***1AC***
Advantage
The threat of regime change posed by military presence creates a security dilemma that risks
miscalculation and full scale war.
Maleki and Reardon 14 – (10/4, Abbas, PhD in Strategic Management, assistant professor of political
science at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, director of the International Institute for Caspian
Studies, senior associate of the Belfer Center's International Security Program, former Wilhelm Fellow in
International Studies at MIT and deputy foreign minister of Iran from 1988-1997, and Robert, PhD in
Political Science from MIT, Research Fellow with the International Security Program and the Project on
Managing the Atom at Harvard’s Belfer Center, “Improving U.S.-Iranian Relations and Overcoming
Perceptual Biases,” in U.S.-Iran Misperceptions: A Dialogue, pp. 158-161)
The views Americans and Iranians have of each other as innately and implacably hostile revisionist states are mutually reinforcing.
Leaders in both Tehran and Washington have frequently discounted as mere rhetoric each others’ efforts to describe these views. The authors in this volume suggest however, that they are largely genuine,
and strongly inform the decision-making process in both countries. As a result, each country’s actions are interpreted in the
most aggressive light possible.
A consequence of these mutually reinforcing views is what Robert Jervis has referred to as the “spiral model.” According to the spiral model, conflicts arise when
both sides of a dispute believe, falsely, that the other will best respond to coercive threats, and that positive
inducements will invite greater aggression. Both sides therefore adopt coercive postures toward the other, and eschew
compromise. The result is a spiral of mutual hostility, and a conflict that neither side intended nor desired. The
spiral model stands in contrast to the “deterrence model,” in which one party to a dispute falsely believes it can satisfy its rival’s claims by offering
concession. Instead, the appeasement convinces the rival that it can effectively coerce the appeaser, reinforcing its aggressive behavior.
Foreign policy hawks in both Tehran and Washington believe that the deterrence model best describes
the current relationship between the United States and Iran, and their adherence to this view has had a significant effect on
U.S. policy. Throughout Washington, Iran is typically treated as an implacably hostile state that will only respond to
coercion. With only a few notable exceptions, U.S. efforts at engagement with Iran have been infrequent and half-hearted .
When engagement is pursued, as it has been with respect to Iran’s nuclear program, the American negotiating stance (in cooperation with its Western allies) has been inflexible. At the same time, in the belief
that the Iranians cannot be expected to negotiate in good faith unless they are simultaneously
threatened with coercive measures , Washington has followed a “carrot-and-stick” approach . Thus, even
where negotiations might succeed, they are often undermined by threats .
In both Washington and Tehran, political conservatives tend to paint advocates of negotiation and
rapprochement as naïve would-be appeasers who dangerously misunderstand the other state’s malign intentions. The dynamic is illustrated by the repeated references to the Munich Pact
in the public discourse in the United States about Iran’s nuclear program. Hawkish politicians and pundits have often sought to use the 1938 deal with Hitler by the British and French that partitioned Czechoslovakia and fueled the
Nazis’ aggression as an analogy for U.S. engagement strategies with Iran. Just as Hitler was not satisfied with the Sudetenland and interpreted British and French behavior at Munich as a signal of their weakness and lack of resolve,
Tehran could be expected to pocket whatever
concessions the United States offered and, eventually, seek greater concessions through aggressive means. On the Iranian side, it is reflected in the
so would Iran not be satisfied with any deal regarding its nuclear program with the P5+1, or have any intention of honoring the deal.
Supreme Leader’s oft-made statements that the U.S. offers to negotiate over the Iranian nuclear program are not made in good faith, and mask an American effort to make Iran subordinate to American power.
Decision-makers’ perceptions of the nature of the U.S.-Iran relationship and whether it should be described using the deterrence or spiral model are
shaped by their beliefs about the other’s intentions. Specifically, they are more likely to perceive the relationship as the deterrence model if they believe the other side is an
aggressor that seeks to overturn the legitimate status quo. In the case of the United States and Iran, as the authors of this volume show, both sides tend to see themselves as the
legitimate defender of the status quo, and view the other state as the illegitimate, revisionist challenger.
Each side’s behavior is therefore interpreted as aggression designed to expand the state’s power in the region.
Because these mutually incompatible views dominate on both sides, the result is a spiral model : Both American and Iranian decision makers tend to believe that coercion will be more effective
than carrots when dealing with the other state, and that it is dangerously naïve to make any concessions that could signal a lack of resolve. None of this is to say that either the United States or Iran is necessarily peaceful or
aggressive. The problem is that each side sees the other as the aggressor, and itself as the aggrieved. And, critically, each side believes that this is equally apparent to the other, and that the other’s claims of grievances are
disingenuous.
Thirty-three years of mutual hostility between the United States and Iran have served to strongly reinforce negative perceptions
and suspicions on both sides. Misperceptions about each other’s attitudes are now deeply rooted and typically go unchallenged in elite and popular discussions. Where positive attitudes do exist, or where they
challenge strongly held negative assumptions, they are typically hidden to the other side. For example, most Americans would surprised to find that among the Iranian public there are remarkably favorable attitudes toward the
American people, and a strong desire for good relations between the two nations. Notably, the Iranian public’s show of sympathy toward America after the 9/11 attacks went largely unnoticed and unreported in the U.S. media.
Few Americans know that hundreds of Iranians gathered publicly to pay their respects and to show their solidarity with the American people, first on September 13, 2001, two days after attacks on New York and Washington, DC,
and did so again in two other vigils. Three days after the attacks, a moment of silence for the American tragedy was held before the stat of the World Cup qualifying soccer game, the same day the Tehran Friday prayer leader said
the terrorist attacks against America were “heart-rending, everyone condemns, denounces, and is saddened by it.”4 These sorts of positive public attitudes are not just unfamiliar but often inconceivable to many Americans.
Misperception and ignorance on both sides can affect policy making and unnecessarily close off policy
options.
The spiral model illustrates that the greatest danger brought about by U.S. and Iranian misperceptions of one another is
not just continued stalemate but escalation . When each side believes it must stand firm to demonstrate
resolve , and must likewise meet any threat with a counterthreat—and at the same time believes that any conciliatory gesture could be used by the other as a means to gain an
advantage— the risk of escalation to overt conflict , even when such a conflict is not desired by either side, is
real . Repeated rounds of threats and counterthreats limit policy choices and raise the perceived
international and domestic political stakes of backing down in order to avoid catastrophe. The severance
of diplomatic contacts, a refusal to negotiate (or to only do so on rare occasion in high-profile, one-off meetings), and the use of inflammatory
rhetoric all reduce effective means of communication and policy coordination, and only heighten the risk of
misperception and miscalculation , increasing the risk of accidental or unintended conflict . In recent months, the United
States and Iran appear to be accelerating down this path, not least by raising tensions in the Persian Gulf , where a small-scale or accidental military
encounter could easily trigger a much wider conflagration .
Military force and “soft power” driven regime change are two sides of the same coin – only the threat
of intervention prevents Iran from effectively resisting neoliberal infiltration.
Hossein-Zadeh 15 – (8/28, Ismael, Professor Emeritus of Economics at Drake University, “Behind the
Congressional Disagreements Over the Iran Nuclear Deal,”
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/08/28/behind-the-congressional-disagreements-over-the-irannuclear-deal/)
the Obama administration’s recent approach of relying primarily on business/market forces of regime
change, or modification, without ruling out the military option is likely to be more effective in achieving its goal
than the war party’s reckless insistence on escalating sanctions and military threats.
The effectiveness of this approach lies in the fact that, as pointed out earlier, the nuclear deal would significantly limit
Iran’s military and defense capabilities. The deal would also avail the US extensive knowledge of Iran’s
economic, technological, security, and military capabilities and, therefore, vulnerabilities. This means that if at any
time in the future Iran defies or resists the heavy-handed imperialistic designs of the U nited S tates, the US
can then employ its war machine more effectively as it would have the necessary information on strategic places or targets to be attacked or
Indeed,
bombarded.
This is no speculation or conspiracy theory. It is, indeed, a scenario projected by the Obama administration
officials and other advocates of the nuclear deal as they promote it ahead of the next month’s critical vote in Congress. “In meetings on Capitol Hill and with
influential policy analysts, administration officials argue that inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities under the deal will reveal important details that can be used for better
targeting should the U.S. decide to attack Iran” [1].
Commenting on this ominous depraved scheme, Representative Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told Michael Crowley of the Politico, “It’s certainly an
argument I’ve heard made. . . . We’ll be better off with the agreement were we to need to use force” [2].
suffice it to remember the fact that this is exactly what
was done to Iraq and Libya. In both cases, the U nited S tates and its allies used disingenuous negotiations with Saddam
Hussein and Muammar al-Qaddafi as pretexts to collect information about their military/defense capabilities and, then, used the information thus
acquired for targeted bombardment and effective invasion .
To see how this menacing projection is not simply an abstract or partisan argument,
Presence threatens Iran and emboldens the GCC, causing an expansion of the military-industrial
complex throughout the region and multiple instances of ongoing violence including in Yemen,
Bahrain, and Syria.
Jones 11 – (12/22, Toby, PhD in Middle Eastern History from Stanford University, assistant professor of
history at Rutgers University, “Don't Stop at Iraq: Why the U.S. Should Withdraw From the Entire Persian
Gulf,” http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/12/dont-stop-at-iraq-why-the-usshould-withdraw-from-the-entire-persian-gulf/250389/)
Led by Saudi Arabia, the Arab Gulf states claim that their fears of Iranian ambition are existential. It is certainly
true that Tehran is locked in a regional balance of power struggle with Saudi Arabia and that Iran seeks greater influence. But Iran does not seek the destruction of Saudi
Arabia or the overthrow of Arab world's political order. In spite of claims to the contrary by the Saudi and Bahraini governments, Iran's
revolutionary imperative is a relic of the past. Israel expresses a similar anxiety about Iran as a security threat. And Iran's leaders have played their part in fostering Israeli
uncertainty. Iran's potential acquisition of nuclear weapons is a source of concern, of course, as is its support for Hezbollah and Syria. The challenge of how best to deal with
Iranian ambition, however, is mainly a political problem, one that has for too long been treated almost
entirely through the lens of security and militarism.
The presence of the American military in the Gulf has not only done little to deter Iran's ambitions, it
has emboldened them . Surrounding Iran militarily and putting it under the constant threat of
American or Israeli military action has failed to deter the country . Instead this approach has
strengthened hardliners within Tehran and convinced them that the best path to self-preservation is through
defiance, militarism, and the pursuit of dangerous ties across the Middle East. The rivalry between Iran,
the U.S., and its regional partners has turned into a political and military arms race, one that could easily
spin out of control .
Less obvious, the United States' military posture has also emboldened its allies, sometimes to act in counterproductive
ways. Saudi Arabia and Bahrain justify their brutal crackdown of Bahrain's pro-democracy movement by
falsely claiming Iranian meddling. While American policymakers support democratic transitions in the Middle East rhetorically, their unwillingness to
confront long-time allies in the Gulf during the Arab Spring is partly the product of the continued belief that the
U.S. needs to keep its military in the Gulf, something that requires staying on good terms with Gulf monarchies. The result is that Saudi Arabia
and its allies have considerable political cover to behave badly, both at home and abroad.
If the Arab Spring has demonstrated anything, it is that the old political order is vulnerable to domestic political
pressure. The Middle East is moving to an era of mass politics, in which mobilized publics demand
greater rights and greater influence. While many observers believe that the oil states are less susceptible to such pressures, this seems far from certain. In fact, Saudi
Arabia, the world's most important oil producer, shares many of social and political-economic characteristics of its beleaguered
neighbors, including high unemployment, widespread poverty, popular disillusion with corruption, and
an increasingly sophisticated network of grassroots organizations committed to political change. Even
flush with considerable oil revenue and the capacity to throw money at its many internal problems, Saudi Arabia has still been forced to
unleash its police and security forces to quell unrest. The United States, because of its relationship with Saudi Arabia and Bahrain and its apparent
preference for preserving the political status quo in the Gulf, is increasingly seen by the region's citizens as
conflated with the violent forces of counterrevolution . Should revolutionaries and would-be revolutionaries in the Gulf
force political transitions in the future, the United States could pay a political price for its long-standing
military entanglements.
Now, even the White House no longer believes our large military presence in the Gulf is good for combating
the big threat we're supposedly there to contain: terrorism. Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, remarked last
week that u," he said, to bring the U.S. security posture in the region more "in line with where we were before 1990." Rhodes apparently did not comment on either energy security or Iran. While his comments strike the right tone,
there may be less to them than meets the eye. Last week's statement directly contradicted an October New York Times report that administration officials plan to reallocate military resources and combat troops from Iraq to
elsewhere in the Gulf, Kuwait in particular.
the Obama administration will not demilitarize the Gulf to pre-1990 levels, as Rhodes said. The majority of U.S.
New military spending and new
construction are planned for 2012. The State Department has requested around $26 million dollars for new construction at the Fifth Fleet's Bahrain headquarters. This is not a huge sum, but it was
requested as Bahraini security forces carried out a brutal crackdown on its own people. American priorities are, sadly, all too clear.
There are compelling reasons to believe that
military facilities, including the al-Udeid airbase in Qatar and the headquarters of the Navy's Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, were built after 1990.
The status quo is never easy to change, especially when it comes to institutions as risk-averse as the Pentagon and State Department and to practices as entrenched as the 25-year U.S.-Gulf alliance. A new strategic approach, one
Skeptics will warn that Iran would be emboldened, that terrorists
would seek a foothold, and that the flow of oil would be imperiled. But these fears are exaggerated . To
the extent that these dangers are plaudible at all, it's because our current policy makes them possible .
that relies less on the projection of military power, will seem replete with risk.
The greatest risk is proceeding ahead with the status quo . To disengage from our fraught and
increasingly counterproductive Gulf presence would require the U.S. to begin withdrawing its military
personnel from the region, reduce its spending on existing infrastructure, put an end to the weapons pipeline, and look for places from which it can
depart immediately, such as moving the Fifth Fleet out of the Gulf and reducing the Navy's burden in patrolling the Gulf.
Blurring the binary between war and peace is crucial – the Gulf is not at peace, and believing it is
obscures hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Jones 12 – (2012, Toby, PhD in Middle Eastern History from Stanford University, assistant professor of
history at Rutgers University, “America, Oil, and War in the Middle East,” Journal of American History
(2012) 99 (1): 208-218)
It might be tempting to argue that the escalating involvement of the U nited S tates and its history of militarism and military engagement in the Gulf region
have provided a kind of security for the region. After all, oil has continued to flow, the network of oil producers has remained the same, and thus the primary interests of the United States in the region have
been served. But three decades of war belie this argument. War is not tantamount to security, stability, or peace. Even in the
periods between wars in the region the violence carried out by regimes against their own subjects makes clear that
peace is not always peaceful . The cost has been high for the United States and especially for people who live in the Middle
East. In thirty years of war, hundreds of thousands have died excruciating and violent deaths. Poverty,
environmental disaster, torture, and wretched living conditions haunt the lives of many in Iraq, Iran,
and elsewhere in the region. Of course, the burden of death and destruction does not fall entirely on the United States and its policy of militarization. The politics of war have
primarily served the interests of regional leaders who have, often from a position of weakness, exported violence to deflect internal challenges
to their authority. And international political rivalry, particularly during the Cold War, drew in the other global powers, most notably the Soviet Union, which also
helped facilitate insecurity and disorder in the Middle East.
Removing presence is key – the US attempt to play a balancing role in the region causes conflict
Oktav 11 – (Summer 2011, Özden Zeynep, PhD, Professor of Political Science and International
Relations, Yildiz Technical University, Turkey, “The Gulf States and Iran: A Turkish Perspective,” Middle
East Policy Council, Volume XVIII, Number 2)
From Tehran’s perspective, the military presence of the United States is the key destabilizing factor
removal of American influence is Iran’s sole strategic objective
therefore, the
;
in the Persian Gulf. On the other hand, the Gulf states’ situation has been even more difficult.
They have been increasingly uneasy about American intentions, especially since Obama has come to power. The U.S. president’s engagement policy with the Islamic Republic made the Gulf countries more vulnerable, pushing them to diversify their security relations.11 Put differently, the
Obama administration’s lighter footprint in the region strengthened the belief that "the United States could acquiesce to Iranian domination of the Gulf if Tehran were to put an end to its uranium enrichment program and renounce its ambition to develop nuclear weapons."12 Moreover,
President Ahmadinejad’s reelection in 2009 showed that the engagement policy did not quell the Islamic Republic’s revolutionary zeal to "change the current circumstances in the world."13 This exacerbated the GCC countries’ security concerns and led to an increase in their military
spending.
Although a strong military collaboration was reinstated between the GCC and the United States after 2003, the GCC states are still vulnerable due to their lack of military experience, modest populations and limited geographic size. In addition, with the exception of Saudi Arabia, none has
strategic depth. Iran’s army has a total manpower of more than 540,000, compared to a combined GCC total of 176,500.14 Most important, "There isn’t a GCC military alliance akin to NATO."15
The GCC countries have always been very cautious about military confrontation with Iran
The Gulf countries fear the chaos of a U.S. strike
and they want Washington
to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons
Military force would prompt Iran to
activate its networks and assets in Iraq, fueling an already highly volatile situation
Iran has the ability to block
the Strait of Hormuz
Commercial interests also pressure both sides to be cautious about military confrontation
and reluctant to counter Iran’s nuclear
program by military means.
more than the effects of Iran’s nuclear acquisition,
rather than confronting them militarily.
. In addition, the GCC countries would not be able to continue
their tacit cooperation with Iran, a crucial part of the policy of diversification, to protect their interests but not challenge the United States. The GCC countries would be "hard-pressed to choose a side."16 Third,
and cut the Gulf’s oil traffic in half, a disaster for the region as well as the West.
. Most of Iran’s foreign-currency earnings
derive from the export of energy through the Persian Gulf. The region is also Iran’s main route of international trade and communication and the starting point for Iran’s international relations.17 It is also noteworthy that the Saudi petrochemical industry has an ever-increasing need for
instability from any military confrontation would hinder the flow of foreign
direct investment to the Gulf
primarily Saudi Arabia
natural gas, and Iran holds the world’s second-largest reserves.18 In addition, the
countries,
. For example, between 2004 and 2006, Saudi inward foreign direct investments, as a percentage of gross fixed capital, rose from 4.5
percent to 32.1 percent; in Iran, it rose from 0.7 to 1.9 percent. The average in the developing world in 2006 was 13.8 percent.19
Despite the existence of so many reasons for both sides to avoid military confrontation and build
interdependent relations, they have not been able to reinstate mutual trust due to two factors: the
U.S. policy of containing Iran and Iran’s insistence on being a nuclear power
, mostly
. These two factors drive the Gulf governments to continue relying on
outsiders to ensure a rough balance of power that will protect their sovereignty, domestic identity and regime security.
The GCC states’ increasing military dependence on the U S both exacerbates Iranian threat
perceptions and limits the Gulf states’ room to maneuver vis-à-vis Iran
U.S. military presence
produces an anti-Iranian alliance that prevents normalization of relations
the U.S. military
presence in the region including
Bahrain
Qatar and
Kuwait
nited
tates
since the
. Moreover,
,
its naval facilities in
, air-force installations in
,20
ground troops in
, not only promotes Arab Gulf passivity in defense and strategic
thinking but also prevents the Gulf countries from "harnessing and refining their ‘soft power’ tools to counter any Iranian attempt to hurt their Islamic legitimacy and shore up their counterterrorism capabilities."21
Thus, the rough balance of power based on confrontation between Iran and the United States basically hinders the Gulf countries’ transition from controlled states to more open societies. Currently, there are two parallel developments in the region: "top-down state building" and
The U.S. plan to develop a new security architecture and to continue its role as "external
balancer" in the region ignores those two parallel developments and
not only fails to solve the
primary interstate issues, but also complicates the existing ones
"bottom-up globalization."22
, therefore,
. Abu Musa Island offers a pointed example. It emerged as a disputed area after the withdrawal of British
colonial power. For Iran, the territorial separation is an accident of a British intervention that was by nature illegitimate, as it involved an outside power. For the Arab Gulf states, external powers are default local powers. According to Michael Kraig, "The dispute is not just a legal
argument, but an existential issue involving the security of the Arab and Persian sides of the Gulf."23
since the Cold War, the security environment in the Gulf has become increasingly
internationalized
Washington
has failed to cope with new security threats
In a nutshell,
national-
. This has made external influence, namely that of the United States, extremely important in setting the regional-security agenda. However, it is evident that the balance of power set by
period
in the post-Iraq War
, such as ethnic rivalries, Sunni extremism, religious and civil war and the probability of territorial disintegration.
Neither sectarianism nor firm ideological conflicts between “progressives” and “reactionaries”
sufficiently explain current events in the Gulf – adequate analysis requires attention to the strategic
and geopolitical drivers of conflict.
Gause 14 – (July 2014, F. Gregory Gause, John H. Lindsey ’44 Chair, Professor of International Affairs and
Head of the International Affairs Department at Texas A&M University, “Beyond Sectarianism: e New
Middle East Cold War,” Brookings Doha Center Analysis Paper, Number 11,
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Research/Files/Papers/2014/07/22-beyond-sectarianism-cold-wargause/English-PDF.pdf?la=en)
The best framework for understanding the complicated and violent regional politics of the Middle East is as a cold
war among a number of regional players, both states and non-state actors, in which Iran and Saudi Arabia play the leading roles.
It is a cold war because these two main actors are not confronting and most probably will not confront each other militarily. Rather, their contest for influence plays out in the domestic
The military and
political strength of parties to civil wars, and the contributions that outsiders can make to that strength, is more
important than the military balance between Riyadh and Tehran. This struggle predates the Arab uprisings of 2011, but that profound
political systems of the region’s weak states. It is a struggle over the direction of the Middle East’s domestic politics more than a purely military contest.
regional upheaval has opened up new arenas in which the Middle East cold war is being played out. There are also important conflict axes that fall outside the main Saudi-Iranian contest for
influence. Saudi Arabia also sees itself locked in a contest with the Muslim Brotherhood (and to some extent Qatar, as a state patron of the Brotherhood) over the direction of domestic politics
in the Sunni Muslim states of the Arab world.
This is a “new” Middle East cold war because it shares important structural similarities with the Middle East regional conflicts of the 1950s and 1960s, what the late Malcolm Kerr famously
dubbed “the Arab cold war.”1 Then, Gamal Abd al-Nasir used the new technology of the day, transistor radio, to rally Arab nationalist support against ruling regimes in Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi
Arabia, and elsewhere. Nasir squared off against the “reactionary” monarchs in Saudi Arabia and Jordan, but also tangled with fellow Arab nationalist “progressives” like Abd al-Karim Qasim in
Iraq and the Ba‘ath Party in Syria. It was not the power of Egypt’s army that made Nasir influential. The one time he deployed it in service of spreading his influence in the Arab world, in
Yemen, the results were disastrous. His military brinksmanship with the Israelis in 1967 was even more damaging, in effect ending his regional leadership role. It was his ability to mobilize
support across borders and in the domestic politics of other Arab states that made him the leading force in Arab politics from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s.
It is not an ideological battle
of “progressives” versus “reactionaries.” The line-ups are less ideological and more identity-based. Yet the similarities are striking. The power of the major
The new Middle East cold war goes beyond the Arab world.2 Iran is a major protagonist. Turkey has made a bid for a greater regional role.
protagonists in the Arab cold war was measured in their ability to affect domestic political struggles in neighboring states, where weak regimes had trouble controlling their own societies and
contending camps themselves were not
always united, with tactical alliances crossing what appeared to be the lines of conflict. Israel was a
focus, but not much of a player. The great powers were important participants, but not the drivers of events. The new Middle East cold war shares every one of these
local players sought regional allies against their domestic opponents. Nonstate actors played major roles. The
characteristics.3 The current confrontation has even come to play a major role in the struggle for power in Syria, which has drawn in all the regional players, much as was the case in the early
years of the Arab cold war.4
This new Middle East cold war has an important sectarian element, but it cannot be accurately understood
simply as a “Sunni versus Shia” fight . It is a balance of power game , but not one played by impermeable state entities with matching
military power and occasionally clashing on the battlefield. It can only be understood by appreciating the links between domestic
conflicts, transnational affinities, and regional state ambitions.5 Domestic conflicts for power lead local actors to seek out
regional allies who can supply them with money, guns, ideological cover, and diplomatic support. They look for regional
allies who share, in some way, their own political and ideological positions, with whom they feel some kinship on ideological or identity grounds. The regional powers need these ideological or
identity links to consolidate their relations with their local clients. Providing clients with material support is important, but it is not enough to sustain influence. States that have the military
and material potential to reach for regional domination but lack these ideological and identity links across borders, like Israel, are severely hampered in their ability to have an impact on the
new Middle East cold war.
The empirical analysis of Saudi-Iranian cooperation during the 1990s supports our interpretation.
Hamidaddin 13 – (9/20, Abdullah, PhD candidate in King’s College London, writer and commentator on
religion, Middle Eastern societies and politics with a focus on Saudi Arabia and Yemen, “A window for
Iranian-Gulf relations?” http://english.alarabiya.net/en/views/news/middle-east/2013/09/20/Awindow-for-Iranian-Gulf-relations-.html)
When I look at the improvement of relations between the Saudis and the Iranians, starting from the
early 1990s, I see two countries which were almost waging a war
during the 1980s yet were able
to overlook that and start a steady process of trust building culminating in the domestic security
agreement of the late 1990s This proves beyond doubt the possibility and desirability of positive
relations despite recent animosity
This also tells us that sectarianism is not a factor in the
relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran most importantly, this tells us that radical elements in the
Iranian government do not shape its foreign policy
against each other
,
.
between the two countries.
. But
; rather they are brought forward or withdrawn depending on the regional situation. The radicals were present and powerful during the 1990s, but
the regional politics demanded a more conciliatory approach to foreign relations so they stepped back.
In the 1990s, the regional balance of power
and network of alliances
was shaken due to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.
The U S is pivotal
Saudis and the Iranians to initiate good relations. But there was a limit to where they could reach due to two barriers: the United States and Iranian regional interference.
nited
tates
This allowed the
to Saudi security and thus the Saudis cannot go too far
with a country that is hostile to the United States. They can however create amiable relations as long as the opposition to the United States is not polarizing. On the other side Iranian security vis-à-vis the United States depends on its control of pockets of influence in the weak countries of
the region such as Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen; which in turn has been a threat to regional stability and Saudi security. In other words Iran’s quest for security depended on activities which threatened the security of Saudi Arabia creating a second barrier for Saudi-Iranian
normalization.
After the fall of Saddam Hussein the balance of power
radically changed
leading to worsening relations
I think that the American
invasion of Iraq was more fundamental It created an American military presence in the Gulf, leading
to a severe polarization of positions It was no longer possible for an ally of the U S to be close to its
rivals
It was even expected that allies of the U S go against Iran and actively
seek to damage its interests
Iran subsequently
increased its regional activity
creating a vicious circle
in 2003
of the 1990s - which allowed for relatively better Saudi-Iranian relations -
. Some analysts say that it was mainly due to the competition between the Saudis and the Iranians in Iraq. While I agree with that;
.
.
. Here we had a situation of opposition with polarization.
nited
nited
tates
regionally and globally. For example the U.S. had demanded that the Saudis use their leverage to disrupt relations between China and Iran.
, which consequently threatened Saudi security,
.
tates
Plan
The United States should significantly reduce its military presence in the states of the Gulf
Cooperation Council.
Method
Scenario analysis is pedagogically valuable – enhances creativity and self-reflexivity, deconstructs
cognitive biases and flawed ontological assumptions, and enables the imagination and creation of
alternative futures.
Barma et al. 16 – (May 2016, [Advance Publication Online on 11/6/15], Naazneen Barma, PhD in Political
Science from UC-Berkeley, Assistant Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate
School, Brent Durbin, PhD in Political Science from UC-Berkeley, Professor of Government at Smith
College, Eric Lorber, JD from UPenn and PhD in Political Science from Duke, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher,
Rachel Whitlark, PhD in Political Science from GWU, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the Project on
Managing the Atom and International Security Program within the Belfer Center for Science and
International Affairs at Harvard, “‘Imagine a World in Which’: Using Scenarios in Political Science,”
International Studies Perspectives 17 (2), pp. 1-19,
http://www.naazneenbarma.com/uploads/2/9/6/9/29695681/using_scenarios_in_political_science_isp
_2015.pdf)
**FYI if anyone is skeptical of Barma’s affiliation with the Naval Postgraduate School, it’s worth looking at her publication
history, which is deeply opposed to US hegemony and the existing liberal world order:
a) co-authored an article entitled “How Globalization Went Bad” that has this byline: “From terrorism to global warming,
the evils of globalization are more dangerous than ever before. What went wrong? The world became dependent on
a single superpower. Only by correcting this imbalance can the world become a safer place.”
(http://cisac.fsi.stanford.edu/publications/how_globalization_went_bad)
b) most recent published scenario is entitled “World Without the West,” supports the a Non-Western reinvention of the
liberal order, and concludes that “This argument made a lot of people uncomfortable, mostly because of an endemic
and gross overestimation of the reach, depth and attractiveness of the existing liberal order”
(http://nationalinterest.org/feature/welcome-the-world-without-the-west-11651)
Over the past decade, the “cult of irrelevance” in political science scholarship has been lamented by a growing
chorus (Putnam 2003; Nye 2009; Walt 2009). Prominent scholars of international affairs have diagnosed the roots of the gap between academia and policymaking,
made the case for why political science research is valuable for policymaking, and offered a number of ideas for enhancing the policy
relevance of scholarship in international relations and comparative politics (Walt 2005,2011; Mead 2010; Van Evera 2010; Jentleson and Ratner 2011; Gallucci 2012; Avey and Desch 2014). Building on these insights, several
initiatives have been formed in the attempt to “bridge the gap.”2 Many of the specific efforts put in place by these projects focus on providing scholars
with the skills, platforms, and networks to better communicate the findings and implications of their research to the
policymaking community, a necessary and worthwhile objective for a field in which theoretical debates, methodological training, and publishing norms tend more and more toward the abstract and
esoteric.
Yet enhancing communication between scholars and policymakers is only one component of bridging the gap between international affairs theory and practice.
Another crucial component of this bridge is the generation of substantive research programs that are actually policy
relevant —a challenge to which less concerted attention has been paid. The dual challenges of bridging the gap are especially acute for graduate students, a particular irony since many enter the discipline with the
explicit hope of informing policy. In a field that has an admirable devotion to pedagogical self-reflection, strikingly little
attention is paid to techniques for generating policy-relevant ideas for dissertation and other research topics. Although
numerous articles and conference workshops are devoted to the importance of experiential and problem-based learning, especially through techniques of simulation that emulate policymaking processes (Loggins 2009; Butcher
2012; Glasgow 2012; Rothman 2012; DiCicco 2014), little has been written about the use of such techniques for generating and developing innovative research ideas.
This article outlines an experiential and problem-based approach to developing a political science research program
using scenario analysis. It focuses especially on illuminating the research generation and pedagogical benefits of this technique by describing the use of scenarios in the annual New Era Foreign Policy
Conference (NEFPC), which brings together doctoral students of international and comparative affairs who share a demonstrated interest in policy-relevant scholarship.3 In the introductory section, the article outlines the practice
of scenario analysis and considers the utility of the technique in political science. We argue that scenario analysis should be viewed as a tool to stimulate problem-based learning for doctoral students and discuss the broader
scholarly benefits of using scenarios to help generate research ideas. The second section details the manner in which NEFPC deploys scenario analysis. The third section reflects upon some of the concrete scholarly benefits that
have been realized from the scenario format. The fourth section offers insights on the pedagogical potential associated with using scenarios in the classroom across levels of study. A brief conclusion reflects on the importance of
developing specific techniques to aid those who wish to generate political science scholarship of relevance to the policy world.
What Are Scenarios and Why Use Them in Political Science?
Scenario analysis is perceived most commonly as a technique for examining the robustness of strategy. It can immerse decision makers in future states
that go beyond conventional extrapolations of current trends, preparing them to take advantage of
unexpected opportunities and to protect themselves from adverse exogenous shocks. The global petroleum company Shell, a
pioneer of the technique, characterizes scenario analysis as the art of considering “what if” questions about possible future worlds. Scenario analysis is thus typically seen as
serving the purposes of corporate planning or as a policy tool to be used in combination with simulations of decision making. Yet
scenario analysis is not inherently limited to these uses . This section provides a brief overview of the practice of scenario analysis and the
motivations underpinning its uses. It then makes a case for the utility of the technique for political science scholarship and describes how
the scenarios deployed at NEFPC were created.
The Art of Scenario Analysis
We characterize scenario analysis as the art of juxtaposing current trends in unexpected combinations in
order to articulate surprising and yet plausible futures , often referred to as “alternative worlds.”
Scenarios are thus explicitly not forecasts or projections based on linear extrapolations of contemporary
patterns , and they are not hypothesis-based expert predictions . Nor should they be equated with
simulations, which are best characterized as functional representations of real institutions or decision-making
processes (Asal 2005). Instead, they are depictions of possible future states of the world , offered together with a
narrative of the driving causal forces and potential exogenous shocks that could lead to those futures . Good scenarios thus rely on explicit
causal propositions that, independent of one another, are plausible—yet, when combined, suggest surprising and sometimes controversial future worlds. For example, few predicted the dramatic fall in oil prices toward the end of
2014. Yet independent driving forces, such as the shale gas revolution in the United States, China’s slowing economic growth, and declining conflict in major Middle Eastern oil producers such as Libya, were all recognized secular
trends that—combined with OPEC’s decision not to take concerted action as prices began to decline—came together in an unexpected way.
While scenario analysis played a role in war gaming and strategic planning during the Cold War, the real antecedents of the contemporary practice are found in corporate futures studies of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Raskin et
al. 2005). Scenario analysis was essentially initiated at Royal Dutch Shell in 1965, with the realization that the usual forecasting techniques and models were not capturing the rapidly changing environment in which the company
operated (Wack 1985; Schwartz 1991). In particular, it had become evident that straight-line extrapolations of past global trends were inadequate for anticipating the evolving business environment. Shell-style scenario planning
“helped break the habit, ingrained in most corporate planning, of assuming that the future will look much like the present” (Wilkinson and Kupers 2013, 4). Using scenario thinking, Shell anticipated the possibility of two Arabinduced oil shocks in the 1970s and hence was able to position itself for major disruptions in the global petroleum sector.
Building on its corporate roots, scenario analysis has become a standard policymaking tool. For example, the Project on Forward Engagement advocates linking systematic foresight, which it defines as the disciplined analysis of
alternative futures, to planning and feedback loops to better equip the United States to meet contemporary governance challenges (Fuerth 2011). Another prominent application of scenario thinking is found in the National
Intelligence Council’s series of Global Trends reports, issued every four years to aid policymakers in anticipating and planning for future challenges. These reports present a handful of “alternative worlds” approximately twenty
years into the future, carefully constructed on the basis of emerging global trends, risks, and opportunities, and intended to stimulate thinking about geopolitical change and its effects.4 As with corporate scenario analysis, the
technique can be used in foreign policymaking for long-range general planning purposes as well as for anticipating and coping with more narrow and immediate challenges. An example of the latter is the German Marshall Fund’s
EuroFutures project, which uses four scenarios to map the potential consequences of the Euro-area financial crisis (German Marshall Fund 2013).
Several features make scenario analysis particularly useful for policymaking.5 Long-term global trends
across a number of different realms—social, technological, environmental, economic, and political—combine in often-unexpected ways to
produce unforeseen challenges. Yet the ability of decision makers to imagine, let alone prepare for,
discontinuities in the policy realm is constrained by their existing mental models and maps. This limitation is
exacerbated by well-known cognitive bias tendencies such as groupthink and confirmation bias (Jervis 1976;
Janis 1982; Tetlock 2005). The power of scenarios lies in their ability to help individuals break out of conventional
modes of thinking and analysis by introducing unusual combinations of trends and deliberate
discontinuities in narratives about the future. Imagining alternative future worlds through a structured
analytical process enables policymakers to envision and thereby adapt to something altogether
different from the known present .
Designing Scenarios for Political Science Inquiry
Scenarios are
essentially textured, plausible, and relevant stories that help us imagine how the future political-economic world could
be different from the past in a manner that highlights policy challenges and opportunities. For example, terrorist organizations are a known threat that have captured the attention of the policy
The characteristics of scenario analysis that commend its use to policymakers also make it well suited to helping political scientists generate and develop policy-relevant research programs.
community, yet our responses to them tend to be linear and reactive. Scenarios that explore how seemingly unrelated vectors of change—the rise of a new peer competitor in the East that diverts strategic attention, volatile
commodity prices that empower and disempower various state and nonstate actors in surprising ways, and the destabilizing effects of climate change or infectious disease pandemics—can be useful for illuminating the nature and
limits of the terrorist threat in ways that may be missed by a narrower focus on recognized states and groups. By illuminating the potential strategic significance of specific and yet poorly understood opportunities and threats,
scenario analysis helps to identify crucial gaps in our collective understanding of global politicaleconomic trends and dynamics. The notion of “exogeneity”—so prevalent in social science scholarship—applies to models of reality,
Very simply, scenario analysis can throw into sharp relief often-overlooked yet pressing
questions in international affairs that demand focused investigation.
Scenarios thus offer, in principle, an innovative tool for developing a political science research agenda. In practice,
achieving this objective requires careful tailoring of the approach. The specific scenario analysis technique we outline below was designed and refined
not to reality itself.
to provide a structured experiential process for generating problem-based research questions with contemporary international policy relevance.6 The first step in the process of creating the scenario set described here was to
identify important causal forces in contemporary global affairs. Consensus was not the goal; on the contrary, some of these causal statements represented competing theories about global change (e.g., a resurgence of the nationstate vs. border-evading globalizing forces). A major principle underpinning the transformation of these causal drivers into possible future worlds was to “simplify, then exaggerate” them, before fleshing out the emerging story
with more details.7 Thus, the contours of the future world were drawn first in the scenario, with details about the possible pathways to that point filled in second. It is entirely possible, indeed probable, that some of the causal
claims that turned into parts of scenarios were exaggerated so much as to be implausible, and that an unavoidable degree of bias or our own form of groupthink went into construction of the scenarios. One of the great strengths
of scenario analysis, however, is that the scenario discussions themselves, as described below, lay bare these especially implausible claims and systematic biases.8
An explicit methodological approach underlies the written scenarios themselves as well as the analytical process around them—that of case-centered, structured, focused comparison, intended especially to shed light on new
The use of scenarios is similar to counterfactual analysis in that it modifies certain
variables in a given situation in order to analyze the resulting effects (Fearon 1991). Whereas counterfactuals are
traditionally retrospective in nature and explore events that did not actually occur in the context of known history, our scenarios are deliberately forwardlooking and are designed to explore potential futures that could unfold. As such, counterfactual analysis is especially well suited to identifying how individual events
causal mechanisms (George and Bennett 2005).
might expand or shift the “funnel of choices” available to political actors and thus lead to different historical outcomes (Nye 2005, 68–69), while forward-looking scenario analysis can better illuminate surprising intersections and
sociopolitical dynamics without the perceptual constraints imposed by fine-grained historical knowledge.
We see scenarios as a complementary resource for
exploring these dynamics in international affairs, rather than as a replacement for counterfactual analysis, historical case studies, or
other methodological tools.
In the scenario process developed for NEFPC, three distinct scenarios are employed, acting as cases for analytical comparison. Each scenario, as detailed below, includes a set of explicit “driving forces” which represent hypotheses
about causal mechanisms worth investigating in evolving international affairs. The scenario analysis process itself employs templates (discussed further below) to serve as a graphical representation of a structured, focused
investigation and thereby as the research tool for conducting case-centered comparative analysis (George and Bennett 2005). In essence, these templates articulate key observable implications within the alternative worlds of the
scenarios and serve as a framework for capturing the data that emerge (King, Keohane, and Verba 1994). Finally, this structured, focused comparison serves as the basis for the cross-case session emerging from the scenario
analysis that leads directly to the articulation of new research agendas.
The scenario process described here has thus been carefully designed to offer some guidance to policyoriented graduate students who are otherwise left to the relatively unstructured norms by which political
science dissertation ideas are typically developed. The initial articulation of a dissertation project is generally an idiosyncratic and personal undertaking (Useem 1997; Rothman 2008),
whereby students might choose topics based on their coursework, their own previous policy exposure, or the topics studied by their advisors. Research agendas are thus typically developed by looking for “puzzles” in existing
research programs (Kuhn 1996). Doctoral students also, understandably, often choose topics that are particularly amenable to garnering research funding. Conventional grant programs typically base their funding priorities on
extrapolations from what has been important in the recent past—leading to, for example, the prevalence of Japan and Soviet studies in the mid-1980s or terrorism studies in the 2000s—in the absence of any alternative method for
identifying questions of likely future significance.
The scenario approach to generating research ideas is grounded in the belief that these traditional
approaches can be complemented by identifying questions likely to be of great empirical importance in
the real world, even if these do not appear as puzzles in existing research programs or as clear
extrapolations from past events. The scenarios analyzed at NEFPC envision alternative worlds that could develop in
the medium (five to seven year) term and are designed to tease out issues scholars and policymakers
may encounter in the relatively near future so that they can begin thinking critically about them now .
This timeframe offers a period distant enough from the present as to avoid falling into current events
analysis, but not so far into the future as to seem like science fiction. In imagining the worlds in which these scenarios might come to pass,
participants learn strategies for avoiding failures of creativity and for overturning the assumptions
that prevent scholars and analysts from anticipating and understanding the pivotal junctures that
arise in international affairs.
Valid, descriptive understandings of the world are an essential prerequisite to emancipatory critique
and epistemic decolonization.
Jones 04 – (August 2004, Branwen Gruffydd, PhD in Development Studies from the University of Sussex,
Senior Lecturer in International Political Economy at Goldsmiths University of London, “From
Eurocentrism to Epistemological Internationalism: power, knowledge and objectivity in International
Relations,” Paper presented at Theorising Ontology, Annual Conference of the International Association
for Critical Realism, University of Cambridge, http://www.csog.group.cam.ac.uk/iacr/papers/Jones.pdf)
The ‘common-sense’ view pervading recent discussions of epistemology, ontology and methodology in IR asserts that objectivity implies valuefree neutrality. However, objective social inquiry has an inherent tendency to be critical , in various senses. To the
extent that objective knowledge provides a better and more adequate account of reality than other
ideas, such knowledge is inherently critical (implicitly or explicitly) of those ideas . 30 In other words critical
social inquiry does not (or not only) manifest its ‘criticalness’ through self-claimed labels of being
critical or siding with the oppressed, but through the substantive critique of prevailing ideas . Objective
social knowledge constitutes a specific form of criticism: explanatory critique . The critique of dominant ideas
or ideologies is elaborated through providing a more adequate explanation of aspects of the world, and in
so doing exposing what is wrong with the dominant ideology . This may also entail revealing the social conditions which give rise to ideologies, thus
exposing the necessary and causal relation between particular social relations and particular ideological conceptions.
the reproduction of those structured relations
is in the interests of the powerful, whereas transformation of existing structured relations is in the interests of the weak.
Because ideas inform social action they are casually efficacious either in securing the reproduction of
existing social relations (usually as an unintended consequence of social practice), or in informing social action aimed at transforming social relations. This is why
ideas cannot be ‘neutral’ . Ideas which provide a misrepresentation of the nature of society, the causes of unequal social conditions, and the conflicting interests of the weak and powerful, will tend
In societies which are constituted by unequal structures of social relations giving rise to unequal power and conflicting interests,
to help secure the reproduction of prevailing social relations. Ideas which provide a more adequate account of the way society is structured and how structured social relations produce concrete conditions of inequality and
ideas which are false are ideological and, in serving to promote
the reproduction of the status quo and avoid attempts at radical change, are in the interests of the powerful. An account which is objective
exploitation can potentially inform efforts to change those social relations. In this sense,
criticism here arises not, or not only, from pointing out the coincidence
between ideologies and the interests of the powerful, nor from a prior normative stance of solidarity with the oppressed, but from
exposing the flaws in dominant ideologies through a more adequate account of the nature and causes
of social conditions 31 .
A normative commitment to the oppressed must entail a commitment to truth and objectivity,
because true ideas are in the interest of the oppressed, false ideas are in the interest of the
oppressors . In other words, the best way to declare solidarity with the oppressed is to declare one’s
commitment to objective inquiry 32 . As Nzongola-Ntalaja (1986: 10) has put it:
It is a question of whether one analyses society from the standpoint of the dominant groups, who have
a vested interest in mystifying the way society works, or from the standpoint of ordinary people, who
have nothing to lose from truthful analyses of their predicament.
The philosophical realist theory of science, objectivity and explanatory critique thus provides an
alternative response to the relationship between knowledge and power . Instead of choosing
perspectives on the basis of our ethical commitment to the cause of the oppressed and to
emancipatory social change, we should choose between contending ideas on the basis of which
provides a better account of objective social reality . This will inherently provide a critique of the
ideologies which, by virtue of their flawed account of the social world, serve the interests of the powerful.
will contradict ideological ideas, implicitly or explicitly criticising them for their false or flawed accounts of reality. The
Exemplars of explanatory critique in International Relations are provided in the work of scholars such as Siba Grovogui, James Gathii, Anthony Anghie, Bhupinder Chimni, Jacques Depelchin, Hilbourne Watson, Robert Vitalis,
Sankaran Krishna, Michel-Rolph Trouillot 33 . Their work provides critiques of central categories, theories and discourses in the theory and practice of IR and narratives of world history, including assumptions about sovereignty,
international society, international law, global governance, the nature of the state. They expose the ideological and racialised nature of central aspects of IR through a critical examination of both the long historical trajectory of
imperial ideologies regarding colonized peoples, and the actual practices of colonialism and decolonisation in the constitution of international orders and local social conditions. Their work identifies the flaws in current ideas by
revealing how they systematically misrepresent or ignore the actual history of social change in Africa, the Caribbean and other regions of the Third World, both past and present – during both colonial and neo-colonial periods of
the imperial world order. Their work reveals how racism, violence, exploitation and dispossession, colonialism and neo-colonialism have been central to the making of contemporary international order and contemporary doctrines
of international law, sovereignty and rights, and how such themes are glaring in their absence from histories and theories of international relations and international history.
Objective social knowledge which accurately depicts and explains social reality has these qualities by
virtue of its relation to its object, not its subject . As Collier argues, “The science/ideology distinction is an epistemological one, not a social one.” (Collier 1979: 60). So,
for example, in the work of Grovogui, Gathii and Depelchin, the general perspective and knowledge of conditions in and
the history of Africa might be due largely to the African social origins of the authors. However the judgement
that their accounts are superior to those of mainstream IR rests not on the fact that the authors are African, but on the
greater adequacy of their accounts with respect to the actual historical and contemporary production of
conditions and change in Africa and elsewhere in the Third World. The criteria for choosing their accounts over others derives from the relation between the ideas and their
objects (what they are about), not from the relation between the ideas and their subjects (who produced them). It is vital to retain explicitly some commitment to objectivity in social inquiry, to the notion that the proper criterion
for judging ideas about the world lies in what they say about the world, not whose ideas they are.
A fundamental problem which underlies the origin and reproduction of IR’s eurocentricity is the overwhelming dominance
of ideas produced in and by the west, and the wilful and determined silencing of the voices and histories of the
colonised . But the result of this fundamental problem is flawed knowledge about the world .
Eurocentricity is therefore a dual problem concerning both the authors and the content of
knowledge, and cannot be resolved through normative commitments alone . It is not only the voices of the colonised, but the histories
of colonialism, which have been glaring in their absence from the discipline of International Relations.
Overcoming eurocentricity therefore requires not only concerted effort from the centre to create space
and listen to hitherto marginalised voices, but also commitment to correcting the flaws in prevailing
knowledge – and it is not only ‘the Other’ who can and should elaborate this critique . A vitally important implication of
objectivity is that it is the responsibility of European and American, just as much as non-American or nonEuropean scholars, to decolonise IR . The importance of objectivity in social inquiry defended here can perhaps be seen as a
form of epistemological internationalism . It is not necessary to be African to attempt to tell a more
accurate account of the history of Europe’s role in the making of the contemporary Africa and the rest of the world,
for example, or to write counter-histories of ‘the expansion of international society’ which detail the systematic barbarity of so-called Western
civilisation. It is not necessary to have been colonised to recognise and document the violence, racism, genocide and dispossession which have characterised European expansion over five hundred years.
Root cause explanations of international politics don’t exist – methodological pluralism is necessary to
reclaim IR as emancipatory praxis and avoid endless political violence.
Bleiker 14 – (6/17, Roland, Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland,
“International Theory Between Reification and Self-Reflective Critique,” International Studies Review,
Volume 16, Issue 2, pages 325–327)
This book is part of an increasing trend of scholarly works that have embraced poststructural critique but want to ground it in more positive political foundations, while retaining a reluctance to return to the positivist tendencies
that implicitly underpin much of constructivist research. The path that Daniel Levine has carved out is innovative, sophisticated, and convincing. A superb scholarly achievement.
the key challenge in international relations ( IR ) scholarship is what he calls “unchecked reification” : the widespread and
dangerous process of forgetting “the distinction between theoretical concepts and the real-world things
they mean to describe or to which they refer” (p. 15). The dangers are real, Levine stresses, because IR deals with some of the
most difficult issues, from genocides to war . Upholding one subjective position without critical scrutiny
can thus have far-reaching consequences . Following Theodor Adorno—who is the key theoretical influence on this book—Levine takes a post-positive position and assumes that the
For Levine,
world cannot be known outside of our human perceptions and the values that are inevitably intertwined with them. His ultimate goal is to overcome reification, or, to be more precise, to recognize it as an inevitable aspect of
thought so that its dangerous consequences can be mitigated.
Levine proceeds in three stages: First he reviews several decades of IR theories to resurrect critical moments when scholars displayed an acute awareness of the dangers of reification. He refreshingly breaks down
distinctions between conventional and progressive scholarship, for he detects self-reflective and critical moments in scholars that are usually associated with
straightforward positivist positions (such as E.H. Carr, Hans Morgenthau, or Graham Allison). But Levine also shows how these moments of self-reflexivity never lasted long and were driven
out by the compulsion to offer systematic and scientific knowledge.
outlines why IR scholars regularly closed down critique. Here, he points to a range of factors and phenomena, from peer review processes to the speed at which academics are
And here too, he eschews conventional wisdom, showing that work conducted in the wake of the third debate, while explicitly post-positivist and critiquing the reifying
tendencies of existing IR scholarship, often lacked critical self-awareness. As a result, Levine believes that many of the respective authors
failed to appreciate sufficiently that “ reification is a consequence of all thinking —including itself” (p. 68).
The third objective of Levine's book is also the most interesting one. Here, he outlines the path toward what he calls “ sustainable critique”: a form of self-reflection that can counter the dangers of reification.
Critique, for him, is not just something that is directed outwards, against particular theories or theorists . It is also
inward-oriented, ongoing, and sensitive to the “limitations of thought itself” (p. 12).
The second stage of Levine's inquiry
meant to publish.
The challenges that such a sustainable critique faces are formidable. Two stand out: First, if the natural tendency to forget the origins and values of our concepts are as strong as Levine and other Adorno-inspired theorists believe
they are, then how can we actually recognize our own reifying tendencies? Are we not all inevitably and subconsciously caught in a web of meanings from which we cannot escape? Second, if one constantly questions one's own
perspective, does one not fall into a relativism that loses the ability to establish the kind of stable foundations that are necessary for political action? Adorno has, of course, been critiqued as relentlessly negative, even by his
second-generation Frankfurt School successors (from Jürgen Habermas to his IR interpreters, such as Andrew Linklater and Ken Booth).
He starts off with depicting reification not
as a flaw that is meant to be expunged, but as an a priori condition for scholarship. The challenge then is not to let it go unchecked.
Methodological pluralism lies at the heart of Levine's sustainable critique . He borrows from what Adorno calls a “constellation”: an
attempt to juxtapose, rather than integrate, different perspectives. It is in this spirit that Levine advocates multiple methods to understand the same event or
phenomena . He writes of the need to validate “multiple and mutually incompatible ways of seeing” (p. 63, see
also pp. 101–102). In this model, a scholar oscillates back and forth between different methods and paradigms , trying to
understand the event in question from multiple perspectives. No single method can ever adequately
represent the event or should gain the upper hand . But each should, in a way, recognize and capture details
or perspectives that the others cannot (p. 102). In practical terms, this means combining a range of
methods even when— or, rather, precisely when —they are deemed incompatible. They can range from
poststructual deconstruction to the tools pioneered and championed by positivist social sciences .
The benefit of such a methodological polyphony is not just the opportunity to bring out nuances and
new perspectives. Once the false hope of a smooth synthesis has been abandoned, the very
incompatibility of the respective perspectives can then be used to identify the reifying tendencies in
each of them. For Levine, this is how reification may be “checked at the source” and this is how a “critically reflexive
moment might thus be rendered sustainable” (p. 103). It is in this sense that Levine's approach is not really postfoundational but, rather, an attempt to “balance foundationalisms against one another” (p. 14). There are strong parallels here with
The response that Levine has to these two sets of legitimate criticisms are, in my view, both convincing and useful at a practical level.
arguments advanced by assemblage thinking and complexity theory—links that could have been explored in more detail.
Studying the security dilemma is a valuable contribute to IR scholarship.
Cheraghlou 14 – (June 2014, Ebrahim Mohseni, Research Associate at Center for International and
Security Studies at Maryland, Lecturer on the Faculty of World Studies at the University of Tehran, and a
Senior Analyst at the University of Tehran Center for Public Opinion Research, MA in Public Policy and a
Graduate Certificate in Intelligence Analysis from the University of Maryland, PhD candidate (at pub
time), “WHEN COERCION BACKFIRES: THE LIMITS OF COERCIVE DIPLOMACY IN IRAN,” Thesis submitted
in partial fulfillment of a PhD in Public Policy at UMD, http://drum.lib.umd.edu/handle/1903/16554)
As this dissertation illustrates, a
coercing power must ensure that his coercive measures do not augment and/or add to
the very factors that have positively contributed to the adoption of the objectionable policy by the target.
Coercion could potentially initiate a positive feedback loop that would create many more reasons for the target to more aggressively
pursue the objectionable policy. Indeed, if a coercive measure and/or the costs that it imposes on the target positively induces it to
continue on with or even intensify its pursuit of the objectionable policy, then it would be unrealistic to expect that
that coercive measure would eventually persuade the target to stop the objectionable policy. What makes the situation even more
tragic is that those who adopt such coercive measures are often unaware of the positive feedback loop that they might have created and when they see their
coercive measures not working, they often conclude that their coercive measure was not tough enough, resulting in the intensification of the coercive measure,
which in turn further adds to the motives of the target to pursue the objectionable policy with much more vigor.
Existence of such a mechanism has long been known to international relations theorists that have studied the
nature of international conflicts under such labels as the “spiral model” or the “security dilemma.” More than half a century ago, John
H. Herz described this tendency in international relation in his Political Realism and Political Idealism and asserted that “the self-help attempts of
states to look after their security needs tend, regardless of intention, to lead to rising insecurity for
others as each interprets its own measures as defensive and the measures of others as potentially
threatening” (1951 p.7). Indeed, policymakers often interpret events and actions based on what they think to
be true. So if they think a state has hostile intentions , neutral or even friendly postures of that state is more
likely to be ignored, distorted, or seen as attempted duplicity if not outright as hostile (Jarvis, 1976 p. 68). It is due time
for those studying various aspects of coercive diplomacy to start incorporating those concepts into their works
and more vigorously study their effects on successful utilization of the strategy .
***2AC***
scholarship o/v
Understanding the intrincacies of politics, the state, and the military is a PREREQUISITE to addressing
oppression – means our ACADEMIC theorizing is methodologically valuable and a PREREQUISITE to
the alternative.
Bryant 12 – (9/15, Levi, professor of Philosophy at Collin College and Chair of the Critical Philosophy
program at the New Centre for Research and Practice, “War Machines and Military Logistics: Some
Cards on the Table,” https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/09/15/war-machines-and-militarylogistics-some-cards-on-the-table/)
We need answers to these questions to intervene effectively. We can call them questions of “military logistics”. We are, after all, constructing war machines to combat
these intolerable conditions. Military logistics asks two questions: first, it asks what things the opposing force, the opposing war machine
captured by the state apparatus, relies on in order to deploy its war machine: supply lines, communications networks,
people willing to fight, propaganda or ideology, people believing in the cause, etc. Military logistics maps all of these things. Second,
military logistics asks how to best deploy its own resources in fighting that state war machine . In what way should we deploy our war machine
to defeat war machines like racism, sexism, capitalism, neoliberalism , etc? What are the things upon which these state based war machines are based, what
are the privileged nodes within these state based war machines that allows them to function? These nodes are the things upon
which we want our nomadic war machines to intervene. If we are to be effective in producing change we better know what the supply lines are so that we might make them our target.
What I’ve heard in these discussions is a complete indifference to military logistics . It’s as if people like to wave
their hands and say “this is horrible and unjust!” and believe that hand waving is a politically
efficacious act . Yeah, you’re right, it is horrible but saying so doesn’t go very far and changing it. It’s also as if people are horrified
when anyone discusses anything besides how horribly unjust everything is. Confronted with an analysis why the social functions in the horrible
way, the next response is to say “you’re justifying that system and saying it’s a-okay!” This misses the
point that the entire point is to map the “supply lines” of the opposing war machine so you can
strategically intervene in them to destroy them and create alternative forms of life. You see, we already took
for granted your analysis of how horrible things are. You’re preaching to the choir . We wanted to get to work determining how to
change that and believed for that we needed good maps of the opposing state based war machine so we can decide how to intervene.
your sole strategy seems to be ideological critique or debunking . Your idea
seems to be that if you just prove that other people’s beliefs are incoherent, they’ll change and things
will be different. But we’ve noticed a couple things about your strategy: 1) there have been a number of bang-on
critiques of state based war machines, without things changing too much, and 2) we’ve noticed that we
might even persuade others that labor under these ideologies that their position is incoherent, yet they still adhere to it as if
the grounds of their ideology didn’t matter much. This leads us to suspect that there are other causal factors that undergird these social assemblages and cause them to endure is they do. We thought to ourselves, there
are two reasons that an ideological critique can be successful and still fail to produce change: a) the problem can be
one of “distribution”. The critique is right but fails to reach the people who need to hear it and even if they did receive the message
they couldn’t receive it because it’s expressed in the foreign language of “academese” which they’ve never been substantially exposed to
(academics seem to enjoy only speaking to other academics even as they say their aim is to change the world). Or b) there are other causal factors involved in why social
worlds take the form they do that are not of the discursive, propositional, or semiotic order. My view is that it is a combination of both.
I don’t deny that ideology is one component of why societies take the form they do and why people tolerate intolerable conditions. I merely deny that
this is the only causal factor. I don’t reject your political aims, but merely wonder how to get there .
Meanwhile, you guys behave like a war machine that believes it’s sufficient to drop pamphlets out of an airplane debunking the ideological
reasons that persuade the opposing force’s soldiers to fight this war on behalf of the state apparatus, forgetting supply lines, that
there are other soldiers behind them with guns to their back, that they have obligations to their fellows, that they have
families to feed or debt to pay off, etc. When I point out these other things it’s not to reject your political aims, but to say that perhaps these are also good things to intervene in if we wish to
change the world. In other words, I’m objecting to your tendency to use a hammer to solve all problems and to see all
things as a nail ( discursive problems ), ignoring the role that material nonhuman entities play in the form that social assemblages take.
We then look at your actual practices and see that
This is the basic idea behind what I’ve called “terraism”. Terraism has three components: 1) “Cartography” or the mapping of assemblages to understand why they take the form they take and why they endure. This includes the
mapping of both semiotic and material components of social assemblages. 2) “Deconstruction” Deconstruction is a practice. It includes both traditional modes of discursive deconstruction (Derridean deconstruction, post-
It
is not simply beliefs, signs, and ideologies that cause oppressive social orders to endure or persist, but
also material arrangements upon which people depend to live as they do. Part of changing a social
order thus necessarily involves intervening in those material networks to undermine their ability to maintain their relations or feedback
mechanisms that allow them to perpetuate certain dependencies for people. Finally, 3) there is “Terraformation”. Terraformation is the hardest thing of all, as it requires the
activist to be something more than a critic , something more than someone who simply denounces how bad
things are , someone more than someone who simply sneers, producing instead other material and semiotic arrangements
rendering new forms of life and social relation possible. Terraformation consists in building alternative forms of life. None of this,
however, is possible without good mapping of the terrain so as to know what to deconstruct and what
resources are available for building new worlds. Sure, I care about ontology for political reasons because I believe this world sucks and is profoundly unjust. But
rather than waving my hands and cursing because of how unjust and horrible it is so as to feel superior to all those about me who
don’t agree, rather than playing the part of the beautiful soul who refuses to get his hands dirty, I think we need good
maps so we can blow up the right bridges, power lines, and communications networks , and so we can engage in effective
structuralist feminist critique, Foucaultian genealogy, Cultural Marxist critique, etc), but also far more literal deconstruction in the sense of intervening in material or thingly orders upon which social assemblages are reliant.
terraformation.
at dillon
Fails to produce emancipatory political change and reifies the squo.
Bevernage 15 – (October 2015, Berber, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Ghent, “The
Past is Evil/Evil is Past: On Retrospective Politics, Philosophy of History, and Temporal Manichaeism,”
History and Theory Volume 54, Issue 3, pages 333–352)
Torpey is certainly not the only intellectual expressing these worries. According to historian Pieter Lagrou ,
“our contemporary societies, for
lack of future projects, shrink into a ‘passeist’ culture.”12 In European public discourse, he argues, the focus on crimes of
the distant past has become so strong that it tends to marginalize claims of victims of contemporary crimes and human rights
violations. Therefore, Lagrou argues, “a commemorative discourse of victimhood is very much the opposite of a constructive and dynamic engagement with the
present, but rather a paralyzing regression of democratic debate.”13 Lagrou's argument closely resembles many others that turn against retrospective politics and
“victim culture” such as Ian Buruma's warning about the peril of minorities defining themselves exclusively as historical victims and engaging in an “Olympics of
suffering”14 and Charles Maier's claims about a “surfeit of memory.”15
These warnings about the perils of a retrospective politics outweighing or even banning politics directed at contemporary injustices or striving for a more just
future should be taken seriously. Yet the alternative of an exclusively present- or future-oriented politics disregarding all historical injustice is not
desirable either. Contemporary injustice often manifests itself in the form of structural repetition or continuity of injustices with a long history. Moreover,
totalitarian versions of progressivist politics have frequently abused the idea of a struggle for a more just future in order to justify past and present suffering. It
could even be argued that the rise of dominant restrospective politics has been initiated partly on the basis of disillusionment with the exculpatory mechanisms of
progressivist ideology.16 Some indeed claim that much of present-day retrospective politics and the “setting straight” of historical injustices would be unnecessary
had totalitarian progressivist politics focused less exclusively on the bright future and shown more sensitivity to the contemporary suffering of its day. This claim
certainly makes sense if one thinks of extreme examples such as Stalin's five-year plans and Mao's Great Leap Forward. Yet, as Matthias Frisch rightly argues, the
risk of the justification of past and present suffering lurks around the corner wherever progressive logics of history or promises of bright and just futures are not
counterbalanced by reflective forms of remembrance.17
we should resist dualist thinking that forces us to choose between restitution for historical
injustices and struggle for justice in the present or the future . Rather, we should look for types of
retrospective politics that do not oppose but complement or reinforce the emancipatory and utopian
elements in present- and future-directed politics —and the other way around: present- and future-oriented
politics that do not forget about historical injustices.
Therefore,
In this paper I want to contribute to this goal by focusing on the issue of retrospective politics and by analyzing how one can differentiate emancipatory or even
utopian types of retrospective politics from retrospective politics that I classify here as anti-utopian. I argue that the currently
dominant strands of
retrospective politics indeed do tend to be anti-utopian and have a very limited emancipatory potential . Moreover, I
claim that currently dominant retrospective politics do not radically break with several of the exculpatory intellectual
mechanisms that are typically associated with progressivist politics but actually modify and sometimes even
radicalize them. In that restricted sense, and only in this sense, it can be argued that currently dominant retrospective politics do not
represent a fundamentally new way of dealing with historical evil and the ethics of responsibility.
My perspective is not a pessimistic one, however. Besides the currently dominant retrospective politics, there exist other strands of retrospective
politics that do have emancipatory or even utopian features and that do not force us to choose between restitution for historical injustices
and struggle for justice in the present or the future. Anti-utopianism and ethical “passeism,” I argue, are not inherent or necessary
features of all retrospective politics but rather result from a specific, underlying type of historical thought or philosophy of history18 that treats the relation
between past, present, and future in antinomic terms and prevents us from understanding “transtemporal” injustices and responsibilities. Sometimes this type of
historical thought indeed stimulates a moralistic stance in which the past is charged with the worst of all evil, while the present becomes morally discharged by
simple comparison. The latter type
of “temporal Manichaeism” can be highly problematic , I argue, because it not only posits that
the “past is evil” but also tends to turn this reasoning around and stimulates the wishful thought that “evil is past.”
at anti-humanism
Anti-humanism is just as fucked as humanism and humanism isn’t always bad – context is always key
and narratives of humanity are contingent.
Lester 12 – (January 2012, Alan, Director of Interdisciplinary Research, Professor of Historical
Geography, and Co-Director of the Colonial and Postcolonial Studies Network, University of Sussex,
“Humanism, race and the colonial frontier,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Volume
37, Issue 1, pages 132–148)
Anderson argues that
it is not an issue of extending humanity to … negatively racialised people, but of putting into question that from which such
people have been excluded – that which, for liberal discourse, remains unproblematised. (2007, 199)
I fear, however, that if we direct attention away from histories of humanism’s failure to deal with difference and
to render that difference compatible with its fundamental universalism, and if we overlook its proponents’ failed attempts to combat dispossession, murder
and oppression; if our history of race is instead understood through a critique of humanity’s conceptual separation from nature, we dilute
the political potency of universalism .
Historically, it was not humanism that gave rise to racial innatism, it was the specifically anti-humanist politics of settlers forging
new social assemblages through relations of violence on colonial frontiers. Settler communities became
established social assemblages in their own right specifically through the rejection of humanist interventions .
Perhaps, as Edward Said suggested, we can learn from the implementation of humanist universalism in
practice , and insist on its potential to combat racism, and perhaps we can insist on the contemporary conceptual hybridisation of human–non-human entities too,
without necessarily abandoning all the precepts of humanism (Said 2004; Todorov 2002). We do not necessarily need to accord a specific value to the human, separate from
and above nature, in order to make a moral and political case for a fundamental human universalism that can be wielded strategically against racial
violence.
Nineteenth century humanitarians’ universalism was fundamentally conditioned by their belief that British
culture stood at the apex of a hierarchical order of civilisations. From the mid-nineteenth century through to the mid-twentieth century, this
ethnocentrism produced what Lyotard describes as ‘the flattening of differences, or the demand for a norm (“human nature”)’, that ‘carries with it its own forms of
terror’ (cited Braun 2004, 1352). The intervention of Aboriginal Protection demonstrates that humanist universalism has the potential to inflict such terror (it was the Protectorate of Aborigines Office reincarnated that was
responsible, later in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for Aboriginal Australia’s Stolen Generation, and it was the assimilationist vision of the Protectors’ equivalents in Canada that led to the abuses of the Residential Schools
But we must not forget that humanism’s alternatives , founded upon principles of difference rather
than commonality, have the potential to do the same and even worse .
In the nineteenth century, Caribbean planters and then emigrant British settlers emphasised the multiplicity
of the human species, the absence of any universal ‘human nature’ , the incorrigibility of difference , in
their upholding of biological determinism . Their assault on any notion of a fundamental commonality
among human beings has disconcerting points of intersection with the radical critique of humanism
today . The scientific argument of the nineteenth century that came closest to post-humanism’s insistence on the hybridity of humanity, promising to ‘close the ontological gap between human and nonhuman animals’ (Day 2008, 49), was the evolutionary theory of biological descent associated with Darwin, and yet this theory was adopted in Aotearoa New Zealand and other colonial sites precisely
to legitimate the potential extinction of other, ‘weaker’ races in the face of British colonisation on the grounds of
system).
the natural law of a struggle for survival (Stenhouse 1999).
Both the upholding and the rejection of human–nature binaries can thus result in racially oppressive
actions, depending on the contingent politics of specific social assemblages .
Nineteenth century colonial humanitarians, inspired as they were by an
irredeemably ethnocentric and religiously exclusive form of universalism, at least combatted exterminatory settler discourses and practices at multiple sites of empire, and provided spaces on mission and protectorate stations in which indigenous peoples could be shielded to a very
limited extent from dispossession and murder. They also, unintentionally, reproduced discourses of a civilising mission and of a universal humanity that could be deployed by anticolonial nationalists in other sites of empire that were never invaded to the same extent by settlers, in
independence struggles from the mid-twentieth century. Finally, as Whatmore’s (2002) analysis of the Select Committee on Aborigines reveals, they provided juridical narratives that are part of the arsenal of weapons that indigenous peoples can wield in attempts to claim redress and
recompense in a postcolonial world.
The politics of humanism in practice, then, was riddled with contradiction, fraught with particularity and
latent with varying possibilities. It could be relatively progressive and liberatory; it could be dispossessive and
culturally genocidal. Within its repertoire lay potential to combat environmental and biological determinism and innatism, however, and this should not be forgotten in
a rush to condemn humanism’s universalism as well as its anthropocentrism. It is in the tensions within universalism that
the ongoing potential of an always provisional, self-conscious, flexible and strategic humanism – one that
now recognises the continuity between the human and the non-human as well as the power-laden
particularities of the male, middle class, Western human subject – resides.
at lib econ
Their diagnosis of racism in the libidinal economy exposes its contingent nature.
Johnson 05 – (2005, Adrian, PhD from SUNY-Stony Brook, Professor in the Department of Philosophy at
the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque and a faculty member at the Emory Psychoanalytic
Institute in Atlanta, “Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive,” p. 340-1)
Despite the apparent bleakness and antiutopianism of an assessment of human nature as being perturbed by
an irreducible inner antagonism, there is, surprisingly, what might be described as a liberating aspect to this splitting of the
drives. Since drives are essentially dysfunctional, subjects are able to act otherwise than as would be
dictated by instinctually compelled pursuits of gratification, satisfaction, and pleasure . In fact, subjects are
forced to be free , since, for such beings, the mandate of nature is forever missing. Severed from a strictly
biological master-program and saddled with a conflict-ridden, heterogeneous jumble of contradictory impulses—impulses mediated by an
inconsistent, unstable web of multiple representations, indicated by Lacan's “barring” of the Symbolic Other—the parlêtre has no
choice but to bump up against the unnatural void of its autonomy. The confrontation with this void is frequently avoided. The true
extent of one's autonomy is, due to its sometimes-frightening implications, just as often relegated to the shadows of the unconscious as those heteronomous factors secretly shaping conscious
thought and behavior.
The contradictions arising from the conflicts internal to the libidinal economy mark the precise places
where a freedom transcending mundane materiality has a chance briefly to flash into effective
existence; such points of breakdown in the deterministic nexus of the drives clear the space for the
sudden emergence of something other than the smooth continuation of the default physical and
sociopsychical “run of things.” Moreover, if the drives were fully functional—and, hence, would not prompt a mobilization of a series of
defensive distancing mechanisms struggling to transcend this threatening corpo-Real—humans would be animalistic automatons, namely, creatures
of nature. The pain of a malfunctioning, internally conflicted libidinal economy is a discomfort signaling
a capacity to be an autonomous subject . This is a pain even more essential to human autonomy than what Kant identifies as the guilt-inducing burden of
duty and its corresponding pangs of anxious, awe-inspiring respect. Whereas Kant treats the discomfort associated with duty as a symptom-effect of a transcendental freedom inherent to
rational beings, the reverse might (also) be the case: Such freedom is the symptom-effect of a discomfort inherent to libidinal beings. Completely “curing” individuals of this discomfort, even if
As Lacan might phrase it, the
split Trieb is the sinthome of subjectivity proper, the source of a suffering that, were it to be entirely eliminated, would
entail the utter dissolution of subjectivity itself. Humanity is free precisely insofar as its pleasures are
far from perfection , insofar as its enjoyment is never absolute .
it were possible, would be tantamount to divesting them, whether they realize it or not, of an essential feature of their dignity as subjects.
Exclusive causal focus on affect is a theoretical shortcut to avoid examining the concrete nature of
politics.
Grossberg 10 – (2010, Lawrence, PhD, Morris Davis Distinguished Professor of Communication Studies
and Cultural Studies; Adjunct Distinguished Professor of Anthropology; Director of the University
Program in Cultural Studies at UNC, “Affect’s Future,” in The Affect Studies Reader, p. 315-6)
Gs ac MG: Yes, that's something that we were going to ask about: is
it possible that affect itself has been overinvested by
theory? Is there a way that affect lets one off the hook in the way, as you've sometimes argued, that theory does?
LG: Yes, I think that is a nice way of putting it . I do think that affect can let you off the hook . Because it has come
to serve, now, too often as a "magical" term . So, if something has effects that are, let's say, nonrepresentational then we can just describe it as "affect:' So, I think there is a lot of theorizing that does not
do the harder work of specifying modalities and apparatuses of affect, or distinguishing affect from
other sorts of non-semantic effects, or, as I said, analyzing the articulations between (and hence, the difference between,
as well as how one gets from) the ontological and the "empirical."
The last is a vexing problem, and crucial I think if we are ever going to sort out a theory of affect. It's
like people who say the world is
"rhizomatic:' The world isn't rhizomatic! I mean, as virtual, the world is rhizomatic. On the plane of consistency then, the world is rhizomatic.
But there is always a plane of organization and that's what you have to describe because that is what you have to deterritorialize and decode, and then of course it will always be re-territorialized and you will of course never get back to the plane of consistency.' And whether
or not Deleuze and Guattari thought you could become a body without organs, I have never had the desire .. . and I
see nothing particularly political about it anyway .
Gs & MG: But is it that these planes (virtual/actual or consistency/organization) are so separable or is it that they persist alongside one another in the manner of
Spinoza's monism? That is, is there another way perhaps to think the spatiality of their relationship?
LG: Yes, I do assume that these two planes are the same thing. It's like Nietzsche's will: it
is the ontological condition of possibility of any
empirical reality. But that doesn't mean that it is a description of any empirical reality . There is a
difference between the transcendental condition of possibility and the actualization of those conditions.
So, I think that sometimes affect lets people off the hook because it lets them appeal back to an ontology that
escapes. And, it often ends up producing a radically de-territorializing politics that I have never been
particularly enamored of anyway.
But it also lets me too much off the hook, because what we need to do is take up this work and rethink it. You know that brilliant chapter in A Thousand Plateaus (
1987) where Deleuze and Guattari talk about regimes of signification, or what Foucault would have called discursive apparatuses, different forms of discursive
apparatuses. Machinic assemblages produce different kinds of effects. We know that. Foucault would say that. Deleuze would say that. And Spinoza too, you know.
Some of those kinds of effects are useful to group together and call affect. But then you have to do the work of specifying the particular regime of signification, and
the particular machinic effectivity that is being produced.
In too much work done by people who talk about affect -or at least I get the feeling when reading some of it anyway-there is a
kind of immediate effectivity of affect on the body. Despite constant denials, I can't escape the feeling
that Brian Massumi's recent work, for example, on the color-coding of terror alerts reduplicates a kind of old-fashioned
media-effects model. You know, you flash these lights at people and there is some kind of bodily response. Well, there isn't! Affect then
becomes a magical way of bringing in the body. Certainly, there is a kind of mediation process but it is a machinic one. It goes through
regimes that organize the body and the discourses of our lives, organize everyday life, and then produce specific kinds of effects. Organizations of affect might
include will and attention, or moods, or orientation, what I have called "mattering maps:' and the various culturally and phenomenological constituted emotional
economies. I say it this way because I am not sure that emotions can simply be described as affect, even as configurations of affect. I have always held that emotion
is the articulation of affect and ideology. Emotion is the ideological attempt to make sense of some affective productions.
So,
I don't think that we've yet done the actual work of parsing out everything that is getting collapsed
into the general notion of affect . Basically, it's become everything that is non-representational or nonsemantic – that's what we now call affect. And, so, yes, I think you are right: it is letting us off the hook because then we don't
end up having to find the specificity .
at afro-P
Ontological fatalism reifies dehumanization – affirming the conditions of possibility for anti-racism is a
better starting point for political praxis
Marriott 12 – (2012, David, PhD in literature from the University of Sussex, Professor of the History of
Consciousness at UC-Santa Cruz, “3. Black Cultural Studies,” Years Work Crit Cult Theory, 20 (1): 37-66)
In the concluding pages of Darker Than Blue, Gilroy restates why he finds the ongoing attachment to the idea of race in the US so very unsatisfactory in comparison, say, to the anti-racism of Frantz Fanon:
[Fanon’s] ‘audacious commitment to an alternative conception of humanity reconstituted outside “race” […] is something that does not endear Fanon’s work to today’s practitioners of the facile antihumanism and ethnic
absolutism so characteristic of life on US college campuses, where class-based homogeneity combines smoothly with deference to racial and ethic particularity and with resignation to the world as it appears. Fanon disappoints that
scholastic constituency by refusing to see culture as an insurmountable obstacle between groups, even if they have been racialized. He does not accept the “strategic” award of an essential innocence to the oppressed and the
wretched of the earth. Their past and present sufferings confer no special nobility upon them and are not invested with redemptive insights. Suffering is just suffering, and Fanon has no patience with those who would invoke the
armour of incorrigibility around national liberation struggles or minority cultures’. (pp. 157–8, my emphasis)
Whatever one might think of the cogency of these remarks (if only because the notion of a non-racial life is predicated on the idea that the human can somehow reside ‘outside’ of race, a humanism that would always then be
the question of whether US culture can ever escape racial antagonism is the
primary focus of Frank B. Wilderson III’s powerful Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms, as part of a more general reading of US film culture.
And indeed Fanon’s anti-philosophical philosophical critique of racial ontology (historically blacks were seen as part of existence but not, as yet, part of
human being, a not-yet that forces Fanon to rethink the teleological form of the human as already and essentially violent in its separation from the state of nature from which it has come) forms a major part
of Wilderson’s conception of anti-blackness as the major structural antagonism of US history and
culture. It is against the conception that racism could ever be simply contingent to black experience that Wilderson protests, reflecting on the fact that racial slavery has no parallel to other forms of suffering, and perhaps
most strikingly social death is the constitutive essence of black existence in the US. In brief, slavery remains so originary, in the sense of what he calls its ‘accumulation and fungibility’
(terms borrowed from Saidiya Hartman), it not only has no ‘analogy’ to other forms of antagonism—Wilderson’s examples are the Holocaust and Native American genocide— there is
simply no process of getting over it, of recovering from the loss (as wound, or trauma): as such, slavery remains the ultimate structure of antagonism in
the US. Whether at a personal level or at the level of historical process, if ‘black slavery is foundational to modern Humanism’, then any teleological appeal to a humanism beyond racism is doomed from the start (p. 22). The
problem with Wilderson’s argument , however, is that it remains of a piece with the manichean imperatives
that beset it , and which by definition are structurally uppermost, which means that he can only confirm those imperatives as
absolutes rather than chart a dialectical path beyond them , insofar as, structurally speaking, there is no ‘outside’ to black
social death and alienation, or no outside to this outside, and all that thought can do is mirror its own enslavement by
race. This is not so much ‘afro-pessimism’ —a term coined by Wilderson— as thought wedded to its own despair . However, this is
constitutively compromised by the racism at its frontier),
also not the entire story of Red, White, and Black, as I hope to show.
For example, in Chapter One (‘The Structure of Antagonisms’), written as a theoretical introduction, and which opens explicitly on the Fanonian question of why ontology cannot understand the being of the Black,
Wilderson is prepared to say that black suffering is not only beyond analogy, it also refigures the whole
of being: ‘the essence of being for the White and non-Black position’ is non-niggerness, consequently, ‘[b]eing can thus be thought of, in the first ontological instance, as non-niggerness, and slavery then as niggerness’ (p.
37). It is not hard when reading such sentences to suspect a kind of absolutism at work here, and one that
manages to be peculiarly and dispiritingly dogmatic: throughout Red, White, and Black, despite variations
in tone and emphasis, there is always the desire to have black lived experience named as the worst, and
the politics of such a desire inevitably collapses into a kind of sentimental moralism : for the claim that ‘Blackness is
incapacity in its most pure and unadulterated form’ means merely that the black has to embody this abjection without reserve (p. 38). This logic—and the denial of any kind of
‘ontological integrity’ to the Black/Slave due to its endless traversal by force does seem to reduce
ontology to logic, namely, a logic of non-recuperability—moves through the following points: (1) Black nonbeing is not capable of symbolic resistance and, as such, falls outside of any language of authenticity or reparation; (2) for such a subject, which
Wilderson persists in calling ‘death’, the symbolic remains foreclosed (p. 43); (3) as such, Blackness is the
record of an occlusion which remains ever present: ‘White (Human) capacity, in advance of the event of discrimination or oppression, is parasitic on Black incapacity’ (p.
45); (4) and, as an example of the institutions or discourses involving ‘violence’, ‘antagonisms’ and
‘parasitism’, Wilderson describes White (or non-Black) film theory and cultural studies as incapable of understanding the
‘suffering of the Black—the Slave’ (they cannot do so because they are erroneously wedded to humanism and to the
psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, which Wilderson takes as two examples of what the Afro-pessimist should avoid) (p. 56); as a corrective, Wilderson calls for a new
language of abstraction, and one centrally concerned with exposing ‘the structure of antagonisms between Blacks
and Humans’ (p. 68). Reading seems to stop here , at a critique of Lacanian full speech: Wilderson wants to say that Lacan’s notion of the originary (imaginary) alienation of the
subject is still wedded to relationality as implied by the contrast between ‘empty’ and ‘full’ speech, and so apparently cannot grasp the trauma of ‘absolute Otherness’ that is the Black’s relation to Whites, because psychoanalysis
cannot fathom the ‘structural, or absolute, violence’ of Black life (pp. 74; 75). ‘Whereas Lacan was aware of how language “precedes and exceeds us”, he did not have Fanon’s awareness of how violence also precedes and exceeds
The violence of such abjection—or incapacity—is therefore that it cannot be communicated or avowed, and is always already
delimited by desubjectification and dereliction (p. 77). Whence the suspicion of an ontology reduced to a logic (of abjection). Leaving
aside the fact that it is quite mistaken to limit Lacan’s notion of full speech to the search for
communication (the unconscious cannot be confined to parole), it is clear that, according to Wilderson’s own ‘logic’, his description of the Black is working, via analogy, to Lacan’s notion of the real but, in
his insistence on the Black as an absolute outside Wilderson can only duly reify this void at the heart
of universality . The Black is ‘beyond the limit of contingency’—but it is worth saying immediately that this ‘beyond’ is
indeed a foreclosure that defines a violence whose traces can only be thought violently (that is, analogically), and whose
Blacks’ (p. 76).
nonbeing returns as the theme for Wilderson’s political thinking of a non-recuperable abjection. The Black is nonbeing and, as such, is more real and primary than being per se: given how much is at stake, this insistence on a racial
metaphysics of injury implies a fundamental irreconcilability between Blacks and Humans (there is really no debate to be had here: irreconcilability is the condition and possibility of what it means to be Black).
This argument could be illustrated at many points in Red, White, and Black, which all interconnect. Wilderson is concerned, for example, to argue that a Marxian ontology of labour and/or commodity form is philosophically
inadequate for reading black accumulation and fungibility: this idea, which is not altogether new, is supported by a lengthy reading of the film Monster’s Ball (Chapter Four (‘Monster’s Ball’) and is perhaps the most valuable part of
his book in its illustration of the links between race, violence, contingency, and death). Other chapters offer critiques of what Wilderson calls ‘empathetic’ as against ‘analytical’ cinema, with the former offering ‘sentimental
apologies for structural violence’, rather than ‘paradigmatic analyses’ of black suffering (p. 341). It is not at all clear how this argument differs from film theory’s opposition between a cinema of distraction and a socially engaged
cinema: it seems to me that this theory of the filmwork describes quite precisely the distinction between analysis and empathy Wilderson is trying to make (and unsettle). However, unlike film theory, Wilderson’s attempt to
preserve the distinction seems to work with an unquestioned notion of film spectatorship—i.e. either seduced or interrogated—which means that the theory of cinema he puts forth somewhat undermines his more general claim
It is also a little strange that a work so concerned with the chasm between ‘Human life
and Black death’ should indict cinema for its ‘efforts to reassert relational logic’, but nowhere mentions
how the very form of this reproach relies on reasserting the endless non-relational absence of
Blackness (and thereby reducing the history and politics of race to a logic of non-relationality ) (p. 340). This
transcendentalizing of black suffering is fundamentally absolutist ( and, once again, moralistic ) in
effect if not in intention . In the final sentences of the book, Wilderson asks, ‘How does one deconstruct life?’ It remains a pivotal question. But perhaps, after all, the more urgent task is not how to
that film theory can never understand black suffering.
deconstruct life, but to grasp the necessarily-perverse logic of racial determinations of suffering? Red, White, and Black is a thought-provoking study of racial ontology which, whatever its limitations, is a powerful invocation of why
blackness just is death, a death-in-life which has no analogy or synonym but which, for the same reason, must be thought differently for blackness to live.
The alt’s understanding of blackness reproduces the worst reductive determinism of orthodox
Marxism – anti-blackness is part of a complex ecology of power relations, not a discrete causal
relationship to slavery – it also proves the double turn at the heart of their wilderson and sexton
arguments.
Day 15 – (Fall 2015, Iyko, Associate Professor of English and Chair of Critical Social Thought at Mount
Holyoke College, “Being or Nothingness: Indigeneity, Antiblackness, and Settler Colonial Critique,”
Critical Ethnic Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Fall 2015), pp. 102-121)
But perhaps my own defense of Indigenous decolonization movements for sovereignty begs a larger question about whether sovereignty in itself offers a radical politics that can encompass or mobilize a black radical tradition
rooted in the project of abolition. And it is here that I agree with Sexton’s intervention to problematize the idea that antiracist agendas must emerge from the foundational priority of Indigenous sovereignty and restoration of
against the totalizing frame of Afro-pessimism , I want to stress instead the pitfalls of any
antidialectical approach to the political economy of the settler colonial racial state from the position of
either Indigenous or antiblack exceptionalism. Settler colonial racial capitalism is not a thing but a social
relation . As such, it is not produced out of the causal relationships that Sexton puts forward here : “Slavery,
as it were, precedes and prepares the way for colonialism, its forebear or fundament or support. Colonialism, as it
were, the issue or heir of slavery, its outgrowth or edifice or monument.” 55 The nearly totalizing black existential frame is similarly based on a
questionable construction of epistemic privilege :
[black existence] does relate to the totality; it indicates the (repressed) truth of the political and economic system . That is to say,
the whole range of positions within the racial formation is most fully understood from this vantage point ,
land.54 But
not unlike the way in which the range of gender and sexual variance under patriarchal and heteronormative regimes is most fully understood through lenses that are feminist and queer.56
According to Sexton, no other oppression is reducible to antiblackness, but the relative totality of
antiblackness is the privileged perspective from which to understand racial formation more broadly. But
unlike the way feminist and queer critical theory interrogate heteropatriarchy from a subjectless
standpoint, Sexton’s entire point seems to rest on the very specificity and singularity —rather than subjectlessness— of
black critical theory’s capacity to understand race . The privilege of this embodied viewpoint similarly relies on rigidly
binaristic conceptions of land and bodily integrity . He writes, “If the indigenous relation to land precedes and exceeds any regime of property, then the
slave’s inhabitation of the earth precedes and exceeds any prior relation to land—landlessness. And selflessness is the correlate. No ground for
identity, no ground to stand (on).”57 In other words, the slave’s nonrelation to her body precedes and exceeds any other body’s relation to land. However, the settler colonial designation of the United States and Canada as terra
nullius—as legally empty lands—denies the very corporeality of Indigenous populations to inhabit land, much less have any rights to it. Alongside genocidal elimination, the erasure of Indigenous corporeal existence is inseparable
from the ground it doesn’t stand on, or is removed from.
For the same reason that the economic reductionism of orthodox Marxism has been discredited, such an
argument that frames racial slavery as a base for a colonial superstructure similarly fails to take into
account the dialectics of settler colonial capitalism . The political economy of settler colonial capitalism is more
appropriately figured as an ecology of power relations than a linear chain of events . Relinquishing any
conceptual privilege that might be attributed to Indigeneity, alternatively, Coulthard offers a useful anti-exceptionalist stance: “the colonial
relation should not be understood as a primary locus of ‘base’ from which these other forms of
oppression flow, but rather as the inherited background field within which market, racist, patriarchal,
and state relations converge.”58 From this view, race and colonialism form the matrix of the settler colonial racial state.
The narrative of “no progress” is affectively appealing but historically imprecise – major gains have
been achieved and the political implications of their ethics risks throwing out the possibility of a less
violence, less dehumanizing future around the world.
Winant 15 – (2015, Howard, Professor of Sociology at UC-Santa Barbara, “The Dark Matter: Race and
Racism in the 21st Century,” Critical Sociology 2015, Vol. 41(2) 313–324)
The World-Historical Shitpile of Race
Structural racism an odious stinkpile of shit left over from the past and still augmented in the present
has been accumulated
antiracist accomplishments have reduced the size of the pile
But a massive amount still remains.
Indeed it often seems that this enormous and odious waste pinions the social system under an
immovable burden
despair and hopelessness overcome those who bore this sorrow
–
being
–
by ‘slavery unwilling to die’,4 by empire, and indeed by the entire racialized modern world system. The immense waste (Feagin et al., 2001, drawing on Bataille) of human life and labor by these historically entrenched social
structures and practices still confronts us today, in the aftermath of the post-Second World War racial ‘break’. Our
have lessened the stink.
; we
of waste
So much racial waste is left over from the practice of racial domination in the early days of empire and conquest, to the present combination of police state
and liberalism!
. How often have
? How often have slave and native, peon
and maquiladora, servant and ghetto-dweller, felt just plain ‘sick and tired’ (Nappy Roots, 2003), encumbered by this deadening inertia composed of a racial injustice that could seemingly never be budged? How often, too, have whites felt weighed down by the waste, the guilt and selfdestruction built into racism and the ‘psychological wage’?
Yet racial politics is always unstable and contradictory Racial despotism can never be fully stabilized or
consolidated at key historical moments
rare but also inevitable the sheer weight of racial
oppression –
– becomes insupportable
.
. Thus
, perhaps
qua social structure
,
. The built-up rage and inequity, the irrationality and inutility, and the explosive force of dreams denied, are mobilized politically in ways that would have seemed
almost unimaginable earlier.
Racism remains formidable
Yet That’s Not the Whole Story
, entrenched as a structuring feature of both US and global society and politics. Indeed it often seems impossible to overcome.
Large-scale demographic and political shifts have overtaken the
modern racial system undermining and rearticulating it During and after the Second World War a
tremendous racial ‘break’ occurred a seismic shift
The US was but one national ‘case
which was experienced very profoundly
not only
the modern civil rights movement
but a whole range of ‘new social movements’ that we take for granted today
From the explicit racial despotism of the Jim Crow era to the
‘racial democracy’ of course still very partial and truncated of the present period … : that is a big leap,
people
We are so used to losing! We can’t see that the racial system is in crisis both in the US and globally.
world (
)
,
.
,
rupture,
that swept much of the world (Winant, 2001).
’ of this
: racial transformations occurred that were unparalleled since at least the changes brought about by the US Civil War. Omi and I (1994) – and many, many others – have
proposed that the terrain of racial politics was tremendously broadened and deepened after the War. The increased importance of race in larger political life
grounded
shaped
as central axes of political conflict. In earlier stages of US history it
had not been so evident that ‘the personal is political’ – at least not since the end of Reconstruction.
(
)
.
In the modern world there were always black movements, always movements for racial justice and racial freedom. The experience of injustice, concrete grievances, lived oppression, and resistance, both large and small, always exists. It can be articulated or not, politicized or not.
These movements, these demands, were excluded from mainstream politics before the
civil rights
movement
in a huge ‘break’
‘politicization of the social’ swept over
the world It ignited
major democratic upsurges This included the explicitly anti-racist movements
civil rights
anti-apartheid
the anti-colonial movement
It also included parallel
movements like ‘secondwave’ feminism
gay liberation
and others
movements
produced
Demographic, economic, political, and cultural shifts across the planet
The destruction of the old European empires
largely
after the War. Indeed, after the Second World War,
.
modern
that was racially framed in crucial ways, this
(or reignited)
movement, the
and more-or-less allied,
rise of the
.
movement, and
: the
(India, Algeria, Vietnam, etc.).
, LGBTQ (née
) movements,
In short, the world-historical upheaval of the Second World War and its aftermath were racial upheavals in significant ways: the periphery against the center, the colored ‘others’ against ‘The Lords of Human Kind’ (Kiernan, 1995). These
:
•
•
,
.
•
•
The coming and going of the Cold War
The rise of ‘new social movements’
in the US
this is only the start of
a much bigger list
And
the
, led by the black movement
what could be
.
A Crisis of Race and Racism?
‘[C]risis’, Gramsci famously wrote, ‘consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born: in this interregnum, morbid phenomena of the most varied kind come to pass’ (Gramsci, 1971: 276). Using the Gramscian formula, I suggest that there is such a crisis of race
On the one hand, the old verities of established racism and white supremacy have been officially
discredited, not only in the US but
around the world. On the other hand, racially-informed action
and social organization
continue unchecked
and racism.
fairly comprehensively
, racial identity and race consciousness,
in nearly every aspect of social life! On the one hand, the state (many states around the world) now claims to be colorblind, non-
racialist, racially democratic; while on the other hand, in almost every case, those same states need race to rule. Consider in the US alone: race and electoral politics, race and social control, race and legal order … Why don’t our heads explode under the pressures of such cognitive
dissonance? Why doesn’t manifest racial contradiction provoke as much uncertainty and confusion in public life and political activity as it does in everyday experience? Are we just supposed to pretend that none of this is happening? Can anyone really sustain the view that they are
operating in a nonracial, ‘colorblind’ society?
The ‘colorblind’ claim is that one should not ‘notice’ race. For if one ‘sees’ race, one wouldn’t be ‘blind’ to it, after all.5 But what happens to race-consciousness under the pressure (now rather intense in the US, anyway) to be ‘colorblind’? Quite clearly, racial awareness d oes not dry up
like a raisin in the sun. Not only does it continue as a matter of course in everyday life, but in intellectual, artistic and scientific (both social and natural) life race continues to command attention.6
‘Colorblind’ ideologies of race today serve to impede the recognition of racial difference or racial inequality based on claims that race is an archaic concept, that racial inclusion is already an accomplished fact, and so on. Just so, persistent race-consciousness highlights racial differences
and particularities. ‘Noticing’ race can be linked to despotic or democratic motives, framed either in defense of coercion, privilege, and undeserved advantage, or invoked to support inclusion, human rights, and social justice (Carbado and Harris, 2008; see also Brown et al., 2003).
Obama
Is he a mere token, a shill for Wall Street? Or is he Neo, ‘the one’? If neither alternative is plausible, then we are in the realm of everyday 21st-century US politics. This is the territory in which, as Sam Rayburn famously said, ‘There comes a time in the life of every politician when he [sic]
must rise above principle.’
Yet Barack Obama has transformed the US presidency in ways we cannot yet fully appreciate. Obama is not simply the first nonwhite (that we know of) to occupy the office. He is the first to have lived in the global South, the first to be a direct descendent of colonized people, the first to
have a genuine movement background. Consider: How many community meetings, how many movement meetings did Obama attend before entering electoral politics? But he is no more powerful than any of his predecessors; he is constrained as they were by the US system of rule, by
the US racial regime, by structural racism.
In addition he is constrained by racism as no other US president has ever been. No other president has experienced racism directly:
Moreover, while my own upbringing hardly typifies the African American experience – and although, largely through luck and circumstance, I now occupy a position that insulates me from most of the bumps and bruises that the average black man must endure – I can recite the usual
litany of petty slights that during my forty-five years have been directed my way: security guards tailing me as I shop in department stores, white couples who toss me th eir car keys as I stand outside a restaurant waiting for the valet, police cars pulling me over for no apparent reason. I
know what it’s like to have people tell me I can’t do something because of my color, and I know the bitter swill of swallowed back anger. I know as well that Michelle and I must be continually vigilant against some of the debilitating story lines that our daughters may absorb – from TV and
music and friends and the streets – about who the world thinks they are, and what the world imagines they should be. (Obama, 2006: 233)
On the other hand: he has a ‘kill list’. All presidents kill people, but Obama is the first systematically and publicly to take charge of these egregious and unc onstitutional uses of exceptional powers. In this he echoes Carl Schmitt, the Nazi political theorist, whose famous dictum is ‘Sovereign
is he who decides on the exception’ (2004 [1922]). The drones, the surveillance, and the numerous right turns of his administration all stand in sharp contradiction not only to his campaign rhetoric, but to the anti-racist legacy of the civil rights movement that arguably put him in office.
Obama has not interceded for blacks against their greatest cumulative loss of wealth in US history, the ‘great recession’ of 2008. He has not explicitly criticized the glaring racial bias in the US carceral system. He has not intervened in conflicts over workers’ rights – particularly in the public
sector where many blacks and other people of color are concentrated. Obama himself largely deploys colorblind racial ideology, although he occasionally critiques it as well. Beneath this ostensibly postracial view the palpable and quite ubiquitous system of racial distinction and inequality
remains entrenched. Though modernized and ‘moderated’, structural racism has been fortified, not undermined, by civil rights reform; Obama is not challenging it, at least not directly.
Reframing the Discussion
What should we be studying and teaching now?
the ‘dark matter’ of race
gravitational pull on our politics
The list of themes I have highlighted here is partial of course, and perhaps impressionistic as well. If the argument I have proposed has any validity, then
, which is even more invisible now than it was in the past – in its present ‘post-civil rights’, ‘colorblind’, and even ‘presidential’ forms –
continues to exercise its
. It continues to shape what is called (and improperly deprecated as) ‘identity politics’. The ‘dark matter’ takes on new significance as a central feature of neoliberalism, which is enacted today through
the deployment of ‘accumulation by dispossession’, ‘states of exception’, state violence, and exclusionary politics – all political practices that rely on racism.
Yet the legacy of centuries of resistance to these depredations the undeniable achievements of antiracist and ant-imperialist struggles the extension of democracy
to peoples of color also
exerts a significant political force Race-based ‘freedom dreams’
sustain the hope of democracy,
inclusion, equality, and justice in the US and elsewhere
,
,
– often tortuous and always incomplete –
.
(Kelley again)
.
,
at root cause
The alt fails to account for international dynamics and essentializes blackness.
Wright 15 – (2015, Michelle, PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan, Professor
of African American Studies and Comparative Literature Studies at Northwestern University, “Physics of
Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology,” pp. 147-55, endnote on p. 188)
When interpellated through the Middle Passage epistemology, Blackness has a limited set of qualitative values or denotations that link it to the events in that epistemology such as the commitment to collective and individual struggle, “racial uplift,” and the maintenance of strong
generally, the Middle Passage epistemology like established Black linear
progress or antiprogress narratives e.g.
Afropessimism links all Black collectives
across the Diaspora to the experience of racism
communities through “traditional” or heteropatriarchal family structures. More
(
—
, Afrocentrism, PanAfricanism, Negritude,
other
)10 also
and the need to overcome it—so how can Ramses II be “Black”? Even further, what does it mean for us to claim him as “Black”? It is hard to interpellate
Ramses (or any of the other African kings, queens, leaders, intellectuals, politicians, scientists, etc., whose physiognomy we would acknowledge as stereotypically “Black”) within the qualitative definition of Middle Passage Blackness as making common cause with African Americans—or
any other “Black” community fighting racism and seeking socioeconomic and political equality in the African Diaspora. In attempting to interpellate Ramses within this definition,
identity that transcends time and space
we produce Blackness as a fixed
must
; through this, Ramses no longer belongs to his own spacetime but retroactively becomes a denigrated “Negro” who must combat his oppression. A paradox or—as Massey terms
it, “a dichotomous result”—now confronts us: was Ramses II a Black freedom fighter or a ruler of extraordinary and largely unquestioned power, one of the greatest and most oppressive in the history of Egyptian pharaohs?
It is the qualitative definition of Black progress that creates this dichotomy, a paradox that then
“empties out” all meaning in qualitative collapse
. The attempt to interpellate Ramses II through a Black progress narrative exposes the continuing attempt and subsequent failure of the progress narrative
to interpellate Ramses. He is Black because he is a Black African, but he is not Black, because neither “Black” nor “African” operated as identities in Ramses’s spacetime. Ramses II’s life speaks to the greatness of African empires, but his unapologetic use of massive slave labor should
“expel” him from Black progressive membership, the same way in which some discourses attempt to expel Blacks whose actions deliberately harmed other Blacks.
While we should not lose sleep over the “odd individual” whose behaviors bar
them from
a Black progress narrative
This dichotomy
threatens to create interpellative problems for Blacks who
move across the Atlantic at the
same time as millions of Black Africans are being sailed to and sold into the Americas but not in the
same directions
Black slaves transported outside of the Americas to Europe, India, and elsewhere do not retain a
collective identity They
disappear into households factories, fields
roads and city streets
From the point of view of Black linear narratives
their histories have become irrelevant to the collective historical theme of overcoming
racism Qualitatively speaking, it appears difficult if not impossible to interpellate Blackness using a
Black Atlantic linear narrative in a significant and lasting way
perhaps
terrible
even partial mention in
him, her, or
, there are other Black individuals who are barred from mention who have not acted against the principle of striving for collective progress.
full or perhaps
also
, unlike the Egyptian pharaoh,
,
, veering away from our progress narrative.
.
are sold individually and
, perhaps
intersecting with populations at large.
progress
, or country
,
, progress has not been achieved because the collective has evanesced (and is therefore unable to achieve its
goal of overcoming racism), or read another way,
.
progress
. In “The World Is All of One Piece: The African Diaspora and Transportation to Australia,” which is included in
Ruth Simms Hamilton’s book Routes of Passage, Cassandra Pybus reprises a version of Sidney Mintz’s question about the qualitative limits of Black Atlantic studies:
A transnational historical consciousness and a capacity to encompass experience in disparate time and
space are great strengths of African diaspora studies In so far as there is a weakness, it is that the
Atlantic world remains the locus of discussion While some attention has begun to drift toward the
Indian Ocean, less
has been directed toward the distant Pacific
.
.
scholarship
. . . . In the diaspora at the detailed penal transportation records we can find information about the
African end of the eighteenth century that is very hard to come by elsewhere and that points in directions in which historians may not otherwise look.11
Pybus understands that her topic is framed by African Diaspora studies yet constrained by its “Atlantic focus”; she then observes that despite this swirl of scholarly activity in the Atlantic, there is a “drift” and “direction” toward the Indian Ocean and the “distant Pacific.” This passage
draws a connecting line moving horizontally (well, south by southeast) from the moment of the American Revolution in the Middle Passage timeline to other moments in those kingd oms and empires that border the Indian Ocean and, more specifically, to the moment of the British penal
colony of Australia.
By moving us horizontally into the Pacific, Pybus traces the journey of those (primarily) U.S. Blacks who allied with the defeated British and accompanied them on their return to England. Once there, the promised support from the Crown never materialized, and many of these former
soldiers, spies, and support staff found themselves on the London streets. These (primarily) men would have been in competition with an already burgeoning class of the dispossessed filling the streets of London and other industrial centers. As Robert Hughes argues in his monumental
history of the settling of white Australia, The Fatal Shore, land grabs by the aristocracy and the replacement of cottage industries with large industrialized factories deprived farmers, laborers, and urban workers of their former careers as well as prospects for new ones (many machines,
such as looms, required fewer adult workers). Theft, especially with the poor now rubbing shoulders with the wealthy in crowded urban centers, skyrocketed, and Parliament responded with deeply punitive measures; to steal a bit of ribbon or bread could send you to prison or heavy
labor or, most fearful of all, condemn you to “transport” (to a British penal colony). With the American colonies no longer available for convicts, Britain turned to its recently neglected “discovery” of Australia as a convenient replacement, and so white and Black Britons, along with a few
U.S. and Caribbean Blacks, found themselves transported as part of the First Fleet settlers.
Pybus’s second horizontal reading comes, counterintuitively, mostly through records created by hierarchies such as court, maritime, colonial, and penal records, due to the paucity of “horizontal” archives (correspondence between peers, diaries, etc.). Pybus, not unlike Hughes in The
Fatal Shore, constructs a horizontal narrative of these Black convicts and settlers through (unavoidably) mostly vertical archival sources: state, judicial, colonial, and penal records that read these human beings as mere numbers filling ships, accepting punishment, and perhaps enriching
the Crown through forced labor. To an even greater extent than Hughes, Pybus works to retrieve the very multivalent human experiences behind these records of discipline and punishment, to see the interactions denoted, denounced, and pronounced through their eyes, so to speak,
looking out horizontally rather than down from the (at least figurative) heights of the judge’s bench and foreman’s lash.
Yet despite two horizontal readings qualitative collapse looms because Pybus has framed this history
as a horizontal connection to what is ultimately a vertical framework that finds meaning in the
struggle against racism
these
,
here
. Pybus’s Black Founders offers us a notable exception to our assumptions about Blackness, but in her work, as in other histories she mentions, Blackness evanesces as the convicts and settlers perhaps married, procreated,
and most certainly died without moving a coherent Black Atlantic collective forward in its quest for equality in a majority white society. Or, rather more complicatedly, in Black Founders Blackness evanesces into either the white Australian population or the Australian Aboriginal
population, in the latter case an indigenous Blackness. Most likely reflecting on this, Pybus herself does not think that this discovery of Australia’s “Black founders” radically changes the history of the African Diaspora or Australia: “My point is not that this cohort of convicts is especially
significant to the history of Australia—though it certainly challenges the conventional reading of the colonial experience—but to examine what it can tell us about the wider world.”12
If we add Epiphenomenal time to our Black Atlantic frame, however, we can avoid the qualitative collapse that (re)produces these histories as interesting in their own right but marginal to our understanding of Black Atlantic history. Interpellated through Epiphenomenal time, the
Blackness in Black Founders first changes a person’s relationship to Blackness and indigeneity. Rather than simply “losing” indigenous status once captured and then sold, Blackness intersects twice more with indigeneity, and on two continents: North America and Australia. In both cases,
indigenous peoples sometimes helped Black slaves escape, the latter often marrying into specific American Indian nations. Middle Passage U.S. Blackness now shares a spacetime through indigeneity and raises questions about Central and South American intersections (such as the
Garifunas of Nicaragua).13 One might also see a third, more controversial intersection, between U.S. Blacks who “returned” to establish the free state of Liberia and the indigenous populations who found themselves oppressed in the resulting socioeconomic and political hierarchy. The
qualitative value of Pybus’s Blackness now meaningfully intersects with the Americas but is not swallowed by it, because the frame is horizontally comparative rather than vertically subordinating.
The intersection of Blackness with indigeneity in the Americas, Australia, and Africa also subverts the notion of a “purely” diasporic Blackness, even within the progress narrative itself, because the latter honors indigeneity as the “origin” to which the collective must eventually return. In
this moment of interpellation, origin/home is achieved not necessarily through return but through intersections with other “first nations” in the Atlantic and Pacific. Even further, we can see how Blackness, in intersecting with indigeneity when (formally) seeking “return,” as in Liberia,
might produce not egalitarian unity but instead oppressive hierarchy.
Black Founders also provides us with perhaps unheard of dimensions of Blackness that, once recognized, might usefully connect to other possible spacetimes that share this dimension. As noted before, the “Atlantic Blacks” who arrived with the First Fleet and on subsequent convict ships
experienced a range of lives or careers that cannot be summed up through one collective trajectory, especially that of the progress narrative. Pybus shows that in our present moment of reading, Blackness becomes ambiguous in its meaning in these early colonies. On the one hand, racial
designations are clearly marked in the official records, but unlike in the Americas, socioeconomic and political castes are not created to wholly segregate them. There are many marriages one would designate as “interracial,” but even if one could access some understanding of how
“interracial marriage” would translate in this spacetime, marriage is rarely an ideal that denotes the cessation of difficulties over differences. As more than one wag has pointed out, the dominance of heterosexual marriage certainly does not reflect an egalitarian harmony of relations
between the sexes. The marriages in question are thus racialized outside of social racializations, meaning that to be Black in these colonies does not automatically designate a subaltern status below that of whites. In cases where Black convicts were executed or subjected to physical
punishment (whipping was the most common), we might see racially motivated causes, but in the brutal tide of regular executions and torturous punishment, it is difficult to extrapolate consistently a narrative in which this Blackness can be separated from the brutal imperial and
capitalist caste system that ruled all British subjects, including the white working poor.
Blacks intermixing with the white working poor populations in England and Australia intersect with similar interactions during the earlier spacetime of indentured servitude in the United States and the later one of late nineteenth-century Irish immigration to northeastern urban centers of
the United States. If we step back from Pybus’s initial frame, which connects the history of the Black Atlantic in Australia horizontally, and instead honor the horizontality of her interpellations of Black individuals and their intersections (through marriage, penal life, executions,
manumission, etc.), one can read this history as a series of moments that intersect not only with Black Atlantic histories in the Americas but also with histories in Europe, Africa, and perhaps India. It should be noted that, while we are discovering intersections of collectives, we do so
wholly within idealist frameworks that can be further interpellated only through individuals who make up those collectives; beneficially, however, the collective identities that intersect with these individuals produce yet more collectives in more spacetimes—more dimensions of Blackness
across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans.
While the era of the Middle Passage produces many and varied kinds of Blackness through the intersection of linear and Epiphenomenal time, the conflated eras of World War II and the postwar era offer yet more. I understand World War II and the postwar period as a conflation of eras
because it is impossible to pinpoint where one ends and the other begins; however, when we are operating with Epiphenomenal time, this ambiguity is productive rather than restrictive. Indeed, breadth, depth, ambiguity, ambivalence, and dominance are the strengths contributed by
these overlapping eras: breadth because World War II involved almost the majority of Black Africans and Black Diasporans across the globe, whereas slavery—which forms the cornerstone of the Middle Passage epistemology—did not; depth because the various narratives, such as that of
Black African men attempting to resist forcible conscription by French and British colonial forces, or that of African American men and women who fought for the right to be drafted, require explanation and further research; ambiguity because we find Blackness where we do not expect it
and struggle to interpret it, such as Black German individuals who served in Hitler’s army and Black Brazilian troops tasked with defending Italy; ambivalence because it is a war and its equally destructive aftermath ironically connects the African Diaspora many times over with ease and
diversity; and finally, dominance because World War II and the postwar era constructed an interpellative frame that has been used by so many across the globe, a frame that highlights the contemporary and global importance of Blackness far more frequently than themes of the Middle
Passage ever do. While the rise of the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), the Arab Spring, and other sociopolitical and economic events seem to signal the framing of a new era, journalists, pundits, and politicians alike still interpret many of these events as effects of the World
War II/postwar era.
Even the most rigid histories cannot sustain a completely linear Second World War narrative. For example, the invasion of Poland in 1939 must be explained by the rise of Nazism, which perhaps requires a notation about the Versailles Treaty. Likewise, the bombing of Pearl Harbor is
necessary to explain the entrance of the United States into the war as a direct combatant. The Second World War, therefore, has at least two beginnings and, even by conservative estimates, at least two endings: the surrender of the Nazis in Berlin and the signed surrender by the
Japanese on the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.
This gives us a war with at least two timelines to which there correspond two themes, two notions of progress, and many ways in which occupied nations must be understood: as collaborators, as wholly oppressed, as underground resisters, and so on. This nonlinear set of peoples, places,
and events forces anyone seeking interpellations through World War II to accept all the exceptions to its linear progress narrative—that is, it forces researchers to incorporate great nuance into their interpellations (in asking when the Second World War ended, for example, we have to
amend the question to reflect all the surrenders and dates that dominant discourses on World War II cite in response because, whether there were multiple wars or one great war may be a matter of definition, but there is no question that there were multiple narratives that intersected).
This means that qualitative collapse will occur less frequently in interpellations made through a wholly linear progress narrative on the war (because dominant discourses do not offer, really, any wholly linear narratives of it), but when it does, the effect is almost always “deafening,” as if
it were drowning out alternative interpellations.14
Blackness can manifest through this multidimensionality, in most cases quite easily. In contrast to the difficulty involved in explaining how Blacks from the Atlantic found themselves in Australia, the global reach of the Second World War makes it easy to explain how Blackness has spread
almost everywhere. When using both Epiphenomenal and linear spacetimes to interpellate Blackness in these eras, no long, creativ e narratives are needed to explain the presence of West Africans under British rule, East Africans under Italian Fascist rule, or the fight for equality both at
home and abroad that was the self-appointed task of many an African American man or woman in uniform; moreover, using both spacetimes enables Black European studies to explain without much difficulty how Blacks of African descent came to fight under Hitler. We can arrive at
these explanations by starting with the individual, rather than the collective, as a point of interpellation. We can then link such an individual to his, her, or their variously realized collective identities (understanding that we should never claim that an individual is fully realized, as we can
work within distinct spacetimes only as they are imagined in the now, not in both the present and the past).
Unfortunately, many of these dimensions as interpellated through the postwar epistemology are easily achieved through vertical structures: we need only locate (in ascending order) a military battalion, a regiment, or a division that would contain Black soldiers and its encampments and
headquarters. Vertical readings alone can often interpellate an agential and diverse Blackness: Black soldiers and field nurses with agency, Black civilians with choices, and a whole roster of intersections with a broad variety of peers (soldiers and civilians) across vast geographies. At first
glance, performing vertical interpellations through linear narratives appears to bear the same fruit as a horizontal reading: Blackness with agency and diversity.
This might explain why so many Black collective progress narratives of World War II use this multidimensionality to produce hierarchical, or vertical, interpellations for the collective. The “Windrush narrative” of Black Britain, for example, readily narrates the contributions of Black British
Caribbeans in the Second World War, yet uses a progress narrative to interpellate this Blackness. Like the histories of African American men who fought for the United States during World War I, the “Windrush” narrative underscores the painful hypocrisy of serving the British Crown only
to be treated as an undesirable emigrant in the postwar era.15 Drawing on oral histories of service in the war and archival records from the British War Office, Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain (1999) interpellates Black Britishness as agential and diverse, a proud
component of the history of World War II but of official British histories of the war more particularly.16
To be sure, even when operating within World War II/postwar frameworks, we encounter obstacles. Hierarchies of power are not (unfortunately) wholly erased, and they can be complicated by the complexities of global alliances and rivalries (no matter h ow easily they are manifested in
the postwar epistemology). The postwar epistemology’s emphasis on the “now,” in the absence of a geographical center (a component of even the most traditional narratives of the Second World War/postwar era),17 allows, say, Samoan warriors aiding the Allies to be interpellated
through collective identities that certainly include hierarchal structures (e.g., the military command structure) but also relationships whereby power must constantly be negotiated (e.g., in relationships between soldiers or between soldiers and civilians). The “now” complicates power,
meaning that while an Epiphenomenal interpellation enables agency, it will also reflect those vertical hierarchies that inevitably accompany so many moments of interpellation in every individual life across the globe.18
***BEGIN ENDNOTE***
One could read
Blackness through U.S. versions of Afropessimism but this is a distinction
lacking meaningful difference While it eschews the Middle Passage Epistemology’s progress narrative
Blacks are destined to always be oppressed it needs this linear progress narrative to argue against
progress While claiming to be static, U.S. versions of Afropessimism nonetheless doggedly track each
moment of the Middle Passage Epistemology to state yet again that no progress has been made
***END ENDNOTE***
18.
Smith’s first novel as interpellating
,
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(
),
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.
***1AR***
middle east key
The alt fails without proximate demands – US occupation of the Middle East produces repressive
policing at home and connecting those struggles through the permutation is key to long term change
Taylor 16 (assistant professor in the department of African American Studies at Princeton University)
(Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, Haymarket Books, Kindle
Edition)
In the contest to demonstrate how oppressions differ from one group to the next, we miss how we are
connected through oppression—and how those connections should form the basis of solidarity, not a celebration of our lives on the
margins. The American government demonizes its enemies to justify mistreating them, whether it is endless war, internment, and torture or
mass incarceration and police abuse. There
is a racist feedback loop, in which domestic and foreign policies feed
and reinforce each other. This is why US foreign policy in the Middle East has reverberated at home. The
cynical use of Islamophobia to whip up support for continued American interventions in Arab and
Muslim countries inevitably has consequences for Muslim Americans. And the ever- expanding security state,
justified by the “War on Terror,” becomes the pretext for greater police repression at home—which, of course,
disproportionately affects African Americans and Latino/as in border regions.
In the late 1990s, a movement began to stop racial profiling against Black drivers in police stops. Major class-action
lawsuits in Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Florida highlighted the extent to which African Americans were subjected to unwarranted
suspicion and harassment on the nation’s interstates. New Jersey became a center of anti- profiling activism when, in the spring of 1998 during
a routine police stop, an officer fired into a van filled with young African American men. Al Sharpton led a protest of several hundred people,
including a five-hundred-car motorcade, onto Interstate 95. That same year, the ACLU filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of several Black
motorists who complained of racially motivated traffic stops on Interstate 95. The widespread suspicion of Blacks and Latino/as contributed to
an atmosphere of intimidation and an implicit threat of violence. (This certainly seemed to be the case with the 1999 murder of Amadou Diallo,
which touched off a wave of protests and civil disobedience demanding the prosecution of the cops involved.) Then, in March 1999, Republican
New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman fired the state police superintendent when he said profiling was justified because “mostly
minorities” trafficked in marijuana and cocaine}?
The movement’s momentum however, was dramatically cut short in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of
9/11. The US government rushed to turn tragedy into a call for national unity in preparation for a new war with Afghanistan in 2001 and later
in Iraq. Moreover, federal agents justified racial profiling to hunt down Muslims and Arabs in the aftermath. No
longer was this tactic subject to federal investigation and lawsuits. It became a legitimate and widely
supported tool in the War on Terror. For example, in 1999, 59 percent of Americans said they believed that the police engaged in racial
profiling; of those, 81 percent thought the practice was wrong.” Even George W. Bush, several months before 9/11, addressed a joint
congressional session on the practice to declare, “Racial profiling is wrong and we will end it in America.”9 However, by September 30, 2001,
Black support for racial profiling of Arabs had jumped to 60 percent, compared to 45 percent among the general population.” Not
only was
the developing struggle against racism buried under a wave of jingoism and Islamophobic racism, but
the focal point of the antiracist struggle, racial profiling, was now being championed as a necessary tool
to protect the United States.