MSDI 2007

Framework Answers
Petit/Walters

Framework Answers
Policy Framework Bad.........................................................................................................................................................2
Role Playing Bad..................................................................................................................................................................3
Realism Fails........................................................................................................................................................................4
Realism Causes Violence......................................................................................................................................................5
Ethics First............................................................................................................................................................................6
Ontology First.......................................................................................................................................................................7

MSDI 2007

Framework Answers
Petit/Walters

Policy Framework Bad

Violence is legitimated at the discursive level, to challenge the inherent violence of the
affirmatives policy proposal, we must challenge the framing of social conflict at all
levels. Their attempt to exclude our argument, by relying on arguments the the judge
which institutions are legitimate to present our argument, is a legitimation of the status
quo
Dale Bagshaw (director, conflict management research group, univ. of south Australia) 2001 challenging discourses
on violencep. http://www.conferences.unimelb.edu.au/flagship/abstracts/bagshaw.pdf
All human beings are implicated in the generation of violent human conflict. Conflict, as we know, is a product of social interaction and
violent conflict is fuelled by the institutionalisation of difference. Social conflict at both micro and macro levels can be
constitutively defined in terms of inclusion and exclusion. Violent conflict in schools, and war at an international level, involve a
divisive process whereby parties dig in to their respective positions (which tend to harden as the conflict escalates) and
construct the other as the enemy. A normative discourse develops which justifies such formations, valorising the cause
of one side and denigrating the cause of the other. Currently, binary discourses such as these are dominant at many levels in our
global society, threatening our safety and our survival. Discourse (that is the way we speak about things such as conflict or war) is a
powerful force in determining our realities or truths, or whose truths count in particular contexts. Dominant
discourses are cuturally bound and serve to construct the way we view the world. There are many truths, but these
tend to be embedded in the implicit and explicit rules of various governments , societies, communities, families and
dominant groups in schools. Powerful groups or individuals control who can and cannot speak, what can and cannot be
spoken about, how and in what contexts, and thereby what we can and cannot hear. It is my intention in this paper to deconstruct
some of the dominant discourses on violence that we have come to accept at micro- and macro- levels in our global society and to highlight how
we, as mediators, can collectively play a powerful role in challenging these discourses - at micro-levels in our homes, workplaces and schools and
at macro levels in our various national and global institutions. Violent conflict, whether it is in the school or in the broader international arena,
can only be understood within a wider understanding of human action. Violent conflict is both a product and a constitutive part of
the relationship between individuals and broader societal structures. Currently our focus tends to be on the management and

regulation of interpersonal violence and war, which we have normalised or accepted as inevitable, rather than on its
total elimination. This serves to legitimate violence and, in some situations, to justify it by labelling it as just, normal, natural,
humane, or as a necessary evil. We now have new vocabulary which captures this the new normals.Mediation is not a uniform activity
there are many models and approaches which traverse many domains. However we possibly would all agree that mediation is a practice which
provides us with an opportunity to make a difference to the way people handle conflicts, within given cultural and structural constraints. Most
approaches to mediation generate a move away from violent confrontation towards mutual recognition and understanding. In general, the goal is for
the mediator to recognize and enhance the transformative capacity of individuals, groups and communities and where possible foster tolerance and
acceptance of difference between parties to a conflict, in a climate or respect and openness, so they can deal with their conflicts constructively and
peacefully co-exist. Much of the mediation literature and research to date, however, focuses on mediator qualities, mediation techniques (such as
reframing), the recognition and management of imbalances of power, negotiation and decision-making processes and the effectiveness of different
types of intervention. It tends not to address or question the nature of conflict itself, or the institutions that support it. The emphasis in earlier
models of mediation was on the resolution of conflict through problem-solving and in later models (eg. transformative and narrative) the emphasis
has shifted to the transformative nature of the process. The literature and practices however, rarely challenge the dominant discourses on violence or
the institutional legitimation of violent conflict, nor question the cultural embeddedness of the mediator. For mediation to be useful, our theories and
practices must be critical and self-reflexive and question societal assumptions and views of conflict in ways that enhance creativity and change.

The legitimation of violence, such as in global warfare and in schools, is situated in discursive practices based on
exclusionist identities and a hierarchical construct which legitimates some voices and subordinates or marginalises
others. Peace is a counter-discourse which seeks to understand the legitimation of violence and to challenge the
discursive and institutional structures and frameworks which allow for its emergence. Militarism , for example, is a
constant presence which renders war a desirable and feasible option in times of conflict. In addition, hegemonic patriarchal
discourses continue to underpin and normalise violence in our homes, workplaces and schools. In Australia these discourses privelege the voices of
Western, white, heterosexist, macho males - a phenomena which is also evident in the current global crisis involving Iraq.

MSDI 2007

Framework Answers
Petit/Walters

Role Playing Bad

Role playing and constructing ourselves as imaginary people destroys critical education and
ignores the suffering of innocents--- This framework will only replicate the harms they
try to avoid and foreclose any education goals
Gordon Mitchell (Associate professor at Pittsburg) 1998 Pedagogical Possibilities for Argumentative Agency in
Academic Debate Argumentation and Advocacy Vol. 25
While an isolated academic space that affords students an opportunity to learn in a protected environment has significant pedagogical value (see e.g.
Coverstone 1995, p. 8-9), the notion of the academic debate tournament as a sterile laboratory carries with it some
disturbing implications, when the metaphor is extended to its limit. To the extent that the academic space begins to take on

characteristics of a laboratory, the barriers demarcating such a space from other spheres of deliberation beyond the
school grow taller and less permeable. When such barriers reach insurmountable dimensions, argumentation in the academic
setting unfolds on a purely simulated plane, with students practicing critical thinking and advocacy skills in strictly
hypothetical thought-spaces. Although they may research and track public argument as it unfolds outside the confines
of the laboratory for research purposes, in this approach, students witness argumentation beyond the walls of the
academy as spectators, with little or no apparent recourse to directly participate or alter the course of events (see
Mitchell 1995; 1998). The sense of detachment associated with the spectator posture is highlighted during episodes of alienation
in which debaters cheer news of human suffering or misfortune. Instead of focusing on the visceral negative responses
to news accounts of human death and misery, debaters overcome with the competitive zeal of contest round
competition show a tendency to concentrate on the meanings that such evidence might hold for the strength of their
academic debate arguments. For example, news reports of mass starvation might tidy up the "uniqueness of a disadvantage" or bolster the
"inherency of an affirmative case" (in the technical parlance of debate-speak). Murchland categorizes cultivation of this "spectator" mentality as one
of the most politically debilitating failures of contemporary education: "Educational institutions have failed even more grievously to

provide the kind of civic forums we need. In fact, one could easily conclude that the principle purposes of our schools
is to deprive successor generations of their civic voice, to turn them into mute and uncomprehending spectators in the
drama of political life" (1991, p. 8). Complete reliance on the laboratory metaphor to guide pedagogical practice can
result in the unfortunate foreclosure of crucial learning opportunities. These opportunities, which will be discussed in more detail
in the later sections of this piece, center around the process of argumentative engagement with wider public spheres of deliberation. In the strictly
preparatory model of argument pedagogy, such direct engagement is an activity that is appropriately pursued following the completion of academic
debate training (see e.g. Coverstone 1995, p. 8). Preparatory study of argumentation, undertaken in the confines of the academic laboratory, is
conducted on the plane of simulation and is designed to pave the way for eventual application of critical thinking and oral advocacy skills in
"realworld" contexts.

Policy frameworks, or role-playing the plan is that they separate the advocate form the
argument foreclosing education
Gordon Mitchell (Associate professor at Pittsburg) 1998 Reflexive Fiat: The Outward Activist Turn into Contest
Strategy Rostrum January
Advocacy, under this view of fiat, takes place on the plane of simulation . The power that backs a debaters command that "we
mandate the following ..." is a mirage, a phantasm allowed to masquerade as genuine for the purpose of allowing the game of political
simulation to take place. Debaters have no real authority over the actors they employ to implement their ideas in plans and
counterplans, yet the simulation of such authority is recognized as an essential fiction necessary to allow the game of policy debate to unfold. One

problem with approaches to fiat which feature such a structural separation between advocate and agent of change is
that such approaches tend to instill political apathy by inculcating a spectator mentality. The function of fiat which
gives debaters simulated political control over external actors coaxes students to gloss over consideration of their
concrete roles as involved agents in the controversies they research. The construct of fiat, in this vein, serves as a political
crutch by alleviating the burden of demonstrating a connection between in-round advocacy and the action by external
actors defended in plan or counterplan mandates.

MSDI 2007

Framework Answers
Petit/Walters

Realism Fails
Realism is a representation of technologised thinking-it will inevitably fail to respond to the
needs of politics because it ignores the history of circumstances in favor of efficient
administration
Michael Dillon (senior lecturer in politics and international relations at the university of Lancaster) 1996 The politics
of security
What happens, Gerald Bruns asks, when you try to follow Heidegger up or down one of his paths of thinking, studying
him, trying out his moves, finding yourself caught up in him? His response seems to me to be an exemplary one. One of the things
that happens, he says, is that you begin to appreciate why people are careful to confine themselves to forms of mental
activity that have no history. By that he meant: purely analytical programs like formal logic, philosophy of language, lin guistics, semiotics,
most forms of literary criticism, perhaps most of what gets taught in school: programs you can get in and out of quickly and cleanly without the
burden of having done anything more blameworthy than test, or apply, a certain method, skill, technique, or training. Precisely because it is

so
dangerous and dangerous precisely because it is so intimately connected with history there is often an almost
desperate, and even violent, insistence that politics, too, both as a practice and as an object of study, be reduced in this
way. In short, technologised. So-called political realists and idealists alike, for example, and for similar reasons,
would reduce the political to the formulaic so as to settle its hash once and for all. I take their responses, however, to be
symptomatic of a persistent and ancient desire to escape the sheer difficulty as well as the historicality and singularity
of the political. One cannot take up the question of the political, then, without taking up the question of history. That
means that the scientific, purely analytic programmatic, approach to politics is not only out , however, it also means
that it is construed as another expression of the technologising of the thought and life of politics, of which politics
itself threatens to become the instrument. Just as the political, I will argue, arises neither from an Augustinian nor a Hobbesian lack (the
original fall from Gods grace, or the radical insecurity of the state of nature) but from the ebullient free excess of existence itself, so the
hermeneutical phenomenological study of politics that I would advocate would similarly not be a science out of a lack either, since it also springs
from the superabundance of the very event of (a potentially political) existence as well. <P75-76>

Realism arguments have no weight- the nuclear age proves the inadequacies of realist
political theory, as realism has culminated in the possibility of human species extinction
Michael Dillon (senior lecturer in politics and international relations at the university of Lancaster) 1996 The politics
of security
There is more than an academic interest at stake, therefore, in this modern conjunction between the philosophical and the
political. How we think and what we do, what we think and how we are doing, condition one another. There is clearly
more than a coincidence also in relying upon post-Nietzschean thought to argue for that reappraisal of both which requires a recovery of the
question of the political. For between Hegel and Heidegger metaphysics exposed itself to its own deconstructive impulses. After Marx one
finds Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Freud, and Nietzsche turning philosophy upon itself, thereby unmasking its own taboos and
twisted roots; realising and exhausting its potential, according to Heidegger, in the advent of the epoch of technology. The

same period also witnessed the exhaustion of the European State systems modern metaphysical resolution of the
question of the political its profoundly ambiguous and deeply problematic inauguration as both a State of emergency and a certain kind of
democratic project through the very globalisation of the language, forms and practices of the politics of security upon
which it was based. The advent of the globalised industrial nuclear age exhibits not only the hollowness of that
systems foundational promises to secure order, identity and freedom hence the reason why the disciplines which
promise to tell the truth about the operation of its orders and identities appear to be so peculiarly limited and unreal in
their vaunted realistic representation of reality but also, in the gulf that exists between what its (inter)national
political prospectus offers and what its (inter)national politics provides; the exhaustion of its political imagination. For
this was a period, in which World War One was critical, when that (inter)national politics of security finally realised
the full potential of the self-immolative dynamic pre-figured in its very inception; the real prospect of human species
extinction. <P 26-27>

MSDI 2007

Framework Answers
Petit/Walters

Realism Causes Violence

Realism justifies the violence initiated by our attempt to eradicate difference. this order can
only perpetuate a cycle of violence
Michael Dillon (senior lecturer in politics and international relations at the university of Lancaster) 1996 The politics
of security
The tragic challenge of being-in-common to being-in-common is, therefore, how to deal with a violence that is immanent; a
possibility that inheres within its own being by virtue of the free differential composition of that being. One response to that challenge is to
deny the tragic character of human being by indicting difference itself, and seeking to eradicate it . Integral to the tragic
condition, therefore, is the desire to escape from it, resolving the polemos of life by turning upon the very freeing difference which
constitutes it. Effacing difference in order to secure an end to the violence of a being that bears violence- threatening
difference within itself, nonetheless, means embracing a project that seeks the dissolution of the very life it seeks to
secure. Instead of securing an escape from violence, therefore, the eradication of difference paradoxically serves to
institute that very cycle of limitless violence the logical outcome of which is the effacement of freedom and,
ultimately, of human being itself. Tragedys unique and indispensable contribution to the life of being-in-common is to resist, through
exposing and exploring, that mortal threat to mortal life. It resists not by offering a facile solution to violence, however, but by differentiating
violence from struggle, and by continuously holding open the question of violence entailed in the metaphysical means of trying to secure ourselves
from it. Insisting that there is no such escape, it fixes our attention back on the issue of what Nietzsche calls the spiritualisation of enmity, or on
what William Connolly Nietzscheanly calls agonistic respect; and, thereby, on the possibility of transformation in life. <P151>

MSDI 2007

Framework Answers
Petit/Walters

Ethics First
Cannot separate politics from questions of ethics. all politics are based on the challenge to put
human freedom as an ethical encounter with others
Michael Dillon (senior lecturer in politics and international relations at the university of Lancaster) 1996 The politics
of security
The recovery of the political is, therefore, inescapably bound-up with the recovery of the ethical as well. For, to concur,
and at some length, with Caputos Levinasian forcing of this thought in directions which Heidegger would no doubt have resisted: On the view I
am defending ethics is always already in place, is factically there as soon as there is Dasein, as soon as there is world.
Ethics is not something fitted into a world that is somehow constituted prior to it. Ethics constitutes the world in the
first place. .. . If you want to think what truly is you have to start with ethics and obligation, not add it on later . To put
it in terms that I would prefer, the space of obligation is opened up by factical life, by the plurality of living bodies, by
the commerce and intercourse of bodies with bodies, and above all, in these times, in the times of holocausts and of
killing fields, by bodies in pain but no less by thriving and flourishing bodies, by bodies at play. Later, albeit only in a
sketch, I will therefore argue that the political is precisely this: the continuous challenge to put human freedom as an ethical
encounter with others, and within the Otherness that is integral to its own constitution as a way of being, into work in
the world. <p62>

MSDI 2007

Framework Answers
Petit/Walters

Ontology First
Every aspect of politics contains an ontology-the way that we live is inherently influenced by
the way that we think. only by examining the ontology of metaphysics can new ways of
political being emerge
Michael Dillon (senior lecturer in politics and international relations at the university of Lancaster) 1996 The politics
of security
The radical hermeneutical phenomenology which issues from Heideggers thinking and questioning shows how we understand as we do because we
exist as we do. Understanding as we do in the way that we exist, we came, in the tradition of the West, to think

metaphysically. Metaphysics asked about the truth of Being, of what is, but answered with an account of the truth of
the Being of beings, that is to say of things we find present to hand. Truth was therefore thought to be lodged in the
truthfulness of the assertion about the Being of beings. In the absence of God it came to be founded in the subject
making the assertion. The result was the dominance of the representativecalculative thought of modern subjectivity
in which truth is a measure of the adequation of the correspondence between the thinking subjects assertions and
entities themselves. (Such that: For representational thinking everything comes to be a being. Even Being.) Hence, the absolute centrality of
the subject in the modern age. For a flakey subject riven with Otherness and bearing difference within itself becomes an absolute abhorrence
to truth itself when truth and knowledge demand a secure and reliable subject for their certain foundation: But not every way of being a self is
subjectivity. Heideggers entire corpus of thinking is tenaciously devoted to uncovering metaphysics missed ontology
not only in the various projects (ontology, epistemology, phenomenology) and the core concept (correctness), method (logic) and
epistemological ambition (theory, or the report of the sight of the truth) of Western thought, but also in the very life of the West
itself (technicity). Show Heidegger a thinker, a thought, a practice or a way of life and he will go after the ontology
ontic (metaphysical) as well as fundamental sequestered there . In this respect, his lecture course, Basic Questions of Philosophy.
Selected Problems of Logic, is a virtual text book on the way he habitually proceeds. In every epistemology, too, there is an

ontology. Because we are as we understand and think, in our modern political practices as well as in our political
science or knowledge of politics where a well-founded modesty about scientific pretensions is expressed there therefore lurks the
ontology of metaphysics. Heideggers deconstruction of metaphysics consequently leads to the following chain of
thought, in which we must also never lose sight of the mutually disciosive two fold duality of Being and beings. Thrown, we exist.
Existing, we project and understand. Existing, understanding and projecting as thrown we are obliged to think.
Thinking we think Being. Thinking Being, we have not only come to think (ontologically) the Being of beings, but
also the Being of Being as an, albeit Supreme, being (onto-theo logy) . Thrown into existing as understanding and
thinking we inhabit worlds. The world we inhabit expresses the ways in which we have come to understand and think.
The end of the way that we think metaphysics is technology. Technology is the mounting oblivion of the aletheic truth of
the Being of human being, and the radical impoverishment of human beings capacity to create and live in a world, a
condition globalised by the ballistic power of technologys trajectory . We, therefore, think the political in the way that
we do because of the way that we think. Thinking the political in the way that we do because of the way that we think,
the political too has become technologised such that politics threatens to become identical with technicity. The
political problematic of the modern age, as Heidegger might have expressed it, is the globalisation of technology as
politics and the globalisation of politics as technology.<P84-86>