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Eco-Terorrism Surveillance AFF
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Inherency
Current “domestic terrorism” definitions cover animals rights groups, even if they are
nonviolent
Jerome P. Bjelopera, Specialist in Organized Crime and Terrorism, February 19, 2014, “The Domestic
Terrorist Threat: Background and Issues for Congress,” Congressional Research Service,
https://www.hsdl.org/?view&did=751755, ACC. 6-23-2015
While some domestic terrorism suspects engage in violent plotting, others commit much different
crimes that do not physically harm people. This latter group differs from their homegrown violent
jihadist counterparts, who are often bent on killing or harming people. Two types of activities that avoid
visiting violence upon people but are commonly associated with subjects of domestic terrorism
investigations stand out. First, many animal rights extremists, eco-terrorists, and anarchist extremists
believe in “direct action.” This typically involves what movement members would characterize as nonviolent but criminal protest or resistance activities furthering the movement’s ideology. While direct
action has a long legacy among anarchists, in recent years the ALF and the ELF have played a large role
in articulating its meaning. Second, “paper terrorism” is a term used to describe some of the non-violent
criminal activity committed by sovereign citizens involving the filing of fraudulent documents in the
hopes of harassing enemies or bilking state or federal tax authorities.
Environmental activists are catalogued in a database as “terrorists”
Tome Pelton, Staff Writer, September 16, 2014, “Government Surveillance of Environmental
Activists,” WYPR News,
http://wypr.org/post/government-surveillance-environmental-activists, ACC. 6-26-2015
Over the last year, the news has been full of stories about U.S. government surveillance of its own
civilians. Among those worried about the government’s increased power to track and record the
communications of people in the iPhone age are some environmental activists who in the past have
been wrongly labeled "ecoterrorists" in government databases. “I am more concerned about
surveillance than I’ve ever been," said Mike Tidwell (shown in picture), Founder of the Chesapeake
Climate Action Network. "I am deeply concerned about NSA surveillance of Americans.” Tidwell has a
reason to worry. From 2005 to 2008, the Maryland State Police listed Tidwell and two of his fellow
climate activists in a database of suspected terrorists.
The FBI sees eco-activists as radical extremists
Adam Federman, 2003/2004 Russia Fulbright Fellow, April 10, 2015, “How Corporations and Law
Enforcement Are Spying on Environmentalists,” Truth-Out, http://www.truthout.org/news/item/30134-power-play, ACC. 6-26-2015
In August 2010, the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Domestic Terrorism Analysis Unit distributed an
intelligence bulletin to all field offices warning that environmental extremism would likely become an
increasing threat to the energy industry. The eight-page document argued that, even though the
industry had encountered only low-level vandalism and trespassing, recent "criminal incidents"
suggested that environmental extremism was on the rise. The FBI concluded: "Environmental extremism
will become a greater threat to the energy industry owing to our historical understanding that some
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environmental extremists have progressed from committing low-level crimes against targets to more
significant crimes over time in an effort to further the environmental extremism cause."
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Solvency (advocates)
Congress should narrow the “threat to national security” part of “terrorism” to
exclude animal rights and environmental activists in general. This specifically reduces
domestic surveillance of terrorism to those geared toward catastrophic harm
Tyler C. Anderson, J.D., Harvard Law School, Summer, 2014, “Toward Institutional Reform of
Intelligence Surveillance: A Proposal to Amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,” Harvard Law &
Policy Review, 8 Harv. L. & Pol'y Rev. 413, http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/
articles/98968748/toward-institutional-reform-intelligence-surveillance-proposal-amend-foreignintelligence-surveillance-act, ACC. 6-23-2015
Additionally, Congress should narrow the type of activity that constitutes reasonable suspicion by an
intelligence agency that a U.S. person is an "agent of a foreign power" in Sections 1881b and 1881c,
which it could accomplish by narrowing the definition of "international terrorism." One version of this
proposal has already been put forth by Seventh Circuit Judge Richard Posner. In Judge Posner's
proposal, the FAA would add an additional targeting requirement such that intelligence agencies would
need to reasonably suspect that targets are threats to national security. Specifically, he would define
"threat to national security" to implicate only "threats involving a potential for mass deaths or
catastrophic damage to property or to the economy," and leave to traditional law enforcement the
surveillance of acts that include "ecoterrorism, animal-rights terrorism, and other political violence that,
though criminal, does not threaten catastrophic harm."
The label “eco-terrorist” label should not be used for all environmental activists.
Surveillance should only target specific threats
Sivan Hirsch-Hoefler, Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy Interdisciplinary Center
(IDC), and Cas Mudde, Department of International Affairs, University of Georgia, Athens, December
19, 2014, “Ecoterrorism: threat or political ploy?,’ Washington Post,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/12/19/ecoterrorism-threat-or-politicalploy/, ACC. 6-23-2015
Similarly, the label “ecoterrorism” should not be used for the whole REAR movement, but only for some
of its actions, individuals and groups; this also holds for the most active ‘groups’ within the broader
movement, i.e. ALF and ELF. Obviously, counterterrorist measures should only target these terrorist
minorities, rather than the broader movement. Just as every radical anti-abortion activist is not a
(potential) terrorist, neither is every radical environmentalist or animal rights activist.
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Surveillance Bad – General / misplaced
FBI surveillance of environmental and animals rights groups are clearly misplaced
Kyle J. Bohrer, Beloit College Sustainability Fellow, 2014, “‘Ecoterrorism’ in the United States: Industry
Involvement in Group Prosecution,”
http://pol.illinoisstate.edu/downloads/conferences/2014/Bohrer.pdf, ACC. 6-26-2015
Since the origins of terrorism, it has been widely agreed-upon that acts must be committed against
people to be considered legitimate acts of terror. Although the FBI has broadened the definition of
terrorism to include acts not directly targeted at people, it is still generally agreed upon within the
academic community that the act must ‘terrorize’ the targeted population. Violence against property
may terrorize a population and fulfill this requirement, but only if in doing so it threatens further
violence against persons or property critical for life, such as an aqueduct supplying drinking water to a
city. Acts that maintain the moral distinction between persons and property, while neither harming nor
threatening to harm individuals, are inherently distinguishable from genuine terrorism in theory and
should be distinguished from the tactics used to combat terrorism. Furthermore, the debate of what
constitutes acts of terrorism is not merely academic. In an attempt to dissuade terrorism, the Patriot Act
created harsher punishments for those convicted of terrorist activities. This includes longer prison
sentences, restrictions on contacting friends and family, and placement in higher security prisons.
Perhaps most importantly however, it forever connects the word ‘terrorist’ to the defendant, a term
that has come to symbolize countless number of horrors to many people.
The so-called threat of eco-terrorism is a ploy by the fossil fuel industry in conjunction
with FBI surveillance. But acts of violence have virtually disappeared
Adam Federman, 2003/2004 Russia Fulbright Fellow, April 10, 2015, “How Corporations and Law
Enforcement Are Spying on Environmentalists,” Truth-Out, http://www.truthout.org/news/item/30134-power-play, ACC. 6-26-2015
Since the 2010 FBI assessment was written, the specter of environmental extremism has been trotted
out by both law enforcement and energy-industry security teams to describe a wide variety of
grassroots groups opposed to the continued extraction of fossil fuels. In 2011, the Royal Canadian
Mounted Police (RCMP) published a report titled, "Environmental Criminal Extremism and Canada's
Energy Sector." The RCMP warned that environmental extremism posed a "clear and present criminal
threat" to the energy industry. While both the FBI and RCMP reports make an effort to distinguish
between lawful protest and criminal activity, they often conflate the two – in the RCMP report the terms
"violence" and "direct action" are used interchangeably – and suggest opposition to the energy industry
will lead to extremism. (The FBI's Counterterrorism Division declined to answer questions about the
2010 bulletin.) Yet even as the resistance to "extreme energy projects" has grown in size and scope,
there is little evidence to support the breathless warnings about "eco-terrorism." There has been no
upward spiral in criminality among environmental activists. To the contrary, arson, property destruction,
and other acts of violence most closely associated with the radical animal rights movement of the 1980s
and 1990s have become all but nonexistent. According to figures compiled by the Global Terrorism
Database (GTD) at the University of Maryland, there has been only a handful of incidents defined as ecoterrorism since 2010. In fact, between 2010 and 2013, the latest year for which the GTD has published
figures, out of a total of 54 terror incidents in the United States, five were attributed to the Animal
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Liberation Front. The last recorded incident carried out by the Earth Liberation Front – the bulldozing of
two radio transmission towers in Washington – was in 2009. Earth First! hasn't appeared in the database
since 1994.
Surveillance is ridiculous. The FBI has absurd definitions of “terrorism” to include ecoactivists
Danny Moloshok, Staff Writer, June 14, 2015, “FBI must explain prioritizing environmental activists
on its terrorist lists,” RT, http://rt.com/usa/266866-environmentalists-leftists-fbi-terrorism/, ACC. 6-262015
The targeting of environmental activists is no accident, Potter explained. It's part of the FBI's current
mission and not an aberration, especially in an era of federal legislation, such as the Animal Enterprise
Terrorism Act, a sweeping law that labels and punishes as "eco-terrorism" numerous political activities
or civil disobedience conducted in the name of animal rights. The law covers action that "damages or
causes the loss of any real or personal property" or "places a person in reasonable fear" of injury. "It
may seem like isolated incidents where you have these environmentalists on a most-wanted list, or the
FBI is talking about animal-rights activists, but these are really systemic problems."
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“Eco-terrorist” label bad – Inaccurate / Misplaced
Anti-globalization, Civil Rights, and Abortion movements prove the ecoterrorism label
is misplaced
Sivan Hirsch-Hoefler, Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy Interdisciplinary Center
(IDC), and Cas Mudde, Department of International Affairs, University of Georgia, Athens, December
19, 2014, “Ecoterrorism: threat or political ploy?,’ Washington Post,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/12/19/ecoterrorism-threat-or-politicalploy/, ACC. 6-23-2015
Every major social movement includes moderate and radical individuals and groups, including often a
small violent (terrorist) minority. This was the case in, for example, both the recent anti-globalization
movement and the historical civil rights movement. No one would classify these movements, as a whole,
as terrorist. Today, the U.S. anti-abortion movement includes a significant and very active radical wing
that is involved in criminal acts and even terrorism. Unlike the REAR movement, academics, government
agencies and politicians hardly ever refer to the radical anti-abortion movement as terrorist.
The “eco-terrorist” label is inaccurate
David Thomas Sumner, Professor English/Environmental Studies Director of Writing, Linfield College,
and Lisa M. Weidman, Professor of Mass Communication, Linfield College, Autumn 2013, “Ecoterrorism or Eco-tage: An Argument for the Proper Frame,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature
and Environment, (Autumn 2013) 20 (4): 855-876
What these three examples have in common is a term: terrorism. Yet these examples also raise a
question: What does the term “terrorism” mean? Is it accurate to lump illegal acts that destroy property
but carefully avoid harming people into the same category as acts clearly intended to kill? Is this a
difference of kind or just of degree? While we (the authors) don't generally endorse the destruction of
property as a method of generating social change, we believe that the destruction of property is
fundamentally different from the intentional killing of people; therefore, to label acts of obstruction,
trespassing, vandalism, sabotage, or arson as “terrorism” is inaccurate and has the potential to damage
one's understanding of real acts of terrorism, thereby reducing the potency of the term.
Activists should not be labelled “eco-terrorists” because there is not threat to life
Kyle J. Bohrer, Beloit College Sustainability Fellow, 2014, “‘Ecoterrorism’ in the United States: Industry
Involvement in Group Prosecution,”
http://pol.illinoisstate.edu/downloads/conferences/2014/Bohrer.pdf, ACC. 6-26-2015
Over the course of thirty years, what started as a buzzword and tool of political rhetoric by conservative
organizations became a term defining a political movement. Groups such as Earth First!, the ELF, ALF,
Greenpeace, and even the Sea Shepard Conservation Society, which has had a documentary-style reality
television show since 2008, have been put in the same group as al-Qaeda and its affiliates. Yet unlike
other organizations labeled as terrorists, radical environmental groups have committed no harm against
human life or conspired to overthrow the government in a violent struggle. Although those who
perpetrate ecotage are not innocent, and have broken numerous laws, they should not be labeled as
“terrorists”.
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“Eco-terrorist” label bad - General
Calling activists “ecoterrorists” is fundamentally wrong. The label has a lasting stigma
and faces harsher punishments
Kyle J. Bohrer, Beloit College Sustainability Fellow, 2014, “‘Ecoterrorism’ in the United States: Industry
Involvement in Group Prosecution,”
http://pol.illinoisstate.edu/downloads/conferences/2014/Bohrer.pdf, ACC. 6-26-2015
The terms ‘ecoterrorism’ and ‘ecoterrorist’ have been around since the early 1980s, but what first began
as a name given to discredit politically radial groups has transformed into a classification with very
severe political, social, and ethical consequences. Those convicted of ecoterrorism face longer prison
sentences, reduced legal access, and fast-tracking through the court system. Furthermore, they will
forever carry the social stigma of being labeled a terrorist. The label ‘terrorist’ and the label ‘arsonist’ or
‘political radical’ conjure very different images within the public mind. With such harsh consequences
attached to the terrorist classification, why have radical environmental groups in the United States been
labeled as terrorists while other radical organizations have not? Although radical environmentalists
engage in illegal activity, they have never killed anyone or specifically targeted individuals with intent to
physically harm them. Yet, radical right-wing organizations that have systematically killed doctors that
perform abortions have never been labeled as terroristic. Labeling radical environmentalists as
‘ecoterrorists’ is fundamentally wrong and flawed and completely undermines the ideal of treating
distinct levels of crime with distinct levels of punishment.
Anti-activist surveillance creates a chill that coerced immigrants with the threat of
deportation
Adam Federman, 2003/2004 Russia Fulbright Fellow, April 10, 2015, “How Corporations and Law
Enforcement Are Spying on Environmentalists,” Truth-Out, http://www.truthout.org/news/item/30134-power-play, ACC. 6-26-2015
"It doesn't surprise me that the industry is trying to paint the environmental movement as fringe or
dangerous." They've also made Parras a subject of interest for industry and law enforcement. He is
routinely questioned by the police or harassed by security representatives from Valero Energy, a major
refining company and one of the industries Parras monitors. In 2013 Parras got a text from a friend, Tish
Stringer, saying that an agent had visited her home and wanted to know about her relationship with
him. The Coast Guard special agent, David Pileggi, told Stringer he'd been tipped off by Valero. "It's
nothing new," Parras says. "Since 9/11 we've been harassed repeatedly and pulled over for taking
pictures or video of the facilities." In an emailed statement, Bill Day, vice president of communications
at Valero, said the Houston refinery is designated by Homeland Security as "critical infrastructure" and
therefore must meet enhanced security requirements. "One of those requirements," he wrote, "is that
when we see people taking photos or video of our facilities, we ascertain the purpose of that activity
and then report it to DHS." According to Shauna Dunlap, media coordinator for the FBI's Houston
Division, photographing and videotaping of critical infrastructures "can be a precursor of potential
criminal activity." The Joint Terrorism Task Force, she says, is "obligated to look into each and every
suspicious activity report." This kind of surveillance and intimidation, Parras says, is particularly chilling
in an area with a large number of undocumented residents. Not only are they vulnerable to threats of
deportation, but also they're quite literally at the crossroads of environmental destruction and the risks
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associated with climate change. East Houston is home to a disproportionate number of the city's largest
sources of industrial pollution, four major highways, and the shipping channel that feeds into the Port of
Houston. If built, the Keystone XL pipeline would terminate in East Houston; Valero has a contract with
TransCanada to receive most of the oil. "On the basis of location alone these neighborhoods appear far
more vulnerable to health risks than others in Greater Houston," a 2006 study commissioned by the
mayor's office concluded. In addition, rising sea levels threaten to inundate the heavily industrialized
shoreline. "It puts us at even higher risk because we're on the coast," says Parras. "All these facilities are
right on the water."
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A2: Environmental Movement Turns – Non-unique
The mainstream environmental movement is already out of touch with the public and
cannot resolve climate change
Sam Gindin, adjunct professor at York University in Toronto, January 11, 2015, “The Environmental
Movement and Capitalism: When History Knocks, Review of Noami Klein's Book,” Global Research,
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-environmental-movement-and-capitalism-when-historyknocks/5423789, ACC. 6-24-2015
In contrast, the mainstream environmental movement, Klein laments, “generally stands apart from
these expressions of mass frustration, choosing to define climate activism narrowly – demanding a
carbon tax, say, or even trying to stop a pipeline.” Building a non-parochial, mass movement against
climate change isn’t about de-emphasizing the central importance of the environmental crisis but of
thinking about it politically and in the context of wider values. Such a mass movement needs to forge its
own common sense, structures independent of capital, and the energy and staying power that comes
with a realizable, if distant, vision.
The environmental movement is weaker than ever
Mark Stoll, Associate Professor of History and Director of Environmental Studies at Texas Tech
University, April 22, 2015, “Whatever Happened to the Environmental Movement?,” History New
Network, http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/159176, ACC. 6-26-2015
Earth Day inaugurated a decade of environmental action. Responding to this popular outcry, the federal
government created the Environmental Protection Agency, protected endangered species, cleaned up
the air and water (mostly), banned or restricted toxic chemicals, tightened regulation of nuclear power
plants, and established the Superfund to clean up toxic waste sites. Earth Day 2015 is unlikely to be
anything like that first Earth Day. Environmental organizations have far more members than in 1970 (the
Sierra Club, for example, has almost 40 times more members) but are weaker than ever. Congress has
passed no major environmental legislation in 25 years. The environmental movement has never been
bigger – or less effective at the national level.
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A2: Environmental Movement Turns – Link-Turn
How we talk about environmental extremism matters. The mere label of “terrorism”
guarantees harsher penalties and sentences, while undermining the entire movement
Steve Cooke, PhD, Manchester Centre for Political Theory (MANCEPT) at the University of Manchester,
Research Fellow, 2013, “Animal Rights and Environmental terrorism,” Journal of Terrorism Research,
4:2, http://ojs.st-andrews.ac.uk/index.php/jtr/article/view/532/598, ACC. 6-23-2016
The result of this analysis is not only to show that should we avoid labelling many forms of paradigmatic
animal rights and environmental extremism as terrorism, but also to provide a partial justification for
them. Of course, many other supporting reasons would need to be given in an all things considered
justification. Other such factors might include: whether acts are proportionate responses; whether they
have a chance of succeeding in their aims; whether the threat they seek to avert is urgent and
immanent; whether non-violent methods have been exhausted; and so forth. Thus, whilst the
strong prima facie case against violent activism or terrorism is maintained, it is not ruled out a priori.
The importance of reassessing the moral and legal status of the more extreme forms of animal rights
and environmental activism is high. The consequences of infelicitous use the terms ‘terrorism’ or
‘terrorist’ can be very grave indeed. As John Hadley points out, terrorists face harsher penalties and
longer sentences than criminals convicted of comparably violent non-political offences, and in addition
such labelling carries de-legitimising stigma for an ideological movement and social censure for its
advocates. When considering our responses to paradigmatic forms of animal rights and environmental
extremism care must be taken in how we describe activists and their acts, and in how the law responds
to them. To call all violent activism ‘terrorism’ is not only often incorrect, but can also, given the
consequences of doing so, count as a wrong done against those who engage in radical activism.
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A2: Environmental Movement Turns – Movement Bad / Whiteness
The environmental movement is steeped in whiteness and racist biases
Olivia Aguilar, assistant professor of environmental studies at Denison University, April 16,
2015, “Diversifying the Environmental Movement Isn't Enough,” Truthout, http://www.truthout.org/opinion/item/30185-diversifying-the-environmental-movement-isn-t-enough, ACC. 6-26-2015
We have known for quite a while the environmental movement is stubbornly White. Most
recently, Barbara Grady, of GreenBiz Group, noted that improvements are in the works, citing that the
leaders of the EPA and NRDC were women of color. Unfortunately, this doesn't address the elephant in
the room. Environmentalists don't have a diversity problem, they have an identity problem. And it's
rooted in a racist history and unchecked biases.
The green movement is actually white. Attempts to diversify will fail without
addressing the underlying environmental justice
Eliza Sherpa and Sarah Arndt, Skidmore College, April 16, 2014, “On why the environmental
movement is failing to ‘diversity’,” We Are Power Shift, http://www.wearepowershift.org/blogs/whyenvironmental-movement-failing-diversify, ACC. 6-26-2015
Environmentalism, especially on a small scale, is often criticized as a “white man’s fight” (see for
example, Van Jones on why the “green movement” is too white). The goal of diversification is frequently
talked about within environmental organizations, and something our own campus environmental
community strives for. While commendable, we need to critically analyze the intentions, vision, and
methods of diversification to understand why we seem to continuously fail at moving towards this goal.
One aspect of white privilege we often hear discussed is the ability to be treated as an individual in a
white dominated society, as opposed to being profiled. While this may seem an obvious point, what this
means within an environmental context is that gaining the participation of a few people of color does
not mean we’ve successfully diversified our movement, since those voices can certainly not, nor should
they be expected to, represent all communities of color. While it may seem an obvious point to make,
many of us, perhaps unconsciously, make this assumption each time we wait for a person of color to
raise the issue of race, assume that our own understandings of racial marginalization applies to specific
people of color, or call our movement inclusive merely because of who’s sitting at the table.
Whiteness infects the environmental movement at all levels. This prevents it from
addressing climate change
Katie Valentine, Staff Writer, September 23, 2013, “The Whitewashing Of The Environmental
Movement,” Think Progress,
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/09/23/2230511/environmental-movement-diversity/, ACC. 6-262015
The traditional environmental movement has a diversity problem. That’s according to Van Jones,
founder of Green for All and environmental and civil rights advocate. But Jones says it’s not just that the
staffs of many large, mainstream environmental organizations have been historically mostly white — it’s
that most of the smaller environmental justice groups are getting a fraction of the funding that the big
groups receive. Jones says for the environmental movement as a whole to succeed, that needs to
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change. Environmental justice groups are the ones serving populations that are often most vulnerable to
climate change and affected most by pollution — Americans who are low income, live in cities and are
often people of color.
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A2: Environmental Movement Turns – Movement Bad / Whiteness
Race and ethnic diversity is absent under environmental leadership organizations
Raul M. Grijalva, represents Arizona’s 3rd Congressional District and has served in the House since
2003. He is ranking member on the Natural Resources Committee and also sits on the Education and the
Workforce Committee, April 27, 2015, “Diversify and win: What lies ahead for the environmental
movement,” The Hill, http://thehill.com/opinion/op-ed/239996-diversify-and-win-what-lies-ahead-forthe-environmental-movement, ACC. 6-26-2015
As the nation commemorated Earth Day last week, it was once again apparent that, despite all the
progress the environmental movement has made over the past half-century, something is still
amiss. That missing element is racial and ethnic diversity in the mainstream environmental movement
and among environmental funders. And it needs to be addressed if the movement is to prepare itself
for the unmet challenges that need to be addressed now and in the coming years. Those challenges
have expanded from a call to action on the first Earth Day 45 years ago to include a broad range of
public health and civil rights issues afflicting everyday life in communities of color across the
country. Yet studies show that while the overall movement itself is very diverse, the mainstream bigbudget green advocacy and scientific organizations, foundations and environmental agencies in
government continue to be overwhelmingly led and staffed by whites.
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A2: Terrorism / Law Enforce DA
Blanket federal designations of “eco-terrorist” undermine domestic terrorism policy
effectiveness
Jerome P. Bjelopera, Specialist in Organized Crime and Terrorism, February 19, 2014, “The Domestic
Terrorist Threat: Background and Issues for Congress,” Congressional Research Service,
https://www.hsdl.org/?view&did=751755, ACC. 6-23-2015
The federal government has used broad conceptualizations to describe domestic terrorism. DOJ
discusses the issue in terms of a handful of general “threats” such as animal rights extremists, ecoterrorists, anarchists, and anti-government extremists—not specific groups. Additionally, terms such as
“terrorism” and “extremism” appear to be used interchangeably. Presumably, using the term
“extremist” allows lawyers, policy makers, and investigators the flexibility to discuss terrorist-like activity
without actually labeling it as “terrorism” and then having to prosecute it as such. However, this may
lead to inconsistencies in the development and application of the law in the domestic terrorism arena.
For example, policy makers may ponder why a specific terrorism statute covers ideologically motivated
attacks against businesses that involve animals, while there are no other domestic terrorism statutes as
narrow in their purview covering a particular type of target and crime.
FBI surveillance of eco-activists represents misplaced priorities that undermine
effectiveness
Will Potter, an award-winning investigative journalist and current TED Fellow, June 3, 2015, “5
Reasons Why the FBI’s Most Wanted Domestic Terrorists List Should Have You Outraged,” Green is the
New Red, http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/fbi-most-wanted-domestic-terrorists-list/8349/,
ACC. 6-26-2015
When we see stories today about the FBI spying on Keystone pipeline protesters, or the FBI entrapping
environmentalists in faux terrorism plots, we need to remember that they aren’t isolated instances.
These misplaced priorities are coming from the top down. It’s time for a full investigation and overhaul
of the FBI’s domestic terrorism priorities. The FBI needs to be held accountable for focusing on
environmentalists and animal rights groups, and leftists from decades ago, while more serious threats
go unaddressed.
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Schmitt K AFF
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State of Excpetion cause genocide
Schmitt’s approach to domestic enemies makes populations disposable
Didier Bigo. Professor at Kings College. 2006. Security, exception, ban and surveillance.
Accessed May 23, 2015.
https://www.academia.edu/3102812/Security_exception_ban_and_surveillance
In conclusion, to focus on governmental antiterrorist policies alone, on Guantanamo Bay and torture in
Iraq or elsewhere, without seeing the relationship to the daily treatment of foreigners at the borders
and the suspicion concerning any deviant behaviour, is misleading. We need to insist on this
normalization of emergency as a technique of government by unease, and on the success of the
differentiation between a normalized population which is pleased to be monitored 'against danger' and
an 'alienation' of some groups of people considered as dangerous 'others'. The surveillance and
monitoring of the movement of each individual is growing, but effective controls and coercive
restrictions of freedom are concentrated on specific targets. These targets are constructed as 'invisible
and powerful enemies in networks' and the narratives concerning these threats predate September 11
and even the end of bipolarity. Nevertheless, September 11 has reinforced the idea that the struggle
against these threats justifies the profiling of certain people's potential behaviours, especially if they are
'on the move'. The political reaction to September 11 justifies a proactive and pre-emptive strategy,
which has the ambition to know, and to monitor the 'future'. The call for preventive action creates
uncertainty and gathers, inside large transnational databases, to control the judiciary protection of
privacy, both solid information about the past, and rumours collected by different sources. They are
used to create profiles and trends in order to anticipate the events through social sciences and
psychological bodies of knowledge. But in fact, this new technique is mixing the newest technologies
(biometrics, databases, DNA analysis) with a kind of astrological discourse of intelligence agencies and of
some professionals of politics concerning their capacity to know the future with some certainty. It is
driven by a faith in the truth of the body identification as a sign for a predictable pattern of behaviour.
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Using the state as a security apparatus makes the population peripheral and disposable
Jeremy Douglas. Independent Scholar. 2009. Disappearing Citizenship: Surveillance and the
state of exception. Surveillance and Society. Vol 6 No 1. Accessed May 23, 2015.
http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/3402
The essential goal of sovereignty is to maintain power, which is achieved when laws are obeyed and the
divine right of the throne is reaffirmed. 'Power' is the essential defining component of sovereignty, while
'government' is more or less just an administrative component within the sovereign state a component
that is the function of the family; the family, oikos, in ancient Greece was the private management
(government) of economic matters where the father ensured the security, health, wealth, and goods of
his wife and children, while the polis was the public realm where man realised his political significance in
striving for "the good life". The rise of government in the sixteenth century is marked by this family
government model being "applied to the state as a whole" (ibid, 93), as well as by the rise of
"mercantilism" - the former not realizing its full scope and application until the eighteenth century and
the latter being a stage of rasion d'état between sovereignty and governmentality. However, when the
art of governing becomes the predominant 'goal' of the state in the eighteenth century, the family is
relegated to the position of an "instrument" and population emerges as the "main target" (ibid, 108) of
the government (territory is the main target of sovereignty insofar as a sovereign defines itself according
to its territory, while government defines itself in term of its population). With population as the central
concern for government, other institutions and sites - such as territory, the family, security (military),
police, and discipline - all become "elements" or "instruments" in the management of the population
these biopolitical tactics are what primarily distinguish governmentality from sovereignty.
Exception exposes the population to genocide
Jeremy Douglas. Independent Scholar. 2009. Disappearing Citizenship: Surveillance and the
state of exception. Surveillance and Society. Vol 6 No 1. Accessed May 23, 2015.
http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/3402
"The exception, which is not codified in the existing legal order, can at best be characterized as a case of
extreme peril, a danger to the existence of the state, or the like" (Schmitt 1922, 6). Under the state of
exception there becomes a 'threshold' between law that is in the norm but is suspended and law that is
not the norm — i.e. not necessarily part of the juridical order — but is in force; so, in the state of
exception there appears this "ambiguous and uncertain zone in which de facto proceedings, which are
themselves extra- or antijuridical, pass over into law, and juridical norms blur with the mere fact — that
is, a threshold where fact and law seem to become undecidable" (Agamben 2005, 29). What needs to be
underlined here is the relation between the state of exception and bare life. This point is absolutely
crucial for Agamben and for understanding the role of governmental surveillance: the state of exception
opens up the possibility of bare life and of the camp, where bare life is outside law but constantly
exposed to violence and "unsanctionable killing" (Agamben 1994, 82). Agamben's position can be
understood in the triadic relation 'state of exception-camp-bare life'; the ultimate power of the
sovereign, and the complete dissolution of democracy into totalitarianism — two political systems that,
according to Agamben, already have an "inner solidarity" (ibid, 10) — happens at the point when the
state of exception becomes the rule and the camp emerges as the permanent realization of the
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indistinguishability between violence and law, to which we all, as homines sacri, are exposed. The
paradigmatic example is, of course, Nazi Germany; but what remains to be seen is how this triad can be
applied to our current political milieu.
Prioritizing sovereignty forces the state to kill simply to preserve its own power
Jeremy Douglas. Independent Scholar. 2009. Disappearing Citizenship: Surveillance and the
state of exception. Surveillance and Society. Vol 6 No 1. Accessed May 22, 2015.
http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/3402
I have used the term 'potentiality' a number of times precisely to point to the state in which the citizens
(or, more broadly, the population) of a number of countries find themselves. The potentiality I want to
analyse can follow two directions: it is the potentiality to be stripped of citizenship, to be banned, to be
abandoned to the law, and to be subjected to political violence, or it is the potentiality for the
government to exercise violence and exceptional law upon the population. So, this potentiality can be
both negative and positive. Although violence becomes indistinguishable from law or, more specifically,
indistinguishable from surveillance and control in the state of exception, what needs to be emphasised
is that it is not a power relation of pure violence, but rather, of potential violence. It is important, as
Benjamin notes in "Critique of Violence", to understand that violence is a function of the power
mechanisms of the government (although Benjamin would probably say 'sovereign'): "the law's interest
in a monopoly of violence vis-a-vis individuals is not explained by the intention of preserving legal ends
but, rather, by that of preserving the law itself; that violence, when not in the hands of the law,
threatens it not by the ends that it may pursue but by its mere existence outside the law" (Benjamin
1933, 136). The state of exception arises when the population threatens to take violence away from the
law the population (rather than individuals per se) are regulated by surveillance methods, in order to
ensure that the 'norm' of the law is not threatened; and for this norm to remain 'in force' an indefinite
period of state of exception is often exercised, as we see with the example of the USA Patriot Act.
Emergency overreach renders the law as a tool of violence
Colleen Bell. Professor at University of Toronto. 2006. Subject to Exception: Security
Certificates, National Security and Canada’s Role in the War on Terror. Accessed May 22, 2015. Canadian
Journal of Law and Society. Vol 21, N 1. Page 63-83.
As a component of Canada's contemporary national security endeavors, the legal provisions of the
certificate override respect for the basic political rights for accused persons and deny protection
afforded to people under criminal law. This amounts to a situation in which emerging discretionary legal
actions suspend established law by eroding the principle of the rule of law. Effectively a suspension of
law-by-law, a form of sovereign power is enacted that subverts normal juridical procedures of argument
and evidence, and affords security and executive officials significant power, independent of establishing
culpability, to Initiate detainment (which then usually becomes indefinite), and to heavily influence the
outcome of the trial. This opening of a sovereign realm of "extra-legal authority," treats law as a tactic of
governmental rule in the name of security. 7 Such a tactical treatment compromises the independence
of law, framing governmental power as Indivisibly sovereign and rendering the "rule of law " the "rule of
men.' Much like the conditions of Guantanamo Bay, the security certificate's overwhelming reliance on
executive will harkens back to a time before the modern precondition for the separation of powers.
Rendered an exercise of prerogative power, the sovereign power of the state becomes disarticulated in
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the security certificate process, losing the legitimacy of impartiality, and becomes a means by which
“the state extends its own domain its own necessity, and the means by which its self-justification
occurs.”
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The political is prone to eliminating the enemy above all else
Fred Lee. PhD at Princeton University. May 2007. The Japanese Internment and the Racial
State of Exception. Accessed May 22, 2015. Theory and Event. Vol. 10 Issue 1.
https://www.academia.edu/1181635/The_Japanese_Internment_and_the_Racial_State_of_Exception
In summary I would emphasize two interpretative implications of the theoretical staging of the Japanese
internment above. First, the determination of military necessity encodes a racial state of exception,
rather than miscodes a factual situation that might justify it. For Nishiura Weglyn and the CWRIC, the
state acted inexcusably without reference to the fact of loyalty -- but this normative construction from
the start makes less intelligible how the state acted with reference to the fact of sovereignty. Secondly,
the sovereign decision that the Japanese were the enemy race was not just politically motivated but
essentially political. For Daniels and Rentlen, the state's treatment of Japanese Americans epitomized
American racism. Yet explanations based on racism -- as in wartime intensified fears, (un)conscious
motivation, or anxiously-repeated stereotypes -- at best locate the psychological or social origins of the
internment, but for lack of adequate conceptual distinctions necessarily fall short of the political
specificity of the race question. The friend/enemy distinction and the state of exception disclose the
distinct logic of sovereignty at work in the internment otherwise easily overlooked: the racial enemy
must be 'eliminated' according to decisions that would restore the 'normal' situation. My argument
pushes the conception of the interment as racial politics to its limit, where it posits the concept of
politicized race.
The enemy is only created as an expression of the desire to commit violence
Fred Lee. PhD at Princeton University. May 2007. The Japanese Internment and the Racial
State of Exception. Accessed May 22, 2015. Theory and Event. Vol. 10 Issue 1.
https://www.academia.edu/1181635/The_Japanese_Internment_and_the_Racial_State_of_Exception
Put simply, the state decided that an exceptional situation existed in the face of a determined 'danger.'
This statement can neither attack nor defend military necessity as a justification because it treats
military necessity as a sovereign decision on the exception.24 What's more, this framing of the facts
avoids the problem of responding to the WDC's charge of Japanese American disloyalty -- for although
the intentions behind such a response are more often than not admirable, an answer to that charge can
only be as perverted as the question itself.
The sovereign not only decides on the state of exception,
but also decides on the friend/enemy distinction that conceptually defines the politicaLink - as Schmitt
defines it, "the specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that
between friend and enemy."25 If the stakes of the norm/exception distinction are the legal order and its
limits, then the ultimate stakes of the friend/enemy distinction are life and death. Though conceptually
distinct, Schmitt interrelates war and the political as mutual presuppositions. War presupposes "that the
political decision has already been made as to who the enemy is," while the possibility of war is the
"leading presupposition" of the political.26 The enemy is not the figure hated or considered morally
inferior by the friend, but is rather the figuration of the possibility of violent conflict between armed
collectivities. The extremity of enmity then correlates to the intensity of political conflict, although the
enemy as a category has no necessary content. As a formal distinction, the political only refers to the
highest degree of (dis)association between groups, and these groupings might divide along class,
religious, racial or any other lines. However only a grouping of sufficient quantitative intensity can
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qualify as political, and moreover, only in this qualification is any social antagonism 'politicized' in the
more familiar phrase.
Identifying enemies unconsciously draws in moral imperatives and justifies violence—
Japanese internment proves
Fred Lee. PhD at Princeton University. May 2007. The Japanese Internment and the Racial
State of Exception. Accessed May 22, 2015. Theory and Event. Vol. 10 Issue 1.
https://www.academia.edu/1181635/The_Japanese_Internment_and_the_Racial_State_of_Exception
Once this occurs, the political distinction takes control or is overriding: "The real friend-enemy grouping
is existentially so strong and decisive that the nonpolitical antithesis, at precisely the moment at which it
becomes political, pushes aside and subordinates its hitherto purely nonpolitical criteria and motives to
the conditions and conclusions of the political situation at hand."27
The pervasive figuration of race
as racism in American popular and academic discourse precisely elides the crucial distinction between
political and non-political forms of (dis)association. Indeed, even Alison Dundes Renteln's
unconventional psychoanalysis of the internment is entirely conventional in this respect when it argues
that "a deeply rooted fear of sexual congress between the races consciously or unconsciously motivated
some of the actions which led to the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans... A combination of the
ideas of eugenics and virulent racism... was partly responsible for the occurrence of one of America's
worst civil liberties disasters."28 Within the necessity-rights circle, Rentlen collapses the difference
between the specter of racial miscegenation and the concrete declaration of racial enmity by turning the
former into a (partial) cause of (the several actions that produced) the later. Thus maintaining the
distinction between the political and the social from the outset not only re-politicizes the overly
psychologized question of race, but shifts our analysis away from the (pre-political) causes of the
decision to intern towards the structuring friend/enemy distinctions of the Japanese internment. All this
initial staging then stands or falls on this simple premise: the state politicized race in the decision that
the Japanese Americans were enemies and this identification of 'danger' coincided with the decision on
the state of exception.29
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Killing will never end once justified under sovereignty
Michael Dillon. Professor at Ohio State University. 2008 . Lethal Freedom: Divine Violence
and the Machiavellian Moment. Accessed May 22, 2015.
http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/theory_and_event/v011/11.2.dillon.h
tml
Preoccupied with the problematic of order and its entailments, Schmitt largely elides the problematic
and entailments of the freedom of signification which are logically anterior to it. Factically free, modern
man does not discover the law, Schmitt agrees, but he makes the law, Machiavelli maintains, by finding
within himself the republican virtue (virtù), rather than the unmediated decisional will, required to do
so. Freedom's virtù is ultimately underwritten by the polysemous freedom of the sign - that radically
contingent undecidability which ultimately defines evental time itself. The Schmittean sovereign is
somehow supposed magisterially to transcend the sign. Criticizing traditional definitions of sovereignty
as, "the highest, legally independent, underived power," for example, Schmitt argues that this "is not
the adequate expression of a reality but a formula, a sign, a signal. It is infinitely pliable, and therefore in
practice, depending on the situation, either extremely useful or completely useless."4 Continuously
stressing the "concrete situation",5 as if it arrives un-signed, Schmittean sovereignty unaccountably
escapes the undecidability of the sign, however, as it decides the exception.6 "The exception in
jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology"7; a miraculous seeming without seeming which
Machiavelli would immediately see-through. Machiavelli knows that lethal violence is never
unmediated. Indeed 'cruelty well-used' is precisely this; killing as political signification. Machiavellian
man enacts his freedom, instead, therefore, through his capacity not simply to read but also, and above
all, to constantly re-write the signs of the times via a continuous calculus of necessary killing. Sign and
sex are always powerfully related in Machiavelli also. Virtù is violent political semiotics as sexual
potency; indeed, if we follow Machiavelli the dramatist, sexual potency is a play of political semiotics.
For that reason I deliberately maintain the vocabulary of 'man. Subsequent sections analyse the nature
of this Machiavellian moment of modern factical freedom. They do so, first, as a strategic moment. That
strategic moment is acted-out, second, in the form of a war for, and through, the radically undecidable
power of the sign. Factical freedom as semiotic battlespace is continuously required to signify how much
killing is enough. But it can never resolve this strategic predicament because the very contingency of
evental time, upon which its freedom relies, denies it the possibility of ever securely computing the
strategic calculus of necessary killing which ultimately defines its moment. When asked to say how much
killing is enough, whatever it replies, factical freedom is equipped to give only one answer: more.
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A state of emergency justifies wars to be waged on behalf of the population
culminating in extinction
Eugene Thacker. Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology. 2005 . Nomos, Nosos and
Bios. Accessed May 22, 2015. http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/25/32)
There must be some set of principles for allowing, in exceptional circumstances, the introduction of
sovereign power. In other words, there must be some set of conditions that can be identified as a
threat, such that a corresponding state of emergency can be claimed, in which the formerly
decentralized apparatus of biopolitics suddenly constricts into the exception of sovereignty. 'It is at this
moment that racism is inscribed as the basic mechanism of power, as it is exercised in modern States'
(2003: 254). But I would argue that Foucault means 'racism' here in a specific, medical and biological
sense. Racism in this sense is a biologically-inflected political relation in which war is rendered as
fundamentally biological: 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 Â… the existence in
question is no longer the juridical existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence of a
population. (1978: 137) In a curious turn of phrase, Foucault later calls this a 'democratization of
sovereignty,' a condition in which the sovereign state of emergency emerges through a widespread and
generalized threat to the population (2003: 37). In such conditions, both a medical-biological view of the
population, and a statistical-informatic means of accounting for the population, converge in the
identification of potential threats and possible measures of security. In a sense, it is war that acts as the
hinge between population and information, but a war that always puts at stake the biological existence
of the population (and thus nation). The body natural, even as it serves as an analogy for the body
politic, is always what is fundamentally at stake in the body politic.
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The political shouldn’t justify surveillance
Using Schmitt to justify violations of privacy is a mandate for continuous war
Philip S Golub. Writer at Le Monde Diplomacy (France). September 2006 . The Will to
Undemocratic Power. Accessed May 23, 2015. http://mondediplo.com/2006/09/08democracy
In a permanent state of emergency, the exception becomes the norm. In the early 20th century, the
state of exception and emergency rule were defined by the reactionary German political theorist Carl
Schmitt. His early writings distinguish between commissarial and sovereign dictatorship: the first is
grounded in the existing legal order and is designed to preserve the constitutional norm; the second
destroys it. In his most important works, Political Theology and The Concept of the Political, Schmitt
adopts sovereign dictatorship: “taken to its logical extreme, Schmitt’s work forms the basis for an
authoritarian exceptionless exception” (10). He argued that the state, as the highest expression of the
political, discovers its true essence only in situations of emergency when “it chooses the enemy and
decides to combat him”. That choice generates collective meaning, unifies the nation, depoliticises civil
society and concentrates power. The state of emergency allows the state to transcend society and
establish dictatorial autonomy. Having acquired the monopoly of political action and decision, the state,
embodied by the dictator who decides the exception and by so doing becomes truly sovereign, enjoys
limitless powers, the most important of which is the power to override or crush the existing legal order.
Since war is the purest form of the state of emergency, war becomes the ontological foundation of the
state. Today the deconstruction of the constitutional order is happening in the context of a ubiquitous
and timeless war that the US executive (and by extension its allies) has framed from the start as having
no spatial or temporal boundaries. The 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States described
the US “vulnerability to terrorism” as a “new condition of life” (11). This implied that perpetual warfare
has become the early 21st century way of life. The Pentagon’s 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review
describes the “long war” led by the US as “a struggle that [will] be fought in dozens of countries
simultaneously and for many years to come” (12). The White House’s 2006 National Security Strategy,
which reaffirms the core elements of the 2002 strategy (officially endorsing the doctrine of preventive
war), asserts that the US “is in the early years of a long struggle, similar to what our country faced in the
early years of the cold war” (13).
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Schmitt’s justification for violating privacy removes all standards of war conduct
Scott Horton. Writer at Balkanization. November 7, 2005. The Return of Carl Schmitt.
Accessed May 23, 2015. http://balkin.blogspot.de/2005/11/return-of-carl-schmitt.html
Given this philosophical predisposition, how was a lawyer then to evade the application of the Geneva
and Hague Conventions? Here an answer can be drawn not from Schmitt’s academic works, but from a
series of determinations by the German General Staff which quite transparently reflected the influence
of the then-Prussian State Councilor Carl Schmitt. A careful review of the original materials shows that
the following rationales were advanced for decisions not to apply or to restrict the application of the
Geneva Conventions of 1929 and the Hague Convention of 1907 during the Second World War: (1)
Particularly on the Eastern Front, the conflict was a nonconventional sort of warfare being waged
against a “barbaric” enemy which engaged in “terrorist” practices, and which itself did not observe the
law of armed conflict. (2) Individual combatants who engaged in “terrorist” practices, or who fought in
military formations engaged in such practices, were not entitled to protections under international
humanitarian law, and the adjudicatory provisions of the Geneva Conventions could therefore be
avoided together with the substantive protections. (3) The Geneva and Hague Conventions were
“obsolete” and ill-suited to the sort of ideologically driven warfare in which the Nazis were engaged on
the Eastern Front, though they might have limited application with respect to the Western Allies. (4)
Application of the Geneva Conventions was not in the enlightened self-interest of Germany because its
enemies would not reciprocate such conduct by treating German prisoners in a humane fashion. (5)
Construction of international law should be driven in the first instance by a clear understanding of the
national interest as determined by the executive. To this end niggling, hypertechnical interpretations of
the Conventions that disregarded the plain text, international practice and even Germany’s prior
practice in order to justify their nonapplication were entirely appropriate. (6) In any event, the rules of
international law were subordinated to the military interests of the German state and to the law as
determined and stated by the German Führer. The similarity between these rationalizations and those
offered by John Yoo in his hitherto published Justice Department memoranda and books and articles is
staggering. It is of course possible that John Yoo came upon all of this on his own, like a scholar laboring
in some parallel universe unaware of the work of others. Possible. But not probable. It is more likely that
Yoo’s work is a faithful, through crude and occasionally flawed interpretation of Schmitt. I say "crude"
principally because Schmitt expresses from the outset the severest moral reservations about his concept
of "demonization." It is, he fears, subject to "high political manipulation" which "must at all costs be
avoided." The use of this technique, he writes, may only be available when "the survival of the people is
at stake." Der Begriff des Politischen, pp. 20-33. Yoo expresses no comparable hesitation, preferring
simply to place all confidence in the Executive, and justifying this implausibly in the writings of the
Founding Fathers.
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Labeling enemies fails
Locating the enemy based on the arbitrary signifier of citizenship is otherizing and
violent
Jeremy Douglas. Independent Scholar. 2009. Disappearing Citizenship: Surveillance and the
state of exception. Accessed May 22, 2015. http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-andsociety/article/view/3402
We have seen how a permanent state of emergency creates a situation in which foreign residents or
visitors can be detained without a court order for an indefinite period of time; even greater
governmental powers are now aiming at expanding this exposure to the pure power of the juridicalpolitical system to citizens as well. Citizenship and political significance are becoming less fundamental
and inalienable rights and more categorizations that are only maintained though blind adherence to socalled democratic polices, which look more and more like a dictatorial structure (see: Arendt 1973).
What should also be mentioned is the production of bare life in foreign states; or, conversely, the loss of
political rights to another state power within one's own country. The power to detain and expose
individuals to pure violence and even death is characteristic of the CIA's and M15's borderless security,
policing and surveillance mechanisms, which becomes more evident with the Patriot Act and FISA. This
may be seen as grounds for a debate between sovereignty and governmentality. Is sovereignty
concerned, above all, with the territorial nation-state, as Foucault argues (Foucault 2007, 14)? Or, is
sovereignty more accurately defined as that which decides on the exception, as Schmitt and Agamben
maintain? Neither of these questions can be properly answered until we understand the relations
between sovereignty and foreign states. That is to say, is sovereignty only possible in a contained
nation-state, or is it something broader that can be applied to foreign nations and even to the point of
being able to declare a state of exception in a foreign land? But if this latter situation is possible the
suspension of other sovereigns' law maybe it is something that should, as Foucault insists, be called
'governmentality'. What should be understood as common to both conceptions of sovereignty and
governmentality, however, is the production of camp, in which the state of exception reaches its
ultimate realization. It should be clear that the Patriot Act and other juridical-political provisions
precondition and allow for the continued existence of the camp.
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Refusing to extend rights to non-citizens unhinges legal sovereignty
Colleen Bell. Professor at University of Toronto. 2006. Subject to Exception: Security
Certificates, National Security and Canada’s Role in the War on Terror. Accessed May 22, 2015. Canadian
Journal of Law and Society. Vol 21, N 1. Page 63-83.
What also becomes apparent is that the condition of possibility for the assertion of sovereign authority
over non-citizens is no different than that which serves as the prerequisite for the creation and
possibility of law itself. By simply calling on the imperative of national security, the opportunity for
actions that are outside of the realm of routine governance strategies is made available. This is because
the very decision on what constitutes a security concern, and what is therefore outside of the realm of
regular law, is to decide on what constitutes the exception to the rule. And to decide on the exception is
to simultaneously codify what is normal. Because the exception makes possible the suspension of
normal rules and delimits the moment in more about the character of contemporary politics than the
rule. In this sense, the concerns of national security do not merely point to the extremities of rule but to
the realm of possibility for rule in liberal states. As Schmitt made clear, it is the exception, and not the
rule, that confirms everything.93 The sovereign exception therefore stands as the condition of
possibility for juridical rules, because in order to have the moment of exception In which sovereign
power can be forcefully asserted it must first Initiate the rule.
Exception leads to arbitrary enemy signifiers
Colleen Bell. Professor at University of Toronto. 2006. Subject to Exception: Security
Certificates, National Security and Canada’s Role in the War on Terror. Accessed May 22, 2015. Canadian
Journal of Law and Society. Vol 21, N 1. Page 63-83.
Again, this points to the way in which the negation of the "rule of law" signals how sovereign power is
not simply the alterity of the rule of law, but is actually implicated m its foundational possibility. If the
rule of law serves as the basis upon which Individuals exercise independence and protection from
arbitrary state coercion and the means by which the state can be held to account, it is therefore also the
basis from which liberal notions of rights and freedoms are derived. Simultaneously, the security
certificate shows us that the rule of law can be subject to exception on the basis of national security by
relying on arbitrary distinctions (between citizens and non-citizens) that are largely irrelevant in the task
of addressing the actual activity of terrorism.
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Nuclear weapons and terrorism distort the traditional purpose of war
Gianluigi Palombella. Research Fellow at European Union Institute. November 2011 .
From Where Can War Be Thought? Institutions, Rules, and the Common International Space. Accessed
May 22, 2015. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=987250
If war is not an end in itself, but rather the intimate logic of political- type social relations among States,
it has a precise relation with the nature of the world order, it is a sort of recourse to the supreme
decision for the manifestation or re-production of the order. War produces new forms of social political
order, and redefines the scenarios of coexistence, though along the lines of the friend-enemy dual
concept. However, the evolution of the world as well as that of technological capacities and the
appearance of non-state actors in the scenario of international conflict, seem to deprive war of its once
current meaning. The effort to understand war through peace, i.e. through the idea of which social
relations the war should produce, does not seem either epistemologically or critically prone to any
success. This happens when it becomes impossible to see peace as the outcome of every war, when
“the” war changes nature, so much so that it represents a type of conflict that cannot be “won” and
maybe not even “concluded”. This is highlighted by changes in war, up to the XX and XXI centuries. The
risk of nuclear conflict and global terrorism promote a change in paradigm that deprives war of the
possibility to be what it should be: it removes its ultimative character. When the hypothesis of a nuclear
war emerges, war cools down, it denies itself, and actors are no longer able to stake everything. The
nuclear conflict and terrorism deprive war of its traditional identity and prevent it from being conducted
sensibly. Its “solemn” functions disappear: i.e. functions related on the one hand to the chivalrous
confrontation between sovereign States and on the other to the affirmation of a “final” dominium, and
therefore to the purpose to “re-order” the world, to undergo the cyclic redefinition of the “sense” of
international political reality. War, instead, threatens nuclear destruction, or an endless repetition and
dissemination, in forms totally uncontrollable by States, through terrorism
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Realism make enemy creation excessive and violent
William Hooker. Professor at London School of Economics. 2009., Carl Schmitt’s
International Thought. Accessed May 20, 2015. page 204-205.
The emphasis in Schmitt's work on the primacy of the political decision and the immutability of war as a
human possibility resonates naturally with a 'realist' interpretation of international relations. For
instance, as Scheuerman has amply illustrated, Schmitt had a profound influence on forming the 'harder'
edges of Hans Morgenthau's political realism, and the latter's concern for the role of the nation state as
bearer of authentic human meaning.2 Schmitt himself has been characterized as a realist of sorts, to be
read alongside other theorists of political power and raison d'etat.' In his pre-war writings in particular,
Schmitt showed an intimate concern for the requirements of pragmatic and power-oriented foreign
policy that read like classic expressions of realist IR theory.4 He also produced a highly sympathetic
study of Meinecke's theory of Staatsriison. 5 This implacable opposition to the creation of a global state,
and concern to impose limits to the intrusion of international law inside the boundaries of the state,
have made Schmitt an apparently valuable resource to realists, broadly conceived. Gary Ulmen
described by one of his closest collaborators as a 'pro-New Deal American nationalist, is one of the most
prominent protagonists in the attempt to deploy Schmitt against the replacement of the international
order with 'free-floating concepts [that] do not constitute institutional standards but have only the value
of ideo logical slogans'. 7 Ulmen takes up Schmitt's critique of the just-war tradition, and shares the view
that denial of war as a tool of rational politics is both dangerous and hypocritical, and will result in the
use of war as a form of religious or ideological domination rather than a part of acceptable raison d'etat.
8 In addition to his basic hostility to a normatively based global politics, Schmitt also appeals to certain
contemporary realists for his apparent ability to avoid the stasis that might result from an unrealistic
continued attachment to notions of Westphalian politics. In his distinction of politics from the state
form, Schmitt appears to hold out the possibility of restructuring political realism time after time,
adapting the basic premise of power politics to new structures of global power. In characterizing the
contemporary value of Schmitt's Nomos of the Earth, Ulmen argues that '[g]lobalization and new, larger
political entities require a new political realism and a new political theory dealing with a new type of law
regulating "international" relations. This global order will fail if it does not take into account the
accomplishments of the only truly global order of the earth developed so far: the jus publicum
Europaeum.'9 In other words, Schmitt appears to offer hopes of a new conceptual depth to political
realism, allowing a constructive engagement in debates on globalisation and the changing political
competence of the state. The necessity of the political' as part and parcel of the human condition can be
defended, whilst the future competence of the state can be debated. In particular, Schmitt's interest in
the possibility of a new spatial basis for politics proves an attractive line of enquiry to those realists
aware of the potential need to move beyond the rigid old assumptions of specifically state power as the
basic component of world politics.
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Permutation
Perm, do both—Even if the friend-enemy distinction is good, using it exclusively
causes conflict
Mikkel Thorup. PhD at the Institute of Philosophy and the History of Ideas. January
2006. In Defence of Enmity. Accessed May 20, 2015. Critiques of Liberal Globalism. Page 39-40.
Political fictionalism “subordinates politics to ‘higher’ principles or ‘truths’”, whereas political realism is
“the permanently repeated attempt to conceive of politics as what in fact it is” (1991: 371). It is a
(unintended) caricature on the self-professed realist’s sense of superiority because of their courage and
ability to confront the really real reality: Political fictionalisms help to satisfy man’s need for consolation,
edification, hope and sense, tending to veil real conditions of government. The political realist seeks to
identify necessities – irrespective of their severity and without consideration for any need for deceit
under the existing government. (1991: 371-2) This is the kind of reductionism of the political that I want
to avoid. Working with Schmitt’s categories and critiques entails a danger of falling in the (very selfcomforting) trap of proclaiming only one true and ‘hard’ version of the political and of dismissing all
others as fictions and wishful thinking. Primacy of the political becomes primacy of foreign policy,
organized violence etc. The political is effectively reduced to a few areas – which is just what liberalism
is criticized for doing. The friend/enemy distinction or conflictuality may often be a dominant feature of
the political, but that is not to say that it is then the political. As Ankersmit (1996: 127) says, that would
be the same as making the unavoidability of marital disagreements into the very foundation of marriage
as such. I want instead to argue that the political contains a number of styles, sides, variants (or
whatever one want to call it) that can very loosely and ideal-typically be grouped in two main forms:
Politics as conflict and politics as technique, where neither of them can claim exclusivity. So, I want to
avoid a sterile discussion of what the political really is. My interest is far more the various styles of the
political that are operative in political debate. Schmitt and many other conflict theoreticians do not see
the other face of the political as anything other than a ‘secondary’, ‘dependent’, ‘corrupted’ expression
of politics. Liberals tend to exclude politics as conflict, confining it to other spaces in time or geography,
as aberration or relapse. What the two concepts each do is to highlight a certain aspect of the political,
and my claim is that they are elements of a unity. There’s a certain pendulum process at work and I’ll
give that a number of expressions, which basically states the not very controversial thought that the
political world is located between the extremes of repetition and break, stability and change, regime
and revolution, or, as I prefer to call them, technique and conflict. Depoliticization, then, is a way to
describe the attempts to or methods of making repetition, stability and regime universal and eternal –
to place areas, practices and actors beyond change and critique – whereas repoliticization describes the
opposite movement – disruption, change, recreation of the entire social space.
Perm, do both—the friend-enemy dichotomy can be applied
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The permutation solves—the friend/enemy distinction can just as easily apply to
those who do and do not violate basic human rights.
Stephen Roach. Professor at University of South Florida. October 2006. Politicizing the
International Criminal Court: The Convergence of Politics, Ethics, and Law. Accessed May 20, 2015. Page
185.
Yet, as I have argued, it is not that Schmitt ignores the content of democratic values, but rather that, in
times of crisis, the sovereign ruler must rise above these principles in order to undo the crisis that the
formalism of these principles has engendered (inaction). This, however, does not necessarily mean that
a new constitution should exclude liberal principles; nor that Schmitt adamantly ruled out the possibility
of future liberal constitutionalism. Rather, it suggests the cyclical nature of peace and crises. In terms of
Schmitt’s decisionism, this partakes of the need for an absolute solu- tion to restore stability and the
viability of these principles. Cer- tainly, one may disagree with this latter statement; however, it is quite
plausible that Schmitt believed in the temporality of a state of emergency and, by extension, the
temporary suspension of demo- cratic principles. In this way, we need to distinguish between a crisis
and the per- manent dissolution of the values that brought the state into the cri- sis in the first place. To
be sure, Schmitt failed to clarify this idea that the absolute sovereign decision restores a stable balance
be- tween democracy and liberal constitutionalism; that it regenerates, in other words, the forces of
constitutionalism whose own dynamics remain inseparable from the forces of democratic and liberal
val- ues. In effect, what I am arguing here is that Schmitt’s theory employs a tacit dialectical logic to
validate the claim that a liberal constitution is responsible for bringing the state into a state of cri- sis.
Unless Schmitt believed that this decision permanently dissolved liberal constitutionalism, then it makes
little sense to speak of the permanent dissolution of liberal and democratic values. Which brings us to
the issue of the suspension of traditional UN norms and a rules-guided decision to stop gross humanrights violations. Can we make an analogy between Schmitt’s state centric decisionism and a new form
of decisionism, in which the international community devises a framework for a binding political
decision to stop genocide? As one scholar has pointed out, Schmitt possessed the ability “to perceive
the political as an independent, dynamic variable, outside the state and beyond the law . . . for
sovereignty is by no means divided, which would contradict its concept, but remains durably suspended
between the federation and the member states.”35 It is this statist character, however, that needs to
be reinterpreted in terms of the evolution of state sovereignty into the realm of the global. As we shall
see, there are changing conditions that enable us to conceptualize and theorize about the parameters of
a global decisionism, even if this framework remains immanent and rudimentary vis-à-vis state
sovereignty. For instance, global technologies have called increasing attention to the need to address
humanitarian emergen- cies, as the Racak massacre in Kosovo on January 15, 1999, illustrates. In the
next section, I assess how this emerging global trend provides space for reinterpreting the decisional
value of humanitarianism, while also exposing the flaw in Schmitt’s theory; namely, that humanitarian
wars are inherently destructive (globalized) wars.
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Humanitarian concerns should come before maintaining political relations
Stephen Roach. Professor at University of South Florida. October 2006 . Politicizing the
International Criminal Court: The Convergence of Politics, Ethics, and Law. Accessed May 20, 2015. Page
201.
This methodological interpretation was intended to show how certain changes in the global-security
apparatus could enter into Schmitt’s theory. Viewed in this way, humanitarianism is not just a universal
concern, as Schmitt came to see it; it is also an evolving security concern for establishing an effective
and reliable political authority at the global level. It is this new phenomenon, I have claimed, that forces
us to reconcile Schmitt’s theory of decisionism with these changes, while also relaxing his rigid and
authoritarian assumptions that stem from his narrow view of political sovereignty. In effect,
globalization has eroded or unbundled state sovereignty in ways that enable us to weave new normative
strands through Schmitt’s theory. This, in turn, entails a new discussion of the political trajectory of his
own theory in an age of globalization. An acceptable political criteria for declaring and stopping
humanitarian emergencies would operate according to two goals: to suspend the principles of
nonintervention and the sovereign quality of states, and to institutionalize the friend/enemy distinction
in the form of those willing to operate outside the existing law to stop humanitarian emergencies
(friend) and the gross violators of human rights (enemies). This criteria need not exist within article , but
rather in some recognizable institutional form of higher politically legitimate authority. In this respect, it
is important to realize that neither reason nor values can be disengaged from the political decision to
stand out- side the existing rules and law. This is because the sovereign authority must be able to
apprehend the value of his or her decision in terms of the preservation of the democratic will of the
people. As Jean-Marc Coicaud remarks, “relations of forces are indissociable from a dynamic in which
collective beliefs regarding the organiza- tion of life in society become involved in the triggering,
develop- ment and the outcome of confrontations. It is therefore not power alone, understood in the
physical sense, that decides events.”37 Thus, it could be argued that the decision to stop genocide can
and should trump the state’s right to rise above the law. In this context, the crime of genocide is one
instance in which the state’s right or duty has become increasingly displaced from the state to global
level, insofar as it demonstrates the growing interpenetra- tion of global responsibility and the political
realities of inter- national action.
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Schmitt is wrong about humanity
Schmitt misplaces the cause of violence and essentializes human nature
Slavoj Zizek. Slovenian philosopher. May 2002. Are we in a war? Do we have an enemy?
Accessed May 22, 2015. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n10/slavoj-zizek/are-we-in-a-war-do-we-have-anenemy
When the Enemy serves as the ‘quilting point’ (the Lacanian point de capiton) of our ideological space, it
is in order to unify the multitude of our actual political opponents. Thus Stalinism in the 1930s
constructed the agency of Imperialist Monopoly Capital to prove that Fascists and Social Democrats
(‘Social Fascists’) are ‘twin brothers’, the ‘left and right hand of monopoly capital’. Thus Nazism
constructed the ‘plutocratic-Bolshevik plot’ as the common agent threatening the welfare of the
German nation. Capitonnage is the operation by means of which we identify/construct a sole agency
that ‘pulls the strings’ behind a multitude of opponents. Exactly the same holds for today’s ‘war on
terror’, in which the figure of the terrorist Enemy is also a condensation of two opposed figures, the
reactionary ‘fundamentalist’ and the Leftist resistant. The title of Bruce Barcott’s article in the New York
Times Magazine on 7 April, ‘From Tree-Hugger to Terrorist’, says it all: the real danger isn’t from the
Rightist fundamentalists who were responsible for the Oklahoma bombing and, in all probability, for the
anthrax scare, but the Greens, who have never killed anyone. The ominous feature underlying all these
phenomena is the metaphoric universalisation of the signifier ‘terror’. The message of the latest
American TV campaign against drugs is: ‘When you buy drugs, you provide money for the terrorists!’
‘Terror’ is thus elevated to become the hidden point of equivalence between all social evils. How, then,
are we to break out of this predicament? An epochal event took place in Israel in January and February:
hundreds of reservists refused to serve in the Occupied Territories. These refuseniks are not simply
‘pacifists’: in their public proclamations, they are at pains to emphasise that they have done their duty in
fighting for Israel in the wars against the Arab states, in which some of them were highly decorated.
What they claim is that they cannot accept to fight ‘in order to dominate, expel, starve and humiliate an
entire people’. Their claims are documented by detailed descriptions of atrocities committed by the
Israel Defence Forces, from the killing of children to the destruction of Palestinian property. Here is how
an IDF sergeant, Gil Nemesh, reports on the ‘nightmare reality in the territories’ at the protesters’
website (www.seruv.org.il):
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Schmitt’s understanding of the sovereign has been empirically disproven
Daniel McLoughlin. Professor at University of New South Wales. 2009 . Crisis, Modernity,
Authority: Carl Schmitt on Order and the State. Accessed May 20, 2015.
https://www.academia.edu/1538748/Crisis_Modernity_Authority__Carl_Schmitt_on_Order_and_the_State
Schmitt’s work is profoundly structured by the antinomy between the juridical form, as a unity between
a political idea and life that produces a particular constitutional form, and the pure formalism of
technical reason. Schmitt was deeply worried by the threat to political order posed by the development
of the economic technical, and the alleged weakness of liberal formalism, which was incapable of
accepting the fundamental trauma of political modernity, the radically ungrounded nature of the state,
and instead, elided the political in favour of the economic and the ethical. Against this, Schmitt
advocated a sovereign decisionism that would preserve the order and unity of the state by deciding for
the existing political order, and against its enemies. In our own neo-liberal epoch, however, the politics
of the relationship between law, authority, and the economic-technical form is somewhat different. The
extension of ‘value neutral functionalism’ to the state through neo-liberal governmentality has seen
neither the fracturing of the state through party pluralism, nor a vacillating state incapable of decisions.
Instead, we are witness to the closure of political imagination around a technocratic neo-liberal
orthodoxy, accompanied by the emergence of an increasingly authoritarian state that uses the law in a
purely instrumental fashion.
Enemy creation and exception are necessarily arbitrary
Colleen Bell. Professor at University of Toronto. 2006. Subject to Exception: Security
Certificates, National Security and Canada’s Role in the War on Terror. Accessed May 22, 2015. Canadian
Journal of Law and Society. Vol 21, N 1. Page 63-83.
To employ legal Instruments in a manner that bolsters executive decision- making power, rather than
affirms its limit and separation from the juridical sphere, retracts legal jurisdiction in all but name. As
Schmitt argued, what characterizes the emergence of the exception is the unfolding of unlimited
authority that comes with the continued presence of the state, with the recession of law.78 The frame
of law may remain, but the principles that define the judicial order, that is, the rule of law, are
suspended.79 These exercises of sovereign will are legitimated through situations that are deemed to be
exceptional, by opening a space by which to invalidate the established judicial order so as to selectively
discipline those whom suspicion is effected on to. Certainly, a moment of exception does not require
that executive auth01ity suspend the constitution as a whole but that there are specific laws and
statutes which may readily take exception to particular groups on the basis of arbitrary criteria such as
citizenship status (which has no definable relationship to criminality), under conditions of „ 80 "national
security" or as Schmitt put it, "urgent necessity.”
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Political solutions that weren’t based on antagonism have empirically solved conflict
William E Scheuerman. Professor at Indiana University. 2006. Carl Schmitt and the Road to
Abu Ghraib. Accessed May 22, 2015. http://docslide.us/documents/carl-schmitt-and-the-road-to-abughraib.html
Schmitt describes the broadening of traditional legal protections to include partisans and guerrillas as
the product of a “humane conscience,” but he ultimately underlines its deep incongruities (22–23). In
fact, he concludes with the dramatic assertion that the “normative regulation” of irregular combatants is
“juridically impossible” (25). No coherent legal regulation of the irregular fighter, it seems, is achievable.
International law obscures this harsh fact with vague language and open-ended legal clauses, but
“regular law” never can successfully contain or regulate the phenomenon of “irregular fighter.” Regular
law and irregular combatant are like oil and water: they simply do not mix. By necessity, the irregular
combatant will remain a legal black hole where – or so Schmitt implies – no legal norm can realistically
provide a modicum of predictability. Schmitt offers three reasons in support of this view. First, he
implicitly relies on the stock argument that “authentic” politics necessarily elides legal regulation: when
conflicts involve “existentially” distinct collectivities faced with “the real possibility of killing,” the
attempt to tame such conflicts by juridical means is destined to fail, or at least badly distort the
fundamental (political) questions at hand. Insofar as the partisan fighter represents one of the last
vestiges of authentic (i.e., Schmittian) politics in an increasingly depoliticized world, he has to dub any
attempt to regulate the phenomenon at hand as misguided and maybe even dangerous. Yet this
argument relies on Schmitt’s controversial model of politics, as outlined eloquently but unconvincingly
in his famous Concept of the Political. To be sure, there are intense conflicts in which it is naïve to expect
an easy resolution by legal or juridical means. But the argument suffers from a troubling circularity:
Schmitt occasionally wants to define “political” conflicts as those irresolvable by legal or juridical devices
in order then to argue against legal or juridical solutions to them. The claim also suffers from a certain
vagueness and lack of conceptual precision. At times, it seems to be directed against trying to resolve
conflicts in the courts or juridical system narrowly understood; at other times it is directed against any
legal regulation of intense conflict. The former argument is surely stronger than the latter. After all, legal
devices have undoubtedly played a positive role in taming or at least minimizing the potential dangers of
harsh political antagonisms. In the Cold War, for example, international law contributed to the peaceful
resolution of conflicts which otherwise might have exploded into horrific violence, even if attempts to
bring such conflicts before an international court or tribunal probably would have failed.22
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International norms check inevitable conflict
William E Scheuerman. Professor at Indiana University. 2006. Carl Schmitt and the Road to
Abu Ghraib. Accessed May 22, 2015. http://docslide.us/documents/carl-schmitt-and-the-road-to-abughraib.html
For Schmitt, legal restraints on emergency power are not only misconceived because they fail to
anticipate novel crises; they are also inappropriate because the emergency situation may necessitate
absolute state power, and hence the surrender of rudimentary legal restraints on its exercise. Basic
threats to the survival of the polity legitimize extreme and even violent measures. In Schmitt’s theory,
this view depends on a dreary portrayal of the political universe as consisting of a series of ruthlessly
competitive collectivities, each of which faces off against existentially defined “others” who pose an
imminent life-or-death threat.23 The international system pits such entities against one another in a
brutal fight for survival. International political life still contains starkly violent elements akin to those
underscored by Schmitt. Yet it also institutionalizes competing elements which function to correct his
bleak picture. Even great powers like the United State are increasingly subject to those mechanisms:
“the United States, like it or not, is being brought into the ambit of international norms.”24 When we
conceive of the international arena as at least partially rule-guided and legally organized, Schmitt’s
postulate that the competitive struggle for survival requires potentially unbounded expressions of state
power becomes less self-evident as well. Since the international system now contains a number of
limited yet meaningful legal mechanisms for conflict resolution, it is by no means as self-evident as
Schmitt asserts that dire crises may require dictatorial power. Because existing international legal
institutions already provide some legal devices for combating terrorism, for example, liberal
democracies may not be forced to pursue authoritarian or violent measures in order to do so.
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Liberalism good
Universal principles are critical to improving the standard of living.
Anneli Anttonen and Jorma Sipila. Professors at Nova University. 2009 . Universalism: and
idea and principle in social policy. Accessed May 20, 2015.
http://www.nova.no/asset/3723/1/3723_1.pdf
If we want to see some light in the tunnel, we assume that there will be more political space for
democratic decision making and pure national interests. The nation state’s comeback in difficult times
may feed the spirit of universalism, just as wartime. As unemployment and the risk of social exclusion
will increase rapidly there will need for activities that show the spirit of social inclusion. Such
developments may influence social policies when the crisis is over. General economic considerations are
much more positive towards the universal programs. Although expensive the universal programs
improve in many ways the basis of economy. Services for children and youth, especially education, are
supposed to be valuable investments in human capital (source) and the universal cash benefits do not
impede participation in labour force in the form of ‘income traps’ as the residual benefits do (source).
The administrative efficiency of universal programs is marvelous compared to selective programs and
those who need the benefit also receive it (sources; Bergh 2004).
Schmitt’s philosophy is empirically wrong—wars waged in the name of liberal
humanitarianism have been far less bloody
Chris Brown. Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science. 2006.
The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal War, and the Crisis of Global Order.
Accessed May 20, 2015. www.und.edu/.../jrweinstein-adamssmithinfor
Schmitt’s normative position is impossible to sympathize with, but the clarity with which he develops his
argument is admirable, as is his recognition of the changes in world order that took place in the
seventeenth and again in the twentieth centuries. It is not necessary to share in Schmitt’s nostalgia for
the jus publicum Europaeum in order to admire the precision with which he delineates its
characteristics. He presents an account of the European states-system which is rather more compelling
than the version of international society associated with English School writers (Butterfield and Wight
1966; Bull 1977), or with the much less clearly defined a-historical world of modern neo-realist theorists
(Waltz 1979; Baldwin 1993). The Nomos of the Earth is a book that should be on the reading list of any
international relations theorist. Still, one might admire, but one should not endorse. The picture of the
world that Schmitt presents invites us to accept that the ‘humanized wars’ of the modern European
states-system represent not simply in practice, but also in theory, an advance over the ‘just wars’ that
preceded them, and the ‘humanitarian wars’ that have followed them. That these humanized wars were
generally less terrible than their predecessors and successors is an empirical judgement that can be
contested, but that the attempt to control and limit the role of violence in human affairs is necessarily
futile and counter-productive is a normative position that deserves to be rejected. Ultimately, Schmitt’s
critique of the notion of the Just War rests upon a shaky empirical base and an undesirable normative
position – but it still represents one of the most compelling critiques of the notion available. Schmitt’s
critique of the Just War is not a critique that is based on contingencies – how Just Warriors behave – but
on fundamentals. He takes us to the heart of the problem and demonstrates that both the medieval
Christian and the modern, liberal, legal/moral account of Just War are unacceptable – but if we believe
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that it is desirable to reduce the role of violence in human affairs this should simply stimulate us to
rework the relevant categories to try to produce a more viable account of the circumstances under
which the resort to force might be justified.
Humanitarian intervention is empirically successful at stopping violence.
Chris Brown. Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science. 2006 .
The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal War, and the Crisis of Global Order.
Accessed May 20, 2015. www.und.edu/.../jrweinstein-adamssmithinfor
The term ‘humanitarian intervention’ is a rather unfortunate recent coinage. It refers to circumstances
where one state or a coalition of states intervenes by force in the supposedly domestic affairs of
another state ostensibly in the interests of the population of the latter, for example to prevent or curtail
genocide or other gross violations of their human rights. It is unfortunate because, apart from the fact
that the adjective ‘humanitarian’ in itself raises all sorts of issues that will be addressed later in this
chapter, it directs attention towards the motives of the intervener as the key defining quality of this kind
of action, with the implication that unless the intervening states are pure at heart the intervention in
question will not count as properly humanitarian. Since, ex hypothesi, states almost always act for a
variety of reasons, some altruistic, most not, this kind of purism generally leads to the conclusion that
no humanitarian interventions have taken place, and that the claim of such motivation always hides
some darker intent. This way of looking at the issue is, I think, mistaken. From the point of view of the
victims of genocide or other forms of serious oppression, the motives of their rescuers are not a matter
of immediate importance – to take one obvious example, had the French or US governments acted
effectively to end the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, it seems unlikely that those whose lives had been
saved thereby would have worried too much about exactly why their rescuers acted. In such extreme
cases outcomes are what matter rather than intentions; indeed, in this particular case it was precisely
because any US action would have had to have been motivated by altruism, since it had no substantial
material interests in Rwanda, that no such action took place.2 Having made this point, I will simply
assert – since the scope of this chapter does not allow me to discuss in detail the facts of each case –
that there have been a number of interventions since 1990 where states have used force in
circumstances where action has actually ended, or curtailed, or prevented large-scale human rights
abuses and where the motives of the interveners were to bring about this state of affairs, or, at a
minimum, were not inconsistent with this outcome. Such was, I think, the case in northern Iraq in 1991,
in Bosnia in 1994/1995, in Kosovo and East Timor in 1999 and, under rather different circumstances, in
Sierra Leone in 2001.
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The main problems in the world are global and require cooperative solutions
Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. International Peer Reviewed Journal
Website. 2012. Executive Summary An Overview of U.S. Policies Toward the International Legal
System. Accessed May 22, 2015. http://www.ieer.org/reports/treaties/execsumm.pdf, May 2002, LEQ)
The evolution of international law since World War II is largely a response to the demands of states and
individuals living within a global society with a deeply integrated world economy. In this global society,
the repercussions of the actions of states, non-state actors, and individuals are not confined within
borders, whether we look to greenhouse gas accumulations, nuclear testing, the danger of accidental
nuclear war, or the vast massacres of civilians that have taken place over the course of the last hundred
years and still continue. Multilateral agreements increasingly have been a primary instrument employed
by states to meet extremely serious challenges of this kind, for several reasons. They clearly and publicly
embody a set of universally applicable expectations, including prohibited and required practices and
policies. In other words, they articulate global norms, such as the protection of human rights and the
prohibitions of genocide and use of weapons of mass destruction. They establish predictability and
accountability in addressing a given issue. States are able to accumulate expertise and confidence by
participating in the structured system established by a treaty. However, influential U.S. policymakers are
resistant to the idea of a treaty-based international legal system because they fear infringement on U.S.
sovereignty and they claim to lack confidence in compliance and enforcement mechanisms. This
approach has dangerous practical implications for international cooperation and compliance with
norms.
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Liberalism is key to hegemony
William Nash. Retired U.S. Army Major General. 2006. The ICC and the Deployment of U.S.
Armed Forces. Accessed May 19, 2015. http://www.amacad.org/publications/icc9.aspx
Thus U.S. military power is more effectively employed when its actions are endorsed as consistent with
international norms and broadly shared objectives and when U.S. forces act in coalition and in
conjunction with nations and institutions that undertake political, social, and economic efforts. Securing
international support, while not determining, has become increasingly important for advancing U.S.
security interests. The overwhelming vote against the U.S. proposal to allow states to shelter their
nationals form the ICC shows that most nations, including some of the strongest allies of the United
States, recoil at what they perceive as an open display of U.S. exceptionalism. This perception is
dangerous. Over the long term, it undermines the capacity of the United States to lead. The ICC
unfortunately is not the only issue fueling this perception. But because it goes to the heart of
accountability international norms and because it is the first new international security institution in
decades, it is a particularly resonant issue by which to measure U.S. attitude toward global leadership.
This places a heavy burden on opponents of the ICC to demonstrate why it is not in U.S. interests to join
the Court. The United States does not conduct coalition operations because it could not achieve its
military objectives without the assistance of other nations. Put bluntly, the United States can accomplish
virtually any strictly military task it is ordered to carry out. Rather, the United States works in
partnership with others to accomplish a variety of objectives-and political objectives are at the
forefront. Leading coalitions can be trying, time-consuming, and resource intensive. The associated costs
and uncertainties cannot be predicted. But leadership of the United States, and its ability to sustain its
credibility and effectiveness as a leader in the twenty-first century, hinges in no small part on its
willingness to lead with and through other nations. In addition, the ICC is the first security-related
international institution since the United Nations. U.S. absence from the Court would be a significant
and supremely isolating act. It will underscore U.S. ambivalence about joining in collective efforts and
institutions to enhance security, an attitude that, however reasonably presented, weakens the claim of
the United States to international leadership. Other nations increasingly question the intentions of a
leading power that appears willing to lead exclusively on its own terms. The United States loses leverage
and credibility by fueling impressions that its cooperation in international politics requires an exemption
from the rules. Moreover, by trumpeting its uniqueness and appearing to demand special treatment,
the United States corrodes its own power and authority.
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Liberalism is the natural human compulsion, not violence
Thomas Moore. Proffessor at University of Edinborough. 2007. Mastery and Dominion: Carl
Schmitt's Juridical Concept of the Political. Accessed May 22, 2015.
www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/1532
This thesis examines the juridical framing of the political in the thought of Carl Schmitt. The purpose of
this discussion is to draw attention to the fundamental inconsistencies that are present in Schmitt’s
thinking on the political. These inconsistencies arise from Schmitt’s desire to advance a concept of the
political that can be understood autonomously in terms of the friend-and-enemy grouping. This thesis
argues that Schmitt’s concept of the political should not be understood autonomously but in terms of a
juridical ethic of mastery and dominion. Schmitt’s desire to ground the political in an autonomous field
of meaning—where the political achieves mastery over all other domains—reduces the political down to
a juridical moment. Schmitt fails in his mission to construct an autonomous concept of the political,
primarily because theology frames Schmitt’s analysis of sovereignty. Moreover, Schmitt’s concept of the
political presupposes the state and a decisionist discourse of sovereignty. Schmitt’s decisionism is
expressed in terms of a sublime, symbolising the highest region of both political conduct and
knowledge. For Schmitt, mastery and dominion are the core values of the political. This has severe
implications for the concept of legality and the democratic functioning of the state. Thinking beyond a
juridical formula unleashes political thought from the strictures of both proceduralism (liberalism) and
decisionism (authoritarianism). This reflexive approach to the political—present in the work of Foucault,
Butler, and Mouffe—allows for the shared regime of mastery and dominion to be critically
reformulated. Without the imperative of mastery—the unilateral control of conduct by the subject—
political thought is freed from the need to exercise dominion and can focus on the ways in which the
subject can be constituted in less exclusionary ways.
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Spreading hegemony and democracy ensures a break from moral righteousness
Susan Buck-Morss. Professor at Boston University. Spring 2008. American Power after the
Berlin Wall. Accessed May 20, 2015. Cultural Critique. Vol. 69. Page 145.
When it becomes a matter of U.S. national interest to preserve its own global hegemony—hegemony
that was solidified by a onetime, contingent historical event, that is, the implosion of the Soviet Union
that left the United States by default as the sole global superpower— then both the globe and the
nation are caught in a double bind: We are told that the general universalism of U.S. moral principles
needs to be suspended to meet the threat to this country’s particular, national–democratic sovereignty,
while at the same time, the law and constitutional guarantees specific to the United States need to be
suspended domestically to “spread democracy” abroad. This is the self-contradictory and self-defeating
situation in which we have been placed by the U.S. government today. The problem was brought to a
head by the terrorist attacks of Al-Qaeda, and in my closing comments I will attempt to sketch out the
implications. Al-Qaeda is engaged in postnational politics, which makes it immune from the historically
specific, Western logic of national sovereignty based on territorial states. But it is preglobal politics,
because of the exclusiveness of its sense of community. Like the medieval European nomos, it is based
on the idea of religious legitimation: Its founding principle is the sovereignty of God. Like the U.S.
nomos, its bid for global hegemony appeals to the general universalism of moral right. The limitations of
both these conceptions of global order have been demonstrated historically, and radical Islam has not
(yet) indicated its capacity, or its will to overcome them. But is the alternative the universalization of the
principle of national sovereignty as advocated by the United States, and does it justify continued U.S.
global hegemony in order to achieve this? If the United States, having been accidentally granted by
history a time of global hegemony, had reversed its imperial past and insisted on practicing its own
universal principles rather than suspending them, if it had not argued that on the basis of national
interests it could not ratify the Kyoto agreements, could not join the International Criminal Court, could
not assent to UN control of the disarmament process in Iraq— if, in short, the United States, as the
means for spreading democracy, had actually practiced democracy on a global scale, the answer might
be yes. But precisely such a practice of democracy has been seen as inimical to the national interests of
the United States. U.S. democratic legitimacy as a sovereign nation is on a collision course with U.S.
hegemonic legitimacy as a nomic sovereign. This collision has the force to break the old nomos—
without, however, when it crumbles, being capable of guaranteeing a new order to replace it. The
double indemnity that the world faces when these two sovereign principles collide, seen from the seat
of power, leads the sovereign himself into a double bind. And this has important implications for
political praxis—important, because the problem is not exclusively that of the Republican
administration. It is no accident that the Democratic Party finds very little in principle that it would
change in U.S. foreign policy, were it to win the presidency, as the protection of U.S. hegemonic status
within a U.S.–instigated global world order is not (yet) considered by any mainstream candidate to be
negotiable.
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Eco-Terrorism NEG
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Federal action will not solve
Federal action cannot solve because of state classification of eco-terrrorism
Lauren Kirchner, Staff Writer, January, 26, 2015, Whatever Happened to 'Eco-Terrorism'?, Pacific
Standard, http://www.psmag.com/nature-and-technology/whatever-happened-to-eco-terrorism, ACC
6-22-15
“To those who have studied radical movements, the unprecedented prosecution of environmental
activists represents the end of an era,” Vanessa Grigoriadis wrote in Rolling Stone in 2006. “Four states
have already passed legislation—drafted by a right-wing lobbying group that represents 300 major
corporations—that classifies any act of property destruction motivated by environmental beliefs as
‘ecological terrorism.’”
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Surveillance is low now
FBI/DOJ surveillance peaked in 2005
Michael Loadenthal, PhD., American University, International Peace and Conflict Resolution
(IPCR), 2013, “The “Green Scare” & “Eco-Terrorism”: The Development of US “Counter-Terrorism”
Strategy Targeting Direct Action Activists,” https://www.academia.edu/1449301/_
2013_The_Green_Scare_and_Eco-Terrorism_The_Development_of_US_CounterTerrorism_Strategy_Targeting_Direct_Action_Activists, ACC. 6-22-2015
This large number of ALF/ELF “attacks” documented in FBI reports may also be due to the movements’
success rate (i.e., incidents which are carried out to their completion and where suspects are not
arrested beforehand) and the high economic cost incurred by the targets. It is this successful campaign
of economic sabotage that may have led the law enforcement community to focus more heavily on the
ALF/ELF. In total, between 2001 and the climax of the “Green Scare” in 2005, at least fourteen FBI/DOJ
speeches referenced the ALF/ELF as an increasing threat, deserving of the full attention of a federallymanaged law enforcement effort.
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Surveillance is good
Empirically, FBI surveillance works to stop eco-terrorist acts
Jerome P. Bjelopera, Specialist in Organized Crime and Terrorism, February 19, 2014, “The Domestic
Terrorist Threat: Background and Issues for Congress,” Congressional Research Service,
https://www.hsdl.org/?view&did=751755, ACC. 6-23-2015
Some animal rights extremists support violence. For example, in February 2012 Meredith Lowell was
arrested for allegedly using a Facebook page she created (under an assumed name) to solicit a hit man
to kill “someone who is wearing fur.” In the investigation, the FBI used an undercover employee to pose
as a hit man and communicate with Lowell online. She was arrested before anyone could be harmed.
Eco-terrorist groups are a dynamic terrorist threat. We need more surveillance, not
less
Steven M. Chermak, Ph.D., National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism & Responses to Terrorism
(START), and School of Criminal Justice, Michigan State University, Et. Al, May 2013, An Overview of
Bombing and Arson Attacks by Environmental and Animal Rights Extremists in the United States, 19952010, Final Report to the Resilient Systems Division, Science and Technology Directorate, U.S. DoH,
http://www.start.umd.edu/sites/default/files/files/publications/START_BombingAndArsonAttacksByEnv
ironmentalAndAnimalRightsExtremists_ May2013.pdf, ACC. 6-22-2015
The results of this study demonstrate that terrorism threats are dynamic and it is important to consider
the subtle and not so subtle similarities and differences in the ideologies, structures, and criminal
activities of the various segments and supporters within the animal and environmental rights extremist
movements. Such an appreciation might make the difference between successful and unsuccessful
investigations and useful and non-useful risk assessments.
Empirically, FBI surveillance solves for acts of vandalism and arson
Lauren Kirchner, Staff Writer, January, 26, 2015, Whatever Happened to 'Eco-Terrorism'?, Pacific
Standard, http://www.psmag.com/nature-and-technology/whatever-happened-to-eco-terrorism, ACC
6-22-15
Liddick thinks it is possible that the FBI’s concerted law enforcement efforts and the Department of
Justice’s harsher sentencing guidelines in the mid-2000s may have succeeded in discouraging activists
from future acts of vandalism or arson. Or, more likely, he says, there were fewer incidents after that
time period because, for the most part, the really “hard-core” people who had been the organizers of
those incidents all got caught.
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The risk of eco-terrorism is real
Most domestic terrorism events are from eco-terrorists
Sivan Hirsch-Hoefler, Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy Interdisciplinary Center
(IDC), and Cas Mudde, Department of International Affairs, University of Georgia, Athens, 2014,
““Ecoterrorism”: Terrorist Threat or Political Ploy?,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 37, pp. 586–603
According to a (later published) FBI Terrorism Report, “the majority of domestic terrorism incidents
between 1993 and 2001 were attributable to the left-wing special interest movements the ALF and the
ELF.” In 2004, his colleague John Lewis, deputy assistant director of the FBI Counterterrorism Division,
went even further in his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, declaring: “In recent years, the
Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front have become the most active criminal extremist
elements in the United States,” and “the FBI’s investigation of animal rights extremists and ecoterrorism
matters is our highest domestic terrorism investigative priority” (emphasis added).
Multiple factors mean there is a high risk of environmental radicalization toward
terrorism, causing massive destruction
Simon M. Berkowicz, Arid Ecosystems Research Center, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2011, “Ch. 2
- Eco-Terrorism/Enviro-Terrorism: Background, Prospects, Countermeasures,” Environmental Security
and Ecoterrorism, Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Environmental Security
and Ecoterrorism Moscow, https://drive.google.com/file/d/
0B9bX852JMJ__azRUME1RLXJTVC1RUzN1MnFObGpnQQ/edit?pli=1, ACC. 6-24-2015
We may thus envisage the intensification of two separate but overlapping trends involving eco-terror
and enviro-terror. The activists involved in traditional actions against industry or governments for
perceived or real harm to the environment will likely continue in their mainly localized tactics. There is a
risk that such individuals will “graduate” into extremely violent actions with international dimensions
because of the globalization of companies. There may be a convergence where pressing environmental
problems may radicalize individuals or groups to resort to large-scale actions in order to curtail real or
perceived environmental damage. In addition, we must consider that well-meaning individuals or
organizations may inadvertently be used as a cover by outside parties in order to allow lethal actions to
take place. Individuals who are emotionally adrift and isolated may be more susceptible for recruitment
by hostile organizations that can offer “a purpose” in their lives. As an example, attacks on nuclear
power plants may be justified by environmental militants but without realizing the potential harm from
a successful operation.
Eco-terrorism is real and causes substantial damage
Steven M. Chermak, Ph.D., National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism & Responses to Terrorism
(START), and School of Criminal Justice, Michigan State University, Et. Al, May 2013, An Overview of
Bombing and Arson Attacks by Environmental and Animal Rights Extremists in the United States, 19952010, Final Report to the Resilient Systems Division, Science and Technology Directorate, U.S. DoH,
http://www.start.umd.edu/sites/default/files/files/publications/START_BombingAndArsonAttacksByEnv
ironmentalAndAnimalRightsExtremists_ May2013.pdf, ACC. 6-22-2015
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Between 1995 and 2010, there were a total of 239 arsons and bombings committed by these groups,
with 55% attributed to ELF and 45% to ALF. Of these 239 incidents, 62% were bombings, and 38% were
arsons. The vast majority of all incidents, 66%, occurred in the West. Over 42% of these incidents
resulted in substantial or very substantial property damage and financial losses. Target types are
displayed below.
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The risk of eco-terrorism is real
Eco-terrorists are responsible for a significant amount of domestic terrorism
Jerome P. Bjelopera, Specialist in Organized Crime and Terrorism, February 19, 2014, “The Domestic
Terrorist Threat: Background and Issues for Congress,” Congressional Research Service,
https://www.hsdl.org/?view&did=751755, ACC. 6-23-2015
Additionally, a key caveat regarding the violence involved in domestic terrorist activity may be of
importance. Many domestic terrorist incidents have been linked to either animal rights extremists or
eco-terrorists. As highlighted elsewhere in this report, many animal rights extremists and eco-terrorists
claim to avoid violent acts that directly target people. The attacks by these individuals can often be
described as property crimes involving arson or vandalism.
Eco-terrorism is a substantial part of domestic terrorism
Steven M. Chermak, Ph.D., National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism & Responses to Terrorism
(START), and School of Criminal Justice, Michigan State University, Et. Al, May 2013, An Overview of
Bombing and Arson Attacks by Environmental and Animal Rights Extremists in the United States, 19952010, Final Report to the Resilient Systems Division, Science and Technology Directorate, U.S. DoH,
http://www.start.umd.edu/sites/default/files/files/publications/START_BombingAndArsonAttacksByEnv
ironmentalAndAnimalRightsExtremists_ May2013.pdf, ACC. 6-22-2015
Animal and environmental rights extremists pose a threat to American public safety. Domestic terrorism
attacks outnumber international ones seven to one in the United States, and animal and environmental
rights extremists compose a dangerous segment of domestic extremist movements. To date, most
terrorism research has focused on international terrorism, and research on domestic political extremists
has mostly focused on far-right extremists. For example, Gruenewald, Freilich and Chermak (2009)
identified over 320 studies on far-right extremists in the fields of criminology, political science, sociology
and terrorism, while our review of the literature on animal and environmental rights extremists in these
disciplines found less than 70 studies. The criminal activities of these extremists are thus a neglected
research topic. This report begins to fill this gap through its systematic analysis of the attacks conducted
by ALF and ELF extremists, as well as the characteristics of the perpetrators convicted for these crimes.
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The “terrorist” label is appropriate
Eco-terrorists are no different than other terrorists for multiple reasons
Andrew Hoek, J.D., Attorney, 2010, “Sea Shepherd Conservation Society v. Japanese Whalers, the
Showdown: Who Is the Real Villain?,” Stanford Journal of Animal Law and Policy, 3 Stan. J. Animal L. &
Pol'y 159, https://journals.law.stanford.edu/stanford-journal-animal-law-policy-sjalp/print/volume-32010/issue-1/sea-shepherd-conservation-society-v-japanese-whalers-showdown-who-real, ACC. 6-232015
The FBI defines eco-terrorism as "the use or threatened use of violence of a criminal nature against
innocent victims or property by an environmentally oriented, sub-national group for environmentalpolitical reasons, or aimed at an audience beyond the target, often of a symbolic nature." According to
James F. Jarboe, Domestic Terrorism Section Chief of the FBI's Counterterrorism Division, "[a]cts of
international terrorism are intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, influence the policy of
a government, or affect the conduct of a government." The proposed Stop Terrorism Property Act of
2003 defined an eco-terrorist as someone who "intentionally damages the property of another with the
intent to influence the public with regard to conduct the offender considers harmful to the
environment." In a recent publication, Chrystal Mancuso-Smith explains the role of the eco-terrorist as
twofold in purpose. "First, [the eco-terrorist] intends that [her violent or destructive] acts will thrust
environmental issues to the forefront of the public's attention. Second, [the ecoterrorist] hopes that
causing fear and economic damage will scare perceived 'violators' into stopping behavior she finds
offensive or harmful." Eco-terrorists hope to ultimately "deter or cause economic harm" to those groups
which they oppose. Finally, just like a traditional terrorist, eco-terrorists are "quick to claim credit" for
incidents.
Arguments against the terrorist label ignore the fact that they use the threat of
violence and intimidation
Kevin R. Grubbs, J.D. from the Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law, 2010, “Saving
Lives or Spreading Fear: The Terroristic Nature of Eco-Extremism,” Animal Law, vol. 16, no. 2 (2010), p.
353-57
One of the main arguments against calling eco-extremist activity terrorism - specifically against the
Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA) - is that it "does a complete disservice to the public, as it inspires
unwarranted fear and imposes a misdirected burden on efforts to combat true terrorism." The
argument asserts that comparing "vegetarian advocacy groups" to the Taliban "is a clear indication that
things have gone too far." Further, critics argue that anti-terrorism resources would be better focused
on other groups - anarchists, the Ku Klux Klan, and extremist anti-abortion activists - engaged in
significantly more violent and deadly acts. These arguments miss the mark. The ALF ideology encourages
members to instill fear in those who engage in the activities that the ALF opposes: fear of harm to
themselves and their families, and fear of personal and professional economic loss. Additionally, these
arguments assume that "true terrorism" is fundamentally different from animal rights terrorism. While it
is true that animal rights terrorism, as a whole, does not engage in the same scale of violence as other
extremist groups, those working in academia, research, agriculture, and food service industries are no
less fearful when their homes and workplaces are firebombed; violent tactics can instill fear even when
they are used infrequently. Further, characterizing the comparison as one between "vegetarian
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advocacy groups" and the Taliban is itself misleading. What makes ALF members terrorists is not that
they advocate for vegetarianism, but that they advocate the use of illegal and violent methods. Other
animal protection organizations - such as the Humane Society - similarly encourage vegetarianism and
veganism, but because they do not engage in violent attacks aimed at forcing others to adopt their
viewpoint, they are not classified as terrorists.
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The “terrorist” label is appropriate
They don’t have to threaten national security to be terrorists. Radical activists use
violence and jeopardize the economy. They deserve the terrorist label
Kevin R. Grubbs, J.D. from the Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law, 2010, “Saving
Lives or Spreading Fear: The Terroristic Nature of Eco-Extremism,” Animal Law, vol. 16, no. 2 (2010), p.
353-57
While radical members of the eco-extremist movement do not pose the same external threat to national
security that come from other, more violent organizations such as Al Qaeda, members of the Animal
Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front still constitute a threat to a large number of Americans,
as well as to industries important to the U.S. economy. While many could empathize with the animal
protection movement's goals of preventing cruelty, that empathy does not extend to its extremist
elements. Eco-extremists act with a specific desire to intimidate and coerce. They use methods both
violent and dangerous. In their desire to save the lives of animals, they unduly risk the lives and
livelihoods of Americans, and as long as their methods continue to include fire and fear, they will
continue to warrant the terrorist label.
There are two different ways environmental activist engage in terrorism
Hami Alpas, Simon M. Berkowicz, and Irina Ermakova, Editors, 2011, “Preface,” Environmental
Security and Ecoterrorism, Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Environmental
Security and Ecoterrorism Moscow,
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9bX852JMJ__azRUME1RLXJTVC1RUzN1MnFObGpnQQ/edit?pli=1,
ACC. 6-24-2015
Although the term “environmental security” is a rather straight-forward concept, “ecoterrorism”
requires some explanation and definitions. One can divide ecoterrorism into two separate components.
The first is where individuals or groups are environmental “activists”, carrying out actions against
industries, companies or even governments that they believe are harming the environment, as a means
to attract attention to their cause. For the large part, damage is caused to property although some
deaths have been reported. The second is where the environment is used as a weapon to harm an
opponent. Here the intended outcome is usually large-scale deaths, severe damage to the environment,
and generating fear into the populace.
The terrorist label is justified and will only stifle violent dissent
Kevin R. Grubbs, J.D. from the Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law, 2010, “Saving
Lives or Spreading Fear: The Terroristic Nature of Eco-Extremism,” Animal Law, vol. 16, no. 2 (2010), p.
353-57
Additionally, opponents argue that branding eco-extremists as terrorists stifles political dissent. While it
might prove true that branding with the terrorist label will stifle dissent that takes the form of violent
and dangerous attacks, it seems unlikely that calling ALF activity terrorism will decrease the activity of
legitimate organizations that proceed through traditional advocacy channels. Moreover, history teaches
that extremist-group violence tends to escalate if the group's tactics fail to achieve the desired
result. And although the ALF does not yet urge the outright use of violence against individuals, other
eco-extremist groups currently use such tactics. Having established both that eco-extremist activity
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qualifies as terrorism under multiple definitions and that eco-extremists should receive the terrorist
label, the question remains: So what? The following section answers that question, explaining a few of
the important consequences of receiving the "terrorist" label.
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The “terrorist” label is appropriate
The use of arson and bombs to instill fear means eco-terrorists deserve the label
Jerome P. Bjelopera, Specialist in Organized Crime and Terrorism, February 19, 2014, “The Domestic
Terrorist Threat: Background and Issues for Congress,” Congressional Research Service,
https://www.hsdl.org/?view&did=751755, ACC. 6-23-2015
One commentator has suggested that the combination of “fire” as a tactic and instilling “fear” as a goal
ensures eco-terrorists will continue to warrant the terrorist label. Both animal rights extremists and ecoterrorists have histories of using incendiary devices to damage or destroy property—the Vail, CO, fire
(mentioned elsewhere in this report) setting a prominent example for extremists. In fact, one of the
hallmark publications circulated in extremist circles is a handbook on how to fashion incendiary devices
titled Arson Around with Auntie ALF. A recent example underscores this focus on arson.
ALF & ELF members satisfy all the elements of federal terrorism definitions
Kevin R. Grubbs, J.D. from the Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law, 2010, “Saving
Lives or Spreading Fear: The Terroristic Nature of Eco-Extremism,” Animal Law, vol. 16, no. 2 (2010), p.
353-57
Members of the ALF commit all of the above crimes. They destroy and burn government buildings and
property. They damage and attack property used in interstate commerce. Additionally, members of Stop
Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC), arguably affiliated with the ALF, have engaged in what members call
"electronic civil disobedience." This involved a coordinated effort to overload websites, e-mail accounts,
and telephone lines with a high volume of activity. They also encouraged supporters to send "blackfaxes" and repeatedly called toll-free numbers to try to increase costs to the target companies. These
activists clearly satisfied the criminal act element of the terrorism definition. Challengers to the terrorist
label might make similar arguments with this definition - that the acts of the ELF and the ALF are not
calculated to influence or retaliate against the government, but are meant only to intimidate a series of
industries involved in the exploitation of animals and the environment. But as argued above, some ALF
activities do indicate an intent to retaliate against the government. Also as argued above, one of the
ALF's objectives is directly related to influencing policy regarding the status of animals as property.
Consequently, ALF activities appear to satisfy all of the elements of the federal crime of terrorism.
Activist groups like the AFL and ELF clearly meet the definition of terrorism
Kevin R. Grubbs, J.D. from the Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law, 2010, “Saving
Lives or Spreading Fear: The Terroristic Nature of Eco-Extremism,” Animal Law, vol. 16, no. 2 (2010), p.
353-57
The federal regulations that outline the scope of the FBI's investigative and enforcement duties define
terrorism as "the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce
a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social
objectives." Of the available definitions, the FBI definition seems the broadest and most likely to
encompass the extremist activities at issue here. The FBI has not only declared such conduct to be
terrorism, but declared those groups - the ALF and the ELF - and that form of activism one of the
greatest domestic terrorism threats facing the United States today. It has even gone so far as to put one
Animal Liberation Front (ALF) member - Daniel Andreas San Diego - on the Most Wanted Terrorists
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list. Under this definition, eco-extremism clearly qualifies as terrorism. Arson, one of the primary tools of
the ALF and ELF, is an unlawful act using force and violence. Additionally, acts committed by ALF and
Earth Liberation Front (ELF) members are, at a minimum, intended to intimidate or coerce a segment of
the population - specifically the segment dealing with animal or agricultural industries. Finally, the
definition requires that the acts be in furtherance of political or social objectives.
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Eco-terrorist label good – Environmental movement turn
The environmental movement is advancing now. Studies prove environmentalism
changes people’s minds
Michigan State University, Staff Writer, Press Release, June 15, 2015, “Environmental activism
works, study shows,” Eureka Alert!, http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-06/msueaw061015.php, ACC. 6-25-2015
The environmental movement is making a difference - nudging greenhouse gas emissions down in states
with strong green voices, according to a Michigan State University (MSU) study. Social scientist Thomas
Dietz and Kenneth Frank, MSU Foundation professor of sociometrics, have teamed up to find a way to
tell if a state jumping on the environmental bandwagon can mitigate other human factors - population
growth and economic affluence - known to hurt the environment. "We've used new methods developed
over the years and new innovations Ken has developed to add in the politics - and find that politics and
environmentalism can mediate some environmental impact," Dietz said. "Environmentalism seems to
influence policies and how well policies that are in place are actually implemented and it also influences
individual behavior and the choices people make."
Removing the eco-terrorist label dooms the environmental movement. People will
conflate the two
Isaac J. Lock, Staff Writer, 2015, A Brief and Subjective History of Eco-Terrorism, Dis Magazine,
Disaster Issue, http://dismagazine.com/dystopia/68111/ecoterrorism/, ACC 6-22-15
These actions coincided with the disintegration of the wider environmental movement. Regardless of
whether or not they count as real terrorism, they created a public spectacle that was terrifying and
alienating, in a culture where even the mention of terror or violence was automatically associated to the
opposite of freedom. ‘I think people were self righteous,’ says Tim Lewis, an activist in Marshall’s film. ‘I
think people thought they had the answer, weren’t willing to listen to other points of view, because
they’re view was more radical. All of those things came into play to help narrow the amount of people
that were connected within the movement, to the point that it just went “poof”, doesn’t exist any
more.’
The only chance for survival lies with the continued perception of environmental
movements being seen as nonviolent
Isaac J. Lock, Staff Writer, 2015, A Brief and Subjective History of Eco-Terrorism, Dis Magazine,
Disaster Issue, http://dismagazine.com/dystopia/68111/ecoterrorism/, ACC 6-22-15
For a while, people collectively forgot about the environmental cause. It fell out of fashion. Now, as has
been documented elsewhere in the disaster issue, a mass environmental movement is emerging again,
at the moment focused on reform, but also on co-operation and wide scale involvement. The situation
we’re facing environmentally now is different to that faced by Kaczynski, and by the activists in Curry’s
film. Now we know it’s way bleaker and more urgent, similarly to the one faced by Noah. We’re living
with the reality of impending, widespread and unavoidable environmental change. The only way to
survive is to act as the opposite of Noah, Kaczynski, and the ‘eco-terrorists.’ That is, to incorporate and
co-operate, fully and completely share information, knowledge and skills, and to spread empathy. To
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Page 60
use the means we have to connect, to teach and learn from each other, and to share information and
means of adapting, integrating and surviving.
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Eco-terrorist label good – Environmental movement turn uniqueness
The environmental movement has gained traction but all progress could be lost
Katherine Bagley, Staff Writer, December 23, 2014, In 2014, U.S. Climate Movement Grew in
Grassroots Might But Lost Ground in Congress, InsideClimate News,
http://insideclimatenews.org/news/20141223/2014-us-climate-movement-grew-grassroots-might-lostground-congress, ACC 6-24-15
"I've been reading about 'game-changing moments' or the movement 'turning a corner' for 10 years,"
said Robert Brulle, an environmental sociologist at Drexel University. "But it seems as though we've
turned so many we're just going in circles. There's still a lot of work to be done. I think that became
abundantly clear in 2014." Environmental leaders told InsideClimate News that the movement needs to
build on the momentum gained in 2014. The way to do that, said McKibben, the environmental activist
and founder of 350.org, is by maintaining and expanding the strong and diverse collaborative
relationships formed in organizing the People's Climate March. "Like any relationship in your life, you
have to nurture and value it," said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club. Otherwise, all
the progress could be in jeopardy, he said.
The environmental movement is growing but is at risk of perceived as radical and selfdefeating
Marc Brodine, Staff Writer, October 28, 2014, “The environmental movement: which way forward?,”
Political Affairs, http://politicalaffairs.net/the-environmental-movement-which-way-forward/, ACC 6-2415
Again today, we have a new generation being radicalized by an issue and movement, a wave of new
activists who are passionate and not constrained by the limitations of the past, who express fervent
moral indignation about business as usual, some of whom have little or no previous practical experience
of struggle or organization. Again we have a mass movement which is growing, developing, building ties
and coalitions, and in the process experiencing varied tugs and pulls over strategy and tactics. Again, we
have a need to project a program which can unify the broad forces necessary to create change with the
forces of radicalism which correctly explain the basic, root causes of the problems we face, and fringe
groups which seem to make a point of advocating self-defeating tactics. Again we have a movement in
which a crucial question is how to ally with the labor movement, parts of which are already involved,
others who see themselves and their members as enemies of the movement, and many confused about
what path to take. And again we have people who want to condemn the entire labor movement and the
whole membership since it and they are not unified around a progressive position on all environmental
issues.
The growing environmental movement has also diversified, currently it encompasses
unions, schools, churches, and many other sectors of society
Katherine Bagley, Staff Writer, December 23, 2014, In 2014, U.S. Climate Movement Grew in
Grassroots Might But Lost Ground in Congress, InsideClimate News,
http://insideclimatenews.org/news/20141223/2014-us-climate-movement-grew-grassroots-might-lostground-congress, ACC 6-24-15
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This year marked the first major demonstration of how dramatically the quarter-century-old climate
movement has changed, diversified and grown. No longer is global warming an issue solely for
environmentalists. People from more than 1,000 organizations walked in the People's Climate March in
New York, from trade unions, schools, and faith-based, social justice, student and public health groups,
among others. Thousands of activists joined marches in cities around the globe that day.
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Eco-terrorist label good – Environmental movement turn uniqueness
The environmental movement in the U.S. is strong and growing.
Katherine Bagley, Staff Writer, December 23, 2014, In 2014, U.S. Climate Movement Grew in
Grassroots Might But Lost Ground in Congress, InsideClimate News,
http://insideclimatenews.org/news/20141223/2014-us-climate-movement-grew-grassroots-might-lostground-congress, ACC 6-24-15
Hundreds of thousands of people filled the streets of New York City in September demanding that world
leaders act on global warming in the largest climate demonstration yet. The passion and desperation of
activists to inspire change radiated through the crowd that warm, muggy day.Bill McKibben, an
environmental activist and founder of 350.org, one of the main organizers of the event, described the
march as a moment for which he had waited his entire career. "All I ever really wanted was to see a
climate movement come together, to see that we were actually going to fight," he told InsideClimate
News. "And finally that day I was fully convinced."
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Eco-terrorist label good – Environmental movement turn links
Even if we removed the label of ecoterrorism from environmental groups the acts of
destroying property harms the larger environmental movement by creating a
perception of the movement which most activist are unable to identify with
Isaac J. Lock, Staff Writer, 2015, A Brief and Subjective History of Eco-Terrorism, Dis Magazine,
Disaster Issue, http://dismagazine.com/dystopia/68111/ecoterrorism/, ACC 6-22-15
These people emerge not as murderous psychopaths, like Noah and Kaczynski, but as people who had
come to the conclusion that it was down to them and them alone – not an incorporated movement – to
save the planet. They acted as they did under the belief that their despair was more urgent, that the rest
of the world was not looking, that, like Noah and Kaczynski, they were seeing something that no one
else was. And on a small, immediate scale they might have been temporarily effective – burning down a
lumber mill certainly means that, for a time that mill will be out of action, and there will be a brief
respite in logging in that area. They’re actions that probably feel immediate and seductive to those
doing them: the thing is on fire right in front of you. It’s fast and splashy. But on a larger scale, these
isolated actions worked against empathy, against co-operation, against a solution that anyone else could
be involved in. They created an image for the movement that was suddenly secretive and elitist; one
that most people couldn’t feel a part of any more. They were private actions that did not contribute to
finding ways for the species as a whole to survive. ‘This is too much […] This is futile,’ McGowan says
eventually, in Curry’s film. ‘There’ve got to be better ways of addressing what is going on in the world
than just burning things down.’
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Eco-terrorist label good – Environmental mov’t/warming scenario
The newest study proves a direct relationship between increasing environmentalism
and reducing CO2 output. It can influence policy at every level and solve even without
policy changes
Michigan State University, Staff Writer, Press Release, June 15, 2015, “Environmental activism
works, study shows,” Eureka Alert!, http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-06/msueaw061015.php, ACC. 6-25-2015
The combined influences of population and affluence have been regarded as the core of environmental
stress - and have tended to guarantee an annual increase in carbon dioxide emissions. But the paper
"Political influences on greenhouse gas emissions from U.S. states" adds what the MSU researchers say
is an important layer to understanding human impact on climate change. They show that a 1 percent
increase in environmentalism tends to reduce emissions by more than enough to compensate for the
typical annual increase in emissions. "Efforts to mitigate emissions take a variety of forms at the state
and local level and may have substantial impact even in the absence of a unified national policy," the
paper notes. "Existing regulations can be applied strictly or less stringently, and programs can be
pursued enthusiastically or given a low priority. Even without formal policy and programs, the
importance of reducing emissions can be widely accepted by individuals and organizations and result in
actions that have substantial impact."
Global warming will cause extinction in the near-term
Dahr Jamail, Staff Writer, December 1, 2014, “Are Humans Going Extinct?,” Truthout.org,
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/27714-are-humans-going-extinct, ACC. 6-25-2015
And there is nothing to indicate, in the political or corporate world, that there will be anything like a
major shift in policy aimed at dramatically mitigating runaway anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD).
Guy McPherson is a professor emeritus of natural resources, and ecology and evolutionary biology, with
the University of Arizona, who has been studying ACD for nearly 30 years. His blog Nature Bats Last has
developed a large readership that continues to grow, and for six years McPherson has been traveling
around the world giving lectures about a topic that, even for the initiated, is both shocking and
controversial: the possibility of near-term human extinction due to runaway ACD. As McPherson has
told Truthout: "We've never been here as a species, and the implications are truly dire and profound for
our species and the rest of the living planet." He told Truthout that he believes that near-term human
extinction could eventually result from losing the Arctic sea ice, which is one of the 40 self-reinforcing
feedback loops of ACD. "A world without Arctic ice will be completely new to humans," he said.
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Eco-terrorist label good – Government/Corporations turn
Getting rid of eco-terrorism designations means we do not hold corporations and the
government responsible for inaction or damage to the environment, which turns the
case
Hami Alpas, Simon M. Berkowicz, and Irina Ermakova, Editors, 2011, “Preface,” Environmental
Security and Ecoterrorism, Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Environmental
Security and Ecoterrorism Moscow,
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9bX852JMJ__azRUME1RLXJTVC1RUzN1MnFObGpnQQ/edit?pli=1,
ACC. 6-24-2015
Perhaps we can add a third definition of ecoterrorism as harm caused by companies, industry, or
governments through negligence. Here, lack of either environmental regulations or enforcement by
regulatory agencies can allow for hazardous sites to be established and/or become potential sites for
natural disasters or that could attract the attention of terrorists. Insufficient forest fire outbreak
monitoring capabilities, low standards for the construction of mining waste dams, and inadequate
infrastructure are all examples that can provide inadvertent support of catastrophes.
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Eco-terrorists can cause huge damage (general)
Even a few eco-terrorist groups can cause millions in damage
Andrew Hoek, J.D., Attorney, 2010, “Sea Shepherd Conservation Society v. Japanese Whalers, the
Showdown: Who Is the Real Villain?,” Stanford Journal of Animal Law and Policy, 3 Stan. J. Animal L. &
Pol'y 159, https://journals.law.stanford.edu/stanford-journal-animal-law-policy-sjalp/print/volume-32010/issue-1/sea-shepherd-conservation-society-v-japanese-whalers-showdown-who-real, ACC. 6-232015
In the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, terrorism has received broadened
coverage. Environmental terrorists are different than traditional terrorists, but they still can create
trouble for governments all over the world. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) estimates that the
criminal acts of extremist groups Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front alone have caused
damage in excess of 43 million dollars.
Ecological terrorism is a huge risk to environmental security
Mikhail A. Popov, Scientific Centre for Aerospace Research of the Earth, Kiev, Ukraine, Et al, 2011,
“Ch. 12 - Processing of Hyperspectral Imagery for Contamination Detection in Urban Areas,”
Environmental Security and Ecoterrorism, Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on
Environmental Security and Ecoterrorism Moscow, https://drive.google.com/file/d/
0B9bX852JMJ__azRUME1RLXJTVC1RUzN1MnFObGpnQQ/edit?pli=1, ACC. 6-24-2015
The threats to environmental security in the modern world now have a new component in the form of
ecological terrorism. Ecoterrorism is the use or threatened use of violence of a criminal nature against
innocent victims or property by an environmentally-oriented, sub-national group for environmentalpolitical reasons, or aimed at an audience beyond the target, often of a symbolic nature. There is a
growing necessity to develop quantitative estimations of potential environmental harm for both
prediction and rapid response.
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Eco-terrorists can cause huge damage (Nuclear Power Scenario)
Ecoterrorism risk attacks on nuclear power and chemical plants, killing millions
Simon M. Berkowicz, Arid Ecosystems Research Center, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2011, “Ch. 2
- Eco-Terrorism/Enviro-Terrorism: Background, Prospects, Countermeasures,” Environmental Security
and Ecoterrorism, Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Environmental Security
and Ecoterrorism Moscow, https://drive.google.com/file/d/
0B9bX852JMJ__azRUME1RLXJTVC1RUzN1MnFObGpnQQ/edit?pli=1, ACC. 6-24-2015
Potential enviro-terrorist “hard” targets are likely to include nuclear reactors and power supply, water
delivery systems, water reservoirs and dams, chemical and petroleum factories, fuel depots, oil
pipelines, and forests/bushland arson. According to, US chemical manufacturing plants have inadequate
security to prevent or respond to a terrorist threat or attack. They refer to literature indicating that 123
US chemical facilities can each put over one million people at risk to a toxic gas cloud release, with a
further 700 chemical sites that could each put 100,000 people at risk.
Ecological terrorism risks eco-disasters killing millions from attacks on power plants
and pipelines
Mikhail A. Popov, Scientific Centre for Aerospace Research of the Earth, Kiev, Ukraine, Et al, 2011,
“Ch. 12 - Processing of Hyperspectral Imagery for Contamination Detection in Urban Areas,”
Environmental Security and Ecoterrorism, Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on
Environmental Security and Ecoterrorism Moscow, https://drive.google.com/file/d/
0B9bX852JMJ__azRUME1RLXJTVC1RUzN1MnFObGpnQQ/edit?pli=1, ACC. 6-24-2015
One goal of ecological terrorism is to intimidate people by means of environmental impacts, such as
ecocatastrophes. This can include attacks damaging or destroying power plants, large dams, nuclear,
chemical, petroleum-refining, metallurgical and bioengineering works, raw materials and products
storages, oil, gas and ammonia pipelines, military bases, and radioactive and toxic waste dumps. In
many cases, attractive targets are located in or near ports and industrial zones within densely populated
urban areas.
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Page 69
Eco-terrorists can cause huge damage (Nuclear Power Extension)
U.S. nuclear power plants are vulnerable. An attack by 5 or 6 people could trigger
meltdowns and massive radiation
Alan J. Kuperman, Staff Writer, August 26, 2013, “How U.S. nuclear reactors are vulnerable to
terrorists,” CNN, http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2013/08/26/how-u-s-nuclear-reactors-arevulnerable-to-terrorists/, ACC. 6-26-2015
Disturbingly, however, nuclear power plants still must protect against only five or six attackers
(according to published reports), less than one-third the number who engaged in attacks on 9/11. Nor
are these existing facilities required to withstand the impact of a commercial airliner, as hit the World
Trade Center and Pentagon. Unlike the Navy’s nuclear assets, civilian reactors adjacent to large bodies
of water are not required to deploy floating barriers to defend against ship-borne attacks. Nuclear
utilities are not even required to protect against rocket-propelled grenades and sniper rifles with armorpiercing ammunition, weapons that are possessed by many terrorist organizations. America’s nuclear
power plants, and their pools of used fuel, are thus vulnerable to realistic terrorist attacks that could
disable cooling systems, trigger meltdowns, and release massive amounts of radiation, as occurred at
Chernobyl in 1986 and more recently at Japan’s Fukushima reactors.
Radicalization could turn the ELF to attacks on nuclear power plants
Simon M. Berkowicz, Arid Ecosystems Research Center, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2011, “Ch. 2
- Eco-Terrorism/Enviro-Terrorism: Background, Prospects, Countermeasures,” Environmental Security
and Ecoterrorism, Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Environmental Security
and Ecoterrorism Moscow, https://drive.google.com/file/d/
0B9bX852JMJ__azRUME1RLXJTVC1RUzN1MnFObGpnQQ/edit?pli=1, ACC. 6-24-2015
The Earth Liberation Front (ELF) and Animal Liberation Front operating in the USA have been prominent
organizations attacking property to further their ideological views on the use and protection of the
environment. Their targets have focused on laboratories, corporations, and the forestry industry, using
arson, sabotage and vandalism. Leader and Probst point out that the ELF could shift their targets to
include the nuclear industry. Because such groups rely on “leaderless resistance”, and encourage the
formation of autonomous activist cells, there is no central authority for law enforcement agencies to
shut down. Even if a cell could be penetrated, the number of people to be arrested would be few.
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Page 70
Eco-terrorists can cause huge damage (Science Scenario)
Scientific discovery is advancing now
Alex Barbos, Staff Writer, May 28, 2014, “Importance of Science: Understanding Our Past, Present and
Future,” Udemy, https://blog.udemy.com/importance-of-science/, ACC. 6-26-2015
Today we are closer than ever to solving some of science’s biggest mysteries. We have the technology to
simulate important events in the past, such as the Big Bang, and we have the technology to fly into
space. We have nations working together for the greater good, and we have a 500-ton man-made object
– the International Space Station – orbiting into space to prove it. We have the means, the technology
and the will to take things further, and that’s exactly what we’re doing.
Eco-terrorists impede scientific discovery
Jerome P. Bjelopera, Specialist in Organized Crime and Terrorism, February 19, 2014, “The Domestic
Terrorist Threat: Background and Issues for Congress,” Congressional Research Service,
https://www.hsdl.org/?view&did=751755, ACC. 6-23-2015
As articulated by some scientific researchers, the monetary toll on legitimate businesses and
laboratories in the United States exacted by animal rights and eco extremists is compounded by less
tangible issues. For example, animal rights extremists and eco-terrorists have impacted the work of
scientists. In some cases, special equipment and research materials have been destroyed in attacks. The
consequences of criminal activity in the name of movements such as the ALF can also be more personal.
Two advocates of animal research conducted strictly according to federal regulations have noted that
the actions of animal rights extremists have pushed some scientists to quit lab work involving animals.
Often, this work relates to products and procedures that some maintain cannot feasibly be marketed
without animal testing. In 2006, a UCLA professor of behavioral neuroscience declared he was stopping
his research on monkeys because of what he described as harassment by animal rights groups.
Additionally, animal rights extremists are said to be driving out students from research programs.
Science is key to survival and a quality life
Alex Barbos, Staff Writer, May 28, 2014, “Importance of Science: Understanding Our Past, Present and
Future,” Udemy, https://blog.udemy.com/importance-of-science/, ACC. 6-26-2015
Can you imagine a world without science? You wouldn’t have to worry about being late to work or
finding your car keys because, well, jobs and cars wouldn’t exist. You would be living in a cave or a
rudimentary built shelter, at best, wondering whether you’ll be able to hunt something for your next
meal, or get killed and become some wild animal’s next feast in the process. The moment that early
humans decided to take action into securing their survival marked the birth of science, as that’s the
moment when they started asking themselves two vital questions about the world surrounding them:
“How?” and “Why?”. Basically, that’s exactly what science is about: understanding how things work and
why, and the answers science gave us so far allowed us to survive, ensure our survival and improve our
lifestyle in the process, so I don’t think it’s exaggerated to say that science is the most important
element of our existence. If you want a proof of just how awesome science is, check out this online
course on geology and you will learn about the origins of our planet, how it was formed and why it is in
the form we know it today – starting from billions of years ago, all the way up to the present day.
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Eco-terrorists can cause huge damage (Science impacts)
Science is essential to survival. We have an obligation to future generations
David P. Balamuth, professor of physics and, since 1995, associate dean for the natural sciences and
researcher at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory in Michigan and the Lawrence
Berkeley Laboratory in California, Winter 1997, “The Importance of Understanding Science, An
Interview with David Balamuth,” Penn State Arts & Sciences,
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/sasalum/newsltr/ winter97/Balamuth.html, ACC. 6-26-2015
If the historical record is any guide, scientific knowledge is vital to sustaining the earth's population.
Therefore, society should support science if for no other reason than its long-term self-interest. For their
part, it's essential for scientists to realize that their freedom to pursue research is the result of the work
and sweat of people who generate the resources to support these efforts. Scientists must be
accountable and explain why they pursue the questions they do. In any successful bargain, like the
compact between scientists and society, each party must recognize the fundamental legitimacy of the
other's point of view. One of the major hurdles we face is how hard it is for laypeople to realize how
long the timescales involved in scientific work can be. At Penn, for example, we tend to think of
Benjamin Franklin as a wonderfully practical fellow who invented bifocals and so on. Far more important
were his profound and important discoveries about the nature of electricity, which is the foundation of
our industrial civilization. Nearly 200 years later, most of the objects in this room have come from those
fundamental advances that Franklin made. We have an obligation to maintain that intellectual
momentum just as our ancestors did. We owe it to our children and grandchildren. If we don't, we're in
for some pretty tough times.
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A2: “They are nonviolent / civil disobedience”
Eco-terrorists often use bombs. They are not non-violent
Jerome P. Bjelopera, Specialist in Organized Crime and Terrorism, February 19, 2014, “The Domestic
Terrorist Threat: Background and Issues for Congress,” Congressional Research Service,
https://www.hsdl.org/?view&did=751755, ACC. 6-23-2015
Federal officials are especially concerned about the use of incendiary devices and explosives by animal
rights extremists and eco-terrorists. In congressional testimony from 2005, then-ATF Deputy Assistant
Director Carson Carroll stated that the “most worrisome” trend regarding animal rights extremists and
eco-terrorists was their “willingness to resort to incendiary and explosive devices.”
Even if most eco-activists are nonviolent, some are violent. This negates any claim to
civil disobedience
Kevin R. Grubbs, J.D. from the Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law, 2010, “Saving
Lives or Spreading Fear: The Terroristic Nature of Eco-Extremism,” Animal Law, vol. 16, no. 2 (2010), p.
353-57
The argument that eco-extremists are not terrorists because they are not as violent as other groups
must similarly fail. Other movements do use methods more likely to kill or injure. That the government
has chosen to deal with eco-extremism as a terrorist threat before dealing with other groups does not
itself invalidate that choice. Courts have established, in other areas, that the government is not required
to correct a problem in its entirety all at once; rather, it may try to attack the problem piecemeal. The
same reasoning should apply here. Some activist supporters argue that civil disobedience should not be
synonymous with terrorism. This argument suggests that dealing with the animal rights movement like
terrorists - as the AETA does - would replace appropriate sanctions for civil boycott or disobedience with
unjustifiably harsh ones. This argument, too, is flawed. For the argument to hold true, the acts in
question must necessarily constitute civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is "a deliberate but
nonviolent act of lawbreaking to call attention to a particular law or set of laws believed by the actor to
be of questionable legitimacy or morality." Hence, civil disobedience assumes nonviolence and admits
that its goal is to effect legal change. The ALF actions are frequently violent, however.
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A2: “They are not an organized threat”
Even a few eco-terrorists can cause millions in financial loss
Jennifer Varriale, Carson University of Central Missouri, Et al., March 2014, “Eco-Terrorism and the
Corresponding Legislative Efforts to Intervene and Prevent Future Attacks,” The Canadian Network for
Research on Terrorism, Security, and Society, http://library.tsas.ca/entries/eco-terrorism-and-thecorresponding-legislative-efforts-to-intervene-and-prevent-future-attacks/, ACC. 6-22-2015
Eco-terrorism has been noted to cause huge financial loss with only a few attacks. Just like the “black
swans” phenomenon referred to by Gary LaFree (2013), a small amount of these types of incidents tend
to fall outside the realm of regular expectations and have a high impact against prediction. Eco-terrorist
incidents seem to follow the black swan prediction. In Figure 3-3, we notice that incidents that occurred
in certain years led to a huge amount of property damage. For example, in 2000, only 101 incidents
caused $35,556,750 worth of damage while in 2001, 163 incidents caused $13,191,974 worth of
damage.
Despite looseness of affiliation, REAR groups are coordinated
Sivan Hirsch-Hoefler, Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy Interdisciplinary Center
(IDC), and Cas Mudde, Department of International Affairs, University of Georgia, Athens, 2014,
““Ecoterrorism”: Terrorist Threat or Political Ploy?,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 37, pp. 586–603
The REAR movement is a broad and loosely organized amalgam of individuals, groups and organizations
that condone radical (i.e., non-legal) actions to realize a world in which both animals and the
environment are fully respected. Most of their radical actions are aimed at exposing or stopping
environmental destruction and animal abuse. While all members of the REAR movement differ from the
much larger moderate environmental and animal rights movement in terms of their acceptance of nonlegal activities, some also have more radical political goals. For example, many radical animal rights
activists believe that animals should have the same rights as humans, while many radical
environmentalists believe that environmental concerns are more important than economic concerns.
Although the various REAR groups do not constitute a single entity, “they are at the very least close
cousins.”
Most eco-terrorists are chronic offenders that improve methods over time
Steven M. Chermak, Ph.D., National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism & Responses to Terrorism
(START), and School of Criminal Justice, Michigan State University, Et. Al, May 2013, An Overview of
Bombing and Arson Attacks by Environmental and Animal Rights Extremists in the United States, 19952010, Final Report to the Resilient Systems Division, Science and Technology Directorate, U.S. DoH,
http://www.start.umd.edu/sites/default/files/files/publications/START_BombingAndArsonAttacksByEnv
ironmentalAndAnimalRightsExtremists_ May2013.pdf, ACC. 6-22-2015
There are several interesting findings that highlight policy relevant concerns. First, there was a relatively
small group of individuals who were responsible for a large number of the offenses in the database. One
of the offenders, for example, was linked to 15 different offenses. The offenders who committed
multiple offenses were also different compared to those offenders who committed only one bombing or
arson. They were more likely to be female, were more educated, and were more likely to be part of an
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informal cell. The influence of these small cells might help to explain the wide variation over time in the
number of ALF and ELF incidents that occur. That is, although the number of incidents that occur in any
particular year is generally small, periods with larger numbers of incidents might be related to the
operations of specific cells while periods with smaller numbers of incidents might be related to the
apprehension of these cells. Such chronic offending is of particular concern to law enforcement because
offenders have the opportunity to learn, adjust, and cause greater damage over time. That is, the more
crimes they commit, the more efficient and effective they become.
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Schmitt K NEG
This year’s resolution takes a starkly liberal approach to civil liberties by attempting to curtail domestic
surveillance. As such, an ideologically conservative criticism is perhaps the most direct and obvious way
to generate offense on the Neg. This Kritik will serve both as a justification for status quo surveillance
policies and meta-level turn to the logic of the Aff. Carl Schmitt is best known as the “Crown Jurist” of
Nazi Germany and a paragon of neoconservative movement. While Schmitt was a Nazi and an antiSemite, these labels misunderstand his application in the debate context. While his early works were
characterized as conservative endorsements of enmity and agonist politics, his work after the war
developed this philosophy into a nuanced understanding of liberal states that would influence
prominent liberal theorists like Hannah Arendt and Gorgio Agamben.
Schmitt begins with a traditional agonist politics; he believed that political conflict and competition are
inevitable in human nature. To harness these conflicts and produce the most positive socio-political
outcomes, societies naturally draw lines of division along differences in identity. However, since the
Enlightenment, when religious and monarchical authority devolved to empirical reason, the divisions of
society have been co-opted by a sense of higher morality inherent in liberal politics. The use of rights
and ethics, in the form of constitutions and legalism, to guide these divisions has led to a sense of
absolute enmity that cannot be tempered. For Schmitt, large absolute wars like WWII were the result of
ideological approaches to identity in nation-states.
Schmitt died before surveillance became a popular topic in political theory. However, his theories
concerning exception and emergency are foundational texts in security literature. Schmitt emphasized
that the law was limited to the point of its impact on sovereignty. Included in a people’s sovereign rights
is the right to defend against the suffering of their citizens by curtailing the law; this justifies breaches of
the constitution generally and can be used to justify the securitizing mindset of the status quo.
The Schmitt K makes the most sense against a critical affirmative with a plan text. However, it is also one
of the more generic Kritiks at the link level meaning it can be used in almost any circumstance.
Framework and cede the political arguments simply should not work against this Kritik as it is designed
to coexist with these principles. However, you will need to emphasize the link with a specific story to
avoid permutations. The perm, particularly for policy teams, is probably the most effective Aff argument
as it will force the Neg to generate offense against the liberal mindset of the Aff. That should not be
difficult on this topic but is less material than a link to the outright extension of rights, inhibition of the
executive or decay of nation-states; this is what the critique is designed to link to and not all Affs will
apply.
I strongly suggest reading Schmitt’s primary texts to understand his mindset. His writing is less abstract
than Heidegger and Nietzsche, his predecessors as the philosopher of Fascist Germany but carries many
references to the politics of the early 20th century; while these don’t translate well to debate cards, they
will give you a unique understanding of contemporary power relations. While he was a leading member
of the Nazi party that should not totally obscure his contribution to our modern international security
paradigm.
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1NC
The Aff’s evocation of liberal universal rights make inimical surveillance regimes
inevitable and radicalized
Stephen Legg. Professor at Rutgers University. May 2011 . Spatiality, Sovereignty and Carl
Schmitt: Geographies of the Nomos. Accessed May 22, 2015. Page 70.
The responses to an anomos of the Earth also point to the ready policing, and control unknown since the
mass mobilization for WWII during 1941—1945. The examples set by the Ashcroft/ Gonzales
Department of Justice and the George W. Bush Administration's PATRIOT Act unfortunately have
pointed the USA down a road leading to an odd new dirigisme (Gill 1995). Attorney-General Holder and
President Obama are just now slowly backing away from this path, but not entirely, and only in certain
situations. By wrapping the cloak of national, municipal, and personal security around the predicates of
liberal society, the fetish for individual freedom sees liberty in recasting state repression as riskmanagement, constant surveillance as insurance, and aggressive policing as collective security. Amicality
here is nationalized, class- focused, ethnified, and ultimately racialized, creating identifiable foreign,
poor, ethnic, and racial others—from whom enmity is always suspected and amity is never expected.
Trust evaporates in a fog of peace-seeking suspicion rather than the flashes of militant war. Such
responses turn the mythographical clash of Huntington's civilizations (1996) into a self-fulfilling strategic
prophecy, but these "Other-based" myths also do not guarantee security (b Tuathail and Dalby 1998).
Before the Oklahoma City bombing and the Washington sniper attacks, most citizens in America's liberal
capitalist society believed that no one or, at least not one of us—that is, an ordinary American white
man or black man such as Timothy McVeigh or John Allen Muhammed—could have "done what they
did." Nonetheless, they did. And, even PATRIOT Act-driven anti-terrorist profiling, which can turn any
airline ticket holder, suburban gun owner, average motorist, or former serviceman through
sophisticated data mining into a ticking Islamic terrorist time bomb, cannot prevent new violent events
from coming from other like-minded agents in the peace that ends all peace. Likewise, principles of
liberalism militate against state repression and the commercial impulse behind daily standards of living
require continuing liberalism’s industrial practices, so ways of life maintaining inequalities at home and
abroad are a peace of that ends all peace.
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Enemies are key to the political—liberalizing this relationship leads to an ideological
imperialism more deadly than any nation-state war
S Parvez Manzoor. Professor at University of Stockholm. 2007 . The Sovereignty of the
Political: Carl Schmitt and the Nemesis of Liberalism. Accessed May 23, 2015.
http://www.algonet.se/~pmanzoor/CarlSchmitt.htm
Given the possibility of actual, physical killing in a friend-enemy encounter, the political cannot be made
subordinate to any other set of values or institution, whether religious, moral, aesthetic or economic.
The political transcends all norms and upholds the sovereignty of the existential over the theoretical.
Thus, 'war, the readiness of combatants to die, the physical killing of human beings who belong on the
side of the enemy - all this has no normative meaning, but an existential meaning only, particularly in a
real combat situation with a real enemy. There exists no rational purpose, no norm no matter how true,
no programme no matter how exemplary, no social ideal no matter how beautiful, no legitimacy or
legality which could justify men in killing each other for this reason. If such physical destruction is not
motivated by an existential threat to one's own way of life, then it cannot be justified. Just as little can
war be justified by ethical and juristic norms. If there really are enemies in the existential sense as
meant here, then it is justified, but only politically, to repel and fight them physically.' (48-9; my italics)
The justification for war, then, does not reside in its being fought for ideals or justice, or economic
prosperity, but in its being fought for preserving the very existence of the polity. In the final analysis, the
political, inasmuch as it is sovereign, cannot be evaluated and measured by norms that are external to it;
nor can it be avoided. The political is the fundamental fact of existence, the basic characteristic of
human life from which man cannot escape; or, expressed differently, man would cease to be man by
ceasing to be political. From the inevitability of the political, it also follows that pacifism is a lost cause
and conciliatory visions of a universal humanity are nothing but pious delusions: 'The political entity
presupposes the real existence of an enemy and therefore coexistence with another political entity. As
long as a state exists, there will always be in the world more than just one state. A world state that
embraces the entire globe and all of humanity cannot exist. The political world is a pluriverse, not a
universe.' (53). It is hardly surprising that Schmitt's concept of the political has been understood as a
strongly polemical text that exposes the hypocrisy of liberal humanism. Liberalism, with its predilection
for vacuous abstractions, its burdensome legal formalism, its vacillation between military pacifism and
moral crusading, its sham universalism of rights and its real espousal of inequality, remains for him the
ultimate enemy of the political man. As for liberalism's moral claim to universal humanism, Schmitt is
mercilessly candid: 'The concept of humanity is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperial
expansion, and in its ethical-humanitarian form it is a specific vehicle of economic imperialism.'
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If we don’t construct enemies in our politics we will construct them in our
imaginations—that’s more dangerous
Slavoj Zizek. Slovenian philosopher. May 2002. Are we in a war? Do we have an enemy?
Accessed May 22, 2015. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n10/slavoj-zizek/are-we-in-a-war-do-we-have-anenemy
There is a lesson to be learned here from Carl Schmitt. The division friend/enemy is never just a
recognition of factual difference. The enemy is by definition always (up to a point) invisible: it cannot be
directly recognised because it looks like one of us, which is why the big problem and task of the political
struggle is to provide/construct a recognisable image of the enemy. (Jews are the enemy par excellence
not because they conceal their true image or contours but because there is ultimately nothing behind
their deceiving appearances. Jews lack the ‘inner form’ that pertains to any proper national identity:
they are a non-nation among nations, their national substance resides precisely in a lack of substance, in
a formless, infinite plasticity.) In short, ‘enemy recognition’ is always a performative procedure which
brings to light/constructs the enemy’s ‘true face’. Schmitt refers to the Kantian category
Einbildungskraft, the transcendental power of imagination: in order to recognise the enemy, one has to
‘schematise’ the logical figure of the Enemy, providing it with the concrete features which will make it
into an appropriate target of hatred and struggle. After the collapse of the Communist states which
provided the figure of the Cold War Enemy, the Western imagination entered a decade of confusion and
inefficiency, looking for suitable schematisations of the Enemy, sliding from narco-cartel bosses to the
succession of warlords of so-called ‘rogue states’ (Saddam, Noriega, Aidid, Milosevic) without stabilising
itself in one central image; only with 11 September did this imagination regain its power by constructing
the image of bin Laden, the Islamic fundamentalist, and al-Qaida, his ‘invisible’ network. What this
means, furthermore, is that our pluralistic and tolerant liberal democracies remain deeply Schmittean:
they continue to rely on political Einbildungskraft to provide them with the appropriate figure to render
visible the invisible Enemy. Far from suspending the binary logic Friend/Enemy, the fact that the Enemy
is defined as the fundamentalist opponent of pluralistic tolerance merely adds a reflexive twist to it. This
‘renormalisation’ has involved the figure of the Enemy undergoing a fundamental change: it is no longer
the Evil Empire, i.e. another territorial entity, but an illegal, secret, almost virtual worldwide network in
which lawlessness (criminality) coincides with ‘fundamentalist’ ethico-religious fanaticism – and since
this entity has no positive legal status, the new configuration entails the end of international law which,
at least from the onset of modernity, regulated relations between states.
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Prioritizing exception is key to maintaining the political
Eric Posner and Adrian Vermeule. Professors at University of Chicago Law School.
2011. Demystifying Schmitt. Accessed May 23, 2015.
http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1088&context=public_law_and_legal
_theory
The problems with this equation are twofold. First, the general norms or rules of law enacted by
representative legislatures through statutes typically assume a normal, stable state of "5 affairs in which
it is possible to imagine a "closed system of legality covering the whole space of possible policies. In such
an environment, legality and legitimacy are largely congruent. Where the political and economic
environment changes rapidly, however, exceptions to general statutes become necessary and legality
and legitimacy may diverge. This is the problem of the exception, which we take up in Section 2 below. A
related but distinct problem, however is logically antecedent to the distinction between the norm and
the exception. In the legislative or parliamentary state, there is no role for direct political action by the
masses, as opposed to the peaceful procedures of representative democracy; as Schmitt puts it, "a
closed system of legality grounds the claim to obedience and justifies the suspension of every right of
resistance. But it is unclear, Schmitt points out, how legality by itself could causally motivate compliance
with law (whether or not as a normative matter it justifies compliance with law). The legislative state
"assumes away the issue of obedience.. . Schmitt avers that contemporary legality does not account for
why authority is obeyed.”
Alternative—Acknowledge the sovereign power of exception in domestic surveillance
and reject the extension of liberal rights to surveillance subjects
Alain De Benoist. Founder of Nouvelle Droit (France). 2013. Carl Schmitt Today: Terrorism,
'Just' War, and the State of Emergency. Accessed May 24, 2015. Page 76.
By suspending the legal norm, adds Carl Schmitt, the emergency helps one to better understand the
nature of politics, in the sense that it shows where sovereignty— that is, the concrete capacity of
making decisions when faced with an unexpected situation — resides. The state of emergency reveals
simultaneously the authority and the place of sovereignty at the same time that it causes the decision
(Entscheidung) to appear in its 'absolute purity.' The sovereign political authority is not necessarily
synonymous with the state. 'Souverän ist, wer über den Ausnahmezustand entscheidet,'183 writes Carl
Schmitt. This formula, which has become famous, can be understood in two ways: the one who decides
in an exceptional situation is sovereign, but also the one who decides on the exception itself is
sovereign, that is, the one who decides that the situation is no longer normal and that the ordinary rules
no longer apply. There is therefore a close link between the exception and the decision that Schmitt
identifies as the 'first cause' of every political society or body. Schmitt sees in the decision in the
exceptional (or emergency) case the purest expression of the political act: the suspension of the legal
norms in an exceptional case constitutes the ultimate manifestation of political sovereignty.
Sovereignty, he emphasizes, is in fact not so much the power of laying down the law as the power of
suspending it. But one would be wrong to interpret this statement as an apology for arbitrariness. On
the one hand, Schmitt emphasizes that in deciding in a case of emergency, the sovereign is not free to
act according to his own good pleasure, but that he is, on the contrary, obliged to act in a way that takes
into consideration his responsibilities. On the other hand, he affirms that the exception defines the rule
in the sense that one cannot understand a rule without taking its limits into consideration, that is, the
circum- stances that can make it inapplicable. In other words: the one who decides the exception to the
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norm also defines the norm. 'The exception is more interesting than the rule,' writes Schmitt in his
Political Theology. ‘The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything: It confirms not only the
rule but also its existence, which derives only from exception.’
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Link- Digital Surveillance
Political control of cyberspace is the next frontier for friend-enemy conflict—the Aff
abandons the US’s role in this dichotomy
Leonid Savin. Writer at Geopolitica (Russia). December 29, 2014. Cybergeopolitics:
emergent set of practices, phenomenon and discipline. Accessed May 24, 2015.
http://www.geopolitica.ru/en/article/cybergeopolitics-emergent-set-practices-phenomenon-anddiscipline#.VWTZGfm4Q2w
In recent times, we hear about the increasing role of cyberspace as a political tool or domain where
confrontation takes place between the various political organizations, countries, and even alliances of
states. Edward Snowden's case is indicative of the fact of how Internet communication and the
interdependence of the social environment with politics, economics, and the military sector has become
important and affects both the current agenda and the strategic planning of the leaders of the major
world powers. If geopolitics already developed a scientific apparatus and definitions which are used by
politicians, experts, and scholars, cyberspace in some sense is a “terra incognita”, and there is an active
struggle for the domination of this space. Extremely significant in this confrontation are the positions of
different states on the regulation of the Internet domain. A dichotomy in this field literally repeats the
mega-civilizational break that runs through the countries and peoples belonging to the Sea and Land
Powers. The U.S., EU countries, and their satellites are in favor of a free Internet service that is obvious
hypocritical (because of the hidden manipulations with social networks, the PRISM program, and so on),
while Russia, Iran, China, India, and some other states require that the Internet be a sovereign space and
under the jurisdiction of international law, precisely the International Telecommunication Union under
the United Nations. The Summit on Cyberspace held in December 2012 in Dubai showcased the
exacerbated contradictions of international telecommunications when the United States refused to sign
the new treaty regulating the right of all states to engage in management of the Internet. This
separation clearly fits into the scheme of Carl Schmitt, which is a reliable indicator of the politically dual
categories of friend or foe. These categories are not moral, but technical, features that manifested
themselves in the positions over the view of the functioning of the Internet space.
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Link- Muslim surveillance
Liberal universalism is the cornerstone of Islamophobia—Schmitt’s ethics are key to
Islamic empowerment
S Parvez Manzoor. Professor at University of Stockholm. 2007 . The Sovereignty of the
Political: Carl Schmitt and the Nemesis of Liberalism. Accessed May 23, 2015.
http://www.algonet.se/~pmanzoor/CarlSchmitt.htm
Far less innocuous than any hermeneutical encounter between Schmitt and the fuqaha of the past,
however, is the ghost of Schmitt that haunts Muslims here and now in the Islamophobic scenarios of a
future 'clash of civilizations.' For there can be no doubt that this barbaric 'theory', wishful thinking if not
a self-fulfilling prophecy, is nothing but a reincarnation of the infamous Schmittian 'friend-enemy'
distinction that according to him constitutes the heart of political existence. Of the very few Muslim
responses to this challenge, i.e., the deliberate, persistent and vicious cultivation of imagery and
discourses that define Islam as the 'enemy', the one by Ahmet Davutoglu, Civilizational Transformation
and the Muslim World, merits scholarly attention, not least because of its sophistication candour and
optimism. Through a panoramic, trans-cultural vision, Davutoglu surveys the mileposts of 'universal'
history and detects in our own times an air of crisis, a moment of 'ontological insecurity',
'epistemological relavitity', 'ethico-material and ecological imbalances', etc. Perceiving also that a new,
global civilization is emerging, Davutoglu resents the fact that historic animosities and perverse political
interests of the West prevent Islam from playing a meaningful and legitimate role in this
transformational process. The current world order, he rails, incorporates an inveterate and congenital
form of anti-Islamism. He ends his sustained reflection, as strategic as it is philosophical, by exhorting
the Muslims to develop civilizational visions and strategies to reclaim their rightful share in the future of
humanity. All of this makes Davutoglu's rather terse statement both Isamically significant and
ideationally rewarding. In a similar vein, Victor Segesvary, a Hungarian emigré in the US who has been
associated with the United Nations, meditates on the spiritual, moral and cultural state of the world. His
is however a tract of meta-theory that incorporates, in the author's own idiosyncratic manner,
philosophical insights, moral criticisms, utopian visions and religious homilies of almost every notable
thinker under the sun. It is a Herculean effort, a formidable display of the author's erudition, an
eloquent testimony to his involvement with the future of our humanity, but, alas, it lacks focus and
clarity. Notwithstanding its imposing, even intimidating, title, Segevary offers no 'political' blueprints for
the future world which has experienced the 'collapse of the universalistic worldview.' On the contrary,
he hopes that a new civilization will arise on the basis of an 'ontological/cosmic perspective.' It is a
visionary reflection that should appeal to other visionaries! For Muslims, who find themselves at the
receiving end of civilizational polemics, the lesson of Carl Schmitt is precisely the political nature of the
world-order, the duplicity of its institutions and the sanctimony of its moral crusaders. Universalism is
the mask that hides the countenance of hegemony and might is the right of the elect. Carl Schmitt's
thought, an authentic product of Western elf-reflection, opens up an intellectual space that allows us
the luxury of indulging in counter-polemics. And yet, we must be weary of the polemical as well as the
political. For the ultimate value that Islam stands for is not political but trans-political; the final aim of its
mission is not the eradication, or subjugation, of its enemies, not the establishment of a universal state,
not the sustenance of a global order of terror and economic exploitation, but the unity of man and
peace in the city of humanity. Islam means sovereignty of the Transcendent and not of the political.
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Liberal universalism is what truly oppresses Islamic culture
S Parvez Manzoor. Professor at University of Stockholm. 2007 . The Sovereignty of the
Political: Carl Schmitt and the Nemesis of Liberalism. Accessed May 23, 2015.
http://www.algonet.se/~pmanzoor/CarlSchmitt.htm
For Löwith, the intellectual affinities between Schmitt's political existentialism and Heidegger's
philosophical existentialism are far from fortuitous. 'It is no accident', he asserts, 'if Heidegger's
existential ontology corresponds to a political "decisionism" in Carl Schmitt, a decisionism that shifts the
capacity for "Being-as-a-whole" of the Dasein which is always on its own to the "totality" of the state
which is always one's own. The self-assertion of political existence, and to "freedom toward death"
correspond the "sacrifice of life" in the political exigency of war. In both cases, the principle is the same,
namely "facticity", i.e., what remains of life when one does away with all life-content.' Yet again are we
reminded of the futility of all purely temporal - existential, occasional, decisionist -schemes of things and
their inability to engender any ethic of right and wrong! The Muslim interest in Carl Schmitt, I believe, is
not for historical reasons, insofar as the context of his life does not eclipse the text of his thought.
Schmittism may be a specifically European phenomenon that can only be understood and appraised
against the background of philosophical nihilism and political uncertainty from which it emerges.
Nevertheless, some of the questions that Schmitt raises about politics, law and the state, and the very
provocative answers that he gives to them, are the very stuff of political reflection and as such far
transcend the narrow confines of his European context. From the moral point of view, he may be
despicable and the normative import of his theories may be virtually nil, but it is as a phenomenologist
of the political - he characterizes himself as the 'metaphysician of the political' - that his insights make
demands on the Muslim thinker. That he has been totally ignored by the Western 'Islamologue', or that
Muslim writers show no awareness of his radical theories, is a fact that may be regretted but which may
not daunt the critical Muslim thinker from making a direct and independent encounter with his thought.
Carl Schmitt's problematic political philosophy, in my opinion, not only de-masks the duplicity of the
dominant liberal ideology, it also helps us de-construct many of the peculiarities of fiqhi discourse that
arouse the outsider's squeamish aversion and the insider's ingenuous perplexity.
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Link- Limiting Executive Power
Administrative actions are designed to account for emergency powers
Robert Knowles. PhD at Florida State University. 2013. National Security Rulemaking. Access
May 23, 2015. https://archive.org/stream/pdfy-ElW3wCQnqY3Kqx6K/The%20Dual%20State%20%20Wilson%20%28ed%29%202012_djvu.txt
How do the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) and the larger body of administrative law respond to
real or perceived emergencies? I suggest that our administrative law contains, built right into its
structure, a series of legal "black holes" and " grey holes. "2 Legal black holes arise when statutes or
legal rules "either explicitly exemptLl the executive from the requirements of the rule of law or explicitly
ex- cludeLl judicial review of executive action. "3 Grey holes, which are "disguised black holes,"4 arise
when "there are some legal constraints on executive action it is not a lawless void but the constraints
are so insubstantial that they pretty well permit government to do as it pleases. "S Grey holes thus
present "the facade or form of the rule of law rather than any substantive protections. David Dyzenhaus
and other theorists of the rule of law show that black holes and grey holes are best understood by
drawing upon the thought of Carl Schmitt, in particular his account of the relationship between legality
and emergencies. If this is so, and in this sense, my claim is that the administrative law of emergencies
just is Schmittian. Moreover, the existence of these black and grey holes is inevitable. The aspiration to
extend legality everywhere, so as to eliminate the Schmittian elements of our administrative law, is
hopelessly utopian.
Legal norms that restrict sovereignty deny the political
William Rasch. Professor and Chair of Germanic Studies, Indian University
Bloomington. 2006. Lines in the Sand: Enmity as a Structuring Principle. Accessed May 20, 2015. The
South Atlantic Quarterly. 104:2.
By way of an anthropological sleight of hand, liberalism represents itself as an ethos, a moral and
economic emancipation, and not as what it really is, namely, a power-political regime with traditional
power-political aims. For Schmitt, distinctions, rather than the effacement of distinctions, structure the
space within which we live, including the space of the political. Only within structured space, space
literally marked by human activities, by human groupings and the boundaries they draw, do terms
achieve their meanings. Norms, he repeatedly stated, are derived from situations, normal situations;
they are not derived logically from underived first principles. Categories like ‘‘liberty’’ and ‘‘equality’’ can
have political significance only when defined and delineated within the sphere of the political. They are
neither natural nor innately human qualities; they are not self-evident truths. Consequently, Schmitt’s
suspicion of liberalism, pacifism, or any other -ism that denies an initial and therefore ever-present
potential war of all against all is a suspicion of those who wish to make their operative distinctions
invisible, and thus incontestable, by claiming the immorality or illegality of all distinction. Schmitt’s
insistence, then, on our ‘‘evil’’ nature is evidence neither of his existential misanthropy nor even,
necessarily, of his conservative authoritarianism, but rather of his desire to secure the autonomy and
necessity of that human mechanism called ‘‘the political.’’ To the question of whether there is a war,
Schmitt emphatically answers ‘‘yes’’—by which he means to affirm not armed conflict or bloodshed as a
virtue in and of itself, but rather the necessity of the view that the proverbial state of nature is, as
Hobbes knew, a state marked by imperfection, and that this imperfection manifests itself as violence
and the guilt associated with it.
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Courts can’t account for exceptions to legal norms
Eric Posner and Adrian Vermeule. Professors at University of Chicago Law School.
2011. Demystifying Schmitt. Accessed May 23, 2015.
http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1088&context=public_law_and_legal
_theory
Courts face similar problems. Detailed statutes enacted before the emergency will seem antiquated and
inapt. Courts will feel pressure to interpret them loosely or use procedural obstacles to avoid their
application. For this reason, violations of FISA and the Anti-Torture Act never led to prosecutions. Vague
statutes enacted before and after the emergency provide no Lille of decision, and courts are reluctant to
substitute then views about policy for those of the executive, which has far more expertise and
resources. Commentators have urged courts to use constitutional or even international law to control
the executive, but these norms also prove to be ambiguous standards rather than clear-cut rules. To
apply such standards, courts would have to engage in judicial policymaking. But judges do not believe
that they have the information or expertise to make policy cluing emergencies and so they have seldom
taken this approach.
Constitutional appeals are particularly weak in the face of emergency
Douglas Cason. Professor at St. Olaf College. 2008. Emergency Judgment: Carl Schmitt, John
Locke, and the Paradox of Prerogative. Accessed May 24, 2015.Politics & Policy, Volume 36, No. 6.
Schmitt was a harsh critic of constitutional liberalism. In fact, he devoted his formidable intellect to
issues surrounding state emergencies to demonstrate the impossibility of making executive emergency
power consistent with the rule of law.2 He argued that proponents of modern constitutionalism are
fundamentally deluded concerning the nature of law. They assume that all governmental action can be
contained within a set of explicit legal norms and thus fail to grasp the political reality of the exception.
In a state of emergency, the norms of a legal order give way to the political act, the act of decision. In
that moment, political actors no longer experience the comforting consistency and clarity of ordinary
legal strictures. They recognize that any legal order originates and is maintained by the political act, a
moment of judgment that Schmitt calls “pure decision.” Schmitt coined the term “decisionism” to
describe his view that the concrete moment of decision is more legally significant than any abstractly
valid legal order. As Schmitt (2005, 13) argued, “[t]here exists no norm that is applicable to chaos.” In
the midst of crisis, law is not sovereign. The sovereign is whoever decides on the exception (5).
According to Schmitt, the inescapable presence of power lurks just behind the friendly facade of
constitutional government. The recent revival of interest in Schmitt is a result, in part, of the way the
Bush Administration has defended its authority in remarkably Schmittian terms. The attacks of
September 11, we have been told, changed everything. Legal norms and expectations that might have
once applied had to be reevaluated in light of the present crisis. Moreover, the process of reevaluation,
administration lawyers have argued, lies solely within the unmitigated discretionary power of the
executive. A memorandum written for the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) by John Yoo and submitted
under the signature of Jay Bybee in 2002 asserted that “the President enjoys complete discretion in the
exercise of his Commander-in-Chief authority and in conducting operations against hostile forces”
(Danner 2004, 145). Complete discretion in this case means that the president in wartime has no
authority to which he must answer. The president is sovereign. Prohibitions of international, as well as
domestic law, simply do not apply to him.
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Link- Terrorism
Acts of terrorism provide one of the last stable dichotomies for political action
Banu Bargu. Professor at New School. 2010. Unleashing the Acheron: Sacrificial Partisanship,
Sovereignty, and History." Theory & Event 13.1. Accessed May 24, 2015.
https://www.academia.edu/231246/Unleashing_the_Acheron_Sacrificial_Partisanship_Sovereignty_and
_History
Like the partisan, the human weapon is irregular and outside legality, with a counter-claim of his own
legitimacy.34 With the de-statization of war, the individualization of acts of violence, and the
haphazardness of targets, this irregularity is more pronounced.35 The human weapon's actions
transcend territorial boundaries, with aspirations to be operative on a regional or even global scale.36
Despite these similarities, there are three main reasons why the human weapon must be qualitatively
distinguished from the patriot or the revolutionary: (1) the transmogrification of the relation of enmity
into a corporeally lodged, existential antagonism; (2) the subversion of the instrumental logic of warfare;
and (3) the sacrificial ideology that marks the self-understanding of these fighters. Let me briefly
examine each in turn. Schmitt contends that deciding on the enemy is the most important act of
asserting an entity's political existence; indeed, it is the manifestation of that entity's sovereignty.
Without naming the enemy, an entity's political existence is annulled.37 The decision on the enemy is
not simply an act of naming but incorporates the moral authority of the political entity in harnessing the
willingness of its members to die and to kill, i.e., to undertake political sacrifice, against the enemy in the
name of the political entity.38 The most noticeable difference of the human weapon is in the alteration
of enmity. With human weapons, Schmittian "friend-enemy criterion" is not only absolutized, but also
fully internalized and existentialized. Acts of violence that constitute political sacrifice are now properly
self-sacrificial; that is, they are firmly situated in corporeal space, and they establish a direct and
material relation between the individual and the collective body politic, on the one hand, and between
the individual and the enemy, on the other hand. In destroying his own body, the human weapon
attacks the enemy and confers life upon the political collective of which he is a part.39 The distinction
between life and death collapses as the political is increasingly equated with the moment of the agent's
self-destruction. In fact, the annihilation of the human weapon becomes the precondition of the
annihilation of the enemy. Taking oneself out of the order dominated by the enemy by taking into one's
own hands the sovereign right over life and death - this corresponds to a political vision in which the
power sustaining that order will eventually crumble by such an exodus. In other words, the annihilation
of the self is not the collateral consequence but the very medium of warfare that cannot and, according
to these agents, ought not to be contained.
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The only way to confront the violence and imperialism of the War on Terror is to
excise liberal understandings of terror
Banu Bargu. Professor at New School. 2010. Unleashing the Acheron: Sacrificial Partisanship,
Sovereignty, and History." Theory & Event 13.1. Accessed May 24, 2015.
https://www.academia.edu/231246/Unleashing_the_Acheron_Sacrificial_Partisanship_Sovereignty_and
_History
While the forces of life and death clash upon the body, the universal value and sanctity of human life
and the humanitarianism of the global public are put to the test. Secondly, the transformation of the
human into weapon involves the metonymization of life and death. The human weapon is marked by a
strong determination to die and, in some cases, readiness to kill. But in the transformation of humans to
weapons, there is a somber sense in which the very instrumentality of this warfare is annulled. Although
human weapons are mobilized in pursuit of political goals and mythical ends, appearing as a means to
advance or achieve political gains for insurgent organizations (as cheap and smart bombs, for example),
the humanity of each fighter also loses its character as means. In the war fought by self-destructive
violence, the human weapon prioritizes his cause more than his life, he devalues life (his own as well as
that of the enemy), and he reduces himself into a mere means (and the enemy into a mere target) in the
service of his absolute and existential enmity. However, his alienated self-destruction as a weapon also
becomes an expression of his humanity, a self-enactment. The becoming-weapon of the human is the
becoming-manifest of a political existence that lacks voice; the very destruction of the human weapon
aims to speak the political voice of the oppressed.40 The interpretation of the weaponization of life as
an expressive and communicative form of action should not be taken to imply that its violence is
necessarily legitimate; rather, the ends that are supposed to justify the means implode and collapse into
one another. The human weapon thereby combines the partisan's intense political commitment and
willpower with a defiance or subversion of the means-ends structure of conventional politics. Such an
implosion of means and ends, of life and death, makes it much more difficult to judge the means on the
basis of the ends they ostensibly serve. The human weapon is both human and weapon, the subjectobject of violence as Lukács might say, instigating horror and lingering on the precarious threshold of a
"terrorist" criminality, abject thingification, and willed inhumanity. What makes this horror the ultima
ratio for de-humanization is that the human weapon occupies the position of the "terrorist" as "enemy
of humanity" by attacking our common political imaginary, an imaginary defined by sovereignty and
unified through the discourse that sanctifies human life as the ultimate end toward which violence can
be deployed as a means.41 The ideology of sacrifice upends this imaginary based on the understanding
that the political cause is more valuable than life, and this understanding is sustained by an alternative
cosmology.
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How we relate to terrorism will determine the scope of our ethical inclusivism
Banu Bargu. Professor at New School. 2010. Unleashing the Acheron: Sacrificial Partisanship,
Sovereignty, and History." Accessed May 24, 2015. Theory & Event 13.1.
https://www.academia.edu/231246/Unleashing_the_Acheron_Sacrificial_Partisanship_Sovereignty_and
_History
For human weapons, it is the ideology of sacrifice that supplies and sustains this separation by
establishing the articulation with the sacred. Hubert and Mauss show us that sacrifice establishes the
link of communication between the profane and the sacred through the mediation of priests and
rituals.42 The link, i.e., the one to be sacrificed, is separated from the profane world by violence, most
commonly lethal violence. Similarly, Benveniste shows the etymological link in Latin between sacrifice
(sacrificium), which has the double meaning of "to make sacred" and "to put to death," and the sacred
(sacer), as both "august and accursed, worthy of veneration and evoking horror."43 The violence that
separates the object of sacrifice from the profane world hallows it, makes it sacred, and enables its
veneration as such.44 Sacrifice connects transcendence to the realm of human practices, partakes of
the sacred, and in turn imparts sacredness on the purpose, entity, or collective in the name of which
sacrifice is undertaken.45 In Schmittian terms, the division between the friend and the enemy, us and
them, lies at the heart of the sacrificial mechanism's political iteration, rendering "us" sacred in and
through conflict with "them." Human weapons render their actions political not simply by naming the
enemy but by offering their lives against the enemy. It is through an appeal to the transcendent whether this is the Nation, the People, the Proletariat or God - in the name of which they are willing to
die (and, perhaps, to kill others) that human weapons validate their collective identity and attain the
authority of deciding on the enemy. Acts of self-sacrifice collapse the subject and object of the sacrificial
mechanism and consecrate both, representing the ultimate act of sacred affirmation through the
negation of life. In partaking of the sacred through the sacrificial mechanism, human weapons
theologize the political cause in the name of which they wage war, even though the cause itself may be
far from theological in content. It is sufficient to recall here that not all human weapons fight for
religious goals; in fact, most of them belong to organizations advocating secular causes.46 However, in
order for the distinction between friend and enemy and the ensuing ability to spill blood to make sense,
the cause is theologized; it is held to be absolute and sacrosanct (and abstract, insofar as it is absolute
and sacrosanct). The more human weapons give themselves to the cause and give up their life, the more
sacred their collectivity and political cause become. In turn, the sacredness of the cause singles them out
as select fighters in their communities, becomes the wellspring of legitimacy, and commands the
necessary moral authority to support the conviction and enmity to carry out acts of self-destructive
violence. At the same time, these fighters may also be viewed as surrogate victims for the purpose of
their community's expiation.47 They die so that their political collective may find life, achieve internal
cohesion, and redeem itself from criminality before established law. Human weapons are thus both
"august and accursed," as Benveniste points out. The ideology of sacrifice constitutes the vortex of their
violence.
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Link- International Relations
Boosting international relations by extending rights and limiting sovereignty
eviscerates the political
Sergei Prozorov. Professor of International Relations at Petrozavodsk State University.
2006. Liberal Enmity: The Figure of the Foe in the Political Ontology of Liberalism. Accessed May 22,
2015. Millennium - Journal of International Studies. Vol 34, No 2.
Schmitt’s concern with the liberal effacement of pluralism in the name of cosmopolitan humanity does
not merely seek to unravel hypocrisy or ridicule inconsistency but has more serious implications in the
context of the transcendental function of enmity that we have introduced above. For Schmitt, the
‘pluriversal’ structure of international relations accords with his political ontology that affirms the
ineradicability of difference, from which, as we have discussed, Schmitt infers the ever-present ‘extreme
possibility’ and the demand for the decision on the enemy. Moreover, the actual pluriversal structure of
international relations satisfies the criterion of equality between the Self and the Other by precluding
the emergence of a global hierarchy, whereby a particular ‘concrete order’ lays a claim to represent
humanity at large. While this pluralism does nothing to eliminate the ‘most extreme possibility’ of
violent conflict, it may be said at least to suspend it in its potentiality by retaining the possibility that the
‘existentially different and alien’ might not become the enemy simply by remaining outside the
‘concrete order’ of the Self and thus positing no actual existential threat. Moreover, as long as the
boundary between the Self and the Other is present, there remains a possibility that whatever conflicts
may ensue from the irreducible ontological alterity, they may be resolved on the basis of the mutually
recognised sovereign equality of the Self and the Other in the domain of the international, which by
definition is effaced by any political unification of humanity.43 Thus, for Schmitt ‘it is an intellectual
historical misunderstanding of an astonishing kind to want to dissolve these plural political entities in
response to the call of universal and monistic representations, and to designate that as pluralist’.44
However, this dissolution of actually existing pluralism is not a mere misunderstanding, a logical fallacy
of presupposing the existence of the unity that is yet to be established. In an invective that we consider
crucial for understanding Schmitt’s critique of liberal ultra-politics, Schmitt approaches liberal monism
with an almost existential trepidation: ‘What would be terrifying is a world in which there no longer
existed an exterior but only a homeland, no longer a space for measuring and testing one’s strength
freely.’45
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Monitoring and confronting the enemy is key to maintain stable politics
S Parvez Manzoor. Professor at University of Stockholm. 2007 . The Sovereignty of the
Political: Carl Schmitt and the Nemesis of Liberalism. Accessed May 23, 2015.
http://www.algonet.se/~pmanzoor/CarlSchmitt.htm
The totalizing thrust of Schmitt's argument is directed against liberalism, which by the postulation of a
false universalism, according to him, obscures the existentially paramount nature of politics and
replaces it with the struggle for purely formal notions of rights. Thus, Schmitt is at pains to underscore
that, within the purview of his theory, friend and foe are not to be construed as metaphors or symbols,
for they are 'neither normative nor pure spiritual antitheses.' Elsewhere, he elaborates the same point
in the following manner: 'The distinction of friend and enemy denotes the utmost degree of intensity of
a union or separation, of an association or dissociation. It can exist, theoretically and practically, without
having simultaneously to draw upon all those moral, aesthetic, economic, or other distinctions. The
political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic
competitor, and it may even be advantageous to engage with him in business transaction. But she is,
nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for her nature that she is, in a specially intense
way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are
always possible. These can neither be decided by a previously determined norm nor by the judgement
of a disinterested and therefore neutral third party.' (26-7; emphasis has been added.) The political
enemy, furthermore, must not be confounded with the private adversary whom one hates. For 'an
enemy exists only when, at least potentially, one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar
collectivity. The enemy is solely the public enemy, because everything that has a relationship to such a
collectivity of men, particularly to a whole nation, becomes public by virtue of such a relationship.' (28;
my emphasis.) Given Schmitt's quintessentially tribal and bellicose conception of politics, it is not
surprising that he is not disturbed by the New Testament exhortation: 'Love your enemies' (Matt: 5:44;
Luke: 6:27) for the Bible quotation, he claims, does not touch the political antithesis, and 'it certainly
does not mean that one should love and support the enemies of one's own people.' Thus, loving one's
(private) enemy and pursuing the politics of the Holy Crusade are accepted as two complementary
religio-political activities. Carrying his argument about the legitimacy of the two-tier, public-private,
morality further, Schmitt then appeals to the logic of history itself: 'Never in the thousand year struggle
between Christians and Moslems did it occur to a Christian to surrender rather than defend Europe out
of love toward the Saracens or Turks.' (29) Thus, defining one's enemy is for him the first step towards
defining the innermost self: 'Tell me who your enemy is and I'll tell you who you are,'
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2NC- Impact
Liberal universalism guarantees the loss of the political
Eric Posner and Adrian Vermeule. Professors at University of Chicago Law School.
2011. Demystifying Schmitt. Accessed May 23, 2015.
http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1088&context=public_law_and_legal
_theory
Schmitt's examples here are provocative, perhaps deliberately so, and instill in liberal legalists a sense of
foreboding; they tend to read Schmitt as implicitly referring to the street violence of the early 1930s,
and perhaps even foreshadowing the events of 1933. Yet there is a less lurid interpretation. On this
interpretation, Schmitt is pointing to the problem of parchment barriers. As Madison noted, in the face
of widespread public sentiment, legal rules and written or convention-based constitutions may be swept
away. Constitutions face a pervasive commitment problem: for self-sufficient national states, there is no
enforcer external to society who can police attempts to deviate from the constitutional rules. 10
Rational, self-interested citizens and political agents have no clear incentive to obey and enforce the
law. The "closed system of legality" in the legislative state cannot, by itself, secure the political
conditions for its own enforcement. obedience to or compliance with the law needs micro foundations
in the Incentives and beliefs of political actors, including voters, officials, political parties, Interest
groups, and social movements. In the terms of legal theory, Schmitt anticipates the point that
compliance with the large-c Constitution is shaped and constrained by small-c constitutionalism.
Wars based in liberal values are the most violent A) They moralize violence
William Rasch. Professor and Chair of Germanic Studies, Indian University
Bloomington. 2006. Lines in the Sand: Enmity as a Structuring Principle. Accessed May 22, 2015. The
South Atlantic Quarterly. 104:2.
In The Concept of the Political, Schmitt concludes that ‘‘all genuine political theories presuppose man to
be evil, i.e., by no means an unproblematic but a dangerous and dynamic being.’’2 This anthropological
fiction—and Schmitt is aware of the claim’s fictional status—serves as the logical premise that secures
Schmitt’s definition of the political as the friend/enemy distinction. We live in a world, he says, in which
associations with likeminded others are our only means of security and happiness. Indiscriminate
concourse of all with all cannot be the foundation for necessary political discriminations. Thus, the
anthropological presupposition of evil, guilt, and violence is designed to expose what Schmitt sees as the
duplicity of liberal theory, which consists in using the promise of formal equality to camouflage political
power by displacing it in the realms of economics and morality. Liberal theory denies original enmity by
assuming the innate goodness of the human being. Those—communitarians and liberals alike— who say
there is no war presuppose a counterfactual ‘‘ontological priority of non-violence,’’ a ‘‘state of total
peace’’ 3 that invites universal inclusion based on the ‘‘essential homogeneity and natural virtue of
mankind.’’ 4 If, in such a benign state of nature, violence were to break out, such common Equity.’’ Such
a ‘‘Criminal’’ has ‘‘declared War against all Mankind, and therefore may be destroyed as a Lyon or a
Tyger, one of those wild Savage Beasts, with whom Men can have no Society nor Security.’’ 5 The
violence would be considered a perversion and, if all else were to fail, would have to be extirpated by an
even greater violence. To cite John Locke, this ‘‘State of perfect Freedom’’ and universal ‘‘Equality,’’
governed solely by reason and natural law, can be disturbed only by an ‘‘Offender’’ who ‘‘declares
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himself to live by another Rule, than that of reason and political, on this view, emerges only as the result
of the Fall—that is, emerges only to fight the war against war, a war always initiated by a sinful or bestial
other.
B) They make failure unacceptable and total war inevitable
David Luban. Professor at Georgetown University. 2011. Carl Schmitt and the Critique of
Lawfare. Accessed May 24, 2015. http://ssrn.com/abstract=1797904
It follows from Schmitt's fundamental friend-enemy conception of politics that all political groupings are
oppositional no enemies, no politics. The political world is by definition a world of us and them, and a
political community "which embraces the entire globe and all of humanity cannot exist. "2 The ancient
ideal of a cosmopolis, a community of all humanity, is an apolitical fiction, and the fact that one of them,
the enemy, is just as human, just as decent, and just as lovable as one of us provides no argument
against killing him. Of course people will continue to invoke the ideals of "humanity." But in Schmitt's
view, anyone who does so operates in bad faith. As he puts it in the most memorable line in this very
memorable book, "whoever invokes humanity wants to „29 cheat. Not that there is anything wrong with
cheating that's politics: That wars are waged in the name of humanity has an especially intensive
political meaning. When a state fights its political enemy in the name of humanity, it is not a war for the
sake of humanity, but a war wherein a particular state seeks to usurp a universal concept against its
military opponent Humanitarianism is, in Schmitt's view, extraordinarily dangerous. Fighting on behalf of
"humanity" makes your enemy "an outlaw of humanity" and allows you to do the most terrible things to
him.3 A war to end all war 'the absolute last war of humanity"—is “necessarily unusually intense and
inhuman because… it simultaneously degrades the enemy into… a monster that must not only be
defeated by also utterly destroyed.
Lack of political binaries causes ontological psychosis, war and genocide
Kenneth Reinhardt. Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of California. 2004 .
Towards a Political Theology- Of the Neighbor. Accessed May 24, 2015.
http://www.cjs.ucla.edu/Mellon/Towards_Political_Theology.pdf
If the concept of the political is defined, as Carl Schmitt does, in terms of the Enemy/Friend opposition,
the world we find ourselves in today is one from which the political may have already disappeared, or at
least has mutated into some strange new shape. A world not anchored by the “us” and “them”
binarisms that flourished as recently as the Cold War is one subject to radical instability, both
subjectively and politically, as Jacques Derrida points out in The Politics of Friendship: The effects of this
destruction would be countless: the ‘subject’ in question would be looking for new reconstitutive
enmities; it would multiply ‘little wars’ between nation states; it would sustain at any price so-called
ethnic or genocidal struggles; it would seek to pose itself, to find repose, through opposing still
identifiable adversaries – China, Islam? Enemies without which … it would lose its political being …
without an enemy, and therefore without friends, where does one then find oneself, qua a self? (PF 77)
If one accepts Schmitt’s account of the political, the disappearance of the enemy results in something
like global psychosis: since the mirroring relationship between Us and Them provides a form of stability,
albeit one based on projective identifications and repudiations, the loss of the enemy threatens to
destroy what Lacan calls the “imaginary tripod” that props up the psychotic with a sort of pseudosubjectivity, until something causes it to collapse, resulting in full-blown delusions, hallucinations, and
paranoia. Hence, for Schmitt, a world without enemies is much more dangerous than one where one is
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surrounded by enemies; as Derrida writes, the disappearance of the enemy opens the door for “an
unheard-of violence, the evil of a malice knowing neither measure nor ground, an unleashing
incommensurable in its unprecedented – therefore monstrous –forms; a violence in the face of which
what is called hostility, war, conflict, enmity, cruelty, even hatred, would regain reassuring and
ultimately appeasing contours, because they would be identifiable” (PF 83).
Liberal enmity acts as a conflict multiplier
Tarik Kochi. Research Fellow at Hudson Institute. 2006. The Partisan: Carl Schmitt and
Terrorism. Accessed May 24, 2015. DOI 10.1007/s10978-006-9002-2
This movement is central to Schmitt's theory of the partisan, the development of the partisan from a
technical-military conception to a political conception: a reformulation of what underlies the concept of
the political. By linking the military partisan to revolutionary consciousness the traditional conception of
political organisation via a system of sovereign states is put under question. When the partisan is guided
by the effort to negate the absolute enemy, the traditional 'game' of ordering the monopoly upon the
legitimacy of violence via inter state recognition is put under threat. Further, the notion of the absolute
enemy is not confined by territorial boundaries, European or colonial. The enemy (or enemies) occurs
across a number of states and opens onto the possibility of global civil war.
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2NC- Alternative
The friend-enemy dichotomy helps realize agonist politics
James Martin. Professor at Washington University. July 18, 2013. Chantal Mouffe:
Hegemony, Radical Democracy and the Political. Accessed May 20, 2015. Page 201.
Besides putting the emphasis on practices and language games, an alternative to the
rationalist framework also requires coming to terms with the fact that power is constitutive of
social relations. One of the shortcomings of the deliberative approach is that, by postulating the
availability of a public sphere where power would have been eliminated and where a rational consensus
could be realized, this model of democratic politics is unable to acknowledge the dimension of
antagonism that the pluralism of values entails and its ineradicable character. This is why it is bound to
miss the specificity of the political, which it can only envisage as a specific domain of morality.
Deliberative democracy provides a very good illustration of what Carl Schmitt had said about liberal
thought: "In a very systematic fashion liberal thought evades or ignores state and politics and moves
instead in a typical „ 30 always recurring polarity of two heterogeneous sphere, namely ethics and
economics . Indeed, to the aggregative model, inspired by economics, the only alternative deliberative
democrats can put forward is one that collapses politics into ethics. In order to remedy this serious
deficiency, we need a democratic model able to grasp the nature of the political. This requires
developing an approach, which places the question of power and antagonism at its very center. It is such
an approach that I want to advocate and whose theoretical bases have been delineated in Hegemony
and Socialist Strategy.3 The central thesis of the book is that social objectivity is constituted through acts
of power. This implies that any social objectivity is ultimately political and that it has to show the traces
of exclusion, which governs its constitution. This point of convergence — or rather mutual collapse —
between objectivity and power is what we meant by "hegemony". This way of posing the problem
indicates that power should not be conceived as an external relation taking place between two preconstituted identities, but rather as constituting the identities themselves. Since any political order is
the expression of a hegemony, of a specific pattern of power relations, political practice cannot be
envisaged in simply representing the interests of pre-constituted identities, but in constituting those
identities themselves in a precarious and always vulnerable terrain. To assert the hegemonic nature of
any kind of social order is to operate a displacement of the traditional relation between democracy and
power. According to the deliberative approach, the more democratic a society is, the less power would
be constitutive of social relations. But if we accept that relations of power are constitutive of the social,
then the main question for democratic politics is not how to eliminate power but how to constitute
forms of power more compatible with democratic values.
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Exception is necessary for the intended security functions of a state
James Martin. Professor at Washington University. July 18, 2013. Chantal Mouffe:
Hegemony, Radical Democracy and the Political. Accessed May 20, 2015. Page 201.
The now dominant political tradition of liberal constitutionalism emerged as a negation of these
sovereign claims to absolute power. According to the liberal thinking of Schmitt's time, the law was not
the product of the sovereign's command: rather, the state was a product of the law brought into being
and regulated by the norms laid down in the constitutional document, and its powers divided amongst
different state organs. Central to this subordination of the state to law was the elimination of discretion
and arbitrariness from the legal system: the rule of law would allow the state to operate like a
'technically rational machine'. In the liberal rule of law state (or Rechssfaat in the German tradition) all
power is to be subordinated to pre-existing norms, a state 'in which not men and persons rule but rather
where norms are valid' According to Schmitt, however, the liberal and rationalist struggle against the
monarchy did not abolish the problem of sovereignty, but, rather, repressed and transformed it.
Schmitt's 1922 work Political Theology attempts to revive the concept from theoretical abeyance by
turning to the problem of the emergency situation. He argues that norms are designed to govern
'normal conditions' that is, a political situation of peace and stability. In order to be effective then, the
rule of law requires a certain minimum of political order and this 'effective normal situation IS not a
mere superficial presupposition that a jurist can ignore'. According to Schmitt, law has its grounds in
political domination and while conditions of peace and order can lead theory to forget these origins, the
emergency situation brings this presupposition to light. When order breaks down and there is external
or civil war, it may be impossible for the state to apply the constitutional legal order. The decision on the
exception is the decision that the normal situation in which the legal system can function has come to an
end, and that an exception to the rules should be created. The sovereign then suspends those parts of
the law that place limitations on the state, allowing it to take action that restores order.
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Answer to perm
Sovereign powers must be clearly prioritized over liberal rights
Anna Tsiftsoglou and Massimo Fichera. Research Fellow at IACL World Congress. June
16, 2014. Security in the Balance: Reviewing Surveillance Measures in the War on Terror. Accessed
May 24, 2015. www.jus.uio.no/.../w1-tsiftsoglou&fichera.pdf
The right to privacy belongs to those fundamental rights that constitute an integral part of the individual
sphere of liberty and autonomy. Inevitably, however, the protection of privacy cannot be absolute but
needs to be balanced m certain circumstances- with a public interest like national or domestic security
or with another fundamental right like freedom of expression. But one could observe that, between the
two models, privacy appears as a lower-ranking value in the war than in the law enforcement paradigm.
If the enemy is a foreign state or a non-state entity, any measure breaching privacy is allowed, as long as
it is justified by the need to defeat the enemy. In a way, Schmittian political existentialism cannot be
liquidated that easily. According to Schmitt, bourgeois freedoms can be superseded when the political
existence of the State is at stake: this would demonstrate that, ultimately, the existential element of
constitutions is superior to the normative element20. This highlights a key challenge in the surveillance
case law, as it shows how problematic can be finding a balance between privacy and security when the
paradigms of war and law enforcement are blurred. Quite simply, the frailties of the liberal ideas of
reason, measure, human dignity and respect for the other are exposed. They risk being blown away by
power struggles, hostility and the politics of fear.
Value systems are either universalized or oppositional – there is no middle ground
Alberto Moreiras. Director of European Studies at Duke. 2004. A God without Sovereignty.
Political Jouissance. Accessed May 23, 2015. Page 79-80
The friend/enemy division is peculiar at the highest level, at the level of the order of the political. This
peculiarity ultimately destroys the under- standing of the political as based on and circumscribed by the
friend/enemy division. The idea of an order of the political presupposes that the enemies of the order as
such—that is, the enemy configuration that can overthrow a given order, or even the very idea of an
order of the political—are generated from the inside: enemies of the order are not properly external
enemies. This is so because the order of the political, as a principle of division, as division itself, always
already regulates, and thus subsumes, its externality: externality is produced by the order as such, and it
is a function of the order. Or rather: a principle of division can have no externality. Beyond the order,
there can be enemies, if attacked, but they are not necessarily enemies of the order: they are simply
ignorant of it. At the highest level of the political, at the highest level of the friend/ enemy division,
there where the very existence of a given order of the political is at stake, the order itself secretes its
own enmity. Enmity does not precede the order: it is in every case produced by the order. The
friend/enemy division is therefore a division that is subordinate to the primary ordering division,
produced from itself. The friend/enemy division is therefore not supreme: a nomic antithesis generates
it, and thus stands above it. The order of the political rules over politics. The political ontology implied in
the notion of an order of the political deconstructs the political ontology ciphered in the friend/enemy
division, and vice versa. They are mutually incompatible. Either the friend/enemy division is supreme,
for a determination of the political, or the order of the political is supreme. Both of them cannot
simultaneously be supreme. The gap between them is strictly untheorizable. If the friend/enemy division
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obtains independently of all the other antitheses as politically primary, then there is no order of the
political. If there is an order of the political, the order produces its own political divisions.
The political cannot be subordinated to any value without degrading binaries
S Parvez Manzoor. Professor at University of Stockholm. 2007 . The Sovereignty of the
Political: Carl Schmitt and the Nemesis of Liberalism. Accessed May 23, 2015.
http://www.algonet.se/~pmanzoor/CarlSchmitt.htm
Schmitt has pronounced on more than one occasion. Little wonder that he claims that 'the political is
the most intense and extreme antagonism.'! Given the possibility of actual, physical killing in a friendenemy encounter, the political cannot be made subordinate to any other set of values or institution,
whether religious, moral, aesthetic or economic. The political transcends all norms and upholds the
sovereignty of the existential over the theoretical. Thus, 'war, the readiness of combatants to die, the
physical killing of human beings who belong on the side of the enemy - all this has no normative
meaning, but an existential meaning only, particularly in a real combat situation with a real enemy.
There exists no rational purpose, no norm no matter how true, no programme no matter how
exemplary, no social ideal no matter how beautiful, no legitimacy or legality which could justify men in
killing each other for this reason. In the final analysis, the political, inasmuch as it is sovereign, cannot be
evaluated and measured by norms that are external to it; nor can it be avoided. The political is the
fundamental fact of existence, the basic characteristic of human life from which man cannot escape; or,
expressed differently, [wo]man would cease to be [wo]man by ceasing to be political. From the
inevitability of the political, it also follows that pacifism is a lost cause and conciliatory visions of a
universal humanity are nothing but pious delusions: 'The political entity presupposes the real existence
of an enemy and therefore coexistence with another political entity. As long as a state exists, there will
always be in the world more than just one state. A world state that embraces the entire globe and all of
humanity cannot exist. The political world is a pluriverse, not a universe.' (53). It is hardly surprising that
Schmitt's concept of the political has been understood as a strongly polemical text that exposes the
hypocrisy of liberal humanism. Liberalism, with its predilection for vacuous abstractions, its burdensome
legal formalism, its vacillation between military pacifism and moral crusading, its sham universalism of
rights and its real espousal of inequality, remains for him the ultimate enemy of the political [wo]man.
As for liberalism's moral claim to universal humanism, Schmitt is mercilessly candid: 'The concept of
humanity is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperial expansion, and in its ethicalhumanitarian form it is a specific vehicle of economic imperialism.'
A stable political must be established before deliberative approaches can function
James Martin. Professor at Washington University. July 18, 2013. Chantal Mouffe:
Hegemony, Radical Democracy and the Political. Accessed May 20, 2015. Page 201.
Coming to terms with the constitutive nature of power implies relinquishing the ideal of a democratic
society as the realization of a perfect harmony or transparency The democratic character of a society
can only be based on the fact that no limited social actor can attribute to herself the representation of
the totality and claim to have the "mastery" of the foundation. Democracy requires, therefore, that the
purely constructed nature of social relations finds its complement in the purely pragmatic grounds of
the claims to power legitimacy This implies that there is no unbridgeable gap between power and
legitimacy — not obviously in the sense that all power is automatically legitimate, but in the sense that:
a) if any power has been able to impose itself, it is because it has been recognized as legitimate in some
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quarters; and b) if legitimacy is not based on a aprioristic ground, it is because it is based on some form
of successful power. This link between legitimacy and power and the hegemonic order that this entails is
precisely what the deliberative approach forecloses by positing the possibility of a type of rational
argumentation where power has been eliminated and where legitimacy is grounded on pure rationality.
Once the theoretical terrain has been delineated in such a way, we can begin formulating and
alternative to both the aggregative and the deliberative model, one that I propose to call “agonistic
pluralism.”
Ethical ordering destroys the ability for the alt to take action
William Rasch. Professor and Chair of Germanic Studies, Indian University
Bloomington. 2006. Lines in the Sand: Enmity as a Structuring Principle. Accessed May 20, 2015. The
South Atlantic Quarterly. 104:2.
In opposition to the near universal pressure to abolish the pesky complexity of the political, the aim of
this volume is to reject every resurrection of eschatological desire, and to affirm conflict as the
necessary and salutary basis of political life. To this end, the work of Carl Schmitt can be of considerable
help. One must be clear, however, that the term most often associated with his thought – namely
political theology – is not a term that can be sensibly used to describe his own best work. When, in
1922, Schmitt writes that ‘all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized
theological concepts’ (Schmitt, 1985b, p 36), he makes an analogous claim about the modern political
state to the one Max Weber had already made nearly two decades earlier about the modern money
economy.2 Just as wealth, industriously achieved, serves as a sign of grace for the Puritans in early
modern Europe (and the Massachusetts Bay Colony), so too the sovereign, as a mortal God, mimics
divinity. But God and grace soon become mere power and market value, and Schmitt’s and Weber’s
emphases center on the necessities of this secularization, on the profane, not the sacred, on the political
and the economic, not the theological. Their focus is on the butterfly, so to speak, not the caterpillar.
Schmitt and Weber, each in their own way, may have recoiled from the effects of neutralization and
rationalization, even preached the occasional Jeremiad against the vacuous sterility of the modern
wasteland, but, as both recognized and clearly stated, by at least the end of the eighteenth century
neither the monopolization of power nor the accumulation of wealth were thought to guarantee
salvation, or even hint at special dispensation when it came to God’s favors. If capitalism was born from
the spirit of Protestantism, it was, for all that, capitalist, not Calvinist. And if the concepts of the modern
theory of the state still carried the traces of their ethereal origin, they were nonetheless political
concepts, and these traces had been thoroughly profaned. In short, the political for Schmitt was no
more theological than money was for Weber. And it made absolutely no sense to be nostalgic for an
imagined other space or fulfilled time in which the sacred and the profane were united. Indeed, it was
for the autonomy of the political against the prevailing political theologies, the religions of humanity
called socialism and liberalism, that Schmitt waged his conceptual warfare. Thus, if one wants to insist
on referring to Schmitt as a political theologian, it is because he made a religion out of the political – out
of the distinction, that is, between the theological and the political – and not because he sought either
the spirit or the authority of the divine in the power and violence that is the mundane world of politics.
It behooves us, therefore, to examine, briefly, the nature of this autonomy before we move on to the
more detailed examinations of the structure of the political in the chapters that follow.
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The aura of legalism is what dooms the political
Douglas Casson. Professor at St. Olaf College. 2008 Emergency Judgment: Carl Schmitt, John
Locke, and the Paradox of Prerogative. Accessed May 22, 2015. Politics & Policy,
Volume 36, No. 6. Page 944-971.
Agamben argues, the fact that almost all modern regimes make use of extensive emergency powers
while insisting that they are ruled by law simply demonstrates the self-contradictory and perhaps even
hypocritical nature of modern liberalism (Agamben 2005; Lobel 1989). Schmitt argues that liberals seek
to obscure their own reliance on these exceptional powers because those powers lie outside the reach
of normal law. They cling to the illusion of constitutional rationalism—that all governmental action can
be contained within explicit legal norms—even though all of the evidence contravenes it. As Dyzenhaus
(2006, 39) puts it, “[b]ecause liberals cannot countenance the idea of politics uncontrolled by law, they
place a thin veneer of legality on the political, which allows the executive to do what it wants while
claiming the legitimacy of the rule of law.” According to Schmitt and those who have embraced his
critique, the naiveté of constitutional rationalists actually contributes to the seemingly unstoppable
process of executive expansion. In a world characterized by a “war on terrorism” and executive selfassertion, Schmitt can certainly seem like a prescient guide. Yet Schmitt and those who have embraced
his critique leave readers with a stark and unsettling choice. We can either stubbornly cling to a naïve
view of constitutional rationalism, insisting that the exercise of emergency power can and should be
subjected to legal regulation in all cases, or we can acknowledge that the promise of liberal selfgovernment is fundamentally illusory and that emergency power is ubiquitous and absolute. We can
embrace either constitutional rationalism or Schmittian decisionism. Yet this simple choice is a false one,
and traces of a more complex and interesting alternative can be found in the very tradition that he urges
us to overcome. In the following essay, I seek to uncover a version of liberalism that recognizes the
necessity of extralegal political action yet struggles to constrain discretionary power. Schmitt offers a
crucial reminder to liberals that a constitutional regime is not a legal machine that runs by itself. The
rule of law must always be supplemented by the exercise of human judgment. By returning to Locke in
the context of Schmitt’s challenge, I hope to offer some insight into a theory that would take seriously
Schmitt’s critique without surrendering to his authoritarianism. Locke recognized what many liberal
thinkers since have been hesitant to admit. Fixed laws can help restrain prerogative to a certain extent
but cannot transform the irrational and unpredictable nature of political life nor eliminate the
discretionary power necessary to respond to it. This is why in section 159 of his Second Treatise, he
insisted that “well-framed governments” include both legal and prudential elements (Locke 1988, 374).
Both written law and political judgment fall within the scope of legitimate constitutional government.
Those who execute laws are called to do more than simply apply general rules to particular cases. They
are asked to use their judgment. This power of judgment cannot be reduced to a legal power. It is a
power that acts beyond and sometimes even in conflict with law. It is extralegal, yet it is not
extraconstitutional.4
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Answer to Schmitt causes violence
The violence they depict in the state of emergency is the product of apolitical liberal
values dominating the political realm—the status quo represents this failure
Sergei Prozorov. Professor of International Relations at Petrozavodsk State University.
2006. Liberal Enmity: The Figure of the Foe in the Political Ontology of Liberalism. Accessed May 24,
2015. Millennium - Journal of International Studies. Vol 34, No 2.
For a thinker still stuck with an asinine label ‘the crown jurist of the Third Reich’, Carl Schmitt certainly
receives a lot of attention in the contemporary discussion. In recent years, the neoconservative policy
course of the Bush presidency has been frequently read in terms of the resurgence of the ‘Schmittian’
orientation in foreign policy that allegedly consists in the valorisation of the friend–enemy distinction
and the open manifestation of conflict as an indicator of ‘authentic politics’ or ‘authentic life’ more
generally.1 The association of the present American administration with the philosopher who, despite
abundant evidence to the contrary,2 remains linked with Nazism in much of the liberal discourse,
apparently lends credence to the intense, if superficial, criticism of the Bush administration as effecting
a disastrous rupture in domestic and international politics, which can only be mended through a return
to liberal cosmopolitan policy orientations that dispense with the concept of enmity in the project of
‘world unity’. In this manner, the binary opposition between realism and idealism or ‘liberal
internationalism’3 is reproduced and fortified by subsuming contemporary American exceptionalism
under the heading of ‘realism’. This, in turn, is delegitimised through its originary association with
Schmitt’s political thought. Although this article engages with very specific aspects of Schmitt’s thought,
it may be read as an attempt to problematise the operation of this opposition by demonstrating both
the dependence of the liberal idealist position on the very ‘Schmittianism’ against which it defines itself
and the continued urgency of Schmitt’s own criticism of the tendencies that are erroneously attributed
to him. The facile and historically inaccurate character of the identification of Schmitt with
contemporary neoconservatism has been addressed by contemporary critical approaches, which point
to a fundamental heterogeneity between the two theoretico-political projects.4 Yet, rather than
rehearse this critique here, it is important to note that even the critical discourse, which fortunately
avoids the liberal pathos of compulsory denunciation of Schmitt, remains tied to some of the
constitutive presuppositions of the liberal (mis)reading of Schmitt that relate specifically to the theme
highlighted in the present discussion of Schmitt’s thought, i.e. the problematic of enmity. In this article
we shall both rely on critical-theoretical readings of Schmitt and attempt to go beyond them in
deconstructing the politics of enmity with which Schmitt’s thought is erroneously associated. Against
the argument that Schmitt’s critique of liberalism logically leads him to the valorisation of authoritarian
and violent politics, founded on the friend–enemy distinction, we shall assert that the contemporary
politics of enmity is decidedly un-Schmittian but rather inherent in the rationality of liberal rule that has
been the object of Schmitt’s criticism. Thus, our argument does not simply dismiss the straw figure of a
‘Schmittian’ politics of enmity as having little to do with Schmitt, but rather returns this message to the
sender in a demonstration of the uncanny proximity of this straw figure to the liberal mode of the
friend–enemy distinction.
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Liberalism compels negative expressions of sovereignty
David Abraham. Professor at University of Miami School of Law. 2007 . The Bush Regime
from Elections to Detentions: A Moral Economy of Carl Schmitt and Human Rights. Accessed May 23,
2015. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=942865
Only a few years ago, one of America's leading liberal human-rights figures, Samantha Power 8, argued
that "holocaust consciousness" was extremely important in politics because it provided ' 'a moral life
preserver In a sea of Interest-based callousness." From Armenia to Auschwitz from former Yugoslavia to
Rwanda, from Rwanda to Iraq, the cycle of "interest-based callousness" had permitted evil forces to
destroy millions of lives. But, in the new era of global human rights consciousness and readiness to
intervene, there would be fewer dictators and yet fewer killers. For the Pino- chets no harbor; for the
Milosevics's no quarter; for the Hutu death squads no looking away; and for the tyrants like Sadaam
Hussein no more toleration, regardless of the oil they might have to offer the greedy countries of the
West. No more concessions to tyrants, such as the one once offered by Donald Rumsfeld to Saddam
Hussein, a "man with whom we can do business. It is perhaps never entirely possible to distinguish
among falsehoods, self-delusions, ideological rationalizations, and utopian hopes. And now we can only
mock the way Bush and his officials went shopping for war rationales. But it is instructive to look at the
most frequently proffered reasons for supporting war in Iraq offered by American liberals. Now, the
entirety of the Bush regime or of its foreign policy is certainly not to be reduced to Iraq, but the political
and moral vision of the country's elites and their attitude toward an "axis of evil" and those who would
fight that axis are here on display. Human-rights oriented liberals and compassionate conservatives
could agree that: Saddam was cruel; Saddam had used chemical weapons and weapons of mass
destruction against both his neighbors and his own citizens; Iraqis were suffering from both tyranny and
endless material sanctions; Iraqis would like all people everywhere, benefit from democracy; a
democratic Iraq could function as a challenge to repressive Saudi power; a democratic Iraq could help
break the Israeli-Palestinian logjam; a democratic, multiethnic, and secular Iraq could liberalize and help
educate the Arab world; a democratic, multiethnic, and secular Iraw could liberalize and help educate
the Arab logjam; a democratic Iraq could offer idealistic Muslim youth an alternative to symbolic
radicalism; and a democratic Iraq would demonstrate a place for virtue in international affairs.
Violence is inevitable—restraint comes from agonism, not the law
David Luban. Professor at Georgetown University. 2011. Carl Schmitt and the Critique of
Lawfare. Accessed May 24, 2015. http://ssrn.com/abstract=1797904
One additional idea, not very apparent in The Concept of the Political, comes out in some of Schmitt's
later works, particularly his 1962 lectures on what we would today call terrorism, The Theory of the
Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political, and his 1950 book on international
law, The Nomos of the Earth. It would be a mistake to think that Schmitt rejects the idea of laws
governing warfare, or for that matter, that he idealizes war and rejects humanitarian restraint. Rather,
he believes that the ability to "bracket" war to limit it according to the jus in bello principles of noncombatant immunity and avoidance of unnecessary suffering is a historically contingent achievement of
European public law, restricted to sovereigns who treat war as akin to a duel among gentlemen. The jus
publicum Europaeanum collapsed through the rise of America, the advent of air-power that detaches
warfare from territory, and non-state warriors who ruthlessly wage absolute war. With it collapsed the
possibility of “bracketed” warfare.
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Liberal influence neither contains nor objectivizes state violence
Tarik Kochi. Research Fellow at Hudson Institute. 2006. The Partisan: Carl Schmitt and
Terrorism. Accessed May 24, 2015. DOI 10.1007/s10978-006-9002-2
Within this tension, however, the concept of war is still premised upon the sovereign state body and
action of the sovereign state. Short of a form of global or international sovereignty with a selfdependent military or police force, war carried out in the name of human rights or international law
takes place as an act of state sovereignty, and relies upon state-based military organizations and state
constitutional requirements. I Here the right to violence and right to carry out properly an act of what is
understood as 'war' is still an act carried out by particular states. While reasons for their actions might
be the defence of 'humanity', under the present structure of international law, not all humans can carry
out 'war', 'war' is a privilege of states. What emerges in this brief discussion is the relation between the
concept of war and a question of political and legal ordering. In this relation the concept of war itself is
tied to questions of political and legal legitimacy. The determination of the boundaries of what
constitutes 'war' is tied to the question of which actors are understood to have legal and political
legitimacy. The distinction within the concept of war generally between 'war 'civil war' 'terrorism', and
'crime', while involving distinctions in the manner, form and scale of violence involved (technological,
logistical, strategic) is one which is dependent upon a recognised or assumed legitimacy of the actors
involved. Part of the question turns upon what acts of violence come under the 'concept of war' and
what acts are excluded from this.
Liberal rights only recategorize violence beyond ideological terms—terrorism proves
Tarik Kochi. Research Fellow at Hudson Institute. 2006. The Partisan: Carl Schmitt and
Terrorism. Accessed May 24, 2015. DOI 10.1007/s10978-006-9002-2
The question of what is to be brought within and what is to be excluded from the concept of war is a site
of contestation. One ten- sion that is related to the question of an 'internal' versus 'external' war occurs
with regard to the 'form' or 'manner' of fighting or vio lence. Under the Westphalian conception of state
war other forms of non-state or non-sovereign violence in which the manner of fighting or warfare is
'irregular' (not carried out by an army in uniform, for example: guerrilla warfare, sabotage, terrorist
bombing) might not be considered to fit within the sphere of 'war proper'. Rather, these acts are often
characterized or understood to belong to the related field of 'civil war' or 'revolution' or considered as
acts of 'insurgency' or 'terrorism'. Such acts as carried out not by states are more likely under
international law to be looked upon not as acts of 'war' but as acts of 'civil disorder' or as 'criminal' acts.
Viewed in this light acts of terror operate to challenge the state's monopoly upon the legitimacy of
violence. Under this logic it is not so difficult to see why the 'international community' would denounce
acts of terror, which stand outside the sphere of ‘war proper’ as acts of illegal and illegitimate violence
and as criminal acts.
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Liberal societies are the most oppressive
Colleen Bell. Professor at University of Toronto. 2006. Subject to Exception: Security
Certificates, National Security and Canada’s Role in the War on Terror. Canadian Journal of Law and
Society. Vol 21, N 1. Page 63-83.
Consequently the rule of law, and the independence and liberty that it proscribes, while upheld as
foundational to liberal democracy, provides only a partial account of the tradition of liberal political rule.
As Barry Hindess played an important part in the government of states committed to the „95
maintenance and defence of individual liberty. A cursory glance at the developmental rationality that
guided history of western colonialism, and its use m today's governance of poor, homeless and
immigrant communities shows that, rather than anti-liberal moments, such governance practices are
integral to the development of liberal societies. Such moments of authoritarian rule for select groups, as
seen by the treatment of security certificate detainees, are not simply justified as necessaily illiberal
moments, „ 96 but rather are "justified on the liberal grounds of freedom. As Canada's former Justice
Minister proclaimed, anti-terrorism laws are fundamentally, 97 aimed at 'the safeguarding of democracy
itself. Equally foundational to liberal governance is the rule of law and sovereign will, even if the latter is
primarily exercised on marginalized populations. This point is especially important to examining the
implications of the security certificate for the meaning of political freedom.
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Answer to cede the political
Schmitt does not resist politics—our framework is anti-idealist
David Luban. Professor at Georgetown University. 2011. Carl Schmitt and the Critique of
Lawfare. Accessed May 24, 2015. http://ssrn.com/abstract=1797904
Schmitt denounces all "neutralizations and depoliticizations, which for him are the hallmarks of
liberalism. There are no neutralizations: if you are not with us you are against us and we will destroy
you: "If a part of the population declares that it no longer recognizes enemies, then, depending on the
circumstance, it joins their side and aids „41 them. You may not be interested in politics, but politics is
interested in you. Is there any escape from the all-consuming quicksand of politics? Not according to
Schmitt: "If a people no longer possesses the energy or the will to maintain itself in the sphere of
politics, the latter will not thereby vanish from the world. Only a weak people „42 will disappear. To
retreat from politics invites annihilation; to yearn for a respite from politics is to yearn for death.
Schmitt’s dichotomy is the foundation of political action
Tarik Kochi. Research Fellow at Hudson Institute. 2006. The Partisan: Carl Schmitt and
Terrorism. Accessed May 24, 2015. DOI 10.1007/s10978-006-9002-2
Schmitt's conception of the theory of the partisan's opening onto global civil war and upsetting of
traditional categories of international law does not wash away the role of the state. He notes that the
partisan, as an irregular fighter, is always dependent in some 50 way upon a regular power. This
dependency occurs through economic and military assistance and through political recognition. In this
respect the position of the partisan is linked to a relation , 51 with an 'interested third party. For
Schmitt, the interested third party offers not only money, munitions and material assistance but,
further, offers a form of political recognition, which is required by the partisan if the partisan is to avoid
falling into the sphere of the 'unpolitical': that is, the sphere of the 'criminal', including the thief 52 and
the pirate. Schmitt argues that in the longer view of things the 'irregular must legitimize itself through
the regular and for the partisan this involves only two possibilities: recognition by an existing regular, or
establishment of a new regularity by its own force.
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Schmitt allows the state to operate organically—their liberal concept of action
imposes values
Daniel McLoughlin. Professor at University of New South Wales. 2009 . Crisis, Modernity,
Authority: Carl Schmitt on Order and the State. Accessed May 20, 2015.
https://www.academia.edu/1538748/Crisis_Modernity_Authority__Carl_Schmitt_on_Order_and_the_State
For Schmitt, the philosophy and institutions of liberalism are fundamentally shaped by the neutrality
and objectivity of formal reason. For liberalism, freedom is conceived of as negative liberty, the freedom
from Interference by the state, which is thereby confined 'to securing the conditions for liberty and
eliminating infringements on freedom'. This is undergirded by the anti political fantasy of a utopia in
which 'things manage themselves', the ideal of the marketplace as an objective and impersonal
mechanism, in which the pursuit of private interest will guided by the free hand, add up to the public
good, rendering politics and the state unnecessary. Further, the liberal state is conceived as being a
purely neutral mechanism for the arbitration of social conflicts through the formal mechanism of
parliamentary democracy. As Schmitt puts it then, in the Rechsstaaf, law, statute and legality are
"neutral" procedural mechanisms and voting procedures that are indifferent to content of any sort and
accessible to any substantive claim' Liberalism is then for Schmitt, a theory not of the state and politics,
but rather a theory of how to limit and negate the state as having a substantive reality of its own,
Instead conceiving it as a merely technical apparatus for facilitating free competition and the selforganization of society.
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Answer to framework
Static methods of decision-making lead to political failure—policymaking should be
unrestrained by preconceived liberal ethics
S Parvez Manzoor. Professor at University of Stockholm. 2007 . The Sovereignty of the
Political: Carl Schmitt and the Nemesis of Liberalism. Accessed May 23, 2015.
http://www.algonet.se/~pmanzoor/CarlSchmitt.htm
The problem of the exception, for the constitutional jurist Schmitt, can only be resolved within the
framework of a decision (an actual historical event) and not within that of a norm (an ahistoric and
transcendent idea). Moreover, the legal act which decides what constitutes an exception is 'a decision in
the true sense of the word', because a general norm, an ordinary legal prescription, 'can never
encompass a total exception'. If so, then, 'the decision that a real exception exists cannot be derived
entirely from this norm.' The problem of the exception, in other words, demarcates the limit of the rule
of law and opens up that trans-legal space, that no-man's land of existential exigency, which is bereft of
legal authority and where the decision of the sovereign abrogates the anomaly of the legal void.
However, it is against the background of the liberal theory of the state, which equates 'sovereignty' with
a simple 'rule of law', that Schmitt's highlighting of the problem of the exception becomes significant
and meaningful. For, against the legal positivism of his times, Schmitt seems to be arguing that not law
but the sovereign, not the legal text but the political will, is the supreme authority in a state. States are
not legal entities but historical polities; they are engaged in a constant battle for survival where any
moment of their existence may constitute an exception, it may engender a political crisis that cannot be
remedied by the application of the rule of law. From the existential priority of the sovereign over the
legitimacy of the norm, it would also follow that according to Schmitt, law is subservient to politics and
not autonomous of it.
Political frameworks must be flexible
Alain De Benoist. Founder of Nouvelle Droit (France). 2013. Carl Schmitt Today: Terrorism,
'Just' War, and the State of Emergency. Accessed May 24, 2015. Page 76.
The state of emergency is also important because it reveals the originally non-normative character of
the law. It is not justice (Recht) as such that is suspended in the state of emergency, but only the
normative element of the law (Gesetz). The state of emergency reveals thereby the existential character
of the law. The exception is essential, not because it is rare, but because it is unpredictable. Just as the
enemy himself, who cannot be determined a priori by a pre-existing general norm — for hostility is
always related to the concrete context of the it cannot therefore be codified in advance. In relating the
moment — law to its non-juridical source, in the case of the sovereign decision, Schmitt attacks all forms
of constitutional rationalism, notably the theory of the rule of law or positivist theory, according to
which the sovereign should always respect the law, no matter what the circum- stances. The occurrence
of an emergency situation, and its implications, demonstrate that that is quite simply not possible, since
the norm cannot foresee the exception. A constitution remains, in this sense, always incomplete. At
most it can forsee a situation in which it would not be applied.
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Answer to empiricism/positivism
Allowing positivism to transcend the political will encourage violence
Daniel McLoughlin. Professor at University of New South Wales. 2009 . Crisis, Modernity,
Authority: Carl Schmitt on Order and the State. Accessed May 20, 2015.
https://www.academia.edu/1538748/Crisis_Modernity_Authority__Carl_Schmitt_on_Order_and_the_State
While Schmitt's critiques of liberalism are many and varied, the fundamental problem with the
application of formal rationality to the political is that it undermines the foundations of the political, for
it is hostile to the very essence of politics the idea. Instead, it grounds itself in the Immanence of the
economic, which 'has its own reason and veracity in that it is absolutely material, concerned only with
things. The political is considered immaterial, because it must be, 43 concerned with other than
economic values. Technical reason does not know any substantive value, and as such, is unable to
ascribe normative meaning to the world and to found a politics, and is, in fact, hostile to the political:
Claiming it has no enemies, only economic competitors and debating adversaries, liberalism negates the
state and the constitution as a locus of value, and reduces public political concerns to private moral or
economic ones: 'liberal thought evades or Ignores state and politics and moves Instead in a typical
always recurring polarity of two heterogeneous spheres, namely ethics and economics, intellect and
trade, education and property'. Schmitt's concern with this, was that while the Weimar constitution was
an expression of nineteenth century liberalism, the forces of modern rationalism and technology had in
the meantime, profoundly transformed the social and political fabric of European society. According to
Schmitt, the development of industrialization and mass society, the expansion of the franchise and the
rise of class based party politics, had changed the nature of European parliamentary democracy seeing
the emergence of what he calls the 'pluralist party state'. The Weimar parliament was not the
gentleman's club of the liberal ideal in which compromise was reached through rational debate and
reciprocal persuasion. It was, rather, profoundly fractured amongst stable party organizations, a power
politics of business calculations and negotiations based on strength of numbers, in which individual
parliamentarians simply conformed to party discipline. Moreover, according to Schmitt, these political
parties acted, not in the interests of Germany as a whole, but rather, on behalf of the particular interests
they represented, using the state as an instrument in the pursuit of power, a 'tactical means in the
struggle carried on by me one party against another and by all of them, against the state and the
government.’ This pluralist party politics of the Weimar state was so fractured, that parties who were
hostile to the existence of the state had substantial political support, with the Communists posing the
major threat during the Republic’s first crisis, along with the Nazis during its second.
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Answer to Habermas/civic democracy
Schmittian ethics create a safer space for civic engagement
James Martin. Professor at Washington University. July 18, 2013. Chantal Mouffe:
Hegemony, Radical Democracy and the Political. Accessed May 20, 2015. Page 201.
Introducing the category of the "adversary" requires complexifying the notion of antagonism and
distinguishing it from agonism. Antagonism is struggle between enemies, while agonism is struggle
between adversaries. We can therefore reformulate our problem by saying that envisaged from the
perspective of "agonistic pluralism" the aim of democratic politics is to transform antagonism into
agonism. This requires providing channels through which collective passions will be given ways to
express themselves over issues, which, while allowing enough possibility for identification, will not
construct the opponent as an enemy but as an adversary. An important difference with the model of
"deliberative democracy', is that for "agonistic pluralism,” the prime task of democratic politics is not to
eliminate passions from the sphere of the public, in order to render a rational consensus possible, but to
mobilize those passions towards democratic designs.
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Answer to value to life
Collective identity is what eliminates human value – difference is what generates
unique identities that make our lives worth living
William Rasch. Professor and Chair of Germanic Studies, Indian University
Bloomington. 2006. Lines in the Sand: Enmity as a Structuring Principle. Accessed May 20, 2015. The
South Atlantic Quarterly. 104:2.
But while affirmative theorists like Habermas and Rawls are busy constructing the ideological scaffolding
that supports the structure of the status quo, what role is there for the "critical" theorist to play?
Despite the sanguine hopes of Hardt and Negri (2000) that "Empire" will all but spontaneously combust
as a result of the irrepressible ur-desire of the multitude, can we seriously place our faith in some
utopian grand alternative anymore, or in some revolutionary or therapeutic result based on the truth of
critique that would allow us all, in the end, to sing in the sunshine and laugh everyday? Do, in fact, such
utopian fantasies not lead to the moralizing hubris of a [End Page 142] Rawls or a Habermas? 16 In
short, it is one thing to recognize the concealed, particular interests that govern the discourse and
politics of human rights and quite another to think seriously about how things could be different, to
imagine an international system that respected both the equality and the difference of states and/or
peoples. Is it possible—and this is Todorov's question—to value Vitoria's principle of the "free
circulation of men, ideas, and goods" and still also "cherish another principle, that of self-determination
and noninterference" (Todorov 1984, 177)? The entire "Vitorian" tradition, from Scott to Habermas and
Rawls, thinks not. Habermas, for instance, emphatically endorses the fact that "the erosion of the
principle of nonintervention in recent decades has been due primarily to the politics of human rights"
(1998, 147), a "normative" achievement that is not so incidentally correlated with a positive, economic
fact: "In view of the subversive forces and imperatives of the world market and of the increasing density
of worldwide networks of communication and commerce, the external sovereignty of states, however it
may be grounded, is by now in any case an anachronism" (150). And opposition to this development is
not merely anachronistic; it is illegitimate, not to be tolerated. So, for those who sincerely believe in
American institutional, cultural, and moral superiority, the times could not be rosier. After all, when
push comes to shove, "we" decide—not only about which societies are decent and which ones are not,
but also about which acts of violence are "terrorist" and which compose the "gentle compulsion" of a
"just war." What, however, are those "barbarians" who disagree with the new world order supposed to
do? With Agamben, they could wait for a "completely new politics" to come, but the contours of such a
politics are unknown and will remain unknown until the time of its arrival. And that time, much like the
second coming of Christ, seems infinitely deferrable. While they wait for the Benjaminian "divine
violence" to sweep away the residual effects of the demonic rule of law (Benjamin 1996, 248-52), the
barbarians might be tempted to entertain Schmitt's rather forlorn fantasy of an egalitarian balance of
power. Yet if the old, inner-European balance of power rested on an asymmetrical exclusion of the nonEuropean world, it must be asked: what new exclusion will be necessary for a new balance, and is that
new exclusion tolerable? At the moment, there is no answer to [End Page 143] this question, only a
precondition to an answer. If one wishes to entertain Todorov's challenge of thinking both equality and
difference, universal commerce of people and ideas as well as self-determination and nonintervention,
then the concept of humanity must once again become the invisible and unsurpassable horizon of
discourse, not its positive pole. The word "human," to evoke one final distinction, must once again
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become descriptive of a "fact" and not a "value." Otherwise, whatever else it may be, the search for
"human" rights will always also be the negative image of the relentless search for the "inhuman" other.
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Answer to securitization
Agonist us-them politics eliminate security’s paranoia
Rens van Munster. Professor at University of Southern Denmark. 2009. Logics of Security:
The Copenhagen School. Accessed May 25, 2015. Page 6-9.
Risk management differs significantly from exceptional logic of security that was put forward in the
previous section. 11 Risk management, first of all, is not a decision that calls the binary opposition
between friend and enemy into existence; rather, risk management should be considered as a regulating
form of security that permanently identifies, classifies and constitutes groups/populations on the basis
of the risk that is ascribed to these groups. Concomitantly, risk management does not consider friend
and enemy as two, mutually exclusive, binary groupings, but as end points on a continuum of threats
that are more or less likely to concretise in the foreseeable future. Contrary to existential threats, risks
only exist as potentialities, which entails that risk management is mainly concerned with making sure
that risks are prevented from developing into concrete, acute threats to the survival of a community.
Thus, rather than excluding an existential threat risk by staging it as the enemy that threatens survival,
risk management seeks to measure, evaluate and reduce the dangerousness of so-called risky
populations. To quote Castel at some length: “[A] shift becomes possible as soon as the notion of risk is
made autonomous from that of danger. A risk does not arise from the presence of a particular precise
danger embodied in a concrete individual or group…There is, in fact, no longer a relation of immediacy
with a subject because there is no longer a subject. What the new preventive policies primarily address
is no longer individuals but factors, statistical correlations of heterogeneous elements. They deconstruct
the concrete subject of intervention, and reconstruct a combination of factors liable to produce risk.
Their primary aim is not to confront a concrete dangerous situation, but to anticipate all the possible
forms of irruption of danger” (Castel, 1991: 288). In risk management, the subject is not encountered as
a unique person with some sort of indispensable inner singularity, but as an aggregate of risk factors, a
modulation that can be managed and tamed through continuous monitoring. Risk management reduces
‘individuals’ to ‘idividuals’, that is, a part of their identity (Deleuze, 1995).
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Identity and liberal rights are what make security concerns hyperbolic
Rens van Munster. Professor at University of Southern Denmark. 2009 . Logics of Security:
The Copenhagen School. Accessed May 25, 2015. Page 6-9.
In the words of Hardt and Negri: “The Other that might delimit a modern sovereign Self has become
fractured and indistinct, and there is no longer an outside that can bound the place of
sovereignty…Today it is increasingly difficult…to name a single unified enemy; rather, there seems to be
minor and elusive enemies everywhere” (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 189). Thus whereas the exceptional
decision creates a spatial order, risk management disrupts the link between space and order. Or, to put
it differently, risk management “does not have to draw the line that separates the enemies of the
sovereign from his obedient subjects; it effects distributions around the norm” (Foucault, 1978: 144). In
risk management, therefore, “we detect a new dynamic by means of which security goes hyperbolic,
since any assemblage, organisation or population, however differentiated and specified, may become
acerbic. Security goes hyperbolic in as much as unlimited knowledge of infinitely defineable
assemblages, populations and networks is a necessary concomitant of the problematic of becomingdangerous” (Dillon and Reid, 2001: 57). Risk management, Foucault in turn concludes, brings “life and its
mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations” and makes “power/knowledge an agent of
transformation of human life” (Foucault, 1978: 143). Because risk management is not focused upon an
existing existential threat, the logic of risk management is by definition preventive (see figure below).
The strategic goal of risk management is to intervene before the situation reaches to the point of
extremity in which exceptional measures are called for. Instead of bringing conflict to the extreme of
war, risk management “thus attempts to pre-empt or dedramatize conflict by acting upon the physical
and social structures within which individuals conduct themselves” (Rose, 1999: 237). Effective risk
management demands a cybernetics of control in which risk calculations, risk management and risk
reduction form an integral part of security measures. This is exemplified, for instance, by the current
security discourse of the United States in relation to the war on terrorism.
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