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Biopolitical Neoliberalism K
1NC Shell
Creating zones of privacy free from government intrusion is a smokescreen for the politics of security –
making the security state seem reasonable and proportional while allowing the capitalist domination of
life
Henry 13 (PhD candidate at Carleton University reading Sociology and Political Economy)
(Aaron, Socialist Studies / Études socialistes 9 (2) Winter 2013, THE PERPETUAL OBJECT OF REGULATION: PRIVACY AS
PACIFICATION)
We have established the idea that ‘privacy’ has the effect of disassociating security from the fabrication of private life or,
rather, privacy creates the conception that security is distinct and balanced by liberalism. What does any of
this have to do with privacy and the further alienation of our collective social power? It is not enough to state that privacy
is the means whereby security extends itself into social life and assures us of its own proportionality or
reasonableness. Rather, privacy not only fails to challenge capital, as Neocleous has demonstrated (2002, 106) but,
further still, lends itself to the reification of capitalist social relations and the further separation of the
individual to their own social power and objective conditions of life. Privacy not only numbs us to the
logics of security and its reasonable agreement to let certain areas of our lives occur seemingly
unencumbered by security projects. Rather, it ensures, through the limits privacy sets on our experiences of
collective life, the forms of political activity and social engagement that appear possible to us, that in advancing
privacy we only further reinforce security and its colonization of “all aspects of human practices
and thinking” (Rigakos, 2011, 62).
This leads to global inequality
Fuchs 11 (Department of Informatics and Media Studies, Uppsala University)
(Christian, The Political Economy of Privacy, Research Paper Number #8, The Internet & Surveillance - Research Paper Series: 2011)
David Lyon notes that the liberal "conception of privacy connects neatly with pri- vate property. Mill's sovereign
individual were characterized by freedom to pursue their own interests without interference, by rational,
calculating and self-motivated action in transforming nature to their own ends. This presupposes a highly competi- tive
environment, in which one person's freedom would impinge on another‘s, hence the need to balance values like ‘privacy’
with others" [Lyon 1994, 186). Crawford Macpherson (1962) has termed this Marxian critique of liberalism the critique of
pos- sessive individualism. Possessive individualism is the "conception of the individual as essentially the
proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them" (Macpherson 1962, 3).
According to Macpherson, it is the underlying worldview of liberal-democratic theory since John Locke and John Stuart
Mill. The problem of the liberal notion of privacy and the private sphere is that relatively un- hindered private accumulation
of wealth, as the neoliberal regime of accumulation has shown since the 1970s, comes into conflict with social justice and is
likely to re- sult in strong socio-economic inequality. The ultimate result of Mill's understanding of privacy is an
extreme unequal distribution of wealth. So his privacy concept privi- leges the rich owning class at the expense
of the non-owners of private property in the means of production. 3. The concepts of privacy and the private
sphere are ideological foundations of the modern class structure.
Marx says that capitalism's "principle of individualism" and a constitution of state and society that guarantees the existence of classes is the attempt “to plunge man back into the limitations of his private sphere" (Marx 1843a, 147] and to thereby
make him a "private human being” (Marx 1843a, 148]. If the private sphere in mod- ern society is connected to the notion of private property. then it is an inherent foun- dation of the class antagonism between capital and work: “But labor. the
subjective essence of private property as exclusion of property, and capital, objective labor as exclusion of labor, constitute private property as its developed state of contradiction- hence a dynamic relationship moving inexorably to its resolution"
(Marx 1844. 99). The capitalist mode of production is on the one hand based on the "socialization of labour" and “socially exploited and therefore communal means of production" (Marx 1867, 928]. This social dimension of capitalism is
circumvented by private ownership of the means of production: "Private property, as the antithesis to social, collective property. exists only where the means of labour and the external conditions of labour belong to private individuals" (Marx 1867,
927). “But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms. on the exploitation of the many by the few" (Marx and Engels, 484].
4. There is an inherent connection of privacy. private property, and the patriarchal family. Engels has stressed the inherent connection of the private sphere with private property and the patriarchal family. “The first class antithesis which appears in
histo- ry [slavery] coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamian marriage, and the first class oppression with that of the fe- male sex by the male. [...] The administration of the household lost its public
charac- ter. It was no longer the concern of society. It became a private service. The wife be- came the first domestic servant. pushed out of participation in social production" (Engels 1891. 474. 480]. The Marxian analysis of the political economy
of privacy was partly reflected in the works of liirgen Habermas and Hannah Arendt Marx stresses that capitalism is based on a separation of the state and bourgeois society. The latter would be based on private property. Man "leads a double life.
[...] In the political community he regards himself as communal being; but in civil society he is active as a private individual, treats other men as means, reduces himself to a means. and becomes the plaything of alien powers” (Marx 1843b. 225; see
also: Marx 1843a. 90). This Marxian moment of analysis is a crucial element in l-labermas' theo- ry of the public sphere.
During the course of the development of capitalism since the 19'" century. the world of work and organization became a
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distinct sphere. With the rise of wage labour. industrialism, and the factory. the economy became to a certain degree
disembedded from the private household (Habermas 1989. 152, 154; see also: Arendt 1958, 47, 68]. Consumption became a
central role of the private sphere: “On the other hand, the family now evolved even more into a consumer of income and
leisure time, into the recipient of publicly guaranteed compensations and support services. Private autonomy was
maintained not so much in functions of control as in functions of consumption" (Habermas 1989, 156]. Therefore privacy
is for Habermas an illusionary ideology - "pseudo-privacy" (Habermas 1989, 157] — that in reality functions as
community of consumers: "there arose the illusion of an intensified privacy in an interior domain
whose scope had shrunk to compromise the conjugal family only insofar as it constituted a community
of consumers" (Habermas 1989, 156). A central role of the private sphere in capitalism is also that it is a sphere of
leisure: "Leisure behavior supplies the key to the floodlit privacy of the new sphere, to the externalization of what is
declared to bet he inner life" (Habermas 1989, 159]. Ex- pressed in other words, one can say that the role of the private
sphere in capitalism as sphere of leisure and consumption that Habermas identifies is that it guarantees the
reproduction of labour power so that it remains vital, productive, and exploitable. Habermas (1989,
124-129) stresses that for Marx the inherent principle of universal accessibility of the public sphere is undermined by the
facts that in capitalism private property of the means of production is controlled by capitalists and workers are ex- cluded
from this ownership. The separation of the private from the public realm ob- structs "what the idea of the bourgeois public
sphere promised" (Habermas 1989, 125).
Hannah Arendt [1958] reflects in her work the Marxian notion that the liberal privacy concept is atomistic and alienates
humans from their social essence. She stresses that sociality is a fundamental human condition. Privacy is for her in modern
society "a sphere of intimacy" (Arendt 1958, 38]. For Arendt, the public realm is a sphere, where everything can be seen
and heard by everybody (Arendt 1958, 50]. It is "the common world" that "gathers us together and yet prevents our falling
over each oth- er" (Arendt 1958, 52). Privacy would be a sphere of deprivation, where humans are deprived
of social relations and "the possibility of achieving something more perma- nent than life itself’ (Arendt 1958, 58). “The
privation of privacy lies in the absence of others" (Arendt 1958, 58). Arendt says that the relation between private
and public is "manifest in its most elementary level in the question of private property” (Arendt 1958, 61).
In modern society, as a result of private property the public would have become a function of the private and the private the
only common concern left, a flight from the outer world into intimacy (Arendt 1958, 69). Labour and economic production,
formerly part of private households, would have become public by being integrated into capitalist production.
This biopolitical neoliberalism creates multiple structural trends towards extinction
Szentes 8 (a Professor Emeritus at the Corvinus University of Budapest)
(Tamás, “Globalisation and prospects of the world society”, 4/22 http://www.eadi.org/fileadmin/Documents/Events/exco/Glob.___prospects_-_jav..pdf)
It’ s a common place that human society can survive and develop only in a lasting real peace. Without peace countries
cannot develop. Although since 1945 there has been no world war, but --numerous local wars took place, --terrorism has
spread all over the world, undermining security even in the most developed and powerful countries, --arms race and
militarisation have not ended with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, but escalated and continued, extending also to
weapons of mass destruction and misusing enormous resources badly needed for development, --many “invisible wars”
are suffered by the poor and oppressed people, manifested in mass misery, poverty, unemployment,
homelessness, starvation and malnutrition, epidemics and poor health conditions, exploitation and oppression,
racial and other discrimination, physical terror, organised injustice, disguised forms of violence, the denial or regular
infringement of the democratic rights of citizens, women, youth, ethnic or religious minorities, etc., and last but not least,
in the degradation of human environment, which means that --the “war against Nature”, i.e. the disturbance of
ecological balance, wasteful management of natural resources, and large-scale pollution of our environment, is still going
on, causing also losses and fatal dangers for human life. Behind global terrorism and “invisible wars” we find
striking international and intrasociety inequities and distorted development patterns , which tend to
generate social as well as international tensions, thus paving the way for unrest and “visible” wars. It is a
commonplace now that peace is not merely the absence of war. The prerequisites of a lasting peace between and within
societies involve not only - though, of course, necessarily - demilitarisation, but also a systematic and gradual elimination
of the roots of violence, of the causes of “invisible wars”, of the structural and institutional bases of large-scale international
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and intra-society inequalities, exploitation and oppression. Peace requires a process of social and national emancipation, a
progressive, democratic transformation of societies and the world bringing about equal rights and opportunities for all
people, sovereign participation and mutually advantageous co-operation among nations. It further requires a pluralistic
democracy on global level with an appropriate system of proportional representation of the world society, articulation of
diverse interests and their peaceful reconciliation, by non-violent conflict management, and thus also a global governance
with a really global institutional system. Under the contemporary conditions of accelerating globalisation and deepening
global interdependencies in our world, peace is indivisible in both time and space. It cannot exist if reduced to a period
only after or before war, and cannot be safeguarded in one part of the world when some others suffer visible
or invisible wars. Thus, peace requires, indeed, a new, demilitarised and democratic world order, which can provide
equal opportunities for sustainable development. “Sustainability of development” (both on national and world level) is
often interpreted as an issue of environmental protection only and reduced to the need for preserving the ecological balance
and delivering the next generations not a destroyed Nature with overexhausted resources and polluted environment.
However, no ecological balance can be ensured, unless the deep international development gap and
intra-society inequalities are substantially reduced. Owing to global interdependencies there may exist hardly any
“zero-sum-games”, in which one can gain at the expense of others, but, instead, the “negative-sum-games” tend to
predominate, in which everybody must suffer, later or sooner, directly or indirectly, losses. Therefore, the actual question is
not about “sustainability of development” but rather about the “sustainability of human life”, i.e. survival of mankind –
because of ecological imbalance and globalised terrorism. When Professor Louk de la Rive Box was the president of EADI,
one day we had an exchange of views on the state and future of development studies. We agreed that development studies
are not any more restricted to the case of underdeveloped countries, as the developed ones (as well as the former “socialist”
countries) are also facing development problems, such as those of structural and institutional (and even system-)
transformation, requirements of changes in development patterns, and concerns about natural environment. While all these
are true, today I would dare say that besides (or even instead of) “development studies” we must speak about and make
“survival studies”. While the monetary, financial, and debt crises are cyclical, we live in an almost permanent crisis of the
world society, which is multidimensional in nature, involving not only economic but also socio-psychological, behavioural,
cultural and political aspects. The narrow-minded, election-oriented, selfish behaviour motivated by thirst for
power and wealth, which still characterise the political leadership almost all over the world, paves the way for the
final, last catastrophe. One cannot doubt, of course, that great many positive historical changes have also taken place in
the world in the last century. Such as decolonisation, transformation of socio-economic systems, democratisation of
political life in some former fascist or authoritarian states, institutionalisation of welfare policies in several countries, rise of
international organisations and new forums for negotiations, conflict management and cooperation, institutionalisation of
international assistance programmes by multilateral agencies, codification of human rights, and rights of sovereignty and
democracy also on international level, collapse of the militarised Soviet bloc and system-change3 in the countries
concerned, the end of cold war, etc., to mention only a few. Nevertheless, the crisis of the world society has extended and
deepened, approaching to a point of bifurcation that necessarily puts an end to the present tendencies, either by the final
catastrophe or a common solution. Under the circumstances provided by rapidly progressing science and technological
revolutions, human society cannot survive unless such profound intra-society and international
inequalities prevailing today are soon eliminated. Like a single spacecraft, the Earth can no longer afford to have
a 'crew' divided into two parts: the rich, privileged, wellfed, well-educated, on the one hand, and the poor, deprived,
starving, sick and uneducated, on the other. Dangerous 'zero-sum-games' (which mostly prove to be “negative-sum-games”)
can hardly be played any more by visible or invisible wars in the world society. Because of global interdependencies, the
apparent winner becomes also a loser. The real choice for the world society is between negative- and positive-sum-games:
i.e. between, on the one hand, continuation of visible and “invisible wars”, as long as this is possible at all, and, on the
other, transformation of the world order by demilitarisation and democratization. No ideological or terminological
camouflage can conceal this real dilemma any more, which is to be faced not in the distant future, by the next generations,
but in the coming years, because of global terrorism soon having nuclear and other mass destructive weapons, and also due
to irreversible changes in natural environment.
Our alternative is to refuse neoliberal subjectivity. We control the internal link to political effectiveness
of all social movements
Read 9
(Jason, The University of Southern Maine, A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus: Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity,
Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 25-36, February 2009)
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Foucault’s development, albeit partial, of account of neoliberalism as governmentality has as its major advantage a
clarification of the terrain on which neoliberalism can be countered. It is not enough to simply oppose
neoliberalism as ideology, revealing the truth of social existence that it misses, or to enumerate its various
failings as policy. Rather any opposition to neoliberalism must take seriously its effectiveness, the manner in
which it has transformed work subjectivity and social relationships. As Foucault argues, neoliberalism
operates less on actions, directly curtailing them, then on the condition and effects of actions, on the sense of possibility.
The reigning ideal of interest and the calculations of cost and benefit do not so much limit what one can do, neoliberal
thinkers are famously indifferent to prescriptive ideals, examining the illegal drug trade as a more or less rational
investment, but limit the sense of what is possible. Specifically the ideal of the fundamentally self-interested
individual curtails any collective transformation of the conditions of existence. It is not that such
actions are not prohibited, restricted by the dictates of a sovereign or the structures of disciplinary power, they are
not seen as possible, closed off by a society made up of self-interested individuals. It is perhaps no
accident that one of the most famous political implementers of neoliberal reforms, Margaret Thatcher, used the
slogan, “there is no alternative,” legitimating neoliberalism based on the stark absence of possibilities. Similarly, and
as part of a belated response to the former Prime Minister, it also perhaps no accident that the slogan of the famous Seattle
protests against the IMF and World Bank was, “another world is possible,” and it is very often the sense of a
possibility of not only another world, but of another way of organizing politics that is remembered, the
image of turtles and teamsters marching hand and hand, when those protests are referred to.26 It is also this sense of
possibility that the present seems to be lacking; it is difficult to imagine let alone enact a future other
than a future dominated by interest and the destructive vicissitudes of competition. A political
response to neoliberalism must meet it on its terrain, that of the production of subjectivity, freedom
and possibility.
***Links***
1NC Long Link
Creating zones of privacy free from government intrusion is a smokescreen for the politics of security – it
makes the security state seem reasonable and proportional while allowing the capitalist domination of
life.
-atomizes individuals
-obscures class inequalities
-pacifies resistance
Henry 13 (PhD candidate at Carleton University reading Sociology and Political Economy)
(Aaron, Socialist Studies / Études socialistes 9 (2) Winter 2013, THE PERPETUAL OBJECT OF REGULATION: PRIVACY AS
PACIFICATION)
We have established the idea that ‘privacy’ has the effect of disassociating security from the fabrication of private life or,
rather, privacy creates the conception that security is distinct and balanced by liberalism. What does any of
this have to do with privacy and the further alienation of our collective social power? It is not enough to state that privacy
is the means whereby security extends itself into social life and assures us of its own proportionality or
reasonableness. Rather, privacy not only fails to challenge capital, as Neocleous has demonstrated (2002, 106) but,
further still, lends itself to the reification of capitalist social relations and the further separation of the
individual to their own social power and objective conditions of life. Privacy not only numbs us to the
logics of security and its reasonable agreement to let certain areas of our lives occur seemingly
unencumbered by security projects. Rather, it ensures, through the limits privacy sets on our experiences of
collective life, the forms of political activity and social engagement that appear possible to us, that in advancing
privacy we only further reinforce security and its colonization of “all aspects of human practices
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and thinking” (Rigakos, 2011, 62).
As Marx noted “labour is, therefore, the objectification of [human] species life,” reality is constructed through and mediates upon the social, economic, and biological conditions through which humans
contemplate their own objectively constituted existence (Marx, 1975, 76). It follows that species being, as both the object and will of one’s practical activity and as the objective reality contained and
represented in the products of labour, is estranged by the condition of labour in capitalist society. Thus, in the course of making the worker’s product nothing more than the “means to our physical existence”
in equal measure species-life itself becomes [merely] a means” as well (Marx, 1975, 77). The estrangement of life and labour from nature and other people force both nature and other people to “appear as
objects other than and differentiated from” [the labourer] (Marx, 1975, 78). As such, relations that one confronts independently of one’s own particular labour, forces of ‘nature’ and other individuals appear
“as something alien and objective, confronting [individuals] not as their relations to one another but as our subordination to relations which exist independently of [us]” developing merely from the collisions
between mutually indifferent individuals (Marx, 1973, 157). To this end, with the advent of capitalist relations, the individual’s understanding of themselves as part of a species life dissipates and instead the
predominant social bond between individuals is that of “a spontaneous interconnection, [a] material and mental metabolism...independent of the knowing and willing individuals [which] presupposes their
“reciprocal independence and indifference” (Marx, 1973, 161). Consequently, as the contemplation of social life of life-activity as a shared social product wanes and in its place individuals increasingly find
themselves “ruled by abstractions” as objective relations of dependency, the reciprocal relations of production appear separate and autonomous to the individuals who constitute these very relations (Marx,
1973, 164).
privacy serves to further
acclimatize us to this reification of species-life as nothing more than the atomized world of the
‘individual’. Which is a way of saying that privacy is part and parcel of the process of pacification, a key
mechanism in the fabrication of bourgeois order. In particular, it is only in the absence of species-life, when
My point is not that ‘privacy’ produces these conditions; the estrangement of individuals from species-life is innate to capitalist production. My point is that
our relations of our social dependence take on the fantastic form of relations between things and relations between people
appear as forces alien to us, that the partitioning of social life into private isolated, ‘natural’ individuals becomes feasible;
“liberty is... the right to do everything which does not harm others” it is essentially “the right of the circumscribed
individual, withdrawn into him/herself” (Marx, 1975, 42). Thus, the demand for privacy is not merely forever
circumscribed by the logics of security but it entrenches the very separations between people
presupposed by capitalist social relations that security is used to enforce and maintain. Privacy, then,
promises a life apart, a mode of existence separate from others and to this end is presupposed by our appearance as
individuals who are autonomous from another and can, therefore, ‘choose’ to be further detached and apart. Before
concluding I think there is an overarching political implication from this relation between privacy, security and capital.
This appearance of choice, of course, serves only to further obfuscate the social nature of human
existence and our inextricable tie to unequal class, gender and race relations.
By agreeing to live in the form of privacy that is carved out by security projects, we live as individuals who perceive their
primary social bond with society to be nothing more than a spontaneous, indifferent and independent set of connections.
Any social forces we are confronted by are, by definition, abstractions of the concrete real relations of society. As such,
increasingly structural forces such as unemployment, ecological catastrophe, fears about old-age or even
general depression or dissatisfaction have the appearance of existing completely suspended from our society
and our mode of social (re) production. In this sense, adhering to privacy, as a mode of resistance does not just
leave one apart from society but it ‘displaces’ the social with the ‘personal’. In this sense, it is only partially
true, as Tocqueville claimed, “as the extent of political society expands, one must expect the sphere of private life to
contract” (1968, [1840], 782-3). It may be true that as political society grows, it develops to include new apparatuses to
consolidate and legitimate dominant relations of rule (Abrams, 1977, 58); but in capitalist society the growth of political
society in any substantive sense (i.e. the common deliberation on life in its totality not merely in its forms of abstraction) is
utterly antithetical to conditions of accumulation in capitalist society; after-all, the egotistical person “is [in capitalist
society] the foundation and presupposition of the political state” (Marx, 1975, 45). However, the opposite holds; as political
society shrinks the larger the sphere of ‘private social life’ looms.
In particular, the less leave we are given collectively to contemplate and organize the objective conditions of social
reproduction (education, labour, health-care, old-age) and the more private market relations come to dominate our social
experience, the more private life becomes our only mode of contemplation and action. Indeed, although we should not
conflate privacy and privatization, the latter historically presupposes the emergence of the former, privacy has increasingly
become a force of further commodification. Not solely in terms of direct commodification but in eschewing one’s existence
as a social being, individuals are increasingly left with no other expression or mode of contemplation outside their own
private milieu. As such, when confronted by social, economic and political forces the recourse of the private individual is
not to confront these forces as the products of our own objective activity or even as incidents that can be challenged
collectively but as personal threats or risks. Thus, each, in the scale of their own atomized sense of reality, manages these
personal risks and effects through the only sphere of relations open to the private individual: commodification and
correlative security projects. Thus, we purchase security against disease, security against disability, theft, unemployment,
old age, etc. as these things crowd into our ‘lives apart from society’ as nothing more than personal concerns abstracted
from the objective concrete relations that determine them. To the extent that human life becomes monadic and takes on the
appearance of being assailed by alien forces, the more the demands for protection from these forces is expressed in
purchases of private or individual security from these forces; which, in turn, only makes social life all the more atomized
and ‘apart’. Thus, in the course of drawing on privacy as a means to confront economic and political
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domination, we are not only acclimatized to the existence of these relations but we are pacified, or at least deterred,
from radical, collective forms of political action.
“Security is not just hegemonic, it is hegemony”, says Rigakos (2011, 58). Attempts to reveal the tensions and points of
incoherency within security projects simply seem to drive the greater refinement of these very projects. In many respects, it
is the hegemony of security, its analytical inscrutability that has prompted the turn to pacification both as a concrete
historical formation of rule and as an analytical concept, a means to reveal its contingencies, its overlaps, and points of
formation (Rigakos, 2011, 61; Neocleous, 2010). The other problem posed by the hegemony of security, implicit to the first
problem perhaps, is that in attaining hegemony it has colonized a number of social forms. This means that some relations
that appear like sites of possible resistance, such as privacy, in fact form capillary points in the economy
of relations behind security. With this problem in mind I have tried to tease out the historical relation of privacy to
security in capitalist society, so as to demonstrate how the former was, from the outset, entangled with the latter. Security
presupposes privacy, decides its scope of power and the facets of social life to which it applies. Furthermore, not only does
security condition privacy but also privacy itself, as a mode of life, has the effect of pacifying us to the further
penetration of security into social life. Thus, privacy will be in existence for as long as the logics of security remain
in play; for, as I outlined earlier in this discussion, it is the private sphere of relations, the sanctity of homo-economicus,
that the project of police has long since had as its object. We on ‘the Left’ would do well to consider these aspects of
privacy. As suggested by Tyler Wall’s paper in this collection, it is by making appeals to privacy, that drones in the United
States have made the transition from battlefield technology to a component of the ‘domestic’ security apparatus. Following
the insights from this paper, it can be argued that challenging drones through privacy will ostensibly experience moderate
success. Drones perhaps will only be flown at certain times, in certain areas, and will contravene these
rules only when vital security or safety concerns arise. The footage they capture will perhaps even be handled in
a manner similar to the PNR data. Yet it is the security apparatus itself, not privacy, that will determine how
these limits operate. These limits not only become our measure of freedom and autonomy but also structure our
pacification. Thus, in a society that approaches security through the right to privacy, the proliferation of
the conduct of war abroad and at home, the organization of human potential into a dehumanizing
economic mode of production, will continue apace; insofar as these forces will continue to confront us as
happenstance things, filtering in and out of each individual’s private, insular existence. To live this pacified mode of
life is no less the promise of privacy than it is the guarantee of security.
2NC Extension of Short Link
Their reformist politics of privacy atomizes individuals, obscures class inequalities and pacifies resistance
Henry 13 (PhD candidate at Carleton University reading Sociology and Political Economy)
(Aaron, Socialist Studies / Études socialistes 9 (2) Winter 2013, THE PERPETUAL OBJECT OF REGULATION: PRIVACY AS
PACIFICATION)
privacy serves to further
acclimatize us to this reification of species-life as nothing more than the atomized world of the
‘individual’. Which is a way of saying that privacy is part and parcel of the process of pacification, a key
mechanism in the fabrication of bourgeois order. In particular, it is only in the absence of species-life, when
My point is not that ‘privacy’ produces these conditions; the estrangement of individuals from species-life is innate to capitalist production. My point is that
our relations of our social dependence take on the fantastic form of relations between things and relations between people
appear as forces alien to us, that the partitioning of social life into private isolated, ‘natural’ individuals becomes feasible;
“liberty is... the right to do everything which does not harm others” it is essentially “the right of the circumscribed
individual, withdrawn into him/herself” (Marx, 1975, 42). Thus, the demand for privacy is not merely forever
circumscribed by the logics of security but it entrenches the very separations between people
presupposed by capitalist social relations that security is used to enforce and maintain. Privacy, then,
promises a life apart, a mode of existence separate from others and to this end is presupposed by our appearance as
individuals who are autonomous from another and can, therefore, ‘choose’ to be further detached and apart. Before
concluding I think there is an overarching political implication from this relation between privacy, security and capital.
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This appearance of choice, of course, serves only to further obfuscate the social nature of human
existence and our inextricable tie to unequal class, gender and race relations.
By agreeing to live in the form of privacy that is carved out by security projects, we live as individuals who perceive their
primary social bond with society to be nothing more than a spontaneous, indifferent and independent set of connections.
Any social forces we are confronted by are, by definition, abstractions of the concrete real relations of society. As such,
increasingly structural forces such as unemployment, ecological catastrophe, fears about old-age or even
general depression or dissatisfaction have the appearance of existing completely suspended from our society
and our mode of social (re) production. In this sense, adhering to privacy, as a mode of resistance does not just
leave one apart from society but it ‘displaces’ the social with the ‘personal’. In this sense, it is only partially
true, as Tocqueville claimed, “as the extent of political society expands, one must expect the sphere of private life to
contract” (1968, [1840], 782-3). It may be true that as political society grows, it develops to include new apparatuses to
consolidate and legitimate dominant relations of rule (Abrams, 1977, 58); but in capitalist society the growth of political
society in any substantive sense (i.e. the common deliberation on life in its totality not merely in its forms of abstraction) is
utterly antithetical to conditions of accumulation in capitalist society; after-all, the egotistical person “is [in capitalist
society] the foundation and presupposition of the political state” (Marx, 1975, 45). However, the opposite holds; as political
society shrinks the larger the sphere of ‘private social life’ looms.
In particular, the less leave we are given collectively to contemplate and organize the objective conditions of social
reproduction (education, labour, health-care, old-age) and the more private market relations come to dominate our social
experience, the more private life becomes our only mode of contemplation and action. Indeed, although we should not
conflate privacy and privatization, the latter historically presupposes the emergence of the former, privacy has increasingly
become a force of further commodification. Not solely in terms of direct commodification but in eschewing one’s existence
as a social being, individuals are increasingly left with no other expression or mode of contemplation outside their own
private milieu. As such, when confronted by social, economic and political forces the recourse of the private individual is
not to confront these forces as the products of our own objective activity or even as incidents that can be challenged
collectively but as personal threats or risks. Thus, each, in the scale of their own atomized sense of reality, manages these
personal risks and effects through the only sphere of relations open to the private individual: commodification and
correlative security projects. Thus, we purchase security against disease, security against disability, theft, unemployment,
old age, etc. as these things crowd into our ‘lives apart from society’ as nothing more than personal concerns abstracted
from the objective concrete relations that determine them. To the extent that human life becomes monadic and takes on the
appearance of being assailed by alien forces, the more the demands for protection from these forces is expressed in
purchases of private or individual security from these forces; which, in turn, only makes social life all the more atomized
and ‘apart’. Thus, in the course of drawing on privacy as a means to confront economic and political
domination, we are not only acclimatized to the existence of these relations but we are pacified, or at least deterred,
from radical, collective forms of political action.
“Security is not just hegemonic, it is hegemony”, says Rigakos (2011, 58). Attempts to reveal the tensions and points of
incoherency within security projects simply seem to drive the greater refinement of these very projects. In many respects, it
is the hegemony of security, its analytical inscrutability that has prompted the turn to pacification both as a concrete
historical formation of rule and as an analytical concept, a means to reveal its contingencies, its overlaps, and points of
formation (Rigakos, 2011, 61; Neocleous, 2010). The other problem posed by the hegemony of security, implicit to the first
problem perhaps, is that in attaining hegemony it has colonized a number of social forms. This means that some relations
that appear like sites of possible resistance, such as privacy, in fact form capillary points in the economy
of relations behind security. With this problem in mind I have tried to tease out the historical relation of privacy to
security in capitalist society, so as to demonstrate how the former was, from the outset, entangled with the latter. Security
presupposes privacy, decides its scope of power and the facets of social life to which it applies. Furthermore, not only does
security condition privacy but also privacy itself, as a mode of life, has the effect of pacifying us to the further
penetration of security into social life. Thus, privacy will be in existence for as long as the logics of security remain
in play; for, as I outlined earlier in this discussion, it is the private sphere of relations, the sanctity of homo-economicus,
that the project of police has long since had as its object. We on ‘the Left’ would do well to consider these aspects of
privacy. As suggested by Tyler Wall’s paper in this collection, it is by making appeals to privacy, that drones in the United
States have made the transition from battlefield technology to a component of the ‘domestic’ security apparatus. Following
the insights from this paper, it can be argued that challenging drones through privacy will ostensibly experience moderate
success. Drones perhaps will only be flown at certain times, in certain areas, and will contravene these
rules only when vital security or safety concerns arise. The footage they capture will perhaps even be handled in
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a manner similar to the PNR data. Yet it is the security apparatus itself, not privacy, that will determine how
these limits operate. These limits not only become our measure of freedom and autonomy but also structure our
pacification. Thus, in a society that approaches security through the right to privacy, the proliferation of
the conduct of war abroad and at home, the organization of human potential into a dehumanizing
economic mode of production, will continue apace; insofar as these forces will continue to confront us as
happenstance things, filtering in and out of each individual’s private, insular existence. To live this pacified mode of
life is no less the promise of privacy than it is the guarantee of security.
2NC Turns Case
This embedding of privacy causes more autoritarianism
Lippert and Walby 13 (Department of Sociology & Criminology University of Windsor, Canada; University of Victoria,
Canada)
(Randy K. and Kevin, Governing Through Privacy: Authoritarian Liberalism, Law, and Privacy Knowledge, Law, Culture and the
Humanities 0(0) 1–24)
The “enfolding” and “unfolding” processes of a “liberal
police” situate privacy law in liberalism insofar as
these processes tether civil society’s values and regulatory practices to state agencies. We focused on uses
of privacy law and guidelines in connection to the diffusion of “open-street” camera surveillance across Canada. We also
used the example of access to information in Canada to discuss how privacy and personal information are invoked when
information pertaining to authoritarian practices is sought. The forms of privacy law that we have investigated operate
between the two pinnacles of governing too much, backed by limited state resources and little direct intrusion, and
governing too little.107 These are only two of many possible examples given the scope of this form of a “liberal police,”
but they nonetheless show that governing through privacy law can have the effect of further embedding
authoritarian practices into organizations. We have not commented on the issue of subjectification, also central
to governmentality studies, though a discussion of privacy here presents an important avenue for future research.
Surveillance fosters individualization, but so too does privacy law. In this latter sense, privacy law is a form of
political subjectification requiring liberal subjects to learn how to manage their own privacy in new
ways and sites.108 However, as we have argued, understanding these forms of governance entails recognition that they
have a technical side that is highly dependent on the expansion of privacy knowledge, expertise, and commodification.
One major implication of our argument is that neither privacy law nor liberalism are likely to disappear in the near future.
Although there is variation, some scholars and privacy advocates have called for standardization of privacy
law to counter the spread of surveillance. Further consideration of this idea must be tempered by a critical
under- standing of how governing through privacy law is increasingly tethered to surveillance and
security within liberalism, even if – perhaps especially if – we accept Foucault’s view that law “extends itself
illimitably” in its responsiveness.109 Such contemplation will require judging the extent to which privacy studies can move
beyond the expert and technical knowledge documented here to become informed to a greater extent by a normative and
critical edge of the humanities that was once evident in relation to other authoritarian practices.110
Our analysis also begins to reveal how authoritarian practices are incorporated within liberalism through privacy. Our
argument thus supplements others’ accounts of liberal governmentality and what Dean has claimed about “authoritarian
liberalism.” Future empirical research on “governing through privacy” and on privacy law as a form of “lib- eral police”
may provide ways of exploring how an inherently unstable “authoritarian liberalism” is possible in particular sites and
discerning the extent to which Dean’s con- cept has purchase on our present. If the 20th century was one of individual
privacy rights, the 21st century may be one of governing through privacy. Privacy elevates a discourse of rights
whilst at times producing conditions for authoritarian practices to occur or expand. The narrower
implication of the foregoing argument is a new obligation to inquire further into forms of law and regulation within
contemporary liberalism, and how other enfolding and unfolding processes, like those involving privacy, can so easily
facil- itate practices of securitization.
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2NC Reformism Link
Their focus on defending individuals on a particular technology of the police state does nothing but
pacify individual and cement inequalities
Tetrault 14 (MA in Sociology from Carleton University)
(Justin, Reclaiming Visual Sovereignty: A Theoretical Critique of Facial Recognition Technology, Master’s Thesis,
https://curve.carleton.ca/system/files/theses/31799.pdf)
As of now there is little in place to stop or slow the sharing of biometric information among and between states and the private sector, especially since the development and future of biometric technologies are dependent on a healthy relationship
between business and the state. The Snowden-NSA revelations, while having little to do with biometrics (so far), are nevertheless particularly demonstrative of the limits of liberal privacy initiatives and the demands for government and institutional
transparency. For example, one of the leaked NSA documents discusses the Toronto G20 summit of 2010, revealing that the US embassy in Ottawa became a nexus for G20 spying operations for the NSA; presumably to overcome the legal issues
inherent in having Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) spy on Canadian citizens (20131202-CBC-G20 2014). Additionally, the FBI has recently been sued by the Electronic Privacy Information Centre (EPIC) for not disclosing
a single document regarding their 1.2 billion dollar Next Generation Identification (NGI) program spearheaded by private contractors such as Lockheed Martin and IBM (Vrankulj 2013). When completed, the NGI will be the largest biometric
database in the world, encompassing fingerprints, palm prints, iris scans, DNA profiles, voice identification, and digital photographs (McCall, Rotenburg & Brody 2013: 3). According to EPIC, the vast majority of records contained in the NGI
database will be of US citizens and will include photographs of individuals who were unaware that their images were captured, in addition to other biometric identifiers that have been collected without the explicit consent of the subject (McCall,
Rotenburg & Brody 2013: 2, 3). The document also suggests that the NGI database will be used in conjunction with the MORIS program – the aforementioned project involving portable devices in use by local law enforcement to identify suspects
by taking security for granted, liberal privacy initiatives do little more
than communicate the ‘acceptable’ limits of security projects, and offer an illusion of control by the
individual – in the case of FR software, the fiction that identification regimes have been forged in our own interest (Henry
2013: 95, 104). For these reasons, privacy is a form of pacification, as it can ever only be articulated as
something which defends private life, a concept championed by liberals which keeps “individuals apart
and disinterested” and “restricts their capacity for rebellion” (Henry 2013: 100). Thus, even in the best
case scenario - if a competent privacy policy recommendation becomes successfully incorporated into
law – at the end of the day, we all return to the pursuit of private interests, with the ‘egoistic
individual’ remaining fully intact (103). Henry (2013) puts it best in the following excerpt: security decrees the
activities and relations that can be declared to form the individual’s privacy. . .[thus,] the success of privacy, its very
completion, offers nothing more than a return to the freedoms of private life, which is a return to the freedoms
that conditioned and deployed the apparatus of security in the first instance (Henry 2013: 103, 104). As such,
it is not enough to challenge FR software from a privacy perspective as, like all police projects, the technology is
but an extension of social imperialism that will further cement existing inequalities. The following
through their biometrics (McCall, Rotenburg & Brody 2013: 4). Thus,
section explores these issues, and chapter 6 concludes with a discussion about resistance.
2NC Fear of the State Link
Their fear of the state covers up the corporations responsible for creating the data in the first place and
enables corporate domination to continue unchecked
Fuchs 11 (Department of Informatics and Media Studies, Uppsala University)
(Christian, The Political Economy of Privacy, Research Paper Number #8, The Internet & Surveillance - Research Paper Series: 2011)
Etzioni (1999) stresses that liberal
privacy concepts typically focus on privacy invasions by the state, but
ignore privacy invasions by companies. The contemporary undermining of public goods by overstressing
privacy rights would not be caused by the state, but rather stem “from the quest for profit by some private
companies. In- deed, I find that these corporations now regularly amass detailed accounts about many aspects of the
personal lives of millions of individuals, profiles of the kind that until just a few years ago could be compiled only by the
likes of the East German Stasi. [...] Consumers, employees, even patients and children have little protection
from marketeers, insurance companies, bankers, and corporate surveillance” (Etzioni 1999, 9f). The task of
a socialist privacy conception is to go beyond the focus of priva- cy concepts as protection from state
interference into private spheres, but to identify those cases, where political regulation is needed for the
protection of the rights of consumers and workers.
This turns the case – corporate surveillance is what enables government surveillance
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Jansen 14
(Leon, DEFINING REALITY AFTER SNOWDEN, Erasmus School of History, Culture & Communication Erasmus University
Rotterdam, Master Thesis June 2014
Perhaps, most notable in the previous discussion of discourses among societal sectors is the complete failure to mention the
corporate sector’s role in the surveillance process, for it is the corporate sector that amasses and transmits the
data that government is accused of tapping into on such a mass scale. Especially the fact that the citizen group
sector has been found to adopt much of the corporate sector’s technological optimism, and in doing so fails to address the
fundamental commercial infrastructure underlying much of today’s communication through internet. As a result, the
fundamentally ideological positioning of the myth of government in corporate sector discourse is reinforced by citizen
group discourse. The complete absence of any mention to the role of the corporate sector in current mass
surveillance suggests hegemonic intervention by corporate sector discourse.
Furthermore, considering the emphasis on human rights for a global audience in citizen group discourse it is especially
striking that the phenomenon of prosumer commodification (Fuchs, 2011) by the corporate sector is entirely omitted by
citizen groups. As Fuchs (2011) argues, while prosumers use services of web 2.0 applications, their data is collected
and sold as a commodity. The laborers in this context are users themselves who while using the web 2.0 services also
effectively produce data that companies reap the benefits from in the form of monetary profit (Fuchs, 2011). In this context,
“prosumers are digitally enclosed and digitally exploited” (Fuchs, 2011, p. 299).
A prominent explanation for the widespread failure to acknowledge this new form of capitalist exploitation is the
transformation of the role of work itself in society. Indeed, towards the middle of the 1970s capitalism gradually moved
from the traditional ‘Fordist’ form of organizing work to a post-Fordist network structure characterized by more flexible
labor systems and relative work autonomy. While the traditional structures of capitalism and bureaucracy were critiqued,
the gradually evolved network structure triumphed while the hierarchical division of labor effectively remained the same.
As a result, while traditional exploitation was extensively addressed and critiqued after the 1960s, the newly emerged
neocapitalism effectively continued exploitation while going relatively uncontested (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2006). The
ignoring of capitalism in citizen groups’ critique of mass surveillance suggests that the neocapitalist
hegemonic intervention is replicated discursively by the societal sectors in the triangle.
Notwithstanding the stark differences between surveillance discourse and national security discourse on issues of privacy or
secrecy, very notably both univocally present U.S. citizenship as a privileged status that positions one’s privacy or
protection from mass surveillance as superior to those of non-U.S. citizens. This is a stance from the government sector that
has potentially profound ideological implications. While the U.S. politicians are very prominently covered in the
governmental sector, the relatively large coverage of their stances in global mass media potentially reinforces the
ideological influence of their articulations of reality on public discourse.
Furthermore, while both commercial discourse as well as activist discourse include the key signifier of transparency, both
articulate it fundamentally different in their respective discourses. To clarify, activist discourse advocates for more
transparency, for instance with help of whistleblowers, in order to aide increased accountability to a global public. By
contrast, the corporate sector hopes increased ‘transparency’ will reinforce customer trust in their product. More
specifically, the corporate sector publishes Transparency Reports including very undetailed information about government
requests for customer data. Arguably, this practice of publishing Transparency Reports has two immediate effects. First, the
attention is distracted from corporate involvement in mass surveillance by reinforcing the myth of
government through logic of equivalence in a ‘we versus them’ structure. And secondly, the corporate
sector emphasizes the impression that their minimum act of transparency helps to solve a program that
they help to maintain to exist in the first place.
Privacy Link – Security Top Level
Creating zones of privacy against state intrusion reinforces rather than challenges the security state
Henry 13 (PhD candidate at Carleton University reading Sociology and Political Economy)
(Aaron, Socialist Studies / Études socialistes 9 (2) Winter 2013, THE PERPETUAL OBJECT OF REGULATION: PRIVACY AS
PACIFICATION)
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There is a conviction today that privacy is in a state of irretrievable crisis. In addition to the collection and sale of day-today personal activity by telecommunications services and social networking sites, programmes of surveillance and
registration have allegedly eroded what were previously understood as the firm borders between public and private spheres
of relations. That this has happened or is in the process of materializing has taken on the weight and opacity of a social fact.
Yet, while privacy is said to be in a state of crisis, the ‘right to privacy’ is often trumpeted by liberals as the
counterweight to balance the intrusion of state projects into the lives of individuals. Indeed, this appears to
be the general sentiment that rests behind initiatives like the ‘Orwell Award’ given to companies that have violated privacy,
or the American Civil Liberties Union recent mobilization against Drones as a privacy concern. Thus, privacy is
presented as means to make intrusions into the life of the individual proportional to the objectives of
security projects, and in some instances security projects are legitimized for the forms of privacy they
safeguard (Cavoukian, 1999, 13). To this end, privacy is subject to a rather peculiar positioning as both a relation
threatened by security and as a regulative principle capable of ensuring the ‘acceptable’ limits of
security projects.
What I want to demonstrate in this paper is that the relation of privacy to security as both an object threatened by security
and as a means of regulating security projects is the product of a longstanding relation between privacy, security and
capital. This relation is expressed in two ways. First, while privacy has been invoked as a means to resist projects of
security, I argue that privacy is in fact deployed as a means to structure the fields of relations through
which security interventions are made.2 In this sense, when the power of state or capital intervenes upon the
individual, privacy emerges as a concept. Privacy, a retroactive concept, exists as a means to assuage individuals that the
duration and scope of security projects will be ‘reasonable or proportional’; thus, security presupposes and delimits privacy.
Second, in the course of defending the individual's freedom and autonomy over their inner world, privacy reinforces private
property and private life, the very relations projects of security safeguard. Thus, privacy acclimatizes us to a mode
of existence where we are alienated from our collective social power, and so we confront relations of
domination and exploitation as private individuals. This commodification of our selves is, I suggest, part of the
condition of pacification.
First, I attempt to theorize how security and its relation to capital render it not only generative of privacy but structure its
perimeters. I demonstrate the formation of this relationship between security and privacy through a critical reading of
Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. Second, I offer a contemporary example of this relation between privacy and security through
an analysis of the Passenger Name Record (PNR) agreement between the United States and the EU. Finally, I conclude by
reviewing how privacy as desirable form of existence constitutes a form of pacification insofar as it not
only fails to challenge capital but has further entrenched the logics of security into social life.
Privacy Link – Neoliberalism Top Level
Policies to protect personal data from government snooping secure corporations ability to continue
generating that data in the first place. Secured from the government it becomes a tool of capitalist
domination
Coll 14 (lecturer at the Department of Sociology of the University of Geneva)
(Sami Coll (2014) Power, knowledge, and the subjects of privacy: understanding privacy as the ally of surveillance, Information,
Communication & Society, 17:10, 1250-1263)
In following the adaptation of Foucault’s model of the dispositive of power to privacy, companies and governments
should be considered the main actors of the regulation of a ‘practice of privacy’, as medical institutions
have been regulating a ‘practice of sexuality’. In a way, data protection policies (created by companies or
governments) make people feel at ease with the spread of the information society now at the core of
modern capitalism, without blocking the economic market (Kessous & Rey, 2007). For Regan, it ‘can in fact be alibi
on the part of public power wishing to avoid the new problems brought about by the development of enormous data files’
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(Regan, 1995, p. 219). For example, in the ‘Montreux Declaration (2005)’, a reference document produced and used by
privacy commissioners and privacy advocates from all over the world, there is no fundamental critique of the information
society. While expressing concerns about sur- veillance practices, the report mentions that the development of the
information society must not be hindered in any way. Even though privacy commissioners have shown an increasing
concern about surveillance practices (Madrid Privacy Declaration, 2009), the global direction is still set to embed privacy
within modern informational capitalism. Like the artistic critique during the 1960s and 1970s (Boltanski & Chiapello,
2005), privacy as a critique of information society has been assimilated and reshaped by and in favour of capitalist
structures, notably by being over-indivi- dualized. First a political and literary critique, then defended by non-profit
organizations, it is now included in each company’s policy – especially Internet giants (Bennett, 2008) – to the extent that
privacy seems to have become, somehow, a consumer good (Rey, 2012, p. 158). As Kessous (2012, p. 79) suggests, the
current ‘sanctuarisation of privacy’ (our translation) has become conditional to the well-being of the
economy. Indeed, although it could be approached as a common, public, and collective value (see Regan, 1995), privacy
is continuously the subject of a drive towards individualization, occurring notably through the so-called individual
empowerment that lies at the very centre of the self-determination principle.
With the growth of the information society and its economical ‘partner-in-crime’, relationship marketing, companies
will continue collecting massive amounts of data. Data mining has become more sophisticated and now allows
marketers to infer significant knowledge and sensitive data about consumers from ‘innocuous’ raw data. This is why the
debate on data protection is considered highly relevant and as the main way to protect an individual’s privacy. Even the
majority of most critical privacy scholars (see, e.g. Gilliom, 2011; Regan, 2011) agree that facing the lack of solutions to
abuses of personal data use, the ‘regime of privacy’ (Bennett, 2011a) and its resources already in place must certainly still
be defended. As Stalder (2011, p. 508) argues, while being very critical of the concept of privacy, ‘it would be foolish to
give up such resources in exchange for, well, what?’. Indeed, the history of privacy policies shows many successes in
preventing the worst surveillance practices from being used (Bennett, 2011b).
However, as was also made clear in our study on loyalty programmes, privacy advocates, reflexive consumers, and
consumers experiencing privacy as an everyday life experience do not share the same perspective. Aside from this
empirical study, many authors have already focused on different theoretical aspects of privacy (Holvast, 2007, p. 738),
which leads to differ- ent perspectives. The perception of privacy is controversial, and any attempt to provide a univocal
definition of it must be considered an act of power. Because we depicted privacy as a tool of gov- ernance in the sole
context of Swiss loyalty cards and because almost two-thirds of the interviews were conducted with women,4 some
precautions should be taken about the generalizability of our study. However, we think that our argument demonstrates at
the very least that surveillance issues cannot be simplified any longer into a duality between one’s privacy and surveillance
systems. Broaching surveillance only in terms of privacy threat is potentially detrimental and can paradoxi- cally reinforce
it, since privacy and surveillance are not antagonistic (Stalder, 2002); rather, they seem to work together in the deployment
of the surveillance society. The more that is said about privacy, the more consumers focus on their individuality,
reinforcing the care of the self, described by Foucault (1986), which shapes them as the subjects of control.
Privacy Link – Biopower
Biopower+law+capitalism
Coll 14 (lecturer at the Department of Sociology of the University of Geneva)
(Sami Coll (2014) Power, knowledge, and the subjects of privacy: understanding privacy as the ally of surveillance, Information,
Communication & Society, 17:10, 1250-1263)
Without going as far as this, many privacy and surveillance scholars have been highly critical about the notion of privacy
(Gilliom, 2011; Monahan, 2006; Stalder, 2002). The most radical ones suggest putting it aside in the analyses because, they
argue, it tends to hide actual social and power issues (see, e.g. Gilliom, 2011, p. 500). Others, including Westin (2003),
while still supporting the notion, consider privacy as an upper-class privilege:
[P]rivacy is frequently determined by the individual’s power and social status. The rich can withdraw
from society when they wish; the lower classes cannot. The affluent do not need to obtain subsidizing
support from the government by revealing sensitive information to authorities, while those in economic or social need must disclose or go without. (p. 432)
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According to the results of Gilliom’s (2001) study, which show how working classes hide their revenues from the social system in order to avoid having their social assistance removed and con- sequently becoming even poorer, Gilliom would not
disagree with Westin. Steeves (2009) is also quite critical when she mentions that in her observations, the protection of data sometimes seems to contrast with the protection of privacy. For Regan, who has been defending since 1995 the idea that
privacy should be reinforced as a collective value rather than being seen only as an individual resource, the idea of an ‘invasion of privacy’ has actually become too limited to account for what turned out to be a worrying and recurring issue of
modern life (Regan, 2011).
normative statements on privacy made by governments and
companies can be regarded as a tool of power and governance in service of informational
capitalism. Initially defined as a fundamental freedom, privacy seems to have become a precondition for a
The intention of this article is to further develop this critical perspective by arguing that
blossoming economy in the context of the information society (Kessous, 2012, p. 79). This is precisely the idea that will be developed herein, with the argument
based on the Foucauldian concept of biopower and on the results of a study on the loyalty programmes run by the four biggest retailers of Switzerland (Coll, 2014).
Governing with privacy
Because the notion of privacy, despite more than 30 years of scholarly work, is still a very complex, multidimensional, and confusing notion (Bennett, 2008; Solove, 2008), there is no univocal definition of it that could unify scholars and lawyers.
In the information society context, since the 1960s and 1970s when ‘society was moving from paper records to large com- puterized databases’ (Regan, 2011, p. 497), laws generated to protect citizens’ privacy have been increasingly focusing on
privacy’s informational dimension. Protection of privacy now inevitably involves protection of data, so specific data protection laws have been adopted by many govern- ments. Their purpose is to ensure the protection and the ownership of
personal data, and the specific area of privacy that consists of all private data concerning an individual is most often defined as informational privacy.1
Despite this attempt to define the issue of privacy in the information society, it is not always clear in the debates and in the literature whether one is talking about privacy in its entirety or about a specifically informational privacy – that is to say, a
set of information considered private in a given context. Moreover, even if one focuses on studying the informational dimension of privacy, it is unclear whether one is interested in information in general or in computer data. Not- withstanding
these difficulties, when speaking about the possible abuse of surveillance practices, the notion of privacy remains the weapon of choice and is not reduced solely to its informational dimension. In the 1960s, pioneering thinkers consolidated the idea
of self-determination of privacy (Jourard, 1966; Ruebhausen & Brim, 1965; Westin, 1967), which has become the corner- stone of current privacy policies. Concretely, in the legal context, such debates aim to address the problem of data protection
by granting every individual the right – but also the responsibility – to control his or her own data through the right to access the data and correct it if needed.2 This became the so-called ‘informational self-determination principle’ promoted by
most European policies on data protection, particularly in Germany and Switzerland (Bennett, 2008, pp. 6–7).
Today, legislators continue the difficult task of developing an operational approach to privacy and a set of rules that can address the problems emerging with the massive production of data. While recognizing the importance of this work, many
data protection laws to shut privacy up within an individualistic and static conception (see,
e.g. Gilliom, 2011, p. 501; Stalder, 2002, p. 121). Most often, privacy is seen as an informational bubble
surrounding individuals that must be protected against external and undesired intrusions from the state,
authors lament the tendency of
private companies, or even other persons motivated by their curiosity.
No one would blame the legislature for this tendency, as these laws are primarily intended to thwart the damage that could
be produced by the increasing digitization of personal data, not to feed an endless discussion about an academic definition
of privacy. Nevertheless, this positivist view of privacy, which we propose to call herein objective privacy, has a
normative and prescriptive scope that produces power effects that we wish to analyse.
Power, knowledge, and the subjects of privacy
Before becoming a value protected by the legislature, privacy has been the subject of a historical development originating, according to historians, around the early eighteenth century. They observe the emergence at this time of specific activities
that have become increasingly auton- omous from public ones and that can gradually be qualified as private activities (Ariès, 1987, p. 18). The gradual increase in the autonomy of these activities shows the emergence of the value of the right to own
‘privacy’. A new window of space and time became available for specific activities that would today be labelled as private, allowing the possibility of privacy to emerge. Such privacy remained an exclusively upper-class privilege until the early
1960s (Holvast, 2007; Prost, 1999). Before, for example, popular classes had no designated places such as the con- jugal bedroom, a boudoir, or an alcove, as the bourgeoisie did, as a place for private sexuality (Prost, 1999, p. 60). This
democratization of privacy as a value probably encouraged middle classes to claim a so-called sexual liberation during the 1960s and 1970s. The very same liber- ation has been described by Foucault (1978) as a subtle operation of power aiming to
encourage popular classes to speak about their sexuality to the social institutions, such as medicine or gov- ernment, aiming to regulate sexual practices through birth control politics. Foucault further gen- eralized the concept of biopower, first
theoretically developed around sexuality, for any type of power that directly targets the body and intends to take control of it (Foucault, 1979, 2008).
Sexual liberation and the development of scientific knowledge on sexuality, the democratiza- tion of privacy, and the emergence of scientific discourses about privacy are processes that show intriguing similarities. Like sexuality, privacy involves
the acquisition of rights, the diffusion of values, and the development of statements that regulate its implementation. In this sense, privacy, like sexuality, is a ‘power-knowledge’ (Foucault, 2003, p. 252) related to moral standards defining what
privacy should be.
In the second volume of Foucault’s work on sexuality, The use of pleasure (1985), sexuality is theoretically formalized as a social control to regulate sexual behaviour, a dispositive of power with the objective of taking control of bodies. This
dispositive organizes power around three axes (Foucault, 1985):
To speak of sexuality as a historically singular experience also presupposed the availability of tools capable of analyzing the peculiar characteristics and interrelations of the three axes that constitute it: (1) the formation of sciences (savoirs) that
refer to it, (2) the systems of power that regulate its prac- tice, (3) the forms within which individuals are able, are obliged, to recognize themselves as subjects of this sexuality. (p. 4)
According to Foucault, around the middle of the nineteenth century, sexuality was being redefined as a list of particular practices that creates scientific knowledge – mainly medical and psychoana- lytic – and the church no longer monopolized
societal understanding of it. This new type of knowledge has produced discourses distinguishing normal and pathological practices based on rational argumentation. This alludes to the theoretical suggestion of this article: that privacy can also be
modelled through the very same axes used to describe biopower on sexuality. First, privacy is also an object of science. Efforts are made by many experts – some call them the ‘privacy scholars’ (Bennett, 2011a) – to provide the best definition of it.
In the information age, scientific literature on privacy is growing. Second, data protection laws and policies, public or private, and ‘privacy advocates’ (Bennett, 2008; Regan, 1995) constitute ‘the systems of power that regulate its practice’
(Foucault, 1985, p. 4). They have the power to define what privacy is or is not and to suggest measures to protect it. Lawyers, for example, have the power to determine when an invasion of privacy is legitimate or not, in the name of security, public
health, or economic growth. Third, by promoting in the first place the self-determination principle, the main project and discourse of data protection laws is to educate users to protect their own privacy, at least in the informational context. In other
biopower is producing subjects owning a privacy, feeling concerned about it and willing to protect
it. Discourses produced by most privacy advocates and activists about our freedom are de facto prescriptive when
words,
addressing citizens, consumers, or users of technologies of information. Their statements might sound something like, ‘You
have privacy, you must protect it, and we will tell you how to do it.’
From here emerges the theoretical idea that the notion of privacy and the surveillance of data act as the
‘partners-in-crime’ of the current growing digital economy. The aim of the second part of this article is to
use the results of a case study on loyalty cards to empirically illustrate some of the aspects of this dynamic. Although it is
limited to the context of consumption in Switzerland, this case study can nevertheless modestly present an argument in
favour of such a thesis.
Privacy Link – Inequality
Privacy protections leas to inequality and poverty
Fuchs 11 (Department of Informatics and Media Studies, Uppsala University)
(Christian, The Political Economy of Privacy, Research Paper Number #8, The Internet & Surveillance - Research Paper Series: 2011)
Privacy is in modern societies an ideal rooted in the Enlightenment. The rise of cap- italism resulted in the idea that
the private sphere should be separated from the pub- lic sphere and not accessible for the public and that therefore
autonomy and anonym- ity of the individual is needed in the private sphere. The rise of the idea of privacy in modern
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society is connected to the rise of the central ideal of the freedom of private ownership. Private ownership is the idea that
humans have the right to own as much wealth as they want, as long as it is inherited or acquired through individual
achievements. There is an antagonism between private ownership and social equity in modern society. How much and what
exactly a person owns is treated as an aspect of privacy in contemporary society. To keep ownership structures secret is a
measure of precaution against the public questioning or the political and individual attack against private ownership.
Capitalism requires anonymity and privacy in order to function. But full privacy is also not possible in modern
society because strangers en- ter social relations that require trust or enable exchange. Building trust requires knowing
certain data about other persons. It is therefore checked with the help of surveillance procedures if a stranger can be trusted.
Corporations have the aim of accumulating ever more capital. That is why they have an interest in knowing as much as
possible about their workers (in order to control them] and the interests, tastes, and behaviours of their customers. This
results in the surveillance of workers and consumers. The ideals of modernity (such as the freedom of ownership] also
produce phenomena such as income and wealth inequality, poverty, unemployment, precarious living and
working conditions. The establishment of trust, socio-economic differences, and corporate interests are three qualities of
modernity that necessitate surveillance. Therefore, modernity on the one hand advances the ideal of a right to privacy, but
on the other hand it must continuously advance surveillance that threat ens to undermine privacy rights. An antagonism
between privacy ideals and surveillance is therefore constitutive for capitalism.
Liberal privacy discourse is highly individualistic, it is always focused on the indi- vidual and his/her freedoms. It
separates public and private spheres. Privacy in capitalism can best be characterized as an antagonistic value
that is one the one side up-held as a universal value for protecting private property, but is at the same
time permanently undermined by corporate surveillance into the lives of workers and con- sumers for profit
purposes. Capitalism protects privacy for the rich and companies, but at the same time legitimates privacy violations of
consumers and citizens. It thereby undermines its own positing of privacy as universal value.
Privacy Link – “Right to Privacy”
The right to privacy affirms capitalist individualization and commodification
Fuchs 11 (Department of Informatics and Media Studies, Uppsala University)
(Christian, The Political Economy of Privacy, Research Paper Number #8, The Internet & Surveillance - Research Paper Series: 2011)
In contrast to de Bruin, Mark Neocleous (2002) questions the liberal value of privacy. He characterizes the rise of this value
as characteristic of the constitution of capitalism: " The idea that ‘privacy’ as a political virtue came about with
the rise of capitalism, the consolidation of the state, and the gradual emergence of liberal democracy" (Neocleous
2002, 86). More than that, he argues that privacy has ideological character in capitalism: "When it comes to
companies known by the government to be breaking the law, secrecy must be maintained; under a regime of open
government crimes committed by capital ean be kept secret. [...] Liberalism's defense of privacy historically accompanied
its defense of capital. [...] The ‘right to privacy’ in this sense merely confirms the processes of
individualization and commodification in which we find ourselves and which we should be
struggling against" (Neocleous 2002, 99, 104, 106). Privacy would therefore be "a concept that can just as
easily be used by corporate power in its struggle to create a world after its own image" (Neocleous 2002,
106). Secrecy and privacy is handled in a differentiated way by the state in capitalist society so that companies and
corporate crimes are frequently protected from public scrutiny and public knowledge. Therefore the question arises how a
socialist position on privacy exactly can look like. Is privacy a bourgeois value that is doomed to be ideological and that is
incompatible with socialist politics?
Privacy Link – A2: It’s Key to Suceed
Privacy fails especially for the most vulnerable groups
Monahan 15 (associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina)
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(Torin, The Right to Hide? Anti-Surveillance Camouflage and the Aestheticization of Resistance, Communication and
Critical/Cultural Studies Vol. 12, No. 2, June 2015, pp. 159–178)
Ultimately, discourses of “the right to hide” are weak variations of “the
right to privacy,” both of which depend on
conceptually inadequate and empirically deficient mobilizations of universal rights. Indeed, poor and
racialized populations subjected to the most invasive forms of monitoring are much more concerned
with issues of domination and control, along with the practicalities of survival, than they are with legal or
philosophical abstractions like privacy.69 Privacy is also a deeply individualistic concept, poorly suited to
forestall discriminatory practices against social groups.70 As Sami Coll explains, “The notion of privacy, as a
critique of [the] information society, has been assimilated and reshaped by and in favour of
informational capitalism, notably by being over-individualized through the self- determination principle.”71 The
discourse of the right to hide, as with the right to privacy, accepts the legitimacy of state demands for
legible populations and offers symbolic compromises to assert degrees of freedom within those
constraints.
***Security/Biopower Impacts***
War/Structural Violence Impact
Their mode of security politics makes both escalation and global structural violence inevitable
Anthony Burke, Senior Lecturer @ School of Politics & IR @ Univ. of New South Wales, ‘7 [Beyond Security, Ethics and
Violence, p. 231-2]
Yet the first act in America's 'forward strategy of freedom' was to invade and attempt to subjugate Iraq, suggesting
that, if 'peace' is its object, its means is war: the engine of history is violence, on an enormous and tragic scale, and
violence is ultimately its only meaning. This we can glimpse in 'Toward a Pacific Union', a deeply disingenuous chapter of
Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man. This text divides the earth between a 'post-historical' world of affluent
developed democracies where 'the old rules of power-politics have decreasing relevance', and a world still 'stuck in history'
and 'riven with a variety of religious, national and ideological conflicts'. The two worlds will maintain 'parallel but separate
existences' and interact only along axes of threat, disturbance and crucial strategic interest: oil, immigration, terrorism and
the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Because 'the relationship between democracies and nondemocracies will
still be characterised by mutual distrust and fear', writes Fukuyama, the 'post-historical half must still make use of realist
methods when dealing with the part still in history ... force will still be the ultima ratio in their relations'. For all the book's
Kantian pretensions, Fukuyama naturalises war and coercion as the dominant mode of dealing with
billions of people defined only through their lack of 'development' and 'freedom'. Furthermore, in his advocacy of the
'traditional moralism of American foreign policy' and his dismissal of the United Nations in favour of a NATO-style 'league
of truly free states ... capable of much more forceful action to protect its collective security against threats arising from the
non-democratic part of the world' we can see an early premonition of the historicist unilateralism of the Bush
administration. 72 In this light, we can see the invasion of Iraq as continuing a long process of 'world-historical'
violence that stretches back to Columbus' discovery of the Americas, and the subsequent politics of genocide,
warfare and dispossession through which the modem United States was created and then expanded initially with the colonisation of the Philippines and coercive trade relationships with China and Japan, and eventually to
the self-declared role Luce had argued so forcefully for: guarantor of global economic and strategic order after
1945. This role involved the hideous destruction of Vietnam and Cambodia, 'interventions' in Chile, El
Salvador, Panama, Nicaragua and Afghanistan (or an ever more destructive 'strategic' involvement in the Persian
Gulf that saw the United States first building up Iraq as a formidable regional military power, and then punishing its people
with a 14-year sanctions regime that caused the deaths of at least 200,000 people), all of which we are meant to accept as
proof of America's benign intentions, of America putting its 'power at the service of principle'. They are merely
history working itself out, the 'design of nature' writing its bliss on the world.73 The bliss 'freedom' offers us,
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however, is the bliss of the graveyard, stretching endlessly into a world marked not by historical
perfection or democratic peace, but by the eternal recurrence of tragedy, as ends endlessly disappear in
the means of permanent war and permanent terror. This is how we must understand both the prolonged
trauma visited on the people of Iraq since 1990, and the inflammatory impact the US invasion will have on the new
phenomenon of global antiWestern terrorism. American exceptionalism has deluded US policymakers into believing that
they are the only actors who write history, who know where it is heading, and how it will play out, and that in its service it
is they (and no-one else) who assume an unlimited freedom to act. As a senior adviser to Bush told a journalist in 2002:
'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality . . We're history's actors."
War Impact
Security politics makes escalation of war inevitable
Burke 7 (Prof on Int’l Relations, University of New South Wales)
(Anthony, Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and Reason, Theory and Event, 10:2, MUSE)
This closed circle of existential and strategic reason generates a number of dangers. Firstly, the
emergence of conflict
can generate military action almost automatically simply because the world is conceived in terms of
the distinction between friend and enemy; because the very existence of the other constitutes an
unacceptable threat, rather than a chain of actions, judgements and decisions. (As the Israelis insisted of
Hezbollah, they 'deny our right to exist'.) This effaces agency, causality and responsibility from policy and
political discourse: our actions can be conceived as independent of the conflict or quarantined from
critical enquiry, as necessities that achieve an instrumental purpose but do not contribute to a new and
unpredictable causal chain. Similarly the Clausewitzian idea of force -- which, by transporting a Newtonian category
from the natural into the social sciences, assumes the very effect it seeks -- further encourages the resort to military
violence. We ignore the complex history of a conflict, and thus the alternative paths to its resolution
that
such historical analysis might provide, by portraying conflict as fundamental and existential in nature;
as possibly containable or exploitable, but always irresolvable. Dominant portrayals of the war on terror, and
the Israeli-Arab conflict, are arguably examples of such ontologies in action.
This relation to the world creates war and violence as a natural and mechanistic part of all life
Burke 7 (Prof on Int’l Relations, University of New South Wales)
(Anthony, Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and Reason, Theory and Event, 10:2, MUSE)
By itself, such
an account of the nationalist ontology of war and security provides only a general insight
into the perseverance of military violence as a core element of politics. It does not explain why so many
policymakers think military violence works. As I argued earlier, such an ontology is married to a more
rationalistic form of strategic thought that claims to link violent means to political ends predictably and
controllably, and which, by doing so, combines military action and national purposes into a common -- and thoroughly
modern -- horizon of certainty. Given Hegel's desire to decisively distil and control the dynamic potentials of modernity in
thought, it is helpful to focus on the modernity of this ontology -- one that is modern in its adherence to
modern scientific models of truth, reality and technological progress, and in its insistence on imposing
images of scientific truth from the physical sciences (such as mathematics and physics) onto human
behaviour, politics and society. For example, the military theorist and historian Martin van Creveld has argued that
one of the reasons Clausewitz was so influential was that his 'ideas seemed to have chimed in with the rationalistic,
scientific, and technological outlook associated with the industrial revolution'.54 Set into this epistemological
matrix, modern politics and government engages in a sweeping project of mastery and control in which
all of the world's resources -- mineral, animal, physical, human -- are made part of a machinic process
of which war and violence are viewed as normal features.
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Value to Link Impact
Security destroys the value to life
Der Derian 93
(James, “The value of security: Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche, and Baudrillard,” in The Political Subject of Violence, pp. 102-105)
The desire for security is manifested as a collective resentment of difference that which is not us, not certain, not
predictable. Complicit with a negative will to power is the fear-driven desire for protection from the unknown. Unlike the
positive will to power which produces an aesthetic affirmation of difference, the search for truth produces a truncated
life which conforms to the rationally knowable, to the causally sustainable. In The Gay Science Nietzsche asks of the
reader: Look, isn't our need for knowledge precisely this need for the familiar, the will to uncover everything strange,
unusual, and questionable, something that no longer disturbs us? Is it not the instinct of fear that bids us to know? And is
the jubilation of those who obtain knowledge not the jubilation over the restoration of a sense of security?" The fear of the
unknown and the desire for certainty combine to produce a domesticated life, in which causality and rationality
become the highest sign of a sovereign self, the surest protection against contingent forces. The fear of fate assures a
belief that everything reasonable is true, and everything true reasonable. In short, the security imperative produces and is
sustained by the strategies of knowledge which seek to explain it. Nietzsche elucidates the nature of this generative
relationship in The Twilight of the Idols: A safe life requires safe truths. The strange and the alien remain unexamined, the
unknown becomes identified as evil, and evil provokes hostility - recycling the desire for security. The 'influence of
timidity,' as Nietzsche puts it, creates a people who are willing to subordinate affirmative values to the 'necessities' of
security: 'they fear change, transitoriness: this expresses a straitened soul, full of mistrust and evil experiences'." The point
of Nietzsche's critical genealogy is to show the perilous conditions which created the security imperative - and the western
metaphysics which perpetuate it - have diminished if not disappeared; yet the fear of life persists: 'Our century denies this
perilousness, and does so with a good conscience: and yet it continues to drag along with it the old habits of Christian
security, Christian enjoyment, recreation and evaluation." Nietzsche's worry is that the collective reaction against older,
more primal fears has created an even worse danger: the tyranny of the herd, the lowering of man, the apathy of the last
man which controls through conformity and rules through passivity. The security of the sovereign, rational self and state
comes at the cost of ambiguity, uncertainty, paradox - all that makes life worthwhile. Nietzsche's lament for this lost
life is captured at the end of Daybreak in a series of rhetorical questions:
Democracy Impact
Security depoliticizes issues – preventing democratic debate and deliberation
Jayasuriya 1 (Senior Research Fellow, Southeast Asia Research Centre, City University of Hong Kong)
(Kanishka, 9/11 and the New 'Anti-politics' of 'Security', Social Science Research Council,
http://essays.ssrc.org/sept11/essays/jayasuriya.htm)
The dramatic events of September 11, 2001 have ramifications for the nature of global governance as well as the
institutions of liberal democracy. The most serious danger these events pose is their potential to usher in, under the
appealing cloak of 'security', a debilitating a form of 'anti politics' that marginalises the constructive
conflicts- the debate and discussion - that animate the public sphere in liberal polities. Some of these effects are already apparent
in the US, where self-censorship in the media has made discussion of the politics of terrorism all but impossible. Perhaps more seriously, the language of security serves to frame facets of transnational
governance in terms of 'risk', thereby occluding important issues of conflict and power. Take, for example, the pressure on the Canadian government by the United States to impose 'perimeter continental
security', with the objective of establishing common entry and exit policies for visitors, immigrants, and refugees. Posing the movement of people as primarily a security risk submerges the significant
questions of power and distribution raised by the proposed policy of continental integration, and constrains serious discussion of the proposal. It could well be argued that these developments presage the
emergence of a new security state. Indeed, an analogy for the present crisis can be found in the anti-Communist and cold war rhetoric that dominated US domestic and international politics in the decades
after 1945. The obvious parallels are to be found in the increasing importance attached to issues of 'security' in both domestic and international politics. The decisive shift in the political climate initiated by
Truman, and consolidated by Eisenhower, lay not in the increasing salience of security to public policy and political language, but in how the US state apparatus came to be dominated by cold war
imperatives. The pursuit of these imperatives was often at the expense of broader civil liberties, as exemplified by the infectious spread of McCarthyism. Like the cold war, the present crisis has also exposed
the precarious position of civil liberty as this 'new war' gathers steam. The US Attorney General has proposed far reaching changes - including the preventive detention of immigrants on suspicion of
terrorism - which would severely curtail civil liberties. Further, the US President has signed an order for special military tribunals to try those charged with terrorism. These tribunals have lower standards of
proof and admissibility of evidence than ordinary judicial processes. Yet other actions such as increasing surveillance and wire-tapping powers pose serious problems for those concerned with basic rights.
Similarly the British Home Secretary has proposed tough anti-terrorist legislation that includes extending the already substantial powers to detain suspected terrorists, and the extensive use of surveillance
powers. In Australia, the ruling Liberal and National Coalition, with the support of the opposition Labor Party, has enacted draconian laws on border security that effectively curtail judicial review for
asylum seekers and give wide discretionary powers to Ministers. In surprisingly short order, a broad set of emergency powers based on the concept of 'exceptions' has emerged to offer political leaders and
other public officials a legislative framework for acting outside normal constitutional and representative institutions. Carl Schmitt, the deeply conservative jurist who was a critic of the Weimar Republic, is
perhaps the most pre-eminent theorist of the exception: 'exception' is the capacity of the sovereign to make decisions in terms of its political will rather than be constrained by normative 'law'. Schmitt
suggests the exception as something that is '… codified in the existing legal order, can at best be characterised as a state of peril, a danger to the existence of the state, or the like. But it cannot be
circumscribed factually and made to conform to preformed law' (1985: 6). In this context, the emergence of certain aspects of a 'state of exception' (to use a phrase of the outstanding Weimar jurist Franz
Neumann) should be a cause for concern for those interested in the protection of fundamental political rights. One of Neumann's (1986) central arguments is that the development of capitalism leads to the
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development of non-formal instruments of law. The last century has seen a gradual acceleration of legal fragmentation and dissolution. Legal deformalization Neumann argued is rooted in a fundamental
transformation of capitalist economies over the greater part of the twentieth century. It could be argued that the new language of security reflects the fact that globalisation has changed the internal
architecture of the state and this is markedly apparent in the increasing emphasis placed on aspects of 'risk' and 'security' across social life. It leads both at the international and domestic level to the kind of
legal deformalisation so astutely analyzed by Neumann. This process has been accelerated by the events of September 11. At this point the analogy with the cold war 'national security state' is misleading
because it obscures how globalisation has transformed the very notion of security in recent years, so that it is increasingly understood in terms broader than merely as a matter of 'guns and bombs'. The
language of security now permeates every sphere of life - ranging from finance to the environment. International relations boffins like to talk about 'securitisation' to describe this expansive notion of
security. For example, one of the most striking elements of the policy response to this crisis is that many ethnic and minority groups are now deemed to pose a threat to national security. Many cold war
warriors in the United States have given extraordinarily generous airplay to Sam Huntington's thesis of a clash of civilisation. Unlike during the cold war, these threats to national security are framed in terms
of 'ethnicity' rather than 'ideology', but the outcome poses the same challenge to basic rights. Further, this shift towards a 'security state' is not confined to the US and Britain, but is evident in a number of
European countries as well as Australia where members of the ruling Coalition government have implied that Afghan refugees and Muslim immigrants were 'terrorists'. But this language of security is not
just confined to mainstream security agencies. It has also become an intrinsic rationale of the program of development agencies like the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). For these
international agencies and many other non-governmental organisations, the vacuous notion of 'human security' now includes such areas as poverty and the environment; it is the transnational analogue of
'community policing'. This new perspective embodies the more expansive understanding of security employed by establishment security agencies. The expansive definition of security - whether used by the
UNDP or the Pentagon - has disturbing consequences. Security in this conception takes over the idea of risk management from penology and other related disciplines. Indeed, this is what is most striking
about the new security debate: the extension of the US 'law and order state' to the transnational arena. In this respect, one of the most interesting and worrying developments is likely to be the
internationalisation of the 'state of exception'. New forms of risk management apply risk profiles to a set of relationships, institutions, and even geographic sites, rather than endeavouring to manage or
transform the behaviour of individuals. This emphasis on the management of risk at the level of population rather than individuals is critical. It is reflected in the high priority given to issues of border control
and the use of identity documents. This approach to risk control and management strips away the social and legal context of individual behaviour as governments and other organisations seek to manage the
The effect is depoliticisation of
complex problems and issues, as transnational problems are disembedded from the politics of power
and interests and situated within the anti-political framework of security and risk. Within the
framework of the new security language - whether it is the 'hard' security of Bush's National Security Council or the
'soft' security of some international development agencies - the conflict and debate that are raw material of
politics get submerged in the search for policies of risk management. This 'politics of anti-politics' is
deeply inimical to the institutions and values that sustain and animate politics in liberal democracies.
'sites' of criminal activity such as terrorism, international drug trafficking, or the current panic over so-called 'people smuggling'.
Fear Impact
Security fears create debilitating fear
Masco 6 (Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Chicago)
(Joseph, The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico, pg. 229)
A core project for many activists is thus to register the psychosocial and cultural effects of the bomb on
their lives, replacing a discourse of national security with a quotidian experience of nuclear terror. One
laboratory critic, for example, declared herself to be the “potential mother of a mutant child. n She narrated to DOE
officials what it was like to be six months pregnant living beside a nuclear facility and worrying if her unborn fetus was
mutating inside her. Imagining a future life caring for a deformed child, she decried the DOE for allowing “nuclear
projects,” “toxic dumps,” and “bomb tests” to be performed in northern New Mexico, concluding that “maybe a country
who planned to bomb and destroy whole countries deserves to bear monsters, a karma fitting to so monstrous a mentality.
Maybe I deserve to have a mutant because once I was so casually uncaring about what these bombs were made for.” As
her womb is made foreign and dangerous to her, she is colonized by the psychosocial consequences of the
nuclear security state. This activist articulates the proliferating anxiety felt by some in Santa Fe at the end of
the Cold War, as news of environmental damage around the nuclear complex changed not only how they viewed Los
Alamos but also their own lived spaces. The inability here to escape nuclear terror-in either the form of
radioactive contamination or nuclear war---destabilizes a self that can no longer locate the
boundaries between body and bomb. When pursued through a discourse of citizenship this process
also illustrates one of the core effects of radioactive nation-building, a toxic public sphere where
official statements are by definition suspect and discounted as conspiracy.
***Neoliberalism Impacts***
Root Cause – Surveillance
Neolib is the root cause of surveillance
Tetrault 14 (MA in Sociology from Carleton University)
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(Justin, Reclaiming Visual Sovereignty: A Theoretical Critique of Facial Recognition Technology, Master’s Thesis,
https://curve.carleton.ca/system/files/theses/31799.pdf)
This thesis has shown how the face’s bondage to security has played a key role in the reification of modern subjects,
specifically in the expression of identity and in the optic perception of the human body. FR software is but an extension of
this historical process as the booming market of biometric technologies signifies the commodification of the body, and
further cements its relationship to identification, and thus to the policing powers of security. Therefore, it can be concluded
that facial identification – manifested as FR technology or otherwise - is a form of pacification because it attempts to
neutralize struggles over identity and visual sovereignty. As a non-negotiable part of the human contract, facial
identification seeks to place limits on political representation and subsequently, how resistance can be articulated. The
discourse of privacy, perceived as the only way to challenge FR software, is demonstrative of this trend – as opposition can
only be legitimately expressed through referencing back to the body’s role as a productive enterprise (ie: how do we
introduce a ‘socially acceptable’ version of FR software) all the while assuming its taken-for-grantedness within the logics
of liberal capitalism. Instead, facial recognition technology must be resisted at the level of identification, as the
boundaries enforced by this social sorting mechanism (one that becomes internalized through dominant cultural
representations) increasingly strips Western subjects of their right to self-construction and political
representation. The starting point of any discussion regarding the invasiveness of FR software must
therefore begin by exposing and dismantling the tendency for humanity to be reduced to codes and
categories that satisfy capitalist production and consumption.
Laundry List Impact
Makes social inequality and exn inevitable
Wise et al. 10 (Director of Doctoral Program in Migration Studies & Prof of Development Studies; Universidad Autónoma de
Zacatecas, Mexico)
(Raúl Delgado Wise, Humberto Márquez Covarrubias, Rubén Puentes, Reframing the debate on migration, development and human
rights: fundamental elements, October, 2010, www.migracionydesarrollo.org)
At the end of the first decade of the 21st century, a general crisis centered in the United States affected the
global capitalist system on several levels (Márquez, 2009 and 2010). The consequences have been varied:
Financial. The overflowing of financial capital leads to speculative bubbles that affect the socioeconomic
framework and result in global economic depressions. Speculative bubbles involve the bidding up of
market prices of such commodities as real estate or electronic innovations far beyond their real value,
leading inevitable to a subsequent slump (Foster and Magdof, 2009; Bello, 2006). Overproduction. Overproduction
crises emerge when the surplus capital in the global economy is not channeled into production processes due to a fall in
profit margins and a slump in effective demand, the latter mainly a consequence of wage containment across all sectors of
the population (Bello, 2006). Environmental. Environmental degradation, climate change and a predatory
approach to natural resources contribute to the destruction of the latter, along with a fundamental
undermining of the material bases for production and human reproduction (Fola- dori and Pierri, 2005; Hinkelammert and
Mora, 2008). Social. Growing social inequalities, the dismantling of the welfare state and dwindling means of
subsistence accentuate problems such as poverty, unemployment, violence, insecurity and labor precariousness,
increasing the pressure to emigrate (Harvey, 2007; Schierup, Hansen and Castles, 2006).
The crisis raises questions about the prevailing model of globalization and, in a deeper sense, the systemic
global order, which currently undermines our main sources of wealth—labor and nature—and overexploits
them to the extent that civilization itself is at risk. The responses to the crisis by the governments of developed
countries and international agencies promoting globalization have been short-sighted and exclusivist. Instead of
addressing the root causes of the crisis, they have implemented limited strategies that seek to rescue
financial and manufacturing corporations facing bankruptcy. In addition, government policies of labor
flexibilization and fiscal adjustment have affected the living and working conditions of most of the population. These
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measures are desperate attempts to prolong the privileges of ruling elites at the risk of imminent and
increasingly severe crises. In these conditions, migrants have been made into scapegoats, leading to
repressive anti- immigrant legislation and policies (Massey and Sánchez, 2006). A significant number of jobs
have been lost while the conditions of remaining jobs deteriorate and deportations increase. Migrants’ living standards have
drastically deteriorated but, contrary to expectations, there have been neither massive return flows nor a collapse in
remittances, though there is evidence that migrant worker flows have indeed diminished.
Democracy/Public Sphere Impact
Leads to facism and collapses
Giroux 6
[Henry A. Giroux, Symploke, 14.1/2 (2006) 98-151]
But there is even more at stake here than the obliteration of public concerns, the death of the social, the
emergence of a market-based fundamentalism that undercuts the ability of people to understand how to
translate privately experienced misery into collective action, and the elimination of the gains of the welfare
state. There is also the growing threat of displacing "political sovereignty with the sovereignty of the
market, as if the latter has a mind and morality of its own" (332). As democracy becomes a burden
under the reign of neoliberalism, civic discourse disappears, and the reign of unfettered social
Darwinism with its survival-of-the-slickest philosophy emerges as the template for a new form of protofascism. However, none of this will proceed further in the face of sufficient resistance. The increasing move toward
proto-fascism is not inevitable. It is rather the case that the conditions have been put into place for
democracy potentially to lose all semblance of meaning in the United States. [End Page 143]
Wars Impact
Neoliberal economic model makes global wars inevitable
Castles 3
(Stephen, Towards a Sociology of Forced Migration and Social Transformation, Sociology, Vol. 77, no. 1, pp. 13-34, 2003)
The context of this trend was the inability to achieve economic and social development and the failure
to build legitimate and stable states in large areas of the South. What Mary Caldor calls ‘the new wars’ are
usually internal wars connected with identity struggles, ethnic divisions, problems of state formation
and competition for economic assets. But they are simultaneously transnational as they involve diaspora
populations, foreign volunteers and mercenaries, and international intervention forces. They also draw in international
journalists, UN aid organizations, NGOs, and regional organizations. The means of warfare have also changed. The
protagonists are not large standing armies but irregular forces. The aim is not control of territory, but political control of the
population. Mass population expulsion is often a strategic goal, which is why the new wars have led to such an upsurge in
forced migration (Kaldor 2001). Ninety per cent of those killed are civilians. Both government forces and insurgents use
exemplary violence including torture and sexual assault as means of control. Many politicians and media commentators
saw the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Former Yugoslavia, Rwanda etc. as the resurgence of ‘age-old hatreds’. It
is more accurate to see such practices as systemic elements of a thoroughly modern new form of warfare
(Summerfield 1999). Northern economic interests (such as the trade in oil, diamonds, coltan or small arms) play an
important part in starting or prolonging local wars. At a broader level, trade, investment and intellectual property
regimes that favour the industrialised countries maintain underdevelopment in the South. Conflict and forced
migration are thus ultimately an integral part of the North-South division. This reveals the ambiguity of
efforts by the ‘international community’ (which essentially means the powerful Northern states and the intergovernmental
agencies) to prevent forced migration. They seek to do this through both entry restrictions in the North and ‘containment’
measures in the South. Containment includes humanitarian aid, peace-keeping missions and even military
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intervention. At the same time, the North does more to cause forced migration than to stop it, through enforcing an
international economic and political order that causes underdevelopment and conflict. However, violence and forced
migration also causes social transformation. They destroy economic resources, undermine traditional ways of life and break
up communities. Forced migration is thus a factor which deepens underdevelopment, weakens social bonds, and reduces
the capacity of communities and societies to achieve positive change. Post-conflict reconstruction rarely leads to restoration
of the pre-conflict situation, but rather to new and often problematic social relationships. The study of forced migration
therefore should be a central part of the sociology of development. Forced migration is a factor in social transformation in
an additional sense, as Mark Duffield has recently argued (Duffield 2001). Persistent underdevelopment in large parts of the
South is not an economic problem for the North, because these countries are largely disconnected from the global economy.
However, underdevelopment is increasingly seen as a threat to security in the North. This is because the
South connects with the North in unexpected and unwanted ways: through the proliferation of
transnational informal networks, such as international crime, the drug trade, people smuggling and
trafficking, as well as migrant networks which facilitate irregular mobility. Such phenomena are partly a result of
trends towards economic deregulation and privatisation in the North, which open up the space for informal
economies. The Al Qaida network can be seen as the very epitome of an undesirable transnational network, whose goals
and mode of operation would have been unthinkable in any earlier epoch. Duffield argues that the result is a fundamental
change in the objectives of both development policy and humanitarianism. Containment of forced migration through neutral
humanitarianism has failed. Similarly, the Washington Consensus – the neo-liberal credo of the World Bank and the IMF
that underdevelopment could be countered by economic growth based on foreign investments and export-led growth – has
proved mistaken. Humanitarianism and development policy have a new joint task: the transformation of whole societies in
order to prevent conflict and to achieve social and economic change. The principle of transforming whole societies was
contained in a remarkable lecture by the then Senior Vice-President of the World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz, in 1998. He argued
that development required fundamental shifts in cultural values and social relationships, and that it was the task of
international agencies to help bring these about (Stiglitz 1998). In the meantime, Stiglitz has left the World Bank and been
awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize for Economics. Development is now seen by Northern governments and international
agencies as impossible without security and peace. This means that humanitarian action and military
intervention can no longer attempt to be neutral. Rather, such interventions seek to restore peace at the
local level through imposing certain political and economic structures as part of a system of
‘networked global liberal governance’. This system has ‘a radical mission to transform societies as a whole,
including the attitudes and beliefs of the people within them’ (Duffield 2001). The price of being connected to
global economic and political networks is thus the adoption of Northern economic structures, political
institutions and value systems.
The quest to spread liberal forms of governance is implicated in a radically violent war machine.
Dillon and Reid 2000
(Michael and Julian, ”Global Governance, Liberal Peace, and Complex Emergency.” Alternatives. Vol. 25, Issue 1)
Complex emergencies are intimately related to the liberal peace of global governance.[ 1] They are said
to occur at the boundaries of liberal peace, where that regime of power encounters institutions, norms,
and practices that violently differ from its own. Global liberal governance does not, however, simply
encounter other so-called rogue states--such as Iraq, Libya, Serbia, or Iran--at the frontiers of the peace that it
celebrates. There has been a widely acknowledged weakening and dissolution of the state form in those regions of Africa
and Eurasia where complex emergencies are said to arise. That is among the reasons why liberal peace encounters what it
calls "complex emergencies" there. Here, liberal peace finds itself deeply implicated in a terrain of disorder in
which some states are powerful, some states are in radical dissolution, traditional societies are
collapsing and civil conflict is endemic, where international corporations and criminal cartels are also
deeply involved, and where international organizations and nongovernmental organizations are inextricably
committed as well. The authors of this article prefer to call these circumstances "emerging political complexes," because they are comprised of dynamic power relations that have long, often convoluted, and poorly understood
histories that are social and cultural as well as political and economic and that are simultaneously undergoing significant reformulation and change. The term complex emergency tends to elide these dynamics, often simplifying the vexed
political character of them. It does so typically by masking the complex implication of global liberal governance in them. The violent conflicts associated with such emerging political complexes are not simply the persistent recurrence, as so many
contemporary analysts are inclined to argue, of fixed and irresolvable historical hatreds. They are very much a function of the ways in which societies in dissolution, since they are at the turbulent confluence of local and global dynamics excited
by the diverse military, political, and economic practices of global liberal governance itself, are in consequence thereby subject to violent disorder and change. It is that change that engenders emerging political complexes. While radically
reformulating old identity myths and inventing new ones is a typical feature of such complexes, so giving the appearance of unchanging historical form, these are devices by which political and economic forces are mobilized everywhere in the
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face of change. That is why they are also an active part of the political processes by which emerging political complexes coalesce. It is however quite simplistic to think of them as peculiar to those regions where complex emergencies are said to
occur or the mere recurrence of unchanging historical truths there. These practices are part of the common currency of political mobilization in the domain of liberal peace as well. It therefore seems obvious that the radical and continuous
transformation of societies that global liberal governance so assiduously seeks must constitute a significant contribution to the very violence that it equally also deplores. The disorder of emerging political complexes is of course fueled by local
factors. In a world that has always been more or less interdependent, however, it would be grossly naive to think that local factors were ever permanently or totally isolated historically from global developments.[ 2] Much less so now, then, in
an age of virulent globalization. Global liberal governance is not, of course, a neutral phenomenon, indifferent to local cultures, traditions, and practices. Neither is it benignly disposed toward them. Rather, it has always been virulently
disruptive of them and aggressively related to them as much in moral as in economic and military terms. Much of the disorder that borders the domain of liberal peace is clearly also a function, therefore--albeit a fiercely contested function--of
its very own normative, political, economic, and military agendas, dynamics, and practices, and of the reverberations these excite throughout the world. It seems increasingly to be a function, specifically, of the way in which development is now
ideologically embraced by all of the diverse institutions of liberal peace as an unrelenting project of modernization.[ 3] The chief economist of the World Bank (Joseph Stiglitz) attacks the Washington Consensus on liberalization, stabilization, and
privatization in the world economy, for example, as too technical and too narrowly framed a development strategy. He espouses instead a new intensive as well as extensive policy committed to the unqualified and comprehensive
modernization and "transformation of traditional societies."[ 4] "Honesty, however requires me to add one more word. In calling for a transformation of societies, I have elided a central issue," Stiglitz had the candor to conclude, "transformation
to what kind of society and for what ends?" The impact of modernization on modern as well as traditional societies is, of course, as violent as the impact on global resources and global ecology. The values, practices, and investments that propel
such development nonetheless, however, are precisely what protect it from pursuing the key question, locally as well as globally, that Stiglitz posed in terms other than those that underwrite his very problematization of it. Pursued as a
deliberate policy of comprehensive social transformation, and of power projection, development becomes allied in novel ways via global liberal governance with geopolitical military and economic institutions and interests. The transformation is
therefore to be effected according to the current efficiency and performance criteria of good governance--economically and politically--set by the varied institutions of global liberal peace. In the process, sovereignty, as the traditional principle
of political formation whose science is law, is being supplemented by a network-based account of social organization whose principle of formation is "emergence" and whose science increasingly is that of complex adaptive systems.[ 5] These
ensure that the political issue posed by Stiglitz rarely progresses beyond an afterthought. This incendiary brew is currently also fueled by a resurgent liberal moralism. That moralism generates its own peculiar forms of liberal hypocrisy. These
include: the calling for intervention by the international community against Indonesian actions in East Timor while liberal states furnished Indonesian armed forces with the very means of carrying out those actions; and seeking to proscribe child
soldiers while failing to address the global arms economy that furnishes the children with their weapons. The vexed relation between liberalism and capitalism is also at issue once more since clearly, too, the globalization of markets and of
capitalism is intimately involved in the "complex emergencies" that global liberal governance seeks to police. …dilon and reid continue… As much attention is paid to civil-military communication and coordination and practices of political
negotiation in the development of the novel operational concepts and doctrines that such complex interventions require--quite literally, their very discursive formation at an operational level--as it is to traditional military requirements.
Moreover, liberalization has applied to military security in some areas and in some respects as much as it has applied to economics and social welfare. The complexification of conflict has also opened new commercial possibilities for the
provision of "security," and new security discourses, practices, and agencies have flourished as a consequence. Private armies have emerged and transnational security corporations now offer their services. States have contracted alliances with
commercial security organizations that offer assistance where formal state intervention, for whatever reason, is eschewed. Even international organizations avail themselves of the security advice and services that commercial security companies
offer, for example with respect to protecting food warehouses so that "spontaneous distribution" of food supplies does not occur.[ 8] Emerging political complexes in Africa and Eurasia have therefore become the "strange attractors" around
which novel security-development alliances of states, international organizations, international nongovernmental organizations, and local nongovernmental organizations have formed within the domain of liberal peace and at the interface of its
Global liberal governance thus responds to the turbulence of emerging political complexes
by forming its own emerging strategic complexes as a means of dealing with the instances of violence
that the densely mediated polities of the West periodically find unacceptable there, or in response to the
turbulent border terrain.[ 9]
security threats that they are generally said to pose. The resultant assemblages are often coalitions of the willing, the
accidental, and the ready to hand. Their formation and intervention are selective, influenced by media attention, and by
economic and geostrategic interests at least as much as by the calculation or anticipation of need. Such diverse multiple
international/interagency networks pose novel strategic and political questions not only for their own contingent formations
but also to the order of liberal peace as such. Their accounts of the sources of disorder are varied and conflicting, yet they
also offer new rationales for Western armed forces and their allied arms economies. The outcome can be quite
contradictory: military attaches can be committed both to selling arms and to selling "security reform" measures
designed to introduce Western-style policing, the rule of law, and demilitarization. Through the advent of such
emerging strategic complexes, development analysts have become as interested in conflict, war, and security as security
specialists have become interested in development economics, civil society, and conflict resolution.[ 10] In the process, the
liberal peace of global governance exposes its allied face of humanitarian war. An additional feature of these strategic
complexes is, however, also a deep and profound confusion about military purpose and military strategy. That in turn
promotes a new liberal bull market for strategic ideas in the aftermath of the dissolution of Cold War discourse.[ 11]
Already, then, discourses concerned to elucidate the practices and dynamics of interagency cooperation have emerged,
operational concepts and doctrines are formulated and disseminated, and manuals of good practice are officially adopted .
Accounts of the bureaucratic politics that characterize the intense interagency competition and rivalry that
accompany the formation and operation of such strategic complexes are also emerging. These relish the failure and
confusion that abounds in such circumstances, but simultaneously also appeal to it in order to fuel demands for
yet better governance, early warning of incipient conflicts, and more adaptive military might to deal with them. No
political formulation is therefore innocent. None refers to a truth about the world that preexists that
truth's entry into the world through discourse. Every formula is instead a clue to a truth. Each is crafted in the
context of a wider discursive economy of meaning. Tug at the formula, the pull in the fabric begins to disclose the way in
which it has been woven. The artefactual design of the truth it proclaims then emerges. We are therefore dealing with
something much more than a mere matter of geo- political fact when encountering the vocabulary of complex emer- gency
in the discourse of global governance and liberal peace. We are not talking about a discrete class of unproblematic actions.
Neither are we discussing certain forms of intractable conflicts. The formula complex emergency does of course address
certain kinds of violent disorder. That disorder is not our direct concern. Recall with Foucault and many other thinkers that
an economy of mean- ing is no mere idealist speculation. It is a material political pro- duction integral to a specific political
economy of power.
Global War/Genocide Impact
Neoliberalism will cause genocides globally
Pramon (Prof @ School of Social Science, The Australian National University) 3
(Siswo, The Genocidal Global Politics and Neoliberalism, Journal of Economic and Social Research 4 (2), 115-138)
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The neoliberal global politics can also incite to the desire to protect the psychological self such as identity and self-esteem
(Staub, 1989). Protection against who? A protection against the perceived hegemon, for one, can give rise to the desire for
harm doing as suggested in the previous point. But, worse, often "it employs such 'internal', psychological means as
scape-goating or devaluation of others, which eventually provides a basis for violence against them" (Staub, 1989: 39).
Those who attempt to protect the psychological self can arbitrarily determine the "others", which might include minority
and unwanted groups, which have nothing to do with the provoking hegemon. Thus, for instance, facing the mounting US
military threat at the end of 2001, the anti-American sentiment within the Taliban regime was directed against the nonPhustun Afganis such as Hazaris, Tajiks and Uzbeks. And in the 1991 Gulf War, the anti-American sentiment within the
Iraqi regime was directed against the Kurd minority. The next instigating factor to observe is the question of (in)justice.
A sense of injustice can incite resentment, anger, and violence (Staub, 1989). For instance, following the political reform
in 1998, Indonesia is becoming more democratic but poor. Yet, it is the democratisation —more than the
simplistically alleged radicalism— which gives rise to the anti-American sentiment. More and more Indonesians
dare to challenge, although with little success, the practice of US neoliberal global politics. Why should Indonesians who
work for an American leading sportswear company in Indonesia be paid less than US$ 2.00 per day for a product worth
US$ 45 - US 80 in American market? (McKinley, 2001). Aside from the question of (in)justice, the rising anti-American
sentiment in Indonesia, and in the third world in general, which has sometimes led to violence, should be viewed as a
result of frustration, acute deprivation, and sense of powerlessness. Such psychological conditions will motivate peoples
to regain a sense of personal efficacy and personal power. If people feel vulnerable to diseases, poverty, the
constant threat of military pre-emptive strikes and weapons of mass-destruction, and, ultimately, death,
then killing (eg, homicide, genocide) "may give the killer a feeling of invulnerability and power over [the]
death" itself (Staub, 1989: 41). Such killings elusively help improve a sense of personal power. And this personal power
is a psychological tool to help survive the increasing uncertainty, anarchy or chaos. "Chaos, disorder and sudden
profound changes, especially when accompanied by frustration, threat, and attack," for Staub (1989: 41), "invalidate the
conceptions of self and world that serve as guides by which new experience acquires meaning and life gains coherence."
As such, chaotic changes from a society based on the value of work to a workless society, as discussed in the previous
section, would trigger moral panic until the arrival (or the acceptance) of a 'new' ideology that is perceived as able to
provide a renewed comprehension. If you were deprived from material gain, why would you not embrace something
against (or destroy) all kinds of material gain? (eg, the case of Taliban anti-modernisation policy in Afghanistan) If you
were deprived of a better life (and in no way can attain this) why would not you embrace a sub-culture that destroys all
kinds of lives (eg, the case of terrorist ideology). In either case, albeit suicidal- genocidal, you were no longer a loser.
Thus, the neoliberal global politics help the appeal of such destructive (and murderous) ideology in the
decaying society. The point is that not only is the neoliberal theory-as-practice genocidal, as depicted in
the previous sections, but also it inflicts difficult life conditions that increase the severity of the existing
global genocide. Most big cases of genocide happened in the backdrop of difficult life conditions.
Turkey committed genocide against the Armenians after years of humiliation —losses of territory, power, and global
political status— before and during the World War I. Difficult life condition following the defeat of Germany in World
War I helped Hitler's rise to power. And the Holocaust was committed in the years when Germany was losing World War
II. In Cambodia, the Polpot regime committed genocide in 1970s after years of civil war, starvation, and misery. In
Argentina, severe economic problems preceded genocide (Staub, 1989). In Rwanda, the collapse of the coffee
industry, the country's main national earning, preceded genocide. And in Indonesia, symptoms of genocidal society have
been apparent since the collapse of the national economy following the Asian economic meltdown in 1997. With the
neoliberal theory-as-practice, genocidal global politics is materialised and intensified.
Racism/Biopower Impact
Neoliberalism creates a racist biopolitics
Bourassa (University of Utah Salt Lake City) 11
(GREGORY N. , Rethinking the Curricular Imagination: Curriculum and Biopolitics in the Age of Neoliberalism, 25 JAN 2011,
Curriculum Inquiry, Volume 41, Issue 1, pages 5–16, January 2011)
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Youth in a Suspect Society marks a continuation of Giroux's recent interests in the resurgence of authoritarianism, marketbased logics of disposability, and a biopolitics of neoliberalism. The convergence of these concepts, for Giroux, is
accompanied by a fundamental shift from an imperfect social state to a ruthless market state. This shift, from “state
sovereignty” to “market sovereignty” is characterized by a disinvestment in the public sphere. In this configuration,
anything pertaining to the public is not only neglected but also met with great disdain. As an economic logic, neoliberalism
invades the public sphere, invalidating and enclosing that which cannot be filtered through a market rationality. Here,
neoliberalism meets biopolitics in that politics distances itself from social governance—withdrawing from a commitment to
protect its citizens—and increasingly resorts to governing populations through the economic reign of the market. In this
cruel landscape that Giroux calls the biopolitics of neoliberalism, the social state ceases to exist only to be
replaced by a corporate state that is intent on warding off democratic sensibilities and enclosing the few
spheres of the public that remain. Giroux's conceptual mapping of a biopolitics of neoliberalism contains yet another
important element. Excluded from social and political life, those populations marginalized by class and race are
reduced from the status of citizens to waste, or in Agamben's (1998) terms, from bios (social and political life) to
zoē (life without quality). Rendered disposable under a biopolitics of neoliberalism, marginalized populations are
vulnerable to Agamben's formulation of biopolitics as thanatopolitics. Giroux, rightfully taking Agamben's biopolitics
seriously in this instance, draws here from Achille Mbembe (2003), who argues that “vast populations are subject to
conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead” (p. 40). In short, a neoliberal biopolitics
of disposability ushers in forms of social death, rendering populations expendable, without support,
protection, or compassion. In Giroux's account, such a biopolitical order abandons populations under the guise that they
represent the refuse of a neoliberal economic regime. This epitomizes, for Giroux, a complete violation of ethical
responsibility and obligation to youth and the democratic future to come.
A2: Heg Good
Hegemonic stability theory is wrong and racist
Lutz (professor of anthropology at Brown University and the Watson Institute for International Studies) 9
(Catherine, The Bases of Empire p. 29)
The reasons given for stationing U.S. forces overseas, though, cannot simply be called wrong. While the weight of evidence
just briefly reviewed suggests that they are, the pursuit of th e immense project of circling the globe with soldiers
and equipment is fueled as much by mythic structures as by reason and rationality. It then becomes difficult
to distinguish one from the other. While such myths may be invalidated by rational argumentation, their explanatory power
often remains powerfully intact. Support for foreign military bases hinges first on the idea that war is often
necessary and ultimately inevitable. It is widely believed that humans are naturally violent and that war can be a
glorious and good venture. Racism adds the notion that the modern and not coincidentally white
nations have the responsibility, intelligence, religious ethic, and right to control more primitive (and more
chaotically violent) others through violence if necessary. These racial ideas made it possible for people
in the United States and Europe to support colonial exterminationist wars in the nineteenth century, but to find wars
between indus- trialized or civilized states increasingly unthinkable during the late nineteenth century (despite what went
on to happen in the twentieth). They also underpin the assumption that Gusterson (1999) has labeled “nuclear
orientalism,” which holds that only the United States and European powers can truly be trusted with nuclear weapons.
Such beliefs provide important foundation stones for support of the U.S. basing system.16
Hegemonic competition makes global structural violence inevitable
Lutz (Research Professor at the Watson Institute for International Studies and Professor of Anthropology at Brown University) 9
(Catherine, US Bases and Empire: Global Perspectives on the Asia Pacific, The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 12-3-09, March 16, 2009.
http://old.japanfocus.org/-Catherine_Lutz/3086)
Much about our current world is unparalleled: holes in the ozone layer, the commercial patenting of life forms, degrading
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poverty on a massive scale, and, more hopefully, the rise of concepts of global citizenship and universal human rights. Less
visible but equally unprecedented is the global omnipresence and unparalleled lethality of the U.S. military, and the
ambition with which it is being deployed around the world. These bases bristle with an inventory of weapons whose
worth is measured in the trillions and whose killing power could wipe out all life on earth several times
over. Their presence is meant to signal, and at times demonstrate, that the US is able and willing to attempt to control
events in other regions militarily. The start of a new administration in Washington, and the possibility that world economic
depression will give rise to new tensions and challenges, provides an important occasion to review the global structures of
American power.Officially, over 190,000 troops and 115,000 civilian employees are massed in 909 military facilities in 46
countries and territories. There, the US military owns or rents 795,000 acres of land, and 26,000 buildings and structures
valued at $146 billion. These official numbers are quite misleading as to the scale of US overseas military basing,
however, excluding as they do the massive buildup of new bases and troop presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as
secret or unacknowledged facilities in Israel, Kuwait, the Philippines and many other places. $2 billion in military
construction money has been expended in only three years of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Just one facility in Iraq, Balad
Air Base, houses 30,000 troops and 10,000 contractors, and extends across 16 square miles with an additional 12 square
mile “security perimeter.”Deployed from those battle zones in Afghanistan and Iraq to the quiet corners of Curacao, Korea,
and England, the US military domain consists of sprawling Army bases, small listening posts, missile and artillery testing
ranges, and berthed aircraft carriers. While the bases are literally barracks and weapons depots and staging areas for war
making and ship repair facilities and golf courses and basketball courts, they are also political claims, spoils of war, arms
sales showrooms, toxic industrial sites, laboratories for cultural (mis)communication, and collections of customers for local
bars, shops, and prostitution. The environmental, political, and economic impact of these bases is enormous and, despite
Pentagon claims that the bases simply provide security to the regions they are in, most of the world’s people feel
anything but reassured by this global reach. Some communities pay the highest price: their farm
land taken for bases, their children neurologically damaged by military jet fuel in their water supply, their
neighbors imprisoned, tortured and disappeared by the autocratic regimes that survive on US military and
political support given as a form of tacit rent for the bases. Global opposition to U.S. basing has been
widespread and growing, however, and this essay provides an overview of both the worldwide network of U.S.
military bases and the vigorous campaigns to hold the U.S. accountable for that damage and to reorient
their countries’ security policies in other, more human, and truly secure directions.
And that’s the root cause of global violence
Davis (Department of Geography and Environmental Science, University of Hawaii) 11
(Sasha, The US military base network and contemporary colonialism: Power projection, resistance and the quest for operational
unilateralism, Political Geography xxx (2011))
In this analysis of the shifting US military base network I have endeavored to examine the impacts and resistances going
on in these “towns and villages” so as to better understand the US military’s global network. As geographers have long
been aware, acting at the global or local scale is not an either/or choice: acting in the world at any scale has ramifications
at a variety of scales. Increasingly, local anti-militarization groups have recognized this and have started to more formally
engage in activism at a variety of other scales including the global. At the global conference against military bases in 2007
activists put forward the view that the global imperial present is held together by violences committed in
(colonized) place. That violence may be wielded globally, but it is produced at local sites.
Furthermore, its operation relies on particular sites being legitimately seen as landscapes of emptiness or
sacrifice. So when people resist these interpretations of place and claim them as places of life it not
only makes everyday life more tolerable but also has repercussions at other scales. The military has
currently been able to use its ability to spatially shif t its activities to maintain its domination. Activists, however, are
attempting to incorporate a global vision into their movements so that local victories do not become
someone else’s loss; rather they become the beginning of the empire’s unraveling.
This is the largest proximal cause of genocide and interstate war
Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois (Prof of Anthropology @ Cal-Berkely; Prof of Anthropology @ UPenn) 4
(Nancy and Philippe, Introduction: Making Sense of Violence, in Violence in War and Peace, pg. 19-22)
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This large and at first sight “messy” Part VII is central to this anthology’s thesis. It encompasses everything from the
routinized, bureaucratized, and utterly banal violence of children dying of hunger and maternal despair in Northeast Brazil
(Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33) to elderly African Americans dying of heat stroke in Mayor Daly’s version of US apartheid
in Chicago’s South Side (Klinenberg, Chapter 38) to the racialized class hatred expressed by British Victorians in their
olfactory disgust of the “smelly” working classes (Orwell, Chapter 36). In these readings violence is located in the symbolic
and social structures that overdetermine and allow the criminalized drug addictions, interpersonal bloodshed, and racially
patterned incarcerations that characterize the US “inner city” to be normalized (Bourgois, Chapter 37 and Wacquant,
Chapter 39). Violence also takes the form of class, racial, political self-hatred and adolescent self-destruction (Quesada,
Chapter 35), as well as of useless (i.e. preventable), rawly embodied physical suffering, and death (Farmer, Chapter 34).
Absolutely central to our approach is a blurring of categories and distinctions between wartime and
peacetime violence. Close attention to the “little” violences produced in the structures, habituses, and
mentalites of everyday life shifts our attention to pathologies of class, race, and gender inequalities.
More important, it interrupts the voyeuristic tendencies of “violence studies” that risk publicly humiliating the powerless
who are often forced into complicity with social and individual pathologies of power because suffering is often a solvent of
human integrity and dignity. Thus, in this anthology we are positing a violence continuum comprised of a multitude of
“small wars and invisible genocides” (see also Scheper- Hughes 1996; 1997; 2000b) conducted in the normative social
spaces of public schools, clinics, emergency rooms, hospital wards, nursing homes, courtrooms, public registry offices,
prisons, detention centers, and public morgues. The violence continuum also refers to the ease with which humans are
capable of reducing the socially vulnerable into expendable nonpersons and assuming the license - even the duty - to
kill, maim, or soul-murder. We realize that in referring to a violence and a genocide continuum we are flying in the
face of a tradition of genocide studies that argues for the absolute uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust and for vigilance
with respect to restricted purist use of the term genocide itself (see Kuper 1985; Chaulk 1999; Fein 1990; Chorbajian 1999).
But we hold an opposing and alternative view that, to the contrary, it is absolutely necessary to make just such
existential leaps in purposefully linking violent acts in normal times to those of abnormal times. Hence
the title of our volume: Violence in War and in Peace. If (as we concede) there is a moral risk in overextending the concept
of “genocide” into spaces and corners of everyday life where we might not ordinarily think to find it (and there is), an
even greater risk lies in failing to sensitize ourselves, in misrecognizing protogenocidal practices and
sentiments daily enacted as normative behavior by “ordinary” good-enough citizens. Peacetime crimes,
such as prison construction sold as economic development to impoverished communities in the mountains and deserts of
California, or the evolution of the criminal industrial complex into the latest peculiar institution for managing race relations
in the United States (Waquant, Chapter 39), constitute the “small wars and invisible genocides” to which we
refer. This applies to African American and Latino youth mortality statistics in Oakland, California, Baltimore, Washington
DC, and New York City. These are “invisible” genocides not because they are secreted away or hidden
from view, but quite the opposite. As Wittgenstein observed, the things that are hardest to perceive are
those which are right before our eyes and therefore taken for granted. In this regard, Bourdieu’s partial and
unfinished theory of violence (see Chapters 32 and 42) as well as his concept of misrecognition is crucial to our task. By
including the normative everyday forms of violence hidden in the minutiae of “normal” social practices - in the architecture
of homes, in gender relations, in communal work, in the exchange of gifts, and so forth - Bourdieu forces us to reconsider
the broader meanings and status of violence, especially the links between the violence of everyday life and explicit political
terror and state repression, Similarly, Basaglia’s notion of “peacetime crimes” - crimini di pace - imagines a direct
relationship between wartime and peacetime violence. Peacetime crimes suggests the possibility that war crimes
are merely ordinary, everyday crimes of public consent applied systematically and dramatically in the
extreme context of war. Consider the parallel uses of rape during peacetime and wartime, or the family resemblances
between the legalized violence of US immigration and naturalization border raids on “illegal aliens” versus the US
government- engineered genocide in 1938, known as the Cherokee “Trail of Tears.” Peacetime crimes suggests that
everyday forms of state violence make a certain kind of domestic peace possible. Internal “stability” is purchased with the
currency of peacetime crimes, many of which take the form of professionally applied “strangle-holds.” Everyday forms of
state violence during peacetime make a certain kind of domestic “peace” possible. It is an easy-to-identify peacetime crime
that is usually maintained as a public secret by the government and by a scared or apathetic populace. Most subtly, but no
less politically or structurally, the phenomenal growth in the United States of a new military, postindustrial prison industrial
complex has taken place in the absence of broad-based opposition, let alone collective acts of civil disobedience. The
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public consensus is based primarily on a new mobilization of an old fear of the mob, the mugger, the
rapist, the Black man, the undeserving poor. How many public executions of mentally deficient
prisoners in the United States are needed to make life feel more secure for the affluent? What can it
possibly mean when incarceration becomes the “normative” socializing experience for ethnic minority youth in a society,
i.e., over 33 percent of young African American men (Prison Watch 2002). In the end it is essential that we
recognize the existence of a genocidal capacity among otherwise good-enough humans and that we
need to exercise a defensive hypervigilance to the less dramatic, permitted, and even rewarded everyday acts of
violence that render participation in genocidal acts and policies possible (under adverse political or economic
conditions), perhaps more easily than we would like to recognize. Under the violence continuum we include,
therefore, all expressions of radical social exclusion, dehumanization, depersonal- ization,
pseudospeciation, and reification which normalize atrocious behavior and violence toward others. A
constant self-mobilization for alarm, a state of constant hyperarousal is, perhaps, a reasonable response
to Benjamin’s view of late modern history as a chronic “state of emergency” (Taussig, Chapter 31).
A2: Econ Collpase
Collapse of neoliberalism is inevitable because of economic and environmental trends – multiple
structural trends make resuscitation impossible, which means its try-or-die for the alt
Li ‘10
(Minqi, Chinese Political Economist, world-systems analyst, and historical social scientist, currently an associate professor of
Economics at the University of Utah “The End of the “End of History”: The Structural Crisis of Capitalism and the Fate of
Humanity”, Science and Society Vol. 74, No. 3, July 2010, 290–305)
In 2001, the U. S. stock market bubble started to collapse, after years of “new economy” boom. The Bush
administration took advantage of the psychological shock of 9/11, and undertook a series of “preemptive wars”
(first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq) that ushered in a new era of intensified inter-state conflicts. Towards the end of 2001,
Argentina, which was regarded as a neoliberal model country, was hit by a devastating financial crisis.
Decades of neoliberalism had not only undermined the living standards of the working classes, but also destroyed the
material fortunes of the urban middle classes (which remained a key social base for neoliberalism in Latin America until the
1990s). After the Argentine crisis, neoliberalism completely lost political legitimacy in Latin America.
This paved the way for the rise of several socialist-oriented governments on the continent. After the 2001 global
recession, the global economy actually entered into a mini–golden age. The big semi-peripheral economies, the
so-called “BRICs” (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) became the most dynamic sector. The neoliberal global
economy was fueled by the super-exploitation of the massive cheap labor force in the semi-periphery
(especially in China). The strategy worked, to the extent that it generated massive amounts of surplus value that
could be shared by the global capitalist classes. But it also created a massive “realization problem.” That is, as
the workers in the “emerging markets” were deprived of purchasing power, on a global scale, there was a
persistent lack of effective demand for the industrial output produced in China and the rest of the semiperiphery. After 2001, the problem was addressed through increasingly higher levels of debt-financed
consumption in the advanced capitalist countries (especially in the United States). The neoliberal strategy was
economically and ecologically unsustainable. Economically, the debt-financed consumption in the
advanced capitalist countries could not go on indefinitely. Ecologically, the rise of the BRICs greatly
accelerated resource depletion and environmental degradation on a global scale. The global ecological
system is now on the verge of total collapse. The world is now in the midst of a prolonged period of economic
and political instability that could last several decades. In the past, the capitalist world system had responded to
similar crises and managed to undertake successful restructurings. Is it conceivable that the current crisis will
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result in a similar restructuring within the system that will bring about a new global “New Deal”? In three respects, the
current world historical conjuncture is fundamentally different from that of 1945. Back in 1945, the United
States was the indisputable hegemonic power. It enjoyed overwhelming industrial, financial, and military
advantages relative to the other big powers and, from the capitalist point of view, its national interests largely coincided
with the world system’s common and long-term interests. Now, U. S. hegemony is in irreversible decline. But
none of the other big powers is in a position to replace the United States and function as an effective
hegemonic power. Thus, exactly at a time when the global capitalist system is in deep crisis, the system is
also deprived of effective leadership.4 In 1945, the construction of a global “New Deal” involved
primarily accommodating the economic and political demands of the western working classes and the nonwestern elites (the national bourgeoisies and the westernized intellectuals). In the current conjuncture, any new global
“New Deal” will have to incorporate not only the western working classes but also the massive, nonwestern working classes. Can the capitalist world system afford such a new “New Deal” if it could not
even afford the old one? Most importantly, back in 1945, the world’s resources remained abundant and
cheap, and there was still ample global space for environmental pollution. Now, not only has resource
depletion reached an advanced stage, but the world has also virtually run out of space for any further
environmental pollution.
Attempting to resolve short term economic collapse papers over massive ongoing structural violence of
capitalism
Shannon and Volcano (editor of the Routledge journal Contemporary Anarchist Studies; member of the Workers Solidarity
Alliance and Queers without Borders) 12
(Deric and Abby, Capitalism in the 2000s in The Accumulation of Freedom, pg. 87-88)
As Asimakopoulos explains in this collection, capitalism is prone to periodic "crises." This isn't necessarily a new
insight-a. system based on capital investments creates "bubbles" in expanding industries (i.e., housing, the "dot corn boom,"
etc.) that cannot last, but that investors want to make a quick buck off (or a few million, for that matter). When these
bubbles "burst" (when they are no longer profitable), investors stop raking in profits and this can lead to economic
downturns-to recessions or, in the case of the current crisis, depressions.
But what do we mean with this discourse of"crisis?" A quick look at the ultra-rich doesn't show a drastic reduction in
comfort and lifestyle. And while unemployment, poverty; precarity, and privation are affecting larger sections of the
world's population, those problems are business as usual for a significant portion of the world. And yet we declare
capitalism in "crisis" now, For children working in sweatshops, for entire countries struggling with
food insecurity and hunger, for continents grappling with an AIDS crisis that disproportionately affects
our most marginalized populations, for trafficked women and children, for queer youth struggling to
obtain basic resources and kicked out of their homes by fundamentalist parents, for those people living
with the legacy of colonization and slavery-for the majority of the world's inhabitants capitalism IS
the crisis. But the discourse of "crisis" isn't employed until it starts hurting the collective bottom line of the wealthy.
'This, in and of itself, can be used as an opportunity to discuss the need for socialist alternatives. And the truth is that
capitalism requires these "crises" to function. People talk about events like the 1987 stock market crash, the
Asian financial crisis of 1997, and the dot-corn and housing bubbles and bursts as though they are anomalies. These things
are regular features of capitalism. And those not at the top tiers of our global class system (about 95 percent of the world)
are experiencing crisis every single day-a constant crisis of sorts. So the discourse surrounding crises themselves
seem to uphold that capitalism is more or less functioning the rest of the time. More and more people are
coming to the realization that this is not the case-and we need to be pressing this point as we battle against austerity. If we
want to avoid "austerity," we need to smash capitalism to pieces. No amount of good-hearted reform or
Keynesian policy is going to substantively address the social crisis that is capitalism.
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***Alt***
Reject Neolib Subjectivity Alt Ext.
Our alternative is to reject neoliberal subjectivity
Dilts (Collegiate Assistant Professor, University of Chicago) 10
(Andrew, From ‘entrepreneur of the self’ to ‘care of the self’: Neoliberal Governmentality and Foucault’s Ethics,
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1580709, Western Political Science Association 2010 Annual Meeting Paper)
In this same interview, Foucault was asked directly about the relationship between the lectures on liberalism and neoliberalism and its connection to the work on sexuality.5 He was asked if “liberalism seemed to be a detour taken to discover
the individual beyond the mechanisms of power,” noting that it was at this point that, “one began to speak of a subject of
practices, and the rereading of liberalism took place somewhat in that context.” This is not at all a surprising question, as
the idea of homo œconomicus seems to be precisely a rejection of the idea of the sovereign, psychological, anthropological,
or phenomenological subject. Foucault’s response is fascinating: I don’t think there is actually a sovereign, founding
subject, a universal form of subject that one could find everywhere. I am very skeptical and very hostile toward this
conception of the subject. I think, on the contrary that the subject is constituted through practices of subjection, or, in a
more anonymous way, through practices of liberation, of freedom, as in Antiquity, starting of course from a number of
rules, styles and conventions that are found in the culture (Foucault 1996, 452). Foucault makes no mention of homo
œconomicus here, and yet the figure seems to be implied and rejected in the same move. The neo-liberal homo
œconomicus is surely a universal form of the subject, as it is driven by a theory of human capital that
extends to any and all persons who make decisions about their activities within a scope of temporal
and material conditions. As a universalizing figure, Foucault can easily be read as “hostile” to such a sweeping move.
Yet it is precisely the attention to the human capital theory that reminds us that this neo-liberal homo œconomicus is
a subject that is constituted primarily through practices. The key term, of course, is if the practices of neo-liberal
rationality are rightly called practices of “subjection.” Certainly, Becker and Schultz understood all practices as being
fundamentally expressions of freedom, that is, as choices. For the neo-liberals (and in fact, many classical liberals before
them), freedom is expressed precisely through choice (and in fact, might be radically coincident with choice). The
antitheses of freedom, as Schultz repeatedly reminds his readers, is slavery and servitude, instances in which the theory of
human capital takes on its more nefarious tones. A slave or an indentured servant is unfree precisely because they are
unable to choose their daily activities. What Foucault seems to be expressly attending to in the account of a subject formed
through practices is the way in which freedom is only achieved through practices of the self that proceed from the “rules,
styles, and conventions” of a particular culture. To identify what practices constitute free practices requires (as
he sets out to do in The Care of the Self in particular) an account of how some practices can be understood as
ones that allow access to a self that is not sovereign, but which “takes care of oneself” as a way of
“knowing oneself.” That is, the truth of a practice as a “free” practice requires precisely an account of the specific rules
and practices of a specific milieu, of the truth games or regimes of veridiction that are in play. That is, as a subject that
forms him or herself, but precisely by never appearing to be “beyond the mechanism of power.” If our
current milieu, at least in terms of its dominant mode of governmental reason, is one in which we are, from the point of
view of the exercise of power, individuals whose conducts are to be determined in relation to the rules of the games, then it
requires us to think not just about how to resist the use of power, but how to conduct ourselves under those rules. That is,
if we must accept some degree of the neo-liberal understanding of the subject, then we must think very
seriously about the care of the self, about the kinds of individuals that we form ourselves into - never
forgetting, however, that we are constrained, that we are already governable, or that we can succumb to
something that forms and reforms us. We must take part in that work ethically rather than
satisfactorily. That is, as an ethical activity rather than a purely consumptive activity.
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Counter-Surveillance Alt Solvency
It can be good and empowering
Monahan et al 10 (Prof of Communication at UNC; Faculty of Information, University of Toronto; Surveillance Studies Centre,
Queen’s University)
(Torin Monahan, David J. Phillips and David Murakami Wood. 2010. Editorial: Surveillance and Empowerment. Surveillance &
Society 8(2): 106-112)
Surveillance is used by institutions to understand and manage complex environments and populations, from traffic patterns
to consumer habits to weather systems. Surveillance can be empowering if it allows a population or a
community to better understand itself and its environment, and to call to account those who are
adversely affecting that environment. For instance, the monitoring of air quality and water pollution,
when coupled with alert mechanisms, could function as a form of surveillance of environmental
conditions that improves public health, even if the affluent are more likely to benefit from such systems (Monahan
and Mokos 2010). Similarly, web interfaces, like Scorecard.org, render information about toxic release
inventories accessible so that people can monitor pollution and polluters in their communities and
mobilize for polluter accountability and environmental cleanup (Monahan 2010a). But environmental data do
not make sense of themselves. Surveillance involves not merely data collection, but creating social meaning from the data,
and using that meaning to inform action. Data must be interpreted and that interpretation deployed. Therefore
empowering surveillance becomes an exercise in “semiotic democracy” (Phillips 2009). Related to this,
Ottinger, in this issue, shows the struggles and negotiations in meaning making of environmental data in three realms – in
defining issues, in enforcing laws, and in informing individual choice.5
Also in this issue, Skoric et al pursue this notion of environmental surveillance and distributed data collection in a very
different realm. Their article addresses the conditions and consequences, not of the imposition of norms on individuals by
large institutions like states or corporations, nor of individuals and communities monitoring the actions of institutions, but
of the enforcement of community norms through public shaming. In this situation, the power to monitor, publicize, or
normalize is peer-based, as vigilantes publicize the anti-social habits of litterers and those with egregious parking habits.
Pervasive computing systems also possess potentials for catalyzing social empowerment. Although current technological
trajectories would suggest that such computing system would be used to further divide societies or sort populations
according to market or security logics, this does not have to be the case. In the spirit of universal design, pervasive
computing could de-marginalize the elderly, for instance, by providing an infrastructure to reduce dependencies that
diminish autonomy while still supporting dependencies that build social ties. Instead of trying to police the elderly with
electronic “wander guards” or pharmaceutical delivery systems, systems that afforded the elderly enhanced mobility and
opportunities to selectively communicate with caregivers could build relationships of trust and allow older members of
society to age in place (Kenner 2008). This facilitates a co-ownership of place, which Albrechtslund and Glud address
further. Their article in this issue suggests that residents of marginalized communities can use GPS-enabled
smartphones to create user-generated maps that visualize their experience of the neighborhood. This
makes their experience, their lives, visible in a way useful to themselves, justifying and facilitating
their engagement in planning initiatives, and allowing them to persuasively intervene in networks of
influence.
Systems that afford critical awareness of one’s exposure to extractive forms of surveillance might also be thought of as
empowering. For example, Gregory Donovan has a participatory action research project called MyDigitalFootprint.org that
seeks to counter prominent government, civic, and corporate cybersafety campaigns that simplistically encourage parents to
monitor and police their children. Donovan explains:
As young people are already present in cyberspace and often with more experiential knowledge than their guardians and
gatekeepers, MyDigitalFootprint.org situates young people as active participants rather than pre-scripted victims or
criminals, as “netizens” who have to cohabitate with monsters (be they online predators, cyberterrorists, or dataaggregating social networks) in a public environment. (Donovan 2009) While it could be misconstrued as encouraging
disciplinary self-surveillance, this project instead invites youth to take stock of their own information environments, define
problems according to their own criteria, and seek collective solutions to reassert information control.
Even surveillance systems that have long been associated with covert military functions can be
appropriated for social justice and empowerment goals. Earth remote sensing (ERS) satellite systems offer a
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case in point. As Lane DeNicola describes, imagery activists are harnessing ERS to assist with “environmental
forensics, public disclosure, counter-mapping, urban ecosystem analysis, and the coordination of community data
collection efforts” (DeNicola 2009). For instance, genocides can be documented and represented through such systems,
transforming what might be thought of as hidden or contested knowledge into information demanding action and
intervention. The “Crisis in Darfur” project, sponsored by Google and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, shows the
persuasive force of such imagery, provoking this affirmation from former President George W. Bush: “millions of Internet
users around the world will be able to zoom in and see satellite images of the burnt-out villages and mosques and schools.
No one who sees these pictures can doubt that genocide is the only word for what is happening in Darfur -- and that we
have a moral obligation to stop it” (Graham 2010). And while solid critiques can be made about the Crisis in Darfur project,
such as it “reproduces problematic Western tropes of African tragedy and misses an opportunity to generate public literacy
around satellite images,” (Parks 2009) the potentials for empowering surveillance remain. Another compelling example of
imagery activism is the SkyTruth project, which uses satellite imagery to document oil-spill disasters and
overdevelopment in the American Midwest by multinational petroleum companies. Walsh, in this issue,
takes a similar tack, studying how sophisticated surveillance systems along the U.S.-Mexico border can be
used to monitor and resist both state agencies and vigilante organizations, and to directly assist
migrants in danger.
Many examples
Monahan 11 (Professor of Communication at UNC)
(T., SURVEILLANCE AS CULTURAL PRACTICE. The Sociological Quarterly, 52: 495–508. doi: 10.1111/j.15338525.2011.01216.x)
If one employs a symmetrical approach to research (Bloor 1991), however, then the set of technologies, techniques, and
practices that the field calls “surveillance” should be identified and studied as such when deployed by individuals or groups
operating outside government or corporate organizations (Monahan, Phillips, and Murakami Wood 2010). Surveillance can
be defined as the systematic monitoring of people or groups in order to regulate or govern their behavior. This is but one
possible definition, of course, but it is useful for being agnostic about the subjects and objects of scrutiny and control.
Surveillance can be mobilized to repress populations or bring about conditions of collective empowerment; it can be used
by people occupying positions of high institutional status or by those excluded from traditional arenas of power and
influence.
From this perspective, surveillance can serve democratic or empowering ends if it brings about openness, transparency,
accountability, participation, and power equalization among social groups and institutions (Monahan 2010a). For example,
Gwen Ottinger (2010) writes about grassroots monitoring of air quality by people living near oil refineries in Louisiana,
which when coupled with some control over the criteria for deciding what constitutes a health risk has the potential to
empower residents, regulate polluting industries, and make communities safer. In another example, James Walsh (2010)
shows how progressive activist groups engage in technological surveillance of the U.S.–Mexico border, border agents, and
vigilantes to prevent immigrant deaths, by using geographic information systems, for instance, to determine where to site
water stations. Lane DeNicola (2009) investigates activists' use of earth remote sensing satellite systems, long associated
with military operations, to engage in environmental forensics and counter-mapping efforts to render visible environmental
disasters, overdevelopment, and even genocide, subsequently introducing a valence for community and government
intervention.3
This section sketched a rough continuum for research emerging from the social studies of surveillance: from the intentions
and practices of the watchers, to the experiences and (re)actions of the watched, to the proactive mobilization of
surveillance from below. One problem with this narrative, other than being partial and artificially linear, is that it does not
adequately account for the thorough integration of surveillance into social worlds, not as a set of tools to be used for
instrumental ends but as forms of life in their own right.
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2NC Neolib Not Inev
Massive networks of oppressed people are coalescing throughout the world now – what they lack is a
clear vision to counter neoliberal development.
Wise 9 (Director of Doctoral Program in Migration Studies & Prof of Development Studies; Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas,
Mexico)
(Raúl Delgado, Forced Migration and US Imperialism: The Dialectic of Migration and Development, Crit Sociol, 35: 767, ProQuest)
The profound need for change in the structural dynamics and strategic practices at work in the current schemes of regional
integration and neoliberal national development have given way to two types of social agents, which can be
separated into two groups: those ‘from above’ and those ‘from below’. The current economic project has clearly been
implemented ‘from above’ by the agents of US imperialism in tandem with Mexican allies. They work within a political
coalition that seeks to maintain the privileges of neoliberal integration and push them to its very limits. In short, this is an
actual class project that promotes economic asymmetries, social inequalities and phenomena such as poverty,
unemployment, labor precarization and migration. In contrast, those ‘below’ – particularly in Mexico – are mostly
unhappy and disenchanted, although they sometimes engage in open acts of opposition, resistance, and
rebellion. It is true that there is currently no collective agent that can articulate a project that counters the one
being implemented by neoliberal elites. However, we should point out that a number of dispersed social
alternative movements have willingly, even optimistically, sprung up. The Mexican agricultural sector,
one of the quarters that has been hardest hit by the implementation of NAFTA and is suffering in the productive,
commercial, population and environmental areas, has given rise to movements like El Barzón (The ‘Plow’), El
Campo No Aguanta Más (The Countryside Can’t Take Anymore; see Bartra, 2003) and the campaign Sin Maíz no
hay País (No Corn, no Country). Other denouncers of the neoliberal system include the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación
Nacional (Zapatista Army of National Liberation, EZLN) and its Otra Campaña (Other Campaign), as well as some sectors
of the social and electoral left who have converged into the Coalición por el Bien de Todos (Coalition for the Good of All)
and the Convención Nacional Democrática (National Democratic Convention). There are also other more or less important
national sociopolitical movements, but what is worth noticing is that the widespread popular discontent (which could
even extend to the majority of Mexicans) is not expressed in an organized manner and has not produced yet
an alternative development project. On a binational level, the actions of opposition forces have been even more
scattered. Initially, the Red Mexicana de Acción frente al Libre Comercio (Mexican Action Network in Opposition of Free
Trade) communicated with likeminded organizations in the USA and Canada that opposed the signing of NAFTA, but since
then its actions (which involve agreements between unions and social organizations on both sides of the border) have been
few and far between (Brooks and Fox, 2004). The idea that migrants are agents of development has been promoted for over
a decade. This proposal, which is in no way sustainable when applied to large-scale social processes, suggests that migrants
should be held responsible for promoting development in their countries of origin. And yet, as Fox (2005) has pointed out,
migrant society has produced social actors who operate on three levels: integration into US society (e.g. unions, the media,
and religious organizations); networki ng and promoti on of devel opment i n pl aces of ori gi n (i . e. nati ve organizations),
and binational relationships that combine the previous two (i.e. pan-ethnic organizations). For example, Mexican migrant
organizations fund public works and social projects in their communities of origin with the aid of the program Tres por
Uno. And during the spring of 2006 USA-residing immigrants participated in massive marches in favor of their working,
political, social, and civil rights. As for the latter, Petras (2006) points out that ‘between March 25 and May 1, 2006 close
to five million migrant workers and their supporters marched through nearly 100 cities of the US’.
This, he notes, is the biggest and most sustained workers’ demonstration in the history of the USA. In
its 50-year history, the US trade union confederation, the AFL-CIO, has never been capable of mobilizing even a fraction of
the workers convoked by the migrant workers movement. The rise and growth of the movement is rooted in the
historical experience of the migrant workers (overwhelmingly from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean),
the exploitative and racist experience they confront today in the USA and the future in which they face
imprisonment, expulsion and dispossession. Generally speaking, migrants and their organizations affect the political,
social, economic, and cultural aspects of sending and receiving countries to varying degrees. However, it would be a
theoretical mistake to present migrants themselves as a collective agent of transformation. If we intend to portray them as
agents of development, then we had better examine the strategic projects and structural dynamics present on the differ- ent
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planes and levels, as well as the interests that prompt participation ‘from above’ and ‘from below’. This will allow us to
understand the role played by migrants. Stating that they cannot be considered agents of development does
not entail a pessimistic message advocating immobility. Quite the opposite: this can help us
disentangle possible forms of articulation between migrant organizations and social sectors that seek a
new type of development agenda, one that can be applied on the global, regional, national, and local
levels. Only then will we be able to discuss the configuration of an agent of social trans- formation that
includes migrant participation. In any case, as Petras (2006) has pointed out, ‘[t]he emergence of the mass
migrant workers’ movement opens a new chapter in the working class struggle both in North America,
and Central America’. First and foremost it represents the first major upsurge of independent working class struggle in
the USA after over 50 years of decline, stagna- tion and retreat by the established trade union confederation.
Neolib Not Inev Ext.
New knowledge communities are developing now proves that the alternative is possible
Wise et al. (Director of Doctoral Program in Migration Studies & Prof of Development Studies; Universidad Autónoma de
Zacatecas, Mexico) 10
(Raúl Delgado Wise, Humberto Márquez Covarrubias, Rubén Puentes, Reframing the debate on migration, development and human
rights: fundamental elements, October, 2010, www.migracionydesarrollo.org)
During the later part of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, the relationship between migration and development
has become a major academic and political is- sue encompassing the national, regional and global contexts. So far, the
discussion agenda has been dictated by the governments of the major migrant-receiving north- ern
countries—primarily the United States and the European Union—and implemented by some key international
organizations like the World Bank (WB). These bodies define the topics that determine the course of
international and regional forums, policy design, and research financing. The governments of sending and
transit countries, mostly located in the southern hemi- sphere as well as parts of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, tend to
take a passive stance in the de- bate. Most merely validate the political position taken by receiving countries
or discursively protest the treatment received by their emigrants, in order to justify the failure of their
own development policies. Some progressive governments, however, are now taking an alternative approach in order
to reassess the role played by their nations in the fields of development and migration. Academic research is also
under the sway of the dominant agenda, but new voices have begun to question this perspective,
highlighting the need to reframe the debate while introduc- ing new theoretical and empirical tools with which to
approach these complex problems and find alternative solutions. Some of these new think-tanks include the
International Network on Migra- tion and Development (RIMD), the Institutet för Forskning om Migration,
Etnicitet och Samhälle (REMESO) in Sweden, Oxford’s International Migration Institute (IMI), Princeton’s
Center for Migration and Development (CMD), and the Scalabrini International Migration Network (SIMN).
While civil society has not remained passive, its participation in policy making processes has so far
been essentially marginal. Organizations, movements and networks that create alternative spaces for
discussion and resistance have begun to emerge. Among them is the World Social Forum on Migration, which
brings together thousands of delegates each year, including academics. The Global Forum on Migration and Development
(GFMD), a governmental forum derived from the 2006 United Nations (UN) High-Level Dialogue, provides some room
for participation and includes spaces where civil society representatives can discuss governmental agendas and make
suggestions. Discussions between civil society and governments and northern and southern nations have, how- ever, been
unfruitful during the past three GFMD meetings in Brussels, Manila, and Athens. The People’s Global Action on
Migration, Development and Human Rights (PGA) has come into being alongside the aforementioned
assemblies. It convenes civil society organizations and networks that follow an alternative agenda,
seeking to change the terms of the debate and influence public policies. It is worth mentioning that civil
society and migrant organizations and networks in particular have driven a wide range of local, regional and transnational
development initiatives, in addition to being key participants in regional forums across the globe and weighing in on a
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Despite all of this, receiving countries still maintain a reductionist and exclusivist
approach to migration and development, obscuring the root causes of the first and ignoring the
contribu- tions made by migrants to receiving societies. This discourse also masks the costs migration has for
wealth of issues.
migrants themselves and for their societies of origin, despite the alleged benefits of remittanc- es. Instead of a
comprehensive approach, we have a distorted view of reality that encourages the perception of migrants as public enemies.
Furthermore, agendas that emphasize national security promote xenophobic, anti-immigration policies. In these
circumstances, actual development in countries of origin and respect for migrants’ human rights remain unfulfilled goals.
A2: Things Getting Better
Both real and relative poverty are massively increasing – neoliberal growth is unsustainable
Li (Prof of political economy at the Department of Political Science of York University, fmr. Chinese political prisoner) 4
(Minqi, After Neoliberalism: Empire, Social Democracy, or Socialism?, http://monthlyreview.org/2004/01/01/after-neoliberalismempire-social-democracy-or-socialism)
According to United Nations’ Human Development Report, the world’s richest 1 percent receive as much income as the
poorest 57 percent. The income gap between the richest 20 percent and the poorest 20 percent in the world rose
from 30:1 in 1960, to 60:1 in 1990, and to 74:1 in 1999, and is projected to reach 100:1 in 2015. In 1999–2000, 2.8
billion people lived on less than $2 a day, 840 million were undernourished, 2.4 billion did not have access
to any form of improved sanitation services, and one in every six children in the world of primary school age were not in
school. About 50 percent of the global nonagricultural labor force is estimated to be either unemployed or underemployed.1
In many countries, working people have suffered an absolute decline in living standards. In the United States,
the real weekly earnings of production and nonsupervisory workers (in 1992 dollars) fell from $315 in 1973 to
$264 in 1989. After a decade of economic expansion, it reached $271 in 1999, which remained lower than the average real
wage in 1962. In Latin America, a continent that has suffered from neoliberal restructuring since the 1970s, about 200
million people, or 46 percent of the population, live in poverty. Between 1980 and the early 1990s (1991–1994),
real wages fell by 14 percent in Argentina, 21 percent in Uruguay, 53 percent in Venezuela, 68 percent in Ecuador, and
73 percent in Bolivia.2 The advocates of neoliberalism promised that the neoliberal “reforms” or “structural adjustments”
would usher in an era of unprecedented economic growth, technological progress, rising living standards, and material
prosperity. In fact, the world economy has slowed towards stagnation in the neoliberal era. The average
annual growth rate of world GDP declined from 4.9 percent between 1950 and 1973, to 3.0 percent between 1973 and
1992, and to 2.7 percent between 1990 and 2001. Between 1980 and 1998, half of all the “developing countries”
(including the so-called “transition economies”) suffered from falling real per capita GDP.3 The global
economy has been kept afloat by the debt-financed U.S. economy. Between 1995 and 2002, the U.S. economy
accounted for 96 percent of the cumulative growth in world GDP.4 The U.S. expansion has been financed by reducing
domestic savings, raising the private sector debts to historically unprecedented levels, and running large and ever-rising
current account deficits. The process is unsustainable. The enormous imbalances have to be corrected one way or the
other. If the United States cannot continue to generate ever-rising current account deficits and none of the other large
economies are capable of functioning effectively as the autonomous driving force, the neoliberal global economy
will be under powerful downward pressures and exposed to the threat of increasingly frequent and
violent financial crises.
A2: Framework
Beggs the question of the K – We have to adopt a pedagogy that allows revolutionary thought or
neoliberal biopower is inevitable
Bourassa (University of Utah Salt Lake City) 11
(GREGORY N. , Rethinking the Curricular Imagination: Curriculum and Biopolitics in the Age of Neoliberalism, 25 JAN 2011,
Curriculum Inquiry, Volume 41, Issue 1, pages 5–16, January 2011)
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Second, employing the theory of a neoliberal biopolitics of disposability, Giroux highlights the broken promises of public
schooling in terms that refocus what is at stake for curriculum inquiry. Beyond the myopic rhetoric of accountability and
standards, it is absolute democracy (Dewey, 1927; Hardt & Negri, 2004) and its unfolding futurity that is in jeopardy. Put
differently, a biopolitical reading of curriculum insists that the production and reproduction of certain
forms of life are at the very center of the educational experience. Thus, no longer can prevailing conceptions of
curriculum fail to locate the ideological underpinnings of school practices, allowing the relationship between schooling and
economic, political, and cultural imperatives to remain veiled. In other words, curriculum inquiry must strive to locate and
disrupt the commensurability between these prevailing imperatives, their broader political projects and the mandates they
impose on curriculum. With the aid of Giroux's biopolitical framework, the curricular imagination must conceive
of the educational experience not as a formula to be consumed or constructed for calculable
instrumentality, but rather as a vital resource for galvanizing a robust social imagination capable of
collectively negotiating and perpetually reconstructing democratic life (Dewey, 1927). The writings of Tyson
Lewis, which I will now turn to, are especially crucial for this task.
Their education is worthless – becomes more neoliberal route learning without a self-reflexive
examination of their own assumptions and the possibility of a radical imagining like the alt
Bourassa (University of Utah Salt Lake City) 11
(GREGORY N. , Rethinking the Curricular Imagination: Curriculum and Biopolitics in the Age of Neoliberalism, 25 JAN 2011,
Curriculum Inquiry, Volume 41, Issue 1, pages 5–16, January 2011)
One of the more difficult and pressing challenges confronting curriculum inquiry today relates to the increasing enclosure
and privatization of the public sphere. Public schools, often exalted and thought to be among the most resilient spaces of the
common, are now incredibly fragile, on the brink of being fully besieged by the onslaught of neoliberalism (De Lissovoy,
2008; Saltman, 2007). While this practice of enclosure is not necessarily new, as market forces have long been encroaching
the spaces of public schooling (Du Bois, 1918; Dewey, 1930), the emergence of neoliberalism in the last thirty years marks
a particularly insidious turn. The novelty of neoliberalism resides not only in that it has become normalized and even
celebrated, but also in that the far-reaching tentacles of neoliberalism assume pedagogical dimensions.1 At
the same time, the unapologetic posturing of neoliberalism (Giroux, 2009) offers curriculum theorists the
contours of a common target that has not always been so easily recognizable in attempts to chart the
flows and logics of capital. From this, we might gather that the current configuration of neoliberalism, like that of
public schooling, precariously occupies a liminal status between that of inordinate durability and immanent vulnerability.
Given the hubris and arrogance of neoliberalism, we are now better armored with the vocabularies and conceptual
understandings needed to both defend and rethink the institution of public schooling in our current juncture. For curriculum
inquiry, this means reclaiming, and more accurately, reinventing, the educational experience. As William Pinar (2004)
notes: In its interest in and commitment to the study of educational experience, curriculum theory is critical of
contemporary school “reform.” Indeed, “educational experience” seems precisely what politicians do not
want, as they insist we focus on test scores, the “bottom line.” By linking the curriculum to student performance
on standardized examinations, politicians have, in effect, taken control of what is to be taught: the curriculum.
Examination-driven curricula demote teachers from scholars and intellectuals to technicians in service to the state. The
cultivation of self-reflexive, interdisciplinary erudition and intellectuality disappears. Rationalized as
“accountability,” political socialization replaces education. (pp. 2–3) Although Pinar is highlighting some of the most
saliently corrosive school practices, his stress on the enclosure of the educational experience does not translate into
acquiescence to market forces. In fact, it could be argued that the circumstances for absolute democracy have never been
more possible (Hardt & Negri, 2004).2 In the face of perpetual reform, high-stakes testing, mechanical pedagogy, scripted
curricula, and punitive disciplinary practices, curriculum inquiry is immediately thrust into a limit-situation in which a new
horizon of possibilities is unveiled (Freire, 2000). In other words, these realities are not “the impassable boundaries where
possibilities end, but the real boundaries where all possibilities begin” (Alvaro Vieira Pinto, quoted in Freire, 2000, p. 99).
With this, the task of curriculum inquiry is to collectively imagine fields of possibility (Appadurai, 1996), working from the
occupied, yet generative, confines of a “cramped space” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1986, p. 17). At the same time, such calls for
an unleashed curricular imagination must be tempered with the humility of a diligent yet playful social imagination that
recognizes that problems are always beginning anew and altering in both form and appearance (de Certeau, 1984). Thus in
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curriculum inquiry's quest to reinvent public schooling as a beacon of possibility and promise for a
new democratic future, the only way to proceed is to nourish a radically collective imagination and
embrace the inextinguishable spirit of struggle (Dewey, 1927; Giroux, Penna, & Pinar, 1981; Pinar, 2004).
***Aff***
2AC Strategy Notes
There are two keys to creating a good 2AC to a K: diversity of argument and smart analytics. First, you want to include a
diversity of carded argument from this file: at least one link defense argument, at least one answer to the efficacy of the alternative, at
least one impact answer and at least one impact turn (neolib good/heg good). You don’t want to only read cards answering one part of
the argument but to challenge it at all levels. Second, you don’t just want to read cards, you want to make smart analytic arguments.
Try to put at least one analytic argument between every card you read. This is even easier to do when you’re working with a starter
pack like this cause you can read all of the evidence that the native has before the debate even starts and can write out your criticism of
their evidence instead of having to do it on the fly.
I’ve put stars (**) next to the tag of a couple of the cards that I think you might want to include in your 2AC but don’t JUST
include those and don’t forget to make a permutation argument!
A2: Privacy Link – Pragmatism
**Putting limits on the government doesn’t have to rely on the theoretical model of privacy they critique
Stalder 2 (Department of Sociology, Queens University, Ontario, Canada)
(Felix, Surveillance & Society1(1): 120-124, Opinion. Privacy is not the antidote to surveillance)
In our democracies, extensive institutional
mechanisms have been put into to place to create and maintain
accountability, and to punish those who abuse their power. We need to develop and instate similar
mechanisms for the handling of personal information – a technique as crucial to power as the ability to exercise physical
violence – in order to limit the concentration of power inherent in situations that involve unchecked surveillance.
The current notion of privacy, which frames the issue as a personal one, won't help us accomplish that.9 However, notions
of institutionalized accountability will, because they acknowledge surveillance as a structural problem of
political power. It's time to update our strategies for resistance and develop approaches adequate to the
actual situation rather than sticking to appealing but inadequate ideas that will keep locking us into unsustainable
positions.
Protecting the subordinated populations doesn’t link to their general claims about privacy
Fuchs 11 (Department of Informatics and Media Studies, Uppsala University)
(Christian, The Political Economy of Privacy, Research Paper Number #8, The Internet & Surveillance - Research Paper Series: 2011)
I argue for going beyond a bourgeois notion of privacy and to advance a socialist notion of privacy that tries to strengthen
the protection of consumers and citizens from corporate surveillance. Economic privacy is therefore posited as undesirable
in those cases, where it protects the rich and capital from public accountability, but as desirable, where it tries to protect
citizens from corporate surveillance. Public sur- veillance of the income of the rich and of companies and public
mechanisms that make their wealth transparent are desirable for making wealth and income gaps in capitalism visible,
whereas privacy protection for workers and consumers from cor- porate surveillance is also important. In a socialist privacy
concept, existing liberal privacy values have therefore to be reversed. Whereas today we mainly find surveil- lance of the
poor and of citizens who are not capital owners, a socialist privacy con- cept focuses on surveillance of capital and the rich
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in order to increase transparency and privacy protection of consumers and workers. A
socialist privacy concept
conceives privacy as collective right of dominated and exploited groups that need to be protected from
corporate domination that aims at gathering information about work- ers and consumers for
accumulating capital, disciplining workers and consumers, and for increasing the productivity of capitalist production
and advertising. The liberal conception and reality of privacy as individual right within capitalism protects the rich and the
accumulation of ever more wealth from public knowledge. A socialist privacy concept as collective right of workers and
consumers can protect humans from the misuse of their data by companies. The question therefore is: privacy for
whom? Privacy for dominant groups in regard to secrecy of wealth and power can be problematic, whereas privacy at
the bottom of the power pyramid for consumers and normal citizens can be a protection from dominant
interests. Privacy rights should therefore be differentiated according to the position people and groups occupy in the
power structure.
A2: Privacy Link – Individualism
Pricacy as a collective value is good – doesn’t have to rely on capitalist individualism
Coll 14 (lecturer at the Department of Sociology of the University of Geneva)
(Sami Coll (2014) Power, knowledge, and the subjects of privacy: understanding privacy as the ally of surveillance, Information,
Communication & Society, 17:10, 1250-1263)
One way to counter this tendency and to make privacy less easy to grab and control would be to pursue the work of
scholars who have been trying to approach it as a common good, rather than considering it only as an individual resource to
be protected against potential invasions (Regan, 1995; Westin, 2003). That might address Tocqueville’s early concern
expressed in the second volume of Democracy in America (2004). According to him, liberal societies place too much
importance on intimacy and individuality, which weakens the public action that maintains common goods like freedom and
democracy. Indeed, if the notion of privacy remains trapped within an individualistic perspective, it might be related to an
inappropriate and over-individua- lized conception of freedom. Concretely, compared to the interests of a national economy
or to the security of the state, privacy, as a private value, is likely to be neglected – because, as argued by Westin (2003),
‘when society does not accept certain personal conduct, it is saying this is not a matter of private choice and does not allow
a claim of privacy’ (p. 433).5 Privacy as an individual resource, which every individual should ‘learn’ to protect thanks to
the self-determination prin- ciple, cannot compete with political concerns such as the wealth and security of the state. Only
a conception of privacy oriented in terms of a collective good can possibly balance measures meant to
serve these overwhelming interests. In other words, as argued by Regan (1995, p. 221), privacy should not only
aim to protect the individual, but also the society and its demo- cratic values. This study aimed to
demonstrate that when privacy policies are reduced to the self- determination principle, a risk is taken to shape it as a tool
of power and governance. Privacy and its definition must urgently be understood as a struggle of power
between the promoters of a model of informational capitalism based on surveillance of citizens and
consumers, and those who would prefer to promote privacy as a common good that could lead society
to more democ- racy and freedom. Since Big Data is going to be a revolution in the way we produce knowledge,
make decisions, and govern people through massive data collection and analysis (Mayer-Schön- berger & Cukier, 2013),
the normativity of privacy we wanted to discuss in this article must be more than ever at the centre of the debates.
A2: Privacy Neolib Link – Perm
We don’t need to reject privacy demands in order to correct for capitalist domination
Fuchs 11 (Department of Informatics and Media Studies, Uppsala University)
(Christian, The Political Economy of Privacy, Research Paper Number #8, The Internet & Surveillance - Research Paper Series: 2011)
Boudewijn de Bruin (27010) has argued for the "ITiberaFValue of Privacy" [paper ti- tle). He held against privacy sceptics
that privacy should be seen as an important val- ue within liberal discourse. This is an inner-liberal debate, as most debates
about the privacy concept are. My argument in this paper is somewhat different, provocative, and challenges the position
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of de Bruin and others. I argue that liberalism as such is problematic, that a liberal privacy concept has a legitimizing and
ideological function in capitalism, and that as an alternative a socialist privacy concept is needed. Discus- sions about
privacy and surveillance have too long been dominated by liberal posi- tions. It is time to advance privacy concepts
from Marxist and socialist points of view. De Bruin argues that "privacy is a liberal value, and it does outweigh
other liberal val- ues in certain cases" (de Bruin 2010, 520). My argument in this paper will be that privacy as a liberal
value has problematic implications, but that this does not mean one should abandon the notion in total,
but define it in an alternative and differentiated way from a socialist and Marxist perspective.
A2: Privacy Fails
it can be productively used to protect the most vulnerable groups
Bennett 11 (Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria, British Columbia)
(Colin J., In Defence of Privacy: The concept and the regime, Surveillance & Society 8(4): 485- 496)
A second implication of social sorting relates to the argument that privacy addresses the problems of discrete individuals,
rather than categories of people. It is argued to be somewhat oblivious to distributional questions. Who gets what privacy,
or who gets what surveillance, are questions that the privacy regime tends not to address, let alone remedy. At a
governance level, however, there is plenty of evidence that laws and other policy instruments are being
designed with sensitivity to the particular invasions and problems experienced by categories of people
and the data they generate. For example, laws do contain particular protections for ‘sensitive’ categories of data. The
1995 Data Protection Directive, upon which all European laws should be based, permits member states to
impose more stringent rules on the processing of: data relating to racial or ethnic origin, political
opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, and data concerning health or
sexual preference. The explicit assumption behind these provisions is the fear of discrimination on the basis of race,
ethnic origin, political affiliation, religion, trade union membership, health and/or sexual orientation.
Many regulators have attempted to target their advice and assistance to particularly vulnerable
subpopulations within their jurisdictions, be it aboriginal groups in Australia and Canada or immigrant
groups in Europe. Indeed, it is very difficult to determine any contemporary privacy issue that is not, in
some way, implicated by issues of categorical discrimination and concern for the impact of
surveillance on vulnerable groups. For example, one common complaint about the construction of databases without
appropriate access controls, is the potential for stalking, particularly of young women. Cases have been documented with
respect to airport surveillance practices, university records-systems, health databases, population registers, socialnetworking sites and many others. This one example, and many others could be cited, suggests that the realm of privacy
law is not about protecting an undifferentiated population of ‘data subjects’ . Questions about the distribution of
privacy risks are implicit, and often explicit, in almost every complaint received, investigation
conducted, and report written by the world’s data protection authorities.
Empirically, privacy protections can be beneficial
Bennett 11 (Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria, British Columbia)
(Colin J., In Defence of Privacy: The concept and the regime, Surveillance & Society 8(4): 485- 496)
Privacy is not the ‘antidote to surveillance’ nor was it ever meant to be. But privacy has come a long way ––
conceptually and politically. It has been disaggregated, refined and contextualized. Some formulations have been
declared narrow or culturally specific. Others have been declared so broad that they are virtually indistinguishable from
related concepts, such as liberty or autonomy. The concept has been expanded to a point where Solove declares that it is ‘a
concept in disarray’ (Solove 2008, 1). Like ‘surveillance’ it is not clear what it means, and it is not clear what it does not
mean. In the effort to fashion concepts that will travel and be relevant across cultures both ideas have been victim to what
Sartori (1970) calls ‘conceptual-stretching’. For both, it is becoming impossible to identify the range of empirical referents
or observables that should fall within their scope.
Arguably, I have summarized and categorized a complex critique which does not do justice to the richness of these
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arguments. My overall impression, however, is that they address a conception of privacy which is dated, and a framing of
the issue which is only partially related to what privacy protection means in practice, and what privacy regulators do in their
day-to-day work. Thus, each critique is an important contribution, but none really challenges the concept and regime of
privacy in toto. And none persuasively argues for a more effective way to redress the power imbalances
between the hapless subject and the large organizations employing the latest information technologies.
Despite the slipperiness of the concept, ‘privacy’ does frame the contemporary political and social issue, both
in the English-speaking world and elsewhere. It envelops a complicated network of private and public sector actors who
engage in overlapping domestic and international regimes –– privacy commissioners, chief privacy officers, privacy
consultants, privacy advocates. It frames the many international, regulatory, self-regulatory and technological policy
instruments all of which contribute to the ‘governance of privacy’ (Bennett and Raab 2006). It describes the policy
tools: privacy impact assessments, privacy management tools, privacy accountability frameworks, privacy policies,
privacy codes, privacy standards, and so on. It has also taken its place as a critical trade-related question to be resolved
within the interplay of broader forces and interests in the international political economy (Newman 2008). It animates
civil society activism and resistance (Bennett 2008). And it frames the scandals and conflicts in the public and media
realm. As a concept, and as a regime, it has come a long way in forty years.
The most pressing challenge is clearly with enforcement and implementation. And here, I have considerable sympathy with
the critics. Privacy protection policy is flawed. Laws are often weakened by broad exemptions, especially for law
enforcement. The regulators generally have few resources, and many do not have the real independence from government
or business, preventing them from acting as real privacy advocates. Self-regulatory schemes, such as privacy codes,
policies, seals, standards, regularly suffer from the perception that the organizations responsible for compliance are also
those with the greatest to gain from the uncontrolled processing and dissemination of personally related data. The
governance of privacy is always under attack from powerful public and private interests eager to use the latest information
technologies in the name of risk management or profit accumulation.
More broadly, contemporary information privacy legislation is often designed to manage the processing of personal data,
rather than to limit it. From the perspective of those interested in understanding and curtailing excessive surveillance, the
formulation of the privacy problem in terms of trying to strike the right ‘balance’ between privacy and organizational
demands for personal information does not address the deeper issue and cannot halt surveillance. The privacy regime may
produce a fairer and more efficient use and management of personal data, but it cannot control the voracious and inherent
appetite of modern organizations for more and more increasingly refined personal information (Rule et al. 1980).
According to Jim Rule, this has led to the paradoxical situation where there are more privacy rules –– and less privacy
(Rule 2008).
I do argue, however, that there is little wrong with the idea of forcing organizations to abide by the common set of fair
information principles. Put it this way, if all organizations followed the OECD’s 1981 Guidelines on the protection of
privacy, with all their limitations, gaps, anachronisms, exemptions, there would be less surveillance in the world. The
regime and the policy instruments it contains can plainly address many, though not all, of the social problems captured by
the word surveillance, and there are sufficient examples where the more intrusive practices have been curtailed. Success is
contingent, however, on a number of conditions: the content of law, the strength of the regulatory authority and its
leader(s), the commitment of organizations, market incentives, the actions of a vigilant and concerned citizenry and the
ability to design privacy into new systems (Bennett and Raab 2006, 264). It is also crucially contingent on the work and
activism of the ‘gatekeepers’ –– the privacy advocates and activists who can articulate the broader public interest in privacy
protection and warn constantly of the drift into the surveillance society (Bennett 2008).
In this latter respect, there are unfortunate implications to the critique of privacy protection. The skepticism about privacy
tends to promote a certain passivity and reluctance to engage in the messy debates over the rules, and the implementation
and enforcement of those rules. Lyon sees a similar tendency: ‘ Legal measures do need overhaul from time to
time, and everyone concerned about surveillance would do well to see this as an arena of “surveillance
struggle”’ (Lyon 2007, 176). If privacy is not the antidote to surveillance, then why bother trying to improve privacy
laws, or attempting to hold government and business accountable using those rules? With such scepticism, there
is a propensity for government and business to get away with practices that should be questioned and
resisted. It is left to a few brave privacy advocates to do the really hard empirical work of comparing practice to norms,
and of holding the processing of personal data to account.
Realistically, without privacy regimes, there would be few if any actual mechanisms of social redress for public and private
wrongs. And sometimes, the policy regimes do have positive results. The recent complaint about Facebook, for example, by
the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) produced a largely critical finding by the Canadian
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Privacy Commissioner and forced the company to change its practices (Privacy Commissioner of Canada 2009). Detailed
empirical work on self-regulatory privacy schemes can expose the obvious gaps and contradictions between wild claims
about ‘privacy friendliness’ and the troubling details of privacy practices. Chris Connolly’s work on privacy seal systems,
such as Truste, as well as on the Safe Harbor regime, is an excellent example (Connolly 2008).
There are many legal and non-legal rules about privacy protection. Some are strong, and others are weak. Any public
statement or commitment to privacy protection, however qualified, provides an opportunity to test whether
words are supported by actions and practices; whether organizations say what they do, and do what they say.
Experience from other issues also suggests that the broader the network, the easier it is to ‘shop around’ for opportunities to
challenge surveillance practices. If a law in one country does not offer an opportunity to challenge the practices of a multinational company, then the network might use actors located in another and broaden the opportunities for collective action
(Keck and Sikkink 1997).
For younger scholars in particular, perhaps privacy simply is not ‘cool’; surveillance is. Poring over laws, reports,
guidelines, standards or privacy policies is not ‘cool’ either; interpreting the latest technologies and
practices through the lens of post-modern social theory is. Responding to consultative exercises, or
preparing for hearings, or registering complaints is not ‘cool’; resistance is. Engaging with the crucially
important contemporary debates about how, practically, to make consent meaningful on the internet is
not ‘cool’; deconstructing the ontological assumptions behind the very notion of consent, is. Coming to
grips with cookies, deep-packet inspection, cryptography, spyware, protocols, and other opaque
instruments of network management is not cool either; constructing metaphors about ‘cybersurveillance’ is.
In conclusion, it is obvious that for all the academic critique, ‘privacy’, as a concept, as a regime, as a set of policy
instruments, and as a way to frame advocacy and activism, is not going to disappear. On the contrary, it
displays a remarkable resilience as a way to regulate the processing of personal information by public
and private organizations, and as a way for ‘privacy advocates’ (Bennett 2008) to resist the excessive
monitoring of human behaviour. Like it or not, privacy frames the ways that most ordinary people see the
contemporary surveillance issues. Surveillance scholars have got to live with it.
Privacy Frame Good – Key to Action
Privacy demands are key to take action
Bennett 11 (Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria, British Columbia)
(Colin J., In further defence of privacy, Surveillance & Society 8(4): 513-516)
In conclusion, if not privacy, then what? A broad politics of anti-surveillance, perhaps? I read Regan’s response as
contending that the social problem should be defined in terms of surveillance because it more accurately frames the breadth
and complexity of the social and political challenges. But privacy frames the risk because it is the most ‘robust
and concise understanding of the reason we are, and should be, concerned’. I think this formulation counters
Gilliom’s contention that ‘surveillance is not, in fact, the ontological antithesis of privacy’. That argument is also implicit in
my contention that privacy was never meant to be the ‘antidote to surveillance’.
I would add a further reason as to why privacy continues to resonate very powerfully, and why surveillance may not be the
better way to frame the social problem. One of the features of privacy advocacy is its broad ideological base. For
example, recent campaigns in the US have drawn support from the libertarian right, Christian groups as well
as those from the public interest and civil liberties traditions. If one were to try to reframe the discourse
in terms of a politics of ‘anti-surveillance’ and to situate it within broader social antagonisms and
struggles, these issues would tend to become associated with a politics of the left. One can challenge an ID
card, or a video-surveillance system, or a genetic database, or a health identifier, or a host of other surveillance measures,
without engaging in a broader social ‘struggle’. Perhaps one of the strengths of the contemporary privacy
advocacy network is that resistance can, and does, spring from a multitude of ideological sources at
unpredictable moments.
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A myriad of under-resourced privacy advocacy organizations are attempting to challenge the spread of
surveillance. In October 2009, the Public Voice Coalition of privacy advocates launched the Madrid Privacy Declaration
at the international conference of Privacy and Data Commissioners. It has been translated into ten different languages and
has been endorsed to date by over 100 organizations, and around 200 international experts, from many countries including
several in the developing world. Among other things, the declaration reaffirms support for the ‘global framework of fair
information practices’, the data protection authorities, privacy-enhancing technologies and calls for a ‘new international
framework for privacy protection’. More controversially, the Declaration calls for a ‘moratorium on the development or
implementation of new systems of mass surveillance, including facial recognition, whole body imaging, biometric
identifiers, and embedded RFID tags, subject to a full and transparent evaluation by independent authorities and democratic
debate’.1 Over forty official privacy and data protection agencies are receiving complaints, conducting investigations and
audits, consulting with organizations, educating the public, and imposing sanctions. Increasingly they are trying to work in
a concerted fashion. In 2009, for instance, ten commissioners sent a joint public letter to Google CEO, Eric Schmidt,
expressing their strong concern that ‘the privacy rights of the world’s citizens are being forgotten as Google rolls out new
technological applications’.2 Some of these activities are effective; others less so. But I have difficulty seeing them as
‘background noise’. Far from being a ‘stultifying intellectual crutch’, privacy can serve to engage, coalesce and
resonate with many individuals and groups around the world.
The critique of privacy at conceptual and governance levels will and should continue. But that critique is diverse and
sometimes contradictory, and I have tried in my essay to disentangle the various strands. At the same time, if that critique
continues without reference to what regulators and advocates actually think and do in the name of privacy
protection, then I fear that it will be misplaced and ultimately ineffective.
Alt Fails – Counter-Surveillance Fails
Watching from below doesn’t alter power relationships – plan is a necessary first step
Monahan et al 10 (Prof of Communication at UNC; Faculty of Information, University of Toronto; Surveillance Studies Centre,
Queen’s University)
(Torin Monahan, David J. Phillips and David Murakami Wood. 2010. Editorial: Surveillance and Empowerment. Surveillance &
Society 8(2): 106-112)
Steve Mann and colleagues have labeled these interventions “sousveillance,” or watching from below (Mann, Nolan, and
Wellman 2003). While this concept is intriguing, especially for its grassroots overtones, one should exercise great care
when presuming to speak on behalf of others, especially if those other people occupy different socio-economic positions or
possess radically different race and gender identities. The concept of sousveillance is problematic as well
because it privileges the direction of the gaze instead of its effect. Watching from below begins to
matter when pressure or control is felt by individuals in positions of higher institutional status, at which
point the gaze may still be from below, but the power relationship shifts to one of control over, thereby
becoming “surveillance.” Of course, power is both dynamic and multi-dimensional, so the ability to
surveil people in positions of relatively higher status does not necessarily alter the vulnerability of
those watching from below, as any whistleblower can attest.
Alt Fails – Legal Engagement Key
**Legal engagement is crucial to prevent the domination of elites. Only the perm’s legal enegagement
allows their alt to succeed
Cohen 15 (professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center)
(Julie, 2015, Studying Law Studying Surveillance, Studying Law Studying Surveillance. Surveillance & Society 13(1): 91-101)
Relative to legal scholarship, work in Surveillance Studies is more likely to build from a solid foundation in
contemporary social theory. Even so, such work often reflects both an insufficient grasp of the complexity of
the legal system in action and lack of interest in the ways that legal and regulatory actors understand, conduct, and
contest surveillance. By this I don’t mean to suggest that Surveillance Studies scholars need law degrees, but only to point
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out what ought to be obvious but often isn’t: legal processes are social processes, too, and in overlooking these processes,
Surveillance Studies scholars also engage in a form of black-boxing that treats law as monolithic
and surveillance and government as interchangeable. Legal actors engage in a variety of discursive
and normative strategies by which institutions and resources are mobilized around surveillance, and understanding
those strategies is essential to the development of an archaeology of surveillance practices. Work in Surveillance
Studies also favors a type of theoretical jargon that can seem impenetrable and, more importantly, unrewarding to those in
law and policy communities. As I’ve written elsewhere (Cohen 2012a: 29), “[t]oo many such works find power
everywhere and hope nowhere, and seem to offer well-meaning policy makers little more than a
prescription for despair.”
Returning to the topics already discussed, let us consider some ways in which Surveillance Studies might benefit from dialogue with law.
Let us return first to the problem of digitally-enhanced surveillance by law enforcement—the problem of the high-resolution mosaic. As discussed in the section above, works by Surveillance Studies scholars exploring issues of mobility and control offer profound insights into the ways in which continual observation shapes spaces and subjectivities—the precise questions about which, as we have already seen,
judges and legal scholars alike are skeptical. Such works reveal the extent to which pervasive surveillance of public spaces is emerging as a new and powerful mode of ordering the public and social life of civil society. They offer rich food for thought—but not for action. Networked surveillance is increasingly a fact of contemporary public life, and totalizing theories about its power don’t take us very far toward
Acknowledgment of pervasive social shaping by networked
surveillance need not preclude legal protection for socially-shaped subjects, but that project requires
attention to detail.
gaining regulatory traction on it. That enterprise is, moreover, essential even if it entails an inevitable quantum of self-delusion.
To put the point a different way, the networked democratic society and the totalitarian state may be points on a continuum rather than binary opposites, but the fact that the continuum exists is still worth something. If so, one needs tools for assessment and differentiation that Surveillance Studies does not seem to provide.
As an example of this sort of approach within legal scholarship, consider a recent article by legal scholars Danielle Citron and David Gray (2013), which proposes that courts and legislators undertake what they term a technology-centered approach to regulating surveillance. They would have courts and legislators ask whether particular technologies facilitate total surveillance and, if so, act to put in place
comprehensive procedures for approving and overseeing their use. From a Surveillance Studies perspective, this approach lacks theoretical purity because its technology-specific focus appears to ignore the fact that total surveillance also can emerge via the fusion of data streams originating from various sources. But the proposal is pragmatic; it does not so much ignore that risk as bracket it while pursuing the
narrower goal of gaining a regulatory foothold within the data streams. And because it focuses on the data streams themselves, it is administrable in a way that schemes based on linear timelines and artificial distinctions between different types of surveillance are not. One can envision both courts and legislatures implementing the Citron and Gray proposal in a way that enables far better oversight of what law
enforcement is doing.
Turning next to the linked practices of commercial profiling and social media surveillance, we have already seen that work in Surveillance Studies again steps in where legal scholarship badly needs supplementation: on the question of how pervasive surveillance by private market actors shapes the production of culture and the patterns of emergent subjectivity. Such work typically does not, however, consider or
explore the ways that the legal construct of consent mobilizes legal and policy discourses to sanction ongoing expansions of private-sector surveillance and insulate them from regulatory oversight. Work in Surveillance Studies also has not seemed to pay particularly careful attention to the roles that rhetorics of innovation and competition play in regulatory debates about information privacy. For a discipline that
seeks to develop comprehensive and rigorous accounts of surveillance as social ordering and as cultural practice, these are large omissions. As we have seen, the notice-and-choice paradigm has deep roots within liberal theory, and legal and policy discourses about notice and choice reflect legal culture in action. By the same token, understanding surveillance simply as a means to effective administration, or as a
means for pursuing and performing security, misses the extent to which a narrative about the inevitable nature of innovation and knowledge production positions surveillance as a modality of technical and social progress (Cohen 2015). The “surveillance-industrial complex” does not simply parallel the military-industrial complex; it is also deeply rooted in Silicon Valley’s technoculture and (albeit paradoxically)
in the tropes of romantic individualism and cultural iconoclasm with which its participants self-identify. These themes have been especially salient for privacy regulators.
Engagement with legal scholarship on information privacy would inform the project of understanding
surveillance as social ordering
and as culture in a number of complementary ways. First and most basically, many legal writings on information privacy are important as primary sources that reveal the notice-and-choice paradigm and the narrative of inevitable innovation at work. But there is also a rich vein of legal
scholarship interrogating the assumptions and the politics that underlie privacy and data protection regulation (e.g., Cohen 2012a, 2012c, 2013, 2015; Kerr 2013; Ohm 2010; Solove 2013). In addition, legal scholars have produced richly detailed and revealing investigations of regulatory and compliance processes; for example, scholars concerned with the operation of “surveillant assemblages” and “digital
enclosures” ought to read and consider the important work by Kenneth Bamberger and Deirdre Mulligan on corporate privacy compliance cultures (2011a, 2011b).
If Surveillance Studies is to inform the content of laws and the nature of regulatory practice in the domain of commercial profiling and social media, however,
surveillance theorists will need to do more than simply read
legal sources. Work in Surveillance Studies so far has not been particularly well-adapted to helping policymakers figure
out what, if anything, to do about evolving practices of commercial surveillance. Once again, if it is to be useful to
policymakers, the view from Surveillance Studies requires translation into a form that might furnish a
framework for action.
Here I want to identify three important sets of questions on which Surveillance Studies scholars who want their work to make a difference might take their cues from legal scholarship.
An initial set of questions concerns how to redefine privacy and data protection in functional terms that do not presuppose the stable, liberal self, and that instead offer real benefit to the situated subjects who might claim their protection. David Lyon (2001) has argued that the organizing concepts of “privacy” and “data protection” are inadequate to comprehend surveillance as a mode of social ordering. From a
sociological perspective that is undoubtedly right, but privacy and data protection still might be made effective as legal constructs if articulated differently, in ways that correspond more closely to the ways that surveillance shapes experience. That project calls for the sort of theoretical cannibalization that makes Ph.D. committees in Real Disciplines nervous, but at which legal scholars excel. With some
trepidation, I offer my own work on privacy as boundary management for the postliberal self (Cohen 2012a, 2013), as well as Valerie Steeves’ (2009) work on relational subjectivity, as examples of the sort of exercise that is necessary to reframe the effects of surveillance as social ordering in ways to which legal systems can respond. For law to develop a sustainable and effective approach to regulating data
protection and protecting privacy, the ways of theorizing about the subject represented by these projects must become second nature, not only for scholars but also and more importantly for legislatures, regulators, and courts. That in turn requires second process of translation, from the language of academia into a vernacular that can supply inputs into policy processes.
A second set of questions concerns how to understand what constitutes privacy harm in an era in which some surveillance is a constant. To the Surveillance Studies reader this may seem to be a variation on the first question, but it is different: in law, harm is what makes violation of an interest actionable, and the potential for harm is what creates the predicate for comprehensive regulation of particular domains
of activity. Harm need not be individualized or monetizable; environmental regulations and financial market regulations address systemic and often nonmonetizable risk. But it must be reasonably definite; talk of power, power everywhere is plainly insufficient and it should come as no surprise that policymakers find it risible. Work on this problem is still preliminary, but here legal scholarship has a leg up
because it deals in practicalities. Surveillance Studies scholars might profitably read works by Danielle Citron (2007) and Paul Ohm (2010) that identify and name the systemic risks associated with leaky and largely unregulated data reservoirs, and that draw on resources ranging from the history of tort law to computational science to craft recommendations for more effective regulatory strategies.
A final set of questions concerns the design of governance mechanisms. As we have already seen, the flows of surveillance within social media create novel institutional design challenges. In the domain of commercial profiling, many activities on the business-facing side of personal information markets, removed from consumer-facing processes that purport to ensure notice and choice, have eluded regulatory
scrutiny entirely. Some of the classic works on privacy governance originate within the Surveillance Studies tradit ion; these include Priscilla Regan’s (1995) study of the way privacy legislation emerges within the U.S. political system and Colin Bennett and Charles Raab’s (2006) work on privacy governance and the emergence of data protection as a regulatory paradigm. But the question of governance badly
needs to be revisited; in particular, Surveillance Studies scholars have not yet engaged with the “new privacy governance” now emerging as official policy in the U.S. (and as de facto policy in the European Union) in a sustained and meaningful way. Works by legal scholars on the political, epistemological, and normative dimensions of the new governance (e.g., Bamberger 2010; Cohen 2012b, 2013; Freeman
2000; Lobel 2004) offer starting points for an inquiry that moves beyond “doing Surveillance Studies” to consider the more pressing challenge of doing surveillance regulation wisely and effectively.
Conclusion: Doing Law-and-Surveillance-Studies Differently
The prospects for fruitful interchange and collaboration between legal scholars and Surveillance Studies scholars are likely to remain complicated by pronounced differences in underlying theoretical orientation. But since Surveillance Studies is itself an interdiscipline (Garber 2001), and since legal scholarship has thrived on interdisciplinary exploration, the prospects for effective communication also seem
Bridging the gaps requires, first and foremost, efforts by emissaries from both traditions to foster a more tolerant
and curious dialogue directed toward improved understanding and, ultimately, toward methodological
hybridization. Within one’s own academic community, it can become too easy to mistake consensus
on methodological conventions for epistemological rigor, and to forget that methodological strength also derives from
refusal to be hemmed in by disciplinary boundaries.
From the standpoint of theory, a more sustained dialogue between law and Surveillance Studies would count as a
success if it produced a mode of inquiry about surveillance that melded the theoretical sophistication of Surveillance
Studies with lawyerly attention to the details, mechanisms, and interests that constitute
reasonably good.
surveillance practices as legal practices, and to the kinds of framing that mobilize legal and
policy communities. To do Surveillance Studies better, legal scholars need to challenge their own preference for
putting problems in categories that fit neatly within the liberal model of human nature and behavior, and Surveillance
Studies scholars can help by calling attention to the social and cultural processes within which surveillance practices are
embedded. Surveillance Studies scholars need to do more to resist their own penchant for totalizing
dystopian narratives, and should delve more deeply into the legal and regulatory realpolitik that
surrounds the administration of surveillance systems; legal scholars can help by demystifying legal
and regulatory processes.
From a legal scholar’s perspective, however, theory achieves its highest value when it becomes a tool for forcing
productive confrontations about how to respond to real problems. And so I think it would count as an even bigger success if
dialogue between law and Surveillance Studies generated not only a hybridized theoretical discourse of law-andSurveillance-Studies but also the beginnings of a more accessible policy discourse about surveillance and
privacy, along with reform proposals designed to put the animating concepts behind such a discourse
into practice. Here the goal would be a hybridization between law’s ingrained pragmatism and Surveillance Studies’
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attentiveness to the social and cultural processes through which surveillance is experienced and assimilated. Working
together, legal scholars and Surveillance Studies scholars might advance the project of formulating working
definitions of privacy interests and harms, and might develop more sophisticated projections of the likely effects of
different policy levers that could be brought to bear on systems of surveillance.
Neolib Good – Poverty and Structural Violence
**Both poverty and war deaths are at their lowest levels because of US-led globalization
Barnett, Professor in the Warfare Analysis & Research Department, U.S. Naval War College, 11
(Thomas P.M.,“The New Rules: Leadership Fatigue Puts U.S., and Globalization, at Crossroads,” March 7
http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/8099/the-new-rules-leadership-fatigue-puts-u-s-and-globalization-at-crossroads,)
It is worth first examining the larger picture: We live in a time of arguably the greatest structural change in the global
order yet endured, with this historical moment's most amazing feature being its relative and absolute lack of mass
violence. That is something to consider when Americans contemplate military intervention in Libya, because if we do
take the step to prevent larger-scale killing by engaging in some killing of our own, we will not be adding to some
fantastically imagined global death count stemming from the ongoing "megalomania" and "evil" of American "empire."
We'll be engaging in the same sort of system-administering activity that has marked our stunningly successful stewardship
of global order since World War II. Let me be more blunt: As the guardian of globalization, the U.S. military has
been the greatest force for peace the world has ever known. Had America been removed from the global
dynamics that governed the 20th century, the mass murder never would have ended. Indeed, it's entirely conceivable there
would now be no identifiable human civilization left, once nuclear weapons entered the killing equation. But the world did
not keep sliding down that path of perpetual war. Instead, America stepped up and changed everything by ushering
in our now-perpetual great-power peace. We introduced the international liberal trade order known as
globalization and played loyal Leviathan over its spread. What resulted was the collapse of empires, an
explosion of democracy, the persistent spread of human rights, the liberation of women, the doubling of life
expectancy, a roughly 10-fold increase in adjusted global GDP and a profound and persistent reduction in
battle deaths from state-based conflicts. That is what American "hubris" actually delivered.
Neoliberalism is causing a massive drop in absolute poverty
Obhof, Graduate of Yale Law School, 2003
(“WHY GLOBALIZATION? A LOOK AT GLOBAL CAPITALISM AND ITS EFFECTS”. University of Florida Journal of Law &
Public Policy. Fall 2003)
The effects of globalization have largely been positive for both developed and developing countries.
Consider, for example, the effects of the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations, which lasted from 1986 to 1994 and
resulted in agreements to reduce tariffs and other non-tariff barriers. Advanced countries agreed to lower their tariffs
by an average of 40%, and [*99] the signatories agreed to liberalize trade in the important areas of agriculture and
clothing. n32 The effects of the Uruguay Round have been both positive and large. Reducing tariffs and non-tariff
barriers has produced annual increases in global GDP of $ 100-300 billion. n33 This figure is five times larger
than the total worldwide aid to developing countries. n34 More importantly, a significant share of this
increase has gone to the poorest people. The percentage of the population in developing countries living under $ 1
per day has fallen from 30% to 24% in the past decade. n35 The recent experience of Mexico offers an excellent example of
global capitalism in action. The extent of poverty in Mexico is shocking; 20 million people live on less than $ 2 per day.
n36 This is so for a number of reasons, including government intervention in the market in the form of protectionist
measures intended to help ailing or failing industries. Using government interventions to shape the allocation of resources
traditionally led to gross inefficiencies and a low pace of innovation and adoption of new technologies. n37 Trade
liberalization has helped curb such interventions - indeed, the opening of its markets has become one of the most important
and far-reaching reforms in Mexico. The effects of trade liberalization on the Mexican economy have been
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significant. Exports in Mexico have increased sixfold since 1985, and the GDP of the country has grown at an average
rate of 5.4% per year since 1996. n38 Since NAFTA created a "free trade area" among the United States,
Canada, and Mexico in 1994, Mexican labor productivity has grown fast in its tradable sectors. n39 Not surprisingly,
however, productivity has remained stagnant in nontradable sectors. n40 NAFTA has also improved Mexico's aggregate
trade balance and helped to ameliorate the effect of the [*100] peso crisis on capital flows. n41 As most economists
predicted during the NAFTA debate, the effects of the agreement have been positive and large for Mexico. n42
The effects have also been positive, although smaller, for the United States. This is also consistent with the pre-NAFTA
analyses of most economists. n43 The positive effects of globalization have been consistent throughout the developing
world. Dramatic increases in per capita income have accompanied the expansion of trade in countries that have become
more globalized. Korea, for example, has seen average incomes increase eightfold since 1960. n44 China has
experienced an average growth of 5.1% during the same period, and other countries in Asia, Africa, and
Latin America have experienced faster growth than that in advanced countries. n45 The evidence is
incredibly one-sided. "[P]romoting openness, and supporting it with sound domestic policies, leads to faster growth."
Neolib Good – War
Global economic liberalism solves war between great powers
Griswold, Associated Director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the CATO Institute in Washington, 02
(Daniel, “seven Moral Arguments for Free Trade,” The Insider, 01 May, http://www.insideronline.org/feature.cfm?id=106)
In an 1845 speech in the British House of Commons, Richard Cobden called free trade “that advance which is calculated to
knit nations more together in the bonds of peace by means of commercial intercourse.” Free trade does not guarantee
peace, but it does strengthen peace by raising the cost of war to governments and their citizens. As
nations become more integrated through expanding markets, they have more to lose should trade be
disrupted.
In recent years, the twin trends of globalization and democratization have produced their own “peace dividend”: since
1987, real spending on armaments throughout the world has dropped by more than one-third. Since the
end of the Cold War, the threat of major international wars has receded. Those nations most closely associated with
international terrorism – Libya, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and North Korea – are among
the least globalized countries in the world in terms of non-oil trade and foreign investment. Not one of them
belongs to the World Trade Organization.
During the 1930s, the industrialized nations waged trade wars against each other. They raised tariffs
and imposed quotas in order to protect domestic industry. The result, however, was that other nations
only raised their barriers even further, choking off global trade and deepening and prolonging the
global economic depression. Those dark economic times contributed to the conflict that became World
War II. America’s post-war policy of encouraging free trade through multilateral trade agreements was aimed at
promoting peace as much as it was prosperity.
And Neoliberalism solves internal state violence
Tures, Assistant Professor of Political Science at LaGrange College, 2003
(John A., http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj22n3/cj22n3-9.pdf)
The last three decades have witnessed an unprecedented expansion of market-based reforms and the
profusion of economic freedom in the international system. This shift in economic policy has sparked a debate about
whether free markets are superior to state controls. Numerous studies have compared the neoliberal and statist
policies on issues of production capacity, economic growth, commercial volumes, and egalitarianism. An overlooked
research agenda, however, is the relationship between levels of economic freedom and violence within countries.
Proponents of the statist approach might note that a strong government can bend the market to its will, directing activity
toward policies necessary to achieve greater levels of gross domestic product and growth. By extracting more resources for
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the economy, a powerful state can redistribute benefits to keep the populace happy. Higher taxes can also pay for an army
and police force that intimidate people. Such governments range from command economies of totalitarian systems to
autocratic dictators and military juntas. Other economically unfree systems include some of the authoritarian “Asian tigers.”
A combination of historical evidence, modern theorists, and statistical findings, however, has indicated
that a reduced role for the state in regulating economic transactions is associated with a decrease in
internal conflicts. Countries where the government dominates the commercial realm experience an
increase in the level of domestic violence. Scholars have traced the history of revolutions to explain the
relationship between statism and internal upheavals. Contemporary authors also posit a relationship between
economic liberty and peace. Statistical tests show a strong connection between economic freedom and
conflict reduction during the past three decades.
Neolib Good – Inequality
Neoliberalism solves global inequality
Obhof, Graduate of Yale Law School, 2003
(“WHY GLOBALIZATION? A LOOK AT GLOBAL CAPITALISM AND ITS EFFECTS”. University of Florida Journal of Law &
Public Policy. Fall 2003)
Many in the anti-globalization camp have focused their efforts on rising tensions within, rather than between,
countries. They argue that the rich and the poor are drifting farther apart, and that violence between
classes of people within the same country is increasing. Noting that economic groups often tend to break down
along ethnic lines, some have even postulated that the spread of free-market democracy fosters "ethnoeconomic
resentment" to the point of conflagration. n171 On their collective face, these arguments appear to have some merit.
Intrastate war is now the [*121] predominant form of armed conflict. n172 In the last decade, civil wars "have scarred the
world's poorest countries, leaving a legacy of more than five million dead, many more driven from their homes, billions of
dollars in resources destroyed, and wasted economic opportunity." n173 Is the spread of global capitalism responsible
for these atrocities? The answer is likely no. Such analyses often overlook more obvious sources of backlash:
elite behavior, corruption, and latent ethnic, nationalist, and religious tensions. n174 They also ignore
historical and economic realities. As discussed above, there is no correlation between globalization and
increased inequality within countries - in fact, the opposite is true. Furthermore, the risk factors most closely
correlated with civil war include the share of GDP coming from the export of primary commodities, geography, recent
conflicts, economic opportunities, and ethnic and religious composition. n175 Since the end of the Cold War,
conflict has been concentrated in countries with little education and economic decline. n176 Intrastate
conflict is systematically related to low national income n177 and a lack of economic opportunities, n178
but not inequality. n179 Unequal societies are simply not more prone to conflict than more egalitarian
ones. Given the importance of economic opportunity in preventing conflict, and the unequivocally positive results
of increased trade and foreign investment, it seems that global capitalism is a potential cure, rather than a
cause, of internal conflict. In fact, internal pressures appear to be greater [*122] in countries that have not
become more globalized in recent years. Whatever the merits of this latter claim, though, the assertion that
globalization has increased internal conflict is simply not supported by the facts.
Inequality increases without free trade and Neoliberalism
Obhof, Graduate of Yale Law School, 2003
(“WHY GLOBALIZATION? A LOOK AT GLOBAL CAPITALISM AND ITS EFFECTS”. University of Florida Journal of Law &
Public Policy. Fall 2003)
B. Openness and Between-Country Inequality Has globalization led to greater inequality between developed and
developing countries? That depends on how one interprets the question. Data indicates that globalization may have
decreased income inequality between developed and globalizing developing countries. During the
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1990s, per
capita income grew faster in developing countries that were open to international trade than
in developed countries by a ratio of more than two-to-one. n71 Per capita income experienced little or no
growth, however, in countries that did not globalize. The income gap therefore increased between nonglobalizing, undeveloped countries and developed countries. The difference in performance between
globalizing and non-globalizing countries accounts for the general lack of convergence between rich
and poor countries taken together.
Neolib Good – Democracy
Neoliberalism helps spread democracy which helps decrease war
Griswold, Associated Director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the CATO Institute in Washington, 2007
(Daniel, “Trade, Democracy and Peace: The Virtuous Cycle,” 20 April 2007, http://www.freetrade.org/node/681)
The good news does not stop there. Buried beneath the daily stories about suicide bombings and insurgency movements is
an underappreciated but encouraging fact: The world has somehow become a more peaceful place. A little-noticed headline
on an Associated Press story a while back reported, " War declining worldwide, studies say." In 2006, a survey by
the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute found that the number of armed conflicts around the world has
been in decline for the past half-century. Since the early 1990s, ongoing conflicts have dropped from 33 to 17, with
all of them now civil conflicts within countries. The Institute's latest report found that 2005 marked the second year in a
row that no two nations were at war with one another. What a remarkable and wonderful fact. The death toll from war has
also been falling. According to the Associated Press report, "The number killed in battle has fallen to its lowest point in the
post-World War II period, dipping below 20,000 a year by one measure. Peacemaking missions, meanwhile, are growing in
number." Current estimates of people killed by war are down sharply from annual tolls ranging from 40,000 to 100,000 in
the 1990s, and from a peak of 700,000 in 1951 during the Korean War. Many causes lie behind the good news--the end of
the Cold War and the spread of democracy, among them--but expanding trade and globalization appear to be playing a
major role in promoting world peace. Far from stoking a "World on Fire," as one misguided American author argued in a
forgettable book, growing commercial ties between nations have had a dampening effect on armed
conflict and war. I would argue that free trade and globalization have promoted peace in three main ways.
First, as I argued a moment ago, trade and globalization have reinforced the trend toward democracy, and democracies
tend not to pick fights with each other. Thanks in part to globalization, almost two thirds of the world's
countries today are democracies--a record high. Some studies have cast doubt on the idea that democracies are less
likely to fight wars. While it's true that democracies rarely if ever war with each other, it is not such a rare occurrence for
democracies to engage in wars with non-democracies. We can still hope that has more countries turn to democracy,
there will be fewer provocations for war by non-democracies.
Neolib Good – Environment
Environment getting better now and its because of growth and tech innovation
Bailey, award-winning science correspondent for Reason magazine, 2k
(Ronald, “Earth Day, Then and Now The planet's future has never looked better. Here's why.”,
http://reason.com/archives/2000/05/01/earth-day-then-and-now/4)
Earth Day 1970 provoked a torrent of apocalyptic predictions. "We have about five more years at the outside to do
something," ecologist Kenneth Watt declared to a Swarthmore College audience on April 19, 1970. Harvard biologist
George Wald estimated that "civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems
facing mankind." "We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a
suitable place of human habitation," wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the
scholarly journal Environment. The day after Earth Day, even the staid New York Times editorial page warned, "Man must
stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable
deterioration and possible extinction." Very Apocalypse Now. Three decades later, of course, the world hasn't come
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to an end; if anything, the planet's ecological future has never looked so promising. With half a billion
people suiting up around the globe for Earth Day 2000, now is a good time to look back on the predictions made at the first
Earth Day and see how they've held up and what we can learn from them. The short answer: The prophets of doom
were not simply wrong, but spectacularly wrong. More important, many contemporary environmental alarmists
are similarly mistaken when they continue to insist that the Earth's future remains an eco-tragedy that has already
entered its final act. Such doomsters not only fail to appreciate the huge environmental gains made over the
past 30 years, they ignore the simple fact that increased wealth, population, and technological
innovation don't degrade and destroy the environment. Rather, such developments preserve and enrich
the environment. If it is impossible to predict fully the future, it is nonetheless possible to learn from the past. And the
best lesson we can learn from revisiting the discourse surrounding the very first Earth Day is that passionate concern,
however sincere, is no substitute for rational analysis.
Heg Good – A2: Security Impacts
No impact uniqueness – world getting better now heg is peaceful
Busby, 12 [Get Real Chicago IR guys out in force, Josh, Assistant Professor of Public Affairs and a fellow in the RGK Center for
Philanthropy and Community Service as well as a Crook Distinguished Scholar at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International
Security and Law. http://duckofminerva.blogspot.com/2012/01/get-real-chicago-ir-guys-out-in-force.html]
Is Unipolarity Peaceful? As evidence, Monteiro provides metrics of the number of years during which
great powers have been at war. For the unipolar era since the end of the Cold War, the United States has been at war
13 of those 22 years or 59% (see his Table 2 below). Now, I've been following some of the discussion by and about
Steven Pinker and Joshua Goldstein's work that suggests the world is becoming more peaceful with interstate
wars and intrastate wars becoming more rare. I was struck by the graphic that Pinker used in a Wall Street Journal
back in September that drew on the Uppsala Conflict Data, which shows a steep decline in the number of deaths per
100,000 people. How do we square this account by Monteiro of a unipolar world that is not peaceful (with
the U.S. at war during this period in Iraq twice, Afghanistan, Kosovo) and Pinker's account which
suggests declining violence in the contemporary period? Where Pinker is focused on systemic
outcomes, Monteiro's measure merely reflect years during which the great powers are at war. Under
unipolarity, there is only one great power so the measure is partial and not systemic. However, Monteiro's theory aims to be
systemic rather than partial. In critiquing Wohlforth's early work on unipolarity stability, Monteiro notes: Wohlforth’s
argument does not exclude all kinds of war. Although power preponderance allows the unipole to manage conflicts
globally, this argument is not meant to apply to relations between major and minor powers, or among the latter (17). So
presumably, a more adequate test of the peacefulness or not of unipolarity (at least for Monteiro) is not the
piece
number of years the great power has been at war but whether the system as a whole is becoming more
peaceful under unipolarity compared to previous eras, including wars between major and minor powers or wars
between minor powers and whether the wars that do happen are as violent as the ones that came before. Now, as Ross
Douthat pointed out, Pinker's argument isn't based on a logic of benign hegemony. It could be that even if the present era is
more peaceful, unipolarity has nothing to do with it. Moreover, Pinker may be wrong. Maybe the world isn't all that
peaceful. I keep thinking about the places I don't want to go to anymore because they are violent (Mexico, Honduras, El
Salvador, Nigeria, Pakistan, etc.) As Tyler Cowen noted, the measure Pinker uses to suggest violence is a per capita one,
which doesn't get at the absolute level of violence perpetrated in an era of a greater world population. But, if my read of
other reports based on Uppsala data is right, war is becoming more rare and less deadly (though later data
suggests lower level armed conflict may be increasing again since the mid-2000s). The apparent violence of the
contemporary era may be something of a presentist bias and reflect our own lived experience and the ubiquity of news
media .Even if the U.S. has been at war for the better part of unipolarity, the deadliness is declining,
even compared with Vietnam, let alone World War II. Does Unipolarity Drive Conflict? So, I kind of took
issue with the Monteiro's premise that unipolarity is not peaceful. What about his argument that unipolarity
drives conflict? Monteiro suggests that the unipole has three available strategies - defensive dominance, offensive
dominance and disengagement - though is less likely to use the third. Like Rosato and Schuessler, Monteiro suggests
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because other states cannot trust the intentions of other states, namely the unipole, that minor states won't merely
bandwagon with the unipole. Some "recalcitrant" minor powers will attempt to see what they can get away with and try to
build up their capabilities. As an aside, in Rosato and Schuessler world, unless these are located in strategically important
areas (i.e. places where there is oil), then the unipole (the United States) should disengage. In Monteiro's world,
disengagement would inexorably lead to instability and draw in the U.S. again (though I'm not sure this
necessarily follows), but neither defensive or offensive dominance offer much possibility for peace either since it is U.S.
power in and of itself that makes other states insecure, even though they can't balance against it.
No interventions forthcoming – Iraq era over
Heroux 3/19 (Paul Heroux, senior analyst at the Institute for Defense and Disarment Studies, Master's in International Relations
from the London School of Economics and a Master's from the Harvard School of Government, “The Aftermath of Iraq: A Cautious
West in Iran, Syria and Afghanistan,” 3/19/12) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-heroux/the-aftermath-of-iraq-ac_b_1363368.html
The aftermath of the war in Iraq has resulted in a more cautious approach to U.S. military engagements
overseas. No longer do Americans think that the U.S. can or should become involved in military operations
overseas unless our national security is directly at risk. Even then, there is ample room for debate on what is
our national security interest. In the wake of the war in Iraq, the U.S. is reluctant to become involved in the humanitarian crisis
going on in Syria and anxious to get out of Afghanistan for fear of getting bogged down. But with Iran, the lesson
from Iraq seems to be that there is a new standard of what constitutes 'evidence' of a nuclear weapons
program. Iran The West does not trust Iran on its word that it is not pursuing a nuclear weapons program. However, there is no hard evidence of such a program. At
present, the concern is not if Iran is constructing a nuclear weapon, but over the concern that Iran is building a nuclear weapon capability. Israel recognizes this important
distinction. There are many steps that Iran would have to take to signal to the world that it is pursuing a nuclear 'weapons' program. So long as the IAEA has the ability to
monitor their program, we will know if Iran is going to construct a nuclear weapon.
In the aftermath of Iraq, the West is far more hesitant
about preemptive attacks on another nation suspected of pursuing a nuclear weapons program. Israel is working on a much shorter timeline for a strike on Iran
than the U.S. Such a premature and perhaps needless attack could have serious consequences for the U.S. and the world. From the U.S. point of view, if diplomacy, sanctions
and covert action fails in Iran, the prospect of military intervention becomes almost inevitable. On the one hand, the argument can be made that the U.S. won't get a WMD
there is a heightened level of skepticism of what the U.S. knows and what
it should or should not get involved with. The aftermath of Iraq has made the U.S. wary of preemptive
attacks against other nations, and rightly so. Syria With over a year of violence between the Syrian government and its people, talk of ethnic cleansing
program wrong a second time. On the other hand,
has entered the fray. Ethnic cleansing is a crime against humanity per the International Criminal Court. The question is: Do hostilities against the Sunni Muslims at the hands of
should the U.S. intervene,
Alawite Muslims constitute ethnic cleansing? If so,
and if so, how -- boots on the ground, sanctions, diplomacy, a combination of
all of the above? We can use successful examples of humanitarian intervention as a guide but we do so with limitations. We intervened in 1995 in Bosnia and Herzegovina
under the Dayton Accords, but this is not 1995, it is not the Balkans, and this is not yet at the point where anyone is talking about genocide. Russia and China have been
obstructing efforts to bring hostilities to an end, and the Arab League has not exhausted all of its own options. Finally, with some reason to believe that terrorist groups may be
opposing the al Asad regime, how does the U.S. not support the rebels but not support the terrorist groups? If there were an easy answer, it would not be in the news and we
The aftermath of Iraq has made us wary to intervene in a humanitarian crisis
would not be talking about it.
at the hands of
a dictator. Afghanistan With the recent killing of 16 Afghan civilians allegedly at the hands of a U.S. soldier, this incident has brought our attention to the issue of what are we
still doing in Afghanistan. The U.S. entered Afghanistan for the right reasons. Now that the Taliban has been removed from power, Osama bin Laden is dead, and with
Afghanistan's president essentially saying that the U.S. has overstayed their welcome, the debate is in full gear about our role in that country. Should we leave earlier than
planned, or should we stay the course and finish what is called our mission? The aftermath of Iraq has made us wary to remain in any country for a prolonged period of time.
In the wake of Iraq, we may be left with a heightened sense of cautiousness about getting
involved overseas. This may be a good thing, but taken too far, it may cripple our ability to get involved when it may be necessary.
Looking Forward
Heg Good – Method
War is at its lowest level in history because of heg---best statistical studies prove heg solves war because it
makes democratic peace resilient and globalization sustainable---it’s the deeper cause of proximate
checks against war
Owen 11
(John M. Owen, Professor of Politics at University of Virginia PhD from Harvard "DON’T DISCOUNT HEGEMONY" Feb 11
www.cato-unbound.org/2011/02/11/john-owen/dont-discount-hegemony/)
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Andrew Mack and his colleagues at the Human Security Report Project are to be congratulated. Not only do they present a study
with a striking conclusion, driven by data, free of theoretical or ideological bias, but they also do something quite
unfashionable: they bear good news. Social scientists really are not supposed to do that. Our job is, if not to be Malthusians, then at least to point out
disturbing trends, looming catastrophes, and the imbecility and mendacity of policy makers. And then it is to say why, if people listen to us, things will get
better. We do this as if our careers depended upon it, and perhaps they do; for if all is going to be well, what need then for us? Our colleagues at Simon
Fraser University are brave indeed. That may sound like a setup, but it is not. I shall challenge neither the data nor the general conclusion that violent
conflict around the world has been decreasing in fits and starts since the Second World War. When it comes to violent conflict among and
within countries, things have been getting better . (The trends have not been linear—Figure 1.1 actually shows that the frequency of interstate
wars peaked in the 1980s—but the 65-year movement is clear.) Instead I shall accept that Mack et al. are correct on the macro-trends, and focus on their
explanations they advance for these remarkable trends. With apologies to any readers of this forum who recoil from academic debates, this might get
mildly theoretical and even more mildly methodological. Concerning international wars, one version of the “ nuclear-peace” theory is not in fact
laid to rest by the data. It is certainly true that nuclear-armed states have been involved in many wars. They have even been attacked (think of
Israel), which falsifies the simple claim of “assured destruction”—that any nuclear country A will deter any kind of attack by any country B because B
fears a retaliatory nuclear strike from A. But the most important “nuclear-peace” claim has been about mutually assured destruction, which obtains
between two robustly nuclear-armed states. The claim is that (1) rational states having second-strike capabilities—enough deliverable nuclear weaponry to
survive a nuclear first strike by an enemy—will have an overwhelming incentive not to attack one another; and (2) we can safely assume that nucleararmed states are rational. It follows that states with a second-strike capability will not fight one another. Their colossal atomic arsenals neither kept the
United States at peace with North Vietnam during the Cold War nor the Soviet Union at peace with Afghanistan. But the argument remains strong that
those arsenals did help keep the United States and Soviet Union at peace with each other. Why non-nuclear states are not deterred from fighting nuclear
states is an important and open question. But in a time when calls to ban the Bomb are being heard from more and more quarters, we must be clear about
precisely what the broad trends toward peace can and cannot tell us. They may tell us nothing about why we have had no World War III ,
and little about the wisdom of banning the Bomb now. Regarding the downward trend in international war, Professor Mack is friendlier to more palatable
theories such as the “democratic peace” (democracies do not fight one another, and the proportion of democracies has increased, hence less war); the
interdependence or “commercial peace” (states with extensive economic ties find it irrational to fight one another, and interdependence has increased,
hence less war); and the notion that people around the world are more anti-war than their forebears were. Concerning the downward trend in civil wars, he
favors theories of economic growth (where commerce is enriching enough people, violence is less appealing—a logic similar to that of the “commercial
peace” thesis that applies among nations) and the end of the Cold War (which end reduced superpower support for rival rebel factions in so many ThirdWorld countries). These are all plausible mechanisms for peace. What is more, none of them excludes any other; all could be working toward the same
end. That would be somewhat puzzling, however. Is the world just lucky these days? How is it that an array of peace-inducing factors happens to
be working coincidentally in our time, when such a magical array was absent in the past? The answer may be that one or more of these
mechanisms reinforces some of the others, or perhaps some of them are mutually reinforcing. Some scholars, for example, have been
focusing on whether economic growth might support democracy and vice versa, and whether both might support international cooperation, including to
We would still need to explain how this charmed circle of causes got started, however. And here let
factor is what
international relations scholars call hegemony—specifically American hegemony. A theory that many regard as discredited,
end civil wars.
me raise another factor, perhaps even less appealing than the “nuclear peace” thesis, at least outside of the United States. That
but that refuses to go away, is called hegemonic stability theory. The theory emerged in the 1970s in the realm of international political economy. It asserts
that for the global economy to remain open—for countries to keep barriers to trade and investment low—one powerful country must take the lead.
Depending on the theorist we consult, “taking the lead” entails paying for global public goods (keeping the sea lanes open, providing liquidity to the
international economy), coercion (threatening to raise trade barriers or withdraw military protection from countries that cheat on the rules), or both. The
theory is skeptical that international cooperation in economic matters can emerge or endure absent a hegemon. The distastefulness of such claims is selfevident: they imply that it is good for everyone the world over if one country has more wealth and power than others. More precisely, they imply that it
has been good for the world that the United States has been so predominant. There is no obvious reason why hegemonic stability theory could not apply to
other areas of international cooperation, including in security affairs, human rights, international law, peacekeeping (UN or otherwise), and so on. What I
want to suggest here—suggest, not test—is that American
hegemony might just be a deep cause of the steady decline
of political deaths in the world.
How could that be? After all, the report states that United States is the third most war-prone country since
1945. Many of the deaths depicted in Figure 10.4 were in wars that involved the United States (the Vietnam War being the leading one). Notwithstanding
politicians’ claims to the contrary, a candid look at U.S. foreign policy reveals that the country is as ruthlessly self-interested as any other great power in
history. The answer is that U.S.
hegemony might just be a deeper cause of the proximate causes outlined by
Professor Mack. Consider economic growth and openness to foreign trade and investment, which (so say some theories) render violence irrational.
American power and policies may be responsible for these in two related ways. First, at least since the 1940s Washington has prodded
other countries to embrace the market capitalism that entails economic openness and produces sustainable
economic growth. The United States promotes capitalism for selfish reasons, of course: its own domestic system depends upon growth, which in
turn depends upon the efficiency gains from economic interaction with foreign countries, and the more the better. During the Cold War most of its allies
Second, the U.S.-led western victory in the Cold War damaged the
credibility of alternative paths to development—communism and import-substituting industrialization being the two leading ones—
accepted some degree of market-driven growth.
and left market capitalism the best model. The end of the Cold War also involved an end to the billions of rubles in Soviet material support for regimes
that tried to make these alternative models work. (It also, as Professor Mack notes, eliminated the superpowers’ incentives to feed civil violence in the
Third World.) What we call globalization is caused in part by the emergence of the United States as the global hegemon. The same case can be made,
with somewhat more difficulty, concerning the spread of democracy. Washington has supported democracy only under certain conditions—the chief one
being the absence of a popular anti-American movement in the target state—but those conditions have become much more widespread following the
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collapse of communism. Thus in the 1980s the Reagan administration—the most anti-communist government America ever had—began to dump
America’s old dictator friends, starting in the Philippines. Today Islamists tend to be anti-American, and so the Obama administration is skittish about
democracy in Egypt and other authoritarian Muslim countries. But general U.S. material and moral support for liberal democracy remains strong.
Both absolute poverty and war deaths are at their lowest levels because of US hegemony – shocks to the
international system have historically produced the worst violence
Barnett 11
(Thomas P.M. Barnett, Former Senior Strategic Researcher and Professor in the Warfare Analysis & Research Department, Center for
Naval Warfare Studies, U.S. Naval War College American military geostrategist and Chief Analyst at Wikistrat., worked as the
Assistant for Strategic Futures in the Office of Force Transformation in the Department of Defense, “The New Rules: Leadership
Fatigue Puts U.S., and Globalization, at Crossroads,” March 7 http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/8099/the-new-rulesleadership-fatigue-puts-u-s-and-globalization-at-crossroads,
It is worth first examining the larger picture: We
live in a time of arguably the greatest structural change in the global order yet endured, with
this historical moment's most amazing feature being its relative and absolute lack of mass violence. That is something to consider when
Americans contemplate military intervention in Libya, because if we do take the step to prevent larger-scale killing by engaging in some killing of our
own, we will not be adding to some fantastically imagined global death count stemming from the ongoing "megalomania" and "evil" of American
"empire." We'll be engaging in the same sort of system-administering activity that has marked our stunningly successful stewardship of global order since
World War II. Let me be more blunt: As
the guardian of globalization, the U.S. military has been the greatest force
for peace the world has ever known. Had America been removed from the global dynamics that governed the
20th century, the mass murder never would have ended. Indeed, it's entirely conceivable there would now be no
identifiable human civilization left, once nuclear weapons entered the killing equation. But the world did not keep
sliding down that path of perpetual war. Instead, America stepped up and changed everything by ushering in our now-perpetual
great-power peace. We introduced the international liberal trade order known as globalization and played loyal Leviathan over its
spread. What resulted was the collapse of empires, an explosion of democracy, the persistent spread of human rights, the liberation of
women, the doubling of life expectancy, a roughly 10-fold increase in adjusted global GDP and a profound and
persistent reduction in battle deaths from state-based conflicts. That is what American "hubris" actually delivered. Please
remember that the next time some TV pundit sells you the image of "unbridled" American military power as the cause of
global disorder instead of its cure. With self-deprecation bordering on self-loathing, we now imagine a post-American world that is anything but.
Just watch who scatters and who steps up as the Facebook revolutions erupt across the Arab world. While we might imagine ourselves the status quo
power, we remain the world's most vigorously revisionist force. As for the sheer "evil" that is our military-industrial complex, again, let's examine what
The last great period of global structural change was the
first half of the 20th century, a period that saw a death toll of about 100 million across two world wars. That
comes to an average of 2 million deaths a year in a world of approximately 2 billion souls. Today, with far
more comprehensive worldwide reporting, researchers report an average of less than 100,000 battle deaths
annually in a world fast approaching 7 billion people. Though admittedly crude, these calculations suggest a 90
percent absolute drop and a 99 percent relative drop in deaths due to war. We are clearly headed for a world order
characterized by multipolarity, something the American-birthed system was designed to both encourage and accommodate. But given how things
turned out the last time we collectively faced such a fluid structure, we would do well to keep U.S.
power, in all of its forms, deeply embedded in the geometry to come. To continue the historical survey, after salvaging Western Europe from
its half-century of civil war, the U.S. emerged as the progenitor of a new, far more just form of globalization -one based on actual free trade rather than colonialism. America then successfully replicated globalization further in East Asia
the world looked like before that establishment reared its ugly head.
over the second half of the 20th century, setting the stage for the Pacific Century now unfolding. As a result, the vector of structure-building connectivity
shifted from trans-Atlantic to trans-Pacific. But if the connectivity push of the past several decades has been from West to East, with little connectivity
extended to the South outside of the narrow trade of energy and raw materials, the current connectivity dynamic is dramatically different. Now, the
dominant trends are: first, the East cross-connecting back to the West via financial and investment flows as well as Asian companies "going global"; and
second, the East creating vast new connectivity networks with the South through South-South trade and investment. The challenge here is how to adjust
great-power politics to these profound forces of structural change. Because of the West's connectivity to the East, we are by extension becoming more
deeply connected to the unstable South, with China as the primary conduit. Meanwhile, America's self-exhausting post-Sept. 11 unilateralist bender
triggered the illusion -- all the rage these days -- of a G-Zero, post-American world. The result, predictably enough for manic-depressive America, is that
we've sworn off any overall responsibility for the South, even as we retain the right to go anywhere and kill any individuals -- preferably with flying robots
-- that we deem immediately threatening to our narrowly defined national security interests. The problem with this approach is that China has
neither the intention nor the ability to step up and play anything resembling a responsible Leviathan over the restive South, where
globalization's advance -- again, with a Chinese face -- produces a lot of near-term instability even as it builds the basis for longerterm stability.
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A2 Root Cause
No root cause of war – monocausal explanations are reductive and fail
Holsti 91
Kalevi Jaakko, Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia, On The Study Of War,” Peace And War: Armed
Conflicts And International Order, 1648-1989, Published by Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0521399297, p. 3
Investigators of conflict, crises, and war reached a consensus years ago that monocausal explanations are
theoretically and empirically deficient. Kenneth Waltz’ (1957) classic typology of war explanations convincingly
demonstrated various problems arising from diagnoses that locate war causation exclusively at the individual, state
attribute, or systemic levels. He also illustrated how prescriptions based on faulty diagnoses offer no solution to the
problem. Even Rousseau’s powerful exploration of the consequences of anarchy, updated by Waltz (1979), remains full of
insights, but it only specifies why wars recur (there is nothing to prevent them) and offers few clues that help to predict
when, where, and over what issues. Blainey (1973), in another telling attack on monocausal theories, continues where
Waltz left off. He offers, on the basis of rich historical illustrations, both logical and anecdotal rebuttals of facile
explanations of war that dot academic and philosophical thought on the subject. But rebuttals of the obvious are not
sufficient. We presently have myriads of theories of war, emphasizing all sorts of factors that can help
explain its etiology. As Carroll and Fink (1975) note, there are if anything too many theories, and even too
many typologies of theories. Quoting Timascheff approvingly, they point out that anything might lead to war,
but nothing will certainly lead to war.
A2 Neolib Unsustainable
It’s sutainable and conomic rationality is the only option
Barnhizer, 6
David, Prof of Law, Cleveland State U, ‘Waking from Sustainability's "Impossible Dream”,’ Geo Int’l Envtl L Rev, pg. l/n
In a way disturbingly similar to the sudden inability of the former Soviet Union to support the safety net for its citizens,
Western system's ability to operate on the level it has achieved is in question. n65 There should be no
the
doubt that basic commitments to the well-being of hundreds of millions of residents are at risk. That
the Western systems will decline in both relative and absolute terms in their ability to generate wealth
seems undeniable. This phenomenon is already evident [*623] in massive job loss, spending cuts, and bankrupt
pension plans. The key questions are how far we will allow the decay to go and what if anything can be
done to stop it. Many American and European industries are uncompetitive with those outside competitors allowed to follow different rules, not because of the quality
of management and productivity factors, but because the Western social model has imposed expensive social obligations on their domestic economic actors. Producers in China,
India, and elsewhere enjoy low taxes or special tax breaks, and have lower costs for labor and raw materials. This advantage does not derive from the status of these nations as
superior competitors but because their social and economic systems have lagged behind those of western Europe, North America, and Japan. Businesses in the United States,
Japan, and western Europe, on the other hand, have been successful to the extent that their wealth generation capacities allowed the development and funding of expensive and
fully integrated social and economic systems. The ability to continue funding those moral systems of social justice is being degraded under the rubric of "free trade" and
The competitive advantage those other countries enjoy has little to do with fair competition,
but rather relates to the fact that American and western European businesses carry significant social
obligations and regulatory costs that the others do not. Many of the arguments extolling free trade in an
"unfree" system ignore the moral implications and inherent unfairness of their claims. If it is accepted that
globalization.
businesses have the obligation to pay its workers fair wages in the context of what is fair in this system and to generate wealth and revenues to fund social benefit programs, then
penalizing Western businesses by requiring them to compete with producers and suppliers from other regions who are not required to bear those social costs is inherently unfair.
We cannot take the chance involved in slowing down our economic system through the imposition of
new rules requiring the internalization of heretofore external costs, or through the "friction" that would
be applied if we sought to govern economic activity through totally coherent "sustainability"
institutions. It will be all we can do if we can even come close to sustaining our ability to fulfill
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existing social obligations and incrementally contribute to the reduction of poverty and creation of
opportunity in the world. Whatever else might be said about the consequences of the Western economic model, there
is a clear moral basis to the system it supports and that we now must determine how to sustain. n66
Although proponents of economic stasis argue in favor of either slow growth that takes all the effects
of our activities into account or even for full stasis, these are not realistic options. n67 We are not
beginning from a zero point, but one where [*624] expectations, dependency, cultures, and systems
are already in place. Consider the enormous public and private deferred debt bills and unfunded obligations undertaken in the United States and Europe in the
form of a series of budgetary "IOUs." n68 In the United States we have incurred massive debt obligations that allow us
to make comparatively small payments now but that will require enormous balloon payments later. We
would have difficulty meeting those obligations even in a healthy economy due to the demographic shifts we are
experiencing as our population ages. But there is no reason to believe that we will be able to "sustain" the
health of our economic and social systems. As they come due, the balloon payments will necessitate
some combination of higher taxes, abandonment of the promises themselves, or reductions in what can
actually be delivered. The Western system of social support may have to change and support lessened
social and economic expectations, but there is a great difference between lessening and complete
collapse. While a modification of the core social morality of the Western system may become necessary, it is not
morally acceptable if preventable. We need to understand the impact of the false arguments of free trade which are in many ways veiled justifications
for destroying the moral strength of Western culture by penalizing Western productive activities for carrying the social costs governments mandated they sustain, while
rewarding competitors for avoiding such obligations and encouraging our productive economic activities to relocate to regions of the world that do not require them to carry the
burden of expensive social choices.
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