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1NC Shell ...................................................................................................................................... 7
Security K 1NC – Generic ........................................................................................................ 9
1NC Security K ............................................................................................................................................... 10
Additional Potential 1NC Evidence ....................................................................................................... 12
Useful Overview Evidence .................................................................................................. 38
2NC/1NR—Epistemology ......................................................................................................................... 39
2NC---Reject Aff Evidence ......................................................................................................................... 43
2NC---Value to Life ....................................................................................................................................... 44
Aff Ev. Suspect ................................................................................................................................................ 45
Links ........................................................................................................................................... 54
Link --Accidents ............................................................................................................................................. 55
Link -- Arctic Link ......................................................................................................................................... 56
Link -- Catastrophe ....................................................................................................................................... 58
***Links – China*** ...................................................................................................................................... 60
China .................................................................................................................................................................. 61
Link---Chinese Cyberattacks/IP.............................................................................................................. 63
Link---Chinese Maritime Disputes ......................................................................................................... 65
Link---Chinese Nationalism ...................................................................................................................... 67
Link---Chinese Rise ...................................................................................................................................... 69
Link---Chinese Threats ............................................................................................................................... 73
Link - China...................................................................................................................................................... 74
Link -- China - Method Debate ................................................................................................................ 87
[ ] Containment causes war ................................................................................................................... 88
Link -- China - Threats False..................................................................................................................... 91
Link -- China - AT: Perm ............................................................................................................................. 93
*Link -- Other .................................................................................................................................................. 94
Link -- China - AT: Realism........................................................................................................................ 95
Link – General Security............................................................................................................................... 96
Link – Security Rhetoric ............................................................................................................................. 97
Link -- Democracy...................................................................................................................................... 100
Mueller, pol sci and IR prof, 9 .......................................................................................................... 101
Link---Deterrence ...................................................................................................................................... 111
Link---Disease.............................................................................................................................................. 113
MacPhail 2009 .................................................................................................................................... 117
Link -- Competitiveness........................................................................................................................... 125
Dr. ......................................................................................................................................................... 125
Link---Disembodied IR ............................................................................................................................ 130
Link---Economy .......................................................................................................................................... 132
Link -- Economy.......................................................................................................................................... 136
Link -- Economy – Poverty ..................................................................................................................... 139
Smith 2007 .......................................................................................................................................... 139
Link -- Economy – Economic Analysis Fails .................................................................................... 142
Tooze 5 ................................................................................................................................................. 142
Tooze 5 ................................................................................................................................................. 143
Link -- Economy – AT Econ =/= Realism .......................................................................................... 144
Tooze 5 ................................................................................................................................................. 144
Link – Energy Security ............................................................................................................................. 145
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Link -- Energy Security ............................................................................................................................ 147
Link – Environment .................................................................................................................................. 148
Buell 3 .............................................................................................................................................................. 148
Link – Environment -- AT: Environmental Security Good ........................................................ 155
Link -- Failed States................................................................................................................................... 159
Link—Food Security ................................................................................................................................. 165
Link – Global Warming ............................................................................................................................ 167
Link – Global Governance ....................................................................................................................... 176
Link – Hegemony ....................................................................................................................................... 179
Link -- Hegemony [Rule] ......................................................................................................................... 211
Link -- Hegemony [Rule] ......................................................................................................................... 213
Link -- Hegemony [Burke] ...................................................................................................................... 215
Link -- Hegemony [Burke] ...................................................................................................................... 216
Link—Human Rights ................................................................................................................................ 218
Link --- Ikenberry Liberal Hegemony ................................................................................................ 221
Link -- Indo-Pak War ................................................................................................................................ 223
Das, 2010 ............................................................................................................................................. 223
Link --I-Law .................................................................................................................................................. 225
Link -- Israel/Iran Strikes ...................................................................................................................... 227
Link -- Iran .................................................................................................................................................... 229
Link -- Iran Prolif........................................................................................................................................ 232
Woods ............................................................................................................................................................. 246
Link — Islamic/Middle East Threat .................................................................................................. 250
Link -- Japan Relations ............................................................................................................................. 259
Link -- Japan Alliance................................................................................................................................ 260
Link – North Korea .................................................................................................................................... 261
Link -- Korea War....................................................................................................................................... 268
Bleiker Professor of International Relations ................................................................................. 268
Kang, 3.................................................................................................................................................. 270
Link -- Korea War – Alt Solves/AT Perm.......................................................................................... 274
Link -- Korean Prolif ................................................................................................................................. 275
Link -- Latin America ................................................................................................................................ 277
Link -- Middle East – Representations First.................................................................................... 278
Link -- Middle East – Impact Calc ........................................................................................................ 279
Bilgin 2005 ........................................................................................................................................... 279
Link -- Middle East – FW card ............................................................................................................... 280
Karawan, 03 ........................................................................................................................................ 280
Link -- Middle East – AT Said Indicts ................................................................................................. 282
Link -- Middle East – Alternative ......................................................................................................... 283
Link -- Middle East – Iraq ....................................................................................................................... 284
Young 08 .............................................................................................................................................. 284
Link —Multilateralism............................................................................................................................. 286
Link---Objective IR .................................................................................................................................... 287
Link -- OCS..................................................................................................................................................... 289
Link---Ontological Security .................................................................................................................... 292
Link---Order ................................................................................................................................................. 294
Link---Orientalism ..................................................................................................................................... 295
Link---Proliferation ................................................................................................................................... 296
Link -- Prolif ................................................................................................................................................. 298
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Der Derian 03 ...................................................................................................................................... 298
Link -- Prolif – AT Perm ........................................................................................................................... 307
Link -- Prolif – ‘Spread’ Link .................................................................................................................. 310
Link -- Prolif – NPT Link .......................................................................................................................... 312
Link -- Prolif – AT Can’t Deter Third World .................................................................................... 313
Link -- Prolif – AT Crazy Third World................................................................................................ 315
Link---Psychoanalysis .............................................................................................................................. 316
Link—Resource Wars .............................................................................................................................. 318
Link- Realism ............................................................................................................................................... 322
Link -- Schmitt ............................................................................................................................................ 323
Link – Soft Power ....................................................................................................................................... 327
Link -- Survival ............................................................................................................................................ 337
Link---Terrorism ........................................................................................................................................ 340
Link -- Terrorism........................................................................................................................................ 346
Mitchell, 05 ......................................................................................................................................... 349
Link -- Terrorism – Alt’ Solves .............................................................................................................. 363
Link --Terrorism – AT Perm/Flawed Epistemology.................................................................... 364
Jarvis, 9................................................................................................................................................. 364
Link -- Terrorism – Biological Terrorism Link .............................................................................. 365
Link -- Terrorism – Nuclear Terrorism Link .................................................................................. 366
Jackson 4 .............................................................................................................................................. 366
Link -- Terrorism – Cyberterrorism Link ......................................................................................... 368
Link -- Terrorism – AT Elshtain ........................................................................................................... 369
Link -- Water Wars .................................................................................................................................... 371
Trottier 2004 ....................................................................................................................................... 371
Trottier 2004 ....................................................................................................................................... 371
Responses to Common 2AC Arguments ....................................................................... 381
A2: Discourse Doesn’t Shape Reality ................................................................................................. 382
A2: Negative State Action/We’re Nice............................................................................................... 385
A2: SQ Stable---Pinker ............................................................................................................................. 388
A2: SQ Stable---Pinker---Stats............................................................................................................... 390
A2: Threats Real ......................................................................................................................................... 393
A2: Utilitarianism....................................................................................................................................... 394
A2: Our Harms Are Objective ................................................................................................................ 395
A2: Realism – Reflexive ........................................................................................................................... 396
A2: Realism – Evolutionary.................................................................................................................... 397
Busser 6................................................................................................................................................ 397
Busser 6................................................................................................................................................ 397
Bell and MacDonald, 01 .................................................................................................................... 398
A2: Realism – General .............................................................................................................................. 400
A2: Realism Inevitable ............................................................................................................................. 410
A2: Realism Inevitable [Empiricism] ................................................................................................. 417
A2: Realism Inevitable [K Solves Realism] ...................................................................................... 418
A2: Realism Good ....................................................................................................................................... 422
A2: Realism Inevitable ............................................................................................................................. 423
A2: Murray/Guzini .................................................................................................................................... 424
A2: Guzinni ................................................................................................................................................... 429
AT: Perm ........................................................................................................................................................ 433
2NC Ethics DA.............................................................................................................................................. 436
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2NC Alt............................................................................................................................................................ 438
A2: O’Tuathail .............................................................................................................................................. 441
A2: Jarvis........................................................................................................................................................ 444
Shapiro 1 .............................................................................................................................................. 444
A2: Kurasawa............................................................................................................................................... 446
A2: Gunning .................................................................................................................................................. 448
Gunning 2007 ...................................................................................................................................... 448
A2: Jones ........................................................................................................................................................ 449
Burke 7 ................................................................................................................................................. 449
A2: Lockman (Middle East Studies Reflexive) ............................................................................... 450
A2: Heydemann – Role of the Ballot................................................................................................... 451
A2: Zarnett (Reverse Essentialism).................................................................................................... 452
A2: Mueller (Democracy Discourse Doesn’t Cause War) .......................................................... 453
A2: Rychlak (Should Represent Islamic Terrorism).................................................................... 454
A2: Valbjorn (Shouldn’t Focus on Representations) ................................................................... 456
A2: Kaufman (Discourse Doesn’t Cause Violence) ....................................................................... 457
A2: Pinker (Violence Declining Because of the West) ................................................................ 458
A2: Pinker...................................................................................................................................................... 460
A2: Schmitt/Emnity .................................................................................................................................. 462
A2: Human Nature is Self-Interested/Violence Inevitable ....................................................... 467
A2: Security Inevitable............................................................................................................................. 479
A2: War Inevitable ..................................................................................................................................... 481
A2: Threats Real ......................................................................................................................................... 483
A2: Action Key ............................................................................................................................................. 490
A2: Case Outweighs ................................................................................................................................... 492
A2: We Have a Specific Impact ............................................................................................................. 496
A2: Scenario Planning Good .................................................................................................................. 498
A2: Transitions............................................................................................................................................ 499
A2: Benign Hegemon ................................................................................................................................ 501
A2: Good forms of security..................................................................................................................... 503
A2: We just respond to existing threats ........................................................................................... 507
A2: Security K2 Freedom ........................................................................................................................ 508
A2 – Critical Security Bad ....................................................................................................................... 509
A2: Liberal Democracy Solves War .................................................................................................... 512
A2: Threat Con Solves War .................................................................................................................... 513
A2: We Solve ................................................................................................................................................ 516
A2: Nuke War Outweighs ....................................................................................................................... 518
A2: Predictions Good ................................................................................................................................ 521
A2: ‘Hegemony Good’ Impact Turns .................................................................................................. 523
2NC Hegemony – No !............................................................................................................................... 524
2NC Hegemony – AT War Decreasing (Pinker) ............................................................................. 530
2NC Hegemony – AT Statistics ............................................................................................................. 531
2NC Hegemony – AT Deterrence ......................................................................................................... 532
2NC Hegemony – AT Kagan ................................................................................................................... 533
2NC Hegemony – AT Ferguson............................................................................................................. 534
2NC Hegemony – AT Thayer (Card) ................................................................................................... 535
2NC Hegemony – AT Thayer (Analytic)............................................................................................ 536
2NC Hegemony – Credibility ................................................................................................................. 537
2NC Hegemony- Power Vacuum.......................................................................................................... 539
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Impacts .................................................................................................................................... 540
General ........................................................................................................................................................... 541
Turns Case---War ....................................................................................................................................... 545
2NC---Environment................................................................................................................................... 546
2NC---Extinction......................................................................................................................................... 548
2NC---Interventionism ............................................................................................................................ 552
Threat Construction.................................................................................................................................. 553
Turns Case .................................................................................................................................................... 554
Turns Environment ................................................................................................................................... 561
Endless Violence......................................................................................................................................... 562
SFFP (Turns Case) ..................................................................................................................................... 567
Genocide ........................................................................................................................................................ 570
Bare Life ......................................................................................................................................................... 575
Biopower Bad .............................................................................................................................................. 577
Value to Life.................................................................................................................................................. 578
Environmental Destruction ................................................................................................................... 585
ALTERNATIVE ....................................................................................................................... 587
2NC---Floating PIK..................................................................................................................................... 588
A2: Fails.......................................................................................................................................................... 589
Discourse Impact ....................................................................................................................................... 591
Reps First ...................................................................................................................................................... 592
Ethical Obligation to Vote Neg .............................................................................................................. 595
Rejection ........................................................................................................................................................ 598
Embrace Insecurity ................................................................................................................................... 604
A2: Not Real World.................................................................................................................................... 614
A2: Realism Good ....................................................................................................................................... 615
A2: Realism Inevitable ............................................................................................................................. 616
New Alt---Decolonial Alliances............................................................................................................. 617
FRAMEWORK......................................................................................................................... 619
2NC---Framework...................................................................................................................................... 620
Framework---A2: Aff Choice.................................................................................................................. 625
Framework---A2: Education (Plan Focus)....................................................................................... 626
Framework---A2: Education---Policy ................................................................................................ 631
Framework---A2: Education---Topic ................................................................................................. 632
Framework---A2: Fairness/Arbitrary ............................................................................................... 633
Framework---A2: Politics Good ........................................................................................................... 635
Thirdly, it can be claimed that the security mindset channels the obligation to address
environmental issues in an unwelcome direction. Due to terms laid out by the social
contract “security is essentially something done by states…there is no obligation or
moral duty on citizens to provide security…In this sense security is essentially
empty…it is not a sign of positive political initiative” (Dalby, 1992a: 97-8). Therefore,
casting an issue in security terms puts the onus of action onto governments, creating a
docile citizenry who await instructions from their leaders as to the next step rather
than taking it on their own backs to do something about pressing concerns. This is
unwelcome because governments have limited incentives to act on environmental
issues, as their collectively poor track record to date reveals. Paul Brown notes that “at
present in all the large democracies the short-term politics of winning the next election
and the need to increase the annual profits of industry rule over the long term interests
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of the human race” (1996: 10; see also Booth 1991: 348). There is no clearer evidence
for this than the grounds on which George W. Bush explained his decision to opt out of
the Kyoto Protocol: “I told the world I thought that Kyoto was a lousy deal for
America…It meant that we had to cut emissions below 1990 levels, which would have
meant I would have presided over massive layoffs and economic destruction” (BBC:
2006). The short-term focus of government elites and the long-term nature of the
environmental threat means that any policy which puts the burden of responsibility on
the shoulders of governments should be viewed with scepticism as this may have the
effect of breeding inaction on environmental issues. Moreover, governmental
legislation may not be the most appropriate route to solving the problem at hand. If
environmental vulnerabilities are to be effectively addressed “[t]he routine behaviour
of practically everyone must be altered” (Deudney, 1990: 465). In the case of the
environmental sector it is not large scale and intentional assaults but the cumulative
effect of small and seemingly innocent acts such as driving a car or taking a flight that
do the damage. Exactly how a legislative response could serve to alter “non-criminal
apolitical acts by individuals” (Prins, 1993: 176- 177) which lie beyond established
categories of the political is unclear. Andrew Dobson has covered this ground in
claiming that the solution to environmental hazards lies not in piecemeal legislation but
in the fostering of a culture of ‘ecological citizenship’. His call is made on the grounds
that legislating on the environment, forcing people to adapt, does not reach the
necessary depth to produce long-lasting change, but merely plugs the problem
temporarily. He cites Italian ‘car-free city’ days as evidence of this, noting that whilst
selected cities may be free of automobiles on a single predetermined day, numbers
return to previous levels immediately thereafter (2003: 3). This indicates that the
deeper message underlying the policy is not being successfully conveyed. Enduring
environmental solutions are likely to emerge only when citizens choose to change their
ways because they understand that there exists a pressing need to do so. Such a
realisation is unlikely to be prompted b A2: Policymaking Good.......................................... 636
A2: Intellectualism Bad ........................................................................................................................... 643
A2: Cede the Political................................................................................................................................ 646
Permutation Debate ........................................................................................................... 649
A2: Perm Do Alt .......................................................................................................................................... 650
A2: Perm Do Alt---Judge Choice ........................................................................................................... 651
A2: Perm Do Both ...................................................................................................................................... 653
A2: Perm Rethink Security ..................................................................................................................... 655
A2: Perm ........................................................................................................................................................ 656
A2- Perm: Must Disengage First .......................................................................................................... 665
A2: Perm- Realism Coopts ...................................................................................................................... 667
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1NC Shell
7
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8
Security K
Security K 1NC – Generic
9
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1NC Security K
They perpetuate securitization by positing a framework oriented upon
existential threats. The politics of their paradigm constitutes violence.
[Seriously this card seems to be perfectly descriptive of debate – extinction, gotta act now to save everyone, lets fiat something totally unreasonable]
Williams 15 (Michael C Williams, Professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the
University of Ottawa, author. “Securitization as political theory: The politics of the extraordinary”, International Relations,
March 2015, Vol. 29(1) 114-120.) AT SUMMER 15
the politics of the extraordinary? From one side, it is familiar within securitization¶ theory as the declaration of
existential threat and (if successful) the generation of the capacity¶ to break free of the rules of ‘normal’
What is
politics. In the debates over securitization theory,¶ this has often become identified (usually negatively) with ‘Schmittian’ exeptionalism,¶ decisionism, and the declaration of
a divide between friend and enemy. Yet, as the controversies¶ over whether securitization can also be positive show, a purely negative view of¶ securitization cannot capture the
calling
into action what Sieyès famously called the ‘constituent power’ of a¶ political order.6 Placing the question of the constituent power at
the center of concern shifts¶ the gravity of securitization theory. While exceptional politics within a friend/enemy logic¶
produces or reproduces an exclusionary order, extraordinary politics stresses also the possibility¶ of securitization as a process of openness
range of issues involved.5 Focusing instead on the possibility¶ of positive securitization brings into view a second type of extraordinary politics, that¶ which see it as
and self-determination with democratic¶ potential. In Kalyvas’ evocative formulation, within a democratic vision of extraordinary¶ politics ‘there is an intensification of popular
mobilization, an extensive consensus’ which¶ ‘describes the extraordinary reactivation of the constituent power of the people and the¶ self-assertion of a democratic sovereign’.7
its potential for
The positive potential of securitization theory is¶ thus the corollary of
closure, allowing for not only a normative reaction of¶ expansion of concern in the
name of more ‘positive’ forms of security but also a more¶ foundational – if always fraught – reevaluation of the political order itself in ways that can¶ be inclusive and
violent exclusion
reformative as well as
ly
ary.¶ This potential of securitization theory has been noted on a number of occasions8 in¶ connection with ‘acts of
founding’, such as revolutionary moments, which are foundational¶ in the sense of ‘higher’ law-making: they express the ‘constituent power’, the will¶ of the people in the
Mobilized in the construction of a new political¶ order, this constituent power becomes latent in ‘normal’
retreats – and must¶ necessarily do so – in order for stability to be secured, and normality to prevail over the¶
vicissitudes of permanent revolution. Ordinary politics thus becomes dominated by the¶ more narrow and
mundane competition of diverse interests and elite political management.¶ As Kalyvas nicely puts it (linking the arguments of Bruce Ackerman10 with¶
broadest sense.9
politics: it
Schmitt), ordinary politics is:¶ characterized by widespread pluralism and political fragmentation, devoid of any collective¶ project that could unify the popular sovereign around
some concrete fundamental issues. This¶ fragmentation explains and justifies the predominance of relations of bargaining, negotiation,¶ and compromise among organized
interests, driven by their narrow, particular interests.11¶ Yet, in this vision, the constituent power remains capable of mobilization. At such junctures,¶ ‘the people’ – the
constituent power of the political order – can emerge from¶ repose. The politics of the extraordinary, and a democratic politics of the extraordinary¶ in particular, are thus marked
by times when the:¶ formal procedural rules that regulate normal institutionalized politics are supplemented by or¶ subordinated to informal, extraconstitutional forms of
participation that strive to narrow the¶ distance between rulers and ruled, active and passive citizens, representatives and represented.¶ Extraordinary politics aims either at core
constitutional matters or at central social imaginary¶ significations, cultural meanings, and economic issues, with the goal of transforming the basic¶ structures of society and
resignifying social reality. To put it in more general terms, the¶ democratic politics of the extraordinary refers to those infrequent and unusual moments when¶ the citizenry,
overflowing the formal borders of institutionalized
The alternative is to interrogate the ontological presumptions at the heart of
security – their approach is a violent ontology of security that promotes
otherization and serial policy failure – our questions should come first –
reform fails – it only considers how to deliver violent American values not
whether to in the first place
Turner ’16 – Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh
Oliver Turner, “China, India and the US Rebalance to the Asia Pacific: The Geopolitics of Rising
Identities,” Geopolitics 21, no. 4 (2016): 922-944. Taylor and Francis.
Spacialising the world in this way encapsulates the continuing “struggle between centralizing states and authoritative centers, on the
one hand, and rebellious margins and dissident cultures, on the other” 70. When China is specifically singled out as a
beneficiary of “the open and rules-based system that the United States helped to build and works
to sustain”, 71 the responsibility falls on Beijing alone to behave or risk disciplinary measures for
appearing rebellious or, in modern parlance, ‘revisionist’. As such, the US is concerned that China abides
by international rules, but those rules are imaginary constructs made significant or not, and judged to
have been complied with or not, according to the mechanics of presupposition and subject positioning.
Rather than from statutes of law, in large part they emerge from ontological differentiation.
US engagement in the Asia Pacific, and by extension its internationalism, also continues to represent less
a political choice than a mode of being. In a majority of statements it is argued that American values
and/or principles, which Clinton asserts are the United States’ ‘most potent asset’ in the Asia Pacific, even above the military,72
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should be exported for the greater good. Such an understanding remains a common sense statement of fact; the
question is never whether the world benefits from ‘universal’ American values, only how best
they are delivered. For political practice to be legitimised and for additional narratives to be rendered unthinkable,
discourses dominate by nullifying opposition.73 Thus when Ash Carter explains that “we must all
decide if we are going to. . . cement our influence and leadership in the fastest-growing region in the world;
or if, instead, we’re going to take ourselves out of the game”, 74 he shuts down debate over
American internationalism by removing all credibility from the only apparent alternative.
Together with representations of the Asia Pacific as an opportunity for the United States in twelve of the fifteen statements, little
space is left for dissent.
Thus in several respects the rebalance represents modern day “proof of ‘America’”, by enhancing its presence in a region which has
potential and is maturing (see Table 2) but which requires indispensable US support. Indeed, with
a familiarly
unquestioned duty to internationalism persists an enduring belief in the moral right to
American power and hegemony. Three quarters of statements refer to the beneficial or
benevolent role of the US military in the Asia Pacific. As tellingly, as constitutive of ideas about US power and
purpose China’s military is envisioned as destabilising in part for being morally illegitimate. This
lack of legitimacy is once again a construct of discursive design.
For example, Clinton observes that “the United States and the international community have watched China’s efforts to modernize and
expand its military, and we have sought clarity as to its intentions”. 75 In doing so she undermines China’s already uncertain
relationship with the international community, but with no defined borders, membership, or qualifications for entry, that community is
an imaginative geography par excellence. The American frontier once represented “the outer edge of the
wave – the meeting point between savagery and civilization”. 76 Now the talk is rarely about “civilization”
versus “barbarism” or “savagery”, but that global binary of inside/outside is embodied in such fantasised
institutions as the international community of which the US is its self-appointed figurehead.
Civilisation still requires a savagery against which to distinguish itself77 and the image of a
China which lacks the full standards of civilisation continues to pervade American politics.78
Rising India, by virtue of its ontologically derived status as a “leader” of the American-led community,79 affirms the right of the US
to its preeminent military position.
This is how the present – the rebalance in its current form – becomes logically possible to the point where anything beyond procedural
broadly cooperative relations, China exists as a
strategic Other of the United States, “a discursive construct from which it cannot escape”. 80
Even at a time of national budget cuts, the alternative of withdrawing or downsizing the United
States’ 75,000-plus troops in myriad regional bases and other facilities81 is conceived as no
alternative at all. As Table 2 shows, then, in the broadest sense the ‘proof’ of America is found in the underlying
presupposition that “different” China, constructed as a real or potential revisionist, rule-breaker,
security threat and so on is a challenge which can only be met by an equally imagined United
States as a leader and benevolent promotor of security and prosperity.
and strategic details escapes meaningful debate. Despite
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Additional Potential 1NC Evidence
The impact is extinction—securitization turns inwards on itself in a selfimmolating cleansing
Dillon, 15—Professor of Politics at the University of Lancaster (Michael, Biopolitics of Security: A
political analytic of finitude pg 71, dml)
The problematic of modern politics is, therefore, subtly misconceived when freedom and security are construed exclusively as
contending values locked in a zero-sum game in which the one is advanced or lost at the expense of the other. Security is not opposed
to freedom when freedom is understood as the contingent developmental freedom of biological existence. In its biological
contingency, security does not possibilise freedom and freedom is not designed to constrain security. Here, instead, security
becomes a set of mechanisms self-governing the very contingent properties of the freedom which
biological entities are said to display; aspiring to autopoietic and complex adaptive systemic forms of freedom generically
implicated in varying accounts of becoming, and of the continuous individuation of form. In the process, freedom
becomes the principal mechanism by which biopolitical security is secured. Free to make life live
freely, biopolitics of security will and do enforce that project violently. Through the regulation
and enactment of the very aleatory character of species existence, modern freedom is the mechanism by which
security is forcefully biopoliticised in the name of promoting the life and potentiality of the
species. It does so, according to Foucault, to the point of its self-immolation. In Volume 1 of The History of
Sexuality, he observes how a certain threshold of modernity is reached when it comes to wager the life of
the species on its own (bio-)political strategies. Only when the interrogation of security
acknowledges that it must become an interrogation of the intimate operational correlation of security and
freedom in the biopolitics of security will it begin to engage the aporia of security which threatens
the very project of political modernity itself; that in seeking to secure the promotion of human being as
species being, modern security practices threaten its very existence. Making life live is a lethal
business. Paradoxically, freedom from it may be required if species life is in fact to outlive its grip.
Vote neg to critically interrogate the 1ac assemblage
Leese, 15—Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, International Centre for Ethics in the Sciences and
Humanities (IZEW), Research Associate (Matthias, “On Security, Once More: Assorted Inquiries in
Aviation”, Universität Tübingen: Dissertation, dml)
Thus, how
are we to come to terms with an agenda of security as assemblage empirically, if its empirics are
a clear-cut “problem orientation, pursuing the
contours of an issue up and down these interacting scales, as the issue requires.” If security politics
evolve around specific security problems, in whichever of the manifold ways that we have sketched out so far, then
the very evolution of complex, and at times contradictory, assemblages alongside the constitution of
security politics provides a valuable starting point. As Adey and Anderson (2012: 106) argue, “in seeking to
understand how life is governed in and through contingency, we should take care to remember the
contingencies of the apparatus of security – that is, how apparatuses form, endure and change as the
elements that compose them are (re)deployed.” Already implied in such a perspective is the notion
that each assemblage could be formed differently – and that what we encounter is merely a
momentary snap-shot of stabilization that might rather sooner than later fall apart again through the
multiple contestations that security is subjected to. As Schouten (2014b: 88) claims, such a perspective could
defined by radical openness? Connolly (2013: 401) suggests
considerably contribute to a general agenda of thinking about security by “by radicalizing the insight in security studies that security is
‘essentially contested’ to study the on-going attempts to stabilize security.” As he adds: “if security practitioners ‘out there’ struggle
with the very ontology of (in)security, how could ‘we’ as analysts a priori decide that security is a matter of discourse, practice or
materiality?” (Schouten, 2014b: 88)
The utility of such an approach becomes rather obvious when we call to mind the preceding narrative of security as economy and the
ensuing “close assemblage with international partners and private companies that underpin the EU’s force in the domain of security”
(de Goede, 2011: 12). Moreover, it can also contribute to the multiple layers of security as surveillance and technology, as
government, and as futurity and securitization. Security as assemblage, however, is not some kind of ‘master
12
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narrative’. Neither does it occupy a privileged position among the narratives of security provided here. Rather, thinking about
security as assemblage can arguably contribute to a better understanding of how all of those
narratives come into being empirically – not necessarily through an underlying political agenda,
but through complexity, fragility, and ambiguity. With regard to security, then, as Schouten (2014a: 28) explains,
“this process of translation concerns ontological politics, for establishing security as technical rather than social, or private rather than
public, subsequently restricts and redefines accountability; distribution of scarce output; and/or the scope of possible action available
to different affected actors [emph. in orig.].”
After all, as Rose (1999: 22) reminds us, “the space of government is always shaped and intersected by other
discourses, notably the veridical discourses of science and changing moral rhetorics and ethical vocabularies, which have
their own histories, apparatuses and problem spaces, and whose relation to problematics of
government is not expression or causation but translation.” It is this very translation that must be
researched empirically if any analysis seeks to unpack specific security assemblages. The
processes of translation mark the trajectories along which actor relations form and re-form, and,
most importantly, become visible: “when security is in the making – that is, still a controversy to be
settled – it is ontologically unstable and indistinguishable from the ‘context’ made up of
economic, technological, medical and legal considerations” (Schouten, 2014a: 38). Scholars of governmentality
have shown that “an analytics of a particular regime of practices, at a minimum, seeks to identify the
emergence of that regime, examine the multiple sources of the elements that constitute it, and
follow the diverse processes and relations by which these elements are assembled into relatively
stable forms of organization and institutional practice” (Dean, 2006: 21), and thus we can once more identify a
strong parallel here.
As Rose (1999: 277) quite plainly frames the issue, “our present has arisen as much from the logics of contestation as from any
imperatives of control”, and thus security studies must in fact transcend the scope on control that strikes at the heart of many inquiries
into surveillance and technology. In the vein of Foucauldian thought, as Schouten (2014a: 38) emphasizes, the “critical
purchase thus lies in offering us a way to study security, not in terms of stable arrangements that
impress themselves upon us as powerful ‘cold monsters’, but rather as unsettled accounts of
fragile security by entering in to the controversies when security is still in the making.” What
implications must be derived from such insight? How does this narrative of security as assemblage undermine, underpin,
challenge, or reinforce its preceding narratives? It most certainly thwarts any over-simplistic understanding of
security that centers merely centers around selected rationalities, thereby neglecting others. It can
serve to highlight how economics or technological discourses have prevailed in the arena by tracing how, and
through which particular power relations, controversies and ambiguities have become settled and
stabilized. And by doing so, it can most notably challenge security politics by exposing reductionist
and epistemologically twisted arguments of governing, of securitization, and of futurity. As
Connolly (2013: 404) rather ironically puts the added value of assemblage thought: “‘How come we did not anticipate this?’, ask the
Intelligence agencies. ‘How come we did not predict this?’, whisper political scientists to each other,
before they catch themselves to recall how they only promise to predict hypothetical events under
conditions in which the ‘variables’ are closely specified, and not to explain actual events in the
messy, ongoing actualities of triggering forces, contagious actions, complex and floating
conflicts, creative responses, obscure searches, ambiguous anxieties, and shifting hopes.”
The very frame of security studies itself generates and enables this political
violence through its unproblematic account of disembodied subjects who
rationally manage international politics for the protection of ahistorical,
biopolitical objects who breathe, suffer, or die depending on policy decisions.
Wilcox 15 – prof of gender studies @ Cambridge
(Lauren, Bodies of Violence: Theorizing Embodied Subjects in International Relations, pp. 1-3)
Bodies have long been outside the frame of International Relations (IR)—unrecognizable even as the modes
of violence that use, target, and construct bodies in complex ways have proliferated. Drones make it possible
to both watch people and bomb them, often killing dozens of civilians as well, while the pilots operating these machines remain thousands of miles away, immune from bodily
harm. Suicide bombers seek certain death by turning their bodies into weapons that seem to attack at random. Images of tortured bodies from Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib
provoke shock and outrage, and prisoners on hunger strikes to protest their treatment are force-fed. Meanwhile, the management of violence increasingly entails the scrutiny of
persons as bodies through biometric technologies (p.2) and “body scanners.” In each of these instances, the body becomes the focal point, central to practices of security and
International Relations—the body brought into excruciating pain, the body as weapon, or the body as that which is not to be targeted and hence is hit only accidentally or
collaterally.
Such bodily focus is quite distinct from prevailing international security practices and the disciplinary ways of
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addressing those practices in IR. Convention has it that states or groups make war and, in doing so, kill and injure
people that other states are charged with protecting. The strategic deployment of force in the language of rational
control and risk management that dominates security studies presents a disembodied view of
subjects as reasoning actors. However, as objects of security studies, the people who are protected from
violence or are killed are understood as only bodies: they are ahistorical, biopolitical aggregations whose
individual members breathe, suffer, and die. In both cases, the politics and sociality of bodies are erased.¶ One of
the deep ironies of security studies is that while war is actually inflicted on bodies, bodily violence and vulnerability,
as the flip side of security, are largely ignored. By contrast, feminist theory is at its most powerful when it denaturalizes accounts
of individual subjectivity so as to analyze the relations of force, violence, and language that
compose our profoundly unnatural bodies. Security studies lacks the reflexivity necessary to see its contribution to the very context it seeks to
domesticate. It has largely ignored work in feminist theory that opens up the forces that have come to compose and
constitute the body: by and large, security studies has an unarticulated, yet implicit, conception of
bodies as individual organisms whose protection from damage constitutes the provision of
security. In IR, human bodies are implicitly theorized as organisms that are exogenously
determined—they are relevant to politics only as they live or die. Such bodies are inert objects:
they exist to be manipulated, possess no agency, and are only driven by the motivations of
agents. Attentive to the relations provoked by both discourse and political forces, feminist theory redirects attention to how both of these compose and produce bodies on
terms often alien and unstable. Contemporary feminist theorizing about embodiment provides a provocative
challenge to the stability and viability of several key concepts such as sovereignty, security, violence, and
vulnerability in IR. In this book, I draw on recent work in feminist theory that offers a challenge to the deliberate maintenance and policing of boundaries and the
delineation of human bodies from the broader political context.¶ Challenging this theorization of bodies as natural organisms is a key
step in not only exposing how bodies have been implicitly theorized in (p.3) IR, but in developing a reading of IR that is attentive to
the ways in which bodies are both produced and productive. In conceptualizing the subject of IR as
essentially disembodied, IR theory impoverishes itself. An explicit focus on the subject as
embodied makes two contributions to IR. First, I address the question vexing the humanities and social sciences of how to account for the
subject by showing that IR is wrong in its uncomplicated way of thinking about the subject in
relation to its embodiment. In its rationalist variants, IR theory comprehends bodies only as inert objects
animated by the minds of individuals. Constructivist theory argues that subjects are formed through social relations, but leaves the bodies of
subjects outside politics as “brute facts” (Wendt 2001, 110), while many variants of critical theory understand the body as a medium of social power, rather than also a force in its
In contrast, feminist theory offers a challenge to the delineation of human bodies from subjects
and the broader political context. My central argument is that the bodies that the practices of violence take as their object are deeply
political bodies, constituted in reference to historical political conditions while at the same time acting
upon our world. The second contribution of this work is to argue that because of the way it theorizes subjects in relation to their
embodiment, IR is also lacking in one of its primary purposes: theorizing international political violence. This project argues that
violence is more than a strategic action of rational actors (as in rationalist theories) or a destructive violation of
community laws and norms (as in liberal and constructivist theories). Because IR conventionally theorizes bodies as outside
politics and irrelevant to subjectivity, it cannot see how violence can be understood as a creative
force for shaping the limits of how we understand ourselves as political subjects, as well as forming the
boundaries of our bodies and political communities. Understanding how “war is a generative
force like no other” (Barkawi and Brighton 2011, 126) requires us to pay attention to how bodies are killed and
injured, but also formed, re-formed, gendered, and racialized through the bodily relations of
war; it also requires that we consider how bodies are enabling and generative of war and practices of
political violence more broadly.
own right.
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Large-scale threats of future suffering stake a hegemonic claim to political
and moral urgency that makes the bodily violence of imperialism illegible,
endlessly deferring its priority to an awaited future that will never come. The
only response is to interrupt this temporal blackmail, insisting that the urgent
bodies suffering structural violence across the globe cannot wait any longer.
Olson 15 – prof of geography @ UNC Chapel Hill
(Elizabeth, ‘Geography and Ethics I: Waiting and Urgency,’ Progress in Human Geography, vol. 39 no. 4,
pp. 517-526)
Though toileting might be thought of as a special case of bodily urgency, geographic research suggests that the
body is
increasingly set at odds with larger scale ethical concerns, especially large-scale future events of
forecasted suffering. Emergency planning is a particularly good example in which the large-scale threats of future
suffering can distort moral reasoning. Žižek (2006) lightly develops this point in the context of the war on terror, where
in the presence of fictitious and real ticking clocks and warning systems, the urgent body must be bypassed because
there are bigger scales to worry about:¶ What does this all-pervasive sense of urgency mean ethically? The pressure of
events is so overbearing, the stakes are so high, that they nec
essitate a suspension of ordinary ethical concerns. After all,
displaying moral qualms when the lives of millions are at stake plays into the hands of the enemy. (Žižek, 2006) ¶ In the presence of
large-scale future emergency, the urgency to secure the state, the citizenry, the economy, or the climate
creates new scales and new temporal orders of response (see Anderson, 2010; Baldwin, 2012; Dalby, 2013;
Morrissey, 2012), many of which treat the urgent body as impulsive and thus requiring management. McDonald’s (2013) analysis of
three interconnected discourses of ‘climate security’ illustrates how bodily urgency in climate change is also recast as a menacing
impulse that might require exclusion from moral reckoning. The logics of climate security, especially those related to national
security, ‘can encourage perverse political responses that not only fail to respond effectively to climate change but may present
victims of it as a threat’ (McDonald, 2013: 49). Bodies
that are currently suffering cannot be urgent, because
they are excluded from the potential collectivity that could be suffering everywhere in some
future time. Similar bypassing of existing bodily urgency is echoed in writing about violent
securitization, such as drone warfare (Shaw and Akhter, 2012), and also in intimate scales like the street and the
school, especially in relation to race (Mitchell, 2009; Young et al., 2014).¶ As large-scale urgent concerns
are institutionalized, the urgent body is increasingly obscured through technical planning and
coordination (Anderson and Adey, 2012). The predominant characteristic of this institutionalization of
large-scale emergency is a ‘built-in bias for action’ (Wuthnow, 2010: 212) that circumvents contingencies.
The urgent body is at best an assumed eventuality, one that will likely require another state of waiting, such
as triage (e.g. Greatbach et al., 2005). Amin (2013) cautions that in much of the West, governmental need to provide evidence of
laissez-faire governing on the one hand, and assurance of strength in facing a threatening future on the other, produces ‘just-in-case
preparedness’ (Amin, 2013: 151) of neoliberal risk management policies. In the US, ‘personal ingenuity’ is built into emergency
response at the expense of the poor and vulnerable for whom ‘[t]he difference between abjection and bearable survival’ (Amin, 2013:
153) will not be determined by emergency planning, but in the material infrastructure of the city. ¶ In short, the urgencies of the
body provide justifications for social exclusion of the most marginalized based on impulse and
perceived threat, while large-scale future emergencies effectively absorb the deliberative power
of urgency into the institutions of preparedness and risk avoidance. Žižek references Arendt’s
(2006) analysis of the banality of evil to explain the current state of ethical reasoning under the war on terror,
noting that people who perform morally reprehensible actions under the conditions of urgency assume a ‘tragic-ethic grandeur’ (Žižek,
2006) by sacrificing their own morality for the good of the state. But his analysis fails to note that bodies are today so rarely legitimate
the context of the assumed priority of the large-scale future emergency, the
urgent body becomes literally nonsense, a non sequitur within societies, states and worlds that
will always be more urgent.¶ If the important ethical work of urgency has been to identify that which must not wait, then
sites for claiming urgency. In
the capture of the power and persuasiveness of urgency by large-scale future emergencies has consequences for the kinds of normative
arguments we can raise on behalf of urgent bodies. How, then, might waiting compare as a normative description and critique in our
own urgent time? Waiting can be categorized according to its purpose or outcome (see Corbridge, 2004; Gray, 2011), but it also
modifies the place of the individual in society and her importance. As Ramdas (2012: 834) writes, ‘waiting … produces
hierarchies which segregate people and places into those which matter and those which do not’.
The segregation of waiting might produce effects that counteract suffering, however, and Jeffery (2008: 957) explains that though the
‘politics of waiting’ can be repressive, it can also engender creative political engagement. In his research with educated unemployed
Jat youth who spend days and years waiting for desired employment, Jeffery finds that ‘the temporal suffering and sense of
ambivalence experienced by young men can generate cultural and political experiments that, in turn, have marked social and spatial
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effects’ (Jeffery, 2010: 186). Though this is not the same as claiming normative neutrality for waiting, it does suggest that waiting is
more ethically ambivalent and open than urgency.¶ In other contexts, however, our descriptions of waiting indicate a strong
can demobilize radical reform, depoliticizing
‘the insurrectionary possibilities of the present by delaying the revolutionary imperative to a
future moment that is forever drifting towards infinity’ (Springer, 2014: 407). Yonucu’s (2011) analysis of the
condemnation of its effects upon the subjects of study. Waiting
self-destructive activities of disrespected working-class youth in Istanbul suggests that this sense of infinite waiting can lead not only
to depoliticization, but also to a disbelief in the possibility of a future self of any value. Waiting, like urgency, can
undermine the possibility of self-care two-fold, first by making people wait for essential needs, and again by
reinforcing that waiting is ‘[s]omething to be ashamed of because it may be noted or taken as evidence of indolence or low status, seen
as a symptom of rejection or a signal to exclude’ (Bauman, 2004: 109). This is why Auyero (2012) suggests that waiting creates an
ideal state subject, providing ‘temporal processes in and through which political subordination is produced’ (Auyero, 2012: loc. 90;
see also Secor, 2007). Furthermore, Auyero notes, it is not only political subordination, but the subjective effect of waiting that
secures domination, as citizens and non-citizens find themselves ‘waiting hopefully and then frustratedly for others to make decisions,
and in effect surrendering to the authority of others’ (Auyero, 2012: loc. 123). ¶ Waiting can therefore function as a
potentially important spatial technology of the elite and powerful, mobilized not only for the
purpose of governing individuals, but also to retain claims over moral urgency. But there is
growing resistance to the capture of claims of urgency by the elite, and it is important to note that even in
cases where the material conditions of containment are currently impenetrable, arguments based on human value are at
the forefront of reclaiming urgency for the body. In detention centers, clandestine prisons,
state borders and refugee camps, geographers point to ongoing struggles against the ethical
impossibility of bodily urgency and a rejection of states of waiting (see Conlon, 2011; Darling, 2009, 2011; Garmany,
2012; Mountz et al., 2013; Schuster, 2011). Ramakrishnan’s (2014) analysis of a Delhi resettlement colony and Shewly’s (2013)
discussion of the enclave between India and Bangladesh describe people who refuse to give up their own status as legitimately urgent,
even in the context of larger scale politics. Similarly, Tyler’s (2013) account of desperate female detainees stripping off their clothes
to expose their humanness and suffering in the Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre in the UK suggests that demands for
recognition are not just about politics, but also about the acknowledgement of humanness and the irrevocable possibility of being that
which cannot wait. The continued existence of places like Yarl’s Wood and similar institutions in the USA nonetheless points to the
challenge of exposing the urgent body as a moral priority when it is so easily hidden from view,
and also reminds us that our research can help to explain the relationships between normative dimensions and the political and social
conditions of struggle.¶ In closing, geographic depictions of waiting do seem to evocatively describe otherwise obscured suffering
(e.g. Bennett, 2011), but it is striking how rarely these descriptions also use the language of urgency. Given the discussion above, what
might be accomplished – and risked – by incorporating urgency more overtly and deliberately into our discussions of waiting, surplus
and abandoned bodies? Urgency can clarify the implicit but understated ethical consequences and normativity associated with waiting,
and encourage explicit discussion about harmful suffering. Waiting can be productive or unproductive for radical praxis, but urgency
compels and requires response. Geographers could be instrumental in reclaiming the ethical work of urgency in ways that leave it
open for critique, clarifying common spatial misunderstandings and representations. There is good reason to be thoughtful in this
process, since moral outrage towards inhumanity can itself obscure differentiated experiences of being human, dividing up ‘those for
whom we feel urgent unreasoned concern and those whose lives and deaths simply do not touch us, or do not appear as lives at all’
(Butler, 2009: 50). But when the urgent body is rendered as only waiting, both materially and discursively, it is
just as easily cast as impulsive, disgusting, animalistic (see also McKittrick, 2006). Feminist theory
insists that the urgent body, whose encounters of violence are ‘usually framed as private,
apolitical and mundane’ (Pain, 2014: 8), are as deeply political, public, and exceptional as other
forms of violence (Phillips, 2008; Pratt, 2005). Insisting that a suffering body, now, is that which cannot
wait, has the ethical effect of drawing it into consideration alongside the political, public and
exceptional scope of large-scale futures. It may help us insist on the body, both as a single unit and a
plurality, as a legitimate scale of normative priority and social care.¶ In this report, I have explored old and new
reflections on the ethical work of urgency and waiting. Geographic research suggests a contemporary popular bias
towards the urgency of large-scale futures, institutionalized in ways that further obscure and
discredit the urgencies of the body. This bias also justifies the production of new waiting places in
our material landscape, places like the detention center and the waiting room. In some cases, waiting is normatively
neutral, even providing opportunities for alternative politics. In others, the technologies of waiting serve to manage potentially
problematic bodies, leading to suspended suffering and even to extermination (e.g. Wright, 2013). One of my aims has been to suggest
that moral
reasoning is important both because it exposes normative biases against subjugated
people, and because it potentially provides routes toward struggle where claims to urgency seem to
foreclose the possibilities of alleviation of suffering. Saving the world still should require a debate
about whose world is being saved, when, and at what cost – and this requires a debate about
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what really cannot wait. My next report will extend some of these concerns by reviewing how feelings of urgency, as well
as hope, fear, and other emotions, have played a role in geography and ethical reasoning. ¶ I conclude, however, by pulling together
past and present. In 1972, Gilbert White asked why geographers were not engaging ‘the truly urgent questions’ (1972: 101) such as
racial repression, decaying cities, economic inequality, and global environmental destruction. His question highlights just how much
the discipline has changed, but it is also unnerving in its echoes of our contemporary problems. Since White’s writing, our moral
reasoning has been stretched to consider the future body and the more-than-human, alongside the presently urgent body – topics and
concerns that I have not taken up in this review but which will provide their own new possibilities for urgent concerns. My own hope
temporal characteristics of contemporary capitalism
can be interrupted in creative ways (Sharma, 2014), with the possibility of squaring the urgent body
with our large-scale future concerns. Temporal alternatives already exist in ongoing and
emerging revolutions and the disruption of claims of cycles and circular political processes (e.g. Lombard,
2013; Reyes, 2012). Though calls for urgency will certainly be used to obscure evasion of
responsibility (e.g. Gilmore, 2008: 56, fn 6), they may also serve as fertile ground for radical critique, a
truly fierce urgency for now.
presently is drawn from an acknowledgement that the
The affirmative’s geopolitical imagination of policy centers on macropolitical
state rivalries and threats—this conflict prevention strategy merely stabilizes
the world for the imposition of an institutionalized slow violence that
squashes any resistance. Instead, we should develop nuanced geographies of
peace.
Dalby 11 – professor @ Carleton University
(Simon, ‘PEACE AND GEOPOLITICS: IMAGINING PEACEFUL GEOGRAPHIES,’ Paper for
presentation to the University of Newcastle symposium on Peace in Geography and Politics)
Contemporary social theory might point to Michel Foucault, and the argument drawn from his writings that politics is the extension of
war rather than the other way round. Given the interest in biopolitics and geogovernance within the discipline these matters are
needs to be thought carefully beyond formulations that
simply assume it as the opposite of wars (Morrissey 2011). This is especially the case given the
changing modes of contemporary warfare and the advocacy of violence as an appropriate policy in present
circumstances. The modes of warfare at the heart of liberalism suggest that the security of what Reid and
Dillon (2009) call the biohuman, the liberal consuming subject, involves a violent series of practices designed to
pacify the world by the elimination of political alternatives. The tension here suggests an
imperial peace, a forceful imposition of a state of non-war. In George W. Bush’s terms justifying the war on
obviously relevant but the connection to peace
terror, a long struggle to eliminate tyranny (Dalby 2009a). Peace is, in this geopolitical understanding, what comes after the
elimination of opposition. In late 2011 such formulations dominated discussions of the death of Colonel Gadaffi in Libya. ¶ The
dramatic transformation of human affairs in the last couple of generations do require that would-be peaceful
geographers look both to the importance of non-violence and simultaneously to how global
transformations are changing the landscape of violence and social change, all of it still under the
threat of nuclear devastation should major inter-state war occur once again. The re-emergence of non-violence as an explicit
political strategy, and in particular the use of Gene Sharp’s (1973) ideas of non-violent direct action in recent events pose these
questions very pointedly. Geographers have much to offer in such re-thinking that may yet play their part in
a
more global understanding of how interconnected our fates are becoming and how inappropriate national
state boundaries are as the premise for political action in a rapidly changing biosphere.¶ But to do so some hard thinking is
needed on geopolitics, and on how it works as well as how peace-full scholarship might foster
that which it desires. Linking the practical actions of non-violence from Tahrir Square to those of the Occupy Wall Street
actions, underway as the first draft of this paper was keyboarded, requires that we think very carefully about the practices that now are
designated in terms of globalization. Not all this is novel, but the geopolitical scene is shifting in ways that need to
be incorporated into the new thinking within geography about war, peace, violence and what the discipline
might have to say about, and contribute to, non-violence as well as to contestations of
contemporary lawfare (Gregory 2006).¶ Whether the delegitimization of violence as a mode of rule will be extended further
in coming decades is one of the big questions facing peace researchers. The American reaction to 9/11 set things back dramatically, an
opportunity to respond in terms of response to a crime and diplomacy was squandered, but the wider
social refusal to
accept repression and violence as appropriate modes of rule has interesting potential to constrain
the use of military force. The professionalization of many high technology militaries also reduces their inclination to involve
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themselves in repressing social movements, although here Mikhail Gorbachev’s refusal to use the Red Army against dissidents in
Eastern Europe in the late 1980s remains emblematic of the changes norms of acceptable rule that have been extended in the last few
geography discipline seriously interested in peace needs to link the social processes
on the relatively small scale such as the non-violent protests Megoran (2011) highlights, and the peaceful
accompaniment actions that Koopman (2011) documents, to the larger geopolitical transformations of
our times, to make the eminently geographical point that peace activities vary widely from place to place, but now
are an important part of larger contemporary geopolitical transformations. ¶ Geopolitics has mostly
been about rivalries between great powers and their contestations of power on the large scale.
These specifications of the political world focus on states and the perpetuation of threats mapped as
external dangers to supposedly pacific polities. Much geopolitical discourse specifies the world as
a dangerous place, hence precisely because of these mappings, one supposedly necessitating violence in
what passes for a realist interpretation of great powers as the prime movers of history (Mearsheimer 2001).
Geopolitical thinking is about order and order is in part a cartographic notion. Juliet Fall (2010) once again
emphasizes the importance of taken for granted boundaries as the ontological given of
contemporary politics. Politics is about the cartographic control of territories, as Megoran (2011) too ponders regarding the
generations.¶ A
first half of the twentieth century, but it also about much more than this, despite the fascination that so many commentators have with
the ideal form of the supposedly national territorial state. Part of what geographers bring to the discussion of peace is a
more nuanced geographical imagination than that found in so much of international studies (Dalby 2011a).¶ On the
other hand much of the discussion of peace sees war as the problem, peace as the solution. Implied in that is geopolitics as
the problem, mapping dangers turns out to be a dangerous enterprise insofar as it facilitates the
perpetuation of violence by representing other places as threats to which our place is susceptible. But this
only matters if this is related to the realist assumptions of the inevitability of rivalry, the eternal
search for power as key to humanity’s self-organisation and the assumption that organized
violence is the ultimate arbiter (Dalby 2010). Critical geopolitics is about challenging such contextualizations, and as such
its relationships to peace would seem to be obvious, albeit as Megoran (2011) notes mostly by way of a focus on what Galtung (1969,
the repeated reinvention of colonial tropes in contemporary Western
political discourse such critique remains an essential part of a political geography that grants peoples “the courtesy of
political geography” (Mitchell and Smith 1991). Undercutting the moral logics of violence, so frequently
relying on simplistic invocations of geographical inevitability, to structure their apologetics, remains a
crucial contribution.¶ Both the practical matters of recent history and the scholarly contributions by geographers
do not allow simple binary distinctions of peace and war to be used as the premise of either
scholarship or political practice. History and scholarship suggest rather that peace is what comes
after war; the relationship is temporal, stages in matters of violence, geography and reorganizing facts on the ground.
Historically in the era of European warfare, coincident with the rise of modernity, that many people hope is now near its end, peace
was that which was imposed by the victors, who in turn were the most powerful in whatever contest was followed by
a “peace”. Much recent geographical scholarship suggests that post conflict re-construction is a mode of peace
building literally (Kirsch and Flint 2011). But those of us who would challenge war as a human
institution, or think about non-violence as a strategy for a better world, will not be satisfied with a
geography that is concerned only to pick up the pieces and reconfigure them after they have been
shattered by the latest round of organized violence.¶ The key points are that reconstruction is a violent
transformation of society, a world where frequently neo-liberal globalization is seen as the imposition of
social forms that will not resist its logics. Hence peace is what victors impose, an imperial peace
that may eventually be quite welcome to those who benefit from the new arrangements. Is peace then post-war? Perhaps it
can be understood in these terms. But the corollary is the equally important point that peace is also frequently what
comes before the next war. The normal human situation these days is a matter of non-war, but it is far from clear where
security is enforced that this is more than a limited form of negative peace. Without large-scale de-militarization
then peace is just what happens between wars. But given this then one additional key point that geographers
1971) calls negative peace. Given
interested in war need to pay attention to is the matter of how peace fails, how conflict escalates and how geography matters in these
processes (Flint et al 2009). Peacekeeping is frequently about geographical separation as the Orwellian names for contemporary walls
in terms of lines of peace have it. But there is much more geographical thinking to be done about these matters and the scales of
interactions across supposedly peaceful borders, not least where what matters most is state security and its ordering principles rather
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than local interactions across frontiers. This is so not least because of the marked current trend to build fences around states as the
supposed solution to numerous security challenges (Jones 2011).¶ Putting matters into historical context also suggests that war
is
not what it used to be, at least not after the events of the 1940s. Negative peace is about preventing
conflict; non-violence is about political strategies to delegitimise violence, to challenge the
human norms of behavior that allow cultures of violence. It is important to link this to the issues
of what are now called lawfare (Morrissey 2011), the use of law as power and coercion to set the
rules of social and political life too. This has been a key part of the US strategy for a long time;
shaping institutions to the benefit of the US economy as been what much of international relations has been
about, but the larger benefits of constraining conflict are part of the larger process that international law struggles to legitimize. Rules
of conduct matter in the international system and the wide-scale repudiation of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 demonstrated
this point clearly.
The alternative is critical peace research, a strategy that continuously
critiques and questions sovereign conceptions of violence and peace while
simultaneously committing to the ethical and practical imperative of nonviolent resistance to structures of domination. This requires rejecting social
science’s purportedly neutral/objective focus on problem solving and linear
causality in favor of a critical pedagogy that equips students with a set of
conceptual tools to practically critique and resist power. This shift in the
pedagogical frame is a prerequisite for ethical subject formation.
Ask not ‘what causes this?’ but ‘how is this made possible by the world?’ – structural questions not direct
causality
Education should be problem-posing and not problem-solving in order to empower students to deconstruct
and transform structures of domination
Jackson 15 – prof of peace and conflict studies @ U of Otago
(Richard, ‘Towards critical peace research: Lessons from critical terrorism studies,’ chapter in Researching
Terrorism, Peace and Conflict Studies: Interaction, synthesis, and opposition, edited by Ioannis Tellidis
and Harmonie Toros, pp. 24-31)
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Critical peace research: a proposal On the basis of the above assessment, this section briefly outlines a set of core commitments which I believe ought to
characterise CPR. I conceive of ‘critical’ (peace) research in two primary senses. First, it simply means an intellectual orientation or attitude which attempts to stand
questions
widely accepted common- sense and dominant forms of knowledge about peace and conflict,
and which asks probing questions about how existing social and epistemic orders came into
existence and the processes by which they are maintained. Second, and more narrowly, the term ‘critical’ is used to refer
apart from the existing order (while at the same time acknowledging that one can never fully escape one’s own situatedness or biases), which
to approaches which draw upon the analytical tools and insights of Frankfurt School- inspired Critical Theory, as well as related critical-normative social theories and
disciplinary approaches such as critical constructivism, post- structuralism, feminism, post- colonialism and others. In the first instance, critical approaches are
characterised by a healthy scepticism towards accepted knowledge claims and dominant ideas, and
instead, seek to continuously question and interrogate that which is taken for granted. In particular, critical
scholars are committed to interrogating how the status quo is implicated in some of the very
problems that traditional theory seeks to solve, in this case, the ‘problems’ of conflict,
violence, lack of reconciliation and the like. In part, this is because critical approaches recognise that knowledge and power are intimately connected– that
knowledge is never neutral, but ‘theory is always for someone and for some purpose’ (Cox 1981). Lastly, in contrast to the social scientific
adoption of a purportedly neutral standpoint on political and ethical issues, critical
approaches are characterised by an openly ethical- normative commitment to human rights, social
justice, progressive politics, and improving the lives of individuals and communities – or
what is often called ‘emancipation’ or praxis (McDonald 2009). Ontological commitments What
exactly are the things called ‘conflict’, ‘peace’, ‘violence’, ‘terrorism’, ‘mediation’, ‘reconciliation’ and
the like, that we study, and how should we conceive, understand and speak of them? An openly critical
approach would suggest that all of these objects of study are not free- standing, ontologically distinct
phenomena discoverable by objective social scientific study. Instead, things like ‘peace’,
‘humanitarian intervention’, ‘cultural violence’ or ‘reconciliation’ are social formations and
sets of social activities that are in large part contingent upon, and constituted by, the terms, languages and
discourses used to describe and study them. A concept like ‘peace’ is actually ‘an ontologically
suspicious concept’ (Elshtain quoted in Neufeld 1993: 172), and whether a particular society is described as ‘peaceful’, ‘post- conflict’, ‘reconciled’, or ‘violent’ is
not a value- free fact or ‘truth’ waiting to be discovered by a scholar through the scientific method, but the consequence of the operation of a series of academic, political
there is a discursive, political, cultural and
academic process by which real world actors and processes are given meaning through the
negotiated application of different kinds of political and intellectual labels, categories and narratives, including a
set of discursively constructed measures by which ‘peacefulness’ or ‘violence’ can be ranked, or
groups judged to be ‘spoilers’, for example. Such measurements are inherently ideological in that they prioritise
some values over others: direct violence over structural violence, order over social justice, dialogue
over resistance. Moreover, such labels, concepts, categories and meanings are prone to change and
contestation; they never just ‘speak for themselves’. In terms of exactly what a ‘conflict’ consists of, for example, something that started as a ‘rebellion’ might
and social discourses, judgements and practices in different locales. In other words,
then become a ‘terrorist campaign’ (or ‘The troubles’), before being designated a ‘civil war’ (usually, by virtue of reaching an arbitrary fatality threshold), a ‘genocide’
This is not to say that critical approaches do not recognise actual
physical violence in the ‘real world’ which is experienced by people as ‘civil war’ or ‘terrorism’,
or conditions of low direct violence which is understood as ‘peace’. Rather, it is to adopt a Frankfurt
or a ‘counter-insurgency campaign’.
School- inspired ontology which maintains a ‘minimal foundationalism’ in which the ontological distinction between subject and object is preserved, and
discourse and materiality are conceptualised as shaping each other in a dialectical, neverceasing dynamic, rather than the one being solely constituted by the other (Toros and Gunning 2009). Such
an ontological standpoint recognizes that there are observable ‘regularities’ in human activity (what positivists might call laws), and that one can distinguish between
different phenomena on the basis of their delineated characteristics, while at the same time recognising that these characteristics and how they are interpreted are a
product of their social and historical context and thus, are not ‘objective facts’ in the positivist sense. Consequently, for critical scholars, the acceptance of the relative
ontological insecurity of analytical concepts results in a real sensitivity to the politics of labelling and categorising, and extreme care in the use of different terms during
peace, conflict, violence, reconciliation and
the like are in themselves constituted by social and political narratives, discourses and
practices. As a consequence, critical scholars are interested in the constitutive nature of norms, ideas and other discursive elements which make the social
research and teaching. However, critical approaches go even further, recognising that
practices of conflict, violence, dialogue, peace and reconciliation possible in specific historical and spatial contexts (Alkopher 2005: 716). In other words, critical
violent conflict cannot be fully understood apart from the particular kinds of
narratives, discourses and social practices which make it possible by rendering it conceivable,
legitimate and reasonable (see Jabri 1996). Crucial to this process is the role played by existing normative structures which function to construct
approaches suggest that
identities, interests and modes of social action (Alkopher 2005: 720). Importantly, in addition to critical civil war research (see Jackson 2014) within the conflict analysis
side of the field, a critical ontology which accepts the social construction and inherent instability of the key concepts is also starting to inform approaches to the study of
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Epistemological commitments A critical epistemology
knowledge is ultimately a social process which depends on a range of contextual
and process- related factors, not least the social position of the researcher, the institutional context within which they conduct their research, and
the kinds of methods they employ. Such factors impact on the kinds of knowledge produced, as well as the
purposes to which it is ultimately put. Importantly, this does not mean that all knowledge
about the social world is hopelessly insecure, that scholarly standards and procedures in research should be
rejected, or that ‘anchorages’ – relatively secure knowledge claims – cannot be found and built upon (Booth 2008). Rather, it suggests that CPR
should be characterised by a continuous and critical reflexivity in regards to its own epistemology,
methodology and assumptions. It also means that there are few if any knowledge claims about
conflict, violence, peace, reconciliation and the like that cannot be challenged or questioned. Related to this, a
critical perspective also recognises that no individual, including academic researchers, can completely put aside their personal
identity, values, perceptions, and world view and then engage in purely objective, dispassionate, value- free research. Rather, every
peace (Richmond 2007, Shinko 2008) and conflict resolution (Hansen 2008), among others.
accepts that creating
researcher brings with them a particular culture and set of values and understandings which shapes their research in important ways. At the very least, critical scholars
recognising and acknowledging the personal subjectivity of the researcher is an important step
not least because such continuous reflexivity acts as an antidote to the
dangerous claim that some kinds of knowledge are objective and wholly unbiased, and therefore superior
to others. Crucially, such an epistemological stance does not entail a wholesale rejection of the social scientific notion of objectivity, but instead accepts that
there are multiple ways of knowing about objects of social analysis, such as conflicts or peace processes, that it is in
any case beyond the capacity of any single narrative to provide the best account of such
processes, and that through a pluralisation of perspectives and their inevitable clashes a more justifiable knowledge can be assembled (see Campbell 1998: 279–
281). A critical approach therefore suggests that ‘ continual contestation, rather than the aspirations of synthesis and
totality, should be the aim of inquiry’ (ibid.: 281). A third important epistemological stance is a deep
awareness of the linkages between power and knowledge, particularly in terms of the different ways in which knowledge can be
employed by actors as a political tool of influence and domination. For example, critical scholars are sceptical of
the way in which certain kinds of knowledge claims about peace and conflict – for example, that
movements who resist and contest neoliberalism or reject dialogue are by definition ‘spoilers’, or that dialogue is an
inherent social good, or that neo- liberal peacebuilding leads inevitably to ‘peace’ – have been used by
governments and international organisations to de- legitimise certain kinds of struggles and support
certain kinds of externally imposed ‘solutions’ (see Duffield 2001). Consequently, critical scholars begin by
asking: Who is peace and conflict research for? How does peace research support
particular interests? What are the ideological effects of peace research, particularly on those societies being studied? Another important epistemological
argue that
(see Breen Smyth 2009),
issue for CPR is the notion of categories and how they are applied, particularly in research on political violence, peace, reconciliation and the like (Jackson et al. 2011:
158–164). While categories can be very useful for understanding complex realities and uncovering salient aspects of a particular phenomenon, they are at the same time
profoundly problematic. In particular, critical scholars are concerned that when typologies are presented as universally applicable, without recognition of the specific
power- knowledge structures in which they emerged and which sustain them, they can function as a tool of ideology, in part through their assumptions of ‘sameness’ and
‘otherness’, and their reliance on presumed essences and binary differences. As Foucault (1970) argues in The Order of Things, at their root, orders or categories are
never natural or objective, but part of a political- historical structure. In contrast, critical scholars do not view their categories as timeless or universal, but as products
of a particular set of power structures and their regimes. As such, they should be continuously interrogated, their boundaries, dichotomies and causal implications
problematised, and their political and ideological effects exposed. This has certainly been the case by CTS scholars in the terrorism field (see Jackson et al. 2011).
Methodological commitments The ontological and epistemological commitments outlined thus far have a number of important specific consequences for method and
critical scholars are committed to transparency about their own values and
standpoints, particularly as they relate to the interests and values of the societies in which they live and work. For Western- based
scholars, this translates into an abiding commitment to being aware of, and trying to
overcome, the Eurocentric, Orientalist, and patriarchal forms of knowledge often prevalent
within Peace Studies, Security Studies, IR, and other areas of social science more generally
(see Henderson 2013; Toros and Gunning 2009). Related to this, critical scholars are committed to taking subjectivity
seriously, in terms of both the researcher and the research subject (Dauphinee 2007). This means being aware of, and transparent about, the values and impact of
the researcher on the process and outcomes of the research, and being willing to seriously engage with the viewpoint and
perceptions of the Other, particularly those who have been demonised or silenced in broader peace and
security discourses. As Jutila, Pehkonen and Vayrynen (2008: 628) put it, the peace researcher ‘should enter into the life- worlds of the groups she or he
studies before venturing to write about them’. Another commitment of a critical approach is to methodological and
disciplinary pluralism – a willingness to embrace the insights and perspectives of different academic disciplines, intellectual approaches, and schools of
thought. In particular, critical scholars see value in post- positivist and non- IR-based methods and approaches,
such as discourse analysis, post-structuralism, constructivism, Critical Theory, historical materialism, history, ethnography and others. In one respect, this
research practice. First,
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means refusing to be limited by the narrow logic of normal social scientific explanation based on
linear notions of cause and effect. Instead, a critical perspective argues that adopting an
interpretive ‘logic of understanding’ rooted in ‘how possible’ rather than ‘what causes’
questions, can open space for subjects, perspectives and affective forms of understanding that
are often foreclosed by traditional social science (see Doty 1993). A final important methodological
commitment is a permanent adherence to a set of responsible research ethics which take account of the various end- users of
peace and conflict research, including informants, the communities from which insurgents or rebels
come, vulnerable populations like refugees or child soldiers, and the populations who bear the brunt of
counter- insurgency campaigns or peacebuilding programmes – as well as the wider public, other academics, and
policymakers. More concretely, this means ‘recognising the human behind the label’ (Booth 2008: 73),
identifying marginalised and silenced voices, the adoption of a ‘do no harm’ approach, operating
transparently as a researcher, recognising the different kinds of vulnerability of those being researched, honouring undertakings of confidentiality and
protecting interviewees, utilising principles of informed consent, and taking responsibility for the anticipated impact of research and the ways in which it may be utilised
(Breen Smyth 2009). A critical praxis of peace research Simultaneous with the ontological, epistemological and methodological commitments described above, CPR is
no
reality transforms itself ’ (Freire 1993: 53); rather, human agents must engage in critical interventions –
critical praxis – in order to transform oppression. Related to this, it is based on the acceptance of
the inherently degenerate and harmful nature of all forms of structural, cultural and direct
violence. Consequently, critical research implicitly and explicitly questions both the ways in which dominant
Western narratives have constructed their own practices of war and humanitarian intervention as legitimate violence,
and the power structures, practices and narratives in the Western- dominated status quo which make direct and
structural violence possible – including narratives of ‘new barbarism’, ethnic essentialism, worthy and
unworthy victims, ‘good wars’, democratic peace, peacebuilding and the instrumental
rationality of legitimate political violence (see Jabri 1996). More specifically, a critical approach involves a
shift from state- centrism and making state security and system stability the central concern, to a
focus on the security, freedom, and well- being of human individuals and communities. Critical
scholars tend to prioritise human security and societal security over national security, and they are committed to minimizing all forms
of physical, structural, and cultural violence (Toros and Gunning 2009), including that which results from
states and international organisations, and from practices such as humanitarian intervention,
diplomacy, peacebuilding, and the like. Importantly, this means abandoning the established conflict resolution norm
of neutrality in conflict resolution practice, because ‘a neutral stance, without an analysis of power between the
parties in conflict, can obfuscate the power differential that exists between parties in conflict and actually undermine
the efforts of oppressed people by tacitly or explicitly supporting the prevailing ideology and
social order oppressing them’ (Hansen 2008: 412). Third- party neutrality, in this context, functions to reinforce the
status quo and unwittingly oppress the very people they are serving. Related to this, CPR takes seriously the
scholarly and practical exploration of non- violent resistance and agonistic dialogue as practical
alternatives to both legitimate and illegitimate forms of political violence. Importantly, this entails the adoption of an explicitly critical
rooted in a broad but clear set of ethical- normative and praxiological commitments. These commitments are based first and foremost on the recognition that ‘
approach to conflict resolution practice, whether it is third- party peacemaking or peacekeeping (Pugh 2004, 2005) during the open conflict stage, or stabilisation and
CPR entails a commitment to non-violent
alternatives to the use of military force, local ownership and empowerment, resistance to oppression, the
priority of social justice, the transformation of structures of structural and cultural violence
(which may therefore entail the rejection of neo- liberal economic and political forms), and agonistic
forms of politics. Critical scholars are committed to engaging equally with both policy-makers – the officials who
have to make policies to deal with conflict and violence – and policy- takers – the groups and wider societies who have
to bear the brunt of humanitarian intervention, neo- liberal peacebuilding policies or other peace efforts.
Engaging with policy- takers lessens the risk of co- option by the status quo, particularly if those thus engaged include
peacebuilding (Mac Ginty 2012a) during the post- conflict stage. In either case,
members of communities labelled as ‘protestors’, ‘activists’, ‘rebels’, ‘insurgents’ or even ‘terrorists’. However, to be effective in realising the potential for positive
change within the status quo, critical scholars must simultaneously strive to engage with those who are embedded in the state, international officials, and so on.
Collectively, this set of commitments – to human security over state security, to ending avoidable suffering,
to minimising and questioning all forms of violence, to continuous immanent critique, including
conflict resolution practice, and to positively transforming existing structures, including neo- liberal
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capitalism – can be described as a broad commitment to the notion of emancipation (see Jackson et al. 2009:
226–227), or what Freire (1993: 66) more simply calls ‘the ontological and historical vocation of
becoming more fully human.’ Despite objections to the term and its past implication in violent hegemonic projects, critical scholars
for the most part see emancipation as a process of trying to construct ‘concrete utopias’ by realising the
unfulfilled potential of existing structures, freeing individuals from unnecessary structural constraints, and the democratisation of the public sphere (Wyn Jones 2004:
a continuous process of struggle and critique rather than any
particular endpoint or universal grand narrative. Critical pedagogy Lastly, given the importance and centrality of teaching to Peace
Studies, I would argue that CPR is openly committed to critical pedagogy (Freire 1993; see also Hansen 2008). Such a commitment is rooted in
an understanding that teaching can never be neutral; instead, ‘education either functions as an
instrument that is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it
becomes . . . the means by which men and women . . . discover how to participate in the transformation of their world’ (Shaull 1993: 34; original
emphasis). In other words, instead of problem- solving education, CPR ought to be oriented towards a
kind of ‘problem- posing education’ in which ‘students learn to deconstruct the societal
ideology affecting them in their everyday lives, see how it inhibits attainment of their interests, and visualize possible societal changes
that could better serve their interests’ (Hansen 2008: 408). This necessarily entails providing students with a language and set
of conceptual tools for understanding the ‘problematics of power, agency, and history’ (Macedo 1993: 17), and
for developing appropriate modes of resistance and emancipatory action. Such forms of
critical pedagogy are inherently praxiological because ‘when individuals reach critical
consciousness, it allows them to become subjects in their world, actively and consciously cocreating it, rather than passive “objects” who accept their social reality’ (ibid.). From one vantage point, it
also means accepting that ‘education is . . . a subversive force’ (Shaull 1993: 29), and the goal of teaching is in part to radicalise the
student because ‘the more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality
so that, knowing it better, he or she can better transform it’ (Freire 1993: 39). Clearly, at the present juncture, such a
229–232). Importantly, emancipation should be seen as
Reject the affirmatives survivalist politics as framed
though security – voting negative creates messianic openings that are more
accepting of alterity
Debrix, Poli Sci Prof @ Virginia Tech, 15
critical pedagogy is far removed from the current
(Francois, “Katechontic Sovereignty: Security Politics and the Overcoming of Time,” International
Political Sociology Volume 9, Issue 2, pages 143–157)
In a recent study, Hurd argues against the view that (late) modern political institutions and processes need to be seen as secular
modalities of organization, preservation, or even devastation of social and political life. “Secularism is not the absence of religion,”
she writes. Rather, secularism “enacts a particular kind of presence. It appropriates religion: defining, shaping, and even transforming
it” (Hurd 2012:955). Looking back at the ancestral, yet always active, practice of sovereign restraint and its close ties to security and
security practices, Hurd's assessment has to be revised a bit. As I have shown in the present essay, because sovereignty must always be
katechontic, because the sovereign must always define its survival in terms of security and by way of security
operations geared toward agents or figures of finitude (seen as disorder or indeed “terror”), sovereignty is never a fully secular notion.
Sovereignty is always obsessed with eschatological questions and with the quest to live and remain
in power perpetually. Thus, not only the “body” of the sovereign, but the very principle of sovereignty itself, guarded by
security, must seek to maintain its two “lives.” That is to say, its this-worldly (and security-driven or terrorremoving) attributes as well as its other-worldly or eternal existence, from which its claims to
making or securing universal political meaning, rule, and order are derived. Katechontism, I suggest,
allows one to recognize the obsession with immortality and permanence that, in a way, dooms sovereignty always to seek out forces of
finitude in an effort to oppose them (or, indeed, to make them other). It also helps to clarify how and why security is the main
theologico-political practice for the sovereign and its agents. The specter of eschatological time and ends explains
why the sovereign and, just as crucially, how the sovereign's subjects (whether they agree with this or not) must
be mobilized and perhaps made into “subjects of security” (Foucault 2003, 2007). Yet, perhaps, the eschaton
could be rescued or redeemed. Perhaps we need to remove the eschaton from the clutches of the sovereign's so-called
practices of restraint. Perhaps we can extirpate the eschaton from the sovereign order, not so much to recreate an outside or re-invent an other (nor even to hope to form a new, genuine dialectic of power), but rather to encourage
the possibility of an “infinity of finite possibilities” (as Dillon puts it) in a more open political domain
that would not be defined by the ontological vulnerability of the sovereign. Perhaps we need to
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confront the actual terror, the terror brought on by the katechon and security politics (and a terror falsely
attributed to the eschaton of time, once again), with the specter or vision of finite time. The time of the eschaton
promises different ends than those the sovereign hopes to see. The time of the eschaton, or the “infinity of finite
possibilities,” foretells of situations and events (including violent conflicts or security operations,
many of them initiated in the name of the sovereign) that may render the image of the sovereign unrecognizable
or indistinguishable from human history and human finitude. Put another way, the specter of the
eschaton haunts the ontological security of the sovereign by presenting a multitude of ways of
putting the sovereign to political death and, perhaps more crucially, of continuing the proliferation of the
sovereign's remains (Santner 2011:12) beyond the point of the sovereign's physical extermination. Perhaps better read as a
figure of horror than terror (since the finitude of the eschaton targets the sovereign beyond its physical collapse; the eschaton never
allows a certainty about the eternity of the sovereign's life to be reasserted), the eschaton may matter as a principle of demolition or
undoing that takes advantage of the sovereign's ontological vulnerability, insecurity, or fear of fragmentation (Asad 2007; Cavarero
the temporal/terrestrial finitude of the eschaton transforms the terrorizing biopolitical
force of the sovereign and its security agents into a horrific violence—often from within the sovereign
order itself—for which the threshold of life and death or of the human and the inhuman may
no longer matter (Mbembe 2003; Debrix and Barder 2012). Perhaps, then, it is time to reclaim
eschatological time and ends. But I would argue that they need to be reclaimed not because the eschaton (or what it may
2007). Indeed,
represent through its haunting work) is a positive force of salvation or, on the contrary, a negative or even evil presence or deed, but
because the horrifying presence of the eschaton is neither positive nor negative. It is neither positive
nor negative because, even when its “infinity of finite ends” pulverizes the power/order/life of the sovereign,
it does not seek to impose a new order or permanence to life in return. It does not seek good or
evil because, politically or ethically, it does not need to position itself in relation to an other (whether sacred
or profane). Precisely because it is beyond good and evil, eschatological “horror” can offer a space
of solace away from sovereign violence and the politics of security and terror. This is what I take
Dillon (2011:784) to mean when, gesturing toward Walter Benjamin's thought on the irruptive violence of history, he writes that one
way of dealing with end-of-time questions without submitting to forces of katechontic power is
“to side with the order of the repressed subjected to the rule of truth and the truth of rule of …
[the sovereign's] temporal order.” Put another way, eschatological “horror” has no place for the sovereign's miraculous
intervention and, in total indifference to the religious/sacred foundations of the katechontic sovereign, offers events and bodies a series
of messianic possibilities for a more open and perhaps just here and now to-come. This, I think, would be the kind of messianism that
Jacques Derrida (1994), for example, had in mind (in his reading of Marx's work and “spirit”). Derrida (1994:59) did not so much call
for a notion of eschatological “horror,” but rather for what he referred to as a “messianic eschatology,” or the idea of “ a certain
experience of the emancipatory promise … a messianism without religion, even a messianic without messianism, an idea of justice …
and an idea of democracy.” I would like to suggest that what I have called eschatological “horror” can be such a
messianic idea. It can operate as a force that punctually frees up, shatters boundaries and limits, and
refuses to settle or to doom to eternity or universality (or to the inevitability of a certain mode of
sovereign immortality). Only through its dismantling work can this form of “horror” be left to
encounter an “infinity of finite possibilities” or be put in contact with the this-worldly to-come,
here and now, of other (non-sovereign) possibilities, including possibilities for freedom and justice (but also, since
nothing is preordained anymore with eschatological horror, for equally plausible encounters in this time and in this world with
coercion and injustice). Only
by recognizing the “messianic opening” provided by the eschaton can we
perhaps try to incant an “eschatological relation to the to-come of an event and of a singularity, of
an alterity that cannot be anticipated” (Derrida 1994:65). Thus, we might do well to not just cast away the eschaton
of time and its “messianic horror.” This, I suggest, would be a non-sovereign and non-katechontic wager. It would perhaps start not so
much with an apprehension—if not a comprehension—of horror (for horror is never meant to be comprehended), but with a
recognized dissatisfaction with the insecurity and terror that regimes of sovereign security invariably bring. Once such a
dissatisfaction with security and the katechon is recognized and affirmed, the possibility of a
different time, a time to-come, may be envisioned, if only fleetingly. As political theorist James Martel has
noted, there would be nothing grand about this to-come of a different time and its engagement with sovereignty (Martel 2012:44–45).
If nothing else, at this point, and in a manner inspired by Benjamin's thought/vision (1968), one might see a flashing
image, horrifying as it might appear to be to start with, of “what it might be to have the history of the
oppressed enter … the time of the present otherwise understood as a kind of marching on” (Butler
2012:104), a marching on of the infinite temporal order of the sovereign.
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Katechontic securitization relies on a politics of clichés and spectacles
concerned with future outbreaks of violence – these threats normalize
everyday instances of insecurity and transform subjects into political
spectators who aid sovereign powers acceleration of chaos risking extinction
Dillon, IR Prof @ Lancaster, 15
(Michael, “Biopolitics of Security : A Political Analytic of Finitude,” pg. 209-212)
The societies of the North Atlantic basin have never been so secure. That security is a function of such a
Wide variety of security institutions and practices it seem pointless to name them, for they penetrate into the very weft and warp of
everyday life. Pointless to name them, but not pointless to re-describe them by giving them a different name. They are in every respect
baroque. Ordinarily addressed as a period and or a style of art, an aesthetic, the bauoque names, instead, a space of problematisation,
and a mode of operationalisation. If fac- tical finitude is the condition of possibility for the baroque, as well as for modern politics, the
baroque names factical finitude’s condition of operability. No more so, in fact, than in respect of the conditions of operability of
modern politics of security. What is being secured, in the securing of Life whose very vital signs are now
construed as generically dangerous to itself, or of the sovereign that is fated to fail the
standards of sovereign being, is the continuous suspension of any other expression of politics. It
is a suppression that works through substitution, the substitution of repeated clichés, marvels and
spectacles concerning the 'now', the 'future' , 'potency' , 'radical contingency' and survivability in a world
whose very security apparatuses have turned politically motivated killing into an industrial and
commercial processes integral to our civilization but capable also of threatening the survivability
of planetary life. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, these now seek their expression in tropes that
intensify security’s baroque fixation with morbidity, mortality and modernity: complex
adaptation and change, competitiveness, emergence, catastrophic emergency, the event that saves,
the event that threatens, and, above all, resilience the capacity to endure by becoming something else.
To survive is to submit, through holocaust or social therapy, to self-annihilation as governmental
necessity. We might therefore envisage the baroque character of our politics of security as the
attempt to unify these themes within synthetic narratives of competitiveness, identity, the enemy, or
simply terror. The past of security and war is forgotten by continuous repetition in spectacle,
simulation and practice. These are now organised through scopic regimes employmg different orders of signification and
representa— tion as well as novel technologies. To give our contemporary politics of security another name is, therefore, a deliberate
gives a
face to that which does not have a face. Our security politics are preoccupied, however, with
presenting a face that will move the world, a face for the world to accept at face value. Having a face
device. It gives them another face. In rhetoric this manoeuvre is called prosopo- poeia. Strictly speaking, prosopopoeia
is, therefore, not the issue here. The issue is what face. I have attempted to give our politics of secur- ity another face, one capable of
refracting its face of baroque display. Prosopopoeia is a difficult art. It does not seek to achieve closure or finality
as some forms of narrative, history and positivity do. It does not labour under the rule of verisimilar adequacy, and
it does not suborn itself to policy or governmental relevance. It seeks to represent not that which is absent, 'but that
whose presence is so intense that we can only feel it and see it from a safe distance' (Godzich and
Spadaccini, in Maravall 1986: xiil—xiv). Initially, the political programme of the baroque was the formal answer of the monarchicalseigniorial segments of sixteenth-century Spanish society, to the assaults launched against the traditional étatist structure taking shape
in early modern Spain (Godzich and Spadaccini, in Maravall 1986: xvii). One of its most distinguished historians, José Antonio
Maravall, defines the baroque, 'as a culture provoked by a cultural crisis of major proportions, one that was felt in all of Europe, and
perhaps most intensely in Spain, during the greater part of the seventeenth century' (Godzich and Spadaccini, in Maravall 1986: xviii).
Where, once, baroque politics included defence of the monarchy, the safeguard of honour as the raison
d'état of individual and social life, and the constant reaffirmation of love as a uni— versal justification (Godzich and
Spadaccini, in Maravall 1986: xix), our baroque politics of security is a vast palimpsest of rules of truth and
truths of rule, constantly reaffirming peace, rights and justice as universal justifications for
security and war. The baroque names its mode of operativity, rather than a period. I have extended this description of it to the
generic crisis induced by factical finitude and the changing baroque politics of security that helps distinguish the states and societies of
the North Atlantic basin at the beginning of the twenty-first century. As with the early baroque, so also with the twenty-first century
we are confronted with a political culture directed towards the multitude of anonym— ous and, therefore, potentially disruptive
individuals — homegrown 'terrorists', for example — no longer simply concentrated in the cities, but capable of circulating globally.
Its mode of operativity is distinguished by the effort that is spent on casting the political subject
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as political spectator, whose voluntary servitude to indefinite governance is secured through the
spectacles of security, catastrophic emergency and war, as much as through their everyday
governmentalisation. Deleuze noted, acutely, that, ' ltlhe essence of the baroque entails neither falling Into nor emerging
from illusion but rather realizing something in illusion itself' (Deleuze 1992: 124). A fuller depiction of the neo-baroque character of
contem— porary security politics, therefore, requires further studies. Among other things, these would have to revisit the
problematization not only of spectacle and the virtual, but all modes of making manifest politically and governmentally in which these
are Intimately involved as a matter of priority. But this has to wait, and for the moment I can only add a coda to the present book, by
gesturing towards how politics of security in the twenty-first century are distinguished by the ways in which they exceed the
katechontic security politics of the baroque sovereign that I introduced, thlough Reinhart Koselleck and Carl Schmitt, in the first
chapter of the book. Politics
of security remain katechontic, fated to pursue the infinite deferral of
the very finitude of which they are comprised, and from which they also take their warrant to conduct the infinite
securitisation of finite things and processes of becoming finite. But this katechontic enterprise changes its character as
we not only move from addressing modern sovereign geopolitics to biopolitics, but also as we
move from the baroque traits of the early modern era to those of the neo— baroque of our own
times. What is additionally interesting is that, as the modern geopolitics of the West has become a largely
biopolitical enterprise, so also has the katechontic task of restraint become acceleration of the
very forces that the katechon was once said to restrain — chaos, lawlessness and anarchy, since order
now is commonly said to arise from chaos. Katechontic politics of security at the beginning of the twenty-first
century thus aim to become the very anomic chaos originally stigmatised in the anarchy
problematic of classical international relations theory, which so extolled the necessity of the
sovereign state, and of statecraft, simultaneously also fostering the belief that there was no stagecraft to
statecraft, in explicitly katechontic terms. No longer simply committed to restraining the coming of the end, the katechontic
enterprise of the biopolitics of security of the twenty—first century is now much less committed
to restraint than to acceleration, acceleration of the vital forces of being-in—formation and becoming—
dangerous that exceed finitude, thereby offering the prospect of securely commanding it.
Predictions of insecurity are not value-neutral – their logic is grounded in
Western-centric frameworks which replicate colonialism creating the conditions
for violence and insecurity – endorse a robust ethical commitment to positive
peace
Richmond, IR Prof @ University of St. Andrews, 8
(Oliver, “Peace in International Relations,” pg 153-159)
IR, and the liberal peace that it supports, is in crisis is illustrated by its underlying
struggle over a concept of peace. But the failure of one universal notion or ontology of peace to triumph over others, whether it is a
That orthodox
victor’s peace, an idealist or liberal peace, an emancipatory peace, or plural ontologies of peace, is indicative of the growing vibrancy of IR in this
context, as Carr himself thought.2 Indeed, the many dimensions of contemporary IR theorising, drawing on many disciplines and sites of knowledge, the
broad range of approaches and issues, the increasing level of reflection and self-awareness, are necessary for a consideration of peace. IR is perhaps no
the dilemma for orthodox IR theory is that the focus
on worst case scenarios, pragmatism, rationalism, state frameworks and interests, means that the
challenge of critical and particularly post-structural approaches cannot afford to be ignored. It is a
contradiction that orthodox theory, adept at claiming its capacity to respond to ‘real’ worst case
scenarios, rejects the claim that its approaches replicate the roots and issues that lead to
violence – any risk of this should be responded to within this realist ontology (perhaps explaining why the
liberal peace has become so ubiquitous). Mainstream IR has become associated with closure, the proscription of dissent,
and with the distancing of everyday life.3 This is especially so in the contemporary world where
conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, the ‘war on terror’, weak or failing peacebuilding projects in many other
countries, as well as poverty and environmental dangers, appear to have dispersed the so-called post-Cold
War liberal ‘peace dividend’. Despite the inference that the liberal peace is a ‘civilised’ compromise between idealism and realism, the
discourses and practices associated it are often more representative of the dystopian than the
moderated utopian. This is particularly so in its application and experience outside of its Western
roots, and in the current applications of a recently evolved muscular liberal peace, which can be observed
longer the ‘backwards discipline’ – in some quarters at least. Indeed,
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in the state-building attempt in Iraq. The attempt
to mimic the liberal state in Iraq has done much to discredit the
universal claims of the transferability of the liberal peace in political terms,4 adding to the obvious
failures of its neo-liberal components, which have been observed in a wide range of case from the UN
assistance mission in Cambodia in the early 1990s to the return of UN peacekeepers to East Timor after the
crisis of 2006. Thus, the liberal peace spans both civil and uncivil forms of peace, being based on international consensus, but often on a much weaker
local consensus. Indeed, the rhetoric of local ownership, participation and consent is often a disguise for non-consensual intervention, for dependency and
conditionality, there
being little space for empathy, emancipation or indigeneity in the liberal peace
framework, other than through a romanticised view of the local. Though orthodox IR theory has
missed an important opportunity through the evolution of the discipline to speak truth to power
about its replicating tendencies in terms of war and conflict,5 this challenge has been broadly
carried forward by critical approaches, which offer a much clearer ontological acceptance of
pluralist agendas for peace. This is not to say, as Jackson has pointed out, that an account of IR should exclude states or ‘hard’ security
issues,6 though acknowledging the self-replicating dangers of such discourses should be part of any discussion of the latter. An acknowledgement of new
agendas is necessary, rather than remaining slavishly chained to the old, or to excessively ‘rigorous’ methods, which are often designed to support
particular research agendas and their implicit ideologies.7 This is necessary to develop a better understanding of IR’s implicit perspectives on peace,
which have been ensnared by liberal–realist theories and a
Western-centric view of the world, in particular elevating
governmental elites and institutions over societies and everyday life. Cultural neutrality and a failure of
recognition mean that liberal peace is often equated by its recipients as colonial or hegemonic. This indicates that
emancipation is absent, certainly that it fails to achieve any form of empathy or care,8 and that it fails to
facilitate an understanding of the ontologies of peace. The liberal peace is unable to communicate across cultures, rests
upon a legalistic framework, disassociates law from norms, rests upon preserving the pre-existing liberal order, and claims a problematic universality.9
As a result of this failure, it often fails to provide even the ‘thin recognition’, let alone mutual consent and recognition that are often claimed, given the
paucity of local consent. What is missing here is a discussion of dialogue and communication – indeed a discourse ethic – of notions of emancipation and
care, and an understanding of the ontologies of peace. The liberal concept of toleration, and liberalism’s link with sovereignty and the state, as well as its
homogenising tendencies, and its failure to engage with issues such as culture and welfare, provide obstacles for this broader engagement10 leading to
what Williams has argued is an ‘auto-ambivalence’,11 which disguises the negative consequences of the liberal peace.12 Yet, even ‘enlightened’ debates
the notion of a ‘just
peace’, even an emancipatory approach, or the widely used concept of human security, tend to draw on, either by mimicking, extending or
contesting, the liberal–realist paradigm, where peace is theorised as something which is at best
institutionally constructed around states to engage with individual needs and emancipation, or in
on the concept of peace which generally tend to draw on approaches such as Galtung’s negative/positive framework,
its more limited form a postponement of the tragedy of IR. Even critical and post-structural contributions revolve around the defence or attack of
universalist principles and norms of peace. There are several key dimensions to sketching out an explicit analytic framework through which one can
understand the concept of peace inherent in each of IR’s theoretical debates. The first is to note that there is either implicitly or explicitly a concept of
peace inherent in each and every debate, though this is rarely acknowledged. Indeed, if every debate acknowledged this as well as the usual discussion of
casual adjustments or preventive measures, the concepts of peace might have been less obscure and thus would have been factored into policy
if intellectual and policy approaches
considered their implications for specific concepts of peace in conceptual, theoretical and
methodological terms, as well as their underlying ontologies, this would provide them with a
clearer approach to assessing their implicit construction of an epistemological framework to
support an ontology of peace, its institutions, its emancipatory claims, its empathetic capacities, in
an everyday context. It would also, of course, hold to account theories and decisions and in particular would probably
focus research and policy far more closely on how to create a self-sustaining peace. Related to this are
decisionmaking where it is linked to prescriptive forms of IR theory. In other words,
debates over different methods by which the type of peace extant can be evaluated. Clearly it is inadequate to merely research the nature of the
international or a society through its documents and codification. There needs to be a normative and philosophical investigation. Ethnographic methods
might be deployed in order to deepen the understanding of the multiple dimensions of peace in social, cultural, aesthetic and environmental terms.
Clearly, the
broader the understanding of the multiple dimensions of peace, from levels of analysis, actors and
issues, to methodological, ontological and epistemological issues, the more plausible it is to talk of a self-sustaining
peace, as opposed to a hegemonic peace through external governance coloured by its interests
and biases. Critics may warn that this is too complicated an approach to have any policy relevance,
requiring instead prioritisation and parsimony, yet re-applying the same solutions in the hope that they may
finally work runs the risk of unanticipated consequences for the lives of really existing
individuals that IR’s orthodoxy appears to prefer to hide. Yet, in a globalising and democratising world they can no
longer be hidden beneath the state, its associated institutions, or statistical descriptions. Approaches to peace able to consider such dimensions would then
become another basis upon which IR theory can be evaluated, and on which policy and practice can be formed. This would also make explicit the
agendas of those who claim to represent power and truth, who claim to have privileged knowledge of the international, and claim the capacity to
discursively represent and change the world through political, economic and social policy. The reclaiming of peace as a key component of the IR project
would have major implications for the sustainability of peace as it is experienced across the world. This would just relate to a Western normative
framework, but the negotiation of forms of peace that reflect local ontologies as well as the need for emancipation, and selfsustainability in a broader
global context, far beyond the often colonial mentality of aspects of the Western IR academy and the reflection and perpetuation of an Enlightenment and
liberal project sharpened by Western strategic interests. What are the different possibilities for peace arising from interdisciplinary research? First, if
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realism’s tragic postulation that peace is very limited and narrowly conceived at best is rejected, and liberalism’s claim that both institutional regulation
and individual agency are required is problematised, and the need for a discursive framework for emancipation, plural ontologies and hybridity, is
accepted, then this opens up several different areas of research of peace. Institutional regulation has received much attention already in terms of law,
justice, IOs, global governance and constitutional frameworks. Individual agency has received rather less attention so far, mainly because it involves
engagement with a potentially non-Western, non-liberal other. This raises difficult ontological and epistemological questions about institutions and their
associated knowledge systems in relation to peace within the liberal framework, and certainly produces a tension with the privilege claimed by the
discipline to be able to speak, rationally or otherwise, for the other. The liberal framework claims that individuals attain freedom through institutional
regulation. Because Marxist-oriented approaches to class and economic frameworks have been discredited, and because the US projected contemporary
neo-liberal approach underpins much of the peacebuilding practice around the world, the liberal peacebuilding project of the contemporary era tends to
conceptualise individual freedoms as political freedoms in practice. This means the freedom to vote, rather than economic welfare and access to a decent
level of facilities and economic opportunity (though neo-liberalism ironically presents this as free-trade, marketisation and economic freedom). The
dominance of US neo-liberalism is hardly surprising, even despite the fact that many major donors practice social forms of democracy in their own states
(such as Britain and the Scandinavian donors). This is also coloured by neo-liberal development arguments, which follow similar lines in creating free
markets that provide modernisation and opportunities for the labour force. However, liberal approaches are constrained by their universal normative
ontology and a methodology that prioritises officialdom and institutions, which make it extremely difficult to move beyond their main focus (which is
always on institutions and states) towards the everyday life of individuals. This means that the freedom of the individual is by far a lesser priority in
orthodox theorising of peace than international order – at best defined as a narrow peace. Peace between states is the priority; far outweighing any
negative impacts this might have on some individuals within states who are sacrificed on the pragmatic and painful alter of ‘order’. These are questions
that the liberal framework cannot resolve, partly because of the inflexibility of the orthodoxy of IR theory, though it may be able to develop a heightened
sensitivity to them by adopting some of the insights of constructivism and Critical theory. Constructivism also tends to rely on states and liberal
institutional structures as the vehicles through which individual subjective and objective existences are inscribed. Critical theory is more focused on the
emancipation of the individual and an ontology of emancipation, and draws on a range of political philosophy and social theory in order to construct a
discursive framework in which a politics of peace can be constructed and embedded. This has, however, been criticised for resting on Western norms and
traditions, not least for envisioning a world in which basic norms, structures and frameworks can be found or developed which are common to all, and
claiming that this process can be insulated from the dangers of hegemony and institutional capture. Critical theory’s response has been to problematise
universality while at the same time seeking a way to retain it. Post-structural approaches to IR theory seek to take this process much further, both drawing
eclectically on a range of representations of the political and international space, through the investigation of the discursive modes of power/knowledge
that are deployed by elites to protect their power, and which can be unravelled in order to develop peaceful discourses. The resultant juxtaposition of
different methods, disciplines and modes of analysis and representation within IR enable an engagement with ontologies of peace as a way of
circumventing some of the limitations with Critical theory’s emancipatory peace. This via media is inter-disciplinarity. Table 1 outlines the implications
for peace of the main approaches to IR. In addition, various sub-disciplines and areas imply other dimensions of peace. Placing peace at the centre of the
discipline indicates that to fully engage with the international, IR theory needs to embrace (through critical ‘verstehen’ approaches to social action)14 its
complexity rather than avoid it.15 This means it should also have some sense of the peace that it implies (see above) to avoid the accusation that IR has
become complicit in these oversights in order to support a hegemonic and essentially liberal order.16 Though the liberal peace offers a form of
emancipation this is potentially hegemonic, and perhaps reflects what Rorty has described as a ‘liberal utopia’.17 As Walker has argued, IR
theory
fails when it attempts to present a truth as anything other than a ‘historically specific spatial
ontology’.18 But there is an additional problem. If peace is assumed to be a goal of discursive approaches to the IR, not defining it in advance,
perhaps in relation to a specific theory, sheds doubt on that intention. Defining it in advance without a careful negotiation of peace through an intersubjective process offers a more sophisticated discursive framework, but also is rather instrumentalist in the light of Walker’s argument that all IR theory
IR – it creates an
instrumentalist need for theory and practice to offer progress from a war system to peace system
in advance of its engagement with a specific conflict context, meaning that great care must be
taken to separate this intention from an alien, blueprint approach to peace that is then transplanted
into conflict zones. This raises the broader question of how IR can engage with the other without falling into a ‘white man’s burden’,
is linked to specific moments and places in history. This is the paradox of thinking about peace in orthodox
Orientalist and coercive syndrome, while assuming that a specific epistemology of IR and peace is superior and can be transplanted into any location
without regard for context. Thus ‘peace’ as a process offers a contradiction – it requires a method, ontology and epistemology which are negotiated
locally, but prompted externally by agents who must engage with the other, but cannot know one another, at least in a short time and at the depth of detail
required for such ambitious relationships. These concerns underline the possibilities offered by critical approaches to peace. They also point to one of the
key problems with orthodox IR’s engagement with peace – or indeed with its lack of it. This is the result of a methodological weakness, which has both
ontological and epistemological implications. The discipline’s deeper contest is over how far its right to interpret the other, who may be unknowable at
least without a deep investigation of more than simply political and state level structures, extends.19 This raises the questions of legitimacy and
privileged claim to know the mind of the other was increasingly contested as the
is on this basis that many of the
assumptions inherent particularly in orthodox IR theory are derived – and through which many of
the disciplines’ stereotypes about power, sovereignty and identity, as well its silences, are reproduced. But this
right is so valuable, particularly in a context of an environment in which peace is defined by hegemons, that it is important to
problematise it so that IR theory does not merely reaffirm and replicate the very problems it is
supposed to address. It is through addressing the problem of peace directly that these problems might be responded to. This indicates that a
focus simply on a negative peace and a balance of power, or an institutional framework for peace is not enough.
These reproduce bare life,20 peace needs to become embedded within everyday life and the
societies it affects. This may seem naive to many working within a more orthodox tradition, but to others who are working beyond these
intervention. The
discipline moved through realism toward critical and post-structural approaches. Yet, it
traditions, orthodox approaches seem naive – destined to repeat the traumas of liberal–realist ‘history’. Again, this indicates the need for an engagement
with the political, social, economic, cultural and environment dynamics of everyday life, if an everyday form of peace is to replace a negative
epistemology of peace. This
clearly prioritises the individual, their identity, difference and consent, as
well as stable and peaceful relations between them. Jabri has articulated a useful conceptualisation of peace in contemporary
IR. She argues that: the politics of peace, the capacity at once to both resist violence and struggle for a
just social order, is not just within the purview of the liberal state or indeed and international civil service, but it
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located primarily with individuals, communities and social movements involved in critical
engagement with the multiform governance structures, as well as non-state agents, they
encounter in their substantial claims for human rights and justice. The politics of peace must then rely on a
conception of solidarity that has a capacity to transcend the signifying divide of state and culture, while at the same time recognising the claims of
both.21 This represents a critical rendition of the concept of peace, to which can be added the need for empathy. In addition, according to Allan and
Keller, justice through peace is preferable to justice through war and the most marginalised provide guidance to the powerful in understanding what peace
means, requiring respect for free speech and human rights. This means that individuals have primacy over states in terms of their rights, freedoms and
participation,22 recognition is central, as is the way in which categorisations are made to include or exclude others.23 Recognition implies empathy, care
The language of Western liberal
institutionalism, or of sovereignty is, as Allan and Keller argue, not a basis for a ‘just peace’, because these offer
obstacles to the recognition of certain others, favour liberals, and continue the process of
marginalisation. Reconciliation cannot stem from this (hence the inability of many liberal states to recognise even their own native peoples).
and, thus, solidarity and reconciliation, but the latter cannot occur before the former.24
Allan adds to this analysis an element of ‘care’ which he argues extends the concept of peace beyond its positive connotations.25 This global care ethic
supersedes a positive peace, drawing on the eponymous feminist concept.26 Tolerance and solidarity coalesce within care, according to Allan, in that
difference and uniqueness are accepted, and sympathy for the difficulties of others and a willingness to assist are present.27 Pluralism requires a
methodological breadth and interdisciplinarity. Gender debates, and advocacy, can be read as requiring a radical restructuring of representation across
political, social, professional and economic spheres, and within the public–private/agency–structure debate. Similarly, environmental readings of IR
generally point to the unsustainability of many political, economic and social practices that lead to the consumption of non-renewable resources, and
reflect an unequal demography of consumption. Focusing on marginalised actors such as children raises the question of their agency within the broader
adult-dominated structures of IR, and whether and how they can be represented. The problem of poverty has of course been linked to a tendency for
the need to expand the scope of any consideration
of peace to include social, political, economic and cultural dynamics and sustainability, and a
wide range of actors not merely determined by their official status, on an ontological rather than
merely interest-oriented basis. Related methodological issues also arise. This is one of the key problems of IR in that while it tends not
violence, relative deprivation and frustration aggression. This illustrates
to embrace inter-disciplinarity, the sheer scale of the issues it faces require it to do so, and especially require the ensuing diversity of method. One of the
crucial outcomes of the grand experiment in creating peace around the world, from Westphalia to the League, the UN, and post-Cold War peacebuilding
Parsimony is not conducive to a sustain-able,
ontological peace. Yet, the renegotiation of this broader peace means that there is a certain
‘ontological insecurity’ in the resulting scale and scope of the peace project. It has become so wide and
is that more depth and breadth is required if the peace created is to be sustainable.
complex that it cannot be investigated through one discipline, or created by one institutional framework, as the above Tables show. This necessitates the
diversification of the discipline, both in inter-disciplinary and methodological terms, as has now occurred. Even where a liberal peacebuilding consensus
exists about the range of issues, frameworks and actors involved, it opens up the problem of universal versus pluralist versions of peace: but an
engagement with an empathetic, emancipatory peace and its multiple ontologies navigates around the problem of a narrow version of peace for a majority
leading to the tyrannising of the minority. This responds with breadth and equity to the question of whom and what peace is for. But this can only be
achieved through inter-disciplinary work across disciplines where the dynamics of peace have rarely received attention.
The affirmative is built on an affective economy of fear that relies on an
inculcation of militarized subjectivity in order create “safety.” Military presence
is no longer the basis of American exceptionalism, the plan collaborates with the
very security apparatus that creates the conditions for its own destruction with
baseless speculation and overblown reactions. The chaotic future they have
foretold can only be imagined, but the process of analyzing that temporal plane
erases the real domestic and objective violences of neoliberalism.
Masco, Anthropology Prof @ University of Chicago, 14
(Joseph, PhD in anthropology from UC San Diego, November 2014, “Theater of Operations: National
Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror,” pp 1-21)
In the fall of 2001, the United States inaugurated a new project to secure the American future, and
did so in the name, and language, of counterterror. The very real terrorist violence of September
2001 was quickly harnessed by U.S. officials to a conceptual project that mobilizes affects (fear,
terror, anger) via imaginary processes (worry, precarity, threat) to constitute an unlimited space
and time horizon for military state action. By amplifying official terror and public anxiety, the
U.S. security apparatus powerfully remade itself in the early twenty-first century, proliferating
experts, technological infrastructures, and global capacities in the name of existential defense.
Counterterror constitutes itself today as endless, boundless, and defensive—a necessary means
of protecting American interests in a world of emergent and violent dangers. The resulting security state apparatus
no longer recognizes national boundaries or citizenship as the defining coordinates of its governance; rather, it
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constitutes a dangerous future as its object of concern. The motivating force behind this radical
renewal and expansion of the national security state in the twenty-first century is a vision of a
world without borders, generating threats without limit. The goal of the counterterror state is to
produce and administer a U.S.-centric world, one in which American interests can never be
surprised by external events, let alone shocked by them (see U.S. White House 2002a). Always already in crisis and failing, this
aspirational image of American power has nonetheless been hugely productive in its first decade, generating new expert worlds devoted to counterterror as a planetary project
while rewriting the domestic social contract in fundamental ways. The relationship between affect, technological capacity, and political agency in U.S. national security culture is
the central concern of this book, which investigates the conditions of possibility for the most powerful military state in human history to declare war on an emotion. In particular, it
the affective politics of the Cold War nuclear state both enabled, and—after 2001—were
transformed into those of the counterterror state. Terror , as we shall see, has a specific genealogy in the United States after 1945,
one that is deeply structured by the revolutionary effects of military technoscience on American society and governance. But existential terror (after 1945, of the
atomic bomb; after 2001, of the WMD) not only empowers the most radical actions of the security state; it
also creates ideological barriers to dealing with a vast set of everyday forms of suffering and
vulnerability that Americans experience, now rejected in favor of warding off imagined
catastrophes. The escalating violence of neoliberal economics in the twenty-first century
(poverty, bankrupt municipal governments, spectacular white-collar crime, energy scarcity) and
of an increasingly destabilized biosphere (affecting health, agriculture, city infrastructures)
generate an intensifying experience of precarity in the United States but rarely rise to the level of
a formal national security concern. Although cities lost to storm surges and bankruptcies create terrors of the most visceral and immediate kind for
citizens, such events do not activate the attention of the counterterror state. 1 The state security apparatus today sets aside these
everyday insecurities endured by citizens to pursue a specific, if expansive, universe of terroristic
potentials. American insecurity may derive from many sources, but it can be affectively
channeled to enable a state project with specific logics and coordinates. Put differently, the United States
is a global hyperpower that increasingly produces the conditions for its own instability
(politically, economically, environmentally) and then mobilizes the resulting vulnerability of its
citizens and systems to demand an even greater investment in security infrastructures.
Counterterror has thus become recursive and self-colonizing, replacing the social commitment to
building a prosperous collective future and a stable international order with the project of
warding off a field of imagined and emergent dangers. Given the wide-ranging global violence
(involving wars, covert operations, and drone strikes) as well as the extraordinary costs of counterterror, its incompatibility with democratic governance,
and its overwhelmingly negative vision of citizens, international relations, and the future, it is important to consider how and why
counterterror has become so American. What a national community fears and how it responds to those fears are cultural forms as well as
traces how
technologically mediated processes, the basis for a domestic politics as well as a geopolitics. The affects and infrastructures of the contemporary security state, as we shall see,
have both a history and an emerging logic and purpose. This book explores why American society, at the very height of its global military, economic, and cultural power, has been
so receptive to a state program that offers little in the way of material everyday security in exchange for increasing public docility, private excitability, and the promise of unending
war. The Theater of Operations is ultimately an examination of American self-fashioning through technoscience and threat projection, of how fear and terror have been
domesticated as a primary national resource and projected out globally as a twenty-first-century American project. Threatening Histories One of the very first formal acts of the
War on Terror was a purge of the U.S. national archives. After the suicide-hijacker attacks on New York and Washington in 2001, researchers at the U.S. National Archives and
Records Administration, myself included, began to notice the disappearance of long-available files or the absence of documents within them, sometimes marked with a withdrawal
notice stating that “this item was removed because access to it is restricted” (figure I .1; see Aid 2006; U.S. Information Security Oversight Office 2006). Specific historical
materials related to national intelligence estimates, emergency response planning, nuclear policy, and covert actions dating back to World War I were pulled from public access
and reclassified. Documents that had been in the public domain for years and, in some cases, already published in official government histories were nonetheless inexplicably
recategorized as official secrets. Codified in secret legal agreements with U.S. intelligence and defense agencies, this reclassification program extended from the National Archives
to the presidential library system, involving records from the State Department, National Security Council, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and Department of Defense (DOD),
before
the United States invaded Afghanistan on October 7, 2001 (which inaugurated the George W. Bush administration’s global War on Terror), or
adopted the U.S.A. Patriot Act on October 26 (which profoundly redefined the concept of U.S. citizenship through search, seizure, surveillance, and detention policies), a war
on public memory was already well under way. We might well ask: Why would national security policy documents, particularly those of
the long-dead Cold War, be of such immediate concern to U.S. officials, appearing to undermine the War on Terror at its very founding? And if American history
began anew with the violence of September 2001, as White House officials reiterated over and
over again in their public statements, declaring the end of Cold War security logics of deterrence
and a “new normal” of preemptive counterterrorism, then why was it so important to control the deep history of the national security
state? We should begin by recognizing that the official declaration of a “new” counterterror state in 2001 was actually
a repetition, modeled in language and tone on the launch of the national security state in 1947. Both
as well as from agencies that no longer officially exist—such as the Atomic Energy Commission, Defense Nuclear Agency, and Chemical Warfare Service. Thus,
projects involved the designation of new insecurities, new institutions to fight them, a public mobilization campaign grounded in fear, and above all, official claims that a new kind
of war (a cold war or a war on terror) was a multigenerational commitment, constituting a new mode of everyday life rather than a brief intensity of conflict. The former cold
warriors in the George W. Bush administration intended the War on Terror to be as powerful as the Cold War in realigning citizen-state relations and defining American
geopolitical objectives, constituting a renewed commitment to state and nation building through confronting an existential danger. Nonetheless, official desires for a newly
militarized consensus, and a reliance on a prior model of state and nation building, still do not explain the immediate anxiety about the public history of the national security state
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in the fall of 2001. Consider the following two instances of War on Terror reclassification of Cold War materials. 2 A “top secret” memo from April 27, 1951 (originally
declassified in 1996), on the subject of “Chinese Communist Intentions to Intervene in Korea” seems to have been reclassified because it documents a failure to predict the future.
The CIA intelligence estimate states that the Chinese would not invade Korea in 1950, as they in fact did in November of that year (U.S. Central Intelligence Agency 1951). It was
pulled for reclassification on October 16, 2001. A CIA report to the National Security Council from April 1949 (originally declassified in 1996 and reclassified in 2005) on the
subject of the “Atomic Energy Program of the USSR” also attempts to engage the future, stating that “in order to estimate the capability of the USSR to wage atomic warfare, it is
necessary to know, not only the events that preceded the date when the first bomb is detonated, but also the capability for bomb production thereafter” (U.S. Central Intelligence
Agency 1949, 1). It calls for a comprehensive effort to study Soviet capabilities in nuclear weapons science, including “special intelligence,” “interrogations,” “covert operations,”
attention to “Soviet technical literatures,” as well as the production of a “detection system” to discover when a nuclear explosion has occurred (ibid.). The document suggests that
in spring 1949 the CIA was unaware that the Soviets would test their first atomic bomb on August 29 of that year. Today, these documents show how the newly formed U.S.
intelligence agencies of the mid-twentieth century calculated Communist activities and nuclear threat at the very start of the Cold War. However, the documents also reveal
something else that is deeply important to national security professionals to this day: the value—and the shame—of strategic surprise. In their historical moments, the shock of the
first Soviet nuclear test and of the Communist revolution in China and later actions in Korea were driving forces for a massive expansion of the national security state in the 1950s,
the nuclear security state, shocked by
suicide-hijacker attacks on two American cities, remade itself under the logics of counterterror.
The politics of shock are central to the conceptualization of the national security state as a
distinctly American form of power. We might think of the reclassification project as not only a
sign of the deep commitment of the counterterror state to official secrecy and covert action in all
its forms, but also as an effort to purge evidence of the inability of the national security apparatus
to perfectly predict the future—to anticipate and mediate crisis and thereby produce a
normalized everyday, unbroken by trauma. It is as if the failure to prevent the suicide hijackers
in 2001 created a reverberating anxiety not only about the attacks but also about the concept of
national security itself, connecting seemingly disparate and historically distinct expert judgments
within an alternative understanding of American power, an infrastructure of failure rather than
success. The failure to predict global events, let alone protect U.S. citizens and cities from
violence, haunts U.S. security culture today, creating the constant drive for new technical
capacities and the increasing militarization of American life. It also generates professional
desires for revenge against those who have revealed the institutional weakness of the global
hyperpower. These administrative commitments fuse the problem of futures, infrastructures,
expertise, and international competition with affect in a new way, one that creates the expectation
of a total anticipatory control of the future even as that possibility breaks down from one
second to the next, producing the grounds for serial shocks (and thus, perpetual trauma). During the
Cold War constituting, mobilizing, and exploiting existential danger was a central domain of national
politics, with each federal election in part based on how prospective leaders would handle the production of nuclear technologies as well as manage the minute-to-minute
threat of nuclear attack. Evoking existential threat became the core vehicle for building a militaryindustrial state, pursuing rivalries between political parties, and mobilizing ideological
campaigns on both the Right and the Left. Nuclear fear was thus a total social formation in the second half of the twentieth century,
mobilizing all aspects of American society through specific images of the end of the nationstate. This negative view of the future was balanced by investments in a welfare-state apparatus devoted to improving the conditions of everyday life for citizens in terms of
a radical investment in militarism not to be repeated until the first decade of the twenty-first century, when
health, education, and the environment (Light 2003). Thus, the catastrophic as well as the utopian potentials of the nuclear state were explicit terms of public discourse, making
Americans now live in a postwelfare state society, which is
no longer so formally invested in improving the qualities of collective life through social
programming; thus, terror has increasingly become the primary domain of everyday politics in the
early twenty-first century. The lack of a positive vision of the collective future is pronounced in
the United States today, and it is amplified by the increasingly blurred public memory of the
historical evolution of the security state itself. Indeed, the proliferation of Cold War nuclear panics is rarely discussed as a model for
both panic and promise the basis for the domestic political sphere.
contemporary counterterror politics, leaving largely unexamined the truth or falsity of official claims of Soviet nuclear advantage: the 1950s bomber gap, the 1960s missile gap, the
these domestic productions, as
iconic moments in American politics, were emotional recruitments before they were
technological or military claims of fact. These episodes were domestic political campaigns of
threat proliferation before, and sometimes even after, the technological and scientific reality of
Soviet military capabilities had been determined. From this perspective, terror has a specific American logic
and domestic history, one that since 1945 has drawn on the destructive capacities of nuclear
weapons to focus social energies, unlock resources, and build things. In the twentieth century, the United
States remade itself through the atomic bomb, using nuclear fear as a coordinating principle for
U.S. institutions, citizen-state relations, and geopolitics alike (Masco 2006). The counterterror state, like the countercommunist
1970s window of vulnerability, and the 1980s Soviet first-strike capability. But it is important to recognize that
state before it, attempts to install through domestic affective recruitments a new perception of everyday life that is unassailable. The campaign to normalize threat is the flip side of
identifying and articulating new kinds of danger, allowing new forms of governance to be pursued as a necessary counterformation. Consider, for example, the following official
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statements about insecurity in the United States framed in the future conditional: This situation will continue as far ahead as anyone can foresee. We cannot return to “normalcy.”
This is the “new normalcy.” Only by winning what at best will be a long war of endurance can we hope to avoid . . . the very possible destruction of civilization itself. (quoted in
Chernus 2002, 44) Homeland security is not a temporary measure just to meet one crisis. Many of the steps we have now been forced to take will become permanent in American
life. They represent an understanding of the world as it is, and dangers we must guard against perhaps for decades to come. I think of it as the new normalcy. (Cheney 2001) As far
as anyone can foresee . The first statement—from July 1953—is by Eisenhower administration official James Lambie, who was charged with developing a national
communications strategy to mobilize citizens in the thermonuclear age. In response, he helped craft one of the largest public education campaigns in U.S. history (a program that
we remember today as civil defense), devoted to teaching citizens to fear the bomb in a specific way so as to prepare them for a potentially short nuclear or long cold war. The
second evocation of a “new normal”—from an October 2001 speech to the Republican Governors Association—is by Vice President Dick Cheney, who also attempts to
standardize danger and to create a new psychic infrastructure capable of accommodating a permanent, imminent danger. In both cases, existential threat is presented as both novel
and emergent and is then positioned as the baseline reality for a new kind of everyday American life. Future crisis is projected—as concept—to be the basis for life at institutional,
technological, and affective levels, reordering domestic politics and geopolitics in a startlingly economical gesture. Declaring a “new” normal is thus anything but new as a state
security practice in the United States. However, the objects, logics, and consequences of defense have significantly changed with the shift from the twentieth century’s nuclear
“balance of terror” to the twenty-first century’s “War on Terror.” 3 Interrogating the links between the first decade of the Cold War and the first decade of the War on Terror is a
technological revolution, surprise, normality, and terror have
been used to orchestrate a new kind of security culture. I pursue these comparisons not because they are absolutely symmetrical or
simply code shifts from nuclear fear to terrorism, but because each iteration of the national security state announces itself
through acts of normalization and naturalization (see Der Derian 2002). It is increasingly important to understand how
historically crafted images and logics of imminent danger allow feelings to be nationalized and
directed to produce antidemocratic actions and policy. These affective logics constitute a
specific zone of interaction between citizens and the state, one that is the very basis for the social
contract (which Hobbes once defined as the exchange of public obedience for collective security). As we shall see, national security affect is a
special kind of collective experience, one that is central to enabling the technological and
administrative capacities of the security state. Infrastructures—affective, imaginative, and
material—are linked in the production of American power today, creating an unprecedented
global projection of American fears and desires in the name of existential defense. The Threat Matrix
central project of this book, which pays specific attention to how
Since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, surprise and its opposite, anticipation, have been foundational concerns of the U.S. national security state. A formal
rationale for the 1947 National Security Act (which created the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, and the CIA) was to prevent a nuclear Pearl Harbor—to
prevent strategic surprise in the nuclear age. 4 U.S. policy makers immediately understood the power of the atomic bomb to be revolutionary, enabling U.S. leaders to threaten
rival nations with “prompt and utter destruction,” as President Harry Truman did in July 1945, or with “shock and awe,” in the language of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. 5 The ability to shock (at both psychic and material levels) and not experience shock, in other words, became a primary goal of the
American security state after 1945. The national security state also sought right from the beginning to politically exploit the psychological effects of nuclear fear as much as the
destructive physical capacities of nuclear weapons. This formulation of security makes the near future as well as the human nervous system specific objects of state scrutiny, with
perceptions and temporalities of danger the guiding administrative logics of the security state. At the start of the Cold War, the United States transformed an anticipated Soviet
nuclear capability into the rationale for building a global technological system, which became the always-on-alert infrastructure of mutual assured destruction. The nuclear
strategist Albert Wohlstetter (1958) famously called this the “delicate balance of terror,” a phrase that underscores the Cold War’s affective logics but not always its material
reality. Indeed, the era of most acute nuclear paranoia in the United States was a largely self-generated effort to mobilize and coordinate citizens, officials, military personnel, and
major social institutions through a new concept of nuclear terror. In the first decade of the War on Terror, the United States also committed to building an ever-expanding, alwayson-alert global security apparatus, but one that had an astonishing new range of interests (weapons, people, data, microbes). This is a broad-based effort to create a kind of
American power that can administer the global future, prevent rivals from amassing threatening power, and is never deterred or shocked. Counterterror is a project subject to
constant failure, and precisely because it fails constantly, it energizes a hyperactive, and increasingly planetary, U.S. security apparatus, one that is forever striving to realize its
imaginary potential. For defense experts, the challenge of the September 2001 attack was not only its spectacular violence but also the shocking display of American vulnerability
(see RETORT 2005). The fact that the global nuclear hyperpower could still suffer strategic surprise—and by suicide hijackers armed not with atomic bombs and state-of-the-art
bombers, but with simple box cutters and commercial airplanes—challenged the existing rationale for the massive multigenerational investment in defense. The U.S. nuclear
complex alone has cost over $6 trillion since 1943, a federal expenditure exceeded only by those for the nonnuclear military and social security (S. Schwartz 1998). Rather than
enjoying the end of history with the demise of the Soviet Union and the start of a new, unipolar American century, U.S. security experts were shocked and shamed by the ease with
which the attacks were carried out. Indeed, the attacks transformed the most powerful security apparatus in the world into a nervous system in a state of global panic (Taussig
1992). Immediately after the attacks, President Bush ordered that all potential threats made to U.S. interests around the world be routed directly to the White House. This unfiltered
“threat matrix” became a daily exercise in expanding the field of imminent danger for decision makers, as unvetted threats piled on top of one another to create a world of
By embracing an
amplifying economy of fear, policy makers became the most terrified of American subjects. When a
seemingly endless and varied forms of danger, with verifiable information mixed in with rumor, error, and hearsay (Mayer 2008, 5).
second wave of attacks hit on September 18, 2001, in the form of anthrax-filled letters aimed at top elected officials and figures in the news media, the result was a spectacularly
consequential dislocation: the U.S. Congress moved into improvised facilities while its members deliberated some of the most important security legislation in U.S. history; at the
same time, prominent media figures who might otherwise have been reporting on those deliberations instead focused on securing their work spaces from biological agents, while
generating a proliferating and hysterical media narrative of imminent attack. In this context, key White House officials came to believe they had been victims of a chemical warfare
attack when a “sensitive, specialized sensor, designed to alert anyone in the vicinity that the air they were breathing had been contaminated by potentially lethal radioactive,
chemical, or biological agents” sounded (Mayer 2008, 3). This alarm led Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and others to believe that they might have been
lethally infected by nerve gas. A faulty White House bioweapons sensor played a significant role in the evolution of the War on Terror, creating an affective atmosphere of
immediate danger to officials huddled in their most secure facilities. At this moment of vulnerable uncertainty, every worst-case scenario might have been playing out in real
The ever-expanding threat matrix created both escalating
responsibilities and new institutional opportunities to pursue specific visions of American power,
which in turn allowed a vast range of interests to quickly agree on “terror” as the operative
principle for a renewal and expansion of American power in the twenty-first century. The inability to
time—a cascading set of imagined horrors and potentials.
perfectly predict and preempt low-tech terroristic violence in 2001 enabled a new vision of the future to emerge among security experts, one in which nearly every aspect of
American life was potentially at risk from unknown forces, requiring not only a conceptual remaking of the concept of “security” but also a new global apparatus to achieve it.
Identifying threat, in all its myriad forms and temporalities, transformed the state security project from a focus on capabilities—that is, an expert effort to identify existing
technological capacities of known enemies—to a world of what ifs. A key innovation of the counterterrorist state is this commitment to using the imaginary to locate danger. Since
2001 scenarios, speculations, and hypotheticals have been endowed with the power to drive American policy across the spectrum of government agencies, which are now charged
not only with administering a day-to-day lived reality but also with responding to threatening probabilities, potentials, and possibilities before they become fact. Consider, for
example, how one branch of the Department of Defense (DOD) currently defines both its mission and U.S. national security: The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency
(DARPA) was established in 1958 to prevent strategic surprise from negatively impacting U.S. national security and create strategic surprise for U.S. adversaries by maintaining
the technological superiority of the U.S. military. To fulfill its mission, the Agency relies on diverse performers to apply multi-disciplinary approaches to both advance knowledge
through basic research and create innovative technologies that address current practical problems through applied research. DARPA’s scientific investigations span the gamut from
laboratory efforts to the creation of full-scale technology demonstrations in the fields of biology, medicine, computer science, chemistry, physics, engineering, mathematics,
materials sciences, social sciences, neurosciences and more. As the DOD’s primary innovation engine, DARPA undertakes projects that are finite in duration but that create lasting
revolutionary change. (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency n.d.) To prevent strategic surprise at home while creating it for others through revolutionary technological
change. DARPA announces itself programmatically here as an unending series of Manhattan Projects, using the full spectrum of scientific inquiry for U.S. national advantage. The
success or failure of U.S. national security is thus determined by the register of surprise—a highly slippery term whose negation requires a specific ability to read the future, as
well as the capacity to anticipate intentions, accidents, and opportunities on a global scale. DARPA’s mission statement also assumes nothing less than a permanent war posture
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and a planetary field of action. When amplified across the global U.S. national security apparatus, the logics of threat designation and preemption transform counterterrorism into a
project of constant affective recruitment and capacity generation. The Congressional Research Service estimates the formal costs of the first decade of the War on Terror at $1.4
trillion (Belasco 2011)—a vast U.S. expenditure that is in addition to the costs of maintaining the largest formal military budget in the world, which has almost doubled since 2001
(Stockholm International Peace Research Institute 2011). The Watson Institute at Brown University estimates that total costs of the first decade of counterterror come closer to $4
trillion (Costsofwar.org 2013). The first decade of the War on Terror has produced multiple fronts: many Manhattan Project–like research programs located across the military
sciences (from drones to cyberwar to biosecurity); the creation of a second defense department in the Department of Homeland Security; and a vast new commitment to
intelligence gathering, data mining, global digital communications systems, and, above all, new forms of expert threat perception. Dana Priest and William Arkin have shown that
since 2001 a new intelligence apparatus has been built that is too big for any single person to understand its reach, level of redundancy, or output. The authors found that over
850,000 people now have security clearances in counterterrorism alone, and generate some 50,000 reports a year. Priest and Arkin were able to identify “1,271 government
organizations and 1,931 private companies” working on “programs related to counter-terrorism, homeland security, and intelligence at over 10,000 locations across the United
States” (Priest and Arkin 2010, 1; see also 2011). Committed to recognizing vulnerabilities in the global web of U.S. interests and imagining proliferating vectors of foreign and
domestic threat, the catastrophic terrorist future is now a competitive domain for security experts at multiple agencies and companies—making disaster calculation the major
growth industry of the new century. The worst-case terrorist scenario is produced across this spectrum of expert activity, dictating the terms of the counterterror formation, and
maintaining a charged hold on the concept of security as well as the future. The paradox is that despite this commitment to preemption and the fact that the United States outspends
almost all other countries combined on its security, Americans in the twenty-first century are caught in multiple forms of crisis (economic, environmental, and political).
Counterterror is a mode of global engagement that attempts to extend U.S. military dominance
but one that paradoxically generates new forms of insecurity: by installing technological and
bureaucratic capabilities to preempt imagined threats, counterterror simultaneously creates new
forms of uncertainty, ripple effects from expert practices that create their own realities and
retaliations and threats. Every system has built into its infrastructure a future crisis: the
counterterror state is loading new capacities into the future as well as the conditions of possibility
for new nightmares not yet realized (Cazdyn 2007; see also Berlant 2007). This is not quite the epistemic murk that Michael Taussig (1987)
encounters in the mutual terror of colonial-native encounters in rubber-boom Colombia, as its domain is the future instead of the present. But by allocating
conceptual, material, and affective resources to ward off imagined but potentially catastrophic
terroristic futures, the counterterror state also creates the conditions for those catastrophic
futures to emerge. It does so by generating new arms races; increasing international blowback
from war, covert actions, and drone strikes; and by not responding to existing suffering at home
and abroad with the same urgency as it addresses real and imagined terrorist acts. A perverse
effect of the counterterror system is that failure and disaster, like surprise and shock, can be
absorbed as part of its internal circuit, authorizing an expansion of the number of objects to be
surveilled and secured, empowering expert speculation about the various forms of danger that
might emerge from an ever-shifting landscape of information and potential threat. Thus, for defense experts
most of all, an affective recruitment to constant crisis is one of the chief effects of the counterterror
formation—which is self-colonizing, opening a potentially endless conceptual space of worry and
projected dangers. Counterterror thus approaches the American future as both already ruined—a boundless source of violence—and as perfectible—a conceptual
universe requiring radical social and technological engineering and intervention. One powerful effect of these administrative logics is that demilitarizing becomes increasingly
impossible to imagine, as potential dangers pile up for experts, while citizens feel increasingly insecure with the diversion of funds and psychic energies from everyday welfare to
anticipatory defense (see Gusterson and Besteman 2009). Counterterror, then, constitutes itself as an endless horizon, providing a self-justifying rationale for radical expenditures
and action—offering a potentially eternal project for the security state. For when can the future ever be perfectly secured? When can terror ever be eradicated from both thought
and action? Threat, as an imaginary engagement with the future, is limitless, offering an ever-expanding field of potentials, possibilities, and fears for counterterror governance.
Gaming Death Perceptions of the future are affectively laden, as well as tied to expert judgment and information; they are based on feelings and intensities that can be nonrational
but that link people together through threat-based projection. Put differently, one can be afraid only of that which one knows to fear. Fear requires a kind of familiarity with danger
that the future does not allow us full access to. In the realm of esoteric military technologies—weapons of mass destruction, for example—the general public has no expert
knowledge to draw on and must instead be educated to think and feel a particular way about technological capacities and worst-case outcomes. Rehearsing the end of the nationstate at the level of imagination has consequently been a core American project since the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with each generation embracing its
The innovation of the War on
Terror is that it formally rejects deterrence, with its focus on global stability, as an objective in
favor of preemption —an unending manipulation of the future for national advantage. The
counterterror state is devoted to locating and/or conjuring up images of dangers from an
unrealized future and then combating each of those alternate futures as if they were material
and imminent threats. In this way, imagined futures and the affects they produce have become
institutionalized as national security policy, creating a form of expert judgment that is at war
with its own apocalyptic imaginary before it meets the real world, creating a massively
productive form of militarization that is easily delinked from evidence, facts, or the observable
in the name of confronting and eliminating potentially cataclysmic future danger. How did this kind of
own concept of nation-ending apocalyptic danger, consolidated most powerfully in the image of the mushroom cloud.
governance come to be? The origins of the preemptive, counterterror state reside in the logics and lessons of the Cold War. The nuclear arms race, with its minute-to-minute
calculation of threat and advantage and the always ready-to-launch nuclear war machine, was an effort to stabilize the present by loading nuclear destruction into the everyday and
continually displacing it by a few minutes into the future. Mutual assured destruction promised that any state that started a nuclear war would only minutes later be destroyed by it,
an unprecedented compression of time, space, and destructive capability in the name of global defense. To make this system work, U.S. defense experts not only built nuclear
weapons and delivery systems that could function in any environment, launch within minutes, and operate on a planetary scale, but they also gamed, modeled, and fantasized
future war scenarios incessantly (see Ghamari-Tabrizi 2005). Locating security in intercontinental missile systems that were never fully tested and trusting a vast web of machines,
institutions, and people to respond perfectly in the first moments of global crisis, the nuclear war machine was designed first and foremost to produce fear of the near future in
adversaries and to harness that fear to produce a stable bipolar world. The Cold War system was therefore saturated with affective and imaginary recruitments as well as
anticipatory logics. Deterrence, however, restrained both sides of the conflict, putting a break on both U.S. and Soviet desires and aggressions. The Cold War focus on nuclear
weapons and delivery systems also set material parameters for the speculative expert imaginary; it focused experts’ attention on the numbers and types of Soviet weapons, their
deployments and machinic capabilities (speed and force), as well as on the psychologies of nuclear command and control. These technoscientific forms were never free of political
calculation but had a material basis: Donald MacKenzie (1990) has shown how the accuracy of intercontinental missiles was determined in the United States not by exacting
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experimental proof but rather by a political consensus among all the interested scientific, military, and industrial parties (adding an unacknowledged uncertainty to nuclear
targeting going forward). Similarly, Lynn Eden (2004) has shown how the urban consequences of fire from nuclear explosions fell out of formal nuclear war planning in the 1960s,
enabling the development of nuclear war and civil defense concepts that vastly underestimated the material effects of each detonation and allowed far greater numbers of U.S.
although nuclear war remained at the conceptual stage
after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, it was fought incessantly at the level of
the imagination, with an unending state-based commitment to trying to model, game, intuit, and
assess the likely actions of all parties in a nuclear conflict. By contrast the future imagined by
counterterror officials today is an endless spectrum of threat, with a proliferating set of objects,
vectors, scales, and possibilities—a spectrum that is literally not bounded by time, space,
technology, or the rules of evidence. By defining terror as constantly emergent, the
counterterror state also assumes an open-ended futurity that cannot be deterred by external
forces. As Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld (2002) famously put it in a press conference about the (ultimately fictional) threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction before the
U.S. invasion, the counterterror state needs to make not-yet-visible dangers its central concern because:
weapons to be deployed globally (see also Gusterson 2008). In other words,
Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know
there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if
one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones. And so people who have the omniscience that they
can say with high certainty that something has not happened or is not being tried, have capabilities . . . they can do things I can’t do. “Unknown unknowns” can now be the basis
for war. Here, Rumsfeld transforms a catastrophic future at the level of the speculative imaginary into an urgent problem of counterterror. Security is thus constituted as both a
necessity (to defend against catastrophic shock) and as an unachievable goal (as the future is an inexhaustible source of threat), a perverse logic that the counterterror state uses to
drive increasing calls for resources, technical capacities, and agency. In the first decade of counterterror, a strategic mobilization by security officials of the unknown, not yet
emergent, or invisible danger has powerfully overturned long-standing American democratic values about the rule of law, the treatment of captives, the surveillance of citizens, and
the necessity of covert actions. It has transformed intuitions and desires into policy, invalidated long-standing forms of expert judgment that worked to constrain official fears by
attending to material reality, and—as a result—has enabled deadly actions in the absence of facts. Rumsfeld’s vision—precisely because it transforms the unknown into a space of
terror requiring immediate action—simultaneously validates and eliminates the possibility of factual evidence, creating both a rationale for unrestrained American power and a
security apparatus of constantly expanding capacities and infrastructures. This logic renders security itself obsolete, replacing it with a constant conceptual agitation and physical
mobilization. Threat (as pure potential) is used to enable a radically active and ever emerging counterterror state, allowing action to be favored over restraint, possibilities over
capabilities, hypotheticals over knowledge. Excitable Subjects The uniquely destructive capabilities of nuclear weapons and the speed of their potential delivery constituted a new
kind of technologically mediated existential threat after 1945, one that made feelings (fear, terror, shock, aggression, futility, revenge) a new national project. I argue in this book
that the first and most powerful effect of the nuclear revolution in the United States was the constitution of a new affective politics, one that informs the evolution of the national
security state to this day and that is key to the formation of the counterterror state. Put differently, in the age of thermonuclear war, the security state became a committed affect
theorist, investing substantial multidisciplinary resources in efforts to understand public morale, contagious affects (panic, fear, terror), resilience, resolve, and the long-term effects
of stress. The nuclear balance of terror was always an all-encompassing formation, creating a new executive (a president preauthorized to start a nuclear war any second of the day)
and a new citizen-subject (recruited to reorganize everyday life around the minute-to-minute reality of nuclear danger). Military science funded extensive research on affects,
feelings, and emotions with the goal of both psychologically strengthening and militarizing American society, using nuclear fear to calibrate officials and citizens alike through a
National security affect has thus become a new kind of infrastructure—a
“structure of feeling,” to use Raymond Williams’s felicitous phrase (1978, 132)—that is historically produced, shared, and
officially constituted as a necessary background condition of everyday life (see Stoler 2009). It is based on
fears that are officially sanctioned and promoted as a means of coordinating citizens as members
of a national security state. It can be a specific and negative form of what Kathleen Stewart calls “ordinary affects” (2007), in the sense that certain
kinds of fear are now coded into social life as potentials that can be triggered by small events—
fear of the unattended suitcase in the airport, for example—or directly recruited by official
statements, such as terrorist alert warnings. National security affect also relies on a specific
political aesthetic, one that rehearses certain forms and images to produce what Jacques Rancière calls a
“sensuous shock” that limits thought as much as expands it (2009, 6; see also M. Hansen 2004). The goal of a
national security system is to produce a citizen-subject who responds to officially designated
signs of danger automatically, instinctively activating logics and actions learned over time
through drills and media indoctrination. An individual’s response to this kind of emotional call (in either the affirmative or negative) reveals his or
her membership in a national community. Indeed, the production of a fearful and docile public in the nuclear age has
been historically matched by the rise of vibrant activist movements (across the antinuclear, peace,
justice, and environmental spectrum), counterpublics that mirror the intensities of officially
sanctioned nuclear terror in pursuit of different collective futures. 6 An affective atmosphere of
everyday anxiety (Anderson 2009), grounded in an understanding that accidents, disasters, and attacks
can happen at any moment of the day, is transformed into individualized emotion by specific
events, becoming a personalized and deeply felt experience. As Stewart puts it, “what affects us—the
sentience of a situation—is also a dwelling, a worlding born from an atmospheric attunement” (2011,
449). I argue in this book that national security affect has a specific form in the United States, one that is tied to
a deep structural investment in the atomic bomb and that has been recalibrated and expanded
since 2001 to address a new concept of terror (consolidated in the logic of the WMD ). American
citizens have been taught through official and mass-media campaigns to attune themselves to
the possibility of terroristic violence as an unlimited daily potential. This new concept of terror
new image of collective death.
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maintains the minute-to-minute threat made familiar by decades of Cold War nuclear culture,
but it is different in that it is an open-ended concept, one that links hugely diverse kinds of
threats (nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons to be sure, but also attacks on the public
image of the United States, computer hacking, infectious disease, and disruptions to daily life, to
name but a few) and treats them all as equally imminent, equally catastrophic. Counterterror
today requires a continual expansion of the security state, reaching a limit only when its key
objects attain planetary scale (exhausting space) or when federal monies run out (exhausting
resources). That is, counterterror sets no conceptual or territorial limit to defense, scaling its
problems up to the ultimate spatial unit—the earth—while offering an unlimited call for
resources to secure life from the species to the population to the individual to the microbe. In this
manner, counterterror produces a highly mobile sovereignty, one that uses the potential of
catastrophic future events as a means of overcoming legal, ethical, and political barriers in the
here and now and that is endlessly searching for new objects of concern. However, this commitment
to total security—and the constant failure to achieve it—creates an unending bureaucratic circuit
where shock requires ever more militarization and normalization in the name of warding off
future shock. A war on shock, like a war on terror, locates national security within the human
nervous system itself, constituting a peculiarly embodied psychopolitics (Orr 2006) that fuses an
energetic apocalyptic imagination with both an immediate and deep future. Conceptually, a national security
project of this kind would seem to offer only two means of achieving stability: first, by changing the nature of the individual at the level of emotions, senses, and psychology so
that he or she experiences threat in a different manner—a project of normalization through militarization; and second, by changing the global environment in the hope of
endeavoring to
produce a new citizen who is tuned to the specific threats of the age and psychologically
capable of supporting permanent war, while simultaneously mobilizing U.S. economic and
military power to change the international system, in the hope of eradicating threat on a planetary
basis. However, the impossibility of this dual effort to produce a completely compliant citizen
incapable of resisting the national security state or to eliminate danger on a planetary scale creates
an endless feedback loop of shock, normalization, and militarization. We could say that this recursive
system is what constitutes the United States as a global hyperpower, but an increasingly fragile
one—as experts see danger coming in all physical dimensions (land, sea, air, space, and
cyberspace) as well as in all temporal conditions (past, present, and future). This requires a new
kind of expert psychopolitics that is not grounded in the effort to establish facts but rather is
committed to generating speculative futures (imagined dangers of cataclysmic scale) that it will
then need to counter. Security thus becomes a highly conceptual enterprise, one that moves past
statistical, fact-based, or capability-based assessments of risk (see Collier 2008; De Goede 2008). Threat
assessment—with all its imaginative, affective recruitments—becomes the chief domain of
counterterror. The inability to perfectly predict and counter threat creates in the American security
system the opportunity to constitute nearly every domain and object of everyday life as a
potential vector of attack, creating a national security project that performs as a nearly perfect
paranoid system, but one with planetary reach. Peter Sloterdijk has noted that a nervous condition is an
attribute of globalization, which he sees as: the establishment of the system of synchronous stress
on a global scale. This has progressed to such an extent that those who do not make themselves continuously
available for synchronous stress seem asocial. Excitability is now the foremost duty of all
citizens. This is why we no longer need military service. What is required is the general theme
of duty, that is to say, a readiness to play your role as a conductor of excitation for collective,
opportunist psychoses. (Sloterdijk and Henrichs 2001, 82) Excitability is now the foremost duty of all citizens .
The circulation of affect, the ability to be coordinated as subjects through felt intensities rather
than reason at a mass level, is a core aspect of modern life (see Mazzarella 2010; Clough 2007, 19; Orr 2006). The atomic bomb is
eliminating the possibility of danger. The Cold War state and the counterterror state in specific formulations have attempted to do both:
one key origin of this kind of governance (see Lutz 1997, 247), a WMD that greatly expanded American power but that also created a world of constant existential danger, one that
A security culture of
existential threat was embedded quite thoroughly in American society and U.S. security
was quite formally managed for generations by suturing collective life to an imminent destruction located in each minute of the day.
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institutions by decades of Cold War, allowing national politics of every kind (domestic,
international, activist) to be positioned as a matter of collective life or collective death. From this
perspective, terror is a familiar mode of governance in the United States, one that was merely
reconstituted in 2001 with a new set of objects, ambitions, and concerns.
Reject colonial knowledge-production – their epistemology contributes to a matrix
of imperialism that marginalizes local experience which fuels global and
interpersonal racism – vote NEG as an act of epistemic disobedience
Mignolo, Prof @ Duke University, 13
(Walter, “Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and De-Colonial Freedom,” Theory, Culture &
Society 26(7): 1-24, http://waltermignolo.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/epistemicdisobedience-2.pdf)
Knowledge-making in the modern/colonial world is at once knowledge in which the very concept of
‘modernity’ rests and the judge and warrantor of legitimate and sustainable knowledge. Vandana
Shiva (1993) suggested ‘monocultures of the mind’ to describe Western imperial knowledge, its
totalitarian and epistemically non-democratic implementation.11 Knowledge-making presupposes a semiotic
code (languages, images, sounds, colors, etc.) shared between users in semiotic exchanges. It is a common human endeavor (I would
say of any living organism, since without ‘knowing’ life cannot be sustained). Taking a short cut from general conditions of
knowledge-making among human beings sensu largo (that is, without racist and gender/sexual normativity) to knowledge-making in
the organization of society, institutions are created that accomplish two functions: training of new (epistemic obedient) members and
control of who enters and what knowledge-making is allowed, disavowed, devalued or celebrated. Knowledge-making
entrenched with imperial/colonial purposes, from the European Renaissance to the US
neoliberalism (that is, political economy as advanced by F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman) that guided the last stage of
globalization (from Ronald Reagan to the Wall Street collapse), was grounded – as mentioned before – in specific languages,
institutions and geo-historical locations. The languages of Western imperial/knowledgemaking (and the selfdefinition of the West – the West of Jerusalem – by social actors that saw themselves as Western Christians) were
practiced
social actors (human beings) dwelling in a specific geo-historical space, with
specific memories that said actors constructed and reconstructed in the process of creating their
own Christian, Western and European identity. Briefly, the formal apparatus of enunciation is the basic apparatus for
(speaking and writing) by
engaging in institutional and purposive knowledge-making geo-politically oriented. Originally theology was the overarching
conceptual and cosmo - logical frame of knowledge-making in which social actors engaged and institutions (monasteries, churches,
universities, states, etc.) were created. Secularization, in the 18th century, displaced Christian theology and secular philosophy and
science took its place. Both frames, theological and secular, bracketed their geo-historical foundation and, instead, made of theology
and philosophy/science a frame of knowledge beyond geo-historical and body location. The subject of theological knowledge
depended on the dictates of God while the subject of secular philosophy/science depended on Reason, on the Cartesian ego/mind and
Kant’s transcendental reason. Thus, Western imperial knowledge was cast in Western imperial languages and was theopolitically and
ego-politically founded. Such foundation legitimizes the assumptions and claims that knowledge was beyond bodies and places and
that Christian theology and secular philosophy and science were the limits of knowledge-making beyond and besides which all
knowledge was lacking: folklore, myth, traditional knowledge, were invented to legitimize imperial epistemology. Theo- and egopolitics of knowledge also bracketed the body in knowledge-making (Mignolo, 2007a). By locating knowledge in the
mind only, and bracketing ‘secondary qualities’ (affects, emotions, desires, anger, humiliation, etc.),
social actors who happened to be white, inhabiting Europe/ Western Christendom and speaking specific
languages assumed that what was right for them in that place and which fulfilled their affects,
emotions, fears and angers was indeed valid for the rest of the planet and, consequently, that
they were the depositor, warrantor, creator and distributor of universal knowledge. In the process of globally
enacting the European system of belief and structure of knowledge, human beings who were not Christian did not inhabit the
memories of Europe, from Greece through Rome, were not familiar with the six modern imperial European languages and, frankly,
did not care much about all of that until they realized that they were expected and requested to submit to the European (and in the 20th
century to the United States also), knowledge, belief, life style and world view. Responses to the contrary came, since the 16th
century, from all over the globe, but imperial theo- and ego-politics of knowledge managed to prevail through economically sustained
institutions (universities, museums, delegations, state officers, armies, etc.). Now, the type of responses I am referring to were
responses provoked by the making and remaking of the colonial matrix of power: a complex conceptual structure that guided actions
in the domain of economy (exploitation of labor and appropriation of land/ natural resources), authority (government, military forces),
gender/sexuality and knowledge/subjectivity. Since the responses I am referring to were responses to the colonial matrix of power, I
would describe such responses as de-colonial (Mignolo, 2007b). The cases/examples I offered in Section III also show that in such
responses de-colonial geo-politics of knowledge confronted imperial theo- and ego-politically based assumptions on the universality
of Western knowledge-making and institutional grounding. But there is still another dimension in de-colonial politics of knowledge
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claim that knowledge-making for well being rather than for controlling
and managing populations for imperial interest shall come from local experiences and needs,
rather than from local imperial experiences and needs projected to the globe, invokes also the bodypolitics of knowledge. Why? Because not only regions and locales in which imperial languages were not
ancestrally spoken and that were alien to the history of Greek and Latin were disqualified and the disqualification filled with
relevant for my argument: the
knowledge-product and knowledge-making in bodies and institutions where the conceptual warranty of Greek and Latin legitimized
the belief of their dwelling in the universal, but bodies too. Racism, as we sense it today, was the result of two
conceptual inventions of imperial knowledge: that certain bodies were inferior to others, and that inferior bodies carried
inferior intelligence. The emergence of a body-politics of knowledge is a second strand of de-colonial thinking and the de-colonial
option. You can still argue that there are ‘bodies’ and ‘regions’ in need of guidance from developed ‘bodies’ and ‘regions’ that got
there first and know how to do it. As an honest liberal, you would recognize that you do not want to ‘impose’ your
knowledge and experience but to ‘work with the locals’. The problem is, what agenda will be
implemented, yours or theirs? Back then to Chatterjee and Smith. De-colonial thinking presupposes delinking (epistemically and politically) from the web of imperial knowledge (theo- and ego-politically
grounded) from disciplinary management. A common topic of conversation today, after the financial crisis on Wall Street, is ‘how to
save capitalism’. A de-colonial question would be: ‘Why would you want to save capitalism and not
save human beings? Why save an abstract entity and not the human lives that capitalism is constantly destroying?’ In the same
vein, geo- and body-politics of knowledge, de-colonial thinking and the de-colonial option place human lives and life in general first
rather than making claims for the ‘transformation of the disciplines’. But, still, claiming life and human lives first, de-
colonial thinking is not joining forces with ‘the politics of life in itself’ as Nicholas Rose (2007) has it.
Rose’s ‘politics of life in itself’ is the last development in the ‘mercantilization of life’ and of ‘bio-power’ (as
Foucault has it). In the ‘politics of life in itself’ political and economic strategies for controlling life at the same time as creating more
one of the practical consequences of an
ego-politics of knowledge implemented in the sphere of the state. Politics of life in itself extends it to the
consumers join forces. Bio-politics, in Foucault’s conception, was
market. Thus, politics of life in itself describes the enormous potential of bio-technology to generate consumers who invest their
earnings in buying health-promoting products in order to maintain the reproduction of technology that will ‘improve’ the control of
human beings at the same time as creating more wealth through the money invested by consumers who buy health-promoting
technology. This is the point where de-colonial options, grounded in geo- and body-politics of knowledge, engage in both
decolonizing knowledge and decolonial knowledge-making, delinking from the web of
imperial/modern knowledge and from the colonial matrix of power.
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Useful Overview Evidence
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2NC/1NR—Epistemology
Their obsession with scientific quantification of IR is narcissism in the face of
inevitable uncertainty—their studies are not neutral, but rather are deeply
political—variables are cherry picked to support theories that conform to
pre-conceived cultural notions.
Jeong 99—associate professor at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason
University (Ho-Won, Epistemological Foundations for Peace
Research, classweb.gmu.edu/hwjeong/epistemological.htm)
Modes of Social Inquiry
In a positivist mode of inquiry, social knowledge emerges from emulating the procedures of natural
sciences. There is a clear distinction between facts and values. Efforts for new theoretical departures
remain valid only if concrete empirical research programs are developed. A theory needs to be verified by
the process of operationalizing and testing hypotheses. Research should be freed from non-empirical claims
of individual conviction and conscience. In dealing with the complexity of empirical phenomena, theory
ought to explain and predict the trend of events
Contrary to that, hermeneutics is based on the analysis of the meanings which human beings attach
to their actions. The study of mind is different from that of nature. Analysis should reveal social
constraints and promote cultural understanding. The goal of research is enlightenment
and emancipation. The values and priorities of goals tend to be diverse across social groups and
classes. What is rational changes across time and space. Rationalities are intersubjective in the
sense that they can only be really examined from within the experiences of social groups which
are the object of research.
Critical theory methodology identifies forms of conflict and patterns of development which could
lead to the transformation of a world order. There is no over-arching ahistorical
structure. Explanation of the prospects for change requires analysis of the connections
between modes of production and hierarchical political structures (Cox, 1996). The scope of
the inquiry also focuses on a distorted ideological account of social relations by a hegemonic
class.
In a postmodern vein, problems in different social locations and histories are interpreted by
multiple minds and knowledge rather than meta-narratives (Seidman, 1994:5). Speculation is the most
open form of inquiry. Humanity cannot be studied through a legislative reason which is helpful in
producing general theories. The social world is fragmented into a multitude of communities and
cultural traditions. The role of a social analyst is to mediate between different social worlds and to interpret
unfamiliar cultures (Sediman, 1994:14). Resolving major theoretical differences is not desirable nor
feasible.
Scientific Approaches to Peace Research
The early endeavor to establish a peace science originates in mathematical modelling of dynamics of arms
races (Richardson, 1960). Quantitative studies of conflict behavior in the 1960s was affected by the
revolution of behavioral sciences. Theoretical development was believed to be promoted by the collection
of raw data, highly deductive propositions, and empirical verification. Formal models supported by
statistical analysis were expected to explain both behavioral and structural characteristics of violent
conflict.
The motivation behind scientific research was that ideas for creating a peaceful world would emerge
from theories on human behavior and institutions verified by empirical methods. Hypothesis building
would help researchers observe cooperative and conflictual patterns of behavior under different
circumstances. Order in international relations could be analyzed in terms of such variables
as distribution of power and patterns of interaction between political units (Kaplan, 1957; Modelski,
1978). Perceptions and cognition of decision makers and group processes are important variables in
scientific approaches to research on war decision making. Regularities in human behavior
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were conceptualized and generalized in the studies of the Korean War decision making and the Cuban
Missile Crisis.(Allison, 1971; Paige, 1968)
Scientific orientation has paid a great deal of attention to data collection and representation of the data
through a modelling process. Simulation, gaming techniques have been utilized in developing a causal
model of violent conflict (Guetzkow and Alger, 1963; Singer and Small, 1972). Later the interaction of
economic, social, political and environmental systems was studied by world modelling approaches
(Bremer, 1987). Methodological rigor and precision were sought in systematic observation of the problems
of violence and other types of human sufferings.
The Critique of Behavioral Sciences
The behavioralist traditions of peace research have been criticized for being too empiricist.(Galtung,
1975) Quantitative analysis is not able to reveal intentional aspects of behavior in a specific
context. Developing peace research requires a framework for synthesis in integrating different
sets of issues. While collecting data on manifest violence, arms races and military coups is critical to the
development of empirical theories (SIPRI, 1996), research design has to be guided by appropriate
theoretical frameworks. The ability to think about and discuss key research questions stems from
conceptual development of issues to be studied.
Ignoring normative questions would not help find alternative visions. Conditions for building
peace are not dealt with in behavioral research traditions. Statistical data and empirical findings
are themselves do not offer strategies for creating a peaceful world. The uncertainty of politics
would not be removed by pure scientific analysis of human behavior. According to some observers
in peace studies, the efforts to find regularities have been pursued "to the point of eliminating
individual creativity and responsibility may well mire us in cyclic determinism."(Forcey,
1989:13) Critics of the positivist paradigm attribute the reductionist character of contemporary
thought to the drive for control of nature.
The critique of behavioral sciences coincides with a "critique of conscience" in the academic community.
Conscience dictates feelings, moral stances, and a concern for truth and justice. The desire for value
explicit inquiry stems from the fact that human behavior would not be investigated without references to
social collectivity in historical contexts. Overall, the normative starting point of peace research has to be
anchored in the agreement that peace is the object of the quest.(Broadhead, 1997:2) The utility of any
research methods could be evaluated in terms of the way they are compatible with the general goal of a
disciplinary focus.
Holistic Approaches
Some researchers suggest that peace studies should start from holism as the framework.(Smoker and Groff,
1996) Knowledge about general human experiences of conflict helps interpret specific events. Given their
abstract nature, however, theories may not correspond with the facts and events which they seek to explain.
The meanings of events are set up within a context of wholes. The intellectual transformation is
necessary for developing a paradigm of peace. The achievement of peace should be a holistic goal of
research.
Holistic versions of theories project the flow of alternative images of reality. There are different
theoretical explanations about how and why to go to war. The plurality of theories ought not to be regarded
as a preliminary stage of knowledge which will eventually lead to one true grand theory. Universally
applicable knowledge is not produced by piecemeal theory building efforts. There seems to be consensus
that peace research must not be limited to conventional empirical methods. Extended historical
perspectives illustrate what is important in understanding conditions for peace. The evaluation of
research findings needs a yardstick for examining their relevance. The incorporation of
emancipatory cognitive interest would help suggest theories for a peaceful world. More holistic
approaches can be encouraged by hermeneutic philosophy of science.
Reasoning needs to be combined with experiences in understanding the holistic pictures of social
relations. The outcome in the real world is not easily deduced from abstractly modeled
relationships. In considering difficulties for justification of inducing wholes from parts, the ultimate
validity of the big pictures is elusive. Theories which can be positively verifiable does not
necessarily mean that they are true. Realities in peace and conflict do not last long enough to be
subject to comprehensive, systematic and effective empirical assaults on them. Explanation can
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be based on intuitive understanding of long and varied experiences. There are various ways to
observe the world, including historical interpretations.Different perceptions of social relationships
result from the process of formation and transformation of images and symbols.
Peace studies may belong to the same category as history and critical sociology in terms of its methods to
study an object. In contrast with economics, many factors related to structural violence such as
political repression and economic exploitation cannot be easily understood without sociohistorical contexts. Distinctions between independent and dependent variables are
artificial. Understanding the outcome of an event would be enhanced by clarifying the specific goals of
actors.
Emancipatory Projects
Direct criticism of sovereign state power may be based on questioning the mode of analysis to
construct linear histories. Social and political boundaries cannot be imposed especially when truth
and meanings are in doubt. Sovereign claims are used to shape human loyalties, but the forms of
identities are not any more certain. Resolving differences of opinion about the legitimacy of state
institutions is not possible within clearly defined and demarcated areas of research. Thus
emancipatory projects oppose intellectual and social closure which does not tolerate diversity.
In a poststructural approach, language and discourse shape politics and social institutions.(Bannet,
1993) A normative social space is located in the process of assigning meanings to opposing
phenomena. Binary opposition have contributed to the creation of linguistic and social
hierarchies.(Seidman, 1994:18) Poststructuralism aims to disturb the dominant binary meanings that
function to perpetuate social and political hierarchies. Deconstructionism is the method to be deployed.
This involves unsettling and displacing the binary hierarchies. The goal of a deconstructionist strategy is to
create a social space which favors autonomy. This process is tolerant of difference and
ambiguity.(Seidman, 1994:19) The historically contingent origin and political
role of binary hierarchies are uncovered by deconstructionism.
Instead of being instruments of bureaucratic social control, human studies should serve
emancipatory aims. Society is imagined less as a material structure, organic order, or social
system than as a construction rooted in historically specific discursive practices. Communities serve
as texts whose symbols and meanings need to be translated. Interpretative knowledge promotes diversity,
expands tolerance, and legitimates difference as well as fosters understanding and communication
(Seidman, 1994:14-5)
People's perceptions about the world rely on their social and cultural milieu. The goal
of emancipation has nothing to do with science. Legitimation arises from their own linguistic practice
and communicational interaction. As long as social science serves as the instrument of a disciplined
society, truth is produced by power. (Foucault, 1967) All knowledge claims are moves in a power
game. Social science can contribute to emancipation by widening and deepening our sense of
community. If meanings rest with communities, knowledge can have a specific role in promoting
human solidarity.(Waever, Ole, 1996:171)
Value Issues
Even in a conventional mode of inquiry, values are not always considered separate from
analysis. The accumulation of more data and testing hypotheses may reveal a trend in the arms
race. However, the ultimate analytical goal should be not only explanatory but also
prescriptive. The goals of peace research are defined in terms of broad human interests which
are not dealt with by a state-centric paradigm. Human dimensions of security can be more
easily understood in value paradigms. This paradigm shift requires a more focus on non-state centric
actors, ranging from individuals to supranational institutions. The bias toward a more inclusive concept
of global society as opposed to the exclusionary state can be justified in terms of a goal oriented
research.
Each discipline is governed by certain sets of assumptions and rules that determine its approaches
to knowledge and acceptable methods (Forcey, 1989:11). Peace and conflict studies have been
developed by value-guided research paradigms. Multidimensional concepts of security explain
the importance of economic equity and ecological protection. Core theories have been established
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around negative and positive peace. Peace has become a more inclusive concept. The underlying
assumptions of positive peace have value implications for the satisfaction of basic needs. Peaceful
conditions include freedom from oppression and social justice beyond the absence of violence. The impact
of poverty and economic exploitation on conflict can be empirically understood. However, their
major form of inquiry ought to be dialectic. While peace and conflict studies need to be as
objective as possible, it cannot succumb to the academic prejudice of total dissociation from the
object of study. The starting point for peace research may be found in the ideals of social
transformation through knowledge.
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2NC---Reject Aff Evidence
Securitization rhetoric relies on power relations to reinforce its own
legitimacy – the judge as an educator should challenge those assumptions and
disrupt the presumed credibility of the affirmative’s scholarship
Song ’15 – associate professor of political science at the University of Macau, received his Ph.D. in
political science from the University of Siena, Italy
Weiqing Song. “Securitization of the “China Threat” Discourse: A Poststructuralist Account” China
Review, Volume 15, Number 1, Spring 2015, pp. 145-169. Project Muse.
In the present research, the three specific modes outlined by Hansen are used to identify the various ways in which the China threat
issue is discursively performed and to determine how this process relates to policy making. Language
is an essential
component of successful securitization, and is thus key to the formation and performance of
the China threat discourse. However, language is deployed in various specific social situations,
each associated with a distinct style, status, and register. A useful way of classifying social situations is domain
analysis. In sociolinguistic terms, a domain is defined by three characteristics: place, role– relationship, and topic.38 A domain is a
discourse community comprising a group of people who subscribe to the conventions that define a particular kind of language use. In
communicative relationship is inseparable from, and always overlaps with, power
relations wherein individuals’ actions are exercised upon other individuals.39 Each individual
belongs to a different discourse community (or communities) within society, according to his or her
education, status, ideological affiliation, and so on. Therefore, the success of a securitization act
relies on the ability of an authoritative agent to deploy language that is appropriate to its audience
in terms of both style and content.
Therefore, securitization acts relating to the so-called China threat are effective only if the
relevant authoritative agents perform in the correct discourse communities or domains.
Authoritative agents may struggle to convey convincing and compelling interpretations of
international issues in their securitization acts. Three major communities can be identified in human society, along a
practice, this
continuum from general to specific: the general public, the attentive public, and social elites. Each of these communities uses language
and knowledge differently, and thus requires a particular securitization mode. As shown in Table 1, each of the three modes of
securitization—scientific theory, normative analogy, and political myth—has a different logic and operates differently in terms of
structural incorporation, episteme terrain, and substantial modality. It is worth noting that the three modes are ideal types
that are not clear-cut, but overlapping. For example, although the scientific mode is dominated by the method of
scientific theory, it may also be complemented by the methods of historical analogy and political myth. The following sections are
devoted to detailed discussion of the three modes. Three classic texts are chosen to illustrate these modes, each performed by relevant
authoritative agents of power in their respective domains of knowledge.
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2NC---Value to Life
Security imposes a calculative logic that destroys value to life
Dillon 96 (Michael, Professor of Politics – University of Lancaster, Politics of Security, p. 26)
Everything, for example, has now become possible. But what human being seems most impelled to do with the
power of its actions is to turn itself into a species; not merely an animal species, nor even a species of currency or consumption
(which amount to the same thing), but a mere species of calculation. For only by reducing itself to an index of
calculation does it seem capable of constructing that oplitical arithmetic by which it can secure the
security globalised Western thought insists upon, and which a world made uncreasingly unpredictable by the very
way human being acts into it now seem to require. Yet, the very rage for calculability which securing security incites is
precisely also what reduces human freedom, inducing either despair or the surrender of what is human to
the dehumanising calculative logic of what seems to be necessary to secure security. I think, then, that Hannah Arendt was
right when she saw late modern humankind caught in a dangerous world-destroying cleft between a belief that everything is possible
and a willingness to surender itself to so-called laws of necessity (calculability itself) which would make everything possible. That it
was, in short, characterized by a combination of reckless omnipotence and reckless despair. But I also think that things have gone
one stage further – the surrender to the necessity of realising everything that is possible- and that this found its
paradigmatic expression for example in the deterrent security policies of the Cold War; where everything up to
and including self-immolation not only became possible but actually necessary in the interests of (inter)national
security. The logic persists in the metaphysical core of modern politics- the axiom of Inter-state security relations, popularized for
example, through strategic discourse- even if the details have changed.
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Aff Ev. Suspect
Prefer our evidence—the Aff is epistemologically bankrupt. Their evidence is
manufactured and distorted by the threat industry.
Pieterse 7—Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Sociology @ Illinois (Urbana) [“Political and Economic
Brinkmanship,” Review of International Political Economy 14: 3 p 473]
Brinkmanship and producing instability carry several meanings. The American military spends 48% of
world military spending (2005) and represents a vast, virtually continuously growing establishment
that is a world in itself with its own lingo, its own reasons, internecine battles and projects. That
this large security establishment is a bipartisan project makes it politically relatively immune. That
for security reasons it is an insular world shelters it from scrutiny. For reasons of ‘deniability’ the
president is insulated from certain operations (Risen, 2006). That it is a completely hierarchical world
onto itself makes it relatively unaccountable. Hence, to quote Rumsfeld, ‘stuff happens’. In part this is
the familiar theme of the Praetorian Guard and the shadow state (Stockwell, 1991). It includes a
military on the go, a military that seeks career advancement through role expansion, seeks
expansion through threat inflation, and in inflated threats finds rationales for ruthless action and
is thus subject to feedback from its own echo chambers. Misinformation broadcast by part of the
intelligence apparatus blows back to other security circles where it may be taken for real (Johnson,
2000). Inhabiting a hall of mirrors this apparatus operates in a perpetual state of self hypnosis
with, since it concerns classified information and covert ops, limited checks on its functioning.
Military empirically hypes threats
Zenko 2/26—Micah Zenko is a Fellow in the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign
Relations [February 26, 2013, “Most. Dangerous. World. Ever.” Foreign Policy,
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/02/26/most_dangerous_world_ever?wp_login_redirect=0]
In fact, the military is actually pretty good at developing worst-case contingency response plans
for any number of foreseeable or crazy crises, using the operations -- or "3" -- planning staffs at
combatant commands and in the Joint Staff. But the Pentagon's budgetary and programmatic
managers did not plan in advance of sequestration, and now they find themselves scrambling to
finish the job. In September, Defense Department comptroller Robert Hale said, "We will wait as long as
we can to begin this process." Last week, he defended the lack of planning: "If we'd done this six months
ago, we would have caused the degradation in productivity and morale that we're seeing now among our
civilians." History will judge whether or not the Pentagon gambled correctly, if the already once-delayed
sequestration is triggered as scheduled this Friday.
Instead of planning, Pentagon officials seemed to all reach for their thesauri after the Budget Control Act
was passed in August 2011. Civilian and military officials have used a range of colorful terms to
decry the joint-White House-Congress manufactured crisis of sequestration: "doomsday
mechanism," "fiscal castration," "peanut butter," "stupid," "gun to their heads," "nuts,"
"irrational," "an indiscriminate formula," "worst possible outcome," "legislative madness,"
"devastating," "shameful," "reckless," and "absolutely disastrous." During what was supposed to be
his final overseas trip -- before Senate Republicans delayed Chuck Hagel's confirmation process -- Panetta's
staff appropriately gifted him a plastic meat axe, his favorite metaphor for graphically describing how
sequestration would be applied across defense budget.
Besides applying these metaphors while simultaneously defending the necessity and relevance of their
service or agency, national security officials have also seized the opportunity to paint the world
as increasingly dangerous, unstable, and unpredictable. This casual threat inflation -unquestioned by congressional members and the vast majority of punditry and media outlets -has serious consequences for America's future foreign policy agenda. Consider these comments from
over the past two weeks:
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Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin Dempsey informed the Senate Armed Service
Committee (SASC), "I will personally attest to the fact that [the world is] more dangerous than it
has ever been." The next day, he warned the HASC: "There is no foreseeable peace dividend. The
security environment is more dangerous and more uncertain." Similarly, Army Chief of Staff Gen.
Ray Odierno professed to the SASC, "The global environment is the most uncertain I've seen in my
thirty-six years of service." Director of National Intelligence James Clapper also concluded in an interview:
"In almost 50 years in intelligence, I don't remember when we've had a more diverse array of threats and
crisis situations around the world to deal with."
I will not repeat Gen. Dempsey's questionable threat calculus again in this column. However, it is worth
noting that Dempsey has claimed for over a year: "We are living in the most dangerous time in my
lifetime." Now, Dempsey argues that we are not merely living in the most dangerous moment
since his birth in 1952, but since the earth was formed 4.54 billion years ago.
Also appearing before the HASC, Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Amos predicted: "The
world we live in right now is very dangerous, and it's going to be that way for the next two
decades." Referring to the relatively responsive capabilities of the Marine Expeditionary Units, Amos
added: "I'm not trying to scare everybody, but you have to have a hedge force...to buy time for our national
leaders." Given the U.S. military's terrible track record of predicting future conflicts, we should
be skeptical of Amos's contention of being able to accurately forecast the global security
environment through 2029.
Truth claims / epistemology
Security Discourse Assumes Threats As Natural – Their Harms and Solvency
Claims are Products of a Particular Ideology.
David Shim, Phd Candidate @ GIGA Institute of Asian Studies, ‘8 [Paper prepared for presentation at the
2008 ISA, Production, Hegemonization and Contestation of Discursive Hegemony: The Case of the SixParty Talks in Northeast Asia, www.allacademic.com/meta/p253290_index.html]
The notion of discourse draws on the concept elaborated by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (2001). 7
Discourses are treated as productive (social, linguistic, non-linguistic) practices, which construct objects
and subjects and define the very conditions of meaningful statements and actions (Laffey/Weldes 2004: 28;
Torfing 2005b: 161). Discourse enables one to know and to make sense of the world (Doty 1996: 6). The
underlying themes of poststructural discourse theory are the assumptions that the meanings of objects and
subjects are not fixed and not pre-given by nature, god or reason, but are rather “contextual, relational, and
contingent” (Howarth 2005: 317).8 Things, events or actions do not ‘tell their own tale’, but it is the
discursive practices that produce meaning, which, for instance, makes a tank a means of aggression or
defense. The mere existence of brute facts does not have any intrinsic meaning, which could arise from
itself. They become meaningful only in discourse (Waever 2004: 198). So, the task for discourse analysts is
to unveil the structures of meaning and examine how they are constituted and changed.9 9 In the words of
Janice Bially Mattern (2005: 5), discourse analysts do not seek for discoveries, which suggest finding new
facts of the world, but for uncoveries, which imply “an excavation from underneath layers of ossified or
never problematized knowledge” (see also Roland Bleiker 2005: xlviii). Laclau and Mouffe (2001: 112)
understand discourses as the (temporary) fixation of meaning around certain signs, which they call nodal
points. Meaning is produced through articulatory practices, which establish a particular relationship
between other signs and those nodal points, so that their meanings are mutually modified (ibid. 105). For
instance, as it is shown in section 4, ‘peace’ or ‘stability’ acquire their specific meanings in relation to
‘denuclearization’, ‘non-proliferation’ or ‘normalization’ in the discourse of the Six-Party Talks.
The study of language is seen crucial for discursive analyses although the latter is not limited to the former
(Neumann 2002). The common understanding of language in IR and other disciplines regarding its
significance is to refer to it as a transparent medium which merely reflects the world as it is. Moreover, in
traditional accounts of IR, such as (neo)realism, liberalism, institutionalism and conventional
constructivism the significance of language is ignored or treated as marginal.10 What counts, are (social
inter-)actions. ‘Talk is cheap’ and ‘one cannot be sure if s/he really means what s/he says’ are commonly
shared understandings.11 In contrast to that, discourse theoretical approaches consider language – defined
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as any collective sign system – not just as a mirror or mediator of the world, but as its very creator (cf.
Campbell 1998; Howarth 2000; Hansen 2006). Basically it is stated that subjects, objects and concepts do
not exist or rather do not have any meaning unless they are talked (but also acted and interacted) into
existence through certain linguistic, non-linguistic and social practices.12 As Janice Bially Mattern (2005:
92) puts it, “the world is not real in any socially meaningful sense unless actors find ways to communicate
about it”.
The affirmatives predictions are based in misplaced certainty – they have compiled
indeterminate evidence and generated a singular, likely inaccurate reading
Mitzen and Schweller, 11 (Jennifer Mitzen and Randall Schweller, Mitzen and Schweller are
professors of Political Science at Ohio State University, “ Knowing the Unknown Unknowns: Misplaced
Certainty and the Onset of War”, 3/15/2011,
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09636412.2011.549023, RM)
Taking the definitional question first, we define misplaced certainty as a situation where a decision maker
has eliminated uncertainty prematurely. Thus understood, misplaced certainty is comprised of two equally
important dimensions. First, the decision-maker's subjective probability estimate of one does not line up
with the way the world really is, that is, with the objective probability, which is less than one. The decision
maker has made a mistake. In some sense, mistakes are inevitable—decision makers can never know all of
the relevant information and are, to some extent, always placing bets. Seen in this light, international
politics is like the stock market: longs bet that a stock will go up, while shorts bet that it will go down; both
sides cannot be correct. 63 Both have some degree of confidence in their assessment, but one of the traders
must be misestimating the future price of the stock. Most everyday decisions are low-risk, low-cost bets
under uncertainty, and mistakes are common. Misplaced certainty, however, is not merely a mistake. With
misplaced certainty a decision maker places a bet without really acknowledging it is only a bet. The
evidence is indeterminate, but the decision maker imposes a singular reading of the situation on which the
bet is based. This suggests the second dimension of misplaced certainty—persistence. The decision maker
holds tight to those estimates, acting as if they are accurate readings of a situation. As Arie Kruglanski and
Donna Webster describe it, the mind “seizes and freezes.” 64 A mistake is a case where the decision maker
decides, perhaps even is certain about a course of action, but then realizes that the initial judgment was
mistaken and changes course. With misplaced certainty, in contrast, if the decision maker encounters new
information that objectively undermines the initial judgment he or she does not, as a result, become less
certain about it. Rather, as time passes, certainty about the initial judgment or decision hardens, and
incoming information, even when contradictory, is assimilated to it. 65
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Truth claims / epistemology
Threat perception is rooted in stimulation; not reality.
James der Derian ’90, James Der Derian is a Watson Institute research professor of international
studies. He was a director of the Institute's Global Security Program and founder of the Information
Technology, War, and Peace Project and the Global Media Project. The (S)pace of International Relations:
Simulation, Surveillance, and Speed, International Studies Quarterly, Blackwell Publishing on behalf of
The International Studies Association. Vol. 34, No. 3, Sep., 1990, Page [295] of 295-31
After analyzing the political economy of the sign and visiting Disneyland, Jean Baudrillard, the
French master of edifying hyperbole, notified the inhabitants of advanced mediacracies that they
were no longer distracted by the technical repro- duction of reality, or alienated and repressed by
their over-consumption of its spec- tacular representation. Unable to recover the "original" and
seduced by the simula- tion, they had lost the ability to distinguish between the model and the
real: "Abstrac- tion today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept.
Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation
by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal" (1983a: 2). Baudrillard exceeds
Nietzsche in his interpretation of the death of god and the inability of rational man to fill the
resulting value-void with stable distinctions be- tween the real and the apparent, the true and the
false, the good and the evil. In the excessive, often nihilistic vision of Baudrillard, the task of
modernity is no longer to demystify or disenchant illusion-for "with the real world we have also
abolished the apparent world" (see Nietzsche, 1968: 40-41; Der Derian, 1987: Ch. 9)-but to save
a principle that has lost its object: "Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us
believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are
no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simula- tion. It is no longer a question of
false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real,
and thus of saving the reality principle" (1983a: 25).9
The representation of international relations is not immune to this development. In a very short
period the field has oscillated: from realist representation, in which world-historical figures
meant what they said and said what they meant, and diplo- matic historians recorded it as such in
Rankean fashion ("wie es eigentlich gewesen ist"); to neorealist, in which structures did what
they did, and we did what they made us do, except of course when neorealists revealed in
journals like the International Studies Quarterly and International Organization what they
"really" did; to hyperrealist, in which the model of the real becomes more real than the reality it
models, and we become confused.'
What is the reality principle that international relations theory in general seeks to save? For the
hard-core realist, it is the sovereign state acting in an anarchical order to maintain and if possible
expand its security and power in the face of penetrating, de-centering forces such as the ICBM,
military (and now civilian) surveillance satel- lites, the international terrorist, the
telecommunications web, environmental move- ments, transnational human rights conventions,
to name a few of the more obvious. For the soft-core neorealist and peace-research modeler, it is
the prevailing pattern of systemic power which provides stable structures, regime constraints,
and predicta- ble behavior for states under assault by similar forces of fragmentation. Before we
consider how simulations in particular "work" to save the reality princi- ple, we should note the
multiple forms that these simulations take in international relations. From the earliest Kriegspiel
(war-play) of the Prussian military staff in the 1830s, to the annual "Global Game" at the Naval
War College in Newport, Rhode Island, simulations have been staged to prepare nation states for
future wars; by doing so, as many players would claim, they help keep the peace: qui desiderat
pacem, praeparet bellum. Simulations are used at other defense colleges, such as the strategic
and counterterrorist games played at the National Defense University or the more tactically
oriented computerized "Janus" game perfected at the Army War College." Then there are the
early academic models, like Harold Guetzkow's seminal InterNa- tion Simulation (INS), which
spawned a host of second- and third-generation models: SIPER (Simulated International
Processes), GLOBUS (Generating Long- term Options by Using Simulation), and SIMPEST
(Simulation of Military, Political, Economic, and Strategic Interactions).'2 Many simulations are
now commercially available: the popular realpolitik computer game Balance of Power; the
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remarkably sophisticated video games modeled on Top Gun, the Iranian hostage rescue mission,
and other historical military conflicts; and the film/video WarGames, in which a hacker taps into
an Air Force and nearly starts World War III. And then there are the ubiquitous think-tank
games, like those at the Rand Corporation, that model everything from domestic crime to nuclear
war, as well as the made-to-order macro- strategic games, like the war game between Iraq and
Iran that the private consulting company BDM International sold to Iraq (the
[CONTINUED…NO TEXT REMOVED]
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Truth claims / epistemology
[CONTINUED…NO TEXT REMOVED]
highest bidder?). It may grate on the ears of some of the players to hear "gaming," "modeling,"
and"simulation" used
interchangeably.'3 Yet in the literature and during interviews I found users using all three terms
to describe practices that could be broadly defined as the continuation of war by means of
verisimilitude (Allen, 1987: 6-7). Conventionally, a game uses broad descriptive strokes and a
minimum of mathematical abstraction to make generalizations about the behavior of actors,
while simulation uses algorithms and computer power to analyze the amount of technical detail
considered necessary to predict events and the behavior of actors. Judging from the shift in the
early 1980s by the military and think-tanks to mainly computerized games-reflected in the
change of the Joint Chiefs of Staff gaming organization from SAGA (Studies, Analy- sis, and
Gaming Agency) to JAD (Joint Analysis Directorate)-it would seem that simulation is becoming
the preferred "sponge" term in international relations. "Sim- ulation" also has the obvious
advantage of sounding more serious than "gaming" and of carrying more of a high-tech,
scientific connotation than "modeling." The object of this inquiry is not to conduct an internal
critique of the simulation industry, nor to claim some privileged grounds for disproving its
conclusions.'4 Rather, the intent is to show how, in the construction of a realm of meaning that
has minimal contact with historically specific events or actors, simulations have demon- strated
the power to displace the "reality" of international relations they purport to represent.
Simulations have created a new space in international relations where actors act, things happen,
and the consequences have no origins except the artificial cyberspace of the simulations
themselves.
Over the last four years I have collected numerous examples of this new phenome- non; I will
share two of them here. 15 The first is the case of the U.S.S. Vincennes which shot down an
Iranian civilian airliner on July 3, 1988, in the mistaken belief that it was a military aircraft. The
Vincennes was equipped with the most sophisticated U.S. naval radar system, the Aegis, which
according to a later military investigation functioned perfectly.'6 It recorded that the Iranian
Airbus was on course and flying level at 12,000 feet, not descending towards the Vincennes as
the radar operator, the tactical information coordinator, and one other officer reported at the
time. Some- how, between machine and man, a tragic misreading took place which resulted in
the death of 290 people. One possible cause is stress: the Vincennes and its crew had never been
in combat and were engaged with Iranian speedboats when the Airbus was first detected. Yet
stress has many origins, and the military shows signs of ignoring the most serious one. The
Vincennes trained for nine months before it went into the Persian Gulf. That training relied
heavily on tapes that simulate battle situations, none of which included overflights by civilian
airliners-a common occur- rence in the Gulf.17
To be sure, much more was involved in the decision to fire at the Airbus, not least the memory
of the U.S.S. Stark which was nearly destroyed in the Persian Gulf by an Exocet missile from an
Iraqi warplane. But I would like to suggest that the reality of the nine months of simulated
battles displaced, overrode, absorbed the reality of the Airbus. The Airbus disappeared before
the missile struck: it faded from an airliner full of civilians to an electronic representation on a
radar screen to a simulated target. The simulation overpowered a reality which did not conform
to it.
Militarism is the root cause of environmental destruction
Collins 15 (Sheila D Collins, professor of political science emerita at William Paterson University, May
2015, “War-Making as an Environmental Disaster,” New Labor Forum Volume 24 Number 2) gz
As a response to political conflict, militarism seems to be the world’s modus operandi. Yet militarism
itself is a major, but
overlooked contributor to climate change. The Pentagon is the world’s largest industrial
consumer of fossil fuels. Fighter jets, destroyers, tanks, and other weapons systems emit highly
toxic, carbon-intensive emissions, not to mention the GHGs that are released from the
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detonation of bombs. To understand the impact of our commitment to militarism, one has to take
into account not only the carbon dioxide equivalent13 of the fuels that are directly used by the
military (for transportation and in the building of military infrastructure, weapons, and so on) but
also those related to the U.S. military’s role in protecting global maritime petroleum
distribution, as well as the wars in the Middle East related to securing global petroleum
reserves. Despite the Pentagon’s decision to include more biofuels in its energy mix, the GHG emissions from the
production of biofuels, as well as their indirect effects, also need to be measured. A study
published in 2010 estimated that total emissions from U.S. conventional military fuel use and
acquisitions totaled about 172 million metric tons (MMt) of CO2 equivalent per year. Of that, an
estimated 16 MMt of CO2 equivalent per year may be attributed to the military’s role in securing
global oil supplies.14 An additional 43.3 MMt is attributed to the Iraq war. To get some idea of this military
contribution to global warming, consider that 172 million MMt is roughly equivalent to driving
an average passenger vehicle four and a half billion miles a year, or burning almost 185 billion
pounds of coal.15
The Pentagon is the world’s largest industrial consumer of fossil fuels.
Moreover, unlike warfare before the twentieth century—where weapons were used to kill by piercing and crushing human bodies—
twentieth- and twenty-first-century warfare is designed to kill by destroying and poisoning the
enemy’s environment, making such warfare—even setting aside its contribution to GHG
emissions—qualitatively more environmentally destructive.16 Not only are modern weapons
environmentally destructive when used but also the extraction, production, transporting,
storing, and testing of the materials used in them leaves its own toxic trail.
Think of the history of uranium production and testing, or the nine hundred toxic military
production sites that dot the American landscape, turning thousands of acres into uninhabitable
“sacrifice zones.” More than twelve thousand U.S. military sites where weapons testing takes
place have been found to release perchlorate, a toxic chemical that affects thyroid and
respiratory function, into the groundwater.17
More than twelve thousand U.S. military sites where weapons testing takes place have been found to release [into the groundwater] a
toxic chemical that affects thyroid and respiratory function.
The United States and its allies have spent trillions financing anti-terrorist military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The
United States alone spent $2.6 trillion between 2001 and 2014 but has taken obligations to spend as much as $4.4 trillion.18
Moreover, as the largest arms supplier (and importer) in the world, the United States fuels conflicts directly and indirectly. Many of
these weapons fall into the hands of non-state actors like ISIS and Boko Haram, thus multiplying the arenas of military conflict.
Although the terrible social, cultural, and economic costs are publicly discussed, little is said about the environmental costs of such
wars, and little research has been conducted into these costs, leaving the public in ignorance and without the knowledge necessary to
question and challenge the military’s role.19 To make matters worse, the military sector—with the exception of the military’s
domestic fuel use, that is, the emissions related to the military’s use of fossil fuels within the United States but not abroad—is
excluded from UN inventories of national GHG emissions, thanks to intensive lobbying by the
United States at the Kyoto Protocol negotiations.20 The exclusion of much of the military sector
from national GHG inventories thus makes a mockery of the UN climate negotiations process.
The exclusion of much of the military sector from national greenhouse gas inventories makes a mockery of the UN climate
negotiations process.
How quickly the world has forgotten the terrible environmental legacies of past wars! During the
Vietnam War, the U.S. army sprayed eighty million liters of the defoliant Agent Orange—
containing the highly toxic chemical dioxin, as well as other herbicides—over more than 24
percent of the land area of South Vietnam, leaving nearly five million acres of denuded or heavily
defoliated upland and coastal forests—about 36 percent of the total mangrove forest, an
ecosystem rich in biodiversity—and damaging some five hundred thousand acres of rice and
other crops. It will take centuries to reproduce the ecologically balanced mix of flora and fauna
that once thrived there.21 Between 2.1 to 4.8 million Vietnamese were directly exposed to Agent Orange and other herbicides
during the War, as were thousands of U.S. soldiers. As late as 2014, children were still being born with birth defects from the poison.
During the first Gulf War, Saddam Hussein set an estimated eight hundred Kuwaiti oil wells
ablaze. The thick plumes of smoke that rose as high as six kilometers into the atmosphere
produced an estimated three thousand four hundred metric tons of soot per day. More than twenty
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times the amount of oil that was spilled in the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska flowed into the Persian Gulf, causing irreparable harm
to the Gulf’s ecological integrity.22 Having learned nothing from these disasters, we now have the spectacle of the
United States bombing oil refineries in Syria in an attempt to cripple the oil revenue stream to ISIS
That’s bad
Hobson 14 (John M Hobson, Professor of Politics and International Relations at the University of
Sheffield, October 2014, “Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour
Line,” pp 84-5) gz
One of the ways in which subliminal Eurocentrism has operated is to sanitise or whitewash
Western imperialism from the historical record of world politics while, paradoxically, at the
same time according it a progressive functional sanction. Perhaps the most poignant example of
this manoeuvre lies in Hans Morgenthau’s classical realist text Politics Among Nations (Morgenthau 1967
[1948]), in which imperialism is reimagined not as a policy that the West had long deployed vis-àvis the East but as a normal universal strategy of aspiring great powers in relation to each other.
(Re) presented in this way, Morgenthau is able to downplay the role that Western imperialism
played within the international system in the last half of the millennium.
In Morgenthau’s vision imperialism becomes defined in opposition to a “status quo policy”, where the latter refers to a state that seeks
to preserve the existing distribution of power in the inter-state system. Imperialism, by contrast, constitutes a foreign
policy that aims at “acquiring more power than [a great power] actually has, through a reversal of
existing power relations” (Morgenthau 1967 [1948], 36 – 7). This definition is superior to all previous ones,
he insists, because earlier definitions lacked ethical neutrality and objectivity given that the term
tended to be deployed as a pejorative and is “indiscriminately applied to any foreign policy,
regardless of its actual character, to which the user happens to be opposed” (Morgenthau 1967 [1948], 41).
The paradox here is that Morgenthau produces a definition which can be applied to any foreign
policy that seeks to challenge the status quo, even if this has no relevance to colonies, formal
or informal, thereby rendering the term far less precise than he would have us believe. Indeed, as one
critic put it, Morgenthau “dilutes the term beyond utility. Imperialism becomes the default action of
any powerful state that is not pursuing a status quo policy” (Salter 2002, 117; also Guilhot 2013). One obvious
difficulty of this move emerges from the point that when a great power maintains its empire but does not seek to expand it, it is
following a policy of the status quo rather than an imperialist one. Thus, with the exception of various key moments between c .1492
and 1960/1980 – mainly between
1888 and 1910 when the imperial powers did not significantly expand
their colonial territory – ipso facto the majority of the formal-imperial era logically drops from
view.
By effectively inverting the pre-1945 Eurocentric formulations of imperialism, the paradox emerges wherein
Morgenthau’s universalised definition sanitises or empties the concept of its European/Western
particularities (Morgenthau 1967 [1948], chs 4 and 5). This has the effect of not only letting the West off
the moral hook but relegating one of the crucial dynamics of world politics after 1492 to a
stagnant backwater in the vibrant and mainstream Western story. This is a striking move given that the pre1945 Eurocentric tendency was to explicitly treat Western imperialism as the story of international politics. In this way, then, the
East-West dynamic of world politics becomes obscured by an overwhelming focus on intraWestern relations. Thus, in strong contrast to the c .1830 – 1945 era of international theory, the likes of Carr and
Morgenthau’s emphasis on empire has been conspicuous for its absence. 4 But in the process, such a lacuna performs an
important task in naturalising the East/West imperial division while also revealing the selfdeluded aspect of subliminal Eurocentrism.
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Links
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Link --Accidents
“accident” is a political strategy to obscure responsibility for nuclear violence
Hanna M. Segal, MB ChB FRC – Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst – British Pyscho-Analytic Society, 88 [Psychoanalysis
and the Nuclear Threat: Clinical and Theoretical Studies, p. 47]
The growth of technology is also used for a typically schizoid dehumanization and mechanization. There is
a kind of pervasive depersonalization and derealization. Pushing a button to annihilate parts of the world we have never
seen is a mechanized, split-off activity. Bracken (1984) contends that war is likely to happen as a result of our
machines getting Out of control. Everything is so automated that oversensitive machines could start an unstoppable nuclear
exchange. The MIT computer expert Joseph Weizen-baum (1976) comes to a similar conclusion: modern big computers are so
complicated that no expert can see through and control them. Yet the whole nuclear early warning system is based on these machines.
Since one effect of nuclear explosion is a disturbance in communication systems, it might not be within the power of governments to
stop a war even if they wished to. But the fact that we can even think that "machines will start the war, not us"
shows the extent of denial of our responsibility. We seem to live with a peculiar combination of helplessness
and terror and omnipotence-helplessness and omnipotence in a vicious circle; heightening one another . This
helplessness, which lies at the root of our apathy, is inevitable. We are faced with a horrifyingly threatening danger. But partly
it is induced by us and becomes a self--fulfilling prophesy. Confronted with the terror of the powers of
destructiveness we divest ourselves of our responsibilities by denial, projection, and fragmentation. The
responsibility is fragmented and projected further and further away-into governments, army, scientists, and,
finally, into machines beyond human control. We not only project into our so--called enemies, we also divest
ourselves of our responsibilities by projecting them onto governments. They, in turn, can not bear such responsibility, and they
project onto us, the people, public opinion, and so on, as well as fragmenting their responsibility as previously described. When we
project onto governments, we become truly helpless. We are in their hands.
Descriptions of nuclear accidents outweighs and turns the aff – it dehumanizes people by describing
the process as purely mechanical removing the human element. Eliminating the role of agency in the
process and claiming “machines are going to start the war not us” ignores the discursive framing
that put that system in place, makes their impact inevitable –that’s Segal 88.
Accident fears are missile hysteria
Seng 2 [Tan See, Prof of Security Studies @ IDSS Singapore, July 2002, "What Fear Hath Wrought: Missile Hysteria and The
Writing of America, IDSS Commentary No. 28, http://www.sipri.org/contents/library/0210.pdf]
Few, to be sure, would doubt the sincerity of Secretary Rumsfeld when he averred last June: "I don't think vulnerability is a (viable)
policy."84 Clearly, Washington's preoccupation with missile defence has much to do with the Bush Administration's concern over
what it perceives as the strategic vulnerability of America to potential ballistic missile attack. Nonetheless, as important as debates
over whether or not the "missile threat" actually exists are to the study and practice of international relations, what is equally if not
more fundamental is the question of how discourses of danger figure in the incessant writing of "America" -
a particular and quite problematic identity that owes its materiality to textual inscriptions of difference and
Otherness. Missile hysteria in US national security discourse cannot be simplistically reduced to the level
of an ideological explanation - certainly not according to the classic formulation of Mannheim's. 85 Rather, what this paper has
demonstrated is the centrality of difference and deferral in discourse to the identity of America - a discourse of
danger, fear, and vulnerability posed by potential missile attacks against the US from "rogue states" and
accidental or unauthorized missile launches from a particular "China" or "Russia." The argument maintained here
has been that a particular representation of America does not exist apart from the very differences that
allegedly threaten that representation, just as the particular America of recent lore did not exist apart from Cold War-related
discourses of danger. If missile defence is (as Bauman, cited earlier, has put it) the "foolproof recipe" for exorcising the ghosts or
demons of missile hysteria, then Bush's national security advisors are the exorcists and shamans as well as the
constructors of national insecurity via missile hysteria. 86 However, the argument has not been that the Administration,
the Rumsfeld Commission, and other missile defence enthusiasts fabricated, ex nihilo, a ballistic missile threat against the US by
means of a singular, deliberate "act," which is what some constructivists in international relations, conspiracy theorists, and partisan
Democrats - an interesting if not motley collectivity - would have us believe. Nor has it been that language and discourse is
"everything" as linguistic idealists would have us imagine. Rather, through reiterative and coordinated practices by
which discourse produces the effects that it names, a certain normative representation of America
"emerges" - wrought, as it were, by fear and written into being by missile hysteria.
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Link -- Arctic Link
Your construction of the Arctic justifies increased military presence – turns
conflict and causes environmental degradation
Dittmer et al 11 -- Professors in the Departments of Geography at University College London, University of Oulu, University
College London, and Royal Holloway, respectively (Jason Dittmer, Sami Moisi, Alan Ingrama, Klaus Dodds, Political Geography,
2011, “Have you heard the one about the disappearing ice? Recasting Arctic geopolitics,”
http://www.uta.fi/jkk/jmc/studies/courses/reading1%20+%20arctic%20+%20moisio.pdf)
The idea of the Arctic as an open e or opening e and uncertain space also calls forth future-oriented
imaginative techniques, notably scenario analysis and the booming trade in “Arctic futures” (Anderson, 2010). The
rhetorical orientation of such exercises inevitably reproduces and gives free rein to divergent
conceptualizations of the future. Thus, on the one hand are dystopian imaginations of the Arctic as a
locus of social, political, economic, cultural and ecological disaster. While during the 1990s Arctic space
was infused with political idealism and hope as the end of the Cold War seemed to open the possibility of a less explicitly
territorialized governance regime (the Arctic Council), current interventions in Arctic space raise the spectres
of
conflict, environmental degradation and the “resource curse” (Emmerson, 2010). The notion of the
Arctic as an open, ‘melting space’ is thus represented as posing a multi-faceted security risk. Scott
Borgerson (2008) published a notably neo-realist intervention in Foreign Affairs which considered
this kind of scenario in more detail; he argued that the decrease in sea ice cover is directly
correlated to evidence of a new ‘scramble for resources’ in the region, involving the five Arctic Ocean coastal
states and their national security interests. According to Borgerson (2008: 65), the Arctic “region could erupt in an
armed mad dash for its resources”. More generally, melting ice is correlated with enhanced
accessibility and hence opportunities for new actors ranging from commercial shipping to illegal migrants and
terrorist groups to migrate within and beyond the Arctic. At the most extreme, neorealists have contended that
Arctic installations such as pipelines or terminals might be potential targets for terrorist
organizations hell-bent on undermining North American energy security (Byers, 2009). At the same time, the Arctic is also
framed as a space of promise: the locus of a potential oil bonanza, new strategic trade routes and huge fishing grounds
(Powell, 2008a). No wonder then that the Arctic possibilities have resulted in a number of scenarios on the
relationship between Arctic resources and Arctic geopolitical order. Lawson Brigham, a well known
Arctic expert, has imagined an “Arctic race”, a scenario in which “high demand and unstable
governance set the stage for a ‘no holds barred’ rush for Arctic wealth and resources” (described in
Bennett, 2010, n.p.). This vision, which is opposite to “Arctic saga”, can be regarded as a liberal warning message.
Accordingly, without new governance structures based on new international agreements, high demand in the Arctic region
could lead to political chaos which could also jeopardize Arctic ecosystems and cultures. The
emphasis on the economic potential of the Arctic maritime areas further highlights the dominance of future over present in
contemporary geopolitical discourses. The
image of disaster (as epitomised by the Exxon Valdez sinking in 1989) thus
forms a counterpoint to the image of a treasure chest (the Russian flagplanting in 2007).We suggest that these
assertions of Arctic disaster are used to justify a strengthened military presence in Arctic
waters in the name of national security along with a range of futuristic possibilities (Jensen & Rottem,
2009). Here neo-realism feeds off the idea of the Arctic as opening, shifting and potentially chaotic
space. It thus has an affective as well as descriptive quality e invoking a mood change and associated “calls to arms” (Dodds, 2010).
This theme of ‘fearing the future’ has emerged periodically within Canadian political discourse, with
Stephen Harper’s famous “use it or lose it” dictum traceable through previous governments, which have emphasized the
threat of incursion by the Soviets or the United States (Dodds, in press; Head, 1963; Huebert, 2003). The disaster
argumentation (Berkman & Young, 2009) also underwrites liberal calls for a new multilateral Arctic
legal agreement which would set out rules, for example, on how to exploit Arctic resources. In these representations,
“multilateralism” denotes peace, prosperity, stability and environmental rescue whilst national
control and interest denote increasing tension, environmental degradation and conflict. Arctic
‘openness’ is central to the performance of Arctic geopolitics, enabling sabre-rattling by the five Arctic
Ocean coastal states. The region’s coding as a feminine space to be tamed by masculine exploits
provides an arena for national magnification. The remoteness and difficulty of maintaining
permanent occupation of the far north also makes it a space where overlapping territorial claims and
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competing understandings of access to transit passages can (at the moment) co-exist with relatively
little chance of actual combat (Baev, 2007). As we shall see, this is particularly true of the US/Canadian arguments over the
legal status of the NorthWest Passage. In this way the discursive formation of Arctic geopolitics is also bound
up with neo-realist ideas about the inherent tendencies of ‘states’ towards ‘conflict’ over
‘resources’, ‘sovereignty’ and so on e ideas that have been subject to extensive critical
deconstruction in IR and political geography, but which are being rapidly reassembled in relation
to the Arctic. The Arctic is thus a space in which the foundational myths of orthodox
international relations are being reasserted. It might be said that it is not just the Arctic climate that is changing,
with knock on effects for state politics and international relations, but rather that the region is being reconstituted within a discursive
formation that renders it amenable to neo-realist understandings and practices inconceivable for other, more inhabited regions.
Accepting the premises of ‘Arctic geopolitics’ risks both obscuring the liveliness of Arctic
geography (Vannini, Baldacchino, Guay, Royle, & Steinberg, 2009) and enabling the sovereign fantasy that coastal
states and their civilian and military representatives have previously enjoyed security via effective
territorial control and may establish it once again.
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Link -- Catastrophe
The AFF’s neurotic obsession with security risks is symptomatic of anxiety of
future trauma and catastrophe. The catastrophe imagined in the 1AC is a
fantasy used to sustain a conservative commitment to a forever war grounded
in fear.
Neocleous 2012
/Mark, Professor of the Critique of Political Economy, Politics and History @ Brunel University, London,
“‘Don’t Be Scared, Be Prepared’: Trauma-Anxiety-Resilience,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 2012
37: 188 originally published online 13 June 2012, DOI: 10.1177/0304375412449789/
Rather than concerning ourselves with ‘‘governing trauma’’ we should instead be concerned with
how trauma has come to govern us. Trauma talk now comes naturally, and the article explores what
all this trauma talk might be doing, ideologically and politically, especially in the context of the
relationship between security and anxiety. The management of trauma and anxiety has become a
way of mediating the demands of an endless security war: a war of security, a war for security, a
war through security. The article therefore seeks to understand the concept of trauma and the
proliferation of discourses of anxiety as ideological mechanisms deployed for the security crisis
of endless war; deployed, that is, as a training in resilience. Trauma is less an issue of memory or
the past and more a question of building resilience for the future. The language of trauma and
anxiety, and the training in resilience that is associated with these terms, weds us to a deeply
conservative mode of thinking.
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***Links – China***
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China
The affirmative maintains a politics of American exceptionalism by
constructing China as a threat to the American led global order – their
politics cement China as an uncivilized Other and create the possibility for all
forms of Imperial domination
Turner ’16 – Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh
Oliver Turner, “China, India and the US Rebalance to the Asia Pacific: The Geopolitics of Rising
Identities,” Geopolitics 21, no. 4 (2016): 922-944. Taylor and Francis.
Throughout US history, American expansionism
has been less a policy than a mode of being. Nationstates have consistently exhibited expansionist tendencies, particularly those with the most land and resources. However, brought
into existence not by a people of common race or religion but by disparate groups from all over
the world, the US has arguably to a unique extent always been forced to bind itself according to a
set of defining ideals and values, such as democracy, freedom, and liberty and, crucially, by the
knowledge that these values are universal.22 “Only in a country where it is so unclear what is
American do people worry so much about the threat of things ‘un-American’.” 23 Thus, the United
States was born a ‘redeemer nation’, with an inherent duty to export its identity for the global
good.24 From the base of 13 originally colonies on the eastern seaboard, Thomas Jefferson’s ‘Empire of Liberty’ was expected to
civilise the continent: “Where this progress will stop no-one can say. Barbarism . . . will in time, I trust, disappear from the Earth”. 25
It could be argued that this remains an especially powerful and persuasive myth within the United
States today because, unlike the imperial powers of Europe in particular, the US quickly gained
its own North American empire and never lost it.
The barbarism Jefferson had first in mind was of course that of Native Americans, and in its conflicts
with them the US worked to secure and inflate both its physical and ontological boundaries. Assessments of national
security, indeed, are heavily imbued with considerations of identity. “Ontological security is
security not of the body but of the self, the subjective sense of who one is, which enables and motivates
action and choice”. 26 Ontological difference primes an identity to the possibility of aggression,27 and
with the American self defined by powerful ideas and values it has always correspondingly maintained highly value-driven
conceptions of security.
The desire to expand and seize resources was certainly a motivating drive, but the US does not invade every country over which it
boasts superiority. Foreign Others are constructed in such ways as to make the application of American
power contingent upon understandings of who to invade and who not.28 While it could have captured
(and still could capture) some or all of Canada for example, this was precluded by discursive regulations of mainstream debate.29
Discursive mechanisms can establish ‘truths’ which dictate the boundaries of political possibility
by making it all but impossible to think beyond them.30 Holland argues that discourses achieve such a controlling
effect over foreign policy by becoming conceivable, resonant, and dominant and nullifying oppositional voices.31 Discourses, indeed,
can become naturalised statements of fact,32 or common sense, a form of knowledge which goes unchallenged from the assumption
that it reflects reality.33
Native Americans were no credible threat to US survival, but by their existence as Native
Americans and the largely uncontested ideas by which they were defined, they challenged the
core tenets of its identity. Moreover, they were not passive constructions of an Enlightened American
self. The two were co-constitutive, with the ‘uncivilised’ former active in the (re) affirmation of
the more ‘civilised’ latter as it advanced across the continent. Explains Trachtenberg: “In this ‘progress’, this
proof of ‘America’, the profoundest role was reserved not for the abundance of land but for the fatal presence of the Indian. . .
‘Civilization’ required a ‘savagery’ against which to distinguish itself”. 34
US expeditions beyond its western coastal borders were a “logical outcome of the nation’s march to the Pacific”, 35 with
understandings of potential material gain still functions of a unique interpretive lens. For instance, in 1842 Britain forced
China to lift restrictions on foreign trade and Beijing reluctantly signed an ‘unequal treaty’. Two
years later, and despite the US being founded upon the rhetoric of self-determination and antiimperialism, Washington secured an identical agreement. Thus while nineteenth-century China represented an
economic opportunity for the United States, that ‘opportunity’ existed in the imagination of the American self, for the American
self.36 Japan was similarly opened up in 1854, and when the US occupied the Philippines from around the turn of the twentieth
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century Americans’ experiences with Native Americans and Mexicans provided the operational framework for civilisation to be
brought to the ‘uncivilised’ Filipinos.37
While peoples and places are Othered according to understandings about the self however, identity cannot be essentialised to the point
where it identifiably ‘exists’, as positivists and some constructivists suggest.38 The fluidity of discourse has thus
allowed the US to redefine itself over time as (combinations of) ‘White’, ‘Enlightened’, ‘anticommunist’, etc. The significance of Others as ‘non-White’, ‘exotic’ ‘communist’, etc., have
correspondingly evolved.39 During the early Cold War when the US first embedded itself in East Asia, the Others to which
it responded challenged the American self in different ways than before. As already noted however, the ‘ threats’ were
equally manufactured.
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Link---Chinese Cyberattacks/IP
The fear of Chinese cyber espionage constructs the Other as a thief waiting to
steal money and technology from the West – their discursive strategy places
the US in a civilizing mission and China as an irresponsible child
Ooi ’17 – Associate Professor - Political Science, Faculty Director of Butler in Asia Program, Center for
Global Education at Butler University
Su-Mei. Gwen D’Arcangelis. “Framing China: Discourses of othering in US news and political rhetoric”
Global Media and China vol 2, no. 3-4 (2017): pp. 269-283.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2059436418756096
China as thief: cyber battles
The construction of China as potential enemy Other takes on an additional hue when we look at
the depictions of China’s cyber activities—China moves from cheat to a more malicious cousin, the
thief. The United States first focused on issues of “cyber warfare” in the mid-2000s to late 2000s, but at the time, the trope
associated with China was not necessarily that of thief. In the mass news media, a militaristic lens framed much of the discussion,
depicting China as a rule breaker flouting international norms and thus posing a security threat. For example, a Los Angeles Times
article highlighted that “China in the last year has developed ways to infiltrate and manipulate computer networks around the world in
what U.S. defense officials conclude is a new and potentially dangerous military capability, according to a Pentagon report” (Barnes,
2008). China is even placed in relation to al-Qaeda: “Cyber-attacks and cyber-espionage pose a greater potential
danger to U.S. national security than Al Qaeda and other militants that have dominated America’s global focus since Sept. 11, 2001,
the nation’s top intelligence officials said Tuesday” (Dilanian, 2013). This juxtaposition with al-Qaeda only served
to heighten the military valence of China’s cyber activities, and a push to prepare for such a
threat. Indeed, in the words of Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL): “The threat, to be sure, is real—and, we cannot allow ourselves to grow
complacent …” (Nelson 2008).
Snowden’s revelations of US spying on China in June of 2013 drastically changed the shape of the discussion however. Snowden
demonstrated that the NSA (1) had two data centers in China from which it had been inserting spy software into vulnerable computers;
(2) targeted the Chinese University of Hong Kong, public officials, businesses, and students; (3) hacked mobile phones; and (4) in
2009, hacked the Pacnet headquarters in Hong Kong, which runs one of the biggest regional fibre-optic networks. In response to
Snowden’s revelations, a spate of articles compared the United States’ and China’s hacking, displaying a range of attitudes from
journalists—some espoused that both countries demonstrate equivalent transgressive behavior, while others argued that China has
crossed the line into more aggressive hacking that goes beyond the United States’ more benign “preemptive” hacking.
The latter attitude indicates the resilience of tropes of the Yellow and Red Perils, a China whose
inherent ideological and cultural differences with the West makes it a threat. The different lenses
through which journalists and pundits viewed China’s spying in comparison with that of the United States further invoke this
Orientalist demarcation. An article in The Washington Post thus contrasts China’s behavior against
that of the United States, which merely seeks “to examine huge amounts of communication
metadata around the world to look for trends” and “to preempt some threat against the U.S.”
China’s spying is described, however, as “infiltrating almost every powerful institution in Washington,
D.C.,” “breaking into major news organizations,” “stealing sensitive military technology,” and
“stealing so much intellectual property that China’s hacking has been called the ‘greatest
transfer of wealth in history’” (Fisher, 2013). Drawing in particular on incendiary words like “stealing” and “infiltrating,”
this article distinguishes China as a sneaky thief.
US journalists and pundits, in charging China with stealing economic resources, have further solidified the
demarcation of China as an inferior and dangerous Other. A well-circulated quote by national security pundit
Adam Segal stated, “The problem is we’re not talking about the same things … We’re trying to make a distinction between cyber
economic espionage and normal political-military espionage. The Chinese don’t make that same distinction” (Bengali & Dilanian,
2015). By portraying China as unable to grasp the fundamental distinction between economics and
national security, Segal suggests China’s thievery is connected to a more fundamental
character flaw—China is unable to grasp proper civilized norms. Similarly, US official response has been
that China’s view of data collection as a sovereign right has rendered them essentially different from the United States and by
implication, the civilized world. That Chinese governmental espionage involves the collection of economic intelligence that is shared
with Chinese companies further departs from civilized norms. Michael Rogers, Director of the National Security Agency thus
explained that “they clearly don’t have the same lines in the sand, if you will, with that regard” (Bennett, 2015).
Historically, US depictions of China as uncivilized have occurred whenever China has gained power
or threatened US interests. The narrative of China as a sort of child following in the United States’
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footsteps on the path to modernity has proven exceedingly popular since World War II and
frames the US approach to China as a potential ally and resource who at the same time may
never be civilizable (Kim, 2010; Vukovich, 2012). In this Orientalist narrative, China’s journey to modernity is
always understood as precarious and, moreover, subject to US vigilance as to whether it meets the
appropriate benchmarks. The title of an editorial in The Washington Post epitomizes current iterations of this sentiment and the
ease with which Orientalist imagery can be invoked to portray China’s path to modernity as needing US guidance when China falls
out of line: “The US Needs to Tame the Cyber-Dragon: Stronger Measures are Need[ed] to Block China’s Economic Espionage
[emphasis mine]” (“The U.S. Needs to Tame,” 2013). In reality, US vigilance can be attributed to the concern since the end of the
Cold War, that a “sleeping giant” able to challenge US global hegemony is awakening (Kim, 2010).
Thus, the cultural work done by portrayals of China as unable to adhere to civilized norms serve to
bolster the image of China as perpetually unprepared to be a responsible member of the
international community. In fact, this narrative of China’s thievery serves to persuade the American public that China is a
threat to the international community. One Wall Street Journal journalist perfectly echoes this sentiment:
A China that leads the world in the theft of intellectual property, computer hacking and resource nationalism will prove extremely
destabilizing. If it continues on this course, Beijing should not be surprised if other countries begin to band together to collectively
counter some of the more harmful implications of China’s rise. A better outcome for all will be for China to embrace its
responsibilities to help lead the world … (Metzl, 2011)
This article, although hopeful that China may at some future point become a responsible global actor, even leader, ultimately reifies
the notion that an increase in China’s global power is always suspect.
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Link---Chinese Maritime Disputes
Depicting China as a lawless military threat in maritime disputes merely
gives a veneer of legitimacy to US expansionism – they propagate an image of
the United States as the core power broker in any security disputes, extending
Imperial domination to contain the Other
Ooi ’17 – Associate Professor - Political Science, Faculty Director of Butler in Asia Program, Center for
Global Education at Butler University
Su-Mei. Gwen D’Arcangelis. “Framing China: Discourses of othering in US news and political rhetoric”
Global Media and China vol 2, no. 3-4 (2017): pp. 269-283.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2059436418756096
China as lawless bully: maritime disputes
To cheat and thief, we can layer the trope of lawlessness, readily employed in media representations and political
rhetoric over maritime territorial and EEZ disputes involving China and its neighbors in the Western Pacific. China’s territorial claims
in the South China Sea are largely historical in nature and do encroach on the 200 nautical miles EEZ of neighboring countries such as
the Philippines and Vietnam. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) does not expressly prohibit land
reclamation in the sea as long as due notice is given to other concerned states and due regard to the rights of other states (Art. 60.3,
56.2, and 56.3) is taken into account, while the obligation to protect and preserve the marine environment is observed (Art. 192).
Parties to a dispute are also obligated to refrain from acting in a manner that would jeopardize or hamper a final agreement resolving
the dispute (Art. 74.3 and 83.3). The frantic building of artificial islands to enhance the legality of China’s claims, unilateral
installations, and skirmishes in the disputed areas are thus amenable to interpretation as lawless bullying. An editorial in the Wall
Street Journal titled “Calling Out China’s Lawlessness; The US Points Out that Beijing’s Claims to the South China Sea Don’t Stand
Up,” describes the “sketchy legality of its [Beijing’s] actions” and claims that “China is changing the status quo in the South China
Sea with force and the threat of force” (“Calling Out,” 2014). This characterization in the media is consistent with political rhetoric.
US Secretary of State John Kerry was reported to have said in May 2014 that China’s “introduction of an oil rig and numerous
government vessels in waters disputed with Vietnam was provocative” (Ives & Fuller, 2014). Eliot Engel of the House of
Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee framed China’s actions in skirmishes with Vietnam as “needless provocations” (Engel,
2014).
At the same time, media representations and political rhetoric have tended to obscure the fact that
China’s regional neighbors all built airstrips and outposts on the claimed islands long before
China ever did. China also displays inconsistent behavior in that it has reached agreements with Vietnam in the Gulf of
Tonkin and South Korea in the Yellow Sea to divide fisheries equally and carry out joint enforcement patrols in keeping with
international law.3 Indeed, China has in land disputes signed “fair and balanced” treaties with 13 out
of
14 neighbors in keeping with international legal principles (Kraska, 2015). These instances have not, however,
drawn any significant media attention. Instead, the emphasis on China’s non-compliance with international
law in the South China Sea disputes has served to recapitulate China in Orientalist terms as uncivilized
and, moreover, as a fully awakened “sleeping giant” that bullies its neighbors and is unsuited to
replace the US as regional leader.
US political rhetoric and media representation has also obscured the vagueness of international law when applied to the East China
Sea dispute as it would be inconsistent with the image of China as a lawless bully in the South China Sea. The UNCLOS appears to
have a straightforward framework that gives states maritime jurisdiction over resources 200 nautical miles from their coastal baseline,
but it says nothing about how overlapping maritime jurisdictions are to be resolved. In the case of the East China Sea, the area of
dispute is only 360 miles across at its widest point. At the heart of the territorial dispute between China and Japan is the “territorial
acquisition” of the Senkaku/Diaoyutai islands, but there is no convention on how states acquire sovereignty over disputed territories.4
The flexibility of applicable principles in international customary law have instead allowed both China and Japan to invoke the law to
justify their claims to sovereignty (Ramos-Mrosovsky, 2008). China’s refusal to have the dispute adjudicated by an international body
reflects the unpredictability of outcomes and not necessarily China’s lawlessness, especially when viewed, in light of a similar
disinterest on the part of the Japanese.
The essentialization
of China as lawless, despite the malleability of international law and dissimilar behavior in other
disputes, has the potential to drive a wedge between China and her neighbors, thus “containing”
China’s growing influence in the region. Indeed, the depiction of China as a lawless bully plays up
the insecurities of its immediate—and in many cases, much weaker— neighbors, whose heavy reliance
on international law to constrain hegemonic behavior is palpable. The breaking of norms has been identified
as a crucial signal that heightens threat perception (Farnham, 2003). In the context of long-standing maritime territorial disputes,
playing up an image of China as a lawless bully also suggests that the United States continues
to be a necessary power broker in the region. The notion that there is an overbearing bully in
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the neighborhood that could care less about the rules of the game returns the United States to the
role of protector in the post– Cold War period—its ostensible “manifest destiny.”
Since the late 1990s, titles such as “Spratly Spat Heats up over Chinese ‘Bullying’” (Lamb, 1998) or “Asian Nations Support US
Silently” (Wiseman, 2001) demonstrate how constructing China as a lawless bully serves to reinforce this purpose. Indeed, a recent
editorial in The Wall Street Journal makes this link explicit in the text:
Washington’s hesitant response has allowed controversy to build around freedom-of-navigation missions that should be routine.
Beijing’s strategy in the South China Sea is to bully its neighbors and achieve regional hegemony through coercive means short of
war. Turning peaceful naval patrols into diplomatic hot potatoes is exactly the sort of change Beijing seeks. (“A 12-Mile,” 2015)
Here, China’s behavior is portrayed as incorrigibly belligerent, in distinct contrast to genteel US
diplomacy. One Wall Street Journal article makes this point clear in its title alone: “Chinese Diplomacy Off Course; By
Overreaching in the South China Sea, Beijing has Drawn the US Irrevocably into the Debate” (Wain, 2000). This article embodies the
dominant narrative that assumes implicitly the rightful role of the United States to dole out proper diplomacy and take on any
transgressors to maintain world peace. A Wall Street Journal article describing China’s “increasingly powerful—but highly opaque—
military and its more assertive stance [towards the South China Sea]” emphasize China’s military as an inherent threat to world order
but construct the US military according to a different standard, again assuming the righteousness of US military intervention (Page,
2011).
In this regard, it is important to note that US grand strategy consists of preventing the development of
any regional power capable of obstructing US access to Eurasia—where most of the world’s
resources and economic activity are located. This long-term security goal has informed the Obama administration’s
much-touted Pacific Pivot policy, which many have viewed as a “China containment policy.” A Congressional Report notes that
although U.S. policymakers have not often stated this key national strategic goal explicitly in public, U.S. military (and diplomatic)
operations in recent decades—both wartime operations and day-to-day operations—can be viewed as having been carried out in no
small part in support of this key goal. (O’Rourke, 2014)
China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea cover about 90% of the area that could potentially allow China to deny the United
States such access. As China continues with the modernization of its naval and air capabilities, US apprehension has increased that the
disputed land features in the South China Sea are being used to bolster military and coast guard forces that can monitor and respond to
the activities of US allies, deny the US navy access to these waters, and ultimately check US naval dominance in the region.
It is for this reason that the United States has insisted on freedom of navigation and innocent passage—protected by UNCLOS—
through these contested waters, although tensions with China have ratcheted up considerably as a result. As direct conflict between the
United States and China has become a real possibility, and as the United States has not ratified the UNCLOS, the United States has
attempted to base its actions on firm legal principles, and in turn, to frame China’s behavior in the region as lawlessness. Through
US portrayals of China as a lawless bully, China incurs reputational costs in the global and
regional community that have the potential to exert pressure on China to stand down. The guidedmissile destroyer USS Lassen was thus sent in October 2015 on a “freedom of navigation” patrol within 12 nautical miles of islands
artificially built by China in the Spratly chain, which the United States insists is in compliance with international law.5 The United
States revealed this aim in another dispute on whether China has an international legal right to regulate foreign military actors
operating within China’s 200-nautical-mile EEZ. The United States’ view, which China disagrees with, is that China has a right to
restrict military and surveillance activities only within 12 nautical miles of its territorial waters. Tensions reached new heights when
China announced in November 2013 an East China Sea Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) that not only covered her territorial
waters but extended into its EEZ and thus, the contested areas in the East China Sea. US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel responded
in a press statement that “We view this development as a destabilizing attempt to alter the status quo in the region. This unilateral
action increases the risk of misunderstanding and miscalculations,” yet the United States followed shortly by flying two B-52 bombers
through the zone (Harlan, 2013).
Certainly, there have been media analyses that characterize China’s behavior as motivated by
normal national self-interest or that point out that US actions to curtail China are “hypocritical”
and “hegemonic” (see, for example, Denyer, 2015; Wu, 2005). However, many more choose to reprise long-standing debates
about whether China is a military threat or not, with titles such as “US Starting to View China as Potential Enemy” (Mann, 1995) and
“Weakening Yet Still Aggressive, China Poses Test for U.S. Presidential Candidates” (Sanger, 2015). None take seriously China’s
claims that its actions in the region have been defensive in nature. Even with a wide range of opinions on the matter, by focusing on
the issue of China’s military buildup, these news articles only serve to heighten this perceived threat by inferring threatening intent
from growing military capabilities.
Political rhetoric tends to contain far less ambiguity, however, some even going so far as to suggest that the United States has been
unnecessarily patient toward China. Senator John McCain (2016), Chairman of the Committee of Armed Services, thus commended
and encouraged the continuance of the freedom-of-navigation operation of October 2015, adding that “this decision is long overdue.”
In a keynote speech delivered at the Fourth Annual CSIS South China Sea Conference in 2014, Representative Mike Rogers (R-MI),
Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence further advised that the United States should stop being
“deferential” to China’s “naked aggression” as it continues to “bully” and “intimidate” its neighbors.6 Indeed, political rhetoric
appears to take China’s image as lawless to its logical conclusion—China as the full-fledged
threat to regional stability legitimizes any force that the United States might be compelled to
take in the future to contain such a threat. Unpacking the great power rivalry in the maritime disputes thus helps us
to understand the cultural work that the trope of lawless bully does to bolster the long-term security objectives of the United States in
the region.
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Link---Chinese Nationalism
Rhetoric of Chinese nationalism reifies a binaristic division between the
benevolent self and evil Other – their rhetoric constructs China as antithetical
to Western values and propagates racist Western exceptionalism
Song ’15 – associate professor of political science at the University of Macau, received his Ph.D. in
political science from the University of Siena, Italy
Weiqing Song. “Securitization of the “China Threat” Discourse: A Poststructuralist Account” China
Review, Volume 15, Number 1, Spring 2015, pp. 145-169. Project Muse.
Here, the
China threat issue is securitized in a value-laden manner that is qualitatively different
from the scientific mode. Nicholas Kristof, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and longtime commentator on China,
does not simply state that China is threatening because it is not democratic; rather, he pursues the
more nuanced argument that increasing nationalism in China is a major source of potential
conflict with other nations. Yet even a careless reader of the above text may notice that the author adeptly links
the alleged threat posed by China with the historical precedents of Nazi Germany and militarist
Japan in the past century. Drawing such analogies between history and the present constitutes a
securitization act.
Using this mode of analogical reasoning, the China threat argument is structurally incorporated into
a higher level of security discourse, situated among the “macro-securitising discourses” of
political ideology,55 which involve certain ethical and subjective sets of doctrines, ideals, and
worldviews about the governance of human societies, usually with a blueprint for a specific social
order. It is important for poststructuralist discourse analysts to bear in mind the perspective on social goods communicated in this
use of language.56 Kristof attributes the possibility of a China threat to the Chinese government’s ill-intentioned promotion of
“ferocious nationalism.” As one of the West’s veteran commentators on China, Kristof noticed the country’s vigorous rise much
earlier than many others. Twenty years ago, in his early Foreign Affairs essay “The Rise of China,” he warned that although China is
neither a “villain” nor a “renegade country,” it is “an ambitious nation.”57 In this and other works, he
has sought to define
the possible China threat arising from Chinese nationalism.
Such arguments involve the politics of identity. The poststructuralist approach to identity
formation emphasizes the dualism that structures human experience, particularly the
“interior/exterior (inside/outside) binary, according to which the inside is deemed to be the self,
good, primary, and original while the outside is the other, dangerous, secondary, and
derivative.”58 However, when one tries to build one’s own identity, the outside is always central
to the composition of the inside. Conversely, when one builds an antagonist identity, the inside is
essential to the construction of the outside. An interior/exterior binary is exactly what authors
like Kristof seek to achieve in their securitization of the China threat issue. Kristof’s argument
fundamentally, if not overtly, differentiates China from the democracies of the West. Linking China with
Nazi Germany and militarist Japan in the first half of the 20th century lends weight to his criticism of the Chinese government and its
deliberate instigation of “ferocious nationalism” among the Chinese people. In this way, China
is depicted as different
from “normal” Western countries, which are represented as right, good, proper, and valuable.
Within the broader context of political ideology, the mode of normative analogy requires an
appropriate episteme terrain. In other words, securitizers must use the right language in the right contexts to successfully
articulate China’s threat to the world at large through analogy. Unlike securitizers speaking in the scientific mode, whose audience
comprises academics and policy analysts, normative-analogy securitizers address an attentive, well-informed,
and usually well-educated public. Therefore, successful securitizers in the latter mode are usually those well placed to
communicate with the relevant audiences in the correct venues and in the appropriate language. Kristof, for example, writes for the
New York Times, a widely circulated newspaper with well-informed and well-educated readers in the United States and other Western
countries. His essays appear in Foreign Affairs, a scholarly journal published by an important U.S. think tank that focuses on foreign
policy and provides an international forum for new ideas, analysis, and debate regarding significant world issues. The audience of
Foreign Affairs includes government officials, academics, business leaders, and the representatives of nongovernmental groups such
as human rights organizations, all of whom need to communicate with their own audiences using appropriate linguistic styles and
registers. Historical analogies are an effective means of communicating with such audiences, who usually find concrete examples and
precedents from history to be rhetorically persuasive.59
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Kristof is not alone. The
same securitizing role is played by many opinion leaders with wide influence
in their respective social groups. For example, John Ikenberry, a well-known IR scholar, has expressed
concerns about China’s rise due to its different political system, although he believes that China can eventually
be absorbed peacefully into a West-dominated and institutionalized world.60 Robert Kagan, a Washington Post columnist, shares
Kristof’s view that China’s rise will not be peaceful on the grounds that it is not willing to be
“integrated” into the liberal world system.61 Although these opinion leaders offer different policy recommendations,
all of them define a real or potential Chinese threat to both U.S. security and the security of the
world at large.
In the analogical mode, the substantial modality of the threat posed by China to the outside world is largely concerned with the
political sphere. Political threats are usually defined in terms of “constituting principles” such as
sovereignty and ideology.62 The referent objects under threat are units that include the nation or
the state but may exceed these designations, as in the cases of the military and strategic spheres.
The referent objects may be states with similar political systems, such as the so-called
“democracies” or the “free world.” In their political warnings against the “China threat,” securitizers such as Kristof
discursively construct the Chinese identity by linking it with bellicose Nazi Germany and militarist
Japan, thereby differentiating it from the identity of the “peace-loving” Western
democracies.63
Securitizers working in the normative-analogy mode conduct “conversations” with their audiences in which
they relate major themes, debates, or motifs that are familiar to the social groups concerned.64
This approach is more likely to result in the audience absorbing maximum knowledge, which in
turn leads to a more effective excision of power. Kristof, for example, constructs the possibility of a China threat
by focusing on Chinese nationalism in his “conversations” with educated and well-informed readers in the United States and other
Western countries. This is a judicious strategy, as such audiences are more receptive to nationalism, the promotion of democracy and
other forms of ideological reasoning. As Buzan suggests, existential threats in the political sector may also be ideologically defined.65
Therefore, the arguments of opinion leaders can contribute to the act of securitizing the alleged impending threat: “Yet what worries
me about China isn’t its upgrade of its nuclear arsenal and its military acquisitions to project power beyond its borders. … No, what
troubles me, as one who loves China and is rooting for it to succeed, is the growing nationalism that the government has cultivated
among young people.”66 Unlike the scientific mode, in which securitizers reason deductively, the normative-analogy mode has an
inductive logic, as it reaches its conclusions on the basis of a number of historical and contemporary examples.
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Link---Chinese Rise
Demonizing China is a tactic by neoliberal elites to maintain US imperialist
domination at the expense of progressive social transformation, perpetually
feeding the defense industrial complex through a fear of the racialized Other
– reject their attempts to secure the West and sustain an immoral system of
US imperialism
Singh ’18 – Toronto based lawyer and political analyst with a focus on the People's Republic of China
Ajit. April 9. “China’s rise threatens U.S. imperialism, not American people,”
https://mronline.org/2018/04/09/chinas-rise-threatens-u-s-imperialism-not-american-people/
This year marks the 40th anniversary of China’s “reform and opening up,” initiated in 1978. At that time, although living standards
had significantly improved following the socialist revolution in 1949—life expectancy nearly doubling in the first 30 years—China
still faced tremendous challenges. Seeking to overcome the country’s severe underdevelopment, the West’s monopoly over
technology, and the isolation to which it had been subjected to during the Cold War by the United States, China implemented reforms
in order to promote economic growth and development. Deng Xiaoping, chief architect of the policy, summed up the Communist
Party’s thinking in three simple clauses: “Our country must develop. If we do not develop then we will be bullied. Development is the
only hard truth.”
Four decades later, the success of reform is undeniable: China has lifted 800 million people out
poverty—more than the rest of the world combined during the same period—and generated “the
fastest sustained expansion by a major economy in history,” according to the World Bank. China’s GDP growth
has averaged nearly 10 percent a year over a 40-year period, without crises, with the country becoming a world leader in science,
technology and innovation. Rising from extreme poverty to international power, China now has the world’s second largest economy,
and is generally expected to overtake the U.S. in GDP terms within the next two decades. Measured in terms of purchasing power
parity, China’s economy has already surpassed the U.S.
When beginning its reform, China sought to “keep a low profile” and “bide its time, while building up
strength”, as the U.S. led an international offensive, destructively imposing neoliberalism on
countries throughout the global South. Today, we are in the midst of a turning point. Announcing to
the world that it is entering a “new era” at last year’s National Congress of the Communist Party, China is playing a more
assertive and leading role in global affairs. The country’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative—called “the largest
single infrastructure program in human history”—involves over 70 countries and 1,700 development projects connecting Asia, Africa,
Latin America, and Europe. Meanwhile, mired in economic stagnation and decline, the U.S. is its losing international
authority. In particular, during the “America First”-era, the country’s reputation has plummeted, as the Trump
administration unilaterally withdraws from international institutions and agreements, displays
open bigotry towards developing countries, and eschews diplomacy for insulting arrogance and
genocidal threats.
U.S. hostility towards China increases
That China and the U.S. are moving in opposite directions is not a new phenomenon, but this trend has been brought into sharp focus
under Trump. Growing anxious about its diminishing global dominance, the U.S. demonstrates
increasing hostility towards China. In a series of recent policy statements – the National Security Strategy, National
Defense Strategy, Nuclear Posture Review, and State of the Union address – the Trump administration has repeatedly
identified the “threat” posed by “economic and military ascendance” of China, declaring that
“[i]nter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national
security.” It is claimed that China, along with Russia, “want to shape a world antithetical to U.S.
values and interests.”
In response to this “danger,” the Trump administration is pursuing a substantial buildup in U.S. military
forces, viewing “more lethal” and “unmatched power [as] the surest means of our defense.”
Trump’s 2019 budget proposes a massive increase in Pentagon spending to $716 billion and he has assembled a war cabinet to make
use of it, including extreme hawks and noted anti-China hardliners such as John Bolton, Mike Pompeo and Peter Navarro. These
moves come after top U.S. military officer, General Joseph Dunford, called China the country’s “greatest threat” and U.S. Pacific
Commander Admiral Harry Harris, new ambassador to Australia, told Congress in February that the U.S. must prepare for war with
China. Washington is increasing military pressure on Beijing: ratcheting up tensions on the Korean
peninsula; taking steps to construct a “quadrilateral” alliance with right-wing governments in
India, Japan and Australia, targeting China; and passing the Taiwan Travel Act which violates the
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“One China” policy and encourages the U.S. “to send senior officials to Taiwan to meet
Taiwanese counterparts and vice versa”
On the economic front, the Trump administration seeks to launch a “trade war” with Beijing and form a
broad anti-China alliance, proposing $50 billion in tariffs targeting Chinese imports (and threatening $100 billion more),
launching an investigation into technology transfers to China, and lodging formal complaints at the World Trade Organization on “the
state’s pervasive role in the Chinese economy.” Washington is increasingly regulating and monitoring inbound
Chinese investment, outbound U.S. investment in China, and joint ventures. Viewing technological
dominance as a pillar of its international authority, Washington considers China’s development and
technological advance to be an “existential economic threat.”
As this animosity increases, U.S. rhetoric towards China calls to mind the virulent anti-communism of
the Cold War and racist “yellow peril” phantoms of decades past. Newly appointed Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo recently warned that China was trying “to infiltrate the United States with spies – with
people who are going to work on behalf of the Chinese government against America … We see it in
our schools. We see it in our hospitals and medicals systems. We see it throughout corporate America. It’s also true in other parts of
the world … including Europe and the UK.” Similarly, FBI director Christopher Wray told Congress in February that
“the whole of Chinese society” is a threat to the U.S. That such belligerent statements can be
made towards 1.4 billion people, one-fifth of humanity, without receiving any challenge from
Democrats, Republicans or the corporate-owned media, is an indication of the consensus around
the “China threat” theory in the U.S. establishment, and the danger this poses.
A new Cold War
Washington’s hostility towards Beijing is rooted in the foundation of modern U.S. foreign
policy. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and end of the Cold War, ushered in an era during which the
U.S. has sought to establish unipolar global dominance. Explicitly outlined in a 1992 Defense Policy Guidance
paper authored under neoconservative Paul Wolfowitz, the principal objective of U.S. foreign policy in this
period has been “to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival” capable of challenging U.S.
aspirations for global hegemony. In the quarter-century since, the U.S. has aggressively pursued this aim,
engaging in endless wars, “regime change” efforts, and military build-ups around the world, now
operating over 900 military bases globally.
Despite these most destructive efforts, the U.S. has been unable to stop China’s momentous rise, which has emerged as the primary
obstacle to U.S. aims for unipolar dominance. Although Washington has sought regime change in Beijing ever since the socialist
revolution of 1949, the
U.S. has generally pursued a strategy of “containment through engagement”
following the normalisation of bilateral relations in the 1970s. In part, Washington had hoped that China’s
economic reform and the fall of the Soviet Union would lead to political reform in Beijing and the abandonment of Communist Party
leadership and socialism with Chinese characteristics, in favour of Western-oriented neoliberalism. History has confirmed that China
has no such intention.
Recognizing its own declining leverage and that China will not become “more like us”, Washington is attempting to
launch a new Cold War against China. The identification of China as the primary target of U.S.
foreign policy originated during the Obama era with the “Asia pivot” seeking to encircle China,
shifting 60 percent of U.S. naval assets to Asia by 2020. As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton argued that the U.S. must reorient the
focus of its foreign policy from the Middle East to the Asia-Pacific to ensure “continued American leadership well into this century.”
The developments under Trump, mark an escalation of this bipartisan strategy.
The unipolar-multipolar struggle
The importance of U.S.-China relations cannot be overstated, with the two countries at the core of a broader unipolar-multipolar
struggle over the shape of the international order. While the U.S. seeks to secure global dominance, China’s rise is central to
a multipolarisation trend, in which multiple centres of power are emerging to shape a negotiated,
more democratic world.
China’s political orientation has been fundamentally shaped by its history of subjugation to
foreign powers during its “century of humiliation” and anti-imperialist struggle for national
liberation. Under the leadership of the Communist Party, China has always identified itself as part of the Third World or global
South and the collective struggle of formerly colonized and oppressed nations against the global inequality wrought by imperialism.
Under the banner of “South-South cooperation”, China continues to champion this collective struggle today,
promoting greater say for developing countries in global governance and the construction of a
rules-based international order in place of the unilateral actions of major powers, in particular the
U.S. More than mere rhetoric, China provides crucial investment, infrastructure construction,
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technology transfers, debt forgiveness, and diplomatic support to developing countries. Most
importantly, unlike the U.S. and West which engage in destructive foreign interventions, China
abides by the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries and does not
impose conditions on its relations.
China’s respect for the self-determination of other countries has made it an indispensable partner
for nations resisting foreign domination and pursuing independent development, including Cuba,
Venezuela, Bolivia, Zimbabwe, Syria, Iran, and North Korea. It is for this reason that the late Cuban
revolutionary Fidel Castro declared in 2004 that “China has objectively become the most promising hope and the best example for all
Third World countries … an important element of balance, progress and safeguard of world peace and stability.” Venezuelan foreign
minister Jorge Arreaza echoed these sentiments last December, saying “Thank God humanity can count on China,” as his country
faces sanctions, economic sabotage, and threats of regime change from the U.S.
Contributing to the declining global authority of the U.S, China’s international relations have prompted
Washington to cynically accuse China of fostering dependency in Africa and being an “imperial
power” towards Latin America. In fact, rather than behaving in a predatory manner, China
provides sorely needed funding, on favorable terms, to African borrowers, and as we have seen
above China supports Latin America’s struggle against imperialism. That China is praised by fiercely
independent nations of the global South and faces such charges from the U.S.—the most powerful empire in history—reveals the
absurdity of such claims. Anxious about its own decline, the U.S. seeks to both drive a wedge between
China and the South, and also restrict the right of developing nations to choose their own partners
and path. China has demonstrated that its rise is compatible with the self-determination of other
nations—whether capitalist or socialist; what it comes into contradiction with is U.S. imperialism.
It is important to recognize that U.S. hostility towards China is not simply a product of narrow
competition with the Asian power, it is a resistance to the empowerment of the global South
and democratization of international relations. China is the primary target of U.S. imperialism
because of its strategic importance at the heart of the world multipolarisation trend, which
threatens to bring an end to U.S. international supremacy and 500 years of Western global
dominance.
An opportunity for ordinary Americans
For years, the U.S. political establishment has sought to leverage American workers in its struggle against China.
Endless
rhetoric about how China is “stealing U.S. jobs” seeks to stir up xenophobia and racism in order
divert attention from the fact that it was Washington and U.S. corporations that implemented the
neoliberal reforms which hollowed out America’s economy. On a near daily basis, the corporate-owned
media further promotes hostility towards China with hawkish, sensationalized and dishonest
reporting. In recent months, Americans have been told that China, with its “model of totalitarianism for the 21st century”, “has a
plan to rule the world”, that its “‘long arm’ of influence stretches ever further”, its “fingerprints are everywhere” as it “infiltrates” U.S.
classrooms, colleges, and more. The message is clear: be afraid.
However, for ordinary Americans, multipolarity
and the strengthening of international forces, like China,
which challenge U.S. imperialism are not a threat. Instead, this offers the potential for progressive
advances for the American people in their own struggles. The 20th century provides a historical precedent for
this, where the existence of the Soviet Union and a concrete socialist alternative to capitalism along
with the wave of Third World national liberation struggles, placed pressure on Western capitalist
countries, including the U.S., to respond to their own people’s demands for progressive social and
economic policies, such as the welfare state, higher taxes on the wealthy, and anti-racist
measures.
Similarly, today, as the U.S. and the world face tremendous social, economic and environmental challenges, Chinese socialism
is demonstrating a concrete alternative to the dominant capitalist system: pledging to eradicate
poverty by 2020; with wage growth soaring and real income for the bottom half of earners
growing 401 percent since 1978 (compared to falling by one percent in the U.S. during that time); declaring
healthcare to be a universal human right; praised for having the “best response to the world’s
environmental crisis” and reducing pollution in cities by an average of 32% in just four years since declaring
a “war on pollution”; becoming “a world leader in wind, solar, nuclear and electric vehicles”;
building the world’s longest bullet-train network, spending more on infrastructure than the U.S.
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and Europe combined; and announcing that inequality, not economic underdevelopment, is now
the “principal contradiction” to be addressed in Chinese society.
China is able to prioritize social and environmental policies—while sustaining rapid, crisis-free economic growth for four decades—
because, unlike the U.S., the interests of corporations and wealthy do not rise above political
authority. China’s wealthy regularly face severe repercussions for criminal behaviour (instead of bailouts). For example, an annual
list of China’s richest citizens is commonly called the “death list” or “kill pigs list” because those named are often later imprisoned or
executed—according to one study 17% of the time.
While China is not a perfect society and continues to face many challenges, the system of socialism with Chinese characteristics has
been able to respond to a number of pressing issues facing the world today, better than the U.S. capitalist system . This is likely
why China leads the world in optimism, with 87% feeling the country is headed in the right
direction, compared to only 43% feeling the same in the U.S.
The new Cold War that Washington seeks to launch against China requires massive increases in military
spending, paid for by ordinary Americans with massive cuts to already inadequate social
programs, housing support and health care. If the American people can reject the Cold War
mentality of their ruling class and arrogant notions of “American exceptionalism”, China’s rise
could offer them the opportunity to learn how to build a society that better meets their
needs.
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Link---Chinese Threats
Identifying China as a threat is a boundary producing discourse that
constructs foreign danger, propels aggressive responses that make conflict
more likely, and cements ideological and racist foundations of exceptional
violence
Turner 12 – Oliver Turner, Research Associate at the Brooks World Poverty Institute at the University
of Manchester, “’Threatening’ China and US Security: The International Politics of Identity,” Review of
International Studies, https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/api/datastream?publicationPid=uk-ac-manscw:206471&datastreamId=POST-PEER-REVIEW-PUBLISHERS.PDF
In his analysis of the China Threat Theory Chengxin Pan argues that the ‘threat’ is an imagined construction of American observers.15
Pan does not deny the importance of the PRC’s capabilities but asserts that they appear threatening from understandings about the
United States itself. ‘[T]here is no such thing as ‘‘Chinese reality’’ that can automatically speak for itself’, Pan argues. ‘[T]o fully
understand the US ‘‘China threat’’ argument, it is essential to recognize its autobiographical nature’.16 The geographical territory of
China, then, is not separate from or external to, American representations of it. Rather, it is actively constitutive of those
representations.17 The analysis which follows demonstrates that China ‘threats’
to the United States have to some
extent always been established and perpetuated through representation and discourse. Michel
Foucault described discourse as ‘the general domain of all statements’, constituting either a group of individual statements or a
regulated practice which accounts for a number of statements.18 American discourse of China can therefore be
manifest as disparate and single statements about that country or as collectives of related
statements such as the China Threat Theory. Ultimately, American representations of China are discursive
constructions of truths or realities about its existence. The article draws in part from the work of David Campbell who suggests that
dangers in the international realm are invariably threats to understandings about the self. ‘The
mere existence of an alternative mode of being’, argues Campbell, ‘the presence of which exemplifies that different
identities are possible . . . is sometimes enough to produce the understanding of a threat.’19 As a result,
interpretations of global danger can be traced to the processes by which states are made foreign
from one another through discourses of separation and difference.20 In this analysis it is demonstrated that
particular American discourses have historically made the US foreign from China. Case study one for
example demonstrates that nineteenth century racial discourses of non-white immigrant Chinese
separated China from a United States largely defined by its presumed Caucasian foundations. In
case study two we see that Cold War ideological discourses of communism distanced the PRC from the
democratic-capitalist US. These types of discourses are shown to have constituted a ‘specific sort
of boundary producing political performance’.21 Across the history of Sino-US relations then
when ‘dangers’ from China have emerged, they have always been perceived through the lens
of American identity. In consequence, they have always existed as dangers to that identity. In this
analysis it is argued that a key purpose of depicting China as a threat has been to protect components
of American identity (primarily racial and ideological) deemed most fundamental to its being.
As such, representations of a threatening China have most commonly been advanced by, and served
the interests of, those who support actions to defend that identity. The case study analyses which follow
reveal that this has included politicians and policymaking circles, such as those within the administration of
President Harry Truman which implemented the Cold War containment of the PRC. It also exposes the complicity of other societal
individuals and institutions including elements of the late nineteenth-century American media which supported restrictions against
Chinese immigration to the western United States. It is demonstrated that, twice before, this discursive process of
separating China from the United States has resulted in a crisis of American identity. Crises of identity
occur when the existing order is considered in danger of rupture. The prevailing authority is seen to be weakened and rhetoric over
how to reassert the ‘natural’ identity intensifies.22 Case studies one and two expose how such crises have previously emerged. These
moments were characterised by perceived attacks upon core assumptions about what the United States was understood to be:
fundamentally white in the late nineteenth century and democratic-capitalist in the early Cold War. Case study three shows that while
today’s China ‘threat’ to US security is yet to generate such a crisis, we must learn from those of the past to help
avoid the types of consequences they have previously facilitated. As Director Clapper unwittingly confirmed
then the capabilities and intentions of a ‘rising’ China are only part of the story. International relations are driven by forces both
the processes by which China is made foreign from, and potentially
dangerous to, the United States are inseparable from the enactment of US China policy. This is
because, to reaffirm, American discourses of China have never been
material and ideational and
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Link - China
China threat discourse reduces the world to calculative strategy. Behaviors,
histories, and possibilities that don’t fit into the affirmative’s worldview of
stability and certainty are labeled threatening.
Chengxin PAN IR @ Australian Nat’l ‘4
“The China Threat’ in American Self-Imagination: The Discursive
Construction of Other as Power Politics” Alternatives 29 p. 314-315
In this sense, the discursive construction of China as a threatening other cannot be detached from
(neo)realism, a positivist. ahistorical framework of analysis within which global life is reduced to endless
interstate rivalry for power and survival. As many critical IR scholars have noted, (neo) realism is not a
transcendent description of global reality but is predicated on the modernist Western identity, which, in the
quest for scientific certainty, has come to define itself essentially as the sovereign territorial nation-state.
This realist self-identity of Western states leads to the constitution of anarchy as the sphere of insecurity,
disorder, and war. In an anarchical system, as (neo) realists argue, "the gain of one side is often considered to be the loss of the
other,"''5 and "All other states are potential threats."'•^ In order to survive in such a system, states inevitably pursue power or
capability. In doing so, these realist claims represent what R. B. J. Walker calls "a specific historical articulation
of relations of universality/particularity and self/Other."^^ The (neo) realist paradigm has dominated the U.S. IR
discipline in general and the U.S. China studies field in particular. As Kurt Campbell notes, after the end of the Cold War , a whole
new crop of China experts "are much more likely to have a background in strategic studies or international
relations than China itself. ""^^ As a result, for those experts to know China is nothing more or less than to
undertake a geopolitical analysis of it, often by asking only a few questions such as how China will
"behave" in a strategic sense and how it may affect the regional or global balance of power, with a particular emphasis
on China's military power or capabilities. As Thomas J. Christensen notes, "Although many have focused on intentions as
well as capabilities, the most prevalent component of the [China threat] debate is the assessment of China's overall future military
power compared with that of the United States and other East Asian regional powers."''^ Consequently, almost by default, China
emerges as an absolute other and a threat thanks to this (neo) realist prism. The (neo) realist emphasis on survival and
security in international relations dovetails perfectly with the U.S. self-imagination, because for the United
States to define itself as the indispensable nation in a world of anarchy is often to demand absolute security. As James
Chace and Caleb Carr note, "for over two centuries the aspiration toward an eventual condition of absolute security has been viewed
as central to an effective American foreign policy."50 And this self-identification in turn leads to the definition of not
only "tangible" foreign powers but global contingency and uncertainty per se as threats . For example, former
U.S. President George H. W. Bush repeatedly said that "the enemy [of America] is unpredictability. The enemy is instability. "5'
Similarly, arguing for the continuation of U.S. Cold War alliances, a high-ranking Pentagon official asked, "if we pull out, who knows
what nervousness will result? "^2Thus understood, by its very uncertain character, China would now
automatically constitute a threat to the United States. For example, Bernstein and Munro believe that "China's political
unpredictability, the always-present possibility that it will fall into a state of domestic disunion and factional fighting," constitutes a
source of danger.s^ In like manner, Richard Betts and Thomas Christensen write: If the PLA [People's Liberation Army] remains
second-rate, should the world breathe a sigh of relief? Not entirely. . . . Drawing China into the web of global interdependence may do
more to encourage peace than war, but it cannot guarantee that the pursuit of heartfelt political interests will be blocked by a fear of
economic consequences. . . . U.S. efforts to create a stable balance across the Taiwan Strait might deter the use of force under certain
circumstances, but certainly not all.54 The upshot, therefore, is that since China displays no absolute certainty for peace,
it must be, by definition, an uncertainty, and hence, a threat . In the same way, a multitude of other unpredictable factors
(such as ethnic rivalry, local insurgencies, overpopulation, drug trafficking, environmental degradation, rogue states, the spread of
weapons of mass destruction, and international terrorism) have also been labeled as "threats" to U.S. security. Yet, it seems that in the
post-Cold War environment, China represents a kind of uncertainty par excellence. "Whatever the prospects for a more peaceful, more
democratic, and more just world order, nothing seems more uncertain today than the future of post-Deng China,"55 argues Samuel
Kim. And such an archetypical uncertainty is crucial to the enterprise of U.S. self-construction, because it
seems that only an uncertainty with potentially global consequences such as China could justify U.S.
indispensability or its continued world dominance. In this sense, Bruce Cumings aptly suggested in 1996 that China (as a threat)
was basically "a metaphor for an enormously expensive Pentagon that has lost its bearings and that requires
a formidable 'renegade state' to define its mission (Islam is rather vague, and Iran lacks necessary weights)."56
Chinese threat construction essentializes a violent Chinese "other" - causes war and kills value to life
Pan 2004 —Prof IR @ Australian Natl. Univ. (Chengxin, "The 'China Threat' in American Self-Imagination: The Discursive
Construction of Other as Power Politics," Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, vol. 29, no. 3 (2004)”)
Having examined how the "China threat" literature is enabled by and serves the purpose of a particular U.S. selfconstruction, I want to turn now to the issue of how this literature represents
a discursive construction
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of other, instead of an "objective" account of Chinese reality. This, I argue, has less to do with
its portrayal of China as a threat per se than with its essentialization and totalization of
China as an externally knowable object, independent of historically contingent
contexts or dynamic international interactions. In this sense, the discursive construction of
China as a threatening other cannot be detached from (neo)realism, a positivist, ahistorical framework
of analysis within which global life is reduced to endless interstate rivalry for power and
survival. As many critical IR scholars have noted, (neo)realism is not a transcendent description of
global reality but is predicated on the modernist Western identity, which, in the quest for
scientific certainty, has come to define itself essentially as the sovereign territorial nation-state.
This realist self-identity of Western states leads to the constitution of anarchy as the
sphere of insecurity, disorder, and war. In an anarchical system, as (neo)realists argue, "the gain
of one side is often considered to be the loss of the other ," (45) and "All other states are
potential threats." (46) In order to survive in such a system, states inevitably pursue power
or capability. In doing so, these realist claims represent what R. B. J. Walker calls "a specific historical articulation of
relations of universality/particularity and self/Other." (47) The (neo)realist paradigm has dominated the
U.S. IR discipline in general and the U.S. China studies field in particular. As Kurt Campbell notes, after the
end of the Cold War, a whole new crop of China experts "are much more likely to have a background in strategic studies or
international relations than China itself." (48) As a result, for those experts to know China is nothing more
or less than to undertake a geopolitical analysis of it, often by asking only a few questions
such as how China will "behave" in a strategic sense and how it may affect the regional or
global balance of power, with a particular emphasis on China's military power or capabilities. As Thomas J.
Christensen notes, "Although many have focused on intentions as well as capabilities, the most prevalent component of the
[China threat] debate is the assessment of China's overall future military power compared with that of the United States and
other East Asian regional powers." (49) Consequently, almost by default, China emerges as an absolute other
and a threat thanks to this (neo)realist prism. The (neo)realist emphasis on survival and
security in international relations dovetails perfectly with the U.S. self-imagination, because for the United States to
define itself as the indispensable nation in a world of anarchy is often to demand absolute security. As James Chace and
Caleb Carr note, "for over two centuries the aspiration toward an eventual condition of absolute security has been viewed as
central to an effective American foreign policy." (50) And this self-identification in turn leads to the definition of not
only "tangible" foreign powers but global contingency and uncertainty per se as threats. For
example, former U.S. President George H. W. Bush repeatedly said that "the enemy [of America] is unpredictability. The
enemy is instability." (51) Similarly, arguing for the continuation of U.S. Cold War alliances, a high-ranking Pentagon
official asked, "if we pull out, who knows what nervousness will result?" (52) Thus understood, by its very uncertain
character, China would now automatically constitute a threat to the United States. For example,
Bernstein and Munro believe that "China's political unpredictability, the always-present possibility that it will fall into a
state of domestic disunion and factional fighting," constitutes a source of danger. (53) In like manner, Richard Betts and
Thomas Christensen write: If the PLA [People's Liberation Army] remains second-rate, should the world breathe a sigh of
relief? Not entirely.... Drawing China into the web of global interdependence may do more to
encourage peace than war, but it cannot guarantee that the pursuit of heartfelt political
interests will be blocked by a fear of economic consequences.... U.S. efforts to create a
stable balance across the Taiwan Strait might deter the use of force under certain
circumstances, but certainly not all. The upshot, therefore, is that since China displays no absolute
certainty for peace, it must be, by definition, an uncertainty, and hence, a threat. In the same way, a
multitude of other unpredictable factors (such as ethnic rivalry, local insurgencies, overpopulation, drug
trafficking, environmental degradation, rogue states, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, and international
terrorism) have also been labeled as "threats" to U.S. security. Yet, it seems that in the post-Cold War
environment, China
represents a kind of uncertainty par excellence. "Whatever the prospects
for a more peaceful, more democratic, and more just world order, nothing seems more uncertain
today than the future of post-Deng China,"
75
Security K
The affirmative’s discourse of a China threat influences policy formulation at
every stage. The only way to achieve a coherent China foreign policy is to
interrogate the role of discourse in policy making. The K is prior to solvency
Turner 13—Oliver Turner is a Research Associate at the Brooks World Poverty Institute at the
University of Manchester. He is the author of American Images of China: Identity, Power, Policy
(Routledge, forthcoming) [“‘Threatening’ China and US security: the international politics of identity,”
Review of International Studies, FirstView Articles, pp 1-22, Cambridge University Press 2013]
The modern day China ‘threat’ to the United States is not an unproblematic, neutrally verifiable
phenomenon. It is an imagined construction of American design and the product of societal
representations which, to a significant extent, have established the truth that a ‘rising’ China
endangers US security. This is an increasingly acknowledged, but still relatively under-developed,
concept within the literature.121 The purpose of this article has been to expose how ‘threats’ from China
towards the United States have always been contingent upon subjective interpretation. The three
case studies chosen represent those moments across the lifetime of Sino-US relations at which China has
been perceived as most threatening to American security. The ‘threats’ emerged in highly contrasting
eras. The nature of each was very different and they emerged from varying sources (broadly speaking,
from immigration in the nineteenth century and from ‘great power’ rivalry in the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries). Yet in this way they most effectively demonstrate how China ‘threats’ have repeatedly
existed as socially constructed phenomenon.
Collectively they reveal the consistent centrality of understandings about the United States in
perceptions of external danger. They demonstrate that, regardless of China's ability to assert
material force or of the manner in which it has been seen to impose itself upon the United States,
the reality of danger can be manufactured and made real. China ‘threats’ have always been
threats to American identity so that the individual sources of ‘danger’— whether a nuclear capability
or an influx of (relatively few) foreign immigrants— have never been the sole determining factors. As
James Der Derian notes, danger can be ascribed to otherness wherever it may be found.122 During
the mid-to-late nineteenth century and throughout the early Cold War, perceptions of China ‘threats’
provoked crises of American identity. The twenty-first-century China ‘threat’ is yet to be
understood in this way but it remains inexplicable in simple material terms. As ever, the physical
realities of China are important but they are interpreted in such a way to make them
threatening, regardless of Beijing's intentions.
Most importantly, this article has shown how processes of representation have been complicit at
every stage of the formulation, enactment, and justification of US China policy. Their primary
purpose has been to dislocate China's identity from that of the United States and introduce
opportunities for action. Further, those policies themselves have reaffirmed the discourses of
separation and difference which make China foreign from the United States, protecting American
identity from the imagined threat. Ultimately, this analysis has sought to expose the inadequacy of
approaches to the study of US China policy which privilege and centralise material forces to the extent that
ideas are subordinated or even excluded.
Joseph Nye argues that the China Threat Theory has the potential to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Based upon a crude hypothetical assumption that there exists a 50 per cent chance of China becoming
aggressive and a 50 per cent chance of it not, Nye explains, to treat China as an enemy now effectively
discounts 50 per cent of the future.123 In such way he emphasises the ideational constitution of material
forces and the power of discourse to create selected truths about the world so that certain courses of action
are enabled while others are precluded. Assessments such as those of Director of National Intelligence
James Clapper in March 2011 should therefore not only be considered misguided, but also potentially
dangerous. For while they appear to represent authoritative statements of fact they actually rely
upon subjective assumptions about China and the material capabilities he describes.
In late 2010 President Obama informed Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao that ‘the American people [want] to
continue to build a growing friendship and strong relationship between the peoples of China and the United
76
Security K
States’.124 The hope, of course, is that a peaceful and cooperative future can be secured. Following the
announcement that the Asia Pacific is to constitute the primary focus of Washington's early
twenty-first-century foreign policy strategy, American interpretations of China must be
acknowledged as a central force within an increasingly pertinent relationship. The basis of their
relations will always be fundamentally constituted by ideas and history informs us that particular
American discourses of China have repeatedly served to construct vivid and sometimes
regrettable realities about that country and its people. Crucially, it tells us that they have always
been inextricable from the potentialities of US China policy. As Sino-US relations become
increasingly consequential the intention must be for American representations of the PRC— and
indeed Chinese representations of the United States— to become the focus of more concerted
scholarly attention. Only in this way can the contours of those relations be more satisfactorily
understood, so that the types of historical episodes explored in this analysis might somehow be
avoided in the future.
US studies of china are all formed not around objective evaluations of reality but tailored toward
what the US response should be—consequences cannot be separated from questions of epistemology
Breslin 2009
Shaun, Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick, “Understanding China’s regional rise:
interpretations, identities and implications” International Affairs 85: 4 (2009)817–835
China’s rise or America’s decline? Another key problem is the near-impossibility of disentangling the study of
China’s regional relations from conceptions of US (in)security. US-based scholars have devoted considerable
time and attention in recent years to the study of Chinese power in East Asia. The subdiscipline has been enriched by, among other
works, monographs by Sutter and Kang, edited collections by Shambaugh and by Keller and Rawski, and a range of articles in
International Security.55 There are also strong Asia dimensions to broader considerations of the implications of China’s rise—
Lampton’s consideration of different dimensions of Chinese power, Shirk’s understanding of the fragility of the Chinese regime,
Goldstein’s understanding of China’s grand strategy, Gill’s focus on security diplomacy and Johnston’s forensic investigation of how
China is being socialized into international norms through participation in global and regional regimes.56 It is not surprising that
Asia figures so highly in these considerations of the implications of China’s rise. It is in its own
neighbourhood that China is most active, and has made the most progress in establishing itself as a major
(if still not quite yet the primary) power. It is also the region in which the power of the US is perhaps most under threat. As a
result, there are some who are concerned that negative perceptions of the US and/or US neglect of the region and/or US foreign policy
initiatives in the Middle East have resulted in declining support for Washington. Moreover, the association of the US with the policies
promoted in the region by the IMF in the wake of the Asian financial crisis are also seen as undermining support for US values and
culture (culture defined in political economy terms if not in the continued appeal of individual leading brands). So, in many respects,
interest in the rise of China’s soft power should be seen alongside the concomitant concern about the loss of US soft power in
particular, and challenges to US hegemony in general. All of these studies are of course about China, but they are also
in many respects for the US. They are designed at least in part to influence the way in which US policymakers think about and act towards China, by assessing first the nature of this thing called China; then the
nature of the challenge that it poses to the US; and finally the efficacy of different responses in defending
US national interests. To suggest that much of the literature on Chinese power is intended to influence a policy
audience in Washington is not particularly heretical: most of these works are explicit in their intention and
have chapters devoted to explaining what the authors’ arguments mean for the US and how the government
should respond. Keller and Rawski perhaps speak for them all when they say that ‘our investigation is structured to inform a US
policy on Asia capable of responding to dynamic change’ in the light of an ‘apparent US disengagement from Asia’—an ‘unfortunate
coincidence’ of the decline of the US with China’s new regional initiatives.57 This ‘policy advocacy’ dimension to
analyses of Chinese power needs to be kept in mind when trying to evaluate the consequences of
China’s changed regional policy—not so much when reading the studies referred to above, but at least
when considering some of the warnings of an impending tip in the balance of power. When the intention is to
convince an audience, it is important to get the message across. So when it comes to talking about Chinese ‘soft power’,
the broader the definition of what it actually is, the greater the amount of power that China seems to have
(and the more urgent the threat to the US). For example, despite his earlier comments about the attraction of the Chinese
model, at the heart of Kurlantzick’s definition of the sources of Chinese soft power is the rather ‘hard’ strategic use of economic
relations as a means of achieving power politics objectives.58 Windybank also focuses on economic relations, including politically
inspired trade and aid, and concludes that the challenge to the US is real and urgent: ‘through a combination of trade, aid and skilful
diplomacy, Beijing is laying the foundations for a new regional order with China as the natural leader and the United States as the
outsider’.59 Perhaps the tone is best summed up by the title of Mosher’s 2001 book—Hegemon: China’s plan to
dominate Asia and the world.60
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Security K
Their detached and orderly description of China reduces a complex and nuanced
society to a specimen that can be clinically observed and analyzed—this approach to
‘knowing China’ renders critical reflection impossible and legitimizes violence.
Chengxin Pan, Department of Political Science and International Relations at the Australian National
University, 2004 (“The "China Threat" in American Self-Imagination: The Discursive Construction of Other
as Power Politics,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Volume 29, Issue 3, June/July, Available Online
via Academic Search Premier, p. 305-306)
While U.S. China scholars argue fiercely over "what China precisely is," their debates have been
underpinned by some common ground, especially in terms of a positivist epistemology. Firstly,
they believe that China is ultimately a knowable object, whose reality can be, and ought to be,
empirically revealed by scientific means. For example, after expressing his dissatisfaction with
often conflicting Western perceptions of China, David M. Lampton, former president of the
National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, suggests that "it is time to step back and look at
where China is today, where it might be going, and what consequences that direction will hold for
the rest of the world."2 Like many other China scholars, Lampton views his object of study as
essentially "something we can stand back from and observe with clinical detachment."3 Secondly,
associated with the first assumption, it is commonly believed that China scholars merely serve as
"disinterested observers" [end page 305] and that their studies of China are neutral, passive
descriptions of reality. And thirdly, in pondering whether China poses a threat or offers an
opportunity to the United States, they rarely raise the question of "what the United States is." That
is, the meaning of the United States is believed to be certain and beyond doubt. I do not dismiss
altogether the conventional ways of debating China. It is not the purpose of this article to venture
my own "observation" of "where China is today," nor to join the "containment" versus
"engagement" debate per se. Rather, I want to contribute to a novel dimension of the China debate
by questioning the seemingly unproblematic assumptions shared by most China scholars in the
mainstream IR community in the United States. To perform this task, I will focus attention on a
particularly significant component of the China debate; namely, the "China threat" literature.
More specifically, I want to argue that U.S. conceptions of China as a threatening other are always
intrinsically linked to how U.S. policymakers/mainstream China specialists see themselves (as
representatives of the indispensable, security-conscious nation, for example). As such, they are
not value-free, objective descriptions of an independent, preexisting Chinese reality out there, but
are better understood as a kind of normative, meaning-giving practice that often legitimates power
politics in U.S.-China relations and helps transform the "China threat" into social reality. In other
words, it is self-fulfilling in practice, and is always part of the "China threat" problem it purports
merely to describe. In doing so, I seek to bring to the fore two interconnected themes of self/other
constructions and of theory as practice inherent in the "China threat" literature—themes that have
been overridden and rendered largely invisible by those common positivist assumptions.
Their representations of China are grounded in a myth of American Exceptionalism
that is epistemologically indefensible. Fears of the ‘China Threat’ are products of U.S.
anxiety that are manifested in violence—this turns the case.
Chengxin Pan, Department of Political Science and International Relations at the Australian National
University, 2004 (“The "China Threat" in American Self-Imagination: The Discursive Construction of Other
as Power Politics,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Volume 29, Issue 3, June/July, Available Online
via Academic Search Premier, p. 310-314)
American Self-imagination and the Construction of Otherness In 1630, John Winthrop, governor
of the British-settled Massachusetts Bay Colony, described the Puritan mission as a moral beacon
[end page 310] for the world: "For wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the
eies [eyes] of all people are uppon us."26 Couched in a highly metaphoric manner, the "city on
the hill" message greatly galvanized the imagination of early European settlers in North America
who had desperately needed some kind of certainty and assurance in the face of many initial
difficulties and disappointments in the "New World." Surely there have been numerous U.S.
constructions of "what we are," but this sense of "manifest destiny," discursively repeated and
reconstructed time and again by leading U.S. politicians, social commentators, the popular press,
78
Security K
and numerous school textbooks, has since become a pivotal part of U.S. self-consciousness. In
1992, Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote: America is a remarkable
nation. We are, as Abraham Lincoln told Congress in December 1862, a nation that "cannot escape
history" because we are "the last best hope of earth." The president said that his administration
and Congress held the "power and . . . responsibility" to ensure that the hope America promised
would be fulfilled. Today . . . America is still the last best hope of earth, and we still hold the
power and bear the responsibility for its remaining so.2'' This sentiment was echoed by Madeleine
K. Albright, the former secretary of state, who once called the United States "the indispensable
nation" and maintained that "we stand tall and hence see further than other nations."28 More
recently, speaking of the U.S. role in the current war on terrorism. Vice President Dick Cheney
said: "Only we can rally the world in a task of this complexity against an enemy so elusive and so
resourceful. The United States and only the United States can see this effort through to victory."29
It is worth adding that Cheney, along with several other senior officials in the present Bush
administration, is a founding member of the Project for the New American Century, a project
designed to ensure U.S. security and global dominance in the twenty-first century. Needless to
say, the United States is not unique in ethnocentric thinking. For centuries, China had assumed it
was the center of the world. But what distinguishes U.S. from Chinese ethnocentric self-identities
is that while the latter was based largely on the Confucian legacy, the former is sanctioned by
more powerful regimes of truth, such as Christianity and modern science. For the early English
Puritans, America was part of a divine plan and the settlers were the Chosen People blessed by
covenant with God. With the advent of the scientific age, U.S. exceptionalism began taking on a
secular, scientific dimension. Charles Darwin once argued that "the [end page 311] wonderful
progress of the United States, as well as the character of the people, are the results of natural
selection."3' The United States has since been construed as the manifestation of the law of nature,
with its ideas and institutions described not as historically particular but as truly universal. For
example, in his second inaugural address in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson declared that U.S.
principles were "not the principles of a province or of a single continent. We have known and
boasted all along that they were the principles of a liberated mankind. " In short, "The US is Utopia
achieved." It represents the "End of History."* What does this U.S. self-knowledge have to do
with the way in which it comes to know others in general and China in particular? To put it simply,
this self-knowledge is always a powerful analytical framework within which other societies are to
be known. By envisioning a linear process of historical development with itself at its apex, the
United States places other nations on a common evolutionary slope and sees them as inevitably
traveling toward the end of history that is the United States. For example, as a vast, ancient nation
on the other side of the Pacific, China is frequently taken as a mirror image of the U.S. self. As
Michael Hunt points out, we imagine ourselves locked in a special relationship with the Chinese,
whose apparent moderation and pragmatism mirror our own most prized attributes and validate
our own longings for a world made over in our own image. If China with its old and radically
different culture can be won, where can we not prevail? Yet, in a world of diversity, contingency,
and unpredictability, which is irreducible to universal sameness or absolute certainty, this kind of
U.S. knowledge of others often proves frustratingly elusive. In this context, rather than questioning
the validity of their own universalist assumptions, the people of the United States believe that
those who are different should be held responsible for the lack of universal sameness. Indeed,
because "we" are universal, those who refuse or who are unable to become like "us" are no longer
just "others," but are by definition the negation of universality, or the other. In this way, the other
is always built into this universalized "American" self. Just as "Primitive . . . is a category, not an
object, of Western thought," so the threat of the other is not some kind of "external reality"
discovered by U.S. strategic analysts, but a ready-made category of thought within this particular
way of U.S. self-imagination. Consequently, there is always a need for the United States to find
a specific other to fill into the totalized category of otherness. [end page 312] In the early days of
American history, it was Europe, or the "Old World," that was invoked as its primary other,
threatening to corrupt the "New World." Shortly after World War II, in the eyes of U.S. strategists,
the Soviet Union emerged as a major deviance from, hence an archenemy of, their universal path
toward progress via the free market and liberal democracy. And after the demise of the Soviet
Union, the vacancy of other was to be filled by China, the "best candidate" the United States could
find in the post-Cold War, unipolar world. Not until the September 11 attacks in New York and
79
Security K
Washington had China's candidature been suspended, to be replaced by international terrorism in
general and Saddam's Iraq in particular's At first glance, as the "China threat" literature has told
us, China seems to fall perfectly into the "threat" category, particularly given its growing power.
However, China's power as such does not speak for itself in terms of an emerging threat. By any
reasonable measure, China remains a largely poor country edged with only a sliver of affluence
along its coastal areas. Nor is China's sheer size a self-evident confirmation of the "China threat"
thesis, as other countries like India, Brazil, and Australia are almost as big as China. Instead, China
as a "threat" has much to do with the particular mode of U.S. self-imagination. As Steve Chan
notes: China is an object of attention not only because of its huge size, ancient legacy, or current
or projected relative national power. . . . The importance of China has to do with perceptions,
especially those regarding the potential that Beijing will become an example, source, or model
that contradicts Western liberalism as the reigning paradigm. In an era of supposed universalizing
cosmopolitanism, China demonstrates the potency and persistence of nationalism, and embodies
an alternative to Western and especially U.S. conceptions of democracy and capitalism. China is
a reminder that history is not close to an end. Certainly, I do not deny China's potential for strategic
misbehavior in the global context, nor do I claim the "essential peacefulness" of Chinese culture."
Having said that, my main point here is that there is no such thing as "Chinese reality" that can
automatically speak for itself, for example, as a "threat." Rather, the "China threat" is essentially
a specifically social meaning given to China by its U.S. observers, a meaning that cannot be
disconnected from the dominant U.S. self-construction. Thus, to fully understand the U.S. "China
threat" argument, it is essential to recognize its autobiographical nature. [end page 313] Indeed,
the construction of other is not only a product of U.S. self-imagination, but often a necessary foil
to it. For example, by taking this particular representation of China as Chinese reality per se, those
scholars are able to assert their self-identity as "mature," "rational" realists capable of knowing the
"hard facts" of international politics, in distinction from those "idealists" whose views are said to
be grounded more in "an article of faith" than in "historical experience."41 On the other hand,
given that history is apparently not "progressively" linear, the invocation of a certain other not
only helps explain away such historical uncertainties or "anomalies" and maintain the credibility
of the allegedly universal path trodden by the United States, but also serves to highlight U.S.
"indispensability." As Samuel Huntington puts it, "If being an American means being committed
to the principles of liberty, democracy, individualism, and private property, and if there is no evil
empire out there threatening those principles, what indeed does it mean to be an American, and
what becomes of American national interests?" In this way, it seems that the constructions of the
particular U.S. self and its other are always intertwined and mutually reinforcing. Some may
suggest that there is nothing particularly wrong with this since psychologists generally agree that
"individuals and groups define their identity by differentiating themselves from and placing
themselves in opposition to others."^3 This is perhaps true. As the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de
Saussure tells us, meaning itself depends on difference and differentiation. Yet, to understand the
U.S. dichotomized constructions of self/other in this light is to normalize them and render them
unproblematic, because it is also apparent that not all identity-defining practices necessarily
perceive others in terms of either universal sameness or absolute otherness and that difference
need not equate to threat.
Chinese threats are grounded in US primacy’s demand of securitization versus a vague other—this
logic creates a self fulfilling cycle of endless intervention
Pan, 2004. Chengxin Pan, Department of Political Science and International Relations at Australian
National University. Alternatives 29, 2004. Pages 310-313.
In 1630, John Winthrop, governor of the British-settled Massachusetts Bay Colony, described the
Puritan mission as a moral beacon for the world: "For wee must Consider that wee shall be as a
Citty upon a Hill, the eies [eyes] of all people are uppon us." Couched in a highly metaphoric
manner, the "city on the hill" message greatly galvanized the imagination of early European
settlers in North America who had desperately needed some kind of certainty and assurance in the
face of many initial difficulties and disappointments in the "New World." Surely there have been
numerous U.S. constructions of "what we are," but this sense of "manifest destiny," discursively
80
Security K
repeated and reconstructe{d time and again by leading U.S. politicians, social commentators, the
popular press, and numerous school textbooks, has since become a pivotal part of U.S. selfconsciousness. In 1992, Colin Powell, then chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote:
America is a remarkable nation. We are, as Abraham Lincoln told Congress in December 1862, a
nation that "cannot escape history" because we are "the last best hope of earth." The president said
that his administration and Congress held the "power and . . . responsibility" to ensure that the
hope America promised would be fulfilled. Today . . . America is still the last best hope of earth,
and we still hold the power and bear the responsibility for its remaining so.
This sentiment was echoed by Madeleine K. Albright, the former secretary of state, who once
called the United States "the indispensable nation" and maintained that "we stand tall and hence
see further than other nations." More recently, speaking of the U.S. role in the current war on
terrorism. Vice President Dick Cheney said: "Only we can rally the world in a task of this
complexity against an enemy so elusive and so resourceful. The United States and only the United
States can see this effort through to victory." It is worth adding that Cheney, along with several
other senior officials in the present Bush administration, is a founding member of the Project for
the New American Century, a project designed to ensure U.S. security and global dominance in
the twenty-first century.
Needless to say, the United States is not unique in ethnocentric thinking. For centuries, China
had assumed it was the center of the world. But what distinguishes U.S. from Chinese ethnocentric
self-identities is that while the latter was based largely on the Confucian legacy, the former is
sanctioned by more powerful regimes of truth, such as Christianity and modern science. For the
early English Puritans, America was part of a divine plan and the settlers were the Chosen People
blessed by covenant with God. With the advent of the scientific age, U.S. exceptionalism began
taking on a secular, scientific dimension. Charles Darwin once argued that "the wonderful progress
of the United States, as well as the character of the people, are the results of natural selection."
The United States has since been construed as the manifestation of the law of nature, with its
ideas and institutions described not as historically particular but as truly universal. For example,
in his second inaugural address in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson declared that U.S. principles
were "not the principles of a province or of a single continent. We have known and boasted all
along that they were the principles of a liberated mankind." In short, "The US is Utopia achieved."
It represents the "End of History."
What does this U.S. self-knowledge have to do with the way in which it comes to know others
in general and China in particular? To put it simply, this self-knowledge is always a powerful
analytical framework within which other societies are to be known. By envisioning a linear process
of historical development with itself at its apex, the United States places other nations on a
common evolutionary slope and sees them as inevitably traveling toward the end of history that
is the United States. For example, as a vast, ancient nation on the other side of the Pacific, China
is frequently taken as a mirror image of the U.S. self. As Michael Hunt points out,
we imagine ourselves locked in a special relationship with the Chinese, whose apparent
moderation and pragmatism mirror our own most prized attributes and validate our own longings
for a world made over in our own image. If China with its old and radically different culture can
be won, where can we not prevail?
Yet, in a world of diversity, contingency, and unpredictability, which is irreducible to universal
sameness or absolute certainty, this kind of U.S. knowledge of others often proves frustratingly
elusive. In this context, rather than questioning the validity of their own universalist assumptions,
the people of the United States believe that those who are different should be held responsible for
the lack of universal sameness. Indeed, because "we" are universal, those who refuse or who are
unable to become like "us" are no longer just "others," but are by definition the negation of
universality, or the other. In this way, the other is always built into this universalized "American"
self. Just as "Primitive ... is a category, not an object, of Western thought," so the threat of the other
is not some kind of "external reality" discovered by U.S. strategic analysts, but a ready-made
category of thought within this particular way of U.S. self-imagination.
Consequently, there is always a need for the United States to find a specific other to fill into the
totalized category of otherness. In the early days of American history, it was Europe, or the "Old
World," that was invoked as its primary other, threatening to corrupt the "New World." Shortly
81
Security K
after World War II, in the eyes of U.S. strategists, the Soviet Union emerged as a major deviance
from, hence an archenemy of, their universal path toward progress via the free market and liberal
democracy. And after the demise of the Soviet Union, the vacancy of other was to be filled by
China, the "best candidate" the United States could find in the post-Cold War, unipolar world. Not
until the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington had China's candidature been
suspended, to be replaced by international terrorism in general and Saddam's Iraq in particular.
At first glance, as the "China threat" literature has told us, China seems to fall perfectly into the
"threat" category, particularly given its growing power. However, China's power as such does not
speak for itself in terms of an emerging threat. By any reasonable measure, China remains a largely
poor country edged with only a sliver of affluence along its coastal areas. Nor is China's sheer size
a self-evident confirmation of the "China threat" thesis, as other countries like India, Brazil, and
Australia are almost as big as China. Instead, China as a "threat" has much to do with the particular
mode of U.S. self-imagination. As Steve Chan notes:
China is an object of attention not only because of its huge size, ancient legacy, or current or
projected relative national power. . . . The importance of China has to do with perceptions,
especially those regarding the potential that Beijing will become an example, source, or model
that contradicts Western liberalism as the reigning paradigm. In an era of supposed universalizing
cosmopolitanism, China demonstrates the potency and persistence of nationalism, and embodies
an alternative to Western and especially U.S. conceptions of democracy and capitalism. China is
a reminder that history is not close to an end.
Certainly, I do not deny China's potential for strategic misbehavior in the global context, nor do I
claim the "essential peacefulness" of Chinese culture." Having said that, my main point here is that
there is no such thing as "Chinese reality" that can automatically speak for itself, for example, as a
"threat." Rather, the "China threat" is essentially a specifically social meaning given to China by its
U.S. observers, a meaning that cannot be disconnected from the dominant U.S. self-construction.
Thus, to fully understand the U.S. "China threat" argument, it is essential to recognize its
autobiographical nature.
Chinese threat construction assumes a knowable and essentially violent Chinese
Other—this Western lens makes militarization and conflict inevitable.
Pan, 2004. Pan, IR at Australian National University, 04[Chengxin, "The 'China Threat' in American SelfImagination: The Discursive Construction of Other as Power Politics," Alternatives: Global, Local, Political,
vol. 29, no. 3 (2004)”]
Having examined how the "China threat" literature is enabled by and serves the purpose of a
particular U.S. self-construction, I want to turn now to the issue of how this literature represents a
discursive construction of other, instead of an "objective" account of Chinese reality. This, I argue,
has less to do with its portrayal of China as a threat per se than with its essentialization and
totalization of China as an externally knowable object, independent of historically contingent
contexts or dynamic international interactions. In this sense, the discursive construction of China as a
threatening other cannot be detached from (neo)realism, a positivist, ahistorical framework of analysis within which global
life is reduced to endless interstate rivalry for power and survival. As many critical IR scholars have noted, (neo)realism
is not a transcendent description of global reality but is predicated on the modernist Western
identity, which, in the quest for scientific certainty, has come to define itself essentially as the
sovereign territorial nation-state. This realist self-identity of Western states leads to the
constitution of anarchy as the sphere of insecurity, disorder, and war. In an anarchical system, as
(neo)realists argue, "the gain of one side is often considered to be the loss of the other," (45) and
"All other states are potential threats." (46) In order to survive in such a system, states inevitably
pursue power or capability. In doing so, these realist claims represent what R. B. J. Walker calls "a specific historical
articulation of relations of universality/particularity and self/Other." (47) The (neo)realist paradigm has
dominated the U.S. IR discipline in general and the U.S. China studies field in particular. As Kurt
Campbell notes, after the end of the Cold War, a whole new crop of China experts "are much more likely to have a
background in strategic studies or international relations than China itself." (48) As a result , for those experts to
know China is nothing more or less than to undertake a geopolitical analysis of it, often by asking
only a few questions such as how China will "behave" in a strategic sense and how it may affect
the regional or global balance of power, with a particular emphasis on China's military power or capabilities. As
Thomas J. Christensen notes, "Although many have focused on intentions as well as capabilities, the most prevalent
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component of the [China threat] debate is the assessment of China's overall future military power compared with that of
the United States and other East Asian regional powers." (49) Consequently, almost by default, China emerges as an
absolute other and a threat thanks to this (neo)realist prism. The (neo)realist emphasis on survival
and security in international relations dovetails perfectly with the U.S. self-imagination, because for the United States
to define itself as the indispensable nation in a world of anarchy is often to demand absolute security. As James Chace and
Caleb Carr note, "for over two centuries the aspiration toward an eventual condition of absolute security has been viewed
as central to an effective American foreign policy." (50) And this self-identification in turn leads to the definition of not
only "tangible" foreign powers but global contingency and uncertainty per se as threats. For example,
former U.S. President George H. W. Bush repeatedly said that "the enemy [of America] is unpredictability. The enemy
is instability." (51) Similarly, arguing for the continuation of U.S. Cold War alliances, a high-ranking Pentagon official
asked, "if we pull out, who knows what nervousness will result?" (52) Thus understood, by its very uncertain
character, China would now automatically constitute a threat to the United States. For example,
Bernstein and Munro believe that "China's political unpredictability, the always-present possibility that it will fall into a
state of domestic disunion and factional fighting," constitutes a source of danger. (53) In like manner, Richard Betts and
Thomas Christensen write: If the PLA [People's Liberation Army] remains second-rate, should the world breathe a sigh
of relief? Not entirely.... Drawing China into the web of global interdependence may do more to
encourage peace than war, but it cannot guarantee that the pursuit of heartfelt political interests
will be blocked by a fear of economic consequences.... U.S. efforts to create a stable balance across
the Taiwan Strait might deter the use of force under certain circumstances, but certainly not all.
The upshot, therefore, is that since China displays no absolute certainty for peace, it must be, by
definition, an uncertainty, and hence, a threat. In the same way, a multitude of other unpredictable
factors (such as ethnic rivalry, local insurgencies, overpopulation, drug trafficking, environmental degradation, rogue
states, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, and international terrorism) have also been labeled as "threats"
to U.S. security. Yet, it seems that in the post-Cold War environment, China represents a kind of
uncertainty par excellence. "Whatever the prospects for a more peaceful, more democratic, and
more just world order, nothing seems more uncertain today than the future of post-Deng China,"
Their so-called ‘China Experts’ use flawed methodologies—their conclusions should
be rejected.
Chengxin Pan, Department of Political Science and International Relations at the Australian National
University, 2004 (“The "China Threat" in American Self-Imagination: The Discursive Construction of Other
as Power Politics,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Volume 29, Issue 3, June/July, Available Online
via Academic Search Premier, p. 315)
The (neo) realist paradigm has dominated the U.S. IR discipline in general and the U.S. China
studies field in particular. As Kurt Campbell notes, after the end of the Cold War, a whole new
crop of China experts "are much more likely to have a background in strategic studies or
international relations than China itself." As a result, for those experts to know China is nothing
more or less than to undertake a geopolitical analysis of it, often by asking only a few questions
such as how China will "behave" in a strategic sense and how it may affect the regional or global
balance of power, with a particular emphasis on China's military power or capabilities. As Thomas
J. Christensen notes, "Although many have focused on intentions as well as capabilities, the most
prevalent component of the [China threat] debate is the assessment of China's overall future
military power compared with that of the United States and other East Asian regional powers."
Consequently, almost by default, China emerges as an absolute other and a threat thanks to this
(neo) realist prism.
Congressional debates about China prove our argument – hostile representations of
a “China Threat” manifest themselves in ineffective policies and undermine relations.
Stanley Lubman, Lecturer of Law and Visiting Scholar for the Center for the Study of Law and Society at
the University of California-Berkeley, 2004 (“The Dragon As Demon: Images Of China On Capitol Hill,”
Center for the Study of Law and Society Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, JSP/Center for the Study
of Law and Society Faculty Working Papers, Paper 18, March 4, Available Online at
http://repositories.cdlib.org/ csls/fwp/18/, p. 22-24)
Any faint hope that narrow and dogmatically negative views of China might be tempered is no
more than a whistle in the dark, but the debates that have been quoted here suggest that there is a
good deal of darkness in Congress that needs to be illuminated. Unfortunately, the groups in
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Congress that have been identified here as anti-Chinese gather strength from their numbers taken
together, and are more likely than not to continue to join forces, especially on the economic issues
that grew prominent in 2003. On these latter issues, moreover, Congressional emotions are
understandably fueled by [end page 22] knowledge of the pain of constituents who lose jobs
because their employers move manufacturing activities to China or close in the face of competition
from China. This article has explored only the surface manifestations of deeper issues that lie
beneath the Congressional debates because it has been concerned only with what has been said
publicly, for the record. It undoubtedly slights many other members whose spoken words have
been few, but who are more temperate in their judgments than some of their more vocal colleagues.
More important, relationships with interest groups lie behind the one-dimensional images of China
in Congress that have been illustrated here. Labor unions, human rights advocates and antiabortion groups have been among China’s strongest critics, and there are others less obvious, such
as Taiwan-funded lobbyists. The impact of the lobbyists is reinforced, however, by what one
veteran of thirty years of China-watching in the US government has noted as “the lack of
professional training or experience in dealing with China on the part of congressional staff
members critical of administration policy.”40 But when members of Congress reflect uncritically
what lobbyists and poorly-informed staff tell them, ignoring the complexities of modern China,
they are led into drastic oversimplification of their debate and thought on China policy. It is
impossible to differentiate among the reasons underlying the demonizing of China by some in
Congress, but some ignorance, willful or not, underlies the words of the demonizers. More than
ignorance is involved, of course, and inquiry into the dynamics of Congressional participation in
making China policy obviously must go behind the Congressional debate that forms the public
record. Whatever other factors are at work, however, the rhetoric that dominates discussions of
China by some members of Congress promises to continue to deform not only their personal
perspectives, but the contribution that Congress makes to formulation of this country’s China
policy. At the very least, administration policymakers are “diverted from other tasks…Much time
is spent dealing with often exaggerated congressional assertions about negative features of the
Chinese government’s behavior…The congressional critics are open to a wide range of
Americans— some with partisan or other interests – who are prepared to highly in often graphic
terms real or alleged policies and behaviors of the Chinese government in opposition to US
interests.”41 It is difficult not to agree with the conclusion of one recent study, that “the
cumulative effect” of Congressional criticism of the China policies under both the first President
Bush and President Clinton “reinforced a stasis in US-China relations and slowed forward
movement.”42 Of the PNTR debate itself, it has recently been said that “…the rancorous
partisanship in both House and Senate during the PNTR process, and the numerous other
challenges highlighted by the protagonists – [end page 23] nonproliferation, human rights, trade
deficits, and other issues – sharpened the disagreements and laid the ground for future battles…
the potential remained for even more controversy and contention over China policy.”43 Indeed,
the passage of time and the growing power of economic issues since the PNTR debate underlines
the trenchancy of this prediction, as the concluding section of this article suggests.
their very understanding of China is locked in a mentality of paranoid threat
construction in which containment and engagement become indistinguishable
Seng 2—Head of Research for Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, Singapore. PhD (Tan See, What
Fear Hath Wrought: Missile Hysteria and The Writing of “America”, July 2002,
http://www.rsis.edu.sg/publications/WorkingPapers/WP28.PDF, AMiles)
In Kyle’s discourse we encounter, first, the partisan criticism levelled against the previous administration for its evidently erroneous belief that China could be “reformed” by the
“civilizing influence of the West.” That this statement proceeds immediately from there to demonstrate why “this theory hasn’t proven out” is not to imply that the senator from
Arizona therefore thinks that the entirety of the Clinton Administration’s purported logic is thereby flawed. Indeed, his discourse enacts precisely the same exclusionary practice,
This
exclusionary matrix by which subjects are formed thus requires the simultaneous production of a
domain of abject beings, those who are not yet ‘subjects,’ but who form the constitutive outside to
the domain of the subject.” 75 I would suggest that Butler’s “abject beings…who are not yet ‘subjects’”
may possibly be construed as what I have termed “lesser subjects.” Hence, in much the same way that
colonial or Orientalist discourses produced subaltern subjects in order to be known, domesticated,
present in the logic that he has just criticized, so as to position China as a “lesser subject,” so to speak, relative to the US. Again, Butler’s thoughts are helpful here: “
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disciplined, conquered, governed, and of course civilized, 76 the figuration of “China” in Kyle’s
discourse, evoking a genre of Otherness most moderns prefer to think has disappeared with the passing of
colonialism, is that of an uncivilized barbaric nation and people. The previous Democratic
administration, according to Kyle, erred in believing that the Chinese can be reformed and civilized, but no
such hope – and it is, after all, a liberal hope – need be entertained by conservatives who know better than
to even attempt to civilize “the natives.” This representation allows for the simultaneous production of the
properly constituted subject, “America,” where human rights, the rule of law, democracy, and a track
record of good neighbourliness are fully embraced along with capitalism. Here we may note that although
this inventory of criteria has long been associated with how Americans perceive themselves – and, to be
sure, how the world perceives America, positively as well as negatively – their own national history,
however, is littered with as many spectacular failures as there have been successes in these very areas.
Further, what is interesting to note, in terms of the redeployment – or, to paraphrase Foucault, a “reincitement” – of Orientalist tropes in security discourse, is the shift from the sorts of axiomatic and
practical axes that structure interrelated discourses on communism during and prior to the Cold War, to the
axes that configure contemporary readings of communism or, more precisely, the latest variant of
“socialism with Chinese characteristics.” As Campbell has pointed out, one of the dimensions upon which
pivoted the construction of Soviet communism as the West’s Other was that of the organizing of economic
relations: notably, in its most simplistic terms, central planning and collectivisation on the part of the
communist bloc; and, laissez faire cum mixed economy and private ownership on the part of the Free
World. 77 In the case of Senator Kyle’s narrative – which, in a key respect, reiterates and references norms
and tropisms already present in security discourses on China during the Clinton presidency – that particular
axis has become irrelevant in the wake of China’s “embrace of western capitalism” and growing integration
with the global economy. 78 For a replacement, contemporary security discourse has mobilized other
representational resources that, as we have seen, function within the senator’s discourse to
domesticate and constitute China as a threat. And although China is described therein as “being led by
a communist regime,” the choice of this particular adjective, deliberately circulated to invoke past
articulations of fear, no longer refers to the same thing, however. Hence, much as China has “embraced
western capitalism,” much as communism in its economic sense is no longer adhered to throughout all of
China, the discursive construction of Otherness, to the extent that the figuration of communism is still
being employed, now proceeds along the democratic/authoritarian axis, as well as along other axes
(elaborated upon earlier) around which rogue states are constituted. From this fragment of discourse –
reliant as it is on other discourses developmental, humanitarian, juridical, ethical, economic, political,
ideological, cultural, and of course security in order to be effective – “emerges” a China that can be
perceived in no other way other than as a threat to the US. Kyle concludes with a stirring
endorsement of what may be for others symptomatic of American hubris and ethnocentricity: “We should
hold China up to the same standards of proper behavior we have defined for other nations, and we
should work for political change in Beijing, unapologetically standing up for freedom and democracy” 79 –
words today that resonate ambivalently as Washington wages its “new war on terrorism” in the name of
freedom and democracy while, at the same time, having to infringe upon the civil liberties of some
Americans of particular ethno-religious backgrounds in the name of that war. Finally, it is not entirely
clear why Chinese “military modernization and buildup of forces opposite Taiwan,” much less
“Beijing’s threatening rhetoric” – as if Chinese leaders, unlike their US counterparts, do not ever
employ rhetoric for purposes of domestic consumption – should automatically lead Americans to
“the conclusion that China potentially poses a growing threat to [the US’s] national security.” To its
credit, the Bush Administration has, for the most part, avoided any forthright labelling of China as a
threat, much less a clear and present danger. But the conditions of discursive possibility for such
labelling are clear and present, so much so that policy options of containment, confrontation, and
engagement, in an important sense, do not constitute fundamentally distinct ways of
conceptualising China, but rather overlapping approaches to managing an already presumed
Other, both dangerous and threatening. As National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice has argued,
“China is not a ‘status quo’ power [because it] resents the role of the United States in the AsiaPacific region” 80 – an ideological reduction that not only constitutes China as incorrigibly
revisionist, but refuses the possibility that China may in fact accept (or, as a retired Chinese diplomat
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recently put it, “tolerate” 81 ) the international status quo owing to the benefits Beijing has accrued
and desires to continuing accruing, thanks largely to America’s apparent stabilizing influence in the
region. 82 Moreover, as one analyst has averred, “Beijing has a history of testing US presidents early to
see what they’re made of.” 83 As in the above illustrations concerning rogue states, exclusionary
practices along various axiomatic and practical axes construct a particular China that, in turn,
legitimates the view of the Chinese and their missiles as threats. All the while, the contemporaneous
production and reproduction of a particular American identity proceeds apace by way of the
reiteration and reference of boundary producing performances that form the constitutive “outside”
of danger, threat, and vulnerability.
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Link -- China - Method Debate
[ ] Negative representations result in an essentialist and racist policy towards China, turns case
Lubman 4 — Lecturer in Law and Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Law and Society (Stanley, "The Dragon As
Demon: Images Of China On Capitol Hill," Working Papers, March)
In Congress, alliances of partisans of single issues insist vocally on highly negative views of China. Critics of
China’s human rights practices, including a repressive criminal process and suppression of dissent, have joined with members who
speak for the religious right in decrying China’s birth-control policies and hostility to religions not licensed by the state. Supporters of
Tibetan independence and an autonomous Taiwan add further heat to debate, as do others in whose geostrategic perspective China has
already become a threat to American security. Underlying the views of some, echoing the labor unions, is a commitment to
protectionism. One respected Senator suggested during the debates that latent racism may lurk even deeper. These
views cloud debate because they often caricature a complex society and foster unconstructive moralizing
rather than analysis of the problems that they address. By demonizing China they obstruct the formulation
and maintenance of a coherent American policy toward China and weaken Congress’ contribution to
making US policy.
[ ] That's a decision rule - you should reject racism in every instance because it confines our
knowledge and replicates cruelty and injustice - c/a Batur
[ ] Their discourse causes containment - presupposing conflict incentivizes war plans which replicate
the security dilemma
Weber 8 — PhD Candidate at Johann Wolfgang-Goeth University (Christian, “Securitizing China and Russia?, Western relations
with “rising powers” in the East,” Journal of Historical Sociology, Vol. 16(3), http://www.soz.unifrankfurt.de/hellmann/projekt/Securitizing%20China%20and%20Russia_September_2008.pdf)
One clear example for the reproduction of the West through practices of securitization is
the conceptualization of China’s rise as a long term security threat. Since the mid-1990s, Western
scholars and politicians try to evaluate the power potential and the aims of the Chinese
leadership in order to assess in a more informed fashion whether Western states should be either
concerned or dispassionate about China’s impressive economic growth rates and its increases in military
spending.19 One striking feature of this literature is its normative Western outlook. Scholars, particularly in the U.S.,
presume that the current “liberal international order” and the Western supremacy within
this order must be preserved. A revision of the existing rules on China’s terms is hardly ever
considered as an acceptable option and is associated with warlike escalations of previous power transitions. Thus,
the literature on “China’s rise” starts from the presupposition that Western predominance
should be upheld and depicts a more powerful China as a challenger that should be either fully socialized into the “liberal
system” through a policy of engagement or restrained from subverting it through a containment
strategy.20 Proponents of containment who regard a future antagonism between China and the West as almost inevitable made
themselves heard with explicit securitizing moves when conflicts between U.S. and Chinese foreign policy came up. For example, a
few months after the Taiwan Strait crisis in 1995-96 the journal Foreign Affairs appeared with a special section on “The China
threat”.21 In the lead article, Richard Bernstein and Ross Munro, two American journalists, made some deterministic predictions
suggesting that China “is bound to be no strategic friend of the United States, but a long-term adversary” (p.22). In East Asia, they
contended, military conflict between China and the U.S. over Taiwan or over territorial claims in the South China Sea was always
possible and becoming more and more likely as China’s military strength continued to grow. Bernstein and Munro did not see this
conflict confined only to China and the U.S. but instead presented it as a veritable global security problem: Moreover, the ChineseAmerican rivalry of the future could fit into a broader new global arrangement that will increasingly challenge Western, and especially
American, global supremacy. China’s close military cooperation with the former Soviet Union, particularly its purchase of advanced
weapons in the almost unrestricted Russian arms bazaar, its technological and political help to the Islamic countries of central Asia
and North Africa, and its looming dominance in East Asia put it at the center of an informal network of states, many of which have
goals and philosophies inimical to those of the United States, and many of which share China’s sense of grievance at the long global
domination of the West.22 This quote reads like a textbook version of a securitization move in which China is stylized as the leader of
an “informal” but nevertheless dangerous coalition of autocratic and Islamic enemies that prepare for a struggle against Western
dominance. It is hardly surprising that they cite Samuel Huntington’s thesis on the “clash of civilizations” in the subsequent
paragraph. Their vision shares quite a similarity with Huntington’s idea of a “Confucian- Islamic Connection that has emerged to
challenge Western interests, values and power”.23 Interestingly, they would see less need for concern if China would become a
democracy. Then, its military strength would be less threatening than if it remained a dictatorship. They don’t believe that to happen,
however, since “that would be contrary to Chinese culture”.24 Bernstein and Munro’s essay was not the last one to portray China as
the coming danger to for the West. In the context of renewed tensions over Taiwan in 2000, the Washington
Times journalist Bill Gertz made very similar claims in his book on the “The China threat”. Gertz
argued that China
was the “most serious long-term national security challenge to the United States”. It threatened Taiwan
with a massive missile buildup, supported terrorist groups that threatened the U.S. and enhanced military cooperation with Russia.
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These claims and allegations of anti-American intentions are only garnished with quotes from Chinese senior generals and illustrated
with incidents where China and the U.S. have come into diplomatic conflict. The Clinton administration is accused of having sold out
American interests in ignoring the most serious security threat of the United States by naively trying to “engage” China via economic
cooperation. As trade would not ensure friendly relations, he argues, instead China must be contained through a recommitment to East
Asian military involvement and a U.S. military buildup.25 Although the western security agenda after 9/11 had clearly shifted towards
Islamic terrorism, in the second edition of his book Gertz sticks to his warning that the “danger from the nuclear-armed communist
dictatorship in China is growing”. From an IR theory perspective there seem to be two separate arguments about the alleged dangers
of China’s rise. The first is the liberal argument that there is a qualitative difference in the foreign policy behaviour of democratic and
autocratic regimes with the latter being more risk-acceptant and dangerous because their leaders are not as dependent on the consent of
their respective population as the former.26 The second argument is a realist one about power transitions. According to this
perspective, a look at the historical record allows draw- ing the lesson that the hegemony of a state does not last forever because over
time the distribution of power will change to its detriment. New rising powers, also frequently called revisionist powers, will not be
prepared to satisfy themselves with the existing set of rules that constituted the old hegemonic order and will instead seek to change
the rules to their own favour.27 Since there is no reliable mechanism in international society to manage this transition peacefully and
because the dominant actors will not give up their power position voluntarily, serious conflict over world hegemony and a radical
revision of the old rules seem inevitable. 28 Against this backdrop it should come as no surprise that realist scholars like John
Mearsheimer and Robert Kagan join the public dispute with the message that a more powerful China is a long term threat that must be
contained by the United States and its allies.29 In the public debate about China’s rise the liberal and the realist arguments are
combined to a distinctive narrative that can be summarized as follows.30 China poses a long term threat to the security of the U.S. and
the liberal Western order as a whole. As soon as the leading great power in the world is seriously challenged by the “rise” of great
powers that are equipped with the sufficient demographic and economic potential, the fight over world hegemony cannot be prevented
forever. Democracies and “totalitarian regimes” cannot coexist peacefully indefinitely. This is a lesson that can be drawn from 19th
and 20th century history. Sooner or later they will fight each other until one or the other side prevails. Therefore, it would be
detrimental to U.S. long term interests to engage China in a policy of “appeasement” e.g. through trade partnership as the Clinton
administration had practiced it. Instead
it must assume a firm posture and contain China through a
“politics of strength” e.g. with a military build-up in East Asia and the forging of alliances of
democracies. It is up to the U.S. as the leader of the Western world to take the initiative and
demonstrate military strength. This narrative had a considerable impact in China
itself where it was received under the label of “Chinese threat theory”. Chinese scholars and
officials reviewed U.S. and European articles that named China as a security threat and took it as an illustration of the onesidedness
with which China was treated by foreigners. In this way, complaining about the Western “Chinese threat
theory” at the same time fostered Chinese foreign policy identity: the country would not
turn to imperial expansion as Western great powers had done in the past but would instead go its own way of “peaceful rise” or
“peaceful development”. 31 This short reconstruction of the China threat narrative shall serve only as a starting point illustrate how a
securitization of China could look like. Of course it is only one specific part of an overall discourse about how to understand and react
to China’s growing importance in world politics that is taking place in the academy as well as in policy circles and in the wider public.
But at least one preliminary observation still seems worth noting. China is not only seen as a threat in the United States as one might
expect.32 For example, the Gaullist former French prime minister Edouard Balladur recently called for a “union of the West” that
could stop the alleged relative decline of the Atlantic community vis-à-vis China’s economic growth.33 Opinion polls indicate that
large parts of the population not only in the United States but also Europe see the “growing power of China” as an economic and even
as a “military threat”.34 Of course this does not mean that they would support a policy of containment. People who are worried about
China’s growth may favor diplomatic negotiations as the more adequate measure. But
nevertheless the description of
the problem has an impact on the range of options that are taken into
consideration. When the German Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in its recent Asia Strategy conceptualizes “Asia as a
strategic challenge and opportunity for Germany and Europe”, it pushes the range of alternatives in a certain direction.35 If even
those who prefer a politization of Sino-Western relations through multila- teral negotiations and economic
cooperation build their arguments upon a description of China’s rise as a “strategic
challenge” the plausibility to treat it like a security issue increases.
[ ] Containment causes war
Eland 5/11/05 — Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace and Liberty at the Independent Institute (Ian Eland,
"Coexisting with a Rising China," Independent Institute)
Instead of emulating the policies of pre-World War I Britain toward Germany, the United States should take a page from
another chapter in British history. In the late 1800s, although not without tension, the British peacefully allowed the fledging United
States to rise as a great power, knowing both countries were protected by the expanse of the Atlantic Ocean that separated them.
Taking advantage of that same kind separation by a major ocean, the United States could also safely allow China to
obtain respect as a great power, with a sphere of influence to match. If China went beyond obtaining a reasonable sphere of
influence into an Imperial Japanese-style expansion, the United States could very well need to mount a challenge. However, at
present, little evidence exists of Chinese intent for such expansion, which would run counter to recent Chinese history.
Therefore, a U.S. policy of coexistence, rather than neo-containment, might avoid a future catastrophic war or
even a nuclear conflagration.
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[ ] Chinese threat literature is an exercise in the construction of US identity—not “true” statements
about China.
Pan 2004 — Prof IR @ Australian Natl. Univ. (Chengxin, "The 'China Threat' in American
Self-Imagination: The Discursive Construction of Other as Power Politics," Alternatives:
Global, Local, Political, vol. 29, no. 3 (2004)”)
Instead, China as a "threat" has much to do with the particular mode of U.S. self-imagination. As Steve Chan
notes: China is an object of attention not only because of its huge size, ancient legacy, or current or projected relative national power. .
. . The importance of China has to do with perceptions, especially those regarding the potential that Beijing
will become an example, source, or model that contradicts Western liberalism as the reigning paradigm. In
an era of supposed universalizing cosmopolitanism, China demonstrates the potency and persistence of
nationalism, and embodies an alternative to Western and especially U.S. conceptions of democracy and
capitalism. China is a reminder that history is not close to an Certainly, I do not deny China's potential for strategic misbehavior in
the global context, nor do I claim the "essential peacefulness" of Chinese culture." Having said that, my main point here is that there is
no such thing as "Chinese reality" that can automatically speak for itself, for example, as a "threat." Rather, the "China threat" is
essentially a specifically social meaning given to China by its U.S. observers, a meaning that cannot be
disconnected from the dominant U.S. self-construction. Thus, to fully understand the U.S. "China threat" argument, it is
essential to recognize its autobiographical nature. Indeed, the construction of other is not only a product of U.S. self-imagination, but
often a necessary foil to it. For example, by taking this representation of China as Chinese reality per se, those
scholars are able to assert their self-identity as "mature," "rational" realists capable of knowing the "hard
facts" of international politics, in distinction from those "idealists" whose views are said to be grounded more in "an article of
faith" than in "historical experience."41 On the other hand, given that history is apparently not "progressively" linear , the
invocation of a certain other not only helps explain away such historical uncertainties or "anomalies" and
maintain the credibility of the allegedly universal path trodden by the United States, but also serves to
highlight U.S. "indispensability." As Samuel Huntington puts it, "If being an American means being committed to the
principles of liberty, democracy, individualism, and private property, and if there is no evil empire out there threatening those
principles, what indeed does it mean to be an American, and what becomes of American national interests ?" In this way, it
seems that the constructions of the particular U.S. self and its other are always intertwined and mutually
reinforcing.
[ ] Their China threat discourse is inflated by the military-industrial complex - overwhelms and
collapses deterrence
Walt 8/27/12 — (Stephen Walt, Prof IR @ Harvard, Belfer Center, "Inflating the China threat," Foreign Policy,
http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/08/27/inflating_the_china_threat)
If you were focusing on Hurricane Isaac or the continued violence in Syria, you might have missed the latest round of threat inflation
about China. Last week, the New York Times reported that China was "increasing its existing ability to deliver nuclear
warheads to the United States and to overwhelm missile defense systems." The online journal Salon offered an even
more breathless appraisal: the headline announced a "big story"--that "China's missiles could thwart U.S."--and the
text offered the alarming forecast that "the United States may be falling behind China when it comes to weapon technology." What
is really going on here? Not much. China presently has a modest strategic nuclear force. It is believed to
have only about 240 nuclear warheads, and only a handful of its ballistic missiles can presently reach the
United States. By way of comparison, the United States has over 2000 operational nuclear warheads deployed on
ICBMs, SLBMs, and cruise missiles, all of them capable of reaching China. And if that were not enough, the U.S. has nearly
3000 nuclear warheads in reserve. Given its modest capabilities, China is understandably worried by U.S. missile
defense efforts. Why? Chinese officials worry about the scenario where the United States uses its larger and
much more sophisticated nuclear arsenal to launch a first strike, and then relies on ballistic missile defenses to deal
with whatever small and ragged second-strike the Chinese managed to muster. (Missile defenses can't handle large or sophisticated
attacks, but in theory they might be able to deal with a small and poorly coordinated reply). This discussion is all pretty Strangelovian,
of course, but nuclear strategists get paid to think about all sorts of elaborate and far-fetched scenarios. In sum,
those fiendish Chinese are doing precisely what any sensible power would do: they are trying to preserve their own
second-strike deterrent by modernizing their force, to include the development of multiple-warhead
missiles that would be able to overcome any defenses the United States might choose to build. As the Wall
Street Journal put it: The [Chinese] goal is to ensure a secure second-strike capability that could survive in the
worst of worst-case conflict scenarios, whereby an opponent would not be able to eliminate China's nuclear capability by
launching a first strike and would therefore face potential retaliation. As the U.S. Defense Department's Ballistic Missile Defense
Review points out, "China is one of the countries most vocal about U.S. ballistic missile defenses and their strategic implications, and
its leaders have expressed concern that such defenses might negate China's strategic deterrent." Three further points should be kept in
mind. First, hawks are likely to use developments such as these to portray China as a rising revisionist threat,
but such claims do not follow logically from the evidence presented. To repeat: what China is doing is a
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sensible defensive move, motivated by the same concerns for deterrent stability that led the United States to create
a "strategic triad" back in the 1950s. Second, if you wanted to cap or slow Chinese nuclear modernization, the smart
way to do it would be to abandon the futile pursuit of strategic missile defenses and bring China into the
same negotiating framework that capped and eventually reduced the U.S. and Russian arsenals. And remember: once nucleararmed states have secure second-strike capabilities, the relative size of their respective arsenals is irrelevant. If neither side can prevent
the other from retaliating and destroying its major population centers, it simply doesn't matter if one side has twice as many warheads
before the war. Or ten times as many. Or a hundred times.... Third, this episode reminds us that trying to protect the country by
building missile defenses is a fool's errand. It is always going to be cheaper for opponents to come up with ways to override
a missile defense. Why? Because given how destructive nuclear weapons are, a missile defense system has to work almost perfectly in
order to prevent massive damage. If you fired a hundred warheads and 95% were intercepted -- an astonishingly high level of
performance -- that would still let five warheads through and that means losing five cities. And if an opponent were convinced that
your defenses would work perfectly -- a highly unlikely proposition -- there are plenty of other ways to deliver a nuclear weapon.
Ballistic missile defense never made much sense either strategically or economically, except as a makework program for the aerospace industry and an enduring component of right-wing nuclear theology.
[ ] K is the root cause
Zhang 11 — Associate Prof Political Science and Director of the Center for Asia-Pacific Studies at Lingan Univ (Baohui, “The
Security Dilemma in the U.S.-China Military Space Relationship," Proquest)
The China problem they reference is a biproduct of the security dillema that they
exacerbate China’s interpretation of the revolution in military affairs and its quest for
asymmetric warfare capabilities are important for understanding the 2007 ASAT test. This article suggests that the
Chinese military space program is also influenced by the security dilemma in international
relations. Due to the anarchic nature of the world order, “the search for security on the part of state A
leads to insecurity for state B which therefore takes steps to increase its security leading
in its turn to increased insecurity for state A and so on.” 5 The military space relationship between China and
the U.S. clearly embodies the tragedy of a security dilemma. In many ways, the current Chinese thinking on space
warfare reflects China’s response to the perceived U.S. threat to its national security.
This response, in turn, has triggered American suspicion about China’s military intentions in
outer space. Thus, the security dilemma in the U.S.-China space relationship has
inevitably led to measures and countermeasures. As Joan Johnson-Freese, a scholar at the Naval War
College, observed after the January 2007 ASAT test, China and the U.S. “have been engaged in a dangerous spiral of action-reaction
space planning and/or activity.” This article, citing firsthand Chinese military sources, identifies the major factors
contributing to the security dilemma that is driving China’s military space program. The first is China’s attempt to
respond to perceived U.S. military strategies to dominate outer space. Chinese strategists are keenly aware of the
U.S. military’s plan to achieve so-called full-spectrum dominance, and the Chinese
military feels compelled to deny that dominance. The second factor is China’s concern about U.S. missile
defense, which could potentially weaken Chinese strategic nuclear deterrence. Many PLA analysts believe that a multilayered ballistic
missile defense system will inevitably compromise China’s offensive nuclear forces. China’s response is to attempt to weaken the
U.S. space-based sensor system that serves as the eyes and brains of missile defense. Thus, U.S. missile defense has
forced China to contemplate the integration of nuclear war and space warfare
capabilities. Because of the security dilemma, many experts in both China and the U.S. have expressed
growing pessimism about the future of arms control.
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Link -- China - Threats False
Prefer our holistic view of China—their security analysis creates a self-justifying race to destroy—
this creates a rigged game
Bruce Blair, president of the World Security Institute, ex-Brookings Institution AND Chen Yali is the editor in chief of
Washington Observer, works with the Chen Shi China Research Group, ex-China Daily, China Security, Vol. 2, 2006
American threat assessments, however, focus almost exclusively on real or potential capabilities. Because intentions can be
easily changed, asserting peaceful aims carries little weight for Americans. Such assurances do little to assuage suspicions or
downgrade threat projections. Also, since the late 1990s, the predominance of "hawkish" American attitudes
toward potential threats has pushed the U.S. intelligence community to adopt extremely conservative
criteria for projecting threat -- for instance, by assessing an adversary's 'possible capabilities' instead of
'likely capabilities.' This is a throwback to the early Cold War habit of using 'greater-than-expected' threats
as the basis for building up U.S. nuclear forces. 'Possible' threat is even more extreme than 'greater-thanexpected' threat. In any case, there is nothing China can do to convince American worst-case analysts that China could not
possibly adapt its dual-use space capabilities for 'possibly' posing military threats to the United States. There is no escape from
this logic trap.
Be skeptical of their evidence, it’s written by neocons and hacks and doesn’t reflect technological
realities
Foust 8 — aerospace analyst, editor and publisher of The Space Review, degrees from Caltech and MIT (Jeff, “China and the US:
Space Race or Miscommunication?,” The Space Review, March)
Those in the US who are concerned about Chinese military space capabilities routinely
cite a bevy of evidence, much of which appears in official Defense Department documents, in support of their claims. This
evidence suggests that China is actively developing a wide range of ASAT weapons, from the kinetic kill vehicle tested last year to
exotic approaches, like “parasitic microsatellites” that could stealthily attack larger spacecraft. Many of those claims, though, are
perceptions of
Chinese intent regarding their civil and their military space programs—is based on very shoddy
sources,” said Gregory Kulacki, senior analyst and China program manager for the Global Security Program of the Union of
dubious. “A lot of the information that our analysts and intelligence officers are consuming—that’s driving their
Concerned Scientists. Kulacki, speaking about US-Chinese relations in space at the New America Foundation in Washington last
month, said that many of the reports about Chinese military space projects came from questionable sources and
were either inaccurate or misinterpreted by US analysts. A case in point is the claim of Chinese
development of parasitic microsatellites, which appeared in the 2003 and 2004 editions of Defense Department
reports to Congress about the Chinese military. “In chasing that source down, it turns out it’s from an individual’s
web site—a blogger—who made the whole thing up,” Kulacki said. (The same Chinese blogger, he added,
had published claims of a fanciful array of other advanced weapons on his site.) In another case, the National Air and Space
Intelligence Center mistranslated a publication by a junior instructor at a Chinese artillery college and concluded that China was
planning to deploy ASAT systems. To better understand the types of sources out there, Kulacki and colleagues reviewed 1,500
articles published in China that referenced ASAT technology in some manner between 1971 and 2007, and grouped them into four
categories. Nearly half—49 percent—were classified as “reviews” that provided only general information, while an additional 16
percent were “polemics”, or political diatribes with little technical information. Such articles are considered “trash
articles” in China, Kulacki said: “They’re things people have to publish because they’ve got to publish something. They’re
very low value and not read in China.” Of the rest, 29 percent of the articles represented some kind of
original analysis of ASAT technology, while only 6 percent delved into technical issues.
Moreover, those technical articles don’t get the same level of attention by American analysts as the reviews and polemics. “If you look
at the citations in US reports on this, we’re undervaluing the journals that actually might contain information that could tell us
something meaningful about Chinese ASAT capabilities,” he said. While American views of Chinese space efforts may be based on
questionable sources, Chinese views of American space efforts are more complex. “In a general sense, the Chinese public and Chinese
professionals have a very positive view of the US space program,” Kulacki said. He noted that a public expo about spaceflight in
China shortly before the Shenzhou 6 mission was primarily about American space efforts, including a wall in the back that featured
There are, though, more hostile views of US
space programs in China, particularly of American military space projects. Those articles
tend to be written not by space professionals but by political officers in the Chinese
military, who write polemics that claim that the US wants to fight space wars. Because they’re
portraits of the astronauts who died on the space shuttle Columbia in 2003.
not written by professionals, Kulacki said, they tend not to be sophisticated: in one example shown by Kulacki, a Chinese article was
illustrated by a model of an American ASAT weapon—made of Lego bricks. This results in something of an echo
chamber effect between the “polemical communities” in the US and China. “They feed off
of each other for sure,” Kulacki said. “There is this whole tiny dialogue between these two hawkish
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communities in these two countries that dominates the entire discussion on this in the
public domain.” There are also Chinese suspicions of American motives elsewhere in space. Kulacki noted that, shortly before
the Shenzhou 5 launch, NASA provided orbital debris tracking data to the Chinese so they could avoid any potential collisions. A
Chinese official involved with the mission told Kulacki that the data came late in their planning process, raising suspicions. “The
relationship is so bad that he was convinced that NASA did that on purpose to mess them up,” he said. “There’s a lot of mistrust and
bad feelings.”
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Link -- China - AT: Perm
The perm fails
Shambaugh 3 (David, Professor of Political Science & International Affairs and Director of the China Policy Program in the
Elliot School of International Affairs at The George Washington University and nonresident Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy
Studies Program and Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies at The Brookings Institution, “Introduction: Imagining Demons: the
rise of negative imagery in US-China relations,” Journal of Contemporary China, Volume 12, Issue 35, May, p. 235-236, DB)
Americans both romanticized and demonized China and the Chinese —consider-[end 235]ing them to be cultivated
and erudite as well as despotic and heathen, earthy yet superstitious, ideological yet pragmatic, stoic yet sadistic, conservative yet
extremist, calm and introspective yet warlike and aggressive, weak yet formidable, and so on. For their part, the Chinese respected and
sought to emulate the United States, while also feeling revulsion over many aspects of American society and culture and contempt for
American behavior abroad. The United States was, for many Chinese, a ‘beautiful imperialist’ (Mei Di). Sometimes these
contradictory and dualistic images existed simultaneously in the collective mindsets of each, while during
other periods one set of stereotypes became dominant and held sway for some time before swinging back in
the opposite direction. Either way, scholars noted that this ambivalence produced a ‘love–hate syndrome’ in mutual imagery.2
This dual syndrome played directly into a fairly repetitive cycle in the relations between the two countries:
Mutual Enchantment → Raised Expectations → Unfulfilled Expectations → Disillusion and
Disenchantment → Recrimination and Fallout → Separation and Hostility → Re-embrace and Reenchantment. And then the cycle repeats. While not always mechanical and predictable, the Sino–American
relationship over the past century has tended to follow this pattern while ambivalent mutual images have
paralleled and underlaid the pattern. The result has been alternating amity and enmity. Two other aspects of
Sino–American mutual perceptions have also been evident over time. The first is that neither side seems comfortable with, or is able
to grasp, complexity in the other. While it is apparent that mutual images have become more diversified and realistic over time as a
result of mutual contact and interaction,3 the perceptions of the other are still often reduced to overly simplistic
stereotypes and caricatures which lack nuance and sophistication. Consequently, because they are derived
from overly generalized image structures, they do not tend to easily accommodate incongruous information
that contradicts the stereotypical belief— thus producing reinforcing cognitive dissonance and
misperception. Certain images—such as the Chinese perception of American hegemony or the American perception of the
Chinese government’s despotic nature—become so hardened and ingrained that behavior of the other is filtered
through these dominant image constructs and does not allow for nuance or alternative explanations. The
second noticeable element is that perceptions of the other tend to say much more about the perceiver than the
perceived. That is, there has been a persistent tendency to externalize beliefs about one’s own society and
worldview on to the other. Writers, elites, and officials in each society are so imbued with their own
worldviews that they not only instinctively impose it and its underlying assumptions on to the other, but
reveal an extreme inability to ‘step outside’ of their own perceptual mindsets and see either the other or
themselves as the other would. This results in mutual ‘deafness’ and unnecessary arrogance on each side .
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*Link -- Other
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Link -- China - AT: Realism
Realism is an interpretation and a way to frame actions, not an absolute truth. This lens is not
inevitable because our constructions of China are fluid
Yaqing 10 – Assistant President of the Foreign Affairs College at Bejing and Professor of English and International Studies (Qin,
"International Society as a Process: Institutions, Identities, and China’s Peaceful Rise", The Chinese Journal of International Politics,
2010, July 21st 2010, Vol. 3, No. 2, p. 21-22)
Identity in process means that an actor’s identity is constructed and re-constructed by processual forces which
come from relations in motion. If we follow Buzan’s categorization, any state could be called a revisionist, including the
United States, the UK, or France, for in their identity revisionist elements can be easily detected. This is essentially the concept of
‘identity in fixity’, static and non-transformable. The reality is that any identity is identity in process. In the past three
decades, China’s success in peaceful rise has been mainly due to its own change, which comes from
interaction with and practices in international society.45 We did not have another cold war because, to a large
extent, China changed and brought the change as well as itself into international society. It is often argued over
the question that such change is tactical or fundamental, or as a result of calculation or of ideational reshaping.46 It is a false question,
for the two again are inseparable.47 Change includes behavior change and identity change, which are inter- and
correlated. Action starting from interest calculation leads an actor into a process and once inside the process
mere interest calculation will not work, for the process has its own dynamics and the complex relations
may entangle the actor in endless intersubjective practices. The intensive interaction among the actor and
other actors and between the actor and the process is powerfully transformative. 48 Bian thus is the key to
understanding such processes. Continuity through change and change through intersubjective practices is the key
to the process-oriented interpretation of society as well as of identity. Buzan argues that it will be extremely difficult
for China to accept the primary institutions of international society. We may use one example to illustrate the opposite. Even if we
take a brief look at the case of the market institution, we may see how the process approach works. The story tells us how China has
accepted the institution of market economy and together with it how China has gradually changed its identity from a most rigidly
planned economy to largely a market economy. The process is a difficult, gradual, and through all the ups and downs, but it is not
necessarily violent. Market economy has been long a primary institution of the Western international society. China’s acceptance
of the institution of market economy was extremely difficult and painful at the beginning. For thirty years
since 1949, China adopted the planned economy model and practiced it to the extreme during the Cultural
Revolution. Market was not a mere economic issue. Rather it was related to China’s identity as a socialist
state and to the Chinese Communist Party’s identity as a revolutionary party. The first serious test for
China’s reform and opening up was therefore whether China would accept the market institution. Using the
three steps in the process approach we argue that the key to this test was how to look at the two opposites: market and planning.
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Link – General Security
The AFF’s imagination of war and catastrophe is part and parcel of a
cultural politics of fear and anxiety which writes trauma into every aspect of
life. The 1AC security frame ensures a mania surrounding the coming
trauma, ensuring the perpetuation of a constant state of warfare and closing
off all epistemologies which do not obsess about looming threats to life.
Neocleous 2012
/Mark, Professor of the Critique of Political Economy, Politics and History @ Brunel University, London,
“‘Don’t Be Scared, Be Prepared’: Trauma-Anxiety-Resilience,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 2012
37: 188 originally published online 13 June 2012, DOI: 10.1177/0304375412449789, SAGEOnline/
The idea of trauma is now deeply engrained in our political, cultural, and intellectual universe.
What in the seventeenth century was a surgeon’s term to describe a physical wound, transformed in the
nineteenth century to include psychic ailments comparable to shock, morphed into ‘‘shell shock’’ and
‘‘nervous trauma’’ by the end of World War I (WWI) and from there eventually became a psychiatric
category now used to describe experience of war, genocide, and catastrophe. The history of the
category could be described as moving from the idea of physical damage to the mental health system and
on to the social management of major disasters.1 This is most obviously true in the discourse
surrounding war and conflict—at some point in the future, note the editors of one collection of essays
on the trauma of war, historians looking back at the wars of the 1980s, 1990s, and early twentieth century
will notice ‘‘trauma projects’’ appearing alongside food, health, and shelter interventions.2 Yet the
historians will also see a highly traumatized society in general, as trauma has become the discourse
through which not only catastrophic events are articulated, but through which virtually all
sufferings are expressed: ‘‘That was really traumatic!’’ is now thought to be an appropriate
response to any event that would once have been described as ‘‘rather unpleasant’’ or ‘‘quite
difficult.’’ It is this everydayness, or naturalness, of trauma talk that I want to engage here. When
categories and concepts take on an increasing appearance of being the natural categories through which we
are encouraged to think, critical theory needs to be on the alert. Such is the case with trauma. My main
purpose is to explore what all this trauma talk might be doing, ideologically and politically. Such a
task places us on the terrain of the relationship between security and anxiety. A glance at any
security text, from the most mundane government pronouncement to the most sophisticated literature
within academic ‘‘security studies,’’ reveals that through the politics of security runs a political
imagination of fear and anxiety. I want to first explore this relation before connecting it with the
question of trauma. In so doing I suggest that the management of trauma and anxiety has become a
way of mediating the demands of an endless security war: a war of security, awar for security,
awar through security; a war whose permanence and universality has been established to match
the permanence and universality of our supposed desire for security. The article therefore has
nothing to say about ‘‘governing traumatic events.’’ Rather, it seeks to understand the emergence of a
hypertrophied concept of trauma and the proliferation of discourses of anxiety as ideological
mechanisms deployed for the security crisis of endless war; deployed, I will argue, as a training in
resilience. As such, I want to suggest that the language of trauma and anxiety, and the training in
resilience that is associated with these terms, weds us to a deeply conservative mode of thinking,
with the superficial ‘‘humanitarianism’’ supposedly captured in the discourse of trauma in fact
functioning as a means of cutting off political alternatives.
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Link – Security Rhetoric
Security rhetoric presumes a conception of peace that leads to inevitable violence
and undermines human security
Sandy & Perkins 1 (Leo R., co-founder of Peace Studies at Plymouth State College and Ray, teacher of philosophy at
Plymouth State College, The Nature of Peace and Its Implications for Peace Education Online Journal of Peace and Conflict
Resolutions, 4.2)
Also, versions of this name appear on entrances to some military bases. Keeping "peace" in this
manner evokes the theme in Peggy Lee's old song, "Is That All There is?" What this really comes
down to is the idea of massive and indiscriminate killing for peace, which represents a morally
dubious notion if not a fault of logic. The point here is that a "peace" that depends upon the
threat and intention to kill vast numbers of human beings is hardly a stable or justifiable
peace worthy of the name. Those in charge of waging war know that killing is a questionable
activity. Otherwise, they would not use such euphemisms as "collateral damage" and "smart bombs"
to obfuscate it.
Security rhetoric props up the legitimization of the state to a point where
elimination of all that is foreign to maintain the safety of the ‘inside’ is justified
Steans 98 (Senior Lecturer in International Relations Theory , Department of Political Science and International Studies,
University of Birmingham, Gender and International Relations: An Introduction, 108-109)
Critical approaches to International Relations criticize the state centrism of realism, not only
because it is inherently reductionist, but also because it presents a view of the state as a concrete entity with
interests and agency. Not only does the state act, but the state acts in the national interest. Those who adopt critical approaches 15
view the state in dynamic rather than static terms, as a process rather than a ‘thing’. The ‘state’ does not exist in any concrete sense; rather it is
‘made’. The
state is made by the processes and practices involved in constructing boundaries and
identities, differentiating between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’. Andrew Linklater has recently argued that
critical approaches to the study of International Relations centre around understanding the processes of ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’, which have
in a sense always been the central concerns of the discipline.16 However, as Linklater contends, critical theorists understand that these processes have also worked to ‘include’ and ‘exclude’ people on the basis of race, class and gender.’7 In
the ‘making’ of the state
the construction of the hostile ‘other’ which is threatening and dangerous is central to the
making of identities and the securing of boundaries. Indeed, David Campbell argues that the legitimation
of state power demands the construction of danger ‘outside’. The state requires this ‘discourse
of danger’ to secure its identity and for the legitimation of state power. The consequence of this
is that threats to security in realist and neo-realist thinking are all seen to be in the external realm and citizenship becomes synonymous with
loyalty to the nation-state and the elimination of all that is foreign.’8 Jean Elshtain has argued that the problems of war and
the difficulties of achieving security in the so-called ‘anarchy’ of the international realm, should not be seen as problems which are not rooted
in the compulsions of interstate relations as such.’9 Rather, they arise from ‘the ordering of modern, technological society’ in which political
elites have sought to control the masses by the implementation of ‘the mechanism of the perfect army’.20 Elshtain argues that to see war as a
continuation of politics by other means, is to see a continuation of the ‘military model’ as a means of preventing civil disorder.2’ In critiquing
dominant conceptions of security in International Relations, feminists have, to some extent, echoed the arguments of non-feminist critical
thinkers, but have been concerned to show what is lost from our understanding of security when gender is omitted. As was noted in chapter 4,
feminist political theorists have demonstrated that in much Western political thought the conception of politics and the public realm is a
‘barracks community’, a realm defined in opposition to the disorderly forces which threaten its existence.22 This
same conception
of politics is constructed out of masculine hostility towards the female ‘Other’. One sees in the
development of this political discourse a deeply gendered subtext in which the citizen role is in
all cases identified with the male.23 Hartsock believes that this sets a hostile and combative dualism at the heart of the
community men construct and by which they come to understand their lives.
Framing the foreign as unstable portrays them inferior and perpetuates our
relationship with the “Other” in terms of domination and subordination
Tickner 92 (J. Ann, Professor of International Relations at University of South California, Gender in
International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security, 8-9)
Extending Scott’ s challenge to the field of international relations, we can immediately detect a
similar set of hierarchical binary oppositions. But in spite of the seemingly obvious association of
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international politics with the masculine characteristics described above, the field of international
relations is one of the last of the social sciences to be touched by gender analysis and feminist
perspectives. 1 The reason for this, I believe, is not that the field is gender neutral, meaning that the
introduction of gender is irrelevant to its subject matter as many scholars believe, but that it is so
thoroughly masculinized that the workings of these hierarchical gender relations are hidden.
Framed in its own set of binary distinctions, the discipline of international relations assumes
similarly hierarchical relationships when it posits an anarchic world “outside” to be defended
against through the accumulation and rational use of power. In political discourse, this becomes
translated into stereotypical notions about those who inhabit the outside. Like women, foreigners
are frequently portrayed as “the other”: nonwhites and tropical countries are often depicted
as irrational, emotional, and unstable, characteristics that are also attributed to women. The
construction of this discourse and the way in which we are taught to think about international
politics closely parallel the way in which we are socialized into understanding gender differences.
To ignore these hierarchical constructions and their relevance to power is therefore to risk
perpetuating these relationships of domination and subordination. But before beginning to
describe what the field of international relations might look like if gender were included as a central
category of analysis, I shall give a brief historical overview of the field as it has traditionally been
constructed.
By replicating the predominant image of a global space teeming with dangers
against which a national home must be secured, the discourse of the 1AC
contributes to the emergence of destructive security-state that becomes
indistinguishable from the forms of violence it seeks to prevent.
Agamben, Professor of Philosophy at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris, 2002 [Giorgio, Theory & Event 5:4,
ProjectMuse]
Security as the basic principle of state politics dates back to the birth of the modern state. Hobbes already
mentions it as the opposite of the fear which compels human beings to unite and form a society together. But
not until the 18th century does the paradigm of security reach its fullest development. In an unpublished
lecture at the Collège de France in 1978, Michel Foucault showed how in the political and economic practice
of the Physiocrats security opposes discipline and the law as instruments of governance.
Neither Turgot and Quesnay nor the Physiocratic officials were primarily concerned with the prevention of
famine or the regulation of production, but rather wanted to allow for their development in order to guide
and "secure" their consequences. While disciplinary power isolates and closes off territories, measures of
security lead to an opening and globalisation; while the law wants to prevent and prescribe, security wants to
intervene in ongoing processes to direct them. In a word, discipline wants to produce order, while security
wants to guide disorder. Since measures of security can only function within a context of freedom of traffic,
trade, and individual initiative, Foucault can show that the development of security coincides with the
development of liberal ideology.
Today we are facing extreme and most dangerous developments of this paradigm of security. In the course
of a gradual neutralisation of politics and the progressive surrender of traditional tasks of the state, security
imposes itself as the basic principle of state activity. What used to be one among several decisive measures
of public administration until the first half of the twentieth century, now becomes the sole criterion of political
legitimation. Security reasoning entails an essential risk. A state which has security as its only task and source
of legitimacy is a fragile organism; it can always be provoked by terrorism to turn itself terroristic.
We should not forget that the first major organisation of terror after the war, the Organisation de l'Armée
Secrète (OAS) was established by a French General who thought of himself as patriotic and who was
convinced that terrorism was the only answer to the guerilla phenomenon in Algeria and Indochina. When
politics, the way it was understood by theorists of the "Polizeiwissenschaft" in the eighteenth century, reduces
itself to police, the difference between state and terrorism threatens to disappear. In the end it may lead to
security and terrorism forming a single deadly system in which they mutually justify and legitimate each
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others' actions.
The risk is not merely the development of a clandestine complicity of opponents but that the hunt for security
leads to a worldwide civil war which destroys all civil coexistence. In the new situation -- created by the end
of the classical form of war between sovereign states -- security finds its end in globalisation: it implies the
idea of a new planetary order which is, in fact, the worst of all disorders. But there is yet another danger.
Because they require constant reference to a state of exception, measures of security work towards a growing
depoliticization of society. In the long run, they are irreconcilable with democracy.
Nothing is therefore more important than a revision of the concept of security as the basic principle of state
politics. European and American politicians finally have to consider the catastrophic consequences of
uncritical use of this figure of thought. It is not that democracies should cease to defend themselves, but the
defense of democracy demands today a change of political paradigms and not a world civil war which is just
the institutionalization of terror. Maybe the time has come to work towards the prevention of disorder and
catastrophe, and not merely towards their control. Today, there are plans for all kinds of emergencies
(ecological, medical, military), but there is no politics to prevent them. On the contrary, we can say that
politics secretly works towards the production of emergencies. It is the task of democratic politics to prevent
the development of conditions which lead to hatred, terror, and destruction -- and not to reduce itself to
attempts to control them once they occur.
Security discourse results in ethical segregation of non-western others
Campbell 5 (David. Professor of cultural and political geography at Durham University “Oil, Empire,
and the Sports Utility Vehicle: The Biopolitics of Security” American Quarterly 57.3, 943-972 )
Over time, of course, ambiguity is disciplined, contingency is fixed, and dominant meanings are
established. In the history of U.S. foreign policy—regardless of the radically different contexts
in which it has operated—the formalized practices and ritualized acts of security discourse
have worked to produce a conception of the United States in which freedom, liberty, law,
democracy, individualism, faith, order, prosperity, and civilization are claimed to exist because of
the constant struggle with and often violent suppression of opponents said to embody tyranny,
oppression, anarchy, totalitarianism, collectivism, atheism, and barbarism.
This record demonstrates that the boundary-producing political performance of foreign policy does
more than inscribe a geopolitical marker on a map. This construction of social space also involves
an axiological dimension in which the delineation of an inside from an outside gives rise to a
moral hierarchy that renders the domestic superior and the foreign inferior. Foreign policy
thus incorporates an ethical power of segregation in its performance of identity/difference.
While this produces a geography of "foreign" (even "evil") others in conventional terms, it also
requires a disciplining of "domestic" elements on the inside that challenge this state identity. This is
achieved through exclusionary practices in which resistant elements to a secure identity on the
"inside" are linked through a discourse of "danger" with threats identified and located on the
"outside." Though global in scope, these effects are national in their legitimation.12
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Link -- Democracy
Democratization is imperialism 2.0 – exposing the flip side of this oppressive regime is necessary
Alison J.
Ayers
, Department of Political Science - Simon Fraser University, “Imperial Liberties: Democratisation and
Governance in the ‘New’ Imperial Order” POLITICAL STUDIES:
2009
VOL 57, 1–27
Thus, far from non- or indeed anti-imperial, the current ‘global mission’ to ‘democratise’ the world is
internal to contemporary imperialism. For those who do constantly think within the horizons of the putatively non-imperial
present, the internationalisation of (neo)liberal democracy is presumed to be incompatible with imperialism, but this habitual and
normative acceptance is highly problematic (Marks, 2000; Tully, 2008). Mainstream accounts of ‘democratisation’
presuppose what requires explanation, taking for granted the non-imperial character of this global project,
the hegemony of a specific and impoverished model of (neo)liberal democracy, highly problematic, dehistoricised notions of state, society and self and the categorical separation of the ‘domestic’ and the
‘international’. The article seeks to address such lacunae through a critique of the project of ‘democratisation’. It provides detailed
empirical evidence from Africa. As such Africa is central while also curiously marginal to the general thesis. The article seeks to
demonstrate that far from an alternative to imperialism, the ‘democratisation project’ involves the
imposition of aWestern (neo)liberal procedural form of democracy on imperialised peoples. As such,
‘democracy promotion’ is concerned, in part, with manufacturing mentalities and consent around the
dominant (neo)liberal notion of democracy, foreclosing attempts to understand or constitute democracy in
any other terms. It should be noted, however, that this project is executed somewhat inconsistently. Western powers have
been selective in their approach to liberal-democratic reform when countervailing strategic, economic or
‘ideological’ interests have prevailed. Thus Western governments have eschewed aid restrictions despite
gross and persistent violations of human rights or ‘good governance’ in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Algeria,
Egypt, Colombia, Uzbekistan, Pakistan and Niger (Callinicos, 2003; Crawford, 2001; Olsen, 1998). As demonstrated by
the situation in Uganda (detailed below) as well as Niger, in cases of violations of liberal democratic principles, official Western
agencies have routinely prioritised liberalisation over democratic principles . Likewise, in other instances, Western
intervention has terminated autonomous democratic processes, for example in Chile, Guatemala and Nicaragua (Slater, 2002).
Selective adherence notwithstanding, the orthodox (neo)liberal model of democracy claims universality. As Bhikhu Parekh notes in
his account of the cultural particularity of liberal democracy, such claims have ‘aroused deep fears in the fragile and nervous societies
of the rest of the world’ (Parekh, 1992, p. 160). In seeking to constitute African (and other) social relations in its own particular image,
the democratisation project reproduces internal tensions and antinomies within liberal thought. As such, a
profound non-correspondence exists, in Mahmood Mamdani’s (1992) terms, between ‘received’ (neo)liberal democratic
theory and ‘living’ African realities. Resistance is therefore widespread, with Western (neo)liberal democratic notions being ‘reassessed in many places on the continent nowadays, often more censoriously than may be heard above the clamor of Euro-American
triumphalism’ (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1997, p. 141). As Michel Foucault argued in The Subject and Power,
‘between a relationship of power and a strategy of struggle there is a reciprocal appeal, a perpetual linking
and a perpetual reversal’. The ensuing instability enables analysis ‘either from inside the history of struggle or from the
standpoint of the power relationships’ as well as interaction or ‘reference’ between the two (Foucault, 1994, p. 347). Each
approach is necessary but not possible within the scope of the present article. The article seeks to provide
analysis of the articulation of informal imperialism, inter alia through ‘democracy’ and ‘governance’
interventions, as a necessary and prefigurative ‘mapping’ exercise (Peterson, 2003) to understanding social
transformation, as well as the social conditions of possibility of alternative forms of relation and engagement.5 The ‘mapping’ of
this project is essential in illuminating relations of power. The current imperial order is inimical to
democracy but to ‘disrupt and redirect the particular orderings “at work” we must first be able to see them
clearly’ (Peterson, 2003, p. 173, emphasis in original). As such, analysis of how ‘post-colonial’ imperialism is articulated is a
necessary precondition of thinking in an informed manner about resistance and transformation.
Democracy is discursive justification for imperialism – it has empirically been use to invade and “fix”
other countries like Afghanistan, Iraq and Vietnam. It also creates structural inequality because we
automatically take the side of democracies further alienating non-democratic regimes. This means
everyone is either With or Against us, that probably makes conflict more likely. The claim that
authoritarian regimes are conflict prone is laughable because the people at the top of the chain know
that wars would only risk destabilizing their position.
The myth of democratic peace is used to justify military intervention—turns their advantage
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Mueller, pol sci and IR prof, 9
—pol sci prof and IR, Ohio State. Widely-
recognized expert on terrorism threats in foreign policy. AB from U Chicago, MA in pol sci from UCLA and PhD in pol sci from
UCLA (John, Faulty Correlation, Foolish Consistency, Fatal Consequence: Democracy, Peace, and Theory in the Middle East, 15
June 2007, http://psweb.sbs.ohio-state.edu/faculty/jmueller/KENT2.PDF, p.. 7-10)
Philosophers and divines not only encased democracy in a vaporously idealistic or ideological mystique, they
have done the same for the democracy-peace correlation. After all, if correlation is taken to be cause, it
follows that peace will envelop the earth right after democracy does . Accordingly for those who value peace, the
promotion of democracy, by force or otherwise, becomes a central mission. This notion has been brewing for some
time. Woodrow Wilson's famous desire to "make the world safe for democracy" was in large part an antiwar motivation. He and many
others in Britain, France, and the United States had become convinced that, as Britain's Lloyd George put it, "Freedom is the only
warranty of Peace" (Rappard 1940, 42-44). With the growth in the systematic examination of the supposed peace-democracy
connection by the end of the century, such certain pronouncements became commonplace. Notes Bruce Russett, sentiments like those
have "issued from the White House ever since the last year of the Reagan administration" (2005, 395). Foolish consistency, fatal
consequence: the role of little statesmen It was left to George W. Bush to put mystique into practice. As he stressed to reporter Bob
Woodward during the runup to his war with Iraq, "I say that freedom is not America's gift to the world. Freedom is God's gift to
everybody in the world. I believe that. As a matter of fact, I was the person that wrote that line, or said it. I didn't write it, I just said it
in a speech. And it became part of the jargon. And I believe that. And I believe we have a duty to free people. I would hope we
wouldn't have to do it militarily, but we have a duty" (2004, 88-89). And in an address shortly before the war, he confidently
proclaimed, "The world has a clear interest in the spread of democratic values, because stable and free nations do not breed the
ideologies of murder. They encourage the peaceful pursuit of a better life" (quoted, Frum and Perle 2003, 158). In this, Bush was only
trying to be consistent (foolishly so, perhaps, but nonetheless), a quality that endears him to so many of his followers. If democracy
is so wonderful, and if in addition it inevitably brings both peace and creates favorable policy preferences, then forcefully
jamming it down the throats of the decreasing number of nondemocratic countries in the world must be all
to the good. He had already done something like that, with a fair amount of success, in Afghanistan; his father had crisply slapped
Panama into shape; Reagan had straightened out Grenada; and Bill Clinton had invaded Haiti and bombed the hell out of Bosnia and
Serbia with the same lofty goal at least partly in mind. Further, the Australians had recently done it in East Timor and the British in
Sierra Leone (Mueller 2004, ch. 7). Critics have argued that democracy can't be spread at the point of a gun, but these cases, as well as
the experience with the defeated enemies after World War II, suggests that it sometimes can be, something that supporters of the
administration were quick to point out (Kaplan and Kristol 2003, 98-99. Frum and Perle 2003, 163). Even Russett, a prominent
democratic-peace analyst, eventually, if rather reluctantly, concedes the possibility (2005, 398-400; see also Peceny and Pickering
2006). However, Bush and some of his supporters--particularly those in the neo-Conservative camp--foolishly, if consistently,
extrapolated to develop an even more extravagant mystique. Not only would the invasion crisply bring viable
democracy to Iraq, but success there would have a domino effect: democracy would eventually spread from its Baghdad
bastion to envelop the Middle East. This would not only bring (it needs hardly to be said) blissful peace in its wake (because, as we
know, democracies never fight each other), but the new democracies would also adopt all sorts of other policies as well including, in
particular, love of, or at least much diminished hostility toward, the United States and Israel (because, as we know, the democratic
process itself has a way of making people think nice thoughts). Vice President Dick Cheney attests, reports Woodward, to Bush's
"abiding faith that if people were given freedom and democracy, that would begin a transformation process in Iraq that in years ahead
would change the Middle East" (Woodward 2004, 428). Moreover, since force can establish democracy and since democracies rather
automatically embrace peaceful and generally nice thoughts, after Iraq was forced to enter the democratic (and hence peaceful and
nice-thinking) camp, military force would be deftly applied as necessary to speed up the domino-toppling process wherever necessary
in the area. Such extravagant, even romantic, visions fill war-advocating neo-Conservative fulminations. In their book, The War Over
Iraq, Lawrence Kaplan and William Kristol apply due reverence to the sanctified correlation--"democracies rarely, if ever, wage war
against one another"--and then extrapolate fancifully to conclude that "The more democratic the world becomes, the more likely it is
to be congenial to America" (2003, 104-5). And war architect Paul Wolfowitz also seems to have believed that the war would become
an essential stage on the march toward freedom and democracy (Woodward 2004, 428). In a 2004 article proposing what he calls
"democratic realism," Charles Krauthammer urges taking "the risky but imperative course of trying to reorder the Arab world," with a
"targeted, focused" effort that would (however) be "limited" to "that Islamic crescent stretching from North Africa to Afghanistan"
(2004 23, 17). And in a speech in late 2006, he continued to champion what he calls "the only plausible answer," an ambitious
undertaking that involves "changing the culture of that area, no matter how slow and how difficult the process. It starts in Iraq and
Lebanon, and must be allowed to proceed." Any other policy, he has divined, "would ultimately bring ruin not only on the U.S. but on
the very idea of freedom." And Kaplan and Kristol stress that "The mission begins in Baghdad, but does not end there....War in Iraq
represents but the first installment...Duly armed, the United States can act to secure its safety and to advance the cause of liberty--in
Baghdad and beyond" (2003, 124-25). With that, laments Russett, democracy and democratic peace theory became "Bushwhacked"
(2005). Democratic processes of pressure and policy promotion were deftly used by a dedicated group to wage costly war to establish
both peace and congenial policy in the otherwise intractable Middle East. It could be argued, then, that the little statesmen of the Bush
administration had the courage of the mystical convictions of the democracy and democratic peace philosophers and divines.
However, although Bush's simple faith in democracy may perhaps have its endearing side, how deeply that passion is (or was) really
shared by his neo-Conservative allies could be questioned. That is, did they really believe that the United States which, as
Francis Fukuyama notes, "cannot eliminate poverty or raise test scores in Washington, DC," could "bring democracy
to a part of the world that has stubbornly resisted it and is virulently anti-American to boot" (2004, 60)? nonIsraeli Middle East is, like Krauthammer's comparable vision, so fantastic as to border on the deranged.) Indeed, after one looks
beneath the boilerplate about democracy and the democratic peace, what seems to be principally motivating at
least some of these people is a strong desire for the United States to use military methods to make the Middle
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East finally and once and for all safe for Israel (Drew 2003, 22; Fukuyama 2004; Roy 2003). All of them are devoted
supporters of Israel, and they seem to display far less interest in advocating the application of military force to deal with unsavory
dictatorial regimes in other parts of the world that do not seem to threaten Israel--such as Burma, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Haiti, or Cuba.
As John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt point out in their discussion of what they call "The Israel Lobby" (2006), such policy
advocacy is entirely appropriate and fully democratic: "There is nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies
attempting to sway US policy" (although they also note that Jewish Americans generally actually were less likely to support the war
than was the rest of the population). Democracy, as noted earlier, is centrally characterized by the contestings of
isolated, self-serving, and often tiny special interest groups and their political and bureaucratic allies . What
happened with Iraq policy was democracy in full flower. It does not follow, of course, that policies so
generated are necessarily wise, and Mearsheimer and Walt consider that the results of much of the Lobby's efforts--certainly in
this case--have been detrimental to American (and even Israeli) national interest, although their contentions that the Lobby was
"critical" or "a key factor" in the decision to go to war or that that decision would "have been far less likely" without the Lobby's
efforts would need more careful analysis. It is also their view that the Lobby has too much influence over U.S foreign policy--a
conclusion, as it happens, that is shared by 68 percent of over 1000 international relations scholars who responded to a 2006 survey.15
However that may be, it could certainly be maintained that, as an Israeli scholar puts it, the United States by its action eliminated what
Israel considered at the time to be a most "threatening neighbor" (Baram 2007). Following this line of thinking, then, the Israel
Lobby and its allies skillfully and legitimately used democracy to Bushwhack the democracy and democratic peace
mystiques as part of its effort to nudge, urge, or impel the United States into a war that, as it happens, has proven to be
its greatest foreign debacle in its history after Vietnam. It should be noted, however, that, although Bush and Cheney and at
least some of the neocons may actually have believed their pre-war fantasies about the blessings that imposed
democracy would in turn impose on the Middle East, the arguments they proffered for going to war stressed
national security issues, not democracy ones--the notion that Saddam's Iraq was a threat to the United States because of its
development, or potential development, of weapons of mass destruction and of its connections to terrorist groups out to get the United
States (Roy 2003). The democracy argument rose in significance , notes Russett, only after those security arguments
for going to war proved to be empty (2005, 396). As Fukuyama has crisply put it, a prewar request to spend "several hundred
billion dollars and several thousand American lives in order to bring democracy to...Iraq" would "have been laughed out of court"
(2005). Moreover, when given a list of foreign policy goals, the American public has rather consistently ranked the promotion of
democracy lower--often much lower--than such goals as combating international terrorism, protecting American jobs, preventing the
spread of nuclear weapons, strengthening the Uni AT: Democracy Prevents Genocide
Democracy makes genocide possible, it doesn’t prevent it.
Mann 99 — Michael Mann, Professor of Sociology at the University of California-Los Angeles, holds a
D.Phil. in Sociology from Oxford University, 1999 (“The Dark Side of Democracy: The Modern Tradition
of Ethnic and Political Cleansing,” New Left Review, Issue 235, May-June, Available Online at
http://www.upf.edu/materials/fhuma/genocidis/docs/mann2.pdf, Accessed 11-10-2011, p. 18-21)
The twentieth century’s death-toll through genocide is somewhere over sixty million and still
rising.* Yet most scholars and laypersons alike have preferred to focus on more salubrious topics. If they
think about genocide at all, they view it as an unfortunate interruption of the real structural tendencies of
the twentieth century—economic, social and political progress. Murderous ethnic and political cleansing is
seen as a regression to the primitive—essentially anti-modern—and is committed by backward or marginal
groups manipulated by clever and dangerous politicians. Blame the politicians, the sadists, the terrible
Serbs (or Croats) or the primitive Hutus (or Tutsis)—for their actions have little to do with us. An
alternative view—often derived from a religious perspective—sees the capacity for evil as a universal
attribute of human beings, whether ‘civilized’ or not. This is true, yet capacity for evil only becomes
actualized in certain circumstances, and, in the case of genocide, these seem less primitive than distinctly
modern. [end page 18] In fact, most of the small group of scholars studying the most notorious twentiethcentury cases of genocide and mass killing—Armenia, the Nazi ‘Final Solution’, Stalinism, Cambodia,
Rwanda— have emphasized the modernity of the horror. Leo Kuper essentially founded genocide studies
by noting that the modern state’s monopoly of sovereignty over a territory that was, in reality, culturally
plural and economically stratified created both the desire and the power to commit genocide.1 Roger Smith
has stressed that genocide has usually been a deliberate instrument of modern state policy.2 Some
emphasize the technology available to the perpetrators: modern weapons, transport and administration have
escalated the efficiency of mass, bureaucratic, depersonalized killing.3 However, Helen Fein detects
modern ideological goals, as well as technological means, for ‘The victims of twentieth century
premeditated genocide . . . were murdered in order to fulfil the state’s design for a new order.’4 She stresses
the genocidal potential of modern ‘myths’ or ‘political formulae’—ideologies of nation, race and class.
In the Name of the People
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But let us remark a quality they all share. They have justified themselves—and their genocides—‘in
the name of the people’. In this respect, they are no different from more moderate twentieth-century
ideologies, for this has been the age of the masses. In all the varied German law courts of the last eighty
years—from Weimar to Nazi to communist DDR to the Bundesrepublik—the judges have used the same
opening formula: ‘In Namen des Volkes’, ‘In the Name of the People’. American courts prefer the formula
‘The Case of X versus the People’. By claiming legitimacy in the name of ‘the people’, genocidal régimes
claim kinship to movements which are usually recognized as the bearers of true modernity, like liberalism
or social democracy. Indeed, I argue here that modern genocide can be regarded as ‘the dark side of
democracy’.
This is an unconventional view, however. The now dominant ‘democratic peace’ school has declared
that democracies are essentially pacific, rarely fighting wars, and almost never against each other. They
are the absolute antithesis of genocide. The school’s main representative in genocide studies is Rudolph
Rummel.5 He claims [end page 19] that the more authoritarian a state, the more likely it is to commit
genocide. Wielding many twentieth-century statistics of genocide, Rummel concludes that democracies
commit virtually no genocide. He concedes a few cases where they do, but argues that these have been in
wartime, where mass murder has been perpetrated secretively and without a democratic mandate. They are,
therefore, exceptions that prove the rule. This is not an unreasonable argument in the case of small-scale
atrocities like My Lai, during the Vietnam War—which, when exposed, was indeed prosecuted and
condemned by American democracy. But Rummel fails to distinguish the more important cases of
‘democratic mass killings’, like the fire-bombing of Dresden or Tokyo, the dropping of the
atomic bombs or the napalming of the Vietnamese countryside—whose casualties he also minimizes.
Though some degree of military secrecy was obviously maintained in these cases, nonetheless, the
American and British governments took these decisions according to due democratic
constitutional process. Moreover, authoritarian genocides are also committed in wartime and with an
attempt at secrecy. Hitler committed almost all his murders during the war, and he did not dare make them
public—indeed, nor did Stalin. But there are larger exceptions to Rummel’s ‘law’: the frequent
genocidal outbursts committed by seventeenth- to early twentieth-century European settlers living
under constitutional governments. Rummel mentions these briefly, absurdly minimizes the numbers
killed, vaguely suggests that ‘governments’ may have been responsible, and fails to explain them. In fact,
Rummel never makes clear why a régime would want to murder vast numbers of people. After all,
almost all historical régimes were authoritarian yet did not commit mass murder. As I will argue
below, there is a relationship between democracy and genocide, but it is more complex and doubleedged than Rummel acknowledges.
Robert Melson attempts to explain genocide in terms of wars following hard upon a revolution. He says
revolutions undermine the institutional and moral restraints of the old régime, creating a potential moral
vacuum.6 They also throw up revolutionaries seeking a wholesale transformation of society in the name of
a mythical ‘people’. That ‘people’ then needs defining and delimiting, which may result in the exclusion of
opponents, perhaps by violent means. And war, he says, aggravates régimes’ feelings of vulnerability
and/or invincibility, permits states to become more autonomous, allows them the option of more ‘radical’
policy alternatives and increases the vulnerability of the victims. The combination of revolution and war
may thus persuade a régime that domestic opponents are in league with deadly foreign enemies, to be
legitimately killed. But Melson is careful to say that this is not a necessary outcome. In Cuba, for example,
the revolution/war cycle was followed only by the expulsion of the bourgeoisie, not by its murder. He also
concedes that earlier [end page 20] revolution/war combinations—for example, the English, American and
French revolutions—were less likely to produce genocide than later ones, though he offers no good
explanation of this. Finally, he does not note that the growth of the ideologies of nation, race and class,
which were used to legitimate genocide, all surged in modern times with or without the accompaniment of
revolution or war.
Rummel and especially Melson offer us genuine insights, but they do not go far enough. If we want to
understand the growth of ideologically-legitimated and state-perpetrated genocide, we must
realize that this has been the perverted product of the most sacred institution of Western
modernity: democracy. For genocide can be seen in two distinct ways as ‘the dark side of
democracy’—the most undesirable consequence of the modern practice of vesting political
legitimacy in ‘the people’.
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The discourse of democratic exceptionalism relies on false binaries that
intensify conflicts.
Geis and Wagner 11 — Anna Geis, Senior Researcher at the Goethe University Frankfurt, holds a
Ph.D. from the University of Hamburg, and Wolfgang Wagner, Professor of International Security in the
Department of Political Science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, holds an M.A. from the University of
Tübingen and a Ph.D. from Goethe University Frankfurt, 2011 (“How far is it from Königsberg to
Kandahar? Democratic peace and democratic violence in International Relations,” Review of International
Studies, Volume 37, Issue 4, October, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Cambridge Journals
Online)
Whatever the explicit position on forcible democratisation Democratic Peace scholars take, Democratic
Peace research has nevertheless contributed to pave the intellectual ground for democratic
‘triumphalism’.106 Though scholarship has produced a wide array of complex studies, debating context
conditions, modifications and flaws of Democratic Peace (research), interested political actors only take
up the ‘good news’, simplify and instrumentalise these for political purposes. In search for an
adequate response to such instrumentalisation, it is an important step that public reflexion upon scholarly
responsibility in this field has recently been growing.107
Third, as indicated above (section 3.2), the democratic turn in institutional peace research in particular
lends legitimacy to a worldview that divides the population of states along the binary lines of
democracies and non-democracies and ascribes higher morality and credibility as well as
institutional privileges to the group of democracies. Such considerations have not only been proposed
by liberal international legal scholars but are an important topic in political philosophy as well.108 For
example, Allen Buchanan and Robert Keohane have justified the privileging of democracies in
international law on the following grounds: they find democracies to meet their ‘standard for comparative
moral reliability’ and believe that ‘when democracies violate cosmopolitan principles, they are more likely
to be criticised by their citizens for doing so, and will be more likely to rectify their behaviour in
response.’109 While such deliberations on the higher or lower legitimacy of regimes are certainly not out
of bounds, the political consequences in international politics are apt to damage the very interests of
democracies since they intensify conflicts between democracies and non-democracies on the
allocation or denial of entitlements. The propagation of a liberal international law in recent years which
allots more (interventionist) rights to democracies and the institutional reform proposals for a ‘Concert of
Democracies’ as a new counter-part to an ‘ineffective’ UN Security Council are more than troubling
developments, reinforcing the classification into first— and second-class regimes.110
The large bipartisan ‘Princeton Project on National Security’ pleads for such a ‘Concert of Democracies’ as
the ‘institutional embodiment and ratification of the “democratic peace”’. In the same vein, Robert Kagan
explicitly votes for such a ‘Concert of Democracies’ as a complement to the UN: ‘If successful, it could
help bestow legitimacy on actions that democratic nations deem necessary but autocratic nations refuse to
countenance— as NATO conferred legitimacy on the intervention in Kosovo. In a world increasingly
divided along democratic and autocratic lines, the world's democrats will have to stick together.’112
Remarkably enough, the very same people who pretend to regret that the world is increasingly
divided along the regime type line, contribute actively to constructing such a division and even
reinforcing it. And once again, such ideas have travelled from academia into politics. For example, the
Republican presidential candidate John McCain voiced the idea of a ‘League of Democracies’ in the last
US presidential election campaign.
Liberal theorists no longer claim democracy creates peace—post 9/11
democracies have defended their right to wage war against aggressors
Dunne 9 [Tim, International Relations Prof-Oxford, “Liberalism, International Terrorism, and
Democratic Wars,” International Relations, March, http://ire.sagepub.com/cgi/pdf_extract/23/1/107?rss=1]
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It is commonplace to draw distinctions between the various strands of liberal thought. This made a
great deal of sense during the 1980s when neo-liberal institutionalists sought to make liberalism compatible
with social scientific methods of inquiry.6 In so doing, a space was opened up for normative liberals to reassert a values based version of liberalism which centred on the claim that democratic states were more
peace-prone. I would argue that this distinction is no longer relevant. Post- 9/11, many former liberal
regime theorists (such as Robert Keohane and Ann-Marie Slaughter) have grafted onto their once
positivist approach a strong normative distinction between liberal and illiberal regimes.7 In place
of the distinction between positivist and normative conceptions of liberalism, the main fault-line in
relation to the war on terror has been between defensive and offensive variants.8 Pre-9/11, the dominant
narrative inside liberalism was about the pacific character of liberal states. Post-9/11, a significant
number of influential liberals have defended the right of Western states to wage war on terrorist
groups and those that allegedly harbour them. The legal basis for such action has been contested in
institutions as varied as the UN Security Council, parliaments, and domestic courts where the validity of
the use of force against Iraq has been vigorously debated. Such as tendency for legal discourse to be at its
most universalist at the hour when statecraft is at its most brutal was one that Martin Wight identified over
four decades ago.
Post-Cold War democracies have worked side-by-side with authoritarian
regimes to invade countries
Dunne 9 [Tim, International Relations Prof-Oxford, “Liberalism, International Terrorism, and
Democratic Wars,” International Relations, March, http://ire.sagepub.com/cgi/pdf_extract/23/1/107?rss=1]
The blurring of several post-9/11 interventions with the ‘war on terror’ has highlighted an important
tension in the liberal understanding of international order. On the one hand, international
institutions are designed to be procedurally liberal, meaning that membership is not restricted to
democratic states, and collective action requires the consent of legitimate institutions (however
imperfectly expressed). The expectation of a liberal order defined by pluralist principles is that all states
have an interest in, and an obligation to obey, the rules. There is empirical evidence that liberal publics
strongly buy into the importance of procedural correctness. One of the striking features of the polling data
acquired in the UK prior to the 2003 Iraq War was the astonishing ‘bounce’ in favour of military action if it
was backed by a UN Security Council resolution. In one poll, 76 per cent preferred multilateral action, as
against 32 per cent who favoured war in circumstances when the US launched a war but the Security
Council did not authorize it.19 The unipolar moment coincided with a shift towards substantive
liberal norms to do with democratic entitlement, good governance and the responsibility of states
for ensuring terrorist groups acting inside their borders were either contained or eradicated. These
emergent substantive norms can be invoked to justify military interventions – against tyrannical states
committing human rights violations (Kosovo 1999) or failing states unable to control terrorist networks
(Afghanistan 2001 to the present). In the absence of the UN being able to act militarily, as was
envisaged by the framers of the Charter, the consequence of this shift towards substantive liberal
norms in international society is to place significant power in the hands of those states and
alliances who have the capacity to act militarily. Such inequities are thrown into even sharper relief
when, in the case of Iraq, the US and the UK brazenly circumvented the will of the very institution tasked
with legitimating forcible action. The flexibility with which democratic wars are conducted by
coalitions of powerful liberal states operating alongside military forces from authoritarian
regimes adds weight to those who are sceptical about how far democratic ideals animate foreign
policy behaviour. It is uncertain why democracies should be so sensitive to regime type when engaged in
long-run institution building (such as NATO or the EU), yet so indifferent to regime type when
constructing war-fighting coalitions. How can it be defensible to fight unjust enemies while standing
shoulder to shoulder with unjust friends?
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Democratic peace theory incorrect-- democracies are more likely to go to war
than authoritarian states-- post Cold war proves
Dunne 9 [Tim, International Relations Prof-Oxford, “Liberalism, International Terrorism, and
Democratic Wars,” International Relations, March, http://ire.sagepub.com/cgi/pdf_extract/23/1/107?rss=1]
An engagement with the question of liberalism and violence must include consideration of the democratic
peace thesis, famously described by Jack Levy as ‘the closest thing we have to an empirical law in
international politics’.13 The strong version of the theory claims that democracies are more peaceful in
general: in other words, there are checks on the executive which diminish the war-proneness of the state.
Democracies are defensive in character ‘all the way down’ to the level of rational citizens, who
oppose war because it endangers their lives and is a waste of economic resources. This rational
aversion to war becomes embedded in the political order of the liberal state such that democracies are ‘least
prone’ to war. The puzzle with this monadic democratic peace theory is that it does not account for
why strong democracies do not go to war against weak democracies when the anticipated benefi
ts are high and the costs very low. To address these weaknesses, advocates of the general hypothesis
that democracies are peace-prone have emphasized cultural factors inherent in open societies, such as the
emphasis upon mediation, dialogue and compromise. The logic of this position is that war is still possible,
though the likelihood is significantly reduced because of domestic institutions and characteristics. The
potential pacifying role of public opinion plays a key role here; a liberal public will constrain the illiberal
temptation of ‘executive power’ during periods when there is an alleged threat to the security of the state.
What is unclear about this monadic cultural explanation is under what circumstances liberal states can
engage in wars of self-defence or wars against what Kant called ‘unjust enemies’. How do we know when a
breach of the general peace prone status quo is acceptable and when it is a betrayal of democratic
principles? In answering this question it is useful to engage with advocates of the democratic peace
who believe that democracies are only peace-prone in relation to other democracies, the weaker
version of the thesis (the so-called dyadic explanation). In relation to illiberal states, democracies are
as war-prone as any other regime type. While war might have become unthinkable between
democracies, the dyadic explanation allows for the fact that war remains an instrument of statecraft in
relation to authoritarian regimes that are unpredictable, unjust and dangerous. The most convincing account
of the dyadic theory comes from constructivism. Inter-democratic peace emerges because democracies
project the same preferences and intentions onto other democratic regimes. Without the fear of aggression,
cooperation becomes possible across a range of issue areas, from the technical to the substantive. In
structural theoretical terms, proponents of dyadic theory believe that the logic of anarchy does not apply to
those who have contracted a separate peace.15 This variant of the literature is particularly germane for
considering the relationship between liberalism and terrorism. No liberal theorist believes there is a duty to
include authoritarian enemies – be they states or terrorist networks – in the pacific union: they do not share
‘our values’ and their states are illegitimate because they lack the consent of the governed. Yet, beyond the
exclusion of non-democracies, there is no agreement on how liberal states should engage with ideological
enemies. Democratic peace theory provides powerful openings into the relationship between domestic
institutions and values, and foreign-policy outcomes. From the vantage point of international history after
the Cold War, however, both variants of the theory are in need of revision. The monadic variant cannot
explain the war-like interventions on the part of liberal states in Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and
Iraq. Looked at from a vantage point outside the liberal zone, the monadic claim to peaceproneness appears to be illusory. The dyadic account has greater immunity to the several post-Cold War
cases in which liberal states have resorted to war. As we have seen, there is no particular claim to
peace-proneness in relations between democracies and authoritarian regimes. That said, the dyadic
variant is challenged by two factors. First, in the period since 1990, the incidence of initiating interstate war has been lower among authoritarian states than among democracies, casting doubt on
Risse’s claim that democratic states are ‘defensively motivated’. Second, given the centrality of regime
type to the democratic peace thesis, there remains the puzzle how and why democracies have
varied so significantly in their response to ‘new threats’ such as international terrorism. In short,
why do anti-militaristic norms of ‘civilian power’ frame the response by certain liberal states to
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foreign policy threats, while others are quick to resort to force and demonstrate effective warfighting capability? To begin to address these questions requires a rethinking of the relationship between
liberalism and international terrorism – specifically, the institutional and social processes by which war is
produced and legitimated
Democratic/liberal peace theory ignores the violence that goes into creating
pliant regimes willing to trade with the US---naturalizes mass violence in the
interim and makes long term collapse inevitable
Herman 12—professor emeritus of finance at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
(Edward, 7/25/12, Reality Denial : Steven Pinker's Apologetics for Western-Imperial Volence,
http://www.zcommunications.org/reality-denial-steven-pinkers-apologetics-for-western-imperial-volenceby-edward-s-herman-and-david-peterson-1)
Pinker’s establishment ideology kicks-in very clearly in his comparative treatment of communism, on the
one hand, and democracy and capitalism, on the other. He is explicit that whereas communism is a
“utopian” and dangerous “ideology” from which most of the world’s serious violence allegedly flowed
during the past century, democracy, capitalism, “markets,” “gentle commerce,” and the like, are all tied to
liberalism—or more exactly to “classical liberalism.”[133] These institutional forms are not the result of
ideologies, much less utopian and dangerous; they are the historically more advanced permutations of the
Leviathan that help to elicit those components of the neurobiology of peaceableness (or “better angels” as
opposed to “inner demons”) for which the human brain has been naturally selected over evolutionary time.
Hence, they are sources of the alleged decline in violence, and their spread is a force for positive and more
peaceful change in the world.[134]¶ Not so communism. At the outset of Chapter 6, “The New Peace,”
Pinker approvingly quotes Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s line that, unlike the communists, “Shakespeare’s
evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses [b]ecause they had no ideology” driving them. (295) In
discussing the alleged mental traits of the members of a society mobilized to commit genocide, he argues
that “Utopian creeds that submerge individuals into moralized categories may take root in powerful
regimes and engage their full destructive might,” and highlights “Marxism during the purges, expulsions,
and terror-famines in Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia.” (328) In his 2002
book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, he devoted several pages to what he called
the “Marxist genocides of the twentieth century,” and noted that “Historians are currently debating whether
the Communists’ mass-executions, forced marches, slave labor, and man-made famines led to one hundred
million deaths or ‘only’ twenty-five million.”[135] And in the section of the current book titled “The
Trajectory of Genocide,” Pinker cites the authority of the “democratic peace” theorist and
“atrocitologist” Rudolph Rummel, who in his 1994 book Death By Government wrote that whereas
“totalitarian communist governments slaughter their people by the tens of millions[,]…many democracies
can barely bring themselves to execute serial murderers.”[136] (357) ¶ As we have seen, Pinker rewrites
history to accommodate this familiar establishment perspective, so that the Cold War was rooted
in communist expansionism and U.S. efforts at containment, and the several million deaths in the
Korean and Vietnam wars were attributable to the communists’ fanatical unwillingness to
surrender to superior force, not to anti-communist and racist attitudes that facilitated the U.S.
military’s mass killings of distant peoples. He deals with U.S. state-capitalism’s support and
sponsorship of the corrupt open-door dictatorships of Suharto, Marcos, Mobutu, Pinochet, Diem,
the Greek Colonels, and the National Security States of Latin America (among many others), and
the “burgeoning” of torture following the end of the Cold War, by eye aversion. ¶ In Pinker’s view,
the Third World’s troubled areas are suffering from their failure to absorb the civilizing lessons
modeled for them in the United States and other advanced countries. He ignores the eight-decadeslong massive U.S. investment in the military and ideological training, political takeovers, and
subsequent support of Third World dictators in numerous U.S. client terror states, including
Guatemala, transformed from a democracy to terror state in 1954, Brazil, shifted from a
democracy to military dictatorship in 1964, the Philippines in 1972, and Chile the same in 1973,
among many others. A tabulation by one of the present authors in 1979 found that 26 of the 35 states in
that era that used torture on an administrative basis were U.S. clients, all of them recipients of U.S. military
and economic aid.[137] These clients were capitalist in structure, but threatened and employed force
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to keep the lower orders disorganized and more serviceable to the local elites and transnational
corporations investing there. One Latin American Church document of that period spoke of the local
U.S.-supported regimes as imposing an economic model so repressive that it “provoked a
revolution that did not exist.”[138] This was a deliberate “decivilizing” process, with the civilized
serving as co-managers.¶ We have seen that Pinker finds the modern era peaceful by focusing on
the absence of war between the major powers, downplaying the many murderous wars carried out
by the West (and mainly the United States) against small countries, and falsely suggesting that the
lesser-country conflicts are home-grown, even where, as in the cases of Iraq and Afghanistan, it
was U.S. military assaults that precipitated the internal armed conflicts, with the United States then
actively participating in them. The Israeli occupation and multi-decade ethnic cleansing of Palestine he
misrepresents as a “cycle of deadly revenge,” with only Israel fighting against “terrorism” in this cycle. He
speaks of Islamic and communist ideology as displaying violent tendencies, and congratulates the U.S.
military for allegedly overcoming the kind of racist attitudes reported at the time of the Vietnam war (U.S.
soldiers referring to Vietnamese as “gooks,” slopes,” and the like)—but the military’s new humanism is
another piece of Pinker misinformation and pro-war propaganda. And he fails to cite the numerous
instances of Israeli leaders referring to Palestinians as “grasshoppers,” “beasts walking on two legs,”
“crocodiles,” “insects,” and a “cancer,” or Israeli rabbis decrying them as the “Amalekites” of the present
era, calling for extermination of these unchosen people.[139] ¶ As regards Israel, Pinker never mentions the
Israeli belief in a “promised land” and “chosen people” who may be fulfilling God’s will in dispossessing
Palestinians.[140] Although the lack of angelic behavior in these assaults and this language, ethnic
cleansing, and dispossession process is dramatic, and has had important effects on the attitudes and
behavior of Islamic peoples, it fails to fit Pinker’s ideological system and political agenda, and therefore is
not a case of conflict with ideological roots. ¶ For Pinker, there is also nothing ideological in the
“miracle of the market” (Reagan), no “stark utopia” in Friedrich von Hayek’s assertion that the
“particulars of a spontaneous order cannot be just or unjust,”[141] no ideology in the faith that an
unconstrained free market will not produce intolerable inequalities and majority resistance that in
turn require the likes of Pinochet, Suharto, or Hitler to reassert the requisite “stability.” It is
simply outside of Pinker’s orbit of thought that liberalism and neoliberalism in the post-Soviet
world are ideologies that have serviced an elite in a class war; that the major struggles and crises
that we have witnessed, over climate change, the massive upward redistribution of income and
wealth, the global surge of disposable workers, and the enlargement of NATO and the police-andsurveillance state, are features of a revitalized consolidation of class power, under more angelic
names like “reform,” “free markets,” “flexibility,” “stability,” and “fiscal discipline.” For Pinker, the
huge growth of the prison population shows the lack of “self-control” of the incarcerated savages still with
us; and it is one merit of the liberal state that it gets the bad guys off the streets. ¶ Another device that
Pinker uses when weighing capitalism versus communism is to take notorious state abuses committed in
the name of communism (e.g., under Joseph Stalin), not as perversions of communism, but as inherent in
its ideology, and flowing directly from it. Many historians and leftists have long argued that Stalinism
constituted a radical betrayal and perversion of genuine communism, and that it emerged out of crises and
stresses that made anything approaching genuine communism unreachable.[142] Pinker never addresses
this kind of explanation and exemption of real-world communism, but he does this implicitly for real-world
degenerate forms of capitalism. Thus, Nazi Germany and its mass murders are not credited to capitalism’s
account, even though Germany under the Nazis was still capitalist in economic form and surely a variant of
capitalism arising under stress and threat from below, with important business support.[143] Suharto’s
Indonesia and Pinochet’s Chile could be said to fit this same pattern. Rightwing believers in the crucial
importance of free markets, such as Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, approved of Pinochet’s
rule, which ended political freedom and freedom of thought, but worked undeviatingly for corporate
interests and rights. But it took only one decade of the Chicago Boys’ privatizations and other “reforms”
for Chile’s economy and financial system to collapse. In the harsh depression that ensued, the banks were
re-nationalized and their foreign creditors bailed-out in a process sometimes called the “Chicago Road to
Socialism,” but then shortly thereafter they were re-privatized all over again, at bargain-basement
prices.[144] (Pinochet does not show up in Pinker’s index; Chile does, but never as a free market state
loved by von Hayek, Friedman, and the Chicago School of Economics, and supported by the United
States.)¶ In one of his book’s more outlandish moments, Pinker even allocates Nazism and the holocaust to
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communism. He writes that since “Hitler read Marx in 1913,” Marxism led definitively if “more
circuitously” to the “[dekamegamurders] committed by the Nazi regime in Germany.”[145] (343) But
while there is no evidence that Hitler really examined Marx or accepted any of his or his fellow Marxist
writers’ ideas,[146] it is incontestable fact that Hitler held Marxism in contempt, and that communism and
communists ranked very high among Hitler’s and the Nazi’s demons and targets (along with Jews) when
they held power in Germany.[147] So is the fact that racist theories and “mismeasure of man” literature in
the Houston Stewart Chamberlain tradition—of which Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray arguably are
heirs—were fanatically embraced by Hitler, and therefore linked to Nazism—and not very “circuitously,”
either. ¶ Pinker not only doesn’t credit the Nazi holocaust to capitalism, he also fails to give capitalism
credit for the extermination of the Native Americans in the Western Hemisphere and the huge
death tolls from the Slave Trades,[148] which should have been prevented by the rising “better angels.”
As noted, he also ignores democratic capitalism’s responsibility for the surge of colonialism in the
18th and 19th centuries, the associated holocausts,[149] and the death-dealing and exploitation of
the Western-sponsored terror states in Indonesia, the Philippines, Latin America and elsewhere.
He also fails to address the huge toll of structural violence under capitalism flowing from its
domestic and global dispossession processes, and, interestingly, intensifying with the post-1979
transformation of China and the breakup of the Soviet bloc and Soviet Union (1989-1991), which reduced
any need on the part of Western capitalism to show concern for the well-being of its own working class
majority. This helps explain the significant global increases in inequality and dispossession and
slum-city enlargement over the past two decades, a period that Pinker calls the “New Peace” and
depicts as an age of accelerating “Civilization”!¶ Pinker refers to the deaths during China’s Great Leap
Forward (1958-1961) as a “Mao masterminded…famine that killed between 20 million and 30 million
people.”[150] (331) For Pinker, clearly, the dead were victims of a deliberate policy that demonstrates the
evil behind communist ideology. But as the development economists Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen have
pointed out, China under Mao installed a massive and effective system of public medical services, as well
as literacy and nutrition programs that greatly benefitted the general population in the years prior to the
famine—a fact that is difficult to reconcile with the allegation that Mao regarded mass starvation as an
acceptable means to some other end. Instead, Drèze and Sen blamed this tragedy on the lack of democracy
in China, with the absence of pressure from below and a lack of timely knowledge of policy failure
significantly offsetting the life-saving benefits of communist China’s medical and other social welfare
programs.[151] ¶ Drèze and Sen also compared the number of deaths caused by this famine under Mao with
the number of deaths caused by what they called the “endemic undernutrition and deprivation” that afflicts
India’s population year-in and year-out. “Estimates of extra mortality [from China’s famine] vary from
16.5 million to 29.5 million,” they wrote, “arguably the largest in terms of total excess mortality in
recorded history.”[152] But “despite the gigantic size of excess mortality in the Chinese famine,” they
continued, the “extra mortality in India from regular deprivation in normal times vastly overshadows the
former. Comparing India’s death rate of 12 per thousand with China’s 7 per thousand, and applying that
difference to India’s population of 781 million in 1986, we get an estimate of excess normal mortality in
India of 3.9 million per year. This implies that every eight years or so more people die in India because of
its higher death rate than died in China in the gigantic famine….India seems to manage to fill its cupboard
with more skeletons every eight years than China put there in its years of famine.”[153] Indeed, by 2005,
some 46 percent (or 31 million) of India’s children were underweight, and 79 percent suffered
anemia. “Forty years of efforts to raise how much food-grains Indians are able to eat has been destroyed
by a mere dozen years of economic reform,” Jawaharal Nehru University economist Utsa Patnaik
observes.[154]
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ted Nations, and protecting American businesses abroad (see Figure 1).
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Link---Deterrence
Deterrence creates an unstable peace that makes structural violence
inevitable
Sandy & Perkins 2 Leo R. veteran of the U.S. Navy and an active member of Veterans for Peace,
Inc., co-founder of Peace Studies at Plymouth State College, Ray; Teaches philosophy at Plymouth State
College, The Nature of Peace and Its Implications for Peace Education”, Online journal of peace and
conflict resolution, Issue 4.2, Spring 02, http://www.trinstitute.org/ojpcr/4_2natp.htm
The peace process additionally must acknowledge and contend with its alternative -war-because of the high value status of violence. For example, while war has brought out the
worst kind of behavior in humans, it has also brought out some of the best. Aside from relieving boredom and monotony, war has been shown to spawn self-sacrifice, loyalty,
honor, heroism, and courage. It is well known that suicide rates decline during war. Also, war has helped to bring about significant social changes such as racial and sexual
violence has been solidly
embedded in the national psyche of many countries. As a result, its elimination will be no easy feat. Nevertheless,
Reardon (1988) insists that “peace is the absence of violence in all its forms --physical, social, psychological, and
structural (p. 16). But this, as a definition, is unduly negative in that it fails to provide any affirmative picture of peace or its ingredients (Copi and Cohen, p. 195). Perhaps
integration, freedom, democracy and a sense of national pride. Because of its apparent utilitarian value and its ability to enervate,
that picture must come, as O’Kane (1992) suggests, from a close examination of the “nature of causes, reasons, goals of war in order that we might ... find ways of reaching human
In its most myopic and limited definition,
peace is the mere absence of war. O’Kane (1992) sees this definition as a “vacuous, passive, simplistic, and
unresponsive escape mechanism too often resorted to in the past -without success.” This definition also commits a serious oversight: it
ignores the residual feelings of mistrust and suspicion that the winners and losers of a war harbor toward each other. The subsequent suppression of mutual
hostile feelings is not taken into account by those who define peace so simply. Their stance is that as long
as people are not actively engaged in overt, mutual, violent, physical and destructive activity, then peace
exists. This, of course, is just another way of defining cold war. In other words, this simplistic definition is too broad because it allows
us to attribute the term “peace” to states of affairs that are not truly peaceful (Copi and Cohen, p. 194). Unfortunately, this
definition of peace appears to be the prevailing one in the world. It is the kind of peace maintained by a “peace through strength”
posture that has led to the arms race, stockpiles of nuclear weapons, and the ultimate threat of mutually
assured destruction . This version of peace was defended by the “peacekeeper”--a name that actually adorns some U.S. nuclear weapons deployed since 1986.1 Also,
versions of this name appear on entrances to some military bases. Keeping “peace” in this manner evokes the theme in Peggy Lee’s old song, “Is That All There is?” What
this really comes down to is the idea of massive and indiscriminate killing for peace, which represents a
morally dubious notion if not a fault of logic. The point here is that a “peace” which depends upon the threat and
intention to kill vast numbers of human beings is hardly a stable or justifiable peace worthy of the name.
goals without resorting to force. That process should help us “uncover” the possible conditions of Peace.”
Those in charge of waging war know that killing is a questionable activity. Otherwise, they would not use such euphemisms as “collateral damage” and “smart bombs” to
obfuscate it. Some different types of peace One way of clearing up the confusion over terms is to define types of peace and war. Thus, there can be hot war, cold war, cold peace,
In hot war, commonly called war, there is a condition of mutual hostility and active physical
engagement through such forms as artillery, missiles, bombs, small arms fire, mortars, flamethrowers, land
and sea mines, hand-to-hand combat, and the like. The aim is the destruction of the enemy or his surrender by intimidation. The object is to have a
and hot peace.
winner and loser. Nationalism reaches its zenith here. In cold war, there is mutual hostility without actual engagement. Intimidation is the sole means of preventing hot war. This
condition is characterized by propaganda, war preparations, and arms races--always at the expense of human needs. During a cold war, nationalism prevails, and the object is to
have a stalemate where neither side will initiate aggression--nuclear or conventional--because of the overwhelming destructive capability of the retaliatory response. In cold peace,
there is almost a neutral view of a previous enemy. There is little mutual hostility but there is also a lack of mutually beneficial interactions aimed at developing trust,
interdependence, and collaboration. There may be a longing for an enemy because nothing has replaced it as an object of national concern. In this situation, isolationism and
Perhaps the current U.S. military
preoccupation with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and the debilitating decade of sanctions against the Iraqi people are
helping to relieve this enemy deficit. The notion that “there are still dangerous people in the world” is often used to advance the cause of military
nationalism occur simultaneously. There is no clear objective because there is no well-defined enemy.
preparedness and at least some momentum toward a restoration of cold war thinking and behavior. The term “peace dividend” that expressed post cold war optimism is hardly
Now we are (again) advancing ballistic missile defense--a variation of the Reagan
Administration’ s Star Wars debacle, and an inst igator of nuclear proliferation. By contrast, hot peace
involves active collaborative efforts designed to “build bridges” between and among past and present
adversaries. This involves searching for common ground and the development of new non-human enemies-threats to the health and well-being of humankind and the planet.2 These new enemies could include human rights abuses, air and
verbalized anymore.
water pollution, dwindling energy resources, the destruction of the ozone layer, famine, poverty, and ignorance. Hot peace promotes-and, indeed, is defined by--global
interdepedence, human rights, democratization, an effective United Nations, and a diminution of national sovereignty. The object is the proliferation of cooperative relations and
mutually beneficial outcomes. Hot peace thinking imagines peace and the abolition of war. Another way of thinking about peace is to have it defined in negative and positive
terms. Peace as the mere absence of war is what Woolman (1985) refers to as “negative peace.” This definition is based on Johan Galtung’s ideas of peace. For Galtung,
negative peace is defined as a state requiring a set of social structures that provide security and protection from acts of direct physical violence committed by individuals, groups or
policies based on the
idea of negative peace do not deal with the causes of violence, only its manifestations . Therefore, these policies
are thought to be insufficient to assure lasting conditions of peace. Indeed, by suppressing the release of tensions
resulting from social conflict, negative peace efforts may actually lead to future violence of greater magnitude .
(Woolman, 1985, p.8) The recent wars in the former Yugoslavia are testimony to this. The massive military machine
nations. The emphasis is ...on control of violence. The main strategy is dissociation, whereby conflicting parties are separated...In general,
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previously provided by the U.S.S.R. put a lid on ethnic hostilities yet did nothing to resolve them thus
allowing them to fester and erupt later.
Doctrinal Paradox- deterrence theory either risks top-level nuclear instability
or escalation of uncontrollable small-scale conflict
Harrington de Santana ‘9, (Anne, Doctoral Candidate in U Chicago Dept. of Poli Sci, Nuclear
Weapons as the Currency of Power: Deconstructing the Fetishism of Force, Nonproliferation Review, Vol.
16, No. 3, November 2009, pgs. 325-345)
Yet policies of nuclear
deterrence did not escape the fundamental paradox of nuclear weapons. Policy debate about
the closed loop of a Mobius strip, the critique of one course of
action leading ineluctably to a conclusion in favor of the other, and vice versa.7 This phenomenon is referred to as the
‘‘stability-instability paradox.’’8 On the one hand, maintaining a minimum arsenal with only as many weapons as were
how to achieve a successful nuclear deterrent followed
necessary to absorb a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union and retaliate with an ‘‘assured destruction’’ capability promoted stability
between the superpowers because neither superpower had an incentive to launch an all- out nuclear attack.9 However, the more
invulnerable the retaliatory forces of both the United States and the Soviet Union became, and the more stable the balance was, the
more likely it was that large-scale nuclear threats would be ineffective against limited forms of aggression. Thus, stability at the
level of ‘‘mutual assured destruction’’ created instability at lower levels of violence. On the other hand,
maintaining a wide range of nuclear options, including tactical weapons for use on the battlefield, provided the possibility of
retaliating proportionally to limited aggression. The capacity for a limited response to limited aggression made the threat of nuclear
retaliation more credible. However, flexible options deployable at a variety of levels provided no reliable mechanism for controlling
escalation and could in fact provide an incentive to launch a preventive attack. If the Soviet Union feared that a limited conflict could
escalate to all-out war, then it may have decided that it would be better to destroy as much of the U.S. arsenal as possible in order to
limit the U.S. capacity for retaliation in kind. Thus, creating stability at lower levels of violence could lead to
instability at the level of all-out war, closing the policy loop by bringing us back to the solution
of maintaining a minimum capacity for retaliation in kind. If there is no escape from the paradox of nuclear
deterrence, and therefore no decisive resolution to the policy debate over the military requirements of deterrence, why is its logic so
persuasive? For more than half a century the practice of nuclear deterrence has been treated as if it were both a natural and inevitable
result of the existence of nuclear technologies. Rather than attempt to escape or resolve the paradox of nuclear weapons, in this article
I posit an explanation for its existence and its persistence. I argue that the recurrent paradox of nuclear weapons is a
symptom of their status as fetish objects. More specifically, I argue that the production of nuclear weapons as fetish
objects is the culmination of a pattern of behavior that I refer to as the fetishism of force.10 There are important similarities between
the pattern of behavior Karl Marx sought to identify with respect to commodities*a pattern he called ‘‘fetishism’’*and the pattern of
behavior I identify here with respect to military force.11 Marx identified money as the mature expression of commodity fetishism; I
identify nuclear weapons as the mature expression of the fetishism of force. Money is the physical embodiment of a form of social
value, namely, wealth. Likewise, nuclear weapons are the embodiment of power. Just as access to wealth in the form of money
determines an individual’s opportunities and place in a social hierarchy, access to power in the form of nuclear weapons determines a
state’s opportunities and place in the international order. In both cases, the physical form of the fetish object is valuable because it
serves as a carrier of social value. In other words, the power of nuclear weapons is not reducible to their explosive capability. Nuclear
weapons are powerful because we treat them as powerful.
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Link---Disease
Securitizing disease creates the individual as a prison which the individual
must now survey and disciple. Fear of a catastrophic outbreak necessitates
the capillary diffusion of carceral and biopolitical violence, turning life into a
biological carcass absent vitality.
Debrix 9 – Francois, Professor and Director of the Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural
Thought (ASPECT) Program @ Virginia Tech, Ph.D., Purdue University and Alexander D., Department of
Political Studies & Public Administration, American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon, PhD in
Political Theory from John Hopkins, ”Nothing to Fear but Fear: Governmentality and the Biopolitical
Production of Terror,” International Political Sociology (2009) 3, 398–413/
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A telling example of this self-mobilization and self-anticipation against one’s own conduct can be
found in the way Western states (or, rather, their governmental agencies) along with some transnational
organizations (the World Health Organization, the United Nations) have asked populations to preemptively
take care of their health, hygiene, and everyday routines in the context of the ongoing
A⁄H1N1 or ‘‘swine flu’’ pandemic. In this recent case of popular health scare, as with many
other instances of spreading epidemics over the past decade (SARS, the H5N1 ‘‘bird flu,’’
but also AIDS before), individuals and groups are asked to be the first layers of
securitization by turning their bodies (or those of family members, neighbors, coworkers, etc.) into primordial
sites of analysis and scrutiny from where not only the disease but, just as importantly, the fear about what might
happen with the disease will be monitored. With the ‘‘swine flu,’’ a constant questioning of one’s
body movements and symptomatic features, but also of one’s daily habits, becomes an
automatic (and autoimmune) measure against the endemic fear. Individual and collective bodies
become the most vital dispositifs of containment of the pandemic and of the terror that
inevitably will spread. This management or governance of the ‘‘swine flu’’ and its scare (the
disease and its terror are inseparable from the moment a pandemic discourse is launched) is said to require constant
self-checking (Do I have a fever? Is my cough a sign that I have been infected? Did I remember to wash my hands after
riding the bus or the subway?). But it also demands what can be called selfcarceralization measures (we must stay
home for several days if we feel sick; we must wear protective masks if we venture outside and have a runny nose; we must
close entire schools for as long as necessary if we suspect that children in the community have the flu). In the end, it
is a
full-blown biopolitics of selfterror that sets in whereby people must allow themselves to be
quarantined, must accept being placed in hospital isolation, and must even be willing not to be treated if pharmaceutical
companies fail to produce enough vaccines for everyone . As the A⁄H1N1 pandemic preemption regime
reveals, individual and collective bodies must always be prepared to immerse themselves
into disciplinary and regulatory procedures, into security mechanisms, and into
governmental tactics. In fact, they must act as dispositifs of fear governance themselves. This
means that bodies become the required lines of forces that connect the possible localized
symptoms to the global pandemic and its terror. From this perspective on how bodies in societies
of unease enable regimes of biopolitical terror and are themselves the product of operations
of governmentalized fear, no return to a centralized model of power is necessary to make sense of the terror
embedded in contemporary regimes of government. Rather, as the ‘‘swine flu’’ case shows, it is the
horizontality, the capillarity, and the propagation of carceral effects across space and
through time that authenticates this (self) imposition of governmental power and force. But
what this system of reproduction of self-governmentalized scare tactics and biopolitical
(in)security calls for, however, is the beginning of a different understanding of life, or of what
life means. Indeed, it is not enough anymore to think of life as docile or regulated. It may also
not be sufficient to think of today’s living bodies as abandoned beings (Agamben 1998) caught in
a state of sovereign exception. Rather, the self-rationalizing, self-securitizing, and selfterrorizing bodies that act, react, and interact in coordination with agents ⁄ agencies of
government and are found at the heart of societies of fear production are more likely to
represent what Mick Dillon has called ‘‘emergent life’’ (Dillon 2007). against disease creates the
individual as a prison which the individual must now survey and disciple. The
AFF vision and fear of a catastrophic disease outbreak necessitates the
capillary diffusion of carceral and biopolitical violence, turning life into a
biological carcass absent vitality.
Debrix and Barder 2009
/Francois, Professor and Director of the Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought
(ASPECT) Program @ Virginia Tech, Ph.D., Purdue University and Alexander D., Department of Political
Studies & Public Administration, American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon, PhD in Political Theory
from John Hopkins, ”Nothing to Fear but Fear: Governmentality and the Biopolitical Production of
Terror,” International Political Sociology (2009) 3, 398–413/
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Security K
A telling example of this self-mobilization and self-anticipation against one’s own conduct can be
found in the way Western states (or, rather, their governmental agencies) along with some transnational
organizations (the World Health Organization, the United Nations) have asked populations to
preemptively take care of their health, hygiene, and everyday routines in the context of the
ongoing A⁄H1N1 or ‘‘swine flu’’ pandemic. In this recent case of popular health scare, as with
many other instances of spreading epidemics over the past decade (SARS, the H5N1 ‘‘bird flu,’’
but also AIDS before), individuals and groups are asked to be the first layers of securitization by
turning their bodies (or those of family members, neighbors, coworkers, etc.) into primordial sites of
analysis and scrutiny from where not only the disease but, just as importantly, the fear about what
might happen with the disease will be monitored. With the ‘‘swine flu,’’ a constant questioning of
one’s body movements and symptomatic features, but also of one’s daily habits, becomes an
automatic (and autoimmune) measure against the endemic fear. Individual and collective bodies
become the most vital dispositifs of containment of the pandemic and of the terror that inevitably
will spread. This management or governance of the ‘‘swine flu’’ and its scare (the disease and its
terror are inseparable from the moment a pandemic discourse is launched) is said to require constant
self-checking (Do I have a fever? Is my cough a sign that I have been infected? Did I remember to wash
my hands after riding the bus or the subway?). But it also demands what can be called
selfcarceralization measures (we must stay home for several days if we feel sick; we must wear
protective masks if we venture outside and have a runny nose; we must close entire schools for as long as
necessary if we suspect that children in the community have the flu). In the end, it is a full-blown
biopolitics of selfterror that sets in whereby people must allow themselves to be quarantined,
must accept being placed in hospital isolation, and must even be willing not to be treated if
pharmaceutical companies fail to produce enough vaccines for everyone . As the A⁄H1N1 pandemic
preemption regime reveals, individual and collective bodies must always be prepared to immerse
themselves into disciplinary and regulatory procedures, into security mechanisms, and into
governmental tactics. In fact, they must act as dispositifs of fear governance themselves. This
means that bodies become the required lines of forces that connect the possible localized
symptoms to the global pandemic and its terror. From this perspective on how bodies in societies of
unease enable regimes of biopolitical terror and are themselves the product of operations of
governmentalized fear, no return to a centralized model of power is necessary to make sense of the
terror embedded in contemporary regimes of government. Rather, as the ‘‘swine flu’’ case shows, it is
the horizontality, the capillarity, and the propagation of carceral effects across space and through
time that authenticates this (self) imposition of governmental power and force. But what this
system of reproduction of self-governmentalized scare tactics and biopolitical (in)security calls
for, however, is the beginning of a different understanding of life, or of what life means. Indeed, it
is not enough anymore to think of life as docile or regulated. It may also not be sufficient to think
of today’s living bodies as abandoned beings (Agamben 1998) caught in a state of sovereign
exception. Rather, the self-rationalizing, self-securitizing, and self-terrorizing bodies that act,
react, and interact in coordination with agents ⁄ agencies of government and are found at the heart
of societies of fear production are more likely to represent what Mick Dillon has called ‘‘emergent
life’’ (Dillon 2007).
115
Security K
116
Security K
Disease descriptions are shaped by political interests and in turn shape reality – turns the aff
MacPhail 2009
(Theresa, medical anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley “The Politics of
Bird Flu: The Battle over Viral Samples and China’s Role in Global Public Health,” Journal of language and politics, 8:3, 2009)
In fact, the health development strategies of international organizations are judged as significant in
reinforcing the role of the state in relation to the production of primary products for the world market,
thereby perpetuating international relations of dominance and dependency. — Soheir Morsy, Political Economy in
Medical Anthropology In July of 2007, former Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona appeared before a congressional
committee and testified that during his term in office he had been pressured by the Bush administration to suppress or
downplay any public health information that contradicted the administration’s beliefs and/or policies .
Gardiner Harris of the New York Times noted that Dr. Carmona was only “one of a growing list of present and former administration
officials to charge that politics often trumped science within what had previously been largely nonpartisan
government health and scientific agencies” (Harris 2007). Dr. Carmona testified that he had repeatedly faced “political
interference” on such varied topics as stem cell research and sex education. Two days later, an editorial in the Times bemoaned the
resultant diminution of public health — both its reputation as non-biased and the general “understanding of important public health
issues” — in the eyes of the same public it was meant to serve (2007). In the wake of Dr. Carmona’s testimony, it would appear that
these are grave times for public health. And yet, public health concerns and international measures to thwart disease pandemics have
never been more at the forefront of governmental policy, media focus and the public imagination. Dr. Carmona’s testimony on the
fuzzy boundaries between science and state, health and policy, is in line with a recent spate of sensational stories on the dangers of
drug-resistant tuberculosis and the recurrent threat of a bird flu outbreak — all of which belie any distinct separation of politics and
medical science and highlight the ever-increasing commingling of the realms of public health and political diplomacy. Until
recently, the worlds of public health and politics have generally been popularly conceptualized as separate
fields. Public health, undergirded by medicine, is primarily defined as “the science and practice of protecting and improving the
health of a community” (public health 2007), regardless of political borders on geographical maps. Disease prevention and care
is typically regarded as neutral ground, a conceptual space where governments can work together for the
direct (or indirect) benefit of all. Politics, on the other hand, is usually referred to in the largely Aristotelian sense of the word,
or politika, as “the art or science of government or governing, especially the governing of a political entity, such as a nation, and the
administration and control of its internal and external affairs” (politics 2007). If we take to be relevant Clausewitz’s formulation that
war is merely the continuation of policy (or such politics) by other means, might we then argue that the recent ‘wars’ on disease
— specifically the one being waged on the ever-present global threat of bird flu — are merely a
continuation of politics by different means? In an article written for the U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC), two health
professionals suggest that the flow of influence works optimally when an unbiased science first informs public health, with public
health then influencing governmental policy decisions. The other potential direction of influence, wherein politics directly
informs public health, eventually constraining or directing scientific research, has the potential to create a
situation in which “ideology clouds scientific and public health judgment, decisions go awry and politics
become dangerous” (Koplan and McPheeters 2004: 2041). The authors go on to argue that: Scientists and public health
professionals often offer opinions on policy and political issues, and politicians offer theirs on public health policies, sometimes with
the support of evidence. This interaction is appropriate and healthy, and valuable insights can be acquired by these cross-discussions.
Nevertheless the interaction provides an opportunity for inappropriate and self-serving commentary, for
public grandstanding, and for promoting public anxiety for partisan political purposes . (ibid.) The authors,
however, never suggest that pure science, devoid of any political consideration, is a viable alternative to an ideologically-driven
disease prevention policy. What becomes important in the constant interplay of science, politics and ideology, is both an awareness of
potential ideological pitfalls and a balance between official public health policy and the science that underlies it. The science/ public
health/politics interaction is largely taken for granted as the foundation of any appropriate, real-world policy decisions (Tesh 1988:
132). Yet the political nature of most health policies has, until recently, been overshadowed in popular discourse
by the ostensibly altruistic nature of health medicine. Yet as Michael Taussig reminds us of the doctor/patient
relationship: “The issue of control and manipulation is concealed by the aura of benevolence” (Taussig 1980: 4). Might the overt
goodwill of organizations such as the WHO, the CDC, and the Chinese CDC belie such an emphasis on politics? Certainly there is
argumentation to support a claim that public health and medicine are inherently tied to politics. Examining the ‘hidden arguments’
underlying public health policies, Sylvia Noble Tesh argues: “disease prevention began to acquire political meaning. No
longer merely ways to control diseases, prevention policies became standard-bearers for the contending political arguments about the
form the new society would take” (1988: 11). Science is a ‘reason of state’ in Ashis Nandy’s Science, Hegemony and Violence (1988:
1). Echoing current battles over viral samples, Nandy suggests that in the last century science was used as “a political plank
within the United States in the ideological battle against ungodly communism” (1988: 3). Scientific performance is
linked to ‘political dividends’ (1988: 9), with science becoming “a substitute for politics in many societies ” (1988:
10). What remains novel and of interest in all of this conflation of state and medicine is the new ‘politics of scale’ of
the war on global disease, specifically its focus on reemerging disease like avian influenza . As doctor and
medical anthropologist Paul Farmer notes: “… the WHO manifestly attempts to use fear of contagion to goad
wealthy nations into investing in disease surveillance and control out of self-interest — an age-old public health
ploy acknowledged as such in the Institute of Medicine report on emerging infections” (Farmer 2001: 56–57). What Farmer’s
observation underlines is that ‘public health’ has transformed itself into a savvy, political entity. Institutions like the WHO are
117
Security K
increasingly needed to negotiate between nations — they function as the new ‘diplomats of health’. Modern politics, then, have
arguably turned into ‘health’ politics. In 2000, the UN Security Council passed a resolution on infectious diseases. The
resolution came in response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic and was the first of its kind issued (Fidler 2001: 80). What started as a
reaction to a specific disease, AIDS, has since developed into an overall concern with any disease or illness
which is seen as having the potential to lay waste to global health, national security, or economic and
political stability. In other words, disease and public health have gone “global”. But, as law and international disease scholar
David Fidler points out, the “meeting of realpolitik and pathogens” that he terms “microbialpolitik” is anything but new (Fidler 2001:
81). Microbialpolitiks is as old as international commerce, wars, and diplomacy. Indeed, it was only the brief halfcentury respite provided by antibiotics, modern medicine and the hope of a disease-free future that made the coupling of politics and
public health seem out-of-date. But now we have (re)entered a world in which modern public health structures have weakened, thus
making a return to microbialpolitiks inevitable. As Fidler argues: “The ‘reglobalization of public health is well
underway, and the international politics of infectious disease control have returned ” (Fidler 2001: 81). Only three
years later, Fidler would write that the predicted return of public health was triumphant, having “emerged prominently on the agendas
of many policy areas in international relations, including national security, international trade, economic development, globalization,
human rights, and global governance” (Fidler 2004: 2). As Nicholas King suggests, the resurgence of such
‘microbialpolitiking’ owes much to the discourse of risk so prevalent in today’s world. The current focus
on ‘risk’, as it specifically pertains to disease and its relationship to national security concerns, has been
constructed by the interaction of a variety of different social actors: scientists, the media, and health and
security experts (King 2004:62). King argues: The emerging diseases campaign employed a strategic and
historically resonant scale politics, making it attractive to journalists, biomedical researchers, activists,
politicians, and public health and national security experts. Campaigners’ identification of causes and consequences at
particular scales were a means of marketing risk to specific audiences and thereby securing alliances; their recommendations for
intervention at particular scales were a means of ensuring that those alliances ultimately benefited specific interests. (2004: 64) King
traces this development to the early 1990s, specifically to Stephen Morse’s 1989 conference on “Emerging Viruses”. Like the UN
Security Council resolution on emerging infections, the conference was in the wake of HIV/AIDS. In King’s retelling, it was Morse’s
descriptions of the causal links between isolated, local events and global effects that changed the politics of public health (2004: 66).
The epidemiological community followed in Morse’s footsteps, with such luminaries as Morse and Joshua Lederberg calling for a
global surveillance network to deal with emerging or reemerging diseases such as bird flu or SARS. However, although both the
problem and the effort were ‘global’ by default, any “interventions would involve ‘passing through’ American laboratories,
biotechnology firms, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and the information science experts” (King 2004: 69). Following the conference,
disease became a hot topic for the media. Such high -profile authors as Laurie Garrett (The Coming Plague) and
Richard Preston (The Hot Zone) stoked the ‘emerging virus’ fires, creating what amounted to a “viral
panic” or “viral paranoia” (King 2004: 73). Stories of viruses gone haywire, such as Preston’s account of Ebola, helped reify the
notion that localized events were of international importance. Such causal chains having been formed in the popular imagination, the
timing was ripe for the emergence of bioterrorism concerns. In the aftermath of 9/11, the former cold war had been transformed, using
scalar politics, into a hot war with international viruses (King 2004: 76). Of course, all of this can be tied into the
Foucaultian concept that knowledge is by its very nature political. In The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault outlines the
ways in which medicine is connected to the power of the state. For Foucault, medicine itself “becomes a task for the
nation” (Foucault 1994: 19). He argues that the practice of medicine is itself political and that “the struggle against
disease must begin with a war against bad government” (Foucault 1994: 33). In an article on the politics of emerging
diseases, Elisabeth Prescott has echoed Foucault’s equation of disease with bad government. She suggests that a nation’s capacity
to combat both old and newly emergent diseases is a marker not of just biological, but of political, health .
She argues that “the ability to respond [is] a reflection of the capacity of a governing system” (2007: 1). What’s more, ruptures in
health can lead to break-downs in effective government or in the ability of governments to inspire confidence. Prescott suggests:
“Failures in governance in the face of infectious disease outbreaks can result in challenges to social cohesion, economic performance
and political legitimacy” (ibid.). In other words, an outbreak of bird flu in China would equate to an example of Foucault’s bad
government. In the end, there can be no doubt that the realms of medicine and (political) power are perpetually intertwined. Foucault
writes: “There is, therefore, a spontaneous and deeply rooted convergence between the requirement of political ideology and those of
medical technology” (Foucault 1994: 38). In other words, we should not be overly surprised by Richard Carmona’s testimony or by
debates over bird flu samples. Politics and health have always arguably gone hand-in-hand
Framing disease as a threat is an act of securitization – it justifies biopolitical regulation.
Dr. Stefan
Elbe ‘4
, Ph.D. in International Relations and Senior Lecturer in International Relations at LSE, 2004, "AIDS,
Security, and Biopolitics".
The securitization of AIDS is also biopolitical, secondly, because of the manner in which international actors
are trying to monitor and govern the health of populations. The detailed statistical monitoring of
populations that formed such an integral component of eighteenth-century European biopolitics is today being
replicated on a global level by international agencies eager to identify and forecast the population dynamics
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Security K
likely to be induced around the world by HIV/AIDS. The task of compiling these statistics has been assigned to the
World Health Organization and the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS). The latter prides itself on its
efforts to provide ‘strategic information’ about HIV/AIDS globally, as well as ‘[t]racking, monitoring and
evaluation of the epidemic and of responses to it’.25 Indeed, it claims to be ‘the world’s leading resource for
epidemiological data on HIV/AIDS’.26 To this end, UNAIDS also provides – in a manner that recalls England’s nineteenth-century
‘Blue Books’ – annual updates on the global state of the AIDS pandemic, and endeavors to keep up-to-date information on HIV
prevalence amongst adult populations for every country. 27 Crucially, UNAIDS does not restrict itself to providing data for collective
populations; its surveillance techniques penetrate further and also generate new sub-populations by singling
out specific risk groups that need to be targeted – another historical hallmark of biopolitics.28 The organization thus
differentiates between adult and child populations and between urban and rural populations, and pays particularly close attention to
sex workers and drug users. Where possible, UNAIDS even gathers data on sexual behavior, such as the median age of first sexual
intercourse and the rate of condom use, as well as a variety of other knowledge indicators. UNAIDS, in short, produces the
‘vital’ knowledge about the biological characteristics of the world’s populations and sub-populations
needed to rein in the pandemic.
Framing the state as the actor to prevent disease is securitizing – it makes the health of the
population the government's responsibility.
Dr. Stefan
Elbe ‘4
, Ph.D. in International Relations and Senior Lecturer in International Relations at LSE, 2004, "AIDS,
Security, and Biopolitics".
Today such biopolitical
impulses can also be found resonating beyond the borders of Europe through
practices such as the securitization of HIV/AIDS. The latter, after all, marks nothing other than a powerful
international intervention targeted directly at the level of population. With the arrival of HIV/AIDS on the
international security agenda, security is no longer confined to defending sovereignty, territorial integrity and
international law; but, as the unprecedented Security Council meeting demonstrates, population dynamics – including levels of
‘disease’ – have now become strategically significant as well. International political actors securitizing HIV/AIDS
are effectively calling upon governments around the world to make the health and longevity of their
populations a matter of highest governmental priority – echoing Foucault’s earlier observation that in a biopolitical age
‘[t]he population now appears more as the aim of government than the power of the ruler’.
Disease descriptions are shaped by political interests and in turn shape reality
– turns the aff
MacPhail 2009 (Theresa, medical anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley “The Politics of Bird Flu: The
Battle over Viral Samples and China’s Role in Global Public Health,” Journal of language and politics, 8:3, 2009)
In fact, the health development strategies of international organizations are judged as significant
in
reinforcing the role of the state in relation to the production of primary products for the world market,
thereby perpetuating international relations of dominance and dependency. — Soheir Morsy, Political Economy in
Medical Anthropology In July of 2007, former Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona appeared before a congressional
committee and testified that during his term in office he had been pressured by the Bush administration to suppress or
downplay any public health information that contradicted the administration’s beliefs and/or policies.
Gardiner Harris of the New York Times noted that Dr. Carmona was only “one of a growing list of present and former administration
officials to charge that politics often trumped science within what had previously been largely nonpartisan
government health and scientific agencies” (Harris 2007). Dr. Carmona testified that he had repeatedly faced “political
interference” on such varied topics as stem cell research and sex education. Two days later, an editorial in the Times bemoaned the
resultant diminution of public health — both its reputation as non-biased and the general “understanding of important public health
issues” — in the eyes of the same public it was meant to serve (2007). In the wake of Dr. Carmona’s testimony, it would appear that
these are grave times for public health. And yet, public health concerns and international measures to thwart disease pandemics have
never been more at the forefront of governmental policy, media focus and the public imagination. Dr. Carmona’s testimony on the
fuzzy boundaries between science and state, health and policy, is in line with a recent spate of sensational stories on the dangers of
drug-resistant tuberculosis and the recurrent threat of a bird flu outbreak — all of which belie any distinct separation of politics and
medical science and highlight the ever-increasing commingling of the realms of public health and political diplomacy. Until
recently, the worlds of public health and politics have generally been popularly conceptualized as separate
fields. Public health, undergirded by medicine, is primarily defined as “the science and practice of protecting and improving the
health of a community” (public health 2007), regardless of political borders on geographical maps. Disease prevention and care
is typically regarded as neutral ground, a conceptual space where governments can work together for the
direct (or indirect) benefit of all. Politics, on the other hand, is usually referred to in the largely Aristotelian sense of the word,
or politika, as “the art or science of government or governing, especially the governing of a political entity, such as a nation, and the
administration and control of its internal and external affairs” (politics 2007). If we take to be relevant Clausewitz’s formulation that
119
Security K
war is merely the continuation of policy (or such politics) by other means, might we then argue that the
recent ‘wars’ on disease
— specifically the one being waged on the ever-present global threat of bird flu — are merely a
continuation of politics by different means? In an article written for the U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC), two health
professionals suggest that the flow of influence works optimally when an unbiased science first informs public health, with public
health then influencing governmental policy decisions. The other potential direction of influence, wherein politics directly
informs public health, eventually constraining or directing scientific research, has the potential to create a
situation in which “ideology clouds scientific and public health judgment, decisions go awry and politics
become dangerous” (Koplan and McPheeters 2004: 2041). The authors go on to argue that: Scientists and public health
professionals often offer opinions on policy and political issues, and politicians offer theirs on public health policies, sometimes with
the support of evidence. This interaction is appropriate and healthy, and valuable insights can be acquired by these cross-discussions.
Nevertheless the interaction provides an opportunity for inappropriate and self-serving commentary, for
public grandstanding, and for promoting public anxiety for partisan political purposes . (ibid.) The authors,
however, never suggest that pure science, devoid of any political consideration, is a viable alternative to an ideologically-driven
disease prevention policy. What becomes important in the constant interplay of science, politics and ideology, is both an awareness of
potential ideological pitfalls and a balance between official public health policy and the science that underlies it. The science/ public
health/politics interaction is largely taken for granted as the foundation of any appropriate, real-world policy decisions (Tesh 1988:
132). Yet the political nature of most health policies has, until recently, been overshadowed in popular discourse
by the ostensibly altruistic nature of health medicine. Yet as Michael Taussig reminds us of the doctor/patient
relationship: “The issue of control and manipulation is concealed by the aura of benevolence” (Taussig 1980: 4). Might the overt
goodwill of organizations such as the WHO, the CDC, and the Chinese CDC belie such an emphasis on politics? Certainly there is
argumentation to support a claim that public health and medicine are inherently tied to politics. Examining the ‘hidden arguments’
underlying public health policies, Sylvia Noble Tesh argues: “disease prevention began to acquire political meaning. No
longer merely ways to control diseases, prevention policies became standard-bearers for the contending political arguments about the
form the new society would take” (1988: 11). Science is a ‘reason of state’ in Ashis Nandy’s Science, Hegemony and Violence (1988:
1). Echoing current battles over viral samples, Nandy suggests that in the last century science was used as “a political plank
within the United States in the ideological battle against ungodly communism” (1988: 3). Scientific performance is
linked to ‘political dividends’ (1988: 9), with science becoming “a substitute for politics in many societies” (1988:
10). What remains novel and of interest in all of this conflation of state and medicine is the new ‘politics of scale’ of
the war on global disease, specifically its focus on reemerging disease like avian influenza . As doctor and
medical anthropologist Paul Farmer notes: “… the WHO manifestly attempts to use fear of contagion to goad
wealthy nations into investing in disease surveillance and control out of self-interest — an age-old public health
ploy acknowledged as such in the Institute of Medicine report on emerging infections” (Farmer 2001: 56–57). What Farmer’s
observation underlines is that ‘public health’ has transformed itself into a savvy, political entity. Institutions like the WHO are
increasingly needed to negotiate between nations — they function as the new ‘diplomats of health’. Modern politics, then, have
arguably turned into ‘health’ politics. In 2000, the UN Security Council passed a resolution on infectious diseases. The
resolution came in response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic and was the first of its kind issued (Fidler 2001: 80). What started as a
reaction to a specific disease, AIDS, has since developed into an overall concern with any disease or illness
which is seen as having the potential to lay waste to global health, national security, or economic and
political stability. In other words, disease and public health have gone “global”. But, as law and international disease scholar
David Fidler points out, the “meeting of realpolitik and pathogens” that he terms “microbialpolitik” is anything but new (Fidler 2001:
81). Microbialpolitiks is as old as international commerce, wars, and diplomacy. Indeed, it was only the brief halfcentury respite provided by antibiotics, modern medicine and the hope of a disease-free future that made the coupling of politics and
public health seem out-of-date. But now we have (re)entered a world in which modern public health structures have weakened, thus
making a return to microbialpolitiks inevitable. As Fidler argues: “The ‘reglobalization of public health is well
underway, and the international politics of infectious disease control have returned ” (Fidler 2001: 81). Only three
years later, Fidler would write that the predicted return of public health was triumphant, having “emerged prominently on the agendas
of many policy areas in international relations, including national security, international trade, economic development, globalization,
human rights, and global governance” (Fidler 2004: 2). As Nicholas King suggests, the resurgence of such
‘microbialpolitiking’ owes much to the discourse of risk so prevalent in today’s world. The current focus
on ‘risk’, as it specifically pertains to disease and its relationship to national security concerns, has been
constructed by the interaction of a variety of different social actors: scientists, the media, and health and
security experts (King 2004:62). King argues: The emerging diseases campaign employed a strategic and
historically resonant scale politics, making it attractive to journalists, biomedical researchers, activists,
politicians, and public health and national security experts. Campaigners’ identification of causes and consequences at
particular scales were a means of marketing risk to specific audiences and thereby securing alliances; their recommendations for
intervention at particular scales were a means of ensuring that those alliances ultimately benefited specific interests. (2004: 64) King
traces this development to the early 1990s, specifically to Stephen Morse’s 1989 conference on “Emerging Viruses”. Like the UN
Security Council resolution on emerging infections, the conference was in the wake of HIV/AIDS. In King’s retelling, it was Morse’s
descriptions of the causal links between isolated, local events and global effects that changed the politics of public health (2004: 66).
The epidemiological community followed in Morse’s footsteps, with such luminaries as Morse and Joshua Lederberg calling for a
global surveillance network to deal with emerging or reemerging diseases such as bird flu or SARS. However, although both the
120
Security K
problem and the effort were ‘global’ by default, any “interventions would involve ‘passing through’ American laboratories,
biotechnology firms, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and the information science experts” (King 2004: 69). Following the conference,
disease became a hot topic for the media. Such high -profile authors as Laurie Garrett (The Coming Plague) and
Richard Preston (The Hot Zone) stoked the ‘emerging virus’ fires, creating what amounted to a “viral
panic” or “viral paranoia” (King 2004: 73). Stories of viruses gone haywire, such as Preston’s account of Ebola, helped reify the
notion that localized events were of international importance. Such causal chains having been formed in the popular imagination, the
timing was ripe for the emergence of bioterrorism concerns. In the aftermath of 9/11, the former cold war had been transformed, using
scalar politics, into a hot war with international viruses (King 2004: 76). Of course, all of this can be tied into the
Foucaultian concept that knowledge is by its very nature political. In The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault outlines the
ways in which medicine is connected to the power of the state. For Foucault, medicine itself “becomes a task for the
nation” (Foucault 1994: 19). He argues that the practice of medicine is itself political and that “the struggle against
disease must begin with a war against bad government” (Foucault 1994: 33). In an article on the politics of emerging
diseases, Elisabeth Prescott has echoed Foucault’s equation of disease with bad government. She suggests that a nation’s capacity
to combat both old and newly emergent diseases is a marker not of just biological, but of political, health.
She argues that “the ability to respond [is] a reflection of the capacity of a governing system” (2007: 1). What’s more, ruptures in
health can lead to break-downs in effective government or in the ability of governments to inspire confidence. Prescott suggests:
“Failures in governance in the face of infectious disease outbreaks can result in challenges to social cohesion, economic performance
and political legitimacy” (ibid.). In other words, an outbreak of bird flu in China would equate to an example of Foucault’s bad
government. In the end, there can be no doubt that the realms of medicine and (political) power are perpetually intertwined. Foucault
writes: “There is, therefore, a spontaneous and deeply rooted convergence between the requirement of political ideology and those of
medical technology” (Foucault 1994: 38). In other words, we should not be overly surprised by Richard Carmona’s testimony or by
debates over bird flu samples. Politics and health have always arguably gone hand-in-hand
The metaphor of disease allows us to cover up the framework of securitization
under the guise of policymaking
Campbell 98 (David, Professor of International Politics at U of Newcastle, Writing Security: US
Foreign Policy and the Polities of Identity. Pg 81-82)
However one might begin to fathom the many issues located within those challenges, our current
situation leaves us with one certainty because we cannot escape the logic of differentiation, we are
often tempted by the logic of defilement. To say as much is not to argue that we are imprisoned within
a particular and permanent system of representations. To be sure, danger is often represented as
disease, dirt, or pollution. As one medical text argues: “Disease is shock and danger for existence”32
Or as Karl Jaspers maintains: “Disease is a general concept of non-value which includes all possible
negative values”33 But such concerns have less to do with the intrinsic qualities of those
conditions that the modernist requirements of order and stability: “Dirt offends against order.
Eliminating it is not a negative moment, but a positive effort to organize the environment.” One
might suggest that it is the extent to which we want to organize the environment- the extent to
which we want to purify our domain that determines how likely it is that we represent danger
in terms of dirt or disease. Tightly defined order and strictly enforced stability, undergirded by
notions of purity, are not a priori conditions of existence; some order and some stability might
be required for existence as we know it (i.e., in some form of extensive political community), but
it is the degree of tightness, the measure of straightness, and the extent of desire for purity that
constitute danger as dirt or disease. But the temptation of the logic of defilement as a means of
orienting ourselves to danger has more often than not been overpowering, largely because it is
founded on a particular conceptualization of “the body” in its use since at lease the eighteenth
century, this conceptualization demands purity as a condition of health and thus make the
temptation to defilement a “natural” characteristic. This has endowed us with a mode of
representation in which health and cleanliness serve the logic of stability, and disorder is
rendered as disease and dirt. In the eighteenth century, when state forms were becoming the
most prevalent articulations of extensive political community, these modes of representation
began to take a new turn that intensified the capacity of representations of disease to act as
discourses of danger of the social.
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Medical security metaphors legitimate practices of violence while
simultaneously promoting a liberal subjectivity on the basis of this violence
Dalby 2(Simon, professor of geography and political economy at Carleton University
in Ottawa, Environmental Security, p. 153-154)
Security studies might draw intellectual support from cultural studies and postcolonial critiques. It
might, as Prins argues, recognize itself in terms of a branch of interpretive humanities. In doing so the
task of academic practitioners, or insecurity specialists, to adopt Davis Bobrow's term but not his
conclusion,29 becomes one of engagement in a conversation about the fate of humanity on an
endangered planetrather than a task of scientists to "objectively" examine a given series of structural
relationships. As such, if it also takes the geographical arguments into account, security studies might
understand itself as many geographical selves, as security studies plural, with Asian, European, and
American variants in addition to a variety of postcolonial and, crucially perhaps, postdevelopment
understandings." Security is not then read as a universal condition, as the American behavioral
scientists might like us to do, but understood as a highly contested signifier that invokes
numerous specifications of danger and legitimates practices of violence while simultaneously
frequently promoting a modern liberal subjectivity on the bases of this violence.
It also invokes the modern political impulse to control and the medical tropes of endangerment
and disease, abnormality, and threat that are, as Bobrow unreflectively notes, pervasive in
contemporary security culture. Foucault's discussions of security, power, policing, and
government have suggested that the political impulse to secure in the lives of populations within
states is linked to the formulations of all sorts of dangers as well as the questions of social
welfare. Thus the metaphors of various wars against everything from polio to drugs are part of
the larger popular geopolitical repertoires for engaging state agencies. " `[T]he end of the Cold
War' represents not a decisive break with the logic of security, but a realignment that throws into relief
problems and sites of contestation that earlier had been less accessible, that is, intelligible.
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Using medical metaphors reproduces cold war discourse and obscures attempts to
reform consumption
Dalby, professor of geography and political economy at Carleton University in
Ottawa, 2002
(Simon, Environmental Security, p. 154-156)
What threatens is a complex matter of cultural politics. Scripts of nationhood are frequently woven around heroic deeds
in wartime. Battles and wars of independence are crucial military events when rendered so by the narratives of nation;
founding myths produce shared identities. As noted in previous chapters, similar military metaphors saturate many
social phenomena concerned with protection and individual subjects. Medical language is replete with
bacterial invasions, therapeutic interventions, and the battle with disease. Immune systems are
the patient's first line of defense prior to the use of pharmaceutical weapons. Victims of disease
struggle valiantly. The battleground is the body analogized to the body politic of the state.
Heroic struggles inscribe both national histories and discussions in hospital wards .32 This
medical intertext also haunts Davis Bobrow's formulation of the tasks of security practitioners in
terms of medical metaphors. And yet the formulations of these threats and the invocations of such
themes as the "New World Order" once again work within a spatial imaginary where the
knowledgeable clinician both specifies the condition of the patient and acts within a disciplinary
spatial apparatus that designates the spaces for treatment, the assignment to the asylum, or the
terms of quarantine. As Francois Debrix argues, borrowing from Foucault's analysis in The Birth of the Clinic,
"peacekeeping" in the medical language of such organizations as Medecins sans Frontieres is also
caught in the normalizing practices of the clinical gaze where the failed state, the site of
genocide, or a humanitarian emergency is specified in contrast to the abstraction of the normal
state.33 Such tropes require the intervention of the medical specialist to diagnose, conduct surgery, organize a
quarantine, or specify safe havens. What preventive care or a holistic medical metaphor might convey as Alternative
mode of knowing the South remains a useful counter/- argument to the assumptions of clinical medicine even if the
answers are far from easy. If at least some of the "new" threats to the geopolitical order of modernity
are fairly directly related to the expansion of the impacts of modernity, and Laurie Garrett's extensive
compilation of the circumstances of the emergence of new species- hopping diseases due to the
disruptions of tropical ecosystems extends the medical language appropriately here, then the
matter of causes rather than cures is especially pressing .34 This is particularly true given the
ecological shadows of "normal" states, where the assumptions of indigenous causes requiring
intervention to provide a cure fail to incorporate the cross-boundary responsibilities implicit in
the causes of the disruptions in the first place. None of this is intended to disparage the work of such
organizations as Medecins sans Frontieres in contemporary crises; but thinking politics without presupposing
narratives of normalization, spatial security, intervention, and imperial control is one important
task for critical thinking "after the cold war." It is if we are to think in terms that do not
reproduce the identities, practices, and politics that cold war security discourses secured . Neither
can one innocently argue that such organizations, the mendicant orders of the twentieth century, to borrow Hardt and
Negri's formulation, are outside the contemporary practices of power however much they may advertise their practices
in antigeopolitical tropes.35 Detaching these things from the traditional ethnocentrism of
international relations is a necessary part of the construction of an international and
interdisciplinary security studies; it would certainly seem to be necessary if a cosmopolitan
understanding of the dynamics of conflict and the possibilities for thwarting identity politics–
based warfare is to be the basis of a new political order .36 If this broader critical agenda is accepted, can it
be used as a way of rescuing politics and security studies from the geopolitical stipulations of communities living in boxes with
violence ultimately arbitrating disagreements? Hopefully it can. Can such thinking also shift the referent objects of security
from the state to the human individual, as both the human security agenda and the critical security literature advocate, without
presupposing the identity of these individuals as neoliberal citizen consumers embedded in a mesh of claims to universal rights?
Can all this be accomplished in recognizing that the social processes currently in motion are interconnected, and in that sense
global, but not in a sense that requires management of the poor by the rich and powerful? To do so, such studies will need a
much' more complicated, geographically diverse world of interconnections as the ontological premise for contemplation and
analysis. Violence and insecurity then can be addressed more directly without the intellectual
detours through assumptions of interstate violence, territorial states, national security, or even
"civilizations" obscuring the social processes in question. International relations and strategic
studies it is probably not, but security studies it might still be, albeit in a rather different guise
from that bequeathed from the hegemonic practices of the past.
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Link -- Competitiveness
Competitiveness discourse mobilizes populations for economic warfare. It’s produced by threat
construction for big biznis rather than economic reality—Vote neg to reject competitiveness
discourse
Dr.
Gillian
Bristow,
Senior Lecturer in Economic Geography @ Cardiff University, ‘
4
(Journal of Economic
Geography 5.3: 285-304, “Everyone’s a ‘winner’”)
This begs the question as to why a discourse with ostensibly confused, narrow and ill-defined content has
become so salient in regional economic development policy and practice as to constitute ‘the only valid currency
of argument’ (Schoenberger, 1998, 12). Whilst alternative discourses based around co-operation can be
conceived (e.g. see Hines, 2000; Bunzl, 2001), they have as yet failed to make a significant impact on the
dominant view that a particular, quantifiable form of output-related regional competitiveness is inevitable, inexorable and
ultimately beneficial. The answer appears to lie within the policy process, which refers to all aspects involved in the
provision of policy direction for the work of the public sector. This therefore includes ‘the ideas which inform policy
conception, the talk and work which goes into providing the formulation of policy directions, and all the
talk, work and collaboration which goes into translating these into practice’ (Yeatman, 1998; p. 9). A major
debate exists in the policy studies literature about the scope and limitations of reason, analysis and
intelligence in policy-making—a debate which has been re-ignited with the recent emphasis upon evidence-based policymaking (see Davies et al., 2000). Keynes is often cited as the main proponent of the importance of ideas in policy making, since he
argued that policy-making should be informed by knowledge, truth, reason and facts (Keynes, 1971, vol. xxi, 289). However,
Majone (1989) has significantly challenged the assumption that policy makers engage in a purely objective,
rational, technical assessment of policy alternatives. He has argued that in practice, policy makers use theory,
knowledge and evidence selectively to justify policy choices which are heavily based on value judgements .
It is thus persuasion (through rhetoric, argument, advocacy and their institutionalisation) that is the key to the policy
process, not the logical correctness or accuracy of theory or data. In other words, it is interests rather than ideas
that shape policy making in practice. Ultimately, the language of competitiveness is the language of the business
community. Thus, critical to understanding the power of the discourse is firstly, understanding the appeal
and significance of the discourse to business interests and, secondly, exploring their role in influencing the
ideas of regional and national policy elites. Part of the allure of the discourse of competitiveness for the business
community is its seeming comprehensibility. Business leaders feel that they already understand the basics of what
competitiveness means and thus it offers them the gain of apparent sophistication without the pain of grasping
something complex and new. Furthermore, competitive images are exciting and their accoutrements of
‘battles’, ‘wars’ and ‘races’ have an intuitive appeal to businesses familiar with the cycle of growth, survival and sometimes
collapse (Krugman, 1996b). The climate of globalisation and the turn towards neo-liberal, capitalist forms of regulation has
empowered business interests and created a demand for new concepts and models of development which offer guidance on how
economies can innovate and prosper in the face of increasing competition for investment and resources. Global policy elites of
governmental and corporate institutions, who share the same neo-liberal consensus, have played a critical role in
promoting both the discourse of national and regional competitiveness, and of competitiveness policies which they
think are good for them (such as supportive institutions and funding for research and development agendas). In the EU, for example,
the European Round Table of Industrialists played a prominent role in ensuring that the Commission's 1993 White Paper placed the
pursuit of international competitiveness (and thus the support of business), on an equal footing with job creation and social cohesion
objectives (Lovering, 1998; Balanya et al., 2000). This discourse rapidly spread and competitiveness policies were transferred through
global policy networks as large quasi-governmental organisations such as the OECD and World Bank pushed the national and,
subsequently, the regional competitiveness agenda upon national governments (Peet, 2003). Part of the appeal of the regional
competitiveness discourse for policy-makers is that like the discourse of globalisation, it presents a relatively structured
set of ideas, often in the form of implicit and sedimented assumptions, upon which they can draw in
formulating strategy and, indeed, in legitimating strategy pursued for quite distinct ends (Hay and Rosamond,
2002). Thus, the discourse clearly dovetails with discussions about the appropriate level at which economic governance should be
exercised and fits in well with a growing trend towards the decentralised, ‘bottom-up’ approaches to economic development policy
and a focus on the indigenous potential of regions. For example, in the UK:‘the Government believes that a successful regional and
sub-regional economic policy must be based on building the indigenous strengths in each locality, region and county. The best
mechanisms for achieving this are likely to be based in the regions themselves’ (HM Treasury, 2001a, vi). The devolution of powers
and responsibilities to regional institutions, whether democratic or more narrowly administrative, is given added tour de force when
accompanied by the arguments contained within the regional competitiveness discourse. There is clear political capital to be gained
from highlighting endogenous capacities to shape economic processes, not least because it helps generate the sense of regional identity
that motivates economic actors and institutions towards a common regional purpose (Rosamond, 2002). Furthermore, the regional
competitiveness discourse points to a clear set of agendas for policy action over which regional institutions have some potential for
leverage—agendas such as the development of university-business relationships and strong innovation networks. This provides
policy-makers with the ability to point to the existence of seemingly secure paths to prosperity, as reinforced
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by the successes of exemplar regions. In this way, the
discourse of regional competitiveness helps to provide a way of
constituting regions as legitimate agents of economic governance. The language of regional
competitiveness also fits in very neatly with the ideological shift to the ‘Third Way’ popularised most notably by
the New Labour government in the UK. This promotes the reconstruction of the state rather than its shrinkage (as
under neo-liberal market imperatives) or expansion (as under traditional socialist systems of mass state intervention). Significantly,
this philosophy sees state economic competencies as being restricted to the ability to intervene in line with perceived microeconomic
or supply-side imperatives rather than active macroeconomic, demand-side intervention—an agenda that is thus clearly in tune with
the discourse around competitiveness. The attractiveness of the competitiveness discourse may also be partly a product
of the power of pseudo-scientific, mathematised nature of the economics discipline and the business
strategy literature from which it emanates. This creates an innate impartiality and technicality for the
market outcomes (such as competitiveness) it describes (Schoenberger, 1998). Public policy in developed countries
experiencing the marketisation of the state, is increasingly driven by managerialism which emphasises the improved
performance and efficiency of the state. This managerialism is founded upon economistic and rationalistic assumptions
which include an emphasis upon measuring performance in the context of a planning system driven by objectives and
targets (Sanderson, 2001). The result is an increasing requirement for people, places and organisations to be
accountable and for their performance and success to be measured and assessed. In this emerging evaluative state,
performance tends to be scrutinised through a variety of means, with particular emphasis placed upon output indicators. This
provides not only a means of lending legitimacy to the institutional environment, but also some sense of
exactitude and certainty, particularly for central governments who are thus able to retain some ‘top-down’,
mechanical sense that things are somehow under their control (Boyle, 2001). The evolutionary, ‘survival of the
fittest’ basis of the regional competitiveness discourse clearly resonates with this evaluative culture. The
discourse of competitiveness strongly appeals to the stratum of policy makers and analysts who can use it to
justify what they are doing and/or to find out how well they are doing it relative to their ‘rivals’. This helps explain the
interest in trying to measure regional competitiveness and the development of composite indices and league tables. It also helps
explain why particular elements of the discourse have assumed particular significance—output indicators of firm performance are
much easier to compare and rank on a single axis than are indicators relating to institutional behaviour, for example. This in turn
points to a central paradox in measures of regional competitiveness. The key ingredients of firm competitiveness and
regional prosperity are increasingly perceived as lying with assets such as knowledge and information which are, by
definition, intangible or at least difficult to measure with any degree of accuracy. The obsession with performance
measurement and the tendency to reduce complex variables to one, easily digestible number brings a ‘kind of blindness’ with
it as to what is really important (Boyle, 2001, 60)—in this case, how to improve regional prosperity. Thus while a composite
index number of regional competitiveness will attract widespread attention in the media and amongst policy-makers and development
agencies, the difficulty presented by such a measure is in knowing what exactly needs to be targeted for appropriate remedial action.
All of this suggests that regional competitiveness is more than simply the linguistic expression of powerful exogenous
interests. It has also become rhetoric. In other words, regional competitiveness is deployed in a strategic and persuasive
way, often in conjunction with other discourses (notably globalisation) to legitimate specific policy initiatives and
courses of action. The rhetoric of regional competitiveness serves a useful political purpose in that it is easier
to justify change or the adoption of a particular course of policy action by reference to some external threat that
makes change seem inevitable. It is much easier for example, for politicians to argue for the removal of supply-side
rigidities and flexible hire-and-fire workplace rules by suggesting that there is no alternative and that jobs would be lost
anyway if productivity improvement was not achieved. Thus, ‘the language of external competitiveness...provides a rosy
glow of shared endeavour and shared enemies which can unite captains of industry and representatives of
the shop floor in the same big tent’ (Turner, 2001, 40). In this sense it is a discourse which provides some
shared sense of meaning and a means of legitimising neo-liberalism rather than a material focus on the
actual improvement of economic welfare. 5. Conclusions The discourse of regional competitiveness has become
ubiquitous in the deliberations and statements of policy actors and regional analysts. However, this paper has argued that
it is a rather confused, chaotic discourse which seems to conflate serious theoretical work on regional
economies, with national and international policy discourses on globalisation and the knowledge economy.
There are, however, some dominant axioms which collectively define the discourse, notably that regional competitiveness is a firmbased, output-related conception, strongly shaped by the regional business environment. However, regional competitiveness tends to
be defined in different ways, sometimes microeconomic, sometimes macroeconomic, such that it is not entirely clear when a situation
of competitiveness has been achieved. It is argued here that the discourse is based on relatively thinly developed and narrow
conceptions of how regions compete, prosper and grow in economic terms. The discourse chooses to ignore broader, non-
output related modalities of regional competition which may tend to have rather more negative than
positive connotations. Moreover, it over-emphasises the importance of the region to firm competitiveness and indeed the
importance of firm competitiveness to regional prosperity. In this sense proponents of regional competitiveness are guilty of
what the eminent philosopher Alfred North Whitehead termed the ‘Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness’. In other words,
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they have assumed that what applies to firms can simply be read across to those other entities called
‘regions’, and that this is a concrete reality rather than simply a belief or opinion.
Framing the US as America Inc. causes bad policy and hurts the economy – A Nobel Prize Winner in
Economics Agrees
Krugman 1-23 professor of economics and
international affairs
received the
Nobel Prize for Economics in 2008
Paul
-11 (
at Princeton University,
, “The Competition Myth,”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/24/opinion/24krugman.html?_r=3&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1295895740-k8wCd1lX2ZIyowhgF19//A)
But let’s not kid ourselves: talking about “competitiveness” as a goal is fundamentally misleading. At best, it’s a
misdiagnosis of our problems. At worst, it could lead to policies based on the false idea that what’s good
for corporations is good for America. About that misdiagnosis: What sense does it make to view our current woes as
stemming from lack of competitiveness? It’s true that we’d have more jobs if we exported more and imported less.
But the same is true of Europe and Japan, which also have depressed economies. And we can’t all export more
while importing less, unless we can find another planet to sell to . Yes, we could demand that China shrink its trade
surplus — but if confronting China is what Mr. Obama is proposing, he should say that plainly. Furthermore, while America is
running a trade deficit, this deficit is smaller than it was before the Great Recession began. It would help if we could make it smaller
still. But ultimately, we’re in a mess because we had a financial crisis, not because American companies have
lost their ability to compete with foreign rivals. But isn’t it at least somewhat useful to think of our nation as if it were
America Inc., competing in the global marketplace? No. Consider: A corporate leader who increases profits by
slashing his work force is thought to be successful. Well, that’s more or less what has happened in America
recently: employment is way down, but profits are hitting new records. Who, exactly, considers this economic success? Still, you
might say that talk of competitiveness helps Mr. Obama quiet claims that he’s anti-business. That’s fine, as
long as he realizes that the interests of nominally “American” corporations and the interests of the nation,
which were never the same, are now less aligned than ever before. Take the case of General Electric, whose chief
executive, Jeffrey Immelt, has just been appointed to head that renamed advisory board. I have nothing against either G.E. or Mr.
Immelt. But with fewer than half its workers based in the United States and less than half its revenues coming from U.S. operations,
G.E.’s fortunes have very little to do with U.S. prosperity. By the way, some have praised Mr. Immelt’s appointment on the grounds
that at least he represents a company that actually makes things, rather than being yet another financial wheeler-dealer. Sorry to burst
this bubble, but these days G.E. derives more revenue from its financial operations than it does from manufacturing — indeed, GE
Capital, which received a government guarantee for its debt, was a major beneficiary of the Wall Street bailout. So what does the
administration’s embrace of the rhetoric of competitiveness mean for economic policy ? The favorable
interpretation, as I said, is that it’s just packaging for an economic strategy centered on public investment, investment that’s actually
about creating jobs now while promoting longer-term growth. The unfavorable interpretation is that Mr. Obama and his
advisers really believe that the economy is ailing because they’ve been too tough on business, and that what
America needs now is corporate tax cuts and across-the-board deregulation. My guess is that we’re mainly talking about
packaging here. And if the president does propose a serious increase in spending on infrastructure and education, I’ll be pleased.
But even if he proposes good policies, the fact that Mr. Obama feels the need to wrap these policies in bad
metaphors is a sad commentary on the state of our discourse . The financial crisis of 2008 was a teachable moment, an
object lesson in what can go wrong if you trust a market economy to regulate itself. Nor should we forget that highly regulated
economies, like Germany, did a much better job than we did at sustaining employment after the crisis hit. For whatever reason,
however, the teachable moment came and went with nothing learned . Mr. Obama himself may do all right: his
approval rating is up, the economy is showing signs of life, and his chances of re-election look pretty good. But the ideology that
brought economic disaster in 2008 is back on top — and seems likely to stay there until it brings disaster
again.
Competitiveness is a hegemonic discourse- its power comes from belief, not truth or accuracy.
Dr. Gillian Bristow, Senior Lecturer in Economic Geography @ Cardiff University, ‘5 (Journal of Economic Geography 5.3: 285304, “Everyone’s a ‘winner’”)
Since the 1990s, in response to the work of authors such as Michael Porter (1990), the concept of regional competitiveness
has become a ‘hegemonic discourse’ (Schoenberger, 1998) within public policy circles in developed countries. Indeed,
regional competitiveness has been enthusiastically adopted as a policy goal by the European Commission and by national
governments across Europe and North America (ACOA, 1996; De Vol, 1999; Commission of the European Communities, 2000). It
has risen to particular prominence in the UK where the national government has explicitly tasked Regional Development Agencies
(RDAs) with the responsibility for making their regions ‘more competitive’ and akin to benchmark competitive places such as Silicon
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Valley (DETR, 1999; House of Commons, 2000; HM Treasury, 2001a). The competitiveness
hegemony is such that
according to certain analysts, ‘the critical issue for regional economic development practitioners to grasp is
that the creation of competitive advantage is the most important activity they can pursue’ (Barclays, 2002, 10).
Current policy documents extolling the language of ‘competitiveness’ tend to present it as an entirely
unproblematic term and, moreover, as an unambiguously beneficial attribute of an economy. Competitiveness
is portrayed as the means by which regional economies are externally validated in an era of globalisation, such that
there can be no principled objection to policies and strategies deemed to be competitiveness enhancing,
whatever their indirect consequences. For example, the European Commission (2004, viii) states that ‘strengthening regional
competitiveness throughout the Union and helping people fulfil their capabilities will boost the growth potential of the EU economy as
a whole to the common benefit of all’. Similarly, theUKgovernment sees its regional policy objective as being one of ‘widening the
circle of winners in all regions and communities’ (DTI, 2001, 4), a sentiment clearly absorbed by the devolved administration in
Wales which has entitled its National Economic Development Strategy, ‘A Winning Wales’ (Welsh Assembly Government, 2002).
The emergence of regional competitiveness as a discrete and important policy goal has spawned the
development of indicators by which policy-makers and practitioners can measure, analyse and compare relative
competitive performance, or find out who is ‘winning’. Various attempts have been made to measure and model
competitiveness for European regions (e.g. IFO, 1990; Pompili, 1994; Pinelli et al., 1998; Gardiner, 2003). Furthermore, the European
Commission has placed the analysis of regional competitiveness at the heart of its ongoing assessment of regional economic
performance (Commission, 1999; 2000). In the UK, the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) has published sets of regional
competitiveness indicators since 1995 (e.g. DTI, 2003, 2004). More recently, efforts have also been made to develop composite
indices of regional competitiveness, following similar trends in the evolution of national competitiveness indicators (e.g. World
Economic Forum, 2003; see Lall, 2001). These combine relevant indicators into one overarching measure, the results of which can be
reported in the form of a ‘league table’ (Huggins, 2000; 2003). This preoccupation with competitiveness and the
predilection for its measurement is premised on certain pervasive beliefs , most notably that globalisation
has created a world of intense competition between regions (Raco, 2002).However, there is some confusion as to
what the concept actually means and how it can be effectively operationalised . Indeed, in a manner cognate with
debates surrounding clusters (see Martin and Sunley, 2003), policy acceptance of the existence and importance of
regional competitiveness and its measurement appears to have run ahead of a number of fundamental
theoretical and empirical questions. The purpose of this paper is to problematise the dominant policy discourse
around regional competitiveness with reference to theory, to explore how and why a discourse with ostensibly thin
and ill-defined content has assumed such significance in policy circles, and to consider the potential policy
consequences. It is argued that the answer lies within the political economy of economic policy and the rhetorical
power and usefulness of the prevailing competitiveness discourse . The paper begins by examining the polysemous yet
overlapping meanings of regional competitiveness in academic debates. (285-6)
Competitiveness makes environmental and economic collapse and resource
wars inevitable
Bristow ’10 (School of City & Regional Planning, Cardiff University) (Gillian, Resilient regions: re‘place’ing regional competitiveness, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 2010, 3, 153–
167)
In recent years, regional development strategies have been subjugated to the hegemonic discourse of competitiveness, such that the
ultimate objective for all regional development policy-makers and practitioners has become the creation of economic advantage
through superior productivity performance, or the attraction of new firms and labour (Bristow, 2005). A major consequence is the
developing ‘ubiquitification’ of regional development strategies (Bristow, 2005; Maskell and Malmberg, 1999). This reflects the status
of competitiveness as a key discursive construct (Jessop, 2008) that has acquired hugely significant rhetorical power for certain
interests intent on reinforcing capitalist relations (Bristow, 2005; Fougner, 2006). Indeed, the competitiveness hegemony
is such that many policies previously considered only indirectly relevant to unfettered economic
growth tend to be hijacked in support of competitiveness agendas (for example Raco, 2008; also Dannestam,
2008). This paper will argue, however, that a particularly narrow discourse of ‘competitiveness’ has been
constructed that has a number of negative connotations for the ‘resilience’ of regions. Resilience is defined as
the region’s ability to experience positive economic success that is socially inclusive, works within
environmental limits and which can ride global economic punches (Ashby et al., 2009). As such, resilience
clearly resonates with literatures on sustainability, localisation and diversification, and the developing understanding of regions as
intrinsically diverse entities with evolutionary and context-specific development trajectories (Hayter, 2004). In contrast, the
dominant discourse of competitiveness is ‘placeless’ and increasingly associated with globalised,
growth-first and environmentally malign agendas (Hudson, 2005). However, this paper will argue that the
relationships between competitiveness and resilience are more complex than might at first appear. Using insights from the Cultural
Political Economy (CPE) approach, which focuses on understanding the construction, development and spread of hegemonic policy
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discourses, the paper will argue that the dominant discourse of competitiveness used in regional development policy is narrowly
constructed and is thus insensitive to contingencies of place and the more nuanced role of competition within economies. This leads to
problems of resilience that can be partly overcome with the development of a more contextualised approach to competitiveness. The
paper is now structured as follows. It begins by examining the developing understanding of resilience in the theorising and policy
discourse around regional development. It then describes the CPE approach and utilises its framework to explain both how a narrow
conception of competitiveness has come to dominate regional development policy and how resilience inter-plays in subtle and
complex ways with competitiveness and its emerging critique. The paper then proceeds to illustrate what resilience means for regional
development firstly, with reference to the Transition Towns concept, and then by developing a typology of regional strategies to show
the different characteristics of policy approaches based on competitiveness and resilience. Regional resilience Resilience is rapidly
emerging as an idea whose time has come in policy discourses around localities and regions, where it is developing widespread appeal
owing to the peculiarly powerful combination of transformative pressures from below, and various catalytic, crisis-induced
imperatives for change from above. It features strongly in policy discourses around environmental management and sustainable
development (see Hudson, 2008a), but has also more recently emerged in relation to emergency and disaster planning with, for
example ‘Regional Resilience Teams’ established in the English regions to support and co-ordinate civil protection activities around
various emergency situations such as the threat of a swine flu pandemic. The discourse of resilience is also taking hold in discussions
around desirable local and regional development activities and strategies. The recent global ‘credit crunch’ and the accompanying increase in livelihood insecurity has highlighted the advantages of those local and regional economies that have greater ‘resilience’ by
virtue of being less dependent upon globally footloose activities, hav-ing greater economic diversity, and/or having a de-termination to
prioritise and effect more significant structural change (Ashby et al, 2009; Larkin and Cooper, 2009). Indeed, resilience features
particular strongly in the ‘grey’ literature spawned by thinktanks, consul-tancies and environmental interest groups around
the consequences of the global recession, catastrophic climate change and the arrival of the era of
peak oil for localities and regions with all its implications for the longevity of carbon-fuelled
economies, cheap, long-distance transport and global trade. This popularly labelled ‘triple crunch’ (New
Economics Foundation, 2008) has power-fully illuminated the potentially disastrous material
consequences of the voracious growth imperative at the heart of neoliberalism and
competitiveness, both in the form of resource constraints (especially food security) and in the
inability of the current system to manage global financial and ecological sustainability. In so doing, it
appears to be galvinising previously disparate, fractured debates about the merits of the current system, and challenging public and
political opinion to develop a new, global concern with frugality, egalitarianism and localism (see, for example Jackson, 2009; New
Economics Foundation, 2008).
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Link---Disembodied IR
The frame of security studies generates political violence through its
unproblematic account of disembodied subjects who rationally manage
international politics for the protection of ahistorical, biopolitical objects who
breathe, suffer, or die depending on policy decisions.
Wilcox 15 – Professor of Gender Studies at Cambridge (Lauren, Bodies of Violence: Theorizing
Embodied Subjects in International Relations, p. 1-3)
Bodies have long been outside the frame of International Relations (IR)—unrecognizable even as the modes
of violence that use, target, and construct bodies in complex ways have proliferated. Drones make it possible
to both watch people and bomb them, often killing dozens of civilians as well, while the pilots operating these machines remain thousands of miles away, immune from bodily
harm. Suicide bombers seek certain death by turning their bodies into weapons that seem to attack at random. Images of tortured bodies from Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib
provoke shock and outrage, and prisoners on hunger strikes to protest their treatment are force-fed. Meanwhile, the management of violence increasingly entails the scrutiny of
persons as bodies through biometric technologies (p.2) and “body scanners.” In each of these instances, the body becomes the focal point, central to practices of security and
International Relations—the body brought into excruciating pain, the body as weapon, or the body as that which is not to be targeted and hence is hit only accidentally or
Such bodily focus is quite distinct from prevailing international security practices and the disciplinary ways of
addressing those practices in IR. Convention has it that states or groups make war and, in doing so, kill and injure
people that other states are charged with protecting. The strategic deployment of force in the language of rational
control and risk management that dominates security studies presents a disembodied view of
subjects as reasoning actors. However, as objects of security studies, the people who are protected from
violence or are killed are understood as only bodies: they are ahistorical, biopolitical aggregations whose
individual members breathe, suffer, and die. In both cases, the politics and sociality of bodies are erased.¶ One of
the deep ironies of security studies is that while war is actually inflicted on bodies, bodily violence and vulnerability,
as the flip side of security, are largely ignored. By contrast, feminist theory is at its most powerful when it denaturalizes accounts
of individual subjectivity so as to analyze the relations of force, violence, and language that
compose our profoundly unnatural bodies. Security studies lacks the reflexivity necessary to see its contribution to the very context it seeks to
domesticate. It has largely ignored work in feminist theory that opens up the forces that have come to compose and
constitute the body: by and large, security studies has an unarticulated, yet implicit, conception of
bodies as individual organisms whose protection from damage constitutes the provision of
security. In IR, human bodies are implicitly theorized as organisms that are exogenously
determined—they are relevant to politics only as they live or die. Such bodies are inert objects:
they exist to be manipulated, possess no agency, and are only driven by the motivations of
agents. Attentive to the relations provoked by both discourse and political forces, feminist theory redirects attention to how both of these compose and produce bodies on
terms often alien and unstable. Contemporary feminist theorizing about embodiment provides a provocative
challenge to the stability and viability of several key concepts such as sovereignty, security, violence, and
vulnerability in IR. In this book, I draw on recent work in feminist theory that offers a challenge to the deliberate maintenance and policing of boundaries and the
delineation of human bodies from the broader political context.¶ Challenging this theorization of bodies as natural organisms is a key
step in not only exposing how bodies have been implicitly theorized in (p.3) IR, but in developing a reading of IR that is attentive to
the ways in which bodies are both produced and productive. In conceptualizing the subject of IR as
essentially disembodied, IR theory impoverishes itself. An explicit focus on the subject as
embodied makes two contributions to IR. First, I address the question vexing the humanities and social sciences of how to account for the
subject by showing that IR is wrong in its uncomplicated way of thinking about the subject in
relation to its embodiment. In its rationalist variants, IR theory comprehends bodies only as inert objects
animated by the minds of individuals. Constructivist theory argues that subjects are formed through social relations, but leaves the bodies of
collaterally.
subjects outside politics as “brute facts” (Wendt 2001, 110), while many variants of critical theory understand the body as a medium of social power, rather than also a force in its
In contrast, feminist theory offers a challenge to the delineation of human bodies from subjects
and the broader political context. My central argument is that the bodies that the practices of violence take as their object are deeply
political bodies, constituted in reference to historical political conditions while at the same time acting
upon our world. The second contribution of this work is to argue that because of the way it theorizes subjects in relation to their
embodiment, IR is also lacking in one of its primary purposes: theorizing international political violence. This project argues that
violence is more than a strategic action of rational actors (as in rationalist theories) or a destructive violation of
own right.
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laws and norms (as in liberal and constructivist theories). Because IR conventionally theorizes bodies as outside
politics and irrelevant to subjectivity, it cannot see how violence can be understood as a creative
force for shaping the limits of how we understand ourselves as political subjects, as well as forming the
boundaries of our bodies and political communities. Understanding how “war is a generative
force like no other” (Barkawi and Brighton 2011, 126) requires us to pay attention to how bodies are killed and
injured, but also formed, re-formed, gendered, and racialized through the bodily relations of
war; it also requires that we consider how bodies are enabling and generative of war and practices of
political violence more broadly.
community
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Link---Economy
Economic collapse rhetoric shuts down deliberation in favor of an immediate
response—creates a violent state of exception that turns the case
Hanan 1 – Ph.D, Professor of Communication at Temple University (Joshua Stanley, “Managing the
Meltdown Rhetorically: Economic Imaginaries and the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008”,
dissertation The University of Texas at Austin)
By framing the proposed legislation in this particular light, Bush offers us a first example of how the neoliberal
state of exception is manifested rhetorically in the sphere of policy. By describing the crisis as
“extraordinary times” in need of “decisive action,” he is able to side step his administration’s
problematic relationship to Wall Street and the present crisis. Since the economy is not operating
normally but is instead in a state of disarray and chaos, the downturn must be addressed without
normal argumentative debate. In his desire to postpone deliberation by emphasizing the
exceptional nature of the crisis, Bush taps into a more general narrative that emerged during the creation and passage of
EESA, namely ethical pragmatism. Like moral critique, ethical pragmatism deploys the state of exception
enthymematically as a way of justifying EESA legislation. Unlike moral critique, however, ethical pragmatism
links the exception to a completely different set of values. By bringing attention to temporary nature of the
present situation, ethical pragmatism argues that deliberation and critique are the enemies. Since the Bush
Administration is “working with Congress to address the root cause behind much of the
instability in our markets,” this narrative contends the worst thing citizens can do right now is
challenge the administration.304 The primary difference between these two rhetorical accounts can thus be located in the
way they deploy the state of exception as an enthymeme to explain EESA and the government’s reaction to the present crisis. Whereas
the moral critique implies that a state of exception has become a permanent practice under Bush, the latter tries to frame the
state of exception as temporary action. Hence, insofar as the narrative of ethical pragmatism attempts to exempt itself
from the problem by emphasizing authentic deliberation at a future point in time, it relies on a different model of the state of exception
that is more justifiable. Turning now to our second policy artifact—that of Secretary Paulson—we see an additional rendering of
ethical pragmatism. Delivered on September 23rd 2008 to the Senate Banking Committee, Paulson’s widely publicized address is
particularly useful in illustrating how a temporary understanding of state of exception can be used as an enthymeme
to circumvent moral critique.305By emphasizing the “urgent response” that the crisis demands, the
former Goldman Sach’s CEO centers his argument on how EESA provides “market stability,” Organizing
his narrative around a series of binaries, Paulson’s ethical pragmatism is predicated on the opposition between a
healthy and sick economy. By arguing that “illiquid mortgage-related assets … are choking off the flow of credit which is so
vitally important to our economy,” for example, Paulson renders the financial system a living entity that has been invaded by foreign
agents.306 Through a viral process of multiplication, he illustrates how “[t]hese bad loans have created a chain reaction” that now
threatens “the very health of our economy.”307In the same way that a virus can weaken a person’s entire immune system, Paulson
wants his audience to see the economy as having been infected by a rapidly proliferating disease—
one that must be eradicated quickly by experts, and without debate. By explaining the financial crisis through
such metaphors, Paulson is able to argue that his legislation is aimed at excising these "troubled assets from the system.”308The
measure is “designed for immediate implementation and [to] be sufficiently large to have
maximum impact and restore market confidence.”309 Thus, by addressing the “underlying
problem”—troubled assets that are dragging down the entire economy—he has devised an expert program to
stabilize the financial system. This plan, while putting taxpayers on the line, will cost American families “far less than the
alternative—a continuing series of financial institution failures and frozen credit markets unable to fund everyday needs and economic
expansion.”310 It is at the end of Paulson’s speech, however, that we realize the primary goal of his narrative: the desire to frame
EESA as a temporary state of exception. In spirit of the “bipartisan consensus for an urgent legislative solution,”311 Paulson argues
that there
is no time to deliberate and contest the parameters of this bill. Since this “troubled asset purchase program on
Paulson’s authority as
Treasury Secretary and pass the bill immediately.312 While it is true that “[w]hen we get through this difficult
its own is the single most effective thing we can do to … stimulate our economy,” we must trust
period…our next task must be to address the problems in our financial system through a reform program that fixes our outdated
financial regulatory structure,” Paulson contends that “we must get through this period first.”313 Through his appeals to
urgency and expedient action, Paulson’s narrative enthymematically invokes a seemingly temporary
state of exception. Since the economy is sick and its pathogen is multiplying rapidly, debate and
deliberation about whether EESA is the right form of interventionism must be postponed to a later point in time. While
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“[w]e must [eventually] have that critical debate” now
is not the time to question the crisis of
neoliberalism.314 As part of Bush’s executive branch we must trust Paulson when he says he has the “best interest of all
Americans” in mind and not risk making the situation even worse. Despite residing in a different sphere of policy than Bush and
Paulson, the third rhetor—Fed Chair Ben Bernanke—demonstrates how the narrative of ethical pragmatism can emerge in
governmental avenues outside the Executive Branch. Delivered to multiple Congressional committees on September 24 and 25, 2008,
Bernanke’s testimony represents perhaps the most explicit attempt to grapple with the contradiction between the Federal government's
neoliberal history and its looming Keynesian intervention.315“Despite the efforts of the Federal Reserve, the …global financial
markets remain under extraordinary stress," declares Bernanke, rationalizing why, in the case of the present downturn, the neoliberal
privileging of monetary policy over fiscal policy will no longer suffice.316 Viewing capitalism through a rhetorical lens similar to that
of Paulson, Bernanke describes how "stresses in financial markets have been high and have recently intensified significantly."317 As
"rising mortgage delinquencies" spiral out of control and intersect other financial venues "the implications for the broader economy
could be quite adverse."318 Bernanke thus declares that "[a]ction by the Congress is urgently required to stabilize the situation."319 If
action is not taken immediately to avert the economy’s growing crisis, the situation may become even bleaker. Like Bush and Paulson,
central to Bernanke's attitude toward EESA is the need for immediate action. While he acknowledges "the shortcomings and
weaknesses of our financial markets and regulatory system" now is not the time to debate the policies underscoring the bill.320 The
"development of a comprehensive proposal for reform would require careful and extensive analysis that would be difficult to
compress into a short legislative timeframe now available."321 Bernanke thus believes that it "is essential to deal with the crisis at
hand" and focus later on building a "stronger, more resilient, and better regulated financial system."322 While Bernanke believes the
urgency of the situation is enough of a justification for passing EESA, he does have a response for those who may be critical of the
bill’s interventionist tendencies: “Government assistance should be given with the greatest of reluctance,” adding that in the present
case such attempts have already been exhausted.323Since the Federal Reserve already “attempted to identify private-sector
approaches” but none were forthcoming, the government has no other choice but to bail out the financial sector. By rationalizing
EESA as the only possible option, then, Bernanke's narrative of ethical pragmatism is meant to
close off the possibility of dissent. For those that feel interventionism is a disgrace to free market capitalism, Bernanke
has made it clear that "private-sector arrangements" were taken into account. On the other hand, for who those critique the government
for "bailing out Wall Street," Bernanke's appeals imply that debate and deliberation will come at a later point in time.
Thus through his stifling of opposition from all sides, Bernanke’s
narrative of ethical pragmatism invokes the state of
exception as the temporary justification for the government’s economic actions. The Exceptionality of
Ethical Pragmatism Bush, Paulson and Bernanke all provide accounts that, while told in slightly different ways, use the strategy of
ethical pragmatism to try to suspend critique and discussion. Whether emphasizing “extraordinary times,”
“urgency,” or “lack of options,” Bush, Paulson, and Bernanke all invoke the state of exception as the
enthymematic justification for their actions. The “exceptional” frame underscoring this series of
arguments, then, offers an additional way to grasp why the dissenting narrative—moral critique—may have
had so little impact on EESA’s legislation. By rendering of EESA as an emergency measure to save the
economy, ethical pragmatism was able to defer debate. Moreover, since ethical pragmatism emerged from the very
same sphere in which EESA was introduced—that of policy—it was able to supersede dissident narratives about the bill at an
institutional level. Since the former, not the latter, narrative defined the parameters of the policy debate; ethical pragmatism had both a
material and discursive advantage. Moral critique’s failure can thus be observed simultaneously in two different rhetorical/institutional
contexts. In respect to its own rhetorical argument, moral critique’s use of the state of exception as an explanation for EESA’s passage
negated its own critique by affirming that this technique of power does indeed exist. At the same time, through the narrative frame of
ethical pragmatism, moral critique was deferred from the realm of policy. Since the “exceptionality” of the situation
demanded a suspension of deliberation, it became justified to pass the bill without proper
economic argument. We are thus left to conclude that the state of exception has both a discursive and extra-discursive reality
since the institutional forms and discourses coincide with one another
Economic security is a tool for world ordering – their threat predictions
cause mass structural violence and global warfare
Neocleous 8 - Professor of Critique of Political Economy at Brunel University (Mark, “Critique of Security.” Pg. 95-102)
In other words, the
new international order moved very quickly to reassert the connection
between economic and national security: the commitment to the former was
simultaneously a commitment to the latter, and vice versa. As the doctrine of national security was being born, the
major player on the international stage would aim to use perhaps its most important power of
all – its economic strength – in order to re-order the world. And this re-ordering was
conducted through the idea of ‘economic security’.99 Despite the fact that ‘economic security’ would never be
formally defined beyond ‘economic order’ or ‘economic well-being’,100 the significant conceptual consistency
between economic security and liberal order-building also had a strategic ideological role. By
playing on notions of ‘economic well-being’, economic security seemed to emphasise
economic and thus ‘human’ needs over military ones. The reshaping of global capital,
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international order and the exercise of state power could thus look decidedly liberal and
‘humanitarian’. This appearance helped co-opt the liberal Left into the process and, of
course, played on individual desire for personal security by using notions such as ‘personal
freedom’ and ‘social equality’.101 Marx and Engels once highlighted the historical role of the bour geoisie in shaping the world
according to its own interests. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the
bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle
everywhere, establish connections everywhere . . . It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois
mode of production; it compels them . . . to become bourgeois in themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.102 In the
second half of the twentieth century this ability to ‘batter down all Chinese walls’ would still rest heavily on the logic of capital, but would also
come about in part under the guise of security. The whole world became a garden to be cultivated – to be recast according to the logic of security.
In the space of fifteen years the
concept ‘economic security’ had moved from connoting insurance policies for working people
constantly shifted between these
registers ever since, being used for the constant reshaping of world order and resulting in a
comprehensive level of intervention and policing all over the globe. Global order has come
to be fabricated and administered according to a security doctrine underpinned by the logic of
capital accumulation and a bourgeois conception of order. By incorporating within it a
particular vision of economic order, the concept of national security implies the
interrelatedness of so many different social, econ omic, political and military factors that
more or less any development anywhere can be said to impact on liberal order in
general and America’s core interests in particular. Not only could bourgeois Europe be
recast around the regime of capital, but so too could the whole international order as capital
not only nestled, settled and established connections, but also ‘secured’ everywhere.
Security politics thereby became the basis of a distinctly liberal philosophy of global
‘intervention’, fusing global issues of economic management with domestic policy formations in an
ambitious and frequently violent strategy. Here lies the Janus-faced character of American foreign policy.103 One
face is the ‘good liberal cop’: friendly, prosperous and democratic, sending money and help
around the globe when problems emerge, so that the world’s nations are shown how they
can alleviate their misery and perhaps even enjoy some prosperity. The other face is the
‘bad liberal cop’: should one of these nations decide, either through parliamentary procedure, demands for self-determination or
to the desire to shape the world in a capitalist fashion – and back again. In fact, it has
violent revolution to address its own social problems in ways that conflict with the interests of capital and the bourgeois concept of liberty, then
the authoritarian dimension of liberalism shows its face; the ‘liberal moment’ becomes the
moment of violence. This Janus-faced character has meant that through the mandate of security the US, as the national security state
par excellence, has seen fit to either overtly or covertly re-order the affairs of myriads of nations – those ‘rogue’ or ‘outlaw’ states on the ‘wrong
side of history’.104 ‘Extrapolating the figures as best we can’, one
CIA agent commented in 1991,‘there have been
about 3,000 major covert operations and over 10,000 minor operations – all illegal, and all
designed to disrupt, destabilize, or modify the activities of other countries’, adding that
‘every covert operation has been rationalized in terms of U.S. national security’.105 These would
include ‘interventions’ in Greece, Italy, France, Turkey, Macedonia, the Ukraine, Cambodia, Indonesia, China, Korea, Burma, Vietnam, Thailand,
Ecuador, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Uruguay, Bolivia, Grenada, Paraguay, Nicaragua, El
Salvador, the Philippines, Honduras, Haiti, Venezuela, Panama, Angola, Ghana, Congo, South Africa, Albania, Lebanon, Grenada, Libya, Somalia,
Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and many more, and many of these more than once. Next up are the ‘60 or more’ countries identified as the
bases of ‘terror cells’ by Bush in a speech on 1 June 2002.106 The methods used have varied: most popular has been the favoured technique of
liberal security – ‘making
the economy scream’ via controls, interventions and the imposition of
neo-liberal regulations. But a wide range of other techniques have been used: terror bombing;
subversion; rigging elections; the use of the CIA’s ‘Health Alteration Committee’ whose mandate was to ‘incapacitate’
foreign officials; drug-trafficking;107 and the sponsorship of terror groups, counterinsurgency
agencies, death squads. Unsurprisingly, some plain old fascist groups and parties have been coopted into the project, from the attempt at reviving the remnants of the Nazi collaborationist Vlasov Army for use against the USSR to the use
of fascist forces to undermine democratically elected governments, such as in Chile; indeed, one of the reasons fascism flowed into Latin America
was because of the ideology of national security.108 Concomitantly, ‘national security’ has meant a policy of non-intervention where satisfactory
‘security partnerships’ could be established with certain authoritarian and military regimes: Spain under Franco, the Greek junta, Chile, Iraq,
Iran, Korea, Indonesia, Cambodia, Taiwan, South Vietnam, the Philippines, Turkey, the five Central Asian republics that emerged with the breakup of the USSR, and China. Either
way, the whole world was to be included in the new‘secure’ global
liberal order. The result has been the slaughter of untold numbers. John Stock well, who was part of a CIA
project in Angola which led to the deaths of over 20,000 people, puts it like this: Coming to grips with these U.S./CIA activities in broad numbers
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and figuring out how many people have been killed in the jungles of Laos or the hills of Nicaragua is very difficult. But, adding them up as best we
can, we come up with a figure of six million people killed – and this is a minimum figure. Included
are: one million killed in the Korean War, two million killed in the Vietnam War, 800,000 killed in Indonesia, one million in Cambodia, 20,000
killed in Angola – the operation I was part of – and 22,000 killed in Nicaragua.109 Note that the six million is a minimum figure, that he omits to
mention rather a lot of other interventions, and that he was writing in 1991. This is security as the slaughter bench of history. All of this has been
more than confirmed by events in the twenty first century: in a speech on 1 June 2002, which became the basis of the official National Security
Strategy of the United States in September of that year, President Bush reiterated that the US has a unilateral right to overthrow any government
in the world, and launched a new round of slaughtering to prove it. While much has been made about the supposedly ‘new’ doctrine of
preemption in the early twenty-first century,
the policy of preemption has a long history as part of national
security doctrine. The United States has long maintained the option of pre-emptive actions to
counter a sufficient threat to our national security. The greater the threat, the greater is the
risk of inaction – and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend
ourselves . . . To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act pre emptively.110 In other
words, the security policy of the world’s only superpower in its current ‘ war on terror’ is still underpinned by a notion of
liberal order-building based on a certain vision of ‘economic order’. The National Security Strategy
concerns itself with a ‘single sustainable model for national success’ based on ‘political and
economic liberty’, with whole sections devoted to the security benefits of ‘economic liberty’, and the benefits to liberty of the security
strategy proposed.111 Economic security (that is, ‘capitalist accumulation’) in the guise of ‘national security’ is
now used as the justification for all kinds of ‘intervention’, still conducted where necessary
in alliance with fascists, gangsters and drug cartels, and the proliferation of ‘national
security’ type regimes has been the result. So while the national security state was in one sense a structural bi-product of
the US’s place in global capitalism, it was also vital to the fabrication of an international order founded on the power of capital. National
security, in effect, became the perfect strategic tool for landscaping the human garden.112
This was to also have huge domestic consequences, as the idea of containment would also
come to reshape the American social order, helping fabricate a security apparatus
intimately bound up with national identity and thus the politics of loyalty.
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Link -- Economy
Attempting to save the global economy from disaster is a liberal orderbuilding method of security
Mark Neocleous, Professor of Critique of Political Economy, Brunel University, 08 (“Critique of Security”, McGillQueen’s University, pp. 94-97, Published 2008)
But 'social security' was clearly an inadequate term for this, associated as it now was with 'soft' domestic policy issues such as old-age
insurance. 'Collective security' would not do, associated as it was with the dull internationalism of Wilson on the one hand and still
very much connected to the institutions of social security on the other." Only one term would do: national security. This
not to imply that 'national security' was simply adopted and adapted from 'social security'. Rather, what we
are dealing with here is another ideological circuit, this time between 'national security' and 'social security',
in which the policies 'insuring' the security of the population are a means of securing the body politic,
and vice versa;" a circuit in which, to paraphrase David Peace in the epigraph to this chapter, one can have one's teeth kicked out
in the name of national security and put back in through social security. Social security and national security were woven
together: the social and the national were the warp and the weft of the security fabric. The warp and the welt, that is, of a broader
vision of economic security. Robert Pollard has suggested that 'the concept of "economic security'- the idea that
American interests would be best sewed by an open and integrated economic system, as opposed to a large
peacetime military establishment - was firmly established during the wartime period'. 71 In fact, the concept of
'economic security' became a concept of international politics in this period, but the concept itself had a longer history as the
underlying idea behind social security in the 1930s, as we have seen. Economic security, in this sense, provides the
important link between social and national security, becoming liberalism's strategic weapon of choice
and the main policy instrument from 1945. As one State Department memo of February 1944 put it, 'the development of
sound international economic relations is closely related to the problem of security. But it would also continue to be used to think
about the political administration of internal order. Hence Roosevelt's comment that 'we must plan for, and help to bring about, an
expanded economy which will result in more security [and so that the conditions of 1932 and the beginning of 1933 won't come back
again'.' On security grounds, inside and outside were constantly folding into one another, the domestic and
the foreign never quite On the fabrication of economic order properly distinguishable. The reason why lay in the kind of
economic order to be secured: both domestically and internationally, 'economic security' is coda for capitalist order.
Giving a
lecture at Harvard University on 5 June 1947, Secretary of State George C. Marshall recalled the disruption to the
European economy during the war and Europe's continuing inability to feed itself, and suggested that if the US did not help there
would be serious economic, social and political deterioration which would in turn have a knock-on effect on US capital. The
outcome was a joint plan submitted to the US from European states at the end of August, after much
wrangling with the Soviet Union, requesting $28 billion over a four-year period (the figure was reduced when
finally agreed by Congress). The European Recovery Program (ERE known as the Marshall Plan) which emerged has gone
down as an economic panacea, 'saving' Europe from economic disaster. But as the first of many such 'Plans', all the
way down to the recent 'reconstruction' of Iraq, it does not take much to read the original Marshall Plan
through the lens of security and liberal order-building.
Alan Milward has suggested that the conventional
reading of the Marshall Plan and US aid tends to accept the picture of post-war Europe on the verge of
collapse and with serious social and economic discontent, such that it needed to be rescued by US aid. In
fact, excluding Germany, no country was actually on the verge of collapse. There were no bank crashes,
very few bankruptcies and the evidence of a slow down in industrial production is unconvincing. There is also
little evidence of grave distress or a general deterioration in the standard of living. By late-1946 production had roughly equalled prewar levels in all countries except Germany. And yet Marshall Aid came about. Milward argues that the Marshall Plan was
designed not to increase the rate of recovery in European countries or to prevent European economies from
deteriorating, but to sustain ambitious, new, expansionary economic and social policies in Western
European countries which were in fact already in full-bloom conditions. In other words, the Marshall Plan was
predominantly designed for political objectives - hence conceived and rushed through by the Department of State itself." Milward's
figures are compelling, and complicate the conventional picture of the Marshall Plan as simply a form of economic aid. But to
distinguish reasons that are 'economic' reasons from reasons that are 'political' misses the extent to which,
in terms of security, the economic and the political are entwined. This is why the Marshall Plan is so inextricably
linked to the Truman Doctrine's offer of military aid and intervention beyond us borders, a new global commitment at the heart of
which was the possibility of intervention in the affairs of other countries. As Joyce and Gabriel Kolko have argued the important
dimension of the Truman Doctrine is revealed in the various drafts of Truman's speech before it was finally delivered on 12 March,
and the private memos of the period. Members of the cabinet and other top officials understood very clearly that the united States was
now defining a strategy and budget appropriate to its new global commitments, and that a far greater involvement in other countries
was now pending especially on the economic level. Hence the plethora of references to 'a world-wide trend away
from the system of free enterprise's which the state Department's speech-writers thought a 'grave threat' to
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American interests. Truman's actual speech to Congress is therefore more interesting for what it implied than what it
stated explicitly. And what it implied was the politics behind the Marshall Plan: economic security as a means of
maintaining political order against the threat of communism. The point then, is not just that the Marshall
Plan was 'political' how could any attempt to reshape global capital be anything but political? It is fairly clear
that the Marshall Plan was multidimensional, and to distinguish reasons that are 'economic' reasons from reasons that are 'political'
misses the extent to which the economic, political and military are entwined The point is that it was very much a project driven by the
ideology of security. The referent object of 'security here is 'economic order'. The government and the emerging
national security bureaucracy saw the communist threat as economic rather than military. As Latham notes, at
first glance the idea of military security within a broad context of economic containment merely appears to be one more dimension of
strength within the liberal order. But in another respect the project of economic security might itself be viewed as the very force that
this sense, the priority given to economic security was the driving
force behind the us commitment to underwrite milita ry security for Western Europe." The protection
made military security appear to be necessary. In
and expansion of capital came to be seen as the path to security, and vice versa . This created the grounds for a reordering of global capital involving a constellation of class and corporate forces as well as state power, undertaken in the guise of
national security. NSC-68, the most significant national security document to emerge in this period, stated that the 'overall policy at
the present time may be described as one designed to foster a world environment in which the American system can survive and
flourish'." In this sense we can also read the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)
of 1947, the Brussels Pact of March 1948 and the nascent movement towards 'European Union' as part and parcel of the security
project being mapped out." The key institutions of 'international order' in this period invoked a particular vision of order with a view
to reshaping global capital as a means of bringing 'security' political, social and economic - from the communist threat.
Framing the economy in terms of security discourse leads states to implement protectionist or
unreliable policies, destroying the economic strength they attempt to preserve
Ronnie
Lipschutz
, Director – Politics PhD Program, UC Santa Cruz,
1998
. “On Security” p. 11-12
The ways in which the framing of threats is influenced by a changing global economy is seen nowhere
more clearly than in recent debates over competitiveness and "economic security." What does it mean to be
competitive? Is a national industrial policy consistent with global economic liberalization? How is the security component of this issue
socially constructed? Beverly Crawford (Chapter 6: "Hawks, Doves, but no Owls: The New Security Dilemma Under International
Economic Interdependence") shows how strategic economic interdependence--a consequence of the growing liberalization
of the global economic system, the increasing availability of advanced technologies through commercial markets, and the everincreasing velocity of the product cycle--undermines the ability of states to control those technologies that, it is often
argued, are critical to economic strength and military might. Not only can others acquire these technologies,
they might also seek to restrict access to them. Both contingencies could be threatening. (Note, however, that by
and large the only such restrictions that have been imposed in recent years have all come at the behest of the United States, which is
most fearful of its supposed vulnerability in this respect.) What, then, is the solution to this "new security dilemma," as
Crawford has stylized it? According to Crawford, state decisionmakers can respond in three ways. First, they can try
to restore state autonomy through self-reliance although, in doing so, they are likely to undermine state
strength via reduced competitiveness. Second, they can try to restrict technology transfer to potential
enemies, or the trading partners of potential enemies, although this begins to include pretty much everybody. It also
threatens to limit the market shares of those corporations that produce the most innovative technologies.
Finally, they can enter into co-production projects or encourage strategic alliances among firms. The
former approach may slow down technological development; the latter places control in the hands of actors
who are driven by market, and not military, forces. They are, therefore, potentially unreliable. All else being equal,
in all three cases, the state appears to be a net loser where its security is concerned. But this does not prevent the
state from trying to gain.
US economic liberalism is part of the security – insecurity paradox – it undercuts other countries’
sense of security, causing a self-fulfilling prophecy
Ronnie D.
Lipschutz ‘95
, Assistant Professor of Politics @ UCSC, 1995. On
Security (p. 15-16)
Consider, then, the
consequences of the intersection of security policy and economics during and after the
Cold War. In order to establish a “secure” global system, the United States advocated, and put into place, a
global system of economic liberalism. It then underwrote, with dollars and other aid, the growth of this
system.43 One consequence, of this project was the globalizations of a particular mode of production and accumulation, which relied
on the re-creation, throughout the world, of the domestic political and economic environment and preferences of the United States.
That such a project cannot be accomplished under conditions of really-existing capitalism is not important:
the idea was that economic and political liberalism would reproduce the American self around the world.44
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This would make the world safe and secure for the Untited States inasmuch as it would all be the self, so to
speak. The joker in this particular deck was that efforts to reproduce some version of American society abroad, in order to
make the world more secure for Americans, came to threaten the cultures and societies of the countries
being transformed, making their citizens less secure. The process thereby transformed them into the very
enemies we feared so greatly. In Iran, for example, the Shah’s efforts to create a Westernized society engendered so much
domestic resistance that not only did it bring down his empire but so, for a time, seemed to pose a mortal threat to the American
Empire based on Persian Gulf oil. Islamic “fundamentalism,” now characterized by some as the enemy that will replace Communism,
seems to be U.S. policymakers’ worst nightmares made real,45 although without the United States to interfere in the Middle East and
elsewhere, the Islamic movements might never have acquired the domestic power they now have in those countries and regions that
seem so essential to American “security.” The ways in which the framing of threats is influenced by a changing global economy is
seen nowhere more clearly than in recent debates over competitiveness and “economic security.” What does it mean to be
competitive? Is a national industrial policy consistent with global economic liberalization? How is the security compenent of this issue
socially constructed? Beverly Crawford (Chapter 6: “Hawks, Doves, but no Owls: The New Security Dilemma Under International
Economic Interdependence”) shows how strategic economic interdependence – a consequence of the growing liberalization of the
global economic sytem, the increasing availability of advanced technologies through commercial markets, and the ever-increasing
velocity of the product cycle – undermines the ability.
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Link -- Economy – Poverty
Poverty securitization rhetoric encourages imperialism, enforces an “us” vs. “them” dichotomy
mindset & turns poverty because it focuses on dangerous poverty and ignores the most needy.
Smith 2007
(Katie is an author for E-International Relations a web site for international relations studies. She
attended Brown University and got a BA in International Relations. “Assess the strengths and weaknesses of securitising poverty”
December 22nd 2007. http://www.e-ir.info/?p=178, MT)
The idea of poverty as a security issue has been fairly commonplace since the end of the Cold War. In 1993,
the United Nations sought to redefine security with individuals as the referent object; a framework in which poverty is one of the
principal security threats as it significantly reduces quality and quantity of life. At the same time, poverty was gaining importance in
the security agendas of states. This is based on the idea that poverty is a threat to the rich as well as the poor and
that an unequal world is an unstable one; a view that has become very powerful in the years since September, 2001. This
essay will address the implications of this second type of securitisation – world poverty as a threat to the west. I will use the
Copenhagen School approach to show how poverty is being securitised by western leaders in the context of the “War on Terror.” I
will then go on to demonstrate that, although the issue of poverty is likely to receive more attention as a result, the
securitisation of poverty may also cause many problems. Firstly, aid may be redirected from the nonthreatening poor (often those most in need) to those perceived to be dangerous. Secondly, the involvement of the
securitising states in the creation of poverty can be hidden as the rich are presented as potential victims. Finally, securitisation
necessarily presents the interests of the securitiser as more important than those who will be affected by its
actions and therefore encourages an imperialistic approach. Although the securitisation of poverty is directing some
much needed attention to the problem, a humanitarian approach is a much more appropriate when considering the needs of the poor.
The securitisation of poverty The theory of ‘securitisation’ is the method by which the Copenhagen School approaches security
studies; it is the process by which an issue comes to be perceived as a security threat by a group. An issue is securitised by the
‘speech act;’ the point at which the relevant authorities are persuaded that the issue is a security threat and
warrants emergency action (Buzan, Waever and de Wilde, 1998: 24-5). Thus the Copenhagen School deals with subjective
security – the perception of threat. Abrahamsen makes an addition to this idea to include partial securitisations. She suggests that,
instead of security threats being only existential threats, ‘security issues can be seen to move on a continuum from normalcy to
worrisome/troublesome to risk and to existential threat—and conversely, from threat to risk and back to normalcy.’ (2005: 5) This is a
scale which can include poverty as a security issue. While poverty has not been allocated a place near the ‘existential
threat’ end of the spectrum by any Western government, recent rhetoric of world leaders (the ‘speech act’) has created a partial
securitisation of poverty. Poverty is increasingly mentioned by world leaders in the context of the “War on Terror,” as a
constituent part of this dominant security framework. (Buzan, 2006) In February 2002, US Secretary of State Colin
Powell stated, “I fully believe that the root cause of terrorism does come from situations where there is poverty, where there is
ignorance, where people see no hope in their lives.” (in Berrebi, 2003: 5) Similarly, Tony Blair claimed in November, 2001, “The
dragon’s teeth [with regards to terrorism and terrorists] are planted in the fertile soil of . . . poverty and
deprivation.” (in Berrebi, 2003: 6). Furthermore, the World Trade Centre bombings have shown that “No-one in this world can feel
comfortable, or safe, while so many are suffering and deprived” (Kofi Annan, BBC, 22/03/02) and that “It is no longer necessary to
prove a direct link between a troubled faraway country and the order of our own societies.” (Jack Straw, in Abrahamsen, 2005: 65)
The policy response to these ideas has been mixed. Between September 2001 and July 2002, US aid to countries bordering
Afghanistan rose dramatically, including a 278% increase for Pakistan. (Looney, 2002) President Bush also promised a 50% increase
in all US aid. (BBC, 22/03/02) However, in reality poverty relief has not topped many agendas; the EU, OEDC, Denmark, Australia,
Japan and others have rewritten the rules of aid to allow counter-terrorism measures to become an acceptable target of development
assistance, therefore militarizing much humanitarian aid. (Christian Aid, 2004) With or without an increase in aid for poverty under
the security agenda, I will argue below that this securitisation is not a positive move from a humanitarian perspective. The NonThreatening Poor Although poverty and terrorism are presented as clearly linked in the quotes above, this is
not generally accepted by terrorism experts. Berrebi is one of many who argue that there is, ‘little reason to believe that
materialistic or educational improvements would help reduce terrorism. If anything, the correlation I find is that those with higher
education and higher living standards are more likely to participate in terrorist activity.’ (2003: 2) Pipes argues that, “… suicide
bombers who hurl themselves against foreign enemies offer their lives not to protest financial deprivation
but to change the world.” (2002) Terrorism is therefore best understood as ‘a response to political conditions and long-standing
feelings (either perceived or real) of indignity and frustration that have little to do with economics.” (Krueger and Maleckova, 2002: 1)
A vast body of literature, some carried out by government bodies themselves, points to the perpetrators of terrorism as predominantly
educated young men who perceive injustice and who feel that they have no option other than terrorism to address the problem.
Importantly, it is widely recognised that terrorism is a product of middle income people in middle income countries. (Berrebi, 2003: 3)
Poverty may still be an important factor however, because other people’s poverty may be a motivation for terrorism. One Hamas
leader identified the ‘poverty-stricken outskirts of Algiers or the refugee camps in Gaza’ as the principal motivations for Islamic and,
more specifically, Palestinian terrorism. (in Pipes, 2002) What this suggests is that it is the combination of political grievance and
poverty which may become dangerous by inspiring terrorism, not poverty per se. So which types of poverty are dangerous to those
afraid of terrorism? Firstly, the poverty linked to clear political injustice. This is the poverty found alongside prosperity where
educated, mostly middle class people engage in terrorism on behalf of politically and economically marginalised communities. And
secondly, the poverty that angers young men – the most likely group to participate in terrorist activities. This is the poverty linked to
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masculine humiliation. While both these types of poverty clearly need to be addressed, looking at poverty from a security
point of view can overlook much poverty that is not seen to be threatening . For example, very poor countries
tend to be less susceptible to terrorism; people must focus on survival and have little time for politics. (Lazarsfeld and Zeisal
in Gurr, 1970: 34) Under a security agenda, the poverty of these people would not need to be addressed . The UK
Department for International Development notes that a disproportionately large amount of the world’s bilateral aid already goes to the
middle income countries where terrorism is most likely. (2005: 15) Further, in 2003, the UK gave a disproportionate amount
of its allocated aid for poor communities in middle income countries to Iraq, showing a further
politicisation of aid. (Christian Aid, 2004: 2) Similarly, the poverty of women will not be seen as important through the security
lens since it is men that are the primary terrorist threat. In contrast both very poor countries and women are particular
targets of non-securitised development aid. (UN, 1997) Thus a securitisation of poverty could easily overlook the ‘nondangerous poor’ on behalf of the ‘dangerous’ The finite pool of resources allocated to poverty reduction is unlikely to ever be able to
address all forms of poverty. More money is, and may further be allocated to those NGO’s and governments that stress the security
aspect of their development work than those who work for purely humanitarian concerns. (Christian Aid, 2004: 2-3) Duffield argues
that escaping the logic of this security regime is already very difficult, emphasising ‘the increasingly overt and accepted politicisation
of aid.’ (2001: 16) ‘Aid, in other words, is being co-opted to serve in the global ‘War on Terror’.’ (Christian Aid, 2004:
1) What may be at stake is the allocation of resources away from the most needy on the behalf of those perceived to be most
dangerous. Externalising poverty Some theorists suggest that securitised issues always carry with them a logic of ‘us’
against ‘them’. A threat to our existence is something that we must be protected from, those threatening us are
external ‘others’ whose aims are incompatible with ours. This is clear in the rhetoric surrounding terrorism and,
increasingly, in the securitisation of poverty. This can have serious implications for the attitude that is taken
towards these issues; in a study of the securitisation of the African continent, Abrahamsen identifies an important process
of shifting attitudes from a cooperative humanitarian approach to an ‘us against them’ approach which
accompanies securitisations; ‘otherness’ is becoming something to fear and policies are increasingly driven by this. (2005: 60,
65 The ‘us against them’ logic that is so central to ideas of security involves a necessary privileging of ‘our’ interests over ‘theirs’.
This is accepted logic in relation to perceived existential threats but becomes more problematic when attached to partial securitisations
and non-traditional threats. That ‘our’ security is considered to be important when dealing with poverty is already clear; the UK’s
foreign office minister for Africa argued that there are “sound practical reasons why we cannot afford to ignore the state of Africa.
The most immediate of these is terrorism.” (in Abrahamsen, 2005: 67) What are not clear are the extents that western governments are
prepared to go to ensure this security. Recent ideas of global policing and ‘voluntary imperialism’ that have emerged from the British
government suggest that, in theory at least, the UK is prepared to take extensive measures. (Cooper, 2002) The combination of
privileging our interests over the interests of impoverished others and a potential ‘voluntary imperialism’ is perhaps the central
problem of securitising poverty. If western society is to be the referent object in addressing poverty, the needs and wishes of those on
the receiving end are necessarily subordinate to the requirements of the west. The further the west is prepared to intervene
in poor countries to protect its own security with little consideration for the people on the receiving end, the
further the choice, democracy and diversity of those people will be eroded . While poverty and related problems
need to be addressed, it is important, for the sake of the people receiving aid, that problems are addressed on their terms and not on the
terms of others. Conclusion The securitisation of poverty is a trend that the western world has seen in the years since the World Trade
Centre bombings. That poverty is a threat to ‘us’ is increasingly emphasised in political rhetoric particularly in relation to terrorism, of
which it is seen to be a cause. More detailed examinations of the subject see a subjective understanding of inequality as the root cause
of terrorism and so, while poverty may be a part of this, necessarily some types of poverty (those linked to conflict and political
discrimination on the national or global scale) are more likely to be a threat than others. The securitisation of poverty can
lead to various problems. Firstly, aid may be redirected from the non-threatening poor (often those most in need)
to those perceived to be a threat. Secondly, the involvement of the securitising states in the creation of poverty can
be hidden as the threat is increasingly presented in external terms. Finally, securitisation necessarily
presents the interests of the securitiser as more important than those who will be affected by its actions .
Recent ideas of ‘voluntary imperialism’, if carried through, could potentially be very damaging to those under their control.The
securitisation of poverty is a trend that we can see in the political rhetoric of today but it is as yet only a partial securitisation. What we
can see is possibly the beginnings of a new, securitised approach to poverty or possibly just a passing phase. The UK Department for
International Development remains careful to distance itself from UK security issues as do many other organisations giving bilateral
aid. However, securitisation can be seen as a sliding scale; the problems addressed in this essay are emerging issues that may or may
not become very problematic. Some, such as the distribution of aid, are already more pronounced than others. In light of these
potential problems and despite the increased attention that poverty can get as a result of being presented as a security threat,
humanitarian approaches to the issue are preferable.
That outweighs
Gilligan ‘96 [James, Professor of Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School, Director of the Center
for the Study of Violence, and a member of the Academic Advisory Council of the National
Campaign Against Youth Violence, “Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and its Causes”, p. 191-196]
The deadliest form of violence is poverty. You cannot work for one day with the violent
people who fill our prisons and mental hospitals for the criminally insane without being forcible and
constantly reminded of the extreme poverty and discrimination that characterizes their lives.
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Hearing about their lives, and about their families and friends, you are forced to recognize the truth
in Gandhi’s observation that the deadliest form of violence is poverty. Not a day goes by without
realizing that trying to understand them and their violent behavior in purely individual terms is
impossible and wrong-headed. Any theory of violence, especially a psychological theory, that
evolves from the experience of men in maximum security prisons and hospitals for the criminally
insane must begin with the recognition that these institutions are only microcosms. They are not
where the major violence in our society takes place, and the perpetrators who fill them are far from
being the main causes of most violent deaths. Any approach to a theory of violence needs to
begin with a look at the structural violence in this country. Focusing merely on those
relatively few men who commit what we define as murder could distract us from examining and
learning from those structural causes of violent death that are for more significant from a numerical
or public health, or human, standpoint. By “structural violence” I mean the increased rates of death,
and disability suffered by those who occupy the bottom rungs of society, as contrasted with the
relatively low death rates experienced by those who are above them. Those excess deaths (or at least
a demonstrably large proportion of them) are a function of class structure; and that structure itself is
a product of society’s collective human choices, concerning how to distribute the collective wealth
of the society. These are not acts of God. I am contrasting “structural” with “behavioral violence,”
by which I mean the non-natural deaths and injuries that are caused by specific behavioral actions of
individuals against individuals, such as the deaths we attribute to homicide, suicide, soldiers in
warfare, capital punishment, and so on. Structural violence differs from behavior violence in at least
three major respects. *The lethal effects of structural violence operate continuously,
rather than sporadically, whereas murders, suicides, executions, wars, and other forms of
behavior violence occur one at a time. *Structural violence operates more or less
independently of individual acts; independent of individuals and groups (politicians, political
parties, voters) whose decisions may nevertheless have lethal consequences for others. *Structural
violence is normally invisible, because it may appear to have had other (natural or violent) causes.
[CONTINUED] The finding that structural violence causes far more deaths than behavioral violence
does is not limited to this country. Kohler and Alcock attempted to arrive at the number of excess
deaths caused by socioeconomic inequities on a worldwide basis. Sweden was their model of the
nation that had come closest to eliminating structural violence. It had the least inequity in income
and living standards, and the lowest discrepancies in death rates and life expectancy; and the highest
overall life expectancy of the world. When they compared the life expectancies of those living in the
other socioeconomic systems against Sweden, they found that 18 million deaths a year could be
attributed to the “structural violence” to which the citizens of all the other nations were being
subjected. During the past decade, the discrepancies between the rich and poor nations
have increased dramatically and alarmingly. The 14 to 19 million deaths a year
caused by structural violence compare with about 100,000 deaths per year from
armed conflict. Comparing this frequency of deaths from structural violence to the
frequency of those caused by major military and political violence, such as World War II
(an estimated 49 million military and civilian deaths, including those by genocide – or about eight
million per year, 1939-1945), the Indonesian massacre of 1965-66 (perhaps 575,000 deaths), the
Vietnam war (possibly two million, 1954-1973), and even a hypothetical nuclear exchange
between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. (232 million), it was clear that even war cannot begin to
compare with structural violence, which continues year after year. In other words, every
fifteen years, on the average, as many people die because of relative poverty as would be killed by
the Nazi genocide of the Jews over a six-year period. This is, in effect, the equivalent of an
ongoing, unending, in fact accelerating, thermonuclear war, or genocide, perpetrated
on the weak and poor every year of every decade, throughout the world. Structural
violence is also the main cause of behavioral violence on a socially and
epidemiologically significant scale (from homicide and suicide to war and genocide). The
question as to which of the two forms of violence – structural or behavioral – is more important,
dangerous, or lethal is moot, for they are inextricably related to eachother, as cause to effect.
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Link -- Economy – Economic Analysis Fails
Economic analysis is neither objective nor inevitable – positivist economic lenses recreate violence
Tooze 5
Relations
Roger, Visiting
Professor of International
at City University “The Missing : Security, Critical International Political Economy, and Community”
Book: Critical Security Studies and World Politics; Edited by Ken Booth (pg. 153-155)
Turning to the problem of the conceptualization of economics, we find even greater
resistance to an integrated political
economy than in traditional political analysis and hence great resistance to an integrated theory and practice
of security. This is because a specific notion of economics has become hegemonic, especially since the
1970s. Among critical theorists, J Richard Ashley has done most to identify the problematics of knowledge
and the consequences of economism for real political agency.81 For Ashley the move from classical
political realism to IR's neorealism was the formal manifestation of a powerful and relentless economism,
expressed under and through the same conditions that in orthodox IPE gave rise to the concern with
economic security. In Ashley's words: The "given" order, including the separation of political and economic spheres, was no
longer self-evident. In matters of resource vulnerability and petroleum embargoes, monetary crises and worldwide recession,
economic processes and relations no longer seemed independent of political interventions. . . . Suddenly, the ever-so-commonsensical
realist depiction of international politics in terms of an autonomous power-political logic lost its magic.82 The resulting
theorization was the statism of neorealism, embedded within which is a logic of economy and technical
rationality. Ashley's work helps us to understand the deep relationship between politics and economics laid down within and
prefigured by a statist, orthodox IPE framed by neorealism. This is an important critical uncovering of hidden theoretical assumptions.
Yet as important as Ashley's insights are, perhaps they do not go far enough. My sense is that the fundamental basis of this
economism is already laid down, not in the theories of IR and IPE but in the construction of a hegemony of
legitimate knowledge driven by the emergence of economics as a sphere of human activity and the market
as its institutionalized form within the overall development of capitalism. The emergence of a realm of
human economic activity that required and requires a special knowledge of economics in order for it to be
made sense of within society is the province of capitalism.83 The rise and consolidation of capitalism is
one, moreover, with which the fields of IR and security studies had and have a very ambivalent and
troublesome relationship, particularly given the primacy of politics that is embedded in both fields. To
assert the primacy of politics, as we saw in the discussion of politics and economics in the last section,
presupposes not only the ontological separation of the interstate political system and "a highly integrated,
incompletely regulated, rapidly growing . . . world economy"84 but also the prior separation of politics and
economics as distinct spheres of activity. This separation is a necessary and integral part of the process of
the construction of self-regulating markets in the dynamics of capitalist growth.85 As Karl Polanyi has pointed
out, A self-regulating market demands nothing less than the institutional separation of society into an economic and political sphere.
Such a dichotomy is, in effect, merely the restatement, from the point of view of society as a whole, of the existence of a selfregulating market. It might be argued that the separateness of the two spheres obtains in every type of society at all times. Such an
inference would be based on a fallacy.86 Polanyi then shows how the existence of a separate economic system is a
specific and historically distinct creation of nineteenth-century English capitalism and indeed is a political
creation, "the outcome of a conscious and often violent intervention on the part of governments which
imposed the market organization on society for noneconomic ends."81 The construction of the market and
its corollary, the separation of economics from politics, is thus political. If the construction of an economics
separate from politics and society is itself a political act and remains a political act in that economic
structures and processes serve particular interests, it is highly problematic when, as Polanyi calls it, the
economic sphere comes to be in turn constructed and justified as neutral, as nonpolitical, and as natural,
above politics. The historical processes by and through which the construction of such a depoliticized political economy has
occurred are complex. They directly to the professionalization of knowledge,88 to the political triumph of a specific and partial view
of human rationality at the beginning of the twentieth century,89 and to the ability of those with wealth to wield the power to
reproduce and enhance those structures that guaranteed and enhanced that wealth. Suffice to say that the thirty-year hegemony
of neoliberalism in the world political economy has constructed the economic sphere in such a way as to
claim that a neoliberal economic way of organizing society within its scale of values is natural, inevitable,
neutral, and rational, with no indication of the inherently and structurally political nature of economics
itself. In other words, the claim that economics is nonpolitical is a political claim.
Focus on national economic security through a positivist lens fails – can’t account for non-state
actors and puts issues of major concern to all in purely economic terms
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Tooze 5
Relations
Roger, Visiting
Professor of International
at City University “The Missing : Security, Critical International Political Economy, and Community”
Book: Critical Security Studies and World Politics; Edited by Ken Booth (pg. 150-151)
To restate the basis of the argument: it is not that national economic security, however defined, does not
matter; it clearly does, but it is that a sole focus on national economic security, theorized only through
positivist methodology and where the economic is defined in the way it is by orthodox IPE, is too narrow,
claims too much, and is increasingly partial and inappropriate. An exemplar of this weakness is the otherwise excellent
analysis of economic security and the problem of cooperation in post-Cold War Europe by Jonathan Sperling and Emile Kirchner.68
This is an important article, both for security studies and IPE, as it argues for a redefinition of security in that "the European security
system has two mutually constitutive elements, the political-military and the economic."69 This achieves (in my view) the necessary
elevation of economic matters above the secondary level afforded by most analyses of security and makes the between security and
political economy equally important; this is all too often ignored by mainstream IPE outside the specific focus on economic security.
The article offers a powerful argument showing the mutually constitutive structures and processes that together may bring about
comprehensive security in Europe. Yet despite discussing societal security in a spatial political economy that is more integrated than
within many states, and despite the extensive discussion of European institutions, this argument still relies on a statist ontology.
This limits its epistemological and political constructivism to the activities of states and state-based
institutions. Here, in effect, politics is defined as what is done by governments, agents of states, or those
involved in formal political structures and roles. But are agents of European states the only institutions
relevant to comprehensive security? Do the large corporations and banks (e.g., Shell, Volkswagen, Credit
Suisse) or mass social movements (e.g. antiglobalization, antinuclear, environmentalist) have no relevant
power in Europe? Does the European economy exist in isolation of the world market economy? One would
think so from this analysis. In holding this position, Sperling and Kirchner maintain a particular
conceptualization of both politics and economics but inadvertently contradict their own assertions through
the assumed definitions and predefined relationships that they (and all orthodox IPE) import into their
political economy from the discipline of economics. Quite simply, the approach of Sperling and Kirchner
shares with orthodox IPE the characteristic of importing into political economy a particular theorization of
economics that has major consequences for our ability to understand political economy. Economics is
analyzed as a purely rational activity to which a technical solution is possible, that is, economics is
accepted as defined by and for economists. The analysis of the guns-versus-butter issue by Sperling and Kirchner, for
example, employs a resolutely rationalistic and economistic argument, which seems to specify the problem in order to make it
amenable to rational analysis. I would argue that the move to butter—social welfare—is the product of much more complex forces
than they identify.70 Moreover, note the argument that "until transition (to stability) is completed and consolidated, issues of political
economy must be treated as elements of the new security order rather than as simple issues of welfare maximization ."1 Does the
achievement of stability really mean that issues of political economy are magically depoliticized and/or
stripped of their power content, to make them amenable to technical rational economic resolution? Can, for
example, the support for agriculture, which directly affects the price of food, be defined as a simple issue of
welfare maximization when it is clearly and necessarily a concern of the democratic polity? It can, but only
if one understands how simple issues of welfare maximization are treated in economics and if we accept the
argument of Sperling and Kirchner.
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Link -- Economy – AT Econ =/= Realism
The affirmative’s notion of “economic security” based on the states is paired with and supports
traditional conceptions of IR
Tooze 5
Relations
Roger, Visiting
Professor of International
at City University “The Missing : Security, Critical International Political Economy, and Community”
Book: Critical Security Studies and World Politics; Edited by Ken Booth (pg. 148-149)
Economic Security The consideration of the economic in the theory and practice
of security, and security in the
theory and practice of political economy, has taken place on the basis of prevailing discourses in
economics, political science, political economy, and international political economy. As we have seen,
these discourses not only embody deep commitments to specific (orthodox) methodology, epistemology,
and ontology; they also construct both economics and politics, and the relationship between them, in very
particular ways. This seems to have led to the possibility of a twin track for investigations into security by political economy and
into economics by security. One track starts with politics (the traditional concerns of security) but with economic added on as a new
domain of threat to states. The other track starts with a (repoliticized) economics, leading to a whole literature on economic security,
vulnerability, and systemic risk (with particular reference to the global financial system). But the way that the economic is
then related to the political (and vice versa) seems to depend upon prior ideological commitments as to the
nature of the relationship between economics and politics, normally expressed in paradigmatic terms of perspectives or
contesting approaches. For instance, a liberal interpretation of economic security is conditioned by the prior
assumption of the between economic prosperity and war based on the assumed beneficial rationality of
markets. In this sense, economic security as a concept and as an issue has been clearly constructed as an
extension of statist, positivist IPE, which brings together the twin tracks by grafting the agenda of
economics onto the classic concerns of state security via neorealism. Of course, the tradition of mercantilist
thinking, or economic nationalism, as Robert Gilpin prefers to describe it, clearly locks economic security into physical
security—but on, and only on, a state basis. In this tradition, power and wealth, and hence national security,
are inseparable and complementary, particularly in what are regarded as strategic industries, that is, those
industries whose healthy development is considered necessary for the maintenance of national military-political security.58
Notwithstanding the mercantilist imperative for both states and theorists, the post-1945 international economic structure
emerged as a U.S. hegemony that was articulated and developed on the public basis of a liberal trade and
investment order with a constituting, rationalizing, and legitimating ideology of liberal political economy.
Hence, for twenty years after IR and economics were theoretically ed in mainstream academic practice, it was only to the extent that a
strong, broad-based modem economy was regarded as necessary to maintain security. However, the early intimations of the failure of
U.S. policy to keep apart the Bretton Woods institutional twin-track system set up after World War II—separating international
politics (as politics) and international economics (as technical management)—manifested themselves in the problems of the dollar and
U.S. payments in the late 1960s. The unwillingness of the United States to tolerate a massive outflow of dollars forced a reconnection
at the policy level of politics and economics, and this led to an upswing of interest in the international politics of economic conflict.
The possibility of trade wars was mooted.59 But the real spur to the study of what became labeled "economic security" came with
action by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in 1973 and the resultant oil-supply threats and related price
shocks for the international economic system.60 The changing structure of the international political economy at that time, with the
move to floating exchange rates and the rediscovery by the West (and the South) of economic vulnerability, brought forth a large
number of studies on the issue and problems of economic security.61 The studies of economic security stemming from
the crises of the 1970s defined their focus principally in terms of the interests of the state. Equally
significant, their definition of economics prioritized issues of trade and trade relations and tended to ignore
other potentially significant elements. This meant that deep structures of international political economy—
finance, production, and knowledge62—and the changing international division of labor (and its
implications) were not seen as part of this conception of economic security. In effect, IPE and IR (including
that branch conceiving itself as security studies) meekly adopted the agenda of U.S. policy economists.
After all, from the perspective of this approach, what matters when all states have adopted the goal of longterm economic growth are threats to the economic security of the state, and the territorial economy of the
state, in terms of the ability of the state to deliver on its claimed economic goals. Such is particularly the
case when this ability is made vulnerable by an apparent change in trade relationships or is made more
sensitive to the problems of deepening economic interdependence.
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Link – Energy Security
Energy security militarizes energy – justifies intervention and causes serial
policy failure
Ciuta 10 -- Lecturer in International Relations and Director of the Centre of European Politics, School
of Slavonic and East European Studies @ University College London, UK (Felix, 2010, "Conceptual Notes
on Energy Security: Total or Banal Security?" Security Dialogue 41(123), Sage)
is a security issue because it is either a cause
or an instrument of war or conflict. Two different strands converge in this logic of energy security. The first strand
focuses on energy as an instrument: energy is what states fight their current wars with. We can find here arguments
Even casual observers will be familiar with the argument that energy
regarding the use of the ‘energy weapon’ by supplier states (Belkin, 2007: 4; Lugar, 2006: 3; Winstone, Bolton & Gore, 2007: 1;
Yergin, 2006a: 75); direct substitutions in which energy
is viewed as the ‘equivalent of nuclear weapons’
(Morse & Richard, 2002: 2); and rhetorical associations that establish policy associations, as exemplified by the
panel ‘Guns and Gas’ during the Transatlantic Conference of the Bucharest NATO Summit. The second strand comes from the
literature on resource wars, defined as ‘hot conflicts triggered by a struggle to grab valuable resources’ (Victor, 2007: 1). Energy is
seen as a primary cause of greatpower conflicts over scarce energy resources (Hamon & Dupuy, 2008; Klare, 2001, 2008).
Alternatively, energy is seen as a secondary cause of conflict; here, research has focused on the dynamics through which resource
scarcity in general and energy scarcity in particular generate socio-economic, political and environmental conditions such as
population movements, internal strife, secessionism and desertification, which cause or accelerate both interstate and intrastate conflict
(Homer-Dixon, 1991, 1994, 2008; Solana, 2008; see also Dalby, 2004). As is immediately apparent, this logic draws on a classic
formulation that states that ‘a nation is secure to the extent to which it is not in danger of having to sacrifice core values, if it wishes to
avoid war, and is able . . . to maintain them by victory in such a war’ (Lippmann, 1943: 51). The underlying principle of
this security logic is survival: not only surviving war, but also a generalized quasi-Darwinian logic of survival
that produces wars over energy that are fought with ‘energy weapons’. At work in this framing of
the energy domain is therefore a definition of security as ‘the absence of threat to acquired values’ (Wolfers, 1952:
485), more recently reformulated as ‘survival in the face of existential threats’ (Buzan, Wæver & de Wilde, 1998: 27).
The defining parameters of this traditional security logic are therefore: (1) an understanding of security focused on the use of force,
war and conflict (Walt, 1991: 212; Freedman, 1998: 48); and (2) a focus on states as the subjects and objects of energy security. In the
war logic, energy security is derivative of patterns of international politics – often captured under the label
‘geopolitics’ (Aalto & Westphal, 2007: 3) – that lend their supposedly perennial attributes to the domain of energy (Barnes, Jaffe &
Morse, 2004; Jaffe & Manning, 1998). The struggle for energy is thus subsumed under the ‘normal’
competition for power, survival, land, valuable materials or markets (Leverett & Noël, 2007). A key effect of
this logic is to ‘arrest’ issues usually not associated with war, and thus erase their distinctive
characteristics. Even the significance of energy qua energy is abolished by the implacable grammar of conflict: energy
becomes a resource like any other, which matters insofar as it affects the distribution of capabilities in the
international system. As a result, a series of transpositions affect most of the issues ranked high on the energy security agenda.
For example, in the European context, the problem is not necessarily energy (or, more precisely, gas, to avoid the typical
reduction performed by such accounts). The problem lies in the ‘geopolitical interests’ of Russia and other
supplier states, whose strength becomes inherently threatening (Burrows & Treverton, 2007; Horsley, 2006).
Energy security policies become entirely euphemistic, as illustrated for example by statements that equate
‘avoiding energy isolation’ with ‘beating Russia’ (Baran, 2007). Such ‘geopolitical’ understanding of international
politics also habituates a distinct vocabulary. Public documents, media reports and academic analyses of
energy security are suffused with references to weapons, battles, attack, fear, ransom, blackmail,
dominance, superpowers, victims and losers. It is therefore unsurprising that this logic is
coterminous with the widely circulating narrative of the ‘new’ Cold War. This lexicon of conflict
encourages modulations, reductions and transpositions in the meanings of both energy and security. This is
evident at the most fundamental level, structuring encyclopaedic entries (Kohl, 2004) and key policy documents (White
House, 2007), where energy security becomes oil security (security modulates energy into oil), which becomes
oil geopolitics (oil modulates security into geopolitics). Once security is understood in the grammar of conflict,
the complexity of energy is abolished and reduced to the possession of oilfields or gas pipelines. The
effect of this modulation is to habituate the war logic of security, and also to create a hierarchy
between the three constitutive dimensions of energy security (growth, sustenance and the environment). This hierarchy reflects and
at the same time embeds the dominant effect of the war logic, which is the militarization of energy
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(Russell & Moran, 2008), an argument reminiscent of the debates surrounding the securitization of the environment (Deudney, 1990).
It is of course debatable whether this is a new phenomenon. Talk of oil wars has been the subject of prestigious conferences and
conspiracy theories alike, and makes the headlines of newspapers around the world. A significant literature has long focused on the
relationship between US foreign policy, oil and war (Stokes, 2007; in contrast, see Nye, 1982). The pertinence of this argument cannot
be evaluated in this short space, but it is worth noting that it too reduces energy to oil, and in/security to war. The key point is that this
logic changes not only the vocabulary of energy security but also its political rationality. As Victor
(2008: 9) puts it, this signals ‘the arrival of military planning to the problem of natural resources’ and
inspires ‘a logic of hardening, securing and protecting’ in the entire domain of energy. There is, it
must be underlined, some resistance to the pull of the logic of war, as attested for example by NATO’s insistence that its focus on
energy security ‘will not trigger a classical military response’ (De Hoop Scheffer, 2008: 2). Yet, the same NATO official claims that
‘the global competition for energy and natural resources will re-define the relationship between security
and economics’, which hints not only at the potential militarization of energy security policy but also
at the hierarchies this will inevitably create. New geographies of insecurity will thus emerge if the
relationship between the environment, sustenance and growth is structured by the militarized
pursuit of energy (Campbell, 2005: 952; Christophe Paillard in Luft & Paillard, 2007).
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Link -- Energy Security
Energy security functions as a metaphor for all realist thought- it organizes the world as infinite
violence being naturally deployed for finite resources
Daojiong Zha Graduate School of International Relations, International University of Japan, Alternatives 1-1-01 p. HighBeam
In addition to considerations about "balance of power," the South China Sea is closely related to
considerations of so-called energy security. This notion "energy security," as an important component of
"economic security," argues for using diplomatic/military means to secure access to energy-resource
deposits and transportation of energy, in particular, oil and gas. The significance of the South China Sea embodies oil-andgas security concerns for two basic reasons. One, the South China Sea waters are a gateway for oil and natural gas transportation from
the Persian Gulf and Indonesian islands to Japan, the United States, and increasingly China. Two, the South China Sea itself is an area
with potential deposits of oil and natural gas in the seabed. For these two reasons, China, according to the realist logic, should
rationally compete with the United States and other powers to influence the use, if not control, of the South China Sea waters. Hence,
the concern about "energy security." [19] The significance of transportation was discussed in the preceding section. Suffice it to say
here that what makes the South China Sea a security concern is the fear of having one power (China, in particular) influence/control
access through the waterways than actual hazards for transportation. Regarding the potential deposits of oil and gas in the South China
Sea seabed, Mark J. Valencia's summary of the politics of science is revealing. According to Valencia, China and the Philippines have
in recent years made the most optimistic predictions about the oil and gas potential in the South China Sea. International oil
companies, which conduct their own geological surveys of the area, are generally pessimistic, partly as a negotiation tactic; these
negotiations are often geared to ex tract concessions from governments, and the governments, in turn, that wish to materialize their
claims to territorial sovereignty by entering into joint exploration projects. [20] More and more scholars, after studying the history of
exploration and comparing the "scientific" data presented, are coming to view the "oil rich Spratlys" as more a fiction than science.
[21] For the governments that claim sovereignty over the South China Sea waters, however, it is important to keep the fiction alive. In
East Asia and other parts of the world, through the granting of hydrocarbon concessions in disputed ocean areas to international oil
corporations, a claimant state makes a declaration of its determination to exercise jurisdiction. In addition, by way of such
"commercial" acts, such states make use of an international energy operator to assist in resisting diplomatic pressures from other
claimant states. Clearly, the diplomatic/political posturing behind such joint exploration projects in part explains the huge gaps in
"scientific findings" about oil and gas deposits in the South China Sea. Of the six claimant states, China and the Philippines are in re
cent years most active in pursuing/reiterating their respective claims, and, naturally, predictions made by scientists associated with
these two states are optimistic: they are politically significant. The predictions help to aid governments in justifying investing
military/diplomatic resources to keep their claims alive, and, by extension, their claims to future access to whatever lies in the
deepwater areas. The notion of "energy security" is at the same time a powerful cognitive tool for realist
researchers to argue for guarding against military actions to solidify one government's claims (those of China,
in particular) to ownership of the energy resources. Such reasoning departs from knowledge about the growth of the Chinese
economy and its increasing dependence on "offshore" sources of oil and gas. That dependence, then, can be used as justification for
modernizing the Chinese armed forces (the navy, in particular), which in turn are meant first to safeguard and then to defend Chinese
claims to ownership of energy in the deep seabed. [22] Like wise, arms races by states in the region are either justified or
understood through the prism of energy security. What the realist arguments about "energy security" in the
area downplay in interpreting history and predicting the future is that the disintegration of the Soviet Union
has opened up vast areas of oil deposits in the former Soviet republics for exploration. Expressed concerns
about threats from China to global energy, mean while, are also but remotely related to realities . The
Chinese government's oil-and-gas development strategy for the next twenty years is to focus on its interior
regions and the area immediately off the Pearl River Delta. [23] More importantly, "geology-based assessments of the
oil and gas resources of the world" have changed from the 1980s through the 1990s largely due to "an evolving understanding of
world recoverable oil and gas resources rather than to procedural or philosophical changes." [24] That "philosophical" continuity
refers to, more than anything else, an ideology to achieve as much "energy independence" as possible, lest oil, gas, and other forms of
energy fall into "enemy hands." That same philosophy explains the Chinese government's choice of continuing to
rely on domestic coal as the dominant fuel, in spite of coal's environmental costs . [25] In short, the promotion
of the South China Sea as a priority area where the world's "energy security" is under threat seems to be
based less on facts than on preparing for the future unknown--the same logic used in arguments for military
preparedness. It serves to legitimate military strategies for maintaining/upgrading the arsenals of
destruction in the region.
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Link – Environment
Environmental apocalypticism causes eco-authoritarianism and mass violence
against those deemed environmental threats – also causes political apathy
which turns case
Buell 3 Frederick—cultural critic on the environmental crisis and a Professor of English at Queens College and the author of five
books, From Apocalypse To Way of Life, pages 185-186
Looked at critically, then,
crisis discourse thus suffers from a number of liabilities. First, it seems to
have become a political liability almost as much as an asset. It calls up a fierce and effective
opposition with its predictions; worse, its more specific predictions are all too vulnerable to
refutation by events. It also exposes environmentalists to being called grim doomsters and
antilife Puritan extremists. Further, concern with crisis has all too often tempted people to try to
find a “ total solution ” to the problems involved— a phrase that, as an astute analyst of the
limitations of crisis discourse, John Barry, puts it, is all too reminiscent of the Third Reich’s
infamous “ final solution .”55 A total crisis of society—environmental crisis at its gravest—
threatens to translate despair into inhumanist authoritarianism ; more often, however, it helps keep
It thus leads, Barry suggests, to the belief that only elite- and expertled solutions are possible.56 At the same time it depoliticizes people, inducing them to accept their
impotence as individuals; this is something that has made many people today feel, ironically and/or passively, that since it
makes no difference at all what any individual does on his or her own, one might as well go along
merely dysfunctional authority in place.
with it. Yet another pitfall for the full and sustained elaboration of environmental crisis is, though least discussed, perhaps the most
deeply ironic. A problem with deep cultural and psychological as well as social effects, it is embodied in a startlingly simple
proposition: the worse one feels environmental crisis is, the more one is tempted to turn one’s back
on the environment. This means, preeminently, turning one’s back on “nature”—on traditions of
nature feeling, traditions of knowledge about nature (ones that range from organic farming techniques to the different departments
of ecological science), and
traditions of nature-based activism. If nature is thoroughly wrecked these
days, people need to delink from nature and live in postnature—a conclusion that, as the next chapter
shows, many in U.S. society drew at the end of the millenium. Explorations of how deeply “nature” has been
wounded and how intensely vulnerable to and dependent on human actions it is can thus lead, ironically, to further
indifference to nature-based environmental issues, not greater concern with them. But what quickly
becomes evident to any reflective consideration of the difficulties of crisis discourse is that all of these liabilities are in fact
bound tightly up with one specific notion of environmental crisis—with 1960s- and 1970s-style
environmental apocalypticism. Excessive concern about them does not recognize that crisis discourse as a whole has
significantly changed since the 1970s. They remain inducements to look away from serious reflection on environmental crisis only if
one does not explore how environmental crisis has turned of late from apocalypse to dwelling place.
The apocalyptic
mode had a number of prominent features: it was preoccupied with running out and running into walls; with
scarcity and with the imminent rupture of limits; with actions that promised and temporally predicted
imminent total meltdown; and with (often, though not always) the need for immediate “total
solution.” Thus doomsterism was its reigning mode; eco-authoritarianism was a
grave temptation; and as crisis was elaborated to show more and more severe deformations of nature,
temptation increased to refute it, or give up, or even cut off ties to clearly terminal “nature.”
Catastrophic depictions of the environment embody the logic of security – they
produce one-shot governmental solutions that utterly fail to resolve the underlying
harm
Roe, 12 (Paul Roe, Associate Professor in the Department of International Relations and European
Studies at Central European University, Budapest, “Is securitization a ‘negative’ concept? Revisiting the
normative debate over normal versus extraordinary politics,” Security Dialogue vol. 43 no. 3, June 2012)
For the Copenhagen School, and particularly for Wæver, desecuritization (politicization) might
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be ‘more effective than securitizing problems’ (Wæver, 1995: 57; emphasis added). This is not
just a matter of the context within which problems are dealt with, but also has to do with the
long-term thinking that normal politics arguably brings with it. Although Wæver is by no means
categorical in the claim that securitization is invariably worse than politicization, his thinking
nevertheless suggests that securitizing problems may not always result in better outcomes.5 For
example, Wæver (1995: 65) restates Barry Buzan’s assertion that some environmental issues
might be tackled more effectively ‘by the process-type remedies of economics, than by the statist
solutions of security logic’. Similarly, Daniel Deudney (1990: 465–7) has warned of the logic of
security being appropriated to create a sense of urgency in relation to the need to address
ecological problems: how some environmentalists endeavour to find a ‘moral equivalence to
war’. In particular, Deudney draws attention to how national security’s propensity for short-term
strategizing – the desire that affairs are quickly returned to normal – ‘is not likely to make much
of a contribution to establishing patterns of environmentally sound behaviour’. Because
‘conventional national security organizations have short-term horizons’, the tendency not to
operate on the basis of long-term thinking represents a ‘poor model for environmental problem
solving’. Stefan Elbe has also raised questions over the efficacy of securitizing certain public
health concerns.6 In Elbe’s treatment of (the more specific) normative debate over the linking of
HIV/AIDS and security, he notes how framing the issue of HIV/AIDS as security ‘pushes
responses to the disease away from civil society toward the much less transparent workings of
military and intelligence organizations, which also possess the power to override human rights
and civil liberties’ (Elbe, 2006: 128).7
Environmental issues become securitizing when extreme measures are taken to
conserve it- when the environment becomes an apriori issues to any others
Buzan et al, 1998 (Barry Bzzan, Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at the London
School of Economics and honorary professor at the University of Copenhagen and Jilin University, Ole
Waever, a professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science, University of
Copenhagen Jaap de Wilde, Professor of International Relations and World Politics at the University of
Groningen., 1998 “Security: A New Framework for Analysis” p.38)
Nor do system-level referent objects always lose out. Thus far they have done so in the military
and political sectors, where the security of humankind has generally had less appeal than that of
the state. But the story is different in other sectors. The environment is becoming an interesting
case, because groups are using a securitizing logic that exactly follows the format prescribed in
the previous section: the environment has to survive: therefore, this issue should take priority
over all others, because if the environment is degraded to the point of no return all other issues
will lose their meaning. If the normal system (politics according to the rules as they exist) is not
able to handle the situation, we (Greenpeace and especially the more extremist Eco terrorists)
will have to take extraordinary measures to save the environment. Sustainability might be the
environmentalist’s equivalent of the state’s sovereignty and the nation’s identity: it is the
essential constitutive principle that has to be protected. If the is idea catches on the environment
itself may be on the way to becoming a referent object- an object by reference to which security
action can be taken in a socially significant way. We discuss this more fully in Chapter 4. Once
this door is opened, one can see other plausible candidates for security referent objects at the
system level. Humankind as a whole achieved some status as a referent object in relation to
nuclear weapons and could do so again- perhaps more successfully- in relation to environmental
disasters, such as new ice ages or collisions between the earth and one or more of the many large
rocks that occupy near-earth space. The level of human civilization could also become the
referent object in relations to environmental threats.
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Environment link
The extension of security logic to the environment reinforces current environmental
trends, and results in the destruction of human civilization and endangers our mere
existence
Dalby 2002 (Simon, professor of geography and political economy at Carleton University,
Environmental Security, 2002, pg. 144-6)
This observation makes the question of what is to be secured especially important. The
possibility that the ecological costs of globalizing omnivorous consumption might drastically
destabilize the biosphere is the rationale for many invocations to think about environmental
security, as well as the related appeals for global environmental management that so worry
"global ecology" thinkers like Wolfgang Sachs.2 While Peter Taylor calls such a program an
eco-fascist world order, the World Order Models Project has discussed these matters in terms of
eco-imperialism and made the argument that such practices are effectively already in action.3
Tim Luke's warning that environmentalists often, if sometimes inadvertently, support such
projects in their zeal to monitor and encourage managerial responses to political crises extends
these observations to once again emphasize the importance of the discursive politics of forms of
ecocritique.4 From this it is clear that a program of environmental management will have to
understand human ecology better than conventional international relations does if world politics
in the global city is going to seriously tackle environmental sustainability. Accelerating attempts
to manage planet Earth using technocratic, centralized modes of control, whether dressed up in
the language of environmental security or not, may simply exacerbate existing trends. The
frequent failures of resource management techniques premised on assumptions about stable
ecosystems are even more troubling in the case of claims about the necessity of managing the
whole planet. Given the inadequacy of many existing techniques, if these practices are to be
extended to the scale of the globe, the results are potentially disastrous. In the face of extreme
disruption, no comfort can be taken from biospheric thinking or the Gaia hypothesis. As James
Lovelock has pointed out, the question for humanity is not just the continued existence of
conditions fit for life on the planet. In the face of quite drastic structural change in the biosphere
in the past, the climatic conditions have remained within the limits that have assured the overall
survival of life-but not necessarily the conditions suitable for contemporary human civilization.
The political dilemma and the irony here is that the political alternative to global managerial
efforts, that of political decentralization and local control, which is often posited by green
theory, frequently remains in thrall to the same limited political imaginary of the domestic
analogy and avoids dealing with the hard questions of coordination by wishing them away in a
series of geographical sleights of hand coupled to the rearticulation of the discourses of political
idealism.5 Given that the ecological analyses of biospheric processes and the human ecology
discussions of biospheric people suggest both the global scope of processes of disruption and the
intrinsic instabilities of ecology, the importance of politics and the inadequacies of international
relations to grapple with its complexities is only emphasized in the face of these calls for either
global management or radical decentralization.6 The widespread failure of the omnivores to
acknowledge the consequences of their actions is a crucial part of these concerns, and this
responsibility is often obscured by the construction of security in terms of technological and
modernist managerial assertions of control within a geopolitical imaginary of states and
territorial entities, urbane civilization and primitive wilderness. But as the focus on human
ecology demonstrates, nature is not just there anymore; it is also unavoidably here, in part a
consequence of human activities, which, although often out of sight to urban residents, cannot
remain out of mind in considering matters of world politics and the radical endangerment of
human "being" as a result of the practices of securing modern modes of existence.
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Environment link
Construction of environmental threats produces securitizing measures but no real
change- no solvency
Buzan et al, 1998 (Barry Buzan, Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at the London
School of Economics and honorary professor at the University of Copenhagen and Jilin University, Ole
Waever, a professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science, University of
Copenhagen Jaap de Wilde, Professor of International Relations and World Politics at the University of
Groningen., 1998 “Security: A New Framework for Analysis” p.73-74 )
It should be emphasized that the political agenda does not only address the more sensational,
emotion manifestations of environmental issues but has also become a part of ordinary politics.
Political parties, departments, and many firms must formulate environmental polities as a part of
their ordinary activities, regardless of whether they believe in them. This situation constitutes
politicization rather than securitization. As long as environmental concerns fall outside
established economic and political practices and routines, their advocates tend to- and probably
must- overemphasize the overwhelming importance of those values and issues. Many
securitizing moves can be found in the reports that bridge both agenda, ranging from the Club of
Rome reports to the work of the Brudtland Commission. These reports present Silent Springtype lessons (de Wilde 1994: Carson 1962): It is not the actual disasters but their predictions that
lead to securitization. Concepts such as resource scarcity and sustainability have successfully
mobilized public concern. when picked up by governments and firms, however, these concerns
are often merely politicized: they constituted a subagenda within the larger political context. The
environmental sector displays more clearly than any other the propensity for dramatic
securitizing moves but with comparatively little successful securitization effects (i.e. those that
lead to extraordinary measures). this finding points to the unsettled standing of the
environmental discourse as such within public debate.
The blending of environmental and national impacts supports a securitized logic of
geopolitics, upholding the US as the only true global savior
Gearóid Ó Tuathail, Professor of Government and International Affairs and Director of the Masters of
Public and International Affairs program – Virginia Tech, Sept 1996. “AT THE END OF
GEOPOLITICS?.” http://www.nvc.vt.edu/toalg/Website/Publish/papers/End.htm
Even within the much remarked upon emergence of "environmental security" and the sacred visions
of green governmentalists like Al Gore, geography is post-territorial in-flowmations of ozone gases,
acid rain, industrial pollution, topsoil erosion, smog emissions, rainforest depletions and toxic spills.
Yet, the discourse of unveiled and primordial geographical regions persists also. In the place of
Mackinder's natural seats of power, Gore presents the "great genetic treasure map" of the globe,
twelve areas around the globe that "hold the greatest concentration of germplasm important to
modern agriculture and world food production." Robert Kaplan's unsentimental journey to the "ends
of the earth" where cartographic geographies are unravelling and fading has him disclosing a "real
world" of themeless violence and chaos, a world where "[w]e are not in control." The specter of a
second Cold War -- "a protracted struggle between ourselves and the demons of crime, population
pressure, environmental degradation, disease and cultural conflict" -- haunt his thoughts. This
equivocal environmentalization of strategic discourse (and visa versa) -- and the environmental
strategic think tanks like the World Watch Institute which promote it -- deserve problematization as
clusters of postmodern geopolitics, in this case congealments of geographical knowledge and green
governmentality designed to re-charge the American polity with a circumscribed global
environmental mission to save planet earth from destruction.
The affirmative harms expand the concept of security from traditional issues like war to
include the environment, this framing of the environment spills over massively expanding
government power and justifying militarism
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Waever 95 (Ole, Senior Researcher at the Center for Peace & Conflict Research, On Security,
p. 63-64) KSM
Central to the arguments for the conceptual innovation of environmental or ecological
security41 is its mobilization potential. As Buzan points out, the concept of national security
"has an enormous power as an instrument of social and political mobilization" and, therefore,
"the obvious reason for putting environmental issues into the security agenda is the possible
magnitude of the threats posed, and the need to mobilize urgent and unprecedented
responses to them. The security label is a useful way both of signalling danger and setting
priority, and for this reason alone it is likely to persist in the environmental debates."42 Several
analysts have, however, warned against securitization of the environmental issue for some of
these very reasons, and some of the arguments I present here fit into the principled issue of
securitization/desecuritization as discussed earlier in this chapter. A first argument against the
environment as a security issue, mentioned, for example, by Buzan, is that environmental
threats are generally unintentional.43 This, by itself, does not make the threats any less
serious, although it does take them out of the realm of will. As I pointed out earlier, the field
of security is constituted around relationships between wills: It has been, conventionally,
about the efforts of one will to (allegedly) override the sovereignty of another, forcing or
tempting the latter not to assert its will in defense of its sovereignty. The contest of concern,
in other words, is among strategic actors imbued with intentionality, and this has been the
logic around which the whole issue of security has been framed. In light of my earlier
discussion, in which I stressed that "security" is not a reflection of our everyday sense of the
word but, rather, a specific field with traditions, the jump to environmental security
becomes much larger than might appear at first to be the case. I do not present this as an
argument against the concept but, rather, as a way of illuminating or even explaining the
debate over it. Second in his critique of the notion of environmental security, Richard
Moss points out that the concept of "security" tends to imply that defense from
the problem is to be provided by the state: The most serious consequence of
thinking of global change and other environmental problems as threats to
security is that the sorts of centralized governmental responses by powerful
and autonomous state organizations that are appropriate for security threats
are inappropriate for addressing most environmental problems. When one is
reacting to the threat of organized external violence, military and
intelligence institutions are empowered to take the measures required to
repel the threat. By this same logic, when responding to environmental
threats, response by centralized regulatory agencies would seem to be logical.
Unfortunately, in most cases this sort of response is not the most efficient or
effective way of addressing environmental problems, particularly those that
have a global character.44 Moss goes on to warn that "the instinct for centralized state
responses to security threats is highly inappropriate for responding effectively to global
environmental problems."45 It might, he points out, even lead to militarization of
environmental problems .46 A third warning, not unrelated to the previous two, is the
tendency for the concept of security to produce thinking in terms of us-them, which could
then be captured by the logic of nationalism. Dan Deudney writes that "the 'nation' is not an
empty vessel or blank slate waiting to be filled or scripted, but is instead profoundly linked
to war and 'us vs. them' thinking ( . . . ) Of course, taking the war and 'us vs. them' thinking
out of nationalism is a noble goal. But this may be like taking sex out of 'rock and roll,' a
project whose feasibility declines when one remembers that 'rock and roll' was originally
coined as a euphemism for sex."47 The tendency toward "us vs. them" thinking, and the
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general tradition of viewing threats as coming from outside a state's own borders, are, in this
instance, also likely to direct attention away from one's own contributions to environmental
problems." Finally, there is the more political warning that the concept of security is basically
defensive in nature, a status quo concept defending that which is, even though it does not
necessarily deserve to be protected. In a paradoxical way, this politically conservative bias
has also led to warnings by some that the concept of environmental security could become a
dangerous tool of the "totalitarian left," which might attempt to relaunch itself on the basis of environmental collectivism." Certainly, there is some risk that the logic of ecology, with its
religious potentials and references to holistic categories, survival and the linked significance
of everything, might easily lend itself to totalitarian projects, where also the science of
ecology has focused largely on how to constrain, limit, and control activities in the name of
the environment.50
Linking ecology to security misrepresents the nature and significance of
environmentalism—environmental problems are diffuse and long-term while
wars are concentrated and violent
Dalby 2 (Simon, professor of geography and political economy at Carleton University
in Ottawa, Environmental Security, p. 16-17)
Discussions of the relationships between environment and security didn't start in 1989, although
at least in the United States it is fair to say that the topic emerged in its contemporary form then."
Against the backdrop of the long summer drought of 1988, alarmist reports of huge tropical forest
destruction, especially in Brazil, renewed concern about global climatic change and stratospheric
ozone depletion, the relaxation of the cold war, and the drastic rethinking of Soviet security
policy, policy discussions in Washington were ripe for some new topics and thinking. Just as
Francis Fukuyama was declaring the end of history and the triumph of liberalism, the environment,
too, became part of the foreign policy discussion and the focus for discussions of
endangerment.65 In 1989 Norman Meyers published an article linking environment and security in
Foreign Policy, and ,`Jessica Tuchman Mathews published one in Foreign Affairs that suggested that
resources and population issues mattered as foreign policy priorities and should be incorporated in a
reformulated understanding of security. Mike Renner's Worldwatch paper of that same year also
linked environment and security.66In Britain Neville Brown published a paper on climate change and
conflict in Survival, the journal of the influential Lute of Strategic Studies; Peter Gleick reversed the
process of introducing environment into security considerations by writing about national security in
the journal Climatic Change. Arthur Westing, the leading researcher on questions of the
environmental disruptions caused by warfare, contributed a discussion of a comprehensive formulation of security. Josh Karliner suggested that the environmental difficulties in Central America
amounted to a different form of warfare there.67 National sovereignty and the transboundary responsibilities for the global environment were also the topic for articles.68 Special issues of the journals
Millennium and the Fletcher Forum on International Affairs followed in 1990. A little later Gwyn
Prins introduced the discussion to wider British audiences in a book and television documentary with
the memorably apt title of Top Guns and Toxic Whales.69 Daniel Deudney was quick to pen a paper
arguing that all this was not necessarily a good idea. In what has probably become the most cited
paper in this whole discussion, he argued that linking security to ecology required a number of
serious mismatches of means and ends as well as a misconstrual of the nature and significance
of environmentalism:70 He argued that environmental problems are often diffuse and long-term
while wars are concentrated and violent. Polarizing discourses to mobilize populations against
identified—antagonists is not similar to the kinds of social changes needed to deal with
environmental difficulties. With rapid increases in international trade supplying raw materials
from a diversity of sources, most resource conflicts were unlikely to lead to warfare. Before the
debate had developed very far, one of the arguments Deudney made, that military institutions'
frequently dreadful record on environmental matters in the past did not bode well for their
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handling matters of ecology in the future, was powerfully reinforced by pictures of blazing oil
wells in Kuwait in the latter stages of the Gulf War in 1991.
The blending of environmental and national impacts supports a securitized logic of geopolitics,
upholding the US as the only true global savior
Gearóid Ó Tuathail, Professor of Government and International Affairs and Director of the Masters of Public and International
Affairs program – Virginia Tech, Sept 1996. “AT THE END OF GEOPOLITICS?.”
http://www.nvc.vt.edu/toalg/Website/Publish/papers/End.htm
Even within the much remarked upon emergence of "environmental security" and the sacred visions
of green governmentalists like Al Gore, geography is post-territorial in-flowmations of ozone gases,
acid rain, industrial pollution, topsoil erosion, smog emissions, rainforest depletions and toxic spills.
Yet, the discourse of unveiled and primordial geographical regions persists also. In the place of
Mackinder's natural seats of power, Gore presents the "great genetic treasure map" of the globe,
twelve areas around the globe that "hold the greatest concentration of germplasm important to
modern agriculture and world food production." Robert Kaplan's unsentimental journey to the "ends
of the earth" where cartographic geographies are unravelling and fading has him disclosing a "real
world" of themeless violence and chaos, a world where "[w]e are not in control." The specter of a
second Cold War -- "a protracted struggle between ourselves and the demons of crime, population
pressure, environmental degradation, disease and cultural conflict" -- haunt his thoughts. This
equivocal environmentalization of strategic discourse (and visa versa) -- and the environmental
strategic think tanks like the World Watch Institute which promote it -- deserve problematization as
clusters of postmodern geopolitics, in this case congealments of geographical knowledge and green
governmentality designed to re-charge the American polity with a circumscribed global
environmental mission to save planet earth from destruction.
The institutionalization of environmental fears expands securitization into the social realm,
constructing whole populations as threats to be eliminated while ignoring degradation’s true cause
Barry Buzan et al, prof – Int’l Studes, University of Westminster, 1998. Security: A New Framework for Analysis. (Ole
Waever, senior research fellow, COPRI, and Jaap de Wilde, lecturer – IR, University of Twente)
At first sight, there seems to be more room for natural hazards of the first type of threat: Nature
threatens civilization, and this is securitized. Many societies are structurally exposed to recurring
extreme natural events, such as earthquakes, volcanoes, cyclones, floods, droughts, and epidemics.
They are vulnerable these events, and much of heir history is about this continuous struggle with
nature. The risks involved are often explicitly securitized and institutionalized. In the Netherlands,
for example, protection against the sea and flooding rivers is a high-ranking national interest; the
same goes for protection against earthquakes in Japan.
As soon as some form of securitization or politization occurs, however—that is, when some
measure of human responsibilities replaces the role of fate of God—even this group of conflicts
tends to develop a social character (the second type of threat). Following the river floods in the low
countries in 1995, the debate in the Netherlands was about political responsibility for he dikes: Who
was to blame, and what should be done? I Japan, following the Kobe earthquake in early 1995,
designers of seismological early warning systems and of construction techniques, as well as
governmental civil emergency plans, were under fire. Where the means to handle threats are
thought to exist, the security logic works less against nature than against the failure of the human
systems seen as responsible. Moreover, with links suspected between human activities and
“natural” catastrophes, the distinction between natural and manmade hazards is becoming blurred.
Therefore, except for cases in which people undergo natural hazards without any question, the logic
that environment security is about “threats without enemies” (Prins 1993) is often misleading.
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Link – Environment -- AT: Environmental Security Good
The aff is about environmental conflict, not environmental security– they
privilege resource scarcity and national security. Only our alternative
recognizes the role of consumption.
Detraz and Betsill 9—Nicole Detraz Poli Sci @ Memphis and Michele Betsill Poli Sci @ Colorado
St. [“Climate Change and Environmental Security: For Whom the Discourse Shifts” International Studies
Perspectives 10 p. 307-308]
From the environmental security perspective, policies should be targeted at both human behavior
and natural processes, as each of these contribute to environmental insecurity for humans. Human
behaviors that contribute to environmental insecurity include things such as high consumption
patterns (Barnett 2001; Princen, Maniates, and Conca 2002) and high population levels9 (Pirages 1997;
Worku 2007). Natural processes discussed in this discourse include natural disasters or biophysical
alterations such as changes in precipitation levels, the growth or decline of species populations, or changes
in levels of pathogenic microorganisms (Pirages and DeGeest 2004). It is important to note that many of
these natural processes can also be worsened by human behaviors such as consumption and population
growth. However, despite the potential contributions that humans make to processes that lead to
environmental insecurity, there is a different degree of intentionality in the environmental security
discourse when compared with the environmental conflict discourse. In the environmental conflict
discourse, humans have a high degree of intentionality. This means that segments of society
knowingly come into violent contact with each other because of the presence or absence of a
resource. From an environmental security perspective, humans are rarely seen as intentionally contributing
to the insecurity of others. Rather, they act in ways that are consistent with the practices of their societies.
Scholars working within the environmental security discourse are likely to advocate policies that
deal with not only the short-term instances of environmental insecurity but also the longer-term
strategies for combating processes of environmental change. These policies must prioritize human
security over national security, meaning that the security of humans must be the main concern of
security policy. This is in contrast to policies advocated within the environmental conflict
discourse, which tend to have direct links to the security of states themselves either over or in
conjunction with the security of individuals. Environmental security policies will often involve direct
action of states but will also have a role for other actors. According to this storyline, states have a
responsibility to protect the security of their populations, but in some cases this will mean allocating
authority to achieve this objective to other actors—either above or below the state.10 The environmental
security discourse focuses on a wide variety of threats to humans due to environmental change. Policy
making will be directed at vulnerable populations where vulnerability is seen to stem from both human
behaviors and natural processes. This may require a portfolio of governance mechanisms at different scales,
ranging from the local to the global, and involving both state and nonstate actors. It may include policies
aimed at minimizing human activities that lead to environmental degradation as well as enhancing the
ability of human populations to adapt to environmental change. In sum, the environmental security and
environmental conflict discourses represent two distinct ways of conceptualizing the relationship between
security and the environment. We contend that the environmental conflict discourse is more than simply a
part of the broader environmental security discourse. As discussed above, each has its own storylines or
narratives about these issues. Those who use an environmental security discourse introduce a broad range
of threats and vulnerabilities into their analysis of environmental change, focus on the negative effects to
human populations, and envision a broad array of policy solutions. In contrast, the environmental
conflict discourse uses a narrower set of storylines to describe the link between security and the
environment (emphasizing conflict), privileges the security of the state over human populations,
and proposes a more limited set of policy solutions aimed at avoiding conflict over resources
rather than eliminating the sources of resource scarcity in the first place.
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Climate conflict framing focuses on narrow adaptation and militaristic
preparation versus poor-states.
Detraz and Betsill 9—Nicole Detraz Poli Sci @ Memphis and Michele Betsill Poli Sci @ Colorado
St. [“Climate Change and Environmental Security: For Whom the Discourse Shifts” International Studies
Perspectives 10 p. 313-314]
A security dialog is an understandable choice for those who wish to raise the profile of climate change on
the global agenda. As mentioned earlier, the inclusion of environmental concerns into security debates was
designed to raise the environment into the area of ‘‘high politics.’’ Many scholars and policy makers view
climate change as an issue worth all of the attention that is typically bestowed on traditional security issues.
In fact, many are convinced of the security implications of climate change—although how security is
defined varies. At the same time, there are others who question whether framing climate change as a
security issue is beneficial. In a field that is marked by complexity, adding security to the debate may only
serve to confuse matters. As discussed throughout this paper, discourses have implications for the way a
problem like climate change is defined and the range of policy options that are considered. Ultimately, we
believe that a discursive shift to the environmental conflict perspective, even if limited to the Security
Council, would be counterproductive in the development of a global response to climate change. Our
primary concern is that a shift to the environmental conflict discourse would result in a narrowing
of policy options focused on a particular form of adaptation—avoiding conflict—and that other
issues of human security as well as adaptation and mitigation strategies for addressing those
issues could fall off the agenda. One of the problems of relying on the environmental conflict discourse
to understand the security implications of climate change is that the climate issue is different than most
other issues discussed in the literature that links conflict and the environment. Climate change is a
more abstract phenomenon than many other environmental issues and will be experienced in
different ways. While there is some variation in the time horizon expected for climate change, the pace
will be relatively slow but the impacts will spread to a variety of environmental arenas, including water
availability, food availability, and so on. (IPCC 2007). This means that climate change is more likely to act
as a threat multiplier than as a primary source of insecurity. This presents different issues than those often
tackled by the existing environmental conflict cases, which tend to be focused on only one ‘‘resource’’ at a
time.17 According to Purvis and Busby (2004:68), ‘‘the connection between climate change and the
outbreak of violence will unlikely be as strong as when natural resources can be exploited for quick
financial reward.’’ None of this is to suggest that environmental conflict is unlikely to occur as a result of
climate change. On the contrary, there is a possibility that groups in society will conflict over resources if
climate change results in resource scarcity.18 Our point is that this is only one concern in the climate
change debate and quite probably not the most pressing concern. Another issue with the environmental
conflict discourse is the tendency to locate the authority for solutions and action in the military
apparatus of states. Allenby (2000:13) claims that the national security community in most
countries is conservative, insular, heavily focused on military threats and challenges, secretive,
and powerful; it also tends to focus on short-term, obvious problems. Culturally, such security
communities are among the least likely to embrace environmental considerations, and, when they do so,
only in a mission-oriented context. Scholars have long questioned whether armed forces are capable of
meeting the challenges posed by environmental change (Barnett 2003). Liotta and Shearer (2007:133)
argue against the idea that climate change in particular should be met with a militarized response: ‘‘The
problems are too broadly distributed and the consequences are too deeply penetrating for such an
approach to be successful.’’ These positions point out the tendency of militarized solutions to be
narrowly defined and potentially top-down. If climate change requires a behavioral shift to achieve
lasting solutions, then narrowly defined militarized solutions are unlikely to be sufficient responses. These
problems are in addition to the fact that militaries around the world are responsible for major environmental
damage, both through wartime and peacetime activities (Paterson 2001; Liotta and Shearer 2007). It may be
counterproductive to depend on the military apparatus of states as a potential solution to environmental
problems when they are simultaneously contributing to those same problems. Lastly, a shift to the
environmental conflict discourse may lead to the continuation of the status quo—meaning that
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those who are currently advantaged in society will suffer much less from the impacts of climate
change as well as the strategies for mitigating climate change and vice versa. Norda°s and Gleditsch
(2007:635) claim that the security scenarios may well be constructed with the benign intention of arousing
the world to greater attention to a global issue. But they could also lead to greater emphasis on a national
security response to whatever degree of climate change is seen as unavoidable. This would not be helpful to
the primary victims of climate change. This is true both in terms of states and segments of society. IPCC
reports have claimed that the negative impacts of climate change are expected to fall disproportionately on
poor countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America (Biermann and Dingwerth 2004; Park 2005).
Additionally, there are different levels of vulnerability to climate change. Those impacted most are likely to
be those who depend on natural resources and ecosystem services for their livelihoods (Barnett and Adger
2007). This includes agricultural-based economies in particular. If climate change is understood as a
security issue tied to potential for conflict, then these poor states are likely to be seen as a military threat
first and foremost. This may result in military strategies, like ecological intervention, rather than more
humanitarian strategies to help those suffering from environmental insecurity. A related concern is the
potential for disadvantaged populations within states to be targeted differently for climate change solutions.
Paterson (1996) suggests that as countries are hit by the negative impacts of climate change, existing
ethnic, religious, or other divides may play a role in decision-making processes, and governments may
favor dominant groups in decisions. Nondominant groups could be classified as the ‘‘aggressor’’ in
an environmental conflict situation and therefore become targets of environmental conflict
solutions implemented by the state.
Climate security discourse authorizes technocratic top-down politics.
Methmann and Rothe 12—Chris Methmann, Research Associate Poli Sci Inst. @ Hamburg and
Delf Rothe IR PhD Candidate @ Hamburg [“Politics for the day after tomorrow: The logic of apocalypse
in global climate politics” Security Dialogue 43 p. 334-337]
Security: The war of all against nothing The third case study involves the UN Security Council debate
on climate change in 2007. This represents an extreme case, since here securitization is most likely to result
in exceptional measures. At first sight, the discourse here follows the script of securitization in the
Copenhagen School’s sense, articulating climate change as a source of conflict among states. However, our
analysis, as illustrated in Figure 2, reveals a much more fine-grained picture. To be precise, it actually
presents two different versions of securitization, drawing on two different antagonisms. On the one hand,
there is an antagonism constructed between first-order threats—that is, the direct impacts of a changing
climate—and all vulnerable regions, countries or communities. The security framing here is one of
human security, as climate change threatens the livelihoods, food supplies, water security, etc. of
the vulnerable. On the other hand, these hot spots or zones of crisis can become a source of danger
themselves. The human insecurity in vulnerable regions, then, is articulated with what could be called a
neo-Malthusian ‘climate-conflict discourse’ (Trombetta, 2008; Detraz and Betsill, 2009). This states, on the
one hand, that vulnerable regions suffering from the impacts of climate change will be conflict-prone, as
‘they lack the knowledge, capacity and resources to deal with it’ (Heller in UN Security Council, 2007b:
19). Environmental degradation and the resulting scarcity of resources are understood as an additional and
novel driver for conflicts (see Appendix). Taken together, these ideas constitute a security discourse in
which ‘the vulnerable are becoming dangerous’ (Oels, 2012)—that is, a threat for national security
in the Western world or even for international security. The vulnerable thus become the
dangerous enemies in the sense of the logic of security. And this clearly implies the adoption of a
preemptive logic and the exceptional measures of interstate conflict and military intervention.
Yet, even in the security field, preemptive or other security measures, which can be found for example in
disaster management (see Figure 2), only play a minor role. The reason for this is that the two articulations
of climate change and security are heavily permeated by a different storyline, one that follows the logic of
apocalypse (the fantasmatic dimension presented in Figure 2). Also in this case most articulations stress
the universality of the threat, resulting in an antagonistic frontier between humanity and dangerous
climate change that is characteristic for the apocalypse (see above). And this explains why an exceptional
rhetoric in the case of climate change is not linked with the adoption of exceptional measures. While the
climate/humanity antagonism is still most dominantly couched in metaphors of war (see Appendix), the
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unification of humanity implies that this particular war is fought against an entirely spectral enemy: ‘this is
not a struggle against anyone’ (Weisleder in UN Security Council, 2007b: 32). And this war of all against
nothing is the crucial point for the logic of apocalypse that connects security and risk in this
particular case and thus excludes exceptional measures—because ‘our conflict is not being fought
with guns and missiles but with weapons from everyday life—chimney stacks and exhaust pipes’ (Pita in
UN Security Council, 2007b: 8). The antagonism created by a logic of apocalypse does not just
replace or transform the other security articulations: it also links them in crucial ways. As Figure 2
shows, the most prominent demand articulated in the discourse is prevention. And as second-order threats
like ‘uncontrollable migratory flows’ (see Figure 2) mainly evolve under conditions of an apocalyptic
climate change, mitigation becomes the best measure of conflict prevention. Again, there is a
dichotomization between a linear development (e.g. normal migratory patterns) and a state of chaos.
Therefore, also the climate-security discourse heavily promotes the political machinery of the UN
Framework Convention and its Kyoto Protocol (Churkin in UN Security Council, 2007b: 17)—just as
‘appropriate incentives, public–private partnerships, low-carbon emitting technologies and innovative
solutions’ (Kryzhanivskyi in UN Security Council, 2007b: 4). At the same time, also adaptation becomes a
form of conflict prevention, as it lessens the direct impacts of climate change on the vulnerable. The
discourse thus articulates a risk-management approach similar to that in the field of adaptation, which
revolves around the concepts of vulnerability, resilience and community (see, for example, Hill in UN
Security Council, 2007b: 6; (Koenders in UN Security Council, 2007a: 22). The hegemonic discourse here
takes up the calls for supporting the vulnerable with adaptation and constructs a responsibility on the part of
the West (see Appendix and Figure 2). This responsibility is transformed into a pastoral relation,
taking the form of government at a distance through empowerment, stakeholder participation and
self responsibilization of local communities. Also in the field of global security governance we can
see the impacts of the ‘banality of the apocalypse’ (De Goede and Randalls, 2009: 872). Even though
climate change is commonly seen as one of the major threats to international peace and security,
this does not result in the adoption of exceptional measures—not in preemptive geo-engineering, not
in a global climate response force, not in military pre-warning systems, etc. Rather, the (political)
machine of mitigation governance and the preparedness of the vulnerable become the
cornerstones of a broadened security agenda. Conclusion The starting point of this article was the
paradoxical simultaneity of the logic of risk and the logic of security in global discourses of climate
change. Drawing on Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of hegemony, we have argued that risk and security have
been articulated in a way that may be termed the logic of apocalypse: creating a universal threat for the
entire planet, radically undermining the possibility of a future as such, mobilizing religious apocalyptic
imageries and emphasizing an antiepistemology. Our empirical analysis in three cases—those of
mitigation, adaptation and the security sector—reveals that this logic is deeply ingrained in global
discourses of climate change. Yet, apocalypse is the hegemonic way of articulating climate change as a
security problem. And, following our theoretical argument, this logic of apocalypse results coherently in
practices of risk management: mitigation as precautionary risk management, adaptation as investing in
preparedness, and security not as preemption but as a combination of the former two. In the face of the
apocalypse, politicians seem to be too small and ‘human’ to resolve the dawning crisis—hence,
responsibility is handed over to the arcane and obscure practices and rationalities of risk
management. To conclude, we suggest that our study be read as outlining a contribution to critical security
studies that might be termed the security paradox. It may indeed be a recurrent pattern that securitization, as
the Copenhagen School holds, results in exceptional measures. However, there are definitely some cases in
which securitization is so overwhelming that it prompts a counterintuitive result: the greater and more
apocalyptic the perceived threat, the greater the resulting distrust in political actors and
exceptional measures, and thus the smaller and technocratic the political measures; here,
securitization is so exaggerated that it prompts the opposite: routine and micropractices of risk
management. By contrast, for those working in the Foucauldian tradition, this piece could draw attention to
the fact that even the most mundane practices of risk management are politically supported and discursively
sustained by images of an overwhelming apocalyptic threat. In other words, our work supports the
emerging insight that risk and security are two sides of the same coin—rather than two very different
animals.
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Link -- Failed States
Failed states are an entirely constructed threat with no basis in reality. Their discourse shapes policy
goals and justifies global military intervention. It should be rejected.
Logan and Preble 10 Justin is associate director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. He holds a master’s degree in
international relations from the University of Chicago and a bachelor’s degree in international relations from American University and
Christopher is director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. He holds a PhD in history from Temple University and a BA in
history from George Washington University. “Washington’s Newest Bogeyman Debunking the Fear of Failed States” Strategic
Studies Quarterly, Summer 2010
Given the growing acceptance of arguments about failed states and the fact that these ideas have begun to affect
US foreign policy, it is striking how ill-defined the terms of debate have been. How can we measure state failure?
What are the historical correlations between the attributes of failed states and the supposed security threats they pose? Below we show
that by the established definitions of state failure and a reasonable interpretation of the word “threat,” failed states almost always miss
the mark. Impressionism as Social Science A survey of the formal studies of state failure reveals a methodological
wasteland. Analysts have created a number of listings of failed states, which have, in fairness, overlapped considerably; all are
populated by poor countries, many of which have been wracked by interstate or civil violence.48 However, instead of adhering to
basic social-scientific standards of inquiry, in which questions or puzzles are observed and then theories are described and tested using
clearly defined independent and dependent variables, analysts began by drawing up a category—failed state—and then attempted to
create data sets from which theoretical inferences could be induced. To take one prominent case, the authors of the State
Failure Task Force Report contracted by the Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Intelligence chose to adjust
their definition of “failed state” after their initial criteria did not produce an adequate data set for the
quantitative tests the researchers wanted to perform. After dramatically expanding the definition, the task
force produced almost six times more countries that could be coded “failed” as compared with their
original criteria and then proceeded with their statistical analysis. They justified this highly questionable
decision on the judgment that “events that fall beneath [the] total-collapse threshold often pose challenges
to US foreign policy as well.”49 Subsequently, the task force changed its name to the “Political Instability Task Force” and
appeared to back away from the term failed state.50 Beyond methodological shortcomings, the lists of failed states reveal only that
there are many countries plagued by severe problems. The top 10 states in the 2009 Fund for Peace/Foreign Policy magazine Failed
States Index include two countries the United States occupies (Iraq and Afghanistan), one country without any central government to
speak of (Somalia), four poor African states (Zimbabwe, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Central African
Republic), two resource-rich but [ 26 ] Washington’s Newest Bogeyman unstable African countries (Sudan and Guinea) and a
nuclear-armed Muslim country, population 176 million (Pakistan). The sheer diversity of the countries on the lists makes
clear that few policy conclusions could be drawn about a country based on its designation as a failed state.
In fact, what has happened is that analysts have seized on an important single data point—Afghanistan in the 1990s and
2000s—and used it to justify a focus on failed states more broadly. Because Afghanistan met anyone’s definition
of failed state and because it clearly contained a threat, analysts concluded en masse that failed states were
threatening. When confronted with the reality that the countries regularly included on lists of failed states include such strategic
non-entities as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, and East Timor, advocates of focusing on state failure routinely point
back at the single case that can be justified directly on US national security grounds: Afghanistan.51 Even in Afghanistan,
however, remedying the condition of “state failure” would not have eliminated the threat, and eliminating the
threat—by killing or capturing Osama bin Laden and his confederates—would not have remedied the
“failure.” The fact that expansive claims about the significance of state failure have been used to market
studies of the subject, when viewed in light of the diverse and mostly nonthreatening states deemed
“failed,” leaves the impression of a bait and switch. For instance, the 2007 update of the Failed States Index promises on
the magazine’s cover to explain “why the world’s weakest countries pose the greatest danger.” The opening lines of the article declare
that failed states “aren’t just a danger to themselves. They can threaten the progress and stability of countries half a world away.”
Strikingly, then, the article does little to back up or even argue these claims. It instead shrugs that “failing states are a diverse lot” and
that “there are few easy answers to their troubles.” By 2009, the index was conceding that “greater risk of failure is not
always synonymous with greater consequences of failure,” and that the state failure-terrorism link “is less clear than
many have come to assume.”52 Given these concessions undermining the idea that state failure is
threatening, one wonders why scholars continue to study failed states at all . As seen above, the countries on lists of
failed states are so diverse that it is difficult to draw any conclusions about a state’s designation as failed. But the purpose, one would
think, of creating a new category of states would be to unify countries that share attributes that can inform either how we think about
these states or how we craft policies toward these states. Instead, the scholarship on state failure has arbitrarily grouped
together countries that have so little in common that neither academic research nor policy work should be
influenced by this concept. Despite repeated claims to the contrary, learning that a task force has deemed a particular state
“failed” is not particularly useful. Start with the Conclusions and Work Backward Existing scholarship on state failure seems to
indicate that the conclusion led to the analysis, rather than vice versa. Scholars who argue that “failed state” is a
meaningful category and/or indicative of threat provide a rationale for American interventionism around
the globe. Given the arbitrary creation of the category “failed state” and the extravagant claims about its
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significance, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that research on failed states constitutes, as one analyst
put it, “an eminently political discourse, counseling intervention, trusteeship, and the abandonment of the
state form for wide swaths of the globe.”53 The policy proposals offered by state failure theorists certainly meet this
description. In 2003 retired diplomats James Hooper and Paul Williams argued for what they called “earned sovereignty”—the idea
being that target states would need to climb back into the good graces of the intervening power to regain their sovereignty. In some
cases, this would mean that domestic governments would perform whatever functions were allowed by the intervener, but other duties
would be retained by the outside actor. “The element of shared sovereignty is quite flexible . . . as well as the time frame of shared
sovereignty. . . . In some instances, it may be indefinite and subject to the fulfillment of certain conditions as opposed to specified
timelines.”54 The premise seems to be that countries will be returned to the control of their indigenous populations when the
intervener decides it is appropriate. James Fearon and David Laitin, both political science professors at Stanford University, promote a
new doctrine that “may be described as neotrusteeship, or more provocatively, postmodern imperialism.”55 As they see it, this policy
should not carry the stigma of nineteenth- or twentieth-century imperialism. “[W]e are not advocating or endorsing imperialism with
the connotation of exploitation and permanent rule by foreigners.” [ 28 ] Washington’s Newest Bogeyman On the contrary, Fearon
and Laitin explain, “Postmodern imperialism may have exploitative aspects, but these are to be condemned.”56 While perhaps not
intentionally exploitative, postmodern imperialism certainly does appear to entail protracted and quasi-permanent rule by foreigners.
Fearon and Laitin admit that in postmodern imperialism, “the search for an exit strategy is delusional, if this means a plan under which
full control of domestic security is to be handed back to local authorities by a certain date in the near future.”57 To the contrary: “for
some cases complete exit by the interveners may never be possible”; rather, the endgame is “to make the national level of government
irrelevant for people in comparison to the local and supranational levels.”58 Thus, in Fearon and Laitin’s model, nation building may
not be an appropriate term; their ideas would more accurately be described as nation ending, replacing national governments with a
supranational governing order. Stephen D. Krasner, director of the State Department’s policy planning staff under George W. Bush
and a leading advocate of focusing the department increasingly on state building, believes that the “rules of conventional sovereignty .
. . no longer work, and their inadequacies have had deleterious consequences for the strong as well as the weak.”59 Krasner concludes
that to resolve this dilemma, “Alternative institutional arrangements supported by external actors, such as de facto trusteeships and
shared sovereignty, should be added to the list of policy options.”60 He is explicit about the implications of those policies and admits
that in a trusteeship, international actors would remain in control indefinitely. The intervening power would maintain the prerogative
of revoking the target’s sovereignty and should make no assumptions of withdrawal in the short or medium term.61 Krasner’s candor
about the implications of his policy views, however, was not equaled by a willingness to label them accurately. “For policy purposes,
it would be best to refer to shared sovereignty as ‘partnerships.’ This would more easily let policymakers engage in organized
hypocrisy, that is, saying one thing and doing another. . . . Shared sovereignty or partnerships would make no claim to being an
explicit alternative to conventional sovereignty. It would allow actors to obfuscate the fact that their behavior would be inconsistent
with their principles.”62 Development experts with an interest in state failure agree that seizing political control of weak states is the
answer. Paul Collier, for example, writes that outside powers should take on the responsibility of providing [ 29 ] public goods in
failed states, including security guarantees to indigenous governments that pass Western democracy tests, and the removal of
guarantees coupled with the encouragement of coups against governments that fail such tests.63 In part, these sweeping admonitions
to simply seize politico-military control of the countries in question result from the failure to determine which of the “failedness”
indicators should be addressed first or whether there is any order at all. While some studies have proposed hierarchies of objectives,
starting with security and ending with development,64 it is clear that for many analysts, the causal arrows zigzag across the diagram.
Each metric is tangled up with others, forcing those arguing for intervention to advocate simultaneous execution of a number of
extraordinarily ambitious tasks. David Kilcullen lists “cueing and synchronization of development, governance, and security efforts,
building them in a simultaneous, coordinated way that supports the political strategy” as only one of eight “best practices” for
counterinsurgents.65 In Afghanistan, the flow chart of the December 2009 strategy seeking to repair that state looked more like a
parody:66 Discussing this dilemma of interlocking objectives in the context of Afghanistan, Rory Stewart remarks that:
Policymakers perceive Afghanistan through the categories of counter-terrorism, counter-insurgency, statebuilding and economic development. These categories are so closely linked that you can put them in almost
any sequence or combination. You need to defeat the Taliban in order to build a state and you need to build
a state in order to defeat the Taliban. There cannot be security without development, or development
without security. If you have the Taliban you have terrorists, if you don’t have development you have
terrorists, and as Obama informed the New Yorker, “If you have ungoverned spaces, they become havens
for terrorists.”67 Not only do all bad things go together in these analyses, but it also becomes difficult if not
impossible to discern which objective should be the primary focus of state-building efforts. Similarly, on the
issue of state building and democracy, Francis Fukuyama informs readers that “before you can have a democracy, you must have a
state, but to have a legitimate and therefore durable state you must have democracy.” Acknowledging the circularity of this argument,
Fukuyama offered only the rather unsatisfying concession that the two ends “are intertwined, but the precise sequencing
of how and when to build the distinct but interlocking institutions needs very careful thought .”68 This is a
platitude and should be cold comfort to policymakers who are being urged forward by the same experts to
perform these ambitious tasks. The High Costs of Targeting State Failure We have argued that the “failed state”
category is a vacuous construct and that the countries frequently referred to as failed states are not
inherently threatening. For those whom we have not convinced, however, we now examine the historical record and attempt to
examine the costs of a national security policy that placed a high priority on attempting to fix failed states . It is of
course impossible to determine the precise cost of any mission beforehand. Historically, however, such operations have been
extremely costly and difficult. In a study for the RAND Corporation, James Dobbins and his coauthors attempt to draft a ruleof-thumb measure for the costs of nation building in a hypothetical scenario involving a country of five million people and $500 per
capita GDP.69 For less ambitious “peacekeeping” missions, they calculate the need for 1.6 foreign troops and 0.2 foreign police per
1,000 population, and $1.5 billion per year. In the more ambitious [ 31 ] Justin Logan and Christopher Preble “peace enforcement”
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scenarios, they figure 13 foreign troops and 1.6 foreign police per 1,000 population, and $15.6 billion per year.70 Curiously, though,
Dobbins et al. approach this problem by deriving average figures from eight historical nation building (“peace enforcement”)
missions, five of which they had coded in a previous study to indicate whether or not they had been successful. One of these (Japan)
they coded as “very successful,” two (Somalia and Haiti) were “not successful,” one (Bosnia) was a “mixed” result, and one (Kosovo)
was a “modest success.”71 The authors then simply averaged the costs of these missions and deemed the resulting figures to be a rule
of thumb.72 It is unclear why future missions should be based on historical experience when the historical examples used to derive the
figures produced successes, failures, and results in between. Our methodological criticism notwithstanding, even taking Dobbins et al.
on their own terms reveals how remarkably costly it is to attempt to fix failed states. Using the model laid out in Dobbins et al., we
calculated the cost of nation building in three countries: Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan. A peace enforcement mission in Yemen
would cost roughly $78 billion the first year, whereas a peacekeeping mission would cost roughly $12 billion the first year. Similar
missions in Somalia, with a smaller population and a smaller per capita GDP, would only cost around $30 billion and $3 billion,
respectively.73 In the case of a larger country, like Pakistan, the costs would be significantly higher. A peace enforcement operation in
Pakistan would cost approximately $582 billion the first year, while a peacekeeping operation would cost around $81 billion. In all
these examples, the peace enforcement numbers contain very high military costs. According to Dobbins’ model, a peace enforcement
operation in Pakistan would require more than two million international soldiers, costing about $200,000 each.74 Analysts Frederick
Kagan and Michael O’Hanlon suggest that even for the minimal task of trying to tip the balance of an intra-Pakistani conflict, the
“international community” would need to contribute between 100,000 and 200,000 troops (only 50,000–100,000 of whom would be
US, they suggest), and this represents “the best of all the worst-case scenarios.”75 As quickly becomes clear, intervening in any of the
frequently mentioned failed states implies significant costs. As Kilcullen observes in the context of counterinsurgency, a corps of state
builders should be available to stay in the country indefinitely. He proposes that “key personnel (commanders, ambassadors, political
staffs, [ 32 ] Washington’s Newest Bogeyman aid mission chiefs, key advisers, and intelligence officers) in a counterinsurgency
campaign should be there ‘for the duration’.”76 But it is unlikely that Western governments possess large pools of workers willing
and well-equipped to deploy to Bangladesh, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or Haiti “for the duration.” Western civil
services—and even most, if not all, Western militaries—are not comprised of a separate class of citizens who live their lives in farflung locales, away from family and country, indefinitely. It is for this reason that, in addition to the structural changes highlighted
above, a number of policy reports have called for radical overhauls of the national security establishment in the United States so that it
can be better tailored to repair failed states.77 Failed Thinking, Not Failed States From new military doctrines and budget priorities, to
state-building offices in the State Department, to the myriad proposals for transforming the entire US national security establishment,
a long-term strategy of fixing failed states would entail dramatic change and high costs. More
appropriate—and far less costly—than such dramatic changes would be a fundamental rethinking of the
role of nation building and the relevance of state failure to national security planning. However, this does not
appear likely. Thrust forward by the claims of threat, but unequipped with the expensive tools necessary for
the task, policymakers look likely to persist in the failed approach to the subject that they have applied in
recent years. If we intend to seriously embark on a plan to build nations, we must be prepared to bear heavy costs in time, money,
and lives—or we must be prepared to fail. Moreover, no matter how evenhanded the United States may attempt to be,
if US personnel are on the ground in dangerous parts of the world, Americans could be forced to choose
sides in other countries’ internal conflicts, and the nation could become entangled militarily when its vital
interests are not at stake.78 For instance, if our nation builders are killed in the line of duty, will there be a US
military response? It seems likely that Congress and the American people would demand military
retaliation, and at that point, the United States could find itself facing a choice of either a spiraling military
escalation (as in Vietnam) or a humiliating retreat (as in Somalia). Both of those prospects are troubling but may emerge if
policymakers pursue a strategy of fixing failed states without broad public support. The essence of strategy is
effectively balancing ends, ways, and means. Squandering scarce resources on threats that exist primarily in
the minds of policymakers is one indication that, as Richard Betts has pointed out, “US policymakers have lost the
ability to think clearly about defense policy.”79 The entire concept of state failure is flawed. The countries
that appear on the various lists of failed states reveal that state failure almost never produces meaningful
threats to US national security. Further, attempting to remedy state failure—that is, embarking on an ambitious
project of nation or state building—would be extremely costly and of dubious utility. Given these
connected realities, policymakers would be wise to cast off the entire concept of state failure and to
evaluate potential threats to US national security with a much more critical eye.
Failed state discourse frames the Global South as the source of violence. This
colonizes our understanding of international society with demonized
stereotypes that justify oppression.
Cooper 5—Neil Cooper, Peace Studies @ Bradford [“Picking out the Pieces of the Liberal Peaces:
Representations of Conflict Economies and the Implications for Policy” Security Dialogue 36 (4) p. 471]
The political economies of contemporary conflicts have also been the object of analyses influenced by
critical theory and post-structuralism. Mark Duffield, in particular, has identified shadow trade in the
developed world as a form of really existing development taking place outside the formal structures of the
global economy, from which large parts remain excluded. Much of this literature has also emphasized
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the need to distinguish between different kinds of economies that exist in the same environment, for
instance the combat economy of the warlords, the shadow economy of the mafiosi and the coping
economy of ordinary citizens (Pugh, Cooper & Goodhand, 2004). A key feature in this work,
however, has been a concern with the way in which weak and failed states have been
incorporated into a discourse that has re-inscribed underdevelopment as the source of multiple
instabilities for the developed world – what Luke & Ó Tuathail (1997) term ‘the virus of disorder’.
Duffield’s work, in particular, has identified the processes by which the securitization of
underdevelopment has underpinned the new ‘liberal peace’ aid paradigm, centred around the
restoration of order through the application of neoliberalism and the formal accoutrements of
democracy and civil (but not economic) rights (Duffield, 2001). Indeed, for Duffield, development
has become a form of biopolitics concerned with addressing the putative threats posed to effective
states by transborder migratory flows, shadow economies, illicit networks and the global insurgent
networks of ineffective states (Duffield, 2005). And, in contrast to the Cold War, the geopolitics of
effective states is concerned less with arming Third World allies and more with transforming the
populations inside ineffective states. In this view, development represents a ‘security mechanism that
attempts through poverty reduction, conditional debt cancellation and selective funding to insulate
[developed] mass society from the permanent crisis on its borders’ (Duffield, 2005: 157).
While Duffield’s analysis arguably understates the continuities between the Cold War and the post-Cold
War era, these insights are nevertheless of particular relevance when examining both shifts in discourse and
policy on development and security in general and the political economy of conflict in particular, and it is
to these that we will now turn.
Towards a Synthesis of Difference or a Difference in Synthesis?
In the aftermath of 9/11, weak and failed states have become the object of a heightened discourse of
threat that represents them as actual or potential nodal points in global terrorist networks. In this
conception, the absence of state authority and the persistence of disorder creates local societies relatively
immune to technologies of surveillance, making them ideal breeding grounds for terrorist recruitment,
training, money-laundering and armstrafficking, as well as organized crime more generally. As Collier et
al. (2003: 41) note, civil war generates territories outside the control of governments that have
become ‘epicentres of crime and disease’ and that export ‘global evils’ such as drugs, AIDS and
terrorism.
This has produced an element of synthesis between new-right critiques of the current aid
paradigm and at least some critics from the liberal left. In particular, the idea that the neoliberal project
has been taken too far and has had the counterproductive effect of eroding state capacity and legitimacy – a
traditional refrain of the left – has now been taken up by realists. Thus, Fukuyama’s State Building signs up
to earlier analyses that have emphasized the way in which neopatrimonial regimes used external
conditionality as an excuse for cutting back on modern state sectors while expanding the scope of the
neopatrimonial state (Fukuyama, 2004: 22). Fukuyama has also become a belated convert to the idea that,
under the Washington Consensus, the state-building agenda was given insufficient emphasis (Fukuyama,
2004: 7). Thus, the new-right analysis is one that emphasizes strong states and local empowerment. Even
(especially) the Bush administration concluded in its National Security Strategy of 2002 that ‘America is
now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing states’ (White House, 2002: 1).
However, this apparent consensus between the new-right analysis and the liberal critique raises a number of
concerns. First, the new-right analysis is situated as a response to the apparently new global dangers
unleashed by 9/11. As Fukuyama (2004: 126) notes, ‘the failed state problem . . . was seen previously
as largely a humanitarian or human rights issue’, whereas now it has been constructed as a problem
of Western security. This dichotomy between the situation preceding and that after 9/11 is most certainly
an exaggeration. Underdevelopment has always been securitized, just in different ways; and even its postCold War manifestation was firmly in place well before 9/11. Indeed, this historical amnesia can be
understood as an intrinsic element of a securitizing discourse that justifies regulatory interventions as a
response to a specific global emergency rather than as part of longer-term trends.
Nevertheless, it is also the case that the securitization of underdevelopment highlighted by Duffield
has become acutely heightened post-9/11, and it is in this context that current debates about the
need to eradicate debt, increase aid and reform trading structures are taking place. Thus, the
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cosmopolitan emphasis on responding to the plight of other global citizens has been merged with
the security imperatives of the war on terror to create something of a monolithic discourse across
left and right that justifies intervention, regulation and monitoring as about securing both the poor
and the developed world.
Consequently, what structures the debate about addressing abuse or underdevelopment in this perspective is
not the abuse or underdevelopment per se but its links with multiple threats posed to the developed world.
A continuum is thus created for external intervention, entailing not merely the overthrow of Saddam
Hussein in Iraq but also structuring debate about Somalia or the need to address shadow trade. Moreover,
this discourse is by no means unique to new-right perspectives. Thus, the recent Barcelona Report on a
Human Security Doctrine for Europe deploys much the same kind of language, despite being situated in an
explicitly cosmopolitanist analysis that emphasizes the importance of human security. For the authors,
regional conflicts and failed states are ‘the source of new global threats including terrorism, weapons of
mass destruction and organised crime’ and consequently ‘no citizens of the world are any longer safely
ensconced behind their national border’ (Study Group on Europe’s Security Capabilities, 2004: 6–7).
Interventionary strategies, whether designed to address weapons of mass destruction, AIDS or the
shadow trade emanating from civil conflict, are thus explicitly framed as prophylactic strategies
designed to protect the West from terror, disease, refugees, crime and disorder. In the words of an
IISS (2002: 2) report on Somalia, the concern is with ‘inoculating failed or failing states against occupation
by al-Qaeda’.
This is not to suggest there is now complete synthesis between new-right analyses and liberal critiques. As
already noted, analyses such as the Barcelona Report are located in a cosmopolitanist perspective that still
emphasizes the importance of providing human security to the citizens of weak states and stresses the need
for a bottom-up approach that empowers locals. In contrast, for Fukuyama (2004: 115), state-building and
local ownership somehow manage to encompass approval for the idea that, on key areas such as central
banking, ‘ten bright technocrats can be air-dropped into a developing country and bring about massive
changes for the better in public policy’. The emphasis is also on state capacity for enforcement, ‘the ability
to send someone with a uniform and a gun to force people to comply with the state’s laws’ (Fukuyama,
2004: 8) and to maintain the integrity of borders too easily traversed by networked crime and terror.
However, the promise inherent in this monolithic discourse is of a potential synthesis between
solidarism and security – one in which welfare, representation and security (for both rich and poor) can
really be combined. The risk, though, is that security will delimit solidarism in terms of both the
breadth of its reach and the depth of its implementation. For example, following US allegations of
support for terrorism, the operations of a Saudi charity operating in Somalia were suspended, throwing over
2,600 orphans onto the streets (ICG, 2005a: 15). Similarly, while the USA has increased aid, much of the
direction of this aid has been determined by the priorities of the war on terror, while bilateral trade
arrangements have been used to reward key allies in the war on terror, such as Pakistan (Tujan, Gaughran
& Mollett, 2004). A further notable feature of the post-9/11 environment is that while the ‘war on terror’
framing has colonized the representation of a wide variety of topics, including discussion of conflict
trade and shadow war economies, insights from this literature have not always travelled in the reverse
direction. Thus, even the most basis lessons from the literature on the economic challenges of
peacebuilding were ignored in Iraq. What was notable here was the failure of imagination to conceive preinvasion Iraq as an entity that exhibited many features of a war economy – for example, high levels of
corruption, weak infrastructure, a shadow trade in oil and other forms of sanctions-busting, and a
militarized society. Similarly, concern at the way porous borders and informal economies may have been
exploited by terror networks in the Sahel has led the USA to develop a Pan-Sahel Initiative focused on
reinforcing borders and enhancing surveillance. In other words, cutting off networks that have ‘become the
economic lifeblood of Saharan peoples’ (ICG, 2005b: i) has been prioritized rather than dealing with the
underlying dynamics driving such networks.
Conclusion
In some respects, then, there has been a degree of convergence in at least the mainstream discourse and
language deployed to discuss weak states and their various features, including shadow economies. The
current emphasis is on reversing the excesses of neoliberal reforms that are deemed to have undermined the
state in the 1980s and 1990s. The consensus is on the need for strong states and local empowerment (see
the contribution by Rolf Schwarz in this edition of Security Dialogue). However, while the discourse and
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terminology are the same, the meaning applied to them is often very different. How these commonalities
and differences will play themselves out in the development of policy remains to be seen. What is
nonetheless clear is that much of the discussion of civil war economies has become infected by the
virus that is the language of the war on terror. A key concern that this gives rise to is that such
framings will structure all or much policy on inconflict and post-conflict societies as being about
providing hermetic protection for the West, rather than really addressing the lessons about the
local economic dynamics driving shadow economies. The risk is that post-9/11 post-conflict
reconstruction may fuse the liberal peace aid paradigm (a continued emphasis on the rigours of
neoliberalism, albeit mitigated by a nod towards poverty reduction) with elements of more traditional
Cold War interventions that emphasized formal state strength: powerful militaries and
intelligence services (albeit mitigated by a nod to civil society). The ways in which this synthesis
between the security imperatives of the developed world, cosmopolitanist concerns with the poor and the
current reworking of the neoliberal model play themselves out will only really become clear with the test of
time. However, what seems to be emerging is a variable-geometry approach to weak states. Some, like Iraq
and Afghanistan, may become the object of heightened discourses of threat, producing highly
militarized intervention strategies that prioritize order and security issues while failing to address
other factors such as the nature of shadow economies and their relationship to occupation and
regulation. Indeed, at their extreme, as in Iraq, rather than witnessing the modification of discredited
neoliberal models, such objects of intervention may experience even more virulent versions
(Klein, 2005). Others, such as Sudan, may find themselves subject to a post-9/11 variant of the new
barbarism thesis, in which the anarchy and extremes of violence they are deemed to exhibit are
simultaneously presented not only as a rationale for intervention but also as a reason for severely delimiting
intervention in the absence of acute imperatives for action provided by the logic of the war on terror. In
between, there may be a broad swathe of states, from Sierra Leone to Angola to Liberia, where specific
intervention policies may be less strongly influenced by the logic of war on terror and the more general
securitization of underdevelopment, but where broader policies that influence such interventions are
mediated via the dictates of both solidarism and the security and economic interests of the developed world.
Thus, it is perhaps more appropriate to refer not to the imposition of the liberal peace on post-conflict
societies but to the imposition of a variety of liberal peaces (Richmond, 2005), albeit ones still imposed
within the broad constraints of neoliberalism and within the context of profoundly unequal global trading
structures that contribute to underdevelopment.
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Link—Food Security
Food security pays lip service to the hungry while serving as a justification
for the violent expansion of global governance
Alcock 9 (Rupert, graduated with a distinction in the MSc in Development and Security from the Department of Politics, University of Bristol in 2009, MSc dissertation
prize joint winner 2009, “Speaking Food: A Discourse Analytic Study of Food Security” 2009, pdf available online, p. 10-14 MT)
the concept of ‘food security’ has been the primary lens through which the ongoing
prevalence and inherent complexity of global hunger has been viewed. The adoption of the term at the FAO-sanctioned
World Food Conference in 1974 has led to a burgeoning literature on the subject, most of which takes ‘food security’ as an unproblematic
starting point from which to address the persistence of so-called ‘food insecurity’ (see Gilmore & Huddleston,
Since the 1970s,
1983; Maxwell, 1990; 1991; Devereux & Maxwell, 2001). A common activity pursued by academics specialising in food security is to debate the appropriate definition of the
This pervasive predilection for empirical clarity is
symptomatic of traditional positivist epistemologies and constrains a more far-sighted understanding of the power functions of ‘food
security’ itself, a conceptual construct now accorded considerable institutional depth.2 Bradley Klein contends that to understand the political force of
organizing principles like food security, a shift of analytical focus is required: ‘Instead of
presuming their existence and meaning, we ought to historicize and relativize them as sets of
practices with distinct genealogical trajectories’ (1994: 10). The forthcoming analysis traces the
emergence and evolution of food security discourse in official publications and interrogates the
intertextual relations which pertain between these publications and other key sites of discursive
change and/or continuity. Absent from much (if not all) of the academic literature on food security is any reflection on the governmental content of the concept
of ‘security’ itself. The notion of food security is received and regurgitated in numerous studies which
seek to establish a better, more comprehensive food security paradigm. Simon Maxwell has produced more work of this
term; a study undertaken by the Institute of Development Studies cites over 200 competing definitions (Smith et al., 1992).
type than anyone else in the field and his studies are commonly referenced as foundational to food security studies (Shaw, 2005; see Maxwell, 1990; 1991; 1992; 1996; Devereux
& Maxwell, 2001). Maxwell has traced the evolution in thinking on food security since the 1970s and distinguishes three paradigm shifts in its meaning: from the global/national
to the household/individual, from a food first perspective to a livelihood perspective and from objective indicators to subjective perception (Maxell, 1996; Devereux & Maxwell,
2001). There is something of value in the kind of analysis Maxwell employs and these three paradigm shifts provide a partial framework with which to compare the results of my
own analysis of food security discourse. I suggest, however, that the conclusions Maxwell arrives at are severely restricted by his unwillingness to reflect on food security as a
governmental mechanism of global liberal governance. As a ‘development expert’ he employs an epistemology infused with concepts borrowed from the modern development
the macro-politics of ‘food
security’ as a specific rationality of government. In his article ‘Food Security: A Post-Modern Perspective’ (1996) Maxwell provides a
discourse; as such, his conclusions reflect a concern with the micro-politics of food security and a failure to reflect on
meta-narrative which explains the discursive shifts he distinguishes. He argues that the emerging emphasis on ‘flexibility, diversity and the perceptions of the people concerned’
(1996: 160) in food security discourse is consistent with currents of thought in other spheres which he vaguely labels ‘post-modern’. In line with ‘one of the most popular words in
the lexicon of post-modernism’, Maxwell claims to have ‘deconstructed’ the term ‘food security’; in so doing, ‘a new construction has been proposed, a distinctively post-modern
view of food security’ (1996: 161-162). This, according to Maxwell, should help to sharpen programmatic policy and bring theory and knowledge closer to what he calls ‘real food
insecurity’ (1996: 156). My own research in the forthcoming analysis contains within it an explicit critique of Maxwell’s thesis, based on three main observations. First, Maxwell’s
reconstruction’ of food security and re-articulation of its normative criteria reproduce precisely
the kind of technical, managerial set of solutions which characterise the positivistic need for
definitional certainty that he initially seeks to avoid. Maxwell himself acknowledges ‘the risk of falling into the trap of the meta-narrative’ and that ‘the ice is admittedly
‘
very thin’ (1996: 162-163), but finally prefers to ignore these misgivings when faced with the frightening (and more accurately ‘post-modern’) alternative. Second, I suggest that
the third shift which Maxwell distinguishes, from objective indicators to subjective perceptions, is a fabrication which stems more from his own normative beliefs than evidence
from official literature. To support this part of his argument Maxwell quotes earlier publications of his own work in which his definition incorporates the ‘subjective dimension’ of
while lip-service is occasionally paid to the lives and faces of
hungry people, food security analysis is constituted by increasingly extensive, technological and
professedly ‘objective’ methods of identifying and stratifying the ‘food insecure’. This comprises another
food security (cf. Maxwell, 1988). As my own analysis reveals,
distinctly positivistic endeavour. Finally, Maxwell’s emphasis on ‘shifts’ in thinking suggests the replacement of old with new – the global/national concern with food supply and
production, for example, is replaced by a new and more enlightened concern for the household/individual level of food demand and entitlements. Discursive change, however,
defies such linear boundary drawing; the trace of the old is always already present in the form of the new. I suggest that Maxwell’s ‘shifts’ should rather be conceived as
food security is an increasingly complex agenda, increasingly amorphous definitions and the establishment of new divisions of labour
results in a technocratic discourse which ‘presents policy as if it were
directly dictated by matters of fact (thematic patterns) and deflects consideration of values choices and the social,
moral and political responsibility for such choices’ (Lemke, 1995: 58, emphasis in original). The dynamics of technocratic discourse are
‘additions’; the implication for
between ‘experts’ in diverse fields. This
examined further in the forthcoming analysis. These observations inform the explicit critique of contemporary understandings of food security which runs conterminously with the
I adopt a broad perspective from which to interrogate food security as a discursive
technology of global liberal governance. Food security is not conceived as an isolated paradigm,
but as a component of overlapping discourses of human security and sustainable development
which emerged concurrently in the 1970s. The securitisation process can be regarded in some cases as an extreme form of politicisation, while in
others it can lead to a depoliticisation of the issue at hand and a replacement of the political with technological or scientific remedies. I show how the militaristic
component of traditional security discourse is reproduced in the wider agenda of food security,
findings of my analysis.
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through the notions of risk, threat and permanent emergency that constitute its governmental
rationale.
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Link – Global Warming
Even if warming is true, framing it as apocalypse is strategically even more dangerous.
Crist ‘7 – Ass. Prof. Sci & Tech in Society @ VT (Eileen, Telos 141, Winter, Beyond the Climate Crisis)
While the dangers of climate change are real, I argue that there are even greater dangers in representing it as
the most urgent problem we face. Framing climate change in such a manner deserves to be challenged for two
reasons: it encourages the restriction of proposed solutions to the technical realm, by powerfully insinuating that the
needed approaches are those that directly address the problem; and it detracts attention from the planet’s ecological
predicament as a whole, by virtue of claiming the limelight for the one issue that trumps all others. Identifying
climate change as the biggest threat to civilization, and ushering it into center stage as the highest priority problem, has bolstered the
proliferation of technical proposals that address the specific challenge. The race is on for figuring out what technologies, or portfolio
thereof, will solve “the problem.” Whether the call is for reviving nuclear power, boosting the installation of wind turbines,
using a variety of renewable energy sources, increasing the efficiency of fossil-fuel use, developing carbon-sequestering
technologies, or placing mirrors in space to deflect the sun’s rays, the narrow character of such proposals is evident:
confront the problem of greenhouse gas emissions by technologically phasing them out, superseding them,
capturing them, or mitigating their heating effects. In his The Revenge of Gaia, for example, Lovelock briefly mentions the need to
face climate change by “changing our whole style of living.”16 But the thrust of this work, what readers and policy-makers come
away with, is his repeated and strident call for investing in nuclear energy as, in his words, “the one lifeline we can use
immediately.”17 In the policy realm, the first step toward the technological fix for global warming is often identified with
implementing the Kyoto protocol. Biologist Tim Flannery agitates for the treaty, comparing the need for its successful endorsement to
that of the Montreal protocol that phased out the ozone-depleting CFCs. “The Montreal protocol,” he submits, “marks a signal
moment in human societal development, representing the first ever victory by humanity over a global pollution problem.”18 He hopes
for a similar victory for the global climate-change problem. Yet the deepening realization of the threat of climate change, virtually in
the wake of stratospheric ozone depletion, also suggests that dealing with global problems treaty-by-treaty is no solution to the
planet’s predicament. Just as the risks of unanticipated ozone depletion have been followed by the dangers of a long underappreciated
climate crisis, so it would be naïve not to anticipate another (perhaps even entirely unforeseeable) catastrophe arising after the (hopedfor) resolution of the above two. Furthermore, if greenhouse gases were restricted successfully by means of technological shifts and
innovations, the root cause of the ecological crisis as a whole would remain unaddressed. The destructive patterns of
production, trade, extraction, land-use, waste proliferation, and consumption, coupled with population growth,
would go unchallenged, continuing to run down the integrity, beauty, and biological richness of the Earth. Industrial-consumer
civilization has entrenched a form of life that admits virtually no limits to its expansiveness within, and perceived entitlement to, the
entire planet.19 But questioning this civilization is by and large sidestepped in climate-change discourse, with its single-minded quest
for a global-warming techno-fix.20 Instead of confronting the forms of social organization that are causing the climate crisis—among
numerous other catastrophes—climate-change literature often focuses on how global warming is endangering the culprit, and agonizes
over what technological means can save it from impending tipping points.21 The dominant frame of climate change funnels cognitive
and pragmatic work toward specifically addressing global warming, while muting a host of equally monumental issues. Climate
change looms so huge on the environmental and political agenda today that it has contributed to downplaying other
facets of the ecological crisis: mass extinction of species, the devastation of the oceans by industrial fishing, continued
old-growth deforestation, topsoil losses and desertification, endocrine disruption, incessant development,
and so on, are made to appear secondary and more forgiving by comparison with “dangerous anthropogenic
interference” with the climate system. In what follows, I will focus specifically on how climate-change discourse encourages
the continued marginalization of the biodiversity crisis—a crisis that has been soberly described as a holocaust,22 and which despite
decades of scientific and environmentalist pleas remains a virtual non-topic in society, the mass media, and humanistic and other
academic literatures. Several works on climate change (though by no means all) extensively examine the consequences of global
warming for biodiversity, 23 but rarely is it mentioned that biodepletion predates dangerous greenhouse-gas buildup by decades,
centuries, or longer, and will not be stopped by a technological resolution of global warming. Climate change is poised to exacerbate
species and ecosystem losses—indeed, is doing so already. But while technologically preempting the worst of climate
change may temporarily avert some of those losses, such a resolution of the climate quandary will not put an end
to—will barely address—the ongoing destruction of life on Earth.
Their framing of climate change causes a distraction for more pressing
environmental movements that solve extinction
Crist ‘7 – Ass. Prof. Sci & Tech in Society @ VT (Eileen, Telos 141, Winter, Beyond the Climate Crisis)
The diminishment of life's richness began with the exodus of hunters and gatherers from Africa
thousands of years ago, and deepened with the [end page 36] invention of agriculture and cities, the
development of warfare, and the advent of the European voyages.24 But biodepletion
accelerated enormously after the emergence of industrial civilization, and
particularly since the mid-twentieth century, with billions of people not only doubling
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every few decades, but inclining—by force, choice, or delusion—toward a consumer
culture founded on overproduction and global trade. Overproduction and global
trade, in turn, require the ceaseless conversion of living beings and natural systems
into dead objects, "resources," and humanized landscapes and seascapes.25 The
significance of human-driven extinction can never be overstated, because it means not
only the death of species but the end of their evolutionary destinies as well—of the lifeforms they would or might have eventually originated. Present-day extinction is not about species
blinking out sporadically; it is a global and escalating spasm of en masse losses that, the geological
record reveals, is an infrequent event in Earth's natural history. Notwithstanding circulating shallow
sophistry that proclaims extinction to be "natural" or "normal," anthropogenic extinction is neither
natural (for countless species are disappearing from targeted onslaught or pressures far exceeding
their capacity to adapt) nor normal (for this level of losses occurs rarely as a consequence of a
catastrophic event). Yet, as tragic as extinction is, species are also being devastated without being
annihilated: losses of distinct populations and plunges in population numbers are a blow to the
vigor, ecological contributions and connectedness, and evolutionary potential of species. Today,
drops of 70, 80, 90 percent, or more, of wild plants and animals, on land and in oceans, are
common. Such declines mean that species hang on as relics, with shortened lifespans or committed
to extinction, no longer able to play significant ecological and evolutionary roles. The nosedive of
wild-animal and plant abundance foregrounds yet [end page 37] another facet of
biodepletion: the simplification of ecosystems. From a landscape perspective, the decline of
numbers and geographic races of wild organisms signifies constrictions of their former ranges. As
populations blink out from diverse places, their place-bound contributions are lost;
the losses cascade through the communities of organisms to which the extinguished
populations belonged, leaving behind degraded ecosystems. While the simplification
of ecosystems is often dramatically visible, it can also unfold as an incremental, barely
noticeable process. And it is not that ecosystems, here and there, are occasionally
suffering simplification by losing constituent locals. The biosphere is experiencing
gross decline or elimination of areas that are, in certain cases, centers of
diversification—most notably, tropical forests, wetlands, mangrove forests, and coral reefs
everywhere. The whittling down of ecological complexity has been a global trend proceeding from
the conversion of ecosystems for intensive human uses, the aforementioned population depletions,
and the invasion of nonnative species. Nonnative species are the generalists hitching rides in the
bustle of globalization—from the climate-change-favored fungus that is killing frogs, to millions of
domestic cats preying on birds, to innumerable more.26 Human-facilitated invasions, coupled with
the disappearance of natives, lead to places losing the constellation of life-forms that once uniquely
constituted them. The inevitable outcome of extinction, plummeting populations, lost and simplified
ecosystems, and a bio-homogenized world is not only the global demolition of wild nature, but also
the halting of speciation of much complex life. The conditions for the birth of new species within a
wide band of life, especially of large-bodied species that reproduce slowly, are being suspended.27
[end page 38] All these interconnected dimensions constitute what conservation biologists
call the biodiversity crisis—a term that to the postmodernist rings of rhetoric, while to the broad
public (insofar as it has heard anything about it) involves a largely illiterate and vague
understanding of "extinction."28 Academic frivolity and public ignorance aside, the biodiversity
crisis heralds a biospheric impoverishment that will be the condition and experience
of all future human generations: it requires 5 to 10 million years for biodiversity to
recover after a mass extinction of the current scope. In light of this fact, I submit that
unless global warming unleashes appalling penalties—in which case, the climate crisis
and biodepletion will merge into one devastating event for virtually all life29—the
implications of humanity's impact on biodiversity are so far-reaching that they may,
in reality, dwarf the repercussions of climate change. And yet, the current framing of
climate change as the urgent issue encourages regarding the unwinding of
biodiversity as a less critical matter than the forthcoming repercussions of global
warming. Attention to the long-standing ruination of biodiversity underway is subverted in two
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ways in climate-change discourse: either it gets elided through a focus on anthropocentric anxieties
about how climate change will specifically affect people and nations; or biodepletion is presented as
a corollary of climate change in writings that closely consider how global warming will cause
biodiversity losses. Climate change is undoubtedly speeding up the unraveling of life's
interconnectedness and variety. But if global warming has such potential to afflict the
natural world, it is because the latter's "immunity" has been severely compromised.
It is on an already profoundly wounded natural world that global warming is
delivering its blow. Focusing on the added blow of climate change is important, but
this focus should not come at the expense of erasing from view the prior, ongoing, and
climate-change-independent wounding of life on Earth.
Depictions of climate conflict cause pre-emptive military build-up starting great power conflict
before the migration even occurs
Michael Brzoska 8, Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg
[“The securitization of climate change and the power of conceptions of security,” Paper prepared for the International Studies
Association Convention 2008, 3/26-29]
It will affect the living conditions of many people. In many cases the change in living conditions will be for the worse. This
may, in turn, lead to violent conflict. The deterioration of the human environment and the resulting violent conflict may induce
large numbers of people to migrate, thus also creating conflicts in areas less negatively affected by climate change. Beyond local
and regional effects, climate change increases the global risk of violent conflict by adding another element
of contention to the competition among major powers. These dangers associated with climate change are by
now quite well rehearsed. But how high is the probability that they will occur? How likely is it that climate change will lead to
more interstate wars, intrastate wars or terrorism? How much do we know about the links between climate change and violence? Are
these dangers ‘real’ in the sense of having a high likelihood of occurring or are they largely fictitious, edgeof-range possibilities that are used to draw attention to climate change, a level of attention that would not
be attainable by stressing the more likely, but less spectacular economic and social consequences of the
problem? The latter would be understandable but potentially counterproductive. In the literature on securitization it is implied that
when a problem is securitized it is difficult to limit this to an increase in attention and resources devoted to
mitigating the problem (Brock 1997, Waever 1995). Securitization regularly leads to all-round ‘exceptionalism’
in dealing with the issue as well as to a shift in institutional localization towards ‘security experts’ (Bigot
2006), such as the military and police. Methods and instruments associated with these security organizations
– such as more use of arms, force and violence – will gain in importance in the discourse on ‘what to do ’. A
good example of securitization was the period leading to the Cold War (Guzzini 2004 ). Originally a political
conflict over the organization of societies, in the late 1940s, the East-West confrontation became an existential
conflict that was overwhelmingly addressed with military means, including the potential annihilation of
humankind. Efforts to alleviate the political conflict were, throughout most of the Cold War, secondary to improving military
capabilities. Climate change could meet a similar fate. An essentially political problem concerning the
distribution of the costs of prevention and adaptation and the losses and gains in income arising from
change in the human environment might be perceived as intractable, thus necessitating the build-up of
military and police forces to prevent it from becoming a major security problem. The portrayal of climate
change as a security problem could, in particular, cause the richer countries in the global North, which are less
affected by it, to strengthen measures aimed at protecting them from the spillover of violent conflict from the
poorer countries in the global South that will be most affected by climate change. It could also be used by
major powers as a justification for improving their military preparedness against the other major powers,
thus leading to arms races.
The impact is extinction
Heinberg 4 [Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow at the Post-Carbon Institute, 2004, “Book Excerpt: Powerdown: Options and
Actions for a Port-Carbon World,” News Gateway, September 26th, Available Online at http://www.energybulletin.net/node/2291,
Accessed 12-04-2008]
Last One Standing – The path of competition for remaining resources. If the leadership of the
US continues with current policies, the next decades will be filled with war, economic
crises, and environmental catastrophe. Resource depletion and population pressure
are about to catch up with us, and no one is prepared. The political elites, especially in
the US, are incapable of dealing with the situation. Their preferred “solution” is simply to
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commandeer other nations’ resources, using military force. The worst-case scenario
would be the general destruction of human civilization and most of the ecological lifesupport system of the planet. That is, of course, a breathtakingly alarming prospect. As
such, we might prefer not to contemplate it – except for the fact that considerable evidence
attests to its likelihood. The notion that resource scarcity often leads to increased
competition is certainly well founded. This is general true among non-human animals,
among which competition for diminishing resources typically leads to aggressive
behaviour. Iraq is actually the nexus of several different kinds of conflict – between consuming
nations (e.g., France and the US); between western industrial nations and “terrorist” groups; and –
most obviously – between a powerful consuming nation and a weaker, troublesome, producing
nation. Politicians may find it easier to persuade their constituents to fight a common
enemy than to conserve and share. War is always grim, but as resources become more
scarce and valuable, as societies become more centralized and therefore more
vulnerable, and as weaponry becomes more sophisticated and widely dispersed,
warfare could become even more destructive that the case during the past century. By far
the greatest concern for the future of warfare must be the proliferation of nuclear
weapons. The US is conducting research into new types of nuclear weapons—bunker
busters, small earth-penetrators, etc. Recent US administrations have enunciated a policy of
nuclear first-strike. Chemical and biological weapons are of secondary concern,
although new genetic engineering techniques may enable the creation of highly
infectious and antibiotic-resistant “supergerms” cable of singling out specific ethnic
groups. Additionally, the US has announced its intention to maintain clear military
superiority to any potential rival (“full-spectrum dominance”), and is actively developing
space-based weapons and supersonic drone aircraft capable of destroying targets
anywhere on the planet at a moment’s notice. It is also developing an entirely new
class of gamma-ray weapons that blur the critical distinction between conventional
and nuclear weapons.
Attempting to halt global warming produces securitization- countries compete
against each other to reduce, or avoid reducing their emissions
Buzan et al, 1998 (Barry Buzan, Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at the London
School of Economics and honorary professor at the University of Copenhagen and Jilin University, Ole
Waever, a professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science, University of
Copenhagen Jaap de Wilde, Professor of International Relations and World Politics at the University of
Groningen., 1998 “Security: A New Framework for Analysis” p.86)
The third sequence of questions is decisive, because it is here that a political constellation of
mutual security concerns is formed. Who feels threatened? Who must those parties cooperate
with if action is to be effective? Effects and causes are significant conditions in disposing who
will become involved with whom and how, but they do not fully determine our outcomes.
Securitization always involves political choice: thus, actors might choose to ignore major causes
for political or pragmatic reasons and therefore may form a security constellation that is different
from what one would expect based on one’s knowledge of effects and causes. Occasionally ,
pragmatism may prescribe global action, but even then it is necessary to subdivide global issues
according to the context of their causes and effects. Dealing with the causes of, for instance,
global warming require a global contest. The fossil CO2 emissions that contribute to the
greenhouse effect occur worldwide are therefore a global problem, even though important
regional differences should be realized. Meeting the causes of global warming points to the
urgency of a global regime, which was recognized at UNCED where the climate treaty that
became effective in March 1994 was signed. It is telling, however tat at the follow-up
conference in Berlin (28 March-7 April 1995), saving the intentions declared at UNCED was the
optimum goal. Further decision making and regime formation were postponed to the third
Climate Summit, to be held in Tokyo in 1997. This postponement is in part a result of the fact
that those who have to pay the price for prevention are different from those who pay the price of
failure.
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This technological enframing makes warming strategically even more
dangerous.
Crist ‘7 – Ass. Prof. Sci & Tech in Society @ VT (Eileen, Telos 141, Winter, Beyond the Climate Crisis)
While the dangers of climate change are real, I argue that there are even greater dangers in representing it as
the most urgent problem we face. Framing climate change in such a manner deserves to be challenged for two
reasons: it encourages the restriction of proposed solutions to the technical realm, by powerfully insinuating that the
needed approaches are those that directly address the problem; and it detracts attention from the planet’s ecological
predicament as a whole, by virtue of claiming the limelight for the one issue that trumps all others. Identifying
climate change as the biggest threat to civilization, and ushering it into center stage as the highest priority problem, has bolstered the
proliferation of technical proposals that address the specific challenge. The race is on for figuring out what technologies, or portfolio
thereof, will solve “the problem.” Whether the call is for reviving nuclear power, boosting the installation of wind turbines,
using a variety of renewable energy sources, increasing the efficiency of fossil-fuel use, developing carbon-sequestering
technologies, or placing mirrors in space to deflect the sun’s rays, the narrow character of such proposals is evident:
confront the problem of greenhouse gas emissions by technologically phasing them out , superseding them,
capturing them, or mitigating their heating effects. In his The Revenge of Gaia, for example, Lovelock briefly mentions the need to
face climate change by “changing our whole style of living.”16 But the thrust of this work, what readers and policy-makers come
away with, is his repeated and strident call for investing in nuclear energy as, in his words, “the one lifeline we can use
immediately.”17 In the policy realm, the first step toward the technological fix for global warming is often identified with
implementing the Kyoto protocol. Biologist Tim Flannery agitates for the treaty, comparing the need for its successful endorsement to
that of the Montreal protocol that phased out the ozone-depleting CFCs. “The Montreal protocol,” he submits, “marks a signal
moment in human societal development, representing the first ever victory by humanity over a global pollution problem.”18 He hopes
for a similar victory for the global climate-change problem. Yet the deepening realization of the threat of climate change, virtually in
the wake of stratospheric ozone depletion, also suggests that dealing with global problems treaty-by-treaty is no solution to the
planet’s predicament. Just as the risks of unanticipated ozone depletion have been followed by the dangers of a long underappreciated
climate crisis, so it would be naïve not to anticipate another (perhaps even entirely unforeseeable) catastrophe arising after the (hopedfor) resolution of the above two. Furthermore, if greenhouse gases were restricted successfully by means of technological shifts and
innovations, the root cause of the ecological crisis as a whole would remain unaddressed. The destructive patterns of
production, trade, extraction, land-use, waste proliferation, and consumption, coupled with population growth,
would go unchallenged, continuing to run down the integrity, beauty, and biological richness of the Earth. Industrial-consumer
civilization has entrenched a form of life that admits virtually no limits to its expansiveness within, and perceived entitlement to, the
entire planet.19 But questioning this civilization is by and large sidestepped in climate-change discourse, with its single-minded quest
for a global-warming techno-fix.20 Instead of confronting the forms of social organization that are causing the climate crisis—among
numerous other catastrophes—climate-change literature often focuses on how global warming is endangering the culprit, and agonizes
over what technological means can save it from impending tipping points.21 The dominant frame of climate change funnels cognitive
and pragmatic work toward specifically addressing global warming, while muting a host of equally monumental issues. Climate
change looms so huge on the environmental and political agenda today that it has contributed to downplaying other
facets of the ecological crisis: mass extinction of species, the devastation of the oceans by industrial fishing, continued
old-growth deforestation, topsoil losses and desertification, endocrine disruption, incessant development,
and so on, are made to appear secondary and more forgiving by comparison with “dangerous anthropogenic
interference” with the climate system. In what follows, I will focus specifically on how climate-change discourse encourages
the continued marginalization of the biodiversity crisis—a crisis that has been soberly described as a holocaust,22 and which despite
decades of scientific and environmentalist pleas remains a virtual non-topic in society, the mass media, and humanistic and other
academic literatures. Several works on climate change (though by no means all) extensively examine the consequences of global
warming for biodiversity, 23 but rarely is it mentioned that biodepletion predates dangerous greenhouse-gas buildup by decades,
centuries, or longer, and will not be stopped by a technological resolution of global warming. Climate change is poised to exacerbate
species and ecosystem losses—indeed, is doing so already. But while technologically preempting the worst of climate
change may temporarily avert some of those losses, such a resolution of the climate quandary will not put an end
to—will barely address—the ongoing destruction of life on Earth.
Warming Anxiety Link
Dodds 12 Joseph, MPhil, Psychoanalytic Studies, Sheffield University, UK, MA, Psychoanalytic
Studies, Sheffield University, UK BSc, Psychology and Neuroscience, Manchester University, UK,
Chartered Psychologist (CPsychol) of the British Psychological Society (BPS), and a member of several
other professional organizations such as the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society, Psychoanalysis
and Ecology at the Edge of Chaos p 27 *gender mod
Why psychoanalysis? On the face of it, it seems frankly irrelevant. Surely it is the basic sciences
of geology, ecology, biology, and climatology that we need, combined with various hi-tech
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engineering? Yes and no. The science informing us of the risks and possible technical solutions has run far
ahead of our psychological state. We are not yet at the point emotionally of being able to clearly
grasp the threat, and act accordingly. We need to ask why this issue, despite its current prominence,
fails to ignite people's motivation for the major changes science tells us is necessary. This concerns
not only the 'public' but the academy and the psychoanalytic community. In spite of the fact that Harold Searles was already
writing in 1960 that psychoanalysts need to acknowledge the psychological importance of the non-human environment, until very recently his colleagues have almost entirely ignored him.
In this section we explore some of the theories with which we may be able to construct a psychoanalysis of
ecology. Fuller elaboration will involve incorporating approaches from the sciences of complexity and
ecology, and Deleuze and Guattari's 'geophilosophy' or 'ecosophy', which itself emerged in critical dialogue
with psychoanalysis and complexity theory. However, we first need to explore the ecological potential
within psychoanalysis itself, as without the latter's methods and theories for unmasking hidden motivations
and phantasies, this investigation will not be able to proceed.
Lertzman (2008), one of the first psychoanalytically informed social scientists to engage with the ecological crisis, describes a common surreal aspect of
our everyday responses to 'eco-anxiety', the experience of flipping through a newspaper and being
suddenly confronted with:
the stop-dead-in-your-tracks, bone-chilling kind of ecological travesties taking place around our planet today ... declining honey bees,
melting glaciers, plastics in the sea, or the rate of coal plants being built in China each second. But how many of us
actually do stop dead in our tracks? Have we become numb? ... if so, how can we become more
awake and engaged to what is happening?
Environmental campaigners have become increasingly frustrated and pessimistic. Even as their
messages spread further and further, and as scientists unite around their core concerns, there is an
alarming gap between increasingly firm evidence and public response.
Renee
The fact that oil companies donate millions to climate 'sceptic' groups
doesn't help (Vidal 2010). Nor does the fact that eight European companies which are together responsible for 5 -10 per cent of the emissions covered in the EU emissions trading system (Bayet, BASF, BP, GDF Suez, ArcelorMittal, Lafarge, E.ON, and Solvay) gave
$306,100 to senatorial candidates in the 2010 United States midterm elections who either outright deny climate change ($107,200) or pledge they will block all climate change legislation ($240,200), with the most flagrant deniers getting the most funds (Goldenberg
2010; Climate Action Network 2010). These are the same companies that campaign against EU targets of 30 per cent reductions in emissions using current inaction in the United States as a justification, while claiming their official policy is that climate change is a major
threat and they are committed to doing all they can to help in the common cause of dealing with the danger (for the full report see Climate Action Network 2010).
as well. In February 2010 a BBC-commissioned poll by Populus (BBC 2010a,
2010b) of 1,001 adults found that 25 per cent didn't think global warming was happening, a rise of 8 per
cent since a similar poll in November 2009. Belief that climate change was real fell from 83 per cent to 75
per cent, while only 26 per cent believed climate change was established as largely man-made compared
with 41 per cent in November. A third of those agreeing climate change was real felt consequences had
been exaggerated (up from a fifth) while the number of those who felt risks had been understated fell from
38 per cent to 25 per cent (see Figure 3). According to Populus director M. Simmonds, 'it is very unusual ...
to see such a dramatic shift in opinion in such a short period ... The British public are sceptical about man's
contribution to climate change and becoming more so' (BBC 2010a).
. According to the chief scientific advisor at the Department for the
Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Professor Robert Watson: 'Action is urgently needed ... We need the
public to understand that climate change is serious so they will change their habits and help us move
towards a low-carbon economy.' Why this shift? Whilst the poll took place with the background of heavy
snow and blizzards in the UK, always a convenient backdrop to climate sceptic jokes,
(2010a) article
(UEA).
Recent opinion polls show climate scepticism is on the rise in the UK
Most remarkable here is the discrepancy between public and expert opinion
the BBC
focused on a high-profile story concerning stolen emails alleging scientific malpractice at the University of East Anglia
While this was a very serious accusation, no mainstream scientific body seriously imagines it changes in any real way the
overall science, and yet this is not how the public perceived it.
Subsequently, the UK Parliament's Commons Science and Technology Committee completed its
investigation into the case (BBC 2010c). The MPs' committee concluded there was no evidence that UEA's
Professor Phil Jones had manipulated data, or tried 'to subvert the peer review process' and that 'his
reputation, and that of his climate research unit, remained intact' (BBC
2010c). The report noted that 'it is not standard practice in climate science to publish the raw data and the
computer code in academic papers' and that 'much of the data that critics claimed Prof Jones has hidden,
was in fact already publicly available' (BBC 2010c) but called strongly for a greater culture of transparency
in science. The report concluded that it 'found no reason in this unfortunate episode to challenge the
scientific consensus that global warming is happening and is induced by human activity' (BBC 2010c).
. In such a lengthy report of over 3 000 pages,
produced from the combined efforts of the world scientific community on a topic with as many variables as
climate change, it is unsurprising some estimates need revising. Undoubtably there will be more revisions
in the future, some major.
.
No doubt many sceptics will use the Parliamentary committee's report as further evidence of an institutional
cover-up.
This story was followed closely by another in January 2010 when the IPCC admitted a mistake concerning the timetable of Himalayan glacial melting
It is important to emphasize that for the world's scientists the overall picture has not been affected, but public perception is completely different, with triumphant claims of proof 'it is all made up'
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people are ready for such events
- the psychosocial equivalent of a sandpile
in a state of self-organized criticality (Palombo 1999; Bak 1994), when a single grain can cause a major
avalanche cascading through the whole system. Understanding such subtle shifts, and the often unconscious
motivations behind them, is where psychoanalysis perhaps more than any other discipline has a
lot to offer. As Lertzman (2008) writes:
What if the core issue is more about how humans respond to anxiety? ... [Environmental problems
... conjure up anxieties that ... we are done for, and nothing can really be done ... To help me understand more, I turn
to Freud ... because I have found few others who speak as eloquently, and sensitively about what humans do when faced with anxiety or anxiety-provoking news.
The important psychological point is that
, indeed eager for it
Freud, civilization, nature and the dialectic of the Enlightenment
Is Freud really relevant to understanding our current crisis? While he was very much engaged in
relating psychology to social issues, from war to racism, group psychology and the discontents of
civilization (Freud 1913a, 1915, 1921, 1927, 1930), he was writing during a period when the possibility
that human activities could bring the Earth's ecosystems to the brink of collapse would have been hard to
contemplate. Romanticism may have complained about 'unweaving rainbows' and industry's 'dark satanic
mills', but by Freud's day this could be seen as Luddite anti-progress talk, especially for those working
within the Weltangschung of science and the Enlightenment to which Freud (1933) pinned his
psychoanalytic flag. However, much of our current bewildering situation can be understood as
rooted in part in a world view that was at its zenith during Freud's day and, as Lertzman (2008)
suggests, in our responses to anxiety. In addition, Freud did offer us some crucial reflections on our
relationship with nature:
The principle task of civilization, its actual raison d'etre, is to defend us against nature. We all know that in
many ways civilization does this fairly well already, and clearly as time goes on it will do it much better. But no
one is under the illusion that nature has already been vanquished; and few dare hope that she will ever be entirely subdued to man.
(Freud 1927: 51)
Here we can see an interesting ambivalence in Freud's rhetorical style, which perhaps unwittingly captures
two crucial aspects of our civilization's relationship to 'Nature' and thus begins to open up a
psychoanalytic approach to ecology. First, he depicts a series of binary oppositions typical for his
era, and not so different in our own: human versus nature, man versus woman and (more implicitly)
order versus chaos. Here we find the classic tropes of the Enlightenment, modernity, patriarchy,
industrialism and capitalism, which Jungian ecopsychologist Mary-Jane Rust (2008) calls the myths
we live by. The myths she is referring to in particular are the 'myth of progress' and the 'myth of the
Fall'. She argues that in order to create a sustainable future, or indeed any future, we need to find
other stories, other myths, through which to live our lives, to rethink how we have fallen and what
it means to progress. Freud's work suggests that Western culture views civilization as a defence against
nature, and against wildness, inner and outer, but as Rust (2008: 5) writes, at 'this critical point in
human history we most urgently need a myth to live by which is about living with nature, rather
than fighting it.' Thus, according to Rust,
we find ourselves ... between stories (Berry 1999), in a transitional space ... of great turbulence, with little
to hold onto save the ground of our own experience. Our therapeutic task ... is to understand how these
myths still shape our internal worlds, our language, and our defences ... [S]omewhere in the midst of
'sustainability' ... lies an inspiring vision of transformation ... We need to dig deep, to re-read our own
myths as well as find inspiration from the stories of others.
(ibid.)
The myth of progress enters the climate change debate in calls for geo-engineering and Utopian
techno-fixes such as putting thousands of mirrors in space, and in the dismissal of even gentle
questioning of current economic models of unlimited growth. We will later look at Harold Searles' (1972) approach to our
fascination with technology and its role in the current crisis. Returning to Freud, however, there is, as always, another
side, an implicit awareness that the feeling of mastery civilization gives us is in many ways a
dangerous illusion. Behind our need for mastery lies our fear and trembling in the face of the
awesome power of mother nature.
There are the elements which seem to mock at all human control: the earth, which quakes and is
torn apart and buries all human life and its works; water, which deluges and drowns everything in turmoil; storms, which blow everything before them ... With
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these forces nature rises up against us, majestic, cruel and inexorable; she brings to our mind once
more our weakness and helplessness, which we thought to escape through the work of civilization.
(Freud 1927: 15-16)
Here is the other side of Freud's writing on the relation between 'Nature' and 'Civilization', with humanity
portrayed as a weak and helpless infant in awe and fear of a mighty and terrible mother. The lure and
horror of matriarchy lie behind the defensive constructs of patriarchal civilization, just as Klein's
paranoid-schizoid fears of fragmentation, engulfment, and annihilation lie behind later castration threats
(Hinshelwood 1991).
With each new earthquake or flood, nature erupts into culture -similar to Kristeva's (1982) description of
the eruption of the 'semiotic' into the 'symbolic' - and we are thrown back into a state of terror. The 'illusion'
in the title of Freud's 1927 essay The Future of an Illusion was meant to refer to how religion arose to
deal with these anxieties. However, the structural function of the myth of progress, while
undoubtably more successful in terms of practical benefits, can also be included here. In these words
of Freud we have already a deep understanding, albeit largely implicit, of our own current crisis: a
relationship to nature based on a master-slave system of absolute binaries, and an attempt to
maintain an illusory autonomy and control in the face of chaos.
There is often a tension in Freud, between the celebration of Enlightenment values found in works such as
The Future of an Illusion (1927) and the more Romantic Freud who won the Goethe prize and constantly
emphasized the elements Enlightenment rationality leaves out such as jokes, dreams, slips and
psychological symptoms. Thus, as well as being a perfect example of the Enlightenment with its call to
make the unconscious conscious and give the 'rational' ego greater power over the wilds of the id,
psychoanalysis also provides a serious challenge to this way of thinking. There will always be
something beyond our control. We are not, and never can be, masters in our own house, and the
core of who we are is irrational, and often frightening. Marcuse (1998) touched on a similar tension
when declaring Freud's (1930) Civilization and Its Discontents both the most radical critique of Western
culture and its most trenchant defence. Psychoanalysis, as always, is exquisitely ambivalent.
Ultimately, for Freud, both the natural world and our inner nature are untamable and the most we can hope for are temporary, fragile, anxious compromises between competing forces
(Winter & Koger 2004). The chaos of nature we defend against is also the chaos of our inner nature,
the wildness in the depths of our psyche. Civilization does not only domesticate livestock but also
humanity itself (Freud & Einstein 1933: 214). However, attempts to eliminate the risk have in many
ways dangerously backfired, comparable to the ways that the historical programmes aiming to
eliminate forest fires in the United States have led to far bigger and more uncontrollable fires
taking the place of previously smaller and more manageable ones (Diamond 2006: 43-47).
The control promised by the Enlightenment, the power of the intellect to overcome chaos
(environmental and emotional), is therefore at least partly a defensive and at times dangerous
illusion. In our age of anxiety, with the destruction of civilization threatened by nuclear holocaust,
ecosystemic collapse, bioweapons and dirty bombs, Freud's warning is more relevant than ever:
Humans* have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they
would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man ... hence comes a large part
of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety.
(Freud 1930: 135)
Freud's binaries 'masculine/Enlightenment/control/autonomy' versus 'feminine/nature/chaos/dependency'
also lead us to consider what Gregory Bateson (2000: 95) called the 'bipolar characteristic' of Western
thought, which even tries 'to impose a binary pattern upon phenomena which are not dual in nature:
youth versus age, labor versus capital, mind versus matter - and, in general, lack[s] the organizational
devices for handling triangular systems/ In such a culture, as with the child struggling to come to terms
with the Oedipal situation, 'any "third" party is always regarded ... as a threat' (ibid.).
Deleuze and Guattari describe such dualistic forms of thinking using the ecological metaphor of the tree with its fork-branch patterns (although they would not use the term metaphor): 'Arborescent systems are
hierarchical systems with centers of signifiance and subjectification ... an element only receives information from a higher unit, and only receives a subjective affection along preestablished paths' (Deleuze & Guattari
Freud's 'arborescent' system of binaries can also show us the way out, capturing the
psychological bind we are now in. As Deleuze and Guattari (2003a: 277) write: 'The only way to get outside the dualisms is
... to pass between, the intermezzo.' Deconstructing these dualisms allows us to think about how
2003a: 16). However,
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our destructive urge to dominate and control is connected to our fear of acknowledging
dependency on this largest of 'holding environments', the ultimate 'environment mother' (Winnicott
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Link – Global Governance
The affirmative’s call to maintain or reinstate a stable and secure global order only
masquerades as international benevolence. The ritual of peddling solutions to new
global problems only perpetuates a condition of continual crises by which security
apparatuses are able to justify themselves
Dillon and Reid, Professor of Politics at the University of Lancaster and lecturer in international relations at Kings College in London, 2000 [Michael
and Julian, Alternatives vol. 25, issue 1, spring, EbscoHost]
governmentality, according to Foucault's initial account, poses the question of order
not in terms of the origin of the law and the location of sovereignty, as do traditional accounts of power, but in terms instead
of the management of population. The management of population is further refined in terms of specific problematics to
As a precursor to global governance,
which population management may be reduced. These typically include but are not necessarily exhausted by the following topoi of
governmental power: economy, health, welfare, poverty, security, sexuality, demographics, resources, skills,
culture, and so on. Now, where there is an operation of power there is knowledge, and where there is knowledge there is an operation
of power. Here discursive formations emerge and, as Foucault noted,
in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and redistributed by a certain number of
procedures whose role is to ward off its powers and dangers, to gain mastery over its chance events, to evade its ponderous,
formidable materiality.[ 34]
More specifically, where there is a policy problematic there is expertise, and where there is expertise there, too, a policy
problematic will emerge. Such problematics are detailed and elaborated in terms of discrete forms of knowledge as well as interlocking
policy domains. Policy domains reify the problematization of life in certain ways by turning these epistemically
and politically contestable orderings of life into "problems" that require the continuous attention of policy
science and the continuous resolutions of policymakers. Policy "actors" develop and compete on the basis of
the expertise that grows up around such problems or clusters of problems and their client populations.
Here, too, we may also discover what might be called "epistemic entrepreneurs." Albeit the market for discourse is prescribed
and policed in ways that Foucault indicated, bidding to formulate novel problematizations they seek to "sell" these, or
otherwise have them officially adopted. In principle, there is no limit to the ways in which the management of population may
be problematized. All aspects of human conduct, any encounter with life, is problematizable. Any problematization is capable of
becoming a policy problem. Governmentality thereby creates a market for policy, for science and for policy
science, in which problematizations go looking for policy sponsors while policy sponsors fiercely compete on behalf of their favored
problematizations.
Reproblematization of problems is constrained by the institutional and ideological investments surrounding
accepted "problems," and by the sheer difficulty of challenging the inescapable ontological and
epistemological assumptions that go into their very formation. There is nothing so fiercely contested as an
epistemological or ontological assumption. And there is nothing so fiercely ridiculed as the suggestion that the real
problem with problematizations exists precisely at the level of such assumptions. Such "paralysis of analysis"
is precisely what policymakers seek to avoid since they are compelled constantly to respond to circumstances
over which they ordinarily have in fact both more and less control than they proclaim. What they do not have is precisely the
control that they want. Yet serial policy failure—the fate and the fuel of all policy--compels them into a continuous search for the
new analysis that will extract them from the aporias in which they constantly find themselves enmeshed.[ 35]
Serial policy failure is no simple shortcoming that science and policy--and policy science--will ultimately
overcome. Serial policy failure is rooted in the ontological and epistemological assumptions that fashion the
ways in which global governance encounters and problematizes life as a process of emergence through fitness
landscapes that constantly adaptive and changing ensembles have continuously to negotiate. As a particular kind
of intervention into life, global governance promotes the very changes and unintended outcomes that it then
serially reproblematizes in terms of policy failure. Thus, global liberal governance is not a linear problemsolving process committed to the resolution of objective policy problems simply by bringing better information and
knowledge to bear upon them. A nonlinear economy of power/knowledge, it deliberately installs socially specific and
radically inequitable distributions of wealth, opportunity, and mortal danger both locally and globally through
the very detailed ways in which life is variously (policy) problematized by it.
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Belief in global cooperation’s ability to solve obscures the causes of
overexploitation and creates a utopian belief in technology’s ability to solve.
Ahmed 11—Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is an international security analyst. He is Executive Director at
the Institute for Policy Research and Development, and Associate Tutor at the Department of IR,
University of Sussex, where he obtained his DPhil. [“The international relations of crisis and the crisis of
international relations: from the securitisation of scarcity to the militarisation of society,” Global Change,
Peace & Security, Volume 23, Issue 3, 2011, Taylor and Francis Online]
2.3 Neoliberalism: mutual over-exploitation as normative
On the other hand, we have strategies of international cooperation to establish new global governance
regimes by which states can develop treaties and agreements to encourage mitigating action. It is now clear
that the massive proliferation of international legal treaties designed to regulate activities impacting
detrimentally on the environment and thus limit environmental degradation simply cannot be explained
under the realist theoretical framework. While this seemingly vindicates neoliberal theoretical
approaches which underscore the scope for rational state strategies of mutual cooperation,62 the latter are
still at a loss to explain the extent to which ethical norms and values, national cultures and
environmental and scientific advocacy underpin wide-ranging environmental regimes which
cannot be reduced purely to state interests.63
Much of the liberal literature also explores the regressive dynamic of the energy industry and its
international dimensions, though failing to escape realist assumptions about anarchy. Kaldor and her coauthors, for instance, note that conflicts can erupt in regions containing abundant resources when
neopatrimonial states collapse due to competition between different ethnic and tribal factions motivated by
the desire to control revenues.64 Similarly, Collier argues that the most impoverished populations inhabit
the most resource-wealthy countries which, however, lack robust governance, encouraging rampant internal
resource predation and therefore civil wars.65 Lack of robust governance thus facilitates not only internal
anarchy over resource control, but also the illicit and corrupt activities of foreign companies, particularly in
the energy sector, in exploiting these countries.66 This sort of analysis then leads to a staple set of
normative prescriptions concerned largely with ways of inculcating ‘good governance’, such as
transparency measures to avoid excessive secrecy under which oil companies indulge in
corruption; more robust international regulation; corporate social responsibility; and
cosmopolitan principles such as democratisation, political equality and freedom of civil society.67
Yet such well-meaning recommendations often do not lead to sufficiently strong policy action by
governments to rein in energy sector corruption.68 Furthermore, it is painfully clear from the
examples of Kyoto, Copenhagen and Cancun that international cooperative state strategies
continue to be ineffective, with states unable to agree on the scale of the crises concerned, let
alone on the policies required to address them. Indeed, while some modest successes were
apparent in the Cancun Accord, its proposed voluntary emissions regime would still likely
guarantee – according to even mid-range climate models – a global average temperature rise of 4°C or
more, which would in turn culminate in many of the IPCC's more catastrophic scenarios.69
This calls into question the efficacy of longstanding recommendations – such as Klare's – that the
international community develop unprecedented international mechanisms to coordinate the
peaceful distribution of natural resources in the era of scarcity and environmental degradation.70
While at face value such regulatory governance mechanisms would appear essential to avoid
violent conflict over depleting resources, they are posited in a socio-political and theoretical
vacuum. Why is it that such potentially effective international mechanisms continue to be
ignored? What are the socio-political obstacles to their implementation? Ultimately, the problem is that
they overlook the structural and systemic causes of resource depletion and environmental
degradation.
Although neoliberalism shares neorealism's assumptions about the centrality of the state as a unitary
rational actor in the international system, it differs fundamentally in the notion that gains for one state do
not automatically imply losses for another; therefore states are able to form cooperative, interdependent
relationships conducive to mutual power gains, which do not necessarily generate tensions or conflict.71
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While neoliberalism therefore encourages international negotiations and global governance
mechanisms for the resolution of global crises, it implicitly accepts the contemporary social,
political and economic organisation of the international system as an unquestionable ‘given’,
itself not subject to debate or reform.72
The focus is on developing the most optimal ways of maximising exploitation of the biophysical
environment. The role of global political economic structures (such as centralised private resourceownership and deregulated markets) in both generating global systemic crises and inhibiting
effective means for their amelioration is neglected. As such, neoliberalism is axiomatically unable
to view the biophysical environment in anything other than a rationalist, instrumentalist fashion,
legitimising the over-exploitation of natural resources without limits, and inadvertently
subordinating the ‘global commons’ to the competitive pressures of private sector profitmaximisation and market-driven solutions, rather than institutional reform.73 Mutual
maximisation of power gains translates into the legitimisation of the unlimited exploitation of the
biophysical environment without recognition of the human costs of doing so, which are
technocratically projected merely as fixable aberrations from an optimal system of cooperative
progress.74 Consequently, neoliberalism is powerless to interrogate how global political economic
structures consistently undermine the establishment of effective environmental regimes .
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Link – Hegemony
Written out of the 1AC empirical analysis hegemony is the failure of the War
in Vietnam and the subsequent construction of neoliberal laboratories across
the global south beginning with Chile. The AFF imagines U.S. hegemony
existing in the vacuum of international anarchy; the history told by the 1AC
is a Eurocentric history which obfuscates the U.S.’s role in propping up
brutal dictatorships to reassert its hegemonic control. Hegemony is intimately
bound the brutal spread of neoliberalism.
Barder 2013
/Alexander D., Department of Political Studies & Public Administration, American University of Beirut,
Beirut, Lebanon, PhD in Political Theory from John Hopkins, “American Hegemony Comes Home: The
Chilean Laboratory and the Neoliberalization of the United States” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political
2013 38: 103 originally published online 22 April 2013, DOI: 10.1177/0304375413486331/
Examining historical patterns of international hierarchy reveals a rich and multidirectional diffusion of
norms, practices, and knowledges between dominant and subordinate polities.2 Imperial historians have
for some time now have documented this transnational norm diffusion by looking more closely at how
colonial spaces were in fact laboratories of sociopolitical experimentation.3 Nonetheless, this
multidirectional norm diffusion and appreciation of the active reverberations from imperial or
subordinate spaces remains largely unexplored by international theorists, for two main reasons.
First, the fact that canonical international theory remains largely predicated upon an assumption of
international anarchy which is construed as a timeless feature of international politics.4 This
assumption implies a representation of the state ahistorically.5 Furthermore, it construes the global
South as a largely passive and peripheral actor in world history. Second, because of a continuing
Eurocentrism that conceptualizes the ‘‘West’’ as a privileged historical actor by taking for
granted that Western norms travel outbound rather than being the product of interactions with
‘‘non-Western’’ polities.6 Socialization, when it is theorized in international theory, is typically
conceived as the socialization of the non-West into an already constituted European society of states.7
What these two perspectives imply is a lack of appreciation within international theory of how
historical patterns of hierarchical international relations have resulted in a set of what some have
called a colonial archive that has left significant imprints upon the historical trajectory of Western
state-formation.8 Taking the above into consideration, this article explores the conjunction between
changes in American hegemony over the course of the 1970s and the subsequent neoliberalization of the
United States in the early 1980s. While the story of the emergence of neoliberalism has been told through
many different angles, I argue that this ‘‘Reagan-Thatcher neoliberal counterrevolution’’ represents
the normalization of a set of economic theories that were initially experimented within Chile
during the mid- to late 1970s and later adapted within the United States and the United Kingdom.9
Beginning in the late 1960s with the American defeat in the Vietnam War, and later, the collapse of
the Bretton Woods Agreement, the spike in oil prices and especially the economic crises of
stagflation throughout the industrialized North, American political and economic supremacy was
radically challenged. However, as Giovanni Arrighi has shown, this neoliberal counterrevolution was
not simply a response to a particular economic crisis condition; it was more importantly a political
reassertion of American global hegemony by the means of economic structural adjustment.
Moreover, this project of restoring American supremacy abroad was fundamentally entwined with a
domestic reassertion of governmental authority. As Greg Grandin succinctly puts it, ‘‘the restoration of
American’s global military power and the restoration of laissez-faire capitalism were increasingly
understood to be indistinguishable goals.’’10 What connects the international dimension of crisis
management and hegemonic reassertion with domestic neoliberalization is precisely the manner
in which the operationalization of neoliberal reform was experimented with and innovated in
various informal American laboratories. The Chilean laboratory in particular permitted, under
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authoritarian conditions, the radical transformation of the economy according to principles and
theories laid out by the Chicago School of economics. This experience would then become
perceived as the ‘‘tried-and-true’’ developmental model not only across the global South, but
also, with varying degrees, across the North. This article proceeds as follows. In the first section, I
depart from G. John Ikenberry’s recent discussion on post–Second World War American liberal
hegemony. While Ikenberry importantly draws our attention to the hierarchical components of this apre`s
guerre international order and its processes of norm diffusion, he crucially misses the profound crisis
of American hegemony of the 1970s. In the second section, I turn to both Robert Brenner and Giovanni
Arrighi to show, first, the importance of both intercapitalist competition (Brenner) and the collapse of
American international political legitimacy in the wake of the Vietnam War (Arrighi) to account for the
erosion of American control over the global South. Finally, in the third section, I turn to the specific case
of Chile and show how it becomes an important laboratory setting for the experimentation and development
of neoliberalism. This sociopolitical/economic innovation proved to imbricate both a project of
reasserting American hegemony abroad and governmental authority at home.
Hegemony is not based on a liberal order, rather, it is founded on the
imperial financial policies of deregulation and SAP’s which took the global
south from sovereign colonialism to neoliberal colonialism. A benign
hegemonic order is a ruse which covers up the brutal legacy of neoimperialism instated to save U.S. hegemony after our loss in Vietnam. U.S.
hegemony is not only a form of violent imperialism; it is an unsustainable
system which necessitates escalating crises which will collapse hegemony and
neoliberalism.
Barder 2013
/Alexander D., Department of Political Studies & Public Administration, American University of Beirut,
Beirut, Lebanon, PhD in Political Theory from John Hopkins, “American Hegemony Comes Home: The
Chilean Laboratory and the Neoliberalization of the United States” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political
2013 38: 103 originally published online 22 April 2013, DOI: 10.1177/0304375413486331/
Brenner’s argument is that the economic crisis of the 1970s reflected a ‘‘decline in the
manufacturing rate of profit across the advanced capitalist economies’’ as a result of ‘‘overcapacity and over-production.’’35 American firms were placed in a position in which they could not
increase prices in order to keep up with increasing domestic labor costs. Moreover, their profitability was
being undermined because of the higher productivity of their competitors in Germany and Japan. Brenner
acknowledges that this international situation provoked an American domestic political crisis that the
Johnson administration initially attempted to address through fiscal and monetary austerity. However, this
policy did not halt declining economic growth. As Brenner explains, the Nixon administration realized that
the ‘‘political costs of sustaining a serious anti-inflationary policy proved unacceptable . . . . Well before
the defeat of the Republicans in the congressional elections of November 1970, and as high interest rates
threatened to choke off the recovery, the government turned once again to fiscal stimulus and the Fed
accompanied a policy of easy credit. As Nixon was to put it several months later, ‘We are all Keynesians
now.’’’36 The devaluation of the dollar was, as Brenner shows, a way of shifting the burden of declining
profits more evenly across the industrialized world (i.e., negating the inherent benefits for German and
Japanese exporters). However, this proved not to be the panacea that state administrators sought in order to
reestablish American domestic manufacturing profitability. On the contrary, as Brenner writes, ‘‘By the
end of the 1970s, the manufacturing sector on an international scale was at an impasse, as was the
Keynesian programme of demand management that had been implemented to revitalize the world
economy.’’37 Systemwide manufacturing profitability could not be rescued on the basis of fiscal and
monetary policies: the continuation of such policies only furthered a run on the dollar provoking a threat to
the ‘‘dollar’s position as an international reserve currency.’’38 The result was what Brenner calls the
‘‘shift to Reaganism/ Thatcherism’’ which reversed fiscal and monetary stimulus in order to
‘‘dampen the growth of wages, as well as by directly redistributing income to capital through
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reduced taxes on corporations and diminished spending on social services.’’39 The emergent
neoliberalization of economic activity, through the deregulation and liberalization of finance and
other business sectors, ‘‘aimed . . . at bringing about a revitalization of, and thereby a shift into,
domestic and international financial sectors . . . by means of suppressing inflation . . . .’’40
Brenner sees the transformation of the world and domestic (US) economy as fundamentally tied to the
crisis of systemic-wide manufacturing profitability. Neoliberalization was thus meant to address this
economic crisis at the very center of American economic hegemony. Giovanni Arrighi contests
Brenner’s explanation of the worldwide economic crisis of profitability as the main factor in explaining the
subsequent long stagnation of the 1970s and the emergence of the neoliberal alternative. To be sure,
Brenner’s work is helpful in showing that intracapitalist competition provoked an important crisis that had
substantial reverberations for embedded liberalism within the industrialized North. In contrast to
Ikenberry’s narrative, Brenner sees the economic tribulations of the 1970s as reflecting internal
contradictions in the very financial and economic capitalist architecture that otherwise appears
unproblematized within the wider literature on American liberal hegemony. Brenner does not, as
Arrighi argues, convincingly explain the set of international geopolitical and domestic conditions that
influenced policy choices leading to the Reagan/Thatcher monetarist counter revolution.41 What Brenner
misses is that the crisis of profitability located in the first world industrialized North was
fundamentally refracted by a crisis of American liberal hegemony beginning in the late 1960s:
The crisis of profitability that marked the transition from the long boom to the long downturn, as
well as the great stagflation of the 1970 s, were themselves deeply affected by the parallel crisis
of American hegemony which ensued from the Vietnam War and the eventual American defeat. As
for the Reagan-Thatcher counterrevolution, it was not just, or even primarily, a response to the
unsolved crisis of profitability but also—and especially—a response to the deepening crisis of
hegemony.42 Brenner, Arrighi argues, misses the ‘‘broader political context’’ underlying this crisis in
American liberal hegemony precisely because his analysis is primarily focused on intercapitalist
competitive pressures (i.e., between the United States, Germany, and Japan) and not on how the United
States was concerned with maintaining its hegemonic position throughout the global South.43 By
contrast, Arrighi shows that the changes in US balance of payments (and the corresponding
fluctuations in US currency prices that would lead to enormous fluctuations in international and domestic
fiscal and monetary policies) were fundamentally part an ongoing geopolitical project during the
1960s: ‘‘the US government sought to contain, through the use of force, the joint challenge of
nationalism and communism in the Third World.’’44 And, as Arrighi shows, the changes in
politicoeconomic policies beginning with Reagan and Thatcher ‘‘came from the unresolved
crises of US hegemony in the Third World rather than in the crisis of profitability as such.’’45 The
Vietnam War was the main event of this larger US project to dominate the global periphery either through
direct military means or the use of proxies. However, the catastrophic engagement in Vietnam proved
to have not only enormous economic implications—the increase in defense expenditures resulted in
growing budget deficits at the same time that the Johnson Administration was busy funding the Great
Society initiative—but also resulted in a fundamental crisis of legitimacy. Internationally, ‘‘the joint
military and legitimacy crises of the US world power were the expression of the failure of the US militaryindustrial complex to cope with the problems posed by world-wide decolonization.’’46 Whereas
Ikenberry takes for granted that American liberal hegemony ‘‘provides a basis for weaker and
secondary states to make decisions to willingly join and comply with the rules and institutions of
this order,’’ the reality was far more complex and conflictual. Newly decolonized states were
subject to intense American pressure to satisfy its growing economic and political needs
throughout the Cold War.47 Re-industrialization in many northern states, along with ever-increasing
military demands to keep up with the arms race with the Soviet Union by the United States, was
predicated upon the consistent ability to extract primary materials from the global South. What
emerged over the course of the 1950s and 1960s was a set of ‘‘highly effective and efficient organizational
links between Third World primary inputs and First World purchasing power’’ and resulted in ‘‘powerful
vested interest[s] . . . in preserving maximum present and future flexibility in the use of Third World
resources for the benefit of First world states.’’48 There was a tension between the demands of
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continuous capital accumulation by the industrialized North (in the global South) and the progressive
demand for the ‘‘exercise of full sovereignty’’ by newly decolonized states. When it became
clear that the liberal hegemon could not directly subjugate Vietnam into ‘‘complying,’’ as
Ikenberry would argue, with its demands, ‘‘the US government temporarily lost most, if not all of its
credibility as the policeman of the free world.’’49 The loss of American credibility suffered as a result of
its defeat in Vietnam resulted in what Arrighi characterizes as a ‘‘power vacuum’’ that was accentuated
throughout the 1970s. Events such as the rise of [Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries]
OPEC, the oils crises, the Yom Kippur war and the fall of the Shah in 1979, all happened
concurrently with ‘‘the escalation of inter-capitalist competition’’, as Brenner has shown, and
resulted in a profound economic crisis throughout the North.50 This political– economic crisis
perpetuated the impression among political leaders and public opinion across the world that the United
States was incapable of addressing this systemic crisis. All told the conjunction between an
international political crisis derived from the Vietnam War and the crisis in profitability produced (though
aided by extremely lax US monetary policy) the inflationary uptick in the early 1970s and the collapse of
the system of fixed exchange rates. ‘‘In short,’’ Arrighi writes, ‘‘ the interaction between the crisis of
profitability and the crisis of hegemony, in combination with the US inflationary strategy of
crisis management, resulted in a ten-year increase in world monetary disorder, escalating inflation
and steady deterioration in the capacity of the US dollar to function as the world’s means of payment.’’51
This finally paved the way for the dramatic shifts in the set of international and domestic policies
designed to reassert American hegemony. The monetarist counterrevolution embodied in tight
monetary and fiscal policies was designed to reassert faith in the US dollar as the international reserve
currency. But what the increase in real interest rates accomplished in a spectacular fashion was
the direct reassertion of US control over Third World countries that heavily borrowed US dollars
in the open market at a time when there was a massive supply of petrodollars being recycled through
Western banks. Such countries faced ruinous repayment rates that necessitated international
organizations such as the IMF and World Bank provide them with structural adjustment programs.
Significantly, such structural adjustment programs gave primacy to Western corporate interests
through deregulation and the ability to repatriate US dollar assets back home. Direct changes in US
monetary policy resulted in a series of debt crises, that as David Harvey argues, were in fact
‘‘orchestrated, managed and controlled both to rationalize the system and to redistribute assets
during the 1980s and 1990s.’’52 These debt crises were part of a way of reasserting American
hegemony throughout the global South in such a way that was inconceivable merely through
military means. The American-led liberal order, and its reassertion of hegemony in the 1980s,
was in fact predicated upon the very need ‘‘to discipline and coerce weaker states, particularly in
Latin America and the Middle East’’—as Ikenberry writes—through political and economic means.
The debt crises of the 1980s were part of this capacity to discipline. However, these crises, characterized
as well by the explosive development of financial securitization and the proliferation of asset
bubbles, represents what Arrighi calls a ‘‘signal crisis’’ of the ‘‘dominant regime of
accumulation’’ of the American post–second world war order.53 A signal crisis signifies a
‘‘deeper underlying systemic crisis’’ when leading capitalist entities begin switching their
economic activities away from production and trade to ‘‘financial intermediation and
speculation.’’54 This initial move from investment in material production to the fictitious world
of financial speculation and engineering initially forestalls and enhances the capacity for wealth
generation for a certain class. Nonetheless, it cannot embody a lasting resolution of the underlying
contradictions. ‘‘On the contrary,’’ as Arrighi writes, ‘‘it has always been the preamble to a
deepening of the crisis and to the eventual supersession of the still dominant regime of
accumulation by a new one.’’55 What Arrighi calls the ‘‘terminal crisis’’ is then the ‘‘end of the
long century that encompasses the rise, full expansion, and demise of that regime’’—what is
potentially occurring today.56 The signal crisis of American political and economic hegemony
provoked a set of policies to enhance capital accumulations beneficial to American business and
state to the detriment of the global South. What Ikenberry sees as American behavior being
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‘‘crudely imperial’’ in certain contexts was in fact the way of maintaining and reinvigorating
international forms of capital accumulation for the benefit of American hegemony and its allies.
As I will show in the last section of this chapter, this manifestly neo-imperial economic order was not
only meant to be applicable throughout the global South; the Reagan-Thatcher counter revolution was also
an internal revolution that adapted some of the experiences and practices developed in the global
periphery to reinforce American hegemony at home and abroad.
Their pursuit of hegemony is based on a fantasy of control that relies upon the
existence of threatening monsters to maintain the illusion of personal strength and
discipline. This grand strategy prompts resistance and creates a permanent state of
conflict, turning constructed enemies into real enemies and flipping the case.
Ira Chernus, Professor of Religious Studies and Co-director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at
the University of Colorado-Boulder, 2006 (Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and
Sin, Published by Paradigm Publishers, ISBN 1594512752, p. 53-54)
The end of the cold war spawned a tempting fantasy of imperial omnipotence on a global scale.
The neocons want to turn that fantasy into reality. But reality will not conform to the fantasy; it
won’t stand still or keep any semblance of permanent order. So the neocons’ efforts inevitably
backfire. Political scientist Benjamin Barber explains that a nation with unprecedented power has
“unprecedented vulnerability: for it must repeatedly extend the compass of its power to preserve
what it already has, and so is almost by definition always overextended.” Gary Dorrien sees
insecurity coming at the neoconservatives in another way, too: “For the empire, every conflict is
a local concern that threatens its control. However secure it maybe, it never feels secure enough.
The [neocon] unipolarists had an advanced case of this anxiety. . . . Just below the surface of the
customary claim to toughness lurked persistent anxiety. This anxiety was inherent in the problem
of empire and, in the case of the neocons, heightened by ideological ardor.”39 If the U.S. must
control every event everywhere, as neocons assume, every act of resistance looks like a threat to
the very existence of the nation. There is no good way to distinguish between nations or forces
that genuinely oppose U.S. interests and those that don’t. Indeed, change of any kind, in any nation,
becomes a potential threat. Everyone begins to look like a threatening monster that might have to
be destroyed. It’s no surprise that a nation imagined as an implacable enemy often turns into a
real enemy. When the U.S. intervenes to prevent change, it is likely to provoke resistance. Faced
with an aggressive U.S. stance, any nation might get tough in return. Of course, the U.S. can say
that it is selflessly trying to serve the world. But why would other nations believe that? It is more
likely that others will resist, making hegemony harder to achieve. To the neocons, though,
resistance only proves that the enemy really is a threat that must be destroyed. So the likelihood
of conflict grows, making everyone less secure. Moreover, the neocons want to do it all in the
public spotlight. In the past, any nation that set out to conquer others usually kept its plans largely
secret. Indeed, the cold war neocons regularly blasted the Soviets for harboring a “secret plan” for
world conquest. Now here they are calling on the U.S. to blare out its own domineering intentions
for all the world to [end page 53] hear. That hardly seems well calculated to achieve the goal of
hegemony. But it is calculated to foster the assertive, even swaggering, mood on the home front
that the neocons long for. Journalist Ron Suskind has noted that neocons always offer “a statement
of enveloping peril and no hypothesis for any real solution.” They have no hope of finding a real
solution because they have no reason to look for one. Their story allows for success only as a
fantasy. In reality, they expect to find nothing but an endless battle against an enemy that can never
be defeated. At least two prominent neocons have said it quite bluntly. Kenneth Adelman: “We
should not try to convince people that things are getting better.” Michael Ledeen: “The struggle
against evil is going to go on forever.”40 This vision of endless conflict is not a conclusion drawn
from observing reality. It is both the premise and the goal of the neocons’ fantasy. Ultimately, it
seems, endless resistance is what they really want. Their call for a unipolar world ensures a
permanent state of conflict, so that the U.S. can go on forever proving its military supremacy and
promoting the “manly virtues” of militarism. They have to admit that the U.S., with its vastly
incomparable power, already has unprecedented security against any foreign army. So they must
sound the alarm about a shadowy new kind of enemy, one that can attack in novel, unexpected
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ways. They must make distant changes appear as huge imminent threats to America, make the
implausible seem plausible, and thus find new monsters to destroy. The neocons’ story does not
allow for a final triumph of order because it is not really about creating a politically calm, orderly
world. It is about creating a society full of virtuous people who are willing and able to fight off
the threatening forces of social chaos. Having superior power is less important than proving
superior power. That always requires an enemy.
Just as neocons need monsters abroad,
they need a frightened society at home. Only insecurity can justify their shrill call for a stronger
nation (and a higher military budget). The more dire their warnings of insecurity, the more they
can demand greater military strength and moral resolve. Every foreign enemy is, above all, another
occasion to prod the American people to overcome their anxiety, identify evil, fight resolutely
against it, and stand strong in defense of their highest values. Hegemony will do no good unless
there is challenge to be met, weakness to be conquered, evil to be overcome. The American people
must actively seek hegemony and make sacrifices for it, to show that they are striving to overcome
their own weakness. So the quest for strength still demands a public confession of weakness, just
as the neocons had demanded two decades earlier when they warned of a Soviet nuclear attack
through a “window of vulnerability.” The quest for strength through the structures of national
security still demands a public declaration of national insecurity. Otherwise, there is nothing to
overcome. The more frightened the public, the more likely it is to believe and enact the neocon
story.
Attempts to shore up U.S. hegemony are symptomatic of a dangerous obsession with
control—this death drive terminates in apocalyptic violence.
Robert Jay Lifton, Visiting Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, previously Distinguished
Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at the Graduate School and Director of The Center on Violence and
Human Survival at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York, 2003
(Superpower Syndrome: America’s Apocalyptic Confrontation With The World, Published by Thunder’s
Mouth Press / Nation Books, ISBN 1560255129, p. 1-4)
The apocalyptic imagination has spawned a new kind of violence at the beginning of the twentyfirst century. We can, in fact, speak of a worldwide epidemic of violence aimed at massive
destruction in the service of various visions of purification and renewal. In particular, we are
experiencing what could be called an apocalyptic face-off between Islamist* forces, overtly
visionary in their willingness to kill and die for their religion, and American forces claiming to be
restrained and reasonable but no less visionary in their projection of a cleansing war-making and
military power. Both sides are [end page 1] energized by versions of intense idealism; both see
themselves as embarked on a mission of combating evil in order to redeem and renew the world;
and both are ready to release untold levels of violence to achieve that purpose. The war on Iraq—
a country with longstanding aspirations toward weapons of mass destruction but with no evident
stockpiles of them and no apparent connection to the assaults of September 11—was a
manifestation of that American visionary projection. The religious fanaticism of Osama bin Laden
and other Islamist zealots has, by now, a certain familiarity to us as to others elsewhere, for their
violent demands for spiritual purification are aimed as much at fellow Islamics as at American
“infidels.” Their fierce attacks on the defilement that they believe they see everywhere in
contemporary life resemble those of past movements and sects from all parts of the world; such
sects, with end-of-the-world prophecies and devout violence in the service of bringing those
prophecies about, flourished in Europe from the eleventh through the sixteenth century. Similar
sects like the fanatical Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo, which released sarin gas into the Tokyo
subways in 1995, have existed—even proliferated—in our own time. The American apocalyptic
entity is less familiar to us. Even if its urges to power and domination seem historically
recognizable, it nonetheless represents a new constellation of forces bound up with what I’ve come
to think of [end page 2] as “superpower syndrome.” By that term I mean a national mindset—put
forward strongly by a tight-knit leadership group—that takes on a sense of omnipotence, of unique
standing in the world that grants it the right to hold sway over all other nations. The American
superpower status derives from our emergence from World War II as uniquely powerful in every
respect, still more so as the only superpower left standing at the end of the Cold War in the early
1990s. More than merely dominate, the American superpower now seeks to control history. Such
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cosmic ambition is accompanied by an equally vast sense of entitlement, of special dispensation
to pursue its aims. That entitlement stems partly from historic claims to special democratic virtue,
but has much to do with an embrace of technological power translated into military terms. That
is, a superpower—the world’s only superpower—is entitled to dominate and control precisely
because it is a superpower. The murderous events of 9/11 hardened that sense of entitlement as
nothing else could have. Superpower syndrome did not require 9/11, but the attacks on the Twin
Towers and the Pentagon rendered us an aggrieved superpower, a giant violated and made
vulnerable, which no superpower can permit. Indeed, at the core of superpower syndrome lies a
powerful fear of vulnerability. A superpower’s victimization brings on both a sense of humiliation
and an angry determination to restore, or even [end page 3] extend, the boundaries of a
superpower-dominated world. Integral to superpower syndrome are its menacing nuclear
stockpiles and their world-destroying capacity. Throughout the decades of the Cold War, the
United States and the Soviet Union both lived with a godlike nuclear capacity to obliterate the
cosmos, along with a fear of being annihilated by the enemy power. Now America alone possesses
that world-destroying capacity, and post-Soviet Russia no longer looms as a nuclear or superpower
adversary. We have yet to grasp the full impact of this exclusive capacity to blow up anyone or
everything, but its reverberations are never absent in any part of the world. The confrontation
between Islamist and American versions of planetary excess has unfortunately tended to define a
world in which the vast majority of people embrace neither. But apocalyptic excess needs no
majority to dominate a landscape. All the more so when, in their mutual zealotry, Islamist and
American leaders seem to act in concert. That is, each, in its excess, nurtures the apocalypticism
of the other, resulting in a malignant synergy. * In keeping with general usage, Islamist refers to
groups that are essentially theocratic and fundamentalist, and at times apocalyptic. Islamic is a
more general ethnic as well as religious term for Muslims. The terms can of course overlap, and
“Islamic state” can mean one run on Islamist principles.
The aff is fueled by American Exceptionalism—their defense of U.S. hegemony is
inextricably bound up in notions of manifest destiny.
David Grondin, Lecturer in the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa, 2006 (“The
(Power) Politics of Space: What IR Theories have to say about American Astro-Political Discourses on Space
Weaponisation,” Paper Presented At The Annual Meeting Of The International Studies Association, March
25th,
Available
Online
via
All
Academic
at
http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/0/9/8/6/7/p98679_index.html, Accessed
10-26-2008, p. 8-11)
The reterritorialization of the national security state in a global security scheme produces news
frontiers on the global map: cartographically speaking, the US "territorial" boundaries are that of
the globe and national security goes hand in hand with global security – American security
interests would be read as concomitant with global security interests. This idea goes along with a
geopolitical vision centered on globalization. Recently, this idea was put forth by a former
Pentagon's strategist and professor of the US Naval War College, Thomas Barnett, who wishes to
propose the new strategic thinking for the US in the War on Terror5. He wanted to link security
concerns with globalization in a rejuvenated US global strategy that both aims to achieve
neoliberal globalization and global stability. In remapping of the world in two zones, a Functioning
Core and a Non-Integrated Gap6 with globalization (see the map7), he wished to redefine the
frontiers of globalization by using a cartography where security and economy would be in a
symbiotic relation. The US would act as the global systems administrator, as if it were the systems
administrator of computer networks. He sees disconnectedness as the source of danger and
disconnectedness expresses a country that has not accepted the security rules set of globalization,
rules set by the countries that benefit from globalization we should say. And what should be the
objective? To shrink the Gap! For Barnett, the "dangerous" countries are to be found in the Gap.
He sees the US as a global Leviathan state that could act, through its armed forces, in the Gap in
order to "export security" (security has become a commercial product); in the Core, the US state
would act as a policing and peacekeeping force. [end page 8; page 9 omitted -- graphic only]
Barnett goes even further as he associates the fate of globalization as a political and economic
project and as historical development to the destiny of the US: America serves as the ideological
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wellspring for globalization. These United States still stands as its first concrete experiences. We
are the only country in the world purposely built around the ideals that animate globalization's
advance: freedom of choice, freedom of movement, freedom of expression. We are connectivity
personified. Globalization is this country's gift to history – the most perfectly flawed projection of
the American Dream onto the global landscape. [...] In short, we the people needs to become we
the planet (Barnett 2004: 50; original emphasis). Since 1945, the US state has had but one global
strategy, a neoliberal geopolitics of global dominance (Sparke 2005; Robert, Secor, and Sparke
2003).8 As Barnett and other strategic documents like the NSS and the NMS show, the Global
War on Terror has been fuelled by an extremely vibrant and patriotic nationalist base that truly
believes that America is imbued with a providential mission and sense of moral crusade. Despite
an apparent discrepancy between current US militaristic projects that draw from a neoconservative
realist geopolitical discourse and other strategic projects that fall within the scope of a global
neoliberal geoeconomical discourse, I argue that these discourses stem from the same ideological
foundation, the 'liberal imagination' in American political life. According to Daniel Nexon and
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, it is a powerful identity and ideological narrative in the American
discourse on foreign policy which makes them overtly moralistic. It is often used to conflate the
US and the world in the protection of liberal democracy and liberty. As they put it, "Indeed, no
matter what the specific policy recommended, the notion that the United States has a 'manifest
destiny' as the embodiment of freedom and liberty is a constant theme in American political
discourse" (Nexon and Jackson 2003: 146). It is however known that the suffusion of liberal values
and ascription of a divine mission for the world bring about contradictions when confronted with
some of the foreign policy actions of the United States. But this is of no concern for US nationalism
is committed to an "ideological construction of the nation that insists on the global relevance of
the American project" and consequently claims "its righteous entitlement to lead the world". This
remapping of US nationalism is thus to be understood through a dialectical relationship of [end
page 10] exceptionalism/universalism, of a "city upon a hill" and a crusader state. It is in this
framing of US globalist nationalism that its neoliberal hegemonic global strategy tries to have it
both ways, to remake the world in America's image, while assuming that its national interests are
global interests, thereby conflating its national security with global security, as if the great
aspirations of the US and of mankind were one and the same (McCartney 2004: 400). In this light,
the US-led Global War on Terror really becomes a nation-building project that has evolved into a
Global Leviathan, but without its mandatory "social contract" with the peoples of the world
(Barnett 2004: 369-370).
The impact is extinction—exceptionalism engages in an active forgetting of the
horrors of past atrocities, paving the way for ever-increasing violence.
William V. Spanos, Distinguished Professor of English at Binghamton University, State
University of New York, 2008 (American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization: The
Specter of Vietnam, Published by SUNY Press, ISBN 0791472892, p. ix-x) In this book I contend
that the consequence of America's intervention and conduct of the war in Vietnam was the selfdestruction of the ontological, cultural, and political foundations on which America had
perennially justified its “benign" self-image and global practice from the time of the Puritan
"errand in the wilderness." In the aftermath of the defeat of the American Goliath by a small
insurgent army, the "specter" of Vietnam—by which I mean, among other things, the violence,
bordering on genocide, America perpetrated against an "Other" that refused to accommodate itself
to its mission in the wilderness of Vietnam—came to haunt America as a contradiction that
menaced the legitimacy of its perennial self-representation as the exceptionalist and "redeemer
nation." In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the dominant culture in America (including the
government, the media, Hollywood, and even educational institutions) mounted a massive
campaign to "forget Vietnam." This relentless recuperative momentum to lay the ghost of that
particular war culminated in the metamorphosis of an earlier general will to "heal the wound”
inflicted on the American national psyche, into the "Vietnam syndrome"; that is, it transformed a
healthy debate over the idea of America into a national neurosis. This monumentalist initiative
was aided by a series of historical events between 1989 and 1991 that deflected the American
people's attention away from the divisive memory of the Vietnam War and were represented by
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the dominant culture as manifestations of the global triumph of "America": Tiananmen Square,
the implosion of the Soviet Union, and the first Gulf War. This "forgetting" of the actual history
of the Vietnam War, represented in this book by Graham Greene's The Quiet American, Philip
Caputo's A Rumor of War, and Tim O’Brien's Going After Cacciato (and many other novels,
memoirs, and films to which I refer parenthetically), contributed to the rise of neoconservatism
and the religious right to power in the United States. And it provided the context for the renewal
of America's exceptionalist errand in the global wilderness, now understood, as the conservative
think tank the Project for the New American [end page ix] Century put it long before the invasion
of Afghanistan and Iraq, as the preserving and perpetuation of the Pax Americana. Whatever
vestigial memory of the Vietnam War remained after this turn seemed to be decisively interred
with Al Qaeda's attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.
Completely immune to dissent, the confident American government, under President George W.
Bush and his neoconservative intellectual deputies—and with the virtually total support of the
America media—resumed its errand in the global wilderness that had been interrupted by the
specter of Vietnam. Armed with a resurgence of self-righteous indignation and exceptionalist
pride, the American government, indifferent to the reservations of the "Old World," unilaterally
invaded Afghanistan and, then, after falsifying intelligence reports about Saddam Hussein's
nuclear capability, Iraq, with the intention, so reminiscent of its (failed) attempts in Vietnam, of
imposing American-style democracy on these alien cultures. The early representation by the media
of the immediately successful "shock and awe" acts of arrogant violence in the name of
“civilization" was euphoric. They were, it was said, compelling evidence not only of the
recuperation of American consensus, but also of the rejuvenation of America's national identity.
But as immediate "victory" turned into an occupation of a world unwilling to be occupied, and the
American peace into an insurgency that now verges on becoming a civil war, the specter of
Vietnam, like the Hydra in the story of Hercules, began to reassert itself: the unidentifiability or
invisibility of the enemy, their refusal to be answerable to the American narrative, quagmire,
military victories that accomplished nothing, search and destroy missions, body counts, the
alienation of allies, moral irresolution, and so on. It is the memory of this "Vietnam”—this specter
that refuses to be accommodated to the imperial exceptionalist discourse of post-Vietnam
America—that my book is intended to bring back to presence. By retrieving a number of
representative works that bore acute witness, even against themselves, to the singularity of a war
America waged against a people seeking liberation from colonial rule and by reconstellating them
into the post-9/11 occasion, such a project can contribute a new dimension not only to that
shameful decade of American history, but also, and more important, to our understanding of the
deeply backgrounded origins of America's “war on terror" in the aftermath of the Al Qaeda attacks.
Indeed, it is my ultimate purpose in this book to provide directives for resisting an American
momentum that threatens to destabilize the entire planet, if not to annihilate the human species
itself, and also for rethinking the very idea of America.
By defining security around the predominance of US influence, every conflict of
interests becomes justification for militarization, escalating to war.
Campbell 98 (David, Professor International Politics at University of New Castle, "Writing Security; United States Foreign
Policy the Politics of Identity," 31-33)
Most important just as the source of danger has never been fixed, neither has the identity that it was said to
threaten. The contours of this identity have been the subject of constant (re)writing; no rewriting
in the sense of changing the meaning, but rewriting in the sense of inscribing something so that
which is contingent and subject to flux is rendered more permanent. While one might have
expected few if any references to national values or purposes in confidential prepared for the inner
sanctum of national security policy (after all, don't they know who they are or what they represent?) the texts of
foreign policy are replete with statements about the fulfillment of the republic, the fundamental purpose of the
nation, God given rights, moral codes, the principles of European civilization, the fear of cultural and spiritual
loss, and the responsibilities and duties thrust upon the gleaming example of America. In this
sense, the texts that guided national security policy did more than simply offer strategic analysis of
the "reality" they confronted: they actively concerned themselves with the scripting of a
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particular American identity. Stamped "Top Secret" and read by only the select and power few, the texts effaced the boundary
between inside and outside with their quasi-Puritan figurations.
In employing this mode of representation, the foreign policy texts of the postwar period recalled the seventeenth-century literary genre of the
jeremiad, or political sermon, in which Puritan preachers combined searing critiques with appeals for spiritual renewal. Later to establish the
interpretive framework for national identity, these exhortations drew on a European tradition of preaching the omnipresence of sin so as to
instill the desire for order but they added a distinctly affirmative moment:
The American Puritan jeremiad was the ritual of a culture on an errand - which is to say, a culture based on a faith in process. Substituting
teleology for hierarchy, it discarded the Old War ideal of stasis for a New World vision of the future. Its function was to create a climate of
anxiety that helped release the restless "progressivist" energies required for the success of the venture. The European jeremiad thrived on
anxiety, of course.
Like all "Traditionalist" forms of ritual, it used fear and trembling to teach
acceptance of fixed social norms. But the American jeremiad went much further. It made anxiety its end as well as its means.
Crisis was the social norm it sought to inculcate. The very concept of errand after all, implied a state of unfulfillment. The future, though
divinely assured, was never quite there, and New England's Jeremiahs set out to provide the sense of insecurity that would ensure the outcome.
Whereas the Puritan jeremiads were preached b y religious figures in public, the national security planners entreated in private the urgency of
the manifold dangers confronting the republic. But the refrains of their political sermons have occupied a prominent place in postwar political
discourse. On two separate occasions (first in 1950, and t hen in 196), private citizens with close ties to the foreign policy bureaucracy
established a "Committee on the Present Danger" to alert a public they perceived as lacking resolve and will to necessity of confronting the
More recently, with Pentagon planners concerned
about the "guerillas, assassins, terrorists, and subversives" said to be "nibbling away" at the
United States, proclamations that the fundamental values of the country are under threat have been
no less insistent. As Oliver North announced to the U.S. Congress: "It is very important for the
American people to know that this is a dangerous world; that we live at risk and that this
nation is at risk in a dangerous world." And in a State Department report, the 1990s were foreshadowed
political and military threat of communism and the Society Union.
as an era in which divergent political critiques nonetheless would seek equally to overcome the "corruption"
and "profligacy" induced by the "loss" of "American purpose" in Vietnam the "moral renewal." To this end, the
rendering of Operation Desert Shield-turn-Storm as an overwhelming exhibition of America's rediscovered
mission stands as testament. The cold war, then , was both a struggle that exceeded the military
threat of the Soviet Union and a struggle into which any number of potential candidates,
regardless of their strategic capacity, were slotted as a threat. In this sense, the collapse, overcoming,
or surrender of one of the protagonists at this historical junction does not mean "it" is over. The cold war's
meaning will undoubtedly change, but if we recall that the phrase cold war was coined by a fourteenth
century Spanish writer to represent the persistent rivalry between Christians and Arabs, we come to
recognize that the sort of struggle the phrase demotes is a struggle over identity: a struggle that is
no context-specific and thus not rooted in the existence of a particular kind of Soviet Union. Besides, the
United States-led war against Iraq should caution us to the fact that the Western (and particularly American)
interpretive dispositions that predominated in the post-World War II international environment - with their
zero-sum analyses of international action, the sense of endangerment ascribed to all the
activities of the other, the fear of internal challenge and subversion, the tendency to militarize
all response, and the willingness to draw the lines of superiority/inferiority between us and
them - were not specific to one state or ideology. As a consequence, we need to rethink the
convention understanding of foreign policy, and the historicity of the cold war in particular.
Hegemony is a paranoid fantasy---the strategy omnipotence sees threats to
empire everywhere, which necessitates constant violence---you have an
obligation to place the structural violence that hegemony invisibilizes at the
core of your decision calculus
McClintock 9—chaired prof of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at UW–Madison. MPhil
from Cambridge; PhD from Columbia (Anne, Paranoid Empire: Specters from Guantánamo and Abu
Ghraib, Small Axe Mar2009, Issue 28, p50-74)
the United States has come to be dominated by two grand and dangerous hallucinations:
the promise of benign US globalization and the permanent threat of the “war on terror.” I have come to feel
that we cannot understand the extravagance of the violence to which the US government has committed itself
after 9/11—two countries invaded, thousands of innocent people imprisoned, killed, and
tortured—unless we grasp a defining feature of our moment, that is, a deep and disturbing
doubleness with respect to power. Taking shape, as it now does, around fantasies of global
omnipotence (Operation Infinite Justice, the War to End All Evil) coinciding with nightmares of impending attack, the United
States has entered the domain of paranoia: dream world and catastrophe. For it is only in paranoia that
By now it is fair to say that
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one finds simultaneously and in such condensed form both deliriums of absolute power and forebodings of perpetual
threat. Hence the spectral and nightmarish quality of the “war on terror,” a limitless war against a limitless
threat, a war vaunted by the US administration to encompass all of space and persisting without
end. But the war on terror is not a real war, for “terror” is not an identifiable enemy nor a strategic, real-world target. The war on terror is what William Gibson calls elsewhere “a
consensual hallucination,” 4 and the US government can fling its military might against ghostly apparitions
and hallucinate a victory over all evil only at the cost of catastrophic self-delusion and the
infliction of great calamities elsewhere.
I have come to feel that we urgently need to make visible (the better politically to challenge) those established but
concealed circuits of imperial violence that now animate the war on terror. We need, as urgently, to illuminate the
continuities that connect those circuits of imperial violence abroad with the vast, internal
shadowlands of prisons and supermaxes—the modern “slave-ships on the middle passage to nowhere”—that have come to
characterize the United States as a super-carceral state. 5
Can we, the uneasy heirs of empire, now speak only of national things? If a long-established but
primarily covert US imperialism has, since 9/11, manifested itself more aggressively as an overt empire,
does the terrain and object of intellectual inquiry, as well as the claims of political responsibility,
not also extend beyond that useful fiction of the “exceptional nation” to embrace the shadowlands
of empire? If so, how can we theorize the phantasmagoric, imperial violence that has come so
dreadfully to constitute our kinship with the ordinary, but which also at the same moment renders
extraordinary the ordinary bodies of ordinary people, an imperial violence which in collusion
with a complicit corporate media would render itself invisible, casting states of emergency into
fitful shadow and fleshly bodies into specters? For imperialism is not something that happens
elsewhere, an offshore fact to be deplored but as easily ignored. Rather, the force of empire comes to
reconfigure, from within, the nature and violence of the nation-state itself, giving rise to
perplexing questions: Who under an empire are “we,” the people? And who are the ghosted,
ordinary people beyond the nation-state who, in turn, constitute “us”?
We now inhabit a crisis of violence and the visible. How do we insist on seeing the violence that
the imperial state attempts to render invisible, while also seeing the ordinary people afflicted by that violence? For to allow the spectral,
disfigured people (especially those under torture) obliged to inhabit the haunted no-places and penumbra of empire
to be made visible as ordinary people is to forfeit the long-held US claim of moral and cultural
exceptionalism, the traditional self-identity of the United States as the uniquely superior, universal
standard-bearer of moral authority, a tenacious, national mythology of originary innocence now
in tatters. The deeper question, however, is not only how to see but also how to theorize and oppose the violence without becoming beguiled by the seductions of spectacle alone. 6
Perhaps in the labyrinths of torture we must also find a way to speak with ghosts, for specters disturb the authority of
vision and the hauntings of popular memory disrupt the great forgettings of official history.
Paranoia
Even the paranoid have enemies.
—Donald Rumsfeld
Can we fully understand the proliferating circuits of imperial violence—the very eclipsing of which gives to our moment
without understanding the pervasive presence of the paranoia that has come, quite
violently, to manifest itself across the political and cultural spectrum as a defining feature of our
time? By paranoia, I mean not simply Hofstadter’s famous identification of the US state’s tendency toward conspiracy theories. 7 Rather, I conceive of paranoia as an
inherent contradiction with respect to power: a double-sided phantasm that oscillates precariously between deliriums of
grandeur and nightmares of perpetual threat, a deep and dangerous doubleness with respect to
power that is held in unstable tension, but which, if suddenly destabilized (as after 9/11), can produce
pyrotechnic displays of violence. The pertinence of understanding paranoia, I argue, lies in its peculiarly intimate and peculiarly dangerous relation to violence. 8
Why paranoia?
its uncanny, phantasmagoric cast—
Let me be clear: I do not see paranoia as a primary, structural cause of US imperialism nor as its
structuring identity. Nor do I see the US war on terror as animated by some collective, psychic agency,
submerged mind, or Hegelian “cunning of reason,” nor by what Susan Faludi calls a national “terror
dream.” 9 Nor am I interested in evoking paranoia as a kind of psychological diagnosis of the imperial
nation-state. Nations do not have “psyches” or an “unconscious”; only people do. Rather, a social entity
such as an organization, state, or empire can be spoken of as “paranoid” if the dominant powers governing
that entity cohere as a collective community around contradictory cultural narratives, self-mythologies,
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practices, and identities that oscillate between delusions of inherent superiority and omnipotence, and
phantasms of threat and engulfment. The term paranoia is analytically useful here, then, not as a
description of a collective national psyche, nor as a description of a universal pathology, but rather as an
analytically strategic concept, a way of seeing and being attentive to contradictions within power, a way of
making visible (the better politically to oppose) the contradictory flashpoints of violence that the state tries
to conceal.
Paranoia is in this sense what I call a hinge phenomenon, articulated between the ordinary person and
society, between psychodynamics and socio-political history. Paranoia is in that sense dialectical rather
than binary, for its violence erupts from the force of its multiple, cascading contradictions: the intimate
memories of wounds, defeats, and humiliations condensing with cultural fantasies of aggrandizement and
revenge, in such a way as to be productive at times of unspeakable violence. For how else can we
understand such debauches of cruelty?
A critical question still remains: does not something terrible have to happen to ordinary people (military
police, soldiers, interrogators) to instill in them, as ordinary people, in the most intimate, fleshly ways, a
paranoid cast that enables them to act compliantly with, and in obedience to, the paranoid visions of a
paranoid state? Perhaps we need to take a long, hard look at the simultaneously humiliating and
aggrandizing rituals of militarized institutions, whereby individuals are first broken down, then
reintegrated (incorporated) into the larger corps as a unified, obedient fighting body, the methods
by which schools, the military, training camps— not to mention the paranoid image-worlds of the
corporate media—instill paranoia in ordinary people and fatally conjure up collective but unstable
fantasies of omnipotence. 10 In what follows, I want to trace the flashpoints of imperial paranoia into
the labyrinths of torture in order to illuminate three crises that animate our moment: the crisis of violence
and the visible, the crisis of imperial legitimacy, and what I call “the enemy deficit.” I explore these
flashpoints of imperial paranoia as they emerge in the torture at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. I argue that
Guantánamo is the territorializing of paranoia and that torture itself is paranoia incarnate, in order to make
visible, in keeping with Hazel Carby’s brilliant work, those contradictory sites where imperial racism,
sexuality, and gender catastrophically collide. 11
The Enemy Deficit: Making the “Barbarians” Visible Because night is here but the barbarians have not
come. Some people arrived from the frontiers, And they said that there are no longer any barbarians. And
now what shall become of us without any barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.
—C. P. Cavafy, “Waiting for the Barbarians”
The barbarians have declared war.
—President George W. Bush
C. P. Cavafy wrote “Waiting for the Barbarians” in 1927, but the poem haunts the aftermath of 9/11 with
the force of an uncanny and prescient déjà vu. To what dilemma are the “barbarians” a kind of solution?
Every modern empire faces an abiding crisis of legitimacy in that it flings its power over
territories and peoples who have not consented to that power. Cavafy’s insight is that an imperial
state claims legitimacy only by evoking the threat of the barbarians. It is only the threat of the
barbarians that constitutes the silhouette of the empire’s borders in the first place. On the other
hand, the hallucination of the barbarians disturbs the empire with perpetual nightmares of
impending attack. The enemy is the abject of empire: the rejected from which we cannot part. And
without the barbarians the legitimacy of empire vanishes like a disappearing phantom. Those
people were a kind of solution.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, the grand antagonism of the United States
and the USSR evaporated like a quickly fading nightmare. The cold war rhetoric of totalitarianism,
Finlandization, present danger, fifth columnist, and infiltration vanished. Where were the enemies
now to justify the continuing escalation of the military colossus? “And now what shall become of
us without any barbarians?” By rights, the thawing of the cold war should have prompted an
immediate downsizing of the military; any plausible external threat had simply ceased to exist.
Prior to 9/11, General Peter Schoomaker, head of the US Army, bemoaned the enemy deficit: “It’s
no use having an army that did nothing but train,” he said. “There’s got to be a certain appetite for what the
hell we exist for.” Dick Cheney likewise complained: “The threats have become so remote. So
remote that they are difficult to ascertain.” Colin Powell agreed: “Though we can still plausibly
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identify specific threats—North Korea, Iran, Iraq, something like that—the real threat is the unknown,
the uncertain.” Before becoming president, George W. Bush likewise fretted over the post–cold war
dearth of a visible enemy: “We do not know who the enemy is, but we know they are out there.”
It is now well established that the invasion of Iraq had been a long-standing goal of the US administration,
but there was no clear rationale with which to sell such an invasion. In 1997 a group of neocons at the
Project for the New American Century produced a remarkable report in which they stated that to make
such an invasion palatable would require “a catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”
12
The 9/11 attacks came as a dazzling solution, both to the enemy deficit and the problem of
legitimacy, offering the Bush administration what they would claim as a political casus belli and
the military unimaginable license to expand its reach. General Peter Schoomaker would publicly admit that the attacks were an immense boon: “There
is a huge silver lining in this cloud. . . . War is a tremendous focus. . . . Now we have this focusing opportunity, and we have the fact that (terrorists) have actually attacked our homeland, which gives it some
oomph.” In his book Against All Enemies, Richard Clarke recalls thinking during the attack, “Now we can perhaps attack Osama Bin Laden.” After the invasion of Afghanistan, Secretary of State Colin Powell
Krauthammer, for one, called for a
declaration of total war. “We no longer have to search for a name for the post-Cold War era,” he
declared. “It will henceforth be known as the age of terrorism.” 13
noted, “America will have a continuing interest and presence in Central Asia of a kind we could not have dreamed of before.” Charles
Their paranoid projections guarantee unending wars
Hollander 3 – professor of Latin American history and women's studies at California State University (Nancy, "A Psychoanalytic Perspective on the Politics
of Terror:In the Aftermath of 9/11" www.estadosgerais.org/mundial_rj/download/FLeitor_NHollander_ingl.pdf)
9-11 has symbolically constituted a relief in the sense of a decrease in the persecutory anxiety
provoked by living in a culture undergoing a deterioration from within. The implosion reflects the economic
and social trends I described briefly above and has been manifest in many related symptoms, including the erosion of family and
community, the corruption of government in league with the wealthy and powerful, the abandonment of working people by
profit-driven corporations going international, urban plight, a drug-addicted youth, a violence addicted media reflecting and
motivating an escalating real-world violence, the corrosion of civic participation by a decadent democracy, a spiritually
bereft culture held prisoner to the almighty consumer ethic, racial discrimination, misogyny, gaybashing , growing numbers of families joining
the homeless, and environmental devastation. Was this not lived as a kind of societal suicide--an ongoing
assault, an aggressive attack—against life and emotional well-being waged from within against the societal self?
In this sense, 9/11 permitted a respite from the sense of internal decay by inadvertently stimulating a renewed
vitality via a reconfiguration of political and psychological forces: tensions within this country—between the “havesmores” and “have-lesses,” as well as between the defenders and critics of the status quo, yielded to a wave of nationalism in which a united
people--Americans all--stood as one against external aggression. At the same time, the generosity, solidarity and selfsacrifice expressed by
In this sense, then,
Americans toward one another reaffirmed our sense of ourselves as capable of achieving the “positive” depressive position sentiments of love and empathy. Fractured social
The enemy- -the threat to our integrity as a nation and, in D. W. Winnicott’s terms, to our
sense of going on being--was no longer the web of complex internal forces so difficult to understand
and change, but a simple and identifiable enemy from outside of us, clearly marked by their difference, their
foreignness and their uncanny and unfathomable “uncivilized” pre-modern character. The societal relief came with the projection of
aggressive impulses onto an easily dehumanized external enemy, where they could be justifiably
attacked and destroyed. This country’s response to 9/11, then, in part demonstrates how persecutory anxiety is more
easily dealt with in individuals and in groups when it is experienced as being provoked from the outside rather
than from internal sources. As Hanna Segal9 has argued (IJP, 1987), groups often tend to be narcissistic, self-idealizing,
and paranoid in relation to other groups and to shield themselves from knowledge about the reality of their own
aggression, which of necessity is projected into an enemy-- real or imagined--so that it can be demeaned, held in contempt
and then attacked. In this regard, 9/11 permitted a new discourse to arise about what is fundamentally wrong in
the world: indeed, the anti-terrorism rhetoric and policies of the U.S. government functioned for a period
to overshadow the anti-globalization movement that has identified the fundamental global conflict to
be between on the one hand the U.S. and other governments in the First World, transnational corporations, and powerful
international financial institutions, and on the other, workers’ struggles, human rights organizations and environmental movements throughout the world. The new
discourse presents the fundamental conflict in the world as one between civilization and
fundamentalist terrorism. But this “civilization” is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and those who claim to
represent it reveal the kind of splitting Segal describes: a hyperbolic idealization of themselves and their
culture and a projection of all that is bad, including the consequences of the terrorist underbelly of
decades long U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and Asia, onto the denigrated other, who must
be annihilated. The U.S. government, tainted for years by its ties to powerful transnational corporate interests, has recreated itself
relations were symbolically repaired.
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as the nationalistic defender of the American people. In the process, patriotism has kidnapped citizens’ grief and mourning and
militarism has high jacked people’s fears and anxieties, converting them into a passive consensus for an
increasingly authoritarian government’s domestic and foreign policies. The defensive significance of this new discourse has to do
with another theme related to death anxiety as well: the threat of species annihilation that people have lived with since the U.S. dropped
atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Segal argues that the leaders of the U.S. as well as other countries with nuclear capabilities, have disavowed
their own aggressive motivations as they developed10 weapons of mass destruction. The distortion of language
throughout the Cold War, such as “deterrence,” “flexible response,” Mutual Assured Destruction”, “rational
nuclear war,” “Strategic Defense Initiative” has served to deny the aggressive nature of the arms race (p. 8) and “to
disguise from ourselves and others the horror of a nuclear war and our own part in making it possible or
more likely” (pp. 8-9). Although the policy makers’ destructiveness can be hidden from their respective populations and justified for “national security” reasons, Segal
believes that
such denial only increases reliance on projective mechanisms and stimulates paranoia.
The portrayal of the U.S. as a benign hegemon justifies its violence in the name of
peace. The U.S. forces its image of an ideal world onto the world order.
Noorani, 2005. Yaseen Noorani is a Lecturer in Arabic Literature, Islamic and Middle East Studies,
University of Edinburgh. “The Rhetoric of Security,” The New Centennial Review 5.1, 2005.
The Bush administration perpetually affirms that the war against terrorism declared in response
to the attacks of September 2001 is "different from any other war in our history" and will
continue "for the foreseeable future." This affirmation, and indeed the very declaration of such a
war, belongs to a rhetoric of security that predates the Bush administration and which this
administration has intensified but not fundamentally altered. Rhetorically speaking, terrorism is
the ideal enemy of the United States, more so than any alien civilization and perhaps even more
so than the tyrannies of communism and fascism, terrorism's defeated sisters. This is because
terrorism is depicted in U.S. rhetoric not as an immoral tactic employed in political struggle, but
as an immoral condition that extinguishes the possibility of peaceful political deliberation. This
condition is the state of war, in absolute moral opposition to the peaceful condition of civil
society. As a state of war, terrorism portends the dissolution of the civil relations obtaining
within and among nations, particularly liberal nations, and thus portends the dissolution of
civilization itself. Terrorism is therefore outside the world order, in the sense that it cannot be
managed within this order since it is the very absence of civil order. For there to be a world order
at all, terrorism must be eradicated. In prosecuting a world war against the state of war, the
United States puts itself outside the world order as well. The Bush administration affirms, like
the Clinton administration before it, that because the identity of the United States lies in the
values that engender peace (freedom and democracy), the national interests of the United States
always coincide with the interests of the world order. The United States is the animus of the
world order and the power that sustains it. For this reason, any threat to the existence of the
United States is a threat to world peace itself, and anything that the United States does to secure
its existence is justified as necessary for the preservation of world peace. In this way, the
existence of the United States stands at the center of world peace and liberal values, yet remains
outside the purview of these values, since when under threat it is subject only to the extra-moral
necessity of self-preservation. I will argue that the symmetrical externality of the United States
and terrorism to the world order lies at the foundation of the rhetoric of security by which the
U.S. government justifies its hegemonic actions and policies. This rhetoric depicts a world in
which helpless, vulnerable citizens can achieve agency only through the U.S. government, while
terrorist individuals and organizations command magnitudes of destructive power previously
held only by states. The moral-psychological discourse of agency and fear, freedom and
enslavement invoked by this rhetoric is rooted in both classical liberalism and postwar U.S.
foreign policy. The war of "freedom" against "fear" is a psychic struggle with no specific
military enemies or objectives. It arises from the portrayal of the United States as an autarkic,
ideally impermeable collective agent that reshapes the external world in its own image. The war
of freedom against fear thereby justifies measures said to increase the defenses and internal
security of the United States as well as measures said to spread freedom and democracy over the
world. Now that the destructive capacity of warlike individuals can threaten the world order, the
power of the United States must be deployed in equal measure to neutralize this threat
throughout the world. The world as a whole now comes within the purview of U.S. disciplinary
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action. Any manifestation of the state of war, terrorist activity, anywhere in the world, is now a
threat to the existence of the United States and to world peace.There is no “clash of
civilizations,” but the Middle East, as the current site of the state of war, is the primary danger to
the world and must be contained,controlled, and reshaped. The symmetrical externality of the
United States and terrorism to the world order, then, allows its rhetoric to envision a historic
opportunity for mankind—the final elimination of the state of war from human existence, and
fear from the political psyche. Thiswill be achieved, however, only by incorporating the world
order into the United States for the foreseeable future.
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Hegemony link
The U.S. military strategy of creating a perfect safe world through its power is
impossible. It futile attempts just create more violence in the name of liberty and
peace.
Der Derian 2003 [James Der Derian, Associate Professor of Political Science at University of
Massachusetts Amherst, “Decoding The National Security Strategy of the United States of America,
boundary, 2 30.3, 19-27]
Regardless of authorial (or good) intentions, the NSS reads more like late—very late—
nineteenth-century poetry than a strategic doctrine for the twenty-first century. The rhetoric of
the White House favors and clearly intends to mobilize the moral clarity, nostalgic
sentimentality, and uncontested dominance reminiscent of the last great empires against the
ambiguities, complexities, and messiness of the current world disorder. However, the gulf
between the nation's stated cause ("to help make the world not just safer but better" [1]) and
defensive needs (to fight "a war against terrorists of global reach" [5]) is so vast that one detects
what Nietzsche referred to as the "breath of empty space," that void between the world as it is
and as we would wish it to be, which produces all kinds of metaphysical concoctions.¶ ¶ In short
shrift (thirty pages), the White House articulation of U.S. global objectives to the Congress
elevates strategic discourse from a traditional, temporal calculation of means and ends, to the
theological realm of monotheistic faith and monolithic truth. Relying more on aspiration than
analysis, revelation than reason, the NSS is not grand but grandiose strategy. In pursuit of an
impossible state of national security against terrorist evil, soldiers will need to be sacrificed, civil
liberties curtailed, civilians collaterally damaged, regimes destroyed. But a nation's imperial
overreach should exceed its fiduciary grasp: what's a full-spectrum dominance of the battle space
for?¶ ¶ Were this not an official White House doctrine, the contradictions of the NSS could be
interpreted only as poetic irony. How else to comprehend the opening paragraph, which begins
with "The United States possesses unprecedented—and unequaled—strength and influence in
the world" and ends with "The great strength of this nation must be used to promote a balance of
power that favors freedom" (1)? Perhaps the cabalistic Straussians that make up the defense
intellectual brain trust of the Bush administration (among them, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle,
and William Kristol) have come up with a nuanced, indeed, anti-Machiavellian reading of
Machiavelli that escapes the uninitiated. But so fixed is the NSS on the creation of a world in
America's image that concepts such as balance of power and imminent threat, once rooted in
historical, juridical, as well as reciprocal traditions, [End Page 20] become free-floating
signifiers. Few Europeans, "old" or "new," would recognize the balance of power principle
deployed by the NSS to justify preemptive, unilateral, military action against not actual but
"emerging" imminent threats (15). Defined by the eighteenth-century jurist Emerich de Vattel as
a state of affairs in which no one preponderant power can lay down the law to others, the
classical sense of balance of power is effectively inverted in principle by the NSS document and
in practice by the go-it-alone statecraft of the United States. Balance of power is global
suzerainty, and war is peace.
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Hegemony link
The U.S. attempts to create a safe world do not always lead to the ideal world we
hope for
Der Derian 2003 [James Der Derian, Associate Professor of Political Science at University of
Massachusetts Amherst, “Decoding The National Security Strategy of the United States of America,
boundary, 2 30.3, 19-27]
What significance should we make of the fact that the shortest section of the NSS (barely a page
and a half) is on the "nonnegotiable demands of human dignity" and rights, including "free
speech; freedom of worship; equal justice; respect for women; religious and ethnic tolerance;
and respect for private property" (3). Are these rights so self-evident and inalienable that they do
not warrant further clarification or justification? It would seem so: "History has not been kind to
those nations which ignored or flouted the rights and aspirations of their people" (3). And yet
this universalist avowal of rights requires a selective if not outright denial of history. Where was
the U.S. support of freedom, justice, and religious and ethnic tolerance when it supported
Saddam Hussein in his earlier war against Iran? When it provided intelligence, arms, and the
precursors for chemical weapons of mass destruction? When it abandoned the Shiites in the
south and the Kurds in the north of Iraq after the first Gulf War? ¶ Most significant is that these
rights are considered "nonnegotiable," making war, if not the first, certainly more of a viable
option when these [End Page 21] rights are violated. In this regard, President Bush's NSS is a
continuation rather than a repudiation of President Clinton's National Security Strategy of the
United States 1994–1995: Engagement and Enlargement. To be sure, Clinton's National Security
Strategy places greater emphasis on "preventive diplomacy" and multilateral intervention than
Bush's preference for preemptive war and unilateralist predispositions. But the virtuous
imperatives are in full evidence in the Clinton strategy: "All of America's strategic interests—
from promoting prosperity at home to checking global threats abroad before they threaten our
territory—are served by enlarging the community of democratic and free market nations. Thus,
working with new democratic states to help preserve them as democracies committed to free
markets and respect for human rights, is a key part of our national security strategy." 1¶ It is
hardly surprising, then, that many liberals, both within the government and the university,
supported the war against Iraq, and hardly unfair to question the extent to which Clinton and
other moral interventionists prepared the high ground for this war. As a microcosm, consider one
of the most visible splits in the ranks at top American universities, when such "moral" liberals as
Joseph Nye, Michael Ignatieff, and Samantha Power came out in support of the war, whereas
such "amoral" realists as Stanley Hoffmann, Steve Walt, and John Mearsheimer publicly
opposed it. Nietzsche, who always detected the smell of the swamp in all talk of virtue, finds in
The Twilight of the Idols a "bestowing virtue" in the realist's "courage in the face of reality":
"My recreation, my preference, my cure from all Platonism has always been Thucydides.
Thucydides, and perhaps the Principe of Machiavelli, are related to me closely by their
unconditional will not to deceive themselves and to see reason in reality—not in ‘reason,' still
less in ‘morality.' . . ."
Our national security strategy leaves us stuck in an endless war in which the world
must either follow the U.S. or die
Der Derian 2003 [James Der Derian, Associate Professor of Political Science at University of
Massachusetts Amherst, “Decoding The National Security Strategy of the United States of America,
boundary, 2 30.3, 19-27]
The NSS might aim for peace, but it amounts to a blueprint for a permanent war. Gone is any
trace of the humility that presidential candidate Bush invoked in his foreign policy addresses. In
its place, hubris of an epic size obviates any historical or self-consciousness about the costs of
empire. What ends not predestined by America's righteousness are to be preempted by the
sanctity of holy war. The NSS leaves the world with two options: peace on U.S. terms, or the
perpetual peace of the grave. The evangelical seeps through the prose of global realpolitik and
mitigates its harshest pronouncements with the solace of a better life to come. We all shall be—
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as played by the band as the Titanic sank—"Nearer My God to Thee" (coincidently, written by
Sarah Flower Adams, sister of the nineteenth-century poet Elizabeth Barrett, who secretly
married . . .) .
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Hegemony link
The U.S.’s hope for peace and strive to stay a hegemon usually ends violently with
more problems
Der Derian ‘03 [James Der Derian, Associate Professor of Political Science at University of
Massachusetts Amherst, “Decoding The National Security Strategy of the United States of America,
boundary, 2 30.3, 19-27]
Ultimately, however, real-world transformations exceed the grasp of the NSS. The war in Iraq
put on full display just how effective the military could be in attaining its planned goals. But
what falls outside the engineering and imaginary of the plan, what Edmund Burke called the
"empire of circumstance," is in the driver's seat and beyond the cybernetic machinations of the
NSS, as we see in the "peace" that followed. Many scholars saw the end of the Cold War as an
occasion to debate the merits of a unipolar future as well as to wax nostalgic over the stability of
a bipolar past. These debates continued to be state-centric as well as materialist in their
interpretation of how power works. By such criteria, there was little doubt that the United States
would emerge as the dominant military, economic, and, indeed, civilizational power. Even in
Paul Wolfowitz's worst-case nightmares, it was difficult to identify a potential "peer competitor"
on the horizon. [End Page 26]¶ But then came 9/11, and blueprints for a steady-state hegemony
were shredded. Asymmetrical power and fundamentalist resentment, force-multiplied by the
mass media, prompted a permanent state of emergency. After the first responders came a
semiotic fix with a kick, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America. But
from the tragedy of 9/11 to the farce of war in Iraq, after the multilateral hopes for a "safer and
better world" were subverted by the unilateral nihilism of preventive war, the syntax of order
and the code of the simulacrum began to break down. We caught a glimpse of a heteropolar
matrix, in which actors radically different in identity and interests (states versus superempowered individuals), using technologies in revolutionary ways (civilian airliners to create
kamikaze weapons of mass destruction, the Internet to mobilize the largest antiwar
demonstrations ever), were suddenly comparable in their capability to produce improbable
global effects. It might be small solace, but out of this deeply nihilistic moment might yet come
a real balance of power and truth, in which the Straussian reach of The National Security
Strategy is foreshortened by a Nietzschean grasp of reality.¶
The U.S. tries to maintain its power through preemptive actions. The U.S. is a
paradox of both vulnerability and invincibility.
Kaplan 04 (Amy Kaplan, Prof. of English @ Univ. of Pennslyvania, ‘3 [American Quarterly 56.1,
“Violent Belongings and the Question of Empire Today,”2004, p. muse]
This coming-out narrative, associated primarily with neoconservatives, aggressively celebrates
the United States as finally revealing its true essence—its manifest destiny—on a global stage.
We won the Cold War, so the story goes, and as the only superpower, we will maintain global
supremacy primarily by military means, by preemptive strikes against any potential rivals, and
by a perpetual war against terror, defined primarily as the Muslim world. We need to remain
vigilant against those rogue states and terrorists who resist not our power but the universal
human values that we embody. This narrative is about time as well as space. It imagines an
empire in perpetuity, one that beats back the question haunting all empires in J. M. Coetzee's
Waiting for the Barbarians: "One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire:
how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era." 9 In this hypermasculine narrative
there's a paradoxical sense of invincibility and unparalleled power and at the same time utter and
incomprehensible vulnerability—a lethal combination, which reminds us that the word
vulnerable once also referred to the capacity to harm.
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Hegemony is a paranoid fantasy—the most powerful nation sees threats
everywhere, legitimizing constant war.
McClintock 9—chaired prof of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at UW–Madison. MPhil
from Cambridge; PhD from Columbia (Anne, Paranoid Empire: Specters from Guantánamo and Abu
Ghraib, Small Axe Mar2009, Issue 28, p50-74)
By now it is fair to say that the United States has come to be dominated by two grand and dangerous
hallucinations: the promise of benign US globalization and the permanent threat of the “war on
terror.” I have come to feel that we cannot understand the extravagance of the violence to which the
US government has committed itself after 9/11—two countries invaded, thousands of innocent
people imprisoned, killed, and tortured—unless we grasp a defining feature of our moment, that
is, a deep and disturbing doubleness with respect to power. Taking shape, as it now does, around
fantasies of global omnipotence (Operation Infinite Justice, the War to End All Evil) coinciding with
nightmares of impending attack, the United States has entered the domain of paranoia: dream
world and catastrophe. For it is only in paranoia that one finds simultaneously and in such
condensed form both deliriums of absolute power and forebodings of perpetual threat. Hence the
spectral and nightmarish quality of the “war on terror,” a limitless war against a limitless threat, a
war vaunted by the US administration to encompass all of space and persisting without end. But
the war on terror is not a real war, for “terror” is not an identifiable enemy nor a strategic, real-world target.
The war on terror is what William Gibson calls elsewhere “a consensual hallucination,” 4 and the US
government can fling its military might against ghostly apparitions and hallucinate a victory over
all evil only at the cost of catastrophic self-delusion and the infliction of great calamities
elsewhere.
I have come to feel that we urgently need to make visible (the better politically to challenge) those
established but concealed circuits of imperial violence that now animate the war on terror. We need,
as urgently, to illuminate the continuities that connect those circuits of imperial violence abroad
with the vast, internal shadowlands of prisons and supermaxes—the modern “slave-ships on the
middle passage to nowhere”—that have come to characterize the United States as a super-carceral
state. 5
Can we, the uneasy heirs of empire, now speak only of national things? If a long-established but
primarily covert US imperialism has, since 9/11, manifested itself more aggressively as an overt empire,
does the terrain and object of intellectual inquiry, as well as the claims of political responsibility,
not also extend beyond that useful fiction of the “exceptional nation” to embrace the shadowlands
of empire? If so, how can we theorize the phantasmagoric, imperial violence that has come so
dreadfully to constitute our kinship with the ordinary, but which also at the same moment renders
extraordinary the ordinary bodies of ordinary people, an imperial violence which in collusion
with a complicit corporate media would render itself invisible, casting states of emergency into
fitful shadow and fleshly bodies into specters? For imperialism is not something that happens
elsewhere, an offshore fact to be deplored but as easily ignored. Rather, the force of empire comes to
reconfigure, from within, the nature and violence of the nation-state itself, giving rise to
perplexing questions: Who under an empire are “we,” the people? And who are the ghosted,
ordinary people beyond the nation-state who, in turn, constitute “us”?
We now inhabit a crisis of violence and the visible. How do we insist on seeing the violence that
the imperial state attempts to render invisible, while also seeing the ordinary people afflicted by that
violence? For to allow the spectral, disfigured people (especially those under torture) obliged to
inhabit the haunted no-places and penumbra of empire to be made visible as ordinary people is to
forfeit the long-held US claim of moral and cultural exceptionalism, the traditional self-identity of
the United States as the uniquely superior, universal standard-bearer of moral authority, a
tenacious, national mythology of originary innocence now in tatters. The deeper question, however,
is not only how to see but also how to theorize and oppose the violence without becoming beguiled by the
seductions of spectacle alone. 6
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Perhaps in the labyrinths of torture we must also find a way to speak with ghosts, for specters disturb
the authority of vision and the hauntings of popular memory disrupt the great forgettings of
official history.
Paranoia
Even the paranoid have enemies.
—Donald Rumsfeld
Why paranoia? Can we fully understand the proliferating circuits of imperial violence—the very
eclipsing of which gives to our moment its uncanny, phantasmagoric cast—without understanding the
pervasive presence of the paranoia that has come, quite violently, to manifest itself across the
political and cultural spectrum as a defining feature of our time? By paranoia, I mean not simply
Hofstadter’s famous identification of the US state’s tendency toward conspiracy theories. 7 Rather, I
conceive of paranoia as an inherent contradiction with respect to power: a double-sided phantasm that
oscillates precariously between deliriums of grandeur and nightmares of perpetual threat, a deep
and dangerous doubleness with respect to power that is held in unstable tension, but which, if
suddenly destabilized (as after 9/11), can produce pyrotechnic displays of violence. The pertinence
of understanding paranoia, I argue, lies in its peculiarly intimate and peculiarly dangerous relation to
violence. 8
Let me be clear: I do not see paranoia as a primary, structural cause of US imperialism nor as its structuring
identity. Nor do I see the US war on terror as animated by some collective, psychic agency, submerged
mind, or Hegelian “cunning of reason,” nor by what Susan Faludi calls a national “terror dream.” 9 Nor am
I interested in evoking paranoia as a kind of psychological diagnosis of the imperial nation-state. Nations
do not have “psyches” or an “unconscious”; only people do. Rather, a social entity such as an organization,
state, or empire can be spoken of as “paranoid” if the dominant powers governing that entity cohere as a
collective community around contradictory cultural narratives, self-mythologies, practices, and identities
that oscillate between delusions of inherent superiority and omnipotence, and phantasms of threat and
engulfment. The term paranoia is analytically useful here, then, not as a description of a collective national
psyche, nor as a description of a universal pathology, but rather as an analytically strategic concept, a way
of seeing and being attentive to contradictions within power, a way of making visible (the better politically
to oppose) the contradictory flashpoints of violence that the state tries to conceal.
Paranoia is in this sense what I call a hinge phenomenon, articulated between the ordinary person and
society, between psychodynamics and socio-political history. Paranoia is in that sense dialectical rather
than binary, for its violence erupts from the force of its multiple, cascading contradictions: the intimate
memories of wounds, defeats, and humiliations condensing with cultural fantasies of aggrandizement and
revenge, in such a way as to be productive at times of unspeakable violence. For how else can we
understand such debauches of cruelty?
A critical question still remains: does not something terrible have to happen to ordinary people (military
police, soldiers, interrogators) to instill in them, as ordinary people, in the most intimate, fleshly ways, a
paranoid cast that enables them to act compliantly with, and in obedience to, the paranoid visions of a
paranoid state? Perhaps we need to take a long, hard look at the simultaneously humiliating and
aggrandizing rituals of militarized institutions, whereby individuals are first broken down, then
reintegrated (incorporated) into the larger corps as a unified, obedient fighting body, the methods
by which schools, the military, training camps— not to mention the paranoid image-worlds of the
corporate media—instill paranoia in ordinary people and fatally conjure up collective but unstable
fantasies of omnipotence. 10 In what follows, I want to trace the flashpoints of imperial paranoia into
the labyrinths of torture in order to illuminate three crises that animate our moment: the crisis of violence
and the visible, the crisis of imperial legitimacy, and what I call “the enemy deficit.” I explore these
flashpoints of imperial paranoia as they emerge in the torture at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. I argue that
Guantánamo is the territorializing of paranoia and that torture itself is paranoia incarnate, in order to make
visible, in keeping with Hazel Carby’s brilliant work, those contradictory sites where imperial racism,
sexuality, and gender catastrophically collide. 11
The Enemy Deficit: Making the “Barbarians” Visible Because night is here but the barbarians have not
come. Some people arrived from the frontiers, And they said that there are no longer any barbarians. And
now what shall become of us without any barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.
—C. P. Cavafy, “Waiting for the Barbarians”
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The barbarians have declared war.
—President George W. Bush
C. P. Cavafy wrote “Waiting for the Barbarians” in 1927, but the poem haunts the aftermath of 9/11 with
the force of an uncanny and prescient déjà vu. To what dilemma are the “barbarians” a kind of solution?
Every modern empire faces an abiding crisis of legitimacy in that it flings its power over
territories and peoples who have not consented to that power. Cavafy’s insight is that an imperial
state claims legitimacy only by evoking the threat of the barbarians. It is only the threat of the
barbarians that constitutes the silhouette of the empire’s borders in the first place. On the other
hand, the hallucination of the barbarians disturbs the empire with perpetual nightmares of
impending attack. The enemy is the abject of empire: the rejected from which we cannot part. And
without the barbarians the legitimacy of empire vanishes like a disappearing phantom. Those
people were a kind of solution.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, the grand antagonism of the United States
and the USSR evaporated like a quickly fading nightmare. The cold war rhetoric of totalitarianism,
Finlandization, present danger, fifth columnist, and infiltration vanished. Where were the enemies
now to justify the continuing escalation of the military colossus? “And now what shall become of
us without any barbarians?” By rights, the thawing of the cold war should have prompted an
immediate downsizing of the military; any plausible external threat had simply ceased to exist.
Prior to 9/11, General Peter Schoomaker, head of the US Army, bemoaned the enemy deficit: “It’s
no use having an army that did nothing but train,” he said. “There’s got to be a certain appetite for what the
hell we exist for.” Dick Cheney likewise complained: “The threats have become so remote. So
remote that they are difficult to ascertain.” Colin Powell agreed: “Though we can still plausibly
identify specific threats—North Korea, Iran, Iraq, something like that—the real threat is the unknown,
the uncertain.” Before becoming president, George W. Bush likewise fretted over the post–cold war
dearth of a visible enemy: “We do not know who the enemy is, but we know they are out there.”
It is now well established that the invasion of Iraq had been a long-standing goal of the US administration,
but there was no clear rationale with which to sell such an invasion. In 1997 a group of neocons at the
Project for the New American Century produced a remarkable report in which they stated that to make such
an invasion palatable would require “a catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.” 12
The discourse of American leadership is rooted in the construction and
demonization of dangerous others. Their advantage produces the threat that
it names.
Campbell et al. 7—David Campbell, Geography @ Durham [“Performing Security: The Imaginative
Geographies of current US strategy” Political Geography 26 (4) doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2006.12.002 (Other
Authors: Luiza Bialasiewicz, Stuart Elden, Stephen Graham, Alex Jeffrey and Alison J. Williams)]
It is important to highlight the way performativity's idea of reiteration calls attention to changes in
historically established imaginative geographies. While US foreign policy has been traditionally written in
the context of identity/difference expressed in self/other relationships (Campbell, 1992), we detect in
recent strategic performances a different articulation of America's relationship to the world.
Signified by the notion of integration we identify elements in the formation of a new imaginative
geography which enable the US to draw countries into its spheres of influence and control. We
show how integration (and its coeval strategies of exclusion) has been enunciated over the last 15
years through popular-academic books, think-tank documents, policy programmes and security
strategies, as well as popular geopolitical sources. This concept of integration, we argue, is enacted
through a number of practices of representation and coercion that encourage countries to adopt a
raft of US attitudes and ways of operating or else suffer the consequences. As such, we are
witnessing the performance of a security problematic that requires critical perspectives to move beyond a
simple ideal/material dichotomy in social analysis in order to account for more complex understandings of
opposition, including the emergence of new, mobile geographies of exclusion.
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Non-state scribes
To understand the power of the imaginative geographies guiding current US strategy it is important to look
back at the recitation, reiteration and resignification of previous strategic formulations. During the Clinton
years, a number of figures who had been involved in various guises in previous Republican administrations
wrote widely on the geopolitical opportunities and threats of a post-Cold War era. From specifications of
the threat posed by international terrorism, ‘failed states’ and ‘rogue regimes’, to the dangers
posed by cultural/civilisational conflicts. The individuals and institutions we choose to examine in
this section are those whose geographical imaginations have been central in laying the ground for
some of the securitizing strategies of the current Bush administration and, specifically, whose work
has been key in specifying the importance of “integrating” a chaotic world where conflict is
inevitable.
The writers whose work we highlight here occupy a liminal position within policy circles. While not
paid members of the administration, they have either occupied such positions in the past or were aspiring to
them in the future. They do not, therefore, directly speak for the state (a position that grants them a
veneer of “objectivity”), and they navigate in the interstices between academic and “policyoriented” research: a location that, in turn, absolves them from the rigors of a scholarly discipline,
including disciplinary critique. By the term ‘non-state scribes’ we wish to indicate those who occupy a
liminal zone between academic and non-academic work, working in a range of governmental and private
research centres, think-tanks and study groups. What we would like to highlight are some of the ways in
which their influence problematises simple, secure understandings of the state and the constitution of ‘stateinterest’. While these individuals appear as impartial commentators-cum-advisers-cum-analysts, their
access to policy circles is open, if not privileged. To the extent that their geographical imaginations are
invoked by state power, they are also today's consummate “intellectuals of statecraft”: those who
“designate a world and ‘fill’ it with certain dramas, subjects, histories and dilemmas” (Ó Tuathail &
Agnew, 1992: 192).
Certainly the most prominent self-styled ‘community of experts’ intersecting with the Bush
administration is the Project for a New American Century (for critical analysis see Sparke, 2005). The
PNAC, founded in the spring of 1997, defines itself as a “non-profit, educational organization whose goal
is to promote American global leadership” (see PNAC, 2006). Putatively lying outside “formal” policy
networks, the Project from its inception has aimed to provide the intellectual basis for continued US
military dominance— and especially the willingness to use its military might.
As sole hegemon, PNAC argued, the US could not “avoid the responsibilities of global leadership”.
But it should not simply “react” to threats as they present themselves: it should, rather, actively shape the
global scenario before such threats emerge: “the history of the 20th century should have taught us that it
is important to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire”
(PNAC, 2000: i).
The resonance of these views with those of the Bush administration should come as no surprise:
among the Project's founders were individuals who had held posts in previous Republican
administrations and went on to serve in Bush's cabinet: Vice-President Dick Cheney, former Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy and now World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz, along with
the former ambassador to Iraq (and soon to be US Ambassador to the UN) Zalmay Khalilzad, in addition
to well known neoconservatives shaping policy debates in the US today, including Francis Fukuyama,
Norman Podhoretz, and William Kristol (see Fukuyama, 2006 and Williams, 2005). Unsurprisingly, the
most explicit formulation of what would become goals of the Bush administration can be found in the
PNAC's manifesto Rebuilding America's Defenses, which appeared in the election year of 2000. Here and
in subsequent documents, the PNAC envisages the US military's role to be fourfold: “Defend the American
Homeland”; “fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars”; “perform the
‘constabulary’ duties associated with shaping the security environment in critical regions”; and “transform
U.S. forces to exploit the ‘revolution in military affairs’” (PNAC, 2000: iv, 5; cf. The White House, 2002b:
30).
It is telling just how spatialised some of these specifications become when worked through in detail.
Already in 2000, PNAC argued that the major military mission is no longer to deter Soviet
expansionism, but to “secure and expand zones of democratic peace; deter rise of new great-power
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competitor; defend key regions; exploit transformation of war” (PNAC, 2000: 2). They suggested that
rather than the Cold War's “potential global war across many theatres”, the concern now is for several
“potential theatre wars spread across the globe” fought against “separate and distinct adversaries pursuing
separate and distinct goals” (2000: 2, 3). To counter such threats, the US needs to station its troops
broadly, and their presence “in critical regions around the world is the visible expression of the
extent of America's status as a superpower and as the guarantor of liberty, peace and stability”
(2000: 14). They claimed that while US security interests have “expanded”, and that its forces “provide the
first line of defense in what may be described as the ‘American security perimeter’”, at the same time “the
worldwide archipelago of U.S. military installations has contracted” (2000: 14, 15). Because the security
perimeter “has expanded slowly but inexorably” since the end of the Cold War, US forces— “the cavalry
on the new American frontier”— “must be positioned to reflect the shifting strategic landscape”
(2000: 14, 15). Equally, their use of the term ‘homeland’ drew strongly on its use in the Clinton
administration— and prefigured the creation of the Office for Homeland Security under G.W. Bush, with
the concept strengthened by both the PATRIOT acts and the establishment of U.S. Northern
Command.Again, it is essential that we conceptualize these strategies as both containing and
making imaginative geographies; specifying the ways “the world is” and, in so doing, actively
(re)making that same world. This goes beyond merely the military action or aid programmes that
governments follow, but indicates a wider concern with the production of ways of seeing the world,
which percolate through media, popular imaginations as well as political strategy. These
performative imaginative geographies are at the heart of this paper and will re-occur throughout it. Our
concern lies specifically with the ways in which the US portrays— and over the past decade has
portrayed— certain parts of the world as requiring involvement, as threats, as zones of instability, as
rogue states, “states of concern”, as “global hotspots”, as well as the associated suggestion that by
bringing these within the “integrated” zones of democratic peace, US security— both
economically and militarily— can be preserved. Of course, the translation of such imaginations into
actual practice (and certainly results) is never as simple as some might like to suggest. Nonetheless, what
we wish to highlight here is how these strategies, in essence, produce the effect they name. This,
again, is nothing new: the United States has long constituted its identity at least in part through
discourses of danger that materialize others as a threat (see Campbell, 1992). Equally, much has been
written about the new set of threats and enemies that emerged to fill the post-Soviet void— from radical
Islam through the war on drugs to “rogue states” (for a critical analyses see, among others, Benjamin and
Simon, 2003 and Stokes, 2005; on the genealogies of the idea of “rogue states” see Blum, 2002 and Litwak,
2000).
Their hegemonic approach to peace will produce error replication—the very
discourse used to describe their advantages causes violence. We must open
the framework of what constitutes peace to critical interrogation
Richmond 7 [Oliver P. Richmond, School of International Relations, University of St. Andrews,
Scotland, Alternatives 32 (2007), 247–274]
It is generally assumed by most theorists, most policymakers, and practitioners, that peace has an
ontological stability enabling it to be understood, defined, and thus created. Indeed, the implication
of the void of debate about peace indicates that it is generally thought that peace as a concept is so
ontologically solid that no debate is required. There is clearly a resistance to examining the
concept of peace as a subjective ontology, as well as a subjective political and ideological
framework. Indeed, this might be said to be indicative of “orientalism,” in impeding a discussion
of a positive peace or of alternative concepts and contexts of peace.18 Indeed, Said’s humanism indicates
the dangers of assuming that peace is universal, a Platonic ideal form, or extremely limited. An emerging
critical conceptualization of peace rests upon a genealogy that illustrates its contested discourses
and multiple concepts. This allows for an understanding of the many actors, contexts, and
dynamics of peace, and enables a reprioritization of what, for whom, and why, peace is valued.
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Peace from this perspective is a rich, varied, and fluid tapestry, which can be contextualized,
rather than a sterile, extremely limited, and probably unobtainable product of a secular or
nonsecular imagination. It represents a discursive framework in which the many problems that are
replicated by the linear and rational project of a universal peace (effectively camouflaged by a
lack of attention within IR) can be properly interrogated in order to prevent the discursive
replication of violence.19 This allows for an understanding of how the multiple and competing
versions of peace may even give rise to conflict, and also how this might be overcome. One area of
consensus from within this more radical literature appears to be that peace is discussed, interpreted, and
referred to in a way that nearly always disguises the fact that it is essentially contested. This is
often an act of hegemony thinly disguised as benevolence, assertiveness, or wisdom. Indeed, many
assertions about peace depend upon actors who know peace then creating it for those that do not,
either through their acts or through the implicit peace discourses that are employed to describe
conflict and war in opposition to peace. Where there should be research agendas there are often
silences. Even contemporary approaches in conflict analysis and peace studies rarely stop to imagine
the kind of peace they may actually create. IR has reproduced a science of peace based upon
political, social, economic, cultural, and legal governance frameworks, by which conflict in the
world is judged. This has led to the liberal peace framework, which masks a hegemonic collusion
over the discourses of, and creation of, peace.20 A critical interrogation of peace indicates it
should be qualified as a specific type among many.
The aff’s discourse of integration and leadership rehashes the geographies of
exclusion and containment in nicer sounding terms. Construct of dangerous
other versus stable and peaceful United States confirms the material and
moral hierarchies of the dominant U.S. identity.
Campbell et al. 7—David Campbell, Geography @ Durham [“Performing Security: The Imaginative
Geographies of current US strategy” Political Geography 26 (4) doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2006.12.002 (Other
Authors: Luiza Bialasiewicz, Stuart Elden, Stephen Graham, Alex Jeffrey and Alison J. Williams)]
The concept of integration, invoked in different ways and in different measures by both Kagan and
Barnett, is similarly at the heart of the current administration's foreign and domestic policies. The
former Director of Policy at the US State Department, Richard Haass, articulated the central tenets of
the concept when he wondered:
Is there a successor idea to containment? I think there is. It is the idea of integration. The goal of
US foreign policy should be to persuade the other major powers to sign on to certain key ideas as
to how the world should operate: opposition to terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, support
for free trade, democracy, markets. Integration is about locking them into these policies and then
building institutions that lock them in even more (Haass in Lemann, 1 April 2002, emphasis added).
That the US is no longer prepared to tolerate regimes that do not mirror its own democratic values
and practices, and that it will seek to persuade such major powers to change their policies and behaviours
to fit the American modus operandi, is not without historical precedent (Ambrosius, 2006). Nor does the
differently imagined geography of integration replace completely previous Manichean
conceptions of the world so familiar to Cold War politics. Rather, the proliferation of new terms of
antipathy such as ‘axis of evil’, ‘rogue states’, and ‘terror cities’ demonstrate how integration goes
hand in hand with – and is mutually constitutive of – new forms of division. Barnett's divide
between the globalised world and the non-integrating gap is reflected and complemented by Kagan's divide
in ways of dealing with this state of affairs. Much of this imagined geography pivots on the idea of ‘the
homeland’. Indeed, in the imaginations of the security analysts we highlight here, there is a direct
relationship and tension between securing the homeland's borders and challenging the sanctity of borders
elsewhere (see Kaplan, 2003: 87).
Appreciating this dynamic requires us to trace some of the recent articulations of US strategy. Since
September 11th 2001 the US government and military have issued a number of documents outlining their
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security strategy. Each recites, reiterates and resignifies both earlier strategic statements as well
each other, creating a sense of boundedness and fixity which naturalizes a specific view of the
world. Initially there was The National Strategy for Homeland Security (Office of Homeland Security,
2002), and then the much broader scope National Security Strategy (The White House, 2002b; see Der
Derian, 2003). These were followed by the “National Strategy for Combating Terrorism” and particular
plans for Military Strategy, Defense Strategy and the “Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support”
(Department of Defense, 2005a, Department of Defense, 2005b, Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2004 and The White
House, 2002a). These are seen as an interlocking whole, where “the National Military Strategy (NMS)
supports the aims of the National Security Strategy (NSS) and implements the National Defense Strategy
(NDS)” (Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2004: 1); and the “Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support” builds
“upon the concept of an active, layered defense outlined in the National Defense Strategy” (Department of
Defense, 2005b: iii; see also diagram on 6). The updated National Security Strategy (The White House,
2006) presents a further re-elaboration and re-stating of these principles.
As with the understandings we highlighted previously, it should be noted that key elements of these
strategies pre-date September 11. Significant in this continuity is the link between the Bush administration's
strategic view and the 1992 “Defense Planning Guidance” (DPG). Written for the administration of George
H. W. Bush by Paul Wolfowitz and I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, the DPG was the first neoconservative
security manifesto for the post-Cold War; a blue print for a one-superpower world in which the US had to
be prepared to combat new regional threats and prevent the rise of a hegemonic competitor (Tyler, 8 March
1992; see Mann, 2004: 198ff, 212).
Initial versions of the DPG were deemed too controversial and were rewritten with input from then Defense
Secretary Cheney and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Colin Powell (Tyler, 24 May 1992).
Nonetheless, Cheney's version still declared that, “we must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential
competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role” (Cheney, 1993: 2).
What we find in this is the kernel of the policies implemented in the administration of George W. Bush,
reworked through the Clinton period by such organizations as PNAC (discussed above). The assemblage of
individuals and organizations – both inside and outside the formal state structures – running from the DPG,
through PNAC to the plethora of Bush administration security texts cited above (all of which draw upon
well-established US security dispositions in the post-World War II era) demonstrates the performative
infrastructure through which certain ontological effects are established, and through which certain
performances are made possible and can be understood.
As we argue throughout this paper, the distinctive thing about recent National Security Strategies is their
deployment of integration as the principal foreign policy and security strategy. It is telling that Bush's claim
of “either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” (Bush, 2001) relies not on a straightforward
binary, as is sometimes suggested, but a process of incorporation. It is not simply us versus them, but with
us, a mode of operating alongside, or, in the words of one of Bush's most enthusiastic supporters, “shoulder
to shoulder” (Blair, 2001; see White & Wintour, 2001). This works more widely through a combination of
threats and promises, as in this statement about the Palestinians: “If Palestinians embrace democracy and
the rule of law, confront corruption, and firmly reject terror, they can count on American support for the
creation of a Palestinian state” (The White House, 2002b: 9). Likewise, it can be found in some of remarks
of the British Prime Minister Blair (2004) about the significance of democracy in Afghanistan, Africa and
Iraq. Equally Bush's notorious ‘axis of evil’ speech did not simply name North Korea, Iran and Iraq as its
members, but suggested that “states like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to
threaten the peace of the world” (Bush, 2002a, emphasis added). A comparison of the like, alongside the
“with the terrorists” is actually a more complicated approach to the choosing of sides and the drawing of
lines than is generally credited. Simple binary oppositions are less useful to an understanding here than the
process of incorporation and the policy of integration.
These examples indicate the policy of integration or exclusion being adopted by the US and followed by
certain allies. It warns those failing to adopt US values (principally liberal ‘representative’ democracy and
market capitalism), that they will be excluded from an American-centric world. The place of US allies in
these representations is not unimportant. Indeed, the strength of the US discourse relies also on its
reflection and reiteration by other key allies, especially in Europe. Above and beyond the dismissive
pronouncements of Rumsfeld about Europe's “Old” and “New” – a conception that was inchoately
articulated as early as the 1992 DPG – the dissent of (even some) Europeans is a problem for the US in its
world-making endeavours (see Bialasiewicz & Minca, 2005). It is not surprising, then, that following his
re-election, George W. Bush and Condoleeza Rice embarked almost immediately on a “bridge-building”
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tour across Europe, noting not trans-Atlantic differences but “the great alliance of freedom” that unites the
United States and Europe (Bush, 2005).
For although the United States may construct itself as the undisputed leader in the new global
scenario, its “right” – and the right of its moral-political “mission” of spreading “freedom and
justice” – relies on its amplification and support by allies. The construction of the United States'
world role relies also on the selective placement and representation of other international actors
who are “hailed” into specific subject positions (see Weldes, Laffey, Gusterson, & Duvall, 1999). Of
course, different actors are granted different roles and different degrees of agency in the global script: the
place of key European allies is different from that bestowed upon the peripheral and semi-peripheral states
that make part of the “coalition of the willing”. Both, however, are vital in sustaining the representation of
the US as the leader of a shared world of values and ideals. Indeed, the ‘lone superpower’ has little
influence in the absence of support.
Another important dimension of integration as the key strategic concept is its dissolution of the
inside/outside spatialization of security policy. The concluding lines of the “Strategy for Homeland
Defense and Civil Support” are particularly telling. It contends that the Department of Defense can “no
longer think in terms of the ‘home’ game and the ‘away’ game. There is only one game” (Department of
Defense, 2005b: 40). In part this is directed at the previous failure to anticipate an attack from within:
indeed, the Strategy remarks that the September 11th 2001 attacks “originated in US airspace and
highlighted weaknesses in domestic radar coverage and interagency air defense coordination” (2005b: 22).
In other words, the US needs to ensure the security of its homeland from within as much as without, to treat
home as away. In part, however, such rhetoric also reflects a continuity with and reiteration of
broader understandings with a much longer history, promoted by a range of US “intellectuals of
statecraft” since the end of the Cold War: understandings that specified increasingly hard
territorialisations of security and identity both at home and abroad to counter the “geopolitical
vertigo” (see Ó Tuathail, 1996) of the post-bipolar era.
It is important to note here, moreover, that the 2002 National Security Strategy's affirmation that “today,
the distinction between domestic and foreign affairs is diminishing” (The White House, 2002b: 30) also
involves the US treating away as a home, or at least, as a concern. From this we can see how the pursuit of
integration enables the territorial integrity of other sovereign states to be violated in its name, as specific
places are targeted to either ensure or overcome their exclusion (see Elden, 2005). As an example,
consider this statement, which recalls the late 1970s enunciation of an ‘arc of crisis’ stretching from
the Horn of Africa through the Middle East to Afghanistan: “There exists an ‘arc of instability’
stretching from the Western Hemisphere, through Africa and the Middle East and extending to
Asia. There are areas in this arc that serve as breeding grounds for threats to our interests . Within
these areas rogue states provide sanctuary to terrorists, protecting them from surveillance and attack” (Joint
Chiefs of Staff, 2004: 5).
In his foreword to the 2002 National Security Strategy, Bush declared that “We will defend the peace by
fighting terrorists and tyrants. We will preserve the peace by building good relations among the great
powers. We will extend the peace by encouraging free and open societies on every continent” (Bush,
2002b: i). This notion of extension is crucial in understanding the explicitly spatial overtones of this
strategy of integration: more than merely about values, democracy and capitalism, it is about a performative
geopolitics. Put crudely, it is about specifying the geographies of world politics; it is about specifying “the
ways the world (now) is” – a presumably descriptive “geopolitical exercise” but that, as all such exercises,
also implicitly contains the prescription for putting the world “right”.
Imaginative geographies and popular geopolitics
As we have tried to argue, such elaborations of security rely upon the affirmation of certain understandings
of the world within the context of which the strategies and understandings advanced by them are rendered
believable. What is more, we have tried to highlight how such performances invoke earlier articulations,
even as their reiteration changes them. More broadly, we stressed how such articulations provide the
conditions of possibility for current – and future – action. Integration thus marks a new performative
articulation in US security strategy, but it reworks rather than replaces earlier formulations. One of
the ways in which this operates is that the ideal of integration, as we have seen, necessarily invokes the
idea of exclusion. The imagined divide between the US ‘homeland’ and the threatening ‘frontier’
lands within the circle of Barnett's ‘Non-Integrating Gap’ thus recalls earlier iterations of ‘barbarism’
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even if their identity and spatiality are produced by more than a simple self/other binary. In the final section
of this essay, we will make some brief remarks regarding the disjuncture between the theory and the
practice of the enactment of such imaginations. First, however, we would like to highlight some other ways
in which these deployments of categories of inclusion and incorporation, on the one hand, and exclusion
and targeting, on the other, are also performed in the popular geopolitical work done by a wide range of
textual, visual, filmic and electronic media supportive of the ‘war on terror’ at home and abroad. These
cultural practices resonate with the idea of fundamentally terrorist territories, whilst, at the same time
rendering the ‘homeland’ zone of the continental US as a homogenous and virtuous ‘domestic’ community.
Such wide-ranging and diffuse practices that are nonetheless imbricated with each other are further
indications that we are dealing with performativity rather than construction in the production of imaginative
geographies.
The logic of Hegemonic preservation festishizes the US global role, necessitating a
kill-to-save mentality
Noorani, 2005. Yaseen Noorani is a Lecturer in Arabic Literature, Islamic and Middle East Studies,
University of Edinburgh. “The Rhetoric of Security,” The New Centennial Review 5.1, 2005.
The U.S. government's rhetoric of global security draws its power from simultaneously instantiating Schmitt's vision of the political as
non-normative national self-preservation and the liberal vision of the political as normative civil relations. The consequence is not that
this rhetoric disavows political antagonism within the nation, as Schmitt would have it (though there is an element of this), but that it
disavows political antagonism on the global level. I argued above that the positing of a non-normative situation of national selfpreservation, the same as that of a person being murdered, is insupportable due to the inescapable presence of a moral ideal in defining
the nation's self and deciding what threatens it. This applies to all justifications of action grounded in national security. The U.S.
rhetoric of security, however, lifts the paradox to a global level, and illustrates it more forcefully, by designating
the global order's moral ideal, its "way of life" that is under threat, as civil relations, freedom and peace, but
then making the fulcrum of this way of life an independent entity upon whose survival the world's way of
life depends—the United States. Just as an aggressor puts himself outside of normativity by initiating violence, so is the victim
not bound by any norms in defending his life. As the location of the self of the world order that must be preserved,
the United States remains unobligated by the norms of this order as long as it is threatened by terrorism. So
long as it struggles for the life of the world order, therefore, the United States remains external to this order,
just as terrorism remains external to the world order so long as it threatens a universal state of war . Without
the United States everyone is dead. Why should this be? The reason is that the United States fully embodies the values underlying
world peace—"freedom, democracy, and free enterprise" (National Security 2002, i)—and is the key to their realization in the global
domain. These values are [End Page 30] universal, desired by all and the standard for all. "[T]he United States must defend liberty and
justice because these principles are right and true for all people everywhere" (National Security 2002, 3). The fact that the United
States "possesses unprecedented—and unequaled—strength and influence in the world" (1) cannot therefore be fortuitous. It cannot
but derive from the very founding of the United States in universal principles of peace and its absolute instantiation of these principles.
This results in "unparalleled responsibilities, obligations, and opportunity" (1). In other words, the United States as a nation
stands, by virtue of its internal constitution, at the forefront of world history in advancing human freedom.
It is the subject of history. Its own principle of organization is the ultimate desire of humanity, and the development of this
principle is always at its highest stage in and through the United States. For this reason, the values of the United States and its interests
always coincide, and these in turn coincide with the interests of world peace and progress. The requirements of American security
reflect "the union of our values and our national interests," and their effect is to "make the world not just safer but better" (1). The
United States therefore is uniquely charged by history to maintain and advance world peace and universal freedom. America is a
nation with a mission, and that mission comes from our most basic beliefs. We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire.
Our aim is a democratic peace—a peace founded upon the dignity and rights of every man and woman. America acts in this cause
with friends and allies at our side, yet we understand our special calling: This great republic will lead the cause of freedom. (Bush
2004a) America can lead the cause of freedom because it is the cause of freedom. "American values and American interests lead in the
same direction: We stand for human liberty" (Bush 2003b). For this reason, it has no "ambitions," no private national interests or
aspirations that would run contrary to the interests of the world as a whole. It undertakes actions, like the invasion of Iraq, that further
no motive but the cause of humanity as a whole. "We have no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and restore control of [End
Page 31] that country to its own people" (Bush 2003a). In this way, the United States is distinct from all other nations, even though all
of humanity espouses the same values. Only the United States can be depended upon for ensuring the endurance of
these values because they are the sole basis of its existence. "Others might flag in the face of the inevitable ebb and
flow of the campaign against terrorism. But the American people will not" (NSCT 2003, 29). Any threat to the existence of
the United States is therefore a threat to the existence of the world order, which is to say, the values that make this
order possible. It is not merely that the United States, as the most powerful nation of the free world, is the most capable of defending
it. It is rather that the United States is the supreme agency advancing the underlying principle of the free order. The United States is
the world order's fulcrum, and therefore the key to its existence and perpetuation . Without the United States, freedom,
peace, civil relations among nations, and the possibility of civil society are all under threat of extinction.
This is why the most abominable terrorists and tyrants single out the United States for their schemes and
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attacks. They know that the United States is the guardian of liberal values. In the rhetoric of security, therefore, the
survival of the United States, its sheer existence, becomes the content of liberal values. In other words, what does it mean to espouse
liberal values in the context of the present state of world affairs? It means to desire fervently and promote energetically the survival of
the United States of America. When the world order struggles to preserve its "self," the self that it seeks to
preserve, the primary location of its being, is the United States. Conferring this status upon the United States allows
the rhetoric of security to insist upon a threat to the existence of the world order as a whole while confining the non-normative status
that arises from this threat to the United States alone. The United States—as the self under threat—remains external to the normative
relations by which the rest of the world continues to be bound. The United States is both a specific national existence
struggling for its life and normativity itself, which makes it coextensive with the world order as a whole.
For this reason, any challenge to U.S. world dominance would be a challenge to world peace and is thus
impermissible. We read in The National Security Strategy that the United States [End Page 32] will "promote a balance of power
that favors freedom" (National Security 2002, 1). And later, we find out what is meant by such a balance of power.
Hegemony elevates security to a transcendental ideal—it creates a moral framework
for violence that requires the elimination of all that is different or unpredictable.
Der Derian 2003 [James Der Derian, Associate Professor of Political Science at University of Massachusetts
Amherst, “Decoding The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, boundary, 2 30.3, 1927]
From President Bush's opening lines of The National Security Strategy of the United States of
America (NSS), the gap between rhetoric and reality takes on Browningesque proportions: "‘Our
Nation's cause has always been larger than our Nation's defense. We fight, as we always fight, for
a just peace—a peace that favors liberty. We will defend the peace against the threats from
terrorists and tyrants. We will preserve the peace by building good relations among the great
powers. And we will extend the peace by encouraging free and open societies on every continent'"
(1). Regardless of authorial (or good) intentions, the NSS reads more like late—very late—
nineteenth-century poetry than a strategic doctrine for the twenty-first century. The rhetoric of the
White House favors and clearly intends to mobilize the moral clarity, nostalgic sentimentality,
and uncontested dominance reminiscent of the last great empires against the ambiguities,
complexities, and messiness of the current world disorder. However, the gulf between the nation's
stated cause ("to help make the world not just safer but better" [1]) and defensive needs (to fight
"a war against terrorists of global reach" [5]) is so vast that one detects what Nietzsche referred to
as the "breath of empty space," that void between the world as it is and as we would wish it to be,
which produces all kinds of metaphysical concoctions. In short shrift (thirty pages), the White
House articulation of U.S. global objectives to the Congress elevates strategic discourse from a
traditional, temporal calculation of means and ends, to the theological realm of monotheistic faith
and monolithic truth. Relying more on aspiration than analysis, revelation than reason, the NSS is
not grand but grandiose strategy. In pursuit of an impossible state of national security against
terrorist evil, soldiers will need to be sacrificed, civil liberties curtailed, civilians collaterally
damaged, regimes destroyed. But a nation's imperial overreach should exceed its fiduciary grasp:
what's a full-spectrum dominance of the battle space for? Were this not an official White House
doctrine, the contradictions of the NSS could be interpreted only as poetic irony. How else to
comprehend the opening paragraph, which begins with "The United States possesses
unprecedented—and unequaled—strength and influence in the world" and ends with "The great
strength of this nation must be used to promote a balance of power that favors freedom" (1)?
Perhaps the cabalistic Straussians that make up the defense intellectual brain trust of the Bush
administration (among them, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and William Kristol) have come up
with a nuanced, indeed, anti-Machiavellian reading of Machiavelli that escapes the uninitiated.
But so fixed is the NSS on the creation of a world in America's image that concepts such as balance
of power and imminent threat, once rooted in historical, juridical, as well as reciprocal traditions,
become free-floating signifiers. Few Europeans, "old" or "new," would recognize the balance of
power principle deployed by the NSS to justify preemptive, unilateral, military action against not
actual but "emerging" imminent threats (15). Defined by the eighteenth-century jurist Emerich de
Vattel as a state of affairs in which no one preponderant power can lay down the law to others, the
classical sense of balance of power is effectively inverted in principle by the NSS document and
in practice by the go-it-alone statecraft of the United States. Balance of power is global suzerainty,
and war is peace.
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The Aff’s Hegemonic discourse of “Global Instability” versus a stable US validate the
Hierarchy of Dominant US Identity, returning to the geographies of exclusion.
Daavid Campbell et. al. 7, Prof. of Geography @ Durham, ‘7 [Political Geography 26, “Performing
security: The imaginative geographies of current US strategy,” 414-415]
The concept of integration, invoked in different ways and in different measures by both Kagan and Barnett, is similarly at the heart of
the current administration’s foreign and domestic policies. The former Director of Policy at the US State Department, Richard Haass,
articulated the central tenets of the concept when he wondered:
Is there a successor idea to containment? I think there is. It is the idea of integration. The goal of US foreign policy should be to persuade
the other major powers to sign on to certain key ideas as to how the world should operate: opposition to terrorism and weapons of mass
destruction, support for free trade, democracy, markets. Integration is about locking them into these policies and then building
institutions that lock them in even more (Haass in Lemann, 1 April 2002, emphasis added).
That the US is no longer prepared to tolerate regimes that do not mirror its own democratic values and
practices, and that it will seek to persuade such major powers to change their policies and behaviours to fit
the American modus operandi, is not without historical precedent (Ambrosius, 2006). Nor does the differently
imagined geography of integration replace completely previous Manichean conceptions of the world so
familiar to Cold War politics. Rather, the proliferation of new terms of antipathy such as ‘axis of evil’, ‘rogue
states’, and ‘terror cities’ demonstrate how integration goes hand in hand with e and is mutually constitutive
of e new forms of division. Barnett’s divide between the globalised world and the non-integrat- ing gap is
reflected and complemented by Kagan’s divide in ways of dealing with this state of affairs. Much of this
imagined geography pivots on the idea of ‘the homeland’. Indeed, in the imaginations of the security analysts
we highlight here, there is a direct relationship and tension between securing the homeland’s borders and
challenging the sanctity of borders elsewhere (see Kaplan, 2003: 87).
Appreciating this dynamic requires us to trace some of the recent articulations of US strategy. Since
September 11th 2001 the US government and military have issued a number of documents outlining their
security strategy. Each recites, reiterates and resignifies both earlier strategic statements as well each other,
creating a sense of boundedness and fixity which naturalizes a specific view of the world. Initially there was The
National Strategy for Homeland Security (Office of Homeland Security, 2002), and then the much broader scope National Security
Strategy (The White House, 2002b; see Der Derian, 2003). These were followed by the ‘‘National Strategy for Combating Terrorism’’
and particular plans for Military Strategy, Defense Strategy and the ‘‘Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support’’ (Department
of Defense, 2005a, 2005b; Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2004; The White House, 2002a). These are seen as an interlocking whole, where ‘‘the
National Military Strategy (NMS) supports the aims of the National Security Strat- egy (NSS) and implements the National Defense
Strategy (NDS)’’ (Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2004: 1); and the ‘‘Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support’’ builds ‘‘upon the concept
of an active, layered defense outlined in the National Defense Strategy’’ (Department of Defense, 2005b: iii; see also diagram on 6).
The updated National Security Strategy (The White House, 2006) presents a further re-elaboration and re-stating of these principles.
As with the understandings we highlighted previously, it should be noted that key elements of these strategies pre-date
September 11. Significant in this continuity is the link between the Bush administration’s strategic view and the 1992 ‘‘Defense
Planning Guidance’’ (DPG). Writ- ten for the administration of George H. W. Bush by Paul Wolfowitz and I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby,
the DPG was the first neoconservative security manifesto for the post-Cold War; a blue print for a one-superpower world in which the
US had to be prepared to combat new regional threats and prevent the rise of a hegemonic competitor (Tyler, 8 March 1992; see Mann,
2004: 198ff, 212).
Initial versions of the DPG were deemed too controversial and were rewritten with input from then Defense Secretary Cheney and
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Colin Powell (Tyler, 24 May 1992). Nonetheless, Cheney’s version still declared that, ‘‘we must
maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role’’ (Cheney, 1993:
2).What we find in this is the kernel of the policies implemented in the administration of George W. Bush, reworked through the Clinton
period by such organizations as PNAC (dis- cussed above). The assemblage of individuals and organizations e both inside and outside
the formal state structures e running from the DPG, through PNAC to the plethora of Bush administration security texts
cited above (all of which draw upon well-established US security dispositions in the post-World War II era)
demonstrates the performative infrastructure through which certain ontological effects are established, and
through which certain performances are made possible and can be understood.
Pursuit of hegemony is a fantasy of control that relies upon construction of threatening Otherness --- this
prompts resistance and create a permanent state of conflict
Chernus 6 (Ira, Professor of Religious Studies and Co-director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program – University of
Colorado-Boulder, Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin, p. 53-54)
The end of the cold war spawned a tempting fantasy of imperial omnipotence on a global scale. The neocons want to
turn that fantasy into reality. But reality will not conform to the fantasy; it won’t stand still or keep any semblance of permanent order.
So the neocons’ efforts inevitably backfire. Political scientist Benjamin Barber explains that a nation with unprecedented
power has “unprecedented vulnerability: for it must repeatedly extend the compass of its power to preserve what it already
has, and so is almost by definition always overextended.” Gary Dorrien sees insecurity coming at the neoconservatives in another way,
too: “For the empire, every conflict is a local concern that threatens its control. However secure it maybe, it never feels
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secure enough. The [neocon] unipolarists had an advanced case of this anxiety. . . . Just below the surface of the customary
claim to toughness lurked persistent anxiety. This anxiety was inherent in the problem of empire and, in the case of the neocons,
heightened by ideological ardor.”39 If the U.S. must control every event everywhere, as neocons assume, every act of
resistance looks like a threat to the very existence of the nation. There is no good way to distinguish between nations
or forces that genuinely oppose U.S. interests and those that don’t. Indeed, change of any kind, in any nation, becomes a potential
threat. Everyone begins to look like a threatening monster that might have to be destroyed. It’s no surprise that a
nation imagined as an implacable enemy often turns into a real enemy. When the U.S. intervenes to prevent change, it is
likely to provoke resistance. Faced with an aggressive U.S. stance, any nation might get tough in return. Of course, the U.S. can
say that it is selflessly trying to serve the world. But why would other nations believe that? It is more likely that others will
resist, making hegemony harder to achieve. To the neocons, though, resistance only proves that the enemy really
is a threat that must be destroyed. So the likelihood of conflict grows, making everyone less secure.
Moreover, the neocons want to do it all in the public spotlight. In the past, any nation that set out to conquer others usually kept its
plans largely secret. Indeed, the cold war neocons regularly blasted the Soviets for harboring a “secret plan” for world conquest. Now
here they are calling on the U.S. to blare out its own domineering intentions for all the world to [end page 53] hear. That hardly seems
well calculated to achieve the goal of hegemony. But it is calculated to foster the assertive, even swaggering, mood on the home front
that the neocons long for. Journalist Ron Suskind has noted that neocons always offer “a statement of enveloping peril and no
hypothesis for any real solution.” They have no hope of finding a real solution because they have no reason to look for one. Their
story allows for success only as a fantasy. In reality, they expect to find nothing but an endless battle against an enemy that can never
be defeated. At least two prominent neocons have said it quite bluntly. Kenneth Adelman: “We should not try to convince people that
things are getting better.” Michael Ledeen: “The struggle against evil is going to go on forever.”40 This vision of endless conflict is
not a conclusion drawn from observing reality. It is both the premise and the goal of the neocons’ fantasy. Ultimately, it seems,
endless resistance is what they really want. Their call for a unipolar world ensures a permanent state of conflict, so
that the U.S. can go on forever proving its military supremacy and promoting the “manly virtues” of militarism.
They have to admit that the U.S., with its vastly incomparable power, already has unprecedented security against any foreign army. So
they must sound the alarm about a shadowy new kind of enemy, one that can attack in novel, unexpected ways. They must make
distant changes appear as huge imminent threats to America, make the implausible seem plausible, and thus find new monsters to
destroy. The neocons’ story does not allow for a final triumph of order because it is not really about creating a politically calm,
orderly world. It is about creating a society full of virtuous people who are willing and able to fight off the threatening forces of social
chaos. Having superior power is less important than proving superior power. That always requires an enemy. Just as neocons need
monsters abroad, they need a frightened society at home. Only insecurity can justify their shrill call for a stronger nation (and a higher
military budget). The more dire their warnings of insecurity, the more they can demand greater military strength and moral resolve.
Every foreign enemy is, above all, another occasion to prod the American people to overcome their anxiety, identify evil, fight
resolutely against it, and stand strong in defense of their highest values. Hegemony will do no good unless there is challenge to be met,
weakness to be conquered, evil to be overcome. The American people must actively seek hegemony and make sacrifices for it, to
show that they are striving to overcome their own weakness. So the quest for strength still demands a public confession of weakness,
just as the neocons had demanded two decades earlier when they warned of a Soviet nuclear attack through a “window of
vulnerability.” The quest for strength through the structures of national security still demands a public declaration of national
insecurity. Otherwise, there is nothing to overcome. The more frightened the public, the more likely it is to believe and enact the
neocon story.
Conflict de-escalation is backwards – assumptions of violence become a self-fulfilling prophecy and
guarantee environmental collapse
Clark 4 (Mary E., French Cumbie Professor of Conflict Resolution at George Mason University,
“Rhetoric, Patriarchy & War: Explaining the Dangers of "Leadership" in Mass Culture,” Women and
Language. Urbana: Fall,. Vol. 27, Iss. 2, ProQuest)
Today's Western patriarchal world view now dominates globalwide dialogue among the "leaders" of Earth's nearly two hundred
nation-states. Its Machiavellian/Realpolitik assumptions about the necessity of' military power to preserve
order within and between groups of humans trumps--and stifles--other potential viewpoints. Founded on the belief
that "evil" is innate, it dictates that human conflict must be "controlled": global "law" backed by coercive force. This
view, when cross-culturally imposed, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, thus "legitimating" an escalating
use of force. Western leaders (male and female) use a rhetoric couched in a "hegemonic masculinity" to
justify their ready use of military force to coerce "those who are against us" into compliance. This translates globally as "national
leaders must never lose face!" Changing this dominant paradigm requires dismantling the hierarchic hegemony of masculine militarism and its related economic institutions,
through global cross-cultural dialogues, thus replacing a hegemonic world view and institutions with new, more adaptive visions, woven out of the most useful remnants of
multiple past cultural stories. The paper concludes with a few examples where people around the worm are doing just this--using their own small voices to insert their local "sacred
social story" into the global dialogue. This global process--free from a hegemonic militaristic rhetoric--has the potential to initiate a planetary dialogue where "boundaries" are no
longer borders to be defended, but sites of social ferment and creative adaptation. When the call came for papers on War, Language, and Gender, referring us to Carol Cohn's
seminal paper "Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals," (1) I at first felt that little more could be added on the subject. But events in Washington in the
ensuing weeks stimulated me to a broader "take" on this topic. Defense intellectuals, after all, are embedded in a whole culture, and the interaction is two-way. Not only does their
strategic framework with its euphemistic language about war and killing have the outcome of forcing society to think in their terms; their framework and language developed in
In other words, militarism and the necessity for
organized physical force (2) emerge out of culturewide assumptions about human nature. Throughout
historical times these assumptions have repeatedly proved to be self-fulfilling prophecies. The
response to our deeply embedded, Western cultural image of a Machiavellian / neo-Darwinian universe.
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pervasive perception of enemy-competitors has generated violent conflicts that flared up and died
back, only to flare up again through our failure to achieve deep resolution and, especially, to alter our basic beliefs about
human nature and our consequent social institutions. Today our species, politically, comprises some 180190 "nations" of varying cultural homogeneity and moral
legitimacy, not to mention size and physical power. Regardless of their indigenous, internal cultural preferences, their cross-national interactions are institutionalized to fit a
framework long established by former Western colonial powers among themselves. In other words, the global "reality" constructed by Western patriarchies-a Realpolitik,
ultimately grounded in military power-has come to define day-to-day cross-national politics. During the era of the Cold War, this resulted in small, powerless nations seeking
alliances with one or other superpower, which offered not only development aid but military protection, and, for locally unpopular, but "cooperating" leaders, small arms to
maintain order at home. The "end" of the Cold War brought little change in this pervasive global militarism (though it did strengthen the role of economic hegemony by the
remaining superpower (3)).
The enormous technological "improvements"-i.e. efficiency
over the past few decades has now resulted
in killing power-in weaponry of all types
in a dangerously over-armed planet that simultaneously faces a
desperate shortage of resources available for providing the world's people with water, energy, health care, education, and
the infrastructure for distributing them. While our environmental and social overheads continue to mount, our
species seems immobilized, trapped in an institutionalized militarism-an evolutionary cul-de-sac! We need
new insights-as Cohn said, a new language, a new set of metaphors, a new mental framework-for thinking, dialoguing and visioning
new patterns of intersocietal interaction.
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Link -- Hegemony [Rule]
Framing hegemony as necessary greases the wheels of future intervention
James B
Rule
, PhD Harvard, MA Oxford, BA Brandeis, The
Dissent Vol. 57 No 1, Winter
Military State of America and the Democratic Left,
2010
The invasion of Iraq
was a defining moment for the United States. This was the kind of war that many Americans
believed formed no part of this country's repertoire - an aggressive war of choice. Its aim was not to stop
some wider conflict or to prevent ethnic cleansing or mass killings; indeed, its predictable effect was to
promote these things. The purpose was to extirpate a regime that the United States had built up but that had morphed into an obstacle to this
country - and to replace it with one that would represent a more compliant instrument of American purpose. In short, the war was a
demonstration of American ability and willingness to remove and replace regimes anywhere in the world.
Even in the wake of the Iraq fiasco, no one in high places has declared repetitions of such exploits "off the
table" - to use the expression favored by this country's foreign policy elites. For those of us who opposed the war, there is obvious relief at the
conclusion - we hope - of a conflict that has consistently brought out the worst in this country. But at the same time, those on the democratic
Left look to the future with unease. Even under a reputedly liberal president, we have reason to worry about
new versions of Iraq - in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran or venues yet undisclosed . To its credit, Dissent has not joined the
rush to avert attention from the endgames of the Iraq conflict. The Spring 2009 edition features a section of articles under the rubric "Leaving Iraq." The
essays focus on the moral and political quandaries of America's departure from a country that it did a great deal to break, but where its ability to repair
the thinking that gave us the American
invasion of Iraq in the first place has not gone away. George Packer, for example, inveighs against those seeking a
quick exit for American forces. The balance of power among Iraq's domestic forces could easily be upset , he
things is rapidly diminishing. But, a look at the proposals put forward there makes it clear that
holds, and valuable progress undone, without a longlingering presence of Americans as enforcers. Obviously playing to the sensitivities of Dissent
readers, he concludes that "much as we might wish [the war] had never happened at all, America will have obligations as well as interests in Iraq for a
long time to come." The
sense of all this, from Packer's standpoint, becomes clear when you recall his efforts to
discredit Americans' resistance to the war in the months before it began. The antiwar movement, he wrote in
the New York Times Magazine in December, 2002, "has a serious liability . . . it's controlled by the furthest reaches of the
American Left." He goes on, in this same article, to envisage a quite different role for those on the Left, like himself, who took what he considered
a more enlightened view: The "liberal hawks could make the case for war to suspicious Europeans and to wavering fellow Americans," he wrote; "they
might even be able to explain the connection between the war in Iraq and the war on terrorism ..." Brendan O'Leary, another contributor to Dissent's
Spring 2009 "Leaving Iraq" section, also stresses responsibility. He, too, means by this continued readiness to apply U.S. coercion to manage
Iraqi domestic politics. To judge from his words, he has no difficulty in principle with the notion of remaking Iraq by outside military force: "Reasonable
historians should judge ... that removing the genocidal Baathists was overdue," he avers. "The younger Bush made up for his father's mistake, though he
did so for the wrong reasons." Still, O'Leary allows that the invasion hasn't quite unfolded as he might have wished: "... grotesque mismanagement of
regime-replacement ... unnecessary and arrogant occupation ... incompetence of American direct rule... numerous errors of policy and imagination ... in
the horrors and brutalities that have followed." The America occupiers have sometimes proved "blindly repressive," he allows - but sometimes,
apparently, not repressive enough. Still, leaving before America sets things straight would be irresponsible. If the United States just keeps trying, it may
yet get it all right. This country must now manage the political forces set in motion by its invasion according to O'Leary's exacting formula: defend the
federalist constitution, keep resurgent Sunni and Shiite forces from each other's throats, and preserve the autonomy of the Kurds. Just the same, he notes,
"After the United States exits, an Arab civil war may re-ignite, as well as Kurdish-Arab conflict." To some of us, an invasion that leaves such possibilities
simmering after six years of American-sponsored death and destruction itself seems more than a little irresponsible. Some of the aims invoked by Packer
and O'Leary are beyond reproach. Certainly the United States bears profound responsibilities to protect Iraqis at risk from their collaboration with or
employment by American forces - and for that matter, to help repair damage to the country's infrastructure resulting from the invasion. And certainly this
country should do everything possible to prevent regional, communal, and ethnic groupings from exploiting a U.S. pullout to oppress others. But making
good on any of these estimable goals, as the authors seem to realize, will be a very big order - especially given America's record thus far. Yet the
deeper, mostly unstated assumptions underlying these authors' proposals ought to strike a chill throughout
the democratic Left. Their problems with the Iraq invasion - and implicitly, future American military exploits of the same kind have to do with execution, not the larger vision of American power that inspired the enterprise . Their words
strike an eerie resonance with those of Thomas L. Friedman, before the invasion occurred : he favored George W.
Bush's "audacious" war plan as "a job worth doing," but only "if we can do it right." America's violent remaking of Iraq would
have been entirely acceptable, it seems, if only Friedman's sensibilities could have guided it. More important: the continuing mission of the
United States as maker and breaker of regimes around the world remained unquestioned. When any country
gets seriously in the way of American power, the global responsibilities of this country are apt to require
action like that taken in Iraq. We hear this kind of thinking in its most outof-the-closet form from
neoconservatives - who gave us the Iraq invasion in the first place. But its roots in American history lie at least as far back
as notions of Manifest Destiny. Its key inspiration is a particularly aggressive form of American exceptionalism.
Some higher power - fate, Divine Providence, or special "moral clarity" - has created opportunities, indeed obligations, for
America to set things straight on a global scale. Versions of this idea are pervasive among thinkers - American
foreign policy elites, and those who would guide them - who would disclaim identification with the neocons . Often conveying the
doctrine are code words referring to special "responsibilities" of the United States to guarantee world "stability." Or, as Madeleine Albright, then U.S.
ambassador to the United Nations, stated, "If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see
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further into the future. . ." To her credit, Albright's effusions in this direction stopped short of support for invading Iraq - something that cannot be said for
the so-called liberal hawks. Accepting
this view of America as the ultimate and rightful arbiter of global affairs - as
superpower, to use less upbeat terms - triggers the weightiest implications and consequences.
Nearly all of them, I hold, run in collision course to the best aims and directions of the democratic Left. Yet
even for thinkers who identify themselves as being on the Left, acceptance of a hyper-militarized America,
and its concomitant role of global enforcer, often passes without question. For those of us who challenge
this view, the invasion of Iraq was wrong for fundamental political and - indeed - moral reasons. Not because it
was mismanaged. Not because too few troops were dispatched; not because the Iraqi Army was disbanded; not because the occupation was
master hegemon or world
incompetent, corrupt, and often criminally negligent. It was wrong because wars of this kind are always wrong - aggressive, opportunistic wars of choice,
wars are wrong because of the destruction and
distortions that they spread both abroad and at home. Among nations, they countervail against one of the subtle
but hopeful tendencies in the world today - the movement away from sole reliance on brute state power to
resolve international conflict and toward supranational authorities, multilateral decision -making, and
establishment of powers above the level of states. At home, the effects are even more insidious. For in order
to make itself the kind of country capable of "projecting power" anywhere in the world, as America has
done so unsuccessfully in Iraq, it has had to impose vast demands and distortions upon its own domestic
life.
aimed at revamping entire countries to fit the dictates of the invaders. These
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Link -- Hegemony [Rule]
The Logic of US Exceptionalism militarizes society and greases the wheels of intervention. Their
obsession with the specifics of military distribution instead of the framing that allowed fiascos like
Iraq to happen makes error replication and future intervention inevitable.
And, their discourse distorts their description of the world and means the aff’s harms only exist in
their imperialist imagination. This militarization of society makes war fighting the end point of
existence which leads to no value to life because we are cooped up in our homes with duct tape, water
bottles and Fox news too afraid to leave.
Pursuit of hegemony is a fantasy of control that relies upon construction of threatening Otherness --this prompts resistance and create a permanent state of conflict
Chernus 6 (Ira, Professor of Religious Studies and Co-director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program – University of
Colorado-Boulder, Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin, p. 53-54)
The end of the cold war spawned a tempting fantasy of imperial omnipotence on a global scale. The neocons want to
turn that fantasy into reality. But reality will not conform to the fantasy; it won’t stand still or keep any semblance of permanent order.
So the neocons’ efforts inevitably backfire. Political scientist Benjamin Barber explains that a nation with unprecedented
power has “unprecedented vulnerability: for it must repeatedly extend the compass of its power to preserve what it already
has, and so is almost by definition always overextended.” Gary Dorrien sees insecurity coming at the neoconservatives in another way,
too: “For the empire, every conflict is a local concern that threatens its control. However secure it maybe, it never feels
secure enough. The [neocon] unipolarists had an advanced case of this anxiety. . . . Just below the surface of the customary
claim to toughness lurked persistent anxiety. This anxiety was inherent in the problem of empire and, in the case of the neocons,
heightened by ideological ardor.”39 If the U.S. must control every event everywhere, as neocons assume, every act of
resistance looks like a threat to the very existence of the nation. There is no good way to distinguish between nations
or forces that genuinely oppose U.S. interests and those that don’t. Indeed, change of any kind, in any nation, becomes a potential
threat. Everyone begins to look like a threatening monster that might have to be destroyed. It’s no surprise that a
nation imagined as an implacable enemy often turns into a real enemy. When the U.S. intervenes to prevent change, it is
likely to provoke resistance. Faced with an aggressive U.S. stance, any nation might get tough in return. Of course, the U.S. can
say that it is selflessly trying to serve the world. But why would other nations believe that? It is more likely that others will
resist, making hegemony harder to achieve. To the neocons, though, resistance only proves that the enemy really
is a threat that must be destroyed. So the likelihood of conflict grows, making everyone less secure.
Moreover, the neocons want to do it all in the public spotlight. In the past, any nation that set out to conquer others usually kept its
plans largely secret. Indeed, the cold war neocons regularly blasted the Soviets for harboring a “secret plan” for world conquest. Now
here they are calling on the U.S. to blare out its own domineering intentions for all the world to [end page 53] hear. That hardly seems
well calculated to achieve the goal of hegemony. But it is calculated to foster the assertive, even swaggering, mood on the home front
that the neocons long for. Journalist Ron Suskind has noted that neocons always offer “a statement of enveloping peril and no
hypothesis for any real solution.” They have no hope of finding a real solution because they have no reason to look for one. Their
story allows for success only as a fantasy. In reality, they expect to find nothing but an endless battle against an enemy that can never
be defeated. At least two prominent neocons have said it quite bluntly. Kenneth Adelman: “We should not try to convince people that
things are getting better.” Michael Ledeen: “The struggle against evil is going to go on forever.”40 This vision of endless conflict is
not a conclusion drawn from observing reality. It is both the premise and the goal of the neocons’ fantasy. Ultimately, it seems,
endless resistance is what they really want. Their call for a unipolar world ensures a permanent state of conflict, so
that the U.S. can go on forever proving its military supremacy and promoting the “manly virtues” of militarism.
They have to admit that the U.S., with its vastly incomparable power, already has unprecedented security against any foreign army. So
they must sound the alarm about a shadowy new kind of enemy, one that can attack in novel, unexpected ways. They must make
distant changes appear as huge imminent threats to America, make the implausible seem plausible, and thus find new monsters to
destroy. The neocons’ story does not allow for a final triumph of order because it is not really about creating a politically calm,
orderly world. It is about creating a society full of virtuous people who are willing and able to fight off the threatening forces of social
chaos. Having superior power is less important than proving superior power. That always requires an enemy. Just as neocons need
monsters abroad, they need a frightened society at home. Only insecurity can justify their shrill call for a stronger nation (and a higher
military budget). The more dire their warnings of insecurity, the more they can demand greater military strength and moral resolve.
Every foreign enemy is, above all, another occasion to prod the American people to overcome their anxiety, identify evil, fight
resolutely against it, and stand strong in defense of their highest values. Hegemony will do no good unless there is challenge to be met,
weakness to be conquered, evil to be overcome. The American people must actively seek hegemony and make sacrifices for it, to
show that they are striving to overcome their own weakness. So the quest for strength still demands a public confession of weakness,
just as the neocons had demanded two decades earlier when they warned of a Soviet nuclear attack through a “window of
vulnerability.” The quest for strength through the structures of national security still demands a public declaration of national
insecurity. Otherwise, there is nothing to overcome. The more frightened the public, the more likely it is to believe and enact the
neocon story.
Culminates in planetary annihilation
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Dallymayr 4 (Fred, Professor of Philosophy and Political Science – University of Notre Dame, “The Underside of Modernity:
Adorno, Heidegger, and Dussel”, Constellations, 11(1))
What Dussel here calls asymmetry is otherwise often called hegemony – or else the onset of a new global imperialism
(involving the rule of the “West” over the “Rest”). In such a situation, nothing can be more important and salutary than
the cultivation of global critical awareness, of critical counter-discourses willing and able to call into question the presumptions of
global imperial rule. The dangers of such totalizing domination are becoming more evident every day. With the
growing technological sophistication of weaponry we are relentlessly instructed about the underside of
modernity, about the fateful collusion of power and knowledge in the unfolding of modern enlightenment
(as analyzed by Adorno and Horkheimer). Coupled with the globalizing momentum, military sophistication greatly
enhances the prospect of global warfare – indeed of global “total” warfare (as envisaged by Heidegger in the 1930s).
Such warfare, moreover, is profiled against the backdrop of hegemonic asymmetry (as seen by Dussel): the vastly
unequal possession of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. In this situation, the goal of global
warfare is bound to be the “total” subjugation of less developed or subaltern societies – a subjugation
accomplished through longdistance military offensives capable of inflicting maximum casualties on
enemies while minimizing the attackers’ costs.25 Given the intoxicating effects of global rule, must one not also anticipate
corresponding levels of total depravity and corruption among the rulers? In fact, must one not fear the upsurge of a new breed of
“global master criminals” (planetarische Hauptverbrecher) whose actions are likely to match those of their twentieth-century
predecessors, and perhaps even surpass them (behind a new shield of immunity)? Armed with unparalleled nuclear devices
and unheard-of strategic doctrines, global masters today cannot only control and subjugate populations, but in
fact destroy and incinerate them (from high above). In the words of Arundhati Roy, addressed to the world’s imperial
rulers:To slow a beast, you break its limbs. To slow a nation, you break its people; you rob them of volition. You
demonstrate your absolute command over their destiny. You make it clear that ultimately it falls to you to decide who lives, who dies,
who prospers, who doesn’t. To exhibit your capability you show off all that you can do, and how easily you can do it – how easily you
could press a button and annihilate the earth.26
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Link -- Hegemony [Burke]
US Leadership ensures destruction – we only believe it is stabilizing because we refuse to question it
Anthony Burke, Senior Lecturer @ School of Politics & IR @ Univ. of New South Wales, ‘7 [Beyond
Security, Ethics and Violence, p. 231-2]
Yet the first act in America's 'forward strategy of freedom' was to invade and attempt to subjugate Iraq,
suggesting that, if 'peace' is its object, its means is war: the engine of history is violence, on an enormous
and tragic scale, and violence is ultimately its only meaning. This we can glimpse in 'Toward a Pacific Union', a deeply
disingenuous chapter of Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man. This text divides the earth between a 'posthistorical' world of affluent developed democracies where 'the old rules of power-politics have decreasing relevance', and a
world still 'stuck in history' and 'riven with a variety of religious, national and ideological conflicts'. The two worlds will
maintain 'parallel but separate existences' and interact only along axes of threat, disturbance and crucial strategic interest:
oil, immigration, terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Because 'the relationship between
democracies and nondemocracies will still be characterised by mutual distrust and fear', writes Fukuyama, the 'posthistorical half must still make use of realist methods when dealing with the part still in history ... force will still be the
naturalises war and
coercion as the dominant mode of dealing with billions of people defined only
ultima ratio in their relations'. For all the book's Kantian pretensions, Fukuyama
through their lack of 'development' and 'freedom'. Furthermore, in his advocacy of the 'traditional moralism of American
foreign policy' and his dismissal of the United Nations in favour of a NATO-style 'league of truly free states ... capable of
much more forceful action to protect its collective security against threats arising from the non-democratic part of the
world' we can see an early premonition of the historicist unilateralism of the Bush administration. 72 In this light, we
can see the invasion of Iraq as continuing a long process of 'world-historical' violence that
stretches back to Columbus' discovery of the Americas, and the subsequent politics of genocide, warfare
and dispossession through which the modem United States was created and then expanded
- initially with the colonisation of the Philippines and coercive trade relationships with China and Japan, and eventually
to the self-declared role Luce had argued so forcefully for: guarantor of global economic and strategic
order after 1945. This role involved the hideous destruction of Vietnam and Cambodia,
'interventions' in Chile, El Salvador, Panama, Nicaragua and Afghanistan (or an ever more
destructive 'strategic' involvement in the Persian Gulf that saw the United States first building up Iraq as a formidable
regional military power, and then punishing its people with a 14-year sanctions regime that caused the deaths of at least
200,000 people), all of which we are meant to accept as proof of America's benign intentions,
of America putting its 'power at the service of principle'. They are merely history working itself out, the
'design of nature' writing its bliss on the world.73 The bliss 'freedom' offers us, however, is the bliss of
the graveyard, stretching endlessly into a world marked not by historical perfection or
democratic peace, but by the eternal recurrence of tragedy, as ends endlessly
disappear in the means of permanent war and permanent terror. This is how we must
understand both the prolonged trauma visited on the people of Iraq since 1990, and the inflammatory impact the US
invasion will have on the new phenomenon of global antiWestern terrorism. American exceptionalism has deluded US
policymakers into believing that they are the only actors who write history, who know where it is heading, and how it will
play out, and that in its service it is they (and no-one else) who assume an unlimited freedom to act. As a senior adviser to
Bush told a journalist in 2002: 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality . . We're history's
actors."
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Link -- Hegemony [Burke]
Heg may have deterred a few foes, but the question is whether its worth it -- Burke says hegemony's
dominant means of peace is through war. Only our argument is based in empirics -- historical
violence stemming from US leadership archives genocide and dispossession in Vietnam, Cambodia,
Iraq, and Afghanistan.
The 1NC Burke ev criticizes their claims to national existence and a state that admits no questioning
– their commitment to national security creates problematizations of the truth that drive out peaceful
global rule of the political.
Pursuit of hegemony is a fantasy of control that relies upon construction of threatening Otherness --this prompts resistance and create a permanent state of conflict
Chernus 6 (Ira, Professor of Religious Studies and Co-director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program – University of
Colorado-Boulder, Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin, p. 53-54)
The end of the cold war spawned a tempting fantasy of imperial omnipotence on a global scale. The neocons want to
turn that fantasy into reality. But reality will not conform to the fantasy; it won’t stand still or keep any semblance of permanent order.
So the neocons’ efforts inevitably backfire. Political scientist Benjamin Barber explains that a nation with unprecedented
power has “unprecedented vulnerability: for it must repeatedly extend the compass of its power to preserve what it already
has, and so is almost by definition always overextended.” Gary Dorrien sees insecurity coming at the neoconservatives in another way,
too: “For the empire, every conflict is a local concern that threatens its control. However secure it maybe, it never feels
secure enough. The [neocon] unipolarists had an advanced case of this anxiety. . . . Just below the surface of the customary
claim to toughness lurked persistent anxiety. This anxiety was inherent in the problem of empire and, in the case of the neocons,
heightened by ideological ardor.”39 If the U.S. must control every event everywhere, as neocons assume, every act of
resistance looks like a threat to the very existence of the nation. There is no good way to distinguish between nations
or forces that genuinely oppose U.S. interests and those that don’t. Indeed, change of any kind, in any nation, becomes a potential
threat. Everyone begins to look like a threatening monster that might have to be destroyed. It’s no surprise that a
nation imagined as an implacable enemy often turns into a real enemy. When the U.S. intervenes to prevent change, it is
likely to provoke resistance. Faced with an aggressive U.S. stance, any nation might get tough in return. Of course, the U.S. can
say that it is selflessly trying to serve the world. But why would other nations believe that? It is more likely that others will
resist, making hegemony harder to achieve. To the neocons, though, resistance only proves that the enemy really
is a threat that must be destroyed. So the likelihood of conflict grows, making everyone less secure.
Moreover, the neocons want to do it all in the public spotlight. In the past, any nation that set out to conquer others usually kept its
plans largely secret. Indeed, the cold war neocons regularly blasted the Soviets for harboring a “secret plan” for world conquest. Now
here they are calling on the U.S. to blare out its own domineering intentions for all the world to [end page 53] hear. That hardly seems
well calculated to achieve the goal of hegemony. But it is calculated to foster the assertive, even swaggering, mood on the home front
that the neocons long for. Journalist Ron Suskind has noted that neocons always offer “a statement of enveloping peril and no
hypothesis for any real solution.” They have no hope of finding a real solution because they have no reason to look for one. Their
story allows for success only as a fantasy. In reality, they expect to find nothing but an endless battle against an enemy that can never
be defeated. At least two prominent neocons have said it quite bluntly. Kenneth Adelman: “We should not try to convince people that
things are getting better.” Michael Ledeen: “The struggle against evil is going to go on forever.”40 This vision of endless conflict is
not a conclusion drawn from observing reality. It is both the premise and the goal of the neocons’ fantasy. Ultimately, it seems,
endless resistance is what they really want. Their call for a unipolar world ensures a permanent state of conflict, so
that the U.S. can go on forever proving its military supremacy and promoting the “manly virtues” of militarism.
They have to admit that the U.S., with its vastly incomparable power, already has unprecedented security against any foreign army. So
they must sound the alarm about a shadowy new kind of enemy, one that can attack in novel, unexpected ways. They must make
distant changes appear as huge imminent threats to America, make the implausible seem plausible, and thus find new monsters to
destroy. The neocons’ story does not allow for a final triumph of order because it is not really about creating a politically calm,
orderly world. It is about creating a society full of virtuous people who are willing and able to fight off the threatening forces of social
chaos. Having superior power is less important than proving superior power. That always requires an enemy. Just as neocons need
monsters abroad, they need a frightened society at home. Only insecurity can justify their shrill call for a stronger nation (and a higher
military budget). The more dire their warnings of insecurity, the more they can demand greater military strength and moral resolve.
Every foreign enemy is, above all, another occasion to prod the American people to overcome their anxiety, identify evil, fight
resolutely against it, and stand strong in defense of their highest values. Hegemony will do no good unless there is challenge to be met,
weakness to be conquered, evil to be overcome. The American people must actively seek hegemony and make sacrifices for it, to
show that they are striving to overcome their own weakness. So the quest for strength still demands a public confession of weakness,
just as the neocons had demanded two decades earlier when they warned of a Soviet nuclear attack through a “window of
vulnerability.” The quest for strength through the structures of national security still demands a public declaration of national
insecurity. Otherwise, there is nothing to overcome. The more frightened the public, the more likely it is to believe and enact the
neocon story.
Culminates in planetary annihilation
216
Security K
Dallymayr 4 (Fred, Professor of Philosophy and Political Science – University of Notre Dame, “The Underside of Modernity:
Adorno, Heidegger, and Dussel”, Constellations, 11(1))
What Dussel here calls asymmetry is otherwise often called hegemony – or else the onset of a new global imperialism
(involving the rule of the “West” over the “Rest”). In such a situation, nothing can be more important and salutary than
the cultivation of global critical awareness, of critical counter-discourses willing and able to call into question the presumptions of
global imperial rule. The dangers of such totalizing domination are becoming more evident every day. With the
growing technological sophistication of weaponry we are relentlessly instructed about the underside of
modernity, about the fateful collusion of power and knowledge in the unfolding of modern enlightenment
(as analyzed by Adorno and Horkheimer). Coupled with the globalizing momentum, military sophistication greatly
enhances the prospect of global warfare – indeed of global “total” warfare (as envisaged by Heidegger in the 1930s).
Such warfare, moreover, is profiled against the backdrop of hegemonic asymmetry (as seen by Dussel): the vastly
unequal possession of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. In this situation, the goal of global
warfare is bound to be the “total” subjugation of less developed or subaltern societies – a subjugation
accomplished through longdistance military offensives capable of inflicting maximum casualties on
enemies while minimizing the attackers’ costs.25 Given the intoxicating effects of global rule, must one not also anticipate
corresponding levels of total depravity and corruption among the rulers? In fact, must one not fear the upsurge of a new breed of
“global master criminals” (planetarische Hauptverbrecher) whose actions are likely to match those of their twentieth-century
predecessors, and perhaps even surpass them (behind a new shield of immunity)? Armed with unparalleled nuclear devices
and unheard-of strategic doctrines, global masters today cannot only control and subjugate populations, but in
fact destroy and incinerate them (from high above). In the words of Arundhati Roy, addressed to the world’s imperial
rulers:To slow a beast, you break its limbs. To slow a nation, you break its people; you rob them of volition. You
demonstrate your absolute command over their destiny. You make it clear that ultimately it falls to you to decide who lives, who dies,
who prospers, who doesn’t. To exhibit your capability you show off all that you can do, and how easily you can do it – how easily you
could press a button and annihilate the earth.26
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Link—Human Rights
Depictions of human rights catastrophe legitimize realism
Dunne & Wheeler 4 [Tim Dunne, University of Exeter, UK, Nicholas J. Wheeler, University of
Wales, Aberystwyth, UK, “‘We the Peoples’: Contending Discourses of Security in Human Rights Theory
and Practice”, International Relations, Vol. 18, No. 1, 9-23,
http://cadair.aber.ac.uk/dspace/bitstream/2160/1972/1/We%2520the%2520Peoples.pdf]
Where do human rights fit into this realist picture of security? Realist proponents of national
security do not deny the existence of human rights norms such as those embodied in the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights. But crucially, realism argues that they are norms which are not binding
on states when they collide with other interests (such as trade or national security). Hans J.
Morgenthau, the godfather of realism, argued that ‘the principle of the defense of human rights
cannot be consistently applied in foreign policy because it can and must come in conflict with
other interests that may be more important than the defense of human rights in a particular
circumstance’.9 Realists also point to the centrality of states in implementing human rights standards and
the weak or nonexistent enforcement machinery. As a leading representative of the US delegation at San
Francisco made clear, ‘”We the peoples” means that the peoples of the world were speaking through their
governments’.10 Amnesty International’s annual report is a constant reminder that realist thinking on
human rights is part of the fabric of contemporary international society. A recent report summarized
its findings against the backdrop of the war on terror as follows: ‘ Governments have spent billions to
strengthen national security and the “war on terror”. Yet for millions of people, the real sources of
insecurity are corruption, repression, discrimination, extreme poverty and preventable
diseases’.11 This is nothing new. Driven by expediency and self-interest, governments have long
trampled on their citizens’ rights in order to maintain the power and privilege of an elite few. In
the language of International Relations theory, what Amnesty is describing is the problem of statism, by
which is meant the idea that the state should be the sole source of loyalty and values for its citizens.12
Amnesty claims that the majority of states routinely fail to deliver even basic rights to their citizens.
Governments or agencies acting on their behalf routinely imprison without trial, torture and/or
kill individuals who challenge the regime. The Westphalian practice of statism infects international
bodies such as the United Nations. Amnesty International points to the ‘realpolitik’ in the General
Assembly and the UN Commission on Human Rights that it charges as being ‘almost irrelevant to the
protection of victims in Burundi, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo’.13 It is not unusual to
find that no state has tabled a condemnatory resolution at the UN General Assembly even after it has been
presented with evidence of gross human rights violations. Consistent with the charge of statism is the
argument that the UN is merely an arena for raison d’état, a kind of global Westphalian system where
the language for the conduct of international relations has changed but the interests remain the
same. Human rights in this context have represented, in the words of Norman Lewis, ‘nothing more
than an empty abstraction whose function was the legitimation and perpetuation of the given
system of power relations, domestically and internationally’.14
The aff securitizes human rights—however government methods for solving it fail
turning the case
Kardas 5 [Saban Kardas, Ph.D. Student University of Utah Department of Political Science, working
paper no. 31, “Human Rights Policy and International Relations: Realist Foundations Reconsidered”,
December 6, 2005, http://www.du.edu/korbel/hrhw/working/2005/31-kardas-2005.pdf]
The concern for and promotion of human rights has increasingly assumed an international
dimension in the post-War period.2 The Westphalian principles are not the only values advanced by the
UN Charter. To be sure, the Charter also mentions human rights among the purposes of the
organization, along with the maintenance of international peace and security, and a growing body of
human rights regime has accumulated since the enactment of the Charter. This trend is best reflected
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emerged a body of legal in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the two UN Covenants and
other universal and regional Human Rights Conventions and mechanisms. As a result of the development
of such a normative international order, and increasing pace of interdependence and globalization eroding
the traditional distinctions between domestic and international affairs, coupled with the activities of
powerful NGOs, the issues of human rights have found their way into international politics.
Consequently, there norms and mechanisms as well as political instruments, ranging from human
rights diplomacy to humanitarian intervention and international war crimes tribunals, which regulate the
governments’ treatment of their citizens.3 Though very fragile, they provide a ground to put the
domestic conduct of the governments under the scrutiny by individuals, domestic and
international non-governmental organizations, other states and international organizations. Despite
the tension to be discussed below, human rights—especially the violation of them- has become a
legitimate concern to the international society, a process which has been provided with added
impetus in the post-Cold War era.4 The end of the Cold War and the emerging international system
were characterized by the increasing possibilities for international cooperation, especially at a
time where destabilizing effects of the end of the Cold War have increased the need for
international protection and promotion of human rights. Growing activities on the part of
secessionist and nationalist movements created a growing need for the protection of human and
particularly minority rights. Against this setting, the emerging multi-centric international system
and a global wave of democratization have enabled human rights groups to mobilize liberal states
and international organizations to incorporate the promotion of human rights into their agenda.
This process was also reinforced and complemented by the expanding ideas in the post-Cold War era that
the traditional norms of sovereignty and non-intervention cannot be interpreted in their absolute sense and
therefore the international community may override these norms under certain conditions. The widely cited
Vienna Declaration (1993) adapted by the UN World Conference on Human Rights, thus, stated that the
protection and promotion of human rights is the primary responsibility of governments and a
legitimate concern of the international community. Nonetheless, the reality remains there. Although
respect for human rights is a stated concern of the international community and an international
system for protection of human rights has been set up, its implementation and enforcement is far
from being effective. Despite the attempts towards international standard setting, the violations of basic
human rights are still the case on many parts of the globe. Similar to the weakness of other
international regimes in general, this emerging body of international human rights regime still lacks
effective and consistent enforcement mechanisms. In response to this picture, there is a growing belief
that inclusion of human rights concerns into foreign policy making of individual states will contribute to
the betterment of the status of human rights globally, especially to more effective implementation of the
existing human rights regimes. Since progress toward fulfillment of human rights is to a large extent
conditional upon the compliance of the states to the internationally agreed norms, in the absence of
domestic dynamics for change, the external pressure put on the governments by the international
community remains a suitable avenue available to advance human rights.
And this turns the case- security can never be achieved when ones’ rights are being
threatened
Dunne and Wheeler 4 [Tim Dunne, University of Exeter, UK, Nicholas J. Wheeler, University of
Wales, Aberystwyth, UK, “‘We the Peoples’: Contending Discourses of Security in Human Rights Theory
and Practice”, International Relations, Vol. 18, No. 1, 9-23,
http://cadair.aber.ac.uk/dspace/bitstream/2160/1972/1/We%2520the%2520Peoples.pdf]
A critical security approach to human rights opens with a fundamental belief in the indivisibility
of security and human rights. How does this ‘indivisibility’ play out in practice? The human
security discourse would maintain, for example, that there can be no security for the individual if
their right to life is being threatened by their government. Similarly, security is absent when an
individual is denied the rights to subsistence, such as food, clothing and housing. If security is
defined as protection from harm, then it is clear that the infringement of fundamental rights
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Security K
signifies the presence of insecurity.25 Just as its prescriptive orientation emphasizes indivisibility, the
human security discourse recognizes the multidimensionality of the sources of harm. There are military and
non-military producers of harm, national and transnational, private and public. Harm can be the outcome of
intentional acts (employers using child labour) as well as unreflective acts (children in the West buying a
football that has been manufactured by slave labour in India). Rights may be secured by one agent while
simultaneously being threatened by another. For example, the citizens of a social democratic society may
have all their human rights protected by the state, but that does not necessarily mean their community has
security. It could, for example, have borders that are contiguous with a predatory state committed to an
expansionist foreign policy. Another threat could be transnational and unintentional, such as that posed by
high levels of radioactivity caused by an accident in a nuclear power station (for example, the disaster at
Chernobyl). We would argue that the interdependence between security and human rights is at its
strongest when the focus is upon what Henry Shue, and later R.J. Vincent, referred to as ‘basic
rights’.26 ‘Security from violence’ and ‘subsistence’ were defined by Shue as the key basic rights. On the
surface, this might seem to rely on a narrow definition of rights but we define subsistence as covering a
range of economic and social rights (such as work, property, social security) while security from violence
includes many civil and political rights (protection from torture, racial hatred, slavery and asylum).
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Security K
Link --- Ikenberry Liberal Hegemony
Ikenberry’s vision of liberal hegemonic order ignores and erases the
importance of the Vietnam War and the subsequent neoliberalization of the
world in the current crisis overtaking US hegemony. The crisis is not
reducible to the Bush Doctrine, it is a product of neoliberalism which
Ikenberry endorses whole heartedly without critical inquiry.
Barder 2013
/Alexander D., Department of Political Studies & Public Administration, American University of Beirut,
Beirut, Lebanon, PhD in Political Theory from John Hopkins, “American Hegemony Comes Home: The
Chilean Laboratory and the Neoliberalization of the United States” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political
2013 38: 103 originally published online 22 April 2013, DOI: 10.1177/0304375413486331/
To be sure, this liberal hegemonic order that Ikenberry theorizes reflects a set of problematic
formulations that derive from its Western-centric liberal assumptions. Ikenberry is clear that the
origins of this American order initially pertains to Western liberal democracies and progressively
expands outward, especially with the end of the Cold War.24 State and societal modernization is a key
part of this liberal vision, with its emphasis on science, technology, learning, and adaptation.25 In other
words, there is a developmental logic at work in Ikenberry’s text—one that is accepted without
question—a traditional Western/Eurocentric bias toward what he perceives to be the universality
of liberal values: open markets, human rights, democratic governance, free consent toward the
international rules established in and by the West, and so on. The process of expansion of this
order remains the socialization (i.e., through the acceptance of norms and domestic institutes promoting
individual human, political and civil rights) of other nation-states within this particular American
order, which American progressive liberalism clearly embodies and inculcates in various international
institutions. Ikenberry’s vision of this American liberal hegemonic international order, its
evolution, and transformation affects how he understands its current crisis. For Ikenberry, this
current crisis involves questioning ‘‘the merits of living in a world dominated by unipolar America.’’26
However, what this crisis shows is not anything intrinsic in the liberal tradition as he understands
it, or its universal validity that he takes for granted. This crisis certainly does not reflect changes in
American sociopolitical organization over the last few decades. Rather, it emanates from the central
geopolitical shift of the end of the Cold War with the emergence of American unipolarity. For
Ikenberry, the crisis at the heart of today’s international order is a ‘‘crisis of authority within the old
hegemonic organization of liberal order, not a crisis in the deep principles of the order itself. It is a
crisis of governance.’’27 This crisis of authority or gove