regarding the potential that

Beijing will become an example, source, or model that contradicts Western liberalism as the reigning
paradigm. In an era of supposed universalizing cosmopolitanism, China demonstrates the potency and
persistence of nationalism, and embodies an alternative to Western and especially U.S. conceptions of
democracy and capitalism. China is a reminder that history is not close to an Certainly, I do not deny China's potential for
strategic misbehavior in the global context, nor do I claim the "essential peacefulness" of Chinese culture." Having said that, my main
point here is that there is no such thing as "Chinese reality" that can automatically speak for itself, for example, as a "threat." Rather,

the "China threat" is essentially a specifically social meaning given to China by its U.S. observers, a
meaning that cannot be disconnected from the dominant U.S. self-construction. Thus, to fully understand the U.S.
"China threat" argument, it is essential to recognize its autobiographical nature. Indeed, the construction of other is not only a product
of U.S. self-imagination, but often a necessary foil to it. For example, by taking this representation of China as Chinese

reality per se, those scholars are able to assert their self-identity as "mature," "rational" realists capable of
knowing the "hard facts" of international politics, in distinction from those "idealists" whose views are said to be
grounded more in "an article of faith" than in "historical experience."41 On the other hand, given that history is apparently not
"progressively" linear, the invocation of a certain other not only helps explain away such historical uncertainties

or "anomalies" and maintain the credibility of the allegedly universal path trodden by the United States, but
also serves to highlight U.S. "indispensability." As Samuel Huntington puts it, "If being an American means being
committed to the principles of liberty, democracy, individualism, and private property, and if there is no evil empire out there
threatening those principles, what indeed does it mean to be an American, and what becomes of American national interests ?" In

this

way, it seems that the constructions of the particular U.S. self and its other are always intertwined and
mutually reinforcing.
[ ] Their China threat discourse is inflated by the military-industrial complex - overwhelms and
collapses deterrence
Walt 8/27/12 (Stephen Walt, Prof IR @ Harvard, Belfer Center, "Inflating the China threat," Foreign Policy,
http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/08/27/inflating_the_china_threat)
If you were focusing on Hurricane Isaac or the continued violence in Syria, you might have missed the latest round of threat inflation
about China. Last week, the New York Times reported that China was "increasing its existing ability to deliver nuclear
warheads to the United States and to overwhelm missile defense systems ." The online journal Salon offered an even
more breathless appraisal: the headline announced a "big story"--that "China's missiles could thwart U.S."--and the
text offered the alarming forecast that "the United States may be falling behind China when it comes to weapon technology." What is

really going on here? Not much. China presently has a modest strategic nuclear force. It is believed to have
only about 240 nuclear warheads, and only a handful of its ballistic missiles can presently reach the United
States. By way of comparison, the United States has over 2000 operational nuclear warheads deployed on ICBMs,
SLBMs, and cruise missiles, all of them capable of reaching China. And if that were not enough, the U.S. has nearly 3000
nuclear warheads in reserve. Given its modest capabilities, China is understandably worried by U.S. missile defense
efforts. Why? Chinese officials worry about the scenario where the United States uses its larger and much
more sophisticated nuclear arsenal to launch a first strike, and then relies on ballistic missile defenses to deal with
whatever small and ragged second-strike the Chinese managed to muster. (Missile defenses can't handle large or sophisticated attacks,
but in theory they might be able to deal with a small and poorly coordinated reply). This discussion is all pretty Strangelovian, of
course, but nuclear strategists get paid to think about all sorts of elaborate and far-fetched scenarios . In sum,
those fiendish Chinese are doing precisely what any sensible power would do: they are trying to preserve their own

second-strike deterrent by modernizing their force, to include the development of multiple-warhead

missiles that would be able to overcome any defenses the United States might choose to build. As the Wall
Street Journal put it: The [Chinese] goal is to ensure a secure second-strike capability that could survive in the
worst of worst-case conflict scenarios, whereby an opponent would not be able to eliminate China's nuclear capability by
launching a first strike and would therefore face potential retaliation. As the U.S. Defense Department's Ballistic Missile Defense
Review points out, "China is one of the countries most vocal about U.S. ballistic missile defenses and their strategic implications, and
its leaders have expressed concern that such defenses might negate China's strategic deterrent." Three further points should be kept in
mind. First, hawks are likely to use developments such as these to portray China as a rising revisionist threat,
but such claims do not follow logically from the evidence presented. To repeat: what China is doing is a

sensible defensive move, motivated by the same concerns for deterrent stability that led the United States to create
a "strategic triad" back in the 1950s. Second, if you wanted to cap or slow Chinese nuclear modernization, the smart
way to do it would be to abandon the futile pursuit of strategic missile defenses and bring China into the
same negotiating framework that capped and eventually reduced the U.S. and Russian arsenals. And remember: once nucleararmed states have secure second-strike capabilities, the relative size of their respective arsenals is irrelevant. If neither side can prevent
the other from retaliating and destroying its major population centers, it simply doesn't matter if one side has twice as many warheads
before the war. Or ten times as many. Or a hundred times.... Third, this episode reminds us that trying to protect the country by
building missile defenses is a fool's errand. It is always going to be cheaper for opponents to come up with ways to override
a missile defense. Why? Because given how destructive nuclear weapons are, a missile defense system has to work almost perfectly in
order to prevent massive damage. If you fired a hundred warheads and 95% were intercepted -- an astonishingly high level of
performance -- that would still let five warheads through and that means losing five cities. And if an opponent were convinced that
your defenses would work perfectly -- a highly unlikely proposition -- there are plenty of other ways to deliver a nuclear weapon.

Ballistic missile defense never made much sense either strategically or economically, except as a makework program for the aerospace industry and an enduring component of right-wing nuclear theology.
[ ] K is the root cause
Zhang 11 Associate Prof Political Science and Director of the Center for Asia-Pacific Studies at Lingan Univ (Baohui, The
Security Dilemma in the U.S.-China Military Space Relationship," Proquest)
The China problem they reference is a biproduct of

the security dillema that they

exacerbate Chinas interpretation of the revolution in military affairs and its quest for
asymmetric warfare capabilities are important for understanding the 2007 ASAT test. This article suggests that the
Chinese military space program is also influenced by the security dilemma in international
relations. Due to the anarchic nature of the world order, the search for security on the part of state A
leads to insecurity for state B which therefore takes steps to increase its security leading
in its turn to increased insecurity for state A and so on. 5 The military space relationship between China and
the U.S. clearly embodies the tragedy of a security dilemma. In many ways, the current Chinese thinking on space
warfare reflects Chinas response to the perceived U.S. threat to its national security.
This response, in turn, has triggered American suspicion about Chinas military intentions in
outer space. Thus, the security dilemma in the U.S.-China space relationship has
inevitably led to measures and countermeasures. As Joan Johnson-Freese, a scholar at the Naval War College,
observed after the January 2007 ASAT test, China and the U.S. have been engaged in a dangerous spiral of action-reaction space
planning and/or activity. This article, citing firsthand Chinese military sources, identifies the major factors contributing

to the security dilemma that is driving Chinas military space program. The first is Chinas attempt to respond to perceived
U.S. military strategies to dominate outer space. Chinese strategists are keenly aware of the U.S.
militarys plan to achieve so-called full-spectrum dominance, and the Chinese military
feels compelled to deny that dominance. The second factor is Chinas concern about U.S. missile defense, which
could potentially weaken Chinese strategic nuclear deterrence. Many PLA analysts believe that a multilayered ballistic missile defense
system will inevitably compromise Chinas offensive nuclear forces. Chinas response is to attempt to weaken the U.S. space-based
sensor system that serves as the eyes and brains of missile defense. Thus, U.S. missile defense has forced China to

contemplate the integration of nuclear war and space warfare capabilities . Because of the
security dilemma, many experts in both China and the U.S. have expressed growing pessimism
about the future of arms control.

Link -- China - Threats False

Prefer our holistic view of Chinatheir security analysis creates a self-justifying race to destroy
this creates a rigged game
Bruce Blair, president of the World Security Institute, ex-Brookings Institution AND Chen Yali is the editor in chief of
Washington Observer, works with the Chen Shi China Research Group, ex-China Daily, China Security, Vol. 2, 2006
American threat assessments, however, focus almost exclusively on real or potential capabilities. Because intentions can be
easily changed, asserting peaceful aims carries little weight for Americans. Such assurances do little to assuage suspicions or
downgrade threat projections. Also, since the late 1990s, the predominance of "hawkish" American attitudes
toward potential threats has pushed the U.S. intelligence community to adopt extremely conservative
criteria for projecting threat -- for instance, by assessing an adversary's 'possible capabilities' instead of
'likely capabilities.' This is a throwback to the early Cold War habit of using 'greater-than-expected' threats
as the basis for building up U.S. nuclear forces. 'Possible' threat is even more extreme than 'greater-thanexpected' threat. In any case, there is nothing China can do to convince American worst-case analysts that China could not
possibly adapt its dual-use space capabilities for 'possibly' posing military threats to the United States. There is no escape from
this logic trap.
Be skeptical of their evidence, its written by neocons and hacks and doesnt reflect technological
realities
Foust 8 aerospace analyst, editor and publisher of The Space Review, degrees from Caltech and MIT (Jeff, China and the US:
Space Race or Miscommunication?, The Space Review, March)

Those in the US who are concerned about Chinese military space capabilities routinely
cite a bevy of evidence, much of which appears in official Defense Department documents, in support of their claims. This
evidence suggests that China is actively developing a wide range of ASAT weapons, from the kinetic kill vehicle tested last year to
exotic approaches, like parasitic microsatellites that could stealthily attack larger spacecraft. Many of those claims, though, are
dubious. A lot of the information that our analysts and intelligence officers are consumingthats driving their perceptions

of
Chinese intent regarding their civil and their military space programsis based on very shoddy
sources, said Gregory Kulacki, senior analyst and China program manager for the Global Security Program of the Union of
Concerned Scientists. Kulacki, speaking about US-Chinese relations in space at the New America Foundation in Washington last
month, said that many of the reports about Chinese military space projects came from questionable sources and

were either inaccurate or misinterpreted by US analysts. A case in point is the claim of Chinese
development of parasitic microsatellites, which appeared in the 2003 and 2004 editions of Defense Department
reports to Congress about the Chinese military. In chasing that source down, it turns out its from an individuals
web sitea bloggerwho made the whole thing up, Kulacki said. (The same Chinese blogger, he added,
had published claims of a fanciful array of other advanced weapons on his site.) In another case, the National Air and Space
Intelligence Center mistranslated a publication by a junior instructor at a Chinese artillery college and concluded that China was
planning to deploy ASAT systems. To better understand the types of sources out there, Kulacki and colleagues reviewed 1,500 articles
published in China that referenced ASAT technology in some manner between 1971 and 2007, and grouped them into four categories.
Nearly half49 percentwere classified as reviews that provided only general information, while an additional 16 percent were
polemics, or political diatribes with little technical information. Such articles are considered trash articles

in China, Kulacki said: Theyre things people have to publish because theyve got to publish something. Theyre very low value
and not read in China. Of the rest, 29 percent of the articles represented some kind of original
analysis of ASAT technology, while only 6 percent delved into technical issues. Moreover, those
technical articles dont get the same level of attention by American analysts as the reviews and polemics. If you look at the citations
in US reports on this, were undervaluing the journals that actually might contain information that could tell us something meaningful
about Chinese ASAT capabilities, he said. While American views of Chinese space efforts may be based on questionable sources,
Chinese views of American space efforts are more complex. In a general sense, the Chinese public and Chinese professionals have a
very positive view of the US space program, Kulacki said. He noted that a public expo about spaceflight in China shortly before the
Shenzhou 6 mission was primarily about American space efforts, including a wall in the back that featured portraits of the astronauts
who died on the space shuttle Columbia in 2003. There are, though, more hostile views of US space programs

in China, particularly of American military space projects. Those articles tend to be

written not by space professionals but by political officers in the Chinese military, who
write polemics that claim that the US wants to fight space wars . Because theyre not written by
professionals, Kulacki said, they tend not to be sophisticated: in one example shown by Kulacki, a Chinese article was illustrated by a
model of an American ASAT weaponmade of Lego bricks. This results in something of an echo chamber

effect between the polemical communities in the US and China. They feed off of each

other for sure, Kulacki said. There is this whole tiny dialogue between these two hawkish
communities in these two countries that dominates the entire discussion on this in the
public domain. There are also Chinese suspicions of American motives elsewhere in space. Kulacki noted that, shortly before
the Shenzhou 5 launch, NASA provided orbital debris tracking data to the Chinese so they could avoid any potential collisions. A
Chinese official involved with the mission told Kulacki that the data came late in their planning process, raising suspicions. The
relationship is so bad that he was convinced that NASA did that on purpose to mess them up, he said. Theres a lot of mistrust and
bad feelings.

Link -- China - AT: Perm

The perm fails
Shambaugh 3 (David, Professor of Political Science & International Affairs and Director of the China Policy Program in the
Elliot School of International Affairs at The George Washington University and nonresident Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy
Studies Program and Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies at The Brookings Institution, Introduction: Imagining Demons: the
rise of negative imagery in US-China relations, Journal of Contemporary China, Volume 12, Issue 35, May, p. 235-236, DB)
Americans both romanticized and demonized China and the Chineseconsider-[end 235]ing them to be cultivated
and erudite as well as despotic and heathen, earthy yet superstitious, ideological yet pragmatic, stoic yet sadistic, conservative yet
extremist, calm and introspective yet warlike and aggressive, weak yet formidable, and so on. For their part, the Chinese respected and
sought to emulate the United States, while also feeling revulsion over many aspects of American society and culture and contempt for
American behavior abroad. The United States was, for many Chinese, a beautiful imperialist (Mei Di). Sometimes these

contradictory and dualistic images existed simultaneously in the collective mindsets of each, while during
other periods one set of stereotypes became dominant and held sway for some time before swinging back in
the opposite direction. Either way, scholars noted that this ambivalence produced a lovehate syndrome in mutual imagery.2
This dual syndrome played directly into a fairly repetitive cycle in the relations between the two countries:
Mutual Enchantment Raised Expectations Unfulfilled Expectations Disillusion and
Disenchantment Recrimination and Fallout Separation and Hostility Re-embrace and Reenchantment. And then the cycle repeats. While not always mechanical and predictable, the SinoAmerican
relationship over the past century has tended to follow this pattern while ambivalent mutual images have
paralleled and underlaid the pattern. The result has been alternating amity and enmity. Two other aspects of
SinoAmerican mutual perceptions have also been evident over time. The first is that neither side seems comfortable with, or is able
to grasp, complexity in the other. While it is apparent that mutual images have become more diversified and realistic over time as a
result of mutual contact and interaction,3 the perceptions of the other are still often reduced to overly simplistic
stereotypes and caricatures which lack nuance and sophistication. Consequently, because they are derived

from overly generalized image structures, they do not tend to easily accommodate incongruous information
that contradicts the stereotypical belief thus producing reinforcing cognitive dissonance and
misperception. Certain imagessuch as the Chinese perception of American hegemony or the American perception of the
Chinese governments despotic naturebecome so hardened and ingrained that behavior of the other is filtered
through these dominant image constructs and does not allow for nuance or alternative explanations . The
second noticeable element is that perceptions of the other tend to say much more about the perceiver than the
perceived. That is, there has been a persistent tendency to externalize beliefs about ones own society and
worldview on to the other. Writers, elites, and officials in each society are so imbued with their own
worldviews that they not only instinctively impose it and its underlying assumptions on to the other, but
reveal an extreme inability to step outside of their own perceptual mindsets and see either the other or
themselves as the other would. This results in mutual deafness and unnecessary arrogance on each side .

Link -- China - AT: Realism

Realism is an interpretation and a way to frame actions, not an absolute truth. This lens is not
inevitable because our constructions of China are fluid
Yaqing 10 Assistant President of the Foreign Affairs College at Bejing and Professor of English and International Studies (Qin,
"International Society as a Process: Institutions, Identities, and Chinas Peaceful Rise", The Chinese Journal of International Politics,
2010, July 21st 2010, Vol. 3, No. 2, p. 21-22)
Identity in process means that an actors identity is constructed and re-constructed by processual forces which
come from relations in motion. If we follow Buzans categorization, any state could be called a revisionist, including the
United States, the UK, or France, for in their identity revisionist elements can be easily detected. This is essentially the concept of
identity in fixity, static and non-transformable. The reality is that any identity is identity in process. In the past three

decades, Chinas success in peaceful rise has been mainly due to its own change, which comes from
interaction with and practices in international society.45 We did not have another cold war because, to a large
extent, China changed and brought the change as well as itself into international society. It is often argued over the
question that such change is tactical or fundamental, or as a result of calculation or of ideational reshaping.46 It is a false question, for
the two again are inseparable.47 Change includes behavior change and identity change, which are inter- and

correlated. Action starting from interest calculation leads an actor into a process and once inside the process
mere interest calculation will not work, for the process has its own dynamics and the complex relations
may entangle the actor in endless intersubjective practices. The intensive interaction among the actor and
other actors and between the actor and the process is powerfully transformative. 48 Bian thus is the key to
understanding such processes. Continuity through change and change through intersubjective practices is the key
to the process-oriented interpretation of society as well as of identity. Buzan argues that it will be extremely difficult
for China to accept the primary institutions of international society. We may use one example to illustrate the opposite. Even if we take
a brief look at the case of the market institution, we may see how the process approach works. The story tells us how China has
accepted the institution of market economy and together with it how China has gradually changed its identity from a most rigidly
planned economy to largely a market economy. The process is a difficult, gradual, and through all the ups and downs, but it is not
necessarily violent. Market economy has been long a primary institution of the Western international society. Chinas acceptance

of the institution of market economy was extremely difficult and painful at the beginning. For thirty years
since 1949, China adopted the planned economy model and practiced it to the extreme during the Cultural
Revolution. Market was not a mere economic issue. Rather it was related to Chinas identity as a socialist
state and to the Chinese Communist Partys identity as a revolutionary party. The first serious test for
Chinas reform and opening up was therefore whether China would accept the market institution. Using the
three steps in the process approach we argue that the key to this test was how to look at the two opposites: market and planning.

Link -- Indo-Pak War

South Asian conflict is a consequence of Historical processes and identity formations. This makes
their empirical reading incomplete. Only an alt which attends to the cultural situatedness of security
discourses stands a chance at comprehending the Phenomenon.

Das, 2010

(Runa, doctoral candidate and graduate instructor in the Department of Political Science at

Northern Arizona University, State, identity and representations of Nuclear (In)Securities in India and Pakistan, Journal of Asian and
African Studies, 45(2) 146-169)
According to mainstream realism, studies of nuclear policies belong to the domain of the empirical . From this
objective epistemology, understanding nuclear threat perceptions or detonations may be devoid of subjective
issues like a nations history, religion, culture and ideology. Yet, in this article, I have offered an interpretive approach
to India and Pakistans nuclear policies which, following Campbells (1992) representations of danger has analyzed the rearticulations of India and Pakistans nationalist identities, perceptions of (in)securities, and their nuclear policies. In rendering this
analysis, I have accepted the realist premise that there exists anarchy in the international realm, which in a fundamental way adheres to
these states abilities to articulate and maintain distinctions between the domestic and the foreign which are taken as pre-existing and
given. Once this distinction is accepted, the domain of International Relations acquires a hegemonic density requiring the
consolidation of states boundaries vis--vis the constant presence (or production) of geo-strategic insecurities. Despite such realist
compulsions of nations boundary-making exercises, I have deemed it important to explore in this article how India and Pakistan,

while justifying their nuclear policies on the basis of certain geo-strategic (in)securities, have
simultaneously drawn from their national histories, economic or developmental anxieties, and their political
leaders ideologies (secular or cultural) to interpret their national selves and (in)securities. In rendering this
analysis, I have highlighted how both the Indian and the Pakistani states identities, which in the case of Pakistans
identity has remained Islamic in contrast to Indias secularmodern and Hindutva identities, have drawn
from various interpretations of (in)securities ranging from developmental/economic, political/military, and
cultural to justify their nuclear policies. While the transition of the Indian states (in)securities from economic/developmental
to political/military has represented a transformation in the strategic thinking of the Indian state (that has departed from the Gandhian
brand of moralistic politics to one of a defense-oriented/militarized India), which, some argue, has also laid the foundations for the
BJP to go nuclear in 1998, yet the cultural rearticulation of nuclear (in)securities in India under the BJP marks a unique departure from
the earlier phases that cannot be belittled. Likewise, what has been simultaneously interesting in the analysis of Pakistans
nuclearization discourse is that unlike the pre-1998 years where Pakistans nuclear (in)security discourses vis--vis India have
remained primarily political/military (despite some cultural references to an Islamic bomb), Pakistans nuclear (in)security discourses
at the eve of May 1998 have became cultural grounded specifically in terms of Pakistans Islamic versus Indias Hindu bomb. In
exploring this discursive transition, I do not speculate whether the BJPs nuclear security discourses guided by the Hindutva identity
has spurred a similar culturally grounded re-articulation of nuclear (in)securities in the Pakistani polity. Rather, my point in the above
analysis has been to show how at a particular conjectural moment of South Asian politics, that is at the eve of May 1998, the nuclear
security discourses of India and Pakistan have drawn from cultural re-articulations of nationalist identities and (in)securities to justify
their nuclear policies. In comprehending this shift in the representations of (and the linkages between) India and Pakistans nationalist
identities, perceptions of (in)securities, and nuclear policies, I have also noted how the two states have drawn from realism
(i.e. geo-strategic threats) and cultural representations of (in)securities (by re-writing national histories, religious
and cultural identities) to explain their nuclear trajectories. What does the above analysis of South Asian nuclearization
as studied through the combined frames of realism and critical constructivism imply for re-reading theories and practices of security in
international politics? Following the critical constructivist premise that insecurities are cultural in the sense that they are

produced in and out of the context within which people give meanings to their actions and experiences and
make sense of their lives (Weldes et al., 1999: 1), I suggest that an empirical reading of danger as given, as
suggested by the conventional International Relations theories, is incomplete. Rather, an analysis of
(in)security must consider that what is real is also a form of representation, where certain context-bound
judgments made by policy-makers self-consciously adopts an imagination of the Self and Other to define
danger mostly to suit their tasks of nation-making. As I have shown in this article, both the Indian and the Pakistani states,
depending on their temporality and spatiality (i.e. their political/cultural milieu), have socially represented various forms of their
national insecurities as economic, political and cultural to suit their ongoing tasks of nation-making whether in a developmental,
external Hobbesian, or a culturally-defined domestic political context. Comprehending (in)securities as cultural and social

representations, also requires re-visiting conventional International Relations that views states as objective,
sovereign entities in world politics that are distinct from their (in)securities . Instead, I suggest that states, in
addition to being sovereign political entities in world politics as required by the logic of realpolitik are simultaneously
social/cultural entities. As social/cultural entities, states identities are constituted by the ideological mindsets of their
managers/political leaders who define their desired imaginations of nation-states and their corresponding perceptions of national
(in)securities. Seen as a social/cultural entity, a state as a self/subject is not distinct from its insecurities; rather, as a self/subject it
defines its insecurity, and is simultaneously the object that faces threat from its constructed insecurity. This
subject/object constitution and interpellation of the Pakistani and the Indian states is evidenced in this case study where the ideological
construct of these states either as secularmodern, Hindu, or Islamic have discursively interwoven corresponding representations of

(in) securities developmental, political/military and/or cultural to consolidate their identities as performatively constituted
entities. In this sense, states and their dangers are also mutually constituted entities. Finally, I suggest that an analysis of
insecurity, which, as I premise in this paper, is not an empirical phenomenon, requires attention to how dangers
are discursively constituted. This requires a how-possible approach to the study of security, that is, how discourses guided by
codes of intelligibility or ideational frameworks of political leaders come to constitute a field of knowledge, where an established
common sense, made real in collective discourse foregrounds some dangers while repressing others (Weldes et al., 1999: 12).

A key element of such discourse would also include drawing from a multiplicity of historical processes and
engaging in ideological-cultural forms of representations to make security practices possible . How state-centric
discourses of India and Pakistan guided by their decision-makers secular/religious codes of intelligibility have foregrounded certain
notions of dangers, namely through the discursive projection of an Islamic versus a Hindu bomb particularly at the eve of May
1998 has remained a key point in this essay. This study therefore argues that the field of International Relations/Security

Studies remains open to grasp the representational dynamics of securitization and that the significant yet
understudied terrain of the cultural production of identity and insecurity in international relations merits
attention. This requires engaging realism with critical constructivism to comprehend and connect the security dynamics of the local
to the global (read: Western) levels.

Link -- Latin America

Their case is a lie US representations of Latin America
are manufactured to support our interests
Young 11 -- political organizer for Organization for a Free Society and PhD candidate in history at
Stony Brook University (Kevin, 10/31/2011, "Few Surprises in Latin American Poll: US Foes Still among
the More Democratic Regimes in Latin America, According to their People,"
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/6594)
The poll

results also indicate widespread opposition to neoliberal economic policies of

privatization and reduced social programs. A large majority of respondents in every country
believe that the distribution of wealth should be more equitable, which is an unequivocal
rejection of neoliberalisms tendency to exacerbate inequality. And although most Latin
Americans say that markets and private enterprise should play some role in their economies, they strongly reject the
privatization of public services and industries that was imposed across the region in the 1980s
and 1990s. Only 36 percent of all Latin Americans think that privatizations have been beneficial for their countries, and just 31
percent report satisfaction with privatized services (almost precisely the same figures as last year) [12]. Past Latinobarmetro polls
have found overwhelming support for keeping basic services and industries mainly in the hands of the State, and have found that
about half of Latin Americans think that government should provide free education and health care [13]. The 2011 version omitted
these questions. Implications These findings

present a general picture of Latin America that is starkly

different from the standard images in US press coverage and political commentary. The
image of close US allies like Colombia, Mexico, and Honduras as shining examples of democracy
finds little support in the poll results. Conversely, US foesparticularly the arch-foe, Venezuelaare rated
reasonably well by their own people. The view of the Chvez government as dictatorial and
repressive that is ubiquitous in US corporate media is simply not shared by most Venezuelans. Venezuela is
certainly not an ideal democracy, and the Chvez government has acted undemocratically at times, but the poll results do support the
notion that Venezuela is among the more democratic governments in the region [14]. The same is true of most other left-leaning
regimes, but the trend is especially apparent in the case of Venezuela. Mainstream commentators have an interesting way of dealing
with such findings. The Latinobarmetro analysts quietly acknowledge that Venezuelans themselves respond positively to the actions
of the Chvez government, while the world rates it negatively (the world is presumably intended here in its technical sense, as the
world of elite opinion) [15]. Last years report commented on this same disjunction: Its paradoxical that Venezuela features the most
support [for democracy], given that its also the country about which there is the most criticism regarding the state of its democracy.
Venezuelans, however, dont have the same opinion as the analysts of democracy. (My emphasis) The 2010 report thus argued that

there is an incongruence between objective reality and perceived

reality

[16]. In other words, Venezuelans themselves are too stupid and brainwashed to realize that their country is a

totalitarian dungeon, and that countries like Colombia and Mexico are the vanguard of democracy and human rights. Our only hope is
that the analysts of democracy can show Venezuelans this objective truth before Chvez installs the gas chambers. As I argued last
year, the Latinobarmetro poll and the mainstream commentary that accompanies it (led by The Economist) reveal almost as much
about the intellectual subservience and dishonesty of the commentators as they do about Latin Americans attitudes [17]. Another
crucial implication concerns US policy. When public opinion is the measure of democracy, there is absolutely no positive

correlation between US support for a regime and the level of democracy in that country; if anything,
the correlation is negative: the US government tends to support regimes that are less democratic. Although polls alone are
insufficient to prove this relationship, when considered alongside regimes broader human rights records they provide strong evidence
that

the US government prefers repression and exclusionary forms of

democracy (what William Robinson calls polyarchy) to more participatory forms and social
redistribution [18]. The idea that US policy supports repression and opposes meaningful
democracy is certainly consistent with past history , for which academic studies have
confirmed this pattern [19].

Link North Korea

Securitization of North Korean war turns case ethical
obligation to reject it
Bleiker 5 Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland (Roland, Professor
of International Relations at the University of Queensland, University of Minnesota Press, google books,
x-xi)
The dangers of North Koreas nuclear brinkmanship are evident and much discussed. Miscalculation or a sudden escalation could
precipitate a human disaster at any moment. Equally dangerous, although much less evident, are the

confrontational and militaristic attitudes with which some of the key regional and global players seek to
contain the volatile situation. Particularly problematic is the approach of the most influential external actor on the
peninsula, the United States. Washingtons inability to see North Korea as anything but a threatening rogue
state seriously hinders both an adequate understanding and potential resolution of the conflict. Few policy
makers, security analysts, and journalists ever try to imagine how North Korea decision makers perceive these threats and how these
perceptions are part of an interactive security dilemma in which the West is implicated as much as is the vilified regime in Pyongyang.
Particularly significant is the current policy of preemptive strikes against the rogue states, for it reinforces half a century of American
nuclear threats towards North Korea. The problematic role of these threats has been largely obscured, not least because the highly
technical discourse of security analysis has managed to present the strategic situation on the peninsula in a manner that attributes
responsibility for the crisis solely to North Koreas actions, even if the situation is in reality far more complex and interactive.

fundamental rethinking of security is required if the current culture of insecurity is to

give way to a more stable and peaceful environment. Contributing to this task is my main objective of this book. I do so
by exploring insights and options broader than those articulated by most security studies specialists. While pursuing this objective I
offer neither a comprehensive take on the Korean security situation nor a detailed updates on the latest events. Various excellent books
have already doe so. I seek not new facts and data but new perspectives. I identify broad patterns of conflict and embark on a
conceptual engagement with some of the ensuing dilemmas. I aspire to what Gertrude Stein sought to capture through a poetic
metaphor: the

political and moral obligation to question the immutability of the status quo;

the need to replace old and highly problematic Cold War thinking patterns with new and more sensitive
attempts to address the dilemmas of Korean security.

Understanding North Korea in a military terms like their relationship to US bases,

provides legitimacy for defense experts to mask the construction of threat and
whitewash the USs responsibly in the nuclear crisis.
Bleiker, 2003. Roland Bleiker,Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland, 2003,
A rogue is a rogue is a rogue: US foreign policy and the Korean nuclear crisis, International Affairs 79,
n4]
A fundamental paradox emerges: on the one hand, an array of abstract acronyms and metaphors
has removed our understanding of security issues further and further from the realities of conflict
and war. On the other hand, we have become used to these distorting metaphors to the point that
the language of defence analysis has become the most acceptedand by definition most credible
and rationalway of assessing issues of security. The ensuing practices of political
legitimization provides expertsthose fluent in the techno-strategic language of abstraction
not only with the knowledge, but also with the moral authority to comment on issues of
defence.67 Experts on military technologies have played an essential role in constructing North
Korea as a threat and in reducing or eliminating from our purview the threat that emanates from
the US and South Korea towards the North. The political debate over each sides weapons
potential, for instance, is articulated in highly technical terms. Even if non-experts manage to
decipher the jargon- packed language in which defence issues are presented, they often lack the
technical expertise to verify the claims thus advanced, even though those claims are used to
legitimize important political decisions. As a result, the techno- strategic language of defence
analysis has managed to place many important security issues beyond the reach of political and
moral discussions.

The Affirmative presents a one sided vision of North Korea as and unpredictable
rogue state.
Bleiker, 2003. Roland Bleiker,Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland, 2003,
A rogue is a rogue is a rogue: US foreign policy and the Korean nuclear crisis, International Affairs 79,
n4]
This article has examined the underlying patterns that shaped the two Korean nuclear crises of
the last decade. In each case, in 19934 and in 20023, the crisis allegedly emerged suddenly
and was largely attributed to North Koreas problematic behaviour, most notably to its nuclear
brinkmanship. But a more thorough analysis of the events reveals a far more complex picture.
Given the deeply entrenched antagonistic Cold War atmosphere on the peninsula, the most
recent crisis hardly comes as a surprise. Indeed, a crisis is always already present: the question is
simply when and how it is perceived and represented as such. Responsibility for the nuclear
crisis is equally blurred. North Korea undoubtedly bears a large part of it. Pyongyang has
demonstrated repeatedly that it does not shy away from generating tension to promote its own
interests, particularly when the survival of the regime is at stake. Even a primitive North Korean
nuclear programme poses a grave threat to the region, not least because it could unleash a new
nuclear arms race. But Pyongyangs actions have not taken place in a vacuum. They occurred in
response to internal as well as external circumstances. The central point to keep in mind here is
that North Korea has been subject to over half a century of clear and repeated American nuclear
threats. Few decision-makers and defence analysts realize the extent to which these threats have
shaped the security dilemmas on the peninsula. If one steps back from the immediate and highly
emotional ideological context that still dominates security interactions on the peninsula, then the
attitude and behaviour of North Korea and the US bear striking similarities. Both have
contributed a great deal to each others fears. Both have also used their fears to justify aggressive
military postures. And both rely on a strikingly similar form of crisis diplomacy. But the ensuing
interactive dynamics are largely hidden behind a rationalized security policy that presents threats
in a one-dimensional manner. The image of North Korea as an evil and unpredictable rogue state
is so deeply entrenched that any crisis can easily be attributed to Pyongyangs problematic
actions, even in the face of contradictory evidence. Keeping up this image, and the threat
projections that are associated with it, requires constant work. The specialized discourse on
security and national defence contributes to the performance of this task. It presents threats in a
highly technical manner and in a jargon-ridden language that is inaccessible to all but a few
military experts. As a result, a very subjective and largely one-sided interpretation of security
dilemmas has come to be accepted as real and politically legitimate. [end page 736] Articles on
defence issues usually end with policy recommendations. Not so this one, even though much
could be said about a great many crucial issues, such as the possibility of involving China as a
way of reaching a compromise between Pyongyangs insistence on bilateral negotiations and
Washingtons preference for a multilateral approach. But trying to identify the underlying
patterns of Koreas security dilemmas seems a big enough task on its own. This conclusion, then,
takes on a more modest tone and merely draws attention to the type of mindset with which the
challenges ahead may be approached more successfully. Required more than anything is what
Gertrude Stein sought to capture through the metaphor that served as a model for the title of this
article:80 the political and moral obligation to question the assumption that something is how it
is and how it has always been; the need to replace old and highly problematic Cold War thinking
patterns with new and more sensitive attempts to address the dilemmas of Korean security.

Representations of North Korea are rooted in ideological hegemony not objective

data
David Shim, Phd Candidate @ GIGA Institute of Asian Studies, 8 [Paper prepared for presentation at the
2008 ISA, Production, Hegemonization and Contestation of Discursive Hegemony: The Case of the SixParty Talks in Northeast Asia, www.allacademic.com/meta/p253290_index.html]
Laclau and Mouffes (2001: chapter 2) concept of hegemony, which is used here, rely on a
notion developed by Antonio Gramsci (1971). Gramsci broadened the traditional notion of

hegemony beyond the view of mapping hegemony in terms of leadership and dominance, which
are based on material capabilities, by introducing inter-subjective and ideological aspects into
this concept. Accordingly, hegemony contains the ability of a class (bourgeois) to project the
world view over another (workers, peasantry) in terms of the former, so that it is accepted as
common sense or reality. His merit was to conceptualize hegemony in terms of power without
the use of force to reach consent by the dominated class through education and, what he calls,
the role of intellectuals (men of letters) such as philosophers, journalists and artists (Gramsci
1971: 5-43). The process of fixing meaning, that is, in terms of Laclau and Mouffe (2001: 105),
when an element (sign with unfixed meaning) is transformed through articulation into a moment
(sign with fixed meaning), is hegemonic, since it reduces the range of possibilities and excludes
alternative meanings by determining the ways in which the signs are related to each other. That
is to say, when meaning is fixed, i.e. hegemonized, it determines, what can be thought, said or
done in a meaningful way. 13 Applied to this case, the exclusive character of a hegemonic
discourse makes it unintelligible to make sense of North Koreas nuclear program in terms of,
for instance, energy needs, because as it is argued practices of problematization hegemonized
the ways of thinking, acting and speaking about North Korea. Discursive hegemony can be
regarded as the result of certain practices, in which a particular understanding or interpretation
appears to be the natural order of things (Laclau/Mouffe 2001). This naturalization consolidates
a specific idea, which is taken for granted by involved actors and makes sense of the(ir) world.
As Hall (1998: 1055-7) argues, common sense resembles a hegemonic discourse, which is a
dominant interpretation and representation of reality and therefore accepted to be the valid truth
and knowledge. Referring to the productive character of discursive hegemony, the Six-Party
Talks can be regarded as an outcome of the dominating interpretation of reality (cf. also Jackson
2005: 20; Cox 1983; Hajer 2005). The hegemonic discourse regarding North Korea provides the
framework for a specific interpretation in which the words, actions or policies of it are attached
with meaning, that is, are problematized. As Jacob Torfing argues a discursive truth regime []
specifies the criteria for judging something to be true of false, and further states, that within
such a discursive framework the criteria for acknowledging something as true, right or good are
negotiated and defined (Torfing 2005a: 14; 19; cf. also Mills 2004: 14-20). However, important
to note is, if one is able to define this yardstick, not only one is able to define what is right, good
or true, but also what kinds of action are possible. In other words, if you can mark someone or
something with a specific label, then certain kinds of acts become feasible.14 Basically, it can be
stated that discursive hegemony depends on the interpretation and representation by actors of
real events since the interpretation of non-existent facts would not make sense. But the existence
of real events does not necessarily have to be a prerequisite for hegemonizing interpretational
and representational practices because actions do not need to be carried out, thus, to become a
material fact, in order to be interpreted and represented in a certain way (Campbell 1998: 3). Suh
Jae-Jung (2004: 155) gives an example of this practice. In 1999 US intelligence agencies
indicated to preparing measures taken by North Korea to test fire a missile. Although the action
was not yet executed, it was treated as a fact, which involved and enabled certain implications
and material consequences such as the public criticism of North Korea, the issuance of
statements, diplomatic activity and efforts to hegemonize and secure this certain kind of reality,
i.e. to build a broad majority to confirm this view on North Korea. In other words, the practices
of problematizing North Korea took place even before an action was done.

Claims of Korean instability are rooted in exclusionary racism

Tan See Seng, Prof of Security Studies @ IDSS Singapore, 2002 [July, What Fear Hath Wrought: Missile
Hysteria
and
The
Writing
of
America,
IDSS
Commentary
No.
28,
http://www.sipri.org/contents/library/0210.pdf]
Otherness, in Wolfowitzs rendition, is also discursively constituted along a moral/immoral or,
alternatively, responsible/irresponsible axis. Equally interesting is the notion that authoritarian
or rogue-state leaders, besides lacking in rationality and viewing problem solving as a form of
weakness, are ruthless and avaricious an intentional, not accidental, choice of predicates. That
(and here we are left to infer) North Korea or Iraq is ruled by such roguish elements can only mean that such states
can, indeed they should, therefore be properly referred to as rogue states. Against these inscriptions of
immorality or amorality stand, in diametric contrast, moral America. And here the unequal adoption

by Wolfowitzs discourse, in the case of democracies, of the analytical level of state/regime connotes that all America,
and not only its leaders or certain individuals, is thereby kind, compassionate, altruistic the polar opposite of all that
rogue states, and possibly even China and Russia, represent. To be sure, nowhere in his words does Wolfowitz imply that
there are as such no immoral or irresponsible Americans. Nor does he even hint that all citizens of rogue states are
therefore roguish; political correctness, after all, is the norm in these enlightened times. But the discursive effect is

such that we are left with the impression that leaders of rogue nations Saddam Hussein, Kim
Chong-il, and their ilk epitomize the darkest of the dark metaphysics of human nature. And
roguish as such are their foreign policies. In his evaluation of the missile threat from North Korea, the deputy CIA
director asserted: Like everyone else, we knew the [Pyongyang] regime was brutal within its borders and a menace
beyond. Its commando raids into South Korea and its assassination attempts against successive South Korean presidents
including the 1983 bombings in Rangoon that killed 21 people were clear windows into the minds and morals of
North Korean leaders.62 Again, it bears reminding that the argument here does not refuse the historical reality and
tragic consequences either of Pyongyangs oppressive policies at home or its ruinous forays abroad. In terms of
exclusionary practices, however, interpretive conclusions concerning the brutality of the Pyongyang
regime cannot be separated from the morality axis on which this particular statement turns. What,
for instance, is the effect created by the use of the opening phrase, Like everyone else? To who exactly does
everyone refer? That this analysis is intelligible at all depends upon the presupposition that this particular reading an
American reading, to be precise is universally accepted by one and all. But this is clearly not the case as implied by the
vociferous and potentially violent tide of militant Muslims in Pakistan and parts of the Middle East, who hold
Washington in contempt for the latters alleged brutality and menace toward, say, the Iraqis, (by proxy) the
Palestinians, or (most recently) the Afghans. As such, the discursive effect of the preceding constructions is
the naturalization of the Pyongyang regime as immoral, irresponsible, or just plain evil given the
damning evidence of dastardly deeds that proffer clear windows into the minds and morals of North Korean leaders.
Further, that the enumerated acts above were those perpetrated by Kim Il-song and not by his son, Kim Chong-il, seems
not to matter in this analysis, although it is the latter Kims government with whom the Bush Administration must deal.
This is not to imply that this intelligence estimate on Kim was essentially all caricature and thereby shorn of truth. The
CIA official continues in his assessment: It is easy to caricature Kim Chong-il either as a simple tyrant blind to his
dilemma or as a technocratic champion of sweeping change. But the extreme views of him tend to be the product of bias,
ignorance, or wishful thinking. The reality is more complex Like his father, he has been shrewd enough to make bad
behavior the keystone of his foreign policy. He knows that proliferation is something we want to stop. Thus, Kim Chongil has tried to drum up outside assistance by trading off international concerns about his missile programs and sales. He
has more subtly, of course done much the same thing with foreign fears of renewed famine and the chaos that could
accompany any unravelling of his regime.63 The evident attempt at nuance in the above analysis, however, does not
preclude the continued deployment of representational practices along the axis of responsibility. Like his father, we

are told, the shrewd Kim makes bad behavior the keystone of his foreign policy

an indication of
chronic irresponsibility in North Koreas international relations. We may note here the likely intrusive influence of another discourse,
particularly that on nineteenth-century European diplomacy as it figures in American intellectual and popular culture. As historian Barbara
Tuchman once noted, for most Americans the notion of diplomacy carries with it all the wicked devices of the Old World, spheres of
influence, balances of power, secret treatises, triple alliances64 and other such forms of Machiavellian intrigue for which America,
idealized as the New World a seemingly virginal, innocent, and righteous identity had no place. Indeed, just such a pristine identity is
often adduced as the universal ideal to which all nations and peoples are presumed to aspire a point made forcefully in the earlier cited
end of history thesis popular in mainstream political debate at the close of the Cold War.65 In other words, what is good for America is
obviously good for the whole world (or, at least those parts that are rational, responsible, moral). Missile defense, one
congressman averred, is for Americans, for Europeans, for Russians, and for all peace-loving peoples on the face of the Earth.66
Without ignoring or denying North Korean complicity in the light of its sizeable transfers of missile technology to the Middle East ,

what those exclusionary practices produce is the materializing effect of a Pyongyang regime
that, if anything, can be expected to harm the US at the slightest provocation a representation
of danger that finds easy resonance with American policymakers because of its familiarity rather
than any likelihood of such an eventuation. Further, what is effaced or erased by the above
statement are plausible illustrations of bad behaviour in American foreign policy: a policy
orientation that, even by most orthodox accounts, has been realist in both its prudential as well as Machiavellian
aspects throughout much of the Cold War period.67 Indeed, this effacement stands out starkly in the light of resistant
discourses mostly but not exclusively from European sources which portray America as a rogue state68 given the
apparent lack of strategic restraint in its post-Cold War foreign policy.69 Hence the tenuousness of such

constructions of identity through excluding contradictions and tensions that are as much a part of
Self as it is of the Other.

Attempts to securitize North Korea fail, in attempting to understand their

government and leadership we inherently misperceive the threat
Hazel Smith, prof of IR @ Warwick, Ph.D from London School, Fulbright Scholar at Stanford,
12/16/2002, International Affairs
Volume 76 Issue 3, Pages 593 - 617
The securitization paradigm differs from a straightforward security-based analysis because of the

formers overweening single-factor analysis and because of its heavy normative commitments.
Although it accepts the classical security assump- tions that military power and military
instruments are ultimately the only significant factors of analysis in respect to Korea, it goes
further than this by sublimating all other issues, including DPRK economic, cultural and
humani- tarian policies, within a military-based analysis. In addition, its inherent normative
assumption is that the domestic and foreign politics of north Korea provide the root cause of all
tensions on the Korean peninsula. The securitization paradigm permeates the literature on north
Korea to a greater or lesser degree. It is most visible in the US think-tank community, where
analysis coming from the American Enterprise Institute, the United States Institute for Peace and
the Institute for International Economics is most overtly shaped by the paradigm. Two articles
emanating from these institutes have shaped the policy debates in the United States and have
also articulated the common-sense view held by the US and international media.7 This
common- sensical view shapes all analysis of north Korea to the extent that scholarship
representing a different position, however well supported by research, is sidelined or deemed
questionable simply because it does not fit well with the sociological consensus of the research
community.8 These assumptions are so pervasive that they also creep into analysis which does
not overtly share the world-view of the securitization prism, with the tendency to accept, unless
proved otherwise, the securitization view of north Korea. The securitization perspective portrays
north Korean politics as mad in the sense of being irrational and unknowable and bad in the
sense of the motivation and impetus for policy being ascribed to normatively unacceptable
characteristics of the state and its leadership. That these two aspects of the paradigm are sometimes
contradictoryif the state is mad, can it really be understood as bad in the sense of being consciously
directed by an evil intent whose instigators could take responsibility for their actions?is not a problem for
the paradigm given that these are assumptions made prior to analysis. As long as these assumptions prove
fruitful in solving research puzzles, at least within the Kuhnian theory of paradigms, they will continue to
shape scientific enquiry. Nor do these paradig- matic assumptions need always to give rise to precisely the
same conclusions. Kuhn informs us that paradigms shape research questions, acting as a filtering

device to weed out assumptions which do not fit paradigmatic frameworks. They may thus
narrow the theoretical agenda, but they also permit differing research outcomes within the
confines of the paradigms fundamental assumptions. Thus, within the securitization paradigm
we can find different strandswhat I will call the hard and soft variants of the bad and mad
perspectives.

The accepted securitization paradigm for analyzing North Korea is not longer
effective
Hazel Smith, prof of IR @ Warwick, Ph.D from London School, Fulbright Scholar at Stanford,
12/16/2002, International Affairs
Volume 76 Issue 3, Pages 593 - 617
Although the once pervasive epistemological notion of paradigms has become a pretty oldfashioned idea in social science, it provides a useful analytical framework for the discussion here
because it helps in the evaluation of how some- times irrational and often unexamined
assumptions shape research question and research outcomes.5 The Kuhnian argument is that
within a scientific community dominant conceptual frameworks, which Kuhn calls paradigms,
are constituted by sets of fundamental (that is, unquestioned) assumptions. A successful
paradigm is one whose fundamental assumptions continue for some length of time to provide a
fruitful base for problem-solving. Such assumptions are held to be true for as long as they
consistently help solve research puzzles. Paradigmatic assumptions, by their nature, do not have
to be either proved or falsified and can therefore be thought of as pre-theoretical. Paradigms are
incommensurable with one another. Scholars working within the confines of one conceptual
framework simply cannot directly communicate with scholars utilizing alternative paradigms.
They literally see different things, with paradigms acting as a kind of scientific filtering or
selection mechanism which decides what is significant or important, prior to analysis taking
place. Kuhn argues that paradigms can cope with anomalies, including facts that do not fit the
framework, but that they fall into crisis when there are simply too many anomalies for the
paradigm to continue to be persuasive. Kuhn argues that after crises we sometimes see a

paradigm shift or a revolution in which the dominant paradigm is replaced by an alternative

which is more successful in puzzle-solving. The intriguing and controversial nature of Kuhns
approach is its insistence that paradigms are sociological as well as purely rational constructs. At
its crudest, the paradigm is true because the community of researchers believes it to be true.
When they cease believing, the paradigm ceases to provide an accept- able scientific framework
for analysis. This does not mean, however, that any arbitrarily chosen set of assumptions can
replace the previous paradigm. Paradigms do not arise as if by magic. There must be an
alternative available, perhaps based on a body of research, which, although starting from within
the dominant paradigm, repeatedly throws up conclusions which, precisely because they do not
fit paradigmatic assumptions, are ignored or sidelined by the broader scientific community.
Paradigm change is not a common occurrence, however. This is because dominant paradigms are
powerful and can last for longer than their apparent utility might warrant. Given the Kuhnian
framework, therefore, the argument in the present context would run as follows. The
securitization paradigm for interpreting north Korean politics may have once been fruitfulfor
instance, during the Cold Warand it could hitherto cope with anomalies, including facts that
did not fit the overall framework. Now that these anomalies are both numerous and visible, the
dominant paradigm is called into question as a useful and appropriate device for helping
understand north Korean politics. There is a now a substantial alternative body of literature
underpinned by sets of assumptions different from the securitization paradigm, but this
paradigm in waiting has not yet replaced the securitization paradigm. The alternative
conceptual frameworks (paradigms) available to the dominant mad or bad options are what I
shall call the sad or rational actor options; either of these, I will argue, forms a better puzzlesolving framework than the mad or bad approaches. The argument demonstrates, however,
that paradigm shift away from the dominant perspective is not an automatic or easy process.
Sociological factors, including the relative visibility of the scientific community working within
this perspective, can serve to give the securitization paradigm a life of its own long after its
utility has been called into question. This is evidenced by the continued dominance of the securitization perspective in the literature, irrespective of both the numerous anomalies and the
available alternatives.

Link -- Korea War

Securitization of North Korean war turns case ethical obligation to reject it

Bleiker Professor of International

Relations
2005
at the University of Queensland

(Roland, Professor of International

Relations at the University of Queensland, University of Minnesota Press, google books, x-xi)
The dangers of North Koreas nuclear brinkmanship are evident and much discussed. Miscalculation or a sudden escalation could
precipitate a human disaster at any moment. Equally dangerous, although much less evident, are the confrontational

and militaristic attitudes with which some of the key regional and global players seek to contain the volatile
situation. Particularly problematic is the approach of the most influential external actor on the peninsula, the United
States. Washingtons inability to see North Korea as anything but a threatening rogue state seriously
hinders both an adequate understanding and potential resolution of the conflict. Few policy makers, security
analysts, and journalists ever try to imagine how North Korea decision makers perceive these threats and how these perceptions are
part of an interactive security dilemma in which the West is implicated as much as is the vilified regime in Pyongyang. Particularly
significant is the current policy of preemptive strikes against the rogue states, for it reinforces half a century of American nuclear
threats towards North Korea. The problematic role of these threats has been largely obscured, not least because the highly technical
discourse of security analysis has managed to present the strategic situation on the peninsula in a manner that attributes responsibility
for the crisis solely to North Koreas actions, even if the situation is in reality far more complex and interactive. A fundamental

rethinking of security if required if the current culture of insecurity is to give way to a more stable and
peaceful environment. Contributing to this task is my main objective of this book. I do so by exploring insights and options
broader than those articulated by most security studies specialists. While pursuing this objective I offer neither a comprehensive take
on the Korean security situation nor a detailed updates on the latest events. Various excellent books have already doe so. I seek not
new facts and data but new perspectives. I identify broad patterns of conflict and embark on a conceptual engagement with some of
the ensuing dilemmas. I aspire to what Gertrude Stein sought to capture through a poetic metaphor: the political and moral

obligation to question the immutability of the status quo; the need to replace old and highly problematic
Cold War thinking patterns with new and more sensitive attempts to address the dilemmas of Korean security.
Representations of North Korea are rooted in ideological hegemony not objective data
David

Shim,

Phd Candidate @ GIGA Institute of Asian Studies,

[Paper prepared for presentation at the 2008

ISA, Production, Hegemonization and Contestation of Discursive Hegemony: The Case of the Six-Party Talks in Northeast Asia,
www.allacademic.com/meta/p253290_index.html]
Laclau and Mouffes (2001: chapter 2) concept of hegemony, which is used here, rely on a notion developed by Antonio Gramsci
(1971). Gramsci broadened the traditional notion of hegemony beyond the view of mapping hegemony in terms of
leadership and dominance, which are based on material capabilities, by introducing inter-subjective and ideological
aspects into this concept. Accordingly, hegemony contains the ability of a class (bourgeois) to project the
world view over another (workers, peasantry) in terms of the former, so that it is accepted as common sense or reality. His
merit was to conceptualize hegemony in terms of power without the use of force to reach consent by the dominated class through
education and, what he calls, the role of intellectuals (men of letters) such as philosophers, journalists and artists (Gramsci 1971: 543). The process of fixing meaning, that is, in terms of Laclau and Mouffe (2001: 105), when an element (sign with unfixed meaning)
is transformed through articulation into a moment (sign with fixed meaning), is hegemonic, since it reduces the range of possibilities
and excludes alternative meanings by determining the ways in which the signs are related to each other. That is to say, when
meaning is fixed, i.e. hegemonized, it determines, what can be thought, said or done in a meaningful way.
13 Applied to this case, the exclusive character of a hegemonic discourse makes it unintelligible to make sense
of North Koreas nuclear program in terms of, for instance, energy needs, because as it is argued practices
of problematization hegemonized the ways of thinking, acting and speaking about North Korea. Discursive
hegemony can be regarded as the result of certain practices, in which a particular understanding or interpretation appears to be the
natural order of things (Laclau/Mouffe 2001). This naturalization consolidates a specific idea, which is taken for
granted by involved actors and makes sense of the(ir) world. As Hall (1998: 1055-7) argues, common sense resembles
a hegemonic discourse, which is a dominant interpretation and representation of reality and therefore accepted to be the valid truth and
knowledge. Referring to the productive character of discursive hegemony, the Six-Party Talks can be regarded as an outcome of the
dominating interpretation of reality (cf. also Jackson 2005: 20; Cox 1983; Hajer 2005). The hegemonic discourse regarding
North Korea provides the framework for a specific interpretation in which the words, actions or policies of it
are attached with meaning, that is, are problematized. As Jacob Torfing argues a discursive truth regime []
specifies the criteria for judging something to be true of false, and further states, that within such a discursive
framework the criteria for acknowledging something as true, right or good are negotiated and defined (Torfing

2005a: 14; 19; cf. also Mills 2004: 14-20). However, important to note is, if one is able to define this yardstick, not only one is able to
define what is right, good or true, but also what kinds of action are possible. In other words, if you can mark someone or
something with a specific label, then certain kinds of acts become feasible.14 Basically, it can be stated that
discursive hegemony depends on the interpretation and representation by actors of real events since the interpretation of non-existent
facts would not make sense. But the existence of real events does not necessarily have to be a prerequisite for hegemonizing
interpretational and representational practices because actions do not need to be carried out, thus, to become a material
fact, in order to be interpreted and represented in a certain way (Campbell 1998: 3). Suh Jae-Jung (2004: 155) gives an
example of this practice. In 1999 US intelligence agencies indicated to preparing measures taken by North
Korea to test fire a missile. Although the action was not yet executed, it was treated as a fact , which involved
and enabled certain implications and material consequences such as the public criticism of North Korea, the
issuance of statements, diplomatic activity and efforts to hegemonize and secure this certain kind of reality, i.e. to
build a broad majority to confirm this view on North Korea. In other words, the practices of problematizing North Korea took place
even before an action was done.

Their representations are a product of imperialism and media bias

Alexandra Homolar-Riechmann, @ Peace Research Institute Frankfurt & Kings College, 9 [Prepared for delivery at the 2009
Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association, Rebels without a cause: US foreign policy and the concept of rogue states,
p. allacademic]
The 1993-94 North Korean nuclear crisis had a profound impact on the development of an overarching rogue
states narrative in three key respects. First, with a particular focus on weapons of mass destruction the terminology
began to be officially applied to describe the chief threat to US national interests amidst the height of the tensions
with the DPRK. A study conducted by Paul D. Hoyt (2000) on the rise of the rogue states image in American foreign policy
between 1993 and 1998 demonstrates this. Using the built-in search engines of the White House, the Department of State, the
Department of Defense and CIA Web pages, Hoyt generated a database on the basis of all documents mentioning the term rogue
from the Clinton administration. The results show that the first reference to rogue states was made early in the Clinton
administration, in January 1994. Over time, usage of the term rogue became considerably more frequent in general,
and also became more widespread across different agencies and departments. In particular, the increased emphasis on
rogue states in Pentagon documents from mid-1994 onwards contributed to a rise of the total numbers of annual
agency mentions of the term (Hoyt 2000: 298-301). However, although North Koreas nuclear ambitions appear to have
catalyzed the usage of the rogue states terminology, and although WMD capabilities remained the chief concern in the period covered
by Hoyts study, the DPRK does not lead the list of rogues mentioned between 1993 and 1998. Instead, Iran and Iraq were mentioned
most frequently, followed by Libya and then North Korea (Hoyt 2000: 302). Second, the North Korean nuclear crisis had a major
impact on the development of US policy options that aimed at countering the threats posed by rogue states armed with weapons of
mass destruction and the means to deliver them. In December 1993, for example, Secretary of Defense Les Aspin announced that the
Pentagon had launched a program, the Defense Counterproliferation Initiative, to counter the perceived
increased threat posed by Third World countries armed with nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons, which included
developing a range of new military capabilities (Abrams 1993). In a Foreign Affairs article in spring 1994, Clintons
National Security Advisor Anthony Lake (1994: 45-6) emphasized that the outlaws 16Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, and Libya are
often aggressive and defiant, which share a siege mentality and have the potential to threaten the international community with
advanced weaponry, in particular weapons of mass destruction and missile delivery systems. Invoking George Kennans 1947 strategy,
Lake specifically laid out a strategy of dual containment toward the backlash states of Iran and Iraq as part of the US objective to
develop a strategy to neutralize, contain and, through selective pressure, perhaps eventually transform these states (Lake 1994: 46).
Applying the language of containment to the problem of dealing with rogue states is significant because, similar to its original
application to the Soviet threat, the term containment implies the introduction of a carrot-and-stick approach to changing rogue state
behavior, as well as an ambitious attempt at the restructuring of geopolitical space. This, in turn, further enabled the

establishment of an overarching security narrative and conceptual framework that has influenced how the
intentions and capabilities of rogue states are interpreted by US defense policymakers (Chilton 1996: 134). Both the
concept of counterproliferation and the dual containment strategy subsequently became integral parts of Clintons 1995 National
Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement (cf. Clinton 1995: 13; 30). By the mid-1990s, the rogue state terminology had thus
become a central element in President Clintons approach to US foreign and defense policy (cf. Litwak 2000: 56-70; Klare 1998: 14).
Finally, the North Korean nuclear crisis contributed significantly to the proliferation of the rogue states terminology in political
discourse outside the branches of US government. Among other things, in order for actors to take advantage of such catalytic events to
promote particular policy agendas requires planning, organization, publicity and political positioning (Parmar 2005: 8). In light of
North Koreas potential nuclear ambitions and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and related technologies,
conservative US think thanks, such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), began to
actively engage in the proliferation and consolidation of the rogue states terminology. A review of the Heritage
Foundations online archives shows that while the term rogue state did not feature in its publications during the early post-Cold War
era prior to the North Korean nuclear crisis, the number of articles mentioning rogue states in general and those with a specific focus
on North Korea skyrocketed between 1993 and 1994 (www.heritage.org). A similar effect can be observed in US
mainstream news media. A search of the Lexis-Nexis database for major mentions of the rogue states label in all US news
media shows the impact of the North Korea-US nuclear crisis on the development of an overarching rogue states narrative.
Despite the War in the Persian Gulf against Saddam Husseins Iraq, which later became the model rogue state, only two newspaper

articles mentioned the term rogue state in 1992 one in relation to human rights and one with respect to fissile material. In 1993, US
news organizations began to report on rogue states more frequently: twelve newspaper articles use the term and seven made an
explicit connection between nuclear weapons, missile technology, proliferation and North Korea. While Iran was counted as a rogue
state in five of the 1993 newspaper articles, Iraq was mentioned only twice. One year later, over thirty newspaper articles mentioned
the term rogue state, many of them now referring to North Korea, along with Iraq and Iran, as the archetypal rogue state (Sigal
1994: 22). By 1996 the rogue state concept had become firmly rooted in the US news media vocabulary: the term rogue state was
mentioned in 129 newspaper articles and has not fallen under the benchmark of one hundred in any year since. What is

particularly important is that the conservative US think tank community portrayed North Korea as immoral,
unpredictable, and belligerent so vigorously that opposing views were marginalized and even deemed
questionable in the wider defense policy community and political debates (Smith 2000: 596-8). In the absence of major
alternative sources of information that were independent from US government agencies, both policymakers and US news
media tended to reflect these views, thereby distorting the complexities of North Koreas actions, politics, and
policies (cf. Bleiker 2003; Smith 2000).
Cold War conceptions of Asia aren't true anymore disproving the myth of an apocalyptic North
Korea is key

Kang, 3

. David (Professor of International Relations and Business, Director of Korean Studies Institute), Getting

Asia Wrong: The Need for New Analytical Frameworks International Security, Volume 27, Number 4, Spring 2003, pp. 57-85 MUSE

Following the end of the Cold War in 1991, some scholars in the West began to predict that Asia was ripe
for rivalry.12 They based this prediction on the following factors: wide disparities in the levels of
economic and military power among nations in the region; their different political systems, ranging from
democratic to totalitarian; historical animosities; and the lack of international institutions. Many scholars thus
envisaged a return of power politics after de- cades when conict in Asia was dominated by the Cold War tension between the United
States and the Soviet Union. In addition, scholars envisaged a re- turn of arms racing and the possibility of major

conflict among Asian countries, almost all of which had rapidly changing internal and external
environments. More specific predictions included the growing possibility of Japanese rearmament;13 increased Chinese
adventurism spurred by Chinas rising power and ostensibly revisionist intentions;14 conict or war over the status of Taiwan;15

terrorist or missile attacks from a rogue North Korea against South Korea, Japan, or even the United
States;16 and arms racing or even conflict in Southeast Asia, prompted in part by unresolved territorial
disputes.17 More than a dozen years have passed since the end of the Cold War, yet none of these
pessimistic predictions have come to pass. Indeed there has not been a major war in Asia since the 197879 VietnamCambodia-China conict; and with only a few exceptions (North Korea and Taiwan), Asian countries do not fear for their survival.
Japan, though powerful, has not rearmed to the ex- tent it could. China seems no more revisionist or adventurous now than it was
before the end of the Cold War. And no Asian country appears to be balancing against China. In contrast to the period 195080, the
past two decades have witnessed enduring regional stability and minimal conict. Scholars should directly confront these anomalies,
rather than dismissing them. Social scientists can learn as much from events that do not occur as from those that

do. The case of Asian security provides an opportunity to examine the usefulness of accepted international
relations paradigms and to determine how the assumptions underlying these theories can become
misspecified. Some scholars have smuggled ancillary and ad hoc hypotheses about preferences into realist,
institutionalist, and constructivist theories to make them fit various aspects of the Asian cases, including:
assumptions about an irrational North Korean leadership, predictions of an expansionist and revisionist China, and
depictions of Japanese foreign policy as abnormal.18 Social science moves forward from the clear statement of a
theory, its causal logic, and its predictions. Just as important, however, is the rigorous assessment of the
theory, especially if predictions flowing from it fail to materialize. Exploring why scholars have
misunderstood Asia is both a fruitful and a necessary theoretical exercise . Two major problems exist with many of
the pessimistic predictions about Asia. First, when confronted with the nonbalancing of Asian states against China, the lack of
Japanese rearmament, and five decades of noninvasion by North Korea, scholars typically respond: Just wait. This reply, however, is
intel- lectually ambiguous. Although it would be unfair to expect instantaneous national responses to changing
international conditions, a dozen years would seem to be long enough to detect at least some change . Indeed
Asian nations have historically shown an ability to respond quickly to changing circum- stances. The Meiji restoration in Japan in
1868 was a remarkable example of governmental response to European and American encroachment, and by 1874 Japan had
emerged from centuries of isolation to occupy Taiwan.19 More re- cently, with the introduction of market reforms in late 1978, when
Deng Xiaoping famously declared, To get rich is glorious, the Chinese have trans- formed themselves from diehard socialists to
exuberant capitalists beginning less than three years after Maos death in 1976.20 In the absence of a specic time frame, the just
wait response is unfalsiable. Providing a causal logic that explains how and when scholars can expect changes is an important aspect of this response, and reasonable scholars will accept that change may not be immediate but may occur over time. Without such a
time frame, however, the just wait response is mere rhetorical wordplay designed to avoid trou- bling evidence.

Labeling North Korea as a terrorist or rogue state constructs it as a threat, warping policy

McCormack 2 Gavan McCormack, Orientalist specialising in East Asia who is currently Emeritus Professor and Visiting Fellow,
Division of Pacific and Asian History of the Australian National University. He is also a coordinator of an award-winning open access
journal The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, Saturday, December 14, 2002, "North Korea" ZNet: The Spirit of Resistance Lives
North Korea ranks high on the Bush administration's list of 'terror states'. The January 2002 'Axis of Evil'
speech and the June 2002 commitment to preemptive war were stark signals from Washington to Pyongyang. The
formal presidential statement of strategy presented to Congress in September 2002 referred only to two 'rogue

states', meaning states that brutalize their own people, ignore international law, strive to acquire weapons of
mass destruction, sponsor terrorism, 'reject basic human values and hate the United States and everything
for which it stands.' These states, which constituted 'a looming threat to all nations', were Iraq and North
Korea. It is true that the acts to which Kim Jong Il confessed in September 2002 - kidnapping and spying - could be described as
'terroristic'. Yet simply to label North Korea in such terms is neither to understand the burden of the past nor to
offer any prescription for the present or future. 'Normalcy' has not been known in the area of East Asia surrounding the
Korean peninsula for a hundred years. Colonialism, division, war, Cold War and confrontation have profoundly distorted the frame of
state and inter-state relationships. The warping has affected not only state systems but also minds and souls .

Conceptions of Korea are tainted by orientalist distortionthey are further skewed by the
North/South and Asian/modern dichotomies.
Wilson, 91. Rob (Professor of English at the University of Hawaii) Theory's Imaginal Other: American Encounters with South
Korea and Japan in boundary 2, Vol. 18, No. 3, Japan in the World (Autumn, 1991), pp. 220-241
Negotiating the postmodern terrain of the 1990s, it may now be the case that "Korea," like "Japan," must be warily inflected in
quotation marks. Haunted by the American political imaginary, that is to say, "Korea" gets produced and projected as

a
cultural sign and occidental distortion from within some redemptive master narrative of global
modernization. Or, worse yet, as Edward Said contends in a critique of the most textually self- scrupulous or "postparadigm"
anthropology, this conflicted nation-state can be articulated only from within unequal structurations of
capital/symbolic capital under the gaze of Empire.' In terms of cultural capital and geo- political clout, "Korea" by no
means equals "Japan," whatever the share of orientalism blandly obtaining. With the trauma of "Vietnam" re-coded into family
melodrama and uplifting sagas of self-redemption, the divided and American-policied terrain of South/North Korea still troubles the
con- sumerist bliss of the suburban shopping mall like the return of the Cold War repressed.2 Estranging Western logic or selfhood
in exotic otherness can posit little cure from such skewed narratives of geopolitical encounter as "dia- logue" or "travel," although
such strategies in defamiliarization may disturb a certain discursive inertia. While visiting imperial Japan and colonized Korea in the
early 1930s as the self-ironical "barbarian in Asia," the French surrealist poet Henri Michaux, for example, had presciently
intuited that "the Japanese [culture] has been modern for ten centuries" not only for the preci- sion and geometry of
their uncluttered architecture and art but also for their uncanny ability to imitate, mimic, and assimilate "things Western" into their
own techno-poetics.3 If such is the case, this allows the Japanese to be con- sidered the first culture that we could nominate, after
Lyotard's imperative of capitalist culture discarding forms and collaging narratives, "postmodern" before they were ever even
"premodern."4 As Michaux shrewdly claimed when confronting this Asian will to modernity, "The cinema, the phonograph, and
the train are the real missionaries from the West" (BA, 70). Nevertheless, "Korea" resists such an easy assimilation into

this deconstructive paradigm of "Japan" as a postmodern condition of "infan- tile capitalism";5 that is,
national sublation into one hypercommunicative and brand-name glutted "empire of signs" encapsulating
the imaginal pres- ence, if not the collective worship, of a half-Zen, half-imperial nothingness that serves
so well the dynamics of the commodity form.6 Lest we forget, "South" and "North" must be affixed as
differential prefixes to "Korea," tying any poststructural flights of "satellited reference" down to the
dialec- tics of twentieth-century history that have divided this pre-Perry "Hermit Kingdom" into a
tormented landscape of belligerence and self-division: half- Capitalist, half-Communist, bipolarized by
the Cold War "language game" whose power struggles and outcomes are weightier than the difference of
textual terms.

The affirmatives representations of North Korea are not objective and neutral
their techno-strategic discourse is politically-loaded only challening the hegemony
of defense expertism in the context of North Korea can prevent conflict.
Roland Bleiker, Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland, 2003 (A Rogue Is
A Rogue Is A Rogue: US Foreign Policy And The Korean Nuclear Crisis, International Affairs, Volume
79, Issue 4, July, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Academic Search Elite, p. 733-734)
Why is it so difficult to deal with, or even recognize, the interactive dynamics of security
dilemmas? Why is it still possible to present as rational and credible the view that North Korea
alone is responsible for yet another nuclear crisis on the peninsula? And why have militaristic
approaches to security come to be seen as the only realistic way of warding off the perceived

threat, even though they are quite obviously implicated in the very dynamic that led to its
emergence in the first place? Answers to these complex questions are, of course, not easy to
find. I certainly do not pretend to offer them here. But at least some aspects can be understood
by observing the central role that defence analysis plays in the articulation of security policy.
The latter has in essence been reduced to discussions about military issues which, in turn, are
presented in a highly technical manner. Consider a random example from one of many recent
'expert' treatises on North Korea's missile programme: If North Korea launches a ballistic
missile attack on South Korean airfields and harbors, it could seriously impede Flexible
Deterrence Options (FDO) operations by US forces. The argument has been made that even if
the North uses ballistic missiles, the accuracy or circular error probable (CEP) of the Rodong-1
(about 1 km) is such that it would not be able to undertake airstrike missions.66 [end page 733]
A fundamental paradox emerges: On the one hand, an array of abstract acronyms and metaphors
has removed our understanding of security issues further and further from the realities of conflict
and war. On the other hand, we have become used to these distorting metaphors to the point that
the language of defence analysis has become the most acceptedand by definition most credible
and rationalway of assessing issues of security. The ensuing practices of political
legitimization provides expertsthose fluent in the techno-strategic language of abstraction
not only with the knowledge, but also with the moral authority to comment on issues of
defence.67 Experts on military technologies have played an essential role in constructing North
Korea as a threat and in reducing or eliminating from our purview the threat that emanates from
the US and South Korea towards the North. The political debate over each side's weapons
potential, for instance, is articulated in highly technical terms. Even if non-experts manage to
decipher the jargon- packed language in which defence issues are presented, they often lack the
technical expertise to verify the claims thus advanced, even though those claims are used to
legitimize important political decisions. As a result, the technostrategic language of defence
analysis has managed to place many important security issues beyond the reach of political and
moral discussions.

Framing North Korea as a threat to U.S. interests obscures the complex issues
involved in the relationship relying on hypertechnical defense analysis creates a
self-fulfilling prophecy of conflict.
Roland Bleiker, Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland, 2003 (A Rogue Is
A Rogue Is A Rogue: US Foreign Policy And The Korean Nuclear Crisis, International Affairs, Volume
79, Issue 4, July, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Academic Search Elite, p. 720-721)
The purpose of this article is to examine the role of the United States in the Korean nuclear
crisis, for no aspect of the past and present dilemmas on the peninsula can be addressed or even
understood without recourse to the US. This is why China repeatedly stressed that the latest
nuclear crisis was primarily an issue between North Korea and the United States.6 Kim Daejung, in his final speech as South Korea's president, reiterated the same theme: 'more than
anything, dialogue between North Korea and the United States is the important key to a
solution.'7 A solution is, however, far from reach. Both the US and North Korea see the other as
a threat. And each has good reasons for doing so. But each is also implicated in the production of
this threat. The problem is that these interactive dynamics are hard to see, for the West tends to
project a very one-sided image of North Koreaone that sees it solely as a rogue outlaw, and
thus a source of danger and instability. Nicolas Eberstadt, for instance, stresses [end page 720]
that 'North Korean policies and practices have accounted for most of the volatility within the
Northeast Asian region since the end of the Cold War.'8 Very few policy-makers, security
analysts and journalists ever make the effort to imagine how threats are perceived from the
North Korean perspective, or consider how these perceptions are part of an interactive security
dilemma in which the West, and US foreign policy in particular, is implicated as deeply as the
vilified regime in Pyongyang. The central argument of this article is that the image of North
Korea as a 'rogue state' severely hinders both an adequate understanding and a possible
resolution of the crisis. The rhetoric of rogue states is indicative of how US foreign policy
continues to be driven by dualistic and militaristic Cold War thinking patterns. The 'Evil Empire'
may be gone; not so the underlying need to define safety and security with reference to an

external threat that must be warded off at any cost. Rogues are among the new threat-images that
serve to demarcate the line between good and evil. As during the Cold War, military means are
considered the key tool with which this line is to be defended. In the absence of a global power
that matches the US, this militaristic attitude has, if anything, even intensified. Look at
Washington's recent promulgation of a pre-emptive strike policy against rogue states. The
consequences of this posture are particularly fateful in Korea, for it reinforces half a century of
explicit and repeated nuclear threats against the government in Pyongyang. The impact of these
threats has been largely obscured, not least because the highly technical and specialized
discourse of security analysis has enabled the US to present the strategic situation on the
peninsula in a manner that misleadingly attributes responsibility for the crisis solely to North
Korea's actions.

Link -- Korea War Alt Solves/AT Perm

Representing Korea requires theorization and historizationengaging these is key to recognize
incorrect agendas and end Western discourse hegemony- The logic of the affirmative precludes this
Wilson, 91. Rob (Professor of English at the University of Hawaii) Theory's Imaginal Other: American Encounters with South
Korea and Japan in boundary 2, Vol. 18, No. 3, Japan in the World (Autumn, 1991), pp. 220-241
Is "sublime Japan" or "beautiful Korea" just a Western projection of exotic immensity,

heterogeneous riches,
unrecuperable difference; in short, is an unimaginable post-Kantian otherness better left untheorized,
unsay- able, and unsaid? Fearful of cross-cultural misrepresentation, is the post- modern future threatened
with various versions of linguistic solipsism or the semiotic warfare of re-essentialized nationalism ?18 Can
such comparative speculations, positing semiotic enigmas of affinity, likeness, and sameness (as in Roland
Barthes's semiotically im- perial L'Empire des signes), or, on the other hand, imagining enclaves of dialogue,
difference, remoteness, and staunch unlikeness (as in Noel Burch's fascinated re-coding of Japanese film techniques in To
the Dis- tant Observer) break with Western tactics enforcing symbolic domination? 19 Can the most self-reflexively
radical cross-cultural poetics (as in Henri Michaux's A Barbarian in Asia or American avant-garde ethnography) ex- onerate the maker
from strategies of imperial appropriation and disciplinary design? Are we just fated to produce/reproduce glitzy optical

illusions of sameness/difference as a way to install/deconstruct Western models of specular subjectivity , or

liberal selfhood, in effect enforcing further entrench- ments of theory's mastery and control? Understanding
entails representing the cultural other; and "representing otherness" necessarily involves both a theorizing
and a historiciz- ing of this other: that is, representation entails an attempt to posit a total field of otherness
and difference and yet to articulate the times and spaces in which this cultural difference can emerge . Yet
the very notion of "rep- resentation," for all practical purposes within paradigms of poststructural textuality,
might as well be re-coded into the blatantly guiltier and specular term "misrepresentation ," thereby
suggesting a shared predicament of narrative construction that, however principled, experimental, or
goodwilled, seems fated to the mutual construction of fictive otherness. For "represen- tation" further
carries within its claims the charges and burdens not only of deconstructive textuality but of political
situatedness, that is, the sense of representing powers, purposes, and designs beyond intentional choice or
communal willing. (To cite an American usage of this double sense of "representation" as textualized affiliation, Emerson's
characters are "repre- sentative men," and what each represents is some aspect not only of the over-soul and of transcendental egotism,
as is proclaimed, but of emerging national power and expansionist willing.) So theorized, such "(mis)representations" of

cross-cultural other- ness can emerge to voice constructs of geopolitical poetics with often dimly perceived
or misrecognized projects and agendas accruing cultural capi- tal for discipline and self . Beyond the quest
for agonistic individuation and marketplace sublimity, these anxious textualizations function, in effect, as
symbolic strategies and discursive practices, furthermore, to create non- Western alternative models of
subjectivity and new regimes of rationality as well as to disseminate counter-hegemonic modes of cultural
production.

Link -- Korean Prolif

The affirmative demonizes North Korea they say its perfectly ok for the US to have thousands of
nukes but if North Korea has one or two then the world goes to hell this conception of North Korea
prevents effective solutions and is a violent way of viewing the world

Lal, prof in IR 09, Lal, activist, MA in IR, tenure-track professor in IR 2k9 (Prerna, North Korea Is Not a Threat
Unveiling Hegemonic Discourses http://prernalal.com/2009/04/north-korea-is-not-a-threat-unveiling-hegemonic-discourses/)

That security is socially constructed does not mean that there are not to be found real,
material conditions that help to create particular interpretations of threats, or that such
conditions are irrelevant to either the creation or undermining of the assumptions
underlying security policy. Enemies, in part, create each other, via the projections of
their worst fears onto the other; in this respect, their relationship is intersubjective. To
the extent that they act on these projections, threats to each other acquire a material
character. -Ronnie Lipschutz, UCSC Kim Jong-Il wants attention. And now he has it. He wont go in our Morons of
the Week column and certainly scores points for knowing how to misuse national resources to get international attention.

Our problem with MSM coverage of the North Korea missile threat is with the
purported hegemonic discourse. Hegemonic discourse does not pertain to just speech; it
refers to whole narratives, with a hero and a villain, and us and them that we must defeat
and overcome. The point of hegemonic discoursein this case the discourse of the United
States on demonizing North Korea and drawing attention to its nuclear activitiesis
to subjugate and oppress the counter-discourses of a race-war, nuclearism and anticapitalism. (1) Race war discourse While this is not a clash of civilizations, it is certainly a
race war in that the entire discourse revolves around preventing certain kinds of
people from acquiring and using nuclear weapons. Would the United States use the same
tactics in France? Or even India? No, in fact it looked the other way on outrageous French nuclear testing in
the Pacific and supports Indias nuclear program despite the fact that it is not a signatory of the NPT! Ronnie Lipschutz
has some fine lines for us in On Security: To be sure, the United States and Russia do not launch missiles against each
other because both know the result would be annihilation. But the same is true for France and Britain, or China and Israel.
It was the existence of the Other that gave deterrence its power; it is the disappearance of the Other that has vanquished
that power. Where Russia is now concerned, we are, paradoxically, not secure, because we see no need to be secured. In
other words, as Ole Waever might put it, where there is no constructed threat, there is no security

problem. France is fully capable of doing great damage to the United States, but that
capability has no meaning in terms of U.S. security . On the other hand, see the Iran nuclear crisis as
an example. The United States has demonized Ahmadinejad at every opportunity and conjured him up as an Islamic
fundamentalist and nationalist who will defy non-proliferation at all costs. On the other hand, Ahmadinejad cheekily
asked the United States to join the rest of civilization in worshipping God. That is the discourse of race war

but it is concealed by juridical discoursethe hegemonic discourse. To borrow from

Michael Foucault, the United States is using the juridical schema of nuclear nonproliferation to conceal the war-repression schema. North Korea is the historical Other,
the terrorist, the threat against whom the world must be protected in the juridical
schema. Yet, under the war-repression schema, North Korea is a sovereign nation with the right to develop nuclear and
communications technology. And this latest action is really nothing more than a plea for economic help. (2)
Nuclearism discourse Tied to the race war schema, is the discourse of nuclearism, which refers to the

ideology that nuclear weapons are instruments of peace. Nukespeak in the form of MAD or the hype
over so-called precision weapons by our leaders has had trickle-down effects to the point of achieving a mental-wipe or
historical amnesia of the U.S. nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This discourse effectively

represents a war on history and subjugation of knowledges about the horrors of nuclear
war and fallout. Closely related to nuclearism is the issue of whiteness around nuclear
weapons, the paternalistic presupposition that Western powers are the responsible and
rightful leaders on the issue, the racist ideology that nuclear weapons in the hands of an
Islamic country or terrorist spells end to world peace or catastrophe while it is perfectly
alright for France, Britain, the United States, Russia, China and now India, to have nuclear
weapons. The epistemological assumptions of nuclearism are dangerous, besides being

racist and morally repulsive. The formation of a nuclear club and an exclusive right to
possess nuclear weapons makes them a forbidden fruit and an issue of prestige, thereby
encouraging proliferation. Indeed, discourse around the North Korea and Iran nuclear buildup denotes that
these countries see a successful completion of the fuel cycle or the launching of a rocket as an issue of great prestige. There
is absolutely nothing prestigious about owning weapons of mass destruction, weapons that can end civilization. However,
countries like North Korea and Iran can be forgiven for their nuclearist mentality; after all, it is an implication of the
discourse that has been perpetuated by the West, a discourse that has become common knowledge and culture.
Nuclearism must be addressed and put on the table to move past the current impasse over nuclear negotiations and the
non-proliferation regime. Without denouncing nuclear weapons and facing our moral

conscience as the only nation to have ever used nuclear weapons, we cannot hope to
avert nuclear proliferation and prevent rogue states from going that route. (3) AntiCapitalism Discourse Truth be told, much of the world is suffering from the dire effects of an international economic
system that does not benefit them. All the signs of desperation are present. They come from the rallies andburning of
effigies around the world. The violent protests against NATO and the G-20 summit. The high prices of food. They come as
small requests from students on whether anyone is listening. And even the scapegoating of the Other (be it gays, Muslims,
liberals, undocumented immigrants) is really an ignorant response to our unwanted troubles, thoughts and desires. The

problem is not North Korea or Kim Jung II. The problem is an international system of
haves and have-nots, where people without institutional power vie for attention. In this
scenario, a nuclear missile from an impoverished, wretched country helps garner more
attention than protests, rallies and suicide. How else can North Korea hope to get the
help that it desperately needs? Foolcracy is hits the nail on what might happen next: What else of those
consequences besides the expected veto of proposed UN sanctions? It probably means that a deal will be
made with North Korea for food and other essentials. In return, North Korea will give
up part of its nuclear or rocket program andthen, in a couple of years, they will go back to the same
game of spitting in the face of the world in exchange for food and other essentials. In other words, its a bit like a
dysfunctional family that likes to play with guns. The Obama Administration has scrambled to battle anti-Americanism
with new euphemisms. It is not the global war on terror but a global contingency operation. Not likely to catch on
anytime soon. The people living in dire states and conditions, ravaged by war, poverty and hardship, know precisely what
it isan attack on their existence predicated by the United States and its allies . We have seen and read the

master narrative before of demonizing a country, bringing about regime change and
killing, colonizing and repressing more peoples while doing it. By unearthing these
counter-discourses, we can hope to move towards a solution to the North Korea issue .
Again, the problem-solution is not the missiles, but the manner in which North Korea is
seeking help and attention. Finding common ground requires discovering and
deconstructing the cultural and discursive constructs. However, the window of
opportunity is quite small, as seen by positions and interests of the parties involved. I
dont doubt though, that North Korea will cease to be an entity sometime in the near
future and become into Korea again.

Link -- Japan Relations

Our understandings of Japan are rooted in our understandings of WWII-era Japan that prevents
true co-operation
Teramoto 01 (Fukimo Teramoto, Masters in Communication, Culture, and Technology at Georgetown University, pg 5-7, Japan in
an American Mirror: A Critical Study of American Perceptions of Japan)

The analysis of psychology of national trauma explains American attitudes toward Japanese Americans
immediately after the Pearl Harbor incident and the outrage of the American public following the
assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on the same footing. Both incidents can be categorized as national
trauma and both strong responses were resulted from collective sadness and anger. Nonetheless, it is obvious that
different perspectives are required to understand each response appropriately. In other words, the theory of national trauma is
insufficient to explain American attitudes towards Japanese Americans in those days. In his further discussion, Neal describes
American attitudes to the internment of Japanese Americans as follows: The deep-seated racial prejudice toward Orientals prior to the
war now became ethically embellished and perceived as justified. The combination of extreme racism with anger and

fear produced a highly volatile situation. (1998, 67) It is thus possible to say that the racial prejudice was
awoken and took a hostile form through the war, which is an ultimately negative form of interactions
between the two countries. Neal writes that in telling and retelling the stories of our past, the events in
question became stereotyped and selectively distorted as they become embedded in collective memories
(1998, 201). Undoubtedly, a historical event such as World War II, which caused American national trauma,
has become embedded in collective memories. World War II memories have remained unchanged not only
at the personal level but also at the national level in the United States. Halbwachs discusses collective memory as the
form of the reconstruction of the past. Halbwachs views collective memory as being under the influence of the present social milieu
(1992, 49). That is, the past is reconstructed in the framework of the present society, which will reshape and even distort memories to a
large extent. While Halbwachs suggests the social restriction of collective memory, Neal points out that collective memories

are frequently drawn upon to support a political position and that memories of World War II and the
Vietnam War were reflected in the policy on the Gulf War. Although national traumas cause collective fear,
sadness, and anger, as I discussed above, they also forge the collective identity of any given group of
people. According to Neal, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor followed by World War II produced
nationally unprecedented feeling of cohesion, membership, belonging, and community among Americans
(1998, 25). The strong identity of Americans grew out of the trauma of the Pearl Harbor. This sense of
collective identity can be another reason for long-enduring memory of World War II in the United States.
When identity, community, and sense of unity have become weak in the course of the socio-cultural
changes, collective memory might have filled the sense of American identity. Not only in the United States but also in many
countries public ceremonies or monuments in commemoration of war can be seen as a symbol of collective fear, sadness, and anger
and also collective identity of the time and of subsequent times. From a more critical standpoint, Said raises an example

of controversial attempt of the Enola Gay.

Link -- Japan Alliance

Discourse that constructs the roles for US allies legitimates the exclusion of others
Bialasiewicz et al 7 Luiza Bialasiewicz a, David Campbell b, Stuart Elden b, Stephen Graham b, Alex Jeffrey c, Alison J.
Williams a Department of Geography, Royal Holloway University of London, United Kingdom b International Boundaries Research
Unit, Geography Department, Durham University, Durham, DH1 3LE, United Kingdom c School of Geography, Politics and
Sociology, University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, United Kingdom, Performing security: The imaginative geographies of current US
strategy Political Geography 26 (2007) 405e422, via sciencedirect.com)
As we argue throughout this paper, the distinctive thing about recent National Security Strategies is their deployment of integration as
the principal foreign policy and security strategy. It is telling that Bushs claim of either you are with us, or you are
with the terrorists (Bush, 2001) relies not on a straightforward binary, as is sometimes suggested, but a process of
incorporation. It is not simply us versus them, but with us, a mode of operating alongside, or, in the words of
one of Bushs most enthusiastic supporters, shoulder to shoulder (Blair, 2001; see White & Wintour, 2001). This works more
widely through a combination of threats and promises, as in this statement about the Palestinians: If Palestinians embrace democracy
and the rule of law, confront corruption, and firmly reject terror, they can count on American support for the creation of a Palestinian
state (The White House, 2002b: 9). Likewise, it can be found in some of remarks of the British Prime Minister Blair (2004) about the
significance of democracy in Afghanistan, Africa and Iraq. Equally Bushs notorious axis of evil speech did not simply name North
Korea, Iran and Iraq as its members, but suggested that states like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to
threaten the peace of the world (Bush, 2002a, emphasis added). A comparison of the like, alongside the with the terrorists is
actually a more complicated approach to the choosing of sides and the drawing of lines than is generally credited. Simple binary
oppositions are less useful to an understanding here than the process of incorporation and the policy of integration. These examples

indicate the policy of integration or exclusion being adopted by the US and followed by certain allies. It
warns those failing to adopt US values (principally liberal representative democracy and market capitalism), that they will
be excluded from an Americancentric world. The place of US allies in these representations is not
unimportant. Indeed, the strength of the US discourse relies also on its reflection and reiteration by other
key allies, especially in Europe. Above and beyond the dismissive pronouncements of Rumsfeld about Europes Old and New
e a conception that was inchoately articulated as early as the 1992 DPGethe dissent of (even some)Europeans is a problemfor theUSin
itsworld-making endeavours (seeBialasiewicz&Minca, 2005). It is not surprising, then, that following his re-election,George W. Bush
and Condoleeza Rice embarked almost immediately on a bridge-building tour across Europe, noting not trans-Atlantic differences
but the great alliance of freedom that unites the United States and Europe (Bush, 2005). For although the United States may
construct itself as the undisputed leader in the new global scenario, its right e and the right of its moral-political mission of
spreading freedom and justice e relies on its amplification and support by allies. The construction of the United States

world role relies also on the selective placement and representation of other international actors who are
hailed into specific subject positions (see Weldes, Laffey, Gusterson, & Duvall, 1999). Of course, different actors are
granted different roles and different degrees of agency in the global script: the place of key European allies
is different from that bestowed upon the peripheral and semi-peripheral states that make part of the
coalition of the willing. Both, however, are vital in sustaining the representation of the US as the leader
of a shared world of values and ideals. Indeed, the lone superpower has little influence in the absence of support.

Link -- Israel/Iran Strikes

Depictions of imminent Israeli-Iranian conflict entrenches a myth of insecurity which makes conflict
inevitable
Chernus 12, 1/29Professor of Religious Studies (Ira, 1/29/12, New York Times Hypes Israeli Attack On Iran,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ira-chernus/israel-iran-attack_b_1240510.html?ref=media)
It's an impressive piece of art: the cover of this week's New York Times Magazine . "ISRAEL VS. IRAN,"

spelled out in charred black lettering, with flame and smoke still rising from "IRAN," as
if the great war were already over. Below those large lurid letters is the little subtitle:
"When Will It Erupt?" -- not "if," but "when," as if it were inevitable. Though the article itself is

titled "Will Israel Attack Iran?", author Ronen Bergman, military analyst for Israel's largest newspaper, leaves no doubt of
his answer: "Israel will indeed strike Iran in 2012." Bergman does cite some compelling arguments against an Israeli strike
from former heads of Mossad (Israel's CIA). And he makes it clear that no attack can prevent Iran from building nuclear
weapons if it wants them. Everyone agrees on that. The argument is only about whether an attack would delay the Iranian
program by a few years or just a few months. Nevertheless , his article stacks the deck in favor of

supposedly persuasive reasons for Israel to act. It's almost a hymn of praise to what one
Jewish Israeli scholar has called Iranophobia, an irrational fear promoted by the Jewish
state because "Israel needs an existential threat." Why? To sustain the myth that shapes
its national identity: the myth of Israel's insecurity. That myth comes out clearly in
Bergman's conclusion: Israel will attack Iran because of a "peculiar Israeli mixture of
fear -- rooted in the sense that Israel is dependent on the tacit support of other nations to
survive -- and tenacity, the fierce conviction, right or wrong, that only the Israelis can
ultimately defend themselves." Fear of what? Defend against whom? It doesn't really matter. Israeli
political life has always been built on the premise that Israel's very existence is
threatened by some new Hitler bent on destroying the Jewish people . How can Israel
prove that Jews can defend themselves if there's no anti-semitic "evil-doer" to fight
against? So here is Israel's defense minister, Ehud Barak, talking to Bergman about Iran's "desire to destroy Israel."
Proof? Who needs it? It's taken for granted. In fact, in accurate translations of anti-Israel diatribes
from Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, there's no mention of destroying or
even harming Jews, nor any threat of war. There's only a clear call for a one-state
solution: replacing a distinctly Jewish state, which privileges its Jewish citizens and imposes military
occupation on Palestinians, with a single political entity from the Jordan River to the
Mediterranean Sea. Guess who else called for exactly the same resolution to the conflict: the most renowned
Jewish thinker of the 20th century, Martin Buber. Plenty of Jews keep Buber's vision alive today, offering cogent (though
debatable) arguments that a one-state solution would be in the best interests of Jews as well as Palestinians. Yet

Ronen Bergman and the editors of the New York Times Magazine see no need for their
readers to encounter these facts. Nor do they see any need to mention the most important fact of all, the one
most flagrantly missing from Bergman's long article: No matter what Iran's leaders might desire, it's
beyond belief that they would ever launch a single nuke against Israel. They know full
well that it would be national suicide. Israel has at least 100 nukes, and 200 or more by
many estimates, all ready to be used in a counterattack . Which makes it hard not to laugh when
Bergman reports Ehud Barak's other arguments for attacking Iran. Even if Iran doesn't intend to kill all the
Jews, "the moment Iran goes nuclear, other countries in the region will feel compelled to
do the same." That's the foolish "stop a Middle East nuclear arms race" argument we hear so
often coming out of Washington, too -- as if Israel had not already started the Middle East nuclear
arms race decades ago. And how can a supposedly serious journalist like Bergman solemnly repeat the latest
popular argument of the Iranophobes: A nuclear-armed Iran (in Barak's words) "offers an entirely different kind of
protection to its proxies," Hezbollah and Hamas. That "would definitely restrict our range of operations" in any war
against those so-called "proxies." As if Iran would even consider committing national suicide to

serve the interests of any Lebanese or Palestinian factions. Yet the myth of "poor little
Israel, surrounded by fanatic enemies bent on destroying it" is so pervasive here in the U.S.,
most readers might easily take this Iranophobic article at face value, forgetting the
absurd premises underlying all arguments that Israel "must" attack Iran . What

American readers think is key here. Most Israelis do believe that (as Bergman puts it) Israel
needs "the support of other nations to survive." It's a crucial piece of their myth of
insecurity. And the only nation that really supports them any more is the U.S . So Israel
won't attack Iran without a green light from Washington . Bergman glibly asserts that there's some
"unspoken understanding that America should agree, at least tacitly, to Israeli military actions." For years, though, a
torrent of reports from Washington have all agreed that both the White House and the Pentagon, under both the Bush and
Obama administrations, would refuse to support an Israeli attack on Iran. The consequences for the U.S. are too drastic to
even consider it. Why should that change now?

Link -- Iran
Describing Iran as a security threat crowds out
discussions on root causes of conflict and cause selffulfilling prophecies
Limbert 12 earned his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University, Prof of IR @ US Naval
Academy, 2009-2010 served as Deputy Assistant Secretary, responsible for Iranian affairs, in the State
Departments Bureau of Near East Affairs (John, We Need to Talk to Iran, But How? Thirty-two years of
sanctions and bluster haven't worked. It's time to try something different)
It was easy enough to miss amid all the chest-thumping, threats, and talk of imminent strikes filling the
airways, but last week, Iran signaled its willingness to restart talks with the P5+1 (the five U.N. Security Council members plus Germany) about its
nuclear program. "We hope the P5+1 meeting will be held in near future," Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said, as a group of inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) toured the
country. The last round of such talks ended inconclusively in Istanbul in January 2011, and it has taken more than a year to get close to a new meeting. Although no date has been set for the new talks, it's not too early
to begin planning for how to make them more productive than past negotiations. Here are a few steps that could put us on a road more promising than the current ominous exchanges. 1. DON'T UNDERESTIMATE

It is tempting to dismiss the current talk of war as bluff and bluster . Although there is certainly much hot air in
Each threat, each warning, each
"red line" declared threatens to trap the parties in rhetorical corners. Even worse, a party might
start believing its own defiant rhetoric and fail to distinguish between real and imaginary threats.
Complicating the issue is the fact that the United States and Iran have almost never spoken officially
to each other in more than 30 years. Diplomats do not meet; officials do not talk; and military
officials to not communicate. Instead of contact in which each side can listen to the other, take the measure of personalities, and look for underlying interests behind public positions,
each side has imputed the worst possible motives to the other, creating an adversary both
superhuman (devious, powerful, and implacably hostile) and subhuman (violent, irrational, and
unthinking). This mutual demonization -- born of fear and contempt -- raises the risk that a simple
confrontation will lead to miscalculation and full-scale conflict. Put simply, today, in the absence of direct communication, it would be very
difficult to de-escalate a potential incident in the Persian Gulf or Afghanistan. With each side assuming the worst about the other, a minor
incident could lead both sides into military and political disaster. 2. REACT CAUTIOUSLY Current events are not running in Iran's favor,
THE RISK OF MISCALCULATION

the current talk of Iran's closing the Strait of Hormuz or of imminent Israeli attacks on Iran, its very volume and frequency should make us worry.

despite its bombastic rhetoric. The overthrow of longtime despots in Tunisia and Egypt raised an obvious question for Iranian leaders: "Why not here?" Iranians chanted in the streets, Tunes tunest; Iran natunest
("Tunisia could; Iran could not"). As for Bahrain, the Islamic Republic could only watch and denounce as a Sunni-dominated government with Saudi support suppressed fellow Shiites. Bashar al-Assad's regime in
Syria, one of Iran's few reliable friends in the region, is engulfed in a burgeoning civil war. A frustrated Iran is one that will lash out in all directions -- at Israel, at the United States, at Britain (as in the recent attack
on its embassy in Tehran), and at Saudi Arabia (as in the alleged plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States with the help of Mexican drug cartels). Nonetheless, U.S. negotiators should be careful
not to overreact to every claim, every statement, and every bit of bluster coming from the harried leaders in Tehran. Iran would like Washington to dance to its tune, and it likes to show its power by provoking
America into unwise reactions. In such cases, language matters, and U.S. diplomats should be measured, clear, and cautious. Let the other side rant and rave. 3. SMASH THE ATOM If these future talks -- or any
talks -- deal only with Iran's nuclear program, they will fail. For better or worse, the nuclear program has become highly symbolic for the Iranian side. Exchanges on the subject have become an exercise in
"asymmetric negotiation," in which each side is talking about a different subject to a different audience for a different purpose. The failure of such exchanges is certain, with both sides inevitably claiming afterward,
"We made proposals, but they were not listening." For Americans, the concern is technical and legal matters such as the amounts of low- and high-enriched uranium, as well as the type and number of centrifuges in
Iran's possession. For Iranians, the negotiations are about their country's place in the world community -- its rights, national honor, and respect. As such, any Iranian negotiator who compromises will immediately
face accusations of selling out his country's dignity. Such was the case 60 years ago between Prime Minister Mohammad Mosadegh and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company when the British insisted on the sanctity of
contracts and the Iranians sought to rectify a relationship out of balance for over a century. Today, the United States risks falling into the same trap of mutual incomprehension. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's
words on the subject are revealing. He says, "We do not believe in making atomic bombs. We believe that goes against human morality." He adds, however, that the decision to build or not build such a weapon is
Iran's decision to make. No one else -- not the United States, the United Nations, the IAEA, or the European Union -- can tell Iran what to do. It is Iran's right to make that decision. In other words, "Others are
seeking to impose their will on us; we are seeking to assert our national rights." 4. BROADEN THE CONVERSATION So if not nukes, what should the talks be about? If U.S. negotiators are interested in going
beyond the most difficult issue on the table -- Iran's nuclear program -- and exploring areas where "yes" is possible, they need to be talking about Afghanistan, Iran, terrorism, drugs, piracy, and other areas where, in a
rational world, there exists basis for agreement. Such will never happen, however, if U.S. and Iranian officials cannot talk to each other. Before the United States enters another round of talks, it must make certain that
the Iranians will not re-enact the farce of their January 2011 meeting with the P5+1 in Istanbul. At that session, Iranian representative Saeed Jalili, apparently under instructions from Tehran, deliberately avoided a
bilateral meeting with U.S. Deputy Secretary of State William Burns. The sad irony is that, among senior U.S. officials, Burns is probably the only one prepared to listen seriously to Iranian concerns. In fact, the two
had met productively in Geneva in 2009 to discuss a deal to supply fuel to Tehran's research reactor. If the Iranians won't talk to Burns, however, then there is no one in Washington who will listen to them. Of course
there is little one can do if the Iranians insist on rubbing salt into self-inflicted wounds. But they should know the opportunity is there. Although the Geneva deal eventually collapsed, those 2009 talks are still the
only high-level meeting between U.S. and Iranian officials during Barack Obama's presidency. Iranians and Americans need to be talking again at that level, and about much more than just their nuclear programs. In
the preparations for the next round of talks, the Americans -- through the designated P5+1 channel -- should make two points: 1. Burns looks forward to a bilateral meeting with his Iranian counterpart. 2. He is
prepared to listen to Iranian concerns on all issues and explore areas of potential agreement and further discussion. 5. MANAGE EXPECTATIONS The United States should be wary of overplaying its hand -something it often accuses the Iranians of doing. It should be realistic about the effectiveness of so-called "punishing" and "biting" sanctions. Just who gets punished and bitten by these measures? Such actions may
have their effects, though perhaps not on those in Tehran whom America is seeking to influence. If Iran cannot sell crude oil, it will clearly be in serious trouble. But if sanctions do not bring the Iranians to yield -and 32 years of sanctions have not done so -- the only way to do so may be long-term measures to lower the world oil price so that Iran faces an economic crisis it cannot avoid no matter how much oil it sells.

Nor should the United States oversell the "threat" from Iran. The Islamic Republic, through its economic
mismanagement, inept diplomacy, and talent for making gratuitous enemies, is chiefly a threat to itself.
Although the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran is very worrying to others in the region, it is difficult to see
how a nuclear weapon serves Iran's interests or helps the current authorities stay in power. A nuclear
weapon is of no use against urban demonstrators seeking a government that treats them decently or against
restive ethnic minorities seeking cultural rights and a fair share of political and economic power. The chief
threat to the Islamic Republic, in the government's own words, is not an invasion of foreign armies, but a
"soft overthrow," a velvet revolution fueled by hostile foreign countries and local Iranian "seditionists ."
Whenever negotiations occur, there will be no quick breakthroughs. If there is any progress, it will be slow, and it will measured in small achievements -- something not said, a handshake, an agreement to meet again,

The Americans cannot simply throw up their hands and say,

"Well, we tried, but they are just too irrational (or devious, or suspicious). Let's return to what we
have always done." One thing is clear: Three decades of demonization and hostility have
accomplished nothing. Both sides need to stop shouting and start listening.
a small change in tone. Above all, what is needed is patience and forbearance.

The affs reductionist view of Iran produces a self-fulfilling prophesy - contrasting

the free west to the enemy east.
Majid Sharifi, PhD Candidate in Poli Sci @ Univ. of Florida, 3/12/2008 [For Presenatioan @ ISA
Conference,
Imagined
Enemies:
US
Iran
Relations,
http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p252035_index.html]
In regards to Irans relations with the West in general and the United States in particular, political
pundits, who have extensively written on Iran, also have a reductionist worldview of good
versus evil. From this reductionist worldview, the solution to confront Iran is also reductionistic.
Generally, it is about two approachesconfronting Iran or containing Iran. However, both of
these policies essentially presuppose Iran as an enemy, and this presupposition has become a
productive self-fulfilled prophecy. 4For example, on the right, Michael Ledeen, argues that
there is a natural contrast between the West as a freedom lover and Iran as an enemy that never
[hides] its intention to destroy or dominate us. 3 Then Ledeen, off course, calls for an
immediate confrontation with Iran before it is too late. On the left, Kenneth Pollack, former
advisor to the National Security Council during both Clinton and Bush administrations, attempts
to reveal the complexity of US-Iran relations by examining the historical circumstances that
have helped construct what he labels as an Iranian pathological nationalism. Then he argues
that since Iranians have already mis-learned their history, it is highly unlikely that the truth
of history would be revealed to them, therefore, the U.S. must lead a multilateral policy to
contain the Iranian menace. 4 In the same way, in the official state discourse in Iran, there are
only two approaches to the U.S. For some, the best way to deal with the U.S. is to contain its
inherent menace by not provoking it, but simultaneously not allowing it to expand its influence
in Iran or the region. On the other hand, in a manner very similar to how, for example, Ledeen
represents Iran, there are Iranian confrontationalists, who symbolize the U.S. as belligerent
power that aims to exploit, corrupt, dominate, and destroy Iran or Islam. Labels such as the
Great Satan, the Arrogant America, Death to American, America the Bully (Amerikay-yah
zoor gu), Murderous America (Amerika-yah Jani), etc. are abundant in their language. It
appears that for confrontationalists on both sides, each is not only the most serious threat to the
other, but also the most serious threat to the world. These two dominant approaches are reflected
in the popular media too. 3 4 5For example, from Oct 10, to Nov. 11, 2007, I examined the front
pages of the largest mainstream daily in Iran, the word America showed up in 48 titles, fortysix of which depicted American as a threat. In contrast, in the same period, the word Iran
showed up in thirty-eight titles of the New York Times, thirty-six of which presupposed Iran as a
negative force for both Iranians and Americans. In the final analysis, these representations and
analyses are embedded in the construction of a simplistic worldview of good versus evil that
cannot and have not contributed to reducing either tension or resolving the conflicts. Instead,
they have reproduced themselves. Moreover, since both have used demonizing the other as a
way of defeating their domestic rivals, for the past 29 years, these policies have had selffulfilling prophecies. As such, in this research, I allow the empirical evidence to speak for
itself. This does not mean that I am completely neutral in my values. It only means that I
consciously try to analyze texts dialogically

The Iranian state is ever shifting as the US policies of containment stay the same.
Majid Sharifi, PhD Candidate in Poli Sci @ Univ. of Florida, 3/12/2008 [For Presenatioan @ ISA
Conference,
Imagined
Enemies:
US
Iran
Relations,
http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p252035_index.html]
In regards to the U.S., while Iranian confrontationalists represent the U.S. government as an
evildoer out to destroy Iran and Islam by misleading its own people as well as intending to
destroy Islam. From this perspective, this evildoer ought to be stopped if possible, and resisted at
all necessary costs. This representation practice reproduces legitimacy for confrontationalists in
Iran. Ironically, this is very similar to the way the U.S. Right tries to create legitimacy for itself.
For confrontationalists in the United States, Iran provides, and has provided, a safe bet for
constructing a good enemy, although the content of Iran as an enemy has been a shifting concept.

It has ranged from being a threat for spreading fundamentalism to the threat of defeating Saddam
Hussein and thus breaking the balance of power in the region, to threat of terrorism, Shiism, and
nuclear proliferation. These shifting threats have been the only constant variable in imagining of
Iran as an enemy. Even Irans nuclear threat has been a shifting concept. The threat began as
Irans intension to rebuild its nuclear power plants, then it was shifted to Iran wanting to import
nuclear fuel from Russian, which the U.S opposed then, but supports now. Recently, the threat of
Iran has shifted from uranium enrichment to having the knowledge of enriching it. In other
cases, for example, Iran was a threat because it had confrontational approaches to the Saudis,
Egyptians, or the Gulf states, but nowadays Iran is a threat because it is building friendly
relations with these states, therefore, it wants to dominate them. In other words, the content of
Irans threat has been shifting, not because the material reality has changed, but because the
representational practices of Iran in the U.S. has changed. What has remained constant has been
the ontological view of Iran, which bars Iranian voices by labeling them as fundamentalists,
ideologues, Islamists, irrational, evil, etc. Likewise, the discourse of Iranian confrontationalists
bars U.S. voices by labeling them as various faces of evil. On the other hand, from the
perspective of the Left in Iran and U.S., policies of containment are also embedded in the same
ontological presuppositions, but their prescription are different.

Link -- Iran Prolif

Their Iranian threats legitimize endless violence and obscure Western violence
Marandi 09prof, North American studies, U Tehran (Seyed, Western Media Representations, Iran, and Orientalist Stereotypes,
January 2009, http://conflictsforum.org/briefings/western-media-representations.pdf, AMiles) Ellipses in orig
When it comes to the Iranian nuclear program, however, the western media becomes even more explicitly one
sided and antagonistic. In a disturbing article in the USA Today (September 14, 2008) titled U.S. arsenal is adding more
bunker busters, Tom Vanden Brook effectively dehumanizes Iranians in order to help justify any act of
aggression by the American regime against the countrys sovereignty and its civilian population. In the article,
he states that Irans production of enriched uranium, the key ingredient in nuclear weapons in Natanz is part of a
suspected program to make weapons of mass destruction. The fact that the International Atomic Energy Agency has at no
point made such a claim seems to be irrelevant. He then goes on to say that: The Pentagons Defense Threat Reduction
Agency, which leads efforts against weapons of mass destruction, has almost doubled its spending on research into how
to counter such weapons This sentence is interesting, because it directs the reader to the idea that the United
States is sincerely trying to reduce or even eradicate a specific threat to the well being of all human beings. The

fact that they carry out research implies scientific objectivity and honesty and their efforts against
weapons of mass destruction remind the reader of efforts to eradicate Polio or Malaria. It is understandable if the
reader forgets that the United States has the worlds largest stockpile of WMDs, that Israel the worlds only
remaining apartheid state and its key ally in the Middle East has such weapons, and that the United Stated just
a few years ago helped Saddam Hussein acquire and use WMDs against Iranian and Iraqi civilians . In any case, the
story leaves the impression that through objective and honest research one can conclude that Irans nuclear
program is a threat. This allows Brook to end his article with two sentences that one would expect would create outrage and
disgust among ordinary American readers (apparently there was none). After explaining Angel Fire technology and how the American
military could use it, he states: That would allow them to target workers when they are congregated in one spot, such as a housing
complex. Killing those workers could set back their program for years. According to USA Today, the intentional murder of hundreds if
not thousands of innocent Iranian civilians in housing complexes is legitimate and can be a central objective of US military planning.
Presumably, this is not a problem in the eyes of most American readers, otherwise there would have been a strong response to such a
barbaric view of the Other. Through effectively presenting Iran as a global threat that is comparable to a dangerous
disease, Brook has helped prepare public opinion with a justification for mass murder . The Iranian nuclear
program is one example where all mainstream British and American news outlets report an issue almost identically. On September 12,
2008 Reuters released a piece by Mark Heinrich with the title IAEA probe stalls, Iran slowly boosts atom enrichment. Regardless of
the generally biased nature of the report, one sentence in the story is particularly interesting as it is repeated almost word for

word in many other news reports. Iran says it is enriching uranium not to yield atom bomb fuel, as Western
powers suspect, but only to run nuclear power stations The two key words are says and suspect, which are
sometimes replaced by states or claims for the Iranian side and concern and fear on the western side. In such sentences
the balance is definitely tilted in favor of the Europeans and Americans. In contrast to Irans statements or claims,
which cannot be judged or verified according to such reports, western government officials who suspect
or are concerned are depicted as sincere. Western powers and politicians are presented as genuine in their distrust towards the
Iranians and their intentions and as a result the reader is much more likely to accept the western account of the
conflict. A similar sentence can be seen in a provocative New York Times piece (November 20, 2008) with a very misleading title
Iran said to have Nuclear Fuel for one weapon. Here again one reads: Iran insists that it wants only to fuel reactors for nuclear power.
But many Western nations, led by the United States, suspect that its real goal is to gain the ability to make nuclear weapons. These

stories do not dwell at all on Iranian suspicions or concerns about the American or Israeli fabrication of
intelligence, such as the dubious American claim that the CIA has acquired an Iranian laptop computer
which contains secret documents linked to an Iranian nuclear weapons program. According to Scott Ritter a
former US military intelligence officer and UN weapons inspector who questions the sources of the computer the CIA and the MEK
(an anti Iranian terrorist organization) as well as its veracity: Give it [the computer] the UNSCOM treatment. Assemble a team of CIA,
FBI and Defense Department forensic computer analysts and probe the computer, byte by byte. Construct a chronological record of
how and when the data on the computer were assembled. Check the logic of the data, making sure everything fits together in a
manner consistent with the computers stated function and use. Tell us when the computer was turned on and logged into and how it
was used. Then, with this complex usage template constructed, overlay the various themes which have been derived from the
computers contents, pertaining to projects, studies and other activities of interest. One should be able to rapidly ascertain whether or
not the computer is truly a key piece of intelligence pertaining to Irans nuclear programs. The fact that this computer is acknowledged
as coming from the MEK and the fact that a proper forensic investigation would probably demonstrate the fabricated nature of the data
contained are why the U.S. government will never agree to such an investigation being done.12 From the Iranian perspective, western
intentions are suspect to say the least. However, as the media is Eurocentric the Iranians like almost all other non-western countries,
which have legitimate grievances against oppressive western powers, are antagonized by the western media. The titles of various news
reports are themselves quite revealing. Iran pushed for nuclear answers (BBC News, September 22, 2008), IAEA shows photos
alleging Iran nuclear missile work (Reuters, September 17, 2008), EU warns Iran close to nuclear arms capacity (Associated Press,
September 24, 2008), and Iran tests precision missile able to reach Europe (Associated Press, November 12, 2008)are just a few

such headlines. In an Associated Press report (September 24) the reader learns that while Iran insists its atomic activities are
peaceful, the European Union has warned that the country is nearing the ability to arm a nuclear warhead. In fact, the article goes
even further than Israeli, EU, and American claims: Israel says the Islamic Republic could have enough nuclear material to make its
first bomb within a year. The U.S. estimates Iran is at least two years away from that stage, and some experts say the country could
reach that stage in as little as 6 months through uranium enrichment. The claims made by unnamed experts are
reinforced by a series of explanations from the head of the Washington-based Institute for Science and
International Security that increase fears about Iran. Significantly, according to the Associated Press report, this
Institute closely tracks suspect nuclear proliferators. Hence, like the November 20 New York Times piece the story is

completely one sided, as it merely reinforces the position of the American government as well as the
dominant discursive practices in western countries regarding Iran as a threat to peace and security. Apparently,
Iran cannot be trusted even when it states that it has captured an Iranian national that had spied for Israel. After his trial and execution,
the BBC (November 22, 2008) uses the headline Israel spy put to death in Iran. In other words, the BBC uses scare quotes to
express doubt about Irans counterintelligence capability or its honesty in reporting such an event. One of the problems of having a
sensible discussion about relations between the West and Iran, as well as developments inside the country, is that western journalism
is far from sensible. Iranian society is regularly depicted as abnormal and irrational, which itself helps reinforce
the claim that Iran is a threat that cannot be dealt with through dialogue and reason. Recently, for example, Hugh
Sykes of the BBC offered the report Iranian women battle the system (BBC News September 5, 2008). Amidst the misleading
statements he makes, which makes the report look like a propaganda piece, one is particularly notable. Not only is it completely
untrue, but Sykes tries to convert that falsehood into a fact accepted throughout Iran. This is Sykes text: There is little protection
against so-called honour killings for women who are raped; a husband - or a father who kills the rape victim may face only a short
jail sentence. This is inhuman, a law professor at Teheran University, Rosa Gharachorloo, told me. Most of the people I have spoken
to here agree: they believe rape victims should be comforted, not killed. First, the University of Tehran does not have a law professor
whose name is Rosa Gharachorloo. More important, however, is the fact that everyone, not almost everyone, that I know believes rape
victims should be comforted, not killed and that is why such an honour killings culture does not exist in Iran. Indeed, those who
commit such a crime in Iran can expect to face capital punishment, while their victims can expect state support. Unfortunately, for
Sykes, there is no known law in Iran that allows leniency for the murder of rape victims. Hence, it is no wonder to see how in the often
upside down world of the western media, one can read the BBC headline Israel agrees to free two killers(BBC NEWS, August 18,
2008). While the Israeli armed forces carry our regular attacks on Palestinian and Lebanese civilian and military targets alike, killing
thousands of people as a result, Muhammad Abu Ali who killed an Israeli army reservist and was jailed for 28 years is labeled a killer
by the BBC. The BBC does not view the Israeli regimes daily acts of terror through air strikes, assassinations, torture, the long term
imprisonment of women and children, the imposition of hunger through the siege of civilian populations, and the indiscriminate use of
weapons like cluster bombs, as terrorism. However, if a Palestinian kills an Israeli soldier he is a murderer. Hence, it seems clear that
policy making and media circles in many Western countries regularly demonstrate belligerent hostility and manufacture
exaggerated stereotypes, which even critics of Orientalism, such as Edward Said and Noam Chomsky, sometimes fail to
recognize. This dominant strategy of discourse and power does not merely produce West or East, rather the
Other becomes the millions of people whose lives are not only reduced to caricatures and prejudices through
this approach, but are often destroyed as a result. While there are certainly issues of politics, class, ethnicity, and gender within
the East (like the West) as well as between East and West, these issues are rarely objectively considered and are regularly
distorted by media presentations in both the past and present. This phenomenon dominates discursive practices relating to the Muslim
East and is something that must be addressed by critics with a sense of urgency. It seems that in order to bring about a more balanced
and judicious atmosphere for a comprehensive and productive dialogue among civilizations and nations, these issues must be dealt
with.

Iranian prolif is constructed as a post hoc justification for failed US policies

Fred Goldstein, Workers World Party Secretariat [Very socialist people], 6 [In crisis, Washington manufactures new tensions,
http://www.workers.org/2006/us/bush-0126/]
The Bush administration, besieged by crises at home and abroad, is manufacturing new international tensions. It is
pushing the government of Iran up against the wall, demanding that it cede its sovereign right to develop peaceful nuclear technology.
In Iraq in the last week, three U.S. helicopters have been shot down. The Iraqi resistance has escalated since the Dec. 15 election as
U.S. and Iraqi puppet casualties mount. Washington has announced it is sending 2,000 military police to Iraq to supervise the Iraqi
police. This is an open admission that the Pentagon cannot trust the Iraqi police force. It has been over a month since the muchheralded Iraqi elections and the result has still not been announced, indicating behind-the-scenes antagonisms among Washingtons
collaborators that cannot be resolved. In Pakistan, the CIA and the Pentagon on Jan. 13 launched four missiles from a Predator drone
that struck dwellings in the village of Damadora, near the Afghan border. U.S. authorities claimed they were trying to kill Ayman alZawahiri, an alleged al-Qaeda leader. But instead they killed 18 villagers, including children. The strikes were in complete violation of
Pakistani sovereignty and provoked mass outpourings throughout the country. The strikes weakened Pakistani President Pervez
Musharraf, a close collaborator of the Pentagon. In Afghanistan, a Canadian envoy and his aides were killed by the resistance on the
eve of an announcement by the Canadian government that it was going to increase its troop strength in the country from 500 to 2,000.
The puppet Afghan forces of the government of Ahmad Karzai have suffered heavy casualties and the resistance continues, despite
20,000 U.S. troops and thousands of German troops. At home, the Bush administration has been rocked by the Abramoff scandal,
which is aimed at numerous Bush allies in the Republican Party. Vice President Dick Cheneys chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, has been
indicted and Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove is under investigation. Bush is facing congressional hearings, lawsuits and
growing cries for impeachment because of the illegal wiretapping of thousands of people in the U.S. without a court order. When in
trouble, create a wider crisis Bushs antidote to all this is to create a new international crisis by declaring Iran to

be a threat to stability, to the Middle East, to the U.S. and the world, because it wants to have nuclear
technology to generate electric power and for a multitude of scientific purposes generally available to all the imperialist countries

and many less developed capitalist countries. Washington is going through the Iraq scenarioraising the specter of weapons of mass
destruction and demanding sanctions on Iran. To this end it has bulldozed the European imperialists, the Russian capitalist government
and the Peoples Republic of China into calling on Iran to cease research on its program for the enrichment of uranium. Washington
claims that this program is really a cover for developing nuclear weapons and is therefore a threat. It could not, however, get China
and Russia to agree to UN sanctions. It is now universally understood and well documented that all the U.S. government claims about
weapons of mass destruction that served as the basis for the invasion of Iraq were fraudulently concocted by the White House, the
Pentagon and the CIA, and underwritten by the State Department. The Iranian government has submitted to numerous
intrusive inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which concedes that it has never found any evidence
of Iranian intentions to carry out a weapons program. The suspicion that such a program exists is entirely based upon unfounded
assertions by the Bush administration and its imperialist allies in Britain, France and Germany. The pretext for Washington
creating the crisis was the announcement by the Iranian government that it was going to break the IAEA
seals on its nuclear installation at Isfahan and resume its research on uranium enrichment. Washington went into high gear, whipping
up fear and hysteria about the danger of Iran developing a nuclear bomb and so-called violations of confidence. The facts in the case
are as follows: After Sept. 11, Bush declared Iran to be part of the axis of evil along with Iraq and North Koreathree countries that
had won their independence from imperialism by revolution and armed struggle. Iran has a long history of nuclear research
and development, which began under U.S. auspices when the Shah was still in power in the late 1960s. But in late 2003
Washington declared, without a single bit of evidence, that Iran was seeking to build nuclear arms in violation of the Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty (NPT). With the U.S. government in the background, the so-called E3Britain, France and Germanybegan
negotiations with Iran over the issue. On Nov. 14, 2004, the Iranians agreed to cease their research but only on the ground that the E3
recognize the cessation as a voluntary confidence-building measure and not a legal obligation. The E3 agreedbecause it was well
known that the development of peaceful nuclear technology is not only permitted under Article IV of the NPT, but encouraged.
Therefore, the Iranians were acting completely within their treaty obligations in pursuing their research program and were not required
to stop. They did so to make a goodwill gestureunder pressure. No to nuclear and scientific apartheid After two years of
negotiations with the European imperialists, the Iranians were getting nothing but inspections, harassment and
demands from the IAEA, Washington, Paris, Berlin and London. Their nuclear program was in a complete stall with no
end in sight. Frustrated by the stalling tactics of the imperialists, Iran in August 2005 began the conversion of yellow-cake uranium to
gas, whereupon the IAEA issued an order for Iran to stop its conversion. The speaker of the Iranian parliament, the Majlis, then
declared the IAEA order illegal under the NPT. On Dec. 26, 2005, Iranian Foreign Minister Manoucher Mottaki declared: We do not
accept nuclear apartheid and scientific apartheid. (Aljazeera.com, Dec. 26) Later he said that Iran was ready to discuss its nuclear
program but that does not mean that we are waiting for any countrys permission for the right of Iranian nation and the Islamic
republic to enjoy nuclear technology. (Aljazeera.com, Jan. 5) On Jan. 5, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad insisted that Iran would
resume its nuclear research. Speaking to thousands of people in the holy city of Qom and referring to the Western powers, he said:
Recently, some of them have said the Iranian nation has no right to nuclear research. But they should know that the Iranian nation
and government will defend the right to nuclear research and technology and will go forward prudently. By relying on its young
scientists, Iran will use this technology for medicine, industry, energy in the near future, he said to cries of support. Washingtons
nuclear policy for the Shah Can the Iranian people regard the U.S. government as anything but a potential
aggressor? It was the CIA that overthrew the popularly elected nationalist government of Mohammed
Mossadegh in 1953, after he nationalized Iranian oil. It was the U.S. government that put in place the repressive regime
of the Shah. The Shah then gave the oil to a consortium of U.S. oil companies. It was the CIA that set up the Savak police
torturers who tried to destroy all left and progressive forces in the country. And it is the U.S. government that has had an
attitude of implacable hostility to Iran ever since the puppet Shah was overthrown by the revolution of 1979. As for nuclear
development and the needs of Iran, it is important to note that when the Shah came to power, he and his U.S. overseers
set up a plan to have 23 nuclear power stations in the country. Both Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, under President
Richard M. Nixon, and President Gerald Ford signed orders authorizing U.S. government and industry support for Irans nuclear
development. It was not out of concern for Iranian national development that Washington promoted nuclear technology. It was for the
profit of the U.S. nuclear industry and also because U.S. oil companies felt that the more Iran was able to use nuclear energy instead of
oil to generate electricity, the more oil it would make available to the oil companies to market at a profit. So nuclear technology
was good for Iran, as far as Washington was concerned, as long as the counter-revolutionary Shah of Iran was
watching over the Persian Gulf, with weapons supplied by the U.S., to enforce the rule of the Pentagon and big oil.
But once a revolutionary regime was set up that took the oil back and declared its independence from U.S. imperialism, then nuclear
development became a threat to stability - that is, the stability of imperialist rule. The U.S. nuclear threat The U.S. government
still possesses 10,600 nuclear weaponsmore than the rest of the world combined. It is the only government in the world to
ever have used nuclear weapons, having bombed the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing an estimated 200,000
with two bombs. The Pentagon is now working to develop new nuclear weapons for use on the battlefield and is incorporating the use
of tactical nuclear weapons into its battle plans, to be used in conjunction with conventional weapons. In a blunt act of international
terrorism, the Bush administration recently declared openly that it reserved the right to carry out a nuclear first strike and, furthermore,
that these strikes could be carried out against non-nuclear nations as well as nuclear ones. Washington has supported the
development of an estimated 200 nuclear weapons by the Zionist settler regime of Israel. These nuclear military
doctrines and developments must be placed in the context of threats by Washington against Iran, North Korea, Syria, Cuba and
Venezuela, and also accusations by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld about Chinas military development Denying self-defense
to intended targets The Bush administrations nuclear policy is that of an imperialist power that presumes to dictate to
its intended victims that they have no right of self-defense. When Washington was aiming to attack Iraq, it used the UN
as a cover to disarm the country. It has aimed at regime change in Iran with the goal of recolonizing it, even while its colonial
adventure in Iraq is going down in flames. Wash ingtons objective is not only to keep Iran from developing nuclear technology but

also to cut off any possibility of it developing weapons of self-defense against the Pentagon or its Israeli cats-paw. U.S. imperialism
has long sought to overthrow the socialist government of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea. It is trying to remove the
possibility that the DPRK could have a nuclear self-defense in the event of an attack by the U.S., which has never abandoned its global
ambitions to conquer Asia.

Fear of Iranian proliferation rooted in racist colonialism

Simon Dalby, Prof. of Geog @ Carleton Univ., 2/14/9 [Paper for presentation to the International Studies Association workshop on
Arms Control, http://http-server.carleton.ca/~sdalby/papers/Critical%20Geographies%20of%20Arms%20Control.pdf]
Looking at American political relations with Tehran (see Sick 2009), it appears that this isnt so much

evangelism as a master narrative of the authoritarian pedagog. Its a matter of discipline and punishment, an
insistence that Tehran submit to American dictates on nuclear matters ; the recalcitrant child, banished to the
corner of the classroom, is repeatedly being admonished to admit the error of his ways, and renounce his attempts to challenge
the teachers authority. Banishment, shame and shunning, the sanctions regime, is backed by repeated threats to use
force to make the errant child abandon its stubborn refusal to adjust its behaviour and submit to American authority. The cane has
not (yet?) been administered, but clearly this coercive mode of biopolitics is about punishment, and about what
is known in the strange world of international politics as credibility. It all presupposes American pre-eminence in an
unruly world where teacher knows best, and violence remains a last resort to discipline the errant child and
coerce them into willing obedience. Not surprisingly Iranian national pride refuses to accept such attempts to discipline it, especially
when its professions of nuclear innocence are so flatly rejected in Washington. In so far as the focus on Tehran and its

nuclear program are part of an agenda of unilateral arms control, then given the other much more pressing
issues which are not getting attention in the region in particular and more generally elsewhere this form of arms control is
a distraction from the pressing priorities that need attention.
Iranian proliferation discourse is colored by orientalist racism
Foad Izadi & Hakimeh Saghaye-Biria, Comm & Public Affairs @ LSU Baton Rouge, 7 [Journal of Communication Inquiry
31.2, A Discourse Analysis of Elite American Newspaper Editorials, p. sage]
The focus of all the editorials revolved around the United Statess responsibility to fight the spread of nuclear
weapons to Iran. The editorials attempted to show that Iran had violated its international obligations under the NPT. The two
themes of Oriental untrustworthiness and Islam as threat appear to function as the ideological underpinning
of this construction of us versus them. Whereas it downplays or denies Irans right to all nuclear technology applicable to peaceful
purposes, a most central tenet of the NPT was left outside the editorials discourse: nuclear disarmament. Under the terms of the NPT,
the five original nuclear powers, who are parties to the NPT, were permitted to keep their nuclear arsenal but pledged to negotiate in
good faith the end of the nuclear arms race and the elimination of their nuclear arsenals in return for other nations not seeking nuclear
weapons (IAEA, n.d., pp. 1, 4). As stated by the Washington-based Institute for Public Accuracy (2005b), 35 years after the adoption
of the NPT, the nuclear weapon states have failed to live up to their part of the treaty: [ They] cynically [interpret] the NPT as a
mechanism for the permanent maintenance of an international system of nuclear apartheid in which only they can
possess nuclear weapons. . . . Now the Bush administration wants to add a second tier to its nuclear double standard by denying
uranium enrichmentneeded for both nuclear power and weaponsto countries which dont already have it. Today, the United States
is spending about $40 billion annually on nuclear weapons. U.S. nuclear weapons spending has grown by 84% since 1995. The United
States was to spend about $7 billion in 2005 to maintain and modernize nuclear warheads, excluding the billions of dollars it will
spend to operate and modernize its delivery and command and control systems. The U.S. arsenal has 10,000 nuclear warheads, and
some 2,000 on hair-trigger alert, each one many times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
(Institute for Public Accuracy, 2005a). The New York Times reported on February 7, 2005, that the Bush administration has begun
designing a new generation of nuclear arms meant to be sturdier and more reliable and to have longer lives (Broad, 2005, p. A1).
Former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn criticized the administrations decision, saying that the United States has not set a good example for
nuclear nonproliferation (Agence France-Presse, 2005). El Baradei has also criticized the U.S. nuclear policy (Giacomo, 2003). The
U.S. government demands that other nations not possess nuclear weapons; meanwhile, it is arming itself. . . . In truth there are no good
or bad nuclear weapons. If we do not stop applying double standards, we will end up with more nuclear weapons, El Baradei said.
Writing in the editorial section of The Washington Post, former President Jimmy Carter (2005) criticized the nuclear powers for
refusing to meet their NPT nuclear disarmament commitments. He argues, The United States is the major culprit in this
erosion of the NPT. While claiming to be protecting the world from proliferation threats in Iraq, Libya, Iran and
North Korea, American leaders not only have abandoned existing treaty restraints but also have asserted plans to test and develop new
weapons, including anti-ballistic missiles, the earth-penetrating bunker buster and perhaps some new small bombs. They also
have abandoned past pledges and now threaten first use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states. (p. A17) Whereas Irans
alleged violation of its commitments under the NPT is important, the failure of the United States and the other nuclear weapon states
to follow through on their promise to work toward the elimination of nuclear weapons is not deemed worthy of discussion. Conclusion
This study supports Karim (2000) and McAlisters (2001) findings that, today, Orientalist depictions of Muslim countries and
their political issues concentrate around the idea that Islam is a source of threat. This study also finds that in the case
of Irans nuclear program, the issue of trust plays a more central role than the actual existence of evidence for
Irans possession of a clandestine nuclear weapons program. The present critical discourse analysis also reveals how the three
elite newspapers editorials selectively framed the issues surrounding the Iranian nuclear dispute by employing linguistic,
stylistic, and argumentative maneuvers. Despite their differences in their policy recommendations, none challenged

the underlying assumptions that Iran has a clandestine nuclear weapons program, that the Islamic nature of its
government is a threat, and that it should not be trusted with sensitive nuclear technology. Their inattention to the
inconsistent nonproliferation policies of the United States and other European nuclear powers shows the limits of media criticism of
official policies.

Rhetoric of Iranian hostility and proliferation is deployed

within a neoconservative regime of truth to legitimize war
with Iran. Paying attention to how Iran is represented is
the first obligation of nuclear policymakers.
Adib-Moghaddam 7 (Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, 4/1/2007, Department of Politics and International
Relations, University of Oxford, Manufacturing war: Iran in the neo-conservative Imagination Third
World Quarterly, 28:3, EBSCOhost)
Abu Nasr Farabi expressed a comparably sceptical view of scientific determinism when he argued that
every demonstration is . . . the cause of the scientific knowledge acquired thereby, but not all
demonstration conveys the knowledge of the cause of the things existence.4 Although I am
oversimplifying, it is probably correct to say that the ultimate argument of both men is that one must not

presume that there exists a sphere of human relations that is somehow detached from a
manufactured contexthistorical, economic, philosophical, traditional, ideational, political or
other. All human facts, Gadamer and Farabi agree, are invented, objectified, internalised and
ultimately introjected.5 Although this brief sketch may make the ideas of both thinkers appear
commonsensical enough to accept, we too often continue to assume that facts are somehow
detached from a manufactured context, that they exist on their own without a historical
background and ontological present signifying them.6 Notions of unchangeable laws of
nature or a-historical continuity constrain our capacity for understanding that facts are socially
engineered, that they are elastic, relative, differentiated.7 To some postmodern and critical
theorists, this may seem unchallengeable. But if we switch our focus away from these approaches to the
reality of contemporary international relations studies in general, and to analyses of West Asia in
particular, we see that the majority of scholars take facts for granted , that they fail to focus on
the social engineering of world politics.8 One serious consequence of the absence of critical
approaches in my empirical field of study is that the image of Iran as a country in the grip
of enigmatic, hostile revolutionaries led by intransigent, retroactive Mullahs is surprisingly
salient. Part of the problem, I will argue in the following paragraphs, is that the Islamic Republic
has occupied a prominent place in the imagination of influential neo-conservative strategists
with direct links to the decision-making process in Washington and immense resources to
influence the public discourse in the USA.9 Together with their allies in the Likud party in Israel
(some of them are now members of Kadima), that neo-conservative coterie has manufactured an
image of Iran which has made the countrys irrational nature an established fact among
influential strata of international society .10 The missing link in that causeeffect relationship is the
role of a specific context (in our case neo-conservatism) in the production of reality (in our case the image
of Iran as an international pariah governed by irrational religious zealots), a dialectic which both Farabi and
Gadamer well understood. It would be a mistake to underestimate that dialectic, especially with regard to
Irans nuclear file. For is the ideological representation of Iran not governed by the strategy to expel from
competing realities the notion of a Third World country that is attempting to exercise its right to national
development; to contain the view that Iranians are as rational as the Japanese, Germans or other nations
who have developed a nuclear energy programme? The answer is yes, in my opinion, which explains my
focus on the neo-conservative habitat of producing the image of Iran as an international pariah in the
following paragraphs. I am not so much interested in quantifying the proliferation of anti-Iranian discourses
in neoconservative circles. It is rather more central, I think, to account for the way Iran is spoken
about, to analyse who does the speaking, to explore the institutions which codify people to speak about the
country, and to understand the political culture that signifies and legitimates the things that
are said. What is at issue in this article, in short, is the overall discursive representation of Iran

by neo-conservative ideology, the way in which Iran is translated to us by an exalted ,

cumbersome, coterie of activists with an overtly and self-consciously anti-Iranian agenda .11
No manufacturing of consent, no engineering of facts, no ideological effort to produce reality,
no campaign to transform a specific political consciousness can function if, through a pattern of
institutions, functionaries and media outlets, it does not constitute an overall strategy. And,
inversely, no such strategy can achieve lasting effects if it is not based on a consensus
serving, not as a headquarters, conspiracy or a predetermined, static outcome, but as the smallest
common denominator among its adherents. With regard to Iran that consensus is constituted by
influential, idea-producing conglomerates established by neo-conservative functionaries and activists with
close links to Jewish lobbying organisations and likeminded parties in Israel. These all adhere to a
common interest: to subvert the Iranian state and , by extension, to recode Iranian behaviour
in accordance with US and Israeli interests in West Asia and beyond.12 Let me start exploring
some of the strategies pursued to that end from a comparative perspective by sketching the involvement of
neo-conservative functionaries in the build-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.13 It is no secret that there are
strong ideological and institutional links between the neo-conservative coterie surrounding the White
House and various parties in Israel.15 No lobby has managed to divert US foreign policy as far from what
the American national interest would otherwise suggest, write John J Mearsheimer, Professor at the
University of Chicago, and Stephen Walt, dean of Harvards Kennedy School of Government, while
simultaneously convincing Americans that US and Israeli interests are essentially the same.16 One oftcited example of this nexus is a paper authored by Douglas Feith (among others), who was US
Undersecretary of Defense for Policy from July 2001 until August 2005. The paper bears the curious title,
A clean break: a new strategy for securing the realm. Produced in July 1996 by the Institute for Advanced
Strategic and Political Studies, a think-tank based in Washington, DC and Jerusalem, the paper urges Israel
to reconsider its strategic posture. The report advocates the principle of pre-emption, rather than retaliation
alone. It suggests that Israel work with moderate regimes such as Jordan and Turkey in order to contain,
destabilise, and roll back some of its most dangerous threats. In addition, it recommends that Israel focus
on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraqan important Israeli strategic objective in its own right
as a means of foiling Syrias regional ambitions. Historically valuable, if viewed within the context of
the current situation in Iraq, the paper also suggests that Israel support Jordan in advocating restoration of
the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq.17 The list of functionaries involved in the production of the paper reads
like a whos who of the neo-conservative cabal (it will become clear later that the same people are involved
in the campaign against Iran). Apart from Douglas Feith, the list includes Richard Perle, one of the central
advocates of the Iraq war and until recently chairman of the Pentagons Defense Policy Board; Charles
Fairbanks Jr, a personal friend of Paul Wolfowitz; David Wurmser formerly of the American Enterprise
Institute (AEI) and ex-special assistant to John Bolton at the State Department; and his wife Meyrav
Wurmser, who runs the Hudson Institute and directed the Washington office of the Middle East Media
Research Institute. (Memri is an invention of Col Yigal Carmon, who spent 22 years in Israeli intelligence
and later served as counter-terrorism advisor to former Israeli prime ministers Yitzak Shamir and Yitzak
Rabin.)18 In July 1996 the then prime minister of Israel, Binyamin Netanyahu, presented the central
strategic tenets of the Clean Break paper to the US Congress. The case for an invasion of Iraq was
followed up by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) and the Project for a New
American Century. JINSAs board of advisors included Vice President Dick Cheney, former US
ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, and Douglas Feith before they entered the Bush
administration. Leading neoconservatives such as Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen, Stephen Bryen, Joshua
Muravchik and former CIA director James Woolsey continue to be members of the board at the time of
writing. The Project for a New American Centurys declared goal is to promote American global
leadership.19 It is chaired by William Kristol, editor of the rightwing Weekly Standard. Already by
January 1998 the Project had sent a letter to then US president Bill Clinton advocating a strategy for
removing Saddams regime from power and demanding a full complement of diplomatic, political and
military efforts to that end. This appeal was followed by a letter to congressional leaders Newt Gingrich
and Trent Lott in May 1998, urging that US policy should have as its explicit goal removing Saddam
Husseins regime from power and establishing a peaceful and democratic Iraq in its place. Out of the 17
signatories to the two letters, 11 have held posts in the Bush administration since the invasion of Iraq was
launched in March 2003. Elliot Abrams, who had orchestrated the Iran Contra operation, when the
Reagan administration scandalously used the proceeds of arms sales to Iran (despite its own embargo) to

circumvent a congressional prohibition on funding Nicaraguan rebels, was recruited as Senior Director for
Near East, Southwest Asian and North African Affairs on the National Security Council advancing Bushs
strategy of advancing democracy abroad.20 Richard Armitage was named Deputy Secretary of State; John
Bolton, Under Secretary, Arms Control and International Security (promoted to US Ambassador to the
UN); Paula Dobriansky, Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs; Zalmay Khalilzad, Special
Presidential envoy to Afghanistan and Ambassador-at-large for Free Iraqis (promoted to US Ambassador
to Iraq); Richard Perle, chairman of the Pentagons Defense Policy Board; Peter W Rodman, Assistant
Secretary of Defence for International Security Affairs; Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defence; William
Schneider, Jr, chairman of the Pentagons Defense Science Board; Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of
Defense (promoted to Director of the World Bank); and Robert B Zoellick, the US Trade Representative
(promoted to US Deputy Secretary of State).21 It would be nave to assume that the institutionalisation of
the neoconservative nexus in a myriad of think-tanks and lobbying organisations did not create the
structural platform to advocate the case for war against Iraq. Let me put forward a general hypothesis here.
Neo-conservatism does not refuse aggression. On the contrary, it habituates us to accept war as
rational; it puts into operation an entire machinery for producing true facts in order to
legitimate militaristic foreign policies. Not only do neo-conservatives speak of war and urge everyone
to do so; they also present an aestheticised version of war. Via neo-conservatism then, justice, patriotism,
morality, even chivalry, find an opportunity to deploy themselves in the discourse of war. Not, however, by
reason of some naturally positive property immanent to war itself, but by virtue of the properties neoconservatism and other militaristic ideologies ascribe to it. Let me turn to explaining how a comparable
Kriegskontext with the same eponymous heroes is manufactured with regard to Iran.22 One newly
established link in the chain of neo-conservative think-tanks tied to Jewish lobbying organisations
advocating confrontation with Iran is the Coalition for Democracy in Iran (CDI). Founded in 2002 by
Michael Ledeen and Morris Amitay, who used to be executive director of the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the organisation aims to foster political support for regime change in the
Islamic Republic. Members include Raymond Tanter of the Washington Institute for Near East Affairs
(WINEA), itself an invention of AIPAC, Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy (CSP)
and Rob Sobhani, who has close personal and political links to the son of the deposed Shah of Iran, Reza
Pahlavi. Ledeen, Amitay and Sobhani joined forces at the AEI in May 2003 in a seminar entitled The
Future of Iran: Mullahcracy, Democracy, and the War on Terror, co-sponsored by the Hudson Institute and
the Foundation for Defense of Democracies . All three have connections with the media agency Benador
Associates, which manages both their op-ed placements and television appearances. Eleana Benador
represents Richard Perle, James Woolsey, Charles Krauthammer, Martin Kramer and other neoconservative advocates. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies also supports the Alliance for
Democracy in Iran (ADI), which is backed by prominent political strategists such as Jerome Corsi.
Whereas the CDI and ADI support the restoration of the monarchy in Iran, the Iran Policy Committee (IPC)
acts as a lobbying organisation for the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), which is listed as a terrorist organisation
by the US State Department and the European Union. Those readers who are familiar with Fox News and
its propensity for readymade, formulaic analysis by former members of the US armed forces will recognise
some of the supporters of the IPC: Lt Col Bill Cowan, US Marine Corps (ret); Lt Gen Thomas McInerney
USAF (ret); Maj Gen Paul E Valley, US Army (ret); Capt Charles T Nash, US Navy (ret); and Lt Gen
Edward Rowny, US Army (ret). Other IPC members are also familiar faces: the aforementioned Raymond
Tanter; Clare Lopez, a former CIA analyst; and Jim Atkins, US ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the
presidency of Richard Nixon. Creating more and more interlinked foundations, think-tanks, and other
institutional platforms tied to the neo-conservative cabal has served its political purpose. In the US
Congress the Iranian government has been targeted by several bills, including the Iran Freedom and
Support Act, sponsored by Senators Rick Santorum (R-Penn.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas), and a
comparable bill proposed by Rep Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Florida Republican and strident anti-Castro
campaigner. Funding of $3 million for Iranian opposition activities was inserted by Congress in the 2005
budget on the initiative of Sen Sam Brownback, a Kansas Republican and a member of the Institute on
Religion and Public Policy which has recently launched its in-house Iran Project. This is aimed at
enhancing the understanding of Irans policy-making process and politico-Islamist system.24 The
aforementioned Santorum, moreover, advocated regime change in an address to the National Press Club
concerning Islamic fascism in July 2006, stating that every major Islamic leader has openly identified the
US as its enemy.25 Influence on the levers of power in Washington is not only secured through lobbying
efforts. There is also persuasive evidence for covert activity. In August 2004 it was revealed that classified

documents, including a draft National Security Presidential Directive devised in the office of then
Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith was shared with AIPAC and Israeli officials. The
document set a rather more aggressive US policy towards Iran and was leaked by Lawrence Franklin, an
expert on Iran who was recruited to Feiths office from the Defense Intelligence Agency.26 An FBI
counter-intelligence operation revealed that the same Franklin had repeated meetings with Naor Gilon, the
head of the political department at the Israeli embassy in Washington, and with other officials and activists
tied to the Israeli state and Jewish lobbying organisations. Franklin was sentenced to 12 years and seven
months in jail in January 2006 for disclosing classified information to Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman.
Both were members of AIPAC.27 Douglas Feith himself has longstanding links to Zionist pressure groups.
The Zionist Organisation for America (ZOA), for instance, honoured him and his father for their service to
Israel and the Jewish people in 1997. He is also cofounder of One Jerusalem, a Jerusalem-based
organisation whose ultimate goal is securing a united Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel.28 A
second co-founder of this organisation is David Steinmann, who is chairman of JINSA (see above). He is
also a board member of the Center for Security Policy (CSP) and chairman of the executive committee of
the Middle East Forum. Two other co-founders of One Jerusalem are directly tied to the Likud Party: Dore
Gold was a top advisor to former prime minister Ariel Sharon and Natan Sharansky was Israels minister of
diaspora affairs from March 2003 until May 2005 (he resigned from the cabinet in April 2005 to protest
against plans to withdraw Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip). Let me sketch now how the neo-conservative
machinery works within a specific political context, namely Irans ninth presidential elections in June 2005.
Here, the strategy to inject the public discourse with false facts and predictions was evident before, during
and after the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Any normal person familiar with the Islamic republic
knows that these are not elections at all, wrote Michael Ledeen of the AEI in an article entitled When is
an election not an election. They are a mise en sce`ne, an entertainment, a comic opera staged for our
benefit. The purpose of the charade, Ledeen claimed, is to deter us from supporting the forces of
democratic revolution in Iran.29 Kenneth Timmerman reiterated the neoconservative message in an article
for the National Review Online entitled Fake election, real threats, which was reprinted by the
Washington Times. Citing Abolhassan Banisadr, the first president of the Islamic Republic, who fled into
exile and has not been in Iran for nearly 30 years, Timmerman predicted that no more than 27% of eligible
voters in Iran would participate in the elections (his estimate missed the real turnout by over 34%).30
Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defence policy studies at the AEI, made a similarly
misleading prophecy. In Not our man in Iran, she argued that Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani was
handpicked by the machinations of the mullahs to win the election. (Rafsanjani lost, of course, having
received seven million votes fewer than Ahmadinejad.31) Other articles by Nir Boms, vice president of the
Center for Freedom in the Middle East and former academic liaison at the Israeli embassy in Washington,
DC; by Elliot Chodoff, a major in the reserves of the Israeli army; and by Abbas Milani and Michael
McFaul, who direct the Project on Iranian Democracy at the conservative Hoover Institution in California,
were similarly misleading. The campaign to trivialise the democratic process in Iran before and
during the elections served a dual, interdependent purpose: rendering the ninth presidiency of the
Islamic Republic illegitimate a priori and, by extension, representing Iran as an irrational
actor, as a country where there is no regulatory context in which decision makers and others
operate. Such manipulation helps produce the image of Iran as a rogue country which, in
turn, serves the important function of legitimating diplomatic and, potentially, military
aggression. The strategy has appeared to be at least partially successful. After the election leading
journalists, including John Simpson of the BBC, alleged that Ahmadinejad had been one of the students
responsible for holding US diplomatic staff captive between 1979 and 1980.32 This rather apocryphal
claim was rejected by the CIA only after it had its impact on global public opinion. Crucially it minimised
the diplomatic power of the Ahmadinejad administration before its first serious engagement with the
international community at the United Nations in September 2005. (All this happened before
Ahmadinejads excessive tirades against Zionism in general and the Israeli state in particular.) Let me add
in parenthesis that tracing the impact of neo-conservatism on the way Iran is portrayed is not, of course, to
defend the political process in Iran. The Islamic Republic has not constituted a representative democracy at
this stage of its development,33 and I dont think that Mahmoud Ahmadinejads raucous and bellicose
posture in general and his abominably limited understanding of the history of the holocaust is
representative of the political culture of the country. Yet it should also be added emphatically here that neoconservative activists favour this type of West Asian politician. There are benefits to having an enemy that

openly bares its teeth, suggests Daniel Pipes in this regard, for Westerners, it clarifies the hostility of the
regime much more than if it subtly spun webs of deceit.34 Let us state the obvious, writes Reuel Marc
Gerecht of the AEI in a similarly congratulatory mood: The new president of the Islamic Republic of Iran,
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is a godsend.35 Ilan Berman, the author of Tehran Rising: Irans Challenge to the
United States agrees: Thank goodness for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.36 The Muslim democrat, I am in no
doubt, is anathema to the neo-conservative Weltanschauung. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad unconsciously serves
neoconservative interests because he has made it that much easier to portray Iran as a monolithically
irrational, even fascist country.37 In another parallel to the way Iraq was portrayed before the invasion,38
likening Iran to absolute evilin contemporary world politics always epitomised by Nazi Germanyhas
become a central pillar of the neo-conservative campaign to discredit the country. Ahmadinejad has cast
himself as Adolf Hitler reincarnated writes George Melloan in a column for the Wall Street Journal
representatively.39 Moreover, by adopting a retroactive political discourse permeated by a static notion of
Shia-millenial symbolism and imagery as a means to appeal to the (neo)conservative factions of Iranian
society and especially the orthodox clergy, Ahmadinejad has further inhibited Irans bargaining power with
regard to the nuclear issue. It should not come as a surprise that the neoconservative apparatus feeeds on
Ahmadinejads anachronistic rhetoric, knitting his abominations closely together in one thoroughly antiIranian episteme: So a Holocaust-denying, virulently anti-Semitic, aspiring genocidist, on the verge of
acquiring weapons of the apocalypse, writes Charles Krauthammer, believes that the end is not only near
but nearer than the next American presidential election . . . This kind of man, Krauthammer continues,
would have, to put it gently, less inhibition about starting Armageddon than a normal person.40 There is
a radical difference between the Islamic Republic of Iran and other governments with nuclear weapons
[sic], Princeton emeritus Professor Bernard Lewis agrees. This difference is expressed in what can only
be described as the apocalyptic worldview of Irans present rulers . . .Mr Ahmadinejad and his followers
clearly believe, Lewis emphasises, that the terminal struggle has already begun . . . It may even have a
date, indicated by several references by the Iranian president to giving his final answer to the US about
nuclear development by Aug 22 [2006]. This year, we are told, Aug 22 corresponds, in the Islamic
calendar, to the 27th day of the month of Rajab of the year 1427. This, by tradition, is the night when many
Muslims commemorate the night flight of the prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq, first to the
farthest mosque, usually identified with Jerusalem, and then to heaven and back (cf Koran XVII.1).
Lewis delves even deeper into the realms of ideological mythology when he tells us that it would be wise
to bear the possibility in mind that 22 of August might well be deemed an appropriate date for the
apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world.41 The same theme was picked up by Kenneth
Timmerman: As the world prepares to confront an Iranian regime that continues to defy the International
Atomic Energy Agency over its nuclear programs . . .we must listen to what Irans leaders say as we watch
what they do. A religious zealot with nuclear weapons is a dangerous combination the world cannot afford
to tolerate.42 Timmerman heads the so called Foundation for Democracy in Iran (FDI) and is a member of
the Committee on the Present Danger.43 The latter organisation issued a policy paper in January 2006
calling for more sanctions against Iran and lobbys the Bush administration to energetically assist
dissidents to bring about the downfall of the Iranian state.44 Much too occasionally the neo-conservative
campaign to present Iran as an irrational polity receives setbacks.45 In May 2006 bloggers and
investigative journalists exposed as wholly invented a story by Amir Taheri, whose opinion pieces are
managed by Benador Associates (see above).46 In an article for the National Post of Canada (founded by
the media mogul Conrad Black and now owned by the Asper family), Taheri had claimed that a new law
would require Iranian Jews to be marked out with a yellow strip of cloth sewn in front of their clothes
while Christians will be assigned the colour red. Zoroastrians end up with Persian blue as the colour of their
zonnar.47 Accordind to Taheri the new codes would enable Muslims to easily recognise non-Muslims so
that they can avoid shaking hands with them by mistake and thus becoming najis (unclean).48 To reiterate
the message, the article ran alongside a 1935 photograph of a Jewish businessman in Berlin with a yellow,
six-pointed star sewn on his overcoat. The National Post was forced to retract the bogus piece and
apologise publicly. But by then the New York Post, part of the media empire controlled by Rupert
Murdoch, the Jerusalem Post, which also featured a photo of a yellow star from the Nazi era over a photo
of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the New York Sun had picked up the story.49 In another
New York Post column in 2005 Taheri claimed that Irans ambassador to the UN, Javad Zarif, was one of
the students involved in the capture of US diplomats in Tehran between 1979 and 1980. The story was
retracted after Dwight Simpson, a professor at San Francisco State University, wrote to the newspaper
explaining that the allegation was false. On the day of the seizure of the US embassy in Tehran Zarif was

a graduate student in the Department of International Relations of San Francisco State University. He was
my student, Simpson told the editors, and he served also as my teaching assistant.50 Worringly Amir
Taheri was among a group of experts on Iran and the region invited to the White House for a meeting with
Tony Blair and George W Bush in May 2006.51 <<Not surprisingly AIPAC has made fears about Irans
nuclear energy programme a central pillar of its congressional agenda. At its largest ever policy conference
in May 2005 AIPAC presented a Disney-inspired multimedia tour aimed at fostering the argument that Iran
is developing nuclear weapons. Similarly the American Jewish Committee (AJC) has taken out fullpage
advertisements in influential US newspapers since April 2006 entitled A nuclear Iran threatens all,
depicting radiating circles on an Iran-centred map to show the potential reach of the missiles. Suppose Iran
one day gives nuclear devices to terrorists the ad reads. Could anyone anywhere feel safe?.52 The same
message is reiterated by native informants; old ones like Manuchehr Ghorbanifar, arms dealer and a
central player in the Iran Contra scandal who recently met envoys from the Pentagon in Rome;53 and
new ones like Amir Abbas Fakhravar, who advocated the policy of regime change in his testimony to a
Senate Homeland Security Committee in July 2006.54 In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph in the
same month, Fakhravar reverted to the other neo-conservative themes explored above, stating that the
world has to do somethingwhatever it takesso that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad does not become another
Hitler.55 Sitting safely in his office at the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies, Fakhravar even
promotes military action against Iran: Whatever the world does against the Iranian regime, he assures us,
much in the same way Iraqi exiles did in the build-up to the Iraq war, the Iranian people will be
supportive.56 The theme to equate Iran with Nazi Germany, which is central to the neoconservative
propaganda against the country, has already entered the political consciousness of decision makers in
western Europe and the USA. The prolific investigative journalist of the Inter Press Service, Jim Lobe,
recently reported that Senator John McCain had likened the nuclear standoff with Iran to the situation in
Europe in the 1930s.57 Angela Merkel, leader of the Grosse Koalition between the conservative Christian
Democratic Union and the centre-left Social Democratic Party in Germany appears to adhere to a similar
view: Looking back to German history in the early 1930s when National Socialism was on the rise, there
were many outside Germany who said Its only rhetoricdont get excited, Merkel told policy makers
at the 2006 Munich security conference.58 There were times when people could have reacted differently
and, in my view, Germany is obliged to do something at the early stages . . .We want to, we must prevent
Iran from developing its nuclear programme.59 Another prominent policy maker to employ that threat
scenario is Newt Gingrich, who argued that Iran could be planning for a pre-emptive nuclear
electromagnetic pulse attack on the USA that would turn one third of the country back to a 19th century
level of development.60 Gingrich, it should be added, is a member of the Senior Advisory Board of the
United States Commission on National Security/21 Century. The Commission has produced a series of
policy recommendations that discuss US national security challenges up to 2025. Questioned at the
theoretical level, neo-conservatism is not ordered in accordance with a unifying headquarters or
conspiracy.61 Contemporary neoconservatism should be understood rather as an ideological space open in
three dimensions. In one of these we have already situated the neo-conservative functionary, for whom
writing the script, the speech, the terminology of a specific political discourse is central (eg the axis of
evil invented by David Frum). In a second dimension we may situate the decision maker,
neoconservatisms public face, who proceeds by relating diversified but consensual discourses in such a
way that they are then able to claim causal validity and strategic value (eg Richard Perle, Dick Cheney,
Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, etc). These two dimensions are largely empirical in that they are part of
the day-to-day affairs of politics in Washington, DC (and in the think-tank belt scattered around Dupont
Circle for that matter). The third dimension, in my opinion, is that of strategic value, which develops as a
long-term state interest out of the latter; it forms a salient grand strategy and is hence not easily discarded
or altered. It is here that we meet the legitimation of war; its translation from the empirical realms of dayto-day politics into theorised reality; it is this realm that is least transparent, causal, ontological. What
evidence is available to us today if we seek to explore Irans position in that third dimension? Let me frame
this question with two political realities that define Irans place in the strategic imagination of
contemporary neo-conservatives. First, the global war on terror and the Bush doctrine of pre-emption
have emerged as the primary institutions of US foreign policy, advocating military intervention against
potential adversaries even if they are not considered an immediate threat to US national security.62
According to Norman Podhoretz, who was editor-in-chief of the influential neo-conservative magazine
Commentary between 1960 and 1995, the global war on terror is instrumental in producing a new species
of imperial mission for America, whose purpose would be to oversee the emergence of successor

governments in the [West Asian] region more amenable to reform and modernisation than the despotisms
now in place. After taking Baghdad, Podhoretz prophesied, we may willy-nilly find ourselves forced by
the same political and military logic to topple five or six or seven more tyrannies in the Islamic world.63
The pre-emptive strategic doctrine, which was announced in June 2002 by President Bush at the military
academy at West Point, provides the political legitimacy for such an agenda. Setting out an interventionist
framework for US foreign policy, Bush declared that the country will confront evil and lawless regimes, if
necessary, by military force.64 The US National Security Strategy published three months later
institutionalised the Bush doctrine. According to its authors, the USA has long maintained the option of
preemptive actions to counter a sufficient threat . . . The greater the threat . . . the greater is the risk of
inaction and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if
uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemys attack.65 There is enough evidence to
conclude that Iran is on that target list. First, there is the circumstantial evidence, eg the repeated warnings
by Seymour Hersh, Scott Ritter, Robert Fisk and others that the war on Iran is already on its way, or the
reports leaked to the Sunday Times that under the American plans Britain would be expected to play a
supporting role, perhaps by sending surveillance aircraft or ships and submarines to the Gulf or by allowing
the Americans to fly from Diego Garcia.66 Second, there is the factual evidence exemplified by the
classified version of the National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD) 17 and Homeland Security
Presidential Directive 4,67 leaked to the Washington Post. This broke with 50 years of US counterproliferation efforts by authorising pre-emptive strikes on states and terrorist groups that are close to
acquiring weapons of mass destruction or the long-range missile capable of delivering them. In a leaked,
top-secret appendix the directive named Iran, Syria, North Korea (and Libya) among the countries that are
the central focus of the policy.68 Moreover, NSPD 17 also sets out to respond to a WMD threat with
nuclear weapons. This nuclear first strike policy is reiterated in presidential directive NSPD 35 (Nuclear
Weapons Deployment Authorisation), issued in May 2004, the Nuclear Posture Review in January 2002
and the Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations published in March 2005. In addition, US Senate Joint
Resolution 23 (Authorisation for Use of Military Force) empowers the president to take action to deter
and prevent acts of terrorism against the United States without consulting Congress.69 There are even calls
to change international law to legitimate the policy of pre-emption. In another similarity to the Iraq war,
when scholars such as Fouad Ajami covered the invasion with an academic canopy, Harvard Law
professor Alan Dershowitz argues that by deliberately placing nuclear facilities in the midst of civilian
population centres, the Iranian government has made the decision to expose its civilians to attacks . . . if all
else fails . . . Israel, or the United States, must be allowed under international law to take out the Iranian
nuclear threat before it is capable of the genocide for which it is being built.70 Second, Iran was
mentioned 16 times in the new National Security Strategy (NSS) of the USA, a wartime document that
uses such emotionally charged phrases as tyrannical regime, ally of terror, which harbor[s] terrorists,
and is an enemy of freedom, justice, and peace to describe the Islamic Republic.71 Moreover, despite a
1981 treaty of non-interference in domestic Iranian affairs, the NSS spells out a policy of subversion
against the Iranian state, as a means to protect our national and economic security against the adverse
effects of their bad conduct.72 To that end, the US State Department has established an in-house Iran
Desk and Iran watch units in Dubai as well as in US embassies in the vicinity of Iran, and a $75 million
programme aimed at expanding broadcasting into the country, funding nongovernmental organisations and
promoting cultural exchanges.73 This policy of subversion is further diversified by a parallel process
probing tensions between Irans ethnic minorities and the central government in Tehran. A research project
to this end was implemented by the Marine Corps Intelligence, which focuses on crises and predeployment
support to expeditionary warfare.74 This strand of current US policies vis-a`-vis Iran, unsurprisingly, is
overwhelmingly endorsed by neo-conservative functionaries and is exemplified by an AEI conference in
October 2005 entitled Another case for Federalism and chaired by Michael Ledeen. The Iranian
people have no connection to a glorious past, we are told much in that same spirit, and thus no foundation
for a flourishing future.75 Michael Rubin agrees: Iran is more an empire than a nation . . .When the
Islamic Republic collapses, we are reassured, a strong unified Iran will be a force for stability and a
regional bulwark against the Islamism under which the Iranian people now chafe.76 To the extent that the
different nationalities each have their own identities and oppose the essentially Persian regime, Edward
Luttwak joins the chorus, they are likely to applaud external attacks on the nuclear installations rather than
rally to the defense of their rulers.77 Luttwak ignores, of course, that both President Ahmadinejad and
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei are Iranian-Azeri, that is, members of the largest minority
community populating the country. In conclusion, I would like to discuss at least three central concerns

with regard to the preceding analysis. First, is a military attack on Iran imminent? I doubt that the political
establishment in Washington has been won over on this one yet. The Democrats resurgence in the midterm elections in November 2006, Donald Rumsfelds and John Boltons departure from the Pentagon and
the UN, respectively, the continuing disaster in Iraq and the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan
indicate that Republican neoconservatism represented by the Bush administration is facing profound
challenges. Moreover, the USA is facing a legitimacy crisis in the international arena, and in the
geostrategic modifications engendered by an increasingly multipolar world order. Hence Russias efforts
to reassert its role in Central Asia and the Northern Caucasus exemplified by joint military exercises with
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan under the Collective Security Treaty Organisation in August 2006
and the coercive energy politics pursued by Gazprom. Hence Chinas increasingly assertive role in East
Asia and its recent multibillion-dollar investments in Africa. Hence Irans successful strategy to mobilise
support in Asia, Latin America and Africa which has been recently re-emphasised by President
Ahmadinejads calls for Asian Unity in his speech to the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation, which
comprises Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. negotiate in good faith? It
would be easier to act sooner rather than later. Yes, there would be repercussionsand they would be
healthy ones, showing a strong America that has rejected further appeasement.87 Hence also his repeated
calls for a strategic partnership with leftist governments, most prominently those of Hugo Chavez in
Venezuela, Fidel Castro in Cuba and Evo Morales in Bolivia, and Irans diplomatic initiatives in Africa.
Moreover, containing Iran or marginalising the country from the international community appears to be
futile because, parallel to Irans involvement in prominent international institutions such as the
Organisation of the Islamic Conference and the UN, the country is also a vocal member of a range of other,
lesser known intergovernmental organisations: the Developing Eight (D-8) comprising Egypt, Bangladesh,
Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan and Turkey, the Economic Co-operation Organisation, including
Pakistan, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and
Afghanistan and the G-77, which was founded in 1964 to lobby the UN on behalf of developing nations
and has grown to include 133 countries. Irans diplomatic manoeuvring space is significantly enhanced by
involvement in these organisations because they create effective outlets to counter the communicative
power of the US state, dissecting its efforts to mobilise political and public opinion against the country
especially with regard to the nuclear issue. In the light of these currents of contemporary world politics,
legitimating another military aggression in West Asia internationally will be difficult indeed. These
constraining international factors do not mean, of course, that neoconservatives will not continue to work
towards military aggression against Iran. This brings us to a second question: are there no competing
narratives in the USA? Let there be no misunderstanding in this regard. I do not claim that neoconservatism has a total grip on the political culture in the USA. This is quite impossible in a pluralistic
democracy. But there is no escaping the fact that neo-conservatives have a strong influence on the levers of
power in Washington. This has been repeatedly lamented by former high-ranking officials. For example,
Graham Fuller, a former Vice-Chairman of the National Intelligence Council for long-range forecasting at
the CIA, concedes that Efforts to portray Iran with some analytical balance have grown more difficult,
crowded out by inflamed rhetoric and intense pro-Israeli lobbying against Tehran in Congress.78 Stephen
Walt and John J Mearsheimer are equally critical. In an emphatic article published by the London Review
of Books they argue that the thrust of US policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic
politics, and especially the activities of the Israel Lobby. Walt and Mearsheimer define that lobby as the
loose coalition of individuals and organisations who actively work to steer US foreign policy in a pro-Israel
direction.79 I agree with Walt and Mearsheimer that there is no such thing as a neo-conservative
headquarters, manifesto, conspiracy or even party. There are Republican and Democrat sympathisers,
Jewish and non-Jewish functionaries, Christian fundamentalists and Muslim collaborators (and
entertainers such as Glenn Beck, whose primetime show on CNN is openly anti-Islamic, and anti-Iranian
for that matter).80 But the empirical evidence suggests that the pervasive concentration of neo-conservative
think-tanks and activiststhe neoconservative apparatusconstitutes a consensus providing an image of
Iran as an international pariah. Along with this image goes a macro-culture. This is the overarching
habitat I have explored at the beginning of this article in relation to the ideas of Gadamer and Farabi; the
place where the image of Iran as an international threat is implanted. For what gives the country its
negative image in the West is not its own ontological content but the act of institution, an installation, a
consecration that gives significance to what has, in itself, a neutral content.81 It is within that very tightknit, ubiquitous neo-conservative habitat that the invasion of Iraq was made possible and it is within a
similarly pervasive Kriegskontext that the idea of military intervention against Iran is cultivated. What is at

stake in revealing neo-conservative propaganda is not to undifferentiate US foreign policies. I am not

suggesting a monocausal link between neo-conservatism and hostiltity towards Iran, no automatism, no
inevitable political outcome. What I have hoped to explore in this article, rather, is the nihilistic
international agenda that neo-conservatism promotes: the social engineering of a militaristic ideology
which has secured a place in that ferosciously contested space we may call international political culture.
Consider the comments of Patrick Clawson at a symposium organised by the militant FrontPageMag.com
in July 2005. Clawson, deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East policy, bluntly advocated
covert operations in order to sabotage nuclear facilities in Iran: Accidents are known to happen (remember
Three Mile Island or Chernobyl). If there were to be a series of crippling accidents at Iranian nuclear
facilities . . . that would set back the Iranian program.82 Consider also neo-conservative writings during
Israels invasion of Lebanon in summer 2006.83 No one should have any lingering doubts about whats
going on in the Middle East Michael Ledeen proclaimed. Its war [and] there is a common prime mover,
and that is the Iranian mullahcracy, the revolutionary Islamic fascist state that declared war on us 27 years
ago and has yet to be held accountable.84 All of us in the free world owe Israel an enormous thank-you
for defending freedom, democracy and security against the Iranian cats-paw wholly-owned terrorist
subsidiaries Hezbollah and Hamas, echoed Larry Kudlow.85 They are defending their own homeland and
very existence, but they are also defending Americas homeland as our frontline democratic ally in the
Middle East.86 William Kristol strengthened the plot: Whats happening in the Middle East isnt just
another chapter in the Arab Israeli conflict. Whats happening is an Islamist Israeli war . . . Better to
say that whats under attack is liberal democratic civilization, whose leading representative right now
happens to be the United States . . . Communism became really dangerous when it seized control of Russia.
National socialism became really dangerous when it seized control of Germany. Islamism became really
dangerous when it seized control of Iran . . . The right response is renewed strengthin supporting the
governments of Iraq and Afghanistan, in standing with Israel, and in pursuing regime change in Syria and
Iran. For that matter, we might consider countering this act of Iranian aggression with a military strike
against Iranian nuclear facilities. Why wait? Does anyone think a nuclear Iran can be contained? That the
current regime will Ultimately, then, neoconservative functionaries inscribe the narrative of
war in international relations; they inscribe it in institutions (eg the Committee on the Present
Danger), language (eg the axis of evil), mindsets (eg Why do they hate us?), and policies (eg the
doctrine of pre-emption). This strategy transforms other countries into replaceable variables . To
be more precise, pre-emption and the war on terror are made into versatile ideological
agents that can be employed to legitimate military aggression globally not only in the
Iraqi, Iranian, Venezuelan or Syrian context, but also with regard to other conflict scenarios
(China-Taiwan, Russia-Chechnya, etc.). Thus, from the neo-coservative perspective,
Lebanon, Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and others are just episodes in the same neoconservative project, namely the Fourth World War invented by Eliot Cohen and popularised by
ex-CIA director James Woolsey. Even if we sucessfully avert one crisis, neoconservatives are
always busy planning the next. In essence that political strategy is reassuringly mimetic: once a
specific war project has bedded in, its supposed chivalry is loudly trumpeted, bundled up in a morally
righteous and infallible narrativein essence the legitimation of US neo-imperialismand stitched into
the political fabric of contemporary America. It is in this sense that neo-conservatism reveals itself as war
a war continued by other means. The perverse irony of this malicious ideology is that it makes us think
that it serves the liberation of mankind.

The threat of Iranian nuclear acquisition is rooted in a

racist description of the world that seeks to universalize
the American vision of controlthis ensures genocide and
unending war
Batur 7 [Pinar, PhD @ UT-Austin Prof. of Sociology @ Vassar, The Heart of Violence: Global
Racism, War, and Genocide, Handbook of The Sociology of Racial and Ethnic Relations, eds. Vera and
Feagin, p. 447-9]

In 1993, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Samuel P. Huntington racialized the

future of global conflict by declaring that the clash of civilizations will dominate global
politics (Huntington 1993:22). He declared that the fault line will be drawn by crisis and bloodshed.
Huntingtons end of ideology meant the West is now expected to confront the Confucian-Islamic other.

Huntington intoned Islam has bloody borders, and he expected the West to develop
cooperation among Christian brethren, while limiting the military strength of the ConfucianIslamic civilizations, by exploiting the conflicts within them. When the walls of communism fell, a new
enemy was found in Islam, and loathing and fear of Islam exploded with September 11. The new color line
means we hate them not because of what they do, but because of who they are and what they believe in.
The vehement denial of racism, and the fervent assertion of democratic equality in the West ,
are matched by detestation and anger toward Muslims, who are not European, not Western,
and therefore not civilized. Since the context of different and inferior has become not just a
function of race or gender, but of culture and ideology, it has become another instrument of belief and the
selfrighteous racism of American expansionism and new imperialism. The assumed superiority of

the West has become the new White Mans Burden, to expand and to recreate the world
in an American image. The rationalization of this expansion, albeit to protect our freedoms
and our way of life or to combat terrorism, is fueled by racist ideology, obscured in the
darkness behind the faade of inalienable rights of the West to defend civilization against
enemies in global culture wars. At the turn of the 20th century, the Terrible Turk was the image that
summarized the enemy of Europe and the antagonism toward the hegemony of the Ottoman Empire,
stretching from Europe to the Middle East, and across North Africa. Perpetuation of this imagery in

American foreign policy exhibited how capitalism met with Orientalist constructs in the
white racial frame of the western mind (VanderLippe 1999). Orientalism is based on the
conceptualization of the Oriental otherEastern, Islamic societies as static, irrational,
savage, fanatical, and inferior to the peaceful, rational, scientific Occidental Europe and
the West (Said 1978). This is as an elastic construct, proving useful to describe whatever is considered as
the latest threat to Western economic expansion, political and cultural hegemony, and global domination for
exploitation and absorption. Post-Enlightenment Europe and later America used this iconography to define
basic racist assumptions regarding their uncontestable right to impose political and economic dominance
globally. When the Soviet Union existed as an opposing power, the Orientalist vision of the 20th century
shifted from the image of the Terrible Turk to that of the Barbaric Russian Bear. In this context,
Orientalist thought then, as now, set the terms of exclusion. It racialized exclusion to define the
terms of racial privilege and superiority. By focusing on ideology, Orientalism recreated the superior
race, even though there was no race. It equated the hegemony of Western civilization with the right
ideological and cultural framework. It segued into war and annihilation and genocide and

continued to foster and aid the recreation of racial hatred of others with the collapse of the
Soviet other. Orientalisms global racist ideology reformed in the 1990s with Muslims and
Islamic culture as to the inferior other. Seeing Muslims as opponents of Christian civilization is
not new, going back to the Crusades, but the elasticity and reframing of this exclusion is evident in recent
debates regarding Islam in the West, one raised by the Pope and the other by the President of the United
States. Against the background of the latest Iraq war, attacks in the name of Islam, racist attacks on
Muslims in Europe and in the United States, and detention of Muslims without trial in secret prisons, Pope
Benedict XVI gave a speech in September 2006 at Regensburg University in Germany. He quoted a 14thcentury Byzantine emperor who said, show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you
will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.
In addition, the Pope discussed the concept of Jihad, which he defined as Islamic holy war, and said,
violence in the name of religion was contrary to Gods nature and to reason. He also called for dialogue
between cultures and religions (Fisher 2006b). While some Muslims found the Popes speech regrettable,
it also caused a spark of angry protests against the Popes ill informed and bigoted comments, and voices
raised to demand an apology (Fisher 2006a). Some argue that the Pope was ordering a new crusade, for
Christian civilization to conquer terrible and savage Islam. When Benedict apologized, organizations and
parliaments demanded a retraction and apology from the Pope and the Vatican (Lee 2006). Yet, when the
Pope apologized, it came as a second insult, because in his apology he said, Im deeply sorry for the

reaction in some countries to a few passages of my address at the University of Regensburg, which were
considered offensive to the sensibilities of Muslims (Reuters 2006). In other words, he is sorry that
Muslims are intolerant to the point of fanaticism. In the racialized world, the Popes apology came as an
effort to show justification for his speechhe was not apologizing for being insulting, but rather saying
that he was sorry that Muslim violence had proved his point. Through orientalist and the white racial
frame, those who are subject to racial hatred and exclusion themselves become agents of racist
legitimization. Like Huntington, Bernard Lewis was looking for Armageddon in his Wall Street Journal
article warning that August 22, 2006, was the 27th day of the month of Rajab in the Islamic calendar and is
considered a holy day, when Muhammad was taken to heaven and returned. For Muslims this day is a day
of rejoic-ing and celebration. But for Lewis, Professor Emeritus at Princeton, this might well be deemed
an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and, if necessary, of the world (Lewis 2006). He
cautions that it is far from certain that [the President of Iran] Mr. Ahmadinejad plans any such
cataclysmic events for August 22, but it would be wise to bear the possibility in mind. Lewis
argues that Muslims, unlike others, seek self-destruction in order to reach heaven faster . For
Lewis, Muslims in this mindset dont see the idea of Mutually Assured Destruction as a constraint but
rather as an inducement (Lewis 2006). In 1993, Huntington pleaded that in a world of different
civilizations, each...will have to learn to coexist with the others (Huntington 1993:49). Lewis, like Pope
Benedict, views Islam as the apocalyptic destroyer of civilization and claims that reactions against
orientalist, racist visions such as his actually prove the validity of his position. Lewiss assertions run
parallel with George Bushs claims. In response to the alleged plot to blow up British airliners, Bush
claimed, This nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who
love freedom, to hurt our nation (TurkishPress.com. 2006; Beck 2006). Bush argued that the fight against
terrorism is the ideological struggle of the 21st century and he compared it to the 20th centurys fight
against fascism, Nazism, and communism. Even though Islamo-fascist has for some time been a
buzzword for Bill OReilly, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity on the talk-show circuit, for the president of
the United States it drew reactions worldwide. Muslim Americans found this phrase contributing to the
rising level of hostility to Islam and the American Muslim com-munity (Raum 2006). Considering that
since 2001, Bush has had a tendency to equate war on terrorism with crusade, this new rhetoric equates
ideology with religion and reinforces the worldview of a war of civilizations. As Bush said, ...we still
arent completely safe, because there are people that still plot and people who want to harm us for what we
believe in (CNN 2006). Exclusion in physical space is only matched by exclusion in the
imagination, and racialized exclusion has an internal logic leading to the annihilation of the
excluded. Annihilation, in this sense, is not only designed to maintain the terms of racial
inequality, both ideologically and physically, but is institutionalized with the vocabulary of
self-protection. Even though the terms of exclusion are never complete, genocide is the definitive
point in the exclusionary racial ideology, and such is the logic of the outcome of the
exclusionary process, that it can conclude only in ultimate domination. War and genocide

take place with compliant efficiency to serve the global racist ideology with dizzying
frequency. The 21st century opened up with genocide, in Darfur.

Prolif is an epistemological excuse for violence their

discourse wrecks alternative approaches and trades off
with structural violence
Woods 7 Matthew, PhD in IR @ Brown - Researcher @ Thomas Watson Institute of International
Relations [Journal of Language and Politics 6.1Unnatural Acts: Nuclear Language, proliferation, and
order, p. 116-7]
It is important to identify, expose and understand the successful creation of 'proliferation' as the inevitable,
uncontrollable and dangerous spread of nuclear arms because it changed the world in innumerable ways . On
one hand, it is the chief motivation for a wide array of cooperative endeavors among states and the central rationale for the
most successful arms control agreement in modern history, the NPT. It inspired sacrifices that led to faith in our regard for others
and stimulated confidence in international law. On the other hand, it is the reason for an unparalleled collection of

international denial and regulatory institutions and it is the omnipresent and ineliminable threat at

the heart of our chronic , unremitting suspicion of others. It is a cause of global inequality and
double-standards among states and the progenitor of the name and identity 'rogue state' (states that reject the
whaling ban are not 'rogue states'). It is a central element in world-wide toleration for human misery, such as
starvation in North Korea, and in public toleration for the clear deception and dissembling of government
elites, such as in the US. It is a vehicle in some media for racial stereotypes. The existence of 'proliferation' is a
primary rationale among nuclear states for preserving and improving their nuclear arsenals. And faith in the
existence of 'Proliferation: most recently, brought about i nvasion, war and continuing death in the
Middle East. Every individual that fears it, organization that studies it and state that strives to prevent it
embraces 'proliferation' as a real and known thing and, in part, orients their identity and
behavior according to it . The successful creation of 'proliferation' represents the creation of our
common sense, our everyday life and our natural attitude toward the nuclear world 'out there.' It is uncontestable
and to suggest otherwise that nuclear states might be to blame for any spread of nuclear arms, or that it has actually been rare and so
far benign or that it may even be beneficial (see a critical review of this literature in Woods 2002) - is to invite derision and ostracism.
The reality of 'proliferation' is so massive and solidified that the essential role of (cell) proliferation in maintaining life and health is
virtually forgotten, overwhelmed, its positive meaning restricted to the doctor's office and biology lab. In short, the creation of

'proliferation' is a textbook example of what some term hegemony, the creation by a dominant group of a
world that realizes its ideological preferences while marginalizing other possibilities and co-opting
subordinates.

The proliferation metaphor is epistemologically bankrupttheir framing obscures

the root cause of the spread of weapons, turning the case.
Muttimer, 2000. David Mutimer, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at York
University (Canada), 2000 ("The Proliferation Image," The Weapons State: Proliferation and the Framing
of Security, Published by Lynne Rienner (Boulder, CO), ISBN 1555877877, p. 58-63)
To this point I have discussed the various images through which weapons technology has been framed in general terms. The central
argument of this book is that these technologies have been reframed in terms of proliferation, and that this has had particular
practical and political consequences. To make this argument and to explore those consequences, it is necessary to fill in the

proliferation frame in much more detail. This image joins together a number of discursive links to create
a particular discursive construction of an international security problem. The central element of the image,
the one that draws the others together into a single image, is proliferation itself. Before its appropriation by
those concerned with the development of nuclear weapons following World War II, proliferation was
commonly used (when it was commonly used) to talk of the reproduction of animals and plants. Animals
even human animalsproliferated by having children, usually a lot of children. Rabbits were particularly
proliferous. This meaning is clearly reflected in the Oxford English Dictionary's definition [end page 58] of
proliferous: Producing offspring; procreative; prolific. Initially, analysts and policymakers adopted the
language of proliferation for the problem of an increase in the number of states with access to nuclear
technology after controlled fission was developed in 1945. This act of discursive imagination yielded
nuclear proliferation as a policy problem in the Cold War. Nuclear technology would reproduce,
spawning an ever-growing family of nuclear nations. This image of nuclear proliferation underpinned the
various solutions that were devised: the NPT and its attendant supplier groups, the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and the
Zangger Committee. We can see what sort of thing is made of nuclear proliferation by its being imagined as proliferation if we
look more closely at the earlier use of proliferationthe familiar referent in terms of which this new and unfamiliar nuclear
technology came to be understood. Animals produce offspring; they are procreative, that is, they are proliferous.

To say that an animal proliferates is to say that it has young. Often, particularly when used for humans
rather than for other animals, proliferation carries the connotation of excessive reproductionhumans
proliferate when they have noticeably more than the accepted number of children rather than just when they
have children. This implication is suggested in the Oxford English Dictionary's use of prolific in the
definition I quoted earlier. Thus proliferation has two important entailments as the metaphor chosen to
imagine the development of nuclear weapons. First, proliferation is a natural process that requires external
intervention not to proceed but rather only for prevention (e.g., various forms of birth control). Second, the
result of unchecked proliferation tends to be excessive growth in the originating organism. Both of these
entailments are captured nicely in a use of the term proliferation in a discussion of metaphor by literary theorist Paul de Man: Worse
still, abstractions [tropes] are capable of infinite proliferation. They are like weeds, or like cancer; once you have begun using a single

one, they will crop up everywhere. 15 De Man's reference to cancer is rather ironic .

Cell biologists have also adopted the

language of proliferation to talk about the way in which cells in organisms multiply. 16 In particular, the
language of proliferation is central to the study of cancers. The connection between cell proliferation and
cancer throws the entailments of proliferation into stark relief. By itself, cell proliferation is a harmless,
natural processindeed, it is essential to life as we know it. This proliferation is managed by a series of
biological control mechanisms that regulate the growth of cells so they faithfully reproduce what is coded
into their genetic material. Once these mechanisms fail and the cells reproduce without control, cancers,
often deadly to the organism as a whole, result. As Andrew Murray and Tim Hunt write in introducing the study of cell
proliferation, Without knowing the checks and balances that normally ensure orderly cell division, we cannot devise [end page 59]
effective strategies to combat the uncontrolled cell divisions of the cancers that will kill one in six of us. 17 Proliferation, as

appropriated within the study of cancer, refers to an autonomous process of growth and spread, internally
driven but externally controlled. Danger arises when the controls fail and the natural proliferation of cells
produces excessive reproduction. When the language of proliferation was used in thinking about the
development of nuclear technology after the discovery of controlled fission in the U. S. Manhattan Project,
a process similar to that which produces cancer was imagined as a result. 18 The U. S. nuclear program
was the original technology that would multiply and spread. Such spread, when imagined as
proliferation, is a natural process and is inevitable without active outside intervention. Once the
development of nuclear technology is imagined as proliferation, this entailment of a natural process of
spread leads to the expectation of inevitable growth in the number of nuclear powers. This, of course, is
precisely what was expected. Because such a condition was considered dangerous and undesirable,
attempts were made to establish external controls over the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Again, this
follows from imagining the problem in terms of proliferation. Some form of external control is necessary
to prevent the prolific growth of nuclear weapons outside the United States. Attempts to place such
external, international controls on nuclear proliferation resulted in the NPT of 1970, which remains the
principal mechanism of proliferation control. What are the implications of this imagewith its understandings of
autonomous, natural growth and external controlfor the policy response to the development of nuclear technology? The first
implication is that something imagined in terms of proliferation is seen to grow or multiply from a single
source. Although animal reproduction involves two individuals, the father is quickly forgotten, and it is the
mother who is proliferous. The budding of cells, which gives rise to the proliferation of some plants and, of
course, cancers, begins with a single, or source, cell and spreads from therein the case of a cancer, both
to produce a single tumor and to create a number of separate tumors throughout the host body. Similarly,
the problem of weapons proliferation is one of a source or sources proliferating, that is, reproducing by
supplying the necessary technology to a new site of technological application. This form of imagining
highlights the transmission process from source to recipient. Hence, the dominant response to nuclear
proliferation has been the creation of supplier groupsthe Zangger Committee and the NSGthat seek to
control the spread of nuclear technology. In other words, to paraphrase Murray and Hunt, they attempt to
provide the checks and balances that normally ensure orderly transfer and prevent the spread of nuclear
technology resulting in the cancer of a prolific number of nuclear weapons. [end page 60] The second
implication of the proliferation metaphor for the problem of nuclear weapons spread is an extreme
technological determinism. Animal reproduction is an internally driven phenomenon, and so the metaphor
of proliferation applied to the development of nuclear technology highlights the autonomy in the growth of
that technology and its problematic weapons variant. It is worth recalling Frank Barnaby's words: A
country with a nuclear power program will inevitably acquire the technical knowledge and expertise, and
will accumulate the fissile material necessary to produce nuclear weapons. 19 In fact, the text from which
this quotation is drawn presents an interesting example of the autonomy of the proliferation metaphor. The
book is entitled How Nuclear Weapons Spread: Nuclear Weapon Proliferation in the 1990s. Notice that the
weapons themselves spread; they are not spread by some form of external agentsay, a human being or a
political institution. Under most circumstances such a title would be unnoticed, for the implications are so
deeply ingrained in our conceptual system that they are not recognized as metaphorical. This image, by
highlighting the technological and autonomous aspects of a process of spread, downplays or even hides
important aspects of the relationship of nuclear weapons to international security. To begin with, the image
hides the fact that nuclear weapons do not spread but are spreadand, in fact, are spread largely by the
Western states. Second, the image downplaysto the point of hidingany of the political, social,
economic, and structural factors that tend to drive states and other actors both to supply and to acquire
nuclear weapons. Finally, the image downplays the politics of security and threat, naturalizing the security
dilemma to the point that it is considered an automatic dynamic. The image of proliferation thus

privileges a technical, apolitical policy by casting the problem as a technical one. The NPT controls and
safeguards the movement of the technology of nuclear energy. The supporting supplier groups jointly
impose controls on the supplythat is, the outward flowof this same technology. The goal in both cases
is to stem or at least slow the outward movement of material and its attendant techniques . These
entailments suggest that to reimagine another problem of weapons technology in terms of proliferation is
to construct that problem as technologically autonomous and to privilege solutions that attempt to control
this natural growth by means of interventions aimed at the constituent technologies. This is precisely the
strategy institutionalized within the chemical weapons convention. The general obligations of the states
party to the CWCset out in its first articleare to refrain from developing, producing, or holding any
CW; to refrain from using CW or making military preparations for their use; and to refrain from assisting
anyone else from doing anything prohibited by the convention. 20 These obligations are usefully compared
with those assumed by states in the first two articles [end page 61] of the NPT. 21 In both cases the
obligations of states party are to refrain from producing or procuring the weapon in question and to forego
transferring the weapon to others. The differenceand it is an important differenceis that in the case of
the NPT, five nuclear weapon states do not have to renounce their nuclear weapons capability. Otherwise,
the obligations are identical. More to the point than the initial obligations, however, are the practices each treaty
institutionalizes to prevent the spread of weapons. In both cases direct international supervision and control are placed on precursor
technologies to ensure that they do not spread to weapons. The NPT obliges all NNWSs party to place their nuclear industries under
IAEA safeguards, and the NWSs party to the NPT have also placed their nonmilitary nuclear facilities under international safeguard.
22 These safeguards are an internationally monitored material accountancy, designed to ensure that all fissile material used to produce
nuclear energy is accounted for throughout the nuclear fuel cycleand thus has not been diverted to produce nuclear weapons.
Similarly, the CWC establishes an extensive machinery to verify that chemicals from the chemical industries of the states party are not
used to produce CW. The mechanics of the CW system vary from those of the nuclear safeguards, but the essentials do not. In both
cases potential industrial sources of technological spread are declared to the international agency, which can then monitor those
industries to ensure that the declarations are accurate and that the material of concern is properly accounted for. The CWC is therefore
a proliferation control instrument, in the same way the 1989 and 1990 bilateral agreements between the Soviet Union and the United
States over chemical weapons were arms control agreements. The centrality to the CWC regime of the practices monitoring
chemical industries to ensure they are not used to spread chemical weapons marks it as an instrument to control proliferation, not one
designed to achieve disarmament, for instance. Only in the context of a reimagining of the problem of chemical weapons from one of
arms control or disarmament to one of proliferation did the CWC become possible. As chemical weapons came to be imagined
as a proliferation problem in the late 1980s, the CWC as a nonproliferation agreement for chemical technology (but without the
overtly discriminatory features of the nuclear NPT) became realizable. The end of the Cold War not only produced a limited arms
control agreement between the superpowers concerning chemical weapons but, more important, created the conditions for realizing
what reimagining in terms of the proliferation image made possible. A proliferation image produces a particular kind

of object. It imagines a technology that reproduces naturally and autonomously, moving outward from an
identifiable origin by relentlessly multiplying. The image [end page 62] imagines this technology as
essentially benign but with the possibility of excessreproduction is natural, expected, and even desirable,
but prolific reproduction is dangerous. To permit the benign spread of technology while preventing the
dangerous conclusion to that spread, external controls are required. Because the object of proliferation is
imagined in this fashion, the forms of control that can be applied are constrained. Put another way, the
particular imagination of the object of proliferation enables a specific series of control practices. The
reverse is also true: creating given practices will construct the object of those practices in particular ways.
The result is a neatly closed circle it is simple to reifywe face this particular problem with these
practices; these practices are employed, so we are facing this problem. Read in either direction, the
contingent becomes seen as the natural. What has happened since the late 1980s, particularly following the
war in the Gulf, has been the reimagining of all forms of military technology in terms of the proliferation
image and the embedding of that image in a series of control practices. Alternatively, a series of control
practices has been established around the range of military technologies, which has constituted the object of
those practices as a proliferation problem.

Link -- Middle East

Representations cant be divorced from policy actions- they establish a framework for thinking about
the Middle East. They selectively reveal and conceal aspects of the Middle East to represent it as
conflict prone
Pinar

Bilgin, PhD International Politics

University of Wales, Aberystwyth, Department of International Relations Bilkent Univ., Regional Security in the Middle East

2005

p. 1

Throughout the twentieth century, the Middle East remained as an arena of incessant conflict attracting global attention.
As the recent developments in Israel/Palestine and the US-led war on Iraq have showed, it is difficult to exaggerate the signifcance of
Middle Eastern insecurities for world politics. By adopting a critical approach to re-think security in the Middle
East, this study addresses an issue that continues to attract the attention of students of world politics. Focusing
on the constitutive relationship between (inventing) regions, and (conceptions and practices of) security, the study argues that the
current state of 'regional security' - often a euphemism for regional insecurities - has its roots in practices that have

throughout history been shaped by its various representations - the geopolitical inventions of security. In
doing this, it lays out the contours of a framework for thinking differently about regional security in the
Middle East. Prevailing approaches to regional security have had their origins in the security concerns and
interests of Western states, mainly the United States. The implication of this Western bias in security thinking
within the Middle Eastern context has been that much of the thinking done on regional security in the Middle East
has been based on Western conceptions of 'security'. During the Cold War what was meant by 'security in the
Middle East' was maintaining the security of Western (mostly US) interests in this part of the world and its military
defence against other external actors (such as the Soviet Union that could jeopardise the regional and/or global status quo). Western
security interests in the Middle East during the Cold War era could be summed up as the unhindered flow of oil at
reasonable prices, the cessation of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the prevention of the emergence of any regional
hegemon, and the maintenance of 'friendly' regimes that were sensitive to these concerns. This was (and still is) a top-down
conception of security that was military-focused, directed outwards and privileged the maintenance of
stability. Let us take a brief look at these characteristics. The Cold War approach to regional security in the Middle East was topdown because threats to security were defined largely from the perspective of external powers rather than regional
states or peoples. In the eyes of British and US defence planners, communist infiltration and Soviet intervention constituted the
greatest threats to security in the Middle East during the Cold War. The way to enhance regional security, they argued, was
for regional states to enter into alliances with the West. Two security umbrella schemes, the Middle East Defence Organisation
(1951) and the Baghdad Pact (1955), were designed for this purpose. Although there were regional states such as Iraq (until the 1958
coup), Iran (until the 1978-79 revolution), Saudi Arabia, Israel and Turkey that shared this perception of security to a certain extent,
many Arab policy-makers begged to differ. Traces of this top-down thinking are still prevalent in the US
approach to security in the 'Middle East'. During the 1990s, in following a policy of dual containment US policy-makers
presented Iran and Iraq as the main threats to regional security largely due to their military capabilities and the
revisionist character of their regimes that were not subservient to US interests . In the aftermath of the events of
September 11 US policy-makers have focused on 'terrorism' as a major threat to security in the Middle East and elsewhere. Yet, US
policy so far has been one of 'confronting the symptoms rather than the cause' (Zunes 2002:237) as it has focused

on the military dimension of security (to the neglect of the socio-economic one) and relied on military tools
(as with the war on Iraq) in addressing these threats. This is not to underestimate the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction or
terrorism to global and regional security. Rather, the point is that these top-down perspectives, while revealing certain
aspects of regional insecurity at the same time hinder others. For example, societal and environmental
problems caused by resource scarcity do not only threaten the security of individual human beings but also exacerbate existing
conflicts (as with the struggle over water resources in Israel/Palestine; see Sosland 2002). Besides, the lives of women in

Kuwait and Saudi Arabia were made insecure not only by the threat caused by Iraq's military capabilities,
but also because of the conservative character of their own regimes that restrict women's rights under the cloak of
religious tradition. For, it is women who suffer disproportionately as a result of militarism and the channelling
of valuable resources into defence budgets instead of education and health (see Mernissi 1993). What is more, the
measures that are adopted to meet such military threats sometimes constitute threats to the security of
individuals and social groups. The sanctions regime adopted to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction has caused a problem
of food insecurity for Iraqi people during the 1990s. In the aftermath of the US-led war on Iraq, Iraqi people are still far from meeting
their daily needs. Indeed, it is estimated that if it were not for the monthly basket distributed as part of the United Nations' 'Oil for
Food' programme, 'approximately 80 percent of the Iraqi population would become vulnerable to food insecurity' (Hurd 2003). Such
concerns rarely make it into analyses on regional security in the Middle East.

The discourse of Middle Eastern instability upholds

orientalist hierarchies. They construct a peaceful west
versus an irrational and unstable east.
Valbjrn 4Morten Valbjrn, PhD in the Department of Political Science @ Aarhus [Middle East and
Palestine: Global Politics and Regional Conflict, Culture Blind and Culture Blinded: Images of Middle
Eastern Conflicts in International Relations, p. 63-4]
From this perspective, it is irrelevant to discuss whether the Middle East should be regarded as a region like
all the others, as it is the case in the IR mainstream, or as a region like no other, as the essentialists would
claim. Rather, regions should be seen as social constructions that are produced through specific discursive
practices just like the international system and its various actors. Instead of discussing what the Middle East
is, the relational conception of culture regards the Middle East as an imaginary region, where, first and
foremost, it is important to focus on how the Middle East has been constructed through
discursive practices and how this has extensive consequences on its international relations .
This focus characterizes Edward Said's Orientalism (1995), one of the principal works dealing with the
Middle East in applying a relational conception of culture. Despite his principle recognition of the mere
existence of societies with a location southeast of the Mediterranean, Said almost completely refrains from
dealing with what characterizes these societies (1995: 5). Instead, he focuses on how European and

American contexts have described and imagined the Middle East and how a particular
"orientalist" way of thinking has functioned as a filter through which the Middle East is
constructed as a unique oriental cultural entity. Even though the orientalist representations of the
Middle East should have less to do with the Middle East than with the orientalists' own
context (1995: 12), this does not mean that these representations are innocent or ineffectual.
The European and American identity and way of performing power are thus closely interwoven
with the conception of the Middle East as oriental and alien.
The orientalist conception of the Middle East functions as a constituting counterimage of
European and American identity, of a so-called occidental culture whose supposedly democratic,
rational, and enlightened character is contrasted by the depictions of a despotic, irrational, arid
barbaric Orient. According to Said, "the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its
contrasting image" (Said, 1995: 1-2). But orientalism also formed a central element of "a western
style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient" (Said, 1995: 3). The French
and British colonial representation of Middle Eastern societies as passive, backward, and inferior
justified and subsequently legitimized their colonization. This close connection between orientalist
descriptions of the Middle East and different kinds of performance of power allegedly does not belong
only to the past. According to Said, the situation of today bears a lot of resemblance to the time of British
and French colonialism. He points to how U.S. military interventions, the Carter Doctrine, and the
establishment of Rapid Deployment Forces often have been preceded by popular and academic
discussions on the threat from "political Islam" and the like (Said, 1997: 28; see also Farmanfarrnaian,
1992; Sidaway, 1998; McAlister, 2001).
As a consequence of this very different approach to international relations in the Middle East,
subscribers to a relational conception of culture, instead of asking what makes the Middle Eastern
international relations conflict-ridden, will ask how representations of the Middle East as an
unstable "Arc of Crises"-to phrase Zbigniew Brezezinski, President Carter's National Security Advisor-

have made "the West" appear impressively peaceful, and made Western military
engagement in this part of the world possible, necessary, and for the benefit of the people of
the Middle East themselves.

Crisis representations of the Middle East naturalize

imperialist orientalism. They depict the West as a rational
source of security and oriental others as irrational,
dangerous, and in need of intervention.
Teffelen 95Toine van Teffelen, Prof. in Discourse Analysis @ Birzeit Univ [The Decolonization of
imagination: Culture, Knowledge, and Power, p. 113-8]
A major methodological problem in the study of Western images of the non-Western other is how precisely
such images surface in discourse. Much post-structuralist theorizing, preeminently concerned with texts
and self--other contrasts, pays scant attention to the concrete manifestations of images as they are evoked,
negotiated, and adapted in talk and in writing. In the modern media, self-other divides cannot be taken for
granted. Powerful as they are, such divides are not immune to interrogation and challenge; in fact, their
viability partially depends on their adaptive capacity in the face of new arguments and new developments.
Critical discourse analysis is an approach intended to reveal the subtle linguistic re-creation and negotiation
of self-other oppositions against a background of commonsense reasonings. In following one strand of this
tradition, I will inquire here into the workings of a set of metaphors commonly brought into association
with the Arab-Islamic world. Since the 1970S regular media hypes about the dangers of terrorism,
Islamic fundamentalism and (nuclear) war have suggested the Middle East to be a 'powder
keg' where problems are 'explosive', or a 'volcano' where crises reach a 'boiling point'. In associating
the domains of physics and nature with a political situation, these crisis metaphors give expression to
a fear of a Middle East out of control.
A political issue in the Middle East that has long been regarded as defying control is the Palestine question,
and of all the various events and places related to this conflict those pertaining to the West Bank and
especially to the Gaza Strip have obtained special metaphoric treatment. During the Intifada, soldiers
petitioned for withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, feeling they were 'sinking' in an 'ocean' of hostility,
'engulfed' by crowds. In a reversal of the image, Israeli prime minister Rabin wished the Gaza Strip, in an
offstage remark made in 1993, 'to sink into the se-a'. An article headline such as 'West Bank explodes' or
'Gaza explodes' has for a long time been routine in the Israeli media in the same way as similar metaphors
dominated the coverage of violence in Soweto during apartheid. In the case of the West Bank and the Gaza
Strip some Israeli lournalists have in fact become aware of the clich:
Expression like 'pressure cooker', 'powder keg', 'playing with fire', and a 'match liable at any moment to
ignite a terrible conflagration here' sounded especially true this time. (Gid'on Levi, 'The Gaza Strip: 'A dog
in Tel Aviv lives a more normal life than we do", Haaretz weekly supplement, 12 June I992.
In its turn the Western press took over crisis discourse on the Occupied Palestinian Territories. It is quite
likely that this discourse has contributed to the political viewpoint, gradually endorsed by a dominant
current of Israeli society, that Israel should abandon Gaza; not as a matter of principle, out of concern for
Palestinian political rights, but rather to protect Israeli lives and interests, and to realize control by other
means. This viewpoint became reality after the Gaza-.Jericho agreement between Israel and the PLO made
in I993-94.
Here I consider a number of articles on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and especially Gaza, written in
the 59805 by Israeli and Western Dutch journalists, in order to show the ideological implications of the
above-mentioned metaphors; how they shaped attitudes and definitions of reality within an argumentative
context not without ambiguity.
The explosion metaphor
Recently communication studies, psychology and social anthropology have paid a great deal of attention to
metaphors. As has been argued by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), metaphors should not be treated as
simply rhetorical decorations or convenlions of figurative language but rather as keys to people's
imagining and reasoning about the world. Some cognitive studies regard metaphors as economic
devices - frames or schemas suitable to grasp quickly divergent or new situations where a non-metaphoric,
literal approach would render understanding and reasoning laborious. More socially or culturally inclined
authors (for instance, Quinn 1987, and contributions in Fernandez 1991) regard metaphors as linguistic
cues to widely shared cultural models, Whereas metaphors can be applied in a deliberate way, as handy

devices to think through dilemmas or to shed light on new realities, most of the time they are employed
routinely and unconsciously to express commonsense notions.
Although such approaches have helped to give metaphor a more prominent status in cognitive and cultural
studies they run the risk of losing sight of the constructive as well as ideological potential of metaphor.

Metaphors are not mere windows on or tools to understand a pre-existing reality, but rather
they take part in a situated practice of defining reality (see Haste 1993 and Lupton 5994 for recent
case studies on the political use of metaphors). In conveying authority to a particular reasoning about
reality they discredit or de-emphasize rival interpretations They thus have a bearing upon
social and political reality, including relations of domination and control.
In much crisis discourse about the Gaza Strip we see the elaborate use of a metaphoric
construction of politics in which increasing tension or pressure is said to culminate in an
explosion. Consider an example from David Grossman's preface to the Dutch translation of his Yellow
Wind (1988). In this book Grossman, a widely known Israeli journalist and an acclaimed writer, relays his
experiences during his journeys in the Occupied Palestinian Territories just before the Intifada began.
[The first stone was thrown in Gaza, ... Emotions and forces which were repressed for twenty years erupted
in an explosion of violence. (p. 8, translation TvT) In December 1987 the Palestinian uprising started. It
was not planned: it was the fruit of prolonged dissatisfaction. The violence suddenly erupted, nourished by
years of bitterness and hatred. Not only were the Israelis surprised. For the Arab countries and the PLO the
uprising was a surprise as well. Indeed, the Palestinians themselves were surprised. Until that moment they
had never dared to make use of the energy which they had bottled up for twenty years without action. (p. io,
translation Tv1)
The main metaphors suggest the situation at hand, the beginning of the Intifada, is to he understood through
the consecutive stages of built-up 'energy'/'tension' followed by 'eruption'/'explosion'. In the commonsense
schema presented here, three conditions seem to influence the explosion's intensity: the repression of
tension, the 'prolonged' duration of this repression as emphasized by the repeated mentioning of the
occupation's length, and the lack of an opportunity to release the 'bottled-up' tension. The level of tension
apparently determines the size of the explosion. Concepts of energy arid tension refer to the emotions and
unspecified 'forces' of the refugees; concepts of eruption and explosion refer to the resulting violent
behaviour.
This reasoning seems primarily based upon ordinary metaphoric thinking about the psychology of anger.
Lakoff and Kovecses (1987) have demonstrated how Western discourse tends to understand anger in terms
of a central metaphoric construction: 'the heat of a fluid in a container'. Examples are when somebody 'boils
over', 'seethes with rage' or 'makes your blood boil'.
Their analysis indirectly suggests why anger metaphors can be effective devices for constructing self-other
relations. The metaphor tension/explosion suggests a breakdown of self control and a loss of
rationality that violate a broadly shared set of Western values. Ideally speaking, the expression
of anger should be guided by reason, which means that it must be based on a legitimate grief; that other
ways should be tried to redress the grief; that when anger is allowed to come out, it should happen in a
controlled way, and that it should be directed towards the wrongdoer, and retributive in proportion to the
grief (Lakoff and Koveeses 1987).
Apparently, all this does not apply here: the Palestinians simply release their tension, they are even
'surprised' by their own anger. The intifada appears to lack planning or a meaningful target.
Both literary criticism and the social sciences provide authoritative sources for the reasoning
associated with the deviant anger model that is imposed upon the Palestinians. The literary
prototype of ressentimeni, extensively theorized by Nietzsche, has been a common device in Western
novels to discredit forms of resistance of the working class or the nonWestern Other as being reactive and
based on griefs and feelings of envy and hate that can be easily manipulated to suit exterior ends (Jameson
1980). In the social sciences the 'volcanic' model of rebellion or revolution equates collective violence with
the 'periodic eruption of social-psychological tensions that boil up in human groups like lava under the
earth's crust' (Aya 1979: 14, quoted in Farsoun and Landis 1991: I-f). In this model, society is epitomized
by the 'mass', the fearful phenomenon which, according to popular psychologies, is not only a threat to the
social order but in fact its very negation. In mass society there is 'lurking ... the undefined mass, the

anonymous crowd, a formless aggregation of little entities, each isolated from the others'

(Moscovici 1990: 70). The individual is nothing but 'a molecule in an expanding gas'. Such a society is
prone to explosion.
Social reasoning here easily ties in with the above-mentioned conception of the individual being
overpowered by emotions. When society is nothing more than a sum of individuals, it can only
reflect the laws of individual behaviour. According to this line of thinking, discontent, if not put
into constructive action, transforms itself into madness and hysteria which in their turn are prime
sources of criminal individual behaviour or destabilizing mass action when people mindlessly imitate
each other's behaviour (a process that Gustave Le Bon, a writer who was particularly instrumental in
popularizing mass psychology, called 'contagion'). Isolated from their political context, oppositional

violence or resistance can thus he easily dismissed as destructive, senseless and dangerous
from a functional point of view.
More generally, these reasonings are informed by the reason-versus emotion dichotomy that
permeates Western discourse. Emotion points to a fearful threat to order: to wildness, chaos, nature,
femininity, alternatively, rationality points to control, order, predictability, culture, masculinity. Both person
and society are viewed as being physically divided into spheres of rationality and spheres of emotion. This
division, and the wish to keep it intact, also seem to inform the metaphors under discussion here. By
evoking two domains separated by a physical border vulnerable to penetration - when the tension explodes,
the lava erupts, or the hot water flows over - the metaphors graphically construct a fragile
boundary in need of protection (van Teeffelcn ii).
By naturalizing 'Others' and making them the object of uncontrollable forces , the energytension and eruption-explosion metaphors also down play human agency. Although it is impossible
to discuss linguistic elements other than metaphor in detail here, it should be noted that the example
above contains syntactic devices that serve to reinforce the draining of discourse from
human agency (Kress and Hodge 1979), especially intransitives ('the violence ... erupted'; 'emotions and
forces which were repressed.') and nominalizations (when processes or actions are represented by nouns, as
in the clause 'bitterness and hatred'). They make it easier to suggest that human properties are part of a
quasi-physical rather than a moral realm.
Let us move from the linguistic construction of a self-other divide to the ideological
implications for the situation described, the Israeli control over the Gaza Strip. In describing a border

situation that defies control, the discourse of fear is said to accomplish a double purpose:
the justification of suppression and the mobilization of support for the colonizing power
(AbuLughod and Lutz 1990: 14). It is pertinent here to reflect upon the question of to what extent
Grossman, in creating a self-other boundary by emphasizing the Other's deviant expression of anger, in fact
exploits such a discourse of fear for ideological ends.
To begin with, those familiar with the journalistic and literary work of Grossman will remark that the
example above should be considered in relation to the remainder of the book, and also in the context of the
public climate in Israel, Grossman is a journalist who was courageous enough to present the Israeli public
with the harsh reality of Palestinian daily life in the Occupied Palestinian Territories before the Intifada
started. In the Introduction to the book he asserts that his account of the Occupied Palestinian Territories
delivered all the facts needed to understand the emergence of the Intifada. The crisis metaphors served to
urge Israel to realize that long-term control over Gaza is untenable,
It may seem paradoxical that Grossman constructs a self-other contrast while at the same time opting for a
liberal politics of changing the political status quo. Here we arrive at a point of supreme importance for
understanding the politics of metaphor, namely, its employment to lend authority to a particular definition
of reality as opposed to rival definitions. In other words, political metaphors attain their rhetorical effect
within what Billig (1987) calls 'a context of controversy'.
Like many other Israeli liberal writers, Grossman pursues two polemics. He objects to the normalizing
discourse practised by the Israeli right, which pretended that the army was in control of the West Bank and
Gaza Strip and that the occupation was benevolent in nature. Yet he also warns against a definition of
Palestinian reality in terms of curtailed political rights, a definition supported in many liberal Western
circles. In addressing a Dutch public Grossman explicitly states that his descriptions of the occupation must
not be misunderstood as evidence of support for the Palestinian cause.
The use of the tension and explosion metaphors in crisis discourse serves to effectuate this dual
demarcation vis--vis normalizing discourse and political rights discourse. On the one hand , the

metaphors negate the idea of a normal situation; they ring the bell warning that something
may happen. On the other hand, they maintain and even reinforce a self-other divide by casting
the reasoning in a mechanistic form. This device creates distance and prevents identification
with the victims of the occupation. It does not matter what emotions they have: grief, anger, hatred, or
whatever. All emotions are lumped together as potential sources of violence. It is difficult to
sympathize with undifferentiated emotions or with people who function in a mechanistic way and are
controlled by outside forces; the more so when they internally 'build up tension' and 'explode' at an
unpredictable time, You had better get out of their way.
In the Grossman example, the interaction with the other discourses remains implicit. I now turn to other
examples to show how the metaphors function when conflict between the rival discourses surfaces in the
text, and how the metaphors are used to reframe a definition of the problem from one based on
a denial of political rights to one created by a loss of control . At the same time, the new examples
render it possible to illustrate some other theoretical issues that inform the politics of metaphor.

The Affirmative practice and discourse constructs towards the middle east is a
performance of racial power, The Affs approach legitimizes colonialism and
ensures constant intervention.
Volbjorn 2004. Morten Valbjorn, 2004 Middle East and Palestine: Global Politics and Regional
Conflict, Culture blind and culture blinded: Images of Middle Eastern Conflicts in International
Relations, 63-4
From this perspective, it is irrelevant to discuss whether the Middle East should be regarded as a
region like all the others, as it is the case in the IR mainstream, or as a region like no other, as the
essentialists would claim. Rather, regions should be seen as social constructions that are
produced through specific discursive practices just like the international system and its various
actors. Instead of discussing what the Middle East is, the relational conception of culture regards
the Middle East as an imaginary region, where, first and foremost, it is important to focus on
how the Middle East has been constructed through discursive practices and how this has
extensice consequences on its international relations.
This focus characterizes Edward Saids Orientalism (1995), one of the principal works dealing
with the Middle East in applying a relational conception of culture. Despite his principle
recognition of the mere existence of societies with a location southeast of the Mediterranean,
Said almost completely refrains from dealing with what characterizes these societies. Instead, he
focuses on how European and American contexts have described and imagined the Middle East
and how a particular orientalist way of thinking has functioned as a filter through which the
Middle East is constructed as a unique oriental cultural entity. Even through the orientalist
representations of the Middle East should have less to do with the Middle east than with the
orientalists own context, this does not mean that these representations are innocent or
ineffectual. The European and American identity and way of performing power are thus closely
interwoven with the conception of the Middle East as oriental and alien.
The orientalist conception of the middle east functions as a constituting counterimage of
European and American identity, of a so-called occidental culture whose supposedly democratic,
rational, and enlightened character is contrasted by the depictions of a despotic, irrational, and
barbaric Orient. According to Said, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its
contrasting image. But orientalism also formed a central element of a western style for
dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient. The French and British
colonial representation of Middle Eastern Societies as passive, backward, and inferior justified
and subsequently legitimized their colonization. This close connection between orientalist
descriptions of the Middle East and different kinds of performance of power allegedly does not
belong only to the past. According to Said, the situation of today bears a lot of resemblance to
the time of British and French colonialism. He points to how U.S. military interventions, the
Carter Doctrin, and the establishment of Rapid Deployment Forces often have been preceded by
popular and academic discussions on the threat from political Islam and the like. As a
consequence of this very different approach to international relations in the Middle East,
subscribers to a relational conception of culture, instead of asking what makes the Middle

Eastern international relations conflict-ridden, will ask how representations of the Middle East as
an unstable Arc of Crises- to phrase Zigniew Brezezinski, President carters National Security
Advisor have made the West appear impressively peaceful, and made Western military
engagement in this part of the world possible, necessary, and for the benefit of the people of the
Middle East themselves.

The 1acs cry of instability embeds the Middle east in a language of universalism,
dooming us to a violent cycle of global intervention
Noorani, 2005. Yaseen Noorani is a Lecturer in Arabic Literature, Islamic and Middle East Studies,
University of Edinburgh. The Rhetoric of Security, The New Centennial Review 5.1, 2005.
Bush here invokes the recurrent American anxiety that Americans are too individualistic, too materialistic,
and therefore lacking in solidarity and conviction. This is the worry that America has become a collection
of self-centered consumers motivated by private wants rather than real agency. The war on terror allows
America to show that this is not so, and to make it not so. Through the war on terror, Americans can
manifest their agency and solidarity by empowering the U.S. government to fulfill their agency and
solidarity by leading the world to peace. To do this, however, they must engage in the war themselves by
recognizing the threat of terrorism and by feeling the fear for it, deeply. Only in this way can they redeem
themselves from this fear through the moral struggle waged on their behalf by the government. Conversely,
it is no accident that the Middle East is the source of the threat they must fear. Recall that Schmitt stipulates
that the enemy is "the other, the stranger . . . existentially something different and alien" [End Page 36]
(1996, 27). This is the irreducible enemy, whom one can only, if conflict arises, fight to the death. The
Middle East can be cast as this sort of enemy because it can be easily endowed with characteristics that
make it the antipode of the United States, intrinsically violent and irrational. But it is, at the same time, a
region of peoples yearning for freedom who can be redeemed through their submission to moral order and
brought into the fold of civilization. So in order to redeem the Middle East and ourselves from fear and
violence, we must confront the Middle East for the foreseeable future with fear and violence. It is
important to recognize that the rhetoric of security with its war on terrorism is not a program for action, but
a discourse that justifies actions. The United States is not bound to take any specific action implied by its
rhetoric. But this rhetoric gives the United States the prerogative to take whatever actions it decides upon
for whatever purpose as long as these actions come within the rhetoric's purview. Judged by its own
standards, the rhetoric of security is counterproductive. It increases fear while claiming that the goal is to
eliminate fear. It increases insecurity by pronouncing ever broader areas of life to be in need of security. It
increases political antagonism by justifying U.S. interests in a language of universalism. It increases enmity
toward the United States by according the United States a special status over and above all other nations.
The war against terror itself is a notional war that has no existence except as an umbrella term for various
military and police actions. According to a report published by the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S.
Army, "the global war on terrorism as currently defined and waged is dangerously indiscriminate and
ambitious" (Record 2003, 41). This assessment assumes that the actions comprehended under the rubric of
the "war on terrorism" are designed to achieve a coherent military objective. The impossible "absolute
security," feared by the report's author to be the "hopeless quest" of current policy (46), may be useless as a
strategic objective, but it is eminently effective in organizing a rhetoric designed to justify an open-ended
series of hegemonic actions. The rhetoric of security, then, provides the moral framework for U.S. political
hegemony through its grounding in the idea of national agency and in the absolute opposition between the
state of civility and the state of [End Page 37] war. Designating the United States as the embodiment of the
world order's underlying principle and the guarantor of the world order's existence, this rhetoric places both
the United States and terrorism outside the normative relations that should inhere within the world order as
a whole. The United States is the supreme agent of the world's war against war; other nations must simply
choose sides. As long as war threatens to dissolve the peaceful order of nations, these nations must submit
to the politics of "the one, instead of the many." They must accept the United States as "something
godlike," in that in questions of its own securitywhich are questions of the world's securitythey can
have no authority to influence or oppose its actions. These questions can be decided by the United States
alone. Other nations must, for the foreseeable future, suspend their agency when it comes to their existence.
Therefore, the rhetoric of security allows the United States to totalize world politics within itself in a
manner that extends from the relations among states down to the inner moral struggle experienced by every
human being.

Representations cant be divorced from policy actionsthey establish a framework for thinking about the Middle
East. They selectively reveal and conceal aspects of the
Middle East to represent it as conflict prone

Bilgin, PhD International Politics, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, Department of International Relations
Bilkent Univ., Regional Security in the Middle East 2005 p. 1
Pinar

Throughout the twentieth century, the Middle East remained as an arena of incessant conflict attracting global attention.
As the recent developments in Israel/Palestine and the US-led war on Iraq have showed, it is difficult to exaggerate the signifcance of
Middle Eastern insecurities for world politics. By adopting a critical approach to re-think security in the Middle
East, this study addresses an issue that continues to attract the attention of students of world politics. Focusing
on the constitutive relationship between (inventing) regions, and (conceptions and practices of) security, the study argues that the
current state of 'regional security' - often a euphemism for regional insecurities - has its roots in practices that have

throughout history been shaped by its various representations - the geopolitical inventions of security. In
doing this, it lays out the contours of a framework for thinking differently about regional security in the
Middle East. Prevailing approaches to regional security have had their origins in the security concerns and
interests of Western states, mainly the United States. The implication of this Western bias in security thinking
within the Middle Eastern context has been that much of the thinking done on regional security in the Middle East
has been based on Western conceptions of 'security'. During the Cold War what was meant by 'security in the
Middle East' was maintaining the security of Western (mostly US) interests in this part of the world and its military
defence against other external actors (such as the Soviet Union that could jeopardise the regional and/or global status quo). Western
security interests in the Middle East during the Cold War era could be summed up as the unhindered flow of oil at
reasonable prices, the cessation of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the prevention of the emergence of any regional
hegemon, and the maintenance of 'friendly' regimes that were sensitive to these concerns. This was (and still is) a top-down
conception of security that was military-focused, directed outwards and privileged the maintenance of
stability. Let us take a brief look at these characteristics. The Cold War approach to regional security in the Middle East was topdown because threats to security were defined largely from the perspective of external powers rather than regional
states or peoples. In the eyes of British and US defence planners, communist infiltration and Soviet intervention constituted the
greatest threats to security in the Middle East during the Cold War. The way to enhance regional security, they argued, was
for regional states to enter into alliances with the West. Two security umbrella schemes, the Middle East Defence Organisation
(1951) and the Baghdad Pact (1955), were designed for this purpose. Although there were regional states such as Iraq (until the 1958
coup), Iran (until the 1978-79 revolution), Saudi Arabia, Israel and Turkey that shared this perception of security to a certain extent,
many Arab policy-makers begged to differ. Traces of this top-down thinking are still prevalent in the US
approach to security in the 'Middle East'. During the 1990s, in following a policy of dual containment US policy-makers
presented Iran and Iraq as the main threats to regional security largely due to their military capabilities and the
revisionist character of their regimes that were not subservient to US interests . In the aftermath of the events of
September 11 US policy-makers have focused on 'terrorism' as a major threat to security in the Middle East and elsewhere. Yet, US
policy so far has been one of 'confronting the symptoms rather than the cause' (Zunes 2002:237) as it has focused

on the military dimension of security (to the neglect of the socio-economic one) and relied on military tools
(as with the war on Iraq) in addressing these threats. This is not to underestimate the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction or
terrorism to global and regional security. Rather, the point is that these top-down perspectives, while revealing certain
aspects of regional insecurity at the same time hinder others. For example, societal and environmental
problems caused by resource scarcity do not only threaten the security of individual human beings but also exacerbate existing
conflicts (as with the struggle over water resources in Israel/Palestine; see Sosland 2002). Besides, the lives of women in

Kuwait and Saudi Arabia were made insecure not only by the threat caused by Iraq's military capabilities,
but also because of the conservative character of their own regimes that restrict women's rights under the cloak of
religious tradition. For, it is women who suffer disproportionately as a result of militarism and the channelling
of valuable resources into defence budgets instead of education and health (see Mernissi 1993). What is more, the
measures that are adopted to meet such military threats sometimes constitute threats to the security of
individuals and social groups. The sanctions regime adopted to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction has caused a problem
of food insecurity for Iraqi people during the 1990s. In the aftermath of the US-led war on Iraq, Iraqi people are still far from meeting
their daily needs. Indeed, it is estimated that if it were not for the monthly basket distributed as part of the United Nations' 'Oil for
Food' programme, 'approximately 80 percent of the Iraqi population would become vulnerable to food insecurity' (Hurd 2003). Such
concerns rarely make it into analyses on regional security in the Middle East.

Link -- Middle East Representations First

Representations are the root cause of policy failures and Middle East conflict- this card will smoke
them
Pinar Bilgin, PhD International Politics, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, Department of International Relations Bilkent
Univ., Regional Security in the Middle East 2005 p. 12-5
Reflecting upon the history of US engagement with the Middle East, Douglas Little identifies representations of
the region as the problem behind policy failures. According to Little, it is 'American Orientalism' defined as 'a
tendency to underestimate the peoples of the region and to overestimate America's ability to make a bad
situation better' that has often misled US policy-makers in their dealings with the region . Regarding the future,
Little (2002:314) writes: Although there is greater appreciation for the complexities of the Muslim world than a generation ago, most
Americans still view radical Islam as a cause for instant alarm. Having been fed a steady diet of books,
films and news reports depicting Arabs as demonic anti-Western others and Israelis as heroic pro-Western
partners and having watched in horror the events of 11 September, the American public understandably
fears Osama bin Laden and cheers Aladdin. Little's argument builds upon that of Edward Said in his 1978 book
Orientalism, where the author pointed to the relationship between representations and practice. Said's point was that
the academic discourse of Orientalism (defined as 'a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction
made between the Orient and [most of the time] the Occident' [Said 1995a: 2]) had not only helped to make the Middle
East what it has become but also made it difficult to become something else : a book on how to handle a fierce lion
might cause a series of books to be produced on such subjects as the fierceness of lions, the origins of fierceness, and so forth.
Similarly, as the focus of the text centers more narrowly on the subject - no longer lions but their fierceness - we

might expect that the ways by which it is recommended that a lion's fierceness be handled will actually
increase its fierceness, force it to be fierce since that is what it is, and that is what in essence what we know or can
only know about it. (Said 1995a: 94) This is because the Orientalist discourse does not merely represent the 'Orient' but
also lays down the rules that enable one to 'write, speak and act meaningfully' (Agnew and Corbridge 1995:45). In
his later works (see Said 1994b, 1995b, 1997, 2001) Said went on to show how contemporary representations of the Middle
East (and Islam) in the media (as well as academia) have reduced it to terrorism and very little else. Said's argument is in
line with E.P. Thompson's observation on the impact British historical representations of India have had on Indian politics (Said
2001:44-5). According to Thompson, writings on India in English 'simply left out the Indian side of things' thereby deepening the
irreconcilability between Indians and the British. Thompson wrote: Our misrepresentation of Indian history and character is one of the
things that have so alienated the educated classes of India that even their moderate elements have refused to help the Reforms [of
colonial policy]. Those measures, because of this sullenness, have failed, when they deserved a better fate. (quoted in Said 2001:45)
Reading Thompson, one is reminded of the numerous attempts made by US policy-makers during the Cold War
to generate reform and modernisation movements in the Middle East; some of which attempts have backfired (as
with Iraq, Libya and Iran) (Little 2002:193-227). What Little, Thompson and Said are pointing to are the different

impact representations have on those who produce the representations and those who are represented. What
all share is the damaging effect representations have had on both groups of actors. According to Said, the
Middle East as a spatial representation has been repressive in that it has had 'the kind of authority [that]
doesn't permit or make room for interventions on the part of those represented' (Said 2001:42). The Middle
Eastern security discourse, which is informed by this representation, has reflected the Cold War security
concerns of the great powers while neglecting that of regional states and peoples . Hence the argument that the
current state of regional insecurity in the Middle East has its roots in practices that have been informed by
its dominant representation: the 'Middle East'. By way of adopting this spatial representation, the Middle East has been
categorised in terms of its politics (as the region that 'best fits the realist theory of international politics' [Nye
2000:163]) and the type of foreign policy its 'nature' demands. In the immediate aftermath of the US-led war on Iraq, one
newspaper columnist warned: 'Middle East is not Europe' (Zaharna 2003). Indeed. Yet, this should not be taken to suggest
that the Middle East is destined to relive its insecure past. Such representations that emphasised Middle
Eastern insecurities without reflecting upon their roots have had the effect of privileging certain security
practices (such as the 1998-99 bombing campaign directed at obtaining Iraqi cooperation with the UN team inspecting the Iraqi
weapons of mass destruction programme) whilst marginalising others (such as the adoption of a more comprehensive longterm policy of creating a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East). Becoming aware of the 'politics of the geographical
specification of politics' (Dalby 1991:274) and exploring the mutually constitutive relationship between
(inventing) regions, and (conceptions and practices of) security is not mere intellectual exercise; it helps
reveal the role human agency has played in the past and could play in the future. Such awareness, in turn,
would enable one to begin thinking differently about regional security to help constitute an alternative
future whilst remaining sensitive to regional actors' multiple and contending conceptions of security, what
they view as referent object(s), and how they think security should be sought in this part of the world.

Link -- Middle East Impact Calc

Traditional magnitude assessments and the concept of an all or nothing civilizational apocalypse is
the founding premise of colonialism. Massive violence can only be justified through reference to
larger, fantastic violence. Epistemological uncertainty demands that probability be given a larger
role.
Orientalist scholarship is directly responsible for genocidal violence
A. Empirics- US track record in the middle east proves politics have instrumentalized the eastern
other for perceived geopolitical necessity and the truth value of serial policy failure.
B. Knowledge/Power- racialized exclusion requires an imperial scholarly project to naturalize it.
Knowledge produced in academia DIRECTLY facilitates military violence by producing a racialized
narrative of otherization.
C. Each debate is key while the 1AC does not directly result in genocide in a 1 to 1 manner, the
system of orientalism they propagate is responsible for unimaginable harm. This obligation trumps
the "gameplaying" aspects of debate.
The Knowledge Apparatus of Western Thinking is The Root Cause of Middle East Instability and
leads to Extinction.

Bilgin 2005 Prof Ir

Bikent University Regional Security in the Middle East a

Critical Perspective, Page 164-165

Thinking about the future from a critical security perspective need not be limited to 'desired' futures only. Students of security
could also try and shape the future by pointing to what some futures may bring if no preventive action is taken in
the present - as Ulrich Beck has done in Risk Society (1992). According to Beck, if threats to security are 'threats to the future', as is
the case with many environmental threats (such as depletion of natural resources), then, it is imperative that they be addressed in the
present. For, through our past decisions about atomic energy and our present decisions about the use of
genetic technology, human genetics, nanotechnology and computer science, we unleash unforeseeable,
uncontrollable, indeed even, incommunicable consequences that threaten life on earth. (Beck 2003:257) 'As conjectures, as
threats to the future, as prognoses, [such threats] have and develop a practical relevance to preventive actions', notes Beck (1992:34).
However, one problem with trying to mobilise action to meet such threats is that they only exist in the future as conjectures. It is only
through thinking and writing about such threats that one could raise peoples' awareness regarding what the future may bring, and what
needs to be done in the present to prevent them from happening. When issues such as threats to the environment are concerned,

thinking (and writing) about the future becomes crucial; otherwise they have the potential to cause
destruction on 'such a scale that action afterwards would be practically impossible' (Beck 1992:34). Although
Beck's thesis is about the environment, the points he makes in explaining the way human agency has been
complicit, via the production of knowledge, in exacerbating (if not creating) 'threats to the future' could be
adopted and adapted to further develop the critique students of critical security present of prevailing security
discourses in general and US discourse on regional security in the Middle East in particular. Beck (1992:183) writes: In
contrast to all earlier epochs the risk society is characterized by a lack : the impossibility of an external attribution of
hazards. In other words, risks depend on decisions Risks are the reflection of human actions and omissions, the expression of
highly developed productive forces. That means that the sources of danger are no longer ignorance but knowledge;
not a deficient but a perfected mastery over nature. Beck's point is made within the context of environmental politics,
where the grip of 'scientific' knowledge over practice is even stronger than in the less 'scientific' Security Studies. Nevertheless, as
noted above, knowledge about the future, presented in terms of obstacles and opportunities, both constrains and informs actors'
practices thereby helping constitute the future. Then, given the ways in which the Middle Eastern security discourse
has, in the past, been complicit in shaping regional insecurity in the Middle East, it could be argued that

uncritical adoption of existing knowledge produced by prevailing discourses that do not offer anything
other than more of the same does itself constitute a 'threat to the future'. Accordingly, students of security who
fail to reflect upon the self-constitutive potential of their thinking would be complicit in perpetuating
regional insecurity in the Middle East.
No Solvency- American foreign policy manufactures instability. Orientalist understandings form a
cycle of volatility to legitimize overall presence. Our policies fail to understand key internal cultural
and political dynamics- dooms their stability advantages.

Link -- Middle East FW card

We link turn their policy offense- Our failure to critically engage the Middle East is at the root cause
of foreign policy failure. Academic discussions can have a positive effect on policy.

Karawan, 03

director of the Middle East Center at the University of Utah, where he teaches

international politics, 2003 (Ibrahim, Time for an Audit, Journal of Democracy 13.3, pg. 96-101
Today there is a clear need for fresh discussion of the issues of Middle East studies, Islamism, and democracy.
The impact of September 11 is one obvious reason. Then too there is the simple lapse of time. It has been a quarter of a century since
Leonard Binder edited a major volume to reassess the field. 1 It was also about a quarter-century ago that Islamist movements made a
comeback as significant players in Middle Eastern and Muslim-world politics. So perhaps we are due for an audit of the academic
discipline of Middle East studies that would include a reassessment of how well or poorly it has succeeded in its efforts to understand,
forecast, and generally make sense of the resurgence and future prospects of Islamist movements. Since September 11, debates among
scholars of the Middle East over the meaning and direction of Islamism have frequently and perhaps understandably been rather
heated. On one side have been those, like Martin Kramer, who criticize the field of Middle East studies as a set of "ivory towers built
on sand," populated by experts whose conceptual confusions and shortcomings prevented them from properly anticipating the
willingness and ability of Islamist militants to engage in the massive acts of terror witnessed on September 11. Those attacked by
Kramer and his supporters have responded in essence by saying, "You are out to deprive us of our right to express ourselves, and in
doing so you are motivated by political considerations." I hope to go beyond this exchange of claims and counterclaims by shedding
light on some key questions. First, we need to examine the link between knowledge and policy. Whether or not a given
scholar of the Middle East aims to give advice concerning what should or should not be U.S. or Western policy toward the region,

scholarly arguments over issues such as the state, Islamism, and democratization inescapably have policy
implications. Not all scholars in Middle East studies want to devote the bulk of their research efforts to influencing public policy,
not least because policy makers have not generally been eager to listen. But scholars play a policy role in a variety of
ways. They are often the teachers of those who spend their careers engaged in policy making. And scholars
also play a part in shaping public opinion. There are many ways of thinking about the link between knowledge and policy,
and the thoughts involved should not be confined to providing options to policy makers in response to the
question: "What are the most effective ways of dealing with this or that phenomenon ?" The Limits of Prediction
A second key question is whether prediction constitutes an important task of Middle East and other regional
studies. This may set the stage in turn for some wider reflections on the criteria that we can use to determine whether a given field or
approach within a field is succeeding or failing. The stress laid on prediction by Kramer and others is somewhat ironic, for there was a
time not long ago when the field of Middle East studies was criticized not for being insufficiently practical and predictive but rather
for being insufficiently theoretical and conceptual. Over the last decade or so, however, scholars who study the Middle East have
made greater conscious efforts to be more clearly theoretical and conceptual. Now it is said that our failures at prediction
must be a result of fundamental failures in explanation. Over the last few months, Martin Kramer has been playing in
Middle East studies a role very much like the one that Ken Jowitt played among Sovietologists in the aftermath of the USSR's demise
ten years ago, arguing that the field's failure to anticipate a massive event (in the current case, 9/11) was not an accident and reflected
not merely a lack of data but a fundamental poverty of ideas. Nor are Middle East studies and Soviet studies the only disciplines where
the experts have not been able to "get it right." Latin American studies used to be replete with books and articles explaining how
bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes in that region had the backing of mighty coalitions of major actors who could marshal vast sums of
money, the whole armamentarium of official repression, and ample expertise to guide policy and make it effective. Yet the "third
wave" of democratization reached Latin America at the end of the 1970s and quickly swept it all away. The same literature that sang
the strengths of Latin American bureaucratic authoritarianism also dwelt on the obstacles that the region's political culture threw up to
impede the progress of democratization, and here again we saw how events could expose the limitations of such conclusions and
predictions. Might the Middle East today be like Latin America was in the 1960s or the Soviet world was in the 1980s? The point of
the Soviet and Latin American precedents seems clear: We should be wary of assuming that accounts explaining how
and why things got to be the way they are today prove that they can never change, because we know from history
that things do change, and sometimes in quite dramatic and unexpected ways. The predictive record of quantitative studies
of Latin America, Asia, and Africa, as well as the Middle East, leaves much to be desired. Martin Kramer has
argued that Middle East experts did not properly predict the danger posed by militant Islamists or got things backward by predicting
that Islamism would somehow lead to democracy. According to Kramer, U.S. academics have so abjectly failed to predict

or explain the evolution of Middle Eastern societies or political affairs over the past two decades, and have
been so surprised by their subjects so often, that influential publics now regard Middle East studies as
suffering from a "credibility gap." In Washington, D.C., the mere mention of academic Middle East studies is often enough to
make eyes roll. 2 Let us recall, however, that one of Kramer's own recommendations was for the U.S. government to establish some
linkage between the predictive success of Middle East studies centers and the public funding allocated to them. Kramer wrote this, no
doubt, with at least some expectation that he would succeed in getting his advice followed. So what has happened? The U.S.
Department of Education has just announced that it is raising the total sum that it budgets for Middle East studies centers at some
leading U.S. universities by more than 25 percent! If Kramer himself cannot make an accurate short-term prediction about an
environment he knows so well, should we really be shocked that others did not see Bin Ladenism coming ten or more years ago? The
moral of the story is that we should avoid making the ability to predict concrete political outcomes a central consideration in
evaluating our field. I feel safe in saying, moreover, that very few scholars have actually aspired to the impossible goal of making

Middle East studies that kind of exact science. The Temptations of "Endism" In considering how Islamist movements have been
studied, we need to be aware of the dangers of projecting this or that clear-cut end to the story of Islamism .
Consider the last 25 years, the period of the audit called for at the beginning. Early on we were told about "the passing of traditional
society"with Middle Eastern cases given prominent placesand theerosion of Islamist movements. Then came another trend, and
we heard about "retreating states and expanding societies" and the decline of state power. This was followed by yet a third trend which
suggested that Islamism was not a relic of the past but rather the wave of the future. Then, after the dramatic events of September 11,
we began to hear the counterintuitive claim that moderate types of Islamism may actually have begun gaining ground at the expense of
Islamist militancy. 3 In the case of each of these claims, the argument was hardly articulated before evidence
suggesting its limitations began to surface. If we want to improve our ability to understand Islamist

movements, we will have to cast a cold eye on the "endism" that I have just sketched. There are a number
of other weaknesses in Middle East studies that require serious attention. The first of these has been a climate of
opinion in the field that tends to discourage the study of violent movements. The reasons given, to the extent that
they are spelled out, are that 1) violence is the province of an exceedingly tiny minority in this vast region, and 2) dwelling on
militancy and terrorism would have the malign effect of fostering bias against Islam and Muslims in the West. Then came the
cataclysmic impact of September 11although many incidents before then had shown how much damage tiny but ruthless groups
could do. I come from Egypt, where a few years ago six Islamist gunmen slaughtered about 60 tourists at Luxor, not only causing
horrible loss of life but also seriously disrupting the entire economy of a nation of 66 million people, many of whom depend upon
tourism for their livelihoods. So the notion that because a group is small it does not deserve serious attention is unfounded. As for the
second reason for not discussing violent movements in the Middle East and the larger Muslim world, this argument has always
puzzled me. The question is not whether we should talk about such movementsof course we should, given their undeniable
importance; the regrettable fact that some people in the West do not like Islam or Muslims is no excuse for silence. The real
question, it seems to me, is how we talk about them. I am convinced that it is desirable to study violence. 4 It matters, and we
have ample material to work with, including manuscripts, studies, books, interviews, and trial records (Islamists use courtroom
speeches as platforms for their beliefs, as those who followed the trials of Ayman al-Zawahiri and his jihad organization in Egypt since
the early 1980s have found out). There are lots of things that one can study in a rigorous way without being deterred by the argument
that we are talking about small numbers of people or by worries that the responsible study of Islamist violence may harm the larger
community of peaceful Muslims. Another weakness in the field is a penchant for what I call "essentialism"
regarding Islam itself. I find arguments about whether this or that behavior or attitude belongs or does not belong to the essence
of Islam to be beside the point, and I am frankly surprised that so many able people have devoted so much time and spilled so much
ink in hashing and rehashing them. The truth is that Islamic arguments can be used to critique or justify different things. When I was
growing up in Egypt in the 1960s, we were told that Islam was on the side of public ownership, central planning, and the redistribution
of wealth. Then in the mid-1970s we heard, in some cases from the same authorities, that Islam was actually on the opposite side.
Islam is now more than 1,400 years old, and it has generated a vast body of religious texts and scholarship through which anyone with
the time and inclination can search for support on any number of topics. Others who hold contradictory opinions can do the same, and
they too may come up with justifications for their views from these same sources. I respect those who wish to study the so-called
essence of Islam, but the problem remains that different people will identify more than one essence. People should be encouraged to
study Islamic groups, and the strategic choices that Islamic movements have made . Those who study militant Islamist
groups do not all come to the same conclusions. The Egyptian scholar Saad Eddin Ibrahim, for instance, studied these
groups and then reached the conclusion in his publication Civil Society that many of them could be accommodated within the system.
If one studies militant Islam, the policy implication is not necessarily "Let's have more repression." It depends on the mode of analysis
and the ability of the analyst. First, we need to study the climate that produces terror, including the types of

political systems that are likely to lead to the growth of these movements. Second, we should examine the
types of reforms that may produce a climate less conducive to violent extremism. And third, we should take
a closer look at the debates that go on within the world of Islamist thought, because here we will find
significant controversies between liberals and Islamists, militants and moderates, conservatives and
radicals, and state-sponsored Islamic organizations and Islamic organizations based in society at large . We
should also attend carefully to the important exchanges that go on between political Islamists and Arab nationalists about what course
to follow and what they may have in common. We need to look at those because they provide programmatic guides for

action by political activists at times when a broad reassessment by those activists has been strongly needed.
Finally, the field of Middle East studies suffers from an excessive preoccupation with the United States and
its policies toward the region. I do not mean that we should be indifferent toward the implications of what happens in the
United States or its policies toward the Muslim world. What I mean is that we should stop attributing everything to what
the United States does or does not do vis-'a-vis the region. Underdevelopment, the absence of democracy, the role of
military elites, the rise of fundamentalism, and the persistence of Saddam Hussein in power have all been attributed to U.S. actions
and desires. Even September 11 has been explained in light of U.S. designs on hegemonic control of the region. The United States is
an important actor of course, but many analysts of Middle Eastern issues tend to attribute to it more power, more
coherent strategic purpose, and more ability to produce its desired outcomes than it can possibly possess. In
the process, local and regional actors are absolved of responsibility for their own actions or omissions, while

everything is heaped on the shoulders of an all-powerful Uncle Sam. This is not to deny that there is a
major asymmetry of power between the United States and this or that Arab or Muslim country. But it does
mean that the leaders of those countries must assume responsibility for their own political decisions. It also

means that students of the Middle East should in fact avoid providing intellectual excuses for leaders who wish to evade this key
responsibility.

Link -- Middle East AT Said Indicts

1. Criticisms of Said don't apply to modern scholars
Zachary Lockman is professor of modern Middle East history at New York University, PhD Harvard, , Behind the Battles
Over US Middle East Studies , January 2004 http://www.merip.org/mero/interventions/lockman_interv.html
Overall, Kramers approach is deeply flawed as a history of Middle East studies as a scholarly field. Kramer blames Edward Said
and Orientalism for everything that he believes has gone wrong with Middle East studies from the late 1970s onward,
ignoring both the extensive critiques of modernization theory and Orientalism that preceded the publication
of that book and the complex and often critical ways in which Saids intervention was received and
developed. As Ivory Towers tells the story, every scholar in Middle East studies either slavishly embraced every
pronouncement that fell from Saids lips, or else cringed in silent terror. But, for the most part, scholars in
the field did not simply swallow Saids take on Orientalism hook, line and sinker but engaged with it critically,
accepting what seemed useful and rejecting, recasting or developing other aspects. Kramers
psychologizing account of why so many scholars and students in Middle East studies were receptive to
critiques of the fields hitherto dominant paradigms is shallow and tendentious.
2. Prefer Said Even Critics Acknowledge the Relevence of Counter-Orientalism and Their Authors
are Apologists for Western Imperialism
Halliday 2004 London School of Economics and Poly Sci 911 and Middle East Studies, International Affairs, Vol 80 is
Since 1978, numerous critics have inventoried the various limitations, overgeneralizations and theoretical and
analytical inconsistencies of Saids work. These have included a host of progressive, anti-imperialist commentators, many
of whom have simultaneously acknowledged Saids own progressive commitments and /or the many
valuable contours and contributions of Orientalism and its signifi cance in reanimating new sets of
highly illuminating, cross-disciplinary, and more comprehensive heuristic inquiries and debates in
confronting past and ongoing forms of imperialism and other modes of exploitation (within and beyond the
matrices of West-Orient encounters since the late eighteenth century).2 The scope of these critiques have ranged, among others, from
Saids essentialist treatment of the West to his construction of an equally homogeneous Orient, his imposition of a particular reading of
Orientalism onto the entire range of academic and nonacademic modes of Western representations of and encounters with the Middle
East, his inadequate attention to themes of class and gender, his elision of varying manifestations of Western imperialism with all
Western expressions of cultural alterity vis--vis the Orient, and his insuffi cient attention to the interplay between intended political
effects of imperialism and Western (mis)representations of the Orient, such as whether misconceptions about and misrepresentations
of the Orient would not at some level hinder the presumed desiderata of Western imperial domination of oriental societies. Among

Saids critics have also been the advocates of Western civilizational superiority, as well as apologists of the
pernicious legacies of Western imperialism and defenders of current U.S. neo-imperialism and Israeli
territorial and military aggression, such as Bernard Lewis, Martin Kramer, Daniel Pipes, and Samuel P. Huntington. This
category of Saids detractors, variously asserting a sweeping Oriental (in this case, Middle Eastern Muslim) intellectual and cultural
dormancy since at least the eighteenth century, as well as an ostensibly fundamental retrograde civilizational attribute of Islam, in

fact fi t Saids otherwise stereotypic archetype of Orientalists advancing and legitimizing Western
imperialism and cultural chauvinism through self-centric and self-serving devaluation and demonization of
a putatively homogenized oriental/Muslim Other. Nonetheless, a common underlying premise of this latter
category of Saids critics and many of the more discerning and judicious critics is their ultimate concurrence with Saids
supposition that Orientalism was/is a sui generis Westerngenerated mode of knowledge. Hence, frequently
absent form the genealogy of Orientalism has been the agency and contribution of orientals
themselves to orientalist knowledge production. The works reviewed in this essay are among recent attempts that
further advance the historiographies of oriental (and other) contributions to the broad spectrum of orientalist production of knowledge
about, and representations of, the Orient. Both of these works also engage in recovering and reinscribing oriental (and other)
counterhegemonic narratives in opposition to contemporary Western expressions of cultural and/or ethnic and racial superiority.
Additionally, by worlding and expanding the epistemological chassis of West-Orient encounters (without
disregarding the uneven power relations of imperialism), these works depart from the essentializing binary confi
guration of West/Orient still evident in most critiques of Western Orientalism (as well as in works in the broader fi
eld of colonial and postcolonial studies). The recognition of the dialogical oriental (and other non-Western) agency in
orientalist knowledge production, as well as the manifold self-expedient oriental (and other) interpretations,

adoption, and refutations of orientalist knowledge, highlights the historical and analytical necessity of
incorporating multivalent and heterogeneous Western and oriental (counter)narratives into our coming to
terms with the history of Orientalism.

Link -- Middle East Alternative

1. Disengaging from contemporary thinking about the east is key. The cold war constitution of reality
the aff embodies has been shown empirically and theoretically bankrupt. Only adoption of new
critical perspectives can open the space needed for emancipation
Bilgin 2005 Prof Ir Bikent University Regional Security in the Middle East a Critical Perspective, Page 7
From a critical perspective, thinking differently about security involves: first, challenging the ways in which
security has traditionally been conceptualised by broadening and deepening the concept and by rejecting
the primacy given to the sovereign state as the primary referent for, and agent of, security. Critical approaches also
problematise the militarised and zero-sum practices informed by prevailing discourses and call for
reconceptualising practice. Second, thinking differently entails rejecting the conception of theory as a neutral
tool, which merely explains social phenomena, and emphasises the mutually constitutive relationship between
theory and practice. That is, the way we (the community of students of security) think and write about
security informs practice; it privileges certain practices whilst marginalising others, thereby helping
constitute what human beings choose to call 'reality'. Theory is itself a form of practice; theorising is
recognised as a political activity. Finally, adopting a critical approach to security implies adopting an
explicitly normative (for some, emancipation-oriented) approach to security in theory and practice.
(continued) PAGE 58 Emphasising the mutually interactive relationship between intellectuals and social movements
should not be taken to suggest that to make a change, intellectuals should get directly involved in political
action. They could also intervene to provide a critique of the existing situation, what future outcomes may
result if necessary action is not taken at present, and by pointing to potential for change immanent in world politics.
Students of security could help create the political space that would enable the emergence of a Gorbachev,
by presenting such critique. It should, however, be emphasised that such thinking should be anchored in the potential
immanent in world politics. In other words, intellectuals should be informed by the practices of social movements themselves (as was
the case in Europe in the 1980s). The hope is that non-state actors such as social movements and intellectuals (who may or may not be
aware of their potential to make a change) may constitute themselves as agents when presented with an alternative reading of their
situation. Lastly, intellectuals could make a change even if they limit their practices to thinking, writing
and self-reflection. During the Cold War very few security analysts were conscious and open about the impact their thinking and
writing could make. Richard Wyn Jones cites the example of Edward N. Luttwak as one such exception who admitted that 'strategy is
not a neutral pursuit and its only purpose is to strengthen one's own side in the contention of nations' (cited in Wyn Jones 1999:150).
Still, such explicit acknowledgement of the political dimension of strategic thinking was rare during the Cold War. On the contrary,

students of International Relations in general and Security Studies in particular have been characterised by
limited or no self-reflection as to the potential impact their research could make on the subject of research
(Wyn Jones 1999:148-50).

2. Intellectual resistance is vital- restricting our critique to a re-orientation of thinking is necessary to

allow for a reversal of the current course. Academic critique of the present situaton radically alters
perspectives on reality - that's Owen.
3. The alternative doesn't have to "solve the case" since the 1AC harms are just random factoids
politically constructed to make the plan appear to be a good idea. The question of the ballot should
be does voting negative avoid the imperialist pitfalls of the 1AC knowledge systems
4. Framework resolves the alternative- if we win epistemology is the paramount concern then you can
vote negative on presumption

Link -- Middle East Iraq

Their depictions of an unstable Iraq ignore the root cause of that instability

Young 08

grad student, Latin American History, SUNY (Kevin, Orientalism in Full Force: Edward Said,

Liberals, and Iraq, http://www.zcommunications.org/orientalism-in-full-force-edward-said-liberals-and-iraq-by-kevin-young)

One of the most stunning examples of liberals' continued ignorance of the book's main argument is the frequent neglect and/or
distortion of the views of the occupied population in Iraq. The inability of subject peoples to speak for themselves is a
central assumption of Orientalist thought, and one which continues to characterize most liberal mainstream "criticism" of
the Iraq occupation. Polls have consistently found strong majorities of ordinary Iraqis agreeing that the US
occupation incites more violence than it prevents, and that the violence would not increase after a US withdrawal. On the
contrary, they say, a US departure would lead to improved security and chances for political reconciliation (1). Despite all the euphoria
in the West over the alleged successes of the US "surge," 67-70 percent of Iraqis stated in August 2007 that "security ha[d]
deteriorated" and that "the surge ha[d] hampered conditions for political dialogue, reconstruction and economic development"(2). An
October 2007 US Defense Department poll found that only 12 percent of Iraqis "had at least some confidence" in the occupying forces
to reduce violence (3). Most liberals who criticize the war pay little attention to these findings, however. Liberal critics fall into one of
two categories with respect to Iraqi public opinion. The first group argues that the chaos in Iraq is tragic and that Bush has mishandled
things, but that the US cannot withdraw because of its "moral responsibility" to the Iraqi people (4). The second group argues
that the US must tear itself away anyways, for our own good. A US withdrawal from Iraq would let Iraqis down, but we
should withdraw despite Iraqis' reluctance to let us go. Both groups of critics agree that Iraqis want us to stay. Disdain for Iraqi
opinions extends to other issues as well. For example, mainstream defenders and critics of the war almost universally praise the USbacked Iraqi oil bill as a way of ensuring "an equitable division of oil wealth," and fault the Bush administration and the Iraqi
government for failing to push the bill through the Iraqi Parliament. Absent from the discussion is the fact that the privatization of
Iraqi oil is opposed by a solid two-thirds majority of Iraqisa remarkably high percentage given the pervasive propaganda in support
of the US-backed proposal (5). That percentage includes much of the Iraqi labor movement, which the occupying forces have brutally
suppressed using the very same anti-labor laws that Saddam used (6). But commentators almost unanimously take it for granted that
ordinary Iraqis would welcome our magnanimous plan for what we call "revenue sharing." In short, mainstream commentators
who do take "Iraqi views" into account often make highly-misleading implications about what ordinary Iraqis think
and want. Usually the term "Iraqis" implicitly refers to the Iraqi government, not the Iraqi people. This distinction is crucial since
the Iraqi government favors a continuation of the occupation for its own survival. More frequently, though, commentators

completely dodge the question of Iraqis' opinions. Ignoring or downplaying those opinions is justified
because Iraqis are not yet mature enough to make responsible decisions for themselves. As Said might say, Iraqis
exhibit a "rejection of rationalist modes of thought" and therefore need a responsible father-figure to make
decisions for them (7). This implicit assumption reveals a metaphor present throughout much critical
commentary: the characterization of the US as a responsible father and of Iraqis as delinquent children.
When asked recently how she would justify a US withdrawal to the Iraqis (who, remember, want us to stay), Hillary Clinton
replied, "I would say 'I'm sorry, it's over. We are not going to baby-sit a civil war'" (8). Clinton is by no means the only
liberal to employ the "babysitting" analogy. Barack Obama has voiced the same opinion verbatim (9). New York Times columnist
Thomas Friedman is even more explicit: By now it should be clear that Iraq is going to be what it is going to be. We've never had
sufficient troops there to shape Iraq in our own image. We simply can't go on betting so many American soldiers and resources that
Iraqis will one day learn to live together on their ownwithout either having to be bludgeoned by Saddam or baby-sat by us. (10)
Here Friedman combines several common motifs. He conjures the image of a benevolent, burdened giant who is

victimized by a stubborn population of childlike delinquents who insist on perpetuating the cycle of
violence and driving up their father's blood pressure. The US is a kind-hearted and patient, if sometimes bumbling,
parent; Iraqis are recalcitrant children who just can't seem to behave in a dignified, civilized manner. And Friedman's biggest lament is
that we didn't invade with enough military power "to shape Iraq in our own image," which is an inherently noble goal of course. The
ascendance of Thomas Friedman to the status of a widely-renowned best-selling author, winner of three Pulitzer Prizes, and "arguably
the world's most influential and popular foreign-policy thinker" (11) is an interesting commentary on the dominant intellectual culture
of the US and Western Europe. Other critics are less explicit yet no less condescending toward Iraqis, and their criticisms betray many
of the Orientalist tendencies that Said critiques. They generally paint a picture of an irrational, ungrateful, and

violence-prone Iraqi population who refuses to put its own house in order, and of a US doing everything in
its own power to help Iraq. In a Fall 2006 piece entitled "Lost in the Desert," Times op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd lamented
that "the Iraqis evince not the slightest interest in a secure environment" (12) We must bear in mind, as the Times editors remind us,
that "America can't want peace and democracy for Iraq more than the Iraqis" (13). Neither column mentioned the various ways in
which the US has deliberately obstructed democracy and reconciliation: by backing laws and policies which
exacerbate sectarian tensions; by facilitating the rise to power of misogynistic and theocratic officials (14);
by its repeated efforts "to shelve or dilute" elections like the January 2005 ones (15); by pushing its oil law

proposal against Iraqis' wishes; by maintaining Saddam's draconian labor laws to suppress the Iraqi labor
movement; and most obviously, by invading and occupying Iraq in spite of overwhelming popular
opposition. Instead, as usual, the US appears as a caring parent perpetually burdened by its delinquent

children. The lack of attention to Iraqis' views on the occupation is just one way in which liberal "criticism" of the last five years has
subtly reinforced many of the unspoken assumptions upon which military imperialism is premised. The war may be bad, but
Iraqi opinions do not figure in to the decision about how to proceed. Such assumptions are hundreds of
years old, yet among mainstream intellectuals they are as fierce and vicious as ever. I'm not sure if Said would laugh or cry.

Link -- Russia
Russian threat constructions are rooted in western racism
yvind Jger, @ Norweigian Institute of International Affairs and the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute, 2k [Peace and
Conflict Studies 7.2, Securitizing Russia: Discoursive Practice of the Baltic States,
http://shss.nova.edu/pcs/journalsPDF/V7N2.pdf#page=18]

The Russian war on Chechnya is one event that was widely interpreted in the Baltic as a ominous sign of what
Russia has in store for the Baltic states (see Rebas 1996: 27; Nekrasas 1996: 58; Tarand 1996: 24; cf. Haab 1997). The
constitutional ban in all three states on any kind of association with post-Soviet political structures is indicative of a threat perception
that confuses Soviet and post- Soviet, conflating Russia with the USSR and casting everything Russian as a threat through what
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985) call a discursive "chain of equivalence". In this the value of one side in a binary
opposition is reiterated in other denotations of the same binary opposition. Thus, the value "Russia" in a
Russia/Europe-opposition is also denoted by "instability", "Asia", "invasion", "chaos", "incitement of ethnic
minorities", "unpredictability", "imperialism", "slander campaign", "migration", and so forth. The opposite value of

these markers ("stability", "Europe", "defence", "order", and so on) would then denote the Self and thus
conjure up an identity. When identity is precarious, this discursive practice intensifies by shifting onto a security
mode, treating the oppositions as if they were questions of political existence, sovereignty, and survival .
Identity is (re)produced more effectively when the oppositions are employed in a discourse of in-security and
danger, that is, made into questions of national security and thus securitised in the Wverian sense. In the Baltic cases, especially the
Lithuanian National Security Concept is knitting a chain of equivalence in a ferocious discourse of danger. Not only does it establish
"[t]hat the defence of Lithuania is total and unconditional," and that "[s]hould there be no higher command, self-controlled combat
actions of armed units and citizens shall be considered legal." (National Security Concept, Lithuania, Ch. 7, Sc. 1, 2) It also posits that
[t]he power of civic resistance is constituted of the Nations Will and self-determination to fight for own freedom, of everyone
citizens resolution to resist to [an] assailant or invader by all possible ways, despite citizens age and [or] profession, of taking part in
Lithuanias defence (National Security Concept, Lithuania, Ch. 7, Sc. 4). When this is added to the identifying of the objects of
national security as "human and citizen rights, fundamental freedoms and personal security; state sovereignty; rights of the nation,
prerequisites for a free development; the state independence; the constitutional order; state territory and its integrity, and; cultural
heritage," and the subjects as "the state, the armed forces and other institutions thereof; the citizens and their associations, and; non
governmental organisations,"(National Security Concept, Lithuania, Ch. 2, Sc. 1, 2) one approaches a conception of security

in which the distinction between state and nation has disappeared in all-encompassing securitisation.
Everyone is expected to defend everything with every possible means. And when the list of identified threats to
national security that follows range from "overt (military) aggression", via "personal insecurity", to "ignoring of national
values,"(National Security Concept, Lithuania, Ch. 10) the National Security Concept of Lithuania has become a totalising one taking
everything to be a question of national security. The chain of equivalence is established when the very introduction of the National
Security Concept is devoted to a denotation of Lithuanias century-old sameness to "Europe" and resistance to "occupation and
subjugation" (see quotation below), whereby Russia is depicted and installed as the first link in the discursive chain that follows. In
much the same way the "enemy within" came about in Estonia and Latvia. As the independence-memory was ritualised and added to
the sense of insecurity already fed by confusion in state administration, legislation and government policy grappling not only with
what to do but also how to do it given the inexperience of state institutions or their absence unity behind the overarching objective of
independence receded for partial politics and the construction of the enemy within. This is what David Campbell (1992)

points out when he sees the practices of security as being about securing a precarious state identity. One
way of going about it is to cast elements on the state inside resisting the privileged identity as the
subversive errand boys of the prime external enemy.
Their framing of Russia is based on the fear of uncertainty all of their arguments about Russian
motivation or instability are all constructed by Cold War ideologies- Dont trust the aff

Jger
2k
yvind

, @ Norweigian Institute of International Affairs and the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute,

[Peace and Conflict Studies 7.2, Securitizing Russia: Discoursive Practice of the Baltic States,

http://shss.nova.edu/pcs/journalsPDF/V7N2.pdf#page=18]

Reading Baltic literatures on security, one is not left in much doubt that Russia is the organised political
power, (i.e. the representation of an anthropomorphic collective will). The Russian state is the danger to the Baltic. The
danger of Russia is primarily seen as one of encroachment be it by ways of political or economic
subversion, or by downright military aggression on their state sovereignty. Conflating state and nation, everything
Estonian, Latvian or Lithuanian is thereby also threatened. The sheer size and might of Russia, and the asymmetric
power relations between Russia and the Baltic states itself is inscribed with danger. The prevalent economic
and political instability in Russia is denoted as a threat in terms of uncertainty and unpredictability, that is,
installed as one link in a discursive chain of equivalence casting Russia as anarchy, the binary opposition to
state sovereignty. Baltic state sovereignty is thus underpinned by a discourse of danger securitising culture,

crime, diseases, alleged smear campaigns and possible invasions alike. In this discourse of danger, the current
thaw and policy of liberal reform in Russia is interpreted as a mere parenthesis in a brutal history of
Russian imperialism, her true nature, as it were. It is widely held among the Balts that the imperial traditions in Russian foreign
policy might resuscitate at any time and imminently pose a threat to the Baltic states. The bottom line of Baltic threat perception and
assessment is one of Russian coercive aggression.

Their predictions of Russian behavior conflates a multitude of different political entities in an

attempt at rendering an inherently indeterminate entity predictable

Sushko 2004

(Oleksandr, Director of the Center for Peace, Conversion and Foreign Policy of

Ukraine, The Dark Side of Integration: Ambitions of Domination in Russia's Backyard, The Washington Quarterly, Volume 27,
Number 2, Project Muse)
Despite the fact that the former Soviet republics have been independent for 12 years , the 12 countries of the
Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) are generally considered by the Western public as one integrated
unit, that is, the West still often perceives of the vast expanse of territory to the east and southeast of Poland as "Russia." Several

significant factors contribute to this perception, including the apparent similarity of sociopolitical and
economic models across the CIS and an inability of the former Soviet states (except, probably, for the Baltic states)
to convey their individuality and identity to Western observers. Any realistic assessment of the
contemporary politico-economic criteria that could be used to measure the extent of integration of this postSoviet region, however, reveals that this area is far from unified. The CIS lacks a single functioning organization that
serves to integrate its members. Although CIS member nations signed an agreement on free trade as early as 1994, the
commonwealth has no functioning free-trade area (FTA) because the Russian Federation's State Duma (the
lower chamber of parliament) blocked its ratification. No trade, economic, or legislative regulations encompass all CIS
member states; and the use of discriminatory economic tools, such as quotas and antidumping among members, has become
widespread.

That turns the case worst case forecasting results in a cycle of insecurity only the alt can solve
LaBanca 11, Gregory Robert, Masters in Security Studies from Georgetown University, Forecasting Uncertainty: U.S. and Russia
Threat Dynamics During the Reset,
https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/bitstream/handle/10822/553533/laBancaGregoryRobert.pdf?sequence=1

The process of worst case forecasting created an increasingly threatening relationship

between the U.S. and Russia from 2002-2009. The U.S. came to regard Russia as an
increasingly U.S. focused actor (intent on subverting the American democratization agenda abroad); an
increasingly powerful actor (willing to exert economic, energy, military and political power toward
this end), and an increasingly coherent and different actor from itself (the model of antidemocratic authoritarianism).
Likewise, Russia came to perceive the U.S. as an increasingly Russia-focused actor (seeking
to contain an expansion of Russian power in the name of American hegemony); an increasingly powerful actor (capable of
launching successful bottom up revolutions in multiple countries simultaneously) and an increasingly coherent and
different actor from itself (naively focused on making every other country look like itself). These processes hung

together and were mutually reinforcing. The reset reflected the decoupling of these selfreinforcing processes. This assessment poses a substantial challenge to existing theoretical approaches to threat
dynamics, because those approaches cannot fully account for the way in which perceptions of capability and identity
interact over time. Power transition theory correctly identifies power equalization between a hegemon and a
rising power as the most threatening moment in a bilateral relationship. However, it fails

to recognize that
perceptions of material capabilities are as significant to the overall power balance as are
the actual, objectively verifiable capabilities. This perceptual element skews the key inflection point in power
transition theorythe point at which a rising power is approaching a dominate power. Although Russia became a more
powerful actor during the early and mid 2000s, it also perceived that the U.S. was an increasingly powerful actor due to its
perception that democratic revolutions and international terrorism were part of the U.S. foreign policy toolkit.
Accordingly, the inflection point described in power transition theory should not have been reached until late 2008, the
moment at which, in Russias eyes, the U.S. was at its weakest. The August Russia-Georgia war revealed that the color
revolutions had not produced the enduring U.S. allies that Russia perceived the U.S. had sought. Moreover, the U.S. was
maximally over-extended in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to power transition theory, we should have seen a deepening
of the threat spiral, marked by an aggressive Russian effort to undermine a relatively weaker U.S. and an aggressive U.S.
seeking to contain Russian power. Since U.S.-Russian threat dynamics moved in exactly the opposite direction, power
transition theory does not convincingly describe the bilateral threat dynamic. Defensive realisms focus on the role of
intentions helps to address realisms over-reliance on material balance of power . However, it fails to

articulate how material elements and perceptual elements interact to generate threat

perceptions. Walt, for example, admits that his balance of threat theory cannot determine a priori . . . which sources
of threat will be most important in any given case.73 Walts theory is limited because it holds state identity constant and
because it focuses, like most rationalist theories, on future expectations of utility in isolation from processes of interaction.
Since realist theories do not admit the possibility of states updating their identities during interaction, and since interests
are defined significantly by identities, realist theories cannot account for how perceptions of

intention influence threat dynamics. For example, as explained above, Moscow only determined
that it was in its interests to try to work with the U.S. to dispel the pernicious effects of
the security dilemma when it assessed that the U.S. was no longer capable of using or willing
to use democratization as a foreign policy tool to contain Russia. For both defensive realists and liberal
institutionalists, security seekers can find themselves in threatening interactions because uncertainty about
future expectations generates fearthe essence of the security dilemmaprompting both sides to
accumulate more power in order to hedge against the possibility that the other side may
choose to harm it. However, this assumption about the role of uncertainty is wrong. Rather, threat is a subjective
realization that someone has sufficient capabilities to harm you and the intention of harming you. The language of
realism, the theoretical dialogue through which we seek to understand why we ought to

fear

others, is really the voice of the cautious paranoid.74 Liberal institutionalism, in turn, is the voice of the
cautious optimist; both views, and the identities of the states that hold them, can quickly slip toward increasingly
delusional performances of either unwarranted threat or unwarranted trust as their perceptions of self and other move in
self-reinforcing lock-step. Rationalist presumptions about the role of shared interests in dampening threat perceptions
likewise fail to shed light on threat dynamics. This thesis suggests that simply providing two states with more information
about where shared bargaining room might be found is insufficient, because information about intentions

and interests is fundamentally indeterminate in intersubjective processes. In times of

accelerating threat, it is unlikely that signals of cooperative intent will be read as
anything more than signals of deceit. Due to the attributional effect, as actors intentions and identities are
perceived as increasingly exclusive to the other and as increasingly coherent, suspicions about anothers
true intentions will grow as well. It is through this pernicious, interactive cycle of mistrust that states in turn
define and constitute their national interests. 75 The role of interaction in the formation of national interests presents a
problem for cultural based arguments as well. Both the U.S. and Russia framed their increasing sense of fear of each other
prior to the reset in terms that drew upon mythological conceptions of their identities. However, after the reset, both
states simply drew on different elements of their national history to justify their changing articulations of their identities.
Identity formation is a continually evolving process in which states can draw on and co-opt old memories, identities, and
loyaltiesthere is no need to draw on all of them at the same time.76 Since identities change in reaction to processes of
state interaction, if we freeze a states identity at a given point in time in order to try to understand its approach to threat,
we will end up losing both the explanatory and predictive power that only dynamic explanations can provide. At any given
time there are multiple alternative accounts carried along within a society until they are resolved into one account from
which the next phase of reality constructing takes off.77 Resets are precisely such points in time.

Link -- Turkey
Turkeys depiction as a central state used by the West deny it its natural sphere of influence
Bilgin 7 Pinar (Only Strong States Can Survive in Turkey's Geography: The uses of geopolitical truths in Turkey, Associate
professor of international relations at Bilkent University, Ph.D. International Politics, University of Wales, M.Sc. Econ. Strategic
Studies, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, Master of International Relations, Bilkent University, B.Sc. International Relations,
Middle East Technical University, science direct)
The central state metaphor was first offered in a text authored by the Office of the Commander of the Military Academy
(1963) and has, since then, been frequently deployed by various actors (see, for example, [Davutolu, 2004a], [Davutolu,
2004b], [Doanay, 1989], [Hacisaliholu, 2003], [Okman, 2002] and [zda, 2003]; Stratejik ngr, 2005; [Trsan, 1971] and
[Uzun, 1981]). At the time, it was through building upon the central state metaphor that military authors had

emphasized the need for caution in and expert input into Turkey's statecraft. Their texts presented the
central state metaphor as an upshot of the ideas of Halford Mackinder. In these writings, the significance Mackinder
attaches to the region surrounding Turkey is somehow transformed into an affirmation of its centrality for world politics. That is to
say, in the process of re-working Mackinder's Heartland into Turkey as a central state, what Mackinder says is less relevant than
what cursory references to his works allow these authors to say. The irony here is that in order to substantiate their

warnings about Western schemes plotted against Turkey, these authors seem to need to appeal to the
authority Western geopoliticians. Having said that it is no more ironical than AKP leader (Adalet ve Kalknma Partisi
Justice and Development Party) and Prime Minister Erdoan's (2005) embrace of the notion of Turkey as a central state. Given
AKP's conservative democrat credentials and tense relations with the military, Erdoan's resort to a geopolitical notion produced
and disseminated by the military is illustrative of the flexibility of geopolitics as a tool. Clearly, Prime Minister Erdoan's discourse is
informed by the ideas of his chief foreign policy advisor Professor Ahmet Davutolu, who has articulated the need for activism in
foreign policy to realize the potentiality of Turkey's location as a central state (Davutolu, 2001, 2004). Professor Davutolu was
appointed as Ambassador without portfolio by the AKP government when it came to power in late 2002. He has also served as the
chief foreign policy advisor to the Minister of Foreign Affairs. Davutolu's (2001) book Stratejik Derinlik (Strategic Depth) went
through several prints in a manner unusual for a book of academic nature and generated debates (see, for example, [Akyol, 2003],
[Kmrc, 2003] and [Yilmaz, 2001]). Critical of Euro-Atlantic Cold War policies (that were based on the axiom of
Turkey's geopolitical significance for the West) for denying Turkey its natural sphere of influence and
its strategic depth (which he locates in the former Ottoman territories by implicit reference to the state-as-organism metaphor),

Davutolu has called for a new strategic theory that would help Turkey's policy-makers to make use of
the opportunities created by the post-Cold War geopolitical and geoeconomic vacuum (Davutolu, 2001).
Emerging in the discourse of military geopoliticians (who offered it as an upshot of the ideas and theories of Classical
Geopoliticians), the central state metaphor has evolved from a tool of domestic politics (produced and used by the
military) to one of foreign policy (used by civilians); from a tool advising caution (military authors) to one calling for activism (AKP
actors' twist on the military's pro-status quo construct). More recently, it has been employed by civilian and military
actors to argue against Turkey making the reforms required by EU conditionality. The following section uses the
debates on TurkeyEU relations to illustrate how different actors tap geopolitics to justify pursuit of conflicting

positions.

Link --- Ikenberry Liberal Hegemony

Ikenberrys vision of liberal hegemonic order ignores and
erases the importance of the Vietnam War and the
subsequent neoliberalization of the world in the current
crisis overtaking US hegemony. The crisis is not reducible
to the Bush Doctrine, it is a product of neoliberalism
which Ikenberry endorses whole heartedly without critical
inquiry.
Barder 2013
/Alexander D., Department of Political Studies & Public Administration, American University of Beirut,
Beirut, Lebanon, PhD in Political Theory from John Hopkins, American Hegemony Comes Home: The
Chilean Laboratory and the Neoliberalization of the United States Alternatives: Global, Local, Political
2013 38: 103 originally published online 22 April 2013, DOI: 10.1177/0304375413486331/
To be sure, this liberal hegemonic order that Ikenberry theorizes reflects a set of problematic
formulations that derive from its Western-centric liberal assumption s. Ikenberry is clear that
the origins of this American order initially pertains to Western liberal democracies and
progressively expands outward, especially with the end of the Cold War.24 State and societal
modernization is a key part of this liberal vision, with its emphasis on science, technology, learning, and
adaptation.25 In other words, there is a developmental logic at work in Ikenberrys text one
that is accepted without questiona traditional Western/Eurocentric bias toward what he

perceives to be the universality of liberal values: open markets, human rights, democratic
governance, free consent toward the international rules established in and by the West, and
so on. The process of expansion of this order remains the socialization (i.e., through the
acceptance of norms and domestic institutes promoting individual human, political and civil rights) of
other nation-states within this particular American order , which American progressive
liberalism clearly embodies and inculcates in various international institutions. Ikenberrys vision of
this American liberal hegemonic international order, its evolution, and transformation affects
how he understands its current crisis. For Ikenberry, this current crisis involves questioning the
merits of living in a world dominated by unipolar America.26 However, what this crisis shows is not
anything intrinsic in the liberal tradition as he understands it, or its universal validity that
he takes for granted. This crisis certainly does not reflect changes in American sociopolitical
organization over the last few decades. Rather, it emanates from the central geopolitical shift of the
end of the Cold War with the emergence of American unipolarity. For Ikenberry, the crisis at
the heart of todays international order is a crisis of authority within the old hegemonic
organization of liberal order, not a crisis in the deep principles of the order itself. It is a crisis of
governance.27 This crisis of authority or governance within the international order stems from multiple
sources: changes in the norm of sovereignty, new sorts of threats, and the rise of illiberal powers such a
Russia and China. But Ikenberrys main focus is on the decision making of the Bush administration and
the choices it made in reconceptualizing a more militant role for American power (i.e., the Bush doctrine). Bushs obvious imperial posture redefined the unique role of American
leadership away from the postsecond world war liberal order making it more proactive and reflecting what Ikenberry calls a conservative nationalist vision of global order.28
In brief, he does not consider any of the structural features of liberal hegemony as consequential for understanding the contemporary politicaleconomic crises. But is this the

Ikenberry draws a straight line

from 1945 to the present. Conspicuously absent from Ikenberrys analysis is the subject of the
Vietnam War and the implications that it had for American hegemony internationally and domestically. We should also recall that it was in the early 1970s that the
only hegemonic crisis that occurred during the six decades comprising American liberal hegemony till the present?

international economic and financial system fell into a deep crisis and ushered in a series of important international structural changes that impacted domestic economic practices
as well: this was when the Nixon administration took the United States off the gold standard and allowed for a flexible currency trading regime which lead to the liberalization of

the larger transition from embedded liberalism

to what is now commonly referred to as neoliberalism does not fit into Ikenberrys larger
argument about what constitutes the crisis and transformation of world order.29 In other words,
financial capitalism beginning in the early 1980s. The demise of the Bretton Woods system and

Ikenberrys glossing over the deep-seated economic crises of the 1970s is part and parcel of

a framework that sees American hegemony acting in a more or less positive manner
within its ever-growing orbit of client states.30 Ikenberry never questions the virtues of American
capitalism and its expansion. Ikenberry never asks why the Bretton Woods agreement failed, or
why the New Deal domestic framework or embedded liberalismthe underpinnings of American
liberal hegemony in the postwar perioddramatically changed in such a way as to ultimately
undermine institutional frameworks of global capitalism. Put differently, what Ikenberry sees
as a contemporary political and economic crisis of American hegemony is anything but
novel; the roots of this contemporary crisis can be traced back to a set of structural
changes in the 1970s and 1980s. These structural changes occurred in tandem within the
United States and throughout the global South as a way of reasserting American hegemony
internationally and domestically.

Link -- Catastrophe
The AFFs neurotic obsession with security risks is
symptomatic of anxiety of future trauma and catastrophe.
The catastrophe imagined in the 1AC is a fantasy used to
sustain a conservative commitment to a forever war
grounded in fear.
Neocleous 2012
/Mark, Professor of the Critique of Political Economy, Politics and History @ Brunel University, London,
Dont Be Scared, Be Prepared: Trauma-Anxiety-Resilience, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 2012
37: 188 originally published online 13 June 2012, DOI: 10.1177/0304375412449789/
Rather than concerning ourselves with governing trauma we should instead be concerned
with how trauma has come to govern us. Trauma talk now comes naturally, and the article
explores what all this trauma talk might be doing, ideologically and politically, especially in the context
of the relationship between security and anxiety . The management of trauma and anxiety

has become a way of mediating the demands of an endless security war: a war of security, a
war for security, a war through security. The article therefore seeks to understand the
concept of trauma and the proliferation of discourses of anxiety as ideological mechanisms
deployed for the security crisis of endless war; deployed, that is, as a training in resilience.
Trauma is less an issue of memory or the past and more a question of building resilience for the
future. The language of trauma and anxiety, and the training in resilience that is associated
with these terms, weds us to a deeply conservative mode of thinking .

Link -- Survival
The attempt to maintain survival at all costs is a life
denying attempt to insulate life from the risk and flux, the
Heraclitian heart of becoming and life. The AFFs desire to
secure life and survive is a nihilistic impulse which
reduces humanity to bare biological preservation, thereby
annulling the essence of life.
Babich 1994
/Babette E., Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science : Reflecting
Science On the Ground of Art and Life, SUNY Series, the Margins of Literature, State University of New
York Press Pg. 194-196/
Without Price: The Will to Truth as the Will to Life As we have seen, the democratic or (for Nietzsche,
decadent) drive of scientific culture is expressed in the Will to Truth. The Will to Truth reigns in

science because the decadent moral ideal of its culture proclaims not merely a will to life,
but a will to life at any price. The motif of self-preservation, or survival is, by its own definition,
an insistent, desperate one. What is desired in the will to life at any price is not at all life or
living, per se. What is willed is much rather simply the preservation of life , perhaps as little as
possible, perhaps so that one may have it for as long as possible, perhaps as painlessly as
possible. 79 What is essential is merely that one "have" and not that one "live" life . Our
words betray our values. Thus we tend to say, "Life involves risk" as if it were possible to
exclude risk with a little care. This possibility is impossible. Life is fundamentally risk. In
what Anaximander expresses as the supreme principle of the cosmos (which Schopenhauer understood so
well), the contradictory heart of the living thing sounds the promise of its evanescence. 80

The longing for life at any rate, at any price denies physiological finitude. And life is nothing
but physiological finitude. The desire for immortality manifests the nihilism of a longing for
life at any price, sans aucun risque. Because life cannot be held in stock nor ultimately
preserved, the will to life is fundamentally opposed to the essence of life . It has been argued
that for those seeking to preserve life at all costs, it is not merely death that threatens. The
expenditure of life (as it can be found in those who endanger life by celebrating its joys or spending its
resources recklessly) is to be countered as well. The will to (preserve) life is plainly aligned with
morality. This opposition reveals two life-orientations. The first orientation that of saving or
preserving life is consumptive and acquisitive, expressing its own need and indigence, while
the second the literal spending of life is an expression of inherent power. The artist's desire
to create, to give, and to enjoy which also means to suffer life, stands in contrast to the
fearful, acquisitive longing for life. And here it should be said that the "artist" in question is not the
creative individual of paints and brushes nor a dancer nor even a musician nor any kind of cultural
architect. The meaning of art must be understood in terms of the grand style, a matter more of character
than mtier All of life manifests desire or Will to Power. That is, all life expresses Will to Power, even in its
most decadent expression. Yet, a decadent expression of the Will to Power is radically different
from the strong pessimism of the Will to Power that is, as Nietzsche expresses it in 1886,
"prompted by well-being, by overflowing health, by the fullness of existence." The material

acquisitiveness of a decadent Will to Power battles emptiness on the unidimensional plain of

fantasy in its drive to possess. Nietzsche, describing the correspondence between the constant search
and constant boredom of modern culture, writes, "it is a tragic spectacle to see how the dance of its
thought rushes longingly toward ever-new forms, to embrace them, and then, shuddering,
lets them go suddenly as Mephistopheles does the seductive Lamiae."82 This is more than an account of
modern culture between the agitations of the mode, but it describes the broad compass of science in its
endless project, the achievement of a "unified vision of the world."83 Driving this blithe commitment

to truth "at any price," what is then operative in this life-preservative orientationthe need
to preserve life ''at any price"is a powerful thrust toward world appropriation. 84 This drive
can be understood as Nietzsche understands psychological and organic drives: "The course of logical ideas
and inferences in our brain today corresponds to a process and a struggle among impulses that are, taken
singly, very logical and unjust. We generally experience only the result of this struggle because this
primeval mechanism now runs its course so quickly and is so well concealed."85 We have seen that this
primordial mechanism is the basis of perceptual and conceptual (that is logical) knowledge. The working of
this mechanism corresponds to Nietzsche's expression of the Will to Power. This mechanism can now be
defined. Elucidating the direction of the moral structure of science, desire alone should be understood
simply as will. Power (Macht) is correlative to desire: it is its articulation. But the Will to Power as a
concept goes beyond desire; it is equivalent neither to an unconditioned or indeterminate Wille,86 nor to
any kind of conatus. Thus, for Nietzsche, apart from a negative definition, the idea of power cannot be
given an eudaimonistic expression, because the positive significance of power is to be found only in the
activity or expression of power. The end of the active expression of power is power itself. Where the

end of expressed power, where what is risked, is no more than a bid for more power, an
original (and reactive) lack is confirmed. The expression of power, then, has a double sense
corresponding to the degree and type of power (that is, active or reactive). We may explicate this duality as
the desire for power (impotence) and the desire of power (abundance). The first reactive expression
of the Will to Power is from the side of a lack of power and a need for power; this is
neediness of desire: articulated want. The second (active) expression of the Will to Power is

from a superabundance of power and a need for creative expression; this is the plenitude of
desire: articulated affirmation.

Link- Realism
The authority of realism depends on an interpretive coup de force that obliges us to avoid the
enchantment of calculative thinking
Campbell, 1998. David Campbell, professor of international politics at the university of Newcastle,
Writing Security, 1998, pg. 199-201
Bosnia is one such terrifying moment in which we have witnessed spectacular genocides, expulsions
or deportations that so often accompany the foundation of states. It is, moreover, a terrifying moment many have found uninterpretable or indecipherable. But do the concepts of simulacrum,
fiction, violence without a ground, the absence of foundations, and mystique offer an
incisive understanding? Such notions would appear at first sight to confirm the worst fears of
deconstructions detractors, that it is beyond reason and nothing more than (in Derridas words) a
quasi-nihilistic abdication before the ethico-political-juridical question of justice and before the
opposition between just and unjust.45 But appearances at first sight can be deceptive, particularly
if they themselves are motivated by a certain desire to go beyond reasoned argument and simply
dismiss that which appears alien, foreign, and strange. For at least three reasons, to speak of the
interpretive and performative basis of authority is not to advocate irrationalism, injustice, or any
other form of licentious anarchy. The first reason is that within the frame of Derridas argument, the
proposition that the interpretive and performative COUP de force gives birth to grounds that must be
considered either illegal or in-authentic is rethought. To say that the foundation of authority
cannot rest on anything but itself, that it is therefore violence without a ground, is not to say that
they [the grounds constituted in the coup de force] are in themselves unjust, in the sense of illegal.
They are neither legal nor illegal in their founding moment. They exceed the opposition between
founded and unfounded, or between any foundationalism or anti~foundationalism46The second
reason is that just as the founding of the law, or any similar foundation of authority, exceeds the
normal confines of either! or logic, so too the authority of reason as that which itself supposedly governs
the logic of the either/orfor it is the powers of reason that are said to enable us to distinguish
between the just and the unjust, and so on exceeds these confines. Simply put (though this is very
difficult to put simply), this is because reason cannot ground the authority of reason. In other words,
the authority of reason itselfby which it is said that the argument above might be quasi-nihilistic,
irrational, and so on depends on a similar interpretive and performative coup de force.47 This
feature of reason has been forgotten (or, better, it has become a silence walled up) because of the
transformation of Leibnitzs principle that nothing is without reason into the situation, identified
by Heidegger, in which the principle now says that every thing counts as existing when and only
when it has been securely established as a calculable object for cognition.48 This transformationcum-deformation has meant the erosion of the distinction enabled by reason between calculative
thinking and reflective thinking. But, Heidegger asks, may we give up what is worthy of
thought in favor of the recklessness of exclusively calculative thinking and its immense
achievements? Or are we obliged to find paths upon which thinking is capable of responding to
what is worthy of thought instead of, enchanted by calculative thinking, mindlessly passing over
what is worthy of thought?49

Link -- Schmitt
Schmitts vision of the sovereign has it at the helm of
violence, fear, terror and the like. Such a politics of fear
results in a permanent state of anxiety and a Leviathan
turned monster of war. We must resist a schmittian
reading of power in favor of a Foucauldian analysis of
normalization and governmentality.
Debrix and Barder 2009
/Francois, Professor and Director of the Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought
(ASPECT) Program @ Virginia Tech, Ph.D., Purdue University and Alexander D., Department of Political
Studies & Public Administration, American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon, PhD in Political Theory
from John Hopkins, Nothing to Fear but Fear: Governmentality and the Biopolitical Production of Terror,
International Political Sociology (2009) 3, 398413/

Schmitt is interested in making use of Hobbes fear (and his state of nature war specter) to
normalize a continuous mode of sovereign decisionism, a foundational decision on the
exception that, in fact, necessitates a constant production of fear of physical harm and
death within the state. Without such an unremitting anxiety, the rationale for abstracting
any normative content out of the juridicopolitical order would disappear, and what Schmitt
perceives as a form of partisanship (with respect to the determination of the legal substance of the
political order) would take over the state and deprive it of its vitality . This is perhaps why
there is always a need for Schmitt to think in terms of extreme cases, or to mobilize the
figure of an absolute threat, or even to imagine what is in excess of the political (Derrida
1997:112137). Such a way of thinking also seems to justify the deployment of political and
juridical concepts that revolve around the idea of a decisionistic unity . What Schmitt dreads
most is the impotence of the state. While Schmitt also realizes that there remains a dramatic
possibility that the sovereign may end up exchanging the terror of the state of nature for a
terror brought by war-mongering agents (Barder and Debrix 2009), his decisionistic model is
in fact what is likely to lead to a state of affairs where a monstrous executive power,
representing an unbounded will, takes over political life. This is the kind of scenario that,
Slavoj Z izek argues, normalizes an abyssal act of violence (Zizek 1999:18), that is to say, a
political action that is no longer restrained by any form of obligation to secure the
individual subject and whose consequences for the state itself are no longer controllable
(Weiler 1994:9899). Schmitts objective is to neutralize anything that could compete with the
states monopoly, not simply on violence, but also on the production of fear, terror, and
ultimately death. In this fashion, Schmitt ends up conflating the sovereign decision to go to
war and the always possible return to the state of war in the image of a Leviathan-turnedMonster of War for whom chaos or destructive violence and order preservation of the
state can become one and the same. As some political chroniclers have argued, the image of this
sovereign monster has had a tendency to return in concrete political circumstances of late
(Hardt and Negri 2004). A normalization of terror, violence, and fearful life is often the
outcome of many of this sovereigns actions and decisions. And contemporary critical studies
have been tempted by this analysis, particularly in the context of the US-led war on terror (Smith 2004;
Coker 2007; Munkler 2007). By contrast, Foucaults writings suggest that a careful

understanding of the way mechanisms of normalization operate requires one to deemphasize the central role given to the sovereign in political designs. It is toward these
Foucaultian considerations and their implications for a governmental approach to fear
production that we now turn.

Schmitts reading of sovereignty is unable to properly

read the governmentality of fear and the diffusion of
control throughout society which emerged with
biopolitical society. Power can no longer be understood as
purely sovereign. Schmitts political theory lends itself to
the unending war against all which characterizes
governmentalitys terrorization of life. Their political
reading of power leads to boundless violence and cannot
hope to grasp the shifting forms of power relations at play
in the war on life.
Debrix and Barder 2009
/Francois, Professor and Director of the Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought
(ASPECT) Program @ Virginia Tech, Ph.D., Purdue University and Alexander D., Department of Political
Studies & Public Administration, American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon, PhD in Political Theory
from John Hopkins, Nothing to Fear but Fear: Governmentality and the Biopolitical Production of Terror,
International Political Sociology (2009) 3, 398413/
The first part of this essay briefly reviews how Hobbes and Schmitt organized their thoughts with a view
toward perpetuating techniques of centralization of fear in modern politics. Today, the Hobbesian

mechanism of fear concentration and the Schmittian condition of sovereign exception often
look like they have been generalized to global politics. Instances of war against and
destruction of enemies proliferate across the globe in the hope that such antagonistic and
supposedly exceptional operations will make us free from fear (Hardt and Negri 2004). Of
course, one must recognize that the Global War on Terror has been a convenient excuse for
Western states, as it has allowed them to execute openly the kind of boundless violence in
the name of an eradication of danger that, for centuries, they practiced with proficiency
against the non-West. In the West, a typical response to the threat of so-called dangerous
enemies has consisted in re-injecting in the sovereign state a capacity to institutionalize fear
at any moment by having recourse to war and warriors (Debrix 2008; Barder and Debrix 2009).
But in this article, we also wish to move past Hobbes and Schmitts solutions to the fear
production dilemma by introducing some of Michel Foucaults analyses, particularly those on
governmentality (Foucault 1990, 2003, 2007). Foucault allows us to identify an additional
dimension in the relationship between fear and modern power . To be sure, Foucaults
concept of power is radically different from that introduced by Hobbes and expanded upon by
Schmitt. As is now well-known, Foucault stresses a non-essentialist and relational concept of
power that further allows him to map out a non-sovereign centered potential for
disciplinization and normalization. At the same time, a less debated aspect of Foucaults concept of
power is its connection to practices and discourses of war. Foucaults micro-histories of Western
discourses of war, battles, and racialized antagonistic violence suggest that fear (and the
power relations that flow from its production) is actually not something that the modern
state and its agents ever want to do away with or be free from. Rather, fear is what must be
produced and reproduced by governmental agents in order to establish the control,
supervision, or enhancement of the social body through multiple mechanisms of
measurement, calculation, improvement, and preservation of life. Thus, Foucault intimates,
fear must be made productive and reproductive of society, not only to allow the sovereign
state to mobilize death, terror, or endless destruction through a recourse to war and
warriors, but also to enable lifeor a certain conception of what it means to have live
bodies in societyto thrive. It is indeed through a series of governmentalized techniques or
procedures of maintenance of life that, in the modern age, fear has been made beneficial to

society by, first, operating at the level of individual docile bodies (through disciplinary
mechanisms) and later, around the turn of the nineteenth century, working on the population in its
entirety (through methods of rational regulation). Thus, one could argue that by the time Schmitt (in
the twentieth century) seeks to revisit Hobbes model of sovereignty (as a system of power premised
upon a concentration of fear), a generalized biopolitics of fear has already been put to good,
efficient, and positive uses in the modern state, through the disciplining and normalizing
efforts of various governmental agents that may or may not directly serve the interests of
the central sovereign executive power. As agencies, arrangements, or assemblages of
surveillance and regulation of bodies and the population disseminate their effects
throughout the body politic, governmentality displaces authority and power away from the
centralized sovereign (Butler 2004:65; Neal 2008). More than a politics of sovereign
exceptionality, it is a biopolitics of fear enacted by way of governmentality that is operative
and that, in a way, disables the states central monopoly on power. This pluralization of fear
and power in governmentalized modernity further encourages all sorts of public agents
agencies to mobilize the specter of danger, threat, insecurity, and enmity. Far from
mastering the conditions of production and reproduction of fear (as Hobbes, Schmitt, or even
some contemporary proponents of a return to sovereign exceptionalism would have it), the sovereign is
actually made to depend upon a wide array of decentralized executive, sometimes public,
and generally administrative procedures and mechanisms (or dispositifs, as Foucault would call
them) that bear the mantle of social order and security. A Foucault inspired analysis of the
way fear is rendered productive in modernity (or a biopolitics of fear) performs a break in
contemporary critical analyses that have suggested that Schmittian theories of sovereignty
are best suited to explain the return to a politics of fear today. Indeed, contemporary
discourses on fear and terror (and on the wars that bear terrors name) make sense
precisely because they reflect a political and discursive context in which multiple
governmentalized agencies proliferate power-effects, control-effects, security-effects and,
ultimately, terror-effects throughout society. When biopolitical agents agencies of fear
productionpolice forces, the military, immigration and customs officers, airport security services, but
also some educators, some doctors and scientists, some legal and constitutional experts, or some
administrators of public bureaucraciesbecome the loci of enunciation of techniques of

governmentalized power, the likelihood of unlimited violence and the prospect of a

generalized condition of terror are no longer what must be cast away. Rather, a shift is
taking place whereby these deplorable conditions are now what must be expected, accepted,
and anticipated by populations whose lives are said to be constantly threatened and, as such,
must become the objects of sustained normalization or heightened regulation. In the last
section of this essay, we discuss this reversal in the productive mobilization of fear (from a fear of violent
death to a fear of letting the wrong people live and, consequently, of not being able to allow the safe and
regulated populations to enjoy normal lives), and we examine some possible meanings and
consequences of this expanded governmentalizing yet terrorizing condition for life itself.

Impacts

General
This fantasy of control will only produce a never-ending
war for securityblowback ensures efforts to create
order out of disorder will fail and result in more violence.
Ritchie 11Nick, PhD, Research Fellow at the Department of Peace Studies @ University of Bradford,
Executive Committee of the British Pugwash Group and the Board of the Nuclear Information Service
[Rethinking security: a critical analysis of the Strategic Defence and Security Review International
Affairs Volume 87, Issue 2, Article first published online: 17 MAR 2011]
Third, the legitimating narrative of acting as a force for good that emerged in the 1998 SDR

to justify an expensive, expeditionary, war-fighting military doctrine in the name of

enlightened self-interest must be scrutinized. But the relationship between the rhetoric and the
reality is highly questionable. From a critical perspective it can be argued that successive governments
have framed interventionist policy choices as positive, progressive and good to generate
support for risk transfer military operations of choice that are presented as essential to the
security of UK citizens but in fact reproduce a state-centric construction of a particular
national role. This reflects Hirshbergs contention that the maintenance of a positive national selfimage is crucial to continued public acquiescence and support for government, and thus to the smooth, ongoing functioning of the state. 86 The notion that Afghanistan is a noble cause for the British state

reflects a state-centric concern with ideas of status and prestige and the legitimating moral
gloss of the force for good rhetoric. 87 Furthermore, the rhetoric of enlightened self-interest
implies that the exercise of UK military force as a force for good will lessen security risks to
the British state and citizenry by resolving current security threats and pre-empting future
risks. But, returning again to Iraq and Afghanistan, we must ask whether sacrificing solders lives,
killing over 100,000 Iraqi civilians including a disproportionate number of women and
children, destroying the immediate human security of several million others through injury,
displacement, persecution and trauma, and sparking long-term trends of rising crime rates,
property destruction, economic disruption, and deterioration of health-care resources and
food production and distribution capabilities, all while providing profits for largely western
corporations through arms deals, service contracts and private military contractors,
constitutes being a force for good when the outcomes of these major military interventions
have proven at best indeterminate. 88 The legitimacy of this question is reinforced by Curtiss
analysis of the deadly impact of British foreign policy since the 1950s. Curtis argues that the history of
British foreign policy is partly one of complicity in some of the worlds worst horrors contrary to the
extraordinary rhetoric of New Labour leaders and other elites, policies are continuing on this traditional
course, systematically making the world more abusive of human rights as well as more unequal and less
secure. 89 Add to this the statistic that the UK was involved in more wars between 1946 and 2003 (21 in
total) than any other state, and the force for good rationale begins to unravel. 90 Furthermore, the

militarized force for good narrative encompasses the active defence of the rules-based
system as a global good. But it is clear that the current rules-based system of westerndominated multilateral institutions and processes of global governance does not work for
billions of people or for planetary ecological systems . The Human Development Reports
produced by the United Nations Development Programme routinely highlight the global political and
economic structures and systems that keep hundreds of millions of people poor, starving,
jobless, diseased and repressed. 91 A stable rules-based system is no doubt in the interests of UK
citizens and the interests of global human society. With stability comes predictability, which can minimize
uncertainty, risk and insecurity. But there is a growing consensus that long-term stability,

particularly the reduction of violent conflict, will require far greater political, economic and

environmental equity on a global scale, as advocated in the Department for International

Developments 2009 white paper on Eliminating world poverty. 92 An interventionist, militaryoriented, state-centric, global risk management doctrine and the risks it can generate are
unlikely to stabilize and transform the rules-based system into a more equitable form. A
growing literature now argues that prevailing western approaches to understanding, managing
and ameliorating global insecurity and its violent symptoms are inadequate and
unsustainable. They are proving, and will continue to prove, increasingly incapable of
providing security for both the worlds poor and immiserated, concentrated in the Global
South, and the worlds elite of around one billion, mainly located in the North Atlantic
community, Australasia and parts of East Asia, which will remain unable to insulate itself
from violent responses to pervasive insecurity. 93 This is not to suggest that the UK should not
exercise elements of national power to alleviate others suffering as a consequence of natural or man-made
disasters. Indeed, the Commission on Intervention and State Sovereigntys 2001 responsibility to protect
doctrine sets out clearly the principle of conditional sovereignty and the grounds for legitimate intervention
when a state cannot or will not protect its citizens from pervasive and severe harm. 94 More broadly, if we
accept that in an increasingly complex, interdependent world the human security of UK citizens enmeshed
in global networks of risk and opportunity is intertwined with the human security of others, particularly in
conflict-prone regions often characterized by poverty, weak governance and underdevelopment, then
actions to improve others long-term human security does constitute a form of enlightened self-interest.
But we must question the assumption that war-fighting interventionist missions of choice do, in fact, serve
the long-term human security interests of UK citizens as opposed to the interests of the state based on
prevailing conceptions of national role. Utility of force Connected to this critique is a reappraisal of the
utility of force within the conception of national security as global risk management, on two counts. First,
security risks are increasingly likely to arise from a complex mixture of interdependent factors.
Environmental, economic, military and political sources of insecurity could include the effects of climate
change, mass poverty and economic injustice, global pandemic disease, mass migration and refugee flows,
poor governance, weak and failing states, international terrorism and asymmetric warfare, the spread of
WMD and advanced conventional military technologies, ethnic and sectarian nationalism, and competition
over access to key resources such as oil and water. Future conflicts are therefore likely to be complex and
diverse. They are unlikely to be susceptible to purely military solutions, and the use of military force in
regional crises will be messy, indeterminate and of limited value and effectiveness. 95 It is not obvious that
the armed forces have a significant war-fighting role to play in mitigating these risks, as opposed to
supporting police, intelligence and security forces in countering terrorist plotsand possibly launching a
limited, precision strike against WMD capabilities in the event of the extreme scenario of robust
intelligence that a WMD attack is imminent. In fact, the 2009 National Security Strategy limited the role of
the armed forces to defence against direct threats to the UK and its overseas territories (which one could
qualify as direct violent, or military, threats) together with a contributory role in tackling threats to our
security overseas by helping to address conflict, instability and crises across the globe. 96 This broad but
essentially supportive remit for the military was reinforced in the 2010 National Security Strategys
catalogue of priority risks. The three-tiered list enumerated 15 risks, which can be reduced to five:
terrorism, civil emergencies, international crime, trade disputes and an attack by another state. 97 The role
of military force is limited in all of these except the last, which remains by far the least likely. As Jenkins
argues, almost none of the above is a threat. They are crimes, catastrophes, or, in the case of being drawn
in to a foreign conflict, a matter of political choice as for the threat of conventional attack on the British
Isles by another state, we can only ask who? The threat is so negligible as to be insignificant. It is like
insuring ones house for billions of pounds against an asteroid attack. 98 Bob Ainsworth, then Defence
Secretary, seemed to grasp this in 2009, arguing that our initial conclusions on the character of warfare
should be first that international intervention will be more difficult not less. We will have to consider
carefully how to apply military force in pursuit of national security. And second, and related to this, that the
timely application of soft power and methods of conflict prevention will be a high priority. 99 Yet the
government also insists on maintaining an interventionist, expeditionary military doctrine and
corresponding capabilities based on a seemingly unquestioned national security role as a force for good in
global risk management operations. Second, risk management through military intervention in a

complex international security environment characterized by asymmetric cultures, actors

and distributions of power and knowledge, and interconnections on many levels, can
generate significant negative feedback, or blowback , from unintended outcomes that
create more risk . This challenges notions of effective risk management and control through
linear change via the exercise of military power. 100 In fact, as Williams argues, the decision to act to
mitigate a risk itself becomes risky: in the attempt to maintain control, negative feedback
from the effects of a decision inevitably leads to a loss of control . 101 The danger is
that military-based risk management becomes a cyclical process with no end in sight.
102 Rogers, for example, presciently envisaged a post-9/11 never-ending war of military-

led risk mitigation generating new and potentially more dangerous risks deemed susceptible
to further military solutions, and so on. 103 This risk is not limited to distant theatres of
conflict, but also applies to the very way of life the current militarized risk management
doctrine is meant to protect, through the erosion of civil liberties and the securitization of
daily life. There is a powerful argument that the exercise of UK military force for optional expeditionary
war-fighting operations will be an increasingly dangerous, expensive and ethically dubious
doctrine that could generate more, and potentially more lethal, risks than it resolves or
contains. Since absolute security cannot be achieved , the value of any potential,
discretionary increment in UK security through the exercise of military force must take into account its
political, economic and human cost. As Wolfers argues, at a certain point, by something like the economic
law of diminishing returns, the gain in security no longer compensates for the added costs of attaining it,
and the exercise of military force becomes ineffective or, worse, wholly counterproductive.
104 After following George W. Bush on a risky adventure into Iraq, the UK must question the effectiveness
of a militarized risk transfer strategy as the foundation for managing globalized security risks in relation
to the long-term human security needs of British citizens.

Their dependence on the security logic transforms the ambiguity of life into a quest
for truth and rationality, causing violence against the unknown and domesticating
life.
Der Derian, 93. James Der Derian, The value of security: Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche, and Baudrillard,
The Political Subject of Violence, 1993, pp. 102-105
The desire for security is manifested as a collective resentment of difference that which is not
us, not certain, not predictable. Complicit with a negative will to power is the fear-driven desire
for protection from the unknown. Unlike the positive will to power which produces an aesthetic
affirmation of difference, the search for truth produces a truncated life which conforms to
the rationally knowable, to the causally sustainable. In The Gay Science Nietzsche asks of the
reader: Look, isn't our need for knowledge precisely this need for the familiar, the will to
uncover everything strange, unusual, and questionable, something that no longer disturbs us? Is
it not the instinct of fear that bids us to know? And is the jubilation of those who obtain
knowledge not the jubilation over the restoration of a sense of security?" The fear of the
unknown and the desire for certainty combine to produce a domesticated life, in which
causality and rationality become the highest sign of a sovereign self, the surest protection
against contingent forces. The fear of fate assures a belief that everything reasonable is true, and
everything true reasonable. In short, the security imperative produces and is sustained by the
strategies of knowledge which seek to explain it. Nietzsche elucidates the nature of this
generative relationship in The Twilight of the Idols: A safe life requires safe truths. The strange
and the alien remain unexamined, the unknown becomes identified as evil, and evil provokes
hostility - recycling the desire for security . The 'influence of timidity,' as Nietzsche puts it,
creates a people who are willing to subordinate affirmative values to the 'necessities' of
security: 'they fear change, transitoriness: this expresses a straitened soul, full of mistrust and
evil experiences'." The point of Nietzsche's critical genealogy is to show the perilous conditions
which created the security imperative - and the western metaphysics which perpetuate it - have
diminished if not disappeared; yet the fear of life persists: 'Our century denies this perilousness,

and does so with a good conscience: and yet it continues to drag along with it the old habits of
Christian security, Christian enjoyment, recreation and evaluation." Nietzsche's worry is that the
collective reaction against older, more primal fears has created an even worse danger: the
tyranny of the herd, the lowering of man, the apathy of the last man which controls through
conformity and rules through passivity. The security of the sovereign, rational self and state
comes at the cost of ambiguity, uncertainty, paradox - all that makes life worthwhile.
Nietzsche's lament for this lost life is captured at the end of Daybreak in a series of rhetorical
questions:

Security tactics are grounded in the desire to control life. Only once we let
go of this security imperative of the eternal feeling of death can we stop any
violence.
Der Derian 95 (James, Professor of Political Science at Brown University, The Value of Security:
Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche, and Baudrillard, Chapter Two in On Security by Ronnie D. Lipschutz)
The will to power, then, should not be confused with a Hobbesian perpetual desire for power. It can, in its negative form,
produce a reactive and resentful longing for only power, leading, in Nietzsche's view, to a triumph of nihilism. But Nietzsche
refers to a positive will to power, an active and affective force of becoming, from which values and meanings--including selfpreservation--are produced which affirm life. Conventions of security act to suppress rather than

confront the fears endemic to life, for ". . . life itself is essentially appropriation, injury,
overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one's own
forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation--but why should one always use those words in which
slanderous intent has been imprinted for ages." 35 Elsewhere Nietzsche establishes the pervasiveness of agonism in life: "life is
a consequence of war, society itself a means to war." 36 But the denial of this permanent condition,

the effort to disguise it with a consensual rationality or to hide from it with a fictional
sovereignty, are all effects of this suppression of fear.
The desire for security is manifested as a collective resentment of difference--that which is not
us, not certain, not predictable. Complicit with a negative will to power is the fear-driven
desire for protection from the unknown. Unlike the positive will to power, which produces an aesthetic
affirmation of difference, the search for truth produces a truncated life which conforms to the
rationally knowable, to the causally sustainable. In The Gay Science , Nietzsche asks of the reader: "Look, isn't our
need for knowledge precisely this need for the familiar, the will to uncover everything strange, unusual, and questionable,
something that no longer disturbs us? Is it not the instinct of fear that bids us to know? And is the jubilation of those who
obtain knowledge not the jubilation over the restoration of a sense of security?" 37

The fear of the unknown and the desire for certainty combine to produce a domesticated life,
in which causality and rationality become the highest sign of a sovereign self, the surest
protection against contingent forces. The fear of fate assures a belief that everything
reasonable is true, and everything true, reasonable. In short, the security imperative produces,
and is sustained by, the strategies of knowledge which seek to explain it. Nietzsche elucidates the
nature of this generative relationship in The Twilight of the Idols :
The causal instinct is thus conditional upon, and excited by, the feeling of fear. The "why?" shall, if at all possible, not give
the cause for its own sake so much as for a particular kind of cause --a cause that is comforting, liberating and relieving. . . .
That which is new and strange and has not been experienced before, is excluded as a cause. Thus one not only searches for
some kind of explanation, to serve as a cause, but for a particularly selected and preferred kind of explanation--that which
most quickly and frequently abolished the feeling of the strange, new and hitherto unexperienced: the most habitual
explanations. 38

A safe life requires safe truths. The strange and the alien remain unexamined, the unknown
becomes identified as evil, and evil provokes hostility--recycling the desire for security. The
"influence of timidity," as Nietzsche puts it, creates a people who are willing to subordinate
affirmative values to the "necessities" of security: "they fear change, transitoriness: this
expresses a straitened soul, full of mistrust and evil experiences." 39

Threat Construction
Threat-construction

makes the war and violence inevitable- the implications of their

representions must be evaluated first.
Der Derian 2 (James, Professor of Political Science at Brown University, Theory & Event The War of Networks)
Without falling into the trap of 'moral equivalency', one can discern striking similarities. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and
others have made much of the 'asymmetrical' war being waged by the terrorists. And it is indeed a canny and even diabolical
use of asymmetrical tactics as well as strategies when terrorists commandeer commercial aircraft and transform them into
kinetic weapons of indiscriminate violence, and then deploy commercial media to counter the military strikes that follow. Yet,

a fearful symmetry is also at work, at an unconscious, possibly pathological level, a war of

escalating and competing and imitative oppositions, a mimetic war of images. A mimetic war is a
battle of imitation and representation, in which the relationship of who we are and who they
are is played out along a wide spectrum of familiarity and friendliness, indifference and
tolerance, estrangement and hostility. It can result in appreciation or denigration,
accommodation or separation, assimilation or extermination. It draws physical boundaries
between peoples, as well as metaphysical boundaries between life and the most
radical other of life, death. It separates human from god. It builds the fence that makes good
neighbors; it builds the wall that confines a whole people. And it sanctions just about every kind
of violence. More than a rational calculation of interests takes us to war. People go to war because
of how they see, perceive, picture, imagine, and speak of others: that is, how they construct the
difference of others as well as the sameness of themselves through representations. From Greek
tragedy and Roman gladiatorial spectacles to futurist art and fascist rallies, the mimetic mix of
image and violence has proven to be more powerful than the most rational discourse. Indeed,
the medical definition of mimesis is 'the appearance, often caused by hysteria, of symptoms of a
disease not actually present.' Before one can diagnose a cure, one must study the symptoms -- or, as
it was once known in medical science, practice semiology.

Turns Case
Representations and the affective field of images are the
basis and motivation for war. What we lack is not a proper
scientific or empirical challenge to violence; we lack the
cultural critics willing to fight the fear mongering which
results in war. The AFFs discourse is enmeshed in a form
of affective securitization that makes war inevitable. As
scholars, we have an obligation to refuse and
problematize the cultural grammar of security.
Elliott 2012
/Emory, University Professor of the University of California and Distinguished Professor of English at the
University of California, Riverside Terror, Theory, and the Humanities ed. Di Leo, Open Humanities Press,
Online/
In a 1991 interview for the New York Times Magazine, Don DeLillo expressed his views on the place of
literature in our times in a statement that he has echoed many times since and developed most fully in his
novel Mao II: In a repressive society, a writer can be deeply influential, but in a society thats
lled with glut and endless consumption, the act of terror may be the only meaningful act .
People who are in power make their arrangements in secret, largely as a way of maintaining and furthering
that power. People who are powerless make an open theater of violence. True terror is a language and

a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter
consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to. (qtd. in DePietro 84) The implications of
DeLillos statement are that we are all engaged in national, international, transnational, and global conflicts
in which acts of representation, including those of terrorism and spectacular physical

violence as well as those of language, performance, and art compete for the attention of
audiences and for influence in the public sphere. In the early days of the Iraq War, the
United States used the power of images, such as those of the mother of all bombs and a
wide array of weapons, as well as aesthetic techniques to influence and shape the
consciousness of millions and to generate strong support for the war. The shock, fear, and
nationalism aroused in those days after 9/11 have enabled the Bush administration to pursue a
military agenda that it had planned before 9/11. Since then, the extraordinary death and destruction,
scandals and illegalities, and domestic and international demonstrations and criticisms have been unable to
alter the direction of this agenda. Those of us in the humanities who are trained as critical
readers of political and social texts, as well as of complex artistically constructed texts, are needed

now more urgently than ever to analyze the relationships between political power and the
wide range of rhetorical methods being employed by politicians and others to further their
destructive effects in the world. If humanities scholars can create conscious awareness of
how such aesthetic devices such as we see in those photos achieve their affective appeal, citizens
may begin to understand how they are being manipulated and motivated by emotion rather
than by reason and logic. In spite of our ability to expose some of these verbal and visual constructions as
devices of propaganda that function to enflame passions and stifle reasonable discussion, we humanities
scholars find ourselves marginalized and on the defensive in our institutions of higher learning where
our numbers have been diminished and where we are frequently being asked to justify the
significance of our research and teaching. While we know the basic truth that the most serious

threats to our societies today are more likely to result from cultural differences and failures
of communication than from inadequate scientific information or technological
inadequacies, we have been given no voice in this debate. With the strong tendency toward
polarized thinking and opinion and the evangelical and fundamentalist religious positions in the US

today and in other parts of the world, leaders continue to abandon diplomacy and resort to
military actions. Most government leaders find the cultural and social explanations of the
problems we face to be vague, and they are frustrated by complex human issues. That is not reason
enough, however, for us to abandon our efforts to influence and perhaps even alter the
current course of events. In spite of the discouragements that we as scholars of the humanities are
experiencing in these times, it seems to me that we have no option but to continue to pursue our

research and our teaching and hope to influence others to question the meaning and motives
of what they see and hear.

The securitizing act constructs the social being in terms of hostility this requires
the endless production of new enemies in order to ground stability
Roe, 12 (Paul Roe, Associate Professor in the Department of International Relations and European
Studies at Central European University, Budapest, Is securitization a negative concept? Revisiting the
normative debate over normal versus extraordinary politics, Security Dialogue vol. 43 no. 3, June 2012)
Aradaus (2004, 2008) work, however, rejects Floyds proposition. Aradau views securitys
production of us and them categories as something negative: whatever the categories, there
will always be winners and losers. This approach reflects a more deontological ethics, inasmuch
as judgment rests as much on an understanding of what security is as on what security does.
Aradaus thinking in this respect derives from the assumption that the Copenhagen Schools
extraordinary politics is again reflective of Schmitts notion of the political particularly its
emphasis on the production of an intense antagonism that constitutes and delineates bodies of
friend and enemy.8 Aradaus view as to the necessary production of us and them is shared, for
example, by Huysmans. In its identification of existential threat and the nature of the referent
thus brought into question, Huysmans (1998: 571) notes how, in terms of Schmittian political
realism, securitisation turns into a technique of government which retrieves the ordering force
of fear of violent death by a mythical replay of variations of the Hobbesian state of nature. Read
in this way, fear of violent death anxiety over the extinction of the referent (and the human
life it contains) constructs the political community in a particular way: securitization makes
the kind of politics that defines the self on the basis of hostility (Huysmans, 1998: 576).
Andreas Behnke (2006: 650) similarly contends that without the process of identifying and
excluding Others, order in itself is made impossible: Inclusion and community can only be had
at the price of exclusion and adversity. While Williams (2003: 522) notes that, in much the same
way as Schmitt, members of the Copenhagen School view securitization as a social possibility
intrinsic to political life.

Security Dilemmas inevitably fuel conflict only a step away from security logic can
avoid spiraling arms races
Mitzen and Schweller, 11 (Jennifer Mitzen and Randall Schweller, Mitzen and Schweller are
professors of Political Science at Ohio State University, Knowing the Unknown Unknowns: Misplaced
Certainty and the Onset of War, 3/15/2011,
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09636412.2011.549023)
An intense security dilemma engenders powerful preemptive incentives and spiraling arms
races; it is the proverbial powder-keg situation, where any spark can explode into war. 43 The
security dilemma is most acute when offense has the advantage and is indistinguishable from
defense. Here, the impossibility of signaling one's own benign intentions combined with the
staggering costs of guessing wrong about the intentions of others explains how uncertainty, via
security dilemmas, can lead to aggressive behavior and preemptive wars that no one wants. Such
conditions give rise to the reciprocal fear of surprise attack and other preemptive incentives
that compel all states to act like aggressors and assume the worst of others. 44 States operating
in an environment of large first-strike advantages confront the same problem faced by two
gunslingers in a small town lacking a capable sheriff. Both gunslingers may prefer a bargain
whereby each leaves the other alone, but neither side can credibly commit not to shoot the other
in the back. 45 Security dilemmas also generate spiraling arms competitions. Because states
exist in a self-help environment and can never be entirely certain about others intentions and

future capabilities, they build arms to protect themselves from the potential harm of others.
When offensive weapons have a significant advantage over defensive ones, states uncertain of
others intentions build arms and respond immediately to each others arms increases by building
more arms. This action-reaction dynamic fuels an arms race that leaves all the participants less
secure than they were at the outset. It is the familiar case of individual rationality producing
collectively suboptimal outcomes. Uncertainty about future capabilities exacerbates the situation
by triggering overreactions in weapon's acquisitions because states tend to plan their forces
against greater-than-expected threats, and the development of new weapons systems requires
long lead times.

Impact self-fulfilling prophecy

Representations become reality- threat construction becomes a self-fulfilling
prophecy
Lipschutz 98, Ronnie D. Lipschutz, Columbia International Affairs Online, On Security, On Security.
Lipschutz, http://www.ciaonet.org/book/lipschutz/lipschutz11.html
Security is, to put Wver's argument in other words, a socially constructed concept: It has a
specific meaning only within a specific social context. It emerges and changes as a result of
discourses and discursive actions intended to reproduce historical structures and subjects within
states and among them. To be sure, policymakers define security on the basis of a set of
assumptions regarding vital interests, plausible enemies, and possible scenarios, all of which
grow, to a not-insignificant extent, out of the specific historical and social context of a particular
country and some understanding of what is "out there." But, while these interests, enemies, and
scenarios have a material existence and, presumably, a real import for state security, they cannot
be regarded simply as having some sort of "objective" reality independent of these constructions.
That security is socially constructed does not mean that there are not to be found real, material
conditions that help to create particular interpretations of threats, or that such conditions are
irrelevant to either the creation or undermining of the assumptions underlying security policy.
Enemies, in part, "create" each other, via the projections of their worst fears onto the other; in
this respect, their relationship is intersubjective. To the extent that they act on these projections,
threats to each other acquire a material character. In other words, nuclear-tipped ICBMs are not
mere figments of our imagination, but their targeting is a function of what we imagine the
possessors of other missiles might do to us with theirs.

Securitization is the root cause of all your harms, it creates an endless cycle of
violence
Aradau 1 (Claudia, Research Associate in the Centre of International Relations,
Department of War Studies, Kings College London,
http://venus.ci.uw.edu.pl/~rubikon/forum/claudia2.htm)
Survival refers not only to the fear of death, but implies countermeasures, the extraordinary
measures of the CoS. Michael Dillon has formulated the appeal to security as necessarily
implying a specification, no matter how inchoate, of the fear which engenders it and hence
calls for counter-measures to deal with the danger which initiates fear, and for the
neutralization, elimination or constraint of that person, group, object or condition which
engenders fear. These countermeasures are directed at the other, the enemy to be eliminated. Or in
metaphoric terms, to use Jef Huysmans favorite analogy society-garden, counter-measures refer to
unearthing the weeds threatening the harmonious growth of the garden. The metaphor of war is
constitutive of what both Ashley and Campbell have called the paradigm of sovereignty. In
Campbells formulation, sovereignty signifies a center of decision presiding over a self that is to
be valued and demarcated from an external domain that cannot and will not be assimilated to
the identity of the sovereign domain. This process of demarcation of friends and enemies,
delineation of boundaries of order versus disorder has been the prerogative of the sovereign
state, provider of security within its boundaries and preserver of law and order. The
injunction to preserve the internal order of the modern harmonious garden has targeted both
internal and external enemies, the weeds that need to be rooted out for the benefit of the
political community. As the war on drugs will clearly illustrate, this approach is highly
ambiguous for a political community predicated upon tahe friend/enemy differentiation. In
this political community constituted upon the logic of war, securitizing moves are only liable to
breed insecurity. Elimination of enemies or their circumscribing is the ultimate goal of war. Thus
the sovereign logic of security ultimately endangers, threatens those who threaten us and in
this sense it has disquieting effects on the political community. Moreover, the mutual
constitutiveness of threats and threatened objects leads to a spiral of enemy constructions. The

enemy needs to be eliminated and at the same time the very identity of society, for example,
depends on enemy construction. The war logic of security is thus likely to lead to a paradoxical
story, in which security is only likely to breed more insecurity and eventually violence.

Security politics is the root cause of all the affirmatives

impacts the alternative is key to solve global problems
like environmental destruction and nuclear war
Burke 7 [Anthony, Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations in the University of New
South Wales , 2007(Sydney, Theory & Event, Volume 10, Issue 2, 2007,, Ontologies of War: Violence,
Existence and Reason, Muse, Accessed on August 21, 2013)]
My argument here, whilst normatively sympathetic to Kant's moral demand for the eventual abolition of
war, militates against excessive optimism.86 Even as I am arguing that war is not an enduring historical
or anthropological feature, or a neutral and rational instrument of policy -- that it is rather the

product of hegemonic forms of knowledge about political action and community

-- my analysis does suggest some sobering conclusions about its power as an idea and formation. Neither
the progressive flow of history nor the pacific tendencies of an international society of republican states
will save us. The violent ontologies I have described here in fact dominate the conceptual and
policy frameworks of modern republican states and have come, against everything Kant hoped for,
to stand in for progress, modernity and reason. Indeed what Heidegger argues, I think with some credibility,
is that the enframing world view has come to stand in for being itself. Enframing, argues Heidegger, 'does
not simply endanger man in his relationship to himself and to everything that is...it drives out every other
possibility of revealing...the rule of Enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to
him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth.'87
What I take from Heidegger's argument -- one that I have sought to extend by analysing the
militaristic power of modern ontologies of political existence and security -- is a view that the

challenge is posed not merely by a few varieties of weapon, government, technology or

policy, but by an overarching system of thinking and understanding that lays claim to our
entire space of truth and existence. Many of the most destructive features of contemporary
modernity -- militarism, repression, coercive diplomacy, covert
intervention, geopolitics, economic exploitation and ecological
destruction -- derive not merely from particular choices by policymakers based on
their particular interests, but from calculative, 'empirical' discourses of scientific and
political truth rooted in powerful enlightenment images of being. Confined within such an
epistemological and cultural universe, policymakers' choices become necessities, their actions
become inevitabilities, and humans suffer and die. Viewed in this light, 'rationality' is the name
we give the chain of reasoning which builds one structure of truth on another until a course
of action, however violent or dangerous, becomes preordained through that reasoning's very
operation and existence. It creates both discursive constraints -- available choices may simply not be
seen as credible or legitimate -- and material constraints that derive from the mutually reinforcing
cascade of discourses and events which then

Enframing of national security is a pre-requisite to

macropolitical violence
Burke 7Anthony, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at UNSW, Sydney
[Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and Reason, Theory and Event, 10.2, Muse]
My argument here, whilst normatively sympathetic to Kant's moral demand for the eventual abolition of
war, militates against excessive optimism.86 Even as I am arguing that war is not an enduring
historical or anthropological feature, or a neutral and rational instrument of policy -- that it
is rather the product of hegemonic forms of knowledge about political action and community

-- my analysis does suggest some sobering conclusions about its power as an idea and formation. Neither

the progressive flow of history nor the pacific tendencies of an international society of
republican states will save us. The violent ontologies I have described here in fact dominate the
conceptual and policy frameworks of modern republican states and have come , against
everything Kant hoped for, to stand in for progress, modernity and reason. Indeed what Heidegger
argues, I think with some credibility, is that the enframing world view has come to stand in for
being itself. Enframing, argues Heidegger, 'does not simply endanger man in his relationship
to himself and to everything that is...it drives out every other possibility of revealing ...the rule
of Enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original
revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth.'87
What I take from Heidegger's argument -- one that I have sought to extend by analysing the militaristic
power of modern ontologies of political existence and security -- is a view that the challenge is posed

not merely by a few varieties of weapon, government, technology or policy, but by an

overarching system of thinking and understanding that lays claim to our entire space of
truth and existence. Many of the most destructive features of contemporary
modernity -- militarism, repression, coercive diplomacy, covert intervention, geopolitics,
economic exploitation and ecological destruction -- derive not merely from particular
choices by policymakers based on their particular interests, but from calculative, 'empirical'
discourses of scientific and political truth rooted in powerful enlightenment images of being.
Confined within such an epistemological and cultural universe, policymakers' choices
become necessities, their actions become inevitabilities, and humans suffer and die. Viewed in
this light, 'rationality' is the name we give the chain of reasoning which builds one structure
of truth on another until a course of action, however violent or dangerous, becomes preordained
through that reasoning's very operation and existence. It creates both discursive constraints -available choices may simply not be seen as credible or legitimate -- and material constraints that derive
from the mutually reinforcing cascade of discourses and events which then preordain militarism and
violence as necessary policy responses, however ineffective, dysfunctional or chaotic.
The force of my own and Heidegger's analysis does, admittedly, tend towards a deterministic fatalism. On
my part this is quite deliberate; it is important to allow this possible conclusion to weigh on us. Large
sections of modern societies -- especially parts of the media, political leaderships and national security
institutions -- are utterly trapped within the Clausewitzian paradigm, within the instrumental

utilitarianism of 'enframing' and the stark ontology of the friend and enemy. They are
certainly tremendously aggressive and energetic in continually stating and reinstating its
force.
But is there a way out? Is there no possibility of agency and choice? Is this not the key normative problem I
raised at the outset, of how the modern ontologies of war efface agency, causality and
responsibility from decision making; the responsibility that comes with having choices and making
decisions, with exercising power? (In this I am much closer to Connolly than Foucault, in Connolly's
insistence that, even in the face of the anonymous power of discourse to produce and limit subjects, selves
remain capable of agency and thus incur responsibilities.88) There seems no point in following Heidegger
in seeking a more 'primal truth' of being -- that is to reinstate ontology and obscure its worldly
manifestations and consequences from critique. However we can, while refusing Heidegger's unworldly89
nostalgia, appreciate that he was searching for a way out of the modern system of calculation; that he was
searching for a 'questioning', 'free relationship' to technology that would not be immediately recaptured by
the strategic, calculating vision of enframing. Yet his path out is somewhat chimerical -- his faith in 'art' and
the older Greek attitudes of 'responsibility and indebtedness' offer us valuable clues to the kind of
sensibility needed, but little more.
When we consider the problem of policy, the force of this analysis suggests that choice and
agency can be all too often limited; they can remain confined (sometimes quite wilfully) within
the overarching strategic and security paradigms. Or, more hopefully, policy choices could

aim to bring into being a more enduringly inclusive, cosmopolitan and peaceful logic of the
political. But this cannot be done without seizing alternatives from outside the space of

enframing and utilitarian strategic thought, by being aware of its presence and weight and
activating a very different concept of existence, security and action.90
This would seem to hinge upon 'questioning' as such -- on the questions we put to the real and our efforts to
create and act into it. Do security and strategic policies seek to exploit and direct humans as material, as
energy, or do they seek to protect and enlarge human dignity and autonomy? Do they seek to impose by
force an unjust status quo (as in Palestine), or to remove one injustice only to replace it with others (the
U.S. in Iraq or Afghanistan), or do so at an unacceptable human, economic, and environmental price? Do
we see our actions within an instrumental, amoral framework (of 'interests') and a linear
chain of causes and effects (the idea of force), or do we see them as folding into a complex

interplay of languages, norms, events and consequences which are less predictable and
controllable?91 And most fundamentally: Are we seeking to coerce or persuade? Are less violent and
more sustainable choices available? Will our actions perpetuate or help to end the global rule of insecurity
and violence? Will our thought?

Turns Environment
This form of militarism is linked to the practice of ecocide
we dont have to win that they lead to conflict to win our
impact their exclusion of peace time militarism justifies
the worst violence against the environment
Cuomo, Professor of Philosophy, 1996 Chris, Hypatia 11.4, proquest
There are many conceptual and practical connections between military practices in which humans aim to kill
and harm each other for some declared "greater good," and nonmilitary practices in which we displace,
destroy, or seriously modify nonhuman communities, species, and ecosystems in the name of human
interests. An early illustration of these connections was made by Rachel Carson in the first few pages of The Silent Spring (1962),
in which she described insecticides as the inadvertent offspring of World War II chemical weapons research. We can now also trace
ways in which insecticides were part of the Western-defined global corporatization of agriculture that helped kill off the small family
farm and made the worldwide system of food production dependent on the likes of Dow Chemical and Monsanto.

Military practices are no different from other human practices that damage and irreparably modify nature.
They are often a result of cost-benefit analyses that pretend to weigh all likely outcomes yet do not consider
nonhuman entities except in terms of their use value for humans and they nearly always create
unforeseeable effects for humans and nonhumans. In addition, everyday military peacetime practices are
actually more destructive than most other human activities, they are directly enacted by state power, and,
because they function as unquestioned "givens," they enjoy a unique near-immunity to enactments of moral
reproach. It is worth noting the extent to which everyday military activities remain largely unscrutinized by environmentalists,
especially American environmentalists, largely because fear allows us to be fooled into thinking that "national security" is an adequate
excuse for "ecological military mayhem" (Thomas 1995, 16).

Militarism is the greatest threat to the environment it

perpetuates ecocide based in larger structures of
oppression
Cuomo, Professor of Philosophy, 1996 Chris, Hypatia 11.4, proquest
In Scorched Earth: The Military's Assault on the Environment, William Thomas, a U.S. Navy veteran, illustrates the extent to which
the peacetime practices of military institutions damage natural environments and communities. Thomas argues that even "peace"
entails a dramatic and widespread war on nature, or as Joni Seager puts it, "The environmental costs of militarized peace
bear suspicious resemblance to the costs of war" (Thomas 1995, xi). All told, including peacetime activities as well as the immense
destruction caused by combat, military institutions probably present the most dramatic threat to ecological wellbeing on the planet. The military is the largest generator of hazardous waste in the United States, creating nearly a ton of toxic
pollution every minute, and military analyst Jillian Skeel claims that, "Global military activity may be the largest
worldwide polluter and consumer of precious resources" (quoted in Thomas 1995, 5). A conventionally powered aircraft
carrier consumes 150,000 gallons of fuel a day. In less than an hour's flight, a single jet launched from its flight deck consumes as
much fuel as a North American motorist bums in two years. One F-16 jet engine requires nearly four and a half tons of scarce
titanium, nickel, chromium, cobalt, and energy-intensive aluminum (Thomas 1995, 5), and nine percent of all the iron and steel used
by humans is consumed by the global military (Thomas 1995, 16). The United States Department of Defense generates 500,000 tons
of toxins annually, more than the world's top five chemical companies combined. The military is the biggest single source
of environmental pollution in the United States. Of 338 citations issued by the United States Environmental Protection
Agency in 1989, three-quarters went to military installations (Thomas 1995, 17). The feminization, commodification, and
devaluation of nature helps create a reality in which its destruction in warfare is easily justified. In imagining
an ethic that addresses these realities, feminists cannot neglect the extent to which military ecocide is connected,

conceptually and practically, to transnational capitalism and other forms of human oppression and
exploitation. Virtually all of the world's thirty-five nuclear bomb test sites, as well as most radioactive dumps and uranium mines,
occupy Native lands (Thomas 1995, 6). Six multinationals control one-quarter of all United States defense contracts (Thomas 1995,
10), and two million dollars per minute is spent on the global military (Thomas 1995, 7). One could go on for volumes about the
effects of chemical and nuclear testing, military-industrial development and waste, and the disruption of wildlife, habitats,
communities, and lifestyles that are inescapably linked to military practices.

Endless Violence
The logic of the insecurity means perpetual failure in the search for securing the
globe The end point is the entire world becomes an enemy as a means of retaining
our innocence
Chernus 1 (Ira, PROFESSOR OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO AT
BOULDER,
FIGHTING TERROR IN THE NATIONAL INSECURITY STATE,
http://spot.colorado.edu/~chernus/WaronTerrorismEssays/FightingTerror.htm, AD: 7/10/09) jl
In the national insecurity state, stability depends on global control. So the inevitable failure to
gain full control will become further evidence of eternal instability, hence eternal peril. When
allies are alienated by U.S. policies and refuse to cooperate fully in the war, that will become further
evidence that the world is indeed a dangerous place, demanding more strenuous efforts at control.
When U.S. actions provoke violent counter-actions, that will be seen, not as the inevitable give-andtake of war, but as further evidence of implacable hatred, not of what we do, but of what we are.
Within the framework of the national insecurity state, the only available response is to
proclaim anew our innocence and redouble efforts at stability and security, which means
imposing greater control. Thus the spiral of violence grows higher. Every possible outcome of
U.S. policies will end up confirming the premise of permanent insecurity.
Beyond these certainties lies the possibility of another Vietnam. The potential enemy nations
have all learned the lesson of Vietnam. If attacked, their populace would take to the hills, or the
urban skyscrapers, and wage guerilla war. U.S. strategists would be strongly tempted to erase
the line between enemy soldiers and civilians. The Bush administration took a first step in this
direction when it claimed the right to attack not only terrorists, but whole states. From the first, this
claim met great skepticism outside the U.S. Even within this country, there is widespread awareness
that most civilians everywhere oppose terrorism. There is a widespread demand to have only
terrorists, not innocent civilians, attacked.

The uncertainty of the world means we depend on the pre-cautionary principle the
enemy could be anyone, anywhere
Chernus 1 (Ira, PROFESSOR OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO AT
BOULDER,
FIGHTING TERROR IN THE NATIONAL INSECURITY STATE,
http://spot.colorado.edu/~chernus/WaronTerrorismEssays/FightingTerror.htm, AD: 7/10/09) jl
But the demise of the communist bloc did not make Americans feel more secure. On the
contrary, a chorus of elite voices insisted that it made us less secure, because now the enemy
could be anyone, anywhere. Moreover, the war on terrorism is a direct legacy of the cold war. AlQaeda and similar Muslim groups were enabled, perhaps even created, by the CIA. The grievances
that brought them together were virtually all fallout from the U.S. effort to keep Soviet influence out
of the Middle East. The U.S. role as the sole remaining superpower virtually insured that it
would become the target of global attacks.

Security tactics motivates war without limits and a normalization of militarism.

Giroux 6 (Henry A., Masters degree from Appalachian State University, and received his doctorate from
Carnegie-Mellon University, Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. Symploke
14.1/2, The Emerging Authoritarianism in the United States: PolItical Culture Under the Bush/Chaney
Administration 2006. Project Muse AD 7/9/09) JM
Popular fears about domestic safety and internal threats accentuated by endless terror alerts
have created a society that increasingly accepts the notion of a "war without limits" as a
normal state of affairs. But fear and insecurity do more than produce a collective anxiety among Americans, exploited
largely to get them to believe that they should vote Republican because it is the only political party that can protect them. In
addition to producing manufactured political loyalty, such fears can also be manipulated into a
kind of "war fever." The mobilization of war fever, intensified through a politics of fear,

carries with it a kind of paranoid edge, endlessly stoked by government alerts and repressive
laws and used "to create the most extensive national security apparatus in our nation's
history" (Rosen 2003b, para. 5). It is also reproduced in the Foxified media, which, in addition to constantly marketing the
flag and interminably implying that critics of American foreign policy are traitors, offer up seemingly endless images of
brave troops on the front line, heroic stories of released American prisoners, and utterly privatized commentaries on those
wounded or killed in battle. Time Magazine embodied this representational indulgence in military culture by naming "The
American Soldier" as the "Person of the Year" for 2003. Not only have such ongoing and largely uncritical depictions
of war injected a constant military presence in American life, they have also helped to create a civil
society that has become more aggressive in its warlike enthusiasms. But there is more at work here than
either the exploitation of troops for higher ratings or an attempt by right-wing political strategists to keep the American public
in a state of permanent fear so as to remove pressing domestic issues from public debate. There is also the attempt by
the Bush administration to convince as many Americans as possible that under the current "state of
emergency" the use of the military internally in domestic affairs is perfectly acceptable, evident

in the increasing propensity to use the military establishment "to incarcerate and interrogate
suspected terrorists and 'enemy combatants' and keep them beyond the reach of the civilian
judicial system, even if they are American citizens" (R. Kohn 174-175). It is also evident in the federal
government's attempt to try terrorists in military courts, and to detain prisoners "outside the provisions of the Geneva
Convention as prisoners of war . . . at the U.S. [End Page 126] Marine Corps base at Guantanamo, Cuba because that facility
is outside of the reach of the American courts" (R. Kohn 174-5).

Security makes war inevitable The only option to gain power is to take it from
other countries in the name of safety
Der Derian 98 (James, Prof of PoliSci at the U of Massachusetts, "The Value of Security: Hobbes,
Marx, Nietzsche, and Baudrillard," Cianet, http://www.ciaonet.org/book/lipschutz/lipschutz12.html, AD:
7/10/09) jl
In chapter 10 of the Leviathan , Hobbes opens with the proposition that "The Power of a Man . . . is
his present means, to obtain some future apparent Good." 22 Harmless enough, it would seem, until
this power is put into relation with other men seeking future goods. Conflict inevitably follows,
"because the power of one man resisteth and hindereth the effects of the power of another:
power simply is no more, but the excess of the power of one above that of another." 23 A man's
power comes to rest on his eminence , the margin of power that he is able to exercise over others.
The classic formulation follows in chapter 11: "So that in the first place, I put a generall inclination
of all mankind, a perpetuall and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death."
24
The implications for interpersonal and interstate relations are obvious. Without a common power to
constrain this perpetual struggle there can be no common law: "And Convenants, without the
Sword, are but Words, and of no strength to secure a man at all." 25 In the state of nature there exists
a fundamental imbalance between man's needs and his capacity to satisfy them--with the most basic
need being security from a violent and sudden death. To avoid injury from one another and from
foreign invasion, men "conferre all their power and strength upon one Man, or upon one Assembly
of men, that man reduce all their Wills, by plurality of voices, into one Will." 26 The constitution of
the Leviathan, the sovereign state, provides for a domestic peace, but at a price. Hobbes's solution
for civil war displaces the disposition for a "warre of every man against every man" to the
international arena. 27 Out of fear, for gain, or in the pursuit of glory, states will go to war
because they can. Like men in the precontractual state of nature, they seek the margin of power
that will secure their right of self-preservation--and run up against states acting out of similar
needs and desires.
In these passages we can discern the ontotheological foundations of an epistemic realism, in the
sense of an ethico-political imperative embedded in the nature of things. 28 The sovereign state
and territoriality become the necessary effects of anarchy, contingency, disorder that are
assumed to exist independent of and prior to any rational or linguistic conception of them. In
epistemic realism, the search for security through sovereignty is not a political choice but the
necessary reaction to an anarchical condition: Order is man-made and good; chaos is natural and
evil. Out of self-interest, men must pursue this good and constrain the evil of excessive will
through an alienation of individual powers to a superior, indeed supreme, collective power. In
short, the security of epistemic realism is ontological, theological and teleological: that is,

metaphysical. We shall see, from Marx's and Nietzsche's critiques, the extent to which Hobbesian
security and epistemic realism rely on social constructions posing as apodictic truths for their power
effects. There is not and never was a "state of nature" or a purely "self-interested man"; there is,
however, clearly an abiding fear of violent and premature death that compels men to seek the
security found in solidarity. The irony, perhaps even tragedy, is that by constituting the first
science of security, Hobbes made a singular contribution to the eventual subversion of the
metaphysical foundations of solidarity.

The innocence the affirmative preserves keeps us from re-evaluating failed policies
This authorizes infinite violence
Chernus 1 (Ira, PROFESSOR OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO AT
BOULDER,
FIGHTING TERROR IN THE NATIONAL INSECURITY STATE,
http://spot.colorado.edu/~chernus/WaronTerrorismEssays/FightingTerror.htm, AD: 7/10/09) jl
The only path to security, it seems, is to prevent change by imposing control over others. When
those others fight back, the national insecurity state protests its innocence: we act only in selfdefense; we want only stability. The state sees no reason to re-evaluate its policies; that would
risk the change it seeks, above all, to avoid. So it can only meet violence with more violence. Of
course, the inevitable frustration is blamed on the enemy, reinforcing the sense of peril and the
demand for absolute control through violence.
The goal of total control is self-defeating; each step toward security becomes a source of, and is
taken as proof of, continuing insecurity. This makes the logic of the insecurity state viciously
circular. Why are we always fighting? Because we always have enemies. How do we know we
always have enemies? Because we are always fighting. And knowing that we have enemies, how
can we afford to stop fighting? In the insecurity state, there is no way to talk about security
without voicing fears of insecurity, no way to express optimism without expressing despair. On
every front, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy; a self-confirming and self-perpetuating spiral of
violence; a trap that seems to offer no way out.

The logic of the insecurity state short-circuits any attempt at change - it uses its
own failed logic to justify murderous policy.
Chernus 1 (Ira, PROFESSOR OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO AT
BOULDER,
FIGHTING TERROR IN THE NATIONAL INSECURITY STATE,
http://spot.colorado.edu/~chernus/WaronTerrorismEssays/FightingTerror.htm, AD: 7/10/09) jl
But that is just what most Americans expect, in any event. Caged inside the logic of the insecurity
state, they can see no other possibility. So the official story hardly seems to be one option among
many. Its premises and conclusions seem so necessary, so inevitable, that no other story can be
imagined. For huge numbers of Americans, the peace movements alternative story is not
mistaken. It is simply incomprehensible, like a foreign language, for it assumes that we can take
steps to address the very sources of insecurity. That denies the most basic foundations of the
prevailing public discourse. Quite naturally, then, the majority embraces the only story it can
understand. The story is persuasive because the alternative seems to be having no story at all.
The official story prevails by default, as the nation faces the prospect of further war around the
world. Yet that is only half its power. The other half comes from the paradoxical consolation it
provides as we look back to what happened here at home, on September 11, when four hijacked
planes crashed headlong into the national insecurity state.
The cold war is long over, the Reds are long gone, and now the twin towers are gone, too. But
the national insecurity state still stands. Indeed, it stands stronger and taller precisely because the
towers are gone. Our sense of insecurity has grown. But it is not fundamentally different in kind.
The attacks did not create a pervasive sense of insecurity. Rather, the insecurity that was already
pervasive shaped the dominant interpretation of and response to the attacks.
The first response was the nearly universal cry: "Pearl Harbor." But "this was not Pearl Harbor," as
National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice recognized. There is no rivalry between great nation

states. No foreign nation has attacked the U.S. No long-standing diplomatic and economic
maneuvering preceded the attacks of September 11, 2001. Why, then, did they so quickly evoke the
imagery of December 7, 1941? The common thread was not a hope for redemption, but only a
conviction that the nations very existence was threatened.
In 2001, that judgment is debatable, to say the least. Assuming that the attacks were indeed the work
of a Muslim splinter group, such groups have been trying to attack U.S. interests for a quartercentury or more. One massive act of destruction, as horrendous as it was, hardly constitutes
evidence of their overwhelming power. Nor is there any real evidence for Bushs charge that these
groups aim to impose their "radical beliefs on people everywhere and end a way of life." Yet
evidence is irrelevant in the national insecurity state. The fear comes first, before any evidence
that it is warranted. How do we know that our existence is threatened? Because it is so
obviously threatened! QED.

SFFP (Turns Case)

Their fear of security threats colonizes our lives It has no logical limit. Chasing
security threats produces a broader insecurity that turns their impacts
Lipschutz 98 (Ronnie D, Professor, Department of Politics @ The UC Santa Cruz, "8. Negotiating the
Boundaries of Difference and Security at Millennium's End,"
Cioanet,http://www.ciaonet.org/book/lipschutz/lipschutz18.html, AD: 7/10/09) jl
Why are enemies so important to our collective selves? Why are we driven to find new ones when
the body of the old one is hardly yet cold (and might yet be revived, perhaps with our unwitting
assistance)? Consider what is said to threaten our security today. An incomplete list would
include terrorism (infection by fanaticism); nuclear proliferation (infection by irradiation or,
perhaps, blackmail--making us behave as we never would want to); environmental degradation
(infection by Nature or ourselves); immigration (by religion and culture); drugs (by turning us into
mindless robots); and AIDS (by tainting our bodily fluids). Consider how in the past, at one time or
another, many of these "threats" were said to be fostered and assisted by the Kremlin and its state
and non-state proxies. Now, when there is no one single enemy anywhere, there are enemies
everywhere, inside as well as outside. If this is so, then the threat of social chaos, the loss of self,
can arise from within, from the "wild zones" inside of each of us (shades of Hobbes!). Can the
existence of such wild zones be tolerated by the "tame zones" of the industrial coalition proposed by
Barry Buzan? Do the former not pose a threat to the very organizing principles of the latter? Can
they be contained or excluded?
The chapters by Dan Deudney and Pearl-Alice Marsh remind us just how problematic it can be
to discipline wildness and direct tameness, even when, to some, the world appears to be black and
white. Even as nuclear doctrine sought to secure the United States against the enemy, it
threatened the very people it was intended to protect. And, even as U.S. security policy in
southern Africa promised to protect the home appliances apparently deemed so important to the
American people by its leaders, so, too, did it also raise the possibility of a cessation in the very
mineral flows that made those appliances feasible and affordable. Contradictory speech acts
emerged from this process, undermining security policy and leaving behind less security, rather
than more.

The impact is millions of deaths and an increasing risk of WMD war

Der Derian 98 (James, Prof of PoliSci at the U of Massachusetts, "The Value of Security: Hobbes,
Marx, Nietzsche, and Baudrillard," Cianet, http://www.ciaonet.org/book/lipschutz/lipschutz12.html, AD:
7/10/09) jl
The rapidity of change in the international system, as well as the inability of international theory to
make sense of that change, raises this question: Of what value is security? More specifically, just
how secure is this preeminent concept of international relations? This evaluation of security
invokes interpretive strategies to ask epistemological, ontological, and political questions-questions that all too often are ignored, subordinated, or displaced by the technically biased,
narrowly framed question of what it takes to achieve security. The goal, then, of this inquiry is
to make philosophically problematic that which has been practically axiomatic in international
relations. The first step is to ask whether the paramount value of security lies in its abnegation of the
insecurity of all values.
No other concept in international relations packs the metaphysical punch, nor commands the
disciplinary power of "security." In its name, peoples have alienated their fears, rights and
powers to gods, emperors, and most recently, sovereign states, all to protect themselves from the
vicissitudes of nature--as well as from other gods, emperors, and sovereign states. In its name,
weapons of mass destruction have been developed which have transfigured national interest
into a security dilemma based on a suicide pact. And, less often noted in international relations,
in its name billions have been made and millions killed while scientific knowledge has been furthered and
intellectual dissent muted.
We have inherited an ontotheology of security, that is, an a priori argument that proves the existence and necessity of only
one form of security because there currently happens to be a widespread, metaphysical belief in it. Indeed, within the concept

of security lurks the entire history of western metaphysics, which was best described by Derrida "as a series of substitutions
of center for center" in a perpetual search for the "transcendental signified." 1 From God to Rational Man, from Empire to
Republic, from King to the People--and on occasion in the reverse direction as well, for history is never so linear, never so
neat as we would write it--the security of the center has been the shifting site from which the forces of authority, order, and
identity philosophically defined and physically kept at bay anarchy, chaos, and difference.
Yet the center, as modern poets and postmodern critics tell us, no longer holds. The demise of a bipolar system,

the diffusion of power into new political, national, and economic constellations, the decline of civil
society and the rise of the shopping mall, the acceleration of everything --transportation, capital and
information flows, change itself--have induced a new anxiety. As George Bush repeatedly said-that is, until the 1992 Presidential election went into full swing--"The enemy is unpredictability.
The enemy is instability." 2

Genocide
Securitization is a precondition to genocide- their
advantage descriptions will be used to justify massive
violence
Friis 2K [Karsten Friis, UN Sector at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, Peace and
Conflict Studies 7.2, From Liminars to Others: Securitization Through Myths, 2000,
http://shss.nova.edu/pcs/journalsPDF/V7N2.pdf#page=2]

The problem with societal securitization is one of representation. It is rarely clear in advance
who it is that speaks for a community. There is no system of representation as in a state. Since literately
anyone can stand up as representatives, there is room for entrepreneurs. It is not surprising if we

experience a struggle between different representatives and also their different

representations of the society. What they do share, however, is a conviction that they are best
at providing (a new) order. If they can do this convincingly, they gain legitimacy. What must be
done is to make the uncertain certain and make the unknown an object of knowledge. To
present a discernable Other is a way of doing this. The Other is represented as an Other -- as an unified
single actor with a similar unquestionable set of core values (i.e. the capital O). They are objectified,
made into an object of knowledge, by re-presentation of their identity and values. In other
words, the representation of the Other is depoliticized in the sense that its inner qualities are treated as
given and non-negotiable. In Jef Huysmans (1998:241) words, there is both a need for a mediation of
chaos as well as of threat. A mediation of chaos is more basic than a mediation of threat, as it implies

making chaos into a meaningful order by a convincing representation of the Self and its
surroundings. It is a mediation of ontological security, which means ...a strategy of managing the
limits of reflexivity ... by fixing social relations into a symbolic and institutional order (Huysmans
1998:242). As he and others (like Hansen 1998:240) have pointed out, the importance of a threat
construction for political identification, is often overstated. The mediation of chaos, of being the
provider of order in general, is just as important. This may imply naming an Other but not
necessarily as a threat. Such a dichotomization implies a necessity to get rid of all the liminars
(what Huysmans calls strangers). This is because they ...connote a challenge to
categorizing practices through the impossibility of being categorized, and does not threaten the
community, ...but the possibility of ordering itself (Huysmans 1998:241). They are a challenge to the
entrepreneur by their very existence. They confuse the dichotomy of Self and Other and thereby the
entrepreneurs mediation of chaos. As mentioned, a liminar can for instance be people of mixed
ethnical ancestry but also representations of competing world-pictures. As Eide (1998:76) notes:
Over and over again we see that the liberals within a group undergoing a mobilisation process for
group conflict are the first ones to go. The liminars threaten the ontological order of the entrepreneur
by challenging his representation of Self and Other and his mediation of chaos, which ultimately
undermines the legitimacy of his policy. The liminars may be securitized by some sort of
disciplination, from suppression of cultural symbols to ethnic cleansing and expatriation. This is
a threat to the ontological order of the entrepreneur, stemming from inside and thus repoliticizing the
inside/outside dichotomy. Therefore the liminar must disappear. It must be made into a Self, as
several minority groups throughout the world have experienced, or it must be forced out of the
territory. A liminar may also become an Other, as its connection to the Self is cut and their former
common culture is renounced and made insignificant. In Anne Nortons (1988:55) words, The presence of
difference in the ambiguous other leads to its classification as wholly unlike and identifies it unqualifiedly
with the archetypal other, denying the resemblance to the self. Then the liminar is no longer an ontological
danger (chaos), but what Huysmans (1998:242) calls a mediation of daily security. This is not
challenging the order or the system as such but has become a visible, clear-cut Other. In places like Bosnia,
this naming and replacement of an Other, has been regarded by the securitizing actors as the solution to the

ontological problem they have posed. Securitization was not considered a political move, in the
sense that there were any choices. It was a necessity: Securitization was a solution based on a
depoliticized ontology.10 This way the world-picture of the securitizing actor is not only a representation
but also made into reality. The mythical second-order language is made into first-order language, and its
innocent reality is forced upon the world. To the entrepreneurs and other actors involved it has become
a natural necessity with a need to make order, even if it implies making the world match
the map. Maybe that is why war against liminars are so often total; it attempts a total
expatriation or a total solution (like the Holocaust) and not only a victory on the
battlefield. If the enemy is not even considered a legitimate Other, the door may be more open to a

kind of violence that is way beyond any war conventions, any jus in bello. This way,
securitizing is legitimized: The entrepreneur has succeeded both in launching his world-view
and in prescribing the necessary measures taken against it. This is possible by using the
myths, by speaking on behalf of the natural and eternal, where truth is never questioned.

Security justifies war and genocide

Campbell and Dillon 93 (David and Michael, Assistant Professor in Political Science at The Johns Hopkins
University and Senior Lecurer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Lancaster, The Political Subject of
Violence, http://books.google.com/books?
id=6kS8AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA97&lpg=PA97&dq=review+of+michael+dillon's+politics+of+security&source=bl&ots=dxyRyld_
LJ&sig=q1QwCTHyCz5CmTM1gNxny6iWBQo&hl=en&ei=qbZXSoT0AZDQtgP5qXWBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=10, AD:7/10/9) AJK

No other concept in international relations packs the metaphysical punch, nor commands the
disciplinary power of security. In its name peoples have alienated their fears, rights and
powers to gods, emperors, and most recently, sovereign states, all to protect themselves from
vicissitudes of nature as well as from other gods, emperors, and foreign states. In its name
weapons of mass destruction have been developed which transfigured national interest into a
security dilemma based on a suicide pact. And, less often noted in IR, in its name billions have
been made and millions killed while scientific knowledge has been furthered and intellectual
dissent muted. We have inherited an onto- theology of security, that is, an a priori argument
that proves the existence and necessity of only one form of security because there currently
happens to be a widespread, metaphysical belief in it. Indeed, within the concept of security
lurks the entire history of western metaphysics, which was best described by Derrida as a series
of substitutions of center for center in a perpetual search for the transcendental signified. From
God to Rataional Man, from Empire to Republic, from King to the People and on occasion in the
reverse direction as well, for history is never so linear, never so neat as we would write it the
security of the centre has been the shifting site from which the forces of authority, order, and
identity philosophically defined and physically kept at bay anarchy, chaos, and difference. Yet
the centre, as modern poets and postmodern critics tell us, no longer holds. The demise of a
bipolar system, the diffusion of power into new political, national, and economic constellations, the
decline of civil society and the rise of the shopping mall, the acceleration of everything
transportation, capital and information flows, change itself have induced a new anxiety. As George
Bush repeatedly said that is, until the 1992 election went into full swing - The enemy is
unpredictability. The enemy is unstability.

Their security threats demand constant surveillance and total control over so-called
threatening identities Rogue regimes, terrorists, hackers etc become bogeys to be
eradicated. The empirical result is atrocities
Tuathail 96 [Gearoid O. Prof. of Govt and Intergovernmental Affairs VA Tech. At
the End of Geopolitics? http://www.nvc.vt.edu/toalg/Website/publish/papers/end.htm
AD 07/10/09] JL

A complex postmodern geopolitics entwining territory, media and machines was evident in the U.S.
cruise missile attacks against Iraq in September 1996. The latest version of the U.S. Tomahawk
cruise missile used in these attacks (made by the GM owned Hughes Aircraft Company at an
estimated cost of $1 million apiece) employed not only a supposedly improved terrain "scenematching" computer but also a complementary guidance system that used satellites to continually
update the missile's location and target. (Many of the missiles still missed!). The unusual
geopolitics of these attacks -- the use of drone weapons launched by warships in international
waters and by B-52's based in Guam, a 20 hour flight away -- was necessitated both by territorial
limits in the region, diplomatic restrictions on the use of airbases in Turkey and Saudi Arabia,
and televisual limits at home, the Clinton administration's fear of the spectacle of U.S. military
casualties in the run-up to a presidential election. The geopolitics of vision, in this case, was
triangulated by technology, territory and television. A second cluster of postmodern geopolitics
is that emerging from the efforts of intellectuals and institutions of statecraft to re-map the global
strategic landscape after the Cold War. While the crude Manichean world of the Cold War may be
gone for now, the preoccupation of the national security establishment with "rogue states and
nuclear outlaws" is indicative of a persistent territorial conceptualization of danger in international
security studies. Underwriting these territorializing specifications of danger are, of course, oldfashioned essentialist identities -- totalitarian states, Islamic fundamentalists, die-hard
Communists, terrorists, criminals and devils (like Saddam Hussein) -- and a longstanding
strategic commitment on the part of the Western security apparatus to pro-Western states like Israel,
Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The effort of NATO to extend this zone of strategic commitment and
protection in Central Europe is evidence that a state-centric territorial geopolitics does persist,
but increasingly it is also non-territorial "postmodern terrorist" threats in a speeding hybrid
world that preoccupy the defense planners in the Pentagon, at NATO headquarters in Brussels,
and elsewhere. Threats from contraband flows and proliferations -- the spread of nuclear
weapons, plutonium, terrorists, drugs, illegal migrants, infectious diseases, money laundering,
sensitive high-tech assets, biological and chemical agents, etc. -- and threats to vital official flows
and ports -- oil pipelines, subways, world trading centers, airports, teleports, secret data archives,
fiber-optic lines, international financial networks, and global sporting spectacles -- have brought
into being a postmodern geopolitics of security where the geographies are in fluid flowmations
not fixed formations. Ostensibly preoccupied by a geography of territorial fixities during the Cold
War, security discourse has expanded to encompass the protection of fundamental spaces of
flows from material attack or the immaterial terrorism of computer hackers and software
viruses. The creation of a Belfast-style "ring of steel" and CCTV system around the City of London
-- a strategic space of financial flows -- and the militarization of U.S. airports in response to
recent spectacular bombings disclose a geopolitics that mixes traditional forms of containment
and detainment with new panoptic surveillance and scanning technologies. Again, media
vectors are also implicated in the creation of these landscapes, one of their "strategic" functions
being the simulation of security and the containment of media borne viruses of panic and hysteria.

The construction of the dangerous Other mobilizes the populace and legitimizes
violence in the name of security.
Tsoukala 8 (Anastassia, Associate Professor of Criminology at the University of Paris V, Boundarycreating Processes and the Social Construction of Threat, Alternatives, 33(2), AD: 7-8-9) BL
Despite their differences, the two principal moral-panics models, elaborated by Cohen and Goode
and Ben-Yehuda, present similarities that are to a large extent shared by many analyses of the
construction of political enemies.23 First, though the focus may change significantly from one
model to another, there are no divergent views as to the identity of the actors involved in that
process. Then, when it comes to defining the objective of that process, the construction of social
enemies is seen as essential to the defining of the mainstream society and to fostering social
bonds. As Jef Huysmans has put it, threat definition creates a self and an other in a process in
which the definition of the self depends on the definition of the other.24 The members of the
mainstream society and the values they share are better defined through an oppositional pattern,
according to which their attributes are shaped in negative rather than positive terms; that is, through
the constant confrontation with what they are not. The "other," as the necessary conceptual

boundary and, at the same time, inversed mirror of the community's ideal image, becomes
then the condition sine qua non of the very existence of that image. In other words, good, virtue,
and beauty cannot possibly exist without evil, vice, and ugliness. This ordinary defining process is
strengthened in times of crisis when the community and/or its values are, or are thought to be,
in danger. Never do the members of a community feel closer to each other than when called to face
a common threat to their shared values. Besides, the very process of getting closer strengthens the
internal cohesion of the group in that it presumes a wide sharing of common values or, at least,
imposes it de facto as a taken-for-granted reality. Differences then have to be forgotten or
disregarded as if they had never existed. At the same time, this transnational and to some extent
atemporal consensus-making process through the designation of moral boundaries cannot be
dissociated from an array of spatially and temporally definable political, bureaucratic, and economic
stakes.25 While politicians may seek to strengthen their position in the political and security
realms by opposing themselves to the social enemies of the day, security professionals may
associate their preventive and coercive policies with budget claims and/or the ongoing repositioning
of their agencies in the security field, and sensationalist media campaigns guarantee an
economically quantifiable rise in their audience. When it comes to analyzing the way these social
outcasts are created, it is acknowledged that their efficient exclusion from mainstream society
rests upon a rupturing process, liable to draw a clear line between the perpetrator of the
allegedly threatening acts and the rest of the community,26 as part of a process of establishing
guilt.27 This boundary-creating process allows, moreover, the expulsion of all the moral
ambiguity from the measures to be adopted against the wrongdoers and from the values thus
defended. It is the exclusion of the other from the mainstream society that makes possible the
unreserved implementation on him or her of a series of coercive measures, going from various
control devices to detention, torture, and even death.28 It is the symbolic banning of the other
from the community that legitimizes the imposition on the other of numerous privacy-intrusive
proactive measures, in the name of the protection from the probable future risk he or she is believed
to represent for the common well-being. The doubt-dispelling binary logic this exclusion rests upon
is also a useful hegemonic device that simplifies complex issues. In setting up the other as a
"hypersignifier of all that is bad and immoral,"29 it hushes the complex causes of their actions and,
hence, avoids putting any possible blame on the mainstream society.

Creating a boundary between social groups allows for scapegoating of the Other.
Tsoukala 8 (Anastassia, Associate Professor of Criminology at the University of Paris V, Boundarycreating Processes and the Social Construction of Threat, Alternatives, 33(2), AD: 7-8-9) BL
In his analysis of the social construction of political enemies, Murray Edelman sums up prior
academic knowledge to highlight the way the boundary-creating process is embedded in the
broader process of constructing social enemies.^ First, it is presumed that the members of the
target group are malign and immoral. These allegedly inbuilt features are then associated with
current social, economic, or political problems to suggest that the members of the target group
are the source or, at least, one of the aggravating factors of, those problems. Once established, this
association transforms the way the target group is represented. Henceforth, its representation
becomes detached from factual conditions. It rests upon the reproduction of stereotyped
schemes that articulate an image of permanent threat to the well-being of the community

Bare Life
The language of security reduces our lives to hollow shells, protected from the risk
of death by difference, but unable to find a reason to live
Lipschutz 98 (Ronnie D, Professor, Department of Politics @ The UC Santa Cruz, "8. Negotiating the
Boundaries of Difference and Security at Millennium's End,"
Cioanet,http://www.ciaonet.org/book/lipschutz/lipschutz18.html, AD: 7/10/09) jl
As a speech act, security is about specifying, through discourse, the permitted conditions under
which acts that "secure" the state can take place. In a world of relatively autonomous states, with
low levels of interaction, it is possible to draw the conceptual boundaries that establish
difference between two states and that also define a range of permitted behavior and beliefs.
Specifying the goals of other states' behaviors, as friendly or hostile, could also be a part of this
boundary-drawing. Whether we accept such boundary definition as justifiable or not is beside the
point; the state is clearly the referent of security as speech act and as behavior.
The most secure state is, under these conditions, the one most successful in excluding outside
influences by drawing boundaries that can be secured; in Barry Buzan's terms, a "closed" state.
But, as Buzan's analysis suggests, a closed state is either very sure of itself and its purpose in the
world, or very insecure about its viability. 7 It is either very confident of its ability to ward off the
efforts of others to penetrate it, and very sure that it has the undying loyalty of its citizens, so that no
social and economic intercourse is desirable or necessary. Or, it is so weak and insecure that, as in
the case of North Korea, closure is the only way to ensure that the state and its citizens will not be
subverted and "turned" by external influences.
Major difficulties arise when the referent of security becomes less clear. We can maintain the state
as the referent of security, the speech act, but in doing so we may be muddying the waters. Indeed,
the very notion of the state becomes problematic: On the one hand, it is assumed to be an
independent and autonomous political entity that fulfills a particular set of constitutive
characteristics codified in part in the Treaties of Augsberg and Westphalia; on the other hand, it is
quite evident that the state of 1995 is not the same as the state of 1648. Giving the name "state" to
particular political entities at a particular time does not mean that they meet the complete, idealized
set of constitutive requirements imagined to apply at another time. 8 Consequently, applying
unchanging concepts or practices to these entities, or to others that we might choose to define, does
not mean that the logic of security follows today as it once did, either 30 or 300 years ago.
Closure is, consequently, a formula for poverty and destitution, as both Buzan and Beverly
Crawford make clear. The citizens of such states are wont to escape their security in the interest
of finding better lives and more "secure" livelihoods. Left behind is a hollow shell, less and less
able to secure itself. For different reasons, open states are subject to much the same logic: As they
engage in extensive social and economic intercourse, the boundaries separating one state from
another become, more and more, lines on a map and, perhaps, lines on the ground, but lines that
become quite unclear in the minds of citizens whose routines involve living in culturally diffuse
"borderlands" that may, geographically, be quite distant from the lines on the ground.
Security, under these circumstances, is about the drawing and defense of lines and boundaries,
about limits, and about exclusion and, in this sense, it is the quintessential "speech act"
described by Ole Wver. Defining security involves establishing a definition of the collective self
vis--vis other collective selves. It is not only about "who is against us," but also, as the observation
offered at the beginning of this chapter suggests, about "who we are" and whom we do not wish to
be. It is, to a large degree, about boundaries of difference that are increasingly difficult to specify
and negotiate.

Biopower Bad
Biopower wages war on entire populations and as conflict grows nuclear war
becomes the only possible outcome.
Foucault 78 (Michel, Professor of Philosophy at the College de France, The History Of Sexuality: An
Introduction, Volume 1, 136-137)
Since the classical age the West has undergone a very profound transformation of these mechanisms of power.
Deduction has tended to be no longer the major form of power but merely one element among others, working to incite,
reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, making

them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them
submit, or destroying them. There has been a parallel shift in the right of death, or at least a tendency to align itself
with the exigencies of a life-administering power and to define itself accordingly. This death that was based on the
right of the sovereign is now manifested as simply the reverse of the right of the social body to
ensure, maintain, or develop its life. Yet wars were never as bloody as they have been since the
nineteenth century, and all things being equal, never before did regimes visit such holocausts on their
own populations. But this formidable power of deathand this is perhaps what accounts for part of its force and the
cynicism with which it has so greatly expanded its limitsnow presents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a
positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and
comprehensive regulations. Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be

defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are
mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have
become vital. It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage
so many wars, causing so many men to be killed. And through a turn that closes the circle, as the technology
of wars has caused them to tend increasingly toward all-out destruction , the decision that initiates
them and the one that terminates them are in fact increasingly informed by the naked question of survival. The atomic
situation is now at the end point of this process: the power to expose a whole population to
death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individuals continued existence. The
principle underlying the tactics of battlethat one has to be capable of killing in order to go on livinghas become the
principle that defines the strategy of states. But the existence in question is no longer the juridical
existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence of a population . If genocide is indeed the
dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and
exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population.

Value to Life
This militarism paints human existence as nothing more than war and individuals
are essentially agents of violence
Marzec 9 (Robert P., Associate Professor of English literature and postcolonial studies at Purdue
University, and associate editor of Modern Fiction Studies. The Global South, Volume 3, Number 1,
Militariality Spring 2009. Project Muse AD 7/9/09) JM
These stratocratic controls of planetary human activity reveal more than the ideology of a single
administration; they are an extension of what we can now see as the complete devotion to an
apparatus that captures all cultural and political energies in terms of what Clausewitz defined as
policy. The original state of emergency as defined by the Bush Administration in the wake of the World Trade
Center and Pentagon attacks has been naturalized and sedimented as to become a fundamental
starting point of human existence. Consequently, understanding the full intensity of the age of militariality
requires more than the common critical awareness of Clausewitzs central doctrine: War is merely the
continuation of policy by other means (28). It requires first an understanding that for Clausewitz, war is the
very ontological basis of human existence, a basis that transcends culture, history and temporality. War defines the
very structure of human subjectivity, a juridico-natural code of law that is deeply rooted in a people, an
army, a government: war is a paradoxical trinitycomposed of primordial violence, hatred, and
enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force; of the play of chance and probability within which the creative
spirit is free to roam; and of its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy (30). Clausewitz assigns a constituency
to each of the registers of this trinity: The first of thesemainly concerns the people; the second the commander and his
army; the third the government (30). In a totalizing problematic organized according to the idea of war serving as

the basis of human existence, the people of a nation are equated with that of a blind
primordial force of violence: the first, which refers to primordial vio- lence, hatred, and enmity identifies the
people living in the nation. Government therefore names that entity constituted for the exclusive purpose of controlling its
unstable citizenry by reorienting the energies of the people to- wards warfare. This reorientation lays the

groundwork and delineates the horizon of human creativity, and determines the single
legitimized space of freedom: the army, where the creative spirit is free to roam. The space of in- stability, of
chance, which is the condition for the possibility of creativity, en- ters into the war-footing picture of reality only on this
register of militarized human activity. This connection here is not a matter of association; military activity defines
the very essence of freedom and human creativity. The army and its state are not defined in this picture in
traditional terms of democracy, protection, and service to a people. Nor are they the a sign of the discourse of biopower, for
biopower has its eyes on the productivity of a population and functions according to a general administration of life that,
although affecting distributions around a norm, still invites and produces a certain amount of heterogeneity (Foucault
266).

The drive toward security causes no value to life We live life in our seatbelts
instead of embracing the unknown which gives meaning to our lives. Their method
only locks us in a cycle of violence and counter-violence
Der Derian 98 (James, Prof of PoliSci at the U of Massachusetts, "The Value of Security: Hobbes,
Marx, Nietzsche, and Baudrillard," Cianet, http://www.ciaonet.org/book/lipschutz/lipschutz12.html, AD:
7/10/09) jl
The desire for security is manifested as a collective resentment of difference--that which is not
us, not certain, not predictable. Complicit with a negative will to power is the fear-driven desire
for protection from the unknown. Unlike the positive will to power, which produces an aesthetic
affirmation of difference, the search for truth produces a truncated life which conforms to the
rationally knowable, to the causally sustainable. In The Gay Science , Nietzsche asks of the reader:
"Look, isn't our need for knowledge precisely this need for the familiar, the will to uncover
everything strange, unusual, and questionable, something that no longer disturbs us? Is it not the
instinct of fear that bids us to know? And is the jubilation of those who obtain knowledge not the
jubilation over the restoration of a sense of security?" 37
The fear of the unknown and the desire for certainty combine to produce a domesticated life,
in which causality and rationality become the highest sign of a sovereign self, the surest
protection against contingent forces. The fear of fate assures a belief that everything reasonable is
true, and everything true, reasonable. In short, the security imperative produces, and is sustained

by, the strategies of knowledge which seek to explain it. Nietzsche elucidates the nature of this
generative relationship in The Twilight of the Idols :
The causal instinct is thus conditional upon, and excited by, the feeling of fear. The "why?" shall, if
at all possible, not give the cause for its own sake so much as for a particular kind of cause --a cause
that is comforting, liberating and relieving. . . . That which is new and strange and has not been
experienced before, is excluded as a cause. Thus one not only searches for some kind of
explanation, to serve as a cause, but for a particularly selected and preferred kind of
explanation--that which most quickly and frequently abolished the feeling of the strange, new
and hitherto unexperienced: the most habitual explanations. 38
A safe life requires safe truths. The strange and the alien remain unexamined, the unknown
becomes identified as evil, and evil provokes hostility--recycling the desire for security. The
"influence of timidity," as Nietzsche puts it, creates a people who are willing to subordinate
affirmative values to the "necessities" of security: "they fear change, transitoriness: this expresses
a straitened soul, full of mistrust and evil experiences." 39
The unknowable which cannot be contained by force or explained by reason is relegated to the offworld. "Trust," the "good," and other common values come to rely upon an "artificial
strength": "the feeling of security such as the Christian possesses; he feels strong in being able to
trust, to be patient and composed: he owes this artificial strength to the illusion of being protected
by a god." 40 For Nietzsche, of course, only a false sense of security can come from false gods:
"Morality and religion belong altogether to the psychology of error : in every single case, cause and
effect are confused; or truth is confused with the effects of believing something to be true; or a state
of consciousness is confused with its causes." 41
Nietzsche's interpretation of the origins of religion can shed some light on this paradoxical origin
and transvaluation of security. In The Genealogy of Morals , Nietzsche sees religion arising from a
sense of fear and indebtedness to one's ancestors:
The conviction reigns that it is only through the sacrifices and accomplishments of the
ancestors that the tribe exists --and that one has to pay them back with sacrifices and
accomplishments: one thus recognizes a debt that constantly grows greater, since these
forebears never cease, in their continued existence as powerful spirits, to accord the tribe new
advantages and new strength. 42

The product of securitization is a life without value it creates the tyranny of the
herd, and an inability to affirm life.
Der Derian 98 (James, Prof of PoliSci at the U of Massachusetts, "The Value of Security: Hobbes,
Marx, Nietzsche, and Baudrillard," Cianet, http://www.ciaonet.org/book/lipschutz/lipschutz12.html, AD:
7/10/09) jl
This powerful nexus of fear, of external and internal otherness, generates the values which
uphold the security imperative. Indeed, Nietzsche locates the genealogy of even individual rights,
such as freedom, in the calculus of maintaining security:
- My rights - are that part of my power which others not merely conceded me, but which they wish
me to preserve. How do these others arrive at that? First: through their prudence and fear and
caution: whether in that they expect something similar from us in return (protection of their
rights); or in that they consider that a struggle with us would be perilous or to no purpose; or in
that they see in any diminution of our force a disadvantage to themselves, since we would then be
unsuited to forming an alliance with them in opposition to a hostile third power. Then : by
donation and cession. 45
The point of Nietzsche's critical genealogy is to show that the perilous conditions that created the
security imperative--and the western metaphysics that perpetuate it--have diminished if not
disappeared; yet, the fear of life persists: "Our century denies this perilousness, and does so with a
good conscience: and yet it continues to drag along with it the old habits of Christian security,
Christian enjoyment, recreation and evaluation." 46 Nietzsche's worry is that the collective reaction
against older, more primal fears has created an even worse danger: the tyranny of the herd,
the lowering of man, the apathy of the last man which controls through conformity and rules
through passivity. The security of the sovereign, rational self and state comes at the cost of
ambiguity, uncertainty, paradox--all that makes a free life worthwhile. Nietzsche's lament for

this lost life is captured at the end of Daybreak in a series of rhetorical questions:

Deriving politics from security destroys value to life.

McWilliams 7 (Wilson, Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University, Power After Power:
Reflections on Liberalism in Politics and Vision, Theory & Event, 10(1), AD: 7-9-9) BL
Begin with the proposition that liberal politics derives from fearfulness, the impulse to preserve
life and avoid pain and the corresponding desire for security and comfort. Human beings enter
society precisely as part of an "escape from freedom," as Gouvernor Morris told the Convention:
"the savage State was more favorable to liberty than the Civilized...It was preferred by all men who
had not acquired a taste for property."46 Liberty, for model liberal citizens, is in part
burdensome and inconvenient; they prefer caution to daring and their conduct is "modest and
unheroic" (296). Politically "desensitized" (429), they agree with Hamilton's assertion that the
"bright talents and exalted endowments" associated with ancient cities are not worth the price
of the turbulent politics of the polis.47 They are hesitant even to defend their rights, as Locke
was at some pains to indicate, hard to move toward change, more disposed to suffer than to run the
risk of resistance and likely to act only after "a long train of abuses."48 31. Leaving the State of
Nature, in other words, involves a measure of slavishness, a barter of liberty for safety and support
that is partly disguised and made tolerable for liberals to the extent that it is not - as Leviathan is - a
submission to some one: it is slavishness without a master.49 Political society is always a
questionable bargain, a matter of "selling out" in which the price is always open to question,
and nowhere more than in liberal souls.

The irony of security is that it delivers what it seeks to prevent. Reducing the value
to life to mere existence causes cycles of violence that end in extinction.
Dillon 96 (Michael, Politics of Security: Towards a Political Philosophy of Continental Thought,
http://www.questia.com/read/103092657?title=Politics%20of%20Security:%20Towards%20a%20Political
%20Philosophy%20of%20Continental%20Thought#, AD: 7/10/9) AJK
One has ones being to be. The struggle in life is, therefore, simply a struggle for life. Much less is it a
struggle between antecedently determined and conflictual features of human being. Rather, it is instead the
struggle of life with its being, the striving of the striving to take-up that which it undergoes; the
struggle of its occupation of, and its pre-occupation with and within, the freedom of its very being
there. This is not human beings struggle to be, therefore, but, always already being, the struggle
which the being of human beings freedom to be entails. Here, Heideggers understanding of being in
the free, active and verbal sense comes across most strongly. For where there is a life comprised by, and
in virtue of, difference, there is always struggle less between its free constitutent parts as of this
manifold openness with and within the freedom, marked by the ontological difference, into which it is
thrown. A being that bears this difference as its free composition is a being which is continuously in
danger of being overwhelmed by the violence into which that difference may degenerate. For violence
incites reprisal and there is no necessary end to the cycle of violence which results, short of the
extinction of human being. There is no principle of guaranteed effectiveness, as Girard puts it, for
quelling violence. Only violence, it seems, can secure an end to violence, yet not even violence can do
that securely because violence, of course, begets violence. Offered as the final

This militarism paints human existence as nothing more than war and individuals
are essentially agents of violence
Marzec 9 (Robert P., Associate Professor of English literature and postcolonial studies at Purdue
University, and associate editor of Modern Fiction Studies. The Global South, Volume 3, Number 1,
Militariality Spring 2009. Project Muse AD 7/9/09) JM
These stratocratic controls of planetary human activity reveal more than the ideology of a single
administration; they are an extension of what we can now see as the complete devotion to an
apparatus that captures all cultural and political energies in terms of what Clausewitz defined as
policy. The original state of emergency as defined by the Bush Administration in the wake of the World Trade
Center and Pentagon attacks has been naturalized and sedimented as to become a fundamental

starting point of human existence. Consequently, understanding the full intensity of the age of militariality
requires more than the common critical awareness of Clausewitzs central doctrine: War is merely the
continuation of policy by other means (28). It requires first an understanding that for Clausewitz, war is the
very ontological basis of human existence, a basis that transcends culture, history and temporality. War defines the
very structure of human subjectivity, a juridico-natural code of law that is deeply rooted in a people, an
army, a government: war is a paradoxical trinitycomposed of primordial violence, hatred, and
enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force; of the play of chance and probability within which the creative
spirit is free to roam; and of its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy (30). Clausewitz assigns a constituency
to each of the registers of this trinity: The first of thesemainly concerns the people; the second the commander and his
army; the third the government (30). In a totalizing problematic organized according to the idea of war serving as

the basis of human existence, the people of a nation are equated with that of a blind
primordial force of violence: the first, which refers to primordial vio- lence, hatred, and enmity identifies the
people living in the nation. Government therefore names that entity constituted for the exclusive purpose of controlling its
unstable citizenry by reorienting the energies of the people to- wards warfare. This reorientation lays the

groundwork and delineates the horizon of human creativity, and determines the single
legitimized space of freedom: the army, where the creative spirit is free to roam. The space of in- stability, of
chance, which is the condition for the possibility of creativity, en- ters into the war-footing picture of reality only on this
register of militarized human activity. This connection here is not a matter of association; military activity defines
the very essence of freedom and human creativity. The army and its state are not defined in this picture in
traditional terms of democracy, protection, and service to a people. Nor are they the a sign of the discourse of biopower, for
biopower has its eyes on the productivity of a population and functions according to a general administration of life that,
although affecting distributions around a norm, still invites and produces a certain amount of heterogeneity (Foucault
266).

The drive toward security causes no value to life We live life in our seatbelts
instead of embracing the unknown which gives meaning to our lives. Their method
only locks us in a cycle of violence and counter-violence
Der Derian 98 (James, Prof of PoliSci at the U of Massachusetts, "The Value of Security: Hobbes,
Marx, Nietzsche, and Baudrillard," Cianet, http://www.ciaonet.org/book/lipschutz/lipschutz12.html, AD:
7/10/09) jl
The desire for security is manifested as a collective resentment of difference--that which is not
us, not certain, not predictable. Complicit with a negative will to power is the fear-driven desire
for protection from the unknown. Unlike the positive will to power, which produces an aesthetic
affirmation of difference, the search for truth produces a truncated life which conforms to the
rationally knowable, to the causally sustainable. In The Gay Science , Nietzsche asks of the reader:
"Look, isn't our need for knowledge precisely this need for the familiar, the will to uncover
everything strange, unusual, and questionable, something that no longer disturbs us? Is it not the
instinct of fear that bids us to know? And is the jubilation of those who obtain knowledge not the
jubilation over the restoration of a sense of security?" 37
The fear of the unknown and the desire for certainty combine to produce a domesticated life,
in which causality and rationality become the highest sign of a sovereign self, the surest
protection against contingent forces. The fear of fate assures a belief that everything reasonable is
true, and everything true, reasonable. In short, the security imperative produces, and is sustained
by, the strategies of knowledge which seek to explain it. Nietzsche elucidates the nature of this
generative relationship in The Twilight of the Idols :
The causal instinct is thus conditional upon, and excited by, the feeling of fear. The "why?" shall, if
at all possible, not give the cause for its own sake so much as for a particular kind of cause --a cause
that is comforting, liberating and relieving. . . . That which is new and strange and has not been
experienced before, is excluded as a cause. Thus one not only searches for some kind of
explanation, to serve as a cause, but for a particularly selected and preferred kind of
explanation--that which most quickly and frequently abolished the feeling of the strange, new
and hitherto unexperienced: the most habitual explanations. 38
A safe life requires safe truths. The strange and the alien remain unexamined, the unknown
becomes identified as evil, and evil provokes hostility--recycling the desire for security. The
"influence of timidity," as Nietzsche puts it, creates a people who are willing to subordinate
affirmative values to the "necessities" of security: "they fear change, transitoriness: this expresses
a straitened soul, full of mistrust and evil experiences." 39

The unknowable which cannot be contained by force or explained by reason is relegated to the offworld. "Trust," the "good," and other common values come to rely upon an "artificial
strength": "the feeling of security such as the Christian possesses; he feels strong in being able to
trust, to be patient and composed: he owes this artificial strength to the illusion of being protected
by a god." 40 For Nietzsche, of course, only a false sense of security can come from false gods:
"Morality and religion belong altogether to the psychology of error : in every single case, cause and
effect are confused; or truth is confused with the effects of believing something to be true; or a state
of consciousness is confused with its causes." 41
Nietzsche's interpretation of the origins of religion can shed some light on this paradoxical origin
and transvaluation of security. In The Genealogy of Morals , Nietzsche sees religion arising from a
sense of fear and indebtedness to one's ancestors:
The conviction reigns that it is only through the sacrifices and accomplishments of the
ancestors that the tribe exists --and that one has to pay them back with sacrifices and
accomplishments: one thus recognizes a debt that constantly grows greater, since these
forebears never cease, in their continued existence as powerful spirits, to accord the tribe new
advantages and new strength.

The product of securitization is a life without value it creates the tyranny of the
herd, and an inability to affirm life.
Der Derian 98 (James, Prof of PoliSci at the U of Massachusetts, "The Value of Security: Hobbes,
Marx, Nietzsche, and Baudrillard," Cianet, http://www.ciaonet.org/book/lipschutz/lipschutz12.html, AD:
7/10/09) jl
This powerful nexus of fear, of external and internal otherness, generates the values which
uphold the security imperative. Indeed, Nietzsche locates the genealogy of even individual rights,
such as freedom, in the calculus of maintaining security:
- My rights - are that part of my power which others not merely conceded me, but which they wish
me to preserve. How do these others arrive at that? First: through their prudence and fear and
caution: whether in that they expect something similar from us in return (protection of their
rights); or in that they consider that a struggle with us would be perilous or to no purpose; or in
that they see in any diminution of our force a disadvantage to themselves, since we would then be
unsuited to forming an alliance with them in opposition to a hostile third power. Then : by
donation and cession. 45
The point of Nietzsche's critical genealogy is to show that the perilous conditions that created the
security imperative--and the western metaphysics that perpetuate it--have diminished if not
disappeared; yet, the fear of life persists: "Our century denies this perilousness, and does so with a
good conscience: and yet it continues to drag along with it the old habits of Christian security,
Christian enjoyment, recreation and evaluation." 46 Nietzsche's worry is that the collective reaction
against older, more primal fears has created an even worse danger: the tyranny of the herd,
the lowering of man, the apathy of the last man which controls through conformity and rules
through passivity. The security of the sovereign, rational self and state comes at the cost of
ambiguity, uncertainty, paradox--all that makes a free life worthwhile. Nietzsche's lament for
this lost life is captured at the end of Daybreak in a series of rhetorical questions:

Deriving politics from security destroys value to life.

McWilliams 7 (Wilson, Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University, Power After Power:
Reflections on Liberalism in Politics and Vision, Theory & Event, 10(1), AD: 7-9-9) BL
Begin with the proposition that liberal politics derives from fearfulness, the impulse to preserve
life and avoid pain and the corresponding desire for security and comfort. Human beings enter
society precisely as part of an "escape from freedom," as Gouvernor Morris told the Convention:
"the savage State was more favorable to liberty than the Civilized...It was preferred by all men who
had not acquired a taste for property."46 Liberty, for model liberal citizens, is in part
burdensome and inconvenient; they prefer caution to daring and their conduct is "modest and
unheroic" (296). Politically "desensitized" (429), they agree with Hamilton's assertion that the
"bright talents and exalted endowments" associated with ancient cities are not worth the price
of the turbulent politics of the polis.47 They are hesitant even to defend their rights, as Locke

was at some pains to indicate, hard to move toward change, more disposed to suffer than to run the
risk of resistance and likely to act only after "a long train of abuses."48 31. Leaving the State of
Nature, in other words, involves a measure of slavishness, a barter of liberty for safety and support
that is partly disguised and made tolerable for liberals to the extent that it is not - as Leviathan is - a
submission to some one: it is slavishness without a master.49 Political society is always a
questionable bargain, a matter of "selling out" in which the price is always open to question,
and nowhere more than in liberal souls.

The irony of security is that it delivers what it seeks to prevent. Reducing the value
to life to mere existence causes cycles of violence that end in extinction.
Dillon 96 (Michael, Politics of Security: Towards a Political Philosophy of Continental Thought,
http://www.questia.com/read/103092657?title=Politics%20of%20Security:%20Towards%20a%20Political
%20Philosophy%20of%20Continental%20Thought#, AD: 7/10/9) AJK
One has ones being to be. The struggle in life is, therefore, simply a struggle for life. Much less is it a
struggle between antecedently determined and conflictual features of human being. Rather, it is instead the
struggle of life with its being, the striving of the striving to take-up that which it undergoes; the
struggle of its occupation of, and its pre-occupation with and within, the freedom of its very being
there. This is not human beings struggle to be, therefore, but, always already being, the struggle
which the being of human beings freedom to be entails. Here, Heideggers understanding of being in
the free, active and verbal sense comes across most strongly. For where there is a life comprised by, and
in virtue of, difference, there is always struggle less between its free constitutent parts as of this
manifold openness with and within the freedom, marked by the ontological difference, into which it is
thrown. A being that bears this difference as its free composition is a being which is continuously in
danger of being overwhelmed by the violence into which that difference may degenerate. For violence
incites reprisal and there is no necessary end to the cycle of violence which results, short of the
extinction of human being. There is no principle of guaranteed effectiveness, as Girard puts it, for
quelling violence. Only violence, it seems, can secure an end to violence, yet not even violence can do
that securely because violence, of course, begets violence. Offered as the final

Environmental Destruction
Militarism guarantees ecological destruction on unprecedented scales, culminating
in extinction.
Cuomo 96 (Chris J., Associate Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University of
Cincinnati. Hypatia, Vol. 11, No. 4, Women and Violence, War Is Not Just an Event: Reflections on the
Significance of Everyday Violence Autumn 1996. JSTOR AD 7/9/09) JM
All told, including peacetime activities as well as the immense destruction caused by combat, military institutions
probably present the most dramatic threat to ecological well-being on the planet. The military is
the largest generator of hazardous waste in the United States, creating nearly a ton of toxic pollution every minute, and
military analyst Jillian Skeel claims that, "Global military activity may be the largest worldwide
polluter and consumer of precious resources" (quoted in Thomas 1995, 5). A conventionally
powered aircraft carrier consumes 150,000 gallons of fuel a day. In less than an hour's flight, a single
jet launched from its flight deck consumes as much fuel as a North American motorist bums in two years. One F-16 jet
engine requires nearly four and a half tons of scarce titanium, nickel, chromium, cobalt, and energy-intensive aluminum
(Thomas 1995, 5), and nine percent of all the iron and steel used by humans is consumed by the global military (Thomas
1995, 16). The United States Department of Defense generates 500,000 tons of toxins annually, more

than the world's top five chemical companies combined. The military is the biggest single
source of environmental pollution in the United States. Of 338 citations issued by the United States
Environmental Protection Agency in 1989, three-quarters went to military installations (Thomas 1995, 17). The
feminization, commodification, and devaluation of nature helps create a reality in which its destruction in warfare is
easily justified. In imagining an ethic that addresses these realities, feminists cannot neglect the extent to which military
ecocide is connected, conceptually and practically, to transna- tional capitalism and other forms of human oppression and
exploitation. Virtually all of the world's thirty-five nuclear bomb test sites, as well as most radioactive dumps and uranium
mines, occupy Native lands (Thomas 1995, 6). Six multinationals control one-quarter of all United States defense contracts (Thomas 1995, 10), and two million dollars per minute is spent on the global military (Thomas 1995, 7). One could go
on for volumes about the effects of chemical and nuclear testing, military-industrial development and waste, and the
disruption of wildlife, habitats, communities, and lifestyles that are inescapably linked to military practices. There

are many conceptual and practical connections between military practices in which humans
aim to kill and harm each other for some declared "greater good," and nonmilitary practices
in which we displace, destroy, or seriously modify nonhuman communities, species, and
ecosystems in the name of human interests. An early illustration of these connections was made by Rachel
Carson in the first few pages of The Silent Spring (1962), in which she described insecticides as the inadvertent offspring
of World War II chemical weapons research. We can now also trace ways in which insecticides were part of the Westerndefined global corporatization of agriculture that helped kill off the small family farm and made the worldwide system of
food production dependent on the likes of Dow Chemical and Monsanto. Military practices are no different from
other human practices that damage and irreparably modify nature. They are often a result of cost-benefit

analyses that pretend to weigh all likely outcomes yet do not consider nonhuman entities
except in terms of their use value for humans and they nearly always create unforeseeable effects for humans
and nonhumans. In addition, everyday military peacetime practices are actually more destructive
than most other human activities, they are directly enacted by state power, and, because they
function as unquestioned "givens," they enjoy a unique near-immunity to enactments of
moral reproach. It is worth noting the extent to which everyday military activities remain largely unscrutinized by
environmentalists, espe- cially American environmentalists, largely because fear allows us to be fooled into thinking that
"national security" is an adequate excuse for "ecological military mayhem" (Thomas 1995, 16).

If environmental destruction is a necessary aspect of war and the peacetime practices of

military institutions, an analysis of war which includes its embeddedness in peacetime
militarism is necessary to address the environmen- tal effects of war. Such a perspective must pay
adequate attention to what is required to prepare for war in a technological age, and how women and other Others are
affected by the realities of contemporary military institutions and practices.

Militarism guarantees ecological destruction on unprecedented scales, culminating

in extinction.
Cuomo 96 (Chris J., Associate Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University of
Cincinnati. Hypatia, Vol. 11, No. 4, Women and Violence, War Is Not Just an Event: Reflections on the
Significance of Everyday Violence Autumn 1996. JSTOR AD 7/9/09)
All told, including peacetime activities as well as the immense destruction caused by combat, military institutions
probably present the most dramatic threat to ecological well-being on the planet. The military is
the largest generator of hazardous waste in the United States, creating nearly a ton of toxic pollution every minute, and
military analyst Jillian Skeel claims that, "Global military activity may be the largest worldwide
polluter and consumer of precious resources" (quoted in Thomas 1995, 5). A conventionally
powered aircraft carrier consumes 150,000 gallons of fuel a day. In less than an hour's flight, a single
jet launched from its flight deck consumes as much fuel as a North American motorist bums in two years. One F-16 jet
engine requires nearly four and a half tons of scarce titanium, nickel, chromium, cobalt, and energy-intensive aluminum
(Thomas 1995, 5), and nine percent of all the iron and steel used by humans is consumed by the global military (Thomas
1995, 16). The United States Department of Defense generates 500,000 tons of toxins annually, more

than the world's top five chemical companies combined. The military is the biggest single
source of environmental pollution in the United States. Of 338 citations issued by the United States
Environmental Protection Agency in 1989, three-quarters went to military installations (Thomas 1995, 17). The
feminization, commodification, and devaluation of nature helps create a reality in which its destruction in warfare is
easily justified. In imagining an ethic that addresses these realities, feminists cannot neglect the extent to which military
ecocide is connected, conceptually and practically, to transna- tional capitalism and other forms of human oppression and
exploitation. Virtually all of the world's thirty-five nuclear bomb test sites, as well as most radioactive dumps and uranium
mines, occupy Native lands (Thomas 1995, 6). Six multinationals control one-quarter of all United States defense contracts (Thomas 1995, 10), and two million dollars per minute is spent on the global military (Thomas 1995, 7). One could go
on for volumes about the effects of chemical and nuclear testing, military-industrial development and waste, and the
disruption of wildlife, habitats, communities, and lifestyles that are inescapably linked to military practices. There

are many conceptual and practical connections between military practices in which humans
aim to kill and harm each other for some declared "greater good," and nonmilitary practices
in which we displace, destroy, or seriously modify nonhuman communities, species, and
ecosystems in the name of human interests. An early illustration of these connections was made by Rachel
Carson in the first few pages of The Silent Spring (1962), in which she described insecticides as the inadvertent offspring
of World War II chemical weapons research. We can now also trace ways in which insecticides were part of the Westerndefined global corporatization of agriculture that helped kill off the small family farm and made the worldwide system of
food production dependent on the likes of Dow Chemical and Monsanto. Military practices are no different from
other human practices that damage and irreparably modify nature. They are often a result of cost-benefit

analyses that pretend to weigh all likely outcomes yet do not consider nonhuman entities
except in terms of their use value for humans and they nearly always create unforeseeable effects for humans
and nonhumans. In addition, everyday military peacetime practices are actually more destructive
than most other human activities, they are directly enacted by state power, and, because they
function as unquestioned "givens," they enjoy a unique near-immunity to enactments of
moral reproach. It is worth noting the extent to which everyday military activities remain largely unscrutinized by
environmentalists, espe- cially American environmentalists, largely because fear allows us to be fooled into thinking that
"national security" is an adequate excuse for "ecological military mayhem" (Thomas 1995, 16).

If environmental destruction is a necessary aspect of war and the peacetime practices of

military institutions, an analysis of war which includes its embeddedness in peacetime
militarism is necessary to address the environmen- tal effects of war. Such a perspective must pay
adequate attention to what is required to prepare for war in a technological age, and how women and other Others are
affected by the realities of contemporary military institutions and practices.

A2: Hegemony Good Impact

Turns

2NC Hegemony No !
They cant garner offense there are no real threats to US power their threats are merely
constructed from psychological paranoia and cause irrational policy and intervention
Christopher J. Fettweis, April 2010. Assistant Professor of Political Science at Tulane University in New Orleans. Threat and
Anxiety in US Foreign Policy, Survival 52.2, Informaworld.

For the architects of US foreign policy , one belief has remained constant
the Second World War:

since

we are living in dangerous times . In the 1950s, fears of communism caused the

United States to raise and maintain an enormous peacetime military for the first time in its history, an action that would have horrified
the founding generation. The Cold War ended, but the perception of threat lived on. Today, the Committee on the Present Danger, first
established in the 1950s, has re-emerged to assure America that mortal danger had not gone the way of the Soviet Union. Former
Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is typical of many American leaders in his belief that the challenges of the current era are every
bit as great as those faced by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, taking it as given that America's present enemies pose a 'mortal
threat to our survival as a free country'.11 To US foreign policymakers, the world is full of enemies and evil, and America must never
relax its guard.

More than one observer has noted that the U nited S tates displays a

level of threat perception that is far higher than that of the other great
powers. 12

This feeling of insecurity is not limited to US leaders.

Six in ten Americans apparently

think that a Third World War is 'likely to occur' in their lifetime ; others, including
influential opinion-makers, believe it has already begun.13 In April 2007, 82% of Americans told pollsters that the world is a more
dangerous place than it used to be, and that it is getting worse. One year later, another poll by the same firm found that a 'significant
majority' of Americans were anxious about US security, demonstrating that in the United States, 'anxiety remains steady over time'.14
This level of anxiety is striking when compared to public opinion in other post-Cold War powers. Whether the issue is Islamic
fundamentalist terrorism or rogue actors such as Saddam Hussein or Hugo Chaacutevez, the United States detects higher levels of
danger than any other state. During the Cold War, the pattern was the same: the United States feared an attack by the Warsaw Pact far
more than did its West European allies, who presumably had more to lose if such an event occurred; it worried about the influence of
communist China more than did South Korea, Japan or the ASEAN states; and it obsessed over the potential pernicious influence of
Fidel Castro and the Sandinistas more than did the smaller states of the region.15 Despite the fact that virtually all other states are
demonstrably weaker than the United States, and therefore presumably more vulnerable to a variety of threats, they do not seem to
worry about their safety nearly as much as does Uncle Sam. Is the US perception justified? Just because a country is paranoid does
not mean that there are not forces seeking to do it harm. Any modern state is confronted with a number of possible dangers and threats.
The question is whether those facing the twenty-first-century United States are quite as dire as its leaders seem to believe.
Conventional security threats
affairs,

Compared to any other country in the long history

of international

the U nited S tates is fundamentally safe from conventional assault.

It is hard to

imagine how even the combined military and economic might of Eurasia (if such a combination were possible) could be harnessed to
mount a successful trans-oceanic invasion. Today,

a few nuclear weapons would probably suffice

to deter any imaginable approaching armada, but even before the nuclear
age few serious strategists considered invasion a realistic possibility . 'Shall we
expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow?' wondered Abraham Lincoln in 1838: Never!
All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a
Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand
years.16 Princeton international-relations scholars Harold and Margaret Sprout spoke for many security analysts when they argued in
1939 that by the time the United States entered the First World War, 'it was manifest, both from indisputable data publicly available at
that time and from inferences easily and fairly deductible therefrom' that a trans-oceanic invasion 'simply could not occur'.17 Not
only is the invasion and conquest of the United States virtually unthinkable, but

warfare of all kinds is

everywhere on the decline . Since the end of the Cold War, inter-and intranational conflict and crises have steadily declined in number and
intensity .18 The risk for the average person of dying in battle has plummeted since the Second World War, especially since the
end of the Cold War.19 The incidence of new wars is also at an all-time low.20

Only one international war

has been fought since the invasion of Iraq, and it can be counted only if the
common understanding of 'war' is stretched a bit . Despite the sound and fury that accompanied

the 2008 Russo-Georgian clash, the combined battle-death figure appears to be under 1,000, which means it would not even qualify as
a war using the most-used definitions.21 By virtually all measures, the world is a far more peaceful place than it has been at any time
in recorded history.

This trend is apparent on every continent . At the beginning of 2010, the only

conflict raging in the Western Hemisphere was the ongoing civil war in Colombia, but even this conflict is far less severe today than it
was ten years ago. Europe, which has in the past been the most war-prone of continents, is entirely calm, without even the threat of
inter-state conflict. Little war planning now goes on among the European powers, a rather stark departure from previous eras.22 Every
one of the two billion or so people of the Pacific Rim is currently living in a society at peace. The brief but bloody Sri Lankan civil
war was Asia's only conflict in 2009. In Africa, despite a variety of serious on-going challenges, levels of conflict are the lowest they
have been in the centuries of written history we have about the continent. In the greater Middle East, the Israeli-Palestinian issue
continues to simmer, if at a relatively low level, as do the civil war in Yemen and the two counterinsurgency campaigns in which the
United States and its allies currently find themselves bogged down. None of this is to suggest that these places are without problems,
or that war is impossible. But given the rapid increase in the world's population and the number of countries (the League of Nations
had 63 members at its peak between the wars, while the United Nations currently has 192), a pure extrapolation of historical trends
might lead one to expect a great deal more warfare than there actually is. Conquest, it seems, is far less common today than it has been
throughout history.

Territorial disputes, the most common cause of warfare in the

past, have dropped to record low levels, especially among the great powers .
International borders have all but hardened. By any reasonable measure, the world is living in a golden age of peace and security, even
if it may not always appear so. If indeed

major war is all but obsolete , as an increasing number of prominent

observers believe,23 then surely even the most diehard pessimists can admit that the United States need not fear invasion and
conquest.

State survival , the key factor behind state behaviour according to 'defensive realists', is

today

all but

assured for even the smallest states .24 To be sure, throughout most of human history, the obliteration of
political entities was a distinct possibility. Polities as diverse as Central Asian empires, Greek poleis and German 'princely states' were
all at risk of conquest or absorption by powerful neighbours. That this no longer occurs is an under-appreciated break from the past.
Since the Second World War, precisely zero UN members have been forcibly removed from the map.25 Today, states are safe from
complete annihilation. The stronger countries are even safer; the strongest is the safest. A variety of explanations have been proposed
to account for this peaceful trend.

Some realists take the view that nuclear weapons have

thrust peace upon the otherwise conflictual system.26 Liberal explanations

include the expanding number of democracies, multilateral institutions
and the deepening complexity of economic interdependence.27
Constructivists do not necessarily deny the importance of any of these
factors, but give primary credit to a change in ideas in contemporary
international society. 28 Those factors exogenous to the human mind are important only to the extent that they affect
the way people think, and that society functions. It is ideational evolution, and the corresponding change in behavioural norms
regarding conflict, that has been decisive in this view.

All these explanations share one important factor:

the change they describe is likely to be irreversible . Nuclear weapons cannot be uninvented, and no defence
against their use is ever going to be completely foolproof. The pace of globalisation and economic interdependence shows no sign of
slowing. Democracy seems to be firmly embedded in the cultural fabric of many of the places it currently exists, and may well be in
the process of spreading to the places where it does not. The United Nations shows no signs of disappearing. Finally, normative
progress, like that which brought an end to slavery and duelling, tends to be unidirectional.

One potential

explanation for the growth of global peace can be dismissed fairly quickly:
US actions do not seem to have contributed much. The

limited

evidence

suggests that there is little reason to believe in the stabilising power of the
US hegemon, and that there is no relation between the relative level of
American activism and international stability. During the

19 90s ,

the U nited

S tates cut back on its defence spending fairly substantially . By 1998, the United States was
spending $100 billion less on defence in real terms than it had in 1990, a 25% reduction.29 To internationalists, defence hawks and
other believers in hegemonic stability, this irresponsible 'peace dividend' endangered both national and global security. 'No serious
analyst of American military capabilities', argued neo-conservatives William Kristol and Robert Kagan in 1996, 'doubts that the
defense budget has been cut much too far to meet America's responsibilities to itself and to world peace'.30
from the 1990s is fairly plain:

And yet

the verdict

the world grew more peaceful while the U nited S tates cut its

forces . No state seemed to believe that its security was endangered by a less-capable US military, or at least none took any
action that would suggest such a belief.

No militaries were enhanced to address power

vacuums; no security dilemmas drove insecurity or arms races; no regional

balancing occurred once the stabilis-ing presence of the US military was
diminished . The rest of the world acted as if the threat of international war was not a pressing concern, despite the reduction
in US military capabilities. Most of all, the United States was no less safe. The incidence and magnitude of global conflict declined
while the United States cut its military spending under President Bill Clinton, and kept declining as the George W. Bush
administration ramped the spending back up. Complex statistical analysis is unnecessary to reach the conclusion that world peace and
US military expenditure are unrelated. Unconventional security threats Conventional war, much less outright assault, is not the
leading security challenge in the minds of most Americans today. Instead, irregular or non-state actors, especially terrorists, top the list
of threats to the West since 11 September 2001. The primary guiding principle of US foreign policymaking, for better or worse, is the
continuing struggle against terrorism. President Bush repeatedly used the term 'Islamofascists' to describe the enemy that he reoriented the US defence establishment to fight, transforming al-Qaeda from a ragtag band of lunatics into a threat to the republic itself.
It is not uncommon for even sober analysts to claim that Islamic terrorists present an 'existential threat' to the United States, especially
if they were ever to employ nuclear, biological or chemical weapons. Perhaps

it is Parkinson's Law that

inspires some analysts to compare Islamic fundamentalists with the great

enemies of the past , such as the Nazis or the Communists, since no rational analysis of
their destructive potential would allow such a conclusion.

Threat is a function of

capabilities and intent; even if al-Qaeda has the intent to threaten the existence of the United States, it does not possess the capability
to do so.

This is not to deny that Islamist terrorists pose a danger

to suggest that policymakers are poised to 'let down their guard', as President Bush has worried.
however,

to the United States, or

A rational U nited S tates,

would interpret this issue for what it is: a law-enforcement challenge

of the first order rather than an existential strategic threat . Fortunately, there is no
meaningful dissension in the industrialised world about modern transnational problems such as terrorism, weapons proliferation,
human trafficking, drug smuggling or piracy. Multilateral cooperation, coordination and intelligence-sharing to address such issues are
in the interest of every state and occur at high, if often under-reported, levels. Police action against terrorism is much less expensive
than war, and is likely to be far more productive.

Even terrorists equipped with nuclear,

biological or chemical weapons would be incapable of causing damage so

cataclysmic that it would prove fatal to modern states . Though the prospect of
terrorists obtaining and using such weapons
the new era, it

is one of the most consistently terrifying scenarios of

is also highly unlikely and not nearly as dangerous as sometimes

portrayed. As the well-funded, well-staffed Aum Shinrikyo cult found out

the 1990s,

in

workable forms of weapons of mass destruction are hard to

purchase, harder still to synthesise without state help, and challenging to

use effectively . The Japanese group managed to kill a dozen people on the Tokyo subway system at rush hour. While
tragic, the attack was hardly the stuff of apocalyptic nightmares. Super-weapons are simply not easy for even the most sophisticated
non-state actors to use.31 If terrorists were able to overcome the substantial obstacles and use the most destructive weapons in a
densely populated area, the outcome would of course be terrible for those unfortunate enough to be nearby. But we should not operate
under the illusion that doomsday would arrive. Modern industrialised countries can cope with disasters, both natural and man-made.
As unpleasant as such events would be, they do not represent existential threats. Responsibility lies with those who ought to know
better The American public can be forgiven for being afraid of nuclear-, biological-or chemical-armed terrorists, since the messages
they have been receiving from US leaders have been uniformly apocalyptic, informed by worst-case thinking. The responsibility for
this pathological fear lies with those who ought to know better - who know, for instance, that plastic sheeting and duct tape are not
realistic protections against anything, but who recommend their stockpiling anyway.

Terrorists can kill people

and scare many more, but the localised damage they can cause is by itself
incapable of changing the character of Western civilisation. Only the people
of the West, largely through their own overreaction, can accomplish that.
While US analysts spend time worrying about such events, it is worth recalling that the diplomats of any prior age would likely have

been quite grateful to have our problems in lieu of their own. Today's security debate often seems to be driven less by actual threats
than vague, unnamed dangers. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld warned about 'unknown unknowns': the threats 'we
don't know we don't know', which 'tend to be the difficult ones'.32 Kristol and Kagan worry that if the United States fails to remain
highly engaged, the international system 'is likely to yield very real external dangers, as threatening in their own way as the Soviet
Union was a quarter century ago'.33 What exactly these dangers are is left open to interpretation.

In the absence of

identifiable threats, the unknown can provide us with an enemy, one whose
power is limited only by the imagination . This is what Benjamin Friedman and Harvey Sapolsky call
'the threat of no threats', and is perhaps the most frightening danger of all.34 Even if, as folk wisdom has it, anything is possible, not
everything is plausible. Vague, generalised dangers should never be acceptable replacements for specific threats when crafting national
policy. There is no limit to the potential dangers the human mind can manufacture, but there are very definite limits to the specific
threats the world contains. 'To make any thing very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary', noted Edmund Burke. 'When
we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes.'35 The full
extent of today's dangers is not only knowable, but relatively minor. Non-security threats: liberty and prosperity Security is not the
only vital national interest, of course. Prosperity and democracy are typically items included on the short list of issues for which the
United States should be willing to fight. During the Cold War, neither could be taken for granted. The health of the US economy
would presumably have been at grave risk if the rest of the world had been swept into the communist camp. A united, hostile, Sovietled Eurasia could have posed a major threat to the United States. Embargoes or other forms of economic warfare could have proved
devastating to the US standard of living. Furthermore, as economist and political theorist (and later national security advisor) Walter
Rostow argued at the time, if totalitarian dictatorships had come to power across the world, the very survival of democracy in the
United States would have been imperiled.36 The precarious balance that every country must strike between liberty and security might
have tilted decisively toward the latter if the United States were left alone in a hostile world. It was difficult for Rostow to imagine
how American democracy could have long survived as an island in a totalitarian sea. It was therefore imperative for the United States
to oppose the spread of communism in Eurasia, to secure the future of both prosperity and liberty. The vigour with which post-Cold
War American administrations have pursued the promotion of democracy around the world might make one believe that without a
strong ally, liberty and freedom are powerless and doomed, and even under threat in the United States. One need not be convinced that
history has ended, however, to accept the notion that the collapse of communism has left no viable political challenger to democracy
and no economic alternative to free markets.37 No political ideology exists around which to rally a hostile coalition of states against
the major democratic powers. Communism and fascism, while perhaps not completely dead, are relegated to the background, and
although totalitarianism persists in some regions of the world, political legitimacy in today's international society comes from a
mandate from the masses. Even if democracy does not soon infiltrate those last bastions of illiberalism (and it might), it is not losing
ground to other forms of government. Meanwhile, 'waves' of democracy have at times swept over the world with very little direct aid
from abroad, and it is reasonable to assume that the values of liberty and freedom will endure even without US efforts to promote
them.38 In addition, although the flavours may differ, free-market capitalism is today almost universally recognised as the fastest
route to prosperity and wealth. Were a group of unfriendly governments to come to power in Eurasia, they would still find it in their
interest to maintain trade and financial relations with the United States. No state would benefit from cutting ties with the world's
largest market and producer of goods. Economic inter-dependence is, after all, a two-way street; the major trading partners of the
United States are all more dependent upon the US market than vice versa.39 As long as capitalism remains the dominant form of
economic organisation, and there is little reason to believe that any change is on the horizon, the economic danger presented by even
the most hostile of coalitions will remain extremely low. Explaining the pathology If a mismatch between perceptions of threat and
reality indeed exists in the United States, how can it be explained? If the connection between power and paranoia is an example of a
political pathology, one that compels irrational reactions and behaviour, why is it present? Potential explanations draw from structural
features of the international system; those unique to the American experience; and factors of individual psychology. Systemic-level
explanations

Since great powers have broader interests than do smaller powers,

one might expect that the lone hyperpower in a unipolar system would have
the broadest interests of all. 40 With great power comes both great flexibility to pursue a wide variety of goals
and great responsibility to affect the progression of events.

'Most countries are primarily concerned

with what happens in their neighborhoods', says

Robert

Jervis, 'but the world

is the unipole's neighborhood' .41 As interests expand, new threats appear which, if states are not careful, can
soon take on an inflated importance and inspire unnecessary action. Threats to secondary interests can rapidly be misinterpreted as
significant dangers if not kept in perspective by a constant, conscious process of evaluation.

The expansion of

interests as power grows is natural, but the interpretation of those new

interests as vital is not. Vital national interests do not change from decade
to decade, much less from administration to administration, but interest
inflation is a central aspect of foreign-policy pathology in unipolar systems .
Great powers of the past have often proved unable to disconnect vital interests from peripheral ones as expansion occurred. Newly
perceived dangers have seemed to require action, which has often taken the form of further expansion, leading to the identification of
new threats. There will never be a time when no threats can be generated by the human imagination. States can never be fully safe if
all interests are vital and all threats dire. Insecurity has no natural limits, and if not kept in check can easily lead to overexpansion,

overspending and decline.42 Historical examples are not difficult to find. Two millennia after its collapse, it is easy to forget that
insecurity contributed to the growth of the Roman Empire. Many of its most prominent conquests, from Gaul to Dacia to Iberia, were
driven not only by the desire for glory or plunder but also by the sincere belief that the populations along Rome's widening periphery
could represent a threat. Cicero observed that many Romans felt that expansion was thrust upon them, as part of a project to rid
themselves of 'frightening neighbours'.43 The fact that most of these neighbours were manifestly weaker did not matter. As its power
grew, so too did Rome's insecurity. Even Rome's most ardent defenders stop short of claiming that Roman expansion can be fully
explained with reference to virtuous, defensive motives. But prestige and financial gain were not the only motivations of Roman
strategists. As both Cicero and Virgil argued, Rome never felt safe as long as it had enemies, both real and imagined.44 The most
powerful - and in many ways safest - society in the ancient world was unconvinced that its security was assured as long as it had
neighbours. Their mere existence constituted a potential threat. Great Britain exhibited a similar level of insecurity as its power grew
throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As the boundaries of its empire expanded, new dangers constantly appeared just
over the horizon. British politicians and strategists felt that turbulence on colonial borders 'pulled them toward expansion', in the
words of historian John Galbraith.45 The notion that empire could never be safe until all potential threats were addressed encouraged
unnecessary and strength-sapping forays into such places as Afghanistan, Zululand and the Crimea. There is little doubt that the
empires of the past did have real enemies that could have been the cause of genuine security concerns.

Insecurity is only

pathological when elevated to disproportionate, irrational levels. Today the

U nited S tates faces far fewer existential dangers than did either the Roman or
British empires . American dominance is far greater, as is the strength of its pathology. State-level explanations

Given

that the geographic position of the United States occasionally allows its people the luxury of forgetting about the problems of the
world, greaterthan-average shock follows when that seeming isolation is shattered by surprise attack.46 The vast distance separating
the United States from any potential foe tends to create the preconditions for overreaction if and when its presumed safety is violated.
As a result, surprise attacks have a greater influence on the development of the national-security posture of the United States than any
other great power.47 Since the attacks of September 2001 were a major shock, one might expect a US reaction that was out of
proportion to extant threats. As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman put it, '9/11 made us stupid'.48 The liberal tradition
encourages a Manichaean worldview The United States might also be peculiarly susceptible to the insecurity pathology because of
what political scientist Louis Hartz called the 'liberal tradition' in the United States, at least as compared with those states whose
intellectual inheritances are based more squarely in the lessons of realpolitik.49 This liberal political tradition encourages a
Manichaean worldview and a simultaneous acceptance of messianic responsibilities. It is unsurprising to American liberals that their
country - a major force for good in the world - is the target of a variety of evil-doers. Islamist fundamentalist terrorists, they argue,
harbour hatred for the United States not based upon what it has done, but what it is: the world's leading voice for freedom, democracy
and modernity.50 Realists are usually somewhat more sanguine about the threats facing a state, and are by nature less prone to
exaggeration. Liberalism has been particularly influential in the White House over the past 16 years. The administration of George W.
Bush contained a number of people who inhabited the far end of the threat-perception spectrum, and who drove it in a decidedly
liberal direction. There is no doubt that the neo-conservatives, who represent a muscular version of the American liberal tradition, tend
to perceive more danger in the international system than do many other observers. Indeed, inherent in many of the definitions of
neoconservatism is a high perception of threat; it is an essential part of what differentiates a neocon from other analysts.51 The extent
to which the United States overestimates the level of danger in the world is at least in part directly related to the influence of neoconservatives both directly upon policymaking and indirectly in the marketplace of ideas. When neo-conservatives are prominent, as
they have been since the Cold War ended, either in administrations or as leading voices of the opposition, the people of the United
States are bound to feel more insecure than they actually are. The liberal tradition has helped foster a sense of moral superiority that is
a central feature of the American historical narrative. While it is normal for people to take pride in their country or culture, Americans
have long been exceptional in their exceptionalism.52 A key component of the US national self-image is moral, driven in part by the
comparative strength of religious belief in the United States: America is not only unique and essential, but good. And good cannot
exist without evil. The greater the power of good, the greater the threat it represents to evil, which will respond in diabolical ways,
employing all of the cunning and deception at its disposal. No amount of security will ever be enough to assure safety in a world beset
by the forces of darkness; as US strength grows, so too will that of Satan's minions, even if they are not always detectable. Finally, the
United States is served, or held hostage, by a 24-hour news cycle that thrives on conflict and danger. Fear is an essential component of
the business model of both CNN and Fox News, a necessary tool to keep fingers away from remote controls during commercial
breaks. Voices of reason tend to spoil the fun, and may inspire people to seek excitement elsewhere. News outlets win by presenting
stories that are more frightening, angry and simple than those of their competitors, not by supplying historical perspective and
reassurance. If no danger exists, it must be created, or at least creatively implied. Truth, as George Kennan noted, is sometimes a poor
competitor in the marketplace of ideas. 'The counsels of impatience and hatred can always be supported by the crudest and cheapest
symbols', he wrote:
For the counsels of moderation, the reasons are often intricate, rather than emotional, and difficult to explain.
And so the chauvinists of all times and places go their appointed way: plucking the easy fruits, reaping the little triumphs of the day at
the expense of someone else tomorrow, deluging in noise and filth anyone who gets in their way, dancing their reckless dance on the
prospects for human progress.53 The noise and filth produced by the American media is louder and thicker than in any other state.
Individual explanations

At least three mental processes may help account for the

overestimation of threat among US policymakers . Firstly, a number of scholars have proposed

that the creation of enemies is a natural and inevitable part of human social interaction, for both individuals and groups.54

People need enemies for their own self-image;

it is meaningless to be the good guy if there is no

corresponding bad guy. Evil will always be found, even if none exists. In the absence of clear enemies foreign policy tends to
flounder, as critics accused US foreign policy of doing in the 1990s. The attacks of 2001 merely con-firmed what many already
believed: our enemies are massing against us.

But the psychological need to have a rival does

not make a danger real . Secondly, there seems to be a tendency towards a

correlation between power and insecurity, or even paranoia, in individual
leaders .55 Time and again, people who have exhibited borderline deranged behaviour have attracted followers, solidified bases,
come to power and remained there for extended periods across a wide variety of settings. It could be there are times when paranoia is
advantageous for the would-be leader, since broad purges surely kill conspirators alongside innocents. US leaders are not autocrats, of
course, but they do enjoy an unprecedented level of power, which is virtually uncheckable by the international system. Perhaps they
too, like the dictator or the king, though not to the same degree, are affected by the destabilising effects of great power.

Finally,

security discourse itself may help explain the high level of threat
perception

in the United States. That we live in a dangerous world has become something of a truism, a shared belief in the

foreign-policy community that is rarely subjected to rational analysis. Official discourse can not only affect popular perceptions but
frame potential reactions and shape state behaviour.

Constant repetition of the idea that we live in a

dangerous world can, over time, easily lead to genuine belief, for leaders and followers
alike .56 A more rational examination of threats could therefore be useful in
altering the current conventional wisdom in both popular and strategic
circles. US leaders have repeatedly decided to raise threat levels to
encourage Americans to support otherwise unpopular policy choices . This is not
new phenomenon; H.L. Mencken observed that in order to create support for America's entry into the First World War, Woodrow
Wilson and other US liberals realised that 'the only way to make the mob fight was to scare it half to death'.57 More recently,

the

American public showed little enthusiasm for the first Gulf War until
President George H.W. Bush began injecting the threat of Iraqi nuclear
weapons into his speeches . Likewise, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Dick
Cheney were fond of arguing that a failure to attack Iraq could well result in a nuclear attack on the United States. When faced with
such choices, the American people understandably go along. Manipulation of popular perceptions by individual leaders surely
contributes to the national pathology. Stoking such fires not only has effects for the short term, raising support for otherwise
unnecessary action, but tends to do long-term damage as well. Once lit, such fires are hard to extinguish. Fear and anxiety persist long
after they are useful, and continue to drive decisions. It can prove beyond the power of more rational leaders to control them. President
Barack Obama has repeatedly demonstrated an instinct toward restraint and moderation, but time and again has decided that the
political situation requires hyperventilation, or at least that overreaction would not be costly. On a range of issues, including the
Russian incursion into Georgia, the Iranian nuclear programme and the so-called 'Underpants Bomber', Obama's instincts initially
produced measured and calm reactions, but each time, criticism from the right, and comparisons with the perceived weaknesses of the
Jimmy Carter administration, convinced him to change his reaction and become much more belligerent. Only in a deeply pathological
society is reason a synonym for weakness.

It will probably never be possible to determine the

precise explanatory power of any of these explanations, none of which are

mutually exclusive. But in the final analysis, understanding the cause is not as
urgent as recognition, treatment and cure. Policymakers would be wise to take
account of Parkinson's Law, the natural tendency to see more threats as
power grows . In unipolar systems, the dominant state sees more monsters in need
of destruction than do lesser states. Unnecessary ventures follow,
accompanied by overextension, overspending and eventual decline .
tendency to identify more threats as power increases is one of the natural levelling forces of international politics.

Perhaps this

Unless US

leaders wish to see the unipolar moment end sooner than need be, they
must recognise that the threats they perceive are generally less dire than
they appear . The pathological , exaggerated sense of threat among many Americans is potentially harmful to
the future of the country and the world. Born in irrationality, it

inspires equally irrational actions,

many of which are costly beyond any possible benefit . With a new administration in power

and serious economic uncertainty gripping the nation, one can hope that the American public will be receptive to a more reasonable
conception of danger, now that it has seen the results of overreaction. As with alcoholics, sometimes a nation must hit rock bottom
before it sees the need to make drastic changes. Iraq should be that rock bottom for America. If the consequences lead the United
States to return to its traditional, restrained grand strategy, then perhaps the whole experience will not have been in vain.

2NC Hegemony AT War Decreasing (Pinker)

Wars increasing

Hadley 11
Editor of History Today Kathryn, Alarming increase in wars, July, http://www.historytoday.com/blog/2011/07/alarming-increasewars

New research by Professors Mark Harrison from the University of Warwick and Nikolaus Wolf from Humboldt University has
revealed that between 1870 and 2001, the frequency of wars between states increased steadily by 2% a year
on average. Between 1870 and 1913, the frequency of pairwise conflicts (the numbers of pairs of countries involved in conflicts)
increased on average by 6% per year. The frequency of wars increased by 17% per year in the period of the First and Second World
Wars, and by 31% per year during the Cold War. In the 1990s, the frequency of wars between states rose by 36% per year. Professor
Mark Harrison explained how: The number of conflicts has been rising on a stable trend. Because of two world
wars, the pattern is obviously disturbed between 1914 and 1945 but remarkably, after 1945 the frequency of wars resumed its upward
course on pretty much the same path as before 1913. The graph below illustrates this increase in pairwise conflicts. It only includes
wars between states and does not include civil wars. Conflicts range from full-scale shooting wars and uses of
military force to displays of force (sending warships and closing borders, for example). Although Harrison and
Wolfs study does not measure the intensity of violence, it reflects the readiness of governments to settle disputes
by force.

Pinkers analysis is useless entirely ignores role of population growth, which accounts for all of the
change he cites

Flynn 12/7
Julian Flynn, Financial Times, Angel thesis hangs on overpopulation, December 7, 2011, http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/30bf527c1cfb-11e1-a134-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1h1lHx8gS
Sir, Gideon Rachmans article The long shadow of the 1930s (Comment, November 29) refers to Steven Pinkers new book,
The Better Angels of Our Nature, which makes

the case that, statistically, humans have become less violent

deals with percentages of the global population. For example, his
book states that the second world war ranks as only the ninth worst atrocity in history.
Because he deals with percentages of the global population, his thesis absolutely
over the course of history. Mr Pinker

depends on the exponential overpopulation of our species . The total of 50m-plus

second world war

dead

only seems smaller because of the exponential

growth of the human population . Mr Pinkers lets be grateful for whats gone right
message depends entirely on another issue (rampant overpopulation) which is an extremely
serious sword of Damocles hanging over our planet.

2NC Hegemony AT Statistics

Unipolarity is not peaceful statistics prove

Montierro 12, Nuno Montierro, assistant prof of political science at Yale, Unrest Assured,
http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/files/Unrest_Assured.pdf
How well, then, does the argument that unipolar

systems are peaceful account for the first

two decades of unipolarity since the end of the Cold War? Table 1 presents a list of great powers
divided into three periods: 1816 to 1945, multipolarity; 1946 to 1989, bipolarity; and since 1990, unipolarity.46 Table 2
presents summary data about the incidence of war during each of these periods. Unipolarity is the most

conflict prone of all the systems, according to at least two important criteria: the percentage of
years that great powers spend at war and the incidence of war involving great powers . In
multipolarity, 18 percent of great power years were spent at war. In bipolarity, the ratio is 16 percent. In unipolarity,
however, a remarkable 59 percent of great power years until now were spent at war. This is by
far the highest percentage in all three systems. Furthermore, during periods of multipolarity and
bipolarity, the probability that war involving a great power would break out in any given year was,
respectively, 4.2 percent and 3.4 percent. Under unipolarity, it is 18.2 percentor more than four
times higher.47 These figures provide no evidence that unipolarity is peaceful.48 In sum, the argument that
unipolarity makes for peace is heavily weighted toward interactions among the most
powerful states in the system . This should come as no surprise given that Wohlforth makes a structural
argument: peace flows from the unipolar structure of international politics, not from any particular characteristic of the
unipole.49 Structural analyses of the international system are usually centered on interactions between great powers.50
As Waltz writes, The theory, like the story, of international politics is written in terms of the great powers of an era.51 In
the sections that follow, however, I show that in the case of unipolarity, an investigation of its

peacefulness must consider potential causes of conflict beyond interactions between the
most important states in the system.

2NC Hegemony AT Deterrence

First the assumptions about rationality that underlie deterrence are incorrectmiscalculation
ensures breakdown and conflict.
Krieger 2K,

David Krieger, President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, holds a Ph.D. in
Political Science from the University of Hawaii, 2000 (The Irrationality of Deterrence: A
Modern Zen Koan, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, April 7th, Available Online at
http://www.wagingpeace.org/articles/2000/04/ 07_krieger_irrationality.htm, Accessed
01-20-2006)
The concept of deterrence, which underlies the nuclear weapons policies of the United States and other nuclear
weapons states, presupposes human rationality in all cases. It is based upon the proposition
that a rational person will not attack you if he understands that his country will be
subject to unacceptable damage by retaliation. What rational person would want his
country to be exposed to unacceptable damage? Perhaps one who miscalculates. A
rational person could believe that he could take action X, and that would not be sufficient
for you to retaliate. Saddam Hussein, for example, believed that he could invade Kuwait
without retaliation from the United States. He miscalculated, in part because he had been
misled by the American Ambassador to Iraq who informed him that the US would not
retaliate. Misinformation, misunderstanding, or misconstruing information could lead a
rational person to miscalculate. We don't always get our information straight, and we
seldom have all of the facts.
Second this is a decision-rulethe bloody game of accounting that undergirds deterrence is
morally bankrupt and justifies mass murder.
Shaffer 10,

Bretigne Shaffer, writer and filmmaker, 2010 (Saving Women and Preventing
Genocide: The Real Reasons Were in Afghanistan Now, LewRockwell.com, August
10th, Available Online at http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig5/shaffer-br7.1.1.html,
Accessed 08-30-2010)
Forget all of that because really, it is beside the point. The point here is not the hypocrisy, dishonesty or even navet of
those who would support war as a means of "protecting innocents." It is the moral decrepitude of

presuming to calculate the worth of one persons life against anothers, or even to declare
that a certain number of deaths (always, someone elses death) are "acceptable" by virtue
of preventing more deaths. The reality is that this kind of exercise can never be anything more
than an intellectual parlor game. As a practical matter, there is never any certainty about
how many will or will not die if a given course of action is taken . Of course no-one could
have known with any certainty how many people would die after the US pullout from
Vietnam any more than anyone could have known with certainty that the US bombing
campaign in Cambodia would eventually lead to the deaths of 12 million Cambodians at
the hands of the Khmer Rouge. No matter how good the information is, one is ultimately dealing in
the realm of speculation. But more to the point, if one murder can be justified in this way, then
so can a thousand. And then a million. It soon becomes a silly, bloody game of
accounting where after a point the numbers become meaningless and there is just one group
of savages pitted against another, with nothing to distinguish them but perhaps a
marginally lower body count, or slightly less stomach-churning methods of torture.

2NC Hegemony AT Kagan

Kagans analysis of hegemony ensures perpetual war
Bialasiewicz et al 7 Luiza Bialasiewicz a, David Campbell b, Stuart Elden b, Stephen Graham b, Alex Jeffrey c, Alison J.
Williams a Department of Geography, Royal Holloway University of London, United Kingdom b International Boundaries Research
Unit, Geography Department, Durham University, Durham, DH1 3LE, United Kingdom c School of Geography, Politics and
Sociology, University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, United Kingdom, Performing security: The imaginative geographies of current US
strategy Political Geography 26 (2007) 405e422, via sciencedirect.com)
Yet another of PNACs co-founders chose to remain on the outside, howevere and it is to his work that we now turn. The scribe in
question is Robert Kagan, who in June 2002 published a highly influential piece in the foreign policy journal Policy Review, later
expanded as a book (Kagan, 2003). At the time, Kagan was a political commentator for the Washington Post and a writer for a number
of conservative monthlies, and had served in the State Department from 1984 to 1998. In the early 1980s he was a member of the
Departments policy planning unit, and worked in the first Bush Administration as Secretary of State George Schultzs speechwriter.
Entitled Power and Weakness, Kagans essay detailed what he argued was the increasingly evident disparity between American
and European worldviews, particularly with regard to the conduct of international affairs. But his analysis, as we will argue

here, constituted above all a justification for American power, and its exercise wherever and however
necessary. Kagans analysis e as part of a wider understanding of the ways in which the post-Cold War
world works developed by neoconservative intellectuals e would prepare the ground, indeed, make
indispensable, US unilateralism and its doctrine of pre-emptive action. Kagans article was highly influential,
just as Fukuyamas (1989, 1992) The End of History? had been 13 years before, because of his profile within the foreign policy
establishment, and because Kagan (as Fukuyama) was speaking to friends and colleagues e and, in many ways, reiterating a set of
shared understandings. Kagans claims have been widely discussed, lauded and refuted by academics and political leaders alike (see,
for example those referenced in Bialasiewicz & Elden, 2006), so we will present them here only in brief. Kagans central claim
was that Europeans and Americans no longer share a common view of the world and, moreover, that in essential
ways they can be understood as occupying different worlds: Europe is turning away from power, or to put it a little differently, it is
moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation. And while

Europe has withdrawn into a mirage of Kantian perpetual peace, the US has no choice but to act in a
Hobbesian world of perpetual war. This state of affairs, for Kagan, is not the result of the strategic choices
of a single administration, but a persistent divide and the reflection of fundamentally different perspectives
on the world e and the role of Europe/ the US within it (Kagan, 2002: 1). Kagan spends a significant part of
his paper (and later book) analyzing what he terms the psychology of power and weakness. It is a deeply
troubling argument, for Kagan claims, at base, that Europeans believe in diplomacy and multilateralism
because they are weak: Europeans oppose unilateralism [.] because they have no capacity for unilateralism (Kagan, 2002:
7). What is more, he claims, the construction of the European paradise, the geopolitical fantasy [of] a
postmodern system [where] the age-old laws of international relations have been repealed; [where]
Europeans have stepped out of the Hobbesian world of anarchy into the Kantian world of perpetual peace
(2002: 11) was made possible only by American power which assured the Cold War peace. America
continues to hold this role because post-historical Europe will not e and cannot; the US is forced to
remain stuck in history, left to deal with the Saddams and the ayatollahs, the Kim Jong Ils and the Jiang
Zemins, leaving the happy benefits to others (2002: 16). As we have argued elsewhere, the US is thus invoked into
a number of positions: as global leader (faced with Europes failings/ withdrawal), but also the only state able, due
to its power-position, to perceive threats clearly; the only one with a Gods eye view of international affairs.
It is thus, at once, the worlds geo-politican and its geo-police; the only state with the knowledge but also
the capability to intervene.

2NC Hegemony AT Ferguson

Fergusons analysis of hegemony ensures perpetual war belief in inevitable benevolent dominance
is based on inaccurate IR assumptions
Scott Preston, B.A. Honours, Communications, University of Regina, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. Dark Age Blog 2-22- 05
http://www.darkage.ca/blog/_archives/2005/2/22/363696.html
The recent history of American interventions around the globe doesn't suggest that Mr. Ferguson's thesis has much
merit. Central America, America's erstwhile neglected "backyard" and the site of much US military and

political meddling, still lies outside the umbrella of American benevolence, languishing in the Hobbesian
gloom of that dark age that Mr. Ferguson's thesis suggests should not exist under the hegemony of the
tutelary power. Nor does the history of US military intervention in Southeast Asia inspire much confidence
in the thesis, designed as it was to bomb North Vietnam "back into the stone age", as one ferocious military planner put it -- an
objective almost realised. American government efforts to roll back or preclude social revolution and the

struggle against history in some of the darkest areas of the world seems to fly directly counter to Ferguson's
(mis)representation of affairs. What bothers me about Ferguson's damn fool either/or treatment of the
situation is that all-too-typical tendency of the modern mentality to aspire to grand abstractions of history in
the famous "25 words or less". "We tend to assume that power, like nature, abhors a vacuum" and therefore "the
struggle for mastery is both perennial and universal". That human beings might be something more than
Newtonian forces of nature living on the brink of a Hobbesian condition of "the war of all against all" just
never seems to cross their minds. They call this their "realism" and they are proud of their little realities. Mr. Ferguson
relies on the precedents of history to support his contention that "a world with no hegemon at all.... could turn out to mean a new Dark
Age of waning empires and religious fanaticism; of endemic rapine in the world's no-go zones; of economic stagnation and a retreat
by civilisation into a few fortified enclaves" (presumably something like "Fortress America" and the gated communities of

entrenched mentality in North American suburbia, paranoiac survivalist refuges from the largely fantasised
gathering Hobbesian gloom of the surrounding world and society) . However, the precedents of history offer no guide
to the unprecedented condition in which we find ourselves today, and therefore the past is no certain guide to the present or the future
(thank God). We now live in an interconnected world. This is unprecedented. Our perceptions of reality are (at
least in part) no longer guided by official gatekeepers and authorised guardians of conscience keeping watch

at the portals of the mind, despite the considerable barrage of propaganda we are daily subjected to
designed to counteract this emergent globalism of one world and one humanity (like the whole "clash of
civilisations" creed). In some ways, it truly is a Global Village, even if from inside the walls of Fortress America it might look like the
proverbial "jungle out there" (while to those of us on the outside of Fortress America peering in, it's beginning to look virtually
medieval inside those walls). Human beings are not, after all, forces of nature -- or at least, not entirely so. They speak, and
speech is super-natural. Speech is already effective power and the organisation of power, amongst other things.
Into the "vacuum of power" may global dialogue flow! Human beings may have different interests, but they are also
creatures with identical interests too, and those identical interests are what makes dialogue possible at all. It always strikes me as
suspicious how the modern "mentality" simply overlooks human speech as if it just wasn't there. It seems to offend their

"realism". Yet it is speech, and not power relations, that defines us as human beings. Where speech does not
exist, in fact, only violence can restore order amongst human beings, and a truly Hobbesian state of nature
would indeed prevail. Violence is a disease of speech. Mr. Ferguson's "power vacuum" is actually a "speech
vacuum".But the real mendacity of Ferguson's either/or proposition is the way he overlooks the situation in
the US itself. The notion that American imperialism might itself precipitate the Dark Age, which he presupposes is
already lurking beyond the walls of Fortress America, never intrudes to stain the spotlessness of his cogitations. What he
has described as the Hobbesian condition in the absence of a hegemon is really a condition of speechlessness -- the absence of
dialogue. Yet, in the US today, the Bush Administration's emphasis on unilateralism , pre-emption, rejection of dialogue,
contempt for dissenting views, the cooking of intelligence, resort to propaganda, dismissal of scientific evidence
not in conformity with policy, subordination of the universities to political objectives, the Inquisitions of the
Patriot Act, and intimidation of the press all conspire to produce the very conditions of darkness and speechlessness and atrophy of
dialogue that Ferguson claims belong only to the Hobbesian darkness "outside"! Like Robert Kaplan, who warns of The Coming
Anarchy and prescribes US imperialism, "warrior politics" and a return to the good old "pagan ethos" of the Roman emperor Tiberius,

the proposed solution conspires to produce the very barbarism and Dark Age it is alleged to ameliorate. It's
a self-devouring logic and a tautology. What lunacy! It's like the Dance of St. Vitus (and in that sense Ferguson is right.
History can indeed be a guide to the present, at least in terms of the universal madness of groupthink).

2NC Hegemony AT Thayer (Card)

Thayer is part of the military-strategic studies complex

Morrissey 2011 (John, Director of the MA in Environment, Society and Development at NUI Galway and Acting Head of
Geography, PhD (University of Exeter), "Architects of Empire: The MilitaryStrategic Studies Complex and the Scripting of US
National Security," Antipode, Vol 43, No. 2)
Bradley Thayer is the senior analyst in international and national security at the National Institute for Public Policy in Fairfax,
Virginia. For Thayer, the war on terrorism provides the opportunity to increase significantly American

military and economic power in the Middle East; it was only by invading Iraq that the United States
could reach its strategic objectives in the region; and since the US is an imperial power, it should
rightfully exert its influence in the region to bring about regional change (2003:4, 15, 19). Thayer is just one
of literally hundreds of national security experts within what can be called the militarystrategic studies
complex of the United States today. This complex is a powerful, well-funded assemblage of policy institutes, military
colleges and university departments, all with close links to the US Department of Defense and specializing in Strategic Studies
research, teaching and policy publications. Like the National Institute for Public Policy, many are located in and around Washington,
DC and northern Virginia, and in post-9/11 America their proliferation can be read as an adjunct of the ascendant Pentagon of the Bush
administration.

2NC Hegemony AT Thayer (Analytic)

Their Thayer evidence is the biggest link we could ever find. It says, and I quote Without U.S.
power, the liberal order created by the United States will end just as assuredly.
Locating the US in the values of liberal democracy creates the US as the fulcrum of the global liberal
order. The US is obligated to hunt down and eliminate any threat to its interests because they
constitute a threat to the global liberal order.
This is why we invaded Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and why we will continue to invade other lands
because this war is a never-ending psychic struggle against insecurity.
This evidence also assumes the democracy promotion is the fastest way to a better world, quote once
states are governed democratically, the likelihood of any type of conflict is significantly reduced. But
democracies arent inherently peaceful, they are just too busy waging just wars against undemocratic
nations to make them see the truth.
Their card goes on, quote Critics have faulted the Bush Administration for attempting to spread
democracy in the Middle Eastit is the obligation of Bush's critics to explain why democracy is good
enough for Western states but not for the rest, and should not even be attempted. Here he assumes
everyone should be a democracy, and if they dont choose so for themselves, it is the obligation of the
US and other western powers to extend brotherly correction. Using liberalism as a standard by
which others are judged is a way to write certain people out of the script of humanity in order to
wage just wars.

2NC Hegemony Credibility

Credibility doesnt influence reality attempts to maintain it cause bad policy and conflict.
Christopher J. Fettweis, April 2010. Assistant Professor of Political Science at Tulane University in New Orleans. Threat and
Anxiety in US Foreign Policy, Survival 52.2, Informaworld.
For individuals as well as states, pathologies - mistaken or incorrect beliefs that inspire irrational action - create their own
reality and drive behaviour accordingly. In individuals, pathologies reside in the mind, while state-level pathologies
exist as shared irrational beliefs among leaders and the public. Strategic pathologies, then, are incorrect beliefs that
drive destructive, or at least counterproductive, state behaviour. The United States suffers from several. The credibility
imperative is a clear example, one that continues to have a particularly strong influence upon the United States.7 Credibility,
when used in policy debates, is a code word for the prestige and reputation of a state; it is, in Henry Kissinger's words,
'the coin with which we conduct our foreign policy', an intangible asset that helps states influence the actions of others.8 In periods of
high credibility, policymakers believe, a state can deter and compel behaviour and accomplish goals short of war. When credibility is
low, sceptical adversaries and allies may be tempted to ignore threats and promises. To national leaders, therefore, healthy

credibility seems to be the equivalent of many armed divisions, and is worth protecting at almost any cost.
This belief rests on a shaky foundation, to put it mildly. Decades of scholarship have been unable to
produce much evidence that high credibility helps a state achieve its goals, or that low credibility makes
rivals or allies act any differently.9 Although study after study has refuted the basic assumptions of the
credibility imperative, the pathology continues to affect policymaking in the new century, inspiring new
instances of irrational, unnecessary action. The imperative, like many foreign-policy pathologies, typically inspires
belligerence in those under its spell.10 Credibility is always maintained through action, usually military action, no
matter how small the issue or large the odds. Insecurity, likewise, whether real or imagined, leads to
expansive, internationalist, interventionist grand strategies. The more danger a state perceives, the greater its
willingness to go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. The 'preventive' war in Iraq is the most obvious consequence of the inflated
US perception of threat, but is hardly the only one. America's insecurity pathology is in need of diagnosis and cure,
lest Iraq be not a singular debacle but a harbinger of other disasters to come.

Discourse supporting the theory of credibility causes escalation and war

Fettweis 2008 (Christopher, Assistant Professor in the Political Science Department at Tulane University, "Losing hurts twice as
bad: the four stages to moving beyond Iraq," Google Books)

Why would anyone, much less some of the most experienced observers of foreign policy, believe that a loss
in Iraq would cripple the U.S. ability to shape events, or lead to the downfall of our democracy, or even the
death of America? The answer lies in the continuing importance that policymakers place on the credibility of the United States.
Great powers tend to be insecure by nature. They are always quite conscious of the position they hold in the
international system, and spend much of their time and energy seeking to maintain their status. Losing prestige is as
unacceptable as losing land or treasure, partly due to loss aversion and partly because the perception of their power affects
their ability to wield it. They guard their image, therefore, at least as tightly as they do hold their gold and their land. Since few
events harm an image more than defeat at the hands of a minor power, strong countries are apt to fight on
long past the time when the end is clear. minor wars can take on a life-or-death significance for great
powers, even if their material importance is otherwise quite small, because of the implications for the national
credibility. As the primary historian of the Dutch revolt explained, Reputation, or prestige, was recognized to have tangible
influence in politics and diplomacy, and Spain feared that acknowledgement of weakness in the Netherlands would decrease her statue
as a world power. The Netherlands didn't matter; Spanish credibility, however, did. Experienced practitioners of foreign

policy take for granted the notion that actions taken today can affect (and perhaps prevent) the crisis of
tomorrow. The messages sent by foreign policy actions can sometimes seem to be more important than the actions themselves, since
other states including current and potential enemies are watching our every move, making judgments about the credibility of the U.S.
threats and promises. It is in the vital interest of the United States, therefore, to have its threats and promises
remain credible. This belief, memorably labeled the credibility imperative by the historian Robert McMahon, is quite widespread
and well established in foreign policy community. According to its logic, defeat in Iraq would deal a catastrophic blow to U.S.
credibility, which is the glue that holds the international system together. This conventional wisdom became the object of

a great deal of criticism after Vietnam, however, after the credibility imperative drove the United States to
disaster. The Soviet Union was evidently not sufficiently emboldened by the U.S. defeat and loss of credibility to increase its
adventurism in the Third World. Levels of Soviet involvement in the affairs of other countries showed little
appreciable differences in the seventies, when U.S. credibility was low, compared to the fifties and sixties,
when it was presumably much higher. In an important study, political scientist Ted Hopf examined over five
hundred articles and three hundred leadership speeches made by Soviet policymakers throughout the 1970s,

and found that their public pronouncements did not show evidence of a belief that U.S. setbacks in the
Third World signaled a lack of resolution. The most dominant inference Soviet leaders made after Vietnam, concluded Hopf,
was not about falling regional dominoes or bandwagoning American allies, but about the prospects of dtente with the United States
and Western Europe. Soviet behavior did not change, despite the perception of irresolution that many

Americans feared would inspire increased belligerence. Relative levels of credibility made little difference.

2NC Hegemony- Power Vacuum

Power vacuums rhetoric makes intervention and power politics inevitable

Shimko, professor of political science at Purdue, 2004 p. 205-206

(Keith, in Metaphorical World Politics ed. By Beer and Landtsheer)

Yet another tried and true geopolitical metaphor is the concept of the "power vacuum." This
wauld also be mobilized at various junctures during the Cold War. President Eisenhower (who
appears to have had a particular fondness for geopolitical metaphors) observed after the 1956 Suez
crisis that "the existing vacuum in the Middle East must be filled by the United States before it is
filled by Russia."19 The metaphor of the power vacuum is .. a prime example af what I call a
metaphor of power: it embodies a concep tion of how the world works that is
conducive to the exercise of great (pawer. Like many influential geopolitical metaphors, this
one is drawn \ from the natural, physical, and biological sciences. Such metaphors imply .ithat
the social world of international relatians operates according to certain :::laws, such as
the laws of physics. Perhaps such analogies are so common because they provide a
comforting vision of predictability for an unpre.dictable world . It is a world in which

nations and decision makers are oddly robbed of volition and agency (and, thus,
moral responsibility?). Natlire abhors a vacuum. Vacuums will be filled; they will draw things
in. This is inevitable and inexorable. As Eisenhower insists, the vacuum must" be filled. If it
is not filled by the United States, it will be filled by the ;oviet Union: these are the only two aptions.
And since it is a vacuum of 6wer, who else can fill it except those who possess power-for example,
the United States. The notion that there exists these things called power vacuums that

must be filled is a metaphor of power because it presents an understanding of how the

world works that almost inevitably leads to the conclusion that those with power must
expand to fill the vacuums. In filling power vacuums we are only doing what must inevitably be
done-in fact, it is the vacuum itself that is to blame because it "draws" in power (and,
thus, the powerful). The metaphor, of course, hides the obvious objection to the analysis and
conclusion: perhaps no one has to "fill" the "vacuum" because it is not in fact a "vacuum" at all.

Alternative

General
By asserting our agency as political beings within the exclusionary field of
international relations we can challenge the discursive dominance of security and
open new possibilities for inter-subjective ethics. Dont allow debate to be nothing
more than a space for the ritual repetition of the tropes of statehood and sovereignty
vote not Aff
Burke, School of Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland 2002 [Anthony, Alternatives 27]

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

Discourse Impact
Security discourse makes extinction inevitable
Dillon 96 (Michael, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Lancaster,
The Politics of Security)
To put it crudely, and ignoring for the moment Heidegger's so-called `anti humanist' (he thought
'humanism' was not uncannily human enough) hostility to the anthropocentrism of Western thought. As the
real prospect of human species extinction is a function of how human being has come to dwell
in the world, then human being has a pressing reason to reconsider, in the most ordinary way
possible, notwithstanding other arguments that may be advanced for doing so, the derivation of its
understanding of what it is to dwell in the world, and how it should comport itself if it is to continue to do so.
Such a predicament ineluctably poses two fundamental and inescapable questions about both Philosophy
and politics back to philosophy and politics and of the relation between them: first, if such is their end, what
must their origins have been? Second, in the midst of all that is, in Precisely what does the creativity of new
beginnings inhere and how can it be preserved, celebrated and extended? No matter how much we
may want to elide these questions, or, alternatively, provide a whole series of edifying answers to them,
human beings cannot ignore them, ironically, even if they remain anthropocentric in their concerns,
if they wish to survive. Our present does not allow it. This joint regress of the philosophical and the
political to the very limits of their thinking and of their possibility therefore brings the guestion of
Being (which has been the question of philosophy, even though it has always been directed towards beings
in the answers it has offered) into explicit conjunction with the question of the political once more through
the attention it draws to the ontological difference between Being and beings, and emphasizes the abiding
reciprocity that exists between them. We now know that neither metaphysics nor our politics of
security can secure the security of truth and of life which was their reciprocating raison d'66tre
(and, raison d'etat). More importantly, we now know that the very will to security - the will to
power of sovereign presence in both metaphysics and modern politics - is not only a prime
incitement to violence in the Western tradition of thought, and to the globalization of its
(inter)national politics, but also self-defeating; in that it does not in its turn merely endanger, but
actually engenders danger in response to its own discursive dynamic . One does not have to be
persuaded of the destinal sending of Being, therefore, to be persuaded of the profundity - and of the
profound danger- of this the modern human condition.

Reps First
Questions of representations come first the way we discuss policy is more
important than the policy itself.
Roxanne Lynn Doty, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Arizona State
University, 1996 (Imperial Encounters: The Politics of Representation in North-South Relations,
University of Minnesota Press, Borderlines Series, ISBN 0816627622, p. 5-6)
This study begins with the premise that representation is an inherent and important aspect of
global political life and therefore a critical and legitimate area of inquiry. International relations
are inextricably bound up with discursive practices that put into circulation representations that
are taken as "truth." The goal of analyzing these practices is not to reveal essential truths that
have been obscured, but rather to examine how certain representations underlie the production of
knowledge and identities and how these representations make various courses of action possible.
As Said (1979: 21) notes, there is no such thing as a delivered presence, but there is a represence, or representation. Such an assertion does not deny the existence of the material world,
but rather suggests that material objects and subjects are constituted as such within discourse.
So, for example, when U.S. troops march into Grenada, this is certainly "real," though the march
of troops across a piece of geographic space is itself singularly uninteresting and socially
irrelevant outside of the representations that produce meaning. It is only when "American" is
attached to the troops and "Grenada" to the geographic space that meaning is created. What the
physical behavior itself is, though, is still far from certain until discursive practices constitute it
as an "invasion," a "show of force," a "training exercise," a "rescue," and so on. What is "really"
going on in such a situation is inextricably linked to the discourse within which it is located. To
attempt a neat separation between discursive and nondiscursive practices, understanding the
former as purely linguistic, assumes a series of dichotomiesthought/reality,
appearance/essence, mind/matter, word/world, subjective/objectivethat a critical genealogy
calls into question. Against this, the perspective taken here affirms the material and
performative character of discourse. 6 In suggesting that global politics, and specifically the
aspect that has to do with relations between the North and the South, is linked to representational
practices I am suggesting that the issues and concerns that constitute these relations occur within
a "reality" whose content has for the most part been defined by the representational practices of
the "first world." Focusing on discursive practices enables one to examine how the processes
that produce "truth" and "knowledge" work and how they are articulated with the exercise of
political, military, and economic power.

Security rhetoric shapes how we view the worldwe need to reject these discourses
completely.
Lott 4 (Anthony D., Assistant Professor at St. Olaf College, Creating Insecurity: Realism,
Constructivism, and US Security Policy, Critical Security)
In what will initially appear somewhat controversial, I propose we come to understand
constructivism by differentiating two aspects of the approach. First, we might consider a general
constructivist epistemology as a necessary prerequisite to a coherent analysis of security. This
portion of the security process has been suggested to us in the framework outlined by Buzan,
Waever, and de Wilde. Their understanding of constructivism suggests its role in recognizing how
language defines the world in which actors live. Accepting this point, we can envision a
constructivist umbrella over the discussion that follows. It is important to recognize how this
epistemological constructivism challenges our ability to understand security issues. Unlike
realists, we are unable to speak of real security threats. Securitization is a practice that brings about
broad recognition of a threat. The specific act of labeling something a threat makes it real-but
we have no gods eye position as analysts, to critique the existential merit of that specific
speech-act. Taken to the extreme, this would lead to security relativism. But Buzan, Waever, and de
Wilde insist that such a position need not be taken. The concept of security, like all concepts, is

intersubjective in nature. Simply because one actor demands we see a particular act as
relating to security does not mean that is is securitized. Speech-acts require the implicit or
explicit acceptance of a host of actors to be deemed plausible. Further, specific actions might
be security threats even when prominent actors refuse to label them so. The rise of Hitlers
Germany presents a classic example. At what point is Hitler a threat to Europe: in 1936 when he
reoccupies the Rhineland, in 1938 when he creates the Anschluss, in 1939 with the invasion of
Poland, or at another point between his rise and the beginning of the War? While a debate would
seem inevitable, realists are content with recognizing that Hitler is a real security threat. Whether he
is labeled so or not, Hitlers Germany represents an existential threat to international peace and
security- a claim that on the face of it would seem to undermine the securitization argument and
the form or epistemological constructivism advocated here. However, as will at stake at the
epistemological level is not what constitutes a security threat but how that threat becomes
known to actors.

Their construction of the world is reliant upon their discursive understanding of itwe need to analyze representations before we can look to policies.
Lott 4 (Anthony D, Assistant Professor at St Olaf College in Northfield, USA. Creating Insecurity:
Realism, Constructivism, and US Security Policy Critical Security Series.)
At the most general level of a security analysis it is necessary to recognize the role that language
plays in the process of threat construction and the collective feelings of insecurity. The objectivist
features of traditional security studies rest on shaky epistemological foundations. The
materialist ontology and empiricist epistemology that pervade neo-realism seek to understand
real threats and dangers that exist in an extra-linguistic universe. Against this approach, we can
agree with Buzan, Waever, and de Wilde that security issues are made so by acts of securitization.
While the language they employ is somewhat difficult, their understanding of the importance of
speech-acts is central to the development of a coherent security analysis. Emphasizing the
constructed nature of our world, these authors do much to influence the direction of security
studies. They articulate an understanding of security threats that recognizes the central role
played by human interpretation in their creation. We do not try to peek behind this to decide
whether it is really a threat (which would reduce the entire securitization approach to a theory of
perceptions and misperceptions). Security is a quality actors inject into issues by securitizing
them, which means to stage them on the political arenaand then to have them accepted by a
sufficient audience to sanction extraordinary defensive moves. Here, we can be even more direct. It
is not simply that we do not try to peek behind particular threats to decide whether they warrant
such a label, it is the impossibility of such an endeavor that sets for us the parameters of our security
framework. Here, Nicholas Onuf is most clear: [we] are always within our constructions, even as
we choose to stand apart from them, condemn them, reconstruct them. Similarly, Karin Fierke
writes, we connot get behind our language to compare it with that which it describes. In a
very real and meaningful way the limits of our language define the limits of our threats.

Representations shape our understanding of the world- we cant implement effective

policies without analyzing the discursive implications.
Securitizing discourse lays the groundwork for securitization on a national level
Klaebel 8 (Alan, "Imagining the Day after Tomorrow - Popular Culture, Legitimation, and Environmental Securitization" Paper presented at the
annual meeting of the International Studies Association 48th Annual Convention)

This paper investigates the link between popular culture, cultural legitimacy, and the prospects for
the success of securitizing moves particularly as it pertains to environmental security. It will be
argued that similarly to security discourses, popular culture frames an uncertain future by presenting
a limited horizon of expectation it turns particular possibilities of future existence into certainties
in the present. Furthermore, the case will be made that as texts, security discourses and popular
culture forms a symbiotic relation where they lend each other credibility and authority. If

these assertions are correct it means that people are being primed for securitizing moves
through pop-cultural exposure. Indeed, it means that any construction of a security
object/issue is dependent upon this preconditioning for its success. In order to make the case
concerning the connection between popular culture, legitimation, and environmental securitization,
the paper will present a number of social theories. The baseline argument is the Copenhagen School
understanding of security as socially constituted. Furthermore, the paper emphasize that security
always concerns future projections. And according to Paul Ricoeur, such temporal projections
necessarily take the format of a narrative employment, that is, as a story of the future.
Accordingly, security discourses share a structural similarity as text with popular culture that
also tells stories. This links the discussion to the theory of intertextual relations. According to
the idea of intertextuality, any text (such as the environmental security discourse) is read in
relation to, not in isolation from, other texts. That means that the acceptance or rejection of a
security discourse is dependent on its resonance in other texts, including popular cultural texts.
In other words, it is argued that any securitization must take place within a social field already
constituted by a process of legitimation that designates the scope of meaningful action.
Following the same logic, it is argued that securitizing discourses can piggyback on popular
culture, which makes it easier to pass the threshold that divides normal policy from security
policy. This I would argue presents a significant democratic challenge in this age of risk
societies and wars on terror.

Representations, not rational action, cause violence

Der Derian 2 (James, Professor of International Relations at Brown University and Professor of Political Science at
UMASS/Amherst, War as Game, http://ics.leeds.ac.uk/papers/pmt/exhibits/1066/DerDerian.pdf)

The charge of moral equivalencyin which any attempt at explanation is identified as an act of
exonerationshould not deter investigations into the dangers of the mimetic relationships operating
in war and games. People go to war not only out of rational calculation but also because of how
they see, perceive, picture, imagine, and speak of each other: that is, how they construct the
difference of other groups as well as the sameness of their own. Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein
are not the first to mine this act of mimesis for political advantage. From Greek tragedy and Roman
gladiatorial spectacles to futurist art and fascist rallies, mimetic violence has regularly
overpowered democratic discourse. The question, then, is how long after Baghdad has fallen will
this mimetic game of terror and counter-terror last? Bush, Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein need
their mimetic foesit takes two to play. Without a reciprocal hatred, their politics and prophecies
lose their self-fulfilling powers. Historically, terrorist movements either evolve into states, or,
without a mass base, they quickly weaken and rarely last longer than a decade. And empires
inevitably, by over-reach or defeat, fall. However, this mimetic struggle, magnified by the media,
fought by advanced technologies of destruction, and unchecked by the UN or U.S. allies, has now
developed a logic of its own in which assimilation or extermination become plausible solutions,
credible policies. Under such circumstances, one longs for the sure bet, a predictable unfolding of
events, or at least a comforting conclusion. "At this stage of the game" (as Schwartzkopf said in the
midst of GW1), I have none, because the currently designed game, to rid the world of evil,
cannot possibly find an end. Inevitably, what Edmund Burke called the empire of circumstance
will surely, and let us hope not too belatedly, trump Bush's imperial game as well as Bin Laden's
terrorist one. When tempted in the interim by the promise of virtuous war to solve the world's
problems, we best listen to the great Yogi: "If the world were perfect, it wouldn't be."

Ethical Obligation to Vote Neg

Securitization is a justification for the death and suffering
of the Other a priori ethical obligation to vote neg
Burke 07 [Anthony Burke, Senior Lecturer at School of Politics & IR at Univ. of New South Wales,
2007 (Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence, 36, Accessed on August 26, 2013)]
In short, this and other chapters suggest that our understanding of how power produces, takes hold
of and utilizes life must be more complex than Agamben's imagery of life in the camps reduced to
'bare life', as revealing as it is in many contexts. Mitchell Dean's comment that perhaps 'we are all

homo sacer' - that the 'bare life which constituted the sover- eign exception [has begun] to
enter a zone of indistinction with our moral and political life and with the fundamental
presuppositions of polit- ical community' - is an intriguing expansion of Agamben's thinking, but it
nonetheless portrays us as potential victims of our own societies (which is certainly a
possibility),30 However, what if we are simultaneously beneficiaries of such power, or perceive ourselves
as such? Hence the need to understand the production and seizure of life by power, beneath
the overarching promise of security, in more complex ways. We need to understand how the
living are created, organized and utilized by forms of social, political and economic power in
diverse and differentiated ways, not all of them coercive or unpleasant; how the living are
conceived as resources for use and exploitation; and how death and suffering can
then be seen as necessary and productive, as perhaps regrettable but not immoral.
In short, we need to understand how the pain and annihilation of some can be the condition
of existence and happiness for others. It is this insight that Beyond Security, Ethics and
Violence takes up as --a central theme and focus of critique: how the dreams of
security , pros- perity and freedom hinge, from their earliest conceptualizations to the
contemporary politics of the national security state, on the insecurity and dying of

others . Our societies run, prosper and survive - however danger- ously and dysfunctional - on the
back of a political economy of death and suffering that is embedded and legitimized in our
most basic ethical and political ideals.
Our criticism proceeds the affirmative- the racialized logic of securitization upon which the plan
relies is the root of their harms claims -- You have an ethical obligation to oppose this frame.
Roxanne Doty, Prof. of Political Science @ ASU [Woot], 1996 [Imperial Encounters: The Politics of Reprsentations in NorthSouth Relations, p. 166-71]

One of the deadly traces that has been deposited in our current "reality" and that figures prominently in this
study is "race." The inventory of this trace has been systematically ignored by international relations
scholarship. It seems fair to suggest that most international relations scholars as well as makers of foreign
policy would suggest that "race" is not even a relevant issue in global politics. Some might concede that
while "race" may have been a significant factor internationally during particular historical periods-as a
justification for colonialism, for example - "we" are past that now. The racial hierarchy that once prevailed
internationally simply no longer exists. To dwell upon "race" as an international issue is an unproductive,
needless rehash of history. Adlai Stevenson rather crudely summed up this position when he complained
that he was impatiently waiting for the time "when the last black-faced comedian has quit preaching about
colonialism so the United Nations could move on to the more crucial issues like disarmament" (quoted in
Noer 1985: 84). This view is unfortunately, although subtly, reflected in the very definition of the field of
international relations, whose central problems and categories have been framed in such a way as to
preclude investigation into categories such as "race" that do not fit neatly within the bounds of prevailing
conceptions of theory and explanation and the legitimate methods with which to pursue them. As Walker
(1989) points out, current international relations research agendas are framed within an understanding that
presumes certain ontological issues have been resolved. Having already resolved the questions of the "real"

and relevant entities, international relations scholars generally proceed to analyze the world with an eye
toward becoming a "real science." What has been defined as "real" and relevant has not included race. As
this study suggests, however, racialized identities historically have been inextricably linked with power,
agency, reason, morality, and understandings of "self" and "other."' When we invoke these terms in certain
contexts, we also silently invoke traces of previous racial distinctions. For example, Goldberg (1993: 164)
suggests that the conceptual division of the world whereby the "third world" is the world of tradition,
irrationality, overpopulation, disorder, and chaos assumes a racial character that perpetuates, both
conceptually and actually, relations of domination, subjugation, and exclusion. Excluding the issue of
representation enables the continuation of this and obscures the important relationship between
representation, power, and agency. The issue of agency in international affairs appears in the literature in
various ways, ranging from classical realism's subjectivist privileging of human agents to neorealism's
behavioralist privileging of the state as agent to the more recent focus on the "agent-structure problem" by
proponents of structuration theory (e.g., Wendt [19871, Dessler 119891). What these accounts have in
common is their exclusion of the issue of representation. The presumption is made that agency ultimately
refers back to some prediscursive subject, even if that subject is socially constructed within the context of
political, social, and economic structures. In contrast, the cases examined in this study suggest that the
question of agency is one of how practices of representation create meaning and identities and thereby
create the very possibility for agency. As Judith Butler (1990: 142-49) makes clear and as the empirical
cases examined here suggest, identity and agency are both effects, not preexisting conditions of being. Such
an antiessentialist understanding does not depend upon foundational categories -an inner psychological self,
for example. Rather, identity is reconceptualized as simultaneously a practice and an effect that is always in
the process of being constructed through signifying practices that expel the surplus meanings that would
expose the failure of identity as such. For example, through a process of repetition, U.S. and British
discourses constructed as natural and given the oppositional dichotomy between the uncivilized, barbaric
"other" and the civilized, democratic "self" even while they both engaged in the oppression and
brutalization of "others." The Spector of the "other" was always within the "self." The proliferation of
discourse in times of crisis illustrates an attempt to expel the "other," to make natural and unproblematic the
boundaries between the inside and the outside. This in turn suggests that identity and therefore the agency
that is connected with identity are inextricably linked to representational practices. It follows that any
meaningful discussion of agency must perforce be a discussion of representation. The representational
practices that construct particular identities have serious ramifications for agency. While this study suggests
that "race" historically has been a central marker of identity, it also suggests that identity construction takes
place along several dimensions. Racial categories often have worked together with gendered categories as
well as with analogies to parent/child oppositions and animal metaphors. Each of these dimensions has
varying significance at different times and enables a wide variety of practices. In examining the
construction of racialized identities, it is not enough to suggest that social identities are constructed on the
basis of shared understandings within a community: shared understandings regarding institutional rules,
social norms, and selfexpectations of individuals in that community. It is not enough to examine the shared
social criteria by which one identity is distinguished from another. Two additional elements must be
considered: power and truth. "Race" has not just been about certain rules and resources facilitating the
agency of some social groups and denying or placing severe limitations on the agency of other social
groups. Though it has been about these things, this is only one aspect of what "race" has historically been
about. "Race" has most fundamentally been about being human. Racist discourses historically have
constructed different kinds and degrees of humanness through representational practices that have claimed
to be and have been accepted as "true" and accurate representations of "reality." Racist discourses highlight,
perhaps more than any other, the inextricable link between power and truth or power and knowledge. A
theory of agency in international relations, if it is to incorporate issues such as "race," must address the
relationship between power and truth. This realization in turn implies a reconceptualization of power and
how it works that transcends those present in existing theories of international relations. The cases examined in this
study attest to the importance of representational practices and the power that inheres in them. The infinity of traces
that leave no inventory continue to play a significant part in contemporary constructions of "reality." This is not to
suggest that representations have been static. Static implies the possibility of fixedness, when what I mean to suggest is
an inherent fragility and instability to the meanings and identities that have been constructed in the various discourses I
examined. For example, to characterize the South as "uncivilized" or "unfit for self-government" is no longer an
acceptable representation. This is not, however, because the meanings of these terms were at one time fixed and stable.
As I illustrated, what these signifiers signified was always deferred. Partial fixation was the result of their being
anchored by some exemplary mode of being that was itself constructed at the power/ knowledge nexus: the white male

at the turn of the century, the United States after World War II. Bhabha stresses "the wide range of the stereotype, from
the loyal servant to Satan, from the loved to the hated; a shifting of subject positions in the circulation of colonial
power" (1983: 31). The shifting subject positions-from uncivilized native to quasi state to traditional "man" and society,
for example -are all partial fixations that have enabled the exercise of various and multiple forms of power. Nor do
previous oppositions entirely disappear. What remains is an infinity of traces from prior representations that themselves
have been founded not on pure presences but on differance. "The present becomes the sign of the sign, the trace of the
trace," Derrida writes (1982: 24). Differance makes possible the chain of differing and deferring (the continuity) as well
as the endless substitution (the discontinuity) of names that are inscribed and reinscribed as pure presence, the center of
the structure that itself escapes structurality. North-South relations have been constituted as a structure of deferral. The
center of the structure (alternatively white man, modern man, the United States, the West, real states) has never been
absolutely present outside a system of differences. It has itself been constituted as trace-the simulacrum of a presence
that dislocates itself, displaces itself, refers itself (ibid.). Because the center is not a fixed locus but a function in which
an infinite number of sign substitutions come into play, the domain and play of signification is extended indefinitely
(Derrida 1978: z8o). This both opens up and limits possibilities, generates alternative sites of meanings and political
resistances that give rise to practices of reinscription that seek to reaffirm identities and relationships. The inherently
incomplete and open nature of discourse makes this reaffirmation an ongoing and never finally completed project. In
this study I have sought, through an engagement with various discourses in which claims to truth have been

staked, to challenge the validity of the structures of meaning and to make visible their complicity with
practices of power and domination. By examining the ways in which structures of meaning have been
associated with imperial practices, I have suggested that the construction of meaning and the construction
of social, political, and economic power are inextricably linked. This suggests an ethical dimension to
making meaning and an ethical imperative that is incumbent upon those who toil in the construction of
structures of meaning. This is especially urgent in North-South relations today: one does not have to search
very far to find a continuing complicity with colonial representations that ranges from a politics of silence
and neglect to constructions of terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism, international drug trafficking, and
Southern immigration to the North as new threats to global stability and peace. The political stakes raised
by this analysis revolve around the question of being able to "get beyond" the representations or speak
outside of the discourses that historically have constructed the North and the South. I do not believe that
there are any pure alternatives by which we can escape the infinity of traces to which Gramsci refers. Nor
do I wish to suggest that we are always hopelessly imprisoned in a dominant and all-pervasive discourse.
Before this question can be answered-indeed, before we can even proceed to attempt an answer-attention
must be given to the politics of representation. The price that international relations scholarship pays for its
inattention to the issue of representation is perpetuation of the dominant modes of making meaning and
deferral of its responsibility and complicity in dominant representations.

Rejection
Our alternative is to reject traditional conceptions of security.
This is crucial to open space for emancipatory perspectivesour critique is
mutually exclusive with the aff.
Pinar Bilgin, Associate Professor of International Relations at Bilkent University (Turkey), 2005
(Conclusion, Regional Security in the Middle East: A Critical Perspective, Published by Routledge,
ISBN 0415325498, p. 205-207)
Emphasising the mutually interactive relationship between intellectuals and social movements
should not be taken to suggest that the only way for intellectuals to make a change is to get
directly involved in political action. They can also intervene by providing a critique of the
existing situation, calling attention to what future outcomes may result if necessary action is not
taken at present, and by pointing to potential for change immanent in regional politics. Students
of security could help create the political space for alternative agents of security to take action
by presenting appropriate critiques. It should be emphasised however that such thinking should
be anchored in the potential immanent in world politics. The hope is that non-state actors (who
may or may not be aware of their potential to make a change) may constitute themselves as
agents of security when presented with an alternative reading of their situation. Thinking about
the future becomes even more crucial once theory is [end page 205] conceptualised as
constitutive of the 'reality' it seeks to respond to. In other words, our ideas about the future - our
conjectures and prognoses - have a self-constitutive potential. What the students of Cold War
Security Studies consider as a more 'realistic' picture of the future becomes 'real' through
practice, albeit under circumstances inherited from the past. Thinking about what a 'desired'
future would look like is significant for the very same reason; that is, in order to be able to turn it
into a 'reality' through adopting emancipatory practices. For, having a vision of a 'desired' future
empowers people(s) in the present. Presenting pictures of what a 'desired' future might look like,
and pointing to the security community approach as the start of a path that could take us from an
insecure past to a more secure future is not to suggest that the creation of a security community
is the most likely outcome. On the contrary, the dynamics pointed to throughout the book
indicate that there exists a potential for descent into chaos if no action is taken to prevent
militarisation and fragmentation of societies, and the marginalisation of peoples as well as
economies in an increasingly globalising world. However, these dynamics exist as 'threats to the
future' to use Beck's terminology; and only by thinking and writing about them that can one
mobilise preventive action to be taken in the present. Viewed as such, critical approaches present
not an 'optimistic', but a more 'realistic' picture of the future. Considering how the 'realism' of
Cold War Security Studies failed not only when judged by its own standards, by failing to
provide an adequate explanation of the world 'out there', but also when judged by the standards
of critical approaches, as it was argued, it could be concluded that there is a need for more
'realistic' approaches to regional security in theory and practice. The foregoing suggests three
broad conclusions. First, Cold War Security Studies did not present the 'realistic' picture it
purported to provide. On the contrary, the pro-status quo leanings of the Cold War security
discourse failed to allow for (let alone foresee) changes such as the end of the Cold War,
dissolution of some states and integration of some others. Second, notwithstanding the important
inroads critical approaches to security made in the post-Cold War era, much traditionalist
thinking remains and maintains its grip over the security practices of many actors. Third, critical
approaches offer a fuller or more adequate picture of security in different parts of the world
(including the Middle East). Cold War Security Studies is limited not only because of its narrow
(military-focused), pro-status quo and state-centric (if not statist) approach to security in theory
and practice, but also because of its objectivist conception of theory and the theory/practice
relationship that obscured the mutually constitutive relationship between them. Students of
critical approaches have sought to challenge Cold War Security Studies, its claim to knowledge
and its hold over security practices by pointing to the mutually constitutive relationship between
theory and practice and revealing [end page 206] how the Cold War security discourse has been

complicit in constituting (in)security in different parts of the world. The ways in which the Cold
War security discourse helped constitute the 'Middle East' by way of representing it as a region,
and contributed to regional insecurity in the Middle East by shaping security practices, is
exemplary of the argument that 'theories do not leave the world untouched'. The implication of
these conclusions for practice is that becoming aware of the 'politics behind the geographical
specification of politics' and exploring the relationship between (inventing) regions and
(conceptions and practices of) security helps reveal the role human agency has played in the past
and could play in the future. An alternative approach to security, that of critical approaches to
security, could inform alternative (emancipatory) practices thereby helping constitute a new
region in the form of a security community. It should be noted, however, that to argue that
'everything is socially constructed' or that 'all approaches have normative concerns embedded in
them' is a significant first step that does not by itself help one adopt emancipatory practices . As
long as people rely on traditional practices shaped by the Cold War security discourse - which
remains prevalent in the post-Cold War era - they help constitute a 'reality' in line with the tenets
of 'realist' Cold War Security Studies. This is why seeking to address evolving crises through
traditional practices whilst leaving a critical security perspective to be adopted for the long-term
will not work. For, traditionalist thinking and practices, by helping shape the 'reality' 'out there',
foreclose the political space necessary for emancipatory practices to be adopted by multiple
actors at numerous levels. Hence the need for the adoption of a critical perspective that
emphasises the roles human agency has played in the past and could play in the future in shaping
what human beings choose to call 'reality'. Generating such an awareness of the potentialities of
human agency could enable one to begin thinking differently about regional security in different
parts of the world whilst remaining sensitive to regional actors' multiple and contending
conceptions of security, what they view as referent(s) and how they think security should be
sought in different parts of the world. After decades of statist, military-focused and zero-sum
thinking and practices that privileged the security of some whilst marginalising the security of
others, the time has come for all those interested in security in the Middle East to decide whether
they want to be agents of a world view that produces more of the same, thereby contributing
towards a 'threat to the future', or of alternative futures that try to address the multiple
dimensions of regional insecurity. The choice is not one between presenting a more 'optimistic'
or 'pessimistic' vision of the future, but between stumbling into the future expecting more of the
same, or stepping into a future equipped with a perspective that not only has a conception of a
'desired' future but is also cognisant of 'threats to the future'.

The only way to move beyond security is to find a new way of thinking and
socializing.
(Mark Neocleous, 08, Critique of Security, Brunel University in the Department of Government)
The only way out of such a dilemma, to escape the fetish, is perhaps to eschew the logic of
security altogether to reject it as so ideologically loaded in favour of the state that any real
political thought other than the authoritarian and reactionary should be pressed to give it up. That
is clearly something that can not be achieved within the limits of bourgeois thought and thus
could never even begin to be imagined by the security intellectual. lt is also something that the
constant iteration of the refrain this is an insecure world' and reiteration of on_e fear, anxiety
and insecurity after another will also make it hard to do. But it is something that the critique of
security suggests we may have to consider if we `want a political way out of the impasse of
security. This impasse exists because security has now become so all encompassing that it
marginalises all else, most notably the constructive conflicts, debates and discussions that
animate political life. The con- stant prioritising of a mythical security as a political end as
the political end constitutes a rejection of politics in any meaningful sense of the term. That
is, as a mode of action in which differences can be articulated, in which the conflicts and
struggles that arise from such differences can be fought for and negotiated, in which people
might come to believe that another world is possible that they might transform the world and
in turn be transformed. Security politics simply removes this; worse, it removes it while
purportedly addressing it. In so doing it suppresses all issues of power and turns political
questions into debates about the most efficient way to achieve security, despite the fact that we
are never quite told never could be told what might count as having achieved it. Security
politics is, in this sense, an anti-politics, dominating political discourse in much the same
manner as the security state tries to dominate human beings, reinforcing security fetishism and
the monopolistic character of security on the political imagination. We therefore need to get
beyond security politics, not add yet more sectors to it in a way that simply expands the scope
of the state and legitirnises state intervention in yet more and more areas of our lives . Simon
Dalby reports a personal communication with Michael Williams, co-editor of the important text
Critical Security Studies, in which the latter asks: if you take away security what do you put in
the hole thats left behind? But Im inclined to agree with Dalby: maybe there is no hole. The
mistake has been to think that there is a hole; and that this hole needs to be filled with a new
vision or revision " of security in which it is rernapped or civilised or gendered or. humanised
or expanded or whatever. All of these ultimately remain within the statist political imaginary and
consequently end up re affirming the state as the terrain of modern politics, the grounds of
security. The real task is not to fill the supposed hole with yet another vision of security but to
fight for an alternative political language which takes us beyond the narrow horizon of bourgeois
security and which therefore does not constantly throw us into the arms of the state. Thats the
point of critical politics: to develop a new political language more adequate to the kind of society
we want. Thus while much of what I have said here has been of a negative order; part of the
tradition of critical theory is that the negative may be as significant as the positive in setting
thought on new paths. For if security really is the supreme concept of bourgeois society and the
fundamental thematic of liberalism, then to keep harping on about insecurity and to keep
demanding more security' (while meekly hoping that this increased security doesnt damage our
liberty) is to blind ourselves to the possibility of building real alternatives to the authoritarian
tendencies in contemporary politics. To situate ourselves against security politics would allow us
to circumvent the debilitating effect achieved through the constant securitising of social and
political issues, debilitating in the sense that security helps consolidate the power of the
existing forms of social domination and justifies the shortcircuiting of even the most
democratic forms. It would also allow us to forge another kind of politics centred on a different
con- ception of the good. We need a new way of thinking and talking about social being and
politics that moves us beyond security. This would perhaps be emancipatory in the true sense of
the word. What this might mean, precisely must be open to debate. But it certainly requires
recognising that security is an illusion that has forgotten it is an illusion; it requires

recognising that security is not the same as solidarity; it requires accepting that insecurity is part
of the human condition, and thus giving up the search for the certainty of security and instead
learning to tolerate the uncertainties, ambiguities and insecurities' that come with being human;
it requires accepting that securitizing an issue does not mean dealing with it politically but
bracketing it out and handing it to the state; it requires us to be brave enough to return the gift.

Individual rejection of securitization solves it opens a site for alternate practices

which solve.
Darby 6 (Professor of Political Science at the University of Melbourne, Alternatives, Volume 31, Issue 4:
Security, Spatiality, and Social Suffering, GaleGroup)
This grim reflection takes us back to security and serves to introduce a crucial proposition: the need to look to
the everyday and to the understandings and experience of ordinary people. Proceeding in this
way carries the prospect of loosening the linkage between security and the state. A space may
thus be cleared for thinking security differently and for locating a politics of security within
society, rather than above it. Such an approach brings into the ambit of security international
processes that generate fear and suspicion and impinge on peoples' opportunities and wellbeing. Think, for instance, of the atomization of neoliberalism, the feminization of poverty, the
rising stigma of social and cultural difference. So also, within nation-states, it brings into reckoning
the role of state power in setting the forms of acceptable identity, the limits of dissent, and the
parameters for exploring different forms of community. Against this background, the nub of our
concern is to flesh out the ways in which the everyday constitutes a site for alternative security
practices in which local people take the initiative or at least play a major role. An archive needs
to be developed on neighborhood and more-dispersed practices of self-securing, the shaping and use
of public space to provide meeting places, and on the role of dissent as a form of community
building. By working along such lines, people who are usually left out of account would be
brought into security discourse: victims, the marginalized, those in pain and suffering. (One
might think of the process as analogous to taking account of the views of people defeated in war.)
For the most part, the stories recounted are likely to be at some remove from the researcher's own
experience. Issues of positionality are therefore involvedm and the research would need to go
forward collaboratively. Although not concerned with security as such, the best source of which I
am aware for work of this nature is Partha Chatterjee's account of what he calls "popular politics" in
Calcutta.

Rejection opens space for radical alternatives a complete abandonment of these

approaches is crucial.
Milojevi 1 (Ivana, Professor at The University of Queensland Australia, Gender, Peace and Terrestrial Futures:
Alternatives to Terrorism and War http://www.metafuture.org/articlesbycolleagues/IvanaMilojevic/Ivana_Milojevic__Gender_peace_and_terrestrial_futures.htm accessed 8-3-06)

Social and economic strategies require radical transformation and restructuring of societies and
economies. This means working towards the objectives of equality, development and peace by improving employment, health
and education (The Beijing Platform for Action, The Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing, in Peterson, Runyan,
1999:218). Approximately 3,000 deaths from terrorist attack on Unites States are 3,000 deaths too many. But so are estimated
24,000 deaths of people who died of hunger on the same day, 6,000 children killed by diarrhea and 2,700 children killed by
measles on the 11 September 2001 (New Internationalist, 2001:18-19). If we become aware that the number of malnourished
children in developing countries is about 149 million, the number of women who die each year of pregnancy and childbirth
about 500,000 and number of illiterate adults 875 million it is clear that where priorities should be. Preventing terrorism by
policing is crucial but so is the holy war against injustice, structural and cultural violence, poverty. These problems are, as is
terrorism, global problems. The understanding of security predominately in terms of national

security or the security of the state is becoming obsolete by the day. Although the USA did not in
any way deserve the attacks that occurred on the 11th September, we should still become aware
that all violence (in the international, national or family realms) is interconnected (Tickner,
1993:58). Which means that there is an intimate connection between both direct, structural and
cultural violence, as well as domestic and international violence. Thus, any serious attempt to
end war must involve significant alterations in local, national, and global hierarchies (Peterson
and Runyan, 1999:228). This includes addressing sexism, racism, classism, heterosexism, and

gendered nationalism which have all been vital to sustaining militarism and the us and
them mentality that goes along with it (Peterson and Runyan, 1999:228), One of the most important strategy,
connected to socio-economic trasformations is demilitarization. Availability of weapons may not be sufficient factor for war
and terrorism but certainly it is necessary. Particular cultural cognitive maps determine how are technologies to be used. Still,
the general production, availability and the trade of weapons directly support various wars as well as terrorism.
Unfortunately, the direction taken after 11th September has been further militarisation, because the new reasons for further
militarisation have been activated. The logical response should instead had been redirection of resources from the military
towards civilian needs and requirements. This would include a redirection of resources towards development of international
courts system, towards initiatives that work on inter-cultural understandings, communication and alliances. The overall
problem of course is that the patriarchal worldview determines that life-taking activities are better funded than life-giving
ones. For example, worldwide, over half the nations of the world still provide higher budgets for the military than for their
countries health needs. In the USA alone, the Pentagon received $17 billion more than it requested in both 1996 and 1997
(The Ohio story, quoted in Peterson and Runyan, 1999:125). The awaited peace dividend after the end of the cold war has
not materialized because 6 years later the Pentagon in the USA still receives 5 times what is spend on education, housing, job
training and the environment combined (The Ohio Story, in Peterson and Runyan, 1999:120). Demands for demilitarisation are underlined by the more acute awareness that peace is not a state but a process. The focus is on peacebuilding, peace-making and peace-keeping, contesting the belief that peace is a kind of condition or state which is achieved
or simply occurs (Boudling, 1990:141). Or as something that happens only after the military intervention is over. The
awareness that peace never exists as a condition, only as a process (Boulding, 1990:146) means that military involvement
or doing war - is seen as directly opposite from doing peace, that is, from various peace-making activities. The patriarchal
worldview implies that waging wars is sometimes necessary to maintain the peace. Alternative perspectives to this worldview
imply that peace cannot be defined only as the absence of war and that both direct and structural
forms of violence need to be addressed. Therefore, peace does not merely depend on the absence of war, but
rather on constant efforts to achieve equality of rights, equal participation in decision making processes and equal
participation in distribution of the resources that sustain society (Borelli in Brock-Utne, 1989:2). In that sense, peace

either happens now, as well as yesterday and tomorrow, or it does not. Its temporal and
geographical locations almost entirely depend on peace activities and result from active practicing
of peace promoting activities. Doing war is therefore, not a necessary condition for achieving reconciliation, but
directly opposite condition that can best be defined as the absence of peace, and peace promoting activities. The list of
previously mentioned strategies is by no means exclusive, but it is an example of how different visions for the future as well
as a different worldview bring different understanding of how conflicts are to be understood and resolved. Current and

traditional means of resolving conflicts have resulted in a well-documented violent history. If

future histories are to be changed, traditional, neo-liberal, realists and patriarchal discourses,
with their trademark short-term orientation, need to be abandoned. They could be replaced
with alternatives that provide an expanded sense of time and long-term orientation as well as a
more balanced views on war/violence, human nature, history, conflict, power, sovereignty,
security, strength, identity, peace and future. This means that it is those alternatives that are, in
effect, more pragmatic, realistic and viable. The emerging global order requires constant negotiations and
building of alliances between all our diversities. It requires global justice and fairness rather then the might is right approach
currently practiced by individualistically oriented and self-centered nation states. In our globalized, compressed, hyperreal
and hybrid world the alternatives that aim to develop both unified and diversified terrestrial futures have not become less,
but rather more urgently needed and necessary. Consequently, they could potentially be one important path that can be taken
in order to, epistemologically and strategically, support the efforts and struggles toward global peace and global security.

Embrace Insecurity
Embracing insecurity solves it leaves behind the desire for mastery over the
international sphere
Der Derian 98 (James, Prof of PoliSci at the U of Massachusetts, "The Value of Security: Hobbes,
Marx, Nietzsche, and Baudrillard," Cianet, http://www.ciaonet.org/book/lipschutz/lipschutz12.html, AD:
7/10/09) jl
One immediate response, the unthinking reaction, is to master this anxiety and to resecure the
center by remapping the peripheral threats. In this vein, the Pentagon prepares seven military
scenarios for future conflict, ranging from latino small-fry to an IdentiKit super-enemy that goes by
the generic acronym of REGT ("Reemergent Global Threat"). In the heartlands of America, Toyota sledge-hammering
returns as a popular know-nothing distraction. And within the Washington beltway, rogue powers such as North Korea, Iraq,
and Libya take on the status of pariah-state and potential video bomb-site for a permanently electioneering elite.
There are also prodromal efforts to shore up the center of the International Relations discipline. In a newly instituted series in
the International Studies Quarterly , the state of security studies is surveyed so as to refortify its borders. 3 After
acknowledging that "the boundaries of intellectual disciplines are permeable," the author proceeds not only to raise the
drawbridge but also to caulk every chink in the moat. 4 Recent attempts to broaden the concept of "security" to include such
issues as global environmental dangers, disease, and economic and natural disasters endanger the field by threatening "to
destroy its intellectual coherence and make it more difficult to devise solutions to any of these important problems." 5 The
field is surveyed in the most narrow and parochial way: out of 200-plus works cited, esteemed Third World scholars of
strategic studies receive no mention, British and French scholars receive short shrift, and Soviet writers do not make it into
the Pantheon at all.
The author of the essay, Stephen Walt, has written one of the better books on alliance systems; 6 here he seems intent on
constructing a new alliance within the discipline against "foreign" others, with the "postmodernist" as arch-alien. The tactic is
familiar: like many of the neoconservatives who have launched the recent attacks on "political correctness," the "liberals" of
international relations make it a habit to base their criticisms on secondary accounts of a category of thinking rather than on a
primary engagement with the specific (and often differing) views of the thinkers themselves. 7 In this case, Walt cites IR
scholar Robert Keohane on the hazards of "reflectivism," to warn off anyone who by inclination or

error might wander into the foreign camp: "As Robert Keohane has noted, until these writers
`have delineated . . . a research program and shown . . . that it can illuminate important issues in
world politics, they will remain on the margins of the field.' " 8 By the end of the essay, one is
left with the suspicion that the rapid changes in world politics have triggered a "security
crisis" in security studies that requires extensive theoretical damage control.
What if we leave the desire for mastery to the insecure and instead imagine a new dialogue of
security, not in the pursuit of a utopian end but in recognition of the world as it is, other than
us ? What might such a dialogue sound like? Any attempt at an answer requires a genealogy: to
understand the discursive power of the concept, to remember its forgotten meanings, to assess
its economy of use in the present, to reinterpret--and possibly construct through the
reinterpretation--a late modern security comfortable with a plurality of centers, multiple meanings,
and fluid identities.
The steps I take here in this direction are tentative and preliminary. I first undertake a brief history
of the concept itself. Second, I present the "originary" form of security that has so dominated our
conception of international relations, the Hobbesian episteme of realism. Third, I consider the
impact of two major challenges to the Hobbesian episteme, that of Marx and Nietzsche. And finally,
I suggest that Baudrillard provides the best, if most nullifying, analysis of security in late modernity.
In short, I retell the story of realism as an historic encounter of fear and danger with power and
order that produced four realist forms of security: epistemic, social, interpretive, and hyperreal. To
preempt a predictable criticism, I wish to make it clear that I am not in search of an "alternative
security." An easy defense is to invoke Heidegger, who declared that "questioning is the piety of
thought." 9 Foucault, however, gives the more powerful reason for a genealogy of security:
I am not looking for an alternative; you can't find the solution of a problem in the solution of
another problem raised at another moment by other people. You see, what I want to do is not the
history of solutions, and that's the reason why I don't accept the word alternative . My point is not
that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do.
10
The hope is that in the interpretation of the most pressing dangers of late modernity we might be
able to construct a form of security based on the appreciation and articulation rather than the
normalization or extirpation of difference.

Affirming insecurity solves security only causes greater intervention and conflict
We should give up hope of a secure utopia.
Der Derian 98 (James, Prof of PoliSci at the U of Massachusetts, "The Value of Security: Hobbes,
Marx, Nietzsche, and Baudrillard," Cianet, http://www.ciaonet.org/book/lipschutz/lipschutz12.html, AD:
7/10/09) jl
If security is to have any significance for the future, it must find a home in the new disorder
through a commensurate deterritorialization of theory. We can no longer reconstitute a single
Hobbesian site of meaning or reconstruct some Marxist or even neo-Kantian cosmopolitan
community; that would require a moment of enlightened universal certainty that crumbled long
before the Berlin Wall fell. Nor can we depend on or believe in some spiritual, dialectical or
scientific process to overcome or transcend the domestic and international divisions, ambiguities,
and uncertainties that mark the age of speed, surveillance and simulation.
This is why I believe the philosophical depth of Nietzsche has more to offer than the hyperbolic
flash of Baudrillard. Can we not interpret our own foreign policy in the light of Nietzsche's
critique of security? As was the case with the origins of an ontotheological security, did not our
debt to the Founding Fathers grow "to monstrous dimensions" with our "sacrifices"--many noble,
some not--in two World Wars? Did not our collective identity, once isolationist, neutralist and
patriotic, become transfigured into a new god, that was born and fearful of a nuclear,
internationalist, interventionist power? The evidence is in the reconceptualization: as distance,
oceans and borders became less of a protective barrier to alien identities, and a new international
economy required penetration into other worlds, national interest became too weak a semantic
guide. We found a stronger one in national security , as embodied and institutionalized in the
National Security Act of 1947, as protected by the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, and as
reconstructed by the first, and subsequent National Security Council meetings of the second, cold
war.
Nietzsche speaks a credible truth to increasingly incredible regimes. He points toward a way in
which we might live with and recognize the very necessity of difference. He recognizes the
need to assert heterogeneity against the homogenizing and often brutalizing forces of progress.
And he eschews all utopian schemes to take us out of the "real" world for a practical strategy
to celebrate, rather than exacerbate, the anxiety, insecurity and fear of a new world order
where radical otherness is ubiquitous and indomitable.

The alternative is the critical dissent of the Affirmatives Straight-Jacket of Identity.

Embracing understanding and difference in the face of international security
dangers destroys sovereign replication of violence. Dissent in the face of
territorialization breaks the shackles of the identity of the nation state
Campbell 98 (David, Professor of International politics at the University of Newcastle, Writing
Security: US Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity #4-6)

But there are alternative ways to think, and this book

exhibits a commitment to one of them. Contrary to the
claims of epistemic realism, I argue that as understanding
involves rendering the unfamiliar in the term of the
familiar, there is always an ineluctable debt to
interpretation such that there is always nothing outside of
discourse. Contrary to a narrativizing historiography, I employ a
mode of historical representation that self-consciously adopts a
perspective. And contrary to the logic of explanation, I embrace a
logic of interpretation that acknowledges the improbability of
cataloguing, calculating, and specifying the real causes, and
concerns itself with considering the manifest political
consequences of adopting one mode of representation over
another. As such my argument is part of an emerging dissident
literature in international relations that draws sustenance from a
series of modern thinkers who have focused on historically modes
of discourse rather than supposedly independent realms of
subjects and objects. Starting from the position that social and
political life composes a set of practices in which things
are constituted in the process of dealing with them, this
dissent does not (and does not deserve to) constitute a
discrete methodological school claiming to magically
illuminate the previously dark recesses of global politics.
Nor is it the dissent of a self-confident and singular figure
claiming to know the error of all previous ways and offering
salvation from all theoretical sin. Rather, this form of dissent
emerges from a disparate and sometimes divergent series
of encounters between the traditions of international
relations and theories increasingly prominent in other
realms of social and political inquiry. It is a form of dissent
that celebrates difference: proliferation of perspectives,
dimensions, and approaches to the very real dilemmas of
global life. It is a form of dissent that celebrates the
particularity and context-bound nature of judgments and
assessments, not because it favors a (so-called) relativist
retreat against the incommensurability of alternatives but
because it recognizes the universalist conceits of all
attempts to force difference into the straight-jacket if
identity.12 It is a form of dissent skeptical-but not cynical-about

the traditions of international relations and their claims of

adequacy to reality. It is a form of dissent that is not concerned to
seek a better fit between thought and the world, language and
matter, proposition and fact. On the contrary, it is a form of
dissent that questions the very way our problems have been
posed in these terms and the constraints within which they
have been considered, focusing instead on the way the
world has been made historically possible.13 Consequently,
in attempting to understand the ways in which Untied
States foreign policy has interpreted danger and secured
the boundaries of the identity in whose name it operates,
this analysis adopts neither a purely theoretical nor a
purely historical mode. It is perhaps best understood in the
terms of a history of the present, an interpretative attitude
suggested by Michael Foucault.14 A history of the present does
not try to capture the meaning of the past, nor does it try to get a
complete of the past as a bounded epoch, with underlying laws
and technology. Neither is a history of the present an instance of
presentism-where the present is a read back into the past-or an
instance of finalism, that mode of analysis where by the
analyst maintains a kernel of the present located in the
past has inexorably progressed such that it now defines our
condition. Rather the history of the present exhibits an
unequivocally contemporary orientation. Beginning with an
incitement from the present- an acute manifestation of a ritual of
power-this mode of analysis seeks to trace how such rituals of
power arose, took shape, gained importance, and effected
politics.15 In short, this mode of analysis asks how certain
terms and concepts have historically functioned with
discourse. Alternative Solvency

Spillover from criticism is empirically proven. The role of

the judge should be an intellectual whose goal is to
destabilize the security regimes through critical
interrogation of the status quo.
Jones 99 [Richard Wyn Jones, Professor International Politics at Aberystwyth University, Security,
Strategy, and Critical Theory, 1999, p. 155-163]

The central political task of the intellectuals is to aid in the construction of a

counterhegemony and thus undermine the prevailing patterns of discourse and interaction
that make up the currently dominant hegemony. This task is accomplished through
educational activity, because, as Gramsci argues, every relationship of hegemony is
necessarily a pedagogic relationship (Gramsci 1971: 350). Discussing the relationship of the
philosophy of praxis to political practice, Gramsci claims: It [the theory] does not tend to leave the
simple in their primitive philosophy of common sense, but rather to lead them to a higher conception of
life. If it affirms the need for contact between intellectuals and simple it is not in order to restrict
scientific activity and preserve unity at the low level of the masses, but precisely in order to construct an

intellectual-moral bloc which can make politically possible the intellectual progress of the mass and not
only of small intellectual groups. (Gramsci 1971: 332-333). According to Gramsci, this attempt to construct
an alternative intellectual-moral bloc should take place under the auspices of the Communist Partya
body he described as the modern prince. Just as Niccolo Machiavelli hoped to see a prince unite Italy, rid
the country of foreign barbarians, and create a virtu-ous state, Gramsci believed that the modern price could
lead the working class on its journey toward its revolutionary destiny of an emancipated society (Gramsci
1971: 125-205). Gramscis relative optimism about the possibility of progressive theorists playing a
constructive role in emancipatory political practice was predicated on his belief in the existence of a
universal class (a class whose emancipation would inevitably presage the emancipation of humanity itself)
with revolutionary potential. It was a gradual loss of faith in this axiom that led Horkheimer and Adorno to
their extremely pessimistic prognosis about the possibilities of progressive social change. But does a loss of
faith in the revolutionary vocation of the proletariat necessarily lead to the kind of quietism ultimately
embraced by the first generation of the Frankfurt School? The conflict that erupted in the 1960s between
them and their more radical students suggests not. Indeed, contemporary critical theorists claim that the
deprivileging of the role of the proletariat in the struggle for emancipation is actually a positive move.
Class remains a very important axis of domination in society, but it is not the only such axis (Fraser 1995).
Nor is it valid to reduce all other forms of dominationfor example, in the case of genderto class
relations, as orthodox Marxists tend to do. To recognize these points is not only a first step toward the
development of an analysis of forms of exploitation and exclusion within society that is more attuned to
social reality; it is also a realization that there are other forms of emancipatory politics than those associated
with class conflict.1 This in turn suggests new possibilities and problems for emancipatory theory.
Furthermore, the abandonment of faith in revolutionary parties is also a positive development. The history
of the European left during the twentieth century provides myriad examples of the ways in which the
fetishization of party organizations has led to bureaucratic immobility and the confusion of means with
ends (see, for example, Salvadori 1990). The failure of the Bolshevik experiment illustrates how
disciplined, vanguard parties are an ideal vehicle for totalitarian domination (Serge 1984). Faith in the
infallible party has obviously been the source of strength and comfort to many in this period and, as the
experience of the southern Wales coalfield demonstrates, has inspired brave and progressive behavior (see,
for example, the account of support for the Spanish Republic in Francis 1984). But such parties have so
often been the enemies of emancipation that they should be treated with the utmost caution. Parties are
necessary, but their fetishization is potentially disastrous. History furnishes examples of progressive

developments that have been positively influenced by organic intellectuals operating outside
the bounds of a particular party structure (G. Williams 1984). Some of these developments
have occurred in the particularly intractable realm of security . These examples may be
considered as resources of hope for critical security studies (R. Williams 1989). They
illustrate that ideas are important or, more correctly, that change is the product of the dialectical
interaction of ideas and material reality. One clear security-related example of the role of critical
thinking and critical thinkers in aiding and abetting progressive social change is the experience of the
peace movement of the 1980s. At that time the ideas of dissident defense intellectuals (the
alternative defense school) encouraged and drew strength from peace activism. Together they
had an effect not only on short-term policy but on the dominant discourses of strategy and
security, a far more important result in the long run. The synergy between critical security
intellectuals and critical social movements and the potential influence of both working in tandem can be
witnessed particularly clearly in the fate of common security. As Thomas Risse-Kappen points out,
the term common security originated in the contribution of peace researchers to the German security
debate of the 1970s (Risse-Kappen 1994: 186ff.); it was subsequently popularized by the Palme
Commission report (Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues 1982). Initially,
mainstream defense intellectuals dismissed the concept as hopelessly idealistic ; it certainly had
no place in their allegedly hardheaded and realist view of the world. However, notions of common
security were taken up by a number of different intellectuals communities , including the liberal
arms control community in the United States, Western European peace researchers, security specialists in
the center-left political parties of Western Europe, and Soviet institutchiksmembers of the influential
policy institutes in the Soviet Union such as the United States of America and Canada Institute (Landau
1996: 52-54; Risse-Kappen 1994: 196-200; Kaldor 1995; Spencer 1995). These communities were

subsequently able to take advantage of public pressure exerted through social movements in
order to gain broader acceptance for common security. In Germany, for example, in response to
social movement pressure, German social organizations such as churches and trade unions quickly
supported the ideas promoted by peace researchers and the SPD (Risse-Kappen 1994: 207). Similar
pressures even had an effect on the Reagan administration. As Risse-Kappen notes: When the
Reagan administration brought hard-liners into power, the US arms control community was removed from
policy influence. It was the American peace movement and what became known as the freeze
campaign that revived the arms control process together with pressure from the European allies.
(Risse-Kappen 1994: 205; also Cortright 1993: 90-110). Although it would be difficult to sustain a claim
that the combination of critical movements and intellectuals persuaded the Reagan government to adopt the
rhetoric and substance of common security in its entirety, it is clear that it did at least have a substantial
impact on ameliorating U.S. behavior. The most dramatic and certainly the most unexpected
impact of alternative defense ideas was felt in the Soviet Union. Through various East-West links,
which included arms control institutions, Pugwash conferences, interparty contacts, and even direct
personal links, a coterie of Soviet policy analysts and advisers were drawn toward common
security and such attendant notions as nonoffensive defense (these links are detailed in Evangelista
1995; Kaldor 1995; Checkel 1993; Risse-Kappen 1994; Landau 1996 and Spencer 1995 concentrate on the
role of the Pugwash conferences). This group, including Palme Commission member Georgii Arbatov,
Pugwash attendee Andrei Kokoshin , and Sergei Karaganov, a senior adviser who was in regular contact
with the Western peace researchers Anders Boserup and Lutz Unterseher (Risse-Kappen 1994: 203), then
influenced Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachevs subsequent championing of common security
may be attributed to several factors. It is clear, for example, that new Soviet leadership had a strong

interest in alleviating tensions in East-West relations in order to facilitate much-needed

domestic reforms (the interaction of ideas and material reality). But what is significant is that the
Soviets commitment to common security led to significant changes in force sizes and
postures. These in turn aided in the winding down of the Cold War, the end of Soviet
domination over Eastern Europe, and even the collapse of Russian control over much of the
territory of the former Soviet Union . At the present time, in marked contrast to the situation in the
early 1980s, common security is part of the common sense of security discourse. As MccGwire points out,
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) (a common defense pact) is using the rhetoric of common
security in order to justify its expansion into Eastern Europe (MccGwire 1997). This points to an

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

potential future addressees for critical international theory in general, and critical security
studies in particular. Third, it also underlines the role of ideas in the evolution in society .
CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES AND THE THEORY-PRACTICE NEXUS Although most proponents
of critical security studies reject aspects of Gramscis theory of organic intellectuals, in particular his
exclusive concentration on class and his emphasis on the guiding role of the party, the desire for
engagement and relevance must remain at the heart of their project. The example of the peace movement
suggests that critical theorists can still play the role of organic intellectuals and that this organic relationship
need not confine itself to a single class; it can involve alignment with different coalitions of social
movements that campaign on an issue or a series of issues pertinent to the struggle for emancipation (Shaw
1994b; R. Walker 1994). Edward Said captures this broader orientation when he suggests that

critical intellectuals are always tied to and ought to remain an organic part of an ongoing
experience in society: of the poor, the disadvantaged, the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless

(Said 1994: 84). In the specific case of critical security studies, this means placing the experience of

those men and women and communities for whom the present world order is a cause of
insecurity rather than security at the center of the agenda and making suffering humanity
rather than raison detat the prism through which problems are viewed . Here the project stands
full-square within the critical theory tradition. If all theory is for someone and for some purpose,
then critical security studies is for the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless, and its
purpose is their emancipation. The theoretical implications of this orientation have already been
discussed in the previous chapters. They involve a fundamental reconceptualization of security
with a shift in referent object and a broadening of the range of issues considered as a
legitimate part of the discourse. They also involve a reconceptualization of strategy within this expanded
notion of security. But the question remains at the conceptual level of how these alternative
types of theorizingeven if they are self-consciously aligned to the practices of critical or new social
movements, such as peace activism, the struggle for human rights, and the survival of minority cultures
can become a force for the direction of action. Again, Gramscis work is insightful. In the Prison
Notebooks, Gramsci advances a sophisticated analysis of how dominant discourses play a vital role in
upholding particular political and economic orders, or, in Gramscis terminology, historic blocs (Gramsci
1971: 323-377). Gramsci adopted Machiavellis view of power as a centaur, ahlf man, half beast: a mixture
of consent and coercion. Consent is produced and reproduced by a ruling hegemony that holds sway
through civil society and takes on the status of common sense; it becomes subconsciously accepted and
even regarded as beyond question. Obviously, for Gramsci, there is nothing immutable about the values
that permeate society; they can and do change. In the social realm, ideas and institutions that were once
seen as natural and beyond question (i.e., commonsensical) in the West, such as feudalism and slavery, are
now seen as anachronistic, unjust, and unacceptable. In Marxs well-worn phrase, All that is solid melts
into the air. Gramscis intention is to harness this potential for change and ensure that it moves in the
direction of emancipation. To do this he suggests a strategy of a war of position (Gramsci 1971: 229239). Gramsci argues that in states with developed civil societies, such as those in Western liberal
democracies, any successful attempt at progressive social change requires a slow, incremental, even

molecular, struggle to break down the prevailing hegemony and construct an alternative
counterhegemony to take its place. Organic intellectuals have a crucial role to play in this process by
helping to undermine the natural, commonsense, internalized nature of the status quo. This in turn
helps create political space within which alternative conceptions of politics can be developed and new
historic blocs created. I contend that Gramscis strategy of a war of position suggests an appropriate model
for proponents of critical security studies to adopt in relating their theorizing to political practice. THE
TASKS OF CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES If the project of critical security studies is

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

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

critical theorists base their critique on the presupposition, elegantly stated by Adorno, that
the need to lend suffering a voice is the precondition of all truth (cited in Jameson 1990: 66).
The aim of critical security studies in attempting to undermine the prevailing orthodoxy is ultimately
educational. As Gramsci notes, every relationship of hegemony is necessarily a pedagogic relationship
(Gramsci 1971: 350; see also the discussion of critical pedagogy in Neufeld 1995: 116-121). Thus, by
criticizing the hegemonic discourse and advancing alternative conceptions of security based
on different understandings of human potentialities, the approach is simultaneously playing apart

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

educational activities, proponent of critical security studies should aim to provide support
for those social movements that promote emancipatory social change. By providing a
critique of the prevailing order and legitimating alternative views, critical theorists can
perform a valuable role in supporting the struggles of social movements . That said, the role of
theorists is not to direct and instruct those movements with which they are aligned; instead, the relationship
is reciprocal. The experience of the European, North American, and Antipodean peace movements of the
1980s shows how influential social movements can become when their efforts are harnessed to the
intellectual and educational activity of critical thinkers. For example, in his account of New Zealands
antinuclear stance in the 1980s, Michael C. Pugh cites the importance of the visits of critical
intellectuals such as Helen Caldicott and Richard Falk in changing the countrys political
climate and encouraging the growth of the antinuclear movement (Pugh 1989: 108; see also
COrtright 1993: 5-13). In the 1980s peace movements and critical intellectuals interested in issues of
security and strategy drew strength and succor from each others efforts. If such critical social movements
do not exist, then this creates obvious difficulties for the critical theorist. But even under these
circumstances, the theorist need not abandon all hope of an eventual orientation toward practice. Once
again, the peace movement of the 1980s provides evidence of the possibilities. At that time, the movement
benefited from the intellectual work undertaken in the lean years of the peace movement in the late 1970s.
Some of the theories and concepts developed then, such as common security and nonoffensive defense,
were eventually taken up even in the Kremlin and played a significant role in defusing the second Cold
War. Those ideas developed in the 1970s can be seen in Adornian terms of the a message in a bottle, but
in this case, contra Adornos expectations, they were picked up and used to support a program of
emancipatory political practice. Obviously, one would be nave to understate the difficulties facing those
attempting to develop alternative critical approaches within academia. Some of these problems have been
alluded to already and involve the structural constraints of academic life itself. Said argues that many
problems are caused by what he describes as the growing professionalisation of academic life (Said 1994:
49-62). Academics are now so constrained by the requirements of job security and
marketability that they are extremely risk-averse. It pays in all sensesto stick with the
crowd and avoid the exposed limb by following the prevalent disciplinary preoccupations ,
publish in certain prescribed journals, and so on. The result is the navel gazing so prevalent in the

study of international relations and the seeming inability of security specialists to deal with
the changes brought about by the end of the Cold War (Kristensen 1997 highlights the
search of U.S. nuclear planners for new targets for old weapons). And, of course, the
pressures for conformism are heightened in the field of security studies when governments
have a very real interest in marginalizing dissent. Nevertheless, opportunities for critical
thinking do exist, and this thinking can connect with the practices of social movements and
become a force for the direction of action. The experience of the 1980s, when, in the depths of the
second Cold War, critical thinkers risked demonization and in some countries far worse in order to
challenge received wisdom, thus arguably playing a crucial role in the very survival of the human race,
should act as both an inspiration and a challenge to critical security studies.

Analysis of the irrationality of security discourse allows us to break free from the
discourse.
Anker 6 (Elisabeth, Assistant Professor of English at Wake Forest University, The Only Thing We Have
To Fear..., Theory & Event, 8(3), AD: 7-9-9) BL
Robin argues that in order to disentangle the use of fear from the tight grasp of elite power, we
need only to recognize the rational diagnosis of fear he puts forth: much like a Young Hegelian,
Robin argues that as we see the truth of fear, we will be free from its repressive power. By
identifying the pathways of fear in the social order, the liberal structure of governing institutions,
and the workplace, liberal subjects will stop collaborating with fear, stop de-politicizing it, and
move on to a more optimistic politics: one still liberal, but now based on hope, not fear. Politics
could then be grounded in the liberating visions of Rawls, Dworkin and Habermas, not the
darkened despair of Hobbes or Montesquieu (though it seems that Rawls, at least, enjoins a
political order generated by the fear of living at the bottom of society.) Yet these hopeful visions that
Robin celebrates are mentioned only in passing, as if their promises of liberation were so patent as
to pass without scrutiny. While Robin rightly takes communitarians to task for postulating a model
of individuality too weak and fearful to support itself without the backbone of a strong social order,
Robin takes just the opposite position: he supplies a paradigm of selfhood so agentic and
autonomous that with minimal promptings it can create its own conditions of existence.
Acknowledging the constraints of political fear is sufficient for Robin's individual to break its
shackles and reorient itself toward a politics grounded in hope.

Examining the truth-claims of security opens up space for political resistance.

Burke 2 (Anthony, Associate Professor of Politics at the University of New South Wales, Aporias of
Security, Alternatives, 27(1), AD: 7-9-9) BL
The answer is not to seek to close out these aporias; they call to us and their existence resents
an important political opening. Rather than seek to resecure security, to make it conform to a new
humanist idealhowever laudablewe need to challenge security as a claim to truth, to set its
meaning aside. Instead, we should focus on security as a pervasive and complex system of
political, social, and economic power, which reaches from the most private spaces of being to
the vast flows and conflicts of geopolitics and global economic circulation. It is to see security as
an interlocking system of knowledges, representations, practices, and institutional forms that
imagine, direct, and act upon bodies, spaces, and flows in certain waysto see security not as an
essential value but as a political technology. This is to move from essence to genealogy: a
genealogy that aims, in William Connollys words, to open us up to the play of possibility in the
present[to] incite critical responses to unnecessary violence and injuries surreptitiously
imposed upon life by the insistence that prevailing forms are natural, rational, universal or
necessary.

We have to question security and recognize that it is always paired with insecurity in
order to solve
Dillon 96 (Michael, Politics of Security: Towards a Political Philosophy of Continental Thought,
http://www.questia.com/read/103092657?title=Politics%20of%20Security:%20Towards%20a%20Political
%20Philosophy%20of%20Continental%20Thought#, AD: 7/10/9) AJK

But because the project is one concerned with what is required in order to recover the question of
the political, by asking must we secure security I refrain from any engagement with the enormous
and secondary literature surrounding security- Particularly the exposition of such literature in the
past fifteen years because none of it can help me with this project, on the contrary, that literature
proves a fundamental obstacle because it does not ask the question of security as such. It invokes
security as a ground and seeks largely to specify what security is; how security might be
attained; and which are the most basic, effective, or cost-effective means of doing so. Along the
way, it occasionally notes a so-called security paradox; that my security project may excite
your insecurity. What it does not do is relies that there is never security without insecurity and
that the one always occurs in whatever form with the other. Indeed, of course, our politics of
security does not ask after its own ground in terms of the question of the political either . We
have, instead, to make security questionable, and go through that questioning process, in order
to arrive at the threshold of the question of the political itself. Once we recognize that we have
to think security and insecurity together, we have already moved beyond security thinking
towards posing the thought of the obligatory freedom of human being itself. In short, it is only
at that point that we find ourselves on the path of beginning to think the aporia of obligatory
human freedom as it manifests itself in our times, and have begun to think politically again.

We must examine the word security and its truth value

Dillon 96 (Michael, Politics of Security: Towards a Political Philosophy of Continental Thought,
http://www.questia.com/read/103092657?title=Politics%20of%20Security:%20Towards%20a%20Political
%20Philosophy%20of%20Continental%20Thought#, AD: 7/9/9) AJK
To pursue these themes we have to listen first, then, to what the word security itself has to say.
That way we can detect something about the structure of what is going on in it- namely the
disclosive structure of truth, the truth of being-in-common whose very rupturedness
constitutes a plethos, or plurality, which poses the question of the political itself- and seek to
ensure that genealogys access to the very philosophical resources that have incited it are
recalled so that they can continue to nourish it.

We have to separate ourselves from security in order to rethink it

Dillon 96 (Michael, Politics of Security: Towards a Political Philosophy of Continental
Thought, http://www.questia.com/read/103092657?title=Politics%20of%20Security:
%20Towards%20a%20Political%20Philosophy%20of%20Continental%20Thought#,
AD: 7/9/9) AJK
There is, then, an exquisite paradox at work here. Our (inter)national politics of security hide what
they most depend upon, by making it most obvious. The metaphysical dynamics and demands
that determine them are securely securedlocked away and forgottenby means of the very
insistence upon security itself. The engagement with security has not, therefore, even begun. Securing
security is, it seems, too immediate and too pervasive a preoccupation within our world . We
have not, yet, been sufficiently separated from it. Locked in an intensely technologised epistemic
preoccupation with it, we lack the dramatic distance needed for re-thinking the belonging
together of security and insecurity and so, therefore, of a politics which operates in an
understanding of their indissoluble, and indissolubly agonistic, connection in the condition of
obligatory freedom.

A2: Policymaking Good

The affirmatives commitment to policymaking ensures serial policy failurethe
problems and solutions they identify are prefigured by their approach,
guaranteeing cyclical failure.
Michael Dillon, Professor of Politics at Lancaster University, and Julian Reid, Lecturer in International
Relations at King's College (London), 2000 (Global Governance, Liberal Peace, and Complex
Emergency, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Volume 25, Issue 1, January-March, Available Online
to Subscribing Institutions via Academic Search Premier)
As a precursor to global governance, governmentality, according to Foucault's initial account,
poses the question of order not in terms of the origin of the law and the location of sovereignty,
as do traditional accounts of power, but in terms instead of the management of population. The
management of population is further refined in terms of specific problematics to which
population management may be reduced. These typically include but are not necessarily
exhausted by the following topoi of governmental power: economy, health, welfare, poverty,
security, sexuality, demographics, resources, skills, culture, and so on. Now, where there is an
operation of power there is knowledge, and where there is knowledge there is an operation of
power. Here discursive formations emerge and, as Foucault noted, in every society the
production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and redistributed by a certain
number of procedures whose role is to ward off its powers and dangers, to gain mastery over its
chance events, to evade its ponderous, formidable materiality.[34] More specifically, where
there is a policy problematic there is expertise, and where there is expertise there, too, a policy
problematic will emerge. Such problematics are detailed and elaborated in terms of discrete
forms of knowledge as well as interlocking policy domains. Policy domains reify the
problematization of life in certain ways by turning these epistemically and politically contestable
orderings of life into "problems" that require the continuous attention of policy science and the
continuous resolutions of policymakers. Policy "actors" develop and compete on the basis of the
expertise that grows up around such problems or clusters of problems and their client
populations. Here, too, we may also discover what might be called "epistemic entrepreneurs."
Albeit the market for discourse is prescribed and policed in ways that Foucault indicated,
bidding to formulate novel problematizations they seek to "sell" these, or otherwise have them
officially adopted. In principle, there is no limit to the ways in which the management of
population may be problematized. All aspects of human conduct, any encounter with life, is
problematizable. Any problematization is capable of becoming a policy problem.
Governmentality thereby creates a market for policy, for science and for policy science, in which
problematizations go looking for policy sponsors while policy sponsors fiercely compete on
behalf of their favored problematizations. Reproblematization of problems is constrained by the
institutional and ideological investments surrounding accepted "problems," and by the sheer
difficulty of challenging the inescapable ontological and epistemological assumptions that go
into their very formation. There is nothing so fiercely contested as an epistemological or
ontological assumption. And there is nothing so fiercely ridiculed as the suggestion that the real
problem with problematizations exists precisely at the level of such assumptions. Such "paralysis
of analysis" is precisely what policymakers seek to avoid since they are compelled constantly to
respond to circumstances over which they ordinarily have in fact both more and less control than
they proclaim. What they do not have is precisely the control that they want. Yet serial policy
failurethe fate and the fuel of all policycompels them into a continuous search for the new
analysis that will extract them from the aporias in which they constantly find themselves
enmeshed. Serial policy failure is no simple shortcoming that science and policyand policy
sciencewill ultimately overcome. Serial policy failure is rooted in the ontological and
epistemological assumptions that fashion the ways in which global governance encounters and
problematizes life as a process of emergence through fitness landscapes that constantly adaptive
and changing ensembles have continuously to negotiate. As a particular kind of intervention into

life, global governance promotes the very changes and unintended outcomes that it then serially
reproblematizes in terms of policy failure. Thus, global liberal governance is not a linear
problem-solving process committed to the resolution of objective policy problems simply by
bringing better information and knowledge to bear upon them. A nonlinear economy of
power/knowledge, it deliberately installs socially specific and radically inequitable distributions
of wealth, opportunity, and mortal danger both locally and globally through the very detailed
ways in which life is variously (policy) problematized by it. In consequence, thinking and acting
politically is displaced by the institutional and epistemic rivalries that infuse its power/
knowledge networks, and by the local conditions of application that govern the introduction of
their policies. These now threaten to exhaust what "politics," locally as well as globally, is about.
[36] It is here that the "emergence" characteristic of governance begins to make its appearance.
For it is increasingly recognized that there are no definitive policy solutions to objective, neat,
discrete policy problems. The "subjects" of policy increasingly also become a matter of
definition as well, since the concept population does not have a stable referent either and has
itself also evolved in biophilosophical and biomolecular as well as Foucauldian "biopower"
ways.

Excluding discursive framing questions from security

policy makes their framework arbitrary and less effective
for policymaking. Limiting decisions to explicit policy
options impoverishes analysis.
Cheeseman and Bruce 96Graeme Cheeseman, Snr. Lecturer @ New South Wales, and Robert
Bruce [Discourses of Danger & Dread Frontiers, p. 5-9]
This goal is pursued in ways which are still unconventional in the intellectual milieu of international
relations in Australia, even though they are gaining influence worldwide as traditional modes of theory and
practice are rendered inadequate by global trends that defy comprehension, let alone policy. The inability to
give meaning to global changes reflects partly the enclosed, elitist world of professional security analysts
and bureaucratic experts, where entry is gained by learning and accepting to speak a particular,
exclusionary language. The contributors to this book are familiar with the discourse, but accord no
privileged place to its knowledge form as reality in debates on defence and security. Indeed, they believe
that debate will be furthered only through a long overdue critical re-evaluation of elite
perspectives. Pluralistic, democratically-oriented perspectives on Australias identity are both required and
essential if Australias thinking on defence and security is to be invigorated.
This is not a conventional policy book; nor should it be, in the sense of offering policymakers and their academic counterparts sets of neat alternative solutions, in familiar language
and format, to problems they pose. This expectation is in itself a considerable part of the
problem to be analysed. It is, however, a book about policy, one that questions how problems
are framed by policy-makers. It challenges the proposition that irreducible bodies of real knowledge
on defence and security exist independently of their context in the world, and it demonstrates how
security policy is articulated authoritatively by the elite keepers of that knowledge ,
experts trained to recognize enduring, universal wisdom. All others, from this perspective, must accept such
wisdom or remain outside the expert domain, tainted by their inability to comply with the rightness of the
official line. But it is precisely the official line, or at least its image of the world, that needs to

be problematised . If the critic responds directly to the demand for policy

alternatives, without addressing this image, he or she is tacitly endorsing it. Before engaging
in the policy debate the critics need to reframe the basic terms of reference . This book, then,
reflects and underlines the importance of Antonio Gramsci and Edward Saids critical intellectuals The
demand, tacit or otherwise, that the policy-makers frame of reference be accepted as the only
basis for discussion and analysis ignores a three thousand year old tradition commonly
associated with Socrates and purportedly integral to the Western tradition of democratic dialogue.
More immediately, it ignores post-seventeenth century democratic traditions which insist that a good

society must have within it some way of critically assessing its knowledge and the decisions based
upon that knowledge which impact upon citizens of such a society. This is a tradition with a slightly
different connotation in contemporary liberal democracies which, during the Cold War, were proclaimed
different and superior to the totalitarian enemy precisely because there were institutional checks and
balances upon power. In short, one of the major differences between open societies and their (closed)
counterparts behind the Iron Curtain was that the former encouraged the critical testing of the knowledge
and decisions of the powerful and assessing them against liberal democratic principles. The latter tolerated
criticism only on rare and limited occasions. For some, this represented the triumph of rational-scientific
methods of inquiry and techniques of falsification. For others, especially since positivism and rationalism
have lost much of their allure, it meant that for society to become open and liberal, sectors of the population
must be independent of the state and free to question its knowledge and power. Though we do not expect
this position to be accepted by every reader, contributors to this book believe that critical dialogue is long
overdue in Australia and needs to be listened to. For all its liberal democratic trappings, Australias security
community continues to invoke closed monological narratives on defence and security.
This book also questions the distinctions between policy practice and academic theory that inform
conventional accounts of Australian security. One of its major concerns, particularly in chapters 1 and 2, is
to illustrate how theory is integral to the practice of security analysis and policy prescription. The
book also calls on policy-makers, academics and students of defence and security to think critically about
what they are reading, writing and saying; to begin to ask, of their work and study, difficult and searching
questions raised in other disciplines; to recognise, no matter how uncomfortable it feels, that what is
involved in theory and practice is not the ability to identify a replacement for failed models, but a
realisation that terms and concepts state sovereignty, balance of power, security, and so on
are contested and problematic, and that the world is indeterminate, always becoming what is written
about it. Critical analysis which shows how particular kinds of theoretical presumptions can
effectively exclude vital areas of political life from analysis has direct practical implications for
policy-makers, academics and citizens who face the daunting task of steering Australia through some
potentially choppy international waters over the next few years. There is also much of interest in the
chapters for those struggling to give meaning to a world where so much that has long been taken for
granted now demands imaginative, incisive reappraisal. The contributors, too, have struggled to find
meaning, often despairing at the terrible human costs of international violence. This is why readers will find
no single, fully formed panacea for the worlds ills in general, or Australias security in particular. There are
none. Every chapter, however, in its own way, offers something more than is found in orthodox literature,
often by exposing ritualistic Cold War defence and security mind-sets that are dressed up as new thinking.
Chapters 7 and 9, for example, present alternative ways of engaging in security and defence practice.
Others (chapters 3, 4, 5, 6 and 8) seek to alert policy-makers, academics and students to alternative
theoretical possibilities which might better serve an Australian community pursuing security and
prosperity in an uncertain world. All chapters confront the policy community and its counterparts in the
academy with a deep awareness of the intellectual and material constraints imposed by dominant traditions
of realism, but they avoid dismissive and exclusionary terms which often in the past characterized
exchanges between policy-makers and their critics. This is because, as noted earlier, attention needs to be
paid to the words and the thought processes of those being criticized. A close reading of this kind
draws attention to underlying assumptions, showing they need to be recognized and questioned. A sense of
doubt (in place of confident certainty) is a necessary prelude to a genuine search for alternative

policies. First comes an awareness of the need for new perspectives, then specific policies
may follow. As Jim George argues in the following chapter, we need to look not so much at
contending policies as they are made for us but at challenging the discursive process which
gives [favoured interpretations of reality] their meaning and which direct [Australias]
policy/analytical/military responses. This process is not restricted to the small, official defence and
security establishment huddled around the US-Australian War Memorial in Canberra. It also encompasses
much of Australias academic defence and security community located primarily though not exclusively
within the Australian National University and the University College of the University of New South
Wales. These discursive processes are examined in detail in subsequent chapters as authors attempt to make
sense of a politics of exclusion and closure which exercises disciplinary power over Australias security
community. They also question the discourse of regional security, security cooperation,

peacekeeping and alliance politics that are central to Australias official and academic security
agenda in the 1990s. This is seen as an important task especially when, as is revealed, the disciplines of
International Relations and Strategic Studies are under challenge from critical and theoretical debates
ranging across the social sciences and humanities; debates that are nowhere to be found in Australian
defence and security studies. The chapters graphically illustrate how Australias public policies on defence
and security are informed, underpinned and legitimised by a narrowly-based intellectual enterprise which
draws strength from contested concepts of realism and liberalism, which in turn seek legitimacy through
policy-making processes. Contributors ask whether Australias policy-makers and their academic advisors
are unaware of broader intellectual debates, or resistant to them, or choose not to understand them, and
why?

Critical intellectual distance to security discourse

repoliticizes the objectives of security discourse. Your
ballot interrogates who and what are deemed as worthy
objects of security discourse.
C.A.S.E. Collective 6 [Security Dialogues 37.4, Critical Approaches to Security in Europe: A
Networked Manifesto, Sage Political Science, p. 464]
To take this discussion one step further, we need to ask ourselves, as researchers and as a collective, what
the claim of being critical and representing a collective intellectual entails for our engagement with the
political. This question naturally can be extended to all CASE scholars. First, what do we mean by
critical? Are not all theories by definition critical (of other theories)? In virtue of which principle, as a
networked collective, would we allow ourselves to be self-labelled as critical? What is so critical about the
general perspective we are collectively trying to defend here? From the Kantian perspective to the postMarxist Adornian emancipatory ideal, from Hockheimers project to the Foucaldian stance toward regimes
of truth, being critical has meant to adopt a particular stance towards taken-for-granted assumptions and
unquestioned categorizations of social reality. Many of these critical lines of thought have directly or
indirectly inspired this critical approach to security in Europe. Being critical means adhering to a
rigorous form of sceptical questioning, rather than being suspicious or distrustful in the vernacular
sense of those terms. But, it is also to recognize one-self as being partially framed by those regimes of
truth, concepts, theories and ways of thinking that enable the critique. To be critical is thus also to be
reflexive, developing abilities to locate the self in a broader heterogeneous context through abstraction and
thinking. A reflexive perspective must offer tools for gauging how political orders are
constituted. This effort to break away from naturalized correspondences between things and words,
between processes framed as problems and ready-made solutions, permits us to bring back
social and political issues to the realm of the political. Being critical therefore means , among
other things, to disrupt depoliticizing practices and discourses of security in the name of
exceptionality, urgency or bureaucratic expertise , and bring them back to political discussions
and struggles. This goal can partly be achieved through a continuous confrontation of our
theoretical considerations with the social practices they account for in two directions: constantly
remodelling theoretical considerations on the basis of research and critical practice, and creating the
possibilities for the use of our research in political debate and action. This raises questions about
the willingness and modalities of personal engagement. While critical theories can find concrete
expressions in multiple fields of practice, their role is particularly important in the field of security.
Since engaging security issues necessarily implies a normative dilemma of speaking security (Huysmans,
1998a), being critical appears as a necessary moment in the research. The goal of a

critical intellectual is not only to observe, but also to actively open spaces of discussion and
political action, as well as to provide the analytical tools, concepts and categories for possible
alternative discourses and practices. However, there are no clear guidelines for the critical
researcher and no assessment of the impact of scholarship on practice or vice versa. Critical approaches
to security have remained relatively silent about the role and the place of the researcher in the political

process, too often confining their position to a series of general statements about the impossibility of
objectivist science.19 The networked c.a.s.e. collective and the manifesto in which it found a first
actualization may be a first step toward a more precisely defined modality of political commitment while
working as a researcher. Writing collectively means assembling different types of knowledge and different
forms of thinking. It means articulating different horizons of the unknown. It is looking at this
limit at which one cannot necessarily believe in institutionalized forms of knowledge any longer,
nor in the regimes of truth that are too often taken for granted. It is in this sense that being critical is a
question of limits and necessities, and writing collectively can therefore help to critically define a
modality for a more appropriate engagement with politics.

The Alt is to Reject the Affirmatives Security Logic, allowing for actually political
thought. Accepting their Descriptions and Responses colonizes the debate
Neoclus, 2008. (Mark Neocleous, 08, Critique of Security, Brunel University in the Department of
Government)
The only way out of such a dilemma, to escape the fetish, is perhaps to eschew the logic of security
altogether to reject it as so ideologically loaded in favour of the state that any real political
thought other than the authoritarian and reactionary should be pressed to give it up. That is clearly
something that can not be achieved within the limits of bourgeois thought and thus could never even
begin to be imagined by the security intellectual. lt is also something that the constant iteration of
the refrain this is an insecure world' and reiteration of on_e fear, anxiety and insecurity after
another will also make it hard to do. But it is something that the critique of security suggests we
may have to consider if we `want a political way out of the impasse of security. This impasse exists
because security has now become so all encompassing that it marginalises all else, most notably the
constructive conflicts, debates and discussions that animate political life. The con- stant prioritising
of a mythical security as a political end as the political end constitutes a rejection of politics in
any meaningful sense of the term. That is, as a mode of action in which differences can be
articulated, in which the conflicts and struggles that arise from such differences can be fought for
and negotiated, in which people might come to believe that another world is possible that they
might transform the world and in turn be transformed. Security politics simply removes this; worse,
it removes it while purportedly addressing it. In so doing it suppresses all issues of power and turns
political questions into debates about the most efficient way to achieve security, despite the fact
that we are never quite told never could be told what might count as having achieved it.
Security politics is, in this sense, an anti-politics, dominating political discourse in much the same
manner as the security state tries to dominate human beings, reinforcing security fetishism and the
monopolistic character of security on the political imagination. We therefore need to get beyond
security politics, not add yet more sectors to it in a way that simply expands the scope of the state
and legitirnises state intervention in yet more and more areas of our lives. Simon Dalby reports a
personal communication with Michael Williams, co-editor of the important text Critical Security
Studies, in which the latter asks: if you take away security what do you put in the hole thats left
behind? But Im inclined to agree with Dalby: maybe there is no hole. The mistake has been to
think that there is a hole; and that this hole needs to be filled with a new vision or revision " of
security in which it is rernapped or civilised or gendered or. humanised or expanded or whatever.
All of these ultimately remain within the statist political imaginary and consequently end up re
affirming the state as the terrain of modern politics, the grounds of security. The real task is not to
fill the supposed hole with yet another vision of security but to fight for an alternative political
language which takes us beyond the narrow horizon of bourgeois security and which therefore does
not constantly throw us into the arms of the state. Thats the point of critical politics: to develop a
new political language more adequate to the kind of society we want. Thus while much of what I
have said here has been of a negative order; part of the tradition of critical theory is that the negative
may be as significant as the positive in setting thought on new paths. For if security really is the
supreme concept of bourgeois society and the fundamental thematic of liberalism, then to keep
harping on about insecurity and to keep demanding more security' (while meekly hoping that this
increased security doesnt damage our liberty) is to blind ourselves to the possibility of building real
alternatives to the authoritarian tendencies in contemporary politics. To situate ourselves against
security politics would allow us to circumvent the debilitating effect achieved through the constant

securitising of social and political issues, debilitating in the sense that security helps consolidate
the power of the existing forms of social domination and justifies the shortcircuiting of even the
most democratic forms. It would also allow us to forge another kind of politics centred on a different
con- ception of the good. We need a new way of thinking and talking about social being and politics
that moves us beyond security. This would perhaps be emancipatory in the true sense of the word.
What this might mean, precisely must be open to debate. But it certainly requires recognising that
security is an illusion that has forgotten it is an illusion; it requires recognising that security is not
the same as solidarity; it requires accepting that insecurity is part of the human condition, and thus
giving up the search for the certainty of security and instead learning to tolerate the uncertainties,
ambiguities and insecurities' that come with being human; it requires accepting that securitizing
an issue does not mean dealing with it politically but bracketing it out and handing it to the state; it
requires us to be brave enough to return the gift.

A2: Intellectualism Bad

Exilic intellectualism accommodates those suffering oppression by showing respect
for all humanity
Shampa BISWAS, Prof Politics, Whitman, 2007 "Empire and Global Public Intellectuals: Reading
Edward Said as an International Relations Theorist" Millennium 36 (1)
The kind of globalism that Said advocates involves a felt and sympathetic awareness of an inand co-habited world. In an interview with Bruce Robbins, Said is at pains to underscore that
the rootlessness and exilic marginality he promotes are not detached, distant positions that
exclude sympathetic identification with a people suffering oppression ... [e]specially when that
oppression is caused by ones own community or ones own polity. The exilic orientation
involves the crossing of barriers, the traversing of borders, the accommodation with various
cultures, not so much in order to belong to them but at least so as to be able to feel the accents
and inflections of their experience. It is a globalism that is very much linked to Saids
unabashed defence of humanism. At the heart of this defence is a commitment to an aware
and felt ethic of humanity that emerges from a sense of worldliness (i.e. a sense of the real
historical world) and knowledge of difference. A central defining pole of (Saids) humanism,
says Akeel Bilgrami in the foreword to Saids posthumously published collection of essays in
Humanism and Democratic Criticism, is the yearning to show regard for all that is human, for
what is human wherever it may be found and however remote it may be from the more vivid
presence of the parochial. Said himself criticises the rampant use of the word human in much
of the current discourse on humanitarian intervention, which, as he points out, is conducted
largely by visiting violence on distant humans. His humanism is an attempt to retrieve the
humanity of those distant humans by developing a genuinely globalist ethic. This globalist ethic
is not based on a crass abstract universalism, but is very much a concrete, grounded ethic that
takes the local seriously.

Security discourse is meaningful only intersubjectivelydiscourse shapes the policy

agenda.
David Mutimer, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at York University (Canada),
2000 ("Imagining Security," The Weapons State: Proliferation and the Framing of Security, Published by
Lynne Rienner (Boulder, CO), ISBN 1555877877, p. 17-19)
Acts of interpretation are indispensable to the reproduction of practices, understood in this
fashion. First, before a person can engage in a practice, he or she must determine that previous
examples of conduct are part of a single patternthat is, that they are instances of a single
practice rather than multiple practices or random activity. Even having recognized that these
prior instances of behavior form a practice, she must formulate a guide to her own activity from
these prior instances. Of course, such interpretive acts are often unconscious and are rarely, if
ever, entirely individual. We are not often in the position of trying to engage in an unfamiliar
practice without assistance. Rather, we share these crucial interpretive acts with others in our
society. We recognize collectively that certain patterns of behavior are parts of the same practice,
and we teach others, in more or less formal ways, the standards of conduct that govern these
behaviors. In a short book published in 1956, Kenneth Boulding outlined a similar conception
of social life around the concept of the image: The image not only makes society, society
continually remakes the image. This hen and egg process is perhaps the most important key to
the understanding of the dynamics of society. The basic bond of any society, culture, subculture,
or organization is a 'public image,' that is, an image the essential characteristics of which are
shared by the individuals participating in the group. Practices are stable patterns of behavior
produced by acting in terms of the image; on the other hand, the image is seen in those same
patterns of behavior, and thus it is reproduced. What Boulding calls the image is necessarily
social; it is a public image shared by members of a society. Thus the acts of interpretation that
produce practices are not subjective, as they appear in the previous paragraph, but

intersubjective. Charles Taylor has provided a clear example of the nature of constitutive
intersubjective meanings in practices: Take the practice of deciding things by majority vote. It
carries with it certain standards, of valid and invalid voting, and valid and invalid results,
without which it would not be the practice that it is. All those who participate in the practice
must share an image of the practice in which they are engaged. They must share a certain
collection of rules for fair and unfair voting, as well as knowing what essential behaviors they
are expected to perform. They must also understand that they are independent agents but also
parts of a collective who can decide as a whole through the aggregation of independent
decisions. As Taylor concludes, In this way, we say that the practices which make up a society
require certain self-descriptions on the part of the participants. The image of majority voting
constitutes the practice of voting by enabling the actors and actions necessary for the practice
and defining the relationships between the actors and those between the actors and the practice.
The same is true for the practices in which states engage, which are the object of study in
international relations. A practice such as waging war, perhaps the definitive practice of the
traditional study of international relations, is conducted in terms of certain standards, as is
voting. 20 Intersubjectively held meanings establish the conditions under which war may or may
not be waged, as well as establishing which violent conduct is and which is not to be counted as
war. The image constitutive of war is socially held, adjudged, contested, and taught. Thus, when
the United States went to war in Vietnam, it was recognized by the society of states to be waging
war, despite its subjective labeling of the violence as a police action. On the other hand, the U. S.
War on Drugs was recognized by those same states to be metaphorically warlike rather than an
instance of the practice of waging war, despite the use of military and paramilitary violence. If
intersubjective meanings constitute practices, engaging in practices involves acting toward the
world in the terms provided by a particular set of intersubjective meanings. Practices can
therefore be said to carry with them sets of meanings. If we investigate state action in terms of
practices, we can ask questions about the constitutive intersubjective meanings, about the world
these practices make through reproducing meaning. As Roxanne Doty has argued, Policy
makers function within a discursive space that imposes meanings on their world and thus
creates reality. At this point I reconnect to the argument with which this chapter began, because
the reality that is created in this discursive space involves the identification of the objects of
action, the actors, and the interests that are pursued. The intersubjective understandings that
constitute practices can be thought of, adapting Boulding's usage, as images that frame a
particular reality. This framing is fundamentally discursive; it is necessarily tied to the language
through which the frame is expressed. A problemfor example, that of the proliferation of
weaponsis not presented to policymakers fully formed. Weapons proliferation as a problem
does not slowly dawn on states but rather is constituted by those states in their practices. What is
more, this practically constituted image of a security problem shapes the interests states have at
stake in that problem and the forms of solutions that can be considered to resolve it. To
understand how an image shapes interest and policy, it is useful to consider the place of
metaphor in shaping understanding.

Representational choices construct the meaning of the reality on which the aff
acts an interrogation of these choices is inextricably linked with an interrogation
of their policy.
Roxanne Lynn Doty, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Arizona State
University, 1996 (Imperial Encounters: The Politics of Representation in North-South Relations,
University of Minnesota Press, Borderlines Series, ISBN 0816627622, p. 169-171)
The cases examined in this study attest to the importance of representational practices and the
power that inheres in them. The infinity of traces that leave no inventory continue to play a
significant part in contemporary constructions of reality. This is not to suggest that
representations have been static. Static implies the possibility of fixedness, when what I mean to
suggest is an inherent fragility and instability to the meanings and identities that have been
constructed in the various discourses I examined. For example, to characterize the South as
uncivilized or unfit for self-government" is no longer an acceptable representation. This is
not, however, because the meanings of these terms were at one time fixed and stable. As I

illustrated, what these signifiers signified was always deferred. Partial fixation was the result of
their being anchored by some exemplary mode of being that was itself constructed at the power/
knowledge nexus: the white male at the turn of the century, the United States after World War II.
Bhabha stresses the wide range of the stereotype, from the loyal servant to Satan, from the
loved to the hated; a shifting of subject positions in the circulation of colonial power (1983:
31). The shifting subject positions--from uncivilized native to quasi state to traditional man
and society, for example--are all partial fixations that have enabled the exercise of various and
multiple forms of power. Nor do previous oppositions entirely disappear. What remains is an
infinity of traces from prior representations [end page 169] that themselves have been founded
not on pure presences but on differance. The present becomes the sign of the sign, the trace of
the trace, Derrida writes (1982: 24). Differance makes possible the chain of differing and
deferring (the continuity) as well as the endless substitution (the discontinuity) of names that are
inscribed and reinscribed as pure presence, the center of the structure that itself escapes
structurality. North-South relations have been constituted as a structure of deferral. The center
of the structure (alternatively white man, modern man, the United States, the West, real states)
has never been absolutely present outside a system of differences. It has itself been constituted as
tracethe simulacrum of a presence that dislocates itself, displaces itself, refers itself (ibid.).
Because the center is not a fixed locus but a function in which an infinite number of sign
substitutions come into play, the domain and play of signification is extended indefinitely
(Derrida 1978: 280). This both opens up and limits possibilities, generates alternative sites of
meanings and political resistances that give rise to practices of reinscription that seek to reaffirm
identities and relationships. The inherently incomplete and open nature of discourse makes this
reaffirmation an ongoing and never finally completed project. In this study I have sought,
through an engagement with various discourses in which claims to truth have been staked, to
challenge the validity of the structures of meaning and to make visible their complicity with
practices of power and domination. By examining the ways in which structures of meaning have
been associated with imperial practices, I have suggested that the construction of meaning and
the construction of social, political, and economic power are inextricably linked. This suggests
an ethical dimension to making meaning and an ethical imperative that is incumbent upon those
who toil in the construction of structures of meaning. This is especially urgent in North-South
relations today: one does not have to search very far to find a continuing complicity with
colonial representations that ranges from a politics of silence and neglect to constructions of
terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism, international drug trafficking, and Southern immigration to
the North as new threats to global stability and peace. The political stakes raised by this
analysis revolve around the question of being able to get beyond the representations or speak
outside of the discourses that historically have constructed the North [end page 170] and the
South. I do not believe that there are any pure alternatives by which we can escape the infinity of
traces to which Gramsci refers. Nor do I wish to suggest that we are always hopelessly
imprisoned in a dominant and all-pervasive discourse. Before this question can be answered-indeed, before we can even proceed to attempt an answer--attention must be given to the politics
of representation. The price that international relations scholarship pays for its inattention to the
issue of representation is perpetuation of the dominant modes of making meaning and deferral of
its responsibility and complicity in dominant representations.

A2: Cede the Political

The political has already been ceded
Grondin 4 [David, master of pol sci and PHD of political studies @ U of Ottowa (Re)Writing the
National Security State: How and Why Realists (Re)Built the(ir)
http://www.er.uqam.ca/nobel/ieim/IMG/pdf/rewriting_national_security_state.pdf]

Cold

War,

As American historian of U.S. foreign relations Michael Hogan observes in his study on the rise
of the national security state during the Truman administration, the national security
ideology framed the Cold War discourse in a system of symbolic representation that defined
Americas national identity by reference to the un-American other, usually the Soviet Union,
Nazi Germany, or some other totalitarian power (Hogan, 1998: 17). Such a binary system
made it difficult for any domestic dissent from U.S. policy to emerge it would have
amounted to an act of disloyalty (Hogan, 1998: 18).15While Hogan distinguishes advocates
from critics of the American national security state, his view takes for granted that there is a
given and fixed American political culture that differs from the new national security ideology.
It posits an American way, produced by its cultural, political, and historical experience.
Although he stresses that differences between the two sides of the discourse are superficial,
pertaining solely to the means, rather than the ends of the national security state, Hogan sees the
national security state as a finished and legitimate state: an American state suited to the Cold
War context of permanent war, while stopping short of a garrison state: Although government
would grow larger, taxes would go up, and budget deficits would become a matter of routine,
none of these and other transformations would add up to the crushing regime symbolized in the
metaphor of the garrison state. The outcome instead would be an American national security
state that was shaped as much by the countrys democratic political culture as it was by the
perceived military imperatives of the Cold War (Hogan, 1998: 22). I disagree with this
essentialist view of the state identity of the United States. The United States does not need to be
a national security state. If it was and is still constructed as such by many realist discourses, it is
because these discourses serve some political purpose. Moreover, in keeping with my
poststructuralist inclinations, I maintain that identity need not be, and indeed never is,
fixed. In a scheme in which to say is to do, that is, from a perspective that accepts the
performativity of language, culture becomes a relational site where identity politics happens
rather than being a substantive phenomenon. In this sense, culture is not simply a social context
framing foreign policy decision-making. Culture is a signifying part of the conditions of
possibility for social being, [] the way in which culturalist arguments themselves secure the
identity of subjects in whose name they speak (Campbell, 1998:221). The Cold War national
security culture represented in realist discourses was constitutive of the American national
security state. There was certainly a conflation of theory and policy in the Cold War militaryintellectual complex, which were observers of, and active participants in, defining the meaning
of the Cold War. They contributed to portray the enemy that both reflected and fueled
predominant ideological strains within the American body politic. As scholarly partners in the
national security state, they were instrumental in defining and disseminating a Cold War culture
(Rubin, 2001: 15). This national security culture was a complex space where various
representations and representatives of the national security state compete to draw the boundaries
and dominate the murkier margins of international relations (Der Derian, 1992: 41). The same
Cold War security culture has been maintained by political practice (on the part of
realist analysts and political leaders) through realist discourses in the post-9/11 era and
once again reproduces the idea of a national security state. This (implicit) state
identification is neither accidental nor inconsequential. From a poststructuralist vantage point,
the identification process of the state and the nation is always a negative process for it is
achieved by exclusion, violence, and margina-lization. Thus, a deconstruction of practices
that constitute and consolidate state identity is necessary: the writing of the state must
be revealed through the analysis of the discourses that constitute it. The state and the

discourses that (re)constitute it thus frame its very identity and impose a fictitious
national unity on society; it is from this fictive and arbitrary creation of the modernist
dichotomous discourses of inside/outside that the discourses (re)constructing the state emerge. It
is in the creation of a Self and an Other in which the state uses it monopolistic power of
legitimate violence a power socially constructed, following Max Webers work on the ethic of
responsibility to construct a threatening Other differentiated from the unified Self, the
national society (the nation).16 It is through this very practice of normative statecraft,17 which
produces threatening Others, that the international sphere comes into being. David Campbell
adds that it is by constantly articulating danger through foreign policy that the states very
conditions of existence are generated18.

The plan cedes the political- they assume the state is

always right and dont question any political assumptions,
allowing the Right to take over politics unimpeded
Our poststructuralist stance is the only effective political
strategy broadening the scope of politics is key to
effective engagement.
Grondin 4 [David, master of pol sci and PHD of political studies @ U of Ottowa (Re)Writing the
National Security State: How and Why Realists (Re)Built the(ir)
http://www.er.uqam.ca/nobel/ieim/IMG/pdf/rewriting_national_security_state.pdf]

Cold

War,

A poststructuralist approach to international relations reassesses the nature of the political.

Indeed, it calls for the repoliticization of practices of world politics that have been
treated as if they were not political. For instance, limiting the ontological elements in ones
inquiry to states or great powers is a political choice. As Jenny Edkins puts it, we need to bring
the political back in (Edkins, 1998: xii). For most analysts of International Relations, the
conception of the political is narrowly restricted to politics as practiced by
politicians. However, from a poststructuralist viewpoint, the political acquires a
broader meaning, especially since practice is not what most theorists are describing as
practice. Poststructuralism sees theoretical discourse not only as discourse, but also as political
practice. Theory therefore becomes practice. The political space of poststructuralism is not that
of exclusion; it is the political space of postmodernity, a dichotomous one, where one thing
always signifies at least one thing and another (Finlayson and Valentine, 2002: 14).
Poststructuralism thus gives primacy to the political, since it acts on us, while we act in
its name, and leads us to identify and differentiate ourselves from others. This political act is
never complete and celebrates undecidability, whereas decisions, when taken, express the
political moment. It is a critical attitude which encourages dissidence from traditional
approaches (Ashley and Walker, 1990a and 1990b). It does not represent one single
philosophical approach or perspective, nor is it an alternative paradigm (Tvathail, 1996: 172). It
is a nonplace, a border line falling between international and domestic politics (Ashley, 1989).
The poststructuralist analyst questions the borderlines and dichotomies of modernist discourses,
such as inside/outside, the constitution of the Self/Other, and so on. In the act of definition,
difference thereby the discourse of otherness is highlighted, since one always defines an
object with regard to what it is not (Knafo, 2004). As Simon Dalby asserts, It involves the
social construction of some other person, group, culture, race, nationality or political system as
different from our person, group, etc. Specifying difference is a linguistic, epistemological and,
most importantly, a political act; it constructs a space for the other distanced and inferior from
the vantage point of the person specifying the difference (Dalby, cited in Tvathail, 1996: 179).
Indeed, poststructuralism offers no definitive answers, but leads to new questions and new
unexplored grounds. This makes the commitment to the incomplete nature of the political and of
political analysis so central to poststructuralism (Finlayson and Valentine, 2002: 15). As Jim
George writes, It is postmodern resistance in the sense that while it is directly (and sometimes

violently) engaged with modernity, it seeks to go beyond the repressive, closed aspects of
modernist global existence. It is, therefore, not a resistance of traditional grand-scale
emancipation or conventional radicalism imbued with authority of one or another sovereign
presence. Rather, in opposing the large-scale brutality and inequity in human society, it
is a resistance active also at the everyday, community, neighbourhood, and interpersonal
levels, where it confronts those processes that systematically exclude people from
making decisions about who they are and what they can be ( George, 1994: 215,
emphasis in original). In this light, poststructural practices are used critically to investigate how
the subject of international relations is constituted in and through the discourses and texts of
global politics. Treating theory as discourse opens up the possibility of historicizing it. It is a
myth that theory can be abstracted from its socio-historical context, from reality, so to speak, as
neorealists and neoclassical realists believe. It is a political practice which needs to be
contextualized and stripped of its purportedly neutral status. It must be understood with

respect to its role in preserving and reproducing the structures and power
relations present in all language forms. Dominant theories are, in this view, dominant
discourses that shape our view of the world (the subject) and our ways of understanding it.

A2: Perm
The permutation either is severance or doesnt solveseverance of representations is bad because it screws
negative offense- you have to punish their bad view of the
world
The permutation doesnt solve because it still links to the
K- it still uses securitizing logic which guts solvencythats Neocleous
The plan cannot be detached from its discursive
underpinnings. The noble effort to restrict violence is
enframed by a larger structure of security logic that
writes the effort into a broader system of hegemonic
power and economic domination.
Anthony Burke, Senior Lecturer @ School of Politics & IR @ Univ. of New South Wales, 7 [Beyond
Security, Ethics and Violence, p. 3-4]
These frameworks are interrogated at the level both of their theoretical
conceptualisation and their practice: in their influence and implementation in specific
policy contexts and conflicts in East and Central Asia, the Middle East and the 'war on terror',
where their meaning and impact take on greater clarity. This approach is based on a conviction
that the meaning of powerful political concepts cannot be abstract or easily
universalised: they all have histories, often complex and conflictual; their forms and meanings
change over time; and they are developed, refined and deployed in concrete struggles over
power, wealth and societal form. While this should not preclude normative debate over how
political or ethical concepts should be defined and used, and thus be beneficial or destructive to
humanity, it embodies a caution that the meaning of concepts can never be stabilised or

unproblematic in practice. Their normative potential must always be considered in

relation to their utilisation in systems of political, social and economic power and
their consequent worldly effects. Hence this book embodies a caution by Michel Foucault, who
warned us about the 'politics of truth . . the battle about the status of truth and the economic and
political role it plays', and it is inspired by his call to 'detach the power of truth from the forms of
hegemony, social, economic and cultural, within which it operates at the present time'.1
It is clear that traditionally coercive and violent approaches to security and strategy are both still culturally
dominant, and politically and ethically suspect. Ho

wever, the reasons for pursuing a critical analysis relate not only to the most
destructive or controversial approaches, such as the war in Iraq, but also to their
available (and generally preferable) alternatives. There is a necessity to question not
merely extremist versions such as the Bush doctrine, Indonesian militarism or Israeli
expansionism, but also their mainstream critiques - whether they take the form of liberal
policy approaches in international relations (IR), just war theory, US realism, optimistic
accounts of globalisation, rhetorics of sensitivity to cultural difference, or centrist Israeli security
discourses based on territorial compromise with the Palestinians. The surface appearance of
lively (and often significant) debate masks a deeper agreement about major concepts ,
forms of political identity and the imperative to secure them. Debates about when and how it
may be effective and legitimate to use military force in tandem with other policy options, for
example, mask a more fundamental discursive consensus about the meaning of security, the
effectiveness of strategic power, the nature of progress, the value of freedom or the promises of
national and cultural identity. As a result, political and intellectual debate about insecurity,
violent conflict and global injustice can become hostage to a claustrophic structure of

political and ethical possibility that systematically wards off critique.

A2: Perm/pragmatism
Focus on feasibility destroys our critical project. Their perm shores up the
exclusivist discourse of security.
Burke 7 (Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence, p. 21-2]
A further argument of the CSS thinkers, one that adds a sharply conservative note to their normative
discourse, needs comment. This states that proposals for political transformation must be based on an
identification of 'immanent possibilities' for change in the present order. Indeed, Richard Wyn Jones is
quite, militant about this: [D]escriptions of a more emancipated order must focus on realizable utopias ... If
[critical theorists] succumb to the temptation of suggesting a blueprint for an emancipated order that is
unrelated to the possibilities inherent in the present ... [they] have no way of justifying their arguments
epistemologically. Furthermore, it is highly unlikely that a vision of an emancipated order that is not based
on immanent potential will be politically efficacious. 47 Certainly it is helpful to try to identify such
potentials; but whatever the common sense about the practicalities of political struggle this contains, I
strongly reject the way Jones frames it so dogmatically. Even putting aside the analytical ambiguities in
identifying where immanent possibilities exist, such arguments are ultimately disabling and risk
denying the entire purpose of the critical project. It is precisely at times of the greatest pessimism, when
new potentials are being shut down or normative change is distinctly negative arguably true of the period in
which I am writing - that the critical project is most important. To take just one example from this book,
any reader would recognise that my arguments about the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will
be extremely difficult to 'realise' (even though they endorse a negotiated two-state solution). This only
makes it more important to make them because the available contours of the present, confined as they are
within the masculinist ontology of the insecure nation-state, fail to provide a stable platform either for
peace or a meaningful security. In the face of such obstacles the critical project must think and conceive the
unthought, and its limiting test ought not to be realism but responsibility. The realism underlying the idea
of immanent possibility sets up an important tension between the arguments of this book and the normative
project of cosmopolitanism which was most famously set out by Kant in his Perpetual Peace as the
establishment of a 'federation of peoples' based on Republication constitutions and principles of universal
hospitality, that might result in the definitive abolition of the need to resort to war. 41 However, Kant's
image of universal human community and the elimination of war exists in fundamental tension with its
foundation on a 'pacific federation' of national democracies. With two terrible centuries' hindsight we
know that republics have not turned out to be pacifistic vehicles of cosmopolitan feeling; instead, in a
malign convergence of the social contract with Clausewitzian strategy, they have too often formed into
exciusivist communities whose ultimate survival is premised upon violence. Is the nation-state the reality
claim upon which cosmopolitanism always founders? Could a critique of security, sovereignty and
violence, along the lines I set out here, help us to form a badly needed buttress for its structure?

Arguments based on necessity produce the worst violence in the name of security

Neocleous 8 (Mark, Professor of the Critique of Political Economy; Head of Department of Politics &
History Brunel Univ, Critique of Security, 33-34)
The key problem with all such claims is that by presenting such measures to us as the lesser evil they
become increasingly normalized and legitimized, an issue we shall take up at much greater length in
Chapter 2. The point here, however, is that running through such arguments is the belief that although such
practices may not be desirable, they are necessary: necessity may require the commission of bad acts,
says Ignatieff. This is a modern version of an idea that has underpinned cruel and unusual punishments
through the centuries: where historically it was said that necessary cruelty is not really cruelty, now it is
said that necessary interrogation is not really torture. Here liberalism once again merely reiterates rather
than rebuffs a central principal of reason of state, for which necessity was frequently used to overcome
concerns about the justness of a particular action if something is absolutely necessary then the question
of whether it is just or not is merely a philosophical dispute. As Hannah Arendt puts it: Necessity, since the
time of Livy and through the centuries, has meant many things that we today would find quite sufficient to
dub a war unjust rather than just. Conquest expansion, defense of vested interests, conservation of power in
view of the rise of new and threatening powers, or support of a given power equilibrium all these wellknown realities of power politics were not only actually the causes of the outbreaks of most wars in history,
they are also recognized as necessitates. Not only does this circumvent philosophical disputes about the
just war (for Livy the war that is necessary is just), but it also circumvents philosophical debate about the
justness of a whole range of other actions taken by the state: the action that is necessary is thought either
to be just or to be so necessary that questions of justice are irrelevant. It is not difficult to see that
necessity easily becomes little more than window-dressing for reason of state. In so doing it becomes the
justification for prerogative actions of virtually any kind, and contains its own justification: the notion
implies that something has to be done and will be done; necessity is an irresistible action that double the
parts of indispensable and inevitable. Hence the implication that acts of necessity must be carried out
regardless of the legal or moral restrictions or implications.

Including their mainstream liberal option ward offs kritik

of the discourses that ground U.S. foreign policy.
Burke 7Anthony Burke, Senior Lecturer @ School of Politics & IR @ Univ. of New South Wales
[Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence, p. 3-4]
These frameworks are interrogated at the level both of their theoretical conceptualisation

and their practice: in their influence and implementation in specific policy

contexts and conflicts in East and Central Asia, the Middle East and the 'war on tei-ror',
where their meaning and impact take on greater clarity. This approach is based on a conviction that the
meaning of powerful political concepts cannot be abstract or easily universalised: they all have
histories, often complex and conflictual; their forms and meanings change over time; and they are
developed, refined and deployed in concrete struggles over power, wealth and societal form. While
this should not preclude normative debate over how political or ethical concepts should be defined and
used, and thus be beneficial or destructive to humanity, it embodies a caution that the meaning of

concepts can never be stabilised or unproblematic in practice. Their normative potential

must always be considered in relation to their utilisation in systems of political,
social and economic power and their consequent worldly effects. Hence this book embodies a
caution by Michel Foucault, who warned us about the 'politics of truth . . the battle about the status of truth
and the economic and political role it plays', and it is inspired by his call to 'detach the power of truth from
the forms of hegemony, social, economic and cultural, within which it operates at the present time'.1
It is clear that traditionally coercive and violent approaches to security and strategy are both still culturally
dominant, and politically and ethically suspect. However, the reasons for pursuing a critical analysis
relate not only to the most destructive or controversial approaches, such as the war in

Iraq, but also to their available (and generally preferable) alternatives. There is a
necessity to question not merely extremist versions such as the Bush doctrine , Indonesian

militarism or Israeli expansionism, but also their mainstream critiques - whether

they take the form of liberal policy approaches in international relations (IR), just war
theory, US realism, optimistic accounts of globalisation, rhetorics of sensitivity to cultural difference,
or centrist Israeli security discourses based on territorial compromise with the Palestinians.
The surface appearance of lively (and often significant) debate masks a deeper agreement
about major concepts , forms of political identity and the imperative to secure them.
Debates about when and how it may be effective and legitimate to use military force in tandem with other
policy options, for example, mask a more fundamental discursive consensus about the meaning
of security, the effectiveness of strategic power, the nature of progress, the value of freedom or the
promises of national and cultural identity. As a result, political and intellectual debate about
insecurity, violent conflict and global injustice can become hostage to a claustrophic
structure of political and ethical possibility that systematically wards off critique .

Reconstructing security discourse fails. They change the

content but maintain the imperialist form. identifying
current policy as a threat to stability strengthens the
exlusionary constructions of security.
Burke 7Anthony Burke, Senior Lecturer @ School of Politics & IR @ Univ. of New South Wales
[Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence, p. 30-1]
However, these differences should not be quickly effaced. While the common metaphysical assumption
presents a problem, the critiques of Tickner, Walker and others have been of enormous political value, and
implicitly contested both their own and realist assumptions that security was universal. This occurred in
two ways. First, in arguments for human security there was a radical shift in the nature of the subject to be
protected:
from the highly abstract imaginary of the nation-state to the immediate, corporeal distress of the human; a
human which, in that distress, activates a call for difference that simultaneously undermines the illusory
unity of a body-politic that would subsume all differences beneath a common imagination of home.
Second, the force of such critiques shattered Realism's claim to be a founding and comprehensive account
of security: scattering its objects, methods, and normative aims into an often contradictory and antithetical
dispersal. What was revealed here was not a universality but a field of conflict - as much social as
conceptual. This creates some serious problems for a more radical and inclusive language of security,
however important its desire for justice. This was recognised later by Walker, who argued in 1997 that
'demands for broader accounts of security risk inducing epistemological overload' ." Indeed
Simon Dalby argues that security, as a concept, may no longer be viable. He thinks that radical

reformulations suggest that: 'the political structures of modernity, patriarchy and

capitalism are the sources [rather than the vulnerable objects] of insecurity ... [are] so
different as to call into question whether the term itself can be stretched to accommodate
such reinterpretations. Inescapably, it puts into question the utility of the term in political discourse
after the Cold War."'

Thus humanist critiques of security uncover an aporia within the concept of security. An
aporia is an event that prevents a metaphysical discourse from fulfilling its promised unity:
not a contradiction which can be brought into the dialectic, smoothed over and resolved into the
unity of the concept, but an untotalisable problem at the heart of the concept, disrupting its trajectory,
emptying out its fullness, opening out its closure. Jacques Derrida writes of aporia being an 'impasse', a
path that cannot be travelled; an 'interminable experience' that, however, 'must remain if one wants to think,
to make come or to let come any event of decision or responsibility' 14
As an event, Derrida sees the aporia as something like a stranger crossing the threshold of a foreign land:
yet the aporetic stranger 'does not simply cross a given threshold' but 'affects the very experience of the
threshold to the point of annihilating or rendering indeterminate all the distinctive signs of a prior identity,

beginning with the very border that delineated a legitimate home and assured lineage, names and language
'1 With this in mind, we can begin to imagine how a critical discourse (the 'stranger' in the security state)
can challenge and open up the self-evidence of security, its self- and boundary-drawing nature, its
imbrication with borders, sovereignty, identity and violence. Hence it is important to open up and focus on
aporias: they bring possibility, the hope of breaking down the hegemony and assumptions of powerful
political concepts, to think and create new social, ethical and economic relationships outside their
oppressive structures of political and epistemological order - in short, they help us to think new paths.

Aporias mark not merely the failure of concepts but a new potential to experience and
imagine the impossible. This is where the critical and life-affirming potential of genealogy can come
into play.
My particular concern with humanist discourses of security is that, whatever their critical value,
they leave in place (and possibly strengthen) a key structural feature of the elite strategy they
oppose: its claim to embody truth and to fix the contours of the real . In particular, the

ontology of security/threat or security/insecurity which forms the basic condition of the real
for mainstream discourses of international policy - remains powerfully in place, and
security's broader function as a defining condition of human experience and modern
political life remains invisible and unexamined. This is to abjure a powerful critical
approach that is able to question the very categories in which our thinking, our experience
and actions remain confined.
This chapter remains focused on the aporias that lie at the heart of security, rather than pushing into the
spaces that potentially lie beyond. This is another project, one whose contours are already becoming clearer
and which I address in detail in Chapters 2 and 316 What this chapter builds is a genealogical account of
security's origins and cultural power, its ability to provide what Walker calls a 'constitutive account of the
political' - as he says, 'claims about common security, collective security, or world security do

little more than fudge the contradictions written into the heart of modem politics: we can
only become humans, or anything else, after we have given up our humanity, or any other
attachments, to the greater good of citizenship' .17 Before we can rewrite security we have to
properly understand how security has written us how it has shaped and limited our very
possibility, the possibilities for our selves, our relationships and our available images of
political, social and economic order. This, as Walker intriguingly hints, is also to explore the aporetic
distance that modernity establishes between our 'humanity' and a secure identity defined and limited by the
state. In short, security needs to be placed alongside a range of other economic, political, technological,
philosophic and scientific developments as one of the central constitutive events of our modernity, and it
remains one of its essential underpinnings.

Even if their intent is to demilitarize via arms control

their discourse of national security depoliticizes the
structural-representational questions that generate
violence.
C.A.S.E. Collective 6 [Security Dialogues 37.4, Critical Approaches to Security in Europe: A
Networked Manifesto, Sage Political Science, p. 460]
Nowadays, matters of peace and security, as well as security and develop- ment, are considered closely
related. These nexuses have been referred to as mergings.11 Such mergings lie at the core of new research
agendas in security studies. Indeed, by extending the field of security to new social fields, such as peace
and development, they allow for new research agendas within security studies. However, before exploring
the possibility of com- mon research directions between critical peace research, development studies and
CASE, we need to critically engage the notion of merging that participates in the widening of the
contemporary security agenda. The question of the widening of the field of security has given rise to
fierce debates. The implicit argument of many of the wideners is that by securitiz- ing new issues such as
peace and development, one encourages politicians to deal with them in a positive way. However, such an

approach might be problematic. The widening of the security agenda, when justified by a
concern to free people from fear and threat, might run into what we have called the security
trap. Talking about a security trap refers both to the non- intentional dimension of the consequences of
widening and to the fact that these consequences might conflict with the underlying intention. It
refers to the fact that one cannot necessarily establish a feeling of security , understood as a feeling
of freedom from threat, simply by securitizing more issues or by securitizing them more.
The process of securitization is a specific form of politicization that appeals to the professionals of security.
It points not only to the fact that one has to deal with the problem, but also to how one has
to deal with it in a coercive way. As many critical scholars have warned, when transforming a
societal issue into a security issue, one risks having the issue securitized for oneself by more established
security professionals (Bigo, 1996; Wver, 1995). In other words, even when widening the security
agenda with the explicit intention of demilitarizing international security, the signifier
security might on the contrary subordinate these issues to governmental security agencies,
thus foreclosing the range of political options available to deal with the issues. Even if securitization
is a political process, it might legitimate practices that depoliticize the approach to the
securitized issues (Buzan, Wver & de Wilde, 1998; Olsson, 2006a,b) by giving preference to coercive
approaches. This can be seen as a first aspect of the security trap. The precise mechanisms through which
the process of securitization might lead to the involvement of coercive state agencies have, however, to be
further analysed. Drawing on the work of French historian Jean Delumeau (1986), Bigo has shown that the
securitization of societal issues raises the issue of protection by insecuritizing the audience the security
discourses are addressing. This insecuritization will translate into a social demand for the intervention of
coercive state agencies through reassurance discourses and protection techniques. In other words, the
processes of securitization and of insecuritization are inseparable. This leads him to speak of the process of
(in)securitization (Bigo, 1995). This means that one is confronted with a security dilemma: the more one
tries to securitize social phenomena in order to ensure security, the more one creates (intentionally
or non-intentionally) a feeling of insecurity. This happens, for example, when the military is called in to
patrol streets in order to prevent terrorist attacks. Even if the underlying idea is to reassure the population, it
might also create a feeling of panic (Guittet, 2006). As a logical consequence, the politics of maximal
security are also politics of maximal anxiety. This is the second aspect of the security trap. The irony is that
even the most careful and critical scholar aiming at avoid- ing the first and second traps might
unwillingly participate in the securitiztion of new issues when analysing how these issues are
de facto framed in terms of security. When analysing the securitization of a phenomenon, how can
one avoid playing into the hands of the deep structures of the security discourse and thus participating in
its discursive securitization? This question of the normative dilemma of security studies is the third aspect
of the security trap. Highlighting the non-intentional and adverse effects of analysing the widening of
security, it remains the most difficult to handle (Huysmans, 1998a).

The permutation cant solve rejecting state-centrism

is a prerequisite to confronting security issues and
effective policymaking our critique is mutually exclusive
with the affirmative
Ahmed 11 [Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, M.A. in Contemporary War & Peace Studies and a PhD in
International Relations from the School of Global Studies at Sussex University, Executive Director of the
Institute for Policy Research and Development, Professor at the Department of International Relations,
University of Sussex, UK, 2011 (The international relations of crisis and the crisis of international
relations: from the securitisation of scarcity to the militarisation of society, Department of International
Relations, University of Sussex, UK, Global Change, Peace & Security, Vol. 23, No. 3, October 2011, 335
355, p.354-55. PDF, Accessed on August 20, 2013)]

While recommendations to shift our frame of orientation away from conventional statecentrism toward a human security approach are valid, this cannot be achieved

without confronting the deeper theoretical assumptions underlying

conventional approaches to non-traditional security issues . By
occluding the structural origin and systemic dynamic of global ecological, energy and economic
crises, orthodox approaches are incapable of transforming them .
Coupled with their excessive state-centrism, this means they operate largely at the level of
surface impacts of global crises in terms of how they will affect quite traditional security
issues relative to sustaining state integrity, such as international terrorism, violent conflict and
population movements. Global crises end up fuelling the projection of risk onto social
networks, groups and countries that cross the geopolitical fault-lines of these surface
impacts which happen to intersect largely with Muslim communities. Hence, regions particularly
vulnerable to climate change impacts, containing large repositories of hydrocarbon energy resources, or
subject to demographic transformations in the context of rising population pressures, have become the
focus of state security planning in the context of counter-terrorism operations abroad.

The perm relies upon the same conservative thought which caused these problems in
the first place
Dillon 96 (Michael, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the
University of Lancaster, The Politics of Security)
Reimagining politics is, of course, easier said than done. Resistance to it - especially in International
Relations - nonetheless gives us a clue to one of the places where we may begin. For although I think of
this project as a kind of political project, resistance to it does not arise from a political conservatism.
Modern exponents of political modernity pride themselves on their realistic radicalism.
Opposition always arises, instead, from an extraordinarily deep and profound conservatism of
thought. Indeed, conservatism of thought in respect of the modern political imagination is required of the
modern political subject. Remaining politics therefore means thinking differently. Moreover, the
project of that thinking differently leads to thinking 'difference' itself. Thought is therefore
required if politics is to contribute to out-living the modern; specifically, political thought. The
challenge to out-live the modern issues from the faltering of modern thought, however, and the
suspicion now of its very own project of thought, as much as it does from the spread of weapons of
mass destruction, the industrialization and ecological despoliation of the planet, or the
genocidal dynamics of new nationalisms. The challenge to out-live the modern issues,
therefore, from the modern condition of both politics and thought. This so- called suspicion of
thought - I would rather call it a transformation of the project of thought which has disclosed the
faltering of the modern project of thought - is what has come to distinguish continental thought in the last
century. I draw on that thought in order to think the freedom of human being against the defining political
thought of modernity: that ontological preoccupation with the subject of security which commits
its politics to securing the subject. Motivated therefore, by a certain sense of crisis in both
philosophy and politics, and by the conviction that there is an intimate relation between the
two which is most violently and materially exhibited globally in (inter)national politics, the aim
of this book is to make a contribution towards rethinking some of the fundamentals of International
Relations through what I would call the political philosophy of contemporary continental thought. Its
ultimate intention is, therefore, to make a contribution toward the reconstruction of International
Relations as a site of political thought, by departing from the very commitment to the politics of
subjectivity upon which International Relations is premised. This is a tall order, and not least because the
political philosophy of continental thought cannot be brought to bear upon International Relations if the
political thought of that thought remains largely unthought.

The perms attempt to combine theory with realism fails at realizing either.
Bartleson 0 (Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Stockholm, A Genealogy of Sovereignty, 47-8)

The synthesis advocated by structurationists and scientific realists not only holds out the hope
of resolving conceptual conflicts within existing fields of knowledge. It also makes the
breaching of disciplinary boundaries look virtuous, since it promises to settle the ontological
differences underlying their compartmentalization into distinct fields. What makes this promise
look attractive is the quite naive assumption that the way a problem in political philosophy is
formulated is independent of the way in which solutions to it are presented. The general
incommensurability between agency and structure, first elevated into a problem of imperial
proportions by structurationists, is then opened to a glorious peace-by-interdependence between
conflicting concepts and estranged fields of knowledge. From a deconstructive viewpoint,
however, it is the 'undisputed truth' underlying the 'agent-structure problem' that is the real
problem, since it is the former which makes the latter look like a chicken-and-egg debate. To say
that all social and political life is ultimately composed of two kinds of stuff is simply to presuppose
that essence is essential to social and political theory. Ontological questions invariably yield
ontological answers, since they drag the political philosopher into a quest for firm foundations and
proper origins. Starting with the assumption that agency and structure are radically different in
essence, which it is necessary to do in order to depict all prior theoretical efforts to wrestle with this
conceptual zero-sum game as vain, the structurationist then solves his problem by pointing to the fact
that what is different always shares one thing in common, namely, the fact of being different.
At this point, the 'agent-structure' debate seems to deconstruct itself; being centred on the quest for
essence, it pushes us back in an infinite series of reversals. Whenever a structure is identified, its
existence is conditioned by a prior agency, which in turn is made possible by yet another structure,
and so forth. However far back we push in this series in search of a foundation, what appears as
essential will always prove to be supplementary, in a way that deprives it of the authority of ontological
simplicity. The attempted synthesis tries to overcome the same ontological difference that
nourishes it: if the problem could be solved, the solution must also indicate that there was no
problem in the first place. The reconceptualization of sovereignty that comes with the structu rationist effort to relate the domestic inside and the international outside can be regarded as
symptomatic of the quest for essence that governs it. The very problem that the conceptualization of
sovereignty in relational terms hopes to solve, merely crops up again at a more certain depth, but
now beyond the reach of critical concepts. To say that sovereignty is constitutive with respect to
both the domestic and the international by being that which makes the internal internal and the
external external, is either to turn sovereignty into an agency that structures or a structure that acts; in
both cases the original problem is restored.

A2- Perm: Must Disengage First

Only a conscious disengagement from the securitized mindset before action can prevent cooption
David Campbell, professor of international politics at the university of Newcastle, Writing Security,

1998, pg.

202

security becomes the central dynamic in

governmental rationality, so that (as discussed in chapter 6) we live today, not in a narrowly defined
and overtly repressive disciplinary society, but in a society of security, in which practices of
national security and practices of social security structure intensive and extensive power relations,
and constitute the ethical boundaries and territorial borders of inside! outside, normal/pathological,
civilized/barbaric, and so on23 The theory of police and the shift from a sovereigns war to a populations war thus not only changed the nature of man and war, it constituted the identity of man in
the idea of the population, and articulated the dangers that might pose a threat to security. The major
implication of this argument is that the state is understood as having no essence, no ontological
status that exists prior to and is served by either police or war. Instead, the state is the mobile
effect of a multiple regime of governmentality, of which the practices of police, war, and foreign
policy/Foreign Policy are all a part.34 Rethinking security and government in these terms is one of
the preconditions necessary to suggest some of the political implications of this study. Specifically, it
Furthermore, Foucault argues that from the eighteenth century onward,

has been the purpose of this book to argue that we can interpret the cold war as an important moment in the production and
reproduction of American identity in ways consonant with the logic of a society of security To this end, the analysis
of the texts of Foreign Policy in chapter 1, the consideration of Eisenhowers security policies in chapter 6, and the
examination of the interpretation of danger surrounding the war on drugs in chapter 7, demonstrated that even
when these issues are represented in terms of national security and territorial boundaries, and even when these issues

are written in the depoliticizing mode of policy discourse, they all constitute the ensemble of the
population in terms of social security and ethical borders. Likewise, Foucaults argument underpins
the fact that these developments are not peculiar to the postWorld War II period.

A2: Perm- Realism Coopts

Perm cant solve Realism cant conceptualize itself.
Linklater, Senior Lecturer in Politics Monash University, 1990 [Andrew, Beyond Realism and Marxism, pp 14-15]
Although some realists and rationalist have argued for the transformation of world politics, most
nevertheless emphasize the limited opportunities for significant reform. On these grounds, most members
of these traditions have been dismissive of the revolutionist tradition. As noted above, several recent attempts to apply critical
theory to international relations accept the realists point that Marxism and critical sociology failed to recognize the
importance of international systemic constraints. From the perspective of critical theory, however, realism can

only be true if the species is unfree. What realism offers is an account of historical circumstances
which human subject have yet to bring under their collective control. What it does not possess is an
account of the modes of political intervention which would enable human beings to take control of
their international history. That is the ultimate task facing the critical theory of international
relations. An inquiry into the alternative forms of foreign policy behavior cannot be divorced from
the question of how to construct a post-realism analysis of international relations. Rationalism and
critical theory of world politics have a similar approach to this problem. Both reject the method of analyzing the
states-system as if it were a domain apart. Both regard the abstraction of the state-system as a barrier to
understanding one of the crucial dimensions of international relations: the universalization of the basic principles of
international order, and the universalizastion of the demand for the self-determination respectively. As for Waltzs
realism, the problem is not that it fails as an account of the reproduction of the states-system, or that it errs by emphasizing
the need for a technically-rational dimension of foreign policy. The issue is whether the decision to abstract the

states-system from other domains ignores the existence of actual or potential logics of systemmodification which may strengthen the bond of international community; and it is whether the
preoccupation with the systemic reproduction ends in a practice which suppresses the tendencies
inherent in alternative logics. Consequently, although realism succeeds in explaining the necessitous character of
international relations it fails to explicate its role in reproducing the power relations which it regards as
the objective foundation for the impossibility theorem.

A2: Framework

Sure, they can weigh their case, but its logic is flawed and
leads to our impacts
We are a competitive policy option- we change the way
that policy is made and the perm debate proves we
compete with the plan
Assumptions are a-priori to questions of politics.
Jayan Nayar, shape-shifter, horse whisperer, 1999 (SYMPOSIUM: RE-FRAMING INTERNATIONAL
LAW FOR THE 21ST CENTURY: Orders of Inhumanity Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems Fall,
1999) Lexis

The description of the continuities of violence in Section II in many ways is familiar to those
who adopt a critical perspective of the world. "We" are accustomed to narrating human wrongs
in this way. The failures and betrayals, the victims and perpetrators, are familiar to our critical
understanding. From this position of judgment, commonly held within the "mainstream" of the
"non-mainstream," there is also a familiarity of solutions commonly advocated for
transformation; the "marketplace" for critique is a thriving one as evidenced by the
abundance of literature in this respect. Despite this proliferation of enlightenment and the
profession of so many good ideas, however, "things" appear to remain as they are, or, worse still,

deteriorate. And so, the cycle of critique, proposals for transformation and disappointment
continues. Rightly, we are concerned with the question of what can be done to alleviate
the sufferings that prevail. But there are necessary prerequisites to answering the "what do
we do?" question. We must first ask the intimately connected questions of "about what?"
and "toward what end?" These questions, obviously, impinge on our vision and judgment.
When we attempt to imagine transformations toward preferred human futures, we engage in the
difficult task of judging the present. This is difficult not because we are oblivious to violence or
that we are numb to the resulting suffering, but because, outrage with "events" of violence aside,
processes of violence embroil and implicate our familiarities in ways that defy the

simplicities of straightforward imputability. Despite our best efforts at

categorizing violence into convenient compartments--into "disciplines" of study and analysis
such as "development" and "security" (health, environment, population, being other examples of
such compartmentalization)--the encroachments of order(ing) function at more pervasive levels.
And without doubt, the perspectives of the observer , commentator, and actor become
crucial determinants. It is necessary, I believe, to question this, "our," perspective, to
reflect upon a perspective of violence which not only locates violence as a happening "out there"
while we stand as detached observers and critics, but is also one in which we are ourselves
implicated in the violence of ordered worlds where we stand very much as participants. For this
purpose of a critique of critique, it is necessary to consider the "technologies" of
ordering.

Alternative Solves Warming Better

And it trades off with more useful mitigation policies

ONeill 9 (Saffron, Research Fellow in the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility, Fear Wont Do It:
Promoting Positive Engagement With Climate Change Through Visual and Iconic Representations, Science Communication, Volume
30 Number 3, March)

Individuals May Become Desensitized to Fear Appeals A further consequence of long-term reliance on
fear appeals, as stated by Hastings et al. (2004), is that it is possible that a law of diminishing returns may exist. If
this exists, fear approaches need to be made more intense as time goes by because of repeated
exposure to threatening information in order to produce the same impact on individuals. Linville and Fischers
(1991) finite pool of worry effect is also worthy of note here. This theory states that increased concern
for one risk may decrease concern for other risks, as if individuals only have a certain capacity
for worry. So it could be posited that communicating particularly fearful messages about certain
climatic phenomena (e.g., dramatically rising sea levels because of ice sheet melt) might
desensitize individuals to be concerned about other potentially more salient
concerns (e.g., the consideration of local impacts such as city heat waves), impacts that
they could act on constructively.
Framing warming in terms of extinction is net worse for mobilizing action

Feinberg and Willer 11 (Matthew, Psychology Department UC Berkley, and Rob, Sociology Department UC Berkley,
Apocalypse Soon? Dire Messages Reduce Belief in Global Warming by Contradicting Just-World Beliefs, 1-12, Journal of
Psychological Science)
Although scientific evidence attests to the existence and severity of global warming, high

percentages of people in the

United States and elsewhere increasingly see global warming as nonexistent, exaggerated, or
unrelated to human activity (BBC Climate Change Poll, 2010; Gallup Poll, 2009, 2010; Pew Research Center for the
People and the Press, 2009). Because scientists agree that large-scale action will be necessary to
counteract the effects of global warming, environmental advocates often engage in public appeals
designed to increase rates of proenvironmental behaviors and promote support for initiatives aimed at
counteracting climate change. These appeals often emphasize the severity of potential consequences,
relying on messages that highlight the dire risks associated with unchecked global warming
(Kerr, 2007). But what if these appeals are in fact counterproductive? We contend that one cause of
skepticism concerning global warming may be that such dire messages threaten individuals
need to believe that the world is just, orderly, and stable, a motive that is widely held and
deeply ingrained in many people (Lerner, 1980; Lerner & Miller, 1978). Research shows that many
individuals have a strong need to perceive the world as just , believing that rewards will be bestowed on
individuals who judiciously strive for them and punishments will be meted out to those who deserve them (Dalbert, 2001; Furnham,
2003). Research on just-world theory has demonstrated that when individuals need to believe in a just world is

threatened, they commonly employ defensive responses, such as dismissal or rationalization of the
information that threatened their justworld beliefs (for reviews, see Furnham, 2003; Hafer & Bgue, 2005). Information
regarding the potentially severe and arbitrary effects of global warming should constitute a
significant threat to belief in a just world, and discrediting or denying global warmings existence
could serve as a means of resolving the resulting threat. Many dire messages aimed at stopping global
warming make salient the impending chaos and unpredictable catastrophe that global
warming will bring with it. Moreover, these messages often emphasize the harm that will be done to children and future
generations who have done nothing themselves to cause global warming. Such messages contradict the belief that the world is
predictable and fair by suggesting that good people will suffer and that the innocent will be the primary victims. Because these
messages contradict just-world beliefs, individuals who most strongly hold such beliefs should be the most threatened. When such

people are exposed to dire messages concerning global warming, they are thus likely to
discount the evidence. By increasing skepticism about global warming, these dire messages

should, in turn, also reduce

peoples willingness to engage in behaviors aimed at combating global warming.

We conducted two experiments testing these claims . In the first, we measured participants tendencies to hold
just-world beliefs, varied the type of global-warming message participants were exposed to, and then measured their levels of
skepticism regarding global warming. In the second study, we investigated the role of just-world beliefs more directly, manipulating
the salience of these beliefs before exposing participants to a dire global-warming message. We then measured both levels of
skepticism and participants willingness to curb their daily carbon emissions.

Their apocalyptic framing of warming undermines the political will to act,

turning the case
Foust et al. 8 [Christina R. Foust, Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Communication Studies at the University of
Denver, et al., with William O. Murphy, Doctoral Student and Graduate Teaching Instructor in the Department of Human
Communication Studies at the University of Denver, and Chelsea Stow, Doctoral Student and Graduate Teaching Instructor in the
Department of Human Communication Studies at the University of Denver, 2008, Global Warming and Apocalyptic Rhetoric: A
Critical Frame Analysis of US Popular and Elite Press Coverage from 1997-2007, Paper Submitted to the Environmental
Communication Division of the National Communication Association Convention in San Diego, November 20th, Available Online at
http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p260125_index.html, Accessed 03-18-2009, p. 22-23]

Elements of an apocalyptic frame could be said to exist in most of the articles we read, though all
elements were not present in each article. Nonetheless, apocalyptic framing should give us pause,
for it threatens to hinder progress in forming a political will to change the carbon-based
energy economy (and thus mitigate the consequences of global warming). To announce the

coming of the apocalypse creates despair as people feel they cannot stop such an event , but
can only hope that they are among the chosen few to be saved (if they believe in the
immanence of the end). Apocalyptic framing also creates denial, as when people fail to exit
the movie theater because they have heard fire yelled once too often. There may also be a
sense of denial in terms of the effectiveness of solutions: Why make changes to our
lifestyle, if the world is going to end [end page 22] quickly and our actions dont make a
difference anyway? If the end is, indeed, the total destruction of earth, wont our efforts to
make change now be in vain? As Brummett suggests of pre-millennial apocalyptic rhetoric
(which assumes that the world will be destroyed after a judgment day), the cosmically mandated
telos of catastrophe overshadows any efforts to change the trajectory of the narrative. The
only place for human agency within such rhetoric is the capacity to agree with prophesies,
against the polarized opposition of non-believers. By agreeing with the prophesies,
believers feel a sense of control over the situation because they are right, not
necessarily because they are taking collective and personal steps to resolve the issue .
The alternative doesnt ignore climate change but rather fosters a more
productive frame of thinking
Foust et al. 8 [Christina R. Foust, Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Communication Studies at the University of
Denver, et al., with William O. Murphy, Doctoral Student and Graduate Teaching Instructor in the Department of Human
Communication Studies at the University of Denver, and Chelsea Stow, Doctoral Student and Graduate Teaching Instructor in the
Department of Human Communication Studies at the University of Denver, 2008, Global Warming and Apocalyptic Rhetoric: A
Critical Frame Analysis of US Popular and Elite Press Coverage from 1997-2007, Paper Submitted to the Environmental
Communication Division of the National Communication Association Convention in San Diego, November 20th, Available Online at
http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p260125_index.html, Accessed 03-18-2009, p. 24-25]

In conclusion, we hope to inspire more scholarship in the spirit of Moser and Dillings (2007) call
for a greater inter-disciplinary conversation on climate change. The methodological tool of frame

analysis can help foster common ground between humanities scholars, social scientists, and
climate scientists, concerned about global warming. Frame analysis can also be a valuable
tool in identifying the troubling aspects of how a discourse evolves and is communicated
and in so doing, it can lead to more effective communication. Deconstructing the harmful
effects of an apocalyptic frame, we feel some responsibility to try to offer alternative
frames which might balance the need to communicate the urgency of climate change,
without [end page 24] moving people to denial and despair. We would like to see the press
inspire more of a public dialogue on how we can mitigate climate change, rather than
encouraging readers to continue to be resigned to the catastrophic telos. This does not

mean that we should ignore the potentially devastating consequences of global warming
(now and in the future); but it does mean that we must begin a conversation about how to
change our daily routines to make things better. We believe that the press could promote
greater human agency in the issue of climate change, so that people do not become
resigned to the telos of global warming. This includes encouraging more personal and civic
responsibility, rather than suggesting that experts will take care of it (or that we can do
nothing to mitigate the impacts of climate change). Journalists could acknowledge the
expertise of scientists, balanced with an acknowledgement of the power of common sense
and morality such a move may help avoid casting scientists as prophets. Through a less
tragic, more productive framing of the issues of climate change, we may expand the
common ground needed to build a political will for dealing with climate change.

Answers to (A2) Common Affirmative Arguments

A2: Our Harms Are Objective

Their harms are social constructionswhat counts as a problem to be solved is
defined by the dominant discourse.
Anastassia Tsoukala, Research Fellow at the University of Paris V-Sorbonne and Associate Professor at
the University of Paris XI, 2008 (Boundary-creating Processes and the Social Construction of Threat,
Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Volume 33, Issue 2, April-June, Available Online via Academic
Search Elite, p. 137-138)
While the tenants of the objectivist model consider social problems as "a product of
dysfunctions, social disorganization, role and value conflicts, and a violation of norms,"1 the
defenders of the constructionist thesis assume that what qualifies as a "problem" for a given
society at a given moment is the outcome of "long-standing and day-to-day constructions made
by persons and groups." Hence, it depends less on its objective features than on the way people
prioritize and perceive collective values and interests to assess problems. This is not meant to
deny the objective seriousness of social conditions but rather to stress that the subjective
definition of these conditions is to a large measure independent of their seriousness. Not all
harmful social conditions will be seen as social problems, while some relatively benign ones
will. Far from being objective realities, social problems tell us then what is righteous and useful
or, on the contrary, what is evil and dangerous; they show who has the power to define these
values and to impose punishment on their potential adversaries; they uncover whose interests are
advanced when social problems are brought to public awareness. In short, they bring to light an
ongoing process of asserting power through the distinction of right from wrong and the
subsequent delimiting of the social reality. In this respect, not only is the construction of social
enemies important in political terms but it is also thought to be essential to the very defining of
the mainstream society and to the further maintenance of its cohesion. These two functions are
so strongly interrelated that it is not possible anymore to address the political aspect of the
process while ignoring its social one. In other words, the political benefits that may result from
the introduction of hard coercive policies against allegedly threatening social figures should not
be dissociated from the fact that "civilized" societies keep on confirming their own sense of
unitary consensus when creating outcasts.

A2: Realism Reflexive

1. Their evidence describes the alternative not the aff - our link arguments prove they engage in the
uncritical, deterministic, neorealism their permutation evidence criticizes. Our K recognizes that
certain international structures exist, but is more concerned with asking how and why they came
about.
2. Specific links o/w- even if reflexive realism is theoretically possible, the aff doesn't deploy it.
Winning this permutation doesn't prove that their 1AC representations specifically are defensible.
3. Transformative realism still links core assumptions still cause simplistic securitization.
Grondin 2004 (David, Masters in Political Science & Ph.D. Candidate University of Ottawa, 2004 (Re)Writing the National
Security State, Center for United States Studies)
Like many concepts, realism is essentially contested.

In a critical reinterpretation of realism , James Der Derian

offers a genealogy of realism that deconstructs the uniform realism represented in IR: he reveals many
other versions of realism that are never mentioned in International Relations texts (Der Derian, 1995: 367). I am
aware that there are many realist discourses in International Relations, but they all share a set of assumptions ,
such as the state is a rational unitary actor, the state is the main actor in international relations, states
pursue power defined as a national interest, and so on. I want to show that realism is one way of representing
reality, not the reflection of reality. While my aim here is not to rehearse Der Derians genealogy of realism, I do want to
spell out the problems with a positivist theory of realism and a correspondence philosophy of language.
Such a philosophy accepts nominalism, wherein language as neutral description corresponds to reality. This
is precisely the problem of epistemic realism and of the realism characteristic of American realist
theoretical discourses. And since for poststructuralists language constitutes reality, a reinterpretation of realism as
constructed in these discourses is called for.10 These scholars cannot refer to the essentially contested
nature of realism and then use realism as the best language to reflect a self-same phenomenon (Der Derian,
1995: 374). Let me be clear: I am not suggesting that the many neorealist and neoclassical realist discourses in International Relations
are not useful. Rather, I want to argue that these technicist and scientist forms of realism serve political purposes, used as
they are in many think tanks and foreign policy bureaucracies to inform American political leaders . This is the
relevance of deconstructing the uniform realism (as used in International Relations): it brings to light its locatedness in a hermeneutic
circle in which it is unwittingly trapped (Der Derian, 1995: 371). And as Friedrich Kratochwil argues, [] the rejection of a
correspondence theory of truth does not condemn us, as it is often maintained, to mere relativism and/or to endless deconstruction
in which anything goes but it leaves us with criteria that allows us to distinguish and evaluate competing theoretical creations
(Kratochwil, 2000 : 52).

A2: Realism Evolutionary

1. Evolutionary realism is wrong
A. Its based on flawed assumptions about human nature
B. Sociobiological explanations deny human agency and become a self-fulfilling prophecy this
makes war inevitable

Busser 6

(Mark, Masters candidate at NYU. The Evolution of Security: Revisiting the Human Nature

Debate in International Relations http://www.yorku.ca/yciss/publications/documents/WP40-Busser.pdf)

The broad goal of Thayers paper is to unite his two arguments to demonstrate that universal biological impulses
drive human beings towards war. His argument revolves around the idea of an evolved human antipathy towards difference.
Thayer suggests that xenophobia and ethnocentrism would have been helpful attributes to groups seeking to protect limited resources,
and concludes that given the contribution of xenophobia and ethnocentrism to fitness during human evolution, ethnic conflict is
likely to be a recurring social phenomenon. Therefore ethnic conflict, like war and peace, is part of the fabric of international
politics.39 While Thayer acknowledges that culture and religion can dampen or exacerbate xenophobia and ethnocentrism, he still
argues that these phenomena are an integral part of an evolved biological human nature. In this he follows Edward O. Wilson, who has
argued that war as we know it is the evolutionary result of a phenomenon known as kin selection. This refers to the particular selective
mechanism whereby genetic relatives affect each others evolutionary fitness through interactions that make survival of the relatives
as well of the gene or trait encouraging such interactions more likely. According to Wilson, the continual processes of kin selection
have encouraged warlike behaviours because of various competitive advantages to violent ethnocentrism.40 With this starting point,
Thayer, Shaw and Wong attempt to explain a human propensity for warfare in terms of central tendencies in aggression and lethal
conflict, which [they] maintain have been adapted to serve humans in hunter/gatherer groups for 99 percent of humanitys
existence.41 To prove this claim, Shaw and Wong attempt to formalize a cost-benefit analysis model supported by the concept of
inclusive fitness. Theoretical decisions are mapped out in terms of mathematical probabilities to show how aggressive tendencies
would lend individuals communities relative fitness and encourage such traits to be passed along. Responding directly to

Thayer, Duncan Bell and Paul MacDonald have expressed concern at the intellectual functionalism inherent
in sociobiological explanations, suggesting that too often analysts choose a specific behaviour and read
backwards into evolutionary epochs in an attempt to rationalize explanations for that behaviour . These
arguments, Bell and MacDonald write, often fall into what Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould have called adaptionism, or
the attempt to understand all physiological and behavioural traits of an organism as evolutionary adaptations.42 Arguments such
as these are hand-crafted by their makers, and tend to carry forward their assumptions and biases. In an
insightful article, Jason Edwards suggests that sociobiology and its successor, evolutionary psychology, are
fundamentally political because they frame their major questions in terms of an assumed individualism .
Edwards suggests that the main question in both subfields is: given human nature, how is politics possible?43

The problem is that the givens of human nature are drawn backward from common knowledges and truths
about humans in society, and the game-theory experiments which seek to prove them are often created with
such assumptions in mind. These arguments are seen by their critics as politicized from the very start. Sociobiology in
particular has been widely interpreted as a conservative politico-scientific tool because of these basic assumptions, and because of the
political writings of many sociobiologists.44 Because sociobiology naturalizes certain behaviours like conflict ,
inequality and prejudice, Lewontin et al. suggest that it sets the stage for legitimation of things as they are.45
The danger inherent in arguments that incorporate sociobiological arguments into examinations of modern political
life, the authors say, is that such arguments naturalize variable behaviours and support discriminatory political

structures. Even if certain behaviours are found to have a biological drives behind them, dismissing those
behaviours as natural precludes the possibility that human actors can make choices and can avoid antisocial, violent, or undesirable action.46 While the attempt to discover a geneticallydetermined human nature has usually been
justified under the argument that knowing humankinds basic genetic programming will help to solve the resulting social problems,

discourse about human nature seems to generate self-fulfilling prophesies by putting limits on what is
considered politically possible. While sociobiologists tend to distance themselves from the naturalistic fallacy that what is is
what should be, there is still a problem with employing adaptionism to explain how existing political structures because
conclusions tend to be drawn in terms of conclusions that assert what must be because of biologicallyingrained constraints.47 Too

firm a focus on sociobiological arguments about natural laws draws attention away from humanitys
potential for social and political solutions that can counteract and mediate any inherent biological impulses ,
whatever they may be.

2. Evolutionary biology goes our way humans naturally seek meaning and bonding with other
humans this is also a reason why the alternative solves case because meaning to life prevents war

Busser 6

(Mark, Masters candidate at NYU. The Evolution of Security: Revisiting the Human Nature

Debate in International Relations http://www.yorku.ca/yciss/publications/documents/WP40-Busser.pdf)

Citing evolutionary Science does not truly support realist narratives and explanations of egoistic competition in
human society, despite the fact that over the years it has often been cited by those wishing to make such cases. There is plenty of
evidence in evolutionary science for explaining why biology is not destiny, and in fact, for unsettling any
claim about an evolutionarily-derived human nature that underlies political life . In her book In Search of Human
Nature, Mary E. Clark has suggested that instead of a human nature defined by genetically programmed instincts, predispositions and
drives, it is more useful to discuss a human nature in terms of universal needs. These needs, she argues, are as close to a human
nature as we humans have, since their fulfilment is necessary as a result of complex development. Clark suggests that human

beings have basic biological and psychological needs for bonding, for autonomy, and for meaning. Bonding
with a social group, Clark says, is an evolved human propensity that was necessary for survival during our
evolution, and which also became indispensable because of other biologically evolved traits. Situating her
evolutionary arguments in the context of the Pleistocene era, she suggests that biological changes in the evolving human body
demanded social changes as well. For example, as the primate brain grew in size, the birth canal could not enlarge to accommodate it.
This meant that as primate intelligence evolved and increased, selective pressures encouraged primate children to be born increasingly
premature, thus experiencing more and more of early childhood development outside of the womb. This, Clark argues, meant that
natural selection favoured mutually supportive group behaviour.61 A large brain therefore coevolved with an interdependent social
lifestyle. However, this is not a repeat of the sociobiological emphasis on inclusive fitness. Clark argues that not only individuals,

but also groups were selected for traits during the most crucial phases of primate evolution. Culture became
the most critical adaptation for survival in the Pleistocene as group living became vital not only to the survival of individual
members, but also to the survival of the group as a whole. Communication skills and their social use became critical to
survival. Shared group intelligence, Clark suggests, independent of genetically determined behaviours, promotes the survival of
groups, and hence of all their members.62 learn how to survive.63 The need for autonomy, Clark insists, does not translate into a
genetic predisposition towards egoistic individualism. She criticizes Machiavellian interpretations of evolutionary science, arguing
that ultra-Darwinians overemphasize the ubiquity of dominance hierarchies.64 Much of the science that supports the

Hobbesian view of human nature, Clark argues, is based on studies of primates conducted under obtrusive
conditions and in artificial environments. When scientific observers have developed less invasive methods
for observing primates in their natural habitat, far different results were recorded where primates were seen
as more peaceful, cooperative, and conciliatory. Much of the conflict, aggression, tendencies towards
dominance and violence observed in primate societies, Clark writes, is the result of irregular stresses upon
the individuals and the group as a whole, often posed by scientists conducting their studies .65 Neither neoHobbesian sociobiologists nor the rational game theorists have correctly envisioned primate nature in its complexities, Clark asserts.
The intersection between the basic human needs for bonding and autonomy offers a space for understanding complex behaviours and
social arrangements. Citing extensive ethnographic evidence, she suggests that primates have the potential for both dominance
hierarchies and for egalitarian co-existence, and that the determining factor is the level of stress experienced by a group. When
individuals are allowed autonomy within the context of meaningful group bonding, she argues, hierarchies are less likely to emerge.
66 The implication is that the conflict-driven hierarchies that observers like Thayer believe to be an unavoidable part of human and
primate nature are instead contingent upon environmental and social circumstances, being merely the result of a failure to fulfil basic
needs. The third basic human propensity, Clark suggests, is for the creation of meaning. The evolved human

ability to conceive of meaning in the world, according to Clark, has been of prime importance to the
survival of groups. Communication has been critical to group survival in many ways. Shared cultural stories are key to the
coherence of groups, and individual growth depends on them. The specific stories within cultures structure the existence of societies
and provide standards of humanity by which members evaluate their actions. Because they are important, human beings actively
defend their meaning systems from threats, and result in conflict between groups over meaning systems.67 Furthermore, Clark argues,

the particular meaning system embraced by a society can help to shape survival strategies and responses to
potential stresses: Whether a given culture becomes extinct or successfully adapts depends less on what
causes the stresses it experiences than on how those stresses are interpreted and responded to. In other
words, its beliefs are more significant than its circumstances.68 Freedom and Security Perhaps Clarks most
significant arguments for political scientists is her argument that within social groups, conflict and aggression can be
mitigated by finding a way to allow members the freedom to fulfil the basic needs of bonding, autonomy,
and meaning.
3. We call shenanigans on your methodology sociobiology should not be used to explain
international relations or human behavior

Bell and MacDonald, 01

(Duncan, Paul, Center for International

Studies doctoral candidate, Cambridge University and Columbia University Department of Political Science doctoral candidate,. "Start
the Evolution Without Us," International Security 26.1, Project Muse)

Thayer advocates the adoption of sociobiological reasoning to augment the traditional realist account of
human behavior because sociobiology "offers a firm intellectual foundation" (p. 126) and a "sound scientific
substructure" (p. 127) for understanding the ulimate causes of egoistic and dominating behavior by human beings. He implies that
sociobiology, which can be broadly defined as the application of evolutionary theory to explain the genetic foundations of an
organism's social behavior, is generally accepted as an unproblematic approach within the scientific community and that the

extrapolation of findings from sociobiological theories into the realm of human behavior is also widely regarded as legitimate. Neither
of these claims can be upheld: The science of sociobiology is the subject of great controversy within biology as well as other cognate
disciplines. Indeed, given the torrent of scientific criticism since the publication of Edward 0. Wilson's Sociobiology: The New
Synthesis, Thayer's failure to mention the ethically and scientifically contested nature of sociobiology is surprising. Some advocates of
sociobiology portray their opponents as motivated primarily by political correctness. We believe, however, that there are serious
ethical issues at stake in the attempt to reduce complex social and political behavior to essential elements of human genetics. When
accepted uncritically, sociobiological claims contain the potential to be utilized in the naturalization of behaviors that are variable and
in the justification of discriminatory sociopolitical orders. For this reason, sociobiological theories should be held to a high standard of
intellectual and analytical scrutiny before they are adopted as scientific fact, or be avoided altogether. Given these concerns,
international relations theorists should seriously consider the methodological criticisms leveled against sociobiology. We briefly
highlight three of the most salient of these criticisms. First, the universality of the sociobiological project-and

specifically its applicability to the study of human behavior-is extremely controversial. Thayer downplays
the serious disagreements by claiming that the study of humans is central to the sociobiological project (p.
130). In contrast, one commentator has noted that "most 'sociobiologists' . . . are quite uninterested in
humans."6 In particular, many biologists themselves dispute the applicability of sociobiological approaches
to humans because of the central role of culture, language, and self-reflexivity in determining human
behavior.7 Although advocates of human sociobiology acknowledge the dual influences of culture and genetics in shaping human
behavior, no consensus exists on how to explain the complex interplay between these factors. Second, sociobiological
explanations of human behavior are often unacceptably functionalist. Sociobiologists take a particular form
of human behavior and account for it with reference to evolutionary fitness. Different sociobiologists
explain behaviors rang- ing from selfishness to altruism and from monogamy to rape based on the claim
that they confer a selective advantage to the individuals or groups who practice them. The quality of
sociobiological explanations and the models used to demonstrate them vary tremendously, but such
arguments generally fall into the trap of what Rich- ard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould call "adaptationism," the
attempt to understand all the physiological and behavioral traits of an organism as evolutionary adaptations.
Individual traits may in fact be the result of a complex web of design and development in the organism's growth. The effects of
individual genes may not be discernable in isolation from their interaction with other genetic traits and environmental factors. Traits
may be nonadaptive and the product of allometry-the relative and incidental growth of a part of an organism in relation to the whole
bundle of traits that constitute an organism. Thus a particular behavior may be "a consequence of adaptations rather than an adaptation
in its own right."9 The complexity and unpredictability of interactions between individual selection pressures

and particular traits create intractable problems for researchers attempting to isolate the genetic foundations
of behavior within variegated environmental and cultural contexts. In other words, even if we develop an account of
how any given behavior is functional with reference to evolutionary fitness, we are a long way from being able to conclude that
evolutionary mechanisms actually gave rise to that behavior. In this way, sociobiological accounts easily degenerate into
examples of the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy generally associated with other versions of functionalist explanations in
the social sciences. This problem of isolating particular genetic traits is compounded within human populations, which are not
generally divided into isolated, distinguishable gene pools and which, as mentioned above, attribute a large role to culture in
determining socially acceptable and legitimate behavior." Third, sociobiologists themselves disagree over the unit of
selection that should be emphasized during evolution-whether it be the gene, the individual, or the group .12
Because different sociobiological studies examine selection at different analytical levels, they frequently produce different and
contradictory hypotheses about what behaviors should maximize fitness. Sociobiologists have not systematically

examined how different units of selection interact analytically, and they disagree as to what level exerts the
greatest degree of influence on evolution. For example, Maynard Smith argues that if fitness is exercised at an aggregate
level, then group-level selection pressures must be sufficiently stringent and rapid so that incentives to maximize individual fitness
will not supersede those of the group.13 Empirically assessing the relative degree and frequency of group selection

pressures vis-a-vis individual or genetic factors is extraordinarily complex, however, and in the messy
world of human political and cultural interaction, this task is practically impossible . This controversy is further
muddied by disagreement over how to operationalize the theoretical concept of the gene. Many biologists dispute the notion that
particular genes can be understood in isolation, and emphasize the importance of the interactions between genes in a complete,
interconnected genome as well as to the environment in which they are embedded.'4 Similarly, others criticize the fact that many
sociobiologists do not actually link particular behavior with an individual gene, but rather rely on population genetics and statistical
analysis to identify "hypothetical" genes that correlate with particular behaviors. These critics correctly view the highly stylized,
formal results of sociobiology as suspect, because they are never able to control for all possible exoge- nous variables and they
minimize the importance of controlled experimentation. In sum, numerous evolutionary biologists, anthropologists, and psychologists
who, although extremely sympathetic to the scientific study of humans, regard socio- biology as simplistic and misleadingly
erroneous.16 For this reason, sociobiology provides an unstable set of foundations on which to construct a

rigorously scientific approach to the study of world politics, for its scientific status remains essentially
contested.

A2: Realism General

The affs neo-conservative dominance isnt realist its triumphalist. Turning realism into an
uncritical heroic narrative undermines democratic self-limitation and criticism crucial for better
policy-making
Michael WILLIAMS Prf. @ Aberystwyth 5 What is the National Interest? The Neoconservative Challenge in IR Theory
European Journal of Intl Relations 11 p. 326-327

Morgenthau warned that appeals to national greatness and a principled patriotism could easily contribute to
a political culture prone to an imprudent and crusading foreign policy. Patriotism risked becoming identified with a
bellicose nationalism, virtue with an aggressive internationalism, and patriotism with support for military adventures.35 Moreover, he
felt that an uncritical politics of national greatness would have disastrous impacts on diplomacy, producing a

policy that divided the world between true allies who recognized American virtue as well as American
power, and who were willing to face up to the existential issues at stake in the struggle between a civilization of values and the
renewed spectre of nihilism, and those unreconstructed regimes, decadent liberals, overly optimistic rationalists, or narrowly selfinterested cynics who were cast as irresponsibly obstructive at best, positively dangerous at worst. Far from providing the basis for a
robust and responsible foreign policy, Morgenthau worried that the uncritical assertion of national greatness and

the assumption of legitimacy on the basis of an a priori claim to virtue actually risked undermining the
legitimacy and power of the United States. Greatness, he argued, is something that must be recognized by others, not just
asserted by the self; while too great a regard for ones own virtue was a constant temptation to be zealously guarded against, lest it
yield an hubristic blindness or arrogance, deaf to the demands of prudence, and leading to disaster rather than glory. Similarly, while
calling for a need to recognize the attractions of national greatness as an antidote to some of modernitys most corrosive dynamics,
he refused to regard these ideals as adequately realized within the United States itself, and was fearful that engaging in foreign
adventures would prove a tempting if ultimately illusory response to deep domestic difficulties.36 Finally, Morgenthau was
consistently concerned that declarations of national virtue could readily become barriers to criticism, a powerful
weapon with which to attack critics at home for being insufficiently virtuous, decadently weak and lacking

heroic zeal and fortitude, or even as harboring a suspiciously weak commitment to the American ideal
itself. Far from securing democracy, he feared, such ideas could easily become means for stifling the vibrant debate
that is both the lifeblood of democratic politics and a vital contribution to successful policy.37 That these
criticisms resonate remarkably with controversies and concerns surrounding neoconservatism today is hardly
surprising, since they emerge from a position that was not only aware of the theoretical claims and political concerns represented by
contemporary neonconservatism, but that developed a powerful account (and critique) of these dangers from within the problematic
of politics in liberal modernity that neoconservatism has since made its own. Recovering this aspect of classical Realism

provides an important counterweight to neoconservatisms castigation and caricaturing of the Realist

tradition. More importantly, it demonstrates that IR possesses resources within its theoretical traditions that provide a basis for a
direct and critical engagement with neoconservatism at its very foundations. Nor is classical realism by any means the only avenue
available in IR theory for such an engagement. For example, while neoconservative assaults on liberal culture and politics are
mainstays of its political rhetoric, these attacks should not obscure the fact that (as the analysis above has shown) neoconservatism is
neither totally hostile toward, nor opposed to, the liberal tradition as a whole. On the contrary, neoconservatism emerges out of a
clearly identifiable liberal tradition and an engagement with its dilemmas. As a result, there exist a wide range of areas where
contemporary liberalism might engage with neoconservatism. For instance, neoconservatives would heartily endorse Moravsciks
claim that what states want matters (1997: 521), and that in determining these desires ideational and material factors, and domestic
interests and structures are crucial. Yet the differences between Moravsciks liberalism and neoconservatism are also profound,
ranging from their differing assessments of the adequacy of self-interest as a foundation for political order, their contrasting appraisals
of the merits of pluralist democracy, and their understandings of the nature of liberal republicanism, to name but a few. The issues at
stake in these differences are too complex to survey in this context, but both their potential as grounds for a critical engagement
between liberal theories of IR and neoconservatism, and their political significance are more than apparent.

Realism is dead it relies on an outdate conception of state and lives on only as an institution without
any an intellectual grounding.
James

Der Derian (A VIRTUAL THEORY OF GLOBAL POLITICS, MIMETIC WAR, AND THE SPECTRAL STATE
1999)

journal of the theoretical humanities 4:2

The sovereign state, having outlived its original purpose to end feudal and religious violence and bring order to the
seventeenth- century Cosmopolis, has become equally spectral-dependent in its violent effects, haunting
world polities and international politics with the white-sheet rhetoric of fear and insecurity. It is not
difficult to find empirical support for Derridas theoretical suspensions of disbelief. Take, for example, current mimetic
conjuring for the exorcism of internal spirits by invocations of external evils, like drugs, immigration, and Islam; black magic
shows of virtual violence through the simulacrum of war games; and "humanitarian" intervention (like the UN in Bosnia - but
not Rwanda) for performative acts of deterrence and compellence.

Moreover. Derrida takes the critique of sovereignty afield, going beyond his usual concern with logocentrism to explore how
the haunting of politics has moved from the bounded text of geopolitical specters to the practically borderless
electromagnetic spectrum:
And if this important frontier is being displaced, it is because the medium in which it is instituted, namely, the medium of
the media themselves (news. the press- telecommunications. techno-telediscursivity. techno-teleiconicity. that which in
general assures and determines the spacing of public space, the very possibility of the revelation and the phenomenality of the
political), this element itself is neither living nor dead, present nor absent: it speetralizes. It does not belong to ontology, to
the discourse of Being of beings, or to the essence of life or death. It requires, then, what we call, to save time and space
rather than just to make up a word, hauntology.
Nietzsche and Derrida offer a penetrating critique of sovereignty, vet ... it lives, most demonstrably in international theory
and diplomatic state-craft, as, no less, the realist perspective. What do we mean by "realism"? It encompasses a
world-view in which sovereign states, struggling for power under conditions of anarchy, do what they
must to maintain and promote their own self-interests. But what do "we" mean by "realism"? We realists constituted by and
representing disciplinary schools of thought, diplomatic corps, intelligence bureau depict things as they really are, rather than
as idealists might wish them to be. And what do "we" mean by "realism"? We mean what we say and say what we

mean. in that transparent way of correspondence that provides the veridical, deadly discourses of
realism, like mutual assured destruction assures our security. or "we had to destroy the village in
order to save it."
But with the end of the Cold War, and pace Nietzsche, why beat a dead horse? Precisely because realism does death so
well, by refusing to acknowledge not only its ongoing complicity in tine death of others but also the
fact that it gave up the ghost a long time ago. How many times, after how many "revolutionary" transitions, have
we heard that sovereignty is at bay, at an end, dead? There is always the easy deflection, that sovereignty is an "essentially
contested concept," - a "convenient fiction." that changes with the times. But the frequency of such death-notices, from
politicians, military strategists and pundits, as well as academicians, leads one to suspect that something other than funerary
oration, philosophical speculation, or a topic for it special issue is at work. Is there a darker, even gothic side to the sovereign
state, a bidden power which resides in its recurrent morbidity? Take a look at some of the principle necroses.

Realism has built a life out of the transformation of fictions, like the immutability of human nature
and the apopoditic threat of anarchy, into facticity. With a little digging, realism conies to resemble
nothing so much as the undead, a perverse mimesis of the living other, haunting international
politics through the objectification of power, the fetishisation of weaponry, the idealization of the
state, the virtualization of violence, and the globalization of new media. Now the fact of its own dealth
lives on as a powerful fiction, as the morbid customs, characteristics, and habits of the living dead.
Their evidences just a flawed series of assertions, ignoring realisms social construction. Only an
interrogation of the politics of securitzation can avoid reentrenching bias.
David Mutimer, assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at York University. The Weapons State,
129)

2000. (125

The notion of interest, or more precisely, the national interest, is central to the discipline of
international relations. Disciplinary lore tells of the founding of international relations in the debate between realists
and idealists. The first figure in this debate, at least on the victorious realist side, is E. H. Carr, whose realist critique of
idealism focused on idealism's assumption of a harmony of interest, particularly the assumption that all states have a common
interest in peace that could be relied on to found an institutionalized international peace.22 In place of the harmony of
interests, the early realists placed the national interest at the heart of their theory of world politics. As Arnold Wolfers wrote
in 1952, "Statesmen, publicists and scholars who wish to be considered realists, as many do today, are inclined to insist that
the foreign policy they advocate is dictated by the national interest."23 What, then, is this concept of interest to
which realists appeal? Ironically, despite the importance of interest to realism, the concept is poorly theorized in realist
writings; nevertheless, it is possible to read from their usage of the term the understandings that inform it. The place to begin
such an investigation is with Hans Morgenthau's Politics Among Nations, in which Morgenthau argues that the

"main signpost that helps political realism find its way through the landscape of international
politics is the concept of interest defined in terms of power. This concept provides the link between
reason trying to understand international politics and the facts to be understood."24 Furthermore, the
"concept of interest defined as power imposes intellectual discipline upon the observer, infuses rational order into the subject
matter of politics and thus makes the theoretical understanding of politics possible."25 Interests, then, play a crucial
role in the realist understanding of international relations, as they provide the possibility for a theoretical
understanding of international politics, tying together the analyst and the empirical universe she is trying to comprehend. This
is a crucial concept indeed. Morgenthau defines interest simply in terms of power, so to gain further insight into his use of
the term we must see what he means by powernotoriously, a concept perhaps even more ill defined than is interest in realist
writing. To begin, Morgenthau argues that the notion of "interest defined as power" is universally valid but
that the content of that power varies historically.26 When he sets out that content, however, the space for variation is limited
indeed, with the most fundamental elements of national powergeography, national resources, and industrial capacity
variable only over a tremendous time span. Interest, defined in terms of this understanding of power, is very stable
necessarily so given the analytic weight the realist puts on it. Furthermore, despite the fact that Morgenthau defines power as

"man's control over the minds and actions of other men," the elements of national power are notably nonrelational. They are
conceived as attributes of particular nations rather than as characteristics of relationships between them.
If interests are

defined as power and power is a set of attributes, how does the national interest dictate policy? The
answer must be that policy should seek to protect or augment those elements of powerthat, in
other words, national interests and national security are one and the same to realists. This is the position
Wolfers adopts, and it is reinforced by Kenneth Waltz's conception of national interests in Theory of International Politics,
the defining neorealist text: "To say that a country acts according to its national interest means that,

having examined its security requirements, it tries to meet them. That is simple; it is also
important."27 Waltz may be right that his equation of interest and security is simple, but he is less
convincing about "important." Wolfers drew very different conclusions from the equation almost 30 years before
Waltz. In a very vague and general way "national interest" does suggest a policy which can be distinguished from several
others which may present themselves as alternatives. It indicates that the policy is designed to promote demands which are
ascribed to the nation rather than to individuals, sub-national groups or mankind as a whole. It emphasizes that the policy
subordinates other interests to those of the nation. But beyond this it has very little meaning.2 Simple and banal might have
been a better conclusion for Waltz.
Following the publication of Waltz's book, the neorealist position was the focus of a
number of sustained critiques. The critique that shared the most with the neorealists was initially organized around the
concept of the regime. How did this neoliberal alternative to neorealism conceive of interests, and did it advance the concept
beyond the realist simplicity? The standard reference work for regime analysis is Stephen Krasner's edited collection,
International Regimes, in particular the introductory chapter by the editor. Krasner locates interests in the regimes research
program: "This project began with a simple causal schematic. It assumed that regimes could be conceived as intervening
variables standing between basic causal variables (most prominently, power and interests) and outcome and behavior."29 For
regime theorists, interests are basic causal variablesautonomously discovered factors that give rise to the outcomes of
concern to analysts. The question that remains for both neorealists and neoliberals is, where do these interests come from?
Robert Keohane, the leading neoliberal theorist, confronted this problem, at least as far as it affects neorealist thinking
Sophisticated contemporary thinkers in the Realist tradition, such as Gilpin, Krasner, and Waltz, understand that interests
cannot be derived simply on the basis of rational calculation, from the external positions of states, and that this is particularly
true of great powers, on which, ironically, Structural Realism focuses its principal attentions. Realist analysis has to retreat to
a "fall-back position": that, given state interests, whose origins are not predicted by the theory, patterns of outcomes in world
politics will be determined by the overall distribution of power among states.30
The best the realist tradition can
produce, then, is to take state interests as given. As Jutta Weldes notes in her critique of the realist conception of
interests, "The realist 'national interest' rests upon the assumption that an independent reality is
directly accessible both to statesmen and to analysts."31 Regime theorists advanced a little on realists, for
although they began by treating interests as basic causal variables that entirely preceded theory, one of the conclusions of
their workwhich has informed later neoliberal thinkingwas that "once principles, norms, rules, and decision-making
procedures [i.e., regimes] were entrenched they may alter the egoist interests and power configurations [the basic causal
variables] which led to their creation in the first place." 32
The implication of this conclusion in neoliberal thinking is
that interests do not exist prior to practice but emerge out of practicein the same way I argue
throughout this book that objects and identities emerge out of practice. Despite its being the implication of their
own work, neoliberals are not comfortable with this conclusion because, ultimately, it requires

embracing the epistemological break between the empirical universe and our knowledge of that
universe that is at the heart of postpositivist conceptions of social life. Keohane argues, for instance, that
"under different systemic conditions states will define their self-interests differently,"33 Self-interests, according to this
formulation, are not inherent or
When using the state as the starting point for its analysis, realism is unable to account for the
accelerating of change present in modernity in our virtual world, looking at discourses and their
implications is a better tool.

Der Derian (A VIRTUAL THEORY OF GLOBAL POLITICS, MIMETIC WAR, AND THE SPECTRAL STATE
journal of the theoretical humanities 4:2 1999)
James

In war, diplomacy, and the media, the real morphs with the virtual. Not even the state, the foundation of Real politick,
is immune from virtualization. Sovereignty, the primary means by which the supreme power and legitimate violence of the state is
territorially fixed, declared once, many-times dead, now seems only able to regain its vigor virtually, through media spawns which
oppose ordered, identical "heres" to external, alien "out-theres" through representations which are real in time, not space. Instant
scandals, catastrophic accidents, "live-feed" wars, and quick-in, quick-out interventions into still-born or moribund states provide the
ephemeral. virtual seuiblartce of sovereignty. Once upon a space, war was the ultimate reality-check of international politics; now,
seamlessly integrating battlefield simulations and public dissimulations through the convergence of PC and TV, war is virtualized and
commoditized as pure war, infowar, netwar, cyherwar. For the intractable problems of post-Cold War politics, the technical fix has
acquired a new lustre: primetime as well as C4I (Command, Control, Communications, Computers and Intelligence) networks

bring us "virtual war"; beltway think-tanks and information technology industries promote a "virtual
diplomacy." And, according to a recent Time cover-story on high-finance, money verges toward the virtual: one financial expert
emphatically states that "the distinction between software and money is disappearing." to which a Citibank executive responds "it's

revolutionary - and we should be scared as hell." To be sure,

questions of power and identity, space and borders,

legitimacy and meaning will continue to be framed by the necessitous narratives of personal and public
security couched in the legal imperative of sovereignty. But in the new hyper-realms of global politics produced by
economic penetration, technological acceleration, and new media, these questions now entail virtual investigations. Will the sovereign
state become so spectral as to disappear all together, one more unholy relic for the museum of modernity? Or will it re-emerge in
global, virtual forms? Does globalization enhance the prospects of a democratic peace? Or does virtu-alit ion assure the continuation
of war by other means? Has Clausewitz been repudiated - or merely brought up to speed? Is virtuality replacing the reality of war? Is it
the harbinger of a new world order, or a brave new world? Most importantly, will processes of virtualization help to close or to further
open the gulf between those who have the technology and those who do not? New thinking often lags behind transitions
driven by new technologies, and, as Albert Einstein famously remarked about the atom bomb, the results can be
catastrophic. The virtual technologies of new media warrant a commensurate critical scrutiny. New media,
generally identified as digitized, interactive, networked forms of communication, now exercise a global effect if not ubiquitous
presence, through instant video-feeds, satellite link-ups, TI-T3 links, overhead surveillance, global mapping, distributed computer
simulations, programmed trading, and movies with Arnold Sehwarzenegger in them. Virtual media represent the most penetrating and
sharpest - to the point of invisibility - edge of globalization. The power of virtuality lies in its ability to collapse distance, between here
and there, near and far, fact and fiction. Moreover, the virtual effect of bringing "there" here in near real-time and with nearverisimilitude adds a strategic as well as comparative advantage to the production of violence - what one futurist at a recent military
conference referred to as the "fifth dimension" of global warfare. However , like all complex systems, there is potential for

catastrophe, from what organizational theorists call negitive synergy, of the sort that produced a Three Mile
Island or a Chernobyl. The spatialist, materialist - that is, realist - bias of thinking in international theory
renders it less than adequate for a critical inquiry into the temporal, representational, deterritorial, and
potentially dangerous powers of virtual technologies. Semiotic, critical, and discourse theories offer a better
perspective, having led the way in tracing the reconfiguration of power into new representational,
immaterial forms. They have helped us to under-stand how acts of inscription and the production of information tan reify
consciousness, float signifiers, and render concepts undecidable. However, as the realities of international politics increasingly are
generated, mediated and simulated by successive technical means of reproduction, there is not so much a distancing from some
original, truth-bearing source as there is an implosion, where meaning disappears into a media black hole of insignificance. As the
globalization and virtualization of new media sunder meaning from conventional moorings, and set information adrift as it moves with
alacrity and celerity from phenomenal to virtual forms, one searches for new modes of understanding. Attenuated by cant and deemed
too popular for serious scholarship, the virtual has already become an academic taboo . All the more reason, I believe, to

extend the reach of critical approaches. Derrida and Nietzsche are valuable because they provide a
philosophical perspective which links public space with a responsive as well as responsible private space
Realism destroys our ability to defuse conflict -- demands fatalism and submission is a DA to their
framework.

Luke, university distinguished professor of political science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University,
2003, Language, Agency, and Politics in a Constructed World, p. 107-08
Timothy

Once the concursivity of relating internationally is recognized, it seems apparent that international relations is, at worst,
commotion, or perhaps, at best, interoperationality, cooperativity, or coperformativity. In any case, it is not a random
motion of conflicting and colliding bodies. Concursive constructs confound the Cartesian predicates of modern
agency. That is, a reasoning self spatializes cognition and action around an inside and an outside . As
Ashley asserts, this maneuver imposes the expectation that there shall be an absolute boundary between inside and
outside, whereby the former term is privileged (1989, 290). Concursivity, however, implicitly implodes this spatialization
with what coincides at their elisions and congruencies. The facts of inside and identity with outside and otherness are
increasingly infested by the artifacts of the coincide. Cooperativity assumes that boundaries are fused, ordered, or broken as
selves and others interact, often without privilege, hierarchy, or differentiation, between the internal and external.
Onsidedness, offsidedness, and residedness easily mingle centers and boundaries beyond clear demarcations at the
coincidedness of insidedness/outsidedness. How different and discontinuous is an other who watches the same CNN
feeds, drives the same Toyota trucks, eats the same ConAgra grains, plans the same Euro-Disney vacation, fears the same
ozone holes, and worries about the same bioengineered clones? Likewise, how identifiable and continuous is a self whose
sharp boundaries and hierarchical order of its decisionistic ego must calculate its desires in euros, yens, or US dollars;
calories, BTUs, or kilojoules; M.D., J.D., or Ph.D.; beef, pork or chicken? Todays sterile division of scholarship
on foreign affairs into disparate disciplinary domains that are beholden to various analytical cliques pledging
loyalty to realism, structuralism, or idealism is quite problematic. Such divisions continuously confuse

many phenomena in their common modes of interpretation. Indeed, these disciplinary divisions spin
around particular wordslike discourse, data, description, and globalization or environment,
economy, and explanationuntil they become disturbing chokepoints in the free flow of
professional analysis. As everyone listens to these readymade phrases all day, as Pierre Bourdieu worries,
the precepts of realism can easily become a doxosophy, or a whole philosophy and a whole
worldview which engender fatalism and submission (1984, 57). Few moves can be more disarming

than the discursive reduction of the world into such preprocessed categories, because those
confusions then circulate widely in political rhetorics, economic arguments, and cultural
controversies. Alone, this discursive reduction turns such concepts into key strategic assets for
anyone who is intent upon prevailing in these cultural struggles, and their doxic effects on politics
must not be discounted.

Claims about realisms centrality lock the link to the

critiqueself-fulfilling prophecy
Neocleous, prof. of critique of political economy @ Brunei University, 2008 p. 3-4
(Mark, Critique of Security)

saturation of the political and social landscape with the logic

of security has been accompanied by the emergence of an
academic industry churning out ideas about how to defend and
improve it. Security has been defined8 and redefined.9 It has been re-msioned,1 re-mapped,
This

gendered,12 refused.13 Some have asked whether there is perhaps too much security,14 some
have sought its cimlisation,15 and thousands of others have asked about how to 'balance' it with

Much of this redefining, revisioning and remapping and so on, has come
about through a more widespread attempt at widening the
security agenda so as to include societal, economic and a broad
range of other issues such as development or the environment .
liberty.

These moves have sought to forge alternative notion saturations of' democratic' and 'human'
security as part of a debate about whose security is being studied, the ontological status of
insecurities and questions of identity, and through these moves security has come to be treated
less as an objective condition and much more as the product of social processes. At the same time,

a developing body of work known as 'critical security studies'

has emerged. This range of research - now quite formidable, often impressive
and sometimes drawn on in this book - has a double lack. First, for all its talk
about discourse, processes and the need for a critical edge, it
still offers a relatively impoverished account of the different
ways in which security and insecurity are imagined.16 To speak of

different' security fields' such as the environment, migration, energy, and so on, often fails to open
up the analysis to the ways in which spaces and places, processes and categories, are imagined
through the lens of insecurity and in turn appropriated and colonised by the project of security.

Given the centrality of the state to the political imagination, to

imagine the whole social order through the lens of insecurity is
to hand it over to the key entity which is said to be the ground
of security, namely the state.17 This is related to the second lack, which is that for
all the critical edge employed by the authors in question, the
running assumption underpinning the work is that security is
still a good thing, still necessary despite how much we
interrogate it. The assumption seems to be that while we might
engage in a critical interrogation of security, we could never
quite be against it. 'Why we might want" security" after all' is
how one of the most influential essays in this area ends. IS As Didier
Bigo points out, how to maximise security always seems to remain the
core issue.19 And so there is a danger that these approaches do
not quite manage to shake off the managerialism prevalent in
more traditional security studies: the desire to 'do' security
better. The common assumption remains that security is the
foundation of freedom, democracy and the good society, and
that the real question is how to improve the power of the state
to 'secure' us.

Realism exists as a result of state behaviornot an

eternal truth
Linklater, Intl Politics Prof. @ University of Wales, 2005 p. 118
(Andrew, Critical Security Studies and World Politics Ed. By Ken Booth)
For their part, critical theorists do not underestimate the obstacles

to global political reform; nor do they subscribe to any notion of

inevitable and irreversible progress. They argue there is nothing
in international anarchy that makes competition and conflict
permanent features of world politics. The qualities of anarchy ,
especially as neorealism characterizes that condition, are at heart the attributes of the
dominant powers. This is why critical theory can start with the Kantian proposition that everything
hinges on how political community is constructed, particularly in the most
powerful regions. From this vantage point, it is a profound mistake to ignore the
respects in which states threaten their own citizens so that the
study of international relations is free to develop its specific
focus on the ways in which states interact with and threaten
each other. The important point is that societies that are quick to resort to strategic action in their internal relaions are
improbable advocates of communicative action in world politics, unless foreign policy pragmatism suggests that commitments to
dialogue will produce national advantages; conversely, societies that have standing commitments to communicative action
domestically already have the potential to bring similar orientations to bear on relations with outsiders. Consequently

critical theory does not begin with how independent political

communities conduct their external relations but with the
deeper question of how they are constituted in the first place .

Voting negative is a cultural intervention that saps

realism of its power and privilege
Cheeseman, visiting politics fellow @ Univ. of New South Wales, 2005 p. 80-81
(Graeme, Critical Security Studies and World Politics Ed. By Ken Booth)
In spite of the impressive amount of theoretical and empirical evidence brought against it, then, the realist-neorealist perspective
continues to be the one most favored by national security planners across the globe and their mainstream advisers in academe.

, the space and

incentives for alternative or critical thinking about security have
been progressively closed down and its proponents ignored,
marginalized, and stigmatized. This return to tradition is occurring at a time, ironically, when
new ideas and new and critical approaches to security are most
desperately needed. Why is this happening? It is possible that the realist inclinations of Western security
Indeed, since the inception of the war on terrorism under the administration of George W. Bush

planners and policymakers are the most appropriate for the troubled times we are now in, although the clear and emerging policy
failures in Israel, Afghanistan, Iraq, and parts of the former Soviet Union might suggest otherwise. It is possible, too, that the sheer
shock of September 11 generated within the policymaking fraternity (and the broader communities to which they belong) a kind of
strategic reflex whereby reason gave way to more instinctual responses

. Faced with uncertain and

troubling times, strategic planners, like drunkards and religious

zealots, have turned to what they are most comfortable with. Or, to
paraphrase the Australian historian Henry Reynolds, admittedly in another but not entirely unconnected context , when the
chips are down, history and culture will always triumph over
geography.73 The fact that security policymakers everywhere
seem naturally predisposed toward realist understandings and
solutions points to a number of other important (and related)
factors and determinants. The first is the crucial role of the U.S. strategic studies
mainstream and its military history wing, which have continued
to dominate ways of viewing and responding to world affairs,
acting as intellectual gatekeepers, and patrolling the
boundaries of their disciplines repelling intruders and heretics.

Another is the ascendancy within Western democracies everywhere

of neoconservative
political forces and actors who have long been wedded; emotionally as well as intellectually, to realist political and strategic axioms
and are prepared, ruthlessly, to invoke national military myths, exploit popular fears and prejudices, and spend as much of their
national treasures as is necessary to advance their own particular personal or party political interests. Within such a closed

, traditional discourses of security, international relations,

technological progress, and cultural relativism serve as useful
and effective means of constituting reality in ways that can
serve to advance or protect the interests not of peoples or
humanity but those of the power holders themselves . 74 A third and
environment

important factor is our own culpability in this process. We need to realize and accept that the siren calls of our politicians, teachers,
and expert policy advisers connect as much to our emotional as our intellectual selves. As Martin Shaw has argued in Post-Military

, while the move toward a more harmonious, cooperative,

and peaceful world depends, at one level, on the progressive
weakening of the power of established military (and
militarized) institutions and thinking in favor of alternative
structures and perspectives, these structural changes need also
to be accomplished by a shift in societal values and beliefs . As Shaw
puts it, Beyond specific political tasks, culture will remain the last refuge of
militarism. A fulIy postmilitary citizenship will be achieved only
when the ideas, values, and concepts of military culture, which
permeate society at the deepest levels, have been genuinely
domesticated.75 Any move beyond the strictures of realism will
ultimately depend on us coming to terms with our own
understandings and prejudices, how these have and continue to
be shaped by our particular histories and experiences, and how
they can be open to exploitation and manipulation . Such knowledge can
Society

provide us with a better and more informed understanding of who and what we are and, in the process, make us not only more
resilient and discerning but also more open to humanity's common experiences, heritages, and destiny. These underlying processes
of personal and community consciousness and empowerment are, for this writer at least, the essence of critical security thinking.

The LITANY of Departures From Realism and Failure of Systemic Punishment

Disproves Their Theory.
Ronald R. Krebs, Faculty Fellow - Government @ University of Texas at Austin, Donald D.
Harrington, Prof. of Political Science Univ. of Minnesota, 6 [Rhetoric, Strategy, and War: Language,
Power, and the Making of US Security Policy, http://www.polisci.umn.edu/~mirc/paper200607/fall2006/Krebs.pdf]
Structural realists, focusing on the imperatives to security- or power-maximization that states
must obey if they are to survive in the anarchic international system, are simply uninterested in
domestic debate of any sort. They have long argued that these systemic imperatives, derived
from the distribution of material power and perhaps geography, constitute an objective national
interest that must be the chief driver of foreign policy.23 When states, for whatever reason,
behave in contrary ways, they will eventually suffer punishment for their foolishness.24 But are
there really such objective systemic dictates? The very fact that American structural realists
frequently rail against US foreign policy suggests that departures from realist expectations are
hardly exceptional. The typical realist response is that in these cases actors with more parochial
or moralistic perspectives have hijacked policy, but realists, with their inattention to domestic
politics, are then hard pressed to explain when such views hold sway.25 Moreover, the fact that
such hijackings are so common suggests either that the system does not often punish states
for disobeying its rules, in which case the structural logic collapses, or that there are no such
rules in the first place. Structural realism imagines foreign policy as an exceptional realm
above the political fray. Yet, even when the house is on fire, foreign policy lies in the realm of
choice, not compulsion, and thus very much in the realm of the political.

Realism creates a death drive.

Der Derian 98 [JAMES, ON SECURITY, http://www.ciaonet.org/book/lipschutz/lipschutz12.html]

In epistemic realism, the search for security through sovereignty is not a political choice but the
necessary reaction to an anarchical condition: Order is man-made and good; chaos is natural and
evil. Out of self-interest, men must pursue this good and constrain the evil of excessive will
through an alienation of individual powers to a superior, indeed supreme, collective power. In
short, the security of epistemic realism is ontological, theological and teleological: that is,
metaphysical. We shall see, from Marx's and Nietzsche's critiques, the extent to which
Hobbesian security and epistemic realism rely on social constructions posing as apodictic truths
for their power effects. There is not and never was a "state of nature" or a purely "self-interested
man"; there is, however, clearly an abiding fear of violent and premature death that compels men
to seek the security found in solidarity.

Realism operates as a state control mechanism were told we are violent and hence
we become violent.
Bleiker 2K [Roland, Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics, Page 16, Google Books]
Human agency is not something that exists in an a priori manner and can be measured
scientifically in reference to external realities. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as human
agency, for its nature and its function are, at least in part, determined by how we think about
human action and its potential to shape political and social practices. The mutually constituted
and constantly shilling relationship between agents and discourses thus undermines the
possibility of observing social dynamics in a value-free way. To embark on such an endeavour
nevertheless is to superimpose a static image upon a series of events that can only be understood
in their fluidity. It is to objectivise a very particular and necessarily subjective understanding of
agency and its corresponding political practices. The dangers of such an approach have been
debated extensively. Authors such as Richard Ashley, Jim George and Steve Smith have shown
how positivist epistemologies have transformed one specific interpretation of world political
realities, the dominant realist one, into reality per se." Realist perceptions of the international
have'. gradually become accepted as common sense. to the point that any critique against them
has to be evaluated in terms of an already existing and obiectivised world-view. There are
powerful mechanisms of control precisely in this ability to determine meaning and rationality.
'Defining common sense', Smith thus argues, is 'the ultimate act of political power'." It separates
the possible from the impossible and directs the theory and practice of international relations on
a particular path.

A2: Realism

A2: Realism inevitable human nature

Evolutionary theory is nothing without interpretation cultural knowledge shapes
responses by defining proper biology, only the alt can allow actual engagement with
non-violent knowledge
Busser 6 [Mark, Masters Candidate Department of Political Science, York University, The Evolution of
Security: Revisiting the Human Nature Debate in International Relations, York Centre for International and
Security Studies Working Paper Number 40, August,
http://www.yorku.ca/yciss/publications/documents/WP40-Busser.pdf]
Unfortunately for Bradley Thayer, evolutionary arguments do not provide a simple and
incontestable ontological and epistemological foundations for revitalized realism. Since
arguments like Thayers draw on controversial scientific branches of sociobiology and
evolutionary psychology, which arguably assume the basic features of human nature they seek to
prove, the conclusions for political theory remain almost as scientifically arbitrary as
Morgenthaus assumption of an animus dominandi. In framing the problematic of their
exploration, many of these arguments assume an individualistic and egoistic human nature and
question how political relations might arise out of the mechanical dynamics of self-interest. As
Mary Clarks work demonstrates, this ignores important factors in the evolutionary development
of the human being. Since interpersonal, cultural, political ,and social influences have had a
large role in shaping the evolution of humans and our primate relatives, it is not such a simple
task to explain human nature based on rational actor models and mathematical calculations. In
contrast to the sociobiology and evolutionary psychologys depiction of human nature as
biologically determined, Clark argues that it is a societys construction of a story of human
nature that affects how people will imagine ways to live together, fulfilling basic human needs or
not. Biology is not destiny, she seems to argue, but what we believe about our biology
threatens to become our destiny if we allow it. This highlights the possibility that seemingly
universal traits like competition, aggression and egoism might be contingent on the weight we
lend them and not biologically determined. If we have a choice in the matter, it is possible to
begin conceiving of political possibilities for global social orders that do not depend on a
combative and competitive engagement with Others. In turn, this allows a reconsideration of
the conceptual lens through which to view security. If it is not programmed into our genes to be
intolerant, ethnocentric, and aggressive, then we can find ways to abandon the traditions that
have normalized such behaviours. Following Jim George and David Campbell, perhaps a new
conception of international relationships would serve better than the current paradigm, which is
based on traditional views of an aggressive and competitive human nature. It may be that, as
Clark suggests, conflict can only be mitigated when basic human needs are met. Doing so, it
seems, would require a rethinking of how differences are engaged with, interpreted and
reconciled in both international and local societies. If we humans are not biologically destined to
draw lines between ourselves and others, then it is possible for us to escape conceptions of
security that necessitate aggression against, or protection from, outsiders. Perhaps the security
long sought after in international relations will come not from making societies secure from
difference, but making difference secure within and between states.

A2: Realism Inevitable

Realism is only inevitable now because of existing power structures challenging dominant
discourses via the alt overcomes realism

Grondin 4 [David, master of pol sci and PHD of political studies @ U of Ottowa (Re)Writing the National Security State:
How and Why Realists (Re)Built the(ir) Cold War,
http://www.er.uqam.ca/nobel/ieim/IMG/pdf/rewriting_national_security_state.pdf]
Neorealist and neoclassical realism offer themselves up as a narrative of

the world institutional order. Critical

approaches must therefore seek to countermemorialize those whose lives and voices have been
variously silenced in the process of strategic practices ( Klein, 1994: 28). The problem, as revealed in the
debate between gatekeepers of the subfield of Strategic Studies (Walt, 1991), is that those analyses that contravene
the dominant discourse are deemed insignificant by virtue of their differing ontological
and epistemological foundations. Approaches that deconstruct theoretical practices in order
to disclose what is hidden in the use of concepts such as national security have something valuable to
say. Their more reflexive and critically-inclined view illustrates how terms used in realist
discourses, such as state, anarchy, world order, revolution in military affairs, and security dilemmas, are produced by a
specific historical, geographical and socio-political context as well as historical forces and social relations of power
(Klein, 1994: 22). Since realist analysts do not question their ontology and yet purport to provide a
neutral and objective analysis of a given world order based on military power and interactions between the most
important political units, namely states, realist discourses constitute a political act in defense of the
state. Indeed, [] it is important to recognize that to employ a textualizing approach to social policy involving conflict and war is
not to attempt to reduce social phenomena to various concrete manifestations of language. Rather, it is an attempt to
analyze the interpretations governing policy thinking. And it is important to recognize that policy thinking
is not unsituated (Shapiro, 1989a: 71). Policy thinking is practical thinking since it imposes an
analytic order on the real world, a world that only exists in the analysts own narratives. In this light, Barry Posens
political role in legitimizing American hegemonic power and national security conduct seems obvious: U.S. command of the
commons provides an impressive foundation for selective engagement. It is not adequate for a policy of primacy. [] Command of
the commons gives the United States a tremendous capability to harm others. Marrying that capability to a conservative policy of
selective engagement helps make U.S. military power appear less threatening and more tolerable. Command of the commons creates
additional collective goods for U.S. allies. These collective goods help connect U.S. military power to seemingly prosaic welfare
concerns. U.S. military power underwrites world trade, travel, global telecommunications, and commercial remote sensing, which all
depend on peace and order in the commons (Posen, 2003: 44 and 46). Adopting a more critical stance, David Campbell points out
that [d]anger is not an objective condition. It (sic) is not a thing which exists independently of

those to whom it may become a threat. [] Nothing is a risk in itself; [...] it all depends on
how one analyses the danger, considers the event (Campbell, 1998: 1-2). In the same vein, national
security discourse does not evaluate objective threats; rather, it is itself a product of historical
processes and structures in the state and society that produces it. Whoever has the power to define
security is then the one who has the authority to write legitimate security discourses and
conduct the policies that legitimize them. The realist analysts and state leaders who invoke national security and act
in its name are the same individuals who hold the power to securitize threats by inserting them in a discourse that frames national
identity and freezes it.9 Like many concepts, realism is essentially contested. In a critical reinterpretation of realism,
James Der

Derian offers a genealogy of realism that deconstructs the uniform realism represented
in IR: he reveals many other versions of realism that are never mentioned in International Relations
texts (Der Derian, 1995: 367). I am aware that there are many realist discoursesin International Relations, but they all share a set of
assumptions, such as the state is a rational unitary actor, the state is the main actor in international relations, states pursue power
defined as a national interest, and so on. I want to show that realism is one way of representing

reality, not the reflection of reality. While my aim here is not to rehearse Der Derians genealogy of realism,
I do want to spell out the problems with a positivist theory of realism and a correspondence philosophy of language. Such a
philosophy accepts nominalism, wherein language as neutral description corresponds to reality. This is precisely the problem

of epistemic realism and of the realism characteristic of American realist theoretical discourses. And
since for poststructuralists language constitutes reality, a reinterpretation of realism as constructed in these discourses is called for.10

These scholars cannot refer to the essentially contested nature of realism and then use
realism as the best language to reflect a self-same phenomenon (Der Derian, 1995: 374). Let me be
clear: I am not suggesting that the many neorealist and neoclassical realist discourses in International Relations are not useful. Rather,
I want to argue that these technicist and scientist forms of realism serve political purposes, used as they are in many think tanks and

foreign policy bureaucracies to inform American political leaders. This

is the relevance of deconstructing the

uniform realism (as used in International Relations): it brings to light its locatedness in a hermeneutic circle in which it is
unwittingly trapped (Der Derian, 1995: 371). And as Friedrich Kratochwil argues, [] the rejection of a correspondence theory of
truth does not condemn us, as it is often maintained, to mere relativism and/or to endless deconstruction in which anything goes
but it leaves us with criteria that allows us to distinguish and evaluate competing theoretical creations (Kratochwil, 2000: 52). Given
that political language is not a neutral medium that gives expression to ideas formed independently of structures of signification that
sustain political action and thought, American realist discourses belonging to the neorealist or neoclassical realist traditions cannot be
taken as mere descriptions of reality. We are trapped in the production of discourses in which national

leaders and security speech acts emanating from realist discourses develop and reinforce a notion of
national identity as synony- mous with national security. U.S. national security conduct should thus be
understood through the prism of the theoretical discourses of American political leaders and realist scholars that co-constitute it.
Realist discourses depict American political leaders acting in defense of national security, and political leaders act in the name of
national security. In the end, what distinguishes realist discourses is that they depict the United States as having

behaved like a national security state since World War II, while legitimating the idea that the United States should
continue to do so. Political scientists and historians are engaged in making (poesis), not merely
recording or reporting (Medhurst, 2000: 17). Precisely in this sense, rhetoric is not the description of
national security conduct; it constitutes it.

The alt solves their claims of IR inevitability there is no objective way of viewing
geopolitics. Actively questioning how we know what we know is necessary to
understand all politics.
Grondin 4 [David, master of pol sci and PHD of political studies @ U of Ottowa (Re)Writing the
National Security State: How and Why Realists (Re)Built the(ir) Cold War,
http://www.er.uqam.ca/nobel/ieim/IMG/pdf/rewriting_national_security_state.pdf]
Since realist analysts do not question their ontology and yet purport to provide a neutral and objective
analysis of a given world order based on military power and interactions between the most important
political units, namely states, realist discourses constitute a political act in defense of the state. Indeed,
[] it is important to recognize that to employ a textualizing approach to social policy involving conflict
and war is not to attempt to reduce social phenomena to various concrete manifestations of language.
Rather, it is an attempt to analyze the interpretations governing policy thinking. And it is important to
recognize that policy thinking is not unsituated (Shapiro, 1989a: 71). Policy thinking is practical thinking
since it imposes an analytic order on the real world, a world that only exists in the analysts own
narratives. In this light, Barry Posens political role in legitimizing American hegemonic power and national
security conduct seems obvious: U.S. command of the commons provides an impressive foundation for
selective engagement. It is not adequate for a policy of primacy. [] Command of the commons gives the
United States a tremendous capability to harm others. Marrying that capability to a conservative policy of
selective engagement helps make U.S. military power appear less threatening and more tolerable.
Command of the commons creates additional collective goods for U.S. allies. These collective goods help
connect U.S. military power to seemingly prosaic welfare concerns. U.S. military power underwrites world
trade, travel, global telecommunications, and commercial remote sensing, which all depend on peace and
order in the commons (Posen, 2003: 44 and 46). Adopting a more critical stance, David Campbell points
out that [d]anger is not an objective condition. It (sic) is not a thing which exists independently of those to
whom it may become a threat. [] Nothing is a risk in itself; [...] it all depends on how one analyses the
danger, considers the event (Campbell, 1998: 1-2). In the same vein, national security discourse does not
evaluate objective threats; rather, it is itself a product of historical processes and structures in the state and
society that produces it. Whoever has the power to define security is then the one who has the authority to
write legitimate security discourses and conduct the policies that legitimize them. The realist analysts and
state leaders who invoke national security and act in its name are the same individuals who hold the power
to securitize threats by inserting them in a discourse that frames national identity and freezes it.9 Like
many concepts, realism is essentially contested. In a critical reinterpretation of realism, James Der Derian
offers a genealogy of realism that deconstructs the uniform realism represented in IR: he reveals many
other versions of realism that are never mentioned in International Relations texts (Der Derian, 1995: 367).
I am aware that there are many realist discoursesin International Relations, but they all share a set of
assumptions, such as the state is a rational unitary actor, the state is the main actor in international
relations, states pursue power defined as a national interest, and so on. I want to show that realism is
one way of representing reality, not the reflection of reality. While my aim here is not to rehearse Der
Derians genealogy of realism, I do want to spell out the problems with a positivist theory of realism and a

correspondence philosophy of language. Such a philosophy accepts nominalism, wherein language as

neutral description corresponds to reality. This is precisely the problem of epistemic realism and of the
realism characteristic of American realist theoretical discourses. And since for poststructuralists language
constitutes reality, a reinterpretation of realism as constructed in these discourses is called for.10 These
scholars cannot refer to the essentially contested nature of realism and then use realism as the best
language to reflect a self-same phenomenon (Der Derian, 1995: 374). Let me be clear: I am not suggesting
that the many neorealist and neoclassical realist discourses in International Relations are not useful. Rather,
I want to argue that these technicist and scientist forms of realism serve political purposes, used as they are
in many think tanks and foreign policy bureaucracies to inform American political leaders. This is the
relevance of deconstructing the uniform realism (as used in International Relations): it brings to light its
locatedness in a hermeneutic circle in which it is unwittingly trapped (Der Derian, 1995: 371). And as
Friedrich Kratochwil argues, [] the rejection of a correspondence theory of truth does not condemn us,
as it is often maintained, to mere relativism and/or to endless deconstruction in which anything goes but
it leaves us with criteria that allows us to distinguish and evaluate competing theoretical creations
(Kratochwil, 2000: 52). Given that political language is not a neutral medium that gives expression to ideas
formed independently of structures of signification that sustain political action and thought, American
realist discourses belonging to the neorealist or neoclassical realist traditions cannot be taken as mere
descriptions of reality. We are trapped in the production of discourses in which national leaders and security
speech acts emanating from realist discourses develop and reinforce a notion of national identity as synonymous with national security. U.S. national security conduct should thus be understood through the prism of
the theoretical discourses of American political leaders and realist scholars that co-constitute it. Realist
discourses depict American political leaders acting in defense of national security, and political leaders act
in the name of national security. In the end, what distinguishes realist discourses is that they depict the
United States as having behaved like a national security state since World War II, while legitimating the
idea that the United States should continue to do so. Political scientists and historians are engaged in
making (poesis), not merely recording or reporting (Medhurst, 2000: 17). Precisely in this sense, rhetoric
is not the description of national security conduct; it constitutes it.

Realism is self-constitutivestates create the rules of the

international system, if they act differently, the system
adapts.
Wendt 99Associate Professor of Political Science at Yale [1999, Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of
International Politics, p. 331-2]

The underlying logic here is the self-fulfilling prophecy : by treating the Other as if he is
supposed to respond a certain way Alter and Ego will eventually learn shared ideas that
generate those responses, and then by taking those ideas as their starting point they will
tend to reproduce them in subsequent interactions. Identities and interests are not only
learned in interaction, in other words, but sustained by it. The mass of relatively stable interactions
known as society depends on the success of such self-fulfilling prophecies in ever day life. Although he
does not distinguish between the behavioral and construction effects of interaction, this idea is nicely
captured by what Morton Deutsch calls the crude law of social relations: [t]he characteristic processes
and effects elicited by any given type of social relation tend also to induce that type of social relation,44 to
which we might add mediated by power relations. From the Crude Law can be drawn the conclusion
that the most important thing in social life is how actors represent Self and Other. These
representations are the starting point for interaction, and the medium by which they determine
who they are, what they want, and how they should behave. Society, in short, is what people make of
it, and as corporate people this should be no less true of states in anarchical society .
Which brings us to the question of how states might learn the egoistic conceptions of security that underpin
Hobbesian cultures. We have already shown how states might become egoists through natural selection
and imitation. They might also do so through learning. The key is how Alter and Ego represent

themselves in the beginning of their encounter, since this will determine the logic of the
ensuing interaction. If Ego casts Alter in the role of an object to be manipulated for the

gratification of his own needs (or, equivalently, takes the role of egoist for himself), then he will engage
in behavior that does not take Alters security needs into account in anything but a purely
instrumental sense. If Alter correctly reads Egos perspective he will reflect Egos

appraisal back on himself, and conclude that he has no standing or rights in this
relationship. This will threaten Alters basic needs, and as such rather than simply accept this positioning
Alter will adopt an egoistic identity himself (egoism being a response to the belief that others will
not meet ones needs), and act accordingly toward Ego. Eventually, by repeatedly engaging in
practices that ignore each others needs, or practices of power politics, Alter and Ego will create
and internalize the shared knowledge that they are enemies, locking in a Hobbesian structure.
The self-fulfilling prophecy here, in other words, is Realism [sic] itself.50 If states start out
thinking like Realists then that is what they will teach each other to be , and the kind of
anarchy they will make.

Realism cant be inevitablethere is no constitutive rule

to explain how states became realist. Just because they
act realist now doesnt make it inevitable.
Ruggie 98Dean of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University [Autumn
1998, John Gerard Ruggie, What Makes the World Hang Together? Neo-utilitarianism and the Social
Constructivist Challenge, International Organization 52.4, Ebsco]

Perhaps the most consequential difference between neorealism and neoliberal

institutionalism, on the one hand, and social constructivism, on the other, has to do with the
distinction between constitutive and regulative rules. The distinction goes back to a seminal article
by John Rawls.(n93) Searle offers an easier point of entry. Let us begin with a simple illustration. We can
readily imagine the act of driving a car existing prior to the rule that specified "drive on the
right(left)-hand side of the road." In an account perfectly consistent with neo-utilitarianism, the rule
would have been instituted as a function of increased traffic and growing numbers of fender-benders.
Specifying which side of the road to drive on is an example of a regulative rule ; as the term
implies, it regulates an antecedently existing activity. To this rule were soon added others, such as those
requiring licenses, yielding at intersections, imposing speed limits, and forbidding driving while under the
influence of alcohol. Now imagine a quite different situation: playing the game of chess . "It is
not the case," Searle notes sardonically, "that there were a lot of people pushing bits of wood around on
boards, and in order to prevent them from bumping into each other all the time and creating traffic jams, we
had to regulate the activity. Rather, the rules of chess create the very possibility of playing chess .
The rules are constitutive of chess in the sense that playing chess is constituted in part by acting in accord
with the rules."(n94) Regulative rules are intended to have causal effects--getting people to approximate the
speed limit, for example. Constitutive rules define the set of practices that make up a particular
class of consciously organized social activity --that is to say, they specify what counts as that activity.

This basic distinction permits us to identify an utterly profound gap in neoutilitarianism: it

lacks any concept of constitutive rules. Its universe of discourse consists entirely of
antecedently existing actors and their behavior, and its project is to explain the character and
efficacy of regulative rules in coordinating them. This gap accounts for the fact that, within their theoretical
terms, neorealism and neoliberal institutionalism are capable of explaining the origins of
virtually nothing that is constitutive of the very possibility of international relations : not
territorial states, not systems of states, not any concrete international order, nor the whole host of
institutional forms that states use, ranging from the concept of contracts and treaties to multilateral
organizing principles. All are assumed to exist already or are misspecified. Why is this the case, and is
it inherent to the enterprise? The reason is not difficult to decipher: neo-utilitarian models of
international relations are imported from economics. It is universally acknowledged that the
economy is embedded in broader social, political, and legal institutional frameworks that make it possible
to conduct economic relations--which are constitutive of economic relations. Modern economic theory

does not explain the origins of markets; it takes their existence for granted. The problem
arises because, when neo-utilitarian models are imported into other fields, they leave those
constitutive frameworks behind. This problem appears not to matter for some (as yet unspecified)
range of political phenomena, domestic and international, which has been explored by means of
microeconomic models and the microfoundations of which are now far better understood than before. But
there are certain things that these models are incapable of doing. Accounting for constitutive roles--which
they were not responsible for in economics--is among the most important.(n95) Nor can this defect be
remedied within the neo-utilitarian apparatus. Alexander James Field has demonstrated from
within the neoclassical tradition, and Robert Brenner the neo-Marxist, that marginal utility analysis

cannot account for the constitutive rules that are required to generate market rationality
and markets(n96)--an insight that Weber had already established at the turn of the century(n97) and
Polanyi demonstrated powerfully a half century ago.(n98) The terms of a theory cannot explain the
conditions necessary for that theory to function, because no theory can explain anything
until its necessary preconditions hold. So it is with modern economic theory.

Purported objectivity and inevitability of realism

sanctions mass violencehuman history disproves this
kind of determinism.
Kraig 2 [Robert Alexander Kraig is Wisconsin state political director for Service Employees
International Union (SEIU). He is also an instructor in the Communication Department at the University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Rhetoric & Public Affairs 5.1 (2002) 1-30]

Given the claimed inevitability of realisms description of international politics, one might think
that nations need not look to expert guidance because power interests will inevitably
determine governmental policy. But the realists, while embracing determinism, simultaneously
argue that human nature is repeatedly violated. One traditional claim has been that America,
because of its unique history, has been ever in danger of ignoring the dictates of the foreign policy scene.
This argument is offered by Henry Kissinger in his avowedly Morgenthauian work Nuclear Weapons and
Foreign Policy. 21 Realists also argue that there are idealists in all human societies who refuse
to see the reality of power. As Richard W. Cottam, a trenchant critic of orthodox realism, explained the
argument: "Every era has its incorrigible idealists who persist in seeing evil man as good. When
they somehow gain power and seek to put their ideas into effect, Machiavellians who understand

mans true nature appear and are more than willing and more than capable of exploiting
this eternal naivete." 22 Cottam was referring to one of the central ideological constructs of
international relations theorythe realist/idealist dichotomy. First explicated in detail by Morgenthau
in his Scientific Man vs. Power Politics, 23 this dichotomy is used to discredit leaders who dare to
consider transcending or transforming established patterns of global competition . This
construct is enriched by the narratives of failed idealistsmost prominently Tsar Alexander the First,
Woodrow Wilson, Neville Chamberlain, and Jimmy Cartermen who, despite and in fact because of their
good intentions, caused untold human suffering. After World War II, realists built their conception
of leadership on a negative caricature of Woodrow Wilson. 24 As George Kennan, one of the
primary architects of Cold War policy, warned in 1945: "If we insist at this moment in our history in
wandering about with our heads in the clouds of Wilsonean idealism . . . we run the risk of losing even that
bare minimum of security which would be assured to us by the maintenance of humane, stable, and
cooperative forms of society on the immediate European shores of the Atlantic." 25 Wilsons supposed

idealism was said by the emerging realist scholars to have led to the unstable international
political structure that caused World War II [End Page 6] and now threatened the postwar balance
of forces. Despite convincing refutations by the leading historians of Wilsons presidency, most
recently John Milton Cooper Jr. in his definitive study of the League of Nations controversy, realists
continue to caricature Wilson as a fuzzy-headed idealist. 26 Idealists, in realist writings, all

share a fatal flaw: an inability to comprehend the realities of power . They live in a world of
unreality, responding to nonexistent scenes. As Riker put it, "Unquestionably, there are guilt-ridden and
shame-conscious men who do not desire to win, who in fact desire to lose . These are irrational
ones in politics." 27 It is here that the realist expert comes in. It is assumed that strategic
doctrine can be rationally and objectively established. According to Kissinger, a theorist who later
became a leading practitioner, "it is the task of strategic doctrine to translate power into policy." The
science of international relations claims the capacity to chart the foreign policy scene and then
establish the ends and means of national policy. This objective order can only be revealed by
rational and dispassionate investigators who are well-schooled in the constraints and
possibilities of power politics. Realisms scenic character makes it a radically empirical science.
As Morgenthau put it, the political realist "believes in the possibility of distinguishing in politics between
truth and opinionbetween what is true objectively and rationally supported by evidence and illuminated
by reason, and what is only subjective judgement." Avowedly modernist in orientation, realism

claims to be rooted not in a theory of how international relations ought to work, but in a
privileged reading of a necessary and predetermined foreign policy environment. 28 In its
orthodox form political realism assumes that international politics are and must be dominated
by the will to power. Moral aspirations in the international arena are merely protective
coloration and propaganda or the illusions that move hopeless idealists. What is most
revealing about this assessment of human nature is not its negativity but its fatalism. There is little if
any place for human moral evolution or perfectibility. Like environmental determinism
most notably the social darwinism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuriespolitical realism
presumes that human social nature, even if ethically deplorable, cannot be significantly
improved upon. From the stationary perspective of social scientific realism in its pure form,
the fatal environment of human social interaction can be navigated but not conquered.
Description, in other words, is fate. All who dare to challenge the orderCarters transgression
will do much more damage than good. The idealist makes a bad situation much worse by
imagining a better world in the face of immutable realities . As one popular saying among foreign
policy practitioners goes: "Without vision, men die. With it, more men die." 70 (continued) The
implications of this social philosophy are stark. Tremendous human suffering can be rationalized

away as the inevitable product of the impersonal international system of power relations.
World leaders are actively encouraged by the realists to put aside moral pangs of doubt and
play the game of international politics according to the established rules of political
engagement. This deliberate limitation of interest excuses leaders from making hard moral choices.
While a moralist Protestant like Jimmy Carter sees history as a progressive moral struggle to realize
abstract ideals in the world, the realist believes that it is dangerous to struggle against the inexorable. The
moral ambiguities of political and social ethics that have dogged philosophy and statesmanship time out of
mind are simply written out of the equation. Since ideals cannot be valid in a social scientific sense,
they cannot be objectively true. The greatest barrier to engaging the realists in serious

dialogue about their premises is that they deny that these questions can be seriously
debated. First, realists teach a moral philosophy that denies itself. There is exceedingly narrow
ground, particularly in the technical vocabulary of the social sciences, for discussing the moral potential of
humanity or the limitations of human action. Yet, as we have seen in the tragedy of Jimmy Carter, a

philosophical perspective on these very questions is imparted through the back door. It is
very hard to argue with prescription under the guise of description. The purveyors of this
philosophical outlook will not admit this to themselves, let alone to potential interlocutors. [End Page 21]
Second, and most importantly, alternative perspectives are not admitted as possibilities realism
is a perspective that as a matter of first principles denies all others. There is, as we have seen
in the Carter narrative, alleged to be an immutable reality that we must accept to avoid
disastrous consequences. Those who do not see this underlying order of things are idealists or

amateurs. Such people have no standing in debate because they do not see the intractable
scene that dominates human action. Dialogue is permissible within the parameters of the presumed

order, but those who question the existence or universality of this controlling scene are
beyond debate. Third, the environmental determinism of political realism, even though it is
grounded in human social nature, is antihumanist. Much of the democratic thought of the last
200 years is grounded on the idea that humanity is in some sense socially self-determining.
Society as social contract is a joint project which, over time, is subject to dialectical
improvement. Foreign policy realism, as we have seen, presupposes that there is an order to
human relations that is beyond the power of humans to mediate. 71 When you add to this
the moral imperative to be faithful to the order (the moral of the Carter narrative), then
democratic forms lose a great deal of their value. Indeed, there has been a great deal of hand
wringing in international relations literature about how the masses are inexorably drawn to idealists like
Carter and Wilson. Morgenthau states this much more frankly than most of his intellectual descendants:
[the] thinking required for the successful conduct of foreign policy can be diametrically opposed to the
rhetoric and action by which the masses and their representatives are likely to be moved. . . . The statesman
must think in terms of the national interest, conceived as power among other powers. The popular mind,
unaware of the fine distinctions of the statesmans thinking, reasons more often than not in the simple
moralistic and legalistic terms of absolute good and absolute evil. 72 Some realists, based on this empirical
observation, openly propose that a realist foreign policy be cloaked in a moral facade so that it will be
publicly palatable. Kissingers mistake, they say, was that he was too honest. Morgenthau concludes that
"the simple philosophy and techniques of the moral crusade are useful and even indispensable for the
domestic task of marshaling public opinion behind a given policy; they are but blunt weapons in the
struggle of nations for dominance over the minds of men." If one believes that social scientists have unique
access to an inexorable social reality which is beyond the control of humanityand which it is social
suicide to ignoreit is easy to see how democratic notions of consent and self-determination can give way
to the reign of manipulative propaganda. 73 There is another lesson that can be drawn from the savaging of
Carter in international relations scholarship for those who seek to broaden the terms of American foreign
policy thought and practice. Those who would challenge the realist orthodoxy [End Page 22] face

a powerful rhetorical arsenal that will be used to deflect any serious dialogue on the
fundamental ethical and strategic assumptions of realism. Careful and balanced academic
critiques, although indispensable, are unlikely to be a match for such formidable symbolic
ammunition. Post-realism, if it is to make any advance against the realist battlements, must
marshal equally powerful symbolic resources. What is needed, in addition to academic critiques
aimed at other scholars, is a full-blooded antirealist rhetoric. It must be said, in the strongest
possible terms, that realism engenders an attitude of cynicism and fatalism in those who
would otherwise engage the great moral and political questions of our age. 74 History is
replete with ideals that, after much time and effort, matured into new social realities. In the notso-distant past, republican governance on a mass scale and socially active government were empirical
impossibilities. However halting and imperfect these historical innovations may be, they

suggest the power of ideals and the possibility of human social transformation. On the other
hand, fatalism fulfills itself. The surest way to make a situation impossible is to imagine it
so. This is a tragic irony we should strive to avoid, no matter how aesthetically fitting it may be.

Kritiks of realism are needed to improve it. Realism could be good but their
instance is bad. The K solves.
Freyberg-Inan 4 (Annette, Ph.D. of political science What Moves Man: The Realist Theory of
International Relations and Its Judgment of Human Nature, State University Press of New York Press, pg.
152-3)
Stephen Brooks has observed that "neorealism's worst-case focus and emphasis on capabilities to the
exclusion of other variables leads its proponents to see little hope for progress in international
relations." He therefore. suggests that "postclassical realism" with its "probabilistic focus" should split off
neorealist theory to form a separate approach.' As we have seen, Brooks's characterization of postclassical
realism is similar to what is elsewhere called "defensive realism." Thus we may identify as another option
open to realists the possibility of retaining their label while attempting to evade the pessimistic
determinism that stems from the axiomatic foundations on which the tradition rests. However, this would
require a modification of basic assumptions extensive enough to call into question the retention of the

realist label. This is why Bahman Fozouni has suggested that "if there is anything realism is worth
salvaging it must first be saved from realists and neorealists."3

A2: Realism Inevitable [Empiricism]

Realism cant explain numerous actionsempirical
evidence proves identity and culture influenced decisions.
Macdonald 2kAssociate Professor of Political Science at Colgate University [2000, Douglas J.
Macdonald, Making Realism Face the Facts, SAIS Review 20.2, p. 331-2]

With the end of the Cold War, neither Classical Realism nor Neorealism proved useful in
explaining the behavior of the major states, especially that of the former Soviet Union. According
to the predictions inferred from the theories, states are not supposed to contract their
international power position voluntarily, as did the Soviets. Realists had a great deal of
difficulty explaining Gorbachevs "new thinking" on foreign affairs--Classical Realists because
they assumed states wanted to expand their power as a constant, and Neorealists because there had
been no structural changes that could explain the collapse of the Soviet empire. Ideas, it
seemed, were more important than either of the Realisms had recognized . The new
information emerging from the archives of the former communist countries , although
incomplete to say the least, directly challenged the idea that ideology was not important in
decision-making in those countries. For example, Stalin, long described by many as the
supremely cautious power realist, appears to have given North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung
permission to strike south in 1950 as part of a regional plan to spread communist ideology in
the midst of the "crisis of capitalism." The move was not, as Realists had assumed, merely to gain territorial
control for security reasons. If one consults the new documentation, Stalin was genuinely interested in
spreading communist revolution. In response to these failures of Realist theory, new works appeared

that moved away from the rationalist, structuralist paradigm of Neorealism. They brought
back factors such as culture, ideology, and human agency more generally in ways that had been
downplayed or ignored by both Classical and Neorealist theory for years. 1 Although the new Culturalists
have made some creative theoretical critiques of Realism, their efforts have been criticized for a
paucity of detailed empirical work. Stephen Morris chimes into this debate with his recent book,
Why Vietnam Invaded Cambodia: Political Culture and the Causes of War. With the skills of an historian
and the social science perspective of a political scientist, Morris has written one of the first
Culturalist theoretical studies that includes impressive empirical detail , especially that
obtained from the archives of the former Soviet Union. Drawing threads from secondary sources,
public materials, and newly available archival information, Morris weaves a complicated tale of relations
among the communist states of the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, and Cambodia. He believes the

primary challenge for Neorealists is to explain explaining why the weaker states in the SinoSoviet, Sino-Vietnamese, and Viet-Cambodian relationships acted in ways that ran against
their basic security interests when the contradictions were obvious . Why, for example, did the
Cambodians disregard their huge military disparity vis--vis the Vietnamese? His sensible answer is
that rationalist or structuralist assumptions do not capture the complicated mixture of
received political cultures; the simultaneously fanatical and paranoid fervor of newly
victorious and highly ideological regimes; and the historical rivalries and hatreds that even [End Page
233] communist internationalism could never completely overcome. These qualities, which characterized
the regimes in Phnom Penh and Hanoi in the 1970s, and Beijing in an earlier period, do not fit easily
into Realist theory. In other words, highly ideological, revolutionary regimes do not always act in the
rationalist ways ascribed to them by the Realists. Morris then offers a broad definition of political culture as
an alternative approach to understanding these phenomena. Clearly in the new Culturalist camp, Morris
does not believe that Classical Realism and Neorealism are wrong, but rather that they are incomplete.
Cultural and ideological factors must also be considered to explain state behavior.

A2: Realism Inevitable [K Solves Realism]

We dont hate to win that realism is bad, just that it needs to take threat
construction into account.
Mack 91 (John E., MD in Psychiatry, Psychodynamics of International Relationships Vol
1 p. 58-59)
Attempts to explore the psychological roots of enmity are frequently met with an argument that, reduced to its
essentials , goes something like this: Its very well to psychologize but my enemy is real. The Russians (or germans,
arabs, Israelis, Americans) are armed, threaten us, and intend us harm. Furthermore, there are real struggles
between us and them and differing national interests: competition over oil, land or scarce resources and
genuine conflicts of values between our two nations (or political systems) It is essential that we be strong and
maintain a balnce of superiority of (military and political) power, lest the other side take advantage of our
weakness. This argument is netiher wrong nor right, but instead simply limited. It fails to grapple
with a critical distinction that informs the entire subject. Is the threat really generated by the enemy
as it appears to be at any given moment, or is it based on ones own contribution to the threat,
derived from distortion of perception by provocative words and actions in a cycle of enmity and
externalization of responsibility? In sum, the enemy IS real, but we have not learned to identify our
own role in creating that enemy or in elaborating the threatening image we hold of the other group or
country and its actual intentions or purposes. we never see our enemys motives and we never labor
to asses his will with anything approaching objectivity.

2.
3. Realism is bad research - modifications have made it incoherent and ruined its scientific rigor
dr. A. (Annette) Freyberg Inan Associate Professor, the Director of the Master's Program in Political Science, Univ of Amsterdam,
PhD in Political Science at the University of Georgia, USA. Her MA degrees in Political Science and English were obtained at the
University of Stuttgart in her native Germany. Editorial Board Member: International Studies Review, Globalizations Journal,
Advisory Board Member: Millennium, What Moves Man: The Realist Theory of International Relations and Its Judgment of Human
Nature 2004
In a recent article, John Vasquez sets out to evaluate the realist claim to scientific rigor. He acknowledges three
criteria by which scientific theories and paradigms may be judged: empirical accuracy, falsifiability, and the
criterion established by Lakatos that legitimate scientific theory must produce progressive research programs.35 Observing that
a number of analysts . . . argue that, despite anomalies, the realist paradigm is dominant because it is more enlightening and fertile
than its rivals, he holds that, instead, what some see as a theoretical enrichment of the realist paradigm is
actually a proliferation of emendations that prevent it from being falsified.36 Vasquez holds with Lakatos that
no single theory can ever be falsified because auxiliary propositions can be added to account for

discrepant evidence and that the appropriate task is, thus, to evaluate a series of theories that are
intellectually related. 37 He observes that realist and neorealist theories do constitute such a family of theories, or
paradigm. Vasquez notes that a paradigm can only be appraised indirectly by examining the abilit y of the theories it generates to
satisfy criteria of adequacy. 38 He focuses his examination on a core research program within the realist paradigm: the empirical
research conducted to test Kenneth Waltzs balancing proposition. He then sets out to determine whether this research program is
degenerating or progressive by Lakatosian standards.39 A research program is degenerating if its auxiliary

propositions increasingly take on the characteristic of ad hoc explanations that do not produce any novel
(theoretical) facts as well as empirical content. 40 To find out whether a research program is degenerating or not, we
must examine whether its problemshifts, that is, its theoretical emendations, are progressive or ad hoc. According
to Lakatos, progressive problemshifts must be both theoretically and empirically progressive , that is, they must
explain novel facts as well as be able to corroborate their claims, while also being able to account for the findings of
their rivals. By comparison, a degenerating problemshift or research program . . . is characterized by the use of
semantic devices that hide the actual contentdecreasing nature of the research program through
reinterpretation.41 Vasquez observes that, while some latitude may be permitted for the development of ad hoc explanations, the
longer this goes on in the face of discrepant evidence, the greater is the likelihood that scientists are engaged in a
research program that is constantly repairing one flawed theor y after another without any incremental
advancement in the empirical content of these theories. What changes is not what is known about the
world, but semantic labels to describe discrepant evidence that the original theory( ies) did not
anticipate.42 One effect of such a development is that collectively the paradigm begins to embody contradictory
propositions, such as (1) war is likely when power is not balanced and one side is preponderant and (2) war
is likely when power is relatively equal. The development of two or more contradictory propositions
increases the probability that at least one of them will pass an empirical test . . . . Carried to an extreme, the
paradigm could prevent any kind of falsification, because collectively its propositions in effect pose the bet:
heads, I win; tails, you lose. A research program can be considered blatantly degenerative if one or more of the behaviors
predicted is only predicted after the fact.43 Vasquez finds that this realist research program is degenerating
because of (1) a protean character in its theoretical development, which plays into (2) an unwillingness to
specify what form(s) of the theory constitutes the true theory, which if falsified would lead to a rejection of
the paradigm, as well as (3) a continual and persistent adoption of auxiliary propositions to explain away
empirical and theoretical f laws that greatly exceed the abilit y of researchers to test the propositions and (4)
a general dearth of strong empirical findings.44 He concludes that there have been too many empirical failures
and anomalies, and theoretical emendations have taken on an entirely too ad hoc nonfalsifying character for
adherents to say that the paradigm cannot be displaced until there is a clearly better theory available . Such a
position makes collective inertia work to the advantage of the dominant paradigm and makes the field less
rather than more rigorous.45 The judgment of Vasquez is supported by Bahman Fozouni, whose analysis of its
epistemological liabilities leads him to the conclusion that political realism, properly understood, is
empirically an untenable theory.46 Fozouni examines various attempts to rescue realism from potential
falsifying evidence, among them strategies of qualifying realisms universal claim by means of additional auxiliary assumptions,
incorporating additional explanator y variables and/or changing functional relationships among them, or diluting the theories
nomothetic-deterministic claim by using statistical generalization (507). He finds that the epistemological liabilities

of
realism are primarily a function of such attempts by realists and neorealists to save the theory from
refutation. He holds that in many cases such efforts have had the unsalutory effect of impoverishing the
paradigm and that they all detract in varying degrees from the theorys most desirable epistemic features

 amenabilit y to falsification (testabilit y), parsimony, scope, and content (ibid.). His judgment is that none of
these modifications produces any apparent compensating gains in either the explanatory power or predictive accuracy of the theory
(ibid.). (148-150)

4.

A2: Realism Good

Realism is a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Freyberg-Inan 4 (Annette, Ph.D. of political science What Moves Man: The Realist Theory of
International Relations and Its Judgment of Human Nature, State University Press of New York Press, pg.
152-3)
The problem of the self-fulfilling prophesy is of course not unique to the realist paradigm of
international relations. We have seen that similar criticisms have been raised against other scientific approaches,
and that, in principle, any interpretive frame work, if it is influential enough, can become self confirming.
However, an exposure of these tendencies as they are exhibited by political realism may be considered
particularly important. It is important because of the effects realist policies can have on the lives of
human beings. It is clear that realism is enormously influential as a political ideology. It is far from clear that,
through lack of proper judgment, it does not serve to inhibit peaceful coexistence and cooperation
and increase the risk of violent -conflict among and within nation-states. As long as there is
only a slight risk that it might, it is necessary that at least part of the discipline of international
relations theory adopt a critical as opposed to a defensive attitude with respect to its major
assumptions. It is equally necessary that the other part listen.

Realism allows hard liners to come to power-this is a prerequiaite for conflict

Freyberg-Inan 4 (Annette, Ph.D. of political science What Moves Man: The Realist Theory of
International Relations and Its Judgment of Human Nature, State University Press of New York Press, pg.
152-3)

In addition to studying the possible psychological effects of realist motivational

assumptions on foreign policy decision making, it is useful to observe the
political effects of the operation of the realist paradigm. If the above suspicions are
supportable, we should be able to identify particular patterns in international
interaction that associated with realist policies. According to Margaret Hermann
and Joe Hagan, i44'"" "[T]he view that the world is anarchic ... leads to a focus on
threats and security, a sense of distrust, and a perceived need for carefully
managing the balance of power. Leaders with this view must always remain alert to
challenges to their states' power and position in the international system."131 John Vasquez has
even argued that "the rise to power of militant hardliners who view the world in
such realpolitik terms is a crucial prerequisite for war.

A2: Realism Inevitable

Realism isnt inevitable- current politicians agree on it but its not human nature.
George and Cambell 90 (Jim George Australian National University; David Campbell
The Johns Hopkins UniversityInternational Studies Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 3, Special
Issue: Speaking the Language of Exile: Dissidence in International Studies. (Sep., 1990),
pp. 269-293.)
It is difficult to overstate the implications of this argument for the understanding of international relations,
because it goes to the very heart of how "international relation? are constituted and understood, and how the
discipline of International Relations understands its own history and contemporary role. Bull once argued that the
theory of international relations was concerned with general propositions that may be advanced about the
political relations among states (Bull, 1972). Such a proposition would seem to many to be unobjectionable to the
point of banality, but it resolves the process of understanding global life in a particular way, through a
division between theory and practice so that theory is outside of the world it purports simply to observe. The
interpretive approach, in contrast, sees theory as practice: the theory of international relations is an instance in one
site of the pervasive cultural practices that serve to discipline ambiguity. Experience has to be arrested, fixed, or
disciplined for social life to be possible. The form that emerges through this process is thus both arbitrary and
nonarbitrary: arbitrary in that it is one possibility among many, and nonarbitrary in "the sense that one can
inquire into the historical conditions within which one way of making the world was dominant so that we now have
a world that power has convened" (Shapiro, 1987:93). In this context, international relations theory is

constitutive ofthough by no means solely responsible forthe understanding of global life in

terms of sovereignty and anarchy, inside and outside,state and world. The "world" we so often
take for granted was not given by nature, convened by God, or planned by the intentions of
statesmen: it came to be through multiple political practices related as much to the
constitution of various subjectivities as to the intentional action of predetermined subjects.

A2: Murray/Guzini
The alternative enriches and sustains realism
recognizing the social and psychological basis of enemy
discourse is crucial to overcome security dilemmas and
ameliorate realisms blind spotsensures a more
authentic engagement with realism
Niarguinen 1 [Dmitri Niarguinen, Rubikon, E-journal, ISSN 1505-1161, December, 2001,
http://venus.ci.uw.edu.pl/~rubikon/forum.htm]
Morgenthaus state-centric theory is clearly set, but it is not to say he envisages it as being pre-destined and
unchangeable. The political, cultural and strategic environment will largely determine the forms of
power a state chooses to exercise, just as the types of power which feature in human relationships
change over time. In addition, Realists should not be wedded to a perennial connection between
interest and the nation-state which is a product of history, and therefore bound to disappear[19].
Later (in 1970) Morgenthau anticipated that the forces of globalization would render the
nation-state no longer valid: the sovereign nation-state is in the process of becoming obsolete[20].
He stresses that a final task that a theory of international relations can and must perform is to prepare
the ground for a new international order radically different from that which preceded it[21].
Kenneth Waltzs neo-realism is both a critique of traditional realism and a substantial intellectual
extension of a theoretical tradition which was in danger of being outflanked by rapid changes in
the contours of global politics. The international system (anarchy) is treated as a separate domain
which conditions the behavior of all states within it. Paradoxically, with the advent of neo-realism,

the scope and flexibility of Realism have significantly diminished. The theory has become
deterministic, linear, and culturally poor. For neo-realists, culture and identity are (at best) derivative
of the distribution of capabilities and have no independent explanatory power. Actors deploy culture and
identity strategically, to further their own self-interests. Nevertheless, it is wrong to assert that neo-realist
perspectives do not acknowledge the importance of social facts. Gilpin has developed a compelling
argument about war and change. While his book is built on (micro)economic premises, he does not neglect
sociological insights as necessary for understanding the context of rational behavior. "Specific interests or
objectives that individuals pursue and the appropriateness of the means they employ are dependent on
prevailing social norms and material environmentIn short, the economic and sociological
approaches must be integrated to explain political change. " Waltz was implicitly talking about
identity when he argued that anarchic structures tend to produce like units. He allows for what he calls
socialization and imitation processes. Stephen Krasner suggested that regimes could change state
interests. Regimes are an area where knowledge should be taken seriously. If regimes matter, then
cognitive understanding can matter as well. Realism is not necessarily about conflict; material
forces may as well lead to cooperation. However, the minimalist treatment of culture and social
phenomena increasingly proved neo-realism as losing ground empirically and theoretically .
It was the suspicion that the international system is transforming itself culturally faster than would have
been predictable from changes in military and economic capabilities that triggered the interest in problems
of identity. Reconstruction of the theory was vital in order to save Realism from becoming
obsolete. The realization of this fact has triggered a shift in Realist thinking and gave way to the
emergence of a constructivist re-incarnation of Realism. Friedrich Kratochwil has once observed that no
theory of culture can substitute for a theory of politics. At least, nobody has ventured to accomplish such an
enterprise so far. To disregard culture in politics, it seems obvious today, is inappropriate, not to
say foolish. There remain opportunity costs incurred by Realism in its asymmetric
engagement with cultural phenomena. Thus, Realism, notwithstanding its concern with parsimony,
should make a serious commitment to building analytical bridges which link identity - and
culture-related phenomena to its explanatory apparatus (like anarchy, sovereignty, the security dilemma,

self-help, and balancing). Alexander Wendt in his seminal article Anarchy Is What States Make of It has
masterfully shown how power politics is socially constructed. Salus populi supreme lex. This classical
metalegal doctrine of necessity is associated with raison detat, the right of preservation, and self-help.
Wendt is convinced that the self-help corollary to anarchy does enormous work in Realism, generating the
inherently competitive dynamics of the security dilemma and collective action problem. What misses the
point, however, is that self-help and power politics follow either logically or causally from anarchy. They
do not; rather, they are just among other institutions (albeit significant ones) possible under anarchy.
Consequently, provided there is relatively stable practice, international institutions can transform state
identities and interests. Let me focus on two concrete security issues - the security dilemma and nuclear
deterrence - to illustrate the point. A central tenet of Realism, the security dilemma[34], arises for the
situation when one actors quest for security through power accumulation ... exacerbates the feelings of
insecurity of another actor, who in turn will respond by accumulating power[35]. As a result of this
behavior, a vicious circle or spiral of security develops, with fear and misperception exacerbating the
situation[36]. Nevertheless, security dilemmas, as Wendt stresses, are not given by anarchy or
nature[37]. Security dilemmas are constructed because identities and interests are
constituted by collective meanings which are always in process . This is why concepts of security
may differ in the extent to which and the manner in which the self is identified cognitively with the other.
Because deterrence is based on ideas about threat systems and conditional commitments to carry out
punishment, it has proved particularly congenial to the strategic studies scholarship within the Realist
tradition[38]. Deterrence is a conditional commitment to retaliate, or to exact retribution if another party
fails to behave in a desired, compliant manner. Thus defined, deterrence has been invoked as the primary
explanation for the non-use of nuclear weapons. The nuclear case, in contrast to chemical weapons, for
example, is definitely problematic for challenging traditional deterrence theory because it is widely felt that
the tremendous destructive power of thermonuclear weapons does render them qualitatively different from
other weapons. Yet, the patterns of the non-use of nuclear weapons cannot be fully understood without
taking into account the development of norms that shaped these weapons as unacceptable. By applying
social constructivist approach, it is possible to emphasize the relationship between norms, identities, and
interests and try to provide a causal explanation of how the norms affect outcomes[39]. Norms shape
conceptualizations of interests through the social construction of identities. In other words, a constructivist
account is necessary to get at what deters, and how and why deterrence works [40]. International
relations theory cannot afford to ignore norms. Demonstrating the impact of norms on the interests,
beliefs, and behavior of actors in international politics does not and must not invalidate Realism.
Rather, it points to analytical blind spots and gaps in traditional accounts. In so doing, it not
only casts light into the shadows of existing theory but raises new questions as well.[41]
However, with all the constructivist adjustments made (which are absolutely credible), it is important to
keep in mind pure rationalist tools as well. Krasner points out that whenever the cost-benefit ratio
indicates that breaking its rules will bring a net benefit that is what states will do[42]. Wendt introduces a
correction that instrumentalism may be the attitude when states first settle on norms, and "continue(s) to be
for poorly organized states down the road"[43]. States obey the law initially because they are forced to or
calculate that it is in their self-interest. Some states never get beyond this point. Some do, and then obey the
law because they accept its claims on them as legitimate[44]. This is truly an excellent observation. The
problem here, however, could be that even when states remove the option of breaking the law from their
agenda, this already implies that benefits overweight costs. And even if this is not the case, how can we
know where exactly this point is, beyond which states respect law for laws sake? Furthermore, states that
supposedly have stepped over this point might break the law, when it has become least expected, if they
consider this of their prime interest. Powerful illustration of this is France, which resumed its nuclear
testing to the great surprise of the world[45]. Another interesting example is the case of NATO. Traditional
alliance theories based on Realist thinking provide insufficient explanations of the origins, the interaction
patterns, and the persistence of NATO. The brand new interpretation is that the Alliance represents an
institutionalized pluralistic community of liberal democracies. Democracies not only do not fight each
other, they are likely to develop a collective identity facilitating the emergence of cooperative institutions
for specific purposes[46]. Thus presented, old questions get revitalized. Why is NATO the strongest among
the other post-Cold War security institutionsas compared to, the WEU, not even to mention the EUs
Common Foreign and Security Policy? Why is not the OSCE given a chance to turn into a truly pluralistic
European Security Architecture? Why was NATO so eager to bomb Kosovo, which was a clear breach of

international law? Because it is an institutionalized pluralistic community of liberal democracies? Or yet

because it is a predominantly military organization? Why do public opinion polls in Russia[47] repeatedly
show that NATO is an aggressive organization (and which can also be observed in official rhetoric, as in the
national security conception and the military doctrine[48])? All these questions suggest that to claim that
Realist explanation of NATO existence can be thrown into a dustbin is at minimum inappropriate. Social
sciences do not evolve via scientific revolutions, as Thomas Kuhn argues is the case for the natural
sciences. Not paradigm shifts but rather style and fashion changes are what characterize social science[49].
Thus posed, paradigm development promises Realism a bright future. In this respect, recent success of
constructivism has, metaphorically speaking, breathed in a new life into Realism. Realism is in much debt
to constructivism for being revitalized. Yet, paying full credit to the contribution of constructivism, it
should be noted that to a large extent constructivists take off from the Realist positions.

Realism is only as inevitable as they make ittheir overly

reductive and inflexible use of realism shuts off critical
reflection
Niarguinen 1 [Dmitri Niarguinen, Rubikon, E-journal, ISSN 1505-1161, December, 2001,
http://venus.ci.uw.edu.pl/~rubikon/forum.htm]
Thus, it can be argued that what we observe is the continuity of the process rather than a radical
change. Put bluntly, if Realism is constructed and then is being analyzed in sociological and psychological
terms, it does not cease being Realism. Constructivists have just built another layer (of culture and
ideas) onto the material base of Realism. This is why constructivism has enriched rather
than overthrown Realist theory. For the genuine link between constructivism and Realism to be taken
seriously, certain elaborations are in order. It is tempting, and, indeed, has been common practice to
polarize and dichotomize two grand standpoints: positivism and reflectivism. While positivism has
been a dominant notion for at least two centuries now, reflectivism seems to be increasingly gaining
momentum and may, over time, switch the pendulum to the other extreme. The tendency is out there: under
the banner of reflectivism, scholars receive an opportunity to criticize everything which has a grain of
rationality. This might lead to either Sokal-hoax type incidents[50] or to a new dogma. In the light of strict
positivist/reflectivist dichotomy, hard-core rigid Realism is rightly accused of being blind and
stumble. To the same degree may hyper-reflectivism be accused of being chaotic, utopian
and irrelevant[51]. Instead of this black-and-white division, we are much more flexible to
view things in the shades of gray. To operate on the rationalist/reflectivist continuum then would
rather be a virtue than a vice. It is thus important to move from instrumental rationality (Zweckrationalitaet)
to value-rationality (Wertrationalitaet).[52] Equally is it important to stay away from pure ideas of
reflectivism, which like Sirens in Homers Odyssey are luring scholars onto the rocks. As Alexander Wendt
has indicated, ideas, after all, are not all the way down. To counter an argument that reflectivism and
positivism are epistemologically incompatible, it is plausible to say that much cooperation is possible on
the ontological basis alone. Indeed, neither positivism, nor reflectivism tells us about the structure and
dynamics of international life. The state of the social sciences of international relations is such that
epistemological prescriptions and conclusions are at best premature[53]. With all my attachment to
Realism, there are certain pitfalls to be aware of and to avoid. What I do not argue about is Realism being
an all-encompassing thought trespassing all possible borders and conquering both terra incognita and terra
cognita. In a world full of anomalies, Realism is neither sufficiently established nor sufficiently precise to
be treated as a sacrosanct paradigm to which other lines of argumentation must defer[54]. Moreover, it is a
matter of attitude. Neoliberalists could claim with the same success that constructivism, for example, is
doing a great job on their behalf[55]. Also, there is scholarship working on the extreme polar of
reflectivism. Being appealing and powerful, it is unbridgeable epistemologically with Realism not only at
the extreme positivist polar but even on the gray territory. To disregard or downplay this school would
be, to say the least, inadequate. Having acknowledged this, however, it is tempting to illustrate on the
example of the English School of Realism how indeed far Realism can stretch[56]. For the English School,
international system is a society in which states, as a condition of their participation in the system, adhere
to shared norms and rules in a variety of issue areas. Material power matters, but within a framework of

normative expectations embedded in conventional and customary international law. Sociological imaginary
is strong in the English School: it is not a great leap from arguing that adherence to norms is a condition of
participation in a society to arguing that states are constructed, partly or substantially, by these norms[57].
The English School thinkers encourage us to think about international relations as a social arena whose
memberssovereign statesrelate to each other not only as competitors for power and wealth, but also as
holders of particular rights, entitlements, and obligations. In terms of method, they emphasize the
importance of a historical approach. Michael Walzer and John Vincent are particularly concerned with the
relationship between human rights and the rights of sovereign states[58]. They seek ways in which to
reconcile the society of states with cosmopolitan values. Terry Nardin, building his theory on the ideas of
political philosopher Michael Oakenshott, argues that international society is best seen as a practical
association made up of states each devoted to its own ends and its own conception of the good. The
common good of this inclusive community resides not in the ends that some, or at times most, of its
members may wish collectively to pursue but in the values of justice, peace, security, and co-existence,
which can only be enjoyed through participation in a common body of authoritative practices.[59] Martin
Wights triptych of international thought is extremely eclectic, not simply because of his refusal to delineate
these traditions with any philosophical or analytic precision, but also because of his personal reluctance
either to transcend them or to locate his own views consistently with the parameters of any single one[60].
Wight has written widely about the cultural and moral dimensions of international relations, and his work is
a constant reminder that what may appear to be new disputes in the field about contemporary issues are in
fact extensions and manifestations of very old arguments, although couched in a different idiom. It is now
acknowledged that the English School is an underutilized research resource and deserves a prominent role
in international relations because of its distinctive elements: methodological pluralism, historicism, and its
inter-linkage of three key concepts: international system, international society, and world community.[61]
International system, thus, is associated with recurrent patterns of behavior that can be identified using
positivist tools of analysis. By contrast, international society needs to be explored using hermeneutic
methods that focus on the language that lies behind the rules, institutions, interests, and values that
constitute any society. Finally, world community can only meaningfully be discussed by drawing on critical
theory. To refigure the value of Realism in a period of rapid systemic change means to

interpret it as an ongoing discursive struggle that cuts across the traditional theory-practice,
and other synchronic and scholastic antinomies of world politics. It gives notice of how Realism
in its universalistic philosophical form and particularistic state application has figuratively and literally
helped to constitute the discordant world it purports to describe[62]. This is an attempt to open up the
hermeneutic circle, to enlarge the interpretive community, to break out of the prison-house of a
reductive vocabulary that has so attenuated the ethico-political dimension of realism[63]. Thus, it is
important to consider the paradox that the power of Realism lies not in its immanence but in its distance
from reality, from realities of contingency, ambiguity, and indeterminacy that Realism tries to keep at bay.
*** It is often argued that globalization - the growth of transnational economic forces, combined with a
growing irrelevance of territorial control to economic growth and the international division of labor rendered Realism obsolete, with the end of the Cold war as a fatal blow for the theory. Has, indeed,
Realism become anachronistic? If it were a monolithic rigid theory, the answer would probably be yes. I
have argued, however, that Realism is not homogeneous; rather, it has an irreducible core which is able to
create flexible incarnations. At minimum, Realism offers an orienting framework of analysis that gives the
field of security studies much of its intellectual coherence and commonality of outlook[64]. This is true
even if Realism stays on the extreme polar of positivism. However, positivism/rationalism in a pure form is
of little value. In the words of the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, the approach of rational behavior, as it is
typically interpreted, leads to a remarkably mute theory[65]. Realism needs not be predestined to
remain stagnant[66]. At maximum, thus, when Realism operates in the shades of gray between positivism
and reflectivism, its strength is paramount. Consequently, there are good reasons for thinking that the
twenty-first century will be a Realist century[67]. Once again I want to stress that Realism should not be
perceived as dogmatic. And this is why we do need reflectivist approaches to problematize what is selfevident, and thus to counterbalance naive Realism[68]. In doing so, however, we are more flexible in
keeping the middle ground and not in sliding to the other extreme. As Wendt believes, in the medium run,
sovereign states will remain the dominant political actors in the international system[69]. While this
contention is arguable, it is hardly possible to challenge his psychological observation, Realist theory

of state interests in fact naturalizes or reifies a particular culture and in so doing helps

reproduce it. Since the social practices is how we get structurestructure is carried in the
heads of agents and is instantiated in their practicesthe more that states think like
Realist the more that egoism, and its systemic corollary of self-help, becomes a selffulfilling prophecy[70]. Even strong constructivists admit that we cannot do away with
Realism simply because it is a still necessary hermeneutical bridge to the understanding of
world politics[71]. Ergo, ita est.

A2: Guzinni
Guzzini concedes realism is ineffective and his
theorizations regarding its inevitability are flawed; 7
reasons
Makinda, Prof. of IR @ Murdoch, 2000 p. Proquest
(Samuel, Australian Journal of International Affairs Vol. 54 Reading and Writing International
Affairs)
Guzzini concludes that realism cannot offer a proper understanding of world politics and that the
`unity between diplomatic discourse and the discipline of International Relations, so self-evident
in times of Morgenthau, can no longer be upheld' (p. 234). He believes that attempts `to save
realism as the discipline's identity defining theory' have failed because currently there is no work
that provides a meta-theoretically coherent realism (p. 235). Guzzini therefore posits that realist
scholars face a fundamental dilemma. They can update the practical knowledge of a diplomatic
culture, rather than science, and thereby risk losing scientific credibility. Alternatively, they can
cast realist rules and culture into a scientific mould, but this will continue to distort the realist
tradition. Guzzini argues that despite its crises, realism cannot be ignored because it is `part of the
collective memory and selfdefinition of international actors, academics [and] politicians alike,
which order thought, suggest analogies, and empower attitudes to political action' (p. 227). He
concludes that `despite realism's several deaths as a general causal theory, it can still powerfully
enframe action' (p. 235).
Guzzini presents a powerful argument, but his analysis raises several questions. First, in the light
of the debates unearthed by Schmidt, part of Guzzini's argument looks like a distortion of IR
history. Guzzini claims that IR in the US dates back to the 1940s. However, there is evidence that
the discipline emerged long before the US became a superpower.
Second, Guzzini has placed too much emphasis on a symbiotic relationship between the
American foreign policy establishment and the evolution of the discipline. Even Morgenthau, the
so-called founding father of IR, was opposed to the US involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s and
1970s. While the external world cannot be ignored in a serious analysis of the evolution of IR, its
effects on the core concepts have been more limited than Guzzini would like to suggest.
Third, I believe Guzzini has over-emphasised the identification of the entire discipline with
realism. Guzzini's attempt to identify realism with IR has made it difficult for him to consider, for
example, the works of theorists like Michael Doyle (1986) and James Lee Ray (1995), on the
`democratic peace' thesis. By reducing all IR developments in the US to the evolution of realism,
Guzzini has denied himself a chance to understand the rich tradition of liberal thought in
American IR.
Fourth, I find Guzzini's discussion of the `inter-paradigm' debate a little problematic (cf. Waver
1996; Banks 1985). Guzzini makes very interesting points in relation to the 'banalisation' of
Thomas Kuhn's concept of paradigm. However, his definition of realism is so wide that it
captures virtually everyone, including those who believed they were offering alternatives to
realism. For example, major contributors to the `inter-paradigm' debates included Keohane and
Nye (1977), whose book, Power and Interdependence made a major breakthrough in IR theory by
articulating the concept of `complex interdependence'. Guzzini argues that `their theory did not
imply a departure from all realist thought, but a broadening of the International Relations agenda'
(p. 112). While Guzzini's reading of Nye and Keohane is accurate, it is not the only proper
reading of this book. The assumption that everyone who defends the role of the state in global
politics is a realist can be misleading. Such an assumption would turn several critical and liberal
theorists into realists!

Another weakness in Guzzini's taxonomy comes out when he analyses the implications of The
Logic of Anarchy (Buzan et al. 1993). Like several other scholars, Guzzini regards this book as a
major effort `to rescue the rich realist tradition out of neorealism ... a realist response to the crisis
of both realism and neorealism' (p. 217). However, after delving into Jones's contribution, he
remarks: `This is a neat description of main research programmes inspired by post-structuralism
or constructivism ... It is less obvious, however, how this can fit realism' (p. 223). This underlines
the indeterminacy of many labels in IR, including realism. One way of dealing effectively with
this situation is to go for principled or self-conscious eclecticism.

The nation state is dying out- its becoming less relevant

to discussions of international relations
Spegele, IR Prof. @ Monash University, 02 p. http://ire.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/16/3/381
(Roger D., Emancipatory International Relations in International Relations)
For emancipatory international relations, nation-states, and the state-systems of which they
form the essential parts, are either anachronistic institutions which have no legitimacy and
which we should replace with something else (although there is no consensus on what that
something might be) or they have always involved repression, lacked legitimacy and
marginalized the powerless. In any case, there is no place for nation-states or state-systems
in any emancipatory conception of international relations. For emancipatory international
relations, the state and the state-system need to be replaced with other institutional structures, the
kind and character of the substitute depending on the particular emancipatory theory in question.
World socialism (Wallerstein); dialogic communities (Linklater); alternative world orders (Cox);
international human rights regime (Booth); nongendered societies; global society (Albrow);
maternalist society (Ruddick); homesteads (Slyvester); anarchy (Ashley and George) would be
just some of the things that give content to what Kant called the Kingdom of Ends. Whatever the
value of thinking in terms of radical goals that may not be realizable, one part of the
emancipatory international relationists claim seems to be solidly based: for, there is, after
all, considerable support for the empirical claim that the authority, capacity and power of
nation-states are rapidly diminishing in the face of globalization, interdependence and a just
environmental order. Clearly much more content would have to be given to the institutional
envelopes that would be morally and practically superior to the nation-state. It will not do, for
example, to talk in some vague way about the rise of the postmodern state.30

Guzinnis conclusions are based on a warped

understanding of IR that overemphasizes realism
Makinda 99 [Samuel M. Makinda, School of Politics and International Studies Murdoch University
Australian Journal of International Affairs, Nov 1999, Vol. 53, Issue 3 p.334]

Guzzini observes that realism cannot offer a proper understanding of world politics. He
argues that attempts to save realism as the disciplines identity defining theory have failed
because currently there is no work that provides a meta-theoretically coherent realism.
Guzzini therefore posits that realist scholars face a fundamental dilemma. They can update the practical
knowledge of a diplomatic culture, rather than science, and thereby risk losing scientific credibility.
Alternatively, they can cast realist rules and culture into a scientific mould, but this will distort the realist
tradition. Guzzini concludes that despite realisms several deaths as a general causal theory, it can
still powerfully enframe action. Guzzini presents a powerful and illuminating argument, but his
analysis raises some questions. First, Guzzinis argument is basically another distortion of the
evolution of IR. While Guzzini claims that IR dates back to the 1940s and attributes its establishment to
Morgenthau, there is evidence that the discipline is much older and emerged as part of political science
long before the US became a superpower. Second, Guzzini has placed too much emphasis on a

symbiotic relationship between the American foreign policy establishment and the evolution of
IR. Even Morgenthau, the so-called founding father of IR, was opposed to the US involvement in
Vietnam. Third, Guzzini has overemphasised the identification of IR with realism. His attempt
to identify realism with IR has made it difficult for him to consider the works of theorists like
Michael Doyle and Bruce Russett on the democratic peace thesis. Indeed, what Guzzini has done
is provide a reconstructed and partially distorted history of IR, which can be denigrated
and maligned much more easily by post-structuralists, post-modernists, feminists and critical
theorists.

Guzinni incorrectly credits realism as an unchallenged

theory
Rologas 2K [Mitchell Rologas, University of St Andrews International Affairs, Jan 2K, Vol. 76, Issue 1
p. 141]

This is a stimulating work which, for all the excellence of some of its individual components,
nevertheless does not add up to a convincing whole. Guzzinis interpretation of realism as the
attempt to translate the rules of the diplomatic practice of the nineteenth century into scientific rules of
social science which developed mainly in the US (p. 11) is plausible enough but his treatment of the
historical assimilation is questionable. He repeats the tired old myth that there was an
interwar debate between idealism and realism (p. 32). Not only do scholars investigating the
period find little evidence for such a debate, but they also have considerable difficulty in separating the
idealists from the realists (see for example the essays in David Long and Peter Wilson, eds., Thinker of the
twenty-year crisis: inter-war realism reassessed, 1995). Was Chamberlain an idealist or a realist? E. H. Carr,
as Guzzini is aware, gave different answers to this question in consecutive editions of his Twenty-year
crisis. Certainly, if we accept Guzzinis summary that in short, idealism holds that through reason alone
mankind can overcome the state of nature in inter-state relations (p. 17) we will be hard pressed to identify
very many idealists at all. This is important because Guzzini wishes to resurrect the Kuhnian

notion of paradigms in suggesting that there was a paradigmatic shift from idealism to
realism as the dominant paradigm after the Second World War. I doubt whether realism has ever
enjoyed quite the unchallenged status that Guzzini ascribes to it, certainly nothing that would
approach the Kuhnian state of normal science. Hans Morgenthau--whose Politics among nations is
described by Guzzini as the paradigmatic text of the emerging US social science (p. 16)--had numerous
detrators both within academe and in the broader policy-shaping networks. Guzzini sees the
academic community as the binding link between the internal conceptual debates and the external context
of realist thought, describing this approach as a historical sociology of a fairly limited kind (p. 2). It is,
indeed, so limited as to hardly warrant the description at all. Guzzini has very little to tell us about
the links between academe and government . Chapter two introduces Morgenthau and E. H. Carr as
the fouding fathers of the new descipline (p. 16) but in chapter four where Guzzini explores the formation
of US foreign policy it is George Kennan who emerges as the most significant figure. To say merely that
realist thought developed in parallel with US foreign policy formulations (p. 49) is to side-step too many
important questions. Guzzini acknowledges that the growth of hegemonic stability theory epitomized
again the close link between US foreign policy concerns and the research interests of the academia in
international relations (p. 142) but if this close link amounts to little more than trailing in the wake of the
twists and turns of US foreign policy the discipline can hardly be worthy of its grandiose title. The absence
of any attempt to explore these linakages helps to explain the self-contained feel of the individual chapters.

Guzzinis Analysis is a Reason to Refuse the International System as natural - Realist

explanations are Politically Mandated.
Pinar Bilgin, Prof. of IR @ Bilkent, Berivan Elis, PhD Candidate in IR @ Ankara, 8 [Hard Power, Soft
Power: Toward a More Realistic Power Analysis, http://www.bilkent.edu.tr/~pbilgin/Bilgin-Elis-IT2008.pdf]

While the realist conception of power has come to shape mainstream accounts of world politics,
critical scholars have pointed with vigor to the increasingly unrealistic analysis it delivers.
Underscoring the limits of realist power analysis, Caporasos study of structural power56
points to the difference between dependence as a corollary of interstate relations and dependency
as a structural feature of the existing world order; i.e. less developed countries find themselves in
a limited choice situation due to the structure of the capitalist international economy. Stranges
focus on international political economy highlights the role of global markets as an arena where
power is exercised by actors other than the state in that structural power decides outcomes (both
positive and negative) much more than relational power does.57 Guzzini, in turn, points to the
impersonal part of the power phenomena, which he calls governance. Although both power
and governance are needed for a comprehensive power analysis, he argued, the concept of power
should remain attached to agents/actors so that an actors responsibilities and possible actions for
emancipatory change would become more visible.58
With the aim of rendering power analysis more realistic, we should open up to new research
agendas as required by the multiple faces of power. Power is far too complex in its sources,
effects and production to be reduced to one dimension.59 Indeed, power is diffused and
enmeshed in the social world in which people live in such a way that there are no relations
exempt from power.60 Since power shapes the formation of actors consciousness, no interest
formation can be objective;61 defining what an actors real interests are is not free of power
relations. That is to say, not only the mobilization of bias and agenda-setting but also the
production and effects of all norms and values that shape human consciousness should be
critically scrutinized. This, in turn, calls for not three- but four-dimensional power analysis
Lukes plus Foucault as dubbed by Guzzini.62 Contra Lukes, whose three-dimensional
power analysis rests on assumptions regarding (1) the possibility of uncovering power relations,
and (2) Bs objective (real) interests that A denies through various expressions of hard and soft
power, Foucault maintains that power and knowledge directly imply one another [in that]
there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any
knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.63 The
academic field of International Relations constitutes a supreme example of the workings of the
fourth face of power. Over the years, students of IR have studied international relations as an
effect of power. It is only recently that they have begun to study power as an effect of
international relations (as world politics) 64 and International Relations (as an academic
field).65 However, as Booth reminds us, such silences, as with IRs narrow conception of power,
are not natural, they are political. Things do not just happen in politics, they are made to
happen, whether it is globalization or inequality. Grammar serves power.66 One of the sites
where the productive effects of grammar in the service of power is most visible is the Third
World. This has been one of the central themes of postcolonial studies where [f]rom Fanon to
Jan Mahomed to Bhabha, the connecting theme is that Western representations construct
meaning and reality in the Third World. Concepts such as progress, civilized and modern
powerfully shape the non-European world.67 The ways in which grammar serves power
becomes detectable through more realistic power analysis.

A2: OTuathail
1. Our evidence subsumes- OTuathail just says a focus on representations without discussion of
political institutions is flawed but does not counter the sequencing argument of our framework
2. They misread Otuathail. He concedes representations come first and that your logic of geopolitical
domination enables further violence
Gearid Tuathail, Department of Geography, Virginia Tech, 9/96
At the end of geopolitics: reflections on a plural problematic at the centurys end
http://www.nvc.vt.edu/toalg/website/publish/papers/End.htm

With their powerful systems of image capture, global media machines have
tremendous police power over how we see and understand "real (i.e. virtual)
geography" in international politics. Together with other megamachinic assemblages, they help
zone and format post-Cold War global space into sectors like "rogue states,"
(a war machine zone), "failed states" (a paragovernmental zone) and "emerging markets" (a global
financial machine zone). Beyond the mass media but still part of the technological enframing of global space,
commercial and quasi-state enterprises, like Sovinformsputnik and Prioda from Russia, Israeli
Aircraft Industries and the private California based Core Software Technology, Space Imaging (lead by Lockheed Martin),
E-Systems (a Raytheon and Mitsubishi Corp joint venture), EarthWatch (backed by Ball Aerospace, WorldView Imaging
and Hitachi) and Orbital Sciences, are all in competition to sell high-quality satellite

images of any spot on the exposed face on the earth. The postmodern geopolitics of these

satellite image companies is particularly interesting for they mark the privatization of previously state monopolized
intelligence operations. A sub-division of Orbital Sciences, Orbital Imaging's satellite OrbView is scheduled for launch in
mid-1997 and offers exclusive territorial agreements for clients. Buy the images of a certain terrain or region and no one
else will get access. In the future, states may be forced to buy up images of their own

territory to prevent spying. The Israeli government has already objected to a Saudi Arabian investment in
Orbital Science, resulting in an agreement to alter the satellite's software to block imaging of the Israeli state. The
French state, whose Helios 1A high-resolution optical spy satellite joined those
of Russia and the United States in orbit in early 1996, understands the global view
afforded by their system as a geo-power which helps , literally and figuratively, to define
the nation. More than simply seeing actual high-definition images of France from space, it re-confirms
France's mythical identity as a great power. As a Chirac aid put it: "Over-the-horizon
information is a new source of geopolitical power, like nuclear weapons ."
Other machinic systems producing techno-geopolitical views include the U.S. run global positioning system ( GPS)
and military intelligence platforms and systems whose ongoing efforts to
police the planetary spectrum are driven by technoscientific and militaristic
fantasies of pure global (war machine) vision. A complex postmodern geopolitics entwining
territory, media and machines was evident in the U.S. cruise missile attacks against Iraq in
September 1996. The latest version of the U.S. Tomahawk cruise missile used in these
attacks (made by the GM owned Hughes Aircraft Company at an estimated cost of $1 million apiece) employed
not only a supposedly improved terrain "scene-matching" computer but also
a complementary guidance system that used satellites to continually update
the missile's location and target . (Many of the missiles still missed!). The unusual
geopolitics of these attacks -- the use of drone weapons launched by
warships in international waters and by B-52's based in Guam, a 20 hour flight away -- was
necessitated both by territorial limits in the region, diplomatic restrictions on the use of airbases in
Turkey and Saudi Arabia, and televisual limits at home, the Clinton administration's fear of the spectacle
of U.S. military casualties in the run-up to a presidential election. The geopolitics of vision, in this
case, was triangulated by technology, territory and television . A second
cluster of postmodern geopolitics is that emerging from the efforts of
intellectuals and institutions of statecraft to re-map the global strategic
landscape after the Cold War. While the crude Manichean world of the Cold War may be gone for now,
the preoccupation of the national security establishment with "rogue states

and nuclear outlaws" is indicative of a persistent territorial

conceptualization of danger in international security studies. Underwriting
these territorializing specifications of danger are , of course, old-fashioned
essentialist identities -- totalitarian states, Islamic fundamentalists , die-hard
Communists, terrorists, criminals and devils (like Saddam Hussein) -- and a
longstanding strategic commitment on the part of the Western security
apparatus to pro-Western states like Israel, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The effort of NATO to extend
this zone of strategic commitment and protection in Central Europe is evidence that a state-centric
territorial geopolitics does persist, but increasingly it is also non-territorial
"postmodern terrorist" threats in a speeding hybrid world that preoccupy
the defense planners in the Pentagon, at NATO headquarters in Brussels, and elsewhere. Threats from
contraband flows and proliferations -- the spread of nuclear weapons,
plutonium, terrorists, drugs, illegal migrants, infectious diseases, money laundering, sensitive
high-tech assets, biological and chemical agents, etc. -- and threats to vital official flows and ports -- oil
pipelines, subways, world trading centers, airports, teleports, secret data archives, fiber-optic lines, international financial
networks, and global sporting spectacles -- have brought into being a postmodern

geopolitics of security where the geographies are in fluid flowmations not

fixed formations. Ostensibly preoccupied by a geography of territorial fixities
during the Cold War, security discourse has exspanded to encompass the protection
of fundamental spaces of flows from material attack or the immaterial
terrorism of computer hackers and software viruses. The creation of a Belfast-style "ring of steel" and CCTV system
around the City of London -- a strategic space of financial flows -- and the militarization of U.S. airports in
response to recent spectacular bombings disclose a geopolitics that mixes
traditional forms of containment and detainment with new panoptic
surveillance and scanning technologies. Again, media vectors are also implicated in the
creation of these landscapes, one of their "strategic" functions being the simulation of security
and the containment of media borne viruses of panic and hysteria. Even within the much remarked upon emergence of
"environmental security" and the sacred visions of green governmentalists like Al Gore, geography is post-territorial inflowmations of ozone gases, acid rain, industrial pollution, topsoil erosion, smog emissions, rainforest depletions and toxic
spills. Yet, the discourse of unveiled and primordial geographical regions persists also. In the place of Mackinder's natural
seats of power, Gore presents the "great genetic treasure map" of the globe, twelve

areas around the globe that "hold the greatest concentration of germplasm
important to modern agriculture and world food production ." Robert Kaplan's
unsentimental journey to the "ends of the earth" where cartographic geographies
are unravelling and fading has him disclosing a "real world" of themeless violence and
chaos, a world where "[w]e are not in control." The specter of a second Cold
War -- "a protracted struggle between ourselves and the demons of crime, population pressure, environmental
degradation, disease and cultural conflict" -- haunt his thoughts. This equivocal environmentalization of
strategic discourse (and visa versa) -- and the environmental strategic think tanks like the World Watch
Institute which promote it -- deserve problematization as clusters of postmodern
geopolitics, in this case congealments of geographical knowledge and green governmentality
designed to re-charge the American polity with a circumscribed global
environmental mission to save planet earth from destruction . Thirdly, the
deterritorialization of national sovereignty, territorial integrity and inherited identity by the transnational flowmations of
economic, financial and cultural globalization has already provoked a postmodern geopolitical rhetoric of acceleration and
pace, on the one hand, and resistance and place, on the other hand, within U.S. political culture. On the one side, one has
dromo-celebrants like Jack Kemp and Newt Gingrich for whom "accelerating the transition" from Second Wave industrial
capitalism to Third Wave informational capitalism has become a mantra. America needs to dismantle its obsolete and oldfashioned regulatory "barriers" and speed itself out onto Microsoft's "road ahead" and into a futuristic "opportunity
society" of friction-free (b)orderless capitalism. On the other hand, one has self-styled rebels,

fundamentalists, and cultural warriors, like Patrick Buchanan, Ross Perot and Pat Choate, who
campaign against the swamping of American identity by illegal immigration
and multiculturalism, the erosion of American sovereignty by international
agencies and corporations, and the dissipation of American patriotism

induced by permissive individualism and radical social minorities .

Buchanan's call for the construction of a vast wall along the Rio Grande
seemed to symbolize his whole campaign for president, his metaphors of
barriers, walls and resistance symptomatic of a profound desire to
resolidify and reterritorialize America around imaginary notions of place,
country and kin. In a postmodern time where, Zygmunt Bauman notes, "formlessness is the fittest of forms,"
Buchananism represented a desire to return to a time when forms were enduring
fixities, the durable structures of family, faith and America first that made the United States the fittest of all the
nations. Yet Buchanan, an electronic populist -- a product of the very screens of power he condemns -- can
only offer teletraditionalist solutions to deterritorialization, the simulation of
sovereignty in a world where the real thing is gone forever . Briefly summarized
here are only some of the many decentered clusters in the postmodern
geopolitics constellation now free-forming around us . As should be evident, the condition
of postmodernity is saturated with geographical politics of many different kinds. To glibly assert that
geopolitics is coming to an end is to ignore the ongoing struggle over global
space at the end of the twentieth century. The imperial visions of Halford
Mackinder and Cold War geopoliticians may be obsolete but new
technoscientific visions of space have taken their place and strive to
enframe our world. Geopolitics is not over; the struggle to envision and
enframe global space in imperial constellations of geography/power/
knowledge continues. So also do struggles of resistance .

A2: Jarvis
1. Framework indicts academic hegemony. The realist school is built to eradicate forms of
knowledge that conflict with its basic premise. A premium on problem solving leads to the creation
of problems just for the sake of solving them. Turns the case.
2. Begs the question of the impact debate Jarvis rationale is that problematizing has nothing
useful to offer to the world if we win our impacts matter then we are relevant.
3. Jarvis misreads and essentializes critical scholarship making his claims worthless

Shapiro 1

(Michael J, Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaii, International Studies

Association review of Books, p. 126-128

D. S. L. Jarvis's International Relations and the Challenge of Postmodernism: Defending the Discipline constitutes a radical alternative
to Cochran's practice of critique. Manifesting a serious allergy to critique and especially to what he calls "postmodernism," Jarvis

presumes that he must defend traditional, neopositivist IR against (in the words of the book jacket) "the
various postmodern and poststructuralist theories currently sweeping the discipline of International Relations."To put the matter
simply at the outset, Jarvis appears to be almost entirely ignorant of the philosophical predicates

of the critical IR literature he attacks. He invents a model of thought that he finds

vulnerable and then proceeds with his method of argumentation, mostly to scoff at the
enemy he has invented. But Jarvis's scoffing amounts to whistling in the dark. He has entered a
field of critique with predicates that are mysterious to him, and he shows signs of being genuinely anxious about the consequences of
critical work. The monster Jarvis creates is a work of fiction, for he begins with the pre-

sumption that postmodern orientations are "sweeping" and therefore threaten ing the
discipline. (I estimate that roughly one percent of the papers at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association
reference postructuralist philosophy.) Returning to the Victorian genre of Gothic fiction in which the constitutive practice involves two
primary rolesthe monster and the victimJarvis portrays Richard Ashley as the Frankenstein monster and the victim as the entire
IR discipline. Moreover, Jarvis's overwrought style of characteriza tion of the dangers of

postmodern IR fits Gothic fiction's motivational profile as well . As is noted in Fred Botting's treatment of
the genre: "The terrors and horrors of transgression in Gothic writing become powerful means to reassert the values of society, virtue
and propriety. . . . They warn of dangers by putting them in their darkest and most threatening form" (p. 5). Why fiction?

Jarvis' makes "the postmodern" (which he seems to know primarily on the basis of rumor , for
most of his citations are not to postructuralist texts but to thinkers hostile to them) an elastic
category that applies to everything that he perceives to be antagonistic to his pre-Kantian
empiricism. It encompasses most of feminist IR and anything that uses interpretive method. Although the use of a
deconstructive mode of critique is extremely rare in international studies (the major practitioner is David Campbell),
Jarvis frequently uses the term "deconstruction" as a synonym for postmodernist method .
He assumes, without showing any evidence that he has read a word of Jacques Derrida's writings, that deconstruction is hostile to
theory building and is opposed to all forms of affirmation. This characterization is belied by Derrida's state-ments and demonstrations
and by Campbell's deconstruction-inspired writing on war, security, and the ethics of responsibility. Symptomatic of his woeful
ignorance of critical work in general, Jarvis refers at one point to the expression "structure of feeling" as a "postmodern phrase" (p.
32). Structure of feeling is initiated in the work of Raymond Williams, the late (and famousthough not sufficiently to alert Jarvis)
Marxist literary critic whose work cannot be remotely related to poststructuralist critique and has inspired such prominent postmodernism bashers as Terry Eagleton.Jarvis's ignorance is not confined to contemporary critical interpretive theory (postmodern or
otherwise); it even extends to the neoempiricist philosophy of science. For example, he chides postmodernists for holding the
outrageous view that theorizing constitutes fact (p. 27), while he wants to uphold a model in which the integrity of theoryin
international studies or elsewhererequires that the domains of theory and fact be understood as radically separate. One need not
resort to a Foucauldian treatment of discourse as event or a Deleuzian critique of representational thinking to

challenge Jarvis's approach to theory. Jarvis's view of the theorydata relationship was seriously

impeached by enough neoempiricist philosophers by the 1960s to field a softball team (among
the heavy hitters in the starting lineup would be Willard V. Quine, Patrick Suppes, and Norwood Russell Hanson).The critical
work for which Jarvis has contempt is not the threat he imag ines to "the discipline," unless
we construct the IR discipline as a trained inat tention to the problematics, within which the
work of theory proceeds. The writings of Michel Foucault (some of whose work Jarvis seems to have read) have
implications for a critical and affirmative perspective that does not compromise the kind of theory building that IR empiricists do. It
extends the arenain which to theorize while encouraging a historical sensitivityto regimes of discourse and

suggests an ethico-politics of freedom from the impo sitions of identity. Although Foucault's conception
of the problematic points to how concepts and the modes of fact assigned to them are historically contingent, explicable in contexts of
value, and complicit with modes of power and authority, this does not thereby invalidate theory. Rather, it opens

the way to work on the ethico-political context of theory and, among other things, to theorize with a sensitivity to theory's constituencies ( beyond the policymakers that seem to be
prized by Jarvis). As Molly Cochran, whose work is based on knowledge and critique rather than rumor and contempt,
implies, an important legacy of contemporary critical work is the expansion of political and
moral inclusion. Finally, there is one other genre that is (regrettably) embedded in Jarvis's fable of the dangers of
postmodernism, a biographical speculation about a five-year hiatus in Richard Ashley's publishing life. Obsessed with the dangers of
postmodernism, Jarvis attributes these years of silence to the "deep resignation" (p. 183) that he thinks Ashley's version of postmodern
theorizing invites. Without insisting on a counterspeculation, I want to point out that Ashley's publishing hiatus coincides with the
period shortly after an automobile accident claimed the life of his wife and seriously maimed his two sons. At a minimum,

the information renders Jarvis's biographical fable crass and uninformed like the
rest of the book.

A2: Kurasawa
1. Their predictions backfire --- dystopic alarmism gets twisted to lock in oppression

Kurasawa 4 (Fuyuki, Professor of Sociology York University of Toronto, Cautionary Tales: The Global Culture of Prevention
and the Work of Foresight, Constellations, 11(4))
Up to this point, I have tried to demonstrate that transnational socio-political relations are nurturing a thriving culture and
infrastructure of prevention from below, which challenges presumptions about the inscrutability of the future (II) and a stance of
indifference toward it (III). Nonetheless, unless and until it is substantively filled in, the argument is

vulnerable to misappropriation since farsightedness does not in and of itself ensure

emancipatory outcomes. Therefore, this section proposes to specify normative criteria and participatory procedures
through which citizens can determine the reasonableness, legitimacy, and effectiveness of competing dystopian
visions in order to arrive at a socially self-instituting future. Foremost among the possible distortions of farsightedness is
alarmism, the manufacturing of unwarranted and unfounded doomsday scenarios . State and market
institutions may seek to produce a culture of fear by deliberately stretching interpretations of reality beyond the
limits of the plausible so as to exaggerate the prospects of impending catastrophes, or yet again, by intentionally promoting
certain prognoses over others for instrumental purposes. Accordingly, regressive dystopias can operate as Trojan horses
advancing political agendas or commercial interests that would otherwise be susceptible to public scrutiny and
opposition. Instances of this kind of manipulation of the dystopian imaginary are plentiful: the invasion of Iraq in
the name of fighting terrorism and an imminent threat of use of weapons of mass destruction; the severe curtailing of American
civil liberties amidst fears of a collapse of homeland security; the neoliberal dismantling of the welfare
state as the only remedy for an ideologically constructed fiscal crisis; the conservative expansion of policing and
incarceration due to supposedly spiraling crime waves; and so forth. Alarmism constructs and
codes the future in particular ways, producing or reinforcing certain crisis narratives, belief structures, and
rhetorical conventions. As much as alarmist ideas beget a culture of fear, the reverse is no less true.

2. This turns every benefit of preventive foresight --- only the alt solves

Kurasawa 4 (Fuyuki, Professor of Sociology York University of Toronto, Cautionary Tales: The Global Culture of Prevention
and the Work of Foresight, Constellations, 11(4))
On top of their dubious assessments of what is to come, alarmism and resignation would, if

widely accepted,
undermine a viable practice of farsightedness. Indeed, both of them encourage public disengagement
from deliberation about scenarios for the future, a process that appears to be dangerous, pointless, or unnecessary. The
resulting depublicization of debate leaves dominant groups and institutions (the state, the market, techno-science) in
charge of sorting out the future for the rest of us, thus effectively producing a heteronomous social order. How, then,
can we support a democratic process of prevention from below? The answer, I think, lies in cultivating the public
capacity for critical judgment and deliberation, so that participants in global civil society subject all claims about
potential catastrophes to examination, evaluation, and contestation. Two normative concepts are particularly well suited to
grounding these tasks: the precautionary principle and global justice.

Kurasawa concludes negHe concedes alarmism destroys predictions and collapses

into manufactured technostrategic discourse
Kurasawa 4 Professor of Sociology @ York Universty of Toronto, Constellations, 11.4
Foremost among the possible distortions of farsightedness is alarmism, the manufacturing
of unwarranted and unfounded doomsday scenarios. State and market institutions may
seek to produce a culture of fear by deliberately stretching interpretations of reality beyond
the limits of the plausible so as to exaggerate the prospects of impending catastrophes, or
yet again, by intentionally promoting certain prognoses over others for instrumental
purposes. Accordingly, regressive dystopias can operate as Trojan horses advancing political
agendas or commercial interests that would otherwise be susceptible to public scrutiny and
opposition. Instances of this kind of manipulation of the dystopian imaginary are plentiful:
the invasion of Iraq in the name of fighting terrorism and an imminent threat of use of
weapons of mass destruction; the severe curtailing of American civil liberties amidst fears
of a collapse of homeland security; the neoliberal dismantling of the welfare state as the only

remedy for an ideologically constructed fiscal crisis; the conservative expansion of policing and
incarceration due to supposedly spiraling crime waves; and so forth. Alarmism constructs and codes
the future in particular ways, producing or reinforcing certain crisis narratives, belief structures,
and rhetorical conventions. As much as alarmist ideas beget a culture of fear, the reverse is no less
true.

A2: Gunning
1. Our alt isnt a counterplan we dont claim to pragmatically solve aff impacts. The alt is a
framing of the world. Our links are all predicated on the context in which you identify your impacts
not the impacts themselves. Evaluate the alt as a context within which politics should be evaluated.
2. Opps. Their article concludes that critical approaches are worth persuing even if they conflict
with tradition key to freedom from statism and old methodologies.

Gunning 2007

[Jeroen, Lecturer in Intl Politics @ U of Wales, Government and Opposition

42.3, A Case for Critical Terrorism Studies?]

The explicit pursuit of a critical turn may also exacerbate the tension between traditional
and critical approaches. However, this is not a reason for rejecting a critical turn and
could in fact be turned into a creative tension. Tensions between traditional terrorism studies and
critical or cognate approaches already exist . A self-conscious critical turn does not have to
exacerbate this situation if it is executed sensitively, by emphasizing the need for
inclusion and cooperation rather than simply highlighting the shortcomings of
traditional approaches. Traditional terrorism studies have produced a wealth of descriptive data and analysis, and not
to acknowledge this would weaken the critical project which should complement rather than supplant traditional
approaches.106Critical approaches must in turn be challenged by traditional perspectives,

to
keep them focused on the need for policy relevance and to (re)-consider the benefits of the
status quo. At the same time, not considering the critical turn will be highly costly in terms of knowledge lost through
fragmentation and lack of critical exposure. From both a conceptual and a policy-relevance perspective,
the statist focus and ahistoricity of problem-solving approaches to the study of terrorism,
as well as the methodological implications of these characteristics, must be overcome if the
quality of research and policy recommendations is to improve. Similarly, for knowledge (and
knowledge about the conditions of this knowledge) to be expanded, the many fragmented voices of those studying aspects of
terrorism outside the traditional terrorism field should be brought together under one umbrella to enable the confluence of disparate
insights, and to facilitate the cross-fertilization between traditional terrorism studies, critical terrorism studies and cognate
disciplines

A2: Jones
1. Our alt isnt a counterplan we dont claim to pragmatically solve aff impacts. The alt is a
framing of the world. Our links are all predicated on the context in which you identify your impacts
not the impacts themselves. Evaluate the alt as a context within which politics should be evaluated.
2. Jones is wrong and is focus on feasibility dooms and disables the critical project

Burke 7

(Anthony, Senior Lecturer School of Politics and Professor of International Relations University of

New South Wales, Beyond Security: Ethics and Violence, p. 21-22)

A further argument of the CSS thinkers, one that adds a sharply conservative note to their normative discourse, needs comment. This
states that proposals for political transformation must be based on an identification of 'immanent possibilities' for change in the present
order. Indeed, Richard Wyn Jones is quite, militant about this: [D]escriptions of a more emancipated order must focus on
realizable utopias ... If

[critical theorists] succumb to the temptation of suggesting a blueprint

for an emancipated order that is unrelated to the possibilities inherent in the present ...
[they] have no way of justifying their arguments epistemologically. Furthermore, it is highly
unlikely that a vision of an emancipated order that is not based on immanent potential
will be politically efficacious. 47 Certainly it is helpful to try to identify such potentials; but whatever the common sense
about the practicalities of political struggle this contains, I strongly reject the way Jones frames it so dogmatically. Even putting
aside the analytical ambiguities in identifying where immanent possibilities exist, such arguments are
ultimately disabling and risk denying the entire purpose of the critical project. It is precisely at times of
the greatest pessimism, when new potentials are being shut down or normative change is distinctly negative arguably
true of the period in which I am writing - that the critical project is most important. To take just one example from this
book, any reader would recognise that my arguments about the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be extremely difficult
to 'realise' (even though they endorse a negotiated two-state solution). This only makes it more important to make them because the
available contours of the present, confined as they are within the masculinist ontology of the insecure nationstate, fail to provide a stable platform either for peace or a meaningful security. In the face of such obstacles the

critical project must think and conceive the unthought, and its limiting test ought not to be realism but
responsibility. The realism underlying the idea of immanent possibility sets up an important tension between the arguments of this
book and the normative project of cosmopolitanism which was most famously set out by Kant in his Perpetual Peace as the
establishment of a 'federation of peoples' based on Republication constitutions and principles of universal hospitality, that might result
in the definitive abolition of the need to resort to war. 41 However, Kant's image of universal human community and the elimination
of war exists in fundamental tension with its foundation on a 'pacific federation' of national democracies. With two terrible

centuries' hindsight we know that republics have not turned out to be pacifistic vehicles of cosmopolitan
feeling; instead, in a malign convergence of the social contract with Clausewitzian strategy, they have too often formed
into exclusivist communities whose ultimate survival is premised upon violence. Is the nation-state the reality
claim upon which cosmopolitanism always founders? Could a critique of security, sovereignty and violence, along the lines I
set out here, help us to form a badly needed buttress for its structure?

A2: Lockman (Middle East Studies Reflexive)

1. Concludes neg. Youll notice the title of this articles is The Neo-Conservative Assault on Middle
Eastern Studies. The aff uses evidence from the same think tanks making the assault. The 1AC is
filled with cards from The American Interest, The Weekly Standard, and conservative Israeli
scholars.
2. Lockman rejects focus on U.S. security interests supports our reframing alternative.
Zachary LOCKMAN, Middle Eastern Studies and History @ NYU 4 Contending visions of the Middle East: the history and
politics of Orientalism, p. 262-263
More broadly, however, Kramers fixation on accurate prediction as the chief (or even sole) gauge of good scholarship
is itself highly questionable. Most scholars do not in fact seek to predict the future or think they can do so; they try to interpret
the past, discern and explain contemporary trends and, at most, tentatively suggest what might happen in the future is present trends
continue, which they very often do no. Of course, governments want accurate predictions in order to shape and implement effective
policies, but Kramers insistence that the primary goal of scholarship should be the satisfaction of that desire tells us a great deal about
his concept of intellectual life and the proper relation between scholars and the state. As I suggested earlier, Kramers model of what
US Middle East studies should be seems to be based on the institution with which he was affliated for two decades, the Dayan Center.
Just as many (though by no means all) of the Israeli scholars associated with the Dayan Center have seen themselves as producing
knowledge that will serve the security and foreign policy needs of Israel, so American scholars of the Middle East should,

Kramer suggested, shape their research agendas to provide the kinds of knowledge the US government will
find most useful. His book demonstrated no interest whatsoever in the uses to which such knowledge might
be put or in the question of the responsibility of intellectuals to maintain their independence and speak truth
to power or indeed in what scholarship and intellectual life should really be about. His real complaint was that US Middle East
studies had failed to produce knowledge useful to the state. Yet by ignoring larger political and institutional contexts,
Kramer could not understand or explain why so many scholars had grown less than enthusiastic about producing the kind of
knowledge about the Middle East the government wanted, or conversely, why it was that the government and the media now
routinely turned to analysts based in think tanks, along with former military and intelligence personnel, for
policy-relevant knowledge rooted in the official consensus about what constitutes Americas national
interest in the Middle East. But there is a larger issue at stake here. At the very heart of Kramers approach is a dubious
distinction between the trendy, arcane theorizing of the scholarship he condemned as at best irrelevant and at
worst pernicious, on the one hand, and on the other the purportedly hard head, clear sighted, theory free
observation of, and research on, the real Middle East in which he and scholars like him see themselves as engaging.
Kramer was not wrong to suggest that there has been some trendy theory-mongering in academia, including Middle East studies. But
he went well beyond this by now banal observation, and beyond a rejection of poststructuralism, to imply that all theories, paradigms,
and models are distorting and useless, because they get in the way of the direct, unmediated, accurate access to reality that he seemed
to believe he and those who think like him possess. This seems to me an extraordinarily nave and unsophisticated
understanding of how knowledge is produced, one that few scholars in the humanities and social sciences have taken
seriously for a long time. Even among historians, once the most positivist of scholars, few would today argue that
the facts speak for themselves in any simple sense. Almost all would acknowledge that deciding what should be construed as
significant facts for the specific project of historical reconstruction in which they are engaged , choosing which are more
relevant and important to the question at hand and which less so, and crafting a story in one particular way
rather than another all involve making judgements that are, at bottom, rooted in some sense of how the world
works- in short, in some theory or model or paradigm or vision, whether implicit or explicit, whether consciously
acknowledged or not. Kramers inability or refusal to grasp this suggests a grave lack of self-awareness, coupled with an alarming
disinterest in some of the most important debates scholars have been having over the past four decades or so. It is moreover a stance
which Kramer did not indeed, could not maintain in practice. His assertions through the book were based on a certain framework
of interpretation, even as he insisted that they were merely the product of his acute and hard-headed powers of observation, analysis
and prediction. It is for example striking that at the very end of Ivory Towers Kramer explicity set forth what is obviously a political
and moral jdugement rooted in his theoretical vision of the world: his insistence that a healthy reconstructed Middle East studies must
accept that the United States plays an essentially beneficient role in the world. He never explained why we should accept this vision
of the US role in the world as true, nor did he even acknowledge that it may be something other than self-evidently true. The assertion
nonetheless underlined his avowed epistemological stance and graphically demonstrated its untenability.

A2: Heydemann Role of the Ballot

Heydemann criticizes the stability-security framing of democracy research. This Proves alternative
solvency. This says policymakers should pay more attention to academic research that favors
democratization over compromises with authoritarianism. The stability frame devalues democracy
and manipulates the process according to short term interests.
[Heres the last paragraph of their card]
Does such attention to theory lead the field down esoteric byways, detached from the concerns of policy makers? That research has an
obligation to serve foreign policy goals is a dubious proposition, but interaction between research and policy on questions of reform is
evident, even if the two often pull in different directions. On the one hand, U.S. policy favors stability in the short run, with little
apparent regard for the longer-term costs of sustaining authoritarian regimes. Policy makers have tended to subordinate political
reform to economic reform in the belief that markets will create the preconditions for political changeeventually. In other words,
U.S. policy has evolved to favor markets now, democracy later. Academic specialists, on the other handincluding some with highlevel government experiencetend to be skeptical if not critical of this approach, generally preferring more assertive U.S. support for
democratization.7 Nonetheless, the feasibility of promoting markets without also seeking democracyof supporting what has become
a shift from populist to partially market-based forms of authoritarianism is sadly consistent with the findings of the research
literature. Moreover, this divergence between the policy and research communities is not an indicator of academic failure but a
reflection of policy makers neglect, whether intentional or not, of a research literature that has been largely accurate in assessing the
rise and decline of political liberalization in the Middle East during the course of the 1990s.

A2: Zarnett (Reverse Essentialism)

This indicts Saids overreaching claims to trace Orientalism from the Greeks to the modern day. We
read no evidence from Said, our evidence is democracy assistance.
Focus on American exceptionalism and imperialism avoids homogenizing the West.
Meghana NAYAK Poli Sci @ Pace AND Christopher MALONE Poli Sci @ Pace 9 American Orientalism and American
Exceptionalism: A Critical Rethinking of US Hegemony International Studies Review 11 p. 254-255
We claim that American

Orientalism is a style of thought that gets grounding through American

Exceptionalism, a particular and specific form of Orientalism intended to produce America .
Exceptionalism, as Americas foundational narrative, holds that the United States has a unique place in
history, differing fundamentally and qualitatively from all other countries; it also emphasizes a God-given
destiny to guide the rest of the world according to the mainstream US political, social, and economic
worldview (Lipset 1996). Orientalism and Exceptionalism share in common the discursive deployment of
ontological difference and epistemological claims underlying the American providential mission to provide
order to the world, the justifications for conquering and occupying territories, and the racial hierarchy that prioritizes AngloSaxons. However, we argue that American Exceptionalism differs from American Orientalism because it is rooted
in American political thought about the development and articulation of the American nation in
contradistinction to Europe. Accordingly, while critical IR analysis of Orientalism can help to critique and
understand the positional superiority of Western countries in relation to the Othering of the non-West, both
inside and outside of Western borders, it needs to interrogate American Exceptionalism so as to better explain
and interpret American othering of Europe and the concomitant historical and contemporary clashes within the socalled
Western world.5 Critical IR should be better equipped to challenge the clash of civilizations thesis not simply because it smacks of
overly polemic and divisive rhetoric, but, as we argue, it obscures the significance, implications, and timing of perceived clashes
between Western powers. In particular, we note there are contentious differences between the United States and Europe, as well as
within Europe, regarding intra-European relationships and Europes relationship with the United States. Examples include the relative
roles of the US and various European powers in the world; differences on who or what constitutes Europe; the distinction between the
policies of old and new Europe; immigration; secularism; whether to admit Turkey to the European Union; appropriate responses
to terrorism; policy positions on situations regarding, among others, Russia, Iran, Israel, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea;
relationships with emergent powers such as China and India; the role of the state vis-a`-vis corporations and regional organizations;
and how to participate in neoliberal global governance via the United Nations, international financial institutions, trade agreements
and zones, and nuclear non-proliferation agreements. Further, scholars and political pundits alike have accused the Bush
administration of not only exerting violence against the Muslim and or Arab Other, but also of creating conflict with the United
States key allies in Europe. Critical discussion of these tensions would help to challenge the fiction of a coherent
Western civilization. In other words, we contest that there is a monolithic, hermetically sealed West that posits itself against
the rest of the world. While the United States and Europe seem all too similar in their Orientalism, we must understand such othering
practices in the context of the aforementioned transatlantic and European conflicts. At stake is a deeper examination of how and when
the United States and Europe may both invoke Orientalism but contend differently with the realities of US hegemony. What are the
implications, for example, of the increasingly voiced opinion that Europe, specifically through the European Union, is potentially
creating a collective, non-violent sovereignty that is markedly different from the US statecraft?6 We also wish to challenge the
perception that Europe, while confronting its own forms of state and border violence and disagreeing over the future of the European
Union, can and should cohesively counter US hegemony.

We dont essentialize the region we strategically trace the power relationships that influence our
understanding of the Middle East.
Pinar BILGIN IR @ Bilikent (Ankara) 10 The 'Western-Centrism' of Security Studies: 'Blind Spot' or Constitutive Practice?
Seucurity Dialogue 41 p. 615 FOOTNOTE 1
Throughout this article, I

will use the terms developed/developing, West/non-West, Europe/non- Europe,

First World/Third World, core/non-core and South/North interchangeably, not because I am not aware
of the problems involved in so doing, but because I want to talk about a set of problems that are tied up with
these binaries. The main binary that the article revolves around is Western/non-Western, not because
ethnocentric construction of knowledge is a western privilege, but because this particular privilege has
been intrinsic to the deployment of global power (Slater, 1998: 669) and the imperial is thus crucial for
understanding global security dynamics in theory and in practice. Accordingly, following Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,
I have made a choice for strategic essentialism that is, using a clear image of identity to fight a politics
of opposition (which would not be possible if all the aspects of identity were to be incorporated) (Sharp, 2009: 114).

A2: Mueller (Democracy Discourse Doesnt

Cause War)
Concludes that security framing justified intervention. Proves our link. Combining democracy with
hyperbolic middle east threat discourse twists the democracy agenda to support militarized
intervention and imperialism.
Concludes framing democracy assistance as a form of cultural moderation and expansion of pro-U.S.
publics supports imperialism.
Mueller, Poli Sci Ohio St University, 6/15/7
(John, Faulty Correlation, Foolish Consistency, Fatal Consequence: Democracy, Peace, and Theory in the Middle East,
http://psweb.sbs.ohio-state.edu/faculty/jmueller/KENT2.PDF)
However, Bush and some of his supporters--particularly those in the neo-Conservative camp--foolishly, if consistently,
extrapolated to develop an even more extravagant mystique. Not only would the invasion crisply bring viable democracy to
Iraq, but success there would have a domino effect: democracy would eventually spread from its Baghdad bastion to
envelop the Middle East. This would not only bring (it needs hardly to be said) blissful peace in its wake (because, as we
know, democracies never fight each other), but the new democracies would also adopt all sorts of other policies as well
including, in particular, love of, or at least much diminished hostility toward, the United States and Israel
(because, as we know, the democratic process itself has a way of making people think nice thoughts). Vice President Dick Cheney
attests, reports Woodward, to Bush's "abiding faith that if people were given freedom and democracy, that would begin a
transformation process in Iraq that in years ahead would change the Middle East" (Woodward 2004, 428). Moreover, since force can
establish democracy and since democracies rather automatically embrace peaceful and generally nice thoughts, after Iraq was forced
to enter the democratic (and hence peaceful and nice-thinking) camp, military force would be deftly applied as necessary to speed up
the domino-toppling process wherever necessary in the area. Such extravagant, even romantic, visions fill war-advocating neoConservative fulminations. In their book, The War Over Iraq, Lawrence Kaplan and William Kristol apply due reverence to
the sanctified correlation--"democracies rarely, if ever, wage war against one another"--and then extrapolate fancifully to
conclude that "The more democratic the world becomes, the more likely it is to be congenial to America "
(2003, 104-5). And war architect Paul Wolfowitz also seems to have believed that the war would become an essential stage on the
march toward freedom and democracy (Woodward 2004, 428). In a 2004 article proposing what he calls "democratic realism," Charles
Krauthammer urges taking "the risky but imperative course of trying to reorder the Arab world," with a "targeted, focused" effort that
would (however) be "limited" to "that Islamic crescent stretching from North Africa to Afghanistan" (2004 23, 17). And in a speech in
late 2006, he continued to champion what he calls "the only plausible answer," an ambitious undertaking that involves "changing the
culture of that area, no matter how slow and how difficult the process. It starts in Iraq and Lebanon, and must be allowed to proceed."
Any other policy, he has divined, "would ultimately bring ruin not only on the U.S. but on the very idea of freedom." And Kaplan and
Kristol stress that "The mission begins in Baghdad, but does not end there....War in Iraq represents but the first installment...Duly
armed, the United States can act to secure its safety and to advance the cause of liberty--in Baghdad and beyond" (2003, 124-25).

A2: Rychlak (Should Represent Islamic

Terrorism)
This defends the term, not the narrative. Our alternative doesnt ban considering the possibility of
religious conflict, but we shouldnt represent the Egyptian revolution as a choice between irrational
radicals and reasonable secularists. The cooperation of these groups and promises of peace in Tahrir
Square should be respected. Our Abu-Nimer evidence postdates and is about the Brotherhood.
Discourses of Islamist duplicity and extremism prevent democratic engagement. Prioritizing
religious motivation ignores political demands and response to US securitization.
Raymond BAKER Intl Politics @ Trinity (Hartford) & Frmr. President Intl Association of Middle Eastern Studies 10 in Islam in
the Eyes of the West: images and realities in an age of terror eds. Tareq Ismael & Andrew Rippin p.
252-254
Is it any wonder that I, like so many of my Western counterparts, only caught glimpses of the Islamic Awakening, in retrospect the
major development of the late 1960s and early 1970s? Throughout the area at that time new Islamist intellectuals and movements were
emerging to reshape the Middle East in ways completely at odds with Western expectations, not to mention those of the Egyptian left.
In my political study of Egypt written during that period, I focused instead on the secular forces, nationalist and leftist, that were
driving Nasser's revolution. I juxtaposed the views of Egyptian leftists and their impressive critique of the Nasserist experience with
the truths I had acquired at Harvard. I still reassure myself that this intellectual exercise helped to make my first book a better one,
though it could not overcome its inattention to Islam and its political impact. I regrettably left the Islamic movements, notably the
Muslim Brotherhood, in the shadows. However, I do note with some small pleasure that even then I could never quite manage the
hostility to all things Islamic that animated the work of my mentors at Harvard and of my new friends on the Egyptian left. It took
some time and a great effort of unlearning before I could get a reasonable grasp on the Islamic Awakening and
develop an appreciation of just why Egypt has been so central to it. However, what concerns me in this chapter is
less my own earlier experience of disillusionment with so much of Western scholarship on the Islamic world, whether taken directly
from its sources or indirectly from Westernized Arab intellectuals. Rather, I want to share my very vivid sense that we are not doing
much better today. In fact, the rampant hostility in the wake of September 11 , 2001 to all things Islamic has made the situation much
worse, though President Obama has begun the serious work of changing those attitudes. My courses for the last few years
have been flooded with students motivated by a 'know thy enemy' impulse that I had seen only once before as a
student myself of the Soviet Union. The enemy in those days was Soviet communism and our 'totalitarian' models explained it
fully. During the long Bush years the enemy was defined in broad strokes as 'Islamofacism' with pretty much the same model in play,
tinted green instead of red, though equally abstract, self-serving, and unrelated to realities on the ground. In the 1960s, the area

studies programs for the Soviet Union and the Middle East in which I was trained were motivated by a
sense that the United States was an emerging superpower with global responsibilities . We needed people to
understand the world beyond our borders to help facilitate its economic and political transformation along
the modem lines we, rather than the Soviets, had pioneered. The rhetoric of global responsibility screened a
rising imperial assertiveness and talk of underdeveloped countries slid easily into condescending assumptions of
underdeveloped peoples. Yet, however unhappy these pretensions and their racist implications in the 1960s, things
are worse today. Now, the call is for terror specialists, fluent in Arabic, to serve national security interests. In my
worst moments, I wonder whether my recommendations of students for language study programs now simply increase the crop of
Arabic speakers for interrogation and eaves-dropping purposes. The terror specialists, with their special focus on the
Arab world, are preparing themselves to face a vast and nameless army of Islamic extremists that must be
confronted abroad, they are told, with as much violence as is needed, in order to avoid another September 11 at home. America's
putative aim now is not to develop backward societies but rather to demolish imagined Islamist enemies and protect the 'homeland'.
The old centers for development and modernization now take a back seat to a new generation of centers for Terror Studies at some of
the West's most prestigious universities. Convinced of history's direction, my generation of graduate students

believed that our Western, secular experience, from which abstract and ahistorical models of development
were extracted, provided a mapping of the future of the Arab Islamic world. With eyes riveted on an
imported, inevitable future for the Arab societies, we missed the importance of the Islamic wave then
emerging to shape important dimensions of political and social life. Today, with our gaze finnly fixed on
the criminal, extremist Islamist minorities represented by al-Qaeda and on the violence and mayhem they cause, we
pay almost no attention at all to the centrist lslamist mainstream that has made itself the driving force of the
Islamic Awakening. During all these many years of my Cairo connection hardly a day has gone by without two or three Middle
East stories in the major American news outlets. Over these four decades my American family, friends, and students repeatedly and
always with a sense of the novelty of the moment have commented on "what a fascinating time to be living and working in the Middle
East" - responding always to media reports of the latest disaster, upheaval or war. Yet, consistently, from the vantage point of my direct
experience, the most important developments in the region today make almost no impression at all. Real struggles for freedom

and social justice with reasonable prospects for success are underway and they go unnoticed or
misrepresented. For too many in the West, they are screened from view simply because they are waged
under Islamist banners. All we see is terrorism or extremism in clever, moderate disguise . In fact, the Islamic
mainstream has been gaining strength everywhere since the late 1960s and has been establishing itself as the major opposition to
currently existing regimes and as the inspiration for resistance to foreign invaders. The story of these struggles and the

successes registered should be of interest to all who share democratic and anti-imperialist commitments.
These values still represent an important part of the legacy of the American people, though they have often all too
often been badly compromised, not least since 200 I. However, we should not forget that these same years have also
witnessed impressive efforts - originating from American civil society - to resist empire and protect American
civil liberties. It is imperative that those thousands and thousands who took to the streets recognize potential allies in
Islamic lands and among Islamic centrists for the advancement of these anti-imperialist and democratic
aims. Arab peoples, in particular, groan under authoritarian rule while facing foreign assault on several fronts.
These realities of everyday life, so completely outside the experience of Westerners, inevitably mean that the struggle just to live an
ordinary life takes place in quite extraordinary circumstances. Battles for normalcy in such circumstance generate a surprising capacity
for resistance, including forceful resistance. It makes no sense at all to criticize the 'duplicity' of mass Islamist

movements because they are committed both to social welfare projects for their people and to assertive
resistance to occupiers. The first is not a mere screen for the second. The identity of Islamist resistance movements
codifies both sets of commitments. Circumstances require no less, as the experiences of the routinely demonized movements
of Hamas and Hizbullah make clear. Both are movements of national resistance that arose to confront foreign occupation. They are
also social movements that strive to meet the pressing social needs of the people from whom they have arisen. They have also evolved
into political movements that are important players in their respective national settings. Ordinary citizens throughout the Arab world
have an acute sense that the immediate enemies of freedom and the prospects of a decent life, represented by the repressive
governments under which they live, are not the only, nor always the most serious threat they face. In this assessment they are
absolutely correct. There are indeed enemies from afar, with Israel and the United States in the front rank. Memories of direct foreign
occupation are fresh and cutting throughout the region, revived continuously over four decades in a particularly vivid way by the
oppressive Israeli occupation and unrelenting colonization of the West Bank and Gaza.

A2: Valbjorn (Shouldnt Focus on

Representations)
[evidence indict also read/apply K prior cards]
Alternative doesnt reject policy action on democracy assistance. This evidence says Said failed to
provide a strategy of engagement. We do, we just think that strategy should be premised on genuine
democratic engagement instead of U.S. national security interests. This doesnt defend the aff frame.
Cross-apply Schwedler, Mandaville, and Paris.
Specificity of the link trumps our evidence is about the narrative depictions and response of the
Arab spring and the framing of democracy assistance. Generic Said indicts dont matter.

A2: Kaufman (Discourse Doesnt Cause

Violence)
Proves the importance of framing and that we politically choose different narratives. This card
says threat construction isnt sufficient but that making symbolic narratives available to
policymakers makes wars more likely. Its a case study of how the use of hardline symbolic
narratives by Israeli and Palestinian leaders undermined the Oslo process. U.S. policymakers
framing their response to the Arab Spring in terms of the U.S. versus Islamist fanatics risks the same
process.

A2: Pinker (Violence Declining Because of the

West)
Links to their homogenziation argument. This isnt an impact or analysis specific to the region. This
should be rejected.
Equating the West and democratic and scientific progress justifies the most oppressive forms of
Orientalism. Even if global conflicts have been decreasing, weve fought several wars over these
issues in the region. Historically, their narrative frame justified support for regimes that tortured
and killed their citizens.
[Read/apply Saunders Impact]
Orientalism rigs the game for evidenciary standards and empirics.
Meghana NAYAK Poli Sci @ Pace AND Christopher MALONE Poli Sci @ Pace 9 American Orientalism and American
Exceptionalism: A Critical Rethinking of US Hegemony International Studies Review 11 p. 256-257
Second, the various debates about Saids work have inspired and fortified critiques of rationalist methodology of mainstream IR
scholars and of how their ontological presumptions about and methodological studies of the West and the
rest obscure more than they explain (Allain 2004; Chowdhry 2007). Third, the American variant of Orientalism

allows for an analysis of the discursive deployments in which (1) the United States assumes and relies upon
an ontological distinction between the United States and Others (Weldes et al. 1999; Richter- Montpetit 2007); (2) the
United States employs authoritative epistemological claims and representations about Others bodies,
habits, beliefs, feelings, and political sensibilities, thereby justifying interventions , sanctions, and other actions
within, across, and outside of its borders (Persaud 2002); and (3) US foreign policy relies on a rationalist methodology
consisting of finding evidence, such as reports and fact-finding missions, of foregone conclusions about
the Other and the United States need to assert its position (Tetreault 2006).
Justifies historical amnesia whitewashes atrocity.
Julian SAURIN Intl Relations @ Sussex 6 Decolonizing International Relations ed. Branwen Grffydd Jones p.
Whatever the paucity of references to or uses of the history of the colonized (subaltern and otherwise dispossessed), IR

scholarship
is able to present the colonized as much through omission and unspoken assumption as by direct reference.
There are four principal (and no doubt complementary) paths one can take in exposing the nature and effects of these omissions and
assumptions. First, there is the general critique of Eurocentrism in which the now global dominance, indeed intellectual
hegemony, of the European "enlightenment" social scientific traditions has effected the silencing or permanent
subordination of subaltern knowledge, including historical knowledge. Here, "subaltern" and "colonized" are synonymous.
Second, there is the profoundly important critique of "oriental ism" in which the Western imagination tells us little or nothing about
"the rest" but everything about the West. Here, " nothing" and "the rest" are synonymous. Third, there is the recording, tracing, and
critique of the profound political economic inequalities that were generated by colonial (or imperial)
international order and that have resulted in the perennial extermination of the colonized. Here, "colonial order"
and "inequality" are synonymous. Finally, one could demonstrate the contradiction, partiality, differentiation, and inconsistency of
ostensibly universalist doctrines, most obviously of human rights and human equality, in the constitution of the colonial (or imperial)
order. Here, "partiality" and "universality" are synonymous. The removal or discounting of the subordinated from their own history is
secured often through the simplest of techniques, such as in the repetition of simple phrases. Thus, in his critical assessment of Said's
work, Bruce Robbins takes Disraeli's imperial dictum that "the East is a career" and comments that his phrase is briefly and brilliantly
offensive. Activating the convention by which an empty, immobile point on the compass is held capable of condensing millions of
undescribed personal destinies, the sentence equates these missing millions with a single individual 's rising curve of professional
accomplishment. The individual who is to enjoy the career is elided, as if in pretense of equal exchange for the elision of the colossal
human diversity that is to be its raw material; in the space of symmetrical impersonality thus cleared , the static East can be spurred
into movement, metamorphosed into the kinesis of a (Western) 'pursuit.,,25 So, in a phrase, is captured the essence of imperial
administration and the attitude to subject peoples. And it is the task of overturning a deep and long established attitude
that any call for decolonizing lR must face . This attitude in fact tells the story of Western supremacy-its historical and
historiographical evolution- by presupposing Western supremacism. Guha identifies the problem clearly when he counterposes Hegel's
characterization of world history with what is historically entailed in the production of that world history. Thus, quoting Hegel, world
history moves on a higher plane than that to which morality properly belongs .... The deeds of great men who are individuals of world
history . .. appear justified not only in their inner significance ... but also in a secular sense.26 In this way, the historical function and

purpose of the imperial nation or state is presented as already peculiar and elevated and not prone to the limiting conditions and
considerations that characterize the subordinate. What does this abstraction mean concretely? Imperialism is author of history,
author of law, author of historical subject, author of indictment, author of judgment. For example, "By

inventing a universal humanity and endowing this juridical abstraction with inalienable rights, it absolved
Europe of crimes both past and future ," Bess is opines before asking whether "Enlightenment thought, like stormbearing Clouds, already carries future horrors within it, formulating the limits of universality in such a way
as to make Europe its sole guardian?"27 Correspondingly, Guha argues that from the point of view of those left out
of World-history this advice amounts to condoning precisely such " world-hi storical deeds"-the rape of
continents, the destruction of cultures, the poisoning of the environment-as helped " the great men who
[were] the individuals of world history" to build empires and trap their subject populations in what in the
pseudo-historical language of imperialism could describe as Prehistory.28 Imperial rule makes itself known as imperial
rule through the power of universalizing its own story and self-validating its own story. The twin of this is to
deprive the subordinated of the capacity to tell their own story and to determine an alternative legitimation and self-validation.

A2: Pinker
Pinkers thesis is fundamentally wrong, defines violence
in ways that sanitize the violence of the privileged West,
and should be rejected
Hart, 2011 (David Bentley, theologian and publisher of numerous texts on theology in Yale University
Press, http://www.firstthings.com/article/2011/12/the-precious-steven-pinker)
Whether Pinker himself does the tale justice, however, is debatable. He is definitely not an adept
historian; his view of the pastparticularly of the Middle Ages, which he tends to treat as a single
historical, geographical, and cultural momentis often not merely crude, but almost cartoonish (of course,
he is a professed admirer of Norbert Elias). He even adduces two edited images from Das Mittelalterliche
Hausbuch as illustrations of the everyday texture of life in medieval Europe, without noting that they
come from a set of astrological allegories about planetary influences, from which he has chosen those for
Saturn and Mars rather than, say, Venus and Jupiter. (Think what a collection of Saturnine or Martial
pictures he might have gathered from more recent history.) It is perfectly fair for Pinker to call attention to
the many brutal features of much of medieval life, but one would have more confidence in his
evenhandedness if he acknowledged at least a few of the moral goods that medieval society achieved
despite its material privations. He says nothing of almshouses, free hospitals, municipal physicians,
hospices, the decline of chattel slavery, the Pax Dei and Treuga Dei, and so on. Of the more admirable
cultural, intellectual, legal, spiritual, scientific, and social movements of the High Middle Ages, he appears
to know nothing. And his understanding of early modernity is little better. His vague remarks on the longmisnamed Wars of Religion are tantalizing intimations of a fairly large ignorance. Perhaps such
complaints miss the point, though. Pinkers is a story not of continuous moral evolution, but of an irruptive
redemptive event. It would not serve his purpose to admit that, in addition to the gradual development of
the material conditions that led to modernity, there might also have been the persistent pressure of moral
ideas and values that reached back to antique or medieval sources, or that there might have been occasional
institutional adumbrations of modern progress in the Middle Ages, albeit in a religious guise. He
certainly would not want to grant that many of his own moral beliefs are inherited contingencies of a long
cultural history rather thandiscoveries recently made by the application of disinterested reason. For him,
modern cultures moral advances were born from the sudden and fortuitous advent of the Age of Reason,
whichaided by the printing pressproduced a coherent philosophy called Enlightenment humanism,
distilled from the ideas of Hobbes, Spinoza, Descartes, Locke, David Hume, Mary Astell, Kant, Beccaria,
Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton and John Stuart Mill. We know what he means:
not the dark side of the Enlightenment and the printing pressscientific racism, state absolutism,
Jacobinism, the rise of murderous ideologies, and so onbut the nice Enlightenment of perpetual peace,
the rights of man, and so on. Well, each to his or her own tribalism, I suppose. It is pleasant to believe
ones society is more enlightened or rational than all others, and Pinker has every right to try to
prove the point. He would be more convincing, though, if only the central claim of his book were not so
entirely dependent upon a statistical fiction. That is to say, yes, of course modern societies have reduced
certain kinds of brutality, cruelty, and injustice. Modern technology makes it far easier to control crime. We
have weapons both too terrifying to use in open combat and so precise that we can kill at great distances,
without great armies, out of sight and mind. We have succeeded at reforming our own nations internally in
ways that make them ever more comfortable, less threatening, and more complacent. Our prison system is
barbaric, but not overtly sadistic, and our more draconian laws rarely inconvenience the affluent among us.
We have learned to exploit the labor and resources of poorer peoples not by enslaving them, but merely by
making them beneficiaries of globalization. The violence we commit is more hygienic, subtler, and less
inconvenient than that committed by our forebears. Even so, the numbers do not add up. Pinkers

method for assessing the relative ferocity of different centuries is to calculate the total of
violent deaths not as an absolute quantity, but as a percentage of global population. But statistical
comparisons like that are notoriously vacuous. Population sample sizes can vary by billions, but a
single life remains a static sum, so the smaller the sample the larger the percentage each life represents.
Obviously, though, a remote Inuit village of one hundred souls where someone gets killed in a fistfight is

not twice as violent as a nation of 200 million that exterminates one million of its citizens. And even where
the orders of magnitude are not quite so divergent, comparison on a global scale is useless, especially
since over the past century modern medicine has reduced infant mortality and radically extended life spans
nearly everywhere (meaning, for one thing, there are now far more persons too young or too old to fight).
So Pinkers assertion that a person would be thirty-five times more likely to be murdered in the Middle
Ages than now is empirically meaningless. In the end, what Pinker calls a decline of violence in

modernity actually has been, in real body counts, a continual and extravagant increase in
violence that has been outstripped by an even more exorbitant demographic explosion. Well, not to put too
fine a point on it: So what? What on earth can he truly imagine that tells us about progress or
Enlightenmentor about the past, the present, or the future? By all means, praise the modern world for
what is good about it, but spare us the mythology.

A2: Schmitt/Emnity
Enmity creates absolute foes that drive unlimited conflict.
Scheuerman 4 [William Scheuerman, Political Science at Indiana, International Law as Historical
Myth, Constellations, 11 (4) p. 546-547]
Second, Schmitts odd periodization obscures the fundamental changes to traditional

European interstate relations generated by the emergence of the modern nation-state . As

Bobbitt has succinctly observed, the appearance of the nation-state was accompanied by the
strategic style of total war. If the nation governed the state, and the nations welfare
provided the states reason for being, then the enemys nation must be destroyed indeed,
that was the way to destroy the state. . . . [F]or the nation-state it was necessary to annihilate the vast
resources of men and material that a nation could throw into the field . . . . 36 It was the idea of a
nation in arms that not only posed a direct threat to earlier absolutist images of kings wars, but also

opened the door to many pathologies of modern warfare: the full-scale mobilization of the
nation and subsequent militarization of society, and killing of enemy civilians. The
European nation-state and total war may represent two sides of the same coin.37 Of course, for Schmitts
purposes it is useful that the idea of the nation in arms first takes the historical stage in the context of the
French Revolution and its commitment to universalistic ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity.38 Nationstate-based democracy is indeed a normatively ambivalent creature, resting on an uneasy synthesis of
universalistic liberal democratic ideals with historically contingent notions of shared cultural identity,
language, history, and ethnos.39 Although Schmitt and his followers predictably try to link the

horrors of modern warfare to the growing significance of universalistic liberal-democratic

ideals, a more persuasive empirical case can be made that those horrors can be traced to
highly particularistic and exclusionary ideas of national identity, according to which the
otherin this case, outsiders to the national communitycame to be perceived as representing
life-and-death foes in the context of crisis-ridden industrial capitalism and the increasingly
unstable interstate system of the nineteenth centur y. Such ideas of national identity ultimately took
the disastrous form of the inflamed nationalism and ethnic truculence that dominated European politics
by the late nineteenth century and ultimately culminated in World War I. Nationalism and ethnic truculence
played a key role in the destruction of the traditional European balance of power system since they required
a fundamental reshuffling of state borders in accordance with national identity; of course, this question
had been of marginal significance in the absolutist interstate system. In this context as well, one of
Schmitts heroes, Bismarck, in reality played a role very different from that described by
Schmitt in Nomos der Erde: the last statesman of the jus publicum europaeum not only helped forge

a unified German nation-state, but in order to do relied on total warfare while undermining
the traditional European system of states, in part because it rested on state forms (e.g., the diverse,
polyglot Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires) fundamentally distinct from the modern nation-state.41
On this matter as well, Schmitts analysis is either openly misleading or revealingly silent. Perhaps his

own unabashed enthusiasm for rabid ethnonationalism in the context of National Socialism
helps explain this silence.

Emnity creates more destructive wars than liberal

humanitarianism.
Scheuerman 4 [William Scheuerman, Political Science at Indiana, International Law as Historical
Myth, Constellations, 11 (4) p. 542-544]
According to the concluding chapters of the Nomos der Erde, it is the United States that inherits the
imperial mantle of the British sea-power by combining universalistic liberalism with dreams of global
economic domination. In altogether unambiguous terms, Schmitt makes the rise of the US from a regional

to global power primarily responsible for the re-moralization of warfare that occurred in the twentieth
century and allegedly prepared the way for its innumerable wartime atrocities. It is the Americans, he
repeatedly underscores in the works final chapters, who have initiated a series of moralistic regressions in
international law that fall behind the great intellectual accomplishments of Thomas Hobbes and the jus
publicum europaeum. They fail to acknowledge the dangers of crude moralistic conceptions of warfare and
embrace a discriminatory conception of war. Consequently, they plunge international relations back into
civil war, in which the carefully constructed civilizing achievements of the jus publicum europaeum are
irresponsibly discarded. Just as significant, the United States discards the European preference for
regionalism in international lawin Schmitts terminology, a sufficiently homogeneous Raum-based
system of interstate relationsfor the liberalistic fiction of a heterogeneous universal global system of
legality that represents a cloak for US world domination. Schmitt offers a fascinating and oftentimes
perceptive account of why the idiosyncrasies of American political development rendered the US
susceptible to such intellectual mistakes, but his real focus, of course, is more than the messianic excesses
of US political and legal thinking. In the final analysis, it is the busybody interventionist liberalism of
the United States Schmitt considers culpable for the destruction of the basically pacific
European system of jus publicum europaeum. At times offering little more than a warmed-

over version of his Nazi era claim that Hitler was waging a defensive war against the
universalistic (and thereby for Schmitt necessarily imperialistic) United States,20 a central theme of
Nomos der Erde is that the United Statesand not, of course, Germanyposed the greatest threat to world
peace in the twentieth century. II. Separating the Wheat from the Chaff Schmitts apology for Germanys
troubled role in mid-century international politics might legitimately lead a politically and historically
sensible reader to recoil in disgust from Nomos der Erde. Nonetheless, Schmitts stylized vision of the jus
publicum europaeum initially appears to rest on solid historical evidence. As Theodore Rabb has noted,
there is general scholarly agreement that war become milder and more civilized in the late seventeenth
century, and that particular credit must go to the improvement of discipline, military academies, and the
creation of standing armies.21 As Schmitt argues in Nomos der Erde, the rationalization of the modern
state apparatus went hand-in-hand with a relative domestication of warfare, and the decline of religion as a
stimulus to violence, 22 widely noted by historians of this period, might be taken as empirical support for
Schmitts claim that only a de-moralized concept of war can minimize its potential horrors. In the late
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European states typically engaged in delimited warfare, fought with
limited means for limited objects, resulting in a substantial improvement in the military treatment of
civilians during wartime.23 More and more, then, soldiers were now hemmed in by clearly defined official
criteria and requirements against which their actions could be judged.24 A common European aristocratic
ethos in the officer corps facilitated the movement away from the horrors of earlier religiously based
political conflict, as wars increasingly became akin to aristocratic duels.25 Of course, as Schmitt himself
concedes, the relative civility of European interstate relations operated alongside terrible acts
of violence committed against non- European peoples. In addition, the development of the
modern state apparatus, improvement of military discipline, and rise of professionalized standing
armies ultimately helped bring about unprecedented capacities for organized state violence ,

even if such violence was no longer typically unleashed against fellow Europeans in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.26 This is by no means the only oversight in Schmitts
account, however. He conveniently downplays inconvenient historical events that mesh poorly with
his nostalgic gloss. For example, in the Seven Years War (175663), one of Schmitts own
paradigmatic examples of an absolutist land-power, Prussia, lost 180,000 soldiers and one-ninth
of the countrys entire population; Frederick himself conceded that his subjects had nothing left
except the miserable rags which covered their nakedness.27 Armies still spread terrible diseases: in 1771,
soldiers returning from battles with Turks on the south Russian steppe spread a plague that killed 60,000 in
Moscow, 14,000 in Kiev, and 10,000 in the Ukraine.28 A closer look at the jus publicum europaeum
quickly suggests that this golden age not only permitted and perhaps even required the
exploitation, enslavement, and slaughter of non-Europeans around the globe, but that it still

engendered significant misery for those living on the European continent itself.

Their impact is circular. Our explicit use of liberal

standards is better than their implicit use.
Scheuerman 4 [William Scheuerman, Political Science at Indiana, International Law as Historical
Myth, Constellations, 11 (4) p. 537-538]
Schmitt holds the universalistic aspirations of liberal international law responsible for the brutalities of total
war: universalism engenders a self-righteous brand of pseudo-humanitarianism blind to the terrible dangers
of state violence waged under the banner of a (fictional) singular humanity. Blurring any meaningful
distinction between legality and morality, those who dare to oppose the liberal international community are
demonized and accordingly subjected to fire bombings (e.g., Dresden) and even atomic bombs (e.g.,
Hiroshima and Nagasaki). Liberal international law rests on a false universalism not only because selfinterested great powers (e.g., Great Britain and the United States) typically interpret and enforce it, but also
because its humanitarian rhetoric masks their pursuit of global economic domination: Schmitt shares with
orthodox Marxist critics of international law the idea of a necessary kinship between universalistic
international law and global free-market capitalism.1 The apex of liberal self-righteousness is the assertion
that liberal wars no longer even deserve to be described as such. Although their technological superiority
permits them to kill civilians in any corner of the globe, liberal states purportedly undertake police action
(or, in present-day parlance, humanitarian intervention) for the sake of enforcing international law, whereas
only outcast states who dare to challenge liberal hegemony allegedly continue to engage in barbaric wars.
The exclusionary character of liberal universalism is thereby taken to its logical conclusion: liberal
international law requires what Schmitt describes as a discriminatory concept of war. Only a short step
beyond this conceptual move is the widespread real-life liberal tendency to ignore or at least downplay
civilian casualties in humanitarian interventions undertaken against pariah states. Little imagination is
required to understand the potential appeal of this diagnosis at an historical juncture when the worlds most
well-armed liberal state, the United States, self-righteously claims the right to intervene unilaterally in
accordance with its own idiosyncratic interpretation of both international law and the interests of humanity
despite the opposition of both the United Nations and global civil society to President Bush and his
radical right-wing foreign policy.2 Indeed, anyone familiar with Schmitts work on international law
occasionally finds herself wondering whether the White House playbook for foreign policy might not have
been written by Schmitt or at least by one of his followers.3 Nor should it come as a surprise that a
sophisticated body of unabashedly liberal political thoughtI am thinking of realism la Hans Morgenthau
and his followershas tried to build on some of Schmitts more perceptive insights about the special
dangers of an international system dominated by great powers like the United States.4 Readers of this
journal, however, hardly need a reminder of the normative flaws of Schmitts assault on liberal
international law. Notwithstanding the seeming plausibility of Schmitts diagnosis, its basic conceptual
weaknesses are no less self-evident. What is the normative standpoint of Schmitts critique?
Much of the surprising pathos of his attack on liberal international law derives from the fact
that he implicitly contrasts its self-understanding to less-than-attractive legal and political
realities: despite its purported humanitarianism, liberal international law engenders unparalleled brutality.
Even though his hostility to modern universalism prevents him from admitting as much, Schmitts
apparent outrage against the murderousness of recent international politics 5 implicitly
presupposes characteristically modern norms of universal equality and reciprocity. Of course,
Schmitt is no closet universalist. Yet why are brutal air warfare and the discriminatory concept
of war problems in the first place unless Schmitts argument rests at least implicitly on some
(implicitly humanitarian) concern about the basic equality and value of all human life ?6 Pace
Schmitt, the universalistic core of liberal international law can be plausibly interpreted as an immanent
normative motor which allows us to criticize and subsequently reform the sad realities of the existing
international system according to its own internal normative criteria. However accurate Schmitts
description of those realities, what his account obscures is the core normative achievement of

universalistic international law, namely the fact that it offers internal standards for
critically diagnosing and ultimately obliterating the political and legal pathologies described by
him.

Non-universalist and illiberal states fight total wars. Their

alternative cant solve.
Scheuerman 4 [William Scheuerman, Political Science at Indiana, International Law as Historical
Myth, Constellations, 11 (4) p. 544-546]
The most revealing divergence between Schmitts Nomos der Erde and recent research on the history of
international relations lies elsewhere, however. As noted, Schmitt argues that the golden age of the jus
publicum europaeum only came to a conclusion at the outset of the twentieth century, as the United States
exploded onto the world scene and unleashed its deadly brand of messianic universalism on unsuspecting
European victims. At the end of the eighteenth century, French revolutionary armies posed a major
challenge to the traditional state system, Schmitt concedes, but far-sighted nineteenth-century European
statesmen (e.g., political reactionaries like Metternich and Bismarck) were ultimately able to counter the
French revolutionary challenge and stabilize the traditional jus publicum europaeum. In the twentieth
century, however, the political leaders of a weakened European order failed to accomplish the same task,
and sound continental European ideals of international law were not only consequently discarded, but
Europe itself was soon rendered subservient to American power. Schmitts historical periodization of

the rise and fall of the jus publicum europaeum constitutes a key building block for his
books deeply rooted anti-Americanism, according to which the United Statesas that world power
which systematically synthesizes awesome military power with liberal universalismnot only played a
decisive role in destroying a sound Hobbesian system of European interstate relations, but now menaces
humanity to a greater degree than recent totalitarian dictatorships. The anti-American thrust of the

overall argument probably only works if Schmitt can plausibly link the emergence of the
United States as a global power to the decline of the jus publicum europaeum: situating both
events at the outset of the twentieth century allows him to do so. Not surprisingly, this periodization is
the most idiosyncratic feature of Schmitts account. Most historians of international
relations suggest that key features of the traditional European state system were in
shambles long before the appearance of the United States as a major player in global politics.
They also interpret the resurgence of total warfare, where civilians are subjected to horrible
state violence, as occurring before World War I. This is a complicated and by no means
uncontroversial historical question, but two issues in the recent literature are particularly revealing in the
context of Schmitts argument. First, much of this historical literature works to underline the

highly selective and crudely partisan character of Schmitts analysis of the resurgence of
total war. The standard interpretation is that the trend towards total warfarecharacterized in this context
by a full-scale mobilization of society for warfare, as well as the blurring of the distinction between
combatants and non-combatantsoccurred in quite different political contexts in the nineteenth century.
Thus, it is tendentious to see the roots of total warfare in liberal international law let alone a
specifically messianic American version of liberalism. According to Schmitt, for example,
Bismarck represented the last statesman of European international law, a lonely heroic fighter who
struggled to ward off dangerous non-European threats to traditional European great power politics.32 Yet
some of the recent literature describes Bismarck as a far more complex figure, and arguably a destabilizing
one in relation to the European state system, in part because of his pivotal role in the emergence of a
distinct style of warfare that revolutionized European political affairs. In fact, one of the forerunners to the
terrible world wars of the twentieth century was the Franco-Prussian War of 187071, in which Prussia
reaped the benefits of mass mobilization and lightning-fire technologies, stunning its military rivals on the
continent and spurring them to imitate Prussian military innovations. As Philip Bobbitt has pointed out,
Prussia led the way in Europe in militarizing every aspect of society while exploiting technological
innovationsthe railways, telegraphs, and the standardization of machine toolsin order to bring about
dizzying increases in the speed and mobility of military dispositions. 33 Schmitt is right to see a
foreshadowing of more recent forms of warfare in the US Civil War.34 However, he ignores the fact that
recent total war builds at least as clearly on the militarization of Prussian society that
accompanied Germanys role as a late modernizer . As a prominent military history notes, [a]fter
1871 the Prussian institutionsconscription, strategic railways, mobilization techniques,
above all the General Staffwere copied by every state in continental Europe . Thirty years

later, after disastrous experiences in South Africa and Cuba, Britain and the United States adapted the
model to their own needs.35 Schmitts book is remarkably silent about this decisive feature of recent
military development. The reason for this oversight is obvious enough: it allows him to underplay the
existence of a potential link between modern dictatorship and total war. After all, it was dictatorships,

at least as commonly as liberal democracies, which perfected the horrible techniques of

total war in the twentieth-century: recall the Japanese invasion of China, or Nazi
Germanys aerial bombings against the Spanish Republic and, subsequently, slaughter of
innocent civilians in World War II. It is telling that in Schmitts own account (at least in its
Nazi-era rendition), the Axis powers represented paradigmatic cases of political entities that
had broken decisively with the decadent legacy of liberal universalism .

A2: Human Nature is Self-Interested/Violence

Inevitable
This is a linkthe assumption that humans are selfinterested guarantees extinction and is disproven by
recent scientific evidencethe communications revolution
enables the creation of a cosmopolitan identity.
Rifkin 10a senior lecturer at the Wharton Schools Executive Education Program at the University of
Pennsylvaniathe worlds #1 ranked business school, author, an advisor to the European Union since
2002, the founder and chairperson of the Third Industrial Revolution Global CEO Business Roundtable
[January 11, 2010, Jeremy Rifkin, The Empathic Civilization: Rethinking Human Nature in the
Biosphere Era, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeremy-rifkin/the-empathic-civilization_b_416589.html]

The problem runs deeper than the issue of finding new ways to regulate the market or
imposing legally binding global green house gas emission reduction targets. The real crisis lies
in the set of assumptions about human nature that governs the behavior of world leaders -assumptions that were spawned during the Enlightenment more than 200 years ago at the dawn of the
modern market economy and the emergence of the nation state era. The Enlightenment thinkers--John
Locke, Adam Smith, Marquis de Condorcet et. al.--took umbrage with the Medieval Christian world view
that saw human nature as fallen and depraved and that looked to salvation in the next world through Gods
grace. They preferred to cast their lot with the idea that human beings essential nature is
rational, detached, autonomous, acquisitive and utilitarian and argued that individual
salvation lies in unlimited material progress here on Earth. The Enlightenment notions about
human nature were reflected in the newly minted nation-state whose raison dtre was to

protect private property relations and stimulate market forces as well as act as a surrogate
of the collective self-interest of the citizenry in the international arena . Like individuals,
nation-states were considered to be autonomous agents embroiled in a relentless battle with
other sovereign nations in the pursuit of material gains. It was these very assumptions that
provided the philosophical underpinnings for a geopolitical frame of reference that
accompanied the first and second industrial revolutions in the 19th and 20th centuries. These
beliefs about human nature came to the fore in the aftermath of the global economic
meltdown and in the boisterous and acrimonious confrontations in the meeting rooms in
Copenhagen, with potentially disastrous consequences for the future of humanity and the planet.
If human nature is as the Enlightenment philosophers claimed, then we are likely doomed .
It is impossible to imagine how we might create a sustainable global economy and restore
the biosphere to health if each and every one of us is, at the core of our biology, an
autonomous agent and a self-centered and materialistic being. Recent discoveries in brain
science and child development, however, are forcing us to rethink these long-held shibboleths
about human nature. Biologists and cognitive neuroscientists are discovering mirrorneurons--the so-called empathy neurons--that allow human beings and other species to feel
and experience anothers situation as if it were ones own. We are, it appears, the most social
of animals and seek intimate participation and companionship with our fellows.
Social scientists, in turn, are beginning to reexamine human history from an empathic lens
and, in the process, discovering previously hidden strands of the human narrative which
suggests that human evolution is measured not only by the expansion of power over nature,
but also by the intensification and extension of empathy to more diverse others across
broader temporal and spatial domains. The growing scientific evidence that we are a
fundamentally empathic species has profound and far-reaching consequences for society,
and may well determine our fate as a species. What is required now is nothing less than a

leap to global empathic consciousness and in less than a generation if we are to resurrect the
global economy and revitalize the biosphere. The question becomes this: what is the mechanism that
allows empathic sensitivity to mature and consciousness to expand through history? The pivotal turning
points in human consciousness occur when new energy regimes converge with new
communications revolutions, creating new economic eras. The new communications
revolutions become the command and control mechanisms for structuring, organizing and
managing more complex civilizations that the new energy regimes make possible . For
example, in the early modern age, print communication became the means to organize and manage the
technologies, organizations, and infrastructure of the coal, steam, and rail revolution. It would have been
impossible to administer the first industrial revolution using script and codex. Communication

revolutions not only manage new, more complex energy regimes, but also change human
consciousness in the process. Forager/hunter societies relied on oral communications and
their consciousness was mythologically constructed. The great hydraulic agricultural
civilizations were, for the most part, organized around script communication and steeped in
theological consciousness. The first industrial revolution of the 19th century was managed by
print communication and ushered in ideological consciousness. Electronic communication
became the command and control mechanism for arranging the second industrial
revolution in the 20th century and spawned psychological consciousness. Each more
sophisticated communication revolution brings together more diverse people in increasingly
more expansive and varied social networks. Oral communication has only limited temporal and
spatial reach while script, print and electronic communications each extend the range and depth of human
social interaction. By extending the central nervous system of each individual and the society
as a whole, communication revolutions provide an evermore inclusive playing field for
empathy to mature and consciousness to expand. For example, during the period of the great

hydraulic agricultural civilizations characterized by script and theological consciousness,

empathic sensitivity broadened from tribal blood ties to associational ties based on common
religious affiliation. Jews came to empathize with Jews, Christians with Christians, Muslims with
Muslims, etc. In the first industrial revolution characterized by print and ideological consciousness,
empathic sensibility extended to national borders, with Americans empathizing with Americans, Germans
with Germans, Japanese with Japanese and so on. In the second industrial revolution, characterized by
electronic communication and psychological consciousness, individuals began to identify with like-minded
others. Today, we are on the cusp of another historic convergence of energy and

communication--a third industrial revolution--that could extend empathic sensibility to the

biosphere itself and all of life on Earth. The distributed Internet revolution is coming together with
distributed renewable energies, making possible a sustainable, post-carbon economy that is both globally
connected and locally managed. In the 21st century, hundreds of millions--and eventually billions--of
human beings will transform their buildings into power plants to harvest renewable energies on site, store
those energies in the form of hydrogen and share electricity, peer-to-peer, across local, regional, national
and continental inter-grids that act much like the Internet. The open source sharing of energy, like open
source sharing of information, will give rise to collaborative energy spaces--not unlike the collaborative
social spaces that currently exist on the Internet. When every family and business comes to take
responsibility for its own small swath of the biosphere by harnessing renewable energy and sharing it with
millions of others on smart power grids that stretch across continents, we become intimately interconnected
at the most basic level of earthly existence by jointly stewarding the energy that bathes the planet and
sustains all of life. The new distributed communication revolution not only organizes distributed renewable
energies, but also changes human consciousness. The information communication technologies
(ICT) revolution is quickly extending the central nervous system of billions of human beings

and connecting the human race across time and space, allowing empathy to flourish on a
global scale, for the first time in history . Whether in fact we will begin to empathize as a species will
depend on how we use the new distributed communication medium. While distributed communications
technologies-and, soon, distributed renewable energies - are connecting the human race, what is so
shocking is that no one has offered much of a reason as to why we ought to be connected. We talk
breathlessly about access and inclusion in a global communications network but speak little of exactly why

we want to communicate with one another on such a planetary scale. Whats sorely missing is an
overarching reason that billions of human beings should be increasingly connected. Toward what end? The
only feeble explanations thus far offered are to share information, be entertained, advance commercial
exchange and speed the globalization of the economy. All the above, while relevant, nonetheless seem
insufficient to justify why nearly seven billion human beings should be connected and mutually embedded
in a globalized society. The idea of even billion individual connections, absent any overall unifying
purpose, seems a colossal waste of human energy. More important, making global connections without any
real transcendent purpose risks a narrowing rather than an expanding of human consciousness. But what if
our distributed global communication networks were put to the task of helping us re-participate in deep
communion with the common biosphere that sustains all of our lives? The biosphere is the narrow band that
extends some forty miles from the ocean floor to outer space where living creatures and the Earths
geochemical processes interact to sustain each other. We are learning that the biosphere functions like an
indivisible organism. It is the continuous symbiotic relationships between every living creature and
between living creatures and the geochemical processes that ensure the survival of the planetary organism
and the individual species that live within its biospheric envelope. If every human life, the species as a
whole, and all other life-forms are entwined with one another and with the geochemistry of the planet in a
rich and complex choreography that sustains life itself, then we are all dependent on and responsible for the
health of the whole organism. Carrying out that responsibility means living out our individual lives in our
neighborhoods and communities in ways that promote the general well-being of the larger biosphere within
which we dwell. The Third Industrial Revolution offers just such an opportunity. If we can harness our

empathic sensibility to establish a new global ethic that recognizes and acts to harmonize
the many relationships that make up the life-sustaining forces of the planet, we will have
moved beyond the detached, self-interested and utilitarian philosophical assumptions that
accompanied national markets and nation state governance and into a new era of biosphere
consciousness. We leave the old world of geopolitics behind and enter into a new world of
biosphere politics, with new forms of governance emerging to accompany our new
biosphere awareness. The Third Industrial Revolution and the new era of distributed capitalism allow us
to sculpt a new approach to globalization, this time emphasizing continentalization from the bottom up.
Because renewable energies are more or less equally distributed around the world, every region is
potentially amply endowed with the power it needs to be relatively self-sufficient and sustainable in its
lifestyle, while at the same time interconnected via smart grids to other regions across countries and
continents. When every community is locally empowered, both figuratively and literally, it can engage
directly in regional, transnational, continental, and limited global trade without the severe restrictions that
are imposed by the geopolitics that oversee elite fossil fuels and uranium energy distribution.
Continentalization is already bringing with it a new form of governance. The nation-state, which grew up
alongside the First and Second Industrial Revolutions, and provided the regulatory mechanism for
managing an energy regime whose reach was the geosphere, is ill suited for a Third Industrial Revolution
whose domain is the biosphere. Distributed renewable energies generated locally and regionally and shared
openly--peer to peer--across vast contiguous land masses connected by intelligent utility networks and
smart logistics and supply chains favor a seamless network of governing institutions that span entire
continents. The European Union is the first continental governing institution of the Third Industrial
Revolution era. The EU is already beginning to put in place the infrastructure for a European-wide energy
regime, along with the codes, regulations, and standards to effectively operate a seamless transport,
communications, and energy grid that will stretch from the Irish Sea to the doorsteps of Russia by
midcentury. Asian, African, and Latin American continental political unions are also in the making and will
likely be the premier governing institutions on their respective continents by 2050. In this new era of
distributed energy, governing institutions will more resemble the workings of the ecosystems they manage.
Just as habitats function within ecosystems, and ecosystems within the biosphere in a web of
interrelationships, governing institutions will similarly function in a collaborative network of relationships
with localities, regions, and nations all embedded within the continent as a whole. This new complex
political organism operates like the biosphere it attends, synergistically and reciprocally. This is biosphere
politics. The new biosphere politics transcends traditional right/left distinctions so characteristic of the
geopolitics of the modern market economy and nation-state era. The new divide is generational and
contrasts the traditional top-down model of structuring family life, education, commerce, and governance
with a younger generation whose thinking is more relational and distributed, whose nature is more

collaborative and cosmopolitan, and whose work and social spaces favor open-source commons. For the
Internet generation, "quality of life" becomes as important as individual opportunity in fashioning a new
dream for the 21st century. The transition to biosphere consciousness has already begun. All over the world,
a younger generation is beginning to realize that ones daily consumption of energy and other resources
ultimately affects the lives of every other human being and every other creature that inhabits the Earth. The

Empathic Civilization is emerging. A younger generation is fast extending its empathic

embrace beyond religious affiliations and national identification to include the whole of
humanity and the vast project of life that envelops the Earth. But our rush to universal empathic
connectivity is running up against a rapidly accelerating entropic juggernaut in the form of climate change.

Can we reach biosphere consciousness and global empathy in time to avert planetary
collapse?

Your human/nature claims lock in realisms status as

supreme, and the alt can solve
Booth, head of IR dept. @ University of Wales, 2005 p. 2-4
(Ken, Critical Security Studies and World Politics, Ed. By Booth)
There is one world, but many realities.! The one world is that progressively
revealed by the natural sciences; the many realities consist of "facts by human
agreement" in the social world, as John Searle puts it.2 It is these political and
social realities-"nations," "war," "gender," "capitalism,"
"sovereignty," "human nature," and so on-that demand the primary
attention of students of security. They create the structures and
processes by which humankind lives-or dies. Critical explorations of
the ideas that made us is part of trying to answer three fundamental questions
about security: What is reality? What is reliable knowledge? What might we
do? The study of security has always been a central concern in the academic
discipline of international relations (IR). This reflects the circumstances of the
discipline's birth in the profound and shocking violence of World War I (19141918) and the concern of liberal opinion in the West that the cry "never again!"
be supported by the systematic study of the causes of war and the potential
foundations of lasting peace. The issue area of security subsequently
dominated the intellectual preoccupations of students of international relations,
particularly in the aftermath of World War II and through the nearly half-century
of the Cold War.3 Compared with the period of the Cold War, international
security ceased to be central to students of international relations in the West
during the decade between the dismantling of the Soviet state and the
destruction of the World Trade Center, the defining points of what we can now
see as the brief interregnum of the post-Cold War era.4 Today, however,

security in all its manifestations is back at the top of the agenda

and looks set to remain there for the foreseeable future. In
addition to traditional insecurities (the result of interstate rivalry, ethnic
conflict, patriarchy, and so on), the new threats generated by

globalization together with the causes and consequences of the

U.S.-led war on terrorism combine to ensure that human society
will for a prolonged period live in an "Age of Anxiety ," a world "on
the Edge," a "runaway world."5 Human society faces what threatens to be a
"long hot century."6 The subject of security studies as it developed in its
orthodox form during the Cold War was constructed in the image of political
realism (and for the most part a rather austere version of it). The academic
project of critical security studies (CSS) involves rethinking the

common sense of this orthodoxy from the bottom up while

exposing the extent to which discourse itself constitutes the

political realist orthodoxy in security studies. Ulrich Beck has

described Max Weber's "iron cage" (in which he believed humanity was
"condemned to live for the foreseeable future") as "a prison of categories and
basic assumptions of classical social, cultural and political sciences."9

Political realism has operated as such an iron cage in world

politics; it has created a prison of categories and assumptions
that have worked to create a world that does not work for most
of its inhabitants. To this extent, political realism has not been in
the global human interest; nor, incidentally, is it calculated to
promote a more positive relationship between humans and the
rest of the natural world. The critical perspectives on security offered in
this volume seek some liberation from realism's iron cage, though nobody
should underestimate the theoretical and political obstacles. As the academic
discipline of international relations grew, realismmore accurately, political
realism-was the label that was unhelpfully given to what became the orthodoxy
about the nature and dynamics of politics among nations.1O We continue to

have to live with this misnomer, despite realism's blinkers when

it comes to seeing the world's realities. Realist-derived security
studies in the past half-century has attempted to impose just
one image of reality on a world that not only consists of many sovereign
states but also is multicultural, divided by gender and class, and
made up of individuals, families, tribes, nations, and other
collectivities; there are also some solidarities across all these (and other)
subdivisions of humanity. The field of security studies, constructed
out of political realism, continues to offer its students one
image of reality, with predefined answers to key global
questions. This makes it a serious liability in world politics,
being an iron cage seeking to contain a liquid ecology . It is a
textbook exemplar of a problem masquerading as the problemsolver

The belief that humans are inherently violent is flawed and has been disproven by
experts multiple times. Its our environment and raising which produces violent
behavior-continuation of the belief that we are born with violent tendencies allows
for extinction
Kohn 88 (Alfie, writes and speaks widely on human behavior, education, and parenting, Human Nature
Isnt Inherently Violent, http://salsa.net/peace/conv/8weekconv1-4.html, AD: 7-11-09) JN
Peace activists can tell when it's coming. Tipped off by a helpless shrug or a patronizing smile, they brace themselves to hear the phrase once
again. "Sure, I'm in favor of stopping the arms race. But aren't you being idealistic? After all, aggression is just" - here it comes - "part of
human nature." Like the animals, -- "red in tooth and claw," as Tennyson put it - human beings are thought to be unavoidably violent creatures.
Surveys of adults, undergraduates, and high school students have found that about 60 percent agree with this statement. " Human

nature
being what it is, there will always be war." It may be part of our society's folk wisdom, but it
sets most of the expert's heads to shaking. Take the belief, popularized by Sigmund Freud and
animal researcher Konrad Lorenz, that we have within us, naturally and spontaneously, a
reservoir of aggressive energy. This force, which builds by itself, must be periodically drained
off - by participating in competitive sports, for instance - lest we explode into violence. It is an
appealing model because it is easy to visualize. It is also false. John Paul Scott, professor
emeritus at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio, has written: "All of our
present data indicate that fighting behavior among higher mammals, including man,
originates in external stimulation and that there is no evidence of spontaneous internal
stimulation." Clearly, many individuals - and whole cultures - manage quite well without
behaving aggressively, and there is no evidence of the inexorable buildup of pressure this
"hydraulic" model would predict. The theory also predicts that venting aggressive energy should make us less aggressive - an

effect known as "catharsis," which follows Aristotle's idea that we can be purged of unpleasant emotions by watching tragic dramas. But one
study after another has shown that we are likely to become more violent after watching or participating in such pastimes. Although the
hydraulic model has been discredited, the more general belief in an innate human propensity for violence has not been so easily shaken. Among
the arguments one hears is these: Animals are aggressive and we cannot escape the legacy of our evolutionary ancestors; human history is
dominated by takes of war and cruelty, and certain areas of the brain and particular hormones are linked to aggression, proving a biological
basis for such behavior. First, we

should be cautious in drawing lessons from other species to explain our

own behavior, given the mediating force of culture and our capacity for reflection. But even
animals are not as aggressive as some people think - unless the term "aggression" includes killing
to eat. Organized group aggression is rare in other species, and the aggression that does exist is
typically a function of the environment in which animals find themselves. Scientists have
discovered that altering animals' environment, or the way they are reared, can have a
profound impact on the level of aggression found in virtually all species. Furthermore, animals
cooperate both within and among species far more than many of us may assume on the basis of
watching nature documentaries. When we turn to human history, we find an alarming number
of aggressive behaviors, but we do not find reason to believe the problem is innate. Here are
some of the points made by critics of biological determinism: Even if a given behavior is
universal, we cannot automatically conclude that it is part of our biological nature. All known
cultures may produce pottery, but that does not mean that there is a gene for pottery-making.
Aggression is no where near universal. Many hunter-gatherer societies in particular are entirely peaceful. And the cultures
that are "closer to nature" would be expected to be the most warlike if the proclivity for war were really part of that nature. Just the reverse
seems to be true. While it is indisputable that wars have been fought, the fact that they seem to dominate our history may say more about how
history is presented than about what actually happened. Many people have claimed that human nature is aggressive after having lumped
together a wide range of emotions and behavior under the label of aggression. While cannibalism, for example, is sometimes perceived as
aggression, it might represent a religious ritual rather than an expression of hostility. It is true that the presence of some hormones or the
stimulation of certain sections of the brain has been experimentally linked with aggression. But after describing these mechanisms in some
detail, K.E. Moyer, a physiologist at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, emphasizes that " aggressive

behavior is
stimulus-bound. That is, even though the neural system specific to a particular kind of
aggression is well activated, the behavior does not occur unless an appropriate target is
available (and even then) it can be inhibited." Regardless of the evolutionary or neurological
factors said to underlie aggression, "biological" simply does not mean "unavoidable." The fact
that people voluntarily fast or remain celibate shows that even hunger and sex drives can be
overridden. All this concerns the matter of aggressiveness in general. The idea that war in
particular is biologically determined is even more far-fetched. To begin with, we tend to make
generalizations about the whole species on the basis of our own experience. "People in a highly
warlike society are likely to overestimate the propensity toward war in human nature," says
Donald Greenberg, a sociologist at the University of Missouri. The historical record, according to
the Congressional Research Service, shows the United States is one of the most warlike societies on
the planet, having intervened militarily around the world more than 150 times since 1850. Within
such a society, not surprisingly, the intellectual traditions supporting the view that aggression is
more a function of nature than nurture have found a ready audience. The mass media also play a
significant role in perpetuating outdated views on violence, according to Jeffrey Goldstein, a
psychologist at Temple University. Because it is relatively easy to describe and makes for a snappier
news story, reporters seem to prefer explanations of aggression that invoke biological necessity, he
says. An international conference of experts concluded in 1986 that war is not an inevitable
part of human nature. When one member tried to convince reporters that this finding was
newsworthy, few news organizations in the United States were interested. One reporter told him,
"Call us back when you find a gene for war." Leonard Eron, a psychologist at the University of
Illinois in Chicago, observes, "TV teaches people that aggressive behavior is normative, that the
world around you is a jungle when it is actually not so." In fact, research at the University of
Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of Communications has shown that the more television an
individual watches, the more likely he or she is to believe that "most people would take advantage
of you if they got the chance." The belief that violence in unavoidable, while disturbing at first
glance, actually holds a curious attraction for some people. It also allows individuals to excuse their
own acts of aggression by suggesting that they have little choice. "In order to justify, accept, and
live with war, we have created a psychology that makes it inevitable," says Dr. Bernard Lown, cochairman of International Physicians for th4e Prevention of Nuclear War, which received the Nobel
peace Prize in 1985. "It is a rationalization for accepting war as a system of resolving human
conflict." To understand these explanations for the war-is-inevitable belief is to realize its
consequences. Treating any behavior as inevitable sets up a self-fulfilling prophecy: By

assuming we are bound to be aggressive, we are more likely to act that way and provide
evidence for the assumption. People who believe that humans are naturally aggressive may
also be unlikely to oppose particular wars. The evidence suggests, then, that humans do have a
choice with respect to aggression and war. To an extent, such destructiveness is due to the
mistaken assumption that we are helpless to control an essentially violent nature. "We live in a
time," says Lown, "when accepting this as inevitable is no longer possible without courting
extinction."

Violence isnt intrinsic to human nature its a result of unfortunate circumstances

Dime 7 (Jamin, Are Humans Inherently Violent?, Newsvine, 11-20-7,
http://jamindime.newsvine.com/_news/2007/11/20/1110479-are-humans-inherently-violent) LE
Humans are creatures of circumstance. However, there are those respected voices in the
anthropological world such as Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson that contend we are not.
Instead, we are slaves to our biological makeup. According to their essay, Demonic Males: Apes and
the Origins of Human Violence, it is difficult to escape our evolutionary past and we are, as a result,
forced to act according to our inherent nature. Both Peterson and Wrangham believe that war and human violence
exist because of inherited behavioral tendencies. These tendencies are the result of sexual selection where aggressive males
typically dominant less-aggressive males, preventing them from mating and passing on their traits. Sure, we can see evidence of this
in the Guido tribes of the northeastern United States, but due to rampant steroid use the chances for reproductive success are slim. In
order to understand why certain people tend to be more prone to violence than others, it is crucial to understand that humans tend to
move towards the simplest method of accomplishing a goal. The constant advancement of technology is proof of this, and while
certain products of technology might be difficult to understand or learn at first, they prove to make whatever task they are designed
for much easier and quicker to complete. In regards to violence, the same concept can be applied. People prone to violence see
violence as the easiest method for acquiring what they want. Nevertheless, violence is not an inherent trait of

human beings or primates. Despite the guarantee of reading or hearing about a dozen or more
violent acts in the media, violence is not the default response for the average person. While
Sussman's argument that violence is the result of culture and society is a credible one, culture is not
the sole cause for violence. Innate tendencies such as competition and pride mixed with the
way in which a society functions can bring about the need for violent action due to the
circumstances of a situation. After all, we are creatures of circumstance. We adapt and react to
the world around us, and because of this there are times when we must engage in violent
activity. However, we can use culture as a means to create a situation where competitive means
for survival are unneeded, but until there is a united effort to reform the way we interact with
the world, violence is just an unfortunate consequence.

Violence is not an inherent human quality

Clark 2 (Mary E., In Search of Human Nature, AD: 7/11/9) AJK
In fact, as Grossman argues throughout his book, soldiers must be thoroughly trained, through
repeated drills and simulated battle-field conditions, to act reflexively in combat without conscious
awareness, before they are able to shoot at an enemy up close. This was part of the Vietnam soldiers
training, and led to such massacres as that at My Lai. Only when soldiers were both pretrained to kill and
given specific commands on sites to neautralize everything were they sufficiently desensitized to carry
out the slaying of old men, mothers, children and babies. My point is that human beings, male or females,
are not born killers of other people. Aggressive violence is not automatic. It is contextural; it requires
meaning, a justifiable reason. As Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and other advocates of
nonviolent action recognized, it is easy to harm or kill face-less strangers at a distance; it is almost
impossible to do so (with some significant exceptions to be taken up in later chapters) when face-to-face. It
is far easier to hurt someone you trusted, who has broken that trust, or to kill an enemy whom you have
seen blow up your buddy. But, as Lt. Col. Grossman says: Killing comes with a price, and societies
must learn that their soldiers will have to spend the rest of their lives living with what they have
done. Violent aggression always has a social cause. It is not a natural drive.

Violence not inevitable fears disproportionate to risks

Fraser et al 1 (Colin, Brendan Burchell, Dale Hay, Gerard Duveen, Introducing social psychology, pg
178, AD: 7/11/09) JC
Aggression has always been a topic of special interest to social psychologists and we now know a
great deal about the answers to the question: Why and when are people aggressive? Certainly,
popular beliefs in Western societies that humans inevitably behave violently are too pessimistic.
Most psychologists and contemporary biologists (Bateson and Martin 1999) agree that human
violence is no inevitable. Fears of war and violent crime undermine our sense of security, but
victimization surveys show that many public fears of violence are disproportionate to the
actual risks. For example, Dowds (1994) showed that fears of street violence markedly exceeded
the actual risks, and B. Jones and colleagues (1994) described a survey of 10,000 women in the UK
which had found that 20 per cent felt very unsafe when walking out at night, even though less than
1 per cent had in fact been attacked in the last year. To the extent that our actions are based on
erroneous beliefs, we are likely to be ineffective in reducing aggression. As you will see,
psychological research can offer new insights into the nature of aggression and suggest a more
adequate basis for eradicating conditions conducive to both individual and collective violence

Violence is not inevitable action is key

UNICEF 5 (an agency of the United Nations responsible for programs to aid, EAPRO consultation
concludes: violence is not inevitable, http://www.unicef.org/media/media_27417.html, 6/16/05, AD:
7/11/09) JC
BANGKOK, 16 June 2005 Violence is not inevitable but rather an injustice that can be ended by
recognizing that peace is a human right and that this responsibility belongs to everyone, more than
250 delegates proclaimed at the end of the three-day Regional Consultation on Violence Against Children.
Anupama Rao Singh, UNICEF Regional Director, urged all delegates to begin the work of putting the
recommendations in place immediately rather than waiting for the UN Study on Violence Against
Children report to give them direction. The Regional Consultation is one of nine meetings worldwide that
will contribute to a worldwide UN study on violence against children that will be finalized in 2006.
Everyday children are exposed to violence in their lives that continues to compromise their right to grow
up loved, safe, respected and protected. It also threatens societys social and economic stability, laying the
seeds for larger conflict, Singh said. Yet the recommendations proposed at this Consultation are doable
and demonstrate that this is a problem we can address if we are willing to commit at every level,
including the higher echelons of Government, to act now. She also stressed that ending violence is an
overarching development goal. Presenting the final Consultation Statement, Lina Laigo, Executive
Director, Council for the Welfare of Children in the Philippines, concluded that the cycle of violence can
only be broken by creating a culture of peace and harmony; by improving cooperation among
children, adults, communities, civil society, governments and international agencies; and by
recognizing that violence against children and in society as a whole, is not inevitable but rather an
injustice that can be ended by recognizing that peace is a human right. This responsibility belongs to
everyone

Violence is not innate in human nature evolving warfare proves it is a product of

culture
Seville Statement on Violence 86 (The Seville Statement on Violence was drafted by an
international committee of 20 scholars at the 6th International Colloquium on Brain and Aggression held at
the University of Seville, Spain, 5-16-86, http://www.neag.nl/pagina%27s/english/Docs/Seville
%20Statement%20on%20Violence.pdf, AD: 7-11-9) MW
Misuse of scientific theories and data to justify violence and war is not new but has been made
since the advent of modern science. For example, the theory of evolution has been used to justify not only war, but
also genocide, colonialism, and suppression of the weak. We state our position in the form of five propositions. We are aware
that there are many other issues about violence and war that could be fruitfully addressed from the standpoint of our
disciplines, but we restrict ourselves here to what we consider a most important first step. It is scientifically

incorrect to say that we have inherited a tendency to make war from our animal ancestors.
Although fighting occurs widely throughout animal species, only a few cases of destructive intra-species

fighting between organized groups have ever been reported among naturally living species, and none
of these involve the use of tools designed to be weapons. Normal predatory feeding upon other species cannot be
equated with intra-species violence. Warfare is a peculiarly human phenomenon and does not occur in
other animals. The fact that warfare has changed so radically over time indicates that it is a
product of culture. Its biological connection is primarily through language which makes possible the
coordination of groups, the transmission of technology, and the use of tools. War is biologically possible, but it is
not inevitable, as evidenced by its variation in occurrence and nature over time and space. There are cultures which have
not engaged in war for centuries, and there are cultures which have engaged in war frequently at some times and not at
others. It is scientifically incorrect to say that war or any other violent behavior is genetically
programmed into our human nature. While genes are involved at all levels of nervous system function, they
provide a developmental potential that can be actualized only in conjunction with the ecological and social environment.
While individuals vary in their predispositions to be affected by their experience, it is the interaction between their genetic
endowment and conditions of nurturance that determines their personalities. Except for rare pathologies, the genes do not
produce individuals necessarily predisposed to violence. Neither do they determine the opposite. While genes are coinvolved
in establishing our behavioral capacities, they do not by themselves specify the outcome.

Violence is not innate but learned through events that take place in society??
Iadicola and Shupe 3 (Peter and Anson, associate professor and chair of the Department of Sociology
and Anthropology at IPFW, Violence, Inequality, and Human Freedom, 2003,
http://books.google.com/books?
id=iPZglSEVOvMC&pg=PA377&lpg=PA377&dq=violence+inequality+and+human+freedom&source=bl
&ots=jd3_9WHfeg&sig=KM8jBp0tlW2CljZDeaAH7Xu8HMI&hl=en&ei=Z15ZSqHJYTEsQOswpieCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2AD: 7-11-9)EH
Stress is on universal definitions of violence tied to human rights. Violence is not innate but
learned. Social forms in which we live our lives are the causes. Hierarchies and exploitative
relationships are the fundamental causes of violence. Constructive, adaptive, and disruptive to
the social order. Violence is seen as playing a role in reproducing hierarchical/ exploitative
relations within the order and as a form of adaptation to or rebellion from those relations.

Humans are not biologically prone to violent acts competition and society breed
violent actions
Dimeck 9 (Joe, News Analyst, Is Violence An Innate Human Trait?, RoneBreak, 3/22,
http://ronebreak.com/2009/03/22/is-violence-an-innate-human-trait/, A.D.: 7/11/09) JH
Humans are creatures of circumstance. However, there are those respected voices in the anthropological world
such as Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson that contend we are not. Instead, we are slaves to our biological makeup.
According to their essay, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, it is difficult to escape our evolutionary
past and we are, as a result, forced to act according to our inherent nature. Both Peterson and Wrangham believe that war and
human violence exist because of inherited behavioral tendencies. These tendencies are the result of sexual selection where
aggressive males typically dominant less-aggressive males, preventing them from mating and passing on their traits. Sure, we
can see evidence of this in the Guido tribes of the northeastern United States, but due to rampant steroid use the chances for
reproductive success are slim. Nonetheless, Wrangham and Peterson appear to suffer from monomania, as their argument for
an inherent tendency towards violence seems to focus primarily on sexual selection as the driving force behind keeping the
aggressive gene in our blood. While they conclude that pride is an integral factor in perpetuating
violence, primarily among males, it does not prove that humans and chimps are biologically prone to
violence. Robert W. Sussman, a professor of Physical Anthropology at Duke University, rebuts Wrangham and Petersons contention
specifically in regards to their theory on sexual selectionsaying that women choosing a dominant or aggressive male as a mate is due to the
type of society rather than an innate inclination. Furthermore, Sussman points out that the decision to mate with a dominant male could also be
a mistake, stemming from an irrational need to follow social conventions and obtain a male who would be considered a good reproducer.
Sussman uses the passive, docile, and promiscuous Bonobo chimps as an example, stating: However, among pygmy chimpanzees females form
alliances and have chosen to mate with less aggressive males. So, after all, it is not violent males that have caused humans and chimpanzees to
be their inborn, immoral, dehumanized selves, it is rather, poor choices by human and chimpanzee females. In fact, women in general tend, or
at least claim, to prefer men who are less aggressive and of a kinder nature. Additionally, aggressiveness and strength are not prerequisites for
being able to produce healthy kin. Due to the type of society we are currently living in, the need for a male who can protect his female
counterpart from outside violence is not as prevalent as it was in previous centuries. Granted, there are exceptions that can be found outside of
the United States and seen in other species, but using exceptions as a basis for dismissing the norm is unjustifiable. While interesting to note,
the rarity and uncommon occurrence does not give credence to putting exceptions on equal ground with what occurs most often. Another point,
which Wrangham and Peterson argue, is the Selfish Gene Theory. They contend, The general principle that behavior evolves to serve selfish
ends has been widely accepted; and the idea that humans might have been favored by natural selection to hate and to kill their enemies has
become entirely, if tragically, reasonable. Fortunately, the

tendency to hate and kill are not innate, but are

caused by circumstance. Since chimpanzees are considered to be the closest biologically to
humans, it is fitting that humans use chimps as a means to determine why we act the way we do. Many behavioral

patterns are shared by chimps and humans, and evidence of this can be found in a passage from Sussmans article,
Exploring Our Basic Human Nature. Just how common is conspecific killing in chimpanzees?Jane Goodall described the
chimpanzee as a peaceful, non-aggressive species during the first 24 years of study at Gombe (1950-1974).
During one year of concentrated study, Goodall observed 284 antagonistic encounters: of these 66% were due to competition
for introduced bananas, and only 34% could be regarded as attacks occurring in normal aggressive contexts. Only 10
percent of the 284 attacks were classified as violent, and even attacks that appeared punishing to me often resulted in no
discernable injury Other attacks consisted merely of brief pounding, hitting or rolling of the individual, after which the
aggressor often touched or embraced the other immediately. It is important to note the part referring to competition for
introduced bananas. Sussman goes on to explain that the reason why people tend to think humans are
inherently violent is because of a cultural desire to think such is the case. In fact, studies have shown
that the more people watch or read the news, the more likely they are to view the world as an overly violent place.
Nevertheless, humans are competitive beings and this competitive nature coupled with pride can lead to violence depending
on the situation. When our situation is one where resources, which enable survival, are scarce, competitionoften violent
becomes necessary. Take for example the following situation. Two men are stranded on an island. Both men are nearing
starvation and happen to discover a cache of food and water, which is only big enough to keep one of them alive long enough
to attempt escape or be rescued. This would certainly put the men in an unfortunate predicament where one must starve, but
how would they decide who gets to eat? At first, they might try to be fair and suggest to draw straws, but the loser would not
be able to accept his impending death so easily. The obvious course of action would be to kill the man who has won the food
and water. After all, killing is the easiest way to ensure survival, which would allow the man to survive. While that situation
is hypothetical, it illustrates the advantage of killing for scarce resources rather than trying to compromise and split them up
into an amount that would not allow a group or person to maintain adequate healthsuch reasoning can be seen throughout
time and in primate societies. The main objective of a species is to expand, and by expanding, the

population increases, which affects the carrying capacity of the environment. Such expansion
will undoubtedly lead to competition between members of the same species as well as other species that inhabit the same area. Oddly
enough, humans have been quite good at displacing and doing away with other speciesto the point where most of the competition for land, resources, and other
things which allow for survival have been relegated to human vs. human competition. Due to the overwhelming expansion of humans, much of the territory once
dominated by primates has dwindled to the point where many chimps and other primates must engage in territorial battles. Is this an ominous example of what is to
come of our species? Is our seemingly biological desire to expand to the point of overpopulation going to create a human world that is ripe with violence, more so than
it is now? It appears so. However, there are technological advancements such as birth control and vertical farming that can allow humans to reduce

population growth and minimize the amount of land used to produce resourcesvertical farming is a method of farming that
uses vertical, multi-level towers that produce various types of food year-round, including livestock, using greenhouse
growing methods. Nevertheless, the ability to produce unlimited resources might actually have an adverse effect on the
population, causing it to explode, which would lead to the unwanted situation where land and resources are scarce and must
be competed over. In order to understand why certain people tend to be more prone to violence than others it is crucial to
understand that humans tend to move towards the simplest method of accomplishing a goal. The constant advancement of
technology is proof of this, and while certain products of technology might be difficult to understand or learn at first, they
prove to make whatever task they are designed for much easier and quicker to complete. In regards to violence, the same
concept can be applied. People prone to violence see violence as the easiest method for acquiring what they want. In this
regard, Sussmans belief that violence tends to manifest from cultural reasons is almost proven. Even
Wrangham and Peterson contend that we can unlearn certain tendencies as seen with the Bonobo
chimp, which went from a murderous monkey hunter to a passive and horny creature. And please, do not think that more
sex is the solution to violence. Such a method would eventually lead to an extreme case of violence as the carrying capacity
of the land would become overwhelmed by all of the tiny surprises. That said, violence is not an inherent trait of
human beings or primates. Despite the guarantee of reading or hearing about a dozen or more violent acts in the
media, violence is not the default response for the average person. While Sussmans argument that
violence is the result of culture and society is a credible one, culture is not the sole cause for violence. Innate
tendencies such as competition and pride mixed with the way in which a society functions can bring about the need for
violent action due to the circumstances of a situation. After all, we are creatures of circumstance. We adapt and react

to the world around us, and because of this there are times when we must engage in violent
activity. However, we can use culture as a means to create a situation where competitive means for survival are unneeded,
but until there is a united effort to reform the way we interact with the world, violence is just an unfortunate
consequence.

Violence is not inevitable

Ury 2 (William L., Must We Fight? From the Battlefield to the Schoolyard, a New Perspective on
Violent Conflict and Its Prevention, 2002, http://www.questiaschool.com/read/108856572?title=Must
%20We%20Fight%3f%20%20From%20the%20Battlefield%20to%20the%20Schoolyard%2c%20a
%20New%20Perspective%20on%20Violent%20Conflict%20and%20Its%20Prevention, AD: 7/11/9) TR
Let me sum up then. What does it take to prevent violent conflict? My hunch is that it takes three
things. First, it takes a mobilized community, in other words a third side, acting systematically to
contain, to resolve, and to prevent violent conflict. Second, this community must be motivated by
incentives, catalysts, and critical incidents. Third, the community must believe that violence is
not inevitable, but preventable. In other words, the challenge we face is to constitute a winning

alliance against violence. In every situation of potential violence, we need to ask ourselves how to
strengthen the third side so that it is equal to the task of the difficult situation at hand. Our
focus needs to go beyond the conflict itself to the social capacity that's needed to contain and
transform conflict. We could compare the third side roughly to the immune system. If you've got a
strong immune system you can prevent the spread of a virus. Strengthening the third side means
not just curing disease, not just resolving destructive conflict, but building health, building the
capacity of the community to transform conflict.

Violence is not innate, but a product of climate change, population growth, and
ethnic rivalry
Hallpike 3 (C.R., Oxford University anthropologist, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute,
Volume 9, Deadly Developments: Capitalism, States and War, 2003,
http://www.questiaschool.com/read/5001954519?title=Deadly%20Developments%3a%20Capitalism%2c
%20States%20and%20War, AD: 7/11/9)
This book consists of ten papers on the relations between capitalism, the state, and war, primarily in
the twentieth century. Apart from Reyna's introduction and an historical paper, there are eight case
studies of war in New Ireland, Texas, Uganda, Ethiopia, Mozambique, the Sahel, and Peru. A major
weakness of the book is the platitudinous level of its theory. Reyna, for example, claims that its
findings refute biological explanations of warfare; as one contributor puts it, 'Contemporary
anthropological theory points to the conclusion that violence is not innate but is culturally
constructed' (p. 162). Obviously, no anthropologist today would claim that warfare is just an
expression of innate aggression, but matters are not that simple. An innate disposition is not
necessarily spontaneous, an irresistible urge to kill, but merely something that is easy to
acquire, and there is overwhelming evidence that in this sense aggression does have an innate
aspect, in young males especially. Again, Reyna derides what he terms 'ethnic essentialism', the idea
that certain groups have essential attributes that lead them to hate one another. This is, indeed,
tabloid sociology, but there is no doubt that groups which have lived together peacefully for
generations can, in changed circumstances, turn upon one another with extreme ferocity, but neither
he nor the other contributors can explain this ferocity, which clearly requires an understanding of
psychological as well as social and cultural factors. Reyna begins his introduction with a challenge
to 'classic social theory' which, he says, claimed that capitalist states are inherently peaceful. We
do not need this book to tell us that they are quite compatible with war -- as the history of world
trade amply demonstrates -- but the connections between capitalism and the state, and with the
different varieties of colonialism, need a careful examination which they do nor receive in this
book. The specific implications of capitalism for war are not systematically explored, and in many
of the case studies capitalism does not provide some distinctive and essential ingredient to the
brew of war but is merely one of a number of factors, such as climate change, population
growth, and ethnic rivalry. If, moreover, we are to discuss war in the modern world why limit it to
'capitalist' states and not contrast these with Communist and Islamic stares as well? The answer,
apparently, is that capitalism is a uniquely wicked social system: as Reyna concludes his introduct
ion, 'The savage Other is (capitalist) us' (p. 18). The general discussion of war is also not assisted by
Reyna's claim that 'the term war is applied properly only to societies with states' (p. 4) which would
seem to leave most of the anthropological literature on war at something of a loose end.

Violence is not inevitable or biological but a product of culture

Bosak 6 (Susan V., Kegacy Projects Founding Chair, educator, researcher, and bestselling author, Is
Violence Inevitble? Legacy Center http://www.legacyproject.org/guides/violence.html, AD: 7/11/9)
Violence Isn't "Natural" Did you know that the atomic bomb was being manufactured before the first automatic
washing machine? It's interesting where humans put their priorities. In addition to the "war on terrorism," there are at least
two dozen major wars in progress in the world at this moment. All are being fought over truth claims of one kind or another .

Despite unprecedented advances in science and culture, acts of horrific violence persist. Ideals
of tolerance and forgiveness are quickly pushed aside in the face of divisive "lists" of membership,
beliefs, boundaries, and rules. This is true at the level of the local gang and at the level of an ethnic
group. Given our regular media diet of street violence, strikes, lawsuits, political battles, and wars,

the conscious "story" we've constructed of human beings as "naturally" prone to violence is
understandable. But it overlooks a fundamental fact: most of the time, most people do get along.
Although we may not give it much thought or attention, it's true. Despite differing temperaments, habits, values, and beliefs,
most families, neighborhoods, and nations work together most of the time. This is not to say that violence and the way in
which war has evolved are not extremely serious problems. It's just to point out that peace is also a reality, and a
prevalent one at that. And there have been major steps of progress in world conflicts: the Berlin Wall coming down,
the end of the Cold War, reductions in violence in Northern Ireland, the end of apartheid in South Africa. In his landmark
book Getting to Peace, William Ury of the internationally-recognized Harvard Negotiation Project

points out that:

Archaeologists have found little evidence of organized violence during the first ninety-nine
percent of human history. We have been maligning our ancestors. They weren't cavemen looking to bash every
stranger over the head. Rather, they worked hard at coexisting. They sought to get along with each other and their neighbors...
Our image of the first ninety-nine percent of human history should be neither of killer apes, nor of naturally peaceful folk, but
of human beings prone to conflict and struggling to coexist amid their differences... If all four million years of

human evolution were to be telescoped into a single twenty-four-hour day, the period of
coexistence would last through the night, the morning, the afternoon, the evening, all the way, in
fact, until just before midnight. The period we call history, filled with violence and domination,
wars and empires, would last barely one minute.
The argument that people are biologically or genetically programmed for violence was soundly
rejected by a group of prominent biologists and social scientists participating in a meeting of the
International Society for Research on Aggression in 1986. The meeting adopted a widely circulated document known
as the Seville Statement on Violence. It has been endorsed by many organizations, including Psychologists for Social Responsibility, the
American Psychological Association, and the American Anthropological Association. Among its conclusions: It is scientifically incorrect to say
that we have inherited a tendency to make war from our animal ancestors... Warfare is a peculiarly human phenomenon and does not occur in

warfare has changed so radically over time indicates that it is a product of

culture... Violence is biologically possible, but it is not inevitable... There are cultures which
have not engaged in war for centuries, and there are cultures which have engaged in war
frequently at some times and not at others. It is scientifically incorrect to say that war or any other
violent behavior is genetically programmed into our human nature... It is scientifically incorrect to say that in the course
other animals. The fact that

of human evolution there has been a selection for aggressive behavior more than for other kinds of behavior... Violence is neither in our
evolutionary legacy nor in our genes... Just as "wars begin in the minds of men," peace also begins in our minds. The same species who
invented war is capable of inventing peace. The responsibility lies with each of us.

So violence is not automatic or natural.

It can be inflamed or tamed by the power of social forces. It begins with the group or society, as
well as the individual. This is a challenge for each of us to think about the nature of conflict, the
limits of human freedom, and the power of social forces to shape individual behavior.

Violence is socially constructed not human nature

Clark 2 (Mary, Professor of Biology at San Diego State University In search of Human Nature, pg. 249, AD: 711-09)MT

My point is that human beings, males or females, are not born killers of other people.
Aggressive violence is not automatic. It is contextual; it requires meaning, a justifiable
reason. AS Maatma Ghandi, Martin Luther King, and other advocates of nonviolent action
recognized, it is easy to harm or kill faceless strangers at a distance; it is almost impossible to do so
(with some significant exceptions to be taken up in later chapters) when face-to-face. It is far easier
to hurt someone you trusted, who has broken that trust, or to kill an enemy whom you have
seen blow up a buddy. Violent aggression always has a social cause. It is not a natural drive.

A2: Security Inevitable

Conflicts appear inevitable because we allow security to
constitute our world.
Burke 7Anthony Burke, Senior Lecturer @ School of Politics & IR @ Univ. of New South Wales
[Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence, p. 68-9]
This chapter is thus an exercise in thinking, which challenges the continuing power of political
ontologies (forms of truth and being) that connect security, sovereignty, belonging, othemess and
violence in ways that for many appear like enduring political facts , inevitable

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

A2: War Inevitable

War isnt human nature and we need to develop an alternative framework.
Holmes 83 (PhD and Professor of Philosophy, The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters,
Nonviolence in Theory and Practice, 133)
Not that people think war a good thing. Most would agree with George Kennan that major
international violence is, in terms of the values of our civilization, a form of bankruptcy for us all...
that all of us, victors and vanquished alike, must emerge from it poorer than we began it and farther
from the goal we had in mind
But they see no alternative. They view war as a problem so large and complex as to be
incapable of resolution by the efforts of the individual. One can only accept it, they feel, as
though it were part of the nature of thing,- And thus, portending the defeat of the human
imagination and spirit, they resign themselves to being swept along to whatever end chance or
fate decrees.
But it needn't be this way. War is a problem of our own creation. It can be solved by our own
effort. But to do that requires courage, determination, and the resolve to effect revolution in our
moral and conceptual thinking which have been left behind with the acceleration of civilization
down the path of technological development
We still speak glibly of defense and security, for example, though these concepts applied without
qualification to the nuclear age. But they don't. They derive from simpler models of interpersonal
relations under conditions that are not duplicated in the nuclear arena. Against a fully armed
nuclear opponent there is no defense; there is only retaliation. And although retaliation can
insure your opponent's destruction. it cannot prevent your own

War is as much a human creation as anything else- the idea that we cant avoid it is
exactly what prevents us from reaching peace.
Fogarty 0 (Brian E., Chair and Professor of sociology at College of St. Catherine, War, Peace, and the Social Order, 2-3)
This book is based on a third assumption, that humans are not "inherently" anything.
Everything we are, we have made ourselves and whatever we want to be will likewise have to
be a human construction. Both war and peace are cultural inventions, and each can lay claim
to equal importance in human affairs. It is a bitter truth that human nature seems to often be
characterized by both extremes: peace and violence, cooperation and competition, love and hate.
Most striking, much of human behavior consists of both at the same time. To the sociologist these
ironies have a familiar ring, for they manifest old dualities: that freedom comes partly through
constraint that conflict involved cooperation, that the self is created through others, that "we" are
partly defined in terms of "them."
This dualistic assumption about human nature leads to two general principles. First, war is to be
regarded as a natural social process that can be understood in the same way as other familiar social
ills. This means that war itself must be given attention as one of humanity's creations. I believe
strongly that the study and advancement of peace, without an understanding of war, is doomed to
failure. Those who dismiss war as an incomprehensible aberration, or as the evil work of wicked
people, cannot hope to disassemble the machinery that produces it.
Second, war and violence are not inevitable simply because they are natural social processes.
The human world is human made, and real peace- with freedom, dignity and justice- can be
had if people set themselves the task of learning how to bring it about. It is a sad irony that
much of what makes war possible is ignorance of the possibility of peace.

The idea that war is inevitable spans inaction to stop it and creates a self-fulfilling
prophecy.

Zinn 90 (Howard, Professor Emeritus in the Political Science Department at Boston University, Declarations of Independence:
Violence in Human Nature, http://lemming.mahost .org/library/violence.htm)

Beliefs about human nature thus become self-fulfilling prophecies If you believe human beings
are naturally violent and bad, you may be persuaded to think (although not required to
think) that it is "realistic to be that way yourself But is it indeed realistic (meaning, ''l regret
this. but it's a fact. )) to blame war on human nature,

A2: Threats Real

Their authors are flawed and only work within the military-industrial complex- they
earn their living constructing the threats for the state to fight against
Their evidence doesnt support their claims- even though threats may exist, they
blow them up into ever-existential risks that have to be squashed

Claims of insecurity are self-fulfilling prophecies fights

over security inevitably degrade into fascism
Neocleous 8 (Mark, Professor of the Critique of Political Economy; Head of Department of Politics &
History Brunel Univ, Critique of Security, 9)
A final introductory word on fascism. A number of writers have noted that there is a real Schmittan logic
underpinning security politics: that casting an issue as one of security tends to situate that issue
within the logic of threat and decision, of friend and enemy, and so magnifies the dangers and
ratchets up the strategic fears and insecurities that encourage the construction of a certain
kind of political reason centered on the violent clampdown of the moment of decision .
Speaking and writing about security is never innocent, says Jef Huysman, it always risks contributing to
the opening of a window of opportunity for a fascist mobilization. Events since 11 September 2001, bear
witness to this. It seems abundantly clear that any revival of fascism would now come through the
mobilization of society in the name of security. This potential for fascist mobilization underlines
once more that far from being a distinct political force outside of liberalism and capital, fascism is in fact
liberal capitalisms doppelganger. The lesson of the twentieth century is that the crises of liberalism,
more often than not expressed as crises of liberalism, the fascist potential within liberal democracy
has always been more dangerous than the fascist tendency against democracy . The critique of
security being developed her is intended as a reminder of the authoritarian, reactionary and fascist potential
within the capitalist order and one of its key political categories.

Even if their impacts are true, injection of security politicizes engagement and
dooms solvency.
Huysman 98 [JEF HUYSMANS is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International
Studies (POLIS) at the Open UniversitySecurity! What Do You Mean?: From Concept to Thick Signifier
European Journal of International Relations 1998; 4; 226]
Approaching security as a thick signifier pushes the conceptual analysis further. It starts from the
assumption that the category security implies a particular formulation of questions, a particular
arrangement of material. But, instead of stopping at the conceptual framework by means of
which the material can be organized into a recognizable security analysis, one searches for key
dimensions of the wider order of meaning within which the framework itself is embedded. In a
thick signifier analysis, one tries to understand how security language implies a specific
metaphysics of life. The interpretation does not just explain how a security story requires the
definition of threats, a referent object, etc. but also how it defines our relations to nature, to other
human beings and to the self. In other words, interpreting security as a thick signifier brings us
to an understanding of how the category 'security' articulates a particular way of organizing
forms of life.
For example, Ole Wver has shown how security language organizes our relation to other people
via the logic of war (Wver, 1995); James Der Derian has indicated how it operates in a
Hobbesian framework by contrasting it with Marx's, Nietzsche's and Baudrillard's interpretation
of security (Der Derian, 1993; also Williams, forthcoming); Michael Dillon has argued that our
understanding of security is embedded in an instrumental, technical understanding of knowledge
and a particular conception of politics by contrasting it with the concept of truth as aletheia and
politics as tragedy in the Greek sense (Dillon, 1996); J. Ann Tickner has outlined the gendered
nature of security by disclosing how security studies/policies privilege male security experiences
while marginalizing the security feelings of women (Tickner, 1991: 32 5, 1992).

A thick signifier approach is also more than a deepening of the conceptual approach. While
conceptual analyses of security in JR assume an external reality to which security refers an
(in)security condition in a thick signifier approach 'security' becomes self referential. It does
not refer to an external, objective reality but establishes a security situation by itself. It is the
enunciation of the signifier which constitutes an (in)security condition. 5 Thus, the signifier has
a performative rather than a descriptive force. Rather than describing or picturing a condition, it
organizes social relations into security relations. For example, if a society moves from an
economic approach of migration to a security approach, the relation between indigenous people
and migrants and its regulation change (among others, instead of being a labour force, migrants
become enemies of a society) (Huysmans, 1995, 1997). Since the signifier 'security' does not
describe social relations but changes them into security relations, the question is no longer if the
security story gives a true or false picture of social relations. The question becomes: How does a
security story order social relations? What are the implications of politicizing an issue as a
security problem? The question is one of the politics of the signifier rather than the true or false
quality of its description (or explanation).
Security is not just a signifier performing an ordering function. It also has a 'content' in the sense
that the ordering it performs in a particular context is a specific kind of ordering. It positions
people in their relations to themselves, to nature and to other human beings within a particular
discursive, symbolic order. This order is not what we generally understand under 'content of
security' (e.g. a specific threat) but refers to the logic of security. This is not a configuration
(such as the Cold War) or a form (such as the framework that a conceptual analysis explores) but
an ensemble of rules that is immanent to a security practice and that defines the practice in its
specificity (Foucault, 1969: 63). I will use the Foucaultian concept 'discursive formation' to
refer to this ordering logic which the signifier articulates.' Different dimensions of this formation
have been explored by Walker, Wver, Der Derian, Dillon, Dalby and others. In the next section I
will try to contribute to this literature by interpreting security as a strategy constituting and
mediating our relation to death.
The thick signifier approach also formulates a separate research agenda in security studies. In
that sense it is more ambitious than a conceptual analysis or a definition. The latter serve an
already existing agenda and concentrate on correctly defining and explaining security questions
in International Relations. This agenda exists largely independently of the conceptual interest in
the meaning of security. This is not the case in the thick signifier approach. It implies in itself a
security studies agenda which interprets security practices by means of interpreting the meaning
of security, that is, the signifying and, thus, ordering work of security practices. How does
security order social relations? What does a security problematic imply? What does the signifier
do to the discussion of the free movement of persons in the EU, for example? Rather than being
a tool of clarification serving an agenda, the exploration of the meaning of security is the
security studies agenda itself. The main purpose is to render problematic what is mostly left
axiomatic, what is taken for granted, namely that security practices order social life in a
particular way. This brings two important elements into security studies which are not present in
the traditional agenda supported by definitions and Wolfers' and Baldwin's conceptual analyses.
First, as already argued, it adds an extra layer to the exploration of the meaning of security. It
introduces the idea that besides definitions and conceptual frameworks, the meaning of security
also implies a particular way of organizing forms of life. It leads to interpretations of how
security practices and our (IR) understandings of them are embedded in a cultural tradition of
modernity (Walker, 1986). Second, interpreting security as a thick signifier also moves the
research agenda away from its techno instrumental or managerial orientation. The main question
is not to help the political administration in its job of identifying and explaining threats in the
hope of improving the formulation of effective counter measures. Rather, the purpose of the
thick signifier approach is to lay bare the political work of the signifier security, that is, what it
does, how it determines social relations.
This introduces normative questions into the heart of the agenda. The way these questions are
introduced differs from the normative dimension of security policies which Classical Realists
sometimes discussed. For example, Arnold Wolfers' classic piece (1962: 147 65) on national
security argues that security is a value among other social values, such as wealth. This implies
that a security policy implicitly or explicitly defines the importance of security in comparison

with other values (to put the question crudely how much do we spend on nuclear weapons that
we cannot spend on health care?). The policy also has to decide the
level of security that is aspired to (for example, minimum or maximum security (see also Herz,
1962: 237 41)). But, this normative 'awareness' does not capture the basic normative quality of
security utterances that the thick signifier approach introduces. If security practices constitute a
security situation, a normative question is introduced which, in a sense, precedes the value
oriented decisions Wolfers refers to. One has to decide not only how important security is but
also if one wants to approach a problem in security terms or not. 7 To make the point in
oversimplified terms (especially by bracketing the intersubjective character of the politics of the
signifier) once security is enunciated, a choice has been made and the politics of the signifier is
at work. The key question, then, is how to enunciate security and for what purpose.

Policies that claim to know the truth of a situation fall into the trap of misplaced
certainty and take overly-bold steps against imaginary threats think WMDs in
Iraq
Mitzen and Schweller, 11 (Jennifer Mitzen and Randall Schweller, Mitzen and Schweller are
professors of Political Science at Ohio State University, Knowing the Unknown Unknowns:
Misplaced Certainty and the Onset of War, 3/15/2011,
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09636412.2011.549023, RM)
It is not surprising that decision makers dealing with enormous complexity and uncertainty
sometimes mistake spiral situations for deterrent ones and vice versa. What is puzzling is that we
frequently observe these problems decisively resolved in the minds of leaders. Faced with
actions of great consequence and uncertainty, leaders might be expected to be indecisive or to
adopt a classic hedging strategy, making incremental judgments and letting experience
accumulate with an open mind. In security dilemma and spiral model cases, however, things go
terribly wrong because leaders form very strong opinions and take bold and decidedly nonincremental actions. Why does this seem to happen so often? IR scholarship pays more attention
to uncertainty as a cause of war than it does to misplaced certainty. In this paper we have
challenged this uncertainty bias in two ways. First, we show that misplaced certainty matters.
We argued that certainty rather than uncertainty triggers security dilemmas and arms spirals.
Indeed, we see it as a necessary condition for these logics to produce war in most cases. The
centrality of misplaced certainty is apparent in the three key elements that define security
dilemmas and spiral dynamics: (1) there cannot be any real underlying conflicts of interest that
explain the conflict; (2) leaders, nevertheless, become convinced that the state confronts a real
threat that requires mobilization and risks of war to counter the certain danger; and (3) their
threat perceptions and assessments of the other's hostile intentions must be incorrect. Like
paranoia, then, conflict spirals and their associated dynamics are driven by firmly held but
delusional beliefs of persecution and harm, that is, by misplaced certainties of external danger.
Second, we distinguished three different types of uncertainty and argued that the risk approach in
IR cannot accommodate fundamental uncertainty, which makes it an unrealistic premise for at
least some important situations in world politics. Our confidence model of certainty, which
assumes fundamental uncertainty, thus better accounts for both the phenomenology and
prevalence of misplaced certainty. This model is not intended to replace the risk approachthe
as if assumptions of the risk model have been theoretically productive, and exposing its
empirical boundaries does not diminish that usefulness. But because the boundaries of risk are
such that some important decision environments of world politics slip through the cracks, it also
leaves room for theories with more realistic assumptions to give insight; and so we offer the
confidence model as a way of beginning that conversation.

Events may be objective but danger is interpreted

Campbell 92 (David, Professor of Political Geography at the University of Durham, Writing Security,)

Furthermore, the role of interpretation in the articulation of danger is not restricted to the
process by which some risks come to be considered more serious than others. An important
function of interpretation is the way that certain modes of representation crystallize around
referents marked as dangers. Given the often tenuous relationship between an interpretation
of danger and the "objective" incidence of behaviors and factors thought to constitute it, the
capacity for a particular risk to be represented in terms of characteristics reviled in the
community said. to be threatened can be an important impetus to an interpretation of danger.

As later chapters will demonstrate, the ability to represent things as alien, subversive, dirty, or sick has been pivotal
to the articulation of danger in the American experience.
In this context, it is also important to note that there need not be an action or event to
provide the grounds for an interpretation of danger. The mere existence of an alternative
mode of being, the presence of which exemplifies that different identities are possible and
thus denaturalizes the claim of a particular identity to be the true identity, is sometimes
enough to produce the understanding of a threat' In consequence, only in these terms is it
possible to understand how some acts of international power politics raise not a whit of
concern, while something as seemingly unthreatening as the novels of a South American
writer can be considered such a danger to national security that his exclusion from the
country is warranted.' For both insurance and international relations, therefore, danger
results from the calculation of a threat that objectifies events, disciplines relations, and
sequesters an ideal of the identity of the people said to be at risk.

The most recent psychological evidence confirms our Kthe affirmatives enemy creation is not based on objective
reality, but a paranoid need for certainty. Rejecting their
media doomsaying in favor of acceptance of uncertainty
solves better
Jacobs 10 [Tom Jacobs, Professional Journalist for 20 years, 3-8-10 http://www.millermccune.com/politics/the-comforting-notion-of-an-all-powerful-enemy-10429/]
We have seen the enemy, and he is powerful. Thats a recurring motif of contemporary political
discourse, as generalized fear mutates for many into a fixation on a ferocious foe. Partisan
rhetoric has turned increasingly alarmist. President Obama has difficulty getting even watereddown legislation passed, yet he is supposedly establishing a socialist state. The Tea Party is viewed as a
terrifying new phenomenon, rather than the latest embodiment of a recurring paranoid streak in American
politics. Osama bin Laden is likely confined to a cave, but hes perceived as a threat large enough to justify
engaging in torture. According to one school of thought, this tendency to exaggerate the strength of
our adversaries serves a specific psychological function. It is less scary to place all our fears

on a single, strong enemy than to accept the fact our well-being is largely based on factors
beyond our control. An enemy, after all, can be defined, analyzed and perhaps even defeated.
The notion that focusing our anger on a purportedly powerful foe helps mitigate our fears was first
articulated by cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker in his 1969 book Angel in Armor. It has now been
confirmed in a timely paper titled An Existential Function of Enemyship, just published in the Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology. A research team led by social psychologist Daniel Sullivan of

the University of Kansas reports on four studies that suggest people are motivated to
create and/or perpetually maintain clear enemies to avoid psychological confrontations with
an even more threatening chaotic environment. When you place their findings in the

context of the many threats (economic and otherwise) people face in todays world, the
propensity to turn ideological opponents into mighty monsters starts to make sense . In one of
Sullivans studies, conducted during the 2008 presidential campaign, a group of University of Kansas
undergraduates were asked whether they believed enemies of their favored candidate (Obama or John
McCain) were manipulating voting machines in an attempt to steal the election. Prior to considering such
conspiracy theories, half were asked to consider the truth of statements such as I have control over
whether I am exposed to a disease, and I have control over how my job prospects fare in the economy.
The other half were asked to assess similar statements on relatively unimportant subjects, such as I have
control over how much TV I watch. Those who were forced to contemplate their lack of control over
significant life events reported a stronger belief in opponent-led conspiracies, the researchers report. In
another study, the student participants were randomly assigned to read one of two essays. The first stated
that the U.S. government is well-equipped to handle the economic downturn, and that crime rates are
declining due to improved law enforcement. The second reported the government is not at all competent to
cope with the recession, and crime rates are going up in spite of the authorities best efforts. They were then
presented with a list of hypothetical events and asked to pick the most likely cause of each: A friend, an
enemy, or neither (that is, the event happened randomly). Those informed that the government was not in
control were more likely to view a personal enemy as responsible for negative events in their lives. In
contrast, those told things are running smoothly seemed to defensively downplay the extent to which
enemies negatively influence their lives, the researchers report. These studies suggest its oddly
comforting to have someone, or something, you can point to as the source of your sorrows.

This helps explain why Americans inevitably find an outside enemy to focus on, be it the
Soviets, the Muslims or the Chinese. Given that society pays an obvious price for such
illusions, how might we go about reducing the need for enemyship? If you can somehow
raise peoples sense that they have control over their lives and negative hazards in the world, their need to
enemize others should be reduced, Sullivan said in an e-mail interview. In our first study, for instance,
we showed that people who feel dispositionally high levels of control over their lives did not respond to a
reminder of external hazards by attributing more influence to an enemy. Any social structure or
implementation that makes people feel more control over their lives should thus generally reduce (though
perhaps not completely eliminate) the need or tendency to create or attribute more influence to enemy
figures. In our third study, we showed that if people perceived the broader social system as ordered, they
were more likely to respond to a threat to personal control by boosting their faith in the government, rather
than by attributing more influence to an enemy. So, again, we see that the need to perceive enemies is

reduced when people are made to feel that they are in control of their lives, or that there is a
reliable, efficient social order that protects them from the threat of random hazards. One
could imagine, then, that circumstances which allow all citizens to be medically insured, or
to have a clear sense of police protection, could reduce the tendency to seek out enemy
figures to distill or focalize concerns with random, imminent threats. Sullivan also offers two
more personal potential solutions. If people have such inherent needs for control and certainty
in their lives, they should try to channel those needs as best they can into socially beneficial
pursuits, he says. Lots of people pursue science, art and religion just to give a few
examples as means of boiling down uncertainty about the world into clear systems of
rules and engagement with reality, creating small domains for themselves in which they can
exert a sense of mastery. Insofar as these pursuits dont harm anyone, but still provide a
sense of control, they can reduce the need for enemyship. A final solution would be to
encourage people to simply accept uncertainty and lack of control in their lives , he adds.
Some meaning systems Taoism for example are rooted in this idea, that people can eventually accept
a certain lack of control and eventually become resigned to this idea to the extent that they no longer react
defensively against it. So there, at least, is a practical place to begin: Less MSNBC and more

meditation.

The facts they base their world view on are tainted by

hostile cognitive filtersif its true empirical social
science methodology works, vote negative
Smoke and Harman 87 [Richard Smoke BA Harvard magna cum laude, PhD MIT, Prof. @ Brown,
Winner Bancroft Prize in History, and Willis Harman M.S. in Physics and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering
from Stanford University, Paths To Peace, 1987 p.82-3]
The class involving social and cognitive psychology has its roots in the empirical, experimental
tradition. The insights especially relevant to peace arise from research on perception and attribution.
How do we perceive the outer world, especially other persons, and why do our perceptions
sometimes differ from those of othersand from reality? What do we attribute to othersthat is, what
motivations do we assume in them, and what explanations do we come up with for their behavior? How
does cognitive functioning restrict peoples abilities to comprehend complexity and to achieve what is in
their own best interests? There is an enormous body of research on these kinds of questions, some of which
is highly applicable to peace. In important respects the behavior of nations resembles the
behavior of individuals, and research on the latter sheds light on the former. A few elementary examples
will illustrate the applicability: In complex situations involving two parties, each of which

perceives the others overall goals to be threatening or illegitimate, each party is likely to
interpret ambiguous behavior by the other as hostile. Behavior suggesting aggressiveness is
more noticeable than behavior suggesting peaceableness, and once noticed, the former is
likely to be interpreted in the most hostile terms that the evidence can reasonably sustain ;
In situations of mutual antagonism, each hostile act by one party tends to reinforce the others
perception of hostility. As a consequence of repeated reinforcement, a strong expectation of
hostility may be built up. Peaceful initiatives then must overcome entrenched attitudes, which can often
be done only with great difficulty; Cognitive limitations on information processing tend to
produce images of the other party that are considerably oversimplified versions of the
reality. In an emotional context of anxiety, the simplifications made will be those consistent with
fear; Costly or difficult actions that one takes in the name of defense tend to reinforce ones presumption
that the other party is hostile because it becomes too emotionally difficult to admit to oneself that ones
assumptions might have been wrong and that all that cost may have been unnecessary; Aggressive

individuals who have climbed to the top in highly competitive government hierarchies are
likely to attribute aggressive characteristics to their counterparts in other government
hierarchies; Entrenched perceptions and attitudes become part of national leaders and whole
populations definitions of reality. Perceptions become so interwoven with the entire "inner map" of
theway-things-are that they become very difficult to change. Such ideas arising from empirical
research (presented here in simplified form) shed much light on international behavior. Although
they do not lead to easy answers for creating peace, their accumulated power can add up to an
enormously potent diagnosis of situations where peace is threatened . An accurate diagnosis can
tell us in which directions work to change the situation can be most effective and should be pursued, as well
as which directions are likely to be least effective. In some cases, the converse of the ideas are equally true
and can help sustain peace. For example, two nations in a long-standing state of stable peace remain so in
part because peaceful expectations have become interwoven into leaders and populations definitions of
reality.

Minor impacts wont escalate- fear of enemy space tech causes us to exaggerate all
threats
Huntley 2009 (Wade L. Huntley, Ph.D., senior lecturer in the National Security Affairs department at the
Naval Postgraduate School 2009 Securing Outer Space )
"Joint Vision 2010" was superceded by "Joint Vision 2020" in 2000. This updated blueprint for
the US Defense Department retains the central US military planning objective of "full-spectrum
dominance," meaning "the ability of U.S. forces, operating alone or with allies, to defeat any

adversary and control any situation across the range of military operations" (Garamone 2000).
This vision elaboration, in turn, provides the "framing" within which current US military
planning and policy-making on expanding military uses of space is now being undertaken.4 The
particular framing flowing from this planning is an ever-increasing imperative to sustain US
dominance in space. This framing provides the basis for grave interpretation of otherwise modest
events, such as, for example, Saddam Hussein's attempt to jam US GPS satellite signals at the
outset of the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003. In the words of General Lance Lord,
commander of US Space Command, this action denoted: "The war in space began during
Operation Iraqi Freedom."5

A2: Action Key

We need to question the drive towards quick solutions, rethinking alone is the only
solution to these problems.
George and Cambell 90 (Jim George Australian National University; David Campbell
The Johns Hopkins UniversityInternational Studies Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 3, Special
Issue: Speaking the Language of Exile: Dissidence in International Studies. (Sep., 1990),
pp. 269-293.)
We are cognizant of criticisms that might be aimed at a project such as this. It might be argued that
returning to thinkers and themes once at the center of dissent but now marginalized is somewhat
incongruous in the present context. It might also be argued (see Biersteker, 1989) that we don't
need "another preface," that it is time "to move beyond introductions . . to concrete
applications . . . Ito works on] some concrete issue or subject." Two brief responses are in
order. First is that for all the current centrality of the debates sparked off by Figures such as
Wittgenstein. Winch, and Kuhn, there is little evidence that they have received anything but the
scantiest of attention by mainstream International Relations specialists. Indeed, as Frost (1986) has
charged, International. Relations remains an intellectual backwater of the main currents of Western
social theory. Consequently, prominent scholars of the "classical" realist persuasion can speak in the
late 1980s of "fact driven theory" (Holsti, 1989), and assert that a crucial test of any new paradigm
is whether or not the critical questions it generates have a "reasonable correspondence with the
observed facts of international politics" (Holsti, 1986:vii). The second issue, concerning the need for
more "concrete' research, is dealt with below. But perhaps for those urging quick-fire concrete
application of theoretical approaches, the following is worth pondering. Speaking of the
"god's-eye view" of those who want "hard nosed, concrete solutions to particular problems,"
Walker (1988b:71 argues that it is an "arrogance that is inconsistent with the empirical
evidence" of contemporary global life. Such evidence, he suggests, "requires a willingness to
face up to the uncertainties of the age, not with the demand for instant solutions . . [or]
concrete policy options . . . but more crucially, for a serious rethinking of the ways in which
it is possible for human beings to live together."

A2: Case Outweighs

The logic of outweighs is merely another link to the Kthey say that we shouldnt rethink our view of the world
because their extinction scenario involves more
mushroom clouds than ours
K outweighs the case- Coviello says that security
discourse will lead to the apocalypse that the case
portrays because of constant cycle of fear and oppression
brought on by state security
Nuclear securitys risk calculus relies on faulty
universalizations that cannot account for any quality of
life
Bryan Hubbard, MA in Political Science @ ASU, 97 [Rhetorical Analysisis of Two Contemporary
Atomic Campaigns, http://handle.dtic.mil/100.2/ADA327948]
The escalation of risk to life-threatening risk makes a particular value statement that
suggests all people prioritize risks to life over risks to quality of life . This practice
repeats universalizing discourse of modernity despite other appeals toward difference. The

automatic escalation of risk discussion to life-threatening risk ignores a plethora of

values short of life and death and universalizes criteria for decision making .
Experience shows social practices often occur for reasons outside the evaluation of lifethreatening risk based on individualized cultural perceptions, tastes and values. People disagree
over what they consider a risky activity because of differences in value systems and multiple
decision-making heuristics not considered by traditional risk communication which envisions
one uniform rational-world paradigm. This difference involves very specific value judgments.
Different activities will receive different risk characterization despite their statistical similarity.
Ravetz (1980) suggests, "the variety in the public perceptions of acceptable risk partly reflects
the variety of life itself in its many dimensions of experience" (p. 47). This does not necessarily
point to the failure of risk communication to inform individuals of risk but indicates other
criteria also inform decisions that traditional risk communication ignores. To date, the bulk of
academic literature on risk communication seems to have an invested interest in the future of the
nuclear industry and modernity. Largely based on social science, the literature has tried to
quantify public perception and acceptance of technological risk (Bassett, Jenkins-Smith, &
Silva, 1996; Cohen 1995; Farr, 1992; Fischoff, 1995; Garrick & Gekler, 1989; McBeth &
Oakes, 1996; McCormick, 1981; McDaniels, Axelrod, & Slovic, 1995; Sokolowska & Tyszka,
1995; Weinberg, 1991). The results are mixed. Waterstone (1992) reviews this line of study and
notes, it "has taken a mechanistic, deterministic view of events and behavior; has
been scientific and technocratic; has largely downplayed, if not ignored, the role of
social and economic factors in affecting risk; and has represented an ideology of the status
quo" (p. 2). Risk communicators, who share a rational-world vision with these social scientists,
employ this line of research and disregard public failure to conform as examples of an ignorant
irrational publics. This perception decreases policy-makers faith in democratic decision making
while creating resentment toward technocrats from the general public who can read the
insensitivity toward their concerns. The institutionalization of risk communication as
previously conceptualized sanctions nuclear communication as an
exclusive
technocratic discourse which results in polarizing one-way communication.

And, K turns the case- Coviello says their apocalyptic

rhetoric merely leads to more of the same
Their reliance on security suffers from serial policy failure
and the attendant endless production of new threats to
be countered creates an endless politics of war
Dillon and Reed 09 (IR professor @ Lancaster University; Lecturer @ Kings College London, The
Liberal Way of Killing: Killing to Make Live)
There is, third, the additional critical attribute of contingency. It is this feature which does not merely add
governing through contingency to the political rationalities and governmental technologies of contemporary
liberal rule. It lends its own distinctive infection to them; one which has had a profound impact on the
nature of liberal rule and war in relation, especially, to its current hyperbolicization of security and its
newly problematized and proliferating accounts of dangers, threats and enemies. For if the biopolitical
imperative is that of making life live, the martial expression of that imperative, the drive to liberal war, is
preparedness to make war on the enemies of life. The biopoltiical imperative to make life live finds its
expression today, however in making life live the emergency of its emergence; for that is what species life
is now said to be. The liberal way of rule and war has thus become the preparedness to make
war on whatever threatens lifes capacity to live the emergency of its emergence . For allied to
the radical contingency of species existence is an account of species existence as a life of continuous
complex adaptation and emergence. From the perspective of security and war, in particular, such a
pluripotent life, characterized by its continuously unfolding potential, is a life that is continuously
becoming-dangerous to itself, and to other life forms. Such danger is not merely actual; because life itself,
here has become not merely actual. The emphasis in the problematization of danger which accompanies
such a politics of life itself therefore also shifts dramatically from the actual to the virtual. Only this
explains the astonishing degree to which the historically secure lives of the Atlantic basin have come to
construe themselves, politically, as radically endangered by as many unknown as there are unknowable
dangers; a point regularly and frankly admitted, officially, from terror to health mandarins, nationally and
internationally. Many have observed that the societies of the Atlantic basin are now increasingly ruled
by fear; that there is a politics of fear. But they interpret this politics of fear in political nave ways, as the
outcome of deliberate machination by political and economic elites. They may well be correct to some
degree. But what is perfectly evident, also, is that the elites themselves are governed by the very grid of
intelligibility furnished by the account of life as an emergency of emergence. It is not simply a matter,
therefore, of leaders playing on fears. The leadership itself is in the grip of a conjugation of government and
rule whose very generative principle of formation is permanent emergency. In other words, fear is no longer
simply an affect open to regular manipulation by leadership cadres. It is, but it is not only that, and not even
most importantly that. More importantly (because this is not a condition that can be resolved
simply by throwing the rascals out) in the permanent emergency of emergence, fear becomes a
generative principle of formation for rule. The emergency of emergence therefore poses a found crisis in
western understandings of the political, and in the hopes and expectations invested in political as opposed
to other forms of life. Given the wealth and given the vast military preponderance in weapons of mass
destruction and other forms of global deployed military capabilities of the societies of the Atlantic basin,
notably, of course, the United States, this poses a world crisis as well. In short, then, this complex

adaptive emergent life exists in the permanent state of emergence. Its politics of security
and war, which is to say its very foundational politics of rule as well, now revolve around this state
of emergency. Here, that in virtue of which a we comes to belong together, its very generative principle
of formation (our shorthand definition of politics), has become this emergency. What happens, we also
therefore ask of the biopoliticization of rule, when emergency becomes the generative principle of
formation of community and rule? Our answer has already been given. Politics becomes subject to the
urgent and compelling political economy, the logistical and technical dynamics, of war. No longer a we in
virtue of abiding by commonly agreed rules of government, it becomes a we formed by abiding by
commonly agreed rules of government, it becomes a we formed by the rule of the emergency itself; and
that is where the political crisis, the crisis of the political itself is that a we can belong together not only in
terms of agreeing to abide by the rule of its generative principles of formation but also by the willingness to

keep the nature of operation of those generative principles of formation under common deliberative
scrutiny. You cannot, however, debate emergency. You can only interrogate the futile demand
it makes on you, and all the episteme challenges it poses, acceding to those demands according both to
how well you can come to know them, and how well you have also adapted you affects to suffering them,
or perish. The very exigencies of emergency thus militate profoundly against the promise of politics as it
has been commonly understood in the western tradition; not simply as a matter of rule, but as a matter of
self-rule in which it was possible to debate the nature of the self in terms of the good for and of the self.
Note, also, how much the very idea of the self has disappeared from view in this conflation of life with
species life. The only intelligence, the only self-knowledge, the only culture which qualifies in the
permanence of this emergency is the utilitarian and instrumental technologies said to be necessary to
endure it. We have been here before in the western tradition and we have experienced the challenges of this
condition as tyranny (Arendt 1968). The emergency of emergence, the generative principle of formation,
the referential matrix of contemporary biopolitics globally, is a newly formed, pervasive and insidiously
complex, soft totalitarian regime of power relations made all the more difficult to contest precisely because,
governing through the contingent emergency of emergence, it is a governing through the transactional
freedoms of contingency.

Claiming impacts of policy outcome outweigh theoretical

assumptions produces policy failuretheir impact calculus
reproduces the concerns of dominant actors.
Zalewski 96Marysia Zalewski, Womens Studies @ Queens (Belfast) [International Theory:
Postivism and Beyond eds. Smith, Booth and Zalewksi p. 351-352]
All these theories yet the bodies keep piling up5 The 'real worlders' use a variety of tactics to

delegitimise those forms of theorising which they see as either useless or downright dangerous to
international politics. These range from ridicule, attempts at incor poration, scare-mongering
and claiming that such theories are the product of 'juvenile' whims, fads and fashions . The
charitable interpretation of these manoeuvrings is that they are instigated by a sense of fear, with the
'real worlders' insisting that the 'theorists' and the plethora of theories do not relate to what is
'really' going on in the world and thus the 'bodies keep piling up' while the 'theorists'
make nice points. Conversely, the 'theorists' accuse the 'real worlders' of being complicit in the construction
of a world in which the 'bodies keep piling up' and the resistance to criticism simply reflects their
institutional and, sometimes, public power as well as their intellectual weaknesses. Perhaps it is not
surprising that we are having these debates about theory as 'the practice of theory has been deeply affected
by the debate about modernism versus postmodernism and the attendant questions of a social theory which
can foster human autonomy and emancipation' (Marshall, 1994, p. 1). But what is the future for the
discipline and practice of international politics if such a debate has the effect of bringing out the worst in
people and which is often conducted within a spirit of 'jousting' verging on the hostile? Richard Ashley's
contribution to this volume attests somewhat to the futility of and angst felt by many who are party to and
witness to these debates with his comments that there is little point in offering arguments to a community
'who have repeatedly shown themselves so proficient at doing what it takes not to hear'. In a
paradigmatically masculinist discipline such as international relations perhaps the sport of intellectual
jousting and parodies of bar room brawling is functionally inevitable. Maybe the concentration on

wars, foreign policy, practices of diplomacy and the imageries of 'us' and 'them' that goes
along with all of that fosters a 'winners' and 'losers' mentality . So the 'theorists' do battle with the
'real worlders' and the 'modernists' do battle with the 'post- modernists'. So who wins? Perhaps nobody wins
with the possible exception of the publishers, especially in the context of contemporary academic life,
where an academic's value is measured by the quantity of publications. If research produced in
International Relations departments is to be of use besides advancing careers and increasing departmental
budgets then it surely has something to do with making sense of events in the world, at the very least. In
that endeavour it will be of supreme importance what counts as an appropriate event to pay attention to and
who counts as a 'relevant' theorist, which in turn fundamentally depends on what we think theory is and
how it relates to the so-called 'real world'. International politics is what we make it to be, the

contents of the 'what' and the group that is the 'we' are questions of vital theoretical and
therefore political importance. We need to re-think the discipline in ways that will disturb
the existing boundaries of both what we claim to be relevant in international politics and
what we assume to be legitimate ways of constructing knowledge about the world . The bodies
do keep piling up but I would suggest that having a plethora of theories is not the problem. My fear
is that statements such as 'all these theories yet the bodies keep piling up' might be used to
foster a 'back to basics' mentality , which, in the context of international relations,
implies a retreat to the comfort of theories and understanding of theory which offers relatively
immediate gratification, simplistic solutions to complex problems and
reifies and reflects the interests of the already powerful .

Short term impact focus distorts the information and

impacts we consider relevant. We should aim to resolve
structural inequalities.
Bilgin and Morton 4Pinar Bilgin, IR @ Bilikent and Adam David Morton, Senior Lecturer and
Fellow of the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice IR @ Nottingham [From Rogue to
Failed States? The Fallacy of Short-termism Politics 24 (3) p. 176-178]
Conclusion: the fallacy of short-termism
Calls for alternative approaches to the phenomenon of state failure are often met with the criticism that
such alternatives could only work in the long term whereas something needs to be done
here and now . Whilst recognising the need for immediate action, it is the role of the political

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

strategic thinking . The latter requires policymakers to rethink their long-term goals and take
small steps towards achieving them. It also requires heeding against taking steps that might eventually
become self-defeating.
The United States has presently fought three wars against two of its Cold War allies in the postCold War era, namely, the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Both were
supported in an attempt to preserve the delicate balance between the United States and the Soviet Union.
The Cold War policy of supporting client regimes has eventually backfired in that US policymakers
now have to face the instability they have caused. Hence the need for a comprehensive
understanding of state failure and the role Western states have played in failing them
through varied forms of intervention. Although some commentators may judge that the road to the
existing situation is paved with good intentions, a truly strategic approach to the problem of
international terrorism requires a more sensitive consideration of the medium-to-long-term implications of
state building in different parts of the world whilst also addressing the root causes of the problem of
state failure.Developing this line of argument further, reflection on different socially relevant meanings
of state failure in relation to different time increments shaping policymaking might convey alternative
considerations. In line with John Ruggie (1998, pp. 167170), divergent issues might then come to the fore
when viewed through the different lenses of particular time increments. Firstly, viewed through the
lenses of an incremental time frame , more immediate concerns to policymakers

usually become apparent when linked to precocious assumptions about terrorist networks ,
banditry and the breakdown of social order within failed states. Hence relevant players and events are
readily identified (al-Qaeda), their attributes assessed (axis of evil, strong/weak states )
and judgements made about their long-term significance (war on terrorism). The key analytical problem for
policymaking in this narrow and blinkered domain is the one of choice given the constraints of time and

energy devoted to a particular decision. These factors lead policymakers to bring conceptual
baggage to bear on an issue that simplifies but also distorts information . Taking a second
temporal form, that of a conjunctural time frame , policy responses are subject to more

fundamental epistemological concerns . Factors assumed to be constant within an

incremental time frame are more variable and it is more difficult to produce an intended effect on ongoing
processes than it is on actors and discrete events. For instance, how long should the war on terror be
waged for? Areas of policy in this realm can therefore begin to become more concerned with the
underlying forces that shape current trajectories.
Shifting attention to a third temporal form draws attention to still different dimensions. Within an epochal
time frame an agenda still in the making appears that requires a shift in decision-making, away from a
conventional problem-solving mode wherein doing nothing is favoured on burden-of-proof grounds,
towards a risk-averting mode, characterised by prudent contingency measures. To conclude, in relation to
failed states, the latter time frame entails reflecting on the very structural conditions shaping the
problems of failure raised throughout the present discussion, which will demand lasting and delicate
attention from practitioners across the academy and policymaking communities alike.

A2: We Have a Specific Impact

The 2AR will say vote affirmative to solve this specific
short term impact that affirmatives call to shorttermism ultimately leads to piecemeal policies leads
to serial policy failure and turns the case
Bilgin and Morton 4 [Pinar Bilgin, Ph.D. International Politics, University of Wales, Master of
International Relations, Bilkent University, B.Sc. International Relations, Middle East Technical University,
and Adam David Morton, Senior Lecturer and Fellow of the Centre for the Study of Social and Global
Justice IR at Nottingham, 2004 (From Rogue to Failed States? The Fallacy of Short-termism Politics
24 (3) p. 176-178, Accessed on August 27, 2013)]
Conclusion: the fallacy of short-termism
Calls for alternative approaches to the phenomenon of state failure are often met with the criticism that
such alternatives could only work in the long term whereas something needs to be done
here and now . Whilst recognising the need for immediate action, it is the role of the political

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

strategic thinking . The latter requires policymakers to rethink their long-term goals and take
small steps towards achieving them. It also requires heeding against taking steps that might eventually
become self-defeating.
The United States has presently fought three wars against two of its Cold War allies in the postCold War era, namely, the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Both were
supported in an attempt to preserve the delicate balance between the United States and the Soviet Union.
The Cold War policy of supporting client regimes has eventually backfired in that US policymakers
now have to face the instability they have caused. Hence the need for a comprehensive
understanding of state failure and the role Western states have played in failing them
through varied forms of intervention. Although some commentators may judge that the road to the
existing situation is paved with good intentions, a truly strategic approach to the problem of
international terrorism requires a more sensitive consideration of the medium-to-long-term implications of
state building in different parts of the world whilst also addressing the root causes of the problem of
state failure.Developing this line of argument further, reflection on different socially relevant meanings
of state failure in relation to different time increments shaping policymaking might convey alternative
considerations. In line with John Ruggie (1998, pp. 167170), divergent issues might then come to the fore
when viewed through the different lenses of particular time increments. Firstly, viewed through the
lenses of an incremental time frame , more immediate concerns to policymakers

usually become apparent when linked to precocious assumptions about terrorist network s,
banditry and the breakdown of social order within failed states. Hence relevant players and events are
readily identified (al-Qaeda), their attributes assessed (axis of evil, strong/weak states )
and judgements made about their long-term significance (war on terrorism). The key analytical problem for
policymaking in this narrow and blinkered domain is the one of choice given the constraints of time and
energy devoted to a particular decision. These factors lead policymakers to bring conceptual
baggage to bear on an issue that simplifies but also distorts information . Taking a second
temporal form, that of a conjunctural time frame , policy responses are subject to more

fundamental epistemological concerns . Factors assumed to be constant within an

incremental time frame are more variable and it is more difficult to produce an intended effect on ongoing
processes than it is on actors and discrete events. For instance, how long should the war on terror be
waged for? Areas of policy in this realm can therefore begin to become more concerned with the

underlying forces that shape current trajectories. Shifting attention to a third temporal
form draws attention to still different dimensions. Within an epochal time frame an agenda still in the
making appears that requires a shift in decision-making, away from a conventional problem-solving mode
wherein doing nothing is favoured on burden-of-proof grounds, towards a risk-averting mode,
characterised by prudent contingency measures. To conclude, in relation to failed states, the latter time
frame entails reflecting on the very structural conditions shaping the problems of failure raised
throughout the present discussion, which will demand lasting and delicate attention from practitioners
across the academy and policymaking communities alike.

A2: Scenario Planning Good

Scenario planning actually makes disasters into inevitable
occurrencesonly allows post-disaster triage instead of
presupposing a world where disaster is not inevitable at
all
Duffield 2011 (Mark, Professor of Development Politics at the University of Bristol, Envirnmental
Terror: Uncertainty, Resilience, and the Bunker Working Paper No. 06-11)
Today, uncertainty is measured against the open acknowledgement that, given the range of possible threats,
governments alone cannot protect people against all of them (Cabinet Office 2008: 42). However,
according to the new risk orthodoxy, while we cannot fully protect ourselves against uncertainty, we can
improve our preparedness for it. Through imaginative enactment, role-play, disaster rehearsal

and other scenariobased techniques and hazard modelling tools, we can overcome our
inability to predict by gaming our response capacities in relation to scientifically
constructed future threat scenarios (Collier 2008). Originating in war, these techniques are
now generalised as tools of strategic planning for the imagining potential futures ...and
then managing their consequences (Lentoz and Rose 2009: 236). Using such imaginative allhazard tools, preparedness can be strengthened thus reducing potential exposure and
vulnerability; an uncertain future can be brought into the present as a tangible object of
policy (Cabinet Office 2001). Within the new risk orthodoxy, because emergencies cannot be
fully predicted, preparedness will not stop them from happening. It will, however, help
recovery from them. In this respect, the key term of art, now ever-present across the
sciences and popular media, is resilience (Zebrowski 2009). In the space of a decade, resilience
...has become ubiquitous as an operational strategy of emergency preparedness, crisis response
and national security (Cooper and Walker 2010: 25). Resilience, however, is more than just
recovery; it is the ability to survive through adaptability. A resilient system is capable of not
only reforming around a new stability regime but, if necessary, moving between several
such relative states, while still retaining essential functionality. For a resilient system,
uncertainty is not a necessarily negative condition; it can also be positive and productive.
Despite their downsides, disasters can also provide creative opportunities to establish
something new; new ways of coping, living and, not least, making money (Cabinet Office 2008;
Klein 2007).

A2: Transitions
The transition DA assumes a binary between a then and
nowbut if disorder itself is a form of order, its embrace
is the best alternative
Bleiker, Professor of IR @ Queensland University, 2005 p. 191
(Roland, International Society and Its Critics Ed. Bellamy)
The values of order and disorder are, then, not as absolute and
as diametrically opposed as suggested by dualistic Western
thinking patterns. Disorder is certainly not as bad as its
reputation has it. There is enough evidence, empirical and
conceptual, to back up Bull's suggestion that at times social change can be
promoted only at the expense of order. Perhaps a citation from the world of science,
somewhat ruthlessly taken out of context, captures this aspect of world politics best. Consider how the so-called Second Law of
Thermodynamics states that 'all change is the consequence of the purposeless collapse of energy and matter into disorder' (see

further: disorder can have positive effects

not only as a route towards a more just order, but also as a
state of affairs and a value in itself, a possibility
that Bull did not
contemplate. Consider the countless and continuously spreading
new social movements, pressure groups, and other loose
organizations that challenge various aspects of local, national,
or global governance. The state-centric nature of English School scholarship provides little space to recognize,
Atkins 2003: ch. 4). .. One must go one step

yet alone appreciate the role of \these increasingly important transnational actors. Part of their importance stems \ from the fact that

these movements operate in a rather chaotic way. They come

and ;go. They are neither centrally controlled nor do they all seek the same

objective. 'Some operate on the right end of the political spectrum. Others on the left. Some pppose globalization. Others hail it.

it is precisely through
this lack of coherence, control, and certainty that the respective
movements offer a positive contribution to the political , and not only
Some seek more environmental regulations. .others defend neoliberal free trade. And

because their activities may contribute to an international :ociety even in the absence of a state-controlled order. These seemingly
chaotic activties are perhaps the quintessential aspect of postmodern politics, of local resistance against orders that have become
encroaching and unjust (see Walker 1988 and White '91: 10-12). They embody what William Connolly believes is the key to
cultural:denocratization, perhaps even to a post-national notion of democracy: a certain yel of 'productive ambiguity, that is, the
commitment to always resist 'attempts to low one side or the other to achieve final victory' (Connolly 1995: 153-5; White IOD: 106-

Without such political checks-and-balances, and the disorder

they require to exist and thrive, any order will eventually
undermine the sense of justice it originally supposed to
promote and protect.
50).

Second presumption lies against the status quo

disorders better than the unjust order of IR
Bleiker, Professor of IR @ Queensland University, 2005 p. 186-187
(Roland, International Society and Its Critics Ed. Bellamy)
In view of the long modern compulsion of ordering it is hardly surprising that
order is seen by and large as unproblematic and positive . One can say
exactly the same { about order as Chris Brown (1995a: 90) said about the

notion of an international community: it is always used in a positive way,

never pejoratively, as if order itself would make the world a better place .
It is thus also not surprising that English School} scholarship treats order not only as an analytical category, but also as a normative
goal. Bull (1977: 96, p. xii) is among the few scholars who recognized the problematic' dimensions of this double assumption. While
introducing his study as a detached, scholarly analysis of order as an empirical phenomenon in world politics, rather than. a

presentation of order as a 'value, goal, or objective: he acknowledged that the two are difficult to separate: I have sought to

avoid giving a 'persuasive definition' of the term 'order' that would

prejudge the question of the value of order as a human goal . On the other
hand, I do in fact hold that order is desirable, or valuable in human affairs. and
a fortiori in world politics. Few would question that order is desirable and

essential. Without order there can be no rule of law, no protection of

human rights, no civilized life in general. But order does not necessarily
equate with the good life. The recently proliferating antiglobalization
movement, for instance, has drawn attention to the undersides of the current
neoliberal world order. The merits of this body of knowledge and activism can
be debated, but it is far more difficult to dispute that many if not most

injustices in life, from domestic abuse to torture, are not the product of
disorder, but of unjust orders. The horror of Nazi Germany, or of any
authoritarian state, does not stem from absence of order, but from an
obsession with order. Indeed, no society is more ordered than presentday North Korea: absolutely everything is regulated and controlled by an omnipresent and paranoid state apparatus.
Few commentators would present this form of order as desirable. And yet, order remains an overwhelmingly positive and
unproblematized category in scholarship about international society.

A2: Benign Hegemon

Benign hegemony thesis wrong: U.S. is only benign on its
own terms/those who do not agree will find themselves
excluded and discriminated against
Wu 2001 (Xinbo, Professor at Center For American Studies at Fudan University, A Response to
Thomas. G. Moore in Asian Affairs 21.3)

Is the United States a benign hegemon? For some countries the answer is "yes." Those
countries rely on the economic opportunity created by American markets, technology, and
investment, as well as access to the U.S.-led international economic system more generally. However, a
benign hegemon does not mean an altruistic one. In allowing access to U.S. markets for goods,
capital, and technology, Wash- ington seeks in return important political, economic, and
security concessions from other countries. If they fail to meet U.S. demands, their access to
the U. S. econo- my or to U.S.-controlled resources will be denied or reduced. Neither is the United States an enlightened hegemon. If U.S. supremacy is challenged, its rivals willfind
themselves running into hard times. This was true for both the former Soviet Union (in politicomilitary affairs during the latter stages of the Cold War) and for Japan (in the economic field in the late
1980s and early 1990s). In addition, the United States often fails to be a fair player in international
economic activities. Indeed, there are many cases in which Washington has sought to set the

rules of the game primarily to U.S. advantage and asked for concessions from other
countries that go beyond the limits of international norms

Idea of U.S. as a benign hegemon is a neutral narrative

used to justify continue dominance and violence
Wu 2001 (Xinbo, Professor at Center For American Studies at Fudan University, A Response to
Thomas. G. Moore in Asian Affairs 21.3)
Moore suggests that American officials generally see themselves as working with, rather than
striving to achieve dominance over, other countries. But many American officials also believe
that the United States is the only qualified leader in the world. In that sense, leadership in world
affairs has become a self-imposed destiny for America since the end of World War II. During the
Cold War, that ambition was covered by concern in the West over the Soviet threat and the desire to defend
the "free world." With the end of the Cold War, Washington has become much more vocal in
endeavoring to build the Pax Americana. In fact, if there is an overarching goal in U.S. global
strategy, it is to establish and maintain Amer- ican hegemonic stability . For that purpose, the

United States needs to solidify and expand the camp of its followers, transform and
constrain Russia and China, and punish and weaken the so-called rogue states. U.S. economic
strategy in the Asia- Pacific, consistent with its security strategy in the region, serves the purpose of
extending the imbalance of power. The real problem here is how the United States maintains its
supremacy. Wash- ington may behave as a responsible power and play a constructive, leading
role in world affairs. In that case, a U.S. hegemony may not be seen as especially threatening and
destabilizing. In other words, refraining from excessively seek- ing relative gains and expanding the
imbalance in material terms will serve to increase the moral power of the United States. Washington can

also act as an irre- sponsible power, doing things for purely selfish purposes without
considering their consequences. Such a United States will be regarded as a rogue
superpower. It may gain materially, but it will lose morally. The current U.S. policy on nation- al
missile defense is a case in point. Even Washington's close allies are concerned about its negative impact on
global strategic stability and therefore advise the United States not to pursue that program. However, driven
by the desire to seek unilateral and absolute security and pressured by the defense industry, Washing- ton

seems likely to go ahead with this venture. Given the long-term impact of the program, the United States
will pay a high price both morally and militarily for such a decision

This locks the linkAmerican hegemony is only benign for

those whose minds continue to be colonized by a neutral
vision of U.S. strength
Boggs 2005 (Carl, Professor of Social Science at National University, Imperial Delusions p. xxxvi)
How could such a highly developed, prosperous, literate nation with vast resources in
education and communication have arrived at such a disastrous state of affairs-for the
United States and the world? How could the political process be so lacking in democratic sensibilities,
in moral concerns, in global accountability? The answer must begin with the overarching theme
presented in this book: the lack stems from public and intellectual failure to confront the
actualities of U.S. military power and the Empire it supports, owing to a deep historical
legacy of imperialism, racism, military conquest, and patriotism. Whatever its great
advantages as a superpower, the United States has an embarrassingly impoverished and
provincial political culture, most visible in global affairs. If this historical legacy seemed to wane after
the Vietnam defeat, it has come back with a resurgence over the past decade, and especially since 9/11. In
many ways Americ-an nationalism, denied by the pundits and intellectuals, constitutes the most powerful
source of domestic legitimation. Surely chauvinism, xenophobia, and arrogance enable the vast

majority of Americans to take on a cavalier attitude toward war, enabling them to largely
ignore the vast costs and consequences involved. As -with Iraq, the visitation on other
countries of callous feelings toward death and destruction becomes the norm. Elements of
the right wing find intrinsic value, even catharsis, in warfare presumably waged for noble
ends, while liberals join in the hunt for foreign devils, whether Communists or terrorists. For both,
a blind, uncritical support of Israel combined with addiction to the war economy fits into the equation. Cold
warriors, along with many on the progressive Left, have for years been obsessed with fighting the ghosts of
Stalin and locating the most recent evil dictator to be destroyed by U.S. military force. They too are
overcome by a violent, arrogant, patriotic mind-set. The bearers of liberalism, globalization theory, and
postmodernism often distance themselves from the imperial outlook, but, as we have seen, their framework
sidesteps the overwhelming reality of U.S. military power where it does no~ glorify such power.
Meanwhile, the architects of imperial power and military aggression have more room to

maneuver in pursuit of U.S. global domination.

A2: Good forms of security

The security framing infects all noble goals. For every person made secure, many
others are dragged into the system
Roe, 12 (Paul Roe, Associate Professor in the Department of International Relations and European
Studies at Central European University, Budapest, Is securitization a negative concept? Revisiting the
normative debate over normal versus extraordinary politics, Security Dialogue vol. 43 no. 3, June 2012)
Many writers acknowledge that the panic politics of securitization is analogous to traditional
national-security behaviour. Although this does not mean that successfully securitized issues will
necessarily be militarized, it does mean that they will reflect a national security mode or, as
Wver (1995: 54) puts it, a logic of war that is, a logic of challengeresistance(defense)
escalationrecognition/defeat. Given Wvers formulation, again, it is difficult to get away
from the equation of securitization with Schmitts concept of the political: the logic of war is the
very product of the fear of the extinction of the referent, and exactly the kind of politics that, to
repeat Huysmans (1998: 576), defines the self on the basis of the expectation of hostility. And
it is this understanding of Schmittian political realism that fundamentally informs Aradaus
critique of the Aberystwyths Schools notion of security as emancipation.17 For Aradau, the
potential for emancipation to transform social relations is necessarily hindered by virtue of its
security framing. Reflecting on Booths (and also Richard Wyn Joness)18 normative
commitment to tackle insecurities such as human and minority rights abuses, poverty, and
violence against women, Aradau (2008: 72) argues that security as emancipation forgets that
security itself institutes a particular kind of ordering [of] political communities. Rather
than the other of power, she goes on, security practices buttress institutional
arrangements and legitimize forms of domination and exclusion. Aradau contends that
someone made secure inevitably entails someone else made dangerous. On which grounds,
she asks, can one privilege such a construction of security, the security of migrants over the
security of racists, the security of HIV-positive people over those at risk of being infected?
(Aradau, 2004: 399).

The security framing is structurally divisive positive articulations are impossible

because of the logic of exclusion
Roe, 12 (Paul Roe, Associate Professor in the Department of International Relations and European
Studies at Central European University, Budapest, Is securitization a negative concept? Revisiting the
normative debate over normal versus extraordinary politics, Security Dialogue vol. 43 no. 3, June 2012)
Concentrating instead on the societal sector of security, Aradau maintains that since security
utterances are constitutive of who belongs to the (political) community and who does not, nondivisive referents are (at least for societal security) rendered unattainable that is, the
inherent boundary-making function of security necessarily hinders the inclusionary intent
of other, positive approaches. For example, referring to some feminist approaches to security,
Aradau (2008: 73) contends that J. Anne Tickners attempt to move beyond enemy Others to the
preservation of life itself as an ultimate value fails to acknowledge the practices brought by
existing hegemonies of power:
The life of refugees and asylum seekers can be valued as they are provided with food, shelter,
and even medical assistance, but are in principle excluded from the political community. They
are to be saved from sinking boats only to be deported to their country of origin. By bringing the
condition of politics upon the precondition for acting as a political subject, the discourse of life
preservation closes down struggles about the kind of life that people can live.
In other words, we can help you, but you are not one of us and so you are not welcome here. In
this sense, Aradau (2008: 162) refers to security as barred universality, inasmuch as exclusion
and subordination are intrinsic to its practices. And this leads her to the rather provocative
conclusion that the horizon of security is, ultimately, fascism, the community that draws
impermeable boundaries (Aradau, 2008: 1623).

A2: Good forms of security

Using policies to disentangle ourselves from security discourse fails it merely
encroaches us deeper into that discourse
Neocleous 8 (Mark, Professor of the Critique of Political Economy; Head of Department of Politics &
History Brunel Univ, Critique of Security, 13)
Because liberalism has situated itself as the ideology, movement or party of liberty, and because it is so
often reiterated in these terms, a common assumption is that if anyone should be defending liberty against
security, it is the liberals. The classic formulation of this view if found in Benjamin Franklins claims that
they that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety,
a claim that has been repeated so many times in the twenty-first century that to list all references would be
a research task in itself. This chapter suggests that theres a certain myth-making going on when people talk
of the search for the right balance between liberty and security, and that this myth-making obscures some
of the real history of liberalism. For while it make be that the moral instinct of the liberal is typically to
give some special status to the protection of the basic liberties, which means that they cannot be traded
away, the political instinct lies firmly in the direction of security. So, building on one of Marxs insights
and on a key theme within Foucaults work, I argue that rather than resist the push to security in the name
of liberty liberalism in fact enacts another form of political rationality that sets in place mechanisms for a
society of security. Security here straddles law and economy, police power and political economy, and
becomes the dominant mode of what Foucault calls governmental rationality. Taking these ideas, I want
to suggest that in encouraging an essential liberal mode of thought, the myth of a balance between
security and liberty opens the (back) door to an acceptance of all sorts of authoritarian security measures;
measures which are then justified on liberal grounds. This argument is developed through a critical
historical analysis of the relationship between security and liberty in the liberal tradition, which will then
open the door to a wider discussion of security, emergency powers and liberal order-building in the chapters
that follow.

Trying to Reappropriate security fails it gives more power to the state which
neutralizes all political value
Neocleous 8 (Mark, Professor of the Critique of Political Economy; Head of Department of Politics &
History Brunel Univ, Critique of Security, 3-4)
This range of research now quite formidable, often impressive and sometimes drawn on in this book has
a double lack. First, for all its talk about discourse, processes and the need for a critical edge, it still offers a
relatively impoverished account of the different ways in which security and insecurity are imagined. To
speak of different security field such as the environment, migration, energy, and so on, often fails to open
up the analysis to the ways in which spaces and places, processes and categories, are imagined thought the
lens of insecurity and in turn appropriated and colonized by the project of security. Given the centrality of
the state to the political imagination, to imagine the whole social order through the lens of insecurity is to
hand it over to the key entity which is said to be the ground of security, namely the state. This is related to
the second lack, which is that for all the critical edge employed by the authors in question, the running
assumption underpinning the work is that security is still a good thing, still necessary despite how much we
interrogate it. The assumption seems to be that while we might engage in a critical interrogation of security,
we could never quite be against it. Why we might want security after all is how one of the most
influential essays in this area ends. As Didier Bigo points out, how to maximize security always seems to
remain the core issue. And so there is a danger that these approaches do not quite manage to shake off the
managerialism prevalent in more traditional security studies: the desire to do security better. The common
assumption remains that security is the foundation of freedom, democracy and good society, and that the
real question is how to improve the power of the state to secure us. But what if at the heart of the logic of
security lies not a vision of freedom or emancipation, but a means of modeling the whole of human society
around a particular vision of order? What if security is little more than a semantic and semiotic black hole
allowing authority to inscribe itself deeply into human experience? What if the magic word security
serves merely to neutralize political action, encouraging us to surrender ourselves to the state in a
thoroughly conservative fashion? And what if this surrender facilitates an ongoing concession to authority
and the institutional violence which underpins the authority in question, and thus constitutes the first key

step in learning how to treat people not as human beings, but as objects to be administered? In other words,
what if the major requirement of our time is less an expanded, refined, or redefined vision of security, and
nothing less than a critique of security? Corey Robinson points out that when a particular idea routinely
accompanies atrocities then some real critical engagement with the idea would seem to be in order. And
since there is a clear and not particularly long line linking the idea of security and the atrocities being
carried out in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and other security centres at which people are currently being
held, never mind the long history of states slaughtering millions in the name of security, then the time must
be right for a critique of security.

A2: We just respond to existing threats

The claim to knowledge of existing threats is the most dangerous form of
securitization. It invokes the logic of the discourse without even the benefit of
clearly defending the practice
Roe, 12 (Paul Roe, Associate Professor in the Department of International Relations and European
Studies at Central European University, Budapest, Is securitization a negative concept? Revisiting the
normative debate over normal versus extraordinary politics, Security Dialogue vol. 43 no. 3, June 2012)
The view that securitization is bad for democracy is also given salience by the so-called Paris
School. Inspired predominantly by the work of Pierre Bourdieu, the Paris School has sought to
illuminate how the practices of various agencies the police, border guards, etc. serve to
reveal certain processes that do not necessarily derive from identifiable security speech acts.
Often focusing on the securitization of migration, the work of perhaps the most prominent of the
Paris Schools members, Didier Bigo, shows how security professionals those officials and
bureaucrats who, empowered with privileged information, purport to authoritatively define
threats, rather than responding to such threats out there exaggerate or provoke existing fears
for the purpose of promoting their own institutional interests (Bigo, 2002: 64). Rather than the
politics of exception that is characteristic of the Copenhagen Schools formulation, Bigos
security professionals are enabled by a politics of unease (Huysmans and Buonfino, 2008). The
politics of unease is not concerned with existential threats to political autonomy and territorial
integrity, but with other dangers that are nonetheless to be policed, linking together various
policy fields (e.g. counter-terrorism, trafficking and illegal immigration) in order to warrant the
introduction of governmental technologies such as racial profiling and ID cards. The important
point here is that through more ordinary that is to say, more discreet and surreptitious
mechanisms, the politics of unease can create contexts for securitization within which there is no
clear discursive framing of threat.4 As Huysmans (2011: 376) has written more recently, if
instead of the moment of securitization we have a myriad of decisions in a process that is
continuously made and remade, then what is left of the political critique of securitizing that is
invested in the notion of speech act? In other words, if you cannot locate a securitization, if you
cannot identify who is responsible, how can you scrutinize the policy? This presents a particular
kind of challenge for open and accountable government.

A2: Security K2 Freedom

The alternative solves- security can never be provided in
its entirety like their evidence assumes- its better to stop
fear of the other from affecting life and allow becomingthats Neocleous

A2 Critical Security Bad

Critical intellectualism key to solve extinction---voting
negative outweighs hypothetical plan consequences
Jones 99IR, Aberystwyth (Richard, 6. Emancipation: Reconceptualizing Practice, Security, Strategy and Critical Theory,
http://www.ciaonet.org/book/wynjones/wynjones06.html, AMiles)

The central political task of the intellectuals is to aid in the construction of a counterhegemony and thus
undermine the prevailing patterns of discourse and interaction that make up the currently dominant hegemony. This task is

accomplished through educational activity,

because, as Gramsci argues, every relationship of hegemony is necessarily a pedagogic

theory] does not tend to leave the simple in their primitive

philosophy of common sense, but rather to lead them to a higher conception of life. If it affirms the need for contact between intellectuals and
simple it is not in order to restrict scientific activity and preserve unity at the low level of the masses, but precisely in order to construct an intellectual
moral bloc which can make politically possible the intellectual progress of the mass and not only of small
relationship (Gramsci 1971: 350). Discussing the relationship of the philosophy of praxis to political practice, Gramsci claims: It [the

intellectual groups. (Gramsci 1971: 332333) According to Gramsci, this attempt to construct an alternative intellectualmoral bloc should take place under the auspices of the Communist Partya body he
described as the modern prince. Just as Niccol Machiavelli hoped to see a prince unite Italy, rid the country of foreign barbarians, and create a virtous state, Gramsci believed that the modern prince could lead
the working class on its journey toward its revolutionary destiny of an emancipated society (Gramsci 1971: 125205). Gramscis relative optimism about the possibility of progressive theorists playing a constructive
role in emancipatory political practice was predicated on his belief in the existence of a universal class (a class whose emancipation would inevitably presage the emancipation of humanity itself) with revolutionary
potential. It was a gradual loss of faith in this axiom that led Horkheimer and Adorno to their extremely pessimistic prognosis about the possibilities of progressive social change. But does a loss of faith in the
revolutionary vocation of the proletariat necessarily lead to the kind of quietism ultimately embraced by the first generation of the Frankfurt School? The conflict that erupted in the 1960s between them and their
more radical students suggests not. Indeed, contemporary critical theorists claim that the deprivileging of the role of the proletariat in the struggle for emancipation is actually a positive move. Class remains a very
important axis of domination in society, but it is not the only such axis (Fraser 1995). Nor is it valid to reduce all other forms of dominationfor example, in the case of genderto class relations, as orthodox
Marxists tend to do. To recognize these points is not only a first step toward the development of an analysis of forms of exploitation and exclusion within society that is more attuned to social reality; it is also a
realization that there are other forms of emancipatory politics than those associated with class conflict. 1 This in turn suggests new possibilities and problems for emancipatory theory. Furthermore, the abandonment
of faith in revolutionary parties is also a positive development. The history of the European left during the twentieth century provides myriad examples of the ways in which the fetishization of party organizations has
led to bureaucratic immobility and the confusion of means with ends (see, for example, Salvadori 1990). The failure of the Bolshevik experiment illustrates how disciplined, vanguard parties are an ideal vehicle for
totalitarian domination (Serge 1984). Faith in the infallible party has obviously been the source of strength and comfort to many in this period and, as the experience of the southern Wales coalfield demonstrates,
has inspired brave and progressive behavior (see, for example, the account of support for the Spanish Republic in Francis 1984). But such parties have so often been the enemies of emancipation that they should be

History furnishes examples of progressive developments

that have been positively influenced by organic intellectuals operating outside the bounds of a particular party structure (G. Williams
treated with the utmost caution. Parties are necessary, but their fetishization is potentially disastrous.

1984). Some of these developments have occurred in the particularly intractable realm of security. These examples may be considered as resources of hope for critical security studies (R. Williams 1989). They

ideas are important or, more correctly, that change is the product of the dialectical interaction of ideas and
material reality. One clear securityrelated example of the role of critical thinking and critical thinkers in aiding and abetting progressive social change is the experience of the peace
movement of the 1980s. At that time the ideas of dissident defense intellectuals (the alternative defense school) encouraged and drew strength from
peace activism. Together they had an effect not only on shortterm policy but on the dominant
discourses of strategy and security, a far more important result in the long run. The synergy between
illustrate that

intellectuals and critical social movements and the potential influence of both working in tandem can be witnessed particularly clearly in
the fate of common security. As Thomas RisseKappen points out, the term common security originated in the contribution of peace researchers to the German security debate of the
1970s (RisseKappen 1994: 186ff.); it was subsequently popularized by the Palme Commission report (Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues 1982). Initially, mainstream
defense intellectuals dismissed the concept as hopelessly idealistic; it certainly had no place in their allegedly hardheaded and realist view of the world.
However, notions of common security were taken up by a number of different intellectual communities, including the
critical security

liberal arms control community in the United States, Western European peace researchers, security specialists in the centerleft political parties of Western Europe, and Soviet institutchiksmembers of the

These
communities were subsequently able to take advantage of public pressure exerted through social
movements in order to gain broader acceptance for common security. In Germany, for example, in response to social movement pressure, German social
organizations such as churches and trade unions quickly supported the ideas promoted by peace researchers and the SPD (RisseKappen 1994: 207). Similar pressures even had an effect
on the Reagan administration. As RisseKappen notes: When the Reagan administration brought hardliners into power, the US arms control community was removed from policy
influence. It was the American peace movement and what became known as the freeze campaign that revived the arms control process together with
influential policy institutes in the Soviet Union such as the United States of America and Canada Institute (Landau 1996: 5254; RisseKappen 1994: 196200; Kaldor 1995; Spencer 1995).

pressure from the European allies. (RisseKappen 1994: 205; also Cortright 1993: 90110) Although it would be difficult to sustain a claim that the combination of critical movements and

intellectuals
have a
substantial impact on ameliorating U.S. behavior. The most dramatic
persuaded the Reagan government to adopt the rhetoric and substance of common security in its entirety, it is clear that it did at least

and certainly the most unexpected

impact of alternative defense ideas was felt in the Soviet Union. Through various EastWest links, which included arms control institutions, Pugwash
conferences, interparty contacts, and even direct personal links, a coterie of Soviet policy analysts and advisers were drawn toward common security and such attendant notions as nonoffensive defense (these links
are detailed in Evangelista 1995; Kaldor 1995; Checkel 1993; RisseKappen 1994; Landau 1996 and Spencer 1995 concentrate on the role of the Pugwash conferences). This group, including Palme Commission
member Georgii Arbatov, Pugwash attendee Andrei Kokoshin, and Sergei Karaganov, a senior adviser who was in regular contact with the Western peace researchers Anders Boserup and Lutz Unterseher (Risse
Kappen 1994: 203), then influenced Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachevs subsequent championing of common security may be attributed to several factors. It is clear, for example, that new Soviet

the
Soviets commitment to common security led to significant changes in force sizes and postures . These in turn aided in
leadership had a strong interest in alleviating tensions in EastWest relations in order to facilitate muchneeded domestic reforms (the interaction of ideas and material reality). But what is significant is that

the winding down of the Cold War, the end of Soviet domination over Eastern Europe, and even the collapse of Russian control over much of the territory of the former Soviet Union. At the present time, in marked
contrast to the situation in the early 1980s, common security is part of the common sense of security discourse. As MccGwire points out, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) (a common defense pact) is
using the rhetoric of common security in order to justify its expansion into Eastern Europe (MccGwire 1997). This points to an interesting and potentially important aspect of the impact of ideas on politics. As

The hope is
that enough of the residual meaning can survive to shift the parameters of the debate in a
potentially progressive direction. Moreover, the adoption of the concept of common security
concepts such as common security, and collective security before it (Claude 1984: 223260), are adopted by governments and military services, they inevitably become somewhat debased.

by official circles provides critics with a useful tool for (immanently) critiquing aspects of
security policy (as MccGwire 1997 demonstrates in relation to NATO expansion). The
example of common security is highly instructive. First, it indicates that critical intellectuals can be politically engaged
and play a rolea significant one at thatin making the world a better and safer place. Second, it points to potential future addressees for critical

it

underlines the role of ideas in the evolution of society .

international theory in general, and critical security studies in particular. Third,

also
Although most proponents of critical security studies reject aspects of Gramscis theory of organic intellectuals, in particular his exclusive concentration on class and his emphasis on the guiding role of the party, the

critical theorists can still play the role of

organic intellectuals and that this organic relationship need not confine itself to a single class; it can involve
alignment with different coalitions of social movements that campaign on an issue or a series of issues
pertinent to the struggle for emancipation (Shaw 1994b; R. Walker 1994). Edward Said captures this broader orientation when he suggests that critical
desire for engagement and relevance must remain at the heart of their project. The example of the peace movement suggests that

intellectuals are always tied to and ought to remain an organic part of an ongoing experience in society:
of the poor, the disadvantaged, the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless (Said 1994: 84). In the specific case of critical security studies , this
means placing the experience of those men and women and communities for whom the present world
order is a cause of insecurity rather than security at the center of the agenda and making
suffering humanity rather than raison dtat the prism through which problems are viewed.
Here the project stands fullsquare within the critical theory tradition. If all theory is for someone and for some purpose, then
critical security studies is for the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless, and its
purpose is their emancipation. The theoretical implications of this orientation have already been discussed in the previous chapters. They involve a fundamental
reconceptualization of security with a shift in referent object and a broadening of the range of issues considered as a legitimate part of the discourse. They also involve a reconceptualization of strategy within this
expanded notion of security. But the question remains at the conceptual level of how these

alternative types of theorizingeven if they are selfconsciously aligned to the practices

of critical or new social movements, such as peace activism, the struggle for human rights, and the survival of minority cultures

can become a force for the direction of

action. Again, Gramscis work is insightful. In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci advances a sophisticated analysis of how dominant discourses play a vital

role in upholding particular political and economic orders, or, in Gramscis terminology, historic blocs (Gramsci 1971: 323377). Gramsci adopted
Machiavellis view of power as a centaur, half man, half beast: a mixture of consent and coercion. Consent is produced and reproduced by a ruling hegemony that
holds sway through civil society and through which ruling or dominant ideas become widely dispersed . 2 In particular, Gramsci describes
how ideology becomes sedimented in society and takes on the status of common sense; it becomes subconsciously accepted and even
regarded as beyond question. Obviously, for Gramsci, there

is nothing immutable about the

values that permeate society; they can and do change
ideas and
. In the social realm,

institutions that were once seen as natural and beyond question (i.e., commonsensical) in the West, such as feudalism
and slavery, are now seen as anachronistic, unjust, and unacceptable. In Marxs wellworn phrase, All that is solid melts
into the air. Gramscis intention is to harness this potential for change and ensure that it moves in the direction of emancipation. To do this he suggests a strategy of a war of position (Gramsci 1971: 229239).

any successful attempt at progressive social change

requires a slow, incremental, even molecular, struggle to break down the prevailing hegemony and
Gramsci argues that in states with developed civil societies, such as those in Western liberal democracies,

intellectuals have a crucial role to play in this process by

helping to undermine the natural, commonsense, internalized nature of the status quo. This in turn helps create
political space within which alternative conceptions of politics can be developed and new historic blocs
construct an alternative counterhegemony to take its place. Organic

created. I contend that Gramscis strategy of a war of position suggests an appropriate model for proponents of critical security studies to adopt in relating their theorizing to political practice. The Tasks of Critical

the main task of those intellectuals who align

themselves with the enterprise is to attempt to undermine the prevailing hegemonic security
discourse. This may be accomplished by utilizing specialist information and expertise to engage in an immanent critique of the prevailing
security regimes, that is, comparing the justifications of those regimes with actual outcomes .
When this is attempted in the security field, the prevailing structures and regimes are found to fail grievously on their own
terms. Such an approach also involves challenging the pronouncements of those intellectuals,
traditional or organic, whose views serve to legitimate, and hence reproduce, the prevailing world order.
This challenge entails teasing out the often subconscious and certainly unexamined assumptions that underlie their arguments while
drawing attention to the normative viewpoints that are smuggled into mainstream thinking
about security behind its positivist facade. In this sense, proponents of critical security studies approximate to Foucaults notion of specific
intellectuals who use their expert knowledge to challenge the prevailing regime of truth (Foucault
Security Studies If the project of critical security studies is conceived in terms of a war of position, then

1980: 132). However, critical theorists might wish to reformulate this sentiment along more familiar Quaker lines of speaking truth to power (this sentiment is also central to Said 1994) or even along the eisteddfod
lines of speaking truth against the world. Of course, traditional strategists can, and indeed do, sometimes claim a similar role. Colin S. Gray, for example, states that strategists must be prepared to speak truth to

whereas the former seeks to influence

policymakers in particular directions without questioning the basis of their power, the latter
aim at a thoroughgoing critique of all that traditional security studies has taken for granted. Furthermore, critical
power (Gray 1982a: 193). But the difference between Gray and proponents of critical security studies is that,

theorists base their critique on the presupposition, elegantly stated by Adorno, that the need to lend suffering a voice is the precondition of all truth (cited in Jameson 1990: 66).

The aim of critical

security studies in attempting to undermine the prevailing orthodoxy is ultimately educational. As Gramsci notes, Every
relationship of hegemony is necessarily a pedagogic relationship (Gramsci 1971: 350; see also the discussion of critical pedagogy in Neufeld 1995: 116121). Thus, by criticizing the
hegemonic discourse and advancing alternative conceptions of security based on different understandings of human potentialities, the approach is simultaneously
playing a part in eroding the legitimacy of the ruling historic bloc and contributing to the development of a counterhegemonic
position. There are a number of avenues open to critical security specialists in pursuing this educational strategy. As teachers, they can try
to foster and encourage skepticism toward accepted wisdom and open minds to other possibilities. They can also take advantage of the seemingly

As teachers, we try to foster an

emergent pedagogical counterculture.... As critical public intellectuals we try to inject our perspectives into whatever cultural or political public spheres we have
access to (Fraser 1989: 11). Perhaps significantly, support for this type of emancipatory strategy can even be found in the work of the ultrapessimistic Adorno, who argues: In the history of
civilization there have been not a few instances when delusions were healed not by focused
propaganda, but, in the final analysis, because scholars, with their unobtrusive yet insistent
work habits, studied what lay at the root of the delusion . (cited in Kellner 1992: vii) Such unobtrusive yet insistent work does not in itself
create the social change to which Adorno alludes. The conceptual and the practical dangers of collapsing practice into
theory must be guarded against. Rather, through their educational activities, proponents of critical
security studies should aim to provide support for those social movements that promote
emancipatory social change. By providing a critique of the prevailing order and legitimating alternative views, critical
theorists can perform a valuable role in supporting the struggles of social movements. That said, the
role of theorists is not to direct and instruct those movements with which they are aligned; instead, the relationship is reciprocal. The experience of the European, North American, and Antipodean peace
movements of the 1980s shows how influential social movements can become when their
efforts are harnessed to the intellectual and educational activity of critical thinkers. For example, in his
unquenchable thirst of the media for instant punditry to forward alternative views onto a broader stage. Nancy Fraser argues:

account of New Zealands antinuclear stance in the 1980s, Michael C. Pugh cites the importance of the visits of critical intellectuals such as Helen Caldicott and Richard Falk in changing the countrys political
climate and encouraging the growth of the antinuclear movement (Pugh 1989: 108; see also Cortright 1993: 513). In the 1980s peace movements and critical intellectuals interested in issues of security and strategy
drew strength and succor from each others efforts. If such critical social movements do not exist, then this creates obvious difficulties for the critical theorist. But even under these circumstances, the theorist need not
abandon all hope of an eventual orientation toward practice. Once again, the peace movement of the 1980s provides evidence of the possibilities. At that time, the movement benefited from the intellectual work
undertaken in the lean years of the peace movement in the late 1970s. Some of the theories and concepts developed then, such as common security and nonoffensive defense, were eventually taken up even in the
Kremlin and played a significant role in defusing the second Cold War. Those ideas developed in the 1970s can be seen in Adornian terms of a message in a bottle, but in this case, contra Adornos expectations,
they were picked up and used to support a program of emancipatory political practice. Obviously, one would be naive to understate the difficulties facing those attempting to develop alternative critical approaches
within academia. Some of these problems have been alluded to already and involve the structural constraints of academic life itself. Said argues that many problems are caused by what he describes as the growing
professionalisation of academic life (Said 1994: 4962). Academics are now so constrained by the requirements of job security and marketability that they are extremely riskaverse. It paysin all sensesto stick
with the crowd and avoid the exposed limb by following the prevalent disciplinary preoccupations, publish in certain prescribed journals, and so on. The result is the navel gazing so prevalent in the study of
international relations and the seeming inability of security specialists to deal with the changes brought about by the end of the Cold War (Kristensen 1997 highlights the search of U.S. nuclear planners for new
targets for old weapons). And, of course, the pressures for conformism are heightened in the field of security studies when governments have a very real interest in marginalizing dissent. Nevertheless,

opportunities for critical thinking do exist, and this thinking can connect with the practices of social movements and become a force for the
direction of action. The experience of the 1980s, when, in the depths of the second Cold War, critical

thinkers risked demonization and in some countries far worse in order to challenge received wisdom, thus arguably playing a
crucial role in the very survival of the human race, should act as both an inspiration and a challenge to critical security studies.

A2: Liberal Democracy Solves War

A2: Threat Con Solves War

Their threat discourse mass structural violence
Jackson 12Director of the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, the University of Otago.
Former. Professor of International Politics at Aberystwyth University (8/5/12, Richard, The Great Con of
National Security, http://richardjacksonterrorismblog.wordpress.com/2012/08/05/the-great-con-of-nationalsecurity/)
It may have once been the case that being attacked by another country was a major threat to the lives of
ordinary people. It may also be true that there are still some pretty serious dangers out there associated with
the spread of nuclear weapons. For the most part, however, most of what youve been told about
national security and all the big threats which can supposedly kill you is one big con designed to
distract you from the things that can really hurt you, such as the poverty, inequality and
structural violence of capitalism, global warming, and the manufacture and proliferation of
weapons among others. The facts are simple and irrefutable: youre far more likely to die
from lack of health care provision than you are from terrorism; from stress and overwork than
Iranian or North Korean nuclear missiles; from lack of road safety than from illegal immigrants; from
mental illness and suicide than from computer hackers; from domestic violence than from asylum
seekers; from the misuse of legal medicines and alcohol abuse than from international drug lords. And

yet, politicians and the servile media spend most of their time talking about the threats
posed by terrorism, immigration, asylum seekers, the international drug trade, the nuclear
programmes of Iran and North Korea, computer hackers, animal rights activism, the threat of
China, and a host of other issues which are all about as equally unlikely to affect the health and
well-being of you and your family. Along with this obsessive and perennial discussion of socalled national security issues, the state spends truly vast sums on security measures which
have virtually no impact on the actual risk of dying from these threats, and then engages in
massive displays of security theatre designed to show just how seriously the state takes these threats
such as the x-ray machines and security measures in every public building, surveillance cameras
everywhere, missile launchers in urban areas, drones in Afghanistan, armed police in airports, and a
thousand other things. This display is meant to convince you that these threats are really, really
serious. And while all this is going on, the rulers of society are hoping that you wont notice

that increasing social and economic inequality in society leads to increased ill health for a
growing underclass; that suicide and crime always rise when unemployment rises; that workplaces
remain highly dangerous and kill and maim hundreds of people per year; that there are
preventable diseases which plague the poorer sections of society; that domestic violence kills
and injures thousands of women and children annually; and that globally, poverty and
preventable disease kills tens of millions of people needlessly every year. In other words, they are
hoping that you wont notice how much structural violence there is in the world. More than
this, they are hoping that you wont notice that while literally trillions of dollars are spent on
military weapons, foreign wars and security theatre (which also arguably do nothing to make any
us any safer, and may even make us marginally less safe), that domestic violence programmes
struggle to provide even minimal support for women and children at risk of serious harm from their
partners; that underfunded mental health programmes mean long waiting lists to receive basic care for atrisk individuals; that drug and alcohol rehabilitation programmes lack the funding to match the demand for
help; that welfare measures aimed at reducing inequality have been inadequate for decades; that
health and safety measures at many workplaces remain insufficiently resourced; and that measures to
tackle global warming and developing alternative energy remain hopelessly inadequate. Of course, none of
this is surprising. Politicians are a part of the system; they dont want to change it. For them, all the
insecurity, death and ill-health caused by capitalist inequality are a price worth paying to keep the basic
social structures as they are. A more egalitarian society based on equality, solidarity, and other nonmaterialist values would not suit their interests, or the special interests of the lobby groups they are

indebted to. It is also true that dealing with economic and social inequality, improving public health,
changing international structures of inequality, restructuring the military-industrial complex, and making
the necessary economic and political changes to deal with global warming will be extremely difficult and
will require long-term commitment and determination. For politicians looking towards the next election, it
is clearly much easier to paint immigrants as a threat to social order or pontificate about the ongoing
danger of terrorists. It is also more exciting for the media than stories about how poor people
and people of colour are discriminated against and suffer worse health as a consequence. Viewed
from this vantage point, national security is one massive confidence trick misdirection on an

epic scale. Its primary function is to distract you from the structures and inequalities in
society which are the real threat to the health and wellbeing of you and your family, and to
convince you to be permanently afraid so that you will acquiesce to all the security measures
which keep you under state control and keep the military-industrial complex ticking along. Keep
this in mind next time you hear a politician talking about the threat of uncontrolled immigration, the risk
posed by asylum seekers or the threat of Iran, or the need to expand counter-terrorism powers. The question
is: when politicians are talking about national security, what is that they dont want you to think and talk
about? What exactly is the misdirection they are engaged in? The truth is, if you think that terrorists
or immigrants or asylum seekers or Iran are a greater threat to your safety than the capitalist
system, you have been well and truly conned, my friend. Dont believe the hype: youre much more
likely to die from any one of several forms of structural violence in society than you are from
immigrants or terrorism. Somehow, we need to challenge the politicians on this fact.

A2: We Solve
There is no status Quoour evidence indicates their 1AC
harms and solvency claims are just random factoids
politically constructed to make the plan appear to be a
good idea. They take a snapshot of a dynamic status quo
and attempt to portray it as a static universality. This is
analogous to the way status quo politicians use the
absence of declared conflict to promote a FALSE image of
peace.
Dillon and Reid 2K [Global Governance, Liberal Peace, and Complex Emergency, By: Michael
Dillon, Julian Reid, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 03043754, Jan-Mar 2000, Vol. 25, Issue 1]
More specifically, where there is a policy problematic there is expertise, and where there is expertise there,
too, a policy problematic will emerge. Such problematics are detailed and elaborated in terms of discrete
forms of knowledge as well as interlocking policy domains. Policy domains reify the
problematization of life in certain ways by turning these epistemically and politically contestable
orderings of life into "problems" that require the continuous attention of policy science and
the continuous resolutions of policymakers. Policy "actors" develop and compete on the
basis of the expertise that grows up around such problems or clusters of problems and their client
populations. Here, too, we may also discover what might be called "epistemic entrepreneurs." Albeit the
market for discourse is prescribed and policed in ways that Foucault indicated, bidding to formulate
novel problematizations they seek to "sell" these, or otherwise have them officially adopted. In principle,
there is no limit to the ways in which the management of population may be problematized. All aspects of
human conduct, any encounter with life, is problematizable. Any problematization is capable of
becoming a policy problem. Governmentality thereby creates a market for policy , for science
and for policy science, in which problematizations go looking for policy sponsors while policy
sponsors fiercely compete on behalf of their favored problematizations. Reproblematization of
problems is constrained by the institutional and ideological investments surrounding

accepted "problems," and by the sheer difficulty of challenging the inescapable ontological
and epistemological assumptions that go into their very formation. There is nothing so fiercely
contested as an epistemological or ontological assumption. And there is nothing so fiercely ridiculed
as the suggestion that the real problem with problematizations exists precisely at the level of
such assumptions. Such "paralysis of analysis" is precisely what policymakers seek to avoid
since they are compelled constantly to respond to circumstances over which they ordinarily
have in fact both more and less control than they proclaim. What they do not have is
precisely the control that they want. Yet serial policy failure--the fate and the fuel of all policy-compels them into a continuous search for the new analysis that will extract them from the
aporias in which they constantly find themselves enmeshed.[ 35] Serial policy failure is no
simple shortcoming that science and policy--and policy science--will ultimately overcome.
Serial policy failure is rooted in the ontological and epistemological assumptions that
fashion the ways in which global governance promotes the very changes and unintended
outcomes that it then serially reproblematizes in terms of policy failure. Thus, global liberal
governance is not a linear problem-solving process committed to the resolution of objective
policy problems simply by bringing better information and knowledge to bear upon them. A
nonlinear economy of power/knowledge, it deliberately installs socially specific and
radically inequitable distributions of wealth, opportunity, and mortal danger both locally and
globally through the very detailed ways in which life is variously (policy) problematized by it. In

consequence, thinking and acting politically is displaced by the institutional and epistemic
rivalries that infuse its power/ knowledge networks, and by the local conditions of application that
govern the introduction of their policies. These now threaten to exhaust what politics, locally as well as
globally, is about. It is here that the emergence characteristic of governance begins to make its
appearance. For it is increasingly recognized that there are no definitive policy solutions to

objective, neat, discrete policy problems. The subjects of policy increasingly also become
a matter of definition as well, since the concept population does not have a stable referent
either and has itself also evolved in biophilosophical and biomolecular as well as Foucauldian
biopower ways.

A2: Nuke War Outweighs

Structural violence outweighsfocus on nuclear impacts
destroys peace movements and causes paralysis and
oppressionnuke war wont cause extinctiontheir
authors are biased hacks trying to preserve their power
through a politics of extinction (actions that actually
threaten us are caused by the security apparatus)
Martin 84 [Dr Brian Martin is a physicist whose research interests include stratospheric modeling. He
is a research associate in the Dept. of Mathematics, Faculty of Science, Australian National University, and
a member of SANA 5-16-84 http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/84sana1.html]
By the 1950s, a large number of people had come to believe that the killing of much or all of the
worlds population would result from global nuclear war. This idea was promoted by the peace
movement, among which the idea of overkill - in the sense that nuclear arsenals could kill everyone on
earth several times over - became an article of faith. Yet in spite of the widespread belief in nuclear
extinction, there was almost no scientific support for such a possibility. The scenario of the book and
movie On the Beach,[2] with fallout clouds gradually enveloping the earth and wiping out all life,
was and is fiction. The scientific evidence is that fallout would only kill people who are immediately
downwind of surface nuclear explosions and who are heavily exposed during the first few days. Global
fallout has no potential for causing massive immediate death (though it could cause up to millions
of cancers worldwide over many decades).[3] In spite of the lack of evidence, large sections of the peace
movement have left unaddressed the question of whether nuclear war inevitably means global extinction.
The next effect to which beliefs in nuclear extinction were attached was ozone depletion. Beginning in the
mid-1970s, scares about stratospheric ozone developed, culminating in 1982 in the release of
Jonathan Schells book The Fate of the Earth.[4] Schell painted a picture of human annihilation from
nuclear war based almost entirely on effects from increased ultraviolet light at the earths surface due to
ozone reductions caused by nuclear explosions. Schells book was greeted with adulation rarely observed in
any field. Yet by the time the book was published, the scientific basis for ozone-based nuclear
extinction had almost entirely evaporated. The ongoing switch by the military forces of the United
States and the Soviet Union from multi-megatonne nuclear weapons to larger numbers of smaller weapons
means that the effect on ozone from even the largest nuclear war is unlikely to lead to any major effect on
human population levels, and extinction from ozone reductions is virtually out of the question.[3] The latest
stimulus for doomsday beliefs is nuclear winter: the blocking of sunlight from dust raised by nuclear
explosions and smoke from fires ignited by nuclear attacks. This would result in a few months of darkness
and lowered temperatures, mainly in the northern mid-latitudes.[5] The effects could be quite significant,
perhaps causing the deaths of up to several hundred million more people than would die from the
immediate effects of blast, heat and radiation. But the evidence, so far, seems to provide little basis for
beliefs in nuclear extinction. The impact of nuclear winter on populations nearer the equator, such as in
India, does not seem likely to be significant. The most serious possibilities would result from major
ecological destruction, but this remains speculative at present. As in the previous doomsday
scenarios, antiwar scientists and peace movements have taken up the crusading torch of
extinction politics. Few doubts have been voiced about the evidence about nuclear winter or the politics
of promoting beliefs in nuclear extinction. Opponents of war, including scientists, have often

exaggerated the effects of nuclear war and emphasized worst cases. Schell continually bends
evidence to give the worst impression. For example, he implies that a nuclear attack is inevitably followed
by a firestorm or conflagration. He invariably gives the maximum time for people having to remain in
shelters from fallout. And he takes a pessimistic view of the potential for ecological resilience to radiation
exposure and for human resourcefulness in a crisis. Similarly, in several of the scientific studies of nuclear
winter, I have noticed a strong tendency to focus on worst cases and to avoid examination of ways to

overcome the effects. For example, no one seems to have looked at possibilities for migration to coastal
areas away from the freezing continental temperatures or looked at people changing their diets away from
grain-fed beef to direct consumption of the grain, thereby greatly extending reserves of food. Nuclear
doomsdayism should be of concern because of its effect on the political strategy and
effectiveness of the peace movement. While beliefs in nuclear extinction may stimulate some people into
antiwar action, it may discourage others by fostering resignation. Furthermore, some peace movement

activities may be inhibited because they allegedly threaten the delicate balance of state
terror. The irony here is that there should be no need to exaggerate the effects of nuclear war, since, even
well short of extinction, the consequences would be sufficiently devastating to justify the greatest efforts
against it. The effect of extinction politics is apparent in responses to the concept of limited nuclear war.
Antiwar activists, quite justifiably, have attacked military planning and apologetics for limited nuclear war
in which the effects are minimized in order to make them more acceptable. But opposition to military
planning often has led antiwar activists to refuse to acknowledge the possibility that nuclear war could be
limited in the sense that less than total annihilation could result. A limited nuclear war with 100 million
deaths is certainly possible, but the peace movement has not seriously examined the political implications
of such a war. Yet even the smallest of nuclear wars could have enormous political consequences, for which
the peace movement is totally unprepared.[6] The peace movement also has denigrated the value of civil
defence, apparently, in part, because a realistic examination of civil defence would undermine beliefs about
total annihilation. The many ways in which the effects of nuclear war are exaggerated and worst cases
emphasized can be explained as the result of a presupposition by antiwar scientists and activists that their
political aims will be fulfilled when people are convinced that there is a good chance of total disaster from
nuclear war.[7] There are quite a number of reasons why people may find a belief in extinction from
nuclear war to be attractive.[8] Here I will only briefly comment on a few factors. The first is an implicit
Western chauvinism The effects of global nuclear war would mainly hit the population of the
United States, Europe and the Soviet Union. This is quite unlike the pattern of other major
ongoing human disasters of starvation, disease, poverty and political repression which mainly affect
the poor, nonwhite populations of the Third World. The gospel of nuclear extinction can be seen as

a way by which a problem for the rich white Western societies is claimed to be a problem
for all the world. Symptomatic of this orientation is the belief that, without Western aid and trade, the
economies and populations of the Third World would face disaster. But this is only Western selfcentredness. Actually, Third World populations would in many ways be better off without the West: the
pressure to grow cash crops of sugar, tobacco and so on would be reduced, and we would no longer witness
fresh fish being airfreighted from Bangladesh to Europe. A related factor linked with nuclear extinctionism
is a belief that nuclear war is the most pressing issue facing humans. I disagree, both morally
and politically, with the stance that preventing nuclear war has become the most important social issue
for all humans. Surely, in the Third World, concern over the actuality of massive suffering and

millions of deaths resulting from poverty and exploitation can justifiably take precedence
over the possibility of a similar death toll from nuclear war. Nuclear war may be the greatest
threat to the collective lives of those in the rich, white Western societies but, for the poor, nonwhite Third
World peoples, other issues are more pressing. In political terms, to give precedence to nuclear war as

an issue is to assume that nuclear war can be overcome in isolation from changes in major
social institutions, including the state, capitalism, state socialism and patriarchy. If war is deeply
embedded in such structures - as I would argue[9] - then to try to prevent war without making
common cause with other social movements will not be successful politically . This means that
the antiwar movement needs to link its strategy and practice with other movements such as the feminist
movement, the workers control movement and the environmental movement. A focus on nuclear
extinction also encourages a focus on appealing to elites as the means to stop nuclear war, since there
seems no other means for quickly overcoming the danger. For example, Carl Sagan, at the end of an article
about nuclear winter in a popular magazine, advocates writing letters to the presidents of the United States
and of the Soviet Union.[10] But if war has deep institutional roots, then appealing to elites has
no chance of success. This has been amply illustrated by the continual failure of disarmament
negotiations and appeals to elites over the past several decades.

Failure to challenge the systems of thought that produce

violent militarism means reducing nukes only results in
weapons a million times more deadly
Sethi 89 [JD Sethi, Gandhian critique of western peace movements, 1989. p. 173-174 (the poor English
in this card is from the original)]
The strategic doctrines discussed in the preceding pages and others which have not been discussed have to
be recognized both as provocations and potentials for war as well as preservers of peace. There can be no
denial that in a system based on nation states where size and resources , development of
technologies are of critical importance, expansionism is inherent in the system. Therefore, the threat

perception arises from security problems which are the products of nation states system.
The balance of power realm of new weapon system, ideological passions and miscalculations
and misperceptions along with other factors determine the nature of international climate
for war and peace, and the nuclear weapons have been the pyramidical culmination of the
progression of all the determinants of war and peace which are euphemistically called
defense and security. The real difference between the past and the present is that the nuclear weapons
can destroy the whole humanity in a short time. This was not the position before, no matter how big and
long wars were fought. But it is also a fact that nuclear powers have not fought a single war since 1945.
Suppose for a moment all the nuclear weapons by some magic disappeared. How much would
the whole world be saved from wars and large scale annihilation? The second World War took a toll of
50 million people. A third world war without nuclear weapons may not take less than 100 million people at
the least. A world free from nuclear weapons while other things remaining the same is likely

to produce some other kinds of weapons because the global system of inequalities, insecurity
of nations, pressure of technologies etc. will inevitably lead to the discovery of weapons
probably million times deadlier than the nuclear weapons. The world would never be safe even
without the nuclear weapons. The peace movements have been making this mistake of not linking issues of
elimination of nuclear weapons with the causes which in the first instance culminated in the production of
nuclear weapons.

A2: Predictions Good

Worst case predictions cause worst case policy making
recognition of our ignorance makes us more secure than
their fatalistic scenario planning
Schneier 10 [Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist and author, MA CS
American University, 3/13/10, http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/05/worst-case_thin.html]
At a security conference recently, the moderator asked the panel of distinguished cybersecurity leaders
what their nightmare scenario was. The answers were the predictable array of large-scale attacks: against
our communications infrastructure, against the power grid, against the financial system, in combination
with a physical attack. I didnt get to give my answer until the afternoon, which was: "My nightmare
scenario is that people keep talking about their nightmare scenarios." Theres a certain blindness that
comes from worst-case thinking. An extension of the precautionary principle, it involves imagining

the worst possible outcome and then acting as if it were a certainty. It substitutes
imagination for thinking, speculation for risk analysis, and fear for reason. It fosters
powerlessness and vulnerability and magnifies social paralysis. And it makes us more
vulnerable to the effects of terrorism. Worst-case thinking means generally bad decision
making for several reasons. First, its only half of the cost-benefit equation. Every decision has
costs and benefits, risks and rewards. By speculating about what can possibly go wrong, and then
acting as if that is likely to happen, worst-case thinking focuses only on the extreme but
improbable risks and does a poor job at assessing outcomes . Second, its based on flawed
logic. It begs the question by assuming that a proponent of an action must prove that the
nightmare scenario is impossible. Third, it can be used to support any position or its opposite.
If we build a nuclear power plant, it could melt down. If we dont build it, we will run short
of power and society will collapse into anarchy. If we allow flights near Icelands volcanic ash,
planes will crash and people will die. If we dont, organs wont arrive in time for transplant operations and
people will die. If we dont invade Iraq, Saddam Hussein might use the nuclear weapons he
might have. If we do, we might destabilize the Middle East, leading to widespread violence and
death. Of course, not all fears are equal. Those that we tend to exaggerate are more easily justified
by worst-case thinking. So terrorism fears trump privacy fears, and almost everything else ;
technology is hard to understand and therefore scary; nuclear weapons are worse than conventional
weapons; our children need to be protected at all costs; and annihilating the planet is bad. Basically, any
fear that would make a good movie plot is amenable to worst-case thinking. Fourth and finally, worst-

case thinking validates ignorance. Instead of focusing on what we know, it focuses on what
we dont know -- and what we can imagine. Remember Defense Secretary Rumsfelds quote? "Reports
that say that something hasnt happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known
knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we
know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we dont
know we dont know." And this: "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." Ignorance isnt a
cause for doubt; when you can fill that ignorance with imagination, it can be a call to action .
Even worse, it can lead to hasty and dangerous acts. You cant wait for a smoking gun, so you

act as if the gun is about to go off. Rather than making us safer, worst-case thinking has the
potential to cause dangerous escalation. The new undercurrent in this is that our society no
longer has the ability to calculate probabilities. Risk assessment is devalued. Probabilistic
thinking is repudiated in favor of "possibilistic thinking": Since we cant know whats likely to go
wrong, lets speculate about what can possibly go wrong. Worst-case thinking leads to bad
decisions, bad systems design, and bad security. And we all have direct experience with its effects:
airline security and the TSA, which we make fun of when were not appalled that theyre harassing 93year-old women or keeping first graders off airplanes. You cant be too careful! Actually, you can. You can

refuse to fly because of the possibility of plane crashes. You can lock your children in the house because of
the possibility of child predators. You can eschew all contact with people because of the possibility of hurt.
Steven Hawking wants to avoid trying to communicate with aliens because they might be hostile; does he
want to turn off all the planets television broadcasts because theyre radiating into space? It isnt hard to
parody worst-case thinking, and at its extreme its a psychological condition. Frank Furedi, a sociology

professor at the University of Kent, writes: "Worst-case thinking encourages society to

adopt fear as one of the dominant principles around which the public, the government and
institutions should organize their life. It institutionalizes insecurity and fosters a mood of
confusion and powerlessness. Through popularizing the belief that worst cases are normal,
it incites people to feel defenseless and vulnerable to a wide range of future threats." Even
worse, it plays directly into the hands of terrorists, creating a population that is easily
terrorized -- even by failed terrorist attacks like the Christmas Day underwear bomber and the Times
Square SUV bomber. When someone is proposing a change, the onus should be on them to justify it over
the status quo. But worst-case thinking is a way of looking at the world that exaggerates the

rare and unusual and gives the rare much more credence than it deserves. It isnt really a
principle; its a cheap trick to justify what you already believe. It lets lazy or biased people
make what seem to be cogent arguments without understanding the whole issue. And when
people dont need to refute counterarguments, theres no point in listening to them.

AT: Democracy Prevents Genocide

Democracy makes genocide possible, it doesnt prevent it.
Mann 99 Michael Mann, Professor of Sociology at the University of California-Los Angeles, holds a
D.Phil. in Sociology from Oxford University, 1999 (The Dark Side of Democracy: The Modern Tradition
of Ethnic and Political Cleansing, New Left Review, Issue 235, May-June, Available Online at
http://www.upf.edu/materials/fhuma/genocidis/docs/mann2.pdf, Accessed 11-10-2011, p. 18-21)

The twentieth centurys death-toll through genocide is somewhere over sixty million and still
rising.* Yet most scholars and laypersons alike have preferred to focus on more salubrious topics. If they
think about genocide at all, they view it as an unfortunate interruption of the real structural tendencies of
the twentieth centuryeconomic, social and political progress. Murderous ethnic and political cleansing is
seen as a regression to the primitiveessentially anti-modernand is committed by backward or marginal
groups manipulated by clever and dangerous politicians. Blame the politicians, the sadists, the terrible
Serbs (or Croats) or the primitive Hutus (or Tutsis)for their actions have little to do with us. An
alternative viewoften derived from a religious perspectivesees the capacity for evil as a universal
attribute of human beings, whether civilized or not. This is true, yet capacity for evil only becomes
actualized in certain circumstances, and, in the case of genocide, these seem less primitive than distinctly
modern. [end page 18] In fact, most of the small group of scholars studying the most notorious twentiethcentury cases of genocide and mass killingArmenia, the Nazi Final Solution, Stalinism, Cambodia,
Rwanda have emphasized the modernity of the horror. Leo Kuper essentially founded genocide studies
by noting that the modern states monopoly of sovereignty over a territory that was, in reality, culturally
plural and economically stratified created both the desire and the power to commit genocide.1 Roger Smith
has stressed that genocide has usually been a deliberate instrument of modern state policy.2 Some
emphasize the technology available to the perpetrators: modern weapons, transport and administration have
escalated the efficiency of mass, bureaucratic, depersonalized killing.3 However, Helen Fein detects
modern ideological goals, as well as technological means, for The victims of twentieth century
premeditated genocide . . . were murdered in order to fulfil the states design for a new order.4 She stresses
the genocidal potential of modern myths or political formulaeideologies of nation, race and class.
In the Name of the People
But let us remark a quality they all share. They have justified themselvesand their genocides
in the name of the people. In this respect, they are no different from more moderate twentiethcentury ideologies, for this has been the age of the masses. In all the varied German law courts of the last
eighty yearsfrom Weimar to Nazi to communist DDR to the Bundesrepublikthe judges have used the
same opening formula: In Namen des Volkes, In the Name of the People. American courts prefer the
formula The Case of X versus the People. By claiming legitimacy in the name of the people, genocidal
rgimes claim kinship to movements which are usually recognized as the bearers of true modernity, like
liberalism or social democracy. Indeed, I argue here that modern genocide can be regarded as the dark side
of democracy.
This is an unconventional view, however. The now dominant democratic peace school has
declared that democracies are essentially pacific, rarely fighting wars, and almost never against
each other. They are the absolute antithesis of genocide. The schools main representative in genocide
studies is Rudolph Rummel.5 He claims [end page 19] that the more authoritarian a state, the more likely it
is to commit genocide. Wielding many twentieth-century statistics of genocide, Rummel concludes that
democracies commit virtually no genocide. He concedes a few cases where they do, but argues that these
have been in wartime, where mass murder has been perpetrated secretively and without a democratic
mandate. They are, therefore, exceptions that prove the rule. This is not an unreasonable argument in the
case of small-scale atrocities like My Lai, during the Vietnam Warwhich, when exposed, was indeed
prosecuted and condemned by American democracy. But Rummel fails to distinguish the more

important cases of democratic mass killings, like the fire-bombing of Dresden or Tokyo,
the dropping of the atomic bombs or the napalming of the Vietnamese countryside whose
casualties he also minimizes. Though some degree of military secrecy was obviously maintained in these
cases, nonetheless, the American and British governments took these decisions according to

due democratic constitutional process. Moreover, authoritarian genocides are also committed in
wartime and with an attempt at secrecy. Hitler committed almost all his murders during the war, and he did
not dare make them publicindeed, nor did Stalin. But there are larger exceptions to Rummels

law: the frequent genocidal outbursts committed by seventeenth- to early twentiethcentury European settlers living under constitutional governments . Rummel mentions these
briefly, absurdly minimizes the numbers killed, vaguely suggests that governments may have been
responsible, and fails to explain them. In fact, Rummel never makes clear why a rgime would
want to murder vast numbers of people. After all, almost all historical rgimes were
authoritarian yet did not commit mass murder. As I will argue below, there is a relationship
between democracy and genocide, but it is more complex and double-edged than Rummel
acknowledges.
Robert Melson attempts to explain genocide in terms of wars following hard upon a revolution. He says
revolutions undermine the institutional and moral restraints of the old rgime, creating a potential moral
vacuum.6 They also throw up revolutionaries seeking a wholesale transformation of society in the name of
a mythical people. That people then needs defining and delimiting, which may result in the exclusion of
opponents, perhaps by violent means. And war, he says, aggravates rgimes feelings of vulnerability
and/or invincibility, permits states to become more autonomous, allows them the option of more radical
policy alternatives and increases the vulnerability of the victims. The combination of revolution and war
may thus persuade a rgime that domestic opponents are in league with deadly foreign enemies, to be
legitimately killed. But Melson is careful to say that this is not a necessary outcome. In Cuba, for example,
the revolution/war cycle was followed only by the expulsion of the bourgeoisie, not by its murder. He also
concedes that earlier [end page 20] revolution/war combinationsfor example, the English, American and
French revolutionswere less likely to produce genocide than later ones, though he offers no good
explanation of this. Finally, he does not note that the growth of the ideologies of nation, race and class,
which were used to legitimate genocide, all surged in modern times with or without the accompaniment of
revolution or war.
Rummel and especially Melson offer us genuine insights, but they do not go far enough. If we want to

understand the growth of ideologically-legitimated and state-perpetrated genocide, we must

realize that this has been the perverted product of the most sacred institution of Western
modernity: democracy. For genocide can be seen in two distinct ways as the dark side of
democracythe most undesirable consequence of the modern practice of vesting political
legitimacy in the people.

The discourse of democratic exceptionalism relies on false

binaries that intensify conflicts.
Geis and Wagner 11 Anna Geis, Senior Researcher at the Goethe University Frankfurt, holds a
Ph.D. from the University of Hamburg, and Wolfgang Wagner, Professor of International Security in the
Department of Political Science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, holds an M.A. from the University of
Tbingen and a Ph.D. from Goethe University Frankfurt, 2011 (How far is it from Knigsberg to
Kandahar? Democratic peace and democratic violence in International Relations, Review of International
Studies, Volume 37, Issue 4, October, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Cambridge Journals
Online)
Whatever the explicit position on forcible democratisation Democratic Peace scholars take, Democratic
Peace research has nevertheless contributed to pave the intellectual ground for democratic
triumphalism.106 Though scholarship has produced a wide array of complex studies, debating context
conditions, modifications and flaws of Democratic Peace (research), interested political actors only
take up the good news, simplify and instrumentalise these for political purposes . In search
for an adequate response to such instrumentalisation, it is an important step that public reflexion upon
scholarly responsibility in this field has recently been growing.107
Third, as indicated above (section 3.2), the democratic turn in institutional peace research in particular

lends legitimacy to a worldview that divides the population of states along the binary lines

of democracies and non-democracies and ascribes higher morality and credibility as well as
institutional privileges to the group of democracies. Such considerations have not only been
proposed by liberal international legal scholars but are an important topic in political philosophy as
well.108 For example, Allen Buchanan and Robert Keohane have justified the privileging of democracies
in international law on the following grounds: they find democracies to meet their standard for
comparative moral reliability and believe that when democracies violate cosmopolitan principles, they are
more likely to be criticised by their citizens for doing so, and will be more likely to rectify their behaviour
in response.109 While such deliberations on the higher or lower legitimacy of regimes are certainly not out
of bounds, the political consequences in international politics are apt to damage the very interests of
democracies since they intensify conflicts between democracies and non-democracies on the
allocation or denial of entitlements. The propagation of a liberal international law in recent years
which allots more (interventionist) rights to democracies and the institutional reform proposals for a
Concert of Democracies as a new counter-part to an ineffective UN Security Council are more than
troubling developments, reinforcing the classification into first and second-class regimes.110
The large bipartisan Princeton Project on National Security pleads for such a Concert of Democracies as
the institutional embodiment and ratification of the democratic peace. In the same vein, Robert Kagan
explicitly votes for such a Concert of Democracies as a complement to the UN: If successful, it could
help bestow legitimacy on actions that democratic nations deem necessary but autocratic nations refuse to
countenance as NATO conferred legitimacy on the intervention in Kosovo. In a world increasingly
divided along democratic and autocratic lines, the world's democrats will have to stick together.112
Remarkably enough, the very same people who pretend to regret that the world is increasingly

divided along the regime type line, contribute actively to constructing such a division and
even reinforcing it. And once again, such ideas have travelled from academia into politics. For example,
the Republican presidential candidate John McCain voiced the idea of a League of Democracies in the last
US presidential election campaign.

Liberal theorists no longer claim democracy creates peace

post 9/11 democracies have defended their right to
wage war against aggressors
Dunne 9 [Tim, International Relations Prof-Oxford, Liberalism, International Terrorism, and
Democratic Wars, International Relations, March, http://ire.sagepub.com/cgi/pdf_extract/23/1/107?rss=1]

It is commonplace to draw distinctions between the various strands of liberal thought. This
made a great deal of sense during the 1980s when neo-liberal institutionalists sought to make liberalism
compatible with social scientific methods of inquiry.6 In so doing, a space was opened up for normative
liberals to re-assert a values based version of liberalism which centred on the claim that democratic states
were more peace-prone. I would argue that this distinction is no longer relevant. Post- 9/11, many
former liberal regime theorists (such as Robert Keohane and Ann-Marie Slaughter) have grafted

onto their once positivist approach a strong normative distinction between liberal and
illiberal regimes.7 In place of the distinction between positivist and normative conceptions of
liberalism, the main fault-line in relation to the war on terror has been between defensive and
offensive variants.8 Pre-9/11, the dominant narrative inside liberalism was about the pacific
character of liberal states. Post-9/11, a significant number of influential liberals have defended the
right of Western states to wage war on terrorist groups and those that allegedly harbour
them. The legal basis for such action has been contested in institutions as varied as the UN
Security Council, parliaments, and domestic courts where the validity of the use of force against Iraq has
been vigorously debated. Such as tendency for legal discourse to be at its most universalist at the hour
when statecraft is at its most brutal was one that Martin Wight identified over four decades ago.

Post-Cold War democracies have worked side-by-side with

authoritarian regimes to invade countries
Dunne 9 [Tim, International Relations Prof-Oxford, Liberalism, International Terrorism, and
Democratic Wars, International Relations, March, http://ire.sagepub.com/cgi/pdf_extract/23/1/107?rss=1]
The blurring of several post-9/11 interventions with the war on terror has highlighted an

important tension in the liberal understanding of international order. On the one hand,
international institutions are designed to be procedurally liberal, meaning that membership
is not restricted to democratic states, and collective action requires the consent of legitimate
institutions (however imperfectly expressed). The expectation of a liberal order defined by pluralist
principles is that all states have an interest in, and an obligation to obey, the rules. There is empirical
evidence that liberal publics strongly buy into the importance of procedural correctness. One of the striking
features of the polling data acquired in the UK prior to the 2003 Iraq War was the astonishing bounce in
favour of military action if it was backed by a UN Security Council resolution. In one poll, 76 per cent
preferred multilateral action, as against 32 per cent who favoured war in circumstances when the US
launched a war but the Security Council did not authorize it.19 The unipolar moment coincided with

a shift towards substantive liberal norms to do with democratic entitlement, good

governance and the responsibility of states for ensuring terrorist groups acting inside their
borders were either contained or eradicated. These emergent substantive norms can be invoked to justify
military interventions against tyrannical states committing human rights violations (Kosovo 1999) or
failing states unable to control terrorist networks (Afghanistan 2001 to the present). In the absence of

the UN being able to act militarily, as was envisaged by the framers of the Charter, the
consequence of this shift towards substantive liberal norms in international society is to
place significant power in the hands of those states and alliances who have the capacity to
act militarily. Such inequities are thrown into even sharper relief when, in the case of Iraq, the US and
the UK brazenly circumvented the will of the very institution tasked with legitimating forcible action. The
flexibility with which democratic wars are conducted by coalitions of powerful liberal states
operating alongside military forces from authoritarian regimes adds weight to those who
are sceptical about how far democratic ideals animate foreign policy behaviour . It is uncertain
why democracies should be so sensitive to regime type when engaged in long-run institution building (such
as NATO or the EU), yet so indifferent to regime type when constructing war-fighting coalitions. How can
it be defensible to fight unjust enemies while standing shoulder to shoulder with unjust friends?

Democratic peace theory incorrect-- democracies are

more likely to go to war than authoritarian states-- post
Cold war proves
Dunne 9 [Tim, International Relations Prof-Oxford, Liberalism, International Terrorism, and
Democratic Wars, International Relations, March, http://ire.sagepub.com/cgi/pdf_extract/23/1/107?rss=1]
An engagement with the question of liberalism and violence must include consideration of the democratic
peace thesis, famously described by Jack Levy as the closest thing we have to an empirical law in
international politics.13 The strong version of the theory claims that democracies are more peaceful
in general: in other words, there are checks on the executive which diminish the war-proneness of the
state. Democracies are defensive in character all the way down to the level of rational citizens,
who oppose war because it endangers their lives and is a waste of economic resources . This
rational aversion to war becomes embedded in the political order of the liberal state such that democracies
are least prone to war. The puzzle with this monadic democratic peace theory is that it does not

account for why strong democracies do not go to war against weak democracies when the
anticipated benefi ts are high and the costs very low . To address these weaknesses, advocates of
the general hypothesis that democracies are peace-prone have emphasized cultural factors inherent in open

societies, such as the emphasis upon mediation, dialogue and compromise. The logic of this position is that
war is still possible, though the likelihood is significantly reduced because of domestic institutions and
characteristics. The potential pacifying role of public opinion plays a key role here; a liberal public will
constrain the illiberal temptation of executive power during periods when there is an alleged threat to the
security of the state. What is unclear about this monadic cultural explanation is under what circumstances
liberal states can engage in wars of self-defence or wars against what Kant called unjust enemies. How do
we know when a breach of the general peace prone status quo is acceptable and when it is a betrayal of
democratic principles? In answering this question it is useful to engage with advocates of the

democratic peace who believe that democracies are only peace-prone in relation to other
democracies, the weaker version of the thesis (the so-called dyadic explanation). In relation to
illiberal states, democracies are as war-prone as any other regime type . While war might have
become unthinkable between democracies, the dyadic explanation allows for the fact that war remains an
instrument of statecraft in relation to authoritarian regimes that are unpredictable, unjust and dangerous.
The most convincing account of the dyadic theory comes from constructivism. Inter-democratic peace
emerges because democracies project the same preferences and intentions onto other democratic regimes.
Without the fear of aggression, cooperation becomes possible across a range of issue areas, from the
technical to the substantive. In structural theoretical terms, proponents of dyadic theory believe that the
logic of anarchy does not apply to those who have contracted a separate peace.15 This variant of the
literature is particularly germane for considering the relationship between liberalism and terrorism. No
liberal theorist believes there is a duty to include authoritarian enemies be they states or terrorist networks
in the pacific union: they do not share our values and their states are illegitimate because they lack the
consent of the governed. Yet, beyond the exclusion of non-democracies, there is no agreement on how
liberal states should engage with ideological enemies. Democratic peace theory provides powerful openings
into the relationship between domestic institutions and values, and foreign-policy outcomes. From the
vantage point of international history after the Cold War, however, both variants of the theory are in need of
revision. The monadic variant cannot explain the war-like interventions on the part of liberal states in
Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. Looked at from a vantage point outside the liberal
zone, the monadic claim to peace-proneness appears to be illusory . The dyadic account has
greater immunity to the several post-Cold War cases in which liberal states have resorted to war. As we
have seen, there is no particular claim to peace-proneness in relations between democracies
and authoritarian regimes. That said, the dyadic variant is challenged by two factors. First, in the
period since 1990, the incidence of initiating inter-state war has been lower among
authoritarian states than among democracies, casting doubt on Risses claim that democratic states
are defensively motivated. Second, given the centrality of regime type to the democratic peace

thesis, there remains the puzzle how and why democracies have varied so significantly in
their response to new threats such as international terrorism. In short, why do antimilitaristic norms of civilian power frame the response by certain liberal states to foreign
policy threats, while others are quick to resort to force and demonstrate effective warfighting capability? To begin to address these questions requires a rethinking of the relationship between
liberalism and international terrorism specifically, the institutional and social processes by which war is
produced and legitimated

Democratic/liberal peace theory ignores the violence that

goes into creating pliant regimes willing to trade with the
US---naturalizes mass violence in the interim and makes
long term collapse inevitable
Herman 12professor emeritus of finance at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
(Edward, 7/25/12, Reality Denial : Steven Pinker's Apologetics for Western-Imperial Volence,
http://www.zcommunications.org/reality-denial-steven-pinkers-apologetics-for-western-imperial-volenceby-edward-s-herman-and-david-peterson-1)
Pinkers establishment ideology kicks-in very clearly in his comparative treatment of communism, on the
one hand, and democracy and capitalism, on the other. He is explicit that whereas communism is a

utopian and dangerous ideology from which most of the worlds serious violence allegedly flowed
during the past century, democracy, capitalism, markets, gentle commerce, and the like, are all tied to
liberalismor more exactly to classical liberalism.[133] These institutional forms are not the result of
ideologies, much less utopian and dangerous; they are the historically more advanced permutations of the
Leviathan that help to elicit those components of the neurobiology of peaceableness (or better angels as
opposed to inner demons) for which the human brain has been naturally selected over evolutionary time.
Hence, they are sources of the alleged decline in violence, and their spread is a force for positive and more
peaceful change in the world.[134] Not so communism. At the outset of Chapter 6, The New Peace,
Pinker approvingly quotes Aleksandr Solzhenitsyns line that, unlike the communists, Shakespeares
evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses [b]ecause they had no ideology driving them. (295) In
discussing the alleged mental traits of the members of a society mobilized to commit genocide, he argues
that Utopian creeds that submerge individuals into moralized categories may take root in powerful regimes
and engage their full destructive might, and highlights Marxism during the purges, expulsions, and terrorfamines in Stalins Soviet Union, Maos China, and Pol Pots Cambodia. (328) In his 2002 book, The
Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, he devoted several pages to what he called the Marxist
genocides of the twentieth century, and noted that Historians are currently debating whether the
Communists mass-executions, forced marches, slave labor, and man-made famines led to one hundred
million deaths or only twenty-five million.[135] And in the section of the current book titled The
Trajectory of Genocide, Pinker cites the authority of the democratic peace theorist and
atrocitologist Rudolph Rummel, who in his 1994 book Death By Government wrote that whereas
totalitarian communist governments slaughter their people by the tens of millions[,]many democracies
can barely bring themselves to execute serial murderers.[136] (357) As we have seen, Pinker rewrites

history to accommodate this familiar establishment perspective, so that the Cold War was
rooted in communist expansionism and U.S. efforts at containment, and the several million
deaths in the Korean and Vietnam wars were attributable to the communists fanatical
unwillingness to surrender to superior force, not to anti-communist and racist attitudes that
facilitated the U.S. militarys mass killings of distant peoples. He deals with U.S. statecapitalisms support and sponsorship of the corrupt open-door dictatorships of Suharto,
Marcos, Mobutu, Pinochet, Diem, the Greek Colonels, and the National Security States of
Latin America (among many others), and the burgeoning of torture following the end of the
Cold War, by eye aversion. In Pinkers view, the Third Worlds troubled areas are
suffering from their failure to absorb the civilizing lessons modeled for them in the United
States and other advanced countries. He ignores the eight-decades-long massive U.S. investment
in the military and ideological training, political takeovers, and subsequent support of
Third World dictators in numerous U.S. client terror states, including Guatemala,
transformed from a democracy to terror state in 1954, Brazil, shifted from a democracy to
military dictatorship in 1964, the Philippines in 1972, and Chile the same in 1973, among
many others. A tabulation by one of the present authors in 1979 found that 26 of the 35 states in that era
that used torture on an administrative basis were U.S. clients, all of them recipients of U.S. military and
economic aid.[137] These clients were capitalist in structure, but threatened and employed

force to keep the lower orders disorganized and more serviceable to the local elites and
transnational corporations investing there. One Latin American Church document of that period
spoke of the local U.S.-supported regimes as imposing an economic model so repressive that
it provoked a revolution that did not exist.[138] This was a deliberate decivilizing
process, with the civilized serving as co-managers. We have seen that Pinker finds the modern
era peaceful by focusing on the absence of war between the major powers, downplaying the
many murderous wars carried out by the West (and mainly the United States) against small
countries, and falsely suggesting that the lesser-country conflicts are home-grown, even
where, as in the cases of Iraq and Afghanistan, it was U.S. military assaults that precipitated
the internal armed conflicts, with the United States then actively participating in them. The Israeli
occupation and multi-decade ethnic cleansing of Palestine he misrepresents as a cycle of deadly revenge,
with only Israel fighting against terrorism in this cycle. He speaks of Islamic and communist ideology as
displaying violent tendencies, and congratulates the U.S. military for allegedly overcoming the kind of

racist attitudes reported at the time of the Vietnam war (U.S. soldiers referring to Vietnamese as gooks,
slopes, and the like)but the militarys new humanism is another piece of Pinker misinformation and prowar propaganda. And he fails to cite the numerous instances of Israeli leaders referring to Palestinians as
grasshoppers, beasts walking on two legs, crocodiles, insects, and a cancer, or Israeli rabbis
decrying them as the Amalekites of the present era, calling for extermination of these unchosen people.
[139] As regards Israel, Pinker never mentions the Israeli belief in a promised land and chosen people
who may be fulfilling Gods will in dispossessing Palestinians.[140] Although the lack of angelic behavior
in these assaults and this language, ethnic cleansing, and dispossession process is dramatic, and has had
important effects on the attitudes and behavior of Islamic peoples, it fails to fit Pinkers ideological system
and political agenda, and therefore is not a case of conflict with ideological roots. For Pinker, there is
also nothing ideological in the miracle of the market (Reagan), no stark utopia in Friedrich von
Hayeks assertion that the particulars of a spontaneous order cannot be just or unjust,[141] no ideology

in the faith that an unconstrained free market will not produce intolerable inequalities and
majority resistance that in turn require the likes of Pinochet, Suharto, or Hitler to reassert
the requisite stability. It is simply outside of Pinkers orbit of thought that liberalism and
neoliberalism in the post-Soviet world are ideologies that have serviced an elite in a class war;
that the major struggles and crises that we have witnessed, over climate change, the massive
upward redistribution of income and wealth, the global surge of disposable workers, and the
enlargement of NATO and the police-and-surveillance state, are features of a revitalized
consolidation of class power, under more angelic names like reform, free markets,
flexibility, stability, and fiscal discipline. For Pinker, the huge growth of the prison population shows
the lack of self-control of the incarcerated savages still with us; and it is one merit of the liberal state that
it gets the bad guys off the streets. Another device that Pinker uses when weighing capitalism versus
communism is to take notorious state abuses committed in the name of communism (e.g., under Joseph
Stalin), not as perversions of communism, but as inherent in its ideology, and flowing directly from it.
Many historians and leftists have long argued that Stalinism constituted a radical betrayal and perversion of
genuine communism, and that it emerged out of crises and stresses that made anything approaching genuine
communism unreachable.[142] Pinker never addresses this kind of explanation and exemption of realworld communism, but he does this implicitly for real-world degenerate forms of capitalism. Thus, Nazi
Germany and its mass murders are not credited to capitalisms account, even though Germany under the
Nazis was still capitalist in economic form and surely a variant of capitalism arising under stress and threat
from below, with important business support.[143] Suhartos Indonesia and Pinochets Chile could be said
to fit this same pattern. Rightwing believers in the crucial importance of free markets, such as Friedrich von
Hayek and Milton Friedman, approved of Pinochets rule, which ended political freedom and freedom of
thought, but worked undeviatingly for corporate interests and rights. But it took only one decade of the
Chicago Boys privatizations and other reforms for Chiles economy and financial system to collapse. In
the harsh depression that ensued, the banks were re-nationalized and their foreign creditors bailed-out in a
process sometimes called the Chicago Road to Socialism, but then shortly thereafter they were reprivatized all over again, at bargain-basement prices.[144] (Pinochet does not show up in Pinkers index;
Chile does, but never as a free market state loved by von Hayek, Friedman, and the Chicago School of
Economics, and supported by the United States.) In one of his books more outlandish moments, Pinker
even allocates Nazism and the holocaust to communism. He writes that since Hitler read Marx in 1913,
Marxism led definitively if more circuitously to the [dekamegamurders] committed by the Nazi regime
in Germany.[145] (343) But while there is no evidence that Hitler really examined Marx or accepted any
of his or his fellow Marxist writers ideas,[146] it is incontestable fact that Hitler held Marxism in
contempt, and that communism and communists ranked very high among Hitlers and the Nazis demons
and targets (along with Jews) when they held power in Germany.[147] So is the fact that racist theories and
mismeasure of man literature in the Houston Stewart Chamberlain traditionof which Richard
Herrnstein and Charles Murray arguably are heirswere fanatically embraced by Hitler, and therefore
linked to Nazismand not very circuitously, either. Pinker not only doesnt credit the Nazi holocaust to
capitalism, he also fails to give capitalism credit for the extermination of the Native Americans
in the Western Hemisphere and the huge death tolls from the Slave Trades,[148] which should
have been prevented by the rising better angels. As noted, he also ignores democratic capitalisms
responsibility for the surge of colonialism in the 18th and 19th centuries, the associated

holocausts,[149] and the death-dealing and exploitation of the Western-sponsored terror

states in Indonesia, the Philippines, Latin America and elsewhere. He also fails to address
the huge toll of structural violence under capitalism flowing from its domestic and global
dispossession processes, and, interestingly, intensifying with the post-1979 transformation of China and
the breakup of the Soviet bloc and Soviet Union (1989-1991), which reduced any need on the part of
Western capitalism to show concern for the well-being of its own working class majority. This helps

explain the significant global increases in inequality and dispossession and slum-city
enlargement over the past two decades, a period that Pinker calls the New Peace and depicts as
an age of accelerating Civilization! Pinker refers to the deaths during Chinas Great Leap Forward
(1958-1961) as a Mao mastermindedfamine that killed between 20 million and 30 million people.[150]
(331) For Pinker, clearly, the dead were victims of a deliberate policy that demonstrates the evil behind
communist ideology. But as the development economists Jean Drze and Amartya Sen have pointed out,
China under Mao installed a massive and effective system of public medical services, as well as literacy
and nutrition programs that greatly benefitted the general population in the years prior to the faminea fact
that is difficult to reconcile with the allegation that Mao regarded mass starvation as an acceptable means to
some other end. Instead, Drze and Sen blamed this tragedy on the lack of democracy in China, with the
absence of pressure from below and a lack of timely knowledge of policy failure significantly offsetting the
life-saving benefits of communist Chinas medical and other social welfare programs.[151] Drze and Sen
also compared the number of deaths caused by this famine under Mao with the number of deaths caused by
what they called the endemic undernutrition and deprivation that afflicts Indias population year-in and
year-out. Estimates of extra mortality [from Chinas famine] vary from 16.5 million to 29.5 million, they
wrote, arguably the largest in terms of total excess mortality in recorded history.[152] But despite the
gigantic size of excess mortality in the Chinese famine, they continued, the extra mortality in India from
regular deprivation in normal times vastly overshadows the former. Comparing Indias death rate of 12 per
thousand with Chinas 7 per thousand, and applying that difference to Indias population of 781 million in
1986, we get an estimate of excess normal mortality in India of 3.9 million per year. This implies that
every eight years or so more people die in India because of its higher death rate than died in China in the
gigantic famine.India seems to manage to fill its cupboard with more skeletons every eight years than
China put there in its years of famine.[153] Indeed, by 2005, some 46 percent (or 31 million) of
Indias children were underweight, and 79 percent suffered anemia. Forty years of efforts to
raise how much food-grains Indians are able to eat has been destroyed by a mere dozen years of economic
reform, Jawaharal Nehru University economist Utsa Patnaik observes.[154]

Useful Overview Evidence

2NC/1NREpistemology
Their obsession with scientific quantification of IR is
narcissism in the face of inevitable uncertaintytheir
studies are not neutral, but rather are deeply political
variables are cherry picked to support theories that
conform to pre-conceived cultural notions.
Jeong 99associate professor at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason
University (Ho-Won, Epistemological Foundations for Peace
Research, classweb.gmu.edu/hwjeong/epistemological.htm)
Modes of Social Inquiry

In a positivist mode of inquiry, social knowledge emerges from emulating the procedures of
natural sciences. There is a clear distinction between facts and values. Efforts for new
theoretical departures remain valid only if concrete empirical research programs are developed. A theory
needs to be verified by the process of operationalizing and testing hypotheses. Research should be freed
from non-empirical claims of individual conviction and conscience. In dealing with the complexity of
empirical phenomena, theory ought to explain and predict the trend of events
Contrary to that, hermeneutics is based on the analysis of the meanings which

human beings attach to their actions. The study of mind is different from that of
nature. Analysis should reveal social constraints and promote cultural understanding. The
goal of research is enlightenment and emancipation. The values and priorities of goals tend to be
diverse across social groups and classes. What is rational changes across time and
space. Rationalities are intersubjective in the sense that they can only be really examined
from within the experiences of social groups which are the object of research .
Critical theory methodology identifies forms of conflict and patterns of development which
could lead to the transformation of a world order. There is no over-arching ahistorical
structure. Explanation of the prospects for change requires analysis of the connections
between modes of production and hierarchical political structures (Cox, 1996). The scope of
the inquiry also focuses on a distorted ideological account of social relations by a hegemonic
class.
In a postmodern vein, problems in different social locations and histories are interpreted by
multiple minds and knowledge rather than meta-narratives (Seidman, 1994:5). Speculation is the most
open form of inquiry. Humanity cannot be studied through a legislative reason which is helpful
in producing general theories. The social world is fragmented into a multitude of communities
and cultural traditions. The role of a social analyst is to mediate between different social worlds and to
interpret unfamiliar cultures (Sediman, 1994:14). Resolving major theoretical differences is not desirable
nor feasible.
Scientific Approaches to Peace Research
The early endeavor to establish a peace science originates in mathematical modelling of dynamics of arms
races (Richardson, 1960). Quantitative studies of conflict behavior in the 1960s was affected by the
revolution of behavioral sciences. Theoretical development was believed to be promoted by the collection
of raw data, highly deductive propositions, and empirical verification. Formal models supported by
statistical analysis were expected to explain both behavioral and structural characteristics of violent
conflict.
The motivation behind scientific research was that ideas for creating a peaceful world would
emerge from theories on human behavior and institutions verified by empirical methods. Hypothesis
building would help researchers observe cooperative and conflictual patterns of behavior under different
circumstances. Order in international relations could be analyzed in terms of such variables
as distribution of power and patterns of interaction between political units (Kaplan, 1957;

Modelski, 1978). Perceptions and cognition of decision makers and group processes are

important variables in scientific approaches to research on war decision

making. Regularities in human behavior were conceptualized and generalized in the studies
of the Korean War decision making and the Cuban Missile Crisis.(Allison, 1971; Paige, 1968)
Scientific orientation has paid a great deal of attention to data collection and representation of the data
through a modelling process. Simulation, gaming techniques have been utilized in developing a causal
model of violent conflict (Guetzkow and Alger, 1963; Singer and Small, 1972). Later the interaction of
economic, social, political and environmental systems was studied by world modelling approaches
(Bremer, 1987). Methodological rigor and precision were sought in systematic observation of the problems
of violence and other types of human sufferings.
The Critique of Behavioral Sciences
The behavioralist traditions of peace research have been criticized for being too empiricist.(Galtung,
1975) Quantitative analysis is not able to reveal intentional aspects of behavior in a specific

context. Developing peace research requires a framework for synthesis in integrating

different sets of issues. While collecting data on manifest violence, arms races and military coups is
critical to the development of empirical theories (SIPRI, 1996), research design has to be guided by
appropriate theoretical frameworks. The ability to think about and discuss key research questions
stems from conceptual development of issues to be studied.

Ignoring normative questions would not help find alternative visions. Conditions for
building peace are not dealt with in behavioral research traditions. Statistical data and
empirical findings are themselves do not offer strategies for creating a peaceful world. The
uncertainty of politics would not be removed by pure scientific analysis of human
behavior. According to some observers in peace studies, the efforts to find regularities have been
pursued "to the point of eliminating individual creativity and responsibility may well mire
us in cyclic determinism."(Forcey, 1989:13) Critics of the positivist paradigm attribute
the reductionist character of contemporary thought to the drive for control of nature.
The critique of behavioral sciences coincides with a "critique of conscience" in the academic community.
Conscience dictates feelings, moral stances, and a concern for truth and justice. The desire for value
explicit inquiry stems from the fact that human behavior would not be investigated without references to
social collectivity in historical contexts. Overall, the normative starting point of peace research has to be
anchored in the agreement that peace is the object of the quest.(Broadhead, 1997:2) The utility of any
research methods could be evaluated in terms of the way they are compatible with the general goal of a
disciplinary focus.
Holistic Approaches
Some researchers suggest that peace studies should start from holism as the framework.(Smoker and Groff,
1996) Knowledge about general human experiences of conflict helps interpret specific events. Given their
abstract nature, however, theories may not correspond with the facts and events which they seek to explain.
The meanings of events are set up within a context of wholes. The intellectual transformation is
necessary for developing a paradigm of peace. The achievement of peace should be a holistic goal
of research.
Holistic versions of theories project the flow of alternative images of reality. There are different
theoretical explanations about how and why to go to war. The plurality of theories ought not to be regarded
as a preliminary stage of knowledge which will eventually lead to one true grand theory. Universally
applicable knowledge is not produced by piecemeal theory building efforts. There seems to be
consensus that peace research must not be limited to conventional empirical methods.
Extended historical perspectives illustrate what is important in understanding conditions for peace. The

evaluation of research findings needs a yardstick for examining their relevance. The
incorporation of emancipatory cognitive interest would help suggest theories for a peaceful
world. More holistic approaches can be encouraged by hermeneutic philosophy of science.
Reasoning needs to be combined with experiences in understanding the holistic pictures of
social relations. The outcome in the real world is not easily deduced from abstractly
modeled relationships. In considering difficulties for justification of inducing wholes from parts, the
ultimate validity of the big pictures is elusive. Theories which can

be positively verifiable does not necessarily mean that they are true. Realities in peace and
conflict do not last long enough to be subject to comprehensive, systematic and effective
empirical assaults on them. Explanation can be based on intuitive understanding of long
and varied experiences. There are various ways to observe the world, including historical
interpretations.Different perceptions of social relationships result from the process of
formation and transformation of images and symbols.
Peace studies may belong to the same category as history and critical sociology in terms of its methods to
study an object. In contrast with economics, many factors related to structural violence such

as political repression and economic exploitation cannot be easily understood without sociohistorical contexts. Distinctions between independent and dependent variables are
artificial. Understanding the outcome of an event would be enhanced by clarifying the specific goals of
actors.
Emancipatory Projects
Direct criticism of sovereign state power may be based on questioning the mode of analysis to
construct linear histories. Social and political boundaries cannot be imposed especially when

truth and meanings are in doubt. Sovereign claims are used to shape human loyalties, but
the forms of identities are not any more certain. Resolving differences of opinion about the
legitimacy of state institutions is not possible within clearly defined and demarcated areas of
research. Thus emancipatory projects oppose intellectual and social closure which does not
tolerate diversity.
In a poststructural approach, language and discourse shape politics and social institutions.
(Bannet, 1993) A normative social space is located in the process of assigning meanings to
opposing phenomena. Binary opposition have contributed to the creation of linguistic
and social hierarchies.(Seidman, 1994:18) Poststructuralism aims to disturb the dominant binary
meanings that function to perpetuate social and political hierarchies. Deconstructionism is the method to be
deployed. This involves unsettling and displacing the binary hierarchies. The goal of a deconstructionist
strategy is to create a social space which favors autonomy. This process is tolerant of difference and
ambiguity.(Seidman, 1994:19) The historically contingent origin and political
role of binary hierarchies are uncovered by deconstructionism.

Instead of being instruments of bureaucratic social control, human studies should serve
emancipatory aims. Society is imagined less as a material structure, organic order, or social
system than as a construction rooted in historically specific discursive practices. Communities
serve as texts whose symbols and meanings need to be translated. Interpretative knowledge promotes
diversity, expands tolerance, and legitimates difference as well as fosters understanding and communication
(Seidman, 1994:14-5)

People's perceptions about the world rely on their social and cultural milieu. The goal
of emancipation has nothing to do with science. Legitimation arises from their own linguistic
practice and communicational interaction. As long as social science serves as the instrument of a
disciplined society, truth is produced by power. (Foucault, 1967) All knowledge claims are
moves in a power game. Social science can contribute to emancipation by widening and
deepening our sense of community. If meanings rest with communities, knowledge can have
a specific role in promoting human solidarity.(Waever, Ole, 1996:171)
Value Issues
Even in a conventional mode of inquiry, values are not always considered separate from

analysis. The accumulation of more data and testing hypotheses may reveal a trend in the
arms race. However, the ultimate analytical goal should be not only explanatory but also
prescriptive. The goals of peace research are defined in terms of broad human interests
which are not dealt with by a state-centric paradigm. Human dimensions of security can
be more easily understood in value paradigms. This paradigm shift requires a more focus on nonstate centric actors, ranging from individuals to supranational institutions. The bias toward a more
inclusive concept of global society as opposed to the exclusionary state can be justified in
terms of a goal oriented research.

Each discipline is governed by certain sets of assumptions and rules that determine its
approaches to knowledge and acceptable methods (Forcey, 1989:11). Peace and conflict
studies have been developed by value-guided research paradigms. Multidimensional
concepts of security explain the importance of economic equity and ecological
protection. Core theories have been established around negative and positive peace. Peace has become a
more inclusive concept. The underlying assumptions of positive peace have value implications
for the satisfaction of basic needs. Peaceful conditions include freedom from oppression and social
justice beyond the absence of violence. The impact of poverty and economic exploitation on
conflict can be empirically understood. However, their major form of inquiry ought to be
dialectic. While peace and conflict studies need to be as objective as possible, it cannot
succumb to the academic prejudice of total dissociation from the object of study. The
starting point for peace research may be found in the ideals of social transformation
through knowledge.

Aff Ev. Suspect

Prefer our evidencethe Aff is epistemologically
bankrupt. Their evidence is manufactured and distorted
by the threat industry.
Pieterse 7Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Sociology @ Illinois (Urbana) [Political and Economic
Brinkmanship, Review of International Political Economy 14: 3 p 473]
Brinkmanship and producing instability carry several meanings. The American military spends 48% of
world military spending (2005) and represents a vast, virtually continuously growing
establishment that is a world in itself with its own lingo, its own reasons, internecine battles
and projects. That this large security establishment is a bipartisan project makes it
politically relatively immune . That for security reasons it is an insular world shelters

it from scrutiny. For reasons of deniability the president is insulated from certain operations (Risen,
2006). That it is a completely hierarchical world onto itself makes it relatively
unaccountable. Hence, to quote Rumsfeld, stuff happens. In part this is the familiar theme of the
Praetorian Guard and the shadow state (Stockwell, 1991). It includes a military on the go, a
military that seeks career advancement through role expansion, seeks expansion through
threat inflation , and in inflated threats finds rationales for ruthless action and is
thus subject to feedback from its own echo chambers . Misinformation broadcast
by part of the intelligence apparatus blows back to other security circles where it may be
taken for real (Johnson, 2000). Inhabiting a hall of mirrors this apparatus operates in a
perpetual state of self hypnosis with, since it concerns classified information and covert ops, limited
checks on its functioning.

Military empirically hypes threats

Zenko 2/26Micah Zenko is a Fellow in the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign
Relations [February 26, 2013, Most. Dangerous. World. Ever. Foreign Policy,
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/02/26/most_dangerous_world_ever?wp_login_redirect=0]
In fact, the military is actually pretty good at developing worst-case contingency response
plans for any number of foreseeable or crazy crises, using the operations -- or "3" -- planning staffs
at combatant commands and in the Joint Staff. But the Pentagon's budgetary and programmatic

managers did not plan in advance of sequestration, and now they find themselves
scrambling to finish the job. In September, Defense Department comptroller Robert Hale said, "We
will wait as long as we can to begin this process." Last week, he defended the lack of planning: "If we'd
done this six months ago, we would have caused the degradation in productivity and morale that we're
seeing now among our civilians." History will judge whether or not the Pentagon gambled correctly, if the
already once-delayed sequestration is triggered as scheduled this Friday.
Instead of planning, Pentagon officials seemed to all reach for their thesauri after the Budget Control Act
was passed in August 2011. Civilian and military officials have used a range of colorful terms to

decry the joint-White House-Congress manufactured crisis of sequestration: "doomsday

mechanism," "fiscal castration," "peanut butter," "stupid," "gun to their heads," "nuts,"
"irrational," "an indiscriminate formula," "worst possible outcome," "legislative
madness," "devastating," "shameful," "reckless," and "absolutely disastrous." During what
was supposed to be his final overseas trip -- before Senate Republicans delayed Chuck Hagel's
confirmation process -- Panetta's staff appropriately gifted him a plastic meat axe, his favorite metaphor for
graphically describing how sequestration would be applied across defense budget.

Besides applying these metaphors while simultaneously defending the necessity and relevance of
their service or agency, national security officials have also seized the opportunity to
paint the world as increasingly dangerous, unstable, and unpredictable. This casual
threat inflation -- unquestioned by congressional members and the vast majority of
punditry and media outlets -- has serious consequences for America's future foreign policy
agenda. Consider these comments from over the past two weeks:
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin Dempsey informed the Senate Armed Service
Committee (SASC), "I will personally attest to the fact that [the world is] more dangerous
than it has ever been." The next day, he warned the HASC: "There is no foreseeable peace
dividend. The security environment is more dangerous and more uncertain." Similarly, Army
Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno professed to the SASC, "The global environment is the most
uncertain I've seen in my thirty-six years of service." Director of National Intelligence James Clapper
also concluded in an interview: "In almost 50 years in intelligence, I don't remember when we've had a
more diverse array of threats and crisis situations around the world to deal with."
I will not repeat Gen. Dempsey's questionable threat calculus again in this column. However, it is worth
noting that Dempsey has claimed for over a year: "We are living in the most dangerous time

in my lifetime." Now, Dempsey argues that we are not merely living in the most dangerous
moment since his birth in 1952, but since the earth was formed 4.54 billion years ago .
Also appearing before the HASC, Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Amos predicted: "The
world we live in right now is very dangerous, and it's going to be that way for the next two
decades." Referring to the relatively responsive capabilities of the Marine Expeditionary Units, Amos
added: "I'm not trying to scare everybody, but you have to have a hedge force...to buy time for our national
leaders." Given the U.S. military's terrible track record of predicting future

conflicts , we should be skeptical of Amos's contention of being able to accurately

forecast the global security environment through 2029.

Truth claims / epistemology

Security Discourse Assumes Threats As Natural Their Harms and Solvency
Claims are Products of a Particular Ideology.
David Shim, Phd Candidate @ GIGA Institute of Asian Studies, 8 [Paper prepared for presentation at the
2008 ISA, Production, Hegemonization and Contestation of Discursive Hegemony: The Case of the SixParty Talks in Northeast Asia, www.allacademic.com/meta/p253290_index.html]
The notion of discourse draws on the concept elaborated by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (2001). 7
Discourses are treated as productive (social, linguistic, non-linguistic) practices, which construct objects
and subjects and define the very conditions of meaningful statements and actions (Laffey/Weldes 2004: 28;
Torfing 2005b: 161). Discourse enables one to know and to make sense of the world (Doty 1996: 6). The
underlying themes of poststructural discourse theory are the assumptions that the meanings of objects and
subjects are not fixed and not pre-given by nature, god or reason, but are rather contextual, relational, and
contingent (Howarth 2005: 317).8 Things, events or actions do not tell their own tale, but it is the
discursive practices that produce meaning, which, for instance, makes a tank a means of aggression or
defense. The mere existence of brute facts does not have any intrinsic meaning, which could arise from
itself. They become meaningful only in discourse (Waever 2004: 198). So, the task for discourse analysts is
to unveil the structures of meaning and examine how they are constituted and changed.9 9 In the words of
Janice Bially Mattern (2005: 5), discourse analysts do not seek for discoveries, which suggest finding new
facts of the world, but for uncoveries, which imply an excavation from underneath layers of ossified or
never problematized knowledge (see also Roland Bleiker 2005: xlviii). Laclau and Mouffe (2001: 112)
understand discourses as the (temporary) fixation of meaning around certain signs, which they call nodal
points. Meaning is produced through articulatory practices, which establish a particular relationship
between other signs and those nodal points, so that their meanings are mutually modified (ibid. 105). For
instance, as it is shown in section 4, peace or stability acquire their specific meanings in relation to

denuclearization, non-proliferation or normalization in the discourse of the Six-Party Talks. The

study of language is seen crucial for discursive analyses although the latter is not limited to the former
(Neumann 2002). The common understanding of language in IR and other disciplines regarding its
significance is to refer to it as a transparent medium which merely reflects the world as it is. Moreover, in
traditional accounts of IR, such as (neo)realism, liberalism, institutionalism and conventional
constructivism the significance of language is ignored or treated as marginal.10 What counts, are (social
inter-)actions. Talk is cheap and one cannot be sure if s/he really means what s/he says are commonly
shared understandings.11 In contrast to that, discourse theoretical approaches consider language defined
as any collective sign system not just as a mirror or mediator of the world, but as its very creator (cf.
Campbell 1998; Howarth 2000; Hansen 2006). Basically it is stated that subjects, objects and concepts do
not exist or rather do not have any meaning unless they are talked (but also acted and interacted) into
existence through certain linguistic, non-linguistic and social practices.12 As Janice Bially Mattern (2005:
92) puts it, the world is not real in any socially meaningful sense unless actors find ways to communicate
about it.

The affirmatives predictions are based in misplaced certainty they have compiled
indeterminate evidence and generated a singular, likely inaccurate reading
Mitzen and Schweller, 11 (Jennifer Mitzen and Randall Schweller, Mitzen and Schweller are
professors of Political Science at Ohio State University, Knowing the Unknown Unknowns: Misplaced
Certainty and the Onset of War, 3/15/2011,
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09636412.2011.549023, RM)
Taking the definitional question first, we define misplaced certainty as a situation where a decision maker
has eliminated uncertainty prematurely. Thus understood, misplaced certainty is comprised of two equally
important dimensions. First, the decision-maker's subjective probability estimate of one does not line up
with the way the world really is, that is, with the objective probability, which is less than one. The decision
maker has made a mistake. In some sense, mistakes are inevitabledecision makers can never know all of
the relevant information and are, to some extent, always placing bets. Seen in this light, international
politics is like the stock market: longs bet that a stock will go up, while shorts bet that it will go down; both
sides cannot be correct. 63 Both have some degree of confidence in their assessment, but one of the traders
must be misestimating the future price of the stock. Most everyday decisions are low-risk, low-cost bets
under uncertainty, and mistakes are common. Misplaced certainty, however, is not merely a mistake. With
misplaced certainty a decision maker places a bet without really acknowledging it is only a bet. The
evidence is indeterminate, but the decision maker imposes a singular reading of the situation on which the
bet is based. This suggests the second dimension of misplaced certaintypersistence. The decision maker
holds tight to those estimates, acting as if they are accurate readings of a situation. As Arie Kruglanski and
Donna Webster describe it, the mind seizes and freezes. 64 A mistake is a case where the decision maker
decides, perhaps even is certain about a course of action, but then realizes that the initial judgment was
mistaken and changes course. With misplaced certainty, in contrast, if the decision maker encounters new
information that objectively undermines the initial judgment he or she does not, as a result, become less
certain about it. Rather, as time passes, certainty about the initial judgment or decision hardens, and
incoming information, even when contradictory, is assimilated to it. 65

Truth claims / epistemology

Threat perception is rooted in stimulation; not reality.
James der Derian 90, James Der Derian is a Watson Institute research professor of international
studies. He was a director of the Institute's Global Security Program and founder of the Information
Technology, War, and Peace Project and the Global Media Project. The (S)pace of International Relations:
Simulation, Surveillance, and Speed, International Studies Quarterly, Blackwell Publishing on behalf of
The International Studies Association. Vol. 34, No. 3, Sep., 1990, Page [295] of 295-31
After analyzing the political economy of the sign and visiting Disneyland, Jean Baudrillard, the
French master of edifying hyperbole, notified the inhabitants of advanced mediacracies that they
were no longer distracted by the technical repro- duction of reality, or alienated and repressed by
their over-consumption of its spec- tacular representation. Unable to recover the "original" and
seduced by the simula- tion, they had lost the ability to distinguish between the model and the
real: "Abstrac- tion today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept.
Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation
by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal" (1983a: 2). Baudrillard exceeds
Nietzsche in his interpretation of the death of god and the inability of rational man to fill the
resulting value-void with stable distinctions be- tween the real and the apparent, the true and the
false, the good and the evil. In the excessive, often nihilistic vision of Baudrillard, the task of
modernity is no longer to demystify or disenchant illusion-for "with the real world we have also
abolished the apparent world" (see Nietzsche, 1968: 40-41; Der Derian, 1987: Ch. 9)-but to save
a principle that has lost its object: "Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us
believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are
no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simula- tion. It is no longer a question of
false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real,
and thus of saving the reality principle" (1983a: 25).9
The representation of international relations is not immune to this development. In a very short
period the field has oscillated: from realist representation, in which world-historical figures
meant what they said and said what they meant, and diplo- matic historians recorded it as such in
Rankean fashion ("wie es eigentlich gewesen ist"); to neorealist, in which structures did what
they did, and we did what they made us do, except of course when neorealists revealed in
journals like the International Studies Quarterly and International Organization what they
"really" did; to hyperrealist, in which the model of the real becomes more real than the reality it
models, and we become confused.'
What is the reality principle that international relations theory in general seeks to save? For the
hard-core realist, it is the sovereign state acting in an anarchical order to maintain and if possible
expand its security and power in the face of penetrating, de-centering forces such as the ICBM,
military (and now civilian) surveillance satel- lites, the international terrorist, the
telecommunications web, environmental move- ments, transnational human rights conventions,
to name a few of the more obvious. For the soft-core neorealist and peace-research modeler, it is
the prevailing pattern of systemic power which provides stable structures, regime constraints,
and predicta- ble behavior for states under assault by similar forces of fragmentation. Before we
consider how simulations in particular "work" to save the reality princi- ple, we should note the
multiple forms that these simulations take in international relations. From the earliest Kriegspiel
(war-play) of the Prussian military staff in the 1830s, to the annual "Global Game" at the Naval
War College in Newport, Rhode Island, simulations have been staged to prepare nation states for
future wars; by doing so, as many players would claim, they help keep the peace: qui desiderat
pacem, praeparet bellum. Simulations are used at other defense colleges, such as the strategic
and counterterrorist games played at the National Defense University or the more tactically
oriented computerized "Janus" game perfected at the Army War College." Then there are the
early academic models, like Harold Guetzkow's seminal InterNa- tion Simulation (INS), which
spawned a host of second- and third-generation models: SIPER (Simulated International
Processes), GLOBUS (Generating Long- term Options by Using Simulation), and SIMPEST
(Simulation of Military, Political, Economic, and Strategic Interactions).'2 Many simulations are
now commercially available: the popular realpolitik computer game Balance of Power; the

remarkably sophisticated video games modeled on Top Gun, the Iranian hostage rescue mission,
and other historical military conflicts; and the film/video WarGames, in which a hacker taps into
an Air Force and nearly starts World War III. And then there are the ubiquitous think-tank games,
like those at the Rand Corporation, that model everything from domestic crime to nuclear war, as
well as the made-to-order macro- strategic games, like the war game between Iraq and Iran that
the private consulting company BDM International sold to Iraq (the
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Truth claims / epistemology

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highest bidder?). It may grate on the ears of some of the players to hear "gaming," "modeling,"
and"simulation" used
interchangeably.'3 Yet in the literature and during interviews I found users using all three terms
to describe practices that could be broadly defined as the continuation of war by means of
verisimilitude (Allen, 1987: 6-7). Conventionally, a game uses broad descriptive strokes and a
minimum of mathematical abstraction to make generalizations about the behavior of actors,
while simulation uses algorithms and computer power to analyze the amount of technical detail
considered necessary to predict events and the behavior of actors. Judging from the shift in the
early 1980s by the military and think-tanks to mainly computerized games-reflected in the
change of the Joint Chiefs of Staff gaming organization from SAGA (Studies, Analy- sis, and
Gaming Agency) to JAD (Joint Analysis Directorate)-it would seem that simulation is becoming
the preferred "sponge" term in international relations. "Sim- ulation" also has the obvious
advantage of sounding more serious than "gaming" and of carrying more of a high-tech,
scientific connotation than "modeling." The object of this inquiry is not to conduct an internal
critique of the simulation industry, nor to claim some privileged grounds for disproving its
conclusions.'4 Rather, the intent is to show how, in the construction of a realm of meaning that
has minimal contact with historically specific events or actors, simulations have demon- strated
the power to displace the "reality" of international relations they purport to represent.
Simulations have created a new space in international relations where actors act, things happen,
and the consequences have no origins except the artificial cyberspace of the simulations
themselves.
Over the last four years I have collected numerous examples of this new phenome- non; I will
share two of them here. 15 The first is the case of the U.S.S. Vincennes which shot down an
Iranian civilian airliner on July 3, 1988, in the mistaken belief that it was a military aircraft. The
Vincennes was equipped with the most sophisticated U.S. naval radar system, the Aegis, which
according to a later military investigation functioned perfectly.'6 It recorded that the Iranian
Airbus was on course and flying level at 12,000 feet, not descending towards the Vincennes as
the radar operator, the tactical information coordinator, and one other officer reported at the time.
Some- how, between machine and man, a tragic misreading took place which resulted in the
death of 290 people. One possible cause is stress: the Vincennes and its crew had never been in
combat and were engaged with Iranian speedboats when the Airbus was first detected. Yet stress
has many origins, and the military shows signs of ignoring the most serious one. The Vincennes
trained for nine months before it went into the Persian Gulf. That training relied heavily on tapes
that simulate battle situations, none of which included overflights by civilian airliners-a common
occur- rence in the Gulf.17
To be sure, much more was involved in the decision to fire at the Airbus, not least the memory of
the U.S.S. Stark which was nearly destroyed in the Persian Gulf by an Exocet missile from an
Iraqi warplane. But I would like to suggest that the reality of the nine months of simulated
battles displaced, overrode, absorbed the reality of the Airbus. The Airbus disappeared before the
missile struck: it faded from an airliner full of civilians to an electronic representation on a radar
screen to a simulated target. The simulation overpowered a reality which did not conform to it.

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