Foucault-Development K Foucault-Development K .............................................................................................................................. 1 1NCs ......................................................................................................................................................... 3 1NC ....................................................................................................................................................... 4 1NC Link – Policy ................................................................................................................................ 9 1NC Link – Labor (Survivors) ............................................................................................................ 12 1NC Link – Cuban Embargo (TRI) .................................................................................................... 15 1NC Link – Cuba Terror ..................................................................................................................... 16 1NC Link – Aid (Sophs) ..................................................................................................................... 17 Thesis ...................................................................................................................................................... 19 Thesis – Development......................................................................................................................... 20 Links – Mechanisms ............................................................................................................................... 21 Link – Economic Engagement ............................................................................................................ 22 Link – Economic Liberalization/Free Markets ................................................................................... 23 Link – Cuba – Sugar ........................................................................................................................... 24 Link – Cuba Embargo ......................................................................................................................... 25 Link – Mexico – Economic Liberalization ......................................................................................... 26 Link – Aid ........................................................................................................................................... 27 Link – Aid – State ............................................................................................................................... 32 Link – Border Infrastructure ............................................................................................................... 34 Link – Border Infrastucture- AT: Not Security................................................................................... 36 Link – Energy ..................................................................................................................................... 37 Link – Labor Unions ........................................................................................................................... 38 Link – Labor Unions – NAALC/Solidarity ........................................................................................ 40 Link – Microfinance ........................................................................................................................... 41 Link – Privatization............................................................................................................................. 43 Link – Small Farms ............................................................................................................................. 44 Links – Advantages................................................................................................................................. 45 Link – China ....................................................................................................................................... 46 Link – Competitiveness ...................................................................................................................... 47 Link – Crime ....................................................................................................................................... 48 Link – Democracy............................................................................................................................... 49 Link – Economics ............................................................................................................................... 50 Link – Failed States ............................................................................................................................ 54 Link – Free Trade................................................................................................................................ 57 Link – Human Rights .......................................................................................................................... 58 Link – Humanitarianism/Poverty ........................................................................................................ 60 Link – ICT........................................................................................................................................... 61 Link – International Law..................................................................................................................... 62 Link – Iran........................................................................................................................................... 63 Link – Liberal Internationalism .......................................................................................................... 64 Link – Oil ............................................................................................................................................ 65 Link – Population Control................................................................................................................... 67 Link – Poverty..................................................................................................................................... 69 Link – Right to Development.............................................................................................................. 72 Link – Technology .............................................................................................................................. 74 Link – Terrorism ................................................................................................................................. 76 Link – War on Drugs .......................................................................................................................... 77 Links - Other ........................................................................................................................................... 79 Link – Public Deliberation .................................................................................................................. 80 Link – Security .................................................................................................................................... 81 Link – Third World Suffering ............................................................................................................. 82 Link – Western Feminism ................................................................................................................... 84 Link – Western Philosophy ................................................................................................................. 85 Impacts .................................................................................................................................................... 87 Impact – Colonial Violence ................................................................................................................ 88 Impact – Ethics/AT: Util & Extinction ............................................................................................... 90 Impact – State Racism......................................................................................................................... 91 Impact – Global Fascism..................................................................................................................... 93 Impact – Famines ................................................................................................................................ 95 Impact – Turns Case ........................................................................................................................... 96 Alt ........................................................................................................................................................... 98 Alt – Border Thinking ......................................................................................................................... 99 Alt – Intellectual Solidarity ............................................................................................................... 101 Alt – Latin America .......................................................................................................................... 103 Alt – Uniqueness ............................................................................................................................... 104 Alt – Solvency – Aid Affs................................................................................................................. 105 Alt – Solvency – Peasants Movements ............................................................................................. 107 Alt – Buen Vivir................................................................................................................................ 109 Answers to Answers ............................................................................................................................. 110 AT: Perm........................................................................................................................................... 111 AT: Framework ................................................................................................................................. 113 AT: State Good/Key ......................................................................................................................... 115 AT: Reps Focus Bad ......................................................................................................................... 117 AT: Biopolitics Not Bad ................................................................................................................... 119 AT: Development Inevitable ............................................................................................................. 121 AT: Underdevelopment Real ............................................................................................................ 122 AT: Our Impacts Are True ................................................................................................................ 123 AT: Cap First .................................................................................................................................... 124 AT: Alt = Degrowth/Anti-Modern.................................................................................................... 125 Aff ......................................................................................................................................................... 127 AFF – Development Good ................................................................................................................ 128 AFF – Rejection Fails ....................................................................................................................... 130 AFF – Alt Fails – No Blueprint ........................................................................................................ 131 AFF – Alt Fails – Local Bad ............................................................................................................. 132 AFF – Labor Aff – Cap First ............................................................................................................ 133 AFF – AT: Biopolitics Impact .......................................................................................................... 134 AFF – Cuba – AT: Biopolitics .......................................................................................................... 136 AFF – AT: Aid K .............................................................................................................................. 137 AFF – AT: Aid K – State Link ......................................................................................................... 139 AFF – Nuclear War Outweighs ........................................................................................................ 140 AFF – AT: Modernity Bad................................................................................................................ 141 AFF – Hegemony/Imperialism Good ............................................................................................... 142 AFF – AT: Epistemology.................................................................................................................. 143 AFF – Foucault IR Fails.................................................................................................................... 145 1NCs 1NC Thesis: Power, control, and subjugation are not simply exercised through prohibition and negativity but through the positive production of docile and normalized subjects. The affirmative’s economic olive branch is a ruse for the discursive production of “backwards” populations to be “developed” under the tutelage of US imperial hegemony, a move destined for failure. DuBois 91 (Marc, “The Governance of the Third World: A Foucauldian Perspective on Power Relations in Development”, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 16, No. 1, Winter 1991, [CL]) Foucault's definition of power is one of his most controversial concepts, and perhaps his most difficult to grasp as well. There is a clash between his notion and accepted notions of power, the latter having in common a certain sensibility: power that can be seen and felt, examined and seized. In contrast, Foucauldian power appears somewhat esoteric. In spite of greatly different theoretical approaches, power has always been presented as a negative or repressive force. Foucault's analyses of various historical phenomena (e.g., psychiatric treatment or penal technology) led him to believe that "the mechanisms that were brought into operation in these power formations were some~ thing quite other, or in any case something much more, than repression." The essence of Foucault's challenge, then, is to remove the blind spots created by a unidimensional notion of power-a task sorely called for in the social sciences. Redefining Power As Foucault understands it, power-repression in Western society is a sort of anachronism. vestiges of a form of power that used to characterize the societies of the West but, over the past two Foucault does not deny the existence of negative or repressive relations of power, but he deemphasizes them, saying that our obsession with power's negativity conceals the real workings of power. This veil allows other, positive relations of power to function in complete autonomy, beyond suspicion. In its negative or repressive form, power is understood as a force that limits, controls, hundred years or so, has gradually ceded to more evolved mechanisms of power. forbids, masks, withdraws, punishes, excludes, and subjugates. Foucault maintains that power is primarily positive, rather than negative, productive rather than He further states that power consists of a set of relations rather than as a commodity and operates from the bottom to the top rather than vice versa. The hallmark of restrictive, exercised rather than possessed, omnipresent rather than localized. Foucault's conceptualization of power is the assertion that power is a positive or productive force, with the other afore- mentioned characteristics more or less following from and supporting this conclusion. The aim of power is to produce "docile bodies" and "normalized subjects." Why is it that people send their children to school? ls it to abide by the rules of the state that impose the schooling of children upon the public? Or is it not because of a set of norms and truths that have been produced, such as "Teachers are better able than parents to educate children" and "It is a parent's moral duty to send his/ her child to school"? Through detailed historical analyses, Foucault demonstrates that power works much differently than is commonly thought. Relations of power do not determine other kinds of relations (economic, sexual, or family relationships) but are "immanent" in these microrelations. At a particular historical juncture some of these microrelations of power fit together or complement one another, a process that builds "strategies"• of power-the weave of power relations that is the condition for macro- relations of power and more "general" or "global" forms of domination. The state, or ruling class, then, results from the configurations and consequences of the microrelations of power. In return, these superstructures of domination determine the environment of the microrelations and, hence, modify or influence them to a certain degree. Political and economic utility act as mechanisms by which certain microrelations of power are "colonized," "invested," "involuted," and "displaced.°3 In this way certain relationships become significant in realms far beyond their original content. For example, relations between anthropologists and Third World ethnic groups gained new meaning and greater political import with the advent of the developmentist epoch because they became of use to donor country, host country, and nongovernmental organization (NGO) apparatuses. One of the most obvious "beneficiaries" of a Foucauldian concept of power would be the state is an inappropriate target of "revolutionary" movements, insofar as it is an effect of and boundary to power relations, not their source. No matter how powerful the state might seem, it is "far from being able to occupy the whole field of power relations [and] can only operate on the the state, which can no longer be characterized as the central locus of power and fount of evil in society. Consequently. basis of other, already existing power relations." With statements such as these, Foucault inverts the tenets of many emancipatory strategies. For instance, rather than considering the power relations within the family to be "a simple reflection or extension of' the power of the State," Foucault avers that "for the State to function in the way that it does, there must be, between male and female or adult and child, quite specific relations of domination which have their own configuration and relative autonomy.'°5 Foucault might be an anathema to the revolution, but he is the patron saint of local resistance. "techniques and procedures" of the exclusion of the mad, rather than that exclusion itself, were of benefit to the bourgeoisie. The same reasoning is relevant to Foucault supports his argument with the example of madness."˜ He shows that the deductions pertaining to the status of development Given the dominant position of the First World vis-avis the Third World, given that the developed/underdeveloped dichotomy creates an opening for legitimized intervention, and given that many of the grand schemes for national development that have passed through this aperture at the recommendation of First World experts (e.g., "cash crops" or "white elephant" industrialization projects) have often benefited First World nations while weakening Third World economies and have led to enormous debt burdens, one could, in a top-down analysis, deduce that these development programs were foisted on the Third World with the expressed intent of fortifying First World hegemony. So it is relatively facile to demonstrate that much of development activity is neocolonialist conspiracy. What is more difficult to address are the genealogical questions-to discover why certain policies and theories proliferated and how such diverse practices as building dams, providing educational grants, and introducing high yield grains were colonized by macrostrategies of power. The Union of Power and Knowledge Foucault pursues his idea that power produces (among other things) knowledge, and actually bonds the two concepts together in a single entity: "power-knowledge." This destroys the typical understanding of the relationship between the two in which either (1) knowledge provides a tool or weapon for those in power or (2) a new form of knowledge propels into power new groups or institutions capable of exploiting it. The power-knowledge dyad is welded together by causality in both directions: power and knowledge "directly imply" one another. First, the exercising of power opens new relations of power and creates new objects of understanding or rational inquiry. Second, knowledge immediately "presupposes and constitutes" power relations. Turning to the Third World, it is frightening to consider the prominent role played by knowledge of the beneficiaries in development projects, as shown below. The acquisition of knowledge does not merely justify an intrusion of power, it is an intrusion of power. Parallel to the necessary relationship between power and knowledge there exists a complex reciprocity between power and truth. In producing knowledge, power produces truth. For Foucault, truth refers not to some superficial statement of the way things are, such as three plus two equals five or "apples are fruit,"• but denotes an abstract "system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements." One example of this sort of truth is the scientific method, which is of paramount importance in contemporary Western society. At the discursive level, this "episteme" distinguishes not truths from falsehoods but 'What may from what may not be characterized as scientific." The episteme, in turn, is connected to the power relations that define and maintain it and to the grid of power that it gives rise to and legitimizes, forming a "regime" of truth. Knowledge, then, arrives in consciousness following a filtering: not only must particular statements submit to the regime of truth, but only they, from a multiplicity of possible statements, are constructed by it. The institutions and community of social scientists are a major culprit in the dissemination of these truth discourses. When these discourses conform with the regime of truth-when the latter validates or approves the former-then certain discourses or bodies of knowledge are admitted into the category of "true knowledge." In this process, a "whole set of knowledges" is rendered suspect, discredited, excluded, and "disqualified" while another, in the case of development, becomes the basis for policy formation. Hence, "le savoir des gens"-local, popular knowledge-has been assigned to categories in the hierarchization of knowledge "beneath the required level of cognition or scient.ificity.'9 One can see that truth, just as knowledge, supports and constitutes power relations, such as those between the development expert and peasant fanner in rural Mali, allowing the discourse of the former to take precedence over the discourse of the latter, even in the realm of the affairs of the latter. Herein lies one of development's most serious flaws. This devaluation of local knowledge dis- associates specific experience (of the problem) from action (the solution), dooming many well-intended development efforts to failure. [INSERT SPECIFIC 1NC LINK MODULE] The imperial and biopolitical politics at the heart of development is responsible for omnipresent violence, market slavery, cultural destruction, and genocide in the name of globalized hegemony Escobar 04 (Arturo, Ph.D Development Philosophy, Policy, and Planning UC Berkeley, ‘Beyond the Third World: imperial globality, global coloniality, and anti-globalisation social movements’, 2004) One of the main consequences, for Santos, of the collapse of emancipation into regulation is the structural predominance of exclusion over inclusion. Either because of the exclusion of many of those formerly included, or because those who in the past were candidates for inclusion are now prevented from being so, the problematic of exclusion has become terribly accentuated, with ever growing numbers of people thrown into a veritable ‘state of nature’. The size of the excluded class varies of course with the centrality of the country in the world system, but it is particularly staggering in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The result is a new type of social fascism as ‘a social and civilizational regime’.20 This regime, paradoxically, coexists with democratic societies, hence its novelty. This fascism may operate in various modes: in terms of spatial exclusion; territories struggled over by armed actors; the fascism of insecurity; and of course the deadly financial fascism, which at times dictates the marginalisation of entire regions and countries that do not fulfil the conditions needed for capital, according to the IMF and its faithful management consultants.21 To the former Third World correspond the highest levels of social fascism of these kinds. This is, in sum, the world that is being created by globalisation from above, or hegemonic globalisation. Before moving on, it is important to complete this rough representation of today’s global capitalist modernity by looking at the US-led invasion of Iraq in early 2003. Among other things, this episode has at last made two things particularly clear: first, the willingness to use unprecedented levels of violence to enforce dominance on a global scale; second, the unipolarity of the current empire. In ascension since the Thatcher–Reagan years, this unipolarity reached its climax with the post-11 September regime, based on a new convergence of military, economic, political and religious interests in the USA. In Alain Joxe’s compelling vision of imperial globality, what we have been witnessing since the first Gulf war is the rise of an empire that increasingly operates through the management of asymmetrical and spatialised violence, territorial control, subcontracted massacres, and ‘cruel little wars’, all of which are aimed at imposing the neoliberal capitalist project. At stake is a type of regulation that operates through the creation of a new horizon of global violence. This empire regulates disorder through financial and military means, pushing chaos to the extent possible to the outskirts of empire, creating a ‘predatory’ peace to the benefit of a global noble caste and leaving untold poverty and suffering in its path. It is an empire that does not take responsibility for the well-being of those over whom it rules. As Joxe puts it: The world today is united by a new form of chaos, an imperial chaos, dominated by the imperium of the United States, though not controlled by it. We lack the words to describe this new system, while being surrounded by its images ... World leadership through chaos, a doctrine that a rational European school would have difficulty imagining, necessarily leads to weakening states—even in the United States—through the emerging sovereignty of corporations and markets.22 The new empire thus operates not so much through conquest, but through the imposition of norms (free-markets, US-style democracy and cultural notions of consumption, and so forth). The former Third World is, above all, the theatre of a multiplicity of cruel little wars which, rather than being barbaric throwbacks, are linked to the current global logic. From Colombia and Central America to Algeria, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East these wars take place within states or regions, without threatening empire but fostering conditions favourable to it. For much of the former Third World (and of course for the Third World within the core) is reserved ‘the World-chaos’, freemarket slavery, and selective genocide.23 In some cases this amounts to a sort of ‘paleo-micro-colonialism’ within regions,24 in others to balkanisation, in yet others to brutal internal wars and massive displacement to free up entire regions for transnational capital (particularly in the case of oil, but also diamonds, timber, water, genetic resources, and agricultural lands). Often these cruel little wars are fuelled by mafia networks, and intended for macroeconomic globalisation. It is clear that this new Global Empire (‘the New World Order the ‘peaceful expansion’ of the free-market economy with omnipresent violence in a novel regime of economic and military globality—in other words, the global economy comes to be supported by a global organisation of violence and vice versa.26 On the subjective side, what one increasingly finds in the Souths (including the South within the North) are ‘diced identities’ and the transformation of cultures of solidarity into cultures of destruction. of the American imperial monarchy’)25 articulates The alternative is to reject the affirmative as a criticism of development discourse. The hegemony of development is not neutral or natural; localized criticism is necessary to move beyond the Western economic paradigms responsible for so much oppression and suffering. DuBois 91 (Marc, “The Governance of the Third World: A Foucauldian Perspective on Power Relations in Development”, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 16, No. 1, Winter 1991, [CL]) In recent years, a full-blown "crisis" situation has been ushered into development studies by a spate of literature and conferences with such promising titles as "Rethinking Development,"• "Alternative Develop- ment," and my favorite, "Requiem or New Agenda for Third World Studies." (Who is being threatened? Should hungry Sudanese children send in their contributions to the agenda?) Development seems to have become the subject of a social scientific advertising campaign: the world has been offered "new," "another," and "alternative"• develop- ments featuring much-heralded "new trends," "new strategies," and "new directions." Most of these strategies, which fall into the overex- tended category of "alternative development," have resulted not in a rejection of the basic development paradigm but in merely broadening it beyond the parameters of pure economics. A minority within this broad alternative movement, however, has gone further than the rest-defying the economistic essentialism of development thinking and, perhaps most importantly, challenging the preeminence of the development expert. The core of arguments in this vein is that the theoretical models underlying development efforts stray dramatically far from being as value-free as they are presented. Critical of a development based upon Western experience, this sort of alternative program emphasizes self-reliance, local participation, endogenous patterns of development, and satisfying basic needs. These features out- line an interesting approach to development, but their most important contribution lies elsewhere-in the establishment of opposition to the venerated external aid/ technical transfer approach to problems of underdevelopment. In other words, this alternative program gives birth to a competing paradigm of policy formulation, which in tum weakens the authority of the prevailing paradigm. Unfortunately, there is very little force behind this competing notion so that the apparent "crisis"• notwithstanding, development is doing just fine, even flourishing-not the process of development of Third World societies, of course, but the business of its promotion. The effectiveness of radical criticism is diminished because even such alternative frameworks of policy formulation fail to penetrate deep enough to confront the most fundamental assumptions embodied in the dominant development paradigm. To put it more bluntly, strategies have been changed, but the foundations of contemporary development ideology are being reinforced. Above the polemics and disagreements over policy, which appear to distinguish the sundry schools of thought in development studies, there exists a profound unity. The locus of this unity is to be found not in the perception of the causes of underdevelopment or the approaches to solving problems therein, but in the definition and identification of these problems of underdevelopment in the first place. Underdevelopment is defined as a lack-a lack that stands out in relief against the backdrop of a "complete" Western society. The existence of "underdeveloped"• (or "developing"• or "undeveloped"• or "less devel- oped") and "developed"• as categories into which human societies are classified is the sine qua non of the development paradigm. The manifold critiques of development leave intact the illusion that development comprises a natural category. Although a myriad of strategies for devel- opment has appeared and then fallen from grace, development itself still retains its original moral luster. It is this self-evident naturalness and law-like necessity of development that constitute the base of the development paradigm. Development is therein transformed (reval- ued) into something much more than just a desideratum: as Skolimowslti laments, "To be primitive is to be backward, almost half human; to join the West in its quest for progress is an imperative, an advancement, an almost necessary condition of being human." Toward Initiating Crisis Criticism of development has arrived at a dead end: the term "development” is riddled with elemental value implications, yet no satisfactory replacement exists. The situation warrants a genealogical investigation (Why was one form of civilization-modern, Western-placed upon a pedestal, thrust aloft as a model to which other civilizations and soci- eties must aspire and in contrast to which they are judged?), but this paper veers toward a complementary objective: the further undermining of the development paradigm (not simply the more superficial technical paradigms of development but their value-rich foundation). Insofar as they are fundamental (to my society) there is a measure of immunity shielding the underlying values of development from direct confrontation. It is therefore more efficacious to attack development from within. In other words, a certain skepticism must be injected into the elemental layers of development discourse in an effort to weaken the pervasive and indisputable appeal of development: people must begin to harbor doubts. To accomplish this debilitation, I propose to alter the accepted con- ceptualization of development by selecting one of the irreducible build- ing blocks of the development paradigm and development will be restructured in the light cast by a Foucauldian conceptualization of power. Two results emerge from following this exercise: (1) Our understanding of the process of development is broadened, uncovering "costs" that have heretofore remained ambiguous or unseen, placing into question the desirability of even those good or suc- cessful development activities (from whomever's standpoint). (2) The primarily discursive process by which the strategies and practices of development are born and promoted is revealed, therein causing the perceived naturalness of the goal of development to pale. Why Foucault? He sees power in noneconomic terms-not as a commodity, but as a relation. More importantly, he draws a connection between power and knowledge-a link that implicates intellectual fields such as development studies. This perspective is imperative if one is to transcend typical critiques of development, which focus upon a negative conceptualization of power located in the state or related instruments (e.g., the International Monetary Fund or multinational corporations) in order to probe power relations at the local level. The paper proceeds with an explanation of Foucault’s "analytics"• of power, and then to a study of power's ineluctable connection with knowledge (and vice then redefining it, thereby altering the structure of the development of which it is a part. To this end, versa). After looking a bit more closely at the work- ings of power-knowledge, the concept will be introduced into an analysis of development practices and then into the discourses surrounding those practices and the larger process of development. Finally, the resulting picture-"another"• development-will be discussed briefly. Before departing on this path, however, it is necessary to render more explicit one of the limits of this investigation: no new (substitute) paradigm is being delineated. One must suppress the urge to seek out allusions to a scientific "proof" or logical "claim" that the conceptualiza- tion of development arrived at in this paper is somehow more correct or true than the one currently in use. In any case, such an impossible proposition is not necessary. This paper aims not to inspire the rejection of one conceptualization of development in favor of a second, but, through the revelation of another interpretation of development, to corrupt the self-evidence of development in its masquerade as natural law. 1NC Link – Policy Economic engagement relies on the orientalist subjugation of Latin American alternatives to economic modernity. Economics is cultural, not universal – their implicit belief in economic rationality produces normalized subjects amenable to the dictates of biopolitical neoliberalism. Escobar 1995 [Arturo, Kenan Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, UNC-Chapel Hill Director, Institute of Latin American Studies, UNC-Chapel Hill Adjunct Professor, Department of Geography, UNC-Chapel Hill Adjunct Professor, Department of Communications, UNCChapel Hill Fellow, Institute of Arts and Humanities, UNC Fellow, Center for Urban and Regional Research, UNC Facilitator, World Anthropologies Network / Red de Antropologías Mundiales Research Associate, Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, Bogotá, “Encountering Development THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF THE THIRD WORLD” 1995, page ECONOMICS AS CULTURE Needless to say, economists illustrious realist tradition, do not see their science as a cultural discourse. In their long and their knowledge is taken to be a neutral representation of the world and a truth about it. Theirs is not, as Patricia Williams writes referring to the law in ways that are equally applicable to economics, “an imposition of an order—the ironclad imposition of a world view” (1991, 28). “At issue,” Williams continues, “is a structure in which a cultural code has been inscribed” (1991, 19; my emphasis). This inscription of the economic onto the cultural took a long time to develop, as the philosopher Charles Taylor explains: There are certain regularities which attend our economic behavior, and which change only very slowly. . . . But it took a vast development of civilization before the culture developed in which people do so behave, in which it became a cultural possibility to act like this; and in which the discipline involved in so acting became widespread enough for this behaviour to be generalized. . . . Economics can aspire to the status of a science, and sometimes appear to approach it, because there has developed a culture in which a certain form of rationality is a (if not the) dominant value. (Taylor 1985, 103). What is the cultural code that has been inscribed into the structure of economics? What vast development of civilization resulted in the present conception and practice of the economy? The answer to this question is complex and can only be hinted at here. Indeed, the development and consolidation of a dominant view and practice of the economy in European history is one of the most fundamental chapters in the history of modernity. An anthropology of modernity centered on the economy leads us to question the tales of the market, production, and labor which are at the root of what might be called the Western economy. These tales are rarely questioned; they are taken as normal and natural ways of seeing life, “the way things are.” Yet the notions of economy, market, and production are historical contingencies. Their histories can be traced, their genealogies demarcated, and their mechanisms of truth and power revealed. In short, the Western economy can be anthropologized and shown to be made up of a peculiar set of discourses and practices —very peculiar at that in the history of cultures. The Western economy is generally thought of as a production system. From the perspective of the anthropology of modernity, however, the Western economy must be seen as an institution composed of systems of production, power, and signification. The three systems, which coalesced at the end of the eighteenth century, are inextricably linked to the development of capitalism and modernity. They should be seen as cultural forms through which human beings are made into producing subjects. The economy is not only, or even principally, a material entity. It is above all a cultural production, a way of producing human subjects and social orders of a certain kind . Although at the level of production the history of the Western economy is well known—the rise of the market, changes in the productive forces and the social relations of production, demographic changes, the transformation of everyday material life, and the commodification of land, labor, and money—analyses of power and signification have been incorporated much less into the cultural history of the Western economy. How does power enter into the history of the economy? Very briefly, the institutionalization of the market system in the eigtheenth and nineteenth centuries also required a transformation at the level of the individual—the production of what Foucault (1979) has called docile bodies—and the regulation of populations in ways consistent with the movements of capital. People did not go into the factories gladly and of their own accord; an entire regime of discipline and normalization was necessary. Besides the expulsion of peasants and serfs from the land and the creation of a proletarian class, the modern economy necessitated a profound restructuring of bodies, individuals, and social forms. This restructuring of the individual and society was achieved through manifold forms of discipline, on the one hand, and through the set of interventions that made up the domain of the social , to which I have alluded, on the other. The result of this process—Homo oeconomicus—was a normalized subject that produces under certain physical and cultural conditions. To accumulate capital, spread education and health, and regulate the movement of people and wealth required no less than the establishment of a disciplinary society (Foucault 1979).3 At the level of signification, the first important historical aspect to consider is the invention of the economy as an autonomous domain. It is well known that one of the quintessential aspects of modernity is the separation of social life into functional spheres (the economy, the polity, society, culture, and the like), each with laws of its own. This is, strictly speaking, a modern development. As a separate domain, the economy had to be given expression by a proper science; this science, which emerged at the end of the eighteenth century, was called political economy. In its classical formulation by Smith, Ricardo, and Marx, political economy was structured around the notions of production and labor. In addition to rationalizing capitalist production, however, political economy succeeded in imposing production and labor as a code of signification on social life as a whole. Simply put, modern people came to see life in general through the lens of production. Many aspects of life became increasingly economized, including human biology, the nonhuman natural world, relations among people, and relations between people and nature. The languages of everyday life became entirely pervaded by the discourses of production and the market. The fact that Marx borrowed the language of political economy he was criticizing, some argue (Reddy 1987; Baudrillard 1975), defeated his ultimate purpose of doing away with it. Yet the achievements of historical materialism cannot be overlooked: the formulation of an anthropology of use value in lieu of the abstraction of exchange value; the displacement of the notion of absolute surplus by that of surplus value and, consequently, the replacement of the notion of progress based on the increase of surplus by that based on the appropriation of surplus value by the bourgeoisie (exploitation); the emphasis on the social character of knowledge, as opposed to the dominant epistemology, which placed truth on the side of the individual’s mind; the contrast between a unilinear conception of history, in which the individual is the all-powerful actor, and a materialist one, in which social classes appear as the motor of history; a denunciation of the natural character of the market economy and a conceptualization, instead, of the capitalist mode of production, in which the market appears as the product of history; and finally the crucial insight of commodity fetishism as a paradigmatic feature of capitalist society. Marx’s philosophy, however, faced limits at the level of the code.4 The hegemony of the code of signification of political economy is the underside of the hegemony of the market as a social model and a model of thought. Market culture elicits commitments not only from economists but also from all those living with prices and commodities. “Economic” men and women are positioned in civil societes in ways that are inevitably mediated, at the symbolic level, by the constructs of markets, production, and commodities. People and nature are separated into parts (individuals and resources), to be recombined into market commodities and objects of exchange and knowledge. Hence the call by critical analysts of market culture to remove political economy from the centrality that it has been accorded in the history of modernity and to supersede the market as a generalized frame of reference by developing a wider frame of reference to which the market itself might be referred (Polanyi 1957b, 270; Procacci 1991, 151; Reddy 1987).5 I suggest that this wider frame of reference should be the anthropology of modernity. Anthropologists have been complicit with the rationalization of modern economics, to the extent that they have contributed to naturalizing the constructs of economy, politics, religion, kinship, and the like as the fundamental building blocks of all societies. The existence of these domains as presocial and universal must be rejected. Instead, “we must ask what symbolic and social processes make these domains appear self-evident, and perhaps even ‘natural,’ fields of activity in any society” (Yanagisako and Collier 1989, 41). The analysis of economics as culture must thus start by subjecting to scrutiny the apparent organization of societies into seemingly natural domains. It must reverse the “spontaneous impulse to look in every society for ‘economic’ institutions and relations separate from other social relations, comparable to those of Western capitalist society” (Godelier 1986, 18). This task of cultural critique must begin with the clear recognition that economics is a discourse that constructs a particular picture of the economy. To use Stephen Gudeman’s metaphor (1986; Gudeman and Rivera 1990), what we usually recognize as economics is only one “conversation” among many regarding the economy; this conversation became dominant throughout the centuries, thanks to the historical processes already sketched. Gudeman’s unveiling of the use in anthropology of allegedly universal economic models is instructive: Those who construct universal models . . . propose that within ethnographic data there exists an objectively given reality which may be captured and explained by an observer’s formal model. They utilize a “reconstructive” methodology by which observed economic practices and beliefs are first restated in the formal language and then deduced or assessed with respect to core criteria such as utility, labor or exploitation. Although the particular theories used in economic anthropology are quite diverse, they share the assumption that one or another universal model exists and can be used to explain a given field data. According to this perspective, a local model usually is a rationalization, mystification or ideology; at most, it only represents the underlying reality to which the observer has privileged access. (1986, Any model, however, whether local or universal, is a construction of the world and not an indisputable, objective truth about it. This is the basic insight guiding the analysis of economics as culture. The coming into dominance of modern economics meant that many other existing conversations or models were appropriated, suppressed, or overlooked. At the margins of the capitalist world economy, Gudeman and Rivera insist, there existed and continue to exist other models of the economy, other conversations, no less scientific because they are not couched in equations or produced by Nobel laureates. In the Latin American countryside, for instance, these models are still alive, the result of 28) overlapping conversations that have been carried out for a long time. I will come back to the notion of local models in the last section of the There is, then, an orientalism in economics that has to be unveiled—that is, a hegemonic effect achieved through representations that enshrine one view of the economy while suppressing others. The chapter. critique of economics as culture, finally, must be distinguished from the better-known analysis of economics as “rhetoric” advocated by McCloskey (1985). McCloskey’s work is intended to show the literary character of economic science and the price economics has paid for its blind adherence to the scientistic attitude of modernism. This author shows how literary devices systematically and inevitably pervade the science of economics. His aim is to improve economics by bringing it into the realm of rhetoric. The aim of this chapter is quite different. Although some rhetorical analysis is used, particularly in the reading of the economic development theories of the 1950s and 1960s, the analysis of economics as culture goes well beyond the formal aspect of the rethoric of economics . How did particular constructions of the economy come to exist? How do they operate as cultural forces? What practices do these constructions create, and what are the resulting cultural orders? What are the consequences of seeing life in terms of such constructions? 1NC Link – Labor (Survivors) The hidden imperialism embedded in the 1AC is exemplified by their faith in labor politics. US Labor has been co-opted and their free trade tinkering will do nothing to change that. The history of labor imperialism demonstrates that the affirmative will be used to discipline foreign workers under the guise of solidarity. Scipes 2005 [Kim, former rank and file member of the Graphic Communications International Union, the National Education Association, and the American Federation of Teachers, and is currently a member of the National Writers Union/UAW. He teaches sociology at Purdue University North Central, Labor Imperialism Redux?: The AFL-CIO’s Foreign Policy Since 1995, Monthly Review Volume 57, Issue 01, http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qHtzXsulSYkJ:monthlyreview.org/2005/05/01/labor-imperialism-redux-the-afl-ciosforeign-policy-since-1995+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us 2005] McWilliams appears to recognize that U.S. foreign policy has weaknesses that must be addressed. In this case, he argues that globalization is doing harm to the world’s workers, that it is a mistake to ignore these escalating problems, that U.S. labor—particularly because of its relations with labor around the world—is uniquely capable of presenting labor’s concerns to foreign policy makers, and that labor should be reincorporated into the government’s foreign policy processes: The U.S. would benefit from engaging international labor in the pursuit of shared goals such as democratization, political stability and equitable economic and social development. An alliance between the U.S. and labor today would focus on worker rights, including ensuring that economic development is not based on the exploitation of child labor, forced labor or employment that discriminates against women and minorities, and on economic justice, ensuring that globalization’s benefits flow to all and not simply to the few best placed to profit from it. A revitalized labor diplomacy today would foster democratic freedoms by shoring up fragile democracies, just as the U.S. labor alliance of the Co ld War era did. (emphasis added) Secretary of State Madeleine Albright recognized the strength of the argument, even before McWilliams published it. After receiving the first report by the ACLD—“A World of Decent Work: Labor Diplomacy for the New Century”—and having a couple of months to evaluate its recommendations, Secretary Albright stated at the November 8, 2000, meeting of the ACLD, “I am absolutely convinced after four years of doing this job that we can’t have a successful U.S. foreign policy without effective labor diplomacy.” She also added: “And becoming a part of the US Government may not have been something you intended in this way, but I do believe it has been a very important partnership.” (emphasis added)17 The ACLD, although initially the Clinton administration—addressed “the importance of labor diplomacy in U.S. foreign policy and the promotion of worker rights in the context of economic globalization”—by its second report in late 2001 (that is, after September 11, 2001), the focus had shifted to “the role and importance of labor diplomacy in promoting US national security and combating the global political, economic, and social conditions that only expected to last for two years, was continued by the Bush administration. However, where the first report—during undermine our security interests.” (emphasis added) This emphasis can further be seen in the title of the ACLD’s second report, “Labor Diplomacy: In the Service of Democracy and Security.” one only has to read a little into the second report to see that workers’ rights are important only if they help advance U.S. security: The war on terrorism provides one more example of why labor diplomacy functions are so important. Working conditions that lead to misery, alienation, and hopelessness are extremely important in the constellation of forces responsible for terrorism, especially when demagogues blame the United States, globalization or other external forces. Policies to There is a lot of talk in the second report, just like in the first one, about the importance of labor rights and democracy. However, improve these conditions are necessary components of strategies to prevent and counter terrorist activities. Effective labor diplomacy is important in informing American analysis and shaping its policy to combat the conditions that breed terrorism around the world. (emphasis added) Further, the 2001 report argues, “…the promotion of democracy needs to be part of any sustainable U.S.- It notes, “These unions are a political battleground because they are proxy political institutions and instruments for controlling the hearts, minds and jobs of workers in these countries.” (emphasis added) Further, they note the role of ACILS in these unions: As the U.S. Government-supported programs of the American Center for International Labor Solidarity ( Solidarity Center) already demonstrate, a policy that aims to cultivate union leadership at the enterprise and industrial sector levels represents the most promising approach to inculcate modern economic thinking and democratic political values among workers in Muslim led effort to combat terrorism, promote stability and ensure national security.” The report discusses “Trade Unions in Muslim Countries.” countries. (emphases added) So, without beating the issue to death, it is clear that by the second ACLD report, ACLD members are seeing labor diplomacy as a vital part of U.S. foreign policy and national security efforts, and they are encouraging the Bush administration to address areas of concern that they have identified.18 This certainly includes conditions that they believe facilitate terrorism, and particularly within the Muslim world. And yet, they state that labor has already been working within the Muslim world, trying to win “the hearts and minds” of workers in these countries. But while great concern is expressed—again and again in the report—for U.S. national security, concern for the well-being of the world’s workers and any possible expressions of mutually-beneficial solidarity-based actions by the AFL-CIO are all but absent. Now, obviously, there is a contradiction that can be seen in McWilliams’s argument, and it is labor’s role in the Cold War one advanced throughout almost all of the government’s foreign policy public documents. The evidence presented in this paper has shown that was terribly reactionary. It acted against democracy in a number of societies and labor movements as well as internally within the U.S. labor movement itself as it sought to maintain U.S. hegemony in the world. McWilliams acknowledges and even celebrates the close ties between labor and government during that period, and argues for their yet he claims that the shared interest of labor and the government is to “spread democracy.” reestablishment. And How can these contradictory claims/realities be resolved? To do this, it is useful to turn to William Robinson’s Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention and Hegemony.19 In an excellent analysis of U.S. foreign policy, Robinson argues that this policy began shifting in the mid-1980s from supporting any dictator who promised fealty and control of “his” people to intervening actively in the “civil society” of targeted nations for the purposes of building support among the more conservative politicians (including labor leaders), and for linking their interests with the United States. Key to this are “democracy-promoting” operations. However, while using the rhetoric of “popular” democracy—the one-person, one-vote grassroots-driven version that we are taught in civics courses and supposedly exists here—the United States is, in fact, promoting polyarchal or top-down, elite-driven, democracy. This polyarchal democracy suggests that citizens get to choose their leaders when, in fact, they only get to choose between those presented as possible choices by the elites of that country. In addition, viable solutions to social problems can only emerge from possibilities presented by the elites. In other words, polyarchal democracy only appears to be democratic; in reality it is not. And institutionally, the United States projects this polyarchal democracy through its “democracy-building programs,” especially through USAID and the Department of State. State, in turn, channels its money and its efforts through the National Endowment for Democracy, upon which the 2001 report comments: “The National Endowment for Democracy (a government-supported but independent agency) funds its four core grantee institutions, including the Solidarity Center, as well as a large number of grantee groups around the world.” This understanding provides a means to “decipher” government reports. When they promote “democracy” and claim it is one of the four interrelated goals of U.S. foreign policy—along with stability, security, and prosperity—in reality, it is a particular form of democracy, a form of democracy that has no relation to the popular democracy that most Americans think of when they hear the word. When labor leaders use the term “democracy” in this manner, they are collaborating with the government against workers around the world, both in the United States and overseas. Where does all this leave us? The AFL-CIO’s unwillingness to clear the air appears to be not an oversight or a mistake. It seems a conscious decision because foreign policy leaders fear a backlash from union members should their long-lasting perfidy become The AFL-CIO, through its American Center for International Labor Solidarity (ACILS), was actively involved with both the CTV and FEDECAMARAS in Venezuela before the April 2002 coup, and these organizations both helped lead the coup widely known, as they should. attempt. ACILS was given over $700,000 by the National Endowment for Democracy for work in that country between 1997 and 2002. These efforts and receipt of the money were not reported to AFL-CIO members and, in fact, the AFL-CIO has actively worked to keep these operations from being known, despite a growing number of AFL-CIO affiliated organizations formally requesting this information. These activities and receipt of this money has not been reported in any labor press, including its own Web site, by the AFL-CIO. And this intentional refusal to As if that weren’t bad enough, labor leaders also have been actively participating in the State Department–initiated Advisory Committee for Labor Diplomacy (ACLD), which has been designed to advance the labor diplomacy efforts of the United States. While considerable benefit address member organization concerns has also been formally condemned by a number of AFL-CIO affiliates. to the U.S. government has been established, there has been no or little benefit to workers either in the United States or in the rest of the world. Again, there has been no transparency by the AFL- In short, there are good reasons to believe that under AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, labor’s foreign policy has reverted back to “traditional” labor imperialism. In light of these findings, it seems obvious that any of the current efforts to “reform” the AFL-CIO are doomed to failure unless they explicitly address the return of labor imperialism at the highest levels of the federation. While certainly not the only issue of importance, it is one of the most important, and this cannot be sidestepped should meaningful change be CIO foreign policy leaders. Active involvement in the ACLD has taken place not only under the Clinton administration but also under the Bush administration. sought. Should this continue to be the case, it is clear that labor activists must consider their own future actions in regards to AFL-CIO foreign policy. The well-being of workers in the United States and around the world—and our allies—will be deeply affected by the choices made. That’s particularly true in the context of their mechanism – the affirmative repeats the history of Northern-led unions “saving” Mexican workers through false and opportunistic solidarity Carr 99 (Barry, History Department Professor, La Trobe University, Australia, research concerns the labour and agrarian history of twentieth-century Latin America, especially Mexico, ‘Globalization from below: labour internationalism under NAFTA’, International social science journal International social science journal, 3-1999) The contrast between this legacy of relatively symmetrical labour internationalism and the trans-border activism of the NAFTA era is particularly striking and has attracted academic comment (Carr, 1996). Since 1994, most transborder worker and union initiatives, whether they involve bureaucratic petitioning under the NAALC or information exchange and solidarity efforts between unions ‘on the ground’ in Mexico, the United States and Canada, have originated in the north – either in the United States or Canada. In the discourse of NAFTA labour internationalism, Mexico is almost invariably constructed as ‘the problem’, ‘the weak link in the chain’ or a ‘Trojan Horse for multinational capital’. The ‘advanced’ character of Mexican labour legislation and the breadth of the social wage entitlements which Mexican workers have obtained over the decades (their poor enforcement and constant violation notwithstanding) are not yet sufficiently acknowledged in the United States -government unions) view the asymmetricality present in both the rhetorical construction and the material base of transborder labour cooperation as a cover for narrow FirstWorld labour protectionism and ‘Mexico bashing’. Given that some of the most active transborder labour actors are linked to those northern unions that have been most vulnerable to capital and labour flight, this is a not entirely inaccurate view. Some US protagonists (the Teamsters are an example) have occasionally introduced chauvinist language into their presentation of labour solidarity issues. The current Teamster campaign against the liberalization of access by Mexican truckers to the US market generates caricatures of Mexican truckers as ignorant amateurs, with claims being made that untrained drivers have been given ‘a licence to kill on US highways’. Perhaps it is no surprise that US and Canadian unionists and workers have had difficulty identifying suitable Mexican counterparts with whom they can work on transborder issues. The FAT has had to carry most of the burden; yet it is a small and poorly resourced organization. It is of course possible that Mexican unions and unionists’ interest in building transnational ties with US and Canadian unions has been diminished by suspicions that ‘northern’ unions have only begun talking about labour internationalism when the jobs of their members have been placed at risk. Additionally, their emphasis on public debate and deliberation masks unequal power relations and produces a disciplined, rational subject. Tan ’11 [Sherman, Ph.B. candidate (Sociology & Linguistics)College of Arts and Social Sciences at The Australian National University, Contemporary Visions of Power and Resistance: On the relevance of Jurgen Habermas, Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, Paper presented at the Inaugural Annual Ph.B. Conference/Student Research Expo, The AustralianNational University, October 26th, 2011] Consequently, it is possible to take Foucault's point even further to present a specific critique of Habermas' ideal of consensus through public debate and deliberation. Perhaps Habermas' ideas do obscure the ways in which power woiks through language. Take for instance Habermas' idea of a "consensus". For Foucault, this is really another form of "totalisation- that is "at once abstract and limiting" (Foucault 1984a: 375-6). Habermas' emphasis on reaching a consensus might actually result in fixing meaning and defining social life in a singular or universal manner (and this could be complicit with certain power relations in society), ignoring alternative possibilities, meanings or discourses. In fact. Habermas sometimes speaks of consensus in terms of "achievement-, but what if we push things further and speak of forging a consensus, mutually imposing an agreement? What if we. like Foucault, tightly juxtapose "consensus" and "discipline"? We then de-naturalize consensus and open it up to questions and problems to which it was previously impervious. We have to consider what might get left out. (Coles 1992: 8z) In Foucault's own words: "there is no prediscursive providence which disposes the world in our favor. We must conceive discourse as a violence which we do to things, or in any case as a practice we impose upon them- (1981:67). Each time we speak, we inevitably communicate through privileging certain meanings over others. And this is an exclusionary practice, rather than one that is ultimately inclusionary in Habermas' ideal of a consensus. Foucault's work, indeed, helps us to attend to the possible hegemony of meaning and exclusion inherent in the Habermasian "consensus". On another level. Foucault's ideas also problematize the apparently apolitical starting point of communicative process often unquestioned in Habermas political theory. Foucault crucially suggests that "it is necessary to determine what 'posing a problem' to politics really means (1984b: 385). According to him. the problem is. precisely, to decide if it is actually suitable to place oneself within a "we- in order to assert the principles one recognizes and the values one accepts [...] It seems to me that the "we" must not be previous to the question: it can only be the result - and the necessary temporary result - of the question as it is posed in the new terms in which one formulates it. (Foucault 1984b: 385) Put in another way, for Foucault, there is no initial social position (or "we") that is outside the influence of relations of power. This has implications for "what it means to ask a question" in politics, and it directs our attention to how the agenda and itinerary of public discussions are already shaped even before the actual debate takes place. For example, if we are discussing the importance of carbon tax, we are already, from the beginning. situated within other existing political discourses. for instance. one which implicitly acknowledges the importance of environmental protection. or one which considers taxation to be a legitimate source of government/national income. Indeed, it becomes important to ask: "who gets to adjudicate and define the issues of concern within public forums?", instead of accepting the Habermasian formulation at face value. Foucault's work also demonstrates how a specific definition or characterization of the "self' (or human "subject") in Western societies comes to be produced and constituted. and this also proffers a critique of Habermas' overall vision of democratic political practice. and in particular, how his theoretical prescriptions actually reinforces the idea of a specific political "participant-or "subject", and excludes other (alternative) visions of what a political "subject"- could be. Indeed. Foucault [...] analyzed how [certain] techniques [...] allow for the self to be created and subjected within relations of power that constitute modern social institutions. [There is also] [...] the production and marginalization of entire categories of people who do not fit what the foundation posits as "normal". (Blasius 1993: zoo) Power may form disciplined individuals, who are rational, responsible, productive subjects, yet that is in no way an expression of a humannature. (Pickett 1996: 458) If we take these ideas more seriously, one does get the sense that within Habermas' own theory of democracy, what is accorded priority is a specific type of political "subject": these "subjects- are individuals who can offer reasonable arguments in rational discussion. and who can draw upon convincing (usually scientifically-based) evidence to support those arguments. From the Foucauldian point of view, one could argue that this narrowly defined political subject is itself an effect of Habermas' own theoretical discourse, and this taken-forgranted "rational" subject that emerges from Habermas' prescriptions, to a large extent, excludes other types of participants and forms of participation in the public spher e, and in the democratic process. What about participants who do not appeal to rational argumentation, but instead put forward art forms - such as dance, paintings and sculptures -as political practice? And what about the role of rhetoric and emotional appeal in political speeches? How can we then accord these participants and their forms of expression an equal status with that of rationality and logical argumentation? 1NC Link – Cuban Embargo (TRI) The affirmative’s naïve embargo removal proves the productive nature of power – lifting a repressive embargo will not free the Cuban people but will simply provide them with new corporate masters. Mark 96 Mark, Detroit, Oct. 1, 1996, The imperialist Helms-Burton law and the myth of Cuban socialism, [http://www.communistvoice.org/10cHelms.html] With Clinton and Congress trying to placate the right-wing on Cuba, another section of bourgeois opinion is critical of this policy and wants an easing of the embargo. They do not want the embargo lifted because they are interested in alleviating the suffering of the Cuban masses. Rather, they believe that U.S. imperialism can best push its agenda in Cuba if there is an opening. They object to the right-wing bullying on the grounds of expediency. They point out that 30-plus years of embargo have not brought down Castro and allow Castro to cement his power by playing on the sentiments of the Cuban masses against arrogant U.S. threats. As well the bourgeois embargo opponents note that there is no viable organized force in Cuba that could presently challenge Castro. Thus, they hold that U.S. interests in Cuba are best served by having U.S. corporations inside the country, even while Castro is still around. They know that U.S. corporations entering Cuba will be a source of U.S. political influence there. . The bottom line for the bourgeois opponents of the hard-line policy is, well, the bottom line. They see the corporations of other countries setting up shop in Cuba and reaching trade deals. They worry that the U.S. companies will be frozen out. This view is expressed, for instance, by Wayne S. Smith, a prominent bourgeois commentator on Cuba who was U.S. ambassador there from 1958-61. In an article in Foreign Affairs of March/April 1996, Smith concludes that the Cuba embargo "complicates relations with America's most important trading partners while denying U.S. companies any share of the Cuban market. The latter is not large, but a recent trade study estimated that the United States and Cuba could quickly be doing some $7 billion a year in business." (1) In another article in the same publication, Pamela S. Falk, Staff Director of the U.S. House of Representatives Western Hemisphere Subcommittee, notes that corporate giants such as GM, Bank of Boston, Sears and major hotel chains have been on scouting expeditions to Cuba. AT&T wants to participate in the multi-billion dollar privatization of the Cuban telecommunications system. The article quotes the CEO of the Ingersoll-Rand construction corporation stating "The embargo is a waste of taxpayer dollars and time" while his counterpart at Archer Daniels Midland claims not to "know a corporate CEO who thinks excluding U.S. business is a good idea, particularly when all of Western Europe is down there." (2) . While it is undoubtedly true that many capitalists do not like the present policy on Cuba, it does not automatically follow that the embargo will quickly fall. For one thing, the embargo has long had widespread appeal among the U.S. bourgeoisie overall, which does not trust the Castro government to look after their interests no matter how many concessions it gives to foreign investors. For another, there is a question of whether the corporate interest in investing in Cuba is strong enough for them to force the capitalist politicians like Clinton and Dole to forgo political expediency and look "weak on communism". (After all, the bourgeoisie spent decades building up anti-communist hysteria against Cuba.) In the case of the huge potential of the China market, the U.S. bourgeoisie did not allow their usual hysteria against the so-called "communism" there to stop economic relations. But the Cuban market does not have anywhere near the same importance to overall U.S. imperialist interests as does the China market. . Of course, the embargo against Cuba is not just opposed by corporations who want to conquer the Cuban market, but by progressive activists who oppose various hardships imposed on the Cuban masses by the embargo and the efforts of the U.S. to strangle Cuba. But it would be a big mistake for activists to think that the lifting of the embargo will solve the main problems of the Cuban masses. This requires not only opposition to U.S. bullying but opposing the Castro regime and the state-capitalist order in Cuba. Indeed, an end to the U.S. embargo means the beginning of the U.S. multinationals sharing in the plunder of the Cuban toilers. The anti-embargo section of the U.S. of the U.S. bourgeoisie opposes the proembargo section from the standpoint of what policy best serves imperialism. Activists who want to stand with the Cuban masses must oppose the embargo as part of a stand against the exploitation of the masses by Cuban state-capitalism and the foreign corporations it welcomes in. 1NC Link – Cuba Terror And, the removal of one country from the terror list does not challenge, but reinforces, the biopolitical nature of the war on terror – they elide the question of why the US should have the ability to exempt actors from enmity in the first place Li 2009 [Darryl, Ph.D., Anthropology & Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University, expected 2011; J.D., Yale Law School, 2009, A Universal Enemy? Legal Regimes of Exclusion and Exemption Under the ‘Global War on Terror, http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1092] Sending out-of-place Muslims home or to another location, however, has often required effectively excluding them from the protection of the law wherever they are, with varying degrees of direct or indirect U.S. involvement. At the same time, the U.S. government through its diplomats, soldiers, and spies, often carries out such campaigns while effectively exempted from accountability to local law. Any U.S. desire for such exemptions is of course neither surprising nor entirely based on GWOT imperatives. But juxtaposing them with the measures taken in the name of defeating an enemy itself marked primarily as “foreign” elucidates the important question of how different outsiders are treated, and how such decisions are made. I refer to this contrast – exclusion from legal protection for and exemption from legal accountability for the U.S. and its allies – as a braided logic of exemption and exclusion. Before demonstrating how this logic works in practice, however, it is necessary to clarify what is at stake when the U.S. and its allies regard “foreignness” as a potential problem. C. The Foreign, the Universal (and Enemies) What makes the braided logic of exemption and exclusion at work in GWOT seem natural? Perhaps the most obvious answer is some reference to sovereignty. This out-of-place Muslims, critique has two sides: domestically, the executive branch is upsetting the balance of powers through sweeping assertions of power, while internationally it disregards international legitimacy and international law. In both cases, there is a concern about “lawlessness,” expressed as an arbitrary and destructive willfulness.37 This analysis, however prescient, is nevertheless inadequate on both counts. Domestically, there is every reason to believe support is widespread (both across the major political parties as well as the branches of government) for the need to pursue foreign fighters abroad and for at least some of the measures employed to that end. Internationally, the Bush administration’s contemptuous attitude towards international law and institutions should not distract from the fact that cooperation with other states38 has always been crucial to U.S. “anti-terrorism” policy, both operationally and in terms of legitimacy.39 GWOT is far too broad an effort to rest solely on one government’s asserted right to do as it pleases anywhere on earth. In order to understand the normative framework justifying the braided logic of exemption and exclusion, let us return to the emphasis on foreign fighters and analyze not what is said about them, but rather the silence around them. This is where the equal, if not greater, “foreignness” of the U.S. and some of its allies in the same sites of intervention stands out. This attitude was vividly demonstrated by Afghan Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak when he stressed the foreignness – and hence, illegitimacy – of certain rebels by remarking that “[i]n some cases, they have to use interpreters to talk to” the local population, as if that were not the case for NATO forces as well.40 The point of this observation is not to decry or to satirize, but rather to point out how the concern over foreign fighters tends to go hand-in-hand with a curious silence about the “foreignness” of others. This blindspot is made To speak from the position of the universal is to assert a veto over the evaluation of differences, according to a worldview or set of criteria that one has adopted as universal.41 This is not tantamount to simply “imposing” one’s own system or views on others, nor does it necessarily imply arrogance; rather, the position of the universal always already acknowledges that some residual differences will remain and may in some cases even celebrate diversity. It also allows for a certain margin of self-critique and selfcorrection. The position of the universal merely gives one the final say as to which (empirical) differences are (normatively) permissible and which are ultimately problematic. From the position of the universal, the U.S. can frame its own differences with local populations as stemming essentially from either side’s failure to live up to certain standards – standards over which the U.S. ultimately exercises a veto. At the same time, the U.S. can assign a presumptively illegitimate value to differences between others. This position can be restated thus: our differences with local Muslims are generally legitimate, but the differences between local and certain foreign Muslims are not, possible by a particular rhetorical position towards the otherwise unremarkable fact of human diversity that I call the position of the universal. therefore the latter are enemies to us all – a universal enemy. The foreign fighter is a universal enemy not because of any alleged enmity towards or from humanity but because he has been declared an enemy by those who occupy the position of the universal. 1NC Link – Aid (Sophs) The discourse of Aid is just the liberal alternative to eugenics – the demarcation between biopolitically valuable forms of life, those worth saving and those merely important for the operations of capital, produce a relationship of disposability toward those the aff targets. This forms the basis for an unending war. Duffield, Professor Emeritus and former Director of the Global Insecurities Centre, University of Bristol, ‘7 [Mark, Development, Security and Unending War Governing the World of People, pg. 216218] liberalism is concerned with the security of people, their well-being, freedom and rights (Dean Development emerges with the advent of the modern world as a practical technology for the protection and betterment of life through harnessing its powers of becoming. The abolition of slavery, the rise of industrial capitalism and imperial expansion called forth development’s referent object, that is, modernity’s predilection constantly to produce life that is either politically or economically surplus to requirements. As a way of redeeming and making safe surplus population, development constitutes a liberal problematic of security. Surplus life is a potentially dangerous life in need of constant rescue and reintegration as a necessary part of constituting liberal political order itself (Agamben 1998). Embracing freed slaves, Europe’s industrial reserve army and the indigenous peoples of Empire, development appears as a technology of security that brackets together and works across national and international boundaries. Cowen and Shenton (1996) have argued that development emerges during the nineteenth century as a means of reconciling the need for order with the necessity of progress. Its key institution is the exercise of an educative and empowering trusteeship over the surplus life that modernity constantly creates. It is thus a liberal alternative to extermination or eugenics, modernity’s other answers to the problem of surplus population. Development shares with liberalism an experience of life that is culturally different as always being somehow incomplete or lacking. As Mehta (1999) has As a design of power, 1999). While different from liberalism, development is intimately connected with it. argued, this impoverished experience of life, and its accompanying will to exercise moral tutelage, is an enduring feature of liberal imperialism. It characterizes nineteenth-century British attitudes towards India, for example, just as it shapes today’s post-interventionary terrain in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond. Since the nineteenth century liberal notions of development have been based on securing or redeeming surplus life through strengthening its powers of self-reliance and self-management. A recurrent theme of development, well reflected in contemporary notions of is a concern to maintain the authenticity of local organization and community in the face of the disruptive and anarchic effects of progress. Then, as now, the foundation of an authentic community-based political voice is the small-scale ownership of land or property. Apart from experiments involving former slaves, development as community-based self-reliance emerged in nineteenth-century Europe in response to the underdevelopment of capitalism (Cowen and Shenton 1996). Underpinned by radical and liberal demands to break up large estates and redistribute land, selfreliance offered a future for the dangerous masses of unemployed and destitute that were a feature of the new industrial towns and cities. Until the end of the nineteenth century development was an important part of domestic welfare discourse. By this time, however, sustainable development, a different and more effective liberal approach to the problem of surplus population began to emerge in Europe – that is, social insurance based on the principle of members making regular payments into a centrally managed fund that can be drawn on at times of need. Extended and deepened by the societal effects of two world wars, this principle would eventually expand to shape In presenting development as a technology of security, development and underdevelopment are distinguished biopolitically, that is, as connected but separate assemblages of institutions, techniques and interventions by which life is supported and distinguished internationally. In this respect biopolitics is not a single strategization of power in the sense of a globalizing or universal disposition for acting on and promoting life at the level of world population. Reflecting its organic ties with racism, development embodies the biopolitical division and separation of the human species into developed and underdeveloped species-life. With the advent of social insurance, earlier developmental approaches the European welfare state, where social protection became a right of citizenship (Rose 2000). to the problem of surplus population based on community self-reliance were eclipsed in Europe. While not disappearing completely, by the beginning of the twentieth century development as a liberal technology of security based on self-reliance migrated and consolidated its association with the protectorates and colonies. Drawing on Enlightenment views on the self-sufficient nature of development as decentralized self-management emerged, for example, in the liberal colonial practice of indirect rule or Native Administration (Cooke 2003). Following the inability of indirect rule to curb the growth of nationalism, however, by the 1940s it had vectored into the colonial practice of community development and the encouragement of producer cooperatives (Kelemen 2006). During the contested process of decolonization, development became an interstate means of differentiating and governing the new world of peoples that nationalism had called forth. The struggle for independence, however, did not expose the connection between liberalism and imperialism thus subjecting it to critique. Decolonization was experienced as revealing a threatening world of poverty that, once again, demanded Western tutelage and trusteeship. In these momentous events, natural man, the global biopolitical divide between a developed or ‘insured’ life versus an underdeveloped or ‘noninsured’ life expected to be self-reliant life was sealed. The effect of development as a technology of security has been to deepen this divide until today it forms the basis of unending war. Thesis Thesis – Development The 1ac is a recreation of the Truman Doctrine – a dream to advance the so-called “underdeveloped” nations out of their state of poverty – but this naïve dream became a nightmare; transforming the world in a hegemonic quest for economic power resulting in the pain, suffering, exploitation, and oppression of any and all who stood in the way Escobar 1995 [Arturo, Kenan Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, UNC-Chapel Hill Director, Institute of Latin American Studies, UNC-Chapel Hill Adjunct Professor, Department of Geography, UNC-Chapel Hill Adjunct Professor, Department of Communications, UNCChapel Hill Fellow, Institute of Arts and Humanities, UNC Fellow, Center for Urban and Regional Research, UNC Facilitator, World Anthropologies Network / Red de Antropologías Mundiales Research Associate, Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, Bogotá, “Encountering Development THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF THE THIRD WORLD” 1995, page 3-4] Harry Truman announced his concept of a “fair deal” for the entire world. An essential component of this concept was his appeal to the United States and the world to solve the problems of the “underdeveloped areas” of the globe. More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery. Their food is inadequate, they are victims of disease. Their economic life is primitive and stagnant. Their poverty is a handicap and a threat both to them and to more prosperous areas. For the first time in history humanity possesses the knowledge and the skill to relieve the suffering of these people. . . . I believe that we should make IN HIS inaugural address as president of the United States on January 20, 1949 , available to peace-loving peoples the bene®ts of our store of technical knowledge in order to help them realize their aspirations for a better life. . . . What we envisage is a program of development based on the concepts of democractic fair dealing. . . . Greater production is the key to prosperity and peace. And the key to greater production is a wider and more vigorous application of modern scienti®c and technical knowledge. (Truman [1949] 1964) The Truman doctrine initiated a new era in the understanding and management of world affairs, particularly those intent was quite ambitious: to bring about the conditions necessary to replicating the world over the features that characterized the ªadvancedº societies of the time - high levels of industrialization and urbanization, technicalization of agriculture, rapid growth of material production and living standards, and the widespread adoption of modern education and cultural values. In Truman's vision, capital, science, and technology were the main ingredients that would make this massive revolution possible. Only in this way could the American dream of peace and abundance be extended to all the peoples of the planet. This dream was not solely the creation of the United States but the result of the speci®c historical conjuncture at the end of the Second World War. Within a few years, the dream was universally embraced by those in power. The dream was not seen as an easy process, however; predictably perhaps, the obstacles perceived ahead contributed to consolidating the mission. One of the most influential documents of the period, prepared by a group of experts convened by the United concerning the less economically accomplished countries of the world. The Nations with the objective of designing concrete policies and measures ªfor the economic development of underdeveloped countries,º put it thus: There is a sense in which rapid economic progress is impossible without painful adjustments. Ancient creed and race have to burst; and large numbers of persons who cannot keep up with progress have to have their expectations of a comfortable life frustrated. Very few communities are willing to pay the full price of economic progress. (United Nations, Department of Social and Economic Affairs [1951], 15)1 The report suggested no less than a total restructuring of ªunderdevelopedº societies. The statement quoted earlier might seem to us today amazingly ethnocentric and arrogant, at best naive; yet what has to be explained is precisely the fact that it was uttered and that it made perfect sense. The statement exemplified a growing will to transform drastically two-thirds of the world in the pursuit of the goal of material prosperity and economic progress. By the early 1950s, such a will had become hegemonic at the level of the circles of power. This book tells the story of this dream and how it progressively turned into a nightmare. For instead of the kingdom of abundance promised by theorists and politicians in the 1950s, the discourse and strategy of development produced its opposite: massive underdevelopment and impoverishment, untold exploitation and oppression. The debt crisis, the Sahelian famine, increasing poverty, malnutrition, and violence are only the most pathetic signs of the failure of forty years of development . In this way, this book can be read as the history of the loss of an illusion, in which many genuinely believed. Above all, however, it is about how the ªThirdWorldº has been produced by the discourses and practices of development since their inception in the early post±World War II period. philosophies have to be scrapped; old social institutions have to disintegrate; bonds of cast, Links – Mechanisms Link – Economic Engagement Economic engagement is a ruse for US imperialism – the aff is a continuation of the interventionism of the Monroe Doctrine Slater 10, David Slater (2010) Rethinking the Imperial Difference: towards an understanding of US–Latin American encounters, Third World Quarterly, 31:2, 185-206, DOI: 10.1080/01436591003711942 p. 189. David is a Professor of Political Geography at Loughborough University. He is also the editor of the Political geography journal For example, in his study of imperialism at the beginning of the 20th century, Hobson argued that in the case of the US, the American ‘mission of civilisation’, and spirit of adventure were clearly less important in explaining imperialism than the ‘driving force of the economic factor’.16 Similarly, Hannah Arendt contended that economic expansion was the central political idea of imperialism, and that ‘imperialism was born when the ruling class in capitalist production came up against national limitations to its economic expansion’.17 It is certainly the case that economic expansion cannot be ignored, especially if we include the ever-pressing need for resources, outlets for US goods, sources of direct investment and overall macroeconomic stability. In the late 19th century the ‘Open Door Policy’ was the first clear expression of an indirect imperialism of free trade, whereby the US’s preponderant economic strength entered and dominated the underdeveloped areas of the world, a policy which continued into the 20th century. It still needs to be argued, however, that our understanding of imperial power has to be more multilayered. Imperial power requires a geopolitical discourse which comes to be rooted in society as a whole, and which is disseminated by influential sectors of that society. Along these lines, Williams suggests that it is quite possible for people to act on the basis of a broad, inclusive integration of information and desires, wherein a framing ‘conception of the world’ interprets data in such a way that political, religious or cultural values may be held to be key, whereas in other instances economic factors may be central.18 At the beginning of the 19th century the US was already characterised by an imperial mentality. In 1809, for example, Thomas Jefferson commented that, ‘no constitution was ever before as well calculated as ours for extensive empire and self-government’ (quoted in Williams 2007, p 60). The idea of the United States as a nation with an imperial destiny was expressed by a host of writers, politicians, and business leaders during the nineteenth century and beyond; Thomas Paine, for example, remarked that ‘we have it in our power to begin the world over again’.19 And in a somewhat more restrained manner Senator Henry Cabot Lodge declared in 1895 that ‘we must be the leaders in the Western Hemisphere’ .20 Throughout and beyond the 19th century the emerging imperial power of the US was codified through, inter alia, th e Monroe Doctrine of 1823, the concept of ‘Manifest Destiny’, which surfaced in the 1840s at the time of the US–Mexico war, the ‘Open Door Policy’ of the 1890s and the Roosevelt Corollary of 1904. The Monroe Doctrine was a statement of differentiation from Europe, and of leadership of the Americas, with the newly emerging republics of Latin America referred to as the ‘southern brethren’. The notion of manifest destiny captured the sense in which the US was envisaged as possessing a geopolitically predestined role of becoming a global power, and the Open Door Policy, as noted above, was designed to open the world’s and in particular China’s market to American manufactured goods. The Roosevelt Corollary assigned to the US a role of ‘ international police power’; wherever there was considered to be chaos and disorder, or threats to civilisation in the countries to the south of the US, intervention would be justified. We may want to add to these four signposts of emerging imperial power President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points speech at the end of the First World War, which emphasised the significance of self-determination, freedom of the seas, economic openness, non-intervention and disarmament. The result for Wilson would be a world of sovereign states committed to the principles of declared, as a clear example of US universalism, that ‘these are American principles, American policies . . . and they are the principles of mankind and must prevail’.21 liberal democracy and free enterprise—Wilson Link – Economic Liberalization/Free Markets The free market is not free – its establishment requires violent and biopolitical state action – undesirable populations are left to die in the name of species evolution guided by the invisible hand of the market Nally 11 – Department of Geography at Cambridge University (David, “The Biopolitics of food provisioning”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers Volume 36, Issue 1, January 2011, Wiley Online Library, These developments are critical to what Foucault describes as a nascent ‘ideology of freedom’ associated with European liberalism and ‘capitalist forms of the economy’ (2007, 48). The physiocrats’ conceptualisation of market forces is principally an extended critique of customary food entitlements – now considered unnatural, even dangerous– as well as a prescriptive programme for a radically different kind of provisioning economy. For this reason Foucault is keen to point out that laissez-faire economics does not imply that ‘everything is left alone’. The liberalisation of the food system –‘not interfering, allowing freedom of movement, letting things take their course’– only succeeds by reformulating ‘the permitted and the forbidden’ (Foucault 2007, 45–6) to produce a novel social order and a new level of working on reality called ‘the economy’. Furthermore, the imposition of free markets will require the active collusion of state forces: ‘anti-scarcity systems’ will have to be dismantled; legislative assistance will be needed to place grain markets in private hands; the repressive powers of the police may be called upon to quell revolt, and so on. In other words, free markets emerge from the intimate connections forged between the state and capital. The assumption that markets are ‘natural systems’ operating outside of power and politics is itself an invention of the 19th century that takes for granted the violent manner in which the state must eliminate all behaviour that is now deemed aberrant or undesirable. The transition to a free-trade economy also does not mean that famines and other catastrophes will in future be prevented. As mentioned above, re-ordering the food system will in some instances require an increase in repressive measures as artisans, small-holders and agricultural labourers are forced to bear the costs of market regulation (Block’s introduction to Polanyi 2001, xxvii). In Foucault’s words, there will no longer be any scarcity in general, on condition that for a whole series of people, in a whole series of markets, there was some scarcity, some dearness [in price], some difficulty in buying wheat, and consequentially some hunger, and it may well be that some people die of hunger after all … the scarcity that caused the death of individuals not only does not disappear, it must not disappear. (2007, 42, emphasis added) Put another way, the old problem of ‘hunger amidst scarcity’ will give way to the distinctly modern crisis of ‘hunger amidst abundance’ (Araghi 2000, 155). Finally, t o legitimise this new biopolitics of provision an ideological distinction between ‘peoples’ and ‘populations’ must be introduced. According to Foucault, the population includes those who conform or adapt to the new economic order; they fall in line with market regulation, even promoting it as a means to attain greater security. The people, on the other hand, are those who ‘disrupt the system’ and ‘throw themselves on the supplies’. They reject the new regime of planned scarcity, and therefore ‘do not really belong to the population’ (2007, 44). For Foucault the act of ‘letting die’ is profoundly connected to the classification of undesirables – what Giorgio Agamben (1995) would later term homines sacri– who are now represented as ‘threats, either external or internal, to the population’ (Foucault 2003, 256). In a liberal biopolitical economy, he concludes, killing or the imperative to kill is acceptable only if it results not in a victory over political adversaries, but in the elimination of the biological threat to and improvement of the species or race. (2003, 256; see also Minca 2006) Link – Cuba – Sugar The aff is a repetition of pre-Castro US imperialism – investment in sugar is used to foster Cuban dependency on the US LEOGRANDE and THOMAS 02 [William, Dean of the American University School of Public Affairs and frequent publisher and expert on Latin America, “Cuba's Quest for Economic Independence”, Cambridge University Press. P. 325-327] In the late eighteenth century sugar displaced tobacco as Cuba's principal crop, and comparative advantage soon made the island the dominant producer in the world market. By 1856 Cuba produced 25 per cent of the world's sugar - two and half times more than its closest competitor, the British West Indies.1 For over a century sugar brought Cuba prosperity, dulling the economic conflicts that fuelled the wars of independence in Spain's other New World colonies. The rise of sugar also linked Cuba to the United States, a thriving market with limited domestic sugar production.2 In 1884, when a collapse in international sugar prices pushed many Cuban sugar mills into bankruptcy, capital from the United States poured into the island, consolidating and modernising the sugar sector. In 1898 Washington's desire to protect these new economic interests contributed to the decision to intervene in Cuba's war of independence. The subsequent US occupation of the island tied its economy ever closer to the United States as US military governors promulgated laws giving US firms concessionary access to the Cuban market.3 By the late 1920S US firms controlled 75 per cent of the sugar industry, and most of the mines, railroads, and public utilities.4 The revolution of 1959 was animated in part by a nationalist desire to reduce Cuba's dependency on the United States.' By 1960 Cuba's revolutionary leaders had concluded that the path to economic independence and development was socialism, and before the year was out $I billion of US direct investment had been nationalised. Thus ended, in one convulsive rupture, a century and a half of US dominance over the Cuban economy. Cuba's revolutionary government could not have survived Washington's declaration of economic war without external assistance. In the decade before 1959, 69.1 per cent of Cuban trade (representing 38.8 per cent of Cuban Gross National Product, GNP) was with the United States, and 54.8 per cent of Cuban sugar was sold in the US market." With the help of the Soviet Union Cuba's international economic relations were radically transformed; by 1962 trade with the United States had fallen to zero, and trade with the Soviet Union - negligible before 195 9- had jumped to 49.3 per cent of all Cuban trade.7 Having ended Cuba's dependency on the United States, the revolutionary leadership next took aim at sugar. Their first development strategy, pursued until 1963, planned for balanced growth based on agricultural diversification and rapid development of both light and heavy industry. This strategy enjoyed some initial success, but by 196I, bottlenecks associated with the shift from the market to central planning began to appear; the growth rate faltered, and started to decline (Table 1). Reduced sugar production (as called for in the diversification plan), together with an unanticipated fall in world sugar prices, cut export earnings drastically and led to a severe balance of payments crisis. By 1963 the government was running a balance of payments deficit of more than $300 million (Table 2) Link – Cuba Embargo The affirmative’s naïve embargo politics proves the productive nature of power – lifting the repressive embargo will not free the Cuban people but will simply provide them with new corporate masters. Mark 96 Mark, Detroit, Oct. 1, 1996, The imperialist Helms-Burton law and the myth of Cuban socialism, [http://www.communistvoice.org/10cHelms.html] With Clinton and Congress trying to placate the right-wing on Cuba, another section of bourgeois opinion is critical of this policy and wants an easing of the embargo. They do not want the embargo lifted because they are interested in alleviating the suffering of the Cuban masses. Rather, they believe that U.S. imperialism can best push its agenda in Cuba if there is an opening. They object to the right-wing bullying on the grounds of expediency. They point out that 30-plus years of embargo have not brought down Castro and allow Castro to cement his power by playing on the sentiments of the Cuban masses against arrogant U.S. threats. As well the bourgeois embargo opponents note that there is no viable organized force in Cuba that could presently challenge Castro. Thus, they hold that U.S. interests in Cuba are best served by having U.S. corporations inside the country, even while Castro is still around. They know that U.S. corporations entering Cuba will be a source of U.S. political influence there. . The bottom line for the bourgeois opponents of the hard-line policy is, well, the bottom line. They see the corporations of other countries setting up shop in Cuba and reaching trade deals. They worry that the U.S. companies will be frozen out. This view is expressed, for instance, by Wayne S. Smith, a prominent bourgeois commentator on Cuba who was U.S. ambassador there from 1958-61. In an article in Foreign Affairs of March/April 1996, Smith concludes that the Cuba embargo "complicates relations with America's most important trading partners while denying U.S. companies any share of the Cuban market. The latter is not large, but a recent trade study estimated that the United States and Cuba could quickly be doing some $7 billion a year in business." (1) In another article in the same publication, Pamela S. Falk, Staff Director of the U.S. House of Representatives Western Hemisphere Subcommittee, notes that corporate giants such as GM, Bank of Boston, Sears and major hotel chains have been on scouting expeditions to Cuba. AT&T wants to participate in the multi-billion dollar privatization of the Cuban telecommunications system. The article quotes the CEO of the Ingersoll-Rand construction corporation stating "The embargo is a waste of taxpayer dollars and time" while his counterpart at Archer Daniels Midland claims not to "know a corporate CEO who thinks excluding U.S. business is a good idea, particularly when all of Western Europe is down there." (2) . While it is undoubtedly true that many capitalists do not like the present policy on Cuba, it does not automatically follow that the embargo will quickly fall. For one thing, the embargo has long had widespread appeal among the U.S. bourgeoisie overall, which does not trust the Castro government to look after their interests no matter how many concessions it gives to foreign investors. For another, there is a question of whether the corporate interest in investing in Cuba is strong enough for them to force the capitalist politicians like Clinton and Dole to forgo political expediency and look "weak on communism". (After all, the bourgeoisie spent decades building up anti-communist hysteria against Cuba.) In the case of the huge potential of the China market, the U.S. bourgeoisie did not allow their usual hysteria against the so-called "communism" there to stop economic relations. But the Cuban market does not have anywhere near the same importance to overall U.S. imperialist interests as does the China market. . Of course, the embargo against Cuba is not just opposed by corporations who want to conquer the Cuban market, but by progressive activists who oppose various hardships imposed on the Cuban masses by the embargo and the efforts of the U.S. to strangle Cuba. But it would be a big mistake for activists to think that the lifting of the embargo will solve the main problems of the Cuban masses. This requires not only opposition to U.S. bullying but opposing the Castro regime and the state-capitalist order in Cuba. Indeed, an end to the U.S. embargo means the beginning of the U.S. multinationals sharing in the plunder of the Cuban toilers. The anti-embargo section of the U.S. of the U.S. bourgeoisie opposes the proembargo section from the standpoint of what policy best serves imperialism. Activists who want to stand with the Cuban masses must oppose the embargo as part of a stand against the exploitation of the masses by Cuban state-capitalism and the foreign corporations it welcomes in. Link – Mexico – Economic Liberalization The xenophobic racism that accompanies border enforcement discourse is the flipside of the affirmative’s economic liberalization – the relaxation of markets requires the disciplinary securitization of migrant bodies Coleman ’05 [M. Coleman, “U.S. statecraft and the U.S.–Mexico border as security/economy nexus” p. 186-187] Efforts to theorize the U.S.–Mexico border in these paradoxical terms (see, for example, Andreas & Snyder, 2000; Blatter, 2001; Kearney, 1998; Lowenthal & Burgess, 1993; Pellerin, 1999; Sadowski-Smith, 2002) cannot be reviewed here in any detail. Instead, I will narrow my focus to two important and groundbreaking analyses by Andreas (2000) and Nevins (2002). Starting from the assumption that relations in the border region are characterized by a mix of interdependence and assymetricality (see also Herzog, 1990; Martı´nez, 1994), with the U.S. the dominant partner that defines in large part the terms of collaboration and integration (see also Castan˜ eda, 2003), Andreas and Nevins tackle the problem of how U.S. statecraft 186 M. Coleman / Political Geography 24 (2005) 185–209 simultaneously nationalizes and internationalizes the gated-yet-global border with Mexico. Andreas provides a sociological analysis of law enforcement, and proposes that the U.S.–Mexico border is a stage and that border policing is an audience directed performance. The latter, for Andreas, is less about the ‘‘instrumental goal of law enforcement’’ and more about the ‘‘expressive role of law enforcement’’ (Andreas, 2000: 11), with the symbolic functionality of policing connected to the project of making a porous trade border in the region. For Andreas, the performance of the border as a blockade ensures that the larger process of economic integration will not be derailed by domestic and bilateral politicking over drug trafficking and migration issues: ‘‘Part of the political project of turning the border into a more expansive economic bridge has also involved making it at least appear to be a more formidable police barrier ’’ (2000: 141; emphasis added). Although not denying the symbolic importance of U.S. geopolitical practice in the border region, Nevins (2002) suggests that border policing cannot be condensed to a media event. Rather, Nevins counsels that as a real-world militarized practice responsible for large numbers of migrant deaths (see also Eschbach, Hagan, Rodriguez, Herna´ndez-Le´on, & Bailey, 1999), border policing tends to complement the neoliberalization of the border in that it concerns a xenophobic and hypernationalist instatement of borderland law and order against flows of migrants unleashed by the liberalization of rural and urban Mexico. In this sense, Nevins names the U.S. a ‘‘gatekeeper state’’ which manages the migratory fallout of U.S.-led Mexican market restructuring. The gatekeeper state, Nevins argues, provides ‘‘extraterritorial opportunities for national territory-based capital (thus intensifying the process of globalization) while, somewhat paradoxically, providing security against the perceived social costs unleashed by globalization’’ (2002: 178). Both Andreas and Nevins caution against a theorization of U.S. statecraft as a coherent phenomenon. However, the tendency in both projects is, generally, to look for the points of coincidence between U.S. geopolitical and geoeconomic practice in the border region. This tendency is front and center in Andreas’ analysis, in which border policing is presented more or less functionally in terms of a larger U.S. project of continental neoliberalization. For example, Andreas seems to suggest that U.S. geopolitical practice (i.e. customs and immigration policing) exists as a second-order theatrical foil to U.S. geoeconomic interests (i.e. free trade), such that ‘‘real’’ U.S. trade interests are strategically accompanied by parallel security ‘‘images’’. In contrast, the incoherences of U.S. policy in the borderlands – specifically, the struggle between the U.S. free trade and border policing agendas, in both local and national contexts – are stated much more forcefully in Nevins’ work which is concerned to highlight how ‘‘different boundary regulatory regimes relate to the [contradictory] security and opportunity components of the modern territorial state’’ (2002: 178). This said, in his specific empirical discussion of U.S. border policing in the mid- to late-1990s, Nevins’ argument tends to reconcile U.S. geopolitical practice in the borderlands with U.S. geoeconomic interests. For Nevins, the U.S.-led NAFTAization of the border region and U.S. border policing go hand in hand as far as both are corresponding disciplinary practices, the former focused on markets and the latter focused on bodies disenfranchized by economic M. Coleman / Political Geography 24 (2005) 185–209 187 restructuring. Importantly, Nevins does not suggest that this coincidence is intended, but rather that economic liberalization has compelled the militarization of the U.S. Southwest border as migrants are pushed northwards. In this sense, Nevins considers the patterned meeting of U.S. geopolitical and geoeconomic policies in the region rather than their intended coherences. Link – Aid The discourse of Aid is just the liberal alternative to eugenics – the demarcation between biopolitically valuable forms of life, those worth saving and those merely important for the operations of capital, produce a relationship of disposability toward those the aff targets. This forms the basis for an unending war. Duffield, Professor Emeritus and former Director of the Global Insecurities Centre, University of Bristol, ‘7 [Mark, Development, Security and Unending War Governing the World of People, pg. 216218] liberalism is concerned with the security of people, their well-being, freedom and rights (Dean Development emerges with the advent of the modern world as a practical technology for the protection and betterment of life through harnessing its powers of becoming. The abolition of slavery, the rise of industrial capitalism and imperial expansion called forth development’s referent object, that is, modernity’s predilection constantly to produce life that is either politically or economically surplus to requirements. As a way of redeeming and making safe surplus population, development constitutes a liberal problematic of security. Surplus life is a potentially dangerous life in need of constant rescue and reintegration as a necessary part of constituting liberal political order itself (Agamben 1998). Embracing freed slaves, Europe’s industrial reserve army and the indigenous peoples of Empire, development appears as a technology of security that brackets together and works across national and international boundaries. Cowen and Shenton (1996) have argued that development emerges during the nineteenth century as a means of reconciling the need for order with the necessity of progress. Its key institution is the exercise of an educative and empowering trusteeship over the surplus life that modernity constantly creates. It is thus a liberal alternative to extermination or eugenics, modernity’s other answers to the problem of surplus population. Development shares with liberalism an experience of life that is culturally different as always being somehow incomplete or lacking. As Mehta (1999) has As a design of power, 1999). While different from liberalism, development is intimately connected with it. argued, this impoverished experience of life, and its accompanying will to exercise moral tutelage, is an enduring feature of liberal imperialism. It characterizes nineteenth-century British attitudes towards India, for example, just as it shapes today’s post-interventionary terrain in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond. Since the nineteenth century liberal notions of development have been based on securing or redeeming surplus life through strengthening its powers of self-reliance and self-management. A recurrent theme of development, well reflected in contemporary notions of is a concern to maintain the authenticity of local organization and community in the face of the disruptive and anarchic effects of progress. Then, as now, the foundation of an authentic community-based political voice is the small-scale ownership of land or property. Apart from experiments involving former slaves, development as community-based self-reliance emerged in nineteenth-century Europe in response to the underdevelopment of capitalism (Cowen and Shenton 1996). Underpinned by radical and liberal demands to break up large estates and redistribute land, selfreliance offered a future for the dangerous masses of unemployed and destitute that were a feature of the new industrial towns and cities. Until the end of the nineteenth century development was an important part of domestic welfare discourse. By this time, however, sustainable development, a different and more effective liberal approach to the problem of surplus population began to emerge in Europe – that is, social insurance based on the principle of members making regular payments into a centrally managed fund that can be drawn on at times of need. Extended and deepened by the societal effects of two world wars, this principle would eventually expand to shape In presenting development as a technology of security, development and underdevelopment are distinguished biopolitically, that is, as connected but separate assemblages of institutions, techniques and interventions by which life is supported and distinguished internationally. In this respect biopolitics is not a single strategization of power in the sense of a globalizing or universal disposition for acting on and promoting life at the level of world population. Reflecting its organic ties with racism, development embodies the biopolitical division and separation of the human species into developed and underdeveloped species-life. With the advent of social insurance, earlier developmental approaches the European welfare state, where social protection became a right of citizenship (Rose 2000). to the problem of surplus population based on community self-reliance were eclipsed in Europe. While not disappearing completely, by the beginning of the twentieth century development as a liberal technology of security based on self-reliance migrated and consolidated its association with the protectorates and colonies. Drawing on Enlightenment views on the self-sufficient nature of development as decentralized self-management emerged, for example, in the liberal colonial practice of indirect rule or Native Administration (Cooke 2003). Following the inability of indirect rule to curb the growth of nationalism, however, by the 1940s it had vectored into the colonial practice of community development and the encouragement of producer cooperatives (Kelemen 2006). During the contested process of decolonization, development became an interstate means of differentiating and governing the new world of peoples that nationalism had called forth. The struggle for independence, however, did not expose the connection between liberalism and imperialism thus subjecting it to critique. Decolonization was experienced as revealing a threatening world of poverty that, once again, demanded Western tutelage and trusteeship. In these momentous events, natural man, the global biopolitical divide between a developed or ‘insured’ life versus an underdeveloped or ‘noninsured’ life expected to be self-reliant life was sealed. The effect of development as a technology of security has been to deepen this divide until today it forms the basis of unending war. Aid is global biopolitical regime – it is only to make lives live in order to prevent catastrophe in the first world Kelly, Lecturer in Philosophy at Middlesex University, in ‘10 [M.G.E., “International Biopolitics Foucault, Globalisation and Imperialism”, Theoria, June] One might argue that there is a countervailing phenomenon to the accumulation of human capital through our selectively permeable borders in the deployment of medical and technical personnel from the rich countries to poor countries in aid programs, and indeed as volunteers. Of course, as we have seen, the general trend of such migration of personnel is overwhelmingly in the opposite direction, and those from rich countries who work in poor countries do not typically stay in the latter long term, thus do not enrich the population in the same way that economic migrants to the rich countries do. However, the flow of aid from the rich to poor countries is increasing, which would seem prima facie to be a contrary tendency to any parasitism. Yet, the overall effect of aid is, like that of migration controls, in the self-interest of the richer countries. One should be wary indeed in this regard of what is called ‘aid’, since loans, including World Bank loans, that shackle recipients, are sometimes categorised as aid, and even less conditional aid is typically given in situations where there is an obvious strategic interest to the donor;13 the largest aid recipients by far today are the oil producers Iraq and Nigeria, for example. Certainly, there is no question of any serious sacrifice being made by the First World to help the Third in aid donation. The UN has set a benchmark for aid of 0.7 per cent of donor countries’ GDP and it is not being met.14 Private donations pale in comparison to the still ultimately insufficient donations of states. There is moreover a tactical logic to aid. Aid has the general function of security for the donor country: it keeps the stability of recipient countries within a range of tolerances necessary for geopolitical security, prevents famine and disorder, which in turn prevents the problems of one area spilling over into other areas, as well as greasing the wheels of trade (particularly in the case of aid to middle income countries), and serving a propaganda function. There is no hidden conspiracy here: these functions are all quite explicit, government spending on aid being justified explicitly on the basis of selfinterest that aid is necessary to geopolitical stability, good for trade, that it will help our friends and enhance our reputation abroad. Aid is not an optional extra to the security of the donor populations. It is rather an external projection of domestic policy, like the use of thanatopolitics. The clearest example of this is aid targeted at (preventing) pandemics: disease can cross borders, so global efforts to combat such diseases are protective to any given population. In principle, it might be possible simply to quarantine one’s population, but of course this would have far-reaching negative consequences, particularly economic. AIDS is the prime example of a pandemic today which the rich countries try to control: USAID spent $2.8 billion on fighting AIDS in 2006. Compare this with the $100 million expenditure fighting malaria in 2005; malaria kills more people, but will not spread to the rich biopolities. Indeed, one of the main claims now made by campaigners seeking funding for anti-malaria campaigns is that malaria is catalysing the spread of HIV; this might explain recent increases in funding to anti-malaria programs. There is no question that in the case of AIDS, calls for funding to fight it in the Third World are routinely couched in terms of security—although some have also conversely argued that the AIDS pandemic has positive security outcomes by controlling population growth, which licenses some level of indifference on the part of governments (Elbe, 2005). Now, humanitarian and development aid neither kills people nor lets them live— rather it makes them live, which makes it a case of biopolitics. It is an inferior biopolitics, however, applied only to protect the core population, as Mark Duffield has argued: ‘International development, with its avowed aim of reducing poverty and strengthening social resilience is a biopolitical technology. It is a biopolitics, however, that is different from that associated with the massified insurance-based safety-nets of developed society’ (Duffield, 2006). The inferior biopolitics of the outside resembles the biopolitics of the inside insofar as it involves monitoring and intervention. Aid may look like a global biopolitics, then, as Dillon and Reid have claimed: ‘biopolitical global development and aid policies constitute a complex population that one might call “the global poor”’; since where there is a population, there is a biopolitics, this implies that there is ‘a form of global biopolitics’ (Dillon and Reid, 2001: 48). However, the inferior biopolitics is so haphazard that it barely counts as biopolitics, providing no guaranteed minimum: there is of course no world state, hence no world population; some people in the world are left entirely outside this inferior biopolitics, and the coverage of billions varies wildly across time and space. International organisations, such as the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) play a critical role in the inferior biopolitics, particularly in data collection (Elbe, 2005), and also in coordination of responses to biological problems in the Third World, but they are responsible for a small proportion of aid dispersal; most aid still comes directly from First World national treasuries, as does most of the budget of these organisations. Aid is not only self-interested, moreover, but, like the migration regime, tends actively to undermine biopower in the Third World. Here we are taking a position similar to that of dependency theory in international relations. The difference is our basis: we do not argue on the basis of a relationship between economies through trade, but simply that aid interferes crucially and specifically with biopolitics in a way that harms aid recipients quite autonomously from any economic ‘dependency’; in this way, our argument is immune to the empirical objections that have largely discredited dependency theory. Criticisms of aid as unhelpful are made by libertarian economists such as James Shikwati, though the direction of our conclusions is entirely opposite to theirs: while the libertarian-influenced critique of aid is of a piece with a critique of government intervention, a biopolitical perspective tells us that government is a necessary element of a social system, and it is the development of the whole, including of government itself, that is retarded by intervention from outside. Our position has more in common with that of Yash Tandon’s critique of ‘aid dependence’ (2008). The aid system involves flows from without, which has certain corrupting effects, which vary according to the distribution conduits for aid. Aid distribution can be either through local agents, or directly by the donor organisation. In the former case, distribution can either be delegated to the state or to ‘civil society’ organisations. There is a tendency for donors to try to avoid distribution through official, state channels because of concerns about corruption. The concerns are well placed: aid is a powerfully corrupting influence, but on anyone who touches it, not just the state; aid’s value itself constitutes an incentive to misdirect it. Economic engagement by the state is subversive form of petty sovereignty, incorporating disparate populations into the West’s regulatory and biopolitical regimes through largescale ordering operations of power. Duffield, Professor Emeritus and former Director of the Global Insecurities Centre, University of Bristol, ‘7 [Mark, Development, Security and Unending War Governing the World of People, pg. 2223] The international political architecture of the Cold War was based on respect for territorial integrity and sovereign competence or noninterference in domestic affairs. While territorial integrity remains central, sovereignty over life in ineffective states is now internationalized, negotiable and contingent (Elden 2006). On the basis of humanitarian emergency and peace activism, Western influence has increased in the biopolitical space of contingent sovereignty. It has expanded, however, on a terrain already staked out by the petty sovereigns of the NGO movement. Humanitarian emergency cleared away Cold War restrictions, allowing UN agencies and NGOs to work legitimately on all sides in unresolved internal wars. Fuelled by a marked increase in Western emergency funding, the end of the Cold War saw the emergence of system-wide relief operations drawing together donor governments, UN agencies, NGOs, private companies and defence establishments into new forms of interaction, cooperation and competition (Duffield 2001). During the Cold War the recurrent move from relief to development had primarily functioned to establish the NGO movement’s sovereignty among the world of peoples; this time it was synonymous with the governmentalization of the movement itself. Through such measures as the growth of donor funding, the creation of new working practices and more comprehensive contractual arrangements and auditing tools, the petty sovereignty of the NGO movement was reorchestrated within a thickening web of overlapping aims and mutual interests connecting donor states, recipient governments, UN agencies and militaries. The govemmentalization of the aid industry is an essential aspect of contingent sovereignty and the advent of a post-interventionary political terrain. While presented as a relation of mutual self-interest, this increased penetration is experienced as essential for the West's own security. Although territorial integrity is respected, populations within ineffective states are nonetheless being reterritorialized through multiagency programmes aimed at reconstructing weak and fragile states. Effective states attempt to govern through these anarchic strategic complexes using technologies of coherence, that is, the search for methodologies, dispositions and administrative arrangements allowing aid and politics to work together in the interests of peace and stability. While the search for coherence invokes the centralization of power, it also provokes new sites of resistance on the part of the independent administrative sovereigns on which aid as governance depends. Western agencies use humanitarian aid as a shield to access power as well as accomplish their foreign policy objectives- empirically proven Duffield ‘4 [Mark, Professor Emeritus and former Director of the Global Insecurities Centre. taught at the Universities of Khartoum, Aston and Birmingham and held Fellowships and Chairs at Sussex, Leeds and Lancaster, CARRY ON KILLING: GLOBAL GOVERNANCE, HUMANITARIANISM AND TERROR, DANISH INSTITUTE FOR INTERNATIONAL STUDIES] Global governance is a design of bio-power. These two terms – design and bio-power – need some elaboration. Understanding power as a design sets it apart from a realist or conventional, state-centric approach to power. For realism, power is something almost tangible. It is an ex- clusive quality or resource that can be captured, amassed or deployed by the powerful; usually elites of some kind – political, economic, military, criminal, and so on. In this context, power is frequently presented as somehow ‘bad’, or at least, having negative connotations; it is what the ‘powerful’ use against the ‘powerless’. Power as a design, however, is more egalitarian, diffuse and inclusive. We are all agents of power, including actors and non-state organisations that realism would regard as merely the external auxiliaries, servants or sub-contractors of the powerful. Power is the ability to change the behaviour and attitudes of others and, in the pro- cess, of ourselves as well (Dean 1999). As such, even life’s bit-players have the ability to stage independent, innovative and often surprising effects. Power relations are everywhere – in the classroom, the doctor’s surgery, the family, the NGO project, and so on. Such relations are productive and shape the comportment of their authoring agents as well as those subject to them.1 Without relations of power, society and the world would grind to a halt. From this in- clusive and pervasive perspective, power itself is ambivalent and can be either ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Deciding between them, and checking the latter in favour of the former, is a matter for a practical ethics and politics. It would be a mistake to regard the realist conception of power (as an exclusive quality amassed by the powerful) as wrong or misconceived. For many actors and nonstate agencies this viewpoint is a convenient construction. It enabled, for example, concentration camp functionaries to frame their defence in terms of ‘just following orders’ of an external power. It also enables humanitarian agencies, in the interests of neutrality, to either remain silent in rela- tion to power so conceived, or else, through recourse to international law, codes of conduct or technical standards, to erect legalistic barriers and professional boundaries to distance them- selves from an external power (Leader 1999). An exclusive and amassed view of power also shapes what humanitarian agencies understand by ‘politics’. That is, those various strategies and techniques relating to the augmentation or deployment of external power (Weiss 1999). 1 Critics of the Foucauldian paradigm have usually concentrated on the ubiquitous nature of power relations, and hence the difficulty or resisting them, to the detriment of its productive capacities. For a defence see (Campbell 1998). DIIS WORKING PAPER 2004/23 5 For example, it has often been argued that humanitarian assistance, through its diversion or theft, can strengthen the position of warring parties (Anderson 1996). At the same time, recent concern over the ‘politicisation’ of aid has focused on how Western states are using humanitarian assistance to accomplish foreign policy objectives (Macrae and Harmer 2003). Silence, the erection of barriers and a politics of externality are important strategies whereby humanitarian agencies are able to deny and conceal their own complicity and involvement in the exercise of power (Campbell 1998; Edkins 2003). Understanding the ‘non-governmental’ or the implications of ‘neutrality’ in relation to humanitarianism requires that we move beyond the comforting shield of such conceptions. Like a particular period of architecture, school of art, music or literary form, power as a design reveals itself through its shape, composition or function. We recognise a design when we see or experience it. A similar design can exist in a variety of circumstances, contexts or organis- ational arrangements without being reduced to them: it vitalises contingent assemblages while also existing beyond them. Global governance as a design of power is able to inscribe itself within and vector across different state/non-state and public/private institutional complexes separated in space as well as time. Whereas the former constitutes a synchronic diagram of interconnections, complicities and contradictions that define distinct regimes or eras, the latter reveals itself as a genealogical pattern existing across a range of such discrete regimes: the past illuminates the present which itself informs the past. In the case of global governance, its genealogy can be traced over two and a half centuries to the birth of modernity itself. In relation to being able to change behaviour and attitudes, global governance has been de- scribed as a hybrid and contested diagram of power that brings together technologies of governance and sovereignty (Dillon and Reid 2000). Before analysing these complementary techniques a couple of contemporary examples can be given. Such hybridity can be seen, for example, in the Western civil-political complex that now exists in the Balkans, East Timor, Afghanistan and Iraq. Here one finds the ‘governance’ activities of UN agencies, NGOs and private companies working in humanitarian, developmental and social reconstruction fields, in a complex and sometimes equivocal relationship with the ‘sovereign’ attributes of Western states, military alliances and international financial institutions. Put another way, this con- nection is a contemporary expression of the relationship between ‘aid’ and ‘politics’. A similar diagrammatic inscription can also be detected at other levels of international conglomeration; for example, the differences that have emerged on how to confront the threat of global terror- ism. While 9/11 created a consensus among leading states on the seriousness of the predica- ment, the invasion of Iraq has forced to the surface clear differences between America and Europe on how it should be tackled (Coker 2003). The European Union – the world’s largest DIIS WORKING PAPER 2004/23 6 integrated regional bloc – has been described in terms of a security community that prefers technologies of international governance based on the inclusionary “soft power” of diplom- acy, international law, trade and developmental aid (Nye 2002). In contrast, America – the world’s only superpower – is associated with the sovereign “hard power” of unilateralism and the use of force in defence of its wider interests (Kagan 2003). Many bemoan this rift, arguing a necessary complementarity between governance and sov- ereignty, aid and politics, soft power and hard power or, to use Bobbit’s terms, “…law and strategy” (Bobbit 2003) in the pursuit of global security (Coker 2003; Ferguson 2003; Cooper 2002). Indeed , it is felt that the current crisis will continue if not deepen unless governance and sovereignty are once again brought into alignment. In order to flesh out these attributes, the notion of bio-power has to be introduced. Link – Aid – State Must abandon the state – otherwise the regime of aid will be caught up in a biopolitical madness that nexeccitates endless wars in the maintinace of state security. Duffield, Professor Emeritus and former Director of the Global Insecurities Centre, University of Bristol, ‘7 [Mark, Development, Security and Unending War Governing the World of People, Pg. 230232] Humanitarian emergencies are, in some respects, not the result of the breakdown of self-reliance but of its essential success; that is, its ability to allow non-insured people, groups and communities to forge livelihoods and survival strategies beyond and outside the state (Keen 1994 and 1998; Duffield 2001: 136-60). The increase in Western interventionism is occurring at a time when people are actively deserting the state. The vast literature on 'war economies', for example, is illustrative of an innovative and radical self-reliance. Transborder and shadow economies have expanded at the same time as a medley of actors - ranging from ethnic associations, clan leaders and religious groups to warlords, Mafiosi and terrorist organizations - have all learned the biopolitical art of enfranchising the dispossessed through alternative forms of protection, legitimacy and welfare as a necessary adjunct of their own political survival (Tishkov 1997; Goldenburg 2001; Kent et al. 2004). Such 'actually existing development' beyond and outside the state deepens the crisis of containment and gives urgency, for example, to Western efforts to reconstruct fragile states and reterritorialize the people living within them. Apart from highlighting the fact that such states have no established or centralized welfare function, the difficulty is that even if successfully reconfigured as governance states, they can only promise the non-material salvation of sustainable development through social reorganization around basic needs and selfreliance. The success of surplus life in forging patterns of actually existing development beyond states defines an important area of contestation and recapture within the framework of unending war. In one of the few attempts to examine global development from a comparative welfare regime perspective, Wood and Gough (2006) identify three generic types: the welfare state, the informal security regime and the insecurity regime. The last two are systems where self-reliance, in terms of the familyzand community forms of reciprocity, provides the bulk of public welfare. The insecurity regime, however, corresponds to zones of crisis and state fragility where these reciprocities have broken down. Whereas welfare states are characterized by the de-commodification of life, for example, through protection from employment risks, within informal security regimes patron-client relations predominate. Reflecting the absence of a mass labour market rather than de-commodification, especially within insecure societies, generalizing welfare is argued to require a process of 'de-clientization' - that is, the practice 'of de-linking client dependants from their personalized, arbitrary and discretionary entrapment to persons with intimate power over them' (ibid.: 1708). In framing this argument, the authors have unwittingly rearticulated the global 'hearts and minds' role into which unending war has channelled development assistance (DAC 2003). When nationalists and liberation movements sought to remake the state during the Cold War, such events were labelled as radical or even revolutionary. Today, as the West takes on this role directly, it finds itself embroiled in expansive and totalizing forms of counter-insurgency. The idea that an alternative development lies in the 'insuring' of the non-insured raises many difficulties. Given the widespread desertion of the borderland state by the dispossessed, such endeavours easily become means of recapturing and bolstering the West's own security; in other words, it would have to contend with the governance function of insurance-based technologies of biopower. This includes the importance of welfare rights as a means of excluding migrants and encoding racial identity and conflict in mass consumer society. At the same time, through the digitalization of life processes, insurance technologies are providing increasingly finely textured mechanisms for the monitoring and modulation of conduct more generally (Ericson and Doyle 2003). These difficulties suggest that, in attempting to rescue the emancipatory urge embedded in development, we should consider following the lead of the dispossessed and global justice movements and also desert the state (Patel and McMichael 2004). Or at least, in the process, the power of an already monstrously powerful state should not be further extended or deepened. Freeing the impulse to protect and better should avoid measures that further privilege the state or, like human security, invoke the state as central to its own existence. This concern underlines the tragedy of the N GO movement and its hopeless enmeshment. That a distancing is required is also suggested from a different but related quarter. During the course of the twentieth century, invoking a state of emergency has become a normal and accepted paradigm of government (Agamben 2005). Following Foucault, Agamben has argued that security can be distinguished from disciplinary power in that the latter seeks to isolate and close territories in the pursuit of order, while security 'wants to regulate disorder' (Agamben 2001: 1). A dangerous contemporary development is the thought of security itself (Homqvist 2004). As security becomes the basic task of the state, politics is progressively neutralized. The thought of security 'bears with it an essential risk. A state which has security as its sole task and source of legitimacy is a fragile organism; it can always be provoked by terrorism to become itself terroristic' (Agamben 2001). Between terrorism and counter-terrorism a curious complicity exists in which each needs the other for its own existence, whether as a legitimation of its own violence or a justification for the draconian methods it requires in defending society. Both share a common ground in the acceptance of a design of war that privileges the state. During the Cold War the geopolitical stand-off between nucleararmed superpowers was underpinned by the threat of 'mutually assured destruction' or MAD. Today we have acquired a sort of biopolitical MADness that interconnects the survival and various fundamentalisms of insurgents and counter-insurgents alike in the fateful and mutually conditioning embrace of unending war. In this encounter the inevitable victor is the state and the unavoidable victim is politics itself. Like actually existing development, the pursuit of emancipation involves working beyond and outside the state, ignoring rather than confronting it, as part of the rediscovery of politics in the practical solidarity of the governed. Link – Border Infrastructure Fortification of the border is a tool of biopolitics and governmentality – migrants are channeled, surveilled, and violently disciplined when they transgress the ideals of normalized citizenry. Nail 13 (Thomas, Ph.D University of Denver, Professor of Philosophy at U of Denver, “The Crossroads of Power: Michel Foucault and the US/Mexico Border Wall”, February, 2013, p. 112) The wall with its steel and concrete, its miles of barbed wire, check points, border patrol, array of flood lights to maximize visibility, cameras, and sensors for permanent and con- stant supervision, mirror many of the techniques of the prison and migration detention center, which again mirror the increased security, supervision, and prison-like workplace conditions that often employ undocumented workers. It is thus no coincidence that the Secure Fence Act, Operation Catch and Detain, and Immigration Workplace Enforcement were all proposed to Congress at the same time. They are three prongs of the border wall itself: sovereignty, discipline, and biopower. Build a wall, discipline the bodies of those who cross, and make a profit from deporting the rest. Crossing the physical border wall marks an incorporeal criminal transformation of the migrant. It marks the migrant’s exit from one set of institutions (the system of poverty, vio- lence, exploitative labor conditions, and other results of N.A.F.T.A in Mexico) into a network of other institutions (the detention camps, work place and school raids, and the racism of the US).40 The wall, the prison, and the workplace thus function as part of a single carceral series intensifying the criminality of that one brief misdemeanor, “unlawful entry,” that now requires their infinite retraining through detention, surveillance, and disciplined behavior in the precarious shadows of US institutions. Migrants cross the wall one or more times. This has two effects: it creates a “criminalization” in both material and discursive senses41 and it produces subjects who are persistent and can endure hardship. As criminalized, migrants enter a work-place system where their daily movements and actions are surveilled and orchestrated by their bosses, but they also endure the additional disciplinary condition of institutionalized precarity: their perpetual deportability.42 The constant threat of deportation creates a fear, docility, and psychic instability that aids in the effective management of bodily labor. Every minor labor infraction or deviant behavior could result in detention and deportation. Consequently, migrants also fill detention centers, prisons, and deportation facilities. In these facilities their daily movements are con- trolled (meals, commissary, exercise, lights out, etc.); they are under constant surveillance; they often wait months or years in jail without conviction, and they often have difficulty communicating with legal representatives or with immigration officials due to both language differences and access. This whole group of technologies creates a distinct kind of subjectification. Although the initial journey to the wall itself does not in every way follow the close temporal articulation of bodily movements that Foucault discusses in nineteenth century pris- ons, the actual process of crossing the wall does to some degree. The way one must dress, look, speak, etc. when presenting a false I.D. is extremely precise, one must become “normal” and “legal.” Even when one crosses the wall outside of town or in the desert there is a very carefully orchestrated activity of waiting in silence for the time in the middle of the night be- tween when the coyotes have dug a new hole in the wall and when the border guards have patched it.49 Disciplinary power in the case of the border wall-prison-work system enforces aconformity to the following normalized model of subjectivity: you will be prepared to be deported at any time, you will be potentially watched under lights and cameras 24hrs a day, you will be hardworking enough to cross the wall multiple times, endure detention and abuse, and be silent in your endurance. These are the “signs of a successful nation of migrants” conduct- ed by the wallprison-work system. After the US government had waived environmental laws and built the border wall, they went back in 2009 with $50 million to “assesses, restore, and mitigate” the environmental damages of the wall. The Army Corps of Engineers detained, tagged, replanted, and monitored, various species of life. The presence alone of Army Corps, border patrol, and migrants, prepares the ecology of the desert and the behaviors of the animals to be continually damaged, monitored, and then restored to a new normal. The most notable physical behavior is restricted movement, decreased food and water sources, but the wildlife is also being trained to ad- just to humans that bring food as well as food that is dead human bodies. Where there is “vir- tual fence” the animals, and even rain, often set off the motion detectors that bring border pa- trol from miles away to verify the “unlawful entry.” Without actually being arrested animals are performatively criminalized in their daily movements across the border . While “criminal- ized” animals at the border are not arrested and put before a court of law, they are captured, detained, transported, relocated, surveyed, and perhaps even shot at. Thus, strategically there are many similarities between human an animal migrants in relation to disciplinary power. Criminalization is not merely a legal determination made by a judge or human court of law, criminalization also includes a set of disciplinary and carceral strategies. Insofar as many of these strategies also affect animals and other ecological entities, they are criminalized mi- grants.50 Every motion in the desert is now being trained to deal with border patrol, constant surveillance, and intervention: the body of the desert is being disciplined. Link – Border Infrastucture- AT: Not Security The aff doesn’t have to increase the Border Patrol to link – the more important dimension is their attempt to discipline flows of migration in the interests of population management. Nail 13 (Thomas, Ph.D University of Denver, Professor of Philosophy at U of Denver, “The Crossroads of Power: Michel Foucault and the US/Mexico Border Wall”, February, 2013, p. 112) The border wall is not merely a physical barrier, or even just part of a disciplinary series, it is also part of a larger process of managing uncertain populations and effectively enforcing transformations in the built environment. The task of eliminating “all unlawful entry, by any means necessary,” as we saw during Michael Chertoff’s six years as Secretary of the DHS, is as financially irresponsible as it is physically impossible. The biopolitical problematic thus begins instead from the presupposition of the impossibility of total control over migration and its surveillance. Rather, it tries to achieve an optimal outcome in the most efficient way possible through the statistical control of the environment. This is achieved through the following strategies. Three major contractors were hired by the US government to help secure the border. While the government agenda may have been to try and stop migration, this is not the structural condition and function of for-profit private companies. Private companies are defined by the structural necessity of profit. If they do not make a profit, they will not be competitive in a capitalist economy. Thus, profitability is not necessarily the psychological “intention” of any person or persons secret or explicit. Profit is the structural determination of the “optimal” functioning of private companies in a capitalist economy. The function of private contractors is thus primarily to generate profit, not necessarily to keep all migrants out of the US. Ending migration would in fact destroy the security market. Thus, the question is not how to stop migration but how to optimally (a.k.a. profitably) manage the “security environment” through the circulation of what is structurally an unpredictable and unstoppable flow of migrants.The chosen placement of the wall along the border is another biopolitical strategy. It cuts through precarious wildlife habitat, and the private property of residents without the fi- nances to legally fight it, while carefully building around well financed golf courses. It cuts through public parks, schools, low-income housing areas, industrial parks, and urban and ru- ral watersheds causing flooding. This is not merely a matter of environmental devastation, classism, or racism, etc. it is a productive investment opportunity for new real-estate and the gentrification of the built environment to, as Foucault says, break up crowds and ensure hy- giene, ventilation, and commerce.58 Without direct punishment, or disciplinary action, the wall is an environmental technology that shapes the natural conditions under which water, plants, animals, and people are allowed to circulate and gather. One way to deter dissent is to break up public areas and privatize them. These are some of the biopolitical strategies that make up the US/Mexico border wall. But these strategies do not simply exist in parallel with sovereign and disciplinary strategies; they also form points of conflict as well as confluence between them. Link – Energy Their mindless production and securitization of energy is a weapon of neoliberal population control and the enclosure of the commons. Hildyard et al 12 Nicholas, The Corner House, Larry Lohmann and Sarah Sexton.12 Energy Security For Whom? For What? February 2012 Commons regimes tend to enshrine both a common right to human survival and respect for nonhuman agents. In 19th century England, John Clare, the “poet of the commons”, saw the human suffering that resulted from enclosure of fields, woods and streams as indivisible from the degradation of the nonhuman world as it was partly converted into resources and its nurture abandoned. In the Andes today, movements for buen vivir and against water and land privatisation and mineral extraction are closely tied to agitation in support of the “rights of nature”. Historically, the development of the concept of Energy with a capital “E” – deriving as it does from the developments of the fossil fuel era – constitutes a threat to this “right to live” of both humans and nonhumans. As geographer Matthew Huber notes: “with the development of large scale fossilized industry, provisioning the right to live did not suit the needs of the emerging industrial capitalist class”41 as steam engines were “clamoring for freedom and machines were crying out for human hands”. In England, the Poor Law reforms of 1834 did away with the right to live and established a national waged labour market, complete with a reserve army of unemployed whose existence helped limit worker power over wages and conditions. Fossil fuels also helped make possible national and then global prices for the necessities of life, rendering local, survival-ensuring “fair prices” a thing of the past. Profits from the massively increased production of the fossil fuel era needed massively extended trade in order to be realised, as well as for all the raw materials involved. The long distances involved necessitated competition to reduce turnover time between investment and payoff. Transport time had to be quickened (and thus fossilised) too.42 Fossilintensive transportation networks were locked in, becoming the basis for yet further expansions. While little price convergence had occurred prior to 1800,43 prices steadily became less responsive to local circumstances as global commodity markets began to emerge. Railways ensured that the price spread between wheat sold in the United States’ grainproducing heartland of Iowa and that in New York dropped from 69 per cent to 19 per cent between 1870 and 1914.44 Transatlantic voyages dropped from five weeks in the 1840s to 12 days by 1913; today, oil-powered containerships continue to shave transit times.45 By 2007 international trade flows were 30 times greater than in 1950, although output was only 8 times greater. As the right to survival of individual humans has been undermined by the fossil-fuelled expansion of commodity relations, so, too, has respect for nonhuman nature. The record of fossil fuel extraction – from the contamination of the Ecuadorean Amazon and the Niger Delta to the removal of mountaintops in the coal fields of Appalachia to the Torrey Canyon and Exxon Valdez oil tanker wrecks to the gigantic BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico – has consistently been one of disregard for water, air, land and living things. This disregard has once again undermined the bases of survival for innumerable human communities. “Securing” supplies of fossil fuels in the name of Energy has tended everywhere to threaten the diverse forms of livelihoods associated with the commons. Nowadays, upper-case Energy itself has taken on the aura of a survival good. In the words of UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon: “universal energy access . . . is a foundation for all the Millennium Development Goals,” particularly for more than 1.3 billion people worldwide who have no electricity. 46 And new struggles for the commons are being waged around modern energy forms, as well as around oil itself. For example, under the banner of the right of all to survive regardless of their income or social status, movements to decommodify electricity are springing up in the deprived urban areas of South Africa, insisting that it should be accessible to all, and making links with movements against privatisation of basic pharmaceutical drugs and other goods. But in an age in which movements that link the right to live of humans and nonhumans constitute what Slovenian thinker Slavoj Zizek calls the “cutting edge of progressive politics”, it is crucial to remember the destructive role played by the emergence of abstract Energy in struggles against enclosure and privatisation. Among those who lack access to modern energy, ironically, are many who have been displaced to make way for hydroelectric dams, coal mines and power plants, many of whom are excluded from access to other subsistence necessities as well. If security has anything to do with survival, any discussion of “energy security” needs to confront the implications.47 Link – Labor Unions The hidden imperialism embedded in the 1AC is exemplified by their faith in labor politics. US Labor has been co-opted and their free trade tinkering will do nothing to change that. The history of labor imperialism demonstrates that the affirmative will be used to discipline foreign workers under the guise of solidarity. Scipes 2005 [Kim, former rank and file member of the Graphic Communications International Union, the National Education Association, and the American Federation of Teachers, and is currently a member of the National Writers Union/UAW. He teaches sociology at Purdue University North Central, Labor Imperialism Redux?: The AFL-CIO’s Foreign Policy Since 1995, Monthly Review Volume 57, Issue 01, http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qHtzXsulSYkJ:monthlyreview.org/2005/05/01/labor-imperialism-redux-the-afl-ciosforeign-policy-since-1995+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us 2005] McWilliams appears to recognize that U.S. foreign policy has weaknesses that must be addressed. In this case, he argues that globalization is doing harm to the world’s workers, that it is a mistake to ignore these escalating problems, that U.S. labor—particularly because of its relations with labor around the world—is uniquely capable of presenting labor’s concerns to foreign policy makers, and that labor should be reincorporated into the government’s foreign policy processes: The U.S. would benefit from engaging international labor in the pursuit of shared goals such as democratization, political stability and equitable economic and social development. An alliance between the U.S. and labor today would focus on worker rights, including ensuring that economic development is not based on the exploitation of child labor, forced labor or employment that discriminates against women and minorities, and on economic just ice, ensuring that globalization’s benefits flow to all and not simply to the few best placed to profit from it. A revitalized labor diplomacy today would foster democratic freedoms by shoring up fragile democracies, just as the U.S. labor alliance of the Cold War era did. (emphasis added) Secretary of State Madeleine Albright recognized the strength of the argument, even before McWilliams published it. After receiving the first report by the ACLD—“A World of Decent Work: Labor Diplomacy for the New Century”—and having a couple of months to evaluate its recommendations, Secretary Albright stated at the November 8, 2000, meeting of the ACLD, “I am absolutely convinced after four years of doing this job that we can’t have a successful U.S. foreign policy without effective labor diplomacy.” She also added: “And becoming a part of the US Government may not have been something you intended in this way, but I do believe it has been a very important partnership.” (emphasis added)17 The ACLD, although initially the Clinton administration—addressed “the importance of labor diplomacy in U.S. foreign policy and the promotion of worker rights in the context of economic globalization”—by its second report in late 2001 (that is, after September 11, 2001), the focus had shifted to “the role and importance of labor diplomacy in promoting US national security and combating the global political, economic, and social conditions that only expected to last for two years, was continued by the Bush administration. However, where the first report—during undermine our security interests.” (emphasis added) This emphasis can further be seen in the title of the ACLD’s second report, “Labor Diplomacy: In the Service of Democracy and Security.” one only has to read a little into the second report to see that workers’ rights are important only if they help advance U.S. security: The war on terrorism provides one more example of why labor diplomacy functions are so important. Working conditions that lead to misery, alienation, and hopelessness are extremely important in the constellation of forces responsible for terrorism, especially when demagogues blame the United States, globalization or other external forces. Policies to There is a lot of talk in the second report, just like in the first one, about the importance of labor rights and democracy. However, improve these conditions are necessary components of strategies to prevent and counter terrorist activities. Effective labor diplomacy is important in informing American analysis and shaping its policy to combat the conditions that breed terrorism around the world. (emphasis added) Further, the 2001 report argues, “…the promotion of democracy needs to be part of any sustainable U.S.- It notes, “These unions are a political battleground because they are proxy political institutions and instruments for controlling the hearts, minds and jobs of workers in these countries.” (emphasis added) Further, they note the role of ACILS in these unions: As the U.S. Government-supported programs of the American Center for International Labor Solidarity ( Solidarity Center) already demonstrate, a policy that aims to cultivate union leadership at the enterprise and industrial sector levels represents the most promising approach to inculcate modern economic thinking and democratic political values among workers in Muslim led effort to combat terrorism, promote stability and ensure national security.” The report discusses “Trade Unions in Muslim Countries.” countries. (emphases added) So, without beating the issue to death, it is clear that by the second ACLD report, ACLD members are seeing labor diplomacy as a vital part of U.S. foreign policy and national security efforts, and they are encouraging the Bush administration to address areas of concern that they have identified.18 This certainly includes conditions that they believe facilitate terrorism, and particularly within the Muslim world. And yet, they state that labor has already been working within the Muslim world, trying to win “the hearts and minds” of workers in these countries. But while great concern is expressed—again and again in the report—for U.S. national security, concern for the well-being of the world’s workers and any possible expressions of mutually-beneficial solidarity-based actions by the AFL-CIO are all but absent. Now, obviously, there is a contradiction that can be seen in McWilliams’s argument, and it is labor’s role in the Cold War one advanced throughout almost all of the government’s foreign policy public documents. The evidence presented in this paper has shown that was terribly reactionary. It acted against democracy in a number of societies and labor movements as well as internally within the U.S. labor movement itself as it sought to maintain U.S. hegemony in the world. McWilliams acknowledges and even celebrates the close ties between labor and government during that period, and argues for their yet he claims that the shared interest of labor and the government is to “spread democracy.” reestablishment. And How can these contradictory claims/realities be resolved? To do this, it is useful to turn to William Robinson’s Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention and Hegemony.19 In an excellent analysis of U.S. foreign policy, Robinson argues that this policy began shifting in the mid-1980s from supporting any dictator who promised fealty and control of “his” people to intervening actively in the “civil society” of targeted nations for the purposes of building support among the more conservative politicians (including labor leaders), and for linking their interests with the United States. Key to this are “democracy-promoting” operations. However, while using the rhetoric of “popular” democracy—the one-person, one-vote grassroots-driven version that we are taught in civics courses and supposedly exists here—the United States is, in fact, promoting polyarchal or top-down, elite-driven, democracy. This polyarchal democracy suggests that citizens get to choose their leaders when, in fact, they only get to choose between those presented as possible choices by the elites of that country. In addition, viable solutions to social problems can only emerge from possibilities presented by the elites. In other words, polyarchal democracy only appears to be democratic; in reality it is not. And institutionally, the United States projects this polyarchal democracy through its “democracy-building programs,” especially through USAID and the Department of State. State, in turn, channels its money and its efforts through the National Endowment for Democracy, upon which the 2001 report comments: “The National Endowment for Democracy (a government-supported but independent agency) funds its four core grantee institutions, including the Solidarity Center, as well as a large number of grantee groups around the world.” This understanding provides a means to “decipher” government reports. When they promote “democracy” and claim it is one of the four interrelated goals of U.S. foreign policy—along with stability, security, and prosperity—in reality, it is a particular form of democracy, a form of democracy that has no relation to the popular democracy that most Americans think of when they hear the word. When labor leaders use the term “democracy” in this manner, they are collaborating with the government against workers around the world, both in the United States and overseas. Where does all this leave us? The AFL-CIO’s unwillingness to clear the air appears to be not an oversight or a mistake. It seems a conscious decision because foreign policy leaders fear a backlash from union members should their long-lasting perfidy become The AFL-CIO, through its American Center for International Labor Solidarity (ACILS), was actively involved with both the CTV and FEDECAMARAS in Venezuela before the April 2002 coup, and these organizations both helped lead the coup widely known, as they should. attempt. ACILS was given over $700,000 by the National Endowment for Democracy for work in that country between 1997 and 2002. These efforts and receipt of the money were not reported to AFL-CIO members and, in fact, the AFL-CIO has actively worked to keep these operations from being known, despite a growing number of AFL-CIO affiliated organizations formally requesting this information. These activities and receipt of this money has not been reported in any labor press, including its own Web site, by the AFL-CIO. And this intentional refusal to As if that weren’t bad enough, labor leaders also have been actively participating in the State Department–initiated Advisory Committee for Labor Diplomacy (ACLD), which has been designed to advance the labor diplomacy efforts of the United States. While considerable benefit address member organization concerns has also been formally condemned by a number of AFL-CIO affiliates. to the U.S. government has been established, there has been no or little benefit to workers either in the United States or in the rest of the world. Again, there has been no transparency by the AFL- In short, there are good reasons to believe that under AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, labor’s foreign policy has reverted back to “traditional” labor imperialism. In light of these findings, it seems obvious that any of the current efforts to “reform” the AFL-CIO are doomed to failure unless they explicitly address the return of labor imperialism at the highest levels of the federation. While certainly not the only issue of importance, it is one of the most important, and this cannot be sidestepped should meaningful change be CIO foreign policy leaders. Active involvement in the ACLD has taken place not only under the Clinton administration but also under the Bush administration. sought. Should this continue to be the case, it is clear that labor activists must consider their own future actions in regards to AFL-CIO foreign policy. The well-being of workers in the United States and around the world—and our allies—will be deeply affected by the choices made. Link – Labor Unions – NAALC/Solidarity The affirmative repeats the history of Northern-led unions “saving” Mexican workers through false and opportunistic solidarity Carr 99 (Barry, History Department Professor, La Trobe University, Australia, research concerns the labour and agrarian history of twentieth-century Latin America, especially Mexico, ‘Globalization from below: labour internationalism under NAFTA’, International social science journal International social science journal, 3-1999) The contrast between this legacy of relatively symmetrical labour internationalism and the trans-border activism of the NAFTA era is particularly striking and has attracted academic comment (Carr, 1996). Since 1994, most transborder worker and union initiatives, whether they involve bureaucratic petitioning under the NAALC or information exchange and solidarity efforts between unions ‘on the ground’ in Mexico, the United States and Canada, have originated in the north – either in the United States or Canada. In the discourse of NAFTA labour internationalism, Mexico is almost invariably constructed as ‘the problem’, ‘the weak link in the chain’ or a ‘Trojan Horse for multinational capital’. The ‘advanced’ character of Mexican labour legislation and the breadth of the social wage entitlements which Mexican workers have obtained over the decades (their poor enforcement and constant violation notwithstanding) are not yet sufficiently acknowledged in the United States -government unions) view the asymmetricality present in both the rhetorical construction and the material base of transborder labour cooperation as a cover for narrow FirstWorld labour protectionism and ‘Mexico bashing’. Given that some of the most active transborder labour actors are linked to those northern unions that have been most vulnerable to capital and labour flight, this is a not entirely inaccurate view. Some US protagonists (the Teamsters are an example) have occasionally introduced chauvinist language into their presentation of labour solidarity issues. The current Teamster campaign against the liberalization of access by Mexican truckers to the US market generates caricatures of Mexican truckers as ignorant amateurs, with claims being made that untrained drivers have been given ‘a licence to kill on US highways’. Perhaps it is no surprise that US and Canadian unionists and workers have had difficulty identifying suitable Mexican counterparts with whom they can work on transborder issues. The FAT has had to carry most of the burden; yet it is a small and poorly resourced organization. It is of course possible that Mexican unions and unionists’ interest in building transnational ties with US and Canadian unions has been diminished by suspicions that ‘northern’ unions have only begun talking about labour internationalism when the jobs of their members have been placed at risk. Link – Microfinance Microfinance doesn’t address the biopolitics of need, it only diffuses power from large corporations Bateman ‘10 (Milford, a professor of economics, “Why Doesn’t Microfinance Work?: The Destructive rise of Neoliberalism”) Another core assumption built into the microfinance model is that the poor are ‘empowered’ through microenterprises. Indeed, microenterprises are said to open the way towards a qualitative transformation in the life of the poor. Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto has lauded the way that a microenterprise can apparently empower an individual and release the ‘heroic entrepreneur’ that supposedly lies within us all.13 Freed from bureaucratic structures and the boss, microenterprises are also said to represent a new form of personal and business freedom. Perhaps most of all, microfinance is supposed to represent a magnificent chance to promote ‘gender empowerment’ within society. This Empowerment is such an emotionally loaded concept that everyone simply must be in favour of any policy or programme intervention that seemingly extends it. Insofar as it is claimed to be a core narrative is an extremely powerful and seductive one. impact of the microfinance concept, however, it is a wrong assumption to make. While historical experience is generally not always directly transferable, there are nevertheless some very evidence from economic history indisputably shows that self-employment and microenterprises have most often been promoted as part of the programmed disempowerment of the poor. Let us first recall a little of the early history of industrial capitalism, beginning with the passing of the Poor Law interesting parallels with earlier historical episodes that help explain matters today. In particular, a careful reading of the Reform of 1834 in England. As the economic historian Karl Polanyi shows in his classic study of economic history,14 this was the crucial intervention that introduced the modern inst itution of the labour market Prior to this, the ‘right to live’, if necessary with the help of local charitable support for those unable to find gainful employment (the so-called ‘Speenhamland system’), was guaranteed by society. The Poor Law Reform did away with this albeit minimal security. From then on, poor individuals would have to confront labour market forces on their own and survive in any way they could. For the majority in the 1830s and 1840s, as intended, this meant quickly adapting to the rigours of wage employment within England’s rapidly expanding industries and factories. For those unable to manage either wage labour in the new factories, or else continue to live as they had done before (for example, as home-based weavers or peasant farmers), the only remaining option to avoid complete penury was to move into a range of ‘survivalist’ individual activities – what we would now call ‘microenterprises’. This ‘new world’ of survivalist microenterprises was exhaustively documented at the time by Henry Mayhew in his classic work London Labour and the London Poor. 15 Mayhew showed in graphic detail how midnineteenth-century England had very rapidly become a cornucopia of informal microenterprise ‘survivalist’ activity. Both the old established aristocracy and the new industrial capitalist elites, as well as Henry Mayhew himself,16 were very supportive of the rapid rise of these new informal ‘survivalist’ activities. The proliferation of such activities would, for a start, justify reducing the charitable burden then placed on the rich. Also, with more family members contributing to the family income through such activity, including any young children, there was likely to be much less upward pressure on factory wages. Perhaps the most important survival aspect so far as business elites in nineteenth-century England were concerned, however, was their own. Supporting the expansion of petty survivalist activities helped to steer the poor away from more transformational activities that risked upsetting the social order. Wrapped up in the act of merely surviving from one day to the next, the poor tended to have very little time, energy or knowledge to get involved in anything else. They therefore offered very little participation in the great number of popular movements getting under way at that time – trade unionism, cooperativism, communism-socialism, anarcho-syndicalism and those seeking the universal franchise (the Chartists) – even though these movements held up the very real prospect of an eventual exit from extreme poverty and degradation. The poor were thus contained thanks to microenterprise activity: that is, they were disempowered. Life was made a lot safer both for the new industrial capitalists and the old aristocracy they were in the process of displacing. One individual who very quickly recognized the significance of this disempowerment was Karl Marx. The lumpenproletariat, Marx regretfully intoned – the term he coined for this class of desperately poor individuals17 – were so docile and downtrodden, so self-absorbed in their own immediate survival, and so thoroughly lacking in hope for the longer term, that they could not be counted upon to play a major role in the revolutionary dismantling of capitalism. Largely thanks to the many new social movements just mentioned, which led to the growing ‘collective capability’ to bring about the required changes of most benefit to the poor, things did begin to change for the better; but through successful evolution, not revolution. But perhaps history has turned a corner. If not in the past, then maybe today microenterprises are instruments leading to the empowerment of the poor? This proposition, however, does not seem to be backed up by any evidence either. As nineteenth-century economic liberalism was famously reborn in the 1980s under the contemporary rubric of neoliberalism, important elements of this disempowerment approach quickly resurfaced in the developed countries. As David Harvey sums up in his 2006 book A Brief History of Neoliberalism, even neoliberals are in pretty much full agreement on what was the central aim of the UK and US governments’ labour market policy thrust in the 1980s and 1990s: to promote self-employment as a way of disempowering organized labour in particular, and the lower classes in general, thereby to (re-)empower the narrow business class.18 And such policies were very successful too, as many noted labour economists reported.19 Moreover, the US and UK governments naturally took steps to ensure that such favoured neoliberal labour market policies were also projected into the developing and transition countries too. Given the US government’s effective control over policy development in the key international development agencies, notably with regard to the World Bank and the IMF, this was not too difficult. It should come as no surprise to find that similar disempowering outcomes as in the US and UK economies have thus been the overwhelming result in almost every developing and transition country.20 So there would appear to be very The huge and growing microenterprise sector in developing countries today is, very much as in the past, the proximate working location for the vast bulk of the most thoroughly disempowered individuals imaginable. And as in the case of the longterm prisoner who is little evidence of a change of heart in relation to the historically assigned role for microenterprises, and so also for microfinance. incrementally provided with a few privileges as a way of controlling any possible intention to reject the entire experience of prison life (say, by escaping or by suicide), even if the average poor micro-entrepreneur is afforded some minimal ‘control’ over a few trivial matters concerning her working life – when to start work, what clothes to wear, when to take lunch, and so on – this can control only what you are permitted to control. It is therefore quite wrong to suggest that microfinance is associated with either a genuine intention to empower the poor or any meaningful outcome having been achieved in this direction does not alter the bare fact that her overwhelming life situation is effectively marked out by pretty much complete powerlessness. You Microfinance reentrenches disciplinary control Brigg ’01 (Morgan, a professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Queensland, “Empowering NGOs: The Microcredit Movement Through Foucault's Notion of Dispositif”) [http://espace.library.uq.edu.au/eserv.php?pid=UQ:11087&dsID=brigg01.pdf] The formation of the loan committee and the deployment of its system of peer accountability represent a multistage disciplinary technique. The first stage, which involves an initial period of training and self-learning about Grameen rules and modes of operation, serves to enroll subjects into Grameen entrepreneurialism and associated subjective modalities. In the second stage, this first operation is linked to the simultaneous discipline of both individuals and peers. Here the linking of provision of a loan to one member with the behavior of other members of the group, initially through the mechanism of a time delay, is a particularly innovative and important part of this technique since it establishes a direct relation between personal desire or need and the imperative to discipline others. Through the disciplinary technique of the loan committee, examination is deployed continuously. This extends from the initial oral examination regarding rules and procedures of Grameen to the supervision by the bank officer of the initial repayments and then to the peer supervision enacted by members. It is in this disciplinary context that stringent loan conditions can be met and that the very poor are judged a good credit risk.[88] Disciplinary rituals carried out at the loan centers complement the peer accountability engendered through the structure and operation of the loan committee. While the operation of power is more diffuse as microcredit recipients go about their daily lives, the loan center is the site where the lines of force of the disciplinary technology of Grameen microcredit are gathered together and are most dense. Before the weekly meetings with the bank officer, recipients gather at the loan center and assemble in a matrix according to their loancommittee groups.[89] When the bank officer is present and all members are assembled, the members rise, salute, and recite the Grameen Bank credo: "Discipline, Unity, Courage, and Hard Work." This ritual precedes physical exercises and collection of payments from members.[90] In his observation of Grameen loan-center operations, David Bornstein notes that the "rules [of Grameen] act as a tight web ... ensuring that villagers are brought together frequently in a setting where they are forced to answer for their actions before all eyes."[91] As the meeting closes, members recite Grameen's sixteen disciplinary imperatives-injunctions such as: Prosperity we shall bring to our families. We shall grow vegetables all year round. We shall eat plenty of them and sell the surplus. We shall always keep our children and the environment clean. For higher income we shall collectively undertake bigger investments.If we come to know of any breach of discipline in any center, we shall all go there and help restore discipline.[92] While Grameen's practice of targeting poor women is broadly seen as commendable by outside donors and lenders, closer scrutiny reveals a different story, and in fact, in accounting for the high percentage of women members, it is found that the Grameen disciplinary imperatives extend beyond the techniques of the loan committee and the operation of the procedures at center meetings. Rahman shows that while the official line is that targeting women provides faster improvements in family conditions and solidarity for women, the bank practice of actually excluding men from the program and focusing on women has much more to do with women being more amenable to the discipline.[93] In his field-work, Rahman found that men were regarded by bank workers as arrogant and difficult to deal with; as a result, men tended to be discouraged or excluded, whereas women, who in a village are more easily traced and who tend to be shy or submissive, were accepted. Furthermore, loans may in fact end up going to men--passed on to them by women who have been pressured by husbands and family members. As Rahman reports, women can thereby find themselves the target of increased pressure and violence as they negotiate both the requirements of Grameen and pressure from men.[94] The disciplinary operation is thus strongly gendered.[95] This local operation of discipline systematically integrates microcredit recipients into the financial and economic networks of the microcredit organization and the development dispositif on a long-term basis. The MCS reports that one of the characteristics of successful microcredit programs is "the incentive of access to larger loans following successful repayment of first loans."[96] The result is that people may be recipients of microcredit for many years. In reporting favorably on the operation of Grameen, Matthews states that after ten years of borrowing, 48 percent of borrowers had crossed the poverty line.[97] Slightly more optimistic is Yunus's quoting of figures that after eight to ten years, 57 percent of Grameen borrowers had escaped poverty.[98] That it should take such a number of years to significantly improve the situation of approximately one-half of Grameen Bank recipients signals the high repayment rates, lack of concessionality, and linkage of local branches with the rest of the lending organization and its broader imperatives. In the case of Grameen, branches borrow from headquarters at 12 percent and lend at 20 percent.[99] The margin is, of course, extracted from the recipients in the microcredit programs. In the spirit of entrepreneurialism, this allows the branches to become profitable and Grameen to expand its operations. Link – Privatization The hidden side-effects of privatization prove the diffuse and tricky nature of power Baer and Birch 1994(Werner Baer and Melissa H. Birch, is an American economist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the Jorge Lemann Professor of Economics. He received his Bachelor's degree from Queen's College and a Master's and a Ph.D. from Harvard University. Associate Professor. Summerfield Education. PhD University of Illinois Masters University of Illinois. “Privitization in Latin America: New Roles for the Public and Private Sectors” pg 33-34.) From the standpoint of employment, the disincorporation process has had a devastating effect on workers in those industries in which major sales, liquidations, and/or mergers have occurred, such as mining, steel, truck and auto parts, fertilizers, sugar, and secondary petrochemicals. A study conducted by the Treasury Secretariat of Privatizations between 1983 and 1989 revealed that privatizations resulted in the direct loss of more than 200,000 jobs in the aforementioned industries.20 Workers' syndicates affiliated with the CTM also reported job losses of up to 200,000 distributed in industries such as steel (40,000), this does not take into account the insidious effect of this policy on workers' rights in the form of enforcement of existing contracts and respect for the right of collective bargaining, the right to strike, and better working conditions in the newly privatized firms. In many cases the government has not hesitated to use bankruptcy proceedings to void labor contracts and/or outright force to "sanitize" state-owned enterprises before formal privatization procedures began. petroleum (20,000 to 135,000), mining (15,000 to 20,000), truck and auto parts (5,000), fertilizers (3,000), and sugar (2,000).21 Moreover, This happened in the privatization of the Cananea mining company in 1988 when, after failed attempts to sell the company to private mining interests, the state stepped in 1989 and declared the company bankrupt. It then "dismissed 2,800 miners, closed the mine, and moved 3,400 troops to insure that workers would not destroy valuable equipment. "22 Another unfavorable outcome of the privatization process (given Mexico's highly inequitable distribution of income and wealth), and one that portends serious consequences for the nation's future political stability and social development, is the unprecedented concentration of productive and financial resources in a relatively few, powerful segments of the private sector (both domestic and foreign). Nowhere is this trend more evident than in the reprivatization of the nation's 18 commercial banks. Despite the Finance Ministry's stated goal of distributing the country's financial power more equitably by prohibiting individual investors from owning more than 5 percent of a privatized bank's shares, ex-bankers and other business and financial leaders created new financial controlling groups that can obtain up to 100 percent of the newly privatized banks. Not surprisingly, some of the same families that dominated the banking system before the 1982 nationalization have returned and some of the nation's most powerful businesspeople have seats on a number of bank boards. Link – Small Farms The fantasy of returning to a small farm utopia keeps surplus populations marginalized, barred from the securities of wealthy society Li, Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto, Canada, ‘10 [Tania Murray, “To Make Live or Let Die? Rural Dispossession and the Protection of Surplus Populations”, Antipode, Vol. 42 No.S1, Jan] Although I began this essay with a critique of the linear narrative of agrarian transition, I want to stress that I do not counterpose transition to a rural utopia, in which people reject newproducts and labour regimes in favour of locally oriented production on small family farms. As my own field research in Sulawesi demonstrates very clearly, and other studies confirm, the transition narrative corresponds closely to a popular desire to leave behind the insecurities of subsistence production, and enjoy the fuller life that better food, housing, education and health care can offer (Ferguson 2005; Rigg 2006). Yet the sad truth is that this desire is frustrated, especially for the poorest people, who are routinely dispossessed through the very processes that enable other people to prosper. Far too many of them cannot even access a living wage, because their labour is surplus to capital’s requirements. Development assistance is new imperialism – new liberal modes of control Duffield, Professor Emeritus and former Director of the Global Insecurities Centre, University of Bristol, ‘7 [Mark, Development, Security and Unending War Governing the World of People, pg. 7-8] Once thought to be no longer applicable in a decolonized world, a liberal conception of trusteeship has once again entered the political foreground following the renewed wave of Western humanitarian and peace interventionism in the post-Cold War period. There has been a revival of interest in liberal imperialism – indeed, an attempt to rehabilitate its self-proclaimed role of protecting and bettering the world (Ferguson 2003; Cooper 2002; Coker 2003). With the exception of Iraq, where mismanagement and horrendous violence have damaged hopes of effective trusteeship, liberal opinion has widely supported the West’s renewed interventionism (Furedi 1994). Michael Ignatieff’s (2003) book Empire Lite, for example, captures today’s acceptance of the necessity of a period of illiberal rule abroad. Awakened by the threat of world disorder and led by avowed anti-imperialists, today’s interventionism constitutes a new form ‘of ostensibly humanitarian empire in which Western powers led by the United States band together to rebuild state order and reconstruct war-torn societies for the sake of global stability and security’ (ibid.: 19). This new empire is being implemented by novel institutional arrangements and divisions of labour linking donor governments, UN agencies, militaries and NGOs. It promises self-rule, not in some distant future but quickly and within an agreed framework. In dealing with elites, many of whom are the products of modern nationalism, the intention is that they should be empowered to succeed. Today’s Empire Liteis only legitimate if it results in the betterment of people and their early self- management. It is imperialism ‘in a hurry, to spend money, to get results, to turn the place back to locals and get out’ (ibid.). For Ignatieff, if there is a problem with this new interventionism, it is that it does not practise the partnership and empowerment that it preaches and is dogged by short-termism and promises betrayed. There is also another and broader conception of trusteeship. Although connected, it lacks the spectacle and immediacy of Ignatieff’s territorial ‘laboratories’ of postinterventionary society (ibid.: 20). Since it is more pervasive and subtle, however, it is arguably more significant. While also having a liberal genealogy, it is about securing freedom by supporting households and community organizations, based on the small-scale ownership of land or property, in their search for economic autonomy and the possibilities for political existence that this affords. It is a trusteeship that encourages local level selfreliance and self-realization ‘both through and against the state’ (Cowen and Shenton 1996: 5). Such a trusteeship operates today in the ideas and institutions of sustainable development. It can be seen in the moral, educative and financial tutelage that aid agencies exert over the attitudes and behaviour of those subject to such development (Pupavac 2005). Although a relation of governance, it nonetheless speaks in terms of empowerment and partnership (Cooke and Kothari 2001). While Western politicians currently argue that enlightened self-interest interconnects development and security, for those insecure humans living within ineffective states the reality of this virtuous circle is, once again, an educative trusteeship that aims to change behaviour and social organization according to a curriculum decided elsewhere. Links – Advantages Link – China The affirmative’s China advantage proves our link – they produce China as a threat, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and turns case Al-Rodhan ‘7 [Khalid, ‘A Critique of the China Threat Theory: A Systemic Analysis’, Asian Perspective Journal, Vol. 31, No. 3, 2007 62-64] the United States have sensationalized their claims by painting an all-powerful, threatening China bent on the destruction of the United States. These claims, as was shown in the previous sections, are speculative at best. With the exception of a few China and international relations specialists, it must be stressed that most scholars have been more nuanced about analyzing the China threat. The problem, however, is that these scholars are not always listened to; recent history provides us with many There is no easy way to analyze the China threat theory. Journalists, strategic thinkers, and pundits in examples of nuance being replaced by exaggeration and irrational threat assessments. The rise of China is certainly an important topic to study and analyze by lay people and academics alike, and the scholarship on this subject is diverse. Analyzing the threat posed by China to East Asia and the United States is certainly an important factor in understanding the policy implications of the rise of China. However, the “China threat” theory” is, on balance, as misleading as it is counterproductive. Methodologically, the “China threat” is a hypothesis about the future. Its supporting examples are imperfect analogies (e.g., to Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany). Each nation’s experience is different and so are the circumstances of the international order. Projecting from these assumptions tends to skew predictions. The forecast that China will be a threat to U.S. national security is a worstcase estimate. It assumes that China’s economy and military will continue to grow at the same rates, that its social cohesion will not be disrupted, and that political stability will not be seriously challenged. These assumptions may hold, but they also may not. The theoretical foundations of the “China threat” suffer from two contradictions. First, it is based on an assumption about Chinese grand strategic intentions. Guessing intentions is often a fruitless exercise. It leads to nothing more than guesstimates about possible futures. The “China threat” theory, simply put, chooses the worst-case scenario of those possible futures; proponents of the theory often use language that reflects certainty and inevitability. Second, as with many theories, there are exceptions to Mearsheimer’s offensive realism; the most recent example is the rise of the United States without war during the early 20th century. Neorealists would argue that the United States and Great Britain, the dominant powers at that time, had “shared values,” which made a war unlikely. This is, however, a unit-level explanation that would not pass the test of systemic theories under neorealism. In either case, the important point to highlight here is that if internal factors matter, then there are many indicators that would point to a different future from the one envisioned by offensive realists. Strategically, the “China threat” thesis is as dangerous as it is misleading. Arm waving by policy makers in Washington can force China to militarize its intentions, even if they were benign, which could lead to enhancing the tensions and making the “China threat” a self-fulfilling prophecy. Overestimating the threat posed by any nation can lead to the wrong policies to contain the threat, which could hurt the United States strategically in the long run. It is not at all clear what China’s exact intentions are. Assuming the worst may be a wise strategy, if one discounts the threats China faces and its security concerns, including instability in Central Asia, North Korea’s nuclear weapons, maritime security in the Pacific, and the potential militarization of Japan. To many, the combination of uncertain intentions and unverified capabilities tends to push the threat posed by China to a new and uncomfortable level of insecurity. Nevertheless, the SinoAmerican relationship has benefited from the strategic ambiguity that has prevailed since the 1970s. The United States and China have avoided conflicts, despite domestic pressures (whether on Taiwan or on economic manipulations); they have also worked toward building a more nuanced and cautious relationship that has been driven by mutual national interests. Declaring China a military and an economic threat can only diminish this ambiguity, and at worst lead to confrontations. In conclusion, Link – Competitiveness Competitiveness rhetoric is used to construct an economic population to be defended through neoliberal warfare Bristow, 5 ( Gillian, BA (Hons) First Class: Economics, Cardiff University (1991). PhD, Cardiff University, “Everyone’s a ‘winner’: problematising the discourse of regional competitivenessPg 299-300 Evolutionary, ‘survival of the fittest’ basis of the regional competitiveness discourse clearly resonates with this evaluative culture. The discourse of competitiveness strongly appeals to the stratum of policy makers and analysts who can use it to justify what they are doing and/or to find out how well they are doing it relative to their ‘rivals’. This helps explain the interest in trying to measure regional competitiveness and the development of composite indices and league tables. It also helps explain why particular elements of the discourse have assumed particular significance—output indicators of firm performance are much easier to compare and rank on a single axis than are indicators relating to institutional behaviour, for example. This in turn points to a central paradox in measures of regional competitiveness. The key ingredients of firm competitiveness and regional prosperity are increasingly perceived as lying with assets such as knowledge and information which are, by definition, intangible or at least difficult to measure with any degree of accuracy. The obsession with performance measurement and the tendency to reduce complex variables to one, easily digestible number brings a ‘kind of blindness’ with it as to what is really important (Boyle, 2001, 60)—in this case, how to improve regional prosperity. Thus while a composite index number of regional competitiveness will attract widespread attention in the media and amongst policymakers and development agencies, the difficulty presented by such a measure is in knowing what exactly needs to be targeted for appropriate remedial action. All of this suggests that regional competitiveness is more than simply the linguistic expression of powerful exogenous interests. It has also become rhetoric. In other words, regional competitiveness is deployed in a strategic and persuasive way, often in conjunction with other discourses (notably globalisation) to legitimate specific policy initiatives and courses of action. The rhetoric of regional competitiveness serves a useful political purpose in that it is easier to justify change or the adoption of a particular course of policy action by reference to some external threat that makes change seem inevitable. It is much easier for example, for politicians to argue for the removal of supply-side rigidities and flexible hire-and-fire workplace rules by suggesting that there is no alternative and that jobs would be lost anyway if productivity improvement was not achieved. Thus, ‘the language of external competitiveness...provides a rosy glow of shared endeavour and shared enemies which can unite captains of industry and representatives of the shop floor in the same big tent’ (Turner, 2001, 40). In this sense it is a discourse which provides some shared sense of meaning and a means of legitimising neo-liberalism rather than a material focus on the actual improvement of economic welfare. Link – Crime The invocation of the spectacle of crime is a tool to expand neoliberal governmentality and discipline abnormal bodies marked as criminal. Corva, 07 (Dominic, BS, Economics, University of Houston. BA, Creative Writing, University of Arizona. MA and PhD, Geography, University of Washington. “Neoliberal globalization and the war on drugs: Transnationalizing illiberal governance in the Americas print) The ‘‘welfarist’’ state logic saw criminal behavior as connected to root social causes such as poverty and racism, and sought to reintegrate its subjects as productive members of society (Beckett&Sasson, 2000).This ‘‘medicalization’’ of criminal justice practices characterizes a liberal approach in which the deviant behavior of individuals is correctable, both through professional management within the carceral systemand through the expansion of social entitlement programs. The logic of the penal state emphasizes a neoliberal, risk-management approach through its emphasis on deterrence, but also requires a complementary intensification of the state’s power to incapacitate: juridically contracteded threats against the freedom of ‘‘bad’’ citizens. The latter is underwritten by a distinctly (neo)conservative3 ideology. O’Malley (2000: 92) critiques 1990s literatures that focus on the neoliberalism of crime control rationalities by distinguishing from them ‘‘a conservative response that emphasizes the duty of the state to act strongly in a sovereign capacity to uphold the rule of law, to intervene purposefully and to punish and exclude transgressors’’. O’Malley reminds us of Foucault’s classic formulation of governmentality as the articulation of sovereign, disciplinary, and economic rationality e not the total eclipse of the pre-liberal first by the other two (Foucault, 1991). In the contemporary context, the sovereign power to punish criminals is ‘‘illiberal’’ (instead of pre-liberal or nonliberal) through its historically and geographically particular articulation with liberal ideas and practices that define the rule of law as the defense of political and economic freedom. In the U.S., the turn to ‘‘penal state’’ criminal justice practices emphasizing incapacitation and deterrence began in the 1970s. The new criminal justice subject changed from the individual with behaviors that can be corrected to abnormal behaviors attached to bodies that must be excluded from the population. The abstraction of behaviors from the bodies which perform them responsibilizes individuals to distinguish morally ‘‘right’’ behavior from ‘‘wrong’’ and self-govern accordingly. The logic of the punitive deterrence is to make crime pay so people will avoid costly criminal behaviors (Beckett, 1997). In this formulation, the penal state is the power-effect of risk-management techniques, and the rise of mass incarceration is the result of the application of neoliberal rationality to an increasingly large population of disorderly, dispossessed urban subjects (Garland, 2001). This formulation raises two empirical questions: is there an increasingly large population of disorderly urban subjects, and if not, then why the prison population explosion? Beckett and Sasson (2000: 16) answer the first question in the negative, noting that the rate of violent crime in the U.S. has remained relatively stable since 1973, while the rate of property crime has fallen dramatically. What has increased, they argue, is spectacle-oriented media coverage of violent crime, which feeds into widespread popular and bipartisan support for ‘‘tough on crime’’ measures characteristic of penal state restructuring. As geographer Ruth Gilmore (1998: 270) puts it, ‘‘it is the greater propensity to lock people up, as opposed to people’s greater propensity to do old or new illegal things, that accounts for 90% of U.S. prison growth since 1980’’. The greater propensity to lock people up, according to Beckett and Sasson, comes from the confluence of late 20th century capitalist media practices oriented towards producing social spectacles for profit, and the depoliticization of social relations that produce ‘‘crime’’ and ‘‘criminals’’ by their transformation into bipartisan electoral capital. The logic of federal ‘‘tough on crime’’ politics can best be understood as part of an attempt by U.S. Democrats to wrest the Senate and the presidency from Republicans, by outflanking them on neoconservative planks of morality and social order. This strategy mirrored the Democratic move to outflank Republicans on questions of economic neoliberalism (‘‘Reaganomics’’), as the welfare state was restructured into the workfare state under the Clinton administration (Peck, 2001). Link – Democracy Promotion of democracy puts a benevolent face on US domination – it’s a tool to draw “developing” countries under the umbrella of US imperialism Ayers 6, Allsion J. Ayers, D.Phil in International Relations/International Political Economy from the University of Sussex and assistant professor of political science at Simon Frase University, “Demystifying Democratisation: The Global Constitution of (Neo)Liberal Polities in Africa,” Thirld World Quarterly, p. 334-335 The dominant social agents of the democratisation project are clearly intent on constituting (neo)liberal polities and establishing the (neo)liberal, procedural notion of democracy as hegemonic. The impetus to constitute African social relations in its own image may be partially attributable to liberalism's universalist pretensions: not compelling for only certain peoples at certain times, but for all human beings at all times in all places.84 Such claims are highly problematic. Social foundations to justify liberalism as universally valid have proved elusive. Indeed, as Margaret Canovan has argued, liberalism has never constituted an account of the world, but rather 'a project to be realised'. Liberal thought and practice historically (currently manifest in the form of democracy and government interventions) when faced with 'difference', 'does indeed have its own broad conception of the good... which it is engaged in imposing politically, legally, socially and culturally wherever it has the power to do so'.85 But an understanding of why the major players in the international system are intent on pursuing the internationalisation of (neo)liberal democracy can not be restricted to the realm of ideas (broadly construed). Ideas have materiality: the ruling ideas of an epoch constitute the dominant material relations grasped as ideas.86 Liberal democracy maintains an organic relation with capitalism. It is in this relation, this article contends, that we may begin to understand the greatpower-defined agenda of 'democratisation'. Western accounts of democratic thought and practice habitually invoke the ancient concept of Athenian democracy as their starting point.87 However, the modern liberal notion of democracy originates not in Athenian democracy but in European feudalism and culminates in liberal capitalism. In this historical trajectory the struggle for the 'rights' and 'liberties' of individuals, characteristic of liberal democracy, arose in large part from the interests of the nascent capitalist class in England concerned by arbitrary and unlimited state power. It was only later that these principles were appropriated and associated with the idea of 'democracy'.88 It was with the emergence of capitalist social property relations that it became possible to conflate or to reduce democracy to liberalism. With the separation of the 'economic' and the 'political' domains, intrinsic to capitalism, there emerged a separate 'economic' sphere constituted by its own power relations not dependent on juridical or political privilege. Liberal democracy 'leaves untouched [this] whole new sphere of domination and coercion created by capitalism'. Much recent commentary on the global nature of capitalism has argued that its economic realm has expanded. beyond the capabilities of liberal-democratic politics, but liberal democracy, whether in its institutional or ideational form, was never intended to extend its reach into the 'economic' realm: The very condition that makes it possible to define democracy as we do in modern liberal capitalist societies is the separation and enclosure of the economic sphere and its invulnerability to democratic power. Protecting that invulnerability has ... become an essential criterion of democracy. This definition allows us to invoke democracy against the empowerment of the people in the economic sphere. Link – Economics Economic engagement relies on the orientalist subjugation of Latin American alternatives to economic modernity. Economics is cultural, not universal – their implicit belief in economic rationality produces normalized subjects amenable to the dictates of biopolitical neoliberalism. Escobar 1995 [Arturo, Kenan Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, UNC-Chapel Hill Director, Institute of Latin American Studies, UNC-Chapel Hill Adjunct Professor, Department of Geography, UNC-Chapel Hill Adjunct Professor, Department of Communications, UNCChapel Hill Fellow, Institute of Arts and Humanities, UNC Fellow, Center for Urban and Regional Research, UNC Facilitator, World Anthropologies Network / Red de Antropologías Mundiales Research Associate, Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, Bogotá, “Encountering Development THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF THE THIRD WORLD” 1995, page ECONOMICS AS CULTURE Needless to say, economists illustrious realist tradition, do not see their science as a cultural discourse. In their long and their knowledge is taken to be a neutral representation of the world and a truth about it. Theirs is not, as Patricia Williams writes referring to the law in ways that are equally applicable to economics, “an imposition of an order—the ironclad imposition of a world view” (1991, 28). “At issue,” Williams continues, “is a structure in which a cultural code has been inscribed” (1991, 19; my emphasis). This inscription of the economic onto the cultural took a long time to develop, as the philosopher Charles Taylor explains: There are certain regularities which attend our economic behavior, and which change only very slowly. . . . But it took a vast development of civilization before the culture developed in which people do so behave, in which it became a cultural possibility to act like this; and in which the discipline involved in so acting became widespread enough for this behaviour to be generalized. . . . Economics can aspire to the status of a science, and sometimes appear to approach it, because there has developed a culture in which a certain form of rationality is a (if not the) dominant value. (Taylor 1985, 103). What is the cultural code that has been inscribed into the structure of economics? What vast development of civilization resulted in the present conception and practice of the economy? The answer to this question is complex and can only be hinted at here. Indeed, the development and consolidation of a dominant view and practice of the economy in European history is one of the most fundamental chapters in the history of modernity. An anthropology of modernity centered on the economy leads us to question the tales of the market, production, and labor which are at the root of what might be called the Western economy. These tales are rarely questioned; they are taken as normal and natural ways of seeing life, “the way things are.” Yet the notions of economy, market, and production are historical contingencies. Their histories can be traced, their genealogies demarcated, and their mechanisms of truth and power revealed. In short, the Western economy can be anthropologized and shown to be made up of a peculiar set of discourses and practices —very peculiar at that in the history of cultures. The Western economy is generally thought of as a production system. From the perspective of the anthropology of modernity, however, the Western economy must be seen as an institution composed of systems of production, power, and signification. The three systems, which coalesced at the end of the eighteenth century, are inextricably linked to the development of capitalism and modernity. They should be seen as cultural forms through which human beings are made into producing subjects. The economy is not only, or even principally, a material entity. It is above all a cultural production, a way of producing human subjects and social orders of a certain kind . Although at the level of production the history of the Western economy is well known—the rise of the market, changes in the productive forces and the social relations of production, demographic changes, the transformation of everyday material life, and the commodification of land, labor, and money—analyses of power and signification have been incorporated much less into the cultural history of the Western economy. How does power enter into the history of the economy? Very briefly, the institutionalization of the market system in the eigtheenth and nineteenth centuries also required a transformation at the level of the individual—the production of what Foucault (1979) has called docile bodies—and the regulation of populations in ways consistent with the movements of capital. People did not go into the factories gladly and of their own accord; an entire regime of discipline and normalization was necessary. Besides the expulsion of peasants and serfs from the land and the creation of a proletarian class, the modern economy necessitated a profound restructuring of bodies, individuals, and social forms. This restructuring of the individual and society was achieved through manifold forms of discipline, on the one hand, and through the set of interventions that made up the domain of the social , to which I have alluded, on the other. The result of this process—Homo oeconomicus—was a normalized subject that produces under certain physical and cultural conditions. To accumulate capital, spread education and health, and regulate the movement of people and wealth required no less than the establishment of a disciplinary society (Foucault 1979).3 At the level of signification, the first important historical aspect to consider is the invention of the economy as an autonomous domain. It is well known that one of the quintessential aspects of modernity is the separation of social life into functional spheres (the economy, the polity, society, culture, and the like), each with laws of its own. This is, strictly speaking, a modern development. As a separate domain, the economy had to be given expression by a proper science; this science, which emerged at the end of the eighteenth century, was called political economy. In its classical formulation by Smith, Ricardo, and Marx, political economy was structured around the notions of production and labor. In addition to rationalizing capitalist production, however, political economy succeeded in imposing production and labor as a code of signification on social life as a whole. Simply put, modern people came to see life in general through the lens of production. Many aspects of life became increasingly economized, including human biology, the nonhuman natural world, relations among people, and relations between people and nature. The languages of everyday life became entirely pervaded by the discourses of production and the market. The fact that Marx borrowed the language of political economy he was criticizing, some argue (Reddy 1987; Baudrillard 1975), defeated his ultimate purpose of doing away with it. Yet the achievements of historical materialism cannot be overlooked: the formulation of an anthropology of use value in lieu of the abstraction of exchange value; the displacement of the notion of absolute surplus by that of surplus value and, consequently, the replacement of the notion of progress based on the increase of surplus by that based on the appropriation of surplus value by the bourgeoisie (exploitation); the emphasis on the social character of knowledge, as opposed to the dominant epistemology, which placed truth on the side of the individual’s mind; the contrast between a unilinear conception of history, in which the individual is the all-powerful actor, and a materialist one, in which social classes appear as the motor of history; a denunciation of the natural character of the market economy and a conceptualization, instead, of the capitalist mode of production, in which the market appears as the product of history; and finally the crucial insight of commodity fetishism as a paradigmatic feature of capitalist society. Marx’s philosophy, however, faced limits at the level of the code.4 The hegemony of the code of signification of political economy is the underside of the hegemony of the market as a social model and a model of thought. Market culture elicits commitments not only from economists but also from all those living with prices and commodities. “Economic” men and women are positioned in civil societes in ways that are inevitably mediated, at the symbolic level, by the constructs of markets, production, and commodities. People and nature are separated into parts (individuals and resources), to be recombined into market commodities and objects of exchange and knowledge. Hence the call by critical analysts of market culture to remove political economy from the centrality that it has been accorded in the history of modernity and to supersede the market as a generalized frame of reference by developing a wider frame of reference to which the market itself might be referred (Polanyi 1957b, 270; Procacci 1991, 151; Reddy 1987).5 I suggest that this wider frame of reference should be the anthropology of modernity. Anthropologists have been complicit with the rationalization of modern economics, to the extent that they have contributed to naturalizing the constructs of economy, politics, religion, kinship, and the like as the fundamental building blocks of all societies. The existence of these domains as presocial and universal must be rejected. Instead, “we must ask what symbolic and social processes make these domains appear self-evident, and perhaps even ‘natural,’ fields of activity in any society” (Yanagisako and Collier 1989, 41). The analysis of economics as culture must thus start by subjecting to scrutiny the apparent organization of societies into seemingly natural domains. It must reverse the “spontaneous impulse to look in every society for ‘economic’ institutions and relations separate from other social relations, comparable to those of Western capitalist society” (Godelier 1986, 18). This task of cultural critique must begin with the clear recognition that economics is a discourse that constructs a particular picture of the economy. To use Stephen Gudeman’s metaphor (1986; Gudeman and Rivera 1990), what we usually recognize as economics is only one “conversation” among many regarding the economy; this conversation became dominant throughout the centuries, thanks to the historical processes already sketched. Gudeman’s unveiling of the use in anthropology of allegedly universal economic models is instructive: Those who construct universal models . . . propose that within ethnographic data there exists an objectively given reality which may be captured and explained by an observer’s formal model. They utilize a “reconstructive” methodology by which observed economic practices and beliefs are first restated in the formal language and then deduced or assessed with respect to core criteria such as utility, labor or exploitation. Although the particular theories used in economic anthropology are quite diverse, they share the assumption that one or another universal model exists and can be used to explain a given field data. According to this perspective, a local model usually is a rationalization, mystification or ideology; at most, it only represents the underlying reality to which the observer has privileged access. (1986, Any model, however, whether local or universal, is a construction of the world and not an indisputable, objective truth about it. This is the basic insight guiding the analysis of economics as culture. The coming into dominance of modern economics meant that many other existing conversations or models were appropriated, suppressed, or overlooked. At the margins of the capitalist world economy, Gudeman and Rivera insist, there existed and continue to exist other models of the economy, other conversations, no less scientific because they are not couched in equations or produced by Nobel laureates. In the Latin American countryside, for instance, these models are still alive, the result of 28) overlapping conversations that have been carried out for a long time. I will come back to the notion of local models in the last section of the There is, then, an orientalism in economics that has to be unveiled—that is, a hegemonic effect achieved through representations that enshrine one view of the economy while suppressing others. The chapter. critique of economics as culture, finally, must be distinguished from the better-known analysis of economics as “rhetoric” advocated by McCloskey (1985). McCloskey’s work is intended to show the literary character of economic science and the price economics has paid for its blind adherence to the scientistic attitude of modernism. This author shows how literary devices systematically and inevitably pervade the science of economics. His aim is to improve economics by bringing it into the realm of rhetoric. The aim of this chapter is quite different. Although some rhetorical analysis is used, particularly in the reading of the economic development theories of the 1950s and 1960s, the analysis of economics as culture goes well beyond the formal aspect of the rethoric of economics. How did particular constructions of the economy come to exist? How do they operate as cultural forces? What practices do these constructions create, and what are the resulting cultural orders? What are the consequences of seeing life in terms of such constructions? Economic development is based on a static interpretation of the economy which fails to take into account the complex nature of economics. This one-shot approach is a quotidian search for perfect knowledge to make the economic man self-regulating Escobar 1995 [Arturo, Kenan Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, UNC-Chapel Hill Director, Institute of Latin American Studies, UNC-Chapel Hill Adjunct Professor, Department of Geography, UNC-Chapel Hill Adjunct Professor, Department of Communications, UNCChapel Hill Fellow, Institute of Arts and Humanities, UNC Fellow, Center for Urban and Regional Research, UNC Facilitator, World Anthropologies Network / Red de Antropologías Mundiales Research Associate, Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, Bogotá, “Encountering Development THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF THE THIRD WORLD” 1995, page 65-67] It was an extremely harmonious view of the economy, without politics, power, or history; an utterly rational world, made even more abstract with the passing of time by the increasing use of mathematical tools. Why did the neoclassical economists abandon classical concerns such as growth and distribution? A commonsense explanation is usually put forward: Because capitalism became consolidated in the second half of the nineteenth century— having achieved remarkable rates of economic growth, elevated the living standards of the masses, and dispelled the old fears of getting to a point where growth would no longer be possible—the analytical preoccupation with growth seemed superfluous. The turn in analysis toward static and short-term theoretical interests, such as the optimization of resource allocation and the decision behavior of individuals and firms, was a logical step to follow.11 Once capitalism was decidedly working, the interest of economists shifted to the fine-tuning of the operations of the system, including the rationalization of decisions and the coordinated performance of markets toward an optimum equilibrium. The dynamic aspects of the economy thus gave way to static considerations. It was what a development economist aptly called the static interlude (Meier 1984, 125–28). Progress had not been without vicissitudes, especially toward the end of the century (falling prices, unemployment, business losses, class struggles, and workers’ organizations); but these problems would fade away as the process of continued growth was not in doubt. And in spite of the fact that by the end of the century the faith in the virtues of laissez-faire had been shaken (especially in relation to the need to control business monopoly), in 1870 most observers believed that universal and perfect trade would reign unhindered. It was as if, the economy having achieved some degree of apparent stability, economists busied themselves with the more mundane but theoretically exciting realm of the quotidian. This confidence was to be torn to pieces with the Great Depression. But by the time this happened, the great “neoclassical edifice,” built in the 1870s and furnished with impeccable precision in the next one hundred years, was firmly in place, shaping the discursive firmament of the discipline. For Schumpeter (1954, 891–909), however, the neoclassical revolution left untouched many of the elements of the classical theory, including “its sociological framework.” The general vision of the economic process was still pretty much the same as in Mill’s time. In short, despite its rejection of the labor theory of value, neoclassical economics inherited, and functioned within, the basic discursive organization laid down during the classical period. The emphasis on individual satisfaction reinforced the atomistic bias of the discipline; more than in classical thought, the economic system was irremediably identified with the market, and economic inquiry with market conditions (especially prices) under which exchange takes place. The problem of distribution was removed completely from the sphere of politics and social relations and reduced to the pricing of inputs and outputs (the marginal productivity theory of distribution). By further isolating the economic system, questions of class and property relations fell outside the scope of economic analysis ; analytical efforts were directed instead to the question of optimization (Dobb 1973, 172–83). The focus on particular static equilibriums, finally, militated against the analysis of macro relations and questions of economic development from a more holistic (for example, Marxist or Schumpeterian) perspective. The great “neoclassical edifice” rested on two basic assumptions: perfect competition and perfect rationality. Perfect and universal knowledge ensured that existing resources would be optimally utilized, guaranteeing full employment. “Economic man” could go about his business in peace because he could be confident that there was a corpus of theory, namely, marginal utility and general equilibrium, which, because it had recourse to a perfect knowledge of things, would provide him with the information he needed to maximize the use of his scarce resources. The underlying picture of the neoclassical world was that of order and tranquillity, of a self-regulating, self-optimizing economic system, a view undoubtedly related to the pomposity of the Pax Britannica then prevailing. This was, then, the neoclassical world at the turn of the century. A world, it was believed, where theory resembled the real economy as a clock resembles time; where the fundamental “niggardliness of nature” was held at bay by those rugged individuals who were able to extract from nature the most precious products; where the invisible hand that ensured the smooth operation of the economy and the welfare of the majority had not yet been burdened with the cumbersome strings of protectionism. The crisis that hit the capitalist world economy from 1914 to about 1948 was to add a number of important components to that edifice. Among them was a new interest in growth. It might be worth recalling these events in some detail, because it was this situation that development economists found at their doorstep when, with great excitement, they decided to build a home for themselves. Link – Failed States The failed states framing relies on ever-shifting definitions of governance based on illfitting Western ideas that encourage quick-fixes and obscures Western imperialism Call ‘8 [Charles T., School of International Service at American University, “The Fallacy of the 'Failed State'”, Third World Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 8, 2008, pp 1491–1507] However, the ‘failed state’ concept now clouds, even misleads, clear analysis. Its utility is diminished for a number of reasons. The concept contains culturally specific assumptions about what a ‘successful’ state should look like and groups together disparate sorts of states with diverse problems. The failed state idea also leads to narrow and univalent policy prescriptions that obscure other important conceptual issues and practical challenges. Six major deficiencies are detailed below. The most serious problem with the concept of failed states is the problem of definition, and more specifically of superaggregation of very diverse sorts of states and their problems. Despite having made the most serious attempt to develop criteria to distinguish ‘failing’, ‘failed’ and ‘collapsed’ states, Zartman, Rotberg, and some policy-oriented projects have had difficulties developing indicators that are intuitively logical or widely shared. Rotberg’s list of indicators of a failed state (which he defines succinctly as ‘broadly, a state in anarchy’12) provides the clearest example of the agglomeration of extremely diverse institutional and social conditions. The list includes: . civil wars characterised by enduring violence; . disharmony between communities; . loss of control over peripheral regions to out-groups; . growth of criminal violence, including gangs, and trafficking of arms and guns; . cessation of functioning legislatures and judiciaries; . informal privatisation of education, health and other social services; . corruption; . loss of legitimacy; . declining per capita GDP, with associated soaring smuggling and the supplanting of the national currency with external money.13 Presumably a state fails when it experiences all of these conditions. Rotberg does not explicitly define what a ‘failing state’ is, but it is presumably a state that exhibits some, but not all, of the above indicators of state failure. The main problem is that these characteristics reflect very disparate social realities, and thus require diverse policy responses. Consider Rotberg’s ‘failing states’ in 2003: Colombia, Cote d’Ivoire, Iraq, North Korea and Indonesia. These countries represent a tremendous range of states and societies. The idea that these states have more shared traits than distinguishing traits seems specious. Colombian state institutions have provided goods and services on a qualitatively different level from those provided by the Nepalese or Ivoirian state, though not throughout the territory. The nature of armed conflicts differs tremendously, and the sorts of policies that one might adopt should presumably reflect these different realities. Similarly, consider the annual Failed States Index (FSI) produced by the Fund for Peace in Foreign Policy magazine for the first time in 2005. That index included 41 sub-indicators of state failure (grouped into 12 categories) as diverse as: . pressures deriving from high population density; . history of aggrieved communal groups based on recent or past injustices; . ‘brain drain’; . institutionalised political exclusion; . a drop in GNP; . the appearance of private militias or guerrillas; . increased corruption; . higher poverty rates for some ethnic groups; . human rights violations; . fragmentation of ruling elites based on group lines, etc.14 The consequence of such agglomeration of diverse criteria is to throw a monolithic cloak over disparate problems that require tailored solutions. The top 10 states on the Failed State Index included those as diverse as Iraq, Cote d’Ivoire, North Korea, Yemen, Sudan and Haiti. The FSI project specifies not only that state strengthening is the medicine for the malady of state failure, but also recommends which parts of the body politic should receive the medicine, without more detailed diagnosis. Given that the symptoms range from poverty to civil war to ethnic diversity to displacement, the idea that a single remedy applied to the same state institutions will cure all problems would be amusing were it not so dangerous. To apply a policy of security sector reform to a country like North Korea, for instance, would make little sense. Likewise a policy of strong support for Ivoirian state institutions might aggravate grievances and violence. Similar thinking led to the universal application of standardised neoliberal structural adjustment packages to all poor countries in the 1990s. We now know that these policies worked against peace processes in places like Central America and Cambodia, and contributed to warfare in Bosnia and Central Africa.15 The failed state concept has led the Western policy community to apply a blunt instrument to states with three million persons (eg Liberia) or 200 million (Indonesia), to strong states with limited areas out of control (Colombia) as much as to weak and legitimate states with low capacity but high legitimacy (East Timor) or predatory states deliberately looting the state for personal or corrupt ends (Liberia). Cookiecutter prescriptions for ‘stronger states’ Just as the ‘failed state’ concept cobbles together diverse states, it tends to lead to a single prescription for diverse maladies: more order. Although those who advance the failed state concept prescribe diverse and tailored solutions to the problems of failing and failed states, they privilege policies that will reinforce order and stability, even when the prevailing order is unjust.16 This emphasis on order and stability clearly serves the interests of Western powers concerned about international insecurities stemming from drug trafficking, terrorism, or internal armed conflicts abroad. It also reflects learning from post-conflict societies that, without security, nothing else is possible. However, the multiple and context-specific needs of a war-torn, abusive, weak or other problem-plagued states tend to be lost, rather than better assured, in the explicit and implicit emphasis on creating states that are foremost strong security providers. The Fund for Peace’s FSI, for instance, suggests that policy makers pursue ‘many remedies and treatments’ for the ‘political pathology’ of failed states. The Index also suggests, however, thLink – Policymakers also must pay more attention to building state institutions, particularly the ‘core five’ institutions: military, police, civil service, the system of justice and leadership.17 Three of these ‘core five’—namely, the military, the police and the justice system—directly reflect a concern for order and stability. These ‘core five’ institutions are seen as the solution for all failed states, despite the vastly disparate 41 indicators of failure described earlier. It is not clear how a stronger military or police capacity (or any of the five core functions) will ensure a rise in GNP, less corruption, more equity among ethnic groups, less subordination to ruling elites, or improved human rights performance. The specious connection between stronger state institutions in these areas and the various problems reflected in the diversity of problemridden states points to the need for more contextualisation, and perhaps categories, to capture these problems with more nuance. As noted earlier, deficient aspects of state performance and state institutions represent genuine problems that have been overlooked. The main challenge for addressing these problems is to go beyond the need to simply ‘build states’, with the implication that external actors should target their assistance first and foremost towards state strength. The one-size-fits-all ‘state-building’ answer to ‘failed states’ misses important tensions and tradeoffs in pursuing state strength. Most salient, enhancing the capacity of military and police and judiciaries when these are instruments of repression, corruption, ethnic discrimination, and/or organised crime will only worsen these problems. The central challenge for state building—how to strengthen state legitimacy and effectiveness when the state is swept under the rug by the discourse of failed states and state predatory, corrupt, authoritarian or otherwise ‘bad’—is building. Dodging democracy and democratisation The focus on failed states and building states obscures another important issue: regimes and their nature. For those concerned primarily with order, the discourse of states and state building helps avoid thorny issues of democratisation, representation, horizontal accountability and transparency. An increasing concern with states and state building coincided with a period in the late 1990s of disillusion with the ability of international actors— whether the UN, international financial institutions, international NGOs (INGOs) or bilateral states—to instil democracy in war-torn countries. The cases of post-war democratisation in Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Cambodia and Liberia weakened the optimism (and resolve) of liberal interventionists about the ability of democracy to take root in heavily internationalised operations after war. In fact, the focus on states and state institutions in most cases provided a refreshing and needed corrective to concepts, policies and programmes that did not deliver on the promise of democracy. However, by focusing on state institutions in an apolitical and technical manner, issues of the rules of governance are neglected or relegated to a backseat. The response to state failure—enhanced states and state institutions— tends to prioritise state agencies like the military, the police, the judiciary, public finance agencies, as well as health, education, and other executive agencies that deliver social services. This discourse is a marked departure from the institutions that the democratisation sub-field has emphasised over the past decade: political parties, civil society organisations, legislatures and the organisations that mediate between citizens and various governmental bodies.18 In societies where state strength is not so much an issue as the degree to which the state serves all the territory equally, or where only certain social groups have access to effective state services, then issues of regime are likely to be more important than issues about the state.19 In countries like Croatia, Macedonia, Colombia and Indonesia, for instance, the strength of state institutions is far less weighty than how state institutions reflect and respond to popular aspirations, needs and identity. And in societies where ethnic groups exist in tension or hold disproportionate economic and political power, or where elites have long exploited the populace without any accountability, strengthening state institutions without attention to how society will relate to the state is perilous. In such states (eg Liberia, Afghanistan, Burundi), state building inevitably must reckon not solely with the nature of the state (federal, autonomous, etc) but also with the regime’s rules of governance. Although recent scholarship has brought needed State building has marginalised questions like what sort of democratic regime is appropriate for a given country, how oppressed groups will receive representation, how social groups’ interests will be mediated, what forms of attention to the state, current concepts of state failure and state building threaten to throw the baby out with the bathwater. accountability over state authorities should be adopted, and to what extent liberal rights will be enshrined and enforced, and by what sort of judicial system.20 These issues of governance, electoral rules, justice and group rights (among many others) will not resolve themselves solely through effective state strengthening. They require deliberate and thoughtful attention. Conflation of peace and stateness One aspect of the growing attention to state failure is the new attention to states and state institutions among those concerned with peace building and peacekeeping. Although state building is not a term often used by donors or the United Nations, these organisations have increasingly come to see fostering sustainable state institutions as the core task of peacebuilding. States are seen as necessary for peace, and successful peace building becomes virtually synonymous with state building. A report by a UN-appointed High- Level Panel making recommendations for UN reform flatly says, ‘Along with establishing security, the core task of peacebuilding is to build effective public institutions that, through negotiations with civil society, can establish a consensual framework for governance within the rule of law’.21 A 2004 UN study found that numerous UN officials indicated that the creation of effective state-building can jeopardise peace, and contribute to insecurity and group tensions.23 Where external donors provide resources to corrupt, predatory central governments in the name of strengthening their institutions, state building only advances abusive authority and fuels resentment and armed resistance. Where postand legitimate states is now the central marker of success of a peace operation.22 Yet conflict state building creates institutions that serve only an ethnic or other minority, peace is threatened. Conversely, by accepting peace deals which enshrine the power of military faction leaders, enabling them to divide and capture state resources, then peace building undermines state building. Just as it glosses over tricky issues of democratisation, the failed state concept allows decision makers to avoid some of the tensions between the strengthening of a central state and the delicate process of ensuring that armed groups do not topple or threaten one another or the state. Peace building may require avoiding state building for a time, just as The most self-evident deficiency of the concept of state failure is the valuebased notion of what a state is, and a patronising approach to scoring states based on those values. Naturally all categorisations rest on values. Indeed, I share many of the liberal values that enhancing state capacities may sometimes foster instability. Paternalism: teleological assumption and Western bias lament the shortcomings of states that fail to provide basic, life-sustaining services to their populations. At the same time, the failed state concept repeats the same assumptions that modernisation theory made in its heyday, assumptions that proved to be so problematic. Both approaches assume that there is some ‘good’ endpoint towards which states should move, and that this movement is somehow natural. Like the ‘modern’ standard of three decades ago, the ‘successful state’ standard of today is based on the features of the dominant Western states. Indeed, little discussion of the partial failures of Western states occurs in the literature on failed states.24 The schoolmarm tone of the concept is apparent: states are ‘bad’ because they have failed some externally defined test. Even where a state’s population might be better served by the temporary or partial assumption of its sovereignty by some assemblage of international or regional actors,25 the multiple problems of such arrangements—ie alternatives to the failed state—are not acknowledged or considered. Similarly, the appeal of forms of authority organised at levels other than the state—sub-state authority arrangements or transnational authority arrangements—are not acknowledged even where these may prove more sensible than seeking to get failing states out of ‘detention hall’ and back to some pre-failure status. The failed state concept goes farther than modernisation theory in presuming that all states at one point held some ‘successful’ (or passing grade) status. Rotberg’s criteria for failed stateness are telling: ‘A failed state is a polity that is no longer able or willing to perform the fundamental tasks of a nation-state in the modern world’.26 Yet many such states have never been effective in meaningful ways, and their populations have received services and security via alternative forms of authority. Whether these tribes, local strongmen, regional authorities, or transnational arrangements have delivered effectively or not, the point is that an ahistorical assessment of a state facilitates quick fixes and prepared solutions that do not necessarily reflect the context of a particular society. One consequence of this usage of the concept is that states with relatively stable objectionable features are conflated with states experiencing unusual crises of authority. For instance, Colombia is considered to be ‘failing’ despite the relatively stable condition of its state institutions over four decades. By contrast, Zimbabwe is considered to be failing as a result Related to the paternalistic character of the failed state label is the obfuscation of the West’s role in the contemporary condition of these states. This ahistoric scoring of a state as failing or fragile omits the long history of colonialism and exploitation in the impoverishment and poor governance of many societies presently considered fragile or failing.27 European states (and later North American countries) created the system of nation-states, often drawing the borders of states themselves, as well as extracting resources, fostering colonial institutions with powerful legacies, propping up postcolonial leaders, providing them with arms, and undermining the emergence of plural and civil societies that might have of an important change in policies by a quasi-democratic ruler, Robert Mugabe, in 2000. Obfuscation of the West’s role in ‘failure’ diminished poverty, warfare and weak institutions.28 Link – Free Trade Free trade is a guise for biopolitical violence- countries that don’t agree to the terms of “free” trade they are disciplined into globalization’s coercive umbrella Kumar 9 (Chandra, PhD in philosophy from University of Toronto, “Foucault, Disciplinary Power, and the ‘Decentring’ of Political Thought: A Marxian View” print pg 25-26) Let me put the point another way: the fact that everyone is, as Foucault believed, involved in coercive relations in one way or another, is to be expected, given the top-down command structures of our economic institutions, highly autocratic structures that play no small role in shaping our lives, including the way we see the world, including our relations to each other; and given the market discipline to which, in varying degrees, the lives of most people, but not the very rich, are subject - not when they rely, as they often do, on massive state subsidies, protectionist measures, government 18 contracts, and various forms of regulation and 'finetuning' of the economy by an interventionist state. (Then there are such things as tax breaks and loopholes for the rich, regressive taxation, and so on.) These political-economic realities surely play a massive role in peoples’ lives, in their ‘local’ settings no less. We live in an era, for example, in which hundreds of millions are sacrificed on the altar of ‘free trade’. The idea of 'free trade' and 'free markets' has, since the dawn of industrial capitalism and European imperialism, been a useful device for the wealthiest corporations to keep wages down, to acquire a larger share of the world market, and to divert attention from their own operations and towards the state as the source of social ills. No country in the era of capitalism has ever substantially developed an industrial base or improved its average standard of living without heavy state involvement in the economy (including protectionist policies) and state spending. It is only when countries thus develop that the doctrine of 'free trade' or 'free markets' is pushed on weaker countries and on the populations of the rich countries.9 What sort of human relations should we expect to obtain in such a world? Given a realistic understanding of the inherently hierarchical and exploitative structures of capitalist society, and given a non-evasive understanding of the historical development and expansion of capitalism globally, is there any good reason for thinking that, so long as we live under this system, we will be able to create a world without a great deal of alienation and suffering, without a lot of nastiness produced by a more or less fiercely competitive labour market and a culture of greedy individualism? In the face of the pervasive decentring of political thought, let me emphasise that the dominant socio-economic order in modern times is one that, even when things are going relatively well, even when the economy is 'booming', crushes people's dreams and hopes for a better life on a regular basis. It is neither 'nature' nor 'cultural backwardness' that does it; rather, it seems to be just the normal workings of the capitalist system. These, at any rate, are the sorts of considerations that, in my opinion, should lead one to avoid construing Foucault's conception of power relations as 'capillary' and/or 'productive', as offering insights that are somehow being covered up by Marxian theory. Rather, it makes more sense to be more Gramscian here, to see Foucault as making a point, perhaps unwittingly, about just how pervasive power relations are in a class-divided society. What Foucault really draws attention to is the ongoing discipline, coercion, manipulation, and divisiveness that functions to keep those at the top comfortable - even though this often requires more subtle methods of social control than strictly repressive methods. It makes more sense, that is, to see Foucault's conception of power as 'capillary' and 'productive' as 19 cohering nicely with what Marxists for a long time have been saying about the nature and functioning of social institutions in class-divided societies, especially where the dominant class is a small minority of the population; and especially in modern societies where 'the masses' have achieved some level of political influence and, as a result, the powerful must at least pay lip service to democratic ideals. In this situation, ‘productive’ power has, surely, acquired a central role in the maintenance of the social order. It might be said that I have missed the point of the many criticisms of class reductionism - whatever that phrase is supposed to mean. In everything I have been saying so far it is just assumed, is it not, that class structure and class relations are always primary in social explanations? Or, to give another reading to 'reductionism', have I not been assuming that every form of social and poltical conflict, despite appearances, is really a form of class conflict? Moreover, it might be added, Foucault's point wasn't to deny the significance of class altogether, but to deny that every form of oppression, every kind of power relation between human beings, can be explained in terms of class or the economic structure of society. To these and similar charges of reductionism, I would remind the reader that my argument was not that class explains everything, or every important thing; nor did I assume or claim that all forms of conflict are, despite appearances, disguised forms of class conflict; nor did I claim or assume that class oppression is morally more important than all other forms of oppression. Rather, I argued (a) that Foucault's notion of power as capillary and/or productive perhaps makes more sense within a framework of class analysis than it otherwise would (it both strengthens and is strengthened by such a Marxian framework); and, minimally (b) that class analysis, a central element of Marxian theory, is not inherently in conflict with Foucault's notion of power as capillary and/or productive. I did so because these conceptions have often been put forth, sometimes by Foucault himself, as a way of diminishing the metaphor of social power as having a centre and as a way of averting our critical eyes from the persistent, deeply consequential concentration of power that is the hallmark of a system of class domination. Link – Human Rights Human rights are just a mask for imperial liberalist violence and biopolitical control of populations Prozorov, 07 (Seregei, University of Helesinki Department of Political and Economic Studies, Foucault, Freedom and Sovereignty, Ashgate Publishing, pg. 108-109) What ought to be problematised from the outset is every attempt to resist the biopolitical investment of man from the standpoint of the citizen. This strategy is arguably at work in the contemporary global discourse of human rights. Which ventures to resist domination by extending what are evidently the rights of a citizen to the entire humanity and in this manner explicating a particular bios into the universal zoe. However, our preceding discussion permits us to claim that the very notion of human rights is meaningless in the biopolitical terrain of late modernity (cf. Rasch 2003). Indeed, it is only citizens that can make recourse to rights as members of a certain political bios, while the synthetic life of the "˜man` of biopolitical investment is hardly a right but rather a duty of both the individual and the state. The human rights, listed in innumerable scriptures of contemporary world politics, are. of course, historically nothing other than the civic rights of the citizens of Western liberal democracies. which are a result of political struggles in particular settings rather than essential attributes of a human being. ln other words, the subjects of Western democracies have gained these rights as citizens rather than as men and these rights belong to the domain of the bios rather than zoe, even if their function is precisely to delimit the domain of zoe from state intervention. The logically necessary form of promoting these rights globally is the establishment of the structure of the "˜world state', in which all men are present as citizens (Wendt 2003. Ci Prozorov 2006b. chapter 7). Anything short of that. e.g. "˜regime change' military operations that seek to establish democratic structures of citizenship in target societies, only serves to subject these populations to the sovereignty of another state, establishing what. irrespectively of all emancipatory rhetoric. is a relationship of domination. Alternatively. the extension of these rights to all men qua men in the absence of the corresponding structures of citizenship would merely entail their subjection to the biopolitics of another state without their participation in the democratic sovereignty of this state. As a number of critical studies have indicated (see e.g. Brlkins 2000: Cooke and Kothari 200l; Brig; 200l: Bryant 2002), the beneficiaries of "humanitarian` interventions of Western powers actually become the object of governmental practices ol' discipline and surveillance, containment and confinement that deprive them of human dignity in the name of their final endowment with "˜human rights”. As non-citizens, these human beings figure in the 'humanitarian' governmentality solely as the objects of the a priori asymmetrical "˜shepherd-t1oclt` relationship. in which the very idea of rights is ipso facto meaningless. The idea of global promotion of human rights is therefore fraught with contradictions that are unfortunately not merely conceptual. Indeed. killing in the name of human rights that we observe today in the murderous crusades of rampant "˜anti-terrorism' and "˜regime change' is possible precisely because the discourse ol` human rights insistently seeks to introduce human life into the domain of global politics. Rather than do anything to resist biopolitical investment, the discourse of human rights replicates exactly the monstrous conflation of sovereignty and biopolitics that permits the state to kill in the name of the care of the living. Thus, we may concur with Agnmben's blunt assertion that every attempt to found political liberties in the rights of man is in vain' (Agamben I998. l8l). Rights are ineffective and reproduce liberal violence – the normalization of the rightsbearing subject is the condition of possibility for the destruction of deviance. Pickett, 05 (Brent, Ph.D. @ University of Colorado, On The Use And Abuse Of Foucault For Politics, Lexington Books Inc., pg. 79-80) A defender of the traditional, liberal conception of rights could respond that Foucault's critique erroneously assumes that rights will only be used against the state. ln fact, of course, rights are also deployed against private individuals and corporations. Yet Foucault's point is that such deployments are still in the legal terms set by the state, and it is those formal restrictions that have been surmounted . So for example, firms establish dress codes, set standards of productivity, and regulate how persons interact with one another, and still remain well within the bounds of the law. Persons are evaluated against a standard of the ideally industrious and normal self; backed by an ever-present threat of sanction or dismissal. For Foucault, much of the normalization that occurs is in these areas of legally permissible action by individuals and corporations. Rights are therefore, according to Foucault, incapable of restricting the most important sites of normalization and production of docile bodies. While formal, equal rights were gradually extended to larger sections of the population, they were in fact becoming irrelevant: in the principal institutions of society, persons were not equal but instead always subject to hierarchies and disciplinary punishment, and the rights they held did nothing to combat the spread of modem power. Furthermore, precisely because traditional rights are obsolete, since they are focused upon a premodern form of power and view society in terms of contractual relations, they direct attention away from the actual functioning of modem power. Rights have therefore become "a system _ . . superimposed upon the mechanisms of discipline in such a way as to conceal its actual procedures, the element of domination inherent in its techniques . . _ "H While philosophers and jurists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries dreamt of a contractual society which established fundamental rights, there was a second dream, originating in the military but spreading well beyond it, which imagined "meticulously subordinated cogs of a machine . . . pennanent coercions . . _ automatic docility."•'2 The dark underside of the dream of the social contract philosophers, and its partial realization, is the nightmare of the diffusion of the techniques for the coercion of bodies. The critique of liberal rights goes beyond the charge of ineffectiveness and misdirection. Foucault also argues that liberal rights help to support modern power, that they are integral to a system of "brutality." '3 There are two reasons for this. The first is that the set of institutions that rights help to legitimate, the laws, courts, police, and prisons charged with protecting citizens' rights, function as a system of domination. Although these govemmental bodies can only exist upon a more fundamental level of disciplines, Foucault argues that they in tum reinforce those basic tactics of power. A rights-based legal order then works through the systematic application of violence through the police and prisons, and perhaps more importantly, it helps to reinforce the larger web of modem power which has colonized rights and the law over the past two and half centuries. The second way in which traditional rights contribute to this system of domination is that they aid in the "˜normalization' of persons. The modern, rights-bearing individual is himself a product of power. Rights have typically been justified by an account of what man is supposed to be by nature. For example, the Lockean rights-bearing self is, by nature, rational, industrious, and under universal duties to be sociable and have a friendly disposition. " Alan Gewirth relies upon a view of the self as motivated by reason and universal principles derived from that reason."• Charles Taylor gives a qualified defense of rights as offering protection for important human capacities such as reason, moral agency, and autonomy.'6 ln contrast, Foucault, at least in his works from the 19605 and 1970s, considers any and every account of human nature to be deeply misguided. We are not anything by nature; even those "good"• capacities of reason and moral agency have to be forced upon us through meticulous rituals of power. As Nietzsche expressed this idea, "how much blood and cruelty lie at the bottom of all "˜good things'!"•'7 Those selves and parts of self that do not live up to this definition can therefore be slandered, marginalized, and disciplined. They are insane, perverts, criminals, or deviants. Or when they are parts of an otherwise "˜normal' self, they are neuroses, passions, and addictions. Traditional rights, in Foucault's view, are part of the problem due to their reliance upon a ln the powerful piece "Two Lectures,"• Foucault lays out his critique of traditional rights, yet he also speaks of his desire to use rights to oppose the disciplines. At this point Foucault, and he thinks everyone else, are caught in a "blind alley"•: what appears to be a way of opposing disciplinary power is itself caught up in that power. Appeals to rights would be worse than ineffective; they would likely be selfdefeating. The very sort of normalization, misdirection from actual power, and covert defense of a system of brutality that one is trying to avoid is intertwined with rights. How can one appeal to rights while avoiding these pitfalls? Link – Humanitarianism/Poverty Their humanitarianism a smokescreen for controlling “underdeveloped” populations based on a disciplinary fear of the poor. Naz 6. Farzana Naz.[MSS (Dhaka), M.Phil in Gender and Development (Norway), is associated with the Centre for Development Governance (CDG) Bangladesh as its Research Associate] Arturo Escobar and the Development Discourse: An Overview. Asian Affairs, Vol. 28, No. 3, 6484, July - September 2006. The order of discourse is telling. ‘Underdeveloped areas’ are portrayed as passive, as victims of diseases, poverty and stagnation. Their inertia stands in sharp contrast to the dynamism and itality of the ‘developed areas’, and the USA in particular. These areas can embark upon ‘bold programmes’, and their technical knowledge and scientific advances are constantly expanding, always reaching new highs. This in turn enables them to rescue the ‘underdeveloped areas’ from their ‘misery’, to deliver them from their primitiveness to modernity; to the era of ‘technical knowledge’, ‘scientific advances’, ‘greater production’, and ‘personal freedom and happiness for all mankind’.Three aspects of this order of discourse deserve further elaboration here, primarily because they have continued to inform and underpin development discourse. These three can be summed up under the captions fear, absences, and hierarchies, and in one way or another they can be seen to have performed crucial functions in development ever since its inception. Fear may seem an odd category in this context. Development is always presented as a humanitarian and moral concern, an ethical obligation on behalf of the rich to help and care for those less fortunate. But behind this aura of humanitarianism lurks a certain fear of poverty and the poor. In the words of President Truman, ‘Their poverty is ... a threat both to them and to more prosperous areas’. The association of poverty with danger can be traced back at least to the eighteenth century, when rapid industrial improvements made the existence of widespread poverty appear as a threat to the wealth and ‘civilised’ way of life of the upper sections of the population. The ‘dangerous classes’ (Gordon, 1991) therefore needed to be controlled, and in the West, the poor gradual1y appeared as a social problem, requiring new forms of intervention and management. ‘Assisting the poor’, Proccacci reminds us, ‘is a means of government, a potent way of containing the most difficult sections of the population and improving all other sections’ (1991: 151). This observation can be explained to include not only domestic welfare arrangements, but also international development aid. In the post-war period, poor countries were associated with unrest and instability, and increasingly appeared as a threat to the liberal world order. This was particularly the case after the rise of Communism, as material deprivation was perceived to make people prone to irrational and extremist politics that could potentially upset the global balance of power. Poverty, at both the domestic and international levels, therefore needed to be managed. In the words of Proccacci, poverty ‘constitutes a development area for techniques designed to structure an organic social order which, whatever the concrete localization of’ the human subjects it deals with, is hitherto remained formless’ (1991: 164). Through the various techniques to combat poverty, the poor become observed and classified, managed and surveilled they become visible objects of disciplinary power (Foucault, 1991). In relations between North and South, development has facilitated such control and management of the ‘third world’ and its ‘formless’ population of poor and destitute (Doty, 1996). Development allowed the North to gather ‘facts’ in order to define and improve the situation of the poor peoples of the South, and the third world became a category of poor peoples of the South, and the third world became a category of intervention, a place to be managed and reformed. New forms of power and control that could be justified with reference to a humanitarian concern for development came into being, and in the process ‘poor people’s ability to define and take care of their own lives was eroded in a deeper manner than perhaps ever before (Escobar, 1995: 39). Another central feature of development discourse, visible already in President Truman’s speech, is the narration of underdevelopment as a series Of absences. The third world is defined primarily by what it is not, rather than by what it is. Its central characteristics become what it lacks, not what it possesses. The essence of the third world is accordingly its lack of development, the absence of ‘technical knowledge’, ‘scientific advances’, prosperity, progress and so on. As development discourse has changed and adapted to the changing circumstances of both donor and recipient countries, the specific nature of these absences has varied. Underdevelopment has been variously described as the absence of ‘growth’, ‘basic needs’, ‘integrated rural development’, ‘structural adjustment’, ‘sustainable development’ and so forth, but the focus has remained firmly on what is wanting. Link – ICT Their attempt to link increased flows of information to democratic practice is a ruse for the extension of biopolitical governmentality – power operates through the reduction of life to information Dillon & Reid 01 [Michael, emeritus scholar at Lancaster University who has written extensively on security and war, international political theory, continental philosophy, and cultural research; Julian, Lecturer in International Relations at King's College London, “Global Liberal Governance: Biopolitics, Security and War” Millennium - Journal of International Studies (2001) 30: 41] In contemporary liberal societies the net-like circulation of power locally as well as globally has generalised this concern for knowledge. Biopower has become informational. This does not simply mean that it operates through digitised and integrated computer-mediated communication and surveillance technologies.35 Information is now regarded as the principle of formation of life itself. That move has been both cybernetic and molecular, a function of the way the information and the life sciences now install information at the centre of the organisation and functioning of life. The Changing Bios of Biopolitics As the life sciences went through a dramatic transformation during the course of the last century, so the bios, or very conception of life informing biopower, began to be conceived differently, and thereby opened up strategically to new governing technologies. These changes can be followed in Lily Kay’s magisterial genealogical studies, The Molecular Vision of Life and Who Wrote the Book of Life?36 Here Kay documented the detailed capillary workings of the power/knowledge nexus that led to the triumph of the molecular vision in the second half of the twentieth century and the current domination of genetic science by the metaphor of language and code.37 The disciplinary power of molecular biology, especially its expanding sphere of influence through the various human there is a remarkable congruence between the cognitive and the social realms, between our technocratic social policies and the technocratic (biopolitical) approach to life, health, and disease…This dialectical process of knowing and doing, empowered by a synergy of laboratory, boardroom, and federal lobby, has sustained the rise of molecular biology into the twenty-first century.38 As the very biological definition of life has changed, so also has the historical character of biopower. Information theory, cybernetics, systems analyses, electronic computers, and simulation technologies fundamentally altered the representation of animate and inanimate phenomena. These new communication sciences began to reorient molecular biology (as they did, to various degrees, other life and social sciences) even before it underwent a paradigm shift (1953) from protein—to DNA—based explanations of hereditary.39 Code, then, appears to mark a new phase in biohistory. It forms a direct link, a common conceptual bond, between the information and the molecular sciences and is the foundation of the new biophilosophical discourse that they share. ‘New biology’, the name given to the life sciences of the 1920s, before the triumph of the molecular revolution, stressed the unity of phenomena common to all organisms, rather than their diversity. This commonality soon genome projects, displays some deep lines of continuity with the past. Today, just as a half a century ago, centred on the gene. In the 1940’s Erwin Schrodinger suggested a code script for the gene. The idea crystallised during the summer of 1953 and by 1965 the representation of heterocatalysis in terms of a genetic code had been completed.40 However, it is in the convergence of digital and the molecular revolutions that the scope of the commonality between these sciences has been bodies’ and ‘populations’ are becoming today something altogether different. While genetic science makes it possible to have trans-species exchanges and life-forms, third order cybernetics conceives of living systems in terms of machinic assemblages comprised of both organic and inorganic matter.41 It is this conjunction of the digital and the molecular revolutions that has given such impetus to the advance of the so-called complexity sciences. As the essential constituent components of life, indeed of all material reality, began to be conceived in terms of information, successive orders of cybernetics have provide conceptual and operational architecture for the ‘strategisation of information’, upon which the operations of network societies have become increasingly dependent. The problematics here become those concerned with identifying and manipulating the generative principles of formation and the codified ways in which selforchestrating informationally ordered networks come into existence and operate. Architecture, in the form of the design of networked information systems, becomes a strategic science. It comes as little surprise, therefore, to discover that key aspects of the US strategic doctrine have recently come to be formulated in terms of network-centric warfare.42 Before exploring these developments, we will outline the extended to encompass all matter as informational. As a consequence, ‘ problematisation of security that we use to analyse them. Link – International Law Modern biopolitics makes a mockery of international law – it does not suppress the excesses of sovereignty but merely extends it through more subtle and nefarious means. Adelman, 10 (Sam , Professor of Legal Theory @ Warwick School of Law, “The Unexceptional Exception: Sovereignty, Human Rights and Biopolitics”, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1534608) Pre-emptive regime change, extraordinary renditions, torture, Guantánamo Bay, the refusal to accord combatant status under the “quaint” Geneva Conventions, control orders in the UK similar to apartheid banning orders under apartheid, and unprece-dented biopolitical surveillance comprise a litany of abuses perpetrated by resurgent sovereign security states. In the wars of and on terror, states of exception are norma-lised as manifestations of sovereign exceptionalism exploiting the politics of fear - “the official prose of the „war on terror‟ now presents a „clear and present danger‟ to the otherwise much vaunted ontological robustness of human rights and fundamental freedoms” (Baxi 2005:25). “At the technical juridico-political level, the foundations of the „new‟ international law are being laid through a complex mosaic of the individ-ual and collective right to „pre-emptive‟ self-defence, justifications for the use of United Nations unsanctioned use of force for the violent achievement of „regime change,‟ and the equally violent disregard for the hitherto relatively settled norms of international humanitarian law” (Baxi 2005:35). „New‟ international law, argues Baxi, is characterized by the surveillance, discipline and punishment of „rogue‟ or „outlaw‟ states, the redundancy of earlier „hard‟ and „soft‟ law, and rank selfjustifying conse-quentialism. In Huntington‟s odious construction, in the „clash of civilizations‟ the Schmittian friend-enemy dichotomy (Mutua, 2002) is resurrected (George W. Bush: “you‟re ei-ther with us or against us”) in a vain attempt to legitimate draconian legislation, xeno-phobia, and violations of human rights law, humanitarian law and the laws of war. As Judith Butler puts it: [I]f the self- preserving and self-augmenting aims of the state are once more linked with „sovereignty‟ … [it] can be mobilized as one of the tactics of gov-ernmentality both to manage populations, to preserve the national state, and to do both while suspending the question of legitimacy. Sovereignty becomes the means by which claims to legitimacy function tautologically.” (Butler 2004:96-97). Butler argues that biopower constitutes people “as less than human without entitle-ment to rights, as the humanly unrecognizable. This is different from producing a sub-ject who is compliant with the law; and it is different from the production of the sub-ject who takes the norm of humanness to be its constitutive principle. The subject who is no subject is neither alive nor dead, neither fully constituted as a subject nor fully deconstituted in death” (Butler 2004:98). Link – Iran Iranian threat construction is based in Orientalism, Islamophobia, and racist double standards Izadi & Biria 7 [Foad Izadi & Hakimeh Saghaye-Biria, Comm & Public Affairs @ LSU Baton Rouge, 2007 Journal of Communication Inquiry 31.2, “A Discourse Analysis of Elite American Newspaper Editorials,”] The focus of all the editorials revolved around the United States’s responsibility to fight the spread of nuclear weapons to Iran. The editorials attempted to show that Iran had violated its international obligations under the NPT. The two themes of Oriental untrustworthiness and Islam as threat appear to function as the ideological underpinning of this construction of us versus them. Whereas it downplays or denies Iran’s right to all nuclear technology applicable to peaceful purposes, a most central tenet of the NPT was left outside the editorials’discourse:nuclear disarmament. Under the terms of the NPT, the five original nuclear powers, who are parties to the NPT, were permitted to keep their nuclear arsenal but pledged to negotiate “in good faith”the end of the nuclear arms race and the elimination of their nuclear arsenals in return for other nations not seeking nuclear weapons (IAEA, n.d., pp. 1, 4). As stated by the Washington-based Institute for Public Accuracy (2005b), 35 years after the adoption of the NPT, the nuclear weapon states have failed to live up to their part of the treaty: [They] cynically [interpret] the NPT as a mechanism for the permanent maintenance of an international system of nuclear apartheid in which only they can possess nuclear weapons....Now the Bush administration wants to add a second tier to its nuclear double standard by denying uranium enrichment—needed for both nuclear power and weapons—to countries which don’t already have it. Today, the United States is spending about $40 billion annually on nuclear weapons. U.S. nuclear weapons spending has grown by 84% since 1995. The United States was to spend about $7 billion in 2005 to maintain and modernize nuclear war- heads, excluding the billions of dollars it will spend to operate and modernize its delivery and command and control systems. The U.S. arsenal has 10,000 nuclear warheads, and some 2,000 on “hair-trigger alert,”each one many times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Institute for Public Accuracy, 2005a) The New York Times reported on February 7,2005,that the Bush administration has “begun designing a new generation of nuclear arms meant to be sturdier and more reliable and to have longer lives”(Broad, 2005, p. A1). Former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn criticized the administration’s decision,saying that the United States has not set a good example for nuclear nonproliferation (Agence France-Presse, 2005). El Baradei has also criticized the U.S. nuclear policy (Giacomo, 2003). “The U.S. government demands that other nations not possess nuclear weapons; meanwhile, it is arming itself....In truth there are no good or bad nuclear weapons. If we do not stop applying double standards, we will end up with more nuclear weapons,”El Baradei said. Writing in the editorial section of The Washington Post, former President Jimmy Carter (2005) criticized the nuclear powers for refusing to meet their NPT nuclear disarmament commitments. He argues, The United States is the major culprit in this erosion of the NPT. While claiming to be protecting the world from proliferation threats in Iraq, Libya, Iran and North Korea, American leaders not only have abandoned existing treaty restraints but also have asserted plans to test and develop new weapons, including anti-ballistic missiles, the earth-penetrating “bunker buster”and perhaps some new “small”bombs. They also have abandoned past pledges and now threaten first use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states. (p. A17) Whereas Iran’s alleged violation of its commitments under the NPT is important, the failure of the United States and the other nuclear weapon states to follow through on their promise to work toward the elimination of nuclear weapons is not deemed worthy of discussion. Conclusion This study supports Karim (2000) and McAlister’s (2001) findings that, today, Orientalist depictions of Muslim countries and their political issues concentrate around the idea that Islam is a source of threat. This study also finds that in the case of Iran’s nuclear program, the issue of trust plays a more central role than the actual existence of evidence for Iran’s possession of a clandestine nuclear weapons program. The present critical discourse analysis also reveals how the three elite newspapers’editorials selectively framed the issues surrounding the Iranian nuclear dispute by employing linguistic, stylistic, and argumentative maneuvers. Despite their differences in their policy recommendations, none challenged the underlying assumptions that Iran has a clandestine nuclear weapons program,that the Islamic nature of its government is a threat, and that it should not be trusted with sensitive nuclear technology. Their inattention to the inconsistent nonproliferation policies of the United States and other European nuclear powers shows the limits of media criticism of official policies Link – Liberal Internationalism Liberal internationalism relies on a juridical understanding of power that disguises its Westernized management of populations through globalized biopolitics Dillon & Reid 01 [Michael, emeritus scholar at Lancaster University who has written extensively on security and war, international political theory, continental philosophy, and cultural research; Julian, Lecturer in International Relations at King's College London, “Global Liberal Governance: Biopolitics, Security and War” Millennium - Journal of International Studies (2001) 30: 41] Just as there are two faces to how liberalism has conceived the problematic of government (juridical, representative and accountable power versus biopolitical power or governance) so also there are two faces to contemporary liberal internationalism. Traditionally liberals have aspired to the ideal of world government that would replace the power and war-like rivalry of sovereign states. However their conception of political subjectivity was precisely responsible for the very system that their ideals sought to supersede in federative and other ways. Therefore the project of liberal internationalism was, and continues to be, both propelled and frustrated by discourses of juridical power, contract, rights and civil society that were themselves developed in the course of the evolution of the sovereign state form and its associated interstate system. However, where liberal internationalism once aspired to some ideal of world government, today global liberal governance pursues the administration of life and the management of populations through the deployment of biopolitical techniques of power. This is not to argue that one face of liberal power has overcome the other. On the contrary, there is a confluence rather than a supercession of powers here. The resultant mixture is a complex one precisely because it represents the convergence of different forms of power and increasingly also different conceptions of knowledge.16 Foucault noted that this confluence went back to the origins of the European international system, arguing that ‘the reason of state, apart from the theories that formulated and justified it, takes shape in two great ensembles of political knowledge and technology’.17 The former were those that came to constitute the traditional discourses of international relations: diplomacy, statecraft, alliances and war. The latter were first formulated in terms of policy, Polizeiwissenschaft, or police, ‘in the sense given to the word then: that is, make the forces of the state increase from within’.18 the set of means necessary to Link – Oil The pursuit of new sources of oil is a biopolitical endeavor to secure American empire Campbell 2005 [David, Professor of Cultural and Political Geography at Durham University, “The Biopolitics of Security: Oil, Empire, and the Sports Utility Vehicle”, American Quarterly, Vol. 57, No. 3] Network is, therefore, the prevailing metaphor for social organization in the era of biopolitical power, and it is a conception that permits us to under- stand how the effects of our actions, choices, and life are propagated beyond the boundaries of our time-space location.20 It is also a conception that allows us to appreciate how war has come to have a special prominence in producing the political order of liberal societies. Networks, through their extensive con- nectivity, function in terms of their strategic interactions. This means that "social relations become suffused with considerations of power, calculation, security and threat."21 As a result, "global biopolitics operates as a strategic game in which the principle of war is assimilated into the very weft and warp of the socio-economic and cultural networks of biopolitical relations."22 This theoretical concern with biopolitical relations of power in the context of networked societies is consistent with an analytical shift to the problematic of subjectivity as central to understanding the relationship between foreign policy and identity. That is because both are concerned with "a shift from a preoccupation with physical and isolated entities, whose relations are described largely in terms of interactive exchange, to beings-in-relation, whose struc- tures [are] decisively influenced by patterns of connectivity."23 At the same time, while conceptual approaches are moving away from understandings pre- mised on the existence of physical and isolated entities, the social and political structures that are produced by network patterns of connectivity often appear to be physical and isolated. As Lieven de Cauter argues, we don't live in net- works; we live in capsules. Capsules are enclaves and envelopes that function as nodes, hubs, and termini in the various networks and contain a multitude of spaces and scales. These enclaves can include states, gated communities, or vehicles - with the latter two manifesting the "SUV model of citizenship" Mitchell has provocatively described.24 Nonetheless, though capsules like these appear physical and isolated, there is "no network without capsules. The more networking, the more capsules. Ergo: the degree of capsularisation is directly proportional to the growth of networks."25 The result is that biopolitical rela- tions of power produce new borderlands that transgress conventional under- standings of inside/outside and isolated/ connected. Together these shifts pose a major theoretical challenge to much of the social sciences, which have adhered ontologically to a distinction between the ideal and the material, which privileges economistic renderings of complex social assemblages.26 As we shall see, overcoming this challenge does not mean denying the importance of materialism but, rather, moving beyond a simplis- tic consideration of objects by reconceptualizing materialism so it is under- stood as interwoven with cultural, social, and political networks. This means that "paying increased attention to the material actually requires a more ex- pansive engagement with the immaterial."2 The Biopolitics of Oil and Security Most accounts of the role of oil in U.S. foreign policy embody economistic assumptions, rendering oil in materialistic terms as an independent variable that causes states to behave in particular ways. In the prelude to the invasion of Iraq, even the best commentaries represented oil as the real reason motivat- ing the buildup to war.28 In this vein, a Greenpeace campaign pictured the (oil) "drums of war" and invited people to read about "what s really behind the war on Iraq."29 In addition to manifesting specific epistemological assump- tions, these views regard resource geopolitics as primarily a question of supply. Before we move beyond this frame of reference to explore what goes unex- plained by this focus, we need to appreciate the infrastructure of oil resource geopolitics that makes this issue so important. Securing global oil supply has been a tenet of U.S. foreign policy in the post-World War II era. Because the Middle East holds two-thirds of the known reserves of oil, this objective has made the region an unavoidable concern for successive U.S. administrations. As the largest and most economical supplier of Middle East oil, Saudi Arabia has had a central place in this strategic calcu lation, with the United States agreeing to defend (internally and externally) the Saudi regime in return for privileged access to Saudi oil. Over the years, this arrangement has cost the United States tens of billions of dollars in mili- tary assistance.30 This strategy was formalized in the Carter Doctrine of 1980, which, in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, declared that any power that threatened to control the Persian Gulf area would be directly challenging fundamental U.S. national security interests and would be seen as engaged in an assault on the United States. None of this would be required if the United States did not rely on im- ported oil for its economic well-being. However, in 2002 oil imports fueled 53 percent of domestic consumption, and the U.S. Department of Energy forecasts only increasing dependence. By 2025 oil import dependence is ex- pected to rise to around 70 percent of domestic needs.31 These percentages mean the United States will consume an additional 8.7 million barrels of oil per day by 2025. Given that total petroleum imports in 2002 were 1 1.4 mil- lion barrels per day, this is a very substantial increase. In recent years, faced with increased dependence on oil imports, the United States has been seeking to diversify supply, with some paradoxical outcomes. As the country was preparing to go to war with Iraq, the United States was importing half of all Iraqi exports (which satisfied only 8 percent of Americas needs), even though this indirectly funded the regime of Saddam Hussein.32 Some Republicans in Congress used this data to smear then-Democratic Sen- ate leader Tom Daschle as an Iraqi sympathizer, arguing that the Democrat's failure to support drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) - as the Bush administration desired - forced America into unholy commercial alliances.33 While this argument conveniently overlooked the fact that ANWR s 3 billion barrels of reserves could supply only six months of the United States' total oil needs, it demonstrated how the internalization of a cleavage between business and environmental interests is sustained through an association with external threat.34 The drive for diversification is now a major security objective. In the 2001 review of energy policy chaired by Vice President Dick Cheney, the final chapter of the report focused exclusively on strengthening global alliances with energy producers to achieve that goal.35 However, the geopolitical pursuit of energy security is likely to produce new and intensive forms of insecurity for those in the new resource zones, which are located in some of the most strategically unstable global locations.36 As a result, the United States has been providing increased military support to governments in the Caspian Basin area, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa - regardless of their ideological complexion or human rights record.37 The magnitude of the link is enormous – oil is central to the entire system of biopol;itics Mcwhorter 5, Ladelle Mcwhorter, “The Technology of Biopower A Response to Todd May’s “Foucault Now?”, James Thomas Professor in Philosophy, Professor of Environmental Studies, Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexualities Studies , Department of Philosophy We should not forget that biopower in all its glory emerged at just about the same time as the oil industry emerged in the US (at the end of the 1860s) and made enormous, leaping gains in momentum as the nation‐states of the industrialized world converted to a petroleum economy based on ubiquitous petroleum‐derived and dependent technologies. Basic techniques of normalization—for example, extensive record‐keeping and surveillance— were possible without petroleum and natural gas (as Bentham’s plan for the Panopticon demonstrates), but they were not possible on anything like the massive scale that they are with the inventive development and extensive use of petroleum products over the last one hundred and forty years. On first glance one might think that much of modern technology— such as surveillance cameras or computers—are not petroleum products and do not use oil in their operation. We tend to think of electricity, largely generated world‐wide by hydro‐electric and coal power, as independent of the oil industry, but the fact is that it is not; most of the machinery in power plants that produce electricity from moving water and fuels other than petroleum and natural gas are built and transported, as well as maintained, with the aid of oil. Without oil, none of those technologies would be viable. And without plastics made from petroleum, we would have no cell phones, no laptops, no light‐weight cameras, recording devices, or vehicles. Virtually all of the surveillance and record‐keeping technology currently in use depends on the availability of oil. To realize the almost incredible degree to which our biopolitical world is dependent on petroleum, one only has to look around the room in which one is sitting at any given moment and ask what would not be there if there were no petroleum‐derived synthetic materials, no gasoline or diesel or jet fuel, and no petroleum‐based lubricants or coolants. And what would happen if the oil from which those things and their replacements are made or transported were to stop flowing? What exercises of power would no longer be possible? My suspicion is that without oil, biopower as a vast network of interlocking and overlapping practices would soon break down. One simply cannot manage entire populations of hundreds of thousands of people without satellites and micro‐chips, and one cannot launch satellites or build micro‐chips without oil. First, large interlocking networks would fragment into smaller normalizing units. Eventually, unable to profit from the large‐ scale reinforcement of a huge biopolitical network, even those smaller units might break down. The end of oil may well come in this century, perhaps even long before this century’s end. Will that moment also bring the death of biopower? Link – Population Control Population control is the biopolitical management of societal behavior DuBois 91 (Marc, “The Governance of the Third World: A Foucauldian Perspective on Power Relations in Development”, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 16, No. 1, Winter 1991, [CL]) How does the power-knowledge dyad operate in the real world? Foucault concerns himself with a subterranean realm of nondiscursive practices (e.g., techniques of examination, architectures of surveillance) that are supported, justified, and imbued with meaning by discourse; a realm of practices that comprises the sites or points of activity of the microphysical relations of power-knowledge. These practices can be roughly divided into "disciplines" and "regulatory controls," the former defined as an "anatamo-politics of the human body" and the latter as a "bio-politics of the population." 'Together, these two poles of power-knowledge relations compose "bio-power," a set of strategies of power-knowledge that produce a supply of docile human bodies that may be "subjected, used, transformed, and improved."" The aim of disciplinary power is to increase, in terms of economic utility, the forces of the body and diminish these same forces in reference to rebellion or nonconformity.'2 Discipline progresses from a direct coercion or control to an indirect, omnipresent form of control, which is able to be colonized by other relations of domination. The key to discipline is normalization, and the keymakers are the members of the various disciplines (pedagogists, penologists, demographists, psychiatrists). In disciplinary power, control exists not in the form of an act of law or a set of legal codes, but in the guise of natural rules or norms, born by the discourse of the social sciences. Foucault shows how disciplinary institutions-schools, hospitals, bar- racks-were invaded by legions of technical experts and observers who began to produce studies that delineated such norms as the correct posture (the precise placement of each part of the body) to be assumed by a pupil while writing or the correct set of movements to be followed by a soldier in moving his gun from his shoulder to a firing position. Below, it will be made quite clear that in the interest of promoting development the Third World has been subjected to a similar invasion of economists, political scientists, health workers, agricultural experts, and so on. The appearance of such norms as isolated is merely a reassuring illusion. They instill in the individual a certain malleability or instructability; a certain susceptibility to the discourses of the disciplines that is colonized by other relations of power. Unimportant or peripheral disciplining of individuals was but the beginning; the disciplines (the human sciences) and their practitioners expanded throughout the social body, creating a network of "teacher-judges "doctor-judges” and "socialworker-judges," to name a few." As Foucault laments, "in the end, we are judged, condemned, classified, determined in our undertakings, destined to a certain mode of living or dying, as a function of the true discourses which are the bearers of the specific effects of power."" Power Over the Social Body The second component of biopower- bio-politics -finds its origins in the coeval demographic growth (in Europe) and economic growth of the productive apparatus during the eighteenth century. Bio-politics coincides with the "emergence of "˜population` as an economic and political problem" that forces governments to think of citizens not as subjects but as resources." A new technology of the population- demographic surveys of various traits of the populous and economic analyses of the relationships between wealth, production, and population-is built upon the fact that "the accumulation of men and the accumulation of capital . . . cannot be separated.""' In order to maintain production and growth, capitalism needs a sufficient supply of labor, in terms of both numbers and health (actually, a surplus is required in order to preserve low wages). However, men cannot be "accumulated"• in the absence of a system that maintains and engages them. In the name of public welfare, then, the entire population was positioned as the object of power relations surrounding and affecting the conditions that largely determine biological processes such as reproduction, nutrition, mortality, and hygiene. This twofold constitution-on one level, of individuals through disciplines, and on another level, of populations through bio-politics- together engenders biopower, the power that "brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life. "IB The Subjection of the Third World It might seem that the preceding discussion of power has digressed quite far from development. A close inspection, however, shows that many aspects of Foucault's conceptualization of power could be used to describe, verbatim at times, certain activities that are part of the process of development. To be more specific, one finds in biopower a way of understanding the relationship between the superstructure in the Third World, especially the state apparatuses and laws, and the chief object of the power relations attached to that superstructure, the so- called masses. Particularly in the Third World, these latter are not only presented as human resources, but as resources in need of modification, adaptation, and change-in other words, development. The task at hand, then, is to probe beneath the question posed for us by bio power, "how to improve the track record of development activities," and discover what it is that these activities do. Where does such an investigation begin, given that development is an extremely broad process encompassing a wide array of activities? Foucault's own methodology involves moving away from the center toward the "extremities," or periphery, away from the grand devices of neocolcolonization, neoimperialism, and etatization to the relations of power at the "ongoing level of subjugation," which in effect constitute these grand schemes. This means focusing upon rural villages and urban shanty towns and the marginalized inhabitants of these areas. In what sort of power relations is the peasant or barrio-dweller engaged? From whence does his or her subjugation arise? Certainly many of the power relations at the periphery are old, traditional relations of power. Some of these, such as the inferior status of women, support other relations to form an important node in the grid of modern strategies: they have been incorporated. But at this periphery one also finds new relations of power, which have accompanied and opened the door for new penetrations of power. These new cultural, religious, economic, and political relations of development is the process that has as its goal the restructuring of the behavior and practices of individuals and populations (or the introduction of new ones). To what end? Ostensibly, to increase economic productivity, the wealth of the nation, the power can all, in various degrees, be linked with t.he penetration of the process of development. Why? Because level of health or education of the people-in short, to increase public welfare. Beneath the surface of activity, however, one can discern the actions of bio-politics and disciplinary power harnessing the energy of the social body and molding individual bodies into subjects. Bio-Politics and Development: The Harnessing of Populations In the poorer regions of the Third World one finds existence itself to be a precarious proposition: cynically speaking, an exorbitant quantity of human resources is wasted. Population, therefore, has emerged as an economic and political problem in contemporary Third World societies to an even greater degree than during the period of industrialization in Western Europe. In many developing nations, the harnessing of human resources involves limiting the amount of total energy, whereas in other regions the maintenance of life itself is paramount, Programs characterized by this bio-political approach, launched by both the state toward its citizenry and by First World nations toward the Third World, fall a priori into the field of development. National development projects geared toward increasing the health of the population, such as immunization campaigns, nutritional education programs, and the establishment of a network of primary health-care centers, all contribute to the "accumulation of men," the complement to the "accumulation of wealth." Given grossly inequitable distribution and the unlikelihood of structural transformation in the nation-state or world-system, it sums that there are insufficient resources (food, medicine) in comparison to the population. Hence, the "population crisis" has confronted the exercise of biopolitical power with a problem that, according to its own inner logic, could be resolved only by still further regulation of the social body. The perspective that grew out of this problem, that citizens were resources for which there was an optimal level or number, is most manifest in strategies of population control-bio-politics in its "highest"• form. Although it is frequently concealed by more palatable terminology (e.g., "family planning' or "primary health care"•), "population control" is a surprisingly frank label. "Population"• ostensibly refers to the numbers of people in a particular social body, but the second meaning of the word, referring to the social body itself; conveys more accurately the effects of said policies. Population control is a prominent instance of the workings of bio-politics in modem society. A look at the history of population control provides an example that highlights nicely the process identified by Foucault by which strategies of domination are always shifting in response to technical discoveries, historical events, and the constant circulation of discourses. To begin the history of population control (greatly abbreviated in this space) one inevitably returns to the origins of the birth control movement in the United States during the late 1800s. This requires two points of clarification. First, birth control and population control, although sometimes used interchangeably, are actually quite separate. The former refers to efforts of individuals (mostly women) to establish control over reproduction, to gain control over their bodies. The latter refers to policies, particularly institutional policies, to win control of the demographic future of a nation or planet. Laid bare, population control involves the management of populations according to technologies of demography, a contravention to increased individual power. Link – Poverty Their poverty discourse produces neoliberal subjects and shifts the lines of exclusion towards other structural faultiness like gender and race Best 13,Jacqueline Best (2013) Redefining Poverty as Risk and Vulnerability: shifting strategies of liberal economic governance, Third World Quarterly, 34:1, 109-12, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2013.755356 The kinds of governance technique required for reducing poverty by managing risk and vulnerability rely on what Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall, drawing on Michel Foucault, call ‘productive power’. 77 This is a kind of power seeks not simply to constrain but to actively constitute practices and subjectivities. Thus, the goal of this kind of policy is not just to reduce poverty, but to constitute a new kind of low-income individual more capable of managing risk and thus able to attain a better quality of life. 78 Bank staff are themselves very keen on the productive and proactive aspects of this new poverty-reduction framework. 79 In their 2009 review of social protection, staff note, ‘The productive, as opposed to the redistributive, role of safety nets is becoming more recognized’. 80 Moreover, the concept note and the consultations for the new 2012–22 Social Protection Strategy emphasise the importance of promoting more resilient communities and individuals. 81 Risk is a category rather than a thing—it is a way that we make the world calculable in particular kinds of ways. 82 Risks are beyond our control and yet also very much subject to our understanding: a risk by definition is something that can be understood through a logic of probability (as opposed to uncertainty, ambiguity and other kinds of indeterminacy). 83 As such, risk-based policies are particularly suited to this kind of productive application of power. This is particularly the case in the context of a market economy, in which risk is never viewed as an entirely bad thing. According to the Bank, risk is an essential tool for understanding poverty, not only because shocks can wreak havoc with efforts to raise incomes (risk as a bad thing), but also because, as poor people find themselves with fewer tools for managing risks, they are less likely to undertake riskier activities, and thus they forgo the potential gains that they might make (risk as a good thing). 84 Risk is thus understood as a double-edged problem: it is not universally bad, but instead needs to be both mitigated and exploited through particular kinds of interventions. The more productive forms of power deployed today are also less direct than the more coercive techniques deployed by the Bank and other international finan- cial institutions in the past. There is less emphasis on formal conditionality and more focus on constituting the right kinds of risk-bearing individuals and creating the conditions necessary for them take on governance tasks themselves. Yet the fact that these forms of power are productive does not make them any less exclu- sionary.85 As a number of social policy analysts have pointed out, even as the social risk framework seeks to engage a wider range of poor people more actively in the process of managing risks, it also tends to neglect those less capable of such active forms of self-governance. The framework’s emphasis on the dynamic character of poverty leads it to downplay the problems of the chronically poor.86 Its advocates’ emphasis on shocks leads them to de-emphasise subtler sources of vulnerability, such as those associated with gender, class, ethnicity or other structural fault-lines. More fundamentally the tendency of advocates of the social risk framework to define poverty in absolute rather than relative terms, and to emphasise poverty reduction as a ‘win-win’ policy means that more difficult, structural solutions to poverty tend to get short-shrift. The 1ac uses the promise of poverty alleviation to legitimize market control over populations – turning the poor into objects of knowledge to be biopolitically managed. This has NEVER solved and uses flawed epistemology to further American hegemony. Escobar 1995 [Arturo, Kenan Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, UNC-Chapel Hill Director, Institute of Latin American Studies, UNC-Chapel Hill Adjunct Professor, Department of Geography, UNC-Chapel Hill Adjunct Professor, Department of Communications, UNCChapel Hill Fellow, Institute of Arts and Humanities, UNC Fellow, Center for Urban and Regional Research, UNC Facilitator, World Anthropologies Network / Red de Antropologías Mundiales Research Associate, Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, Bogotá, “Encountering Development THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF THE THIRD WORLD” 1995, page 21-22] ONE OF THE many changes that occurred in the early post–World War II period was the “discovery” of mass poverty in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Relatively inconspicuous and seemingly logical, this discovery was to provide the anchor for an important restructuring of global culture and political economy. The discourse of war was displaced onto the social domain and to a new geographical terrain: the Third World. Left behind was the struggle against fascism. In the rapid globalization of U.S. domination as a world power, the “war on poverty” in the Third World began to occupy a prominent place. Eloquent facts were adduced to justify this new war: “Over 1,500,000 million people, something like two-thirds of the world population, are living in conditions of acute hunger, defined in terms of identifiable nutritional disease. This hunger is at the same time the cause and effect of poverty, squalor, and misery in which they live” (Wilson 1953, 11). Statements of this nature were uttered profusely throughout the late 1940s and 1950s (Orr 1953; Shonfield 1950; United Nations 1951). The new emphasis was spurred by the recognition of the chronic conditions of poverty and social unrest existing in poor countries and the threat they posed for more developed countries. The problems of the poor areas irrupted into the international arena. The United Nations estimated that per capita income in the United States was $1,453 in 1949, whereas in Indonesia it barely reached $25. This led to the realization that something had to be done before the levels of instability in the world as a whole became intolerable. The destinies of the rich and poor parts of the world were seen to be closely linked. “Genuine world prosperity is indivisible,” stated a panel of experts in l948. “It cannot last in one part of the world if the other parts live under conditions of poverty and ill health” (Milbank Memorial Fund 1948, 7; see also Lasswell 1945). Poverty on a global scale was a discovery of the post–World War II period. As Sachs (1990) and Rahnema (1991) have maintained, the conceptions and treatment of poverty were quite different before 1940. In colonial times the concern with poverty was conditioned by the belief that even if the “natives” could be somewhat enlightened by the presence of the colonizer, not much could be done about their poverty because their economic development was pointless. The natives’ capacity for science and technology, the basis for economic progress, was seen as nil (Adas 1989). As the same authors point out, however, within Asian, African, and Latin or Native American societies—as well as throughout most of European history—vernacular societies had developed ways of defining and treating poverty that accommodated visions of community, frugality, and sufficiency. Whatever these traditional ways might have been, and without idealizing them, it is true that massive poverty in the modern sense appeared only when the spread of the market economy broke down community ties and deprived millions of people from access to land, water, and other resources. With the consolidation of capitalism, systemic pauperization became inevitable. Without attempting to undertake an archaeology of poverty, as Rahnema (1991) proposes, it is important to emphasize the break that occurred in the conceptions and management of poverty first with the emergence of capitalism in Europe and subsequently with the advent of development in the Third World. Rahnema describes the first break in terms of the advent in the nineteenth century of systems for dealing with the poor based on assistance provided by impersonal institutions. Philanthropy occupied an important place in this transition (Donzelot 1979). The This “modernization” of poverty signified not only the rupture of vernacular relations but also the setting in place of new mechanisms of control . The poor increasingly appeared as a social problem requiring new ways of intervention in society. It was, transformation of the poor into the assisted had profound consequences. indeed, in relation to poverty that the modern ways of thinking about the meaning of life, the economy, rights, and social management came into place. “Pauperism, political economy, and the discovery of society were closely interwoven” (Polanyi 1957a, 84). The treatment of poverty allowed society to conquer new domains. More perhaps than on industrial and technological might, the nascent order of capitalism and modernity relied on a politics of poverty the aim of which was not only to create consumers but to transform society by turning the poor into objects of knowledge and management. What was involved in this operation was “a techno-discursive instrument that made possible the conquest of pauperism and the invention of a politics of poverty” (Procacci 1991, 157). Pauperism, Procacci explains, was associated, rightly or wrongly, with features such as mobility, vagrancy, independence, frugality, promiscuity, ignorance, and the refusal to accept social duties, to work, and to submit to the logic of the expansion of “needs.” Concomitantly, the management of poverty called for interventions in education, health, hygiene, morality, and employment and the instillment of good habits of association, savings, child rearing, and so on. The result was a panoply of interventions that accounted for the creation of a domain that several researchers have termed “the social” (Donzelot 1979, 1988, 1991; Burchell, Gordon, and Miller 1991). As a domain of knowledge and intervention, the social became prominent in the nineteenth century, culminating in the twentieth century in the consolidation of the welfare state and the ensemble of techniques encompassed under the rubric of social work. Not only poverty but health, education, hygiene, employment, and the poor quality of life in towns and cities were constructed as social problems, requiring extensive knowledge about the population and appropriate modes of social planning (Escobar 1992a). The “government of the social” took on a status that, as the conceptualization of the economy, was soon taken for granted. A “separate class of the ‘poor’” (Williams 1973, 104) was created. Yet the most significant aspect of this phenomenon was the setting into place of apparatuses of knowledge and power that took it upon themselves to optimize life by producing it under modern, “scientific” conditions. The history of modernity, in this way, is not only the history of knowledge and the economy, it is also, more revealingly, the history of the social.1 As we will see, the history of development implies the continuation in other places of this history of the social. This is the second break in the archaeology of poverty proposed by Rahnema: the globalization of poverty entailed by the construction of two-thirds of the world as poor after 1945. If within market societies the poor were defined as lacking what the rich had in terms of money and material possessions, poor countries came to be similarly defined in relation to the standards of wealth of the more economically advantaged nations. This economic conception of poverty found an ideal yardstick in the annual per capita income. The perception of poverty on a global scale “was nothing more than the result of a comparative statistical operation, the first of which was carried out only in 1940” (Sachs 1990, 9). Almost by fiat, two-thirds of the world’s peoples were transformed into poor subjects in 1948 when the World Bank defined as poor those countries with an annual per capita income below $100. And if the problem was one of insufficient income, the solution was clearly economic growth. Thus poverty became an organizing concept and the object of a new problematization. As in the case of any problematization (Foucault 1986), that of poverty brought into existence new discourses and practices that shaped the reality to which they referred. That the essential trait of the Third World was its poverty and that the solution was economic growth and development became self-evident, necessary, and universal truths. This chapter analyzes the multiple processes that made possible this particular historical event. It accounts for the ‘developmentalization‘ of the Third World, its progressive insertion into a regime of thought and practice in which certain interventions for the eradication of poverty became central to the world order. This chapter can also be seen as an account of the production of the tale of three worlds and the contest over the development of the third. The tale of three worlds was, and continues to be despite the demise of the second, a way of bringing about a political order “that works by the negotiation of boundaries achieved through ordering differences” (Haraway 1989a, 10). It was and is a narrative in which culture, race, gender, nation, and class are deeply and inextricably intertwined. The political and economic order coded by the tale of three worlds and development rests on a traffic of meanings that mapped new domains of being and understanding, the same domains that are increasingly being challenged and displaced by people in the Third World today. Link – Right to Development The “right to development” does not alleviate the problems of biopolitical development but masks it and mires the South in capitalist competition and dependency. Cheah, Rhetoric Professor at Berkeley, 2006 [Pheng, Inhuman Conditions : On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights, pp.227-229] What this competitiveness reveals is the inherently aporetic character of development. At the global level, the interests and ends of states, and their agencies and the actions of employers and individual workers in the processes of economic development and labor migration constitute and are in turn conditioned by the larger structural mechanisms of capitalist accumulation. Obviously, these actors are free consensual agents who make conscious choices. But they are placed in a position to make choices because they inhabit a dynamic field of imperatives and strategies that have as their ultimate end the articulation of a hierarchical division of economic development and labor. In the first place, exportoriented industrialization is premised on a hierarchy of capital, skills, technology, and labor. 121 Moreover, while it is possible for a country to upgrade itself and ascend the international division of labor in a given sector, its success limits the opportunities for similar upgrading by other countries unless it upgrades further and vacates its slot in the economic hierarchy. Each state desires to ascend the hierarchy, and the success or failure of its policies determines the slot it will take up. Hence, the pervasive economic vocabulary about the importance of “carving a niche.” A country’s position will shape its society, and this will in turn condition the actions of individual citizens, such as a worker’s decision to seek overseas employment. In all this, one senses most acutely the competitive anxiety driving capitalist development. If even “advanced” Singapore feels that its future survival depends on trying to ascend the hierarchy, less developed countries must feel this anxiety more intensely. The theoretical issue raised here is whether the right to development can be fully human/humanized in an uneven world. Since this right is the basis for the human rights of migrant workers, we can also put it this way: Can the migrant worker fully achieve humanity? The sad prosaic answer to these related questions has to be no. Aggressive competition in the name of development legitimates the mistreatment of migrant workers. Labor-importing parties stress that however poor the working conditions of FDWs, they receive higher remuneration and are economically better off than they would have been if they had not left their home countries. Labor-exporting states stress the contributions of migrant workers to their home economies, the fact that it is better to be employed overseas than not employed at all, and the value of the skills they will learn abroad. We can offer more salutary answers to these questions if we associate the competitiveness of development with the inhuman totality of global capital as a determinate Gestalt and argue that the right to development can be humanized and the migrant worker can achieve full humanity with the transcendence of global capitalism. This axiom of post-Marxist, progressive leftist thought shares the motif of human transcendence with the doctrine of human rights notwithstanding Marx’s critique of the abstract nature of civil and political rights. The basic structure of righting inhuman wrongs is juridical and presupposes the originality or primacy of the free human subject. The idea that one is free to pursue one’s interests provided one does not constrain the freedom of others to do the same presupposes the liberal subject with freedom of choice. In post-Marxism, the concrete human being as subject of labor and basic needs possesses the capacity for transcendence. The functioning of bio-power, however, puts into question the human capacity for freedom, namely, the ability to transcend the instrumental-technical use of human beings through regulation. For the free subject itself is a product of technologies of bio-power and is constitutively imbricated within an inhuman field of means and ends. It is subjectified as a member of a hierarchical system of means and ends through disciplinary techniques. The interests and basic needs that supply the content of specific human rights are products of governmental techniques. It is important to stress that although biopolitical technai have inhumane consequences, they also enable humanizing efforts at both the national and international levels. We have focused on the bio-power of labor-receiving states, but the sending state also cultivates and enhances the capacities of migrant workers through the exercise of bio-power so that they can achieve their full humanity. OWWA runs programs abroad and within the Philippines to assist in reintegrating returning workers into the Philippine economy by teaching them new skills, fostering entrepreneurship, and planting in them the idea of self-employment. In this way the remittances are diverted from consumption to investments and capital formation that will benefit them and the national economy in the long run. 122 National development is a necessary means to achiev- ing “humanity,” for instance, the full protection of the migrant worker’s human rights. The more difficult thing to grasp is that because these humanizing endeavors are part of a biopolitical complex, they also dehumanize OCWs by regarding them as means to development. A radical equivocation thus marks the human right to development. This right links the economic rights of individuals to the economic wellbeing of their nations, conceived in analogy with an autonomous organic body striving for self-fulfillment. But development is competitive and requires an active opening-up of the national body to the global capitalist system. Hence, a developing nation-state such as the Philippines needs to attach itself to inhuman prostheses in order to protect, augment, and cultivate the humanity of its citizens. The state claims that it needs to export labor so that it can develop. It needs to bind itself to global capital in the hopes that the Philippines can replicate the success stories of Taiwan and South Korea. Its purported hope is that economic growth and foreign investment will, in due time, create jobs that will absorb returning migrants and make further labor emigration unnecessary. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that this humane future will come to pass. Meanwhile, the Philippines has ironically exported so much of its skilled labor that it has to import workers in certain sectors, such as welders and metalworkers, to cope with internal demand. 123 And far from enabling migrant workers to upgrade their skills, when skilled women are forced to work as domestic helpers overseas, they find that their skills become eroded because they are not utilized. It is unlikely that FDWs will acquire new and more valuable skills abroad because they do not work in positions that will expose them to new technologies. In many cases, the hard-earned foreign exchange is not wisely invested but fuels wasteful consumption of imported luxury goods that leads to inflation. The very real danger of a chronic dependency on the part of society (as opposed to the state) on remittances from OCWs can also lead to decreased agricultural production for both domestic use and export. Indeed, one can even say that the inhuman has possessed society or the people, stunting the possibility of social and political transformation. As Arnel de Guzman notes, in the 1970s, “revolution used to be an option [an alternative to the dire economic situation]. Now, it’s foreign work.” Link – Technology The technological solution to Latin American poverty is not neutral – it requires the creation of an economic knowledge, which reorganizes power on a global scale, resulting in the loss of Latin American autonomy Escobar 1995 [Arturo, Kenan Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, UNC-Chapel Hill Director, Institute of Latin American Studies, UNC-Chapel Hill Adjunct Professor, Department of Geography, UNC-Chapel Hill Adjunct Professor, Department of Communications, UNCChapel Hill Fellow, Institute of Arts and Humanities, UNC Fellow, Center for Urban and Regional Research, UNC Facilitator, World Anthropologies Network / Red de Antropologías Mundiales Research Associate, Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, Bogotá, “Encountering Development THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF THE THIRD WORLD” 1995, page 35-36] The Promise of Science and Technology The faith in science and technology, invigorated by the new sciences arising from the war effort, such as nuclear physics and operations research, played an important role in the elaboration and justification of the new discourse of development. In 1948, a well-known UN official expressed this faithin the following way: “I still think that human progress depends on the development and application of the greatest possible extent of scientific research. . . . The development of a country depends primarily on a material factor: first, the knowledge, and then the exploitation of all its natural resources” (Laugier 1948, 256). Science and technology had been the markers of civilization par excellence since the nineteenth century, when machines became the index of civilization, “the measure of men” (Adas 1989). This modern trait was rekindled with the advent of the development age. By l949, the Marshall Plan was showing great success in the restoration of the European economy, and increasingly attention was shifted to the longer-range problems of assistance for economic development in underdeveloped areas. Out of this shift of attention came the famous Point Four Program of President Truman, with which I opened this book. The Point Four Program involved the application to the poor areas of the world what were considered to be two vital forces: modern technology and capital. However, it relied much more heavily on technical assistance than on capital, in the belief that the former would provide progress at a lower price. An Act for International Development was approved by Congress in May 1950, which provided authority to finance and carry out a variety of international technical cooperation activities. In October of the same year, the Technical Cooperation Administration (TCA) was established within the Department of State with the task of implementing the new policies. By l952, these agencies were conducting operations in nearly every country in Latin America, as well as in several countries in Asia and Africa (Brown and Opie 1953). Technology, it was believed, would not only amplify material progress, it would also confer upon it a sense of direction and significance. In the vast literature on the sociology of modernization, technology was theorized as a sort of moral force that would operate by creating an ethics of innovation, yield, and result. Technology thus contributed to the planetary extension of modernist ideals. The concept of the transfer of technology in time would become an important component of development projects. It was never realized that such a transfer would depend not merely on technical elements but on social and cultural factors as well. Technology was seen as neutral and inevitably beneficial, not as an instrument for the creation of cultural and social orders (Morandé 1984; García de la Huerta 1992). The new awareness of the importance of the Third World in global economy and politics, coupled with the beginning of field activities in the Third World, brought with it a recognition of the need to obtain more accurate knowledge about the Third World. Nowhere was this need perceived more acutely than in the case of Latin America. As a prominent Latin Americanist put it, “The war years witnessed a remarkable growth of interest in Latin America. What once had been an area which only diplomats and pioneering scholars ventured to explore, became almost overnight the center of attraction to government officials, as well as to scholars and teachers” (Burgin [1947] 1967, 466). This called for “detailed knowledge of the economic potential of Latin America as well as of the geographic, social and political environment in which that potential was to be realized” (466). Only in “history, literature and ethnology” was the status of knowledge considered adequate. What was needed now was the kind of precise knowledge that could be obtained through the application of the new “scientific” social sciences that were experiencing remarkable growth on U.S. campuses (such as Parsonian sociology, Keynesian macroeconomics, systems analysis and operations research, demography, and statistics). In 1949, an illustrious Peruvian scholar described the “mission of Latin American Studies” as, “through study and research, [to] provide a background which will assist in interpreting and evaluating objectively the problems and events of the day from the perspective of history, geography, economics, sociology, anthropology, social psychology and political science” (Basadre [1949] 1967, 434). Basadre’s was a progressive call for social change as well, even if it became captive to the development mode. The earlier model for the generation of knowledge, organized around the classical professions according to nineteenth-century usage, was replaced by the North American model. Sociology and economics were the disciplines most affected by this change, which involved most natural and social sciences. Development had to rely on the production of knowledge that could provide a scientific picture of a country’s social and economic problems and resources. This entailed the establishment of institutions capable of generating such a knowledge. The “tree of research” of the North was transplanted to the South, and Latin America thus became part of a transnational system of research. As some maintain, although this transformation created new knowledge capabilities, it also implied a further loss of autonomy and the blocking of different modes of knowing (Fuenzalida 1983; Morandé 1984; Escobar 1989). Gone were the days, so most scholars thought in the wake of empirical social science, when science was contaminated by prejudice and error. The new objectivity ensured accuracy and fairness of representation. Little by little, older ways of thinking would yield to the new spirit. Economists were quick to join this wave of enthusiasm. Latin America was suddenly discovered to be “a tabula rasa to the economic historian” (Burgin [1947] 1967, 474), and economic thinking in Latin America was found to be devoid of any connection with local conditions, a mere appendage of European classical economics. The new scholars realized that “the starting point of research must be the area itself, for it is only in terms of its historical development and objectives that the organization and functioning of the economy can be fully understood” (469). The terrain was prepared for the emergence of economic development as a legitimate theoretical endeavor. The better and more widespread understanding of the workings of the economic system strengthened the hope of bringing material prosperity to the rest of the world. The unquestioned desirability of economic growth was, in this way, closely linked to the revitalized faith in science and technology. Economic growth presupposed the existence of a continuum stretching from poor to rich countries, which would allow for the replication in the poor countries of those conditions characteristic of mature capitalist ones (including industrialization, urbanization, agricultural modernization, infrastructure, increased provision of social services, and high levels of literacy). Development was seen as the process of transition from one situation to the other. This notion conferred upon the processes of accumulation and development a progressive, orderly, and stable character that would culminate, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in modernization and “stages of economic growth” theories (Rostow 1960).18 Finally, there was another factor that influenced the formation of the new strategy of development: the increased experience with public intervention in the economy. Although the desirability of this intervention, as opposed to a more laissez-faire approach, was still a matter of controversy,19 the recognition of the need for some sort of planning or government action was becoming generalized. The experience of social planning during the New Deal, legitimized by Keynesianism, as well as the “planned communities” envisaged and partly implemented in Native American communities and Japanese American internment camps in the United States (James 1984), represented significant approaches to social intervention in this regard; so were the statutory corporations and public utility companies established in industrialized countries by government enterprise—for instance, the British Broadcasting Commission (BBC) and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Following the TVA model, a number of regional development corporations were set up in Latin America and other parts of the Third World.20 Models for national, regional, and sectoral planning became essential for the spread and functioning of development. These, very broadly stated, were the most important conditions that made possible and shaped the new discourse of development. There was a reorganization of power at the world level, the final result of which was still far from clear; important changes had occurred in the structure of production, which had to be brought to fit the requirements of expansion of a capitalist system in which the underdeveloped countries played an increasingly important role, if yet not thoroughly defined. These countries could forge alliances with any pole of power. In the light of expanding communism, the steady deterioration of living conditions, and the alarming increase in their populations, the direction in which they would decide to go would largely depend on a type of action of an urgent nature and unprecedented level. Rich countries, however, were believed to have the financial and technological capacity to secure progress the world over. A look at their own past instilled in them the firm conviction that this was not only possible—let alone desirable—but perhaps even inevitable. Sooner or later the poor countries would become rich, and the underdeveloped world would be developed. A new type of economic knowledge and an enriched experience with the design and management of social systems made this goal look even more plausible. Now it was a matter of an appropriate strategy to do it, of setting in motion the right forces to ensure progress and world happiness. Behind the humanitarian concern and the positive outlook of the new strategy, new forms of power and control, more subtle and refined, were put in operation. Poor people’s ability to define and take care of their own lives was eroded in a deeper manner than perhaps ever before. The poor became the target of more sophisticated practices, of a variety of programs that seemed inescapable. From the new institutions of power in the United States and Europe; from the offices of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the United Nations; from North American and European campuses, research centers, and foundations; and from the new planning offices in the big capitals of the underdeveloped world, this was the type of development that was actively promoted and that in a few years was to extend its reach to all aspects of society. Let us now see how this set of historical factors resulted in the new Link – Terrorism The terrorist threat is a tool of fascist coloniality Escobar 04 (Arturo, Ph.D Development Philosophy, Policy, and Planning UC Berkeley, ‘Beyond the Third World: imperial globality, global coloniality, and anti-globalisation social movements’, 2004) The new coloniality regime is still difficult to discern. Race, class and ethnicity will continue to be important, but new, or newly prominent, areas of articulation come into existence, such as religion (and gender linked to it, especially in the case of Islamic societies, as we saw in the war on Afghanistan). However, the single most prominent vehicle of coloniality today seems to be the ambiguously drawn figure of the ‘terrorist’. Linked most forcefully to the Middle East, and thus to the immediate US oil and strategic interests in the region (vis a` vis the European Union and Russia, on the one hand, and China and India in particular on the other, as the most formidable potential challengers), the imaginary of the terrorist can have a wide field of application (it has already been applied to Basque militants and Colombian guerrillas, for instance). Indeed, after 11 September, we are all potential terrorists, unless we are American, white, conservative Christian, and Republi- can—in actuality or epistemically (that is, in mindset). This means that, in seeking to overcome the myth of modernity, it is necessary to abandon the notion of the Third World as a particular articulation of that myth. Similarly, the problematic of social emancipation needs to be refracted through the lens of coloniality. Emancipation, as mentioned, needs to be de-Westernised (as does the economy). If social fascism has become a permanent condition of imperial globality, emancipation has to deal with global coloniality. This means conceiving it from the perspective of the colonial difference. What does emancipation—or liberation, the preferred language of some of the MC authors—mean when seen through the lens of coloniality, that is, beyond exclusion defined in social, economic and political terms? Finally, if not the Third World, what? ‘Worlds and knowledges otherwise’, based on the politics of difference from the perspective of the coloniality of power, as we shall see in the final section.43 Link – War on Drugs Securitized representations of the drug trade are used to justify subversive neocolonial wars of aggression and become a self-fulfilling prophecy, turning case Corva, 07 (Dominic, BS, Economics, University of Houston. BA, Creative Writing, University of Arizona. MA and PhD, Geography, University of Washington. “Neoliberal globalization and the war on drugs: Transnationalizing illiberal governance in the Americas print) 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 e especially within vulnerable spaces and against marginalized subjects, by states and narcoentrepreneurs (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 economies could not operate. In societies characterized by increasing economic inequality, justice is a commodity like any other 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 narco-delinquency. 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 narcodelinquency 23 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, neo-colonially mediated war against populations whose socioeconomic vulnerability 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. This paper applies a critical geopolitics framework to the war on drugs in the Americas, as well as providing a geo-historical context for the emergence of narco-delinquency. But it only skims the surface of a necessary, complementary ‘‘feminist geopolitics’’24 examination of the embodied grounds of drug war geopolitics: prisons, ghettoes, homes, hospitals, favelas, slums, indigenous landscapes, and so forth. There is a wide research agenda on the intersections between globalization, geopolitics and criminalization. This paper is intended as an invitation to a political geography that explores the relationship between the scalar politics of crime control and socioeconomic exclusion across scales, and maps out geographically particular and historically continuous ways in which neoliberal and illiberal governance articulate to produce excluded populations as subjects that ‘‘need’’ to be governed in other ways. Criminalization of the drug trade is a form of racialized biopolitics that otherizes Latin American states, forcing US intervention to return their society to the proper globalized world Corva, 07 (Dominic, BS, Economics, University of Houston. BA, Creative Writing, University of Arizona. MA and PhD, Geography, University of Washington. “Neoliberal globalization and the war on drugs: Transnationalizing illiberal governance in the Americas print) subjects as taking ‘‘the form of nonsovereign beings whose coerced actions are defined as active choices’’ (2002: 826). Coercion, in this formulation, is structural, reflecting highly constricted conditions of possibility for human choosing. Sovereignty is also a matter of degree, related to the formal Coutin et al. describe illiberal inclusion of individuals with full citizenship rights wherever they live. Coutin et al.’s analysis of clandestine spaces of social reproduction in the lives of undocumented immigrants can be usefully applied to those who are excluded from the liberal order via the politics of criminalization. The enactment of criminal law is crucial to the liberal production of illiberal subjects, because it constructs them as ‘‘free’’ choice-having, ‘‘free’’ choice-making individuals, rather than as embedded in social relations of domination that already restrict their possibilities for social, political, and economic inclusion. Their ‘‘bad’’ decisions to break the law justify their formal exclusion from the liberal order, making them subject to the application of the penal apparatus of the state. Narco-delinquency, neoliberalization, and the production of criminal subjects Foucault (1984: 231) describes the illegalities that activate the penal apparatus as ‘‘delinquencies’’: forms ‘‘of illegality that seem to sum up symbolically all the others, but whichmake it possible to leave in the shade those that one wishes to e or must e tolerate’’. Delinquencies are juridical constructions, but they are produced at the nexus of society state relationships, and are associated primarily with forms of conduct which threaten, or are seen to threaten, the normative social order. The enactment of criminal law is a key moment for the consolidation of delinquencies as categories of behavior which must be regulated through state-sponsored coercion. This juridical moment emerges from historically and geographically specific modes of political, economic, and cultural domination e antebellum Southern discourses of cocaineinduced miscegenation by newly freed black labor, for example. The moment of criminalization mutes public discourse that might critically link the historical construction of a particular delinquency to historical and contemporary modes of domination. But the construction of delinquency should not be reduced to the historical moment of criminalization: delinquent populations must be located in shifting geo-historical social contexts. The production of narco-delinquency, for example, is a dynamic transnational process that targets specific populations, dispersed by local criminal justice practices that shape where, when, and against whom to apply the force of the law (Skolnick & Fyfe, 1993). This process is fed by biopolitical practices which continuously script and rescript illegal drugs as a dangerous threat to the individual and social bodies, rather than as embedded in relations of domination and resistance. The state consolidates and disperses discourses of narco-danger that emanate from elite insecurity and hysteria about the ‘‘scourge of drug addiction,’’7 creating the category of narco-delinquency that justifies the application of the criminal justice function, especially against marginalized populations. One of the ways this occurs domestically is through practices of policing ‘‘target rich’’ areas such as poor neighborhoods and public space (Herbert, 2006). This accounts for much of the racial disparity in urban drug policing (see for example Beckett, 2004), where ‘‘revanchist’’ gentrification policies seek to make cities attractive for global capital (Smith, 1996). The criminalization of illicit drugs makes their economic viability dependent on a willingness to assume risk, especially as entry-level narco-labor. This willingness is a condition clearly associated with the socioeconomically marginalized e those who have little to lose but their ‘‘freedom.’’ Neoliberalization produces social and economic vulnerability; criminalization produces ways to capitalize on that vulnerability. The combination produces, among many other things, a steady flow of pre-trial detainees, prisoners, parolees, and families disrupted by harshly punitive sanctions. The expansion of the prison-industrial complex, and the competition for prisons as development strategies (Bonds, 2005), are marketized ways to capitalize on, not causes of, drug war policies which produce ‘‘criminals’’ e populations that must be governed in other ways. The race to build new prisons and lower the cost of prison management for the government is a response to drug war policies that have stressed the capacity of the criminal justice system. The biopolitical production of narco- delinquency overdetermines the racial state (Omi & Winant, 1995), as well as its marketization via the prisonindustrial complex. The incarceration of racialized, classed and gendered subjects in the U.S. happens primarily through the production of narco-delinquency to be addressed by the state through the coercive penal apparatus. But the drug war is not just here, and the expansion of punitivegovernance in locally specific and often more intensely illiberal forms has occurred throughout the Americas. It includes both practices of incarceration and militarization. Diaz-Cotto (2005: 137) describes the multiscalar politics of narco-governance as follows: ‘‘whereas Latin American governments criminalize particular groups of people in their own countries, the United States criminalizes entire Latin American nations while pursuing the war on drugs’’. This process has required locating narco-delinquency to determine where, in the world, the drug war should be exported, and which populations should be subjected to its associated illiberal modes of governance. Links - Other Link – Public Deliberation Their emphasis on public debate and deliberation masks unequal power relations and produces a disciplined, rational subject. Tan ’11 [Sherman, Ph.B. candidate (Sociology & Linguistics)College of Arts and Social Sciences at The Australian National University, Contemporary Visions of Power and Resistance: On the relevance of Jurgen Habermas, Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, Paper presented at the Inaugural Annual Ph.B. Conference/Student Research Expo, The AustralianNational University, October 26th, 2011] Consequently, it is possible to take Foucault's point even further to present a specific critique of Habermas' ideal of consensus through public debate and deliberation. Perhaps Habermas' ideas do obscure the ways in which power woiks through language. Take for instance Habermas' idea of a "consensus". For Foucault, this is really another form of "totalisation- that is "at once abstract and limiting" (Foucault 1984a: 375-6). Habermas' emphasis on reaching a consensus might actually result in fixing meaning and defining social life in a singular or universal manner (and this could be complicit with certain power relations in society), ignoring alternative possibilities, meanings or discourses. In fact. Habermas sometimes speaks of consensus in terms of "achievement-, but what if we push things further and speak of forging a consensus, mutually imposing an agreement? What if we. like Foucault, tightly juxtapose "consensus" and "discipline"? We then de-naturalize consensus and open it up to questions and problems to which it was previously impervious. We have to consider what might get left out. (Coles 1992: 8z) In Foucault's own words: "there is no prediscursive providence which disposes the world in our favor. We must conceive discourse as a violence which we do to things, or in any case as a practice we impose upon them- (1981:67). Each time we speak, we inevitably communicate through privileging certain meanings over others. And this is an exclusionary practice, rather than one that is ultimately inclusionary in Habermas' ideal of a consensus. Foucault's work, indeed, helps us to attend to the possible hegemony of meaning and exclusion inherent in the Habermasian "consensus". On another level. Foucault's ideas also problematize the apparently apolitical starting point of communicative process often unquestioned in Habermas political theory. Foucault crucially suggests that "it is necessary to determine what 'posing a problem' to politics really means (1984b: 385). According to him. the problem is. precisely, to decide if it is actually suitable to place oneself within a "we- in order to assert the principles one recognizes and the values one accepts [...] It seems to me that the "we" must not be previous to the question: it can only be the result - and the necessary temporary result - of the question as it is posed in the new terms in which one formulates it. (Foucault 1984b: 385) Put in another way, for Foucault, there is no initial social position (or "we") that is outside the influence of relations of power. This has implications for "what it means to ask a question" in politics, and it directs our attention to how the agenda and itinerary of public discussions are already shaped even before the actual debate takes place. For example, if we are discussing the importance of carbon tax, we are already, from the beginning. situated within other existing political discourses. for instance. one which implicitly acknowledges the importance of environmental protection. or one which considers taxation to be a legitimate source of government/national income. Indeed, it becomes important to ask: "who gets to adjudicate and define the issues of concern within public forums?", instead of accepting the Habermasian formulation at face value. Foucault's work also demonstrates how a specific definition or characterization of the "self' (or human "subject") in Western societies comes to be produced and constituted. and this also proffers a critique of Habermas' overall vision of democratic political practice. and in particular, how his theoretical prescriptions actually reinforces the idea of a specific political "participant-or "subject", and excludes other (alternative) visions of what a political "subject"- could be. Indeed. Foucault [...] analyzed how [certain] techniques [...] allow for the self to be created and subjected within relations of power that constitute modern social institutions. [There is also] [...] the production and marginalization of entire categories of people who do not fit what the foundation posits as "normal". (Blasius 1993: zoo) Power may form disciplined individuals, who are rational, responsible, productive subjects, yet that is in no way an expression of a humannature. (Pickett 1996: 458) If we take these ideas more seriously, one does get the sense that within Habermas' own theory of democracy, what is accorded priority is a specific type of political "subject": these "subjects- are individuals who can offer reasonable arguments in rational discussion. and who can draw upon convincing (usually scientifically-based) evidence to support those arguments. From the Foucauldian point of view, one could argue that this narrowly defined political subject is itself an effect of Habermas' own theoretical discourse, and this taken-forgranted "rational" subject that emerges from Habermas' prescriptions, to a large extent, excludes other types of participants and forms of participation in the public sphere, and in the democratic process. What about participants who do not appeal to rational argumentation, but instead put forward art forms - such as dance, paintings and sculptures -as political practice? And what about the role of rhetoric and emotional appeal in political speeches? How can we then accord these participants and their forms of expression an equal status with that of rationality and logical argumentation? Link – Security Securitization biopolitically instrumentalizes fear to render raw normalized life that must be protected at any cost Dillon & Reid 01 [Michael, emeritus scholar at Lancaster University who has written extensively on security and war, international political theory, continental philosophy, and cultural research; Julian, Lecturer in International Relations at King's College London, “Global Liberal Governance: Biopolitics, Security and War” Millennium - Journal of International Studies (2001) 30: 41] The history of security is not the pursuit of a universal value by pre-formed subjects, individual or collective.43 Given the foundational significance of security to all established formulations of politics, throughout the political tradition of the West, the history of security is a history of the changing problematisation of what it is to be a political subject and to be politically subject. Thus it is always deeply implicated in the ways in which the task of government itself is problematised and political order conceived.44 Although the security problematic is ordinarily examined in terms of state sovereignty, it has in fact always been a biopolitical as much as a geopolitical problematic.45 Thus conceived security analysis takes the form of the genealogy of dynasties of power relations and the critical analysis of the discursive conditions of emergence of contemporary security regimes. Furthermore, the changing problematisations of security have always been comprised of complex terrains of practices involving deeply embedded discourses of danger said to be foundational to individual welfare, social formation and political order. Said to be foundational to life, individual welfare, social formation and political order, these problematisations of danger, together with their allied discourses of fear are, however, the very means by which specific programmes of life, individual, welfare, social formation and political order are introduced, circulated, reproduced and enacted. The project of securitising, to steal but refashion a term coined elsewhere, is concerned with making life accessible to different social technologies: where technology refers broadly to complex techniques and relations of power established in the course of conceiving government as the administration and ordering of life rather than the politics of free peoples. Thus understood, technology is the process by which life is rendered into some kind of determinate material, raw life, in need of being secured from the threats and fears to which discourses of danger say it is prey.46 The emergence of a new, politically valent, security problematic is necessarily a complex phenomenon. It is not simply determined by the recognition of new needs by established political subjects whose structures and attributes are presumed to pre-exist the relations of force, Given the intimacy of the correlation of power and knowledge, the emergence of new problematisations is profoundly influenced by the complex interplay of epistemic invention and technological innovation, and by the relations of force, knowledge and power that define life and delimit populations. knowledge and power that constitute them as the very specific subjects of power/knowledge that they are. Link – Third World Suffering Discursive appeals to the material suffering of those living in the Third World is a smokescreen for the expansion of power and the creation of a regime of knowledge that feels compelled to modernize and develop the non-West. This turns the “under-developed” world into a space of thought and action that reduces Latin American nations to pawns in an American economic plan Escobar 1995 [Arturo, Kenan Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, UNC-Chapel Hill Director, Institute of Latin American Studies, UNC-Chapel Hill Adjunct Professor, Department of Geography, UNC-Chapel Hill Adjunct Professor, Department of Communications, UNCChapel Hill Fellow, Institute of Arts and Humanities, UNC Fellow, Center for Urban and Regional Research, UNC Facilitator, World Anthropologies Network / Red de Antropologías Mundiales Research Associate, Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, Bogotá, “Encountering Development THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF THE THIRD WORLD” 1995, page 39-40] THE DISCOURSE OF DEVELOPMENT The Space of Development What does it mean to say that development started to function as a discourse, that is, that it created a space in which only certain things could be said and even imagined? If discourse is the process through which social reality comes into being—if it is the articulation of knowledge and power, of the visible and the expressible—how can the development discourse be individualized and related to ongoing technical, political, and economic events? How did development become a space for the systematic creation of concepts, theories, and practices? An entry point for this inquiry on the nature of development as discourse is its basic premises as they were formulated in the 1940s and 1950s. The organizing premise was the belief in the role of modernization as the only force capable of destroying archaic superstitions and relations, at whatever social, cultural, and political cost. Industrialization and urbanization were seen as the inevitable and necessarily progressive routes to modernization. Only through material advancement could social, cultural, and political progress be achieved. This view determined the belief that capital investment was the most important ingredient in economic growth and development. The advance of poor countries was thus seen from the outset as depending on ample supplies of capital to provide for infrastructure, industrialization, and the overall modernization of society. Where was this capital to come from? One possible answer was domestic savings. But these countries were seen as trapped in a “vicious circle” of poverty and lack of capital, so that a good part of the “badly needed” capital would have to come from abroad (see chapter 3). Moreover, it was absolutely necessary that governments and international organizations take an active role in promoting and orchestrating the necessary efforts to overcome general backwardness and economic underdevelopment. What, then, were the most important elements that went into the formulation of development theory, as gleaned from the earlier description? There was the process of capital formation, and the various factors associated with it: technology, population and resources, monetary and fiscal policies, industrialization and agricultural development, commerce and trade. There were also a series of factors linked to cultural considerations, such as education and the need to foster modern cultural values. Finally, there was the need to create adequate institutions for carrying out the complex task ahead: international organizations (such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, created in 1944, and most of the United Nations technical agencies, also a product of the mid1940s); national planning agencies (which proliferated in Latin America, especially after the inauguration of the Alliance for Progress in the early 1960s); and technical agencies of various kinds. Development was not merely the result of the combination, study, or gradual elaboration of these elements (some of these topics had existed for some time); nor the product of the introduction of new ideas (some of which were already appearing or perhaps were bound to appear); nor the effect of the new international organizations or financial institutions (which had some predecessors, such as the League of Nations). It was rather the result of the establishment of a set of relations among these elements, institutions, and practices and of the systematization of these relations to form a whole. The development discourse was constituted not by the array of possible objects under its domain but by the way in which, thanks to this set of relations, it was able to form systematically the objects of which it spoke, to group them and arrange them in certain ways, and to give them a unity of their own.21 To understand development as a discourse, one must look not at the elements themselves but at the system of relations established among them. It is this system that allows the systematic creation of objects, concepts, and strategies; it determines what can be thought and said. These relations— established between institutions, socioeconomic processes, forms of knowledge, technological factors, and so on—define the conditions under which objects, concepts, theories, and strategies can be incorporated into the discourse. In sum, the system of relations establishes a discursive practice that sets the rules of the game: who can speak, from what points of view, with what authority, and according to what criteria of expertise; it sets the rules that must be followed for this or that problem, theory, or object to emerge and be named, analyzed, and eventually transformed into a policy or a plan. The objects with which development began to deal after 1945 were numerous and varied. Some of them stood out clearly (poverty, insufficient technology and capital, rapid population growth, inadequate public services, archaic agricultural practices, and so on), whereas others were introduced with more caution or even in surreptitious ways (such as cultural attitudes and values and the existence of racial, religious, geographic, or ethnic factors believed to be associated with backwardness). These elements emerged from a multiplicity of points: the newly formed international organizations, government offices in distant capitals, old and new institutions, universities and research centers in developed countries, and, increasingly with the passing of time, institutions in the Third World. Everything was subjected to the eye of the new experts: the poor dwellings of the rural masses, the vast agricultural fields, cities, households, factories, hospitals, schools, public offices, towns and regions, and, in the last instance, the world as a whole. The vast surface over which the discourse moved at ease practically covered the entire cultural, economic, and political geography of the Third World. However, not all the actors distributed throughout this surface could identify objects to be studied and have their problems considered. Some clear principles of authority were in operation. They concerned the role of experts, from whom certain criteria of knowledge and competence were asked; institutions such as the United Nations, which had the moral, professional, and legal authority to name subjects and define strategies; and the international lending organizations, which carried the symbols of capital and power. These principles of authority also concerned the governments of poor countries , which commanded the legal political authority over the lives of their subjects, and the position of leadership of the rich countries, who had the power, knowledge, and experience to decide on what was to be done . Economists, demographers, educators, and experts in agriculture, public health, and nutrition elaborated their theories, made their assessments and observations, and designed their programs from these institutional sites. Problems were continually identified, and client categories brought into existence. Development proceeded by creating “abnormalities” (such as the “illiterate,” the “underdeveloped,” the “malnourished,” “small farmers,” or “landless peasants”), which it would later treat and reform. Approaches that could have had positive effects in terms of easing material constraints became, linked to this type of rationality, instruments of power and control. As time went by, new problems were progressively and selectively incorporated; once a problem was incorporated into the discourse, it had to be categorized and further specified. Some problems were specified at a given level (such as local or regional), or at various of these levels (for instance, a nutritional deficiency identified at the level of the household could be further specified as a regional production shortage or as affecting a given population group), or in relation to a particular institution. But these refined specifications did not seek so much to illuminate possible solutions as to give “problems” a visible reality amenable to particular treatments. This seemingly endless specification of problems required detailed observations in villages, regions, and countries in the Third World. Complete dossiers of countries were elaborated, and techniques of information were designed and constantly refined. This feature of the discurse allowed for the mapping of the economic and social life of countries, constituting a true political anatomy of the Third World .22 The end result was the creation of a space of thought and action the expansion of which was dictated in advance by the very same rules introduced during its formative stages. The development discourse defined a perceptual field structured by grids of observation, modes of inquiry and registration of problems, and forms of intervention; in short, it brought into existence a space defined not so much by the ensemble of objects with which it dealt but by a set of relations and a discursive practice that systematically produced interrelated objects, concepts, theories, strategies, and the like. Link – Western Feminism Positing Latin American women as impoverished, poor, and in complete need is a paternalistic attitude, setting the Western Woman as the golden standard, this creates discursive and systematic oppression against Latin American womaen Escobar 1995 [Arturo, Kenan Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, UNC-Chapel Hill Director, Institute of Latin American Studies, UNC-Chapel Hill Adjunct Professor, Department of Geography, UNC-Chapel Hill Adjunct Professor, Department of Communications, UNCChapel Hill Fellow, Institute of Arts and Humanities, UNC Fellow, Center for Urban and Regional Research, UNC Facilitator, World Anthropologies Network / Red de Antropologías Mundiales Research Associate, Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, Bogotá, “Encountering Development THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF THE THIRD WORLD” 1995, page 8] when raising the questions of who produces knowledge about Third World women and from what spaces; she discovered that women in the ThirdWorld are represented in most feminist literature on development as having ªneedsº and ªproblems º but few choices and no freedom to act. What emerges from such modes of analysis is the image of an average Third World woman, constructed through the use of statistics and certain categories: This average third world woman leads an essentially truncated life based on her feminine gender (read: sexually constrained) and her being ªthird worldº (read: ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic, family-oriented, victimized, etc.). This, I suggest, is in contrast to the (implicit) self-representation of Western women as educated, as modern, as having control over their own bodies and sexualities, and the freedom to make their own decisions. (1991b, 56) These representations implicitly assume Western standards as the benchmark against which to measure the situation of Third World women. The result, Mohanty believes, is a paternalistic attitude on the part of Western women toward their Third World counterparts and, more generally, the perpetuation of the hegemonic idea of the West's superiority. Within this discursive regime, works about Third World women develop a certain coherence of effects that reinforces that hegemony. ªIt is in this process of discursive homogenization and systematization of the oppression of women in the third world,º Mohanty concludes, ªthat power is exercised in much of recent Western feminist discourse, and this power needs to be de®ned and namedº (54).4 Needless to say, Mohanty's critique applies with greater pertinence to mainstream development literature, in which there exists a veritable underdeveloped subjectivity endowed with features such as powerlessness, passivity, poverty, and ignorance, usually dark and lacking in historical agency, as if waiting for the (white) Western hand to help subjects along and not infrequently hungry, illiterate, needy, and oppressed by its own stubbornness, lack of initiative, and traditions. This image also universalizes and homogenizes Third World cultures in an ahistorical fashion. Only from a certain Western perspective does this description make sense; that it exists at all is more a sign of The consequences of this feature of modernity have been enormous. Chandra Mohanty, for example, refers to the same feature power over the Third World than a truth about it. It is important to highlight for now that the deployment of this discourse in a world system in which the West has a certain dominance over the Third World has profound political, economic, and cultural effects that have to be explored. Link – Western Philosophy Their reliance on Western authors betrays their Eurocentric and Orientalist understanding of the world Dabashi 13 (Hamid, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, “Can non-Europeans Think?”, 1.15.13, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/01/2013114142638797542.html, [CL]) In a lovely little panegyric for the distinguished European philosopher Slavoj Zizek, published recently on Al Jazeera, we read: There are many important and active philosophers today: Judith Butler in the United States, Simon Critchley in England, Victoria Camps in Spain, Jean-Luc Nancy in France, Chantal Mouffe in Belgium, Gianni Vattimo in Italy, Peter Sloterdijk in Germany and in Slovenia, Slavoj Zizek, not to mention others working in Brazil, Australia and China. What immediately strikes the reader when seeing this opening paragraph is the unabashedly European character and disposition of the thing the author calls "philosophy today" - thus laying a claim on both the subject and time that is peculiar and in fact an exclusive property of Europe. Even Judith Butler who is cited as an example from the United States is decidedly a product of European philosophical genealogy, thinking somewhere between Derrida and Foucault, brought to bear on our understanding of gender and sexuality. To be sure, China and Brazil (and Australia, which is also a European extension) are cited as the location of other philosophers worthy of the designation, but none of them evidently merits a specific name to be sitting next to these eminent European philosophers. The question of course is not the globality of philosophical visions that all these prominent European (and by extension certain American) philosophers indeed share and from which people from the deepest corners of Africa to the remotest villages of India, China, Latin America, and the Arab and Muslim world ("deep and far", that is, from a fictive European centre) can indeed learn and better understand their lives. That goes without saying, for without that confidence and self-consciousness these philosophers and the philosophical traditions they represent can scarce lay any universal These are indeed not only eminent philosophers, but the philosophy they practice has the globality of certain degrees of self-conscious confidence without which no thinking can presume universality. The question is rather something else: What about other thinkers who operate outside this European philosophical pedigree, whether they claim on our epistemic credulities, nor would they be able to put pen to paper or finger to keyboard and write a sentence. Thinkers outside Europe practice their thinking in the European languages they have colonially inherited or else in their own mother tongues - in Asia, in Africa, in Latin America, thinkers that have actually earned the dignity of a name, and perhaps even the pedigree of a "public intellectual" not too dissimilar to Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Michel Foucault that in this piece on Al Jazeera are offered as predecessors of Zizek? What about thinkers outside the purview of these European philosophers; how are we to name and designate and honour and learn from them with the epithet of "public intellectual" in the age of globalised media? Do the constellation of thinkers from South Asia, exemplified by leading figures like Ashis Nandy, Partha Chatterjee, Gayatri Spivak, Ranajit Guha, Sudipta Kaviraj, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Homi Bhabha, or Akeel Bilgrami, come together to form a nucleus of thinking that is conscious of itself? Would that constellation perhaps merit the word "thinking" in a manner that would qualify one of them - as a South Asian - to the term "philosopher" or "public intellectuals"? Are they "South Asian thinkers" or "thinkers", the way these European thinkers are? Why is it that if Mozart sneezes it is "music" (and I am quite sure the great genius even sneezed melodiously) but the most sophisticated Indian music ragas are the subject of "ethnomusicology"? Is that "ethnos" not also applicable to the philosophical thinking that Indian philosophers practice - so much so that their thinking is more the subject of Western European and North American anthropological fieldwork and investigation? We can turn around and look at Africa. What about thinkers like Henry Odera Oruka, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Okot p'Bitek, Taban Lo Liyong, Achille Mbembe, Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, V.Y. Mudimbe: Would they qualify for the term "philosopher" or "public intellectuals" perhaps, or is that also "ethnophilosophy"? Why is European philosophy "philosophy", but African philosophy ethnophilosophy, the way Indian music is ethnomusic - an ethnographic logic that is based on the very same reasoning that if you were to go to the New York Museum of Natural History (popularised in Shawn Levy's Night at the Museum [2006]), you only see animals and non-white peoples and their cultures featured inside glass cages, but no cage is in sight for white people and their cultures - they just get to stroll through the isles and enjoy the power and ability of looking at taxidermic Yaks, cave dwellers, elephants, Eskimos, buffalo, Native Americans, etc, all in a single winding row. The same ethnographic gaze is evident in the encounter with the intellectual disposition of the Arab or Muslim world: Azmi Bishara, Sadeq Jalal Al-Azm, Fawwaz Traboulsi, Abdallah Laroui, Michel Kilo, Abdolkarim Soroush. The list of prominent thinkers and is endless. In Japan, Kojin Karatani, in Cuba, Roberto Fernandez Retamar, or even in the United States people like Cornel West, whose thinking is not entirely in the European continental tradition - what about them? Where do they fit in? Can they think - is what they do also thinking, philosophical, pertinent, perhaps, or is that also suitable for ethnographic examinations ? The question of Eurocentricism is now entirely blase. Of course Europeans are Eurocentric and see the world from their vantage point, and why should they not? They are the inheritors of multiple (now defunct) empires and they still carry within them the phantom hubris of those empires and they think their particular philosophy is "philosophy" and their particular thinking is "thinking", and everything else is - as the great European philosopher Immanuel Levinas was wont of saying - "dancing". The question is rather the manner in which non-European thinking can reach self- consciousness and evident universality, not at the cost of whatever European philosophers may think of themselves for the world at large, but for the purpose of offering alternative (complementary or contradictory) visions of reality more rooted in the lived experiences of people in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America - counties and climes once under the spell of the thing that calls itself "the West" but happily no more. The trajectory of contemporary thinking around the globe is not spontaneously conditioned in our own immediate time and disparate locations, but has a much deeper and wider spectrum that goes back to earlier generations of thinkers ranging from José Marti to Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, to Aime Cesaire, W.E.B. DuBois, Liang Qichao, Frantz Fanon, Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi, etc. So the question remains why not the dignity of "philosophy" and whence the anthropological curiosity of "ethnophilosophy"? Let's seek the answer from Europe itself - but from the subaltern of Europe. 'The Intellectuals as a Cosmopolitan Stratum' In his Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci has a short discussion about Kant's famous phrase inGroundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) that is quite critical in our understanding of what it takes for a philosopher to become universally self-conscious, to think of himself as the measure and yardstick of globality. Gramsci's stipulation is critical here - and here is how he begins: Kant's maxim "act in such a way that your conduct can become a norm for all men in similar conditions" is less simple and obvious than it appears at first sight. What is meant by 'similar conditions'? To be sure, and as Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (the editors and translators of the English translation of Gramsci's Prison Notebooks) note, Gramsci here in fact misquotes Kant, and that "similar conditions" does not appear in the original text, where the German philosopher says: "I am never to act otherwise than so that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law." This principle, called "the categorical imperative", is in fact the very foundation of Kantian ethics. So where Kant says "universal law", Gramsci says, "a norm for all men", and then he adds an additional "similar conditions", which is not in the German original. That misquoting is quite critical here. Gramsci's conclusion is that the reason Kant can say what he says and offer his own behaviour as measure of universal ethics is that "Kant's maxim presupposes a single culture, a single religion, a 'world-wide' conformism... Kant's maxim is connected with his time, with the cosmopolitan enlightenment and the critical conception of the author. In brief, it is linked to the philosophy of the intellectuals as a cosmopolitan stratum". What in effect Gramsci discovers, as a southern Italian suffering in the dungeons of European fascism, is what in Brooklyn we call chutzpah, to think yourself the centre of universe, a selfassuredness that gives the philosopher that certain panache and authority to think in absolutists and grand narrative terms. Therefore the agent is the bearer of the "similar conditions" and indeed their creator. That is, he "must" act according to a "model" which he would like to see diffused among all mankind, according to a type of civilisation for whose coming he is working-or for whose preservation he is "resisting" the forces that threaten its disintegration. It is precisely that self-confidence, that self-consciousness, that audacity to think yourself the agent of history that enables a thinker to think his particular thinking is "Thinking" in universal terms, and his philosophy "Philosophy" and his city square "The Public Space", and thus he a globally recognised Public Intellectual. There is thus a direct and unmitigated structural link between an empire, or an imperial frame of reference, and the presumed universality of a thinker thinking in the bosoms of that empire. As all other people, Europeans are perfectly entitled to their own self-centrism.The imperial hubris that once enabled that Eurocentricism and still produces the infomercials of the sort we read in Al Jazeera for Zizek are the phantom memories of the time that "the West" had assured confidence and a sense of its own universalism and globality, or as Gramsci put it, "to a type of civilisation for whose coming he is working". But that globality is no more - people from every clime and continent are up and about claiming their own cosmopolitan worldliness and with it their innate ability to think beyond the confinements of that Eurocentricism, which to be sure is still entitled to its phantom pleasures of thinking itself the centre of the universe. The Gramscian superimposed "similar conditions" are now emerging in multiple cites of the liberated humanity. The world at large, and the Arab and Muslim world in particular, is going through world historic changes - these changes have produced thinkers, poets, artists, and public intellectuals at the centre of their moral and politcial imagination - all thinking and acting in terms at once domestic to their immediate geography and yet global in its consequences. Compared to those liberating tsunamis now turning the world upside down, cliche-ridden assumption about Europe and its increasingly provincialised philosophical pedigree is a tempest in the cup. Reduced to its own fair share of the humanity at large, and like all other continents and climes, Europe has much to teach the world, but now on a far more leveled and democratic playing field, where its philosophy is European philosophy not "Philosophy", its music European music not "Music", and no infomercial would be necessary to sell its public intellectuals as "Public Intellectuals". Impacts Impact – Colonial Violence Colonial violence is inherent to development policy – the binary between developed and undeveloped nations necessitates aggressive violence to “cure” underdevelopment. Howard, Office of Public Advocate, Hume, Phd Politics @ Universty of Glasgow, and Oslender, MA in Geography and Hispanic Studies @ University of Glasgow, 07(David, Mo, Ulrich, “Violence, fear, and development in Latin America: a critical overview”, Development in Practice, Volume 17, Number 6) There are many ways in which violence and development are intertwined. And there is nothing innocent or objective about the idea of development itself. In fact, 'development' - understood for the most part as modern (economic) development - is one of the most contentious terms in the social sciences. Orthodox views perceive the process as a sustainable increase in the economic wealth of countries or regions for the well-being of their inhabitants, particularly an increase in living standards through higher per capita income and better education and health services. There have, of course, always been debates about how to achieve such an increase in living standards. Yet with the discursive binary construction of the world into developed and developing (or less developed) countries after the end of World War II, the stage was set for ferocious debates, many of which exposed the inherently violent process in which 'development' was conceived and enacted. And to the fore came the many 'uns' of devel opment: underdevelopment, unequal development, and uneven development.. This issue of Development in Practice addresses the impact of violence or aggressive action on the process of development in Central and South America. The understanding of development is here considered in terms broader than the economic context alone, in order to assess wider social, cultural, and political aspects. Five articles consider violence that ranges from direct physical harm and bodily attack to the often more subtle aggression of racialised abuse, or the pressures on community-centred production to conform to the 'rules of the market'. The critique of economic development was particularly strong in Latin America, which saw the emergence of Dependency Theory as an influential, complex body of theoretical concepts with structuralist and Marxist roots that explained Latin America's historical and continued underdevelopment in terms of a structural logic inherent in the development of global capitalism. (See also the Review Essay by Carlos Mallorquin, in this issue.) As argued by Andre Gunder Frank (1969a), one of its principal exponents, the metropolis (or the core) creates and exploits peripheral satellites, from which it expropriates economic surplus for its own economic development. The satellites thus remain underdeveloped for lack of access to their own surplus and as a consequence of the exploitative contradictions that the metropolis introduces and maintains in the satellite's domestic structure. Such an appropriation of surplus value from the periphery was always a violent process, and Frank (1969b) would continue to outline the structural logic that underlies such a 'develop ment of underdevelopment'.1 The insights of dependency theory, originally 'developed' in Latin America, have also been used to speak to the specificities of Africa and to explain the violent global processes that underlie the constitution of unequal development there (Amin 1976). Of course, dependency theory has been challenged for its excessively structuralist explana tory approach to uneven development. The borders between centre and periphery are certainly less spatially stable than suggested. Globalisation has also meant that there is a periphery in the centre (think about the thousands of homeless in Los Angeles), as well as a centre in the per iphery (think about el norte in Bogota, the 'nice' part of town, where the rich live). Moreover, the post-modern angst in the 1980s about saying anything 'essential' at all and its unease over such dramatically determined statements of the dependency school certainly contributed to the latter's loss of influence. Yet it is hard not to agree with its principal insights into the highly structured unevenness of global economic development and its underlying capitalist logic in the production of space (Smith 1991). The period of the late 1980s and 1990s witnessed a renewed critical interest in development debates (although these had, of course, never stopped). The emerging global concern over the critical state of the environment unchecked deforestation; pollution of air, soil, and water ways; increasing desertification, etc. - was linked to human activity and a blind belief in economic development at the expense of global ecosystems. In other words, nature fell victim to the violence of development. From an ecofeminist perspective, such a violation of nature was compared to the violation of women within a patriarchal reductionist model of modern science and development (Shiva 1989). Such violence against the environment was to be stalled by a new perception in the development process. And so the notion of 'sustainable development' was born in the 1987 Brundtland Report, which aimed to promote economic activity and growth, while preserving the environment. This attempt to reconcile two old enemies - growth and environment - while drawing on economism and developmentalism seemed to be contradictory (Redclift 1989). Yet, as Ulrich Oslender's article shows, in the case of Colombia's black communities living in the Pacific coast region, the global concern over environmental destruction found its expression for a short period in the early 1990s in the promotion of sustainable development projects that empowered local communities to protect their tropical rainforest and its biodiversity. Certainly in this region, the protection of the environment and regional growth seemed to be compatible and a real option (see also Oslender 2004). Others, however, have criticised 'Mrs Brundtland's disenchanted cosmos' and the fact that sustainable development is still based on the capitalisation of nature, expressed through global views on nature and environment by those who rule, instead of through local respect for surrounding landscapes (Visvanathan 1991). And Sachs (1992) argues in his widely read Development Dictionary that notions of ecology are merely reduced to higher efficiency, while a development framework is still accepted as the norm. Visvanathan (1991: 384) calls for an 'explosion of imaginations' as a form of resistance to this dominant economism and essentially violent development framework: a call echoed by Peet and Watts (1996: 263-8) in their edited collection on 'liberation ecologies', which envisages 'environmental imagin aries' as primary sites of contestation, which are then articulated by social movements that contest normative visions and the 'imperialism of the imaginary'. In many ways, the very notion of development has been radically called into question, as the concept has been linked to neo-colonial intentions of the Global North to intervene in and keep control of the countries in the Global South. For Escobar (1995: 159), dominant development discourse portrays the so-called 'third world' as a space devoid of knowledge, a 'chronic pathological condition', so that the Western scientist Tike a good doctor, has the moral obligation to intervene in order to cure the diseased (social) body'. This intervention is always a violent one: one that ruptures the cultural fabric, penetrates the colonised body, and inserts a homogeneous developmental reasoning, often extirpating resistant cultural difference. To break this cycle of violent developmentalism, Escobar (1995) calls for an era of 'post-development' as a necessary step for national projects of decolonisation and for the affirmation of truly emancipatory political projects of self-affirmation. Impact – Ethics/AT: Util & Extinction The alternative requires an ethical engagement that looks beyond the politics of life and death – our engagement with the power relations of development represents an impatience for liberty that will not submit to a hypothetical, messianic future Bernauer and Mahon ‘94 [James W, Professor of Philosophy and Boston College, and Michael, associate professor of humanities at Boston University’s College of General Studies, “The Ethics of Michel Foucault” in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, edited by Gary Gutting] What is the necessity of these new relations? What are the stakes? The crucial but overlooked final section of Foucault's first volume on the history of sexuality, "Right of Death and Power over Life,” reveals how high the stakes are: "wars were never as bloody as they have been since the nineteenth century and all things being equal, never did regimes visit such holocausts on their own populations " The motivating force behind Foucault’s attempt to subvert the Freudian linkage of truthsexuality-subjectivity is the prevalence of the corresponding Freudian tendency to understand human existence as a smuggle of life against death, eros against thanatos. Our souls have been fashioned as mirrors of our modem political terrain in which massacres are vital, in which there is a right to kill those who are perceived as representing a biological danger; in which political choice was governed by the sole option between survival or suicide. Ethics for Foucault is a stylization, a mode of self-formation, that struggles against this perverse relation between life and death. In praise of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri, Foucault calls their work "a book of ethics, the first book of ethics to he written in France in quite a long time," and by ethics he means a stylization, “a life style, a way of thinking and living " The distinctiveness of Deleuze and Guattari's ethics of stylization at our peculiar junction in history is to incite us to struggle against fascism - certainly fascism of the historical variety which so successfully moved so many, "but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us " As the Christian was provoked to drive sin from the soul, our distinctive task, our modem ethical task, is to ”ferret out the fascism." lf Discipline and Punish shows that philosophical thought must struggle with the power-knowledge relations that would transform the human soul and existence into a mechanism, Foucault's history of sexuality points to the ethical task of detaching ourselves from those forces that would subordinate human existence (the Greek “bios” which Foucault employs) to biological life (the Greek "zoe"). An "esthetics of existence" resists a "science of life." To think human existence in esthetic categories releases it from the realm of scientific knowledge. It liberates us from endless self-decipherment and from subjecting ourselves to psychological norms. If psychology obliges human beings to decipher our truth in our sexuality, it is because psychology is rooted in biology and its identification of sexuality with life itself, thus binding us to the struggle with death. Modern biology’s articulation of life in terms of the murderous laws of evolution engages our identity with our destiny of death. Human existence and civilization, since Freud, is essentially the contest of life against death (Eros und Tod, Lebenstrieb und Destruktionstrieb) Foucault’s genealogy of the desiring subject is an act of transgression against the life and death struggle that bio-power has made the horizon of human existence. Foucault's ethics, then, is not Nietzsche’s "beyond good and evil" bur is beyond life and death. Nor does it constitute a Nietzschean leap beyond common morality into a splendid isolation cut of from ethical and political solidarity. Foucault committed himself to the cause of human rights, to the transformation of the plight of prisoners, mental patients, and other victims in both his theory and his practice. He identified with Pierre Riviere and Herculine Barbin, in whose memoirs "one feels, under wards polished like stone, the relentlessness and the ruin. His thought moved toward an ever-expanding embrace of otherness, the condition for any community or moral action. Foucault’s last writings put forward an ethical interrogation, an impatience for liberty, for a freedom that does not surrender to the pursuit of some messianic future but is an engagement with the numberless potential transgressions of those forces that war against our self-creation. The commitment to that task will inaugurate new experiences of self and human solidarity, experiences that will renounce any ambition of any abstract principle to name itself the human essence. Impact – State Racism State racism makes sovereign power deadly – the ability to “make live” inherent in the racial management of populations is coextensive with the power to “let die” – massacres become vital when racism marks those who must live and those who must die Elden 2002 [Stuart, Professor of Geography at Durham University, The War of Races and the Constitution of the State: Foucault’s «Il faut défendre la société» and the Politics of Calculation boundary 2 29:1, 2002] The reason that the problem of sexuality is so politically important for Foucault is that it is situated at the crossroads of the body and the population, of discipline and regulation (FDS, 224; see also DE, 3:153; FR, 67; VS, 191–92; WK, 145). ‘‘Sex was a means of access both to the life of the body and the life of the species’’ (VS, 192; WK, 146). The campaigns against masturbation and incest, which allow power to infiltrate the heart of the family, are examples here.35 The creation of norms, by which the individual body can be measured and disciplined, and the social body can be measured and regulated, is central (FDS, 225).36 ‘‘The Constitutions written throughout the world since the French Revolution, the Codes drafted and revised, all this continual and noisy legislative activity should not deceive us: these are the forms which make acceptable this essentially normalizing power’’ (VS, 190; WK, 144). Understanding the demographics of a population could lead to campaigns to control birthrates and prolong life: This was the power to ‘‘make live’’ (FDS, 219–20). The extreme form of this is the power to make life, to make the monster, to make uncontrollable and universally destructive viruses (FDS, 226). The reverse side is the power to allow death. State racism is a recoding of the old mechanisms of blood through the new procedures of regulation. Racism, as biologizing, as tied to a state, takes shape where the procedures of intervention ‘‘at the level of the body, conduct, health, and everyday life, received their color and their justification from the mythical concern with protecting the purity of the blood and ensuring the triumph of the race’’ (VS, 197; WK, 149).37 For example, the old anti-Semitism based on religion is reused under the new rubric of state racism. The integrity and purity of the race is threatened, and the state apparatuses are introduced against the race that has infiltrated and introduced noxious elements into the body. The Jews are characterized as the race present in the middle of all races (FDS, 76).38 The use of medical language is important. Because certain groups in society are conceived of in medical terms, society is no longer in need of being defended from the outsider but from the insider: the abnormal in behavior, species, or race. What is novel is not the mentality of power but the technology of power (FDS, 230). The recoding of old problems is made possible through new techniques. A break or cut (coupure) is fundamental to racism: a division or incision between those who must live and those who must die. The ‘‘biological continuum of the human species’’ is fragmented by the apparition of races, which are seen as distinguished, hierarchized, qualified as good or inferior, and so forth. The species is subdivided into subgroups that are thought of as races. In a sense, then, just as the continuum of geometry becomes divisible in Descartes,39 the human continuum is divided, that is, made calculable and orderable, two centuries later. As Anderson has persuasively argued, to suggest that racism has its roots in nationalism is a mistake. He suggests that ‘‘the dreams of racism actually have their origin in ideologies of class, rather than in those of nation: above all in claims to divinity among rulers and to ‘blue’ or ‘white’ blood and breeding among aristocracies.’’40 As Stoler has noted, for Foucault, it is the other way around: ‘‘A discourse of class derives from an earlier discourse of races.’’41 But it is a more subtle distinction than that. What Foucault suggests is that discourses of class have their roots in the war of races, but so, too, does modern racism; what is different is the biological spin put on the concepts.42 But as well as emphasizing the biological, modern racism puts this another way: to survive, to live, one must be prepared to massacre one’s enemies, a relation of war. As a relation of war, this is no different from the earlier war of races that Foucault has spent so much of the course explaining. But when coupled with the mechanisms of mathematics and medicine in bio-power, this can be conceived of in entirely different ways. Bio-power is able to establish, between my life and the death of the other, a relation that is not warlike or confrontational but biological: ‘‘The more inferior species tend to disappear, the more abnormal individuals can be eliminated, the less the species will be degenerated, the more I— not as an individual but as a species—will live, will be strong, will be vigorous, will be able to proliferate.’’ The death of the other does not just make me safer personally, but the death of the other, of the bad, inferior race or the degenerate or abnormal, makes life in general healthier and purer (FDS, 227–28). ‘‘The existence in question is no longer of sovereignty, juridical; but that of the population, biological. If genocide is truly the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a return today of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population’’ (VS, 180; WK, 136). ‘‘If the power of normalization wishes to exercise the ancient sovereign right of killing, it must pass through racism. And if, inversely, a sovereign power, that is to say a power with the right of life and death, wishes to function with the instruments, mechanisms, and technology of normalization, it must also pass through racism’’ (FDS, 228). This holds for indirect death—the exposure to death—as much as for direct killing. While not Darwinism, this biological sense of power is based on evolutionism and enables a thinking of colonial relations, the necessity of wars, criminality, phenomena of madness and mental illness, class divisions, and so forth. The link to colonialism is central: This form of modern state racism develops first with colonial genocide. The theme of the political enemy is extrapolated biologically. But what is important in the shift at the end of the nineteenth century is that war is no longer simply a way of securing one race by eliminating the other but of regenerating that race (FDS, 228–30). As Foucault puts it in La volonté de savoir : Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of all; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity. Massacres have become vital [vitaux— understood in a dual sense, both as essential and biological]. It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed. (VS, 180; WK, 136) The shift Foucault thinks is interesting is what might be called a shift from sanguinity to sexuality: sanguinity, in that it had an instrumental role (the shedding of blood) and a symbolic role (purity of blood, differences of blood); sexuality, when mechanisms of power are directed to the body, to life. The theme of race is present in both, but in a different form (VS, 194; WK, 147). We have moved from ‘‘a symbolics of blood to an analytics of sexuality. Clearly, nothing was more on the side of the law, death, transgression, the symbolic, and sovereignty than blood; just as sexuality was on the side of the norm, knowledge, life, meaning, the disciplines and regulations’’ (VS, 195; WK, 148). In Nazism, the two are combined. Eugenics and medical/mathematical techniques are coupled with the fantasy of blood and the ideal of the purity of the race. Foucault notes that there was immediate control of procreation and genetics in the Nazi regime, and that regulation, security, and assurance were imposed over the disciplined, ordered society; but at the same time, the old sovereign power of killing traversed the entire society. This was not simply confined to the state, nor simply to the SA or the SS, but ultimately to everyone, as, through denunciation, everyone could have this power over their neighbor (FDS, 231). While destruction of other races was central to Nazism, the other side of it was the exposure of the German race itself to death, an absolute and universal risk of death. The entire German population was exposed to death, and Foucault suggests that this was one of the fundamental duties of Nazi obedience. Only this exposure of the entire population to the universal risk of death could constitute the Germans as the superior race, regenerated in the face of those races either totally exterminated or completely subjugated. We have, therefore, in Nazism, both the absolute generalization of bio-power and the generalization of the sovereign right of death. Two mechanisms— one classical, archaic; one new—coincide exactly. A racist state, a murdering state, a suicidal state. Accompanying the final solution was the order of April 1945 that called for the destruction of the conditions of life of the German people themselves. A final solution for other races, an absolute suicide for the German race (FDS, 231–32). Impact – Global Fascism The genocidal biopolitics of development culminates in global fascism Patel and McMichael ’04 Patel [academic, journalist, activist and writer. his 2008 book, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. most recent book is The Value of Nothingon The New York Times best-seller list during February 2010.] McMichael [International Professor Faculty Fellow, Cornell Center for Sustainable Future] [Third World Quarterly Third Worldism and the Lineages of Global Fascism: The Regrouping of the Global South inthe Neoliberal EraAuthor(s): Rajeev Patel and Philip McMichaelSource: Third World Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 1, After the Third World? (2004), pp. 231-254Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3993786 .Accessed: 10/07/2013 20:41 Second, we emphasise that global fascism, as a form of ruthless (for want of a better qualifier) biopolitics, has always been a world-historical phenomenon. This is not to say that fascism qua fascism is, and always has been, smeared across the world. We do, however, suggest that its component forces, in coming together under colonialism, have informed the project of development, albeit in attenuated form. We have only to think of the colonial project-beginning with the cultural genocide in Iberian America, through slavery to forced/contract labour in the late colonial period, and perhaps including the forced expropriation and starvation of Indians, Chinese and Brazilians, among others, documented in Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niaio Famines and The Making of the Third World by Mike Davis.'" Indeed, we see our project as allied to Davis. He extends the notion of 'holocausts', which had previously been applied to a European phenomenon, into the colonial past.'2 We go one step further, pushing the historical boundaries of global fascism back into colonial time and space, and then drawing it forward, into the colonised present. We conjecture that fascist relations are immanent in global capitalism, intensify state biopolitics at moments of crisis, and may be sustained post-crisis for hegemonic purposes. Consider the 1930s, when a rogue state (Germany) was forced to structurally adjust by the League of Nations powers as a consequence of the collapse of the gold-sterling regime. The result was what has come to be known as fascism: a manoeuvring of elites and a populist appeal by the Nazi party to regenerate an idealised national culture through selective mobilization based on ethnic and racial intolerance, and dedicated to reconstructing modernity via state technologies of control. Culture is, of course, always part of capitalism. Stuart Hall's work informs our use of culture as synonymous with 'ideology'. The relation between culture and capital that informs our use of 'global fascism' is one that invokes particular relations of control between the state, media, the military, and tropes such as 'family', 'homeland', 'nation', 'God' and the market. Our use of 'global fascism' is also an attempt to represent today's transformed international conjuncture, where the crisis of market rule is premised on the defeat of Third World utopianism, and on a definitive 'globalisation' of the commodity form: the combined assault on organised labour (global labour market casualisation), on peasant cultures, and public goods. As early 20th century fascism was premised on the defeat of anticapitalist forces, so global fascism now targets forces with collective claims that stand in the way of commodification. The increasingly unaccountable institutions of market rule (including the 'market state') provide a mechanism for one of the key forces of 'global fascism' and, while this is a universal process, it is so contingently, because it continues the racist project begun under colonialism. In this sense we submit that fascism has foundational roots in European-centred development. The capitalist cultural technologies, with their origins in Europe, have now, under a US aegis, been extended under multilateral developmental institutions. This is very much in keeping with the idea of development-an idea with distinct cultural roots and heritage, but an idea that must, of necessity disavow these roots if it is successfully to claim its goal of disinterested and normalised universality. Impact – Famines Biopolitics legitimizes famines in the name of social and economic modernity Nally 11 – Department of Geography at Cambridge University (David, “The Biopolitics of food provisioning”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers Volume 36, Issue 1, January 2011, Wiley Online Library legitimise this new biopolitics of provision an ideological distinction between ‘peoples’ and ‘populations’ must be introduced. According to Foucault, the population includes those who conform or adapt to the new economic order; they fall in line with market regulation, even promoting it as a means to attain greater security. The people, on the other hand, are those who ‘disrupt the system’ and ‘throw themselves on the supplies’. They reject the new regime of planned scarcity, and therefore ‘do not really belong to the population’ (2007, 44). For Foucault the act of ‘letting die’ is profoundly connected to the classification of undesirables – what Giorgio Agamben (1995) would later term homines sacri– who are now represented as ‘threats, either external or internal, to the population’ (Foucault 2003, 256). In a liberal biopolitical economy, he concludes, killing or the imperative to kill is acceptable only if it results not in a victory over political adversaries, but in the elimination of the biological threat to and improvement of the species or race. (2003, 256; see also Minca 2006)Thus in addition to the Finally, to identification of ‘artificial’ forms of food provisioning and ‘aberrant’ modes of economic management, there appears a regime of human classification that disaggregates populations according to their conduct and perceived threat to the social order (Dean 2002). Under biopolitical conditions, therefore, scarcity and hunger are permissible in so far as their presence provokes a desirable social or economic change (Raulff 2004, 611). To paraphrase David Keen (1994, 77), famines now have functions as well as causes (Nally 2008). In this unique genealogy of the modern food system, Foucault does not discuss the political situation in Britain. If he had, he would have found a clear analogue to the birth of liberalism and the biopower of the state that he readily detects in the political and economic discourse of 18th century France. In Thoughts and details on scarcity (1800), for instance, Edmund Burke (1729–1797) relates food supply (‘one of the finest problems in legislation’) to the issue of responsible government. For Burke, public provision was both naive and dangerous: Of all things, an indiscreet tampering with the trade of provisions is the most dangerous, and it is always worst in the time when men are most disposed to it: that is, in the time of scarcity. (nd, 267–8) According to Adam Smith (1723–1790) restricting by ‘the violence of government’ the freedoms of the market was the most certain method of prolonging famine (Smith 1998, 597). Similarly David Ricardo’s (1772–1823) views on comparative advantage – suggesting that regions and states should specialise in a single niche product to gain a competitive edge – reinforced the case for interdependent global markets, unrestricted private enterprise and food trade liberalisation (Abraham 1991). Referring to the ‘Irish emergency of 1847’, the liberal economist J.S. Mill (1806–1873) also endorsed market mechanisms as the optimal scheme for addressing food scarcity. In his acclaimed Principles of political economy, Mill warned against ‘direct measures at the cost of the state, to procure food’, favouring instead ‘private speculation’ (1871, 549). The British promoters of free-trade (Griffin 2009) also dispensed theories about the effective regulation of social behaviour. Although Burke attacked government intervention in the provisions trade, he nevertheless felt that principled administrations should ‘guide our judgment’ and ‘regulate our tempers’, particularly in times of scarcity when ‘multitudes’ are thrust upon the government for support (nd, 251). Such sentiments reinforce Foucault’s point that ‘the people’ – those aberrant elements that ‘do not really belong to the population’ – need moral guidance and reformatory discipline to correct their individual and collective behaviour. In England the preventive measures that formed the bedrock of the ‘anti-scarcity system’ made way for novel remedial practices designed not to mitigate ‘distress’ – the conventional euphemism for starvation – but to stigmatise and discipline the poor (Himmelfarb 1985). This concern with social regulation received its clearest expression in the revision of the English Poor Law of 1834 (Dean 1991; Driver 1993). The new laws established for the first time an epistemological separation and legal distinction between poverty and indigence. This distinction between the ‘pauper’ (a social delinquent) and the ‘labouring poor’ (those who struggled to make ends meet) – codified in law and spatialised in the workhouse – correlates precisely with the caesura distinguishing the ‘people’ from the ‘population’. The Poor Law was therefore a techne´ for separating the ‘normal’ from the ‘pathological’ in such a way as to naturalise the violence of incarceration and correction. Clearly, market regulation would require certain procedures for disciplining bodies, and in some cases, whole populations (Nally forthcoming). Impact – Turns Case The quick-fix solutions promised by development become a self-fulfilling prophecy based on false materiality which constructs Third World nations as inferior and in need of the 1ac’s development Escobar 1995 [Arturo, Kenan Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, UNC-Chapel Hill Director, Institute of Latin American Studies, UNC-Chapel Hill Adjunct Professor, Department of Geography, UNC-Chapel Hill Adjunct Professor, Department of Communications, UNCChapel Hill Fellow, Institute of Arts and Humanities, UNC Fellow, Center for Urban and Regional Research, UNC Facilitator, World Anthropologies Network / Red de Antropologías Mundiales Research Associate, Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, Bogotá, “Encountering Development THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF THE THIRD WORLD” 1995, page 52-53] CONCLUSION The crucial threshold and transformation that took place in the early post– World War II period discussed in this chapter were the result not of a radical epistemological or political breakthrough but of the reorganization of a number of factors that allowed the Third World to display a new visibility and to irrupt into a new realm of language. This new space was carved out of the vast and dense surface of the Third World, placing it in a field of power. Underdevelopment became the subject of political technologies that sought to erase it from the face of the Earth but that ended up, instead, multiplying it to infinity. Development fostered a way of conceiving of social life as a technical problem, as a matter of rational decision and management to be entrusted to that group of people—the development professionals—whose specialized knowledge allegedly qualified them for the task. Instead of seeing change as a process rooted in the interpretation of each society’s history and cultural tradition—as a number of intellectuals in various parts of the Third World had attempted to do in the 1920s and 1930s (Gandhi being the best known of them)—these professionals sought to devise mechanisms and procedures to make societies fit a preexisting model that embodied the structures and functions of modernity. Like sorcerers’ apprentices, the development professionals awakened once again the dream of reason that, in their hands, as in earlier instances, produced a troubling reality. At times, development grew to be so important for Third World countries that it became acceptable for their rulers to subject their populations to an infinite variety of interventions, to more encompassing forms of power and systems of control; so important that First and Third World elites accepted the price of massive impoverishment , of selling Third World resources to the most convenient bidder, of degrading their physical and human ecologies, of killing and torturing, of condemning their indigenous populations to near extinction; so important that many in the Third World began to think of themselves as inferior, underdeveloped, and ignorant and to doubt the value of their own culture, deciding instead to pledge allegiance to the banners of reason and progress; so important, finally, that the achievement of development clouded the awareness of the impossibility of fulfilling the promises that development seemed to be making. After four decades of this discourse, most forms of understanding and representing the Third World are still dictated by the same basic tenets. The forms of power that have appeared act not so much by repression but by normalization; not by ignorance but by controlled knowledge; not by humanitarian concern but by the bureaucratization of social action. As the conditions that gave rise to development became more pressing, it could only increase its hold, refine its methods, and extend its reach even further. That the materiality of these conditions is not conjured up by an “objective” body of knowledge but is charted out by the rational discourses of economists, politicians, and development experts of all types should already be clear. What has been achieved is a specific configuration of factors and forces in which the new language of development finds support. As a discourse, development is thus a very real historical formation, albeit articulated around an artificial construct (underdevelopment) and upon a certain materiality (the conditions baptized as underdevelopment), which must be conceptualized in different ways if the power of the development discourse is to be challenged or displaced. To be sure, there is a situation of economic exploitation that must be recognized and dealt with. Power is too cynical at the level of exploitation and should be resisted on its own terms . There is also a certain materiality of life conditions that is extremely preoccupying and that requires great effort and attention. But those seeking to understand the Third World through development have long lost sight of this materiality by building upon it a reality that like a castle in the air has haunted us for decades. Understanding the history of the investment of the Third World by Western forms of knowledge and power is a way to shift the ground somewhat so that we can start to look at that materiality with different eyes and in different categories . The coherence of effects that the development discourse achieved is the key to its success as a hegemonic form of representation: the construction of the poor and underdeveloped as universal, preconstituted subjects, based on the privilege of the representers; the exercise of power over the Third World made possible by this discursive homogenization (which entails the erasure of the complexity and diversity of Third World peoples, so that a squatter in Mexico City, a Nepalese peasant, and a Tuareg nomad become equivalent to each other as poor and underdeveloped); and the colonization and domination of the natural and human ecologies and economies of the Third World.26 Development assumes a teleology to the extent that it proposes that the “natives” will sooner or later be reformed; at the same time, however, it reproduces endlessly the separation between reformers and those to be reformed by keeping alive the premise of the Third World as different and inferior, as having a limited humanity in relation to the accomplished European. Development relies on this perpetual recognition and disavowal of difference, a feature identified by Bhabha (1990) as inherent to discrimination. The signifiers of “poverty”, “illiteracy,” “hunger,” and so forth have already achieved a fixity as signifieds of “underdevelopment” which seems impossible to sunder. Perhaps no other factor has contributed to cementing the association of “poverty” with “underdevelopment” as the discourse of economists. To them I dedicate the coming chapter. Alt Alt – Border Thinking The alternative is a form border thinking – a rejection of Eurocentric approaches to Latin America must begin from the perspectives of the excluded and the resuscitation of subjugated knowledge. This effort requires a complete epistemic break from the shackles of modernity. Escobar 02 [Arturo, Kenan Distinguished Professor of Political Ecology at University of North Carolina, “Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise: The Latin American modernity/coloniality Research Program” Tercer Congreso Internacional de Latinoamericanistas en Europa July 3-6, 2002] a non-eurocentric and critical dialogue with alterity, one that fully enables “the negation of the negation” to which the subaltern others have been subjected, and one that does not see critical discourse as intrinsically European. Integral to this effort is the rescuing of nonhegemonic and silenced counter-discourses, of the alterity that is constitutive of modernity itself. This is the ethical principle of liberation of the negated Other, for which Dussel coins the term, “transmodernity,” defined as a project for overcoming modernity not simply by negating it but by thinking about it from its underside, from the perspective of the excluded other. Transmodernity is a future-oriented project that seeks the liberation of all humanity (1996: 14, Ch. 7), “a worldwide ethical liberation project in which alterity, which was part and parcel of modernity, would be able to fulfill itself” (2000: 473), “in which both modernity and its negated alterity (the victims) co-realize themselves in a process of mutual fertilization” (1993: 76). In short, trans-modernity cannot be brought about from within modernity, but requires of the action –and the incorporative solidarity– of the subalternized groups, the objects of modernity’s constitutive violence embedded in, among other features, the developmentalist fallacy. Rather than the rational project of a discursive ethics, transmodernity becomes the expression of an ethics of liberation.Mignolo’s notions of border thinking, border epistemology, and pluritopic hermeneutics are important in this regard. They point at Dussel’s notion of transmodernity signals the possibioity of the need “for a kind of thinking that moves along the diversity of historical processes” (Mignolo 2001: 9). There are, to be sure, no original thinking traditions to which one can go back. Rather than reproducing Western abstract universals, however, the alternative is a kind of border thinking that “engages the colonialism of Western epistemology (from the left and from the right) from the perspective of epistemic forces that have been turned into subaltern (traditional, folkloric, religious, emotional, etc.) forms of knowledge” (2001: 11). Resituating Anzaldúa’s metaphor of the border into the domain of coloniality, Mignolo adumbrates the possibility of “`thinking otherwise’, from the interior exteriority of the border. That is, to engage in border thinking is to move beyond the categories created an imposed by Western epistemology” (p. 11). This is not just a question of changing the contents but the very terms of the conversation. It is not a question of replacing existing epistemologies either; these will certainly continue to exist and as such will remain viable as spaces of, and for, critique. Instead, what he claims “is the space for an epistemology that comes from the border and aims toward political and ethical transformations” (p. 11). Finally, while Mignolo acknowledges the continued importance of the monotopic critique of modernity by Western critical discourse (critique from a single, unified space), he suggests that this has to be put into dialogue with the critique(s) arising from the colonial difference, which constitutes border thinking. The result is a “pluritopic hermeneutics” (a term he seemingly adapts from Pannikar’s “diatopic hermeneutics”), a possibility of thinking from different spaces which finally breaks away from eurocentrism as sole epistemological perspective. This is the double critique of modernity from the perspective of coloniality, from the exterior of the modern/colonial world system. Let it be clear, however, that border thinking entails both “displacement and departure” (2000: 308), double critique and positive affirmation of an alternative ordering of the real. Border thinking points towards a different kind of hegemony, a multiple one. As a universal project, diversity allows us to imagine alternatives to universalism (we could say that the alternative to universalism in this view is not particularism but multiplicity). “The `West and the rest’ in Huntington’s phrase provides the model to overcome, as the `rest’ becomes the sites where border thinking emerges in its diversity, where `mundialización’ creates new local histories remaking and readapting Western global designs ….and transforming local (European) histories from where such designs emerged…. `Interdependence’ may be the word that summarizes the break away from the idea of totality and brings about the idea of networks whose articulation will require epistemological principles I called in this book `border thinking’ and `border gnosis,’ as a rearticulation of the colonial difference: `diversality as a universal project,’ which means that people 310, 311). and communities have the right to be different precisely because `we’ are all equals” (2000: Alt – Intellectual Solidarity Social movements in Latin America are paving the way for an alternative modernity – it is necessary to provide broader intellectual interpretations that challenge hegemonic discourses on modernity to clear space for their progression Escobar 7 Arturo PhD in Development Philosophy, Policy, and Planning at the University of California Berkley [Arturo,” Development, trans/modernities, and the politics of theory” print These policies and reforms refer primarily to the state level. What is happening in the space of social movements and intellectual-activist circles, including in subregions such as southern Mexico, is another matter. Still, the bulk of these movements’ thoughts and proposals fall within the “alternative modernizations” camp; this applies to many of the demands of indigenous peoples, peasants, afro-descendants, and the urban poor.Yet here and there one can hear unmistakable signs of other thoughts and projects.Where “here and there”? This question, as usual, becomes one of perspective, standpoint, engagement, and framework of analysis. What frameworks and engagements? Who one thinks with, from what perspective, and for what purposes become of primary importance to providing a different, and actually broader, interpretation of events, at least if one wants to incorporate the perspective of social movements in these interpretations. Based on the thoughts and practices of some movements and the intellectuals close to these movements (particularly, but not solely, in the Andean region), one can advance the following working hypothesis: that the current social, economic, political, and cultural transformations going on in many parts of Latin America point to the existence of two potentially complementary but also competing projects: (1) alternative modernizations, based on an anti-neoliberal development model, potentially leading to a postcapitalist economy and an alternative form of modernity (Linera’s modernidad satisfactoria); this project stems from the crisis of the neoliberal project of the past three decades. (2) decolonial projects, based on different sets of practices (e.g., communal, indigenous), leading to pluralist postcapitalist, postliberal, and poststatist societies and, potentially, to alternatives to modernity. This second project can be read most clearly from the crisis of modernity in the continent. The question then becomes: is it possible to go beyond capital (as the dominant form of economy), Euro-modernity (as the dominant cultural construction of socionatural life), and the state (as the central form of the institutionalization of the social)? Three scenarios, then: postcapitalist, postliberal, and poststatist.Needless to say, this second hypothesis would require a radical transformation of the pattern of power and knowledge that has characterized modern/ colonial societies until recently. This hypothesis also means that the current moment needs to be interpreted in terms of a particular conjuncture defined by the articulation of a double crisis: the crisis of the neoliberal modernizing model of the past three decades, and the crisis of the project of bringing about modernity in the continent that has lasted for more than five hundred years. The second project emerges from this conjuncture, and it can plausibly be read from a number of social sources. First, there are a number of statements by well-known intellectuals and activists that unambiguously point in this direction. For Luis Macas, former leader of the largest indigenous confederation of Ecuador, CONAIE, “nuestra lucha es epistémica y política” (our struggle is epistemic and political). For Félix Patzi Paco, an Aymara sociologist and the first minister of education of Evo Morales’s administration, the social movements in Bolivia are about “the total transformation of liberal society” (Public talk at University of North Carolina, November 17 2005). Even President Rafael Correa, in his inaugural speech of 15 January 2007, characterized his revolución ciudadana (citizen’s revolution) as involving not an epoch of change but a change of epoch. And García Linera had the following to say about the need for a new constitution: The Constituent Assembly is conceived of and was convoked to create an institutional order that corresponds to the reality of who we are. Up to now, each of our 17 or 18 constitutions has just tried to copy the latest institutional fashion—French, U.S., European. And it was clear that it didn’t fit us, because these institutions correspond to other societies. We are indigenous and nonindigenous, we are liberal and communitarians, we are a profoundly diverse society regionally and a hybrid in terms of social classes. So we have to have institutions that allow us to recognize that pluralism. (Laura Carlsen, 16 November 2007; http://americas.irconline. org/am/4735). Some academics and intellectuals similarly speak about un nuevo ciclo histórico (a new historical cycle), potentially leading to a significant renewal of democracy and development (e.g., Calderón 2007). In other words, if most revolutionary processes of the past still operated within the modern liberal model, what might be at stake in the transformations in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Venezuela in particular is the end of coloniality. This implies the construction of another societal project, free once and for all of its moorings in modernity/coloniality: in short, un giro decolonial (a decolonial turn; see CastroGómez and Grosfogel (2007) and the Latin American Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality group, MCD). Or, as Mario Blaser (2007) argues, if it is true that the left governments constitute attempts to recompose the project of modernity through a modernizing model that to a greater or lesser extent presents an alternative to the neoliberal model, the culturalpolitical projects of many of the region’s social movements seem to overflow modernist criteria. According to Marisol de la Cadena (2007), when considering the recent indigenous forms of political mobilization, we need to start thinking about an ontological decentering of modern politics. There is an active debate on these concepts among indigenous and black intellectuals in the Andean countries, and intellectualactivists are working with, and writing about, some of these movements in the wider region (e.g., Ceceña 2008, Zibechi 2006, and the debates coming from movements such as Xochitl Leyva, Colectivo Situaciones, and the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, to mention just a few of the most recent and prominent examples). To explain the above hypothesis more adequately, however,would require a much longer treatment (in preparation). Alt – Latin America Engagement with Latin America must begin with a disengagement from Eurocentric norms, ideals, and perspectives – this is the only way to challenge the devastation wrought by neoliberal modernity Ibarra-Colado 6, Eduardo (2006). “Organization studies and epistemic coloniality in Latin America: Thinking otherness from the margins.” P. 466-467. Eduardo is the head of the department of Institutional Studies at the Autonomous Metropolitan University and is a professor of Management and Organization Studies. He obtained his PhD in Sociology He is a National Researcher of the Mexican National System of Researchers When we consider the problems of our countries through the eyes of the Centre, what we are doing is accepting unreflectively the problems of the Centre in its effort to submit and dominate the region. Thus, we see the Centre’s constant effort to impose on us its idea of modernization as the only available option, but just as with any sort of loan, the interest rates have always been enormous. This useless dependency on the knowledge of the Centre (useless because the problems modernization set out to resolve are still with us, and aggravated) emphasizes the urgency of moving from translation and imitation to original creation as emancipated creation. Only then will we be able to break our silence and start a real transformation. A different organizational knowledge is needed, constructed from the perspective of ‘otherness’. It must be original insofar as it relates to its origins and is not the result of translation, imitation or falsification. It must analyse the organizational realities of Latin America from the standpoint of the specific history of its economic and political formation and from its vast cultural heritage. These realities function under modes of rationality that differ significantly from the instrumental mode of the Centre. These are, in short, the orienting ideas of this meditation, which I develop in following three sections: The first one establishes the main characteristic of the development of Organization Studies in Latin America as its tendency towards falsification and imitation of the knowledge generated in the Centre. The second section recognizes the role played by the term ‘organization’ as an artifice that facilitates the comparison of different realities through their structural variables, but also the inability of this term to recognize any reality that escapes instrumental rationality and the logic of the market. It also articulates the increasing importance of such concepts in the context of neo-liberalism. The third section concludes by renewing the urgency of appreciating the organizational problems of Latin America from the outside by proposing a preliminary research agenda built from original approaches that recognize otherness. Organization Studies has had little relevance in Latin America although the situation is beginning to change. This lack of substance in Latin American social research is explained, among other reasons, by the colonial condition that gave form to the region. That is, the plundering of Latin American natural wealth, that provided an engine for the development of the Centre, caused structural poverty and exclusion for the countries of this region. For a long time, the debate focused on the functionality of the State as promoter of economic wealth and ‘modernization’. Consequently, while national governments ushered industrialization with the promise of progress, Latin American researchers analysed why these policies failed repeatedly, reproducing and worsening the problems of the region. The debates surrounding the Latin American situation acquired great strength in the 1960s and 1970s partly due to positions taken by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL in Spanish) concerning the conditions of the Latin American Periphery (Bielschowsky, 1998), and partly due to insights of Latin American researchers that confronted ‘developmentalist’ postures with ‘dependentista’ explanations, thus revealing conditions that encourage asymmetrical exchanges (Grosfoguel, 2000; Kahl, 1976). Hence, Latin American ideology was occupied with a wide ranging discussion concerning essential economic, social and political issues, while leaving aside issues concerned with organizational structuring, its functioning and its development. Most social science research focused on structural development difficulties, poverty, political conflicts, social movements and the authoritarian governments that made democratization difficult. Alt – Uniqueness Latin America is at a crossroads that points the way towards a post-development future – alternative modernities are emerging Escobar 08 Arturo Escobar, Department of Anthropology, UNC, Chapel Hill. “Latin America at a Crossroads: Alternative Modernizations, Postliberalism, or Postdevelopment?” p.3-4 so-called “turn to the Left” in Latin America suggests that the urge for a re-orientation of the course followed by most countries over the past three to four decades is strongly felt by many governments. This is most clear in the cases of Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador at present; to a greater or lesser extent, Argentina, Paraguay, Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador; and in the cases of Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay, which make up what some observers have called the “pragmatic reformers” or “neoliberal Left.” Why is this happening in Latin America more clearly than in any other world region at present is a question I cannot tackle fully here, but it is related to the fact that Latin America was the region that most earnestly embraced neo-liberal reforms, where the model was applied most thoroughly, and where the results are most ambiguous, in the best of cases. It is well known that it was on the basis of the early Latin American experiences that the Washington Consensus was crafted. Despite the contradictory and diverse forms it has taken in the present decade, the Thus the fact that many of the reforms carried out in the most recent years are referred to as “anti-neoliberal” seems particularly apposite. Whether these countries are entering a post-neoliberal –let alone, post-liberal—social order remains a matter of debate. There is an acute sense, of course, that this potential will not necessarily be realized, and that the projects under way, especially in their State form, are not panaceas of any sort; on the contrary, they are seen as fragile and full of tensions and contradictions. But the sense of an active stirring up of things in many of the continent’s regions, from Southern Mexico to the Patagonia, and especially in large parts of South America, is strong. How one thinks about these processes is itself an object of struggle and debate, and it is at this juncture that this paper is situated. Is it possible to suggest ways of thinking about the ongoing transformations that neither shortcut their potential by interpreting them through worn out categories, nor that aggrandize their scope by imputing to them utopias that might be far from the desires and actions of the main actors involved? What perspectives might be most fruitful to think through, and about, the transformations? Is it enough to think from the space of the modern social sciences, or must one incorporate other forms of knowledge, such as those of the activist-intellectuals that inhabit the worlds of many of today’s social movements? In other words, the questions of where one thinks from, with whom, and for what purpose become themselves important elements of the investigation; this also means that the investigation, more than ever, is simultaneously theoretical and political. This specificity also has to do with the multiplicity of histories and trajectories that underlie the diverse cultural and political projects at play. As I will suggest in the first part of the paper, the transformations are most fruitfully seen in terms of the crisis of both neo-liberalism and modernity. Seen in this way, it can plausibly be argued that the region could be moving at the very least beyond the idea of a single, universal modernity and towards a more plural set of modernities. Whether it is also moving beyond the dominance of one set of modernities (Euro-modernities), or not, remains to be seen. The answer to this question will depend on the degree to which national, sub-national, and regional projects might be able to go beyond modernization projects and into postcapitalist, postliberal, and post-statist formations. Although moving to a post-liberal society does not seem to be the project of the progressive governments, some social movements could be seen as pointing in this direction. This also means that the relation between the socio-economic and political transformations going on at the level of the State, on the one hand, and the actions and cultural-political demands of social movements, on the other, need to be kept in mind. A third layer to which attention needs to be paid is, of course, the reactions by, and projects from, the right. State, social movements, and the right thus appear as three inter-related but distinct spheres of cultural-political intervention. Said differently, this paper seeks to understand the current conjuncture, in the sense of “a description of a social formation as fractured and conflictual, along multiple axes, planes and scales, constantly in search of temporary balances or structural stabilities through a variety of practices and processes of struggle and negotiation” (Grossberg 2006: 4). Latin America can be fruitfully seen as a crossroads: a regional formation where critical theories arising from many trajectories (from Marxist political economy to postructuralisms and their many combinations); a multiplicity of histories and futures; and very diverse cultural and political projects all find a convergence space. As we shall see, the current conjuncture can be said to be defined by two processes: the crisis of the neoliberal model of the past three decades; and the crisis of the project of bringing about modernity in the continent since the Conquest. Alt – Solvency – Aid Affs The alternative is a form of solidarity with the governed – rather than one-directional and apolitical appeals for aid, we emphasize mutuality and interconnectedness between local struggles. Duffield, Professor Emeritus and former Director of the Global Insecurities Centre, University of Bristol, ‘7 [Mark, Development, Security and Unending War Governing the World of People, Pg. 232-234] In June 1984 Michel Foucault released a statement on behalf of several NGOs to mark the formation of the International Commission Against Piracy and to protest against the interdiction at sea and summary return of Vietnamese boat people. In his statement Foucault stressed that all were present as private individuals, with no grounds for speaking other than 'a certain shared difficulty in enduring what is taking place' (Foucault [1984]: 474). In setting out the aims of the group he listed several principles, including the existence of an 'international citizenship' with rights, duties and obligations to speak out against the abuse of power, whoever the author. After all, 'we are all of the community of the governed, and thereby obliged to show mutual solidarity' (ibid.). The sentiment that 'we are all governed and therefore in solidarity’ is present in different ways and degrees in today's anti-globalization campaigns, such as global justice movements, the World Social Forum, the Zapatistas in Mexico or the international peasant farmers' movement Via Campesina. It disturbs and questions earlier forms of Third World solidarity coalescing around politics, rights and aid (Olesen 2004). Rights and aid solidarity in particular, including humanitarian and development assistance, imply a one-way process between the provider and beneficiary of solidarity. It is a process that emphasizes differences in power and distance, with providers in places of safety and beneficiaries in zones of crisis. It is also apolitical and does 'not fundamentally challenge the underlying causes of grievances that inspire the solidarity effort' (ibid.: 258). In contrast, global solidarity emphasizes mutuality and reciprocity between provider and beneficiary while blurring the differences between them. It involves a 'more extensive global consciousness that constructs the grievances of physically, socially and culturally distant people as deeply intertwined' (ibid.: 259). While difference is acknowledged, it is the similarities that are important. Global solidarity is also political: distant struggles are common points of departure that collectively problematize the overarching, anti-democratic and marginalizing effects of global neoliberalism, whether as struggles against hospital closures in mass consumer society or the ruination of pastoralist livelihoods beyond its borders. In this respect, it minimizes attempts to divide and striate humankind either according to measures of development and underdevelopment or those of culture. Today the fear of radical interconnection, with its ability to threaten the stability of mass consumer society, dominates Western political imagination. For an international citizenship, however, it offers possibilities for new encounters, mutual recognition, reciprocity and hope: it represents the magic of life itself. The principles of mutuality and interconnectedness provide a chance to rediscover politics as a practical interrogation of power. If biopolitics and its technologies of security have absorbed the political, the task is not so much to reinvent it as to reclaim it. It involves questioning the assumptions and practices that support life while at the same time disallowing it to the point of death. Called into question are those acts of administrative or petty sovereignty that, acting through the lens of race, class and gender, order the way we live and dictate how we develop the rest of the world in our own interests. We are all governed by these practices - providers and beneficiaries alike - which themselves are directly or indirectly the result of states. Through interconnectedness, mutuality and conversations among the governed, they can be compared, reconnected and interrogated. Such mutuality, however, demands a change of comportment. In a reversal of the Schumachian paradigm of knowledge, instead of educating the poor and marginalized, it is more a question of learning from their struggles for existence, identity and dignity and together challenging the world we live in. As a precondition, the liberal inclination to prejudge those who are culturally different as somehow incomplete and requiring external betterment has to be abandoned. It requires a willingness to engage in unscripted conversations and accept the risks involved, including the inability to predict or control outcomes - a situation that a security mentality continually tries to avoid. Through a practical politics based on the solidarity of the governed we can aspire to opening ourselves to the spontaneity of unpredictable encounters. It also entails a willingness to help without expecting anything in return, that is, abandoning the security prescription which argues that in helping others we should also help ourselves. While mandatory for donor and NGO assistance, offers of support from and between international citizens would not insist that beneficiaries change their beliefs, attitudes or forms of social organization. If development encloses an emancipatory urge, it does not lie in the formulation of endless 'new and improved' technologies of betterment nor the search for more authentic forms of community - it is found in the solidarity of the governed made possible by a radically interconnected world and the insatiable will to life that flows and circulates through it. Alt – Solvency – Peasants Movements Only the alt solves peasants movements – challenging development is a prerequisite Escobar 1995 [Arturo, Kenan Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, UNC-Chapel Hill Director, Institute of Latin American Studies, UNC-Chapel Hill Adjunct Professor, Department of Geography, UNC-Chapel Hill Adjunct Professor, Department of Communications, UNCChapel Hill Fellow, Institute of Arts and Humanities, UNC Fellow, Center for Urban and Regional Research, UNC Facilitator, World Anthropologies Network / Red de Antropologías Mundiales Research Associate, Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, Bogotá, “Encountering Development THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF THE THIRD WORLD” 1995, page 95-96] One way to detect and investigate local constructions is to focus on popular groups’ forms of resistance to the introduction of capitalist practices. This was the route followed by the ethnographies of resistance of the 1980s, such as those by Nash (1979), Taussig (1980), Scott (1985), and Ong (1987). One of the most unambiguous expressions of the cultural basis of resistance was given by Taussig in his analysis of the spread of capitalist agriculture in the Cauca River Valley in southwest Colombia. The spread of sugarcane was met by fierce opposition by the mostly Afro-Colombian peasants of the region. There was much more at stake than material resistance. In Taussig’s words, Peasants represent as vividly unnatural, even as evil, practices that most of us in commodity- based societies have come to accept as natural in the everyday workings of our economy, and therefore of the world in general. This representation occurs only when they are proletarianized and refers only to the way of life that is organized by capitalist relations of production. It neither occurs nor refers to peasant ways of life. (1980, 3). Taussig invites us to see in this type of resistance a response by people “to what they see as an evil and destructive way of ordering economic life” (17). Other authors in disparate contexts derive similar lessons—for instance, Fals Borda (1984) in his analysis of the introduction of barbed wire and other technologies in northern Colombia at the turn of the century; and Scott (1985) in his study of the fate of green revolution technologies in Malaysia. The works of the 1980s, however, used resistance to illuminate practices of power more than the logic of the subaltern. Several authors have paid more attention to this latter aspect in recent years, introducing new ways of thinking about it (Guha 1988; Scott 1990; Comaroff and Comaroff 1991). In their discussion of the colonial encounter in southern Africa, for example, Comaroff and Comaroff emphatically assert that the colonized “did not equate exchange with incorporation, or the learning of new techniques with subordination” (1991, 309); instead, they read their own significance into the colonizers’ practices and sought to neutralize their disciplines. Although Africans were certainly transformed by the encounter, the lesson derived by this more subaltern actor–oriented view of resistance is that hegemony is more unstable, vulnerable, and contested than previously thought. Ranajit Guha has also called on historians to see the history of the subaltern “from another and historicaly antagonistic universe” (1989, 220). There is a counterappropriation of history by the subaltern that cannot be reduced to something else, such as the logic of capital or modernity. It has to be explained in its own terms. Turning back to local models of the economy, do they exist in “another and historically antagonistic universe”? One thing is certain in this regard: local models exist not in a pure state but in complex hybridizations with dominant models. This is not to deny, however, that people do model their realities in specific ways; local models are constitutive of a people’s world, which means that they cannot be readily observed by objectifying positivist science. I already introduced Gudeman and Rivera’s (1990) notion of local models as conversations that take place in the context of dominant conversations. Indeed, what counts most from the perspective of these authors is to investigate the articulation of local and “centric” (dominant) conversations, including the relationship between inscriptions from the past and practices of the present, between centric text and marginal voices, between the “corporation” in the center and the “house” in the margins. Center and periphery thus emerge not as fixed points in space, external to each other, but as a continuously moving zone in which practices of doing conversations and economies get intermingled, always shifting their relative position. Marginality becomes an effect of this dynamic. Gudeman’s earlier work (see especially 1986) provides a view of the importance and coherence of local models of the economy in Panama, a view further refined through work in Colombia. For these anthropologists, the peasant model that exists today in the Colombian Andes “is the outcome of an extensive conversation”—from Aristotle to Smith and Marx—“that occurred over several thousand years and continues to take place in many lands” (1990, 14). These conversations are incorporated into local social practice, producing a local model of the economy.32 At the basis of the peasant model is the notion that the Earth “gives” based on its “strength.” Humans, however, must “help” the land to give its products through work. There is a relation of give and take between humans and the earth, modeled in terms of reciprocity and ultimately validated by Providence (God). The land may produce abundance or scarcity; most people agree that the land gives less now, and that there is more scarcity. Scarcity is thus not given a metaphysical character (the way things are) but linked to what happens to the land, the house, and the market. If scarcity persists, it is because the Earth needs more help, although peasants know that chemical products—as opposed to organic manure—“burn the earth” and “take away” its force. Food crops draw their strength from the land; humans, in turn, gain their energy and force from food crops and animal products, and this strength, when applied as work on the land, yields more force. Work, construed as concrete physical activity, is the final “using up” of the land’s strength. This construction brings the model full circle. There is a flow of strength from the land to crops to food to humans to work that helps the land give more force. Strength is secured from the earth and used up as humans gather more. Control over this process is established through the house, for by using resources of the house to sustain their work the people gain control over the results of their efforts. (Gudeman and Rivera 1990, 30) The house has two main purposes: to reproduce itself and to increase its “base” (its stock of land, savings, peasants in this part of the world try to minimize their interaction with the market, which they see as a concrete place rather than as an abstract mechanism. Peasants, however, are aware that they are being increasingly pushed into the market; they interpret this fact as a diminishing margin for maneuvering. The house model persists at the margins, where the model of the corporation (which epitomizes the market economy) has not become dominant. House and corporation are in a contrapuntal relation, the latter always trying to incorporate the contents of the former.33 The house economy is based on livelihood; the corporation’s, on acquisition. Peasants are aware that they participate in both types of economy. They also have a theory of how they are being drained by those who control the market. The local model thus includes a view of the circularity and equilibrium of economic life, albeit very different from the classical and neoclassical view . The peasant model and implements). The house is not purely a market participant; indeed, can be seen as closer to the land-based model of the Physiocrats, and the use of “force” can be related to the Marxist notion of labor force, there is a crucial distinction between both models, arising from the fact that the house model is based on daily practice. Local models are experiments in living; the house model “is developed through use . . . it has to do with land, foodstuffs, and everyday life” (Gudeman and Rivera 1990, 14, 15). This does not contradict the assertion that the peasant model is the product of past and present conversations and their adaptation through practice. More than the house model, in Latin America what one increasingly finds is the house business. As the site of conjunction of forms, “dynamic and multicultural yet fragile and unstable in identity” (Gudeman 1992, 144), the house business can be interpreted in terms of metaphors of “bricolage” (de Certeau 1984; although “force” is applied equally to work, land, and food. Beyond these differences, Comaroff and Comaroff 1991) or hybridization (García Canclini 1990). It is composed of partly overlapping domains of practices that must be studied ethnographically. Gudeman and Rivera believe that this general dynamic also marked the development of modern economics, even if the latter became more and more technical with the development of capitalism.34 The implications of this view are enormous. Not only does the idea of a universal model of the economy have to be abandoned, it becomes necessary to recognize that forms of production are not independent from the representations (the “models”) of social life in which they exist. The remaking of development must thus start by examining local constructions, to the extent that they are the life and history of a people, that is, the conditions of and for change. This brings into consideration the relation between models and power. Gudeman and Rivera advocate a process based on “communities of modelers,” in which local and dominant models are accorded a say. But who is to belong to and organize these communities of modelers? Again, what we have here is a confrontation of local and global power, popular and scientific knowledge. At issue is the distribution of global power and its relation to the economy of discourses. Alt – Buen Vivir The alternative searches for the good life – one that prioritizes the holism of indigenous cultures rather than growth-oriented development Escobar and Hopkins 12 (Arturo, Author of many seminal texts on development and Latin America, Professor at UNC Chapel Hill, “Alternatives to Development: an Interview with Arturo Escobar”, 10.2.12, http://www.resilience.org/stories/2012-10-02/%E2%80%98alternatives-development%E2%80%99-interview-arturo-escobar, [CL]) What they find is that Degrowth – and they have some differences with Degrowth – they say here in Latin America we still have to grow in some ways. People’s livelihoods have to improve, and it’s difficult to do that without some growth. Health, education, housing – there are some sectors where the economy still has to grow. But the second point they say is that growth has to be subordinated to a different vision of development, which is the Buen Vivir. Could you tell us a bit more about what that is? Yes, the Buen Vivir is a concept that has been coming out strongly over the past 10 years, especially in South America, in the context of the emergence of the left-leaning regimes in many South American countries, almost all South American countries with the exception of Colombia and Peru now, well it’s difficult to say what Peru’s current regime is. In that context, it is the search for a different way of thinking about development and pushed by indigenous peoples and to some extent by peasants, by African descendents, and in collaboration with ecologists, sometimes feminists, sometimes activists from different social movements. They started to say that for this model of development, this is the moment to change our development model, from a growth-oriented and extraction of natural resources oriented model to something that is more holistic, something that really speaks to the indigenous cosmo-visions of the people in which this notion of prosperity based on material well-being only and material consumption does not exist. What has been traditionally cultivated among indigenous communities, is not even a notion of development, that is the key, because people are saying Buen Vivir is the new theory of development. No, it’s not a theory of development. It’s a theory of something else that is not development. People translate it as ‘the good life’. I prefer to translate it as collective well-being. But it’s a collective well-being of both humans and non-humans. Humans, human communities and the natural world, all living beings. And what does that look like in practice? What are the elements of it? That’s the key question, the practice, the implementation of the Buen Vivir. That’s the struggle, especially in Ecuador and Bolivia that have governments that have been put in power mostly by coalitions of social movements, especially indigenous movements, which over the past 6 years since they were elected in 2006, and they were elected with the promise that they were going to carry out this mandate of the Buen Vivir in the constitutions of both Bolivia and Ecuador, with different notions of Buen Vivir in both constitutions. That said, the goal of state policies should be to promote Buen Vivir which involves social justice, a new notion of rights that includes the rights of nature, ecological sustainability, the elimination of poverty or the reduction of poverty. The reduction of poverty and the protection of nature are the two main dimensions of that. So there are two sides to the Buen Vivir, which is the social and economic political side, and the rights of nature which is the ecological side. So the aims of the constitutions and development plans, I’ve looked at the development plans of both governments and they are very contradictory, because they say “we have to carry out this mandate”. But they keep falling back to the old ideas about growth and extraction of natural resources and planning as a top-down exercise, and we the experts have decided the plan for the Buen Vivir, but communities feel excluded. So they clash now in both countries. This is like, so in southern Colombia, southern Mexico, Chiapas and Oaxaca is between indigenous, and peasant, and black movements on the one hand, movements that are for the Buen Vivir, that are for a different vision of development, and the state approach which still is what Gudynas and Acosta in particular call ‘neo-extractivists’. They are neo-extractivist because they are still based on the extraction of natural resources: oil, natural gas, lithium, soy beans, sugar cane, agro-fuels of all kinds, gold, minerals. They are Left regimes that are transacting with corporations, Canadian, American, European, South African, Chinese, corporations to take out natural resources. They are not traditional extractivism because, like the older Venezuelan regimes for instance, where there was so much oil, but the oil benefited only a small elite. Now the idea of these Left regimes, which is a very good idea obviously, is they are going to be using the revenues which are far larger than in the previous regimes that basically gave everything to the corporations. They are going to use the revenues for social redistribution, to reduce poverty and to reduce inequality and to some extent they are doing it. But in the process, they have become this neo-developmentalist development models, pretty much the same as in the past but with a better social policy. It’s interesting that the starting point was the idea of social justice and linked to environmental protection whereas in England at the moment, for example, the British government there are basically saying we have to go for economic growth at all costs, and environmental protection is optional. It’s interesting to see how with Buen Vivir, that’s been there from the beginning. Exactly, and that is happening in the US as well, with policies like hydro-fracking which has been given carte blanche all over the place Answers to Answers AT: Perm Perm fails – challenging development requires not a surface level critique but a thorough change in perspective. Starting from the position of subalternity requires rejecting their top-down method. Escobar 02 [Arturo, Kenan Distinguished Professor of Political Ecology at University of North Carolina, “Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise: The Latin American modernity/coloniality Research Program” Tercer Congreso Internacional de Latinoamericanistas en Europa July 3-6, 2002] “There is no question,” writes Mignolo (2000: 59), “that Quijano, Dussel and I are reacting not only to the force of a historical imaginary but also to the actuality of this imaginary today.” The corollary is the need to build narratives from the perspective of modernity/coloniality “geared towards the search for a different logic” (22). This project has to do with the rearticulation of global designs by and from local histories; with the articulation between subaltern and hegemonic knowledge from the perspective of the subaltern; and with the remapping of colonial difference towards a worldly culture –such as in the Zapatista project, that remaps Marxism, thirdworldism, and indigenism, without being either of them, in an excellent example of border thinking. While “there is nothing outside of totality ... totality is always projected from a given local history,” it becomes possible to think of “other local histories producing either alternative totalities or an alternative to totality” (329). These alternatives would not play on the “globalization/civilization” couplet inherent to modernity/coloniality; they would rather build on a “mundialización/culture” relation centered on the local histories in which colonial global designs are necessarily transformed, thus transforming also the local histories that created them. Unlike globalization, mundialización brings to the fore the manifold local histories that, in questioning global designs (e.g., neo-liberal globalization), aim at forms of globality that arise out of “cultures of transience” that go against the cultural homogeneity fostered by such designs. The diversity of mundialización is contrasted here with the homogeneity of globalization, aiming at multiple and diverse social orders. In short, the perspective of modernity/coloniality provides an alternative framework for debates on modernity, globalization and development; it is not just a change in the description of events, it is an epistemic change of perspective. By speaking of the colonial difference, this framework brings to the fore the power dimension that is often lost in relativistic discussions of cultural difference. More recent debates on interculturality, for instance in Ecuador’s current political and cultural scene, deepens some of these insights (Walsh 2003). In short, the MC research program is a framework constructed from the Latin American periphery of the modern colonial world system; it helps explain the dynamics of eurocentrism in the making of modernity and attempts to transcend it. If it reveals the dark sides of modernity, it does not do it from an intra-epistemic perspective, as in the critical European discourses, but from the perspective of the receivers of the alleged benefits of the modern world. Modernity/coloniality also shows that the perspective of modernity is limited and exhausted in its pretended universality. By the same token, it shows the shortcomings of the language of alternative modernities in that this latter incorporates the projects of the nonmoderns into a single project, losing the subaltern perspectives and subordinating them, for even in their hybridity subaltern perspectives are not about being only modern but are heteroglossic, networked, plural. In highlighting the developmentalist fallacy, lastly, modernity/coloniality not only re-focuses our attention on the overall fact of development, it provides a context for interpreting the various challenges to development and modernity as so many projects that are potentially complementary and mutually reinforcing. Beyond Latin America, one may say, with Mignolo (2000: 309), that this approach “is certainly a theory from/of the Third World, but not only for the Third World ..... Third World theorizing is also for the First World in the sense that critical theory is subsumed and incorporated in a new geocultural and epistemological location.”7 Perm fails – we need a complete break from and deconstruction of modernity Escobar 7 Arturo PhD in Development Philosophy, Policy, and Planning at the University of California Berkley [Arturo,” Development, trans/modernities, and the politics of theory” print, pg 131 Modernity, however we define it, is part and parcel of the tradition that needs to be reoriented if different understandings of development are to be crafted, or even made visible. Discourses of globalization and development are, themselves, subsidiary to visions of modernity; modernity thus remains a key political and cultural question. For most analysts, globalization is—can only be—the universalization of modernity: in short, “modernity writ large” (Blaser, forthcoming). It seems impossible to imagine it otherwise. Schematically, there could be said to be three main positions regarding modernity: (1) modernity as universal process of European origin (intraEuro/American discourses); (2) alternative modernities (locally specific variations of the same universal modernity); and (3) multiple modernities, that is, modernity as multiplicity without a single origin or cultural home. In this latter view, modernity emerged from multiple intersecting processes, did not have a single origin, and has followed multiple trajectories. The modern, in this way, is an always ongoing struggle to define the real in terms of articulations of time and space, presence and change, lasting structures and the experience of the everyday. In other words, not every modernity is Euro-modernity, and multiple modernities can thus be reclaimed as an ontological and political project. By deessentializing modernity more radically than in most other works, this position—most cogently articulated currently by my colleague at Chapel Hill, Lawrence Grossberg (2007)—opens up new possibilities for rethinking the modern. This is another way of delinking modernity from the tight embrace by the West and locating possibilities for remaking it everywhere.3 AT perm - Development discourse precludes any alternative discourse because it creats a singular view of reality based on capital Escobar 1995 [Arturo, Kenan Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, UNC-Chapel Hill Director, Institute of Latin American Studies, UNC-Chapel Hill Adjunct Professor, Department of Geography, UNC-Chapel Hill Adjunct Professor, Department of Communications, UNCChapel Hill Fellow, Institute of Arts and Humanities, UNC Fellow, Center for Urban and Regional Research, UNC Facilitator, World Anthropologies Network / Red de Antropologías Mundiales Research Associate, Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, Bogotá, “Encountering Development THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF THE THIRD WORLD” 1995, page 83] The early models had an implicit standard (the prosperous, developed countries), and development was to be measured by the yardstick of Western progress. Their notion of underdevelopment occupied the discursive space in such a manner that it precluded the possibility of alternative discourses. By constructing the underdeveloped economy as characterized by a vicious circle of low productivity, lack of capital, and inadequate industrialization, development economists contributed to a view of reality in which the only things that counted were increased savings, growth rates, attracting foreign capital, developing industrial capacity, and so on . This excluded the possibility of articulating a view of social change as a project that could be conceived of not only in economic terms but as a whole life project , in which the material aspects would be not the goal and the limit but a space of possibilities for broader individual and collective endeavors, culturally defined. It has often been said that classical political economy was the rationalization of certain hegemonic class interests: those of a capitalist world economy centered in England and its bourgeoisie. The same can be said of development economics in relation to the project of capitalist modernization launched by the core nations after the Second World War. Indeed, the set of imperatives the United States faced after the war—the five imperatives mentioned earlier: to consolidate the core, find higher rates of profit abroad, secure control of raw materials, expand overseas markets for American products, and deploy a system of military tutelage—shaped the constitution of development economics. Yet development economics should not be seen as the ideological or superstructural reflection of this set of imperatives. This interpretation would only relate a certain descriptive discourse (a set of assertions about a given economy: the five imperatives) to another discourse enunciated in the form of theoretical propositions (namely, development economics). That is, one should avoid falling back into the division between the “ideal” (the theory) and the “real” (the economy); instead one should investigate the epistemological and cultural conditions of the production of discourses that command the power of truth, and the specific mode of articulation of these discourses upon a given historical situation. AT: Framework Their framework is ethically and politically bankrupt – actual change does not come from the prescriptive demands their framework requires but from the very process of critique that challenges and paralyzes old modes of thought. Foucault 1991 [Michel, chair of the History of Systems of Thought at the Collège de France, “Questions of Method”, in The Foucault effect by Michel Foucault, Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, pg. 83-85] We have known at least since the nineteenth century the difference between anaesthesis and paralysis. Let's talk about paralysis first. Who has been paralyzed? Do you think what I wrote on the history of psychiatry paralyzed those people who had already been concerned for some time about what was happening in psychiatric institutions? And, seeing what has been happening in and around prisons, I don't think the effect of paralysis is very evident there either. As far as the people in prison are concerned, things aren't doing too badly. On the other hand, it's true that certain people, such as those who work in the institutional setting of the not likely to find advice or instructions in my books that tell them 'what is to be done'. But my project is precisely to bring it about that they 'no longer know what to do', so that the acts, gestures, discourses which up until then had seemed to go without saying become problematic, difficult, dangerous. This effect is intentional. And then I have some news for you: for me the problem of the prisons prison—which is not quite the same as being in prison—are isn't one for the 'social workers' but one for the prisoners. And on that side, I'm not so sure what's been said over the last fifteen years has been quite so—how shall I put it?—demobilizing. But paralysis isn't the same thing as anaesthesis—on the contrary. It's in so far as there's been an awakening to a whole series of problems that the difficulty of doing anything comes to be felt. Not that this effect is an end in itself. But it seems to me that 'what is to be done' ought not to be determined from above by reformers, be they prophetic or legislative, but by a long work of comings and goings, of exchanges, reflections, trials, different analyses. If the social workers you are talking about don't know which way to turn, this just goes to show that they're looking, and hence are not anaesthetized or sterilized at all—on the contrary. And it's because of the need not to tie them down or immobilize them that there can be no question for me of trying to tell 'what is to be done'. If the questions posed by the social workers you spoke of are going to assume their full amplitude, the most important thing is not to bury them under the weight of prescriptive, prophetic discourse. The necessity of reform mustn't be allowed to become a form of blackmail serving to limit, reduce or halt the exercise of criticism. Under no circumstances should one pay attention to those who tell one: 'Don't criticize, since you're not capable of carrying out a reform.' That's ministerial cabinet talk. Critique doesn't have to be the premise of a deduction which concludes: this then is what needs to be done. It should be an instrument for those who fight, those who resist and refuse what is. Its use should be in processes of conflict and confrontation, essays in refusal. It doesn't have to lay down the law for the law. It isn't a stage in a programming. It is a challenge directed to what is. The problem, you see, is one for the subject who acts—the subject of action through which the real is transformed. If prisons and punitive mechanisms are transformed, it won't be because a plan of reform has found its way into the heads of the social workers; it will be when those who have to do with that penal reality, all those people, have come into collision with each other and with themselves, run into dead-ends, problems and impossibilities, been through conflicts and confrontations; when critique has been played out in the real, not when reformers have realized their ideas. Development is not simply the result of certain policies but a broader system of discursive relations – their framework argument is an attempt to normalize the debate space through false neutrality DuBois 91 (Marc, “The Governance of the Third World: A Foucauldian Perspective on Power Relations in Development”, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 16, No. 1, Winter 1991, [CL]) Several commonly used approaches to criticizing development can be identified as starting points for the lines of criticism traced out in this paper. It is a relatively easy affair, given the domination of the Third World by the First World, to situate development at the center of this unequal relationship. Certainly there is some founding to the notion that development is being employed as a neocolonialist tool. What I have tried to demonstrate is that it is much more of a tool than even hard-line neocolonialists would have dreamed. It is not simply misguided policies, resulting in, for example, soaring debts or dependence upon a single export, which liken the process of development to a modified continuation of colonial rule, but the establishment of subtle power relations and profound hierarchizations. A second tack of criticism aims at the (Western) values underlying our conceptualization of development, which are carried into foreign cultures by development activities. I have endeavored to deepen this attack by passing beyond the level of Western strategic goals (e.g., modernization or lowering infant mortality rates) and question the very value of development. Finally, many attacks on development are based' on an analysis of what development does. It is with this critical perspective that the bulk of this paper is concerned, adding to it a Foucauldian twist. ' Most efforts to understand what development does produce somewhat superficial results. Development activities are criticized for not accomplishing their objectives (e.g., irrigation projects that do not pro- vide enough water to meet the needs of the area irrigated) or for causing unwanted side effects (e.g., industrialization projects that hasten the rural exodus). In both cases, only the execution or results, not the goals, are questioned. The shortcomings in these criticisms can be attributed to an incomplete conceptualization of power, which precludes seeing the full effects of development. It is through a Foucauldian conceptualization of power that another side of development has been revealed, one much less technical or scientific and much more political and ethical-in fact, one much less desirable. Even the best of development projects, irrespective of their content, engender power relations and help constitute strategies of domination. The paper really goes no further than offering this second interpretation of development. It does not aim at supplanting more accepted notions of development, but merely jostling their self-evidence a bit. It certainly does not intend to address the issue of political practice, but merely to expose a tool that enables those involved to denaturalize external claims bearing down upon them (and their behavior, truths, and so on) or to understand the workings of power in such a way as to open new avenues of struggle. By revealing and thereby weakening power at the ongoing level of subjugation, one lightens the pressure of "truths" upon the shoulders of the oppressed, allowing their own truths to emerge. This disclosure is a limit of the role of the intellectual. To go further, to prescribe (all too close, both phonetically and functionally, to "proscribe"•) or outline a path of resistance would be to contribute to the constant sequence of failure/ reform, which reinforces the development paradigm. Playing the role of advisor entails once again substituting (from afar) a "more acceptable" or "more effective" course of action for the present one, precisely what this paper argues against Let there be no doubt, however, that this paper favors the notion of local resistance. To the extent that strategies of domination are constructed from the bottom-up, real changes can be achieved only if these strategies are dismantled in that same direction by the people affected, not outsiders. Resistance must begin at the ongoing level of subjugation-the level at which one finds domination of everyday life being practiced. Resistance must target certain unequal relations of power; it must target, among other things, the process of development. One of the many ways that Foucault characterizes modern society is as a "carceral archipelago" What he had in mind was an extensive set of islands of power relations-family, school, workplace-which became colonized by dominant forces such as the state, trapping the individual in order to render him/her more docile. Foucault does not imply a program of societal stages, but he does suggest a distinction between modern and traditional societies. In traditional societies, the exercising of power, conforming largely to negative or restrictive power, is clumsy, inefficient, and overtly repressive. Modern society is characterized by the "circulation of effects of power through progressively finer channels, gaining access to individuals themselves, to their bodies, their gestures, and all their daily actions."•'7 In other words, there has been a significant increase in domination accompanying what is normally considered progress. The push to modernity warrants cautious consideration, not enthusiastic participation. Clearly, most Third World nations have not yet been modernized with respect to the prevailing form of power relations. Systemic violence has yet to be rendered obsolete by rule by normalization; docile, self-governing individuals have yet to be produced by power relations. But in their quest for what is out there, in their quest for development, Third World nations are becoming modern. It is in this sense that one may understand the process of development as the increased governance of the Third World. AT: State Good/Key The state is not the center of power – biopower operates through the management of populations at EVERY level of society. Dillon & Reid 01 [Michael, emeritus scholar at Lancaster University who has written extensively on security and war, international political theory, continental philosophy, and cultural research; Julian, Lecturer in International Relations at King's College London, “Global Liberal Governance: Biopolitics, Security and War” Millennium - Journal of International Studies (2001) 30: 41] In the biopolitical discourse of global liberal ‘governance without government’, the term governance does not refer to seizing or ruling the State according to some legitimating principle, such as that of representative and accountable government. Biopolitical governance is less concerned with States and non-governmental organisations as pre-formed political subjects, than it is concerned with the detailed knowledgeable strategies and tactics that effect the constitution of life and the regulation of the affairs of populations, no matter how these are specified. It is also concerned with the discursive economies of power/knowledge through which people in their individual and collective behaviour are analysed and subject to selfregulatory freedoms and methods of control.29 Although the liberal account of government is premised upon the assumption that populations have dynamics, needs, propensities and features independent of the mode of inquiry that has assembled them as subjects and objects of its knowledge, specific populations do not come pre-formed.30 They arise as the populations that they are in accordance with a principle of concern or enquiry. Indeed one of the distinguishing characteristics of global liberal governance is the variety of ways in which populations are defined as the subject/objects of all kinds of global biopolitical power/knowledge concerns. Thus they are not merely defined by ‘national’ features, but also by markets, consumption, production or rights. More generally, biopolitical global development and aid policies constitute a complex population that one might call ‘the global poor’. Just as the ‘government of governance’ does not emanate from the actions of a pre-formed, individual or collective, state or non-state, subject but from a whole conglomerate set of biopolitical discourses neither is there a centre to it. Power must be analysed as something, which circulates, or rather something, which only functions in the form of a chain. It is never localised here or there, never in anybody’s hands, never appropriated as a commodity or piece wealth. Power is employed and exercised through a net like organisation.31 Biopolitics operates then as a pervasive, complex and heterogeneous network of practices. Structuring the desires, proprieties and possibilities that shape the operation of life, working on and through subjective freedoms, governmental rationalities typically develop around specific problematics, such as those of health, wealth, security, poverty, esteem, culture, sexuality or migration. These in turn constitute the principles of formation around which populations may be defined and networks developed.32 Extending Althusser and others, like Judith Butler, we might say that such problematisations interpellate and mobilise people individually and collectively. Biopower is a positive and productive form of power that conceives the task of government in terms of the management of populations by systematically assaying their needs, composition, properties and dynamics in order to promote their welfare.33 Central to biopolitics is the intent to govern by investing life through and through, by defining, analysing, knowing and promoting it. What is at stake is not simply the normative and material production and reproduction of specific orders of social relations, but the continuous production and reproduction of life itself.34 Biopolitics is less scientifically universal than it is omniversal, preoccupied with all aspects of the life process down to and including its definition and composition. We must cut off the head of the king –the state is only one element in a circuit of power and governmentality Mackinnon 2000, March, Dr. Danny MacKinnon is a political and economic geographer at the University of Glasglow School of Geographical and Earth Sciences; Political Geography, Managerialism, governmentality and the state: a neo-Foucauldian approach to local economic governance Notions of governmentality support a focus on the how of government , on the specific mechanisms, techniques and procedures which political authorities deploy to realise and enact their programmes (Rose, 1996a). This section sets out the basic premises of the neo-Foucauldian approach and considers their implications for our understandings of the state and its role in local economic governance before going on to assess how the notion of ‘managerial technologies’ can be deployed to interpret local state restructuring. 2.1. Governmentality and the state The origins of current debates on governmentality lie in Foucault's reflections on the nature of modern government in the late 1970s (Foucault, 1991). Foucault interpreted the term as referring to the ‘conduct of conduct’ — the techniques and practices evolved for governing the conduct of others (Burchell, 1996: 19). From this perspective, political programmes are defined in terms of the underlying rationalities that shape the techniques employed by the state as it represents and intervenes in the specific domains it seeks to govern (Murdoch & Ward, 1997). their development (O'Malley, Weir & Shearing, 1997). The concept of governmentality also draws attention to This neo-Foucauldian emphasis on the specific mechanisms, procedures and tactics that are assembled and deployed as particular programmes are materialised contrasts with political theory's traditional focus on abstract principles of rule. Recent studies have developed this approach by tracing a shift from welfarism to ‘advanced’ (neo)liberalism and examining how the latter frames interventions in particular policy fields (see Barry et al., 1996, Rose, 1996a, Rose, 1996b and Rose, 1999). Characteristically, Rose and Miller stress the importance of knowledge and expertise to modern forms of government: Government is intrinsically linked to the activities of expertise, whose role is not one of weaving an all-pervasive web of ‘social control’, but of enacting assorted attempts at the calculated administration of diverse aspects of conduct through countless, often competing, local tactics of education, persuasion, inducement, management, incitement, motivation and encouragement (Rose & Miller, 1992: 175). For neoFoucauldians, what makes particular techniques and practices governmental is their capacity to be made practical, to be transformed into concrete devices for managing and directing reality (Rose, 1996a: 41). As an inherently problematising activity which frames the obligations of authorities in terms of the problems they address, government depends upon knowledge (Rose & Miller, 1992 and Rose & Valverde, 1998). The disciplinary knowledges of the social sciences play an important role here in providing an ‘intellectual machinery’ of ordering procedures and explanations which construct and frame reality in ways that allow government to act upon it (Rose & Miller, 1992: 182).2 Yet expertise can also pose problems for government given the tendency of specialist knowledge to form enclosures: tightly-bounded sites within which the authority of experts is concentrated and defended against external interference (Rose & Miller, 1992: 190). Ruling strategies are characteristically formulated and articulated through specific programmes of government (Miller & Rose, 1990: 6–7). These consist of efforts to address identified problems through more or less coherent plans or strategies that specify intended outcomes consistent with the principles of underlying political rationalities. Rose & Miller (1992: 185) refer to the set of mechanisms, techniques and procedures through which programmes are activated and technologies of government. Following Latour (1987), inscription and calculation are identified as key technologies, enabling ‘enclosures’ to be breached by ‘responsibilising’ and disciplining actors to the claims of central authority (Rose, 1996a). These technologies work to make reality “stable, mobile, comparable, combinable”, thereby enabling government to act upon it (Rose & Miller, 1992: 185). Through successive ‘cycles of accumulation’, information put into practice as is gathered and transferred back to distant centres (Latour, 1987). By bringing traces of distant objects of government back to centres of calculation in this way, government is able to ‘act at a distance’ on these same objects ( Latour, 1987, Miller & Rose, 1990 and Rose & Miller, 1992). Centres of calculation are the key nodes where information is compared, combined and aggregated through the deployment of statistical and mathematical techniques (Latour, 1987: 237–240). Neo-Foucauldian analyses of government have been prompted by dissatisfaction with the tendency to locate political power within the institutional structures of a centralised state (Rose & Miller, 1992 and Miller & Rose, 1995). As Miller and Rose (1995: 594) argue, much of this work “accords ‘the state’ a quite illusory necessity, functionality and territorialisation” (cf. Foucault, 1991: 103–104). Their alternative approach draws on Foucault's notion of power as a ubiquitous feature of modern societies, one that is not confined to any particular set of institutional sites (Foucault, 1980: 96–99). For Rose (1999: 5), the effect is to re-locate the state is an element within wider circuits of power . This is often conceptualised in terms of Foucault's notion of the ‘governmentalisation of the state’, referring to the tendency for state power to be exercised and realised through a heterogeneous array of regulatory practices and technologies (see Foucault, 1991). To the extent that neo-Foucauldians recognise ‘the state’ at all, it is conceptualised as a set of capacities and forces which must be instrumentalised within wider strategies of government (Hindess, 1996: 108–109). The crucial underlying point is that the state cannot be used to explain events but must itself be explained through empirical analysis (cf. Latour, 1986). AT: Reps Focus Bad Underdevelopment and poverty are social constructed, not naturally existent – only an epistemological focus solves Naz 6. Farzana Naz.[MSS (Dhaka), M.Phil in Gender and Development (Norway), is associated with the Centre for Development Governance (CDG) Bangladesh as its Research Associate] Arturo Escobar and the Development Discourse: An Overview. Asian Affairs, Vol. 28, No. 3, 6484, July - September 2006. Edward Said argues in the introduction to Orientalism that there is ‘no such thing as a delivered presence; there is only a re-presence, or a representation’ (1979: 21). The study of development has traditionally paid little attention to the politics of representation, as the practical challenges of development have been perceived as far too urgent to allow for a ‘purely academic’ or even esoteric concern with words and discourse. A focus on representation, however, does not ,deny the existence of a material world or the very real experience of poverty and suffering by millions of people. Nor is an analysis that focuses on discourse by its nature any less motivated by a desire to see a world free from human misery than the conventional development text. Instead such analyses suggest that because objects and subjects are constituted as such within discourse, an understanding of the relevant discourses is a necessary part of any attempt to change prevailing conditions and relations of power.The approach of this study draws in particular on the insights of Michel Foucault, whose forceful articulation of an intrinsic and irreversible relationship between power and knowledge is of immense value to the analysis of development and North-South relations. According to Foucault, power and knowledge are intimately connected and directly imply one another, so that ‘there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations (1991: 27). This close relationship between power and knowledge alerts us to the fact that the problematization of a particular aspect of human life is not natural or inevitable, but historically contingent and dependent on power relations that have already rendered a particular topic a legitimate object of investigation. Underdevelopment and poverty, in other words, do not exist as Platonic forms; they are discursive constructs and their constitution as objects of scientific enquiry can be understood only in the context of the prevailing balance of forces at the time of their formation. An analysis informed by such insights does not accept at face value any particular categorisation of the world, but seeks instead to establish how certain representations became dominant and acquired the position to shape the ways in which an aspect of social reality is imagined and acted upon. As Escobar (1995) argues, thinking about development in terms of discourse enables us to maintain a focus on power and domination, while at the same time exploring the discourse’s conditions of possibility as well as its effects. It allows us to ‘stand detached from [development], bracketing its familiarity, in order to analyse the theoretical and practical context with which it has been associated’ (Foucault, 1986: 3). In other words, development emerges as culturally and historically contingent, and the focus shifts from ‘what is’ to how subjects are formed within this discourse as developed and underdeveloped. This conception of the relationship between power and knowledge enables us to expose the political and strategic nature of discourse previously regarded as existing independently of power relations by virtue of their presumed scientific nature, and to ask instead ‘whom does discourse serve?’ Development discourse colonizes the very reality we live in, forcing us to accept it as truth or get crushed – only an analysis of the underlying discourse behind the 1ac can solve Escobar 1995 [Arturo, Kenan Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, UNC-Chapel Hill Director, Institute of Latin American Studies, UNC-Chapel Hill Adjunct Professor, Department of Geography, UNC-Chapel Hill Adjunct Professor, Department of Communications, UNCChapel Hill Fellow, Institute of Arts and Humanities, UNC Fellow, Center for Urban and Regional Research, UNC Facilitator, World Anthropologies Network / Red de Antropologías Mundiales Research Associate, Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, Bogotá, “Encountering Development THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF THE THIRD WORLD” 1995, page 5-6] Indeed, it seemed impossible to conceptualize social reality in other terms. Wherever one looked, one found the repetitive and omnipresent reality of development: governments designing and implementing ambitious development plans, institutions carrying out development programs in city and countryside alike, experts of all kinds studying underdevelopment and producing theories ad nauseam. The fact that most people's conditions not only did not improve but deteriorated with the passing of time did not seem to bother most experts. Reality, in sum, had been colonized by the development discourse, those who were dissatisfied with this state of affairs had to struggle for bits and pieces of freedom within it, in the hope that in the process a different reality could be constructed.2 More recently, however, the development of new tools of analysis, in gestation since the late 1960s but the application of which became widespread only during the 1980s, has made possible analyses of this type of ªcolonization of realityº which seek to account for this very fact: how certain representations become dominant and shape indelibly the ways in which reality is imagined and acted upon. Foucault's work on the dynamics of discourse and power in the representation of social reality, in particular, has been instrumental in unveiling the mechanisms by which a certain order of discourse produces permissible modes of being and thinking while disqualifying and even making others impossible. Extensions of Foucault's insights to colonial and postcolonial situations by authors such as Edward Said, V. Y. Mudimbe, and Chandra Mohanty, and Homi Bhabha, among others, have opened up new ways of thinking about representations of the Third World. Anthropology's self-critique and renewal during the 1980s have also been important in this regard. Thinking of development in terms of discourse makes it possible to maintain the focus on domination-as earlier Marxist analyses, for instance, Did-and at the same time to explore more fruitfully the conditions of possibility and the most pervasive effects of development. Discourse analysis creates the possibility of ªstand[ing] detached from [the development discourse], bracketing its familiarity, in order to analyze the theoretical and practical context with which it has been associatedº (Foucault 1986, 3). It gives us the possibility of singling out ªdevelopmentº as an encompassing cultural space and at the same time of separating ourselves from it by perceiving it in a totally new form. This is the task the present book sets out to accomplish. AT: Biopolitics Not Bad Their turns/defense presume that liberalism or democracy can check biopolitical violence. That’s naïve – neither is able to go beyond their biopolitical core Dean 2004 [Mitchell, Professor of Sociology at Macquarie University, “Four Theses on the Powers of Life and Death”, http://www.usyd.edu.au/contretemps/5december2004/dean.pdf] The fact that all modern states must articulate elements of sovereignty with bio-politics also allows for a virtuous combination. The virtue of liberal and democratic forms of government is that they deploy two instruments to check the unfettered imperatives of bio-power, one drawn from political economy and the other from sovereignty itself.17 Liberalism seeks to review the imperative to govern too much by pointing to the quasinatural processes of the market or of the exchanges of commercial society that are external to government. To govern economically means to govern through economic and other social processes external to government and also to govern in an efficient, cost-effective way. Liberalism also invokes the freedom and rights of a new subject—the sovereign individual. By ʻgoverning through freedomʼ and in relation to freedom, advanced liberal democracies are able to differentiate their biopolitics from that of modern totalitarian states and older police states. This thesis overcomes the successionist view of forms of power connected with our first thesis, even if it tends to reproduce its bipolar structure. The problem with the latter however it that somehow the source and point of articulation of sovereign and bio-politics seems to escape intelligibility. Why should our societies become “really demonic” when they combine within themselves the powers over life with rights of death, or Hebraic understandings of the duties of the shepherd towards his flock with the virile and agonistic relationships between free citizens found within the Greek polis, as Foucault maintained?18 Can one simply make a virtue out of an absence of intelligibility of the articulation—is it the very heterogeneity of these forms of power that accounts for their devilish potential? Can we democratise sovereignty and use notions of rights to check the totalitarian impulses of bio-politics? Can we redress such despotic potentialities by an appeal to an outside of the sphere of limited government? At times Foucault appears to endorse such possibilities. At others, he seems to suggest that liberalism and democracy are flawed means for this task and that we should not become complacent. Perhaps, in this case, sovereignty can always return to an atavistic form as in Nazism, or liberalism can reveal its horribly illiberal side. Perhaps, to try another suggestion, bio-politics simply puts incredible technological means (the atomic, the biological and the chemical weapons and the organization of the modern military, and the applications of bio-science and biomedicine) in the service of sovereign powers—a kind of biotechnological account of genocide. If…but…perhaps…Foucault has identified a problem and a language to investigate the problem without identifying how and why these elements form the problem. Before moving to a new thesis, let us note that there is one problem with the view that liberalism can act to check totalitarian administration of life. Both of the means by which it hopes to do so refer principally to nothing but simple existence. On the one hand, the economic rationality that provides a limit to government refers before all else to the means of the sustenance of life. On the other, the sovereign individual has rights, especially in the era of international human rights, simply by virtue of merely living itself. “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights” reads the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. If there is optimism in Foucaultʼs approach, it is one that cannot rely on a movement that checks the powers over life. The more liberalism and modern rights movements seek to defend us from the dangers of bio-powers, it would seem, the more they make possible its extension. A third thesis then needs to be tried. Benevolent biopolitical action is a façade for uglier violent truths – they hide relations of war but do not get rid of them Dillon & Reid 01 [Michael, emeritus scholar at Lancaster University who has written extensively on security and war, international political theory, continental philosophy, and cultural research; Julian, Lecturer in International Relations at King's College London, “Global Liberal Governance: Biopolitics, Security and War” Millennium - Journal of International Studies (2001) 30: 41] Intimately allied with the globalisation of capital, but not entirely to be conflated with it, has emerged a new and diverse ensemble of power known as global liberal governance. This term of art refers to a varied and complex regime of power, whose founding principle lies in the administration and production of life, rather than in threatening death. Global liberal governance is substantially comprised of techniques that examine the detailed properties and dynamics of populations so that they can be better managed with respect to their many needs and life chances. In this great plural and complex enterprise, global liberal governance marks a considerable intensification and extension, via liberal forms of power, of what Michel Foucault called the ‘great economy of power’ whose principles of formation were sought from the eighteenth century onwards, once ‘the problem of the accumulation and useful administration of men first emerged’.3 Foucault called this kind of power—the kind of power/knowledge that seeks to foster and promote life rather than the juridical sovereign kind of power that threatens death— biopower, and its politics biopolitics. This paper forms part of our continuing exploration of the diverse character of global liberal governance as a form of global biopolitics.4 We are concerned, like Foucault, to draw attention to the peculiar ways in which biopower deploys force and violence, not least because biopower hides its violent face and, ‘gives to the power to inflict legal punishment a context in which it appears to be free of all excess and violence’.5 Second, we draw attention, as Foucault consistently does, to the ways in which global biopolitics operates as a strategic game in which the principle of war is assimilated into the very weft and warp of the socio-economic and cultural networks of biopolitical relations. Here Foucault reverses the old Clausewitzean adage concerning the relation between politics and war. Biopolitics is the pursuit of war by other means. We are also concerned, however, to note how the conceptualisation and practice of war itself changes via the very process of its assimilation into, and dialogical relation with, the heart of biopolitical order; and we concentrate on that point in this essay. There is, in addition, a further way in which we seek to extend Foucault’s project. AT: Development Inevitable Developmental globalization is not inevitable – the belief otherwise is a result of the marginalization of subaltern perspectives Escobar 02 [Arturo, Kenan Distinguished Professor of Political Ecology at University of North Carolina, “Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise: The Latin American modernity/coloniality Research Program” Tercer Congreso Internacional de Latinoamericanistas en Europa July 3-6, 2002] Is there a logical necessity to believe that the order so sketchily characterized above is the only one capable of becoming global? For most theorists, on all sides of the political spectrum, this is exactly the case. Giddens (1990) has made the argument most forcefully: globalization entails the radicalization and universalization of modernity. No longer purely an affair of the West, however, since modernity is everywhere, the triumph of the modern lies precisely in its having become universal. This may be call “the Giddens effect”: from now own, it’s modernity all the way down, everywhere, until the end of times. Not only is radical alterity expelled forever from the realm of possibilities, all world cultures and societies are reduced to being a manifestation of European history and culture. The “Giddens effect” seems to be at play, directly or indirectly, in most works on modernity and globalization at present. No matter how variously qualified, a “global modernity” is here to stay. Modernity might be seen as de-territorialized, hybridized, contested, uneven, heterogenous, even multiple, or in terms of conversing with, engaging, playing with, or processing modernity, but in the last instance modernity is now everywhere, an ubiquitous and ineluctable social fact.2 Could it be, however, that the power of Eurocentered modernity –as a particular local history– lies in the fact that is has produced particular global designs in such a way that it has “subalternized” other local histories and their corresponding designs? If this is the case, could one posit the hypothesis that radical alternatives to modernity are not a historically foreclosed possibility? If so, how can we articulate a project around this possibility? Could it be that it is possible to think about, and to think differently from, an “exteriority” to the modern world system? That one may envision alternatives to the totality imputed to modernity, and adumbrate not a different totality leading to different global designs, but as network of local/global histories constructed from the perspective of a politically enriched alterity? This is precisely the possibility that may be gleaned from the work of a group of Latin American theorists that in refracting modernity through the lens of coloniality engage in a questioning of the spatial and temporal origins of modernity, thus unfreezing the radical potential for thinking from difference and towards the constitution these modernities end up being a reflection of a eurocentered social order, under the assumption that of alternative local and regional worlds. In what follows, I present succinctly some of the main arguments of these works.3 The modernity/coloniality research program The conceptualization of modernity/coloniality is grounded in a series of operations that distinguish it from established theories of modernity. Succinctly put, these include the following: 1) an emphasis on locating the origins of modernity with the Conquest of America and the control of the Atlantic after 1492, rather than in the most commonly accepted landmarks such as the Enlightenment or the end of the eighteenth century;4 2) a persistent attention to colonialism and the making of the capitalist world system as constitutive of modernity; this includes a determination not to overlook the economy and its concomitant forms of exploitation; 3) consequently, the adoption of a world perspective in the explanation of modernity, in lieu of a view of modernity as an intra-European phenomenon; 4) the identification of the domination of others outside the European core as a necessary dimension of modernity, with the concomitant subalternization of the knowledge and cultures of these other groups; 5) a conception of eurocentrism as the knowledge form of modernity/coloniality –a hegemonic representation and mode of knowing that claims universality for itself, and that relies on “a confusion between abstract universality and the concrete world hegemony derived from Europe’s position as center” (Dussel 2000 471; Quijano 2000: 549). A number of alternative notions emerge from this set of positions : a) a decentering of modernity from its alleged European origins, including a debunking of the linear sequence linking Greece, Rome, Christianity and modern Europe; b) a new spatial and temporal conception of modernity in terms of the foundational role of Spain and Portugal (the so-called first modernity initiated with the Conquest) and its continuation in Northern Europe with the industrial revolution and the Enlightenment (the second modernity, in Dussel’s terms); the second modernity does not replace the first., it overlaps with it, until the present; c) a focus on the peripheralization of all other world regions by this “modern Europe,” with Latin America as the initial “other side” of modernity (the dominated and concealed side); and d) a rereading of the “myth of modernity,” not in terms of a questioning of the emancipatory potential of modern reason, but of modernity’s “underside,” namely, the imputation of the superiority of European civilization, coupled with the assumption that Europe’s development must be followed unilaterally by every other culture, by force if necessary –what Dussel terms “the developmentalist fallacy” (e.g., 1993, 2000). Some additional consequences include the re-valuing of landmark experiences of decolonization, from the Tupac Amaru rebellion and the 1804 Haitian revolution to the 1960s anticolonial movements, as sources of visions for the future, as opposed to the conventional sources such as the French and American revolutions; and, in general, the need to take seriously the epistemic force of local histories and to think theory through from the political praxis of subaltern groups. The main conclusions are, first, that the proper analytical unit for the analysis of modernity is modernity/coloniality --in sum, there is no modernity without coloniality, colonial difference” is a privileged epistemological and political space. The great majority of European theorists (particularly those “defenders of the European patent on modernity,” as Quijano mockingly calls them (2000: 543)) have been blind to the colonial difference and the subalternization of knowledge and cultures it entailed. A focus on the modern/colonial world system also makes visible, besides the with the latter being constitutive of the former (in Asia, Africa, Latin America/Caribbean). Second, the fact that “ the internal conflicts (conflicts within powers with the same world view), those that take place at the exterior borders of the modern/colonial system –i.e., the conflicts with other cultures and world views.5 AT: Underdevelopment Real Economic theories which claim objective truth are based on multiple flawed assumptions used to legitimize violent US “development” Escobar 1995 [Arturo, Kenan Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, UNC-Chapel Hill Director, Institute of Latin American Studies, UNC-Chapel Hill Adjunct Professor, Department of Geography, UNC-Chapel Hill Adjunct Professor, Department of Communications, UNCChapel Hill Fellow, Institute of Arts and Humanities, UNC Fellow, Center for Urban and Regional Research, UNC Facilitator, World Anthropologies Network / Red de Antropologías Mundiales Research Associate, Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, Bogotá, “Encountering Development THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF THE THIRD WORLD” 1995, page 93] A fundamental assumption that persisted in all of these proposals was that there is a reality of underdevelopment that a carefully conducted economic science can grasp progressively, pretty much following the model of the natural sciences. In this view, economic theory was built out of a vast bloc of preexisting reality that is independent of the theorist’s observations . This assumption has fueled the sense of progression and growth of economic theory in general and of development economics in particular. In economic theory, this sense has been further legitimized by the canonization of the most important developments—such as the innovations of the 1870s and 1930s—as veritable scientific revolutions. As a prominent economic historian put it, “Appeal to paradigmatic reasoning has quickly become a regular feature in controversies in economics and ‘paradigm’ is now the by-word of every historian of economic thought” (Blaug 1976, 149; see Hunt 1986 for paradigms in development economics).30 In Latin America and most of the Third World (as in the United States and the United Kingdom), a mixture of approaches under the overall label neoliberal economics became dominant at the level of the elite as the 1980s unfolded. Statist and redistributive approaches gave way to the liberalization of trade and investment regimes , the privatization of state-owned enterprises, and policies of restructuring and stabilizing under the control of the ominous International Monetary Fund (IMF). There was, indeed, a noticeable policy reversal. Reagan’s “magic of the market” speech, delivered at the North-South conference in Cancún in 1981, publicly announced this turn. A certain reading of the experience of the “newly industrializing countries” of East Asia in terms of the advantages of liberal exchange regimes (opening up to the world economy), as well as the influential Berg Report for Africa (World Bank 1981), plus rational choice critiques of the distortional effects of government intervention, all contributed to the dismantling of the economic development approaches that prevailed until the 1970s (Biersteker 1991). The World Bank’s “market friendly development” (1991), the institution’s strategy for the 1990s, was the final crystallization of the return of neoliberalism. Most economists see these changes as a return to realism. AT: Our Impacts Are True The factual correctness of their truth claims is irrelevant – their knowledge production matters independently because of its collateral effects Dillon & Reid 01 [Michael, emeritus scholar at Lancaster University who has written extensively on security and war, international political theory, continental philosophy, and cultural research; Julian, Lecturer in International Relations at King's College London, “Global Liberal Governance: Biopolitics, Security and War” Millennium - Journal of International Studies (2001) 30: 41] In the process of exploring this mutually disclosive relation between power and knowledge, Foucault deliberately sidestepped the epistemological question of whether or not the truth claims of the life sciences, biology and then human, social and increasingly now also psychological and cultural sciences, were correct. He focused instead on what might be called, the ‘collateral’ political and governmental effects of their epistemically driven projects.47 In doing so he made the disturbing point that ways of knowing also have the effect of operating as hitherto unexamined relations of power. He noted also that knowledge not only has powerful ‘collateral’ effects, it may also effect significant ‘collateral’ damage by perpetrating its own subtle cruelties and by insidiously limiting the horizons of possibility; of what it is, for example, to be free, ethical, political, and just.48 Following this logic, we too are less concerned with truth claims. Since distinguished scholars of international relations, as well as influential strategists have embraced the discourses , what we want to know is how the world of security, peace and war starts to get re-figured as a consequence.49 We do not claim by any means to provide an exhaustive account of these issues. Our task of complexity, networks and information that distinguish the digital and molecular revolutions is to broach them. AT: Cap First Capitalism cannot fully explain the reality of western domination – political economy is mediated through discourse Escobar 1995 [Arturo, Kenan Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, UNC-Chapel Hill Director, Institute of Latin American Studies, UNC-Chapel Hill Adjunct Professor, Department of Geography, UNC-Chapel Hill Adjunct Professor, Department of Communications, UNCChapel Hill Fellow, Institute of Arts and Humanities, UNC Fellow, Center for Urban and Regional Research, UNC Facilitator, World Anthropologies Network / Red de Antropologías Mundiales Research Associate, Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, Bogotá, “Encountering Development THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF THE THIRD WORLD” 1995, page 130] Up to this point I have recounted the most widely accepted explanation of the political economy of agrarian change in Latin America. This explanation is useful only up to a point. It must be subjected, however, to the analysis of economics as culture advanced in the previous chapter. De Janvry’s functionalism reduces social life to a reflection of the “contradictions” of capital accumulation; despite a certain dialectical analysis, the realist (never interpretive) epistemology that this brand of analysis espouses subjects understanding of social life to some “really real” force, namely, the “laws” of motion of capital, encoded in the main contradiction between production and circulation, the concomitant tendency for the rate of profit to fall, and repeated realization crises. From a poststructuralist perspective, however, there cannot be a materialist analysis that is not at the same time a discursive analysis. Everything I have said so far in this book suggests that representations are not a reflection of “reality” but constitutive of it. There is no materiality that is not mediated by discourse, as there is no discourse that is unrelated to materialities. From this perspective, the making of food and labor and the making of narratives about them must be seen in the same light. To put it simply, the attempt at articulating a political economy of food and health must start with the construction of objects such as nature, peasants, food, and the body as an epistemological, cultural, and political process. The discursive nature of capital is evident in various ways—for instance, in the resignification of nature as resources; in the construction of poverty as lack of development , of peasants as merely food producers, and of hunger as lack of food requiring rural development ; and in the representation of capital and technology as agents of transformation. As we will see shortly and in the next chapter, the requirements that political economists discovered rest upon the ability of the development apparatus to create discourses that allow institutions to distribute individuals and populations in ways consistent with capitalist relations. The logic of capital, whatever it is, cannot explain fully why a given group of rural people were made the targets of the interventions we are discussing. Such a logic could equally have dictated another fate for the same group, including its total disappearance in order to give way to triumphant capital, which has not occurred. Analyses in terms of political economy, finally, are too quick to impute purely economic functions to development projects; they reduce the reason for these projects to sets of interests to be unveiled by analysis. They also believe that the discourses (such as integrated rural development) are just ideologies or misrepresentations of what developers are “really” up to (Ferguson 1990). Without denying their value, this amounts to a simplification that is no longer satisfactory. AT: Alt = Degrowth/Anti-Modern The question is not one of moving backwards to some golden age, but rather how do we move forward? The alternative is not an idyllic nostalgia for the past Escobar and Hopkins 12 (Arturo, Author of many seminal texts on development and Latin America, Professor at UNC Chapel Hill, “Alternatives to Development: an Interview with Arturo Escobar”, 10.2.12, http://www.resilience.org/stories/2012-10-02/%E2%80%98alternatives-development%E2%80%99-interview-arturo-escobar, [CL]) So in Transition we get asked about what Transition should look like in the Global South, and we say it’s about building resilience in both places, that the process of globalising food production has reduced food resilience in the Global North because we’ve become so dependent on imports and moving stuff around, and in the Global South it’s about the destruction of small farming and so on and so on. What’s your sense of that balance of how we build resilience in both places? Also what Transition groups who are working in the Global North can do through their actions to support what’s happening in the South? I think the concept of resilience is very good and I know that you emphasise it from the very first book, the concept of resilience. I think it is a concept that could cut across Global North and Global South. I would have to go and look more carefully to see if it is being used now in Latin America, but it is a very fruitful concept, and actually that would be a very good question for Eduardo Gudynas who is a very good friend of mine, so I am going to ask him the question. There are some parallels that I think could be thought about for both the Global North and the Global South in principle. In practice they would have their own specificities as you yourself said yesterday in your presentation on the first night, because every town basically has its own specificities. Local food, I think is a very important one in the Global North. It is increasingly important in the Global South, under a different umbrella. The different umbrella is that of food sovereignty, food autonomy. In Colombia for instance, movements prefer to use autonomia alimentaria (food autonomy) which is somewhat different to food sovereignty. Food sovereignty tends to put the emphasis on the national level, so a county might say we basically produce food for the population blah blah blah, that’s not good enough. There has to be food autonomy locally, regionally, nationally. So peasant movements like Via Campesina that is a very important movement in Latin America and worldwide is focussing on food sovereignty, and food autonomy to a lesser extent. So the question of food is crucial as an entry point to Transition. Energy? Energy is so important to the Global North, I see it as less important to the Global South, and that doesn’t necessarily mean something good. We should be thinking more about energy, and that’s actually one of Gudynas’s co-workers now that I recall, who has a programme on energy, in particular for South The people in the Global North who say ‘oh, you can’t talk about local food because if you talk about local food you’re condemning farmers in Kenya and Chile to poverty and unemployment. How do you respond to that argument? I don’t think it makes any sense! If you look carefully, sure, there’s a lot of food being grown in Africa, Asia and South America for the European and American markets, but who’s benefiting from that? Most times it’s not local peasants. It ceased to be local peasants at least two or three decades ago. Even some of the agro-fuels that are touted as big solutions environmentally and so America. He talks about the transformations that have to take place on the level of energy for transitions to take place. forth, like African palm which I know very well because it has been planted in Colombia all over the place. It’s being done at the expense of local communities, local ecosystems, by large Colombian capitalists or by large corporations. I know that in parts of Africa and the Middle East it’s mostly German and European corporations that are planting food in these countries, with local cheap labour, to be exported to European markets. So on the contrary, I think local food in the north is going to be good for local food in the south. It’s going to stop this idea that the south will have to grow luxury crops for the Global North. So if a Transition initiative in the Global North is actively working to localise its food supply, to reduce its carbon footprint, to put in place renewable energy infrastructure, localise it’s economy, is your sense that by default that that is helping the movement towards alternative development in the Global South or could they be doing something more mindfully, more intentionally to support that struggle at the same time? I think that the first option that you outlined is the better way to think about it. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do it thinking about the Global South as well, and might be cases in which particular groups in the Global South might be hurt by practices that emerge in the Global North around Transition initiatives, for instance one of the speakers this morning, Antonella Picchio, a feminist economist, who says we should always think from the perspective of women. In principle that’s very good. How do we ask the question – how might our activities in Transition initiatives in the Global North benefit, or hurt, particular vulnerable groups in the Global South. Women, indigenous peoples, black peoples, ethnic minorities and peasants in particular. how the Global South is affected. There I think that’s always a very good question to ask. It’s not such a huge question to answer, you sort of follow the threads of the actions. But as a whole I would tend to think Transition activities in the Global North would tend to contribute if not immediately, at least at some point, to alternatives to development and local autonomies in the Global South to the extent that they continue to erode corporate power, which is what unites and which is really screwing up everybody, including people in the Global North. My Finnish and Canadian friends tell me that the same corporations that have been screwing up the Global South for so many decades are now doing the same in northern Canada and Finland. So it’s not even going to be the north that’s going to be spared anymore. In that sense I think the alliances have to be built. The conversations between Transition activists in the north and Transition activists in the south have to be cultivated. They will be somewhat difficult conversations and I think the questions you are asking are the ones we have to start with. The concept, the practice of Transition that we use for different parts of the world, we have to take into account that they will be intercultural conversations, inter-epistemic conversations, different knowledge is going to be involved, and those require translation. Translation across knowledges, across cultures, across histories, across different ways of being negatively affected by globalisation, across levels of privilege and so forth. Is just applying the concept of localisation, going to generate sufficient employment to create the kind of employment that these countries need? Probably not. I think it has to be a level, certainly a lot of emphasis on local actions, local solutions, but there has to be also some degree of thinking and policy implementation at the regional state has to become more part of the solution than part of the problem that it is level and at the national level. The now. Now it is much more of the problem. With some of these progressive regimes it has tried to become part of the solution as well in terms of connecting with social movements, but the give and take between social movements that are pushing more for the local autonomy, the protection of territories, the preservation of cultural and biological diversity on the one hand, and the state, who has the national or transnational level in mind, is going again really tight, and ruptures are beginning to happen, even in countries like Bolivia and Ecuador where there has been more closeness between the state and the movements. What’s the role of technology here? There are some people who would say if we could do open-source genetic modification then that would have a role. There are all these technologies like nuclear power, these kinds of things. In your take on alternatives to development what constitutes good technology and what constitutes a technology that doesn’t have a place? I think technology is super important. I think Buen Vivir indigenous communities, Afro-descendant communities, peasant communities, are not opposed to technology per se. If they can be connected to the internet, if they can have technologies that improve the productivity of the land, if they can have technologies that improve their living standards, that’s all great. What they are opposed to is having those technologies coming in at the expense of their autonomy, at the expense of their territories, at the expense of their cultural traditions, at the expense of their world-views and ways of living. But when you read – and I think this is a misconception – that the Buen Vivir, they because it has been promoted mostly by indigenous movements and intellectuals is something about going back to the past – it’s not at all. It’s not about going back. Someone said that here today too, that Degrowth is not about going back, it’s about moving forwards. The same with indigenous communities, it’s about moving forwards, but how? The difference is “how?” The way in which we’re moving forwards today on the basis of growth and instructivism and profit and the dominance of one particular model which is capitalism and modernity, for many communities and in the movements, that is the end and that has to stop. But it’s not anti-technology and it’s not anti-modern. For me the criteria is to weaken or lessen the dominance of the growth model, the hi-tech model, the conventional economic neo-liberal model and the dominance of one particular cultural framework which is the cultural framework of modernity, and to allow for many different world-views and frameworks. Aff AFF – Development Good Economic development produces material conditions of survival, stability, and social flourishing that preclude civil war and conflict – even if Western intervention and economic engagement produces a bad epistemic outcome the material outcome is ethical Andrés Solimano, Regional Adviser of the Economic Development División, Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. Paper prepared for the conference, Making Peace Work, Helsinki, June 4-5, 2004 organized by UNU-WIDER. Comments by Hernan CortesDouglas and Graciana del Castillo appreciated. Effective assistance by Claudio Aravena to the preparation of this paper is appreciated. The motivation of internal conflict is related to grievances associated with a variety of factors: unequal patterns of distribution of wealth, lack of political rights, ideology, religion and social exclusion. International conditions such as influence and intervention of foreign powers can also affect the risk of internal conflict. The economic literature on the effects of inequality on economic growth stresses the 9 Political violence and economic development in Latin America: issues and evidence fact that inequality generates conflict and social polarization inviting greater taxation and discouraging capital formation and growth. In the case of domestic armed conflict, the degree of social conflict is more acute as the conflicting parties pursue their objectives by armed means. Conflict seems to be the result of a combination of (1) inequality that leads to polarization and (2) the failure of formal and informal institutions in channeling conflict through the political system. 1 Historically, dictatorship, weak democracies and unequal societies have provided the background conditions for conflict to develop in Latin America.2 In fact, the agenda of rebel groups, from the Cuban revolution of the late 1950s, the rural guerrilla movements of the 1960s in various Latin American countries, the Southern Cone urban guerrillas in the early 1970s, the Central American rebel groups in the 1980s and others, often included the redistribution of land and wealth in addition to specific political demands.3 These rebel movements usually had a political base in the peasantry and poor urban groups4 although typically their leaders often came from the middle class and many were radicalized intellectuals with a university education. The relation between poverty, inequality, unemployment and the emergence and duration of armed conflict (civil wars) has been the subject of new studies done by economists and political scientists. Collier and Hoffler (2002) investigated 52 armed conflicts around the world between 1960 and 1999 and identified three economic factors as having a significant effect on the probability (risk) of a country having a civil war: the level of GDP (the incidence of armed conflict in poor countries is much higher than in richer countries), the rate of growth of GDP and its composition (dependence on primary commodity exports)5. The level of per capita income was found to be a main determinant of the risk of armed conflict. Doubling per capita income reduces approximately by half the risk of conflict. Economic growth reduces the risk of conflict as it contributes to increase per capita income, thereby making society less risky to conflict. The World Bank, (2003) study indicates that armed conflict has developed and persisted the most “marginalized countries’ that is countries where the average growth rate per capita has been negative in the last 20 years. As “marginalized countries” often combine poor economic performance, a weak state, social exclusion and in many cases illegal activities, conflict tends to flourish. However, the existence of poverty, inequality and exclusion may not be sufficient for rebel and revolutionary groups to strive and for armed conflict to develop. Armed groups need to recruit people and obtain financing for their activities. The work of Collier and associates (see World Bank, 2003) shows that access to natural resources can be an important source of funding for rebel groups. This evidence may be more applicable to conflict in Africa where abundance of diamonds, oil and other resources has been associated with domestic strife. Also certain export crops such as coca and poppies are the raw material for illegal drugs over which insurgent groups can levy informal (or revolutionary) taxes. The cases of Colombia and Afghanistan are an example of this. Rebel groups also receive financial contributions from Diasporas of nationals living abroad that sustain the armed conflict and from supporters at home. Foreign governments may find it convenient to provide funding to rebel groups in other countries for their own geopolitical interests. The recourse to kidnapping, ransom, assaults to banks is another source of revenue for rebel groups. In general, the propagation of conflict and its duration depends on the capacity of the rebel groups to have a steady financial base supporting their struggle, the fighting capacity of the regular army, the support of the population and the international context. Political violence retards economic development as it destroys human lives and economic assets and penalizes the accumulation of capital and wealth creation. In turn, the “classical” problems of underdevelopment -poverty, inequality, and social exclusion along with institutions that have failed at conflict management- breed political violence. Latin America has not been absent from conflict and terrorism in recent decades. However, the causes of its nature and development may differ from those of other regions of the world. Latin America has high inequality, persistent poverty, and erratic growth. Religion has played a very small role in explaining conflict. Most social movements, left-wing political parties and rebel groups in the region have been motivated by an active social agenda that includes income and asset redistribution as a reaction to prevailing inequality and exclusion. A similar agenda is shared by active indigenous movements in the region. In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s several rebel groups in Latin America were inspired by the Cuban revolution; the corresponding reaction was framed in the logic of the cold war. As the cold war disappeared, several prominent armed conflicts such as those in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala ceased to exist. The Colombian conflict, however, proved resilient, fueled by ample resources linked to illegal drug trade. Politically motivated terror has also been present in Latin America for decades instigated both by rebel groups to advance their political causes and by the states challenged by these groups. Latin America has had a traumatic history of state-led violence following the instauration of military regimes in the 1970s. Policies to reduce political violence call for institutional reforms, improved democracies and reduced poverty and inequality. Currently, in Latin America there is a clear lack of both public and private insurance mechanisms and social protection for facing the contingencies associated with 23 Political violence and economic development in Latin America: issues and evidence political violence, conflict and terrorism. For humanitarian reasons there is a need to structure public insurance and compensation schemes for victims and their families in countries that have suffered protracted and costly internal conflicts. At the same time, there is a potential scope for developing market insurance for terrorism and conflict related losses, provided there is proper management of incentives, risk and moral hazard issues. AFF – Rejection Fails No impact and alt fails – their impacts are side-effects of development, not intrinsic problems. Simple rejection can’t solve because it’s too vague Matthews ‘4 Matthews, Sally. [Department of Political Sciences, University of Pretoria, Pretoria 0002, South Africa.] "Post-development theory and the question of alternatives: a view from Africa." Third World Quarterly, 25. 2 (2004): 374-375. <http://www.artsrn.ualberta.ca/courses/PoliticalScience/670A1/documents/SallyMatthewsPost-DevandAlternatives-Africa.pdf>. As pointed out by Nederveen Pieterse (2000: 176), post-development theory can be distinguished from other critical approaches to development (such as dependency theory, ‘alternative development’ theory and ‘human development’) by its insistence that development be rejected entirely, rather than better implemented or altered in specific ways. This rejection appears to emerge from a feeling that the negative consequences which have been observed to result from development are intrinsic to development, rather than being unintentional sideeffects of it. Thus the problem, from the perspective of post-development theorists, is not that the project of development was poorly implemented and that it is necessary to find a better way to bring it about, but that the assumptions and ideas that are core to development are problematic, and so improved implementation is not the answer. Consider Rahnema (1997: 379) who says that development did not fail because governments, institutions and people implemented it poorly, but rather because it is ‘the wrong answer to [its target populations’] needs and aspirations’. Development is thus to be rejected rather than reformed. But what can it mean to ‘reject development’? What is (and what is not) being rejected? In answering this question I think it is important to point out that post-development theorists appear to use the word ‘development’ to refer to the theories and practices which have most commonly been associated with the term ‘development’ in the post-World War II era. Thus, a particular form of development is being referred to in post-development literature. In order to make this distinction clear, I will, for the rest of the paper, use the term ‘the post-World War II development project’ (PWWII development project) to refer tithe theories and practices which have since the 1950s been associated with the term ‘development’. I shall use ‘development’ without qualification to refer tithe concept of development used in a broader way and applicable to a number of contexts. AFF – Alt Fails – No Blueprint The alt fails – endless critique without a concrete direction is a dead end for politics. The alternative is overly pessimistic about modernity and doesn’t solve neoliberalism. Loper ’11 (Christiane, a graduate student of International Development, “Critique of the Critique: PostDevelopment and points of criticism”) [http://www.globalpolitics.cz/clanky/critique-of-the-critique-postdevelopment-and-points-of-criticism] Post-Development literature is highly influenced by Foucault and the method of discourse analysis: consequently, hegemony and power structures are being deconstructed. But what follows is the ignorance of how discourses can be transformed and resisted at the local level. The celebration of local knowledge and local resistance leads to a romantization and an unquestioned believe in tradition. ‚The Local‘ is set equally with authenticity and emancipation. But power structures are, especially in application of the work of Foucault, ever-present (Jakinow 2008: 313). Why then are grassroots movements guarantors for being inclusive, non-hierarchic and democratic? Local forms of oppression are overlooked (Engel 2001:140). Nederveen Pieterse comments: „while the shift towards cultural sensibilities that accompanies this perspective is a welcome move, the plea for ‚people‘s culture', indigenous culture, local knowledge and culture, can lead if not to ethnochauvinism, to reification of both culture and locality or people. It also envices a one-dimensional view of globalization which is equated with homogenization“ (Nederveen Pieterse 1998: 366). Additionally, the exclusive validity of local knowledge precludes the view on multiple knowledge. In consequence the fundamental criticism on modernity and modern science implicates a rejection of the benefits: for example, the rights of the individual as well as the techniques of modern medicine are dismissed, although they brought health security and a higher life-expectancy (Ziai 2007: 102). Nederveen Pieterse even classifies Post- Development to belong “to the neo-traditionalist reaction to modernity“ (Nederveen Pieterse 1998: 366?). In his opinion, PostDevelopment is struck into a paradox: not showing any regard for progressive implications and dialectics of modernity but at the same time dealing with issues like anti-authoritarianism, democratization, emancipation, that all clearly arose out of the Enlightenment and the modern age, is highly inconsistent (ebd. 1998: 365). global structures of inequality are not taken into concern. Storey asks for example how local actors are supposed to find solutions at the global level (Storey 2000). in emphasizing cultural diversity and in rejecting universalism, Post- Development is criticized of being cultural-relativist. Therefore Post- Development stands in suspicion to accept oppression and violence and to be indifferent towards the violation of human rights. Post- Development is accused to feel an affinity for neoliberalism. According to Nederveen Pieterse, it is argued that both approaches reject state intervention and agree on state failure: Escobar is skeptical towards state planning, he questions social engineering and the faith in progress lead by the state. The neoliberal thinker Deepak Lal condemns state-centered development economies (Nedeveen Pieterse 1998: 364). Further, also advocates of a neoliberal capitalism favor a strong civil society and the liberty of all citizens to choose their possibilities. The final criticism is that Post-Development, instead of offering a solution, sticks on the classical development paradigm by being in position of permanent critique. According to Tanja Jakimow Post- Development is “in danger of having to constantly re-manoeuvre to retain its ‘alternative’ status as elements of its critique are incorporated into the mainstream“ (Jakimow 2008: 313). There is no vision of how PostDevelopment can look like in practice: „Post- Development parallels postmodernism both in its acute institutions and in being directionless in the end, as a consequence of the refusal to, or lack of interest in translating critique into construction” (Nederveen Pieterse: 361). AFF – Alt Fails – Local Bad The alt doesn’t solve – they homogenize development and romanticize local cultures Kemp ’08 (Alistair, a graduate research student in Social and Political Thought “Can Post-Development Provide Constructive Criticism, And Furthermore Should It?”) [http://www.schizostroller.com/wpcontent/uploads/2008/03/] One of the main accusations levelled at Post-Development is its essentialisation of Development; this is quite serious as for many writers, Development as discourse is the basis for their critique. Ziai notes that post-development portrays Development discourse as some kind of ‘monolithic structure (Ziai, 2004), “ The heterogeneity of 40 years of development theory and policy and especially the originality of alternative approaches is not adequately taken into account” (Ziai, 2004: 1047). This critique is echoed by Nederveen Pieterse who criticises post-development’s association of Development with Westernisation, which, he claims, denies the agency of Southern actors themselves, as well as ignoring the heterogeneity of ‘the West’, the differences between Europe and the United States for example, as well as Japan and what happened with the East Asian miracle (Nederveen Pieterse, 2000, 2001). Crush notes that it is the actual call for banishment that essentialises Development, this very act assumes there is an ‘unequivocal definition’ (Nederveen Pieterse, 2000, Ziai, 2004). Another criticism of post-development is its reification of local cultures and communities; ‘the last refuge of the noble savage’ as noted by Kiely (Ziai, 2004). There is what amounts to a romanticisation of non-Western communities. Also the complete rejection of modernity ignores many of its positive achievements, for example in medicine, such as increases in life expectancy (Ziai, 2004, Storey, 2000). Again this is a criticism that Nederveen Pieterse agrees upon, although he emphasises the drive for modernisation in the South itself, for example, the high-tech drives in India and parts of Latin America; or India and Pakistan’s nuclear race (Nederveen Pieterse, 2000), not to mention recent events in Iran. It can be argued that symbols of modernity such as nuclear power are precisely what is wrong with modernity, yet, it is also useful when asking particularly for who is modernity bad for. Surely it is too much of a generalisation to suggest that such icons of modernity are not desired by those in the South, and at least patronising to suggest that it is bad for them. Ziai also notes that the rejection of universalism, for example, human rights (Rahnema, 1997c, Esteva and Prakesh, 1997), and the celebration of cultural difference, conceals or, Ziai suggests, even willingly accepts, many traditional forms of oppression and cruelty, such as female genital mutilation (Ziai, 2004). Finally, there is the argument that post-development is purely critique and offers no solutions, it is all ‘critique but no construction’; they fall on ‘Pontius Pilate politics’ (Ziai, 2004). Nederveen Pieterse believes the line between alternative and post-development is quite thin and all that separates them is post-development’s rejection of development as discourse, he believes alternative development “shares with post-development the radical critiques of mainstream development but it retains belief in, and accordingly, redefines development” (Nederveen Pieterse, 2000: 181). If this is the case, what then is the point to post-development? AFF – Labor Aff – Cap First Addressing capitalism is more important than biopower – the control of biological life is but one tool in the capitalist arsenal Vatter 9. Miguel Vatter [Professor of Political Science, School of Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at UNSW Australia]. "Project MUSE - Biopolitics: From Surplus Value to Surplus Life." 2009. Web. 11 Jul 2013. <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/summary/v012/12.2.vatter.html>. Melinda Cooper’s Life as Surplus. Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era brilliantly carries out Lemke’s desideratum that “the analysis of biopolitics not be separated from a critique of political economy of life” (146). As Lemke points out, the vast majority of contemporary works dedicated to biopolitics separate the politicization of life from its economization.ix Cooper’s book bucks this trend as it attempts to show how the connection between life and surplus, to which I alluded at the start as being fundamental for biopolitics, in fact owes its reason to the political economy of biological life in neoliberal forms of capitalism. Cooper’s book treats the relation between biological (re)production and capital accumulation in the United States during the last thirty years. Her analysis takes off from two themes found in Foucault’s work. The first, in The Order of Things, is that biology and political economy develop in parallel because (once value is rooted in labor force, as with Ricardo and Marx) then value also is rooted in the sphere of biological life and its reproduction, since the latter is presupposed by labor force. The second theme emerges from Foucault’s later hypothesis that liberalism should be understood as the framework within which biopower develops. Cooper’s investigations bring together and radicalize the implications of these two themes: on her account, neoliberal economics attempts to “efface the boundaries between the spheres of production and reproduction, labor and life, the market and living tissues” (9). The main thesis of Life as Surplus is that “neoliberalism and the biotech industry share a common ambition to overcome the ecological and economical limits to growth associated with the end of industrial production, through a speculative reinvention of the future” (11). The neoliberal development of capitalism, starting in the decade of the 70s, targeted biological life as the novel source of extraction of surplus value. In this sense, the neoliberal economy is essentially a bioeconomy. This is the first sense in which Cooper speaks of “life as surplus.” Adopting a Marxist notion of social contradictions, she also argues that every attempt of capital to overcome limits to its own expansion ends up creating other limits or contradictions. In the case of the bioeconomy, the extraction of surplus value from biological life requires that life be manipulated, controlled, and ultimately pushed beyond its “natural” limits so to generate an excess or surplus of biological life. Examples range from microbial life that thrives in extreme conditions, to new immunitary devices and self-assembling artificial life forms, to technologies of in-vitro fertilization and embryonic stem cell lines. Cooper’s thesis is that all this creation of biological life in excess of its limits is paid at the price of a deepening devaluation of human lives: the second main sense in which life functions as surplus. The third dimension also has a Marxist inspiration. Just as, for Marx, social contradictions express themselves symptomatically in religious beliefs, so too for Cooper the creation of life “beyond the limits of nature” in contemporary bioscience is strictly correlated to a shift in the global political economy toward financial or speculative capital. Today’s “debtform” relies on faith in the other-worldly understood as faith in the promise of an after-life in this life, a life beyond the limits of human biographical lives. The Evangelical Right and its cults of the unborn and the born-again represent one religious symptom of this fundamental change in the economic basis. AFF – AT: Biopolitics Impact No trade off between making live and letting die – we are a new politics that breaks from a capitalist logic of disposable populations, by affirming a positive biopolitics meant to make useless lives live. Li, Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto, Canada, ‘10 [Tania Murray, “To Make Live or Let Die? Rural Dispossession and the Protection of Surplus Populations”, Antipode, Vol. 42 No.S1, Jan] Both letting die, and making live, have a politics, but I reject the idea that the two are in some kind of functional equilibrium—that it is necessary to select some to die, in order for others to live. No doubt such selections are made, according to a whole range of rationales (race, virtue, diligence, citizenship, location, age, gender, efficiency, affordability; see Sider 2006) but if “the point is to change it”, we cannot concede that selection is necessary. It is possible for social forces to mobilize in a wholly make live direction. Make live possibilities are highlighted by conjunctures such as the one that emerged in the state of Kerala in India, which has a predominantly rural population and no special natural endowments, yet has achieved an average life expectancy of around 73, 10 years longer than the all-India average of 63. This effect was produced by decades of investment in public health and education, together with rates of pay for agricultural workers that are 100% higher than elsewhere in India for the same tasks.3 The social forces that put this regime in place included a strong labour movement, and a communist party held accountable through democratic elections. The way these forces came together in Kerala is the product of a struggle with its own, unique history that cannot be replicated in modular fashion. Further, the gains in Kerala are fragile, and incompletely realized (Paraiyil 2000; Steur 2009; Tharamangalam 2006). Nevertheless, Kerala confirms that “making live” is more than a counterfactual—it too is here, and not just in the welfare states of the global North. Make live interventions become urgent when people can no longer sustain their own lives through direct access to the means of production, or access to a living wage. In large parts of rural Asia, my focus in this essay, these conditions have become widespread as a result of two sets of forces: a new round of enclosures that have dispossessed large numbers of rural people from the land; and the low absorption of their labour, which is “surplus” to the requirements of capital accumulation. For the 700 million Asians who live on less than a dollar a day, tiny incomes are ample testament to the fact that no one has a market incentive to pay the costs of keeping them alive from day to day, or from one generation to the next. Yet I am not convinced that their chronic under-reproduction is, as Araghi (2009:119) has argued, “a strategy of global capital”. I see their perilous condition, rather, as a sign of their very limited relevance to capital at any scale. If the population rendered surplus to capital’s requirements is to live decently, it will be because of the activation of a biopolitics that places the intrinsic value of life— rather than the value of people as workers or consumers—at its core. But what are the social forces that would activate such a politics? And why would they do so? I return to these questions later in this essay. First, however, I want to consider more fully the implications of the concept of surplus population. No impact to biopolitics or disposability Dickinson, associate professor of history – UC Davis, ‘4 (Edward, Central European History, 37.1) In short, the continuities between early twentieth-century biopolitical discourse and the practices of the welfare state in our own time are unmistakable. Both are instances of the “disciplinary society” and of biopolitical, regulatory, social-engineering modernity, and they share that genealogy with more authoritarian states, including the National Socialist state, but also fascist Italy, for example. And it is certainly fruitful to view them from this very broad perspective. But that analysis can easily become superficial and misleading, because it obfuscates the profoundly different strategic and local dynamics of power in the two kinds of regimes. Clearly the democratic welfare state is not only formally but also substantively quite different from totalitarianism. Above all, again, it has nowhere developed the fateful, radicalizing dynamic that characterized National Socialism (or for that matter Stalinism), the psychotic logic that leads from economistic population management to mass murder. Again, there is always the potential for such a discursive regime to generate coercive policies. In those cases in which the regime of rights does not successfully produce “health,” such a system can —and historically does— create compulsory programs to enforce it. But again, there are political and policy potentials and constraints in such a structuring of biopolitics that are very different from those of National Socialist Germany. Democratic biopolitical regimes require, enable, and incite a degree of self-direction and participation that is functionally incompatible with authoritarian or totalitarian structures. And this pursuit of biopolitical ends through a regime of democratic citizenship does appear, historically, to have imposed increasingly narrow limits on coercive policies, and to have generated a “logic” or imperative of increasing liberalization. Despite limitations imposed by political context and the slow pace of discursive change, I think this is the unmistakable message of the really very impressive waves of legislative and welfare reforms in the 1920s or the 1970s in Germany.90 Of course it is not yet clear whether this is an irreversible dynamic of such systems. Nevertheless, such regimes are characterized by sufficient degrees of autonomy (and of the potential for its expansion) for sufé cient numbers of people that I think it becomes useful to conceive of them as productive of a strategic coné guration of power relations that might fruitfully be analyzed as a condition of “liberty,” just as much as they are productive of constraint, oppression, or manipulation. At the very least, totalitarianism cannot be the sole orientation point for our understanding of biopolitics, the only end point of the logic of social engineering. This notion is not at all at odds with the core of Foucauldian (and Peukertian) theory. Democratic welfare states are regimes of power/knowledge no less than early twentieth-century totalitarian states; these systems are not “opposites,” in the sense that they are two alternative ways of organizing the same thing. But they are two very different ways of organizing it. The concept “power” should not be read as a universal stiè ing night of oppression, manipulation, and entrapment, in which all political and social orders are grey, are essentially or effectively “the same.” Power is a set of social relations, in which individuals and groups have varying degrees of autonomy and effective subjectivity. And discourse is, as Foucault argued, “tactically polyvalent.” Discursive elements (like the various elements of biopolitics) can be combined in different ways to form parts of quite different strategies (like totalitarianism or the democratic welfare state); they cannot be assigned to one place in a structure, but rather circulate. The varying possible constellations of power in modern societies create “multiple modernities,” modern societies with quite radically differing potentials.91 AFF – Cuba – AT: Biopolitics Cuba proves the positive potential of biopolitics – their fear of imperialist takeover is unfounded Kelly ‘10 International Biopolitics Foucault, Globalisation and Imperialism, Theoria, Volume 57, Number 123, June 2010 , pp. 1-26(26), M.G.E. Kelly, Monash University, Philosophy, Faculty Member, University of Technology, Sydney, DAB, Honorary Fellow, http://academia.edu/258508/International_Biopolitics_Foucault_globalisation_and_imperialism The biopolitical results of anti-imperialism are mixed. Cuba, in its long-lived stance of defiance of U.S. imperialism, has become the great contemporary biopolitical anomaly, defying the usual connection between wealth and biopolitical development: it is poor, but cares for and controls its population to a degree not seen in some First World countries; Cuba’s infant mortality rate is lower than any country in the world outside of Europe, except for Singapore and Japan. Immediately after the revolution, Cuba suffered a great loss of medical personnel , other skilled professionals, and capital, all fleeing to the U.S., but despite this its health situation dramatically improved almost immediately (MacDonald, 2005: 203). Since biopolitics is about social control, its excellent biopolitics may be a cause for suspicion as much as celebration, but there can be little doubt that Cuba can achieve its biopolitical indicators in spite of its poverty only because its state runs the economy in an orientation towards the health of the population. The case of Cuba demonstrates only that biopolitics can flourish in the absence of imperialism to a greater degree than it can in its presence, of course, not the converse, that it must flourish in its absence. AFF – AT: Aid K No Link – the K ignores the alliance between the aff’s politics and left social movements in Mexico breaking out of the distinction between insured and uninsured life. The K is only descriptive of the status quo, not the aff. Li, Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto, Canada, ‘10 [Tania Murray, “To Make Live or Let Die? Rural Dispossession and the Protection of Surplus Populations”, Antipode, Vol. 42 No.S1, Jan] Echoing the late colonial holocausts, as Davis (2006:174) observes, the structural adjustment programs of the 1980s and 1990s deliberately exposed rural populations of the global South to the full blast of market discipline, while withdrawing social protections. “Letting die” was part of this biopolitical triage, not in its rhetoric—one of economic growth and development—but in its results. In the period 1990–2003, 21 countries experienced a decline in the Human Development Index, which includes factors such as life expectancy and infant mortality (UNDP 2003). The effects of structural adjustment were horrendous, and policies of a similar kind are still promoted. Yet death and destruction were not everything. Even at their height, neoliberal attacks on social protection were tempered by countermoves such as safety nets, employment schemes, and Millennium Development Goals that pulled in the other direction. Likewise, colonial regimes often had protective aspirations that coexisted in uneasy tension with the search for profit, the need for stability, and other agendas (Li 2007b, in press). How can we understand these contradictory formations? One approach to the contradiction between dispossession and protection would be to look at how it is sustained by quotidian practices of compromise that enable, at the end of the day, a monstrous disavowal (Mosse 2008; Watts 2009:275). Or we could approach it as a matter of bad faith: dispossession is real, protection is just talk. Or protection is real but minimal, self-serving, and disciplinary: its purpose is to manage the chaos created by dispossession, and stave off revolt (Cowen and Shenton 1996; Peck and Tickell 2002). Another approach, the one I took in The Will to Improve (Li 2007b), is to take make live aspirations at their word, while acknowledging the contradictions that cause them to fall short. There is, from this perspective, no master plan, only assemblages pulled together by one set of social forces, only to fragment and reassemble. Some of the elements of a make live assemblage are located within the state apparatus. Writing about the rise of neoliberalism in Europe in the 1980s and 1990s, Pierre Bourdieu (1998:2) distinguished between what he called the “left hand of the state, the set of agents of the so called spending ministries which are the trace, within the state, of the social struggles of the past”, and the “right hand of the state”, often headquartered in ministries of finance. In a democratic system, and within the container of the nation state, tensions between productivity and protection may be worked out by means of the ballot and embedded in laws that define entitlements and—just as important—a sense of entitlement that is not easy to eradicate. In the UK, as in France, decades of neoliberal government did not eliminate public expectations about the provision of public services, especially state-mediated social security for people facing hard times. As Janet Newman and John Clarke (2009) argue, announcements of the “death of the social” have been premature. Nevertheless, under increasingly globalized conditions, it is less obvious that nation states provide containers for crossclass settlements, or command the resources to engage in projects of productivity or protection, as contradictory pressures operate at multiple scales (Swyngedouw 2000). Echoing the left-hand/right-hand split at a transnational scale, the UN system, with its Declaration on Economic and Social Rights, including a right to food, and a “rights-based approach” to development, sits awkwardly alongside the IFIs, convinced that sacrifice is necessary in order to promote growth, from which the poor will eventually benefit (Kanbur 2001; United Nations 2007). The IFIs, unable to admit that their own policies are implicated in dispossession and abandonment, attempt to pass the responsibility on to national governments, obliged to prepare poverty reduction strategies as a condition of receiving funds. Many national regimes, in turn, have been radically reconfigured by decentralization measures, making it difficult for them to deliver on national commitments, and devolving responsibilities downwards to districts, “communities”, groups of “stakeholders” and other weakly territorialized units with uncertain mandates and capacities (Craig and Porter 2006). To the left-hand/right-handmix, then, is added the problem of territorial jurisdiction and scale, and the further problem of population mobility. As a result, it is often very unclear who is responsible for the fate of which ensemble of population, and what resources they could command to make the dispossessed live better. The attempt to govern through communities, and make them responsible for their own fate, has been prominent in the era of neoliberalism, especially in the form of micro-credit schemes that require the poor to supply their own employment as entrepreneurs (Elyachar 2005). Variations on the theme of community self-reliance have reappeared with regularity in Indonesia for 200 years, and appeared again in the 1997–1998 economic crisis, when some experts argued that there was no need to supply a “safety net” for displaced urban workers since they could be reabsorbed into the village economy. There was a program to supply them with one-way tickets “home” (Breman and Wiradi 2002:2–4, 306; Li 2007b). The World Bank subsequently glorified this event with a label, “farm financed social welfare”, heralded as a remedy for “urban shocks” (World Bank 2008:3). The same discourse arose in 2009, as global recession set in. A news report about job losses in Thailand anticipated an “exodus of workers back to the family farm”, waxed lyrical on the “bright green rice terraces”, coconut groves, and fishponds dotting “an exceedingly fertile countryside”, and quoted the country director of the Asian Development Bank on the virtues of the Thai countryside as a “social safety net” (International Herald Tribune 2009). A critical flaw in these observations, however, is that a large number of thosewho exit rural areas have no farms, and some of them have been landless for multiple generations. If “farm-financed social welfare” works at all, it works for prosperous landowners. For the poor it is a mirage, with potentially lethal effects. In his recent book, Mark Duffield (2007:19) draws a stark contrast between “insured life” in the global North, and “non-insured surplus life” in the global South. The goal of transnational development intervention, he argues, is not to extend northern-style social protections to the population of the global South, but to keep the latter in their place—ensconced in their nations, communities and families, where they must be self-sufficient, and not make demands. I think the distinction between insured and uninsured life is accurate enough as a description of the status quo, but it is not the end of history. As I noted earlier, some parts of the development apparatus talk in terms of rights and entitlements, even though they do not have the means to secure them. More significantly, Duffield’s North– South division underestimates the aspiration for broader forms of social justice that exists within some nations of the global South, is nurtured in unions, social movements, left-leaning political parties and the “left hand” of the state apparatus, and can sometimes assemble a protective biopolitics, despite the odds. In the next section, I examine one such assemblage in India, that aspires to secure the “right to food” on a national scale, and contrast it with the situation in Indonesia, where movements for social justice are truncated, and the myth of village self-sufficiency leaves the dispossessed seriously exposed. Do not dismiss the aff as just the same old politics – its demand to make live Mexico’s surplus population is a pragmatic policy that opens critical possibility for a wider critique of neoliberalism Li, Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto, Canada, ‘10 [Tania Murray, “To Make Live or Let Die? Rural Dispossession and the Protection of Surplus Populations”, Antipode, Vol. 42 No.S1, Jan] Whose responsibility is it to attend to the welfare of surplus populations? “No purely selfish class”, wrote Karl Polanyi, “can maintain itself in the lead” (1944:156). I fear this is not true, at the extreme. Burma’s military junta is utterly selfish, and has maintained itself for more than four decades. Most regimes, however, wrestle with a more complex sense of “leadership” that involves some degree of balance between contradictory agendas (productivity, equity), and an obligation to make live that has become integral to the modern sense of what it means to govern. Transnational agencies, charitable foundations, activists, experts, and social reformers of many kinds share in this sense of obligation. How the obligation is met, and for which sectors of the population, is a matter that is worked out in specific sites and conjunctures through means that are sometimes grandiose, and occasionally revolutionary, but just as often pragmatic, and unannounced. These conjunctures are worth attending to, however, because as Gillian Hart (2004:95) observes, “the ongoing tension between pressures for ‘economic freedom’ and the imperatives of welfare arising from their destructive tendencies opens up a rich vein of critical possibilities”. These possibilities are both analytical and political, and my essay has offered but a small glimpse of them. AFF – AT: Aid K – State Link Turn – direct AID from the US undermines farmers reliance on the state – making them less apt to participate in state institutions Kelly, Lecturer in Philosophy at Middlesex University, in ‘10 [M.G.E., “International Biopolitics Foucault, Globalisation and Imperialism”, Theoria, June] If, on the other hand, as is increasingly the case, donors bypass governments and deal directly with civil society, this leads to the irrelevance and atrophy of the state, in favour of organisations that do not perform the coordinating functions required for biopolitics, and, moreover, like the government that receives aid, are as a result less likely to be profoundly concerned about the people in their care. As Mark Duffield has argued, the fashionable model of ‘sustainable development’ in fact makes people, rather than states, responsible for their own biopolitics, thus ruling out the development of the complex governmental biopolitics of developed nations (2006). Aid directly administered by Western governments or NGOs, on the other hand, means that people have a relation to those organisations, not to their own state, or even their own civil society: they have less reason to care about their own state, to engage with it politically, to pay taxes, since their limited biopolitical provision comes from elsewhere, but of course they cannot enter into the same sorts of relationship of political involvement with foreign states or NGOs as they can with local stakeholders, since these states and NGOs do not get funds directly from aid recipients. Direct aid thus effectively undermines biopolitics. Clearly, we cannot address the empirical case for aid here in the required detail: this work remains to be done; what we say here amounts only to a hypothesis about the relation of aid to biopolitical society. We hence cannot state that aid is an utterly decisive factor in biopolitical development, such that aid will always prevent such development, or in the absence of aid such development will always occur. We cannot thus simply point to examples of countries that have or have not developed as conclusive cases: only detailed studies on the operation of aid in specific cases can shed light here. We moreover cannot assert that it is impossible to give aid that strengthens biopolities as such: a possible example of such aid is the Marshall Plan by which the U.S. funded European reconstruction after World War II. Reasons for any success of this plan in contrast with aid include: the achievement of a careful administration of funds (funds were managed by joint committees of representatives of the donor, local governments, and civil society, and used to buy either consumables or to invest in industry); the fact that the aid was not ongoing, so did not allow for the development of patterns of dependency or corruption; and the fact that it was in response to a specific situation of devastation (caused by the war) which was not itself a stable, ongoing state of affairs. One type of payment that might be implemented similarly are reparations for past injustices. Duffield suggests there has been a retrograde shift, from the Cold War situation in which Third World nations were built up by either side, as in the Marshall Plan, to a situation in which states are not built up at all, only civil society—Duffield sees this as a return to the colonial policy of Native Administration, albeit within a different and more diffuse institutional framework (Duffield, 2005). Certainly, aid policy today is very similar in key respects to the colonial policy: colonialism was the same as aid in biopolitical terms, casting itself as philanthropic, while having consequences that are rather different. The pure building up of states though is of dubious merit: many states supported by either side during the Cold War were disastrously unsuccessful; as we have indicated, the supply of aid to states is a powerful corrupting force that might enable the rulers to buy support, or might build resentment against them, but either way is unlikely to lead by itself to development per se. What is clearly the case is that aid is sometimes given explicitly with the aim of undermining government, as in the case of USAID’s budget of $15 million for 2006, designated specifically for undermining the Cuban government by building up civil society.15 What is astonishing indeed is that where the United States government gives aid to Cubans precisely to undermine their government, it gives it elsewhere apparently oblivious to its potential to do exactly the same thing. It is not that philanthropy and government assistance in general cleave the state and population apart: when they originate within the same polity, philanthropy and welfare are elements of a biopolitical whole, which incorporates both governmental and non-governmental organisations. It is true that domestic philanthropy may assuage the development of demands for the state intervention necessary to constitute a biopolitics, but once a coherent control of population has developed, philanthropy slots in as an adjunct. AFF – Nuclear War Outweighs The threat of nuclear war outweighs their structural violence claims – focus on the latter makes preventing war impossible Boulding 78 [Ken, is professor of economics and director, Center for Research on Conflict Resolution, University of Michigan, “Future Directions in Conflict and Peace Studies,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Jun., 1978), pp. 342-354] Galtung is very legitimately interested in problems of world poverty and the failure of development of the really poor. He tried to amalga- mate this interest with the peace research interest in the more narrow sense. Unfortunately, he did this by downgrading the study of inter- national peace, labeling it "negative peace" (it should really have been labeled "negative war") and then developing the concept of "structural violence," which initially meant all those social structures and histories which produced an expectation of life less than that of the richest and longest-lived societies. He argued by analogy that if people died before the age, say, of 70 from avoidable causes, that this was a death in "war"' which could only be remedied by something called "positive peace." Unfortunately, the concept of structural violence was broadened, in the word Another factor in this situation was the feeling, certainly in the 1960s and early 1970s, that nuclear deterrence was actually succeeding as deterrence and that the problem of nuclear war had receded into the background. This it seems to me is a most dangerous illusion and diverted conflict and peace research for ten years or more away from problems of disarmament and stable peace toward a grand, vague study of world developments, for which most of the peace researchers are not particularly well qualified. To my mind, at least, the quality of the research has suffered severely as a result.' The complex nature of one slightly unfriendly critic, to include anything that Galtung did not like. of the split within the peace research community is reflected in two international peace research organizations. The official one, the International Peace Research Association (IPRA), tends to be dominated by Europeans somewhat to the political left, is rather, hostile to the United States and to the multinational cor- porations, sympathetic to the New International Economic Order and thinks of itself as being interested in justice rather than in peace. The Peace Science Society (International), which used to be called the Peace Research Society (International), is mainly the creation of Walter Isard of the University of Pennsylvania. It conducts meetings all around the world and represents a more peace-oriented, quantitative, science- based enterprise, without much interest in ideology. COPRED, while officially the North American representative of IPRA, has very little active connection with it and contains within itself the same ideological split which, divides the peace research community in general. It has, however, been able to hold together and at least promote a certain amount of interaction between the two points of view. Again representing the "scientific" rather than the "ideological" point of view, we have SIPRI, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, very generously (by the usual peace research standards) financed by the Swedish government, which has performed an enormously useful service in the collection and publishing of data on such things as the war industry, technological developments, arma- ments, and the arms trade. The Institute is very largely the creation of Alva Myrdal. In spite of the remarkable work which it has done, how- ever, her last book on disarmament (1976) is almost a cry of despair over the folly and hypocrisy of international policies, the overwhelming power of the military, and the inability of mere information, however good, go change the course of events as we head toward ultimate ca- tastrophe. I do not wholly share her pessimism, but it is hard not to be a little disappointed with the results of this first generation of the peace research movement. Myrdal called attention very dramatically to the appalling danger in which Europe stands, as the major battleground between Europe, the United States, and the Soviet Union if war ever should break out. It may perhaps be a subconscious recognition-and psychological denial-of the sword of Damocles hanging over Europe that has made the European peace research movement retreat from the realities of the international system into what I must unkindly describe as fantasies of justice. But the American peace research community, likewise, has retreated into a somewhat niggling scientism, with sophisticated meth- odologies and not very many new ideas. I must confess that when I first became involved with the peace research enterprise 25 years ago I had hopes that it might produce some- thing like the Keynesian revolution in economics, which was the result of some rather simple ideas that had never really been thought out clearly before (though they had been anticipated by Malthus and others), coupled with a substantial improvement in the information system with the development of national income statistics which rein- forced this new theoretical framework. As a result, we have had in a single generation a very massive change in what might be called the "conventional wisdom" of economic policy, and even though this conventional wisdom is not wholly wise, there is a world of difference between Herbert Hoover and his total failure to deal with the Great Depression, simply because of everybody's ignorance, and the moder- ately skillful handling of the depression which followed the change in oil prices in 1-974, which, compared with the period 1929 to 1932, was little more than a bad cold compared with a galloping pneumonia. In the international system, however, there has been only glacial change in the conventional wisdom. There has been some improvement. Kissinger was an improvement on John Foster Dulles. We have had the beginnings of detente, and at least the possibility on the horizon of stable peace between the United States and the Soviet Union, indeed in the whole temperate zone-even though the tropics still remain uneasy and beset with arms races, wars, and revolutions which we cannot really afford. Nor can we pretend that peace around the temper- ate zone is stable enough so that we do not have to worry about it. The qualitative arms race goes on and could easily take us over the cliff. The record of peace research in the last generation, therefore, is one of very partial success. It has created a discipline and that is something of long-run consequence, most certainly for the good. It has made very little dent on the conventional wisdom of the policy makers anywhere in the world. It has not been able to prevent an arms race, any more, I suppose we might say, than the Keynesian economics has been able to prevent inflation. But whereas inflation is an inconvenience, the arms race may well be another catastrophe. Where, then, do we go from here? Can we see war, the breakdown of Galtung's "negative peace," remains the greatest clear and present danger to the human race, a danger to human survival far greater than poverty, or injustice, or oppression, desirable and necessary as it is to eliminate these things. Up to the present generation, war has been a cost and an inconven- ience to the human race, but it has rarely been new horizons for peace and conflict research to get it out of the doldrums in which it has been now for almost ten years? The challenge is surely great enough. It still remains true that fatal to the process of evolutionary development as a whole. It has probably not absorbed more than 5% of human time, effort, and resources. Even in the twenti- eth century, with its two world advancing technology is creating a situation where in the first place we are developing a single world system that does not have the redundancy of the many isolated systems of the past and in which therefore if any- thing goes wrong everything goes wrong. The Mayan civilization could collapse in 900 A.D., and collapse almost irretrievably without Europe or China even being aware of the fact. When we had a number of iso- lated systems, the catastrophe in one was ultimately recoverable by migration from the surviving systems. The one-world system, therefore, which science, transportation, and communication are rapidly giving us, is inherently more precarious than the many-world system of the past. It is all the more important, therefore, to make it internally robust and capable only of recoverable catastrophes. The necessity for stable peace, therefore, increases with every improvement in technology, either of war or of peace. wars and innumerable smaller ones, it has probably not acounted for more than 5% of deaths, though of course a larger proportion of premature deaths. Now, however, AFF – AT: Modernity Bad Modernity is fundamentally good – it’s not intrinsically capable of genocidal politics O’Kane, 97 (“Modernity, the Holocaust, and politics”, Economy and Society, February, ebsco) Chosen policies cannot be relegated to the position of immediate condition (Nazis in power) in the explanation of the Holocaust. Modern bureaucracy is not ‘intrinsically capable of genocidal action’ (Bauman 1989: 106). Centralized state coercion has no natural move to terror. In the explanation of modern genocides it is chosen policies which play the greatest part, whether in effecting bureaucratic secrecy, organizing forced labour, implementing a system of terror, harnessing science and technology or introducing extermination policies, as means and as ends. As Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR have shown, furthermore, those chosen policies of genocidal government turned away from and not towards modernity. The choosing of policies, however, is not independent of circumstances. An analysis of the history of each case plays an important part in explaining where and how genocidal governments come to power and analysis of political institutions and structures also helps towards an understanding of the factors which act as obstacles to modern genocide. But it is not just political factors which stand in the way of another Holocaust in modern society. Modern societies have not only pluralist democratic political systems but also economic pluralism where workers are free to change jobs and bargain wages and where independent firms, each with their own independent bureaucracies, exist in competition with state-controlled enterprises. In modern societies this economic pluralism both promotes and is served by the open scientific method. By ignoring competition and the capacity for people to move between organizations whether economic, political, scientific or social, Bauman overlooks crucial but also very ‘ordinary and common’ attributes of truly modern societies. It is these very ordinary and common attributes of modernity which stand in the way of modern genocides. AFF – Hegemony/Imperialism Good A totalizing rejection of hegemony is politically disabling – the alternative is reactionary, ineffective, and ignores the very real contributions western political thought has made to combat oppression Thompson ‘3 [Michael J., Founder and Editor of Logos and teaches Political Theory at Hunter College CUNY., “Iraq, Hegemony, and the Question of American Empire”, Logos Vol. 2 Issue 4, www.logosjournal.com/thompson_iraq.htm] Hegemony in international terms without some kind of competing force, such as the Soviets, can clearly lead to the abuse of power and a unilateralist flaunting of international institutions that do not serve at the imperium's whim. But this should not mean that hegemony itself is a negative concept. Although empire is something rightfully reviled, hegemony may not be as bad as everyone thinks. We need to consider what is progressive and transformative in the ideas and values of the western republican and liberal traditions. We need to advocate not an anti-hegemonic stance in form, but an anti-hegemonic and anti-imperialist stance in content, one that advocates the particular interests of capital of the market in more broad terms rather than the universal political interests of others. Rather than choose between western hegemony on the one hand and political and cultural relativism on the other, we need to approach this problem with an eye toward cosmopolitanism and what the political theorist Stephen Eric Bronner has called "planetary life." Simple resistance to American "imperial" tendencies is no longer enough for a responsible, critical and rational left. Not only does it smack of tiers-mondisme but at the same time it rejects the realities of globalization which are inexorable and require a more sophisticated political response. The real question I am putting forth is simply this: is it the case that hegemony is in itself inherently bad? Or, is it possible to consider that, because it can, at least in theory, consist of the used as a progressive force in transforming those nations and regions that have been unable to deal politically with the problems of economic development, political disintegration and ethnic strife? It is time that we begin to consider the reality that western political thought provides us with unique answers to the political, economic and social problems of the world and this includes reversing the perverse legacies of western imperialism itself. And it is time that the left begins to embrace the ideas of the Enlightenment and its ethical impulse for freedom, democracy, social progress and human dignity on an international scale. This is rhetorically embraced by neoconservatives, but it turns out to be more of a mask for narrower economic motives and international realpolitik, and hence their policies and values run counter to the radical impulses of Enlightenment thought. Western ideas and institutions can find affinities in the rational diffusion of western political ideas, values and institutions, it could be strains of thought in almost every culture in the world, from 12th century rationalist Islamic philosophers like Alfarabi, Avicenna (Ibn Sinna) and Averroes (Ibn Rushd) to India's King Akbar and China's Mencius. The key is to find these intellectual affinities and push them to their concrete, political conclusions. Clearly, the There was a racist and violent precedent set by the French and English imperial projects lasting well into the 20th century. The problem is in separating the form from the content of western hegemonic motives and intentions. And it is even more incorrect to see the occupation of Iraq as a symptom of western ideas and Enlightenment rationalism. Nothing could be further from the case and the sooner this is realized, the more the left will be able to carve out new paths of critique and resistance to a hegemony that is left's problem with the idea of the spread of western political ideas and institutions is not entirely wrong. turning into empire. And it is precisely for this reason why, in institutional terms, the UN needs to be brought back in. Although there are clearly larger political and symbolic reasons for this, such as the erosion of a unilateralist framework for the transition from Hussein's regime, there is also the so-called "effect of empire" where Iraq is being transformed into an instrument of ideological economics. The current U.S. plan for Iraq, one strongly supported by Bremer as well as the Bush administration, will remake its economy into one of the most open to trade, capital flows and foreign investment in the world as well as being the lowest taxed. Iraq is being transformed into an neo-liberal utopia where American industries hooked up to the infamous "military-industrial complex" will be able to gorge themselves on contracts for the development of everything from infrastructure to urban police forces. As time moves on, we are seeing that Iraq provides us with a stunning example of how hegemony becomes empire. It is an example of how the naïve intention of "nation building" is unmasked and laid bare, seen for what it truly is: the forceful transformation of a sovereign state into a new form suited to narrow western (specifically American) interests. Attempts to build a constitution have failed not from the lack of will, but from the lack of any political discourse about what form the state should take and about what values should be enshrined in law. Ruling bodies have become illegitimate almost immediately upon their appointment because there exists almost complete social fragmentation, and the costs of knitting it together are too great for America to assume. In the end, America has become, with its occupation of Iraq and its unilateralist and militaristic posture, an empire in the most modern sense of the term. But we should be careful about distinguishing empire from a hegemon and the implications of each. And since, as Hegel put it, we are defined by what we oppose, the knee-jerk and ineffectual response from the modern left has been to produce almost no alternative at all to the imperatives that drive American empire as seen in places such as Iraq. To neglect the military, economic and cultural aspects of American power is to ignore the extent to which it provokes violent reaction and counter-reaction. But at the same time, to ignore the important contributions of western political ideas and institutions and their power and efficacy in achieving peace and mutual cooperation, whether it be between ethnic communities or whole nations themselves, is to ignore the very source of political solutions for places where poverty, oppression and dictatorships are the norm and remain stubbornly intact. AFF – AT: Epistemology Reality outweighs representations Wendt, 1999 [Alexander Wendt, Professor of International Security at Ohio State University, 1999, “Social theory of international politics,” gbooks] The effects of holding a relational theory of meaning on theorizing about world politics are apparent in David Campbell's provocative study of US foreign policy, which shows how the threats posed by the Soviets, immigration, drugs, and so on, were constructed out of US national security discourse.29 The book clearly shows that material things in the world did not force US decision-makers to have particular representations of them - the picture theory of reference does not hold. In so doing it highlights the discursive aspects of truth and reference, the sense in which objects are relationally "constructed."30 On the other hand, while emphasizing several times that he is not denying the reality of, for example, Soviet actions, he specifically eschews (p. 4) any attempt to assess the extent to which they caused US representations. Thus he cannot address the extent to which US representations of the Soviet threat were accurate or true (questions of correspondence). He can only focus on the nature and consequences of the representations.31 Of course, there is nothing in the social science rule book which requires an interest in causal questions, and the nature and consequences of representations are important questions. In the terms discussed below he is engaging in a constitutive rather than causal inquiry. However, I suspect Campbell thinks that any attempt to assess the correspondence of discourse to reality is inherently pointless. According to the relational theory of reference we simply have no access to what the Soviet threat "really" was, and as such its truth is established entirely within discourse , not by the latter's correspondence to an extra-discursive reality 32 The main problem with the relational theory of reference is that it cannot account for the resistance of the world to certain representations, and thus for representational failures or m/'sinterpretations. Worldly resistance is most obvious in nature: whether our discourse says so or not, pigs can't fly. But examples abound in society too. In 1519 Montezuma faced the same kind of epistemological problem facing social scientists today: how to refer to people who, in his case, called themselves Spaniards. Many representations were conceivable, and no doubt the one he chose - that they were gods - drew on the discursive materials available to him. So why was he killed and his empire destroyed by an army hundreds of times smaller than his own? The realist answer is that Montezuma was simply wrong: the Spaniards were not gods, and had come instead to conquer his empire. Had Montezuma adopted this alternative representation of what the Spanish were, he might have prevented this outcome because that representation would have corresponded more to reality. The reality of the conquistadores did not force him to have a true The external world to which we ostensibly lack access, in other words. often frustrates or penalizes representations . Postmodernism gives us no insight into why this is so, and indeed, rejects the question altogether.33 The description theory of reference favored by empiricists focuses on sense-data in the mind while the relational theory of the postmoderns emphasizes relations among words, but they are similar in at least one crucial respect: neither grounds meaning and truth in an external world that regulates their content.34 Both privilege epistemology over ontology. What is needed is a theory of reference that takes account of the contribution of mind and language yet is anchored to external reality. The realist answer is the causal theory of reference. According to the causal theory the meaning of terms is determined by a two-stage process.35 First there is a "baptism/' in which some new referent in the environment (say, a previously unknown animal) is given a name; then this connection of thing-to-term is handed down a chain of speakers to contemporary speakers. Both stages are causal, the first because the referent impressed itself upon someone's senses in such a way that they were induced to give it a name, the second because the handing down of meanings is a causal process of imitation and social learning. Both stages allow discourse to affect meaning, and as such do not preclude a role for "difference" as posited by the relational theory. Theory is underdetermined by reality, and as such the causal theory is not a picture theory of reference. However, conceding these points does not mean that meaning is entirely socially or mentally constructed. In the realist view beliefs are determined by discourse and nature.36 This solves the key problems of the description and relational theories: our ability to refer to the same object even if our descriptions are different or change, and the resistance of the world to certain representations. Mind and language help determine meaning, but meaning is also regulated by a mind-independent, extra-linguistic world. representation, as the picture theory of reference would claim, but it did have certain effects - whether his discourse allowed them or not. Rationalist epistemologies don't cause violence and there is no alternative Jarvis, 2K – Prof Philosophy @ U South Carolina (Darryl, Studies in International Relations, “International Relations and the Challenge of Postmodernism”, pg. 179-180) As Richard Rorty reminds us, however, "interesting philosophy is rarely an examination of the pros and cons of a thesis," but incredulous adulation for one perspective over another irrespective of the facts.7 In International Relations too, theoretical creeds have themselves become icons for adulation, proxy political statements of faith, ethics, and belief about how the world should be viewed, how global justice is best achieved, what voices and histories should be analyzed, and on what configuration and structure future worlds should be built. Theory has always been part fervent desire, reflecting the biases and hopes of those who conceive it. But to suppose this the exclusive task of theoretical endeavor in International Relations returns us to the problem of epistemological duality so forcefully expressed by E. H. Carr and, more importandy, of the intrinsic dangers this enterprise harbors: "The inclination to ignore what was and what is in contemplation of what should be, and the inclination to deduce what should be from what was and what is."8 "No Science," noted Carr, "deserves the name until it has acquired sufficient humility not to consider itself omnipotent, and to distinguish the analysis of what is from aspiration about what should be." Postmodernists perhaps forget this, positioning themselves in a way that ignores the actualities of global politics in favor of political advocacy and projects committed more to neoidealist sentiments about images of future societies than current world orders. On one level, the epistemological duality of theoretical debate in International Relations thus remains unchanged, reflecting the visceral division of our "dividing discipline" where the rubric of postmodern theory now accounts for its idealist other half. All, perhaps, is as it should be, the new neoidealists engaged in imaginative epistemological remappings in the hope of securing new worlds, while the more realist-inclined ontologists focus upon the structures, actors and processes of current orders and their consequences. Victim to this latest round of idyllic sentiment, however, are the institutions of language and theory, appropriated for purely political ends and used by postmodernists as a podium to condemn an entrenched vocabulary deemed to have become a nuisance, while heralding "a half-formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises great things."9 Postmodern theorists, for example, condemn modernist/positivist/realist theory for its constitutive role in the atrocities of the twentieth century, while promising not just new understandings but an emancipatory praxis culminating in changed realities and better worlds. Condemnation of the past and of those theories and theorists associated with it has thus conspired for a spate of cathartic expurgations: moral purges of the mind and discipline where the Third Great Debate has become both signifier of epochal change as we stand on the precipice of a new millennium and end of millennium stock-taking amid recriminations for the century we leave behind. And to those who profess expurgation from the past, a self-assured moral propriety has ensconced their (post)enlightened ways of thinking and doing international politics: an optimistic moral high ground untainted by the past and convinced that not again will its political blemishes be repeated under the new thinking. At the end of the millennium, one is either on the side of new perspectives and theory in pursuit of better worlds or on the side of reactionary conservatism complicitous in the maintenance of institutions which repress, exclude, and affront. Postmodern theory might thus be all the rage for reasons as laudable as they are timeless: hope for a better future. This probably explains its attractiveness among the young, idealist, historically aggrieved, and minority voices now vocal throughout the academy. Indeed, the passion and conviction with which these new approaches are held also explain the brawl over theory. Marysia Zalewski, for example, bemoans the fact that contemporary theoretical debates have the effect of bringing out the worst in people, conducted so often in "a spirit of 'jousting' verging on the hostile," where accusations and insults are hurled about so as to make "the sport of intellectual jousting and parodies of bar room brawling" appear functionally inevitable in the discipline.10 Her point, however, is made amid recriminations that International Relations is "a para-digmatically masculinist discipline" whose theory "reifies and reflects the interests of the already powerful" and whose boundaries need to be disturbed.11 Offense is in the eye of the beholder, and in International Relations almost everyone is offended. As Holsti warns, we are traveling down a road toward uncivil war, where the scenery is likely not very pretty and where scholarly discourse threatens to be nasty and brutish.12 AFF – Foucault IR Fails Foucauldian politics cannot be applied to international relations – the neg falsely treats development and biopolitics as monolithic institutions Selby ‘7 [Jan, Sussex University, Engaging Foucault: Discourse, Liberal Governance and the Limits of Foucauldian IR, International Relations 2007 21: 324] A second and related problem with using Foucault to furnish accounts of world order is that the ‘scaling up’ of Foucault necessarily generates accounts which overstate its unity, evenness and indivisibility. Thus, for Hardt and Negri, the emerging logic of Empire ‘effectively encompasses the spatial totality’ of the world, ‘No territorial boundaries limit its reign.’79 It is a ‘seamless web’, a ‘widely inclusive net’ of bio-political production, whose ‘connective fabric’ constitutes subjects across the planet.80 And while there are of course ‘police actions’ against the underdeveloped, or against those engaged in resistance, these actions are within the ‘interstices’ of Empire rather than against a (no-longer existent) outside. What is signifi cant here is that, for all the delicate spatial metaphors, no sense is given of just how variable across the world bio-political administrative systems really are (or how much the practices of government and the constitution of subjects differ between, say, New York and New Guinea), or, even more important, of why these vast differences exist. Equally, within Dillon and Reid’s work we fi nd wide-ranging accounts of the changing practices of global bio-politics, as it evolves in the face of scientifi c and organisational developments (the growing importance of networked forms of organisation, the emergence of digital and molecular technologies, and so on), but only a marginal acknowledgement of the uneven distribution of these evolving changes, and no analysis at all of why they happen to be so unevenly distributed. None of this would be problematic if the aim was merely to identify the tactics and techniques of global liberal governance; but as a theorisation of the postmodern world order, or of the logic of power under a regime of global liberal governance, it is far from satisfactory. Foucauldian tools can be used to theorise the ‘how of power’, as Foucault put it,81 but they cannot help us in understanding the ‘when’, the ‘where’ or (most signifi cantly) the ‘why’ of power. The notion of ‘governmentality’, for example, while it can shed light on how populations are administered and subjects are constituted in, say, modern Turkey, or can point us towards the novel mechanisms by which the New Partnership for African Development is attempting to self-discipline African states into ‘good governance’, cannot itself be used to explain why the Turkish state is more governmentalised than the Syrian one, why there is so much ‘bad governance’ in Africa specifi cally, or indeed what the purposes and objectives of governmentality are. Equally, while Foucauldian perspectives can be used to illuminate how new techniques of surveillance and organisation are transforming the practices of liberal warfare, they cannot tell us why the US state re-invaded Iraq in 2003, or why the British state participated in that invasion but the French state did not. Yet these are the sorts of phenomena, amongst others, that a theorisation of global power relations would need to provide resources to explain. Foucault, standing alone, cannot be convincingly internationalised to provide a theoretical account of the contemporary world order.