Round 1—Aff vs Harvard AD
1AC
PLAN
The United States should make legal and regulate nearly all prohibited Cannabis
Sativa L. in the United States
TREATIES
Contention one is global warming—
It is real and human-caused
Nordhaus, 12 ("Why the Global Warming Skeptics Are Wrong", William is a professor of
economics at Yale, Ph.D. from MIT, foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of
Engineering Sciences, previously served on the committee of the National Academy of Sciences,
February 22, www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/mar/22/why-global-warming-skepticsare-wrong/)
The first claim is that the planet is not warming. More precisely, “Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of
global warming for well over 10 years now.” It is easy to get lost in the tiniest details here. Most people will benefit from
stepping back and looking at the record of actual temperature measurements. The figure below shows data
from 1880 to 2011 on global mean temperature averaged from three different sources.2 We do not need any complicated
statistical analysis to see that temperatures are rising , and furthermore that they are higher in the last
decade than they were in earlier decades.3 Nordhaus-graph-032212 One of the reasons that drawing conclusions on temperature
trends is tricky is that the historical temperature series is highly volatile, as can be seen in the figure. The presence of short-term
volatility requires looking at long-term trends. A useful analogy is the stock market. Suppose an analyst says that
because real stock prices have declined over the last decade (which is true), it follows that there is no upward trend. Here again, an
examination of the long-term data would quickly show this to be incorrect. The last decade of temperature and stock market data is
not representative of the longer-term trends. The finding that global temperatures are rising over the last
century-plus is one of the most robust finding s of climate science and statistics. 2. A second
argument is that warming is smaller than predicted by the models: The lack of warming for more than a
decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can
cause. What is the evidence on the performance of climate models? Do they predict the historical trend accurately? Statisticians
routinely address this kind of question. The standard approach is to perform an experiment in
which (case 1) modelers put the changes in CO2 concentrations and other climate influences in a
climate model and estimate the resulting temperature path, and then (case 2) modelers calculate
what would happen in the counterfactual situation where the only changes were due to natural
sources, for example, the sun and volcanoes, with no human-induced changes. They then compare the actual temperature
increases of the model predictions for all sources (case 1) with the predictions for natural sources alone (case 2). This
experiment has been performed many times using climate models . A good example is the analysis
described in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (for the actual figure, see the
accompanying online material4). Several modelers ran both cases 1 and 2 described above—one including
human-induced changes and one with only natural sources. This
experiment showed that the projections of
climate models are consistent with recorded temperature trends over recent decades
only if human impacts are included. The divergent trend is especially pronounced after 1980. By 2005,
calculations using natural sources alone underpredict the actual temperature increases
by about 0.7 degrees Centigrade, while the calculations including human sources track the actual temperature trend very
closely. In reviewing the results, the IPCC report concluded: “No climate model using natural forcings [i.e.,
natural warming factors] alone has reproduced the observed global warming trend in the second half of
the twentieth century.”5 3. The sixteen scientists next attack the idea of CO2 as a pollutant. They write: “The fact is
that CO2 is not a pollutant.” By this they presumably mean that CO2 is not by itself toxic to
humans or other organisms within the range of concentrations that we are likely to encounter, and indeed higher CO2
concentrations may be beneficial. However, this is not the meaning of pollution under US law or in standard
economics. The US Clean Air Act defined an air pollutant as “any air pollution agent or
combination of such agents, including any physical, chemical, biological, radioactive…substance or matter which
is emitted into or otherwise enters the ambient air.” In a 2007 decision on this question, the Supreme Court ruled
clearly on the question: “Carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and hydrofluorocarbons are without a doubt ‘physical [and]
chemical…substance[s] which [are] emitted into…the ambient air.’ …Greenhouse gases fit well within the Clean Air Act’s capacious
definition of ‘air pollutant.’”6 In economics, a pollutant is a form of negative externality—that is, a byproduct of
economic activity that causes damages to innocent bystanders. The
question here is whether emissions of CO2
and other greenhouse gases will cause net damages, now and in the future. This question has been
studied extensively. The most recent thorough survey by the leading scholar in this field,
Richard Tol, finds a wide range of damage s, particularly if warming is greater than 2 degrees
Centigrade.7 Major areas of concern are sea-level rise, more intense hurricanes, losses of
species and ecosystems, acidification of the oceans, as well as threats to the natural and
cultural heritage of the planet. In short, the contention that CO2 is not a pollutant is a rhetorical
device and is not supported by US law or by economic theory or studies. 4. The fourth contention
by the sixteen scientists is that skeptical climate scientists are living under a reign of terror about their
professional and personal livelihoods. They write: Although the number of publicly dissenting scientists is growing, many
young scientists furtively say that while they also have serious doubts about the global-warming message, they are afraid to speak up
for fear of not being promoted—or worse…. This is not the way science is supposed to work, but we have seen it before—for example,
in the frightening period when Trofim Lysenko hijacked biology in the Soviet Union. Soviet biologists who revealed that they
believed in genes, which Lysenko maintained were a bourgeois fiction, were fired from their jobs. Many were sent to the gulag and
some were condemned to death. While we must always be attentive to a herd instinct, this lurid tale is misleading in the extreme.
Some background on Lysenko will be useful. He was the leader of a group that rejected standard genetics and held that the acquired
characteristics of an organism could be inherited by that organism’s descendants. He exploited the Soviet ideology about heredity,
the need for agricultural production, and the favor of a powerful dictator—Stalin—to attract adherents to his theories. Under his
influence, genetics was officially condemned as unscientific. Once he gained control of Russian biology, genetics research was
prohibited, and thousands of geneticists were fired. Many leading geneticists were exiled to labor camps in Siberia, poisoned, or
shot. His influence began to wane after Stalin’s death, but it took many years for Soviet biology to overcome the disastrous
consequences of the Lysenko affair.8 The idea that skeptical climate scientists are being treated like Soviet
geneticists in the Stalinist period has no basis in fact. There are no political or scientific
dictators in the US. No climate scientist has been expelled from the US National Academy of Sciences. No skeptics
have been arrested or banished to gulags or the modern equivalents of Siberia. Indeed, the dissenting authors are at the
world’s greatest universities, including Princeton, MIT, Rockefeller, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Paris. I can
speak personally for the lively debate about climate change policy. There are controversies about many details of climate science and
economics. While some claim that skeptics cannot get their papers published, working papers and the Internet are open to all. I
believe the opposite of what the sixteen claim to be true: dissident voices and new theories are encouraged because they are critical
to sharpening our analysis. The idea that climate science and economics are being suppressed by a modern
Lysenkoism is
pure fiction. 5. A fifth argument is that mainstream climate scientists are benefiting
from the clamor about climate change: Why is there so much passion about global warming…? There are several reasons,
but a good place to start is the old question “cui bono?” Or the modern update, “Follow the money.” Alarmism over climate is of
great benefit to many, providing government funding for academic research and a reason for government bureaucracies to grow.
Alarmism also offers an excuse for governments to raise taxes, taxpayer-funded subsidies for businesses that understand how to
This argument
is inaccurate as scientific history and unsupported by any evidence. There is a suggestion that
work the political system, and a lure for big donations to charitable foundations promising to save the planet.
standard theories about global warming have been put together by the scientific equivalent of Madison Avenue to raise funds from
government agencies like the National Science Foundation (NSF). The fact is that the first precise calculations about
the impact of increased CO2 concentrations on the earth’s surface temperature were made by
Svante Arrhenius in 1896, more than five decades before the NSF was founded. The skeptics’
account also misunderstands the incentives in academic research. IPCC authors are not
paid . Scientists who serve on panels of the National Academy of Science do so without monetary
compensation for their time and are subject to close scrutiny for conflicts of interest. Academic advancement
occurs primarily from publication of original research and contributions to the advancement of
knowledge, not from supporting “popular” views. Indeed, academics have often been subject to harsh political attacks when their
views clashed with current political or religious teachings. This is the case in economics today, where Keynesian economists are
attacked for their advocacy of “fiscal stimulus” to promote recovery from a deep recession; and in biology, where evolutionary
biologists are attacked as atheists because they are steadfast in their findings that the earth is billions rather than thousands of years
old. In fact, the argument about the venality of the academy is largely a diversion. The big money in
climate change involves firms, industries, and individuals who worry that their economic
interests will be harmed by policies to slow climate change. The attacks on the science of global warming are
reminiscent of the well-documented resistance by cigarette companies to scientific findings on the dangers of smoking. Beginning in
1953, the largest tobacco companies launched a public relations campaign to convince the public and the government that there was
no sound scientific basis for the claim that cigarette smoking was dangerous. The most devious part of the campaign was the
underwriting of researchers who would support the industry’s claim. The approach was aptly described by one tobacco company
executive: “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general
public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.”9
The impact is disasters and extinction
Doebbler 11. Curtis, International Human Rights Lawyer. Two threats to our existence. Ahram
Weekly. July 2011. http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2011/1055/envrnmnt.htm
Climate change is widely acknowledged to be the greatest threat facing humanity. It will
lead to small island states disappearing from the face of the earth, serious global threats to
our food and water supplies, and ultimately the death of hundreds of millions of the
poorest people in the world over the course of this century. No other threat -- including war,
nuclear disasters, rogue regimes, terrorism, or the fiscal irresponsibility of governments -- is
reliably predicted to cause so much harm to so many people on earth, and indeed to the
earth itself. The International Panel on Climate Change, which won the Nobel Prize for its evaluation of thousands of
research studies to provide us accurate information on climate change, has predicted that under the current scenario of "businessas-usual", temperatures
could rise by as much as 10 degrees Celsius in some parts of the world.
This would have horrendous consequences for the most vulnerable people in the
world. Consequences that the past spokesman of 136 developing countries, Lumumba Diaping,
described as the equivalent of sending hundreds of millions of Africans to the furnace. Yet for more
than two decades, states have failed to take adequate action to either prevent climate change or to deal with its consequences. A
major reason for this is that many wealthy industrialised countries view climate change as at worst an inconvenience, or at best even
a potential market condition from which they can profit at the expense of developing countries. Indeed, history has shown them that
because of their significantly higher levels of population they have grown rich and been able to enslave, exploit and marginalise their
neighbours in developing countries. They continue in this vein.
plan solves—our internal link is treaties
Current marijuana policy is defined by the Brownfield doctrine where the US
pretends to be in compliance with drug treaties despite state legalization --- that
breaks international law and prevents treaty reform
Lines, 11/27/14 - Dr Rick Lines is Chair of the International Centre on Human Rights and
Drug Policy, and a Visiting Fellow at the Human Rights Centre, University of Essex (“Into the
breach: Drugs, control, and violating bad laws in good ways”
http://blogs.essex.ac.uk/hrc/2014/11/27/into-the-breach-drugs-control-and-violating-badlaws-in-good-ways/
An October statement on drug control from the US State Department has prompted much comment and speculation at home and
abroad. Delivered by Ambassador William Brownfield, the ‘Brownfield Doctrine’, as it has been named by some
commentators, lays out a four pillar approach the United States will follow in matters of international drug control. In short, these
pillars are: 1. Respect the integrity of the existing UN drug control conventions. 2. Accept flexible interpretation of those
conventions. 3. Tolerate different national drug policies…[and] accept the fact that some countries will have very strict drug
approaches; other countries will legalise entire categories of drugs. 4. Combat and resist criminal organisations, rather than
punishing individual drug users Internationally, the speech comes in the context of efforts, led primarily by
Latin American States, to open discussions on the drug control status quo, and look at
alternatives to the current prohibitionist paradigm. Domestically, it comes in the context of successful state-level
ballot initiatives to legally regulate cannabis in parts of the US, referenda the Obama Administration has said it will respect and not
interfere with. Both of these are welcome developments. The international drug regime is long overdue for reform. The marijuana
referenda will produce many positive criminal justice, health and social outcomes in those US states adopting them. However,
domestic marijuana law reform places the United States in an awkward and compromised position
within broader debates on the future shape of the international drug control regime. In allowing
legally regulated markets in cannabis to operate at state level, the US is in clear breach of core
obligations in both the 1961 and 1988 drug conventions. In one sense, the US position of
breach is no different than that of Uruguay, which in 2013 also enacted legislation
authorising the nationwide legal regulation of cannabis. However, unlike Uruguay, the United
States has historically used international drug control – and its self-appointed role as global policeman of the
treaties – as
tools to advance its economic and military interests at home and abroad. In effect, the new
domestic reality in the US has created, to cite a recent commentary, a ‘treaty breach it does not
wish to admit within a system it wishes to protect’. Does Brownfield’s speech then represent a true
rethinking and opening up of the US’s position on drug reform, or is it merely a cosmetic exercise to protect its influential role in the
international drug control status quo? Responses to this question have been mixed. Some have heralded the statement as a major
shift in US drug policy, one that opens the door to deeper and wider international reforms. Others are less convinced, arguing the
statement represents ‘nothing of the sort’ and that its ‘attractiveness is superficial’. There are at least two reasons to approach this
‘doctrine’ with a degree of caution. The first is that the statement, in fact, offers little that is truly ground-breaking, at
least in the context of the Obama Presidency. How different, for example, is the position of ‘accepting flexible interpretation of the
conventions’ and ‘tolerating different national drug policies’ from Brownfield’s statement at the 2013 meeting of the UN Commission
on Narcotic Drugs: ‘[T]he United States does not claim a monopoly on best practices related to drug control. All countries must
consider their own unique circumstances and experiences. There are no simple answers or uniform solutions. Each government
must decide its own course for how to best uphold its obligations under international law to protect its citizens against the harms
caused by illegal drugs.’ Or his statement at the March 2014 Commission on Narcotic Drugs, ‘The international drug control system
is not perfect. Some argue the conventions cannot handle problems this big and complex. I respectfully disagree: over the decades,
these conventions have been flexible and resilient, evolving to help member states grapple with these challenges. We believe it is
more prudent to advance evidence-based reform within the framework of the conventions than to embrace unproven ideas that
undercut the system and risk greater drug abuse.’ In fairness, the significant new element of the October 2014 speech
is the explicit acceptance of drug legalisation as part of the legitimate policy debate, which
previous statements did not, and the March 2014 statement seems to specifically reject. However, given its new
legal domestic marijuana market, the United States could hardly say otherwise with any credibility,
given it is now among those countries that, to use its own words, ‘embrace unproven ideas that undercut the system’. What is
notable in all these statements is the reinforcement of the primacy of the three international drug control treaties as the foundations
Brownfield calling upon States to ‘respect the integrity’ of treaties to which
the US itself is now in obvious and fundamental breach, his statement does raise important questions about the
concept and limits of treaty flexibility . There are many legitimate reasons why a State may want to adopt
for any way forward. Leaving aside the irony of
domestic laws and policies that break from the punitive prohibitionist norms of the drug conventions, and experiment instead with
legally regulated markets (i.e., to undercut criminal markets, to better address health problems related to drugs, etc.). This is what
Uruguay and a handful of US states have done, and it is a path others are likely to now follow. However, a State cannot
‘flex’ its way out of a core treaty obligation. There may be perfectly good and defensible reasons for a State to
consciously violate a bad or out-dated treaty provision, and drug suppression and control – the core tenets of which date back over
pretending these actions are
not breaches – and failing to explain why the decision to breach was necessary and made in good faith – does
nothing to clarify questions or encourage debates about necessary or appropriate law
reform. Rather, it further obfuscates international processes that already lack both
transparency and consistent application . For example, despite the calls for ‘flexibility’ and ‘tolerance’ in national
100 years in treaty law – is clearly an area of law long overdue for modernisation. But
policies, the US continues to penalise Bolivia for that government’s recent decision to allow the traditional uses of the coca leaf
domestically, particularly among indigenous communities. As described in a recent opinion piece, the official US position is critical
‘that Bolivia tries “to limit, redefine, and circumvent the scope and control” for coca under the 1961 Convention, even though that is
precisely what the US is doing in the case of cannabis.’ This conclusion can in fact be taken a step further: the US penalises
Bolivia for a non-breach (Bolivia has a reservation on the relevant treaty provision) while avoiding criticism of
its own clear breach by embracing ‘flexibility’. This application of flexibility could not be any less
consistent, the decision-making any less transparent, and the contribution to progressive
international legal development any less useful. As a policy approach, it looks remarkably self-serving. One is
left with the conclusion that the only ‘flexibility’ at play is a flexible approach to honest decisionmaking. The effect of the so-called ‘Brownfield Doctrine’ is to allow the US to pretend to
be in treaty compliance when it is not , a pretence some in the drug reform sector have rushed
to embrace. This
not only undermines calls for more meaningful discussion of law reform, it also
allows the US to continue in its self-appointed role as policeman of the conventions, or in this
case arbiter of the limits of flexibility. While this will likely provide welcome ‘wiggle room’ for further domestic reforms
in some countries, even if those are likely limited to cannabis, it does little to fundamentally challenge the
punitive prohibitionist framework of the international conventions, which is the driver of most
of the health and human rights harms of drug control. Indeed, the Brownfield speech actually looks the other
way on human rights abuses linked to drug control. As noted above, pillar three specifically ‘accept[s] the fact that some countries
will have very strict drug approaches; other countries will legalize entire categories of drugs’. Such a statement sends the tacit
message that if you don’t criticise us for our marijuana laws, we won’t criticise you for pursuing the death penalty, corporal
punishment, extrajudicial killings, denying HIV prevention measures for people who use drugs, failing to provide access to essential
medicines, or any of the litany of other human rights abuses linked to drug control that are increasingly becoming a focus of UN
human rights bodies. Significantly, Brownfield’s statement also does nothing to undermine the US’s own
position of power within the regime, and its ability to utilise drug control as a tool to advance its
own national interests. As the Bolivia case illustrates, even with these pillars of flexibility and tolerance to the rhetorical fore,
the US can and will use drug control as a tool to punish States with which it disagrees on
broader geo-political issues, not at all related to drugs. While observers and advocates in the field of drug policy
will likely continue to debate the content and implications of this speech in the months to come, it is worth flagging a second reason
for caution, one based not on US drug policy but on the record of the current administration. More than one observer has noted that
the Obama Presidency is skilled in its ability to defend the status quo while appearing to promote reform. From the illegal detention
of alleged ‘terrorists’ in Guantanamo and elsewhere, to domestic surveillance, to the use of drones to Wall Street reform, the
President and his officials have a well-documented history of using the promise of change as
a distraction to shield controversial US laws from meaningful reform. Given the 100-year
history of the United States using drug control as a basis for pursuing its own international
economic and military interests, it is certainly fair to wonder whether or not the ‘Brownfield
Doctrine’ is truly ‘change we can believe in’.
Keeping marijuana illegal under the CSA is what allows the US to cover up the
breach
Botticelli, 14 - Acting Director, Office of National Drug Control Policy (Michael, Nominations
Hearing November 13, 2014 Questions for the Record from Senator Dianne Feinstein,
http://www.judiciary.senate.gov/download/botticelli-responses-11-13-14)
As you know, the United States is a signatory of the U.N. Conventions on Narcotic Drugs, which limit the production, distribution, possession and use
of narcotics, including marijuana, to scientific and medical purposes. However, in a March 2014 report, the International Narcotics Control Board
concluded that the laws in Colorado and Washington legalizing recreational marijuana use were “not in conformity” with these treaties. Moreover, in
October 2014, Ambassador William Brownfield, the Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of International Narcotics Control and Law
Enforcement Affairs, outlined what he described as the “four pillars” of U.S international drug policy. These pillars included advocating for
“flexible interpretation of the U.N. Conventions” and “tolerating different national drug policies.”3
a
a. Do you believe the United States is currently in compliance with its treaty obligations outlined in the U.N. Conventions, despite the legalization of
marijuana under the laws of various states? Why or why not?
ANSWER: While
the consequences of legalization measures in four states are a serious concern, United
States compliance with the Conventions has not changed . The United States is firmly committed to
upholding our obligations under the three U.N. drug conventions, as well as working with international partners to promote the goals of those
conventions. These conventions are the foundation of international cooperation for dealing with all aspects of the drug problem, and we support them
unwaveringly.
We believe that the policies set forth in the UN Drug Conventions limiting access to controlled substances for medical and scientific purposes are
sound, and based on valid health concerns. The United States has opposed efforts to alter the Conventions.
Under Federal law, marijuana remains a Schedule 1 drug , subject to a high level of control, with
criminal penalties for its illegal distribution and sale. Per the requirements of the Conventions, as well as our domestic laws, the U.S.
Government heavily emphasizes proactive enforcement of laws against drug production and trafficking, as well as related money laundering, violence,
and other illegal activities that impact the safety of our citizens. We lead the world in efforts against international drug cartels wherever they operate,
and have – with the strong support of the Congress over many years - provided training, technical assistance, and other aid to key partners around the
world, especially in the Western Hemisphere to help them disrupt and dismantle these organizations.
The Federal Government has enforced and is enforcing Federal drug laws within existing resources and allows prosecutors appropriate discretion to
prioritize cases. In the Memorandum from Deputy Attorney General Cole dated August 29, 2013, DOJ has articulated eight Federal enforcement
priorities with respect to cannabis and is currently investigating and has prosecuted criminal enterprises involved in marijuana trafficking and violence
in all areas of the country.
As the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) has observed, the Conventions are highly respectful of domestic law, and each country’s unique
circumstances affect how it implements its
Convention obligations. In particular, article 36 of the Single Convention acknowledges “constitutional limitations” as a constraint. The
Conventions, as they have evolved in practice, show the capacity to permit variations in national law and
policy. In the case of the United States, constitutional limitations are a major factor, given the
interplay of Federal and state-level laws and authorities on drug control issues.
The Conventions also explicitly authorize countries to provide alternatives to prison for drug users and low-level drug-involved offenders. Thus for
example, inherent in the Conventions is sufficient flexibility for countries like the United States to differentiate sentencing policy between significant
drug traffickers and violent criminals - deserving of stiff penalties and long prison sentences - and drug-involved nonviolent offenders, who are more
appropriately directed into alternatives to incarceration that can concurrently address substance use problems and protect public safety.
b. What do you believe will be the impact of the State Department’s policy, as set forth in Ambassador Brownfield’s remarks, on U.S. efforts to continue
as an international leader on drug control issues?
ANSWER: The Four Pillar framework is an effort to stake out a middle ground between those who believe that prosecution and jail is the only approach
and those favoring radical changes to the conventions. The pillars advocate for preservation of the integrity of the conventions while accepting
innovation at the national level and prioritizing cooperation against transnational organized crime. This is wholly consistent with the mandates of the
conventions, which are highly respectful of domestic law while providing the tools for cooperating on controls, sharing best practices, and expanding
access to essential medicines.
While our international partners are interested in the impacts of the actions taken at the state level with regard to marijuana, policies by U.S. states
have not had an impact on our ability to work bilaterally and multilaterally on a range of drug issues. Countries continue to support the key areas we
emphasize in our National Drug Control Strategy, such as strengthening international capacities to reduce drug production and trafficking, increasing
efforts on public health solutions to drug use, promoting sentencing reforms that include reduced and alternative sentences for non-violent, low-level
offenders with substance use disorders, and using science and evidence to guide drug policies. Our international partners also continue to recognize the
urgent threats posed by transnational organized crime, and the need for strengthened international responses.
We will continue to support global efforts to reduce the global drug problem and champion a balanced approach to reduce the demand for drugs and
combat trafficking.
c. If confirmed as Director of ONDCP, what specific steps will you take to ensure that the United States remains a leader on international drug control
issues?
ANSWER: The United States is a recognized leader in developing and promoting evidence-based drug abuse prevention and treatment programs and
provides millions of dollars of funding and technical assistance to countries to support their efforts to prevent and reduce drug use and substance use
disorders. We support most of the world’s research on the health aspects of drug abuse and addiction, and also lead the world in efforts against
international drug cartels wherever they operate, and have – with the strong support of the Congress over many years – provided training, technical
assistance, and other assistance to build the criminal justice capacities of key partners around the world, especially in the Western Hemisphere, to help
them disrupt and dismantle these organizations.
ONDCP, in close collaboration with the Department of State and other agencies, works multilaterally to demonstrate U.S. leadership on international
drug control issues and shares best practices and research with the international community. One opportunity to ensure that the United States remains
a leader on international drug control issues is at the annual United Nations Commission on Narcotics Drugs (CND). Under my direction, ONDCP is
working on an ambitious agenda for the next CND meeting in March 2015.
Earlier this year, as Acting Director, I co-led the U.S. delegation to the CND, to actively promote balanced and effective drug policies under the
framework of the U.N. Conventions. We conducted the following activities:
d on the importance
of recovery;
ntion, and international
demand reduction;
ents;
-Chaired with Sweden an eight-country multilateral breakfast meeting on the importance of maintaining the current U.N. Drug Control
Conventions;
INCB leadership;
and all the other CND
resolutions, to highlight U.S. positions and reject policies which advance drug legalization.
In meetings with counterparts in the international community , the United States will continue to
emphasize that marijuana remains illegal under Federal law; reaffirm its strong support
for the three U.N. drug conventions, and reinforce its commitment to reduce and prevent drug use,
including marijuana. We will continue to support global efforts to reduce the drug problem and champion public health interventions to reduce
the demand for drugs and continuing efforts to stop trafficking and reduce supply.
It also explicitly sustains the status quo, and creates a policy of concealed treaty
violations that shred the international system
Bewley-Taylor et al, 11/19/14 - David Bewley Taylor is the founding Director of the Global
Drug Policy Observatory at Swansea University, UK. Martin Jelsma is a political scientist who
has specialised in Latin America and international drugs policy. Damon Barrett is a co-founder
and Director of the International Centre on Human Rights and Drug Policy and a Visiting Fellow
at the Human Rights Centre, University of Essex. (“Fatal Attraction: Brownfield's Flexibility
Doctrine and Global Drug Policy Reform” http://www.tni.org/article/fatal-attractionbrownfields-flexibility-doctrine-and-global-drug-policy-reform?context=595)
State-level cannabis reforms, which gathered steam this month, have exposed the inability of the United
States to abide by the terms of the legal bedrock of the global drug control system; the 1961 Single
Convention on Narcotic Drugs. This is something that should force a much-needed conversation about reform to long-standing
international agreements. But while ostensibly 'welcoming' the international drug policy reform debate,
it is a conversation the US federal government actually wishes to avoid. The
result is a new official position on the UN drugs treaties that, despite its seductively progressive tone,
serves only to sustain the status quo and may cause damage beyond drug
policy.
The 1961 Single Convention has been massively influential. Almost every state in the world is bound to prohibit cultivation, trade
and possession of cannabis and a range of other substances such as coca and opium for anything but medical and scientific purposes.
Wherever you are, your drugs laws are probably modeled on this agreement.
The United States has been a staunch defender of this legal regime. The treaties are central to its foreign policy on drugs, including
in Latin America. But at home the government has been clear that it will not trample on the will of voters with regard to cannabis,
even though this places it in breach of the 1961 Convention. So the US faces a predicament; a treaty breach it does not wish to admit
within a system it wishes to protect.
The response is the new 'four pillars' approach, set out by Ambassador William Brownfield (Assistant
Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement):
Respect the integrity of the existing UN Drug Control Conventions...
Accept flexible interpretation of those conventions...
Tolerate different national drug policies...accept the fact that some countries will have very strict drug approaches;
other countries will legalize entire categories of drugs...
Combat and resist criminal organizations
Brownfield's statement received some positive responses , welcoming it as a breakthrough in drug policy
reform. However, its attractiveness is superficial and there are important reasons to be cautious.
For US foreign policy on drugs the four pillars make sense in the short term. Through these pillars, the US can appear to embrace
reform discussions while changing nothing of substance. US approaches to Latin America that have dominated US attentions can
carry on as before. The US gets to continue to have presence in places it has no business being other than to fight the drug trade - the
fourth pillar of this 'new' approach.
In addition, in defending the 'integrity of the treaties', the US can go on using those treaties as a disciplinary tool against producer
and transit nations in the region. Under the Foreign Relations Authorization Act, when a country does not fulfill the requirements of
the international drugs conventions, the President determines that the country has 'failed demonstrably' to meet its obligations,
which can lead to sanctions.
Bolivia received such a determination again only a few weeks ago. While explaining the rationale for a more 'flexible interpretation'
Brownfield said, 'Things have changed since 1961'. However, the Presidential Determination on Bolivia stressed that the 'frameworks
established by the U.N. conventions are as applicable to the contemporary world as when they were negotiated and signed by the
vast majority of U.N. member states'.
The determination further expressed the US government's concern that Bolivia tries 'to limit, redefine, and circumvent the scope and
control' for coca under the 1961 Convention, even though that is precisely what the US is doing in the case of cannabis.
The US also objected to Bolivia's efforts to have traditional uses of coca removed from international control because it challenged the
'integrity of the treaties' - the very first pillar above. So which countries' reforms or interpretations will be deemed tolerable, and
which will threaten the integrity of the treaties? Crucially, who decides?
It is clear that a legally regulated market in cannabis is not permissible under the 1961
Single Convention. To deal with this the US, in the second pillar above, has signalled its acceptance
of unilateral interpretation of multilateral agreements beyond what those agreements
allow for. That is a very serious call beyond cannabis and beyond drug policies. The attempt under the
Bush administration to argue that waterboarding was not a breach of the UN Convention Against Torture and that detainees in the
war on terror were not covered by the Geneva Conventions should caution against allowing this kind of unilateral approach.
In reality, beyond the progressive sounding words, the path the Brownfield doctrine set out leads to further US
exceptionalism and the ongoing use of the treaties as it sees fit.
But that exceptionalism cuts both ways , and the US has also vital interests, including national security, in
holding states to international and bilateral treaty obligations. A recent example demonstrates the risks of failing
to take this into account. In July, the US issued a determination that Russia was in violation of
obligations of the Inter-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), a bilateral agreement banning the testing of ballistic missiles of a
certain range. But if a 'flexible', a-la-carte approach is to be permissible under the drug control
regime when it suits the US, why should that not apply here?
Why not other important international agreements that matter to so many such as
environmental protocols setting specific targets, or human rights law and its vital protections?
Following the second pillar to the extent the US suggests is a very slippery slope .
The shift to regulated cannabis markets in the US should open the space for a muchneeded discussion of treaty reform . The problem at hand is not the treaty breach by the US;
the problem is the drug control treaty system itself. Preparations have started for a UN summit
on drugs in 2016, the first in almost twenty years, and where a conversation about treaty reform should begin. The
Brownfield doctrine is part of US efforts to keep it off the agenda .
For governments, in an effort to avoid political controversy, the four pillars may seem attractive. For those who support drug policy
reform they may seem progressive. But this is no win for drug policy reform or progress towards policies grounded in evidence and
human rights. To allow the US, for its own ends, to lead us into a politically calculated theatre of
adherence simply serves to sustain a regime that is no longer fit for purpose. It is also harmful for the integrity
of international law more broadly , from human rights, to security to the
environment . The price of allowing the US to avoid its breach of the 1961 Convention, in other words, is too high. And the
war on drugs has already cost too much.
Full legalization precludes Brownfield’s approach of flexible interpretation and
accelerates treaty reform by committing to a non-prohibition stance – net better
for international law
Rolles, 12/12/14 – senior drug policy analyst at Transform (Steve, comment on the article
“The State Department’s move to a more flexible diplomatic policy on drugs is a rational
approach to a difficult question” by John Collins,
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2014/12/01/the-u-s-new-more-flexible-diplomatic-doctrineon-drugs-is-a-rational-approach-to-a-difficult-question/)
Thanks for this John. I agree with a lot of your analysis but differ on a few fundamentals. I dont see how prohibition can be regarded
as an ‘antiquated provision’ of the treaties. Aside from regulating medical uses, prohibition wasand remains their core function; they
are essentially prohibitionist legal instruments. To me the
idea that doing something so fundamentally
contrary to prohibition as legalisation could ever be allowed within any ‘flexible
interpretation’ is not a sustainable argument for the US or anyone else. Its actually as absurd as saying
Decriminalisation, arguably yes.
torture is allow under a flexible interpretation of the convention against torture.
Legalisation – definitely not . On that basis I also disagree that there is any reasonable
case to make that the US are somehow not breaching the treaties. They clearly are – by any reading
of the law, and as claimed by the treaty bodies of the UNODC, and INCB. The reality of breach has to be
the starting point in the debate moving forward
Its certainly welcome that the US are talking about the problems with the treaties and showing
willingness to accept the reality of experiments with regulation models that challenge the prohibitionist
international framework. But the US can’t have their cake and eat it on this issue – you can’t breach a
core treaty framework and try and maintain its integrity at the same time. The US breach (and the
Uruguay breach) are the clearest challenge yet to the fundamentally punitive prohibitionist nature of the drug treaties – the US
needs to acknowledge this and lead the debate on treaty reform instead of hiding from it with spurious legal arguments about
flexibility. Trapped between the impossible challenges of enforcing federal law in the reform states,
or pushing a new treaty system through congress – they have apparently opted for a legal
fudge to try and keep the discussion on treaty refrom off the tabel for as long as possible – at least for the UNGASS.
They should own and justify the breach instead of denying it. For once, it’s a case they can
reasonably make – this is a US treaty breach that has occurred for very good reasons, namely
that the old prohibitionist system is dysfunctional and redundant – and new approaches are needed to protect the
health and welfare of citizens. The drug treaties are not written in stone; as you say, with all laws they contain mechanisms for their
reform and modernisation when needed. That need has clearly arrived
The challenge to the drug treaty framework that the US and other breaches represents can and should act as
a catalyst for meaningful debate and reform of an outdated and broken system. Modernisation of the international
system to make it fit for purpose is something the US should embrace, not shy away from or try
and finesse its way around with untenable and messy legal interpretations If the US are
serious about pursuing the wider health, human rights and development goals of the UN, or specifically the drug treaty goals of
preserving the ‘health and welfare of mankind’ they need to acknowledge that the a prohibitionists
treaty framework is no longer fit for purpose – if it ever was. Nothing could demonstrate this more
clearly than their own overt breach of its core prohibitionist tenets. Ironically, the current US
position does not preserve the ‘integrity’ of the treaties atall. Failure to reform them will simply render them increasingly
marginalised and redundant’. The way to preserve their integrity is to reform them so they achieve the UN’s wider goals.
we can encourage principled
breaches to improve local policy outcomes, and we can encourage an active multilateral debate and
reform process at the same time. The two do not need to be sequential and are not mutually
exclusive – quite the opposite . Countries no longer need the permission o the US to explore legalisation – that time
has passed, and as such the Brownfield doctrine is symbolically significant but largely irrelevant to geopolitical reality. My
sense is we shouldn’t buy into it as some huge concession – its actually a political excuse and delaying tactic that
we should simply exploit to accelerate a treaty reform process by highlighting how broken
and absurd the system is now shown to be.
Unlike the US, the reform movement can have our cake and eat it on this one –
Marijuana is a stress test for adaptability of i-law—spills over to global warming
Wells C. Bennett 10-15, Fellow in National Security Law at the Brookings Institution; and
John Walsh, Senior Associate at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), focused on
drug policy reforms that protect human rights, public health and public safety, 10/15/14,
“Marijuana Legalization is an Opportunity to Modernize International Drug Treaties,”
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/reports/2014/10/15%20marijuana%20lega
lization%20modernize%20drug%20treaties%20bennett%20walsh/cepmmjlegalizationv4.pdf
In making the case for the United States to proactively open the door to future change in the drug treaties, we have emphasized, so far, the negative value of avoiding conflict and
political changes and incentives in play in the
marijuana-policy debate open a real opportunity to demonstrate and improve the
adaptability of the international legal system —a system on which the United States relies more
and more.¶ No treaty can survive the collapse of a political consensus supporting it .
And no treaty system can endure if it cannot cope with changing political conditions.
Sustainability in international law depends not only on commitment but also on resilience and
adaptability.¶ At this writing, one or two more U.S. states may be about to adopt a version of marijuana legalization. If states continue to
legalize, and if the federal government continues to allow their reforms to
proceed , the short run for treaty reform may come quite soon. This is why we refer to the challenge of
marijuana legalization as a “stress test” for the adaptability of international law. Should
legalization prove politically popular or socially successful, it will spread to more states and nations; should it spread, then one way or another
both domestic and international politics will find ways to accommodate it—either by adapting
formal legal commitments or by cutting new, informal channels around those commitments.
The latter would weaken international law; the former would strengthen it .¶
Marijuana-related reform to the drug treaties offers, in several respects, good odds of achieving
constructive adaptation . Reform need not entail any wholesale reconsideration of
international drug policy, nor need any brand new treaty be negotiated. Modest
incrementalism can do the job . In the United States, moreover, a growing political constituency, embracing
members of both political parties, favors reform, so the issue is less partisan than many. Persuading the Senate to make more room for U.S.
experimentation by revising an existing treaty is a lighter lift than persuading it to undertake entirely new treaty obligations. And, if the United States plays its
cards right (with, as we have suggested, suitably narrow and hedged legal changes), we believe a consensus abroad for
modest change could become within reach . In any case, broaching the subject relatively early on —
by ruling treaty change in, now, as a possibility, instead of ruling it out as a non-starter—may itself open the door to a new international
conversation about modernizing and adapting drug treaties. In other words, marijuana offers as good a
chance as we are likely to see of setting a precedent for creative, consensual, and
gradual adaptation of a well-established international treaty structure .¶ The
international legal system, however suspicious of it many Americans may be, has always mattered and has never mattered
more than now . For example, the campaign against ISIS and the Ukraine crisis underscore all too
dramatically the continuing importance of multilateral security commitments . If anything,
international law’s remit is growing as environmental, social, economic, and security problems
transcend national borders. From global warming to sanctions on Iran and Russia to the campaign against terrorism and
military intervention in a host of theaters, the United States and its allies increasingly rely on international
agreements and commitments to legitimize and amplify joint action against
common threats .¶ Of course, marijuana and the international narcotics treaties are only one small
piece of that puzzle. But they are a highly visible piece, and they offer a real opportunity to
demonstrate adaptation through international legal channels, rather than around
them . Laying groundwork for manageably incremental changes—by beginning conversations with
treaty partners and other constituencies about where flexibility might lie—would reaffirm American
instability. We would be remiss not to end on an equally important positive note. The
commitment to constructive adaptation, and to building consensus. Conversely, pushing the outer boundaries of the
drug treaties’ flexibility could weaken the international order and damage American interests.
Now is key—the UN Paris Conference is coming up fast, and successful multilateral
cooperation there creates a critical framework to address the worst effects
warming—bottom-up approaches can’t address the complex dynamism of climate
change
Luomi 2/5—Thematic Expert for Climate Change and Energy Policy, IISD Reporting Services
[UNFCCC=United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change]
(Mari, “Global Climate Governance in 2014 in Retrospect”, http://climate-l.iisd.org/policy-updates/global-climate-governance-in2014-in-retrospect/, dml)
Even after these numerous events and announcements in 2014, the question remains: will the existing and new pledges of action
and forms of cooperation
translate into sufficient levels of implementation to avoid dangerous climate
change? Will these initiatives, plans and policies, established inside and outside the UNFCCC
process, add up to sufficient financial and technical support to vulnerable countries suffering the
adverse consequences of climate change? And will they translate into enough renewable and clean
energy installations, and action on energy efficiency around the world to contribute to the “substantial and sustained
emission reductions” required to stay within the 2°C limit, which will entail a near-term peak and reductions in GHG emissions of
40-70% relative to 2010 by 2050, as indicated by the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC), finalized in 2014?[58]
Beyond initiatives specifically targeted at tackling climate change itself, the impact of external factors on the level of global climate
action cannot be underestimated. With global oil prices at a record low at the start of the year 2015, the impacts on renewable energy
deployment can only be speculated upon. While renewable electricity generation does not generally compete with oil, negative
impacts could be felt by the electric vehicles industry and hybrid power generation in some developing countries. Optimistically
perhaps, Bloomberg New Energy Finance has gone as far to suggest that the question to ask this year, and beyond, is “how the shift
to clean energy is impacting the oil price.”[59] In either case, the level of uncertainty in terms of whether the
global clean energy transition will come fast enough is still unacceptably high, owing to a
lack of clear policy and regulatory signals.
The absence of strong and clear ‘top-down' signals brings us back to the urgent question of how
to find an optimal balance between the bottom up and the top down. Johan Rockström, father of the
concept of planetary boundaries, has argued that there is no evidence , under any of the Rio Conventions, that a
bottom-up approach will be enough, and that “bottom-up innovation” must be coupled with
“top-down regulation” that establishes a cap on total global emissions. He has also argued that, while
nation States will continue to exist as “the fundamental units for accounting and development,”
“global governance, at an unprecedented scale” is required for solving key global
environmental challenges, including climate change.[60]
While international top-down arrangements are undoubtedly crucial for keeping science in sight, it is obvious that in an global
system of sovereign States, even a strong UN climate agreement would not be enough to ultimately enforce action by States – and
international institutions, such as the UNFCCC, will be
needed to build trust, increase transparency, and provide a forum for collective
ambition building at various levels. The major future task of the UNFCCC will arguably not only be to oversee the
implementation of the future post-2020 climate agreement, but also to find a way to engage with the increasingly
complex dynamism of climate action that crosses State boundaries, is increasingly carried
out by non-State actors, and often is driven by related economic, health and other co-benefits.
With the UN Paris Climate Change Conference less than 10 months away, all the international
climate community's attention will undoubtedly be on the 2015 agreement. But what will
happen after Paris? In the life of an organization, after all major events – be they crises or achievements – comes a
moment of self-reflection and, ideally, reinvention. Climate change is a complex problem that knows no
boundaries. The year 2014 clearly demonstrated that the same now applies to global climate action. After
Paris, will it be time for the UNFCCC to look at how it can adjust to this reality while
maintaining its crucial role as the leading international regime
would not be binding on non-State actors. Still,
supporting climate action by all States and actors? This may be the only way to
allow for States to go beyond their individual capabilities, to collectively meet the needs of all,
both humans and the planet.
FRAMING
Contention two is framing—
We live in the Anthropocene, the era of existence characterized by rampant
environmental destruction and a rapidly warming planet—flexible institutional
solutions are key to respond—local action fails on its own, but isn’t mutually
exclusive with the plan
Biermann 14—Environmental Policy Analysis, VU University
(Frank, “The Anthropocene: A governance perspective”, The Anthropocene Review 2014 1: 57, dml)
The classification of a new epoch in planetary history as the ‘Anthropocene’ is fundamentally
changing how we understand our political systems. The transition from the Holocene to an Anthropocene
signifies a new role for humankind: from a species that had to adapt to changes in their natural
environment to one that has become a driving force in the planetary system (Steffen et al., 2011;
Zalasiewicz et al., 2011). Yet the human species, as the defining element of this notion of an Anthropocene,
remains a highly abstract concept. It masks the multitude and variety of human agency, the differences in human
resources and the diversity of human desires. It masks, in particular, the political nature of human society.
Following Aristotle, humans are a zoon politikon, a ‘political animal’ that distinguishes itself from other
species by its capacity to collectively organize its affairs through joint institutions. This
political characteristic of humans is fundamental also for the notion of the Anthropocene.
The
Anthropocene is political ; it has to be understood as a global political
phenomenon (see, in more detail, Biermann, forthcoming).
To start with, the Anthropocene creates, changes or reinforces multiple interdependence relations
within and among human societies. For one thing, it creates new forms and degrees of
interdependence among the more than 190 formally sovereign countries and their national jurisdictions.
Some of these new interdependencies emerge from functions of the Earth System that transform local
pollution into changes of the global system that affect other places that have (much) less
contributed to the problem, with examples being climate change, stratospheric ozone depletion,
the global distribution of persistent organic pollutants and the global spread of species with
potential harm for local ecosystems. Countries are also becoming more interdependent when
local environmental degradation leads to transregional or global social, economic and political
crises, for instance through decreases in food production that raise global food demand and prices. In short, the Anthropocene
creates a new dependence of states, even the most powerful ones, on the community of all other nations. This is a defining
characteristic as well as a key challenge that requires an effective institutional framework
for global cooperation.
Second, the Anthropocene
increases the functional interdependence of human societies. For example,
political response strategies in one economic sector are likely to have repercussions for many
others. Functional interdependence also relates to the mutual substitutability of response options, which poses special problems
of international allocation. In climate governance, for example, for every global policy target there are an
unlimited number of possible combinations of local responses across nations and time frames
with equal degrees of effectiveness. In short, increased functional interdependence in the
Anthropocene requires new degrees of effective policy coordination and
integration , from local to global levels.
Third, the Anthropocene creates new intergenerational dependencies that pose novel political challenges. Causation and effect of transformations of the Earth System are usually separated by (often several)
generations. Sea-level rise, for example, is expected within a time-range of 100 years and more. Such planning horizons exceed the tenure and often the lifetime of present political leaders. Among other things,
this poses the questions of international credibility and trust that future governments will reciprocate and comply with international rules, and the problem of democratic legitimacy of policies in the
intergenerational context. What rights and responsibilities do present generations – and their representatives in parliament – owe to their unborn successors? And to what extent can present generations be held
accountable for activities of their ancestors, for instance regarding the burning of fossil fuels in Europe before the greenhouse effect became more widely known in the 1990s?
Fourth, the Anthropocene comes with persistent uncertainty about the causes of Earth System transformation, its impacts, the links between various causes and response options, and the broader effects of
policies. Most transformations, such as global climate change, are non-linear and might accelerate, or slow down, at any time. Surprises in system behaviour can be expected, but are by definition unforeseeable.
This creates a new political context, as exemplified by Ulrich Beck’s notion of a global ‘risk society’.
Finally, the Anthropocene is an epoch that sees the human species with extreme variations in wealth, health, living standards, education and most other indicators that define wellbeing. According to the World
Bank, the richest 20% of humanity account for 76.6% of the world’s total private consumption. The poorest 20%, on their part, account for just 1.5% of global wealth. Almost half of humanity – roughly, 3 billion
people – lives on less than US$2.5 per day (Chen and Ravallion, 2008). 850 million people lack sufficient food. The poorest 25% of humanity still has no access to electricity (United Nations Development
Programme (UNDP), 2007). About one-third of all children in developing countries are underweight, and every day, 20,000 children die of poverty (United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), 2004). Today, 1
billion people lack sufficient access to water, and 2.6 billion have no basic sanitation (UNDP, 2006). Politics in the Anthropocene has to operate in this global situation of large inequalities in resources and
entitlements.
All these
developments call for a new perspective also in political science. One such new perspective is a
Earth
System governance paradigm is a response and a reaction in the social sciences to the notion of an
Anthropocene (and related concepts such as Earth System analysis). It accepts the core tenet of the Anthropocene, that is,
the understanding of the Earth as an integrated, interdependent system transformed by
newly emerging paradigm in the social sciences, ‘Earth System’governance (Biermann, 2007; Biermann et al., 2009). The
the interplay of human and non-human agency. The focus of Earth System governance is not
‘governing the Earth’, or the management of the entire process of planetary evolution. Instead, Earth System
governance is about the human impact on planetary systems. It is about the societal
steering of human activities with regard to the longterm stability of geobiophysical
systems.
The notion of Earth System governance now underpins a 10-year global research initiative under the auspices of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change. This initiative
– the Earth System Governance Project – was launched in 2009 and has evolved into a broad, vibrant and global community of researchers who share an interest in the analysis of Earth System governance and in
the exploration of how to reform the ways in which human societies (fail to) steer their co-evolution with nature at the planetary scale. More than 2500 colleagues are subscribed to the Earth System Governance
newsletter, and about 250 researchers belong to the group of lead faculty and research fellows closely affiliated with the Project. The term ‘Earth System governance’ already generates about 450,000 Google hits
daily.
Research on Earth System governance needs to address both analytical and normative questions. The analytical theory of Earth System governance studies the emerging phenomenon of Earth System governance
as it is expressed in hundreds of international regimes, international bureaucracies, national agencies, local and transnational activist groups, expert networks, etc. The analytical perspective is, in short, about how
the current governance system functions.
The normative theory of Earth System governance is the critique of the existing systems of
governance in light of the exigencies of Earth System transformation in the Anthropocene. The normative theory
understands Earth System governance as a political reform programme that will benefit
from both evidence-based policy research and more fundamental social science critiques of
underlying systemic driving forces. Such critiques are surely needed, given that – to name one example – after 20 years
of global negotiations and national policies, carbon dioxide emissions in 2010 still grew by 5.9% to a new record high (Peters et al.,
2012). In the academic community, pleas for drastic change in global governance are becoming a frequent feature of scientific
gatherings. For example, the 2011 Nobel Laureate Symposium on Global Sustainability called in its Stockholm Memorandum for
‘strengthening Earth System Governance’ as one of eight priorities for coherent global action (Third Nobel Laureate Symposium on
Global Sustainability, 2011). One year later, the 2012 State of the Planet Declaration, supported by various global
change programs and international agencies, called
for ‘[f]undamental reorientation and restructuring of
national and international institutions’. It is fundamental, the Declaration continues, ‘to overcome barriers to
progress and to move to effective Earth-system governance. Governments must take action to
support institutions and mechanisms that will improve coherence, as well as bring about
integrated policy and action across the social, economic and environmental pillars’ (Co-chairs
of the Planet under Pressure Conference, 2012: C1).
A press release preceding this Declaration, supported by the International Council for Science and others, even requests governments to fundamentally ‘overhaul’ the entire UN system (Planet Under Pressure
Conference, 2012). In the preparation to the 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable Development, members of the Earth System Governance research alliance had advanced a number of proposals for such an
overhaul of the UN system, for example to create a new World Environment Organization and a UN Sustainable Development Council; to better monitor and support private governance mechanisms; to
strengthen the involvement of civil society in international institutions; and to more often rely on qualified majority-voting as opposed to the more common system of consensus-based decision-making (Biermann
et al., 2012).
Yet Earth
System governance is not only about strengthening global institutions, which are merely part
of the entire effort. Notably, also technological change and incremental policies at local and
national levels will remain a driving force of progress in Earth System
governance. For instance, just cutting down the emissions of black carbon and methane – which is a precursor of tropospheric
ozone – could be a win-win solution by reducing global mean warming by around 0.5°C by the middle of the 21st century (Shindell
et al., 2012). Incremental change by national and regional policies is possible, too. For example, a mix of
technological change and climate change policy has allowed the European Union member
countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 18% from 1990 while growing their economies at the
same time by 48% (European Commission, 2013).
Transformations in social behaviour are crucial as well, moving from a focus on mere cooperation and efficiency to broader notions of ‘sufficiency’ (Princen, 2003). Large-scale changes of lifestyles are likely to be
non-linear and might depend on ‘social tipping points’ (Lenton et al., 2008: 1792). There is ample historic precedence of drastic changes in perceptions of good and appropriate lifestyles, often motivated by
religion, national renaissance (for example, Gandhism) or philosophy. Environment-related changes in public perceptions of good and appropriate living include the public ban on smoking as inappropriate
behaviour for movie actors, politicians and other perceived role models; the change in perception of whale-meat consumption that is hardly affected by a recovery in some species stocks; and the rising social
movement of vegetarianism. Another example is the increasing acceptance of bicycles as default vehicle of transportation in cities. In October 2013, 70 top managers of Dutch companies publicly left their
chauffeur-driven cars behind in support of a week-long national ‘Low Car Diet’ campaign, thus accepting a partial redefinition of the appropriate lifestyle in the most affluent segments of society (Takken, 2013).
The branding of bicycle transportation as the ‘new normality’ is also rapidly taking off in parts of North America. New York City, for instance, has, in recent years, increased its network of bicycle lanes by 700 km
and counts today 73,000 members in its bicycle sharing programme, with 35,000 rides per day (Kuin, 2013).
would mean throwing out the baby with the bathwater if
intergovernmental institutions were discarded. The UN system and international negotiations do not
However, it
The
one needs the other . In a world of over 190 independent nation states, there is no
stand in an antagonistic relationship with local action and non-state movements.
way around strong and effective international cooperation .
Effective international cooperation must be a basis for Earth System governance in the
Anthropocene. A concerted effort is needed to bring these institutions in line with the
exigencies of the changed political context of Earth System transformation.
In sum, in the course of the 21st century the Anthropocene is likely to change the way we understand
political systems both analytically and normatively, from the village level up to the United
Nations. This makes the Anthropocene one of the most demanding, and most interesting, research
topics also for the field of political science, which has to develop novel, more effective and more
equitable governance systems to cope with the challenges of Earth System transformation.
Students interrogating environmental issues through policy debate is critical to
developing sustainable solutions
Cotgrave and Alkhaddar 6 – Alison Cotgrave has a PhD in Sustainability Literacy, she is
currently the Deputy Director of the School of the Built Environment and a researcher in
construction education, she is also a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, Rafid Alkhaddar
has a PhD in Civil Engineering and currently teaches at the School of the Built Environment
John Moores University in Liverpool as a Professor of Water and Environmental Engineering
(March 2006, “Greening the Curricula within Construction Programmes,” Journal for Education
in the Built Environment, Vol.1, Issue 1, March 2006 pp. 3-29,
http://131.251.248.49/jebe/pdf/AlisonCotgrave1(1).pdf)
Environmental education ¶ Many writers have determined that the main aim of environmental education
is to change attitudes, that will in turn change behaviour. As long ago as 1976, Ramsey and Rickson identified
that it has long been known that the basis for many environmental problems is irresponsible behaviour.
Without a doubt, one of the most important influences on behaviour is attitude, that in turn is
influenced by education. Campbell Bradley et al. (1999) stress the need for trying to change
young people’s environmental attitudes because young people ultimately will be
affected by, and will need to provide, solutions to environmental problems arising from
present day actions. As future policymakers, the youth of today will be responsible for ‘fixing’
the environment and they will be the ones who must be persuaded to act now in order to
avoid paying a high price to repair damage to the environment in the future , if indeed it is
repairable. Therefore it appears that effective environmental education, which
changes the attitudes of young people, is crucial. ¶ The (then) Department for Education (DFE) report,
commonly known as the ‘Toyne Report’ (DFE, 1993), concluded that as education seeks to lead opinion, it will do so more effectively
¶ if it keeps in mind the distinctive nature of its mission, which is first and foremost to improve ¶ its students’ understanding. Their
concern may well be awakened as a result; but it must be ¶ a properly informed concern. This does not necessarily mean treating the
environment as a purely scientific issue, but does mean that the respective roles of science and ethics need to ¶ be distinguished, and
the complexities of each need to be acknowledged. Failure to do this may lead all too readily to an
‘environmentalism’ which, by depicting possibilities as certainties, can only discredit itself in the
long run and feed the complacency which it seeks to dispel. ¶ McKeown-Ice and Dendinger (2000) have
identified the fact that scientific knowledge and ¶ political intervention will not solve the environmental problem on their own, thus
implying that ¶ something additional is required to change behaviour. As has already been discussed, ¶ behaviour changes
can only occur if attitudes change and this can be achieved through education. As Fien (1997) identifies,
environmental education can play a key role by creating awareness, and changing
people’s values, skills and behaviour . ¶ Introducing environmental elements into the
curriculum can therefore be seen as a potentially effective way of transferring knowledge. This
should in turn improve attitudes that will lead to improvements in environmental behaviour .
Graham (2000) believes that it is crucial that building professionals not only participate in the creation
of projects that have low environmental impact, but equally it is important that they learn to
conceive, nurture, promote and facilitate the kind of paradigm changes seen as necessary to
create a sustainable society. ¶ There are however limitations as to what education can achieve on its own, for as Jucker
(2002) believes, if we do not do everything we can to transform our political, economic and social systems into more sustainable
structures, we might as well forget the educational part.
Invoking climatic apocalypse is politically empowering—experimenting with policy
mechanisms is not just a “quick fix”, it creates awareness of our agency that is
more valuable than theorizing
Clark 14—professor in the Lancaster Environment Center at Lancaster University (UK)
(Nigel, “Geopolitics and the disaster of the Anthropocene”, Volume 62, Issue Supplement S1, pages 19–37, June 2014, dml)
Whether or not ‘apocalyptic’ imagery serves to promote or incapacitate politicization has long
been debated in environmentalist circles and in critical social thought ( see Swyngedouw , 2007; cf. Yusoff and
Gabrys, 2011). In another register and another field, the question of whether ‘actual’ disasters provide
opportunities for political transformation, or whether they are primarily occasions for the
entrenchment of pre-existing power relations, has also been a matter of lively discussion (Cuny,
1983; Pelling and Dill, 2010; Kelman, 2012; Tironi, this volume). Whereas Naomi Klein's (2008) bestselling inquiry into the
machinations of ‘disaster capitalism’ comes down firmly on the side of the latter, geographer Mark Pelling and anthropologist
Kathleen Dill sift through a
range of case studies to arrive, cautiously, at a more hopeful prognosis.
‘Disaster shocks’, they propose ‘ open political space for the contestation or
concentration of political power and the underlying distributions of rights between citizens
and citizens and the state’ (2010: 34).
Engaging in a more general sense with the political potential of the crisis or emergency, political theorist Bonnie Honig comes to a
similar conclusion. Taking issue with the rush of recent critical work that characteristically equates the state of emergency with the
suspension of civil liberties and the closure of political possibility, Honig argues for the fundamental ambivalence of invoking
emergency, observing that no declaration of emergency can dictate how it will be received, interpreted
and acted upon. In contrast to claims that the ‘emergency brings an end to real politics’, she
seeks out and discovers new possibilities for political renewal and change :
‘hidden resources and alternative angles of vision that might motivate action in concert in
emergency settings’ (2009: xv; see also Aradau and van Munster, 2011).
But what might these political possibilities be? What is demanded of the political in the face of the threats and challenges designated
by the Anthropocene? In the final section, I want to sketch out some of the ways that responses to the current geologic predicament
of humankind are awakening to Michel Serres' call for a ‘geopolitics in the sense of the real Earth’ (1995: 44; see also Dalby, 2007).
More than a matter of confronting the consequences of our own actions, I want to suggest, a growing conception of the
inherent instability of the Earth is beginning to impact upon our understanding of the
composition of the political; our sense of what it is we work with – or against – when we
mobilize collectively.
Towards an Anthropocene geopolitics
Resonating with other researchers in the field of science and technology studies, Sheila Jasanoff writes of ‘the indeterminacy and
complexity of many novel risks, and their refusal to stay within neatly drawn geopolitical lines’ (2010: 19; see also Petersen, this
volume). It is timely, however, to ask what exactly the ‘geo’ in ‘geopolitical’ is doing in this scenario, and what claims about the
coming of an Anthropocene epoch might mean for such an understanding of ‘geopolitical lines’. Perhaps the most crucial lesson of
the Anthropocene is that the Earth itself must be understood as much more than a mere surface or stage
on which political contests take place: it must acquire a volumetric or vertical dimension (Dalby, 2013; see also Elden,
2013). That is to say, the ‘geopolitical’ can no longer simply refer to a horizontal and synchronous globality.
But this requires something more than extending the conventional concerns of geopolitical discourse and practice upwards into the
atmosphere or downwards into the depths of the ocean or Earth. It requires us to bring politics into an intensive engagement with
the planet's own dynamics: its processes of sedimentation and mobilization, its layering and folding, its periodicities and
singularities. This means that the crucial borders or thresholds on the political agenda are not only those which divide nations or
other socially inscribed territorial divisions of the Earth's surface, but also the spatio-temporal junctures at which one state or
regime of an Earth system passes into another (Clark, 2011, see Weszkalnys, this volume on the Cenomanian Turonian extinction or
boundary event). Or to put it another way, politics must expand its concerns with the shaping and reshaping of territory to embrace
processes of stratification and destratification (see Deleuze and Guattari, 1987).
When it comes to the threat of crossing boundaries or thresholds in Earth systems, as Johan
Rockström and his interdisciplinary team observes: ‘[c]urrent
governance and management paradigms are
often oblivious to or lack a mandate to act upon these planetary risks’ (2009: unpag.).While the repeated
failure of climate summits to achieve the binding commitments necessary to ward off ‘dangerous’ or ‘extremely dangerous’ climate
change is the most conspicuous manifestation of this shortfall, the relative paucity of attention to other imminent
or already-transgressed ‘planetary boundaries’ is no less revealing (Anderson and Bows, 2011; Rockström
et al., 2009). Recent calls for what has been variously termed ‘planetary stewardship’ (Steffen et al., 2011); ‘Earth
System governmentality’ (Lövbrand et al., 2009); and ‘global earth system governance’ (Dryzek and Stevenson, 2011: 1873)
express a growing recognition of the need for new or greatly strengthened frameworks to
meet the political challenge of maintaining Earth systems in socially desirable states.
Needless to say, normative reasoning is far from enough to conjure such architectures into
existence. Any conceivable success, political theorists John Dryzek and Hayley Stevenson remind us, must work
through and from existing experience (2011: 1873).
But what
kinds of experience might be relevant here? We have seen that critical social thinkers can be as
apprehensive about the successful operationalizing of strategies to ‘manage’ Earth systems as they
are about inadequate planetary governance. While radical critics tend to champion a generalized
advancement of democratic or deliberative political processes, they are often less than forthcoming
about their own preferences for responding practically to the challenges posed by dynamic Earth
or life processes. There are, of course, no easy answers to the question of how to gain experience of
‘governing’ the forces of the Earth. As Latour argues, novel situations configured by messy admixtures of social
and material ingredients present a new imperative to improvise or experiment (see Farías, this volume). When
it comes to situations with the scale and complexity of global climate change, however, he suggests we
are way out of our depth: ‘The problem is that while we know how to conduct a scientific experiment in the narrow confines
of a laboratory, we have no idea how to pursue collective experiments in the confusing atmosphere
of a whole culture’ (Latour, 2003: 31).
But who exactly the ‘we’ is in this statement raises questions of its own – inviting us to consider the historical and geographical
depth of the human experience of living through environmental extremes. One of the motivations for thinking through geological
durations, after all, is to contextualize the events of the present in a much broader framework. As philosopher-geologist Robert
Frodeman explains, ‘[e]arthquakes, floods, hurricanes, and droughts are places where deep time erupts into more familiar temporal
rhythms’ (2003: 125). If such threshold transitions or destratifications might be seen as ways in which the
Earth experiments with its human (and non-human) inhabitants, they are equally occasions which
oblige human populations to respond with experiments of their own. Many of those peoples who still live
in relatively close proximity to the rhythms and upheavals of the Earth have learned how best to shelter from extreme events, when
to move to safer ground, how to channel excess energies, what to cache or stockpile, and when to fight fire with fire (Clark, 2008;
2011). The shaping of such practices and the decisions out of which they are forged might well be
seen as a form of geologic politics – though this is not necessarily ‘politics’ which is played out in the patient,
deliberative manner that social theorists such as Latour or Ulrich Beck (1995) prefer (see Michael, this volume).
As philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987) suggest, our engagement with the organizational
layerings and dynamics of our material worlds can be more than reactive or defensive. There
is always the possibility of constructive traversals of compositional strata, of intercession in the flows of
matter and energy, with no purpose other than the joy of experimentation and the pleasure of
creating new forms and structures . At the same time, Deleuze and Guattari counsel about the
dangers of ‘a too-sudden destratification’, warning that this ‘will sometimes end in chaos, the
void and destruction, and sometimes lock us back into the strata’ (1987: 503). If this cautionary
note applies in a general sense to the planetary predicament that results from unrestricted
consumption of fossil fuels, so too is it apposite with regard to strategies for deliberate
geotechnical interventions into Earth systems – not least the kind of unauthorized geoengineering experiment that
recently took place off the Canadian coast (Geere, 2012).
While geoengineering proposals have justifiably attracted critical scrutiny, they have in the process helped
put
practical experimentation with dynamic Earth processes more explicitly on the academic and
the political agenda (see Galarraga and Szerszynski, 2012). Today, alongside speculative planet-scaled ‘smoke and mirrors’
geoengineering schemes (Humphreys, 2011), a host of more moderately scaled and easily
reversible strategies
for intervening in Earth systems are currently under experiment
and review. These include localized alterations of the planet's albedo involving brightening of water and transformations of
vegetative cover or the built environment, a range of forms of biological and geological carbon capture such as soil enhancement
using charred organic matter, and a whole raft of proposals to protect and enhance ecosystems (Olson, 2012; see also Chris, 2013).
Such strategies are of interest not because they promise quick solutions to climate
change and other Earth system threshold problems, but because they give an idea of the
possible mix of techno-physical and socio-political issues that may characterize
emergent ‘geo-political’ agendas . They direct our attention not only to the kind of material
interventions over which collective decisions must be made, but to the need for political
constituencies to consider their own everyday practical or material implication in the
dynamics of Earth systems – to ask how they themselves might take matter-energy flows into
their own hands. And this implies that, just as critical social thinkers increasingly demand political
awareness on the part of Earth systems scientists and engineers, so too must we require of ourselves a
willingness to commit to some form of experimental intervention in Earth processes –
with all the risks this inevitably entails.
We’re not saying “state’s always good” or “only talk about the state”, but the
question of how to engage is one that can’t be ignored. Climate change should
determine our decisions—we should prioritize addressing the crisis of the
Anthropocene first
Rowan 14—Wageningen University
(Rory, “Notes on politics after the Anthropocene”, from After the Anthropocene: Politics and geographic inquiry for a new epoch,
Prog Hum Geogr February 7, 2014, dml)
The recent popularity of the
Anthropocene within the social sciences, humanities, and arts relies in part on the fact that it
answers a certain subterranean yearning for a framework in which to address macro-scale concerns after
the eclipse of ‘globalization’, a term that seemed to slip off the critical agenda as it sank into the sediment of our political
unconscious. The Anthropocene hence presents an opportunity for critical thinking to reconnect with
macroscalar concerns in a way that escapes the ideological over-determinations of
globalization while engaging with the deep ramifications of anthropogenic
environmental change through an examination of the planet’s material processes. Whereas ‘the global’ suggests a
relatively flat, anthropocentric conception of the Earth focused on the construction of social relations on the surface, ‘the planetary’,
by contrast, points to a more complex, volumic, stratified understanding of an Earth constituted through dynamic geo-social
entanglements. Accordingly, the Anthropocene creates opportunities to cast the planet itself as a key player in the drama of human
politics rather than simply its stage.
This raises the question of what consequences an engagement with the planet has for political
thought. What challenges might the Anthropocene present to political thought, and what forms of politics might be
adequate to face them? In the space remaining I examine these questions with regard to three broad areas: the relationship
between the scale and form of politics; the subject of the Anthropocene; and the relationship between technology and politics.
First, while it seems clear that the Anthropocene calls for thinking through the relationship between politics and the planet, it is
important not to assume that a certain scale of politics maps naturally against a certain form of politics. More precisely, thinking
does not require a totalizing
understanding of politics confined to technocratic dreams of a World State
about politics in planetary terms
or reactionary Big Space geopolitics . How a planetary politics might be understood
depends not simply on questions of scale (itself a social constituted and politically contestable concept) but on
how the political is conceived. Hence, the Anthropocene marks an occasion to return to
fundamental questions of political thought, but within an expanded conceptual horizon
produced by a new planetary circumstance. To my mind the political is best understood as a terrain of
contestation in which struggles take place on numerous fronts, across different geographic and
temporal scales, the chance of successfully shaping social forces being increased if hegemonic
alliances can be built across struggles. The Anthropocene potentially widens the scope of the
political because understanding social forces as embedded in a dynamic
relationship with geophysical forces opens up both as potential objects and sites
of political struggle .
However, this is not to suggest that the scale of the challenges raised by the Anthropocene has no
implication for the form of politics that might take shape in its wake. Indeed, the
Anthropocene raises concerns of such vast geographic and temporal scope and depth
long-term planning,
sustained funding, and significant transnational cooperation
and collective organization that effectively render certain forms of politics
that any response must involve questions of
inadequate. This is especially, perhaps uncomfortably, true of conceptions of politics widely
celebrated on the critical Left that emphasize temporary occupations, local direct
action, or horizontal and non-representational modes of organization . Yet the
Anthropocene seems to demand that some of the problems the critical Left prefers to
shy away from, such as representation and institutionalized power, need to be
faced anew unless the future is to be ceded to ever more intensive forms of
capitalist exploitation, environmental degradation, and the possibility of mass
unemployment, escalating food insecurity, resource wars, and increasingly
This is not to claim that politics
should be constituted around macro-scale concerns alone , but that
reactionary forms of identity politics.
these must make up a key element of any politics that recognizes the significance
of the Anthropocene.
Second, there is the question of the subject of the Anthropocene and its implications for politics, already the topic of heated debate.
Some have advanced the term Capitalocene as an alternative to Anthropocene on the grounds that the historically specific set of
social relations structured around capital accumulation mark a more accurate genesis of global climate change than the activity of a
singular, universal humanity, or anthropos. This argument has much to commend it, at once insisting that the Anthropocene not
become a depoliticizing meta-abstraction that conceals the constitutive fractures of sociopolitical relations and highlighting the
dominant role that the historical development of the capitalist world economy has had in producing it. I am, nonetheless,
apprehensive for two reasons. First, the concept of the Capitalocene seems to emphasize social relations internal to the human
sphere when perhaps the most important aspect of the Anthropocene is that it allows the distinction between the social and the
natural, the human and the inhuman to be muddied by way of their mutually constitutive intrusions. Second, even if it can be
granted that capitalist social relations created the conditions for the Anthropocene,
the Anthropocene’s effects will be universal , shaping all future human
communities (although unevenly) regardless of what new forms of social relations may replace
capitalism. Even if we regard the Anthropocene to be capitalogenic it has something of a universal address,
affecting the lives of everyone even if ‘all’ are not responsible for it equally . In this light,
anthropos can be understood not as a pre-constituted identity but rather as the object of
political contestation in the struggle to define the terms of future human existence on the planet.
In signalling a crisis in our fundamental conceptual categories and our relation to the planet, the Anthropocene appears
to raise that old political question: what is to be done? However, it also complicates this question, throwing
ideas of agency into a new, problematic light. The question of what then is coupled with its more difficult, demanding twin: how is
it to be done? This brings me to the third area of concern: technology. Any attempt to address the long-term,
macro-scalar challenges that the Anthropocene presents must be willing to engage with
the question of the relationship between politics and technology. This is not to evoke a simple
means-ends discussion but to recognize that socio-political formations are bound up with specific
technological platforms and energy regimes, so that any alternative future politics must
make technology not only a tool but a crucial terrain of struggle . Nick Srnicek and Alex
Williams, authors of the recent #Accelerate manifesto, have been germane in questioning the critical Left’s knee-jerk
reaction to the question of technology and the ease with which discussions slip into wellworn critiques of ‘enframing’, ‘instrumental reason’, and ‘apparatuses’ that
exclusively address technology’s ‘great danger’ rather than its ‘saving power’ (Srnicek
and Williams, 2013). The Anthropocene should not lead us to simply recoil in horror at the effects of
industrialization or remain paralysed by the sense that technological progress can only make
things worse. A more open debate about technology and climate politics does of course not
mean cultivating a naive technophilia or uncritically accepting geo-engineering’s promise of sublime
technical fixes, but rather acknowledging the key role technology must play in any
attempt to secure a more socially just and ecologically sound future within the
horizon of the Anthropocene. Facing trenchant socioecological challenges that afford neither
clear exits nor ‘pure’ positions means jettisoning perspectives that reject technological
intervention into complex environments in principle. The question then is not one of abandoning the
critique of technology as such, or ignoring the interests served by particular technologies, but
rather of making the subjectivities, relations, and forms of life that they might open or foreclose,
produce, or negate, sites of political struggle. For example, a ‘progressive’ Leftist approach to the
question of ‘climate technologies’ might require a program to establish rigorous institutional
norms to effectively govern their use and a radical pluralization of the sites of
decision-making and subjects empowered to decide – a difficult labour indeed. Yet the central point
remains: political struggles need to be fought over technology rather than against
technology. If technology is rejected or neglected as the object of political struggles, then our
fate is left to the nostalgia of localist escapisms, the passivity of Leftist melancholia or
the reactionary psychosis of Right-wing identity politics, all wholly compatible with the
enormous adaptive capacities and increasingly catastrophic trajectory of capitalist economics.
I-law might not be perfect, but UN global governance is better than any
international system to date; but, there is still a high risk of extinction that can’t be
dismissed as high impact but low probability
Rosa Brooks 11-13, ’14 – Prof of Law @ Georgetown & Schwartz Sr. Fellow at the New America
Foundation
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/11/13/a_strategyless_nation_america_democrats
_grand_strategy_foreign_policy
I've written about these issues before (here and here), and at risk of being both a narcissist and a broken record, I'll quote myself:
The world has grown more complex. Believe it. The world now contains more people living in more states than ever before, and we're
all more interconnected. A hundred years ago, the world population was about 1.8 billion, there were roughly 60 sovereign states in
the world, the automobile was still a rarity, and there were no commercial passenger flights and no transcontinental telephone
service. Fifty years ago, global population had climbed to more than 3 billion and there were 115 U.N. member states, but air travel
was still for the wealthy and the personal computer still lay two decades in the future. Today? We've got 7 billion people living in 192
U.N. member states and a handful of other territories. These 7 billion people take 93,000 commercial flights a day from 9,000
airports, drive 1 billion cars, and carry 7 billion mobile phones around with them. In numerous ways, life has gotten substantially
better in this more crowded and interconnected era. Seventy years ago, global war killed scores of millions, but interstate conflict has
declined sharply since the end of World War II, and the
creation of the U nited N ations ushered in a far more
egalitarian and democratic form of international governance than existed in any previous era. Today,
militarily powerful states are far less free than in the pre-U.N. era to use overt force to accomplish
their aims, and the world now has numerous transnational courts and dispute-resolution bodies that collectively offer states a viable
alternative to the use of force. The modern international order is no global utopia, but it sure beats
colonial domination and world wars. In the 50 years that followed World War II, medical and agricultural advances
brought unprecedented health and prosperity to most parts of the globe. More recently, the communications revolution has enabled
exciting new forms of nongovernmental cross-border alliances to emerge, empowering, for instance, global human rights and
environmental movements. In just the last two decades, the near-universal penetration of mobile phones has had a powerful leveling
effect: All over the globe, people at every age and income level can use these tiny but powerful computers to learn foreign languages,
solve complex mathematical problems, create and share videos, watch the news, move money around, or communicate with farflung friends. All this has had a dark side, of course. As access to knowledge has been democratized, so too has access to
the tools of violence and destruction, and greater
global interconnectedness enables disease, pollution, and
conflict to spread quickly and easily beyond borders . A hundred years ago, no single individual or
nonstate actor could do more than cause localized mayhem; today, we have to worry about massive bioengineered threats created by
tiny terrorist cells and globally devastating cyberattacks devised by malevolent teen hackers. Even as many forms of power have
grown more democratized and diffuse, other forms of power have grown more concentrated. A very small number of states control
and consume a disproportionate share of the world's resources, and a very small number of individuals control most of the world's
wealth. (According to a 2014 Oxfam report, the 85 richest individuals on Earth are worth more than the globe's 3.5 billion poorest
from a species-survival perspective, the world has grown vastly more
dangerous over the last century . Individual humans live longer than ever before, but a small number of
states now possess the unprecedented ability to destroy large chunks of the human race and
possibly the Earth itself -- all in a matter of days or even hours. What's more, though the near-term threat of
people). Indeed,
interstate nuclear conflict has greatly diminished since the end of the Cold War, nuclear material and know-how are now both less
controlled and less controllable. Amid all these changes, our world has also grown far more uncertain. We possess
more information than ever before and vastly greater processing power, but the accelerating pace of global change has far exceeded
our collective ability to understand it, much less manage it. This makes it increasingly difficult to make predictions or calculate risks.
As I've written previously: We literally have no points of comparison for understanding the scale and
scope of the risks faced by humanity today. Compared to the long, slow sweep of human history, the events of the
last century have taken place in the blink of an eye. This should ... give us pause when we're tempted to conclude that today's trends
are likely to continue. Rising life expectancy? That's great, but if climate change has consequences as nasty as some predict, a
century of rising life expectancy could turn out to be a mere blip on the charts. A steep decline in interstate conflicts? Fantastic, but
less than 70 years of human history isn't much to go on.... That's why one can't dismiss the risk of catastrophic
events [such as disastrous climate change or nuclear conflict] as "high consequence, low
probability." How do we compute the probability of catastrophic events of a type that has never
happened? Does 70 years without nuclear annihilation tell us that there's a low probability of nuclear catastrophe -- or just tell us
that we haven't had a nuclear catastrophe yet?... Lack of catastrophic change might signify a system in stable
equilibrium, but sometimes -- as with earthquakes -- pressure may be building up over time, undetected.... Most
analysts assumed the Soviet Union was stable -- until it collapsed. Analysts predicted that Egypt's Hosni Mubarak would retain his
firm grip on power -- until he was ousted. How much of what we currently file under "Stable" should be recategorized under "Hasn't
Collapsed Yet"? This, then, is the character of world messiness in this first quarter of the 21st century. So on to the next question:
Where, in all this messiness, does the United States find itself?
2AC
CASE
marijuana legalization will crack the international drug control regime. A wave of
defections is coming.
Dave BEWLEY-TAYLOR, Professor of International Relations and Public Policy and founding Director of the Global Drug
Policy Observatory, Swansea University, et al. 14 [Tom Blickman, senior researcher with the Transnational Institute, and Martin
Jelsma, coordinator of TNI's Drugs & Democracy Programme, “The Rise and decline of cannabis Prohibition,”
http://www.tni.org/sites/www.tni.org/files/download/rise_and_decline_ch4.pdf]
Decades of doubts, soft defections, legal hypocrisy and policy experimentation have now reached
the point where de jure legal regulation of the whole cannabis market is gaining political
acceptability, even if it violates certain outdated elements of the UN conventions. Tensions
between countries seeking more flexibility and the UN drug control system and its specialized agencies, as well
as with countries strongly in favour of defending the status quo, are likely to further increase. This seems
inevitable because the trend towards cannabis regulation appears irreversible and is
rapidly gaining more support across the Americas, as well as among many local authorities in Europe
that have to face the difficulties and consequences of implementing current control mechanisms.
In the untidy conflict of procedural and political constraints on treaty reforms versus the
movement towards a modernized more flexible global drug control regime, the system will likely go
through a period of legally dubious interpretations and questionable if not at times hypocritical
justifications for national reforms. And the situation is unlikely to change until a tipping
point is reached and a group of like-minded countries is ready to engage in the challenge to reconcile
the multiple and increasing legal inconsistencies and disputes.
The question appearing on the international policy agenda is now no longer whether or not there is a need to
reassess and modernize the UN drug control system, but rather when and how. The question is
if a mechanism can be found soon enough to deal with the growing tensions and to transform
the current system in an orderly fashion into one more adaptable to local concerns and
priorities, and one that is more compatible with basic scientific norms and UN standards of today. If
not, a critical mass of dissenters will soon feel forced to opt out of the current system’s
strictures, and, using any of the available reservation, modification or denunciation options, use or create a legal
mechanism or interpretation to pursue the drug policy reforms they are convinced will most
protect the health and safety of their people.
Federal legalization forces the US to admit the breach – that’s the only credible
path to international legal reform
Lines, 12/18/14 - Dr Rick Lines is the Chair of the International Centre on Human Rights and
Drug Policy, University of Essex (comment in response to a comment to his post -“ Has the US
just called for unilateral interpretation of multilateral obligations?”
http://opiniojuris.org/2014/12/18/guest-post-us-just-called-unilateral-interpretationmultilateral-obligations/
You ask ‘If
the US admits to breaching the narcotics treaties and takes no action to remedy the
breach, couldn’t that be viewed as promoting acceptance of breeches of treaties?’ We would
argue that no, but such an admission would fundamentally undermine the US’s credibility as the
global policeman on drug control, which is precisely what the four pillars framework is designed
to protect. In other words, if the US can claim itself not in breach, it maintains established power
relationships that allows it to define what is and is not acceptable reform. As is pointed out in our previous
blogs, this is precisely what the US is doing with Bolivia at the moment, where it is penalising that government for
its recent decision to allow the traditional uses of the coca leaf domestically, particularly among indigenous communities. In this case, the US is
penalising Bolivia for a non-breach (Bolivia has a reservation on the relevant treaty provision) while avoiding criticism of its own clear breach by
embracing ‘flexibility’. We believe the
four pillars is designed to undermine momentum for treaty reform
coming from other States, not promote or protect it, a point illustrated in Botticelli’s confirmation hearings, where he says
explicitly that the four pillars are to provide an alternative to ‘radical changes to the conventions’. In terms of your question about best options, our
admitting the breach , and explaining why that position of breach is acceptable or unavoidable , is the best
way to truly promote legal reform and honest discussion about national or international
ways forward . Pretending a bad law is really a good law (which is the essence of the four pillars statement) does
little to promote progressive and thoughtful law reform in our view.
position is that
Slow-down and mitigation are key – they limit the magnitude.
Carnesale 11 (Albert Carnesale, PhD in Nuclear Engineering, UCLA Chancellor Emeritus,
Professor of Public Policy and Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, “America’s Climate
Choices,” March 2011, http://dels.nas.edu/resources/static-assets/materials-based-onreports/reports-in-brief/ACC-final-brief.pdf)
In the judgment of this report’s authoring committee, the environmental, economic, and humanitarian
risks posed by climate change indicate a pressing need for substantial action to
limit the magnitude of climate change and to prepare for adapt ing to its impacts. There are
many reasons why it is imprudent to delay such actions, for instance: • The sooner that serious
efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions proceed, the lower the risks posed by
climate change, and the less pressure there will be to make larger, more rapid, and potentially more expensive reductions
later. • Some climate change impacts, once manifested, will persist for hundreds or
even thousands of years, and will be difficult or impossible to “undo.” In contrast, many
actions taken to respond to climate change could be reversed or scaled back, if they some how prove to be more stringent than
actually needed.
K
Their claim that we need to analyze the history of colonialism before providing a
meaningful policy discussion is arbitrary and self-serving—reformism is possible
despite our violent history and holding us to defending the history of colonialism
absurd and eviscerates productive policy-making
Lipshutz, 2011- Prof of Politics at UC Santa Cruz, Prof of Politics at UC Santa Cruz, speaking after hearing
a policy debate in which the affirmative read a straight up policy aff and the negative read a security
criticism (Ronnie, Speaking about the final round at the California Round Robin, Feb 18, Accessed here:
http://nfltv.org/2011/02/24/cal-round-robin-policy/ JC)
Look, you know, policy -- Public policy -- is obviously influenced by what analysts have learned in college, but it is also
shaped by the organization of the institutions, am I right? I mean this is the rules, and the roles that are
developed. I think that to carry the idea of theoretical distinction into the realm of policymaking is not
appropriate, in the sense that it doesn’t play that role. Now, having said that, If you are in the pentagon, or in some
sort of agency charged with being concerned with security, the sort of general norms are going to be that you
know you have to go along to get along. So you can’t go in and sort of say you know, ontologically or
epistemologically, your entire sort of policy-making framework is wrong. That’s not gonna, you know, you’re going
to be out on the street very quickly. Its interesting how many, I wouldn’t say it’s a lot, but its interesting when generals
retire and suddenly become argued pacifists. And you sort of say, well, why did you wait for retirement in order
to do this? It’s because if they did it while they were on active duty they wouldn’t last very long, they’d
be cashiered very quickly. So the point is, you know, the academic approach is to try and develop what are called
parsimonious approaches to sort of theorizing, you know. Pick out the important variables. Now the critical approach
doesn’t really do that. But what you do do, you know, you sacrifice complexity for simplicity. If you read Waltz, which,
you know, I’m surprised nobody here cites, Waltz basically says, you simplify as much as you can…. ERIN SIMPSON: Very Parsimonious RONNIE LIPSHUTZ: In Mans
state in war, he basically says, its international anarchy that makes war possible. You can’t prevent it. And then, as a kind of a coda, he says, to explain specific wars,
you have to look at personalities and the state itself. So at the end of the day, he’s gone through all this trouble of simplifying the argument only to say, you know,
all it tells you is that war is possible, it doesn’t tell you anything about wars. And so I think you have to be very careful about…. You Know, these
are
dangerous things. And this is why I think that administrations who enlist large numbers of college
professors often suffer the most grievous policy failures. Because the college professors have these
theories, and they want to apply them. I mean, this is what happened with Kennedy in particular. Kennedy and I think
Johnson. They have these theories, and they want to see them operational. These theories are not
about reality. This is not talking about realism. So it’s being realistic. And sometimes realism means you don’t intervene,
you let people alone, you let them decide what they want to do without trying to get involved. You know, we should let the Egyptians decide what they want to do
without worrying about, “what should we do, what should we do”, that kind of thing right. That’s being realistic, not being a realist.
Law solves all existential risks—abdication of legal training guarantees global
violence and extinction—debate is key—don’t need to be lawyers to use legal
education effectively
Matsuda 14—University of Hawai'i, William S. Richardson School of Law
(Mari, “Admit That the Waters Around You Have Grown: Change and Legal Education”, Indiana Law Journal: Vol. 89: Iss. 4, Article
2, dml)
This knowledge is the curse of modernity. We
can see beyond the horizon and know what happens to a
Syrian refugee, a Chinese factory worker, or a Brazilian favela dweller. We can see how choices
we make in our corner interact with lives elsewhere, and we can speculate about how
dislocations elsewhere might erupt in ways that disturb our peace. Things don’t just fall out of
the sky on we-the-unknowing innocents the way an asteroid fell on the dinosaurs. Whether climate change, war,
or asteroid, we have knowledge . We can prepare . My plea is that law schools
prepare and train our students to make things better, not worse. That huge task falls to us
because lawyers, at their best, are professional leaders and problem solvers. They gather facts,
assess them critically, deliberate, strategize, and construct paths to good
outcomes . They do this for clients; they do this for nations; and, in my utopian vision, they do this for the planet .
II. SAID THE JOKER TO THE THIEF20
If you visit your state legislature, or mine, or our Congress, you will see a range of capabilities and predilections. Some
of our
lawmakers work at crafting legislation: they read what they vote on; they consider competing
arguments; they take the long view—alert to unanticipated consequences, to the history of prior
outcomes, and to the multiple influences that predict future outcomes. Some of our lawmakers
do none of that. If you spend any time around the process of law production, you will encounter
the joker and the thief—those who lack the minimal attributes of intelligence and work ethic required
for the public’s trust, those who never ask “what is good for my country,” seeking only narrow self-interest. I was shocked,
when I moved to Washington, D.C. and participated in my first congressional hearings, at the level of discourse. I knew I would
disagree with much of the content because my political views are outside the mainstream, but I was naive enough to believe that in
the halls of Congress people would want to at least appear intelligent and deliberative. C-SPAN was in its early days, and the lack
of intellectual rigor in the law-making conversation was news to some of us. As a law professor and as a
citizen, I expected more, and as the years progressed, I got less. The old state-crafters of both parties, for whom
persuasive oratory, evidence-marshalling debate, and steely-eyed negotiation were
required skills, say it’s over.
We can and should demand intelligent public deliberation preceding decisions as
momentous as going to war or funding the government. A general public disgust with Congress is not limited by
party affiliation. A hunger for leadership is palpable amongst us. The support for the improbable candidate and
then-Senator Obama in his first presidential candidacy reflected that longing for intelligent leadership. Maybe this outsider,
this law professor/community organizer, this erudite orator, this high-IQ book reader who
radiates reasonableness, is whom we need to get us out of Washington gridlock. Whatever you think
about how that hope played out, you might agree that the hope and yearning were real.
I am going to publically disagree with the President whose intellect and character I still respect, deeply.21 Three years of law school
is barely enough. Two would shortchange our students, and four is not unreasonable. More on this later, but first, let’s look at what
we mean when we say “lawyer.”
We could mean scrivener, someone who knows the language and craft of legal materials and
who can recite and apply the same with dexterity. On the day I became an official, state-sanctioned lawyer, I raised
my hand in solemn vow to protect and defend the Constitution. I tell my students, who know me as a vigorous critic of the law, that I
did not hold my other hand with crossed fingers behind my back. I take constitutionalism seriously as a professional and a citizen,
and I do not take a scrivener’s view of the Constitution. It is a living document that requires a deep
commitment to democracy in a changing and challenging world. The lawyer’s oath is to keep that
commitment when it is easy and when it is hard, never joining “the hopeless sinner who would hurt all mankind just to save his
own.”22
When I was still a law student, a partner from a fancy firm in my hometown said to my class “Law is a profession. If you want to
make money go sell insurance, you’ll make more, faster.” This was the standard insider’s line. We are granted a monopoly
on the right to practice law, justified by our professionalism. If pressed, the lawyer holding the traditional view
will say something about high ethical standards, providing pro bono services to those who can’t afford it, and possessing a life of the
mind. We are thinkers, not just technicians. When I arrived downtown as a young lawyer, most of the old-timers
quoted from literature by heart, collected art, and discussed international affairs with insider asides because of their sense that this
is what lawyers did. They were informed and educated citizens who read serious novels and subscribed to
periodicals that didn’t translate French and Latin phrases. One felt smarter in the company of these folks. In whatever province,
however far from the metropole, that’s what lawyers sounded like, with the local accent added. I know you had many among the
alums of this law school. I wrote a biography of one, Harriet Bouslog, small-town Hoosier and world-changing firebrand.23
Let us not overly praise great men. The traditional lawyer as the town’s educated elite perpetuated privilege, and
often helped to entrench systems—in my hometown, the sugar plantation oligarchy—that were not healthy. But such
men [people] also, on occasion, used their position to stand up forthrightly for the right and
the good when the silence of acquiescence from other quarters ran thick. Charles Evans Hughes,
lawyer to the New York scions, led a game-changing anti-corruption campaign;24 and Garner Anthony, lawyer
to the sugar barons, fought martial law in Hawai‘i during World War II.25 The tradition of straight up corporate
lawyers, whose day job was helping the rich amass and retain capital, taking up lonely cudgels to uphold the rule of law simply
because it was the right thing to do and they had the status and the brains to do it, is a professional legacy of “lawyer” I proudly
share. Indeed, as the war on terror brings us profligate government surveillance and threats to
habeas corpus, I await the contemporary equivalent of those earlier crusaders. These are ABA issues,
not just ACLU issues. The contemporary equivalent of the top hat and tails crowd should bellow forth outrage at the diminishment
of core constitutional values, and litigate like lions challenged in their own den.
The fact that no such crusader emerges tells us something about the triumph of the market-driven technocrat bar. It’s no longer ego,
accomplishment, prestige, and power. It’s eat what you kill, and partners in the grand old firms quietly tell me it’s not fun anymore;
they wouldn’t want their children doing this work.
Given the crisis—which threatens the survival of capitalism as well as the well-being of the collective —
we need to revive the notion of lawyer as professional problem solver, social critic,
leader, and thinker. “Lawyer” is the person you call when a problem is too big to handle
yourself. In my locked heart I keep a short list of people I would call in true crisis—you pick the bad movie plot: a kidnapped
child, a false accusation of criminality, or the one I can’t get out of my mind as one immersed in the last century, the knock on the
door when the fascists come to get you for something you said or wrote. My “in case of emergency, call” list comprises mostly
lawyers. Not because those are the only friends I have, but because they have the skill set to confront the big
problems . This short list comprises folks who are extremely smart, deeply charming, viciously tenacious, infallibly loyal,
wickedly strategic, and widely experienced. I’ve seen them take on giants and win, with glee. They are whom I would call in a
moment of deep desperation, faced with a life-shattering problem. In my more mundane and actual life, I have had to call a lawyer
around those classic issues—divorce, wills, or a neighbor’s complaint about an encroaching fence. In each of these, a problem
that was big to me but small to the universe was handed over to wise people who treated my
problem as their own. Whatever I paid, it was worth it. I gave my problem to someone else and they solved it. I wish all
my problems were legal problems. It was so easy and so full of grace—that moment when the
lawyer looked me in the eye and said, “It’s going to be just fine, this is what I’m going to do for
you, it’s my problem now.”
From thinking about the small grace of paying a lawyer to solve a problem and the large grace of knowing a lawyer to call when one’s
life is on the line, let us ratchet up to the biggest problems of all. We live on an irreversibly globalized
planet. Every person in the less-developed world wants a car and a refrigerator someday, and they can’t all get a car and a
refrigerator without sending us into climate oblivion. We who have two cars, and in many cases two refrigerators, are in no position
to tell the rest of the world they can’t have any. This is just one simple matrix of our crisis. The threats we face—from war
to climate change— do
not stay within borders , and as of yet we have no effective
mechanism to create global solutions to global problems .
There is one model that has worked, weakly, for two hundred years. It is the American constitutional
experiment, including federalism, democracy, and the rule of law. We are the most diverse
nation on the planet, comprising a range of race, religion, culture, worldview, belief, and practice more
radically divergent than that of any polity that has heretofore risen to ascendency in the history
of all the world. We are the proof that people as different as night and day can commit to one set of
governing processes and follow them—with big, bloody detours—to create a semblance of stability and
prosperity. I, a vocal critic of the ways in which we have gotten it wrong, am also deeply grateful for what we have gotten right
and all the blessings I have reaped as a result.
The general belief that there are too many lawyers, too many laws, and too much litigation—the
American exceptionalism of an overly-legalized life—fails to understand that law comes from human
hand . This is the great insight I learned from Willard Hurst,26 Lawrence Friedman,27 and, yes, from Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Excess law did not fall upon Americans as victims of the lawyers’ full-employment conspiracy.
We have all this legalism because people desired it, sought it, made it, used it,
demanded it, shaped it, and sued when they were wronged. It is a much better
option than the alternative of private violence, and really our only option if we don’t
want to cede decision making to the nonexistent benign dictator. I once studied early use of
the courts by Native Hawaiians in the early days of American colonialism. I started out
hypothesizing that I would find a tale of law imposed on bewildered newcomers to the notion of
judicial adjudication, instead I found active and aggressive embrace of the law by a newly
litigious people whose indigenous norm enforcement processes were decimated by the tragic
disruption of their nation.28
Law is a tool; people choose it when they need it. It was our nation’s instrument of development
and the commons at which we gathered to decide whom we would be. From Plessy29 to Brown,30 from
Marbury31 to Bush v. Gore,32 our drama of nation making takes place on a legal stage because we have
no other shared stage of belief, culture, or creed. You don’t need law if everyone is following the same
social code. You don’t need law if the fear of the gods stops every transgression from fishing out of season to murder. But we
do not share the same belief or code. And neither does the planet . Law—or
the promise of it—thus becomes inextricably linked to global problem solving.
Law, like double entry bookkeeping, rose along with capitalism. Merchants left their own village, where cheating resulted in social
death, and encountered new opportunities for deal making. New ways of preventing cheating and enforcing norms allowed trade to
expand beyond the village. You know the rest of the story—it’s distilled in the UCC, and we teach it in every law school in the
country. Even in Louisiana.33
Marx called law superstructure, the ideological product reflecting the material reality of
economic relations.34 He did not discount the power of superstructure, he just wanted us to see
the material base and see the harm of subordinating relationships of capital to labor.
I agree with Marx’s critique of the alienation of labor. I agree that law is superstructural. I diverge in the emphasis I put on a
corollary of that insight: law
is a useful superstructure that can create significant humanizing
effects. It is a location of struggle, just as the factory is a location of struggle in the material world, and at that
location important contradictions can resolve into useful victories for subordinated people. In
non-theoretical language, what happens in legal fights matters and can make all of
our lives significantly better or worse.
In a world without unifying social norms we will turn to law to mediate and resolve our
crises, or we will turn to guns . Since guns now include weapons of mass
destruction, it is clear that law is the safer arena of struggle. Lawyers are the
champions we will send forth to represent us in that arena. We need good ones .
A good lawyer is someone who can think critically to solve problems, creating legal structures
that allow human beings to grow and thrive together. At best, the ability to understand and create
these structures comes with the ability to deploy them strategically and to promote them
actively . That is, a good lawyer doesn’t just build a better legal mousetrap. The good lawyer
understands the political and social world and can get everyone on board to use the new mousetrap
properly and enthusiastically, until the threat of bubonic plague is run into the ground. The plague metaphor comes quickly to mind
because one of the significant threats to our well-being is global plagues—bird flu, HIV, resistant TB—that
will happily hop borders. There is nothing we can do to protect ourselves if we ignore the
poverty, illiteracy, and absence of health care that is incubating global plagues in places beyond our sovereign
command. Doctors and epidemiologists will figure out the cures and preventions, but the
implementation of the systems they invent will require globally adept lawyers , devising bordercrossing cooperation and enforcement mechanisms.
Some of my best students never practice law.
They go straight into organizational and transactional
work aimed at global problem solving. The one who put on a play in law school is doing human rights work in Latin
America. The one who talked her way into locked housing projects to organize tenants in D.C. is organizing undocumented youth in
New York City. The one who mentored teens in a high poverty high school is now running a woman’s self-help center in Louisville.35
I know law graduates who are running public health programs, immigrant worker centers,
storefront medical-legal partnerships, grant-making programs, environmental advocacy groups,
and change-making arts and education programs of all kinds. I once taught a large and lively class in antisubordination theory that only one white male student ventured into. He said barely a word all semester. Twenty years later he was
running a school in a juvenile prison performing the daily miracle of teaching the children who others see as lost causes.36 None
of these lawyers are doing the JD-required traditional practice we think of as “lawyering,” but
every one of them is using the lawyer’s skill set to do vital work. They raise the money;
work around regulations; persuade strategic allies; and manipulate rules, principles, rhetoric,
and law to meet the needs of the people they serve. They hire, train, supervise, and deploy
experts—including lawyers. These “non-JD-required” change agents are among the best lawyers
I know.
If the problems we face are unprecedented in their urgency and global scale, we need
problem solvers of the highest order. Training the cadre that will save our planet might seem
like an outsized ambition, but we cannot turn from it.
As our nation debated whether to bomb Syria, one of the strongest arguments was “there is no one else.”37 If there was a serious
breach of international law, we, as the strongest military power on the planet, had to respond, some argued, if no one else would. We
are indeed the only ones capable if measured by economic and military might. We are, for now, at the top of the heap
both in our ability to create problems and our ability to solve them. Our choices are
consequential, our actions and inactions capable of leaving a giant’s footprint. The world needs
that giant to act wisely.
What could this possibly have to do with a state law school, like yours, or mine, charged largely with
training lawyers for local practice? The obvious answer is that in a federal system states have inordinate
power over the giant, as evidenced by the recurrent blackmail over the federal budget. Another answer is that our
graduates, who form the educated elites of our states, are the influencers and thinkers charged
with upholding constitutional values and discerning the correct response to international crises
on the local level. Their abilities, including the ability to see the connection between local and
global realities, are part of the web that will make things worse or better. We have to
act on climate change now . There is no second chance. Local interests—producer states
and consumer states alike—are
tied to global stakes. Fossil fuel dependency is not a concept; it’s a
reality with many consequences, from local jobs to wars over the coming scarcity that will take sons and daughters from
all of us. I have fellow alums and family in my hometown who have buried their children who served this nation in our recent wars.
We asked for blood and treasure. Did we ask wisely? Critical thinkers in each town and hamlet are the ones
who have to bring wisdom and skill to the table when lives hang in the balance.
reform is the best way to hold ilaw accountable
B. S. Chimni 6, Chairperson of the Centre for International Legal Studies(CILS) at Jawaharlal
Nehru University, New Delhi, Visiting Professor at the International Center for Comparative
Law and Politics, Tokyo University, a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School, Visiting
Fellow at Max Planck Institute for Comparative and Public International Law, Heidelberg, and a
Visiting Scholar at the Refugee Studies Center, York University, “Third World Approaches to
International Law: A Manifesto,” International Community Law Review 8: 3-27,2006,
http://www.jnu.ac.in/SIS/MakingSISVisible/Publications/Third%20World%20Manifesto%20B
SChimni.pdf
[italics in the original text]
Of course, there is also the necessity to think about long term goals. On our part, we¶ would like to revisit the idea of socialism.
Socialism should not be seen as a fixed ideal¶ or a frozen concept. It should today be perceived as expressing the aspirations of equal¶ ity and justice of subaltern peoples. The ideal is to be realised through non-violent means and should
exclude all manner of dogmatic thinking and undemocratic practices. The ideal of democratic
socialism would be actualised by way of reform and not revolution and would not
exclude reliance on market institutions. It would be realised¶ through the collective struggles of different
oppressed and marginal groups. The identity and role of these groups, as we have noted above, is not fixed in
history. New iden-¶ tities of oppression emerge and vie for space with other groups. If this understanding¶ is accepted then we
need 'an international political movement capable of bringing together in an appropriate way the
multitudinous discontents that derive from the naked¶ exercise of bourgeois power in pursuit of a Utopian
neoliberalism'.95 This calls for 'the¶ creation of organisations , institutions, doctrines, programs,
formalised structures, and¶ the like, that work to some common purpose'.96 There is, in other
words, a need to build a movement that cuts across space and time, involving NSMs and OSMs in every¶ struggle, to
form a global opposition force that can challenge those transnational¶ social forces which bolster
the regime of capital at the expense of peoples interests.¶ Today, from Seattle to Genoa we are
witnessing an upsurge of sentiment against the¶ neo-liberal form of globalisation. New forms of
struggle have been invented to¶ mobilise people against the injustices of globalisation. There has been adroit and imag-¶ inative use
of digital space to create a global public sphere in which the evolving inter-¶ national civil society can register its protest. While the
sentiments that are expressed¶ have no unified outlook, and are in fact riddled with contradictions, the significance¶ of the protest
cannot be disregarded. If these protests can draw in the OSMs, and the¶ latter respond to it and present a united front, there would
be much to cheer about.¶ Albeit, in terms of framing a theory of resistance we need to distinguish between those¶ demands that are
not so good for third world countries and those that are. Thus, for¶ example, the demand for bringing in labo–ur standards into
WTO is inimical to the¶ interests of third world countries as it would be used as a device of protection by the¶ North"¶ From the
standpoint of TWAIL, it is necessary first, to make the story of resistance¶ an integral part of the narration of international law.
There is perhaps a need to exper-¶ iment with literary and art forms (plays, exhibitions, novels, films) to capture the imag-¶ ination
of those who have just entered the world of international law. Second, we need to strike alliances with other critics
of the neo-liberal approach to international law.¶ Thus, for instance, both feminist and third world scholarship
address the question of¶ exclusion by international law. There is therefore a possibility of developing coherent¶ and comprehensive
alternatives to mainstream Northern scholarship. In other words,¶ we should collaborate with feminist approaches
to reconstruct international law to¶ address the concerns of women and other marginal and
oppressed groups. Third, we need to study and suggest concrete changes in existing
international legal regimes. The¶ articulation of demands would assist the OSMs and NSMs to frame their concerns
in¶ a manner as to not do harm to third world peoples.
is “stood on its head” to argue that it is the universalizing interests of power, understood in
vague terms of biopolitical, neoliberal, global governance, rather than the genuinely
cosmopolitan ethics of empowerment, which drives the discursive practices of regimes of
regulation and intervention in the international sphere. As the 1990s liberal discourse has been
challenged by the 2000s poststructuralist discourse, we seem to be caught up in a contestation
over which academics have the most progressive or radical understandings: of hierarchies of
power―as a product of “statist” exercises of national self-interest or as a product of new global
governmentalities; and of post-territorial political community―as a response and opposition to
these hierarchies, either in the form of global civil society or multitude.¶ However, it is not clear whether the
contestation―in terms of the ontological framings of the relations and dynamics of power or of
alternative political subjects of post-territorial political community―reflects much more than
the starting positions of the critical academic theorists concerned. It seems that the radical
differences between those who espouse and those who critique global liberal ontologies―and
thereby read post-territorial community in liberal or poststructuralist framings―are derived less
from empirical investigations than from their own normative aspirations. For cosmopolitan theorists,
their normative aspirations for a more ethical and engaged foreign policy agenda were given added legitimacy through linking their
demands with those of activist NGOs and assertions of global civil society’s immanent existence. As Kaldor (1999:195) asserts, the
concept of global or transnational civil society is used on the one hand as an analytical device, but on the other hand, it is also used
to express “a political project.”¶ Similarly, for poststructuralist critics, the struggle against “empire” is alleged to be
more than mere philosophical idealism precisely because it is founded upon the immanent
existence of the “multitude.” Just as with the concept of global civil society, Hardt and Negri’s (2006:221) multitude is
partly framed as an abstract heuristic device. But more importantly it is also a normative project: “The multitude needs a political
project to bring it into existence” (2006:212). As they state: “The proletariat is not what it used to be” (2001:53). Their task,
therefore, is to discover a new form of global agency. They describe this mixture of academic investigation and
normative aspiration as illustrating that multitude “has a strange double temporality: alwaysalready and not-yet” (2006:222). It appears that the new post-territorial political communities,
held to be coming into existence, conflate empirical and normative aspirations in the critique of
the perceived hierarchies of power: either being seen as constituted against the narrow stateinterests dominating international politics or against the biopolitics of global “empire.” ¶ At the level
of discursive analysis (as we shall see) the choice between these two approaches can easily appear to be a purely subjective one.
Neither one appears to satisfactorily ground the existence of a new emerging universal subject capable of constituting post-territorial
political community―as the agent of cosmopolitical regimes or of post-cosmopolitical resistance to these regimes. In both, the
subject―which is alleged to demonstrate both the lack and the presence of post-territorial political community―is grounded in a
way that confuses normative political critique with empirical analysis. Both approaches suggest that traditional
territorial political communities have been fundamentally undermined by the changing nature
of social relations―by globalization or by biopolitical production processes. These changing
social relations are held to have undermined territorial political community through the
deconstruction of the unitary assumptions involved in modern liberal democratic political
theory. However, they have been much less successful in demonstrating that new
post-territorial forms of political community have been constructed in their stead .¶
What is clear is that, in the name of post-territorial political community, liberal and radical critics have sought to represent the crisis
of legitimacy of representative political bodies as a product of political contestation emerging from post-territorial actors. In these
frameworks of understanding global politics, the shift toward post-territorial community is seen as indicative of new lines of political
struggle that have replaced those of the territorialized framework of Left and Right. For liberal and critical theorists, this is the
struggle for cosmopolitan and human rights and for emancipation against the sovereign power of states. For poststructuralist
theorists, this is seen as the struggle for autonomy and difference against the universalizing war waged
“over ways of life itself” by neoliberal biopolitical governance (Reid 2006). However, these struggles
remain immanent ones, in which global political social forces of progress are intimated but are
yet to fully develop. There is a problem of the social agency, the collective political subject, which
can give content to the theorizing of global struggle articulated by academic theorists. It seems
that neither liberal nor poststructuralist theorists are able to envisage the possibility that we
could live in a world where politics appears to have become deterritorialized, not as a result
of the expanded nature of collective political engagement, but precisely because of
the absence of political struggle (see further Chandler 2009).
Consumption focus fails
Røpke 05 [Inge Røpke, Department for Manufacturing Engineering and Management Technical University of Denmark,
Consumption in ecological economics, International Society for Ecological Economics, April 2005,
http://www.ecoeco.org/pdf/consumption_in_ee.pdf]
Compared to the other research questions, the question about how to change consumption
patterns in a
more sustainable direction is relatively under-researched in ecological economics. In relation to the
fields of consumer behaviour, economic psychology and environmental psychology, research on 'sustainable consumption'
developed, and energy studies provided new knowledge about energy saving behaviour – research that is sometimes reflected in
ecological economics (an extensive review of literature on consumer behaviour and behavioural change in relation to sustainable
consumption can be found in (Jackson 2005)). The main focus of this research is consumer choice and individual consumer
behaviour, and sustainable consumption is about choosing more environmentally friendly products
and services (e.g. organic food) and about recycling behaviour, water saving, room temperature etc. The question is how to
encourage consumers to make the environmentally correct choices, and measures such as labelling and information campaigns are
studied. This research has also tried to distinguish between different social groups or lifestyles to consider whether the political
measures should be tailored to different target groups (Empacher and Götz 2004). A successful contribution from this field has been
the NOA-model that describes consumer behaviour as the result of the consumer's Needs, Opportunities and Abilities (Ölander and
Thøgersen 1995; Gatersleben and Vlek 1998). For instance, the model is used as an organizing device in the OECD publication
Towards Sustainable Household Consumption 11(OECD 2002). The model opens up for public initiatives that can improve the
opportunities for more sustainable household behaviour, but neither the social construction of needs, nor the macro aspects of the
model akre well developed. However, the idea works well together with strategies for increased technological efficiency: more
efficient products and services are provided, and the consumers are encouraged to buy them. Whereas the behavioural
research usually focuses on individual consumers or households and how they can be motivated
to change behaviour, others have taken an interest in bottom-up initiatives where consumers or
citizens organize collectively to change their lifestyle and consumption patterns – initiatives
varying from mutual help to be 'green consumers' to the establishment of eco-communities (Georg
1999; Michaelis 2004). Unfortunately, such initiatives still seem to have marginal importance. In general,
organizational measures are increasingly studied, both bottom-up initiatives and commercial enterprises – for instance, car-sharing
has been arranged in both ways (Prettenthaler and Steininger 1999). A widely promoted idea is to reduce resource use by selling
services instead of products, the so-called product-service system concept (Mont 2000; Mont 2004). In this way the final services
can be provided with fewer resources, as the provider will have an incentive to reduce costs also in the use phase, and as hardware
can sometimes be shared by several consumers. Most of the practical steps to change consumption patterns
and most of the related research concern relatively marginal changes that are like a snowball
in hell compared to the challenge we face, if consumption patterns should deserve to be called
sustainable – consistent with a level of consumption that could be generalized to all humans
without jeopardizing the basic environmental life support systems. Very little is done to face the 'quantity
problem'. At the level of research it is difficult to translate the complexity of driving forces behind the ever-increasing consumption
into suggestions for workable solutions, and at the level of politics it is hard to imagine how to achieve
support for such solutions. As the driving forces are as strong as ever, all the small steps towards
'sustainable consumption' co-exist with a general worsening of the situation –
although many of these steps can be fine, they are far from sufficient.
World getting better now—it’s not perfect but action is key
Dean 10/16/14—philosopher and science writer, check out all the people he cites!
(Tim, “Cheer up, it’s not all doom and gloom”, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-10-16/dean-cheer-up-its-not-all-doom-andgloom/5818302, dml)
With each year that goes by, the world is becoming a safer, richer and generally better place to
live. So instead of looking at the headlines and losing hope, we can look at them as challenges to
be solved, writes Tim Dean.
Don't let the bleak news headlines fool you. The future is looking bright, and no amount of
haemorrhagic fever outbreaks, militant religious fanaticism, crackdowns on pro-democracy
protesters or doomsaying about the global economy ought to turn your smile upside down.
In fact, now is a great time to be an optimist about the future.
With each year that goes by, the world is becoming a safer, richer and generally better place to
live. And this is true according to almost any metric you choose to look at.
Let's start with violence. While it might seem that the world is as dangerous a place as it has ever
been, with wars both civil and uncivil abroad, "coward punches" and domestic violence at home,
and the spectre of terrorism spreading fear throughout, the fact is there is less violence in
the world today than at any other point in history.
According to the World Health Organisation, about 1.6 million people lost their lives to violence
in the year 2000. That's a gut-wrenching figure. However, it needs to be put in perspective. The
global population in 2000 was about 6 billion. That means less than 0.03 per cent of people - or
fewer than 27 people per 100,000 - died from violence in that year. That's not so appalling when
you consider that somewhere around 15 per cent of people in ancient hunter-gatherer societies
died a violent death, and that figure was still about 3 per cent for the first half of the 20th
century, including the two major world wars.
As Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker argued in his recent book, The Better Angels of Our
Nature, even wars today are less deadly than they once were:
The number of people killed in battle - calculated per 100,000 population - has dropped by
1000-fold over the centuries as civilizations evolved. Before there were organized countries,
battles killed on average more than 500 out of every 100,000 people. In 19th century France, it
was 70. In the 20th century with two world wars and a few genocides, it was 60. Now battlefield
deaths are down to three-tenths of a person per 100,000.
Every violent death is a tragedy, but the very fact that we are so outraged at incidences of
violence today shows that most people no longer regard it as a viable solution to our
disagreements.
That's progress.
What about poverty? Here the story is even more rosy. While there can be no doubt that millions
of people continue to live in states of abject poverty, their numbers are declining at a startling
rate in most regions around the world.
A recent United Nations report stated, "Extreme poverty rates have fallen in every developing
region, with one country, China, leading the way ... Poverty remains widespread in sub-Saharan
Africa and Southern Asia, although progress in the latter region has been substantial."
Speaking of Africa, a continent that is often perceived as being doomed to corruption and
poverty, there the transformation has been profound. Africa is entering a new era of burgeoning
prosperity, much like South-East Asia did in the 1990s. Not only are African economies growing
rapidly, but the wealth is actually reaching the poor.
In fact, by some accounts, the entire African continent (except for a couple of holdouts) may
achieve the Millennium Development Goals to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger this year,
which is one year ahead of schedule.
In terms of our wealth, well, we really have nothing to complain about. Despite all the whinging
about rising cost of living, most of these costs are discretionary (although many people strangely
continue to feel that a crippling mortgage is somehow obligatory). The average income in
Australia has risen dramatically over the past few decades. In 2000, the average pay was
$33,769. In 2013 it was more like $58,000. That's a 19 per cent pay rise, even after adjusting for
inflation.
Oh, and that recent bout of doom and gloom from the International Monetary Fund amounts to
a small reduction in the forecast economic growth that the world ought to enjoy over the next
few years. Getting wealthier, albeit slightly more slowly, isn't what a lot of people would consider
terrible news.
OK, what about the environment? Surely the spectre climate change is of real concern? Well, it
is. But even there progress is being made.
In terms of carbon emissions, we continue to pump out CO2 at record rates, with most of the
growth in emissions coming from China. However, the European Union, United States and
other OECD countries have actually seen emissions decline over the past several years.
China remains somewhat bullish about its right to emit carbon to fuel its return to be an
economic power, but it is also acutely aware of the risks from pollution and carbon emissions
and is aiming for a lower carbon future. China has already invested billions in low-carbon
technologies, from ultra-supercritical coal-fired power stations to thorium nuclear to solar
power. If a few more major economies (including Australia) sign up for a carbon price, it seems
likely that China will jump on board too.
Another positive sign is that world economic growth has recently "decoupled" from carbon
emissions. This has proven that economies can grow without needing to fume more CO2 into the
atmosphere, thus removing another barrier to going renewable.
In the long term, we also have the prospect of limitless clean energy thanks to fusion power. It'll
likely take decades to come to fruition, but when it arrives, it could radically transform our
energy landscape and even help alleviate some of the effects of climate change, such as by using
our abundant electrons to power atmospheric carbon scrubbers or to run desalination plants.
We just have to make it to 2050 or so without totally wrecking the climate, and we stand a good
chance getting through this thing without suffering catastrophic global warming.
And I haven't even touched on how our triumph over disease doubled life expectancy from 40 to
80, or how infant mortality rates continue to decline worldwide, or how increased automation
and machine intelligence could soon lead to a long weekend every week, or how most of the
world is becoming a far more tolerant place.
None of the above means the world isn't facing some grave challenges, nor that we ought to
become complacent. In fact, "optimism" isn't quite the right word for how we should feel.
Optimism can lead to a kind of merry apathy, a blind faith that good will prevail of its own
accord. In that way, a fatalistic optimism can be as dangerous as apathetic pessimism.
A better term is one that sadly doesn't receive nearly enough use these days: "meliorism." This is
the notion that the world is far from perfect, but we can improve it through our own actions. It
reminds us that if we let the world unfold without our intervention, things will probably get
worse, so we must act to change it for the better.
So instead of looking at the headlines and losing hope, we can look at them as challenges to be
solved - challenges that can and will eventually be solved. After all, if we have been able to
reduce amount of violence in the world, lift so many people out of poverty and do the countless
other wondrous things that have made the world as it is today, then history is on our side.
someone’s gotta profit from solving climate change—it’s better than the alternative
Kuiper 2/4—director of the Australian Solar Council
(Gabrielle, “It might seem unethical but someone has to get rich fighting climate change”,
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/05/it-might-seem-unethical-but-someone-has-to-get-rich-fighting-climatechange, dml)
Is 2015 the year when the world will finally decide on a major new global agreement on climate
change? Pundits are beginning to put their cases as to whether the Paris summit in December
will “save the earth”, or will end up as another Copenhagen, as in 2009 when massive
anticipation resulted in inevitable post-conference disappointment. In a speech this week Prince
Charles insisted that 2015 will be a make-or-break year for the climate. But is Paris where the
real action will be?
Like it or loathe it, it’s now about the money. Cost curves, China, India, bankers, entrepreneurs
and the concept of “loss and damage”, in other words, financial risk versus opportunity, are now
more important to what is happening to try and prevent irreversible climate change than any of
the technical details of the negotiations.
Let me throw some numbers at you. Solar has now moved so far down the cost curve that if you
live in Queensland, you can buy a 6kW rooftop solar PV system for $7,800 ($4,000 with the
RET subsidy). Ignoring subsidies now and then, such a large system would have cost $54,000
five years ago. This system will supply you with electricity at a fraction of the price you currently
pay to your electricity retailer.
At a global level, the dramatically positive positions of solar and wind on their respective cost
curves mean that the $310bn invested in clean energy last year paid for almost twice the clean
electricity capacity compared with three years ago.
China has understood for many years that clean energy development would bring them greater
energy independence (although they are still significantly reliant on Russian gas) as well as trade
income, so has sought to dominate solar manufacturing worldwide. As a result, four of the five
largest solar panel manufacturers globally are Chinese companies and China is investing
US$294bn in renewables over the five years to 2015 (that’s not a typo; it’s 3% of China’s GDP).
In turn, Germany has gone from selling solar panels to selling solar manufacturing equipment to
China.
India has recently announced plans for a $100bn expansion of solar power by 2022. Not $1bn or
$10bn, but $100bn – enough for almost 100,000 MW of clean energy (which would be more
than 10% of India’s total generation capacity). As part of the US-India climate agreement
announced by Obama and Modi on Sunday, the US agreed to assist with financing India’s clean
energy development.
Entrepreneur Elon Musk has led electric car startup Tesla through a series of near-death
financial crises to make the company’s innovation available to others. Last year, Tesla declared
its patents available for anyone to use in good faith saying “it is impossible for Tesla to build
electric cars fast enough to address the carbon crisis”. Tesla is also building a $5bn battery
factory in Nevada, just one of multiple investments that have experts agreeing that battery
storage will also quickly fall down the cost curve to be commercial for mass deployment within a
decade. Citigroup’s latest report says this will be a US$400bn industry by 2030 – just 15 years
away.
Forward-thinking banks have been investing on this rising tide. In 2007 Citigroup set an
investment target of US$50bn over 10 years in alternative energy, clean technology and other
carbon-emission reduction activities, which it has already exceeded. US$11bn of climate-themed
bonds were issued in 2013, $35bn in 2014 with $100bn estimated for 2015. Climate bonds
include financing for a wide range of emissions reducing activities from rail lines to forestry to
water recycling.
The Green Climate Fund has reached its start-up goal of $10bn with an ambition of reaching
$100bn a year by 2020. These funds will be invested in developing countries to limit or reduce
their greenhouse gas emissions and assist them to adapt to climate change. This is a partial
response to calls for the developed world to compensate for “loss and damage” inflicted on
countries that have not significantly contributed to the causes of our altered climate.
So there is plenty of money to be made.
And then there is money to be lost.
On the flip side of finance, there is the growing momentum around divestment. The Fossil Free
divestment campaign started by American environmentalist Bill McKibben and 350.org has
been growing fast. Organisations, from the Australian National University to the Uniting Church
in NSW to the heirs of the Rockerfeller oil fortune, have signed up to a total withdrawal sum of
$50bn from fossil fuel investments. Even UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon has been urging
reduced investments in fossil fuels and, more subtly, World Bank president Jim Yong Kim has
called for financial regulators to enforce disclosures of climate risk.
As Matthew Yglesias notes in Slate, such a campaign is as much moral as financial.
Divestment says: If you make your fortune digging fossil fuels out of the ground and poisoning
the air by burning them, then people are going to shun you and your business.
However, the concept of the “carbon bubble” or “unburnable carbon” – that 80% of fossil fuels
on the balance sheets of public and private companies and governments must stay in the ground
if temperatures are to stay below 2C – is gaining credence. A report by analysts at Citigroup in
mid-2013 warned of the likelihood that fossil fuel reserves in Australia will face significant value
destruction in a carbon constrained world. Insurance underwriters too are heeding their
actuaries and are already incorporating climate change risk into their models – and adjusting
premiums and coverage terms and conditions at all levels.
Similarly, the call for an end to fossil fuel subsidies is growing louder. It was made jointly by the
World Bank, the IMF, the International Energy Agency and the OECD in October last year. Now
even the Economist is calling for the annual $550bn of subsidies for the extraction and use of
fossil fuels to be removed (you’ll note that figure is the largest one in this article). And, Australia
notwithstanding, carbon pricing is now in place or scheduled to be implemented in 39 national
and 23 sub-national jurisdictions. The world’s second largest carbon trading market opened for
business this month in South Korea.
When financial flows start changing because the people who control the purse strings see the
future, then you know change is underway.
Reducing climate change mitigation to a financial conversation might be abhorrent to Naomi
Klein, but unless financial institutions can see a way of making a dollar, then we are
not going to make the change as fast as needed. Of course international agreements
and global leadership is absolutely vital, especially in setting the policy and regulatory
framework. Solar PV would never have become so cheap so fast without the German
government’s policy settings, including feed-in-tariffs. But solely focusing on the Paris
negotiations can distract us from the national, regional and city policy changes that are needed
(including re-instating a carbon price in Australia) and the regulatory and financial support
needed for disruptive innovations (for example, removing fossil fuel subsidies would lower the
barriers to entry for clean energy).
It might seem deflating or unethical, but someone has to get rich reducing carbon pollution. Just
as new business models developed with the end of the African slave trade or the introduction of
water restrictions, threats to vested interests are opportunities for others. The particularly good
news in the case of climate change is that a lot of that money is going to be made bringing clean
energy to people who don’t have it today or reducing the amount of energy the rest of us use.
That means solar powered lights in Africa, electric buses in Brazil, cleaner cookstoves in
Cambodia, and yes, some fat banker bonuses in London, Songdo and Beijing.
I-law can be reformed to prevent imperialism---engagement is vital to prevent
worse crackdowns
Antony Anghie 4, Professor of Law at the S.J. Quinney School of Law, University of Utah,
“Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law,”
http://kingdomofhawaii.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/anghie-imperialism-sovereignity-andthe-making-of-international-law.pdf
The further important issue is the question of whether it is possible to create an international law
that is not imperial; that can, in fact,¶ further justice, increase the well being of humanity,
without relapsing¶ into the imperial project that I have attempted to sketch here. This is¶ a large question, to which
again I have no adequate answer. It is not¶ my intention here to be deterministic, to relentlessly demonstrate that¶
colonialism has always been reproduced by international law over the¶ last five centuries of its existence and
that this will therefore inevitably¶ continue to be the case. Rather, I see this work as expressing
certain¶ historically based concerns which, if recognized, can surely be remedied. In making this
argument regarding imperial sovereignty. I hope¶ I have also demonstrated that there is no inherent logic to sovereignty¶ doctrine;
that imperialism has been continuously contested by jurists,¶ peoples and individuals from both
the First and the Third Worlds; and¶ that it is possible to imagine and argue for very different
understandings of the meaning of sovereignty – and, indeed, of international law. This is¶
demonstrated, for example, by the arguments that were made by devel-¶ oping states in the context of the debate over permanent
sovereignty over¶ natural resources (PSNR). Sovereignty doctrine, then, is articulated, sup-¶ ported and
developed through particular argumentative practices that¶ are expressed through and underlie the
decisions of jurists, the writings¶ of scholars, and the resolutions of international institutions. It is
possible to question these practices. To question, for example the strategic way¶ that Vitoria characterizes the nonEuropean peoples in a manner that¶ brings them under the rule of international law without providing them¶ with any of the
benefits of that law, thus ensuring a particular outcome¶ that appears inevitable and legally valid. Having identified these
strategies, it may be possible to contest them, to deny whatever claims they¶ make to being
universal and logical interpretations of the doctrines in¶ question. In other words. I hope that even as I
have illustrated the con-¶ stitutive persistence of colonialism, I have also shown the problems
and¶ weaknesses of the colonial doctrines and framework, the incoherence¶ of the attempts of the nineteenth-
century jurists to place and manage¶ the uncivilized barbarian. The interrogation and undermining of these¶ official narratives might
enable the emergence of alternative histories,¶ an aspect of a much larger project of struggle and contestation that has¶ to take place
at all levels.¶ I continue to hope, together with the many scholars who are working¶ to reconstruct an international law
precisely because of their awareness¶ of the many ways in which it has operated to exclude and subordinate¶ people on account of
their gender, race and poverty, that international law can be transformed into a means by which the
marginalized may be empowered. In short, that law can play its ideal role in limiting and
resisting power. At the very least. I believe that the Third World cannot abandon
international law because law now plays such a vital role in the¶ public realm in the
interpretation of virtually all international events. It is through the vocabulary of international
law, concepts of 'self-defence',¶ 'human rights' and 'humanitarian intervention’ that issues of cause,¶
responsibility and fault are being discussed and analysed, and interpre-¶ tations of these
doctrines which reproduce imperial relations must be contested. The construction of the 'other', I have
argued, is crucial to¶ the extension and universalization of international law. Complex issues¶ arise as to whether it is possible to
somehow imagine the 'other' and¶ behave towards it in some different and non-imperial way. The Peace¶ of Westphalia. I have
already suggested may be seen as one approach to¶ precisely this problem.
International law is inevitable and part of the solution to violence even if it’s not a
panacea --- the alt is impossible and allows the right to fill in
Emmanuelle Jouannet 7, Professor, Universite Paris I - Pantheon Sorbonne, “ESSAY: WHAT
IS THE USE OF INTERNATIONAL LAW? INTERNATIONAL LAW AS A 21ST CENTURY
GUARDIAN OF WELFARE”, 28 Mich. J. Int'l L. 815, Michigan Journal of International Law,
Lexis
It now seems impossible to turn back from the present course. To deny the new aims
of contemporary law and to press for a return to minimalist liberal law would be to allow the neoliberal powers that be to exploit the downfall of the international system for their
own advantage . n94 Under no circumstance should we succumb to the ultraliberal refusal to
tackle mutual problems in the way welfare-inducing law does, as the latter would thus become a
regrettable avatar of classical liberal law. It is not, however, surprising that there is currently a resurgence, in [*850] international law, of the old debate between
ultraliberals, who express discontentment with too much law and bureaucracy, and moderate liberals, whose sole intent is to reform the system. Yet restoring the image of a classical but incentive-creating system
would be inconsistent with the profound socio-cultural changes the contemporary international system has undergone, and with the legitimate aspirations held by millions of individuals, is therefore not an option
either.¶ The shift toward ethical and functionalist welfare-inducing law is the product of a redefinition of politics and of the fabric of international society itself, and is accompanying the evolution of this society
and structuring it accordingly. Classical society and liberal international law were based on international politics as defined solely by States. Contemporary welfare-inducing society presupposes that political
power must aim at fostering communal wellbeing around the planet. But the 1945 consensus deteriorated long ago, as it was borne out of exceptional circumstances. It now needs to be reconstituted in the context
of the new society. The legal values and objectives contemporary international law aspires to correspond to political priorities and certainly do not flow from a universal consciousness. They are the result of
choices that were quite understandable in 1945, but that now need to be reformulated or revoked outright, as even if the same objectives undoubtedly still remain, the modalities have changed and the circle of
addressees has become considerably larger. n95 Some have represented current phenomena in the international system as the result of a "crisis of authority" related to a double crisis of State sovereignty and of
just as one refers to a "global
inversion" to describe the diminishing of sovereignties faced with emancipated groups and
individuals, one could equally refer to an "inversion of international law" since this law is
increasingly restraining States and empowering individuals, minorities, and
peoples through the recognition of rights . This approach is said to be based on "the actor getting his own back on the system." n97 States are no
longer the sole members, actors, and subjects of international society, and individuals and NGOs are now seeking recognition under international law. Today, there are hundreds
of international organizations, thousands of NGOs - including 2,719 with ECOSOC status - and hundreds of
multinationals [*851] thriving in the 208 States and territories. These are the entities with which States, international
organizations, and international politicians interact, n98 which is why political cohesion and the
legitimacy of the existing system require that all actors adhere to shared values . n99 All
territoriality. n96 This is deemed to explain the inability of international law to regulate the current disorder and to create a stable order. However,
could be different if there were greater consciousness of the fact that a legal system can be used beneficially and not simply endured passively. That being said, one should not minimize the role played by States,
and should acknowledge the amicable concurrence of interstatists and cosmopolitans, voluntarists, and communitarians. ¶ This is not to put in question the principle of interventionist welfare-inducing law, but
rather to question its functioning and the limits to which it should be subject. This may appear surprising and perhaps even shocking considering the sociological state of the planet with all its inequalities and
injustices, where collective and individual suffering has never been as dramatic and devastating. The neo-Marxist economists Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein have illustrated how major conflicts of
interest, monopolist and exclusionary phenomena, and the unequal development of powers have persisted due to an excess of unequal resistance from the periphery. n100 But this is precisely what has prompted
the solution might actually lie in subjecting law to certain limits. International law may be
"part of the problem," but it is also, as has been emphasised by Philippe Sands, n101 " part of the solution," so long as
possible options do not go to the detriment of social or political processes or the will of the State.
Without returning to classical minimalist law, we need to fight the preconception that reducing law is
equivalent to regression, and that any limitation on sovereignty is a victory. How far should international law go in
accomplishing its aims? Is it the miracle solution to all of the world's problems?¶ The answer is obviously no.
Law is not a universal panacea. Politics determine international law, even if sometimes they appear to ignore it. Any discourse that glorifies international law and
the present essay, since
its virtues is usually [*852] accompanied by criticism of its weaknesses and perverse effects. This anthropomorphic vision of international law has the aim of turning it into a being in its own right that can be
conveniently accused of defaults that are in fact those of the entities that created it, i.e. principally States, politicians, international experts such as us international jurists, but also those who would like to
appropriate international law, such as NGOs, lobbies, individuals/associations, think tanks, and multinational corporations, which undoubtedly exercise political power despite hesitating to acknowledge it openly.
This anthropomorphic vision needs to be rejected so that everyone can be allocated their proper role and usefulness. In fact, the present situation is interesting in that it reveals the functioning of western political
modernity and its tendency to isolate the legal dimension in order to attribute an exclusive and exorbitant role to it. Yet the difficulties and tensions that have resulted illustrate the necessity of re-evaluating the
two other dimensions to which international law is fundamentally connected: the political and the social. No doubt it is therefore necessary to search for a better balance, or more precisely, to be more conscious of
the political and social dimensions that are concealed behind the law, and which are masked by the heightened role of all that is legal. They no longer have the same mobilizing effect they used to have, at least less
than is the case of, say, legal discourse on human rights. Law does not actually provide a response to all problems, even if law is now omnipresent. In fact, the merit of contemporary deconstructivist critique is to
have deconstructed the illusion of complete legal emancipation and to have attempted to rehabilitate all that is purely political in the elaboration, interpretation, and application of rules; and it is undoubtedly this
critique that will enable us to accept that international law can regain strength as a political means of regulating conduct. n102¶ What thus takes place behind the smokescreen of welfare-inducing law is a political
game of inclusion and exclusion. Why has poverty not been eliminated as proclaimed? Is it because law has remained ineffective and impotent when faced with international reality? Or is it merely a tree
concealing a forest of international renouncement? Reducing world poverty is a commensurable challenge and therefore a realizable objective, but it will not be possible as long as States and other actors have not
set themselves truly fundamental and overriding aims for the benefit of the planet, as well as for their own domestic systems. "Poverty is an invention of civilisation," n103 and it is on the latter that its eradication
will depend. Studies on the phenomenon of poverty are very interesting in [*853] this respect, because they show that at a given moment in the development of a society, poverty always calls for collective action
(and not individual acts of charity). No sooner are substantial amounts of property constituted that give rise to inequalities and merciless confrontation between the rich and the poor, do "asymmetrical
dependencies" appear as the most frequent result. n104 The possible defaults and dysfunctions of welfare-inducing law should not mask political deferral and inaction at the domestic and international levels, or
the fact that international law has always been used in a profoundly ambiguous way: as a positive model of inclusion and simultaneously as a negative model of exclusion, as a positive model of cooperation yet also
as a negative model of domination. The somewhat paradoxical yet inescapable fact is that welfare-inducing law is, as we have seen, easier to instrumentalize than strictly liberal law aimed at regulating conduct,
and is thus, ironically, less social and more unjust. It can be used to accelerate necessary corrections to gaping inequalities between nations or between individuals, but can also enable superpowers and economic
operators to increase their revenue and importance. Furthermore, it can be conveniently denounced by the most virulent dictatorships in underdeveloped countries on the basis that it is inefficient. It can also be
used as a means of obtaining international aid, despite the fact that the sharp rise in poverty and famine over recent years has actually been due to negligence, blind collectivism, terror, or civil war. n105¶ Here,
legal interventionist and welfare-orientated discourse can be a vector of domestic or international domination, much like a powerful lever of transformation. It should also be noted that strictly legal discourse will
it is therefore not a problem if law does not
trump other types of discourse. Law has , however, become so entrenched in international
society that the latter can no longer be conceptualized independently of it. Although
it has undoubtedly always been an instrument of international social and political action, law
not tell us why things are as they are and which might be the best way to change them. That is not its role, and
has never played as important a role as it does today. International legal problems
are no longer external problems one can simply resolve by calling international
State conferences; they have become internalized by all societies, and we are
gradually losing our ability to distance ourselves from them, and indeed from law
itself . Yet distinguishing roles and finalities is all the more difficult when law is not in [*854] itself capable of effectuating change and remains dependent on politics and adaptation.¶ The debate on the
ability of politics to bring about change on an international level is as old as international society itself, and its current prevalence indicates its re-emergence. Although many analysts have taken neo-realist, neoinstitutionalist, neo-functionalist, globalizationist, or transnationalist positions on this issue, n106 the present trend emphasises that the scope for manoeuvre of "real international politics" is limited due to the
rise in bureaucracy, corporate interest groups, legalism in international relations, transnational networks of private actors, the incapacities of fragile States, etc., as if there existed within a decentralized society
(which, however, has never been centralized and thus cannot be decentralized) a sort of political center-point providing a measure of the effectiveness or legitimacy of international political action, n107 when in
reality the concepts most often evoked - namely collective State action, "international regimes," or global governance n108 - actually only recentralize politics in different manners. n109 Should we perhaps nuance
the idea of an international political "center" or "system," either pessimistically by reference to a new Middle Age, n110 or more optimistically by emphasizing the importance of the individual's new role as an
international actor, n111 the emergence of networks, or of orderly pluralism, n112 in order to enlarge our perspective on politics and better understand it? In fact, the increasing relevance of international law is not
putting limitations on power, but bringing about a reorganization of power. The impression of reduced political leeway is thus deceptive, since in fact, new political powers are emerging that involve decisions
affecting people and their environment. The sensation of political powerlessness or of simulacrum derives from [*855] the fact that politics are reduced to the activities carried out within the official international
political system. n113¶ However, whatever is the actual scale of these illusions and developments, they have instilled a sense of unease in internationalist culture, which is necessarily political as well as legal given
the indissoluble links between the two. This is the result of the latent but visible state of disequilibrium between the official appearance of the classical center-points of political power - States, international
organizations, etc. - where official activities appear efficient and regulatory, but often fall short of attaining the fixed objectives, and an international society that is inexorably straying from official political
decisions and introducing new actors with new objectives, decision-making competencies, and political dimensions. That is not to say that States and international organizations are not the prime institutional
actors on the international scene, but simply that behind the unchanged facade of the politics they engage in, new political centre-points are taking shape. Consequently, the boundary between the political and the
non-political is becoming ever more indeterminate, just as the boundary between the legal and the non-legal. To paraphrase Prosper Weil, one can say that politics, much as the law, have become "diluted." The
categories of the political and the non-political, as well as those of the legal and non-legal, must be re-conceptualized with a view to redefining political priorities and redefining them collectively, to the extent that
this is possible. How can welfare-inducing law prevail without a strong and interventionist political center-point to ensure its application as the European States did in the post-war period from the fifties to
seventies? How can one reconcile the changes in the law and international politics? Is not what initially seemed paradoxical but explicable becoming completely contradictory?¶ In any case, there is little point in
Welfare does not seem to be induced by politics, by the law or by the State,
although we have not altogether reached a dead point. n114 International politics does not define
man's happiness, but rather it regulates the conduct of domestic and international actors, combats misery, and prevents
risks.
pinning all our hopes on politics.
I-law obviously isn’t perfect but the alt’s illusory radicalism fails and neglects
political openings to lessen violence
Brad R. Roth 2k, Assistant Professor or Legal Studies and Political Science and Adjunct
Professor of Law at Wayne State University, “Governmental Illegitimacy and Neocolonialism:
Response to Review by James Thuo Gathii”, Michigan Law Review, Vol. 98, No. 6, May 2000,
JSTOR
"Critical" scholars frequently seem to imagine that, in struggling against the methodological norms of
their disciplines, they are struggling against the very structure of the power relations that exploit
and repress the poor and weak — the metaphor being, in their minds, somehow transubstantiated into
reality. The result is all too often, an illusory radicalism, rhetorically colorful but
programmatically vacuous. The danger is that a fantasized radicalism will lead scholars to
abandon the defense of the very devices that give the poor and weak a modicum of leverage, when
defense of those devices is perhaps the only thing of practical value that scholars are in a
position to contribute.*1¶ My main problem with Gathii's critique, then, is not (as he might imagine) that it is political,
but that it is politically dysfunctional. More specifically, for all of Gathii's anticolonial posturing, my book is, I insist, far more
effectively anticolonial than is his critique of it.¶ I. The Law and Politics of Governmental Illegitimacy¶ Professor Gathii is fully justified in subjecting
Governmental Illegitimacy in International Law to an essentially political critique, for the book, like all legal scholarship, has political implications — in
this case, designedly so.* This is not to say, as "critical" scholars sometimes seem to imply, that law or legal scholarship is reducible to ordinary politics.
Law is a purposive project, and thus not exclusively an empirical phenomenon; "law as it is"
cannot be wholly separated from "law as it ought to be."5 The purposes that drive the project,
however, must be demonstrably immanent in social reality, not merely superimposed according
to the predilections of the jurist; the jurist's task, at once creative and bounded, is to render a persuasive account of how those
immanent purposes bind powerful actors to worthy projects (such as the self-determination of Third-World peoples) that they would not otherwise be
inclined to undertake." That legal scholarship impress those who are not natural political allies is the test, not only of its scholarly merit, but also of its
political merit; that friends may be disappointed is of far lesser significance. ¶ This
task is not to everyone's taste, and some
in the academy have devoted their considerable talents to discrediting the project of legal
reasoning, as conventionally understood.7 But their efforts, though often of great
intellectual sophistication, are profoundly misguided. In their zeal to "unmask" law's
legitimation of exercises of power, they fail to appreciate that law can legitimate such exercises
only insofar as it simultaneously constrains them. Power holders seeking the imprimatur of legality can benefit only to the
extent that they accept its limits, for violation of the limits necessarily reverses the process of legitimation.8¶ To deny such a
relationship between legitimation and constraint is to assert that putative legal limits are a
remarkably effective ruse — that legal rhetoric, rather improbably, fools most of the people all of
the time. (Presumably, the power holders are not thought to be fool- ing themselves, since if the constraints, though objectively illusory, seem real
enough to them, the rule of law would be a reality in politi- cal terms even if a chimera in philosophical terms.) On the other hand, if
law does constrain as well as legitimate the exercise of power, to neglect that point
is to miss an important political opportunity.
Alt’s focus on changing paradigms is disempowering
Isacoff 15—Associate Professor of Political Science and the Chair of Environmental Studies at
Gonzaga University
(Jonathan, “Why IR Needs Deweyan Pragmatism”, Perspectives on Political Science, 44:1 (2015), 26-33, dml)
The well-known RCT scholars Shepsle and Bonchek humorously note that while it might not be “rocket science,” the study of politics
should be scientific.46 Others, especially postmodernist critics, argue against the notion of political science and IR as science. A
Deweyan pragmatist approach would suggest that this debate is not useful. By that, I mean that what IR is or is not is not
nearly as important as what it achieves. So the question should not be whether IR is scientific, but rather,
how scientific does it need to be to get the job done? To this, there are many answers, but I suggest a line of reasoning: the scientific
method in the most general sense is useful in helping to explain how and why, all else equal, causal processes work. Put differently,
if we want to know how and why some states go to war and others do not, it would be more
useful—in the sense of getting logically coherent, empirically verifiable answers—to
analyze historical cases systematically than it would be to consult with a shaman or use a crystal ball to obtain
an answer. This is not say that there is not an important role for textual interpretation in the
process of studying war and other international phenomena. Indeed, I elsewhere argue that interpretation of
historical texts is crucial to making valid claims about wars.47 But the main point here is that interpretation is a
means toward an end, namely, the process of coping with the world via human experience. Toward that end,
interpretation is necessary and useful, but it is not the end itself.
A second point is that there is clearly a pragmatic and justifiable need for certain types of quantitative
methods, namely, statistics, though not necessarily formal models, in some segments of IR. Taking a simple example for
illustrative purposes, if one wished to study the effect of speed limits on motor vehicle fatalities, the use of aggregate data statistically
analyzed would be far superior to standing on the corner waiting for an accident to observe or reading several diary accounts of
individual accidents. The
key point here, however, is not that statistical methods are inherently better,
or more “rigorous” than any other type of method. Rather, the use of statistically analyzed data to find
answers to problems of highway fatalities creates knowledge that if properly applied, would
alleviate “concrete human woes,” which is to say it would help to save lives. That is pragmatic political
science.48
What Is a Problem?
Many political scientists believe in the idea of having a “problem orientation” for the field. For example, Atul Kohli
asserts that there is a strong consensus among leading experts “that comparative politics is very much a problem-driven field of
study.” “What motivates the best comparative politics research are puzzles of real-world significance,” writes Kohli, in “The Role of
Theory in Comparative Politics: A Symposium.”49 Similarly, Ian Shapiro, responding
to the question of what
would be a better alternative than RCT asks the question: “What is the phenomenon to be
explained?… The formulation of alternative explanations, in other words, should be a problem-driven
activity.”50 This is clearly consistent with Deweyan pragmatism; in fact, it is inherently pragmatist. “A Deweyan pragmatic
approach to political inquiry,” writes Maurice Meilleur, “would transform political science from a discipline, based on a set of
methods, into a profession, based on a set of problems.”51 But what, more specifically, is a “problem orientation?” First, it is clear
that Kohli and his colleagues mean an empirically driven problem orientation. That is, the study of politics should be
driven by empirical,
not theoretical or methodological problems. Careful not
to push this point too far, a Deweyan pragmatist would suggest that theorization
is an important activity, but it must
not lose its link to problems of human experience, which is to say empirical problems . However, Kohli and
others advocating an empirically driven problem orientation have little to say about how to identify
and value problems. After all, there is a limitless supply of political problems only a fraction of which can be studied.
In response, I would argue that some problems are more significant to the detection and response to
human suffering and thus more deserving of study, than others. This is itself a tricky ethical problem, for
who is to say what is or is not a “real problem?” One reader of this manuscript suggested that “What is really going on here, when
one scratches the analytical surface, is not that IR theorists aren't discussing problems; it's that they are discussing problems that the
author does not feel are worthy of attention. But why should we accept that the author's “problems” are more important or
privileged? Why does the author get to decide what a “real” problem is?” This is a good question but it is a misreading of the
argument. Nowhere does Dewey or this author imply that any individual could or should decide or
dictate which problems matter and which do not. To the contrary, the question of “who decides” is a
public deliberation problem, a subject Dewey addressed exhaustively in his classic The Public and Its Problems.52 According to
Dewey, problems are the direct outcome of a public's determination of its common good . A full
analysis of how this works, or in some cases, fails to work in practice is beyond the scope of this article. But it is important to note
that there is no argument here for the privileging of one private individual's notion of what constitutions “real problem” versus that
of another. That is for the public to decide.
Human Woe and Issues That Matter
The final point to be made about reconstruction stems directly from the previous discussion: some problems matter more
than others with regard to the alleviation of concrete human suffering. Which issues matter the
most in our world? Ultimately, per Dewey's political philosophy touched on above, that is for the public to
decide. Assuming that there ever could be a “common good,” we can hypothesize that people might choose to focus
on issues that affect them daily, issues such as climate change, poverty, health care, education, racism, and sexism, as
well as war and peace, all issues that are of grave importance to humanity . IR, especially in its
American form, with its disproportionate emphasis on global security and great power war, has given scant attention to too many
other issues, and when attention is given to the “lesser” topics, they are relegated to sub-sub-specializations within the discipline,
“Gender and IR,” for instance. More problematic from the standpoint of pragmatism, the approach-driven wing of the
scored more points in
the epic contest for paradigmatic supremacy than with the matter of
discipline is
more concerned with which paradigm has
how the world could or should respond to climate change or why hundreds of million of children lack basic
interpretivist/linguistic wing, in contrast, is more concerned with how
texts are interpreted in graduate seminars than with the fact that children in inner
cities cannot even read a text at all .53
Many IR scholars are still fighting over whether and to what extent “unit-level variables” should be taken into consideration in
understanding international politics (and if so, whether one might still rightly be accepted in the club of realism).54 Others are
trying to demonstrate that IR constructivism is really “liberalism in disguise.”55 This is not a stab at “why
realism is (yet again) wrong.” It is a critique of the self-definitionally obsessed, paradigmdriven culture of academic IR. I would not go so far as to claim that there are no scholars who study everyday politics; many
clearly do.56 Rather, the problem is that that the incentive structure to contribute to the “big debates”
of the discipline, namely, those at the paradigmatic level, is a project that drifts ever
afar from the problems of “concrete human woe” that affect the other millions of people who
nutrition and medical care. The
happen not to have graduate degrees in IR.
1AR
CASE
The plan jumpstarts reform dialogue—prior national policy reform changes
international motives
Collins, 10/28/14 - John Collins is the International Drug Policy Project Coordinator at LSE
IDEAS at the London School of Economics (John, “Surprising source offers signs the global ‘war
on drugs’ may be ending” Reuters, http://blogs.reuters.com/greatdebate/2014/10/28/surprising-source-offers-signs-the-global-war-on-drugs-may-be-ending/
Brownfield, assistant secretary of state in the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs summed up
the key idea underpinning the shift at the United Nations on Oct. 9: Things have changed since 1961. We must have
enough flexibility to allow us to incorporate those changes into our policies … to tolerate different national drug policies, to
accept the fact that some countries will have very strict drug approaches; other countries will legalize entire categories of drugs. The
William R.
statement is hugely significant as it represents a new diplomatic doctrine and a potential tipping point in efforts to end the disastrous “war on drugs” that has lasted six decades.
that immediate reform of the UN drug control conventions (the core of which is the 1961 Single Convention), while
is not yet feasible. But it acknowledges that UN conventions should never serve as a
barrier to improving global drug policies and that different policies will work for different regions and nations. Lastly, it accepts that member
It recognizes
necessary,
states can reinterpret the conventions in response to new scientific evidence and with careful regard to other international human rights norms and obligations — as Uruguay
has done in the case of cannabis regulation. The United States was a key architect of the international control system, begun in 1909, and has traditionally served as chief
proselytizer for a repressive prohibitionist model globally. Although it initially rejected the 1961 Single Convention as too weak relative to its predecessor treaties, the United
States soon embraced it as a useful mechanism to rally nations towards the global war on drugs, formally launched in the 1970s. The United States soon worked to strengthen
the convention through successor treaties, funding initiatives and aggressive bilateral drug diplomacy. Now that the United States has openly rejected the role of key bilateral
enforcer the United Nations will likely cease to be a forum where states are pressured to pursue the war on drugs orthodoxy. Instead, it can become a forum that facilitates
cooperation and discussion on a new range of policy approaches. The main obstacle to this change will likely remain Russia and a coalition of conservative states that are reticent
to move away from a militarized and repressive police response. Nonetheless, Russia, despite a strong grip on the UN drug control apparatus, will struggle to enforce its vision
due to the post-Ukraine diplomatic freeze and a general recognition that Russia’s domestic drug policies have fuelled incarceration, human rights abuses and a HIV epidemic.
As states approach the 2016 UN General Assembly Special Session on Drugs, Brownfield’s framework
provides a practical way forward. It allows states to push ahead with various national regulatory
reforms, including regulated markets around the recreational use of certain drugs. It focuses diplomatic effort on
preserving the ‘core’ of the conventions — nothing to do with national cannabis or coca leaf
prohibitions, and everything to do with regulating licit markets for pain medicines. And it focuses
enforcement efforts on minimizing the impact of illicit markets through effective targeting of criminal gangs, rather than blanket enforcement of impossible global prohibitions.
Finally, it allows regions to move ahead with case-specific policies that reflect their local needs, rather than acting as agents of a self-destructive global ‘one-size-fits-all’ policy.
The United Nations and member states are moving toward a more nuanced understanding that places the drug conventions within broader contexts of human rights, indigenous
rights and other frameworks of health and human empowerment. As Brownfield points out, part of this shift is driven by the need to make rational determinations of resource
allocation and interpret implementation of the conventions accordingly. The United States federal government does not believe making U.S. states comply with drug
Legal reform of the
international drug conventions is certainly required but only prior national reforms will make
that process seem necessary and inevitable to member states. The course outlined in the Brownfield doctrine appears the best
conventions on cannabis is a good use of resources. Other nations should make similar, case specific, determinations.
strategy to ensure the survival and modernization of the global drug control framework for the immediate future.
K
aff is a better step the Drug war mass incarceration entrenches racism
Alexander 6 [2006, Michelle Alexander is an Associate Professor of Law and Director of the
Civil Rights Clinic at Stanford Law School, “Federalism, Race, and Criminal Justice”, Chapter 16
in “Awakening from the Dream Civil Rights Under Siege and the New Struggle for Equal
justice”, pp. 219-228]
Most Americans today can look back and see slavery and Jim Crow laws for what they were-extraordinary and immoral forms of
social control used to oppress black and brown people. However, few believe that a similar form of social control exists today. What I
have come to recognize is that, contrary
to popular belief, a new form of social control does exist, as
disastrous and morally indefensible as Jim Crow -the mass incarceration of people of color.
There is an important story to be told that helps explain the role of the criminal justice system in resurrecting, in a new guise, the
same policies of racial segregation, political disenfranchisement, and social stigmatization that have long oppressed and controlled
all people of color, particularly African Americans. The story begins with federalism and its evolving methods of maintaining white
supremacy. A recent twist has been added; one that the civil rights community has failed to explain to those who do not read reports issued by
the Bureau of Justice Statistics or Supreme Court decisions. In 1980, 330,000 people were incarcerated in federal and state prisons7 - the vast
majority of whom were people of color. 8 Since then, the number has more than quadrupled to over 1.3 million.9 When prison and jail
populations are combined, the number jumps to over two million. 10 Although
African American men comprise less
than seven percent of the population, they comprise half of the prison and jail population.11 Today,
one out of three African American men is either in prison, on probation, or on parole.l2 Latinos
are not far behind. They are the fastest growing racial group being imprisoned, comprising 10.9 percent of all state and federal inmates
in 1985, and nineteen percent in 2003.13 We know how this happened. In 1980, the Reagan administration ushered in the
War on Drugs, another major backlash against civil rights. Although we typically think of the Reagan era backlash as
attacking affirmative action and civil rights laws, the War on Drugs is perhaps the most sweeping and damaging
manifestation of deliberate indifference-or downright hostility-to communities of color. This
war, which continues today, has nothing to do with solving drug abuse, and everything to do with
creating a political environment in which communities of color can be lawfully targeted for mass
incarceration.l4 Not unlike slavery and Jim Crow, mass incarceration provides the white elite with
social benefits . By segregating, incarcerating, and rendering unemployable huge segments of
the black and brown population, the racial hierarchy remains intact . By denying blacks an
equal and adequate education, barring them from certain forms of employment, and relegating
them to the worst neighborhoods, the white elite has ensured that whites will never occupy the bottom rung of
that hierarchy. Today, slavery and Jim Crow laws no longer exist, and affirmative action has opened doors to some, upsetting the
racial caste system. Mass incarceration, however, has emerged as a new, and arguably more durable, form of social controL's In
addition to protecting their social position, mass incarceration provides white elites with clear economic and political benefits. The
prison industry is hugely profitable. Marc Mauer's excellent book Race to Incarcerate documents the unprecedented expansion of
our criminal justice system and the ways that the race to incarcerate has devastated communities of color.16 He cites promotional
literature from the prison industry, one piece of which stated: "While arrests and convictions are steadily on the rise, profits are to be
made-profits from crime. Get in on the ground floor of this booming industry now." I? Prisons have become central to the
development of many small, predominately white, rural communities, not unlike the economic base formerly provided by
plantations in the rural South.18 Moreover, the Thirteenth Amendment, which bars slavery, provides an exception
for forced labor in prisons.'9 Corporations like Victoria's Secret, therefore, commonly use prison labor, paying
prisoners sweatshop wages.20 On the political front, felon disenfranchisement laws in many states, especially those
with large black populations, have tilted the scales of power in favor of the·white electorate . 21 In
fourteen states, a felon permanently loses the right to vote; in seven states, one in four black
men has been permanently disenfranchised.22 A total of 1.4 million black men, or thirteen percent of the black male adult
population, are either temporarily or permanently disen-franchised.23 The 2000 presidential election illustrated the
dramatic effects of felon disenfranchisement. Florida disenfranchises the most, including six hundred
thousand who have served their sentences and have been discharged from the criminal justice
system. Had those people been allowed to vote, Al Gore could have won Florida by more than
thirty-one thousand votes.24 To make matters worse, mass incarceration results in fewer
legislative seats for communities of color .25 Because the Census Bureau counts inmates as
living where they are incarcerated, rural communities that house large prisons gain a
disproportionate number of elected officials representing them in their state legislature and
Congress.26 Meanwhile, no one is representing the people of color behind bars, and the communities
from which they came lose representatives because their population has declined.27 Quickly, quietly,
and with virtually no political opposition, this new form of social control has become entrenched in the social,
political, and economic structure. Like slavery and Jim Crow, mass incarceration is predicated on the
inferiority of a certain class of people, defined largely by race. The genius of the new system is
that it successfully blames the victim; black and brown people are segregated, stripped of
political rights, and used for the economic benefit of propertied whites because they chose to engage
in criminal behavior. That the overwhelming majority of inmates lack a basic education and only ever earned monthly
incomes ofless than one thousand dollars goes unreported.28 Similarly, scant attention is given to the recent resegregation of
schools, and how staggering proportions of black youth graduating from their segregated, under-funded schools can barely read
(discussed in chapters 3 and 12).29 The school-to-prison track for black and brown youth reflects no racial bias, we are told; rather,
these kids have chosen a life of crime. We should not be confused or distracted by such rhetoric. While the strategies and mechanisms of
control have changed, the
goals and beneficiaries remain the same. The backlash against the Civil Rights
Movement has produced a new method of control on a scale that was unimaginable just twenty
years ago. And this system is built to last.