BORDERS K
Borders K ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 1
1NC ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 2
Links....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 2
Link – Thesis .................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 2
Link – Border Crossing/Terrorism.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 3
Link – Cuba .................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 5
Link – Development Rhetoric.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 6
Link – Democracy ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 7
Link – Democracy (Latin American) ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 7
Link – Drug Cartels ..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 8
Link – Globalization .................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 9
Link – Globalization/Terrorism............................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 10
Link – Interventionism ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 11
Link – Liberal Imperialism...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 12
Link – Maps................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 13
Link – Oil Scarcity ..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 14
Link – Oil Supplies.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 15
Link – War Impacts .................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 16
Link – Threat Scenarios .......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 17
Link – Threats (Nuke War/Terrorism)................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 18
Link – Nation State/Hegemony........................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 18
Link – Territory/Nation-State ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 19
Link – Transboundary Water Agreements ...................................................................................................................................................................................................... 21
Link – Water Basins.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 22
Link – Water “Cooperation” .................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 22
Link – Water “Cooperation” .................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 23
Link – Water Security .............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 24
Turns Case – Conflict .............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 24
Impacts .............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 25
Root Cause .................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 25
War ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 26
War/Terror ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 27
Impact Framing ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 29
Cognitive Bias............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 30
Capitalism Mod ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 30
Alternative ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 32
Discursive Analysis ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 32
No Borders – Utopianism ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 34
Zizek – Ideology Critique ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 35
Dikeç – Ideological Critique ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 36
Film ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 38
New Imaginaries ....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 39
Challenge Geopolitics ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 41
Floating PIK ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 42
Framework ....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 43
Framework – Geopolitical Framing .................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 43
Framework – Metaphors Key ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 44
Framework – Metaphors Key ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 45
Discourse 1st ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 46
Local Politics Key ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 47
Maps Determine Politics ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 48
Policymaking Bad ..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 49
A2 Policymaking = Education.............................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 51
AT Aff Answers ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 51
AT: Borders = Social Cohesion............................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 51
Aff Answers...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 54
Borders Key to Peace .............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 54
Borders Prevent Ethnic Cleansing ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 54
Borders Key to Freedom ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 54
Pragmatism Key......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 55
Perm – Critical Geopolitics .................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 56
Perm – Global/Local ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 57
Securitization Good ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 59
Framework Turn ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 61
AT Geopolitics Alternative ..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 61
Aff – Transboundary Conflicts Differ................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 62
Aff – Hydro-Hegemony Perm .............................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 62
Neoliberalism Good ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 63
Extras .................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 63
Extra – Uzbek/Kyrgz................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 63
1NC
YOUR 1NC IS UP TO YOU.
LINKS
LINK – THESIS
SPACE IS NOT STATIC BUT POLITICAL. THE AFFIRMATIVE’S INVOCATION OF THE NATION-STATE IS PART OF A
BROADER PRACTICE OF LEGITIMIZING THE WORLD MAP AND ITS EFFACEMENT OF ALTERITY
– IT RELIES ON A
SERIES OF SILENT ETHICAL ASSUMPTIONS THAT MASK VIOLENCE AND MUST BE CRITICIZED
SHAPIRO ‘97 (Michael J., Department of Political Science, University of Hawai’I, Violent Cartographies: Mapping Cultures of War, pp. 15-16)
Michel
Foucault put the matter of geographic partisanship succinctly when he noted that "territory is no doubt a geographical
notion, but it is first of all a juridico-political one: the area controlled by a certain kind of power."41 Now that
global geographies are in flux, as political boundaries become increasingly ambiguous and contested, the
questions of power and right are more in evidence with respect to the formerly pacified spaces of nation-states.
The "pacification" was violent, but the violent aspects have been suppressed because the narratives and
conceptualizations of familiar political science discourses of comparative politics and international relations , which
have been aphasic with respect to indigenous peoples,
have been complicit with the destruction of indigenous peoples and
their practices. While these discourses now appear increasingly inadequate, it is less the case that they have been
made invalid by changes in the terrains to which they were thought to refer than it is that the extended period of
relative geopolitical stability during the cold war discouraged reflection on the spatial predicates of their
intelligibility. Statecentric academic, official, and media political discourses approached adequacy only in their
role of legitimating the authority of nation-states. Helping to contain ethical and political conversations within
the problematics that served the centralizing authorities of states and the state system, they were complicit in
reproducing modernity's dominant, territorial imaginary. To recognize that the dominant geopolitical map has
been imposed on the world by power rather than simply emerging as an evolutionary historical inevitablity, as the dominant
consensual narratives would have it,
one needs to achieve an effective conceptual distance, to think outside of the state
system's mode of global comprehension, outside of the spatial predicates of its structures of power, authority, and
recognition. 42 As Henri Lefebvre has noted, space, especially for those occupying it, tends to have an air of neutrality, to appear empty of
normative imposition, as "the epitome of rational abstraction . . . because it has already been occupied and used, and has already been the
focus of past processes whose traces are not always evident in the landscape."43
To the extent that the nation-state geography
remains descriptive (what some call "realistic") and ahistorical, the ethics and politics of space remain unavailable to
political contention. More specifically, this resistance to the geographic imaginary's contribution to ethical
assumptions makes it difficult to challenge the prevailing political and ethical discourses of rights, obligations, and
proprieties that constitute the normativity of the state. Nevertheless, the spatial practices of the state—its divisions into
official versus unofficial space, local versus national space, industrial versus leisure space—are
commitments that are as normative as
the spatiality of the Christian imaginary, which divided the world into sacred and profane spaces. Although they
do not appear on the map, cultural and political struggles accompany and continue to challenge the political
consolidations of space that comprise modernity's geopolitical map. The alternative worlds destroyed and
suppressed within modern cartography become available only when the global map is given historical depth and
alternative practices are countenanced. In sum, although the dominant geopolitical map appears uncontentious and
nonnormative, it constitutes what I am calling a moral geography, a set of silent ethical assertions that
preorganize explicit ethicopolitical discourses. Although there is increasing pressure on the statecentric frame of understanding, as
the state system's ability to code and contain actions associated with "large-scale ethnic mobilizations"44 has been attentuated,
the
geopolitical map of states remains the primary model of space. Despite its increasingly active competitors for
identity and affiliation, it continues to dominate the determination of how things are valued, actions are
interpreted, and persons are assigned identities. Representing the structure of approved sovereignties, it is the
primary force determining recognized political subjectivity.
LINK – BORDER CROSSING/TERRORISM
THE THREATS OF TERROR ON THE BORDER ARE MERELY THE FLIP SIDE OF THE GLOBAL IMPERIAL MISSION TO
ELIMINATE ALL NON-AMERICAN EVIL FROM THE GLOBE
FAILS.
– IT INEVITABLY CREATES VIOLENT BACKLASH AND
DISCUSSIONS LIKE THIS ONE IN UNIVERSITY SPACES ARE CRITICAL TO FIGHT BACK AGAINST IMPERIAL
EXPANSION
SHAPIRO ‘7 (Michael J., Department of Political Science, University of Hawai’I, “The New Violent Cartography” Security Dialogue 38, p. 305306)
As Virilio (2002: 8) points out in an analysis he undertook during the first Gulf War, the militarized state looks
inward as well as outward, manifesting a ‘panicked anticipation of internal war’. In the case of the post-9/11 ‘war
on terror’, the same preemption involved in assaults on states has been turned inward. A state of siege mentality
is effacing the inside/outside boundary of the war. Achille Mbembe (2003: 30) puts it succinctly: ‘The state of siege is itself a
military institution.’ In contrast with the firefights deployed on distanced terrains, the weapons used internally are surveillance technologies and
extra- juridical modes of detention. For example, as an instance of hysterical perception, an FBI fingerprinting laboratory identified a lawyer in
Oregon as one whose fingerprints were found among the detritus of the train bombings in Madrid in 2004. Furthermore, FBI agents pressed
their perceptions for some time, despite a rejection of their fingerprint data by their counterparts in Madrid.
The technologies deployed in the ‘war on terror’ have operated on two fronts, the distant and the home. For
example,
the drone, which was ‘weaponized’ for use on a distant battlefield, is being employed in its spare,
observational version in US–Mexico border areas to help prevent illegal entry of immigrants. According to a report in
the New York Times, on 25 June 2004, unmanned planes known as drones, which use thermal and night-vision equipment, were used in the
US southwest to catch illegal immigrants attempting to cross into the USA from Mexico.
The drones form part of the domestic front
in the USA’s ‘war on terror’; specifically, they are part of ‘the Department of Homeland Security’s “operational
control” of the border in Arizona’ (Myers, 2004).
However, while one agency involved in the ‘war on terror’ is diverting its technology to help exclude Hispanic
bodies, another is actively recruiting them for duty on the external war fronts. As shown in Michael Moore’s documentary
Fahrenheit 9/11, military recruiters are most in evidence in poorer and disproportionately ‘ethnic’ neighborhoods and venues – for example,
the parking lots of discount department stores. Ironically, given the participation of southwestern border patrol agencies within the Homeland
Security network, much of the recruiting is aimed at those Hispanics that live on the margins of the national economy. An item about
recruitment in the Denver area tells much of the story:
In Denver and other cities where the Hispanic population is growing, recruiting Latinos has become one of the Army’s top priorities. From
2001 to 2005, the number of Latino enlistments in the Army rose 26 percent, and in the military as a whole, the increase was 18 percent. The
increase comes at a time when the Army is struggling to recruit new soldiers and when the enlistment of African-Americans, a group
particularly disillusioned with the war in Iraq, has dropped off sharply, to 14.5 percent from 22.3 percent over the past four years (Alvarez,
2006).
Where are the recruiters searching? The story continues:
Sgt. First Class Gavino Barron, dressed in a crisp Army uniform, trawls the Wal-Mart here for recruits, past stacks of pillows and towers of
detergent, he is zeroing-in on one of the Army’s ‘special missions’: to increase the number of Hispanic enlisted soldiers.
But the military’s domestic initiatives go beyond collecting bodies. It is also militarizing other agencies, assembling
them within what I have called the ‘tertiary spatialization of terrorism’. As the author of The Pentagon’s New Map points out,
‘a whole lot more than just the Defense Department’ is actively pursuing the ‘war on terror’ (Barnett, 2004: 95).
One aspect of that
broadened participation is evident in a recent collaboration between three kinds of institutions: Hollywood filmmaking, the military, and the university, all of whom share participation in the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative
Technologies.
The collaboration exemplifies ‘the tertiary spatialization of terrorism’ inasmuch as it is located in the
sector of the institutional ecologies of militarization that involve relations among military, entertainment, and
university agencies. Leaving aside the historical development of the film industry (which, like the Internet, has
borrowed much of its tech- nology from innovations in the military’s information technologies), USC’s involvement
can be located in a long history of the university’s role in national policy.
The modern university began, at least in part, as an ideological agency of the state. It was intellectually shaped as a
cultural institution whose task was to aid and abet the production of the ‘nation-state’, a coherent, homogenous
cultural nation contained by the state. Bill Readings describes a paradigmatic example, the University of Berlin, for which Alexander
von Humboldt was primarily responsible: ‘Humboldt’s project for the foundation of the University of Berlin is decisive for the centering of the
University around the idea of culture, which ties the University to the nation-state.’
And, he adds, the project is developed at the
moment of the emergence of the German nation-state. In addition to being ‘assigned the dual ask of research
and teaching’, the university is also involved in ‘the production and inculcation of national knowledge’ (Readings,
1995: 12).
LINK – CUBA
LONG BEFORE THE EMBARGO, AMERICA TREATED CUBA LIKE A PLAYTHING IN ITS GEOPOLITICAL TOYBOX –
THE PLAN IS MERELY A REINTEGRATION OF
CUBA BACK INTO THE AMERICAN SPHERE OF INFLUENCE TO WAGE
IMPERIALISM UNDER NEW, COVERT MEANS
SLATER ’94 (David, Emeritus Professor of Political Geography @ Loughborough University, “Reimagining the Geopolitics of Development:
Continuing the Dialogue” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 233-234)
When, for example, the Cuban Revolution erupted on to the international scene, the sharp reaction of the US
administration could not be simply explained in terms of the Cuban move towards what was perceived to be
Communism. There was a duality in the response which is crucial to our analysis. First, and foremost in historical
terms, Cuba was seen as naturally being within the orbit of US power; essentially a country which had no right
to abandon the discourse of the Master and develop its own independent signifiers of national destiny.
Secondly,
not only to reject the master signifiers of American civilization and Cuba’s place therein, but to chose an
antagonistic political discourse that was represented as constituting the greatest possible menace to the security
of the Free World, was seen as a pernicious double betrayal. As Benjamin (1990) has aptly demonstrated, the historical
restrictions imposed by the United States on Cuba were much older and tighter than the anti-communist ones,
and hence the Castro regime, in seeking its own destiny, broke these bonds before it chose (under limiting geostrategic
conditions)
to inscribe its own place in a bipolar Cold War. As Benjamin (1990, 216) suggests
in the long run, the double betrayal of ideological loyalty and presumed historic destiny reinforced each other and led to an intense and
enduring ideological antagonism.
Retaining our example of the Cuban case but going somewhat further back into history, it is instructive to take
into account that some decades before the codification of modernization theory, the United States formulated its
perceived right to intervene in Cuba in order to preserve Cuban independence. At the turn of the century, immediately
following the end of the Spanish-American War (rightly referred to in Cuba as the Spanish-Cuban-American War), the United
States acquired Cuba as a virtual protectorate. The United States had occupied and ruled the island from 1898 to
1902, departing only after the Cubans agreed to include in their constitution the Platt Amendment which, under Article III, sanctioned US
intervention for the ‘preservation of Cuban independence’.
Apart from institutionalization of Cuba’s compromised sovereignty,
the beginning of the century also saw the initiation of an imperial project for modernizing and developing Cuban
society under US tutelage. Public school reformers built a new instructional system on the island with organization and texts imported
from Ohio; in 1900 Harvard brought 1300 Cuban teachers to Cambridge for instruction in US teaching methods, and protestant evangelists
established around ninety schools (colegios) in Catholic Cuba between 1898 and 1901. Subsequently, serious efforts were made to
‘Americanize’ the systems of justice, sanitation, transportation and trade. Furthermore, the US military government acted to disband the
institutions of the Cuban independence movement - the Liberation Army, the Provisional Government and the Cuban Revolutionary Party. A
US-created and directed rural guard took the place of the Liberation Army and leaders of the Cuban army and government who accepted the
occupation regime were given subordinate posts in the US military government.
United States’ investments were encouraged and
teams of North American experts, an earlier wave of the ‘missionaries of development’, placed the mineral
agricultural and human resources of the island under their scientific gaze so as to determine the proper means for
harnessing the country’s wealth.
In this particular case we have a clear example, in the period prior to 1917, of a modernizing, developmental,
civilizing project that was justified as part of a wider mission of imperial destiny. Under the same banner, the United
States came to occupy and administer the governments of the Dominican Republic (1916-1924), Haiti (1915-1934) and Nicaragua (1912-1925
and 1926-1933). In the case of the Dominican Republic, the attempted installation of ‘development’ through occupation went together with a
five-year guerrilla war against the forces of the US military government (Calder 1988) and, in other instances too, especially in the Nicaraguan
case, there was no absence of resistance.
In general, the project for modernization, development and progress was rooted
in a series of related programmes; for example, US officials introduced initiatives to expand education, improve
health and sanitation, create constabularies, build public works and communications, establish judicial and penal
reforms, take censuses and improve agriculture.
Overall, the point I want to convey here is that
the desire to ‘develop’, the will to ‘modernize’ another society, went
together with a belief in the need for order, but also with a grand sense of civilizing zeal ; as President Roosevelt
expressed in 1904 (quoted in Niess 1990, 76), when referring to the ‘weak and chaotic people south of us’,
…
it is our duty, when it becomes absolutely inevitable, to police these countries in the interest of order and
civilization.
LINK – DEVELOPMENT RHETORIC
GEOGRAPHICAL RHETORIC IS OFFENSIVE AND WITHOUT CHANGE THERE WILL BE VIOLENCE
DALBY ‘3 (Simon Dalby, leading figure in the disciplines of critical geopolitics at Bastille school of International Affairs, 2003, Calling 911:
geopolitics, security and America's new war, Geopolitics, https://mailattachment.googleusercontent.com/attachment/u/0/?ui=2&ik=08eb2519a2&view=att&th=13fe866d86230fb7&attid=0.3&disp=inline&realattid
=f_hj7ca03i2&safe=1&zw&saduie=AG9B_P_o6p833FbULPC-txstLILJ&sadet=1374073763994&sads=LrkN0zMampkXH8suPShGzhtR76M)
Geopolitics is about how ‘the world is actively “spatialized”, divided up,¶ labeled, sorted out into a hierarchy of
places of greater or lesser¶ ‘importance’ by political geographers, other academics and political ¶ leaders. This process
provides the geographical framing within which¶ political elites and mass publics act in the world in pursuit of their own ¶ identities and
interests.’2¶ It is both knowledge and power, a mode of making¶ sense of the world that facilitates action, asserts identity and justifies both. ¶
The dominant themes in modern geopolitics are the view of the world as a¶ single entity, but a politically divided
whole, its presentation in terms of¶ places ranked in terms of their similarities to Euro-American notions of¶
development and democratic accomplishment, and a focus on the nation¶ state as the primary political entity that
matters in struggles for primacy. ¶ But geopolitics is also about the performance of political acts, the specifications of friends and
enemies, the designations of spaces as theirs¶ and ours, the distinctions between hostile and friendly places and peoples.¶
These are
practices of political reasoning that can be challenged and ¶ critiqued by an investigation of their implicit
geographical formulations and¶ how these structure the arguments.3¶ Geopolitics is also about the¶ construction of
popular identities, of masculinities, citizenships and¶ quotidian cultural practices which both specify cultural norms
and provide¶ the political terms that can be interpellated in political discourse in a crisis .4¶ Challenging the
geographical specifications of power is part of what critical ¶ geopolitics writers have been doing for some time.5¶ In
line with this concern¶ in recent scholarship this essay starts with a series of comments and¶ reflections on the dominant themes in the
saturation coverage of the events¶ of 911 in the American mass media in September 2001. It does so because¶ precisely which geopolitical
tropes are invoked in political performance in¶ a crisis matter; these are part of the arguments for specific forms of action.6 ¶ The title of this
essay, ‘calling 911’, points to the importance of these¶ political debates; how an event is ‘called’, to use the sporting phrase, is an ¶ important
part of geopolitical practice.
LINK – DEMOCRACY
WE NEED TO EVALUATE OUR RHETORIC WHEN WE TALK ABOUT GEOPOLITICAL BORDERS
SLATER ‘1 (final version completed May 31st, 2001, David Slater, Department of Geography, Loughborough University, Loughborough, Other
domains of democratic theory: space, power,¶ and the politics of democratization, https://mailattachment.googleusercontent.com/attachment/u/0/?ui=2&ik=08eb2519a2&view=att&th=13fe866d86230fb7&attid=0.4&disp=inline&realattid
=f_hj7ca0533&safe=1&zw&saduie=AG9B_P_o6p833FbULPC-txstLILJ&sadet=1374075638586&sads=q_8sr26Nys984ehpUXm9rrgLr3I)
Moving now to our third question, we need to ask how thinking about space makes a ¶ difference to our
perspective on democracy and democratization. In a view that¶ encapsulates the posited predominance of the
global, it is not infrequently suggested ¶ that the scale upon which so much contemporary socioeconomic, cultural,
and political¶ activity unfolds is so formidable as to make territorial democracy appear increasingly ¶ impotent
(McGrew, 1997). Given the existence of a growth in the importance of transversal social movements and networks
(Keck and Sikkink, 1998) and the overall trend¶ towards a deterritorialization of national spaces, how do we draw
the connections¶ between territoriality and democracy? How do we approach and contextualize the¶ politics of territorial
democracy, and to what extent is it justifiable to follow McGrew's¶ suggestion, in particular when the context is provided by non-Western
spaces, as is the¶ case in this discussion?¶
For Connolly (1993), in his discussion of democracy and territoriality, the
sovereign, territorial state is an insufficient generator of democratic life, and the attempt to ¶ treat it as if it were
sufficient exerts a disciplinary pressure on the citizenry, limiting¶ democratic possibility. Similarly, it is argued that a
democratic ethos is about balancing¶ the desirability of governance through democratic means, with a corollary
politics of¶ democratic disruption by which any specific pattern of previous accommodations¶ might be opened up
for renegotiation. There is then in this view a sharply drawn ¶ tension between two senses of democracy. The
construction of rule inevitably involves¶ the fixing of identities, and the practice of questioning those fixities is
basically unruly¶ or destabilizing. Neither the one nor the other can triumph and the tension between¶ them cannot be permanently
resolved.
In an important sense this tension mirrors¶ the previously mentioned interrelation between democracy and
democratization,¶ and further connects to recent debates concerning consensus, exclusion, and ¶ democratic
politics.¶ On one side, we can locate a conformist vision which argues for limits on the spirit¶ of democracy. For example, earlier on in the
20th century, the Spanish philosopher¶ Ortega y Gasset (1957), in his text on the rebellion of the masses talked about the ¶ dangers of what he
called `hyperdemocracy', in which the mass acts directly and¶ outside of the law, imposing on society its own desires and aspirations by
material¶ pressure and violence. More recently, Crozier et al (1975, page 162), in their report on ¶ the governability of democracies, argued that
a ``pervasive spirit of democracy may¶ pose an intrinsic threat and undermine all forms of association, weakening the ¶ social bonds which hold
together family, enterprise and community.'' For these authors, the governability of a society at the national level depended upon the extent to
which it¶ was effectively governed at the subnational, regional, local, functional, and industrial ¶ levels.
Too much democracy would
erode the effectiveness of governability, and¶ seriously undermine the foundation of authority
LINK – DEMOCRACY (LATIN AMERICAN)
OUR USE OF THIS RHETORIC IS BRINGING BACK US IMPERIALISM AND DISCRIMINATION
SLATER ‘7 (David Slater, Department of Geography, Loughborough University, Loughborough, “Imperial Geopolitics and the promise of
democracy,” Development and Change 38.6)
In the wake of 9/11, with military intervention in Afghanistan in 2001 and¶ more centrally with the invasion of Iraq in 2003,
the resurgence
of US imperial¶ power has been placed firmly back on to the agenda.1¶ Not only has this raised¶ older questions
concerning theories of imperialism (see for example Harvey,¶ 2003), but also related issues connected to the
specificity of US imperialism¶ have begun to re-emerge. Some authors have emphasized the centralizing¶ power of
the United States (for one discussion, see Callinicos, 2003), whilst¶ Hardt and Negri (2004: 323) have argued that in
today’s world, ‘imperial¶ geopolitics has no center and no outside’.¶ In setting out the nature of US power, I intend
to highlight the importance¶ of the dissonant relations between imperial geopolitics and democracy. This¶
discussion will be preceded by a consideration of specific elements of US ¶ imperial power and the nature of its
geopolitical interventionism in Latin ¶ America. The focus on the relations between imperialism and democracy is¶
intended to uncover some of the contradictions of US power and some of the shifting complexities of democratic
politics.2¶ The style of argument is¶ suggestive rather than exhaustive and is intended to provoke new questions¶ and new lines of debate. I
begin by outlining certain aspects of the specificity¶ of the lone super-power in the context of US–Latin American relations,¶ which have been
crucial in the evolution and dynamic of US power (Grandin, ¶ 2006).
Whilst in the history of Western development,
commonalities across the Atlantic have been emphasized, it is necessary to take into account the discursive ¶
separation of the United States from Europe. An early example of such a separation is found in the Monroe
Doctrine of 1823 in which a new American¶ world is distinguished from an old European world and in which the
US’s¶ ‘southern brethren’ (the emerging states of Latin America) are called upon ¶ to distance themselves from the
political system of the European powers. A¶ similar sentiment was expressed by President Polk in 1845 when he noted¶ on
the eve of the US–Mexican war and the surfacing of notions of ‘Manifest¶ Destiny’, that ‘the American system of
government is entirely different from¶ that of Europe’, and that ‘the people of this continent alone have the right
to¶ decide their own destiny’ (quoted in Holden and Zolov, 2000: 23) . Woodrow¶ Wilson, writing at the onset of the twentieth
century, was equally emphatic¶ in his separation of the US from Europe, asserting that ‘no doubt class privilege has been forever discredited
because of our example’, and he went on,¶ ‘we have taught the world the principle of the general welfare as the object ¶ and end of
government, rather than the prosperity of any class or section of¶ the nation’ (Wilson, 1901: 289–90).
This intra-West demarcation has
sometimes been accompanied by an underscoring of the posited affinities between¶ the two Americas, so that , for
example, President
Kennedy, when launching¶ the Alliance for Progress in 1961, called for a common effort to ‘transform¶ the
American continent into a vast crucible of revolutionary ideas and efforts’, where the ‘American revolution’ will
guide the struggle of people¶ everywhere (McPherson, 2006: 152).
LINK – DRUG CARTELS
THEIR SCARE-MONGERING ABOUT DRUG CARTELS OBSCURES RACIST, GENDERED, AND NEOLIBERAL VIOLENCE
– ONLY THE ALTERNATIVE
ALLOWS A PRODUCTIVE REFORMULATION OF THE DANGER OF DRUG CARTELS IN
LINE WITH OUR OWN RESPONSIBILITY. JUST LIKE THE
THE FIRE OF
WAR ON TERROR, THE WAR ON DRUGS IS FUEL FOR
AMERICAN IMPERIALISM
CORVA ‘8 (Dominic, Department of Geography, University of Washington, “Neoliberal globalization and the war on drugs: Transnationalizing
illiberal governance in the Americas” Political Geography 27, pp. 190-191)
The discourse of crime collapses all sorts of choices made in the context of limited possibilities into one global
category: a behavior whose practices present a danger to the social body. The normative social body is
constructed at multiple sites and scales, from the individual to the global, as a rational-choice making, law-abiding
liberal subject of democracy and neoliberal capitalism. A central problem with this construction is that the
production of global narco-delinquency depoliticizes class, gender, racial, and neo-colonial modes of
domination by fetishizing illicit narcotics as, essentially, weapons of mass destruction endowed with the power to
turn human beings into security threats.
Illicit drug trafficking and chemical dependency do produce extensive violence in societies – especially within vulnerable
spaces and against marginalized subjects, by states and narco-entrepreneurs (Bourgois, 1997 and Waldorf, Reinarman, & Murphy, 1991).
The
war on drugs elides the extent to which such violence is produced by the deployment of repressive power to
regulate sets of practices that are more closely linked to survival strategies than to dangerous properties inherent
in drugs themselves (Laniel, 1999). Illiberal governance produced by such representations has arguably turned out
to be more harmful than many of the drugs themselves, but not so much for elite consumers, bankers, and
corrupt police forces without which illicit econ- omies could not operate. In societies characterized by increasing economic
inequality, justice is a commodity like any other e available to those who can afford to purchase their freedom or hide from the state.
The ‘‘penalization of poverty’’ (Wacquant, 2003) is significantly the effect of the multiscalar construction of narcodelinquency. From the vantage point of the liberal state, people are not incarcerated because they are poor or black or an ethnic minority.
They are incarcerated because they participate in an industry whose viability is guaranteed by its production as a delinquency. Poverty is
criminalized, de facto, but it would be more accurate to say that
narco-delinquency23 tends to produce excluded populations,
and the spaces they inhabit, as criminal. This is how Captain Steven Brown of the Seattle Police department, responding to charges of racial
disparity in narcotics policing, can say: ‘‘That’s nonsense .. We’re going where the crime is’’ (Francis, 2006). The Majors Certification process is
an example of this discourse on a global scale. On the ground, the war on drugs can be interpreted critically as a U.S.- sponsored, neocolonially mediated war against populations whose socioeconomic vulnerabil- ity is connected to the U.S.-sponsored, neo-colonial project of
uneven economic globalization.
The war on drugs and the war on terror are connected by a shared discourse that partitions identifies specific
global spaces that need to be governed in other ways. Both underwrite an imperialist geopolitics of coercive
enforcement rooted in liberal notions of spreading freedom and democracy (Slater, 2006: 1376). The war on drugs
replaced the containment of communism as the primary mission of hemispheric security at the end of the Cold
War (Isaacson, 2005), but since 9/11 the two have been increasingly used to reinforce each other. The terrain of these linkages has been discursively geopolitical: for instance, the post-9/11 anti-drug ads linking teen pot-smoking to terrorist funding networks. But
also
it has been politically empirical: the Colombian military is now being used to train U.S.-sponsored Afghan anti-
narcotics police units, as rural farmers in dire economic straits have replicated Andean campesino strategies in the
early 1980s by turning to poppy production.
LINK – GLOBALIZATION
BECAUSE OF POOR USE OF GEOPOLITICAL RHETORIC, OLD TENSIONS SURFACE
SLATER ‘4 (David Slater, 2004, Geopolitics and the post-colonial- rethinking North-South Relations, Department of Geography,
Loughborough University, Loughborough, http://translate-englishindonesia.com/download/International%20Relations/Geopolitics%20and%20Poscolonial.pdf)
Together with the post-1989 dissolution of the Second World, the accelerating tendencies of globalization and the
explosive surfacing of a¶ variety of acute social tensions and conflicts, there has also been a resurgence of interest
in the state of North–South relations. Already in the¶ early 1990s, it was suggested that the growing gap between
First and¶ Third Worlds was raising some of the most acute moral questions of the¶ modern world and becoming a
central issue of our times (see Arrighi¶ 1991 and Ho¨¶ sle 1992). This re-assertion of the significance of North–¶ South
relations captures one of the world’s geopolitical continuities. ¶ Thus, in a world frequently portrayed in terms of
flows, speed, turbulence and unpredictability, there is another narrative rooted in historical ¶ continuity – the
recurring stories of poverty, inequality and exclusion – a¶ ‘shock of the old’.¶ For example, global inequalities in
income in the twentieth century¶ have increased by more than anything previously experienced, illustrated ¶ by the
fact that the distance between the incomes of the richest and¶ poorest country was about 3 to 1 in 1820, 35 to 1
in 1950, 44 to 1 in¶ 1973, and 72 to 1 in 1992 (UNDP 2000: 6). Inequalities are also to be¶ symptomatically
encountered in the world of cyberspace, where access to the internet displays a familiar geographical distribution ,
with over 90 per¶ cent of all internet hosts being located in developed countries which ¶ account for only 16 per cent of the world’s population
(see Main 2001:¶ 86–7 and also World Bank 1999: 63).
LINK – GLOBALIZATION/TERRORISM
WE CAN’T UNDERSTAND TERRORISM DISTINCT FROM BROADER PROCESSES OF GLOBALIZATION – RETALIATION
TO A TERRORIST ATTACK ISN’T INEVITABLE, MERELY AN EXAMPLE OF OUR GROWING FEELINGS OF INSECURITY
TOWARD GLOBAL THREATS
DALBY ‘3 (Simon, Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, “Calling 911: geopolitics, security
and
America's new war” Geopolitics, 8:3, pp. 67-69)
Insecurity in the face of threat/disaster there was in abundance on 11 September, and it is here that the link
between invocations of war and practical policing meet; calling for help requires security personnel but 911
reaches emergency services rather than the military. In the short term dealing with the disaster required fire services and police,
hospitals and ambulances, searcher dogs and construction crews. Insecurity connects to risks and to disasters, threats are not here a matter of
traditional military action, the boundaries between civil defence, emergency preparedness and military action were blurred in a manner that
suggests that things have changed, at least in so far as the conventional distinctions between civil and military, war and disaster, risk and
security no longer operate in the circumstances of 11 September.
The geography had apparently changed too; the assumption that America itself was relatively immune to
terrorism, despite the earlier 1993 bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center, and the Oklahoma bombing
of 1995, was no longer valid. What could reach New York was apparently obviously now a ‘global’ threat. Ballistic missile defences
seemed absurdly inappropriate when boxcutters and martyrdom would do to inflict huge damage on America’s infrastructure and symbols;
and yet building such a system was subsequently accelerated by the war psychosis that gripped Washington.
Insecurity is now indelibly
tied to the horrifying images of burning and collapsing towers. As chaos in airports in many places, not least Canada where
numerous flights were diverted, subsided, ‘security’ for travelers became once again a matter of pressing importance. The survivalist stores and
gunshops in the United States sold gas masks, guns and all sorts of supplies to an anxious public unsure as to where the danger lay or who
the enemy was; insecurity was both a matter of state and a matter that was very personal as anthrax contaminated the American postal system
and killed apparently at random.
Florida once again featured in American politics, this time as a pilot training ground for the would-be hijackers. External dangers are in here
too; geography is no comfort from dangers from outside. But that has not stopped the impulse to reinscribe security in spatial tropes, to
assume that ‘homeland defence’, in the new language of American thinking, is a matter primarily of border controls.13 Clearly tropes of inside
and outside are in play here as foreign dangers are invoked to try to keep illegal acts at bay. But the point that some of the hijackers were
legally resident in the United States and that the weapons, training and skills needed to carry out the attacks were gained within the
boundaries of the United States stretched arguments about ‘keeping the bad guys out’ as the most appropriate mode of dealing with the
possibilities of further attacks.
‘Global’
threats have long been a concern in American security thinking. 14 Although quite what makes them global
as opposed to threats to specific facets of American life is frequently less than clear. Worries about rogue states
equipped with ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction were high on the second Bush administration’s
concerns; other threats had nonetheless been part of the policy landscape too. From concerns with the
proliferation of nuclear weapons through worries about chemical and biological weapons, not to mention drugs,
environmental degradation, demographic change and all manner of international crimes, the post-Cold War
security discussion had extended the discussion of American national security far beyond the traditional themes of
war and peace.15
All this can in part perhaps be explained by looking to the discussions of the geopolitics of risk society with its
complex borderless technological dangers and mobile protagonists. 16 Such formulations seemed an eerily apt and
unsettling summation of matters as the rescue workers struggled with the rubble in New York. The sheer
inventiveness of the planning of the September hijackings suggests that technological risks are now merging into
themes of political violence. The potential for sabotage and criminal acts to unleash technological disasters has
been demonstrated clearly; abstract discussions of terrorist acts on nuclear power stations or water supply systems
has been eclipsed by the use of mundane everyday technologies as brutally effective weapons. The tropes of
global terrorism link to the discussion of risk society in a number of ways, not least the way in which distant
developments have local consequences.
Viewed in terms of the geopolitics of risk society the consequences of political actions in distant places can be
presented as having come back to haunt America. Afghanistan and the support by the CIA and related agencies
for those fighting the Soviet Union are part of the story of the birth of ‘global’ terrorism. The presence of
American troops in the Gulf is part of the rationale given by bin Laden for attacks such as those of 11 September.
Blowback in the classic espionage sense of the term this probably wasn’t, but the interconnections between earlier
conflicts and current ones are inescapable. These violate the basic geopolitical cartography that these were the
kind of events that happened somewhere else, not on inviolate American soil. 17
But the geography of these attacks was not so new as widespread assumptions that something fundamentally new had happened suggested.
In so far as risk society calls into question the geopolitical cartography of borders prior episodes have also
violated American borders in analogous ways. In 1993 the World Trade Center had been attacked by the use of a truck bomb in
the basement. While there were casualties, the damage to the complex was relatively minor. The Oklahoma city bombing some years later had
suggested that large buildings in the United States were targets of terrorist attacks, although once it became clear that Timothy McVeigh was
an American, rather than a foreigner, the geographical script of America invulnerable once again became prominent.
The crucial
connection of McVeigh’s disillusionment with American power in the aftermath of his involvement in the Gulf War
suggests a connection here again with the geopolitics of the Middle East, but that theme has not been much
commented upon.18 McVeigh has been executed; that episode is closed.
LINK – INTERVENTIONISM
THE HIDDEN CARTOGRAPHIC PRACTICES OF THE STATE ARE USED AS THE JUSTIFICATION FOR OUR ROLE AS
INTERNATIONAL POLICE OFFICER, WHERE ISOLATED AND MAPPED ZONES OF CONFLICT BECOME POLITICAL
SPACE FOR INVASION
DALBY ‘5 (Simon, Prof. of Geography @ Carleton U. in Ottawa, “Political Space: Autonomy, Liberalism, and Empire,” Alternatives, Vol. 30, pgs.
433-435)
Starting from the assumptions of stability and the fixity of political spaces in a world where they are so novel
suggests great conceptual confusion, or at least considerable ethnocentrism and "presentism," in the so-called
social sciences. It forces reflection on the social role of such discourses as statements of political aspiration quite as much as analysis of
how things actually are.
Legitimation practices premised on an unreflective cartography of at least relatively
autonomous spaces offer an extension of the geopolitics of liberalism , of local autonomy as the mode of administration of a
political economy that exceeds those spaces repeatedly. Then again, might we social scientists not simply understand ourselves as Wilsonian
liberals dedicated to the triumph of modern affluence administered within autonomous territorial, albeit it not obviously "national" spaces?
Ironically the events of the last few years, and in particular the actions of the Bush administration since September 11, 2001, make all this
much easier to see.
covenant, at least
In a world of supposedly sovereign states with formal political equality , the conditions of the global
the US state under the Bush administration has no problem arrogating to itself the right to intervene
when and where it sees fit to preempt any threats to its preeminence . The nonintervention clauses of the UN Charter are
notably fraying, but still the return of the Bush administration to the United Nations, in the months after its invasion in March 2003, to ask for
help in pacifying Iraq suggests that even the prerogatives of empire do not allow that state to evade its political obligations to claim
legitimacy on the basis of more than brute force. In this sense,
there remains a global "political space," albeit one that seems
to have an impossible Newtonian cartography. The converse of this argument is that political struggles that oppose the
cavalier use of military force to ensure the flows of resources from the periphery to fuel, literally in this case, the
economies of the metropole, are also implicated in a politics that transcends claims to sovereignty. Precisely the
invocation of the rights to nonintervention on the part of activists in many places rely on a nonterritorial strategies of publicity, internet "sites,"
and coordinated protests in many places, to invoke the "rights" to territorial nonintervention. This is not to disparage the undoubted uses of
territorial strategies in defence of many things; but it is to make clear that this is what is going on. It is also
to insist on the utility of
raising explicitly the questions of who precisely writes cosmopolitan texts with many of the assumptions of the
"right" of mobility, travel, and transit anywhere on the planet.66 In addition, the argument that the current occupation of Iraq
is about a war for the US way of life, and gas-guzzling SUVs in particular, makes it clear that this
violence is a form of "shadow
globalization" cast over the peripheries of the world economy. ^^ Progressive politics cannot now be about the
extension of these fossil-fueled urban liberties. It can be about solidarities, which do not have an implicit spatiality to them,
although these sometimes also use spa- tial metaphors to express "horizontal" linkages. Above all else,
this engagement with the
political-space debate reinforces the argument that the cartographies of modern administrative spaces are no
longer an adequate basis on which to build either social sciences or some form of progressive politics. To think
differently is to try to think about politics as connection, as link, as network. As Walker has repeatedly pointed out, this is
immensely difficult to do given the constraints of the spatial languages that we have inherited from modern
thinkers.^^
LINK – LIBERAL IMPERIALISM
LIBERAL IMPERIALISM ATTEMPTS TO EXTEND THE HALF-LIFE OF AMERICAN EMPIRE THROUGH AGGRESSIVE
INTERVENTIONS THAT ONLY RECREATE INSTABILITY AND CAUSE ANTI-AMERICAN BACKLASH
CAIRO ‘4 (Heriberto, Facultad de Ciencias Polı ́ticas y Sociologı ́a, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, “The Field of Mars: heterotopias of
territory and war” Political Geography 23, pp. 1027-1028)
This idea is more fully developed by both Ignatieff (2001, 2003) and Cooper (2002). Ignatieff’s ‘‘humanitarian
imperialism’’ or Cooper’s ‘‘liberal imperialism’’ points to the same problem; the chronic instability of post-colonial
states. However, rather than pointing to the disruption and social fracture inherited from colonialism, the authors make a diagnosis: ‘‘The age
of empire ought to have been succeeded by an age of independent, equal and self-governing nation states. In reality it has been succeeded
by an age of ethnic cleansing and state failure’’ (Ignatieff, 2003: 123).
They also provide a solution, ‘‘a new kind of imperialism,
one acceptable to a world of human rights and cosmopolitan values’’ (Cooper, 2002: 17),
which would be able to create order
through ‘‘nation-building.’’ According to Ignatieff, ‘‘[l]ocal elites must be ‘empowered’ to take over as soon as the American imperial
forces have restored order and the European humanitarians have rebuilt the roads, schools and houses’’ (Ignatieff, 2003: 22). However,
they
provide no explanation as to how a permanent and stable ‘‘order’’ might be achieved. The current impasse in
Bosnia or Kosovo, the growing difficulties in Afghanistan or the popular uprising and overthrow of Haitian president Jean
Bertrand Aristide at the beginning of the year 2004
allow some skepticism. Furthermore, nation-building in such states is perceived as
the mission and responsibility of Western powers.
Here again, the concept of heterotopia both illustrates and problematises this point. According to Foucault’s sixth principle of heterotopia, one
can distinguish between heterotopias of illusion and heterotopias of compensation; in fact heterotopias function between these two extreme
poles.
Heterotopias of illusion create spaces of illusion and ‘‘on the contrary, [the] role [of heterotopias of
compensation] is to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is
messy, ill constructed, and jumbled.’’ It is exemplified by the case of colonies, like those that the Puritan English founded in North
America or the Jesuits in Latin America, which structured the ‘‘general organization of terrestrial space’’ (Foucault, 1986: 27).
The new
protectorates or occupied territories of Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan or Iraq work in similar ways to these
heterotopias. On the one hand, intervening powers attempt to avoid replicating the ills that riddle European and
North American countries in these new ‘‘colonies’’ (racist murders in the streets, ethnic cleansing in upper class neighborhoods,
corruption in the administration .),
whilst on the other hand, they must also constitute a sort of mirror into which the
neighbor states can look. As the British Prime Minister puts it:
The terrorists know that if Iraq and Afghanistan survive their assault, come through their travails, seize the opportunity the future offers, then
those countries will stand not just as nations liberated from oppression, but as a lesson to humankind everywhere and a profound antidote to
the poison of religious extremism.16
LINK – MAPS
THE GEOPOLITICAL MAPPING OF THE AFFIRMATIVE RELIES ON A FORM OF ENFRAMING THAT REDUCES THE
ONTOLOGICAL COMPLEXITY OF THE WORLD TO A COMPREHENSIBLE WORLD-PICTURE
PICKLES ‘4 (A History of Spaces, Cartographic Reason, Mapping, and the Geocoded World, 2004, pgs. 6-8.
John Pickles is an economic
geographer trained in political economy and development studies, cultural and social theory, and continental philosophy. He holds BA and
MA degrees from Oxford University and Ph.D. degrees form the University of Natal and the Pennsylvania State University)
As Olsson indicated by adding 'the eye' to his story,
modern science rests on what Derek Gregory (1994: 15) has called the
'problematic of visualization'. From Descartes to Goethe, the experience of the healthy corporal eye was a direct and true reflection of
reality (Crary 1995: 97-8). But, as Jonathon Crary (1995: 9) has suggested,
such truth effects 'were, in fact, based on a radical
abstraction', an epistemology of 'plain vision' (and the practices, instruments, and institutions that were associated with it) that
naturalized sight as a source of clear unmediated knowledge (Krygier 1997: 30; see also Edney 1997). For geographers, the
ways in which the map became 'a theory which geographers ... accepted' (Ullman 1953: 57) is the story of the radical
abstraction of the practices of the finger and the eye, the history of the technologies and institutions of mapmaking and map use, and ways of seeing and thinking; a story we need to revisit (Figure 1.2).
In a broader sense, this is what the philosopher Martin Heidegger (1982) meant when he described the emergence of
the 'age of the world-as-picture'. In using this phrase, Heidegger pointed to both the representational and objectifying
nature of modern sciences and the global scope of the modern project; a rendering of all aspects of the world as
picture, as 'standing reserve' or as resource for appropriation and use. Rendering the diversity of global alterities
as objects, even commodities, for display and exhibition the global (European) project of modernity 'orders' and
domesticates the unknown and the invisible, making them known and visible, making them available for use
(Mitchell 1991). And in this sense Derek
Gregory (1994) asks us to think about geographical practices such as mapping in
terms of a broader epistemology and a politics that treat the 'world-as-exhibition'. The world-as-picture and asexhibition was, in part, produced by technologies and practices of representation, including cycles of mapping, each
of which left their residual impress on contemporary ways of seeing: the geometrical experiments of perspective;
the exploratory portolan charts and the deep cultural fascination with boundaries (coastlines) that gave rise to
them; the parcelling of land in the regional and national cadastres; the national topographic mapping
programmes; the emergence of the globe as a cultural icon; and the more recent remote remapping of all aspects
of social life (Figure 1.3).
Such a geopolitics of representation has very much been about property and the ownership and trading of
commodities. As Walter Benjamin (1999) has shown in his writings on social and urban life in nineteenth-century Paris, representation
entered fully into the commodity relation by its production of an economy of display in which the spaces of the
city were restructured as spaces of visual display and mass consumption. The visual, informational and the exotic were
commodified for bourgeois consumption through the ur-forms of a new visual and global imaginary: the national exhibition (Crystal Palace),
the panorama, the plate-glass window, and the shopping arcade in which the world of people, places and goods were gathered for display
and consumption (see Buck-Morss 1989).2
LINK – OIL SCARCITY
THE 1AC’S NOTION THAT OIL SCARCITY IS DIVORCED FROM IMPERIALIST ECONOMICS IS WRONG – SUPPLIERS
AND ECONOMIC AGENTS CREATE OIL SCARCITY IN ORDER TO DRIVE UP PRICES AND ENSURE CONTINUED
DEPENDENCE ON OIL.
THEIR OIL = WAR ARGUMENTS GET IT BACKWARDS: MORE OIL MAKES WAR MORE
LIKELY
HUBER ’11 (Matthew T., Department of Geography, The Maxwell School of Syracuse University, “Enforcing Scarcity: Oil, Violence, and the
Making of the Market” Annals of the Association of American Geographers)
Since at least the 1920s petroleum geologists have warned of the looming exhaustion of U.S. petroleum supplies
(Yergin 1991; Olien and Olien 2000).
The most recent manifestation of this narrative is those pro- claiming the imminence
of “peak oil” when global production reaches its peak and goes into decline. Given the fixed nature of petroleum deposits, it is
clear that petroleum production will indeed peak at some point, but predicting the peak is much more difficult
than peak oil proponents claim (Smil 2008). As some critics point out,1 peak oilers tend to downplay capital’s dynamic capacities for
innovation. From a Marxist perspective (e.g., Labban 2010), peak oil theorists fail to theorize the wider social relations through which both the
“supply” and “demand” of oil are structured.
Supply is certainly not the result of petroleum producers producing at the
maximum capacity that geology allows,2 and demand is not always increasing and actually declines in moments of
crisis.3 Moreover, they approach oil as simply a geological “thing” and not a commodity produced for exchange and
profit (Caffentzis 2005, 170–76). Quite apart from geological supply, if producers do not ex- pect the money (M) invested in producing oil (C)
will produce a profit (M′) then they will not supply the market.4 Indeed, private and national oil capitals are still investing substantial money in
oil exploration and development with the expectation that the oil age will continue for years to come (Bridge and Wood 2005).5
Although petroleum is indeed a finite resource, and its limitation certainly should not be ignored, Labban (2008, 2)
commented that history reveals “the problem of oil is not its scarcity but its abundance.” Retort (2005, 59) argued that
the “constant menace” threatening the oil industry is not scarcity but “falling prices . . . surplus and glut.” If oil
scarcity is not actively managed, prices will not be high enough for profitable accumulation. The oil market is
beset by a struggle to find a balance between abundance and scarcity that both allows high enough prices for
profitable accumulation and low enough prices to maintain levels of demand.
What is striking is how difficult it is to achieve the scarcity necessary for market stability and a profitable oil market. From the Texas Railroad
Commission to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC),
elaborate institutional mechanisms have been
constructed with the purpose of limiting oil production. After high prices during the 1970s, non-OPEC production combined with OPEC’s own failure to control each others’ production levels to cause price collapses
throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In 1986, Vice President George H. W. Bush was forced to visit Saudi Arabia to plead with them to
limit production on be- half of U.S. independent oil producers (Yergin 1991).
A glutted market during the financial crisis of 2008
forced petroleum sellers to store 80 million barrels of oil in thirty-five idling supertankers (Krauss 2009).
When scarcity is presumed as a fact of nature and not a remarkable social achievement, it is posited as the
natural cause of violence and war. Over the last decade, many have argued that oil scarcity is ushering in a new era of
“resource wars” and geopolitical conflict (Heinberg 2003; Kunstler 2005; Klare 2008). Yet, given that the world was
“drowning in oil” as re- cently as a decade ago (“Drowning in oil” 1999), it is questionable whether or not oil scarcity
should be so quickly assumed as the cause of recent war and conflict. Nitzan and Bichler (2002) provocatively argued that
the abundance of oil (low prices) is the best predictor of violence in the Middle East. Le Billon and Cervantes (2009, 842)
examine how
violence triggers a “scarcity . . . narrative . . . constructed for and through prices.” The appearance of
scarcity and violence yields high prices and, thus, high returns for particular interests. Thus, although common sense
expects violence to emerge out of oil scarcity, few have explored the possibility that violence could be a
response to oil abun- dance and falling prices. In what follows, I examine perhaps the most spectacular case of the use of
violence to produce scarcity—the declaration of martial law in the oil fields of east Texas and Oklahoma.6 First, I provide some background on
the legal geography of U.S. petroleum production and its endemic problems of overproduction.
LINK – OIL SUPPLIES
OIL IS NOT A SIMPLE COMMODITY: SCARCITY, CONFLICT, AND COOPERATION OVER OIL ARE ALL STRUCTURED
BY DISCURSIVE AND PERFORMATIVE CONSTRUCTIONS OF AVAILABILITY, VIOLENCE, AND BY HIERARCHICAL
RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN COUNTRIES
– DON’T TRUST THEIR OVERLY SIMPLISTIC SCENARIO-BUILDING
ZIMMERER ’11 (Karl S., Department of Geography and Environmental and Earth Systems Institute (EESI), The Pennsylvania State University,
“New Geographies of Energy: Introduction to the Special Issue” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 101:4, pp. 706- 707)
Critical geopolitics is increasingly central to understanding the changing landscapes of hydrocarbons in particular.
In the first article of this section, Bouzarovski and Bassin elucidate how
nationalist discourses of Russia as a “global energy
superpower” are politically important and implicated in identity formation in that country. Substantial geographic
work discusses the role of modern-day imperialism, particularly that of the United States, which is aimed at oil
extraction across extensive regions ranging from the Caspian Basin and the Middle East to the Western Amazon and northern South
America (Venezuela) and to West Africa (Nigeria; Watts 2001, 2008a, 2008b; Harvey 2003).
Clashes and conflicts are commonplace in
the mounting convergence of energy investment, markets, governance, and infrastructure. Much work also
highlights the many examples of capital accumulation through dispossession; “resource curse” impacts and the
failure of oil-based development; and oil-fueled conflicts, referred to as petro-violence, that include the
emergence of new forms of armed insurgencies in such countries as Nigeria (Watts 2001, 2008a, 2008b; Harvey 2003;
Bradshaw 2010; Orta-Martínez and Finer 2010).
Energy security and energy scarcity are shown to be contested concepts
that are consequences of both geophysical factors and broadly social ones defined within national contexts and
international relations (Goldthau and Witte 2010; Sovacool and Brown 2010). Huber probes the concept of energy scarcity,
showing the roles of many nonmarket influences, ranging from the broad political econ- omy to violence in and
near regions of hydrocarbon deposits. This volatile mix of factors is energizing ge- ographic analysis and
contributes to the actual pricing and availability of oil, including the construct of “peak oil” (Huber 2009, this issue; see
also Kaufmann and Cleveland 2001; Cleveland and Kaufmann 2003; Bridge 2010; Bridge and Wood 2010; Harvey 2010; Labban 2010; Kaufmann
2011). At the same time,
the changing landscapes of gas extraction have gained heightened interest and , in some circles,
are now being seen as integral energy sources in the context of scenarios leading to potential low-carbon energy
transitions (e.g., the Natural Gas and Sustainable Energy Initiative of the Worldwatch Institute in Washington, DC; see Flavin and Kitasei
2010). This interest is intensifying despite concerns over growing shale gas extraction, liquefied natural gas facilities (B. Harrison 2008), and
social conflict and environmental degradation issues in extractive sites (e.g., Bolivia and Ecuador; Bridge 2004; Perreault and Valdivia 2010).
LINK – WAR IMPACTS
WAR IS NOT DEFINED BY RATIONAL ACTORS BUT INSTEAD BY A CONSTELLATION OF RHETORICAL AND
ONTOLOGICAL DECISIONS ABOUT THE WORLD’S STRUCTURE
– THE AFFIRMATIVE’S INVOCATION OF GLOBAL
VIOLENCE IS NOT BENIGN AND LOCKS US INTO FURTHER CONFLICT
CAIRO ‘4 (Heriberto, Facultad de Ciencias Polı ́ticas y Sociologı ́a, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, “The Field of Mars: heterotopias of
territory and war” Political Geography 23, pp. 1011-1012)
Our way of ‘‘visualizing global space’’ (Agnew, 2003: 15) is central to the understanding of war. The way we order
things in planetary space is constitutive of what we see and what we conceal : ‘‘proletarian internationalism’’, ‘‘national
libera- tion’’, ‘‘territorial integrity’’ are all dimensions of geopolitical discourses that inform the actions of combatants who try to make them
intelligible to a wider audience.
War, in this sense, is not a matter of rational interest, ‘‘[p]eople go to war because of how
they see, perceive, picture, imagine, and speak of others: that is, how they construct the difference of others as well
as the sameness of themselves through representations’’ (Der Derian, 2002a).
Understanding war is fundamental to appreciate the relevance of geo-political considerations in its analysis. And in order to define the current
social understanding of war, we should take into account
the regularity of its enunciation, which nowadays leads to us to
regard war as a kind of violent group behavior organized on a large scale. Strictly speaking, war is considered a
conflict, but more specifically it is usually defined as: (1) a conflict developed using weapons which surpass a determined threshold of
violence; (2) a violence of a political kind, because politics is a fundamental part of the action; (3) a violence related to a state, because one of
the opponents in wars in the modern world system is usually a state, or at least desires to become a state;3 (4) a territorial behavior, not only
because it is conducted in a particular space, but because the contenders also aim to control the opponent’s territory in full or in part.
This
definition applies to the so-called ‘‘civil’’ war as well as to the inter-state war, but, obviously, excludes some
different kinds of violent behavior: robberies or passionate murders clearly do not fit, just as what are referred to as ‘‘terrorism’’ and
‘‘insurgency’’ do not qualify as war (although the aftermath of September 11 and the American ‘‘War on terrorism’’ launched by the Bush
admini- stration suggests an important shift).
In fact, the dominant discourse of war is basically geopolitical and state-
centered, and, as Shapiro states, ‘‘the map of global warfare changes dramatically when one departs from the
language of sovereignty’’ (Shapiro, 1999: 61). For instance, struggles involving indigenous peoples constitute more than
half of the wars that Bernard Nietschmann includes in ‘‘the Third World War,’’ which is ‘‘hidden from view because
the fighting is against peoples and countries that are often not even on the map’’ (quoted in Shapiro, 1999: 61).
It is also important to stress the historical, constructional and ‘‘constellational’’ character of war and its legitimation.
Firstly, war is a human behavior, which has obviously occurred since early times; that is why we cannot consider it exclusive to our age.4 As
Harvey points out, ‘‘capitalism did not invent war any more than it invented writing, knowledge, science or art. Not all wars, even in the
contemporary era, can be truly regarded as capitalist wars, and war will not necessarily disappear with the demise of capitalism’’ (Harvey, 1985:
162–163). In other words, war has happened in other economic and political contexts. Different kinds of power relations also variously lead to
war, and usually it is not the outcome of a single process. War is not caused by any one thing. Its origins are in what we could call a ‘‘bellical
constellation’’5 of factors and processes, which make each war a unique, but not a singular, event. Notwithstanding,
we are able to find
constants in the issues of peace and war, and social scientists should consider that we can hardly discuss the
‘‘mode of warfare’’ (Kaldor, 1981, 1982) – that is, the way in which societies organize for war – without making assumptions
about the world order from which these wars arise (Shaw and Creighton, 1987: 7). And, lastly, in such a world order it is
possible to distinguish different elements of political, economic, symbolic and legal character, that produce and
are produced by ‘‘a constantly evolving sequence of spatialities’’ (Soja, 1985: 94).
LINK – THREAT SCENARIOS
THE DISCOURSE OF GLOBAL THREATS RISES FROM A DANGEROUS CREATION OF CARTROGAPHIC DIFFERENCES
BETWEEN THE GLOBAL AND LOCAL, ONLY CONTESTING THE MAPPING OF CONTEMPORARY POLITICS CAN
SOLVE THESE THREATS
DALBY ‘5 (Simon, Prof. of Geography @ Carleton U. in Ottawa, “Political Space: Autonomy, Liberalism, and Empire,” Alternatives, Vol. 30, pgs.
431-432)
The case for interventions, and the support of factions within the warring states in which interventions are sometimes sought, is also tied into
diasporic politics. Political lobbies in Washington are legion, the Israeli lobby only being the most famous. The immigration into the
metropoles that is part of most imperial arrangements brings with it people in search of security and citizenship within the empire, but people
with interests and political ambitions in support of numerous causes "back home."^^
The search for inclusion on the part of
immigrants is one aspect of their assertion of their political space; the other is the articulation of identities that have their
origins far from the metropolitan centers, be they London, New York, or the multicultural melange of Toronto.
opportunity
How authenticity and
is articulated within these "communities" of immigrants both suggests once again the difficulties of
understanding politics in the Cartesian coordinates of absolute space and the importance of understanding
geographical claims to home and community as part of the articulation of any political "space. "54 The matter of immigrants and
their struggles to establish lives and livelihoods in the urban centers of the global economy is not a new one; but
the scale of this infiux
to the metropoles and the demands that their consumption has on distant resources, be it mines in other continents,
deep-sea fisheries depletion, or the damage to the ozone layer, suggests that assumptions of politics on the basis of
autonomous spaces or the ethics of locality is simply unpersuasive as the basis for contemporary political legitimacy. Just
as the boundaries are fixed, the problems supposedly constrained within states "flow" across these now stable borders.
The rise of a
discourse of "global" threats, of terrorists, of immigrants, of drugs, of crime, of diseases, of financial instabilities, is an
ironic refiection of the failure of the construction of "stable" borders as a way of literally "fixing" political problems in
a carceral landscape where every thing and every person has "their" place. On the other hand, linking local and global
has long been a slogan of environmentalists who point repeatedly to the distant consequences of "local"
consumption. The assumptions of local dangers and distant threats in neo-Malthusian terms frequently sneaks
back into this geographically imprecise formulation, leading to a reformulation of threats in spatial terms, but the
potential of challenging these themes by being explicit about the historical connections across borders is
considerable.^^ This points to the simple fact that the neoliberal consumer in contemporary carbon-fueled mode
is unsustainable; politics has yet to take this theme very seriously, although green movements, ethical investment
schemes, and the politics of corporate boycotts are well ahead of the politicians on all this.56 Whether this
amounts to the emergence a global civil society, or Empire, or a new phenomenon of globality depends very
much on how you like your social theory.
LINK – THREATS (NUKE WAR/TERRORISM)
THEIR IMPACT SCENARIOS ARE PART OF A BROADER ATTEMPT TO CONTROL THE BALANCE OF TERROR: RECONSTRUCTING POLITICAL COMMUNITIES BY MOBILIZING LIFE AROUND THE PERMANENT THREAT OF OUR
DESTRUCTION.
THIS DESTROYS VALUE TO LIFE AND PROVES THEIR WAR SCENARIOS ARE FLAWED.
CAIRO ‘4 (Heriberto, Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociología, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, “The Field of Mars: heterotopias of
territory and war” Political Geography 23, p. 1033)
The postmodern Field of Mars emerges with the transition from one social mode of warfare, the Industrialized
Total Warfare, to another, ‘Spectator-Sport’ Warfare. Of course, some nation-states continue to wage war
according to past models (Russia, China, India .), but most Western powers, and particularly the US, are fully engaged
in the development of this new type of warfare. The menace of nuclear war and the threat of Doomsday were
key to achieving a ‘‘balance of terror’’, implying ‘‘a generalized resignation to that what exists, to the co-existing
powers of the specialists that organize the fate’’ (Internationale Situationniste, 1962: 3). The menace of terrorist attacks
are nowadays the key to the re-construction of the political community, and the emergence of a new normalcy
and the spatial structures with which it is associated. ‘Spectator-Sport’ Warfare implies, of course, the participation of
people, but in a very different way to modern and traditional modes of warfare. No longer are battalions of
citizen-soldiers required to die in the trenches, now citizen-spectators celebrate the accuracy and power of their
‘‘team’’ in these allegedly ‘‘casualty-free wars.’’
‘‘Victory’’ in war shall unite the American (and Western?) political community, already purified by ‘‘Patriot’’ Acts, in a
virtual Field of Mars in perfect communion with their leaders. Therefore, virtuous wars do not just deal with distant and maybe
confusing (for the right citizens) lands inhabited by bare life forms. As Der Derian (2002b) implies,
they may also provide the ultimate
means by which the US intends to re-secure its borders and maintain its hegemony.
LINK – NATION STATE/HEGEMONY
WAR IS ASSOCIATED WITH TERRITORIES AND BOUNDARIES
CAIRO ‘4
(Heriberto Cairo has a PhD in Political Sciences, 2004, The Field of Mars: heterotopias of territory and war, https://mail-
attachment.googleusercontent.com/attachment/u/0/?ui=2&ik=08eb2519a2&view=att&th=13fe866d86230fb7&attid=0.1&disp=inline&realattid
=f_hj7c9iyx0&safe=1&zw&saduie=AG9B_P_o6p833FbULPC-txstLILJ&sadet=1374071950042&sads=9pheKvP8IIMdu6c2NLvxJyLewf4&sadssc=1)
Organized war has for a long time been associated with the rise of the state. In¶ fact, the particular territories of
each state are born from specific wars, and politics¶ is, in a large sense, the continuation of war by other means.
Organized violence¶ cannot be reduced, not even in the last instance, to the logic of production, as ¶
representations of Self and the diff erence of the Other are crucial in the decision to go ¶ to war. Territory is not
only the stage for war or a prize for the winner, it is¶ constitutive of a kind of politics of nation-state.¶ Territory was a
crucial dimension of the discourse of sovereignty associated with¶ an inter-state system that had its origins in Westphalia. It implied the
substitution of¶ the loyalty to the king for loyalty to territory. Moreover, in the modern nationstate¶ there was a reconstitution of the sacred,
which involved its transfer from monarch to territory, thus making it logical for citizens of the state to give their lives to defend¶ the
‘‘fatherland’s sacred territory.’’
War becomes meaningful within particular¶ symbolic orders, and certain political
discourses render it legible. Pro patria mori was¶ the most noble gesture for citizens of the nation-state, although when wars took¶
place far from their own sacred territory the state had to deploy additional narratives ¶ (civilizing, christianizing, democratizing .) in order to
overcome popular opposition to war, particularly in democratic societies.¶ From
the end of the second-world war, there was a
second displacement in the¶ relations between territory and war. Territorial integrity became un-negotiable,¶ whilst
the other ‘‘real’’ contents of sovereignty declined in significance . In metaphorical terms, territory was substituted by the ‘‘map’’.
Territorial sovereignty thus¶ remains a central value in international law, one which legitimizes the state’s decision ¶
to go to war in order to defend its territory, or galvanizes people who want to form ¶ a separate state to go to war
to achieve their goal. However, the development of the¶ territorial integrity norm, particularly after the second-world war, has in fact¶
legitimated wars that ignore the sovereignty of other states. And this is now a precondition for the appearance of postmodern wars.¶
Particularly interesting in this respect are the post-Cold War wars, which have¶ gradually modelled a new type of
conflict: virtuous wars. The label ‘virtuous war’ ¶ characterizes the US response to the September 11 attacks
because, as Badiou states,¶ ‘‘in the formal representation it makes of itself, the American imperial power ¶ privileges
the form of war as an attestationdthe only onedof its existence. . The¶ United States has become a hegemonic
power in and through war’’ (Badiou, 2002:¶ par. 25). But these virtuous wars also constitute spectacles for internal
and external¶ consumers (as well as acting as reaffi rmations of internal and inter-state domination)¶ rather than
just serving as concrete punishment for particular enemies :¶ Truly speaking, the adversary matters little and may be entirely
removed from¶ the initial crime. The pure capacity to destroy this or that will do the job, even ¶ if at the end what is left is a few thousand
miserable devils or a phantomatic¶ ‘government’. Provided, in sum, that the appearance of victory is overwhelming, any war is convenient
(Badiou, 2002, par. 28).
LINK – TERRITORY/NATION-STATE
THE AFFIRMATIVE’S BENIGN INVOCATION OF THE NATION-STATE IS THE CRUCIAL INTERNAL-LINK TO A WORLD
WHERE VIOLENCE IS THINKABLE
– MAPS AND BORDERS ACT AS MARKERS OF IDENTITY THAT CAN BE
DEPLOYED FOR MALICIOUS ENDS
CAIRO ‘4 (Heriberto, Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociología, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, “The Field of Mars: heterotopias of
territory and war” Political Geography 23, 1018-1020)
The great Argentinean writer, Jorge Luis
Borges, conceived a story of the cartographers of an imaginary Empire who drew ‘‘a
Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point’’. It was so
detailed that it ended up covering the territory it depicted completely, so that the real territory underneath the
map became obscured. Borges narrates the story through an imaginary quote of a non-existent Spanish traveler, Suarez Miranda, which
itself has been extensively quoted and has even been used as the basis for a faked story of the difficulties of drawing a 1/1 scale map.12
Baudrillard (1994: 1, translation from 1981) has used this story to illustrate his theory of simulation, when a new ‘‘reality’’ supplants the real
thing. The ‘‘Map of the Empire’’, that the non-existent Suarez Miranda mentions in the story, is a simulation, not a fake, a mere copy of
something real. It is another reality that has a power and a meaning by itself.
Determined modes of discourse construct symbolic orders in which war and peace are significant ; in other words,
certain political discourses make war and peace understandable (Giddens, 1987). These symbolic orders include
territorial ideologies and strategies, two viewpoints on the same reality (Korinman & Ronai, 1978), which are expressed and shaped by
particular discursive modes.
Territorial doctrines associated with the emergence and development of the nation- state are currently amongst
the most powerful instruments for the ‘‘rationalization’’ of war. This paper does not deal with nationalism; suffice it to recall
that nationalism aims to grant a group identity whilst erasing other sorts of identity amongst people who live in a perfectly delimited space,
through the proposition of a common past and a common future too. That group of people constitutes a nation, which, according to Benedict
Anderson, ‘‘is an imagined political community’’ (Anderson, 1991: 6), an abstract being which becomes concrete through the territory to which
it links its past and future, and which is therefore central to national identity.
Consequently,
‘‘for those who control the state or aim to do so, territorial claims really involve their will (will of
power) to give its ‘historic’ territory back to the nation, which forms the basis of the symbolical representation
that it gives to itself’’ (Korinman, 1990: v). Thus, territorial wars are the meaningful and visceral manifestation of national
identity that help to define, consolidate and secure ‘‘us’’ from the threat of ‘‘them’’, at the same time securing habitable
space for an imagined community. The opposite process also occurs, that is, although war causes interruptions in the ordinary flows between
spatial structures, it has a decisive influence in the formation of group identity by magnifying internal similarities and exacerbating the
insecurity of a group who stand in opposition to a world outside their own perceived borders. In short, these are two sides of the same coin.
One of the most interesting aspects of nationalism as far as war and peace are concerned, however, is why people are ready to die or kill
defending or conquering territories in the name of nations. One explanation is that symbolic orders enable ‘‘peoples’’ to become attached to
‘‘national’’ territories, particularly when the sacred is reconstructed within the nation-state. As Raffestin states, ‘‘[t]he relations of power are
framed in codes in which circulates not only information of a juridical nature, but also a metainformation of a sacred character’’ (Raffestin,
1985: 106). Tuan (1978) has already analyzed sacred places, noting that the modern nation-state harbors all the characteristics of sacred place:
it is clearly bounded and separated, there is a readiness to sacrifice life to defend it and it is a power space. But Raffestin, using Eliade’s
conceptions of the sacred and the profane, points out that the political territory of the modern state is a ‘‘consecrated space,’’ the only real
one for a statesman:
The modern state has ‘sacralized’ the territory and the mechanism of sacralization (in previous times the king’s
consecration was its metonymical expression)
has been kept through the resort to ‘ideological cosmologies,’ which act as
‘the hierophany that reveals an absolute fixed point, a Centre.’ While in previous times, religious men oriented themselves in
reference to this ‘Centre of the World,’ political men nowadays orient themselves in reference to ‘their centre of the world,’ their territory, in
some way, their sanctuary. Even though the statesmen do not explicitly resort to the reference of the sacred, nonetheless they act as if
territory was defined in reference to the sacred (Raffestin, 1985: 104).
The sacralization of the modern state did not occur suddenly. It involved a lengthy transition from medieval
political thought, which Kantorowicz (1957) analyzes through late medieval mystic fiction about ‘‘the king’s two bodies,’’ written mainly by
English jurists of the Tudor period. The king would have a ‘‘body natural’’ and a ‘‘body politic’’:
His Body natural is a Body mortal, subject to all Infirmities that come by Nature or Accident, to the Imbecility of Infancy or Old Age . But his
Body politic is a Body that cannot be seen or handled, consisting of Policy and Government, and constituted for the Direction of the People,
and the Management of the public weal . and the Members thereof are his Subjects, and he and his Subjects together compose the
Corporation . and he is incorporated with them (Reports of Edmund Plowden, quoted by Kantorowicz, 1957: 7–13).
Both bodies are conjoined, forming one unit, ‘‘each being fully contained in the other,’’ but separation is possible: the death of the body
naturaldreferred to as the ‘‘Demise of the king’’dsees the body politic ‘‘. transferred and conveyed . to another Body natural.’’ This allowed the
Parliament to succeed ‘‘in trying ‘Charles Stuart, being admitted King of England and therein trusted with a limited power,’ for high treason,
and finally in executing solely the king’s body natural without affecting seriously or doing irreparable harm to the King’s body politicdin
contradistinction with the events in France, in 1793’’ (Kantorowicz, 1957: 23).
What is of relevance to the argument in this paper is that the ‘‘corporation’’ of subjects and king, ‘‘the regnum or patria was not ‘personified,’
it was ‘bodified.’ Mainly because the state could be conceived of as a [king’s] ‘body,’ could there be constructed the analogy with the mystical
body of the Church’’ (Kantorowicz, 1957: 271). In the thirteenth century, in the wake of the crusades and particularly in France and England,
the concept of patria, which in the Christian usage was ‘‘the Kingdom of Heaven, the celestial city of Jerusalem,’’ began to gain currency in
reference to the new Christian kingdoms. This leads Kantorowicz to consider that the new territorial concept of patria is a ‘‘re-secularized
offshoot of the Christian tradition,’’ thus explaining the willingness to die for the fatherland: ‘‘To defend and protect the soil of France,
therefore, would have semireligious connotations comparable to the defense and protection of the sacred soil of the Holy Land itself’’
(Kantorowicz, 1957: 238).
Foucault also usefully asserts the idea of the persistence of the sacred in modern space. In order to describe heterotopias,
he states that ‘‘[n]ow, despite all the techniques for appropriating space, contemporary space is perhaps still not entirely desanctified. And
perhaps our life is still governed by a certain number of oppositions that remain inviolable, that our institutions and practices have not yet
dared to break down.’’ These
leisure vs. work space –
oppositions – e.g., private vs. public space, family vs. social space, cultural vs. natural space,
are usually regarded as natural facts of life, but are ‘‘still nurtured by the hidden presence of
the sacred’’ (Foucault, 1986: 23). In a bounded space, like the territory of modern states, one of the most important ‘‘sacred’’ oppositions is
that between inside and outside (Walker, 1993). While the projection of power relations from ‘‘inside’’ to ‘‘outside’’ intend to be mechanisms to
achieve peace and organization, the projection of those from ‘‘outside’’ to ‘‘inside’’ is deemed to lead to disorganization thus destroying
sacred territory.
Territory becomes the central element of power behavior, resulting in ideologies that espouse territorial
dominance, projected both inwards and outwards. But it is also necessary to approach the differences between
inside and outside from other points of view; it is important to see that some may aim at peacemaking and
organization of the space beyond their boundaries; that is, they may attempt to expand their territory, justifying
their behavior through ideological discourses such as the ‘‘living space’’ of German Geopolitik or also to develop
global strategies of dominance based on similar conceptions, such as the American ‘‘manifest destiny.’’
Territory also plays a fundamental role in identity politics, and particularly in the violence resulting from it. Krishna shows how ‘‘[t]he effort to
produce Sri Lanka from a space called Ceylon concisely showcases the physical and epistemic violence that accompanies post-colonial nation
building.’’ Civil war between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority results, basically, from a desire of the Sinhalese to regard ‘‘the new
nation as a space that properly belongs to itself’’ (Krishna, 1999: 56–57). Territory, thus, is a marker of identity, as are language, religion,
ethnicity or social customs, but territory in postmodern times and particularly in postcolonial states is a very powerful tool, ‘‘without analogue,’’
in the construction of identity. Mehta gives us a plausible explanation:
Clearly in the post-nationalist era,
states feel the imperative to claim to be able to preserve and defend a distinctive way
of life. But simultaneously, they are aware that such claims to distinctiveness are themselves weakened in this era.
Ethnicity, religion, and language, the very attributes that nations in the stage of their formation so often tout, cease to be the markers of
distinctiveness.
States cannot protect or police the borders of their languages, and still less the religious
commitments and interethnic links that their citizens increasingly cultivate . But they can try to protect their
territorial borders. In an odd sort of way territory becomes the last resort of political autonomy and sovereignty
(Mehta, 1999: 151).
Returning to Borges, his ‘‘Map of Empire’’ shows, according to Grison (1998), the ‘‘illusion of space.’’ It is a hyper-realist writing, ‘‘empty of any
interpretation of the real.’’ Therefore it is a non-sense.
The map, stresses Grison, is ‘‘intrinsically useless, inconsistent and
worthless’’ because it has the dimensions of the real space but it lacks any use for the real people. Maps are not
interchangeable with territory, and territory is only one attribute of sovereignty that loses its original meaning if
the other elements of the equation are transformed. Nonetheless the territory (or, more precisely, the map, the
form of the territory) of the states has become synonymous with sovereignty; it has even displaced the latter in
the legitimating discourse of war, as this paper proceeds to demonstrate.
LINK – TRANSBOUNDARY WATER AGREEMENTS
THE POLITICAL CONTEXT OF HYDRO-HEGEMONY SHOWS THAT THEY MAINTAIN SIMPLY AS POWER GAMES
ZEITOUN AND MIRUMACHI, 2008 (Mark and Naho, Grantham Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, London School of
Economics and Political Science, Department of Geography, King’s College London, London, UK, August 7, 2008, Transboundary Water
Interaction I: reconsidering conflict and cooperation, https://mailattachment.googleusercontent.com/attachment/u/0/?ui=2&ik=08eb2519a2&view=att&th=13ff346bd6d016ea&attid=0.4&disp=inline&realattid
=f_hjacvrgn3&safe=1&zw&saduie=AG9B_P_o6p833FbULPC-txstLILJ&sadet=1374244183295&sads=HmBrOeglT9ReQbpkbiRqN6UNaYk)
This final section intends to demonstrate that
transboundary water interaction is besought¶ by the interests, power games,
illusions and distrust that accompany all political processes. The various faces of interaction we have thus far seen
are captured and linked¶ together—in a first approximation—to the location on the TWINS tool and their
potential¶ driving forces.¶ As a political process, transboundary water interaction may serve strategic purposes, for¶
example to attract external funding, or to share the burden of clean-up costs (Bernauer¶ 2002). Strategy may draw
on power asymmetries, of course, particularly if one of the more¶ neutral or less pretty faces of cooperation are in place.
Thorough evaluation of transboundary water interaction should thus consider the effects of power asymmetry. As
this¶ point is out of the scope of this paper, it suffices to mention here that power asymmetry is ¶ usually present,
and is sometimes extreme. Along with saliency, power asymmetry serves¶ not only to influence the outcome of a
conflict but to affect the actual interactions¶ established. There are reasons explaining, for example, why the clauses of treaties
are not¶ enforceable or may be skewed, and the institutions derived from them lie dormant as ¶ ‘paper tigers’ (Bernauer 2002).¶
If the
political context determines the process of interaction, it is worth capturing the ¶ political nature of the various
faces of cooperation and intensities that we have discussed¶ thus far. These may usefully be categorised into the value-based
categories: negative,¶ neutral and positive, as catalogued in Table 1 and described following.
LINK – WATER BASINS
HYDRO-HEGEMONY COMPETITION IS HIGH AND LEADS TO CONFLICT
ZEITOUN AND WARNER, 06 (Mark Zeitoun and Jeroen Warner, King’s College, London, University of London and School of Social
Science and Public Policy,¶ Department of Geography, The Strand, London and Disaster Studies Group, University of Wageningen,
Hollandseweg, Hydro-hegemony – a framework for analysis of trans-boundary¶ water conflicts, 2006, https://mailattachment.googleusercontent.com/attachment/u/0/?ui=2&ik=08eb2519a2&view=att&th=13ff346bd6d016ea&attid=0.3&disp=inline&realattid
=f_hjacvrgg2&safe=1&zw&saduie=AG9B_P_o6p833FbULPC txstLILJ&sadet=1374177865708&sads=39b4RjBh228Mxoi7OsZfPBFhEXc)
It is useful to view riparian interactions over transboundary water resources as lying somewhere¶ between the
extremes of genuine cooperation and cut-throat competition. For the purpose of this analysis,¶ it is accepted that each
riparian will act to maximize their objectives with the resource, however these may¶ be perceived. Where water is
physically scarce, the interaction could be expected to be a competition¶ fought for control over a greater volume
of flows. Where there is an abundance of water, one riparian may¶ seek control over the flows for hydropower
while another may seek control for flood-management¶ purposes. In certain cases, control of the resource may be
relinquished to achieve politically-afiliated nonwater goals.
Regardless of the motives for control of the resource, both the
strongest and the weaker¶ riparians will find themselves engaged in any of three situations. Control can be either
(a) shared (meaning¶ some form of cooperation exists), (b) consolidated in the stronger riparian’s favour (where
cooperation is¶ minimal, and the competition is shut-down) or (c) contested (when the competition is at its
fiercest). As we see, the form of interaction can be characterised with a distinct nature (i.e. cooperative or competitive), and¶ a particular
form of hydro-hegemony. This situation is represented in Figure 2.
LINK – WATER “COOPERATION”
STRONGER NATIONS WILL USE THEIR RELATIVE ECONOMIC AND MILITARY POWER TO SHAPE WATER
AGREEMENTS FOR IMPERIAL ENDS
ZEITOUN AND WARNER, 06 (Mark Zeitoun and Jeroen Warner, King’s College, London, University of London and School of Social
Science and Public Policy,¶ Department of Geography, The Strand, London and Disaster Studies Group, University of Wageningen,
Hollandseweg, Hydro-hegemony – a framework for analysis of trans-boundary¶ water conflicts, 2006, https://mailattachment.googleusercontent.com/attachment/u/0/?ui=2&ik=08eb2519a2&view=att&th=13ff346bd6d016ea&attid=0.3&disp=inline&realattid
=f_hjacvrgg2&safe=1&zw&saduie=AG9B_P_o6p833FbULPC txstLILJ&sadet=1374177865708&sads=39b4RjBh228Mxoi7OsZfPBFhEXc)
“It
is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle.” (Mandela, 1994).¶ The purpose of this final section is to reveal the
combined effect of the interplay between power, water¶ and intensities of conflict. It will be shown that the nature
of interaction over water resources and form of ¶ hydro-hegemony established is determined by the hydrohegemon. The hydro-hegemon seeking to¶ establish a positive/leadership hydro-hegemonic configuration will
follow any or all of the three water¶ resource control strategies to ensure cooperative interactions under its
guidance. Similarily, a hydrohegemon intent on maintaining sole control over the resources will stifle competition
through a number¶ of means, resulting in a dominative form of hydro-hegemony and a lingering (and usually “silent”)¶
conflict. The hydro-hegemon determines the nature of the interaction, and to what extent the benefits¶ derived
from the flows will also extend to the weaker co-riparians.¶ Along the shared resources of the Nile, Tigris,
Euphrates and Jordan Rivers, each of the regional¶ hegemons (Egypt, Turkey and Israel) have put their power in all
three dimensions to use to determine¶ varying intensities of dominative forms of hydro-hegemony. This holds true
even for those states in¶ geographically weaker downstream or mid-stream positions, like Egypt and Israel.
LINK – WATER “COOPERATION”
NOT ALL COOPERATION FROM HYDRO-HEGEMONY IS PRODUCTIVE- AND MOST OTHER FORMS ARE
DESTRUCTIVE; AS SEEN IN THE ISRAELI-
PALESTINIAN WATER CONFLICT
ZEITOUN AND MIRUMACHI, 2008 (Mark and Naho, Grantham Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, London School of
Economics and Political Science, Department of Geography, King’s College London, London, UK, August 7, 2008, Transboundary Water
Interaction I: reconsidering conflict and cooperation, https://mailattachment.googleusercontent.com/attachment/u/0/?ui=2&ik=08eb2519a2&view=att&th=13ff346bd6d016ea&attid=0.4&disp=inline&realattid
=f_hjacvrgn3&safe=1&zw&saduie=AG9B_P_o6p833FbULPC-txstLILJ&sadet=1374244183295&sads=HmBrOeglT9ReQbpkbiRqN6UNaYk)
Analysis of transboundary environmental regimes runs the risk of being off-mark if the¶ complexity of cooperation
is not explicitly considered in detail. By focusing on the existence¶ of data-sharing between some Indian and
Bangladeshi institutions instead of on the very¶ active political nuances of inter-state relations related to the water
conflict on the Ganges¶ River, for example, one might well be convinced that cooperation is occurring. Indeed, on¶
hearing the passionate plea for greater bi-lateral or multi-lateral cooperation over water data¶ and projects made
by a Bangladeshi representative at a recent water round-table—to temper¶ the tragic consequences of drought
and flood cycles—the Indian representative’s response¶ was ‘but, we are cooperating’ (SIWI 2006). While the
veracity of the statement is not in¶ question, the foundational issues that underpin the water conflict (which
cannot in any case¶ rationally exclude upstream Nepal) remain ignored. The value of cooperation over the¶ selected issues
should be understood within the political context of riparian interactions.¶
The cases highlighted as examples of cooperation in
the 2006 UN World Water¶ Development Report serve to demonstrate the limitations with approaches that do
not take¶ into account the political conditions in which it occurs . Table 11.2 of the report highlights¶ the key and recent
examples of ‘conflicts and cooperation’ from South America to Central¶ Asia. Referring to the Friends of the Earth—Middle East’s (FOEME)
Good Water¶ Neighbours project, which managed to bring together Jordanian, Palestinian and Israeli¶ mayors of Jordan River riparian villages
to advocate on the river’s behalf, the report states¶ that ‘A variety of cooperative programmes have been set up in Jordan, Palestine and
Israel¶ to promote the exchange of information and ideas between the different communities in the¶ region. These programmes have also
furthered the campaign to protect the Jordan River,¶ which brings stakeholders from the entire region together to work on sustaining the flow
of¶ this important river’ (UN 2006, p. 380).¶
The campaign for protection of the Jordan River through unprecedented
transboundary¶ cooperation merits the attention given, and one certainly hopes that cooperation would¶ extend
to the higher political echelons. The report makes no mention elsewhere, however, of¶ the intractable conflict on
the river, which also involves upstream Lebanon and Syria. When¶ taken out of the context, the report’s single reference to the
Jordan River dispute leaves the¶ reader with the impression that relations between the states over water issues are decent, or at¶ least
improving.
Conclusions of a similar nature are reached in Feitelson’s (2006) liberal¶ analysis of the political economy
of the Israeli–Palestinian water conflict, and Sosland’s¶ (2007) liberal international relations analysis of Jordan–Israel transboundary
water relations.
LINK – WATER SECURITY
WATER AND HYDRO-HEGEMONY ARE A SUBJECT OF INTERNATIONAL SECURITY, BUT IT IS AN ESPECIALLY
IMPORTANT ISSUE TO THE
US
WEGERICH 08 (Kai Wegerich, 2008, Irrigation and water Engneering Group, Wageningen University Netherlands, Hydro-Hegemony in the
Amu Darya Basin, http://waterwiki.net/images/0/0d/Wegerich_2008_Hydro-hegemony_Amu_Darya_Basin.pdf)
While the concept of ‘water security’ often refers to ¶ the impact of too little (scarcity, degradation, stress) ¶ and too much water (hazards), in
the context of the ¶ US led War on Terror, ‘water
security’ has become an ¶ important issue of US national security to
ensure water protection and safety against deliberate and largescale poisoning by terrorists. ¶ The US
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ¶ established a “Water Security” Division that pursues a ¶ somewhat
different policy agenda:¶ Improving the security of our nation’s drinking water ¶ and wastewater infrastructures has
become a top priority since the events of 9/11. Significant actions are underway to assess and reduce vulnerabilities to potential
terrorist attacks; to plan for and practice response to ¶ emergencies and incidents; and to develop new security ¶ technologies to detect and
monitor contaminants and ¶ prevent security breaches.
¶
Water security has also become a key concern of the ¶ US
Departments for Homeland Security and Defence ¶ as well as for the US intelligence community. But the ¶ Report
of the National Intelligence Council’s 2020¶ Project, Mapping the Global Future, did not specifically address water
security threats for US national security, as they have plenty of water resources in the ¶ northern part of the
country.¶ Besides the specific case of the narrow conceptualization of water security and its link with US national
defence and homeland or internal security, in ¶ many other countries achieving and maintaining water ¶ security
has become a major national prerogative that ¶ requires the utmost efforts, especially in democratic ¶ societies, to
satisfy the basic human needs of citizens ¶ for drinking water and food (‘value of use’). For some ¶ countries,
especially in the Middle East, the goal of ¶ achieving water and food security has been solved ¶ with imports of
‘virtual water’ in terms of cereals and ¶ meat products. Satisfying food needs at affordable ¶ prizes for all societal
groups has become a political ¶ object to avoid bread or food riots, and thus to maintain domestic stability and
internal security.
TURNS CASE – CONFLICT
HYDRO-HEGEMONY COMPETITION LEADS DIRECTLY TO CONFLICT
ZEITOUN AND WARNER, 06 (Mark Zeitoun and Jeroen Warner, King’s College, London, University of London and School of Social
Science and Public Policy,¶ Department of Geography, The Strand, London and Disaster Studies Group, University of Wageningen,
Hollandseweg, Hydro-hegemony – a framework for analysis of trans-boundary¶ water conflicts, 2006, https://mailattachment.googleusercontent.com/attachment/u/0/?ui=2&ik=08eb2519a2&view=att&th=13ff346bd6d016ea&attid=0.3&disp=inline&realattid
=f_hjacvrgg2&safe=1&zw&saduie=AG9B_P_o6p833FbULPC txstLILJ&sadet=1374177865708&sads=39b4RjBh228Mxoi7OsZfPBFhEXc)
Military force.
Military force is
rarely
used in water conflicts
,
and usually then only as a last resort¶
(Wolf, 2004).
It is nonetheless extremely effective
in the implementation of a resource capture strategy. ¶ The bombing of a dam, political or security apparatus has
very visible, immediate and undeniable effects ¶ on the competition, as evidenced by the outcome of the violence
between Syria and Israel in the 1950s¶ and 1960s7¶ .¶ Covert action. A competitor (or protector, in the case of the Iran-contra
affair)
may engage in¶ undercover operations aimed at weakening the political, military or hydraulic apparatus of its ¶
competitor, or make a pact with those who will. Consider Egypt’s motives behind its support for the ¶ Eritrean
Liberation Front and Somali irredentism (Dinar, 1999; Takele, 2004) and Syria’s support (until¶ 1998) for the Kurdish Workers’ Party
(PKK), in relation to the GAP project (see MacQuarrie, 2004). ¶
Coercion-pressure. This may be the most commonly used tool
used to achieve any of the three water¶ resource control strategies. Threats (military action, economic sanctions or
political isolation) are readily deployed by one state against the other to ensure, for example, that the latter drops
its claims over the¶ resource, or at least stops creating a (potentially compromising) row. As a politically “invisible”
tactic, it¶ can also regularly be deployed by the stronger party, which can downplay the effects of the coercion
and¶ de-politicize issues – a situation endured by the weaker party. Coercive resources available include trade¶ embargoes,
diplomatic isolation, threat of military action, espionage and propaganda. Waterbury ¶ describes the effect of some
of these measures employed by Egypt against Ethiopia
IMPACTS
ROOT CAUSE
THE VIOLENT CARTOGRAPHIC IMAGINARY LIES AT THE FAULT LINE OF MULTIPLE MODALITIES OF VIOLENCE,
THIS IS THE ROOT CAUSE OF THEIR IMPACTS
– THEIR DESIRE FOR COMPLETENESS MAKES ENEMY CREATION AN
INEVITABILITY
SHAPIRO ‘97 (Michael J., Department of Political Science, University of Hawai’I, Violent Cartographies: Mapping Cultures of War, pp. 149-51)
The complicity of the social sciences, psychology, and psychiatry in the idea that there is a natural and normal
cohesive American character type served ultimately to help depoliticize issues of racism, sexism, class repression,
and other forms of antagonism with a discourse on deviance and irrationality. The repression of difference at the
level of institutional politics was therefore reinforced with a conceptual repression. Nevertheless, the forces of
fragmentation persist, and those that are particularly threatening to representational practices of selfhood and
nationhood as coherent and undivided are, among other things, "peripheral sexualities" (hence the recent furor over gays in
the military, a conflict at the level of models of individuality)
and various social antagonisms (hence the recent struggle over
entitlements). Adding a dimension to Herman Melville's insights about the masks of history, Slavoj Zizek has argued, within a Lacanian frame,
that the drive for coherent identity at either individual or collective identity levels is necessarily always blocked.
As this drive to
overcome incompleteness is played out at the collective level, the imposed story of coherence is a mask that
covers a void. The fact of social antagonism is displaced by a myth of undividedness. And rather than facing the
disjuncture between fact and aspiration, the dissatisfaction is turned outward, becoming an "enjoyment" in the
form of a disparaging model of enemy-others, dangerous character types, and outlaw nations. As Zizek notes, it is
not an external enemy that prevents one from achieving an identity with oneself; that coherence is always already
impossible. But the nonacceptance of that impossibility produces fantasy in the form of "an imaginary scenario
the function of which is to provide support filling out the subject's constitutive void." 50 When this kind of fantasy
is elaborated at the level of the social, it serves as the counterpart to antagonism. It is an imagination of a unified
and coherent society that supposedly came into being by leaving a disordered condition of struggle behind. This
mythologizing of origin, which constructs the society as a naturally bounded and consensual community, is a
political story that those seeking legitimacy for a national order seek to perpetuate. But the disorder continues to
haunt the order. The mythic disorder of the state of nature, supposedly supplanted by consensual association as society comes into
being, continues to haunt the polity. It is displaced outside the frontiers and attributed to the Other.51 In short,
the anarchic state of
nature is attributed to relations between states. This displacement amounts to an active amnesia, a forgetting
of the violence that both founds and maintains the domestic order; it amounts to a denial of the disorder within
the order. This tendency to deny domestic disorder in general and to overcome more specifically the disorder and
antagonisms in post-Vietnam War America—stresses between generations, between the military and civilian order, between the
telling of imperialist tales and postcolonial ones—has
been reflected in the media representation of post-Gulf War America.
The triumphalists after the Gulf War have been attempting to write out of U.S. history the post-Vietnam agonism in which tensions within the
order were acknowledged. They seek to banish a politics of intepretation and selfappraisal that was part of both official and popular culture
during the post-Vietnam period. This is especially evident in the orchestration of Norman Schwarzkopf's career as a media personality.
WAR
AND, BORDERS ARE NOT JUST A PART OF WAR, BUT PRECONDITIONS FOR WAR. THIS MAKES THE K TRY OR
DIE FOR THE DISAD IMPACTS.
NEOCLEOUS ‘3 (Mark, Prof. @ Brunel U., “Off the Map : On Violence and Cartography,” European Journal of Social Theory, pgs. 410-412)
The state could thus see in a particular domain, including the persons within it, its own property.
This domain became thought of as ‘territory’, a word which comes into its own in the same period in which ‘state’ comes to the fore.
Territory has been defined as ‘a portion of geographical space that coincides with the spatial extent of a government’s
jurisdiction . . . the physical container and support of the body politic organized under a governmental structure’ .
As such, it is often presented as
the ‘link between space and politics’ (Gottman, 1975: 29). Similarly, one of the preconditions
underlying the authority and unity of the state since its inception has been that the supreme authority within each
independent regnum should be recognized as having no rivals within its own territories as a law-making power and an object of
allegiance. And
the word ‘frontier’ (frontière) originally referred to the façade of a building or the front line of the army, but in the 16th
century came to mean the boundaries or borders of a particular space and
has been associated with state borders ever since
(Febvre, 1973: 208–18). Thus in the modern state system the overlapping frontier is as anathema as the idea of multiple sovereign bodies
within a territory.
The edict of Pope Alexander VI in 1492 which gave impetus to the idea of a spatially divided earth by
drawing lines delineating certain parts of the globe and specifying which part ‘belonged’ to which European power was
extended and formalized in the 17th century with the Peace of Westphalia (1648), strengthened in the 18th century with the
emphasis on territorial (‘national’) unity in the French and American revolutions, and consolidated in the 20th century with an international
state system – a system which became so entrenched that the territorial state became the political form to be adopted by all nations. The
‘modernization’ of politics was thus as much a process of territorialization as it was a process of secularization and rationalization.
The form
of sovereign power that developed in Europe from the 16th century onward conceived space as bounded.
‘Sovereignty’, like ‘state’, implies ‘space’, and control of a territory becomes the foundation of sover- eignty (Lefebvre, 1974: 280; Foucault,
1980: 68–9; 1991: 87). This division of territorial sovereignty between states is most explicit at the point where the fields of power interface:
there must be no overlap and no uncertainty about the borders of the territory . As Michael Hardt and Toni Negri (2000:
167) put it, ‘modern sovereignty resides precisely on the limit’. This requires a new kind of political geography in which neither overlapping
margin nor multiple sovereignty is permitted. (It is precisely because of this exclusive territoriality that Embassies exist. Having created mutually
exclusive territories, states found that there was little space left for the conduct of diplomacy. The outcome was little islands of alien
sovereignty within the state’s territory: the Embassy [see Mattingly, 1955].) At the same time,
it requires the permanent policing of
territorial boundaries. States become and remain ‘sovereign’ not just in the sense that they are all-powerful within their territories,
but also
because they police the borders of a particular space and claim to ‘represent’ the citizens within those borders. The
consequence of this mutually constitutive relation between territory and state power is that the earth’s surface has been inscribed in a
particular way – according to the territorial ambitions of the modern state – and space has come to assume absolute priority in the statist
political imaginary. Without this essential conjunction of space and politics, sovereignty would lose its meaning. As such, we might say that the
modern political imaginary is a territorial imaginary. That this is so is illustrated by the policy of ‘containment’ in which a political counter to
the Soviet Union was thought to be necessary for territorial reasons, and the broader 20th-century terminological distinction between East and
West as friend and foe, with Cuba somehow belonging to the East and Japan co-opted for the West (Buck-Morss, 2000: 22–5). But there is
more to territory than just space. The notion of ‘territory’ is derived from a complex of terms: from terra (of earth, and thus a domain) and
territo-rium, referring to a place from which people are warned off, but is also has links with terre-re, meaning to frighten. And the notion of
region derives from the Latin regere (to rule) with its connotations of military power.
Territory is land occupied and maintained
through terror; a region is space ruled through force. The secret of territoriality is thus violence: the force necessary for
the production of space and the terror crucial to the creation of boundaries. It is not just that
implies
sovereignty implies space, then, but that ‘it
a space against which violence, whether latent or overt, is directed – a space established and constituted by
violence’ (Lefebvre, 1974: 280). As macrosociologists have pointed out time and again, it is the use of physical force in controlling a territory
that is the key to the state, for without it any claim to the territory would mean nothing. Put more simply: ‘ borders
are drawn with
blood’ (General Mladić, cited in Campbell, 1998: 45). A founding violence, and continuous creation by violent means, are
the hallmarks of the state. Part of the construction of the state’s territory took the form of defining the legitimate
use of violence – this is the key to Weber’s famous definition of the state as involving a monopoly over the means of violence.
WAR/TERROR
A POLICY MAKING ROOTED IN THESE VIOLENT CARTOGRAPHIC IMAGINARIES
CAN
ONLY MANIFEST IN
VIOLENT POLICIES
BURKE ‘7 (Anthony, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at UNSW, Sydney,
“Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and
Reason”, Theory and Event, 10.2, Muse)
My argument here, whilst normatively sympathetic to Kant’s moral demand for the eventual abolition of war, militates against excessive
optimism.86 Even as I am arguing that
war is not an enduring historical or anthropological feature, or a neutral and
rational instrument of policy – that it is rather the product of hegemonic forms of knowledge about political
action and community -- my analysis does suggest some sobering conclusions about its power as an idea and formation. Neither the
progressive flow of history nor the pacific tendencies of an international society of republican states will save us.
The violent ontologies I
have described here in fact dominate the conceptual and policy frameworks of modern republican states and have
come, against everything Kant hoped for, to stand in for progress, modernity and reason. Indeed what Heidegger argues, I think
with some credibility, is that
the enframing world view has come to stand in for being itself. Enframing , argues Heidegger,
‘does not simply endanger man in his relationship to himself and to everything that is...it drives out every other
possibility of revealing...the rule of Enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to
enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth .’87 What I take from
Heidegger’s argument -- one that I have sought to extend by analysing the militaristic power of modern ontologies of political existence and
security -- is a view that
the challenge is posed not merely by a few varieties of weapon, government, technology or
policy, but by an overarching system of thinking and understanding that lays claim to our entire space of truth
and existence. Many of the most destructive features of contemporary modernity – militarism, repression, coercive
diplomacy, covert intervention, geopolitics, economic exploitation and ecological destruction – derive not merely
from particular choices by policymakers based on their particular interests, but from calculative, ‘empirical’
discourses of scientific and political truth rooted in powerful enlightenment images of being. Confined within
such an epistemological and cultural universe, policymakers’ choices become necessities, their actions become
inevitabilities, and humans suffer and die. Viewed in this light, ‘rationality’ is the name we give the chain of reasoning
which builds one structure of truth on another until a course of action, however violent or dangerous, becomes
preordained through that reasoning’s very operation and existence. It creates both discursive constraints -- available
choices may simply not be seen as credible or legitimate --
and material constraints that derive from the mutually reinforcing
cascade of discourses and events which then preordain militarism and violence as necessary policy responses ,
however ineffective, dysfunctional or chaotic. The force of my own and Heidegger’s analysis does, admittedly, tend
towards a deterministic fatalism. On my part this is quite deliberate; it is important to allow this possible conclusion
to weigh on us. Large sections of modern societies – especially parts of the media, political leaderships and national security
institutions –
are utterly trapped within the Clausewitzian paradigm, within the instrumental utilitarianism of
‘enframing’ and the stark ontology of the friend and enemy. They are certainly tremendously aggressive and energetic in
continually stating and reinstating its force. But is there a way out? Is there no possibility of agency and choice? Is this not the key normative
problem I raised at the outset, of how the modern ontologies of war efface agency, causality and responsibility from decision making; the
responsibility that comes with having choices and making decisions, with exercising power? (In this I am much closer to Connolly than
Foucault, in Connolly’s insistence that, even in the face of the anonymous power of discourse to produce and limit subjects, selves remain
capable of agency and thus incur responsibilities.88) There seems no point in following Heidegger in seeking a more ‘primal truth’ of being -that is to reinstate ontology and obscure its worldly manifestations and consequences from critique. However we can, while refusing
Heidegger’s unworldly89 nostalgia, appreciate that he was searching for a way out of the modern system of calculation; that he was searching
for a ‘questioning’, ‘free relationship’ to technology that would not be immediately recaptured by the strategic, calculating vision of enframing.
Yet his path out is somewhat chimerical -- his faith in ‘art’ and the older Greek attitudes of ‘responsibility and indebtedness’ offer us valuable
clues to the kind of sensibility needed, but little more.
When we consider the problem of policy, the force of this analysis
suggests that choice and agency can be all too often limited; they can remain confined (sometimes quite wilfully)
within the overarching strategic and security paradigms. Or, more hopefully, policy choices could aim to bring into
being a more enduringly inclusive, cosmopolitan and peaceful logic of the political . But this cannot be done
without seizing alternatives from outside the space of enframing and utilitarian strategic thought, by being aware
of its presence and weight and activating a very different concept of existence, security and action .9 This
would seem to hinge upon ‘questioning’ as such -- on the questions we put to the real and our efforts to create and act into it.
Do security and strategic policies seek to exploit and direct humans as material , as energy, or do they seek to protect and
enlarge human dignity and autonomy?
Do they seek to impose by force an unjust status quo (as in Palestine), or to remove one
injustice only to replace it with others (the U.S. in Iraq or Afghanistan), or do so at an unacceptable human, economic, and environmental
price?
Do we see our actions within an instrumental, amoral framework (of ‘interests’) and a linear chain of causes and
effects (the idea of force), or do we see them as folding into a complex interplay of languages, norms, events and
consequences which are less predictable and controllable?91 And most fundamentally: Are we seeking to coerce or
persuade? Are less violent and more sustainable choices available? Will our actions perpetuate or help to end the
global rule of insecurity and violence? Will our thought?
IMPACT FRAMING
THIS IS NOT A DEBATE PURELY ABOUT BODY COUNTS – THE OVERT EVIDENCE OF WAR IGNORES THE
OBJECTIVE VIOLENCE WROUGHT BY BIOPOWER IN THE EVERYDAY CONTINUATION OF CONTEMPORARY
INSTITUTIONS.
WE MUST TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR WHICH IMPACTS WE VALUE AND UNEARTH THE VIOLENCE
BEHIND “PEACE”
Policante '10 (Amedeo, Doctoral Candidate in the Graduate Programme in Politics @ Goldsmiths College, U. of London, "War against
Biopower - Timely Reflections on an Historicist Foucault" Theory & Event, vol. 13.1, Project MUSE)
Finally, in order to break the binding gaze of biopower, it will be necessary to reinvent new ways of constituting the self, new life practices and
new processes of collective individuation.
We must move against the hegemonic liberal rhetoric that, in presenting a pacified
world of post-political biopolitics, promotes the oblivion of 'war'. The result of this rhetoric, in fact, is to force on our
eyes a complete blindness toward the systemic violence that is perpetuated everyday by the 'normal' working of
global institutions. We are made into 'fearful subjects': terrorized by outbursts of subjective violence that we can no
longer understand, incapable to see the complex interplay of force-relations that operate under the blood stained surface we came to call
'peace'. We are continuously tempted to call up the forces of the state to protect our belongings from the looming terrorist catastrophe, while
we no longer see that
struggle,
the fact that "things just go on is the catastrophe"54. Historicism, with its emphasis on the praxis of
brings forward a new radical subject, identified by Foucault in the figure of the barbarian: 'the one who does
not obey'—the one who does not obey an historical or dialectical destiny but rather affirms herself in the haphazard character of struggle.
The one who does not obey a Truth but rather discovers herself looking through the deceptions of domination and the lies of peace; who
strips down the mask of the "fearful savage" and re-emerges from the Leviathan's intestines holding in her gaze the contingent truth of her
body signed, bruised, written by power. The one who does not obey the Law, against whose pretence to universality deploys the weapon of
her scarred body, the contingency of her truth. And, especially, who does not obey the totalizing power of a biopolitical state obsessed with
life, to which she opposes an openness to the radical difference of living and the haphazard contingency of her own death. It is in this simple
act of exposure that the event reveals itself.
Every time we reclaim the streets with the scream of our bodies, every time we refuse
the pastoral gaze of a CCTV camera and the medical injunction of the state, every time we flee the sanitized walls of the polis
to encounter the unsaid in the streets of transgression, every time we compel what has never happened and make
appear what is unseen; every time, these essential acts of recognition, these moments of exceptional crisis, force us to glimpse,
amidst the flames, the secret texture of the sovereign's palace, the intensity of the struggle that keeps it erected
and that constantly escapes it. Biopolitics is nothing but the oblivion of war. It must always remove from sight the
irreducibility of struggle and negate the systemic violence that sustains its working:
the contingent deaths in the bloody battle to
erect and maintain contemporary institutions. While violence is projected on the background of an imagined peace, normality is
reduced to a harmonic stasis, continuously interrupted by sudden outbursts of inexplicable violence. Seen from the
perspective of biopower, those who die in time of peace can only be 'fatalities', victims of a random, unjustifiable,
and yet fully natural - in the sense that is not inscribed in any wider political framework - violence. We must affirm, instead, that
domination and resistance exist, always at once, but can only be seen from below: "only the fact of being on one side makes it
possible to interpret the truth, to denounce the illusions and errors that are being used to make you believe we are in a world in which order
and peace have been restored"55. It is this Foucault that talks through us, when we read out loud: "The bullet that pierced Alexis' heart was
not a random bullet, shot from a mad cop's gun to the body of an indocile kid. It was the usual working of the state, violently imposing
submission and order to the multitude of milieus and movements that continue to resist its arrangement"56.
COGNITIVE BIAS
CREATES A COGNITIVE BIAS THAT MAKES SYSTEMIC VIOLENCE INVISIBLE, DEVALUES THE LIFE OF THOSE NOT IN
DECISIONMAKING CIRCLES TO NOTHING.
WE HAVE TO CHANGE OUR PERSPECTIVE TO FOREFRONT VIOLENCE
RENDERED INVISIBLE
MIGNOLO ‘7 (Walter, argentinian semiotician and prof at Duke, “The De-Colonial Option and the Meaning of Identity in Politics” online)
The rhetoric of modernity (from the Christian mission since the sixteenth century, to the secular Civilizing mission,
to development and modernization after WWII) occluded—under its triumphant rhetoric of salvation and the
good life for all—the perpetuation of the logic of coloniality, that is, of massive appropriation of land (and today of natural resources),
massive exploitation of labor (from open slavery from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, to disguised slavery, up to the twenty first
century), and
the dispensability of human lives from the massive killing of people in the Inca and Aztec domains to the twenty
million plus people from Saint Petersburg to the Ukraine during WWII killed in the so called Eastern Front.4
Unfortunately, not all the
massive killings have been recorded with the same value and the same visibility. The unspoken criteria for the
value of human lives is an obvious sign (from a de-colonial interpretation) of the hidden imperial identity politics:
that is, the value of human lives to which the life of the enunciator belongs becomes the measuring stick to
evaluate other human lives who do not have the intellectual option and institutional power to tell the story and to
classify events according to a ranking of human lives; that is, according to a racist classification.5
CAPITALISM MOD
A WORLD OF NO BORDERS DESTROYS CAPITALISM, THE END OF GEOGRAPHICAL SEPARATION AND CONSUMER
DISTINCTIONS MAKES CONTINUED GROWTH IMPOSSIBLE
WHYTE ET AL. ‘6 (Jessica, PhD candidate in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Monash U., Australia, Carlos
Fernandez, Doctor in Sociology and works as a precarious researcher @ Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain, Meredith Gill, PhD candidate
in the Program in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society @ U. of Minnesota, Imre Szeman, Associate Professor of English and Cultural
Studies and an Adjunct Member of the Institute for American Studies @ Humboldt U. in Berlin, “Erasing the Line, or, the Politics of the Border”
ephemera 6(4), pgs. 469-470)
The interesting issue here is that both deterritorialization and information technologies would seem to require a borderless world to achieve
the best results.
Mass media and the Internet are supposed to reach the global village and connect everybody in a
network of networks. A new space is created. It is a global space – a space of transits, transparent and virtual (Serres, 1995). There is also
an interesting discourse on the new nomads, people who try to find new experiences and projects (Maffesoli, 2004) as well as project-seeking
knowledge workers (Toffler, 1971). In a certain way, these
discourses that emphasize the nomadic dimension of the global
present seem to rely on the absence of borders: they are the proof of the crises of the nation-state. However, these
discourses are in contradiction with what is truly happening. We have a discourse on movement, but the practice is radically different.
There
is freedom of movement, but with a clear restriction: only with respect of the needs of capital. The masses of lowskilled workers, the hungry ones, cannot pass through the border. And if they pass through, the border will still be
present in one way or another. It still stands, and maybe it is just as strong as capitalism itself. Just as every social formation
establishes its limits and exclusions,
capitalism produces its own. It acts essentially as a producer of separations. It reifies
endlessly and transforms both labour product and workers into commodities. It introduces a social structure with
clear barriers between those who have and those who do not, using anything possible to build hierarchies:
education, skills, income, race, gender. Finally, it needs political borders to increase competitiveness among groups
of workers and to obtain capital surpluses. The demand ‘No borders!’ can thus be seen as an attack on the very
heart of the capitalist machine.
CAPITALIST TERRITORIALIZATION CAUSES THE DEATH OF THE BIOSPHERE AND NUCLEAR CONFLICTS OVER
RESOURCE OPTIMIZATION
– THAT’S EXTINCTION
MASSUMI 92 (Brian, pHD in Philosophy @ Yale, A user’s guide to capitalism and schizophrenia 1992. P 137-8)
"Postmodernity" is not nothing; it constitutes a limited becoming-supermolecular that can increase some bodies' degrees of freedom beyond
anything seen before. The fact that society has reached the point that it can forego both interiority and belief and embrace creation is not to
be lamented. A real cause for concern is that it has done so in a framework that restricts mutation. The forced movement of liberal
"democracy" (parodic verisimilitude) has re-become real movement (simulation), 67 but within limits: a body's transformational potential is
indexed to its buying power. This means that the privilege of self-invention will never extend to every body. Not only do most bodies not have
infinite degrees of freedom, alarming and increasing numbers are starving or malnourished. Mere survival is a privilege in the brave new
neoconservative world.
Capitalism's endocolonial expansion has made the law of unequal exchange that is written into its axiomatic
an inescapable and lethal fact of life. Its outward surge of expansion has nearly exhausted the earth, threatening to
destroy the environment on which all life depends. Capitalism has not ushered in an age of universal wealth and well-being and
never will.
All it can do is displace its own limits.68 The limits of capitalism used to be external boundaries falling between its
formations and non- or precapitalist ones: between molarity and molecularity, the capitalist class and the proletariat, the "First World" and the
"Third World," resource depletion and technological progress. These boundaries were overtaken by capitalism as it grew to saturate its field of
exteriority: Molarity/molecularity has been counteractualized as a distinction between commercialized codes and equally commercialized
subcodes (the identification of the "Other" replaced by trafficking in affects for use in becoming-other). Some proletarians have been
integrated as corporatist workers who are both commodities on the ''job market" and consumers (Fordism), while growing numbers have been
relegated to a "permanent underclass" locked out of steady employment and thus restricted to participating in the economy as consumers —
of the inadequate social services still available after the gutting of the welfare state.69 The inclusion of all nations in the international debt
economy and the creation of "peripheral" areas of underdevelopment in the very heart of the Western world's largest capitals have blurreesd
the boundaries between the "First" and "Third" Worlds. The first three limits have been internalized by capitalism, in the sense of being
subsumed by its axiomatic.
The last limit, between resource depletion and technological "progress," not only remains but has
become absolute — the death of the planet. This limit cannot be internalized by capital (although the nuclear arms race
of the Cold War period that transformed the "advanced" nations into permanent war economies based on postponed
conflagration was a delirious attempt to do just that). It can, however, be crossed. It is capitalism's destiny to cross it. For although
capitalism has turned quantum in its mode of operation, it has done so in the service of quantity: consumption and accumulation are, have
been, and will always be its reason for being.
Capitalism's strength, and its fatal weakness, is to have elevated consumption and
accumulation to the level of a principle marshaling superhuman forces of invention — and destruction. The abstract machine
of consumption-accumulation has risen, Trump-like in all its inhuman glory. Its fall will be a great deal harder. What the final deterministic
constraint that is
the capitalist relation ultimately determines is global death. The virtual pole of capitalism turns out to be no
less suicidal than fascism-paranoia, though in a very different way — by virtue of its success, not because of an irresolvable contradiction
endemic to its dynamic. Capitalism is not defined by its contradictions. 70 It is the social tendency to overcome contradiction. The four
fundamental dense points of its axiomatic grid constitute a creative tension, a real differential, the unmediated operation of a mode of
transpersonal desire. Fascism-paranoia is a desire for unity that is applied to a body by an interceding agency whose operation consists in
carrying a body outside of itself in order to find its identity. It is also a transpersonal desire, or abstract machine, but one that is mediated by a
detour through molarity. The logical contradictions haunting fascist-paranoid formations are indirect expressions of a forcibly personalized
desire to transcend matter. Capitalism's limits are a direct result of its more successful desire to make itself immanent to matter (in the process
of which, as a side effect, it frees some bodies to transcend forced personification).
ALTERNATIVE
DISCURSIVE ANALYSIS
OUR ALTERNATIVE IS TO REJECT THE AFFIRMATIVE IN FAVOR OF RETHINKING THE WAY THEIR DEPICTIONS OF
SPACE AND IDENTITY HAVE EFFACED INDIGENOUS POPULATIONS AND SET THE CONDITIONS FOR WAR: ONLY
THIS ONTOLOGICAL INVESTIGATION INTO THE SPACE BENEATH THE GEOPOLITICAL MAP CREATES THE
POSSIBILITY FOR EMANCIPATION FROM INTERSTATE WARFARE
SHAPIRO ‘97 (Michael J., Department of Political Science, University of Hawai’I, Violent Cartographies: Mapping Cultures of War, pp. 30-34)
As I have noted,
political science discourses on war for the most part are dominated by a statecentric, strategic
orientation. Indeed, so persistent has been the statecentric, geopolitical cartography that security analysts often end
up reasserting it at the same time that they recognize its limitations. This is evident, for example, in Samuel Huntington's
recent at- tempt to refigure global political geography.
Speaking of the "cultural fault lines" separating different
"civilizations," he asserts that they are displacing state boundaries as the geographic framing of political identity.
His next move, however, is to reconstruct a nation-state map in which civilizational affiliations have a more
determining effect on inter- national alliances (that is, nation-state political coalitions) than the old cold war
configuration." Huntington's conceptual recidivism is telling. Apart from his underestimation of the influence of secular bourgeois classes in
maintaining the strength of states against alternative forms of solidarity,100 he redraws the geopolitical map to make the new affiliations he
sees conform to a state-oriented set of antagonisms.
For such strategic thinkers, the prevailing discourse on global power is
so closely tied to the traditional state model of space that the geopolitical map is retrieved in the midst of a
discussion aimed at departing from it.
Clearly
the persistence of the strategic view is owed to more than reasons of state. Identity-related territorial
commitments and the cartographic imaginaries they produce at the level of representation are tied to
ontological structures of self-recognition. The nation-state and its related world of Others persists in policy
discourses because of ontological impulses that are dissimulated in strategic policy talk, articulations in which
spatial predicates are unproblematic. To foreground the significance of ontology in warring violence and to heed the cartographic
predicates of self-Other interpretations, space must be treated explicitly as a matter of practice.
Rather than naturalizing spaces of
enactment by focusing on the actions by which boundaries are policed, defended, and transgressed—the familiar
focus of war and security studies—the emphasis must be on the practices, discursive and otherwise, for
constructing space and identity, on the ways that the self-alterity relationships are historically framed and played
out. This emphasis requires an anthropological rather than a strategic approach to war, or, more specifically, ethnographic inquiries into how
war is located among contending forces at social and cultural levels rather than strategic inquiries into how war is conducted logistically.
While strategic approaches to warfare tend to be explanatory in emphasis (and indeed tend to suppress their interpretive
predicates),
an ethnographic focus is more concerned with the interpretive practices that sustain the antagonistic
predicates of war. Moreover, a critical ethnography attempts to disrupt dominant interpretations by locating the
silenced remainders of various discourses. Rather than naturalizing the boundaries by which states maintain their
control over the representations of global issues, the focus involves both criticism and recovery. It is aimed first at
disclosing how representations of alterity (dangerous Others) reproduce the identities and spaces that give nationstates and nations in general their coherence, and second at disclosing other forms of affiliation uncoded in stateoriented interpretations.
A focus on ontological investments rather than the strategic aspects of warring violence turns our attention to the
identity dimensions im- posed on interpretations of enemy-Others. To elaborate this identity significance in terms of the Euroand Native American encounters I have discussed, it should be noted that the erasure of indigenous peoples, in fact and in representation, has
been part of the self-recognition by which state societies have territorialized and stabilized their identities. In recent years, however,
instabilities in the territorial frames on which nation-states have relied have highlighted the identity stakes
attached to state spatial practices, while at the same time making them more contentious. Given the heightened identity
anxieties that this instability has produced, it is a propitious time to investigate the significance of those stakes in relation to modern state
warfare. An examination of indigenous societies, which have tended to foreground the ontological invest- ments and the identity stakes of
warfare to which they give rise, provides an effective, distancing strategy, a way to make that which has been all too familiar appear strange,
or at least historically contingent.
Accordingly, in the analyses that follow, some of those indigenous so- cieties whose practices have been erased, ignored, or trivialized will be
accorded two kinds of recognition. First, unlike the English Captains Mason and Underbill, who in the seventeenth century regarded Native
American warfare as unprofessional, and John Stuart Mill, who in the nineteenth regarded it as aimless and disorganized, I take it seriously,
focusing on the war-related practices of space and identity. Second, I turn in the last chapter to the issue of recognition to raise questions
about the possibilities for a global ethics of encounter between peoples with incommensurate practices of identity and space, one in which respect for alterity is a primary predicate. The remainder of this chapter focuses on some of the impediments to thinking through such an ethic.
As I have suggested, a primary inhibition to an elaborated frame for extending respectful recognition is the state-oriented map, which continues to supply the moral geography that dominates what is ethically relevant. In effect, states manage an ethical as well as a monetary economy, and, ironically, they have a stronger control over the former, be- cause financial exchanges are more heavily influenced by trans- and
extrastate agencies. To be a subject of moral solicitude one has to be a subject in general, and in the contemporary state system, the
collective imperatives attached to state-managed territories still hold sway over political subjectivity.
The neglect of ethnic minorities,
women, and vestiges of tribal and nomadic and, more generally, nonstate peoples, is tied to the political and
moral hegemony of the state system, which, living in the perpetual present, has closed the book on the ethics of
its cartographic predicates.
What is involved in reopening the book?
example,
The most important step is to get out of the perpetual present where, for
Huntington took up residence in his analysis of "civilizational" confrontations as merely current realities
and exclusively in power terms, that is, as increasingly salient forms of postsovereign global partisanship. The "cultural fault line"
imagery with which he builds the contemporary global map is both historically and ethically impoverished. As the
geopolitical map was formed out of violent confrontations, state boundaries developed and cultural ones were
effaced. As a result, states and many nations within states have residual aspects of cultural alterity within them.
Such aspects of difference cannot be resummoned by redrawing geographical boundaries, for they exist as
invisible forms of internal otherness. Every boundary-firming practice will simply produce new modes of
marginalized difference. It is therefore necessary, as Homi Bhabha states it, to change "the treatment of 'difference'...
from the boundary 'outside' to its finitude 'within.'" 101 The production of a geography within which marginalized
peoples can be recognized and accorded political status and moral solicitude requires both a resistance to state
system maps that deny otherness within and narrative recoveries that add temporal depth to the global map.
NO BORDERS – UTOPIANISM
WE SHOULD ADOPT THE UTOPIAN DEMAND FOR A WORLD WITHOUT BORDERS – OUR POINT IS NOT TO
LITERALLY BRING THIS INTO EXISTENCE BUT TO USE THIS THOUGHT EXPERIMENT TO ORIENT A RADICAL
POLITICS AGAINST NATION-STATE VIOLENCE
WHYTE ET AL. ‘6 (Jessica, PhD candidate in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Monash U., Australia, Carlos
Fernandez, Doctor in Sociology and works as a precarious researcher @ Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain, Meredith Gill, PhD candidate
in the Program in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society @ U. of Minnesota, Imre Szeman, Associate Professor of English and Cultural
Studies and an Adjunct Member of the Institute for American Studies @ Humboldt U. in Berlin, “Erasing the Line, or, the Politics of the Border”
ephemera 6(4) pg. 466)
In light of our journey from our home countries to Moscow and back from Beijing, as well as the collective trip taken by all those involved in
the ‘Capturing the Moving Mind’ project across the Russian/Mongolian and Mongolian/Chinese border,
we wish to articulate a similar
demand with a similar aim: unfettered mobility for individuals and collectives, the dissolution of all borders that
separate, isolate, contain, limit, enable violent forms of extraction and injustice, and impede political imaginings
and futures. In an era dominated by the discourse of mobility,
technology – that of
the organization of movement and space through an older
border line, an entity as abstract and full of metaphysical subtleties as any other in the lexicon of human thought –
remains essential to the smooth operations of capital. Without the border, there would be no differential zones of
labour, no spaces to realize surplus capital through the dumping of overproduction, no way of patrolling surly
populations that might want to resist proletarianization, no release valve for speculative access. The demand for free
movement challenges not only the logics of contemporary economics, but also the operations of the political, which have long been
premised on the establishment of zones of inclusion and exclusion, control over the legal status of citizen-subjects,
practices of demographic accounting and management, and the mobilization of bodies for use in territorial
expansion and war. No borders! Or just as well: free movement! What insights does such a demand produce with respect to the key
forms through which power and social control are exerted today? And what kind of political possibilities do these insights generate in turn? It
is clear enough that
the possibility of unfettered movement – a world without border controls, identity papers, fictions
of national belonging, death and destruction over abstract geographies – would necessitate a social order radically
different from every one hitherto imagined. The physical remnants of what we call ‘history’ are marked by the long
human drama of
the production and patrol of borders: cathedrals, castles, city walls and gates, districts, patrol towers,
checkpoints – even the physical geography of rivers, bodies of water, and mountain ranges, transformed by their role as
dividing markers. The streetscapes of modernity, pathways for the dreamy wanderings of the flâneur, are also designed with
the aim of enabling the quick and efficient deployment of men and military equipment, both to manage unruly
internationalists at home (communists, postcolonials, and the like) and to face the incursion of foreign armies across the
sacred line dividing one nation-state from another. So we would also need new vernacular architectures, new cities, new
modes of labouring, new economies,
new cultures – a great many new things, and this just to begin with. One way forward might be
to try to put everything on the table all at once and so participate in the kind of utopian constructions that Jameson
suggests emerge whenever political energies are blocked. We propose a more politically efficacious way forward, testing
the power of
the demand ‘No borders!’ by looking at a few key ways borders demarcate mobility and immobility today: in relation to
the operations of contemporary capital; the control over migration and nation-state sovereignty; the patrolling of cultural borderlines; and the
collapse of the labour and leisure into a time of perpetual production.
ZIZEK – IDEOLOGY CRITIQUE
OUR ALTERNATIVE IS TO PREFER NOT TO DO DEMOCRACY ASSISTANCE
THIS REFUSAL INTERRUPTS THE ENDLESS CYCLE OF ACTING SO THAT NOTHING CHANGES AND OPENS UP
SPACE CONTRA IDEOLOGY FOR NEW FORMS OF ASSISTANCE.
ŽIŽEK ‘10 (Slavoj, Prof. of European Graduate School, Intl. Director of the Birkbeck Inst. for Humanities, U. of London, and Senior Researcher
@ Inst. of Sociology, U. of Ljubljiana, Living in the End Times, pgs. 399-402)
Indeed, was not Khrushchev's later fate (he was deposed in 1964) proof of Oscar Wilde's quip that, if one tells the truth, one will sooner or
later be caught out? Sartre's analysis nonetheless falls short on one crucial point: Khrushchev's report (J/2 have a traumatic impact, even if he
"was speaking in the name ofthe system: the machine was sound, but its chiefoperator was not; this saboteur had relieved the world of his
presence, and everything was going to run smoothly again. "48 His intervention set in motion a process which ultimately brought down the
system-a lesson worth remembering today.
Our answer to the "What is to be done?" question raised above is thus simple:
why impose a choice in the first place? A Leninist "concrete analysis of concrete circumstances" will make clear what the proper way
to act in a given constellation might be – sometimes, pragmatic measures addressed to particular problems are appropriate; sometimes, as in
a radical crisis, a transformation of the fundamental structure of society will be the only way to solve its particular problems; sometimes,
in a
situation where plus ca change, plus ca reste la meme chose, it is better to do nothing than to contribute to the
reproduction of the existing order. We should always bear in mind the lesson first clearly elaborated by La Boetie in his treatise on la
servitude volontaire:
power (the subordination of many to one) is not an objective state of things which persists even if' we
ignore it, it is something that persists only with the participation of its subjects, only if it is actively assisted by them. What
one should avoid here is the predicament of the Beautiful Soul described by Hegel: the subject who continually
bemoans and protests his fate, all the while overlooking how he actively participates in the very state of things he
deplores. We do not fear and obey power because it is in itself so powerful; on the contrary, power appears powerful because we treat it as
such. This obscene collaboration with the oppressor is the topic of Ismail Kadare's The Pawe ofDreanu, a story of the Tabir Sarrail, the "palace
of dreams" in the capital of an unnamed nineteenth-century Balkan empire (modeled on Turkey). In this gigantic building, thousands of palace
bureaucrats assiduously sort, classify, and interpret the dreams of citizens systematically and continuously gathered from all parts of the
empire. Their immense work of interpretation is Kafkaesque: intense yet a meaningless fake. The ultimate goal of their activity is to identifY the
Master-Dream that will provide clues to the destiny ofthe empire and ofits sultan. This is why, although Tabir Sarrail is supposed to be a place
of mystery exempt from daily power struggles, what goes on there is inevitably caught up in such conflicts-which dream is to be selected (or
perhaps even invented) as the Master-Dream becomes the subject of dark intrigues, The reasons for these struggles are nicely spelled out by
Kadare: "In my opinion," Kurt went on, "it is the only organization in the State where the darker side of its subjects' consciousness enters into
direct contact with the State itself." He looked around at everyone present, as if to assess the effect of his words. "The masses don't rule, of
course," he continued, "but they do possess a mechanism through which they influence all the State's affairs, including its crimes. And that
mechanism is the Tabir Sarrail." "Do you mean to say," asked the cousin, "that
the masses are to a certain extent responsible for
everything that happens, and so should to a certain extent feel guilty about it?" "Yes," said Kurt. Then, more firmly: “ln a way, yes."49 In
order properly to interpret these lines there is no need for any obscurantist thesis positing a "dark irrational link (or secret solidarity) between
"the crowd and its rulers."
The question to be raised concerns power (domination) and the unconscious: how does power work,
why do its subjects obey it? This brings us to the (misleadingly named) "erotics of power":
subjects obey not only because of
physical coercion (or the threat ofit) and ideological mystification, but because they have a libidinal investment in
power. The ultimate "cause" of power is the objet a, the object-cause of desire, the surplus-enjoyment by means of which power "bribes"
those it holds in its sway.
This objet a is given form in the (unconscious) fantasies of the subjects of power, and the
function of Kadare's "Tabir Sarrail" is precisely to interpret those fantasies, to learn what kind of (libidinal) objects they
are for their subjects. These obscure "feedback mechanisms" – between the subjects of power and its holders – regulate the subjects'
subordination, such that if they are disturbed the power structure may lose its libidinal grip and dissolve. The Palace of Dreanu is, of course,
itself an impossible fantasy: the fantasy of a power capable of directly managing its own fantasmatic support. And it is here that what we have
called "Bartleby politics" enters: rather than actively resisting power, the Bartleby gesture of
"preferring not to" suspends the
subject's libidinal investment in it – the subject stops dreaming about power. To put it in mockingly Stalinist terms,
emancipatory struggle begins with the ruthless work of self-censorship and auto-critique – not of reality, but of one's own
dreams. The best way to grasp the core of the obsessive attitude is through the notion of false activity: you think you are active,
but your true position, as embodied in the fetish, is passive. Do we not encounter something akin to this false atctivity in
the typical strategy of the obsessive neurotic, who becomes frantically active in order to prevent the real thing
from happening (in a tense group situation, the obsessive talks continually, cracks jokes, etc., in order to ward off that awkward moment of
silence in which the underlying tension would become unbearable)?
The “Bartleby act” is violent precisely insofar as it entails
refusing this obsessive activity – in it, not only do violence and non-violence overlap (non-violence appears as the highest
violence),
so too do act and inactivity (here the most radical act is to do nothing). The "divine" dimension lies in this very
overlapping of violcnce and non-violence. If
theology is again emerging as a point of reference for radical politics, it is so not
by way of supplying a divine "big Other" who would guarantee the final success of our endeavors, but, on the contrary,
as a token of our
radical freedom in having no big Other to rely on. It was already Dostoevsky who showed how God gives us both freedom and
responsibiliiy – he is not a benevolent master steering us to safety, but the one who reminds us that we are totally left to our own devices.
This paradox lies at the very core of the Protestant notion of Predestination: Predestination does not mean that since everything is determined
in advance we are not really free; rather,
it involves an even more radical freedom than the ordinary one, the freedom to
retroactively determine (that is, change) one's Destiny itself.50
DIKEÇ – IDEOLOGICAL CRITIQUE
IDEOLOGICAL CRITICISM MUST REJECT EVEN THE GIVENNESS OF THE FACTS AS PRESENTED – THEY CREATE THE
PRACTICES WE ENGAGE IN
DIKEÇ ‘12 (Mustafa, Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, “Immigrants, Banlieues, and Dangerous Things:
Ideology as an Aesthetic Affair” Antipode, Early Release)
Hence the political import of an aesthetic approach:
if sensus communis is post-sensory, as suggested in these definitions, and also
the basis of practical judgment, then there are important political reasons for paying attention to what is made
available to the senses (and what is not). In his exploration of how political identities emerge through judgment, Ferguson (2007:1)
argues that
“[j]udgments are the basis of political identities”; while similar judgments may lead to political solidarity
or at least affinity, dissimilar ones often lie at the source of antagonistic identities.
As Rancière himself acknowledges (2000c, 2007) we are getting close here to the Kantian notion of “ a priori forms” that order our sensory
perceptions. This may raise a few questions, so some clarification seems necessary. In his Critique of Pure Reason (1998 [1781]) Kant famously
defined space and time as a priori forms of intuition or sensibility. As a priori forms of sensibility, space and time make objects possible and
provide form to our sensory perceptions, and thus, to our experience of the world. According to Kant, we receive a multitude of sensations,
but this multitude is somehow organised into a whole—this is space, as an a priori form of sensibility, providing a form for the objects
presented to us, giving shape to our experience. To explain it differently, we encounter particular objects in experience, and become aware of
them as spatially (and temporally) ordered—that is, as exhibiting relations of simultaneity and succession—and as having a form—that is,
possessing spatial features such as shape and extension. According to Kant, this spatial (and temporal) system of relations is a priori and has
its source in our minds; namely, our faculty of spatial intuition, or our “outer sense”, as he also refers to it. That it is a priori means, however,
that it is already given to us, built in our minds, that it does not rely on experience, but merely gives a form to our awareness of things in
space (and time). This, I suspect, is where many geographers of a materialist persuasion would start to feel distinctly uneasy. Is spatial (or for
that matter, temporal) form already given to us, imposing itself on our perceptions, ordering our experience of the world?
Rancière does not go that far.
Time and space, for him, are “forms of configuration of our ‘place’ in society, forms of
distribution of the common and the private, and of assignation to everybody of his or her own part” (2005a:13).
Whereas Kant dealt with aesthetics as a priori forms that order what presents itself to sense experience, Rancière deals with it as a “partition of
the sensible” (le partage du sensible): as the form of what is presented to the senses, and actualised in particular historical and geographical
contexts. The word “partage” here is almost an oxymoron as it means both “partition” and “sharing”. Rancière uses it to refer to as what is “put
in common” [mis en commun] and shared in the community, but also to what is separated and excluded, such as the separation of the visible
and the invisible, audible and inaudible, speech and noise, possible and impossible. Another meaning of the word “ partage”, as used in the
phrase “en partage”, is an inheritance, something one is given, or, better yet, endowed with (usually positive, such as talent). So another
connotation of Rancière’s “partage du sensible” would be to be given certain ways of perceiving and making sense of things.13
Therefore, Rancière both alters and expands the notion of a priori forms. This is the first major difference from a strictly Kantian interpretation.
The second difference lies in the source of a priori forms; they are no longer in the mind—where Kant had them—but in particular historical
(and geographical, we could usefully add) contexts as products of specific conjunctures, conflicts and tensions (2009:157).
The partition of
the sensible, therefore, is a contingent distribution of forms that structure common—though not consensual—experience
and ways of thinking, marked by tension and conflict. “A partition of the sensible”, writes Rancie`re, “is always a state of forces
[e ́tat des forces]” (2009:158).
Understood in this way,
refers to as
the ideological function of an aesthetic regime would be something close to what De ́otte (2004:81)
the placing of “an interpretive grid over any event” in a non-totalitarian way. In other words, there is no
claim that everyone will respond in the same way to a given event, though an event—even a non-event—may
surprisingly expose the workings of an aesthetic regime.
In the summer of 2004, France was shocked by a sensational news story. A young woman, travelling with her baby on a banlieue train (RER),
was attacked and mugged by a group of North African and black youth. Upon seeing the address on her identity card, the attackers deduced
that she lived in a rich area, and must therefore be Jewish. From that point on, the attack took on an anti-Semitic form, with the attackers
drawing swastikas on her, cutting her hair, and making marks on her face with a knife. No one on the train attempted to protect her or her
baby; no one pulled the alarm.
Public outrage immediately followed the incident for the next couple of days, including many shocked remarks by politicians. The source of
outrage was neither what the youth did nor the Muslim–Jewish tension, but rather the passivity of the other passengers (although “expert”
writing quickly appeared in the newspapers analysing the behaviour of the banlieue youth). We all knew the banlieue youth does that kind of
thing. We all know about the tensions between the followers of these two religions. But how to account for the conduct of the other
passengers, who did not even come forward to testify? In the midst of growing reactions to the incident, no one really thought about another
possibility:
perhaps there was nothing to do simply because nothing happened, perhaps “because the event did not
take place” (Rancie`re 2005b:191).
This possibility was not raised because the story fit only too well with the stereotypical image of and prejudices against
the banlieues and their inhabitants. The significant point here is that it was this image of the banlieue that motivated the comments and
responses of the politicians and the media rather than the facts of the story, which, at the time, had yet to be established. Two days later the
young woman admitted to inventing the whole story.
This non-event, I believe, is an example that points to the effects of various sensible evidences that were put into place over decades and the
workings of the standard chain of inference that puts immigrants and banlieues in the category of dangerous things. As we have seen,
the
construction of this chain of inference has followed from a consolidation of what I called, following Rancie`re, an
aesthetic regime—certain framings of times and spaces. I would argue that a critical engagement with ideology starts
with a questioning of the sensible evidences put in place within such a regime. Much as Lakoff’s example presented at
the outset of this article exposes how our everyday categorisations perhaps too easily rely on an assumption of commonality, the “Girl on the
RER” episode shows how understandings of banlieues are tainted by certain framings of space.
To come back to the argument with which I started,
the so-called “securitarian ideology” does not consist in the deployment
of more and tougher measures and practices of repression, although these are its material manifestations. It
consists in the putting in place of sensible evidences that provide the conditions of possibility for the legitimate
deployment of such measures and the normalisation of such practices (such as random identity checks targeting certain
groups etc). Therefore,
the most perverse consequence of this ideology (this putting in place of certain sensible evidences) is not
the increasing number and intensity of repressive measures, but the consolidation of an aesthetic regime, the
sensible givens of which made the consensual application of such measures possible, legitimate, even necessary in
order to protect the Republic from Cavafy’s barbarians at the gate.
FILM
FILMS SHOWN IN NOVEL, POLITICAL SPACES CAN BE POWERFUL REJECTIONS OF IMPERIAL GEOPOLITICS
SHAPIRO ‘7 (Michael J., Department of Political Science, University of Hawai’I, “The New Violent Cartography” Security Dialogue 38, p. 309311)
Where are the counter-spaces to the new violent cartography? The violence that has emerged from contemporary
practices of militarization and securiti- zation is being contested in display spaces that function outside of the
governmental controls that were exercised in earlier historical periods. The fate of Edouard Manet’s painting The Execution of
the Emperor Maximilian provides an apt illustration of a former governmental suppression. France installed the Austrian Archduke Maximilian
as the puppet monarch of Mexico in 1863. By 1866, Napoleon decided that funding the French forces required to keep the Archduke in his
position – in the face of an armed republican insurrection – was too costly and withdrew his troops. Left with- out sufficient protection,
Maximilian, who had in fact behaved for the most part as a humane and enlightened monarch, was captured and executed by a firing squad,
along with two of his loyalist generals, in 1867.
Shortly after the event, Manet executed his first of four historical paintings of the execution. However, because it was politically controversial,
inasmuch as it displayed, graphically, one of the lethal consequences of the French foreign policy, visited on what many regarded as an
innocent victim, the painting was denied entry into the Paris Salon, year after year (Friedrich, 1992: 73–76). A canvas that was perhaps a 19thcentury equivalent of the images of a helicopter on the roof of the US embassy in Saigon, leaving many South Vietnamese to their postwar
fates, did not appear in public until it was shown in Boston, seven years after the execution. In contrast, not long after media publicity revealed
the torture and degradation of prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the Colombian artist Fernando Botero executed a series of paintings of
the atrocities committed against Iraqi prisoners there. Shortly after they were finished, the paintings began traveling around the world,
appearing first in Rome at the Palazzo Venezia (beginning in mid-June 2005) and heading thereafter to art museums in Germany, Greece, and
Washington, DC (Johnson, 2005: E-33, E-40).
There is another kind of display space that is available and increasingly used by those who supply images that
contest militarization, securitization, and violence. Increasingly, contemporary film festivals provide a venue for films with
significant anti-violence and anti-war themes and cinematic styles. For example, at the 2006 Berlin Film Festival the trend was ‘definitely
political’, whereas at the previous year’s festival political themes were matched by emphases on sex and football (Bernstein, 2006: 28). At
Cannes, politically oriented films continue to displace Cannes’s historical emphasis on the ‘beautiful’, continuing the trend that brought Michael
Moore’s anti-war documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 the Palm d’Or (Dupont, 2006: 20), and at the Tromsø International Film Festival there is now a
prize for the best ‘peace film’. A panel of reviewers – including scholars involved in peace and con- flict studies, organizers of film festivals, and
makers of feature films and documentaries – deliberate about the anti-war, anti-violence merits of films from all over the planet and bring
those deliberations into public dialogue with sizable audiences. Many of the films shown at the festival also later find their way into theaters.
Among the films showing at the Berlin Film Festival in 2006 (and subse- quently released worldwide to commercial theaters)
was British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom’s The Road to Guantanamo , which, like Botero’s series of paintings about the
abuses at Abu Ghraib, provides stark images of atrocities visited on prisoners/detainees. Winterbottom’s film focuses on ‘three British Muslims
who traveled to Afghanistan just as the United States was embarking on its military campaign’ (Dupont, 2006: 20). These men, who are played
by actors in the film, report, in interspersed documentary close- ups, that after being ‘captured by the pro-American Northern Alliance . . . they
are hooded, beaten, transported with other prisoners in a packed truck and eventually turned over to the Americans who beat them during
interrogation and fly them to Guantanamo, Cuba’. At a minimum, film festival space (and often theater chains with mass audiences) is opening
itself to images that disclose the violence and abuses of rights that constitute much of the new violent cartography that has been effected
during the ‘war on terror’.
Along with other ‘arts’ – notably photography and painting – a politics of aesthetics, which
reconfigures the sensations associated with violence, is available as a counter-force to the institutional collusion
instantiated in the tertiary spatialization of the ‘war on terror’.
Finally,
to contrast the militarization-complicit university–Hollywood– military connection at USC’s Institute for Creative
Technologies with the increasingly political and anti-militarization impetus evident at international film festivals,
we can turn to the issue
of realism. As Michael Dillon (2006: 8) points out, the governing associated with the ‘war on terror’ has produced a
legitimating account of the ‘real’, a soliciting of fear, and an enframing of danger that is ‘beginning to transform
the cultural and political codes of security – civil and military’. As I noted, the military dimension of that transformation is focused on the ‘realism’ that Hollywood film technologies can add to the military’s simulations of
battlefield experiences. But, cinema offers a version of realism that is also critical rather than merely warriorvocational. As Walter Benjamin (1968: 228) suggested during an early epoch of film history, because of its ability to
‘reactivate the object’, film offers an intimacy with reality that was unavailable before the ‘work of art’ was transformed in ‘the age of mechanical reproduction’. Film, he noted ‘permits the audience to take the position of the
critic [because the audience] takes the position of the camera’. Insofar as the spaces of contemplation and
exchange on the reality of the violence associated with recoded modes of security are increasingly activated at
film festivals, film festival space offers itself as a counter-space to the new violent cartography.
NEW IMAGINARIES
OUR ALTERNATIVE IS TO REFUSE ECONOMIC ENGAGEMENT IN FAVOR OF ENGAGEMENT BASED ON MUTUALITY
WE HAVE TO RETHINK THE AFFIRMATIVE PROJECT BY REJECTING ITS VIOLENTLY NEOLIBERAL IDEOLOGY AND
HIDDEN SPATIAL ASSUMPTIONS.
ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE AND IT STARTS NOW
SPRINGER ’11 (Simon, Prof. in Department of Geography @ U. of Otago, “Violence sits in places? Cultural practice, neoliberal rationalism,
and virulent imaginative geographies” Political Geography, Vol. 30, pp. 96-97)
The movement of neoliberalism towards economic orthodoxy, and its eventual capture of such hegemony, was
not only achieved through dissemination of its class project geographically through ‘shocks’ or otherwise, but also by
spreading its worldviews across various discursive fields (Plehwe & Walpen, 2006). Through this merger of discourse and an
imperative for
spatial diffusion, neoliberalism has constructed virulent imaginative geographies that appeal to
commonsense rhetorics of freedom, peace, and democracy through the destructive principles of Orientalism, and
in particular by proposing a static and isolated place-based ‘culture of violence’ thesis in the context of ‘the
Other’. These representations of space and place ‘are never merely mirrors held up to somehow reflect or represent the world but instead
enter directly into its constitution (and destruction). Images and words release enormous power, and their dissemination. can have the most
acutely material consequences’ (Gregory & Pred, 2007: 2). Neoliberalism is a discourse, and words do damage as actors perform their ‘scripted’
roles. But
neoliberalism is also a practice that has ‘actually existing’ circumstances (Brenner & Theodore, 2002) where new
violences are created. Thus, the global south has become ‘the theater of a multiplicity of cruel little wars that,
rather than barbaric throwbacks,
are linked to the current global logic’ (Escobar, 2004: 18). Yet there is nothing quintessentially
‘neoliberal’ about Orientalism. Its entanglement with the neoliberal doctrine is very much dependent upon the context in which
neoliberalization occurs. Initially conceived during the Enlightenment, and later revived in the postwar era,
neoliberalism had a ‘western’
birth, radiating outwards across the globe as the sun was setting on Keynesian economics. Orientalism is, however,
entangled in the project of imperialism, which is ‘supported and perhaps even impelled by impressive ideological formations that
include notions
that certain territories and people require and beseech domination, as well as forms of knowledge affiliated
with domination’ (Said, 1993: 9). As the latest incarnation of ‘empire’ (Hardt & Negri, 2000; Pieterse, 2004), the principles, practices, theories,
and attitudes of a particular class-based faction maintaining economic control over various territories remains intact under neoliberalism and
so we should not be too surprised to discover that the pernicious discourses that support such ‘resurgent imperialism’ similarly remain
unchanged (Hart, 2006).
If, as Richard Peet (2000: 1222) argues, ‘economic rationality is a symbolic logic formed as part of
social imaginaries, formed that is in culture’, then like the project of colonialism, and indeed in keeping with the
‘Self’-expanding logic of capital and its fundamental drive to capture new sites for (re)production (Harvey, 2005),
neoliberalism is intimately bound up in articulating and valorizing cultural change . Yet in order for such change to be seen
as necessary, the ‘irrationality’ of ‘the Other’ must be discursively constructed and imagined. This is precisely where neoliberalism and
Orientalism converge. Neoliberalization proceeds as a ‘civi- lizing’ enterprise; it is the confirmation of reason on ‘barbarians’ who dwell beyond.
Reason, like truth, is an effect of power, and its language developed out of the Enlightenment as an antithetical response to ‘madness’, or the
outward performances of those seen as having lost what made them human (Foucault, 1965). Reason as such, triumphs at the expense of the
non-conformist, the unusual, ‘the Other’. As a consequence, neoliberal ideas are proselytized to rescind the ostensible irrationality and
deviance of ‘the Other’. A closely related second reason for evangelism relates to the purported ‘wisdom’ of neoliberalism, which repeatedly
informs us that ‘we’ have never had it as good as we do right now, and thus ‘Others’ are in need of similar salvation. If ‘they’ are to be ruled,
whether by might or by markets, they must become like ‘us’. This theology of neoliberalism maintains a sense of rationalism precisely because
it looks to reason rather than experience as the foundation of certainty in knowledge. As Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore (2002: 353) argue,
‘the manifold disjunctures that have accompanied the worldwide imposition of neoliberalism – between ideology and practice; doctrine and
reality; vision and consequence – are not merely accidental side effects of this disciplinary project. Rather, they are among its most essential
features.’ In other words, the effects of neoliberalization (poverty, inequality, and mythic violence) are ignored (Springer, 2008), and in their
place a commonsense utopianism is fabricated (Bourdieu, 1998). And so we stand at ‘the end of history’ (Fukuyama, 1992), or at least so we
are told, wherein the monotheistic imperative of one God gives way to one market and one globe. Yet
the certainty of such absolutist
spatio-temporality is in every respect chimerical. Space and time are always becoming , invariably under construction. The
future is open, and to suggest otherwise is to conceptualize space as a vast lacuna.
There are always new stories yet to be told, new
connections yet to be made, new contestations yet to erupt, and new imaginings yet to blossom (Massey, 2005). As Said (1993: 7) argued,
‘Just
as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over
geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms,
about images and imaginings’. This sentiment applies as much to the geographies of neoliberalism as it does to violent geographies.
If so
much of the world’s violence is made possible through virulent imaginings, then perhaps the first step towards
peace is a collective imagining of nonviolence. Undoubtedly, this is an exercise made possible though culture via
human agency because, ‘[i]f violence ‘has meaning’, then those meanings can be challenged’ (Stanko, 2003: 13). Yet
conceiving peace is every bit as much a geographic project.
Violence sits in places in a very material sense, we experience the
world though our emplacement in it, where violence offers no exception to this cardinal rule of embodiment. But
there is no predetermined plot to the stories-so-far of space,
the horizons of place are forever mercurial, and geographies can
always be re-imagined. Geography is not destiny any more than culture is, and as such the possibility of violence being bound in place is
only accomplished through the fearful and malicious imaginings of circulating discourses. Put differently,
it is the performative effects
of Orientalism and other forms of malevolent knowledge that allow violence to curl up and make itself
comfortable in particular places. What can emerge from such understandings is a ‘principled refusal to exclude
others from the sphere of the human’ and an appreciation of how ‘violence compresses the sometimes
forbiddingly abstract spaces of geopolitics and geo-economics into the intimacies of everyday life and the
innermost recesses of the human body’ (Gregory & Pred, 2007: 6). Violence is not the exclusive preserve of ‘the Other’ rooted in
the supposed determinism of either biology or culture; it
populates the central structures of all societies. The capacity for violence
exists within the entirety of humanity, but so too does its opposite, the rejection of violence.
There are choices to be made each
moment of every day, and to imagine peace is to actively refuse the exploitative structures, virulent ideologies,
and geographies of death that cultivate and are sown by violence. This emancipatory potential entails challenging
the discourses that support mythic violence through a critical negation of the circuits it promotes, and nonviolent
engagement in the sites – both material and abstract – that it seeks to subjugate. It requires a deep and
committed sense of ‘Self’-reflection to be able to recognize the circuitous pathways of violence when it becomes
banal, systematic, and symbolic. And it involves the articulation of new imaginative geographies rooted not in
the ‘architectures of enmity’ (Gregory, 2004a), but in the foundations of mutual admiration, respect, and an introspective
sense of humility. By doing so,
we engage in a politics that reclaims the somatic as a space to be nurtured, reproduces
familiar and not so familiar geographies through networks of solidarity built on genuine compassion, and rewrites
local constellations of experience with the poetics of peace.
CHALLENGE GEOPOLITICS
RETHINKING GEOPOLITICAL STRUCTURES IS THE ONLY WAY TO INTERROGATE THE CURRENT SYSTEM –
QUESTIONING THESE POLITICAL ASSUMPTIONS PREVENTS WAR AND ACCEPTANCE OF CONFLICT.
TUATHAIL & DALBY ‘98 (Rethinking Geopolitics, Gearoid O Tuathail & Simon Dalby, 1998, pg. 89-90.
Gearóid Ó Tuathail is Associate
Professor of Geography at Virginia Tech, USA and Simon Dalby is Associate Professor of Geography at Carleton University, Canada.) //GY
A full analysis of sovereignty and geopolitics would necessitate an additional inquiry into constructions of political culture.
Discussions of
political culture are for the most part devoid of critical, or at least theoretical, treatments of sovereignty that allow
for a complex account of the socially constructed relationship between state, sovereignty, and society. The state, in
comparative political science, appears to have fixed those geographical and discursive boundaries that guarantee the division of the domestic
from the international. Biersteker’s and Weber’s definition assists in rethinking this absence of sovereignty and its effects in comparative
analyses. Missing, with regard to comparative analyses of the modern nation- state, are inquiries into the importance of ‘territory’ in the
scripting of narratives of national political cultures. This chapter will architect a starting point from which to begin questioning the
epistemological function of territory in the ‘production of a normative conception’ of the modern state.
Ó Tuathail (1994: 534) specifies one of the primary tasks of critical geopolitics as calling into question ‘the delimitation of the relationship
between geography and politics to essential identities and domains.’
This production of essentialized identities and spaces
through the conjoining of geography and politics produces narratives of geopolitical and national identity that
inform ‘the strategies by which maps of global politics are produced [at] governmental sites’ in the everyday
activities of geopoliticians (ibid.: 535). Those narratives of nation and identity found within political culture can be understood as
geopolitical in so far as they posit and inscribe the bound domestic spaces crucial to geopolitical discourses. Richard Ashley has described
the
importance of these narratives in that ‘“International politics” and the prospect of war are invoked [in modern
statecraft] primarily in opposition to a construct of “domestic society,” conceived as a [self-]identical social whole
that is the very embodiment of a “reasonable humanity,” a “civilization,” a “nation,” a coherent “modern
community of sovereign men”’ (Ashley 1989: 303). Hence, political culture becomes the very set of activities against which the
international is defined. It is the condition of the sovereign domestic sphere that is observed and replicated through each comparison.
Moreover, the ongoing practices of ‘geopoliticians,’ international media, activists, and academic scholarship all participate in the
‘knowledgeable practices of statecraft that functions to produce the effects of modern domestic societies – social identities consisting of
populations subordinate to a rational [political] center’ (ibid.: 304).
Taking seriously the conceptualization of society and culture
found in comparative political culture allows for the interrogation of a site of the continuous production of
sovereignty. To do otherwise would be to accept Almond’s and Verba’s occulted geographies as real representations of the places they
claim to compare.
This
assessment of comparative political culture will critically analyze generalizable summaries of national political
cultures that ‘arrest questioning and suggest essentialist explanations’ of political organization and behavior (Ó
Tuathail 1994: 539). It will be ‘especially attentive to the historical emergence, bounding, conquest, and administration of social spaces,’
recognizing as incomplete those conceptualizations of national culture that ‘accord to moral claims, traditional institutions, or deep
interpretations the status of a fixed and homogeneous essence . . . or an ultimate origin of international political life’ (Ashley 1987: 411).
The
ambiguous status of territory within these explanations calls attention to the place of geopolitics in the imagining
of political culture. Incorporating critiques of comparative political culture into ‘critical geopolitics’ necessarily
denies the disciplinary mandate of political science to relegate the study of the international to the field of
international relations and that of the domestic sphere to comparative politics. In challenging these disciplinary
boundaries and demonstrating the dependence of political analysis upon a ‘geocultural knowledge’ it becomes
possible to reconsider central assumptions of political culture and the very foundations of its comparisons.
FLOATING PIK
THIS OPENS US TO NEW MODALITIES OF ECONOMIC ENGAGEMENT
SPRINGER ’11 (Simon, Prof. in Department of Geography @ U. of Otago, “Violence sits in places? Cultural practice, neoliberal rationalism,
and virulent imaginative geographies” Political Geography, Vol. 30, pp. 96-97)
Violence sits in places in a very material sense, we experience the world though our emplacement in it, where violence offers no exception to
this cardinal rule of embodiment. But there is no predetermined plot to the stories-so-far of space, the horizons of place are forever mercurial,
and geographies can always be re-imagined. Geography is not destiny any more than culture is, and as such the possibility of violence being
bound in place is only accomplished through the fearful and malicious imaginings of circulating discourses. Put differently,
it is the
performative effects of Orientalism and other forms of malevolent knowledge that allow violence to curl up and
make itself comfortable in particular places. What can emerge from such understandings is a ‘principled refusal
to exclude others from the sphere of the human’ and an appreciation of how ‘violence compresses the sometimes
forbiddingly abstract spaces of geopolitics and geo-economics into the intimacies of everyday life and the
innermost recesses of the human body’ (Gregory & Pred, 2007: 6). Violence is not the exclusive preserve of ‘the Other’ rooted in
the supposed determinism of either biology or culture; it
populates the central structures of all societies. The capacity for violence
exists within the entirety of humanity, but so too does its opposite, the rejection of violence.
There are choices to be made each
moment of every day, and to imagine peace is to actively refuse the exploitative structures, virulent ideologies,
and geographies of death that cultivate and are sown by violence. This emancipatory potential entails
challenging the discourses that support mythic violence through a critical negation of the circuits it promotes,
and nonviolent engagement in the sites – both material and abstract – that it seeks to subjugate. It requires a
deep and committed sense of ‘Self’-reflection to be able to recognize the circuitous pathways of violence when it
becomes banal, systematic, and symbolic. And it involves the articulation of new imaginative geographies rooted
not in the ‘architectures of enmity’ (Gregory, 2004a), but in the foundations of mutual admiration, respect, and an
introspective sense of humility. By doing so,
we engage in a politics that reclaims the somatic as a space to be nurtured,
reproduces familiar and not so familiar geographies through networks of solidarity built on genuine compassion,
and rewrites local constellations of experience with the poetics of peace.
FRAMEWORK
FRAMEWORK – GEOPOLITICAL FRAMING
PARTICULAR GEOPOLITICAL FRAMINGS AND IDEOLOGICAL UNDERPINNINGS ARE CONSTITUTIVE OF FOREIGN
POLICY
– HOW AND WHAT WE SAY ABOUT NATIONS, WHO WE LABEL AS THREATS, AND WHAT NATIONAL
MYTHS WE USE TO ADVOCATE POLICY DETERMINES THE STRUCTURE AND EFFECTIVENESS OF ACTION
GÜNEY & GÖKCAN ’10 (Aylin, Dept. of PoliSci @ Bilkent U., Ankara, and Fulya, “The ‘Greater Middle East’ as a ‘Modern’ Geopolitical
Imagination in American Foreign Policy” Geopolitics, Vol. 15, pp. 23-24)
In recent decades, there has been a growing interest in the relationship between imagined geographies and the foreign and security policies
of states. Scholars of critical geopolitics argue that these
policies are enabled by, and productive of, specific geopolitical
imaginations,1 which have framed world politics by providing an overarching global context in which states seek
power outside their boundaries, gain control over less modern regions and their resources, and race with other
major states in a worldwide pursuit of global primacy.2 According to John Agnew, it is the combination of all these features that
makes the geopolitical imagination peculiarly modern. The emphasis here is on the fact that it is a system of visualising the world through a
constructed view of the world.3 Geopolitical imaginations are important in that they provide the ground for publicly justifying
a state’s foreign policy stance, whilst actually being constructions that serve the national interests of that particular
state. In order to understand how and why these geopolitical imaginations are formed, one needs to deconstruct the concept. The
geopolitical imagination, or as mentioned above, the constructed view of the world, is a reflection of the ‘geopolitical vision’
of a country. This is a broad concept, which includes the representations of a country’s (a people’s) territorial limits, as
well as its geopolitical codes and national mission.4 The geopolitical vision is thus the main element which determines what kind
of geopolitical imaginations a state may have. One of the essential components in the formation of geopolitical visions are the
geopolitical
codes of a country. The concept was coined by Gaddis, who defined them as a set of ‘strategic assumptions’5 that a
government makes about other states in making its foreign policy . They are “the manner in which a country
orientates itself toward the world”.6 In other words, these codes refer to a set of social representations based on
national political identity, including ideas about a country’s natural allies and enemies, about the essence of
external threats, and about major international problems and ways to resolve them . What makes geo- political codes
critically important is the contribution they provide towards understanding foreign policy making by directing us to the geo- political
component of belief systems. Thus, they are helpful analytical tools in the interpretation of foreign policy actions.7 According to Taylor and
Flint, a number of calculations play a key role in the formation of the geopolitical codes of a country. These concern identifying current and
potential allies and enemies, and determining how the country can maintain its alliances and nurture potential allies, identifying how it can
counter current enemies and emerging threats, and, finally, determining how it can justify the above-mentioned calculations to the public, and
to the global community.8 In this respect,
the role of national identity and national myths become important in
determining the geopolitical codes of a country. The visions of one’s country and its position in relation to other countries are
formed within particular national myths, which form the basis for geopolitical codes.9 The representations of the enemy,
who tend to be portrayed as barbaric or evil, are tailored for the immediate situation, but they are based upon
stories deposited in national myths that are easily accessible to the general public .10 This is quite important in
mobilising popular support behind the foreign policy actions by invoking ideas about a collective mission or foreign
policy strategy.
These geopolitical codes that ultimately shape geopolitical vision need at least a “them-and-us distinction and
emotional attachment to a place”,11 they certainly involve a societal dimension. In this way, ideological reference to national values, as
well as to strategic concerns about resources and economics, become important in the formation of geopolitical vision.
therefore,
Geopolitical vision,
turns out to be [is] the translation of national identity concepts into geographical terms and symbols. 12
Because ideas about national identity collide with power structures in the world and with other geopolitical constraints, geopolitical visions are
developed in order to cope with such threats.
The ultimate aim is to maintain pride, or just to legitimise aggression.13
National identity is continuously rewritten on the basis of external events, and constructed dangers. This in turn
translates itself into the foreign policy stance of a country. In this way, the link between national myths and foreign policy
stances becomes quite important.14 This section has summarised how national identity and myths play a role in the shaping of geopolitical
codes, and geopolitical vision, and in turn lead to a modern geopolitical imagination in a country’s foreign policy. In the light of this
theoretical background, the next section addresses the question of how the geopolitical imagination of the Greater Middle East has shaped
American foreign policy of the last decade.
FRAMEWORK – METAPHORS KEY
GEOGRAPHICAL REPRESENTATIONS ARE INCREASINGLY COMPLEX AND THEIR USE CREATES THE CONDITIONS
FOR VIOLENCE
DALBY, 05 (Simon Dalby, leading figure in the disciplines of critical geopolitics at Bastille school of International Affairs, 2005, Political
Space: Autonomy, Liberalism and Empire, https://mailattachment.googleusercontent.com/attachment/u/0/?ui=2&ik=08eb2519a2&view=att&th=13fe866d86230fb7&attid=0.2&disp=inline&realattid
=f_hj7c9tjj1&safe=1&zw&saduie=AG9B_P_o6p833FbULPC-txstLILJ&sadet=1374073017994&sads=facPggmplZLAuYXCkZZMZjPjKzs)
Political space: the phrase slips easily off the tongues of commentators these days. Activists invoke the need for
political space frequently. Cartographers regularly seem to have specified political ¶ space in choropleth
representations of provinces and states. Political space seems to be an obviously good thing: the words are used ¶
as a synonym for democratic discussion, with implicit functions of ¶ a public sphere or a civil society. Openings
suggest that dictatorial¶ regimes are becoming less closed; the possibilities of dialogue are¶ related to the
reduction of repression; freedom is spatialized in metaphors of autonomy, as in lack of physical constraint to
mobility. But once citizens move, as they do in processes of globalization,¶ then diasporic peoples in contemporary
urbanization apparently¶ defy national boundaries and hence disrupt matters of citizenship ¶ as the premise for
participation in politics. Invocations of rights¶ and entitlements spill over the conventional categories of political¶
space, complicating notions of justice as well as the possibilities for ¶ participation in a common lived experience of
decision making.¶ Since September 11, 2001, matters of political space have become more complicated, but also
much more transparent in the¶ invocation of global threats and local responses; terror vs, territory ¶ suggests the
importance of getting the political cartography right ¶ when it so frequently seems to obscure social processes. Even the¶ 9/11
event is temporally designated, suggesting that timing is clear¶ even if the appropriate spatial designations of whatever happened¶ that day is
less than certain. Global threats are now added into discussions of globalization, and specifications of danger now invoke ¶ "homeland security"
in the United States, where "national security"¶ apparently now no longer applies to what might once have supposedly been easy to render as
"national" boundaries.¶ The return of the theme of empire into political discourse also¶ heightens the need to reflect critically on political
spatialities, not¶ least because the military dimensions of current events are so¶ much more obviously about lines in the sand and the
possibilities¶ of "interventions," whether military or driven by human security¶ agendas and the "responsibility to protect,"
Duties and
dangers¶ across borders are highlighted in many policy arenas. Notions of¶ cyberspace and assumptions of
postmodern geopolitics likewise¶ raise endless questions of what space means politically. It seems¶ that cyberspace
is only understandable in geographical metaphors,¶ an intriguing matter that suggests the importance of spatial
metaphors in our political thinking
FRAMEWORK – METAPHORS KEY
WE HAVE TO ANALYZE HOW METAPHORICAL REPRESENTATIONS SHAPE THE WORLD TOWARD CERTAIN ENDS
KOPPER ‘12 (Ákos, Kanagawa University, “The Imaginary of Borders: From a Coloring Book to Cézanne’s Paintings1” International Political
Sociology, 6)
In 1980, the editors of the journal He ́rodote asked Michel Foucault about geography. They suggested that geographical knowledge contains
in itself the notion of the frontier, exactly the same way as disciplinary knowledge contains in itself the model of the prison, or the way
knowledge of illness contains in itself the model of the hospital.
could say that
Foucault found the proposal appealing. He suggested that perhaps one
nation-states, by operating along the nationalist agenda, turn their citizens into their inmates (Foucault 1980:73).
The mapping of the world and thereby the “knowledge of space” in the field of politics and in the field of art was generally in accord up to
the late nine- teenth and early twentieth century. At the turn of the century, however, modern painters’ understanding of space changed
radically. As a result of this, in the twentieth century, the way the world was mapped in artistic representation and in the socio-political domain
took different directions—one might suggest that they followed a different dispositif.
This paper has suggested that artistic understanding of spatiality and composi- tion of the late nineteenth century offers an illuminating
metaphor to capture how nowadays the socio-political domain appropriates space. Invoking a different metaphor has epistemological value by
highlighting what has hitherto been less pronounced. Or,
to return to the duck-rabbit picture, it helps us to also see the
rabbit in the picture—thereby allowing us to capture novel interstices between space, power, and individuals. Metaphors, however, go
deeper, by offering quin- tessential interpretations of reality through which to frame action. Thus, metaphors also
have a performative capacity. It is little wonder that totalitarian regimes —the Nazis just as much as the Soviets—were not
great fans of abstract art, their preferred style following an academic tradition offering one universal perspective
from which the world is to be seen.12
The final question is whether the affinity between modern art and today’s socio-political world is a mere coincidence, or whether there is a
deeper connection. Tentatively, I suggest that
whereas modern art in the nineteenth century focused on the sovereignty of
the individual and his subjective understanding of spatiality, the history of the twentieth century , in socio-political
terms,
unfolded with the sovereignty of the state taking primacy over the sovereignty of the individual. It is only
recently that a novel balance between the sovereign individual and the sovereignty of the state has evolved, causing the political and the
artistic dispositifs to re-converge.
The distinctive characteristic of the medieval era was the location of sovereignty in a heavenly order, regarding all earthly matters to be
interpretable only through looking down from a heavenly vantage point. During the Renaissance, this vantage point was brought down to
earth with the attribution of sov- ereignty to two entities: the sovereign state and the sovereign individual. From the socio-political point of
view, the question became how to map the world in a way to fit these two sovereignties within. That is, to bring into line the partic- ulars of
individuals with the universals embedded in sovereign collectives of state.
The interplay of these two sovereignties in the twentieth century was resolved— by and large—within the
Westphalian structure of sovereign states subsuming the sovereign individual (although citizens were proclaimed to be the
actual sovereign).
The world was mapped with the sovereignty of the state prevailing over the sovereignty of the
individual, where by and large the state was to offer an identity kit for the citizen (Bayart 2005:38). Individual states—
as depicted on typical political maps, with each state a different color—provided a template for citizens to map
the world and to imagine themselves within.
This conforms to the spatial understanding of academic paintings which provide an objective rendering of reality. This objective understanding
was exactly what modern painters wanted to deviate from. Modern art challenged the assertion that there was a “mapping of general validity.”
How individuals map the world differs, there are myriad viewpoints from which one can look at reality. This is most explicit in the case of
cubist painters such as Braque or Picasso, whose work follows Cézanne in discarding the linear perspective.
Their art could be understood as attesting to the sovereignty of the individual.
Tentatively, in what has been taking place recently
in practices of citizenship and technologies of governance, a dispositive akin to this can be identified, with the
emphasis increasingly shifting to the individual, both as a rights claimant and as the source of potential security
threats (Bonditti 2004). This explains, perhaps, how modern art—Ce ́zanne, Picasso, Braque—helps to capture metaphorically what is taking
place in the socio-political domain. In both cases, the emphasis is shifting away from the uniform toward the particular, which means in the
case of the socio-political domain a shift from the dominance of the sovereign state toward an increasing emphasis on the sovereign
individual.
It would be wrong to read this as an unambiguous shift toward enhanced liberty. By looking at this citizenship
regime in the making, we may get the impression that the fortunate many—no longer squeezed into national
contain- ers along the logic of a coloring book—are enjoying increased liberty. While this might be true, parallel
to this process—especially since 9/11—there has been an increase in illiberal practices, justified as necessary to
safeguard liberal regimes. This means anything but freedom for those who are deemed to belong to the
“abnormals” (Bigo and Tsoukala 2008). Upon them the border closes in. The point is, therefore, not that the world
has necessarily changed for the better, but that the prevailing understanding of spatiality along which man and
the world is mapped has shifted. The article has suggested that this shift can be captured in an illuminating way
by the metaphor that the way the world is mapped is no longer operating along the logic of a coloring book, but
rather along the way Cézanne created his paintings.
DISCOURSE 1ST
ANALYSIS HAS TO FIRST ENGAGE THE DISCURSIVE OBJECTS OF THE 1AC – WE CANNOT SIMPLY ACCEPT THEM
AS “TRUTHS” ABOUT THE WORLD BECAUSE THEY ARE ACTIVELY PRODUCED AND SHAPED BY MOMENTS OF
THEIR ENUNCIATION LIKE THIS ONE.
SHAPIRO ‘97 (Michael J., Department of Political Science, University of Hawai’I, Violent Cartographies: Mapping Cultures of War, pp. 36-37)
Within a Foucauldian sensibility,
discursive and other practices—for example, the discourse on national consensus
through which states maintain their legitimacy—must be regarded as one production of a collective selfexpression among a variety of possible ones, not an expression of something deeper. The question is not what
they ultimately mean to someone or to a collectivity but rather what the political implications are when particular
discursive objects emerge and maintain significance at particular times. For example, one could seek to disclose what
is enabled and what disenabled by the emergence of "the Vietnam syn- drome," which is an interpretation of the
United States' post-Vietnam reticence to commit itself to violent international confrontations. The appropriate
inquiry would be aimed at identifying the structures of power and authority organized around such a discursive
object.
From a Foucauldian perspective,
to maintain an ethnographic distance from one's own society is not to seek its ultimate
grounds of coherence but to analyze the different forces that impose a particular representation of coherence as
well as discerning those opposing forces against which they work. More specifically to the point of the investigations in this
study,
the point is to be able to gauge the forces that constitute a model of national space and national subjects
as well as those that tend toward fragmentation and incoherence in the national imaginary. To do this, such forces
have to be made to appear unfamiliar by showing that there have been different models of identity, space, and
collective coherence and to show how the apparent stability of the dominant models is belied by the energy that
must be spent to maintain them. To conduct such analyses is, in Foucault's terms, to do "an analysis of cultural facts
which characterize our culture," to do "something like the ethnology of the culture to which we belong." 108
The confrontations I stage in the following chapters on warfare are therefore not meant to be construed primarily hermeneutically, that is, as
"acts of appropriative understanding."109
The aim is less to achieve a deeper appreciation of U.S. warmaking by closing
the distance between our rationales and conduct and thus to learn who we are than it is to provide a critical
distance from the interpretive practices that seek to establish a dominant and unambiguous who.
LOCAL POLITICS KEY
WE HAVE TO GROUND THEIR ABSTRACT GEOPOLITICAL REPRESENTATIONS IN LOCAL PRACTICES AND CRITIQUE
DOWLER & SHARP ‘1 (Lorraine, Department of Geography @ Pennsylvania State University, and Joanne, Department of Geography and
Topographic Science, University of Glasgow, “A Feminist Geopolitics?” Space & Polity, Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 171-172)
In order to start to think in terms of a feminist (or post-colonial feminist) geopolitics, it is necessary to think more
clearly of the grounding of geopolitical discourse in practice (and in place)- to link international representation to the
geographies of everyday life; to understand the ways in which the nation and the international are reproduced in
the mundane practices we take for granted. For example, the construction of a single national identity may seem
obvious at a global scale, however, it is less clear when viewed by way of sociospatial forces such as gender, race
and class (Newman and Paasi, 1998; Sharp, 1999; Dowler, forthcoming). For example, at first glance, Irish West Belfast would appear
to a world audience as a place of ideological solidarity . Landscape elements such as public demonstrations, political murals and
anti-British graffi ti reinforce an image of national solidarity.
However, not reflected in this monolithic representation of
resistance were the concerns of women who wondered what affects reunifi cation with the Republic of Ireland
would have on their daily lives. Questions of divorce, birth control and day-care availability were eclipsed in favour of the appearance
of a unifi ed Irish national solidarity.
Of course,
no attempt at creating a national identity can be totally successful: unintended consequences will
emerge. The images of nation perpetuated by elite figures may be successful in drawing in individuals as national
subjects- but perhaps incompletely, or in tension with other identities and allegiances, which means the creation
of unseen results (hybrid identities, for example). It is in the processes of subject creation- and resistance to this – that
we can see how politics works. It is in the performance of identities and the creation of geopolitical images and practices that
Foucault’s notion that space is where dis- course becomes relations of power (Wright and Rabinow, 1982) is exemplifi ed in all of its
messiness.
Sparke (1998) explains how this process of subject creation through particular places worked for the construction of one particular political
subject: Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma Bomber. McVeigh’s actions can only be understood through an examination of the ways that political
identity was performed through his own biography. McVeigh was the subject of US discourses of inside± outside, of the safety and value of
US culture and identity, and of the threats from those `Others’ beyond the boundary who sought the destruction of the US. He was
interpolated into these discursive practices as a consumer of US culture throughout his life but also, most extremely, in his experience in the
military in the Gulf War (he was in fact awarded a medal for his actions in the confl ict and so regarded himself as a patriot). On his return to
the US, McVeigh apparently developed a sense that America had lost its way (Sparke, 1998). He was a loner, feeling marginalised by dominant
society which was unable to see the trouble it was in. However, reconstructed through the narratives of the lone warrior-masculinity of Rambo
fi lms, this subjectivity merely reinforced his sense of patriotism. With the representations of US global geography that he had experienced,
there was little difference between
turning the people working for the federal government into minions of an evil state apparatus and turning the people of Iraq into minions of
an evil state apparatus (Sparke, 1998, p. 202).
Sparke shows how the Gulf representations have played out – in a very specific way – in this person’s biography
and how to make sense of his actions as a consequence of this. Analysis of the discourses signifi cant to this story
might suggest that the danger would always lie outside the boundaries of the US. However, Sparke’s almost ethnographic
account of the production of geopolitical images and their actual impact on people’s daily lives shows how these have been remade, in this
case, to provide rather different results.
A broadening of the methodology of critical geopolitics from textual analysis to
what might be considered to be an ethnography of international relations offers exciting possi- bilities for
understandings of the complex local embodied geographies that reconstruct the nation and the geography of
international relations.
MAPS DETERMINE POLITICS
WITH THE ADVENT OF ADVANCED TOPOGRAPHY, THE “MAP” HAS ARTIFICIALLY SEPARATED EARTH INTO
GROUPS OF DISTINCT INDIVIDUALS, DECIDING UPON THE RELATIVE EXISTENCE OR NON-EXISTENCE OF GROUPS
BY THEIR LOCATION ON THE MAP, AND JUSTIFYING COLONIAL DOMINATION AND TERRITORIAL EXPANSION.
THE MAP IS NO LONGER AN ABSTRACT UNDERTAKING, BUT SOMETHING THAT SHAPES HOW OUR POLICIES
ARE IMPLEMENTED
SCHIPPERS ‘1 (Thomas, Prof. of Ethnology @ U. of Nice, “The Border as a Cultural Idea in Europe,” Europe: cultural construction and reality,
pgs. 26-27)
But most importantly for my perspective here, these
technical improvements in the arts of cartography allowed maps to
become acceptable graphic representations of (parts of) the world not only as it was supposed to be, but also as it
should be. As far as I know, the choice (in the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494) of the meridian line 370 “leagues” West of the Cabo
Verde Islands to separate present and future possessions of the King of Portugal and the King of Castillia (Spain)
is probably one of the
earliest examples of the ways in which European nations "invented” boundaries to separate themselves by the use of a
map-based conception of space. Ever since[,] cartography and map-making have become arms in the hands of the
powerful not only allowing conquest and possession, but also subject to fraud and cheating. Maps have
progressively become providers of “territorial propaganda” (Harley l995:24) as they not only registered actual borders and
frontiers
but also anticipated colonial empires and legitimised the realities of conquest. As the British geographer and historian of
cartography Brian Harley has suggested, from the XVlth century on,
maps have become for Europeans (at first only the powerful, but from
the end ofthe XIXth century on for all schooled people) part of what he calls “the
(op.cit.:33)
arsenal of psychological international warfare”
between nations. Critical analyses of the history of cartography as those by Brian Harley, have shown during the last decades in
which ways
maps have gradually become in Europe since the XVIIth century a particular form of discourse about the world based
on specilic codes and conventions.
Presence or absence on maps mean information or “silence” which are to be related to the
maker‘s (or his sponsor’s) conscious or unconscious choices or wishes. Behind their apparent “neutral", scientific outlook, all maps remain as
Harley writes “talisman of authority” (op.cit.:-47), especially since the rise of the modern nation-states in the XlXth century and the mass
diffusion of maps in schools and by the media. After having represented more or less accurately kingdoms and empires since the XVth
century, the more precise,
large scale maps based on topographic measurements have increasingly become the
privileged tools not only to direct armed conflicts at distance, but also to settle them far away from the
battlefields during international conferences. This has led to a situation where “the distinc- tiveness of societies, nations and cultures
is based on a seemingly unproblematic division of space [...l The premise of discontinuity forms the starting point from which to theorise
contact, conflict and the contradiction between cultures and societies. For example,
the representation of the world as a collection
of ‘countries’, as in most world maps, sees it as an inherently fragmented space, divided by different colours into
diverse national societies, each ‘rooted’ in its proper place’ (Gupta & Fergusson 1992:6, cited by Rnbinowitz 1998:6). While old
nations or empires were surrounded by more or less controlled areas and buffer zones called marches (Fr.) or marken (Ger.) – which
inhabitants often benefited special privileges – the constant improvements in topographic and cartographic techniques and skills have led
since the XIXth century more and more often to quite arbitrary situations “in the field”. As series of more or less recent ethnographic
monographs have shown, these
apparently simple borderlines drawn on maps by rulers and politicians – after periods with
or without the use of armed violence – have usual- ly needed decades to become social-cultural realities. On the other
hand, studies on the “dissolution” of national borders like the ones by Kortf (1995:248-264) or by Borneman (1992) about the German-German
border show how the vanishing of spatial markers of belonging provokes uncertainties about ones own identity, which results sometimes in
regionalistic or nationalistic activism. These observations seem to prove in contrario the importance for many Europeans of the spatial limits as
essential ingredients of self identification.
POLICYMAKING BAD
FORCLOSING INTELLECTUAL DEBATE UNDER THE GUISE OF POLICY-MAKING COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS CEDES
CONTROL OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE TO DOMINANT DISCOURSE AND DRAINS THE SPACE OF CRITICAL
RESISTANCE.
ONLY OUR POSITION CHALLENGES EXPERT KNOWLEDGES AND PRODUCES CRITICAL
INVESTIGATION AND OPEN ENGAGEMENT
BISWAS ‘7 (Shampa, Assoc. Prof. @ Whitman College, Empire and Global Public Intellectuals: Reading Edward Said as an International
Relations Theorist, Millennium - Journal of International Studies)
One of the profound effects of the war on terror initiated by the Bush administration has been
a significant constriction of a
democratic public sphere, which has included the active and aggressive curtailment of intellectual and political dissent
and a sharp delineation of national boundaries along with concentration of state power. The academy in this context has
become a particularly embattled site with some highly disturbing onslaughts on academic freedom. At the most obvious level, this has
involved fairly
well-calibrated neoconservative attacks on US higher education that have invoked the mantra of ‘liberal bias‘ and
demanded legislative regulation and reform10, an onslaught supported by a well-funded network of conservative think tanks,
centres, institutes and ‘concerned citizen groups‘ within and outside the higher education establishment11 and with considerable
reach among sitting legislators, jurists and policy-makers as well as the media. But what has in part made possible the encroachment of such
nationalist and statist agendas has been a larger history of the corporatisation of the university and the accompanying ‘professionalisation‘
that goes with it. Expressing concern with ‘academic acquiescence in the decline of public discourse in the United States‘, Herbert Reid has
examined the ways in which
the university is beginning to operate as another transnational corporation12, and critiqued the
consolidation of a ‘culture of professionalism‘ where academic bureaucrats engage in bureaucratic role-playing, minor academic turf battles
mask the larger managerial power play on campuses and the increasing influence of a relatively autonomous administrative elite and the rise
of insular “expert cultures” have led to academics relinquishing their claims to public space and authority.13 While it is no surprise that the US
academy should find itself too at that uneasy confluence of neoliberal globalising dynamics and exclusivist nationalist agendas that is the
predicament of many contemporary institutions around the world,
there is much reason for concern and an urgent need to rethink
the role and place of intellectual labour in the democratic process . This is especially true for scholars of the global writing in
this age of globalisation and empire. Edward Said has written extensively on the place of
the academy as one of the few and
increasingly precarious spaces for democratic deliberation and argued the necessity for public intellectuals immured
from the seductions of power.14 Defending the US academy as one of the last remaining utopian spaces, ‘the one public
space available to real alternative intellectual practices: no other institution like it on such a scale exists anywhere else in the world today‘15,
and lauding the remarkable critical theoretical and historical work of many academic intellectuals in a lot of his work, Said also complains that
‘the American University, with its munificence, utopian sanctuary, and remarkable diversity, has defanged (intellectuals)‘16.
The most
serious threat to the ‘intellectual vocation‘, he argues, is ‘professionalism‘ and mounts a pointed attack on the proliferation of
‘specializations‘ and the ‘cult of expertise‘ with their focus on ‘relatively narrow areas of knowledge‘, ‘technical formalism‘, ‘impersonal theories
and methodologies‘, and most worrisome of all, their ability and willingness to be seduced by power.17 Said mentions in this context the
funding of academic programmes and research which came out of the exigencies of the Cold War18, an area in which there was considerable
traffic of political scientists (largely trained as IR and comparative politics scholars) with institutions of policy-making. Looking at various
influential US academics as ‘organic intellectuals‘ involved in a dialectical relationship with foreign policy-makers and examining the
institutional relationships at and among numerous think tanks and universities that create convergent perspectives and interests, Christopher
Clement has studied US intervention in the Third World both during and after the Cold War made possible and justified through various forms
of ‘intellectual articulation’.19 This is not simply a matter of scholars working for the state, but indeed a larger question of intellectual
orientation. It is not uncommon for IR scholars to feel the need to formulate their scholarly conclusions in terms of its relevance for global
politics, where ‘relevance‘ is measured entirely in terms of policy wisdom. Edward Said‘s searing indictment of US intellectuals – policy-experts
and Middle East experts - in the context of the first Gulf War20 is certainly even more resonant in the contemporary context preceding and
following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The space for a critical appraisal of the motivations and conduct of this war has been considerably
diminished by the expertise-framed national debate wherein certain kinds of ethical questions irreducible to formulaic ‘for or against‘ and costs
and benefits‘ analysis can simply not be raised. In effect, what Said argues for, and IR scholars need to pay particular heed to, is an
understanding of intellectual relevance‘ that is larger and more worthwhile, that is about the posing of critical, historical, ethical and perhaps
unanswerable questions rather than the offering of recipes and solutions, that is about politics (rather than techno-expertise) in the most
fundamental and important senses of the vocation.21 It is not surprising that
the ‘cult of expertise‘ that is increasingly driving the
study of global politics has occurred in conjunction with a larger depoliticisation of many facets of global politics, which since the 1980s
has accompanied a more general prosperity-bred complacency about politics in the Anglo-European world, particularly in the US. There are
many examples of this. It is evident, for instance, in the understanding of globalisation as TINA market-driven rationality – inevitable,
inexorable and ultimately, as Thomas Friedman‘s many writings boldly proclaim, apolitical.22 If development was always the ‘anti-politics
machine‘ that James Ferguson so brilliantly adumbrated more than a decade ago, it is now seen almost entirely as technocratic aid and/or
charitable humanitarianism delivered via professionalised bureaucracies, whether they are IGOs or INGOs.23 From the more expansive
environmental and feminist-inspired understandings of ‘human security‘,
understandings of global security are once again
increasingly being reduced to (military) strategy and global democratisation to technical recipes for ‘regime
change‘ and ‘good governance‘. There should be little surprise in such a context that the ‘war on terror‘ has translated into a
depoliticised response to a dehistoricised understanding of the ‘roots of terror‘. For IR scholars, reclaiming politics is a task that will involve
working against the grain of expertise-oriented professionalism in a world that increasingly understands its own workings in apolitical terms.
What Said offers in the place of professionalism is a spirit of ‘amateurism‘ – ‘the desire to be moved not by profit or reward but by love for
and unquenchable interest in the larger picture, in making connections across lines and barriers, in refusing to be tied down to a specialty, in
caring for ideas and values despite the restrictions of a profession‘, an amateur intellectual being one ‘who considers that to be a thinking and
concerned member of a society one is entitled to raise moral issues at the heart of even the most technical and professionalized activity as it
involves one‘s country, its power, its mode of interacting with its citizens as well as with other societies‘. ‘(T)he intellectual‘s spirit as an
amateur‘, Said argues, ‘can enter and transform the merely professional routine most of us go through into something much more lively and
radical; instead of doing what one is supposed to do one can ask why one does it, who benefits from it, how can it reconnect with a personal
project and original thoughts.‘24
This requires not just a stubborn intellectual independence, but also shedding habits,
jargons, tones that have inhibited IR scholars from conversing with thinkers and intellectuals outside the discipline,
colleagues in history, anthropology, cultural studies, comparative literature, sociology as well as in non-academic
venues, who raise the question of the global in different and sometimes contradictory ways. Arguing that the
intellectual‘s role is a ‘non-specialist‘ one,25 Said bemoans the disappearance of the ‘general secular intellectual‘ – ‘figures of
learning and authority, whose general scope over many fields gave them more than professional competence, that is, a critical intellectual
style‘.26 Discarding the professional straitjacket of expertise-oriented IR to venture into intellectual terrains that raise questions of global power
and cultural negotiations in a myriad of intersecting and cross-cutting ways will yield richer and fuller conceptions of the ‘politics‘ of global
politics. Needless to say, inter- and crossdisciplinarity will also yield richer and fuller conceptions of the ‘global‘ of global politics. It is to that
that I turn next.
A2 POLICYMAKING = EDUCATION
FRAMEWORK IS AN ATTEMPT TO CONVERT ACADEMIC PRAXIS INTO ANOTHER IDEOLOGICAL TOOL OF THE
NATION-STATE, WE HAVE TO RESIST THAT TO GAIN ACCESS TO TRUE EDUCATION
SHAPIRO ’07 (Security Dialogue, Michael Shapiro, 2007, pg. 306.
Michael Shapiro is Professor of Political Science at the University of
Hawaii.)
The modern university began, at least in part, as an ideological agency of the state. It was intellectually shaped as a
cultural institution whose task was to aid and abet the production of the ‘nation-state’, a coherent, homogenous cultural
nation contained by the state. Bill Readings describes a paradigmatic example, the University of Berlin, for which Alexander von Humboldt was
primarily responsible: ‘Humboldt’s project for the foundation of the University of Berlin is decisive for the centering of the University around
the idea of culture, which ties the University to the nation-state.’ And, he adds, the project is developed at the moment of the emergence of
the German nation-state. In addition to being ‘assigned the dual ask of research and teaching’,
the university is also involved in ‘the
production and inculcation of national knowledge’ (Readings, 1995: 12).
Although, as Readings (1995: 29) points out, in recent decades, the ‘univer- sity of culture’ has been transformed into more of a corporatetype entity, a bureaucratically run ‘university of excellence’, where ‘“Excellence” . . . func- tions to allow the University to understand itself solely
in terms of the structure of corporate administration’,
there are nevertheless key periods in which its faculties have
participated in shaping and reproducing the dominant discourses of national policy. Certainly the colonial period is
significant.
The university, like weapons technology, helped to consolidate colonial empires. Just as the repeating
rifle and machine gun were instruments used in the European nations’ expansive/violent sovereignty in the 19th century – as John
Ellis (1975: 1) puts it,
the weapons were used to ‘consolidate their nation’s empires’ – even the so-called literary canon,
an academic produc- tion, served as a pacifying instrument. For example, it was invented in Britain as part of a colonial
pedagogy to subdue the Indian subcontinent culturally (Viswanathan, 1989).
AT AFF ANSWERS
AT: BORDERS = SOCIAL COHESION
THE IDEA THAT BORDERS ARE A NECESSARY SOCIAL CONSTRUCT IS BASED IN RACIST AND NATIONALISTIC
CONCEPTIONS OF WHAT IT MEANS TO HAVE COHERENT CULTURE
WHYTE ET AL. ‘6 (Jessica, PhD candidate in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Monash U., Australia, Carlos
Fernandez, Doctor in Sociology and works as a precarious researcher @ Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain, Meredith Gill, PhD candidate
in the Program in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society @ U. of Minnesota, Imre Szeman, Associate Professor of English and Cultural
Studies and an Adjunct Member of the Institute for American Studies @ Humboldt U. in Berlin, “Erasing the Line, or, the Politics of the Border”
ephemera 6(4), pgs. 474-477)
Does culture need borders? Is it defenceless without them? Millennia of cultural interactions, borrowings, and transmutations, and a globe
populated with hybrid forms whose real origins are likely impossible to map, suggest that culture is constantly on the move, always
undergoing changes and transformations, happiest when it finds itself twisted into new shapes and practices.
It is safe to say that
culture always already exceeds those borders in which some have hoped to confine it – whether these are national
borders or aesthetic ones (like the delimitations called ‘genre’). To talk about culture in reference to globalization – a time, we are constantly
told, when movements of cultural ideas, forms, and practices have become if not more common then more rapid and extensive – would thus
seem to require only the unlearning of the conceptual legacy of the past two centuries. It was during this time that ‘culture’ came of age as a
modern concept (Williams, 1985) and was also partitioned off into the discrete, definable entities with which we still associate it – primarily
into ‘national cultures’, but also into the spaces so diligently explored by anthropologists: the tribe, the village, the region, etc. “Every nation is
one people”, Herder writes, “having its own national form, as well as its own language” (Herder, 1800: 166). We know that such sentiments,
which continue to haunt our ideas about the proper space of culture, emerged less as a scholarly or taxonomic response to ‘real’ cultural
divisions and more out of the need to lend support to the emerging political techne of the modern state (no doubt in conjunction with the
limits on movements of peoples that we have been tracking thus far.) After all of the disasters wrought by the fictions of national belonging,
we global moderns are more likely to heed Adorno’s warning about the borders erected around culture:
“The formation of national
collectivities ... common in the detestable jargon of war that speaks of the Russian, the American, surely also of
the German, obeys a reifying consciousness that is no longer really capable of experience. It confines itself within
precisely those stereotypes that thinking should dissolve” (Adorno, 1998: 205). And yet: even as new technologies (like the
Internet) make it all but impossible to patrol the spaces of culture, the idea that culture needs borders has been given new life.
The
especially harsh and unforgiving climate of the global economy has created conditions that seem to require that
culture be sheltered if it is to survive at all. In the era of neo-liberalism, the strain to make every dollar multiply has forced cultural
practitioners to consider turning to the state for assistance – even if the state is well past the point of believing in ‘art for art’s sake’, or in
viewing the university ideal as one of ‘ideal curiosity’ as opposed to envisioning it as an institution where knowledge is produced as a
“merchantable commodity” (Ross, 2000: 3). Contrary to what one might expect at a time when financial borders have all but disappeared,
national cultures and nationalisms are being taken out of the closet, dusted off and once again worn about
proudly and without embarrassment, either as a supposed shield against a global neo-liberal cultural market that is assumed in
advance only to produce cultural garbage, or, more recently, as a defence of the values of Enlightenment civilization against the Islamic hordes
threatening to engulf North America and Europe (best exemplified by Huntington’s grotesque ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis.) Even in Germany, a
nation that has developed an understandable wariness toward nationalisms of all kinds, it has become possible to openly discuss Leitkultur
(dominant or hegemonic culture) and the need to ensure that immigrants absorb the ideas and ideals that (supposedly) define Germanic
culture.
Intellectual debates about globalization and cultural belonging might focus on cosmopolitanisms or a
global ‘multitude’, or look to the myriad ways in which forms of alternative cultural productive have pushed the unlearning of the cultural
borders we spoke of above.
Everywhere else, it appears that not only has the nation-state survived globalization, but so
too has the idea of the nation representing a people and a culture. And while such national-cultural-ethnic
borders may not inhibit physical movement, they are certainly meant to block ideas, to define the formation of
subjectivities, and to shape the identities and commitments of those contained by them. An essential political act
is to assert again and again and again that culture is and should remain unbounded. Cultural practices and forms
have no ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ spaces: the idea that they do is conceptually specious and, inevitability, politically dangerous insofar
as it plays a key role in enabling and legitimating the politics of inclusion and exclusion so central to operation of state sovereignty. And yet
(once again): though it might be easy to challenge the regressive character of ‘cultural’ tests of citizenship (Gumbrecht, 2006), or of right-wing
demands that immigrants of necessity assimilate appropriate ‘cultural’ values and traits (of the kind circulating in France, the Netherlands,
Denmark, Hesse in Germany, and elsewhere), the idea that cultural expression needs protection and support in the age of globalization can
nevertheless be a tempting one. The same nation-states that are running scared about the threat posed by the immigrant populations that
they desperately need (for demographic and economic purposes) are also re-asserting the need for policies to foster and support cultural
expression within their borders. In October 2005, member states of UNESCO voted overwhelmingly to support the ‘Convention on the
Protection of the Diversity of Cultural Contents and Artistic Expressions’. The convention allows states to exempt cultural products from trade
agreements and permits them “to maintain, adopt, and implement policies and measures that they deem appropriate for the protection and
promotion of the diversity of cultural expressions on their territory” (UNESCO, 2005). The real intent of this convention is (to no one’s surprise)
to put a break on US dominance of the international trade in the products of the mass cultural industries (film and television in particular). It
also seeks to affirm the relative autonomy of ‘cultural expressions’ from the larger trade in goods, a separation that other US-led trade
agreements, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, have actively sought to undo (Szeman, 1998). Can’t we affirm the (apparently)
productive impulses of the state to safeguard culture from the market, while rejecting and criticizing the uses to which national culture and its
politics of belonging are being put? Can’t we erect cultural borders in some places, while resolutely taking them down in others?
For those
critical of the dominance of economic relations to the exclusion of all else in the world – something which neo-liberal
globalization has achieved par excellence –
it is hard to resist the idea that cultural expression and cultural autonomy need
protection from the ravages of the market. And if not the state, then who? In the context of our current neo-liberal governments,
the idea of the beneficent Keynesian or social democratic state casts a long political shadow out of whose darkness it has become difficult to
move. But move out of it we must. There are numerous assumptions embedded in the idea of state protection of culture – which is to say: the
establishment of borders for culture – that need to be carefully disentangled and assessed. Right off, the notion that the state that is intent on
patrolling and maintaining existing forms of national culture should be charged with the task of protecting and promoting ‘cultural diversity’ is,
at a minimum, problematic. ‘Diversity’ is a slippery word.
The celebration of diversity against encroaching Americanism or
market culture is one thing; enabling diversity within national borders quite another. The defense of Enlightenment values
against outsiders and the protection of culture from the market seamlessly fold over into one another: the diversity named here is, for the
most part, that of already established forms of national ‘high’ culture – opera, classical music, museums, the fine arts – which have long had an
essential role in legitimating the sovereignty of the state over its borders. As both Roberto Schwarz (1992) and Malcolm Bull (2001) have
shown in different ways,
anxieties about the protection and promotion of forms of ‘authentic’ national culture are ones
that emerge out of the interests of ruling and intellectual elites, and not from the broad masses, who have little
investment or interest in safeguarding the link between culture and state sovereignty. Increasingly, even the impulse to
support non-market cultures is done with economic goals in mind: the support of an essential aspect of the affective labour market; the
creation of conditions for so-called ‘creative classes’ to flourish (Florida, 2004); and the establishment of cultural distinctiveness in order to fuel
tourist economies organized around encounters with managed difference. It is one thing to be critical and anxious about the impact of the
market on culture; it is quite another to see the state – the funding source for the so-called ‘public sector’ – as heroically intervening to enable
non-market social and cultural forms to flourish. The two impulses need to be disengaged. The dangers of giving states the moral authority to
protect and promote culture outweigh the potential benefits, which might include strategic use of state funds by arts, cultural institutions, and
so on, to engage in efforts to shatter cultural borders instead of assisting the state in reinforcing them. Documents such as the UNESCO
Convention pretend to take on what Guy Debord described as ‘the spectacle’: that haze of mediation which has placed representation and
abstraction at the centre of social life. In reality, they do nothing substantive to get at the heart of social drama of accumulation and
‘separation’ that Debord’s concept of the spectacle is intended to capture. Remember: “The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is
a social relationship between people that is mediated by images” (Debord, 1995: 12). To no one’s surprise,
what is at issue in
contemporary anxieties about cultural borders are political ones, whose real object is the maintenance of existing
forms of power at all costs. Culture has no borders, it never has. Why then respond to the threat of the market by giving into
the fantasy of national-cultural borders, a fantasy which, as Adorno writes, goes against the impulses of cultural practice to attack and dissolve
the stereotypes that contain us?
Every border erected for culture claims ‘diversity’ (from the market) or Enlightenment
(against the unbelievers). We must refuse to operate within these borders and the easy stereotypes they offer, and direct
ourselves to understanding and contesting the global political circumstances that continue to make such forms of reifying consciousness
politically viable. No borders for culture! Such a call doesn’t cause the threat of the neo- liberal market to culture to fade; it does, however,
push us away from the false solution of cultural borders and returns us to the task of culture:
the undoing of all borders, maybe
even especially that singular psychic border of commodity culture, which transforms creative labour into dead
things without origin.
AFF ANSWERS
BORDERS KEY TO PEACE
WHEN WE ELIMINATE BORDERS, IT MAKES ALL CONFLICTS CIVIL WARS, WHICH MAKES A PEACE AN
IMPOSSIBILITY.
KOSOVO PROVES THAT PARTITION IS KEY TO STABILITY IN ANY REGION.
DOWNES, 2K6 (Alexander Downes, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duke, More Borders, Less Conflict?: Partition as a Solution to
Ethnic Civil Wars, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/sais_review/v026/26.1downes.html)
<The conventional wisdom among scholars and policymakers opposes solving ethnic conflicts by drawing new borders and creating new
states. This view, however, is flawed because
the process of fighting civil wars imbues the belligerents with a deep sense of
mistrust that makes sharing power after the conflict difficult . This is especially true in ethnic civil wars, in which negotiated
power-sharing agreements run a high risk of failing and leading to renewed warfare. In light of these problems, this article
argues that partition should be considered as an option for ending severe ethnic conflicts. The article shows how
failure to adopt
partition in Kosovo has left that province in a semi-permanent state of limbo that only increases the majority
Albanian population's desire for independence. The only route to long-term stability in the region—and an exit for
international forces—is
through partition. Moreover, the article suggests that the United States should recognize and prepare for the
coming partition of Iraq rather than pursuing the futile endeavor of implementing power-sharing among Iraq's Shi'ites, Kurds, and Sunnis.>
BORDERS PREVENT ETHNIC CLEANSING
BORDERS ARE KEY TO PREVENT ETHNIC CLEANSING
DOWNES, 2K6 (Alexander Downes, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duke, More Borders, Less Conflict?: Partition as a Solution to
Ethnic Civil Wars, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/sais_review/v026/26.1downes.html)
<Recently, however,
scholars have begun to challenge this single-state-solution orthodoxy, arguing instead that
dividing states and creating new borders may be a way to promote peace after ethnic civil wars. One view, [End Page 49]
represented by Chaim
Kaufmann, stresses that ethnic civil wars cannot end until contending groups are separated into
homogeneous ethnic enclaves. When groups are intermingled, each side has an incentive to attack and cleanse
the other. Once separation is achieved, these incentives disappear. With the necessary condition for peace in place, political
arrangements become secondary. Unless ethnic separation occurs, Kaufmann argues, all other solutions are fruitless because ethnic
intermingling is what fuels conflict.3>
BORDERS KEY TO FREEDOM
COMPETITIONS BETWEEN STATES MOTIVATES GOVERNMENTS TO PRESERVE LIBERTY
MORISS 2K4 (Andrew P. Moriss, Professor of Business Law and Regulation at Case Western Reserve University, Borders and Liberty,
http://209.217.49.168/vnews.php?nid=6081, July 2004)
National borders are also important sources of liberty. The Mexican border, for example, offers a choice between a drugregulatory regime that requires a doctor’s prescription for most pharmaceuticals and one
that does not. The streams of visitors to towns such as Algodones, Baja California, are not merely seeking lower prices. Some are seeking
medicines unapproved in the United States; others are looking for
medications for which they have no U.S. prescription, whether for recreational (such as Viagra) or medical (antibiotics) use. Mexico does not
offer the pro-plaintiff tort doctrines of U.S. product-liability law, has lower barriers to entry for pharmacists, and a wide-open market for
pharmaceuticals that includes openly advertised price competition. U.S. residents near the Mexican border thus have a choice of regulatory
regimes for their medicine that those of us who live farther away do not. Border-region residents can buy medicines either with the U.S.
bundle of qualities, restrictions, and rights, or the Mexican bundle. From the level of traffic of elderly visitors I’ve seen at the border crossing, it
appears the Mexican bundle is more
attractive for many.
Borders are thus friends of liberty in two important ways. First,
without borders we would not have the competition among jurisdictions that restricts attempts to abridge liberty.
The impact of borders goes beyond those who live near them. Pharmacists try to prevent the free sale of prescription drugs,
but they would be much more successful if Mexico did not offer an alternative for at least some consumers. It is the margin that matters, and
so free availability of pharmaceuticals in Mexico benefits even those of us who live in Ohio.
Jurisdictions thus compete to attract
people and capital. This competition motivates governments to act to preserve liberty. Famously, for example, states
compete for corporations, with Delaware the current market leader. Delaware corporate law offers companies the combination of a
mostly voluntary set of default rules and an expert decision-making body (the Court of Chancery). As a result, many corporations, large and
small, choose to incorporate in Delaware, making it their legal residence. (Their actual headquarters need not be physically located there.)
Corporations get a body of liberty-enhancing rules; Delaware gets tax revenue and employment in the corporateservices and legal fields.>
PRAGMATISM KEY
FOCUSING ON NATIONAL POLITICS AS CITIZENS IS VITAL TO ENGAGING SOCIETY AND ACHIEVING STRUCTURAL
CHANGE—THE APPEAL TO THE NATION IS THE ONLY WAY THE LEFT CAN REMAIN RELEVANT
RORTY 98 (Richard, Stanford Philosophy Professor, Achieving Our Country, pp. 98-101)
The cultural Left often seems convinced that the nation-state is obsolete, and that there is therefore no point in
at- tempting to revive national politics. The trouble with this claim is that the government of our nation-state will
be, for the foreseeable future, the only agent capable of making any real difference in the amount of selfishness
and sadism inflicted on Americans. It is no comfort to those in danger of being immiserated by globalization to
be told that, since national governments are now irrelevant, we must think up a replacement for such
governments. The cosmopolitan super-rich do not think any replacements are needed, and they are likely to
prevail. Bill Readings was right to say that "the nation-state [has ceased] to be the elemental unit of capitalism," but it remains the entity
which makes decisions about social benefits, and thus about social justice. 12 The current leftist habit of taking the long view and looking
beyond nationhood to a global polity is as useless as was faith in Marx's philosophy of history, for which it has become a substitute. Both are
equally irrelevant to the question of how to prevent the reemergence of hereditary castes, or of how to prevent right-wing populists from
taking advantage of resentment at that reemergence. When we think about these latter questions, we begin to realize that
one of the
essential transformations which the cultural Left will have to undergo is the shedding of its semi-conscious antiAmericanism, which it carried over from the rage of the late Sixties. This Left will have to stop thinking up ever more abstract
and abusive names for "the system" and start trying to construct inspiring images of the country. Only by doing
so can it begin to form alliances with people outside the academy—and, specifically, with the labor unions. Outside the
academy, Americans still want to feel patriotic. They still want to feel part of a nation which can take control of its
destiny and make itself a better place. If the Left forms no such alliances, it will never have any effect on the laws
of the United States. To form them will re- quire the cultural Left to forget about Baudrillard's account of America as
Disneyland—as a country of
simulacra—and to start proposing changes in the laws of a real country, inhabited by real
people who are enduring unnecessary suffering, much of which can be cured by governmental action. 13 Nothing
would do more to resurrect the American Left than agreement on a concrete political platform, a People's Charter, a
list of specific reforms. The existence of such a list— endlessly reprinted and debated, equally familiar to professors and production workers,
imprinted on the memory both of professional people and of those who clean the professionals' toilets—might revitalize leftist politics.14
The
problems which can be cured by governmental action, and which such a list would canvass, are mostly those that
stem from selfishness rather than sadism. But to bring about such cures it would help if the Left would change
the tone in which it now discusses sadism. The pre-Sixties reformist Left, insofar as it concerned itself with
oppressed minorities, did so by proclaiming that all of us—black, white, and brown—are Americans, and that we
should respect one another as such. This strategy gave rise to the "platoon" movies, which showed Americans of various ethnic backgrounds fighting and dying side by side.
By contrast, the con- temporary cultural Left urges that America should not be a
melting-pot, because we need to respect one another in our differences. This Left wants to preserve otherness
rather than ignore it. The distinction between the old strategy and the new is important. The choice between them makes the difference
between what Todd Gitlin calls "common dreams" and what Arthur Schlesinger calls "disuniting America." To take pride in being black or gay
is an entirely reasonable response to the sadistic humiliation to which one has been subjected. But insofar as this pride prevents someone
from also taking pride in being an American citizen, from thinking of his or her country as capable of reform, or from being able to join with
straights or whites in reformist initiatives, it is a political disaster. The rhetorical question of the "platoon" movies—"What do our differences
matter, compared with our commonality as fellow Americans?"—did not commend pride in difference, but neither did it condemn it. The
intent of posing that question was to help us become a country in which a per- son's difference would be largely neglected by others, unless
the person in question wished to call attention to it.
If the cultural Left insists on its present strategy—on asking us to
respect one another in our differences rather than asking us to cease noticing those differences—it will have to
find a new way of creating a sense of commonality at the level of national politics. For only a rhetoric of
commonality can forge a winning majority in national elections. I doubt that any such new way will be found. Nobody has
yet suggested a viable leftist alternative to the civic religion of which Whitman and Dewey were prophets. That civic religion
centered around taking advantage of traditional pride in American citizenship by substituting social justice for
individual freedom as our country's principal goal. We were sup- posed to love our country because it showed
promise of being kinder and more generous than other countries. As the blacks and the gays, among others, were well aware,
this was a counsel of perfection rather than description of fact. But
you cannot urge national political renewal on the basis of
descriptions of fact. You have to describe the country in terms of what you passionately hope it will become, as
well as in terms of what you know it to be now. You have to be loyal to a dream country rather than to the one
to which you wake up every morning. Unless such loyalty exists, the ideal has no chance of becoming actual.
PERM – CRITICAL GEOPOLITICS
WE MUST COMBINE CRITICAL GEOPOLITICS WITH TRADITIONAL ANALYTICAL CONCEPTS TO MAKE THE BEST
SENSE OF THE WORLD IN LIGHT OF THEIR CRITICISM
SLATER, Professor of Geography at Loughborough University of Technology, 1994 [David, “Reimagining the geopolitics of development:
continuing the dialogue,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Vol. 19, No. 2 (1994), 233-238, JSTOR].
In commenting on my analysis of the geopolitical imagination and the enframing of development theory, O Tuathail raises a number of key
issues that can help us further the dialogue that he has positively initiated. He is right to observe that my article contained a series of
psychological terms such as imagination, memory, recognition, enframing and forgetting that could be developed in more detail, as also the
general interface between psychoanalytical theory and a post-structuralist approach to geopolitical reflection. Equally,
I support his call for
a radicalization of our work on geopolitics, and I concur with the suggestion that previous forms of theorization and conceptual
emplacement must be continually rethought and reconstructed.
However, at the same time, we need to be able to move in an
analytical world where there are some nodal points of theoretical meaning which can help us structure our
explanations. And in our explorations it is important that we make connections, so rather than suggesting the idea
of a 'spatiality of flows and movement not fixity and presence' (231), we might perhaps think of the need to explain
the intermingling of fixities and flows, of destabilizing movements and persistent presences.
PERM – GLOBAL/LOCAL
OUR DEMAND ACKNOWLEDGES GLOBAL SUFFERING IN A LOCAL FORUM TO RESHAPE COMMUNITY
INTERACTION
– THIS EXCEEDS A PURE GLOBAL FOCUS AND CAN SHAPE UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS WITHOUT
BEING COOPTED BY GLOBAL FORCES
MERTUS 2000 – Julie Mertus, professor of international law at Ohio Northern, 2000, 32 N.Y.U. J. Int’l L. & Pol. 537
State structures are not the single, defining space when it comes to promoting transformative social change. Social change movements like the
“kitchen tablers” care little about participating in state structures, especially when, as in the case of Serbia, participation would entail
acquiescence to the corrupt methods of a morally bankrupt regime. Instead, social change movements work in the space known as
transnational [*540] civil society, that complex network of associational life that exists below the state and across national borders. No single
map exists of
transnational civil society; it is a process continually in motion, one comprised of transboundary
“networks of strategizing and powers and their articulation.” Transnational and nonstate entitites, with their close connection to and
interaction with people, do wield influence over the development of new legal norms, and in particular, whether such norms are accepted as
legitimate and authoritative. “Kitchen tablers” fit Robert Cover’s vision of interpretive communities that create law and give law meaning
through their own narratives and precepts.
In using the modes of governance that are part of transnational civil society,
they try to shape the way people – at home and far away – think about social change issues. Not only do they
have access to discourse over changing norms, but also to some extent they are the discourse.
Nearly every woman around that kitchen table would participate in the drafting of language for the nongovernmental and governmental
statements at the United Nations world conferences on population and development, housing, or women’s rights. Nearly every one would
speak at international conferences and at meetings of activists, scholars, and diplomats in such places as Geneva, Strasbourg, New York, and
Rome. Some of the women would have the audience of influential [*541] foreign diplomats, and their observations would influence the foreign
policy of sympathetic countries, albeit in an incremental and often indiscernible fashion. Some of them would influence large donor agencies
and effect changes over programmatic trends in humanitarian assistance. Others would influence popular opinion through their writing, street
protests, public art, and other displays.
The activities of social change activists empower others locally in their day-to-day lives: the younger and less
experienced student who gains an opportunity to participate in human rights workshops abroad , the therapist in a
refugee camp who organizes activities for a multi-ethnic group of traumatized youth, and the teenagers in Kosovo who produce videotape
documentaries and organize local youth clubs where the principle of nonviolence is discussed. Social change activists attempt to let their
actions speak as loudly as their words through, for example, the promotion of norms of equality and nondiscrimination by consistently sending
multi-ethnic groups of women to conferences. At their best,
they try to motivate a host of actors with authority in their
communities – government officers, refugee camp elders, high school principals – to think about human rights,
women’s rights, militarism, and intervention. At their worst, they fail to live according to their principles and thus
motivate actors to think and act in ways counter to their own intended goals.
The significance of social change activists is underscored by the ways in which state and nonstate actors attempt to use them to further their
own agenda. Certainly many state and nonstate actors are genuine and even altruistic in their support of social movements. However, many
others manipulate locals to further their preconceived plans for change and/or to perpetuate the status quo. For example, powerful state and
nonstate leaders from western countries overpower their nonwestern counterparts at world conferences. These leaders use their positions of
authority in already-established transboundary [*542] networks to set the agenda, and they use their access to language and diplomacy skills
to work that agenda to serve their own interests. Despite great fanfare, the results of many international conferences, as reflected in the final
governmental (GO) and nongovernmental (NGO) platforms for action, end up being shallow and even regressive. Conference organizers invite
local activists from places like Serbia to lend an air of authenticity to a predetermined outcome; while international audiences listen politely to
their foreign guests, they rarely process what they hear in a way that alters their original plans. This phenomenon does not turn all “outsider”
participants into mere subjects, however. On the contrary, many “outsider” participants refuse to be the good subjects and, even when they
seem to be playing such prescribed roles, they persist on using the outside support to reach their own goals. Thus, they remain important, not
only as subjects of other people’s plans, but as their own agents.
Local social change activists consciously use transnational activities and networks to bring about change in the
policies and practices of states and international organizations. In the case of the former Yugoslavia, for example, they lobby
for the Ad Hoc Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia to take seriously cases of wartime rape and to induce particular large donor countries of
the European Community to recognize and support anti-nationalist women’s groups.
Despite the focus “at the top,” this work has
political relevance beyond the state and [*543] interstate levels. On nonstate levels, the work also shapes norms
about human rights, women’s rights, militarism, and intervention. Paul Wapner has termed these kinds of activities
“would civic politics.” Social change advocates use the language of international human rights treaties and other
governmental documents,
but in so doing, they shape the understanding of the words to fit their local lived realities. It
is in this sense that social change advocates become “interpretive communities,” or spaces that shape and add
definition to international instruments on such matters as the protection of human rights and the environment and to other guiding
norms
that may not yet have gained the status of law.
The success of interpretive communities is hard to gauge with any degree of precision. One cannot attribute new instruments directly to the
work of social change activists or count the number of words in U.N. documents added through their efforts. Even if one could, the results
would not measure the degree to which they achieved their main goal: namely, to influence how communities and individuals understand their
own behavior and the behavior of others according to some measure of justice. Mere words in documents provide scant evidence of changes
in cultural perception of norms. To face this phenomenon, one needs to employ other tools beyond observing state behavior.
In Serbia, I found that a good point of departure for measuring changes in cultural perception includes an analysis of the state-sponsored and
independent media, school curriculum, [*544] and the lived practice of family traditions. Attitudinal surveys and interviews with the same
subjects over a period of time also provide evidence of changes in cultural perception. Scholars of social movements have long interpreted the
impact of activist movements by using these and other methods to observe the diverse signs of “cultural drifts,” “societal moods,” and “public
orientations.” According to these measures,
social change activists in Serbia achieved some degree of success. Before
activists began their campaigns, the popular press rarely mentioned human rights, militarism, or conflict resolution. Nor
did politicians and ordinary people on the street speak of such issues. Now, even state-sponsored journalists
debate these topics and people from all walks of life cannot stop talking about them. This does not mean that politicians
or the majority public see eye-to-eye with the activists. However,
few people dare to say, “Human rights do not matter,” or
“Yes, we are an international law breaker and within the law.” Activists in the Balkans and elsewhere have thus forced
engagement with normative discourse, albeit not always with the desired substantive conclusion.
One lesson I drew from my fieldwork in the former Yugoslavia was a twist on the feminist adage that “the personal is political.” I discovered
that “the political is personal.”
Political decision-making and the distribution of who wins and who loses at the state,
sub-state, and trans-state levels are in a sense deeply personal. Political actions are personal in that they are based on social
relationships. It is through participation in these relationships that the identities and interests of actors and structures are defined. This vision
of the political is closely aligned with that held by “constructivists.” This
me with many tools to theorize about my own experiences.
body of international relations literature has provided
SECURITIZATION GOOD
SECURITY HAS POSITIVE AND BENEFICIAL MEANING FOR SOLIDARITY AND DEMOCRATIC POLITICS---ONLY
RETAINING THE SIGNIFIER OF SECURITY AND RESHAPING ITS MEANING SOLVES THIS---REJECTION FAILS
Nunes 7 – João Reis Nunes, Marie Curie Fellow and Ph.D. Candidate in International Politics at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, September
2007, “Politics, Security, Critical Theory: A Contribution to Current Debates on Security,” online: http://archive.sgir.eu/uploads/Nunes-joaonunespoliticssecuritycriticaltheory.pdf
This section draws from the insight, discussed above, that the political response to the exception need not necessarily install the fear of the
enemy and the exercise of unrestrained sovereign power as ‘energetic principles’ of politics. Simultaneously, the reflection here presented is
indebted to the Welsh School’s insight that security plays a central role in social and political transformation. It will be argued that
when freed from decisionist understandings,
argument will show that
security,
possesses an integrative value and can be considered a ‘necessary virtue’. The
it is possible and desirable to retain the security signifier and that recent work on the
governance of security offers promising insights in the definition of ‘democratic virtues’ within security practices .
The argument presented in this paper has demonstrated that
register of meaning
security has been (implicitly or explicitly) interpreted as a signifier, a
that orders social and political relations in a specific way – that is, as allowing for the rise of a discretionary
and unchecked understanding of power. Huysmans has been particularly eloquent in arguing that ‘security has a history and implies a
meaning, a particular signification of social relations’ (1998:228). His work has shown how ‘security’ can be seen as having a performative – and
not merely descriptive – function: through the use of this signifier, social relations are transformed into security relations (1998:232). Huysmans’
work is a sophisticated example of how the inscription of issues into the security signifier – what he terms ‘security framing’ – has been used
to legitimize undemocratic practices; moreover, his analysis of the spill-over effects of securitization processes (2006) has shown that the
security logic can be discursively transposed and end up ‘contaminating’ other areas (e.g. migration and asylum).
This section wishes to draw from Huysmans’ work on security as a signifier, particularly from his conception of the signifier as eminently
historical. It argues that
we must radicalize this historicity and come to see the meaning of security as the result of a
contingent crystallization, and not an ineluctable condition. In other words, there is no fixed ‘politics of the
signifier’ of security (1998:232); as Rothschild (1995) and Wæver (2004) have shown, the meaning of security – and the set of
understandings and practices that this wide order of meaning entails – have changed through time.
This section argues that
the critique of the current meaning of security must be complemented with the definition of
alternative meanings. In other words, the aim is to go beyond current understandings of security as the suspension of politics,
not by
arguing for the substitution of security with other supposedly autonomous signifier (i.e. politics), but rather by
working within the signifier and attempting to release its transformative potential.
The theoretical reflection undertaken in the previous section can be seen as the first step of this departure from reified assumptions about the
‘politics of the signifier’ of security. By showing that Schmitt’s transcendental conception of sovereign power is problematic and can be
criticized at both the philosophical (Benjamin) and the social-economic-legal level (Neumann), it opened the way for the definition of
alternative normative principles of politics. In other words, it demonstrated the possibility of conceiving different modalities for dealing with
the problem of the exception, thereby allowing for a denaturalization of the connection between security and an extreme conception of
politics based on the ‘fear of the enemy’ and on unrestrained sovereign power. It is interesting to note that Huysmans’ himself engaged with
the work of Neumann and argued that it is possible to conceive exceptionalism in different ways, according to ‘the energetic principles of
politics upon which support for exceptionalism is based’ (2004:338). This section argues that it is possible to follow from this insight whilst
retaining the signifier of security.
But
why work within the signifier of security? Why not recognize the loaded and controversial meaning that
security has come to convey, and rather opt for some other register of meaning, like politics? It can be argued, on the
one hand, that
this ‘strategy of replacement’ – which finds its most concrete materialization in calls for
desecuritization – overlooks the interconnection and mutual dependency between these two signifiers (as Behnke 2006 persuasively
argued in a response to Aradau). This part of the answer has been dealt with satisfactorily and will be left aside. Instead, this reflection will
focus on another issue that is overlooked by calls for dispensing with security altogether: the
positive value of security in the
context of emancipatory change in the political realm, an insight that has been brought to critical debates by the Welsh School.
In this context, this reflection rejects an arguably dominant conception of security as something that is inherently inimical to ‘good’ social
relations (a good example is Zedner 2003) and sides with a growing literature – located mainly in the field of criminology – that recognizes the
positive and ‘civilizing’ role that security can play. Ian Loader and Neil Walker’s recent work is particularly significant here, and offers extremely
interesting insights for a reevaluation of security and a reconfiguration of security practices along more democratic lines.
Loader and Walker defend the idea that
security is ‘an indispensable constituent of any good society’ (2007:4). When
understood as a ‘public good’, security can play an important role in the reinvention of social democratic politics . It
is noteworthy that Loader and Walker directly challenge Schmittian understandings of friend/foe politics when they conceive security as a
realm that deals with the relationship individuals have ‘to the intimates and strangers’ (2007:18). It is their contention that,
when conceived
along more democratic lines, security becomes ‘the producer and product of forms of trust and abstract
solidarity between intimates and strangers that are prerequisite to democratic political communities’ (2007:8).
Engaging explicitly with Neumann’s work on the detrimental effects of a culture of fear to democratic politics28, Loader and Walker argue that
‘a
democratic, egalitarian and solidaristic security culture’ (2007:4) can constitute a powerful antidote to the lack of
cohesiveness and integration of modern societies.
A connection can be established between the positive, emancipatory value of security put forward by the Welsh School and
Loader and Walker’s understanding of security as a ‘thick’ public good, with an integrative and civilizing role in democratic
societies29. Loader and Walker’s exploration of the meaning of security as a public good (2007:143- 169) focuses on three layers: the
instrumental, the social and the constitutive. According to the first level, a social or public element is indispensable to the very process of
producing or providing the good in question – in this sense,
security is a public good because it cannot be produced or
provided in the private sphere, always requiring a social interaction.
The second dimension sees security as an eminently social phenomenon, an intersubjective experience that is ‘based upon the fulfillment of
certain social preconditions’ (Loader and Walker 2007:155).
Given that the problem of insecurity is itself socially generated, the
security of one is dependent upon the actions and attitudes of others . Thus, for Loader and Walker, the social
dimension of security as a public good goes beyond security as an objective situation and points at ‘an internal
relationship between the experience of security and the existence of stable social expectations’ (2007:157). Rather than
functioning merely as a strategic prerequisite (as pertains the instrumental dimension), the enjoyment of security by others has an effect in the
social context in which our own security can be enjoyed.
Finally, the constitutive level of security as a public good aims at investigating ‘how security is implicated in the very process of constituting
the “social” or the “public”’ (Loader and Walker 2007:162). This is arguably the most relevant dimension for the purposes of this argument, as
it gives theoretical substance to the contention that security has an impact in social and political relations. According to Loader and Walker,
the actualization of the good of security ‘is so pivotal to the very purpose of community that at the level of selfidentification is helps to construct and sustain our “we-feeling” – our very felt sense of “common publicness”’
(2007:162).
The public-constitutive character of security can be divided along three elements: firstly, security functions as a motivating factor in the
formation and sustenance of reflexive publics; secondly, it constitutes a ‘way of social being or common sensibility of such a public’ (Loader
and Walker 2007:165); thirdly, it possesses an important instrumental capacity, in the sense that it can become a ‘platform of public power’
(idem) for the provision of objective security.
At this point, Loader and Walker introduce an important element in their discussion, when they conceive the public good of security as ‘an
axiomatic element of lived social relations’ (2007:167). According to this view,
security is a necessary platform for any kind of
society, a true ‘education in society’; it is precisely when security is absent in this axiomatic sense that it acquires the
detrimental features examined earlier in this paper. When it cannot serve its constitutive function in the social
realm, security becomes pervasive in its more unreflexive, parochial and dogmatic forms .
FRAMEWORK TURN
CREATING A CLEAR DELINEATION BETWEEN ACADEMIA AND THE REAL WORLD NOT ONLY CREATES A
DISCIPLINARY SYSTEM OF KNOWLEDGE, THE FACT THAT YOU MAKE THIS ARGUMENT MEANS YOU LINK TO
YOUR OWN CRITIQUE
SPARKE, Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, 2000 [Matthew, draft of "Graphing the geo in
geopolitical: Critical Geopolitics and the re-visioning of responsibility" published in Political Geography, 19, 2000: pages 373 – 380,
faculty.washington.edu/sparke/ReviewCP.html]
One of the most common, albeit uninspired, ways of dismissing the work of critical geographers today is to argue that by
addressing the problematics of power-relations, discourse and identity formation their research and writing has become
disengaged from the real world. I agree that this question of engagement is a crucial one for critical geography to answer, but it also needs reemphasizing that the anti-intellectualism of those claiming objective visions of the real world is itself a form of
disengagement. The trick, or in Donna Haraway's memorable words, the "god-trick" (1991, page 189) of this form of disengagement is that, in the very name
of making instrumental engagements in the world at large, real-worlders set the academy up as outside of the
world and thereby stop asking questions about what worldly processes make their knowledge possible . Indeed, often
privileged beyond the point of self-examination, such
real-worlders cannot ask questions about the power relations that underwrite and
thus simultaneously enable and limit their knowledge. Entrenched in a world of Geography they simply assert
truths about the geography of the world rather than begin the difficult and often unrewarding task of examining
the worlding of geographies.
AT GEOPOLITICS ALTERNATIVE
TUATHAIL’S RADICAL ALTERNATIVE TO GEOPOLITICS CANNOT ESCAPE THE REALIST SYSTEM AND ONLY
REPLICATES IT
SPARKE, Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, 2000 [Matthew, draft of "Graphing the geo in
geopolitical: Critical Geopolitics and the re-visioning of responsibility" published in Political Geography, 19, 2000: pages 373 – 380,
faculty.washington.edu/sparke/ReviewCP.html]
The hyphenation tactic ó Tuathail employs with "geo-politics" can of course sometimes be degraded into a word-play politics where it is made
to seem that the really radical, word-changing-turned-world-changing thing is the hyphen itself. By contrast, the hyphenation of geo-politics
generally serves in Critical Geopolitics as more of a running reminder of the disciplinary exclusions through which geopolitical truths have been
fashioned. As such it prompts both a re-evaluation of disciplinary politics and of the wider political-geographical events and processes
previously left out of the visualized pictures of Mackinder et al. However, with this said, there are at least two ways in which ó Tuathail's own
very arguments about "geo-politics" come to eclipse the complexity he argues is covered over by the palimpsest of official geopolitical truth.
Firstly and with effectively exclusive disciplinary dispatch, the sweeping uses of the word "geopolitics" to describe the spatiality of modernity in
general are dubbed "generalized inflations" (CG, page 16). ó Tuathail argues that the "difficulty with such generalized inflations ... is that they
can efface the historical and geographical particularity of geopolitics as a way of envisioning and writing space-as-global from the turn of the
century." Nevertheless, it seems to me that this very privileging of his own geo-historicized conception of the geopolitical effaces in its own
turn some of the diversity of usages supposedly disclosed by his hyphenation of geo-politics. This may appear a frustratingly disengaged and
academicist point, but as such it evokes in turn the second, more systematic problem haunting ó Tuathail's theoretical sophistication. In this
regard,
Critical Geopolitics may quite literally be read as falling prey to its own critique because, when reading ó
Tuathail's critique of Ashley's critical international relations (IR) work, I felt the words could be equally applied to a
tendency in their author's own approach to debunking the classics of geopolitics. Dissidence takes the form of the critique
of the classics of IR theory [or, as in the case of ó Tuathail, geopolitics] rather than the practical deconstruction of the discourses deployed in
the practice of statecraft.
What is ostensibly a radical challenge to the possibility of theorizing IR arguably works out to
reinscribe the very genre it would problematize (although this is perhaps an unavoidable consequence of a
necessary exercise).... Second, the narratives and discursive strategies of dissident IR [and critical geopolitical] theory run
the risk of becoming merely another form of discursive power politics with the IR [geopolitical] community, another
insurgency that settled down to become an orthodoxy. (CG, pages 173-4)
AFF – TRANSBOUNDARY CONFLICTS DIFFER
MANY TENSIONS OVER TRANS-BOUNDARY WATER INTERACTIONS
ZEITOUN AND MIRUMACHI, 2008 (Mark and Naho, Grantham Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, London School of
Economics and Political Science, Department of Geography, King’s College London, London, UK, August 7, 2008, Transboundary Water
Interaction I: reconsidering conflict and cooperation, https://mailattachment.googleusercontent.com/attachment/u/0/?ui=2&ik=08eb2519a2&view=att&th=13ff346bd6d016ea&attid=0.4&disp=inline&realattid
=f_hjacvrgn3&safe=1&zw&saduie=AG9B_P_o6p833FbULPC-txstLILJ&sadet=1374244183295&sads=HmBrOeglT9ReQbpkbiRqN6UNaYk)
The
tensions over transboundary waters are too sophisticated and complex to be adequately¶ captured by pithy
expressions such as ‘the absence of war does not mean the absence of¶ conflict’ (Zeitoun and Warner 2006, p. 437).
Water conflict varies significantly in intensity¶ across basins and across time, and ranges in form from stymied
fuming to very public¶ displays of hostility, affecting all levels of society, often even in distant non-riparian¶ circles.
Perhaps most significantly, various forms of conflict over water occur almost¶ without exception alongside various
forms of cooperation.¶ The idea that elements of cooperation and conflict co-exist is well understood by any¶ who
survive a relationship. It has certainly been noted in the literature of political psychology (e.g. Mac Ginty et al. 2007),
conflict resolution (e.g. Vasquez et al. 1995), of¶ transboundary environmental negotiations (e.g. Najam 2002), and of
management practice¶ challenges (e.g. Moench et al. 2003; Falkenmark et al. 2007; Wolf 2008). Most projects¶ and research
directed at improving the management of relations over transboundary waters,¶ including many that the authors
have been involved in, insist on the co-existence from the¶ outset. When it comes to the analysis, however, conflict and
cooperation are inevitably¶ treated separately. That separation usually means that the less ugly faces of conflict and ¶ less pretty faces of
cooperation are overlooked, and
the political aspects of the interaction¶ are routinely ignored.
AFF – HYDRO-HEGEMONY PERM
THERE WILL BE CONSEQUENCES IN THE EITHER/OR APPROACH TO HYDRO-HEGEMONY
ZEITOUN AND MIRUMACHI, 2008 (Mark and Naho, Grantham Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, London School of
Economics and Political Science, Department of Geography, King’s College London, London, UK, August 7, 2008, Transboundary Water
Interaction I: reconsidering conflict and cooperation, https://mailattachment.googleusercontent.com/attachment/u/0/?ui=2&ik=08eb2519a2&view=att&th=13ff346bd6d016ea&attid=0.4&disp=inline&realattid
=f_hjacvrgn3&safe=1&zw&saduie=AG9B_P_o6p833FbULPC-txstLILJ&sadet=1374244183295&sads=HmBrOeglT9ReQbpkbiRqN6UNaYk)
This rich body of work is wholly aware of the very complex set of circumstances under ¶ which interaction over
transboundary occurs, notably the complexity of time, space and ¶ changing political regimes. There is furthermore
broad consensus amongst the authors that¶ conflict and cooperation co-exist. The fall-back analytical method,
however, is to examine¶ the two as a distinct phenomena. The most common analytical tool that the body of
work¶ relies on is the continuum, three variations of which appear in Fig. 1.¶ The analysis is greatly facilitated when
conflict and cooperation are viewed under¶ separate microscopes, and complexities are (at least temporarily)
discarded. The use of a¶ continuum forces one to compare the various issues in terms of their relative
significance.¶ NATO’s continuum (Fig. 1a) sees the relations as ‘stages’ towards or away from war.¶ While US–Cuban relations are famously
poor, for example, the current tolerance of¶ deviation from official
rhetoric of both sides would suggest that the neighbours are¶ somewhere
between ‘unstable peace’ and ‘crisis’ with each other (and yet far from either¶ stable peace or war). Delli-Priscoli (1996, 1998a, b)
employs the same device from the¶ perspective of
the US Army Corps of Engineers to characterise the differences between¶
consensual (‘hot tub’) and adversarial (‘war’) approaches to collaborate for the management of transboundary water
disputes (Fig. 1b). In plotting the general relation between¶ two river-basin organisations (RBOs) along the continuum, the author
demonstrates, the¶ analyst is obliged to characterise the communication patterns and trust between the parties. ¶ At
some point (right of point ‘C’), relations may be so poor that the parties themselves may ¶ not be able to manage
their dispute, and external involvement may be required for ¶ arbitration.
NEOLIBERALISM GOOD
NEOLIBERALISM HAS CAUSED CHILE TO PROSPER
LOGAN 06 (Samual Logan
writer and investigative journalist focused on Security, Politics and Energy in Latin America, Chile's Success
Proves Neo-Liberalism Works, 1/6/06, http://www.samuellogan.com/articles/chiles-success-proves-neo-liberalism-works.html)
Chile's regional role is to maintain solid economic growth, proving that less corruption and more sound fiscal
policy does lead to prosperity. Ironically, this is the very message given by the much-hated "Washington Consensus", whose failure in countries such as Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Ecuador has, in part, put these
countries' current leadership in power.
Chile has managed to follow the rule of neo-liberal economics and prosper at the same
time. Such success is in stark contrast to other countries, such as Argentina, where studious stewardship of neo-liberal policies seems to have led to disparity and ruin. Chile's success and reputation of a serious country where corruption is not tolerated
paints the picture that
economic ruin is consistent with high levels of corruption, not neo-liberal economics. Strong economics,
coupled with a successful democratic mechanism, makes Chile the beacon of hope and a regional success story
for government officials in the US and Europe. Chile's pursuit of free trade agreements with South Korea, China,
and now Japan, prove to increase this small nation's popularity in Asia
- increasingly a region of global demand for imports. As a leader of South America's success story,
Bachelet would do well to project her country's leadership to those pockets of South America where desperate hope has fed populist leaders who have not proven yet that their model is better than neo-liberalism.
Chile is proof that
without rampant corruption, market-driven economic policies do work. Bachelet's election will not change that fact.
EXTRAS
EXTRA – UZBEK/KYRGZ
TAKE THE CONFLICT BETWEEN UZBEKISTAN–KYRGYZSTAN AS AN EXAMPLE OF WHAT IS TO COME
MEGORAN 4 (Nick Megoran, 2004, The The critical geopolitics of the Uzbekistan–Kyrgyzstan Ferghana Valley boundary dispute, 1999–2000,
Sydney Sussex College, http://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/nick.megoran/iFrame/megoran_borders.pdf)
Between 1999 and 2000 the hitherto largely invisible border between the republics of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan
became a concrete reality for those living in¶ Ferghana, the expansive valley at the heart of Central Asia through
which much of¶ it winds (see Fig. 1). As politicians contested the ownership of thousands of¶ hectares of land along
the 870 km boundary (Polat, 2002: chapter 2), barbed-wire fences were unilaterally erected in disputed territory,
bridges destroyed, cross-border bus routes terminated, customs inspections stepped up, non-citizens attempting¶
to cross denied access or seriously impeded, and unmarked minefields laid. Tensions flared into violence at
checkpoints, and people and livestock were killed by¶ mines and bullets. Close-knit communities that happened to
straddle the boundary¶ were spliced in two, and a concomitant squeeze on trade added to the poverty and¶
hardship of the Valley’s folk. These experiences of ‘the border question’ traumatized border region populations
and marked the most significant deterioration of¶ relations between the two states since independence from the
USSR in 1991.¶ Such aff ronts to any sane notion of human well-being simply demand an explanation, and that is the purpose of this
paper.
Regarding existing accounts as insufficient, it draws upon critical work within political geography to examine
‘the¶ border question’ as the product of the interaction of domestic power struggles in¶ both states. ‘The border’
acted as both a material and discursive site where elites¶ struggled to gain or retain control of power by inscribing their own geopolitical¶
visions of the political identity of post-Soviet space on the Ferghana Valley.¶
The paper begins by outlining the historical
background to the present conflict,¶ and examining explanations of it. It then situates the study in theoretical
work on¶ critical geopolitics and international boundaries, highlighting the interactions of¶ these with reference to
recent work on the Baltic region. The substantive empirical¶ sections investigate the discursive framing of the ‘border issue’ in the
Uzbekistani¶ government, Kyrgyzstani opposition, and Kyrgyzstani government press, illustrating theoretical arguments introduced earlier .
debate about ‘civic’ versus ‘ethnic conceptions of nationalism is discussed in relation to Kyrgyzstan. The essay¶
concludes with a call for more attention to geography in the study of nationalism¶ in Central Asia, and some
reflections on the practice of critical geopolitics.
A