Critical Impacts

Genocide
 Turns
Genocide destroys culture this turns life and death impacts

Card 03 (Claudia Card is professor of philosophy at University of Wisconsin, Winter 2003, Hypatia, vol.
18 issue 1, JSTOR #!tylerd)

Specific to genocide is the

harm inflicted on its victims' social vitality . It is not just that one's group membership
a group with its own
is the occasion for harms that are definable independently of one's identity as a member of the group. When
cultural identity is destroyed, its survivors lose their cultural heritage and may even
lose their intergenerational connections . To use Orlando Patterson's terminology, in that event, they may
become "socially dead" and their descendants "natally alienated," no longer able to pass
along and build upon the traditions , cultural developments (including languages), and projects
of earlier generations (1982, 5-9). The harm of social death is not necessarily less extreme than that of
physical death. Social death can even aggravate physical death by making it indecent,
removing all respectful and caring ritual, social connections, and social contexts that are capable of
making dying bearable and even of making one's death meaningful . In my view, the
special evil of genocide lies in its infliction of not just physical death (when it does that) but social death,
producing a consequent meaninglessness of one's life and even of its termination .

Genocidal mindset makes life not worth living turns value to

life
Alford 90 (C. Fred Alford, Ph. D UT is a prof. of Government and Politics at the University of
Maryland, March 1990, Political Psychology, Vol. 11 No.1, pp 5-27, The Organization of Evil,
JSTOR #!tylerd)

At the end of this train of genocidal thought lies not only the destruction of the evil
other, but goodness itself, and with it the meaning of life. The slaughter of
innocents so fills the world with evil that there is no escape from its contamination.
Only the destruction of self and world -or rather, only an act of destruction that finally sees
no difference between them, as the metaphor of the corporate body comes to be
taken literally-can protect the self from the evil it has unleashed. Here is the link
between envy and ideological reversal. Both eliminate goodness in the world,
making it a fearful and worthless place to live. But, whereas the former does so by rejecting and
attacking goodness directly, the latter does so by so filling the world with one's own
badness that goodness is displaced, driven out, swamped. Like Richard, the bad crowds out the good.
Greenberg and Mitchell( 1983, p. 126) describe the consequences this way: As a result of his rages. . . the child
imagines his world as cruelly depopulated, his insides as depleted. He is a sole
survivor and an empty shell. However, unlike the child, who has his mother's continued
presence to reassure him that his badness need not obliterate all goodness in the
world, the Nazi doctor has his victims, whose silent witness confirmed his deepest
fears: that he is alone in a wholly evil world, made so by his own badness
 Framing
weigh genocide first util is bankrupt and normalizes genocide
Destexhe 95 (Alain Destexhe is fmr secretary-general of Doctors Without Borders, fmr president of
the Intl Crisis Group and secretary of the Belgian Senate Special Committee of Inquiry into the Genocide in
Rwanda, Rwanda and Genocide in the Twentieth Century, pp. 9-11, NYU Press, google books, #!tylerd)

Another reason why it is of fundamental importance to make distinctions between different kinds of catastrophes is that they are then revealed to
vary greatly both in nature and in degree. However, the increasing amount of exaggerated news coverage
given to any disaster, natural or manmade, nearly always infers that these events have one
common denominator: they are seen as the product of fate and misfortune rather
than the deliberate policy of any one individual or group. This results from the
inability of the general public to make clear distinctions (value judgements) between a
genocide and a civil war, a mugging and a road accident, famine, cholera epidemics
and natural disasters. Massacres and killings are put down to barbarism, age-old
hatreds, ancient fears and tribal wars: ambiguous terms rooted in the racial thinking
of the nineteenth century which often sowed the seeds of much later hostility . For
example, die first real signs of antagonism between the Serbs and Croats only surfaced at the beginning of the twentieth century; and it was after
1960, in the countrysides of Burundi and Rwanda, where the populations mainly lived, thai the social differences between Hutu and Tutsi ceased
to be seen as such and became an ethnic divide. This simplification of issues can be seen everywhere, not only within the media but also in
supposedly learned works on the subject, such as a recent collection with the already ambiguous tide L 'histoire inhumane: massacres et
genocides des origines d nos jours. From the first page onwards, we are told that at the root of all massacres 'there is always fear, from whence
comes haired', and the author concludes: The world seemed to have known the heights of horror with Nazism, the extermination camps and the
holocaust of the Jews (the Shoah), but on 6 August 1945, the United States, the world's leading democratic country... dropped the first atomic
bomb in history on Hiroshima.... Thus did terror make its entry into history on a global scale.11 The author, Guy Richard, not only
trivialises the genocide committed by the Nazis, but, no doubt involuntarily, he
implies that the two atrocities can be measured within the same set of values,
oblivious to the totally different motivations that lay behind each of them. By giving
equal significance to both events he even infers that the United States could be
held responsible (guilty perhaps?) for a new and worse form of barbarism. In the face of this slanted
argument, one almost hesitates to point out that it was Japan and Germany that declared war on the rest of the world and not the other way
around, and that the aims of the Nazis and their system of values were far from the same as those of the Allies. The destruction
of
Dresden, unnecessary and criminal as it was, must also be understood as the response - albeit exaggerated,
horrendous and futile - to Coventry, Rotterdam and Warsaw. But the bombs that fell on
Dresden and the shells fired by both sides in the First World War (and if any war can be termed a
butchery it is this) did not pre-select a race or a people as their victims, The pilot who
dropped the bomb on Hiroshima was involved in fighting a war, not trying to
exterminate die Japanese and deny their right to live as any other people. Although the
government was prepared to commit a crime in order to hasten the end of the war, it did not do so by selecting the Japanese or the Germans as
enemies and categorising them as a sub-human species. It should be clear that fear was not the source of
the Second World War but rather, as with all widespread massacres, the source lay in
individuals and their ideologies. It cannot be denied, therefore, that ultimately it must always be possible to
pinpoint certain individuals responsible for carrying the guilt of their actions and making them face the consequences. It is totally unacceptable
and even dangerous to group together all those who die in tragic circumstances, regardless of the way in which they die. It should be
obvious that it is not at all the same thing to die from cholera in a refugee camp or
as the targetted victim of ethnic cleansing in one's own home. If it were all one and
the same, then there would be no more at stake than the right of all victims to our
compassion. Crime and guilt then cease to be significant and the particularly
horrible murder of one individual would be measured with the same stick as a mass
killing.
Moral Imperative
 Obligation to suffering
Being aware of suffering creates an obligation to solve it
Smith 3 (Michael, associate professor of French at Berry College, Emmanuel Levinas' Ethics of
Responsibility, http://www.kennesaw.edu/clubs/psa/pdfs/Smith_2003_PSA.pdf) Showers

One of the most surprising aspects of Levinass ethicsperhaps meta-ethics, or better yet
proto-ethics, would be a preferable term, since Levinass philosophical work is really a
revamping of philosophy that replaces ontology by ethics: his ethics is not simply layered onto
thinking-as-usualone of the most surprising aspects of this protoethics, then, is that there is no
parity between my situation and yours from an ethical standpoint. You are always better than me.
I am responsible, not only for my transgressions, but for yours as well! There are two aspects or
stages of Levinass ethical thought: my relation to you (as if you were the only other person in
the world) and my relation to you seen in relation to the other of you, my other. Your other may
have conflicting claims, so that I am put in the position of comparing incomparables, to the
extent that each person is a world. From the relation of me to my other, you, love is enough. To
realize the intention of love in a broader sociality, justice is necessary. Justice, the harsh name of
love, must realize loves intentions, and in doing so may lose sight of its original intent, become
alienated into a self-serving institution. This risk, in Levinass view, is one that must be taken.
Here Levinas seldom develops his thought along the lines of strict reasoning. One senses that the
stays of being are relaxed and we would have no possible means of directing our thought beyond
this point without a certain inspiration. Knowledge is no longer sought after: it is inescapable.
We are the hostage of the other. No discussion, even as brief a one as this, can be complete
without some mention of the face. This is a term that Levinas elevates to status of a
philosopheme, a term endowed with a specific philosophical role. The face does not refer to the
plasticity of a visual form in Levinas, nor is it just the look of the other, since the face speaks in
Levinas. It is perhaps the phenomenal basis, or as Levinas sometimes says, the mise-enscne
or theatrical production of the appearance of the person, and it is the way in which we may
become aware of God. I quote: The face puts into question the sufficiency of my identity as an
I, it compels me to an infinite responsibility.4 It is by substitution for the other, or by taking on
the fate of the other, that I embrace a responsibility for which I never signed up. Here Levinas
diverges from the usual notion of responsibility, since the ethical meaning of responsibility is
bound up with the notion of freedom. We are not to imagine that Levinas is involved in some sort
of Skinnerian beyond freedom, but Levinas does enter a realm that is distinct from the dialectic
of promise and promise-keeping and freedom such as we find in the thinking of Jean-Paul Sartre,
for example. This taking up of responsibility is not a virtue (virtue in the sense of strength), nor
is it a weakness (as suggested by the late Michel de Certeau), but precisely the carrying out of
the mitzvah, or commandment of God. We should not expect gratitude, for this would entangle
us in an endless dialectic of quid pro quos. (It is interesting to note in passing that Levinas
praises the institution of money, despite its possible abuses, because if frees us from having to
have a personal relation with each person with whom we deal in life. We can carry on without
this burden.) If we should expect anything, it is rather ingratitude. There is an impersonal
transpersonal?sense in which action, good conduct, is nothing more nor less than a going
beyond the bog of being. What is ethical behavior? It is (I quote) the original goodness of man
toward the other in which, in an ethical dis-inter-estednessword of Godthe inter-ested effort
of brute being persevering in its being is interrupted.5
Patriarchy
 Root Cause
Patriarchy fuels war and environmental destruction
transcending this system is key to preserve life on earth
Warren and Cady 96 Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Macalester University;
and Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Hamline University
[Karen and Duane, Bringing peace home: feminism, violence, and nature, p. 12-13]

Operationalied, the evidence of patriarchy as a dysfunctional system is found

in the behaviors to which it gives rise, (c) the unmanageability, (d) which results. For
example, in the United States, current estimates are that one out of every three or four women
will be raped by someone she knows; globally, rape, sexual harassment, spouse-beating, and
sado-massochistic pornography are examples of behaviors practices, sanctioned, or tolerated
within patriarchy. In the realm of environmentally destructive behaviors, strip-
mining, factory farming, and pollution of the air, water, and soil are
instances of behaviors maintained and sanctioned within patriarchy. They,
too, rest on the faulty beliefs that it is okay to rape the earth, that it is mans God-given right
to have dominion (that is, domination) over the earth, that nature has only instrumental value,
that environmental destruction is the acceptable price we pay for progress. And the
presumption of warism, that war is a natural, righteous, and ordinary way to impose
dominion on a people or nation, goes hand in hand with patriarchy and leads to
dysfunctional behaviors of nations and ultimately to international
unmanageability. Much of the current unmanageability of contemporary
life in patriarchal societies, (d), is then viewed as a consequence of a patriarchal
preoccupation with activities, events, and experiences that reflect
historically male-gender-identified beliefs, values, attitudes, and
assumptions. Included among these real-life consequences are precisely those
concerns with nuclear proliferation, war, environmental destruction, and
violence towards women, which many feminists see as the logical outgrowth of
patriarchal thinking. In fact, it is often only through observing these dysfunctional
behaviorsthe symptoms of dysfunctionalitythat one can truly see that and
how patriarchy serves to maintain and perpetuate them. When patriarchy is
understood as a dysfunctional system, this unmanageability can be seen for what it isas a
predictable and thus logical consequence of patriarchy. The theme that global
environmental crises, war, and violence generally are predictable and
logical consequences of sexism and patriarchal culture is pervasive in
ecofeminist literature. Ecofeminist Charlene Spretnak, for instance, argues that a
militarism and warfare are continual features of a patriarchal society because they reflect and
instill patriarchal values and fulfill needs of such a system. Acknowledging the context
of patriarchal conceptualizations that feed militarism is a first step toward
reducing their impact and preserving life on Earth. Stated in terms of the foregoing model
of patriarchy as a dysfunctional social system, the claims by Spretnak and other feminists take on
a clearer meaning: Patriarchal conceptual frameworks legitimate impaired
thinking (about women, national and regional conflict, the environment)
which is manifested in behaviors which, if continued, will make life on earth difficult,
if not impossible. It is a stark message, but it is plausible. Its plausibility lies in understanding the
conceptual roots of various woman-nature-peace connections in regional, national, and global
contexts.

We control the internal link to the affs advantages- nuclear

weapons are the end result of dominance - nuclear war is
inevitable without the alternative
ASFS 87 (Alliance To Stop First Strike, Anti-militarism and Anti-Patriarchy activist organization,
Nonviolent Civil Disobedience Handbook, Activism: Peace: NVCD: Discrimination,
http://www.activism.net/peace/nvcdh/discrimination.shtml )

In this action, ourstruggleisnotonlyagainstmissilesandbombs,butagainstthesystemofpowertheydefend:asystembasedon

domination,onthebeliefthatsomepeoplehavemorevaluethanothers,andthereforehavetherighttocontrolothers,toexploitthemso
thattheycanleadbetterlivesthanthosetheyoppress. We say that all people have value. No person, no group, has the right to wield power
over the decisions and resources of others. The structure of our organizations and the processes we use among ourselves are our best attempt to
live our belief in self-determination. Besidesworkingagainstdiscriminationofallkindsamongourselves,wemusttrytounderstandhow
suchdiscriminationsupportsthesystemwhichproducesnuclearweapons.Forsomepeoplewhocometothisaction,theoverridingissue
isthestruggletopreventnucleardestruction.Forothers,thatstruggleisnotseparatefromthestrugglesagainstracism,sexism,classism
,
andtheoppressionofgroupsofpeoplebecauseoftheirsexualorientation,religion,age,physical(dis)ability,appearance,orlifehistory.
Understood this way, it is clear that nuclear weapons are already killing people, forcing them to lead lives of difficulty and struggle. Nuclearwar
has already begun, and it claimsits victims disproportionately from native peoples,the Third World, women, and those whoare
economicallyvulnerablebecauseofthehistoryofoppression. All oppressions are interlocking. We separate racism, classism, etc. in order to
discuss them, not to imply that any form of oppression works in isolation. We know that to work against any one of these is not just to try to stop
something negative, but to build a positive vision. Many in the movement call this larger goal feminism. Callingourprocess"feministprocess"
doesnotmeanthatwomendominateorexcludemen;onthecontrary,itchallengesallsystemsofdomination. Thetermrecognizesthe
historicalimportanceofthefeministmovementininsistingthatnonviolencebeginsathome,inthewayswetreateachother. Confronting
the issues that divide us is often painful. People may feel guilty, or hurt, or react defensively when we begin to speak of these things, as if they
were being personally accused. Butworkingthroughthispaintogether,takingresponsibilityforouroppressivebehavior,ispartofour
struggle to end the nuclear arms race. Asking members of oppressed groups to be the catalyst for this change is avoiding our own
responsibility for discrimination. Most of us benefit from some form of privilege due to our sex, or class, or skin color, or sexual orientation, but
that privilege is limited. Noneofusalonehasthepowertoendinstitutionsofdiscrimination.Onlywhenwestruggletogethercanwehope
todoso -- and when pain and hurt arise in that struggle, we can see it as a measure of the depth to which discrimination hurts us all, keeping us
separated and divided in our strength. Racism, Classism, Sexism, Heterosexism and Militarism.

Patriarchal hierarchies are the root cause of international

violence
Runyan 94 (Professor and former Head, Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality
Studies, University of Cincinnati Anne Sisson Women, Gender, and World Politics: Perspectives,
Policies, and Prospects Page 202 203)

These hierarchies of men over women and officers over recruits, Radical feminists insist, lay
the basis for hierarchies in the international system. For example, Strange argues that
"international politics closely resembles gang fights in the playground. The leader is the one
acknowledged to have superior force: his power is then augmented by his position--in effect, the
power of his underlings is added to his own. They give this power to him and get certain
benefits--protection, enhanced prestige from the relationship to the leader." 3 Thus, from the
Radical feminist view, the international system of unequal and competitive states can be
seen as one big male-protection racket wherein the strong extort the weak to enter into
various military and economic alliances or relationships that mostly benefit the strong.
Radical feminists argue that this male-protection racket has its origins in patriarchal thinking that
assumes that "man" should have dominion over natural resources. In particular, Western
patriarchal thinking, which Radical feminists claim is reflective of the worldview of largely
white men in power in the West, considers not only the natural world but also white women
and Third World peoples as raw materials that can be exploited for political and economic
gain. This constant extraction of resources--which increasingly impoverishes women, Third
World peoples and states dependent on "aid" from elite men and First World states--is what
makes the male-protection racket possible. This racket undermines any attempts to develop
self-reliance that might release dominated peoples and states from the contemporary
international hierarchy. Thus, for Radical feminists, the struggles of "weak" states against
"strong" are related to the struggles of women against patriarchal domination. "The aim of self-
reliance is paralleled by the struggle of many women who refuse to be victims any longer, yet
also refuse to become oppressors. What is being struggled against is at root the same thing--a
hierarchy grounded in and perpetuated by sexual dominance." 4

Gender inequality is the root cause for poverty

Masika 97Rachel (Urbanisation and Urban Poverty: A Gender Analysis October 1997,
World bank organization, http://www.bridge.ids.ac.uk/reports/re54.pdf]//AY

4 Dimensions of urban poverty: why a gender perspective is important Gender equity

considerations are important for any analysis of urban poverty conditions and trends. Men and
women experience and respond to urban poverty in different ways as a
result of gendered constraints and opportunities (in terms of access to income,
resources and services). This section demonstrates why a gender perspective is
important to understanding poverty by highlighting gender inequalitie s in
key urban sectors. 4.1 Poverty, employment and livelihoods There is gender-differentiated
access to employment and income-earning opportunities in urban areas.
Unemployment and underemployment have been major concerns for many
urban economies. Recent studies suggest the urban poor have suffered
significantly from structural adjustment through reduction in employment
creation and downward pressure on real wages. New categories of the poor have been
identified, for example, former state employees who have been retrenched. In general terms,
there are two broad labour market trends: the feminisation of the labour force; and
the deregulation and casualistion of the labour market. The rise in female
labour force participation can be attributed in part to a rise in demand for
female labour in industries, and in part to household survival strategies during economic
restructuring. This has positive benefits for women given that social position within, and access
(both social and physical) to, urban labour markets is critical for well-being and survival.
However, there is evidence that in many countries gender segmentation in the labour market
remains widespread (Gilbert 1997) and that womens work remains characterised by
insecurity and low returns. Furthermore, many different facets of womens
work, both unpaid and paid, are not recognised by urban planners . Research
on two low-income settlements in Madras, India suggests that neither household structure nor the
structure of the economy can provide an adequate explanation of either female labour force
participation or the type of work women and girls undertake in Madras. Ideological factors and
their enforcement at the intermediate social levels of the wider kingroup and community are
central to decisions regarding who works in the household and under what conditions. These
ideologies are, however, not rigid dictates but guiding principles around which the household
respectability is negotiated (Vera-Sanso 1995). The importance of the informal sector
for income generation and poverty alleviation is well recognised. There is
increasing reliance on urban informal employment for both men and
women but the ability of the informal sector to absorb the unemployed is
limited. There are genderdifferentiated patterns of access to informal sector work. Research in
Zimbabwe revealed that declines in womens earnings from informal sector activities also meant
less control by the women of household budgets, lower self esteem and increased conflict with
husbands. Several of those interviewed felt that the men were not fulfilling their obligations as
husbands and fathers (Kanji 1995).9 The deregulation and casualisation of the
labour market has lead to an increase in homeworking, particularly among
women, which sometimes leads to greater exposure to environmental risk,
both in terms of human pathogens and industrial toxic compounds at
home or in the workplace (Gilbert 1997; HomeNet 1996)
 Violence
Violence against women goes unnoticed by society and is the
largest systemic impactits an ethical and political obligation
to prevent
French et al 98 (Stanley, Professor of Philosophy at Concordia University in Montreal,
Wanda Teays, professor and chair of the Philosophy Department at Mount St. Mary's College in
Los Angeles, Ph.D. in Humanities from Concordia University in Montreal, and an M.T.S.
(Applied Ethics) from Harvard University, "Violence Against Women. Philosophical
Perspectives", Cornell University, http://books.google.com/books?
id=5_deWNO1GEUC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=o
nepage&q&f=false. Noparstak)
Women are the victims of widespread personal and systemic violence, the true scope and gender-
specific nature of which emergy clearly when all types of violence are set in context in a
collection such as this one. The sweep of violenceover or subtleis striking: common in
North America and elsewhere are sexual assault and rape, wife battering, sexual
harassment, prostitution, sadistic pornography, and sexual exploitation by medical personnel.
Cultures beyond these shores add their own forms of violence such as dowry death and female
genital mutilation as well as the disproportionate abortion of female fetuses and systematic
neglect of girl children. Only recently have philosophers begun to inquire into violence against
women. Yet it is striking that such an important social phenomenon did not capture philosophical
attention long ago. It cries out for conceptual analysis: what do we mean by violence, and
what can we conclude about the special forms of violence directed toward women? Moreover,
such violence is precisely the sort of issue that ethics, political philosophy, and philosophy
of law deal with; so how can there be an elaborate historical discourse on just war theory and
no theory of rape or wife beating? Despite their impact on womens lives, such practices have
simply been part of the backdrop, unnoticed and certainly not treated as fit subjects for
serious theorizing. According to former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, domestic
violence is the top problem for American women, causing more inujuries than automobile
accidents, muggings, and rapes combined. According to a U.S. Justice Department study,
nearly 700,000 victims of violence or suspected violence treated in hospital emergency rooms in
1994 were hurt by someone they knew. Of these approximately 243,000 (or 34 percent) were
injured by someone they knew intimatelya current of former spouse, boyfriend, or girlfriend.
Of these, 203,000 (over 80 percent) were women. One of the distinctive characteristics of
violence directed toward women is that it tends, unlike violence toward men, to come from
those they know (Blodgett-Ford, 1993: 510). That it is rooted in asymmetrical assumptions
about the nature of the two sexes is illustrated by the belated recognition of marital rape as a
crime in most states. (Some, like Oklahoma and North Carolina, still fail to recognize it as such
[Down, 1992: 569].) Sexist assumptions clearly play a role, too, in the massive exploitation of
women as prostitutes. The consequences for these women may be dire, especially when, as in
India, a majority are indentured slaves, many of whom are doomed to die of AIDS (Friedman,
1996: 12). The specifically sexual element in gender relations comes to the fore in pornography,
especially sadistic pornography. Both the production of such materials and their
disproportionate consumption by males reinforce and promote the attitudes toward women
that fuel the practices discussed here. Such attitudes become especially apparent in war, when
rape is used as a weapon against the enemy.
 War Module
Feminism is the only way to prevent great power wars- solves the root
cause of masculine policies and unjust social hierarchies
Tickner 2001 [J. Ann is a feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a professor at the School of International Relations,
University of Southern California, Los Angeles.[1] Her books include Gendering World Politics: Issues and Approaches in the Post-Cold
War Era (Columbia University, 2001), Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving International Security (Columbia
University, 1992) Gendering World Politics: Issues and Approaches in the Post-Cold War Era May
http://www.ciaonet.org/book/tia01/index.html] AK

Chapter 2 deals with war, peace, and securityissues that continue to be central to the discipline. While realists see the
contemporary system as only a temporary lull in great-power conflict, others see a change in the character of war,
with the predominance of conflicts of state building and state disintegration driven by ethnic and national identities as well as by material
interests. Since feminists use gender as a category of analysis, issues of identity are central to their approach; chapter 2 explores the ways in
which the gendering of nationalist and ethnic identities can exacerbate conflict. Feminists are also drawing
our attention to the increasing impact of these types of military conflicts on civilian populations. Civilians now account for about
90 percent of war casualties, the majority of whom are women and children. Questioning traditional IR
boundaries between anarchy and danger on the outside and order and security on the inside, as well as the realist focus on states
and their interactions, feminists have pointed to insecurities at all levels of analysis; for example, Katharine Moon
has demonstrated how the unofficial support of military prostitution served U.S. alliance goals in Korea,
thus demonstrating links between interpersonal relations and state policies at the highest level.15
Feminist analysis of wartime rape has shown how militaries can be a threat even to their own populations;16
again, feminist scholarship cuts across the conventional focus on interstate politics or the domestic determinants of foreign policy. Feminists have
claimed that the
likelihood of conflict will not diminish until unequal gender hierarchies are
reduced or eliminated; the privileging of characteristics associated with a stereotypical masculinity in states
foreign policies contributes to the legitimization not only of war but of militarization more generally.
Wary of what they see as gendered dichotomies that have pitted realists against idealists and led to overly simplistic assumptions about warlike
men and peaceful women,17 certain feminists are cautioning against the association of women with peace, a position that, they believe,
disempowers both women and peace. The growing numbers of women in the military also challenges and complicates these essentialist
stereotypes. To this end, and as part of their effort to rethink concepts central to the field, feminists
define peace and security,
not in idealized ways often associated with women, but in broad, multidimensional terms that include the elimination of
social hierarchies such as gender that lead to political and economic injustice.

Invisible conflicts create more violence than publicized

militaristic violence
Reardon, 93 (Betty, Women and peace: feminist visions of global security, p.39-40)

War has always been the most well organized and destructive form of violence in which human beings have engaged. However, physical or
direct violence, particularly military violence, in the twentieth century appears to be more varied and is certainly more
potentially destructive than it has ever been. Armed conflict itself is a common condition of life
throughout the world. Low-intensity conflict, the constant and pervasive warfare that has plagued Central America, the
Philippines, and other areas where internal violent struggles characterize politics, has become the most common form of war
in our time. It is waged by government, political factions, and drug lords. Such civil conflicts, and the excessive violence that
currently plagues urban society, take more civilian lives than lives of combatants, and disrupt and debase
the life of entire societies. For example, gunfights have occurred between rival gangs in cities; children have been shot on
playgrounds and have shot each other in their schools. In the fall of 1991, the New York Times reported that many children, some as young as
nine, carry guns for protection. While
the media and policy-makers focus more on the major events of
armed conflict among nations, such as that which has kept the Middle East in a constant state of hostility, these other
incidents of warfare go on unabated.
 Dehumanization/VTL Impact

An ideal sense of hegemonic masculinity will forever be unattainable,

instead it dehumanizes females and kills value to life
Tickner, 92-[ J. Ann. (1992). (Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global
Security, Engendered Insecurities. Columbia University Press. Retrieved June 22, 2011 from Columbia International
Affairs Online http://www.ciaonet.org/book/tickner/tickner12.html]- AAA

While the purpose of this book is to introduce gender as a category of analysis into the discipline of international relations ,
the
marginalization of women in the arena of foreign policy-making through the kind of gender
stereotyping that I have described suggests that international politics has always been a gendered activity in the modern state system.
Since foreign and military policy-making has been largely conducted by men, the discipline that
analyzes these activities is bound to be primarily about men and masculinity. We seldom realize we think in
these terms, however; in most fields of knowledge we have become accustomed to equating what is human with
what is masculine. Nowhere is this more true than in international relations, a discipline that, while it has for the most part resisted the
introduction of gender into its discourse, bases its assumptions and explanations almost entirely on the activities and experiences of men. Any
Masculinity
attempt to introduce a more explicitly gendered analysis into the field must therefore begin with a discussion of masculinity.
and politics have a long and close association. Characteristics associated with "manliness," such as
toughness, courage, power, independence, and even physical strength, have, throughout history,
been those most valued in the conduct of politics, particularly international politics. Frequently,
manliness has also been associated with violence and the use of force, a type of behavior that, when conducted in the international arena, has been
valorized and applauded in the name of defending one's country. This celebration
of male power, particularly the
glorification of the male warrior, produces more of a gender dichotomy than exists in
reality for, as R. W. Connell points out, this stereotypical image of masculinity does not fit most men.
Connell suggests that what he calls "hegemonic masculinity," a type of culturally dominant masculinity that
he distinguishes from other subordinated masculinities, is a socially constructed cultural ideal
that, while it does not correspond to the actual personality of the majority of men, sustains
patriarchal authority and legitimizes a patriarchal political and social order. 6 Hegemonic
masculinity is sustained through its opposition to various subordinated and devalued
masculinities, such as homosexuality, and, more important, through its relation to various
devalued femininities. Socially constructed gender differences are based on socially sanctioned,
unequal relationships between men and women that reinforce compliance with men's stated
superiority. Nowhere in the public realm are these stereotypical gender images more apparent than in the
realm of international politics, where the characteristics associated with hegemonic masculinity
are projected onto the behavior of states whose success as international actors is measured in
terms of their power capabilities and capacity for self-help and autonomy.
 Disabilities Module
Questioning urban geography encompasses a wide range of
cultural studies including disabilities
Law 99 (Robin, Department of Geography, University of Otago New Zealand, "Progress in
Human Geography", http://phg.sagepub.com/content/23/4/567.full.pdf . Noparstak)
It is significant, however, that the less glamorous practice of daily mobility has to date been little
affected by developments in social theory. Some scholars of disability have begun to connect
concepts of difference, exclusion, access and justice with concrete issues of daily movement
(e.g., Butler and Bowlby, 1997), but this work still tends to be interpreted as about
disability and thus outside mainstream concerns. Yet the topic offers a great deal of scope for
study. Daily mobility incorporates a range of issues central to human geography, including
the use of (unequally distributed) resources, the experience of social interactions in transport-
related settings and participation in a system of cultural beliefs and practices. Attention to flows
of people through the daily activity-space animates our understanding of geographic
location of home and work, and links spatial patterns with temporal rhythms. It reminds
us that while residential and employment location may be stable, human beings are not rooted in
place, and that activity-space is not divided into a sterile dichotomy of (male) public and
(female) private. Mobility is also a potent issue for local political struggles, drawing on the
interests of individuals variously identified by class, gender, disability, age and neighbourhood
residence. How then might we link the recent theoretical interest in mobility with the issues of
daily mobility more commonly addressed in urban and transport geography? I suggest that
instead of pursuing the metaphors of mobility which populate abstract theory, we turn
instead to some new developments under the broad ambit of cultural studies, from fields
including cultural geography, anthropology, history, sociology, disability studies, literature and
feminist studies. This work offers insights into both practices and meanings (especially gendered
meanings) of daily mobility, through grounded studies of specific situations, and so forms a
useful counterpoint to the behavioural and policy driven focus of existing transport research.

Ableism is structured in an ontology of violence its

imperative to reject it
HughesHead of Division of SociologyGlasgow Caledonian University2007 Bill Being
disabled: towards a critical social ontology for disability studies Disability & Society 22.7 Taylor
& Francis
Readers may have noticed in this very preliminary and adumbrated account of what a critical
social ontology for disability studies might look like a measure of intellectual affinity with one of
the key building blocks of the critique of the individual and medical models of disability (and
ergo of the social model of disability), namely personal tragedy theory (Oliver, 1990). This
concept need not be reduced to issues of compensation, entitlement or therapeutic interventions
(Oliver, 1996, p. 131; Kumari Campbell, 2005) but is closely articulated with the negative and
invalidating way in which nondisabled people relate to disabled people and the threat that this
poses to the psychoemotional wellbeing of disabled people (Thomas, 1999). Fiona Kumari
Campbell (2005, p. 109) argued that,almost without fail in modern discourse,
disability is assumed to be ontologically intolerable , that is, inherently
negative and always present in the ableist talk of normalcy,
normalization and humanness.The assumption that a disabled life is
ubiquitously, even invariably, blighted and aberrant is spliced into the emotion of
pity that underpins disability charity (Smith, 2005), into the practices and effects of the law
(Kumari Campbell, 2005), into conceptions and practices of care (Hughes et al., 2005), into the
humiliations and violations of institutional life (Malacrida, 2005), into the order of things, into
everyday subjectivity. One could go one better, extending the (recently researched)
list of realms in which the authenticity of disability is implicitly or
explicitly questioned, the blight of oppression felt and ontological
recognition denied.It is the task of a critical social ontology for disability
studies to claim authenticity for disability whenever it is denied,be it in
the cold logic of Peter Singers (1995) preference utilitarianism that revokes
personhood from those who are unable to engage reflexively with their own temporality or in
the most mundane everyday words or deeds that exclude or invalidate.
Racism
 Root Cause
Racism is the root cause of all violence.
Foucault in'76 [Michel, Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975-1976, p. 254-
257 Trans. David Macey]

What in fact is racism? It is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of
life that is under power's control: the break between what must live and what must die .
The appearance within the biological continuum of the human race of races, the distinction among races,
the hierarchy of races, the fact that certain races are described as good and that others, in contrast, are
described as inferior: all this is a way of fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls. It is a
way of separating out the groups that exist within a population. It is, in short, a way of establishing a
biological type caesura within a population that appears to be a biological domain. This will allow power
to treat that population as a mixture of races, or to be more accurate, to treat the species, to subdivide the
species it controls, into the subspecies known, precisely, as races. That is the first function of racism: to
fragment, to create caesuras within the biological continuum addressed by biopower. Racism also has a
second function. Its role is, if you like, to allow the establishment of a positive relation of this type: "The
more you kill, the more deaths you will cause" or "The very fact that you let more die will allow you to
live more." I would say that this relation ("If you want to live, you must take lives, you must be able to
kill") was not invented by either racism or the modern State. It is the relationship of war: "In order to live,
you must destroy your enemies." But racism does make the relationship of war-"If you want to live, the
other must die" - function in a way that is completely new and that is quite compatible with the exercise
of biopower. On the one hand, racism makes it possible to establish a relationship between
my life and the death of the other that is not a military or warlike relationship of confrontation, but
a biological-type relationship: "The more inferior species die out, the more abnormal individuals
are eliminated, the fewer degenerates there will be in the species as a whole , and the more
Ias species rather than individual-can live, the stronger I will be, the more vigorous I will be. I will be
able to proliferate." The fact that the other dies does not mean simply that I live in the sense that his death
guarantees my safety; the death of the other, the death of the bad race, of the inferior race (or the
degenerate, or the abnormal) is something that will make life in general healthier: healthier and purer.
This is not, then, a military, warlike, or political relationship, but a biological relationship. And the reason
this mechanism can come into play is that the enemies who have to be done away with are not adversaries
in the political sense of the term; they are threats, either external or internal, to the population and for the
population. In the biopower system, in other words, killing or the imperative to kill is acceptable only if it
results not in a victory over political adversaries, but in the elimination of the biological threat to and the
improvement of the species or race. There is a direct connection between the two. In a normalizing
society, race or racism is the precondition that makes killing acceptable . When you have a
normalizing society, you have a power which is, at least superficially, in the first instance, or in the first
line a biopower, and racism is the indispensable precondition that allows someone to be killed,
that allows others to be killed. Once the State functions in the biopower mode, racism alone can
justify the murderous function of the State. So you can understand the importance-I almost said the vital
importance-of racism to the exercise of such a power: it is the precondition for exercising the right to kill.
If the power of normalization wished to exercise the old sovereign right to kill, it must become racist.
And if, conversely, a power of sovereignty, or in other words, a power that has the right of life and death,
wishes to work with the instruments, mechanisms, and technology of normalization, it too must become
racist. When I say "killing," I obviously do not mean simply murder as such, but also every form of
indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or,
quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on. I think that we are now in a position to
understand a number of things. We can understand, first of all, the link that was quickly-I almost said
immediately-established between nineteenth-century biological theory and the discourse of power.
Basically, evolutionism, understood in the broad sense-or in other words, not so much Darwin's theory
itself as a set, a bundle, of notions (such as: the hierarchy of species that grow from a common
 evolutionary tree, the struggle for existence among species, the selection that eliminates the less fit)
naturally became within a few years during the nineteenth century not simply a way of transcribing a
political discourse into biological terms, and not simply a way of dressing up a political discourse in
scientific clothing, but a real way of thinking about the relations between colonization, the necessity for
wars, criminality, the phenomena of madness and mental illness, the history of societies with their
different classes, and so on. Whenever, in other words, there was a confrontation, a killing or the risk of
death, the nineteenth century was quite literally obliged to think about them in the form of evolutionism.
And we can also understand why racism should have developed in modern societies that function in the
biopower mode; we can understand why racism broke out at a number of .privileged moments, and why
they were precisely the moments when the right to take life was imperative. Racism first develops
with colonization, or in other words, with colonizing genocide. If you are functioning in the
biopower mode, how can you justify the need to kill people, to kill populations, and to kill civilizations?
By using the themes of evolutionism, by appealing to a racism. War. How can one not only wage
war on one's adversaries but also expose one's own citizens to war, and let them be
killed by the million (and this is precisely what has been going on since the nineteenth century, or
since the second half of the nineteenth century), except by activating the theme of racism? From
this point onward, war is about two things: it is not simply a matter of destroying a political adversary, but
of destroying the enemy race, of destroying that [sort] of biological threat that those people over there
represent to our race. In one sense, this is of course no more than a biological extrapolation from the
theme of the political enemy. But there is more to it than that. In the nineteenth century-and this is
completely new-war will be seen not only as a way of improving one's own race by eliminating the
enemy race (in accordance with the themes of natural selection and the struggle for existence), but also as
a way of regenerating one's own race. As more and more of our number die, the race to which we belong
will become all the purer.

Human extinction is inevitable unless we can break down the

walls of racism via individual action.
Bardnt 91 Joseph, Minister, Dismantling Racism

To study racism is to study walls. We have looked at barriers and fences, restraints and limitations,
ghettos and prisons. The prison of racism confines us all, people of color and white people
alike. It shackles the victimizer as well as the victim. The walls forcibly keep people of color
and white people separate from each other; in our separate prisons we are all prevented from
achieving the human potential that God intends for us. The limitations imposed on people of
color by poverty, subservience, and powerlessness are cruel, inhuman, and unjust; the effects
of uncontrolled power, privilege, and greed, which are the marks of our white prison,
will inevitably destroy us as well. But we have also seen that the walls of racism can be
dismantled. We are not condemned to an inexorable fate, but are offered the vision and
the possibility of freedom. Brick by brick, stone by stone, the prison of individual,
institutional, and cultural racism can be destroyed. You and I are urgently called to join
the efforts of those who know it is time to tear down once and for all, the walls of
racism.
 Environmental racism
Waste dumping on native land is cultural genocide and
environmentally racist
Edwards 11 (Nelta Edwards, PhD in sociology, works with Department of Sociology, University of Alaska
Anchorage, 11.2.11, Environmental Justice, Vol. 4, No. 2, Nuclear Colonialism and the Social Construction of
Landscape in Alaska, http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1089/env.2010.0023 )

It is important to examinethe justications and rami- cations surrounding the choice of

particular sites for nuclear testing because nuclear powers employ similar characterizations
to add to the environmental devastation of these landscapes. In the Pacic Islands,
corporations and national governments have attempted to persuade local communities to
take on nuclear and toxic wastes as a form of economic development . Kuletz terms this the
second order of nuclear colonialism. 34 The idea is that since the land has already been polluted,
it makes sense for the native people to accept more nuclear and toxic waste. And, indeed, seeing how the
forces of history have stacked the deck against them, tribes may seek out waste because <it is> the
only business we can get to come here. 35 Unlike the Pacic and the desert Southwest, Alaska has not,
thus far, been suggested as a nuclear waste depository. It does share with other locales a depiction as a
wasteland, suitable as a dumping ground, a test site for dangerous technologies, and as a practice
bombing range. 36 Despite its small population, Alaska has thousands of hazardous waste sites
including active and formerly used defense sites (FUDs), National Priority List (NPL) or Superfund
Sites, active and abandoned mine sites, and solid and industrial waste landlls. 37 Although the military
and industry have never sought to ofcially make Alaska a dump site, it has unofcially served as one.
The use of indigenous land for nuclear weapons testing and waste disposal is a type of
cultural genocide. Attempts to destroy the land amount to attempts to destroy the life
way of the people. In Alaska, Alaska Native subsistence culture equates to individual and
community health and well-being. Alaska Native peoples have traditionally derived not
only their food and nutrition from the land and water, but also their ethics and values
of stewardship, languages, codes of conduct, stories, songs, dances, ceremonies, rites of
passage, history, and sense of place and spirituality. It is a way of life in which everything is
intimately tied to the land and the waters upon which the people depend for sustenance. 38 When the
ecosystem upon which so much is built is damaged; it undermines the people as well .
For Alaska Native people, the land is not separate from themselves and spoiling it goes against what
they have been taught. An Inupiaq elder in Point Hope said, I learned to hunt when I was nine years old
and I been told by my elders to keep my land clean; thats the way I learned itto keep my land clean
<continues in Inupiaq>. 39 In the case of Amchitka, although they were not living on the island when
the United States appropriated it in the 1930s and 1940s, the Aluets consider all of the Aleutian chain,
including the uninhabited islands, their home. 40 When the Cannikin cavity releases its radioactive
contaminants, either gradually through seepage or all at once due to an earthquake, it will present a grave
danger to the health and well-being of Aleut people and others who live in the region. Analysis of the
social construction of landscapes employed by nuclear colonial powers reveals the racism and
entitlement of colonial culture that justied damage to these landscapes. These
constructions include notions of remoteness, emptiness, and sparse populations, characterizations that
have served to displace, ignore, and dismiss the mostly non-white people who live there. Indigenous
people reject these characterizations as exemplied by Inupiat people in Point Hope, Alaska. It is
important for those interested environmental justice to analyze the social construction of landscapes, as
colonial and commercial interests use these same characterizations to exacerbate the existing
environmental damage to these places in ways that jeopardize the cultural viability of native people and
their cultures.
And it destroys value to life and erases populations evaluate
first, neg impacts are justifications for nuclear colonialism
Edwards 11 (Nelta Edwards, PhD in sociology, works with Department of Sociology, University of Alaska
Anchorage, 11.2.11, Environmental Justice, Vol. 4, No. 2, Nuclear Colonialism and the Social Construction of
Landscape in Alaska, http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1089/env.2010.0023 )

Colonial powers have constructed the landscape as remote, empty, and sparsely populated to
justify the violence of nuclear weapons testing. The site selection committee that came up with
Project Chariots location noted the remoteness of the site from any existing population. 18
In a Popular Mechanics article, Edward Teller assured readers that fears of radioactive
contamination were irrelevant because the site was so remote. 19 Project Chariot promoters
drew on images of Alaska popular at that time: one of Alaska as a barren wasteland and the site
of the proposed harbor as a bleak spot and located in a wilderness, far away from any
human habitation. 20 Similarly, the Chief of Naval Operations wrote to the commander of the
Joint Task Force in 1951 saying that he thought that using Amchitka for nuclear testing could
be easily justied because of its extended land area and remote position. 21 The
author of the AECs environmental report went as far as to say that Amchitka was empty of
people for the simple reason that nobody would ever want to live on Amchitka. 22 Whereas
archaeological evidence shows people have lived on Amchitka off and on for at least 3,600 years.
Archeologists have identied 78 sites on Amchitka, indicating that it has supported relatively
large populations. Since the midnineteenth century no one had lived on the island but this should
be seen as a temporary description rather than an indication of its habitability. 23 Of course, the
people who live in these places, and whose ancestors have inhabited these lands for hundreds or
even thousands of years, do not consider them remote. People have lived and thrived near Cape
Thompson and in the Aleutian Islands for millennia and consider these places central to their
way of being. In a community meeting held in Point Hope in October of 1994, after people
learned about the radioactive tracer experiments, an Inupiaq man says, I would like to educate
some of you who are visitors here. You are in Point Hope; it is recognized as the oldest
continuously inhabited communities in North America. Since the coming of the Europeans to this
country they have elbowed their way from one end of the country to the other. And what have
you learned? To displace people. 24 The speaker refers to the fact that archeologists estimate
that people have been living in Point Hope for 2,000 years. This long tenure makes Point Hope,
central, not remote in terms of human habitation. The speaker also points out that Europeans are
relative newcomers to the region and notes the displacement of native peoples by colonial
powers. When nuclear superpowers describe population as sparse to justify nuclear testing,
they employ a utilitarian logic in which harm for the few is justied by protection of the many.
On the face of it, this seems to make sensethe greatest good for the greatest number.
However, this sort of logic is generally used by those who are not being asked to, or forced to,
sacrice their lives or livelihood; that is, the argument is made by the powerful instead of the
powerless, the colonial power rather than its subjects. 25 This logic diminishes the value of the
lives of the people who live near nuclear test sites, as if by virtue of the fact that they are few in
number, their lives are less important. Alaska Native people understand this logic. As one elder
Inupiaq woman said, I guess that at that time in 1962 that there were not that many people
living in Point Hope they just wanted to attack because theres not many people there. But
she counters the immorality of the logic by continuing, They thought we were guinea pigs. We
are not. We are human beings like you. I have a heart like you. 26 Community members used
the words guinea pigs, specimens, and being treated like a plant to describe their
treatment as objects by colonial powers. When colonial powers construct the land as empty, it
discursively erases the people who live there, making it impossible for the colonial powers to
consider the interests of the existing inhabitants. Colonial powers, replete with a sense of
entitlement and racism, overlook nonwhite people, ignoring them and their way of life. An
Inupiaq man reminds others at a community meeting that his people were not then and are not
now, expendable: Now lets see you, you dont get me wrong, ask the white people, take note
of this: we are human, as much as you are. Its just a color difference. 27 It is as if colonial
culture prevented those in power from even seeing the people who lived there as real people,
who have hopes and desires and who have a right to say what happens on their land. An elder
introduces herself at a community meeting by saying, My name is Alice Webber. I have lived
here all of my life and worked here for my village. I am also a signer of the Project Chariot
No. I said NO. Everyone said no and yet they turn around and leave [the tracer experiment
materials] there. Although Point Hope community members very clearly expressed their
disapproval of Project Chariot, their sentiments were ignored by colonial powers. After the
cancellation of Project Chariot in the 1960s, colonial powers conducted the tracer experiments
without the permission of the local people and defying their express wishes. The assumed
superiority of the colonial power, fueled by self-interest, caused them to disregard the people
who lived near nuclear test sites. This colonial hubris is revealed by an Inupiaq woman who
wonders what would happen if Inupiat people treated colonial peoples in a like manner, Thats
why I think, I wonder how it would be to go down to Washington [DC], set some dynamite
around the Capitol, to see whether it will sink or not. 28 In a later meeting, another Inupiaq
woman speculates, If it were the other way around and Point Hope people put nuclear waste
[break in tape] I know they would take us to court right away and solve it right away. If it were
the other way around, what would they have done to us? 29 By reversing the roles, putting
Inupiat people in the position of harming colonial people, these women cleverly make the power
imbalance and absurdity of the situation obvious. When the nuclear superpowers decided that
people in the Pacic should sacrice their lives, land, and livelihood for the good of
mankind, the good of mankind meant to be the military and economic interests of world
superpowers. 30 In the American Southwest, the United States decided that nuclear bomb
testing and mining should take place on Indian land, making Indian people sacrice their lands
and their way of being in the name of American imperialism. 31 This circumstance, where
nonwhite people are made to bear the ecological burden of industrial societies, goes to the heart
of the environmental justice struggle. An Inupiaq woman expresses incredulity, anger, and hurt
at such treatment. They risked our lives, our childrens lives. My god, you know, what are we,
nothing? Why did the government want to harm us, just because of <their> curiosity? Just
because they wondered how radiation would affect us? We never did any harm to them, we
never did. Why did they want to harm us, just because of the land, because they wanted it? 32
The AEC did want to use the land for testing. Superpower militaries have a history of using
native land for military testing and practice. A study of American formerly used defense sites
(FUDS) quantied the burden of U.S. militarism on Native Americans. The study found that the
more acres owned by Native Americans, the greater the number of extremely dangerous sites in
that area and that Native Americans experience a disproportionate exposure to the most
dangerous unexploded ordnance. Importantly, these ndings underestimate the impact of
military pollution on Native Americans because they are only able to look at former sites and
not sites currently in use. In addition, this analysis leaves out the counties with the most
pollution because the Army Corps of Engineers has yet to complete the assessment of these
sites. The term, treadmill of destruction, describes the harm done on Native American land due
to militarism and coercive state policies.
Structural violence
 Systemic death
Structural violence causes systemic death
Galea 11(Sandro, Estimated Deaths Attributable to Social Factors in the United States, American
Journal of Public Health, MD,DrPH, Sandro Galea was with the Department of Epidemiology,
University of Michigan)

Results. Approximately 245000 deaths in the United States in 2000 were

attributable to low education, 176 000 to racial segregation, 162 000 to
low social support, 133 000 to individual-level poverty , 119000 to income
inequality, and 39000 to area-level poverty. Conclusions. The estimated
number of deaths attributable to social factors in the United States is
comparable to the number attributed to pathophysiological and behavioral
causes. These findings argue for a broader public health conceptualization of the causes of
mortality and an expansive policy approach that considers how social factors can be
addressed to improve the health of populations. (Am J Public Health. 2011;101:1456-1465.)
 The Culture of violence
This Structural Violence being ignored has caused it to
desensitize us and let it be second nature, we have fallen into
a culture of violence
Lynch and Wheeler 04, (Wheeler joined Miami University in 1976 as an assistant professor of art and was promoted
to associate professor and then to full professor. He has since held positions including coordinator for English, humanities and fine arts; acting
director of student affairs and associate executive director for academic affairs. Wheeler received a B.F.A. from the University of Connecticut
and an M.F.A. from Arizona State University. Cultures of Violence 5th global Confrence)

Galtung complements action-oriented views of human society with structure-

oriented ones and defines the dominance system in the world in terms of the
pattern of structural violence, where violence is seen as avoidable deprivation of basic human
needs and an inegalitarian distribution of resources. Like direct violence, structural
violence produces suffering and death, yet this form of violence is
mostly invisible, firmly embedded in social structures and institutions. It
is found inside societies as well as between societies, and we experience
them (and, arguably, their violence) as familiar and normal. Because it seems they
have always been like that, these structures tend to appear ordinary and
become second nature. I am aware that extending the concept of violence to structures
might provoke criticism ; however I believe that the extended concept helps to integrate
coherently a range of phenomena in a holistic and inter-disciplinary
approach to violence that enables us to see cases of violence in the
context of an entire culture of violence. And of course there is a political and moral
effect: calling structures violent differs from other descriptions (social injustice etc.) by
conveying a much stronger appeal and urgency to change them and to work towards an
alternative culture of peace.

This Culture of Violence invades our every social construction

and psyche, thus perpetuating itself, violence, and killing VTL
Daniel Bar-Tal 03, (Daniel Bar-Tal is an Israeli academic, author and Branco Weiss Professor of Research in Child
Development and Education at School of Education, Tel Aviv University, Collective Memory of Physical Violence: Its
Contribution to the Culture of Violence)
The above analysis suggests why violence constitutes a significant element
in intergroup conflict: Violence changes the nature of the conflict because
the loss of human life and the performance of violent acts have special
meaning for society's members. Violence often escalates the level of
intergroup conflicts; when it continues for many years, violence has a
crucial effect on the society as the accumulation and sedimentation of
such experiences in collective memory penetrates every thread of the
societal fabric. The collective memory of physical violence serves as a
foundation for the development of a culture of violence . In turn, the
culture of violence preserves the collective memory of the human losses ,
as well as the perceived cruelty, mistrust, inhumanity, and evilness, of the
enemy. By doing so, it rationalizes the continuation of the conflict and
makes an imprint on the reality perception of society members. The relationship between
collective memory and the culture of violence is discussed in the next section of the chapter
The Culture of violence has infiltrated our epistemology, we
are too desensitized to gain educational impacts, we need
other forms of social commune to re-sensitize us
Daniel Bar-Tal 03, (Daniel Bar-Tal is an Israeli academic, author and Branco Weiss
Professor of Research in Child Development and Education at School of Education, Tel Aviv
University, Collective Memory of Physical Violence: Its Contribution to the Culture of
Violence)

The evolution of these four themes of societal beliefs about conflict delegitimization of the
opponent, self-victimization and patriotism is, then, directly related to the
intensity and length of the violence endured. As the violent conflict
becomes protracted, these beliefs become embedded in the societal
repertoire and enter the collective memory. They are frequently presented
through societal channels of communication. Thus, as of the public agenda, they
are disseminated through cultural, educational and societal institutions .
That is, these described societal beliefs become "enduring products" which appear as recurrent
themes in literature, school books, films, theatrical plays, painting and
cultural other products (Bar-Tal, 2000; Winter, 1995). In consequence, they become
more and more central in the personal repertoire of the society's
members. These beliefs, therefore, represent the epistemological pillars of the
culture of violence, as they are widely disseminated, maintained through time and
imparted to the new generation.
 Other
Poverty has become so crushing that the poor sell their organs
to meet the demand made by the wealthy
Heron, Manager of the Social Development the Planning Institute of
Jamaica, 3
(Taitu, Human Agency in an Era of Neoliberal Globalization, Pg. 5, SD)

There is danger in an idea or group of ideas amounting to an ideology that

seeks to reduce the value of human life to the facilitation and/or provision
of materialist accumulation and not much else. This is aggressive-materialist tendency in
the agency we see in globalization and some of the agents that have most of the decision-making and financial
power over the leading and directing the process of globalization. Another way of looking at this
aggressive-materialist expression of agency is to pay attention to the way
it affects the agency of the poor. For instance, technological advancements in
science and medicine have commodified nature and life forms and thus
creating the possibility of cheating disability and postponing death for
those who can afford it. It has created a demand for vital body parts that
can be bought and sold. There is a rising demand for kidneys in the global
market; this demand is met from those among the poor in India, Turkey, Romania and
the Philippines, who have run out of things to sell: fish are gone, coconuts are priced too low and
the demand for unskilled labour is not as high as that for kidneys. Poor persons who have
surrendered their agency in order to improve a situation end up being
worse off because regular medical attention is required after kidney
transplants which they can ill afford and end up neglecting in order to
feed their families.

Structural Violence turns social exclusion

Winter and Leighton in 1999 (Deborah DuNann Winter and Dana C. Leighton. Winter:
Psychologist that specializes in Social Psych, Counseling Psych, Historical and Contemporary Issues,
Peace Psychology. Leighton: PhD graduate student in the Psychology Department at the University of
Arkansas. Knowledgable in the fields of social psychology, peace psychology, and ustice and
intergroup responses to transgressions of justice) (Peace, conflict, and violence: Peace psychology in
the 21st century. Pg 4-5)

recognize the operation of structural violence forces us to ask

Finally, to
questions about how and why we tolerate it, questions which often have
painful answers for the privileged elite who unconsciously support it . A final
question of this section is how and why we allow ourselves to be so oblivious to structural violence.
Susan Opotow offers an intriguing set of answers, in her article Social Injustice. She argues that our
normal perceptual/cognitive processes divide people into in-groups and
out-groups. Those outside our group lie outside our scope of justice. Injustice that would
be instantaneously confronted if it occurred to someone we love or know
is barely noticed if it occurs to strangers or those who are invisible or
irrelevant. We do not seem to be able to open our minds and our hearts to everyone, so we
draw conceptual lines between those who are in and out of our moral
circle. Those who fall outside are morally excluded, and become either invisible, or
demeaned in some way so that we do not have to acknowledge the injustice they
suffer. Moral exclusion is a human failing, but Opotow argues convincingly that it is
an outcome of everyday social cognition. To reduce its nefarious effects, we must be
vigilant in noticing and listening to oppressed, invisible, outsiders.
Inclusionary thinking can be fostered by relationships, communication, and appreciation of diversity.
Like Opotow, all the authors in this section point out that structural violence is not
inevitable if we become aware of its operation, and build systematic ways
to mitigate its effects. Learning about structural violence may be discouraging, overwhelming,
or maddening, but these papers encourage us to step beyond guilt and anger, and begin to think
about how to reduce structural violence. All the authors in this section note that the same
structures (such as global communication and normal social cognition)
which feed structural violence, can also be used to empower citizens to
reduce it
 Structural Violence First
Structural violence outweighs war millions of deaths per year.
Gilman 2000 (Robert, President of Context Institute, Structural Violence, The Foundation of Peace IC #4,
http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC04/Gilman1.htm, 2000, AD: 7-9-9)

Hunger and poverty are two prime examples of what is described as

"structural violence," that is, physical and psychological harm that results
from exploitive and unjust social, political and economic systems. It is something that most of us
know is going on, some of us have experienced, but in its starker forms, it is sufficiently distant from most North American lives that it is often hard to get a good perspective on it. I've come across an approach that seems to help provide that perspective, and I'd like to describe it. How
significant is structural violence? How does one measure the impact of injustice? While this may sound like an impossibly difficult question, Gernot Kohler and Norman Alcock (in Journal of Peace Research, 1976, 13, pp. 343-356) have come up with a surprisingly simple method for
estimating the grosser forms of structural violence, at least at an international level. The specific question they ask is, how many extra deaths occur each year due to the unequal distribution of wealth between countries? To understand their approach, we will need to plunge into some global
statistics. It will help to start with the relationship between Life Expectancy (LE) and Gross National Product Per Person (GNP/p) that is shown in the following figure. Each dot in this figure stands for one country with its LE and GNP/p for the year 1979. All together, 135 countries are
represented (data from Ruth Sivard's World Military and Social Expenditures 1982, World Priorities, Box 1003, Leesburg VA 22075, $4). Kohler and Alcock used a similar figure based on data for 1965, and I'll compare the 1965 data with the 1979 data later in this article. Except for a few oil
exporting countries (like Libya) that have unusual combinations of high GNPs and low Life Expectancies, the data follows a consistent pattern shown by the curve. Among the "poor" countries (with GNP/p below about $2400 per person per year), life expectancy is relatively low and

. The value
increases rapidly with increasing GNP/p. Among the "rich" countries, life expectancy is consistently high and is relatively unaffected by GNP. The dividing line between these two groups turns out to also be the world average GNP per person

of the life expectancy curve at that point (for 1979) is 70 years. Thus,
other things being equal, if the world's wealth was distributed equally
among the nations, every country would have a life expectancy of 70
years. This value is surprisingly close to the average life expectancy for
the industrial countries (72 years), and is even not that far below the
maximum national life expectancy of 76 years (Iceland, Japan, and
Sweden). Kohler and Alcock use this egalitarian model as a standard to compare the actual world situation against. The procedure is as
follows. The actual number of deaths in any country can be estimated by dividing the population (P) by the life expectancy (LE). The difference
between the actual number of deaths and the number of deaths that would occur under egalitarian conditions is thus P/LE - P/70. For example,
in 1979 India had a population of 677 million and a life expectancy of 52
years. Thus India's actual death rate was 13 million while if the life
expectancy had been 70, the rate would have been 9.7 million. The
difference of 3.3 million thus provides an estimate of the number of extra
deaths. Calculating this difference for each country and then adding them
up gives the number of extra deaths worldwide due to the unequal
distribution of resources. The result for 1965 was 14 million, while for
1979 the number had declined to 11 million . (China, with a quarter of the world's population, is responsible for 3/4 of this drop since it raised its life expectancy from
50 in 1965 to 64 in 1979.) How legitimate is it to ascribe these deaths to the structural violence of human institutions, and not just to the variability of nature? Perhaps the best in-depth study of structural violence comes from the Institute for Food and Development Policy (1885 Mission St,
San Francisco, CA 94103). What they find throughout the Third World is that the problems of poverty and hunger often date back hundreds of years to some conquest - by colonial forces or otherwise. The victors became the ruling class and the landholders, pushing the vast majority either on
to poor ground or into being landless laborers. Taxes, rentals, and the legal system were all structured to make sure that the poor stayed poor. The same patterns continue today. Additional support is provided by the evidence in the above figure, which speaks for itself. Also, according to

Third World countries run by military dominated

Sivard, 97% of the people in the Third World live under repressive governments, with almost half of all

governments. Finally, as a point of comparison, Ehrlich and Ehrlich

(Population, Environment, and Resources, 1972, p72) estimate between 10
and 20 million deaths per year due to starvation and malnutrition . If their estimates
are correct, our estimates may even be too low. Some comparisons will help to put these figures in perspective . The total number
of deaths from all causes in 1965 was 62 million, so these estimates
indicate that 23% of all deaths were due to structural violence . By 1979 the fraction had dropped to
15%. While it is heartening to see this improvement, the number of deaths is staggeringly large, dwarfing any other form of violence other than nuclear war. For example, the level of structural violence is 60 times greater than the
average number of battle related deaths per year since 1965 (Sivard 1982). It is 1.5 times as great as the yearly average number of civilian and battle field deaths during the 6 years of World War II. Every 4 days, it is the equivalent of
another Hiroshima. Perhaps the most hopeful aspect of this whole tragic situation is that essentially everyone in the present system has become a loser. The plight of the starving is obvious, but the exploiters don't have much to show
for their efforts either - not compared to the quality of life they could have in a society without the tensions generated by this exploitation. Especially at a national level, what the rich countries need now is not so much more material

The rich and the poor, with the help of modern

wealth, but the opportunity to live in a world at peace.

technology and weaponry, have become each others' prisoners. Today's

industrialized societies did not invent this structural violence, but it could
not continue without our permission. This suggests that to the list of
human tendencies that are obstacles to peace we need to add the ease
with which we acquiesce in injustice - the way we all too easily look in the
other direction and disclaim "response ability." In terms of the suffering it
supports, it is by far our most serious flaw.
Centralizing our academic insights about structural violence
as keyonly we can present a new vision of politics
Ornelas 2012 (Raul, Professor and activist, this essay was peer reviewed in The South
Atlantic Quarterly Winter Counterhegemonies and Emancipations: Notes for a Debate)
The discussion of the horizons of social struggle is neither an academic issue
nor, in the end, a theoretical one. The historical experience of social struggle,
and especially the history of revolutionary processes, demonstrates that
the points of reference that provide the strength and ideas that orient
struggle and social transformation are of primary importance . While it is the
workers and their organizations that through struggle constitute the subject of social
transformation, what we call points of reference (organizations, but also newspapers,
clubs, and more recently, groups of intellectuals) have been able to make
important contributions in formulating analysis and strategies adequate
to the historical moment insofar as they take into account the realities of
the transformational subject. In this sense, we think it is very important to
intensify the debate concerning the horizons of social struggle . This becomes
even more relevant if, following Perry Andersons characterization of the Latin American social
reality, Here and only here, the resistance to neoliberalism and to neo-
imperialism conjugates the cultural with the social and national. That is to
say, it entails an emerging vision of another type of organization of
society and another model of relations among states on the basis of these three
different dimensions.1

Contesting and critiquing common sense key

Bleiker, Professor of IR @ Queensland University, 2005 p. 179-180
(Roland, International Society and Its Critics Ed. Bellamy)

But common sense is not always as commonsensical as it seems, or at least

not as problematic and value-free. This certainly is the case with English School assumptions about
international society. Allow me to present the issue through an unusual foray into neuropsychology. Such a detour may reveal more than a direct
look at world politics. Peter Brugger conducted a highly insightful series of studies that demonstrate how the brain seeks to discover rules and
patterns even in circumstances where there )re only random events. In one of his behavioural tests, Brugger asked forty volubteers to participate
in a game. They had to direct a cursor on a screen towards a target and open it as often as possible. Participants did not know that the target
could be opened only after a certain period of time had expired-otherwise it simply remained locked. All participants managed to score
repeatedly. But instead of simply waiting .unttil the respective time span was over, almost all participants moved their cursors '~cross the
screen, searching for a correct route towards the target. Many developed Wighly complex theories about the most efficient ways of reaching [the
target].'only two of the forty participants figured out that there was no correct route, that I strongly suspect that exactly the same is the case
in international relations scholarship: that we develop complex
theories to visualize the exact outlines of an international society
where there are in fact only blurred contours or none at all; that we
project far more of ourselves onto the world of world politics than
there actually is 'out there'. As a result, we may not only overestimate
the existence of order in international relations, but also overvalue its
importance. In any case, the relationship between order and disorder is far more complex than the modern practice of dualistic
conceptualizing has it. Orders can sometimes be highly unjust, such as in order-

obsessed Nazi Germany. Disorder can occasionally be required to

promote orders that are more just. Or, perhaps most importantly, disorder
can be both the only reality we have and a valuable source of ethical
politics. By probing these issues I am not looking for definitive answers. Rather, I would like to pose a few crucial questions about
international society. The ensuing ruminations stake no claim to comprehensiveness. There will, for instance, be no engagement with various
authors who are central to the English School. Neither will I discuss the controversial issue of who belongs to this tradition and who does not,
except to demonstrate how these very discussions are a reflection of the modern compulsion to order the world. Finally, I must admit that I am
neither English nor received 'formal' training in the English School . But sometimes a look from the
 outside can reveal aspects that are difficult to see from within-a
premise upon which the contribution of this chapter rests.

A loss of value to life precedes all other impacts death is

preferable to a valueless life
Mitchell '05 [Andrew J. Mitchell, Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University, "Heidegger and
Terrorism," Research in Phenomenology, Volume 35, Number 1, 2005 , pp. 171-217]

Devastation (Verwistung) is the process by which the world becomes a

desert (Wfiste), a sandy expanse that seemingly extends without end,
without landmarks or direction, and is devoid of all life.20 If we follow the dialogue in thinking an ancient Greek
the lifeless desert is the being-less
notion of "life" as another name for "being," then
desert. The world that becomes a lifeless desert is consequently an
unworld from which being has withdrawn. The older prisoner makes this connection
explicit, "The being of an age of devastation would then consist in the abandonment of being" (GA 77: 213). As we
have seen, this is a process that befalls the world, slowly dissolving it of worldliness and rendering it an "unworld"
(cf. GA 7: 88, 92f./EP, 104, 107f., etc.). Yet this unworld is not simply the opposite of world; it remains a world, but
a world made desert. The desert is not the complete absence of world. Such an absence would not be reached by
annihilation is
devastation (Verwisiung), but rather by annihilation (Vernichtung); and for Heidegger,
far less of a concern than devastation: "Devastation is more uncanny than mere
annihilation [blofle Vernichtung]. Mere annihilation sweeps aside all things
including even nothingness, while devastation on the contrary
orders and spreads everything that blocks and prevents" (WHD, 11/29-30;
tin). Annihilation as a thought of total absence is a thought from metaphysics. It is one with a thinking of pure
presence: pure presence, pure absence, and. purely no contact between them. During another lecture course on
H6lderlin, this time in 1942 on the hymn "The Ister," Heidegger claims that annihilation is precisely the agenda of
America in regards to the "homeland," which is here equated with Europe: "We know today that the Anglo-Saxon
world of Americanism has resolved to annihilate [zu vernichten] Europe, that is, the homeland, and that means:
the inception of the Western world. The inceptual is indestructible [unzersto'rbar]" (GA 53: 68/54; tm). America is
the agent of technological devastation, and it operates under the assumptions of presence and absence that it itself
is so expert at dissembling. America resolves to annihilate and condemns itself to fdilure in so doing, for the origin
is "indestructible." We could take this a step further and claim that only because the origin cannot be annihilated is
it possible to destroy it. This possibility of destruction is its indestructible character. It can always be further
destroyed, but you will never annihilate it. Americanism names the endeavor or resolution to drive the destruction
of the world ever further into the unworld. America is the agent of a malevolent being. This same reasoning
Evil is the
explains why the older man's original conception of evil had to be rethought.
"devastation of the earth and the annihilation of the human essence
that goes along with it" (GA 77: 207), he said, but this annihilation is simply too easy, too much of
an "Americanism." The human essence is not annihilated in evil-who could care about that? Instead it is destroyed
and devastated by evil. Devastation does not annihilate, but brings about
something worse, the unworld. Without limit, the desert of the
unworld spreads, ever worsening and incessantiy urging itself to
new expressions of malevolence. Annihilation would bring respite
and, in a perverse sense, relief. There would be nothing left to protect and guard, nothing left
to concern ourselves with-nothing left to terrorize. Devastation is also irreparable; no
salvation can arrive for it. The younger man is able to voice the monstrous conclusion of this
thinking of devastation: "Then malevolence, as which devastation occurs [sich ereignet], would indeed remain a
-basic characteristic of being itself" (GA 77: 213, 215; em). The older man agrees, "being would be in the ground
of its essence malevolent" (GA 77: 215). Being is not evil; it is something much worse; being is malevolent.