SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Index
Security 1NC ................................................................................................................................................. 3
Quick n’ Dirty 1NC ......................................................................................................................................... 7
2NC Alternative ............................................................................................................................................. 8
LINKS
Link- Generic ................................................................................................................................................. 9
Link- Crisis Management ............................................................................................................................. 12
Link- Economy ............................................................................................................................................. 13
Link-Environment ......................................................................................................................................... 14
Link- Fear .................................................................................................................................................... 15
Link- Hegemony .......................................................................................................................................... 16
Link- Middle East ......................................................................................................................................... 20
Link- Orientalism.......................................................................................................................................... 23
Link- Peace.................................................................................................................................................. 25
Link- Rhetoric .............................................................................................................................................. 26
Link- South Korea ........................................................................................................................................ 27
Link- Terrorism ............................................................................................................................................ 28
Links- Terrorism ........................................................................................................................................... 29
IMPACTS
Impact- Root Cause ..................................................................................................................................... 30
Impact- Dehumanization .............................................................................................................................. 32
Impact- Unending War ................................................................................................................................. 34
Impact- Nuclear War .................................................................................................................................... 36
Impact- War ................................................................................................................................................. 37
ALTERNATIVE
Alt- Reject .................................................................................................................................................... 38
Alt- Contructivism ........................................................................................................................................ 39
Alt- Genealogy ............................................................................................................................................. 40
Alt- Generic.................................................................................................................................................. 43
FRAMEWORK
Framework-Discourse.................................................................................................................................. 44
Framework- Speech Act .............................................................................................................................. 47
Framework- A2 Rational Actor ..................................................................................................................... 48
ZP ^ HC
1
SCFI 2010
Team Jabob & the STG’s
Securitization K
___ of ___
BLOCKS
A2- Policy Good Framework ........................................................................................................................ 49
A2- Policy Good Framework ........................................................................................................................ 50
A2- No impact to representation .................................................................................................................. 51
A2- Link Turn ............................................................................................................................................... 52
A2- Link Turn ............................................................................................................................................... 53
A2- Kritik is ideological................................................................................................................................. 54
A2- Does Nothing ........................................................................................................................................ 55
A2- Aff O/W ................................................................................................................................................. 56
A2 Perm- Must Disengage First ................................................................................................................... 57
A2 Perm- Realism Co-opts .......................................................................................................................... 58
A2 Perm- Must Act Alone ............................................................................................................................ 59
A2 Perm- Aff Can’t Solve ............................................................................................................................. 60
A2 Perm- Discourse..................................................................................................................................... 61
A2 Perm- Co-option ..................................................................................................................................... 62
A2 Realism- Fails ........................................................................................................................................ 64
A2 Realism- Outdated ................................................................................................................................. 65
A2 Realism- State Bad ................................................................................................................................ 66
A2 Realism- Conflict .................................................................................................................................... 67
A2 Realism- Self-fulfilling ............................................................................................................................. 68
A2 Realism Inevitable .................................................................................................................................. 69
Mearsheimer Indict ...................................................................................................................................... 70
*** AFFIRMATIVE ANSWERS ***................................................................................................................ 71
Alt Fails ........................................................................................................................................................ 72
Perm Solvency ............................................................................................................................................ 73
Perm Solvency ............................................................................................................................................ 75
Realism Good .............................................................................................................................................. 76
Security Solves Alt ....................................................................................................................................... 77
Alt Doesn’t Solve ......................................................................................................................................... 78
Link Turn...................................................................................................................................................... 79
ZP ^ HC
2
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Security 1NC
A) The Links
1. Security Risks represent nothing more than subjective calculations premised upon
international power politics. Security discourse actually creates the reality of threats
through the Security/Insecurity Paradox. This discourse of danger is created only to
legitimate the ontological basis for the existence of sovereign boundaries and the
legitimate violence.
Campbell 1998, (David, Professor of international politics at the University of Newcastle, “Writing Security’, (199-200))
Security and subjectivity are intrinsically linked, even in conventional understandings. Traditional discourses of international
relations maintain that alliance is one where security is a goal to be achieved by a number of instrumentalities
deployed by the state (defense and foreign policy, for example). But the linkage between the two can be understood in a different light, for just as
Foreign Policy works to constitute the identity in whose name it operates, security functions to instantiate the
subjectivity it purports to serve. Indeed, security (of which foreign policy/Foreign Policy is a part) is first and foremost a performative
discourse constitutive of political order: after all, "securing something requires its differentiation, classification and definition.
It has, in short, to be identified."21 An invitation to this line of thought can be found in the later work of Michel Foucault, in which he explicitly
addresses the issue of security and the state through the rubric of "governmental rationality."22 The incitement to Foucault's thinking was his observation that
from the middle of the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century, political treatises that previously had been written as advice to the prince were now
being presented as works on the "art jf government." The concern of these treatises was not confined to the requirements of a specific sovereign, but with the
more general problematic of government: a problematic that included the government of souls and lives, of children, of oneself, and finally, of the state by the
sovereign. This problematic of governance emerges at the intersection of central and centralizing power relationships (those
located in principles of universality, law, citizenship, sovereignty), and individual and
relationships of the Christian church and the welfare state).23 Accordingly, the
individualizing power relationships (such as the pastoral
state for Foucault is an ensemble of practices that are at one
and the same time individualizing and totalizing: I don't think that we should consider the "modern state" as an entity which was developed
above individuals, ignoring what they are and even their very existence, but on the contrary as a very sophisticated structure, in which individuals can be
integrated, under one condition: that this individuality would be shaped in a new form, and submitted to a set of very specific patterns. In a way we can see the
state as a modern matrix of individualization.24 Foucault posited some direct and important connections between the individualizing and totalizing power
relationships in the conclusion to The History of Sexuality, Volume I. There he argues that starting in the seventeenth century, power over life evolved in two
complementary ways: through disciplines that produced docile bodies, and through regulations and interventions directed at the social body. The former centered
on the body as a machine and sought to maximize its potential in economic processes, while the latter was concerned with the social body's capacity to give life
and propagate. Together, these
relations of power meant that "there was an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques
for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations, marking the beginning of an era of 'bio-power.'
" This era of bio-power saw the art of government develop an overtly constitutive orientation through the deployment
of technologies concerned with the ethical boundaries of identity as much (if not more than) the territorial borders of
the state. Foucault supported this argument by reference to the "theory of police." Developed in the seventeenth century, the "theory of police" signified not an institution or mechanism internal to the state, but a governmental technology that helped specify the
domain of the state.26 In particular, Foucault noted that Delamare's Compendium — an eighteenth-century French administrative work detailing the
kingdom's police regulations — outlined twelve domains of concern for the police: religion, morals, health, supplies, roads, town buildings, public safety, the
liberal arts, trade, factories, the supply of labor, and the poor. The logic behind this ambit claim of concern, which was repeated in all treatises on the police, was
that the police should be concerned with "everything pertaining to men's happiness," all social relations carried on between men, and all "living." 27
ZP ^ HC
3
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Security 1NC
2. The affirmative utilizes fear of war as a justification of withdrawal. This securitizing
discourse creates a self-fulfilling prophesy that creates the conditions required for
their impacts- turns the case.
Campbell 1998 (David, Professor of International Politics at the University of Newcastle, ‘Writing Security” Pg 49-51
In fostering an evangelism of fear, with death as its impetus and salvation as its goal, the cultural agents of the period were not
sim¬ply responding to danger as an external condition. The required famil¬iarity with death demanded of individuals an eternal vigilance against the self: “One
should always keep death in mind, just as one would always mount guard against an enemy who might suddenly appear~~ (indeed, for essayists like Montaigne,
death was a synonym for en-emy).47 But it was this vigilance against the self, encouraged
by the experience of finitude and required in the
name of salvation, that constituted the conditions of contemptus mundi from which one sought salvation . In the Specalum
peccatoris (“Sinner’s Mirror”) — a manuscript attributed to Saint Augustine — the author declares, “Consideration of the brevity of life engenders
contempt for the world,” and contin¬ues: “Is there anything that can increase man’s vigilance, his flight from injustice, and his saintly behavior in the fear
of God more than the realization of his [future] alteration, the precise knowledge of his mortal condition and the consequent thought of his horrible death, when
man becomes nonman?”48 The
logic of the evangelism of fear thus ferments the very conditions that it claims necessitate vigilance
against the enemies of the self; put simply, it produces its own danger. The evangelism of fear and its logic of identity are not just of the
past, however. In our own time, argues Delumeau, we can witness their operation: Does not our own epoch help us to understand the beginnings of European
The mass killings of the twentieth century from 1914 to the genocide of Cambodia — passing through
various holocausts and the deluge of bombs on Vietnam — the menace of nuclear war, the ever-increasing use of
torture, the multiplication of Gulags, the resurgence of insecurity, the rapid and often more and more troubling progress of
technology, the dangers entailed by an overly intensive exploitation of natural resources, various genetic
manipulations, and the uncontrolled explosion of information: Here are so many factors that, gathered together,
create a climate of anxi¬ety in our civilization which, in certain respects, is comparable to that of our ancestors between the time of the plague
and the end of the Wars of Religion. We have reentered this “country of fear” and, following a classic process of “projection,” we never weary of
evok¬ing it in both words and images. . . Yesterday, as today, fear of vio¬lence is objectified in images of violence and fear of death in
macabre visions.49 To talk of the endangered nature of the modem world and the enemies and threats that abound in it is thus not to offer a simple
modernity?
ethnographic description of our condition; it is to invoke a discourse of danger through which the incipient ambiguity of our world can be grounded in accordance
with the insistences of identity. Danger (death, in its ultimate form) might therefore be thought of as the new god for the modern world of states, not because it is
peculiar to our time, but be¬cause it replicates the logic of Christendom’s evangelism of fear. a Indeed, in a world in which state identity is
secured through dis¬courses of danger, some low tactics are employed to serve these high ideals. These tactics are not
inherent to the logic of identity, which only requires the definition of difference. But securing an ordered self and an ordered world—
particularly when the field upon which this pro¬cess operates is as extensive as a state — involves defining elements
that stand in the way of order as forms of “othemess.”~ Such obstruc¬tions to order “become dirt, matter out of place, irrationality,
abnormal¬ity, waste, sickness, perversity, incapacity, disorder, madness, unfree¬dom. They become material in need of rationalization,
normalization, moralization, correction, punishment, discipline, disposal, realization, etc.”5’ In this way, the state project of security replicates the church project of
salvation. The state
grounds its legitimacy by offering the promise of security to its citizens who, it says, would otherwise
face manifold dangers. The church justifies its role by guaranteeing sal¬vation to its followers who, it says, would otherwise be destined to an
unredeemed death. Both the state and the church require consid¬erable effort to maintain order within and around themselves, and thereby engage in an
evangelism of fear to ward off internal and ex¬ternal threats, succumbing in the process to the temptation to treat difference as otherness.
ZP ^ HC
4
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Security 1NC
B) The Impacts
1. This game of security reduces us to a species of calculation. All existence
becomes void of value under the system of fear and securitization.
Dillon in 1996 (Michael [Senior Lecturer in politics and international relations @ the University of Lancaster] Politics of Security: Toward a political
philosophy of continental thought, pg. 26)-mikee
Everything, for example, has now become possible. But what human being seems most impelled to do with the power of
its actions is to turn itself into a species; not merely an animal species, nor even a species of currency or consumption (which amount to the same
thing), but a mere species of calculation. For only by reducing itself to an index of calculation does it seem capable of
constructing that political arithmetic by which it can secure the security globalized Western thought insists upon, and
which a world made increasingly unpredictable by the very way human being acts into it now seems to require. Yet,
the very rage for calculability which securing security incites is precisely also what reduced human freedom, including
either despair or the surrender of what is human to the de-humanizing calculative logic of what seems to be necessary to secure
security. I think, then, that Hannah Arendt was right when she saw late modern humankind caught in a dangerous world-destroying cleft between a belief that
everything is possible and a willingness to surrender itself to so-called laws of necessity (calculability itself) which would make everything possible. That it was,
in short, characterized by a combination of reckless omnipotence and reckless despair.
But I also think that things have gone
one stage further- the surrender to the necessity of realizing everything that is possible- and that this found its paradigmatic expression, for example, in the
deterrent security policies of the Cold War; where everything up to and including self-immolation not only became possible but actually necessary in the interests
of (inter)national security.
2. Securitization makes war inevitable.
Burke 07 Associate professor, appointed UNSW@ADFA Anthony Burke “Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and Reason”
war and existence are intertwined. However within such existential imperatives to war lies a more technical, performative (and thus
once it is deemed necessary to use force in defence of one's right to exist it is possible to do so,
to translate military means into political ends in a controlled and rational way. This is the second, rationalist form of state reason that
most commonly takes the name of 'strategy'. Its fundamental tenet was most famously expressed in Carl Von Clausewitz's argument that war 'is a mere
continuation of policy by other means...a pulsation of violent force...subject to the will of a guiding intelligence'.10 That
Thus
rationalistic) discourse: that
this is a textbook model of instrumental reason, one that imports Newtonian physics into human relations, is clear in Clausewitz's influential definition: 'War is an
act of force to compel our enemy to do our will. The IDF's chosen weapons, until the last few days when a limited ground operation was conducted, were F-16s
and artillery strikes deployed against Hezbollah offices and facilities along with crucial infrastructure, and against civilians in their homes and vehicles. The
doctrinal influences appeared to be Clausewitz and the generation of twentieth century airpower theorists such as Guilio Douhet. Douhet believed that command
of the air would ensure victory 'all down the line'; he argued that 'modern warfare allows for no distinction between combatants and
noncombatants' and, in one analyst's paraphrase, that nations must 'at the outset be prepared to launch massive
bombing attacks against the enemy centres of population, government and industry -- hit first and hit hard to shatter
enemy civilian morale, leaving the enemy government no option but to sue for peace. I see such a drive for
ontological certainty and completion as particularly problematic for a number of reasons. Firstly, when it takes the form of the
existential and rationalist ontologies of war, it amounts to a hard and exclusivist claim: a drive for ideational hegemony and
closure that limits debate and questioning, that confines it within the boundaries of a particular, closed system of
logic, one that is grounded in the truth of being, in the truth of truth as such. The second is its intimate relation with violence:
the dual ontologies represent a simultaneously social and conceptual structure that generates violence. Here we are
witness to an epistemology of violence (strategy) joined to an ontology of violence (the national security state ). When we consider their relation to
war, the two ontologies are especially dangerous because each alone (and doubly in combination) tends both to quicken the
resort to war and to lead to its escalation either in scale and duration, or in unintended effects. In such a context violence is not so much
a tool that can be picked up and used on occasion, at limited cost and with limited impact -- it permeates being. This essay describes firstly the ontology of the
national security state (by way of the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, Carl Schmitt and G. W. F. Hegel) and secondly the rationalist ontology of strategy
(by way of the geopolitical thought of Henry Kissinger), showing how they crystallise into a mutually reinforcing system of support and justification, especially in
ethical problem arises because of their militaristic
force -- they embody and reinforce a norm of war -- and because they enact what Martin Heidegger calls an 'enframing' image of
technology and being in which humans are merely utilitarian instruments for use, control and destruction, and force -in the words of one famous Cold War strategist -- can be thought of as a 'power to hurt'.19 The pragmatic problem arises because force so
often produces neither the linear system of effects imagined in strategic theory nor anything we could meaningfully
call security, but rather turns in upon itself in a nihilistic spiral of pain and destruction. In the era of a 'war on terror' dominantly
the thought of Clausewitz. This creates both a profound ethical and pragmatic problem. The
ZP ^ HC
5
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Security 1NC
conceived in Schmittian and Clausewitzian terms,20 the arguments of Hannah Arendt (that violence collapses ends into means) and Emmanuel Levinas (that 'every war employs arms
that turn against those that wield them') take on added significance. Neither, however, explored what occurs when war and being are made to coincide, other than Levinas' intriguing
comment that in war persons 'play roles in which they no longer recognises themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance'. 21What I am trying to
describe in this essay is a complex relation between, and interweaving of, epistemology and ontology. But it is not my view that these are distinct modes of knowledge or levels of truth,
in the social field named by security, statecraft and violence they are made to blur together, continually
referring back on each other, like charges darting between electrodes. Rather they are related systems of knowledge with particular systemic roles and intensities of
because
claim about truth, political being and political necessity. Positivistic or scientific claims to epistemological truth supply an air of predictability and reliability to policy and political action,
which in turn support larger ontological claims to national being and purpose, drawing them into a common horizon of certainty that is one of the central features of past-Cartesian
modernity. Here it may be useful to see ontology as a more totalising and metaphysical set of claims about truth, and epistemology as more pragmatic and instrumental; but while a
distinction between epistemology (knowledge as technique) and ontology (knowledge as being) has analytical value, it tends to break down in action. The epistemology of violence I
describe here (strategic science and foreign policy doctrine) claims positivistic clarity about techniques of military and geopolitical action which use force and coercion to achieve a
desired end, an end that is supplied by the ontological claim to national existence, security, or order. However in practice, technique quickly passes into ontology. This it does in two
instrumental violence is married to an ontology of insecure national existence which itself admits no
questioning. The nation and its identity are known and essential, prior to any conflict, and the resort to violence becomes an equally essential predicate of its
ways. First,
perpetuation. In this way knowledge-as-strategy claims, in a positivistic fashion, to achieve a calculability of effects (power) for an ultimate purpose (securing
being) that it must always assume. Second, strategy as a technique not merely becomes an instrument of state power
but ontologises itself in a technological image of 'man' as a maker and user of things, including other humans, which
have no essence or integrity outside their value as objects.
C) The Alternative: Refuse Security.
Vote negative, not so much to imagine a world without security, but to respond to
security’s totalizing attempt at power. Only a framework that offers individual power
of resistance can solve.
Anthony Burke
in 2002(Anthony, “Aporias of Security” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 27, 2002)-mikee
It is perhaps easy to become despondent, but as countless struggles for freedom, justice, and social transformation have proved, a sense of
seriousness can be tempered with the knowledge that many tools are already available--and where they are not, the effort to create a productive new
critical sensibility is well advanced. There is also a crucial political opening within the liberal problematic itself, in the sense that it
assumes that power is most effective when it is absorbed as truth, consented to and desired--which creates an important
space for refusal. As Colin Gordon argues, Foucault thought that the very possibility of governing was conditional on it being
credible to the governed as well as the governing. (60) This throws weight onto the question of how security works as a technology
of subjectivity. It is to take up Foucault's challenge, framed as a reversal of the liberal progressive movement of being we have seen in Hegel,
not to discover who or what we are so much as to refuse what we are. (61 ) Just as security rules subjectivity as both
a totalizing and individualizing blackmail and promise, it is at these levels that we can intervene. We can critique
the machinic frameworks of possibility represented by law, policy, economic regulation, and diplomacy, while challenging the way
these institutions deploy language to draw individual subjects into their consensual web. This suggests, at least
provisionally, a dual strategy. The first asserts the space for agency, both in challenging available possibilities for being and their larger
socioeconomic implications. Roland Bleiker formulates an idea of agency that shifts away from the lone (male) hero overthrowing the social order in a decisive
act of rebellion to one that understands both the thickness of social power and its "fissures," "fragmentation," and "thinness." We
must, he says, "observe
how an individual may be able to escape the discursive order and influence its shifting boundaries.... By doing so,
discursive terrains of dissent all of a sudden appear where forces of domination previously seemed invincible." (62)
Pushing beyond security requires tactics that can work at many levels--that empower individuals to recognize the larger social, cultural,
and economic implications of the everyday forms of desire, subjection, and discipline they encounter, to challenge and rewrite them, and that in turn contribute to
collective efforts to transform the larger structures of being, exchange, and power that sustain (and have been sustained by) these forms. As Derrida suggests,
this is to open up aporetic possibilities that transgress and call into question the boundaries of the self, society, and the international that security seeks to
imagine and police. The second seeks new ethical principles based on a critique of the rigid and repressive forms of
identity that security has heretofore offered. Thus writers such as Rosalyn Diprose, William Conolly, and Moira Gatens have sought to imagine a
new ethical relationship that thinks difference not on the basis of the same but on the basis of a dialogue with the
other that might allow space for the unknown and unfamiliar, for a "debate and engagement with the other's law and
the other's ethics"--an encounter that involves a transformation of the self rather than the other. (63) Thus while the
sweep and power of security must be acknowledged, it must also be refused: at the simultaneous levels of individual identity,
social order, and macroeconomic possibility, it would entail another kind of work on "ourselves"--a political refusal of the One, the
imagination of an other that never returns to the same. It would be to ask if there is a world after security, and what its
shimmering possibilities might be.
ZP ^ HC
6
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Quick n’ Dirty 1NC
Before the law sits a gatekeeper. To this gatekeeper comes a man from the country who asks to
gain entry into the law. But the gatekeeper says that he cannot grant him entry at the moment. The
man thinks about it and then asks if he will be allowed to come in later on. “It is possible,” says the
gatekeeper, “but not now.” At the moment the gate to the law stands open, as always, and the
gatekeeper walks to the side, so the man bends over in order to see through the gate into the
inside. When the gatekeeper notices that, he laughs and says: “If it tempts you so much, try it in
spite of my prohibition. But take note: I am powerful. And I am only the most lowly gatekeeper. But
from room to room stand gatekeepers, each more powerful than the other. I can’t endure even one
glimpse of the third.” The man from the country has not expected such difficulties: the law should
always be accessible for everyone, he thinks, but as he now looks more closely at the gatekeeper in
his fur coat, at his large pointed nose and his long, thin, black Tartar’s beard, he decides that it
would be better to wait until he gets permission to go inside. The gatekeeper gives him a stool and
allows him to sit down at the side in front of the gate. There he sits for days and years. He makes
many attempts to be let in, and he wears the gatekeeper out with his requests. The gatekeeper
often interrogates him briefly, questioning him about his homeland and many other things, but they
are indifferent questions, the kind great men put, and at the end he always tells him once more that
he cannot let him inside yet. The man, who has equipped himself with many things for his journey,
spends everything, no matter how valuable, to win over the gatekeeper. The latter takes it all but,
as he does so, says, “I am taking this only so that you do not think you have failed to do anything.”
During the many years the man observes the gatekeeper almost continuously. He forgets the other
gatekeepers, and this one seems to him the only obstacle for entry into the law. He curses the
unlucky circumstance, in the first years thoughtlessly and out loud, later, as he grows old, he still
mumbles to himself. He becomes childish and, since in the long years studying the gatekeeper he
has come to know the fleas in his fur collar, he even asks the fleas to help him persuade the
gatekeeper. Finally his eyesight grows weak, and he does not know whether things are really
darker around him or whether his eyes are merely deceiving him. But he recognizes now in the
darkness an illumination which breaks inextinguishably out of the gateway to the law. Now he no
longer has much time to live. Before his death he gathers in his head all his experiences of the
entire time up into one question which he has not yet put to the gatekeeper. He waves to him, since
he can no longer lift up his stiffening body. The gatekeeper has to bend way down to him, for the
great difference has changed things to the disadvantage of the man. “What do you still want to
know, then?” asks the gatekeeper. “You are insatiable.” “Everyone strives after the law,” says the
man, “so how is that in these many years no one except me has requested entry?” The gatekeeper
sees that the man is already dying and, in order to reach his diminishing sense of hearing, he
shouts at him, “Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I’m
going now to close it.”
-“Before the Law” by Franz Kafka
ZP ^ HC
7
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
2NC Alternative
The alternative is to reject the affirmative’s appeals to securitization. Questioning the
conditions of possibility for power relations created through the affirmative’s
representations refuses to participate in calculative and depoliticizing worst case
scenario predictions.
Language matters- debating the affirmative’s representations is key to overcoming
dominant descriptions of agents and objects in international relations
Der Derian 98 (James, a Watson Institute research professor of international studies and directs the Information Technology, War, and Peace Project
and the Global Media Project, “International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics”, Lexington Books, p.13)
Once we give adequate recognition to the texts within which the world emerges and provided an understanding of
politics that focuses on such impositions of meaning and value, we can appreciate the intimate relationship between
textual practices and politics. It is the dominant, surviving textual practices that give rise to the systems of meaning and value from which actions and
policies are directed and legitimated. A critical political perspective is, accordingly, one that questions the privileged forms of
representation whose dominance has led to the unproblematic acceptance of subjects, objects, acts, and themes
through which the political world is constructed. In as much as dominant modes of understanding exist within representational or textual
practices, criticism or resistant forms of interpretation are conveyed less through an explicitly argumentative form than
through a writing practice that is resistant to familiar modes of representation, one that is self-reflective enough to
show how meaning and writing practices are radically entangled in general or one that tends to denaturalize familiar
reunites by employing impertinent grammars and figurations, by, in short, making use of an insurrectional textuality .
To appreciate the effects of this textuality, it is necessary to pay special need to language, but this does not imply that an approach emphasizing textuality
reduces social phenomena to specific instances of linguistic expression. To textualize a domain of analysis is to recognize, first of all, that any "reality" is
mediated by a mode of representation and, second, that representations are not descriptions of a world of facility, but are ways of making facility. Their
value
is thus not to be discerned in their correspondence with something, but rather in the economies of possible
representations within which they participate. Modes of reality making are therefore worthy of analysis in their own
right. Such analysis can be a form of interpretation in which one scrutinizes the effects on behavior or policy that the dominance of some representational
practices enjoy, or it can be a form of critique in which one opposes prevailing representational practices with alternatives.
Therefore, a concern with textuality must necessary raise issues about the texuality (the meaning and value effects) of the language of inquiry itself. In order,
then, to outline the textualist approach, we must develop further our understanding of the language analysis.
ZP ^ HC
8
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Link- Generic
The affirmative engages in realist discourse that uses fear to control the masses—
that’s a tool of securitization.
Altheide and Michalowski 99 [David L., Professor of Justice and Social Inquiry @ ASU, R. Sam, graduate student of Sociology @ City
University of New York, “Fear in the News: Discourse of Control”]
Fear pervades popular culture and the news media. Whether used as a noun, verb, adverb, or adjective, an ongoing study finds that the word
"fear" pervades news reports across all sections of newspapers, and is shown to move or "travel" from one topic to another. The use of fear and the
thematic emphases spawned by entertainment formats are consistent with a "discourse of fear," or the pervasive
communication, symbolic awareness and expectation that danger and risk are a central feature of the effective
environment. A qualitative content analysis of a decade of news coverage in The Arizona Republic and several other major American news media (e.g., the
Los Angeles Times, and ABC News) reveals that the word "fear" appears more often than it did several years ago, particularly in headlines, where its use has
more than doubled. Comparative materials obtained through the Lexis/Nexis information base also reveals that certain themes are associated with a shifting
focus of fear over the years (e.g., violence, drugs, AIDS), with the most recent increases associated with reports about children. Analysis suggests that this use
of fear is consistent with popular culture oriented to pursuing a "problem frame" and entertainment formats, which also have social implications for social policy
and reliance on formal agents of social control. No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear. Edmund Burke Nearly
everyone knows how to read the news of the day. But using news as a resource for everyday life is different from treating it as a topic to understand how social
reality is ordered, maintained, and repaired. On the one hand, news
reports as resources serve to set emotional tones for the rhythms
of life and reminders of ideals of the order and disorder that threaten peaceful neighborhoods and the cosmologies of
"normal order." On the other hand, news reports as topics provide a window into organizational frameworks of reality
maintenance and their relevance for broader societal definitions of situations, courses of action, and assessments of
a life world. News reports, as a feature of popular culture, become intertwined in everyday life, political speeches, and other entertainment forms such as
movies. This article reports on the way fear is being used to provide entertaining news that also benefits formal agents of social
control and promotes distrust among the audience. The way the production of entertaining news shapes the content of news can be clarified
by looking at the role and use of fear over time across social issues. When fear is the prevailing framework for looking at social issues,
then other competing frames and discourses lose out. When President Franklin Roosevelt said, in the context of the Great
Depression, "Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself," he had not envisioned American news
media! Roosevelt cautioned against fear; today fear is embraced and constitutes a major public discourse through
which numerous problems and issues are framed. A discourse of fear may be defined as the pervasive
communication, symbolic awareness, and expectation that danger and risk are a central feature of the effective
environment, or the physical and symbolic environment as people define and experience it in everyday life (Pfuhl and Henry 1993, p. 53). We report on the
expanded use of fear in news reports and reflect on its significance for social order.
ZP ^ HC
9
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Link- Generic
The call to securitize against a threat upholds the state and its population as sacred,
manipulating international politics through the creation of subjective threats.
Campbell 1998 [David Campbell, professor of international politics at the University of Newcastle. Writing Security, 1998. (199 – 202)]
Security and subjectivity are intrinsically linked, even in conventional understandings. Traditional discourses of international relations
maintain that alliance is one where security is a goal to be achieved by a number of instrumentalities deployed by the
state (defense and foreign policy, for example). But the linkage between the two can be understood in a different light, for just as Foreign Policy works
to constitute the identity in whose name it operates, security functions to instantiate the subjectivity it purports to
serve. Indeed, security (of which foreign policy/Foreign Policy is a part) is first and foremost a performative discourse constitutive
of political order: after all, "securing something requires its differentiation, classification and definition. It has, in short,
to be identified."21 An invitation to this line of thought can be found in the later work of Michel Foucault, in which he explicitly addresses the issue of security
and the state through the rubric of "governmental rationality."22 The incitement to Foucault's thinking was his observation that from the middle of the sixteenth
century to the end of the eighteenth century, political treatises that previously had been written as advice to the prince were now being presented as works on the
"art jf government." The concern of these treatises was not confined to the requirements of a specific sovereign, but with the more general problematic of
government: a problematic that included the government of souls and lives, of children, of oneself, and finally, of the state by the sovereign. This
problematic of governance emerges at the intersection of central and centralizing power relationships (those located in
principles of universality, law, citizenship, sovereignty), and individual and individualizing power relationships (such as the pastoral relationships of
the Christian church and the welfare state).23 Accordingly, the state for Foucault is an ensemble of practices that are at one and the
same time individualizing and totalizing: I don't think that we should consider the "modern state" as an entity which was developed above
individuals, ignoring what they are and even their very existence, but on the contrary as a very sophisticated structure, in which individuals can be integrated,
under one condition: that this individuality would be shaped in a new form, and submitted to a set of very specific patterns. In a way we can see the state as a
modern matrix of individualization.24 Foucault posited some direct and important connections between the individualizing and totalizing power relationships in the
conclusion to The History of Sexuality, Volume I. There he argues that starting in the seventeenth century, power over life evolved in two complementary ways:
through disciplines that produced docile bodies, and through regulations and interventions directed at the social body. The former centered on the body as a
machine and sought to maximize its potential in economic processes, while the latter was concerned with the social body's capacity to give life and propagate.
Together, these relations of power meant that "there was an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for
achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations, marking the beginning of an era of 'bio-power.' "
This era of bio-power saw the art of government develop an overtly constitutive orientation through the deployment of
technologies concerned with the ethical boundaries of identity as much (if not more than) the territorial borders of the
state. Foucault supported this argument by reference to the "theory of police." Developed in the seventeenth century, the "theory of police" signified not an
institution or mechanism internal to the state, but a governmental technology that helped specify the domain of the state.26 In particular, Foucault noted that
Delamare's Compendium — an eighteenth-century French administrative work detailing the kingdom's police regulations — outlined twelve domains of concern
for the police: religion, morals, health, supplies, roads, town buildings, public safety, the liberal arts, trade, factories, the supply of labor, and the poor. The logic
behind this ambit claim of concern, which was repeated in all treatises on the police, was that the police should be concerned with "everything pertaining to men's
happiness," all social relations carried on between men, and all "living." 27 As another treatise of the period declared: "The police's true object is man." The theory
of police, as an instance of the rationality behind the art of government, had therefore the constitution, production, and maintenance of identity as its major effect.
Likewise, the conduct of war is linked to identity. As Foucault argues, "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 slaughter in the name of life necessity." In other words, countries go to war, not for the purpose of defending their
rulers, but for the purpose of defending "the nation," ensuring the state's security, or upholding the interests and values of the
people. Moreover, in an era that has seen the development of a global system for the fighting of a nuclear war (the infrastructure of which remains intact despite
the "end of the cold war"), the paradox of risking individual death for the sake of collective life has been pushed to its logical
extreme. Indeed, "the atomic situation is now at the end of this process: the power to expose a whole population to
death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual's continued existence." distinctive of the United
States. Most important, though, it is at the intersection of the "microphysics" and "macrophysics" of power in the problematic
of order that we can locate the concept of security. Security in this formulation is neither just an essential precondition
of power nor its goal; security is a specific principle of political method and practice directed explicitly to "the
ensemble of the population. This is not to suggest that "the population" exists in a prediscursive domain; on the
contrary, "one of the great innovations in the techniques of power in the eighteenth century was the emergence of
'population' as an economic and political problem." The common effect of the theory of police and the waging of war in constituting the identity
in whose name they operate highlights the way in which foreign policy/Foreign Policy establishes the general preconditions for a "coherent policy of order,"
particularly as it gives rise to a geography of evil.30 Indeed, the preoccupation of the texts of Foreign Policy with the prospects for order, and the concern of a
range of cultural spokespersons in America with the dangers to order, manifest how this problematic is articulated in a variety of sites Furthermore, Foucault
argues that from the eighteenth century onward, security becomes the central dynamic in governmental rationality,
CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE
ZP ^ HC
10
SCFI 2010
Team Jabob & the STG’s
Securitization K
___ of ___
CONTINUED FROM ABOVE
so that (as discussed in chapter 6) we live today, not in a narrowly defined and overtly repressive disciplinary society, but in a "society of security," in which
practices of national security and practices of social security structure intensive and extensive power relations, and
constitute the ethical boundaries and territorial borders of inside/ outside, normal/pathological, civilized/barbaric, and
so on. The theory of police and the shift from a sovereign's war to a population's war thus not only changed the
nature of "man" and war, it constituted the identity of "man" in the idea of the population, and articulated the dangers
that might pose a threat to security. The major implication of this argument is that the state is understood as having
no essence, no ontological status that exists prior to and is served by either police or war. Instead, "the state" is "the mobile
effect of a multiple regime of governmentality," of which the practices of police, —— and foreign policy/Foreign Policy are all a part.
ZP ^ HC
11
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Link- Crisis Management
The affirmatives decision to abandon commitments in order to manage crises draws
boundaries between self and the other.
Der Derian 1998 (James, a Watson Institute research professor of international studies and directs the Information Technology, War, and Peace Project
and the Global Media Project, Textual Strategies of the Military, “International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics”, Lexington Books,
p.101)
Strategic discourse is the mode of coordinating and disciplining that peacelessness that reigns without, beyond the
borders of the sovereign state: "over there" in bordering or far distant regions where strange forces of otherness well
u p to challenge domestic order. Like the popular television show of the mid-1960s, "Get Smart," the realist bifurcates domestic "control" and foreign
"chaos." This arises from more general dichotomies such as "the self ' and "the other," of the one and the many, 9 of
domestic order and international anarchy, all of which require that politics stop at the water's edge and that loyalty
reign supreme at home lest the forces of disorder be emboldened. Traditionally, realism has negotiated this political terrain in terms of
two strategies. The first is a kind of statist monism. Here we find a thoroughly articulated political apparatus that presides over civil society, 10 architecture of
bureaucratic Leviathanism that in its absolutist form was celebrated as the embodiment o f domestic reason and interests writ large. Out of this arose a set of
practices that have continued to exercise a decisive hold upon the theoretical imaginations of contemporary realists. I
speak here of the various means by which the state is supposed to maximize the well being of an undifferentiated populace. Mercantilism; pursuing the
national interest; defending national security: these are the economic, political, and military spheres attended to by
the state. Of course, there are people who populate the state: real-life kings and queens, cabinet members, diplomats,
and statesmen. Situated atop, presiding over their sovereign realm, they alone are accorded a freedom of action that is quite literally heroic in its scope.
Witness the gallant, globetrotting Kissingerian figure who has transcended the limits of bureaucratic structure and circumvented all manner of domestic
accountability. II And this is the second strategy of realism: the military genius, the visionary statesman. The IR struggles to secure the well being
of their polity occupy the stage upon which is played out the drama of the realist tradition. Contemporary neorealist has modified
this somewhat, rendering more austere and technocratic the exercise of state power. Domestically, we have witnessed the advent of
decision-making inquiries in a conceptual at tempt to understand the formerly posited unity o f a monolithic realist
state. Internationally, one finds a proliferation of techno strategies and techno diplomacies that have displaced the
drama of the heroic, visionary statesman, replacing him with the avatars of a disciplinary politics in the form of crisis
management, command and control, intelligence gathering, and centrally coordinated war-fighting from computerladen bunkers, dutifully carried out by attached-case carrying military staff. ll This is where strategic discourse
achieves its hegemony, as the intellectual sphere within which these practices of "organized peacelessness"13
became standard operating procedure.
ZP ^ HC
12
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Link- Economy
The affirmative securitizes through the concept of “economic security” by acting to
counter the economies fears
Neocleous 2008 Mark Neocleous, Professor of Critique of Political Economy at Brunel University (UK), 2008 (“Critique of Security.” Pg. 94-95. )
Robert Pollard has suggested that ‘the
concept of “economic security” – the idea that American interests would best be served
by an open and integrated economic system, as opposed to a large peacetime military establishment – was firmly
established during the wartime period’. In fact, the concept of ‘economic security’ became a concept of international politics
in this period, but the concept itself had a longer history as the underlying idea behind social security in the 1930s, as we have seen. Economic security, in
this sense, provides the important link between social and national security , becoming liberalism’s strategic weapon of choice and the
main policy instrument from 1945. As one State Department memo of February 1944 put it, ‘the development of sound international economic
relations is closely related to the problem of security’. But it would also continue to be used to think about the political administration of
internal order. Hence Roosevelt’s comment that ‘we must plan for, and help to bring about, an expanded economy which will result
in more security and so that the conditions of 1932 and the beginning of 1933 won’t come back again’. On security grounds,
inside and outside were constantly folding into one another, the domestic and the foreign never quite properly distinguishable. The reason why lay in the kind of
economic order to be secured: both domestically and internationally, ‘economic security’ is coda for capitalist order.
ZP ^ HC
13
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Link-Environment
The blending of environmental and national impacts supports a securitized logic of
geopolitics, upholding the US as the only true global savior
Tuathail 96 (Gearóid Ó Tuathail, Professor of Government and International Affairs and Director of the Masters of Public and International Affairs program
– Virginia Tech, Sept 1996. “AT THE END OF GEOPOLITICS?.” http://www.nvc.vt.edu/toalg/Website/Publish/papers/End.htm)
within the much remarked upon emergence of "environmental security" and the sacred visions of green
governmentalists like Al Gore, geography is post-territorial in-flowmations of ozone gases, acid rain, industrial pollution,
topsoil erosion, smog emissions, rainforest depletions and toxic spills. Yet, the discourse of unveiled and primordial
geographical regions persists also. In the place of Mackinder's natural seats of power, Gore presents the "great genetic treasure
map" of the globe, twelve areas around the globe that "hold the greatest concentration of germplasm important to
modern agriculture and world food production." Robert Kaplan's unsentimental journey to the "ends of the earth" where
cartographic geographies are unravelling and fading has him disclosing a "real world" of themeless violence and
chaos, a world where "[w]e are not in control." The specter of a second Cold War -- "a protracted struggle between
ourselves and the demons of crime, population pressure, environmental degradation, disease and cultural conflict" -haunt his thoughts. This equivocal environmentalization of strategic discourse (and visa versa) -- and the environmental
strategic think tanks like the World Watch Institute which promote it -- deserve problematization as clusters of
postmodern geopolitics, in this case congealment’s of geographical knowledge and green governmentality designed to
re-charge the American polity with a circumscribed global environmental mission to save planet earth from
destruction.
Even
ZP ^ HC
14
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Link- Fear
The affirmative engages in fear mongering discourse to obtain state control
Altheide and Michalowski 1999 (David L., Professor of Justice and Social Inquiry at ASU, R. Sam, graduate student of Sociology at University
of New York, “Fear in the News: Discourse of Control”)
The prevalence of fear in public discourse can contribute to stances and reactive social policies that promote state
control and surveillance. Fear is a key element of creating "the risk society," organized around communication
oriented to policing, control, and prevention of risks (Ericson and Haggerty 1997; Staples 1997). A constitutive feature of this emerging order
is a blanket reminder of fear. "Fear ends up proving itself, as new risk communication and management systems proliferate" (Ericson and Haggerty 1997, p. 6).
While fear is commonly associated with crime, we suggest that fear provides a discursive framework of expectation and meaning within which crime and related
"problems" are expressed. Media practices and major news sources (e.g., law enforcement agencies) have cooperatively produced an organizational "machine,"
fueled by entertainment and selective use of news sources, that simultaneously connects people to their effective environments even as it generates
entertainment-oriented profits (Altheide 1997). As one law enforcement official stated about Arizona's televised "crimes toppers" dramatizations, "If you can have
a little entertainment and get your man, too, that's great."T his discourse resonates through public information and is becoming a part of what a mass society
holds in common: We increasingly
share understandings about what to fear and how to avoid it. The consequences are felt
in numerous ways but particularly in accelerated negative perceptions about public order (e.g., the streets are not
safe, strangers are dangerous, the state must provide more control and surveillance). In commenting on everyday life features of
mass society, Stanford M. Lyman (1997, p. 294) observes, "Such a fearful disunity undermines the general conditions of trust and
order, encouraging intrigues, deceptions and interactions that are strategic rather than spontaneous."
ZP ^ HC
15
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Link- Hegemony
Hegemony simply greases the wheels of future interventions. We must challenge the
neoconservative logic of their advantage to demilitarize American politics
Rule 2010 (James B, PhD Harvard, MA Oxford, BA Brandeis, “The Military State of America and the Democratic Left” Dissent Vol. 57 No 1)
The invasion of Iraq
was a defining moment for the United States. This was the kind of war that many Americans believed formed no
part of this country's repertoire - an aggressive war of choice. Its aim was not to stop some wider conflict or to
prevent ethnic cleansing or mass killings; indeed, its predictable effect was to promote these things. The purpose was to
extirpate a regime that the United States had built up but that had morphed into an obstacle to this country - and to replace it with one that would represent a more compliant instrument
the war was a demonstration of American ability and willingness to remove and replace regimes
anywhere in the world. Even in the wake of the Iraq fiasco, no one in high places has declared repetitions of such
exploits "off the table" - to use the expression favored by this country's foreign policy elites. For those of us who opposed the war, there is obvious relief at the conclusion we hope - of a conflict that has consistently brought out the worst in this country. But at the same time , those on the democratic Left look to the future with
unease. Even under a reputedly liberal president, we have reason to worry about new versions of Iraq - in
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran or venues yet undisclosed. To its credit, Dissent has not joined the rush to avert attention from the endgames of the Iraq
of American purpose. In short,
conflict. The Spring 2009 edition features a section of articles under the rubric "Leaving Iraq." The essays focus on the moral and political quandaries of America's departure from a
the thinking
that gave us the American invasion of Iraq in the first place has not gone away . George Packer, for example, inveighs against those
country that it did a great deal to break, but where its ability to repair things is rapidly diminishing. But, a look at the proposals put forward there makes it clear that
seeking a quick exit for American forces. The balance of power among Iraq's domestic forces could easily be upset, he holds, and valuable progress undone, without a longlingering
presence of Americans as enforcers. Obviously playing to the sensitivities of Dissent readers, he concludes that "much as we might wish [the war] had never happened at all, America
will have obligations as well as interests in Iraq for a long time to come." The sense of all this, from Packer's standpoint, becomes clear when you recall his efforts to discredit
Americans' resistance to the war in the months before it began. The antiwar movement, he wrote in the New York Times Magazine in December, 2002, "has a serious liability . . . it's
controlled by the furthest reaches of the American Left." He goes on, in this same article, to envisage a quite different role for those on the Left, like himself, who took what he
considered a more enlightened view: The "liberal hawks could make the case for war to suspicious Europeans and to wavering fellow Americans," he wrote; "they might even be able to
explain the connection between the war in Iraq and the war on terrorism ..." Brendan O'Leary, another contributor to Dissent's Spring 2009 "Leaving Iraq" section, also stresses
responsibility. He, too, means by this continued readiness to apply U.S. coercion to manage Iraqi domestic politics. To judge from his words, he has no difficulty in principle with the
notion of remaking Iraq by outside military force: "Reasonable historians should judge ... that removing the genocidal Baathists was overdue," he avers. "The younger Bush made up for
his father's mistake, though he did so for the wrong reasons." Still, O'Leary allows that the invasion hasn't quite unfolded as he might have wished: "... grotesque mismanagement of
regime-replacement ... unnecessary and arrogant occupation ... incompetence of American direct rule... numerous errors of policy and imagination ... in the horrors and brutalities that
have followed." The America occupiers have sometimes proved "blindly repressive," he allows - but sometimes, apparently, not repressive enough. Still, leaving before America sets
things straight would be irresponsible. If the United States just keeps trying, it may yet get it all right. This country m ust now manage the political forces set in motion by its invasion
according to O'Leary's exacting formula: defend the federalist constitution, keep resurgent Sunni and Shiite forces from each other's throats, and preserve the autonomy of the Kurds.
Just the same, he notes, "After the United States exits, an Arab civil war may re-ignite, as well as Kurdish-Arab conflict." To some of us, an invasion that leaves such possibilities
simmering after six years of American-sponsored death and destruction itself seems more than a little irresponsible. Some of the aims invoked by Packer and O'Leary are beyond
reproach. Certainly the United States bears profound responsibilities to protect Iraqis at risk from their collaboration with or employment by American forces - and for that matter, to help
repair damage to the country's infrastructure resulting from the invasion. And certainly this country should do everything possible to prevent regional, communal, and ethnic groupings
from exploiting a U.S. pullout to oppress others. But making good on any of these estimable goals, as the authors seem to realize, will be a very big order - especially given America's
the deeper, mostly unstated assumptions underlying these authors' proposals ought to strike a chill
throughout the democratic Left. Their problems with the Iraq invasion - and implicitly, future American military exploits
of the same kind - have to do with execution, not the larger vision of American power that inspired the enterprise.
Their words strike an eerie resonance with those of Thomas L. Friedman, before the invasion occurred: he favored George
W. Bush's "audacious" war plan as "a job worth doing," but only "if we can do it right." America's violent remaking of Iraq would
have been entirely acceptable, it seems, if only Friedman's sensibilities could have guided it. More important: the continuing mission of the United
States as maker and breaker of regimes around the world remained unquestioned. When any country gets seriously
in the way of American power, the global responsibilities of this country are apt to require action like that taken in
Iraq. We hear this kind of thinking in its most outof-the-closet form from neoconservatives - who gave us the Iraq invasion in the first
place. But its roots in American history lie at least as far back as notions of Manifest Destiny. Its key inspiration is a particularly
aggressive form of American exceptionalism. Some higher power - fate, Divine Providence, or special "moral clarity" - has
created opportunities, indeed obligations, for America to set things straight on a global scale. Versions of this idea
are pervasive among thinkers - American foreign policy elites, and those who would guide them - who would disclaim identification with the
neocons. Often conveying the doctrine are code words referring to special "responsibilities" of the United States to guarantee world "stability." Or, as Madeleine Albright, then U.S.
record thus far. Yet
ambassador to the United Nations, stated, "If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future. . ." To
her credit, Albright's effusions in this direction stopped short of support for invading Iraq - something that cannot be said for the so-called liberal hawks. Accepting
this view
of America as the ultimate and rightful arbiter of global affairs - as master hegemon or world superpower, to use less upbeat
terms - triggers the weightiest implications and consequences. Nearly all of them, I hold, run in collision course to the
best aims and directions of the democratic Left. Yet even for thinkers who identify themselves as being on the Left,
acceptance of a hyper-militarized America, and its concomitant role of global enforcer, often passes without question.
ZP ^ HC
16
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
{Card Continues, No Breaks}
For those of us who challenge this view, the invasion of Iraq was wrong for fundamental political and - indeed - moral
reasons. Not because it was mismanaged. Not because too few troops were dispatched; not because the Iraqi Army was disbanded; not because the
occupation was incompetent, corrupt, and often criminally negligent. It was wrong because wars of this kind are always wrong - aggressive, opportunistic wars of choice, aimed at
wars are wrong because of the destruction and distortions that they
spread both abroad and at home. Among nations, they countervail against one of the subtle but hopeful tendencies in
the world today - the movement away from sole reliance on brute state power to resolve international conflict and
toward supranational authorities, multilateral decisi on -making, and establishment of powers above the level of
states. At home, the effects are even more insidious. For in order to make itself the kind of country capable of
"projecting power" anywhere in the world, as America has done so unsuccessfully in Iraq, it has had to impose vast
demands and distortions upon its own domestic life.
revamping entire countries to fit the dictates of the invaders. These
Hegemony is a securitizing tactic that constructs the world as external threats,
enslaving the population to the state. This legitimizes the elimination of all that’s
foreign.
Tickner 1995, (J. Ann, Professor of Policy at Holy Cross University, “IR Theory Today)
When national security is defined negatively, as protection against outside military threats, the sense of threat is
reinforced by the doctrine of state sovereignty, which strengthens the boundary between a secure community and a
dangerous external environment. For this reason, many critics of realism claim that, if security is to start with the individual, its ties to state
sovereignty must be severed. While E. H. Carr argued for he retention of the nation-state to satisfy people's need for identity, those who are critical of statecentric analysis point to the dangers of a political identity constructed out of exclusionary practices. In the present international system,
security is tied to a
nationalist political identity which depends on the construction of those outsides as 'other' and therefore dangerous.
(Walker 1990) David Campbell suggests that security the boundaries of this statist identity demands the construction of 'danger' on
the outside: Thus, threats to security in conventional thinking are all in the external realm. Campbell claims that the state
requires this discourse of danger to secure its identity and legitimation which • depend• on the promise of security for
its citizens. Citizenship becomes synonymous with loyalty and the elimination of all that is foreign . Underscoring this
distinction between citizens and people reinforced by these boundary distinctions, Walker argues that not until people, rather than any citizens, are the primary
subjects of security can a truly comprehensive security be achieved.
ZP ^ HC
17
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Link- Hegemony
The objective behind US hegemony is that the US must maintain control throughout
the globe to counteract all threats
Chernus 2006 (Ira Chernus, Professor of Religious Studies and Co-director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of ColoradoBoulder, 2006 Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin, Published by Paradigm Publishers, ISBN 1594512752, p. 53-54)
The end of the cold war spawned a tempting fantasy of imperial omnipotence on a global scale. The neocons want to turn that fantasy into reality. But reality will
not conform to the fantasy; it won’t stand still or keep any semblance of permanent order. So the neocons’ efforts inevitably backfire. Political scientist Benjamin
Barber explains that a nation with unprecedented power has “unprecedented vulnerability: for it must repeatedly extend the compass of its power to preserve
what it already has, and so is almost by definition always overextended.” Gary Dorrien sees insecurity coming at the neoconservatives in another way, too: “For
the empire, every conflict is a local concern that threatens its control. However secure it maybe, it never feels secure
enough. The [neocon] unipolarists had an advanced case of this anxiety. . . . Just below the surface of the customary claim to toughness lurked persistent
anxiety. This anxiety was inherent in the problem of empire and, in the case of the neocons, heightened by ideological ardor.”39 If the U.S. must control
every event everywhere, as neocons assume, every act of resistance looks like a threat to the very existence of the nation.
There is no good way to distinguish between nations or forces that genuinely oppose U.S. interests and those that
don’t. Indeed, change of any kind, in any nation, becomes a potential threat. Everyone begins to look like a threatening monster that
might have to be destroyed. It’s no surprise that a nation imagined as an implacable enemy often turns into a real enemy. When the U.S. intervenes to prevent
change, it is likely to provoke resistance. Faced with an aggressive U.S. stance, any nation might get tough in return. Of course , the U.S. can say that it
is selflessly trying to serve the world. But why would other nations believe that? It is more likely that others will resist,
making hegemony harder to achieve. To the neocons, though, resistance only proves that the enemy really is a threat that must be destroyed. So
the likelihood of conflict grows, making everyone less secure. Moreover, the neocons want to do it all in the public spotlight. In the past, any nation that set out to
conquer others usually kept its plans largely secret. Indeed, the cold war neocons regularly blasted the Soviets for harboring a “secret plan” for world conquest.
Now here they are calling on the U.S. to blare out its own domineering intentions for all the world to [end page 53] hear. That hardly seems well calculated to
achieve the goal of hegemony. But it is calculated to foster the assertive, even swaggering, mood on the home front that the neocons long for. Journalist Ron
Suskind has noted that neocons always offer “a statement of enveloping peril and no hypothesis for any real solution.” They have no hope of finding a real
solution because they have no reason to look for one. Their story allows for success only as a fantasy. In reality, they expect to find nothing but an endless battle
against an enemy that can never be defeated. At least two prominent neocons have said it quite bluntly. Kenneth Adelman: “We should not try to convince people
that things are getting better.” Michael Ledeen: “The struggle against evil is going to go on forever.”40 This vision of endless conflict is not a conclusion drawn
from observing reality. It is both the premise and the goal of the neocons’ fantasy. Ultimately, it seems, endless resistance is what they really want.
Their call
for a unipolar world ensures a permanent state of conflict, so that the U.S. can go on forever proving its military
supremacy and promoting the “manly virtues” of militarism. They have to admit that the U.S., with its vastly
incomparable power, already has unprecedented security against any foreign army. So they must sound the alarm about a
shadowy new kind of enemy, one that can attack in novel, unexpected ways. They must make distant changes appear as huge imminent threats to America,
make the implausible seem plausible, and thus find new monsters to destroy. The neocons’ story does not allow for a final triumph of order because it is not
really about creating a politically calm, orderly world. It is about creating a society full of virtuous people who are willing and able to fight off the threatening forces
of social chaos. Having superior power is less important than proving superior power. That always requires an enemy.
Just as neocons need monsters
abroad, they need a frightened society at home. Only insecurity can justify their shrill call for a stronger nation (and a higher military budget). The
more dire
their warnings of insecurity, the more they can demand greater military strength and moral resolve. Every foreign
enemy is, above all, another occasion to prod the American people to overcome their anxiety, identify evil, fight
resolutely against it, and stand strong in defense of their highest values. Hegemony will do no good unless there is
challenge to be met, weakness to be conquered, evil to be overcome. The American people must actively seek hegemony and make sacrifices for it, to show that
they are striving to overcome their own weakness. So the quest for strength still demands a public confession of weakness, just as the neocons had demanded
two decades earlier when they warned of a Soviet nuclear attack through a “window of vulnerability.” The quest for strength through the structures of national
security still demands a public declaration of national insecurity. Otherwise, there is nothing to overcome. The more frightened the public, the more likely it is to
believe and enact the neocon story.
ZP ^ HC
18
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Link- Hegemony
Security ideology paints the outside world as threatening and dangerous. America’s
identity becomes a suspicion of any threats from others within and outside our
borders and forces the elimination of all that’s foreign
Tickner 95 (J. Ann, Professor of Policy at Holy Cross University, IR Theory Today)
national security is defined negatively, as protection against outside military threats, the sense of threat is
reinforced by the doctrine of state sovereignty, which strengthens the boundary between a secure community and a
dangerous external environment. For this reason, many critics of realism claim that, if security is to start with the individual, its ties to state
When
sovereignty must be severed. While E. H. Carr argued for he retention of the nation-state to satisfy people's need for identity, those who are critical state-centric
analysis point to the dangers of a political identity constructed out of xclusionary practices. In the present international system, security is tied to a nationalist
political identity which depends on the construction of those outsides as 'other' and therefore dangerous. (Walker 1990) David Campbell suggests that security
the boundaries of this statist identity demands the construction of 'danger' on the outside: Thus, threats to security in conventional thinking are all in the external
this discourse of danger to secure its identity and legitimation which depend on
the promise of security for its citizens. Citizenship becomes synonymous with loyalty and the elimination of all that is
foreign. Underscoring this distinction between citizens and people reinforced by these boundary distinctions, Walker argues that not until people,
rather than any citizens, are the primary subjects of security can a truly comprehensive security be achieved.
realm. Campbell claims that the state requires
The United States leads securitization of the global through it’s unilateral action.
Kelstrup 2004 [Morten Kepstrup, Writer and editor for Sage Publications “Globalization and Societal Insecurity”, Contemporary Security Analysis and
Copenhagen Peace Research, pg.115-6]
The conclusions of this chapter are that we
are experiencing processes of globalization, which – albeit in complex and contradictory ways –
implies a globalization of societal insecurity, and that the events of the 11 September 2001 mark an even stronger globalization of societal
insecurity in the form of terrorism. In addition, the events have triggered a massive US-dominated securitization with reference to
'humanity' and 'civilization'. This securitization has – with all its lack of clarity – led to a new, 'formative' moment in the global system. In this situation,
we see a competition between different strategies for global governance. The traditional UN-based strategy for global governance
seems challenged by a new, US-based strategy which rests on a combination of unilateralism and securitization. The
perspectives of this change are manifold. One perspective is that it might strengthen the formation of one global polity and that, in the future, we might get a
global political system in which we have a 'real politicization' of strategies for global governance.
ZP ^ HC
19
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Link- Middle East
The Affirmative addresses the Middle East in terms of geostrategic reasoning- This
discourse of danger justifies future “Crusades” into the region.
Toal 1996, (Gerard, PhD, Professor, Government and International Affairs at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, “The Effacement of Place? “
The critical study of geopolitical ideology can be usefully divided into the study of formal and practical geopolitical reasoning
(O Tuathail and Agnew, 1992). The former involves the study of the intellectual and texts of the geopolitical tradition. The latter
involves the study of the pragmatic practice of statecraft by national security elites and is concerned with the
strategies of inscription and re-inscription of identity and difference upon international politics. This takes the form of
the relentless construction of imaginary geographical boundaries between the self and the other, the domain of
freedom and the domain of danger, the inside realm of community and the outside realm of anarchy with the former always privileged over the
latter. In times of crisis this process of geopolitical scripting rigidly designates (in a Kripkean sense) the map of international
politics. Places become rigidly inscribed with sets of identities, descriptions, histories and intentions. The boundary between community
and anarchy becomes a Manichean divide. In the process the complex and ambiguous human geography of places and peoples
become eviscerated. States lose their quality as socially constructed geographic places (locations for the sustainment of life)
and become abstractions in a geopolitical power game (Dalby, 1990; O Tuathail and Agnew, 1992). The speeches and policy
statements of the Bush administration on the Gulf crisis are performances of practical geopolitical reasoning. Using the public record
of speeches and policy statements by top officials in the Bush administration, as chronicled in the US State Departments weekly publication Dispatch, one can
identify certain recurring, inscription strategies by which the crisis was rendered meaningful to the United States and world public. Only a few strategies can be
scripting strategies used in explanations of the ostensible reasons for US force
deployments (oil and the “new world order”), and explications of the historical and geographical meaning of the crisis (World War II and Vietnam
as systems of signification). Other differentiation strategies involving technology (Oriental primitivism versus Western high-tech “smart”
weapons), gender (the Iraqi “rape” of Kuwait versus the protective and socially “liberated” armies of the West), and
religious morality (Islamic barbarism versus Western “just war” morality) are also important but are not considered here.
examined here, so I have concentrated on the
Desire for stability in the Middle East represents violent unconscious desires for
global control
Engelhardt 2009 (Tom, co-founder of the American Empire Project and contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus, runs the Nation Institute's
TomDispatch.com, 3/1/09 Foreign Policy In Focus, “The Imperial Unconscious” Google)
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ recent testimony on the Afghan War before the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee: U.S. goals in Afghanistan must be 'modest, realistic,' and 'above all, there
must be an Afghan face on this war,' Gates said. 'The Afghan people must believe this is their war and we are there to help them. If they think we
Here, according to Bloomberg News, is part of
are there for our own purposes, then we will go the way of every other foreign army that has been in Afghanistan. Now, in our world, a statement like this seems
so obvious, so reasonable as to be beyond comment. And yet, stop a moment and think about this part of it: “There must be an Afghan face on this war.” U.S.
military and civilian officials used an equivalent phrase in 2005-2006 when things were going really, really wrong in
Iraq. It was then commonplace — and no less unremarked upon — for them to urgently suggest that an “Iraqi face” be put on
events there. Evidently back in vogue for a different war, the phrase is revelatory — and oddly blunt. As an image, there’s really only one
way to understand it (not that anyone here stops to do so). After all, what does it mean to “put a face” on something that assumedly already has a face? In this
case, it
has to mean putting an Afghan mask over what we know to be the actual “face” of the Afghan War — ours — a
foreign face that men like Gates recognize, quite correctly, is not the one most Afghans want to see. It’s hardly
surprising that the Secretary of Defense would pick up such a phrase, part of Washington’s everyday arsenal of
words and images when it comes to geopolitics, power, and war. And yet, make no mistake, this is Empire-speak, Americanstyle. It’s the language — behind which lies a deeper structure of argument and thought — that is essential to
Washington’s vision of itself as a planet-straddling goliath. Think of that “Afghan face” mask, in fact, as part of the
flotsam and jetsam that regularly bubbles up from the American imperial unconscious. Of course, words create realities
even though such language, in all its strangeness, essentially passes unnoticed here. Largely uncommented upon, it helps
normalize American practices in the world, comfortably shielding us from certain global realities; but it also has the
potential to blind us to those realities, which, in perilous times, can be dangerous indeed. So let’s consider just a few entries in
what might be thought of as The Dictionary of American Empire-Speak.
ZP ^ HC
20
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Link- Middle East
The affirmative’s representations of the Middle East represent it as a conflict-prone
region to be securitized against.
Bilgin, 2005 (Pinar, PhD International Politics, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, Department of International Relations Bilkent Univ., Regional Security
in the Middle East p. 1)
Throughout the twentieth century, the Middle East remained as an arena of incessant conflict attracting global
attention. As the recent developments in Israel/Palestine and the US-led war on Iraq have showed, it is difficult to exaggerate the
signifcance of Middle Eastern insecurities for world politics. By adopting a critical approach to re-think security in the
Middle East, this study addresses an issue that continues to attract the attention of students of world politics. Focusing on
the constitutive relationship between (inventing) regions, and (conceptions and practices of) security, the study argues that the current state of 'regional
security' - often a euphemism for regional insecurities - has its roots in practices that have throughout history been shaped by its
various representations - the geopolitical inventions of security. In doing this, it lays out the contours of a framework for
thinking differently about regional security in the Middle East. Prevailing approaches to regional security have had
their origins in the security concerns and interests of Western states, mainly the United States. The implication of this
Western bias in security thinking within the Middle Eastern context has been that much of the thinking done on
regional security in the Middle East has been based on Western conceptions of 'security'. During the Cold War what was
meant by 'security in the Middle East' was maintaining the security of Western (mostly US) interests in this part of the world and
its military defence against other external actors (such as the Soviet Union that could jeopardise the regional and/or global status quo). Western security
interests in the Middle East during the Cold War era could be summed up as the unhindered flow of oil at reasonable prices, the
cessation of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the prevention of the emergence of any regional hegemon, and the maintenance of
'friendly' regimes that were sensitive to these concerns. This was (and still is) a top-down conception of security that was militaryfocused, directed outwards and privileged the maintenance of stability. Let us take a brief look at these characteristics. The Cold War
approach to regional security in the Middle East was top-down because threats to security were defined largely from the perspective of
external powers rather than regional states or peoples. In the eyes of British and US defence planners, communist infiltration and Soviet
intervention constituted the greatest threats to security in the Middle East during the Cold War. The way to enhance regional security, they argued,
was for regional states to enter into alliances with the West. Two security umbrella schemes, the Middle East Defence Organisation (1951) and the
Baghdad Pact (1955), were designed for this purpose. Although there were regional states such as Iraq (until the 1958 coup), Iran (until the 1978-79 revolution),
Saudi Arabia, Israel and Turkey that shared this perception of security to a certain extent, many Arab policy-makers begged to differ. Traces of
this top-down thinking are still prevalent in the US approach to security in the 'Middle East'. During the 1990s, in following a
policy of dual containment US policy-makers presented Iran and Iraq as the main threats to regional security largely due to their military
capabilities and the revisionist character of their regimes that were not subservient to US interests. In the aftermath of the
events of September 11 US policy-makers have focused on 'terrorism' as a major threat to security in the Middle East and elsewhere. Yet, US policy so far
has been one of 'confronting the symptoms rather than the cause' (Zunes 2002:237) as it has focused on the military
dimension of security (to the neglect of the socio-economic one) and relied on military tools (as with the war on Iraq)
in addressing these threats. This is not to underestimate the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction or terrorism to global and regional security. Rather,
the point is that these top-down perspectives, while revealing certain aspects of regional insecurity at the same time hinder
others. For example, societal and environmental problems caused by resource scarcity do not only threaten the security of individual human
beings but also exacerbate existing conflicts (as with the struggle over water resources in Israel/Palestine; see Sosland 2002). Besides, the lives of
women in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia were made insecure not only by the threat caused by Iraq's military capabilities,
but also because of the conservative character of their own regimes that restrict women's rights under the cloak of religious tradition.
For, it is women who suffer disproportionately as a result of militarism and the channelling of valuable resources into
defence budgets instead of education and health (see Mernissi 1993). What is more, the measures that are adopted to meet such military
threats sometimes constitute threats to the security of individuals and social groups. The sanctions regime adopted to rid Iraq of
weapons of mass destruction has caused a problem of food insecurity for Iraqi people during the 1990s. In the aftermath of the US-led war on Iraq, Iraqi people
are still far from meeting their daily needs. Indeed, it is estimated that if it were not for the monthly basket distributed as part of the United Nations' 'Oil for Food'
programme, 'approximately 80 percent of the Iraqi population would become vulnerable to food insecurity' (Hurd 2003). Such
into analyses on regional security in the Middle East.
ZP ^ HC
concerns rarely make it
21
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Link- Middle East
The AFFs security discourse regarding the Middle East results in a language of
universalism, dooming us to a violent cycle of global intervention.
Noorani, 2005. (Yaseen Noorani is a Lecturer in Arabic Literature, Islamic and Middle East Studies, University of Edinburgh. “The Rhetoric of Security,”
The New Centennial Review 5.1, 2005.)
Bush here invokes the recurrent American anxiety that Americans are too individualistic, too materialistic, and therefore lacking in solidarity and conviction. This
is the worry that America has become a collection of self-centered consumers motivated by private wants rather than real agency. The war on terror allows
America to show that this is not so, and to make it not so. Through the war on terror, Americans can manifest their agency and
solidarity by empowering the U.S. government to fulfill their agency and solidarity by leading the world to peace. To
do this, however, they must engage in the war themselves by recognizing the threat of terrorism and by feeling the
fear for it, deeply. Only in this way can they redeem themselves from this fear through the moral struggle waged on their behalf by the government.
Conversely, it is no accident that the Middle East is the source of the threat they must fear. Recall that Schmitt stipulates that the
enemy is "the other, the stranger . . . existentially something different and alien" [End Page 36] (1996, 27). This is the
irreducible enemy, whom one can only, if conflict arises, fight to the death. The Middle East can be cast as this sort of
enemy because it can be easily endowed with characteristics that make it the antipode of the United States,
intrinsically violent and irrational. But it is, at the same time, a region of peoples yearning for freedom who can be redeemed through their submission
to moral order and brought into the fold of civilization. So in order to redeem the Middle East and ourselves from fear and violence,
we must confront the Middle East for the foreseeable future with fear and violence. It is important to recognize that
the rhetoric of security with its war on terrorism is not a program for action, but a discourse that justifies actions. The
United States is not bound to take any specific action implied by its rhetoric. But this rhetoric gives the United States the prerogative to take
whatever actions it decides upon for whatever purpose as long as these actions come within the rhetoric's purview.
Judged by its own standards, the rhetoric of security is counterproductive. It increases fear while claiming that the goal is to
eliminate fear. It increases insecurity by pronouncing ever broader areas of life to be in need of security. It increases
political antagonism by justifying U.S. interests in a language of universalism. It increases enmity toward the United
States by according the United States a special status over and above all other nations. The war against terror itself
is a notional war that has no existence except as an umbrella term for various military and police actions . According to a
report published by the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army, "the global war on terrorism as currently defined and waged is dangerously indiscriminate
and ambitious" (Record 2003, 41). This assessment assumes that the actions comprehended under the rubric of the "war on terrorism" are designed to achieve a
coherent military objective. The impossible "absolute security," feared by the report's author to be the "hopeless quest" of current policy (46), may be useless as
a strategic objective, but it is eminently effective in organizing a rhetoric designed to justify an open-ended series of hegemonic actions. The rhetoric of
security, then, provides the moral framework for U.S. political hegemony through its grounding in the idea of national
agency and in the absolute opposition between the state of civility and the state of [End Page 37] war. Designating the United
States as the embodiment of the world order's underlying principle and the guarantor of the world order's existence, this rhetoric places both the
United States and terrorism outside the normative relations that should inhere within the world order as a whole. The
United States is the supreme agent of the world's war against war; other nations must simply choose sides. As long as
war threatens to dissolve the peaceful order of nations, these nations must submit to the politics of "the one, instead of the many." They must accept the United
States as "something godlike," in that in questions of its own security—which are questions of the world's security—they can have no authority to influence or
Other nations must, for the foreseeable future, suspend their
agency when it comes to their existence. Therefore, the rhetoric of security allows the United States to totalize world
politics within itself in a manner that extends from the relations among states down to the inner moral struggle
experienced by every human being.
oppose its actions. These questions can be decided by the United States alone.
ZP ^ HC
22
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Link- Orientalism
Their orientalist epistemology constructs the world in violent, racist dichotomies
Gourgouris 2006 [Stathis Gourgouris Social Text 87, Vol. 24, No. 2, Summer 2006, Duke University Press]
both these registers are, in the first instance, constitutively intertwined. Namely, the broader
epistemological and allegorical register is as real and historical as the one that pertains to actual social times and
spaces. Conversely, a profound allegorical and epistemological force animates and surely exceeds the explicit boundaries of
the social dimensions that are easily recognizable in the specific histories and geographies of orientalist practices.
One need only consider how complex and ubiquitous — indeed, practically limitless — is the racist prejudice that
configures the Arab as terrorist, which permeates the social and political imagination in America, with very real and
brutal consequences. In the second instance, both these registers, intertwined as they are, are fundamentally political in nature. By this I mean: they
are both determined by, but also determining of, a whole complex of relations of power and violent contention, a
social dynamics of domination, antagonism, and resistance, which has been linked from the outset (that is, from
when Links - Orientalismemerged as a bona fide discipline in the nineteenth century) to a vast network of colonialist
and, later, imperialist practices. The tremendous anxiety and animosity that Said‘s book continues to provoke in certain quarters are certainly due to
It is important to understand that
the immanent political stakes of its object of inquiry, despite the fact that most critiques from such quarters compulsively displace their source of animosity to the
author himself.
ZP ^ HC
23
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Links- Orientalism
American discourse on Asian nations normalizes them as a “threatening other”—
withdrawal doesn’t stop this realist construction inherent in American policymakers.
Pan 2004 (Chengxin Pan, School of international and Political Studies, The ‘China Threat’ in American Self-Imagination: The Discursive Construction,
http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst;jsessionid=M1YVnSQnVSKjfc64wGDLfJYxh2JxkyN4VF9vqT3g2TNC7TjFXGg1!-685608593!730112469?docId=5008295085)
We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are. China and its relationship with the United States has long been a fascinating
subject of study in the mainstream U.S. international relations community. This is reflected, for example, in the current heated debates over
whether China is primarily a strategic threat to or a market bonanza for the United States and whether containment or
engagement is the best way to deal with it. (1) While U.S. China scholars argue fiercely over "what China precisely is," their debates have
been underpinned by some common ground, especially in terms of a positivist epistemology. Firstly, they believe that China is ultimately a
knowable object, whose reality can be, and ought to be, empirically revealed by scientific means. For example, after expressing his dissatisfaction with often
conflicting Western perceptions of China, David M. Lampton, former president of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, suggests that "it is time to
step back and look at where China is today, where it might be going, and what consequences that direction will hold for the rest of the world." (2) Like many other
China scholars, Lampton views his object of study as essentially "something we can stand back from and observe with clinical detachment." (3) Secondly,
associated with the first assumption, it is commonly believed that China scholars merely serve as "disinterested observers" and that their studies of China are
neutral, passive descriptions of reality. And thirdly, in pondering whether China poses a threat or offers an opportunity to the United States, they rarely raise the
question of "what the United States is." That is, the meaning of the United States is believed to be certain and beyond doubt. I do not dismiss altogether the
conventional ways of debating China. It is not the purpose of this article to venture my own "observation" of "where China is today," nor to join the "containment"
versus "engagement" debate per se. Rather, I want to contribute to a novel dimension of the China debate by questioning the seemingly unproblematic
assumptions shared by most China scholars in the mainstream IR community in the United States. To perform this task, I will focus attention on a particularly
significant component of the China debate; namely, the "China threat" literature. More specifically, I want to argue that U.S.
conceptions of China as a
threatening other are always intrinsically linked to how U.S. policymakers/mainstream China specialists see
themselves (as representatives of the indispensable, security-conscious nation, for example). As such, they are not
value-free, objective descriptions of an independent, preexisting Chinese reality out there, but are better understood
as a kind of normative, meaning-giving practice that often legitimates power politics in U.S.-China relations and helps
transform the "China threat" into social reality. In other words, it is self-fulfilling in practice, and is always part of the
"China threat" problem it purports merely to describe. In doing so, I seek to bring to the fore two interconnected themes of self/other
constructions and of theory as practice inherent in the "China threat" literature--themes that have been overridden and rendered largely invisible by those
common positivist assumptions. These themes are of course nothing new nor peculiar to the "China threat" literature. They have been identified elsewhere by
critics of some conventional fields of study such as ethnography, anthropology, oriental studies, political science, and international relations. (4) Yet, so far,
the
China field in the West in general and the U.S. "China threat" literature in particular have shown remarkable
resistance to systematic critical reflection on both their normative status as discursive practice and their enormous
practical implications for international politics. (5) It is in this context that this article seeks to make a contribution. I begin with a brief survey of
the "China threat" argument in contemporary U.S. international relations literature, followed by an investigation of how this particular argument about China is
a discursive construction of other, which is predicated on the predominant way in which the United States imagines
itself as the universal, indispensable nation-state in constant need of absolute certainty and security. Finally, this
article will illustrate some of the dangerous practical consequences of the "China threat" discourse for contemporary
U.S.-China relations, particularly with regard to the 1995-1996 Taiwan Strait missile crisis and the 2001 spy-plane incident.
ZP ^ HC
24
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Link- Peace
Peace is the overall concept of security. Dangers are the product of our own actions
forcing peace threats to become risks of security.
Waever 2004(Ole Weaver, Ph.D. in Political Science and Professor of International Relations at COPRI “Peace and Security”, Contemporary Security
Analysis and Copenhagen Peace Research, pg.62-63)
After the end of the Cold War, peace
reappeared as a Western concept. The 'absolute' concept was revalued when it seemed
closer to realisation. With the 'end of history' in sight, liberalism mutated back from scepticist, Popperian Cold War liberalism to the more evolutionary and
optimist belief in its own truth. When the task of the West changed from fighting a Cold War to building a 'new world order', it suddenly remembered that it
actually had a long-term vision of peace as democracy (and/or liberalism) (Rasmussen 2001; Williams 2001). President Bush senior declared in 1989, 'Once
again, it is a time for peace' (quoted by Rasmussen 2001: 341). The famous 'New World Order' speech at the end of the Gulf War (March 6, 1991) was phrased
mostly in terms of peace – 'enduring peace must be our mission'. NATO enlarge- ment is so hard for Russia and others to oppose because it is presented
apolitically as the mere expansion of the democratic peace community (Williams 2001). The war on terror after 11 September 2001 has surpris- ingly few
references to either peace or security – operation 'Enduring Freedom' – but President George W. Bush's address on 7 October 2001 ended with 'Peace and
freedom will prevail', and the (in)famous 'axis of evil' was presented (29 January, 2002) in terms of a 'threat to peace'. Peace has become the overarching
Security in turn, is gradually swallowed up into a generalised concern about 'risk'.
Society's reflections on itself are increasingly in terms of risk ('risk society'). More and more dangers are the product
of our own actions, and fewer and fewer attributable to forces completely external to ourselves – thus threats become
risks (Luhmann 1990). This goes for forms of production and their effects on the environment, and it goes for international
affairs, where it is hard to see the war on terrorism as a pure reaction to something coming to the West from
elsewhere. Western actions in relation to Middle East peace processes, religion, migration and global economic
policy are part of what might produce future terrorism. The short-term reaction to the 11 September attacks on the USA in 2001 might be a
concept of the two examined in this chapter.
re-assertion of single-minded aspirations for absolute security with little concern for liberty and for boomerang effects on future security (Bigo 2002), but in
general debates, the 'risk' way of thinking about international affairs is making itself increasingly felt. We have seen during
the last twenty years a spread of the originally specifically international concept of security in its securitisation
function to more and more spheres of 'domestic' life, and now society takes its revenge by transforming the concept
of security along lines of risk thinking (Waever 2002). Politically, the concepts of peace and security are changing places in
these years. 'Security studies' and 'peace research' were shaped in important ways by the particular Cold War context, though not the way it is often implied
in fast politicians' statements about the post-Cold War irrelevance of peace research. 'Peace research' and 'security studies' (or rather 'strategic
studies') meant, respectively, to oppose or to accept the official Western policy problematique. Today, it is the other way
round. 'Peace research' might be dated because peace is so apologetic as to be intellectually uninteresting, while
'security' is potentially the name of a radical, subversive agenda.
ZP ^ HC
25
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Link- Rhetoric
The affirmative defends plan passage to protect us from threats securitizing the
global system
Kelstrup 2004 (Morten Kepstrup, Writer and editor for Sage Publications, “Globalization and Societal Insecurity”, Contemporary Security Analysis and
Copenhagen Peace Research, pg.111-2)
The concept of securitization seems very useful in grasping some phenomena related to security which otherwise are difficult to identify. Basically,
securitization can be understood as 'the intersubjective establishment of an existential threat with a saliency sufficient
to have substantial political effects' (Buzau et al. 1998: 25). Securitization might be initiated through a speech act where a
securitizing actor designates a threat to a specified referent object and declares an existential threat implying a right
to use extraordinary means to fence it off. The issue is securitized – becomes a security issue, a part of what Is 'security' –'if the
relevant audience accepts this claim and thus grants the actor a right to violate rules that otherwise would bind . (Waver
2000: 251) It was, in some ways, a part of the events of 11 September (as they were interpreted) that they included a securitization of the new 'mass terrorism':
the attacks – and the threat which such attacks represent – were articulated through 'speech acts' by important actors, not least the president of the United
States, as a threat which made extraordinary action legitimate. This `securitization move' by the American government was followed by most other state leaders
and other important representatives in most societies. There were exceptions, but the reactions to 11 September were remarkable in articulating a 'new' security
The 'extraordinary actions' for which the `securitizing actor(s)' sought acceptance and thus some kind of
legitimacy were, in particular, the declared 'war against terror', and this was – at least to a large extent – accepted by 'the relevant audience'.
situation.
Said differently: with the new terrorism we have experienced not only a new dimension in the globalization of societal insecurity. We have also experienced what
might be seen as rather remarkable 'successful' securitization in the global system.
ZP ^ HC
26
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Link- South Korea
The affirmative withdraws from South Korea to securitize themselves from the
nuclear threats of North Korea
Bleiker 2003 (Roland Bleiker, Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland, 2003 “A Rogue Is A Rogue Is A Rogue: US Foreign
Policy And The Korean Nuclear Crisis,” International Affairs, Volume 79, Issue 4, July, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Academic Search Elite, p.
736-737)
This article has examined the underlying patterns that shaped the two Korean nuclear crises of the last decade. In each case, in 1993–4 and in 2002–3, the crisis
allegedly emerged suddenly and was largely attributed to North Korea’s problematic behaviour, most notably to its nuclear brinkmanship. But a more thorough
analysis of the events reveals a far more complex picture. Given the deeply entrenched antagonistic Cold War atmosphere on the peninsula, the most recent
crisis hardly comes as a surprise. Indeed, a crisis is always already present: the question is simply when and how it is perceived
and represented as such. Responsibility for the nuclear crisis is equally blurred. North Korea undoubtedly bears a
large part of it. Pyongyang has demonstrated repeatedly that it does not shy away from generating tension to promote its own interests, particularly when
the survival of the regime is at stake. Even a primitive North Korean nuclear programme poses a grave threat to the region, not least because it could unleash a
new nuclear arms race. But Pyongyang’s actions have not taken place in a vacuum. They occurred in response to internal as well as external circumstances.
The central point to keep in mind here is that North Korea has been subject to over half a century of clear and
repeated American nuclear threats. Few decision-makers and defence analysts realize the extent to which these threats have shaped
the security dilemmas on the peninsula. If one steps back from the immediate and highly emotional ideological context that still dominates
security interactions on the peninsula, then the attitude and behaviour of North Korea and the US bear striking similarities. Both have
contributed a great deal to each other’s fears. Both have also used their fears to justify aggressive military postures.
And both rely on a strikingly similar form of crisis diplomacy. But the ensuing interactive dynamics are largely hidden behind a rationalized
security policy that presents threats in a one-dimensional manner. The image of North Korea as an evil and unpredictable rogue state is so deeply entrenched
that any crisis can easily be attributed to Pyongyang’s problematic actions, even in the face of contradictory evidence. Keeping up this image, and the threat
projections that are associated with it, requires constant work. The specialized discourse on security and national defence contributes
to the performance of this task. It presents threats in a highly technical manner and in a jargon-ridden language that
is inaccessible to all but a few military experts. As a result, a very subjective and largely one-sided interpretation of security dilemmas has come
to be accepted as real and politically legitimate. [end page 736] Articles on defence issues usually end with policy recommendations. Not so this one, even
though much could be said about a great many crucial issues, such as the possibility of involving China as a way of reaching a compromise between
Pyongyang’s insistence on bilateral negotiations and Washington’s preference for a multilateral approach. But trying
patterns of Korea’s security dilemmas seems a big enough task on its own.
ZP ^ HC
to identify the underlying
27
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Link- Terrorism
Their claims to knowledge about terrorism are not neutral or objective, but rather motivated
in terms of the normative agenda of terrorism studies as a discipline.
Burke, 2008. (Burke, University of New South Wales, 2008[Anthony, “The end of terrorism studies”, Critical Studies on Terrorism, Volume 1, Issue 1 April
2008 , pages 37 – 49)
Ever since the early works of Michel Foucault, we have known that no knowledge is neutral, however scientific its appearance. We now
know, in contrast to the positivistic and instrumental assumptions of natural science, that knowledge is not a mirror of the real nor a tool that lies reliably in the
hands of man. It was not what Francis Bacon foretold modern science to be: a vehicle for the restoration of man's 'empire over creation' (Bacon 1620/1952).
Instead, we
all too often find knowledge serving power as it conceals its political function within claims to objectivity and
expertise. We find that it harbours secrets: its discourse of expertise and epistemological mastery, of policy rationality, sitting visibly above a silent bedrock of
assumptions about the nature of culture, the political, the necessary and the good. These it reinforces, without making them audibleKnowledge, argued Foucault,
is utterly intertwined with the exercise and production of power, but it is not a pre-existing knowledge that serves a pre-existing power, whose forms we
understand and accept. Rather, through a series of complex and conflictual operations, it produces and limits the possibility for each, creates a working system of
relations between them, and sets a machinery into operation. Knowledge classifies, imagines, orders and constructs. Foucault conceived this theory as one that
could be applied across the human and social sciences. My interest, on the occasion of the inauguration of a journal entitled Critical Studies on Terrorism, is in a
particular, global social field which terrorism and counter-terrorism as practices traverse, affect and transform. This social field
intersects with a relatively new social science known as 'terrorism studies', one drawing its methodologies and assumptions from other social sciences
(sociology, political science, security studies) and that claims an authoritative understanding of a relatively stable object. Of particular salience is the fact that
terrorism studies is not dominated institutionally by universities so much as by think tanks, policy institutes,
intelligence agencies, militaries, media organizations, and the ideological activity of political parties and ministers. The
traditions of critical scholarship possible in the university here yield to a more immediate and pragmatic concern with effectiveness. Even as it asserts
ontological certainty, the knowledge of terrorists and terrorism produced in such institutions is thoroughly engaged.
What then, can this tell us about 'terrorism'? About (critical) 'terrorism studies'? What is the nature of this intellectual field and
its object, terror? Critical terrorism studies has insinuated itself into an intellectual, institutional and political space
shaped by 'terrorism' and 'counter-terrorism'. There it exists, uneasily and problematically, pulled back and forth
between the disparate (and often antithetical) tasks of study, critique and policy. There it must consider its purposes,
forms and functions; the kind of 'power' it wants its 'knowledge' to become. This, to me, means that - like terrorism
itself - terrorism studies cannot ignore its normative impact. However, cautiously and reflexively, it must set out and
pursue a normative agenda.
ZP ^ HC
28
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Links- Terrorism
The discourse of terrorism and threats is an instance of securitization
Der Derian 1995 (James Der Derian, Director of the Global Security Program and Research Professor of International Studies at the Watson Institute
for International Studies at Brown University, “Arms, Hostages, and the Importance of Shredding in Earnest: Reading the National Security Culture (II),” Facts,
Factoids, and the Factotum of Terrorism, Duke University Press, JSTOR, AD: 7/10/09)
Just as Nietzsche alleged the precession of meaning to facts, North-the factotum of terror and counter-terror-preceded the factoids of terrorism. To be sure,
there are some commonly accepted "facts" about international terrorism. A selection of Rand corporation documents on international
terrorism reveals the following: over the last ten years terrorists have seized over fifty embassies and consulates, held the oil
ministers of eleven states hostage; kidnapped hundreds of diplomats, businessmen and journalists; made several hundred
million dollars in ransom money; assassinated Lord Mountbatten and President Sadat and the former premier of Italy, attempted to assassinate the president of France, the Pope, and
Terrorist incidents and their severity have
increased over the last ten years, but most terrorist actions involve few or no casualties: they are symbolic acts of
violence. Com-pared to the ruthlessness and destructiveness of states, or even to natural disasters, terrorism is a
mere nuisance. Yet it is cause for crises of state, media spasms on a seismic scale, and the hyper-production of institutes, conferences, and books on
terrorism. Why is this? International terrorism does represent a crisis, but not in terms of body-counts or a revolutionary
threat to the states-system. On a political level, the simulacrum of terrorism, that is, the production of a hyperreal
threat of violence, anticipates a crisis of legitimation.9W hat this means is that international terrorism is not a
symptom or a cause or an effect of this systemic crisis: it has become a spectacular, micro-cosmic simulation.
International terrorism simulates a legitimating crisis of the international order; conversely, counter-terrorism is a counterAlexander Haig (a near miss with a rocket launcher when he was supreme allied commander of NATO).
simulation, an attempt to engender a new disciplinary order which can save the dominant legitimacy principle of international relations.
ZP ^ HC
29
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Impact- Root Cause
The security logic the affirmative relies on is the cause of their harms.
Doty 1996 (Roxanne Doty, Prof. of Political Science at ASU [Woot], 1996, “Imperial Encounters: The Politics of Representations in North-South Relations”,
166-71)
One of the
deadly traces that have been deposited in our current "reality" and that figures prominently in this study is "race." The
inventory of this trace has been systematically ignored by international relations scholarship. It seems fair to suggest that most
international relations scholars as well as makers of foreign policy would suggest that "race" is not even a relevant issue in
global politics. Some might concede that while "race" may have been a significant factor internationally during particular historical periods-as a justification
for colonialism, for example - "we" are past that now. The racial hierarchy that once prevailed internationally simply no longer exists. To dwell upon
"race" as an international issue is an unproductive, needless rehash of history. Adlai Stevenson rather crudely summed up this
position when he complained that he was impatiently waiting for the time "when the last black-faced comedian has quit
preaching about colonialism so the United Nations could move on to the more crucial issues like disarmament" (quoted
in Noer 1985: 84). This view is unfortunately, although subtly, reflected in the very definition of the field of international relations,
whose central problems and categories have been framed in such a way as to preclude investigation into categories
such as "race" that do not fit neatly within the bounds of prevailing conceptions of theory and explanation and the
legitimate methods with which to pursue them. As Walker (1989) points out, current international relations research agendas are framed within
an understanding that presumes certain ontological issues have been resolved. Having already resolved the questions of the "real" and relevant entities,
international relations scholars generally proceed to analyze the world with an eye toward becoming a "real science." What has been defined as "real" and
however, racialized identities historically have been inextricably linked with
power, agency, reason, morality, and understandings of "self" and "other."' When we invoke these terms in certain contexts, we also
silently invoke traces of previous racial distinctions. For example, Goldberg (1993: 164) suggests that the conceptual division of the world whereby the "third
world" is the world of tradition, irrationality, overpopulation, disorder, and chaos assumes a racial character that
perpetuates, both conceptually and actually, relations of domination, subjugation, and exclusion. Excluding the issue of
representation enables the continuation of this and obscures the important relationship between representation,
power, and agency. The issue of agency in international affairs appears in the literature in various ways, ranging from classical realism's subjectivist
relevant has not included race. As this study suggests,
privileging of human agents to neorealism's behavioralist privileging of the state as agent to the more recent focus on the "agent-structure problem" by
proponents of structuration theory (e.g., Wendt [19871, Dessler 119891). What these accounts have in common is their exclusion of the issue of representation.
The presumption is made that agency ultimately refers back to some prediscursive subject, even if that subject is socially constructed within the context of
political, social, and economic structures. In contrast, the cases examined in this study suggest that the question of agency is one of how practices of
representation create meaning and identities and thereby create the very possibility for agency. As Judith Butler (1990: 142-49) makes clear and as the empirical
cases examined here suggest, identity and agency are both effects, not preexisting conditions of being. Such an antiessentialist understanding does not depend
upon foundational categories -an inner psychological self, for example. Rather, identity is reconceptualized as simultaneously a practice and an effect that is
always in the process of being constructed through signifying practices that expel the surplus meanings that would expose the failure of identity as such. For
example, through a process of repetition, U.S. and British discourses constructed as natural and given the oppositional dichotomy between the uncivilized,
barbaric "other" and the civilized, democratic "self" even while they both engaged in the oppression and brutalization of "others." The Spector of the "other" was
always within the "self." The proliferation of discourse in times of crisis illustrates an attempt to expel the "other," to make natural
and unproblematic the boundaries between the inside and the outside. This in turn suggests that identity and therefore the agency that is connected
with identity are inextricably linked to representational practices. It follows that any meaningful discussion of agency must perforce be a
discussion of representation. The representational practices that construct particular identities have serious ramifications for agency. While this study
suggests that "race" historically has been a central marker of identity, it also suggests that identity construction takes place along several dimensions. Racial
categories often have worked together with gendered categories as well as with analogies to parent/child oppositions and animal metaphors. Each of these
dimensions has varying significance at different times and enables a wide variety of practices. In examining the construction of racialized identities, it is not
enough to suggest that social identities are constructed on the basis of shared understandings within a community: shared understandings regarding institutional
rules, social norms, and selfexpectations of individuals in that community. It is not enough to examine the shared social criteria by which one identity is
distinguished from another. Two additional elements must be considered: power and truth. "Race" has not just been about certain rules and resources facilitating
the agency of some social groups and denying or placing severe limitations on the agency of other social groups. Though it has been about these things, this is
only one aspect of what "race" has historically been about. "Race" has most fundamentally been about being human. Racist discourses historically
have constructed different kinds and degrees of humanness through representational practices that have claimed to be and have been
accepted as "true" and accurate representations of "reality." Racist discourses highlight, perhaps more than any other, the inextricable link
between power and truth or power and knowledge. A theory of agency in international relations, if it is to incorporate issues such as "race," must address the
relationship between power and truth. This realization in turn implies a reconceptualization of power and how it works that transcends those present in existing
theories of international relations. The cases examined in this study attest to the importance of representational practices and the power that inheres in them. The
infinity of traces that leave no inventory continue to play a significant part in contemporary constructions of "reality." This is not to suggest that representations
have been static. Static implies the possibility of fixedness, when what I mean to suggest is an inherent fragility and instability to the meanings and identities that
have been constructed in the various discourses I examined. For example, to characterize the South as "uncivilized" or "unfit for self-government" is no longer an
acceptable representation. This is not, however, because the meanings of these terms were at one time fixed and stable. As I illustrated, what these signifiers
signified was always deferred. Partial fixation was the result of their being anchored by some exemplary mode of being that was itself constructed at the power/
knowledge nexus: the white male at the turn of the century, the United States after World War II. Bhabha stresses "the wide range of the stereotype, from the
loyal servant to Satan, from the loved to the hated; a shifting of subject positions in the circulation of colonial power" (1983: 31). The shifting subject positions-
ZP ^ HC
30
SCFI 2010
Team Jabob & the STG’s
Securitization K
___ of ___
from uncivilized native to quasi state to traditional "man" and society, for example -are all partial fixations that have enabled the exercise of various and multiple
forms of power. Nor do previous oppositions entirely disappear. What remains is an infinity of traces from prior representations that themselves have been
founded not on pure presences but on differance. "The present becomes the sign of the sign, the trace of the trace," Derrida writes (1982: 24). Differance makes
possible the chain of differing and deferring (the continuity) as well as the endless substitution (the discontinuity) of names that are inscribed and reinscribed as
pure presence, the center of the structure that itself escapes structurality. North-South relations have been constituted as a structure of deferral. The center of the
structure (alternatively white man, modern man, the United States, the West, real states) has never been absolutely present outside a system of differences. It
has itself been constituted as trace-the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates itself, displaces itself, refers itself (ibid.). Because the center is not a fixed locus
but a function in which an infinite number of sign substitutions come into play, the domain and play of signification is extended indefinitely (Derrida 1978: z8o).
This both opens up and limits possibilities, generates alternative sites of meanings and political resistances that give rise to practices of reinscription that seek to
reaffirm identities and relationships. The inherently incomplete and open nature of discourse makes this reaffirmation an ongoing and never finally completed
project. In this study I have sought, through an engagement with various discourses in which claims to truth have been staked, to challenge the validity of the
structures of meaning and to make visible their complicity with practices of power and domination. By examining the ways in which structures of meaning have
been associated with imperial practices, I have suggested that the
construction of meaning and the construction of social, political, and
economic power are inextricably linked. This suggests an ethical dimension to making meaning and an ethical imperative that is
incumbent upon those who toil in the construction of structures of meaning. This is especially urgent in North-South relations today: one does not have to
search very far to find a continuing complicity with colonial representations that ranges from a politics of silence and neglect
to constructions of terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism, international drug trafficking, and Southern immigration to the North as new
threats to global stability and peace. The political stakes raised by this analysis revolve around the question of being able to "get beyond" the
representations or speak outside of the discourses that historically have constructed the North and the South. I do not believe that there are any pure alternatives
by which we can escape the infinity of traces to which Gramsci refers. Nor do I wish to suggest that we are always hopelessly imprisoned in a dominant and allpervasive discourse. Before this question can be answered-indeed, before we can even proceed to attempt an answer-attention must
be given to the politics of representation. The price that international relations scholarship pays for its inattention to the issue of
representation is perpetuation of the dominant modes of making meaning and deferral of its responsibility and complicity in dominant
representations.
ZP ^ HC
31
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Impact- Dehumanization
The affirmative’s securitizing representations reduce human freedom causing
dehumanization and self-immolation in the interests of national security
Dillon 1996 (Michael is a professor of politics at the University of Lancaster, Politics of Security, p. 26)
Everything, for example, has now become possible. But what human
being seems most impelled to do with the power of its actions is
to turn itself into a species; not merely an animal species, nor even a species of currency or consumption (which amount to the same thing), but a mere
species of calculation. For only by reducing itself to an index of calculation does it seem capable of constructing that political arithmetic by
which it can secure the security globalised Western thought insists upon , and which a world made increasingly unpredictable by the
very way human being acts into it now seem to require. Yet, the very rage for calculability which securing security incites is precisely also what
reduces human freedom, inducing either despair or the surrender of what is human to the de-humanizing calculative
logic of what seems to be necessary to secure security. I think, then, that Hannah Arendt was right when she saw late modern
humankind caught in a dangerous world-destroying cleft between a belief that everything is possible and a
willingness to surrender itself to so-called laws of necessity (calculability itself) which would make everything
possible. That it was, in short, characterized by a combination of reckless omnipotence and reckless despair. But I also think that things have gone one stage
further- the surrender to the necessity of realizing everything that is possible- and that this found its paradigmatic expression for example in the deterrent security
everything up to and including self-immolation not only became possible but actually
necessary in the interests of (inter)national security. The logic persists in the metaphysical core of modern politicsthe axiom of Inter-state security relations, popularized for example, through strategic discourse- even if the details
have changed.
policies of the Cold War; where
Securitization hollows out humanity, creating a world full of dehumanization
Dillon 1999 (MICHAEL DILLON, researcher of problematisation of politics, security and war from the perspective of continental philosophy and written
extensively on such subjects. UNIVERSITY OF LANCASTER, “ANOTHER JUSTICE” POLITICAL THEORY VOL. 27, NO. 2, APRILL 1999, JSTOR)
Otherness is born(e) within the self as an integral part of itself and in such a way that it always remains an inherent stranger to itself." It derives from the lack,
absence, or ineradicable incompleteness which comes from having no security of tenure within or over that of which the self is a particular hermeneutical
manifestation; namely, being itself. The point about the human, betrayed by this absence, is precisely that it is not sovereignly
self-possessed and complete, enjoying undisputed tenure in and of itself. Modes of justice therefore reliant upon
such a subject lack the very foundations in the self that they most violently insist upon seeing inscribed there. This does
not, however, mean that the dissolution of the subject also entails the dissolution of Justice.Quite the reverse. The subject was never a firm foundation for justice,
much less a hospitable vehicle for the reception of the call of another Justice. It was never in possession of that self-possession which was supposed to secure
the certainty of itself, of a self-possession that would enable it ultimately to adjudicate everything. The very indexicality required of sovereign subjectivity gave rise
rather to a commensurability much more amenable to the expendability required of the political and material economies of mass societies than it did to the
singular, invaluable, and uncanny uniqueness of the self. The value of the subject became the standard unit of currency for the political arithmetic of States and
the political economies of capitalism. They trade in it still to devastating global effect. The technologisation of the political has become
manifest and global. Economies of evaluation necessarily require calculability. Thus no valuation without mensuration and no
mensuration without indexation. Once rendered calculable, however, units of account are necessarily submissible not only to
valuation but also, of course, to devaluation. Devaluation, logically, can extend to the point of counting as nothing. Hence,
no mensuration without demensuration either. There is nothing abstract about this: the declension of economies of value leads to
the zero point of holocaust. However liberating and emancipating systems of value-rights-may claim to be, for
example, they run the risk of counting out the invaluable. Counted out, the invaluable may then lose its purchase on
life. Herewith, then, the necessity of championing the invaluable itself. For we must never forget that, "we are dealing always with
whatever exceeds measure. But how does that necessity present itself? Another Justice answers: as the surplus of the duty to answer to the claim of
Justice over rights. That duty, as with the advent of another Justice, is integral to the lack constitutive of the human way of
being.
ZP ^ HC
32
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Impact- Dehumanization
Dehumanization depicts life as worthless, making the worst impacts possible
Berube 1997—Professor of communication at the University of Carolina, Director of Public Communication of Science and Technology, NSCU, David
Berube “Nanotechnological Prolongevity: The Down Side” June-July
Unfortunately, societal views of human utility are fleeting. Cultural values are simply unfixed. For example, if we were able to decide who would get to swim in the
human gene pool "a few centuries ago, men with strong backs and women with broad pelvises would have been the first ones society would have wanted to
reproduce. During the industrial age, however, brainpower began to count for more than muscle power" (Kluger, 1997, p. 66). George Annas, an ethicist, argues
a lot of what is a better human being is faddish. At this historical juncture, we would be faced with the prospect of letting previous generations of strapping men
and women die out, replacing them with a new population of intellectual giants. This seems likely when much of the control over the technology would be in the
hands of the nanotechnologists, though assuredly some have broad backs and pelvises. Assuming we are able to predict who or what are optimized humans,
this entire resultant worldview smacks of eugenics and Nazi racial science. This would involve valuing people as means. Moreover, there would always be a
humans would never be able to escape their treatment as means to an always
further and distant end. This means-ends dispute is at the core of Montagu and Matson's treatise on the dehumanization of humanity. They warn: " its
destructive toll is already greater than that of any war, plague, famine, or natural calamity on record - - and its
potential danger to the quality of life and the fabric of civilized society is beyond calculation. For that reason this sickness of the
soul might well be called the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse....Behind the genocide of the holocaust lay a dehumanized thought;
superhuman more super than the current ones,
beneath the menticide of deviants and dissidents... in the cuckoo's nest of America, lies a dehumanized image of man... (Montagu & Matson, 1983, p. xi-xii).
While it may never be possible to quantify the impact dehumanizing ethics may have had on humanity, it is safe to conclude the foundations of humanness offer
great opportunities which would be foregone. When we calculate the actual losses and the virtual benefits, we approach a nearly inestimable value greater than
Dehumanization is nuclear war, environmental apocalypse, and international
genocide. When people become things, they become dispensable. When people are dispensable, any and every
atrocity can be justified. Once justified, they seem to be inevitable for every epoch has evil and dehumanization is
evil's most powerful weapon.
any tools which we can currently use to measure it.
ZP ^ HC
33
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Impact- Unending War
The threat of instability in the Middle East justifies genocide and unending war.
Batur 2007 (Pinar PhD @ UT-Austin – Prof. of Sociology @ Vassar, 2007 “The Heart of Violence: Global Racism, War, and Genocide,” in Handbook of
the The Soiology of Racial and Ethnic Relations, eds. Vera and Feagin, p. 446-7)
At the turn of the 20th century, the “Terrible Turk” was the image that summarized the enemy of Europe and the antagonism toward the hegemony of the
Ottoman Empire, stretching from Europe to the Middle East, and across North Africa. Perpetuation
of this imagery in American foreign policy
exhibited how capitalism met with orientalist constructs in the white racial frame of the western mind (VanderLippe 1999).
Orientalism is based on the conceptualization of the “Oriental” other—Eastern, Islamic societies as static, irrational, savage,
fanatical, and inferior to the peaceful, rational, scientific “Occidental” Europe and the West (Said 1978). This is as an elastic
construct, proving useful to describe whatever is considered as the latest threat to Western economic expansion, political and
cultural hegemony, and global domination for exploitation and absorption. Post-Enlightenment Europe and later America used this
iconography to define basic racist assumptions regarding their uncontestable right to impose political and economic
dominance globally. When the Soviet Union existed as an opposing power, the orientalist vision of the 20th century shifted from the image of the “Terrible
Turk” to that of the “Barbaric Russian Bear.” In this context, orientalist thought then, as now, set the terms of exclusion. It racialized
exclusion to define the terms of racial privilege and superiority. By focusing on ideology, orientalism recreated the superior race, even
though there was no “race.” It equated the hegemony of Western civilization with the “right ideological and cultural
framework.” It segued into war and annihilation and genocide and continued to foster and aid the recreation of racial
hatred of others with the collapse of the Soviet “other.” Orientalism’s global racist ideology reformed in the 1990s with Muslims and Islamic
culture as to the “inferior other.” Seeing Muslims as opponents of Christian civilization is not new, going back to the Crusades, but the
elasticity and reframing of this exclusion is evident in recent debates regarding Islam in the West, one raised by the Pope and the other
by the President of the United States. Against the background of the latest Iraq war, attacks in the name of Islam, racist attacks on Muslims in Europe and in the
United States, and detention of Muslims without trial in secret prisons, Pope Benedict XVI gave a speech in September 2006 at Regensburg University in
Germany. He quoted a 14th-century Byzantine emperor who said, “show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil
and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” In addition, the Pope discussed the concept of Jihad, which he defined as
Islamic “holy war,” and said, “violence in the name of religion was contrary to God’s nature and to reason.” He also called for dialogue between cultures and
religions (Fisher 2006b). While some Muslims found the Pope’s speech “regrettable,” it also caused a spark of angry protests against the Pope’s “ill informed and
bigoted” comments, and voices raised to demand an apology (Fisher 2006a). Some argue that the Pope was ordering a new crusade, for Christian civilization to
conquer terrible and savage Islam. When Benedict apologized, organizations and parliaments demanded a retraction and apology from the Pope and the Vatican
(Lee 2006). Yet, when the Pope apologized, it came as a second insult, because in his apology he said, “I’m deeply sorry for the reaction in some countries to a
few passages of my address at the University of Regensburg, which were considered offensive to the sensibilities of Muslims” (Reuters 2006). In other words, he
is sorry that Muslims are intolerant to the point of fanaticism. In the racialized world, the Pope’s apology came as an effort to show justification for his speech—he
Through orientalist and the white
racial frame, those who are subject to racial hatred and exclusion themselves become agents of racist legitimization. Like
was not apologizing for being insulting, but rather saying that he was sorry that “Muslim” violence had proved his point.
Huntington, Bernard Lewis was looking for Armageddon in his Wall Street Journal article warning that August 22, 2006, was the 27th day of the month of Rajab in
the Islamic calendar and is considered a holy day, when Muhammad was taken to heaven and returned. For Muslims this day is a day of rejoicing and
celebration. But for Lewis, Professor Emeritus at Princeton, “this might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and, if necessary,
of the world” (Lewis 2006). He cautions that “it is far from certain that [the President of Iran] Mr. Ahmadinejad plans any such cataclysmic events for August 22,
but it would be wise to bear the possibility in mind.” Lewis argues that Muslims, unlike others, seek self-destruction in order to reach heaven faster. For Lewis,
Muslims in this mindset don’t see the idea of Mutually Assured Destruction as a constraint but rather as “an inducement” (Lewis 2006). In 1993, Huntington
pleaded that “in a world of different civilizations, each . . .will have to learn to coexist with the others” (Huntington 1993:49). Lewis, like Pope Benedict, views
Islam as the apocalyptic destroyer of civilization and claims that reactions against orientalist, racist visions such as his actually prove the validity of his position.
Lewis’s assertions run parallel with George Bush’s claims. In response to the alleged plot to blow up British airliners, Bush claimed, “This nation is at war with
Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation” (TurkishPress.com. 2006; Beck 2006). Bush argued that “the
fight against terrorism is the ideological struggle of the 21st century” and he compared it to the 20th century’s fight against fascism, Nazism, and communism.
Even though “Islamo-fascist” has for some time been a buzzword for Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity on the talk-show circuit, for the president of
the United States it drew reactions worldwide. Muslim Americans found this phrase “contributing to the rising level of hostility to Islam and the American Muslim
community” (Raum 2006). Considering that since 2001, Bush has had a tendency to equate “war on terrorism” with “crusade,” this
new rhetoric equates
ideology with religion and reinforces the worldview of a war of civilizations. As Bush said,.we still aren’t completely safe, because
there are people that still plot and people who want to harm us for what we believe in” (CNN 2006). Exclusion in physical space is only matched by exclusion
in the imagination, and racialized exclusion has an internal logic leading to the annihilation of the excluded. Annihilation , in this
sense, is not only designed to maintain the terms of racial inequality, both ideologically and physically, but is institutionalized with the vocabulary
of self-protection. Even though the terms of exclusion are never complete, genocide is the definitive point in the exclusionary racial ideology,
and such is the logic of the outcome of the exclusionary process, that it can conclude only in ultimate domination. War and genocide take
place with compliant efficiency to serve the global racist ideology with dizzying frequency . The 21st century opened up with
genocide, in Darfur.
ZP ^ HC
34
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Impact- Unending War
The drive to securitize justifies endless warfare in the name of American ideals
Noorani 2005 (Yaseen, Lecturer in Arabic Literature, Islamic and Middle East Studies, University of Edinburgh. “The Rhetoric of Security,” The New
Centennial Review 5.1,)
The relationship between the United States and the world order, then, is similar to the relationship in Hobbes between
the Leviathan and the civil society that it embodies and represents. The individual members of this civil society are collectively the
author of all of the acts of the Leviathan. Yet they have no authority to influence or oppose the actions of the Leviathan, because they have contracted with each
other to give over all of their powers to it. The Leviathan itself remains outside their social contract. Similarly, insofar as the United States embodies
the normativity of the world order and ensures its existence, the members of this order have implicitly agreed to its
protection of their civil existence, since this is the only rational thing to do. Therefore, when America's own existence is
at stake, they cannot question the decisions it takes to preserve itself, even when these decisions impinge on their
own autonomy.15 The externality of the United States to the world order, its national status as the agent of freedom,
means that it must both enhance its independence and autonomy, and reshape the world in its own image . "We are
protected from attack only by vigorous action abroad, and increased vigilance at home" (Bush 2002a). Enhancing its own agency means making
itself more free, but what this requires is increased self-discipline. The United States must become more impervious to fear and external
coercion by eliminating its internal vulnerabilities to them. The effect of this imperative is to provide justification for bringing an ever
greater number of domains of national life within the purview of national security. At the same time, the United States
must make the world more like itself by [End Page 33] spreading freedom abroad. "We know that free peoples embrace progress and
life, instead of becoming the recruits for murderous ideologies" (Bush 2004b). This requires the strengthening of American military power and the use of this
power against enemies. "We have learned that terrorist attacks are not caused by the use of strength; they are invited by the perception of weakness" (Bush
2003c). The primary field for the exercise of U.S. power in reshaping the world is the Middle East, because this is the
region most engulfed in the state of war. The Middle East thereby remains outside of the world order and threatens
its dissolution. The Middle East will either become a place of progress and peace, or it will be an exporter of violence and terror that takes more lives in
America and in other free nations. The triumph of democracy and tolerance in Iraq, in Afghanistan and beyond would be a grave setback for international
terrorism.... Everywhere that freedom takes hold, terror will retreat. (Bush 2003c) In other words, the Middle East can either become a reflection of the United
States or remain its polar opposite. In the latter mode, however, it mirrors the United States more fully, though inversely. As a state of war outside the
world order, it has the capacity to transform the world just as the United States does. Just as the United States
exports peace and freedom, in the form of military conquests and economic goods, the Middle East exports violence
and terror. Whereas the United States is free of "ambitions" in its actions, the terrorists of the Middle East are driven by "hateful ambitions." The Middle East,
in effect, signifies the absence of all the values embodied by the United States, and herein lies its supreme danger. Yet it is in no way irredeemable. Once the
Middle East is reshaped into a lesser replica of the United States, it will take its humble position in the world order.
The taming of the Middle East, therefore, requires intensive military action there, but also requires preventing the
Middle East and its state of war from penetrating the borders of the United States. Reshaping the world order goes beyond this as
well: it entails the disciplining of the members of this order, whose tendencies toward laxity and fragmentation provide openings for terrorism. The United
States must [End Page 34] bring the world into ever greater conformity with the values that will preserve and advance
the world. This means not only securing cooperation for U.S. military and police actions by "convincing or compelling
states to accept their sovereign responsibilities" (National Security 2002, 6), but reorganizing the world according to the
principles of free enterprise and free trade. Political antagonism can be eliminated through its transformation into economic competition. "We
have our best chance since the rise of the nation-state in the seventeenth century to build a world where the great powers compete in peace instead of prepare
for war" (Bush 2002b). A world order based on economic competition instead of military competition enables the reign of the politics of civil relations, leading to
peace and prosperity for all. In this order, no nation will need any longer to worry about the politics of self-preservation—that is, no nation but the United States.
ZP ^ HC
35
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Impact- Nuclear War
Securitization legitimizes the WMD suicide pact and billions of deaths
Der Derian 1998 [James, prof of political science at Brown, “The Value of Security: Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche, and Baudrillard On Security,” ed. Ronnie
Lipschutz, http://www.ciaonet.org/book/lipschutz/index.html]
the disciplinary power of "security." In its name, peoples
have alienated their fears, rights and powers to gods, emperors, and most recently, sovereign states, all to protect
themselves from the vicissitudes of nature--as well as from other gods, emperors, and sovereign states. In its name, weapons of mass
destruction have been developed which have transfigured national interest into a security dilemma based on a
suicide pact. And, less often noted in international relations, in its name billions have been made and millions killed while scientific
knowledge has been furthered and intellectual dissent muted . We have inherited an onto theology of security, that is, an a priori
argument that proves the existence and necessity of only one form of security because there currently happens to be
a widespread, metaphysical belief in it. Indeed, within the concept of security lurks the entire history of western
metaphysics, which was best described by Derrida "as a series of substitutions of center for center" in a perpetual search for the "transcendental signified." 1
No other concept in international relations packs the metaphysical punch, nor commands
From God to Rational Man, from Empire to Republic, from King to the People--and on occasion in the reverse direction as well, for history is never so linear,
never so neat as we would write it--the
security of the center has been the shifting site from which the forces of authority, order,
and identity philosophically defined and physically kept at bay anarchy, chaos, and difference. Yet the center, as modern
poets and postmodern critics tell us, no longer holds. The demise of a bipolar system, the diffusion of power into new political, national, and economic
constellations, the decline of civil society and the rise of the shopping mall, the acceleration of everything --transportation, capital and information flows, change
itself--have induced a new anxiety. As George Bush repeatedly said--that is, until the 1992 Presidential election went into full swing--"The enemy is
the unthinking reaction, is to master this anxiety and to rescuer
the center by remapping the peripheral threats. In this vein, the Pentagon prepares seven military scenarios for future conflict, ranging from
unpredictability. The enemy is instability." 2 One immediate response,
Latino small-fry to an Identikit super-enemy that goes by the generic acronym of REGT ("Reemerging Global Threat"). In the heartlands of America, Toyota
sledge-hammering returns as a popular know-nothing distraction. And within the Washington beltway, rogue powers such as North Korea, Iraq, and Libya take on
the status of pariah-state and potential video bomb-site for a permanently electioneering elite.
ZP ^ HC
36
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Impact- War
The war logic of securitization leads to the violent elimination of enemies
Aradau, 2001 [Claudia, Research Associate in the Centre of International Relations, Department of War Studies, King’s College London, December.
RUBIKON, Date accessed May 10, 2007, http://venus.ci.uw.edu.pl/~rubikon/forum/claudia2.htm]
Survival refers not only to the fear of death, but implies countermeasures, the ‘extraordinary measures’ of the CoS. Michael Dillon has
formulated the appeal to security as necessarily implying a ‘specification, no matter how inchoate, of the fear which engenders it’
and hence calls for ‘counter-measures to deal with the danger which initiates fear, and for the neutralization,
elimination or constraint of that person, group, object or condition which engenders fear’. [13] These countermeasures
are directed at the other, the enemy to be eliminated. Or in metaphoric terms, to use Jef Huysmans’ favorite analogy society-garden, countermeasures refer to unearthing the weeds threatening the harmonious growth of the garden.[14] The metaphor of war is constitutive of what both Ashley and
Campbell have called the ‘paradigm of sovereignty’.[15] In Campbell’s formulation, sovereignty signifies ‘a center of decision presiding over a self that is to be
valued and demarcated from an external domain that cannot and will not be assimilated to the identity of the sovereign domain’.[16] This process of demarcation
of friends and enemies, delineation of boundaries of order versus disorder has been the prerogative of the sovereign state, provider of security within its
boundaries and preserver of ‘law and order’. The injunction to preserve the internal order of the modern harmonious garden has targeted both internal and
external enemies, the weeds that need to be rooted out for the benefit of the political community. As the ‘war on drugs’ will clearly illustrate, this approach is
highly ambiguous for a political community predicated upon the friend/enemy differentiation. In this political community constituted upon the logic of war,
securitizing moves are only liable to breed insecurity. Elimination of enemies or their circumscribing is the ultimate goal of war. Thus
the sovereign logic of security ultimately endangers, threatens those who threaten us and in this sense it has
disquieting effects on the political community. Moreover, the mutual constitutiveness of threats and threatened
objects leads to a spiral of enemy constructions. The enemy needs to be eliminated and at the same time the very identity of society, for
example, depends on enemy construction. The war logic of security is thus likely to lead to a paradoxical story, in which security
is only likely to breed more insecurity and eventually violence.
Securitization leads to violence and war
Ukeje 05 [Charles Ukeje, Professor of International Relations at Obafemi Awolowo and scholar at the Centre for African Studies, Submitted at 11th
CODESRIA General Assembly, Rethinking Africa’s Security in the Age of Uncertain Globalisation: NEPAD and Human Security in the 21st Century,
Howbeit, the quest to redirect security towards human centred concerns raises several problems. In the first instance, “human security” is still heavily contested
in its definition, scope and utility. The concept is criticised for overstretching the traditional notion of security- much the same way that environmental security did
‘human security’ is far too universalistic, containing “conceptual flaws” that raises
false priorities and hopes regarding the securitization of human beings. The orthodox conception of security, either focusing on
the internal or external dimensions to insecurity, tend to restrict the concept to the political survivability and effectiveness of states and regimes, and
in doing so, excluded economic, environmental, cultural and other non-political threats. It puts the state (and politics) at the centre of
over the last decade. Another criticism is that
the conceptualisation of security, suggesting that non-political threats “become integral components of our definition of security only if they become acute enough
to acquire political dimensions and threaten state boundaries, state institutions, and regime survival” (Vayrynen, 1995: 260). Another limitation of the concept of
human security is that it
cannot be fully consummated for as long as the quest for peace and security remains tied to the
authoritarian values and motivations of those in power, human security would continue to suffer breaches and
abuses as regime/ state security further allows official violence to multiply (Sabelo, 2003: 306; Niukerk, 2004). Adele Jinadu (2000)
offered further perspectives on how human security suffers in the attempts by custodians of the state to retain and extract compliance through the instrumentality
of force and coercion. He explained that the problematic of peace and security is “intrinsically bound up with human nature,
especially the dialectics of the social psychology of human interactions, under conditions of scarcity and choice”. Accordingly, the problem of peace and security
“cannot and should not be divorced from the dialectics of domination and subjection, in order words from considerations of superordinate/ subordinate relations at
the community, national and global levels” (Jinadu, 2000: 1). The crucial question, as he pointed out is “[If] humankind cannot create a perfect society, given
human nature and the reality of scarcity, as well as the difficult and contentious questions of choice which scarcity poses, what needs to be done to create a less
imperfect society? Under what conditions can such a less imperfect society expected to emerge and thrive? He argued that the “modern state…continues to be
the pre-eminently contested terrain of hegemonic groups in national and international society, serving predatory group interests, and itself becoming part of the
problem, the core avenue of contention and conflict, a major impediment to structural reform and, therefore, a major obstacle to peace and security, which
requires in many cases, reconstitution and reconstruction as a necessary condition for the enthronement and durability of peace and security” (Jinadu, 2000: 23). As shall be discussed in the next section, what the above implies, in part, is that NEPAD must first resolve the underpinning motivation of power and
militarism; of superordinate and subordinate.
ZP ^ HC
37
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Alt- Reject
The alternative is to reject the affirmative's representations of security. This solves
because a security measure must be legitimized for securitization to take hold.
Buzan, Waever, and Wilde 1998 (Barry Buzan, Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics, Ole Waever,
Professor of International Relations at the Institute for Political Science, University of Copenhagen, and Jaap de Wilde, senior research fellow at the Centre for
European Studies (CES) and the Department of Political Science of the Faculty of Business, Public Administration and Technology at the University of Twente,
1998 "Security: A New Framework for Analysis", page 25)
A discourse that takes the form of presenting
something as an existential threat to a referent object does not by itself create securitization - this is a securitizing
move, but the issue is securitized only if and when the audience accepts at as such. (Accept does not necessarily mean in
Even if the general logic of securitization is clear, we have to be precise about its threshold.
civilized, dominance-free discussion; it only means that an order always rests on coercion as well as on consent. Since securitization can never only be imposed,
there is some need to argue one's case.) We do not push the demand so high as to say that an emergency measure has to be
adopted, only that the existential threat has to be argued and just gain enough resonance for a platform to be made
from which it is possible to legitimize emergency measures or other steps that would not have been possible had the
discourse not taken the form of existential threats, point of no return, and necessity. If no signs of such acceptance exist, we can
talk only of a securitizing move, not of an object actually being securitized. The distinction between a securitizing move and successful securitization is important
in the chapters that follow
ZP ^ HC
38
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Alt- Contructivism
The alternative is to deconstruct realist thought by rejecting the Affirmative’s security
discourse. Only constructivist understanding solves realist binaries that lead to
conflict.
Hopf 98 (Associate Professor of Political Science, Ohio State University,"The promise of constructivism in international relations theory." International
Security 23.1 (1998): 171+)
One of the most important by-products of this concern with identity politics is the return of differences among states. The same state is, in effect, many different
actors in world politics, and different states behave differently toward other states, based on the identities of each. If true, then we should expect different patterns
of behavior across groups of states with different identities and interests.(74) Although it is tempting to assert that similarity breeds cooperation, it is impossible to
make such an a priori claim. Identities have much more meaning for each state than a mere label. Identities offer each state an understanding of other states, its
Understanding another state as one identity,
rather than another, has consequences for the possible actions of both. For example, Michael Barnett has speculated that the
failure of deterrence against Iraq in Kuwait in 1990 is because Saudi Arabia was seen as an "Arab," rather than a
"sovereign," state. Iraq's understanding of Saudi Arabia as an Arab state implied that Riyadh would never allow U.S. forces to deploy on Arab territory. If,
instead, Iraq had understood Saudi Arabia as a sovereign state, in a realist world, it would have perhaps expected Saudi
balancing against Iraqi actions in Kuwait, including U.S. military intervention, and would have been deterred .(75) In other
words, neorealist predictions of balancing behavior, such as that of Saudi Arabia, rely on a single particular identity
being ascribed to that country by Iraq. But if alternative identities are possible, as constructivism suggests, the
neorealist world is smaller than alleged. Or another state may not be seen as another "state" at all, but instead as an
ally, friend, enemy, co-guarantor, threat, a democracy, and so on.(76) Finally, constructivism's expectation of multiple
identities for actors in world politics rests on an openness to local historical context. This receptivity to identities being
generated and reproduced empirically, rather than resting on pregiven assumptions, opens up the study of world politics to
different units altogether.(77) Hypothesizing differences among states allows for movement beyond the typical binary
characterizations of mainstream international relations: democratic-nondemocratic, great power-non-great power,
North-South, and so forth. While these common axes of analysis are certainly relevant, constructivism promises to explain many other meaningful
nature, motives, interests, probable actions, attitudes, and role in any given political context.
communities of identity throughout world politics.
ZP ^ HC
39
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Alt- Genealogy
Understanding a states’ identity is crucial to solve security dilemmas.
Hopf 98 Associate Professor of Political Science, Ohio State University,
"The promise of constructivism in international relations theory." International Security 23.1 (1998): 177+. Accessed 7/19/2010
Neorealism tells us that states ally against power. Steven Wait rightly observed that this is
empirically wrong. He suggested, instead, that states ally against threats. The attempted fix was to claim that states
will balance, not against power, but against particular kinds of power. The latter is the power possessed by a relatively capable,
BALANCE OF THREAT.
geographically proximate state with offensive military capabilities and perceived hostile intentions.(54) Whereas geographical proximity and offensive military
capacity can be established a priori, perceived intentions threaten tautology. Several constructivist scholars have pointed to balance of threat as one of the
What is missing here is a theory of threat perception, and this is
precisely what a constructivist account of identity offers. Distribution of power cannot explain the alliance patterns
that emerged after World War II; otherwise, the United States would have been balanced against, not the Soviet Union. Instead, the issue must be
how France, Britain, Germany, and the United States came to understand Soviet military capabilities and geographical
proximity as threatening. The neorealist account would be that the Soviet Union demonstrated by its behavior that it was an objective threat to Western
Europe. A constructivist account would be that the state identities of Western Europe, the United States, and the Soviet
Union, each rooted in domestic sociocultural milieus, produced understandings of one another based on differences
in identity and practice. The potential advantage of this approach is that it is more likely to surface differences in how the Soviet threat was constructed
in different sites than is the neorealist approach, which accords objective meaning to Soviet conduct. Let us imagine, for example, that the United
States balanced against the Soviet Union because of the latter's communist identity, and what that meant to the United States. If
true, it means that other possible Soviet identities, such as an Asian, Stalinist, Russian, or authoritarian threat, were not operative. So what? First, how the
United States understood the Soviet threat, as communist, not only explains the anticommunist direction of U.S.
actions in the Cold War, but it also tells us that the United States understood itself as the anticommunist protector of
a particular set of values both at home and abroad. Second, how the United States constructed the Soviet communist threat needs to be
understood in relation to how Western Europeans understood that threat. If, for example, France understood the Soviet threat as a Russian
threat, as an instance of superior Russian power in Europe, then France would not readily join in U.S. anticommunist ventures
against the Soviet Union. In particular, whereas the United States saw the third world during the Cold War as an arena for battling communism, as in
mainstream accounts most susceptible to a constructivist alternative.(55)
Vietnam, Europeans very rarely understood it in those terms, instead regarding third world states as economic actors or as former colonies. SECURITY
DILEMMAS. Security dilemmas are the products of presumed uncertainty. (56) They are assumed to be commonplace in
world politics because states presumably cannot know,
the intentions of others. But as
do not see much evidence of security dilemmas
with sufficient certainty or confidence,
important as the security dilemma is to understanding conflictual relations among states, we
among many pairs or groups of states: members of the same alliance, members of the same economic institution, perhaps two peaceful states or
two neutral states, and so on. In the study of world politics, uncertainty might be best treated as a variable, not a constant.
Constructivism can provide an understanding of what happens most of the time in relations between states, namely,
nothing threatening at all. By providing meaning, identities reduce uncertainty.(57) . States understand different states
differently. Soviet and French nuclear capabilities had different meanings for British decision makers. But of course certainty is not always a source of
security. Knowing that another state is an aggressor resolves the security dilemma, but only by replacing it with certain insecurity, an increased confidence that
the other state is in fact threatening. As Richard Ashley, bowing generously to Karl Deutsch, pointed out, politics itself is impossible in the
absence of "a background of mutual understandings and habitual practices that orients and limits the mutual comprehension of practices, the
signification of social action."(58) Constructivism's empirical mission is to surface the "background" that makes uncertainty a
variable to understand, rather than a constant to assume.
ZP ^ HC
40
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Alt- Genealogy
Vote neg to criticize the affirmative’s language of security—genealogical analysis can
open potentials for new modes of knowing within the aporias of security.
Burke 2002 (Anthony, Prof. Poli. Sci. and Int’l Studies at U of Queensland, “Aporias of Security,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, p. 27)
Refusing Security
It is perhaps easy to become despondent, but as countless struggles for freedom, justice, and social transformation
have proved, a sense of seriousness can be tempered with the knowledge that many tools are already available--and
where they are not, the effort to create a productive new critical sensibility is well advanced . There is also a crucial political
opening within the liberal problematic itself, in the sense that it assumes that power is most effective when it is absorbed as truth, consented to and desired-which creates an important space for refusal. As Colin Gordon argues, Foucault thought that the very possibility of governing was conditional on it being credible
This throws weight onto the question of how security works as a technology of
subjectivity. It is to take up Foucault's challenge, framed as a reversal of the liberal progressive movement of being we have seen in Hegel, not to discover
who or what we are so much as to refuse what we are. (61 ) Just as security rules subjectivity as both a totalizing and individualizing
blackmail and promise, it is at these levels that we can intervene. We can critique the machinic frameworks of
possibility represented by law, policy, economic regulation, and diplomacy, while challenging the way these
institutions deploy language to draw individual subjects into their consensual web. This suggests, at least provisionally, a dual
to the governed as well as the governing. (60)
strategy. The first asserts the space for agency, both in challenging available possibilities for being and their larger socioeconomic implications. Roland Bleiker
formulates an idea of agency that shifts away from the lone (male) hero overthrowing the social order in a decisive act of rebellion to one that understands both
the thickness of social power and its "fissures," "fragmentation," and "thinness." We must, he says, "observe how an individual may be able to escape the
discursive order and influence its shifting boundaries.... By doing so, discursive terrains of dissent all of a sudden appear where forces of domination previously
seemed invincible." (62) Pushing
beyond security requires tactics that can work at many levels--that empower individuals to
recognize the larger social, cultural, and economic implications of the everyday forms of desire, subjection, and
discipline they encounter, to challenge and rewrite them, and that in turn contribute to collective efforts to transform
the larger structures of being, exchange, and power that sustain (and have been sustained by) these forms. As Derrida suggests, this
is to open up aporetic possibilities that transgress and call into question the boundaries of the self, society, and the
international that security seeks to imagine and police. The second seeks new ethical principles based on a critique of
the rigid and repressive forms of identity that security has heretofore offered. Thus writers such as Rosalyn Diprose, William Conolly,
and Moira Gatens have sought to imagine a new ethical relationship that thinks difference not on the basis of the same but on the basis of a dialogue with the
other that might allow space for the unknown and unfamiliar, for a "debate and engagement with the other's law and the other's ethics"--an encounter that
involves a transformation of the self rather than the other. (63) Thus while the sweep and power of security must be
acknowledged, it must also be refused: at the simultaneous levels of individual identity, social order, and
macroeconomic possibility, it would entail another kind of work on "ourselves"--a political refusal of the One, the
imagination of another that never returns to the same. It would be to ask if there is a world after security, and what its
shimmering possibilities might be.
ZP ^ HC
41
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Alt- Constructivism
Critical constructivism sensitizes one to things outside hegemonic representational
formats.
Tierney & Lincoln 1997, University Professor at the Rossier School of Education, Distinguished Professor at Texas A&M University,
Any representation of the world manifests its power through its foreclosure of worlds not represented – that is, the world is always larger than its maps. When
cartographers employ the official mode of geographical representation, they reduce reader cognizance of alternative ways of “knowing” the topography. Which
map is real: the Mercator projection or Peter’s projection? A Western schizophrenic’s catatonic seizure or an aboriginal shaman’s divine trance? A critical
constructivist pedagogy of representation grapples with the relationship between the production of an image and the
mode of its presentation to an audience. As critical researchers come to understand the historical/social nature of
representational form and content, they are better prepared to represent their own subjectivities and personal
contexts outside the orbit of hegemonic representational formats. Here they are able to rescue both their scholarship and their
“selves” from the structuring on dominant modes of representation. In the process such researchers are sensitized to the
erasure of particular group and individuals by power wielders and to the ways particular hegemonic representational
forms mobilize their desire and thus their complicity in such deletions.
ZP ^ HC
42
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Alt- Generic
The only way to move beyond security is to build a new way of thinking and
socializing.
Neoclus, 2008. (Mark Neocleous, 08, “Critique of Security”, Brunel University in the Department of Government)
The only way out of such a dilemma, to escape the fetish, is perhaps to eschew the logic of security altogether — to reject
it as so ideologically loaded in favour of the state that any real political thought other than the authoritarian and
reactionary should be pressed to give it up. That is clearly something that cannot be achieved within the limits of
bourgeois thought and thus could never even begin to be imagined by the security intellectual. lt is also something that the
constant iteration of the refrain ’this is an insecure world' and reiteration of one fear, anxiety and insecurity after another will also make it hard to do. But it is
something that the critique of security suggests we may have to consider if we `want a political way out of the
impasse of security. This impasse exists because security has now become so all encompassing that it marginalises all else,
most notably the constructive conflicts, debates and discussions that animate political life. The con- stant prioritising of a
mythical security as a political end — as the political end — constitutes a rejection of politics in any meaningful sense of the term. That is, as a mode of
action in which differences can be articulated, in which the conflicts and struggles that arise from such differences
can be fought for and negotiated, in which people might come to believe that another world is possible — that they
might transform the world and in turn be transformed. Security politics simply removes this; worse, it removes it while
purportedly addressing it. In so doing it suppresses all issues of power and turns political questions into debates about the most efficient way to achieve
’security’, despite the fact that we are never quite told — never could be told — what might count as having achieved it. Security politics is, in this sense, an antipolitics,‘“ dominating political discourse in much the same manner as the security state tries to dominate human beings, reinforcing security fetishism and the
monopolistic character of security on the political imagination. We therefore need to get beyond security politics, not add yet more
’sectors’ to it in a way that simply expands the scope of the state and legitimizes state intervention in yet more and more
areas of our lives. Simon Dalby reports a personal communication with Michael Williams, co-editor of the important text Critical Security Studies, in which the
latter asks: if you take away security what do you put in the hole that’s left behind? But I’m inclined to agree with Dalby: maybe there is no hole.““ The mistake
has been to think that there is a hole; and that this hole needs to be filled with a new vision or revision " of security in which it is re—napped or civilized or
gendered or. humanized or expanded or whatever. All of these ultimately remain within the statist political imaginary and consequently end up re— affirming the
state as the terrain of modern politics, the grounds of security. The real task is not to fill the supposed hole with yet another vision of security but to fight for an
alternative political language which takes us beyond the narrow horizon of bourgeois security and which therefore does not constantly throw us into the arms of
the state. That’s the point of critical politics: to develop a new political language more adequate to the kind of society we want. Thus while much of what I have
said here has been of a negative order; part of the tradition of critical theory is that the negative may be as significant as the positive in setting thought on new
paths. For if
security really is the supreme concept of bourgeois society and the fundamental thematic of liberalism, then
to keep harping on about insecurity and to keep demanding ‘more security' (while meekly hoping that this increased security doesn’t
damage our liberty) is to blind ourselves to the possibility of building real alternatives to the authoritarian tendencies in
contemporary politics. To situate ourselves against security politics would allow us to circumvent the debilitating
effect achieved through the constant securitizing of social and political issues, debilitating in the sense that ’security’ helps
consolidate the power of the existing forms of social domination and justifies the short—circuiting of even the most democratic forms. It would also allow us to
forge another kind of politics centered on a different conception of the good. We need a new way of thinking and talking about social being
and politics that moves us beyond security. This would perhaps be emancipatory in the true sense of the word. What this might mean, precisely
must be open to debate. But it certainly requires recognizing that security is an illusion that has forgotten it is an illusion; it
requires recognizing that security is not the same as solidarity; it requires accepting that insecurity is part of the
human condition, and thus giving up the search for the certainty of security and instead learning to tolerate the
uncertainties, ambiguities and ’insecurities' that come with being human; it requires accepting that ’securitizing’ an
issue does not mean dealing with it politically but bracketing it out and handing it to the state; it requires us to be
brave enough to return the gift.“’
ZP ^ HC
43
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Framework-Discourse
It is crucial that we analyze the language promoting the affirmative’s representations
as a means of overcoming dominant descriptions of agents and objects in
international relations
Der Derian 98 (James, a Watson Institute research professor of international studies and directs the Information Technology, War, and Peace Project
and the Global Media Project, “International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics”, Lexington Books, p.13)
Once we give adequate recognition to the texts within which the world emerges and provided an understanding of
politics that focuses on such impositions of meaning and value, we can appreciate the intimate relationship between
textual practices and politics. It is the dominant, surviving textual practices that give rise to the systems of meaning
and value from which actions and policies are directed and legitimated. A critical political perspective is, accordingly, one that
questions the privileged forms of representation whose dominance has led to the unproblematic acceptance of subjects, objects, acts, and themes through which
the political world is constructed. In as much as dominant modes of understanding exist within representational or textual practices, criticism or resistant forms of
interpretation are conveyed less through an explicitly argumentative form than through a writing practice that is resistant to familiar modes of representation, one
that is self-reflective enough to show how meaning and writing practices are radically entangled in general or one that tends to denaturalize familiar reunites by
employing impertinent grammars and figurations, by, in short, making use of an insurrectional textuality. To appreciate the effects of this textuality, it is necessary
to pay special need to language, but this does not imply that an approach emphasizing textuality reduces social phenomena to specific instances of linguistic
To textualize a domain of analysis is to recognize, first of all, that any "reality" is mediated by a mode of
representation and, second, that representations are not descriptions of a world of facility, but are ways of making
facility. Their value is thus not to be discerned in their correspondence with something, but rather in the economies of
possible representations within which they participate. Modes of reality making are therefore worthy of analysis in
their own right. Such analysis can be a form of interpretation in which one scrutinizes the effects on behavior or policy that the dominance of some
representational practices enjoy, or it can be a form of critique in which one opposes prevailing representational practices with
alternatives. Therefore, a concern with textuality must necessary raise issues about the texuality (the meaning and
value effects) of the language of inquiry itself. In order, then, to outline the textualist approach, we must develop
further our understanding of the language analysis.
expression.
Discourse is the primary question shaping policies
Lipschutz 1998 [Ronnie, prof of politics at UC Santa Cruz, On Security, ed. Ronnie Lipschutz, http://www.ciaonet.org/book/lipschutz/index.html]
Conceptualizations of security--from which follow policy and practice--are to be found in discourses of security . These
are neither strictly objective assessments nor analytical constructs of threat, but rather the products of historical structures and processes, of struggles for power
within the state, of conflicts between the societal groupings that inhabit states and the interests that besiege them. Hence, there are not only struggles over
Winning the right to define security provides not just access to
resources but also the authority to articulate new definitions and discourses of security, as well. As Karen Litfin
points out, "As determinants of what can and cannot be thought, discourses delimit the range of policy options,
thereby functioning as precursors to policy outcomes. . . . The supreme power is the power to delineate the
boundaries of thought--an attribute not so much of specific agents as it is of discursive practices." 15 These
discourses of security, however clearly articulated, nonetheless remain fraught with contradictions, as the chapters in this
security among nations , but also struggles over security among notions .
volume make clear.
ZP ^ HC
44
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Framework-Discourse
Securitization happens within state discourses, not between them—it is a precursor
to the legitimation of state violence with hierarchy as the legitimizing factor.
Lipschutz 1998 [Ronnie, prof of politics at UC Santa Cruz, On Security, ed. Ronnie Lipschutz, http://www.ciaonet.org/book/lipschutz/index.html]
concepts of security arise, to a great degree, out of discursive practices within states and,
only secondarily, among states. 17 Ole Wæver (Chapter 3: "Securitization and Desecuritization") illuminates this aspect of security, framing it
not as an objective or material condition, but as a "speech act," enunciated by elites in order to securitize issues or "fields,"
thereby helping to reproduce the hierarchical conditions that characterize security practices. Thus, according to Wæver,
much of the agenda of "redefining security" is a process of bringing into the field of security those things that, perhaps,
should remain outside (but this struggle to redefine a concept can also be seen as an effort by heretofore-excluded elites to enter the security discourse).
What this process suggests is that
He warns, therefore, that redefining security in a conventional sense, either to encompass new sources of threat or specify new referent objects, risks applying
the traditional logic of military behavior to nonmilitary problems. This process can also expand the jurisdiction of already-expansive states as well. As Wæver
puts it, "By naming a certain development a security problem, the `state' [claims] . . . a special right [to intervene]." In
intervening, the tools applied by the state would look very much like those used during the wars the state might
launch if it chose to do so. This contradiction was apparent in the initial landing of U.S. Marines in Somalia in December,
1992. Demonstrably, there was a question of matching force to force in this case, but the ostensible goal of
humanitarian assistance took on the appearance of a military invasion (with the added hyperreality of resistance offered only by the
mass(ed) media waiting on shore). This does not mean that Wæver thinks that "security as a speech act" should not be applied to anything at all; only that it is
necessary to consider with care what is implied or involved if we are indiscriminate in doing so.
Discursive contexts determine policies and “enemy” framing.
Lipschutz 1998 [Ronnie, prof of politics at UC Santa Cruz, On Security, ed. Ronnie Lipschutz, http://www.ciaonet.org/book/lipschutz/index.html]
Security is, to put Wæver's argument in other words, a socially constructed concept: It has a specific meaning only within a specific social context. 18 It
emerges and changes as a result of discourses and discursive actions intended to reproduce historical structures
and subjects within states and among them. 19 To be sure, policymakers define security on the basis of a set of
assumptions regarding vital interests, plausible enemies, and possible scenarios, all of which grow, to a not-insignificant extent, out of the
specific historical and social context of a particular country and some understanding of what is "out there." 20 But, while
these interests, enemies, and scenarios have a material existence and, presumably, a real import for state security, they cannot be regarded simply
as having some sort of "objective" reality independent of these constructions. 21 That security is socially constructed does not mean
that there are not to be found real, material conditions that help to create particular interpretations of threats, or that such conditions are irrelevant to either the
Enemies, in part, "create" each other, via the projections of their
worst fears onto the other; in this respect, their relationship is intersubjective. To the extent that they act on these projections,
threats to each other acquire a material character. In other words, nuclear-tipped ICBMs are not mere figments of our
imagination, but their targeting is a function of what we imagine the possessors of other missiles might do to us with
theirs . 22
creation or undermining of the assumptions underlying security policy.
ZP ^ HC
45
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Framework- Discourse
Security grants the state unending permission to secure itself against existential
challenges, making it functionally deny logical discourse analysis
Waever 1998
[Ole, professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, “Securitization and
Desecuritization,” On Security, ed. Ronnie Lipschutz, http://www.ciaonet.org/book/lipschutz/index.html]
With the help of language theory, we can regard "security" as a speech act . In this usage, security is not of
By saying it, something is done (as in betting, giving a promise,
naming a ship). 23 By uttering "security," a state-representative moves a particular development into a specific area, and
thereby claims a special right to use whatever means are necessary to block it . 24 The clearest illustration of this phenomenon--on
which I will elaborate below--occurred in Central and Eastern Europe during the Cold War, where "order" was clearly, systematically, and
institutionally linked to the survival of the system and its elites. Thinking about change in East-West relations and/or in Eastern Europe
What then is security?
interest as a sign that refers to something more real; the utterance itself is the act.
throughout this period meant, therefore, trying to bring about change without generating a "securitization" response by elites, which would have provided the
pretext for acting against those who had overstepped the boundaries of the permitted. Consequently, to ensure that this mechanism would not be triggered,
actors had to keep their challenges below a certain threshold and/or through the political process--whether national or international--have the threshold
the task was to turn threats into challenges; to move developments from the sphere of
existential fear to one where they could be handled by ordinary means, as politics, economy, culture, and so on. As
part of this exercise, a crucial political and theoretical issue became the definition of "intervention" or "interference in
domestic affairs," whereby change-oriented agents tried, through international law, diplomacy, and various kinds of
politics, to raise the threshold and make more interaction possible. Through this process, two things became very clear. First,
the word "security" is the act ; the utterance is the primary reality. Second, the most radical and transformational
perspective--which nonetheless remained realist--was one of minimizing "security" by narrowing the field to which the security
act was applied (as with the European détente policies of the 1970s and 1980s). After a certain point, the process took a different form and the aim
negotiated upward. As Egbert Jahn put it,
became to create a speech act failure (as in Eastern Europe in 1989). Thus, the trick was and is to move from a positive to a negative meaning: Security is the
conservative mechanism--but we want less security! Under the circumstances then existing in Eastern Europe, the power holders had among their instruments
the speech act "security." The use of this speech act had the effect of raising a specific challenge to a principled level, thereby implying that all necessary means
because such a threat would be defined as existential and a challenge to
sovereignty, the state would not be limited in what it could or might do. Under these circumstances, a problem would become a
security issue whenever so defined by the power holders. Unless or until this operation were to be brought to the point of failure--which
nuclear conditions made rather difficult to imagine 25 --available avenues of change would take the form of negotiated
limitations on the use of the "speech act security." Improved conditions would, consequently, hinge on a process
implying "less security, more politics!"
would be used to block that challenge. And,
ZP ^ HC
46
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Framework- Speech Act
Securitization is a speech act, the acceptance of which promotes a denial of logic “in
the name of security”-rejection allows for a deconstruction by taking away the power
source—acceptance. This comes before the allure of the plan.
Ivarsson, 2006 [Niclas, Head of Department of Political Science: Peace and Conflict Studies at Lund Univerity. Health and Security: HIV/AIDS in PostApartheid South Africa, p.6-7, http://theses.lub.lu.se/archive/2007/05/30/1180512652-29760-128/Uppsatsen.PDF]
The process of securitization is often compared by Buzan et al. (1998) to the speech act of theoretical linguistics. A speech act is not referring to an actual event.
Instead it is the speech act itself that is the event. This can be compared to giving a promise to someone. Unless you say it there is no promise. It is the act of
giving the promise that is the actual event or act. For something to be security, uttering the issue and the word security in the same sentence will simply not do
(Buzan et al. 1998 s 26f). It is only when an issue is presented with the logic and grammar of the speech act that we can talk
about securitization. For this we need four components “(i) securitizing actors (such as political leaders, intelligence
experts, etc.), declaring (ii) a referent object (such as a state) to be (iii)existentially threatened (e.g., by an imminent
invasion), and who make a persuasive call for the adoption of (iv) emergency measures to counter this threat(e.g.,
declare war or impose a curfew)” (Elbe 2006 p 125f).Buzan et al. claim that security is always about the future and therefore hypothetical and about
counterfactuals. What will happen if we take action and what will happen if we do not? Security is an arena were objective standards are practically impossible to
apply. Even if tanks were to rush over your border you cannot be sure if it is a threat or not unless you know the socially constituted relationship between the tank
and the referent object. Example, the tanks can be hostile but also part of peace-keeping force. For a securitization to take place the emergency measures
If it (read they) do not accept and tolerate these emergency
measures that under normal circumstances would be illegitimate there is no securitization. The final component that
is needed for a successful securitization is an acceptance from the people. Securitization is therefore essentially an
intersubjective process “as with all politics” (Buzan et al. 1998 p 30f). The rhetoric of securitization would therefore sound
something like “if we don’t take action against this threat now everything else will become unimportant”. Obviously
meaning that there will not be anything left as this threat threatens our very existence. It is important to underline that
this in itself is only a securitizing move not a securitization. A securitization does not require that extreme measures
are actually taken but that the argumentation for a securitization has created a platform from which it would be
possible to legitimize emergency measures that earlier would not have been possible (Buzan et al. 1998 p 25). According to all of
adopted to counter the existential threat must be accepted by the referent object.
this there is no such thing as objective security. However certain events can aid the securitization process as facilitating conditions. Securitization is more likely to
succeed on the state and nation level. This because it is on these levels we find the strongest collective identities. If a securitizing actor can convince the referent
object that their identity, what makes them who they are, is threatened a securitization process is likely to succeed. This is why we rarely see successful
securitization on the global level as it is very difficult to unite all of mankind to perceive a threat in the same way (Buzan et al. 1998 p 23)
ZP ^ HC
47
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Framework- A2 Rational Actor
Their model of a "rational actor" relies on specific positivist epistemologies- this
makes policy making useless
Marston, 2004, Bachelor of Social Science (QUT), PHD (UQ) Social policy and Discourse Analysis , p. 14-15
The positivist paradigm informs an idealized rational actor understanding of the policy-making process. The rational
approach to policy-making is an extension of particular forms of positivism and neo-positivism that seek to purge the social
scientist of values (Bryman, 1988, p.14). This idea of reason without values is maintained through instrumental and technical
rationality. Instrumental rationality in policy-making can be defined as follows: 'in any organization there might be a number of ways of reaching goals; and
when faced with the need to make a choice between alternatives the rational decision maker chooses the alternative most likely to achieve the desired outcome'
The idealistic representation of policy as a form of 'rational decision making' between available
choices and options is problematic for a number of reasons. The limitations of rational approaches to policy-making arise from an
insufficient account of the political context, insufficient emphasis on the participants in the process (and their conflicting
interests) and the 'ideal type' nature of the models themselves (Dalton et al, 1996, p.17). A positivist view of policy-making
asserts policy solutions as universal truths waiting to be discovered by the so-called policy 'expert'. Hillyard and Watson
(1996, p.324) argue that this perception denies the constitutive role of discourse. In short, a positivist epistemology is not an
adequate position for researchers and policy analysts aiming to explore and understand how policy meanings are
discursively constructed, how regulatory functions of the state are being transformed and how policy actors represent and
articulate policy problems and solutions. By focusing on 'objective' outcomes and grand narratives of 'progress', 'rationality' and 'truth', we
remain blind to the multifaceted nature of policy-making processes. Positivist accounts of the social world do not recognize the
constructive nature of discursive processes that produce knowledge and identities, or how conflict over policy meanings is
manifested within specific policy environments. While not denying the place of positivist informed research in social planning, this
paradigm is limited when it comes to understanding questions of power as experienced in the production, reproduction and transformation of
policy agendas. As Yanow (1996, p.6) argues. 'positivist knowledge does not give us information about meanings made by actors in a situation. When we
read a policy we see more than just marks on a page. we hear more than just sound waves'. Exploring the discursive dimensions of policymaking requires alternative theoretical frameworks and epistemologies that are able to capture the processes of
subjectification and the relationship between agency, identity and discourse in local policy contexts. The various strands of
(Ham and Hill, 1993, p.77).
critical social theory and post-structuralism are areas of theorizing that offer social policy researchers different ways of thinking about language and culture.
ZP ^ HC
48
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
A2- Policy Good Framework
Using a policy framework ensures ongoing policy failure- their desire to categorize
problems dooms them, and a policy framework can never solve itself.
Dillon and Reid, 00 (Michael Dillon, Professor of Politics at Lancaster University, and Julian Reid, Lecturer in International Relations at King's College
(London), 2000 (“Global Governance, Liberal Peace, and Complex Emergency,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Volume 25, Issue 1, January-March,
Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Academic Search Premier)
As a precursor to global governance, governmentality, according to Foucault's initial account, poses the question of order not in terms of the origin of the law and
the location of sovereignty, as do traditional accounts of power, but in terms instead of the management of population. The management of population is further
refined in terms of specific problematics to which population management may be reduced. These typically include but are not necessarily exhausted by the
following topoi of governmental power: economy, health, welfare, poverty, security, sexuality, demographics, resources, skills, culture, and so on. Now, where
there is an operation of power there is knowledge, and where there is knowledge there is an operation of power. Here discursive formations emerge and, as
Foucault noted, in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and redistributed by a certain number of procedures
whose role is to ward off its powers and dangers, to gain mastery over its chance events, to evade its ponderous, formidable materiality.[34] More specifically,
policy problematic there is expertise, and where there is expertise there, too, a policy problematic will
emerge. Such problematics are detailed and elaborated in terms of discrete forms of knowledge as well as
interlocking policy domains. Policy domains reify the problematization of life in certain ways by turning these
epistemically and politically contestable orderings of life into "problems" that require the continuous attention of policy
science and the continuous resolutions of policymakers. Policy "actors" develop and compete on the basis of the
expertise that grows up around such problems or clusters of problems and their client populations. Here, too, we may also
where there is a
discover what might be called "epistemic entrepreneurs." Albeit the market for discourse is prescribed and policed in ways that Foucault indicated, bidding to
formulate novel problematizations they seek to "sell" these, or otherwise have them officially adopted. In principle, there is no limit to the ways in which the
management of population may be problematized. All aspects of human conduct, any encounter with life, is problematizable. Any problematization is capable of
becoming a policy problem. Governmentality thereby creates a market for policy, for science and for policy science, in which problematizations go looking for
policy sponsors while policy sponsors fiercely compete on behalf of their favored problematizations. Reproblematization of problems is
constrained by the institutional and ideological investments surrounding accepted "problems," and by the sheer
difficulty of challenging the inescapable ontological and epistemological assumptions that go into their very formation.
There is nothing so fiercely contested as an epistemological or ontological assumption. And there is nothing so fiercely ridiculed as the suggestion that the real
problem with problematizations exists precisely at the level of such assumptions. Such "paralysis of analysis" is precisely what policymakers seek to avoid since
they are compelled constantly to respond to circumstances over which they ordinarily have in fact both more and less control than they proclaim. What they do
not have is precisely the control that they want. Yet serial policy failure—the fate and the fuel of all policy—compels them into a continuous search for the new
analysis that will extract them from the aporias in which they constantly find themselves enmeshed.[35] Serial policy failure is no simple shortcoming that science
and policy—and policy science—will ultimately overcome. Serial policy failure is rooted in the ontological and epistemological
assumptions that fashion the ways in which global governance encounters and problematizes life as a process of
emergence through fitness landscapes that constantly adaptive and changing ensembles have continuously to
negotiate. As a particular kind of intervention into life, global governance promotes the very changes and unintended outcomes that it then serially
reproblematizes in terms of policy failure. Thus, global liberal governance is not a linear problem-solving process committed to the resolution of objective policy
problems simply by bringing better information and knowledge to bear upon them. A nonlinear economy of power/knowledge, it deliberately installs socially
specific and radically inequitable distributions of wealth, opportunity, and mortal danger both locally and globally through the very detailed ways in which life is
variously (policy) problematized by it. In consequence, thinking and acting politically is displaced by the institutional and epistemic
rivalries that infuse its power/ knowledge networks, and by the local conditions of application that govern the
introduction of their policies. These now threaten to exhaust what "politics," locally as well as globally, is about .[36] It is
here that the "emergence" characteristic of governance begins to make its appearance. For it is increasingly recognized that there are no definitive
policy solutions to objective, neat, discrete policy problems. The "subjects" of policy increasingly also become a matter of definition as well,
since the concept population does not have a stable referent either and has itself also evolved in biophilosophical and biomolecular as well as Foucauldian
"biopower" ways.
ZP ^ HC
49
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
A2- Policy Good Framework
The critique functions not only to inform about an alternative, but functions with
international relations theory as a means of transformation.
Bilgin, 05 (Pinar Bilgin, Associate Professor of International Relations at Bilkent University (Turkey), 2005 (“Conclusion,” Regional Security in the Middle
East: A Critical Perspective, Published by Routledge, ISBN 0415325498, p. 205-207)
Emphasising the mutually interactive relationship between intellectuals and social movements should not be taken to suggest that the only way for intellectuals to
make a change is to get directly involved in political action. They can also intervene by providing a critique of the existing situation, calling attention to what future
outcomes may result if necessary action is not taken at present, and by pointing to potential for change immanent in regional politics. Students of security could
help create the political space for alternative agents of security to take action by presenting appropriate critiques. It should be emphasised however that such
thinking should be anchored in the potential immanent in world politics. The hope is that non-state actors (who may or may not be aware of their potential to
make a change) may constitute themselves as agents of security when presented with an alternative reading of their situation. Thinking about the future becomes
even more crucial once theory is [end page 205] conceptualised as constitutive of the 'reality' it seeks to respond to. In other words, our ideas about the future our conjectures and prognoses - have a self-constitutive potential. What the students of Cold War Security Studies consider as a more 'realistic'
picture of the future becomes 'real' through practice, albeit under circumstances inherited from the past. Thinking about what a
'desired' future would look like is significant for the very same reason; that is, in order to be able to turn it into a
'reality' through adopting emancipatory practices. For, having a vision of a 'desired' future empowers people(s) in the
present. Presenting pictures of what a 'desired' future might look like, and pointing to the security community
approach as the start of a path that could take us from an insecure past to a more secure future is not to suggest that
the creation of a security community is the most likely outcome. On the contrary, the dynamics pointed to throughout
the book indicate that there exists a potential for descent into chaos if no action is taken to prevent militarisation and
fragmentation of societies, and the marginalisation of peoples as well as economies in an increasingly globalising
world. However, these dynamics exist as 'threats to the future' to use Beck's terminology; and only by thinking and writing about them that can one mobilise
preventive action to be taken in the present. Viewed as such, critical approaches present not an 'optimistic', but a more 'realistic'
picture of the future. Considering how the 'realism' of Cold War Security Studies failed not only when judged by its own standards, by failing to provide an
adequate explanation of the world 'out there', but also when judged by the standards of critical approaches, as it was argued, it could be concluded that there is a
need for more 'realistic' approaches to regional security in theory and practice. The foregoing suggests three broad conclusions. First, Cold War Security Studies
did not present the 'realistic' picture it purported to provide. On the contrary, the pro-status quo leanings of the Cold War security discourse failed to allow for (let
alone foresee) changes such as the end of the Cold War, dissolution of some states and integration of some others. Second, notwithstanding the important
inroads critical approaches to security made in the post-Cold War era, much traditionalist thinking remains and maintains its grip over the security practices of
many actors. Third, critical approaches offer a fuller or more adequate picture of security in different parts of the world (including the Middle East). Cold War
Security Studies is limited not only because of its narrow (military-focused), pro-status quo and state-centric (if not statist) approach to security in theory and
practice, but also because of its objectivist conception of theory and the theory/practice relationship that obscured the mutually constitutive relationship between
them. Students of critical approaches have sought to challenge Cold War Security Studies, its claim to knowledge and its hold over security practices by pointing
to the mutually constitutive relationship between theory and practice and revealing [end page 206] how the Cold War security discourse has been complicit in
The ways in which the Cold War security discourse helped constitute the
'Middle East' by way of representing it as a region, and contributed to regional insecurity in the Middle East by
shaping security practices, is exemplary of the argument that 'theories do not leave the world untouched'. The implication
constituting (in)security in different parts of the world.
of these conclusions for practice is that becoming aware of the 'politics behind the geographical specification of politics' and exploring the relationship between
An
alternative approach to security, that of critical approaches to security, could inform alternative (emancipatory)
practices thereby helping constitute a new region in the form of a security community . It should be noted, however, that to argue
(inventing) regions and (conceptions and practices of) security helps reveal the role human agency has played in the past and could play in the future.
that 'everything is socially constructed' or that 'all approaches have normative concerns embedded in them' is a significant first step that does not by itself help
one adopt emancipatory practices. As long as people rely on traditional practices shaped by the Cold War security discourse - which remains prevalent in the
post-Cold War era - they help constitute a 'reality' in line with the tenets of 'realist' Cold War Security Studies. This is why seeking to address evolving crises
through traditional practices whilst leaving a critical security perspective to be adopted for the long-term will not work. For, traditionalist thinking and practices, by
helping shape the 'reality' 'out there', foreclose the political space necessary for emancipatory practices to be adopted by multiple actors at numerous levels.
Hence the need for the adoption of a critical perspective that emphasises the roles human agency has played in the past and could play in the future in shaping
what human beings choose to call 'reality'. Generating such an awareness of the potentialities of human agency could enable one to begin thinking differently
about regional security in different parts of the world whilst remaining sensitive to regional actors' multiple and contending conceptions of security, what they view
as referent(s) and how they think security should be sought in different parts of the world . After decades of statist, military-focused and zero-
sum thinking and practices that privileged the security of some whilst marginalising the security of others, the time
has come for all those interested in security in the Middle East to decide whether they want to be agents of a world
view that produces more of the same, thereby contributing towards a 'threat to the future', or of alternative futures
that try to address the multiple dimensions of regional insecurity. The choice is not one between presenting a more 'optimistic' or
'pessimistic' vision of the future, but between stumbling into the future expecting more of the same, or stepping into a future equipped with a perspective that not
only has a conception of a 'desired' future but is also cognisant of 'threats to the future/
ZP ^ HC
50
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
A2- No impact to representation
Representations are the core of not only understanding action- but creating it
Doty, 1996 [Roxanne Lynn, assistant professor of political science at Arizona state university, Imperial Encounters, p. 5-6]
that representation is an inherent and important aspect of global political life and therefore
a critical and legitimate area of inquiry. International relations are inextricably bound up with discursive practices-that
put into circulation representations that are taken as "truth." The goal-of-analyzing these practices is not to reveal
essential truths that have been obscured, but rather to examine bow certain representations underlie the production of
knowledge and, identities and how these representations make various courses of action possible. AS Said (1979: 21) notes, Mere is no such thing as a
delivered presence, but there is a re-presence, or representation. Such an assertion does not deny the existence of the material world,
but rather suggests that material objects and subjects are constituted as such within discourse . SO, for example, when
U.S. troops march into Grenada, this is certainly "real: though the march of troops across a piece of geographic space is in itself
singularly uninteresting and socially irrelevant outside of the representations that produce meaning. It is only when "American"
is attached to the troops and "Grenada” to the geographic space that meaning is created. What the physical behavior itself is,
though, is still far from certain until discursive practices constitute it as an "invasion; a 'show of force," "training exercise, “a "rescue, “and SO on. What is
"really" going on in such a situation is inextricably linked to the discourse within which it is located. To attempt a neat
separation between discursive and nondiscursive practices, understanding the former as purely linguistic, assumes a
series of Dichotomies – thought/reality appearance essence, mind matter, word/world, subjective/objective - that a
critical genealogy calls into Question. Against this, the perspective taken here affirms the material and performative character of discourse. 'In
This study begins with the premise
suggesting that global politics, and specifically the aspect that has to do with relations between the North and the South, is linked to representational practices 1
am suggesting that the issues and concerns that constitute these relations occur within a 'reality' whose content has for the most part been defined by the
representational practices of the ‘first world'. Focusing on discursive practices enables one to examine how the processes that
produce "truth" and "knowledge" work and how they are articulated with the exercise of political, military, and
economic power
ZP ^ HC
51
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
A2- Link Turn
When the affirmative changes the role of the “enemy” they functionally create a new
opposition- always continuing to act with the us-them mindset on. This proves we
need to rethink the entire problem of security
Lipschutz 1998 [Ronnie, prof of politics at UC Santa Cruz, “Negotiating the Boundaries of Difference and Security at Millennium's End,” On Security, ed.
Ronnie Lipschutz, http://www.ciaonet.org/book/lipschutz/index.html]
Security, under these circumstances, is about the drawing and defense of lines and boundaries, about limits, and about exclusion and, in this sense, it is the
quintessential "speech act" described by Ole Wæver. Defining security involves establishing a definition of the collective self vis-à-vis other collective selves. It is
not only about "who is against us," but also, as the observation offered at the beginning of this chapter suggests, about "who we are" and whom we do not wish
to be. It is, to a large degree, about boundaries of difference that are increasingly difficult to specify and negotiate. Lose an Enemy, Lose Yourself Some years
ago, according to a now almost-apocryphal story, a U.S. diplomat was approached by a Soviet colleague and told, sotto voce , "We are about to do a terrible
thing to you. We are going to deprive you of an enemy." 9 At the time, the story had a certain appealing charm to it: The Soviet Union was the primary threat to,
and enemy of, the United States, as forty years of Cold War had definitively established. Without the Soviet Union as an enemy, a new era in international
cooperation could begin. Financial resources allocated to the defense sector by the two superpowers and their allies could now be redirected to social welfare,
basic infrastructure, technological innovation, and environmental protection. The security dilemma that had resulted in the manufacture of more than 50,000
nuclear weapons, the deployment of 300,000 American troops and a comparable number of Soviet soldiers in Europe, and the annual global expenditure of close
to $1 trillion could be eliminated. A new Concert of states, acting through international institutions, would help to wind down the regional and civil wars fostered by
the East-West conflict. In retrospect, the clarity of those last days of bipolarity, only a few short years ago, was illusory; the Cold War appears to have been a
period of great stability (although this, too, is something of an illusion), inasmuch as the world now seems to be rent by conflict and war to a degree that would
have been difficult to imagine in 1989. These wars and conflicts are, however, largely of a quite unanticipated character: They are mostly intrastate and social ,
rather than interstate and political . Today's wars are mostly between literal neighbors, not neighboring states; the security dilemma has been domesticated and
brought into the state (and, in some instances, down to the household level). 10 How can we explain this puzzling phenomenon? Much of the analysis that
currently purports to explain these wars revolves around the concepts of ethnicity and sectarianism : Increasingly, groups of people are defining
themselves collectively, relative to others, in terms of certain shared or acquired characteristics such as appearance, religion,
history, origins, language, and so on. This is not something new, of course; the very ideas of nationalism and the nation-state are based on such differences. But
analyses based on the construction and application of ethnicity generally ignore the importance of the Other --whom
one is not--in fostering the sense of collective identity so important to action centered on ethnicity or sectarianism. 11
Defining oneself in such terms requires defining someone else in different terms; differentiation thus draws a boundary between the self and the Other. This
Other is not, at first, necessarily a threat in terms of one's own continued existence, although ethnicity can and does become securitized. 12 But the
peaceful
acceptance of an Other requires that boundaries be drawn somewhere else, and that security, the speech act,
specify another Other (as in, for example, South Slavs against the Hapsburgs, or Yugoslavia against the Soviet Union). There are always implicit risks in
the peaceful acceptance of an Other as a legitimate ontology, because doing so raises the possibility, however remote, of accepting the Other's characteristics
as a legitimate alternative and, consequently, of being taken over by the Other. Given this epistemology of threats, it does not take much to be "turned." 13 How
else to account for the life and death character of the distinctions among Serbs, Croats, and Muslims in Bosnia, which the untutored eye can hardly detect? 14
As James Der Derian puts it in his contribution to this volume, "The desire for security is manifested as a collective resentment
of difference--that which is not us, not certain, not predictable." 15 The loss of an Enemy can be seen, therefore, as
something of a catastrophe for an identity based on that Enemy, and it opens up a search for a new Other that can
function as the new Enemy. And, make no mistake about it: While the myths underlying American identity are many, during the Cold War the strongest
one had to do with not-being, and not-becoming, Communist, both individually and collectively. In a world dominated by Great Powers and balance-of-power
politics, as was the case prior to World War II, losing one enemy was not a problem; there were others to be found. In the post-bipolar world, the search for
enemies and new security threats is less easily solved, inasmuch as the disappearance of the only Other that counts leaves no other Others that can credibly fill
its place.
ZP ^ HC
52
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
A2- Link Turn
Securitization relies on fear to define and construct the other-the concept of security
does not secure us against all real threats but only chooses ones based on the
violent distancing of difference-the idea that our allies are not threats to us despite
their ability to annihilate us proves the social construction of security- the aff’s goals
predicate this
Lipschutz 1998 [Ronnie, prof of politics at UC Santa Cruz, “Negotiating the Boundaries of Difference and Security at Millennium's End,” On Security, ed.
Ronnie Lipschutz, http://www.ciaonet.org/book/lipschutz/index.html]
To be secure, one had to believe that, were the Other to cross
the line, both the self and the Other would cease to exist. The threat of nothingness secured the ontology of being,
but at great political cost to those who pursued this formula. Since 1991, deterrence has ceased to wield its cognitive force, and the lines in
Nuclear deterrence depended on lines on the ground and in the mind:
the mind and on the ground have vanished, in spite of repeated efforts to draw them anew. To be sure, the United States and Russia do not launch missiles
It was the
existence of the Other that gave deterrence its power; it is the disappearance of the Other that has vanquished that power. Where
Russia is now concerned, we are, paradoxically, not secure, because we see no need to be secured . 25 In other words, as
Ole Wæver might put it, where there is no constructed threat, there is no security problem. France is fully capable of doing
great damage to the United States, but that capability has no meaning in terms of U.S. security. The search for new
against each other because both know the result would be annihilation. But the same is true for France and Britain, or China and Israel.
rationales for security leads, as Beverly Crawford's essay suggests, not to security redefined but to endless iterative loops. To be secure, we must become more
self-reliant, inasmuch as to be reliant means depending on others who are potential Others. To depend on others means that they are more competitive than we
are. To be less competitive means our survival may be threatened. But to be less reliant means that we forego the fruits of technological collaboration with
others. To forego the fruits of collaboration means that we become less competitive, poorer and less secure than others might be. If we are poorer and less
secure, we are more open to penetration by others, who might well take us over.
If we were more like the Japanese, we would be the equal
of Japan and secure; but if we were more like the Japanese, we would be less like Americans and therefore
insecure. And so on through this new Hall of Mirrors. The "new economic security dilemma" is more of a contradiction than a dilemma. While
U.S. policymakers fret over competition, U.S. corporations establish strategic alliances with their Japanese counterparts.
ZP ^ HC
53
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
A2- Kritik is ideological
Ideology affects all theories- it isn’t the problem, it’s the way identity understanding
determines positions. This favors the kritik’s questioning of assumptive truths.
Walker 2002 [RBJ, professor of political science at the University of Victoria, “Realism, Change, and International Political Theory,” International Studies
Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Mar., 1987), pp. 65-86, jstor]
The general problem has a more specific version: all things become other than they were, yet remain somehow enduring. The problem of identity is raised in
terms of time and change. It is with Plato in particular that we conventionally locate the crystallization of a fundamental difference between metaphysical
universals and a realm of becoming, between being and being-in-the-world, the latter having identity and reality only through participation in the former. This
momentous formulation of a radical opposition between eternity and history, between identity and difference in time, continues to haunt contemporary social and
political theory in its search for new horizons. Here structuralism, like the great Cartesian and Kantian rationalisms before it, has inherited the claim to
transtemporal, transspatial abstract universalisms. Structural invariables are distinguished from the mere succession of events, and, in the more extreme
versions we then get a vision of the synchronic structure of universal mind in which the lived meaning- of history is excluded. Not surprisingly, it is just this lived
meaning of history that is then championed as the alternative ground on which to construct, and reconstruct, a more appropriate account of human affairs. In
some forms, history itself becomes the antithesis of structure; Hegelian or post-Hegelian temporality opposes the atemporal structuralisms of Kant. In other
forms, the stress is on the historically constituted meaning of human experience, and hermeneutics or understanding comes to oppose the reifying
methodologies of positivistic science (von Wright, 1971; Ricoeur, 1978; Gadamer, 1981). More recently, structuralism has mutated into post-structuralism. The
absolute priority of universal structure has given way to an absolute priority of temporal process, of "trace" and "difference. "9 But whether on the ground of
history, meaning of praxis, or of the deconstruction of Western "logocentricism," modern social and political theory has become intimately concerned with the
dilemmas and horizons set up by a discourse about change organized as a specific form of an opposition between identity and difference. Neither the more
arcane intricacies of contemporary debate about structure and history, nor even the more familiar problems of interpreting long dead political thinkers are usually
of much interest to analysts of modern world politics. Both enterprises seem, and in some senses certainly are, remote and abstract, divorced from the pressing
concerns of state policy and global conflict. Yet in another sense, the very refusal to take the issues that arise from these two contexts seriously is of at least
some minor signifi- carice in the processes through which the "reality" of modern international politics has come to be, and continues to be reproduced. The
key issue here is ideology. Insofar as it is a critical category, rather than a descriptive term, our understanding of
ideology is also rooted in the underlying problematic of identity and difference. The truth of the one is opposed by the illusions of
difference, whether of the many or of the realm of becoming; hence, many of the characteristic moves of ideology-critique. In one direction, the standpoint
of identity can be used to judge the illusory nature of the plural world of change. This is the typical pose of
rationalism, structuralism and positivistic science. Here the analysis of change tends towards a reification into ahistorical and universal laws.
In another direction, the claim to universality is itself challenged as a mere parochialism, whether in space or in time. Here the
many critiques of Enlighten- ment science or Marx's critique of the pretentions of the bourgeois economists are fairly typical. These moves are central
to the tension between structuralism and historicism in modern social and political theory. Structuralist positions
generally aspire to scientific status, to ahistorical laws and explanations. Historicist positions lean towards the
categories of hermeneutics and practice. For poststructuralists, the real problem is the prior framework in which truth
and illusion are assumed to guarantee each other.
ZP ^ HC
54
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
A2- Does Nothing
Critiques act by creating questions and recognizing that critical thought inherently
intervenes to create the option for alternatives.
Campbell, 98 (David Campbell, professor of international politics at the university of Newcastle, Writing Security, 1998, pg. 227)
This perhaps helps explain why critical scholars of world politics are increasingly and overtly concerned with ethical questions that are inherent to their work. Yet
the political consequences of these arguments — such as the way in which the ethos might play out in the specific sites of United States
Foreign Policy, for example — has attracted to date little enthusiasm.87 Not because the proposals are unappealing per se, but
because they allegedly do not disclose new options that mark them off completely from those that could be advocated by competing
perspectives. In such criticisms lies an important misunderstanding that is worth clarifying by way of conclusion. Even when an
argument of this kind shifts to the register of policy, its contribution is not to simply advocate one fixed position. This is
not because it is incapable of endorsing or suggesting particular decisions in specific circumstances that should be pursued. Rather, an argument of this kind embodies an ethos that considers critique to be a form of intervention, carrying with it particular
assumptions into an already established political formation in order to pry open the space for alternatives. This ethos is
therefore primarily concerned with the temporal process of critique and the positions it makes possible. Whether deconstructive, genealogical, or of some
Its contribution is to
recognize the way such limits establish both the possibility and the insufficiency of particular policy resolutions, to
appreciate that despite such deficiencies decisions must be taken only to be simultaneously criticized and taken
again, and to enact the Enlightenment attitude by a persistent and relentless questioning in specific contexts of the
identity performances, and their inescapable indebtness to difference, through which politics occurs. All of this is
other kind, an argument like this is always looking to the limits and how they can be contested, disturbed, or negotiated.
necessarily part of an ethico-political position far removed from the disciplinary ambitions of social science, for it maintains that only by pursuing the
agonism between closure and disturbance, naturalization and denaturalization, can a democratic ethos be lived.
ZP ^ HC
55
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
A2- Aff O/W
Threats constructed with a realist mindset make collective security responses
improbable, and falsely assumes war as inevitable.
Wendt 06, Ph.D., Political Science, Professor of International Security, The Ohio State University, 2008 [Alexander, “Constructing International Politics”, The
MIT Press, p.77]
If past interactions have created a structure in which status quo states are divided or naive, revisionists will prosper
and the system will tend toward a Hobbesian world in which power and self-interest rule. In contrast, if
past interactions have created a structure in which status quo states trust and identify with each other, predators are
more likely to face collective security responses like the Gulf War. History matters. Security dilemmas are not acts of God:
they are effects of practice. This does not mean that once created they can necessarily be escaped (they are, after all, "dilemmas"), but it puts
the causal locus in the right place. Contrast this explanation of power politics with the "poverty of neorealism."'' Mearsheimer
thinks it significant that in anarchy, states cannot be 100 percent certain that others will not attack. Yet even in
domestic society, I cannot be certain that I will be safe walking to class. There are no guarantees in life, domestic or
international, but the fact that in anarchy war is possible does not mean "it may at any moment occur. Indeed, it may be quite
unlikely, as it is in most interactions today. Possibility is not probability. Anarchy as such is not a structural cause of anything.
What matters is its social structure, which varies across anarchies. An anarchy of friends differs from one of enemies,
one of self-help from one of collective security, and these are all constituted by structures of shared knowledge.
Mearsheimer does not provide an argument for why this is wrong; he simply asserts that it is.
ZP ^ HC
56
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
A2 Perm- Must Disengage First
Security constitutes an ethical boundary that must be challenged rethinking is a
precondition to being able to change politics one must question before acting
Campbell 1998 [David Campbell, professor of international politics at the university of Newcastle, Writing Security, 1998, pg. 202]
Furthermore, Foucault argues that from the eighteenth century onward, security becomes
the central dynamic in governmental rationality,
so that (as discussed in chapter 6) we live today, not in a narrowly defined and overtly repressive disciplinary society, but in
a “society of security,” in which practices of national security and practices of social security structure intensive and
extensive power relations, and constitute the ethical boundaries and territorial borders of inside! outside, normal/pathological, civilized/barbaric, and so
on23 The theory of police and the shift from a sovereign’s war to a population’s war thus not only changed the nature
of “man” and war, it constituted the identity of “man” in the idea of the population, and articulated the dangers that
might pose a threat to security. The ma¬jor implication of this argument is that the state is understood as having no essence, no
ontological status that exists prior to and is served by either police or war. Instead, “the state” is “the mobile effect of
a multiple regime of governmentality,” of which the practices of police, war, and foreign policy/Foreign Policy are all a
part.34 Rethinking security and government in these terms is one of the preconditions necessary to suggest some of
the political implications of this study. Specifically, it has been the purpose of this book to argue that we can interpret the cold war as an important
moment in the production and reproduction of American identity in ways consonant with the logic of a “society of security” To this end, the analysis of the texts of
Foreign Policy in chapter 1, the consideration of Eisen¬hower’s security policies in chapter 6, and the examination of the in¬terpretation of danger surrounding
“the war on drugs” in chapter 7, demonstrated that even when these issues are represented in terms of national security and
territorial boundaries, and even when these issues are written in the depoliticizing mode of policy discourse, they all
constitute “the ensemble of the population” in terms of social se¬curity and ethical borders. Likewise, Foucault’s
argument underpins the fact that these developments are not peculiar to the post—World War II period.
ZP ^ HC
57
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
A2 Perm- Realism Co-opts
Perm can’t solve – Realism can’t conceptualize itself.
Linklater 1990 [Andrew Linklater, Senior Lecturer in Politics Monash University, 1990 Beyond Realism and Marxism, pp 14-15]
Although some realists and rationalist have argued for the transformation of world politics, most nevertheless emphasize the limited opportunities
for significant reform. On these grounds, most members of these traditions have been dismissive of the revolutionist
tradition. As noted above, several recent attempts to apply critical theory to international relations accept the realist’s point that Marxism and critical sociology
failed to recognize the importance of international systemic constraints. From the perspective of critical theory, however, realism can only
be true if the species is unfree. What realism offers is an account of historical circumstances which human subject
have yet to bring under their collective control. What it does not possess is an account of the modes of political
intervention which would enable human beings to take control of their international history. That is the ultimate task facing the
critical theory of international relations. An inquiry into the alternative forms of foreign policy behavior cannot be divorced from
the question of how to construct a post-realism analysis of international relations. Rationalism and critical theory of world politics
have a similar approach to this problem. Both reject the method of analyzing the states-system as if it were a domain apart. Both regard the abstraction of the
state-system as a barrier to understanding one of the crucial dimensions of international relations: the universalization of the basic principles of international
order, and the universalizastion of the demand for the self-determination respectively. As for Waltz’s realism, the problem is not that it fails
as an account of the reproduction of the states-system, or that it errs by emphasizing the need for a technicallyrational dimension of foreign policy. The issue is whether the decision to abstract the states-system from other
domains ignores the existence of actual or potential logics of system-modification which may strengthen the bond of
international community; and it is whether the preoccupation with the systemic reproduction ends in a practice which
suppresses the tendencies inherent in alternative logics. Consequently, although realism succeeds in explaining the necessitous
character of international relations it fails to explicate its role in reproducing the power relations which it regards as the
objective foundation for the “impossibility theorem.”
ZP ^ HC
58
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
A2 Perm- Must Act Alone
The perm doesn’t solve – must act alone in order to transcend securitization
Lott 2004 (Anthony D, Assistant Professor at St Olaf College in Northfield, USA. “Creating Insecurity: Realism, Constructivism, and US Security Policy”
Critical Security Series.)
The second rhetorical perspective suggests the possibility of overcoming this negative vision and improving
the human condition. Adherents suggest it is theoretically possible to transcend the current condition of insecurity.
However, this political perspective should not be confused as the philosophical progeny of inter-war political
idealism. Early forms of idealism recognized the power of the humanist spirit and sought to transcend insecurity by proposing peace through law, collective
security arrangements, democratization, trade, and the success of international peace movements. The rhetorical perspective that is of interest to this study
Political constructivism requires policy makers, analysts,
and other actors to reflect on consistently critique their pre-given assumptions concerning identities and
interests. A deep investigation of culture is a required component in the process of overcoming insecurity.
represents a practical (political) application of post-structural constructivism.
Political constructivists are a sub-set of the larger community of epistemological points, not all constructivists adhere to the reflexive critiques engages in by
political constructivists. Moreover, as discussed below, it is not necessarily the case that constructivism leads to the set of political values emphasized in this
chapter. But, there are significant reasons to recognize a distinct community of scholars engaged in understanding the importance of reflection and constant
criticism in an effort to transcend the sources of insecurity.
ZP ^ HC
59
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
A2 Perm- Aff Can’t Solve
The perm doesn’t solve- it is impossible to analyze your own speech-act to determine
if it is truly a threat.
Lott 2004 (Anthony D, Assistant Professor at St Olaf College in Northfield, USA. “Creating Insecurity: Realism, Constructivism, and US Security Policy”
Critical Security Series.)
At the most general level of a security analysis it is necessary to recognize the role that language plays in
the process of threat construction and the collective feelings of insecurity. The ‘objectivist’ features of traditional security
studies rest on shaky epistemological foundations. The materialist ontology and empiricist epistemology that pervade neo-realism seek to understand real threats
and dangers that exist in an extra-linguistic universe. Against this approach, we can agree with Buzan, Waever, and de Wilde that security issues are made so
understanding of the importance of ‘speech-acts’
is central to the development of a coherent security analysis. Emphasizing the constructed nature of our world, these authors do
‘by acts of securitization.’ While the language they employ is somewhat difficult, their
much to influence the direction of security studies. They articulate an understanding of security threats that recognizes the central role played by human
interpretation in their creation. We do not try to peek behind this to decide whether it is really a threat (which would reduce the entire
securitization approach to a theory of perceptions and misperceptions). Security is a quality actors inject into issues by securitizing them, which
means to stage them on the political arena…and then to have them accepted by a sufficient audience to sanction extraordinary defensive
It is not simply that we do not try to peek behind particular threats to decide
whether they warrant such a label, it is the impossibility of such an endeavor that sets for us the parameters
of our security framework. Here, Nicholas Onuf is most clear: ‘[we] are always within our constructions, even as we
choose to stand apart from them, condemn them, reconstruct them.’ Similarly, Karin Fierke writes, ‘we connot get
behind our language to compare it with that which it describes.’ In a very real and meaningful way the limits of our language
moves. Here, we can be even more direct.
define the limits of our threats.
ZP ^ HC
60
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
A2 Perm- Discourse
The perm can’t solve—the liberal ruling ideology makes breaking free from security
discourse impossible.
Anker 2006 (Elisabeth Anker , Assistant Professor of English at Wake Forest University, “The Only Thing We Have To Fear...,” Theory & Event, 8(3), AD:
7-9-9)
Robin persuasively argues that liberalism
cannot escape its own paradoxical inheritance as both opposed to and grounded in
fear; but if fear is constitutive for liberalism, how can one uphold liberalism while jettisoning fear as a seedbed for political life? Taking Robin's argument to its
logical conclusion, liberalism is by its very nature incapable of abandoning the fear that is its foundation and subsistence.
Liberalism is not merely an ideological orientation but one tethered to specific institutions, histories, and modes of
operation generated and bound by the politics of fear. Whereas Robin asks us to acknowledge these specificities, he then argues for a
liberalism untethered to any particularity, for a liberalism realized only in theory. The path of Robin's argument is more revolutionary than he is willing to
acknowledge; it would require a transformation of liberalism into a more radical democratic politics, in which widespread participation and an egalitarian agenda
actively challenge the politics of fear.
ZP ^ HC
61
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
A2 Perm- Co-option
Perm will be co-opted – the US will always strive for self preservation through
securitization. The alternative alone is the only way to solve.
Campbell 1998 (David, Professor of International politics at the University of Newcastle, Writing Security: US Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity,
pg 38-39)
The subfield of international relations that serves as the main body of literature on foreign is that of “comparative
foreign policy,” a field indebted to the realist orthodoxy that underpins the discipline’s view of the cold war.4 A number of reviews have provided a clear
insight to the entailments and assumptions of this dominant mode of understanding foreign policy. In the introduction to a collection that surveyed “new
directions” in the study of foreign policy, James Rosenau noted with approval that the conspicuous absence of “ philosophical and methodological argumentation”
in the collected essays was an indication of the field’s passage into a “more mature era of inquiry.” In contrast to earlier periods “the epistemological and
methodological premises on which the analysis rest[s]…are largely taken for granted.”5 These assumptions give rise to a conventional and
largely unquestioned substantive focus (for scholars rather than practitioners) in foreign policy analysis: the policies of states
oriented toward the external world.6 Rosenau has provided an illuminating metaphor to describe this focus. Foreign policy analysis, he
argued, “is a bridging discipline. It takes as its focus of study the bridges that whole systems called states to build to
link themselves and their subsystems to the even more encompassing international systems of which they are a
part.”7 In this understanding, global politics comprises states, their(domestic) subsystems, and international systems.
These systems and subsystems exist independently of, and prior to, any relationship that results from their joining by the “bridge” of foreign policy. That
bridge is consciously constructed by the state in an effort to make itself part of the larger system and to deal with the
dangers and uncertainties that the larger system holds for its own security. As a phenomenon thought to be common
to all states, we speak about foreign policy of state “x” or state “y,” Thereby indicating that the state is prior to the
policy. Underpinned by a commitment to epistemic realism, this understanding depends on the “explicit and
grounded... prior conceptualizations of variables and relationships.”8 These variables are the internal factors of the state and the
external conditions of the international system. The relationships involve the structure of the internal factors ( the processes of decision making within the state, in
which psychological interpretations act as an additional “bridge” between individuals and institutions)9 and the interaction of the internal factors and external
conditions.10
ZP ^ HC
62
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
A2 Perm- Turns Itself
The perm relies upon the same thought which caused these problems in the first
place
Dillon 1996 (Michael, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Lancaster, The Politics of Security)
Reimagining politics is, of course, easier said than done. Resistance to it - especially in International Relations - nonetheless gives us a clue to one of the places
resistance to it does not arise from a political
conservatism. Modern exponents of political modernity pride themselves on their realistic radicalism. Opposition
always arises, instead, from an extraordinarily deep and profound conservatism of thought. Indeed, conservatism of thought in
respect of the modern political imagination is required of the modern political subject. Remaining politics therefore means thinking differently.
Moreover, the project of that thinking differently leads to thinking 'difference' itself. Thought is therefore required if
politics is to contribute to out-living the modern; specifically, political thought. The challenge to out-live the modern
issues from the faltering of modern thought, however, and the suspicion now of its very own project of thought, as much as it does from
the spread of weapons of mass destruction, the industrialization and ecological despoliation of the planet, or the
genocidal dynamics of new nationalisms. The challenge to out-live the modern issues, therefore, from the modern
condition of both politics and thought. This so- called suspicion of thought - I would rather call it a transformation of the project of thought which has
where we may begin. For although I think of this project as a kind of political project,
disclosed the faltering of the modern project of thought - is what has come to distinguish continental thought in the last century. I draw on that thought in order to
think the freedom of human being against the defining political thought of modernity: that ontological preoccupation with the subject of
security which commits its politics to securing the subject. Motivated therefore, by a certain sense of crisis in both
philosophy and politics, and by the conviction that there is an intimate relation between the two which is most
violently and materially exhibited globally in (inter)national politics, the aim of this book is to make a contribution towards rethinking some
of the fundamentals of International Relations through what I would call the political philosophy of contemporary continental thought. Its ultimate intention is,
therefore, to make a contribution toward the reconstruction of International Relations as a site of political thought, by departing from the very commitment to the
politics of subjectivity upon which International Relations is premised. This is a tall order, and not least because the political philosophy of continental thought
cannot be brought to bear upon International Relations if the political thought of that thought remains largely unthought.
ZP ^ HC
63
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
A2 Realism- Fails
Realists fail to distinguish between real crises and small predicaments.
Koga 2005, (Yoshifumi, Department of Political Science University of Pittsburgh, “ Constructivist Approach of International Sanctions: Realism,
Liberalism, Cosmopolitanism, and Hegemonism”)
Realist conceptualization of international sanctions is more problematic than liberal one. Liberal approach is acceptable as long as it is
understood as a normative theory that specifies the conditions under which coercive acts are permissible in interstate relations. We do not live in a Kantian world
now, therefore, their arguments are not useful for understanding the realpolitik of international sanctions very much. Yet, the unreality of liberal prescriptions can
be a real force for civilizing our international society in the long run. As E. H. Carr notes, “The ideal, once it is embodied in an institution, ceases to be an ideal
and becomes the expression of a selfish interest, which must be destroyed in the name of a new ideal. This constant interaction of irreconcilable force is the stuff
of politics. Every political situation contains mutually incompatible elements of utopia and reality, of morality and power” (1946: 94). Realists, however, distort
both the ideal and the reality of international sanctions. The meaning of sanctions is lost completely in their arguments. They conceptualize economic sanctions
as the attempt to change another country’s behaviors by restricting economic interactions. They fail to realize how distorted their conceptualization of economic
sanctions is. Their definitions of economic sanctions defy common sense. Ask them three questions. Some realists may start to apprehend the problems of their
arguments. First, ask them to give us a few examples of military sanctions? Representative military sanctions they mention would be Great Britain’s gunboat
diplomacy in the 19th century, Theodore Roosevelt’s “big-stick diplomacy” in the early 20th century, China’s attacks on Vietnamese forces in 1979, or the U.S.led invasions of Iraq in 1991 and 2003. Then, ask them how to distinguish between these cases and many other cases of wars listed in the Correlates of War
projects (Singer and Diehl 1990). Our common sense tells us that Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia, Hitler’s invasion of Poland, and Japan’s attack on Pearl
Harbor are not military sanctions. What is
the difference between Japan’s Pearl Harbor attack of 1941 and the U.S. invasion of
Iraq in 2003? Realists cannot explain the difference between them because they treat sanctions as synonymous with
coercion and military attacks are also coercive acts. In their theory of sanctions the study of military sanctions
becomes indistinguishable from the study of wars. But how many realists could say that “of course, Japan imposed military sanctions on the
United States in December 1941” without hesitation?
ZP ^ HC
64
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
A2 Realism- Outdated
Realism is dead – it relies on an outdated conception of state and lives on only as an
institution without any an intellectual grounding.
Der Derian 1999 (James, journal of the theoretical humanities, “A Virtual Theory of Global Politics, Mimetic War, and The Spectral State’)
The sovereign state, having outlived its original purpose to end feudal and religious violence and bring order to the seventeenth- century Cosmopolis,
has become equally spectral-dependent in its violent effects, haunting world polities and international politics with the
white-sheet rhetoric of fear and insecurity. It is not difficult to find empirical support for Derrida’s theoretical suspensions of disbelief. Take, for
example, current mimetic conjuring for the exorcism of internal spirits by invocations of external evils, like drugs, immigration, and Islam; black magic shows of
virtual violence through the simulacrum of war games; and "humanitarian" intervention (like the UN in Bosnia - but not Rwanda) for performative acts of
deterrence and compellence. Moreover. Derrida takes the critique of sovereignty afield, going beyond his usual concern with logocentrism to explore how the
haunting of politics has moved from the bounded text of geopolitical specters to the practically borderless electromagnetic spectrum: “And if this important frontier
is being displaced, it is because the medium in which it is instituted, namely, the medium of the media themselves (news. the press- telecommunications. technotelediscursivity. techno-teleiconicity. that which in general assures and determines the spacing of public space, the very possibility of the revelation and the
phenomenality of the political), this element itself is neither living nor dead, present nor absent: it speetralizes. It does not belong to ontology, to the discourse of
Being of beings, or to the essence of life or death. It requires, then, what we call, to save time and space rather than just to make up a word, hauntology.”
Nietzsche and Derrida offer a penetrating critique of sovereignty, vet ... it lives, most demonstrably in international theory and diplomatic state-craft, as, no less,
the realist perspective. What do we mean by "realism"? It
encompasses a world-view in which sovereign states, struggling for
power under conditions of anarchy, do what they must to maintain and promote their own self-interests. But what do "we" mean by "realism"? We
realists constituted by and representing disciplinary schools of thought, diplomatic corps, intelligence bureau depict things as they really are, rather than as
idealists might wish them to be. And what do "we" mean by "realism"? We mean
what we say and say what we mean. in that transparent
way of correspondence that provides the veridical, deadly discourses of realism, like mutual assured destruction
assures our security. or "we had to destroy the village in order to save it." But with the end of the Cold War, and pace Nietzsche, why
beat a dead horse? Precisely because realism does death so well, by refusing to acknowledge not only its ongoing complicity in
tine death of others but also the fact that it gave up the ghost a long time ago. How many times, after how many "revolutionary"
transitions, have we heard that sovereignty is at bay, at an end, dead? There is always the easy deflection, that sovereignty is an "essentially contested concept,"
- a "convenient fiction." that changes with the times. But the frequency of such death-notices, from politicians, military strategists and pundits, as well as
academicians, leads one to suspect that something other than funerary oration, philosophical speculation, or a topic for it special issue is at work. Is there a
darker, even gothic side to the sovereign state, a bidden power which resides in its recurrent morbidity? Take a look at some of the principle necroses.
Realism has built a life out of the transformation of fictions, like the immutability of human nature and the apopoditic
threat of anarchy, into facticity. With a little digging, realism conies to resemble nothing so much as the undead, a
perverse mimesis of the living other, haunting international politics through the objectification of power, the
fetishisation of weaponry, the idealization of the state, the virtualization of violence, and the globalization of new
media. Now the fact of its own dealth lives on as a powerful fiction, as the morbid customs, characteristics, and habits of
the living dead.
ZP ^ HC
65
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
A2 Realism- State Bad
When using the state as the starting point for its analysis, realism is unable to account for
the accelerating of change present in modernity
Der Derian 1999 (James, journal of the theoretical humanities, “A Virtual Theory of Global Politics, Mimetic War, and The Spectral State’)
In war, diplomacy, and the media, the real morphs with the virtual . Not even the state, the foundation of Real politick, is immune from
virtualization. Sovereignty, the primary means by which the supreme power and legitimate violence of the state is territorially fixed, declared once, many-times
dead, now seems only able to regain its vigor virtually, through media spawns which oppose ordered, identical "heres" to external, alien "out-theres" through
representations which are real in time, not space. Instant scandals, catastrophic accidents, "live-feed" wars, and quick-in, quick-out interventions into still-born or
moribund states provide the ephemeral. virtual seuiblartce of sovereignty. Once upon a space, war was the ultimate reality-check of international politics; now,
seamlessly integrating battlefield simulations and public dissimulations through the convergence of PC and TV, war is virtualized and commoditized as pure war,
infowar, netwar, cyherwar. For the intractable problems of post-Cold War politics, the technical fix has acquired a new lustre: primetime as well as C4I
networks bring us "virtual war"; beltway think-tanks and information
technology industries promote a "virtual diplomacy." And, according to a recent Time cover-story on high-finance, money verges toward the
(Command, Control, Communications, Computers and Intelligence)
virtual: one financial expert emphatically states that "the distinction between software and money is disappearing." to which a Citibank executive responds "it's
revolutionary - and we should be scared as hell." To be sure, questions of power and identity, space and borders, legitimacy and
meaning will continue to be framed by the necessitous narratives of personal and public security couched in the legal
imperative of sovereignty. But in the new hyper-realms of global politics produced by economic penetration, technological acceleration, and new media,
these questions now entail virtual investigations. Will the sovereign state become so spectral as to disappear all together, one more unholy relic for the museum
of modernity? Or will it re-emerge in global, virtual forms? Does globalization enhance the prospects of a democratic peace? Or does virtu-alit ion assure the
continuation of war by other means? Has Clausewitz been repudiated - or merely brought up to speed? Is virtuality replacing the reality of war? Is it the harbinger
of a new world order, or a brave new world? Most importantly, will processes of virtualization help to close or to further open the gulf between those who have the
New thinking often lags behind transitions driven by new technologies, and, as Albert Einstein
the results can be catastrophic. The virtual technologies of new media warrant a
commensurate critical scrutiny. New media, generally identified as digitized, interactive, networked forms of communication, now exercise a global
technology and those who do not?
famously remarked about the atom bomb,
effect if not ubiquitous presence, through instant video-feeds, satellite link-ups, TI-T3 links, overhead surveillance, global mapping, distributed computer
simulations, programmed trading, and movies with Arnold Sehwarzenegger in them. Virtual media represent the most penetrating and sharpest - to the point of
invisibility - edge of globalization. The power of virtuality lies in its ability to collapse distance, between here and there, near and far, fact and fiction. Moreover,
the virtual effect of bringing "there" here in near real-time and with near-verisimilitude adds a strategic as well as comparative advantage to the production of
violence - what one futurist at a recent military conference referred to as the "fifth dimension" of global warfare. However, like all complex systems,
there is potential for catastrophe, from what organizational theorists call negitive synergy, of the sort that produced a
Three Mile Island or a Chernobyl. The spatialist, materialist - that is, realist - bias of thinking in international theory renders it
less than adequate for a critical inquiry into the temporal, representational, deterritorial, and potentially dangerous
powers of virtual technologies. Semiotic, critical, and discourse theories offer a better perspective, having led the way
in tracing the reconfiguration of power into new representational, immaterial forms. They have helped us to under-stand how acts
of inscription and the production of information tan reify consciousness, float signifiers, and render concepts undecidable. However, as the realities of
international politics increasingly are generated, mediated and simulated by successive technical means of reproduction, there is not so much a distancing from
some original, truth-bearing source as there is an implosion, where meaning disappears into a media black hole of insignificance. As the globalization and
virtualization of new media sunder meaning from conventional moorings, and set information adrift as it moves with alacrity and celerity from phenomenal to
virtual forms, one searches for new modes of understanding. Attenuated by cant and deemed too popular for serious scholarship, the virtual has already become
an academic taboo.
All the more reason, I believe, to extend the reach of critical approaches. Derrida and Nietzsche are
valuable because they provide a philosophical perspective which links public space with a responsive as well as
responsible private space
ZP ^ HC
66
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
A2 Realism- Conflict
Realism destroys our ability to defuse conflict- turns case
Luke 2003, (Timothy, professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, ‘Language, Agency, And Politics in a Constructed
World’, p. 107-108
Once the concursivity of relating internationally is recognized, it seems apparent that international
relations is, at worst, commotion, or perhaps, at best,
is not a random motion of conflicting and colliding bodies. Concursive
constructs confound the Cartesian predicates of modern agency. That is, a reasoning self spatializes cognition and action around an
“inside” and an “outside.” As Ashley asserts, this maneuver imposes the expectation that there shall be an absolute boundary between “inside” and
interoperationality, cooperativity, or coperformativity. In any case, it
“outside,” whereby the former term is privileged (1989, 290). Concursivity, however, implicitly implodes this spatialization with what coincides at their elisions and
congruencies. The facts of inside and identity with outside and otherness are increasingly infested by the artifacts of the coincide. Cooperativity assumes that
boundaries are fused, ordered, or broken as selves and others interact, often without privilege, hierarchy, or differentiation, between the internal and external.
Onsidedness, offsidedness, and residedness easily mingle centers and boundaries beyond clear demarcations at the “coincidedness” of
insidedness/outsidedness. How different and discontinuous is an “other” who watches the same CNN feeds, drives the same Toyota trucks, eats the same
ConAgra grains, plans the same Euro-Disney vacation, fears the same ozone holes, and worries about the same bioengineered clones? Likewise, how
identifiable and continuous is “a self’ whose sharp boundaries and hierarchical order of its decisionistic ego must calculate its desires in euros, yens, or US
dollars; calories, BTUs, or kilojoules; M.D., J.D., or Ph.D.; beef, pork or chicken? Today’s sterile division of scholarship on foreign affairs
into disparate disciplinary domains that are beholden to various analytical cliques pledging loyalty to realism, structuralism, or
idealism is quite problematic. Such divisions continuously confuse many phenomena in their common modes of interpretation.
Indeed, these disciplinary divisions spin around particular words—like “discourse, “ “data, “ “description,” and “globalization” or
“environment,” “economy,” and “explanation”—until they become disturbing chokepoints in the free flow of professional
analysis. As everyone listens to these “readymade phrases all day,” as Pierre Bourdieu worries, the precepts of realism can
easily become a “doxosophy,” or “a whole philosophy and a whole worldview which engender fatalism and submission” (1984,
57). Few moves can be more disarming than the discursive reduction of the world into such preprocessed categories,
because those confusions then circulate widely in political rhetorics, economic arguments, and cultural controversies .
Alone, this discursive reduction turns such concepts into key strategic assets for anyone who is intent upon prevailing
in these cultural struggles, and their doxic effects on politics must not be discounted.
ZP ^ HC
67
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
A2 Realism- Self-fulfilling
Realist theory assumes material capabilities as structure; this creates a security
crisis when understandings conflict in a realist mindset.
Wendt 2008, (Alexander, Ph.D., Political Science, Professor of International Security, The Ohio State University, “Constructing International Politics”, The
MIT Press, p.73)
Where neorealist
and constructivist structuralisms really differ, however, is in their assumptions about what structure is made
of. Neorealists think it is made only of a distribution of material capabilities, whereas constructivists think it is also
made of social relationships. Social structures have three elements: shared knowledge, material resources, and practice. First, social structures
are defined, in part, by shared understandings, expectations, or knowledge. These constitute the actors in a situation and
the nature of their relationships, whether cooperative or conflictual. A security dilemma, for example, is a social structure
composed of intersubjective understandings in which states are so distrustful that they make worst-case assumptions
about each others' intentions, and as a result define their interests in self-help terms. A security community is a different social
structure, one composed of shared knowledge in which states trust one another to resolve disputes without war.8 This dependence of social structure on ideas is
the sense in which constructivism has an idealist (or "idea-ist") view of structure. What makes these ideas (and thus structure) "social," however, is their
intersubjective quality. In other words, sociality (in contrast to "materiality," in the sense of brute physical capabilities), is about shared knowledge.
ZP ^ HC
68
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
A2 Realism Inevitable
Realism isn’t natural or inevitable—it has to be constantly re-articulated
Lipschutz 1998 [Ronnie, prof of politics at UC Santa Cruz, On Security, ed. Ronnie Lipschutz, http://www.ciaonet.org/book/lipschutz/index.html]
In this latter scenario, almost all conventional wisdoms about security no longer hold .
The orderly practices of the world of international
relations embodied in neorealist discourse--the practices of power, not the absence of disorder--require constant
reiteration and reification in mantra-like fashion, even as they become increasingly problematic in the hyper reality of
the non-place and time bound worlds of transnational society. The place-bound concerns of neorealist’s, and their
idealized decision makers, matter only insofar as they help to shore up a crumbling world view. Security, its
discourses, and its modes of production thus become a means of stanching the dikes not against the external forces
of chaos but the internal dynamics of state disintegration.
Positivism in IR falsely presupposes the naturalness of states as prior to IR system
Ashley 1984 [Richard, professor of political science at Arizona State University, “The Poverty of Neorealism,” International Organization, Vol. 38, No. 2
(Spring, 1984), pp. 225-286, jstor]
The issue, however, is the theoretical discourse of neorealism as a move- ment, not the protective clauses that individual neorealists deploy to preempt or deflect
Once one enters this theoretical discourse among neorealists, the state-as-actor model
needs no defense. It stands without challenge. Like Waltz, one simply assumes that states have the status of unitary
actors.32 Or, like Gilpin, one refuses to be deterred by the mountainous inconsistencies between the state as a coalition of coalitions (presumably in
criticisms of that discourse's limits.
opposition to the losing coalitions against which the winning coalition is formed) and the state as a provider of public goods, protector of citizens' welfare, and
solver of the free-rider problem in the name of winners and losers alike.
Knowing that the "objectives and foreign policies of states are
determined primarily by the interests of their dominant members or ruling coalitions,"3 one nonetheless simply joins
the victors in proclaiming the state a singular actor with a unified set of objectives in the name of the collective good .
This proclamation is the starting point of theoretical discourse, one of the unexamined assumptions from which theoretical discourse proceeds. In short, the
state-as-actor assumption is a metaphysical commitment prior to science and exempted from scientific criticism.
Despite neorealism's much ballyhooed emphasis on the role of hard falsifying tests as the measure of theoretical
progress, neorealism immunizes its statist commitments from any form of falsification. Excluded, for instance, is the
historically testable hypothesis that the state-as-actor construct might be not a first-order given of international
political life but part of a historical justificatory framework by which dominant coalitions legitimize and secure consent
for their precarious conditions of rule. Two implications of this "state-centricity," itself an ontological principle of neorealist theorizing, deserve
emphasis. The first is obvious. As a frame- work for the interpretation of international politics, neorealist theory cannot accord
recognition to-it cannot even comprehend-those global collectivist concepts that are irreducible to logical
combinations of state-bounded re- lations. In other words, global collectivist concepts-concepts of transnational class relations, say, or the
interests of humankind-can be granted an objective status only to the extent that they can be interpreted as aggregations of relations and interests having
Much as the "individual" is a prism through which methodological
individualists comprehend collectivist concepts as aggrega- tions of individual wants, needs, beliefs, and actions, so
also does the neorealist refract all global collectivist concepts through the prism of the state .34 Importantly, this means that
neorealist theory implicitly takes a side amidst contending political interests . Whatever the personal commitments of in- dividual
logically and historically prior roots within state-bounded societies.
neorealists might be, neorealist theory allies with, accords recognition to, and gives expression to those class and sectoral interests (the apexes of Waltz's
domestic hierarchies or Gilpin's victorious coalitions of coalitions) that are actually or potentially congruent with state interests and legitimations. It
implicitly
opposes and denies recognition to those class and human interests which cannot be reduced to concatenations of
state interests or transnational coalitions of domestic interests. The second implication takes longer to spell out, for it relates to neorealist
"structuralism"-the neorealist position with respect to structures of the international system. Reflecting on the fourth element of structuralist ar- gument presented
above, one might expect the neorealist to accord to the structure of the international system an identity independent of the parts or units (states-as-actors in this
case); the identities of the units would be supplied via differentiation. The neorealist orrery disappoints these expectations, how- ever. For
the neorealist,
the state is ontologically prior to the international system. The system's structure is produced by defining states as
individual unities and then by noting properties that emerge when several such unities are brought into mutual
reference. For the neorealist, it is impossible to describe international structures without first fashioning a concept of
the state-as-actor. The proper analogy, as Waltz points out, is classical economic theory- microtheory, not macrotheory. As Waltz puts it, "International-
political sys- tems, like economic markets, are formed by the coaction of self-regarding units." They "are individualist in origin, spontaneously generated, and unintended."35
ZP ^ HC
69
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Mearsheimer Indict
Mearsheimer’s analysis is flawed- excludes essential aspects of international politics.
Snyder 2001 (Glenn, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “Mearsheimer’s World— Offensive Realism
and the Struggle for Security,” International Security, 27(1), AD: 7-10-9)
Mearsheimer’s unremitting focus on power-security competition among great powers necessarily means that many
aspects of international politics normally considered essential are either given short shrift or omitted entirely. Conversely, the struggle
for power assumes a bloated role far beyond what might be considered “realistic.” Most conspicuously slighted in the analysis are the
nonsecurity interests of states, such as advancement of an ideology, national unification, or protection of human
rights. There is no mention of transnational movements such as terrorism and religious and ethnic strife. The book slights
norms, institutions, and most kinds of interstate cooperation. Domestic politics are entirely omitted. Some might argue that these are topics that
Mearsheimer, as a realist, should not be required to address. That depends, however, on how much distortion has been introduced by omitting them. In my view,
too much, unless the power-maximizing claim is considerably modified.
ZP ^ HC
70
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
*** AFFIRMATIVE ANSWERS ***
ZP ^ HC
71
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Alt Fails
Denying the function of security inevitably leads to a war- making a world where the
constant creation of a world in conflict will continue to justify securitization tactics.
Doran, 1999 (Charles F. Doran, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University, 1999 (“Is major war obsolete? An
exchange,” Survival, Volume 41, Issue 2, Summer, Available Online via Proquest)
The conclusion, then, is that the probability of major war declines for some states, but increases for others. And it is very difficult to argue that it has disappeared
in any significant or reliable or hopeful sense. Moreover, a
problem with arguing a position that might be described as utopian is that
such arguments have policy implications. It is worrying that as a thesis about the obsolescence of major war becomes more compelling to more
people, including presumably governments, the tendency will be to forget about the underlying problem, which is not war per se, but security. And by
neglecting the underlying problem of security, the probability of war perversely increases: as governments fail to
provide the kind of defence and security necessary to maintain deterrence, one opens up the possibility of new
challenges. In this regard it is worth recalling one of Clauswitz's most important insights: A conqueror is always a lover of peace. He would like to make his
entry into our state unopposed. That is the underlying dilemma when one argues that a major war is not likely to occur and, as
a consequence, one need not necessarily be so concerned about providing the defences that underlie security itself.
History shows that surprise threats emerge and rapid destabilising efforts are made to try to provide that missing
defence, and all of this contributes to the spiral of uncertainty that leads in the end to war.
The alternative does not promote change to policy makers- making it functionally
irrelevant and solvency impossible. Even if the Alt can reach people it will steal focus
from security studies that function both under kritik- destroying its own goals.
Walt 1999 (Stephen, Professor of International Affairs at Harvard University, “Rigor or Rigor Mortis? Rational Choice and Security Studies,” International
Security, 23(4),)
Taken together, these characteristics help explain why recent formal work has had relatively little to say about important real-world security issues. Although
formal techniques produce precise, logically consistent arguments, they often rest on unrealistic assumptions and the
results are rarely translated into clear and accessible conclusions. And because many formal conjectures are often untested,
policymakers and concerned citizens have no way of knowing if the arguments are valid. In this sense, much of the recent formal work in security
studies reflects the "cult of irrelevance" that pervades much of contemporary social science. Instead of using their
expertise to address important real-world problems, academics often focus on narrow and trivial problems that may
impress their colleagues but are of little practical value. If formal theory were to dominate security studies as it has other areas of political
science, much of the scholarship in the field would likely be produced by people with impressive technical skills but little or no substantive knowledge of history,
politics, or strategy.[111] Such
fields are prone to become "method-driven" rather than "problem-driven," as research topics
are chosen not because they are important but because they are amenable to analysis by the reigning methode du
jour.[112] Instead of being a source of independent criticism and creative, socially useful ideas, the academic world
becomes an isolated community engaged solely in dialogue with itself.[113] Throughout most of the postwar period, the field of
security studies managed to avoid this danger. It has been theoretically and methodologically diverse, but its agenda has been shaped more by real-world
problems than by methodological fads. New theoretical or methodological innovations have been brought to bear on particular research puzzles, but the field as a
whole has retained considerable real-world relevance. By contrast, recent formal work in security studies has little to say about contemporary security issues.
Formal rational choice theorists have been largely absent from the major international security debates of the past decade (such as the nature of the post-Cold
War world; the character, causes, and strength of the democratic peace; the potential contribution of security institutions; the causes of ethnic conflict; the future
role of nuclear weapons; or the impact of ideas and culture on strategy and conflict). These debates have been launched and driven primarily by scholars using
nonformal methods, and formal theorists have joined in only after the central parameters were established by others.[114] Thus one of the main
strengths of the subfield of security studies--namely, its close connection to real-world issues--could be lost if the
narrow tendencies of the modeling community took control of its research agenda.
ZP ^ HC
72
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Perm Solvency
Realism is not distinct from the K- in fact the two are best in IR together.
COZETTE 2008 [MURIELLE BA (Hons) (Sciences Po Paris), MA (King's College London), MA (Sciences Po Paris), PhD (LSE) is a John Vincent
Postdoctoral fellow in the Department of International Relations. Review of International Studies (2008), 34, 5–27]
This article concentrates on Morgenthau’s views on the ethics of scholarship and argues that all his works must be read in the light of his central goal: speaking
truth to power. Morgenthau wrote at length, and held very specific views about, the role and function of scholars in society. It is therefore legitimate to claim that,
as a scholar himself, Morgenthau attempted to live up to his very demanding definition of scholarly activity, and his assertion that scholars have the moral
responsibility to speak truth to power informed all his major works. While Morgenthau’s conception of the ethics of scholarship is generally ignored or neglected, it
is, however, indispensable to take it into account when approaching his writings. Indeed, it demonstrates that for Morgenthau, a realist theory of
international politics always includes two dimensions, which are intrinsically linked: it is supposed to explain
international relations, but it is also, fundamentally, a normative and critical project which questions the existing
status quo. While the explanatory dimension of realism is usually discussed at great length, its critical side is consistently – and conveniently – forgotten or
underestimated by the more recent, self-named ‘critical’ approaches. However diverse these recent approaches may be in their
arguments, what unites them all is what they are supposedly critical of: the realist tradition. The interpretation they provide of
realism is well known, and rarely questioned. Although it is beyond the scope of this article to review it at length, it is worth stressing some of the main features
which are constantly emphasised. First then, realism is a state-centric approach, by which is meant that it stresses the importance of anarchy and the struggle for
power among states. From this, most critical approaches jump to the conclusion that realism is therefore strikingly ill-equipped to deal with the contemporary era
where the state is increasingly regarded as outdated and/or dangerous, because it stands in the path of different, more emancipatory modes of political
organisation. Realism, it is also argued, pretends to be objective and to depict ‘things as they are’: but this cannot obscure the fact that theories are never valueneutral and constitute the very ‘reality’ they pretend to ‘describe’. This leads to the idea that realism is in fact nothing but conservatism : it is portrayed as the
voice of (great) powers, with the effect of reifying (and therefore legitimising) the existing international order. This explains why Rothstein can confidently argue
that realism ‘is . . . implicitly a conservative doctrine attractive to men concerned with protecting the status quo’, and
that it is a ‘deceptive and dangerous’ theory, not least because it ‘has provided the necessary psychological and intellectual support to resist
criticism, to persevere in the face of doubt, and to use any means to outwit or to dupe domestic dissenters’.2 Such views represent a fundamental
misunderstanding of the realist project, but are nonetheless widely accepted as commonsense in the discipline. A typical example of this
is the success of Cox’s famous distinction between ‘problem solving’ and ‘critical’ theory. Unsurprisingly, realism is
the archetypal example of a problem-solving theory for Cox. His account of the realist tradition sweepingly equates
Morgenthau and Waltz, who are described as ‘American scholars who transformed realism into a form of problemsolving theory’.3 Thereafter in his famous article ‘Social Forces, States and World Orders’, Cox refers to the works of both scholars by using the term ‘neorealism’. Problem solving theory (and therefore realism) ‘takes the world as it finds it . . . as the given framework for action’, while by contrast, the distinctive trait
of ‘critical theory’ is to ‘stand apart from the prevailing order of the world and asks how that order came about’.4 Problem-solving theory, says Cox, ‘serves
particular national sectional or class interests, which are comfortable within the given order’, which therefore means that its purpose is ‘conservative’.5 Problemsolving theory also pretends to be ‘value free’, while Cox is keen to remind his reader that it contains some ‘latent normative elements’, and that its ‘non
being ‘critical’ in IR means being
openly normative, challenging the status quo, and seeking to advance human emancipation( s), however this concept
is to be defined.7 The picture Cox proposes is therefore simple: critical theory is named as such because of its commitment to ‘bringing about an alternative
normative quality is however, only superficial’.6 By contrast to what Cox presents as a problem-solving theory,
order’ and because of its openly normative stance, while realism, by contrast, is presented as a theory which in effect reproduces and ‘sustain[s] the existing
order’.8 To be fair, not all critical theorists promote such a simplistic vision of what realism stands for – Cox himself, in some of his later works, recognised that
classical realism possesses an undeniable critical dimension. In 1992, providing a more nuanced analysis of the school, he thus accepted that ‘classical realism
is to be seen as a means of empowerment of the less powerful, a means of demystification of the manipulative instruments of power’.9 He did not, however,
investigate the critical dimension of realism in much depth, and failed to identify its emancipatory dimension. Other critical theorists demonstrate an awareness of
the richness and subtlety of Morgenthau’s ideas. The best example remains Ashley’s famous piece on the poverty of neorealism, where he justly argues that the
triumph of the latter has obscured the insights provided by classical realism. Ashley’s analysis remains, however, problematic as his interpretation of Morgenthau
does not identify all the critical dimensions of his writings, and ultimately continues to present classical realism as the ‘ideological apparatus’ of one particular
ruling group, that of statesmen, which remains essentially incapable of realising its own limitations. As he writes: It is a tradition whose silences and omissions,
and failures of self critical nerve join it in secret complicity with an order of domination that reproduces the expectation of inequality as a motivating force, and
insecurity as an integrating principle. As the ‘organic intellectuality of the world wide public sphere of bourgeois society, classical realism honors the silences of
the tradition it interprets and participates in exempting the ‘private sphere’ from public responsibility.10 (emphasis added) The ‘picture’ of classical realism which
is provided by Ashley therefore does not adequately capture its inherent critical dimension, as it ultimately presents it as reproducing the existing order and
silencing dissent. Cox’s distinction clearly echoes the now classic one between ‘orthodox’ and ‘critical’ approaches (a label broad enough to include the selfnamed Critical Theory, Feminism, Normative theory, Constructivism and Post-Structuralism). The diversity of critical approaches should not
obscure the fact that crucially, what allows them to think of themselves as critical is not simply a set of
epistemological (usually ‘post-positivist’) or ontological assumptions they may share. It is also, fundamentally, the
image they think lies in the mirror when they turn it to realism. In most cases then, it seems to be enough to oppose a simplistic picture of
realism like that provided by Cox to deserve the much coveted label ‘critical’. This leads to the idea that it is impossible to be at the same time a realist scholar
and critical, as the two adjectives are implicitly presented as antithetical. This clearly amounts to an insidious high-jacking of the very adjective ‘critical’, which
more often than not merely signals that one does not adopt a realist approach. The meaning of the adjective is therefore presented as self-evident, and realism is
denied any critical dimension. This is highly problematic as this reinforces a typical ‘self-righteousness’ from these ‘critical’ approaches, which tend to rely on a
truncated and misleading picture of what realism stands for and conveniently never properly engage with realists’ arguments. The fact that Waltz is always the
ZP ^ HC
73
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
primary target of these approaches is no coincidence: this article demonstrates that realism as expressed by Morgenthau is at its very core a critical project. In
order to challenge the use of the adjective ‘critical’ by some who tend to think of themselves as such simply by virtue
of opposing what they mistakenly present as a conservative theoretical project, the article highlights the central
normative and critical dimensions underlying Morgenthau’s works. It does so by assessing his views about the ethics of scholarship. The
article is divided into two parts. First, it investigates Morgenthau’s ideal of the scholarly activity, which rests upon a specific understanding of the relationship
between truth and power. Second, it focuses on some features which, for Morgenthau, constitute a ‘betrayal’ of this ideal (a term he borrowed from Julien
contrary to the common interpretation of realism as a theoretical outlook that holds an
implicit and hidden normative commitment to the preservation of the existing order, Morgenthau’s formulation of
realism is rooted in his claim that political science is a subversive force, which should ‘stir up the conscience of
society’, and in doing so, challenge the status quo. For Morgenthau, IR scholars have the responsibility to seek truth, against power if needed,
Benda). The article demonstrates that
and then to speak this truth to power even though power may try to silence or distort the scholar’s voice.11 Giving up this responsibility leads to ideology and
blind support for power, which is something that Morgenthau always saw as dangerous, and consistently opposed. His commitment to truth in turn explains why,
according to him, political science is always, by definition, a revolutionary force whose main purpose is to bring about ‘change through action’. In complete
contrast to what ‘critical approaches’ consistently claim,
that-be.
the realist project is therefore best understood as a critique of the powers-
The perm solves by creating a real impact to the embraced ideology of the K.
Gunning, 07 (Jeroen Gunning, Lecturer in International Politics @ Univ. of Wales, ‘7 Government and Opposition 42.3, “A Case for Critical Terrorism
Studies?” p. Blackwell-synergy)
The notion of emancipation also crystallizes the need for policy engagement. For, unless a ‘critical’
field seeks to be policy relevant, which, as Cox
it does not fulfil its ‘emancipatory’ potential.94 One of the
temptations of ‘critical’ approaches is to remain mired in critique and deconstruction without moving beyond this to
reconstruction and policy relevance.Vital as such critiques are, the challenge of a critically constituted field is also to engage
with policy makers – and ‘terrorists’ – and work towards the realization of new paradigms, new practices, and a transformation, however
modestly, of political structures. That, after all, is the original meaning of the notion of ‘immanent critique’ that has historically underpinned the ‘critical’
rightly observes, means combining ‘critical’ and ‘problem-solving’ approaches,
project and which, in Booth's words, involves ‘the discovery of the latent potentials in situations on which to build political and social progress’, as opposed to
putting forward utopian arguments that are not realizable. Or, as Booth wryly observes , ‘this means building with one's feet firmly on the
ground, not constructing castles in the air’ and asking ‘what it means for real people in real places’.96 Rather than simply
critiquing the status quo, or noting the problems that come from an un-problematized acceptance of the state, a ‘critical’ approach must, in my view,
also concern itself with offering concrete alternatives. Even while historicizing the state and oppositional violence, and challenging
the state's role in reproducing oppositional violence, it must wrestle with the fact that ‘the concept of the modern state
and sovereignty embodies a coherent response to many of the central problems of political life’, and in particular to
‘the place of violence in political life’. Even while ‘de-essentializing and deconstructing claims about security’, it must concern itself with ‘hows
ecurity is to be redefined’, and in particular on what theoretical basis.97 Whether because those critical of the status quo are wary of becoming co-opted by the
structures of power (and their emphasis on instrumental rationality),98 or because policy makers have, for obvious reasons (including the failure of many ‘critical’
scholars to offer policy relevant advice), a greater affinity with ‘traditional’ scholars, the role of ‘expert adviser’ is more often than not filled by ‘traditional’
scholars.99 The result is that policy makers are insufficiently challenged to question the basis of their policies and develop new policies based on immanent
critiques. A notable exception is the readiness of European Union officials to enlist the services of both ‘traditional’ and ‘critical’ scholars to advise the EU on how
better to understand processes of radicalization.100 But this would have been impossible if more critically oriented scholars such as Horgan and Silke had not
been ready to cooperate with the EU. Striving to be policy relevant does not mean that one has to accept the validity of the term ‘terrorism’ or stop investigating
the political interests behind it. Nor does it mean that each piece of research must have policy relevance or that one has to limit one's research to what is relevant
for the state, since the ‘critical turn’ implies a move beyond state-centric perspectives. End-users could, and should, thus include both state and non-state actors
such as the Foreign Office and the Muslim Council of Britain and Hizb ut-Tahrir; the Northern Ireland Office and the IRA and the Ulster Unionists; the Israeli
government and Hamas and Fatah (as long as the overarching principle is to reduce the political use of terror, whoever the perpetrator). It does mean, though,
that a critically constituted field must work hard to bring together all the fragmented voices from beyond the ‘terrorism field’, to maximize both the field's rigour and
its policy relevance. Whether a critically constituted ‘terrorism studies’ will attract the fragmented voices from outside the field depends largely on how broadly the
term ‘critical’ is defined. Those who assume ‘critical’ to mean ‘Critical Theory’ or ‘poststructuralist’ may not feel comfortable identifying with it if they do not
themselves subscribe to such a narrowly defined ‘critical’ approach. Rather, to maximize its inclusiveness, I would follow Williams and Krause's approach to
‘critical security studies’, which they define simply as bringing together ‘many perspectives that have been considered outside of the mainstream of the
discipline’.101 This means refraining from establishing new criteria of inclusion/exclusion beyond the (normative) expectation that scholars self-reflexively
question their conceptual framework, the origins of this framework, their methodologies and dichotomies; and that they historicize both the state and ‘terrorism’,
and consider the security and context of all, which implies among other things an attempt at empathy and cross-cultural understanding.102 Anything more
normative would limit the ability of such a field to create a genuinely interdisciplinary, non-partisan and innovative framework, and exclude valuable insights borne
of a broadly ‘critical’ approach, such as those from conflict resolution studies who, despite working within a ‘traditional’ framework, offer important insights by
moving beyond a narrow military understanding of security to a broader understanding of human security and placing violence in its wider social context.103
Thus, a
poststructuralist has no greater claim to be part of this ‘critical’ field than a realist who looks beyond the state at
the interaction between the violent group and their wider social constituency.104
ZP ^ HC
74
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Perm Solvency
The critique cannot solve on its own- it takes a good step but solving ends in an
advocating of the perm by changing the practice of security.
Bilgin, 05 (Pinar Bilgin, Prof. of IR @ Bilkent Univ, ‘5 [Regional Security in The Middle East, p. 60-1]
Admittedly, providing
a critique of existing approaches to security, revealing those hidden assumptions and normative projects embedded in
is only a first step. In other words, from a critical security perspective, self-reflection, thinking and writing are
not enough in themselves. They should be compounded by other forms of practice (that is, action taken on the ground). It is
Cold War Security Studies,
indeed crucial for students of critical approaches to re-think security in both theory and practice by pointing to possibilities for change immanent in world politics
and suggesting emancipatory practices if it is going to fulfil the promise of becoming a 'force of change' in world politics. Cognisant of the need to find and
suggest alternative practices to meet a broadened security agenda without adopting militarised or zero-sum thinking and practices, students of critical
approaches to security have suggested the imagining, creation and nurturing of security communities as emancipatory practices (Booth 1994a; Booth and Vale
1997). Although Devetak's approach to the theory/practice relationship echoes critical approaches' conception of theory as a form of practice, the latter seeks to
go further in shaping global practices. The
distinction Booth makes between 'thinking about thinking' and 'thinking about doing'
grasps the difference between the two. Booth (1997: 114) writes: Thinking about thinking is important, but, more urgently, so
is thinking about doing .... Abstract ideas about emancipation will not suffice: it is important for Critical Security
Studies to engage with the real by suggesting policies, agents, and sites of change, to help humankind, in whole and
in part, to move away from its structural wrongs. In this sense, providing a critique of existing approaches to security, revealing those hidden
assumptions and normative projects embedded in Cold War Security Studies, is only a first (albeit crucial) step. It is vital for the students of critical approaches to
re-think security in both theory and practice.
ZP ^ HC
75
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Realism Good
No alternative to realism- the alt can ask us to rethink but it cannot enforce a change
of human nature
Solomon, 96 (Hussein Solomon Senior Researcher, Human Security Project, Institute for Defence Policy Published in African Security Review Vol 5 No
2, 1996 http://www.iss.co.za/pubs/ASR/5No2/5No2/InDefence.html)
The post-modern/critical theory challenge to realism has been tested, and proved wanting. Realism
remains the single most reliable analytical
framework through which to understand and evaluate global change. Post-modernism can provide no practical
alternatives to the realist paradigm. We know what a realist world looks like (we are living in one!); but what does a post-modernist world look like?
As long as humanity is motivated by hate, envy, greed and egotism, realism will continue to be invaluable to the
policy-maker and the scholar. In this regard it has to be pointed out that from the end of World War II until 1992, hundreds of major conflicts around
the world have left some twenty million human beings dead.109 Neither has the end of the Cold War showed any sign that such conflict will end. By the end of
1993 a record of 53 wars were being waged in 37 countries across the globe.110 Until a fundamental change in human nature occurs,
realism will continue to dominate the discipline of international relations. The most fundamental problem with postmodernism is that it assumes a more optimistic view of human nature. Srebrenica, Bihac, Tuzla, Zeppa, Goma,
Chechnya, Ogoniland, and KwaZulu-Natal all bear testimony to the folly of such a view.
ZP ^ HC
76
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Security Solves Alt
A secure world is the only place where reevaluation can occur- it comes first.
Booth, 05 (Ken Booth, Prof. of IR @ Wales, ‘5 [Critical Security Studies and World Politics, p. 22)
The best starting point for conceptualizing security lies in the real conditions of insecurity suffered by people and collectivities. Look around. What is immediately
striking is that some degree of insecurity, as a life determining condition, is universal. To the extent an individual or group is insecure, to that
extent their life choices and chances are taken away; this is because of the resources and energy they need to invest in seeking safety from
domineering threats - whether these are the lack of food for one’s children or organizing to resist a foreign aggressor. The corollary of the
relationship between insecurity and a determined life is that a degree of security creates life possibilities . Security might
therefore be conceived as synonymous with opening up space in people’s lives. This allows for individual and collective human becoming - the capacity to have
First, security
can be understood as an instrumental value; it frees its possessors to a greater or lesser extent from life-determining
constraints and so allows different life possibilities to be explored. Second, security is synonymous simply with survival. One can
survive without being secure (the experience of refugees in long-term camps in war-torn parts of the world, for example). Security is therefore more
than mere animal survival (basic animal existence). It is survival-plus, the plus being the possibility to explore human
becoming, As an instrumental value, security is sought because it frees people(s) to some degree to do other than
deal with threats to their human being. The achievement of a level of security - and security is always relative - gives to individuals
and groups some time, energy, and scope to chose to be or become, other than merely survival as human biological
organisms. Security is an important dimension of the process by which the human species can reinvent itself beyond
the merely biological.
some choice about living differently - consistent with the same but different search by others. Two interrelated conclusions follow from this.
ZP ^ HC
77
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Alt Doesn’t Solve
The anti-securitization framework fails and is limited- 3 reasons.
McDonald 08( Matt, Associate Professor in International Security in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick,
“Securitization and the Construction of Security”)
This article argues that while an important and innovative contribution to our understanding of security and its construction,
the securitization
framework is problematically narrow in three basic senses. First, the form of act constructing security is defined narrowly,
with the focus on the speech of dominant actors, usually political leaders. This excludes a focus on other forms of
representation (images or material practices, for example), and also encourages a focus only on the discursive interventions of those
voices deemed institutionally legitimate to speak on behalf of a particular collective, usually a state. Second, the context of the act is defined
narrowly, with the focus on the moment of intervention only. The potential for security to be constructed over time
through a range of incremental processes and representations is not addressed, and the question of why particular representations resonate with relevant
constituencies is under-theorized in this framework.2 Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally, the framework of securitization is narrow in the sense that
the nature of the act is defined solely in terms of the designation of threats to security. This focus ignores the central
importance of the way in which security (as a normative goal or expression of core values) is understood in particular contexts. It also suggests that
security acquires content only through representations of danger and threat. Such a framework encourages a
conceptualization of security politics as inherently negative and reactionary.
ZP ^ HC
78
SCFI 2010
Securitization K
Team Jabob & the STG’s
___ of ___
Link Turn
The K’s claims of securitization as an urgent existential threat that functions as the
enemy make it link to itself
Charrett, 09 [Catherine Charrett, International Catalan Institute for Peace, “A Critical Application of Securitization Theory: Overcoming the Normative
Dilemma of Writing Security”, CATO International Institute in Barcelona, Spain, December 2009, http://www.gencat.cat/icip/pdf/WP7_ANG.pdf, Accessed
7/17/10] soap CS= Copenhagen School ST= Securitization Theory
its particular understanding of securitization is involved in the reproduction of
dominant subjectivities of security and the validation of oppressive or exclusionary securitization processes. The
argument posited in this article, therefore, is that ST[securitization theory], uncritically applied, contributes to the negative
securitization of a referent. Williams explains how the logic of securitization employed by the CS in order to broaden the security agenda without loosing
Theorizers and critics of the CS discuss how
conceptual specificity, that which characterizes a security problem as demanding urgent action by the state, mirrors “the intense condition of existential division,
of friendship and enmity that constitutes Schmitt’s concept of the political” (Williams 2003: 516). Williams analyzes the CS’ conceptualization of
securitization through a Schmittian lens to identify how their theoretical approach to security works to reproduce the same
‘friend-enemy’ logic as Schmitt’s understanding of the political. He explains how Schmitt’s “decisionist theory of sovereignty” can be located in the
CS understanding of securitization as the suspension of normal politics (Williams 2003: 516). Bigo shares a similar concern with the CS’ particular
conceptualization of security, which he argues validates the view of security professionals who purport that
“exceptionalization,” or a “beyond the law” politics is required of securitization (Bigo 2002: 72-73). The critique formulated against
the CS is, therefore, that its conceptualization of securitization reinforces traditionalist or realist views of how securitization processes take place. Hence, the
uncritical application of ST reproduces the subjectivities of fear and othering generated from such an understanding of security, and replicates
the notion
that state power and ordering are required to manage threats. Despite their social constructivist approach to defining security threats, the
CS utilizes a particular understanding of security which does not challenge the dominant or militarized view of security; rather it17 accepts it as the
“truth” about what security is (Bigo 2002: 73). ST thus feeds into the logic that immediate and undemocratic state action is
the only method to manage security concerns, which often result in the negative securitization of a sector.
ZP ^ HC
79