>>>Security K<<<
Links
Plan Links
Link – Surveillance Reform
Legal restricting of surveillance ignores that the law itself is structured through a
series of exception in the name of national security. Surveillance is not a post-9/11
aberration but a norm in the functioning of politics.
Bigo in 2006(Didier, Professor of International Relations at Sciences-Po Paris, France. He is also
Visiting Professor in the Department of War Studies at King’s College, London, “Security, exception, ban
and surveillance,” in Theorizing Surveillance, page 50-55)
The first move of any government that considers its survival threatened is to close its borders and detain
foreigners. This is not new. September 11 was a tragic moment but cannot be considered an ‘unprecedented event’ radically changing the
face of the modern world, even if Tony Blair, George Bush and John Howard have said respectively that this date was a turning point in history
(Huysmans 2004).
The transnationalization of political violence by clandestine organizations is a long process
whose roots are as old as the decolonization process of the 1950s, the hijacking of planes by third parties in the 1980s,
and the development of killing at distance by remote technologies of bombing, as well as the radicalization of conflicts in Lebanon and Palestine
with the rebirth of suicide bombers against French and US armies.18 What was new with September 11, 2001 was, at the level of the use of
violence, the combination of different traditional repertoires of actions (hijacking planes, destroying them, suicide bombers…), the scale of the
attacks, and its location in the heart of US territory. However, this is not the birth of a new age of global terrorism per se, called hyperterrorism,
megaterrorism or third type terrorism, even if some experts on (in)security19 and some ‘fearmongers’ have sold the idea with such success that
it is still difficult to state what we know and what we do not know four years later.20 For example, 21 July in the UK seems to be more of a
copycat bombing than anything else and one must wonder to what extent Al Qaeda is or is not a unified strategic actor (Heisbourg 2002;
Megret 2003). The novelty then, if any, is that some clandestine organizations, not directly related with a mass movement, are perhaps more
credible than before in this claim to launch a war with a high level of intensity by using high-technology weaponry.21 This
possibility of
mass destruction by a clandestine organization of less than 20 people is a serious challenge, but, here
also, too many voices have used the argument that the successful monopoly of legitimate means of
violence over a territory by the state has ended, and the closure of the ‘Hobbesian’ solution with September 11: to plead
for exceptional and global means of unifying police, intelligence services and armies in each nation and
obliging them to collaborate strongly at the Western level. This solution has opened the way for an
argument in favour of a world empire protecting us from the threat of the ‘fanatics’. We have to
distinguish between the seriousness of the miniaturization and dissemination of arms, which may have
mass effects, and the apocalyptic narrative, which is an overstatement of the situation, and try to justify
any ‘answer’, however disproportionate and unjust (ELISE 2005). The novelty of September 11 then, and perhaps mainly, is
in the disproportionate reactions of some politicians. September 11 is not an exceptional event of violence which reframes
the relations of politics; rather, it is the regression of some politicians towards habits that reveal the logic of a
form of governmentality which informs deeply what is called liberalism and generates illiberal practices
(Bigo 2004, 2002). The role of the professionals of politics is important in relation to the professionals of (in)security, and their competitions
and alliances frame the debate about the capacity to declare the exception and the period of emergency with some success. This element has
been developed in detail, analyzing what could be considered as a ‘North Irelandization’ of the world after September 11.22 These
professionals were afraid (or claimed they were afraid), to such a point that they came back to the old idea of
vindication and to the belief that a military war would solve the problem. In just a couple of days, the military path
taken by the professionals of politics gave the intelligence services an incredible new role, and justified major breaches of rule of law and
democracy by arguing that these attacks were threatening the survival of their nations, that they were a kind of undeclared war and not a
criminal act (Huysmans 2004). George Bush’s statement on 13 November 2001 declaring ‘an extraordinary emergency’, as well as what has
been known as the Patriot Act I and II, and various executive orders including the decision to create special military commissions with powers to
judge any aliens suspected of terrorism, have been justified by the belief in an exceptional situation of violence and threat to the survival of the
nation. But the reactivation of border controls after the bombing of September 11 was not the sign of renewed efficiency, it was a sign of a
ritual against fear of the unknown, with fewer and fewer people believing in the ritual and now seeing it as a simulacrum.23 Yet, it is easier to
see this four years after the event.
In the immediate aftermath of September 11, few people challenged the idea
that the sovereignty and integrity of the body of the US nation were at stake; that the survival of the nation after
such a wound was jeopardized. Instead they participated in the creation of a wave of patriotism, an appeal to be more protected and a will to
revenge. Nevertheless, from an academic point of view, it is worthwhile to remember the form of evolution taken by political violence in
previous decades. This gives a different angle to the question of protecting the population and of the possibility to close the borders against
foreign enemies, like in a Maginot line24 full of electronic gadgets. This history challenges the choice of the professionals of politics to choose
war when others strongly resist it, the choice to enhance any form of technological surveillance available, and to use it against foreigners and
their own population measures of exclusion and discrimination. David Cole insists on balancing liberty and security.25 He
claims that the sacrifice of the liberty of others for personal security is not seen as a sacrifice and he has tried to explain that this is one of the
main reasons for the lack of protest in favour of civil liberties.
I think this is an important argument as long as it is not
framed as a rational actor game, and is correlated with the more general structure of surveillance. In terms
of civil liberties, the discrimination created between American citizens and non-citizens (including those with
permanent residence) has taken considerable dimension, given the fact that the position of the administration is to say
that only American citizens can claim access to some of the fundamental principles of civil liberty, such as a fair trial with the right of defence,
to know the content of case files, to know when the trial will take place, to have a jury and to know on what legal basis the client is being
charged. For detainees in Guantanamo, outside of US territory, these rights are not legally binding on the administration. Also, the possibility to
detain people indefinitely without disclosing the charges held against them was finally given approval on 13 November by military order, which,
as one recalls, was refused when the vote for the Patriot Act took place on 26 October 2001. This is only the most visible aspect of this problem
and led the American government to systematically interrogate more than 5000 nationals from Middle East countries over several days on the
sole basis of their nationality. Several of these nationals were arrested and the American government also frequently carried out ‘surveys’ at
the centre of the population being targeted and encouraged allied countries to do the same (such as Saudi Arabia). In addition, the American
government implemented a series of practices that are derogatory to accepted international conventions, in a bid to centralize and control IT
databases containing the personal data of these foreigners or long‑term residents. This has not only played a negative role with regards to civil
liberties and individual rights of foreigners in the US, but also to foreigners in Europe, through pressure imposed by the American government
regarding laws to be adopted in relation to the fight against terrorism. If
the US was the first to stress this vision of a more
globalized surveillance, they were not the only ones. To give but one example of technologies operative at the European
level, multiple databases have been put in place to permit the profiling of risks associated with certain
individuals. Concerning crime, other than the already aging Interpol database, the Sirene system facilitates the rapid circulation of judiciary
documents and the exchange of information.26 New developments of this system will ‘overlook’ the possibility for lawyers to see the
documents; this will be only for magistrative inquisitions to decide. Since the Amsterdam Treaty and the Tampere meeting, justice follows in
step with other security agencies, and does the same thing at a distance via networks.27 The creation of Eurojust and the forgetting of the
corpus juris have provoked disequilibrium between the level of judges of instruction and judges of accusation that are able to draw on EU
resources, and a defence that is confined within a national frame that has no access to this information. But this point is considered secondary
to that of speed and efficiency. The
rule of law is viewed as less important than the speed of rising suspicion and
the accumulation of information and rumours about predefined categories. The functions of borders change with
the regime (political and economic) over time. It is important to point out that unlike Carl Schmitt and his followers, such as Samuel Huntington,
the delimitation between inside and outside is not a natural one; it
is not the declaration of exception that frames the
boundary between the norm and the exception, but the routines of technologies of surveillance. After
September 11 this narrative is coming back to justify the policy of George Bush. Some important writers have given credence to this vision of
the exceptional moment of the declaration as the ‘moment’ transforming history, and giving leaders the right to reframe the boundary of the
normal and the exception, to reframe what is law and the rule of law and what is outside of the law in any case. For these authors, the relation
of the exception is a relation of the suspension of the law, which gives law its true meaning. The
exception is then logically
bordering the law, determining what the law is and is not. Even if lawyers’ strategies are to create the illusion that the law
includes exceptions and circumvents the exception by agreeing with the idea of an arbitrary hole or decisionism controlled by law. But to
counter Schmitt’s rhetoric, one needs to remember Neuman’s arguments about the Roman dictature to save the republic and the importance
of liberal thinking by justifying checks and balances, the role of judges, and of limits against the ‘supreme’ sovereign, the ‘führer’ (Huysmans
2004). Of course, the black letter law cannot predict the future and ‘new’ events, but the spirit of the rule of law and habeas corpus has not
been endangered by the right of the sovereign to declare (even for a specific period and for a specific object) that he will use derogation in
cases of emergency. The
exception has to be reframed into the general principles of the rule of law and
cannot trace the boundaries of legality. Torture can never be justified by a theoretical worst-case argument. Pasquale Pasquino
explained in detail the liberal vision of the ‘Roman dictatorship’ and the ‘safeguard of democracy’ by the ‘exceptional moment’ to show that the
so-called Schmittian solution is a ‘fascist’ solution by the providential man. He emphasized the difficulty for unwritten constitutions to cope
with the moment of exception inside the rule of law, but also the greater flexibility of unwritten constitutions and the specific role of judges
there (i.e. the UK). He developed different doctrines of monism and dualism in the moment of exception (Ferejohn and Pasquino 2004). Elspeth
Guild has shown that the EU is more protected than the US from this move of the leader to insist that he has the absolute right to reframe law
and civil liberties in the name of a new situation, demanding exceptional coercive and intrusive measures never before been seen (Guild
2003b). I agree with Huysmans, Pasquino and Guild, against the justification of the exceptional moment by the sovereign. For me, in contrast,
what is important is essentially that the liberal vision developed by the constitutional lawyers in Germany and France is also one of ‘a moment
of exception’, which is in fact derogation to the law admitted by the law under certain circumstances. I want to make clear that the
discussion at the legal level is underpinned by the transformation of technologies of surveillance and
control and by the involvement of intelligence services and military personnel inside a country. It is this
element which is crucial for our democracies. Military bureaucracies, as well as secret services, cannot be put in charge of the life of the nation
by the professionals of politics. The potential threat of catastrophic terrorism and bombings is not a new kind of perpetual war. Civilians may
accept that the ‘rules’ of the military, which are normally reserved for use outside the country, ‘invade’ the rules of law governing civilians
inside, if the territory is invaded. They nevertheless try to maintain control over the military’s ends, if not the means. If the war is perpetual, the
invasion is always legitimate, as is the connection between the interior and defence ministries when they are backed up by the leaders in a
security state. So the discussion about the matter, size and period of exception is thus more one of military involvement inside as means to
combat the enemy than a question of jeopardizing the rule of law (Bigo 2004). By
focusing too much on the legal aspects
rather than the organic or institutional aspects, critics neglect the importance of routines and
technologies of control. It is here that surveillance studies are extremely valuable for security studies.
Link – Surveillance Law
So long as protecting society from threats is the priority of political discussions,
surveillance will be routinely justified in legal and illegal fashions.
Bigo in 2006(Didier, Professor of International Relations at Sciences-Po Paris, France. He is also
Visiting Professor in the Department of War Studies at King’s College, London, “Security, exception, ban
and surveillance,” in Theorizing Surveillance, page 55-58)
All these derogatory and emergency measures are supposed to answer the questions haunting security services and politicians.
How will
it be possible to find the boundaries again, the distinctions between those who are hostile and the
‘others’ when everybody is inside the country? How can people be protected against those wanting to get in and how can
they clarify their motivations? How can somebody anticipate their actions? How can somebody control the fear of others, of all others,
including their relatives?28 It is clear that classical control procedures and the indiscriminate use of IT linked to other identification
technologies using digital imprints, photo-numerical systems, iris or genetic imprints, is not the solution. Nevertheless, the narratives of the
professionals of politics in the US and Europe, the
discourses of the main international bodies and the main world
companies repeat again and again that technologies of control are not a solution, but that the solution
to terror is in its capacity to trace the movement of people, to recognize patterns of behaviour and to
prevent the suspected terrorists or criminals to act. As for the war, the professionals know that the efficiency of the struggle
against clandestine organizations passes by other means, but the large-scale mobilization of money and technology is supposed to convince the
people that the government cares about their safety and is doing what needs to be done. Graham Allison eloquently said that for bureaucracies
that have a hammer, the world is reframed as a nail; the
narratives that the technology of surveillance is efficient
against an unknown enemy are framed by the available solutions, not by the real problem. It is this element
that the professionals of politics refuse to admit. From September 11, the transnationalization of the bureaucracies of surveillance is seen as
the alternative to the Sisyphean task to seal the borders at a national level. Global surveillance by coordination of the different services inside
and by the different nodes of coordination at the Western level is seen as an ‘imperative’ which cannot be delayed by any consideration of
privacy. Every
politician, either in favour of the war or for a more judicial approach, agrees on this view;
more centralized and globalized intelligence about people on the move is the key to success against all
the evils generated by the freedom of movement of persons. The main narrative starts with the security of airplanes and
the request for air marshals inside planes. The security of airplanes depends on knowing that nobody has brought arms onto the plane under a
false name; thus the security of airports relies on the reinforcement the control of luggage and of the identity of the people travelling abroad.
As developed by David Lyon: to strengthen this security, several countries have proposed to exchange data, under the Personal Name Record
programme, to secure their travel documents (visa and passports), to create new national identification card systems, some involving biometric
devices or programmable chips. Some have questioned how new, while others have questioned how necessary, are the measures that have
been fast-tracked through the legislative process (Lyon 2003). Along these lines, biometrics have become widespread and are linked by
transnational databases; iris-scanners have been developed and justified at airports – now installed at Schipol, Amsterdam, and being
implemented elsewhere in Europe and North America as well;
CCTV cameras are present in public places, enhanced if possible
with facial recognition capacities such as the Mandrake system in Newham, South London; and DNA databanks are used to store
genetic information capable of identifying known ‘terrorists’. Biometrics have also been implemented not
only in visas, passports and resident permits, but also in ID cards and social security cards. In Northern Europe, the American company Printrack
International is pushing its services that enable tracking and automatic identification of people crossing borders, whether by cards with
digitized fingerprints in ports and airports, or retinal imprints. The
goal is to control identities in the most invisible
manner possible, and their advertisements signal that this is the best way ‘due to the fact that this
society of individuals does not like to be affected or slowed down when controlled, but as long as they
do not register the act of control, they do not protest’.29 One can therefore think of generalizing the system in the future
not only in airports but in any collective place, in the name of transparency (not to hide from the police) and fear of the future. The discussion
about airport security and safety shows the extent of the US government’s unease. The discourse is moving toward more control by the state
and public agents in airports and for systematic control over everyone, but social practices are moving massively in the other direction.
Privatization is one factor; so is the desire of the rich not to be targeted. If surveillance practices become private, the multiplicity of actors will
limit any attempt to have a good system of data protection. In short, controls are always differentiated and carried out under different logic.
They articulate more than they integrate. They are unequal and do not target the same people in the same way. They reinforce the advantages
of some and the disadvantages of others, even if sometimes they have contradictory and unpredictable effects. These effects come also from
multiple technologies and disciplines and are not only confined to border technologies and their locus, but are concentrated there. It is not the
proliferation of these technologies that is surprising, it is the will to de-differentiate them, to interconnect databases and to enlarge their
possible use, especially those of police and intelligence services. The
development of all these technologies is correlated
with the rise of surveillance, from the mid-1980s and especially after the end of bipolarity. These technologies are not at all new, but
they are now intensified and globalized. For example, the Schengen Information System (SIS) manages individual dossiers, and functions as a
file preventing illegal migrants from returning to the EU. This system is not very effective at managing criminality, but Schengen is now seen as
the cornerstone of all security in Europe. In a (not so) amusing way one knows the Schengen system has difficulty working. The sphere of
Schengen’s application is constantly being enlarged to create uniform visas not only in the EU but now also at the level of GATT (General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade). In the same way, the exceptional possibilities of identity control in border zones generalizes itself in all
countries up to 20 kilometres from the border, even in countries where the concept of legitimate suspicion envelops controls very strictly. It is
barely contested by the police authorities in question that Schengen institutes immigration police as its priority, even though only five years ago
there was great resistance to using it, and there was no focus on the relation between crime and missing persons. This link between criminal
and foreigners’ files that the SIS puts in place with respect to foreigners reaffirms the suspicion against them and focuses the attention on small
acts of delinquency or illegality while making police and customs infractions primary in importance. Profiling done for Europol files tends to
make surveillance more refined and precise, rather than extending its general reach. Europol registers people who are capable of following
through on their potential to commit a crime. As distinct from the Interpol databases whose entries are dependent on criminals who are
effectively fugitives of justice, the Europol files contain sought-after criminals, suspects who have not yet entered the system of judicial inquiry,
lists of possible informants, possible witnesses who might testify about their neighbour or colleague, victims or persons susceptible of being
victims. Here it amounts to reconstructing individual or social trajectories, marking territories or borders between populations at risk and
others, of analyzing and deciding who is dangerous; here we are at the heart of proactive logic. It
is under this perspective that
one must read the US Total Information Awareness Project, renamed in order to disguise the
disproportionate ambition: the Terrorism Information Awareness Project. This project was partly
blocked by Congress in one of the first acts of opposition to the Bush administration, but relaunched by
different ‘red’ states and a group of private companies at a more local level.
Link – Legal Focus
The global surveillance architecture is founded on social control to prevent the
possibility of future threats with increasing precision – The legality of these practices
is secondary to the culture fear of the unknown which justifies massive amounts of
pre-emptive violence and racist social policy.
Bigo in 2006(Didier, Professor of International Relations at Sciences-Po Paris, France. He is also
Visiting Professor in the Department of War Studies at King’s College, London, “Security, exception, ban
and surveillance,” in Theorizing Surveillance, page 58-63)
In order to be able to manage the individualization of dangers and the complicated borders between the ones to be excluded and the
normalized,
the job of detective and intelligence had to find a new dimension and become globalized.
Fragmentation was answered with the surveillance of these movements at a global scale. This programme of ‘mastering’ the
world and the future, which as one will see, leads to the ‘fictionalization of the world’30 placing it into a
‘maximum security’ programme, has not benefited from unanimous approval. In the European Union, the recently adopted database Eurodac
contains the digital fingerprints of asylum-seekers, undocumented migrants sent back home, as well as an explication of the motives they have
given, and the reasons for which they have been refused entry. The purpose of the database is not only to prevent the overlap of multiple
applications from individuals, but also to spot the stereotypical narratives of asylum-seekers – to trace whether or not they are helped by NGOs
in cases of false declaration. This system is designed to create profiles permitting prediction of the groups which are potentially using routes or
travel agencies considered as ‘dubious’ in order to block the ‘profilees’ which look like the previous ‘offenders’ by refusing their visas or their
travel to Europe. It is not clear if the individuals have to pass extra checks or if members of a suspected group will be refused by the consulates
without being aware of it. Parallel with Eurodac, a securitized net is being developed to address FADO (False and Authentic Documents) that
will function on the basis of information exchange concerning false documents. The idea is that for some series of official passports of ‘dubious’
origin and/or country, the burden of proof will be on the person submitting the document. Documents without biometrics at the standard
required by the EU and the US will be considered as dubious. The principle of suspicion subverts the principle of innocence at both the
individual and the state levels. The work carried out by the research team of Elspeth Guild and Ewelein Brower from Nijmegen University has
given full details of these practices in Europe, which are too often forgotten by those who only debate ‘internally’ in the US. This team has
shown the impact in the European Union on demands for asylum, immigrants, tourists, the management of the control of borders, transport
management on a global scale, the ways demonstrations are linked to terrorism, as well as on communication via the Internet.31 This
will
to control via the link between databases and biometrics continues to face opposition and has not been
able to establish itself as the new programme of truth. It has been forced to make numerous concessions to the traditional
view of frontier control by human beings, of war and intelligence against the hostile foreigner. It has done this by infiltration instead of
combining statistical data connected with software, enabling profiling of unknown individuals whose actions and behaviour look like previous
individuals condemned by the system. Here the foreign status or abnormality is linked to specific statistical and technological processes,
building the profiles of what is normal and what differs from it.
It is no longer the foreigner as such who is the one being
targeted, but all those, foreigners or not, who have an action profile that behaviouralists establishing
the profiles have judged to be a sign of potential danger. For example, buying an outbound airline ticket
without purchasing a return ticket, buying a ticket with cash and not with a credit card, buying it from a
third city and not from the point of departure, or for having recently viewed films or read books that
show an attraction for the East and for Islam, having travelled to those countries, etc. The main advantage of
this policy is that it hides itself behind ‘technical neutrality’: it appears as reasonable and not subjected to
classic racism. This policy is also inspired by the science of traceability and aims to anticipate through an in-depth analysis, action
sequences in which the computer has no soul and therefore, does not have the human defect of classifying some rather than others according
to the colour of their skin. The ‘technical’ redefinition of the foreigner does not solve at all the failure to determine the image of the enemy. It is
all about a forward escape onto the ‘technology’ as last resort and far from developing reasonable antiterrorist policies; it
drags the
politician onto a world of ‘fiction’. The foreigner is no longer the non-citizen, he is the one with the
strange, bizarre and slightly deviant abnormal behaviour, or the opposite, having such normal behaviour
that it seems suspicious. Ericson and Haggerty have insisted on the growth of machines to make and record discrete observations and
on the machine/human continuum that I have discussed in my study about the police liaison agents in Europe.32 They have distinguished
between control and discipline; where a single entity has to be modelled, punished, controlled and ‘surveillance which commences with a
creation of a space of comparison and the introduction of breaks in the flows that emanate from, and circulate within, ‘the human body’
(Haggerty and Ericson 2000: 612), and the construction of a body/information network. I have borrowed from them this idea about the possible
desingularization of the individual and the construction of a fantasmatic collective body of a group that is constructed by social science
‘knowledge’, which has specific features and patterns of behaviour and is the base or the scale of dangerousness for comparison of each
suspect with the pattern. The ACLU, Statewatch and CHALLENGE have developed a detailed critique of all these programmes reactivated after
September 11, 2001.33 For example, the FBI programme that tries to correlate the health information of the body with a pattern of fear of
police and then with a possible terrorist motivation. This programme mixes serialized body information, captured by a discrete machine of
surveillance, with a dubious correlation between fear and heat of the body. It uses an oldfashioned behaviourist argument between a feeling
and an action in the name of efficiency and the belief in the joining of technology and science, even if, of course, they have not stopped any
potential terrorist, only a handful of aliens with falsified documents, and a large majority of pregnant women. Nevertheless, the FBI presents its
programme as the most efficient profiling software in the world and pretends that it is a key element in the struggle against terrorists. The
argument of the imminence and danger of the attack is always used to justify a pre-emptive defence in
the eyes of the US, because of the irreparable character of the action. This justifies the position of ‘not waiting until it
is too late’, as a website showing the Twin Towers and a nuclear mushroom cloud tried to suggest. The heart of the question about probability
in the future and anticipation as fiction is at stake. The
belief in the imminent danger of the Apocalypse justifies at the
same time ‘proactive’ policing actions, ‘pre-emptive’ military strikes, ‘administrative and exceptional
justice’, where anticipations of behaviour are considered as a sufficient element to act. The decisions of those
deciding are then based upon the ‘belief’ they are in a rush, and not upon wisely considered actions backed up by facts. They are based on
profiles, on assumptions concerning the possible future, or more exactly the belief that the intelligence services have a grammar of ‘futur
antérieur’, that they can read the future as a form of the past through their technologies of profiling.34 Their selections of
data are
framed by the ‘morphing’ of the different virtual paths from the point of departure to the point of
arrival. This ‘reversal’ of time is to prevent events from occurring, by identifying the causes of
predictable events. Thus, not everyone is put under surveillance, identified, categorized and checked. This
is only the case for what is constructed as a specific ‘minority’, an ‘abnormal’ group, a group with
virtually violent behaviour, even if this behaviour has never been actualized. The time criterion is created through
the artefacts of statistics concerning correlations that occur with a certain regularity and can be anticipated. These statistics may correlate drug
use and crime, migrants and crime, asylum-seekers and unemployment or social welfare fraud – they are there to create ‘profiles’ through a
specific knowledge of psychology, criminology and social science.
These ‘profiles’ are important for one main reason: in a
liberal regime, surveillance must not be too costly for the global system. So, in a nutshell, globalization is linked with
space and time. The control of the global scale is more preventive and proactive than systematic and
pinpointed to a specific place. However, this ‘economy’ is both inefficient and illegitimate. Of course one could say that the situation
requires ‘prevention’ because, after a catastrophic bombing, it will be too late, and it is not enough to be a good detective after the fact, or to
put out fires after crimes occur. It
is easy for the professionals of politics to say that they rely on science and
teams of ‘profilers’, who can anticipate before the act, who is potentially going to commit an offence and what their actions will be in
the future. Nonetheless this second job is still one of science fiction. One could say, of course, that this evolution is the fault only of
the transformation of violence; that we need to try everything to stop the apocalypse. However, the
present situation is also the fault of the will to master the world, to try to control some part of it by
‘scientifically’ discriminating the enemy within, and to believe that technology can do it. The will to
control time and space, present and future, here and there, has an effect that goes beyond antiterrorist
policies; it creates a powerful mixture of fiction and reality, of virtual and actual, which merge their
boundaries and introduce fiction into reality for profiling as well as it de-realizing the violence of the
state and of the clandestine organizations. The anticipation or ‘astrological’ dimension of the scientific
modernity of the combination of biometrics and databases at the transnational level destroys its false
pretence to be ‘the’ solution. The solution lies within the present tension regarding the fight against terrorism and its lawfulness.
Many examples can be given of this will to control the future and its dramatic consequences. If the war in Afghanistan has already provoked
reactions regarding the way it has been led, it is pointless to distinguish between prisoners of war and enemy combatants; terrorists sent to
Guantanamo Bay as well as the war in Iraq, demonstrate the problem of political decisions made on unconfirmed information due to lack of
time and on the basis of the fear of acting too late when confronted with a serious but randomized threat, in which the capacity of ‘stealth’ (in
the same way as a stealth aircraft) is great. One has the opportunity to see, with the Dr Kelly affair and the Hutton inquiry in the UK,
how
decision-making is founded less and less on facts but instead on beliefs, and how this ends up in a
competition among political figures, the media and intelligence services in order to find out who holds
the truth. This is not only in a given moment but the other way around, once the temporality of the chain of causality has been
reconstructed. To put it differently and more simply: there are not, despite the expectation of American strategists, any ways to foresee the
future and to structure it as one would like to. It is not because people believe in the existence of weapons of mass destruction, ready to be
used and capable of striking in 45 minutes, that they necessarily exist as such in a certain moment, even if Iraqi plans anticipating such usage
had to be found. The phantasm of the virtualization of the real, of the anticipation of action turns into the phantasm of fiction. The film
Minority Report has undoubtedly had enormous success because it recalls this ambiguity, this uncertainty of political security and more
particularly of contemporary antiterrorist policies to try to foresee the future. The dream of security agencies is more to foresee the future and
arrest people before they commit a crime.35
Advantage Links
Radical Islam
The First step to breaking the status quo logic of radicalization and its ties to Islam is
by asking what Radicalization is not
Githens-Mazer in 2012 (Jonathan is a professor in the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies and the Strategy
and Security Institute; “The rhetoric and reality: radicalization and political discourse” International Political
Science Review November 2012 vol. 33 no. 5 PG: 561)
The study of radicalization should be a matter of objective ontological observation. Whether we determine this
to be the study of the process by which ‘collectively informed, individually held moral obligations to participate in direct practice’ take place or
whether it is the study of direct challenges to hegemonic status quo practices is a matter of semantics rather than any kind of philosophy-ofscience issue (Githens-Mazer, 2010a; Githens-Mazer and Lambert, 2010a). Those studies,
scholars, and institutes that seek to
study radicalization solely on the dependent variable of violence without explicitly stating that this is
their aim and objective, and sometimes even while doing so, contribute more to the social construction of risk and
radicalization than they do to any objective scientific consideration of how and why violence occurs in
light of cases and processes. This, therefore, seems a key moment to recalibrate the study of
radicalization. This requires an explicit acknowledgement that radicalization, whichever of the above definitions
we use, has no link to Islam and violence. We must consider the collectively defined though individually
enacted phenomenon of challenging an existing status quo as an act which has no scientific basis for
moral claims as to what constitutes ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or risky or constructive forms of radicalization. Until we
have a wide basis for comparison about understanding how and why individuals challenge the status quo because they feel obligated to do so
on the basis of specific identities, no matter how we personally feel about such challenges, this field will be a moribund quagmire of political
machination. There are two key steps to promoting better second-generation research on radicalization in the future. The first is proper
conceptualization. This requires all future research on radicalization to strive to set aside normative assumptions and value-laden approaches
towards understanding this concept. It also requires scholars to re-examine a whole set of assumptions about the relationships between
radicalization and violence, radicalization and ‘ideology’ or belief, and radicalization and identity. Simply
assigning the study of
radicalization to the category of personality process and, especially, making it the sole purview of
psychology may reify a state of being which is ephemeral in observation and complex in terms of
establishing causation. One way to begin this recalibration may be to perform the conceptual exercise of
asking what radicalization is not, as much as what it is. Goertz (2006; Goertz and Mahoney, 2005) makes the crucial point that in
their enthusiasm for reifying complex sociological or political concepts, theorists and empiricists often focus too much on what a concept is,
rather than identifying such a concept on a continuum, in order to assess when a concept is present versus when it is not.
Terrorism
Terrorism has been depoliticized – it creates the perception that Western democratic
nations with focus on human rights are culturally superior to others
(Tsoukala 08 Anastasia) Tsoukala (Research Fellow at the University of Paris V-Sorbonne and
Associate Professor at the University of Paris XI), “Boundary-creating Processes and the Social
Construction of Threat,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Volume 33, Issue 2, pp. 147. April-June
2008
(Manichean = diametric)
The moral inferiority of terrorists is brought forth through the frequent use of a Manichean image of the
world, where the good lies with the threatened, Western countries and the evil with the aggressors, as is
shown by the latter’s lack of respect for human life and the indiscriminate character of their targets. To further underpin the
dangerousness of the threat, the terrorist act is deprived of any political objective and is turned into a goal in
itself, as if terrorists were solely aiming to inflict pain and suffering. This alleged affective insensibility
facilitates the depoliticization of the conflict as it turns it into more classic patterns of criminal behavior.
While implying that the retaliation will not be a conventional war,43 the depoliticization and subsequent criminalization of
the conflict create, by definition, a huge moral gap between the aggressors and the aggressed and confirm
the already established moral superiority of the aggressed. The cultural inferiority theme prolongs the
Manichean image underlying the moral inferiority theme by reinforcing the creation of an outer space,
in rupture with the rest of the world, that terrorists can be relegated to. The uncivilized nature of this outer space is
usually illustrated by the use of two opposed terms: barbaric, and civilized. Terrorism is seen as a challenge to the Western perception of
civilization—that is, the belief in an uninterrupted civilizing process that gradually improves the human condition. The
establishment of
this view relies on a hierarchical classification of civilizations following two principles: The civilized world
is synonymous with the Western world, and all non-Western countries are culturally inferior insofar as
they do not share the same democratic ideals. As these democratic ideals include some major moral
principles, mainly related to the human-rights issue, this alleged cultural superiority can easily imply a
moral one, thus discrediting completely the political and philosophical system the terrorists rely on.
Security Rhetoric
Modern policy is justified through the fear of imminent danger and the evasion of
worst-case scenario. Moving away from security logic is essential to prevent the
constant exchange of freedoms and security
Bigo in 2011(Didier, Department of War Studies at the University of Manchester, “Northern Ireland as
metaphor: Exception, suspicion and radicalization in the ‘war on terror’,” “Security Dialogue, vol. 42 no.
6 483-498)
The idea of an imminent danger is part of the logic of the worst-case scenario, which eventually unsettles
the balance between security and liberty by always favouring security in its most coercive modes. Fear,
in this respect, becomes the actual justification for any intervention against those forms of violence that
have been attributed by governmental actors to fanatical individuals, supposed to be deaf to reasoning
or negotiation and in possession of weapons of mass destruction. The contradiction involved in taking action
that endangers the very rights and freedoms that it pretends to guarantee remains secondary if such action is
‘accepted’ and thus already ‘excused’. In the logic of the worst-case scenario, any action is better than no action at
all. The logical efficiency of the worst-case-scenario discourse lies in its awe-inspiring dimension, which allows it to impose itself even on the
very premises of the debate: no one doubts that the worst is still to come, and that it is the ‘reason’ why we
must act – and, what is more, appear to be acting efficiently: ‘To give comfort in an atmosphere of
panic, is to accept the principle of implementing measures that have no direct efficiency, but give the
impression that they are efficient’ (Cantegreil, 2005: 94). However, the question is not to decipher what is the
best between idealistic inaction and tough action, but rather to recognize that in any violent situation, a
complex economy made of symbolic strategies is at stake. Such an economy reframes not only the
reality of the threat but also the repertoire of actions undertaken in the name of the fight against the
enemy. Since the events of 11 September 2001 in the United States, the threefold relationship and balance between freedom, security and
danger has been modified. The same holds true in the European Union (Brysk and Shafir, 2007; Bigo, 2002). As the threat is
reappraised, security now has an entirely positive connotation, while the negative overtones linked to
its impact on freedom are swept aside. Rather than considering security as a process, one forgets its
consequences and is led to think that ‘more security is a good thing’. Security is then seen as a set of
measures established for a delimited time that will disappear when the causes of the danger have been
eliminated. However, Northern Ireland can provide useful insights on a segmented society that has been
living in a culture of exceptionalism in which rights have been ‘temporarily’ suspended for 80 years.
Northern Ireland illustrates the precariousness of political discourses on violence in the short and long terms. Because what is really at stake in
this debate is the technique of a certain kind of violence or a certain vision of the future made of and fed by fears and anxieties. Suspicion
–
reinforced by the feeling that an enemy is masked, hidden and probably already infiltrated among ‘us’ –
can destroy the keystone principle of presumption of innocence and thus paradoxically help to complete
the work that clandestine groups may have begun with bomb attacks. Derogation from the rule of law,
particularly when associated with discourses on the ‘foreigner’, can open a breach not only in the
limitations defined by legal and institutional frameworks but also in the basic rights of the citizens seen
as strangers, war prisoners or criminal suspects. This breach, once forced open, twists the borders and creates
spaces between the rules of national and international law, between the constitutional protection of
citizens and the basic rights of a shared humanity. It also violates the law by trying and playing with the
borders between domestic and international law to justify in fine the most ordinary and least ethical
practices. However, are we facing a generalized state of exception, as defined by Giorgio Agamben (1998, 2005), a
situation that eventually leads to ‘bare life’? Has a permanent and generalized state of exception risen from the 9/11 events, under the
unilateral sovereignty of the United States? While according to Agamben we
are in a logic in which exception is proclaimed
by a sole sovereign, we find ourselves on the contrary in a diffracted process in which bureaucratic
practices are daily routines and derogation is justified a posteriori as a necessity. We live in a non-imperial and
non- Schmittian world in which unilateralism produces resistance, in which the definition of exception is
always contested, even at a late stage, by judges or civil society (Guild, 2003: 498; 2007), and in which logics of
resistance and reassessment prevent the authorities from concretizing their dreams and reducing
individual lives to a mere system of biological survival, even when and where humans are detained and
tortured (Guittet, 2008b). Though the announcement by the British government that it will provide millions of pounds in compensation to
former Guantánamo Bay prisoners has been the subject of controversy among ministers and officials, it tends to underline that we are still far
from the position of Giorgio Agamben regarding what the exception means (Bigo, 2006). We are
indeed still in liberal regimes,
the originality of these liberal regimes – something that Agamben
does not mention – lies in their capacity to recognize the other even when that other is using violence as a
tool.
dealing with, reproducing and hiding illiberal practices. And
Forms of security rhetoric should be rejected—the 1AC creates a perpetual series of threats,
which causes the inevitable securitization of internal relations, and will be used to justify
massive violence
Guney & Gokcan ‘10 [Aylin Guney & Fulya Gokcan, Dr. Guney has a Ph.D. Political Science and Public Administration from
Bilkent University, 2/12/10, Bilkent University, “The Greater Middle East as a Modern Geopolitical
Imagination in American Foreign Policy”] Accessed Online: 6/27/15
http://www3.nccu.edu.tw/~lorenzo/Guney%20Middle%20East.pdf
The development of this new global conjuncture following the September 11 attacks led to a redefinition of
enemies and friends – to redefining the geopolitical codes, which had up until the late 1980s been dominated primarily by the
Communist threat. The new geopolitical code was no longer the ideological wars waged against the Communist world, but the war on
terrorism. The key official document that revealed this change was the National Security Strategy of 2002, also
referred to as the ‘Bush Doctrine’. This doctrine is particularly important in revealing the change in American geopolitical imagination by
designating different countries as hostile or friendly, as well as by defining actions needed to achieve new foreign policy objectives. The
new
open-ended war on terrorism would be a means through which US military power would be directed
towards trying to secure the homeland against both domestic enemies and foreign foes. President Bush
identified Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an ‘axis of evil’ for their alleged efforts to develop and potentially use weapons of mass destruction or
provide such weapons to terrorists.
The Bush administration claimed that these states, labelled as ‘rogue states’
had hostile designs, revisionist aspirations and were engaging in destabilizing regional behavior. They
became a central and explicit concern of US policy, especially regarding the Middle East and Persian Gulf, both of which were
extremely important with respect to US interests in the region. Particularly worrisome was the possibility that weapons of
mass destruction might proliferate, and especially that nuclear weapons might spread into the hands of
hostile powers and pose risks for the USA both at home and for its overseas interests in this region. The
formulation of the concept of ‘rogue state’ has proved to be remarkably useful. This category helped to legitimize US interactions with such
states as Iraq, Iran, Libya and Syria because it provided a specific link to America’s own self-image and its relationship with the world.21 That is,
if a state behaves as a rogue power, breaking US-defined rules of conduct or attacking neighbours, it furnishes both the rationale and necessity
for a US response.22 The definition of new enemies for the USA was determined in accordance with the support they provided to terrorist
networks. The first target was therefore Afghanistan, which was perceived by the administration as a failed state after its takeover by the
Taliban in the mid-1990s.23 Al-Qaeda was believed to be sheltered in the zones under Taliban control, so the war on terrorism needed to target
Afghanistan. From this perspective, any
“failed state” that could provide the necessary conditions for the
emergence and survival of terrorist networks was considered as a possible threat and enemy. A more
problematic geography, also a target of the war on terrorism, was Iraq. The Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq was accused of several
‘crimes’: possessing
weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that could jeopardise American interests in the
region; seeking domination of the entire Middle East to take control of a great portion of the world’s energy supplies; directly
threatening the USA and its partners throughout the world; and potentially subjecting the USA and
other nations with nuclear blackmail.24 The Bush Doctrine stated that the strategy to deal with this ‘rogue state’ was ‘preemption’. President Bush stated: “I will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril
draws closer and closer.”25 Accordingly, the next step that US power projection in the region took was to
invade Iraq in March 2003. However, the rationale for the war on Iraq was dissimilar to Afghanistan,
where the threat and the enemy targeted was Al-Qaeda. The Bush administration attempted to justify the invasion of Iraq on three pretexts.
The first was the war on terror declared after 11 September 2001 when, 28 Aylin Güney and Fulya Gökcan against all the evidence, Saddam
Hussein was presented in the United States as an accomplice, if not a sponsor, of Osama bin Laden. The
second was the claimed
threat of WMD, which eventually turned out to be false. However, as the first two pretexts faded, a
third grew in importance: to make Iraq so attractive a democratic model that it would set an example to
the entire Middle East. Thus, the war itself started to be considered as a form of ‘political engineering’, a tool to reshape a country and
the entire region of the Greater Middle East26 and secure the USA’s long-term geopolitical goals. However, the lack of legitimacy for
the Iraq war, the human rights abuses exposed to the whole world, the failed democratisation of the
country, and rising anti-Americanism point to the fact that the age of US dominance in the Middle East
has ended.27 As critical geopolitical theory suggests, justification is an important component of the geopolitical
code which legitimises US hegemonic leadership. From this perspective, the “war on Iraq” undertaken in
the name of the “war on terror” lacked this dimension due to the increasing anti-American reaction to it.
In this light, the US had to justify its presence in the region. The war on Iraq led to a deterioration in the
international image of the USA that had developed in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, and
put its hegemonic role in peril by questioning its legitimacy. It was exactly at that point that the idea of the Greater
Middle East Initiative arose as a further justification of US power projection in the region, redrawn on the mental map of US strategists.
National-Security
Nation-States seek definition through the creation of external political threats
Burke ’07 (Anthony Burke, 2007 Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and Reason
https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v010/10.2burke.html)
The essay concludes by pondering a normative problem that arises out of its analysis: if the divisive ontology of the national security state and
the violent and instrumental vision of 'enframing' have, as Heidegger suggests, come to define being and drive 'out every other possibility of
revealing being', how can they be escaped?26 How can other choices and alternatives be found and enacted? How is there any scope for
agency and resistance in the face of them? Their social and discursive power -- one that aims to take up the entire space of the political -- needs
to be respected and understood. However, we are far from powerless in the face of them. The need is to critique dominant images of political
being and dominant ways of securing that being at the same time, and to act and choose such that we bring into the world a more sustainable,
peaceful and non-violent global rule of the political. Friend and Enemy: Violent Ontologies of the Nation-State In his Politics Among Nations
Hans Morgenthau stated that 'the national interest of a peace-loving nation can only be defined in terms of national security, which is the
irreducible minimum that diplomacy must defend with adequate power and without compromise'. While Morgenthau defined security
relatively narrowly -- as the 'integrity of the national territory and its institutions' -- in a context where security was in practice defined
expansively, as synonymous with a state's broadest geopolitical and economic 'interests', what was revealing about his formulation was not
merely the ontological centrality it had, but the sense of urgency and priority he accorded to it: it must be defended 'without compromise'.27
Morgenthau was a thoughtful and complex thinker, and understood well the complexities and dangers of using armed force. However his
formulation reflected an influential view about the significance of the political good termed 'security'. When this is combined with the way in
which security was conceived in modern political thought as an existential condition -- a sine qua non of life and sovereign political existence -and then married to war and instrumental action, it provides a basic underpinning for either the limitless resort to strategic violence without
effective constraint, or the perseverance of limited war (with its inherent tendencies to escalation) as a permanent feature of politics. While he
was no militarist, Morgenthau did say elsewhere (in, of all places, a far-reaching critique of nuclear strategy) that the 'quantitative and
qualitative competition for conventional weapons is a rational instrument of international politics'.28 The conceptual template for such an
image of national security state can be found in the work of Thomas Hobbes,
with his influential conception of the political
community as a tight unity of sovereign and people in which their bodies meld with his own to form a
'Leviathan', and which must be defended from enemies within and without. His image of effective
security and sovereignty was one that was intolerant of internal difference and dissent, legitimating a
strong state with coercive and exceptional powers to preserve order and sameness. This was a vision
not merely of political order but of existential identity, set off against a range of existential others who
were sources of threat, backwardness, instability or incongruity.29 It also, in a way set out with frightening clarity by the
theorist Carl Schmitt and the philosopher Georg Hegel, exchanged internal unity, identity and harmony for permanent alienation from other
such communities (states). Hegel presaged Schmitt's thought with his argument that individuality and the state are single moments of 'mind in
its freedom' which 'has an infinitely negative relation to itself, and hence its essential character from its own point of view is its singleness':
Individuality is awareness of one's existence as a unit in sharp distinction from others. It manifests itself here in the state as a relation to other
states, each of which is autonomous vis-a-vis the others...this negative relation of the state to itself is embodied in the world as the relation of
one state to another and as if the negative were something external.30 Schmitt is important both for understanding the way in which such
alienation is seen as a definitive way of imagining and limiting political communities, and for understanding how such a rigid delineation is
linked to the inevitability and perpetuation of war. Schmitt argued that the existence of a state 'presupposes the political', which must be
understood through 'the specific political distinction...between friend and enemy'. The enemy is 'the other, the stranger; and it sufficient for his
nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in an extreme case conflicts with him are
possible'.31 The figure of the enemy is constitutive of the state as 'the specific entity of a people'.32 Without it society is not political and a
people cannot be said to exist: Only the actual participants can correctly recognise, understand and judge the concrete situation and settle the
extreme case of conflict...to judge whether the adversary intends to negate his opponent's way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought
in order to preserve one's own form of existence.33 Schmitt links this stark ontology to war when he states that the political is only authentic
'when a fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity. The enemy is solely the public enemy, because everything that has a
relationship to such a collectivity of men, particularly to the whole nation, becomes public by virtue of such a relationship...in its entirety the
state as an organised political entity decides for itself the friend-enemy distinction'.34 War, in short, is an existential condition: the entire life of
a human being is a struggle and every human being is symbolically a combatant. The friend, enemy and combat concepts receive their real
meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing. War follows from enmity. War is the existential negation of the
enemy.35 Schmitt claims that his theory is not biased towards war as a choice ('It is by no means as though the political signifies nothing but
devastating war and every political deed a military action...it neither favours war nor militarism, neither imperialism nor pacifism') but it is hard
to accept his caveat at face value.36 When such a theory takes the form of a social discourse (which it does in a general form) such an ontology
can only support, as a kind of originary ground, the basic Clausewitzian assumption that war can be a rational way of resolving political conflicts
-- because the import of Schmitt's argument is that such 'political' conflicts are ultimately expressed through the possibility of war. As he says:
'to the enemy concept belongs the ever-present possibility of combat'.37 Where Schmitt meets Clausewitz, as I explain further below, the
existential and rationalistic ontologies of war join into a closed circle of mutual support and justification. 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.
Secondly, the militaristic force of such an
ontology is visible, in Schmitt, in the absolute sense of vulnerability whereby a people can judge whether
their 'adversary intends to negate his opponent's way of life'.38 Evoking the kind of thinking that would
become controversial in the Bush doctrine, Hegel similarly argues that: ...a state may regard its infinity
and honour as at stake in each of its concerns, however minute, and it is all the more inclined to
susceptibility to injury the more its strong individuality is impelled as a result of long domestic peace to
seek and create a sphere of activity abroad. ....the state is in essence mind and therefore cannot be
prepared to stop at just taking notice of an injury after it has actually occurred. On the contrary, there arises in
addition as a cause of strife the idea of such an injury...39 Identity, even more than physical security or autonomy, is
put at stake in such thinking and can be defended and redeemed through warfare (or, when taken to a
further extreme of an absolute demonisation and dehumanisation of the other, by mass killing, 'ethnic cleansing'
or genocide). However anathema to a classical realist like Morgenthau, for whom prudence was a core political virtue, these have been
influential ways of defining national security and defence during the twentieth century and persists into
the twenty-first. They infused Cold War strategy in the United States (with the key policy document NSC68 stating that
'the Soviet-led assault on free institutions is worldwide now, and ... a defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere')40 and
frames dominant Western responses to the threat posed by Al Qaeda and like groups (as Tony Blair admitted in
2006, 'We could have chosen security as the battleground. But we didn't. We chose values.')41 It has also become influential, in a particularly
tragic and destructive way, in Israel, where memories of the Holocaust and (all too common) statements by Muslim and Arab leaders rejecting
Israel's existence are mobilised by conservatives to justify military adventurism and a rejectionist policy towards the Palestinians. On the
reverse side of such ontologies of national insecurity we find pride and hubris, the belief that martial preparedness and action are vital or
healthy for the existence of a people. Clausewitz's thought is thoroughly imbued with this conviction. For example, his definition of war as an
act of policy does not refer merely to the policy of cabinets, but expresses the objectives and will of peoples: When whole communities go to
war -- whole peoples, and especially civilized peoples -- the reason always lies in some political situation and the occasion is always due to some
political object. War, therefore, is an act of policy.42 Such a perspective prefigures Schmitt's definition of the 'political' (an earlier translation
reads 'war, therefore, is a political act'), and thus creates an inherent tension between its tendency to fuel the escalation of conflict and
Clausewitz's declared aim, in defining war as policy, to prevent war becoming 'a complete, untrammelled, absolute manifestation of
violence'.43 Likewise his argument that war is a 'trinity' of people (the source of 'primordial violence, hatred and enmity'), the military (who
manage the 'play of chance and probability') and government (which achieve war's 'subordination as an instrument of policy, which makes it
subject to reason alone') merges the existential and rationalistic conceptions of war into a theoretical unity.44 The idea that national identities
could be built and redeemed through war derived from the 'romantic counter-revolution' in philosophy which opposed the cosmopolitanism of
Kant with an emphasis on the absolute state -- as expressed by Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Bismarkian Realpolitik and politicians like Wilhelm
Von Humbolt. Humbolt, a Prussian minister of Education, wrote that war 'is one of the most wholesome manifestations that plays a role in the
education of the human race', and urged the formation of a national army 'to inspire the citizen with the spirit of true war'. He stated that war
'alone gives the total structure the strength and the diversity without which facility would be weakness and unity would be void'.45 In the
Phenomenology of Mind Hegel made similar arguments that to for individuals to find their essence 'Government has from time to time to shake
them to the very centre by war'.46 The historian Azar Gat points to the similarity of Clausewitz's arguments that 'a people and a nation can
hope for a strong position in the world only if national character and familiarity with war fortify each other by continual interaction' to Hegel's
vision of the ethical good of war in his Philosophy of Right.47 Likewise Michael Shapiro sees Clausewitz and Hegel as alike in seeing war 'as an
ontological investment in both individual and national completion...Clausewitz figures war as passionate ontological commitment rather than
cool political reason...war is a major aspect of being.'48 Hegel's text argues that war is 'a work of freedom' in which 'the individual's substantive
duty' merges with the 'independence and sovereignty of the state'.49 Through war, he argues, the ethical health of peoples is preserved in their
indifference to the stabilization of finite institutions; just as the blowing of the winds preserves the sea from the foulness which would be the
result of a prolonged calm, so the corruption in nations would be the product of a prolonged, let alone 'perpetual' peace.50 Hegel indeed
argues that 'sacrifice on behalf of the individuality of the state is a substantial tie between the state and all its members and so is a universal
duty...if the state as such, if its autonomy, is in jeopardy, all its citizens are duty bound to answer the summons to its defence'.51 Furthermore,
this is not simply a duty, but a form of self-realisation in which the individual dissolves into the higher unity of the state: The intrinsic worth of
courage as a disposition of mind is to be found in the genuine, absolute, final end, the sovereignty of the state. The work of courage is to
actualise this end, and the means to this end is the sacrifice of personal actuality. This form of experience thus contains the harshness of
extreme contradictions: a self-sacrifice which yet is the real existence of one's freedom; the maximum self-subsistence of individuality, yet only
a cog playing its part in the mechanism of an external organisation; absolute obedience, renunciation of personal opinions and reasonings, in
fact complete absence of mind, coupled with the most intense and comprehensive presence of mind and decision in the moment of acting; the
most hostile and so most personal action against individuals, coupled with an attitude of complete indifference or even liking towards them as
individuals.52 A more frank statement of the potentially lethal consequences of patriotism -- and its simultaneously physical and conceptual
annihilation of the individual human being -- is rarely to be found, one that is repeated today in countless national discourses and the strategic
world-view in general. (In contrast, one of Kant's fundamental objections to war was that it involved using men 'as mere machines or
instruments'.53) Yet however bizarre and contradictory Hegel's argument, it constitutes a powerful social ontology: an apparently irrefutable
discourse of being. It actualises the convergence of war and the social contract in the form of the national security state. Strategic Reason and
Scientific Truth 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. These are the deeper claims and implications of Clausewitzian strategic reason. One of the most
revealing contemporary examples comes from the writings (and actions) of Henry Kissinger, a Harvard professor and later U.S. National Security
Adviser and Secretary of State. He wrote during the Vietnam war that after 1945 U.S. foreign policy was based 'on the assumption that
technology plus managerial skills gave us the ability to reshape the international system and to bring about domestic transformations in
emerging countries'. This 'scientific revolution' had 'for all practical purposes, removed technical limits from the exercise of power in foreign
policy'.55 Kissinger's conviction was based not merely in his pride in the vast military and bureaucratic apparatus of the United States, but in a
particular epistemology (theory of knowledge). Kissinger asserted that the West is 'deeply committed to the notion that the real world is
external to the observer, that knowledge consists of recording and classifying data -- the more accurately the better'. This, he claimed, has since
the Renaissance set the West apart from an 'undeveloped' world that contains 'cultures that have escaped the early impact of Newtonian
thinking' and remain wedded to the 'essentially pre-Newtonian view that the real world is almost entirely internal to the observer'.56 At the
same time, Kissinger's hubris and hunger for control was beset by a corrosive anxiety: that, in an era of nuclear weapons proliferation and
constant military modernisation, of geopolitical stalemate in Vietnam, and the emergence and militancy of new post-colonial states, order and
mastery were harder to define and impose. He worried over the way 'military bipolarity' between the superpowers had 'encouraged political
multipolarity', which 'does not guarantee stability. Rigidity is diminished, but so is manageability...equilibrium is difficult to achieve among
states widely divergent in values, goals, expectations and previous experience' (emphasis added). He mourned that 'the greatest need of the
contemporary international system is an agreed concept of order'.57 Here were the driving obsessions of the modern rational statesman based
around a hunger for stasis and certainty that would entrench U.S. hegemony: For the two decades after 1945, our international activities were
based on the assumption that technology plus managerial skills gave us the ability to reshape the international system and to bring about
domestic transformations in "emerging countries". This direct "operational" concept of international order has proved too simple. Political
multipolarity makes it impossible to impose an American design. Our deepest challenge will be to evoke the creativity of a pluralistic world, to
base order on political multipolarity even though overwhelming military strength will remain with the two superpowers.58 Kissinger's
statement revealed that such cravings for order and certainty continually confront chaos, resistance and uncertainty: clay that won't be
worked, flesh that will not yield, enemies that refuse to surrender. This is one of the most powerful lessons of the Indochina wars, which were
to continue in a phenomenally destructive fashion for six years after Kissinger wrote these words. Yet as his sinister, Orwellian exhortation to
'evoke the creativity of a pluralistic world' demonstrated, Kissinger's hubris was undiminished. This is a vicious, historic irony: a desire to control
nature, technology, society and human beings that is continually frustrated, but never abandoned or rethought. By 1968 U.S. Secretary of
Defense Robert McNamara, the rationalist policymaker par excellence, had already decided that U.S. power and technology could not prevail in
Vietnam; Nixon and Kissinger's refusal to accept this conclusion, to abandon their Cartesian illusions, was to condemn hundreds of thousands
more to die in Indochina and the people of Cambodia to two more decades of horror and misery.59 In 2003 there would be a powerful sense of
déja vu as another Republican Administration crowned more than decade of failed and destructive policy on Iraq with a deeply controversial
and divisive war to remove Saddam Hussein from power. In this struggle with the lessons of Vietnam, revolutionary resistance, and rapid
geopolitical transformation, we are witness to an enduring political and cultural theme: of a craving for order, control and certainty in the face
of continual uncertainty. Closely related to this anxiety was the way that Kissinger's thinking -- and that of McNamara and earlier imperialists
like the British Governor of Egypt Cromer -- was embedded in instrumental images of technology and the machine: the machine as both a tool
of power and an image of social and political order. In his essay 'The Government of Subject Races' Cromer envisaged effective imperial rule --
over numerous societies and billions of human beings -- as best achieved by a central authority working 'to ensure the harmonious working of
the different parts of the machine'.60 Kissinger analogously invoked the virtues of 'equilibrium', 'manageability' and 'stability' yet, writing some
six decades later, was anxious that technological progress no longer brought untroubled control: the Westernising 'spread of technology and its
associated rationality...does not inevitably produce a similar concept of reality'.61 We sense the rational policymaker's frustrated desire: the
world is supposed to work like a machine, ordered by a form of power and governmental reason which deploys machines and whose desires
and processes are meant to run along ordered, rational lines like a machine. Kissinger's desire was little different from that of Cromer who,
wrote Edward Said: ...envisions a seat of power in the West and radiating out from it towards the East a great embracing machine, sustaining
the central authority yet commanded by it. What the machine's branches feed into it from the East -- human material, material wealth,
knowledge, what have you -- is processed by the machine, then converted into more power...the immediate translation of mere Oriental
matter into useful substance.62 This desire for order in the shadow of chaos and uncertainty -- the constant war with an intractable and volatile
matter -- has deep roots in modern thought, and was a major impetus to the development of technological reason and its supporting theories
of knowledge. As Kissinger's claims about the West's Newtonian desire for the 'accurate' gathering and classification of 'data' suggest, modern
strategy, foreign policy and Realpolitik have been thrust deep into the apparently stable soil of natural science, in the hope of finding
immovable and unchallengeable roots there. While this process has origins in ancient Judaic and Greek thought, it crystallised in philosophical
terms most powerfully during and after the Renaissance. The key figures in this process were Francis Bacon, Galileo, Isaac Newton, and René
Descartes, who all combined a hunger for political and ontological certainty, a positivist epistemology and a naïve faith in the goodness of
invention. Bacon sought to create certainty and order, and with it a new human power over the world, through a new empirical methodology
based on a harmonious combination of experiment, the senses and the understanding. With this method, he argued, we can 'derive hope from
a purer alliance of the faculties (the experimental and rational) than has yet been attempted'.63 In a similar move, Descartes sought to conjure
certainty from uncertainty through the application of a new method that moved progressively out from a few basic certainties (the existence of
God, the certitude of individual consciousness and a divinely granted faculty of judgement) in a search for pure fixed truths. Mathematics
formed the ideal image of this method, with its strict logical reasoning, its quantifiable results and its uncanny insights into the hidden structure
of the cosmos.64 Earlier, Galileo had argued that scientists should privilege 'objective', quantifiable qualities over 'merely perceptible' ones;
that 'only by means of an exclusively quantitative analysis could science attain certain knowledge of the world'.65 Such doctrines of
mathematically verifiable truth were to have powerful echoes in the 20th Century, in the ascendancy of systems analysis, game theory,
cybernetics and computing in defense policy and strategic decisions, and in the awesome scientific breakthroughs of nuclear physics, which
unlocked the innermost secrets of matter and energy and applied the most advanced applications of mathematics and computing to create the
atomic bomb. Yet this new scientific power was marked by a terrible irony: as even Morgenthau understood, the control over matter afforded
by the science could never be translated into the control of the weapons themselves, into political utility and rational strategy.66 Bacon
thought of the new scientific method not merely as way of achieving a purer access to truth and epistemological certainty, but as liberating a
new power that would enable the creation of a new kind of Man. He opened the Novum Organum with the statement that 'knowledge and
human power are synonymous', and later wrote of his 'determination...to lay a firmer foundation, and extend to a greater distance the
boundaries of human power and dignity'.67 In a revealing and highly negative comparison between 'men's lives in the most polished countries
of Europe and in any wild and barbarous region of the new Indies' -- one that echoes in advance Kissinger's distinction between post-and preNewtonian cultures -- Bacon set out what was at stake in the advancement of empirical science: anyone making this comparison, he remarked,
'will think it so great, that man may be said to be a god unto man'.68 We may be forgiven for blinking, but in Bacon's thought 'man' was indeed
in the process of stealing a new fire from the heavens and seizing God's power over the world for itself. Not only would the new empirical
science lead to 'an improvement of mankind's estate, and an increase in their power over nature', but would reverse the primordial humiliation
of the Fall of Adam: For man, by the fall, lost at once his state of innocence, and his empire over creation, both of which can be partially
recovered even in this life, the first by religion and faith, the second by the arts and sciences. For creation did not become entirely and utterly
rebellious by the curse, but in consequence of the Divine decree, 'in the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat bread'; she is now compelled by our
labours (not assuredly by our disputes or magical ceremonies) at length to afford mankind in some degree his bread...69 There is a
breathtaking, world-creating hubris in this statement -- one that, in many ways, came to characterise western modernity itself, and which is
easily recognisable in a generation of modern technocrats like Kissinger. The Fall of Adam was the Judeo-Christian West's primal creation myth,
one that marked humankind as flawed and humbled before God, condemned to hardship and ambivalence. Bacon forecast here a return to
Eden, but one of man's own making. This truly was the death of God, of putting man into God's place, and no pious appeals to the continuity or
guidance of faith could disguise the awesome epistemological violence which now subordinated creation to man. Bacon indeed argued that
inventions are 'new creations and imitations of divine works'. As such, there is nothing but good in science: 'the introduction of great inventions
is the most distinguished of human actions...inventions are a blessing and a benefit without injuring or afflicting any'.70 And what would be
mankind's 'bread', the rewards of its new 'empire over creation'? If the new method and invention brought modern medicine, social welfare,
sanitation, communications, education and comfort, it also enabled the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust and two world wars; napalm, the
B52, the hydrogen bomb, the Kalashnikov rifle and military strategy. Indeed some of the 20th Century's most far-reaching inventions -- radar,
television, rocketry, computing, communications, jet aircraft, the Internet -- would be the product of drives for national security and
militarisation. Even the inventions Bacon thought so marvellous and transformative -- printing, gunpowder and the compass -- brought in their
wake upheaval and tragedy: printing, dogma and bureaucracy; gunpowder, the rifle and the artillery battery; navigation, slavery and the
genocide of indigenous peoples. In short, the legacy of the new empirical science would be ambivalence as much as certainty; degradation as
much as enlightenment; the destruction of nature as much as its utilisation. Doubts and Fears: Technology as Ontology If Bacon could not
reasonably be expected to foresee many of these developments, the idea that scientific and technological progress could be destructive did
occur to him. However it was an anxiety he summarily dismissed: ...let none be alarmed at the objection of the arts and sciences becoming
depraved to malevolent or luxurious purposes and the like, for the same can be said of every worldly good; talent, courage, strength, beauty,
riches, light itself...Only let mankind regain their rights over nature, assigned to them by the gift of God, and obtain that power, whose exercise
will be governed by right reason and true religion.71 By the mid-Twentieth Century, after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, such fears
could no longer be so easily wished away, as the physicist and scientific director of the Manhattan Project, J. Robert Oppenheimer recognised.
He said in a 1947 lecture: We felt a particularly intimate responsibility for suggesting, for supporting and in the end in large measure achieving
the realization of atomic weapons...In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no over-statement can quite extinguish, the
physicists have known sin, and this is a knowledge they cannot lose.72 Adam had fallen once more, but into a world which refused to
acknowledge its renewed intimacy with contingency and evil. Man's
empire over creation -- his discovery of the
innermost secrets of matter and energy, of the fires that fuelled the stars -- had not 'enhanced human
power and dignity' as Bacon claimed, but instead brought destruction and horror. Scientific powers that had
been consciously applied in the defence of life and in the hope of its betterment now threatened its
total and absolute destruction. This would not prevent a legion of scientists, soldiers and national security policymakers later
attempting to apply Bacon's faith in invention and Descartes' faith in mathematics to make of the Bomb a rational weapon. Oppenheimer -who resolutely opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb -- understood what the strategists could not: that the weapons resisted
control, resisted utility, that 'with the release of atomic energy quite revolutionary changes had occurred in the techniques of warfare'.73 Yet
Bacon's legacy, one deeply imprinted on the strategists, was his view that truth and utility are 'perfectly identical'.74 In 1947 Oppenheimer had
clung to the hope that 'knowledge is good...it seems hard to live any other way than thinking it was better to know something than not to know
it; and the more you know, the better'; by 1960 he felt that 'terror attaches to new knowledge. It has an unmooring quality; it finds men
unprepared to deal with it.'75 Martin Heidegger questioned this mapping of natural science onto the social world in his essays on technology -which, as 'machine', has been so crucial to modern strategic and geopolitical thought as an image of perfect function and order and a powerful
tool of intervention. He commented that, given that modern technology 'employs exact physical science...the deceptive illusion arises that
modern technology is applied physical science'.76 Yet as the essays and speeches of Oppenheimer attest, technology and its relation to science,
society and war cannot be reduced to a noiseless series of translations of science for politics, knowledge for force, or force for good. Instead,
Oppenheimer saw a process frustrated by roadblocks and ruptured by irony; in his view there was no smooth, unproblematic translation of
scientific truth into social truth, and technology was not its vehicle. Rather his comments raise profound and painful ethical questions that
resonate with terror and uncertainty. Yet this has not prevented technology becoming a potent object of desire, not merely as an instrument of
power but as a promise and conduit of certainty itself. In the minds of too many rational soldiers, strategists and policymakers, technology
brings with it the truth of its enabling science and spreads it over the world. It turns epistemological certainty into political certainty; it turns
control over 'facts' into control over the earth. Heidegger's insights into this phenomena I find especially telling and disturbing -- because they
underline the ontological force of the instrumental view of politics. In The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger's striking argument was
that in the modernising West technology is not merely a tool, a 'means to an end'. Rather technology has become a governing image of the
modern universe, one that has come to order, limit and define human existence as a 'calculable coherence of forces' and a 'standing reserve' of
energy. Heidegger wrote: 'the threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of
technology. The actual threat has already affected man in his essence.'77 This process Heidegger calls 'Enframing' and through it the scientific
mind demands that 'nature reports itself in some way or other that is identifiable through calculation and remains orderable as a system of
information'. Man is not a being who makes and uses machines as means, choosing and limiting their impact on the world for his ends; rather
man has imagined the world as a machine and humanity everywhere becomes trapped within its logic. Man, he writes, 'comes to the very brink
of a precipitous fall...where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile Man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts
himself to the posture of lord of the earth.'78 Technological man not only becomes the name for a project of lordship and mastery over the
earth, but incorporates humanity within this project as a calculable resource. In strategy, warfare and geopolitics human bodies, actions and
aspirations are caught, transformed and perverted by such calculating, enframing reason: human lives are reduced to tools, obstacles, useful or
obstinate matter. This tells us much about the enduring power of crude instrumental versions of strategic thought, which relate not merely to
the actual use of force but to broader geopolitical strategies that see, as limited war theorists like Robert Osgood did, force as an 'instrument of
policy short of war'. It was from within this strategic ontology that figures like the Nobel prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling
theorised the strategic role of threats and coercive diplomacy, and spoke of strategy as 'the power to
hurt'.79 In the 2006 Lebanon war we can see such thinking in the remark of a U.S. analyst, a former
Ambassador to Israel and Syria, who speculated that by targeting civilians and infrastructure Israel
aimed 'to create enough pain on the ground so there would be a local political reaction to Hezbollah's
adventurism'.80 Similarly a retired Israeli army colonel told the Washington Post that 'Israel is attempting to create a rift between the
Lebanese population and Hezbollah supporters by exacting a heavy price from the elite in Beirut. The message is: If you want your air
conditioning to work and if you want to be able to fly to Paris for shopping, you must pull your head out of the sand and take action toward
shutting down Hezbollah-land.'81 Conclusion: Violent Ontologies or Peaceful Choices? I was motivated to begin the larger project from which
this essay derives by a number of concerns. I felt that the available critical, interpretive or performative languages of war -- realist and liberal
international relations theories, just war theories, and various Clausewitzian derivations of strategy -- failed us, because they either perform or
refuse to place under suspicion the underlying political ontologies that I have sought to unmask and question here. Many realists have quite
nuanced and critical attitudes to the use of force, but ultimately affirm strategic thought and remain embedded within the existential
framework of the nation-state. Both liberal internationalist and just war doctrines seek mainly to improve the accountability of decision-making
in security affairs and to limit some of the worst moral enormities of war, but (apart from the more radical versions of cosmopolitanism) they
fail to question the ontological claims of political community or strategic theory.82 In the case of a theorist like Jean Bethke Elshtain, just war
doctrine is in fact allied to a softer, liberalised form of the Hegelian-Schmittian ontology. She dismisses Kant's Perpetual Peace as 'a fantasy of
at-oneness...a world in which differences have all been rubbed off' and in which 'politics, which is the way human beings have devised for
dealing with their differences, gets eliminated.'83 She remains a committed liberal democrat and espouses a moral community that stretches
beyond the nation-state, which strongly contrasts with Schmitt's hostility to liberalism and his claustrophobic distinction between friend and
enemy. However her image of politics -- which at its limits, she implies, requires the resort to war as the only existentially satisfying way of
resolving deep-seated conflicts -- reflects much of Schmitt's idea of the political and Hegel's ontology of a fundamentally alienated world of
nation-states, in which war is a performance of being. She categorically states that any effort to dismantle security dilemmas 'also requires the
dismantling of human beings as we know them'.84 Whilst this would not be true of all just war advocates, I suspect that even as they are so
concerned with the ought, moral theories of violence grant too much unquestioned power to the is. The problem here lies with the confidence
in being -- of 'human beings as we know them' -- which ultimately fails to escape a Schmittian architecture and thus eternally exacerbates
(indeed reifies) antagonisms. Yet we know from the work of Deleuze and especially William Connolly that exchanging an ontology of being for
one of becoming, where the boundaries and nature of the self contain new possibilities through agonistic relation to others, provides a less
destructive and violent way of acknowledging and dealing with conflict and difference.85 My argument here, whilst normatively sympathetic to
Kant's moral demand for the eventual abolition of war, militates against excessive optimism.86 Even as I am arguing that war is not an enduring
historical or anthropological feature, or a neutral and rational instrument of policy -- that it is rather the product of hegemonic forms of
knowledge about political action and community -- my analysis does suggest some sobering conclusions about its power as an idea and
formation. Neither the progressive flow of history nor the pacific tendencies of an international society of republican states will save us. The
violent ontologies I have described here in fact dominate the conceptual and policy frameworks of modern republican states and have come,
against everything Kant hoped for, to stand in for progress, modernity and reason. Indeed what Heidegger argues, I think with some credibility,
is that the enframing world view has come to stand in for being itself. Enframing, argues Heidegger, 'does not simply endanger man in his
relationship to himself and to everything that is...it drives out every other possibility of revealing...the rule of Enframing threatens man with the
possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth.'87
What I take from Heidegger's argument -- one that I have sought to extend by analysing the militaristic power of modern ontologies of political
existence and security -- is a view that the challenge is posed not merely by a few varieties of weapon, government, technology or policy, but by
an overarching system of thinking and understanding that lays claim to our entire space of truth and existence. Many of the most destructive
features of contemporary modernity -- militarism, repression, coercive diplomacy, covert intervention, geopolitics, economic exploitation and
ecological destruction -- derive not merely from particular choices by policymakers based on their particular interests, but from calculative,
'empirical' discourses of scientific and political truth rooted in powerful enlightenment images of being. Confined within such an
epistemological and cultural universe, policymakers' choices become necessities, their actions become inevitabilities, and humans suffer and
die. Viewed in this light, 'rationality' is the name we give the chain of reasoning which builds one structure of truth on another until a course of
action, however violent or dangerous, becomes preordained through that reasoning's very operation and existence. It creates both discursive
constraints -- available choices may simply not be seen as credible or legitimate -- and material constraints that derive from the mutually
reinforcing cascade of discourses and events which then preordain militarism and violence as necessary policy responses, however ineffective,
dysfunctional or chaotic. The force of my own and Heidegger's analysis does, admittedly, tend towards a deterministic fatalism. On my part this
is quite deliberate; it is important to allow this possible conclusion to weigh on us. Large sections of modern societies -- especially parts of the
media, political leaderships and national security institutions -- are utterly trapped within the Clausewitzian paradigm, within the instrumental
utilitarianism of 'enframing' and the stark ontology of the friend and enemy. They are certainly tremendously aggressive and energetic in
continually stating and reinstating its force. But is there a way out? Is there no possibility of agency and choice? Is this not the key normative
problem I raised at the outset, of how the modern ontologies of war efface agency, causality and responsibility from decision making; the
responsibility that comes with having choices and making decisions, with exercising power? (In this I am much closer to Connolly than Foucault,
in Connolly's insistence that, even in the face of the anonymous power of discourse to produce and limit subjects, selves remain capable of
agency and thus incur responsibilities.88) There seems no point in following Heidegger in seeking a more 'primal truth' of being -- that is to
reinstate ontology and obscure its worldly manifestations and consequences from critique. However we can, while refusing Heidegger's
unworldly89 nostalgia, appreciate that he was searching for a way out of the modern system of calculation; that he was searching for a
'questioning', 'free relationship' to technology that would not be immediately recaptured by the strategic, calculating vision of enframing. Yet
his path out is somewhat chimerical -- his faith in 'art' and the older Greek attitudes of 'responsibility and indebtedness' offer us valuable clues
to the kind of sensibility needed, but little more. When we consider the problem of policy, the force of this analysis suggests that choice and
agency can be all too often limited; they can remain confined (sometimes quite wilfully) within the overarching strategic and security
paradigms. Or, more hopefully, policy choices could aim to bring into being a more enduringly inclusive, cosmopolitan and peaceful logic of the
political. But this cannot be done without seizing alternatives from outside the space of enframing and utilitarian strategic thought, by being
aware of its presence and weight and activating a very different concept of existence, security and action.90 This would seem to hinge upon
'questioning' as such -- on the questions we put to the real and our efforts to create and act into it. Do security and strategic policies seek to
exploit and direct humans as material, as energy, or do they seek to protect and enlarge human dignity and autonomy? Do they seek to impose
by force an unjust status quo (as in Palestine), or to remove one injustice only to replace it with others (the U.S. in Iraq or Afghanistan), or do so
at an unacceptable human, economic, and environmental price? Do we see our actions within an instrumental, amoral framework (of
'interests') and a linear chain of causes and effects (the idea of force), or do we see them as folding into a complex interplay of languages,
norms, events and consequences which are less predictable and controllable?91 And most fundamentally: Are we seeking to coerce or
persuade? Are less violent and more sustainable choices available? Will our actions perpetuate or help to end the global rule of insecurity and
violence? Will our thought? *My thanks to Fiona Jenkins who invited me to present an earlier version of this argument to her philosophy
seminar at the Australian National University, and to Michael Shapiro who provided welcome guidance.
State-Focus
States are only made secure through murderous function – justified through economic
domain
Agathangelou in 2010 (Anna, Associate Professor at York University, “Bodies of Desire, Terror and
the War in Eurasia: Impolite Disruptions of (Neo) Liberal Internationalism, Neoconservatism and the
‘New’ Imperium”, Millennium Journal of International Studies)
The state’s transformation to biopolitical life is secured through the process of ‘racism’, a racism that
‘can justify the murderous function of the State’, and one that ‘develops with colonisation, or in other
words, with colonizing genocide’.38 This colonialism played a significant role in the ‘remaking of Europe
by reference to Westphalia, to competition among states and to “economic domination” as
characteristic of Europe’s relation to the rest of the world from the 17th century’.39 Foucault’s recognition of
colonialism opens up space for us to reconstruct a much longer genealogy of the international, not contained by European borders, even when
he himself evades this question.40 Foucault
also argues ‘liberalism understands the borders of the state to be
incongruent with the reason of the market’.41 Thus, the zero-sum power dynamic that governed the
ideal peace between mercantilist states is anachronistic, displaced by a ‘new type of global calculation ...
political economy that comes to reframe European peace as necessarily dependent upon a “ commercial
globalization”’.42 Economic competition is seen as the pathway to European peace and/or peace by those who have capacity (that is,
those who are able to commit accumulation and fungibility with impunity) and is not necessarily a ‘global peace’, as Kiersey argues.43 The
shift from impoverishment to collective enrichment, Foucault’s ‘collective and unlimited enrichment’,
requires a Europe ‘act[ing] as an economic subject that takes the world as “its economic domain”; this
would ensure that Europe as a whole is “in a state of the permanent and collective growth of wealth
brought about by its own competition, on condition that it is the whole world that makes up the market.
... The game is in Europe, but the stake is the world.”’44
National Security
National security and identities are redeemed through war, mass killing, and genocide
– War is seen as a unifying act of policy
Burke 07, Anthony Burke (Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations in the University
of New South Wales), 2007, “Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and Reason”,
https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v010/10.2burke.html
Identity, even more than physical security or autonomy, is put at stake in such thinking and can be defended
and redeemed through warfare (or, when taken to a further extreme of an absolute demonisation and
dehumanisation of the other, by mass killing, 'ethnic cleansing' or genocide). However anathema to a classical
realist like Morgenthau, for whom prudence was a core political virtue, these have been influential ways of defining
national security and defence during the twentieth century and persists into the twenty-first. They infused
Cold War strategy in the United States (with the key policy document NSC68 stating that 'the Soviet-led assault on free
institutions is worldwide now, and ... a defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere')40 and frames dominant
Western responses to the threat posed by Al Qaeda and like groups (as Tony Blair admitted in 2006, 'We could have chosen
security as the battleground. But we didn't. We chose values.')41 It has also become influential, in a particularly tragic and
destructive way, in Israel, where memories of the Holocaust and (all too common) statements by Muslim and
Arab leaders rejecting Israel's existence are mobilised by conservatives to justify military adventurism
and a rejectionist policy towards the Palestinians. On the reverse side of such ontologies of national insecurity we find
pride and hubris, the belief that martial preparedness and action are vital or healthy for the existence of
a people. Clausewitz's thought is thoroughly imbued with this conviction. For example, his definition of war as an act of policy does not refer
merely to the policy of cabinets, but expresses the objectives and will of peoples: When whole communities go to war -- whole
peoples, and especially civilized peoples -- the reason always lies in some political situation and the occasion is always due to
some political object. War, therefore, is an act of policy.42 Such a perspective prefigures Schmitt's definition of the 'political' (an earlier
translation reads 'war, therefore, is a political act'), and thus creates an inherent tension between its tendency to fuel the escalation of conflict
and Clausewitz's declared aim, in defining war as policy, to prevent war becoming 'a complete, untrammelled, absolute manifestation of
violence'.43 Likewise his argument that war is a 'trinity' of people (the source of 'primordial violence, hatred and enmity'), the military (who
manage the 'play of chance and probability') and government (which achieve war's 'subordination as an instrument of policy, which makes it
subject to reason alone') merges the existential and rationalistic conceptions of war into a theoretical unity.44 The
idea that national
identities could be built and redeemed through war derived from the 'romantic counter-revolution' in
philosophy which opposed the cosmopolitanism of Kant with an emphasis on the absolute state -- as
expressed by Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Bismarkian Realpolitik and politicians like Wilhelm Von Humbolt. Humbolt, a Prussian minister of
Education, wrote that war
'is one of the most wholesome manifestations that plays a role in the education of
the human race', and urged the formation of a national army 'to inspire the citizen with the spirit of true war'. He stated that war
'alone gives the total structure the strength and the diversity without which facility would be weakness
and unity would be void'.45 In the Phenomenology of Mind Hegel made similar arguments that to for individuals to find their essence
'Government has from time to time to shake them to the very centre by war'.46
War On Terror
Terrorism and the threat of terrorism is a threat construction by elites
Githens-Mazer in 2012 (Jonathan is a professor in the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies and the Strategy
and Security Institute; “The rhetoric and reality: radicalization and political discourse” International Political
Science Review November 2012 vol. 33 no. 5 PG: 559-560)
As a term, ‘radicalization’ has pervaded almost all aspects of the discourse on terrorism and risk since
9/11. The question, in many ways, is why this is so. What is it about ‘radicalization’ as a term or concept that makes it
so appealing for political media discourse when asking how and why an individual comes to perpetrate a
terrorist attack? What is this term, as a basis for popular discourse, saying about the kind of vocabulary we think we need in order to
describe such a phenomenon? All risk is a social construction based on a combination of statistical probability
and, more importantly, concerns which a society either explicitly or implicitly deems worthy of attention
and the expenditure of time and resources (Beck, 1992; Douglas, 1992; Douglas and Wildavsky, 1983). Radicalization, in
current parlance, represents this exact phenomenon. Societies often intuit risk as a perception of how
scary and threatening an outcome is, rather than its probability of occurring. The actual threat of
violence from Muslim communities in Europe and the USA is statistically infinitesimal, yet the attention
in terms of time, money, and political rhetoric is massive. Take, for example, the number of arrests for ‘Islamically
inspired’ terrorism in the EU in 2010: 179 were arrested for such terrorist offences of one variety or another, constituting some 30 per cent of
all those arrested and convicted for terrorism offences in the EU (EUROPOL, 2011). This looks, on its own, to be an alarming statistic – almost
one-third of all terrorist convictions in 2010 were for Islamically inspired plots. However, such a figure must be placed in a wider context. As
there are in excess of 53 million Muslims living in Europe, only 0.000033 per cent of the population of European Muslims were arrested and
convicted of these offences. Even on a national scale, if we consider that there were 12 convictions for Islamically inspired terrorism in the UK
in 2010, a policy concerned with Islamic radicalization (that is, counter-radicalization) is based on something like 0.000041 per cent of the entire
British Muslim population (EUROPOL, 2011). As Scott Attran (2010) says: ‘Rarely
in the history of human conflict have so few
people with so few actual means and capabilities frightened so many.’ In part, this reflects the power of the images
of 9/11 – images that came as a total shock to a complacent and unaware western public (Hoskins and O’Loughlin, 2007). In the aftermath of
these attacks, western societies sought an answer to how and why such attacks had happened – and there was an elite and popular attempt to
discern causation in the deaths of more than 3000 in the USA on this dreadful day, asking the question ‘Why did this happen to us?’ Douglas
(1992; Douglas and Wildavsky, 1983) talks extensively about the socially constructed nature of causation, especially in relation to violating
taboos. How
do we understand why something bad happens to us? We think about such issues in light of
morality, religion, and action and reaction, despite the world being massively complex and causation
most often indiscernible. In the aftermath of the horrific attacks of 9/11, governments across the world
resolutely talked of the threat of Islamically inspired terrorism, and the correlative rise in its priority as a
resonant political issue was about addressing degrees of public panic and popular perceptions of this
threat. Simultaneously, states, through their security apparatuses and the co-optation of academic research, sought to ascertain the actual
extent to which these attacks represented a viable challenge to the existing political, cultural, economic, and social status quo. This was the
elite-driven popular construction of perceived causation. The actual risk of a terrorist attack affecting
any one individual’s life was beyond infinitesimal, yet an individual’s perception of this risk is not based
on tangible evidence.
Good or Bad radicalization is determined by the elites not by society
Githens-Mazer in 2012 (Jonathan is a professor in the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies and the Strategy
and Security Institute; “The rhetoric and reality: radicalization and political discourse” International Political
Science Review November 2012 vol. 33 no. 5 PG: 557)
As radicalism and radicalization have been framed as issues of good or bad and as extremist or moderate, a truism seems to have emerged: ‘We
like good radicalism and radicalization, but do not like bad radicalism and radicalization – we like challenges to some things, but believe
challenges to others to be an existential risk to the continued functioning and existence of society.’ What
constitutes ‘valued’
radicalism and radicalization versus risky radicalism and radicalization is, however, subjective, decided
not so much by a wider society, but by those with their hands on the tiller of the status quo – the elites
who control what is deemed ‘normal’ practice and to whom many of the challenges are directly
addressed. On the one hand, politicians and the media seek to engage in strong and definitive talk about the
risk to stability and security posed by ‘radicalization’ (via ‘terrorism’), and yet in an era of austerity, and where many
of the basic assumptions and beliefs in free-market capitalism seem incorrect, the media, policy-makers, and wider society appear to value
some challenges to status quo practices and beliefs that will help to correct social, economic, and in some cases, cultural problems. This
ambiguity, in short, has caused real conceptual dissonance between the subjective use of these terms, their meaning as concepts, and the
potential for academic research into understanding radicalism and radicalization. The discussion that follows here represents an attempt to set
out some basic antecedents for the evolution of ‘radical’ and related terms, explain how radicalism and radicalization constitute a ‘conceptual
back-formation’ for policy-makers and the media when trying to make sense of the attacks of 9/11 (New York World Trade Centre), 3/11
(Madrid commuter train system), and 7/7 (London underground), and how this back-formation is inherently bound to the social construction of
risk. In short, the article will argue that the problem with some current discussions of radicalism and radicalization is that they are based on an
emotional response to the shock of 9/11 and the subsequent securitization of Islam, what Horgan (2005: 23) refers to as the ‘drama’ of
terrorism – a human understanding of the scale of death, destruction, or property damage. ‘Radicalization’ was quickly appropriated by the
media and politicians as a descriptive term to explain how and why Muslims participated in violence against the West, ostensibly in the name of
their religion. It was regularly used interchangeably with terms such as ‘fundamentalist’, ‘Islamist’, ‘jihadist’, and ‘neo-Salafist’ or ‘Wahabbist’.
In other cases, ‘radical’ Islamist was a euphemism for ‘violent’ Islamist (Langohr, 2004).
Democracy/Liberalism
Liberalism is made only through the cog of war – it is the only way to cleanse society
to its ways
Agathangelou in 2010 (Anna, Associate Professor at York University, “Bodies of Desire, Terror and
the War in Eurasia: Impolite Disruptions of (Neo) Liberal Internationalism, Neoconservatism and the
‘New’ Imperium”, Millennium Journal of International Studies)
Foucault begins his analysis of power relations by asking whether ‘war [can] serve as an analyzer of [them]’.30 He then asks: First,
what is this war that exists before the State, and which the State is, in theory, destined to end? What is
this war that the State has pushed back into prehistory, into savagery, into its mysterious frontiers, but
which is still going on? And second, how does this war give birth to the State? What stigmata does war leave on
the body of the State once it has been established? War is the motor behind institutions and order. In the smallest of
its cogs, peace is waging a secret war. To put it another way, we have to interpret the war that is going
on beneath peace; peace itself is a coded war. We are therefore at war with one another; a battlefront
runs through the whole of society, continuously and permanently, and it is this battlefront that puts us
all on one side or the other.31 War is both the web and the secret of institutions and systems of powers
... [What Hobbes wanted to eliminate in his Leviathan was] the terrible problem of the Conquest of England. ... Once we begin to talk
about power relations, we are not talking about right, and we are not talking about sovereignty; we are
talking about domination, about an infinitely dense and multiple domination that never comes to an
end.32 Foucault’s analysis pushes us to ask about the creation of institutions through war, and war as an institution, with its processes central
in world politics and the redefinition of the ‘human’; more importantly, it exposes the ways English discourse ‘functions in both a political and a
historical mode, both as a program for political action and as search for historical knowledge’.33 Hobbes’
Leviathan, for Foucault,
eliminates ‘political historicism’, and consequently, for critical theorists, it is not enough to understand
war in terms of natural rights and the establishment of sovereignty; it has to be understood ‘in terms of
the unending movement – which has no historical end – of the shifting relations that make some
dominant over others’.34 Foucault, here as elsewhere,35 causes us to reflect on the content of social
relations, looking specifically at the larger processes, the shifting relations, ‘the unending movement –
which has no historical end’, that make details on the global canvas infinitely more complex.36 The
engagement with these shifting relations is significant in demonstrating Foucault’s repositioning of his
discourses about liberalism and war. Through this move, he is able to reconstruct the relationship e
stablished by political economy and the art of government between economic processes and
natural/biological/physical processes. Before moving on to engage Foucault’s reconstruction of the role played by the market, I
want to digress and focus on his comments on the shift of discourses of war: War. How can one not only wage war on one’s
adversaries but also expose one’s own citizens to war, and let them be killed by the million (and this is
precisely what has been going on since the nineteenth century, or since the second half of the nineteenth century), except by activating
the theme of racism? In the nineteenth century – and this is completely new – war will be seen not only
as a way of improving one’s own race by eliminating the enemy race (in accordance with the themes of
natural selection and the struggle for existence), but also as a way of regenerating one’s own race. ...
How can one both make a biopower function and exercise the rights of war, the rights of murder and
the function of death, without becoming racist?37
Liberal internationalism cannot solve the paradox of terrorism and evades the relation of murder
Agathangelou in 2010 (Anna, Associate Professor at York University, “Bodies of Desire, Terror and
the War in Eurasia: Impolite Disruptions of (Neo) Liberal Internationalism, Neoconservatism and the
‘New’ Imperium”, Millennium Journal of International Studies)
Economies cannot grow, develop and distribute goods and benefits without using power; the existence
of ‘sufficient security within and between countries to allow producers to plan and produce and
consumers to save and consume’ requires liberal internationalist rules to guide the use of force. Elsewhere,
Slaughter calls this the ‘globalisation paradox’.2 Slaughter’s desire for the production of a New World Order that respects global
governance, democracy and democratic accountability3 is predicated on a constitutive openness that allows this process to free itself from
‘those territories that condition, without containing, its emergent axiomatic order’.4 She articulates
that this desire can be
fulfilled once the basic tension between sovereignty and global governance, that is, the paradox
between the preservation of liberty and the benefits of institutional governance, is resolved. However,
this tension, I am suggesting, is not merely intellectual and consequently cannot be resolved
theoretically. If Slaughter were to raise this reconciliation of sovereignty and global governance as a problem for world politics (and not
just a problem of liberal internationalism), critiques of liberal internationalism and other external yet paradigmatic
postcolonial critiques would oblige her to ask whether the globalisation paradox is called into being not
by a failure to bracket tyranny by arguing for government networks, or global interstices, to actualise
the New World Order but by that very bracketing itself. Slaughter would be obliged to query whether
the temporal bracketing (or containment) of tyranny in liberal internationalist theorisations about the
New World Order in some sense collapses international regulatory institutional processes and freedom
with those of appropriation and murder, thereby hastening the advent of tyranny and the
global/permanent war that it appears to prevent. Thus, the problem for international theorists and
intellectual historians is not merely to resolve a paradox, but rather to ask whether this process was a
rational and an affective calculation6 to enable a ‘kind of stabilisation’ of the interstate system to evade
questions about the inherent and presumed nature of the doctrine of liberal internationalism and its
proclaimed universal order (i.e., a narrow punctuation of the international that has its origins in Europe and is currently led by the
US), its reason, and the freedom of the individual. Using Slaughter’s work as a point of departure, this article asks the following questions: is the
call for the use of more multilateral force in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East another case of liberal internationalism, a neoliberal project in
is the insistence by liberal internationalists on grounding a liberal international
world order, and their desire to achieve it no matter what the costs, a neoliberal project in search of
economic preponderance and interstate transformation7 rather than multilateral reconciliation and
social justice? To answer these questions, I critically engage with liberal internationalists’ claim that the
surest foundation for world peace both within and outside states is market democracy (in other words,
the constitution of a neoliberal democratic polity and a market-oriented economy assumed ‘in human
nature’)8 and enquire into a fundamental process of world politics (i.e. imperial relations) that is evaded
by them: namely, murder.
search of economic stability? Or
The thought that Democratic states won’t go to war with one another is a dangerous
thought because it incentivize democracies to go to war with non-democracies to
forcibly convert them to democracies to prevent war with them
Buchan 2002 (Bruce Buchan, 2002,Explaining War and Peace: Kant and Liberal IR Theory, Alternatives:
Global, Local, Political, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Oct.-Dec. 2002), pp. 407-428)
A key feature of this liberal view, as Hayek presents it, is that having become civilized, modern liberal
civil societies have left violence behind. In drawing an opposition between civilized peace and uncivilized
violence, the responsibility for perpetrating violence and war is too easily traced to peoples, societies, or
states deemed uncivilized. To be uncivilized means that one exists in the unruly and undisciplined
condition of "normlessness." The significance of norms in IR has been emphasized by "constructivists,"
who tell us that "institutions express norms" that emerge from and shape the development of
individuals and societies.91 On this view, liberal states and societies are to be understood as products of
multiple processes of construction, embodying liberal norms. Domestically, these processes are said to
give rise to inclusive communities constituted by similarly constructed individuals. Internationally, an
inclusive community of similarly constructed states is established embodying a liberal commitment to
the inclusion of all peoples and states "in the universal moral community."92 Seeing liberal peace as the
product of processes of norm-oriented construction of selves and states, however, tells us
comparatively little about how liberal thinkers actually conceptualized liberal norms and their
application. Liberalism has always been associated with theories of civilization in which the construction
of liberal selves, societies, and states was juxtaposed to the threat posed by the uncivilized. Within
liberal thought, civilization was understood not only as a process of instilling norms of civility, but of
subduing, subjecting, and governing (often by illiberal means) those people deemed uncivilized. In
general, contemporary liberal theorists have been unwilling to address this legacy.93 Some, however,
have lamented the decline of supposedly more civilized international standards and the rise of uncivil
wars. Such wars are thought to "lack any logic or structure." defy "sober restrictions covering the ground
rules of war," threaten to "ransack the legal monopoly of armed force," and "put an end to the
distinction between war and crime."94 There are even those who call for a "new" imperialism
committed to imposing order on unruly and "stateless" peoples, without degenerating into the injustice
and bloodshed of nineteenth-century-style colonialism.95 We are led to believe here that Western
civilization has been responsible for the limitation of war and violence, or that the norms of that
civilization, if reimposed, might bring an end to uncivil wars. To accept this assumption, however, leaves
us blind to the inseparability of liberalism, civilization, and imperialism in the nineteenth century - and
indeed to the lethal intensification of war (and the technology of mass killing) by apparently civilized
liberal states and civil societies in the twentieth century.96 The identification of peace with civil society
in contemporary IR literature reinforces the view that the responsibility for perpetuating war should be
traced to uncivilized peoples or to "troublemaking," "rogue," or simply "bad" states.97 If there were
more liberal- democracies, the argument runs, there would be more peace.98 For its proponents, the
success that liberal states have had in achieving international preeminence is a direct consequence of
having pacified their own domestic populations and their relations with other liberal states.99 This view
effectively places the onus of responsibility for causing violence onto nonliberal states by assuming that
liberal states will pursue foreign policies consistent with and constrained by the domestically pacific
liberal institutions, values, and principles nourished in civil society.100 The association of civil society
with domestic peace is an enduring feature of liberal political thought, and within recent IR literature
the structures of civil society have been closely identified with the prospects for global peace. Nowhere
is this more evident than in the emergence of "cosmopolitan democracy" and the attempt to envisage a
"transnational civil society," a concept redolent of the imagery of Kantian thought.101 In perpetuating
the association of civil society with peace, however, we run the very real risk of overlooking the
frightening intensification of killing power that civil societies have so successfully fostered and that now
lies at the disposal not only of liberal states but significant proportions of their citizenries as well. Nor
indeed will we recognize the intimate connection between and mutual reliance of "liberal" and
"illiberal" states, as attested by the history of Western liberal support for repressive regimes throughout
Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. Liberal IR theorists often present an interpretation of
liberalism as if it were to be understood solely in terms of its "universal" norms and values, with little or
no sense of the contingent and contextual development of those norms. Throughout its history, a range
of liberal thinkers (not to mention liberal governments and states) have argued that most people are
incapable of exercising the values they regard as restricted to a much smaller circle of civilized
beneficiaries.102 For those deemed "incapable," those who reside outside the restricted circle of civil
society (such as the poor at home or the "natives" abroad) , liberals have long been prepared to support
illiberal and undemocratic kinds of government. The key to understanding this is not to see it as an
embarrassing inconsistency but as a consequence of how liberal thinkers make distinctions between
different kinds of people requiring different kinds of government. The chief conceptual means employed
in making these distinctions has been the discourse of civilization, understood not simply as a standard
of conduct but as a project of controlling and exerting influence over the uncivilized. Given its long
association with liberal- imperialism, it is hard to see why civilization should now be seen as an
acceptable standard of good conduct, much less as an agent of peace. Nor is it clear that even if a
Kantian pacific federation were possible, why a peace built on the superiority of the civilized over the
uncivilized should be thought at all worthy of the name.
US Hegemony
US hegemony bad- the US’s thought process makes it inevitable to go to war
Campbell et al 07 (David, Luiza Bialasiewicz, Stuart Elden ,Stephen Graham, Alex Jeffrey, Alison J.
Williams, Elsivier Political Geography 26 (2007) 405-422, https://www.david-campbell.org/wpcontent/documents/Performing_Security.pdf)
Certainly the most prominent self-styled ‘community of experts’ intersecting with the Bush administration is the Project for a New American
Century (for critical analysis see Sparke, 2005). The PNAC, founded in the spring of 1997, defines itself as a ‘‘non-profit, educational
organization whose goal is to promote American global leadership’’ (see PNAC, 2006). Putatively lying outside ‘‘formal’’ policy networks, the
Project from its inception has aimed to provide the intellectual basis for continued US military dominance e and especially the willingness to use
its military might. As
sole hegemon, PNAC argued, the US could not ‘‘avoid the responsibilities of global
leadership’’. But it should not simply ‘‘react’’ to threats as they present themselves: it should, rather,
actively shape the global scenario before such threats emerge: ‘‘the history of the 20th century should
have taught us that it is important to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats
before they become dire’’ (PNAC, 2000: i). The resonance of these views with those of the Bush administration should come as no
surprise: among the Project’s founders were individuals who had held posts in previous Republican administrations and went on to serve in
Bush’s cabinet: Vice-President Dick Cheney, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy and now World Bank President Paul
Wolfowitz, along with the former ambassador to Iraq (and soon to be US Ambassador to the UN) Zalmay Khalilzad, in addition to well known
neoconservatives shaping policy debates in the US today, including Francis Fukuyama, Norman Podhoretz, and William Kristol (see Fukuyama,
2006; Williams, 2005). Unsurprisingly, the most explicit formulation of what would become goals of the Bush administration can be found in the
PNAC’s manifesto Rebuilding America’s Defenses, which appeared in the election year of 2000. Here and in subsequent documents, the
PNAC envisages the US military’s role to be fourfold: ‘‘Defend the American Homeland’’; ‘‘fight and
decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars’’; ‘‘perform the ‘constabulary’ duties
associated with shaping the security environment in critical regions’’; and ‘‘transform U.S. forces to
exploit the ‘revolution in military affairs’’’ (PNAC, 2000: iv, 5; cf. The White House, 2002b: 30). It is telling just how spatialised
some of these specifications become when worked through in detail. Already in 2000, PNAC argued that the major military
mission is no longer to deter Soviet expansionism, but to ‘‘secure and expand zones of democratic
peace; deter rise of new great-power competitor; defend key regions; exploit transformation of war’’
(PNAC, 2000: 2). They suggested that rather than the Cold War’s ‘‘potential global war across many
theatres’’, the concern now is for several ‘‘potential theatre wars spread across the globe’’ fought
against ‘‘separate and distinct adversaries pursuing separate and distinct goals’’ (2000: 2, 3). To counter
such threats, the US needs to station its troops broadly, and their presence ‘‘in critical regions around
the world is the visible expression of the extent of America’s status as a superpower and as the
guarantor of liberty, peace and stability’’ (2000: 14). They claimed that while US security interests have ‘‘expanded’’, and that its
forces ‘‘provide the first line of defense in what may be 410 L. Bialasiewicz et al. / Political Geography 26 (2007) 405e422 described as the
‘American security perimeter’’’, at the same time ‘‘the worldwide archipelago of U.S. military
installations has contracted’’ (2000: 14, 15). Because the security perimeter ‘‘has expanded slowly but
inexorably’’ since the end of the Cold War, US forces e ‘‘the cavalry on the new American frontier’’ e
‘‘must be positioned to reflect the shifting strategic landscape’’ (2000: 14, 15). Equally, their use of the term
‘homeland’ drew strongly on its use in the Clinton administration e and prefigured the creation of the Office for
Homeland Security under G.W. Bush, with the concept strengthened by both the PATRIOT acts and the establishment of
U.S. Northern Command. Again, it is essential that we conceptualize these strategies as both containing and making imaginative geographies;
specifying the ways ‘‘the world is’’ and, in so doing, actively (re)- making that same world. This
goes beyond merely the military
action or aid programmes that governments follow, but indicates a wider concern with the production
of ways of seeing the world, which percolate through media, popular imaginations as well as political
strategy. These performative imaginative geographies are at the heart of this paper and will re-occur throughout it. Our concern lies
specifically with the ways in which the US portrays e and over the past decade has portrayed e certain
parts of the world as requiring involvement, as threats, as zones of instability, as rogue states, ‘‘states of
concern’’, as ‘‘global hotspots’’, as well as the associated suggestion that by bringing these within the
‘‘integrated’’ zones of democratic peace, US security e both economically and militarily e can be
preserved. Of course, the translation of such imaginations into actual practice (and certainly results) is
never as simple as some might like to suggest. Nonetheless, what we wish to highlight here is how these strategies, in essence,
produce the effect they name. This, again, is nothing new: the United States has long constituted its identity at least in
part through discourses of danger that materialize others as a threat (see Campbell, 1992). Equally, much has
been written about the new set of threats and enemies that emerged to fill the post-Soviet void e from
radical Islam through the war on drugs to ‘‘rogue states’’ (for a critical analyses see, among others, Benjamin & Simon,
2003; Stokes, 2005; on the genealogies of the idea of ‘‘rogue states’’ see Blum, 2002; Litwak, 2000). What is crucial in the rendering of
these strategies, rather, is how those perceived threats are to be dealt with. PNAC, for instance, urged Clinton
to take a more hawkish line on Iraq in a 1998 letter (signed by many who would later populate the Bush administration),
which concluded with an exhortation: ‘‘We urge you to act decisively. If you act now to end the threat of
weapons of mass destruction against the U.S. or its allies, you will be acting in the most fundamental
national security interests of the country. If we accept a course of weakness and drift, we put our
interests and our future at risk’’ (PNAC, 1998). Yet another of PNAC’s co-founders chose to remain on the ‘outside’, however e and
it is to his work that we now turn. The ‘scribe’ in question is Robert Kagan, who in June 2002 published a highly influential piece in the foreign
policy journal Policy Review, later expanded as a book (Kagan, 2003). At the time, Kagan was a political commentator for the Washington Post
and a writer for a number of conservative monthlies, and had served in the State Department from 1984 to 1998. In the early 1980s he was a
member of the Department’s policy planning unit, and worked in the first Bush Administration as Secretary of State George Schultz’s
speechwriter. Entitled ‘‘Power and Weakness’’, Kagan’s essay detailed what he argued was the increasingly evident disparity between American
and European worldviews, particularly with regard to the conduct of international affairs. But his analysis, as we will argue here, constituted
above all a justification for American power, and its exercise wherever and however necessary. Kagan’s analysis e as
part of a wider
‘‘understanding’’ of the ways in which the post-Cold L. Bialasiewicz et al. / Political Geography 26 (2007) 405e422 411 War
world ‘‘works’’ developed by neoconservative intellectuals e would prepare the ground, indeed, make
‘‘indispensable’’, US unilateralism and its doctrine of pre-emptive action. Kagan’s article was highly influential, just
as Fukuyama’s (1989, 1992) ‘‘The End of History?’’ had been 13 years before, because of his profile within the foreign policy establishment, and
because Kagan (as Fukuyama) was speaking to friends and colleagues e and, in many ways, reiterating a set of shared understandings. Kagan’s
claims have been widely discussed, lauded and refuted by academics and political leaders alike (see, for example those referenced in
Bialasiewicz & Elden, 2006), so we will present them here only in brief. Kagan’s
central claim was that Europeans and
Americans no longer share a common view of the world and, moreover, that in essential ways they can
be understood as occupying different worlds: ‘‘Europe is turning away from power, or to put it a little
differently, it is moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational
negotiation and cooperation’’. And while Europe has withdrawn into a mirage of Kantian ‘perpetual
peace’, the US has no choice but to act in a Hobbesian world of perpetual war. This state of affairs, for
Kagan, is not the result of the strategic choices of a single administration, but a persistent divide and the
reflection of fundamentally different perspectives on the world e and the role of Europe/ the US within
it (Kagan, 2002: 1). Kagan spends a significant part of his paper (and later book) analyzing what he terms ‘‘the psychology of power and
weakness’’. It is a deeply troubling argument, for Kagan claims, at base, that Europeans believe in diplomacy and
multilateralism because they are ‘‘weak’’: ‘‘Europeans oppose unilateralism [.] because they have no
capacity for unilateralism’’ (Kagan, 2002: 7). What is more, he claims, the construction of the European ‘‘paradise’’, the ‘‘geopolitical
fantasy [of] a postmodern system [where] the age-old laws of international relations have been repealed; [where] Europeans have
stepped out of the Hobbesian world of anarchy into the Kantian world of perpetual peace’’ (2002: 11) was
made possible only by American power which assured the Cold War peace. America continues to hold this role because ‘‘post-historical
Europe’’ will not e and cannot;
the US is forced to remain ‘‘stuck in history, left to deal with the Saddams and the
ayatollahs, the Kim Jong Ils and the Jiang Zemins, leaving the happy benefits to others’’ (2002: 16). As we have
argued elsewhere, the US is thus invoked into a number of positions: as global leader (faced with Europe’s
failings/withdrawal), but
also the only state able, due to its power-position, to perceive threats clearly; the
only one with a God’s eye view of international affairs. It is thus, at once, the world’s geo-politican and
its geo-police; the only state with the ‘knowledge’ but also the capability to intervene. Such attitudes
clearly inform and reinforce the notion of ‘pre-emptive action’ articulated in the 2002 National Security
Strategy. What is more interesting is that these ideas are also to be found in other contemporary calls for a proper ordering of the world
that have issued from the broader community of ‘non-state’ experts previously described. As we have suggested, what constitutes the force of
such understandings is their performative e citational and reiterative e nature. These understandings echo and speak to each other, resonate
with one another, thus reinforcing their validity as a faithful description of ‘the way the world is’. Of these perhaps one of the most remarkable,
and certainly the most explicitly geographical, is Thomas Barnett’s ‘‘The Pentagon’s New Map’’ (Barnett, 2004). Barnett’s vision has not escaped
political geographers’ scrutiny: Roberts, Secor, and Sparke (2003) have called attention to the power of Barnett’s ‘‘binary spatial model’’ and
what they termed its ‘‘neoliberal geopolitics’’. More recently, Monmonier (2005) has traced the possible uses of Barnett’s cartographies in
justifying current and future US interventions. 412 L. Bialasiewicz et al. / Political Geography 26 (2007) 405e422 What we will do here is focus
more narrowly on the ways in which the concept of ‘‘integration’’ is deployed in Barnett’s work and the specification of the US’s role in assuring
such integration e at home, abroad, and by all means necessary. Barnett’s cartography of international relations is of a disarming simplicity,
rendered in map form as a globe divided into a ‘‘Functioning Core’’ and a ‘‘Non-Integrating Gap’’: the Core torn by the ‘‘Gap’’, figured as a dark
stain spreading from the equator, spanning most of Latin America, Africa and Asia, and leaching into the Balkans and Central Asia. ‘‘NonIntegrating’’ areas are those which are, in the words of Barnett (2004: 8), ‘‘disconnected from the global economy and the rule sets that define
its stability’’. But disconnection is not only a ‘‘problem’’ for these societies alone: ‘‘In this century, it is disconnectedness that defines danger.
Disconnectedness allows bad actors to flourish by keeping entire societies detached from the global community and under their control.
Eradicating disconnectedness, therefore, becomes the defining security task of our age’’ (Barnett, 2004: 8).
Islam Reps
The Affirmatives discourse of radicalization of Islam is locked in status quo logic of
securitization which objectives Islam
Githens-Mazer in 2012 (Jonathan is a professor in the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies and the Strategy
and Security Institute; “The rhetoric and reality: radicalization and political discourse” International Political
Science Review November 2012 vol. 33 no. 5 PG: 557)
So why does radicalization matter here? Risk
and security are intimately bound concepts, as the concept of
‘security’ is a subjective construction that reflects the power of the labeller and inherently elevates one
perspective of what constitutes ‘security’ over others (Floyd, 2006). In this instance, the contemporary security
discourse of radicalization represents the translation of a perception of social risk from Islamically
inspired terrorism into the concrete focus of a policy agenda. In the panic after 9/11, and later the 3/11, 7/7, and
other terrible attacks and atrocities, societies constructed Islam and its practitioners as constituting some sort of
unique existential threat to society (Croft, 2012). In post-9/11 western society, Islam is regularly
exceptionalized, held up to constitute a distinct and ‘other’ religious category worthy of extra scrutiny
either because of an alleged relationship to terrorism and violence or because of a wider ‘clash of
civilizations’ thesis which decries its incompatibility with ‘liberal democratic values’ or democracy, or both
(Cesari, 2009; Croft, 2012; Huntington, 1993, 1996; Lewis, 1990, 1993; Phillips, 2006). This has created a political discourse about the
relationship between minute groups of Muslims who believe that violence against non-Muslim states and individuals in a non-Muslim state is a
necessary and rational act to ‘defend faith’, and the impact of the practice of Islam in the West more widely.
This discourse has meant
that the social construction of risk associated with Islamically inspired violence has become intimately
bound up with debates over ‘community cohesion’, that is, what constitutes ‘reasonable’ behaviour
among British Muslim communities. This discourse exceptionalizes ‘Muslim culture’ (objectifying and essentializing
a vast array of identities, theological outlooks, and experiences), which is constructed by political elites
and the media as constituting a threat to ‘traditional British values’, sometimes as a specific function of ‘Muslim
immigration’ (McLaren and Johnson, 2007: 727; Poole, 2002: 22; Werbner, 2000; Zahera and Ehab, 2006: 1063). Taken as whole, the popular
media and political discourses now routinely juxtapose issues more usually associated with integration and immigration with terrorism and
radicalization, such as the wearing of the Hijab, arranged marriage, and the fundamental compatibility of Islamic religious ideology and practice
with liberal democracy. This
is the essence of the ‘securitization’ of Islam, literally labelling Islam as a potential
existential threat to the security of western, and in this case British, society, and subsequently suspending
legal, social, and political norms to justify this exceptional treatment, by the apparatus of the state, of Islamic faith,
belief, and practice and Islamically inspired political engagement (Bicchia and Martinb, 2006; Cesari, 2009; Croft, 2012; Githens-Mazer, 2009;
Laustsen and Waever, 2003; Pasha, 2006).
Cyber-Warfare/Terrorism
Many issues with computers mirror biological viruses- They have begun to be mirrored
as a virus being engineered in a Bio-terrorist lab
(Cavelty 13) Myriam Dunn Cavelty, Head of the New Risk Research Unit at the Center for Security
Studies, “From Cyber-Bombs to Political Fallout: Threat Representations with an Impact in the CyberSecurity Discourse” International Studies Review, Volume 15, Issue 1, pages 105–122, March 2013
2When
home computers and with them viral metaphors became more widespread in the 1980s, they were
vivid and effective ways of explaining to non-technical experts how malware works and were actively
used as such by computer specialists.8 However, a real-world incident and a lot of media attention were
needed to instill in the public mind the imagery of (digital) viruses. The “Morris Worm” was such an incident.
The worm used so many system resources that the attacked computers could no longer function and
large parts of the early Internet went down (Parrika 2005). Thereafter, the image of computers as the epitome
of control, reliability, efficiency, and order was transformed into an image of computers as threatened
by the unexpected, though inevitable danger of rogue, rampant programs. Professional and popular discussions of computer viruses
figured computer systems as self-contained bodies that must be protected from outside threat. These discussions mainly fed on anxieties about
sexual contamination in populations, particularly AIDS, as expressed in statements like “Browsing the Internet without protection is just plain
foolish!,”9 or calling behavioral computer rules “safe hex” practices.
Computer security rhetoric about compromised
networks also employs language suggestive of that used to describe the bodies of nation-states under
military threat (Lupton 1994). Such language describes viruses using images of foreignness, illegality, and
otherness. The biological description of viruses as key “intruder technology” is militarized: A virus
consists of self-replicating code and a “payload.” The former is like the propulsion unit of a missile; the
latter is the warhead it delivers (Helmreich 2000:473). The use of science-fiction terminology as the main source of cyber-threat
representations in the technological domain seems an inevitable consequence of both the closeness of the computer community to the sci-fi
subculture and a lack of alternatives. When the Internet and computer networks began to spread, there were few literary realms other than scifi with its fascination for outer space and alien life forms that could have helped policymakers and the public to learn how to cope with these
novelties. Given
the special place viruses have in history as one of the scourges of mankind, fear from
infectious disease, virtual or real, is deeply ingrained in the human psyche, so that employing viral
metaphors for things we are scared of, especially “known unknowns,” seems to come naturally to us.10 The
parallels between “real” biological viruses (and the discourses about them) and its digital variants are striking.
Not only have biological metaphors directly inspired technical innovation (like genetic algorithms or evolutionary
programming), but biological models have also led creative individuals to new and more disruptive ways of
programming malware (like polymorphic code that mutates). Also, biology occasionally looks to computer viruses to learn about viral and
societal behavior, as in the case of the “Corrupted Blood” incident in “World of Warcraft” (Balicer 2005). This virtual plague, which was due to a
programming error, “mirrored real-world epidemics in numerous ways: It originated in a remote, uninhabited region and was carried by
travelers to urban centers; hosts were both human and animal, such as with avian flu; it was spread by close spatial contact” (Orland 2008).
Most importantly, however, when looking at the evolution of the technical threat representations, AIDS has stopped being the prime health
concern in the Western world—our epidemic fears today
revolve around viruses that jump boundaries, especially
those that overcome species barriers (zoonotics), like Swine Flu or Ebola. In 2010, the computer world had its own
barrier-jumping incident, when a worm known as Stuxnet overcame the barrier between the virtual and
the corporeal worlds by having a “real” (opposed to virtual) effect. Stuxnet was discovered in June 2010 and has been called
“[O]ne of the great technical blockbusters in malware history” (Gross 2011) due to its complexity and sophistication. While it was initially
impossible to know for certain who was behind this piece of code, though many suspected one or several state actors (Farwell and Rohozinski
2011),
it was revealed in mid-2012 that Stuxnet is part of a US and Israeli intelligence operation,
programmed and released to sabotage the Iranian nuclear program. For many observers, Stuxnet as a
“digital first strike” marks the beginning of an age of (unrestrained) cyber-war between states. In the post-Stuxnet
world, viruses are no longer like the common flu—they have killer qualities. Like the virus bred in the bio-
terrorists’ laboratory, the modern computer virus is increasingly conceptualized as a weapon, aimed at a specific target. And where
there is a weapon, there is malicious intent, which is where the second type of threat representation comes in.
Cyber threats are everywhere and can be anyone- this leads to want more protection
from a threat we do not know- this mindset makes Cyber-terrorism grow and become
worse than what it really is
(Cavelty 13) Myriam Dunn Cavelty, Head of the New Risk Research Unit at the Center for Security
Studies, “From Cyber-Bombs to Political Fallout: Threat Representations with an Impact in the CyberSecurity Discourse” International Studies Review, Volume 15, Issue 1, pages 105–122, March 2013
At the heart of the third type of threat representation is the conceptualization of security threats as
problems of (system) vulnerabilities, the degree to which a system is susceptible to, or unable to cope
with, adverse effects. For most parts, this discourse was shaped by actors in the civil defense
environment (Collier and Lakoff 2008). In it, particular systems and the functions they perform are
singled out by the authorities as “critical” (in the sense of vital, crucial, essential) because their
prolonged unavailability harbors the potential for major crisis, both political and social. Nowadays, these
systems are thoroughly cybered: information infrastructures are intermediaries between physical assets
and physical infrastructure, and the material dimension of infrastructures also expanded to encompass
complex assemblages of knowledge. Bridged and interlinked by information pathways, the body of
critical infrastructures is seen as interconnected, interdependent, and highly complex (cf. PCCIP 1997;
Duit and Galaz 2008). At the same time, the image of modern critical infrastructures has become one in
which it becomes futile to try and separate the human from the technological. Technology is not simply
a tool that makes life livable, technologies become constitutive of novel forms of “a complex
subjectivity,” which is characterized by an inseparable ensemble of material and human elements
(Coward 2009:414). From this ecological understanding of subjectivity, a specific image of society
emerges: Society becomes inseparable from critical infrastructure networks. In this way, systemic risks—
understood as risks to critical infrastructure systems—are risks to the entire system of modern life and
being. The main threat representation in this cluster is centered on one’s own vulnerability (stemming
from complexity, interdependency, and dependency). The very connectedness of infrastructures “poses
dangers in terms of the speed and ferocity with which perturbations within them can cascade into major
disasters” (Dillon 2005:3). Advances in information and communication technology have thus
augmented the potential for major disaster (or systemic risk) in critical infrastructures by vastly
increasing the possibility for local risks to mutate into systemic risks. Critical infrastructure protection
practitioners are particularly concerned about two types of system effects: cascades and surprise
effects. Cascade effects are those that produce a chain of events that cross geography, time, and various
types of systems; surprise effects are unexpected events that arise out of interactions between agents
and the negative and positive feedback loops produced through this interaction. Technological
development is depicted as a force out of control, and the combination of technology and complexity
conveys a sense of unmanageability, combining forces with an overall pessimistic perspective
concerning accidents and the limited possibilities of preventing them and coping with them (Perrow
1984). Furthermore, complexity manifests as an epistemological breakdown. Because all of the
interacting parts move between each other at varying speeds, future system behavior becomes hard to
determine and predict. However, traditional risk assessment tools used to evaluate threat to critical
infrastructures are grounded in strict, measurable assessments and predictive modeling (all of which is
based on past behavior and experiences) and linear cause-effect thinking (cf. DHS 2009). They inevitably
fail their purpose when applied to the truly complex and the uncertain. Therefore, the threats to the
system are depicted as 114 From Cyber-Bombs to Political Fallout unpredictable and in essence
unknowable, which adds to the feeling of vulnerability. This focus on vulnerabilities results in two
noteworthy characteristics of the threat representation: First, the protective capacity of space is
obliterated; there is no place that is safe from an attack. Second, the threat becomes quasi-universal,
because it is now everywhere, creating a sense of “imminent but inexact catastrophe, lurking just
beneath the surface of normal, technologised […] everyday life” (Graham 2006:258). Threats or
dangers are no longer perceived as coming exclusively from a certain direction—traditionally, the
outside—but are system-inherent; the threat is a quasi-latent characteristic of the system, which
feeds a permanent sense of vulnerability and inevitable disaster.
We think cyber-attacks can damage us more than Pearl Harbor or 9/11- this mindset
makes this a matter of when, not if
(Cavelty 13) Myriam Dunn Cavelty, Head of the New Risk Research Unit at the Center for Security
Studies, “From Cyber-Bombs to Political Fallout: Threat Representations with an Impact in the CyberSecurity Discourse” International Studies Review, Volume 15, Issue 1, pages 105–122, March 2013
Technological threat representations are mainly used to depict malware as weapons with a real-world
impact. One often-used analogy is the designation of malware as “weapons of mass disruption”
analogous to “weapons of mass destruction” (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff 2006), also in the
form of “eWMDs.” When speaking about the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against
Estonian Web sites in 2007, the speaker of the Estonian parliament said: “When I look at a nuclear
explosion and the explosion that happened in our country in May, I see the same thing” (Poulsen 2007).
Some are also displaying cyberattacks as more dangerous than traditional explosives: “We are at risk.
Increasingly, America depends on computers. […] Tomorrow’s terrorist may be able to do more damage
with a keyboard than with a bomb” (National Academy of Sciences 1991:7). Socio-political threat
representations are also directly linked to how political actors mobilize in the political arena. Many
public statements address the need for less anonymity in cyberspace directly. In addition, since it can
hardly ever be known who is behind an incident if it is discovered unless the perpetrator steps forward
or unless the incident is investigated thoroughly (which usually takes months if not years), the common
practice in government circles is to assume and communicate the worst when break-ins are discovered,
the worst-case scenario usually being that of enemy state actors stealing the most sensitive data. Early
in the debate, hacking incidents that were prominently discussed in the media—such as the intrusions
into high-level computers perpetrated by the Milwaukee-based 414s—were turned into call for action: If
teenagers (the 414s) were able to penetrate computer networks that easily, it was assumed to be highly
likely that better organized entities such as states would be even better equipped to do so. Actual cyberespionage cases (most prominent is the Cuckoo’s Egg incident [Stoll 1989], which involved a German
Hacker and the KGB) provided the proof for this assumption. Nowadays, China is most frequently made
responsible for high-level penetrations of government and business computer, even though or exactly
because these allegations almost exclusively rely on anecdotal and circumstantial evidence (Deibert and
Rohozinski 2009). A very widespread practice linked to the third threat representation is to refer back to
actual cyber-incidents, which are then portrayed as either devastating or, more commonly, as
harbingers of imminent cyber-doom. The most prominent such cases are the DDoS attacks on Estonia in
2007, on Georgia in 2008, Stuxnet, or more recently Flame, which have become signifiers of the nolongerfuture- but-reality of cyber-war. Such attempts to mobilize are also evident in the classical use of
analogies or case-based reasoning. The most famous analogy is that of an “Electronic Pearl Harbor,” first
used in testimony before the US Congress in 1991 (Schwartau 1994:43). The analogy links the cybersecurity debate to a real and successful surprise attack on critical US military infrastructures during
World War II while, at the same time, warning against the idea of US invulnerability due to its
geographical position. The visions conjured up by this reference are of a sudden crippling blow against
critical infrastructures resulting in chaos and destruction. Another prominent example is the “cyber9/11.” Myriam Dunn Cavelty 117 Senator Joseph Lieberman said in a recent floor statement: “I fear that
when it comes to protecting America from cyberattack it is September 10, 2001, and the question is
whether we will confront this existential threat before it happens […] The system is blinking red, yet we
fail to connect the dots—again” (Lieberman 2012). Other prominent figures have said that a cyber-9/11
is a matter of when, not if (Arquilla 2009) or have even predicted that a cyber-attack could surpass the
impacts of 9/11 “by an order of magnitude” (Lawson 2011).
We think about security in a military sense- this mindset justifies the use of military
power and a cold war begins to emerge
(Cavelty 13) Myriam Dunn Cavelty, Head of the New Risk Research Unit at the Center for Security
Studies, “From Cyber-Bombs to Political Fallout: Threat Representations with an Impact in the CyberSecurity Discourse” International Studies Review, Volume 15, Issue 1, pages 105–122, March 2013
The analysis also reveals a certain tension in how different actors represent threats in and through cyberspace that may well translate into
two different principles or logics are conveyed through
threat representations and cyber-security practices. The first logic is linking cyberspace to state power,
control, and order. The more the discourse is about (re-)establishing control and borders, the more it is about physical
infrastructures that can be subjected to the principles of territoriality and sovereignty. The second is
inspired by organic response, the image of networks and interconnectedness, and more closely connected to
aspirations for self-heal- ing, self-organization, and decentralization. Such different representations do
not constitute a problem per se; but these two do not co-exist very well: If cyberspace is conceptualized
as an auto-generating immune force, then the role of the state is that of a gardener and facilitator. If
cyberspace is conceptualized as a problematic unruly place that needs to be tamed at all cost, then this
inevitably leads to calls for strong(er) interference into the global cyber-system, including the topology of
the Internet.12 Change in threat representations in the last few years shows a steady progression toward
the second logic at the expense of the first. The frequent use of military language to speak about cybermatters suggests that cyber-security can and should be managed as a military issue by military actors.
The stronger the link between cyberspace and a threat of strategic dimensions becomes, the more
natural it seems that the keeper of the peace in cyberspace should be the military. How easily the
digital domain has been subjected to Cold War rhetoric and practices in recent years is both fascinating and
alarming. Ultimately, it is a matter of choice, or at least a matter of (complicated) political processes that has produced this particular
outcome. Awareness of the power of threat representation and the preferences that come with them can
help to understand that it is neither natural nor inevitable that cyber-security should be presented in
terms of power-struggles, war-fighting, and military action, and that there are always different, and
sometimes better options.
tensions on the political/response level. I would argue that
Impact
Security Impacts
Exceptionalist Violence
Security rhetoric and the war on terror posit the United States as the exceptional actor
in IR-this policy is counterproductive as it increases insecurity and fear while justifying
endless US military action at home and abroad
Noorani in 2k5 (Yaseen, Assistant Professor in Near Eastern Studies at the University of Arizona, CR: The
New Centennial Review, 5.1, project muse)
It is important to recognize that the
rhetoric of security with its war on terrorism is not a program for action, but
a discourse that justifies actions. The United States is not bound to take any specific action implied by its rhetoric. But this
rhetoric gives the United States the prerogative to take whatever actions it decides upon for whatever
purpose as long as these actions come within the rhetoric's purview. Judged by its own standards, the rhetoric of
security is counterproductive. It increases fear while claiming that the goal is to eliminate fear. It
increases insecurity by pronouncing ever broader areas of life to be in need of security. It increases
political antagonism by justifying U.S. interests in a language of universalism. It increases enmity toward
the United States by according the United States a special status over and above all other nations. The
war against terror itself is a notional war that has no existence except as an umbrella term for various
military and police actions. According to a report published by the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army, "the global war on
terrorism as currently defined and waged is dangerously indiscriminate and ambitious" (Record 2003, 41). This assessment assumes that the
actions comprehended under the rubric of the "war on terrorism" are designed to achieve a coherent military objective. The
impossible
"absolute security," feared by the report's author to be the "hopeless quest" of current policy (46), may be useless as a
strategic objective, but it is eminently effective in organizing a rhetoric designed to justify an openended series of hegemonic actions.
The rhetoric of security, then, provides the moral framework for U.S. political hegemony through its
grounding in the idea of national agency and in the absolute opposition between the state of civility and
the state of [End Page 37] war. Designating the United States as the embodiment of the world order's underlying principle and the
guarantor of the world order's existence, this rhetoric places both the United States and terrorism outside the
normative relations that should inhere within the world order as a whole. The United States is the supreme agent of
the world's war against war; other nations must simply choose sides. As long as war threatens to dissolve the peaceful
order of nations, these nations must submit to the politics of "the one, instead of the many." They must accept the
United States as "something godlike," in that in questions of its own security—which are questions of the world's security—they can have no
authority to influence or oppose its actions. These
questions can be decided by the United States alone. Other
nations must, for the foreseeable future, suspend their agency when it comes to their existence. Therefore, the
rhetoric of security allows the United States to totalize world politics within itself in a manner that
extends from the relations among states down to the inner moral struggle experienced by every human
being.
External Impacts
(Neo)Liberalism
Neoliberalism takes away those that are ontologically considered incapacitated
Agathangelou in 2010 (Anna, Associate Professor at York University, “Bodies of Desire, Terror and
the War in Eurasia: Impolite Disruptions of (Neo) Liberal Internationalism, Neoconservatism and the
‘New’ Imperium”, Millennium Journal of International Studies)
While Foucault acknowledges he is analysing European neoliberalism, we are forced to consider the
relationship that ‘impels ... a potential more of life to come’.55 What happens to those environments,
those bodies, those relations in the world56 deemed unliveable and thus requiring the preemption of
accidents by those who lead this kind of order and their insurgent activities? What kind of diegetic
labour (i.e. including that of theorists like Foucault) is required by these powers to bracket out those
already considered ontologically incapacitated and killed in the hopes of telling and/or critiquing a tale
of benefit and life-productivity within a newly emerging environment? This environment is characterised
by ‘an indefinite field of immanence which, on the one hand, links him, in the form of d ependence, to a
series of accidents, and, on the other, links him, in the form of production of the advantage of others.
The convergence of interests thus doubles and covers the indefinite diversity of accidents.’57 This
insistence, of course, on the indefinite features of the situation of homo oeconomicus, found in an
environment that generates accidents for him, stems from ‘the specifically individual calculation that he
makes; they give it consistency, effect, insert it in reality, and connect it in the best possible way to the
rest of the world’.58 This finding is intelligible within the contemporary moment, especially under
neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism takes annihilates the ‘white but not quite’ ecologies and bodies
Agathangelou in 2010 (Anna, Associate Professor at York University, “Bodies of Desire, Terror and
the War in Eurasia: Impolite Disruptions of (Neo) Liberal Internationalism, Neoconservatism and the
‘New’ Imperium”, Millennium Journal of International Studies)
As implied by the Project for the New American Century, the state can act as the major pre-emption site
for the market logic not only by supporting it but also by promoting a mode of citizenship that focuses
on the ‘timeless and universal values of freedom and just peace’. Nowhere do we read that conducting
life in this manner requires that some people suffer appropriation, theft and death. Such liberal
internationalism seeks to save itself ideologically by securing profits in the hands of those who set up
capital by all kinds of ‘surges’, even if this means the daily piling up of many Iraqi bodies. The cartoon in Figure 1
shows the stakes for bracketing tyranny. However, even if the ‘dead’ are overreacting to the surges (despite the claims
that they are positive), such affects cannot be strong enough to change the structural relation between
the gatekeepers/the living and the dead, the accumulated fungible objects and those humans whom
the liberal internationalists reconstruct as neoliberal subjects to secure this order. According to
Foucault, the formation of neoliberal subjects does not happen automatically but may occur when the
privatisation of public security and the personalisation of collective goods are widely implemented. The
reconstruction of the new neoliberal subject required more than biopolitics when the US and certain European states turned against
some of the populations they governed, populations that ruptured their attempts to reconstruct a necro-economico-political order whose
foundations depended
not merely on ‘ideological sustenance’135 but on the o ntological elimination of
‘white but not quite’ corporealities. Experiences worldwide with projects of liberal internationalism have
been unsatisfactory. Many projects are inhumane and/or illegal, featuring an antagonistic polemos
foundationally central in organising ‘chaos’ into ‘peace’ to rid us of anarchy and life. Based on market rules, this
polemos is unleashed on ecologies, lands, bodies and existential visions embodying ethico- political claims for global justice through their
disruption of brutal practices. Liberal
internationalism requires those being slaughtered to pretend to be part of
the living. It seems that the New Way Forward, the (un)making and (re)making of (neo)liberal rule of the
market, requires subjects to forget what is done to them, their ecologies, their bodies; this is a necessary
condition to participate in a soteriological economy of moribundity. But is it viable to insist on a politics predicated on
this daily practice of death, or on the fears of those calling for an ideological rescuing of liberal internationalism?
Neoliberalism shift wrenches life and creates annihilation of those deemed dead
Agathangelou in 2010 (Anna, Associate Professor at York University, “Bodies of Desire, Terror and
the War in Eurasia: Impolite Disruptions of (Neo) Liberal Internationalism, Neoconservatism and the
‘New’ Imperium”, Millennium Journal of International Studies)
The shift is co-substantial with what is now neoliberal capitalism and depends on a particular vision of
economic liberty. It ‘resonates strongly with that described by Foucault as “anarcho-liberalism”, a mode
of governmentality based on a radically market-based or transactional ontology of human life’.15 This shift
was understood and implemented by the White House planners and US policy elites who introduced sweeping institutional reforms in Iraq
among forces that hitherto impeded the development of market forces, thereby ‘facilitating the integration of the region into a global society of
exchange, entrepreneurialism, and peace’.16 The
shift required more than just facilitation: it needed pre-e mptive
power to force time to alter globality’s and life’s conditions of emergence in order to ‘bring ... life back’,
as Bush says in his Katrina speech. Powers that return to ‘life’s unlivable conditions of emergence’ to
bring life back have intensified.17 Neoconservatism pre-emptively intervenes to wrench life, not
bringing it back to normal but altering its conditions of emergence through war. The debates among American
proponents of the use of pre-emptive power come to bear on the US decision to use force and redirect the conditions of life’s emergence in
Iraq, thus embodying this shift in the nature of power. Neoconservatism
is a new process, a rush to colonise,
monopolise and threaten actualisation everywhere and at all times of the conditions of the emergence
of life crisis. Whoever does not activate this imperative dies. However, as I argue here, Foucault’s work requires more
than mere supplementation, as such a process may cloud our understanding that this neoliberal shift requires more than a series of conflicts.
Rather,
it is a force grid, where positions of contingent violence are segregated from positions of
gratuitous violence. Positions of contingent violence are segregated from positions of ontological
incapacity; there are those (flesh and matter that are never subjects) who have no immunity from
genocide, captivity and fungibility (i.e. gratuitous violence) in world politics. Through critical engagement
with this thought, I construct a political vision based not on relations of existential incapacitation and
extermination, but on relations that recognise, acknowledge and face the forces that create a circular
sovereign ontology of penetration and ownership (i.e. property relations) and ultimately the murdering
of those bodies deemed already dead.19
Alternative
Framing
Ontology first
Ontology must be evaluated first – continuous violent choice cycles happen if not
Burke 07, Anthony Burke (Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations in the University
of New South Wales), 2007, “Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and Reason”,
https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v010/10.2burke.html
What I am trying to describe in this essay is a complex relation between, and interweaving of, epistemology and ontology. But it is not my view
that these are distinct modes of knowledge or levels of truth, because in
the social field named by security, statecraft and
violence they are made to blur together, continually referring back on each other, like charges darting between
electrodes. Rather they are related systems of knowledge with particular systemic roles and intensities of claim about truth, political being and
political necessity. Positivistic or scientific claims to epistemological truth supply an air of predictability and reliability to policy and political
action, which in turn support larger ontological claims to national being and purpose, drawing them into a common horizon of certainty that is
one of the central features of past-Cartesian modernity. Here it may be useful to see ontology as a more totalising and metaphysical set of
claims about truth, and epistemology as more pragmatic and instrumental; but
while a distinction between epistemology
(knowledge as technique) and ontology (knowledge as being) has analytical value, it tends to break down in action.
The epistemology of violence I describe here (strategic science and foreign policy doctrine) claims positivistic clarity
about techniques of military and geopolitical action which use force and coercion to achieve a desired end, an end that is
supplied by the ontological claim to national existence, security, or order. However in practice,
technique quickly passes into ontology. This it does in two ways. First, instrumental violence is married
to an ontology of insecure national existence which itself admits no questioning. The nation and its identity
are known and essential, prior to any conflict, and the resort to violence becomes an equally essential predicate of
its perpetuation. In this way knowledge-as-strategy claims, in a positivistic fashion, to achieve a calculability of effects (power) for an
ultimate purpose (securing being) that it must always assume. Second, strategy as a technique not merely becomes an
instrument of state power but ontologises itself in a technological image of 'man' as a maker and user of
things, including other humans, which have no essence or integrity outside their value as objects. In
Heidegger's terms, technology becomes being; epistemology immediately becomes technique,
immediately being. This combination could be seen in the aftermath of the 2006 Lebanon war, whose
obvious strategic failure for Israelis generated fierce attacks on the army and political leadership and forced
the resignation of the IDF chief of staff. Yet in its wake neither ontology was rethought. Consider how a reserve soldier, while
on brigade-sized manoeuvres in the Golan Heights in early 2007, was quoted as saying: 'we are ready for the next war'. Uri Avnery quoted
Israeli commentators explaining the rationale for such a war as being to 'eradicate the shame and restore to the army the "deterrent power"
that was lost on the battlefields of that unfortunate war'. In 'Israeli public discourse', he remarked, 'the next war is seen as a natural
The danger obviously raised here is that these dual ontologies of war
link being, means, events and decisions into a single, unbroken chain whose very process of construction
cannot be examined. As is clear in the work of Carl Schmitt, being implies action, the action that is war. This chain is also obviously at
phenomenon, like tomorrow's sunrise.' 22
work in the U.S. neoconservative doctrine that argues, as Bush did in his 2002 West Point speech, that 'the only path to safety is the path of
action', which begs the question of whether strategic practice and theory can be detached from strong ontologies of the insecure nationstate.23 This is the direction taken by much realist analysis critical of Israel and the Bush administration's 'war on terror'.24 Reframing such
concerns in Foucauldian terms, we could argue that obsessive ontological commitments have led to especially disturbing 'problematizations' of
truth.25 However such rationalist critiques rely on a one-sided interpretation of Clausewitz that seeks to disentangle strategic from existential
reason, and to open up choice in that way. However without interrogating
more deeply how they form a conceptual
harmony in Clausewitz's thought -- and thus in our dominant understandings of politics and war -tragically violent 'choices' will continue to be made.
Decision-Making
Securitizing calculus causes a state of exception in which courts rule in favor of
preventing false threats at the expense of the constitution
Wilke 5 (Christiane, Associate Professor, Legal Studies, Carleton University, “Terrorism Cases, Enemy
Combatants, and Political Justice in U.S. Courts,” POLITICS & SOCIETY, Vol. 33 No. 4, December 2005
637-669 http://www.sagepub.com/martin3study/articles/Wilke.pdf)
Courts legitimize and authorize actions of the other, “political,” branches. They can fulfill this task
because they operate according to preestablished rules and maintain their independence from the
executive and the legislative. The courts’ independence and the legality of the proceedings thus give the court
decisions their public legitimacy.70 And because the courts are relatively well insulated against the claims of political power, they
can also decide against the current power holders. The legal and political ramifications of a politically contentious case can be “almost as
uncertain as the outcome of an election campaign.”71 In order to reduce this uncertainty, those
in positions of political power
sometimes try to take shortcuts when they insist that they cannot afford to lose the case. The only way to
secure a favorable outcome, of course, is by disregarding some of the boundaries set by the separation of
powers. The price to be paid for this transgression will be a lower political surplus value of the court
decision. Court decisions that seemed predetermined will not legitimize government action or convince
people to change their views on an issue.72 Governments face the dilemma of either being sure to win a
case or being certain that the decision with an uncertain outcome will command public
legitimacy. Constitutions order governments to choose the second alternative, but governments sometimes find seemingly
compelling reasons for why they cannot lose a certain case even at the price of violating ordinary
separation of powers rules. In these cases, it is justified to speak of political justice. In the post-9/11 cases specifically,
the violation of the separation of powers was linked to a prior vilification of the defendants or petitioners. The asserted
dangerousness of a defendant or detainee is one of the most convincing arguments to this effect.
Indeed, the potential damage that could be inflicted by someone who was let free because of lack
of evidence or because he was “only planning” to commit terrorist acts would be immense. And in times
of public fear of further terrorist attacks, even a minimal risk of another attack committed by one of
the designated “enemy combatants” can suffice to legitimize the detention policy in the eyes of a
wary public. Ruth Wedgwood, an advisor to the government, states that traditionally, the criminal justice system is based on the
assumption that cases might be lost and criminals might wrongly be released. It might happen that a rapist goes free and assaults more women.
Yet the calculus is different, Wedgwood implores the readers, if you are dealing with persons who might kill 100,000 people if they are not
detained.73 Such risk assessments, whether exaggerated or not, seem to introduce the “preventive strike” doctrine into criminal and
administrative law. How would you know that a defendant would be “going to do something to cause 100,000 casualties,” and how justified
could these beliefs be if judge and jury dismiss the evidence? From this perspective, counterterrorism becomes an epistemological problem. In
the end, concurrence with
presidential threat assessments might be rooted in the simple fear of incurring
a small risk of a large-scale attack by questioning executive authority.
Discourse first
Our impacts come first – discourse and performativity implicate the material world, no
policy can escape its constitution through discourse
Bialasiewicz et al 2007, Luiza, Department of Geography, Royal Holloway University of London, United
Kingdom, “Performing security: The imaginative geographies of current US strategy,” Political
Geography 26, 405-422
However, we wish to reposition the terms of the debate by arguing that in the discursive production of imaginative geographies it is
performativity rather than construction which is the better theoretical assumption. Discourse refers
to a specific series of
representations and practices through which meanings are produced, identities constituted, social
relations established, and political and ethical outcomes made more or less possible. Those employing the
concept are often said to be claiming that ‘everything is language’, that ‘there is no reality’, and because of their linguistic idealism, they
are unable to take a political position and defend an ethical stance. These objections demonstrate how understandings
of
discourse are bedevilled by the view that interpretation involves only language in contrast to the
external, the real, and the material. These dichotomies of idealism/materialism and realism/idealism
remain powerful conceptions of understanding the world. In practice, however, a concern with discourse
does not involve a denial of the world’s existence or the significance of materiality . This is well
articulated by Laclau and Mouffe (1985: 108): ‘‘the fact that every object is constituted as an object of discourse has nothing to do with
whether there is a world external to thought, or with the realism/ idealism opposition. What
is denied is not that objects
exist externally to thought, but the rather different assertion that they could constitute
themselves as objects outside of any discursive condition of emergence.’’ This means that while
nothing exists outside of discourse, there are important distinctions between linguistic and nonlinguistic phenomena. There are also modes of representation which are ideational though strictly non-linguistic, such as the
aesthetic and pictorial. It is just that there is no way of comprehending non-linguistic and extradiscursive
phenomena except through discursive practices. Understanding discourse as involving both the ideal and the material,
the linguistic and the non-linguistic, means that discourses are performative. Performative means that discourses constitute
the objects of which they speak. For example, states are made possible by a wide range of discursive
practices that include immigration policies, military deployments and strategies, cultural debates about normal social behaviour,
political speeches and economic investments. The meanings, identities, social relations and political assemblages
that are enacted in these performances combine the ideal and the material. They are either made or
represented in the name of a particular state but that state does not pre-exist those performances. As a consequence, appreciating
that discourses are performative moves us away from a reliance on the idea of (social) construction
towards materialization, whereby discourse ‘‘stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary , fixity
and surface’’ (Butler, 1993: 9, 12). Discourse is thus not something that subjects use in order to describe objects; it is that which
constitutes both subjects and objects.
Alternative Cards
Alt – Reject all Surveillance
The Surveillance state cannot be dismantled without criticism of both the explicit
practices of excluding members of society and the implicit forms of surveillance that
create ideal citizens
Deukmedjian in 2013(John Edward, Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminology,
University of Windsor, “Making Sense of Neoliberal Securitization in Urban Policing and Surveillance,”
CRS/RCS, 50.1)
Since Foucault’s (1995) Discipline and Punish, Bentham’s (1995) Panopticon has
served as an analytical marker when
contextualizing surveillance (Boyne 2000). But this has introduced the problem of resisting the temptation
to reduce all effects of surveillance ipso-facto as disciplinary since this leads to the following analytical incoherency: By
conflating all forms of surveillance with discipline, surveillance within an armature of security, which
historically and presently remains just as prevalent in power’s exercise, necessarily becomes a secondary
and dependent analytical object (i.e., if apparatuses of surveillance are by nature disciplinary, and surveillance is the cornerstone of
security, then apparatuses of security are disciplinary). To avoid this, I attempt to build upon Foucault’s treatment of
discipline and security as processes with distinctive functions and effects, and as such, I distinguish disciplinary
surveillance from security surveillance. How did Foucault distinguish the functions of security and discipline? Foucault (2007) suggested that
discipline functions centripetally: Discipline allows nothing to escape. Not only does it not allow things to run their
course, its principle is that things, the smallest things, must not be abandoned to themselves. The smallest infraction of discipline must be taken
up with all the more care for it being small [ . . . ] The basic function of discipline is to prevent everything, even and above all the detail. (Pp. 44–
45) Apparatuses
of discipline function through practices of prevention, correction, and enforcement and
hence disciplinary surveillance functions to identify breaches of codes, incorrect conduct, lapses in selfcontrol, and so on. Alternatively, apparatuses of security function in a centrifugal manner. “The function of
security,” Foucault (2007) told us, is to rely on details that are not valued as good or evil in themselves, that are
taken to be necessary, inevitable processes, as natural processes in the broad sense, and it relies on these
details, which are what they are, but which are not considered to be pertinent in themselves, in order to obtain something that is considered to
be pertinent in itself because situated [sic.] at the level of the population. (P. 45) Apparatuses
of security “let things happen,”
and so by extension function through thresholds of tolerance. Security surveillance therefore aims to
measure the distance and/or frequency of objects and events in order to identify that which is beyond
some tolerated threshold. When the distance and/or frequency of objects and events is considered to be intolerable, apparatuses
of security function, among other ways, through practices of preparedness, preemption, disruption,
resilience, containment, displacement, or elimination (see, e.g., Lentzos and Rose 2009). In short, we could say that
disciplinary surveillance functions through a grid of peacekeeping, order maintenance, order reproduction, and so on, whereas security
surveillance functions through a grid of war and defense. In distinguishing security and discipline in this manner, it
therefore becomes possible to examine their relation to both sovereignty and governmentality. In the pages to follow we will find that there is
little per se novel about the present assemblage of surveillance: it is neither more nor less disciplinary; and though a shorter temporal view
suggests intense securitization today, securitization becomes somewhat questionable as one merely begins to delve into the breadths of time
and place. Moreover, it is not the case that present-day securitization is some reassertion, reemphasis, or rebirth of an antiquated sovereign
rule. In truth, what we see is some measure of continuity. The
difference today is that disciplinary and security
surveillance functions not just as the outcome of sovereign permission, dictate, or rule. Surveillance has
become fully engrained within ever-shifting governmentalities. Foucault (2007) has told us that we should not see things: . . . as the
replacement of a society of sovereignty by a society of discipline, and of a society of discipline by a society, say, of government. In
fact we
have a triangle: sovereignty, discipline, and governmental management, which has population as its
main target and apparatuses of security as its essential mechanism. (Pp. 107–108) Nevertheless, since apparatuses of
civil security and civil discipline have historically functioned in tandem, rather than conceptualizing a triangle of sovereignty, discipline and
government circumscribed by apparatuses of security (as Dean 1999 suggests), we might consider the following reconfiguration:
sovereignty-government’s essential mechanisms are both apparatuses of security and discipline. The
question is, what (if any) are some of the ways in which apparatuses of disciplinary and security surveillance transform and realign within an
ever-shifting sovereignty government armature? It is to this question that I now turn.
Alt – Reject Neolib
Surveillance has the dual function of disciplining society into free-market ideologies
and securing the body politic from threats to the social order – criticism of surveillance
must begin with a recognition of this dual function.
Deukmedjian in 2013(John Edward, Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminology,
University of Windsor, “Making Sense of Neoliberal Securitization in Urban Policing and Surveillance,”
CRS/RCS, 50.1)
Securitization is enmeshed with neoliberalization and comes into focus through a retracting Keynesian rationality. A
mentality of disequilibrium creates the conditions for the deemphasis of disciplinary-surveillance
practices in preference to practices of security surveillance. Indeed, consider neoliberalism’s antithesis: within the highly
expansive regulatory and socialistic politics of communism what do we find? Following the 1917 October Revolution one of the first decrees of
the Council of People’s Commissars called for the establishment of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution, Sabotage and Speculation, which formed the basis of the longstanding KGB of the Soviet Union (Conquest 1968). The Soviets quickly
established a highly centralized and networked security-surveillance apparatus to identify, contain through the use of the Gulag, or otherwise
eliminate threats to the revolution. At the same time centralized apparatuses of disciplinary surveillance were never prioritized by the Soviet
government since the communal system was expected to ideally be self-disciplinary (Shearer 2009). Neoliberalization fundamentally entails
market and financial securitization. At the same time, surveillance
apparatuses for the reproduction of disciplined
populaces present roadblocks to free market enterprise. A Beckerian entrepreneur, for example, takes risks rather than
rationally calculates or structurally constitutes equilibrium—and centrifugal security-surveillance facilitates an ever-widening circuit of risk
taking (Becker 1976; Foucault 2008). We see both trends in policing and surveillance from about the 1970s. Among the most significant events
include Kelling et al.’s (1974) report on the Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment. Funded by the Police Foundation, Kelling’s
teammonitored the effects of both saturated random patrol and no patrol over a period of one year. Kelling found that motorized patrol had no
statistically significant effect on either fear of crime or crime rates. Kelling et al.’s findings are not surprising—though perhaps because of the
benefit of hindsight. The study applied centrifugal experimental design—a scientific design—to measure the efficacy of a centripetal disciplinary
practice. Few caught on, and Kelling became highly influential in the years and decades to come, armed with a study that undermined not only
the practice of patrol, but also its rational governance through crime statistics and reforms in its efficiency. In the decade that followed there
was an onslaught of academic criticism over various aspects of disciplinary policing. Spelman and Brown’s (1981) study, for example, pointed
out that rapid response to calls by police only led to a small (3 percent) proportion of arrests in serious cases; Shearing (1984) noted that only a
very small proportion of calls were in fact about reporting crime; and Ericson (1982) found that the vast majority of police work focused on
maintaining public order through discipline (rather than fighting crime). Until
1993, both government and academics
advocated the adoption of community policing as the solution to many of these problematizations (see,
e.g., Normandeau and Leighton 1990). Whether through programs like Neighbourhood Watch, Community Consultative Groups, Family Group
Conferencing, community policing held out the promise for accomplishing the following dual ends: first, community policing promised to
improve police-public relations and information and intelligence flows from the public for guiding resource deployments and facilitating
investigations; second, community policing promised to reduce the financial costs of monitoring and disciplining the population because
communities would now be mobilized and empowered to watch and discipline their own. Ultimately, what
separated policecommunity programs in the 1950s from the community policing of the 1980s and 1990s was that the
disciplining of “the social” was no longer considered to be a social good, but rather an activity driven by
market competition and a requirement to download costs. In this sense, O’Malley and Palmer (1996) were quite accurate
with their assessment: community policing represents a fundamental realignment of the police provision in post-Keynesian or neoliberal
governance away from centralized disciplinary surveillance. What
many understandably did not realize at that time (given
the prevailing governmental discourses surrounding community governance) was that there was a parallel emphasis on
instituting security surveillance. The Audit Commission (1993) was perhaps among the first to advocate cost-effectiveness through
an “intelligence-led” approach. The Audit Commission advocated the identification and targeting of prolific
offenders through the cultivation and use of informant assets. In essence it advocated for practices of
security surveillance. Unlike the nineteenth century where the development of security surveillance was overshadowed by a primary
focus on disciplinary surveillance, the Audit Commission called for security surveillance to become a primary focus of police. Still, this meant
that during the 1990s there was, depending on place and time, the dual emphasis: on
the one hand for police to primarily
focus on community policing and on the other to focus on intelligence-led policing. This dual emphasis remains
to this day (see Maguire and John 2006) and not only in policing but governance more broadly (i.e., downloading discipline/uploading security).
Among the more significant trends that have caught the attention of scholars is the development and
expanse of interoperable security-surveillance networks that interconnect variousmilitary and civil
governmental agencies and private providers within a pluralizing market (Deukmedjian and Cradock 2009; Dupont
2004; Lippert and O’Connor 2006). Networks are not new. But it seems that we are witnessing greater horizontal (rather
than hierarchically funneled) interagency and intraagency flows and practices. That said, if we were to apply
Foucault’s concepts of centripetal and centrifugal function, we can easily see that hierarchical networks are disciplinary-surveillance
assemblages—the
bottom-up flows of knowledge and expertise increasingly focus until they reach some
point, and it is that focal point from which action is directed back downward to the bottom. A disciplinary
organization is thus susceptible to “decapitation.” Horizontal networks are expansive, boundless, and centrifugal and as such they afford and
engender security. A horizontal network can continue to function even if some of its “nodes” regularly fail, provided redundancy is sufficiently
diffuse. Of course, and we have seen this with the financial crisis of 2008 and are seeing it currently in Europe, if a network is insufficiently
diffuse and instead contains a small number of critical nodes, then the network is vulnerable to their failure. Still, what is lacking is a better
understanding of the interactions between security and disciplinary surveillance within neoliberal deregulation and desocialization. If nodes are
market enterprises functioning within an ever more detailed and ever expansive competitive space—one that requires tuning and the
identification of someminimum degree of regulation determined by market trends, then nodes increasingly require central arbitration in the
determination of their tolerances and intolerances (cf. Foucault 2008).
Tolerance is increasingly situated in the continuum
of private, local, and individual auspices of self-discipline and surveillance, while intolerance is situated
in the continuum of security surveillance and force. The balancing of tolerance and intolerance across this fluid network12
rather than being driven by some equilibrium found in nature is driven by the disequilibrium engendered by neoliberal market politics. Given its
centrifugal logic, neoliberalism promotes more risk taking and greater flows of capital and hence promotes more security surveillance on risk
taking to identify, disrupt, preempt, contain, prepare for, and increase resiliency toward activity that is seen to potentially cause network
instability or failure. We can thus begin to appreciate both the present shedding of disciplinary-surveillance provisions and the securitization of
neoliberal economies. If sovereign competition now primarily takes place through a politics of free market capital growth and deregulation,
then the protection, preparedness, and resiliency, indeed the insurance (Ericson, Barry, and Doyle 2000) of sovereign markets against
problematic risks becomes a paramount function of governance. Neoliberalization
animates both the securitization of free
markets and the devolution of market discipline through such strategies. Neoliberalism is not terminal:
it functions continuously to deregulate, to desocialize, and to promote greater and diverse risk taking
and this must be achieved through ever-expansive apparatuses of security surveillance to address the
multiform risks that threaten markets. Seen in this light, there are an endless array of risks that require governmental planning,
preparation, and monitoring. Some extreme examples range from the RCMP Integrated Security Unit’s preparation against terrorists potentially
using artificial snow makingmachines to disperse highly radiological material at the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games (Matas 2009), to a 2007
USDA Factsheet that considers food contamination risks in the event of “extraterrestrial hostile action” (Food Safety and Inspection Service
2007).
Alt – Internal Resistance
Surveillance is intricately tied to the power of the law – curtailing its use only reforms
the contours of a violence system We must engage in resistance through the
antagonisms that surveillance produces.
Bogard in 2006(William, Professor of Sociology at Whitman College, “Surveillance assemblages and
lines of flight,” in Theorizing Surveillance, p 98-101)
It has never been more imperative than today to think about resistance to global, networked
surveillance. It is especially important to focus on modes of resistance that are immanent to how the
system organizes itself, not just laws or political reforms, such as better privacy or freedom of
information protections. Theories of surveillance society after Foucault have generally framed surveillance as a power/knowledge
relation, not simply a juridical or legal matter (Bogard 1996; Davis 1998; Elmer 2003; Foucault 1977; Haggerty and Ericson 2000; Koskela 2000;
Lianos 2003; Lyon 1994, 2001, 2002, 2004; Mathiesen 1997; Poster 1990; Virilio 1994, 2000). Still, when it comes to resistance,
this is how
the problem is usually posed, as if the power of the law were not itself already totally invested in
surveillance, or as if political institutions that are themselves fully operationalized by surveillance could
somehow effectively regulate it. In fact, surveillance, as a network of power and knowledge relations,
always generates resistance. This is only to restate Foucault’s wellknown claim that power requires resistance as a force immanent to
its action. We need to better understand how such counter-forces are built into the surveillance
assemblage itself, how surveillance (normally a means of identification, normalization, deterrence, exclusion, etc.) can
become a force against itself (of multiplication, deviation, seduction, inclusion). To surveil something essentially
means to watch over or guard it. Guardianship is not a simple constraint, but an art of control that makes it safe for something to
move freely. You keep a close eye on your child playing, or someone deflects a danger close to you before you even sense it. A computer
silently screens airline passengers for security risks when they purchase their tickets, weeks before they travel, assuring a free, unrestricted
flow of passengers at boarding. Are any of these practices more freeing than any other? Consider the surveillance machine assembled by the
photographer Sophie Calle, who discreetly from behind, in secret, takes pictures of a man who is a virtual stranger to her. She follows him for
days on end, travels behind him, always watches him from a distance, catches images of his comings and goings and meanderings, until finally
one day he notices her watching him and she is forced to abandon her project. What kind of surveillance is this? In his commentary on her
work, Baudrillard says there is nothing to suggest Sophie has an interest in controlling this man or verifying his story (Calle and Baudrillard
1983). There is no ‘object’ of surveillance in the traditional sense, only a complex assemblage consisting of Calle, her photographic and notetaking equipment, the man, her spontaneous desire to follow and observe and record him, all this together producing a certain affective quality
or intensity that Baudrillard identifies with seduction, not control (cf. Baudrillard 1990; Calle and Baudrillard 1983: 76). Although she takes
secret pictures of him, Calle does not seek to expose her subject to anyone, to find out who he is; and while he is under surveillance, the man
does not develop the kind of self-judgemental subjectivity we associate with panoptic surveillance. Sophie does not desire to influence or
predict this man’s behaviour, to know him in any way; in fact, the whole point of her ‘experiment’ in watching him is to lose control of the
whole situation, to open everything, the whole assemblage, including herself, up to luck. The man, for his part, is not placed under any
normalizing or ‘individualizing’ gaze, but watched from behind by a machine that paradoxically ‘cares’ for him, and in so doing ultimately
seduces him. For Baudrillard, to be seduced is to lose one’s identity, to have the responsibility of being one’s self suddenly lifted, and he notes
that Calle herself is seduced, loses herself, no less than the man in whose footsteps she blindly follows. The surveillance assemblage here, far
from an apparatus of the law or a means of subjectification, is rather in this case a kind of gift or ‘gift-assemblage’, one that functions ‘to watch
over another’s life without him knowing about it’, and Calle’s photographic project symbolizes a way of cancelling, through a kind of ‘blind’
surveillance or guardianship, the debt society makes us owe to our own existence (Calle and Baudrillard 1983: 80–1). It is, from her position as a
photographer and an artist, a gift of relieving this man of the reality and truth of who he must be in this world – now, as he enters unwittingly
into the assemblage, he is transformed into someone else, someone freer than before. Like all surveillors, Calle certainly desires to ‘extract’ an
identity from this man, but not in the sense of wanting to identify him. She does not wish to verify or determine who he is. Just the opposite: in
following him she must preserve his (and her own) anonymity, within and through the very assemblage that tracks him and organizes her
watching. Here is a kind of ‘safety’ in the machine, an immanent aesthetic and ethical function of the assemblage. State
and corporate
surveillance today too, of course, is routinely couched in the language of ‘safety’, but this is the safety
provided by police technologies of identification and verification, where everything about you and what
distinguishes you from others is known. This is not at all the kind of safety – or freedom – offered by Calle’s assemblage. What
she offers instead is a kind of freedom from identification, a line of flight that takes the form of ‘caring for the other’s image’ that at the same
time leaves him unmarked, a line that is immanent to the assemblage and how it functions from the start.1 Calle understands that
surveillance must follow something and sustain its resistance, unlike the state, which always tries to lead
with surveillance and eliminate resistance in advance. In other words, Calle knows that surveillance must connect to an
‘outside’ that is immanent to the assemblage, a space of necessary indeterminacy within the system of control itself that she seeks to nurture,
not stamp out.
Indeterminacy and resistance at first seem inconsistent with surveillance, but they really
constitute its core. This is true whether we are talking about panopticons or databases. In the panopticon, power resists
the decoding – that is, the visibility – it imposes on everything else; it works by indetermination, hiding
its always possible absence behind the walls of a central guard tower. With databases, firewalls,
passwords and encryption become our new ‘guard towers’, and power still resists the decoding it
imposes on everything else, only this time, it resists not its own visibility, but its own conversion to
information (informationalization). The point is that surveillance, like all power, flees the very thing it produces, flees determination. Unlike
state surveillance, however, which reserves freedom to itself, Calle’s surveillance has no firewalls or codes to break, no walls to hide behind.
She practises surveillance in a way totally consistent with what it demands, that is, a free, open and nondetermined flow of information. Lyon
notes that surveillance has a dual function, to both constrain and enable social relations (in information
societies, electronic surveillance is a means of control that also generates the ‘token’ trust necessary for social transactions) (Lyon 1994; Lyon
2001: 27). We can also understand surveillance in terms of capture and flight. Capture
involves fixing or arresting a flow –
surveillance as a mode of territorialization, determination, verification and identification, normalization,
and so on. Surveillance as flight, on the other hand, refers to its role in releasing a flow – escape, deterritorialization, indetermination and
resistance. Flight and capture are not opposed terms, however. Deleuze and Guattari note that some lines of flight can become fixed in their
direction, speed, intensity, etc. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 214–6). Surveillance
becomes a police power (in the broad sense)
precisely to the extent that it arrests flows of information. In the same way, deterritorialization does not always imply
freedom. Post-panoptic surveillance has evolved deterritorialized controls that radically subvert the movement to free societies. Hardt and
Negri note, for instance, that deterritorialized information networks are central to the production and organization of global civil war and the
global policing of society (Hardt and Negri 2004: 12–32). On the positive side, flows of information
in the global surveillance
network are never completely fixed. A network is like a rhizome to the extent that any node in it must connect to any other
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 7). Ultimately no police power is capable of controlling the deterritorialization of
surveillance, because the number of virtual connections in a rhizomatic network always exceeds the
number that can actually be monitored (if one path is blocked, another can be found). If surveillance is about control and the
police, it also has these ‘antipolice’, ‘anti-control’ tendencies too, immanent to its deterritorialization. We see these tendencies at
work in resistant practices like file sharing and copying, hacking and cracking, reverse engineering,
spamming, identity theft, communications jamming, and many more. Of course, these are police practices too,
perhaps originally so, since they are all means of information control. The difference is that the police try to retain
exclusive control of them, or block their use by anti-control forces with firewalls, encryption, etc.
(themselves resistant technologies). The tendency of surveillance assemblages, information networks, and power
relations generally, however, to develop rhizomatic connections, suggests that exclusionary strategies of
information control are unlikely to succeed.
Alt - Reject language of Security
The alternative is to reject the affirmative in favor of a critique of security – the rise in
violent activity on the behalf of the state cannot be reformed through a change in
policy. The rhetoric of security that structures the 1AC must be uprooted before
political changes can occur.
(Jelly-Schapiro 13) Eli Jelly-Schapiro, doctoral candidate in American Studies at Yale University Journal of American Studies / Volume
47 / Issue 03 / August 2013, pp 801 - 826
As elaborated above, property and race are two keywords of the modern security project. The
triad of security terms
“prerogative/emergency/ exception” –all of which here refer to the political movement, by an executive
power, beyond the normative constraints of legislative or juridical democratic process–is another crucial
entry in the security lexicon. Executive prerogative is unsurprisingly central to the preliberal or “absolutist” philosophy of Thomas
Hobbes. But as Neocleous demonstrates, prerogative and exception are also of great import to the lib
There are
moments of political exigency, Locke allows, when the legislature is incapable of acting with the required
expediency; the executive power must in these instances arrest democratic deliberation and enact the
power of decision. The “public good” (which is, as Neocleous observes, often merely a euphemism for the protection of private
property), the “safety of the people,” and the security of society more generally periodically demand the
exercise of prerogative power
rerogative power of decision is not in fact exceptional but a basic and permanent feature of
the modern liberal state. Before the procedural enactment of emergency powers, the particular threat that
occasions the emergency must be identified or imagined. In the settler colonial context, the emergency that required or
sanctioned the exception was the (racialized) state of nature broadly conceived. Following 11 September 2001, the “terrorist
threat” was quickly established as an emergency that demanded the invocation of emergency powers.
In all cases, “security” is the reason of state that permits the invocation of emergency or enactment of
prerogative within the normative body of the liberal state; when the “security” of the political
community is under threat from the savage or the terrorist, exception is justified–indeed, is legally provided for. Perhaps it is
more appropriate to think not of a power that moves beyond “the rule of law,” but one that is sanctioned by it, that is essential to it. The
instances in which a state of emergency might be invoked in the name of security today, within the
normal procedures of liberal governance, are various, ranging from economic crisis, to natural disaster,
to foreign or domestic war. But in each case a fundamental contradiction is at work: the suspension of
the law, by the law, in the name of the law. As with race, the concept and practice of “emergency” was developed in concert
with the exercise of colonial power. The colony, Achille Mbembe has argued, is the zone of exception par excellence: Colonies are zones in
which war and disorder, internal and external figures of the political, stand side by side or alternate with each other. As such, the colonies are
the location par excellence where the controls and guarantees of judicial order can be suspended –the zone where the violence of the state of
s,” Mbembe writes,
“stems from the racial denial of any common bond between the conqueror and the native... Savage life,” Mbembe continues,“is just another
sts outside the
moral and rational calculus of the modern state. The state of nature, the pure space of exception, is the laboratory within which colonial power
synthesizes methods of dehumanization with processes of extrajuridical violence. The extra legal violence honed there is subsequently
omic emergency,
capitalist security Until
the late nineteenth century, the invocation of emergency powers – usually expressed in the
enactment of martial law–was limited to moments of imminent physical threat or danger, due to invasion from without or
in multiple instances imposed to
during World War I but most profoundly in its aftermath, exceptional executive
power was enacted in the economic realm, as a response not to violent disorder but to capitalist crisis. In continuance of this
trend, the purview of emergency powers would continue to expand throughout the twentieth century. The economic recovery legislation that
gave initial form to the New Deal was enacted by President Roosevelt under a legally declared state of emergency and was conditioned by the
recurring invocation of “emergency” in public discourse–a rhetorical proliferation that coincided with the heightened discursive power of
“security.” The exigent circumstances of the Great Depression, Roosevelt held, required a countervailing exercise of emergency executive
power. Roosevelt was responding not simply to mass unemployment and a dramatic fall in national income, but also to a wave of labor protest
and intensifying culture of class struggle more broadly. Immediate and decisive intervention was an imperative if people were to be put back to
work and economic growth were to resume, but intervention was also required to mollify class fracture and obviate the possibility of socialist
revolution. The emergency, that is, referred not only to the welfare–or security–of the citizenry but also to the security of capitalist social
The emergency declared by Roosevelt in 1933 marked the beginning of an
unbroken line of emergency governance that remains continuous today The normalization of
emergency has had profound political and social effects, occasioning the dramatic expansion of
executive powers and contributing to the militarization of society
mergency in
1950, in response to China’s invasion of Korea, represents one particularly important moment in this twentieth-century genealogy; Truman’s
proclamation consolidated the emergent but already hegemonic “National Security” state–a new political order founded on the specter of total
and permanent war, which blurred the spatial and temporal distinctions between war and peace and incorporated all of society into the
Truman’s declaration of emergency in 1950 concretized and escalated an extant policy
program, one the President had famously articulated to a joint session of Congress in his 1947 “Truman Doctrine” speech. In that address,
Truman outlined a new, more anticipatory and interventionist foreign policy based on “containment” rather than détente. The emergency
declared by Truman in 1950–in the name of the nation’s economic and military security, and in the defense of capitalist freedom against
“communist imperialism” – was premised not just on the actuality of military conflict but on the “looming peril” of an existential threat to the
nation. The infamous internal policy document NSCdays before his declaration of emergency in 1950, outlined the culture and rationale of Cold War emergency governance. The intellectual
and spiritual antecedent of the Bush Doctrine, NSC-68–which warned of “the ever-present possibility of
annihilation,” and argued that at stake was the survival “not only of this republic but of civilization itself”
–argued for constant and anticipatory military and security mobilization in the face of the communist
threat It argued, moreover, that the struggle against communism would necessarily be waged internally
to the United States as well as in the world. As Neocleous notes, NSC-68 defined the ways in which
National Security is more than a mode of US global power, but a technique for policing individual citizens
and the structuring the national body politic. In the Cold War emergency order, military buildup and McCarthyite repression
went hand in hand, just as the War on Terror and the Patriot Act exist in tandem today. Neoliberal emergency In the neoliberal moment, the
expanding scope of emergency powers –an expansion that has coincided with security’s ever-greater
purchase on human social life–is on full display. In the case of the New Deal, emergency was enacted to mitigate class
contradiction and ensure the reproduction of capitalist social relations. In neoliberalism, emergency powers have a different intent and effect:
not the mollification of class contradiction but its intensification; not the preemptive management of economic insecurity and crisis, but the
deliberate cultivation of a general culture of insecurity and crisis. If the security of capital has always been prior to and above the security of the
person or the public–the latter only privileged when it acts as a conduit to the former–this enduring hierarchy is in neoliberalism utterly
transparent. The neoliberal state of emergency demands the constant and militarized securing of capital, and the constant and militarized
policing of the insecure spaces inhabited by the multitudes that fall through the chasms of the “ownership society.” Capital, in neoliberal order,
is always embattled, always in danger –because only the feeblest of attempts is made to assimilate its other into the realm of achieved security.
In place of the social contract are the gated community and the private security force on the one side and the proliferating slum on the other.
The New Deal and the “embedded liberalism” it helped entrench is one example of the second phase of what Karl Polanyi called capitalism’s
“double movement”: first, the movement toward the liberation of markets and universalization of the commodity form; and second, the
countermovement– encouraged by labor primarily but at moments in the twentieth century by capital as well–toward the lessening of
capitalism’s most alienating and destructive effects. Without the second movement, Polanyi contends, capital would completely destroy the
“fictitious commodities” that are its foundation–land and human labor most of all–and thus destroy itself. The actual complete disembedding of
the market–the dream of the market fundamentalists–is, Polanyi contends, an impossibility, as it would mean turning nature and people into
r and responds
by instituting various protective measures to guard against the violence and reach of the market. Neoliberalism, though, disregards the
imperative of the second movement. According to neoliberal doctrine the brutalities of the market are not to be counteracted; indeed,
neoliberal policy proceeds through the annihilation/privatization of the public institutions and services historically created in the
countermovement. In neoliberal order, emergency powers regulate not the stability of society at large– “there is no such thing as society,”
Margaret Thatcher intoned –but the security of private property, and the security of the ongoing processes of commoditization and
privatization that make up the first movement described by Polanyi. Whether the current economic crisis will provoke a new and sustained
countermovement remains unclear. Thus far, the US executive has used its powers of emergency intervention–outsourced, in large part, to the
Federal Reserve –to bail out precarious financial institutions and to stimulate dormant credit markets; but tellingly, it has not as of yet–with the
tentative exception of last year’s healthcare reform legislation– “exploited the crisis” to buttress beleaguered social safety nets or establish new
ones. And at the state level, the invocation and enactment of “emergency” has enabled the imposition of antiunion legislation and other
a law that gives
him the power to remove elected officials, abrogate union contracts, and eliminate services in any municipality or school district declared by
The War on Terror was imagined, by its
a “forever war.” Indeed, the interminable temporality of the conflict is implicit in the
very idea of a struggle against terror, which is not a material entity that can be eradicated but an
animating idea, a mode of representing a particular–if fluid in definition–form of violence or difference.
The declaration of a War on Terror, in other words, explicitly posits the emergency as permanent. But as I
discussed above, the emergency–and the war that it compels–has been a structural component of modern
political order since its inception. And as Julian Reid and Michael Dillon put it, “when emergency becomes the
generative principle of formation of community and rule,”the political sphere is determined by the
urgency
lonial
neoconservative authors, as
–even as it strives to obscure–the other, deeper, permanent war with
which it is continuous. The
principal policy documents and laws of the War on Terror–the USA Patriot Act (2001), the
National Security Strategy of the United States of America (2002), the National Strategy for Homeland Security (2002)– introduced a
series of terms and categories into the political lexicon, many of which are cited by critics as evidence of
the “state of exception” within which we now live: “enemy combatant,” “battlefield detainee,”
“extraordinary rendition
These categories name the novel forms of liminal, rightless subjectivity
produced by the extrajuridical mechanisms of the US-led War on Terror and experienced in Guantánamo
Bay, Abu Ghraib, and untold secret prisons located throughout the world. The word “extraordinary” nicely captures
the simultaneous newness and mundanity of the War on Terror’s emergency formations –extraordinary as exceptional, and extraordinary as
extra-ordinary (really ordinary). In the latter meaning, the vocabulary of “enemy combatant” and “extraordinary rendition” –the violence it
names– represents an exceptionally acute manifestation of long-established norms, Manichean frames–civilization and barbarism, human and
infrahuman – basic to colonial modernity. It bears emphasizing here that my intention in this section is not to suggest any perfect congruence
between this and that emergency formation; an emergency declared in response to a national disaster of course differs profoundly, in its
political intention and effect, to an emergency declared in wartime or in the face of economic crisis. Rather, my purpose is to locate the
contemporary proliferation of emergency –as a narrative and as a governmental form–within the longer history of emergency as a technique of
state power. This argument about the politics of emergency mirrors the overall argument of this article, which sheds light upon the ways in
which ostensibly discrete instances of security thinking and governance –Social Security and Homeland Security, for example–in fact share a
political genealogy and rationality. VI. CONCLUSION Summoning Walter Benjamin, and invoking as well the work of Giorgio Agamben, a
common critical refrain insists that in the moment of the War on Terror the state of exception has
become the rule The ongoing state of emergency declared by the US executive in the immediate
aftermath of September 11 stands as compelling evidence in support of this thesis. As I have argued in this
article, though, the contemporary iteration of emergency governance is not in fact exceptional but proves or evinces the rule. “The state of
exception,” Agamben himself has written, “is included in the nomos as a moment that is in every sense
fundamental.” The exemplary sites or subjects of the post-9/11 state of exception, such as
Guantánamo Bay or “battlefield detainee,” direct our critical attention to the longer history of
modernity’s exceptional violence –a violence practiced by the imperial state and predatory capital upon
its outside and its internally excluded others. The financial crisis inaugurated in 2008 likewise acts as a revealing lens onto
deeper histories of dispossession and domination. In the ongoing moment of neoliberal crisis, the fundamental contradictions of capitalist
modernity are brought into especially stark relief. The
pervasive insecurity produced by neoliberal crisis illuminates
those spaces–the colony and the excluded zones of the metropolis–wherein insecurity has long been a basic and not
exceptional aspect of social life The contemporary manifestations of security discourse and practice, in
other words, allow us to see the essential logics of the modern security project with a particular clarity.
The security project arose concurrently with and in support of the settler conquest of the New World, the establishment of the modern state
form, and the emergence of the capitalist mode of production. Centuries later, new and old technologies of primitive accumulation continue to
propel capitalism into new worlds both fictitious and real; new and old racisms continue to shape human social life; and new and old narratives
of crisis and emergency –of nature, of war, of economy, of culture–continue to inspire the innovation and intensification of state and market
power. Intrinsic to each of these processes, security –as a political ideal and governmental technique–also acts as one binding thread between
them. All
this is to say that the critique of security, and not merely its pursuit, is today an urgent–and
necessarily historicist–task.
Answers
A2: Cede the politics
War against a public enemy is inevitable to maintain national security – Political
communities deem individuality as a rival to order
Burke 07, Anthony Burke (Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations in the University
of New South Wales), 2007, “Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and Reason”,
https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v010/10.2burke.html
The conceptual template for such an
image of national security state can be found in the work of Thomas Hobbes,
with his influential conception of the political community as a tight unity of sovereign and people in which
their bodies meld with his own to form a 'Leviathan', and which must be defended from enemies within and without. His image of
effective security and sovereignty was one that was intolerant of internal difference and dissent, legitimating a
strong state with coercive and exceptional powers to preserve order and sameness. This was a vision not merely of
political order but of existential identity, set off against a range of existential others who were sources of threat, backwardness,
instability or incongruity.29 It also, in a way set out with frightening clarity by the theorist Carl Schmitt and the philosopher Georg Hegel,
exchanged internal unity, identity and harmony for permanent alienation from other such communities (states). Hegel presaged Schmitt's
thought with his argument that individuality and the state are single moments of 'mind in its freedom' which 'has an infinitely negative relation
to itself, and hence its essential character from its own point of view is its singleness': Individuality
is awareness of one's
existence as a unit in sharp distinction from others. It manifests itself here in the state as a relation to
other states, each of which is autonomous vis-a-vis the others...this negative relation of the state to itself is embodied
in the world as the relation of one state to another and as if the negative were something external.30
Schmitt is important both for understanding the way in which such alienation is seen as a definitive way of imagining and
limiting political communities, and for understanding how such a rigid delineation is linked to the
inevitability and perpetuation of war. Schmitt argued that the existence of a state 'presupposes the political', which must be
understood through 'the specific political distinction...between friend and enemy'. The enemy is 'the other, the stranger; and it sufficient for his
nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in an extreme case conflicts with him are
possible'.31 The
figure of the enemy is constitutive of the state as 'the specific entity of a people'.32 Without
it society is not political and a people cannot be said to exist: Only the actual participants can correctly recognise,
understand and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme case of conflict...to judge whether the adversary intends to negate his
opponent's way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one's own form of existence.33 Schmitt links this stark
ontology to war when he states that the political is only authentic 'when a fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity. The
enemy is solely the public enemy, because everything that has a relationship to such a collectivity of
men, particularly to the whole nation, becomes public by virtue of such a relationship...in its entirety the state as an
organised political entity decides for itself the friend-enemy distinction'.34 War, in short, is an existential condition:
the entire life of a human being is a struggle and every human being is symbolically a combatant. The
friend, enemy and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real
possibility of physical killing. War follows from enmity. War is the existential negation of the enemy.
A2: Realism
Even if countries always assume the worst of others, they would never start a war
Pashakhanlou in 2013 (Arash Heydarian Pashakhanlou; e holds a BA and an MRes degree in
International Relations and International Relations theory respectively from Aberystwyth University,
“Back to the Drawing Board: A Critique of Offensive Realism”, International Relations 2013, 16 pgs.,
website, 7/5/15
The uncertainty assumption of offensive realism makes it clear that states can never fully know the intentions of others, as such security
competition might still pursue even if there are no objective reasons for it. As Mearsheimer points out: ‘it is uncertainty about whether … nonsecurity causes of war are at play, or might come into play, that pushes great powers to worry about their survival and thus act offensively’.34
Indeed, it is this ‘possibility that at least one state might be motivated by non-security calculations’ that is supposed to generate security
competition in offensive realism.35 Hence, states are not required to have revisionist goals to generate security competition according to
offensive realism. The
fact that states cannot discern their rival’s intentions is enough to bring about security
competition since there is no way for great powers to know that their opponents do not harbor malign
intentions towards them.36 Under these conditions, a state must ‘make worst-case scenario assumptions about their rivals’
intentions’ and formulate their policies according to their competitors’ measurable and determinable capabilities.37 This argument,
however, falls apart under scrutiny. Even if we agree with offensive realists that uncertainty compels
states to make worst case scenario assumptions about the intentions of their rival states, which possess the
means to harm them in a self-help system, they would still have no reason to attack each other.38 This is because
anarchy and uncertainty are constant factors of international life and cannot explain variation as
Mearsheimer himself points out.39 Moreover, the condition of uncertainty ultimately makes the intentions of
others unknowable, and since decision-making must be based on something states do know, great
powers have to formulate their policies on basis of their rival’s measurable and determinable offensive
capabilities instead of intentions, according to offensive realism.40 The logical conclusion of offensive
realism’s own claims is thus that states would hold their fire until one of their rivals (whose intentions are
uncertain) threatens them with its offensive capability. This time will, however, never come in offensive realism’s
hypothetical world since states that cherish survival above everything else have no incentives to draw first
blood and expose themselves to unnecessary harm. Indeed, as Mearsheimer himself points out, states engage in
‘calculated aggression’ and ‘weigh the costs and risks of offense against the likely benefits. If the benefits do not outweigh the
risks, they sit tight and wait for a more propitious moment’.
Rational actors would not start wars with one another, as they have little to gain and
everything to lose
Pashakhanlou in 2013 (Arash Heydarian Pashakhanlou; e holds a BA and an MRes degree in
International Relations and International Relations theory respectively from Aberystwyth University,
“Back to the Drawing Board: A Critique of Offensive Realism”, International Relations 2013, 16 pgs.,
website, 7/5/15
even if we accept Snyder’s claim that
Herz restricts his notion of the security dilemma to status quo powers, there is still a key difference
between offensive realism and the approach of Herz, which makes the security dilemma hard to
integrate with the former’s theory. Hertz’s starting assumptions are similar to offensive realism as far as
he emphasizes anarchy, uncertainty, survival and the states’ capacity for violence as the driving forces of
the security dilemma.58 A notable difference can nevertheless be discerned, as the proposition concerning
the rationality of states is missing from Herz’s account. In contrast, Herz maintains that ‘we cannot rely on
Snyder’s assertions regarding offensive realism on this issue are therefore inaccurate, and
absolute rationality in the behavior and calculations of nations’.59 As Peter Stirk also notes, Herz’s stress on
the contingency and the irrationality of the world is hard to reconcile with the rational actors
assumption of offensive realism.60 This difference has important implications since competing units that
try to survive in an anarchic system where uncertainty prevails can logically fall prey to security
competition even if there are no objective differences between them due to irrational factors in Herz’s
world. However, since offensive realism assumes that states are benign rational actors, it is hard to see
why they would be forced to behave as aggressors.61 Indeed, Mearsheimer maintains that states engage in
‘calculated aggression’ and If so, status quo powers who have little to gain and everything to lose by
engaging in security competition should just ‘sit tight’ and avoid this form of self-defeating behaviour as
Mearsheimer himself points out in the passage quoted earlier.
Realism locks in its place as the hegemonic world view through violence—the claim to
intellectual mastery is directly linked to genocidal violence
Guney & Gokcan ‘10 [Aylin Guney & Fulya Gokcan, Guney has a Ph.D. Political Science and Public Administration from
Bilkent University, 2010, Bilkent University, “The ‘Greater Middle East’ as a ‘Modern’ Geopolitical Imagination
in American Foreign Policy”] Accessed Online: 6/27/15
http://www3.nccu.edu.tw/~lorenzo/Guney%20Middle%20East.pdf
Another influential pretext was the new US strategic vision that can be termed ‘integration’ into a Western and American set of values and
modus operandi. Falah and Flint refer to this integrative power of ‘prime modernity’.45 According to this view, state and inter-state
political institutions that can support the hegemonic power’s global project of an open
economic space are repackaged as the necessary foundations for a way of life that has been defined as modern
and therefore should be wanted by most states.46 They further argue that prime modernity is used
to construct a prime morality.47 Thus “faltering states” are identified as those whose economic
practices, political institutions, and civil society do not meet the preferred definition imposed by the
USA. Next, such states are equated with terrorism, with terrorism against the USA being portrayed as a crime
against the ‘basic’ moral values of humanity.48 This integration strategy in turn creates its own set of
exclusions, with forms of violence awaiting those who are either unwilling or unable to be incorporated.49 Although
geopolitical actions under the guise of world leadership provide material benefits for the United States, this self-interest becomes
equated instead with benefits for the whole world. Such benefits are presented and defined through values.50 Flint
further argues that if the calculations of war are traceable back to material interests, such as access
to oil, then governments must usually emphasise values and ideas in justifying their foreign
policy, especially when it involves invading another country. The world leader must therefore convince its
international as well as domestic audience, that the actions are for the benefit of all rather than its own interests. In this respect, the GMEI
represents a US search for allies. Flint also argues that the power of the world leader rests not on its military strength alone, but rather on a
package of innovations that it claims will benefit the whole world. The central ingredients of this package are national selfdetermination and
democracy, or the rule of law. Together, these
“innovations” combine to form the integrative power of the
world leader: the collection of ideas, values, and institutions designed to bring order and
stability to the world. Regarding GMEI, this theory of integrative power of prime modernity contextualised the positions, objectives
and problems of the region. It also facilitated the opportunity to establish alliances guaranteeing US world leadership and regional interests.
That is why this theory constituted a solid ground for justification for the US extra-territorial activities. In conclusion,
the Bush era
ended with serious questions and suspicions regarding US military presence in the region,
despite all the attempts to justify the Bush administration’s faulty geopolitical calculations. In this
sense, the harshest criticisms were raised by the new American president, Barack Hussein Obama, whose slogan was “change”. The following
section is intended to analyse the possible changes and continuities of US geopolitical imagination of the region after the Bush era.
A2: Perm
the perm creates an exception for how we treat an other – this justifies violence by
purchasing self-security at the expense of the other – only the alternative can resolve
the inherent violence of realpolitik by rejecting it
Burke in 2k5 (Anthony, Senior Lecturer in the School of Politics and International Relations at the
University of New South Wales, Sydney, Beyond Security)
It is in this constitutive account of the political that we find the
second aporia of security, which is opened up as an impasse within its
a moral impasse that also possesses a malign functionality. This aporia occurs
because despite their presumption to universality, realist structures of security have always argued that
the security of the self (the individual, the nation or the 'way of life') must be purchased at the expense of another.
This was starkly laid out by Berki, who wrote in his book Security and Society that: Seeking after security for oneself and being
a cause of insecurity for others are not just closely related; they are the same thing, with no chance of
either logical or existential separation . . . when the chips are down, and to a certain degree, they are always down . . .
it is my life, my freedom, my security versus the rest of the human race.18 Ur-theorist of realism Hans Morgenthau,
basic conceptual structure. Sadly, this is
surprisingly enough, expressed some qualms about such an image of security, despite having done so much to entrench national security at the
apex of modern policy making. With the advent of the nuclear age, he argued, no state could purchase its security at the expense of another;
now diplomacy must seek to make all nations equally secure.19 However, this insight was lost on a generation of later theorists and
policymakers, for whom security would inevitably imply the sacrifice of the Other. Consider George Kennan's argument, in 1948, that the
United States would have to 'to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to retain our position of [economic] disparity without
positive detriment to our national security . . . We should cease to talk about vague –and for the Far East – unreal objectives such as human
rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratisation'.20 One of Australia's most senior and influential policymakers of the postVietnam era, Richard Woolcott, underlined the continuing power of this view when he argued in 1995 that 'sentimental notions' of selfdetermination for East Timor and Bougainville were a threat to Australia's national security (a security that for two decades had been premised
on close relations and military co-operation with the murderous Suharto regime).21 This
highlights an urgent need to examine
the images of Self and Other that animate (in)secure identities, and to expose the violence and
repression that is so often relied on to police them. I am serious in arguing that the aporias of security do create important
room to move, to disrupt its claim to universality and truth, to imagine new possibilities that escape its repressive dialectic of Self and Other.
Yet here we also encounter a disturbing irony. Security
forms a political technology whose power partly derives from
its aporetic structure. A generalised opposition between society and its others has worked as an
effective technology of fear, to construct and police forms of national and ethnic identity; while illusions of
universal security have simultaneously worked as a smokescreen for a Realpolitik that purchases the
security of the Self at the expense of the Other. In short, security's power lies in the very slipperiness of its
significations, its ironic structure of meaning, its ability to have an almost universal appeal yet name very
different arrangements of order and possibility for different groups of people. This is why it is pointless to
try and stabilise security's ontology. It is better to track security's tactical and discursive power though
its development as a constitutive account of the political, one that is simultaneously structured, enabled
and fissured by its aporias. <p32-33>
A2: Threats Real
Threats are not based in facts but rather the social structure threat constructionists
produce
(Tsoukala 08 Anastasia) Tsoukala (Research Fellow at the University of Paris VSorbonne and Associate Professor at the University of Paris XI), “Boundary-creating
Processes and the Social Construction of Threat,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political,
Volume 33, Issue 2, pp. 137-138. April-June 2008
While the tenants of the objectivist model consider social problems as “a product of dysfunctions, social
disorganization, role and value conflicts, and a violation of norms,”1 the defenders of the constructionist
thesis2 assume that what qualifies as a “problem” for a given society at a given moment is the outcome
of “long-standing and day-to-day constructions made by persons and groups.”3 Hence, it depends less on
its objective features than on the way people prioritize and perceive collective values and interests to
assess problems. This is not meant to deny the objective seriousness of social conditions but rather to
stress that the subjective definition of these conditions is to a large measure independent of their
seriousness. Not all harmful social conditions will be seen as social problems, while some relatively benign ones will.4 Far from being
objective realities, social problems tell us then what is righteous and useful or, on the contrary, what is evil and dangerous; they show who has
the power to define these values and to impose punishment on their potential adversaries; they uncover whose interests are advanced when
social problems are brought to public awareness. In short, they bring to light an ongoing process of asserting power through the distinction of
right from wrong and the subsequent delimiting of the social reality. In this respect, not only is the construction of social enemies important in
political terms but it is also thought to be essential to the very defining of the mainstream society and to the further maintenance of its
cohesion.5 These two functions are so strongly interrelated that it is not possible anymore to address the political aspect of the process while
ignoring its social one. In other words, the
political benefits that may result from the introduction of hard coercive
policies against allegedly threatening social figures should not be dissociated from the fact that
“civilized” societies keep on confirming their own sense of unitary consensus when creating outcasts.6
While acknowledging the role played by various social actors in constructing social problems, constructionists have frequently sought to
highlight the important place held by the media in the framing of these problems.7 Far from playing a mere informational role, the media are
thought to be actively involved in the shaping of the public debate on social issues, as part of the circle of primary and secondary definers and
claims makers out of which public problems are socially constructed. Therefore, the
media coverage of social problems is seen
as “a socially constructed representation of reality and as an arena of problem construction in which
struggles to designate and define public problems are waged.”8 Media discourses on controversial social
issues are thus integrated into a process of social construction of public problems that, on the one hand,
involves various institutions and social groups struggling to promote their own values and interests and, on
the other hand, obtains its optimum effects when it rests upon the mutual reinforcement of public discourses and policies. This shared
orientation toward social reality should not however shift our attention away from the fact that constructionist approaches remain loosely
circumscribed in a potentially boundless theoretical frame. Going back to Husserl’s phenomenology, while borrowing elements from historical
and anthropological studies on “othering” processes,9 studies
on the social construction of threat have been
developed in many epistemological fields, ranging from criminology and sociology to political science
and linguistics. In seeking to analyze the social processes and the power relations that allow structuring and establishing specific socially
threatening figures, 10 they rested upon various theoretical frames, going from deviance studies to social movements and collective behavior
studies, to be lately associated with Ulrich Beck’s concept of risk society. 11 This diversity makes assessing the methods used to analyze
it is still possible to assess the way the key
elements of these processes have been addressed by constructionists. An overview of the answers given
as to who are the actors involved in the process, what are their objectives, how do they proceed, and
who is targeted would allow us to have a comprehensive image of the issue and probably to uncover
blind spots of the overall approach.
processes related to the social construction of threat particularly difficult. But
Even the aff’s attempt to particularize security to their situation-they still believe that
human security can be known, and exists independently of our knowledge. This stops
the progressive potential of reflection
Grayson in 2k7 (Kyle, Lecturer in International Politics, School of Geography Politics and Sociology @
Newcastle University, Human Security as power/knowledge: the biopolitics of a definitional debate,
Online paper archive for the SGIR Turin Conference 2007
http://archive.sgir.eu/uploads/Grayson-graysonsgir.pdf)
Within the incitement to discourse fostered by the concept of human security, it is sometimes argued that even in the
absence of clear universal definitions and quantitative measurements—or the causal analysis which these make possible—the adoption
of more inclusive and less rigid approaches can provide a meaningful account of human (in)security (Bubandt
2005; Hudson 2005; Newman 2001). Thus strict deductive accounts of human security that aim for universalism are discounted as sacrificing
analytic depth within specific contexts in return for analytic breadth in terms of contextual applicability to a broader biopolitical environment.
Yet, even within the universal/particular debate, cosmological realism looms large on both sides of the
argument. For example, in a critique of Roland Paris’ (2000-01) provocative dismissal of human security as a concept without any analytic
value, Ralph Pettman has argued that providing a rich account: requires casting human security first of all in the politico-cultural terms that are
dominant in our day, namely, the terms set by Rationalism…it means articulating human security set by the analytical languages that
Rationalism provides, and in the terms set by the ways of being and knowing that Rationalism does not provide…[this] is a mind move that
leads to radically competing accounts of human security, as well as to articulations of human security from the perspectives of the margins that
Rationalism makes (Pettman 2005, 139). The
call for context specific accounts of security has been echoed by other
researchers, with variations being determined by categories such as time, space, territory, and identities (Booth 1991; Buzan et al 1998).
Pettman advocates a reinvigorated empiricism which is able to transcend any limits imposed by the metanarrative of Rationalism. He argues
that ‘we can have precise and meaningful purchase upon human security as a concept by couching it in the context of a concise, comprehensive
and systematic account of world affairs’ (Pettman 2005, 139). As such, in ‘inviting a more extensive empirical purview of more diverse issues’,
Pettman asserts that human security draws attention to insecurities generated by HIV/AIDS, gender inequality, marginalised religious
ontologies, and environmental degradation whose ‘transnational challenges are difficult to meet in a world built around the expectation of
state-centric competition’ (Pettman 2005, 139; 143). Human
security and the conditions that generate human
insecurity—material, ideological, and discursive—can be discovered, identified, classified and
transformed into unmediated knowledge within appropriate contexts and made amenable to global
governmentality. The universal pretension is dropped, but Pettman does not seem comfortable in taking the next step by drawing out the
politics of interpretation that is central to the identification of (human) security threats. Thus, within his configuration, as critical as it may be
of the marginalising moves of Rationalism, human security remains to be treated as a material object that can be
ascertained, become known in an unmediated form, and then serve as the basis for a proficient and
effective biopolitics. There continues to be a reliance on being able to deploy (interpretative) authority
in order to make the argument that such and such an issue is clearly a matter of human security and
that human security threats exist independently of our thoughts about them. These are all claims that
are worthy of significant attention for their widespread acceptance makes possible a particular kind of
security politics at odds with the progressive claims of human security adherents.
A2: Friend/Enemy distinction
Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction values preservation of the state and it’s values as
paramount-this ignores that state identity is not homogenous and justifies endless
violence and fascism
Noorani in 2k5 (Yaseen, Assistant Professor in Near Eastern Studies at the University of Arizona, CR: The
New Centennial Review, 5.1, project muse)
Schmitt's critique of liberal normativity is beset with contradictions and unfounded assumptions, beginning
with its own foundation in the liberal notion of the state of war.8 What his critique helps us to understand is not so much the
opposition between the political (self-preservation) and the normative that it argues, but rather, how these two
conditions must hang together in a paradoxical embrace. This contradictory union of the amoral and
moral lies at the heart of liberal social contract theory and is the rhetorical key to the U.S. war on terror. It is also the
rock upon which Schmitt's "political" founders in an instructive manner. Schmitt attempts to obscure the
ultimately normative nature of the concept of "the people" while relying on this normativity
nonetheless. The commonly accepted right of individual self-preservation apparently has an intuitive basis in our recognition of a
fundamental natural drive for self-preservation. We normally regard a living person, or other organism, as a self-evident fact and believe that
by its constitution such an organism senses when its life is in danger and acts to save itself. A "people" and its state, however, is not of this
nature. As Chantal Mouffe points out in the passage quoted above, the
identity of "the people" is subject to political
contestation. Different individuals and groups have conflicting ideas about the nature of their nation, who is
included within it, what its values are. As a result, they also have conflicting ideas about what constitutes a
threat to the nation's existence. Schmitt's argument is based on his assumption that "the people" is a
pre-given entity, a natural kind whose existence is just as self-evident as that of an individual person. This people or nation is the
fundamental unit of self-preservation, of life and death antagonisms among human beings. Therefore, Schmitt rejects
any kind of internal antagonism, [End Page 20] i.e., political division, within the people. The nation/state must be fully
unified in order to fulfill its purpose by protecting its members from possible extinction (Schmitt 1996, 28–32).
One corollary of this view is that the enemy of the people is self-evident—the nation whose life is
threatened by this enemy spontaneously recognizes it, and there is no scope for argument, persuasion, or
moral judgement concerning the matter. The enemy is the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially
intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible. These can neither be
A second
corollary of this view is that the government of a people is the direct expression of this people's being and
as such is fully entitled to determine who enemies are, both foreign and domestic, as well as when and how to wage wars
against them (46). The fascist implications of these views are obvious. Anything is permitted for the sake of
self-preservation, the "people" is the self that must be preserved, and the state is the people's "agency"
empowered to protect it. Despite Schmitt's essentialist mysticism of the people, it is clear that the existence of a
nation, its identity, is not self-evident but determined by the political contestation that Schmitt so much
hates. This is because "the people" or nation is not a preconstituted organism but a moral ideal invoked
for political purposes. Schmitt admits as much when he states that a people goes to war in order to
preserve its "way of life."9 Schmitt does not define his notion of a "people" but stipulates that it is the collective unit of selfdecided by a previously determined general norm nor by the judgment of a disinterested and therefore neutral third party. (27)
preservation, the only unit that engages in life and death antagonisms and thus the only political unit. Unlike Hobbes, Schmitt does not derive
political association and the state from the desire of individuals for self-preservation. Rather, it
is the self-preservation of the
"people" that is of ultimate importance, and individuals can be sacrificed for it. What is of ultimate value,
therefore, more value than individual lives, is a given people's "way of life." This is the self-evident self that people should be willing [End Page
21] to die to preserve. Schmitt has left the biological realm of necessity here and entered the moral. A
way of life can only be
valuable as the way things ought to be. It is a norm whose meaning and content is open to debate.
People have to be persuaded and convinced that it is worth dying for. Moreover, the attribution of a specific way of
life to a nation is always a political act. It is an assertion that all members of this nation adhere to a certain norm that is the identity of this
nation, thus delegitimizing those who espouse or promote different norms. The
call to war, therefore, is political in the sense
of internal politics because in identifying a threat to the nation's existence, its "way of life," those who
call to war assert a particular conception of what constitutes the nation's way of life and attempt to
establish this conception's normativity for all members of the nation. Contrary to Schmitt's claims, we see that
whenever states or others call upon a population to go to war, they adduce existential and moral
justifications at the same time, and indeed the two can never fully be distinguished. We see this even in the
exemplary cases approvingly invoked by Schmitt. He cites the supposed life and death struggle of Christianity and Islam during the Middle Ages
(Schmitt 1996, 30).10 The mutual moral condemnation here as a justification for wars is apparent. Schmitt also cites with great approbation a
speech made by Cromwell illustrating recognition of irreducible enmity with regard to Spain (68). But this speech explicitly attributes the
enmity that Cromwell calls upon his compatriots to feel towards and recognize in Spain to the ungodliness (papacy) of the Spanish and the
godliness of the English. It is an enmity rooted in God's moral strictures. A "way of life" is not a living organism in its facticity but an ambiguous
norm open to contestation, redefinition, and even repudiation. This means that the non-normative status of self-preservation, acceded to the
life of an individual person, is attached in the case of nations to a normative ideal.11
The friend/enemy distinction assumes that beings are always existentially threatening
one another-this justifies endless mass killings, genocide, and war in the name of state
preservation
Burke in 2k7 (Anthony, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at UNSW, Sydney, Theory
and Event 10.2, ontologies of war: violence, existence, and reason, project muse)
Schmitt is important both for understanding the way in which such alienation is seen as a definitive way of
imagining and limiting political communities, and for understanding how such a rigid delineation is linked
to the inevitability and perpetuation of war. Schmitt argued that the existence of a state 'presupposes
the political', which must be understood through 'the specific political distinction...between friend and
enemy'. The enemy is 'the other, the stranger; and it sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way,
existentially something different and alien, so that in an extreme case conflicts with him are possible'.31 The figure of the enemy is
constitutive of the state as 'the specific entity of a people'.32 Without it society is not political and a people cannot be said to exist: Only the
actual participants can correctly recognise, understand and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme case of conflict...to judge
whether the adversary intends to negate his opponent's way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one's own
Schmitt links this stark ontology to war when he states that the political is only authentic
'when a fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity. The enemy is solely the public
enemy, because everything that has a relationship to such a collectivity of men, particularly to the whole nation, becomes public by virtue of
such a relationship...in its entirety the state as an organised political entity decides for itself the friend-enemy distinction'.34 War, in short, is
an existential condition: the entire life of a human being is a struggle and every human being is symbolically a
combatant. The friend, enemy and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they
refer to the real possibility of physical killing. War follows from enmity. War is the existential negation of
the enemy.35 Schmitt claims that his theory is not biased towards war as a choice ('It is by no means as though the political signifies
form of existence.33
nothing but devastating war and every political deed a military action...it neither favours war nor militarism, neither imperialism nor pacifism')
When such a theory takes the form of a social discourse (which it does
such an ontology can only support, as a kind of originary ground, the basic Clausewitzian assumption
that war can be a rational way of resolving political conflicts -- because the import of Schmitt's argument is
that such 'political' conflicts are ultimately expressed through the possibility of war. As he says: 'to the enemy
but it is hard to accept his caveat at face value.36
in a general form)
concept belongs the ever-present possibility of combat'.37 Where Schmitt meets Clausewitz, as I explain further below, the existential and
rationalistic ontologies of war join into a closed circle of mutual support and justification. 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. Secondly,
the militaristic force of such an
ontology is visible, in Schmitt, in the absolute sense of vulnerability whereby a people can judge whether
their 'adversary intends to negate his opponent's way of life'.38 Evoking the kind of thinking that would become
controversial in the Bush doctrine, Hegel similarly argues that: ...a state may regard its infinity and honour as at stake in each of its concerns,
however minute, and it is all the more inclined to susceptibility to injury the more its strong individuality is impelled as a result of long domestic
peace to seek and create a sphere of activity abroad. ....the state is in essence mind and therefore cannot be prepared to stop at just taking
notice of an injury after it has actually occurred. On the contrary, there arises in addition as a cause of strife the idea of such an injury...39
Identity, even more than physical security or autonomy, is put at stake in such thinking and can be defended and
redeemed through warfare (or, when taken to a further extreme of an absolute demonisation and dehumanisation of the
other, by mass killing, 'ethnic cleansing' or genocide).
>>>Aff Answers<<<
Framing Answers
A2: Ontology
Broad indicts of ontology don’t take out our impacts – you should weigh specific
evidence to get closer to the truth
Kratochwil, professor of international relations – European University Institute, ‘8 (Friedrich, “The
Puzzles of Politics,” pg. 200-213)
In what follows, I claim that the shift in focus from “demonstration” to science as practice provides strong prima facie reasons to choose
pragmatic rather than traditional epistemological criteria in social analysis. Irrespective of its various forms,
the epistemological
project includes an argument that all warranted knowledge has to satisfy certain field- independent
criteria that are specified by philosophy (a “theory of know- ledge”). The real issue of how our concepts and the world relate to
each other, and on which non-idiosyncratic grounds we are justified to hold on to our beliefs about the world, is “answered” by two metaphors.
The first is that of an inconvertible ground, be it the nature of things, certain intuitions (Des- cartes’ “clear and distinct ideas”) or methods and
inferences; the second is that of a “mirror” that shows what is the case. There is no need to rehearse the arguments demonstrating that these
under- lying beliefs and metaphors could not sustain the weight placed upon them. A “method” à la Descartes could not make good on its
claims, as it depended ultimately on the guarantee of God that concepts and things in the outer world match. On the other hand, the empiricist
belief in direct observation forgot that “facts” which become “data” are – as the term suggests – “made”. They are based on the judgements of
the observer using cultural criteria, even if they appear to be based on direct perception, as is the case with colours.4 Besides,
there had
always been a sneaking suspicion that the epistemo- logical ideal of certainty and rigour did not quite fit
the social world, an objection voiced first by humanists such as Vico, and later rehearsed in the continuing controversies about erklären
and verstehen (Weber 1991; for a more recent treatment see Hollis 1994). In short, both the constitutive nature of our concepts, and the value
interest in which they are embedded, raise peculiar issues of meaning and contestation that are quite different from those of description. As
Vico (1947) suggested, we “understand” the social world because we have “made it”, a point raised again by Searle concerning both the crucial
role played by ascriptions of meaning (x counts for y) in the social world and the distinction between institutional “facts” from “brute” or
natural facts (Searle 1995). Similarly, since values are constitutive for our “interests”, the concepts we use always portray an action from a
certain point of view; this involves appraisals and prevents us from accepting allegedly “neutral” descriptions that would be meaningless. Thus,
when we say that someone “abandoned” another person and hence communicate a (contestable) appraisal, we want to call attention to
certain important moral implica- tions of an act. Attempting
to eliminate the value-tinge in the description and
insisting that everything has to be cast in neutral, “objective”, observational language – such as “he opened the
door and went through it” – would indeed make the statement “pointless”, even if it is (trivially) “true” (for a powerful
statement of this point, see Connolly 1983). The most devastating attack on the epistemological project, however,
came from the history of science itself. It not only corrected the naive view of knowledge generation as
mere accumulation of data, but it also cast increasing doubt on the viability of various field-independent
“demarcation criteria”. This was, for the most part, derived from the old Humean argument that only sentences with empirical content
were “meaningful”, while value statements had to be taken either as statements about individual preferences or as meaningless, since de
gustibus non est disputandum. As the later dis- cussion in the Vienna circle showed, this distinction was utterly unhelpful (Popper 1965: ch. 2).
It did not solve the problem of induction, and failed to acknowledge that not all meaningful theoretical sentences must correspond with natural
Popper’s ingenious solution of making “refutability” the logical cri- terion and interpreting
empirical “tests” as a special mode of deduction (rather than as a way of increasing supporting evidence) seemed to respond
facts. Karl
to this epistemological quandary for a while. An “historical reconstruction” of science as a progressive development thus seemed possible, as
did the specification of a pragmatic criterion for conducting research. Yet again, studies in the history of science undermined both hopes. The
different stages in Popper’s own intellectual development are, in fact, rather telling. He started out with a version of conjectures and
refutations that was based on the notion of a more or less self-correcting demonstration. Con- fronted with the findings that scientists did not
use the refutation criterion in their research, he emphasised then the role of the scientific community on which the task of “refutation”
devolved. Since the individual scientist might not be ready to bite the bullet and admit that she or he might have been wrong, colleagues had to
keep him or her honest. Finally, towards the end of his life, Popper began to rely less and less on the stock of knowledge or on the scientists’
shared theoretical understandings – simply devalued as the “myth of the framework” – and emphasised instead the processes of communication and of “translation” among different schools of thought within a scien- tific community (Popper 1994). He still argued that these processes
follow the pattern of “conjecture and refutation”, but the model was clearly no longer that of logic or of scientific demonstration, but one that
he derived from his social theory – from his advocacy of an “open society” (Popper 1966). Thus a near total reversal of the ideal of knowledge
had occurred. While formerly everything was measured in terms of the epistemological ideal derived from logic and physics, “knowledge” was
now the result of deliberation and of certain procedural notions for assessing competing knowledge claims. Politics and law, rather than
physics, now provided the template. Thus the
history of science has gradually moved away from the epistemo-
logical ideal to focus increasingly on the actual practices of various scientific communities engaged in
knowledge production, particularly on how they handle problems of scientific disagreement.5 This
reorientation implied a move away from field-independent criteria and from the demonstrative ideal to
one in which “arguments” and the “weight” of evidence had to be appraised. This, in turn, not only generated a
bourgeoning field of “science studies” and their “social” epistemologies (see Fuller 1991), but also suggested more generally that the
traditional understandings of knowledge production based on the model of “theory” were in need of
revision. If the history of science therefore provides strong reasons for a pragmatic turn, as the discussion above
illustrates, what remains to be shown is how this turn relates to the historical, linguistic and constructivist turns that preceded it. To start with,
from the above it
should be clear that, in the social world, we are not dealing with natural kinds that exist
and are awaiting, so to speak, prepackaged, their placement in the appropriate box. The objects we
investi- gate are rather conceptual creations and they are intrinsically linked to the language through
which the social world is constituted. Here “constructivists”, particularly those influenced by Wittgenstein and language
philosophy, easily link up with “pragmatists” such as Rorty, who emphasises the product- ive and pragmatic
role of “vocabularies” rather than conceiving of language as a “mirror of nature” (Rorty 1979). Furthermore,
precisely because social facts are not natural, but have to be reproduced through the actions of agents, any attempt to treat them like “brute”
facts becomes doubly problematic. For one, even “natural” facts are not simply “there”; they are interpretations based on our theories.
Secondly, different from the observation of natural facts, in which perceptions address a “thing” through a conceptually mediated form,
social reality is entirely “arti- ficial” in the sense that it is dependent on the beliefs and practices of the
actors themselves. This reproductive process, directed by norms, always engenders change either interstitially, when change is smallscale or adaptive – or more dramatically, when it becomes “transformative” – for instance when it produces a new system configuration, as
after the advent of national- ism (Lapid and Kratochwil 1995) or after the demise of the Soviet Union (Koslowski and Kratochwil 1994).
Consequently, any examination of the social world has to become in a way “historical” even if some
“structuralist” theories attempt to minimise this dimension. [. . .] Therefore a pragmatic approach to
social science and IR seems both necessary and promising. On the one hand, it is substantiated by the
failure of the epistemological project that has long dominated the field. On the other, it offers a
different positive heuristics that challenges IR’s traditional disciplin- ary boundaries and methodological
assumptions. Interest in pragmatism therefore does not seem to be just a passing fad – even if such an interpre- tation cannot entirely be
discounted, given the incentives of academia to find, just like advertising agencies, “new and improved” versions of familiar products.
Existence First
Existence is a pre-requisite to ontology.
Wapner ‘3
Paul, Associate professor and director of the Global Environmental Policy Program at American
University, DISSENT, Winter, http://www.dissentmgazine.org/menutest/artiles/wi03/wapner.htm
The third response to eco-criticism would require critics to acknowledge the ways in which they themselves silence nature and then to
respect the sheer otherness of the nonhuman world. Postmodernism prides itself on criticizing the urge toward mastery that characterizes
modernity. But isn't mastery exactly what postmodernism is exerting as it captures the nonhuman world within its own conceptual
domain? Doesn't postmodern cultural criticism deepen the modernist urge toward mastery by eliminating the ontological weight of the
nonhuman world? What else could it mean to assert that there is no such thing as nature? I have already suggested the postmodernist
response: yes, recognizing the social construction of "nature" does deny the self-expression of the nonhuman world, hut how would we
know what such self-expression means? Indeed, nature doesn't speak; rather, some person always speaks on nature's behalf, and whatever
that person says is, as we all know, a social construction. All attempts to listen to nature are social constructions-except one. Even the most
radical postmodernist must acknowledge the distinction between physical existence and non-existence. As I have said, postmodernists
accept that there is a physical substratum to the phenomenal world even if they argue about the different meanings wc ascribe to it. This
acknowledgment of physical existence is crucial. We can't ascribe meaning to that which doesn't appear What doesn't exist can manifest
no character. Put differently, yes, the postmodernist should rightly worry about interpreting nature's expressions. And all of us should be wary of
those who claim to speak on nature's behalf (including environmentalists who do that). But we need not doubt the simple idea that a
prerequisite of expression is existence. This in turn suggests that preserving the nonhuman world-in all its diverse embodiments-must be
seen by eco-critics as a fundamental good. Eco-critics must be supporters, in some fashion, of environmental preservation.
Consequences First
Must evaluate consequences – the alternative is moral absolutism that generates evil
Isaac ‘2—Professor of Political Science at Indiana-Bloomington(Jeffery C., Director of the
Center for the Study of Democracy and Public Life, PhD from Yale Dissent Magazine, Vol. 49, Iss. 2,
“Ends, Means, and Politics,” p. Proquest)
It is assumed that U.S. military intervention is an act
of "aggression," but no consideration is given to the aggression to which intervention is a response. The
status quo ante in Afghanistan is not, as peace activists would have it, peace, but rather terrorist
violence abetted by a regime--the Taliban--that rose to power through brutality and repression. This
requires us to ask a question that most "peace" activists would prefer not to ask: What should be done to respond to the
violence of a Saddam Hussein, or a Milosevic, or a Taliban regime? What means are likely to stop
violence and bring criminals to justice? Calls for diplomacy and international law are well intended and
important; they implicate a decent and civilized ethic of global order. But they are also vague and
empty, because they are not accompanied by any account of how diplomacy or international law can
work effectively to address the problem at hand. The campus left offers no such account. To do so would require it
to contemplate tragic choices in which moral goodness is of limited utility. Here what matters is not purity of
As a result, the most important political questions are simply not asked.
intention but the intelligent exercise of power. Power is not a dirty word or an unfortunate feature of the world. It is the core of politics. Power
is the ability to effect outcomes in the world. Politics, in
large part, involves contests over the distribution and use of
power. To accomplish anything in the political world, one must attend to the means that are necessary
to bring it about. And to develop such means is to develop, and to exercise, power. To say this is not to say that power is
beyond morality. It is to say that power is not reducible to morality. As writers such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Max
Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt have taught, an unyielding concern with moral goodness undercuts
political responsibility. The concern may be morally laudable, reflecting a kind of personal integrity, but it suffers from three fatal flaws:
(1) It fails to see that the purity of one's intention does not ensure the achievement of what one intends. Abjuring violence or
refusing to make common cause with morally compromised parties may seem like the right thing; but if
such tactics entail impotence, then it is hard to view them as serving any moral good beyond the clean
conscience of their supporters; (2) it fails to see that in a world of real violence and injustice, moral
purity is not simply a form of powerlessness; it is often a form of complicity in injustice. This is why, from
the standpoint of politics--as opposed to religion--pacifism is always a potentially immoral stand. In
categorically repudiating violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain violent injustices with any
effect; and (3) it fails to see that politics is as much about unintended consequences as it is about
intentions; it is the effects of action, rather than the motives of action, that is most significant. Just as the
alignment with "good" may engender impotence, it is often the pursuit of "good" that generates evil. This is the lesson of
communism in the twentieth century: it is not enough that one's goals be sincere or idealistic; it is equally important, always, to
ask about the effects of pursuing these goals and to judge these effects in pragmatic and historically
contextualized ways. Moral absolutism inhibits this judgment. It alienates those who are not true
believers. It promotes arrogance. And it undermines political effectiveness.
Threats Real
Our security claims are not subjective—we can derive truth through the opinions of
others.
Zerilla 6 (Linda, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, “Truth and Politics,”
Theory & Event, 9(4), AD: 7-11-9) BL
Grassi helps us to see that there
might indeed be a form of truth in politics that is unique. This truth is not
do not have to "know the true standards"
in order to make judgments (subsume particulars under rules) about reality. Even if one were to grant that such standards
aporetic, for it is not objectivist. Contra Strauss's reading of the dialogues, we
are necessary for philosophical knowledge (which Grassi also refutes), politics is autonomous. Insofar as the Socratic project to find the truth
in opinion takes place in the political realm, as Arendt will show us below, we
have good reason for resisting the
introduction of standards or criteria that do not apply there. Thus we shall have good reason to be
suspicious of thinkers who would assimilate politics to philosophy (or to science) and demand of
political claims the same measure of truth. Likewise we shall have good reason to refute the idea that politics, if it does
not meet philosophical (or scientific) standards of proof, is not concerned with truth. 26. If the aporia of truth described earlier pertains to an
objectivist (philosophical) conception of truth but not to truth tout court, as Grassi has shown us, we have all the more reason to pursue the
Socratic quest for the truth in opinion, for such truth would not be based on our possession of universals under which to subsume particulars,
as Strauss would have us believe. The Socratic quest to find truth in opinion is distinguished from Plato's notion of moving from opinion to
to discover truth in opinion
one must move among the holders of opinion, that is to say, one's peers or equals, hence in the
political realm. By contrast with Plato, for whom truth is - and indeed must be - a solitary affair, Socrates holds that truth emerges in
truth in ways that are inseparable from the realm in which the quest for truth takes place. Firstly,
public. The public space is not - or not always - the place to speak a truth one already knows but the condition of finding truth in one's own
opinion. Socrates' practice of maieutic, the art of midwifery (by which one brings oneself and others to find the truth in their opinion), argues
Arendt, "was a political activity, a give and take, fundamentally on the basis of strict equality, the fruits of which could not be measured by
the result of arriving at this or that general truth" (PP 81). This activity is based on the conviction that "every
man has his own
doxa, his own opening to the world." Socrates must ask questions; he cannot know beforehand how the world appears to
each of his fellow citizens. "Yet, just as nobody can know beforehand the other's doxa, so nobody can know by himself and without further
effort the inherent truth of his own opinion" (PP 81), writes Arendt. So
the kind of truth that is relevant for politics, we
might tentatively conclude, requires publicity. 27. There is another important way in which Socrates' search for the truth in opinion
differs from Plato's search for absolute truth. As Strauss makes clear, opinion is something to be replaced by knowledge in Plato's view,
whereas for Arendt's Socrates opinion is the bearer of truth. Socrates style of questioning is deeply critical but not "relentlessly negative," as
Villa interpreting Arendt asserts, for it does not just destroy opinions but reveals what in them is true.20 What else can it mean to find the
truth in opinion, unless we settle on the purely negative or skeptical definition and say that the truth Socrates discovers in opinion is that in
opinion there is no truth? But surely this is not the definition Arendt has in mind when she writes, "For mortals in Socrates' view the
important thing is to make doxa truthful, to see in every doxa truth and to speak in such a way that the
truth of one's opinions reveals itself to oneself and to others. . . . Socrates, in opposition to the Sophists, had discovered that doxa was
neither subjective illusion nor arbitrary distortion but, on the contrary, that to which truth invariably
adhered" (PP 85).
A2: Alt
Transition
Moving away from security creates new challengers and increases the risk of war
Doran, 99 (Charles, Professor of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University's School of
Advanced International Studies, Survival, 1999, Summer, p. 148-9, proquest)
The conclusion, then, is that the probability of major war declines for some states, but increases for
others. And it is very difficult to argue that it has disappeared in any significant or reliable or hopeful
sense. Moreover, a problem with arguing a position that might be described as utopian is that such
arguments have policy implications. It is worrying that as a thesis about the obsolescence of major war
becomes more compelling to more people, including presumably governments, the tendency will be to
forget about the underlying problem, which is not war per se, but security. And by neglecting the
underlying problem of security, the probability of war perversely increases: as governments fail to
provide the kind of defence and security necessary to maintain deterrence, one opens up the possibility
of new challenges. In this regard it is worth recalling one of Clauswitz's most important insights: A
conqueror is always a lover of peace. He would like to make his entry into our state unopposed. That is
the underlying dilemma when one argues that a major war is not likely to occur and, as a consequence,
one need not necessarily be so concerned about providing the defences that underlie security itself.
History shows that surprise threats emerge and rapid destabilising efforts are made to try to provide
that missing defence, and all of this contributes to the spiral of uncertainty that leads in the end to war.
Specificity > Theory
We should study specific solutions to specific problems – The critique of security
sonsigns us to academic irrelevance and decimates politics – Only the perm solve
Walt 91 (Stephen, Professor at the University of Chicago, International Studies Quarterly 35)
Yet the opposite tendency may pose an even greater danger.
On the whole, security studies have profited from its
connection to real-world issues; the main advances of the past four decades have emerged from efforts
to solve important practical questions. If security studies succumbs to the tendency for academic
disciplines to pursue “the trivial, the formal, the methodological, the purely theoretical, the remotely
historical–in short, the politically irrelevent” (Morgenthau, 1966:73), its theoretical progress and its practical value
will inevitably decline. In short, security studies must steer between the Scylla of political opportunism and
the Charybdis of academic irrelevance. What does this mean in practice? Among other things, it means that security
studies should remain wary of the counterproductive tangents that have seduced other areas of
international studies, most notably the “post-modern” approach to international affairs (Ashley, 1984; Der
Derian and Shapiro, 1989, Lapid, 1989). Contrary to their proponents’ claims, post-modern approaches have yet to
demonstrate much value for comprehending world politics; to date, these works are mostly criticism
and not much theory. As Robert Keohane has noted, until these writers “have delineated...a research programe and shown...that it can
illuminate important issues in world politics, they will remain on the margins of the field” (Keohane, 1988:392). In particular, issues of
war and peace are too important for the field to be diverted into a prolix and self-indulgent discourse
that is divorced from the real world. CONTINUES... Because scientific disciplines advance through competition, we should not
try to impose a single methodological monolith upon the field. To insist that a single method constitutes
the only proper approach is like saying that a hammer is the only proper tool for building a house. The
above strictures are no more than a warning, therefore; progress will be best served by increased dialogue between
different methodological approaches (Downs, 1989).
Security Discourse Inev
Security discourse is inevitable and explains the world—rejection risks replicating the
harms.
Williams 3 (Michael, Professor of International Politics at the University of Wales, “Words, Images,
Enemies: Securitization and International Politics,” International Studies Quarterly, 47(4), AD: 7-10-9)
BL
It is irrelevant here whether one rejects, accepts, or perhaps finds it an atavistic remnant of
barbaric times that nations continue to group themselves according to friend and enemy, or
whether it is perhaps strong pedagogic reasoning to imagine that enemies no longer exist at all.
The concern here is neither with abstractions nor normative ideals, but with inherent reality and the real possibility of making such a
distinction. One may or may not share these hopes and pedagogic ideals. But, rationally speaking, it
cannot be denied that
nations continue to group themselves according to the friend–enemy antithesis, that the
distinction still remains actual today, and that this is an ever present possibility for every people
existing in the political sphere (1996 [1932]: 28).30 In certain settings, the Copenhagen School seems very close to this
position. Securitization must be understood as both an existing reality and a continual possibility.
Yet equally clearly there is a basic ambivalence in this position, for it raises the dilemma that securitization theory must
remain at best agnostic in the face of any securitization, even, for example, a fascist speech-act (such as that
Schmitt has often been associated with) that securitizes a specific ethnic or racial minority. To say that we must study the conditions under
which such processes and constructions emerge and become viable is important but incomplete, for without
some basis for
avoiding this process and transforming it the Copenhagen School appears to risk replicating
some of the worst excesses made possible by a Schmittian understanding of politics.
Cede the Political
The alt results in Extinction - the refusal to engage in traditional politics is an
abdication of social responsibility that makes social crises inevitable
Boggs 97 (Carl, National University, Los Angeles, Theory and Society, “The great retreat: Decline of the
public sphere in late twentieth-century America”, December, Volume 26, Number 6,
http://www.springerlink.com.proxy.library.emory.edu/content/m7254768m63h16r0/fulltext.pdf)
The decline of the public sphere in late twentieth-century America poses a series of great dilemmas and
challenges. Many ideological currents scrutinized here – localism, metaphysics, spontaneism, postmodernism, Deep Ecology – intersect with and reinforce each other. While these currents have deep
origins in popular movements of the 1960s and 1970s, they remain very much alive in the 1990s.
Despite their different outlooks and trajectories, they all share one thing in common: a depoliticized
expression of struggles to combat and overcome alienation. The false sense of empowerment that
comes with such mesmerizing impulses is accompanied by a loss of public engagement, an erosion of
citizenship and a depleted capacity of individuals in large groups to work for social change. As this
ideological quagmire worsens, urgent problems that are destroying the fabric of American society will go
unsolved – perhaps even unrecognized – only to fester more ominously in the future. And such
problems (ecological crisis, poverty, urban decay, spread of infectious diseases, technological
displacement of workers) cannot be understood outside the larger social and global context of
internationalized markets, finance, and communications. Paradoxically, the widespread retreat from
politics, often inspired by localist sentiment, comes at a time when agendas that ignore or sidestep
these global realities will, more than ever, be reduced to impotence. In his commentary on the state of
citizenship today, Wolin refers to the increasing sublimation and dilution of politics, as larger numbers of
people turn away from public concerns toward private ones. By diluting the life of common
involvements, we negate the very idea of politics as a source of public ideals and visions. 74 In the
meantime, the fate of the world hangs in the balance. The unyielding truth is that, even as the ethos of
anti-politics becomes more compelling and even fashionable in the United States, it is the vagaries of
political power that will continue to decide the fate of human societies. This last point demands further
elaboration. The shrinkage of politics hardly means that corporate colonization will be less of a reality,
that social hierarchies will somehow disappear, or that gigantic state and military structures will lose
their hold over people’s lives. Far from it: the space abdicated by a broad citizenry, well-informed and
ready to participate at many levels, can in fact be filled by authoritarian and reactionary elites – an
already familiar dynamic in many lesser-developed countries. The fragmentation and chaos of a
Hobbesian world, not very far removed from the rampant individualism, social Darwinism, and civic
violence that have been so much a part of the American landscape, could be the prelude to a powerful
Leviathan designed to impose order in the face of disunity and atomized retreat. In this way the eclipse
of politics might set the stage for a reassertion of politics in more virulent guise – or it might help further
rationalize the existing power structure. In either case, the state would likely become what Hobbes
anticipated: the embodiment of those universal, collective interests that had vanished from civil society.
75
A2: Impact
No Root Cause
No single cause of conflict
Barnett et al 7
Michael, Hunjoon Kim, Madalene O’Donnell, Laura Sitea, Global Governance, “Peacebuilding: What is in
a Name?”, Questia
Because there are multiple contributing causes of conflict, almost any international assistance
effort that addresses any perceived or real grievance can arguably be called "peacebuilding."
Moreover, anyone invited to imagine the causes of violent conflict might generate a rather
expansive laundry list of issues to be addressed in the postconflict period, including income
distribution, land reform, democracy and the rule of law, human security, corruption, gender
equality, refugee reintegration, economic development, ethnonational divisions, environmental
degradation, transitional justice, and on and on. There are at least two good reasons for such a
fertile imagination. One, there is no master variable for explaining either the outbreak of violence
or the construction of a positive peace but merely groupings of factors across categories such as
greed and grievance, and catalytic events. Variables that might be relatively harmless in some
contexts can be a potent cocktail in others. Conversely, we have relatively little knowledge
regarding what causes peace or what the paths to peace are. Although democratic states that
have reasonably high per capita incomes are at a reduced risk of conflict, being democratic and
rich is no guarantor of a positive peace, and illiberal and poor countries, at times, also have had
their share of success. Second, organizations are likely to claim that their core competencies and
mandates are critical to peacebuilding. They might be right. They also might be opportunistic.
After all, if peacebuilding is big business, then there are good bureaucratic reasons for claiming
that they are an invaluable partner.
Realism Good
Critics of realism provide zero support for the assertion that an alternative world is
possible
Murray 97, professor of politics at the University of Wales, 1997 (Alistair, Reconstructing Realism: Between Power Politics and
Cosmopolitan Ethics, netlibrary)
Ashley's critique thus boils down to a judgement as to the potentialities for change in the current situation and how best to exploit them. It
amounts to the difference between a progressive philosophy which regards systemic transformation as imminent, and one which remains more
sceptical. In 'Political realism and human interests', for instance, realism's practical strategy ultimately appears illegitimate to Ashley only
because his own agenda is emancipatory in nature. His disagreement with realism depends on a highly contestable claim — based on Herz's
argument that, with the development of global threats, the conditions which might produce some universal consensus have arisen — that its
'impossibility theorem' is empirically problematic, that a universal consensus is achievable, and that its practical strategy is obstructing its
realisation.48 In much the same way, in 'The poverty of neorealism', realism's practical strategy is illegitimate only because Ashley's agenda is
inclusionary. His central
disagreement with realism arises out of his belief that its strategy reproduces a
world order organised around sovereign states, preventing exploration of the indeterminate number
of — potentially less exclusionary — alternative world orders.49 Realists, however, would be unlikely to
be troubled by such charges. Ashley needs to do rather more than merely assert that the development
of global threats will produce some universal consensus, or that any number of less exclusionary world
orders are possible, to convince them. A universal threat does not imply a universal consensus, merely
the existence of a universal threat faced by particularistic actors. And the assertion that indeterminate
numbers of potentially less exclusionary orders exist carries little weight unless we can specify exactly
what these alternatives are and just how they might be achieved. As such, realists would seem to be
justified in regarding such potentialities as currently unrealisable ideals and in seeking a more proximate
good in the fostering of mutual understanding and, in particular, of a stable balance of power. Despite
the adverse side-effects that such a balance of power implies, it at least offers us something tangible
rather than ephemeral promises lacking a shred of support. Ultimately, Ashley's demand that a new,
critical approach be adopted in order to free us from the grip of such 'false' conceptions depends upon
ideas about the prospects for the development of a universal consensus which are little more than
wishful thinking, and ideas about the existence of potentially less exclusionary orders which are little
more than mere assertion. 50 Hence his attempts, in 'Political realism and human interests', to conceal these ideas from view by
claiming that the technical base of realism serves only to identify, and yet not to reform, the practical, and then, in 'The poverty of neorealism',
by removing the technical from investigation altogether by an exclusive reliance on a problem of hermeneutic circularity. In the final analysis,
then, Ashley's post-structuralist approach boils down to little more than a critique — and, at that, a critique which fails. It is predicated on the
assumption that the constraints upon us are simply restrictive knowledge practices, such that it presumes that the entirety of the solution to
our problems is little more than the removal of such false ways of thinking. It
offers nothing by way of alternative — no
strategies, no proximate goals, indeed, little by way of goals at all. If, in constructivism, the progressive
purpose leads to strategies divorced from an awareness of the problems confronting transformatory
efforts, and, in critical theoretical perspectives, it produces strategies divorced from international
politics in their entirety, in post-structuralism it generates a complete absence of strategies altogether.
Critique serves to fill the void, yet this critique ultimately proves unsustainable. With its defeat, poststructuralism is left with nothing. Once one peels away the layers of misconstruction, it simply fades
away. If realism is, as Ashley puts it, 'a tradition forever immersed in the expectation of political
tragedy', it at least offers us a concrete vision of objectives and ways in which to achieve them which his
own position, forever immersed in the expectation of deliverance, is manifestly unable to provide.51
Realism is accurate, states are good, their alt doesn’t solve and it causes war
Solomon 96 (Hussein, Senior Researcher, Human Security Project, Institute for Defence Policy, “In
Defence of Realism,” African Security Review, Vol 5, No 2,
http://www.iss.co.za/pubs/ASR/5No2/5No2/InDefence.html)
The post-modern/critical theory challenge to realism has been tested, and proved wanting. Realism
remains the single most reliable analytical framework through which to understand and evaluate global
change. Post-modernism can provide no practical alternatives to the realist paradigm. We know what a
realist world looks like (we are living in one!); but what does a post-modernist world look like? As long
as humanity is motivated by hate, envy, greed and egotism, realism will continue to be invaluable to the
policy-maker and the scholar. In this regard it has to be pointed out that from the end of World War II
until 1992, hundreds of major conflicts around the world have left some twenty million human beings
dead.109 Neither has the end of the Cold War showed any sign that such conflict will end. By the end of
1993 a record of 53 wars were being waged in 37 countries across the globe.110 Until a fundamental
change in human nature occurs, realism will continue to dominate the discipline of international
relations. The most fundamental problem with post-modernism is that it assumes a more optimistic
view of human nature. Srebrenica, Bihac, Tuzla, Zeppa, Goma, Chechnya, Ogoniland, and KwaZulu-Natal
all bear testimony to the folly of such a view.
Abandoning realism doesn’t eliminate global violence—alternative worldviews will be
just as violent or worse
O'Callaghan, 2 (Terry, lecturer in the school of International Relations at the University of South
Australia, International Relations and the third debate, ed: Jarvis, 2002, p. 79-80)
In fact, if we explore the depths of George's writings further, we find remarkable brevity in their scope, failing to engage with practical issues
beyond platitudes and homilies. George, for example, is concerned about the violent, dangerous and war-prone character of the present
The world is a cruel and unforgiving place, especially for those who suffer the
indignity of human suffering beneath tyrannous leaders, warrior states, and greedy self-serving elites.
But surely the problem of violence is not banished from the international arena once the global
stranglehold of realist thinking is finally broken? It is important to try to determine the levels of violence
that might be expected in a nonrealist world. How will internecine conflict be managed? How do
postmodernists like George go about managing conflict between marginalized groups whose "voices"
collide? It is one thing to talk about the failure of current realist thinking, but there is absolutely nothing
in George's statements to suggest that he has discovered solutions to handle events in Bosnia, the
Middle East, or East Timor. Postmodern approaches look as impoverished in this regard as do realist perspectives. Indeed, it is
international system. And rightly so.
interesting to note that George gives conditional support for the actions of the United States in Haiti and Somalia "because on balance they
gave people some hope where there was none" (George, 1994:231). Brute force, power politics, and interventionism do apparently have a
place in George's postmodem world. But even so, the Haitian and Somalian cases are hardly in the same intransigent category as those of
Bosnia or the Middle East. Indeed, the Americans pulled out of Somalia as soon as events took a turn for the worse and, in the process, received
Would George have done the same thing? Would he have
left the Taliban to their devices in light of their complicity in the events of September 11? Would he have left
a great deal of criticism from the international community.
the Somalians to wallow in poverty and misery? Would he have been willing to sacrifice the lives of a number of young men and women
(American, Australian, French, or whatever) to subdue Aidid and his minions in order to restore social and political stability to Somalia? To be
blunt, I wonder how much better off the international community would be if Jim George were put in charge of foreign affairs. This is not a
fatuous point. After all, George wants to suggest that students of international politics are implicated in the trials and tribulations of
were
George actually to confront some of the dilemmas that policymakers do on a daily basis, he would find
that teaching the Bosnian Serbs about the dangers of modernism, universalism and positivism, and
asking them to be more tolerant and sensitive would not meet with much success. True, it may not be a
whole lot worse than current realist approaches, but the point is that George has not demonstrated how
his views might make a meaningful difference. Saying that they will is not enough, especially given that
the outcomes of such strategies might cost people their lives. Nor, indeed, am I asking George to
develop a "research project" along positivist lines. On the contrary, I am merely asking him to show how
his position can make a difference to the "hard cases" in international politics. My point is thus a simple
one. Despite George's pronouncements, there is little in his work to show that he has much appreciation
for the kind of moral dilemmas that Augustine wrestled with in his early writings and that confront
human beings every day. Were this the case, George would not have painted such a black-and- white
picture of the study of international politics.
international politics. All of us should be willing, therefore, to accept such a role, even hypothetically. I suspect, however, that
Liberalism/Democracy Good
Liberal Assumptions True
Our ontological assumptions are true – alternative theories cannot explain the cobinding and multilateralism that is a key feature of the liberal order.
(Deudney and Ikenberry 1999)
Daniel, and G. Ikenberry. "The nature and sources of liberal international order." Review of International
Studies 25.02 (1999): 179-196.
Neorealism provides a very strong argument relating system structure to unit-level practices. The core of neorealist theory is that states in an
anarchical system will pursue a strategy of balancing. Anarchy means that there is no central government that the units can rely upon for
security; and in such a situation, states seeking security will balance against other states that they perceive to be threats to their security.
Balancing has both an internal and external dimension. Internally, it takes the form of the domestic mobilization of power resources (via
armament and the generation of state capacity). Externally, balancing typically takes the form of ad hoc, counter hegemonic alliances in which
states join together with other states that fear for their security from threatening or powerful states.6 Moreover, successful balancing, by
undercutting the concentration of power at the system level, tends to reinforce and reproduce anarchy; in effect, balancing and anarchy are cogenerative. Likewise, balancing in anarchy tends to strengthen the capacity of the state in its relation with society, which in turn makes the
creation of system-wide governance more difficult. This pattern of balancing
in anarchy has characterized the Western
state system both in its early modern, Europe-centred phase as well as in the global system that has emerged in
late-modern times. Because of this long pattern and deep logic, realists expect balancing to be pervasive
in international politics wherever there is anarchy. This realist view neglects a distinctive practice that liberal
states have pioneered and which has given the West a distinctive structure unlike anarchy.
Unrecognized by neorealists, liberal states practice co-binding—that is, they attempt to tie one another
down by locking each other into institutions that mutually constrain one another.7 This practice of co-binding
constraint can be either asymmetrical or symmetrical. Asymmetrical binding is characteristic of hegemony or empire, but liberal states practice
a more mutual and reciprocal co-binding that overcomes the effects of anarchy without producing hierarchy. This practice of co-binding
does not ignore the problems and dynamics of anarchy, but rather aims to overcome them. By establishing institutions of
mutual constraint, co-binding reduces the risks and uncertainties associated with anarchy. It is a practice that
aims to tie potential threatening states down into predictable and restrained patterns of behaviour, and it
makes unnecessary balancing against such potential threats. Co-binding practices are particularly suited to liberal
states. When co-binding is successful, it reduces the necessity for units to have strong and autonomous state apparatuses. Moreover,
democratic and liberal states are particularly well suited to engage in co-binding, because their
internal structures more readily lend themselves to the establishment of institutions that constrain
state autonomy. As with anarchy and balancing, co-binding creates an international situation that is congenial to the liberal states that
are particularly suited to co-binding. This co-binding practice has been neglected by neo-realist theory, but it has a
robust logic that liberal states in the West have exhibited. Co-binding is an important feature of the
Western liberal order. While balancing and hegemony played a role in the formation of these Western institutions, this binding
practice was significantly and independently motivated by an attempt to overcome anarchy and its consequences among the Western states.
After the first World War, the United States sought through the League of Nations to establish a system of binding restraints among the
Western states, but this was not fully attempted in practice and, to the extent it was, it failed for a variety of reasons.8 After
the second
World War, the United States and liberal states in Europe sought again to bind themselves through NATO.
Although realists dismiss failed efforts at binding as idealistic, and successful post-World War II
institutions as purely the result of balancing, these institutions were created in significant part by
Europeans and Americans who were eager to avoid the patterns that led to the two world wars. The most
important co-binding institution in the West, of course, is NATO. Although the Soviet threat provided much of the political impetus to
form NATO, the alliance always had in the minds of its most active advocates the additional purpose of constraining the Western European
states vis-a-vis each other and tying the United States into Europe.9 Indeed, NATO was as much a solution for the ‘German problem’ as it was a
counter to the Soviet Union. As the first NATO Secretary General, Lord Ismay famously put it, the purpose of NATO was to keep the ‘Russians
out, the Germans down, and the Americans in’. These aims were all inter-related: in order to counter-balance the Soviet Union it was necessary
to mobilize German power in a way that the other European states did not find threatening and to tie the United States into a firm commitment
on the continent. The NATO alliance went
beyond the traditional realist conception of an ad hoc defence
alliance, because it created an elaborate organization and drew states into joint force planning,
international military command structures, and established a complex transgovernmental political
process for making political and military decisions.10 The co-binding character of this alliance is manifested
in the remarkable effort that its member states made to give their commitment a semi-permanent
status—to lock themselves in so as to make it difficult to exit. The desire to overcome the dynamics of anarchy also gave rise
to an agenda for economic co-binding, particularly in Europe. The European Union movement explicitly sought to achieve
economic interdependence between Germany and her neighbours in order to make strategic military competition much more costly and
difficult to undertake. The first fruit of this programme, the European Coal and Steel Community, effectively pooled these heavy industries that
had been essential for war making. In its administration of the Marshall Plan, the United States sought to encourage the creation of joint
economic organizations in order to create economic interdependencies that crossed over the traditional lines of hostilities between European
states.11 The United States also supported the creation of political institutions of European union, so as to bind the European states together
and foreclose a return to the syndromes of anarchy.12 American supporters of European reconstruction as well as European advocates of the
European community explicitly sought to create European institutions that were more like the United States than the traditional Westphalian
states in anarchy. The
result of this security co-binding among Western liberal states was the creation of a
political order that successfully mitigated anarchy within the West in ways that neorealist theory fails
to appreciate. Although these institutions created by binding practices significantly altered the anarchical relations within the Atlantic
world, they fell far short of creating a hierarchy. Because Waltzian neorealism conceives of order as either hierarchical
or anarchical, it lacks the ability to grasp institutions between hierarchy and anarchy that constitute
the structure of the liberal order.
Ontology/Epistemology does not shape all of our actions-pragmatic rational choice is
more useful in dealing with global problems despite any ontic/epistemic problems
Owen in 2k2 (David, Reader on Political Theory at the University of Southampton, Millennium, Re-orienting International Relations: On
Pragmatism, Pluralism and Practical Reasoning, SAGE)
The first danger with the
philosophical turn is that it has an inbuilt tendency to prioritise issues of ontology and
epistemology over explanatory and/or interpretive power as if the latter two were merely a simple function
of the former. But while the explanatory and/or interpretive power of a theoretical account is not wholly
independent of its ontological and/or epistemological commitments (otherwise criticism of these features would not
be a criticism that had any value), it is by no means clear that it is, in contrast, wholly dependent on these
philosophical commitments. Thus, for example, one need not be sympathetic to rational choice theory to
recognise that it can provide powerful accounts of certain kinds of problems, such as the tragedy of the
commons in which dilemmas of collective action are foregrounded. It may, of course, be the case that the advocates of
rational choice theory cannot give a good account of why this type of theory is powerful in accounting
for this class of problems (i.e., how it is that the relevant actors come to exhibit features in these circumstances that approximate the
assumptions of rational choice theory) and, if this is the case, it is a philosophical weakness—but this does not
undermine the point that, for a certain class of problems, rational choice theory may provide the best account
available to us. In other words, while the critical judgement of theoretical accounts in terms of their
ontological and/or epistemological sophistication is one kind of critical judgement, it is not the only or
even necessarily the most important kind.
Alt Fails/Reflexive Democracy best
Rethinking democracy isn’t a useful contribution to the pragmatic problem of how to
spread democracy, in fact the results of the critique are more likely to be
undemocratic than not. Only promoting liberal values solves.
Richard Youngs 2011, Director of FRIDE and Associate Professor at the University of Warwick,
United Kingdom, “Misunderstanding the maladies of liberal democracy promotion,” FRIDE
working paper, january, google
Critical theorists skate a thin line: they issue pleas for a rethinking of democracy, but
scratch beneath the surface and what they really lionise is undemocratic state-led
development; theirs is in fact not a genuine concern with reconceptualising democracy so
much as a pretty wholesale questioning of the democracy agenda, dressed up in softened discourse. A
central pivot of many such critiques is the criticism of liberalism’s teleological
arrogance. But this centres too much on one influential book published at one rather distinctive moment in time24; liberalism
more broadly and properly understood is not teleology. Moreover, many writers argue
against teleology and prescription but then in the next breath confidently assert that
social democracy must be a superior and more acceptable form of democracy outside
the West and one which has a more sustainable long-term future. This may be the case, but they have no
philosophical justification for saying so without replicating the very same
methodological features they profess to dislike in ‘liberal’ tenets – and thus contradicting
themselves. Clearly, more debate about different forms of political representation would be healthy. Allowing space for a plurality of
routes to and types of political reform would sit well with the core spirit of democracy. However, while more flexibility and
open mindedness are still required in democracy promotion, there is a risk of being
unduly defensive about the virtues of liberal democracy’s core tenets. The problem in
many places of the world is the absence of liberalism’s core values, not their excess. Vigilance in the need
for democracy’s reconc eptualisation is indeed merited. But it would be a muddled reasoning that took this to
provide a case for the wholesale pull back from the (already anaemic) support for liberal
democracy’s notion of fundamental political rights. We need more fully to understand local demands. But
there is an automatic assumption routinely made that such demands are for more
diverse, anti-liberal political forms. This may in many places be the case, but the
evidence must be assembled. One cannot simply assert this as if it were axiomatic to the
emerging world order; there is no reason for supposing a priori that this is a natural outcome of the rebalancing of international
order. The evidence that exists points, again, to a more nuanced conclusion: a demand for the
essential tenets of liberal universalism, made relevant to and expressed through the
language and concepts of local cultures and histories. A growing focus within political philosophy has been
on ‘capabilities’: negative liberal freedoms need to be deepened but also combined with the locally-rooted capabilities that ensure their
effective realisation.25
K Aff card?
Aff card?
Bigo in 2011(Didier, Department of War Studies at the University of Manchester, “Northern Ireland as
metaphor: Exception, suspicion and radicalization in the ‘war on terror’,” “Security Dialogue, vol. 42 no.
6 483-498)
What do we mean by ‘metaphor’? Towards the end of the 1970s, Italian writer Leonardo Sciascia ([1979] 1994) published a book entitled Sicily
as Metaphor, structured as a conversation with the journalist Marcelle Padovani, in which he analysed his own cultural and social roots, his
literary commitment, and his love for Sicily, its people and its writers. Questioned on the articulation between his strong local roots and a need
to speak of the world while avoiding any kind of parochialism, Sciascia ([1979] 1994: 87) suggested that ‘Sicily is such a synthesis of so many
problems and contradictions that are not only Italian but also European that it eventually constitutes a metaphor for the modern world’. Sicily is
not a genealogy, nor is it a model for Europe, but Sicily is a metaphor. In Sciascia’s book, new similarities, comparative points and perspectives –
still to be fully explored and potentially illuminating – are raised beyond Sicily’s geographical bounds and its position as a metaphor for Europe.
Through Sicily, Europe can be read differently. So, Sicily is not Europe, nor is Sicily a condensed example of Europe. We
use here the
word metaphor as an attempt to shift the logical, historical and geographical distances from the far to
the near (Ricoeur, 1975: 279; Passeron, 1991: 149), from the Northern Ireland conflict to our world at war against
terrorism (and vice versa). Within such an approach, metaphor is a rhetorical process playing on the power of fiction in order that we might
reassess a reality (Ricoeur, 1975: 11), a sort of suspension of literal sense and a suspension of ordinary descriptive reference that highlights how
to see the like is to see the same in spite of, and through, the different. We
intend to use this semantic proximity to discuss
the contemporaneous reign of ‘governmentality of unease’ in the current fight against terrorism, viewed
as the intertwining of the technique of governing and framing insecurities where the key element is not
the constitution of crisis situations and the introduction of emergency measures but rather the
institutional and discursive intertwining of different policy areas by means of the application of routines
and institutionalized knowledge of (ordinary) exception and suspicion. The Northern Ireland case of 38 years of
conflict and its resolution through the Good Friday Agreement is more than a specific case study. It sets up a specific matrix of governmentality
of population under suspicion with the use of an anti-terrorist discourse justifying illiberal practices (Bigo and Tsoukala, 2008). Such a matrix
blocks the possibility of any settling agreement and relies quasi-exclusively on coercion, which is one of the most important characteristics of
the post-9/11 ‘war on terror’. Since
9/11, the counterterrorist strategy of the United States has been updated in
many areas. Everything has been done to detain or remove individuals suspected of terrorism, to
enhance the capacities of intelligence agencies and the investigatory tools available to law enforcement
services, to increase detention powers, to expand the range of offences to be considered as terrorism,
to create a new category of ‘enemy combatants’, and to set up military tribunals with the capacity to
judge and convict the latter. Furthermore, at the core of the discourses on global terrorism, the transnationalization of the threat
has become an argument that blurs the frontier between enemies and criminals, between the activities
of the police in the criminal, intelligence and surveillance fields, on the one hand, and law enforcement’s
interventions targeted against an infiltrated enemy, on the other (Bigo, 2005: 67). Two perspectives on security are
clashing here: Should security be without any perimeter, or should its scope be narrowed and bounded?
While the first vision considers the global threat as entirely new, the other presents it as a mere
reproduction and reduces any political change happening to a simple rhetorical variation. While the first
vision justifies the fusion of the police and the army to enable a global intelligence service capable of
countering a threat that is also considered global, the other creates a myth in which an insuperable
frontier is drawn between the practices of the military and those of the police, the differences in their professional
cultures being the factor that would prevent similar modes of action on their part. At the same time, this vision ignores the
multiplication of coercive practices and proactive logics carried out by all the agents of the security field.
Yet, both perspectives seem oblivious to the specific interests that drive public and private security agencies, their competing motivations, their
fight over how to define and rate the priorities: in short,
they disregard all the elements that denaturalize the
relationship between the violence, the threat and the answers brought by the relevant institutions. Both
deny the importance of the differences in the discourses on violence of those institutions and downplay the competition between the
professionals concerned,
their claims to tell the ‘truth’ and the ‘validity’ of the coercive solutions they have
chosen; they similarly ignore the relation that ties the (in)security professionals to the professionals of
politics and the interests of the latter. Northern Ireland reminds us of the differences between the services in charge of security
and their practices, as well as the competition between them. The example of Northern Ireland also allows us to analyse, from a distance in
time, the lies engendered by the refusal to negotiate, the political uncertainties and the necessity in fine of acknowledging the political
dimension of the conflict. The
state openly disengaged from the rule of law, for which the governmental
authorities were later obliged to make public apologies (Guardian, 2005; McDonald, 2005). By making a distinction
between what is internal and external, or by emphasizing what the global is, the discourses on
(in)securitization deploy their arguments in the name of danger, globalization or segmentation of the
relevant threats. But those various discourses on the threats, even if opposed, bring into question public liberties, the right to privacy,
and equal access to the law, and prevent the mounting of any legal resistance to coercive practices, even in a liberal state. The relationship to
the evolution of the violence carried out by clandestine organizations is often uncertain and in no way completely reactive and proportionate.
Thus, what can
be the role of the judiciary in regard to the appropriateness of a derogation? Above all, how
can judges assess the extent of the threat if the latter is de facto political? The question is still an open one. In the
case of Northern Ireland, it took 30 years to acknowledge the departure from the rule of law and to concede responsibility. How much
time will it take to evaluate the post-9/11 ‘anti-terrorist’ policies – their effective practices, their legitimacy and
their restructuration of the key notion of freedom – that continue under the Obama administration even
though changes may have taken place in relation to specific security practices (Bigo et al., 2010)?
We should enter into dialogue with those affected by the War on terror
Bigo in 2011(Didier, Department of War Studies at the University of Manchester, “Northern Ireland as
metaphor: Exception, suspicion and radicalization in the ‘war on terror’,” “Security Dialogue, vol. 42 no.
6 483-498)
What might constitute an ‘international Good Friday Agreement’ in the current ‘war against terrorism’?
Times and circumstances change. Yet, it is clear that the Good Friday Agreement was set up by directly involving actors who on both sides were
supporting violence – and sometimes were even suspected of having previously been active participants in acts of violence (Cox et al., [2000]
2006). The narrative of the British government concerning the refusal to enter into discussion with terrorists in the case of the Provisional IRA
has been exhausted by the multiple stories of the discussions published since the Good Friday Agreement (Dixon, 2001). The success of the
Good Friday Agreement was a result of these direct discussions with groups that were equally radical in their opinions but did not always agree
with the practices of those carrying out bombings. The
process has been a long and difficult one, in which all the
parties have experienced doubts and been afraid of being manipulated, and it has succeeded only
because of the tragedy involved in continued acts of violence that were meaningless since they could
not seriously alter the contest of will. All sides now agree that the process was painful because of the
necessity of recognizing the other and the legitimacy of the other’s grievances. The Provisional IRA was obliged to
curb its will to keep fighting and to accept the strategy proposed by Sinn Féin. The British secret services and paramilitaries – as well as the
private companies working for them in Northern Ireland – which had enjoyed a free hand in their activities, were put back on a leash and kept
under control both by the military and by judges and judicial inquiries. They have also been constrained by the same political actors who had
previously given them carte blanche but could no longer justify a strategy based on eradication of the enemy (Guittet and Bigo, 2004). At
a
time when all of the anti-terrorist legislation passed since 9/11 has expanded surveillance or
criminalized anyone who supports ideas promoted by Islamic activists (Pantazis and Pemberton, 2009), it might be
difficult for British political actors to acknowledge that the only real success in the battle against terrorism
in Northern Ireland was achieved as a result of an agreement to enter into discussions with ‘gateway
organizations’. Despite some recent and rather localized attempts to initiate a dialogue with particular groups (Greer, 2010: 1175–9), all of
the UK’s recent anti-terrorist laws have been driven by the idea of preventing recruitment of home-grown terrorists and supposed candidates
for suicide missions, thus targeting the Muslim community more specifically. Similarly, specific efforts have been deployed to dismantle any
medium of communication with groups thought to be located abroad and using the Internet to maintain contact with potential recruits incountry. The idea of ‘cutting off’ communication, or building a ‘safety belt’ by better ‘integration’ through an assimilation process (Blair, 2006),
has been favoured over a long-term and sustainable policy of dialogue with organizations that have been pushing forward the grievances of
radical Islam concerning the ‘war on terror’, torture and their living conditions in the Western world (Bigo et al., 2008 ).
In most Western
countries, Islamic organizations that are not engaged in violent activities but that support some of the
claims promoted by violent groups have been overcriminalized through laws that prohibit the
glorification of terrorism (Alegre, 2008). Even if it may be highly provocative, a better resolution might be to
engage in a long and surely painful process of recognition of the grievances of both the victims of
violence and the victims of the fight against terrorism. As Campbell and Connolly (2003: 374) point out, the ‘use of a
“war” model in the face of complex public-order problems, political violence, and terrorism risks
providing short-term gains at the expense of long-term damage’. Military and intelligence operations
involving the assassination of leaders and key opponents, massive communications polices based on
propaganda, and a seemingly never-ending increase in preventive surveillance are reinforcing the
problems they purport to solve. The war-like model of the campaign against terrorism and the new
opportunities that this provides for counterinsurgency discourses to return to the front stage from the
shadows of the decolonization period are dangerous. After all – and even if the suggestion hurts popular feeling and
political interests – the only valuable and practical lessons to be learned from Britain’s experience in Northern Ireland are those that seem to
have been forgotten: no
amount of restriction of civil liberties can by itself defeat violence, and it is perhaps
only through discriminate political reforms and protracted negotiations whose outcome is never assured
that violent protagonists can be demobilized. Even if it is difficult to resist the temptation to search the past for validation,
justification and some tangible theoretical recipes that might be applied to our present turbulent times (Campbell, 2002), Northern
Ireland is not a model that can be exported around the globe. Rather, it is an invitation to analyse
contingency, daily operations of security and their effects on social practices and routines. Northern Ireland
also represents a remarkable inducement to assess how exception, suspicion and radicalization are correlated, and to recognize that efforts to
contain the unpredictability of the future are self-defeating. This indeed might be the ultimate reversal of the lesson of Northern Ireland as
metaphor